13
Life in the Treetops
Between the occasional offerings from the secretive creatures in the trees—ReeRee’s family, as Morgan supposed—and what he was able to find with the little animal’s help, he managed to keep starvation at arm’s length. Still, an hour did not pass when he didn’t think of real food, of great slabs of beef or venison, red and dripping, or a cheese tart, the crust as breakable as the ice of an early frost.
You miss things so much when you can’t have them . . .
He thought about wine, too, and brandy. In the first days in the woods his thirst for such things had been so strong that sometimes he feared it would drive him mad. But after hacking angrily at tree trunks with his sword, then having to sharpen the blade again, he had done his best to stop thinking about such impossible things, but it did not keep them from haunting him.
In dreams now he often found himself a child again, his father alive, his mother still with nothing but time for her young son. He ran again through the endless halls of the Hayholt, where everything was giant-high. He crawled on the floors across carpet or cold stone, which had always been closer to his child’s life than the walls or ceiling, the provinces of looming adults. Sometimes he found himself to be something other than his own younger self, a kind of animal perhaps, scuttling along the forest earth, clambering over huge roots or mountainous fallen trees. And when he dreamed he was an animal, he was always hunted. Something out there was searching for him, and despite all his hurrying and scurrying he could never outrun it.
Morgan was in the middle of such a dream when he woke bolt upright in the near-complete darkness of his tree-canopied crevice to discover that little ReeRee was gone.
For a confused moment he felt himself to be both the dream-Morgan, a creature pursued, and the child Morgan, lost and missing his parents. Then both phantoms receded and he remembered where he was and what had happened. As he scrambled out of the crevice a sound made him stop.
Whimpering. It came from upslope and to his right, where the trees leaned close to the granite outcropping that had more or less become his home.
As he made his way cautiously around the base of the great stone, as uneven ground and tangles of underbrush made a puzzle of shadows by the tree-shuttered starlight, he heard the noise again. He made his way to the base of the tall beech tree that grew beside the stone and saw what he felt reasonably sure was ReeRee’s small, huddled form on a branch and close against the trunk, three or four times his own height off the ground.
The small creature turned to look down at him and her eyes were two pale yellow disks glowing in the starlight. He opened his mouth to scold her for getting into a place where she could not get down, then it occurred to him that maybe she had tried to join the rest of her kind, but weakness or her slow-healing injury had prevented it.
She wants her people, he thought, like I want mine—although he knew it was ridiculous to think of animals as “people.” He was about to call her when he heard a rattling in the trees behind him. For a sliver of an instant he thought it might be ReeRee’s fellow creatures come to take her back, but the noise was too loud: something large was shoving its way through thick shrubbery and slender tree limbs, and it was coming closer.
Morgan looked up at ReeRee’s perch in sudden panic but saw that even if he jumped his highest, the lowest limbs were beyond his reach. Even as he cast around for another route of escape he heard himself uttering panicky curses, as though it was someone else speaking. He’d left his sword back in his sleeping place.
The large thing in the trees moved again. A single thin sapling snapped and fell forward into a puddle of starlight—it was now a dozen paces away at most. Was it a wolf? A bear? Or something worse, something he had not ever heard of except in the servants’ ghost stories . . . ?
“Climb something, idiot!” he told himself out loud.
Whatever was skulking in the trees heard him. For a moment it was completely silent, then the sound of crackling branches became loud and steady.
He could not reach the branches where ReeRee crouched or find a climbable tree before whatever it was caught him. Given little choice, he turned and began to scale the stone outcropping itself.
It was a terrible choice: he knew even as he grabbed for his first handhold; the mass of stone jutted from the hillside at such an angle that it was like climbing the prow of a large ship. Even though he managed to haul himself up off the ground, and found a place to lodge his bare feet, each successive movement up the rock tilted him farther and farther backward, until it became harder to hold on each time.
The rattle in the trees ended in a crash of brush as a large shape burst out of the vegetation into the clearing in front of the stone. The unwanted visitor was a bear, dark gray in the dim light and at least twice Morgan’s size. When it saw him clambering up the rock it stopped and reared onto its hind legs, throwing its front legs wide. He saw wisps of gray at the end of both forefeet—claws as long as paring knives.
As the bear lumbered toward him, Morgan turned back to the outcrop, heart thundering and hands slippery with sweat. A piece of stone broke loose under his hand and in a desperate scramble he almost fell down and into the creature’s open jaws. He was able, however, to cling with one hand until his feet found purchase. Still, he was hanging upside down like a spider on a ceiling.
The bear waddled to the base of the stone and reared again, snapping at him, its massive head so near that he could smell the strange, sweet stink of its breath. He could not find anything above him to grasp, and knew he did not have the strength to hang for long where he was. He saw only one chance and took it, crouching with his weight against the footholds while continuing to hold on with one hand. His knees and legs were trembling so badly that for a moment, nightmarishly, he could already feel himself failing, his leap falling short even before he began it. He put all he had into a single uncoiling of his legs, leaping away from the stone with his arms outstretched and his back toward the ground.
He caught the lowest branch of the beech tree and slipped a little, then held on. Beneath him the bear snarled and swung huge but impotent paws. Gasping, Morgan dragged himself onto the branch and clung with both arms and both legs, quivering all over, then slid along it until he reached the trunk and could make his way up, branch by branch. ReeRee was waiting for him, making soft fear-noises. Below, the bear paced back and forth, grumbling and growling. It even climbed a little way up the trunk—Morgan’s heart again thundered—but failed and slid down again. Even after that, the beast would not leave and continued to waddle back and forth around the base of the stone. ReeRee fell silent and for a long while Morgan could hear no sound except for the bear’s snuffling breath.
He finally dropped into a sort of half-sleep on the branch next to ReeRee. He did not tumble out, though dreams of doing just that kept waking him, his fingers gripping the branch beneath him so hard that they ached. He did not truly sleep, nor did he want to. At last, after weary hours, the cold, damp dawn arrived, and he started awake out of another doze to discover that the bear had gone.
It was clear he had to move on. Before it gave up, the bear had pulled most of Morgan’s belongings from the crevice in the rock and scattered them across the slope. And though there was nothing for the monster to eat and no damage done except for scratches and bite marks on his leather purse and boots, he felt sure it would come back. He decided he would be safer sleeping in the trees from now on, no matter how uncomfortable that was.
Morgan made a bed from his folded cloak for ReeRee, and set it in the depths of the crevice as he gathered up his belongings, but he found himself lingering over his sword and shirt of chain mail. Neither had been much use to him thus far, although he had used his blade on more than one occasion to chop through underbrush. But as he held it in his hands and remembered his foolish childhood dreams of using it in battle instead of as a makeshift scythe, he could not bear to leave it behind. The blade had been his father’s, given to John Josua when he had been made a knight and passed to Morgan at his father’s death. His father had never drawn it in anger—unlike King Simon, John Josua had never shown any inclination for the warrior life—but it was still a treasured possession.
What son leaves his father’s sword in the forest? And what prince, especially, would ever do such a thing? What if, next time he had to fight a bear, not hide from it? His knife, useful as it had been elsewhere, would be worth nothing in such a moment.
So although the sword had so far been more of a hindrance than a help, he sheathed it and strapped it around his waist. The armor, though, was a less compelling burden. It did not keep him warm at night, and in the summer days’ heat it weighed on him. It might save him from a bear’s claws or a wolf’s jaws, but only for a moment. He hung the armor from the branch of a tree—a flag that declared, “Prince Morgan was here,” to anyone who might be looking for him, although he was becoming more and more certain that if anyone had been, they had given up by now.
As he picked up the various other scattered articles and stuffed them back in his purse—his muddied Book of Aedon, his coil of rope—he found the spike-covered climbing irons that Little Snenneq had given him. They were certainly heavy, and there seemed very little chance he would be walking or climbing anything icy, unless he was lost in the forest until winter—an ugly possibility he still did not want to consider—and he was about to toss them away, but an idea suddenly came. It seemed so mad that he actually laughed out loud, but the more he examined the irons the more interesting the idea became.
He put them on, though it took him several tries before he could remember the correct way Qina and Snenneq had shown him. When he had laced them firmly over his boots, he walked in an awkward fashion back to the tree where he and ReeRee had spent the night.
He could now dig the spikes that protruded from the toe of his boot into the bark, but found the trunk was still too slippery; he only managed to climb a few feet before his own weight pulled him back. He pulled the toe-spikes out and slid clumsily back down, disappointed. But then a memory of the steeplejacks at the Hayholt and their elaborate harnesses came to him.
Morgan went for his coil of rope and found a suitable stone that he could knot at one end. Returning to the tree, he swung the rope and let the stone end spin around the trunk. Then he pulled the ends even and grasped them tight. He could now dig his toes into the bark and pull back on the rope around the trunk, supporting his upper half at the same time.
After a few failed attempts, including a painful landing on his fundament that he was glad no one he knew had witnessed, he was able to climb even the smooth trunk of the beech to a point where he could grab the bottommost branch. He let himself down—going backward was even harder than going up, but faster—and then did it again. The third time he managed to scramble up to the nearest branch so quickly that when he reached it, he let out a whoop of joy that echoed through the trees. ReeRee came wide-eyed out of the crevice, still favoring her injured foreleg, perhaps wondering why he was bellowing and capering on a branch that she could reach with so little effort.
“I live in the trees!” Morgan shouted and for the moment didn’t care that he was proclaiming it to no one but himself.
The days that followed were some of the strangest and yet happiest Morgan had spent in a long time. ReeRee grew stronger and more interested in climbing on her own, and would leave him for long stretches to search for delicacies only she could locate. But now he could climb up after her, and often they spent hours together in the branches. Morgan found he could also use the cord to tie himself to the trunk at night and sleep without fear of falling. He was still hungry, still lost, still miserably without human company, but if he could climb high enough into the slenderer branches by sundown he no longer had to worry about whatever was out hunting on the ground.
ReeRee seemed to enjoy the new arrangement too, chittering at him to come see something she had found, or curling up on him when she was tired. He could not go everywhere she could, and sometimes, when she leaped from one tree to the next where the branches were too slight to hold his weight, Morgan had to descend one tree and climb the next. They moved slowly. He had largely given up on finding his way out of the forest, so he did not care. The order of the moment was simply to find food and stay alive.
It quickly became clear that ReeRee’s troop had stayed close to her and her odd, clumsy companion. The Chikri seemed less shy of him now that he was often in the trees as well, and though they still kept their distance, he could observe them closely. ReeRee’s first excited reunion with the troop was a particularly joyful thing to see. They all frisked and rubbed against each other, even rubbing noses, and one of them was so reluctant to let ReeRee go again that Morgan felt certain it was her mother. His own mother had been that way once, anxious whenever he was out of her sight, especially in the first months after his father’s death. He could not help feeling sorry for the fear he must have caused in the small animals when they saw their offspring carried away by giant Morgan, presumably to be eaten.
As the forest days crept by the Chikri lost almost all their fear of him, and came closer and closer until whatever tree he was in was usually crowded with the furry creatures. There seemed to be a couple of dozen in the troop, and the more he watched them, the more convinced he was that ReeRee was still young. Most of the others were at least half again as large as she was, and their coats had lost the oblong spots that covered hers. And while ReeRee and one or two of the other small Chikri were endlessly full of curiosity and mischief, the larger ones seemed interested only in gathering food and resting.
The troop, with ReeRee now a part of it once more (though she also stayed close to Morgan) began to move steadily though slowly in one direction through the woods, resting each day a half a mile or so from where they’d begun. When he tried to lead ReeRee another way the other Chikri scolded him, and when he let her choose the direction she followed her family or tribe. He no longer trusted the position of the sun after many frustrating days of circular travel, certain that the Sithi had bespelled this entire part of the forest, but the Chikri seemed to be heading in what he would have guessed was a northwesterly direction. His father had told him once that many animals had paths they traveled every season, just like human roads but invisible to the eye, so he guessed that the creatures were following an ancient food-gathering trail. For now he was content to move with them, though he often had to scramble to keep up. The Chikri did not come down from the treetops if they could avoid it, and then only to feed on some particularly succulent bit of forage like newly-discovered berry brambles or a hazel shedding ripe nuts before scurrying back into the branches again.
Once the troop came across a solitary apple tree, which stood in the middle of a stand of ashes like a lone cuckoo in a nest of blackbirds. The apples were small and sour but the taste made Morgan ache for home. He put several down his shirt for later, and even cried a little when he ate one that night, with ReeRee chuntering quietly in her sleep as she lay curled against his belly.
The strangest thing of all, though, was how alive the treetops were. Morgan had never thought much about trees before, only climbed them as children do, usually with an objective in mind, such as pilfering fruit or hiding from a tutor who never thought to look up while searching for escaped pupils. When Morgan had thought about the treetops he had more or less assumed that, other than birds and a few squirrels, the heights were empty, nothing but leaves waving in the wind. Instead, as he was now learning, an entire world existed there, and it felt as if he alone had discovered it.
The first things he learned was that the trees themselves came in dozens of kinds beyond the common ones like ash, oak, beech, and elm. Each one was different, especially for climbing and sheltering. Some, like silver-barked hornbeams, seemed to present their boughs to the climber like stairs, regular and sturdy. Beeches had hard, slippery bark. But some lured him toward the heights and then left him stranded far below the crown, with all the tree’s best sights, fruits, or nuts still out of reach. Once an old pear tree tempted him with fruit in its high crown, but the branches proved thorny and, even worse, as fragile as kindling. He got scratches all over his legs and on his belly from that lesson, as well as a limp for most of a day, when his rope caught him during the fall and swung him hard against the trunk. Worst of all, the single pear he had plucked before he fell was so sourly unripe that he could barely swallow it and felt ill for hours afterward.
Morgan had never imagined how many animals, birds, and bugs made their homes or at least spent a large part of their day in the trees. He saw snakes entwining through the upper boughs, green and shiny as damp grass, and salamanders squatting contentedly in the rainwater puddles that collected where broken branches had left a hollow. The treetops were an entire little world, and now that world contained at least one lost prince as well.
Qina was on her hands and knees, examining the welter of different prints that covered the clearing in front of the granite outcrop. She lifted a fallen leaf with the edge of her knife.
“Here is a good sign,” she said. “We are lucky there was a storm while he was here, so the ground was wet and the prints are deep. Prince Morgan’s footprint lies on top of the bear’s track and looks newer, but it is hard to tell for certain with so many other prints, especially all of these kunikuni. Daughter of the Mountains! All of those creatures I have ever seen are small, but some of these prints look much bigger than of those that live in the trees at Blue Mud Lake.”
Binabik was examining Morgan’s armor where it hung on a tree branch. “The strange part is not the kunikuni, daughter, but where the prince has gone. There are many of his tracks to say he stayed here some time, but he is not here now and beyond this clearing the footprints simply end.”
“At least we know he was not carried off by the bear,” said Qina’s mother Sisqi, who had coaxed a small fire into being. “There would be some sign.”
“I think your thought is a right one,” said Binabik, “for which I give thanks. I see no evidence of a fight. And I think it has been several days since he was last here. But how did he go away without leaving footprints? It is as if he learned to fly.”
“It is certainly a puzzle,” said Qina, her face so close to the ground that her nose almost touched the earth. She looked up at the sound of Snenneq’s quiet chortle. “What are you doing there? What is funny?”
“I am remembering when you spoke Westerling to the prince. ‘Oh, Morgan Prince, that is a terrible puddle,’ you said.” He poked the fire happily. Because he thought they would be at least a day examining the rock and Morgan’s camp, Binabik had given Snenneq permission to hunt and cook food, and Qina’s betrothed now had a pile of several birds wrapped in wild grape leaves beside him. “‘Puddle,’ Snenneq said again and laughed.
“Not all of us spent so many hours learning the flatlander tongue,” she said, scowling. “Some of us had more important lessons to master, like learning to read tracks.”
“A Singing Man must be able to speak to those beyond his own tribe,” was his lofty reply. “And my skill with their tongue helped us in many ways on this journey, and made us friends among all the flatlanders—even the Croohok!”
“Oh, yes, the Croohok loved you,” Qina said. “Especially those who tried to beat your head in.” She waved her knife significantly. “Remember, even a sheep’s bladder puffed full of air can be emptied with one swift poke.”
Snenneq took a mock-stumble back from the small fire and toppled slowly onto his back where he waved his arms and legs in the air. Vaqana, Binabik’s wolf, gave a bark of annoyance. “Ah! Ah!” Snenneq cried. “My betrothed has stabbed me and let out my air! Ah! Save me, Binabik—your daughter has sharp claws!”
Qina rolled her eyes. “Are all men such fools?” she asked her mother. “And does it grow worse or better once they marry?”
“I think your father chose Little Snenneq to be the next Singing Man because they were so much alike,” Sisqi told her. “They both love to tell jokes that no one else finds funny but themselves.”
Binabik shook his head, frowning. “May I remind you, wife, of the words of my own master, Ookekuq? He told me once, ‘There is only one creature in all the world more ridiculous than a human woman.’”
“And that creature is?”
“Oh, a human man, of course.” Binabik turned from his examination of Prince Morgan’s mail shirt and began once more to pace the clearing in front of the outcrop. “I must climb this rock, I fear. Perhaps that is the way Morgan left, and thus no tracks were left for us to find, although it seems too steep.”
Snenneq stood and brushed himself off. “My birds will not go in to cook until the fire has burned down to coals. I am a good climber. Let me do it.”
Binabik waved his hand. “If you wish. But do not be so busy talking about your climbing skills that you muddle any tracks or signs there might be.”
“But why must we climb the rock at all?” Snenneq said, walking around the side of the outcrop until he was out of Qina’s sight. “Here is a tree right beside it,” he called. “It would be possible to throw a rope over one of those branches, I think, and reach the top of the rock that way. Perhaps that is what Prince Morgan did.” He inspected the trunk. “Look, Qina, here is something strange. Have you ever seen woodpeckers make this sort of hole?”
She came to his side. “It does not look like a woodpecker hole to me, O Singing-Man-To-Be. Woodpecker holes are rounded, the result of many strikes of the beak. This is only a single very narrow strike, like a knife blade.” She stared at the twin punctures in the bark. When she turned to Snenneq he was chortling again. “What has seized you? Has my mention of a knife reminded you how nearly you escaped being punctured, my beloved bladder?”
“No, no. I am thinking instead that I know what Morgan has done, and why we cannot find his tracks beyond this place. Wait here.” He trotted quickly to where his great ram Falku was tethered, nibbling on damp grass, then began to root around in his saddlebag. Hurrying back, he showed her: “Look,” he said, “and then tell me your nukapik is not wise beyond other men.” He lifted the climbing-iron, its rawhide straps trailing, and set it against the trunk. Two of the front spikes fit the holes in the trunk as though they had been made for them.
“Kikkasut’s Wings, I think you are right!” she said. “Father, Mother, come look!”
Binabik and Sisqi examined the holes and the spikes of the climbing iron. “That was indeed a clever idea, Little Snenneq,” Binabik said. “I see now why we see no tracks on the ground.” He shook his head as he looked up into the high branches. “But how do we follow him now?”
“Vaqana’s nose might follow him, even without tracks,” Qina suggested. “It has been days since he passed, but the wolf might still catch his traces if we move now, without waiting.”
“But my birds!” said Snenneq, clearly heartsick. “The coals are almost ready!”
“Wrap them well and perhaps when we stop tonight we may still enjoy them,” said Binabik. “Morgan must rest at sunset—he may have learned to travel through the trees like the kunikuni, but I am guessing he does not leap from limb to limb in darkness. So Qina is right—now we must go.”
Snenneq mournfully wrapped each of the wood pigeons in an extra layer of leaves and placed them carefully in his saddlebag, as though he were holding a funeral for tiny but beloved friends.
Morgan awoke in the darkness of deep night, although at first he didn’t know what had wakened him. The Chikri surrounded him in the branches, silent in sleep, with ReeRee curled on the branch where he had tied himself to the trunk. But something was strange, and it was only when he realized that he could hear a voice speaking quietly—no, not speaking, he realized, so much as singing or chanting—that he noticed that the stars speckling the sky above him were completely and utterly unfamiliar.
He stared at the alien shapes of the constellations—no Staff, no Horned Owl or Lamp, not even the sky-shapes of winter, which would at least have suggested earthly skies—and was certain that he dreamed. The singsong voice murmured on, not from beneath him as he had first thought, or even from the treetop above, but inside his own head. Morgan became even more certain that he was still asleep, although he could not ever remember a dream quite as real as this one.
After a while he began to take meaning from the quiet, musical collection of sounds, as though they had paraded before him wrapped in cloaks, then threw off their disguises to reveal their true selves. As he came to understand the words, he also realized it was a voice he had heard before, but this time it did not speak just to him but, it seemed, to the sky itself.
O, stars of our home! it said, and that single phrase seemed to strike his thoughts with such a feeling of loss that he almost wept. Loneliness swept through him like wind through branches.
O, stars of the vanished land that even my grandmother never saw! Here in this nowhere place I can only see your shapes as she gave them to me, in word and thought and song! I ask you to grant me the strength of the true light, whether the sky-lamps of the fallen land or these, the phantoms of our lost Garden!
I see the Pool, and the Swallower, and the Bend of the River. So they must have glimmered above Tzo, the city named for their light, when it first fell upon our eyes so many ages ago! The Blade, the Well, the Dancer, the Reaching Hand—all lost! Do those stars still shine somewhere, or did they go dark when Unbeing took the Garden?
Morgan could not move, could only listen and stare up at the unfamiliar lights. If this was a dream he could not awaken from it, no matter how he tried, but could only listen as the words that echoed in his head grew even more sharp, more sad. Slowly he came to realize that he was not truly hearing words but ideas: somehow the voice was speaking some tongue he did not know and could not speak, a thing of strange melodies, but still he understood almost all.
But why mourn this way? said the voice in his head. No one can hear me. My beloved mate is gone, my people are lost to me. My children and my children’s children are beyond my reach, and I am caught between one world and another, between life and what comes after. Why mourn? This is our lot, the way of the People, to see too late what they should know in their hearts from birth. Grandmother, I was wrong not to heed you. The voices lie until lies become truth.
And in that instant, Morgan finally knew who was speaking. When she had spoken to him before it had been in dreams and had frightened him so that he did not think about it when it ceased, fearful of going mad. But now he remembered the words from what seemed another life, in the cave where he had gone with Eolair and the two Sithi, Aditu and her brother.
All the voices lie except the one that whispers, she had said then, and Morgan had heard her though her lips had not moved and her breath had not carried the words. And that one will steal away the world. This could only be the mother of Aditu and Jiriki, who he had seen lying near death, covered in a shroud of butterflies.
The voice continued, growing ever quieter. So it must be permitted, it seems, neither to go back nor to go on, with no one to hear me, and a world in pain.
Thus will end Likimeya Y’Briseyu no’e-Sa’onserei, guttering like a candle . . .
“Likimeya!” Morgan said out loud, and found himself sitting upright on the branch where he had fallen asleep, straining against the rope that held him as though he might burst loose and fly over the trees toward those unfamiliar stars. Beside him, ReeRee had wakened too, and stared at him with a worried look. The stars above the treetops, though still stretched and strange, were once more the night-fires he knew. The Lantern again hung high in the sky, tilted as if it were falling away into an unimaginable abyss, but still the same recognizable star that had heralded summer’s arrival all his life. And the voice that had awakened him was gone, as if the candle to which she had compared herself had truly been extinguished.
Morgan shook his head and pulled ReeRee close, his heart beating fast, his cheeks wet with tears he could not entirely understand. Despite the warmth of the little animal’s body and the dark shapes of her fellows perched on branches all around him in the forest night, Morgan felt like the last and loneliest person in the world.