Forged by Fire (11 page)

“Don’t say it!” Gen ordered. “It’ll weaken the strands that hold the enchanted web about you.”
I clung to Savga as she clung to me. She panted against my breast like a terrified cat.
Slowly Gen pulled his hand away from my mouth and sat back on his haunches. Where his hand had pressed against my lips, I could taste the bitterness of incense oil.
I became aware of how tightly I was holding Savga, my fingernails digging into the soft skin of her upper arms. I released my hold. Swallowed. “But . . . how? How can you see what I can’t?”
“I have my ways.”
“And others?”
He exploded air out his nose, deriding the possibility. “You’ve no concern there, hey-o. The web woven about you is strong. It extends beyond the color of your skin. The warp and weft of your very essence have been interwoven with the enchantment. Your smell, the whorls and lines and taste of your skin, they’ve all been disguised. Even some one well skilled in Djimbi ways would have a difficult time detecting you for what you are. If I’d not spent half my life looking for you,
I
wouldn’t have recognized you for what you are!”
I stared down at my hands, so familiar and yet suddenly so foreign to me. “And what am I?”
“The Dirwalan Babu,” Gen said. “The Skykeeper’s Daughter. And a saroon.”
I looked up again.
He once more steepled his fingers against the perfect tip of his groomed beard. “You are the result of a pairing of a munano, a half-blood Djimbi woman, with a fa-pim man.”
“My father wasn’t fa-pim.”
“Not ludu fa-pim, no. Not landed gentry of dragonblessed pure blood. But in terms of breeding, the Emperor considers anyone of Archipelagic descent who is untainted by Djimbi blood to be fa-pim. Truth! It’s only the Mottled Bellies who are clachio.”
Clachio. Filth that must be eradicated. A holy woman had used that term a decade ago, before cutting away my womanhood.
His words slithered about inside me like flukes, slick, fast, debilitating. “Munano. Saroon. I don’t understand.”
“There were few Djimbi on Clutch Re. You’ll not have heard such words before.”
“No,” I faintly agreed.
“On Clutch Re, Archipelagic blood dominates, carrying with it all the hues of the myriad island folk the Emperor has conquered over the centuries. Aosogi being the prod uct of matings between the original inhabitants of Messer and its fa-pim conquerors.”
“Messer . . .” I said stupidly.
“The second-smallest island in the Archipelago, known as Lud y Auk in the Emperor’s tongue.”
I didn’t know what else to say. My head felt as clotted and dense as the clouds gathering outside.
Gen shifted. “Now, Babu, I should leave you. I’ve much explaining to do to Ghepp. Damn stinking mess, this.”
He rose to his feet, became a tower of red raw silk. The swish of his robes set the candle flame dancing and shad ows undulating. I felt, for a moment, as if I’d fallen into a bloodred well.
Gen placed one of his broad hands on my head. His touch was gentle, firm. The illusion fled.
“Peace, Babu. Those words—saroon, munano—they’re just words.”
But they weren’t. They were instruments of control, tools for subjugation.
Until one loses one’s freedom, one never really knows what it is.

A dream with few images, jelly and bloat, dense as clay, cold as mud. Ravens shrieked in my sleep, and thunder ex ploded from a white ocean of sky. Waivia stood before me, the black juice of crushed walnuts running down her hair, her arms. She was the color of a carrion wolf: tar black.

Mother stood beside her. Her eyes had been gouged out. Her mouth gaped, and I knew, without hearing her, that she was calling for Waivia, unaware that Waivia stood beside her.

I woke with my face pressed against Savga’s crown, my mouth full of her hair.
Gagging, I pushed away from her and floundered into a sitting position. My head roared with pressure, felt like a grossly bruised melon. I passed trembling hands over my face.
Outside, the dark skies groaned under the weight of pee vish clouds.
I stared at the coarse walls, the knots and grains and splin ters dissolved by gloom. My heart lisped and squelched in my chest. The air smelled of sweat and unwashed clothes, of rotting teeth and spoiled grain.
I thought of my dream and I knew why my mother’s haunt had stalked me since Mother’s death, urging me to locate Waivia.
The warp and weft of your very essence have been inter woven with the enchantment. Your smell, the whorls and lines and taste of your skin, they’ve all been disguised,
Gen had said of the enchantment that veiled me. And now I knew: Waivia had disguised herself from Mother, using the same pigmentation charm that hid my true identity from strangers. Mother had woven
my
charm about me and thus had been able to locate me when she was a haunt; Waivia had woven her own charm about herself, after being sold to the glass spinners, and Mother had known it not.
Thunder slammed against the roof, rattling shingles.
I remembered, vividly, the way Waivia had looked the last time I’d seen her in my childhood: taller, yet slighter, as if she had been stretched and could hold herself together only by hunching her shoulders and walking in careful, pre cise steps. Bruises splotched her arms. Her upper lip was split and bloody, both eyes half-closed and purple. She’d been repeatedly violated as a sex slave.
The last thing I need is to be known as a Djimbi whore’s bastard,
she’d cried before pushing Mother, and Waivia’s own Djimbi roots, out of her life, to protect herself as best she could for the harsh reality of her future. After that, Waivia must have employed Mother’s pagan arts to dis guise herself, to ensure that Mother couldn’t find her and that others would see her as fa-pim and accord her a mea sure of respect that kiyu didn’t usually receive.
Feasible, that. Waivia had been an extraordinarily bright child, quick to learn, showing singular skill with all she at tempted. Given her segregation within the danku and the hostility shown her—the too-clever piebald bastard from Xxamer Zu—I had no doubt that Mother would’ve taught Waivia all she knew about Djimbi magics during Waivia’s youth. It would have been a bond between them and a weapon in Waivia’s arsenal for survival. A weapon Waivia had eventually used against Mother, in her need to put her Djimbi heritage behind her.
I found myself on my feet, charged with agitation from the epiphany.
Mother had abandoned me to my fate in Arena, whereas before she’d always come to my rescue, in the form of a Skykeeper, so that I might live another day to seek Waivia. In Arena, I’d seen Waivia myself and had realized Mother would come to my aid no longer, for she’d found my long-lost half sister and she had no more need of me.
Wai-ebani bayen,
Waivia had said to me, when I was nine years old.
Foremost First-Citizen Pleasurer. That’ll be me.
She’d always believed she’d one day be Kratt’s pleasurer. With her bewitching beauty and her disguise of fa-pim skin, she’d achieved her ambition. And what better way for a Wai-ebani to retain her position of prominence than to bear a son?
Waivia was carrying Kratt’s child.
I heard Gen’s voice again:
Your moonblood doesn’t flow, does it? That’s how powerful the enchantment is.You’ll never bear children while it’s wrapped about you.
Waivia had annulled the spell about herself to conceive; thus Mother had finally been able to find her. What cared Waivia of her Djimbi ancestry now, with Kratt’s second son in her belly and a haunt that masqueraded as a Skykeeper at her summons? What cared Kratt of Waivia’s true skin color, given those same things?
Thunder again, dry, angry, growling in its impotence. Ev ery organ in my body trembled. I pressed a fist against my chest. The runty thunder of my heart seemed outrageously bold.
I lifted the shutter latch. At once a gust of sultry air snatched at the shutter, whipped it open, banged it against the outside wall. I leaned out to catch the shutter, ribs smarting against the window ledge. Wind lashed my hair against my cheeks, flung it into my eyes, wind as warm as sunbaked grass at dusk, wind that soared and swirled over thousands of miles.
I wondered if Waivia, perhaps unable to sleep from the uncomfortable weight of the child in her womb, was listen ing to the rush of that very wind, was feeling its sultry an ger. I wondered if the babe inside her started with each boom of thunder.
As second son to a Clutch Lupini, I wondered if the babe stood a chance of inheriting a dragon estate, despite his skin color.
Silly me.
Waivia would employ her Djimbi magics upon her child. The infant would be fa-pim, would have skin as pure and ivory as the Emperor himself, because, of course, Waivia would want her son to be the overseer of an egg-production estate. Though I doubted she’d stop at one Clutch. She was ambitious, Waivia.
She was, I realized, someone I feared almost as much as Kratt.

Savga cried frequently during the rest of that night, elon gated moans uttered while she slept. I stroked her slim arms, held her small wrists, pressed my lips against her sweaty brow while outside thunder reverberated across the vast skies.

Dawn came, and with it the sound of bare feet descend ing the clattery stairs. Rustles and banging below. The creak of door hinges. Silence again. I draped an arm protectively around Savga’s waist and drifted into murky sleep.

The rumble of cart wheels and the squeaks of a rusty axle woke me sometime later. Our room was unbearably humid. Head clotted with exhaustion, I swallowed some water from the urn, staggered from the mat, and fumbled with the window shutters. I pushed them aside. Curdled clouds the color of mold hung low in the sky. The air was sodden.

Across the narrow avenue, in front of a tenement two doors down from ours, stood a rickshaw. The piebald youth between the shafts set the rickshaw down, then leaned heavily upon his knees and proceeded to cough as if trying to expel his ribs.

Two bayen women dressed in gauzy bitoos climbed down from the rickshaw. They both held parasols that enclosed them down to their shoulders. One parasol was the green of an angry chameleon, the other the orange of a ripe pump kin. Silk threads in matching colors sinuously embroidered the women’s bitoos, twining from hem to bosom and disap pearing beneath the parasols like buttressed roots support ing trees. The two women ducked into the tenement, still enclosed within their parasols.

I turned from the window and looked down at Savga. Sweat plastered her bangs against her forehead, and her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes looked bruised and sunken, even in her sleep. Her soiled yungshmi had come unknot ted from the small of her back during the night and was twined about her torso like a snake that had tried to swal low a too-large meal.

Sometime while we’d slept, a small pile of plum-colored cloth had been pushed into our room. I bent, picked up the worn fabric, and shook it out. It was two yungshmis, creased and impregnated with the distinctive nutmeg-and cedar pungency of yanew bark.

I shucked my filthy bitoo and, using the cleanest cor ner of it, dampened it with a little water from the urn and washed myself. I then wound one of the yungshmis about my torso and between my legs and knotted it in the small of my back, as I’d seen those in the arbiyesku do. I felt halfnaked with my limbs so exposed. But clean.

Savga jerked awake, then thrashed about as if fighting an unseen assailant.
“Savga, shhh, quiet! I’m here.” She stared at me, panting and shuddering. “I’m here,” I repeated. Slowly I extended my arms. Slowly she crept into them.
She leaned against me, her little ribs heaving, and laid her head upon one of my shoulders. I smoothed her fine hair, snarled at the back from her unquiet sleep, and rocked her slightly. I braced myself for her sobs.
They didn’t come.
Disturbing, that, like the silence that follows a scream, as if the air itself has been shattered.
Uneasy, I spoke against the soft curl of one of her ears. “You must be hungry, yes? We’ll wash a little, then go downstairs for food. Hmm?”
No response.
I pulled her away from me. Her eyes belonged to some one old and ailing. I could scarcely look at them. Carefully, a little awkwardly, I undressed and washed her, then helped her into the second moth-eaten yungshmi. The entire time her eyes followed me, tracking my face with unnerving per severance. But she spoke not a word.
When we were finished, I smiled uncertainly at her. “That feels a little better, yes?”
No answer, not even a shrug.
I held her shoulders. “I lost my mother when I was a little girl, too. I know how you feel, Savga; I do. And it’s all right to be angry at her, understand? Your anger won’t take away the love you feel for her. Don’t fear that. That’ll remain, always.”
She looked at me, face slack, eyes watching, seeming to wait for something. The impossible: the return of her mother.
“I’ll carry you downstairs,” I said, releasing her shoulders. I hoisted her onto one hip, brushed by the dusty barkcloth strips of our room, and descended the scolding stairs.
The crone stood at the great trestle table, crushing the hulls of coranuts in a wooden screw-press. Amber oil dripdripped into a waiting cruse. She glanced up at us, then nodded brusquely at two bowls of cold gruel at the very end of the table.
“My thanks for the loan of these yungshmis,” I said. I lowered Savga onto one of the stairs; her eyes followed me as I retrieved the cold gruel from the table.
The crone grunted. “Can’t have you stinking up the place, hey-o. Smelled worse than maht, you did.”
“I’ll wash our clothes today,” I said, a little stiffly. I pushed a bowl toward Savga. She didn’t take it, didn’t so much as glance at it. Her eyes were rooted on my face.
I set the bowl on her lap and squeezed beside her on the narrow step. I ate stoically, ignoring the cold blandness of the boiled featon grit and the persistence of Savga’s gaze.
I watched the crone work as I ate. She finished with the screw-press and carefully set the cruse of amber oil to one side. Using mortar and pestle, she pulverized a great pile of carmine petals into a fine pulp, then drizzled some of the amber oil into the bloodred paste. She whipped it thor oughly with a strangely pronged utensil and scooped the mess into a fine rufous cloth. My eyes roved to the two great wooden cupboards leaning against each other. I won dered what was stored within them.
“Was a time, in my youth, this house made great good med icines, and everyone knew the skill in Yimtranu’s hands,” the crone said as she knotted the cloth closed. She began squeez ing the bag of oiled pulp. Slowly the bag turned the color of liver, and beads of red seeped through and dripped into a dented metal bowl. The crone’s contorted fingers turned red as she continued to work the bag. “Fine elixirs we made, and poultices. Not nats for coloring bayen lips.”
Nats: worthless frippery.
“But nats earn more chits than tisane and linctus, hey-o. Ri shi can’t afford such medicines anymore, no, no. They get sick, their only medicine is hope. And bayen don’t trust Djimbi remedies. They get sick, they eat useless little rocks that they buy from Liru. So old Yimtranu makes nats instead.”
Yimtranu sniffed sharply, and despite her age I saw in her a pride as fierce as Tansan’s as she glared at me.
“And I don’t earn chits by housing ebanis for lords and ladies and daronpuis to play with. I’m not like the others in this alley.
This
family has its dignity, hey-o. Honor. We know the old ways. We respect them.” Her look turned sharp. “The Wai Vaneshor tells me you’re not his ebani.”
“I’m not,” I confirmed.
With a snort, she went back to mangling the pulp bag.
I finished my gruel, then tried to cajole Savga into eating some of hers. She didn’t so much as refuse as just sit there with lips closed, immobile as stone, her eyes relentlessly carving into mine. With a sigh I set the untouched gruel aside, hoisted her onto my hip, and carried her to the local well to wash our soiled clothes.
The last words I’d heard her utter had been back at the arbiyesku, when she’d asked me to carry her, when I’d picked her up and tried to hand her to Tiwana-auntie and she’d screamed.
Carry me.
That’s what she’d asked for. So I carried her. I carried her to the well to wash our clothes. I carried her in my heart, under my skin, her silence aching in my breast like a broken bone. I carried her lethargy in my limbs, and her grief in the prayers that I whispered to the Winged Infinite as I slapped our wet clothes against the laundering slab adjacent to the well.
Fa cinai, ish vanras yos via rinu, miir eirmis depin lasif.
Pure Dragon, in the strength of this child’s mourning, may her weakness for life prevail.
I carried her back to the tenement while overhead the clouds hung stubbornly in the sky and thunder rumbled across the gray plains. I longed for the wind of last night, for the relentless pressure from overhead to burst apart with claps of thunder and bolts of lightning and monsoon rain. I longed for Savga’s unwavering gaze to leave my face, just for a moment. I longed for her to speak.
Back at the tenement, beneath the lintel, Yimtranu was sizzling a lily white liquid on a smoke-blackened brazier.
“Cock quickener, this,” she grunted bitterly. “For bayen balls.”
She gestured with her chin into the humid interior of the tenement. “Something came for you. Bald Djimbi man de livered it a while ago, sent by your sissu, maybe.”
Sissu: remunerative lover. She meant the Wai Vaneshor, Gen.
“The Wai Vaneshor is not my sissu,” I said sharply. Her expression was wily; she’d been testing me, checking that what I’d said earlier—that I wasn’t an ebani—was true.
“You wouldn’t stay here if he was, aosogi-via.” She cack led. “No fuckie-fuckie in this house, no, no. Wai Vaneshor or not.”
Her pride was both irksome and admirable.
I stepped around her, Savga riding my hip, and ascended to our muggy closet of a room. Ribs aching, the small of my back creaking from carrying Savga, I set the silent child on the floor. Her bruised eyes bored into me. I noticed her lips were chapped and split.
“Drink something, Savga,” I ordered. “You haven’t had water all day.”
She remained still and silent, eyes unwavering. I crouched, lifted the urn to her lips.
“You can’t starve yourself. That won’t bring your mother back. Drink.” I tipped the urn. Her eyes stayed on mine as the water trickled uselessly over her closed lips and down her chin and neck.
Anger born of frustration burned in my gut. I wanted to shake her and cry: Life is under no obligation to give us what we expect, girl! So just bear the intolerable and do without the indispensable and fight back! Fight, Savga, fight.
But I didn’t say such. She was too young, the words too sharp in their truth. And perhaps Savga
was
fighting, in her own way. She was using twembesai gon-fawen, obstinacythat-is-gentle, to deny the reality of her situation.
I turned away from her and unrolled the new sleeping mat Gen had sent over. Inside the mat was a needle and thread, as well as a new yungshmi.
Damn Gen—I’d
told
him I didn’t want Savga to stand out from others her age. I shoved the new yungshmi to one side.
The rolled cloth clunked as it hit the wall.
I looked at it a moment, then pulled it toward me. Un rolled the bolt of fabric. Found inside a bamboo casing glossy with beeswax, yellow with age, hard as anklebone. I turned it over and read the hieratics carved in the old wood:
Sut-cha ki Tagu Nayone Xxamer Zu.
Sixty-numbered vol ume of Xxamer Zu registry.
The cork bung was friable. Dry bits of it crumbled to the floor as I unstoppered the casing. The musty smell of old parchment wafted out, carrying with it the faint scent of in cense. A fat sheath of rolled parchment was nestled inside. I could barely work it out of the casing.
I peeled off the topmost parchment as if peeling the outer skin off an onion. It was new and crisp, the ink upon it ebon and pungent with perfume. It took me a while to understand the unfamiliar hieratics gracing the top right corner: Census Annals. I glanced down the three columns of hieratics that had been written in a precise, cursive hand beneath the title.
It was names, all names.
I carefully peeled off another parchment, this one also new but not as stiff, as if it had been handled more fre quently. More names.
Seventeen pieces of curled parchment later—each piece more aged than the last—I came across a long scroll that wasn’t just a list of names. A petal-arrangement title adorned the upper right hand of the parchment.
Kanyan gai ki Hoos a’ri Chan,
it said. The Scientific Law of Human Chattel.
Thunder rolled across the rooftops. The planks beneath me trembled. Despite the hour of the day, the room was as gloomy as dusk.