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The rising sun was still just considering its path into the sky as Ayika cast herself down those uneven steps from the ancient riverbank into the warren-like alleys of the Bed. Down here all the ragged wooden buildings had their own sense of mismatched individuality. They leaned against each other for support as they struggled on their stilts to stay just above the stinking mud the filled the bottom of this wide shallow valley.
Back when the great Impenetrable City had been founded, the Kuang River had been a broad and mighty expanse that carried the rainfall of the northern mountains down to water the city's crops and carry its ships out to the distant sea. However, floods had threatened the farmers so an ancient king had his earth benders built canals and levees to tame its fury. Then the city was thirsty so one of the tributaries was rerouted through aqueducts to feed the fountains. A later queen thought that water-roads would ease transportation in the growing metropolis so the river was lessened by the lifeblood that filled them. But then the sewers were overburdened so another slice of the river was diverted to clean them. So it went for two thousand years until the city was renown for its canals and bridges, gloried for its fountains and pools, and not a single shred of the Kuang was left to be seen within its far-stretching walls.
Here outside the city's wall, what was once the path of the great river was left a damp and muddy valley. This depression stretched from the edge of the city to the harbor levy where the various sewers and canals finally converged to reassemble the waterway. That forgotten riverbed was so prone to flooding and disease that no sane human would call it home. So inevitably a community of thousands sprang up there, filling the depression with a mess of buildings as eccentric as their inhabitants. The poor, the unlucky, and the immigrants all made their home below the river while the rest of the city happily forgot their existence. That was the Bed, and above it massive stone bridges and vaulted sewers stretched from bank to former bank, steadfastly ignoring absence of river beneath them.
Down near the base of one of those pylons, Ayika turned a narrow corner and opened the creaking apartment door to hear the familiar sound of her mother telling someone how to live their life better.
"...that they'd think I wouldn't notice just goes to show there's so little respect for the basic sense of the matter!"
Ayika's mother, Maekayae, managed an impressive amount of multitasking even without considering whatever lecture Ayika had just wandered into. Maekayae stirred a little cooking pot and gestured intensely with her free hand whenever it wasn't absently straightening and rearranging the hundred articles in the tiny kitchen that occupied the largest corner the apartment. She had the same short and wide-hipped Western figure that Ayika had reluctantly inherited, but Maekayae wore it proudly. She had a way of planting her feet like she was almost daring the world to try and knock her down. Nearby, Ayika's little brother Oakas was seated at the lone low table, head sleepily propped up by his hands, clearly not the recipient or subject of this lecture.
Ayika's quick glance around the room confirmed that her dad was already gone. There was precious little space to hide in this apartment. There were only two rooms and any spot that wasn't occupied by the small chests of their possessions, beds, or by mother's stacks of leathers awaiting sewing was just floors and walls of dark ill-fitting timbers. Those planks were all the castoffs of the shipyards, sold cheaply or unknowingly to the residents of the Bed for constructing their houses. People said that one day the Kuang River would break free and return to its former home but they would be ready. The houses of the Bed remembered how to ride the waves.
Of course, Grandma Aka had always shaken her head when she heard people say this. Then she would flash her sinister gap-toothed smirk and say that was hardly half of what was going to happen when the River God came back. She'd made people nervous when she said thing like that. Her eyes convinced you they saw more than yours did.
Grandma Aka's chair still sat in the corner, draped in blankets and dust, as Maekayae continued talking to her absent husband. Ayika slipped off her boots at the door and walked over to roll up the futon she shared with her little brother. Of course he had not done so, despite being the last one up but Ayika's fraternal expectations were already very low. Her mother continued obliviously:
"Oh and Kadat, do try and talk to Karonak today. His Anaka is just getting so stressed about her aunt's funeral and needs someone to take some of it off her. She's been wailing at me about what the spirits might do if things aren't all proper. Honestly, if your mother was still around it might-"
"Mom," Ayika broke in as she stuffed the bedroll into its ragged wicker chest. She needed to stop this before her mother could build up steam on a new topic. "Dad left already."
Her mother spun and glanced around the husbandless room. "Oh," she said, showing no trace of embarrassment. "Well, at least he grabbed his lunch pack I set out for him."
Then those eyes focused on Ayika who instantly regretted calling attention to herself.
"And you, missy," her mother continued while ladling rice-porridge into the boy's bowl who began automatically shoving it into his mouth. "It's about time you're back. You can't be coming running out like that first thing in the morning. Is that mud on your dress? Here let me get that. You know you need to look nice for those fancy girls you work for."
Ayika dodged the offered hand as it darted towards her. "Mom, it's fine. Look, it's just some dust. It's not like they let me wear these clothes at the school anyway. I'm into my uniform the instant I get through that door." She brushed at the offending skirt. There was no need to mention climbing up on rooftops.
Ayika allowed herself to be guided down onto a stool at the table and took the bowl of porridge placed before her as she tried to run a comb through her wavy hair. Parents always had a strange ability to make their children instantly feel ten years younger.
"Oh, I wish that job let you take the uniform home with you. You looked so pretty in that dress," her mother said as Ayika half listened, chewing methodically while she worked her fingers through knots the comb found. Then Ayika's eyes brightened momentarily. There was a bit of fish in the porridge today; a pleasant if slightly extravagant surprise for this household.
Maekayae continued to talk as she stirred, "Still, the school really isn't paying you that much, really. And the job's so far away you use up half your time riding the city tram in and out. See, I was talking to Mrs Anyakya's niece-in-law the other day and she said that Mrs Anyakya said that she'd be glad to take a girl like you at her cleaners. I'll get that set up for you."
Ayika hurriedly swallowed her mouthful to break back into this one-sided conversation, "I'm not going to go back to being a house-cleaner! You know how hard I worked to find this job." The comb snagged again, jerking painfully in her hair.
"Oh, it wouldn't be that," her mother carried on. "Anyakya always needs more pretty homeland girls to staff the counters. And there you'd get to show everyone how smart you are. I'm sure you'd be helping run one of the shops before too long. The money'd be better as well. Which'd be good because these city-bred Tribe boys don't even come sniffing around if a girl hasn't gotten herself a salary."
This time Ayika almost choked. "Mom? I thought we were talking about jobs?"
Her mother paid the outrage no mind. "Oh, you're sixteen, girl. Stop acting childish. Marriage bears thinking on, whatever these so-called modern girls say they're doing."
"Yeah, Ayika. Stop acting childish!" said Oakas, wide awake now that his favorite activity, criticizing Ayika, had began.
"Shut up," Ayika growled as she swiped across the table at her brother. He simply leaned back out of her way and stuck out his tongue. For her troubles Ayika received a rap across the knuckles from a carefully wielded wooden spoon.
"Enough of that. Let your brother eat. He needs his energy before he goes to the teacher-man. Going to learn enough writing to sit an exam one day, our little boy. Maybe work in the Post Office, good government job," her mother said, beaming distractedly. Oakas just grinned while Ayika silently gulped down another spoonful of her breakfast.
"See, that's my point as well," Ayika said after a moment, attempting to regain her lost momentum. She elected to ignore the mention of marriage for now, her mother was too rooted in the old-country to accept that there was a different timetable here. "Look, at the school I can listen in on the lessons and actually learn things. Just this week Professor Lizhen was going over this amazing story about the early days of the war from the Islanders' side and I heard nearly the whole thing. Like I was his student. I can't go from that to just being a wash-girl or a maid!"
"Honey, you're a maid right now," her mother replied absently, busy with tying back Oakas' long hair as he continued eating.
Ayika grunted. Her mother was being infuriating, ignorant, and of course she was right. It didn't matter of Ayika closed her eyes while listening to the lecturers and dreamed herself into a desk at the front row. Ayika was just a maid, no matter what she liked to imagine. She stood up from the table and went over to quickly wash her face and hands in the little bowl set aside, lifting her top up for a moment to run a damp cloth under her arms. Feeling her mother's continued pointed silence pressing on her back, she jerked down her top as firmly as possible to communicate that this debate was not over.
Then she turned back towards the table and saw Grandma Aka's chair over in its corner. Beside it, on a low shelf, sat the carved spirit idols of bone and wood and shark teeth that Aka had promised held enough ritual power to offer some protection for the house. Aka had also winked when she said that so Ayika had never been sure whether to actually believe her. However, other people did.
In Kuang Harbor, those who couldn't afford to have priests carve their prayers in the city wall came down to the Bed and to Aka the River Witch. From across the twisted blocks and tangled alleys of the overgrown harbor town they made their way towards a small dark skinned woman in giant boots who knew the ways of the spirits. The petitioners came with problems of love, business, sickness, and fertility. All this was inevitably attributed to the spirit world, even if Ayika could have sworn that Aka's fingers were sometimes crossed as she said so.
Grandma Aka had never seemed very happy in the city, and had often complained that the family should never have come here with all the other immigrants after the end of the war. She snapped and grumbled, stewing litanies against ignorance and helplessness to be unleashed at every supplicant even as she performed whatever spirit ritual she'd decided on. But still people came and they left satisfied, whether their problems were mystical or mundane. The little old lady had been a mobile fixture of the Bed, audible from around the street corner if anyone managed to miss the grey-blue smoke cloud which collected above her furiously tended pipe. That bone-work curve had been Aka's one concession to City customs and one loudly self-predicted to be the cause of her death.
She'd probably been quite pleased when she finally did pass on after a respectable bout of coughing at an age no one could guess at, that even to her own son was "none your damn business". She certainly would have liked the midnight procession to the docks, sneaking out ahead of the district functionary and his death exam fee, his stamp charge, his mandatory burial sites, and his burial site upkeep fee. So Grandma Aka had finally left the city by ship as she wanted, though now wrapped in a blanket weighted with stones. People of the Water Tribe always returned to the sea sooner or later, if only for the final descent back into the embrace of the depths.
Ayika completed her toilet and then moved over to pull on her own boots at the door. She glanced up to see her mother looking down with concern.
Maekayae sighed, "Look honey, I know you like that school job. It's just the money and that you don't have time left over for meeting, uh, people, if you're trekking halfway 'cross the city and back every day." She waved away Ayika's response with a tired hand. "We can talk about it tonight. You just be gettin' going now. Oh!"
Her mother grabbed a small parcel off the kitchen counter and said, "Your father forgot to grab the Bao boys' lunch when he went! Ooh that...! And I still have to watch Oakas 'till... Honey, do you think you've time to-?"
Ayika grabbed the package. "Yeah, I can swing it. I'll slide by the docks on my way." And then because she didn't want her mother stewing all day over her girl 'giving her attitude' she smiled as she made for the doorway.
That seemed to comfort her mother. She fell back into washing off bowls and clearing the kitchen. "Hmm. You're already not exactly on time for the tram. It's just that I worry about those two boys and-"
"It's fine mom. I got it. I'll see you tonight."
On the narrow plank walkway outside Ayika's apartment, the familiar faces of her neighbors greeted her just as familiar smells assaulted from the thick mud below the stilted buildings. Down here the skin tones were brown like hers, and hair colors differing from the uniform flat black of the kingdom. In the Bed no one had money, no one was a bender, and less than half could trace their ancestry to anywhere closer than five hundred kilometers away. It was nice.
Then Ayika's path through the winding alleys opened up and the river-wall rose up before her. From every direction elevated aqueducts, sewers, and drainage canals converged and merged and angled for this massive dam, green with damp and stained with leaks. The river-wall lay straight across the Bed from bank to bank while beyond this protective bulk the River Reformed gurgled back into existence, reunited from its various imprisonments rather the worse for wear having passed through the artificial organs of the vast city.
Ayika glanced down at the packed lunches and smiled as she started up the stairs. She could actually go for seeing Xinfei and Xiaobao today. The two brothers had basically grown up with her, playing in the same back alleys and being schooled on how to sort-of read by the same half blind teacher in a slightly larger alley. They'd spent bored afternoons spitting into the canal that bordered the Islanders' district, and continued to be fast friends even after all three of them had gone on to jobs across the city.
Ayika crested the river-wall embankment into the morning light. Beneath the narrow walkway, tunnels and pipes drained the immense city into the ever widening water. Then Ayika was out of the canyon of putrid waterfalls and into the nexus of canals.
She crossed an arching stone bridge as a dozen huge drainage canals, light brown with sediment from the endless fields and orchards to the east and west, came together to reform as the expansive and powerful Kuang River, resurrected from humiliation into a new kind of life. Sometimes if Ayika held her hand out over the true river, the color of the water matched her skin exactly. Her grandmother had said there was power in that. Ayika had tried to believe her.
Then Ayika broke through the last skin of residential life into bridges, canals, and quays of the bustling waterfront of the Kuang Harbor docks. Before her stretched an endless lines of ships and the uncountable population that catered to them.
...