Tracking Broken Rushes

Could three glowing coals of sacred tallow survive a mile of drowned peat while the sky tore open above the western swamp? Gou Dongxian hugged the perforated clay censer to her sternum, crouching beneath the rotting overhang of a hollow cypress as cold rain hammered through the canopy. The flood was rising to her shins, thick with floating black detritus and shredded water-grass. She needed dry pitch to feed the embers before the clay cooled to grave-stone, but every pine branch within reach wept dark, oily water.

A sheet of rain swept sideways, hissing through the reed tops. Dongxian clamped a patch of cured elk hide over the upper vents of the vessel, leaving only three needle-thin drafts along the bottom collar. The smell of scorched lard seeped through the wet seam, sharp and greasy against the stench of rotting peat. Beneath her hemp waistband, the bladder pouch of stolen sulfur dust pressed against her hip, gritty and heavy.

A heavy clump of wet moss dropped from the branches above, landing with a wet slap in the puddle beside her feet.

Dongxian shifted her balance, sliding her right hand down to the fire-hardened oak stake at her belt. She did not look up immediately; in the flooded bottoms, looking up was how a sentry took a barbed reed through the eye. Instead, she watched the murky pool around her shins. In the brown water, ripples spread not from the falling rain, but from a pair of splayed, mud-crusted toes gripping the cypress trunk four paces overhead.

"That pot stinks like a singed sow, priestess," a rasping voice dropped through the foliage.

A man slipped from the cypress crook and struck the peat without splashing. He was small, wiry, and draped in a patchwork of rotting musk-ox hide lashed together with gut-string. Wet moss clung to his shoulders like green scabs, and dried riverbed clay masked his cheeks and forehead. He squatted on a submerged root, his knees level with his ears, his teeth grinding steadily on a clump of luminous green pond weed.

Dongxian kept the clay vessel tucked in the crook of her left elbow, her oak stake leveled at his chest. "Tan Ruizhe. The outcast who eats canal mud."

"I eat what does not bite back," Ruizhe replied, spitting a thread of green slime into the foam. He wiped his chin with the back of a forearm scored by old leech scars. His pale eyes flicked from her spear tip to the thin wisp of blue grease leaking through the censer's seams. "Your high fire-father back on the ridge must be mad. Sending a girl into the drowned bottoms with holy dirt in a jar while the sky is drowning the frogs."

"He sent no one," Dongxian said. "The fire is mine."

"Then you are the mad one. Water is rising three finger-widths every drumbeat. Two ridges over, the river broke its weir. Old Chunhua’s canoes are drifting, and the red briers are swimming in the backwash like hungry eels." Ruizhe dug a grimy finger into the hollow of his neck, scratching at a crust of lichen. "Two more leagues of marsh, and your little clay nest will be a cold mud-ball."

"You came down from the timber," she countered, stepping sideways to keep the thick cypress trunk at her back. "You know where the ground stays hard."

"Of course I know. But knowing costs fat. Good fat, not the boiled bone-water you people feed to the common beggars." Ruizhe extended an open palm, his fingers crooked and black-rimmed. "Give me two fingers of tallow from that pot. The rains wash the duck-grease off my pelt every autumn, and the cold bites into my marrow."

Dongxian hesitated, observing the slight tremor in his jaw. She reached into her waist pouch, brought out a dried cake of cured kidney lard the size of a walnut, and held it in her palm. "Half now. The other half when my sandals touch dry rock."

Ruizhe snorted, but his hand snatched the hard cake with the quickness of a marsh crab. He did not chew it; he rubbed the tallow vigorously across his collarbones and thighs, spreading the white film over the caked clay until his skin smelled of rancid mutton.

"Follow my heels," he said, turning toward the thickest stand of flooded black willows. "Step on the rushes I break. If you step on unbroken reeds, you go down into the black silt, and I will not fish your pot out."

He moved without sound, bounding from one half-submerged root-knee to another. Dongxian followed, her calves aching from the drag of the floodwater. The squall was intensifying, drum-rolls of wind shredding the canopy and driving needles of rain into her face. She kept her head down, tracking the fractured reeds Ruizhe left in his wake.

Three hundred paces into the willow brake, the reek of stagnant marsh gas hit her throat, rotten and sulfurous.

Ruizhe paused on a hump of sodden moss, his foot raised to step onto what appeared to be a raft of tangled brushwood.

"Hold," Dongxian called in a harsh whisper.

Ruizhe glanced back, frowning. "The water is over the hummock here. We cross the drift."

"That is no drift," she said. She dropped to one knee on a submerged root, sheltering her censer beneath her chest. With her bare thumb, she pried open a small inspection flap on the censer's side, withdrew a glowing splinter of dry shale with a pair of bone tweezers, and flicked it toward the floating brush.

The glowing stone hissed as it arched through the deluge, landing on the dark mat. Instantly, a pale blue flame flared across the mud with a soft whump, burning three inches high on the water's surface before drowning in the downpour. The brush raft shuddered, collapsing inward into a yawning funnel of black peat soup that swallowed the surrounding reeds with a sickening gurgle.

Ruizhe pulled his foot back, staring at the swirling void where he had meant to place his weight. "Peat boil," he muttered.

"Methane pocket beneath the taproots," Dongxian said, sealing her censer draft with the oiled flap. "If you had stepped there, the suction would have taken you to the limestone bed. And your splashing would have drowned my coals."

Ruizhe wiped rain from his brows, letting out a dry, rattling cackle that sounded like dry bamboo knocking together. "The altar girl knows how the swamp farts. Fair enough." He reached behind his back, untied a heavy bundle wrapped in oiled reeds from his pack, and tossed a dark, resinous branch to her. "Catch."

Dongxian caught it with one hand. It was a knot of pitch-pine heartwood, heavy as stone and bleeding sticky amber sap that water could not penetrate.

"Took that from an old lightning strike on the north ridge three moons ago," Ruizhe said, turning his shoulder to the gale. "Keep it dry under your coat. When we reach the knoll, you can feed your pig-grease to that."

"Why give it to me?"

"Because if your fire dies, you die, and then nobody gives me the second bite of fat," Ruizhe replied plainly. "Besides, there are things moving in the reed-line that do not like smoke. Even your temple stink is better than being sung to sleep."

He turned and bounded across a row of partially submerged granite boulders that skirted the sinkhole. Dongxian tucked the pitch-pine knot firmly against her ribs, her sandals finding firm purchase on the stone path.

The ground began to rise gradually out of the soup. The black willow brake thinned, giving way to stands of petrified swamp cypress and towering clumps of wild spear-bamboo. The suction of the peat faded, replaced by coarse gravel and gritty red shale.

They climbed out of the standing water, their breathing ragged in the rain-choked darkness. The slope steepened into an elevated spine of basalt knolls, rising ten paces above the drowning basin. Here, the soil was hard and drained, the rain sheeting away down natural gullies instead of collecting into deadly morasses.

Ruizhe stopped at the base of a sharp shale promontory and held up a palm, dropping into a low crouch.

Dongxian froze behind him, her fingers tightening on the bone flute at her throat.

Through the rhythmic drum of the rain on the bamboo fronds above them, a clear, sharp sound drifted down from the crest of the knoll.

Tink. Clink-tink.

It was not the snapping of branches or the heavy footfall of a bog predator. It was the precise, deliberate chime of a hard hammerstone striking volcanic glass. Someone on the high ground was knapping obsidian in the dark.