The Last Green Tree

  “The intrusion will not recur.”

  “In Earnest Council with animals of your kind, we speak as a collective in a pattern so that those of us who are not actively speaking may listen or collect their thoughts,” explained Kowon.

  “We are not as swift as you in speech, though we have learned to become more so.” Binam adjusted himself. The voice changed again, a slight tick up in pitch, then down again, and a variation in cadence, to mark the change in speaker. “First of all we express our understanding of your feeling of loss, which is like our own feeling of regret at the burning of our sister-brothers along the river shore.”

  “The difference being that I contained myself and my anger against your people along the shore.” Dekkar spoke dryly, almost sarcastically. “Whereas your people and your allies have wiped out the greater part of a continent. Had I been so merciless, there would not be one tree standing.”

  Binam sat calmly, hearing and waiting, a half-smile on his face, vacuous; he was elsewhere, himself subordinated to the conversation coming through him. Kowon sat with her head bowed. Binam said, “There is justice in what you say. We are not here to argue the case for or against the grievances the Dirijhi have presented in the past. We are here because we do not believe a war was necessary to achieve our ends. Our allies have used our anger to make us a tool. Those of us who have come to know this have spoken out in this hour. You’ve seen the result along the shore.” A tick up or down in tone between each sentence; many trees speaking a part of a thought in order to keep the conversation moving forward.

  “We are here to make recompense for some ill-conceived actions,” said Kowon. “We’re here to do what we can.”

  “Which is?”

  “We can guide you to Rao. All of us.” Binam paused, this time for effect. “Not that you need us. He’ll come to you in any case.”

  “The forest has changed so much north of Lower Land, we hardly know it ourselves anymore,” Kowon added. “We can’t do much to protect you from the Earthlings. But we can help keep you safe in the crossing through hostile trees.”

  “You can send all these syms with us?” Kitra asked. “What about their trees? Don’t they need to feed?”

  “They’re widows,” said Binam. “They’re being weaned.”

  “Many trees have died in our preparations for this war,” said Kowon.

  “Far too many.” Binam nodded, facing not Dekkar but Keely, as if he was seeing Keely, studying him. “Is this child for Rao?”

  Dekkar turned to Keely, scowled. “I prefer we do not discuss that.”

  “We prefer that we do. If this child is one of the vessels, you must say so.”

  Figg drew Keely against him, covered his ears, as if that would do any good. Kitra leaned into them both, feeling how Figg’s heart pounded. Pel had stepped toward them, knelt behind them.

  “Yes, he is.”

  “He must stay close to you as we travel, or any of the Earthlings could take him. Why do you bring the child to Rao?”

  “I have no choice but to go to Rao myself,” Dekkar answered. “The child must be near me, as you said.”

  “And when you reach Rao?”

  He spread his hands. “God knows.”

  “Indeed. Though which god? Who knows that?” Binam smiled; then the smile faded and he blinked very slowly. “This one tires. There are many of us to carry. We have said what we can say.”

  His voice faded away. Kowon had already stopped speaking. A moment later the other syms stood, waiting patiently. After a while Kowon stood, shaking her head, rubbing her eyes. She dipped herself into a pool of water, then sat, dripping, on the heated rocks.

  After she did this, many of the others did the same. Binam stood near the last, stepped into the water, floated there for a while, then stood, shivered, and walked to the rocks.

  Next moment the world turned white with light, too bright to see, and Dekkar was rising over them through the netted branches of the dumb-tree roof. Kitra shrank to the nearest wall and her friends followed.

  It appeared that the syms understood what was happening as well as anyone else. They watched the lights and one another and occasionally one of them crept to the edge of the dumb-trees and looked out. Kitra sat between Binam and Figg, cradling Binam’s head in her lap.

  “The one in the flitter is not so good against Dekkar,” Keely said. “When he has the math box, she can’t do very much.”

  “How do you know?” Figg asked.

  “I can see. She’s trying to attack him here because she doesn’t care whether he attacks the trees here or not, but she’s not able to do much. He’s singing this song, like—”

  “Countersinging,” Pel said.

  Keely turned his face toward Pel. “Yes.”

  “I know a lot of the right words for what you’re seeing,” Pel said. “I’ve worked around these people before.”

  “They never come very close to each other,” Keely said.

  “They won’t,” Pel said, “until the end.”

  “The end?”

  “When one of them is ready to finish the other off.”

  Figg gave Pel a warning look, but Keely said, “It’s all right, Uncle Figg. I have to know.”

  “Why, Keely? Why do you have to know?”

  “Because this is what the math box is training me to do.”

  What Figg said next was drowned out in a howl, a chorus of shrieking, a sound so shattering it stunned Kitra, sent her flat to the ground, panicked. She waited for a concussion to follow but there was only more of the shrieking, and she realized she had heard the sound before, from the mantises when they attacked Dembut.

  “He’s killing the monsters,” Keely said. “Don’t be scared. The noise is almost over.”

  A sound followed, unearthly, glass breaking, something like the pop of a cheap lightbulb blowing out, magnified by a million. Keely laughed, clapped his hands to the green membrane that simulated the movement of his upper lip, delighted peals of laughter. “They popped,” he said. “Every one of them. Into a million pieces. You should have seen it!”

  Dekkar became visible on the ground again, and for a moment Kitra had the impression he had always been there, that the image of him rising into the air like some kind of star afire had been an illusion, that all the while he had been on the ground with the rest of them, hidden. All the true-language types liked to hide their work, especially from one another. He was pocketing stuff in his robe again, something that he appeared to catch out of the air; gathering in his equipment, or at least some of it. She was meant to see this moment, she had the feeling, or even this much would have been hidden. He paid no attention to her at all, but she was aware of him, peculiarly.

  The syms formed up in orderly ranks. “We’re going farther north now,” Dekkar said. “I wish I could leave you behind; you would be safe with these syms. But that thing is following us.”

  “We think we’d rather stick close to you,” Figg said, looking down at Keely. “Wouldn’t we, son?”

  “We’ll need a few minutes to organize supplies,” Pel said, nodding to Kitra.

  “I bought a lot of transportable stuff,” she said.

  “Hurry.” Dekkar looked almost tired—or maybe thin, stretched, was a better way to put it. “We’ll go back to the docks but we can’t take much time. We have a long walk ahead.”

  “The syms are coming with us?”

  “Yes. They’re more valuable than trees, it seems, especially widows. Once they’re weaned they can be fed from any tree. Even Rao won’t like to destroy them.”

  “You know more than me, if that’s the case,” said Kitra.

  “Your brother told me. I suppose he’s reliable?”

  She was watching Binam in the distance. “Yes. I’m sure he is.”

  Binam walked with her when they trudged north, leaving behind the Erra Bel, heading out of the Lower Land of the Flowering Silas. Some of her pleasure must have shone in her face, because he asked her, after they were settled int
o the walk, “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I’m happy, actually.”

  He averted his eyes, nodded his head. Lips pinched together to keep them still, like when he was a boy. “Me, too.”

  “Things have changed for you since the last time I saw you.”

  “For some of us. Not for all.” He met her eye. “I won’t lie to you, Kitra, I was miserable when I saw you, I wanted to die.”

  “What happened?”

  “The tree changed, for one. After he was moved, he understood pain a bit better; and when he learned he was dying, it gentled him. When we began to see what was happening, what the invaders planned, he lost his sense of superiority. Some of us understood we had something larger to fight for, tree and sym alike.”

  Beyond the dumb-tree halls stood a long road, vaulted over by the Dirijhi, raked and smoothed for walking and for transport by truss, though use of the pack-birds was dying out in favor of the riverboat and the inland scooter. Neither of these was available at the moment, however, due to the war; nearly everything mobile had been taken south. The party headed north along the road, moving under the cloudy sky in the calm, windless day; once, for a moment, the sun peeped through and threw down frames of light onto the murky river. For a while the road ran along Silas, then turned a purer north.

  “All these years you’ve worked to come back for me,” Binam said. “I wrote to tell you I was well, but I couldn’t say much more. Mail from here is censored.”

  “I never believed you were well, no matter what you wrote,” she said. “I knew you were hiding something.”

  “I can leave anytime I please once I’m weaned,” he said. “As long as I can find tree sap. I’m not tied to any particular place in Greenwood anymore.”

  “But would you leave Greenwood altogether, if you could?”

  He thought for a while, the look on his face serene, so unlike the image she had carried for the past decade. He shook his head. “No. Like I said before. This is home now. I’ve given up too much to make a life here, I won’t live anywhere else.”

  “Do all of you feel that way?”

  “All of us who aren’t treated like slaves, yes.”

  A moment later, Figg’s eyes on her from up ahead, she had an impulse to run forward; she took Binam’s hand and led him along. “Let’s walk with Figg,” she said. “I want you to meet him.”

  “Your friend?” Binam raised an eyebrow. The gesture made it a boyfriend question, like when they were telling secrets on the algae farm long ago.

  “Not yet. But maybe.” She smiled, feeling herself blush a bit, but looked him in the eye again. “I don’t guess you’ve stopped to think about your parents.”

  “What? Why?”

  “They’re probably dead, Binam. They lived in Feidreh. Everybody there is gone. Those are the reports.”

  He looked somber and slowly shook his head. “I suppose I did know it in a way. But I don’t feel it.”

  No reason came to mind to cause her to press him for more. Neither of them had been close to their parents in decades, not since Binam’s sale to the Dirijhi. She touched his hair and nodded. “When I get south again, I’ll find out what I can and let you know.”

  “All right.” He nodded, more sober than before.

  “Tell me one more thing. Do widows ever get linked to another tree?”

  He laughed, the most open sound he’d made since she saw him. “Yes, sometimes.”

  “Would you consider it?”

  “If it were the right tree, yes.” He smirked at her, looking himself up and down. “I mean, after all, what else am I going to do? Open a vegetable market?”

  2. Fineas Figg

  After a few hours of walking, the party stopped to rest. Sometimes Figg carried Keely himself, sometimes he let one of the others take a turn, including the Hilda. The boy was easiest to carry piggyback, and severely small for his age to begin with. He walked on his own when he could, but he was weak from the burns to his face.

  As for Figg, his own wounds ached and throbbed, swollen so that his face looked ungainly and awful. So far the wounds stayed dry, but at moments he felt as if bolts were being driven into his head.

  During a rest, Dekkar looked them over again. “I have no more thuenyn or himmel leaf,” he said, “I used all I had left on Keely’s face.”

  “I have a pouch,” Pel said. “Good fresh stuff.”

  Dekkar examined them, Keely sitting by his knees. “You have to cut them off,” Keely said.

  “I see. Yes. They want to grow into him, don’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll give him patches like yours, Keely, how about that? Smaller ones. What do you think?”

  “He’ll look like he’s in my family,” Keely said.

  “I am in your family,” Figg said, tugging the boy’s ear gently.

  Keely giggled—like a small boy again, for a moment, but in a healthy way. It pleased Figg no end to hear Keely laugh.

  “Is that what you’re going to do?” Figg asked. “Cut them off me?”

  Dekkar nodded. “I won’t cut them, of course. But that’s the essence of it.”

  “What are they trying to get inside me to do?”

  “To kill you, I think. Or else to change you into one of those flock creatures. I’m not sure which.”

  “With the teeth, you mean? Not a becoming look for me.”

  “I daresay not.”

  “Do what you have to.”

  “In your case, the skin will grow back and the patches will fall off. I doubt you’ll even have a scar. Though old as you are, who knows?”

  “Bastard.”

  A few moments later his skin burned and for an instant he felt the pain of it, before Dekkar sent that away, too. “I let you feel the pain for a moment so your body will know it’s there. But no more.” He had put silver hand-chains over his hands; he lifted the swollen, pus-filled sores off Figg’s face, set them into a clear, filmy sac. Even glimpsed in transit, the lumps of flesh were putrescent and lurid; Figg’s stomach lurched. His face felt raw, as if the breeze were touching it inappropriately.

  One by one Dekkar placed his leaves and powdered stuff onto Figg. Where there had been a feeling of rawness there was now soothing, a skin of balm. As Dekkar wet the leaves they softened, ran together. At first Figg felt the dry cool of the leaves as separate from him, and then there was a melting, merging, a light fragrance as if he had breathed in mint. Keely was laughing, clapping his hand to his mouth. If he had been using his eyes to look at Figg, he would have been facing the wrong direction, but he was seeing in some other way.

  “You look like a Disturber toy, Uncle Figg.”

  “Thank you, son. I’m sure that’s a good thing.”

  He giggled again.

  For a moment the boy sat oddly still. A shudder passed through him. Figg pushed Dekkar away, looked at Keely, who wanted to put his hands to his head but appeared afraid to touch himself.

  “My head hurts,” Keely said.

  “Do you need the box?” Dekkar asked.

  He nodded. Dekkar gave it to him, helped him with the headset. After a while the aura of pain around him lessened, but still they sat there. “What’s happening?” Figg asked, nodding toward the boy.

  “She injected him with some kind of code. The Nerva-thing did, I mean. I would guess the code is to build something in his brain, some kind of programming or knowledge, or maybe something else. I don’t know. But something to do with Rao needing to inhabit him quickly. Keely’s going to start to change, he probably has already.”

  “To what?”

  Dekkar shook his head. “I don’t know. He doesn’t know either, do you, Keely?”

  He shook his head. Figg lay a hand in his hair, and after a moment the boy leaned against his side.

  “I’ve mucked with the code a bit,” Dekkar said. “We’ll see what happens.”

  Keely listened somberly, keeping very still, the math box headset on his head.

  “You li
e down if you want,” Figg said. “Rest your head while you’re wearing the headset.”

  “Are we walking again soon?” Keely asked.

  “Soon,” Dekkar said. “But the syms need to rest, and so do we.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Yes, I do, sometimes.” Dekkar settled into the carpet of leaves, legs folded under him. He smiled, looking up at the clouds. “See?”

  Keely lay down then, closed his eyes. Figg spread the bedroll over him like a blanket, touched his hand to the warm green membrane.

  Figg lay his head in Kitra’s lap and drowsed for a while. She was talking to her brother. Her voice was easy, peaceful. She stroked the leaf patches on his face with her fingertips, gentle strokes. The smoke and the haze cleared for a few moments and Figg thought he opened his eyes and saw stars, the red moon, the broad flatland of the northern forest, but then he thought he was dreaming, because he was drowsing.

  “Wake up, it’s time to walk some more,” a voice said—a woman, Kitra, who was the first person he saw, offering him a cup of morning tea. He shook his head, sat up, took a deep breath. Keely had rolled into a ball at his back; when Figg moved, Keely made a sound, sat up and took off the headset. He had worn the math box all night.

  Zhengzhou knelt near Keely, adjusted his face mask, the set of his biosuit. They had all slept in the suits, those who had slept at all. “You look fine, sport,” she said.

  “So do you.”

  She laughed. “Ready to walk, you?”

  “Is Hilda up?”

  “A Hilda doesn’t sleep,” Zhengzhou said. “Don’t make fun of it.”

  “I’m ready. Where’s Dekkar?”

  “Walking the line.”

  “What line?”

  “That thing is close to us.” She glanced at Figg.

  Figg sat up, shaking off the heaviness, the wish that he could go on lying still. He gave the skies a worried look, heart in his mouth. “The other magician. The other operator.”

  “Yes. He brought down the flitter it was in.” Pel sauntered near, chewing on a sliver of wood again. “That means it’s on the ground. There’s nothing nastier than one of that kind on the ground.”

  Keely was standing, facing first one direction, then another.