Weavers of Saramyr

Four

It was four days after the murder of her family that Kaiku was found. The one who discovered her was a young acolyte of the. earth goddess Enyu, returning to the temple from a frustrating day of failed meditation. His name was Tane tu Jeribos.

He had almost missed her as he passed by, buried as she was under a drift of leaves at the base of a thick-boled kiji tree. His mind was on other things. That, he supposed, was the whole problem. The priests had taught him the theory behind attuning himself to nature, letting himself become blank and empty so he could hear the slow heart of the forest; yes, he understood the theory well. It was just that putting it into practice was proving next to impossible.

You cannot feel the presence of Enyu and her daughters until you are calm inside. It was the infuriating mantra that Master Olec droned at him every time he became agitated. But how calm could he be? He had relaxed to the best of his ability, evacuated his mind of all the clutter, but it was never enough. Doubly frustrating, for he excelled at his other studies, and his other masters were pleased with his progress. This lesson seemed to elude him, and he could not understand why.

He was turning over sullen thoughts in his mind when he saw the shape buried beneath the leaves. The sight made him jump; his first reaction was to reach for the rifle slung across his back. Then he saw what it was: a young woman, lying still. Cautiously he approached. Though he saw no threat from her, he had lived his whole life in the forests of Saramyr, and he knew enough to assume everything was dangerous until proven otherwise. Spirits took many forms, and not all of them were friendly. In fact, it seemed they were getting more and more hostile as the seasons glided by, and the animals grew wilder by the day.

He reached out and poked the girl in the shoulder, ready to jump back if she moved suddenly. When she did not respond, he shoved her again. This time she stirred, making a soft moan.

'Do you hear me?' he asked, but the girl did not reply. He shook her again, and her eyes flickered open: fevered, roving. She looked at him, but did not seem to see. Instead she sighed something incoherent, and murmured her way back to sleep again.

Tane looked around for some clue about her, but he could see nothing in the balmy evening light except the thick forest. She seemed starved, exhausted and sick. He brushed back her tangled brown hair and laid a hand on her forehead. Her skin burned. Her eyes moved restlessly beneath their lids.

As he was examining her, his hand brushed across the leaves that were covering her, and he paused to pick one up. It was fresh-fallen. In fact, all of them were. The tree had shed them on the girl as she lay, not more than half a day past. He smiled to himself. No tree-spirit would harbour an evil thing in such a way. He straightened and bowed.

'Thank you, spirit of the tree, for sheltering this girl,' he said. 'Please convey my gratitude to your mistress Aspinis, daughter of Enyu.'

The tree made no response; but then, they never did. These were young trees, not like the ancient ipi. Barely aware, all but senseless. Like newborn children.

Tane gathered up the girl in his arms. She was a little heavier than he had expected, but by her lithe figure it was apparent that it was muscle and not fat. Though Tane was no great size himself, forest life had toughened him and tautened his own muscles, and he had no trouble carrying her. It was a short walk to the temple, and she did not wake.

The temple was buried deep in the forest, situated on the banks of the River Kerryn. The river flowed from the mountains to the north-east, winding through the heart of the Forest of Yuna before curving westward and heading to the capital. The building itself was a low, elegant affair, with little ostentation to overshadow the scenery all around. Temples to Enyu and her daughters were intentionally kept simple out of humility, except in the cities where gaudiness was a virtual prerequisite for a place of worship. It was decorated in simple shades of cream and white, supported by beams of black ash, artfully describing lines and perimeters across the structure. It was two storeys high, the second one built further back than the first to take advantage of the slant of the hill. Gentle invocations were inscribed in the henge-shaped frame of the main doors, picked out in unvarnished wood, a mantra to the goddess of nature that was as simple and peaceful as the temple itself. A prayer-bell hung above a small shrine just to one side of the doors, a cairn of stones with bowls of smouldering incense inside, long-stemmed lilies and fruit laid out on a ledge before an icon of Enyu: a carved wooden bear statuette, with one mighty paw circling a cub.

A curving bridge arced from one side of the Kerryn to the other, carven pillars etched with all manner of bird, beast and fish sunk deep into the river bed. The river was a deep, melancholy blue, its natural transparency made doleful by the salts and minerals it carried down from the Tchamil Mountains. It threw back the sun in fins of purple-edged brightness, dappling the smooth underside of the bridge with an endless play of shifting water-light. The effect, intentionally, was that of calm and beauty and idyll.

Tane consulted with his masters, and an aged priest examined her. He concluded that she was starving and fevered, much as Tane had said, but there were no more serious afflictions. She would recover with care.

'She is your responsibility,' Master Olec told him. 'See if you can keep your mind on something for a change.'

Tane knew Olec's withered old tongue too well to be offended. He put her in a guest room on the upper storey. The room was spare and white, with a sleeping-mat in a corner beneath the wide, square windows, whose shutters were locked open against the heat of oncoming summer. Like most windows in Saramyr, there was no need for glass – much of the year it was too hot, and shutters worked just as well against adverse weather.

As evening wore on to a dark red sunset, Tane brewed a tea of boneset, yarrow and echinacea for her fever. He made her sip and swallow it as hot as he dared, half a cup every two hours. She muttered and flinched, and she did not wake, but she did drink it down. He brought a bucket of cool water and mopped her brow, cleaned her face and cheeks. He examined her tongue, gently holding her mouth open. He checked the flutter of her pulse at her throat and wrist. When he had done all he could, he settled himself on a wicker mat and watched her sleep.

The priests had undressed her – it was necessary to determine if she had suffered from poison thorns, insect bites, anything that might influence her recovery – and given her a sleeping-robe of light green. Now she lay with a thin sheet twined through her legs and resting on her ribs, pushed out of place by her stirrings. It was too hot to lie under anyway, especially with her fever, but Tane had been obliged to provide it out of respect for her modesty. He had cared for the sick before, young and old, male and female, and the priests knew it and trusted him. But this one interested him more than most. Where had she come from, and how had she got into the state she was in? Her very helplessness provoked in him the need to help her. She was incapacitated and utterly alone. The spirits knew what kind of ordeals she had gone through wandering in the forest; she was lucky even to be alive.

'Who are you, then?' he asked softly, fascinated.

His eyes ranged over the lines of her cheekbones, a little too pronounced now but they would soften with the return of her health. He watched her lips press together as she spoke half-formed dream-words. The light from outside began to fade, and still he stayed, and wondered about her.

The fever broke two days later, yet there was no immediate recovery. She had beaten the illness, but she had not overcome whatever it was that plagued her waking hours and haunted her dreams. For a week she was nearly catatonic with misery, unable to lift herself from the bed, crying almost constantly. Very little of what she said made sense, and the priests began to doubt her sanity. Tane believed otherwise. He had sat by her while she sobbed and raved, and the few fragments of what he could understand led him to the conclusion that she had suffered some terrible tragedy, endured loss such as no human should have to undergo.

He was excused from some of his less pressing duties while he cared for his patient, though there was little he could do for her now that she was physically well again. He made her eat, though she had no appetite. He prepared a mild sedative – a tincture of blue cohosh and motherwort – and gave it to her to gentle down some of her worse fits of grief. He made an infusion of hops, skullcap and valerian to put her to sleep at night. And he sat with her.

Then one morning, as he came into her room with a breakfast of duck eggs and wheatcakes, he found her at the window, looking out over the Kerryn to the trees beyond. Insects hummed in the morning air. He paused in the doorway.

'Daygreet,' he said automatically. She turned with a start. 'Are you feeling better?'

'You are the one who has been looking after me,' she said. 'Tane?'

He smiled slightly and bowed. 'Would you like to eat?'

Kaiku nodded and sat down cross-legged on her mat, arranging her sleeping-robe about her. She had little recollection of the past two weeks. She could remember impressions, unpleasant moments of fright or hunger or sadness, but not the circumstances that attended them. She remembered this face, though: this bald, shaven head, those even, tanned features, the pale green eyes and the light beige robes he always wore. She had never imagined a young priest – to her, they had always been old and snappy, hiding their wisdom inside a shell of cantankerousness. This one had some of the air of gravity she usually associated with the holy orders, but she remembered moments of light-heartedness too, when he had made jokes and laughed at them himself when she did not. By his speech, she guessed he had come from a moderately affluent family, somewhere above the peasantry though probably still local. While he was educated, he was certainly not high-born. The complexities of the Saramyrrhic language meant it was possible to guess at a person's origins simply by the way they used it. Tane's speech was looser and less ruthlessly elocuted than hers.

'How long has it been?' she asked, as she slowly ate.

'Ten days since we found you. You were wandering for some time before that,' Tane replied.

'Ten days? Spirits, it seems like it was forever. I thought it would never pass. I thought…' She looked up at him. 'I thought I could never stop crying.'

'The heart heals, given time,' Tane said. 'Tears dry.'

'My family are gone,' she said suddenly. She had needed to say it aloud, to test herself, to see if she could. The words provoked no new pain in her. She had mastered her grief, sickened of it; though it had taken a long time, her natural wilfulness would not let her be kept down. Her sorrow had spent itself, and while she doubted it would ever leave her entirely, it would not swallow her again. 'They were murdered,' she added.

'Ah,' said Tane. He could not think of anything else to say.

'The mask,' she said. 'I had a mask with me… I think.'

'It was in your pack,' said Tane. 'It is safe.'

She handed her plate back to him, having eaten only a little. 'Thank you,' she said. 'For taking care of me. I would like to rest.'

'It was my honour,' he replied, getting up. 'Would you like a tea to help you sleep?'

'I do not think I will need it, now,' she said.

He retreated to the door, but before he reached it he stopped.

'I don't know your name…'

'Kaiku tu Makaima,' came the reply.

'Kaiku, there was someone you mentioned several times in your delirium,' he said, turning his shoulder to look at her. 'Someone you said was with you in the woods. Asara. Perhaps she is still-'

'A demon killed her,' Kaiku replied, her eyes on the floor. 'She is gone.'

'I see,' Tane replied. 'I'll come back soon.' And with that he left.

A demon killed her, Kaiku thought. And I am that demon.

She did rest for a time, for she was weakened by her ordeal. She felt more drained than she had ever thought it was possible to feel, more exhausted than she could ever remember. The feeling spurred a memory that she had not come across for months, a random jag of pain that emerged to worry at the fresh wound of her loss. She steeled herself against it. She would not forget. Some things were worth remembering.

It had been at Mishani's summer house by the coast, where she and her brother Machim often stayed. They had always been competitive, and growing up with a brother had left her with some hopelessly unfeminine tendencies – one of which was a stubbornness that verged on mule-headed. One morning, she and Machim had become embroiled in their usual game of boasting who was better at what. The stakes were raised and raised until between them they had devised an endurance course involving archery, swimming, cliff-climbing, running and shooting that was far beyond the capacity of most athletes, let alone two youths who had rarely tasted hardship. Out of sheer unwillingness to concede, they both agreed to attempt it.

The archery they handled easily – they had to shoot ten arrows, and a bullseye meant that they could run down to the beach and swim across the bay to the cliffs. Machim succeeded before she did. The swimming was hard work, for she was trying to catch up with her brother and narrow his head start. She gained ground on the cliffs, but by now the ache in their bodies was evident, and their muscles were trembling. Machim was flagging badly, and he barely made it over the top before collapsing in a panting heap. Kaiku could have given up then and claimed the victory; but it was not enough for her. She began to run back along the cliff top to Mishani's house, where they had set up a makeshift rifle range. Her body burned, her vision blurred, she wanted to be sick, but she would not let herself stop. She reached the house, but the effort of picking up the rifle was too much for her, and she fainted.

She was put to bed then, and until now she had never felt anything like the exhaustion she had experienced on that day. The challenge had taken everything out of her, and it seemed like there was barely enough left to go on surviving. Mishani chided her for her stubbornness. Her brother sneaked in and congratulated her on her victory when nobody else was around.

But however bad that had been, this was worse. Her very soul felt exhausted, used up in the effort to expel the grief of her family's death. She found that thinking of her brother now brought no tears, only a dull ache. Well, she could endure that, if she must.

It was not only the loss of her family that troubled her, however. It was the power… the terrible force that had claimed Asara's life in the forest. Something had come from within her, something agonising and evil, a thing of raw destruction and flame. Was she a demon? Or had she one inside her? Could she even let herself be around other people, after what she had done to-

'No,' she said aloud, to add authority to her denial. It was useless to think that way. She had fled from the horror once already; now she had to face it. Whatever was the cause of Asara's death, it would not be exorcised by hiding herself away from the world. Besides, it had shown no sign of reoccurring in the time since that first cataclysmic event. She felt a hard coil of determination growing inside her. Suddenly she resented the presence of this side of herself that she had never known before. She would understand it, learn about it, and destroy it if necessary. She would not carry around this unnamed evil for the rest of her life. She refused to.

Asara. She had been the key. She had spoke of a cause. They had been watching her father, hoping to persuade him to join them. And they had been watching her, for two whole years.

Mostly it was because of you, Kaiku. Your condition.

Condition? Could she have meant the cruel flame that took her life? How long had it slumbered inside her, then, since Asara had come to her two years before this condition ever manifested itself? She thought back to the circumstances that might have attended her arrival. One of her previous handmaidens had disappeared without word or warning, that was true. Was there anything suspicious in that? Not at the time – after all, she was only a servant – but in retrospect it made her uneasy. No, she had to think before that. She had heard the tales of the spirits of the forest turning bad. She knew the stories of the achicita, the demon vapours that came in the swelter of summer and stole in through the nostrils of sleeping men and women, making them sick on the inside. She knew about the baum-ki, who bit ankles like snakes and left their poison dormant in the body, to be passed on through saliva or other, more personal fluids, hopping from person to person and becoming lethal only when it came across a baby in a womb, killing mother and child in one terrible haemorrhage.

It was the only sense she could make. There was something within, something unknown, something that had lashed out and killed. Had the shin-shin been after her, to claim whatever was inside her? What was she carrying? What was the condition Asara had spoken of?

But Asara was gone, and all she had left behind were questions. What manner of thing was she, who could suck the breath from one person and give it to another? Another demon, sent to look after her own? Who were her masters, the ones who had sent her? And what had her father been involved in, that such a tragedy should be visited on their house?

She slept, and her dreams were full of a face of black and red, a cackling spirit that haunted her in the darkness with the voice of her father.

The priests allowed her to use their sacred glade to make an offering to Omecha, the silent harvester, god of death and the afterlife. It lay along a narrow, winding trail that wove up the hill to the rear of the temple. Tane led the way, taking her hand when she stumbled. Having spent so long in convalescence, her muscles were shockingly weak, and the incline was almost too much for her to take. But Tane was there, keeping a respectful silence, and with his help she made it.

The glade was a spot of preternatural beauty, scattered with low, smooth white stones that peeped from the undergrowth, upon which complex pictograms were carved and painted red. There appeared to be no man-made boundary or border to separate it from the surrounding forest – in fact, were it not for the stones and the shrine, Kaiku would have not recognised it as a sacred place at all. There was a thin stream running through the glade, with the far bank rising higher than the near side, and a great old kamaka tree surmounting it, its thick roots knotted through the soil and its pendulous leaf-tendrils hanging mournfully over the water in flowery ropes. On the near side of the stream was the shrine, little bigger than the one that sat in front of the temple. It had been carved from the bole of a young tree, and the interior was hung with wind-chimes and tiny prayer scrolls; fresh flowers had been laid inside it, and incense sticks smouldered in little clay pots to either side.

She gave Tane a nod and a wan smile, and he bowed, murmured a swift prayer to Enyu to excuse himself from the glade, and retreated down the trail.

Alone, Kaiku took a breath and assembled her thoughts. There was no emotion involved in this; she had spent that entirely by now. This was ritual. Her sorrow had eaten her from the inside and then turned and devoured itself into emptiness. All that was left was what was inevitable, what honour and tradition demanded she do. She acceded without complaint. Everything had fallen apart around her, but this at least was inviolable, and there was some comfort in that.

She knelt among the incense in the grey votive robe the priests had given her, for she had no formal wear and it was necessary to be respectful here. She prayed to her ancestors to guide her family through the Gate, past laughing Yoru into the golden Fields. She named each of them aloud to Omecha, so that his wife Noctu might write them in her great book, and record their deeds in life. And finally she prayed to Ocha, Emperor of the gods and also god of war, revenge, exploration and endeavour. She begged for strength to aid her purpose, asking for his blessing in finding the one that struck down her family. If he would aid her, she swore to avenge them, no matter the cost.

And with that oath, her course was set.

When she left the glade, she felt exorcised somehow. She had left a part of herself behind there, the part that was confused and frightened and heavy with grief. She had a new path now. It was what her family's honour demanded. She would not let them die forgotten; she would right the injustice. There was no other course open to her.

After she had walked back to the temple with Tane, she reclaimed the mask from the priests and looked at it often, turning it about in her hands. Asara said her father had been killed for this mask. What was it, and what did it mean? Sometimes she toyed with the idea of putting it on, but she knew better. Even if Asara had not warned her, she had heard enough tales of the Weavers to learn caution.

Masks are the most dangerous weapons in the world.

The next morning, Tane brought her clothes with her breakfast.

'You've been lying about too long,' he said. 'Come outside. You should see this.'

Kaiku nodded muzzily. She had no particularly strong inclination to do anything, but it seemed easier to go along with his suggestion than to refuse it. When he had gone, she stood up and stretched her limbs, then clambered into her travel clothes that the priests had washed and mended. Someone – presumably Tane -had added a purple silk sash to the bundle, a splash of colour amid the beige and brown. She tied it loosely round her waist, letting it hang down her thigh. It made her attire a little more feminine, at least. She laced up the open-throated shirt and gave herself a perfunctory examination. A smile touched her lips, more wry than humorous. The sash made her look like some flamboyant bandit.

She joined Tane outside in the bright glare of the sun. It was a good time to be out, before the ascending heat became uncomfortable. She appreciated the warmth of Nuki's gaze on some dim and distant level, but it did not seem to penetrate as it had done in the days when her family were still alive. Rinji birds were drifting down the Kerryn, their long, white necks twisting down to snap at fish and beetles that strayed too close. Tane was watching them distractedly.

'They're early this year,' he observed. 'It's going to be a long, hot summer.'

Kaiku shaded her eyes and followed the languid procession with her gaze. Several of the priests had paused in their work and were studying the birds with contemplative expressions. As children, she and Machim used to head out to the riverbank every morning in early summer, to wait for the rinji to come down from their nesting sites in the mountains, down to the plains where the better feeding was. With their long, gangly legs tucked beneath them and their massive wings folded, they glided with effortless grace, riding the currents of the Kerryn towards the lowlands.

When the first rinji had drifted out of sight – there were only a dozen or so, the vanguard of the impending exodus – Tane led Kaiku down to the bank; but at her request, they crossed over the bridge and sat on the south side instead, looking over the shimmering deep-blue expanse towards the unassuming temple.

'This is way we always watched them,' she said by way of explanation. 'Machim and I.' Watching the birds going from left to right instead of the opposite had jarred with her memories and made her unaccountably uncomfortable.

Tane nodded. Whether it was simple preference, or if she was consciously trying to recapture the fond moments she shared with her dead sibling, he was prepared to indulge her.

'It seems there are fewer and fewer each year,' Tane said. 'Word comes down from the mountains that their nesting grounds aren't so safe any more.'

Kaiku raised an eyebrow. 'Why not?'

'Fewer of the eggs hatch, that's one thing,' he replied, rubbing his bald scalp, rasping his palm against the stubble. 'But they say there are things in the mountains now that can climb up to where they lay. And those things are multiplying. It wasn't like that ten years ago.'

Kaiku found herself wondering suddenly why Tane had troubled to bring her out here at all, why they were sitting together and talking about birds.

'I have watched them every year since I can remember,' she said. 'And I used to stay up in the autumn and look out for them flying back.'

It was an aimless comment, a lazy observation thrown out into the conversation, but Tane took it as a cue to continue his train of thought.

'The beautiful things are dying,' he said gravely, looking upstream to where the Kerryn bent into the trees and was lost to sight. 'More and more, faster and faster. The priests can sense it; / can sense it. It's in the forest, in the soil. The trees know.'

Kaiku was not quite sure how to respond to that, so she kept her silence.

'Why can't we do anything about it?' he said, but the question was rhetorical, an expression of impotent frustration.

They watched the birds come down the river all that day, and it did seem that there were fewer than Kaiku remembered.

She stayed another week at the temple while she regained her strength. The waiting was chafing her, but the priests insisted, and she believed they were right. She was too weak to leave, and she needed time to formulate a plan, to decide where to travel to and how to get there.

There was never really any doubt as to her destination, however. There was only one person who might be able to help her learn the circumstances that surrounded her father's death, and only one person who she felt she could trust utterly. Mishani, her friend since childhood and daughter of Barak Avun tu Koli. She was part of the Imperial Court at Axekami, and she was privy to the machinations that went on there. Kaiku had not seen her much since they both passed their eighteenth harvest, for Mishani had been enmeshed in the politics of Blood Koli; yet despite everything, she found herself growing excited at the thought of seeing her friend again.

She walked with Tane often during that week, traipsing through the forest or along the river. Tane was interested in her past, in who she was and how she had come to be under that tree where he had found her. She talked freely about her family; it made her feel good to recall their triumphs, their habits, their petty foibles. But she never spoke of what happened at her house that night, and she made no mention of Asara's fate again. He was light-hearted company, and she liked him, though he tended to swing into unfathom-ably dark moods from time to time, and then she found him unpleasant and left him alone.

'You're leaving soon,' Tane said as they walked side by side in the trees behind the temple. It was the hour between morning oblations and study, and the young acolyte had asked her to join him. Birds chirruped all around and the forest rustled with hidden animals.

Kaiku fiddled with a strand of her hair. It was a childhood habit that her mother used to chide her for. She had thought she had grown out of it, but it seemed to have returned of late. 'Soon,' she agreed.

'I wish you would tell me what you are hurrying for. Are you fleeing your family's murderers, or trying to find them?'

She glanced at him, faintly startled. He had never been quite so blunt with her. 'To find them,' she said.

'Revenge is an unhealthy motive, Kaiku.'

'I have no other motives left, my friend,' she said. But he was a friend in name only. She would not let him close to her, would not divulge anything of true worth to him. There was no sense inviting more grief. She knew she was leaving him; it was necessary, for she still did not know the nature of the demon inside her, and she feared she might harm him as she had Asara. By the same token, she was terribly afraid of endangering Mishani by her presence; but she knew if Mishani were asked, she would willingly take that chance, and so would Kaiku for her. There was some comfort in that, at least. Their bonds of loyalty went beyond question. And there was scarcely any other choice, anyway; it was the only course she could see.

'I'd like it if you stayed,' he said solemnly. She stopped and gave him a curious look. 'For a while longer,' he amended, colouring a little.

She smiled, and it made her radiant. For a moment, she felt something like temptation. He was physically attractive to her, there was no doubt of that. His shaven head, his taut and muscular body honed by outdoor chores and an ascetic diet, his deep-buried intensity; these were qualities she had never encountered in the high-borns she had met in the cities. But though they had spent much time together in the past week, she felt she had not learned anything about him. Why had he become a priest? Why was he driven to heal and help others, as he professed? He was as closed to her as she was to him. The two of them had fenced around each other, never letting their guards down. This was the nearest he had got to real honesty. She exploited the opening.

'What is it I mean to you, Tane?' she asked. 'You found me, you saved my life and sat with me through it all. You have my endless gratitude for that. But why?'

'I'm a priest. It's my… my calling,' he said, frowning.

'Not good enough,' she said, folding her arms beneath her breasts.

He gave her a dark look, wounded that she would pressure him this way. 'I lost a sister,' he said. 'She would not be much younger than you are. I could not help her, but I could help you.' He looked angrily at the ground and scuffed it with his sandals. 'I lost my family too. We have that much in common.'

She wanted to ask how, but she had no right. She would not share her secrets with him, nor he with her. And therein lay the barrier between them, and it was unassailable.

'One of the priests is going downriver to the village of Ban tomorrow,' she said, unfolding her arms. 'I can get a skiff from there to the capital.'

'And you think your friend Mishani will be able to help you?' Tane asked, somewhat bitterly.

'She is the only hope I have,' Kaiku replied.

'Then I wish you good journey,' said Tane, though his tone suggested otherwise. 'And may Panazu, god of the rain and rivers, guard your way. I must return to my studies.'

With that, he stalked away and back to the temple. Kaiku watched him until he was obscured by the trees. In another time, in another place… maybe there could have been something between them. Well, there were greater concerns for now. She thought of the mask that lay in her room, hidden behind a beam on the ceiling. She thought of how she would get to Axekami, and what she might find there.

She thought of the future, and she feared it.