36
A row of old peach trees hung over the road by the sea cliffs. I passed them every day at dawn. They were noisy––singing, gossiping, laughing; they helped me endure the weaving. I hummed their songs as I wrapped stems around my bleeding hands and twisted ropes of saxifrage, columbine and sorrel.
Leode's framework was finished: it looked more a pile of compost than a tunic; and I was almost done with Arin's, which practice and honed skill had rendered a little more shirt-like.
The morning after the trouble I walked past the peach trees. I was musing over the saebel's groaning roots and rolling spheres, and when I'd gone downward a-ways I found I had no tree song to hum.
I retraced my steps and wasted half my hour digging around the roots, climbing the branches, and kicking the trunks. But I didn't hear a single word or note.
They were dead in spirit, and I sat down on the path and cried. My hair stuck to my face. Floy sat on a bough above my head and sang so anxiously that Mordan heard her song all the way from the pool.
"They're dead," I said when he flew into my lap. "All fourteen. I was too late to lay me hands."
"You'd have been too young, too." My tunic knocked his feathers around and he looked at my chest with a rolling eye. "You'll get into trouble, with that rose showing."
"I'll get in trouble either way." I thought of the Gralde who had started the trouble yesterday and the human who had stopped it. "What's the difference, anyways? Between humans and Elde?"
"Arrogance," my brother said immediately, and he stepped off my ankle. "Arrogance is the difference."
He started pacing, and my eyelids lowered and my mind wandered––thinking of Andy's face, which yesterday, dripping with mud and red from my slaps, hadn't looked so much ugly as bewildered. I felt a bit guilty and shifted my legs. My brother kept on: "A tree isn't self-sustaining. A tree needs the sun. We need it, too. But humans, they think they can generate their own sunlight."
"Like a fungus?"
"Reyna––"
"Sure wish I could." I threw a rock at a dead tree. "Maybe it would've helped them trees, too."
"Those trees didn't fall asleep for lack of sun."
"They were always thirsty." I made a circle in the sand with my finger. "All of them are thirsty. And it rains plenty here."
"It's the river. Be happy you haven't got to see."
"What's happened to the Cheldony?" I looked up. "A saebel sang she was running the wrong way. A very old saebel. Do the old ones tell the truth? Is the river running backwards, Mordan?" But he wouldn't answer, and the peach trees were just a tick in a big tally.
Since my visit to the Cheldony two years back I'd begun to notice. The trees were tired, without energy, like old folk who stop drinking water, and dry up. But I never heard tree-song as dead as what was in those peaches along the road, and I started making visits to other trees I knew in the city.
One by one they fell silent: the magnolia on the bulwark, the locusts beneath the belltower, the apple trees in the riverside square, the maple beneath Natty's window. Tired, they said, tired, tired, tired. And then a hard silence, like bare rock in winter. Folk talked about it in brief, or not at all, as though it were too grave to take seriously.
On the day the maple fell silent I wandered along the river. A group of men were fortifying the banks with sand and stone, hidden by the steep hill, singing heaving songs. A clump of mountain laurel grew here, and whenever I waxed morose I woud creep under them to hear the air-tales the trees traded of rain, earth, and nesting weavers.
The buds hadn't opened yet, as though the sleepiness had spread to the outer bushes. I crawled beneath them; their voices were faint and I tried to sing them awake:
"Wake from your slumbering, hold off your sleep,
Shake off your blanket of sluggishy whorls.
Hear ye the thundering, seek ye the deep
Of other damn rivers, ye confounded laurels."
They replied:
Only from one river may we quench thirst.
All other rivers flow bitter as tears.
Shut ye your screeching mouth, stay ye the burst
Of song from a daughter so wanting in years.
And so the arguing went, growing softer and softer, until other voices broke in:
"Is that Gireldine?"
"No. It's all wispy. Like wind through the trees or water over rocks."
"A doctor? You should become a poet, rather. I'm going all teary."
I sat up, blinking and bleary-eyed. "A noble? You should go common, and the tears'll be believable, at least."
"Now, look here," said Andy. "What are you doing?" He pushed his head through the leaves.
"The trees ain't singing anymore."
"Did they ever?" he said.
"Not around you, no."
"Does she speak only in insults?" said Andy to Trid.
"To you." Trid picked a bud from a bush, and popped it open.
"Not so. She was yelling at the trees just now. You should know, Al, I've got an old, ugly yew blocking my window and you can yell at that one, as anything else might cry if you sing any louder––"
"You tried singin?" I crawled forward. "There'd be more than just trees bawling."
"What a wonderful day," said Trid, stepping between us. "Too wonderful for a headache."
"I hope it wasn't me made you bawl your eyes out beneath those bushes." Andy skirted Trid. "Your nose looks like a cherry. Was someone messing about with you?" He pushed branches aside. "What's wrong with you, anyway? You've looked terrible for weeks, and your arms are always bleeding, and you make trouble like you're selling it wholesale." His hair snagged on a branch. He tugged his head away and the bush shook. "Insult me as much as you like, but it won't make you any bigger. Or uglier."
His face was flecked with sunlight. I ripped up the dirt and scoured my cheeks with it. "Ugly enough?" I said, sweating a little.
"No."
"Trid," I shouted, standing up, "tell him to stick his damn pecker somewhere else."
"I'll stick it wherever I damn well please."
"Then don't come running to me when it gets bitten off," said Trid wearily. "It's better left alone, probably."
"Right, we might as well help by pretending she doesn't exist. There's something very wrong with you," Andy said to me. "Who did it? Was it people?"
"People?" I sneered. I felt fragile and hollow, like an egg with the inside blown out. "The whole land's dying, from the river to the sea, and it's the river's fault."
"You're making a catastrophe of nothing," said Andy. "The Cheldony's drying up. Rivers do that. The land's alive as ever." He looked at Trid. "She's hiding something else."
"They've a different notion of death." Then Trid pulled Andy toward him out of the bush, and he started whispering, but not softly enough: "You think she's going to tell you anything?"
"Why not?"
"I don't know, but first you've got some big claws need trimming."
"No point––no file's big enough," I said, and wrapped my fingers around a branch.
Andy glowered at me. I stared back and saw, behind him, a tiny girl running down the hill with a bucket.
She had a red dress and a long, black braid spinning behind her, and a white face that scrunched in panic when she lost control of her legs. Her feet fairly flew in an effort keep her upright, faster and faster.
She slammed into Andy's back, bucket splatting brown goop over his tunic. The goop came almost to my feet. I smelled shellfish––lunch for for her father, I thought. The little Gralde shuddered and began to wail.
"Lord of Light," said Andy. "Get up." He pulled her up, gathered up the bucket, and put it in her arms. "World doesn't need to be any sadder." She went on her way, giving us three backward glances.
Andy mopped his legs with his sleeve. When I let go of the branch my palms were full of divots. I smelled grapes, now.
"Good luck siphoning money out of Forbs," said Trid to Andy.
Andy's eyes were so round he looked like a hooked haddock fresh out of the water. I thrust myself away from the laurels I had bloomed. A bough flung itself back into place, belting Trid in the stomach and brewing the petals into storms. My hands were burning. I tripped over a root, scrambled to my feet, and ran.