Walking the Tree
Page 16
They walked on.
Walked on.
The rain hurt their scalps with its intensity, and shards of lightning flashed through the Tree. The children complained and cried and the teachers were no better. Phyto stayed positive, helped them settle each night, watched the food to make sure they had enough and that it was cooked well before the children were hungry.
A messenger came up behind them. He was slower than usual in the rain, and they offered him food and a warm drink. He shook his head. He knew that he was not allowed to stop along the way to share meals with schools. He fed himself or he did not eat at all. Phyto talked to him about travelling, and the loneliness of it. "At least you can speak to all you meet," Phyto said.
"No, I can't. I don't talk to those I meet as I travel. In the communities they talk to me only about my messages. Nothing else."
"I wish I could go into Thallo with the school in a few days. I am tired of the deep loneliness I feel, waiting for them each time."
The messenger nodded. "I understand."
The light was dulled by the rain and it seemed as if the world was blurred, dark.
With her tired eyes, Lillah at first thought she was seeing a rock in the shape of a person. "Look at that," she said, pointing.
"There's another one there," Morace said, and they saw more, human-shaped rocks posed on the sand. Zygo jumped up and down. "More! I see more!"
When one of the rocks shifted, they screamed.
"They're alive! They came to life!" screamed Rham. Melia walked towards the rocks, calling back, "Let me see what they are. Wait here."
She neared one of the rocks and it rose and opened its arms to her. She hesitated, then allowed herself to be embraced.
She ran back to the group panting. "It's okay, they're people. They're painted with clay."
The rocks began to move towards them and the children screamed and hid behind the teachers. "Let's meet these people," Lillah said.
The teachers struggled forward, the children hanging around their legs.
The people walked stiffly, carefully. Their skin was smooth and pale with the clay and they looked young, not yet teacher age. As they stepped closer, though, Lillah could see wrinkles in the clay, and she wondered at their magic, that they made themselves look so young by plastering their faces.
"Welcome to Thallo." A broad man, his clay darker than the others, held out his hand.
Lillah took the arm extended and stepped into the embrace.
The other men were naked and smooth. They had thick clay cases over their penises and they walked carefully in order not to crack them. They hung back, away from the women, as if frightened of being noticed.
"We're very happy you are here," said one.
Welcomefire was held; the plate exchanged for a pot of paint colours. Then food was given, and drink. The school felt welcomed and wanted. They were led to the seawalk, where the whole village walked.
"I hope it's strong enough to hold us," Melia muttered.
There was an older woman with clay paint on her face, so Lillah and Melia did not recognise her at first. She took their hands and squeezed, saying, "Ah, my girls. My girls. You are grown and teachers yourselves now. You are beautiful, even without clay face."
Lillah said, "Your voice is familiar," and the woman laughed. She knelt on the seawalk and bent down to scoop salt water in her cupped palms. She washed her face clean of clay and looked up at them. It was Pandana, their favourite teacher. They had never forgotten her. She was a tall and beautiful woman who spoke in a loud, strong voice and whose laugh could be heard around corners.
"Pandana!" they said together, and fell upon her with such force they almost pushed her into the water. Lillah felt a splinter probing her knee but she ignored it.
"This is where you stopped?" Lillah said.
Pandana said, "I liked these people." She showed them her home and pointed out her three children.
"You have a beautiful necklace, Lillah. Who carved it? Perhaps you shouldn't wear it while you are here. They think here that having the sap touch your skin is dangerous. That it will take all your strength, and the strength of anyone close by. Perhaps you should keep it in your carryall."
Lillah, not wanting to cause trouble, took off the necklace her father had entrusted to her and stowed it.
Pandana walked with a limp. Lillah wondered how she'd been injured but didn't ask: there was too much else to talk about.
"You know, there is word of your Uncle Legum here. They talk of a man at sea who went out alive and never came back. These people here say he has made friends with the sea monster. You should not confess he is related to you." She touched her ear.
"I'm glad you are here to tell us all of these rules, Pandana," Lillah said.
"I can see why you would have chosen here. The men are beautiful. It will be hard to choose one," Melia said. She stood high on her toes, stretching her legs out.
"They are very good to look at. Good workers, too. Hard workers. All in this Order are. You should observe the women. Our skills here are remarkable."
She took them to meet a woman who was dyeing cloth.
The mother had three buckets of dye, changing the colour of pale cloth.
"Where do the colours come from?" Melia asked.
"The red is from Bark, but only the Bark where the sap has oozed and softened in the damp.
"The green comes from the leaves, but only those which grow black-green higher up the Tree.
"The brown comes from twigs, but only those gone dark with age."
"Those are beautiful colours."
"They're for the feast tomorrow night. We like to dress up. There'll be wonderful music, too. Oh, my Tree Lord, I love the music."
There was no music in Ombu, apart from the sound of rain drops, the flow of water down the Tree, the rhythmic pounding of roots for paste.
Lillah watched two identical children playing apart from the others. It took her a while to realise there were two; each time she looked up she thought it was one child, until she saw them together.
Twins. A multiple birth. Their mother sat to the side, working clay into intricate boxes. She mixed ground, dried seaweed into the clay and Lillah thought, That's so clever! It will bind the clay and keep it stronger.
No one spoke to this woman. The two children stumbled and fell a lot, rose without tears. The mother ignored the falls, which was odd in this Order. Mostly the children barely shed a tear before an adult lifted them for comfort, a sweetness popped into the mouth for distraction.
Lillah walked over to the woman. "Those boxes look very sturdy," she said. "What do you keep in them?"
The woman looked up and smiled. "Berries or seajewels. Stones. Teeth. People keep different things." The boy fell again, this time gashing his head on a rock. This time the mother dropped the box she was working on and ran to staunch the blood.
"It doesn't stop once it starts," she called. The cloth she held against her son's head turned crimson, so Lillah ran into the leaves around the Trunk seeking spiderwebs.
Most places she identified a web soon after arrival, just in case, but she had been distracted by the beautiful, quiet men in clay.
She found webs a hundred steps away and wound them carefully and quickly onto a twig she broke off. She noticed odd drawings in the Trunk and vowed to come back once the boy's bleeding had stopped. The limbs here were oddly smooth, the larger ones reminding her of a man's leg, with tapered ankles. There were small bones (fingers?) hanging from the toes. Lillah wondered why the ghosts had not taken these bones.
The mother watched Lillah gently press the webs onto the boy's forehead. The bleeding stopped and the mother gasped.
"I had heard of this but had never tried it. I took bleeding as another punishment. Born as two, that's what. My punishment for a bad choice."
"Why were they allowed to live?"
"They were left out on the Trunk but they survived the night. It was decided that they were not meant to die, and the
y have been protected ever since. I am to do nothing but watch them. Nothing. But if I had not agreed to this, we all would have been treated. You have a bad baby, you are treated as if you have Spikes. I chose a man too close to me. This is not a good place to stay, for all its beauty."
Lillah walked back to the place she had seen odd drawings. It smelled unpleasant there. The drawings frightened her. They told the story of a killing labour of birth, the woman torn apart. A man stood beside her, and the artist had cleverly drawn him so it was clear he was related to the woman.
The artist worked as she watched. She marvelled at his gentle touch. He used a flattened bone to mix his paint and a sharpened one to draw his pictures.
"There was once a box of painting things washed up. There were wooden sticks with soft hair at the end of them, and bright colours you have never seen."
"I bet the pictures didn't last, though. I imagine they disappeared with sun and time."
"They did. That's true."
There was a mess of a baby painted in the trunk at the man's feet, limbs twisted, eyes pupil-less. There were other babies depicted, too, deformed. Unable to live.
Lillah heard a peck peck and looked up to see a white bird at something in the high branches. She couldn't see, so climbed a branch up, then another.
It was the almost-pecked clean skeleton of a baby. Above it hung another and above that, more.
Lillah fell backwards in her horror, and landed hard on her tail bone. The bird flew away.
Olea's words came back to her. "Be observant."
"Not too hard to observe that," Lillah muttered. No wonder they had an obsession with lineage. Dead births told of wrong matings. These men must be very poor sires. She noticed a small cavity she had missed before. Inside lay the skeleton of what looked like a tiny baby. There was only a torso and head; no limbs. Someone had made a bed for it; sewn a tiny mattress, stuffed a tiny pillow. There were dried flowers, and nuts, and a small, hard ball of sap. Carving on the walls showed birds on the wing, stars. Lillah felt sorry for person who had built this shrine. She stepped back, not wanting to see any more.
Pandana stood there. She took Lillah's wrist between her forefinger and thumb and squeezed.
"Did you touch anything?"
Lillah shook her head. Pandana squinted at her, then stepped over to the cavity. She stared in, then reached up and made a minor adjustment. "The men here are no use, for all their good looks," she said. "It is best to let them be the last. They are even more useless when they are old."
"Maybe the Tree ate their man-bones," Lillah said, and the two women shared their first adult laugh.
Pandana had many children living with her. The parents could work harder for the Order that way. Morace and the other children of Ombu were urged to join the crowd but they felt overwhelmed. Lillah and the other teachers found they had a child holding each hand most of the day.
The feast took place as the sun began to set, out on the seawalk. Men played music, dropping heavy, tethered items into the water rhythmically, restfully. Lillah thought she could get used to this place; Pandana was there, the music was good. There was the cleanliness, though, and the obsession with deformity.
The food was sea-based, and very tasty, served in the most highly polished coconut shells Lillah had seen. The men served it to them, and Lillah saw that the women would sometimes pinch their legs, their arms, scratch at them with little sticks. Lillah noticed they ate every scrap, and even the bones they tossed into a pot to be boiled later for stock. Lillah wondered why the men were treated badly here. Did it all come down to the lack of ability to catch child?
"They do not waste here. They come from a different type of land than yours, Lillah. You come from a place of great privilege, plenty of land, set back from the water. You are on the sunny side of the island. Your needs are met so much more easily when your land provides." Pandana sucked on a bone, and limped over to the pot to drop it in.
"I hadn't thought about it until we travelled. I always thought everybody had the same sort of place to live as I did."
"No. No. Not at all."
The musicians began a different kind of music, a great clanging of metal that hurt the ears.
"It's the parade," Pandana said. "The Cautionary Parade. You should have seen it before you stopped at the last place, but it seems you didn't need it."
"Need what?"
"The reason not to mate with your relatives," Pandana said. "Shhh."
Along the seawalk came children carrying thin earthenware pots. They held these out to the visitors to see; the school children started crying to see it. Lillah stepped forward. "What are you showing them? Let me see." She was angry; she trusted every Order not to hurt her charges, upset them needlessly.
In the pots were the babies who should never have been born. Who had died at birth, or been exposed. The ones who could not expect to live at all. Babies swollen up, or with too many limbs, or not enough. Babies distorted by bulges and splits; the sight made Lillah sick.
"Now, the recital," announced one of the fathers. The teachers stood up and recited their family Trees. The young men did, too; while this was a habit in other Orders, here it appeared to be a way to entertain. They did it with flair, humour, music.
"We take the list very seriously, as you can imagine," Pandana said. "So many deformities. But that doesn't mean we can't enjoy it. People listen more carefully this way."
The young men were very handsome, though Lillah thought perhaps she was more forgiving and needy after the last Order, where to her they had smelt strange and were very unattractive.
"I don't like it here," Morace whispered to Lillah. She looked at him, annoyed. The thought had crossed her mind to stay here. She loved being with Pandana. But she couldn't leave Morace. He was weaker, now, and she needed to keep him safe.
The Tale-teller watched all, nodding. He seemed so sleepy Lillah wondered how he'd manage to remember everything well enough to tell it.
In a deep, carved bowl rested roots, the ones which grew up pale and broke off to rest on the earth.
Lillah picked one up, even though she knew that in most Orders, it was considered the same as touching a ghost.
The root was like a miniature naked person, limbs and groin, arms raised, small twisted face.
Lillah picked another up; it was the same. She could see why this food was taboo in most places.
The children's smoothstones here were carved with distorted figures, which Lillah thought was wrong. The stones were supposed to give comfort, not cause fear. Dead babies are to be forgotten, not thought about it. In Ombu, they would be grieving too often.
The man Lillah chose to be her lover was so attentive and delightful, after a very pleasant evening her skin was smooth. Fine sandpaper as their skin rubbed together. Lillah had noticed there were no old men in the Order. "What happens to your old men?"
"They like to walk the sea." Lillah's lover took her hand and led her to a place in the Bark. Depicted there was a man with weights around his ankles, the list of his offspring beside him.
"They walk into the sea when they lose their beauty," he said. He bent and kissed her lips softly.
She said, "That could never happen to you." He smiled; she had said the right thing.
He gave her some red salt and showed her how to dissolve it in water to make a face wash. She loved the smoothness of her skin afterwards; so did he. He reminded her of the market holder they had met so soon after leaving Ombu. Understanding, thoughtful.
Lillah wondered why Pandana had so little respect for the men here. She had caught child, at least. But others hadn't. Perhaps that was it.
During school, on the long walk, Pandana had kept them alert, always asking questions. She wanted them to think, to analyse, to understand. She did not seem to want to answer questions now, though. Lillah asked her about the men and why they were treated badly, but they began to talk about the school they had shared and about Lillah's return to Ombu at the end of it.
In reality the woman standing there, arms outstretched, eyes only for Lillah, looked old and grey. There was nothing glowing about her at all, in fact she could barely make her mouth work well enough to say "Lillah!" Lillah felt nervous, seeing this woman.