After a moment, the roots loosened. "Come on," I muttered. "You can get out of this." I surveyed the cavity. It didn't contain much: a dish and cup by the fire, both red clay, and a pitcher with a spout. The pitcher smelled of water. Did the treeman intend to drink it? If he could, chances were I could too. I had to risk it; my thirst had become excruciating.
Moving with care, I straightened my leg. The roots pulled tight, until I struggled to breathe. I waited for them to loosen. They were curled around my torso, hips, and upper thighs, but their tangle didn't extend farther down my body. When I could breathe again, I stretched my leg to the fire pit. It took several stops and starts to deal with the tightening cords, but I managed to hook the pot with my foot. I pulled it toward me, first using my foot, then my knee, slowly so it didn't tip over. With all the pauses, it seemed to take forever. But finally I brought it to my body.
I bent my head between my arms, an awkward position with my hands bound. Straining downward, I managed to grab the pitcher with my teeth. As I straightened, the pot slipped, but before it fell, I caught it with my elbows. Frantic with thirst, I worked it up into my hands and tipped it to my mouth, not even waiting for the roots to loosen.
Water ran down my throat, warm and welcome. According to my nanomeds, it contained bacteria my stomach wouldn't appreciate, but nothing it couldn't handle. However, this water wasn't the same as that in the lake. It had probably been boiled…
* * *
"…are you?" a deep voice asked.
I jerked. The treeman was sitting against a wall. Outside, night had fallen. Fear constricted my chest. Where had he come from?
He almost looked human. He wore green trousers woven with softened threads, perhaps spun from the plants. Vine designs lined their seams, flecks of bright green and blue beetle carapaces sewn into the cloth. Similar designs bordered the well-formed collar and cuffs of his tunic, and the lower hem that lay against his thighs. His belt looked like cured plates of plant armor, also inlaid with vine designs in red, blue, violet, and gold. His boots wrapped around his muscular legs, with thongs crisscrossing them from foot to knee. Other thongs ornamented with violet and red carapace-enamel hung from their upper edges, their tassels braided with red beads. His hair resembled moss again, curling to his shoulders, as if he had turned partially back into a forest creation.
"Cold, are you?" he repeated.
"Hot." My voice rasped. "Too much—" I searched my memory for the right Shay word. "Too much steam."
He remained silent, sitting by the wall, one of his long legs stretched out, the other bent at the knee with his elbow resting on it.
Despite the strange circumstances, this felt familiar. A memory came to me. A cold place. Freezing. A huge guard held me wrapped in his jacket, trying to keep me warm, though he shook with cold. All moisture had frozen out of the air. We were in a hovercar. The driver was dead, killed by the avalanche that had engulfed the car. The weight of snow would have crushed us all had the driver not braced himself against the roof, adding the final support that kept the craft from collapsing. He had given his life to save mine. My heart wrenched with the memory. What had I done, that they would make such a sacrifice?
A clue: both men had worn uniforms. Military. Imperial Space Command. ISC. They were my bodyguards. Why I, a civilian, had military bodyguards I didn't recall. And I was a civilian, I was certain. I had long mourned the man who died. My other guard had almost died as well, from hypothermia, before a rescue team dug us out of the snow.
I could see now why that situation recalled this one. It wasn't only the fear. Both times I had been trapped in a small place with someone I didn't know well. It was an occurrence so rare, it brought on the memory despite the otherwise different circumstances.
"Why stare you at me?" the treeman asked.
I swallowed. "I'm scared."
"Should be." He used a matter-of-fact tone.
"What you—" I stumbled over the idiosyncratic Shay grammar. "What you me do?"
"Say again?"
"What do you to me?"
"Tithe, to me, you with yourself pay."
Even understanding his words, I couldn't follow them. So I sent a thought to my language libraries:
change his Shay grammar to a form I understand.
It translated his words as, "You are the tithe."
Did he mean a tax? Or
tyth,
the Shay word for thief? My memory said
tyth
derived from the Iotic verb
ti'.
Ancient Iotic was a precursor to most of our languages, including the modern Iotic I spoke. In ancient Iotic,
ti'
meant "eat plants or the meat of animals," but in Shay it had come to mean "feed oneself by stealing food." Did he believe I had filched his dinner?
"I rob not," I said, trying to sound trustworthy.
He said something about my life. A loan? It wasn't clear. "I owe a debt?" I asked. "This debt to you?"
"Manq owe." The intensity of his gaze burned. "Your life pays this debt."
I didn't like the direction our conversations kept taking. "No kill me."
"Then tithe." As he spoke, one of his memories broke past his guarded thoughts. Normally I had trouble picking up clear images from his mind, but this one exploded with painful clarity.
Rugged stick figures were destroying the forest, mutilating roots.
I had to fortify my barriers, muting the brutal intensity of that image. This memory had great power over him. His grief filled the cavity. Stick figures maiming roots. Did he see that as a form of murder? I questioned my perception of his memory, though. It could be skewed, like my perception of him. Sometimes I saw him as human and other times as a treeman, a creature created by the forest to exact its revenge.
Then I realized both were true. His human body matched his physical appearance. His treeman aspect was how my mind interpreted his self-image, at least what I managed to pick up from his guarded thoughts. Yes, I remembered. I had long seen this way, in more than one mode. Normally I had a better ability to process my perceptions, but right now I was incomplete. Partial waves continued to come in from another reality and fine-tune my existence.
Fatigue, dazing, hazing, dazing…
Fatigue and hunger, dazing, hazing, dazing…
Untether my mind, drift, drifting into psiberspace…
Or what had been psiberspace, before the implosion…
Untether my mind, drift, drifting into psiberspace…
Afloat, afloat, afloat, floating in a forever sea…
Floating, dazing, hazing, dazing…
"—speak!" He sounded frightened.
Fade away…
"…come back!"
With an effort, I pulled into focus. The treeman was crouched in front of me, his body rippling. No, he wasn't rippling; reality was rippling. The cavity ebbed and flowed.
"Say again?" My voice sounded like distant leaves blowing over a plain.
He blanched. "What ****?"
"Understand not," I whispered.
"You started to
vanish.
" Sweat trickled down his temple. "Manq trick."
"No trick." My voice was a lost wind.
"Manq cruelty." He stated it flat and hard, as if to fend off whatever I had become.
"Not Manq."
"Did the Manq tell you?" His voice cracked. "Did it make a good telling?"
"Tell me what?"
Again that image came into my mind, sticks destroying roots.
"Stick people?" I asked, bewildered.
"You ****."
"Understand not." The cavity was solidifying. The treeman looked almost human now, though his eyes still resembled moss. I could feel my breath, fast and hard.
His disquiet seeped into my mind. To him, I looked young, unprotected, and frightened. It bothered him.
He spoke again. "You claim Skolians live above Slowcoal?"
"Slowcoal?" I asked.
"The huge coal that broods in the sky."
So that was what they called the gas giant. "Yes. Skolians live on many worlds."
He snorted. "I have never seen a Skolian. I have no belief they exist."
"I exist." At least I thought I did. "You are Skolian, too."
"I am not Skolian."
"Is true." My language libraries supplied the information. "Opalite and Slowcoal are part of Skolia."
Despite his frown, he didn't object again, which made me suspect he had heard it before.
Exhausted, I closed my eyes. It was only an instant. But when I opened them, sunlight was filtering into the cavity, though a second ago it had been night. A gauzy arthrop hung from the ceiling, its wings like lace spun into a spiral, going around,
round, round…
Round…
Round…
"—dying, are you?" He sounded closer now. Urgent. Apprehensive.
My eyes were closed. Closed? I opened them. Night had fallen, but Slowcoal light filled the cavity, augmented by embers in the fire pit. Disoriented and dizzy, I didn't try to speak. The treeman was kneeling in front of me, holding the pitcher of water to my lips. I drank, gulping, and the precious liquid soothed my throat. After I drank my fill, I bent my head over my bound hands and wiped the moisture from my lips. My arms shook.
He paled. "What are you?"
"I know not." My answer was almost inaudible, like wind over water in a far away place. "Go home… I must."
His voice hardened. "You stay."
"No."
"Yes. Manq lost you. I found."
"Not Manq. Skolian."
"You look Manq."
How did Manq look? I thought of his memory. Stick figures. I didn't look that way to him. He considered the Manq human, but his subconscious thought of them as dead sticks with no humanity at all.
"**** the sun?" he said
"Again?" I asked.
He said something about the sun and my hair. With a wrench of dismay, I recalled who else had hair like mine. An image came to my mind, a man in dark trousers and a rumpled gray sweater sitting at a console. Gleaming hardware surrounded him, lights flashing as he peered at a graph that rotated in the air. He had tousled black hair, glossy and black. Like mine.
My son.
My son.
The treeman gestured at my hair. "**** Manq is."
I tried to concentrate, but the memory of my son brought a gut-twisting dread. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
The treeman shook a length of my hair and repeated his indecipherable question. Anger leaked into his voice. And unease. He hid his apprehension well, but I felt it. He wondered if he had caught a supernatural being.
Fearing he would decide that my apparent spectral state gave him more reason to end my life, I tried to answer. "Manq hair black?"
He let go of my hair. "Yes."
"What else is Manq?"
The treeman tapped his finger next to his eye, then indicated the pitcher he held and spoke a word. He touched a copper ornament on his tunic and repeated the word.
The only similarity I could see between the pot and ornament was color. "Manq eyes brown?" That wasn't the Shay word he had used, though.
"Not brown. Some red." He repeated the other word. "Like metal."
I stored his word in my memory. "Copper?"
"Yes. Copper."
"Not copper, my eyes."
"True this is." He motioned at the walls and said another word. "Yours are like that."
I repeated the word. "Green?"
"Yes. Manq are also tall."
"I am small."
He answered grudgingly. "Yes. Your hair, too, is different. In the sun, it looked Manq. But now, what I see, this hair of yours isn't Manq." He indicated the tiny, curled spears of moss clinging to the wall. "Manq hair is like that."
"Green hair?" Maybe they had altered it to incorporate chlorophyll.
"No. Black."
Puzzled, I glanced at the moss he indicated, then at him.
"Like the water." He brushed his finger through the sheen of moisture on the moss.
"Manq hair liquid?" Apprehension surged over me, but my mind shied away from any memories his words might have evoked. I didn't want to know.
"Did the Manq leave you here?" he asked. "Abandon you?"
Did they? "Know not."
"Why know you not?"
"Thinking gone."
"They think not?" He made a grimace of a smile, as if he found bitter humor in that.
"Not them," I said. "Me. Bad memory."
