She parked across her own driveway, telling herself she was too tired to cook, she’d leave the car out now then put it away after she’d had dinner somewhere. The Chinese place was closest. Or there was a Mexican place half a mile down the boulevard. The mailbox at the head of the drive held two sales announcements, three catalogues, and a postcard from Michael that she read as she walked down the drive toward her carriage house.
Preoccupied with Michael’s news, she stepped through her gate unthinking, running on automatic, only to stop dead as the gate clanged shut behind her. This morning when she’d left, she had seen a board fence and the three little evergreens she’d planted plus about nine hundred square feet of ragged rock and weedy clay. If she had turned her head, she would have seen the chain-link fence, and through it, the alley, and past that, a stretch of vacant land.
What she saw tonight was forest.
In the corner before her a white-trunked copse of trees spilled leaflets in all directions, breaking the orange glare of the evening sun. A profusion of blue-flowered vines hid the board fence. Her little trees were there too, burgeoning. The hard-packed earth was grown up in something spongy, springy, like twiggy grass in all the cracks. She leaned down and picked a bit of it, the smell rising into her nostrils. She knew that smell. Chamomile. Grandma used to make it into tea.
To her right, where the fence and alley should be, stood a grove of larger trees, about the height of the garage roof, as thick through as her arm. They had not been there that morning.
She found the alley gate by feeling for it through a cascade of leafy tendrils, swung it opened and stepped outside. More trees, taller ones, hid the alley—white and gray and green trunked, thrusting up through broken paving, wedges of asphalt still lying around, tarry and glistening. Among the trees was a rash of blacktop pimples, like the ones she had seen at the used car lot. Whatever was growing up from underground was still coming.
Bemusedly, she moved through the trees to what had been the edge of the vacant ground. Vacant no more. Trees and more trees. Bigger ones. Some quite big ones that reminded her of the Tree south of Jared’s place. She walked among the trunks toward the cross street. As she went, the trees became sparser and shorter, until she emerged from the last of them about twenty feet from the sidewalk. She examined the blacktop under her feet, seeing nothing, wondering what the significance was of the trees being tallest at her house, which was halfway down the block. What the hell did that mean, if anything?
As she stood there, ruminating, a garbage truck approached the alley, started to turn in, then stopped. A burly man in stained jeans, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his shoulders, jumped down from the truck, nodded at her, and came to peer down the alley.
“When?” he asked, unsurprised.
“Today,” she replied.
“Hey, Hal,” shouted her interlocutor. “Back up! It’s another one.”
There was a mumble from the truck, a vast shifting of gears and hissing of brakes.
“You got garbage?” the man asked.
She shook her head, mutely. The weed had eaten all her garbage.
“Well, you got garbage, you bring it down to the end of the alley here on pickup day. We can’t get in there. This is about the twentieth one today is why we’re running so late. Yesterday there was only two!” Shaking his head, he returned to his truck, gripped a bar at the side and swung himself aboard. The ponderous vehicle turned left and groaned off down the street that ran along the vacant ground. The forest continued there, Dora noticed. Except for the street itself, everything was covered in trees.
A sound drew Dora’s attention, a tiny shifting of gravel. She looked down. In the crack between the concrete sidewalk and the blacktopped alley, a sprig of green was pushing its way into the air. She saw it put its leafy little hands onto the surface, hunch up its green tendril shoulders and push, heave, push, up into the light. Disney couldn’t have done it better. Now it rested, opening a leafy head to flirt with her while it summoned root strength from below.
Would it stop at the sidewalk? How about the street?
As she walked back the way she had come, she heard small crunching sounds as bits of paving let go, as wedges of blacktop fell back. If she intended to go to work tomorrow, it might be best to leave the car on the street, just in case the forest took over the driveway during the night.
13
Opalears: Meeting Them Trees
“What world would be complete without the onchikian tribes! As exemplars of vivacity, as practitioners of the joyful, they cannot be matched by any other people. Their laughter will enlighten any gloomy day; their music is a pleasure all too infrequently heard. Among all the peoples of earth, surely the onchiki share the delight of the divine….”
THE PEOPLES OF EARTH
HIS EXCELLENCY, EMPEROR FAROS VII
Sahir, Prince Izakar and I came along the trail into Isher, riding close together, keeping an eye open for whatever greenery might prove threatening. We still hadn’t met them trees and were beginning to wonder if them trees did, in fact, exist when, as we neared the crest of a hill, we heard a thin screaming ahead, and voices shouting in a strange language.
“Someone’s yelling for help,” cried Izzy, spurring Flinch into a gallop, Oyk and Irk at his heels.
Soaz shouted and laid his crop onto his umminha’s side, yowling a war cry at the top of his lungs. I looked at Sahir, who looked back at me, very unsure what to do next. Our umminhi, however, who were accustomed to running in a herd, did not wait for instructions. We set off rapidly in pursuit of Soaz, with the pack animals and guards thumping along behind.
Just over the crest of the hill, we found half a dozen small persons being assaulted by trees, short but stout trees with long, flexible branches culminating in tufts of hard, bladelike leaves. The trees had the persons and their pack veebles surrounded and were swatting at them viciously with the sharp tasseled leaves, like a bee keeper who had encountered a ferocious hive. The vebles were crouched down together, their ears flat and their bodies trembling, while one young female person tried to shelter them all with her own slender body. Seeing this, Soaz immediately set to with his scimitar, lopping off branches right and left. Oyk and Irk grasped branch tips and pulled. Izzy, immediately, without a pause, grabbed something and shouted something….
Them trees pulled back their branches and retreated, humping away on their lumpy roots until they had achieved a decent distance, where they quickly squirmed their roots into the earth and turned their leaves toward us.
“Oh, Lord Wind and all the Seven Natural Powers,” cried the oldest one. “I thought we were goners, I really did.”
“Thank you, thank you,” cried a younger female, falling to the ground and bumping her forehead on the ground at Soaz’s feet. “You saved our lives.”
“Get up,” he grouched at her. “No need for all this head bumping. What are you doing here?”
“Had a right,” said the oldest male contentiously, responding to Soaz’s tone rather than his words. “Got a perfect right….”
Since Soaz was grumbling in Tavorian and the others were shrieking in—well, what were they shrieking in? I understood them, but I had no idea what language it was. At any rate, neither understood the other. Diplomatically, Izzy intervened.
Izzy said, “Honored and elderly person, dear and sensitive female person, strong and virile father of this tribe, all offspring of whatever age and condition, this large and whiskered person means no disrespect. He is merely surprised to find onchiki in this place, so far from the sea.”
“Our roof blew off,” caroled the younger male, dancing about in post terror hysteria. “We’re roofless, and that means we’re free. So we set out—”
“Had a right to set out. Did all right about settin out,” the older male interjected.
“We was going to Zallyfro,” cried the old female, “but we come upon this nasty sort, great forests of ’em, all the way down to the shore, and they wouldn’t let us through!”
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“Shoulda turned back,” mumbled the older male. “Shoulda stayed home. Shoulda known it wouldn’t turn out right.”
“You turned inland, looking for a way around the trees?” Izzy asked.
They confirmed that was the way it had happened, though this one had counseled otherwise, and that one had said something else, and none of them had specifically agreed to anything at all.
Izzy conveyed the sense of all this to the rest of us, who were, to a person, staring at him as though he had acquired another head.
“What?” he demanded.
“What was that thing you yelled? What did you do?” demanded Sahir.
Izzy shifted uncomfortably. “I made a gesture of Triple Admonition, pulled a vial of Arcana brand Re-Pel from my belt pouch, threw a pinch of it into the air and screamed an Imperative Estopal at the top of my lungs. To make the trees back off. Why do you ask?”
“You didn’t tell us you were a sorcerer,” said Sahir, stiffly.
“Any educated Palmian has some sorcery,” Izzy said. “Anyone who can read and write, at least. How else could you get through life?”
“There are no sorcerers in Tavor,” said Soaz, fingering his scimitar. “Magic has been illegal in Tavor since the founding.”
“Magic is illegal a lot of places,” Izzy said with some asperity. “Wherever the religious claim sole rights to it, they make it illegal for anybody but themselves, and they burn people for doing it, which makes the practice largely unappealing. No doubt in Tavor religious magic is holy and all other kinds are said to be superstition, but Bubblians don’t see it that way. They think magic is just something else Ghoti thought up. So what? Do you want me to take off the spell and let the trees come back?” He raised his hands, obviously ready to allow just that.
Soaz shared a glance with Sahir, both somewhat troubled, then they stared for some time at the trees, which were obviously watching them and as obviously talking to one another, for the grove rippled with twig tipping and leaf flutter.
“Oh, don’t let them come back,” cried two younger female persons in one voice, correctly interpreting Izzy’s motion. This plea was joined by those of the smallest male and female, who, up until that point, had been comforting the veebles.
“No,” muttered Soaz. “Don’t let them come back. No doubt our geographic separation from Tavor also separates us from its laws.”
“A wise decision,” said I, with a smile at Izzy. “Particularly inasmuch as we, too, will have to get through these trees if we are to reach Zallyfro.”
“Them trees,” corrected Soaz. “I think we’ve met them at last.”
At this point the persons Izzy had rescued introduced themselves, and we met the Biwot family: Grandmama, Diver, Sleekele, Ring, Bright, Burrow, Lucy Low and Mince. Izzy suggested that they join the troop, and that in the interest of speed, they do so by perching on our larger pack creatures, who would not be greatly discomfited by this modest addition to their burdens.
“What about the veebles?” cried Lucy Low. “I can’t leave the veebles. Not Chimary or Chock, not Willagong, not Gai!”
After a moment’s conference, it was agreed that we would proceed at a walk, allowing the four veebles to keep up with the rest of the group for, as Lucy explained, though the pack creatures could move very quickly over short distances, they tired sooner than did the umminhi or the equines.
Though the road went up and down for the next several circums, Pangloss Brook climbed steadily in its bed, sometimes on a level with us, sometimes in a crevasse, but always ascending. We passed a sign bidding us farewell from Isher and another welcoming us to Fan-Kyu Cyndly. The mountains were some distance behind us, the brook had become a stream that meandered through water meadows where various animals grazed between fence rows made up largely of those trees. Afar, to east and west, we could see the chimneys and granaries of little towns, and scattered on the meadows between were stone houses at the end of narrow roads. Nowhere did we see a person, however, and to the north, in our direction of travel, the trees blocked our vision entirely.
Lucy Low regarded the growths with widened nostrils, and said to Izzy, “They wouldn’t let us through. They swatted us.”
Izzy asked, “Did you, by any chance, take an ax to any one of them?” I knew he was remembering the firewood tree.
“Only for a fire to make tea,” she said innocently. “There was no dead wood about, so Burrow tried to cut some wood.”
“And it was then they struck at you.”
She admitted that was the case.
Izzy shared this with the rest of us. “If the firewood trees are, as you have thought, new to this area, there might be other types of tree with whose habits we are unfamiliar. Our encounter is a kind of culture shock. We must learn more about them.”
I said, “I think they’re trying to get along with us.”
Sahir grunted in amusement, twitching his nose.
“No, really,” I persevered. “Didn’t you notice how they’re growing, along the fence rows? They aren’t taking up the meadows. They aren’t threatening the stock. And they didn’t bother the onchiki until they were threatened.”
“I’d love to know where they came from,” said Izzy. “Such trees have not been reported anywhere on earth before.”
“Listen to him,” laughed Soaz. “He knows everything that’s been on earth before. You’re only a pup, boy. You’ve never been out of Palmia! How would you know what may be across the sea, or over the Sharbaks west of the Four Realms? Besides, maybe Ghoti just thought them up!” And he burst himself with chortles.
Izzy bared his teeth, momentarily annoyed, though I thought it was more at himself than at Soaz. He cleared his throat. “Sahir,” he said in his most ingratiating tone, “have the people of Tavor heard any rumors of there being a wizard loose, or perhaps a journeyman magician trying to drum up trade?”
“The Hospice of St. Weel is said to be inhabited by wizards,” said Sahir. “Even Nassif has heard that.”
“I know about the hospice,” Izzy remarked. “But the wizards at St. Weel are not what I’d call loose. They stay at St. Weel and do their magic there, and do not, in general, intrude upon the affairs of the rest of the world.”
“You’re thinking about the trees, aren’t you?” asked I. “You think they may be magical.”
“Well, I wondered…”
“When I first saw them, that’s what I thought. Lots of my stories have enchanted forests in them, living trees, talking trees, that sort of thing.”
Soaz made a troubled sound, deep in his throat. “I have always been told that to discuss such things is to summon them. Perhaps we’d be better off to talk of something else.”
“Oh, speaker of many tongues, what are they saying?” Lucy Low called to Izzy. “Are they talking about the trees?”
“Small, helpful female person, they are.”
“Why didn’t the trees want us to get through to Estafan? Our fortunes say we need to go there.”
“Did they actively block your way?”
“Well, we came upon them in the evening. And then Burrow tried to cut some wood….”
“So, if you’d asked them instead of axed them…”
“That’s what I think, too,” she said, nodding with satisfaction. “Do you suppose they’d let us apologize?”
He shrugged. He had no idea.
“Is that a larbel case hanging from your saddle?” the sleek little person asked next.
“It is,” he said stiffly,
“I love the larbel,” she said. “I wish my hands were big enough to play one.”
We both looked at her arms and hands, indeed very small, smaller than his or mine. Diver was a good deal bigger, about Izzy’s own size. “There are no onchiki in Palmia,” he said. “I’ve never met an onchik before, and I never thought about their being musical.”
“Oh, we sing. We play the slide whistle and we pluck the harp. And drums. We love drums. At the midsummer fair, we have a band, slide w
histles and drums and chimes of all kinds.” She giggled. “It’s lovely.”
“Why are you going to Zallyfro?” he wondered.
She told him a long tale about a storm and a boat bed, and a box of fortunes. “I’m supposed to do something with geese. And Ring and Bright will work in an ale house, Grandmama and Sleekele will do housekeeping, and Diver will clean chimneys. Barbat and Mince will do something or other in the fishing fleet. It’s all foretold.”
“No surprises, eh?”
“Onchiki don’t like surprises much, Grandmama says, nor do they in Estafan. Which means we should suit one another.”
Soaz called from the head of our ragged column, “Town ahead. Do we want food and lodging?”
I most heartily did. Sahir and Izzy concurred. The onchiki demurred, explaining to Izzy about the fortunes, which served as money only in the shore counties. On being told of this difficulty, Sahir remarked they would be his guests. Since the onchiki had been rescued from the trees, he had been watching them every moment, finding them much more amusing than anyone else in the group, including myself. This pleased me. Being chief amuser for someone as sulky as the prince could be tiring.
We came to the edge of the town of Blander, finding there an inn called the Veebles’s Hoof. The place seemed to cater to a wide variety of guests, having small rooms for small people and larger ones for large people, dormitories for servants and slaves, and various stables for horses and umminhi, as well as a capacious and sheltered pen that would do for veebles. Soaz obtained a suite for Izzy, himself, Sahir and me; he sent the guards and handlers off to the dormitories; he ordered food sent here and drink sent there, then collapsed in front of the fire, twirling his whiskers with one hand while yawning mightily.
Izzy and I, meantime, were making sure the onchiki were settled into a cozy room and provided with food, accepting their thanks with slight embarrassment. When we were assured of their comfort, we rejoined our comrades.