Below the Root

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  What it would all be like, what such great changes would mean to them, they could not know. They knew only that change was coming, that it had already begun, and that in nine days’ time there would be an assembly and an announcement, and after that the changes would be enormous and forever.

  They had been sitting together in the common room since late afternoon. The three of them—Raamo, Hearba and Pomma—had not been there long when the father, Valdo D’ok, arrived. Valdo’s reaction to their news was, like everything else that day, strange and unexpected. A boisterous and talkative man, Valdo was immediately stricken with an unnatural speechlessness. Silent and unapproachable, he sat stiffly for a long time, making no sound except for an occasional burst of laughter or a long tremulous sigh.

  The time for eating had come and gone and twilight had deepened into darkness before any one of the family recalled the time, and the activities left undone, and the rituals uncelebrated.

  Roused at last from the stupor of thought by the hungry whimpering of Pomma’s pet sima, Valdo D’ok gestured with astonishment at the darkening sky outside the window.

  “Great Sorrow!” he exclaimed, using a term popular among harvesters, but considered indelicate by others. “Great Sorrow! Here it is nightfall, and we have not celebrated food-taking, nor even so much as set out the honey lamps. Here we sit staring into darkness like a tribe of Pash-shan.”

  They looked up at him smiling, his wife and daughter and the boy, Raamo, who had been his son for thirteen years but was soon to become something far beyond. They smiled with relief, grateful for being called back to the normal and expected, to the pleasant routines of life.

  “I’ll set the lamps, Father,” Pomma said. Springing upward so lightly that she almost seemed to drift, she unhooked the cages of woven tendril from where they hung near the ceiling, and while her father placed the table-board and Raamo helped his mother bring food from the pantry, she quickly baited the lamps with fresh honey and set them outside the door of the nid-place. By the time the food was on the table, the lamps were full and glowing, each of them containing several moon-moths, fat round beetles whose phosphorescent bodies glowed with soft cool light. When the softly glowing lanterns were hung above the table, the ceremony of food-taking was begun.

  “Now the Joy of tables laden,” they began the Hymn of Food-taking. Their voices, blending in the intricate rhythms and harmonies, rose clear and sweet, and on this night as ever, infinitely pleasing to the ear and soothing to the mind. As they sang, they sought each other’s eyes, smiling, and when the first verse was finished they did not stop, as was the common practice now except at official ceremonies and assemblies. In unison, as if by pensed signal, they continued on into the complicated and time-consuming second part of the Food-taking ritual—the dance and ceremonial sharing—and when they sat, at last, around the table, it was with full Peace and Joy. The pan was rich and tender; the fruit was sweet; and the egg sauce, light and tasty. They ate contentedly, their minds quiet and untroubled, their thoughts occupied for the moment only with the amusing antics of the sima, Baya.

  Baya was trying to steal tidbits of food from the table. Although a full plate had been placed on her sleeping shelf, she preferred the excitement of snatching crumbs and rinds from the family’s dishes. Creeping around the floor near their feet, the sly sima would from time to time raise herself on her hind legs until just the top half of her tiny wizened face, with its almost human purple eyes, would clear the edge of the table-board. With eyes wildly rolling, she would silently stretch out her long wisp of an arm, and the delicate handlike paw would close on an unprotected morsel. Then the tiny face, with its peering eyes, would disappear with miraculous suddenness and from beneath the table there would come small sounds of munching and smacking.

  But when Valdo foiled a raid on his plate by lifting it suddenly out of reach, the sima reacted with loud chattering, baring her tiny teeth and pounding her long fingered paws on the table. Such an uncontrolled display of unjoyfulness by a creature so nearly human in appearance was just close enough to being indecent to seem wildly funny. The D’ok family’s laughter was as limitless and unconstrained as that of Garden children in their first year of Joy.

  “Ah,” Valdo said contentedly, “we should take time to follow the full ritual more often. See how the old ways are still the best for bringing quietness to troubled minds.”

  There followed only silence, and the father, glancing around, realized that his statement had only served to remind the others of the troubling events of the day.

  “And yet,” the mother said quickly, “one hears so often that the old rituals and ceremonies are losing their power and becoming meaningless.”

  “Rumors,” Valdo said loudly. “Only rumors. If one listens to rumors, one can hear many troubling things. Many things more troubling than anything that could be said about the simple rituals of ordinary Kindar.”

  Raamo laughed. “The harvesters are famous as rumor carriers,” he said. “There is a saying that in the orchards, rumors grow faster than pan.”

  His father looked up quickly, and there was a sharp edge to his voice as he spoke. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve heard that saying—and another truer one that says, ‘Much can be seen under open skies.’ Believe me, my lad, we harvesters see much that is hidden from the eyes of others.”

  “Like what, Father?” Pomma said. “I thought there were always Ol-zhaan Protectors in the orchards to make certain that the harvesters look only at their work, and especially,” Pomma’s voice trembled with vicarious alarm at the very thought, “—and especially not down at the forest floor. What have you seen that others haven’t. Father?”

  Valdo looked at his daughter uneasily, as if he wished he had been less outspoken, and when she pressed him further, he began to talk of other things—of the importance of the profession of harvester and of how, although they received little recognition or reward, the orchard workers were in many ways the most indispensable people in all Green-sky.

  “I remember, at my own Second Counseling, all who were picked that year to become harvesters were taken to a special chamber, and there we were spoken to by the Ol-zhaan D’ol Falla, who is now the oldest and most honored of all the Ol-zhaan—”

  “I think I saw her today,” Raamo said. “She did not say her name, but I was examined by a woman Ol-zhaan of great age. I’m sure it was she.”

  Valdo shook his head decisively. “No,” he said. “It is quite unlikely. D’ol Falla still leads the Vine Processions, but except for that she is rarely seen by ordinary Kindar. She is of much too great rank to spend her time at counsel.”

  “But what was it you were going to tell us,” Hearba said, “concerning D’ol Falla’s counsel for the harvesters?”

  “Yes,” Valdo said. “I was about to say that D’ol Falla told us that we were chosen as harvesters, not only for our strength of back and limb and our healthy vigor that we might withstand the fierce heat of the orchards where there are no rooftrees to shield against the sun’s rays, but also, and most important, we were chosen for our steadfastness of mind and Spirit. Only those, she said, with unusual firmness of mind, ungiven to flights of fancy, were suited for such dangerous and important work. D’ol Falla herself said it. And it is true. It is not for the timid hearted to work where the tunnels of the Pash-shan run everywhere just below the Root, so that their growls and cries can often be heard and one must always keep one’s eyes averted to avoid the enchantment of their evil eyes.” As Valdo’s voice rolled and swelled, his wife and children listened attentively, although they had heard much before concerning the life of the orchard workers. None of them had ever been past the orchard boundaries, beyond which only the trained harvesters were permitted to go; but they knew well, from Valdo’s stories, exactly what it was like. They could picture almost as clearly as if they could still play the childhood game of Five-Pense—a game in which young children pensed visual images to each other—exactly how it looked in the great open areas. Areas
where, long ago, the forest had been cleared of sheltering rooftrees and giant grunds, so that the hot rays of the sun could shine down on the produce trees that thrived in the bright sunlight. These trees, much smaller than grunds but still towering many hundreds of feet into the brilliant skies, produced many varieties of fruits and nuts as well as the all-important pan, the heavy full-bodied fruit that was the staple of the Green-sky diet. And they also knew, very well, exactly how and why the ever-present danger of the Pash-shan was so much greater in the orchards than elsewhere in Green-sky.

  Every child of the Kindar began to learn about the Pash-shan in earliest infancy. From the time a child learned to climb from his nid and crawl about the floor of his home and out onto the branchpaths, he was constantly being cautioned about the Pash-shan. Indeed, it was then, before a child was old enough to wear and use a shuba, that the Pash-shan were the greatest threat—because it was only then that falling was a real and constant danger. Not from the fall itself, since the gentle gravity of Green-sky was not apt to cause serious injury unless one fell from the very highest regions. But a fall that ended on the forest floor put anyone, child or adult, in grave and terrible danger—because there, on the dark fern-choked earth, far below the great pathways formed by the lower branches of the grundtrees, the Pash-shan were very, very near.

  Almost no one among the Kindar had ever seen a Pash-shan, except in restless dreams or evil imaginings, but every Kindar knew exactly what they looked like and how they came to be imprisoned beneath the surface of the earth. In their homes as well as in the classes at the Garden, Kindar children learned by memory how the Ol-zhaan, far back in the days of the flight, had, through the Spirit-force of ritual and ceremony and the ancient skill of grunspreking, changed a strong native vine into the Wissenvine—the Sacred Ivy, builder, comforter and protector of all human life on Green-sky. Not only did the Vine produce the soothing Berry used in ritual and ceremony, as well as at times of unjoyfulness and stress, but its long limber tendrils were used in almost every form of construction. Everything, every structure, every article of furniture, nearly every utensil used by the Kindar, was fashioned at least in part from tendrils. Limber and elastic when alive, when severed from the Vine, the slender tendrils hardened quickly to a material of almost indestructible toughness and strength. Thus a nid, a womblike cradling hammock, was woven of springy living tendril, while thicker ones, severed and shaped, could support a table-board or frame a wall.

  But as necessary as were the Berries and tendrils of the Vine, they were as nothing compared to the indispensable protection given by the Root. The Root of the Wissenvine was an enchanted growth. Summoned and nurtured by grunspreking—the ancient art of Spirit-force communication with plant life—the Holy Root spread over the entire surface of Green-sky in a close-woven latticework of indestructible strength. And below this lattice in their dark and noisome caverns lived the soul-eating, cloud-spinning monsters, the fearful dream-haunting Pash-shan.

  All these things the Kindar learned in infancy, but according to Valdo, there were other facts concerning the Pash-shan known only to the harvesters.

  “In the forest,” Valdo told his family, as he had often told them before, “the tunnels run far below the surface of the earth and only rarely approach the surface, while in the orchards the Pash-shan have dug many tunnels that run in every direction, just below the grillwork of Wissenroot. Do you know why it is that they have done this?”

  “Yes, father. To steal food and try to catch harvesters,” Pomma answered, but Valdo explained anyway, in case she was not really certain or had forgotten an important detail.

  “The surface tunnels in the forest are used only for ventilation and, of course, as lookouts for fallen Kindar foolish or unlucky enough to be within reach of their long arms and sharp claws.”

  “What happens to them—the fallen Kindar?” Pomma asked, her face puckered with fascinated horror, intrigued in spite of herself by this part of the recital.

  “Who knows. Eaten undoubtedly. Perhaps sliced to bits by the long claws.”

  “Valdo, please,” Hearba said. “It’s not decent to speak of such things. Particularly before children.”

  “Except they don’t eat the babies who fall,” Pomma prompted her father.

  “We know only that they don’t eat all of them,” he agreed. “Babies small enough to be pulled down through an opening in the Root are kept alive—as slaves. It is well known that there are Kindar slaves in the lower regions. Kidnappers, the Pash-shan are, as well as thieves who lie in wait constantly in their orchard ditches, trying to catch every morsel of fruit or pan that falls from the trees before it can be harvested.”

  “But you spoke of rumors,” Hearba said. “Of whispers spreading among the harvesters. What do they concern?” Valdo’s brow contracted into furrows as his thoughts shifted with apparent reluctance from solid certainties to troubling suspicions. “Only rumors,” he said again, but with less assurance. “There are some who say that the cloud columns of the Pash-shan rise daily from new locations, and that this is undoubtedly the cause of the increase in illness and mind-pain among the Kindar. And there is also talk concerning the great increase in the number of Vine Processions, of late. Almost every day in recent weeks, one sees processions of Vine Priests bearing the urns and symbols and the great altar of Wissen, on their way to the forest floor. There are those who say that all is not well with the Blessed Vine—that there are places where the Root seems to be withering and the spaces between growing larger and more open. That is what they are saying but it is perhaps, only talk, with no meaning.”

  “At the last assembly,” Raamo said, “the Ol-zhaan spoke of the need to return to the old ways and practice the ceremonies more faithfully. Perhaps the Ol-zhaan are only setting a good example. Perhaps in the olden days the processions were always made more often.”

  “Exactly,” Valdo said. “I mentioned the same thing last week when some of the rumor spreaders were whispering in the robing room as I was putting on my shading garments. I said that it was probably only a return to the old ways, but they said—” Valdo paused suddenly, uneasily.

  “And they said?” Raamo urged.

  “That there have been more disappearances lately. That among the missing have been grown men and women, some of high honor, and that it is almost certain that they have been taken by the Pash-shan.”

  “But how?” Pomma asked. “They surely couldn’t have fallen—”

  “Not unless they carelessly ventured out of their nid-places without their shubas,” her father said. “It seems unlikely that grown men and women, among them learned academicians and high officials, would do anything so foolish, but perhaps they did. Unless they were even more foolish, and ventured down to the forest floor of their own free will.”

  “Surely no one would do that,” Raamo said.

  “It is hard to believe,” his father said. “But I’d rather believe that than—” Again he paused and then went on hurriedly. In his agitation his thoughts broke through the careful mind-blocking that was a part of his very nature, and Raamo was able to pense that he was deeply troubled. “—than what they are whispering. That the Root is, indeed, withering and that there are places where the Pash-shan have already broken through into Green-sky.”

  They stared at him in consternation as, with obvious effort, Valdo D’ok regained his composure—and with it the mental barrier that usually so effectively checked the sending of his true thoughts and feelings. He smiled stiffly, and the words he gave them were cheerful and comforting. “But, of course, there can be no truth in such rumors, or the Ol-zhaan would have told us so.”

  They smiled in return, Raamo and Hearba and the wide-eyed Pomma, and silence fell among them. Outside the nid-place the night rains had begun and the falling droplets rustled in the rooffronds and whispered down the broad surfaces of the grundleaves. The damp forest air, fragrant with greening life, breathed through the loosely woven walls. Somewhere nearby a flock of paraso birds g
iggled sleepily, and from the distance came the occasional shriek of a blue-winged trencher. The sima whimpered softly and climbed into Pomma’s lap. Clinging to the soft folds of the child’s shuba, she turned her nearly human face from side to side, as though listening to sounds that only she could hear.

  In their woven cages the moonmoths grew dimmer, and at last Hearba rose and lifted her palms to Raamo’s in the tender ritual of parting.

  “Good night, my Raamo,” she said, and then smiling almost teasingly, “my Chosen one.”

  “I’d almost forgotten,” he said.

  “Yes, yes,” Valdo broke in heartily. “Your mother is right. It is very late. The time for sleeping will soon be over.”

  But hours later, swaying gently in his nid, the time for sleeping still had not come for Raamo. Although soothed by the rocking nid and the breathing, flowing night, his mind refused to accept the comfort of sleep. Instead it raced on and on, exploring and questioning. It was truly the strangest night of his life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HE SLEPT BRIEFLY. WHEN he awakened, the night rains were scarcely over and, on every leaf and frond, drops still gathered, clung, and then fell slowly down through the sweet green damp of the forest morning. Slanting rays of early sun, filtering through the rooffronds, made channels of light in which the falling drops were turned into sparkling stars. Leaning out the window, Raamo had a sudden wish to leap outward and drift down a corridor of sunlight, splashing through the glittering stardrops and spattering them into a million smaller stars that would trail behind him in sheets and plumes of brilliance as he glided down, down—

  Finding himself perched precariously on the window ledge, in nothing but his waistcloth, Raamo slid back to the floor of his nid-room, and quickly slipped into his shuba, fastening the wrist and ankle straps securely before he returned to the window. The raindrops had nearly stopped, but now Raamo noticed that just above his window a Wissenflower had blossomed during the night. It was an enormous bloom, its thick translucent petals glowing, flowing, with changing shades of rich deep reds and purples and tender fruity oranges and ambers. Breathing the tantalizing fragrance, Raamo was tempted to touch or even taste the petals, as he had often tried to do as a young child. He had tried many times before he gave up, resigned at last to the sad reality that a Wissenflower could not be tasted or touched without causing it to wither immediately to ragged grayish shreds.