Walking the Tree (32 page)

  They sat out on the seawalk enjoying the sun and the sight of the children playing. As the sun set, they gathered together and watched as the light changed.

  "Look!" Morace said. "That old woman is still coming."

  "Turn your head away," a local said. "Quickly. Don't look."

  "It's just an old woman walking home. We've seen a few of them."

  "Don't look at them! Don't talk to them! If they get their spittle on you you'll die by next Oldnew Day."

 

One woman with a knife stood at the Trunk of the Tree.

  "This is the most important lesson you will ever learn." She scraped the moss; it came off in great flat sheets and curled over itself. Others ran in to collect the rolls and take them away.

  "We must control the babies we have. With crowding comes illness, with illness comes death. The joining of bodies is unavoidable, desirable. You would never give child to an untested father. So we must have the freedom to test, to sample, without the nuisance of childbirth."

  The children began to fidget, bored. "Each of you is precious, because you were chosen. There are no unwanted children."

  Morace asked, "But how do you know if what the teachers do makes the babies? They do it all the time and only sometimes the baby comes."

  "Rham would have known," Zygo said. "She would know that answer." Lillah nodded.

  "This is where we show the importance of sharing knowledge. We know that the men of Douglas study cycles, the weather. They are the experts at making connections, drawing conclusions about cause and effect. They noted, over many years of observation, that after the sex act, often the bleeding would not come. And if the bleeding didn't come eight times, the belly grew with child.

  "We heard these studies and we wondered at our teachers, who caught child very rarely. Further questioning of travelling schools led us to understand that our moss did not grow everywhere. And that we chewed our moss all day, because it soothes the mouth and makes food tastier." Lillah thought of how dull the food tasted here and could see why they would become addicted to the moss.

  "We began sharing our moss with the schools and eventually enough news came back for us to show that the moss prevented a child from catching. We are in control."

  Lillah looked around for Melia, knowing how much she'd be loving this; the questioning, seeking and finding of answers.

  But Melia was not there. She had stayed behind in Alga, for the fresh water.

  The feeling of loss, rare to Lillah, was intense.

  "I have a friend who would love to hear you talking. Hearing about when people first discovered answers. She used to wonder how we knew the love making led to children."

  Phyto nodded. "Melia," he whispered. "Who was the first?"

  "Observation, that's all. Every generation has one or two who will watch and remember. Remember what happened last year and many years before that. Most people aren't interested."

  Lillah thought, Melia is too self-absorbed to learn that way. She wants to be told.

  "What happens when the men take the moss?"

  "We are not sure. Certainly they chew it for the pleasures it brings, and we have very few children here. Teachers who have never taken the moss catch more easily. The men tend to self-administer a lot, too, to keep their potency down. Nobody wants the consequences of an unneeded child."

  Lillah knew people thought the longer you took the moss, the longer it would be for you to catch child when you stopped taking it. It was the reason why most of them had their children when they were older.

  Lillah said, "There are some Orders that deal with their unwanted after birth. Leave them out to die. They disappear though. Perhaps the monkeys, looking for a good meal. There is no trace ever found. Not even the Tale-tellers know, or the Watchers." The listeners nodded. "Where is your Tale-teller?" Lillah asked. The men seemed quiet here; she'd seen no one with a Tale-teller's voice.

  "We don't use a Tale-teller. We know stories as truth without being told." The woman seemed defensive. Lillah didn't think it was because Phyto was with them; mostly they barely noticed him. He took on the characteristics of a woman and that was how people saw him.

 

Three women climbed the highest limbs of the Tree they could reach. Up there the moss grew hard and needed to be scraped with stone knives to remove it. It was a hard job, but these devoted women didn't complain. They climbed down covered with bruises, their palms and fingers marked with cuts and scrapes.

  "The moss is not edible in this state. Once we throw it in the fire, it burns so slow no one will need to work the fire tomorrow. And it is transformed by the heat into a sticky ash. With this we can cook a tasty bread. We mix it with water to make clay, cover the dough with it, bake it slowly. You cannot imagine the wonderful smell when we crack the case."

  "But you're exhausted. How do you keep working like this when you are so tired?"

  "We all need to eat, and we need the fire to burn."

  Lillah wondered if she would ever be so self-sacrificing, to give up comfort, sleep, cause herself pain for others.

  Lillah watched the lowfire, feeling hungry for the stew as it bubbled gently.

  "And there is the stone itself. Where the timing of the year comes from," the woman said. "We will sit up tonight and wait for the moon to strike and show us the symbols we cannot see on any other day. Then until the moon strikes again, we will not speak. We will let the day decide for itself what it wishes us to do. Anything is possible on this day. The sick cured, the dead risen, the sea monsters emerged to steal our babies."

  "I've never seen the ill cured. Nor the dead risen, nor any sign of the sea monster," Musa said. She was a cynic, arguing a lot against the Spikes story and other stories she considered unproven.

  "Those who sleep by the stone tonight will dream their future, or their truth. Or they will dream an answer to a question," the woman said.

  "I think the children can camp out by the stone tonight. I can't see why they should miss out on this opportunity to dream of the stone," Lillah said.

  "There may be nothing to dream," Ster said.

  "Yes, but it's worth a try," the woman said. "They won't be here again, never for the boys, many years for the girls, if at all. I must warn you, though. The stone takes an occasional sacrifice. Sucks the blood out of the victim. There will be no warning. We will not know who will be taken. But that hasn't happened for many years. It may be that the stone has taken enough, or it may be that it is very hungry and will take more than one on this night."

  Morace looked pale in the moonlight. Worried.

  "You should keep him indoors. Away from people who may pass judgement on him," Musa said, her back to the locals.

  Ster nodded. "Keep him inside. There is only so long we can use the excuse of his mother dying to cover his lethargy."

 

Lillah felt worried for them all. She remembered sleeping by the stone when she passed through as a child. It was frightening; she couldn't get to sleep for a long time that night for the fear of what she might dream.

  She had spent the night absorbing noises, her body moving beyond tiredness.

  Just before dawn she fell into a dream of darkness: her head encased in a block of wood from the Tree.

 

They danced that night, once Oldnew Day was over. Lillah and the other teachers leapt about, waving arms and leaping with excitement.

  In contrast, the women of Pinon danced like smoke: wispy, ethereal, so graceful they made Lillah feel like a great sea bass floundering in the sand.

  This was a very promiscuous Order. The women's jaws moved all the time, and for a while the teachers thought they were talking quietly. But it was moss; they chewed moss most of the day, only stopping to eat.

  The land was far less fertile here, on the shady side.

  Sometimes the food made Lillah feel dulled.

  The men chewed, too. It seemed obvious to the teachers that the lack of children was due to the men's lack of potency and the damage done by constant use of moss.

  "Oh, My Tree Lord, we'd love to have more children here. We love their little faces, we do," one woman said, but as she spoke she sighed in irritation as the noise the children made in play reached them. Lillah wondered if they really did love children.

  It was a most uncomfortable night. Again, Lillah found it hard to sleep for fear of her dreams. As a child, she'd remembered nothing but the blackness and the feeling of her head in a wooden block, and her teachers were ashamed of her. Even Pandana had said, "Surely you remember something apart from that?"

  She would not be that way with these children.

  The whole community slept out by the stone. They were given a sweet, hot drink to help them sleep and dream but still Lillah found it difficult. She went from child to child checking the covers, sweeping away insects.

  In the morning the children compared dreams, each one bigger and better than the last. Lillah wondered if they were lying, if, perhaps, they dreamt blank and lied to cover it up.

  Most people spent the day quietly.

The next night, Lillah noticed that the men were not always there, and she wondered where they went; gone quickly, back blinks later.

  "Do they have a secret stash of wine?" she asked Phyto. He laughed. "They like to be able to control themselves, so they release their own seed to take away the desperate need."

  Lillah knew that Phyto gave himself this privacy and she wondered if he would join them.

 

When Lillah finally took her lover, his penis was stretched, elongated, and she wondered if constant masturbation has an effect. The thought made her laugh until she cried, by which time he had left her alone in disgust.

  He had a very deep cave, full of ghosts, he told her, haunted. The further you go in, the more ghosts. He said this in such a foolish way Lillah knew he was teasing.

  "They are on you now," he said. Lillah laughed more; she had never met such a funny man. She knew there were no real ghosts there. She would smell them, she was sure. Feel them. She'd feel them in her hair and she would run so fast to the water to drown them her lover would not even see her go.

  "You are very good with words. Why aren't you the Tale-teller? You could tell the Tree beautifully, I imagine."

  "We have no Tale-teller. The moss-eaters don't like the idea. They say it bores the Tree and makes the Tree sleepy. A sleepy Tree will not produce moss."

  "Have you never had a teller?"

  "Oh, we've had them." He touched his ear. "But sometimes they disappear. There are no volunteers for the job now."

  "How do they disappear? Do they leave anything behind?"

  "Only blood," he said. Lillah could not tell what he thought of this; a bland look came over his face and he began to stroke her.

 

The old woman who had been following them finally caught them. It was not Melia's mother.

  "I am heading for home," she said. She seemed very tired.

  "What if it's closer the other way? Keeping the Tree to your right shoulder?"

  "You have a sense of which way is closer. This way for me. This way to Bayonet." She smiled at Lillah. "You will walk one day. A long, long way."

 

A storm broke over Pinon and, following their nightmares, it made the children terrified. Morace was the bravest, singing songs, making them feel better.

  The storm tossed up massive waves and the children, the teachers too, thought of sea monsters.

  Lillah drew the map, but wrote these symbols onto the Tree as she passed through.

 

In her mapping, Lillah told the Tree: Wa
lking
through the Tree does not feel natural. The Oldnew year
stone is here and they are pleased with it, as pleased as
they are of their moss that keeps us from child.

  
Here, the Tree grows moss. Leaves moss-coloured and
the Bark covered with moss.

 
 
 

It was hard to leave the women of Pinon. Lillah said, "I really enjoyed being with them. Their joy in life, their humour, I think, when you get to know them, see beyond the seriousness, made them very easy to love."

  Ster agreed. "I was tempted to stay," she said. "But I wanted to go with you. Help you."

  "I could have stayed, too," Phyto said. "I almost felt I belonged there. But there is a deep loneliness in me. Something not met."

  Borag began to cry. "I dreamed you were gone, Phyto. I dreamed you were taken by the sea monster."

  "I dreamed the sea monster was made of giant Leaves," Zygo said.

  "I dreamed that my mother grew Tree limbs and she held me close and the branches went up my nose," Morace said.

  "I dreamed you climbed the Tree and threw yourself off," Rubica said. "I dreamt the colours of it and I woke up feeling sick."

  Musa said, "Rubica, no one is interested in your dreams. You brain isn't like everybody else's. Yours is like seaweed. You haven't been trained."

  Rubica snarled. "I suppose you wish Gingko was still here. But she was so foolish she allowed herself to be killed by the Tree."

  "I never knew Gingko," Musa said quietly.

  The others were silent. The children touched their ears, hoping the Tree wouldn't hear Rubica and punish them all for her words.

  "She died in the service of the Tree," Tamarica said. "She gave us great blessing."

  "Blessings you need. There has been a lot of death, hasn't there? The child, Rham. Your lack of care for her means you have no right to instruct me."