Tortall (4 page)

“I believe they will take an old woman with your unusual skills,” the Falcon said to me. “In fact, I am so sure of it that I am willing to pay a proper bride price for you to your parents. But you would not be my bride on our journey to Shang; you would be my student. You would be as safe with me as you would with your father.”

I scowled at him. “Are you buying me? I am no slave.”

He chuckled. “No,” he said, laughter still in his eyes. “This is an offering of thanks I give to your family, for the honor of being allowed to teach so inventive a young lady.”

“We believe him,” Mama said quietly. “We trust him. But you must choose.”

“He says you may visit, when you have finished the studies.” Iyaka smiled at me, but tears rolled down her cheeks.

Papa took up my hand and kissed it. “I think you saved our family’s honor today at high cost to your future,” he said, his voice as soft as Mama’s. “Even less than a bride possessed by a demon will a young man like a wife who can kick his ribs in.”

I looked at the Falcon. “Why should I want to study the ways of warriors out of grandmother tales?” I asked him, feeling my heart beat a little faster.

He got to his knees and pulled a stone half the size of my head over in front of him. His eyes half-closed, he seemed to go away a little, for a moment. I did not even see him cock his fist and punch the stone.

The stone broke in half.

For the first time since we had met Awochu in the street, I felt like myself again. “How did you do that?” I asked. “Will you teach me that? And what is your idea of a fair bride price? If I am to be a Shang warrior, I must not dishonor my family with a few coppers.”

Shriveling. He shrank. Leaves, twigs, branches, roots, all curled in on him. His trunk went limp. His apples dropped to the earth in a green rainfall. He mourned them with tears of sap. These apples were his last crop, his children-to-be. His chance to spread his family with his seeds now lay on the ground, doomed to rot.

Even his tears dried until he had no more. He was dying. He had to be dying, but this was no death he knew. Without lightning or axes no tree ended so fast, in one night. At sunset he’d been vigorous, alive. The rising sun touched him as he fell, dying, from his earth.

Wasn’t death a hard dark? He was soft. Sharp and slick things pricked newly tender bark. Lumps under him were his apples, his unborn children. Would he feel such things if he were dead? Even his heartwood, where his thoughts were paced like the seasons, was different. Now his thoughts tumbled like hailstones in a high wind. They were not made by normal scents and vibrations but by things he could not even name.

Within his heartwood, among these new and frightening thoughts, a shape formed. It was the image of a big rootless
one, like those who picked his fruit. This rootless made signs in the air with his twigs. The sign-shapes blazed, then vanished.

Suddenly the tree knew big rootlesses were
humans
. This one, his thoughts whispered, was a man, a
mage
, who had just used magic on him.

“I beg you, forgive me,” the mage-human said. “I’ve done a dreadful thing to you, and I can’t undo it. I turned an enemy into an apple tree. Half a world away an apple tree—you—became a man.”

When the tree said nothing, the stranger went on. “I am needed here—I can’t come help you. What I
have
done is place a spell so you can understand what your senses tell you. My spell also gives you the ability to speak. You won’t be helpless, this first day of your new life.” He cocked his head. “I’m being called. Listen—you need a name. It’ll be easier to find you, if I have your name. Can you think of one?”

The tree was about to say that trees had no names, but a strange thing happened. Memory whispered that a human female had once spoken to him. A visitor, she had silently touched every tree there. Only when she came to him, the last, did she speak as she took her hand from his bark: “Qiom.”

“Qiom,” he said now, tasting the name with a human tongue. “I am Qiom.”

“Qiom,” the man repeated. “Thank you. Each night, when you sleep, I’ll enter your dreams and answer questions. I’ll do my best to help, I swear it.”

The human faded in Qiom’s heartwood—his
mind
, whispered new, magical knowledge. As he faded, the human
said, “Some of your old self stayed with this body. You will know more about plants than most humans; you’ll be strong. You can use those things to feed and protect yourself.” He was only a shimmer of light among shadows. “
My
name is Numair. Again, forgive me.” He was gone.

Qiom sat up and looked himself over with human eyes. He was rootless, his trunk changed beyond belief. His skin was a darker brown than Numair’s had been; his shaggy crown hair was black. He looked down at human legs, wiggled stunted, ugly toes, and wept.

As the sun rose, his middle clenched. He felt empty; his head spun. New thinking said this was human hunger. If he wasn’t dead, he wanted to live. Living meant food.

He struggled to stand, falling twice, and stretched out his senses. He knew the plants around him in the same way he had known them before this change, but now he also knew how to use them for food.

The apricot and almond trees that shared his grove would give food in some weeks, but not today. Their fruits would make him sick if he ate them right away. The grasses under his feet would not feed a human body at all.

Fumbling and tripping, he left the grove of his old life. He turned his nose into the wind as he had once turned his leaves to it, sorting the fragrances of plants. There, on his west side: food he could eat right now. He shambled into the next grove, where a bounty of ripe cherries waited to be picked. As he gorged himself on them, he pitched their seeds outside the orchard. They would get a chance to take root and grow.

Once he had fed, weariness struck. He folded his new
legs and sat under a cherry tree. Closing the flaps over his eyes, he fell into soft shadows.

He woke to the screams of humans and a feeling of pressure in his belly. Squatting, he passed dung and urine, like the wastes that dogs and other animals dumped on his roots. Human females covered from top to toe in leaves of cloth fled the cherry orchard, screaming, when he did this. As Qiom stood, swaying on his ugly stick legs, the females returned with male humans. These wore cloth leaves that fit their arms and legs closely and left their faces bare, unlike the females. The males carried wooden things
—hoes
, said his magical knowledge, and
staffs
. They hit Qiom with them, shouting, cursing him.

Qiom yelped—the blows hurt. He ran away from the men. They gave chase, still battering him, still cursing him. Qiom ran faster. Once he was a safe distance away, he turned to ask them why.

The first rock struck his belly, slicing tender skin, causing sap—blood—to well out. Qiom clapped his hands over the cut, wailing in fright and pain. The humans threw more rocks at him. One clipped his shoulder. Another struck his head, drawing more blood. Now Qiom ran in earnest.

He kept running until he saw not another human being. He lay down in a stream until his wounds, until all of him but his chattering new knowledge, went numb in the cold water. Free of pain, he rose and trudged on down a strip of beaten earth called a road.

At sunset he entered the woods. He needed to find shelter before the night turned cold. A fallen tree, massive and hollow, offered him a place to rest. He made himself a bed of
leaves and curled up inside the log, shivering as the day’s heat faded. He mourned his last apples again. Would they feel as he did, green and unready for this angry new life?

He drifted in the warmth of sleep for a time. Then light bloomed in the dark, showing him the human male Numair. “What happened?” asked Numair, reaching out as if he could touch Qiom. “You’re hurt. And you’re cold.”

“Humans happened to me,” Qiom said, his voice as sharp as new sap. “I rid myself of urine and dung and they attacked me.”

Numair’s shoulders slumped. “Oh. You see, they expect humans to hide when they, um, release urine and dung. We also bury wastes, and we clean ourselves afterward with leaves and water. Not cleaning makes us sick.”

“The females screamed at me even before I did it,” Qiom told Numair. “Why? I was not hurting them.”

Numair looked Qiom over. “I think it was because you are naked,” he said quietly. “You need clothes.”

Clothes
, his new knowledge whispered. The cloth leaves that covered the human form were clothes.

“With no money, you’ll have to steal some,” Numair said. “It’s a bad idea, but you have no choice.” Carefully, he explained what he meant. For every new word he used, knowledge tumbled into Qiom’s head, showering him with images and explanations. At last Numair faded from Qiom’s sleep, promising to return.

In the morning Qiom found a road. Numair had said it would take him to other humans, who would have things Qiom needed to survive.

In a small village Qiom found drying-lines, each of them heavy with wet cloth fruits. Making sure he was not seen, he plucked breeches from one line, a loincloth from another, and a shirt from a third. He might have escaped the village unnoticed but for the beautiful smell that reached his nose. Warm and heady, it combined wheat, chickens, and a touch of mother cow.
Bread
, magical knowledge told him.
Food
.

Qiom tracked the scent to a plump brown circle in the window of a human dwelling. When he seized the loaf of bread, he scorched his fingers. He dropped it, sucked on his fingertips to cool them, then grabbed it again. Inside the house, a child began to scream.

Again males came, waving their weapons. Qiom ran, bread and wet clothes hugged tight to his chest. He was not quick enough: a rock struck his spine, making him gasp with pain. On he ran.

“You have to be
careful
,” Numair told him that night as Qiom slept. “Stay out of sight, watch what they do.”

Qiom tried. He did, but still he lurched from disaster to disaster. He was not good at sneaking. Someone nearly always saw him—when they did, the screaming, the hitting, the pain, and the running all began afresh.

One night, tired of the cold, Qiom took shelter in a barn. In its haymow he had the best sleep of his rootless life, warmed by the body heat of the cows on the floor below. It was not yet dawn when men woke him. Qiom blinked at them as they dragged him to his feet. Somehow they had brought daylight into the barn in the hours before dawn, light captured on the ends of sticks.

The sticks were burning. These men had made a servant
of fire, the great killer! He shrank from the flames, too frightened to struggle as the men forced him out of the barn. If he disobeyed them, would they burn him, too? It was hard to be calm and think, as Numair was forever telling him to do. Qiom was sure that no one had ever threatened Numair with fire.

The men dragged him to a building where a huge fire burned at its center. Qiom curled himself into a ball, terrified that the flames would jump to him. His captors forced him to look at a man in an orange turban and sash. This man, a priest, babbled of Oracles and gods, saying, “The mad carry the god’s blessing.” He talked and talked. When he finished, the men took Qiom out of the village, away from that great fire. They set him free and told him never to return.

Qiom fled, sure they would send the fire leaping after him. He ran through what remained of the night. At last he fell and slept.

Numair immediately came into Qiom’s dreams, but the tree-man turned away. Where had Numair’s help gotten him? When the sun rose, Qiom woke to bleeding feet, bruises, and a throbbing head. He was tired of human anything. He would finish the dying that began when he shriveled and return to the Great Pine and the Flowering Apple, the parents of all trees. Maybe they would give him a fresh start as a seed.

He sought a place in the open, where he would be sheltered from nothing. At last he found the perfect spot: a hill beside a road into a town. The boulders that formed the hill were capped by a lone, broad, flat stone. He could not ask for better. Qiom sat cross-legged on the rock and waited.

People on the road stared at him. Wagons slowed as they passed. Fearing him, thinking him mad, no one spoke to him. He ignored the humans, just as he ignored Numair when the mage entered his sleep that night.

It was the world apart from people that nearly changed his mind. How could humans rush through a day without looking at the blueness of the sky or the colors of butterflies? How could they ignore the miracles of growing wheat and flying birds? Qiom had to struggle to harden his heart against the beauties visible to human eyes, beauties that tempted him to live. He succeeded. If he needed reminders of why he wished to die, all he had to do was remember fire, and rocks, and screams.

In the afternoon of his second day on the hill, a boy walking toward the town stopped to gaze at him. Even Qiom knew his dark hair was badly cut. No two clumps were the same length. He dressed as all males did—trousers, sash, shirt—and carried a cloth pack on his shoulders.