Walking the Tree (10 page)

  "There's no other evidence of his mother. His parentage. I thought this must be it."

  The joke was cruel and not funny.

  Dickson ran to the rope. "I'll climb it and you'll see my line. You'll see where I'm from."

  He climbed the nearest rope, then reached out for the rope before it. The young men loved to climb, and the women, too. The children were up in the branches all the time, feeling tall, proud, strong.

  Dickson tugged at the rope, testing it. He heard creaking. He did not have the courage to climb further up the ropes, so he pulled down his pants and pissed on the people below. The crowd shouted. "Dickson! You fool!"

  "Dickson's climbing the Tree!" the call went out, and many in the Order laughed. There had never been a self-death at Ombu, through teachers who arrived from other Orders had experienced this loss and didn't find it a reason to joke.

  Lillah noticed Morace standing quietly to the side.

  There was a large fissure in the Tree nearby. Morace had always been fascinated by it.

  He stood there, arms stretched up, hands holding the sides of the fissure on either side. He leaned in, sniffing the air in there.

  "Morace!" Thea screamed. She ran forward and pulled at him. "Don't go inside! There's ghosts in there!" He threw her arm off.

  "Don't touch me," he said.

Zygo stood beside him. "Don't touch him, Thea."

Some of the other children watched, terrified.

"He nearly went in!"

  "My grandmother's in there. And she drowned and got eaten by crabs, so you could see her insides," Zygo said.

  Borag squealed. "Don't go in! He's too curious. Doesn't he know how dangerous curiosity can be?"

  "Come on, Morace. There's something I want to show you," Lillah said.

  Morace reluctantly let go of the Trunk. "I like the way it smells in there. Different to the way it smells out here."

  Lillah took his hand and led him towards the beach. He slowed as the brush cleared then balked altogether. Inwardly, Lillah cursed a mother who would cause her child to be frightened of open spaces.

  "It's okay," she said. "Look." She pointed along the beach, and Araucari, the man who had lost the use of his legs, waved.

 

"Help me," Araucari had whimpered. "Help me." The men had worked together, ten of them heaving at the wood.

  "It seems to weigh more when it falls," grumbled one of the men.

  "Be quiet and keep lifting. If we don't free him soon he will die."

  "What use will he be without legs?" muttered the man, a jealous, lazy type who had never attracted a wife. "He won't be able to find food, or build. What could he do?"

  Someone said, "He can remember, and think. This one is our puzzle solver. Remember when a child disappeared from one of the visiting schools? We all thought she'd drowned, but he remembered her talking about the sun, how she wanted to be close to the sun. We found her on our highest reachable branch. Remember? Someone had to climb up and coax her down with the promise of sweets. He listens, this man. Even more now that he will be inactive."

  "He's a very handy man. Now heave." They threw off the wood and one of the women wrapped the sodden bandages she had prepared as a compress around his legs while he panted and showed them the whites of his eyes. They pulled the stick from his stomach and saw the wound was shallower than they had thought.

  "We need to draw out the poison. This needs to be changed every hour if he is to live." If he died, he would receive a hero's burial, full of worship. Dying by being crushed by falling wood is considered worthy. It hadn't happened in Lillah's lifetime, but etched into the Tree Trunk was a depiction of a man under a huge branch, with a ray of sunlight directed into his face.

  Araucari did survive. Now he mostly ate food that slipped through his body easily: seaweed, cooked to sludge. Lots of liquids. He was known for a certain smell and had no chance of ever finding a wife.

  His legs were never useful again, and you knew where he had been by the drag marks in the sand or dirt. His arm muscles had grown massive and the skin on his hands calloused, thick. He could pick up a red-hot ember and toss it from palm to palm, without feeling a thing. He could pluck food out of the pot and let it cool before passing it around. And he was very kind to the children. He knew he frightened them, so made sure his smile was mild. He did not hand out sweets to them. "I don't want to trick people to like me," he said. There had been a number of disappointed schoolteachers who hadn't realised the extent of his disablement. He would never be a father, and could only morally marry a barren woman.

 

"Araucari's made something for you. Come on. He can't come to us. I'll lead you. Close your eyes if you like."

  Morace did, squeezed his eyes shut and trusted Lillah to lead him.

  They reached Araucari and Lillah nodded to him. He handed Lillah a hat and she placed it carefully on Morace's head.

  "Open your eyes," she said.

  Morace opened one eye, then the other. He gasped. The hat had three flaps; two concealing the world on either side, the third cutting the view in front to just a few metres.

  Morace stepped forward on the sand, then took another few steps. He turned to face the man, grinning broadly.

  "I can pretend I don't have a face with this hat. People will think I am a hat on a body."

  Araucari chuckled. "We understand each other, Morace. I was once like you: afraid of open spaces. I liked my small house, my small room. People could not see me there, and they would not laugh at my legs, my weakness. If they made me come out, I would stand with my nose to the dark, dark, mottled Bark of the Tree. I would breathe it in. We had a school walk through who brought a drink they had made with the Bark and I liked that, too; one drink and your brain was quiet, you had no more thoughts until waking. But it hurt the next day and it was three, four days before you could start thinking again. That is no way to be.

  "Then another school came through, and one of the young boys was like me. I watched a lot because the teachers had no interest in me. That was okay; I understood. Although they did not realise I could bring pleasure to them. They didn't know that."

  Lillah felt her cheeks blush, and she looked at Araucari's long fingers, her thoughts going elsewhere.

  "This young boy was not happy on the walk. He did not like school. We sat and talked and we thought that the world was too big for us, that we did not like to see the world all at once. We liked small views, things we could understand one by one. So together we made a hat each. This is mine."

  "I haven't seen you wear it," Morace said. He did not take the hat off.

  "No, I don't need it anymore. I am no longer scared of the world. That will be you, too, by the time you return."

  Morace smiled. "By the time I return I will have eyes at the back of my head and on top of my ears, so I can see the world all at once."

  Araucari squeezed his shoulders. "You will come back a well-worthy child. I will miss you and your jokes, Morace."

  Lillah squeezed Araucari. He was a good, good man.

 

"Dickson seems even more agitated than usual," Myrist said quietly.

  "I think he was hoping Thea would choose to stay with him. But she cannot live with her brother forever. He thinks no one else will choose him."

  "And he sees that as whose fault?" Myrist said.

   Lillah nodded. "I know. He doesn't see what sort of person he is. He thinks he's fine the way he is."

  They heard screaming and ran to see Dickson spinning a child so fast all was a blur.

  "Dickson!" Myrist shouted. "You'll hurt that child."

  "I told him," Erica said, her hands on her hips. "I told him again and again. He doesn't listen."

  Dickson stopped, panting. "Will I? I didn't realise you could tell the future."

  He let the child slip to the ground.

  "More?" the child said, and those watching laughed.

  Dickson hopped about, unable to keep still. His mouth pursed into a whistle, he waved his arms to try to get Lillah's attention.

  "Come on, Lillah, I want to show you something."

  "I've already seen it, thanks," she said. "I've seen it plenty and I don't need to be reminded of what it looks like." She tied her hair back in a plaited vine and set up a bowl of hot, salty water. She bent over the steamy bowl. She closed her eyes and let the heat absorb her. Her face began to sweat and it was harder to breath; the steam hurt her lungs.

  "I don't know why you're doing that. You're already beautiful," Dickson said.

  Lillah lifted her head up, feigning annoyance but glad of the excuse to stop steaming her face.

  "Dickson, you are the most self-centred, dreary person I know. Can't you leave me alone for just one minute?" He shook his head and danced from foot to foot.

  "It's important for the future of our Order," he said. He tossed his head; hair was always in his eyes. She sighed, dried her face in a soft cloth and stood up. He took her hand and she was surprised at the comfort of it. Not too soft but not callused, his hand was firm as it held hers.

  He led her down over the rocks and to a small rock pool.

  "There," he said. He squatted down and tugged her down, too. In the rock pool there were small, perfect pieces of shell, colourful and glowing in the water. "I want you to tell my future bride that I will make a necklace for her. I'll collect these until she arrives, then I'll string them for her. No one can find shells the way I do. I've got the nose."

  Lillah made no comment on his nose, which was long and fat, with a blob on the end that was almost penis-like. Thea's nose was similar; she hated it.

  Lillah ran her fingers through his shells, admiring their differences. "You should share the shells. Unfair otherwise."

  "Oh, I'll share," he said, but he turned his head away and flapped his hand at her. When he turned back his eyes were teary, and Lillah wasn't sure if it was the salt air or something else.

  "Send me someone beautiful in your place, Lillah. Someone worthy of my love." He rotated his hips and kissed his lips at her.

  "I'll try," Lillah said. She imagined there would be one like him in every Order they stopped at.

  "I need to get back, Dickson. Don't go telling everybody we did anything, all right?"

  He shrugged. "I never lie. Don't you think it would be better the first time with someone who knows you, cares about you? I would never forget it."

  "That's the problem. You'd never forget, always think you have a hold on me, that I would remember you with affection and come back to you. It will only lead to disappointment. There's a school arriving tomorrow or the next day. There will be your partner amongst them. Your perfect girl. And if not that school, then the next. If my brother can win a girl, then you certainly can." Lillah winced as she spoke, knowing these words would not comfort him. His mouth turned down and he stepped away from her.

  "You know your brother used trickery to win Magnolia. Tax says so." It seemed so odd that Thea

could have two such awful brothers.

  "I wouldn't call it trickery. Kindness, I would say."

  "He pretended to be kind just to get her interested."

  "He wasn't pretending. He is kind. Maybe you will need a few tricks, though," Lillah said. "Come on. I think they are eating cake. I don't want to miss out."

  "I'm not coming. I don't want to see those people."

  Lillah wondered what he was up to. She followed him to the Trunk of the Tree, and heard him whispering into its Bark, "This is the teller Dickson. Today I had sex with both Lillah and Melia, because they wished me to seed them before they left. This was my duty for the day."

  Lillah waited until he was gone, then whispered over his tell, "No, he didn't."

  As the moment for departure approached, Lillah felt as if she was awakening, that she was in that moment just before, that moment when defences are down and a different, internal reality takes over. This is the time Lillah felt frightened. Sometimes she tried to fight it, other times she gave in to the randomness of it. There was a sense of green, and a sense of big. This bigness filled her brain to the very edges. The bigness took all the space, till there was room for nothing but bigness. And the bigness was green. This green filling was frightening because she had no control over it. It wasn't like the times they drank too much sap wine; those times the body was uncontrollable, but the brain didn't care. This bigness filled her and she just had to let it be.

  The whole Order came out to the water. Excitement filled the air with noise: eating, collecting messages for people, last-minute conversations about important things. The pot thrower lined up pot after pot, although he was not completely happy with the clay.

  "Too dry. It misses something."

  Lillah gave her childhood doll, Treesa, to one of the little girls too young for school, who hugged it to her chest. No point leaving it, no point taking it. She would make a new doll for any child she had; this doll should stay here.

  Myrist cleared his throat three times but didn't speak.

  "What is it, Myrist? If you have something to say, now is the time. Any messages you send after me will be lost in translation, you know that."

  "I know I shouldn't worry. I want you to be careful, though. Be observant. Watch everyone and everything carefully. Don't let a racing pulse lead you to make a wrong choice. Look at the surroundings. Notice everything. Some Orders appear to be friendly but beneath there lies anger and fear."

  "I'll be able to tell," Lillah said.

  "Some Orders will try to terrify you into making the choice they want you to make. Some places will show you the consequences of a wrong choice."