The Burning City (Spirit Binders) Read online

  “Why are you up so early?” he asked. He said this with a smile, but it fell too quickly. “You and Tulo slept like the dead.”

  I shrugged. “Parech, I’ve been thinking, it’s not such a bad idea. Dishonest, sure, but I’ll do it.”

  “There’s something else. Another reason.”

  He didn’t even look at me as he said this and so I teased, “What, something even more compelling than an endless feast of sour frycakes?”

  This forced a laugh out of him, and he held my shoulder as he leaned against the wall. He left his hand there so long my breath came short and I could hardly think through a torrent of wordless confusion and longing. Had I been wrong about everything I saw growing between him and Tulo? Was it possible? But no, he lowered his hand and I could see nothing like what I felt in his enigmatic expression.

  “I haven’t told you much about my time as a soldier,” Parech said.

  “Was it bad?” I managed, after a moment. I was proud of how unaffected my voice sounded.

  He met my gaze again and laughed. “Bad? You have a way with understatement, Ana. But I fought with the Akane, back on Kukicha. That was worse. I knew some of the men I killed. My chief gave me these warrior marks for slaying my cousins. Here. . .everyone was all the same. You can get used to death. And when it comes to you, well, you’ve killed too much to really resent it.”

  I was shocked. This was the first time Parech had ever even hinted at his experiences as a soldier. And yet this helped me understand how he had managed to laugh at his death when I first met him. Parech wasn’t terribly fierce, but he had a clean core of bravery that sprang from his sense of the absurd.

  “But something happened? Something that’s making you sit by the fish pond like some moody poet?”

  Parech put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. “Truly,” he said, “it was a spirit path that led me to you two. I wonder what they’ll demand in payment.”

  I relaxed into him. “So what’s this thing you haven’t told us?”

  He sighed. “The Maaram are going to launch a new attack on Essel at the start of the cold. Everything they have. The Esselans have the advantage of weapons, so the Maaram want to take them by surprise and overwhelm them with superior numbers.”

  I recalled the numbing horrors of the battlefields I’d stumbled upon during my months in the forest. And those were just minor skirmishes with a few rebellious tribes. I couldn’t even grasp the scale of death and suffering that would be unleashed if the Maaram brought a war like that to Essel. And I had a sensation that I did not quite know how to articulate that such death—with no true dedication or purpose—could do terrible things to the powers of the spirits.

  “What does that mean for us?” I finally asked, since there seemed to be no point in going over the probable effects of the invasion. Parech understood the horrors far better than I.

  “We need to get to Essel. Soon. Before cold sets in. We need to get Taak’s wealth, because I don’t know how else we’ll afford passage.”

  “But I thought you said the Maaram were going to invade!”

  He looked so grim that I tugged on a lock of his hair until he looked at me. “They will,” he said softly, in Kukichan. “And they’re going to lose. You do not want to be in Maaram when the Esselans land, Ana. None of us do.”

  We spoke to Tulo a few hours later, once she had dragged herself awake, up the latest as usual. She made no further objections once Parech explained the real source of his urgency. She didn’t ask him why he hadn’t told us earlier. And why would she? She had been inured to war with the Maaram for her entire life. She understood what this meant.

  “I hope they rot,” she said in hushed Essela. “I hope the Maaram clog the oceans so Esselan fishermen dine on their entrails for weeks.”

  “It might go worse with your people, Tulo, under the Esselans.”

  “What could be worse? Slavery? Butchering our children?”

  Parech gave her a sidelong glance at this but just shook his head and refused to say any more.

  And so we played our parts. Tulo started first, setting herself up across from the great lodge where all the important Maaram chiefs slept. I had wondered why so much of the army crowded Okika City, jostling the locals with their loud manners and ready weapons, but Parech’s revelations made everything comprehensible.

  As Parech predicted, Tulo was an immediate hit with her absurd headdress of tatty pheasant feathers and cape of draped monkey pelts. He’d even attempted to paint her arms, but Tulo had kicked his kneecap and threatened to let the two of us go on without her help. It didn’t hurt her popularity, I realized, that Tulo exuded youth and unconscious beauty. Her hair was wild as ever, and accentuated by the red and blue feathers. By the second day, men had started to line up to have the bones cast and their fortunes read by the blind Kawadiri girl in the square. Parech perched in a nearby tree to keep watch. I stayed with him, though the duty grew tedious. Parech wanted to make sure none of these men took advantage of Tulo. I had to stay here because otherwise the commander’s brother might see me before the appointed time and our whole plan would be ruined.

  At the end of the second day, a group of men stumbled from the officer’s lodge and headed straight for Tulo.

  “Look,” I whispered. “Is he one of them?”

  Parech shaded his eyes. “I’m not sure, maybe the tall one—”

  “Wait, that one on the left, is he. . .wearing a bear?”

  He started to laugh. “A pelt! Well, isn’t Taak one to boast? I suppose he’d have us believe he slayed it himself. Probably for some spirit boon.”

  The man in the bear pelt—head and all—turned to speak to one of his friends, and I saw that what would have been a pleasant face was slashed by three wide, deep scars that ruined his left eye.

  “Maybe he did slay it,” I said softly.

  Parech glanced at me. “He always was an idiot.”

  His friends all took their turns with Tulo, but I could tell from here that she’d focused on Taak and his bear pelt. She took her time with him, closing her eyes and rocking back and forth, as though deep in the throes of some trance. I had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing. Finally, she slumped on her stool and waved off the rest of the crowd. Taak, I thought, was suitably impressed.

  That evening, Tulo told us the whole story. She’d given him a portentously vague reading about destiny and danger and his wise soul and suggested that he needed to return to her once she had “regained her strength” to hear more.

  “I swear, I could tell him to give me a farm because the spirits said so. He’s more gullible than even you thought, Parech. Did you know that he killed a bear because some charlatan told him he’d be invincible in its pelt?”

  We all laughed, though I felt guilty for doing so. It seemed a shame to take advantage of him when he’d already lost so much. But we needed to leave Okika, and I wasn’t going to be picky about how it happened.

  Parech squatted by Tulo’s feet, and she put a hand on his shoulder. I saw the gentleness of the smile he briefly turned up to her. And how sad, I thought, that she would never see him. And that I, who could see Parech smile whenever I wished, would never receive a smile from him like that one.

  Taak found Tulo late the next evening. She roped him expertly, as though she had been running grifts her entire life. Parech wouldn’t let me close enough to overhear, but afterward she told us everything. She had stared deep at Taak (who was, she said, so untuned to the spirit world that he looked as dim as a dying firefly) and declared that he was at a crossroads of fate. She insinuated that he had money problems. That his family didn’t appreciate his ingenuity and give him enough freedom. That he had bravely fought against a great spirit, and the eye he had lost was a sacrifice to guarantee his safety in battle (he had gasped at this revelation, she said, to my discomfort). But he wanted more (“Yes!” he had said, “That’s it exactly!”). He wanted the glory he deserved (“You know my every thought!”). And, as he sho
uld well know, the fastest path to that glory was wealth (“It is? Yes, it is!”). Well, from there it was easy work to convince poor Taak that the crossroads in his fate would soon bring him an opportunity to receive this wealth, “if only you’re brave enough to take it!” What was the nature of this opportunity? Tulo was very coy, but she implied it had to do with foreigners and women, and that he must not speak a word to anyone about it, or the spirits might grow angry and twist his opportunity to evil purposes. At which point she began to tremble and fell into a dead swoon, from which he gallantly caught her.

  From our vantage in the tree, Parech laughed so hard he had tears in his eyes. I had to cover his mouth with my hand when the few people nearby started to glance up, but I was having difficulty keeping laughter back myself. I could imagine what Tulo was really thinking behind that demure facade. Tulo recovered quickly and allowed Taak to buy her a stick of cane sugar and some restorative tea. He left only after he had presented her with a pile of sennit braid and a basket of salt—far more than her requested payment—and begged her to return the next day. She smiled mysteriously and he left. She read a few more fortunes, just so as to not raise suspicions, and then signaled with a rattle of the beads around her wrists that she would meet us by the main irrigation ditch in the farms a safe distance from the city’s edge.

  Parech lingered when I would have left, silently watching Tulo’s contained, quiet movements. She had grown skilled at moving about the city in the two weeks since our argument. Her blindness was obvious as the feathers in her hair, but her grip on her stick was sure, not desperate. She held it before her as she walked, and that seemed to be all the aid she needed. She hardly ever stumbled anymore; in fact, she moved far more gracefully than most of Okika’s residents. I asked her how she did it, for I knew her spirit sight was useless here. She shrugged and said it was easy, once she paid attention. Packed dirt felt different from loose; cobbles felt different from grass. She could smell people before they passed her; she could feel their heat beside her. The air itself felt different by the water, or before a set of stairs. And anything she could not determine with her four senses, well, that was the stick’s job. Once we explained a place to her, she said, once she had oriented herself in her own mind, moving through it wasn’t very different from seeing. I held her in quiet awe. I would never have been able to live as she did. I knew it, and it humbled me.

  Finally, Parech responded to my preemptive tugging on his arm, and we made our way through the fields to the irrigation ditch. Follow it long enough and it led straight through the heart of Okika to the mouth of the river.

  “I’m up next,” Parech said, bunching his hands under his arms for warmth as a brisk breeze blew in from the west. We’d made it to the meeting place before Tulo, so I moved closer to him. He gave me a wry look and then wrapped both arms around me. The warm weather had vanished completely, and I wasn’t used to this kind of cold.

  “I’ll settle for less food in Essel if we can have a chimney,” I said.

  Parech’s chuckle tickled my scalp. “I’ll see what we can work out. But first you and I have to make ourselves worthy of Tulo’s performance.”

  I sighed. “She was marvelous wasn’t she? The look on his face when she fell into his arms!”

  “He’ll dream of her breasts for weeks, I’m sure. That’s our princess.”

  Our princess. I smiled. “When will you start with Taak?”

  “Tonight, I think. Best that he gets used to me for a few days before he runs into our distressed chieftain’s daughter.”

  “Will you ask to stay in their lodge?”

  He shook his head. “Too expensive for us, and conveniently also for the role I’m playing. No, the commanding officers like going to cockfights. I’ll go there, gamble and lose to him, and make a few friendly gestures. Nothing that intrusive. I only need to be a presence in his mind. A disinterested third party who happens to know you. It might be suspicious if I try to get too friendly.”

  I thought of Taak fighting a bear single-handedly on the advice of a street-corner charlatan. “Suspicious? Taak? You could tell him the spirits didn’t like the cut of his kilt and he’d fight the Esselans bare-assed.”

  Parech shifted and I could hear his laugh deep in his chest. I closed my eyes. But instead of some comical image of Taak leading the Maaram charge, dangle flying, I saw a graphic flash of a furious bear raking one giant claw across Taak’s head, ripping his eye apart in a gout of blood and gore. And then Taak’s club as it bludgeons the beast to death. Blood matted on fur. Taak almost dying and then recovering, determined to wear the skin of that bear into battle.

  All because of a street-corner charlatan. Like Tulo.

  I pushed Parech away because I was afraid I might vomit on him. I shivered and stared at the muddy trickle of the irrigation ditch that fed these fields. What were we doing? It was one thing to plan a con game on some faceless soldier, an agent of so much destruction in the islands. It was quite another to take advantage of a gullible fool who’d almost died because someone just like us gave him advice she never expected him to take.

  “Aoi?” Parech said. He was staring at me. He looked strangely tentative. Worried in a way I’d thought he reserved for Tulo.

  I looked away. “I don’t think. . .we shouldn’t do this. I know he’s just another Maaram soldier, I know, but. . .”

  “Oh, don’t tell me you like him now?”

  “Of course not! He’s a fool, a water-carrier, but Parech, did you see his face?”

  He winced, and I realized that Taak’s disfigurement must have been as much of a surprise to Parech as it had been to me. “We’re not planning to maim him, Ana. Just relieve a fool of his wealth.”

  “We’re manipulating him.”

  “I thought that was the point.”

  “He’s Maaram,” Tulo said. Both of us looked up, startled, as she stepped from the surrounding fields of taro flowers, silent as a ghost. “A Maaram soldier.” She could have called him a shiteater and conveyed more respect for his occupation. “He deserves whatever we give him.”

  She squatted beside us and carefully removed the pheasantfeather headdress from her tangled hair. Parech threw a shawl over her bare, goose-pimpled shoulders. I could only imagine how her skin must ache from so many hours uncovered in this chill, but she didn’t seem unduly uncomfortable. Perhaps her people had gone bare-chested longer into the cold season.

  “Not all Maaram are bad people, Tulo,” I said.

  Parech and Tulo shared tight, knowing smiles. “She’s a wetlander,” Parech said, as though in apology.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He shrugged. “Just that you wouldn’t understand. To be a Maaram soldier is to be guilty. Just like on Kukicha. You think a single soul who fought for you wetlanders was innocent of Akane blood? Of course not.”

  “You were a Maaram soldier!”

  His mouth quirked. “And I’ve never claimed innocence.”

  Tulo had shimmied out of the pelts and replaced them with a split skirt. “Don’t worry about the soldier, Aoi,” she said. “You’ll be happy for his money when we’re in Essel.”

  I stood up, furious, though I’d been perfectly fine with this scheme less than an hour ago. “How can you two be so callous? We’re about to ruin the life of another human being!”

  Tulo’s lips thinned. “Another human being? I suppose he’d think of me as another human being, then, if he found my brothers and uncles and cousins defending our homes? Perhaps he’d speak to us, negotiate with us, respect our rights to our ancestors’ land? Or maybe he’d just murder us, every last one, and then find the nearest villages and murder everyone there, too. Maybe he’d even rape the women before murdering them. Perhaps we should treat the soldier like the Maaram do the Kawadiri. Like human beings!”

  I sat down again. I felt myself reeling with horror for the second time in an hour. I looked at Parech. “Is it true?” I asked in Kukichan. “Did you do that?”

  �
��The other soldiers did,” Parech said in the same language. “I hid until it was done. Taak would have done it many times.”

  They were right. No one was innocent, let alone a Maaram soldier. A part of me was still disgusted at the manipulation necessary, especially when juxtaposed against Taak’s gullible joy. But we needed to get to Essel, and this soldier’s money would get us there.

  I stopped arguing. The three of us followed the irrigation ditch until we reached the beach. As usual, crowds of Okikans had gathered there under the flickering light of torches to watch the rising tide and gamble and drink and smoke. The three of us traded salt for a thumb of amant and a jug of kava and sat down to enjoy the evening. A group of drummers pounded an intricate rhythm nearby, accompanied by an occasional drunken-sounding flute. At one point Tulo stood up to general approval and began gently, then more violently, swaying to the beat. She shook off her sandals and stomped her bare feet in the wet sand—smack, smack as she moved her arms and head in a traditional Kawadiri dance, silhouetted against the torchlight. She was so beautiful it took my breath away. Parech stared at her, entranced, and we moved closer together while we watched. She came back to us when she was drenched in sweat, though the crowd that had formed bellowed and cheered for more. She moved with an old assurance, without need of her stick. In the flickering torchlight, she seemed to glow like a spirit.

  “How can you move like that?” I asked her, my heart still racing from the sight of her dance.

  She laughed and flicked her hair over her shoulder. “I was born to dance for the ancestors.”

  Parech ran a finger down her arm and then offered her our half-drunk jug of spirits. “Like a true princess of her people,” he said.

  She beamed at him and then at me. I felt as though a slow fire was consuming me as I met both of their gazes. Joy and passion and desire. I sometimes thought I didn’t understand anything anymore.

  “The spirits are so clear here on the beach,” she whispered. “Maybe it’s you two. You’re like a homing beacon.”