Tortall (5 page)

Qiom saw the boy again that evening: he was working just outside the town walls. Often the boy stopped to stare at him. In the morning, he waved to Qiom as he walked into the town.

Two more days passed. A thunderstorm broke. Qiom begged for lightning to strike him, but it did not. He was hungry, thirsty, and dizzy from lack of food and water. He tried to ignore those feelings, but it was harder than he had expected. Dust blew into his eyes, making them water. He shivered in the chilly nights. Bugs that ate humans feasted on him.

Then he saw the boy leave the town with a fat and heavy pack and a dirtless face. When the boy reached the rocky hill, he climbed it until he scrambled onto Qiom’s stone.

Qiom waited for an order or a demand for information. Instead the boy sat on his heels and opened his pack. He took out a pear. Slowly he set the fruit on the rock between them. “Good day, Elder Brother,” he said. “My pack is heavy. Would you accept a pear, and lighten it?”

Other humans had given Qiom screams, threats, and blows. None had spoken gently. None had offered food. He could smell the pear. His mouth flooded with saliva; his belly, quiet for a whole day, snarled.

Elder Brother? “We are not family,” he croaked. “I am no one’s brother.”

The boy’s skin was paler than Qiom’s, his nose a strong arch on a stubborn face. There was light in his eyes and kindness in his mouth. “ ‘Elder Brother’ is a courtesy title, to show respect. Please accept the pear and my respect.”

Qiom felt things suddenly, not just hunger. The warmth in the boy’s voice made his heart ache. “If I eat, it will take me longer to die,” he said at last.

The boy sat back, surprised. “Die?” he repeated. “It is a beautiful day—bright with sun, cool with breezes. Surely it’s a day for beginnings, not endings.”

“I have begun. I don’t like it,” Qiom replied wearily. “I am useless. I am a tree who cannot be a tree. I know nothing of being a man.”

The boy rubbed his chin. Qiom waited. He didn’t expect the lad to believe him.

At last the boy said, “Trees don’t want to die. They want to sink their roots deep, and open their leaves for sunlight.”

A human who made sense. “I have no roots,” Qiom replied, sorrowful. “And these branches don’t work.” He inspected
his hands. “The one who changed me tries to explain human things, but he only comes at night. It is in the sun that I fail. I never know enough. People hate me. I will sit here until I die.”

The boy frowned. “Aren’t you hungry?” He rolled the pear closer.

Qiom swallowed a mouthful of saliva. “If I ignore it, I will die,” he answered.

The boy wrapped his arms around his knees. Finally he asked, “If I teach you how to be a man, will you eat?”

A feeling struck Qiom like a stone thumping his chest. The feeling was shock. He stared at the boy. “Why? What good am I like this?”

“Everyone has some good,” the boy said earnestly. “You can work. The Oracle says work is a blessing in the eyes of the god. And if there are two of us, we’ll be safer from people who pick on strangers.”

“Safer.” The word had a good sound. “You can teach me to be a man?” If Numair, who had made him, couldn’t do it, could this boy?

The boy smiled crookedly. “I’m good at teaching. My cousin is slow, but I taught him how to tie his sandals. No one else could.”

Slowly Qiom wrapped his hand around the pear. It felt just right in his palm. “Why do you do this?” he asked. “Why do you help me?”

The boy looked down. “I know how it is to be without hope,” he said at last. “I do this because I can.” He put his palms together and bowed slightly. “I am called Fadal.”

*     *     *

Qiom lightened Fadal’s pack by eating four more pears and the flatbread the boy had tucked in his sash. “We’ll get more,” Fadal assured him. “There is little work to be had for money, but people will trade things for chores. First, we need better clothes for you. And aren’t you cold at night?”

Qiom nodded.

“You can have one of my blankets. If you’re as strong as you look and ready to work, we can trade labor for what we’ll need.”

When the western sun grazed the treetops, they camped beside a deep, clear pool. Qiom went in search of mushrooms. He wanted to add something of his own to their food. He also wanted to stay away from the fire that Fadal had started. Humans were so casual with the stuff, as if they believed it would never burn them. Qiom thought he would never be comfortable with fire.

Once he’d washed his mushrooms and given them to Fadal, Qiom retreated to the base of a chestnut tree to watch. Fadal put the sausage and mushrooms on a piece of metal over the fire to work the magic humans named cooking. The food hissed and spat, releasing a smell that made Qiom’s belly talk. Finally the boy put most of the meal on a piece of bark for Qiom.

He scooped up a fistful, the way he had eaten his first meal of cherries, and thrust it into his mouth. Heat seared his hand and mouth. He gasped and nearly choked, burning his throat, before he spat out the food.

“It’s too hot,” Fadal said. “Put cold water on your hand.” Qiom went to the pond and put first his burned hand, then his entire head, into it. The pain went away.
When he pulled out of the water, Fadal washed the dropped sausage and heated it again.

Once it was ready, he crouched before Qiom, holding the piece of bark loaded with steaming food. “You blow on hot food to cool it, like this.” He blew on a mushroom, then gave it to Qiom to eat.

After that, Qiom fed himself. The sausage in particular was very good. “It is the best meal I have had,” he said as Fadal put more wood on the fire.

“Did your mother never cook?” Fadal asked. “What was she like?”

“I don’t know,” Qiom replied. “When I was a seed, I was carried until I was planted. I never saw the tree from which I fell.”

Fadal made a face. “Who named you Qiom, then?” He told him about the woman, about “qiom.” “I like the sound.”

“How could you know what she said?” asked Fadal craftily. “Trees don’t speak or hear.”

“We hear,” Qiom replied. “We hear with the mouths in our leaves, and we speak in their sound. But human talking …” He was quiet for a while, sorting out ideas he had never put to words before. “I was old even then. Changing, becoming different. The little ghost people—elementals—who live in stones and streams, they said I would soon give birth to myself, to my own elemental.” He felt his lips stretch and turn up, as Fadal’s had. He was smiling. It felt good. “Elementals are such liars. I did not walk out of my tree body. I am a tree that walks and talks.”

“So you learned enough speech from just listening to
the visitors to your grove to talk now.” Fadal sounded as if he did not believe Qiom.

Qiom shrugged. It was comforting in a way: at last Fadal acted like every other human he had met. Until this moment he had been so different that Qiom had started to think this friendly boy was a daylight dream born of an empty belly.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Numair put magic on me, so I could speak. All these words … How do humans manage? I get confused. It hurts my heart.”

Fadal sighed and doused the fire. He took blankets from his pack and gave one to Qiom. Then he wrapped himself in his own blanket and lay on a patch of thick grass.

Qiom thought Fadal was asleep, until a new question came from the dark. “Elder Brother, who is Numair?”

“He comes in dreams,” replied Qiom. “He turned a bad man into a tree. The price of that great magic was that I turned into a man, half a world away.”

“And you believe this,” Fadal remarked. The boy sounded amused.

“I must,” Qiom said. He closed his eyes and slept.

The next day they got work repairing stone fences around an olive grove. Resting at midmorning, they drank water and ate figs brought to them by the young son of the grove’s owners. Qiom was ready to get back to work when the same boy ran by, chased by a crying little girl.

The boy halted beside the well, holding a soft, floppy thing over his head, out of the girl’s reach. Magical knowledge told Qiom this was a
doll
, a girl’s toy.

“I’ll tell Mama!” the girl cried. She jumped frantically, trying to get the doll.

“So?” retorted the boy. “Nobody cares what girls say.”

Fadal stirred. “Elder Brother, will you stop this?” he asked Qiom. “As the oldest man present, you should correct the boy.”

“Why?” Qiom wanted to know. “This is not important. It is nothing to do with trees.” Fadal glared at him. “Why are you angry?” Qiom asked, confused. “You said we must finish this work today.”

Fadal marched over to the boy and took the doll. He gave the toy to the girl, who clutched it and ran. “Don’t you know your sacred writings?” Fadal asked the boy. “The Oracle wrote, ‘Women hold our future. Therefore, honor all women as you do your soul.’ Honor does
not
meant torment! Go, and think on what I have said!” He pointed to the house. The boy ran inside.

Fadal returned to Qiom, his cheeks still red with anger. “He shouldn’t have tormented his sister,” he told Qiom. “If men aren’t fair to women, women have no protection at all.”

Qiom didn’t know why Fadal was angry. “If you say so,” he replied, lifting a big stone. “Where shall I set this?”

They finished the repairs and slept in the grove that night. In the morning they left, richer by a shirt that was patched, but warm, for Qiom, as well as by a pouch of dried fruit.

They walked into the hills, working when they could. They spent two days helping a man to slaughter sheep, an afternoon picking olives, a morning dipping candles. Fadal
made sure that on each job they got something useful for Qiom: a knife, a sash, a blanket.

They had finished their noon meal after candle dipping and had gone some miles down the road when Fadal grabbed his shirtfront and sighed. “Wait here,” he ordered Qiom, and strode into the woods just off the road.

Qiom waited, but Fadal took a long time. What if something was wrong? Was he sick, as Qiom had been when he ate a bad piece of meat? Then Fadal had given him herbs to stop his insides from their painful squeezing. Now Qiom found the herb pouch and went to find the boy.

Fadal was not squatting: he was shaking out a long band of cloth. His shirt was pulled up around his shoulders, revealing a body unlike Qiom’s. Fadal’s chest was not flat but carried two small rounds. Now Fadal held one end of the cloth to his ribs and passed the long end around them, as if he bandaged a large scratch. A third wrapping pressed the rounded parts of his chest flat.

“Are you hurt?” Qiom asked. He saw no blood; Fadal had said nothing of being in pain.

Fadal whirled, his face dead white. He covered his chest with his hands. “Go away!” he cried. “I wanted to be alone!”

The cloth fell. He bent to grab it, still trying to hide his chest with one hand. He was breathing in gasps.

Qiom returned to the road, as confused as he had ever been in his short life. His human knowledge said that what he had seen were
breasts
, that Fadal was a female. Why did she pretend to be male? Why use cloth to hide her breasts? Why did she not wear the shell of cloth leaves like other females?

When Fadal returned, she opened her pack. “I’ll make
a bargain with you,” she said. “We’ll split the food and the things we’ve gotten working together, and take opposite paths. All right?”

Fadal wanted to leave? “I don’t understand,” Qiom replied. He did not like this. The thought of going on without Fadal was frightening.

“Oh, please!” Fadal exclaimed, dashing away raindrops that fell from her eyes. “You’ll denounce me at the next temple—”

“Why?” Qiom asked, scared. What would become of him without her? “Temples have fire in them. I hate temples. You said you would explain things. You promised to teach me to be a man, but now you mean to leave. You make no sense, Fadal.”

She stepped back and stared up into Qiom’s face, her eyes searching for something. Her terror was still there, but it began to fade, to be replaced with bewilderment.

“You—” Her voice squeaked. She cleared her throat, then asked, “Why do women cover all but their eyes in veils?”

For perhaps the first time Qiom felt irritation. “I have no idea. Why do you ask me about clothes?”

Fadal sat in the road, plop, like a frog. Her eyes were huge. “You really
were
a tree.”

Qiom blinked. “I said I was. What has my tree-ness to do with cloth leaves—with veils?” Fadal was quite pale. Qiom knelt and offered her the herb pouch. “Are you sure you don’t need medicine?”

Fadal took the pouch but did not open it. Instead she asked, “What do you know of our religion?”

“There is a god who is in fires,” Qiom told Fadal. “I am afraid of fire, so I know nothing of its god.”

Fadal’s mouth quivered like an aspen leaf. “Three hundred years ago, the Oracle came to this part of the world,” she said carefully. “He spoke for the God in the Flame, our oldest god. He spoke clearly, when all others who heard the god’s voice went mad, and he wrote down the god’s commands. We follow what he wrote. He told us that women of an age to bear children are a temptation to men. They are disorderly and selfish. If they are not to distract men from the god, they must live apart from men, except for marriage visits. Outside women’s quarters they must veil themselves until only their eyes, hands, and feet show. Old-fashioned women even wear a sheer veil over their eyes.

“My father wasn’t from here. In his land, the God in the Flame is still one of many gods. Father taught me to hunt and fish and handle tools because he had no son. He died a year ago, and my mother remarried this spring. Her new husband is devout. The day he wed my mother, I was ordered to put on the body veil and move into women’s quarters. He was planning my marriage.” Fadal shook her head. “I couldn’t bear it. I cut off my hair, bound my chest flat, and ran away. If I were caught—an unveiled woman …”

Her voice died away. Qiom, sitting on his heels beside her, nudged her shoulder. “What would happen?” he asked.

“Men would say I was a prostitute or a demon. They would stone me to death.” She looked at him. “But you saw. You are a man of this country; you look it and your accent is
ours. But you don’t care that I’m female, do you? If you didn’t mind for my sake, you would for your own—the man who travels with an unveiled woman is thought to be infected with vice. He too must die because he would spread that infection. Only one explanation fits why you don’t care.”