Read Tinder Stricken Online

Authors: Heidi C. Vlach

Tags: #magic, #phoenix, #anthropomorphic, #transhumanism, #female friendship, #secondary world

Tinder Stricken (7 page)

BOOK: Tinder Stricken
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Carefully, gripping the fabric tight against
more clumsiness, she opened her satchel. She chewed and swallowed a
scant half of the kudzu's leaves and strained her murky vision
toward the shapes flitting in the trees — chirping birds, maybe
wagtails.

Esha had performed animism before. She
remembered little about it since she was shambling drunk at the
time, on rice beer and grief equally — so speaking to a beast
couldn't be
difficult
. It was simply wrong.

Esha threw more of her shame into the wind,
and strained to bend herself upright, and called out with a
rustling of undergrowth lungta in her voice.

“Hail? Hail, birds.”

The chirping stopped. Shining little eyes
turned to her.

“Hey, ah. Hello.” There was a stilted way
animists needed to speak for animals to understand: Esha suddenly
couldn't remember it. “I am a friend. Help me?”

The wagtails' chittering resumed. They
weren't intelligent enough to use speaking lungta themselves — but
as Esha pushed her own energy toward her ears and outward, the
cries began forming sense.


Help?”


Friend?”


No! Largebig!”


Assist friend?”


No! Enemy.”


Enemy trick?”


Trick?! Danger!”

They took wing, all shouting,
danger,
danger!
Flapping faded into the distance.

“Ugh,” Esha growled, “no!” Not that she had
expected much of birds, the brazen little seed thieves. She dangled
because she had to, but her senses were strained toward the trees
now.

She waited — for another hour, as near as
she could tell. Something small and brown came crackling through
the needles but it fled when Esha called out to it. Prey creatures
couldn't overcome their base natures. She needed something more
cunning, something crafty enough to solve problems for its next
meal — a monkey, or a bush pig, or a magpie. Maybe a wild cat would
even listen to her, if it didn’t decide instead that Esha was a
trussed piece of prey.

Her bladder ached and her muscles all
hummed; her headache was a blunted sword against her temple,
pushing hard enough to pierce. Esha couldn't wait for a person any
longer. There were animals around that she hadn't noticed but none
of them were noticing her back.

A few more kudzu leaves went into Esha's
mouth, laboriously swallowed upward. Then with all the air in her
stifled chest, with all the life-movement she could shove into her
words, she called out to the wilds.

“Hey! Hail! I need help. I'll— I'll give you
food if you help me!”

The sky's silence answered her. Wind and
clouds, and not one living thing.

“Help? I'll feed you, just— Help me!”

She closed her eyes and could barely open
them again, the pressure in her head growing. Esha was mustering
herself to heave upright again when she heard it — wings fluttering
above her. Her hopes lapped high and she twisted to look at the
creature.

It was an orange mass with long plumes of
tail feathers, and bright eyes above a scruffy-looking throat. A
phoenix. Staring down at her like judgement itself, and Esha wanted
to glare right back but she was spinning with the wind again.

The phoenix creaked in a rusty-door voice:
in Esha's seeking ears, the kudzu's green lungta sieved out
words.


Stop shouting.”

Even with lungta wasted on it, the beast
couldn't see sense. Esha huffed and waved an arm up at her dilemma.
“I’m
trapped
. I can’t get my leg free. And my knife is down
there, so I need
help
.”


A human is trapped in a red-food ( )?
How the lake-blue ( )!”

Some of the croaking didn't make sense: it
sidestepped the lungta in Esha's thoughts, too slick to grab
meaning from. She hurried more kudzu into her mouth, all the leaves
she could rake off the stem.

While she chewed, the phoenix sat silent.
Feathered wings fluttered again and the slightest of weights jolted
down the trap line, and now the brazen creature sat staring down
its bristly beak at Esha.


This is not a killing-trap for
phoenix-kin? No violet-coloured ( )?”

“I ...? I was trying to catch things that
walk on land. A hare. Maybe a pika.”


It follows that you offer me red
food?”

“You mean meat? You can have meat, if that's
what you want!”

The phoenix grumbled, and stepped downward
to examine Esha's snared leg. Jutting from the edges of its forked
tail were its two stringfeathers, each one knotted around a dozen
no-doubt-stolen trinkets. The phoenix's fire strikers — two rocks,
one dull like iron and one glittering like fools' gold— pulled the
left-side stringfeather so it plumbed straight toward Esha's face.
If she saw the bird reach for its iron and pyrite, she would be as
good as burned.

“I can’t untie myself.” Esha paused. “Untie
— you know what that means?”


Criss-cross, tawny to blue.”
The
phoenix shot a look at Esha, brief as a needle's prick.
“Phoenix-kin are made of scarlet knots. Better tying-skill than
( ).”

A woman would have better luck talking to
her own shoes. Esha held her tongue, and held it tighter while the
phoenix worked its beaktip into the slip knot. Sharp pressure slid
between leather and pant cotton but it couldn't slide far
enough.


Too tight,”
the bird creaked.

“I know that. You’ll need to cut it. I think
you might be large enough to hold a knife.”


An iron-tool? Good iron, no (
)?”

“Yes, yes! The knife!” Esha flailed toward
the ground. “Pick that up, and use the pointed edge on this trap.
Cut
it. You understand?”

It stared. And then it hopped off of Esha,
sailing past with a rush of feathers. It flapped back up a moment
later, alighting sideways on the trap line with the khukuri clasped
in one wiry foot. For a moment, the phoenix stretched its ropy neck
backward, staring at the khukuri with a gradual flaring of head
crests.


This, an iron cutting-tool with ...
crawling-( )-yellow on the end? Inside the crawling-( )-yellow ...
This, it is a ( )-purple-song flower?”

“Gaah,” Esha sighed, “what are you
chattering about? It's a khukuri. A knife, for cutting. The golden
part is pine resin with an orchid flower inside. Just use the sharp
part on the trap! Not on me, though!”

Still, the phoenix sat there. It turned
covetous eyes down at Esha; she suddenly dreaded the beast dropping
the khukuri and splitting her skull with it.


( )-iron cuts you free of the ( )-trap.
That done, what will I receive?”

“I already told you—“

The phoenix screeched, loud and brassy.
“What green-growing will you give?!”

Esha spluttered. “Yams! Millet! Sesame! Any
plant humans grow, I'll get you some! Carrots! I don't know, what
do you want?!”

The bird's eyes glittered. Then it turned
the khukuri in its clawed grip and applied its beak to the blade. A
clumsy cut, and another, and each cut brought downward movement.
There was a deciding instant, a stretching like anticipation, and
then the yankvine snapped like a bowshot and the ground blessedly
knocked Esha's breath from her.


This,”
the phoenix above her
creaked
, “a tool with a ( )-purple-song flower inside. This
flower is a kind of food. This, I will take.”

“No!” Esha cried. She laid there, joints
searing with the night's torture, gasping on the forest floor as
another phoenix sat well beyond her grasp.

It turned away, wings fanning open.
“(
)-blue kin, this bargain is made.”
And with the Kanakisipt
khukuri held tight in its claws, it winged away, gone through the
pines like snuffed fire.

“No,
no!”
Esha pushed off the
leaf-littered ground. Her head twirled and everything was hurting
now; momentum carried her over onto splayed, shaking hands while
her heart contorted. “Goddamned feather-rat! Why?!”

 

Nothing answered her. She stayed there,
bowed to the forest floor, staring at her leathery hands with their
hoof-tough nails.

This morning marked another ruined plan.
Here was another boon slipped through Esha's unworthy hands,
another pole ripped out of her shaking scaffold of retirement
plans.

 

This time, she didn't know what to do.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 4

 

After gulping down cups of water, a
tar-strong cup of buttered tea, and some pain herb, Esha arrived at
Janjuman Farm and accepted the wage penalty for her tardiness. She
worked the fields like any other day, a stranger inside her own
body, numbly tending the yam sprouts. She was only one person
alongside her perfectly honourable field sisters. These other
women, these bent colleagues in a rainbow of coloured saris, had
husbands and children and full heads of hair under their headwraps,
and family names to encompass it all. That was how people deserved
to live.

Maybe, Esha thought, she deserved to be
persecuted after all.

She stopped thinking such things as the sun
descended the sky and she left the fields, gripping her pitifully
light wage packet. Habit tugged her toward the Farback, toward the
trapping circuit. Esha wasn't going back there. Her savings had
suffered a blow but she wasn't going back there. She went home
instead, and cooked a meal that she stuffed into her mouth, still
steaming. While chewing millet and grilled onion, she counted the
contents of her savings chest.

She had enough rupees for a one-week stay in
a retirement shelter. Not a good shelter, either. Selling the gold
bracelet and wooden spoon set might buy her another few days, or a
nurse's fleeting attention. Esha had been counting on that
Kanakisipt kuhkuri — the price of family esteem plus the potent
speaking lungta of a preserved orchid from Tselaya's peak. If a
diplomat or a historian was willing to open their purse, Esha would
have gladly kept a blank face while claiming she didn't know where
this khukuri came from. Some cousin of the family, perhaps. Some
minor noble long since vanished, lost to time.

And those lies might have bought Esha some
peace
if a flea-eaten phoenix hadn't ruined everything. She
didn't have the strength to be angry about it anymore; she just
sat, alone, running her fingers through a small mound of clicking
rupees. She needed to do something about this, or else resign
herself to shifting in public, horrified faces all around as she
started bleating and pissing herself. That thought made Esha sure.
She was plenty sullied and incredibly tired, but she wasn't giving
up.

So she needed another plan. Hunting down
that thief phoenix would fix her troubles — which was foolishness
and Esha knew it. She was no ranger and the phoenix had whole
forests to hide in. Even if Esha didn't have retirement to pay for,
she didn't have the money to have one specific bird tracked down
and killed.

Gita would look after her, said a craftiness
inside Esha. She still had Gita's nameplate, and the extra property
token, now kept safe on a necklace beneath all her layered
clothes.

Maybe this budding plan would work if a
trapper wanted Gita's property token. Those sold for a tall sum if
the right ownership arrangements could be made. Or Esha could
enlist someone interested in capturing a phoenix — a live,
intelligent one.

Thinking of the former Yam Plateau animist
with his hunkered pet, Esha began to remember what hope felt like.
She just needed to find an animist and make a deal.

Rama's Day came, forgotten by Esha forgot
about until it was upon her. Janjuman's fields rang with hymns, the
workers singing together of past royals and eternal gods. The
workday ended at the noon zenith and the fieldwomen took their
reprieve as gladly as their pay.

Esha was glad for it, she had to admit.
Songs lingered in her mouth and once she was past the guard
station, she kept humming as she walked the market street. This
would be a chance to fill her millet sack and butter dish, as well
as reassign Gita's property token to her own imperial record. If
she could find a particularly benign housing clerk, she might even
ask for a listing of diplomats working currently on Yam Plateau.
Esha would call her troubles a
matter of public well-being
and leave the matter at that.

As Esha rounded a corner, flame caught her
eye. A phoenix flew above the metalworkers' homes, its
stringfeathers whipping, wings flared wide as it skimmed over
bamboo shingles and corrugated tin. A phoenix everywhere Esha
went

This had to be a nightmare, a delusion of
her battered mind. But others in the street saw the bird, and
gasped, and pointed. What if this was the same phoenix that stole
her khukuri? Gods, Esha thought, what if this was the same phoenix
she and Gita struck with a stone? But that couldn't be: its wings
worked perfectly well, enough for it to pivot in the air and alight
on a horse-headed roof pole. And it landed on one foot only: the
other leg was a feathered stump.

Then a second phoenix, a whole and
healthy-looking one, alighted on a roof across the road. A brass
tag glinted in its tail — the mark of a tamed bird with an owner.
This trained phoenix called out to the one-footed bird, a cry like
a pleading song.

Around her in the market street, people
murmured, gripping chunks of bamboo and brick they might need to
throw. Guards gathered; one held a bow with an arrow notched but
not drawn, not yet. He would shoot if either phoenix began their
firestarting movements, the hammer-hard striking of iron and pyrite
wielded by an unpredictable animal.

BOOK: Tinder Stricken
2.28Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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