“My mark is sealed with my knot,” she announced loudly. “Slicksaw can’t mistake it.” Or alter it, she said to herself. One might mistake an accidental scarring for a hatchet mark, but one would not mistake any accidental tangle in the hair roots for an individual Bridger’s own knot, complicated as an alphabet, tied and then doused with paint to make it stand out. “It’s tied once at each side, top and bottom,” she said. Then, as they began to turn away, “Of course, I’m going to Bridgers House to see that they check Byle Bander’s measure as well. Otherwise it would be unfair, wouldn’t it, and not something the elders would tolerate. Since you’re all Banders checking a Beed, I’ll ask the Bridgers House to send Chafers or Beed to check Bander. Fair’s fair, after all.”
She had the satisfaction of seeing Byle Bander’s face full of anger as she stalked away. Nor did she miss the hesitation among the other Banders, the glances, the stuttering lips as one or another of them tried to think of something to say. She did not look back, contenting herself with a call. “Good day to you, Bridgers.”
As she walked away to Bridgers House, she could hear their whispers behind her. Well, what had they thought? That she would let a clutter of Bander hangers-on presume to double-check her competence without having some Beed fellows check on Byle’s ability as well? Did they think if they called her girly, as they would some curvy Maintainer wench, wriggling her hips between the tables at dinner, that she would not hear what it was they were really saying? Not likely.
She went directly to Bridgers House. She wanted to talk to Rootweaver Beed, second eldest, a white-haired woman with young eyes whom Beedie admired for her good sense and friendly demeanor toward the younger Bridgers. The woman was curled up on a windowseat, weaving carded hairroot fibers to make a new climbing belt.
“Checking you, are they?” Though Rootweaver was not young, she was straight and supple as a side root, and Beedie had seen her using spurs not four days before. Rootweaver considered the matter now, frowning a little. At last her face cleared and she said, “With all the troubles from below we have to worry us just now, leave it to the Banders to come up with something fretting. Well, it’s never a bad idea to check a measure, ‘specially when it’s a mainroot in question. We’ll take it as though it were friendly meant and send a crew along to check the Bander whelp as well. Have a day off, Beedie. You might help your Aunt Six with the moving. She’s found a place she likes better than Bridgers House again.” The woman laughed, not least at Beedie’s expression of dismay.
Aunt Six had moved house at least two or three times a year since they had come to Topbridge, never able to settle into the same comfort she had known in the Bridgers House on Nextdown. She had moved into and out of Bridgers House on Topbridge seven times—this would make eight. Having Aunt Six behaving as usual made the day somehow merely annoying, an almost customary irritation taking the place of that extraordinary discomfort she had been feeling since she had been hailed by Byle Bander. If Aunt Six was moving house, it must be assumed the world was much as usual.
So she spent the afternoon with a cart, hauling Aunt Six’s bedding and pots and bits and pieces from the pleasant rooms in Bridgers House to some equally pleasant ones on the far edge of Topbridge, about mid-chasm, from which the latticed windows looked out toward Harvester’s bridge, a lumpy line against the bend of the chasm wall behind it. Beedie wondered what the view was like from Harvester’s. Since it was at the turn of the chasm, could the chasm end be seen from there? Was there a chasm end? Odd. She’d never wondered about that until this very minute.
“Beedie! What are you dreaming about, Bridger-girl? You’ll only have this one day to help me, so help me! I’ve got all the rugs yet to bring.”
“Aunt Six, do you think this place will suit you? Will you stay here for a while? Now that I’ve got my tools and tides, I’d like to get some things of my own for this room, but not if you’re just going to move us again.”
“Girl, you get your own things and make it your place, you can stay whether I go or not. For Boundless’ sake, Beedie. You’re a grown-up girl.” She compressed her lips into a thin and disapproving line and began to bustle, accomplishing little but giving a fine appearance of activity.
Beedie smiled to herself. The only time Aunt Six referred to Beedie as a grown-up girl was when there was moving to be done, or something else equally boring or heavy. Still, the new place did have that marvelous view of the chasm, being right at the edge this way. Shaking her head, she went to fetch the rugs.
Slicksaw Bander said she found no fault with Beedie’s measure. Rootweaver Beed was not so favorable about Byle’s. The Seeds found him marked short, as Beedie had feared, and told him so in front of half the Bridgers and a full dozen Maintainers with their ears flapping. Byle was so angry he turned white. Beedie tried not to look superior, failing miserably. Perhaps now he would keep himself to himself and pay attention to his own Bridger business rather than hers. It had a consequence she had not foreseen, however, when she was called to Bridgers House for conference. “Byle’s root was marked short, Beedie,” said Rootweaver, the half-dozen assembled Bridger elders behind her nodding and frowning. They had summoned her without warning, always a slightly ominous occurrence, but this time there had been nothing discomforting in it for her. “Not merely a little short,” Rootweaver went on, “but far short. As though he had not measured at all, and certainly not twice—or got his cord tangled up on the climb, and that’s a child’s trick. So we’re going to go down there with him tomorrow, check his measuring technique and check his axe work, too. Short in one thing, short in all, isn’t that the saying? So. You can go ahead and start cutting a groove on the root you’ve measured, but we’ve no one to help you cut root. After we get young Byle straightened out, you’ll get your crew. Do what you can alone, and we’ll send the crew next day.”
“Byle’s in the classroom right now,” said one of the other elders, indignantly. “Fulminating and fussing. We’re keeping him here tonight, doing a little review of technique, and he’s mad as a hooked flopper. Madder than he should be. You’d think he’d been planning a lovers’ meeting or something the way he’s carrying on. Demands to be let go home.”
“Bridgers House is home for all Bridgers,” said Rootweaver calmly. “Let him go get a change of clothing if he pleases, but I want him to stay here tonight. We’ll see if we can’t talk some sense into him.” All of this made Beedie quite uncomfortable, and she was glad Byle hadn’t seen her with the elders. If he thought she had been privy to his embarrassment, he’d never have permitted her a peaceful day. Since she thought he didn’t know, she had a peaceful night. Come morning, though, she thought he had probably found out, for she was visited by a Harvester elder with an annoying sniff and his pen ready to record her words.
“It’s been reported you’ve been interfering with the slow-girules, girl,” he pinch-mouthed at her, pulling his nose back as though she smelled.
“You may call me Bridger,” she said, holding her fury carefully in check. “And I have never interfered with a slow-girule in my life. I did take a nodule from one, yesterday, when I was delayed on the root and missed a meal.”
“Report is you interfered with it. Rassled it about. Maybe bothered it in its work.”
“I scratched its furry back, and it purred at me. So much for your ‘interference.’ ”
“You could have injured it.” The man was white around the mouth, wanting to storm and yell at her, but afraid to do so seeing her own anger and knowing what Bridger wrath meant.
“Nonsense,” snapped Aunt Six from behind her. “You can’t injure a slow-girule with an axe. Be done, Harvester. Beedie took a nodule from one of your beasties and she must pay a fine for it, for it’s against the rules. So impose your fine and be done. It’s no large thing, and you’d best remember it. The good will of Bridgers is given freely, but it’s taken freely, too, when there’s cause.”
The Harvester did not reply, merely threw the piece of paper at them and stalked away. “Parasites,” hissed Aunt Six, just loud enough that he could not help to hear. “No skills of their own, so they must live by preventing others from using common sense. Sorry the day the Harvesters ever became a caste, Beedie. And sorry the day any Bridger takes one like that seriously.”
The man heard. He turned and made a threatening gesture, mouthing something they could not hear.
“Still,” Beedie said, “I did break the rule, Aunt Six. It was seeing that Byle Bander waiting for me on the bridge, like some old crawly-claw, hiding in a root hole. I didn’t want to come down where he was, so I played with the ‘rulie instead. They like it.”
“Of course they like it, child. The Harvesters may think they own the slow-girules, but no one has ever convinced a slow- girule of that yet. It’s that which makes the Harvesters so angry. They’d like nothing better than to have the ‘rulies turn clipper-claws on all except the Harvesters. That would suit them right to the bridge floor. And what kind of a Bridger is Byle Bander to report one of his own caste.”
“A miserable one,” Beedie replied in a grim voice. “A miserable bit of flopper flub, for all he’s a Bridger.”
All this caused Beedie some delay, and it was late in the morning before she started down, chuff, heave, chuff, humming to herself, throwing a glance upward now and then to see if there were birds. It would be wonderful, she thought, to fly like that, up to the flattrees and the plain—not even dangerous for a bird. A bird wouldn’t have to fear the gnarlibars, the giant pombis, the ubiquitous d’bor hiding in every pool and stream, the poison bats, the were owls. A bird wouldn’t be bothered by the monsters of the plain, the monsters who had almost wiped out the people, would have wiped them out if they hadn’t moved down into the chasm to build the bridgetowns where the monsters couldn’t get at them. Not the Firstbridge, of course. That hadn’t been built far enough down the chasm, and the monstrous forest pombis had climbed down the mainroots to it as they would have climbed a tree. The site of that disaster was the broken city, still hanging high against the light, a network of black in the up-chasm sky. Then there had been the lost bridge, the one that had disappeared one night, never to be seen again—disappeared between dark and dawn without a sound. Built too low, some said, though legend said it had been built only slightly lower than Bottommost. Trouble in the depths, they said. Then and now, they said. Well, all this conjecture wouldn’t help get the job done. She spotted her marks, moved beyond them, readied her hatchet to make the groove, then clung to the root with a sudden, giddy disquietude, overcome by a wave of tamihar horror. She had felt like this before. There was something. Something wrong? Something not as usual? Uneasily she shifted on the root, moving around it as a flopper moves when hiding from the hunters, listening to silence, tasting the air, smelling... smelling.
What was it? An odor so feint she could hardly detect it? But what? She wished for the crew, the other Bridgers, suddenly aware of her solitude.
She began to move lower on the root, sniffing, tapping at the root with her hammer. The sound was wrong, wrong. She moved lower still, still tapping, then abruptly astonished, feeling the heat beneath her palms as a hallucination, an unreality, outrageous and impossible. Roots were cold, her mind said, and therefore ... therefore ...
Even as her mind toyed with a dozen irrelevant notions, her body reacted, leaping upward in three quick movements of arms and legs, chuff, heave, chuff, heave, chuff, hands frantically feeling for cool, not sure they had found it, upward once more in that same panic-ridden gallop, until there was no possibility of mistake. She smelled it then for the first time, that harsh scent of poison smoke, barely detectable. She longed in an instant to be one of the slow-girules, able to turn head down on the root, able somehow to see below her feet. And yet she didn’t need to look. She could smell it. The mainroot was burning.
Back in the old times, she had heard, this was the way roots were severed. A Bridger would climb in between the root and the wall, hack away a hole in the root, then put burning charcoal in there to burn away and burn away until the thing dropped. Sometimes the fire didn’t go out, however. Sometimes it got into the heartwood and kept on going, poisoning the air, no matter how one cut at it and chopped at it. So the Bridgers had stopped burning roots and began cutting them. But someone had burned a mainroot at Nextdown, and someone had set fire to this one Beedie sat upon, the one Beedie should have arrived at with a full crew of Bridgers, earlier than this. If she went back and told about it the fire would have burned the root away by the time they returned, burned it too high, and it was the only useful one in the right place on this side.
So—so what? So cut it off before it went any further. Cut it off right below the mark, working against time, trying to get it cut through before the fire reached the saw cut and the smoke killed her. Her body began it, even while her mind was thinking through the right procedures. She was high on the root in a moment, setting her pitons and hooks for safety tines, one after the other, running the lines through and down to her belt, checking the buckle, checking the lines, setting them high above the mark, so high that no matter if the root fell, she would be left hanging—if a side root didn’t lash her head off, or a tangle tear her away from where she hung.
The axe in her hand flew at the bark, making the first cuts, up and down, overhand, underhand, chips flying out into the chasms to flutter away like crippled birds, down and out of sight forever. The pungent smell of the milky root juice made her nose burn, a corrosive stench. She shifted rapidly to the right, cutting around, keeping her tines straight. When the root was ringed, she went back, d oing it again, cutting deep so the saw loop wouldn’t slip. Then the hatchet went into the belt, the saw loop came out. She had to throw it from behind the root, with free space all around. She held one handle in her right hand, whipped the length of the saw out and left, praying it would wrap around the root, smacking the handle into her left hand.