“Trading Watch,” commented Menon. “Part militia and part trading officials – to make sure everyone gets a fair deal.”
As if to demonstrate the first function, a blazing arrow arced out from the docks and fell between the two watercraft.
“Battrick, you lumbering great oaf!” hollered Menon across the gap to the docks. “You’re going to skewer some poor sailor with that bow of yours one day, or set some trader’s cargo on fire, and we’ll all have to pay for it!”
There was a hubbub of noise on the docks, followed by one solitary bellow. “Menon, is that you, you slippery, one-eyed, time-wasting wanderer. Where are these Hud refugees you went to save from the swamp doogans?”
“Have you no eyes, man?” said Menon. “What d’ye think these two wee sprites are, eh?”
The bellower on the docks grinned, and subsided into silence.
“Lower a loading dock, ye grinning jackernapes,” called Menon.
Several of the men on the docks hurried to obey. They released some ropes lying coiled near the edge of the docks, and a small section of it slid down until it was resting on the water. That made it an easy step up from the boats.
As they got closer, Hudnee could see these men wore the rough leviathan hide and wide belts that Menon and Merrick did. The dooplehuels slid in alongside the docks, and Menon tied up at one end of the lowered section while Merrick tied up at the other end.
The men of Shellport clustered around the travellers as they climbed up onto the top of the docks. Daneesa and the two girls got some special attention.
“Yer ouder wee bairn is safe a’ Habna’s,” said a Shellport man almost as broad as Hudnee, and patted Daneesa on the back. He thought he was being gentle, but it gave her quite a coughing fit. Hudnee wondered if all the Shellport villagers had an accent as thick as his, but Menon and Merrick talked more like mainlanders. Some of the people here must be recent arrivals, he decided.
Menon recounted the trip to the Sweetwater river and back in a few words, and promised the assembled workers terrifying stories about the ‘black hands from the clouds’ later on.
Hudnee looked away through the trees, and saw walkways built between them, with here and there a platform supporting a house.
Word soon spread through the rest of Shellport about the new arrivals, and people started making their way to the docks. Some of the women came to see to Daneesa’s needs.
“Give the poor woman some room!” ordered a lean, ruddy firebrand who introduced herself as Menona, shooing the men away.
“You’ve no a greeting for your husband, then, wife?” said Menon with a grin. She pecked him perfunctorily on the cheek and turned back to Daneesa and her family.
“You’ll stay with us, of course,” she beamed, putting a protective arm around each of the children. “Your eldest, Kanuk, is staying with Habna, the medicine woman, and she’s practically right alongside my house.” She looked at Daneesa’s long shift wistfully.
“We’ve no had woven cloth since all the fibre plants died, and the cloth from them doesn’t normally last much past a year.”
The two women settled into a discussion about making cloth out of different fibres, and Menona bustled Daneesa and the children off toward a rather large, squat house she pointed to through the trees.
Menon promised the Watch, and the other members of Shellport now gathered there, that he would give them a full account of Hudnee and Daneesa’s adventures that evening. Then he hurried along after his wife.
CHAPTER 9
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It was so good to have the comforts of ordinary life again! Hudnee stretched out on the simple pallet stuffed with dried grasses, yawned, and raised himself up on the sleeping platform running along one side of the room. Daneesa had risen earlier, and gone to tend the girls in a similar enclosure that opened off to one side.
I should get up and find out how Kanuk is doing, he thought.
He had made his way to Habna’s house last night, but the boy had been asleep by then. Habna had assured him Kanuk was healing well. It was one of the advantages of being so young, though he would have impressive scars to show off for the rest of his life.
Hudnee’s eyes wandered over the room, noting the way it had been constructed, in the detached way one builder examined another builder’s work. The walls were made of more of the roughly hewn planks he had seen in the dooplehuel. Simple, he thought, but effective. There would be no shortage of wood in the middle of the sea forest.
The roof consisted of strips of hide over trimmed poles. It was a light, and evidently waterproof, solution. He wondered if the strips of hide had been glued or stitched. Then he realised the hide was more of the bounty from the increasing numbers of dying leviathan.
The roof had probably been thatched in the past, before the clouds came, and the plants the villagers used for thatching had began to die. The great trees around them seemed to have been the least affected of all the plant life by the climate change, probably due to their semi-submerged existence in the first place.
Ah well, thought Hudnee, it was time to look around their new home. He wondered what the villagers would make of him, and his family. Then he felt a moment’s anxiety. They couldn’t count on it being their new home yet. They still needed to put their case to a gathering of the people at a community meeting.
When Hudnee visited the medicine woman’s house, a little later on, Kanuk did indeed seem to be on the mend. Hudnee promised the boy he would take him for a gentle walk around the sea village later on, and got Habna’s approval. He made a mental note to do so before the rains came in the afternoon.
Then he set out along the first walkway he came to that led away from the docks. He was hoping he might find Menon somewhere. He had a great many questions for Menon about Shellport, and how it worked.
As Hudnee explored the walkways between the giant trees, he came upon a long, narrow structure that turned out to be the community centre, and a little later a row of stalls that were the fish markets.
The Sea People seemed friendly enough. He was usually greeted with a wave, or a pleasantry in passing. No doubt Menon had told the tale of their flight to the coast last night, to those who were interested, and word had spread. Hudnee discovered there were a lot of houses in the village, all of them spread among the trees in an apparently random pattern. But all connected, if a little haphazardly at times, by walkways.
The water flowing under the village was clear, and no more than waist deep in most places. Hudnee could see drifts of old shells scattered about the bottom, and they were spotted with the same greens and purples as leviathon bones. There had to be shellfish packed side by side in the mud, feeding on the sediment carried down by the river.
On the far side of the village, away from the deep channel that served the docks, mounds of empty shells broke the surface. Hudnee wondered if this was the villagers’ midden, the place they threw the shells after they’d cooked the contents.
After a while, the master builder found Menon. He was part of a gang of men working on a new house near the end of one of the walkways. It wasn’t long before Hudnee was introduced to Grisanton, the builder responsible for the house, and they were soon talking building techniques. The rest of the morning passed in a blur.
The grizzled old builder knew all there was to know about the wood the villagers harvested from the sea forest trees, and Hudnee’s brain was soon full of possibilities for the material. Still, he thought, as he remembered his previous building experience, it lacks the permanence of stone.
The building gang disbursed before the afternoon rains were due, and Hudnee hurried back to take Kanuk for the promised walk. Habna had improvised a crutch for the boy, and he was very firmly told to keep his weight off his injured leg.
After a few tentative starts, Kanuk was soon hobbling along one of the walkways and looking excitedly about him. Hudnee encouraged him to comment on the way the village was built. It was a joy to spend time with his son. After a whi
le they started chewing over the happenings of the last few days. It had been an extraordinary journey that had brought them this far.
Kanuk was pale, and easily tired, but he was determined to make his own way along the walkways. He was quite embarrassed when Hudnee offered to carry him for a while, and Hudnee understood the boy’s thoughts that he was old enough to be independent. Shortly after that they turned back toward Menona’s house, and retraced their steps along the walkways.
How quickly they want to grow up, thought Hudnee wistfully, as Kanuk hobbled ahead of him. He looked up at the sky, and recognised the same black fists boiling under the clouds that had attacked the dooplehuels. He automatically looked east, but he couldn’t see the approaching rains through the curtain of sea forest trunks.
He figured it should be okay, they would be back at Menona’s house in a few more minutes. Above him, several of the boiling protuberances unfolded, with a delicate gentleness that belied their destructive power. Long black fingers began to reach down to the sea along the coast.
Kanuk was the first to comment. “Pada, where is the sea going?”
The columns of plants and animals that stood like pillars around each tree, always terminating just below the surface, were now half their height out of the water.
Hudnee remembered the attack on the two dooplehuel. He had found himself standing on the ocean floor one minute, then high above it the next. He figured this must be more of the same thing. As if to confirm his fears, he heard the whistling howl he remembered from that day, and the sounds of something that was devastating the trees at the seaward end of Shellport’s tree island sanctuary.
Scooping up Kanuk, he ran for Menona’s house. Daneesa was already waiting at the doorway, looking around fearfully for them. She ushered them inside and lifted the door, a simple frame of poles and hide, into place. Menona stood ready to slot a long plank into place behind it. The girls sat on the edge of the sleeping platform, their eyes deep and black in the wide-eyed wonder of the young. Hudnee quickly sat Kanuk next to them.
“Where’s Menon?” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Menona sharply, “but he can look after himself.” It was clear from the tremor in her voice that she wished he was here with them, all the same.
Hudnee thought quickly. From what he had seen today of the house Grisanton and his team had been building, the Sea People understood the idea of bracing well enough. The house should stand.
The villagers needed strong houses. The Kapuas river could flood, and trees could settle under their own weight. So, he thought, the houses are going to be the safest place. Outside, the howl of wind through tortured trees grew louder. In the distance Hudnee heard the sharp crack of a branch snapping.
He grabbed his sack off the floor and scrabbled through his belongings, yelling at Daneesa and Menona to find anything they could use as rope. Barely had he tied them all together, and to the sleeping platform, with an assortment of knotted clothes and hide rope, when the storm hit.
The house shook from the sudden hammering, as if it was being shaken by a giant hand, and the roof separated from the walls along one side. The roof held for a few brief seconds, and then flipped into the trees overhead. The roar of the wind as it howled through a hundred racetracks among the tree trunks was incredible.
The grey afternoon light had turned to an eerie dark, making it feel more like late in the evening. Hudnee could hear the growing hiss, and feel the vibration, as the sea returned to the sea forest. It hit the underside of the house like an avalanche, lifting the house clear of its supports between the trees. It rocked back and forth, only held in place by the trees around it, and scraped up and down the trunks as the seawaters heaved and yawed.
The howl of the wind continued, and anything loose in the room worked its way up the walls. When it reached the top plank it disappeared out of sight in an instant. Seawater streamed through the larger gaps in the plank floor, collecting in the centre of the room where it funnelled up and out of sight – a miniature twisting spout all of their own. There was a grinding crunch from the smaller back room nearest the sea, and Hudnee knew the house had begun to disintegrate around them.
Then it dropped from beneath them, and for a moment they flew weightlessly, until it crashed back onto its platform between the trees. Half a second later the floor came up to meet them. Hudnee was dazed for a moment, and then lurched to his feet.
He feared there must be broken bones after such a fall, and untied himself from the sleeping platform so he could check on the others. Then there was a change in air pressure and his ears popped. He paused. Was it over?
He had taken two steps when the head of one of the forest giants crashed into the room as the tree fell, stubby branches punching into the floor while layers of leaves bunched up against the walls and formed an impenetrable tangle.
He heard Daneesa cry out in pain, and something hit him on the side of the head. He slid into blackness, still trying to force his way across the room to her side.
CHAPTER 10
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Cloud descended on a barren mountaintop. Hudnee slipped on a coating of moss, and it tore away to reveal a patch of slimy brown mud. A gust of windswept rain staggered him back, and his boots crunched on shiny, wet granite. Flecks of crystal glowed wetly in the rock, and he thought it odd that he should notice such detail.
Another gust drove him forward, and he teetered on the edge of a drop that fell away into mist. He glimpsed a rocky outcrop far below him, a place that could so easily mean his death. He knew that he was going to fall, and there was nothing he could do about it. Why wouldn’t his body obey him? As he fell, something grabbed at his arms. It seemed to miss him, then catch hold, and then it pulled free before it suddenly had him again.
It was an outlandish situation. With his feet firmly on the granite top of an immense mountain, bigger by far than anything he had ever seen on Hud, Hudnee was suspended out over a rocky void.
The pain in his arms was immense. He turned his head slowly, despite the pain as his arms protested. Someone had a hold of one arm, and further around another figure was, presumably, holding his other arm.
He forced his head back, and tried to focus on the first figure. It was a man, his torso covered in plates of metal. Some garment made of small, overlapping rings started at his shoulders and covered his arms, ending in gloves covered in much smaller metal plates.
Hudnee tried to make sense of this. What sort of animal could cause enough damage to need this sort of protection? Perhaps this man was a doogan slayer. Then he saw the long, straight sheath at the side of the metal armour. Never had he seen a dagger so long.
Then he had a new thought. Perhaps the metal plates on the man’s body were meant to stop an attack by another man, wielding such a weapon.
A growing sense of fear began to make itself felt in his body. Hudnee thought the feeling of fear was odd. Falling to his death on the rocks below elicited a mild disinterest, yet these figures holding him up seemed to represent something much more threatening.
The man he was looking at took a firmer hold of Hudnee’s arm with one hand, and then braced himself against the rock while he reached back behind his head with the other hand. He fumbled with something behind his head, a catch perhaps, and a section of the metal plates came away to reveal his face.
Hudnee watched in fascination as the faceplate came up. Under a crudely trimmed beard, the man’s face was a pale brown. Touches of red showed on his cheeks, the same way tinges of green outlined Hudnee’s eyes and mouth within his bronze face, but nowhere near as strongly.
The man grimaced with the strain of holding him up, and Hudnee bellowed some sort of challenge at the unnatural, pale brown apparition. The deaths-head brown and red mask of the man’s face looked back at him impassively.
A sudden blow caught Hudnee on the forehead, and then air whooshed back into his lungs as if he had forgotten how to breath. He howled again, this time at the agony in his arms where
they were bent backward over a massive branch of the tree that had smashed into Menona’s house.
A wooden plank was settling back into place on the floor, and he realised this must have sprung loose as the tree came to rest, and snapped up to hit him. It took a moment for him to realise the strange dream was just that, a dream.
Hudnee eased himself away from the tangle of branches and checked himself for injuries. Everything hurt like he’d been trampled by a herd beast stampede, but nothing was broken.
He fought his way through the wall of greenery until he found the others. The girls were pinned down on the sleeping platform, crying but not seriously hurt. Daneesa didn’t respond to his frantic calls. Fearing the worst, he continued to work his way through the branches.
He found Kanuk next. The boy was out cold, with a nasty cut on the side of his face. His leg was twisted behind him, and Hudnee felt sick with the thought it was broken. When he straightened it out, however, the leg came back into a normal position. He checked the rest of the boy carefully, but there was no sign of a break.
Leaving the boy for now, Hudnee climbed almost to the top of the walls to get over the last barrier. At least the roof no longer impeded his progress.
Daneesa was spread out on the floor in the last room, sprawled under one of the biggest of the branches. She was unnaturally pale, and didn’t appear to be breathing. He scrambled down beside her, and managed to wedge the broken end of a branch under the branch that lay across her. He lifted the bigger branch as best he could, and wedged some of the debris under it. He managed to take the pressure off her arm and chest, but he dared not try to move her.
Working gently, Hudnee wiped away some straggling hair from her forehead, and patted dry the rain on her face with his sleeve. He could not detect the rise and fall of her breathing, and was beside himself with a sense of loss until he held his head against hers, and unexpectedly felt a soft exhalation on his cheek.
It was some time before Daneesa came round, and Hudnee went through all the emotions from feeling like his life had been taken away to having it miraculously restored. He had just finished reassuring her that they were all alive and well, then telling her how much he loved her, and finally scolding her for scaring ten years off his life, when a party of Shellport villagers arrived to help them.
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