The elders had decided to expand Nextdown on the up-chasm side. The discussions about it had gone on for a long time, at least a season, with a good deal of exploration among the mainroots to locate proper candidates to carry the new part of the bridgetown. Beed had even been allowed to try her own little spurs up and down the roots, being shown the water-bellies and how to find soft spots, l earning how to judge the direction of side roots. Both the first and second pair of support roots had been located, and the first pair was due to be cut, morning-light side first, then the evening-light side. The Beed family had made the decisions, but they’d invited old Bander, him they called Slysaw, to be part of the cutting crew. He’d told them no thank you very much, but his family had planned to visit kin downstairs at Potters’ bridge that day and some days to follow.
“Besides, you Beeders have plenty hands,” the man had said, sneering a little, the way he always did. “Mighty prolific family, the Beeders. You’ve got hands aplenty. Just take Highspurs and Hookset and a few uncles and you’ve got the job done in a jiffy.” Then he and his family had gone off to the stairs, seeming eager to make the two-day climb it would take with the old woman, though the younger ones might have made it in a day, going down.
“Well,” said Beedie’s dad. “We offered, ‘Walker. You heard me make the offer. The old fart won’t cooperate worth a flopper’s honk. We try and make work for him to earn his space and he goes to visit kin. We don’t make work for him and he complains to the elders we’re shutting him out. Don’t worry what would satisfy the Bander family, tell true, and I’m about tired of trying to find out.”
Beedie remembered it, all of it, the conversation around the hearth where the deadroot fire gleamed and the ‘Tainers were stirring the soup pot. Next morning six of the Beeds, including Uncle Highspurs and Beedie’s parents, went down-root to make the cut, and that was the last anyone saw of them, ever. Hookset and Rootwalker. Uncle Cleancut, Uncle Highspurs, Cousin Rootcutter, Cousin Highclimb, the one who had gone all the way to the rim and brought back most of a fresh leaf from a flattree to astonish them all with the color of it when she unfolded it and it covered the bridgetown from side to side.
All the elders of the family were gone, including the eldest Bridger. They had started the cut right enough, but seemingly the root had broken, broken away while they were working, and carried them all to the bottom, into the dark and mystery of the Bounded, among the rejected dead but without the ceremony of the flopper-skin kites, the memorial clothes. Six of them, gone, gone with all the tools and the hooks and the Unes. All but one rootsaw that Aunt Six found wedged in the cut and brought back to Beedie, for it had been her mother’s.
“Something wrong there, Beedie,” she had mourned. “That root is all black up inside, as though it had been burned. Looky here at what I found. .. .” She had shown the black lumps. “Charcoal. I took that right out of the root at the back, next to the wall, down a little lower than they started the cut. Oh, from the cut side it looks solid, but from the back, it’s only a shell ...”
“Daddy wouldn’t have cut burning wood,” Beedie had objected. “Mother wouldn’t. It isn’t safe.”
“Oh, no, child, they wouldn’t have done it. Not if they’d known. If it was burning up inside when they got there there’d be no smoke to smell. Not until the saw cut through to the center, where the fire was, and then the smoke ...” She didn’t need to say anything more. Greenroot smoke was lethal. Everyone knew that.
A day later, Beedie had put on her spurs and climbed down against all custom and allowances, for she was too young to be allowed on a mainroot by herself. Still she went, chuff and heave until she thought her arms would drop off, to come at last to the end of the mainroot and see for herself. Someone had been there in the meantime. Someone had chopped away all the char with an adze, leaving only clean root, but Beedie went on down a side root and found pieces of the char caught in the root hairs, back near the wall. She looked down, sick and dizzy from a climb considerably above her strength, seeing not far below her the stair to Potter’s bridge. It would have been easy to climb onto the stair from the mainroot. Easy to get to the mainroot from the stair, come to that. Easy. She cut the thought off. Why would anyone burn a mainroot? Greenroot made poisonous smoke. Deadroot was always dried for a long time before burning. Besides, Nextdown needed that root. Meddling with it was unthinkable, so she resolutely did not think it.
The Potter’s bridge stairs were so close, so easy in comparison to the long climb upward on spurs that she almost decided to get back to Nextdown that way, but something dissuaded her. Afterward, it was hard to remember what the reason had been, but she connected it to the return of the Bander family that night. Nothing was the same after that. Slysaw was now the eldest Bridger on Nextdown, which meant he held Bridgers House. He wasn’t the most even-handed of holders, either, though elders weren’t supposed to play favorites, and it wasn’t long before the r emaining Beed cousins were moving up to Topbridge or down to Potter’s or Midwall. Finally, there had been only Beedie and Aunt Six left, and when old Slysaw told Aunt Six she had to move out of her old rooms because he meant to give them to a Bander cousin from Midwall, Aunt Six decided to leave. The two of them moved up to Topbridge next day, carrying what they could on their backs and leaving the rest for the Banders. “Ill-wished on them,” said Aunt Six. “Every table and chair ill-wished on them, and may those who sit there have the eternal trots.”
On Topbridge the Bridgers were more mixed; there were some Banders, true, but there were more Seeds and more Chafers and plenty of housing for them all. The Bridgers House was held by Greenfire Chafer—who was killed soon after, some said by a rogue flopper — and Beedie and Aunt Six were given rooms in the Bridgers House at the morning-light end of the bridge right away. Then Beedie got on with her schooling. Still, every now and then she would wake in the chasm night to the sound of floppers honking in the root mat, half dreaming about hiding on the rootwall, lumps of charcoal in her hands, looking up at the adze-cut end of the mainroot while hearing from below that phlegmy chuckle as Slysaw Bander came climbing up the stairs.
And now it was a Bander again, Slysaw’s son Byle, come to work on Topbridge, cutting the roots too short, putting his hands on Beedie every chance he got, and bragging as though he were a Firstbridger himself. Beedie wondered, not for the first time, if she and Aunt Six moved to Bottommost whether they might escape from Banders once and for all.
The bridgetown grew larger and louder as she climbed down toward it, chunk, chunk, chunk, the spurs biting into the bark. She felt lucky to have found a mainroot right where it was wanted, with good, clean length and no water-bellies. Sometimes, so she had heard, there were no suitable mainroots within a great distance of the existing bridge. Then it was necessary to build elsewhere, or haul a distant root closer with hooks and ropes, a procedure which took half a lifetime and was as deadly as it was dull. Well, it wouldn’t be necessary. As one of the youngest Bridgers, prospecting had been assigned to her, and she had found a good root. That one and the one Byle Bander had found would make up the first pair. After the haulers were started, she’d have to start looking for her half of the second pair. From what the elders had said, this could be a four or five pair job. They wanted the expansion built wide, they said. Enough to absorb all the growth Topbridge might make for the next several lifetimes. Of course, to hear Aunt Six tell it, elders were always like that, always planning more than other people could build. Since the elders didn’t actually have to do the job, it was always easy to plan large.
She amused herself going over the steps it would take to make the cut on the morrow, how the Bridgers would ring the root with hatchets, then fit the loop saw into the groove, two of them braced against the root as they pulled alternately, cutting through the main-root until the whole massive weight of it fell away into the chasm with roaring echoes which seemed to go on forever. It would be the first town root Beedie had helped cut, but she well remembered the sound from the time the root fell at Nextdown. What happened to the roots that fell, she wondered? Did they end up propped against the chasm wall? Or fallen over into the bottom river? Did they rot? Or dry? Did floppers build nests in them? No matter, really. They ended up far below Bottommost, and whatever might happen below Bottommost could not be reckoned with at all. Except, she reminded herself, for whatever this new worry was. Though whether that was coming up from below Bottommost was anyone’s guess.
After cutting the root, the Bridgers would bore hook holes in the end of it, set the great hardwood hooks in place, then run rope from the hooks back and forth through the tackle and across the chasm to the hooks set deep in the other root end there. After which everyone on Topbridge would spend a span of their days hauling at the windlass. Everyone, that is, but the Bridgers.
The Bridgers would be making a detailed chart of every side root on the mainroots, every bud, every ropey growth. Once the mainroot was hauled into its long supporting curve, the Bridgers would use many of the verticals hanging from it to support the base of the new bridge. There would have to be other verticals reaching all the way to the distant Bottom and its nourishing waters if the mainroot was to be kept alive and healthy. Still other side roots would be needed for the stairs which were planned to link Topbridge directly to Potter’s bridge, replacing the current link by way of Nextdown. Any side roots that didn’t fit the plan would have to be trimmed away as they budded; otherwise the mainroot would turn into an unmanageable tangle which could never be maintained properly.
“Hey, skinny girl,” came a call from below. She looked down to see Byle Bander leaning from the bridge rail, staring up at her with the half sneer he always wore. “Hey, Beedie, slow-girule. What are you doing, girl? Harvesting nodutes?”
There were several slow-girules in the roots nearby, their hooked hands tight around the side roots, moving now and then to clip root nodules from the root with the sharp edges of their claws, like scissors. One just below her had a pouch almost full, and she whispered to it, “Nice giruley. Give us? Give us, hmmm?”
“Hnnn,” it growled at her, half in complaint. “Hnnno. Minnnne.” *
“Ah, come on, giruley. Give us one little root mouse to tide us until supper time. One little juicy one. Hmmm?” She reached out to scratch the creature in the one place its own claws could not reach, the middle of its back. The whine turned into a purr, and the creature handed her a green, furry nodule. She leaned against her belt once more to peel it with her Bridger’s knife. Anything for delay’s sake. She didn’t want to descend with Byle there.
“The Harvesters’ caste will be fining you, Beedie,” Byle Bander called. “You know you’re not supposed to fool with the ‘rulies.”
“I’m not fooling, I’m hungry,” she replied, her mouth half full of the juicy, crunchy root nodule. “I could have picked it myself.” If she had behaved in accordance with the rules, she would have picked it for herself. It was uncastely for a Bridger to receive food except from a Maintainer’s hands, though the rules did permit harvesting from the roots if one was kept past meal time. The rules did not allow Bridgers to invade Harvesters’ caste by taking food from the slow-girules, however, and Beedie flushed. Though it was something all the Bridgers did from time to time, it was precisely the kind of thing Byle Bander would make an issue of, or harass her about until she would be heartily sorry for having done it. He liked to couple his attempts at fondling with threats, and neither were welcome. His presence on the walkway below her made her uncomfortable. Still, delaying any longer wouldn’t help. She finished the nodule and wiped her hands on her trousers, moving on down the root to the edge of the bridge. Bander reached out a hand to her, which she ignored. He had the habit of pulling one off balance and then laughing, or, worse, grabbing parts of her she didn’t want grabbed.
As she stepped onto the bridge, she saw a group of Bridgers striding toward her at the same time she saw the expression of amused superiority on Byle Bander’s face. All of the Bridgers in the group were Banders, interesting in itself. What were they up to?
She waited little time for an answer. One of the Bridgers, a ruddy, fussy little man called Wetwedge, bustled up, peered at her as though he had never seen her before, then said,”You getting ready for the cut, girly?”
“That’s what I’ve been doing,” she replied, wondering what this was all about. Certainly it was no chance encounter. It had the feeling of a delegation.
“Not today, girly. No. Big business, this. Got to have it checked at least twice, you know. Can’t cut until we check it twice.”
“I did,” she said, amazed at his open-faced stupidity. What did the man think? That she was witless?
“No, no. I mean you got to have it checked by someone else. Gotcher measuring cord?”
Something deep inside Beedie sat up and looked around with sharp eyes and a sharper nose. Something smelled. “My measuring cord is put away safe, yes.”
“Well, trot it out, girly, and we’ll check it. Old lady Slicksaw here will climb it down for you, down to your mark, just to check.”
“That’s not the way it’s done,” she said, somehow keeping her voice from shaking with anger. “If you want Slicksaw Bander to check my measure, go ahead with my blessing. But she’ll use her own cord and compare it to mine before witnesses from Bridgers House, and any difference will be checked by an impartial eye. That’s the way it’s done, Wetwedge Bander-Bridger, and I’m surprised you should suggest anything different.”
The man looked quickly from side to side, seeking support from one or another of them, but they shifted feet uncomfortably, not looking at him. He laughed, trying to put a good face on it. “Well then, takes more time that way, but it’s according to rule. So, take a day off, then, Beedie.”
She saw deceit on his face, an evil intention which she couldn’t read but one made clear in those shifty eyes, darting up and down like a flooper’s wings. Besides, he wasn’t enough elder to her to tell her to take a day off, and him not even from her own family.