Читать книгу Banner of Souls - Liz Williams - Страница 18

CHAPTER 5

EARTH

For once, it was hard to track the kappa down. Usually the nursemaid hovered protectively near her charge, but now, perhaps not wanting to distract Dreams-of-War, the kappa seemed to be keeping out of sight. Lunae trudged through the house, eventually locating the kappa in the long chamber at the heart of the house, attending to the growing-skins.

Steam rose from the vents in the walls, each configured in the form of a gargoyle’s head. Cross-eyed faces opened mouths to emit plumes of mist; Lunae took care not to go too close. Along the metal-ridged floor, the racks of feeder orchids turned their faces toward the moisture, their petals swelling with water. Bronze walls dripped and ran with a rainy haze. The air smelled damp and hot, rich with loam and a meaty undernote of stagnation that only served to enhance the perfume of the orchids. Lunae always felt safe here, though she did not like to look at the skins, which occasionally bulged and writhed as if the contents sought escape. Lunae knew, however, that she herself had come from one of those fleshy bags, and perhaps this was why she felt so secure in this room.

She watched as the kappa wafted the mist over each skin. In the heat of the chamber, the mist swiftly accumulated into droplets, which ran down the outside of the skins before bouncing into the trays beneath, in an atonal accompaniment to the kappa’s movements. Lunae gave a delicate cough, remembering Dreams-of-War’s countless instructions not to interrupt people when they were busy.

The kappa’s head moved ponderously around, swiveling on the twisted neck. The toes of her wrinkled feet gripped the floor; the kappa found it hard to keep her balance on the lacquered boards of the mansion and the metal floor of the hatching room alike. Lunae could not help feeling a twinge of pity, which rang as plangently as a waterdrop inside her mind.

“We are above such emotions,” Dreams-of-War had told her in her first weeks out of the hatchery. “You are a made-being, even if your ancestors practiced bloodbirth, just as the lowest orders do. You are therefore superior, as I am.”

“Are you a made-thing, too?” Lunae said.

“I?” Dreams-of-War replied, with a disdainful tilt of her head. “Of course. And so is your nurse, when it comes to that. But the kappa is a slave and to be treated as such. Do not waste emotion upon it.”

“I see,” Lunae had said, but though she was then nothing more than a weeks-old child, there seemed something wrong with this picture. It seemed hard on the kappa who was her nursemaid, who walked as if her feet hurt her, and who seemed so encumbered by her heavy shell-like skin. And if the kappa were supposed to serve, then why did so many other folk seem bound to the factories and wage-shops of the city? Perhaps it was different elsewhere. Yet Fragrant Harbor was rumored to be a good place. It did not seem good to Lunae.

Now the kappa said mildly, “You are in disgrace.”

“I know. Dreams-of-War has had much to say on the subject.” Lunae looked down at her hand, at a row of bloody dots that were the legacy of her encounter. “She sent me to find you, to bind this up.”

The kappa looked at Lunae’s hand and made a small scratchy sound of disapproval. “You should never have gone out of the house.”

“I know.”

“The Grandmothers want to see you. They are not pleased, Lunae.”

“I know.” It was beginning to sound like a mantra. “I’m sorry, kappa.”

The kappa reached out and gently touched Lunae’s hair. “I was very worried, Lunae. We all were. Terrible things could have happened to you.”

Lunae gave an unhappy grimace. “Perhaps terrible things did.”

“That remains to be seen. Now, give me your hand.” The kappa rinsed her fingers beneath a nearby tap, then took Lunae’s hand and began to swab at the bloodied holes with a leaf torn from one of the plants.

“Does this hurt?”

“Not very much. Kappa, I don’t understand why that woman—that Kami—even noticed me. Is it because of this—thing I am supposed to be? A hito-bashira?” Her hand was growing cold.

“Perhaps.”

“What is a hito-bashira? I have been told so often that this is what I am, but my memories tell me nothing and I can’t find the word in any of the data-tablets. Even—” Lunae stopped, not wanting the kappa to know that she had looked in places forbidden to her. But she’d had no choice, she had to find out. Limbo is being born in a bag, nursed by dragonfly and spider and toad.

“But it has been explained to you, has it not? You are to be a woman-who-holds-back-the-flood.”

“But, nurse, I don’t understand what that means. Which flood?”

“Ask the Grandmothers,” the kappa said, as she had answered so many times before. She bound Lunae’s hand with a creeper-bandage.

“But they just tell me to ask Dreams-of-War, and she tells me to ask them, or you. I go round and round in circles. Why will no one answer me?”

“Perhaps because it might hinder your development,” the kappa said.

“I am old enough!” Lunae replied hotly.

The kappa’s mouth creased, then split open like a melon to reveal a flash of pink, shiny tongue. “You are nine months old, grown far more swiftly than a normal child. I am a hundred and twenty, and people still won’t tell me anything.”

“But—” Lunae began, then stopped, for what she had been about to say was: That’s different. Dreams-of-War would have approved, she knew, but she still did not feel that it was right for there to be one rule for the kappa, so old and wise, and one rule for herself. Perhaps the kappa was right; perhaps she really was too young. Maybe that was simply the way the world worked. She had witnessed it only from afar, heard snatches of sound from the inside of a litter. Who was she to question the workings of the societies beyond the weir-wards of the mansion? And yet she could not help but question.

The kappa seemed to take pity on her, for she said, “You’ll know when the time is right. Have patience. Enjoy your ignorance while it lasts.”

This suggested the knowledge would not make her happy, but it only made Lunae feel more eager to learn. The kappa stepped back from the skins with an air of satisfaction. “That, at least, is one task finished for today.”

“Why do the skins have to be kept moist?” Lunae asked.

“So that they can grow, of course. Though most of these will have to be pruned back, returned to the mulch.” The kappa gave a gusty sigh. “A pity. But they are too small and spindly.”

“Are we plants, then?” A strange thought. She pictured herself rooted in soil, reaching up toward the hazy sun.

The kappa gave her a lipless smile. “Of course not. You are a made-human.”

“And a hito-bashira,” Lunae said with resignation.

“Just so. There. By this evening, your hand should be healed. And now, the Grandmothers wish to see you.” The kappa fixed her with a round eye, green as moss. She patted Lunae on the arm. “I know you find them a little alarming, perhaps. That is only to be expected. They are ancients, and as such, they do not behave like you and me. It is their right. But you should have no fear. I am sure they love you, in their own strange way.”

Lunae would have died rather than tell anyone, even the kappa, that the reason she did not want to visit the Grandmothers was not simply fear, but revulsion. If she revealed this to the kappa, however, sooner or later the Grandmothers would travel inside the kappa’s skull and find the knowledge nestling inside the nurse’s simple thoughts like a moth in a chrysalis, all curdled toxic soup. The thought of the Grandmothers gaining such knowledge was enough to make Lunae grow cold, for she knew, without understanding precisely how, that the Grandmothers would punish the kappa and not herself. And she did not want to see the kappa punished.

She sighed. Sometimes it was as though the old kappa was the child, to be protected and sheltered, and she the nursemaid. If she told anyone of her feelings about the Grandmothers, it would have to be Dreams-of-War, and her Martian guardian had a frustrating habit of appearing to ignore such pieces of information, only to store them up and deploy them when one was least expecting it. Lunae would simply have to keep her feelings to herself.

It was a long way from the inner chamber to the Grandmothers’ room, and the kappa was unable to move quickly. Lunae, as always, wondered whether the kappa had originally been intended to perform household tasks, or whether she had been bred for another purpose entirely.

Lunae and the kappa walked along dim corridors, passing the familiar demon-swarming tapestries that the Grandmothers had brought from the volcano lands. They depicted figures of legend: the moon-spirits of the lunar craters; the great Dragon-Kings who, it was said, had risen from the depths of the oceans when the Drowning first began, to help humans hold back the surging tide.

“Nurse, where do you come from?” Lunae asked.

It had never occurred to her to ask this before and she felt faintly embarrassed by it, as though the kappa was too much a part of the furniture even to have such an ordinary thing as an origin. But the kappa only smiled and said, “I come from the north, just like those tapestries. From the Fire Islands, the lands of the change-tigers.”

“Where are the Fire Islands, exactly?” Lunae wondered aloud, but even as she spoke, her buried memories were bringing forth an image of a scattered chain beyond the water-ringed summits of Fuji and Hakodate, beyond Sakhalin. Then memory supplied her with a name: Ischa. This was the word that Lunae next spoke.

“Yes,” the kappa replied. “I am from the clan-warren of Hailstone Shore, near Ischa, the southernmost town of the Kamchatka chain.” Her head swiveled around. “It is the only land left in that region of the world. All else has gone, under flood and fire.”

“Why did you come to Fragrant Harbor?” Lunae asked.

“I was sent here. I had no choice.”

“Do you miss your home?”

“If I did,” the kappa said, still smiling, “would you ask the Grandmothers to send me back?”

“I could try,” Lunae ventured, but she already knew what the answer would be. To the Grandmothers, as to Dreams-of-War, the kappa was no more than a useful thing. They would no more consider her desires than they would consider the wishes of a household kettle. The kappa said nothing more, but Lunae knew that she understood.

The shadowy corridors, each lit only by a single lamp, were comforting and familiar. When they reached the passage leading to the Grandmothers’ room, however, Lunae’s heart began to beat faster, lumping along beneath her ribs.

The kappa paused outside the Grandmothers’ door.

“Wait,” she said, then pressed her wrinkled palm against the lock-release and hobbled inside. Lunae fidgeted in the hallway, impatience mingling with reluctance. She wanted the meeting to be over, to leave Cloud Terrace far behind.

The kappa reappeared at the doorway and surveyed Lunae with a nervous, rheumy squint. “They say you are to come in.”