Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(6)
“I have it,” he shouted.
“What do we do now?” Unar cried as they swung in a pendulum arc, crashing into the gap-axe’s smooth, unyielding trunk. But Edax, serpentlike, doubled back on himself, scaling the rope with the cloth-wrapped burden tucked under his arm, and with both of Unar’s hands freed, she was able to climb up after him.
“Here,” he said, breathing heavily, handing the bundle to her.
When Unar unwrapped it, her hands still shaking from the chance she’d taken, she found not a baby, but a bag of half-rotten blue quandong and white satinash fruit. Some of the seeds had germinated but withered in the absence of light.
“New life,” Edax said. “Are you going to save it?”
Made mute by the deepness of her disappointment, Unar spread her hands, spilling the seeds and the wrappings into the blackness below.
TWO
THE GARDEN Gates were high and glittered in the moonlight with inset metals.
Elaborate carvings provided purchase for Unar’s fingers and toes. It was probably sacrilege for her bark-encrusted bare soles to soil the life-giving lips of the engraved goddess, but she didn’t care. All she could think about was the baby who had fallen and the smirk on Edax’s face as she’d let the seeds scatter.
At the top of the Gate, the wards interrogated her memory, invading her mind.
Have you stolen food?
Have you stolen the sovereignty of another’s body?
That question irritated her. If she’d been made a slave, as her mother intended, she could have been sold to the Garden and her bodily sovereignty stolen daily. But the Garden cared only for the sanctity of free Canopians.
Have you stolen human life?
“None of those things,” she whispered, clutching her head as images of everything from her sister Isin’s cross-eyed baby face to the withered seedlings flared and died. At last, the wards permitted her to drop down from the lintel into the Garden.
The Garden grew in the hollowed-out trunk and crown of a lopped-off tallowwood two hundred paces in diameter. It was the tallest tree in the niche of Audblayinland, one of thirteen sovereign kingdom niches that comprised the great city of Canopy, and despite losing half its leaves in the lopping, it was kept alive, growing, and malleable by the birth goddess’s power.
Delicate suspended bridges connected the two dozen smaller gardens, planted in lopped lateral branches, to the central circle of the main garden. Soil was cultivated in the hollows, providing foundations for ferns and flowering miniature trees from Understorey and Floor. Open to the sky, except in the places where peaked pavilions stood, the Garden was watered by rain during the monsoon. In the dry season, slaves carried water from pools in the crotches of leafy lower laterals by screw pumps and buckets on chains.
At the very heart, surrounded by a moat filled with rainbow-hued fish, stood the egg-shaped Temple of Audblayin, Waker of Senses, the birth goddess, sometimes a god, carved of a piece from the lustrous white sapwood and pale yellow heartwood of the tree.
Unar hoped that the lone sentry, the sleepless Bodyguard of the goddess, would be hypnotised by the beauty of the moon this night and fail to spot the miscreant Gardener who crept back towards her hammock in the loquat grove. Unar had seen the goddess only once. It was the morning after an assassination attempt by a pregnant woman who had hoped to gain Audblayin’s soul for her imminent child. The Bodyguard hadn’t been with Audblayin when Unar saw her. Whispers said he had gone to punish the woman’s family. It was he who had foiled the attempt itself, tossing the perpetrator out of one of those crescent-shaped windows to break her neck on the steps below.
Audblayin had emerged from the Temple at dawn to reassure her Gardeners and Servants. Her many-layered robe of eggshell-white and frost-green had a high, constrictive neck. It held her aged face in a receptacle like a benevolent, overripe aubergine. She’d made no motion to aid the growth of any tree or vine, yet all green things in close proximity had sent new growth creeping towards her. Out of season, luminous blue flax lily fruits burst into being on the ends of long black stems, and flowerfowl came nervously out from among the possum-paw plants and golden guinea-flowers to lay their eggs at her feet.
Later in the morning, when the goddess had gone back into the Temple, Gardeners and slaves relished the eggs and fruit. Only Unar stared at the crescent-shaped window and wondered whether Audblayin’s Bodyguard was short or tall, educated or unlettered, born an internoder or born stricken, a superior warrior or a superior mage.
Memories faded. Right now there wasn’t time for Unar to stare at the window, not when she feared the Bodyguard might be staring back. She’d wasted enough of the night on her futile mission without being caught and punished as well.
As she skipped across a slender bridge that chimed gently and swayed under her weight, she barely avoided a collision with a slave.
The woman was cloaked and hooded. Dirty hands flew to her face an instant before she fell to her knees. White hands looked unfinished to Unar, like portrait outlines on parchment waiting for the mixing of the colours. Unar’s friend Oos had made portraits on monkey-vellum upon arriving in the Garden. Those portraits, added to her manner of speaking, earned Oos the instant enmity of the other candidates. Plenty of them would have, prior to their calling, enjoyed a few extra animal skins, the source of the vellum, for warmth. They resented the vizier’s daughter who wasted them on trifles.