Grass (44 page)

Rillibee swarmed down a great vine-draped tree like an ape. "I got turned around," he said. "The trees look different in the light, and it took me a while to find my way back."

"Did you find them?" she asked. "The voices?"

"I found their city," Rillibee answered. "You have to come see it."

"We have to go the other way" – she pointed – "to find the trail … "

"Up," he insisted. "I think we should."

"Up," agreed Brother Mainoa. "If we can."

"One of the things that took me so long was finding a trail the horses can follow," Rillibee said. "That way." He pointed deeper into the swamp. "Then we'll climb."

"Why?" Marjorie cried. "Stella isn't in there … "

"The trail is out there among the grasses, Marjorie," Brother Mainoa said. "But that's not necessarily the way. While you were still asleep, Tony and I went to the edge of the forest. The Hippae are still there. There is no way we can go out that way just now."

"But why?" she gestured upward, fighting tears. "I don't want to go sightseeing, for the love of God."

"Perhaps it is for the love of God we should go," Father James said. "Do you know what's up there, Brother Mainoa?"

"I suspect." he replied. "I suspect what is up there. I have suspected since the report came from Semling."

"What is it?"

"I think it is the last Arbai city," he said. "The very last."

He would tell them nothing more. He said he didn't know. When they asked Rillibee, he said only that they would see for themselves. He led them as they rode across shallow pools, down aisles of trees. Sometimes he stopped and simply looked at the trees while they waited. Once he dismounted and put his hands on a tree, leaning against it as though it had been a friend. Sylvan started to say something during one of these pauses, but Brother Mainoa laid a hand on his shoulder to silence him. They crossed small islands, coming at last to a very large one with a hill at its center.

On a flat pedestal of stone stood a twisted monument much like that in the plaza of the Arbai city.

"Arbai?" Marjorie whispered, staring at it, unbelieving. Despite what Brother Mainoa had said, she had not let herself believe him.

Rillibee pointed upward along a flank of the hill where a trail wound toward a precipitous cliff edge.

"That's how I came down," he said. "Leave the horses. They'll be all right here."

They dismounted, trying to do it quietly so they would not interrupt the voices above them. People were talking. Singing. Telling stories to the accompaniment of muted laughter. Rillibee led them up the trail. At the cliff edge a bridge led between fantastically carved posts across a gulf of air into the trees – a bridge made of grass and vines and splits of wood, intricate and closely woven as an ornamental basket. The railings were laced into designs of leaves and fruit. The floor was plaited in swirls of color, solid as pavement. Two hundred feet in the air they walked behind Rillibee into the shadow of the trees.

There were dwellings – gazebos and cupolas, tented roofs and conical spires, woven walls and latticed windows – hung like fruit in the branches of the trees, opening upon wicker-work alleys and suspended lattice streets. Aloft were sun-dappled pergolas, shaded kiosks, intricate cages, all joined to those below by spider stairs. Lacework houses hung in the high branches like oriole's nests.

There were inhabitants calling from windows, talking from rooms above and below, conversing as they moved along the roadways, their voices growing louder as they came near, dwindling away as they passed Shadowy forms met along the railings. A group leapt from a doorway into the play of light from the applauding leaves. They were graceful, only slightly reptilian. Their eyes lit with laughter, their hands extended to one another as though to say, "Welcome."

But there was no one there. No one at all.

A pair of lovers leaned on the railing of the bridge, arms entwined. Rillibee walked through them, his face spattered with their faces, his body with their bodies, and they reassembled behind him, still staring into one another's glowing eyes.

"Ghosts," breathed Tony. "Mother … "

"No," she said, tears on her cheeks at the sight of the lovers. "Holos, Tony. They left them here. The projectors must be somewhere in the trees."

"They gave them to one another," Mainoa said. "Toward the end. When there were fewer and fewer of them. To keep the last survivors company."

"How do you know?"

"I was told," he said, "just now. And it fits in with other things I have learned since we had lunch together that day at Opal Hill."

"The language … " Marjorie turned to him, eyes wide.

"The language, yes."

"I was so eager to get away, to find Stella, I never thought to ask – "

"The great machines at Semling have chewed on the problem, chewed and swallowed and spat it out again. The machines can translate the books of the Arbai. Some. Oh, half, let us say. Half they can read. The other half they can guess at. The clue was there in the vines on the doors. Where we had never thought to look."

"And the carved doors themselves?"

"They can read those as well."

"What do they say?"

Brother Mainoa shook his head, trying to laugh, the laugh becoming a cough which bent him double. 'They say the Arbai died as they lived, true to their philosophy."

"Here?"

"There on the plain they died quickly. Here in the trees they died slowly. Their philosophy prevented their killing any intelligent thing. In their city on the plain, the Hippae had slaughtered their kinfolk. Those who lived in this summer city among the trees could not go back to live there safely. They did not wish to die. So they lived out one last summer here, and when winter came they slowly died here, knowing that in all the universe they were the last of their people."

"How long ago?"

"Centuries. Grassian centuries."

She looked around her at the woven buildings and shook her head.

"Not possible. These structures would not last. The trees would grow; eventually they would die and fall. These woven roadways would rot away."

"Not if they were renewed, hour by hour, day by day. Not if they were mended."

"By whom?"

"Yes, Marjorie, by whom? We all wonder, don't we. Yes. I think we will meet them very soon."

Rillibee led them along the woven streets. Before them the way widened, expanding into a broad platform with rococo railings and spiraled pillars supporting a wide witch's hat of a roof.

The town square, Marjorie thought. The village green. The meeting hall, open to the air, to the wind and the sound of birds. All around it shadowy figures walked and danced and saluted one another, shadows so thickly cast that for a moment the humans thought the mighty figure padding toward them from across the platform was another shadow. When they saw that it was not, they drew together, Tony reaching for the knife he carried.

"No," said Brother Mainoa, putting his hand on the boy's arm. "No." He walked forward to see what he had so often longed to see with his eyes instead of his mind. "No. He won't hurt us."

They saw an expanse of trembling skin over eyes they could not quite see. Fangs, or something like fangs, in a gleam of blued ivory. Flaring wings of hair, doubly flaring violet auroras, like spurts of cold lightning.

Brother Mainoa murmured, head down, as though he addressed a hierarch, "We are honored."

The being crouched. It gave the impression of nodding. Paws curled – no – hands curled upon the braided walkway. Hands which seemed for an instant to have three fingers and opposed, furry thumbs. Behind maned shoulders lay an armored expanse of mottled hide and callused plates, seen only for an instant, or perhaps not seen at all. It was an impression only, gone too quickly to define. They could not describe it except to say it was not like anything else, not like any earth creature, not like any Grassian creature except itself. The proportions were wrong. The legs were not the usual thing one thought of as legs.

Brother Mainoa confronted this mirage with an expression of awed interest, blinking rapidly, as they all were, trying to clear their vision. "Perceiving you for the first time has made me wonder what evolutionary tangle led to the development of this ferocious aspect," he murmured, eyes down.

Great orbs may have widened. Perhaps a long, curved talon extruded from a half-furred, half-scaled finger and pointed toward Brother Mainoa's throat.

Brother smiled as though at a joke. "I cannot believe you mean that. You don't need any of it against me. You don't need much of it against mankind unless they choose to use heavy weaponry against you, and if they did, all your armor wouldn't help much. Men are expert killers, if nothing else."

Eyes narrowed, possibly, and Brother Mainoa seized his head in both hands. The others fell to their knees, holding their heads, except for Sylvan, who started forward, anger and fear combining to make him reckless.

"Whoa. Whoa." Mainoa drew himself erect, gasping. "I wish they wouldn't do that." Now he knew what evolutionary tangle had led to this armour. There had been an enemy once, a huge, inexorable creature. Brother Mainoa had received an excellent picture of it rampaging about, devouring both Hippae and hounds. His head ached from the assault.

"Extinct?" he asked, receiving a feeling of agreement. "Did you kill them?"

They received an impression of perplexity, then sureness. No. The Arbai had killed them. The armored monsters had not been intelligent things. They had been only walking appetites. The Arbai had done away with them to protect the Hippae. Since that time, there had been many, many Hippae.

Brother Mainoa sat down on the walkway, suddenly lost in weariness. "This being is my friend," he said to the other humans. "He and I have been talking for some time." Now that he had almost seen the creature, he felt weak with anxiety over all the times he had talked with it, unseen. If he had seen, would he have said – ? No. If he had seen, he could not have said anything. One could talk to gods and angels only so long as they did not look like gods and angels, he thought. In order to approach them, we must think of them as like ourselves, and one could not think of the foxen as like oneself … 

"Foxen," Tony breathed. He was still on his knees with the others.

"Foxen," Mainoa agreed. "He or they managed to keep the Hippae at bay long enough for us to get here. He and a few of his friends wanted us to come here, where they could get a good look at us."

"Does he know where Stella … " Marjorie pleaded. She had the impression of a vast head turned in her direction. She shuddered as she said, "I see. Of course. Yes." Sylvan said, "Marjorie?"

"I can hear him," she cried. "Sylvan, I can hear him. Can't you?" He shook his head, casting a suspicious glance at the place he thought the foxen was. "No. I hear nothing."

"You have been a hunter too long," Mainoa said. "You have been deafened by the Hippae."

"Is he speaking?" asked Sylvan.

Rillibee nodded. "It's somewhat like speech. Pictures. Some words." He rose to his feet, utterly immune to further wonder. The trees were wonder enough for one man. He needed nothing else. He did not want to talk to foxen. He, like Marjorie, wanted to find Stella. "What does he say about your daughter?" Sylvan asked. "That others of his kind are looking for her," Marjorie replied. "That they will tell us when they find her."

"There are many things they want to tell us, to ask us," Brother Mainoa said wearily, longing for and yet dreading that converse. "Many things."

"I'll go back down and unsaddle the horses," said Rillibee. If they weren't going to hunt for Stella, then he wanted to be by himself, to cling to the trunk of a huge tree and let the feel and smell of it sink into him. In the darkness, they had looked like the spirits of trees. In the light, they looked like themselves. Joshua would have given his soul for trees like these. On all of Terra there were no trees like these. Trees, all around him, like a blessing. He turned to go back the way they had come.

Sylvan followed him. "I'll help you," he said. "I'm no good here." Ungraciously, Rillibee nodded. The others did not even see them go.

In his suite high in the bon Damfels estancia, Shevlok bon Damfels reclined on a window seat and sipped at a half-empty glass of wine. Dawn stood at the edge of the world. Through the open window he could see the huddled houses of the village, tied to the sky by the smoke rising from their chimneys. Dead calm. The morning had not yet been broken by sound. Even the peepers were silent at this hour.

A case of bottles stood open beside him, half of them empty. On the tumbled bed the Goosegirl slept. She had not left the bed for days. She had slept sometimes. Sometimes she had lain unmoving beneath him while he stroked her, whispered to her, made love to her. Her body had reacted to his manipulations. Her skin had flushed, her nipples had hardened, her crotch had grown moist and welcoming. Beyond that, she had given no evidence that she felt anything at all. Her eyes had stayed open, fixed somewhere in the middle distance, watching something Shevlok could not see.

Once, only once in the midst of his lovemaking, he thought he had seen a spark in her eye, the tiniest spark, as though some notion had fled across her mind too swiftly to be caught. Now she slept while Shevlok drank. He had been drinking since he had first brought her there.

She was to have been his Obermum. She was to have ruled the family with him, when Stavenger died. She was fitting. More than that, he had loved her passionately, Janetta had been everything he had wanted.

But the thing on the bed was not Janetta, not anymore.

He was trying to decide whether he should keep her or not.

Someone rapped at the door, and then, without waiting for an invitation, came in.

"You did do it!" It was Amethyste, peering across the dim room at the girl sprawled on the bed. "Shevlok, what were you thinking of?"

"Thought she'd know me," Shevlok mumbled, the words sounding sticky and ill-defined coming from lips numbed by the wine. "She didn't. Didn't know me."

"How long has she – "