“I’ve never seen Nessa,” Ylly said longingly. “Nor met my mother’s people.”
“There is little to see in Nessa,” Esse said, smiling, head and shoulders taller than the tallest of them. “It is very dark. Here, the lopping of the tree branches at the level of the fabled Garden lets a little light down to us, sometimes. Gannak is closer and more scenic. Still, to get to Gannak right now, you would have to descend all the way to Floor, and if it is not already flooded, it will be soon. You would have to swim with piranhas or risk a boat voyage not consecrated by Floorian bone women. They would sink you with wicked words.”
“We will go with you gratefully,” Hasbabsah said.
“We will?” Oos said incredulously.
“If you wish to jump but are too cowardly,” Ylly said, “I can push you.”
“You are a grandmother, Ylly,” Hasbabsah said sharply. “She is a child. Remember yourself.”
“Sawas was my child, and this one sent her away.”
“Quiet, now,” Esse advised. “The rain and mist screen us somewhat, but I built that net to catch something other than Canopians. The dayhunter who visits this part of the tree has claws longer than that Gardener’s leg bones.”
Unar looked down at her legs.
“This Gardener will go with you,” she said, mimicking his stilted, formal manner of speaking. “This Gardener will do what you say.”
TWENTY-SIX
UNAR SQUATTED to watch Esse work.
How would the five of them go down? He was the only one with the serpent-tooth spines that let him cling to the tree like a spider. Hasbabsah’s had been snapped off when she’d first been captured and made a slave. Esse took a sharp axe from his pack, cut away a slab of tallowwood bark that would have done for a sleeping mat, and began to chisel something from the side of the tree above their heads.
It seemed forever before the short plank, pointed at one end and barely wide enough to hold a single person, was ready to be separated from the tree. Esse paused to push his pursed lips into a bark crevice, drinking the rainwater. Unar and the others did the same. They waited, wet and miserable, while he meticulously shaped another five short planks.
Unar thought about Aoun discovering that she and the two slaves were gone. She imagined him having to tell Servant Eilif that he had failed. It serves him right. Let him torture himself wondering if she and Oos had died or lived.
Edax, though. Edax deserved an explanation. When Unar failed to appear at their secluded meeting place, he might wonder how he’d offended her, when he hadn’t offended her at all. The opposite.
He wouldn’t know that she was below the barrier, as he was, but too far away for him to hear her and with no magic to stretch out to him. In fact, the pool below Ehkisland where Edax had taught her to dive, swim, and move with a man in intimate ways might be near the Understorian town, Gannak, which Esse had said was the closest town, if not the town where Hasbabsah had come from, Nessa.
It occurred to Unar that she could have visited Nessa at any time. She’d never thought that news of it might comfort Hasbabsah, or that she might carry a message from the old woman to her folk. That was because unenslaved Understorians were dangerous and savage.
“Step down,” Esse told her quietly.
He’d used his axe to make holes in the tree trunk. Then, he’d wedged the six little planks into the holes to make a sort of suicidal spiral staircase. Unar stepped down until she stood on the second-lowest plank. The others were arrayed behind her, with Ylly on the second-highest plank.
“Pull out the highest plank and pass it down to me, potplant.”
“Potplant?”
“An Understorian slave grown like an exotic specimen in the soil of the cursed Garden, are you not?” Esse smiled at Ylly. Unar took hold of the front edge of the plank as it was passed down to her, and Esse hacked another hole, lower down, to wedge the plank into.
In this manner, they progressed slowly and carefully, until, by midmorning, they stood at the river’s edge far below the place where Esse had netted them. Unar saw a wooden ramp, narrow and covered with moss and lichen, leading straight into the flow.
“Hold the railing tight,” their guide advised. “Yes, you must get wet again, but you will become warm and dry inside. We keep the fire burning for the whole of the monsoon. Do not think I have enjoyed cutting and drying the fuel. Go on. Go past me. I must bring the planks in.”
Unar brushed him as she passed. His thin, stick-body was completely unyielding; even his belly was hard with muscle. It was like brushing past a sapling. She stared at the rushing water of the vertical river. The ability to swim wouldn’t protect her if she slipped from the platform and was washed down to Floor.
She seized the platform railing and dragged herself through the flow. Her feet left the floor. The weight of water was like hammers on her head. She kicked, hard, and found the platform again, propelling herself towards the tree trunk just as her fingers lost their grip.
The tree trunk was hollowed away. She fell, gasping like a landed fish, into a room lit only by luminous fungi.
Men’s boots and cloaks hung from hooks in the circular wall. Shelves held sacks and woven items unidentifiable in the gloom. Wet underclothes were draped over a drying rack, and Unar hesitated before plunging into the black corridor that was apparently the only way for her to go—were there hairy, naked Understorian warriors inside? Esse had said that they would stay with him until the rain stopped, but how many fellow trappers, fishers, and hunters shared his quarters?
She couldn’t use her magic to find out. The place where it had been no longer felt hollow. It felt like nothing, like before she’d felt the seed inside her for the first time. Unar knew that if she tried to enter Canopy, the border would throw her back as violently as the princess’s curtains had.
Before she could start towards the corridor, Oos and Hasbabsah crashed into her back. They sprawled together on the floor; it was unpolished, and splinters found their way into Unar’s face. She stumbled into a pile of sacks and sat there, trying to work the wood out from under her skin, swearing until she remembered Edax’s tear-shaped scars and became distracted by wondering if their making had been painful for him to endure.
“I think I will just sleep here,” Hasbabsah wheezed, staying where she was, facedown on the floor.
Ylly exploded out of the curtain of river water, spluttering and shaking.
Esse came after her with his arms full of boards. He narrowly skirted the slumped shape of Hasbabsah and leaned the boards against the shelves, shaking his short, dark hair like a wet tapir. He helped the groaning old slave to her feet and led her down the corridor without a word.
At the end of it, he opened a door to a second room filled with heat and light. It smelled powerfully of spices and smoked fish.
Unar was irresistibly drawn with the others, single file, towards it.