Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(49)



It took a long time for Unar to fall asleep. As she hovered on the brink of it, she thought she heard the sound of Marram’s thirteen-pipe flute. It was haunting, like wind over hollow bones.

Something like a deep sense of smell stirred inside Unar’s chest, but it wasn’t quite Canopian magic.

It was colder. Blacker. Lighter.

Like being weightless in a pool with no water. Or floating in an egg-shaped Temple where the light never shone.

*

IN THE morning, Unar emerged to find Hasbabsah, not dead, but awake and cognizant, out of her chair and kneeling by the fire with an entranced expression on her sagging, yellowish face.

Oos sat up at the enormous table, sullenly prodding pieces of fruit around her leaf-plate, while Marram held open a rotted-looking old palmwood chest. It appeared to be the chest contents that had stirred the sickly ex-slave from her stupor.

“What’s in there?” Unar asked.

“My mother’s birth-crown,” Marram answered. “Moonoom gave it to me when we went into exile in case one of us fathered a child. The crown is part of the ceremony welcoming a life. The newborn passes through it.”

Ylly came through the curtain with Issi in her arms.

“Hasbabsah,” she cried. “What are you doing out of your blankets?”

“Come and see, Ylly,” Hasbabsah said in a slurred, slightly delirious voice, and both Unar and Ylly were drawn towards the hearth to look inside the chest.

Unar had expected something shinier. The so-called crown was a ratty, shrivelled circle woven of the same brownish-green leaf fibre she’d been stripping for Esse. Black-flecked, emerald night-parrot feathers and dried gobletfruit were knotted around the edges. It would barely have sufficed as a stricken man’s tribute in the Temple. The chest also contained an assortment of musical instruments, none of which would have been allowed in the Garden at all.

“Ylly,” Hasbabsah said, “let these men perform the ceremony to birth you into your new Understorian life. Let them lower the crown over your head.”

Marram’s gaze flicked between Hasbabsah and Ylly.

“We have the means to make the markings,” he admitted after a while. “White clay and orange ochre from Floor. Indigo from Canopy. My mother told—”

“Your mother told you to keep them for your wedding, boy, but these women can help you to get more when—” Hasbabsah’s interruption was interrupted in turn by a coughing fit that forced her to let go of the edges of the chest. She covered her mouth to keep the bloody sputum from spraying over all of them. Ylly passed the baby to Oos without a word of acknowledgment and forced Hasbabsah back into her chair, bringing water for Hasbabsah to sip and rubbing her back until the coughing eased.

“I don’t think your hand will be steady enough, old woman,” Marram said, smiling sadly.

“Your hand will do,” Hasbabsah managed, and he gaped at her in sudden distress. She gulped at the water and went on in a rush, “I have heard that in Gannak a man does not paint a woman’s face except on the occasion of their marital consummation, but that is not the custom in Nessa.”

“I was born in Het,” Marram said, but Hasbabsah ignored him, speaking over him.

“Do this for me, Marram, third son of Moonoom. Bring my old friend’s daughter to this life soon, today, before I leave it.”

Marram, contrite, did as she asked. He mixed different kinds of coloured dirt with oil and traced them on Ylly’s arms and face. He combed out her hair. Until then, it had resembled an egret’s straw nest tangled with white moulted feathers; when Marram finished winding it tightly around crossed pairs of polished purpleheart sticks, it formed a complex tower of violet and silvery-yellow almost too wide for the crown to fit around. He wrapped her tightly, breast to ankle, in an indigo silk blanket woven with the same white and orange designs he had drawn on her.

Then he stood behind her, his back to the fire. Only the top half of his face showed above Ylly’s carefully arranged hair. He lowered the ugly woven thing from the chest around her neck, saying sentences that sounded the same backwards and forwards, and made no sense to Unar at all.

Hasbabsah glowed with contentment, though, and Ylly seemed as shy and pleased as a girl half her age.

Marram blushed deeply when his hands came to rest on Ylly’s painted collarbones, but Unar suspected it wasn’t over what he considered to be the inappropriate intimacy with Ylly. He wasn’t looking at Ylly at all. His cloud-coloured eyes lingered on Oos.

Oos, for her part, had eyes only for Ylly.

Probably just wished she was still in the Garden so she could try doing her hair with those fancy crossed sticks.

And then Hasbabsah slipped back into unconsciousness, and the small happiness brought by the ceremony turned to cheerless deathwatch once again.





THIRTY

OOS’S BLEED began before Unar’s.

She reacted the way that Unar expected her to react, which was with more crying. It was while Unar was holding the back of Oos’s shirt, to keep her from falling headfirst into the river as she washed her red-streaked legs, that they both heard the crack, like a lightning strike, and the great tallowwood tree shook as they had never felt it shake before, even in the strongest winds.

“What was that?” Oos whispered.

“Maybe one of the big branches breaking,” Unar said. It happened sometimes. The poor hollowed their homes out of the load-bearing parts of too-thin limbs without regard to structural integrity. Nervously, the two women pressed back against the fungus-covered wall. Unar wondered if they would hear another crash when the branch hit Floor, whether it would be too distant or whether the rush of the river would disguise it. One-handed, Oos pulled on a pair of borrowed breeches, the crotch stuffed with dried moonflowers. Her other hand held the door latch down, keeping it from being lifted while she was still half naked.

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