The west end of Bough Four was my sanctuary. A smelly sanctuary, to be sure, but the odor of the ginkgo fruit guaranteed that the likelihood of meeting anyone else was nil. During harvesttime, workers wrapped squirrel pelts around their noses and breathed through their mouths before approaching the western fourth. No one, not even my mother, especially not my mother, knew of my sanctuary.
Even though it would be many months before the trees dropped their fruit, so essential for enhancing the cognition of our elders and combating other ailments, the air was lightly tinged with a vomit smell. I gagged a little until I adjusted to the stink and then rested my long frame against one of the ginkgo trees that was cradled in the armpit of a Great One.
I tilted my head back and looked through the ginkgo branches to the sparse needles of the Great One and the gray sky beyond. The sky threatened rain. When I was younger, I’d been told stories about the beforetimes, when the sky still rained white and cold for many months, a time called Winter. Winter had been one of the four times grouped into Seasons. The main difference among the Seasons was that the temperature changed and the earthwalkers couldn’t grow food while Winter reigned. But then the earthwalkers started the war to control earth and earth fought back, and the first things to die were the Seasons. The Seasons fought among themselves. Winter was the weakest, and it was killed first. Spring and Autumn were the next to die. I can’t remember the difference between those two Seasons; earthwalkers planted in one and harvested in the other. For a while, it looked like Summer had survived the war between earth and the earthwalkers. It stopped raining. And it was hot, so hot. And then the rains started, and Summer drowned. The war ended with earth victorious, the earthwalkers vanquished. And we, the climbers who lived among the Great Ones, survived.
When I was little, I imagined what white, cold rain might feel like. Snow. I loved the droplets on my skin when the rain was coming down hard. The first wave of a downpour was cool and refreshing and I imagined snow would feel like that but last longer. For within seconds of a hard rain, my skin grew used to the temperature and the water felt tepid and clammy, and my clothes were soggy and bloated like the moss on the northside of a limb. The Book of Silvanus told how earthwalkers in the north used to live in houses of ice. Some of them even froze to death. I’d never understood what freezing meant. Maybe stiff and hard like a day-old squirrel carcass but without the smell. That was difficult to imagine. There were odors everywhere in the canopy, some fragrant like overripe apples and flowering currants, some unpleasant like baby bottoms and corpse flower, most cloying like sweat and feet and raw meat. What would it be like to live in a world with no odor? To feel snow on your face in a frozen Winter world?
I used to sit like Erica in school, listening with wide open ears, eager to learn about the earthwalkers. As I grew older, I began to understand that our holy book, The Book of Silvanus, was nothing more than a collection of fairy tales meant to keep us docile and content in the treetops. Because, after years of indoctrination in the so-called “truths” of Silvanus, why would anyone sane choose to leave the canopy for an earth ruled by cannibalistic earthwalkers?
I knew the book was a lie. All of it. I wondered how many of us knew the teachings were untrue but said nothing about it. I was sad that there had never been Seasons though. I really would have liked to have seen white rain.
I embraced the gloom of the gingko grove. It matched my mood. I was exhausted, my reserve of quiet battered down by the faces, the inquiries, the existence of other people. Assistant to the doctor was not a position that lent itself to solitude, and unlike my mother, I had no desire to nurture other souls. I resented the sick and the elderly. I resented the pregnant women and the injured workers. I resented the children with their splinters and the women with their monthly pains and the men with their pulled muscles and smashed fingers. They could all feed the Great Ones, for all I cared.
I’d never wanted this job. Doctor. I didn’t want to turn out like my mother, bitter and jaded and responsible for everyone else. I crawled over to the edge of the bough and looked down. There were no boughs beneath the gingko grove. Though the first fruits wouldn’t have dropped until long after the First Climbers had fed the Great Ones, they had anticipated the future stench when they planted the trees. They had planned for the generations that came after them. If the fruits weren’t harvested, they fell over two-thousand feet down to the forest floor where they exploded and fed the Great Ones with their vomit-stinking flesh.
It was a special kind of planning, of thoughtfulness, to care about the happiness of people who weren’t yet born. The First Climbers imagined us following them after several generations and planted the trees so they wouldn’t drop their stinking fruits on our heads. I know where I’d plant gingko trees—on Bough Seven, right above the heads of Salix and her minions on Bough Six. I giggled to myself imagining the ripe gingkoes landing on their gossipy heads. It cheered me up a little.
I leaned over the bough then and imagined the ending of everything. One little slip, that’s all it would take. I could share the path of the ginkgo fruit and disappear forever from the responsibility, the gloom, the people, the boredom of this place. I closed my eyes and imagined the fall. The breeze rushing past, my hair flowing behind me, a clear path to the leaf and needle-strewn ground beneath, no branches to break my bones or slice my skin. And then, silence. My end. Sustenance for the Great Ones. In my imaginings, it suddenly felt real. I could hear the whistle of the wind in my ears, the sweat whisking off my brow, and then the soft thump as my body met the earth for the first time. And the last.
Bile rose in my throat when I finally opened my eyes. My death by falling felt all too possible suddenly. I pushed away from the edge, my head buzzing with adrenaline, blood surging from my hands and feet to my racing heart. I curled into a ball beneath the stinking ginkgo and drew in deep breaths of filthy humid air scented with vomit. I knew I was being melodramatic. Mom always told me I was too emotional, too intense. But sometimes it felt good to push myself to the brink, to the very edge of reason, and then, at the last second, pull myself back.
My heart quieted and my head cleared. I stood and walked through the grove, picking my way carefully along the rough pathway. My calloused feet, immune to the rough edges of the rarely walked path, gripped the branches.
When I reached the largest ginkgo at the center of the grove, likely the original planted by the First Climbers, I stopped. I pulled myself up into the gnarled tree’s arms and peered into the center. An orb weaver had covered the opening with a large, sticky web. I hadn’t brought my spider stick, so I broke off a dead branch from the gingko and poked it into the web to be sure it wasn’t currently inhabited.
I imagined getting bitten by the monster who’d woven this web and snorted with dark humor. I could hear Michelia if I needed a hand or foot amputated: “How could you have been so careless? I don’t have time to cut off your leg this morning. I have to pack poultices.”
Alerted by the movement of its web, a bulbous brown creature dropped by a thick filament of string to the web’s center. I jumped back and swung at the spider. The stick connected with a soft thump. The spider tumbled out of the tree hollow and swung wildly from its drop line. I ducked away to avoid touching the creature and swung again. The spider ejected a line of sticky string from its spinnerets and dropped down, far below the branch. Too late, I realized that at nearly two inches in diameter, the spider would have made a tasty snack. Much as I disliked killing this creature I identified so strongly with, Michelia’s nut loaf had worn off and my stomach had started complaining.
“Take only what you need. All spirits are equal,” I recited, a habit I’d started in childhood whenever I missed a target with my slingshot.
I pulled the web off the tree, pulled the sticky bits from my fingers, and rolled it into a ball. Spider fleece was a treasured commodity. It could be used to bandage and clean wounds, to block night noise in close and cramped quarters, or when wrapped on a twig, to brush teeth or clean ears and noses. In large quantities, spider fleece could even be spun and woven into lacy undergarments, but I had no use for those.
No creatures would have survived the spider, so I plunged my hand into the tree hollow and pulled out the project I had hidden inside. Soon, it would be too large to fit in this hollow, and I’d need to find another place to hide it. Not that anyone would find it here—not until harvest time, at any rate. I plopped down at the base of the tree and unwound the hank of rope I’d been twisting in secret over the past several months.
Only cedar harvesters were permitted to gather cedar for the community. Cedar trees were interspersed among the Great Ones. We traveled and lived among them, as we lived among the Great Ones. Because cedar bark was resistant to rain, it was essential for clothing and housing our community. To prevent over-harvesting the interior cedars, individuals were forbidden to take the bark for their own purposes. Only tailors, builders, and fiber workers had license to use the bark.
I hadn’t broken the law—not that law, at least. I had crossed beyond the boundaries of the community, beyond the ginkgo grove, to harvest my own bark. It was forbidden to go to the Outer Reaches; locations beyond the canopy boundaries were deemed unsafe for all but the hunters if the builders had not constructed a path from one tree to the next. Of course, that rule never prevented me or any of my friends from climbing where we wanted. If no adults found out, it was like it never happened.
We hadn’t climbed together since our last hangout in the Outer Reaches before we’d begun our traineeships. We were all busy learning our trades. Besides, I didn’t want to hear how wonderful Maestro Wollemia was or how talented Cedrus was. Especially not Cedrus—it was bad enough that Cassia was crazy about him. I certainly didn’t want to listen to Sorbus go on about him.
I especially didn’t want to hear about Mangrove’s wonderful trade. He got to spend his days entirely alone in the canopy with his thoughts for company. That sounded like perfection to me. No, I’d rather commiserate with Wingnut. He was as miserable as I was. Well, nearly. I doubted his soul was as dark as my spider girl soul. If only I could weave iron silk from my butt and drop out of this tree like the orb weaver, I’d escape my destiny of boredom.
As far as I knew, I was the only one who crossed into the cedars from the gingko forest. So much cedar to the west was unharvested—plenty for everyone to have two, three rain cloaks and shingles over all the pathways. But telling anyone about it would have been admitting my crime and worse, revealing my sanctuary.
I ripped a hunk of bark into strips and began braiding. Last year, I’d watched a builder braid cedar bark for a bridge. Pleased by my interest, he taught me that many thin strips twisted together made a rope far stronger than one wide strip alone. I began stockpiling my own secret supply of cedar. By my measurements, I’d braided nearly fifty feet of cedar rope over four months. My nimble fingers could rip and twist quickly. I figured I’d have one hundred feet of rope in four more months, just in time for my birthday that marked seventeen gloriously dull years of living among the Great Ones.
I couldn’t think of a reason for my rope habit. I didn’t need more rope. I didn’t even use what I had for climbing. I’d lost all control over my obsession. I felt a burning need for more feet of rope, more cedar bark to make the rope. I wasn’t sleeping well lately because my mind never quieted. I lay awake at night thinking of harvesting cedar; when I was asleep, I dreamed of braiding rope. For some reason, I was happier when I was making rope.
While I braided, time stopped, and that afternoon I became aware of the darkness creeping around me only after my pile of cedar had been exhausted. I wound the three feet of rope I made that afternoon around the hank and tucked it back into the old gingko’s hollow. My feet gripped the rough bark pathway and I sprinted toward the market.