Below the Root (2 page)

“What Raamo? What will you be?” she piped again the moment the greeting was finished. Watching her curiosity, Raamo was almost tempted to prolong the mystery of his future in order to enjoy the change he saw in her, brought on by the excitement of her only brother’s Second Counseling.

Pomma was not often thus. Engrossed in private dreams, light boned and delicate as a bird, she spent most of her time drifting silently around the nid-place, her beloved pet, a tiny lavender sima, perched on her shoulder or dangling from her neck. She seldom took part in the games or dances of childhood and even made excuses to escape the daily excursions into the open forest to look for paraso tails and trencher beaks—excursions that were the delight, as well as the duty, of most Kindar children. Instead Pomma preferred to lie quietly on a secluded branch with her shuba floating around her so that sudden updrafts sometimes caught and lifted her several inches into the air. It was not often that she laughed, or even sang, except for the necessary rituals, and her pale skin had an unnatural translucency, as if light could penetrate her flesh as easily as it did the petals of a mistborne flower. The mistborne, a fragile blossom that drifted upward through the forest on damp days, its transparent petals immune to the weak gravity of Green-sky, often reminded Raamo of his sister, Pomma.

But today Pomma’s cheeks glowed with life, and watching her, Raamo experienced his first moment of pure pleasure in the great honor that had come to him—pleasure at last unmixed with shock and anxiety.

“Aha, little Berry-dreamer,” he teased. “So you are awake enough to be curious.”

Pomma frowned shockingly, mindless of everything she had been carefully taught about unjoyful expressions in public places. “Don’t call me that,” she said. “I haven’t had a single Berry all day.”

Raamo smiled, knowing by pense that she was only pretending unjoyfulness toward him. Although she frowned, Pomma’s thoughts were open to his pensing, and he read there only eager interest—and a kind of shocked anticipation, almost as if she already suspected—But how could she? He had been making a special effort not to mind-touch, and for many months now, Pomma had claimed that she could no longer pense, not even with members of her own family.

The ancient skill of pensing, or mind-touching, had once been practiced by people of all ages, but for many generations it had been lost to all except the very young. The skill usually faded between the ages of five and ten, and Pomma, at seven, had for several months claimed total inability. But now Raamo felt certain that, somehow, Pomma was very close to knowing his secret.

“Tricky one,” he said. “You’ve been pensing. And you said you’d lost it.”

“I had,” she said. “I’ve not been able to for a long time, even with you. It must be just that I wanted to so badly. And it was only for a moment.”

“What is it, daughter,” their mother asked. “What did you pense? What is Raamo to be?”

“I don’t know,” Pomma said uncertainly. “I must have only imagined it. I imagined that he—” She stopped and stared at Raamo, her eyes enormous with wonder. “A—a—Chosen?” she stammered.

They both stared at her. The mother in shocked amazement, and Raamo in surprise that Pomma had really pensed him, that she had not lost the power after all.

“A Chosen?” Hearba said. Her eyes were wide with shock, but Raamo could pense no disbelief—and she did not chide Pomma for her mistaken pensing. It would seem that his mother found his incredible news easier to accept than Raamo had found it himself.

“Yes, Mother,” he said. “I am a Chosen. It is to be told at the next assembly.”

I
T WAS THE MOST PERTURBING
evening of their lives. Sitting together in the common room of their comfortably familiar nid-place, the members of the D’ok family were, that night, lost in a suddenly unfamiliar world. A world where they experienced strange emotions and struggled to comprehend unthinkable ideas.

Watching them—seeing his father’s shocked silence, his mother’s restless and distant manner, and Pomma’s unnatural wide-eyed intentness—Raamo pensed that for each there were moments of great Joy. But it seemed, for the most part, a strange unnatural Joy, arising from the mind and feeding on flamboyant imaginings rather than on warm and living moments of Peace and happiness. Trained as they were to seek and treasure simple daily Joys, the Kindar were ill prepared to deal with high excitements and the sudden glory of fame and honor.

The situation that the D’ok family was facing that evening was, indeed, a rare one. In all of Green-sky, in all the seven cities, and among all of its myriad citizens, only two were chosen each year to enter the temple. Only two out of hundreds.

No one in the D’ok family, certainly not Raamo himself, had any idea what it would be like to be an Ol-zhaan. The life of an Ol-zhaan was beyond the comprehension of ordinary citizens, beyond even their imaginings. Who, among the Kindar, could picture what it would be like to be a person of power and glory—a priest, magician, leader and healer? It was a thing far beyond understanding.

There was, however, one thing that Raamo and his family knew for certain. They knew that within a few short days every part of their lives would begin to change. Not only Raamo’s life, but the others’, also.

Very soon, Raamo had been told, the entire family would be required to move to a new nid-place on one of the grand lower branchpaths, among the families of grundleaders, guildmasters, and other Kindar of high honor. For the next year, the Year of Honor, Raamo would continue to live at home, except for brief periods when he would be called to the temple or away to another city on one of the seven tours of honor. From time to time, during the year, the D’ok family would be required to accompany Raamo on a tour, or to appear with him at one of the great public celebrations of The Choosing, at which they would be honored and reverenced by all the Kindar.

What it would all be like, what such great changes would mean to them, they could not know. They knew only that change was coming, that it had already begun, and that in nine days’ time there would be an assembly and an announcement, and after that the changes would be enormous and forever.

They had been sitting together in the common room since late afternoon. The three of them—Raamo, Hearba and Pomma—had not been there long when the father, Valdo D’ok, arrived. Valdo’s reaction to their news was, like everything else that day, strange and unexpected. A boisterous and talkative man, Valdo was immediately stricken with an unnatural speechlessness. Silent and unapproachable, he sat stiffly for a long time, making no sound except for an occasional burst of laughter or a long tremulous sigh.

The time for eating had come and gone and twilight had deepened into darkness before any one of the family recalled the time, and the activities left undone, and the rituals uncelebrated.

Roused at last from the stupor of thought by the hungry whimpering of Pomma’s pet sima, Valdo D’ok gestured with astonishment at the darkening sky outside the window.

“Great Sorrow!” he exclaimed, using a term popular among harvesters, but considered indelicate by others. “Great Sorrow! Here it is nightfall, and we have not celebrated food-taking, nor even so much as set out the honey lamps. Here we sit staring into darkness like a tribe of Pash-shan.”

They looked up at him smiling, his wife and daughter and the boy, Raamo, who had been his son for thirteen years but was soon to become something far beyond. They smiled with relief, grateful for being called back to the normal and expected, to the pleasant routines of life.

“I’ll set the lamps, Father,” Pomma said. Springing upward so lightly that she almost seemed to drift, she unhooked the cages of woven tendril from where they hung near the ceiling, and while her father placed the table-board and Raamo helped his mother bring food from the pantry, she quickly baited the lamps with fresh honey and set them outside the door of the nid-place. By the time the food was on the table, the lamps were full and glowing, each of them containing several moon-moths, fat round beetles whose phosphorescent bodies glowed with soft cool light. When the softly glowing lanterns were hung above the table, the ceremony of food-taking was begun.

“Now the Joy of tables laden,” they began the Hymn of Food-taking. Their voices, blending in the intricate rhythms and harmonies, rose clear and sweet, and on this night as ever, infinitely pleasing to the ear and soothing to the mind. As they sang, they sought each other’s eyes, smiling, and when the first verse was finished they did not stop, as was the common practice now except at official ceremonies and assemblies. In unison, as if by pensed signal, they continued on into the complicated and time-consuming second part of the Food-taking ritual—the dance and ceremonial sharing—and when they sat, at last, around the table, it was with full Peace and Joy. The pan was rich and tender; the fruit was sweet; and the egg sauce, light and tasty. They ate contentedly, their minds quiet and untroubled, their thoughts occupied for the moment only with the amusing antics of the sima, Baya.

Baya was trying to steal tidbits of food from the table. Although a full plate had been placed on her sleeping shelf, she preferred the excitement of snatching crumbs and rinds from the family’s dishes. Creeping around the floor near their feet, the sly sima would from time to time raise herself on her hind legs until just the top half of her tiny wizened face, with its almost human purple eyes, would clear the edge of the table-board. With eyes wildly rolling, she would silently stretch out her long wisp of an arm, and the delicate handlike paw would close on an unprotected morsel. Then the tiny face, with its peering eyes, would disappear with miraculous suddenness and from beneath the table there would come small sounds of munching and smacking.

But when Valdo foiled a raid on his plate by lifting it suddenly out of reach, the sima reacted with loud chattering, baring her tiny teeth and pounding her long fingered paws on the table. Such an uncontrolled display of unjoyfulness by a creature so nearly human in appearance was just close enough to being indecent to seem wildly funny. The D’ok family’s laughter was as limitless and unconstrained as that of Garden children in their first year of Joy.

“Ah,” Valdo said contentedly, “we should take time to follow the full ritual more often. See how the old ways are still the best for bringing quietness to troubled minds.”

There followed only silence, and the father, glancing around, realized that his statement had only served to remind the others of the troubling events of the day.

“And yet,” the mother said quickly, “one hears so often that the old rituals and ceremonies are losing their power and becoming meaningless.”

“Rumors,” Valdo said loudly. “Only rumors. If one listens to rumors, one can hear many troubling things. Many things more troubling than anything that could be said about the simple rituals of ordinary Kindar.”

Raamo laughed. “The harvesters are famous as rumor carriers,” he said. “There is a saying that in the orchards, rumors grow faster than pan.”

His father looked up quickly, and there was a sharp edge to his voice as he spoke. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve heard that saying—and another truer one that says, ‘Much can be seen under open skies.’ Believe me, my lad, we harvesters see much that is hidden from the eyes of others.”

“Like what, Father?” Pomma said. “I thought there were always Ol-zhaan Protectors in the orchards to make certain that the harvesters look only at their work, and especially,” Pomma’s voice trembled with vicarious alarm at the very thought, “—and especially not down at the forest floor. What have you seen that others haven’t. Father?”

Valdo looked at his daughter uneasily, as if he wished he had been less outspoken, and when she pressed him further, he began to talk of other things—of the importance of the profession of harvester and of how, although they received little recognition or reward, the orchard workers were in many ways the most indispensable people in all Green-sky.

“I remember, at my own Second Counseling, all who were picked that year to become harvesters were taken to a special chamber, and there we were spoken to by the Ol-zhaan D’ol Falla, who is now the oldest and most honored of all the Ol-zhaan—”

“I think I saw her today,” Raamo said. “She did not say her name, but I was examined by a woman Ol-zhaan of great age. I’m sure it was she.”

Valdo shook his head decisively. “No,” he said. “It is quite unlikely. D’ol Falla still leads the Vine Processions, but except for that she is rarely seen by ordinary Kindar. She is of much too great rank to spend her time at counsel.”

“But what was it you were going to tell us,” Hearba said, “concerning D’ol Falla’s counsel for the harvesters?”

“Yes,” Valdo said. “I was about to say that D’ol Falla told us that we were chosen as harvesters, not only for our strength of back and limb and our healthy vigor that we might withstand the fierce heat of the orchards where there are no rooftrees to shield against the sun’s rays, but also, and most important, we were chosen for our steadfastness of mind and Spirit. Only those, she said, with unusual firmness of mind, ungiven to flights of fancy, were suited for such dangerous and important work. D’ol Falla herself said it. And it is true. It is not for the timid hearted to work where the tunnels of the Pash-shan run everywhere just below the Root, so that their growls and cries can often be heard and one must always keep one’s eyes averted to avoid the enchantment of their evil eyes.” As Valdo’s voice rolled and swelled, his wife and children listened attentively, although they had heard much before concerning the life of the orchard workers. None of them had ever been past the orchard boundaries, beyond which only the trained harvesters were permitted to go; but they knew well, from Valdo’s stories, exactly what it was like. They could picture almost as clearly as if they could still play the childhood game of Five-Pense—a game in which young children pensed visual images to each other—exactly how it looked in the great open areas. Areas where, long ago, the forest had been cleared of sheltering rooftrees and giant grunds, so that the hot rays of the sun could shine down on the produce trees that thrived in the bright sunlight. These trees, much smaller than grunds but still towering many hundreds of feet into the brilliant skies, produced many varieties of fruits and nuts as well as the all-important pan, the heavy full-bodied fruit that was the staple of the Green-sky diet. And they also knew, very well, exactly how and why the ever-present danger of the Pash-shan was so much greater in the orchards than elsewhere in Green-sky.