The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The man heard. He turned and made a threatening gesture, mouthing something they could not hear.

  “Still,” Beedie said, “I did break the rule, Aunt Six. It was seeing that Byle Bander waiting for me on the bridge, like some old crawly-claw, hiding in a root hole. I didn’t want to come down where he was, so I played with the ’rulie instead. They like it.”

  “Of course they like it, child. The Harvesters may think they own the slow-girules, but no one has ever convinced a slow-girule of that yet. It’s that which makes the Harvesters so angry. They’d like nothing better than to have the ’rulies turn clipper-claws on all except the Harvesters. That would suit them right to the bridge floor. And what kind of a Bridger is Byle Bander to report one of his own caste.”

  “A miserable one,” Beedie replied in a grim voice. “A miserable bit of flopper flub, for all he’s a Bridger.”

  All this caused Beedie some delay, and it was late in the morning before she started down, chuff, heave, chuff, humming to herself, throwing a glance upward now and then to see if there were birds. It would be wonderful, she thought, to fly like that, up to the flattrees and the plain – not even dangerous for a bird. A bird wouldn’t have to fear the gnarlibars, the giant pombis, the ubiquitous d’bor hiding in every pool and stream, the poison bats, the were owls. A bird wouldn’t be bothered by the monsters of the plain, the monsters who had almost wiped out the people, would have wiped them out if they hadn’t moved down into the chasm to build the bridgetowns where the monsters couldn’t get at them. Not the Firstbridge, of course. That hadn’t been built far enough down the chasm, and the monstrous forest pombis had climbed down the mainroots to it as they would have climbed a tree. The site of that disaster was the broken city, still hanging high against the light, a network of black in the up-chasm sky. Then there had been the lost bridge, the one that had disappeared one night, never to be seen again – disappeared between dark and dawn without a sound. Built too low, some said, though legend said it had been built only slightly lower than Bottommost. Trouble in the depths, they said. Then and now, they said. Well, all this conjecture wouldn’t help get the job done. She spotted her marks, moved beyond them, readied her hatchet to make the groove, then clung to the root with a sudden, giddy disquietude, overcome by a wave of familiar horror. She had felt like this before. There was something. Something wrong? Something not as usual? Uneasily she shifted on the root, moving around it as a flopper moves when hiding from the hunters, listening to silence, tasting the air, smelling … smelling.

  What was it? An odor so faint she could hardly detect it? But what? She wished for the crew, the other Bridgers, suddenly aware of her solitude.

  She began to move lower on the root, sniffing, tapping at the root with her hammer. The sound was wrong, wrong. She moved lower still, still tapping, then abruptly astonished, feeling the heat beneath her palms as a hallucination, an unreality, outrageous and impossible. Roots were cold, her mind said, and therefore … therefore…

  Even as her mind toyed with a dozen irrelevant notions, her body reacted, leaping upward in three quick movements of arms and legs, chuff, heave, chuff, heave, chuff, hands frantically feeling for cool, not sure they had found it, upward once more in that same panic-ridden gallop, until there was no possibility of mistake. She smelled it then for the first time, that harsh scent of poison smoke, barely detectable. She longed in an instant to be one of the slow-girules, able to turn head down on the root, able somehow to see below her feet. And yet she didn’t need to look. She could smell it. The mainroot was burning.

  Back in the old times, she had heard, this was the way roots were severed. A Bridger would climb in between the root and the wall, hack away a hole in the root, then put burning charcoal in there to burn away and burn away until the thing dropped. Sometimes the fire didn’t go out, however. Sometimes it got into the heartwood and kept on going, poisoning the air, no matter how one cut at it and chopped at it. So the Bridgers had stopped burning roots and began cutting them. But someone had burned a mainroot at Nextdown, and someone had set fire to this one Beedie sat upon, the one Beedie should have arrived at with a full crew of Bridgers, earlier than this. If she went back and told about it the fire would have burned the root away by the time they returned, burned it too high, and it was the only useful one in the right place on this side.

  So – so what? So cut it off before it went any further. Cut it off right below the mark, working against time, trying to get it cut through before the fire reached the saw cut and the smoke killed her. Her body began it, even while her mind was thinking through the right procedures. She was high on the root in a moment, setting her pitons and hooks for safety lines, one after the other, running the lines through and down to her belt, checking the buckle, checking the lines, setting them high above the mark, so high that no matter if the root fell, she would be left hanging – if a side root didn’t lash her head off, or a tangle tear her away from where she hung.

  The axe in her hand flew at the bark, making the first cuts, up and down, overhand, underhand, chips flying out into the chasms to flutter away like crippled birds, down and out of sight forever. The pungent smell of the milky root juice made her nose burn, a corrosive stench. She shifted rapidly to the right, cutting around, keeping her lines straight. When the root was ringed, she went back, doing it again, cutting deep so the saw loop wouldn’t slip. Then the hatchet went into the belt, the saw loop came out. She had to throw it from behind the root, with free space all around. She held one handle in her right hand, whipped the length of the saw out and left, praying it would wrap around the root, smacking the handle into her left hand.

  No. The saw tangled in a mass of root hairs, dangling. She moved down a little, lashed the saw outward again. The loop spun out, around the root, came back into her waiting left hand with a solid thwack. She eased the blade into the groove, dug her spurs deep and began to pull, right, left, tugging against the sawline with its myriad diamond teeth, seeing the puffs of sawdust fly into the air.

  The sawline resisted her for a moment, then bit deep, cutting its own groove deeper, dust puffing at either side. At first she thought the amount of sawdust ridiculously large, then saw that it was mixed with smoke, smoke rising in little clouds from the cut, making her eyes stream, her throat burn. It was deadly. Deadly. Everything in her urged her to get away, to climb outward, away from that hideous smoke, but instead she moved around the root to find an updraft of clean air and went on heaving at the saw. It was well used, supple, only recently re-glued with jeweled teeth for which she had paid a pretty price, the supply of gems being so short. Aunt Six had always said that good tools repaid their keeper, and she chanted this to herself as she went on heaving, feeling the root beneath her spurs begin to grow warm. The fire was eating its way up, toward the mark.

  “Bite teeth, cut deep, saw line chew, job to do, pull, Bridger, pull…” then six deep breaths and chant again, over and over. This was not a job for one Bridger! She should have had a full crew, spelling one another as they tired, encouraging one another. “Bite teeth…” It was getting a little easier as the groove bit deeper, there was less surface to pull against. “Bite teeth, cut deep, saw line chew…” In older days, there had been plenty of gems, plenty of saw gravel. Maybe she should have paid for another dipping. Pull. Pull. The root quivered.

  Quickly she shifted her feet upward, bracing out above the groove, lying almost horizontally from the root as she heaved the line, heaved, heaved, feeling her shoulders start to burn and bind, beginning to choke in the smoke once more, unable to move from this stance, unable to shift her position, trying to hold her breath against that one too many which would bring the poison full strength deep into her lungs.

  A quiver again, this time a mighty one, a shaking, a groaning sound, a rending as the world began to drop from beneath her. The root below her fell away – but only a finger’s width, whipping the entire root to one side as it did so, throwing her to the end of her lines, breaking two of the
m with lashing side roots. She hung, nose dripping blood, suspended between her remaining two lines, turning like a hooked flopper, gagging at the smoke. One incredibly strong cable of fiber held the root, kept it from falling away, one bundle no thicker than her leg, groaning as though it had human voice, toward which the fire crept, upward, upward – taking what seemed an eternity to burn it through.

  She fainted, came to herself, began to go in and out of blackness as though it were a garment put on and took off. Through a veil of swimming gray she saw the mass of the mainroot dropped away down the endless depth of the chasm, lashing side roots as it went so that they twitched and recoiled, knocking Beedie against their rough sides. She swung still at the end of her lines, thrashed into semi-consciousness, eyes staring upward at the rim.

  Far above the noonglow came, through emerald light, a kind of singing. Was it the Birder on Topbridge or the singing of her own blood? High in the light she saw wings, white wings, circling down and down, huge and mysterious, wonderful as a myth, beautiful as a song.

  “It will stop at Topbridge,” she told herself in her dream, “like the other one.” But it did not. It came down and down until it perched on a side root spur just beside her and turned into something else. Something with a woman’s face, but with hands and arms like a slow-girule, arms to hold fast, and legs to reach out and pick Beedie from her lines as though she had been no heavier than a baby. Then the bird person wiped the blood from her face and cradled her, cradled her there on the root and whispered to her.

  “My name is Mavin, little root climber. It seems to me you need some help here, whatever strange wonderful thing it is you are so determined to do.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  After a time Beedie came to herself lying on a horizontal shelf of side root, carefully fastened to it with her own belt and pitons, having the blood washed from her face and neck with something that looked suspiciously like a furry, wet paw. The paw owner went away. There was a sound of water near by, splashing and trickling, then Beedie’s head was lifted and a cup thrust at her lip. She drank, trying not to look at the cup, for it had appeared magically where the paw had been. When the paw/cup/person retreated from her side again, she turned her head to follow the creature/woman/bird as it went to the water-belly and burrowed into it through a sizable hole in the tough shell which had not been there when Beedie had passed it earlier in the day.

  “How did you cut it?” she asked, her voice a mere croak in the sound-deadening mat of the rootwall. “It takes a drill, and a blade saw…”

  “Or a sharp beak and determination,” said the bird/person/creature. “You reached toward this place when I carried you past, mumbling something or other about being thirsty, so I figured there was water inside this what you call it…”

  “It’s a water-belly,” Beedie murmured. “It stores the water the root brings up from the bottom, down there…”

  “Down there, eh? A very long way, root climber. Do you go down there often?”

  “Never.” She shook her head and was frozen into immobility by the resultant pain. “Never. No. Too far. Too dark. The Boundless punished the Lostbridgers by sending them down there, so they say. Maybe for greed, because of the gemstones. We’re running out, you know. All the ones left from that time have been used up. Dangerous. Dangerous creatures on the Bottom, they say. As dangerous as the plain, up top, where you came from.”

  “Plenty of creatures up there, all right. Gnarlibars. Pombis bigger than any I’ve seen elsewhere. There’s a kind of giant bunwit with horns on its rear feet, did you know that? Strangest-looking thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen wonders, oh, root dangler, but I’ve seen wonders. Oceans and lands, lakes and forests, all and everything in a wide world full of wonders. Among which, may I say, is this place of yours, what you call it?”

  “The chasm? We just call it the chasm, that’s all.” If Beedie lay perfectly still, she could speak without really feeling discomfort. So she assured herself, at least.

  “Do you know what it looks like from up there?” the bird/woman/person asked. “Let me tell you, it’s a remarkable sight. To start with, the roots from those trees extend out onto the plain like great cables, bare as pipes. I saw them from up there, my soaring place, and had to come down just to see my eyes didn’t lie to me. Leagues and leagues of these great roots laid out side by side, like the warp threads of some giant loom all ready for the weaving. Then, after leagues of nothing but bare root, a few little stalks pop up; short, stubby things, with one leaf, maybe, or two, gossamer leaves, spread to the sun like the wings of something bigger than you can imagine. Then the stalks grow higher, higher yet, bigger and bigger, until all you can see is the leaves, overlapping each other like scales on a fish, thin as tissue, and green – Gamelords, girl, but it’s a lovely green.”

  “I know,” murmured Beedie, entranced by the rough music of that voice. “We see it every day, at noonglow.”

  “And then a shadow in the green, slightly darker, with a mist rising up through it. At first I thought it was only a river under there, but then I saw how wide the shadow was, a long, dark stripe on the forest, going away north to tall, white-iced mountains; bending away to the southwest into a desert hot and hard as brass, and that mist coming up full of food smells and people smells.

  “Well, I came down, girl, working my way down through those gossamer leaves, eyes all sharpened to see what I could see far down, and what should I see but this great root thrashing about and a small girl person hung on it being smoked like a sausage, the smoke roiling nasty to my nose.”

  “I saw you coming down,” said Beedie. “At first I thought I was dreaming it, that you were the other one.”

  There was a long silence, then the bird/creature/person said, in a voice even Beedie recognized as carefully noncommittal, “What other one is that?”

  “The white bird. The great white bird who came down, oh, a long time ago. A year, almost. It came down in the noonglow, and it perched on the railing of Topbridge commons. Mercald was there, Mercald the Birder?” She started to make an inquiring gesture, to move her head questioningly, but desisted at the swimming nausea she felt. The expression on the bird/person’s face had already told her it did not know what Birders were. “White birds are the messengers of the Boundless, you know?” Beedie tried again. The bird/person nodded helpfully, indicating this was not impossible. “And the Birders are the servants of the Boundless. They do our judging, and our rituals, and dedicate the festivals, things like that. So, birds being sacred, and Mercald being a Birder, naturally, he took the white bird to the Birders House. Only later on it changed into a person, a woman. Like you did.”

  “Ah,” said the bird/person in a flat, incurious voice. “Tell me your name, will you girl? And call me by mine. It will make it easier on us both. I’m Mavin.”

  “Mavin,” said Beedie. “I’m Beedie. Beed’s daughter, really, but they call me Beedie. I’ll get some other kind of name after I’ve worked at Bridging a while – something like, oh…”

  “Smoked sausage? Root dangler?”

  “Probably.” She raised one trembling hand to feel along her ribs. They were bruised, terribly tender, and it hurt when she took a deep breath or moved her head. She put the hand down, carefully, and was still once more. “More likely something like ‘’Rulie-chaser’ or ‘Strap-weaver’ We like to be named after big things we’ve done, but some of us never do anything that big.”

  “Well, Beedie, what did this other bird have to say for itself? When it changed into a woman, I mean?”

  “It never said anything, not that I heard of.” The question made her a little uncomfortable, as though there were a right answer to it, one she didn’t know. “It sings. Mercald used to bring it out in the noonglow and it flew. It circled around and around in the light, singing. Lately, though, it hasn’t changed into a bird at all. It’s stayed a woman.”

  “What does the woman do?”

  “Sits. She sits in the window of the Birders House and br
ushes her hair. They feed her fruit and moss cakes, and bits of toasted flopper. They give her nodule beer to drink, and water. They dress her in soft dresses with ribbons woven by the Weavers’ caste, especially for her. At festival times she watches the processions, and the jugglers, and the root walkers. And she sings.”

  “And never speaks? Never at all?”

  “Never at all,” said Beedie, in a definite voice. “Now, best you tell me what she is to you, for the people up there” – she moved her eyes to indicate the woven bottom of the great bridge above which threw an enormous shadow across them – “those people think she’s sacred. You go asking too many questions, like you have with me, and they won’t be contented just wondering where you came from, like I do. They’ll wonder if maybe you’re a devil from the Bottom. Or another messenger from the Boundless, in which case they’ll lock you up, just to keep you safe, until they decide you’ve delivered the message, whatever it’s supposed to be.” She fell into a gray fog, exhausted by this speech.

  “Dangerous, then, to be a messenger! Well, who else could I be? Who could visit you without stirring any curiosity at all?”

  Beedie’s head was swimming, but she tried to consider the question carefully. “You could be someone from Harvester’s bridge. We hardly ever see anyone from Harvester’s, because it’s such a long way down-chasm. There’s a Harvesters House on Topbridge, so you’d have someplace to stay.” She sighed, the pain pulsing insistently.

  “Ah. Well now. Tell me, Beedie, do you owe me for saving your life?”

  She had not thought about it until that moment, and it was an odd question, all things taken into account, but still it was a question she could answer. “Yes,” she said. “I owe you.”

  “Good. I want you to tell me all about this place, the chasm, the – what did you call them? – the bridgetowns. About Harvesters and Bridgers and whatever else there are about. Then, when you’ve done that, you won’t owe me anymore and we can talk about some other arrangement.”