Beneath Ceaseless Skies #170

by Cat Rambo

  “Why me? There’s five of us that could do it.”

  Ria’s grin was rueful. “We figured you were the only one bitchy enough to keep from rooting, just out of spite. The rest of us, we’re weaker than you. We all know it.”

  “When they root, the Keepers will cut down five trees, including this one,” Rebekah said. “They’ll cut as low down on the trunk as they can. They won’t see you unless you call out or move. You usually don’t.”

  Primaflora nodded, listening, She stretched her arms and legs. She would be in the tree a day or two at most. She could bear that.

  “They take the trees to a central place,” Rebekah said. “It’s not the Palace. I can’t say much beyond that. You’ll see what you’re meant to see, there.”

  She hoped it would be a boat that would take her away from here, as easily as she had been brought, Primaflora thought, but the pig’s face could not be read.

  * * *

  The wood’s grip was tight around her. She was too big, too clumsy, for this foolishness. She could hear voices outside raised in anger, footsteps running back and forth, loud conversation, shouts and blame.

  Someone leaned on her trunk, testing it, and the weight around her shifted so abruptly she almost cried out.

  Then thud and thud and thud again, the tree shuddering under the blows. She thought that her feet might be chopped off. She tried to draw them up as best she could, but there was very little room to do so. She jammed her forearm into her mouth, resolving that no torment could draw a noise from her, no matter what. The world lurched sideways and she screamed into her own flesh, but the crash of the tree drowned out her small, startled sound.

  She felt the movement when they lifted the log from the ground, when they tossed it ungently on the wagon bed with the others.

  “Aught else to be taken?” one asked.

  “Just the wood, that to be cured, that it might be used in the furnace,” the other answered.

  The log jostled underneath her, and she wished she’d drunk less or peed more when she’d last slipped outside it. The journey seemed endless, and she was on an incline most of the time, her feet higher than her head, which made her forehead feel swollen and full of blood. Her pulse echoed in her ears, drowning out any sound.

  Then level space again. She braced herself and this time was more prepared for the jolt and crash of unloading. The log settled into blessed, horizontal stillness.

  “This lot should cure at least a month before it burns,” a voice said.

  “Aye, I’ll tag it with that. Good job to have more, there’s been less and less coming in from the North. Too much harvesting. Too bad we can’t domesticate em, grow em outside of town, in those fruit orchards. That’d be a pretty sight, eh, dryads in among all the blossoms?”

  “They’d scratch your eyes out soon as look at you,” another voice grumbled. “Don’t let Berta hear ya, she gets all snarly when we speak so, even if they be only beasts.”

  “It’s been a deal of work, conveying ‘em,” the first voice said. “If we hurry, we can make it to the Games afore the Duke says his last wherefore.”

  They grumbled and muttered off. Primaflora counted five hundred breaths, then another hundred, before she dared to creep from the log.

  The air was unexpectedly hot on her skin. She stood in the middle of a vast stone-walled chamber, which stretched up higher than any tree above her. The log she had arrived in was stacked against a wall. With horror, she counted the stacks. Close to a hundred, each holding at least five or six logs, sometimes dozens.

  She moved along the stacks, probing, laying her hand flat on the bark, despite the way her flesh flinched away from contact with something so dead. She hoped to find a flicker of life somewhere in among them, but found nothing.

  She wondered where Rebekah was.

  At the very end of the chamber it was hottest. A belt held logs, ready to feed them into another machine. A basket as high as her hip sat underneath a spout on the opposite side, other baskets stacked nearby. The blocky stone of the roaring furnace was here, flames glimpsed behind thick, wavy glass. Tubes and pipes as thick as her waist led in every direction.

  Tabat’s heart. The machine that made the city’s life possible, fed the waterfall and the wires and the lights and all the other human contrivances.

  Her gaze fell on the logs. Fueled on her sisters’ bodies.

  The thought sickened her, wracked her more than the cramps of staying so still ever had. Beside a stack of dead wood, she went to her knees and retched, bringing up a cup or so of liquid, the last of the precious moisture she had, something she could ill afford to lose like this.

  She had thought she could destroy it, but this was all too vast, almost to the point of being beyond comprehension. She had to get away from here.

  Then she would work to shut this evil place, this evil city, down.

  * * *

  Slipping out of the city in the chaos hunched her shoulders with fear, sent tremors down legs unused to walking such a distance. She hid herself in the crowds, wrapping herself in a scrap of blanket taken from the furnace chamber.

  She tried to stride as though she belonged there, as though there were no question, no pursuit. It was not hard for the beasts that lived there, it seemed. They walked with a stopped and deferential gait, careful to stay out of the way of any human’s path. She tried to imitate that walk, but she could feel her heart hammering in her throat. Just another beast in the crowd, she told herself.

  She didn’t know exactly which way to go, but she kept pushing upward, climbing along the stairways that joined the terraces. On the highest one, she went north along the road, seeking the bridge that looped over the river, visible from a distance from the lights hanging from its two arch points. She made her way along it in the pre-morning darkness, hiding in a parapet’s shadow. Across the bridge, she slipped past a high watchtower and found herself on the road outside the city just as pink light began to crawl along the eastern horizon.

  After walking so long, so fast, her feet were gnarled and almost withered, dry and painful, cracked, as she kept walking along the road, away from the city, through fields at first, and then canyons, dry and overgrown with gnarled bush that clung to the sides of the shadowed stone walls.

  When the sun had tracked hours overhead and she came to the riverbank, she didn’t believe it at first. The dry landscape had hidden it from her, buried it in a twist of rock. Only the smudge of the tree line had betrayed the fact that water lurked there, and she had followed that intimation so long that she had begun to believe it mirage or illusion.

  But no. Her bare toes – her gilded sandals had been useless and she’d discarded them once she found the road, along with the remnants of her gown’s hem – protruded over the rock as though determined to see for themselves the water she had set them to seek. Faint spray came from the water to bead on her brown skin, then vanished as she absorbed it. She had lived so long in dryness, parceling out moisture, that her whole body yearned for the churning depths. For a moment, she entertained the thought of just throwing herself in. But her arid body would destroy itself trying to take that much water in. So she sought the edge and began to climb down.

  Her progress would have been faster if she had not paused at each crevice-dwelling plant, hoping for some trace of her race. But this far away from the north all leaves were silent, no more intelligent than the ants toiling among their roots.

  Rocks clattered overhead.

  She looked up to see a silhouette against the sun. Someone stood there.

  Primaflora flattened herself against the rock, hoping the overhang would hide her, but the sound of the other woman’s voice told her she had been spotted.

  “This is a dangerous place, pretty dryad. Come back to the city. Our Duke will cherish you and set you to bloom in his gardens.”

  Primaflora ignored her and continued downward. She would not root herself for them. Anger had allowed her to deny the urge so far, anger like the fire burni
ng in the hearts of the machines that ran the city of Tabat, the machines fueled by the wood of dryads.

  “This is a foolish venture,” the stranger called from above. “You will fall and shatter, or be swept away by the waters.”

  What did the regret in her voice signal? The stranger didn’t care for her, Primaflora thought, so much as the loss of the Duke’s property.

  Once, they said, these plains had been covered with trees. Then, with the coming of Tabat in the south, so many had been chopped down. Chopped down to make houses and furniture and carts such as the ones that bore the stripped boles away.

  “Shadows of the deepest caves,” she prayed as her fingers searched for hold. “Keep me safe. Keep me away from the humans.”

  Her prayers went unheeded. She slipped. The remnants of the shift they had forced on her fluttered as she fell, like birds accompanying her flight. She fell, and the coldness of the water was a shock as it closed over her head.

  * * *

  Foam boiled around Primaflora as she was dragged downstream, slamming into rocks and grounded logs. Dead wood, covered with cold slickness like touching a corpse. She closed her eyes, curling her arms and legs inward, trying to ball herself up, praying that her death would be quick.

  This was not to be, however. She bounced off one last boulder and found herself deposited on a graveled shore edged with ice. The sun shone overhead, clear and cold.

  How fast, how far, had she come? Despite her bruises, she felt a glimmer of hope. She paused to revel in the sense of moisture. It would slow her down – she practically sloshed as she walked – but that much water would sustain her for days.

  She started up the slope. She was closer to the mountains than she had been, and there they would not be able to find her. Then she could get her bearing and perhaps root. Despite her protests she could feel that urge gathering, starting at the top of her spine like an eager root ball, spreading downwards.

  It made her pause. Could she find a hidden place nearby, one where she could elude pursuit? Once she had put down roots, though, she would be defenseless. Since she’d prove useless to them then, they’d chop her down, in order to take her trunk back to Tabat.

  Tears burned at the back of her throat as she saw the distance between herself and the mountains that remained. She could run almost as fast as a horse, but sooner or later they would chase her down.

  A shout. From behind her? Had they spotted her again, so quickly? But it was not a rider atop a horse but rather a centaur, a fellow beast, galloping towards her. A traitor working for them? But as he approached, she saw his hands were empty. He wore no collar. There was something odd about his eyes.

  Without a word, he snatched her up and slung her across his back, and then they were racing forward, towards the mountains and freedom.

  * * *

  Someone was shaking her.

  She had been dreaming of drowning, not an entirely unpleasant experience. She had sunk down, down through the river’s waters to the depths’ calm solitude and laid down along the gravel to root. Her toes and fingers had dug down through the stones to the sodden earth below, spreading through it, tangling in it, helping her form the mass that would become her tree, bark enclosing her, making her its heart, its existence...

  She was awake.

  She lay beside a bonfire that snapped and crackled. Other beasts huddled around her. A cyclops’s unblinking eye regarded her, along with centaurs and apes and several minotaurs.

  A dog-woman whined deep in her throat and shook Primaflora again. “Come. There is food, and we will find you a place to sleep tonight. Tomorrow you will meet everyone.”

  But it seemed she was already doing that. Hands kept reaching for hers, welcoming her, telling her their names, clouds of words that she could not attach to any of the faces. They pressed a bowl and spoon on her hands, and once she had sat down a cup of water, good clear water that sluiced the bitterness from her throat.

  They told her the stories of how they had come there. Autumn, a centaur, had led her mate and colt through the marshes. She had broken a foreleg in the attempt, which they had splinted along the way, but it left her still limping and confined to the camp, unlike the rest of her fellows. Her mate Swiftwind was the one who had grabbed Primaflora and brought her back. He preened beneath her thanks.

  The dog-woman, Ava, had been a traveling priest’s servitor. When her master had perished to bad water, she’d made her way towards Tabat and encountered the camp instead.

  They all had the look of those who lived roughly, and their supplies were few, possessions scavenged or fashioned from what they could find.

  But she wasn’t in the Duke’s Menagerie any longer. Once again her fate had changed, and this time it had been she herself who controlled that change. Now things were even more complicated, but that was all right.

  She had become quite complicated herself.

  * * *

  “We’ll take you to Phillip,” Ava said.

  “Phillip?”

  “Our leader. He and our ally in Tabat are working together to free the beasts there.”

  The dog-woman led Primaflora through a row of tents, past a honey-mother giving suckle and a tangle of brawling satyr teens. The camp was not that far from Tabat, Primaflora thought. A few days travel that she’d made unconscious in Swiftwind’s arms. Such a large camp, such a number of beasts. She couldn’t imagine why no Tabatian outriders had found it yet. She asked Ava, but the dog-woman shrugged.

  “The Gods watch over their own. They know no one else will protect us.”

  This attitude seemed like flimsy armor at best if the humans found them, Primaflora thought. She remembered the thud of axes, the high-pitched screams of trees falling in her grove as she was dragged away, caught in rough rope netting that tore at her skin but not as harshly as the screams had ripped at her heart.

  “Are you all right?”

  Primaflora realized she’d stopped. The dog-woman stared at her and whimpered, an anxious, involuntary sound.

  “I’m fine,” Primaflora said. “Lead on.”

  Phillip was the oldest centaur she’d ever seen. He reclined, an awkward position she’d rarely seen a centaur assume. His gray beard flowed together with his hair and mane, palomino coloring giving him the look of a grizzled lion, like the one in the Duke’s menagerie. But older, older still, than that one.

  Other beasts stood around, a small crowd. She recognized several of the faces as those that had questioned her about the Duke’s menagerie. Autumn knelt beside Phillip and wiped at his face with a cloth until he irritably shooed her away.

  His eyes, rheumy but capable of focus, fastened on her. “The dryad,” he rasped. “Closer.”

  His breath smelled of dust and rot, but she warmed to the kindliness of his smile. She saw why Ava had referred to him with a touch of reverence in her voice. He had charisma, the sort of presence that drew the eye, that made you feel he knew what he was doing, that he was the voice of experience.

  He patted her hand before releasing it. “You are welcome to our camp. If you choose to join our struggle, you may stay and fight. Otherwise we will smuggle you up to Verranzo’s New City and a life there.” He studied her. “Or will that be too long? How old are you?”

  “I feel the urge to root,” she confessed. “But I can forestall it another season or two. Still, sir, I would rather stay and fight than go north.”

  He looked pleased.

  * * *

  Life in the menagerie had been dull. Life among the fugitives was just as dull, and difficult for Primaflora. The urge to root was a constant pain. She grabbed it to herself, used its rasp to hone her purpose to a fine edge. She would see the city brought down, chopped as savagely as the trees. She would see her sisters avenged. Instead of the slow green life she had known, a contemplative existence, she would choose one no dryad had undertaken before: a life of fire and vengeance. She would see the city destroyed somehow, see the ravenous maw that had eaten so many of her sisters
closed for good.

  The question was how.

  She watched Phillip. He had escaped from one of the worst humans, the beast trainer Jolietta Kanto. They said he had once been quick and fluent. Now at the corners of his eyes, weeping scars showed how his mind had been tamed. He was still capable of resistance, though. He had been smuggled away from his mistress after she had lobotomized him. Gradually his mind had healed itself from what Jolietta had done. But he was still slow, and there seemed no real direction to life in the camp.

  The next closest thing to a leader the escapees had was Aisha, a cyclops who had served as a household guard. She had turned on the family she guarded one night, camp gossip said, and slaughtered every one of them, and then the servants in their quarters as well before escaping. She was a brawny, bald woman with a single bulging eye that would seep tears when she was taken by one of her maudlin, heroic moods, preaching the freedom of all of Tabat’s enslaved, although she had no strategy for it, or so it seemed to Primaflora. She thought she would wait a little while; see if the fugitives developed a plan. If not, she would take things into her own hands.

  Aisha had been a gladiator and then a house guard for the Many Cloaks. The goblin who told Primaflora this was reluctant to say more, but she managed to wheedle the story out of him eventually.

  “She told me once, when she’d been drinking too much hooch,” he said, under similar circumstances himself. “Thieves broke in, but they turned out to be more than thieves—they were assassins in the service of some Trade War. Killed the whole family. Authorities claimed she’d done it, were going to put her down. She got smuggled out by an Abolitionist who believed in her innocence, went up North for a few years to Verranzo’s New City. But she came back, said she wanted to help others like her.” He belched. “Not so many like her, the way I see it.”

  At first Aisha had repulsed Primaflora: the broad, flat face set with a single muddy-brown eye. She lacked hair on her head, or rather it grew in so patchy and odd that the cyclops’s sole concession to vanity was to keep her scalp shaved. In the heat of the sun that bathed the mountains’ flanks, the skin had gone a deep brown, almost the same color as Primaflora’s natural hue under the sun. She had an off way of speaking, almost combative, as though she perpetually felt her presence challenged.