“Wait. Is this the part where we take our clothes off and swim through the fish to get purified?”
The fish incident. Unar tried to contain her shudder. After a teaching exercise where they’d sprouted purplepea saplings from seed under the watchful eye of Servant Eilif, Unar had pulled out her tree and put it on the woodpile as instructed, but both Oos and Aoun had mysteriously vanished with their saplings.
When Unar sneaked after Oos’s light sandal-prints, she caught her friend extracting dye from the flowers to make blue ribbons for braiding through her tall, magnificent hair. Unar left Oos to follow Aoun’s prints and found him using the purplepea leaves to stun fish in one of the smaller pools. His mouth was full of the raw flesh of one he’d stabbed after it floated to the surface. Unar had been repulsed.
Aoun had wordlessly offered one of the gasping, scaly abominations to her. Its horrible mustaches were like slug feelers, and a row of spines stuck up on its back. Unar hit Aoun’s hand away from her so hard that the fish sailed off the edge of the Garden.
Now she would have to get naked in the water with them.
Oos, meanwhile, rapturously shaped the Temple interior in the air with her slim hands, made smooth by wasting her time rubbing rough skin off with sandpaper fig leaves. “My father said the inside of the egg shape is spiralled and segmented like a snail shell. It has marble steps and banisters of purpleheart. He said everything leaving the safety of the staircases, passing into the centre, becomes weightless. Great living artworks of white sky-coral cross the empty spaces, and birds build their nests upside down, but the eggs don’t fall out of them.”
“Oos, I can’t swim. And I hate fish. They’re creepy.”
“Your magic will hold you up. Do you feel sick?”
The question was obsolete by the time Oos had finished asking; Unar made it to the other side of a hanging bridge before stumbling to her knees. She vomited into a stand of bulrushes at the edge of the small lily pond where the spoonbills nested. They were the same bulrushes whose roots Aoun once roasted for supper. He’d known the trick of pulling them out without cutting his hands on the sharp-bladed leaves. And then he’d eaten them laden with fish.
“But I don’t have any magic.” Unar would have eaten a hundred bulrush roots to avoid swimming through the fish. “I need to wait for it to grow back. I used it all up. That’s why I’m sick.”
Oos knelt beside her and whispered, “You mean you used it up when you were looking for the baby that fell?”
“Yes.” Unar wasn’t about to admit she’d been helping a slave.
“It’ll grow back very slowly, now that Audblayin is dead.”
“I didn’t know she was going to die today!”
“I’m a good swimmer. I’ll help you. Quickly. We’re falling behind.”
The loquat grove and the petal-like pavilion were well behind them. Three bridge crossings later, they stood at the edge of the main tallowwood trunk that supported the widest part of the Garden with the Temple at its heart. On a platform at the edge of the moat, cracked halves of toucan eggshells held the precious mother-of-pearl powder given as tribute when the deity died, to beg for a speedy return.
Unar wasn’t sure that she really believed in the ocean. She thought the mother-of-pearl, pulverised and waiting, might come from stones hidden in the muck in the foul, reeking depths of Floor. Nobody alive could claim to have seen such a terrifying thing as the sea. The moat at the centre of the Garden was terrifying enough for Unar.
“I’m heavier than you,” she said to Oos. “What if I drown us both?”
The morning sun turned the surface of the water to molten gold. Aoun stood on the platform, stripping off his woven shirt and untying the drawstring of his trousers. For some reason, Unar didn’t hear whatever reassuring reply Oos made. She couldn’t take her eyes off Aoun as slaves began brushing the mother-of-pearl powder over his smooth chest and naked flanks.
Something was wrong. Unar searched uneasily inside herself for the power of the Garden, the power of the goddess.
Oos had asked her, Did it feel like it did before? Could you think wicked thoughts?
Unar couldn’t tell whether it was wickedness or curiosity that drew her eyes to the reddish-brown organ, like a tapir’s trunk, nestling in the curls of Aoun’s pubic hair.
She must have had a hundred opportunities to look at Aoun naked before. She hadn’t cared. She hadn’t tried. What was different now?
Audblayin’s absence. Unar’s forbidden excursion beyond the barrier into Understorey. Had she broken something, some vital connection, forever? No amount of enjoying the way Aoun suddenly looked to her could be worth that!
Then Aoun turned his back to her and Unar realised slaves had helped her to take off her own clothes and started brushing her busily with the powder. She obediently raised her arms just as Aoun dived from the edge of the platform. Shards of sun from the widening ripples interfered with her ability to watch him. Squinting, she saw his wet head surface in the middle of the lake, the purifying powder washed away, left behind in the water as a tribute to the deity.
Fear paralysed her limbs in the face of her own imminent dive. More and more Gardeners leaped carelessly from the platform. Aoun already stood on the distant steps that led to the oval doorway in the egg-shaped Temple.
“You’ve done a poor job, slave,” Oos admonished, taking up the brush herself and drawing it lightly across Unar’s inadequately dusted breasts, her pupils widening as she did so. Unar noticed she was holding her breath.
“You have a secret,” Unar said.
Oos dropped the brush.
“It’s the death of the goddess,” she breathed. “The oaths we took are weakest while she has no bodily form.”
So. That explained why Unar had become so conscious of Aoun. The magic enforcing her promise of chastity was falling away, as it had done when she’d ventured into Understorey. And now Oos’s eyes were glued to Unar’s breasts the same way that Unar’s eyes had been glued to Aoun.
“You must go, Warmed One,” the slave said. Unar recognised the middle-aged hawk-faced woman she’d helped the previous night. “The others have all gone.”
“What’s your name, slave?”
“It’s Ylly, Warmed One.”
Oos tried to take Unar’s hand, but Unar pulled away sharply.
“I’m going to be sick again,” she said.
Tears filled Oos’s dark eyes and ran down through the mother-of-pearl dust. She looked as though Unar had stabbed her with a bore-knife.
“No,” Unar said shortly, angry with herself for being too consumed by her terror of the fish to consider Oos, but also angry with Oos for thinking so poorly of her. “Not because of you.”
Oos blinked, relieved. She dusted over the tear trails with the powder. Unar retched over the grassy end of the platform. Then she turned, straightened, and ignoring her shaking knees, took the hand she’d shaken off just a moment ago.
“Ehkis give me courage,” she said, naming the rain goddess.