Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(14)
Unar shivered.
“And of course,” Ylly continued calmly, leading the way with the heaviest basket, “there are chimeras.”
Unar followed behind her. “Chimeras aren’t real.”
“When I belonged to the princess, I accompanied her to the Temple of Odel, Protector of Children. There was the skin of a preserved chimera there. I saw it with my own eyes, Warmed One.”
“Is it still there?”
“I suppose so.”
Unar couldn’t have explained her sudden need to seek it out. It was something to do with the legend of the creature laying two eggs into its own mouth as a female, transforming into a male, and then fertilising the eggs. One of the eggs became male; the other, female. And then the two of them merged into a single offspring. Something about the Temple of Audblayin being shaped like an egg. Something to do with Unar’s conviction that Audblayin would change from female to male in this next incarnation.
The chimera will be a guardian spirit to me, Unar decided, watching over and helping me in my quest to find the god. The fact that the skin was in the wrong Temple, the Temple of a rival god, was no deterrent.
“I’ll go to see it,” she said. “Tomorrow night, I’ll go to see it. You’ll tell me the best way to go.”
Unar had asked for directions to Odel’s Temple before. If she closed her eyes, she could still see it. A day speckled by sun, a month before Isin fell. Beams of light roved over the hovels of the poor only three or four days a year. Maybe it was the crack of sunlight on the ledge that had enticed Isin out of her crib.
Most babies in Canopy didn’t have cribs. Cages—it’s a cage, little Unar had thought, like a cage for laying fowl. Most babies stayed tied to their mothers morning and night. How else to be certain they wouldn’t fall, if the parents were too poor to pay tribute to Odel? Wide sashes with holes for arms and legs were popular at the local market where Mother wed her axe-heads to smooth, polished handles and Father sold his stacks of fuel. Unar’s parents pooled their meagre earnings to pay rent to their internoder landlord for the one-room hollow with its ill-fitting, west-facing door and single window wide enough to admit pythons but not a grown man’s arm.
Isin slept in the crib, for Mother couldn’t keep a babe close to the forge fire in the stone-lined workhouse three trees over, where she sweated over costly metals. Nor could she leave her work mid-shaping; she must ignore her baby’s needs lest the steel cool and the tempering fail. And who, in similarly drastic circumstances, could spare the time to look up from their own drudgery to wonder why a child’s hungry cries sometimes leaked from the locked door beside or below their own?
Unar didn’t like to go with her father, searching for fuel, leaving her little sister behind, but she wasn’t grown; she couldn’t strap the baby to her own body. She might lose her balance and kill them both. That day, the day the sunlight touched the window, Unar and Father had returned to the hovel for lunch, just in time to see Isin pull herself out of the crib and fall, headfirst, onto the floor.
There was blood. Unar had been frightened. Could babies break? Was her new sister broken? Father had picked Isin up, holding her high so that Unar couldn’t see her. There was just his head brushing the ceiling, his sandals in the blood, and the snake-sound of shushing. Isin hadn’t died.
Not then. Not yet.
I’ll tie you to me, Unar had whispered to the baby, days later, and she had tried. Isin had cried at Unar’s attempt, and Mother had seen, and taken the baby, and beaten Unar until she’d lain senseless on that rough, splintery floor. Mother made those axe handles so beautiful and smooth. Why not polish the place where her own children must set their cut and blood-crusted feet?
If I fixed the floor, foolish girl, do you think we’d be allowed to stay here? Unar remembered her mother growling the season before. The owner, the internoder, could charge twice as much then, and where would we be? Out there in the monsoon!
Mother was always growling. Unar was always wrong. Despite being wrong, and foolish, and all the rest, Unar was afraid of what would happen if Isin got out again. She asked Father which was the way to the Temple of the Protector of Children. She’d found a ring of rare mushrooms and gathered them carefully in the dirty cloth that held back her hair.
Father had laughed and shaken his head, refusing to answer. He’d taken the mushrooms and put them in his tea. They simmered into a broth, which he ate where Mother couldn’t see. Unar had looked on, helpless and silent.
She opened her eyes, returning to the Garden of the present.
He wasn’t there to steal from her anymore. Audblayin knew where he was. Unar didn’t care if he was dead or alive.
She dumped the basket of laundry down beside the bare black briars that would bear white flowers later in the dry season but which, for now, made convenient clothes-hanging places. Her arms ached. She found herself rubbing her left shoulder with her right hand, mimicking the habit of Aoun’s.
It was too late, now, for offerings. Too late for Isin to be saved by Odel. But Unar still, unaccountably, craved the sight of that old demon skin.
“I will try to remember the way, Warmed One,” was Ylly’s weary reply.
SEVEN
UNAR FINISHED pulling weeds.
Smudging her brow with the back of her hand, she washed in the irrigation channel before lowering its wooden lid into place and setting off for the kitchens to collect her supper rations.