Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(46)

“Neither do I.”

Silence.

Issi complained again, loudly.

“I will feed you, then, little black duck,” Bernreb said soothingly. “Getting to be a fat, heavy little chick, are you not? With only a few little fuzzy feathers. It is no good talking to me in the language of the chimera. You are with your own kind now.”

“Ba,” the baby said.

“Bernreb,” Bernreb encouraged her.

“Ba.”

“Close enough.”

Bernreb took Issi back past Unar to the hearth room, with Ylly not far behind him. They left the curtain on its hook, and Marram’s voice floated through the open doorway.

“I think it is the smell of the baby bringing that dayhunter around to this side of our tree.”

“Did you see it?” Esse asked.

“I saw scales rubbed onto bark, three and four trunks from here. Claw marks. Long streaks of dayhunter waste with insects trapped in it, only hours old and not set. The same fully grown male animal that left marks around your nets, Esse. It is not afraid to swim from tree to tree down at Floor.”

“Surely our pet corpse-lover has better pickings at Floor than at this level. Surely it remembers that it has never, in its long life, found anything to eat below the Garden.”

“No matter how we try to hide the baby’s smell in the centre of the river, I think it smells her anyway. Its ancestors spent many centuries plucking bald newborns from hollows in trees. I think even fresh corpses from the fighting at Floor cannot tempt it away from its goal. And Bernreb’s weapons will not puncture its hide.”

“Tonight, I will reset the traps sprung by the Canopians. Trussing it, weighting it, and drowning it remains our best option.”

“I agree.”

Esse sighed. “I need sleep. You should put this Burned One to work with the other one, Marram. Idleness breeds mischief.”

“Not Burned One,” Oos corrected him, her distress obvious. “Warmed One.”

“Warmed One,” Esse repeated mockingly, his voice coming from higher up as if he’d gotten to his feet. “I put some cockles in the fire. To feast on flesh of Floor. One was cold and one was warm. One placed after and one before. I burned one, I splayed one. I’ll turn one, I’ll trade one. All by the Old Gods sowed and made, found by me with my trusty spade.”

“It is a rhyme,” Marram said. “He is not threatening you. Look at me, Servant Oos of the Garden. Forget him and forget the dayhunter. You are in no danger.”

“Marram always wanted a wife,” Esse said, laughing his nasal laugh.

“Go to bed, Esse.”

“Now he thinks he will not have to wait for that squeaky infant to grow up. But the truth is that someone like you can never see him as anything but a slave.”

Esse’s chair scraped as he pushed it back in to the table. There was silence from Marram and Oos. Unar stripped the fibre, her head bowed over the stems, more slowly than she had at first but still working. Esse thought he knew everything, but he was wrong about Oos. Unar had made a similar accusation, and while it was true that Oos had traded Sawas and her child with as much consideration as she might show a hand of plantains, she’d done it for Unar. She had a good heart. She hadn’t known, as Unar had, that those acting, however treacherously, from a place of motherly devotion could be forgiven anything.

That Unar would have battled any demon, sacrificed any dream, if only her mother had wanted her.

Oos would come around, soon enough. She would grow calm. She would feel safe. She would realise that the strata of human life in the Garden were artificial. That her refusal to share knowledge with Unar was wrong. They’d become a team again. Oos would help Unar to first heal Hasbabsah and then find the reincarnation of Audblayin. Aoun would be sorry he’d stayed behind.

“I cannot be your wife,” Oos blurted out.

“I am not asking you to be,” Marram said. “And if I did, it would be entirely your choice to make.” He was silent for a while, then asked, “Is it true that no music is permitted in the Garden?”

“It’s true.” Oos sounded relieved. “But I played the bells as a child.”

“Then let me lend you my thirteen-pipe flute. It is not difficult to play.”





TWENTY-NINE

AFTER SUPPER, when it seemed like time for sleeping, though Unar couldn’t guess the hour with the constant falling water sounds of rain and river and gloom of the interior, she lay down on her pallet in the storeroom with the others, staring up at the living ceiling that was connected to the well-tended beds of the Garden.

The wood was oil-rich. It shone a polished yellow-brown, lacquered in places where the sapwood must have oozed for a while after it was cut, until the gum hardened in the air. The dwelling was a shallow one, not penetrating anywhere near the heartwood of the tallowwood trunk, but blessedly free of insects. Unar supposed they had the river to thank for that. Not a single flying creature fluttered near the flames. The candles, true tallow, stuck fast by their bear-and tapir-fat drippings, weren’t especially bright, but they seemed brighter against the soot-stained niches where they sat.

Unar’s pallet was made up of straw beneath bear pelts, black with yellow circles on them, and she couldn’t tell if they still smelled of bear, if the stench was the candles, or if it was her own smell. She didn’t want to shed her red Gardener’s shirt just yet, though it had gathered rainwater, glue, humus, solvent, fish grease, and leaf sap so far.