I owe the following people a deep debt of gratitude for their contributions in making this book a reality:
My wife, Pamela.
Trish Munroe and Josh Rigsby, eagle-eyes in my group.
Michelle Kidd, my faithful reader and precious friend.
This one is dedicated to all of you.
Cover: Steven Novak
novakillustration@gmail.com
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
(c) 2015 Patrick Sean Lee
They’ve blindfolded me. I sit in the cargo bay of a Helicere II, my hands bound behind my back, my knees to my chest. The only sound is the soft, low whirring of the engines somewhere near the rear below the deck. I am freezing because they stripped me of my prison clothes, then dressed me in a flimsy tunic just before I was led up the ramp. Not even sandals. Why didn’t they simply shoot me, or hang me? After all, I’m a murderer.
It’s been hours, me sitting, numb from the cold, until suddenly, finally, I hear another sound. A different one than the engines, like a door sliding open to my left. Seconds later a hand gripping me under the armpit. A jerk to my feet, and then another, larger door sliding open. And then a frigid blast of wind.
I know what is going to happen next, I’m certain, and I am petrified.
I wonder what it will feel like when I hit the ground? For that last split second of life, anyway. I scream, but it all happens so fast that maybe I only imagine me screaming. Maybe I haven’t made a sound.
Two or three tripping steps, and then the rough push. The whir and drone of the Helicere’s engines slowly fading to quiet. Air ripping over me as hard and furious as water in a raging river. I want to thrash my arms, but I can’t. I want to see the ground rushing up at me for some unexplainable reason, the panorama narrowing until it becomes impossible to focus in that final second coming too soon. The blindfold panics me as much as the sensation of falling. Maybe more. Would it be any more comforting to actually see my death approaching at 120 miles per hour?
I think of Father just before I hit.
I'd never seen my father cry. Not ever. Not even when Emmani died four years ago. She'd contracted some virus two weeks earlier. That was common in our caste neighborhood. Getting sick was more often than not a death sentence, especially for the children or the very old.
Emmani was my sister. The youngest in our family. The one who still had time to learn what living in despair would be like as the years passed. Back then, before she got sick, her eyes were as dark and beautiful and sparkling as the summer sky at midnight. She was six. I was twelve that year. I’d long ago begun to learn.
Father finally cried when they came to arrest me two weeks ago. Three Polit cops with weapons drawn, as though any of us could have resisted. The men didn’t bother to knock. They simply knocked the door inward. It smashed against Jeren who’d been sitting on a stool to the right of the door reading a book Father had stolen just for him. Daddy had made that stool out of scavenged wood from the dump. It broke when the force of the door smashed into Jeren and he fell.
I knew why they’d come, of course. None of my family did, though, except Mondra. I’d killed someone. That crime would probably have gone unnoticed had it been done to someone from our district. Rape and murder and theft in the walled-in area of Black were acceptable, as long as the perpetrator and victim were citizens of Black. As long as it was contained inside the high stone walls. Squalor and over-breeding presented problems to our masters. Well, over-breeding at least. Murder helped in some small way to alleviate frustration and outright revolt they must have reasoned. Plagues that seasonally ravaged us. Quieter. They liked the plagues.
It all helped.
“Alana Bendrece!” That was the officer’s first demand. Step forward, Alana.
He was the tallest of the three, the first in, the ugliest of them, his gun pointed at Daddy. His black Polit cap was pulled down nearly to his fleshy eyebrows. His spotless black uniform and leather coat could not be drawn tightly enough to mask his hideous girth.
Daddy took an almost stumbling step forward when the man yelled, raising his hands in front of him. Don’t shoot.
“What is this…”
The Polit cop sighted his gun. Mother stood way back in the corner like a statue, stone-faced. Jeren lay frozen atop the ruins of the stool. My two other sisters, Mondra and Tereka, faces in shock and disbelief, snapped their heads back at me. I was standing with a wooden ladle dripping the weak stew from the pot hanging in the fireplace onto my skirt.
I knew the Polit police would eventually arrive, and here they were.
“Alana Bendrece! Step forward!” He was looking directly at me by then. So were Mondra and Tereka. Here she is.
I handed the ladle to Tereka. She began to cry. I moved quietly between them and walked the few feet toward the scowling bastard from outside our walls. He kept his gun pointed at Daddy, but he had his eyes locked on mine. One of his companions rushed to me, grabbed my arms, and spun me around. Mondra took hold of Tereka, yanking her face into her chest. I felt the man’s fingers wrap the plastic tie around my wrist, and then the sharp pain of it tightening, gouging my flesh.
“Why? What has she done?” my father asked.
None of them answered. The officer who had lashed my wrists spun me back around, and then dragged me across the room and out the door. He threw me into the Skirter parked in the dirt road, and then slammed the metal door closed. I came to rest flat on my stomach, a gash in my shin. There was only the faint light from the weak seal between the door and the metal enclosure surrounding it, leaking in like the blood oozing out on my leg.
Through the walls of my cage I could hear weeping entreaties from my father, and the harsh command to stay inside spewing from the officer’s mouth.
A moment later the vehicle rustled under the weight of my captors entering the cab, the purr of the hydro engine, and we were away.
I knew my trial wouldn’t take long. Black trials took an hour or less it was rumored. I’d be found guilty because of my stature, my caste, but after that, what fate awaited a murderer no one in Black really knew for certain. Always only rumors, that’s all.
I fall forever. Something, some things strike me again and again and again. Tiny needles that pierce my frozen skin. Pass through me. Rip out the other side. I’m nauseous. I continue forever to tumble, the wind screaming in my ears. But I know none of these sensations, these thoughts, can be true. Not really. It was mere seconds ago they pushed me.
It ends. I hit at last, though that really doesn’t describe my landing adequately. The first sensation is of sinuous fingers or tightly woven branches breaking my fall, slowing it drastically, quickly, but not with the crushing jar I’d expected.
I sink. A second or two of downward deceleration, and then back up I go. I am in a net of some sort! The net catapults me free, and then captures me when I hit again. Again, head over heels. Again...until finally it’s over. I settle in. My head is reeling—me lying here trying to put it all together. My skin tingles. I’m blind. Bound still. Where am I?
I rise wobbly, lose my balance immediately, and then fall forward into the thick elastic-like threads. If I could just see! If my hands weren’t bound. But I have perfect hearing, a sense we Blacks cultivate as carefully as the meager plots of vegetables outside our shacks. There is—was—always danger present back home, and a studied Black can often hear it coming before seeing it. What’s out there in this world I cannot see?
I wonder how much danger lurks here?
I have to somehow scrape the blindfold off my head, at least from over my eyes, and then slide my arms under me so that I can see the binding cutting into my wrists. I have no knife, no weapon or tool of any sort, but I have teeth.
The net fibers don’t help me at first. Scraping my nose, then finally trying to gain purchase with the side of my temple. It hits me, after I’ve rubbed my skin raw—the knot in the back. It’s possible to catch it in the open areas between the net fibers, arch my neck back and forth.
As I work on the knot, I listen intently for any noise. How high off the ground am I? I’ll know in a moment. What kind of place is this? I smell…what? What odors are those?
With one final twist and jerk of my head, the blindfold falls off.
The first thing I see is a hazy blue sky. That’s fine. My rattled mind digests it easily. I turn my head to the left.
Oh gods…
Beyond me out there, melting into my vision, a canopy of dark, dark green. It is thick and foreboding, stretching as far in each direction as I can see. I struggle to my knees.
But I was right. I’ve fallen into a net. It’s massive, stretching nearly to the edge of the forest twenty or thirty yards in front of me. Burning white sand, ten feet below my perch runs up to the beginning of that tangle of dense green cloud. My saving interlocked cords run left perhaps five yards, right fifty. I must have hit the net twenty or thirty yards back to my right, bounced forward over and over, hit again, then wound up here. What were the odds that I’d even hit the net? Luck, or fate I suppose.
I turn, and beyond the checked surface’s distant edge lies a sea. The strongest of those odors that struck me as I fell. The great pier shafts supporting the net on this side soar upward like naked church spires. A strange bird with black wings circles above the one far off to my left, then extends enormous claws and lands silently. Its head and beak drop slightly. It’s looking down at me.
I have to get out of here quickly! I roll onto my stomach, arch my back, and force my bound hands over my rear. Flip onto my back again, and work my arms over my legs and feet.
The giant bird is watching.
The plastic isn’t tied, rather ratcheted, so it’s impossible to use my teeth to loosen what I wish had been a simple knot. Even with my dog-teeth, chewing through it will take hours. I don’t think I have that long. The bird is beginning to raise its wings, and worse, high above, soaring in from the sea, two other of its friends—or competitors—are headed this way.
The distance to the edge of the net on the inland side is short enough. I can’t spread my hands outward to grab hold and swing my body over, but I can grab it, and so I struggle quickly toward it. As I grab hold of the thick rail I catch a glimpse of two bodies sprawled out on the beach near the forest edge. They must have missed the landing spot.
It’s about ten feet to the white sand below. I hope it’s soft. I release my grip and fall a second time, but I’m prepared for the impact this time, and surprised as I roll how giving the sand is.
On my back I can’t help but notice that the bird has come to a new perch—a few feet down from me on the net’s rail. Its wings are moving slowly as it eyes me, and the monster’s claws latching onto the rail are ten times the size of my hands! My only hope is the thick growth of green not far away.
I’m onto my feet and running. I hear the hard rustle of feathers before I get five steps, and I force myself to not look back. Before I can blink, another sound erupts—a hideous screech, the sound of pain coming from my pursuer. A split second later the bird crashes on top of me. Neither claws nor beak rip into my skin, though. No further sound or movement. It’s just dead weight atop me, pinning me to the ground. I’m confused. I feel warm liquid flowing onto my back. The thing’s blood.
As I struggle to catch my breath once more and work free of the beast a voice calls out from the tangle of growth a few yards away.
“Sorry. Meant to get him while he was still checkin’ you out up on the net.”
I raise my head. A boy about my age is running toward me. He has a bow in his left hand, and the quiver on his bare back bounces with each step. His skin is dark brown. He’s wearing only a pair of ragged shorts with spots splattered all over them. He looks like Aaron, the boy I sometimes worked beside in the fields beyond the walls back home. Thick eyebrows over deep-set eyes the color of ebony. A small mouth that’s smiling, but tentatively, as if he’s happy and frightened at the same time.
When he reaches me he grabs my bound hands and yanks me from beneath the dead bird.
“Hustle up. We’ve gotta’ get out of here. They’ll be coming in a second.”
“Wha…? Where am I? Who is they?”
“No time. I’ll explain later. Follow me!”
My first thought as I stumble along behind him is that the theyare the other birds I saw a few moments ago. Maybe he’ll stop at the edge of the bushes, knock an arrow, then turn and shoot another? He doesn’t, though. Just rushes between a break in the bushes. A path barely wide enough for a dog to stay on. I follow, certain that those birds can’t get far. The tree line is only a short distance in front of us. When we reach it he stops and pulls a knife from a scabbard on his hip. He turns to me, and I nearly tumble into him. Not an altogether unpleasant thought. He’s strangely beautiful, so unlike the boys back home. Muscled, and I don’t think he intends to stab me.
“Raise your hands up.”
I do it, taking a step backward, bringing them even with his chest. He isn’t even breathing heavily, which is more than I can say for myself. My head is spinning. Without a word he slips the blade between my wrists, and then with one quick movement slices the bands. He returns the knife to its holder and then grabs my shoulders.
“Thank…”
“We don’t have much time. Let’s get moving,” he says.
He takes my hand, and we’re off at a dead run again. Somehow I don’t think he’s worried about giant birds.
“What is this place? Who are you?” I pant.
“Later.”
In the distance I suddenly hear the sound of voices, growing louder by the second. Thick growth being trampled underfoot. The they the boy was talking about I’m pretty sure. I don’t let go of his hand.
I ran that evening back in Black, but unlike this wild and forbidding place there were no trees to offer protection. At least like the ones here. The path winds around and beneath them like an endlessly long string laid down haphazardly by a wandering beggar. I can barely keep up with the boy as we run. I stumble time and again, but he hesitates only long enough to help me back to my bare feet. And then we’re off again.
I was frightened then. Back outside the walls of the Black. More so than even now. Here I do have the protection of the thick, thorny bushes and the massive trees. And a friend. I think he is. That night I had nothing of the sort. Sterile roads running straight as arrows as far behind me as I could see. Towering canyons of concrete and glass on either side. Narrow alleyways, dark and dangerous, that intersected the streets every hundred yards. The city outside our walls must have been designed by a machine, unlike the untidy maze of Black.
That’s where I found myself near twilight that day. On one of those dreadful avenues. It wasn’t unusual for cobblers or craftsmen or maids to enter Polit. In fact it was necessary, both for us and for them. We provided many of the services that Polits were either incapable of providing for themselves, or too indolent—as Father put it—to lower themselves to engage in.
I had delivered a clean and neatly wrapped bundle of garments Mother had washed and pressed to the arrogant Mr. Dase. His palatial three-story home stood in snarling grandeur, set back off the avenue bordered by lush green lawns, and dotted with manicured bushes. Stately trees in which highly cultured squirrels and birds surely resided in Polit luxury and Polit peace.
Mrs. Freel accepted the garments at the front door that had no doubt been carved and set in its place by some long-dead carpenter from Black. These people would die without us, I remember thinking as I stood there waiting for the maid—the maid brought in, scrubbed to cleanliness that would make gods sigh, and then relegated to quarters somewhere deep in the interior. She was a childhood friend of my mother, but unless Mother herself delivered clean laundry to the home, they would never see one another again. She didn’t smile or greet me in any way when she answered the knock. Just took the clothes, handed me an envelope with six coins sealed inside, and then disappeared.
I left.
I should have known better. I should have returned exactly the way I’d come. Quickly. It was late afternoon, after all. For some reason that escapes me I drifted east toward Freedom Park instead of continuing south, almost as if my legs and feet had replaced my good senses. I sat down on a gray boulder overhanging a gurgling stream far inside the domain reserved for Polits, thinking of nothing in particular, really. Throwing seed pods into the water. Singing low. Watching in envy the well-dressed Polit couples ambling by on the cobbled walk across the stream.
I’d just thrown a pod. A man and a woman had passed by on the walk seconds earlier, paying no attention to me. More likely they hadn’t seen me. A catcall close behind startled me. This was followed by crude laughter and more obscene remarks.
Six Polit teenagers approached my little sanctuary of stone, encircling me. They began to climb up the rounded surface, sneers on their faces. I knew what was coming next.
***
We stop. I am panting, and a thorn from one of the bushes has gashed my calf. My rescuer looks beyond me, his dark eyes shifting every second, following the voices. Searching for them. I want to ask him his name, but there is no time for that. He tightens his grip on my hand, quickly adjusts the bow slung across his back, and then we begin an ascent of the tree we’ve been leaning against as though he is a panther. We rocket upward, he finding every needed branch with one hand, every cleft in the bark with his bare feet. I scream at first, but he shushes me with a scowl. I’m amazed at his strength and agility. I’m hanging onto him with both hands, now.
The trees are at least two hundred feet tall. I can’t see where the one we’re in ends and the next begins. I am on another planet I think. We continue on our journey upward, into a blanket of dense clouds, and then through it. Up. Up. Up. There seems no end to the canopy. The voices far below finally fade, and I wonder if whoever they are they will follow us.
“Stop! Please stop,” I say when he begins to lead me out onto a gnarled branch that’s twice the width of a body. He turns.
“What?”
“Who are you? What’s your name? I’m exhausted and I’m scared to death!”
“You are, huh?” he says. “You want to sit here and talk, or do you want to stay alive?”
“Where are we?”
“My name is Sant. Let’s go.”
I haven’t had time to sit. Sant pulls me onward, moving as assuredly as he did…down there. I’m glad I can’t see through the clouds, and that I have both hands locked in a death grip on his wrist. Fifty feet or so farther on, the branch thins. I can feel it moving up and down with each step, now.
What?
Sant squats slightly, and then springs up and out. Sant! He pulls me into his body in one swift movement as we rise. I’m locked to his chest, screeching like a piglet being slaughtered. I’m tired of falling for one day. For one lifetime. Tired and petrified, because this time there will be no net, and I will see the ground rushing up at me if he loses his grip on me.
We land on yet another branch, which I find incredible. It is flat and almost smooth on top. Sant gently loosens his hold on me, allowing me to collapse at his feet.
“Almost home,” he says in a very normal, quite calm tone of voice. I’m unable to answer. Say anything. I’m sure he can see that I’ve tumbled into a river of ice. That my eyes are the size of two full moons.
The needles are piercing me again. I don’t like this. Not one bit. My heart is hammering in my stomach. My stomach is in my throat. I can’t get up, even though Sant begins to tug. This branch is swaying, and I glare up into his face.
“No. Not another step!”
Sant’s hold on my hand loosens, and he flies backward with a look of shock. He lands an inch away from the edge of the branch, but that doesn’t seem to affect him. His eyes are moons, now, as he looks over at me.
“How did you do that?” he blurts.
I think about the question. “Do what? Sant, I’m scared to death! I’m high up in a tree; somewhere I have no idea of with a…what are you? Where are you taking me? I don’t want to be here!” I crawl over to him and put my face close to his. “Tell me.”
He blinks, looks down over the edge. Back at me. He shrugs his shoulders and then snips. “I just saved your life. You ought to show a little more gratitude, whoever you are.”
“My name is Alana. Thanks, I guess. But, what is this place?”
“I just told you. It’s my home.” I see his eyes flash down at my hands, and then back up to mine. “How’d you do that?”
I don’t know what he is talking about. “I didn’t do anything. Tell me, where are we and where are we going?”
Sant remains silent for a moment, squinting at me. Finally he stands and points up. I follow his fingers and cringe. Above us, the tangle of branches continue until they become lost in a mass of solid green. I gauge we have already ascended maybe a hundred feet. I look over the edge of the branch we’re on. My stomach turns. This can’t be.
“Oh no. No. I want you to take me back down!”
“I don’t think you do. I got to you just in time. Another minute and the Jades would have had you. You can’t go back to the ground.”
Jades? The strange birds, or the voices I heard?
He reaches for my hand with a wary look on his face. “It isn’t far now. Come on. If you’re afraid, just close your eyes. I won’t let go of you, trust me. Won’t they be surprised when they see what I found!”
Won’t I be surprised when I open my eyes and see where he has dragged me. I’m trying to imagine a huge nest up there somewhere. I glance over the side again. It makes me dizzy and want to throw up. Guess I haven’t much choice. He’s smiling a little. He knows what I’m thinking.
“Just don’t let go.”
Sant takes hold of my waist with one hand and pulls me into his chest. I wrap my arms around him and squeeze as hard as I can, and suddenly we’re off again. I close my eyes and pray.
The next few minutes seem to last forever. I refuse to open my eyes, and I don’t think I can lock my hands any tighter around his waist. Tiny branches whip my legs and back every other second as we travel up and up and up. Now and then I hear the surprised screech of birds, and immediately afterward the sound of wings flapping furiously. I’m not as frightened as I was five minutes ago, but that is like the dead person saying she isn’t as dead as she was ten minutes ago. It’s not like we are going straight up, his body twists and bends at the most unexpected times. We drop—I close my eyes tighter and clench my teeth. We hit another branch. He bends down, and then we spring sideways. On and on, over and over, until at last we come to rest, and he doesn’t leap again. Sant’s arm relaxes. He tries to set me down, but I have a death grip on him.
“You can let go now. We’re home,” he says.
It takes a second. I reach down with my left foot. Solid. Okay. I release the hold I have on him, but not before I open one eye and peer out.
I don’t believe what I am seeing!
It smells…earthy. But that can’t be. There isn’t any soil in trees. Still, here it is, or must be. I don’t believe my eyes. Thick mossy green covers the surface everywhere I look. And more trees! Smaller, much like those I’m used to seeing back home in Polit. Straight ahead I see the emerald ground rise. A pathway leads to it, and then winds in a lazy S-curve upward around the contour, disappearing at the top. To the left, a thick forest of the small trees. On the other side of us twenty yards away. Behind us. This is unbelievable. I am in a forest atop a forest.
We’re at the top because I can see the warming sun in a bright blue sky. A colorful bird launches outward from the branches, followed by three others cacking and squawking, chasing after it like swiftly moving splotches of red and orange and purple paint across the face of the sun. The lead bird dives, and, just that quickly, I lose sight of them all.
I take a long deep breath and drop my eyes to where we stand. Soft, almost spongy, but it seems firm. Sant notices, and so he jumps up and down a few times.
“We won’t fall through.” He says this with a tone of amusement.
All I can think of to say in my present state of awe is, “How high?”
“Oh I don’t know. About a mile I suppose." He laughs at that little joke. "About five hundred feet. Like it?” I don’t answer. I can’t. “Let’s go, I’ll take you to my village.”
He leads me over the path in the direction of the tall hill. The green earth, or whatever it is, is well-worn and hardpacked where we step, but off to each side it has that spongy appearance, soft-looking like marshland. Tiny groups of white and crimson flowers, their heads popped up out of the tops of the hundreds of mounds, move to and fro in unison like a little mute choir. Here and there in the deeper troughs white mists hover, and then gracefully change form as imperceptibly soft breezes flow across them, or the un-hearable music strikes their cloudy bodies.
My eyes are everywhere, but nowhere in particular as Sant leads me by the hand up the hill. At last we reach the top, and I nearly topple backward when I catch sight of what lies below. I yank my hand free of his and cover my mouth that has suddenly dropped to my knees.
A mile? Two? I can’t judge. It’s a valley. No, there are hundreds more trees throughout, rising upward with the terrain on three sides. Only a lowland…a valley! But that isn’t the most astonishing thing I see. Below us at the base of this hill we stand upon there is a stream. It can’t be illusory, can’t be thick mist, because it is rippling and reflecting the sunlight, and it is visibly moving. I don’t know where it originates, can’t see where it ends and…plummets over the side?
Oh, if my brother and sisters could only see this.
Sant waves his free hand in a wide arc. “This is Catanar.” Once again I am unable to respond. At least intelligently. I think I might have just said, “Gaaah,” or maybe it was “Guh.”
He leads me down the path. We cross a wisp of a footbridge, under which the stream gurgles by. From where we were at the summit of the hill a moment ago, the valley looked so different. Down here I’m staring into the edge of a beautiful painting, it seems. What was open in places is now closed by the lines of trees. The stream splashes along over rocks, jogs along happily, twisting and turning, and then disappears. I imagine a gaping hole, and the water dancing over its edge into the oblivion of space beneath us. Even the idea of it is astounding. Frightening.
I keep looking sideways, straining my ears to catch the sound of a waterfall. I’m wondering how I could have missed the water when we were still on the forest floor? Maybe that giant bird did get me. I’m dead, dreaming this. Father said once that when you die your brain keeps on working for several minutes. I know the difference between a dream state and consciousness. This is all too real. Every nerve, every sense in my body is totally alive and working overtime.
There! Someone moves quickly in the branches off to the left. Over there, two others. Suddenly there is a swarm of people leaping out of the trees, approaching us. Sant leads me on as they gather and whisper to one another, scurrying around us on either side of the path. He greets some of them as we pass among them. Two of them, a very young boy and a girl, follow close beside me trading giggles every other step. I feel like an alien pet being led home on a leash.
My escorts lead me beneath a bower of branches, a sort of covered walkway, and from there into a wide clearing. Several of the younger-looking of the group leap and dance away into the branches of trees lining the perimeter, shouting, disappearing through wooden doorways half-buried behind railings of thick, intertwined vines. There are no ladders or stairways anywhere.
Sant lets loose of my hand when we’ve gone maybe thirty feet into the clearing. He stops and plants his bow’s tip onto the green surface, greets a few other people who have rushed over to his side. Most of them are youths, like us, but a handful of adults nudge those out of the way and begin questioning Sant. All of these tree dwellers are dressed in varied colored, short tunics, with loose-fitting breeches that fail to hide muscled thighs. Hair the color of coal; bronze that reflects the sun; a few, pale green.
“Who is this?” a tall, older man asks.
“Found her wandering around down on the forest floor.”
No, no, you found me beneath a giant bird!
“Not good, Sant. You should have left her,” the man replies with an air of disdain.
“They were nearly on her, Father. I couldn’t.”
The conversation continues, most of which I can’t make out. I feel dizzy and kind of nauseous suddenly. The woman who was beside him leaves the older man and approaches me. She’s much shorter than the older man—I take it Sant’s father—a kindly smile gracing her pretty face.
“Welcome child. Pay no attention to Maidan and the others. They worry too much. You’re safe here. My name is Mara.”
I don’t answer. I’m staring at her lavender eyes. They’re glowing. Her entire image is beginning to spin, and a searing pain has suddenly begun to grow in my leg, as though I’ve been standing in fire.
“You are as pale as…”
That’s the last thing I hear before everything goes black.
When I awaken it is dark. I am lying on something soft, with a warm coverlet drawn up to my chest. Someone is standing near me in the shadows holding a cloth and a pitcher. What time is it, I wonder? How long have I been out? Hours, or days? I feel so much better, though. Alive again. The pain in my body, especially in my leg, is practically gone.
Through the opening leading outside this room a pulse of light enters, rising and falling in sporadic little bursts that make the room’s deep shadows dance. I hear voices. The people who live up here are gathered somewhere out there, talking about something, maybe arguing, it’s hard to say—I can’t discern the words. Whatever the meeting is about, I get the feeling that I’m at the center of it. Or very close.
“Feeling better? He should have carried you, Alana. He knows better. I’m surprised it didn’t kill you,” she says. It is Mara, or Mala, or Mawba. The woman who came to me—how long ago was that? And what was it that might have killed me, I wonder?
I rise and then walk on unsteady legs to the exit where I peer out. The friendly woman is right beside me, a steadying hand beneath my elbow. Yes. Twenty or so people are gathered in a broad clearing. In the center of a broad pit of stone a fire crackles. All of the people except one are sitting cross-legged. A man is standing, listening to a woman across from him. Maidan. The swirling flames throw little waves of light. Make his face change as tiny shadows emerge and then die away. Fwoop. Fwoop. Fwoop.
I turn my head to the woman beside me. “It’s Mara? That’s your name?”
“Yes. I am Sant’s mother.” She places her other hand around my waist. Mara must think I’m about to collapse again, but I feel fine.
I step outside onto a narrow porch. The exterior walls of the hut I’ve been in are covered with thick vines, filled with leaves that are as big as my hands. The little building sits alone, tucked into what appears to be a small alcove twenty or twenty-five feet off the ground. To my left and right, farther away, other dwellings line the perimeter of the clearing in other trees, built into the maze of thick branches that give way to a night sky splattered with a blanket of stars. Down below there is a fire pit, and the group of people whose voices I heard are gathered around it.
The seated woman continues with whatever she’s been saying, when Maidan notices me. Even as far away as he is in this fractured light, I see a look of concern grow on his face. He motions with a hand for the woman to stop, then steps around the circle of people and walks toward the porch I stand on. All their heads turn. Murmurs erupt in more tiny bursts and exclamations.
“You are well I see,” he says when he reaches me. “Well enough to join us?”
“No, Maidan. Leave her be. She needs more rest,” Mara says to him. She whispers in my ear. “Don’t be frightened. This is about you.”
Somehow I figured as much. No one other than her seems particularly happy. Everyone is jittery, in fact. Sitting in the crowd is Sant. He is stone-faced, looking down at something near his right foot. I guess he’s not thrilled to see me, either. Suddenly I’m nervous, but I let Mara take me back inside, and wait to hear the good news. She takes hold of my hand and squeezes it gently.
“Alana,” she begins, looking at me directly, “our people have lived safely high up in these trees for…” She stops to think, I guess. “For close to one hundred-fifty years. Most of us. A few have braved the dangers of the forest floor—the plants and animals…and people that can end a life in a heartbeat. Sit down, dear.”
I sit on the cot and fold my hands in my lap. Someone—I hope Mara—dressed me in a clean white gown while I was out. It is loose. Comfortable, covering me to just below the knees. My black hair feels clean, too. I suspect Mara scrubbed me head to toe.
Mara walks across the room to a long table stretched out next to a wall. I see a flame burst to life, and then her fingers touch it to the candle in a holder. She returns to me. Sets the candle on a table, and then takes a seat on a low stool beside the cot.
“You haven’t yet seen their handiwork after they’ve gotten hold of someone. You don’t want to,” Mara says. I haven’t a clue who or what she is referring to.
“Who is they?”
“They are the Jades. They live near the southern end of Folly in a valley, inland about fifteen miles from Catanar. Kell, I call it, is a cruel place; its leader the worst kind of man anyone could imagine. Even the strongest among us stay away from that place of horror. There are rumors we gather from our rare encounters with the few ground dwellers still alive concerning barbarism inside Kell’s walls. Before four days ago when you arrived, they knew we existed, but thus far in our long history have left us alone. Unless we stumble into the grasp of a Jade party wandering the forest floor.”
Jades. Sant mentioned them. So they were chasing me? Why?
“My son said he happened upon you wandering in the forest, that your only chance of survival was if he brought you here. That didn’t set well with Maidan and the other men of Catanar. But, it’s done now. They will get used to your presence and warm to you in time. It’s pointless to try to undo what’s happened.”
“No, you have it all wrong, ma’am. I was brought here in a Helicere—I don’t know why, but they threw me out, and I landed in a net. A giant bird was that close to killing me! Sant shot it with an arrow on the beach, and after that he brought me here. I wasn’t wandering anywhere.”
Mara stares silently for a moment, and then finally speaks. “You arrived delirious, child.”
“No! I was scared, but I wasn’t at all delirious. I remember being trapped under that horrible bird. I remember Sant bringing me up the tree! I remember all of it!”
“One of the side effects of an encounter with a Traescho bush, Alana. Hallucinations are common, if the victim lives. You were fortunate Sant found you, but he should have known better than to have let you walk behind him. One of the deadly thorns scraped your calf somewhere along the trail.”
He didn’t let me walk behind him! He made me run!
“If I was out of my mind, why do I remember being out there where everyone has gathered? The hill we crossed, and the...the stream! I remember you walking over to me when we stopped.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Where does that stream come from, and where does it go? I can’t believe this place could exist. There’s nothing like it back home. Why did the Polit send me here, Mara? Did they think those Jade people were waiting near the net for me? I killed a boy in Polit, you know.” I ramble on, telling her everything. She is so polite, listening to all my story, but I know she doesn’t believe a word of it.
“Lie back, now. Rest. I’ll bring you soup when you awaken again. Just try to put it all out of your mind for now, all right?”
Yes, yes. I’m crazy, but that’s okay. I just need to sleep it all away according to Mara.
I’m not crazy or delirious or out of my mind. I don’t know why Sant made up that lie.
“Tell me about the Jades,” I say.
“Lie back. Go to sleep. I’ll be close by, Alana.” Just like that! Mara gently forces my shoulders down onto the cushiony cot, and then lifts my legs onto it. Pulls the coverlet back over me and snuffs the candle. I don’t think I could sleep even if I wanted to.
Of course I don’t sleep. How could I? Four days of sleeping after I got here was more than enough. I don’t care if I see that bed ever again! When Mara leaves, I pace the room, investigate every nook and cranny, but I don’t dare leave. When she returns, I sit and talk with her. Two full days of this. Children, mostly, flit onto the porch and peek through the door that is always open. I don’t see Sant, though. His father probably has him in chains for having brought me here.
For much of my second day, Mara sat and told me the history of Catanar, how several generations ago the first immigrants arrived, having fled the cruelty and injustice of Polit after the first purge. How the wall went up and they began calling us “The Blacks”. Beneath them, they said. Scourges and leeches on their society. One particularly vicious year, hers and Maidan’s and ten other of their ancestor’s families banded together and secretly built five rafts. They hid them among the reeds along the eastern shoreline until the night they gathered up what little they owned, absolutely necessary for survival, and then struck out, not knowing where they would wind up. Just away from Polit, to live or die, free of the Polit yoke and tyranny.
Two weeks later, nearly dead from starvation and dehydration, the currents finally swept the little band onto the shores of this island. Hungry and thirsty, but alive, they were safe at last. They thought. The island, with its trees that made them blink in astonishment, was inhabited. A wild and primitive race that lived far to the south on a plain. These savages practiced any manner of barbarous rituals to appease their chief god, Abanost. One such yearly ritual was particularly brutal—the dismemberment and burning of two children, as offerings. A boy and a girl two years of age! What manner of god, or gods, would ask anyone to do such a horrible thing? Even Polits, with their single god, would never degenerate into such cruelty. Certainly none of the gods of Black would demand such a thing.
These are the Jades.
The newcomers quickly learned to hide from them after their first encounter, in which five of the Black retinue were captured, and then vanished into an unthinkable fate. The forest floor, with its hungry beasts—civilized compared to the quasi-human Jades—was unsafe. The group’s eyes looked upward into the never ending canopy, and so they left with what few tools they possessed, scaled the heights with baited breaths, and began to slowly construct a community out of sight and reach of everything living below. A crude but manageable Catanar was born that year one hundred-fifty years ago. The Jades, fearful of heights as a fish is fearful of land, in time forgot about these invaders. Or at least put their existence in the backs of their minds.
“It was at best a perilous first few years,” Mara explained. “As you have probably seen, there are thousands of strong branches, and yet one cannot live on a branch, wide as some of them are. It took my ancestors years, but finally they managed to gather up thick vines, and weave underpinning among the limbs. Many cross-hatched layers, and atop this, more layers of delicate vines, until mosses and grasses could be brought up, cut from the low country on the eastern side of the island.”
“How did it grow without water?” I asked. The perfect moment to find out where the source of the stream lay. Mara beamed as she told me of the engineering genius of her forebearers.
“Every day—and it took them months—the Catanarian men descended the tree to find and harvest Baekiol shoots. Do you know of them?”
“No,” I replied.
“The Baekiol shoots are hollow and quite long, many of them. These brave and clever men harvested them, linked them together with a resin Jarol Totor devised, and buried each length under the forest floor to this tree, all the way from a freshwater lake inland many miles away. At the far end of Catanar, high above them, the women in the meantime had been busy building a wind-generated pump.”
With further great effort, the men wound the tube up the horrendous height of this vast giant of a tree, planted creeping vines around it to disguise its presence, and then hooked it into the pump. Catanar came to real life.
“Fifteen…perhaps it was sixteen years ago…after so many years of peace and tranquility, the Polit arrived. With brutal efficiency they decimated, and then subjugated the remainder of the wild Jades. We saw the comings and goings of the mainlanders in their air ships. We stayed far away, hidden high up in the trees, however, not knowing whether our presence would be detected. We assumed it was not.
“After the slaughter, the Polit leaders forced the remainder of the Jades to build a fort at the southernmost end of the island, overlooking a cliff. We wondered for what reason they would construct such a place, sent a party of scouts out, and eventually found that it is not only a fortress to keep predators and the few unconquered Jades out, but also a place where some sort of research was to be conducted. It is our feeling that you were on your way there before your ship crashed in the water near the beach.”
“How many times have I told you, I was thrown out!” I told Mara. She merely shook her head in feigned agreement—and obvious pity for me. Traescho induced amnesia, hah!
***
Tomorrow, Mara informs me, I am to be “let loose” to explore Catanar and meet its inhabitants, as chance arranges.
“Will you be escorting me?” I ask.
“No, dear, but someone will be close by at all times. We don’t want you to fall over the edge,” she answers with a mischievous chuckle.
So, the children? Those too young to instinctively know danger? What prevents them from toppling to certain death? She hasn’t answered nearly all of my questions concerning Catanar, this frightfully amazing village, but it seems a certainty that I’ll have a lifetime to stumble upon all the answers by exploration, trial and, hopefully not—error.
***
I am too frightened to jump from the porch to the ground. It must be at least twenty feet! I can see quite a few children whizzing through the branches all around me, but my brain can’t comprehend the mechanics of their movements. They make moving around up here seem like second nature; like normal kids walking and running on a dusty street back home. So, I grab a thick vine dangling near the railing. Test it by yanking, scoot myself over the edge, grunt my way down amid the sounds of laughter at my clumsy antics. But, I’m safe on solid…whatever this stuff is that my feet are on. They aren’t. Maybe it will be one or two of them that falls. Probably not.
I head that way, which is opposite the way I came in. Logical. I don’t know if it’s north, south, east or west, but I’m on my way. Doesn’t matter which direction. They’re all the same at five hundred—did Sant say five hundred?—feet off the forest floor. I try not to think about that. Try to simply observe the marvel of this gigantic treehouse. I stick to the broad pathway that leads eventually through a wall of more trees—what at first I thought was the farthest limit of Catanar. It isn’t. There’s more on the other side.
As one might expect, the ground spreads evenly, pretty much, in both directions ahead of me. This is a man-made plain, after all, bordered by trees and little hillocks on either side. The difference here is immediately apparent, though. I see rows and rows of crops rising up, tucked into a distant horizon. The end of the plain? The edge of this kingdom in the sky? And there, off to my left. That must be the wind pump, leathery arms twirling slowly in the soft breeze. Another smaller version repeats the motion of its neighbor. Beside it on the ground a thatch-covered building with a yellow skinned pipe connected to little guy pump. If they were motionless, they would almost look like the trees surrounding them on two sides. Various other huts run in a semi-circle along the perimeter, with some broad, some narrow, well-beaten byways that snake like veins all across the lumpy green surface connecting them.
Commerce Central? Storehouse Row? Two adults are busy, doing something to the yellowed pipe. They don’t see me, or if they do, pay no attention to my entrance. I see scythes rise and fall rhythmically in the fields straight ahead, tall harvestings shaking, and then falling in their wake. I want to see the source of water, though, and so I turn left and head for the wind pumps, my eyes catching movement behind me when I do. A large group of mixed-aged Catanarians who stop immediately when they notice I’ve spotted them. Like they’re wary of me. A woman with shoulder length dark hair latches onto the shoulders of an ebony-haired child dancing along in front of her. Draws him protectively into her midsection. All of them back up a step or two. The men working on the pipe stop and turn toward the sounds of the approaching crowd. Lay down their tools and stare suspiciously at me. I continue walking along the path anyway. The two men separate at my approach. Am I carrying a plague?
I wonder how long I’ll have to stay in Catanar? I guess I can’t go back to the unfriendlier ground any time soon. If ever. Maybe there are other trees with other communities on this stupid island. Places with nicer residents. I curse the Polits for having sent me here.
“Betta’ not go in,” a deep voice warns me. So he has a tongue! I turn. The guy holding the metal tool is standing five feet away. Far beyond him the others are still standing, keeping their distance, muttering to one another.
“You a Jade?” he answers.
What?
“I’m from Black. It’s a village, kind of like this one. Sort of. Far away—over the ocean somewhere. It isn’t built in a tree, though. Have you heard of it?”
Weird.
“How does the water back in the hut get into the stream I saw when Sant brought me up here?” Maybe he can answer that. I haven’t seen any sign of a stream.
Out of the trees?
“There’s lotsa’ trees.”
“Big one, right ‘neath us.”
“You mean we’re standing on a lake?”
Well yes, any idiot can see that. I press on. “What’s your name?”
“Like string, or kidney?” I’m trying my best to break the ice cleverly.
“Never mind. My name is Alana Bendrece.” I shove my hand at him, but he freaks.
“Jus’ stay back.” Been very nervously rises and backs away. Why is he so frightened of my handshake? Within a few clunky backward steps, he turns and makes a beeline straight across the lumpy green, into the agitated crowd. They all shuffle back in the direction they came. I look down at the palm of my hand. What?