Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(13)
Oos had altered it to a slim-fitting woman’s shirt that crossed over in front, tied with ribbons, and boasted a roomy bust and tight waist. Unar had seen the vizier’s daughter working on it under the eaves of the pavilion during their break for midday meal.
They don’t mind which style we use, so long as the colours are correct, she had said shyly. One who walks in the grace of Audblayin thought it would better glorify the goddess if the colours didn’t fade, too. This mordant was gifted as tribute in the Temple. Servant Eilif said one who walks in the grace of Audblayin could use it.
What is it?
Green vitriol. It is of iron and the milk of mudwasp stings. One of my minder-women used to make it.
I’ve never made anything like that before, Unar said, wrinkling her nose. But I have mixed leaves and mud to make a poultice for bringing bruise swellings down.
Unar had helped Oos with her swollen eye. Oos had offered to treat Unar’s red Gardener’s shirt so that the colour wouldn’t fade. And that was the last involvement with laundry that Unar had had, because it was slave’s work.
Until now.
“I’m almost finished,” the slave woman said.
Unar came closer to the baskets of clothes. They were the dirty slept-in clothes she and the other Gardeners had shucked off by the moat the previous morning. She picked up a shirt. It was Aoun’s.
He wouldn’t need it again. He wouldn’t return to the Garden to toil with his hands again; only to toil with his magic. The sleeve was worn over the upper arm on the left side. He still missed his brother, the one who had drowned.
We used to fight all the time, he told Unar once when they’d been given the job of finding some escaped flowerfowl together. My mother kept a great sack full of all the wishbones from every fowl she ever ate, and we’d snap a dozen a day, deciding who would get a new shirt or which of us would have a bath first and which would get the dirty water.
He’d gone shirtless while they climbed after the foolish, easily frightened birds that day, and Unar hadn’t bothered to look. As a Servant, he’d be wrapped up tight in a white robe all the time; now, when it was too late, was when she wanted to look?
Unar sighed. She wet the shirt and began beating it, hard, against one of the rocks that protruded into the stream of falling water. It felt good. Like she was beating the fat Bodyguard.
“Forgive me, Warmed One,” Ylly said, “but you shouldn’t strike so hard. You’ll distort the weave.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
They beat clothes together in silence for a while. Ylly wrung them out and placed them in another basket. When the shirts were done, she brought out the red robes that the Gardeners had worn to the ceremony, their hems feathered and pale with mother-of-pearl dust.
Unar sighed again as she remembered the sight of a glittering Aoun diving into the water. It was a new and strange sensation, being so fixated on his beautiful form, on the slabs of muscle that covered his once-skinny ribs, on his bulging arms and the shadow of a man’s growth deepening the darkness down his throat. How long would she have to wait before all such urges were repressed once again? She had no time for distractions if she was to meet her destiny. Hopefully this wouldn’t go on until Unar brought Audblayin back to the Garden.
“Ylly,” she mused, to distract herself. “It’s a funny name. I never heard of it before.”
“It was my mother’s name, Warmed One,” Ylly said. “Her only gift to me, other than the gift of my life. We of the Understorey believe it’s good luck to have names that sound the same forwards and backwards. Warriors should be able to travel up and down the trunks of the great trees.”
“Do you really think that if your name was Unar, you’d be able to go up trees but not down again? That is just as stupid as the Bodyguard.”
“Whatever you say, Warmed One.”
“You know what else is stupid?” Unar went on, feeling her face become heated. “Pushing old women off the edge of the Garden when they’re too weak to wash clothes. Surely there’s other work she could do, elsewhere. Cooking. Caring for children.”
“She cannot be sold elsewhere, Warmed One. She knows the secrets of the Garden.”
“What secrets?” Unar said scathingly. “She doesn’t know any secrets.”
Neither do I, she thought. But I’m going to discover them. Somehow.
They lapsed into silence again as they cleaned the thicker, heavier robes. Unar found Oos’s robe, smaller than the others and, like the shirts, more fashionably tailored, and wondered if her friend would enjoy sleeping in the feather beds of the Temple, and whether she’d get fat from an oversupply of food tributes, too.
“Ylly,” she said at last when the laundry was done and they bent to lift the heavy baskets and take them to the drying bushes, “what would happen to a baby who fell from Canopy? If your mother’s people found it alive, would they care for it?”
“An adopted fallen baby is even luckier than a good name, Warmed One. But I must tell you that they rarely survive. If the babe’s bones were not broken by branches, the child’s cries would call demons before warriors.”
“Demons?”
“The predators that your gods and goddesses keep away from Canopy, Warmed One. The old woman tells tales of them. Spotted swarms. They snatch a bite of flesh each with their needle teeth and leave nothing but bones behind. Embracers squeeze the life from sleeping women and men. Dayhunters take possums from their nests and children from their cradles, and longarms, who hunt in packs of five, pull monkeys and men by their heads and limbs into five bloody pieces.”