The Fire Seer (6 page)

Why was she so awful at this? At the temple, when she’d practiced the individual components of writing, it hadn’t been so bad. She could form letters readily enough, she could spell words, and she could compose sentences—as long as she dealt with only the one task at a time. When she put them all together, she was hopeless, overwhelmed. Many of her farmer-caste peers had similar struggles. She felt sick inside. Mandir had been right the day she’d first met him. She wasn’t cut out for Coalition work.

She flicked a bit of clay off her palm and stared resentfully at her worn, callused hands. She might have shed the telltale
isu Ikkarum
from her name, but the marks of hard use she could not remove. They told the truth of her humble origins. They would inform everyone she ever met that she didn’t deserve to wear the green and silver. She should be out in the fields digging in the dirt, or serving as the latest fuck toy for some ruling-caste princeling who’d wearied of his shared wife, to be set aside when he was done with her, perhaps with a pittance of copper sticks as a consolation prize.

Taya brushed away the tears that welled at the corners of her eyes. She was not going to fail at this. She
wasn’t
. She would finish this if it took her all night. She took up the stylus and began, laboriously, to write.

Mandir sauntered in through the courtyard door, looking refreshed, as if he’d taken a nap. He looked around for Taya and spotted her at the table. “Aren’t you finished yet? What’s taking so long?”

“Get out,” Taya snapped, not in any kind of mood to deal with Mandir. She placed a protective arm around the tablet she was working on, to block him from seeing it.

“What are you writing, an epic?” Mandir picked up the first tablet, which she’d already filled, and said, “Oh, you just started.”

“I’ve been working on this for hours, bollhead.”

“Look, you can’t have been working very hard, and I don’t want to sit around all afternoon. Have you felt the change in the air? There’s a storm coming.”

“If you want me to finish quickly, leave me alone.” Taya glanced out the window. It was still sunny out, but Mandir was right: the air did feel different. It was too humid, too still, like the air had been crammed into too small a space and was ready to burst.

“Maybe I can help you,” said Mandir.

“No. Just leave.” The last thing Taya wanted was to let him see her slow, childlike writing. He would pounce on it and make fun of her. He always had.

“Why should you have to do this yourself? We’re a team.”

“Writing is a one-person job,” said Taya. “Your job is just to protect me.”

“Protect and advise,” Mandir corrected.

“If this is what constitutes your advice, I’ve had enough of it.”

Mandir folded his arms. “So far I’ve been nice to you, Taya. If you’d like that to change, provoke me some more.”

Taya sighed. “Please, let me work in peace.”

Mandir’s brow furrowed. He peered closely at the tablet he’d picked up, then at the half-completed tablet in front of Taya, then at Taya’s clay-stained hands and the weary stoop of her shoulders. His face softened. “Have you really been working all this time?”

Taya held her tongue. There was nothing she could say that would not condemn her. She was either lazy or she was stupid. And Mandir was too astute not to have worked out which one it was. She glared at him, wordlessly daring him to mock her. If he so much as laughed, she was ready to set him on fire like the jackal had done to that poor boy in the mud.

Mandir sat down at the table and beckoned for the tablet and stylus. “Hand those over.”

Unsure of his intentions, Taya shook her head.

“Do you want to get this done or not? Quit balking, and
give them here
.”

Taya obeyed, responding more to his tone of voice than to his words, and then berated herself for having done so.

Mandir picked up the stylus and turned the tablet so it faced him. “You dictate, and I’ll write. Go.”

Taya swallowed the lump in her throat, blinked back the tears in her eyes, and began to dictate. As Mandir’s hand flew across the tablet, her heart burned with jealousy for the unearned natural talent he possessed. She waited for his mockery. He knew her weakness now; it was only a matter of time before he used it to hurt her. But he only wrote, keeping his silence.

Twenty minutes later, the work was done.

Chapter 8: Mohenjo Temple, Nine Years Ago

Taya stepped into her first Coalition classroom with trepidation. She looked around for Mandir isu Sarrum, the only fellow first-year initiate who’d been remotely friendly. He’d also been a little bit mean, so she wasn’t sure he liked her. Her heart fluttered with hope and desire as she caught sight of him. He was so handsome and clever. Well above her station, she knew, but one could dream. Mandir was sitting with the three other ruling-caste boys. He saw her, and his expression changed just enough to indicate that he remembered her from the dining hall, but then his gaze slid away as if he’d deemed her beneath his notice.

Taya’s heart sank. She took a seat at the other end of the room.

On her desk was a clay tablet with something written on it in big letters. Looking around, she saw that everyone had a similar tablet, and every tablet had something written on it, but they were all different things. She felt pleased with herself for recognizing that the words were different. But her stomach knotted up as she realized she was probably the only initiate in the room who couldn’t read them.

Mandir rose from his chair and walked across the room. Taya tracked his movement. The boy was larger than life; she couldn’t help but be aware of him. She hoped he might be coming to talk to her, but of course he wasn’t. He had gone to talk to some ruling-caste girl two seats away.

Taya sat quietly, feeling very alone. All the other initiates were talking to their friends, and she didn’t have any friends yet. Nobody wanted to be friends with the farmer girl. She couldn’t even read the words on the tablet while she waited for class to start.

Mandir headed back to his seat, passing behind her.

Suddenly she felt an awful, painful tugging at her hair. Strands tore. She grabbed at her headdress—too late! Mandir had ripped it out of her hair.

Taya’s hair fell free, just brushing her shoulders. The class laughed. Mandir, who’d returned to his seat, dangled the pale yellow headdress in front of her as if baiting a dog. Taya blushed furiously. Farmer girls never wore headdresses, and didn’t grow their hair long enough for them. But Coalition girls were supposed to wear them. It had been a struggle to put the thing on this morning; she’d had to use pins. Now Mandir had exposed her for what she was, with her too-short hair.

“Give it back,” she demanded.

“Come and get it,” he teased.

Taya’s muscles tensed for action, but she stayed where she was. It was no use getting into a physical contest with Mandir isu Sarrum. She could not win.

When he saw she wasn’t going to take the bait, he tossed the headdress over her head to a girl across the room, who neatly caught it.

Taya considered charging at the girl—this was a physical matchup she could handle—but if she did, the girl would just throw it to someone else. While Taya was mulling over her options and lamenting the fact that none of them would result in anything but further embarrassment, the girl suddenly threw the headdress right at her. Surprised, Taya caught it, just in time to hear an instructor rap out, “Class. To order.”

Taya hadn’t seen the instructor come in. She quickly sat down, with her headdress clutched in her hands.

“You,” said the instructor, pointing at Taya. “Why are you not wearing your headdress?”

The class tittered.

Taya, too humiliated to confess the circumstances, froze in her seat.

“See that you come to class properly dressed next time.” He strode out in front of the class. “Initiates, you are here to learn the mother tongue. It is the language of your ancestors, the language of magic. Who among you already knows some of the mother tongue?”

Not a single hand went up.

“Nobody?” said the instructor. “Nobody knows the mother tongue?”

“It’s forbidden,” volunteered one student.

“Yes, it’s forbidden,” said the instructor. “Nonetheless, you all know some of it. You, what’s your name?” He snapped his fingers and pointed at a boy in the front row.

“Abi,” said the boy.

“Abi, what does your tablet say?”

“It says
isu
.”

“And what does
isu
mean?”

“It’s part of a name,” said the boy.

“Right,” said the instructor. “Like your own name. Abi...” He gestured frantically. “Come on, what’s the rest?”

“Abi isu Nappahere.”

“So you’re a metalworker, or at least you were before you became a Coalition initiate,” said the instructor. “The word
isu
is from the mother tongue. It means ‘from.’
Nappahere
is also from the mother tongue. It means ‘metalworker.’ You are Abi from the metalworkers.”

Taya was stunned. Had she really been speaking fragments of the mother tongue all her life? She looked with interest at the other words on the tablets. Were they all mother tongue words in common usage? If only she could read them!

“Let’s try another,” said the instructor. He pointed at another student. “Your word.”

“
Paharu
.”

“Means ‘potter,’” said the instructor. “So
isu Paharu
, class, means?”

“From the potters,” intoned the class.

“Let’s try something harder,” said the instructor. “You’ll find pieces of the mother tongue used in other ways too, not just in names.” He pointed at another student. “What’s on your tablet?”

“
Bantu kasu annasi
,” said the student.

The initiates laughed.

“All right,” said the instructor. “What does
bantu kasu annasi
mean?”

“It’s a curse,” said the student. “You say it when you’re frustrated.”

“But what does it mean?” said the instructor.

The classroom was silent.

“It has a meaning,” said the instructor. “
Bantu kasu annasi
is from the mother tongue. We’ll take it in reverse order. ‘
Annasi
’ means ‘to us.’ ‘
Kasu
’ means ‘help.’ And ‘
bantu
’ means mothers. What you think is a meaningless curse is actually an invocation to the mother goddesses: ‘Mothers help us!’”

Taya felt awed. She’d heard those words so many times, even said them once or twice and got a tanning for it, but had no idea they were the mother tongue or even that they’d had a meaning.

“Now, you may be wondering why some of the old tongue persists in our language, particularly in names and curse words, when we speak primarily the river tongue,” said the instructor. “The answer lies in our history. You will be studying that separately, so I won’t go into detail, but the short answer is that for several hundred years, the river country was occupied by the mountain tribes, and our language at the time—the mother tongue—was nearly obliterated and replaced with their language. We speak that language to this day.”

A student raised his hand. “But the mountain people speak the mountain tongue. Not
our
tongue.”

“Yes and no,” said the instructor. “Both languages derive from the same roots. Our ancestors later expelled the mountain people from the river valley, but we kept their language because by then it was what we all spoke. Today we call it the river tongue because it has diverged a little from what the mountain people now speak. No more argument on this topic for now; you’ll learn more about it in other classes. Let’s keep going.” He pointed at Taya. “What’s your word?”

Taya’s cheeks flushed. “I-I don’t know.”

“Your word,” said the instructor, shaking his finger impatiently. “On the tablet in front of you.”

“She can’t read,” called Mandir from across the room.

The class tittered.

“You’re illiterate?” said the instructor.

Taya bit her lip. She didn’t know what “illiterate” meant.

“The word on your tablet is
sarrum
,” said the instructor. “It means ‘king.’ We have an isu Sarrum in our classroom, do we not?” He looked at Mandir.

Mandir nodded.

“Mandir isu Sarrum. What does it mean, class?”

“Mandir from kings,” they intoned.

“You,” said the instructor, pointing at Taya again. “See me after class.”

Chapter 9: Hrappa

Since it was not far, Taya opted to walk with Rasik and Mandir to Bodhan isu Kasirum’s house rather than ride. Black clouds squatted on the horizon, looking surly. They posed no immediate threat, but when the clouds covered the sky, she and Mandir would have to take shelter in case of flood.

The streets were crowded with townsfolk hurrying to conclude their business before the storm broke. The air felt oppressive and heavy, and despite all the rushing about, the mood in the streets was subdued. Even the dust clung to the ground, refusing to be kicked up. The houses of baked brick, which were so bright in the sunshine, now looked drab, framed against a graying sky. The few swatches of color were the bright greens that peeked out from walled gardens.

They crossed from the ruling district into the artisan district. Here the houses diminished somewhat in size, and Taya began to see colorfully painted signs in front of some of them, advertising wares and services:
Jewelry, Worked Silver and Copper, Wheelwright and Wagons, Fine Cotton Cloth & Indigos
.

Rasik led them to the one that said
Fine Cotton Cloth & Indigos
. They’d arrived at Bodhan isu Kasirum’s house.

Mandir had been right when he’d guessed this man had money. Bodhan’s house, despite being in the artisan district, was larger than most ruling district homes. Two stories high and easily three times the length of her guesthouse, it was practically a palace. A doorman waited on the steps. He looked them over, took their names, and bade them wait while he spoke to someone inside. After a few minutes, he returned. Taya and Mandir dismissed the grumbling Rasik, who was complaining about the many tasks he had to finish before the storm, and followed the doorman into the house.