Crossroads of Canopy

by Thoraiya Dyer

  Everybody went limp and silent again, except for the barkskippers, who plipped, plopped, and flopped desperately. Unar strove to ignore the feel of the fish; it was so dark she couldn’t even see what colour they were. She used her bore-knife to slit the knots by touch and managed to resheathe it without cutting herself.

  “Oos, we need to change places.”

  “Yes, why not?” Oos answered sharply. “It’s what you’ve been trying to do ever since I was chosen to be a Servant and you were not.”

  They struggled, crushed together, to turn over, as if they were a single body. Finally, Unar wrestled Oos underneath her. She scrambled upwards, stepping on already-bruised arms and legs, towards the top of the net.

  “I may have to cut it,” she said.

  “There should be a solid ring of metal at the top,” Hasbabsah said.

  When Unar found it, it was barely the circumference of her hips. She had to breathe out to wriggle through it, and then she was glad for the blackness as her toes rested on the ring. She couldn’t feel dizzy with no indication of the distance to fall.

  She could hardly fear for the fate of the net when she couldn’t see how sturdily it was woven. The rope was rough in the palms of her hands. Difficult to climb without magic. There were no knots in it.

  “Audblayin keep me,” she murmured.

  “Don’t you speak her name!” Oos shouted furiously.

  “His name,” Unar said.

  She drew herself slowly and steadily upwards.

  Before long, the burn in her muscles turned to warnings; her grip would fail fairly soon. She was light, but the rope was wet and her knees couldn’t gain purchase. They couldn’t take any of her weight to give her arms and hands a rest.

  She wondered gloomily if there was any plank at all. What if the fisherman who had set the trap was a Canopian, and the rope went hundreds and hundreds of paces up into the sky? But there was an occasional glowworm on the great trunk, and something black made a silhouette against them.

  Then her hand knocked the underside of good, solid wood, and she whooped as she looped her legs around it and hung there for a moment. Feeling returned to her blistered hands. Once she was upright, crouching on top of the planks, she explored the landing with her feet and elbows. It was three body lengths long, with a coating of something on top like decomposed leaves, which suggested it had been in place for a while. Where it met the trunk of the tallowwood, there was no vibration.

  “It seems strong,” she called down to the others. “Driven in deep. Who’ll come next?”

  Oos came next, followed by Ylly. When the three of them were sitting, side by side, on the plank, they helped each other to haul the net up, with Hasbabsah still caught in it with the fish.

  “Shall I cut her out?” Unar asked.

  “We’ll lose the fish,” Ylly said.

  “I’m not hungry,” Oos said petulantly.

  “Dayhunters come to the smell of decomposing fish,” Hasbabsah said.

  Unar cut up the net, throwing it and the fish in the direction of the river, which was ten or twenty paces around the trunk from where they sat; it was difficult to judge from the sound of it, the fineness of the spray and, again, from the absence of glowworms.

  “Will we even see the daylight from down here?” Unar demanded.

  “Yes.” Hasbabsah sounded exhausted. “And it is daylight we must wait for. We can go nowhere in the dark.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  WITH DAYLIGHT and the part-clearing of storm clouds came the realisation that the coating on the plank was not decomposed leaves.

  “I’m stuck,” Ylly said abruptly.

  “It is sap glue.” Hasbabsah sounded even wearier and gloomier. “For dayhunters or needle-teeth, to stop them from damaging the net or taking the fish. The glue could not set hard until the rain stopped.”

  The rain had stopped, but only temporarily, Unar thought. The rivers were running. The next time it rained, it would rain longer and harder than before and it would go on until the end of the wet season.

  “It’s only stuck to your clothes,” she said. “You can wriggle out of them.”

  “No,” Ylly said. “It’s gone through my clothes. The undersides of my knees and my hands are stuck.”

  Oos began to weep noisily but her hands were stuck, too, so that she couldn’t even wipe her face. “My aura is faded by now. I’ll never get home. The barrier will be closed to me. And there’s no magic here.”

  Ylly turned on her, as much as she was able.

  “Some wicked force that you can’t control is keeping you from the ones you love? Imagine that!”

  Unar felt strangely remote from Oos’s concerns about faded auras; of course they could get back. Of course there was magic here. Understorians had carried a magic bed to the king of Odelland, after all. There must be rules that were not taught, or properly understood, in Canopy.

  “We can wait for a raid to breach it,” she said, thinking aloud. “When the barrier is weak. They must be able to come through when the god of the niche is weak.”

  “She is weak,” Oos cried. “She’s a suckling babe of six moons! Yet there were no raids this winter past. Gods form alliances for the protection of their niches while they are weak.”

  “My granddaughter is a suckling babe of six moons,” Ylly said, “yet I’ve never seen her. I pray you never see your goddess again.”

  “That does not help us, Ylly,” Hasbabsah said.

  “Are you stuck, too, Hasbabsah?” Unar asked, trying to twist; her skin burned, threatening to tear. “I’m stuck by my buttocks. Atwith take whatever Understorian fisherman slathered glue here!”

  “I am stuck too,” Hasbabsah acknowledged.

  “Should we shout to attract attention?”

  “Noise will bring hungry demons. It is unlikely anyone will come to assist us. Most Understorians stay in their well-stocked homes for the wet season. As I said to you, there can be no trunk crossings in the monsoon rains.”

  “Aren’t there any bridges between trunks?” Unar tried to see where the nearest trunk might be, but the meagre dawn light through the forest fog was little better than using a candle in another niche’s Temple for seeing the carvings on the Garden Gate. Unar could still barely make out the shapes of her companions.

  Hasbabsah made a reproving, sucking sound.

  “Would you make a bridge to your door for a demon to cross? If there is one good your barrier has done us, it is that demons can no longer cross from tree to tree by the canopy. All but the chimera must descend to the floor. They have been fewer, and leaner, these last thousand years.”

  “Fire, then,” Unar suggested.

  Hasbabsah shrugged. She perched glumly in her woven cloak and robe like a wet wood hen.

  “Fire would be a fine thing. It would repel the creatures and draw any curious straggling passersby. But I see no way to make one.”

  Unar had to admit she saw no way to make one, either, and when the rain began again, heavy and relentless, the point became moot. She passed magenta cherries and beans to the others, poking them into mouths when hands were stuck. They chewed slowly as the light grew bright enough for them to see each others’ dripping, despondent faces.

  “Perhaps the rain will soften the glue,” Unar said.

  “No,” called a voice from around the curve of the trunk, half drowned out by the rushing of the river. A few moments later, a soft, nasal laugh came from closer by. “The rain will not soften it.”

  Unar stared at the spread-eagled, sticklike young man who crawled carefully around the circumference of the tallowwood. He was slightly above the level of the plank where they perched and drenched like they were; he wore a plain grey shirt and breeches cut off at the elbows and knees, made of strapleaf fibre designed to hold body warmth and protect from bark friction rather than any attempt to keep dry.

  The man’s forearms and shins seemed to adhere to the trunk. It wasn’t until he moved again that Unar saw the flash of slim white spikes
that protruded from his ashy Understorian skin. The huge pack on his back was hung with more ropes and grapples than she’d ever seen in one place before.

  “They are not the dayhunter who has been poaching my catch,” he said over his left shoulder. “But they have wrecked my net all the same. And their skins are not worth anything.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Unar asked loudly.

  “He talks to his blessed side,” Hasbabsah said. “It is what one does, when one is contemplating wrong action.”

  The man turned his head back to them and smiled at Hasbabsah. He had brown hair and clear grey eyes.

  “Welcome home, older sister,” he said. “You have fallen far. My name is Esse. I will get you down.”

  “Up,” Oos begged. “We want to go up. Not down.”

  Esse ignored her. He eased one bare foot down onto the platform where it met the trunk, closest to Unar. The brown glue squished between his shockingly pale toes.

  “This may warm your rump somewhat, Warmed One,” he said. He took a stoppered gourd from the place where it hung from his pack. Laughing his soft, nasal laugh, he turned his head again, briefly, to his left shoulder. Then he poured a splash of clear liquid from the gourd into Unar’s lap. It was not the most expedient place to pour it but clearly he intended to provoke her.

  As it seeped through her clothes and reached the edges of the hardened glue, smoke began rising from it and it made a hissing sound. Unar bit her lip to keep from letting out a shriek as heat prickled her skin.

  Then, she found she was able to lift herself off the plank.

  “Stay still,” Esse said, climbing over her with his long spider-legs to pour the fluid onto Ylly, Oos, and Hasbabsah.

  “What now?” Hasbabsah asked.

  “You will stay with us until the rain stops. Then you can go home.”

  “You are generous.”

  “I’ve never seen Nessa,” Ylly said longingly. “Nor met my mother’s people.”

  “There is little to see in Nessa,” Esse said, smiling, head and shoulders taller than the tallest of them. “It is very dark. Here, the lopping of the tree branches at the level of the fabled Garden lets a little light down to us, sometimes. Gannak is closer and more scenic. Still, to get to Gannak right now, you would have to descend all the way to Floor, and if it is not already flooded, it will be soon. You would have to swim with piranhas or risk a boat voyage not consecrated by Floorian bone women. They would sink you with wicked words.”

  “We will go with you gratefully,” Hasbabsah said.

  “We will?” Oos said incredulously.

  “If you wish to jump but are too cowardly,” Ylly said, “I can push you.”

  “You are a grandmother, Ylly,” Hasbabsah said sharply. “She is a child. Remember yourself.”

  “Sawas was my child, and this one sent her away.”

  “Quiet, now,” Esse advised. “The rain and mist screen us somewhat, but I built that net to catch something other than Canopians. The dayhunter who visits this part of the tree has claws longer than that Gardener’s leg bones.”

  Unar looked down at her legs.

  “This Gardener will go with you,” she said, mimicking his stilted, formal manner of speaking. “This Gardener will do what you say.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  UNAR SQUATTED to watch Esse work.

  How would the five of them go down? He was the only one with the serpent-tooth spines that let him cling to the tree like a spider. Hasbabsah’s had been snapped off when she’d first been captured and made a slave. Esse took a sharp axe from his pack, cut away a slab of tallowwood bark that would have done for a sleeping mat, and began to chisel something from the side of the tree above their heads.

  It seemed forever before the short plank, pointed at one end and barely wide enough to hold a single person, was ready to be separated from the tree. Esse paused to push his pursed lips into a bark crevice, drinking the rainwater. Unar and the others did the same. They waited, wet and miserable, while he meticulously shaped another five short planks.

  Unar thought about Aoun discovering that she and the two slaves were gone. She imagined him having to tell Servant Eilif that he had failed. It serves him right. Let him torture himself wondering if she and Oos had died or lived.

  Edax, though. Edax deserved an explanation. When Unar failed to appear at their secluded meeting place, he might wonder how he’d offended her, when he hadn’t offended her at all. The opposite.

  He wouldn’t know that she was below the barrier, as he was, but too far away for him to hear her and with no magic to stretch out to him. In fact, the pool below Ehkisland where Edax had taught her to dive, swim, and move with a man in intimate ways might be near the Understorian town, Gannak, which Esse had said was the closest town, if not the town where Hasbabsah had come from, Nessa.

  It occurred to Unar that she could have visited Nessa at any time. She’d never thought that news of it might comfort Hasbabsah, or that she might carry a message from the old woman to her folk. That was because unenslaved Understorians were dangerous and savage.

  “Step down,” Esse told her quietly.

  He’d used his axe to make holes in the tree trunk. Then, he’d wedged the six little planks into the holes to make a sort of suicidal spiral staircase. Unar stepped down until she stood on the second-lowest plank. The others were arrayed behind her, with Ylly on the second-highest plank.

  “Pull out the highest plank and pass it down to me, potplant.”

  “Potplant?”

  “An Understorian slave grown like an exotic specimen in the soil of the cursed Garden, are you not?” Esse smiled at Ylly. Unar took hold of the front edge of the plank as it was passed down to her, and Esse hacked another hole, lower down, to wedge the plank into.

  In this manner, they progressed slowly and carefully, until, by midmorning, they stood at the river’s edge far below the place where Esse had netted them. Unar saw a wooden ramp, narrow and covered with moss and lichen, leading straight into the flow.

  “Hold the railing tight,” their guide advised. “Yes, you must get wet again, but you will become warm and dry inside. We keep the fire burning for the whole of the monsoon. Do not think I have enjoyed cutting and drying the fuel. Go on. Go past me. I must bring the planks in.”

  Unar brushed him as she passed. His thin, stick-body was completely unyielding; even his belly was hard with muscle. It was like brushing past a sapling. She stared at the rushing water of the vertical river. The ability to swim wouldn’t protect her if she slipped from the platform and was washed down to Floor.

  She seized the platform railing and dragged herself through the flow. Her feet left the floor. The weight of water was like hammers on her head. She kicked, hard, and found the platform again, propelling herself towards the tree trunk just as her fingers lost their grip.

  The tree trunk was hollowed away. She fell, gasping like a landed fish, into a room lit only by luminous fungi.

  Men’s boots and cloaks hung from hooks in the circular wall. Shelves held sacks and woven items unidentifiable in the gloom. Wet underclothes were draped over a drying rack, and Unar hesitated before plunging into the black corridor that was apparently the only way for her to go—were there hairy, naked Understorian warriors inside? Esse had said that they would stay with him until the rain stopped, but how many fellow trappers, fishers, and hunters shared his quarters?

  She couldn’t use her magic to find out. The place where it had been no longer felt hollow. It felt like nothing, like before she’d felt the seed inside her for the first time. Unar knew that if she tried to enter Canopy, the border would throw her back as violently as the princess’s curtains had.

  Before she could start towards the corridor, Oos and Hasbabsah crashed into her back. They sprawled together on the floor; it was unpolished, and splinters found their way into Unar’s face. She stumbled into a pile of sacks and sat there, trying to work the wood out from under her skin, swearing until she remembered Edax’s te
ar-shaped scars and became distracted by wondering if their making had been painful for him to endure.

  “I think I will just sleep here,” Hasbabsah wheezed, staying where she was, facedown on the floor.

  Ylly exploded out of the curtain of river water, spluttering and shaking.

  Esse came after her with his arms full of boards. He narrowly skirted the slumped shape of Hasbabsah and leaned the boards against the shelves, shaking his short, dark hair like a wet tapir. He helped the groaning old slave to her feet and led her down the corridor without a word.

  At the end of it, he opened a door to a second room filled with heat and light. It smelled powerfully of spices and smoked fish.

  Unar was irresistibly drawn with the others, single file, towards it.

  “Have we leave to sit at your table?” Hasbabsah asked.

  “Our table is yours while the bucket fills,” said a deeper, heartier voice than Esse’s.

  When Unar reached the doorway, she saw a stone hearth bigger than a slave’s bedroom. It dominated the far wall. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen so much precious stone in one place. Perhaps they had traded it from Floor. This big room was as dry, open, and bright as the first space had been dark, cramped, and dank. A bored chimney carried away the fragrant smoke from the fire, but not before it passed through three tiers of gutted river fish on iron spits. Crates of dried broadleaves sat to the left of the hearth; dried, wrapped meat portions filled cloth sacks to the right. There were embroidered hangings on either side of the hearth, too, that might have been decorative or covered entryways to other corridors.

  In the centre of the room, a coarse cross-section of quandong wood served as a table, its surface broad enough to host a demon sacrifice. The slab held dark, dried blood in its crevices, as though it had been used for butchering before.

  Two men sat at the table, at the point farthest from the fire. Thankfully, neither was completely naked; they wore short waist-wraps and nothing else. One was an enormous, red-haired brute with a beard and pale arms patterned with inked beasts. The other was small with a smooth chin, yellow hair, and clear eyes the colour of clouds.