Forged by Fire (5 page)

Yamdalar cinaigours. Dragon cocoons.
Permit me to explain them.
As they near the end of their lives, all female dragons

begin secreting death-wax, whereupon they are marched to a cocoon warehouse. Upon reaching the warehouse, each dragon curls up and enters a comatose state, and death-wax production increases tenfold. Within a clawful of days, the cinaigour is completely enclosed in a yamdalar, or kera tinous involucre. Temple teaches that in this manner, the imperfect female dragon—imperfect by dint of her gender— prepares to enter the Celestial Realm.

Although the encased dragons appear dead, they are alive for some days; limbs and mouth parts occasionally move within the involucre, and sometimes a mournful, liquid braying is emitted. A dragon must never be killed, regardless of age or condition, for the beasts
are
holy, even if recognition of such divinity is oft conveniently reserved for the rare males of the species. So the cocoons are left in peace.

But eventually, all motion and sound stops within an in volucre. A clawful of days after the last visible movement, the dragon has completed her death journey to the Celes tial Realm. Then, and only then, the cocoons may be dis posed of.

As a member of the arbiyesku, that was now my primary responsibility: disposing of dragon cocoons, each month and every month, without fail.

I wove clumsy baskets. I dozed. I wove mats. I dozed. I tried not to think about how repulsive the work of my new clan was. The sun relinquished its searing hold over the grass lands and sank into the horizon in a blaze of red.

I was ferociously hungry, but was loath to rummage about the arbiyesku in search of a food cellar. I didn’t know my new clan’s customs and rules regarding cellars and the handling and distribution of food, and I certainly couldn’t afford to alienate them any further than what I’d inadver tently done already.

I sighed and stared off into the gloaming. And tensed. Running along one of the many grassy paths that radi ated from the arbiyesku compound was a child. I lumbered to my feet, ignoring the pain in my ribs. Slowly the figure resolved itself as Savga. She staggered to a panting, beam ing stop before me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked sharply.
She paced wobbly-legged about me, wheezing as she tried to catch her breath. “Did you . . . miss me?”
“Where’re the others? What’s happened?”
“They’re coming. Slow, slow, always so slow. One of the carts broke and I was tired of waiting.”
“Should I go help?”
“Funny Kazonvia, you can hardly walk! And they’re a long way away, closer to the brooder stables than here.”
“So you came back alone.”
She shrugged. “Mama can’t beat me till she gets here.”
I grimaced. Her folly would hardly endear me to Tansan.
“Let’s you and I start the evening meal, yes?” she said. “I’ll blow on the embers to wake the fire.” She darted to ward one of the cooking pits. With a curse, I limped in her direction.
She was already on her hands and knees and sputtering from the hot soot she’d blown into her face by the time I reached her.
“Not like that! Great Dragon, you’ll burn yourself!” I stiffly knelt beside her and wiped her face with the hem of my bitoo.
“Not so rough!” she wailed.
I muttered an apology as she wriggled from my hands.
“You start the fire, Kazonvia, and I’ll get the dramdacan.”
“What?” But she was already sprinting away into the twilight gloom and disappearing into a mud-brick hut that looked much the same as the rest.
Muttering, I awkwardly lay before the dark embers—I couldn’t bend properly to blow on them, so I had to lie on my side—and, poking them with a charred stick, started blowing and stuffing twists of grass here and there amongst the quickening coals.
Savga returned, huffing, laden with a stack of dried fish.
“Come, you help me cut the dramdacan. We always cook dramdacan on hashing day. Really, I’m telling the truth. Come on.”
Whether she was telling the truth or whether I would be roasted alive for permitting this six-year-old spitfire to chop up the impoverished clan’s store of riverine fish changed nothing: It seemed I had no choice but to obey.
I clambered to my feet and staggered to where Savga knelt beside a pitted stone slab. She held a wicked curved blade topped by twin wooden knobs and was clumsily try ing to cut a dried fish into slices by rocking the blade atop it. The dried fish rattled and popped beneath the steel like grain burning in a pan.
“Do you know how to use that knife, Savga?” I asked wearily. “You’ll chop a finger off if you’re not— Look out! Just put that down, now!”
A moot command: She’d dropped the knife and was standing, howling, holding a bleeding hand crushed against her potbelly.
I ascertained that I wasn’t going to be killed by Tansan for having let her daughter amputate one of her own fin gers; then I stanched the flow of Savga’s cut with a rippedoff portion of my bitoo. Once soothed, Savga sat in the dust nursing her hand and regaled me with a grisly story some one called Tiwana-auntie had told her, about a girl with no hands; I resigned myself to chopping up the dried dramda can as night settled around us.
That was how Tansan found us. First I knew of her pres ence was when Savga leapt to her feet with a gasp.
“Mama!”
I turned—too quickly—from where I was squatted and fell to my rump with a painful cry. Tansan stood above me, her long legs braced, her hands knuckled on her hips.
“Mama, I had to come back, I really had to, I couldn’t leave my foremost friend here all alone with the dark com ing—”
“Enough.” Tansan held up a hand and Savga promptly fell silent. “You know the dangers of walking alone. Get the switch—”
She looked away from Savga sharply, and stared across the compound. I followed her gaze. For a moment I thought Tansan was staring at the white central dome of the Tem ple, located to the south of the arbiyesku, in the center of the Clutch. But then a strange silhouette cut itself from the dark and came lurching toward us.
“Go inside the barracks, Savga.” The urgency in Tansan’s tone made me instantly anxious.
“Don’t let them take my foremost friend, Mama,” Savga whispered.
“Get in the barracks. Now.”
“Promise?”
“Savga . . .”
“Promise?”
“Savga!”
“Mama, you have to promise—”
“Yes. Now go.”
Savga melted into the dark. I clambered to my feet.
It was a rickshaw, that shadow, pulled by a sinewy Djimbi man who came to a wheezing stop a short distance before us. Seated in the rickshaw were two lordlings, their silk shirts sloppily unlaced, their pomaded hair tousled. I could smell the maska spirits on their breath from where I stood.
One of the lordlings flicked a hand that was studded with turquoise rings. “Bring out all the women! Bring ’em all out!”
“We’re alone, Bayen Hacros.” Tansan said the honorific
First Lord Dominant
as if it were a curse. “The arbiyesku is delivering fodder to the brooder stables.”
The two men exchanged bleary looks; then one lord lurched to his feet. The rickshaw creaked and swayed and he almost lost his balance. He planted one hand atop his com panion’s head to steady himself and placed the other on the hilt of the turquoise-studded dagger at his waist.
“Are you lying to us, rishi whore? You know what I do to liars?”
“As is your right, you are welcome to examine every hut and building here, Bayen Hacros,” Tansan said coldly, and she gestured at the mud-brick domiciles in the com pound, her arm gliding smoothly through the air.
The movement, combined with the lift of her chin and the inhalation of her breath, drew the men’s eyes to her chest. It had been, I realized, a calculated move.
Their eyes simultaneously raked over her.
“Think we’ve found us a suitable whore, Neme,” the seated one slurred.
“We’ll take the both of ’em, by dragon.” The standing one’s voice had turned thick.
Tansan took a step forward. “I’ll do. You don’t need her as well.”
I began to suspect what was transpiring and stared at Tansan, appalled. “You can’t—”
She turned and
looked
at me. I took a step back from the intensity on her face, the muted rage.
“I promised Savga,” she hissed.
“I won’t let you keep that promise.”
“That’s not your decision to make.”
“I’ve already made it.”
We stared at each other, neither of us looking at the lordlings making quips in the rickshaw about whores fight ing over the privilege of servicing bayen cocks.
“Both of you come, and that’s an order!” one of them bawled. “There’s more than enough for the two of you!”
Tansan gave a humorless smile that bared only the up per row of her teeth. Her dark eyes were intense as they stayed riveted on mine. “You wouldn’t survive the night with them, Secondgirl. We both know it.”
“I’ve got twice the strength you have. Now go in with your child.”
She slapped me, and the blow rang down my spine and blazed fire across my broken ribs. My vision swam and it was hard to breathe.
“I made a promise to my child.” She grabbed a fistful of my hair and lifted my face to the rickshaw.
“Look at her, Bayen Hacros!” she cried. “This is a woman rotting from the inside out with the mating disease! It’s my duty to inform you of her contagion.”
By the moonlight, the drunken lordlings were able to see the welts and scrapes and bruises that mottled every inch of my face. “Could be that she’s your sister, hey,” one of them said doubtfully. “Could be you’re trying to keep her from her duty.”
“She’s no sister of mine.” The dislike was sincere in her voice. She released me with a push, and I stumbled and fell. White-hot pain blasted across my torso and racheted up and down my spine.
By the time my vision cleared, the rickshaw—with Tansan in it—was gone, and Savga was crouched by my head, weeping.
“Did Mama go with them?”
I thought I might retch. Tansan had knowingly given herself over to violation. Not for my sake, no. But to keep a promise to her child. I was furious and appalled, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I would have had the strength of conviction to do the same for my child, had our situa tions been reversed.
Yes. Yes, I would have. How to break a promise to one’s child, knowing that to do so might result in the death of said child’s friend? How to face the anguish and accusation in the child’s eyes each day thereafter?
And how could I explain all that to the six-year-old sobbing beside me?
“We should have fought them,” I said hoarsely.
Savga’s eyes went wide. “Oh, no, Kazonvia. You don’t
fight
the bayen when they come trolling, hey.”
“Trolling,” I said bitterly. “Is that what it’s called?”
Savga wrapped her little arms about herself and shud dered. “Will Mama come back?”
I glared into the darkness, where Tansan had disappeared.
“Help me prepare the evening meal.” I gestured for Savga to hand me a leathery fish.
And, shuddering, she mutely obeyed.

In the darkness I found Fwipi. Tansan’s infant was sleep ing restlessly in the sling on her humped back. Shoulders stooped, rheumy eyes heavy, Fwipi merely nodded at my hoarse narration of what had occurred. A dark Djimbi man who was pulling one of the carts by means of a yoke about his neck cursed at hearing my news. He wrenched himself free of the traces and strode off.

Fwipi watched him disappear into the dark mouth of a hut as I stammered an inane apology.
“With you, without you, she had to serve, Kazonvia.” She spat in the dust. “A curse, her beauty.”
Thick, pungent smoke from the dragon-dung fagots I’d used in the cooking pit slowly curled toward the vast sea of stars above us. Children whimpered as mothers and aunties woke them from the back of the reeking arbiyesku carts, stripped them of their meager clothing, and began scrub bing their shivering bodies clean in the dark.
“Does Tansan have to go with lordlings often?” I asked.
“Once is often.” Fwipi’s tired eyes searched mine. “More than once, you stop counting.”
I didn’t ask more.
The soup I’d made under Savga’s direction was thick as paste and bland as dust. No one complained; everyone was too bone-weary for talk. Afterward—when the carts had been scrubbed clean with sand and wheeled back into the warehouse, and babies had been diapered and suckled to sleep—Savga chose to lay beside me in the barracks.
I was startled by, and grateful for, her decision. It would have been unbearable if Savga had despised me for her mother’s disappearance.
At Savga’s insistence, I rubbed her smooth little back till she drifted off to sleep.
Tansan’s infant wailed with hunger and suckled only briefly from another woman’s breast, and his pitiful cries kept me awake long into the cool night. When I did start to drift off, I dreamt I was falling down a gaping pit, and I jerked awake, heart pounding. Come dawn, I found myself agitated and exhausted, and in that enervated state, I sifted through the memories of my childhood, trying to recall if trolling had been a practice common on Clutch Re.
Xxamer Zu was but a pocket compared to Re; given the expanse and population of my birth Clutch, it was conceivable that trolling
had
existed there, but hadn’t often occurred where I could witness it, for the compound of my birth clan had been located a half day’s march from the bayen center of the Clutch. I certainly had no memory of trolling occuring on Re. It was a practice I’d have to tell Ghepp to put a stop to on Xxamer Zu. Immediately.
Come morning, Savga and I worked hulling the rem nants of last season’s wizened coranuts, so the nuts could be pounded into paste. Save for several old women spin ning string from beaten jute fibers, and two old men strop ping the blades of several overturned churners, Savga and I were alone in the compound; after a dismal morning meal of the cold remains of last night’s soup, the arbiyesku had trudged with hoe and hand plow into the patchwork of arid fields surrounding us.
One of the old women beside us was Tiwana-auntie, a fearsome hunchback with a voice like scree sliding down a mountainside. She was Fwipi’s elder sister, and as wizened as an old fig.
Beside me, Savga’s entire little body went suddenly as tense as a cur’s scenting a weasel. She sprang to her feet, coranuts flying everywhere, and streaked across the dusty earth. Tansan was entering the compound, along the same grassy path the rickshaw had traveled the night before. Behind her, in the hazy near distance, the central dome of Temple Xxamer Zu shimmered like a gigantic dragon’s egg.
Tansan held a hand up, as if to ward Savga back. Savga stopped, stood uncertainly. Tansan spoke to her and placed a hand on her head. Wordless, the two approached.
To enter the women’s barracks, Tansan had to walk past where I sat in the dust in the barracks’ shade. She walked slowly, pain clenched tight within her, but still carried her self with the feral grace of a creature impossible to capture. She didn’t deign to look at me, and after a quick glance I couldn’t look at her, either. She was as bruised and cut as I. The fishy taste of the congealed soup I’d swallowed for breakfast burned in the back of my throat.
Once again, she looked like my sister, Waivia.
I heard her mount the rickety stairs, heard the rasp of the barracks door swing open on its coarse twine hinges. A pause; Tansan was looking down at me, I could
feel
her eyes burning through my skin.
I met her smoldering gaze.
“This place”—Tansan gestured, taking in the compound, the cocoon warehouse, the rolling miles of sun-seared sa vanna beyond—“this place will be run by us one day soon. It will be ours, belong to Djimbi, belong to rishi. It will be my daughter’s.” Her eyes turned hard. “I think you’re well enough to work the fields tomorrow, Secondgirl.”
With that, Tansan entered the barracks, Savga at her heels, and the door creaked shut. After a pause, the door reopened and Savga clumped down the stairs and rejoined me, her face a thundercloud.
“Mama wants to sleep.” She sounded on the brink of ei ther tears or fury.
She chose fury and stared at me defiantly. “Mama’s my azedo. She’ll do what she says, oh, yes. She’ll get rid of the fa-pim muck in this Clutch, and then no one will hurt her ever again.”
“Close your fast lips, child,” old Tiwana-auntie rasped. “Spoken nonsense kills.”
Savga’s puffed-out chest deflated. She lowered her eyes, bit her lip, then hesitantly looked up at me.
“You won’t tell anyone I said that, hey-o? About my mother being myazedo?”
I didn’t have a clue what the word meant. But I smiled reassuringly. “We’re foremost friends, Savga. I won’t say a thing.”
With a tremulous sigh, Savga nodded. “Foremost friends.”
“Sit beside me.” I patted the ground. “Tell me another of your stories, hey.”
Slowly she nodded. But she didn’t resume shelling cora nuts. She stared at the ground, silent.
“I forget sometimes,” she whispered.
“Forget what?”
She looked lost, drained, devitalized. “That Mama hates me.”
My response was grounded in nothing but reactionary denial. “Your mother doesn’t hate you!”
She shrugged apathetically. “She does every time the lords come trolling. I’m a senemei, hey.”
I didn’t know what the word meant.
“Three bayen lords took Mama one day, when she was returning from the river, before I was born. That’s how she got that scar, fighting them, and that’s why Fwipi-granna’s claimer was killed, for Mama’s defiance. I’m a senemei. Tiwana-auntie says so. Keau claimed Mama afterward, to spare Mama some of the shame of having me.”
I glanced at Tiwana-auntie. Her puckered face was a mask.
I thought senemei must be the Djimbi word for
bastard
. Keau must have been the man who’d stormed into a hut last night, when I’d informed Fwipi that Tansan had been taken.
“That’s why Mama loves Agawan better than me,” Savga continued hoarsely.
“Agawan?”
“My baby brother.” A tear escaped an eye. “She hates me each time the lords come trolling. ’Cause I remind her of . . . them.”
My heart ached for the child before me, and I suddenly understood why she’d been so delighted when I’d prom ised to be her foremost friend, why she’d been so deter mined to stay resolutely by my side since. My entry into the arbiyesku had supplied Savga with a childless woman her mother’s age, and she’d fiercely—and desperately— adopted me as her own.
I awkwardly pulled the child onto my lap and held her, reliving the ache I’d too often felt when my mother had turned from me to favor my sister. She felt small and frail within my arms. I was comforting not just her, understand; I was comforting a mirror image of a younger me.
After a moment, she leaned her small head against my collarbone and wept.