Treason (4 page)

Then I had a thought that comforted me a little—that the strange thing that was happening to me might not be a product of the condition of my own body, but rather might arise from the mysterious forest of Ku Kuei. Couldn’t it be that the forests exuded some chemical that caused weariness? Or perhaps only the illusion of weariness. Or perhaps a whole complex of debilitating drugs in the air, causing hallucinations, distorting my sense of time, making me long to sleep with as much desperation as a man longs for water after three days without a drink.

That would explain why Ku Kuei had become such a feared and hated place. What if a man could wander in here and find his sense of time so distorted that he thought he had wandered miles in only a few minutes? Overcome with weariness, he might sleep twenty-four hours, then rise again, walk a few more meters, and fall down thinking he had done a day’s labor. In only a short time the cumulative effect of all these chemicals could become fatal, either directly, by poisoning the man, or indirectly, by causing him to sleep until he dies of dehydration.

No wonder there were so few wild animals here. Perhaps a few birds acclimated to the poisonous air, some insects whose brains were too small even to be affected. But this would explain why nothing was heard from the Family of Ku Kuei almost from the hour they entered this wood three thousand years before.

Now here I was, caught up in the same natural defenses of this forest, and just as unlikely to win my way to freedom. My sentence had been death after all, not just exile. My flesh would be consumed by the bacteria and small insects of the forest floor; my bones would bleach and, after decades, crumble; I would then become part of the planet we called Treason, contributing to it the only metal that this soil would ever hold, the metal of men’s souls. Was mine a soft and yielding element? Or would I be a hard place in the forest floor; would roots soak up from me a metal that would lend vigor to their massive trunks?

These were my thoughts as I struggled to keep myself awake. For a time I think I even dreamed as I walked on, imagining myself to be one of a thousand trees marching forth to do combat with the dangerous black soldiers of Nkumai. And such was my madness that I even saw myself waving vast branches to sweep the swordsmen of Mueller from their feet, then grinding them into powder with my irresistible roots.

I came to myself again, and thought more soberly—though perhaps just as madly—of what this poisonous forest might imply. It made me realize that in three thousand years of life on this world, all we of Mueller had ever thought about was how to get away, how to earn such vast quantities of iron that we might someday build a spaceship and escape. Other Families had spent their efforts trying to convince their Ambassador that they had repented of their ancestors’ rebelliousness and wished to be returned from exile—after all, they said in a thousand different missives,
we
are but the eightieth great grandchildren of those who once threatened your pleasant Republic. But all such wheedling letters were returned torn to shreds. Whoever was on the other end of the Ambassador, controlling it, had not learned forgiveness in three thousand years. It made me wonder if perhaps our ancestors’ crimes were not in fact far more terrible than they claimed. After all, the only histories we possessed told
their
version of what happened, and in
their
accounts they were completely innocent. But aren’t all monstrous criminals innocent in their own eyes? Don’t all their victims somehow deserve to die, in their imagination, at least?

Why in all these years had we kept our gaze starward, hoping to escape this world, and so learned almost nothing of the secrets that it held? Before we came it had been studied only enough to learn two things: First, that it was habitable—that, small as it was, Treason was massive enough to maintain us at about a third the gravity of the world where humans had evolved, so we would be strong, could run bounding across the prairies and among the giant trees; and the basic chemicals of life were close enough to ours that while we couldn’t profitably eat the native animals, we and our animals could eat enough of the native plants to sustain ourselves, so sending us here was truly exile, and not a sentence of death. And, second, that so little metal was close enough to the surface that it wasn’t even worth trying to extract it. It was a worthless world. A world that did not contain within it the material we could use to build a ladder outward to the stars.

But was it truly worthless, just because it couldn’t let us build starships? This world was one of the rare ones that had given rise to life. Did we even understand why life arose here at all? Was it really enough to know that we could eat the plant life? Had we no curiosity about the differences between the native life and the chemistry of our own bodies? We had learned enough about ourselves to create monsters like me, but we hadn’t learned enough about this world to truly say we lived here. Yet on the eastern border of Mueller there was a place where the very trees had learned enough about
us
to make a lone wanderer die of dreams beneath their shadow.

All these thoughts led to only one conclusion: The certainty of my death. And yet they filled me with a strange excitement, a longing to live long enough to learn more about this world. I had received a great insight. There was another road to freedom besides iron won from the Ambassadors. We had been given a whole world, hadn’t we? Could we be free by no longer pressing upward against the prison wall of gravity, and instead turning downward and discovering what lay beneath our feet; outward, discovering the native life around us and learning wisdom from it?

It was that excitement that drove me on. I even wondered for a time if, in the moments before I died, the plants would speak to me, meaning not that they would find voices, of course, but that their poisons would provoke some illuminating vision that would tell me what this world had planned for us interlopers, us strangers. Now as I laid hold on trunks, leaning and staggering my way through the wood, I silently asked the trees to speak to me. Kill me if you must, but don’t let me die without having known my vanquisher.

Until at last I could not make my legs go anymore, they crumbled under me, and it was only early afternoon, if my guess at the sun’s place was correct. As I staggered forward and collapsed to my knees, I saw a shimmer of bright blue before me; I had come at last to the lake.

It was not so wide I couldn’t see the other shore, far and faint in the haze of vapor rising invisibly from the surface, but it was long enough that I saw no end, either north or south. The sun dazzled on the bright water. And yes, it could only be two o’clock in the afternoon.

I lay by the water and slept, and woke the next day at what seemed to be the very time I had gone to sleep.

I despaired, but also I hoped. For I
had
slept, that was certain. My muscles ached, my legs were rubbery under me, but I could move again, I had the fresh vigor that could only mean I had had, if not as much rest as I needed, at least enough to go on. Above all, I was
awake
. The poisons in the air had not consigned me to die here in my sleep.

Perhaps it was only because I had won free of the trees and collapsed here, where perhaps the open water cleared the air. I felt it was a kind of victory, to have reached this place. I thought back to the map of Treason I held within my head—one of the things that lingered from school days, the map of the world that dated from the first orbital surveys when our ancestors arrived. There were other lakes, strung out eastward of here. If this was in fact the southwesternmost lake, then striking due east would take me to the largest of the lakes, and by skirting the southern shore and following a large river to the easternmost lake, I would be within reach of the borders of Allison.

I knew that the southern tip of the lake was where the woman had told me I should turn south. But Jones was too much in the shadow of Mueller; Dinte might have spies there, and Father certainly would—there was always the chance that Father might have changed his mind and decided the good of Mueller required my death.

My best hope, now that I had proven I could defeat the menace of Ku Kuei, was to go east, fight my way through to Allison, only one Family to the west of Nkumai. There I could complete the mission Father had given me, and perhaps, by proving my loyalty, earn the right to go home, or at least to live without fear of some agent of Mueller coming to remove a threat to the government.

I went east, toward Nkumai, toward the rising sun—rising, that is, in former days, when it used to move across the sky. The journey changed not at all. The same confusion, the same exhaustion—for in each march I seemed to cover so much ground that from the map I carried in my head it should have taken two full days at a good hard walk, not the few hours it seemed to take by the sun. I invented dozens of new explanations or codicils to the old ones; I wearied of trying to understand, and let imaginary visions of Saranna draw me forward, remembering her insane loyalty to me when there was no hope that we could be together anymore. At least it was only thoughts of murder that could carry me across the last stretch of forest without water to break the poisonous air—I dreamed of killing Dinte; and, ashamed of such thoughts toward my own brother, I dreamed of killing the Turd. I imagined that once she had sustained her mortal injury, her magical spell would be released, and she would be revealed as a huge writhing slug oozing along the stone floor of the castle, leaving a trail of thick pus and ichor and glistening slime behind it.

I ate what berries I could find, and my pack was long since empty; my body, which had always been muscular, now became lean, and my womanly breasts, which had grown soft and large on the comfortable diet of Mueller, were now tight and spare and hard, like the rest of me. It made it somehow easier to bear having them, knowing that they had to respond to the same urgencies that drove the rest of my body. Scant rations and hard work affected them along with the rest of me. They were a part of myself. They might have been unwelcome when they first appeared, but it didn’t feel strange to have them anymore.

Finally I reached the grey-barked slender ragwit trees that told me I was near

…white-tree Allison,
of dawn and light among the leaves.

Almost at once, with the change of woods, the poisons stopped having their effect on me. I was still weary—as well a man should be, covering a thousand kilometers, what should have been twenty days’ journey even for the bounding stride of a soldier in open country, in only a dozen long, terrible marches. I knew then that whatever seemed to have happened to the sun’s passage through the sky, I had surely covered the ground I thought I covered—that my exertions were as excruciating as I imagined them to be. Indeed, if I ever lived to return to Mueller, and ever somehow became a person again in Mueller’s eyes, the song they would sing of me would surely include this marvelous journey through the poisonous wood of Ku Kuei, covering in what seemed to be a few days by the sun, in a dozen marching periods, what should have taken a man twenty days in open country, well-supplied; what would have taken an army twice that time. If ever a hero-song were sung of me, this journey would be the envoy. So I thought then, knowing so little.

The madness of the journey was over now, anyway; the sun made its normal passage at its normal pace, and I was able, at last, to walk on until dark.

In the morning, a road. I went back among the trees and changed into the girl’s clothing that the woman of the High Hills had given me. I counted my wealth: twenty-two rings of gold, eight rings of platinum, and, in case of great need, two rings of iron. A dagger in the pack.

I was unsure what to do next. The last news we had heard in Mueller was that Nkumai was attacking Allison. Had they won? Was the war still raging?

I stepped onto the road and walked east.

“Hey, little lady,” said a soft but penetrating voice behind me. I turned and saw two men. Rather larger than I—I still didn’t have my full man’s weight, though I did have near my height since I was fifteen. They looked rough, but their clothing seemed to be the vestiges of a uniform.

“Soldiers of Allison, I see,” I answered, trying to sound glad to see them.

The one with his head in a bandage answered with a sick smile. “Ay, if there yet
be
an Allison, with black inkers loose to rule.”

So the Nkumai had won, or were winning.

The shorter one, who couldn’t take his eyes off my bosom, chimed in with a voice that sounded rusty, as if for lack of use. “Will you travel with two old soldiers?”

I smiled. Mistake. They had me half-stripped before they realized that I knew how to use my dagger and was not playing games. The short one got away, but from the way his leg was bleeding I didn’t think he’d get far. The tall one lay on his back in the road with his eyes rolled up in his head, as if to say, “And after all I lived through, I have to die like
this
.” I closed his eyes.

But they had given me my entry into the first town.

“Andy Apwit’s mother’s garter, little woman, you look half dead.”

“Oh no,” I told the man at the inn. “Half raped, perhaps.”

As he put a blanket around my shoulders and led me upstairs, he chuckled to me, “Half dead you may be, but rape’s an all or nothing thing, lady.”

“Tell that to my bruises,” I answered. The room he showed me to was small and poor, but I doubted there was much better in the town. He washed my feet before he left; an unusual custom, and he was so gentle it tickled unbearably, but I felt much better when he was through. A custom we could encourage the lower classes to adopt in Mueller, I thought at the time. Then I imagined Ruva washing somebody’s feet, and laughed.

“What’s funny?” he asked, looking irritated.

“Nothing. I’m from far parts, and we have no such gracious custom as to wash feet of travelers.”

“Be damned if I’d do it for everybody. Where you be from, little woman?”