by Michael Shea
“What a place to settle!” said Hex. “I have heard that the city’s founders were pushed here by western hordes. But why didn’t they take to sea and find a safer piece of coast?”
“They were uprooted inlanders without maritime skills, and it was an even more dangerous sea then than now. Besides, after several battles with the trees, and heavy casualties, they realized that the trees’ life-pulse was slow and that they were indifferent to unaggressive habitation by men. Only assault roused them. So the folk’s nobility moved into the heights and its commonalty occupied—cautiously—the forest.”
“And outbursts of destruction on the part of the trees have remained endemic since that time?”
Kabrow chuckled softly. “Perhaps you won’t be surprised, good Hex, to learn that there are two theories here regarding the stability of the situation in the slums. The trees scarcely reproduce at all, and the forest here is essentially the original one. Therefore, say the first group of theorists, since the trees’ reactions grow slower with age, they are less apt to riot with each passing year, and thus permit a steady increase in slum population without an attendant rise in violence. This view tends to prevail among the wealthy, all of whom live in the heights, well out of the forest. The slum-dwellers, on the other hand, are likely to tell you that the older any tree grows, the more irascible it gets, and that riots have grown more, not less frequent, with the passage of time, despite the population’s increasing skill in adapting to this tricky environment.”
Hex helped Kabrow carry several bales into the clearing depot, where the clerk obviously knew the old man. Hex could catch no glimpse of the voucher of lading, which might have enlightened him as to Kabrow’s business. A direct question produced only the curt response:
“I’m a vendor of exotica. Come along.”
The old man led him into the tree-slums. The trees’ major branchings began at some twelve to twenty feet above the ground, leaving room for a veritable labyrinth of shacks, shanties, and plank fences to cluster round their trunks. Above this, the boughs supported ramshackle structures at every groin and angle—a tacky maze of airborne hovels that was crazily interwebbed with ramps, catwalks, cable bridges, laundry lines, and guy ropes. Children moved monkey-quick along this network, crowded on swings in the highest branches, or waged nutshell-and-pebble wars between neighbouring rooftops. The noise of their play mixed with the shrill chat of women moving methodically up rope ladders with baskets of washing, and with the rumbling blather and boasts of men loafing on wineshop platforms with leathern jacks in their hands. Meanwhile all these sounds merged with the vast, gentle susurration of foliage—in much the same way as the yellow-and-rust dapple of the dead leaves deeply drifted on every level surface merged with the mellow dapple of sunlight everywhere admitted by the forest canopy.
The main avenues here—on the ground level, at least—were cableways, narrow zones of unbuilt earth to either side of ropes strung waist-high between posts set at twenty-yard intervals. Threading his way behind Kabrow, Hex enjoyed sufficient perspective through the tangled scene to gain a clear impression of the vegetable giants that thronged it. They were squat in profile, their width only slightly exceeded by their height, which averaged some sixty feet. Their thick, horizontally thrust limbs diminished only slightly in bulk towards their crests, and had a flowing, twisted line that unpleasantly suggested muscularity—an impression which their smooth, fine-pored bark reinforced. Though they created an airier environment than Hex had imagined they would, a slightly dark coolness lingered under their leafy ceiling. Still the vitality of the scene was dominant, and the bosky gloom he had expected of the place remained only an undercurrent of its atmosphere.
Kabrow brought them to a wine-shed near a crossing of two cableways. For a short while they leaned in silence at the counter, sipping a tart, pale vintage and gazing at the shady, murmurous traffic around and above them. Hex was framing various ways of broaching the question of Yana. He decided directness was best, that Kabrow would either tell whatever he knew, or he wouldn’t, but as he opened his mouth the old man pointed down the cableway.
“The Leafmould Inn,” he said. The building indicated—of tar-caulked wood—was low and shapeless, and so sprawling, that it incorporated the trunks of three different trees, which thrust up from its mulch-heaped roof like grass stalks from snowdrifts. “It’s two lictors a night, board included. There’s another matter as well, my dear fellow. I would really advise you against those festive boots of yours, and that… striking doublet. They will only excite the, ah, cupidity of strangers. You ought to sell them and get some sensible, plain gear.”
“Yes, I was already going to—”
“There’s a fat man named Grossp who runs a pretty decent jumble-shop here—the goods are sturdy and he can be bargained with. Ask anyone for directions. Now I want you to take this little bonus with your pay, and to wish you all possible good luck.”
Hex was startled by a sudden air of haste in the old man, who had laid two five-lictor pieces on the counter and was already hoisting and draining his glass. When he thumped it down and turned to thrust his hand in Hex’s, the plump scholar anxiously detained it in his clasp.
“Spare me another moment, honoured Kabrow! May I be blunt? I have just—”
“You will be blunt, I suppose, with or without invitation.” A wryness now tempered the old man’s good humour, but he grudgingly half-resumed his stool.
“I have recently learned,” Hex said in an apologetically lowered voice, “of a place called Yana, where the touch of undying is to be had. Clearly you are a man of powers, Kabrow. Would you tell me something of the place?”
Kabrow no longer looked at all grave, and yet neither was the humour in his eyes of its usual sunny sort. The jollity seemed faintly cruel now. “Endless life,” he mused. “I wonder what you’d do with it.”
“I would map the world and give it its first comprehensive cartofolio,” Bramt Hex promptly answered. “Failing that, for I don’t rule out the Infinitists’ view that the world is limitless, I would give the world its most nearly comprehensive cartofolio.” He hesitated, then added, “Might I, without impertinence, ask you what you would do with it?”
“More to the point to ask me what I do with it. Of course, I would not answer you.” Kabrow paused, as had the scholar’s heart. “Look down here a moment,” the old man murmured, indicating his own feet. Under the counter he discreetly pinned his left boot with the toe of his right and withdrew from it—first, a thin and uncommonly hairy ankle, and then a large cloven hoof. No sooner had he shown it than he rebooted it.
“You would map the world,” he marvelled. “By my wrinkly rod, Bramt Hex, you are no wisher-by-halves. You’re a perfectly charming man, I swear it, and I’d love to tell you a dozen vital things. Unfortunately, a great gulf separates us. The information you want must be purchased with risks. Still, I have a parting bit of advice for you—that you go to a bathhouse. There is a particularly suitable one just down the way from Grossp’s jumble-shop. Good-bye now, my friend. All the best to you.”
Hex found himself a bit dazed by this short series of bizarre disclosures, and Kabrow was out of view before he could bestir himself. He bespoke another wine to accompany his chewing-over of what he had been shown and told. The only part of it he could do anything about seemed the least relevant—the advice that he should seek a bathhouse. To Grossp’s he must go in any case, for it was time to see to immediate needs, and defer the larger issues for a while. He got directions from the tapster.
Grossp was a man of nearly spherical obesity who never left—probably was unable to leave without help—a hammock slung behind a small counter in one corner of his mountainously cluttered shop. Each article Hex considered had to be brought into Grossp’s heavy-lidded view to elicit its price. This the man voiced with a languor Hex found intensely irritating, as the price invariably seemed high.
He decided to assemble a full outfit. When he had found a heavy trail-cape of Hill-Plod wool
, kneeboots of stout leather, and a thick doublet of peel—a dun-coloured, supple material resembling suede that he had seen to be much used hereabouts—he took them to the counter to haggle over them en bloc. The offer, though somewhat better this way, still struck him as unfair: for his own boots and doublet he would receive with the new gear only twelve lictors change.
“It’s just plain unreasonable,” Hex expostulated. “For that rate you must throw in a sword, with belt and scabbard, as well.”
“If that will content you, so be it,” breathed Grossp with oleaginous affability. Hex strove to conceal his surprise. He found a twenty-inch shortsword of tough, supple steel, firmly hilted in bone with countersunk copper rivets. Even without its scabbard it would be worth nearly fifty lictors in Glorak, but Grossp nodded serenely at its inclusion. When his purchases were donned, and his money pocketed, Hex felt free to comment on the cheapness of the sword, and Grossp felt free to answer:
“Ah yes. Well swords, you see, sell poorly in the slums. Violence here? Brawls and blades? It would be madness, would it not?”
After a moment, Hex understood him. He shrugged in a debonair way. “Ah well! As I shall soon be on the open road again, we can both count ourselves gainers in the bargain. I’m a cartographer, you see. Not your stay-at-home kind, but peripatetic. An investigator at large.”
It would have been hard for a man to look less enthusiastic about an itinerant existence than Grossp did. Snugging his rotundity more tightly—if that was possible—into the hammock’s vast hemisphere, he bestirred one hand to a faint, dismissive gesture and said:
“Good luck then. Travel multiplies the need of it.”
Nonetheless, outside, Hex remained exhilarated by his own verbal portrait of himself. He stepped into an adjoining wine-shed, where he sat regarding his surroundings with the smiling, canny eye of a knowing vagabond, seasoned to exotic sights.
And the scene, in the gold-lit, late afternoon, was a lively one. Clearly, this was a social hour in the slums. Knots of labourers trudged up the cableway, their peel belts clanking with cargo-hooks or fish-cleaning tools. Most—including many women among them—were thick, big-shouldered people with a splayfoot, rolling gait smoothly adapted to the root-swollen ground. All the wineshops were full, as well as not a few barber stalls—for though the folk here went as long-haired and full-bearded as those of Glorak, combing and delousing seemed an important service in this damp, sylvan environment. Outside the stalls, children shrilled and skylarked, vying for adult notice, or from nearby rooftops flung twigs and nutshells at the barbers’ basins, fleeing with shouts when they raised a splash. Their elders smiled, took squirts of wine from the leathern bottles that hung at their hips, and resumed the endless gossip that seemed more than half their purpose in frequenting the stalls. The breeze jumbled their myriad voices with the leafnoise, and broadcast too all the classic smells of poverty: sweat, soil, wine, urine, and cheap cooking, all tangled with the fresh, bitter scent of foliage.
Hex expanded with affection for these people. Weren’t the poor everywhere the same? Sturdy workers, merry when they could be, straight-forward as safety allowed? Stratagems and cold-blooded killing were the special toys of the powerful. Here, toddlers scrabbled in the dirt, and lean old women, mummied in shawls, walked with careful economy of movement, eking out their last few yards of mortal progress across that same earth. Sweet, sad, universal sight! Hex ordered another wine. As he drank it, he fell to studying the bathhouse Kabrow had told him of.
Some hundred yards distant, at a turning in the cableway, it stood amid particularly venerable trees over eighty feet tall. At three storeys it was itself an imposing structure as slum-buildings went. Each storey sat slightly askew on the lower, according to the thrust of the branches of the two flanking trees that supported it. Between these the mossy building seemed to slouch like a drunk held up by his friends, while the sun-dappled water tank surmounting it perched aslant, as a sot’s cap would. Had the old man meant something by recommending it? There had been a pointedness in his suggestion… In any case, Hex’s last sketchy ablutions had been made with seawater, and he felt distinctly itchy. He finished his wine and walked to the bathhouse.
A caged booth in the anteroom contained the bathwoman. Beyond her, past a doorless portal, stretched an oil-lit maze of wooden bathstalls. Hex marvelled at the probable capacity of the first floor alone, and yet the silence told him that its recesses were deserted.
“Tell me, Madam,” he cried—wine-gay—to the crone within the cage, “do you think I will have much of a wait for a bath? Heh, heh!”
“Why, what a refreshing sense of humour!” crackled the old woman. Her edentulous grin was the emblem of sarcasm. Hex shrugged.
“My apologies. I’m sure you can’t be expected to think it’s funny. I’d like a stall, please.”
“And you shall have one!” cried the crone. Her manner was that of one who is fired with a sudden and profound purpose. “You shall have the best, by all the powers! Seven dhroons, please.” She dragged his coins off the counter and into a chest that sounded surprisingly full of others. She emerged from a door in the side of her booth with two large drying-sponges under her arm. Beckoning Hex, she stumped ahead of him into the labyrinth.
Her hair hung in a sloppy white tail knotted with a dirty ribbon. Her stride was quite vigorous, but even their combined treads echoed little on the sodden floor. The partitions of the countless stalls—all vacant—were splotched and zebra-ed with moss. At a cubicle no different from a dozen they had passed she stopped and turned sharply. Thrusting her face—warped like a raisin—into his, she motioned Hex inside. She laid the sponges by the tub. She unlocked a spigot on the wall, ran the tub half-full, relocked the spigot, and left.
Hex hung his clothes on a wall-peg and wedged himself into the water, which was tepid from the sunlight he had seen falling on the water tank above. Gratefully, he laved his grittiness away, and scrubbed the salt from his hair. The stall door opened suddenly, and the crone stood beaming at him.
“Such pink health!” she cried with rapture. “Shining wet like that, sir, you look like a Bulge that’s stranded at low tide because he’s just swallowed three fishermen and their skiff to boot! Bless your fat youth, you’ll live long!”
“Witch! What are you doing here? And what do you mean? Heavy I may be—I’m not the gross heap you say.” It seemed too womanish to try to shoo her out—it seemed more dignified to return, teeth clenched, to washing himself. The old woman became quite nettled.
“Why do you dispute me?” she cried. “I have lived a long time! You have scarcely lived at all. It’s impertinent! Of course you’re not literally as fat as a Bulge. But your soul’s being so fat, matched with your body’s fat—why, I was speaking figuratively! It’s such a good match, soul and body!” She had, by her own reflections, restored her good humour.
“The impertinence is yours!” cried Hex. “Kindly get out of my stall!”
“The building is mine and I go where I like in it! But come, you cannot anger me! Your plumpness quite disarms me! You are as round and resplendent as a slug on a daisy at noon! For one lictor, 0 Pinkness, I will sell you knowledge of the touch of undying. Think of it! A clue to the possession of immortal life, for only a lictor!”
Hex’s skin crawled. The hair on his arms stood up. He peered into the crone’s grin-slitted eyes and did not doubt that he was looking face-to-face at his fate itself.
“Yes. Yes, beldame. Forgive my anger.” Strangely unselfconscious, he stood from the basin and dug a lictor from his doublet on the wall. He handed it to her and then, because she took it and stood silent, began to dry himself absently, waiting. At last he asked, “Well?”
“It is to be had in Yana, which is to the north of here.”
“Yana. Yes, I knew that. To the north of here. Is that all?”
“It is much! It cuts your search in half! Mind you, I do not even say which shore it is on—only that it is north of here.”
“Forg
ive me if I sound greedy—I have just come from the north—from Glorak Harbor at least… can you say no more? I ask with all respect—I’ll give you another lictor.”
The crone laughed—gleeful wheezes. “Oh!” she cried, “another lictor! By the powers, a sore temptation! Greedy, you say! Oh, greedy indeedy!” She turned, still wheezing, and left the stall.
By the time Hex had dressed and returned to the anteroom, the old woman was not to be found. He left without much hesitation, for the significance of what he had been given was growing on him. A bit at a time—clearly this was the tacit law of his luck so far. That word of Yana should keep coming to him, and from such diverse sources—this was more momentous than the actual extent of the information at this point. Clearly, he must keep an enterprising spirit, and move where opportunity prompted, and more would be given him. His step grew buoyant. Without conscious effort he threaded his way unerringly back to the Leafmould Inn. The place was rough, loud, and malodorous, staffed by black-tattooed Cannibal Islanders six-and-a-half feet tall and wearing flimsy-looking leather muzzles, but Hex’s ebullience was unimpaired—at least they kept the clientele in line.
He found the supper coarse but tasty. Given his door-bolt he repaired to his room. With the door secured, he tried his bed. It was lumpy, and the blanket thin, but somehow he found it quite comfortable. The noise outside in the hall was incessant—stumblings, vinous shouts, eructations—but somehow unobjectionable, even entertaining.
He fell asleep soon, and smiling.
8
An Altercation With a Sylvan Setting
The crash of his iron door bar to the flagstone floor woke Hex. Though his cell lacked a window, he knew it was sunrise—the hour when the bouncers went through the halls and—keying each doorjamb from without—released each room’s purchased bolt. Its fall was the roomer’s alarm, telling him his protected tenure was ended, and he’d better get up and look to his gear before one of his neighbours slipped in and stole it. Hex had slept dressed. He rose irritated at the harshness of this ouster. He turned in his bar at the clerks’ cage at the end of the corridor and went in to breakfast.