Chapter 56:

An hour later Rajani peeled open the door to the rubber forge. She was greeted by a wave of heat. Furnaces lined the north side of the forge. Racks of mammole bones hung on the opposite wall. In the center stood a shallow curing pool. Hunters worked at the kilns and by the racks, some checking the texture and quality of the rubber, others carving pikes and knives over vertically stacked az sap barrels.

Rajani grabbed a finished knife from one of the racks. She looked around the forge for Jiat, and found him paring down a mammole femur, his workbench the head of a barrel. She joined him. They worked on the bone together in silence, waiting for a nearby hunter sanding down a pike to leave.

Once the hunter left, Rajani looked at Jiat head on. His face was swollen and discolored, making the injuries Rajani had received at Chief’s hands seem negligible in comparison.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the meeting,” he whispered. He glanced at the figures tending the kilns behind them.

Pity, unbidden, stirred Rajani’s heart. She knew what it was like to face a force much stronger than she. “You told me he didn’t touch you,” she whispered. “I would never have asked you…”

Jiat gave a low laugh. “I gave him as good as I got. He gets very angry when I interfere with how he treats my cousins. They are his children. But I can’t just stand aside.”

That feeling Rajani also knew well. She almost reached out to take Jiat’s hand. But Jiat was a man and a hunter, not one of her younger cousins. She had likely already given him more sympathy than he wanted; sometimes not making a big deal of a problem was the best thing one could do. So instead Rajani leaned forward, and in hushed tones recounted to Jiat the details of the lexikost debate from the previous darkwake. When Rajani mentioned the looming riots, Jiat nodded. “I heard from someone else that they’re even arming themselves with stones and whatever weapons they brought with them.”

“Now’s the time, then,” Rajani replied. “The lodge mother moot doesn’t want riots. They’ll be more likely now than ever to accept a proposal to do agriculture.”

“No,” Jiat said. He spoke with a grim authority. “Agriculture is too slow. That’s what I found out in my research. It takes a season or more to grow plants. You have to wait several weeks for even the fastest ones to start growing, and then you have to wait even longer before you can eat them.”

“Gather and Hunt,” Rajani swore.

“Don’t worry. I reviewed the trade records too, and I found that the Xhota once tried to trade us fruit-bearing plants, already potted in soil. The records noted that in keeping with our anti-agricultural Tabu, we refused them.”

Hope lit up inside Rajani. “Say more.”

“We can still petition the lodge mother moot. Not to permit agriculture, but to permit the trade of skins and tools for already growing and grown plants. None of the Cursed would even have to eat the fruit from these plants. It could all be given to the Gather’s Children.”

“Yes,” Rajani said. The uncertainty she had been feeling since talking to Lainla now was melting away. “It would ease their hunger. It would halt the riots. No hunters would be called in. And maybe, after the crisis is over, we could argue that the plants should stay. Over time, we’ll get used to agriculture. We’ll rely less and less on the hunters. Eventually, finally, they’ll be forced to live by the same rules as everyone else.”

Jiat looked as if he were about to say something when his eyes darted over Rajani’s shoulder. Her fingers tightened at once on her knife. Someone was behind her.

She turned. Rajani knew none of the four hunters facing her by name, but she knew their faces. All of them were old-Tabled Cursed.

“What do you want?” Rajani said.

One of the hunters stood half a head taller than the others. A smirk was playing on his lips. “What were you saying about hunters living by the same rules as everyone else?”

Rajani was tempted – just for a moment – to deny she had said any such thing. Her pride stopped her. She was a lead hunter. She would act like it.

“My private conversations are not for your benefit.” She gestured the tall hunter towards the forge door. “Leave.”

It worked – for half a second. The tall hunter stopped and looked at his gang. He seemed unsure. One of his friends, however, looked at Rajani through his glasses, and scoffed. “You talk like you think you’re somebody, but that’s not how it looked to me when Chief was slapping you around.”

The others snickered. Rajani struggled not to flush. Anger flooded through her at Chief. Every ounce of respect she had clawed out of the hunters the past seven years, she was about to have to win back all over again.

“Sebit, don’t be a fool,” Jiat said from behind Rajani. “You don’t need this fight.”

“Fight? You?” The hunter who had scoffed at Rajani laughed. “Have you looked at yourself recently?”

Rajani readied herself. Fights among hunters were common enough during rainsoon season. The rules governing them were simple: blow off steam, and keep the sides evenly matched. The reason she was facing a four versus two fight right now was because Chief – Hunt damn him – had marked her as someone to beat down for fun rather than fight as an equal.

“So you want to live by the same rules as non-hunters?” the tall hunter taunted. “Is that right, Jinkari?”

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“Non-hunters don’t fight back,” another hunter jeered.

The entitlement oozing out of their mouths was making Rajani see red. How far the hunters had fallen from the ideal she had outlined for Kaliwa! And yet they still commanded respect, they still retained their high status. It was enough to make Rajani tear her hair out. Scowling, she adjusted her grip on her knife. If any of them took even one step forward...

Rajani didn’t know how it started, but all of a sudden Jiat and Sebit were shouting and shoving each other. The tall hunter joined the melee a moment later, attacking Rajani. She struck back with her knife, knowing she had to be brutal, knowing she had to be fast. His greater strength would wear her down if she let the fight go on for too long.

When the tall hunter cried out and pulled back, Rajani saw with satisfaction that she had sliced a gash down his arm. That would teach him to smirk.

“A knife!” he sputtered.

In response, Rajani stabbed at him again. The hunter twisted out of the way, bumping into another hunter who was exchanging blows with Jiat. Someone grabbed Rajani from behind, pinning her arms to her sides. She stabbed backwards. With a yelp of pain, the hunter released her.

“No knives!” the tall hunter shouted.

“Then only two of you come at us,” Rajani countered.

Rajani saw the tall hunter pause, as if considering her words. She took the lull as an opportunity to lunge for him, but he pulled aside at the last moment. Unable to stop her headlong rush, Rajani splashed knees-first into the curing pool.

“Out! Out!” a hunter on the other side of the pool shouted. “Not in here!”

Jiat pulled on Rajani’s arm, helping her out of the pool. They and the other four hunters were shoved towards the rubber forge door. A moment later all six were outside. Her knife was gone – she had dropped it in the pool. Clenching her fists, Rajani targeted the weakest of the hunters. If she went after him now, before he had a chance to recover, maybe her relentlessness would scare the others off.

Jiat pulled her back. “Let them go.”

They were leaving? With wary eyes Rajani watched as the four hunters shuffled off to the western half of the urb, where the majority of the old-Tabled Cursed lived. One of them spat onto the ground as he left.

“Are you hurt?” Jiat asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Let me check.”

Jiat’s hand on her back was warm and strong. Rajani kept her gaze focused on the departing hunters, but she allowed Jiat to examine her for injuries. Only after the last hunter had dropped out of sight on the other side of the atreola did she meet Jiat’s eyes.

“You were perfect,” she said. She was intensely aware of how close Jiat’s body was to hers. “You jumped in right away. You didn’t let up at all.”

“You were perfect too.” He smiled, his entire face lighting up. “Taking them on with a knife, what were you thinking?”

Rajani grinned. “I had to get them with what I could.”

Jiat gestured towards the east forfend. “Come to the holy place with me.”

“Right now?”

“You want to get cleaned up before you go back to your lodge, don’t you?”

He was right. Rajani could get wash water from the vat by her meal bench, but that would mean having to explain her bleeding lip to Mamai.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re right – let’s go.”

***

With Jiat, it was simple. There was no arguing, no entreating, no begging for understanding. He shared her desire to reduce hunter power. The word enough meant the same thing to them both.

The black rocks and even the hot steam felt different that sunstir as Rajani sat in the holy place and discussed tactics with Jiat. “Only lead hunters can submit proposals to the lodge mother moot,” he said. “You sure you’re okay with taking charge of the submission?”

“Yes.”

“What will you argue?”

“First that we should re-open trade with the overbelters, that it’s past time to normalize relations. Then I may bring up how we benefit from agriculture already. Like how we trade with the overbelters for bioplastic made from domesticated plant fibers.”

His eyes lit up. “That’s a good point. I hadn’t considered that.”

Rajani enjoyed hearing the respect in his voice. “I got the idea from my lodge mother. When I was younger she would tell me stories about her mother, who grew up inside the shelterbelt. I remember once she told me that Grandmamai had been part of a trade ring passing plant fibers onto a bioplastic-producing factory. I remember…”

Rajani paused. Thinking about Mamai was like piercing an old wound. It had been different before. She remembered their shared laughter, the way they used to cook together, the way her mother had always assented whenever Rajani begged to learn how she did her lodge mother duties. Then one day, it all stopped. Mamai didn’t want her to become a lodge mother, and Rajani was old enough now to get serious about her vocation. “Hunters are higher in status,” Mamai had said. “That’s what I want for you.” And so the fighting began, bouts of nastiness that turned into full on shouting matches, until finally, seasons later, Rajani stopped trying and gave in. The years since had brokered an uneasy truce between them, hot resentment cooling into indifference. Now they barely spoke, their relationship a shadow of what it once had been.

“What’s wrong?”

Rajani felt shy. She wasn’t used to the feeling and didn’t know where it was coming from. “I was thinking about my lodge mother.” She gave a light laugh. “Did you know, when I was younger, I wanted to be a lodge mother too?”

Kebet had thrown back his head and guffawed the first time Rajani had shared her secret with him. Jiat merely looked confused. “A lodge mother?”

“I know, silly, right?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Not without knowing why.”

There was something about the way Jiat looked at her that made Rajani want to share more. “I spoke to your cousin this morntide. She was having trouble with the hand ballista. Her technique isn’t bad, but she was distracted, thinking about your uncle. So I told her what it means for her to be a hunter, how she’s part of a sacred story now, one that names her as bold and self-sacrificing, valued and powerful.

“That’s what lodge mothers do. They interpret. They assign meaning to the roles of the Cursed. I already do most of that when it comes to my own Table. I teach them what it means to be. And if I could do that with the moot – if I could do that for the Cursed at large –”

The yearning, strong as ever, filled her. Rajani found she couldn’t continue. She also found she didn’t need to. Jiat had reached out, taken her hand, and filled in with a quotation from one of the Chronicles. “To be a lodge mother is to be a prophet. To hear and speak the god words to the rest of us.”

Rajani’s heart was thudding in her chest. Dimly she wondered why, when there was nothing but respect in Jiat’s eyes, nothing but tenderness in his grasp. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him about her dream from the other night, when footsteps rang out behind them, and they pulled apart.

“We should get back,” Rajani whispered.

Jiat nodded, but his face was alive with light. “I hope we make it.”

“Me too,” said Rajani, and she meant it with all her heart.