Treason (9 page)

“Oh?”

“You came here for something else.”

“What?” I asked, feeling that sickening fear that children feel when they are just about to be found in hide-and-go-find.

“You came here to find out where we get our iron.”

The sentence hung there in the air. If I said yes, I could imagine her crying out in the darkness of night, and a thousand voices hearing her, and my being cast off the platform into the darkness that led to the ground. But if I denied it, then would I be missing a chance, perhaps the only chance to learn what I wanted to know? If Mwabao was indeed a rebel, as I had suspected, she might be willing to tell me the truth. But if she was working for the king (her lover?) she might be leading me on to trap me.

Be ambiguous, my father always taught me.

“Everyone knows where you get the iron,” I said easily. “From your Ambassador, from the Watchers, just like everyone else.”

She laughed. “Clever, my girl. But you have a ring of iron, and you thought it had great value”—did she know
everything
I had said and done these two weeks?—“and if your people are getting iron, in however small a quantity, you must be eager to find out what
we’re
selling to the Ambassador.”

“I’ve asked no one any questions about such matters.”

She chuckled. “Of course not. That’s why you’re still here.”

“Of course I’m curious about many things. But I’m here to see the king.”

“The king, the king, the king, there you go like everyone else, always chasing after lies and empty dreams. Iron. You want to know what we do to get iron. Why, so you can stop us? Or so you can do it yourselves, and get as much iron as we?”

“Neither, Mwabao Mawa, and perhaps we shouldn’t speak of such things,” I said, though I was sure she would go on, was eager to go on.

“But that’s where it’s all so silly,” she said, and I heard a mischievous little girl in her voice. “They take all these precautions, keep you imprisoned either with me or with Teacher all day, every day, and yet it’s so impossible for you anyway, either to stop us or to duplicate what we do.”

“If it’s impossible, why do you worry?”

She laughed—giggled, this time, like a child—and said, “Just in case. Just in case, Lady Lark.” She stood up suddenly, though she had already undressed for bed, and strode out of the room, back toward the room with the chests of books and other things. She was after other things. I followed her, and arrived just in time to catch a black robe she threw at me.

“I’ll leave the room so you can dress,” she said.

When I got back to the sleeping room, she was waiting—impatiently, walking up and down, humming softly to herself. When I came in, she came to me, and put her hands on my cheeks. Something warm and sticky was on them, and she giggled when she looked at me.

“Now you’re black!” she whispered, and proceeded to decorate my hands and wrists, then my ankles and feet. As she painted my feet, she ran one hand up the inside of my leg, past the knee, and I stepped back abruptly, frightened that in playfulness she might find out not-too-playful facts.

“Careful!” she cried out. I looked behind me, and realized that I was standing right at the lip of the platform. I stepped forward.

“Sorry,” she said. “I won’t offend your modesty again! Just playing, just playing.”

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why are you doing this?”

“I can travel at night like this,” she said, spinning her naked body around in front of me, “and no one sees from very far away. But you—lily-white and hair so light, Lady Lark—you they could see from six trees away.” She pulled a snug black cap over my head and took me by the hand to the edge of her house.

“I’m taking you,” she said, “and if you like what you see, you must do me a favor in return.”

“All right,” I said. “What’s the favor?”

“Nothing hard,” she said, “nothing hard.” Then she stepped off into the night. I followed.

It was the first time I had tried to travel in the darkness, and suddenly my old panic returned. Now on the broad branches I was too frightened to run—what if I veered only slightly from the path? How could I see to jump with the swinging ropes? How could I hope to keep my footing anywhere?

But Mwabao Mawa led well, and on the hard places she took my hand. “Don’t try to see,” she kept whispering. “Just follow me.”

She was right. The light, which was only starlight and the dim light of Dissent, did more harm than good, diffused as it was by the leaves. And the lower we got, the darker it became.

There were no swings. For that I was grateful.

And at last we came to a place where she told me to stop. I did, and then she asked me, “Well?”

“Well what?” I responded.

“Can you smell it?”

I hadn’t thought to smell. So I breathed slowly, and opened my mouth, and tasted the air through my nose and tongue, and it was delicious.

It was exquisite.

It was a dream of lovemaking, with a woman I had wanted forever but never hoped to have.

It was a memory of warfare, with the lust of blood and the joy of surviving through a sea of dancing spears and obsidian axes.

It was the essence of rest after a long journey at sea, when land smells welcome and the grain waving on the plains seems to be another sea, but one you could walk on without a boat, one you could drown in and live, and I turned to Mwabao Mawa and I know my eyes were wide with astonishment, because she laughed.

“The air of Nkumai,” she said.

“What is it?” I asked her.

“Many things combined,” she said. “The air rising from a noxious swamp below us. The falling fragrance of the leaves. The smell of old wood. The last vestiges of rain. Spent sunlight. Does it matter?”

“And this is what you sell?”

“Of course,” she answered. “Why else would I bring you? Only the smell is much stronger in daylight, when we capture it in bottles.”

“Smells,” I said, and it seemed funny. “Smells from a gassy swamp. Can’t the Watchers synthesize it?”

“They haven’t yet,” she said. “At least they keep buying it. It’s funny, Lady Lark, that mankind can speed between the stars faster than light itself, and yet we still don’t know what causes smells.”

“Of course we know,” I said.

“We know what different things smell like,” she answered, “but no one knows all that travels from the substance to the olfactory nerves.” There was no arguing that, since I didn’t yet know olfactory from occipital.

Another thing she had said intrigued me. I picked up on what she said about men traveling faster than light. “Any schoolchild knows that’s impossible,” I said. “Our ancestors were brought to Treason in starships that took a hundred years of sleep to arrive.”

“So mankind was crawling then,” she said. “Did you think they would stop learning, just because our ancestors left them? In three thousand years of isolation, we’ve missed the great things of humanity.”

“But faster than light,” I said. “How could they have done that?”

She shook her head, a faint grey in the grey of night moving faintly. “I was just talking,” she said. “Just chattering on. Let’s go back.”

We retraced our steps. We were halfway up a rope ladder when a voice above us whispered faintly in the night.

“Someone’s on the ladder.”

Mwabao Mawa ahead of me froze, and I did the same. Then I felt the rope jiggle slightly, and her foot came down near my face. I assumed we were going down, and would have descended at once except that her foot twisted and hooked under my arm, stopping my descent. So I waited until she climbed down the opposite side of the ladder to be at the same height as me—her feet on the rung below mine, and so her lips not far below my ear.

The sound wouldn’t have been audible three feet away. “First platform. Wash face. Going to visit Official Who Feeds All the Poor. Two Torches.”

So we went on climbing, and reached the first platform, which by chance—a lucky chance, too, since it was not common—had a barrel of water. I washed my face as silently as possible, while Mwabao Mawa kept climbing up and down the same three meters of rope ladder, so that anyone observing the strand in the night wouldn’t know we had stopped.

I got my face as clean as possible, and also my hands and feet. Then I climbed on the ladder behind her.

“No,” she whispered, and then we were both standing on the platform, as she demanded, quietly of course, that I give her my robe.

“I can’t,” I whispered.

“You’re wearing clothing underneath, aren’t you?” she asked, and I nodded. “Well, I can’t be caught naked on the treeways. I can’t.”

But still I refused, until finally she said, “Then give me your underclothing.” I agreed to that, and reached under the robe to strip off the pants and halter. The pants were too tight for her hips, but she struggled into them anyway. The halter, however, fit nicely—one more sad proof of exactly how buxom I had become.

I had a worse realization, however, at the same time. The halter, as I slipped it off my shoulder inside my robe, had snagged on something on my shoulder. There should have been nothing there to snag on. Which meant that something new was growing.

An arm? Then I had less than a week before I’d have to cut it off, and it wasn’t in a good position for me to get at alone. How could I go to an Nkumai surgeon (
were
there any Nkumai surgeons?) and ask him to remove an extra arm?

But the momentary alarm that gave me turned into relief as I realized that of course I didn’t have to stay here for a week, or even another day. I had all that I needed, all I had hoped for. I could now make a great show of leaving Nkumai in disgust at their failure to let me see the king; I could return to my father and tell him what the Nkumai sold to the Ambassador.

Smelly air.

I might have laughed, except that we were climbing the ladder again. And as I realized how close I had come to laughing, it occurred to me that whiffs of Nkumai forest air above noxious swamps could be dangerous. Self-restraints that I could normally count on, disciplined reflexes that had always been sure, didn’t function as well here, not this night.

Finally we reached the platform where the guards were watching.

“Stop,” said the sharp whisper, and then hands grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the platform. Unfortunately, I wasn’t ready for the movement, and it was only with luck that I kept my feet on the rope ladder. As it was, I hung over the abyss, my feet on the ladder and my one arm suspended in the firm grasp of a guard.

“Careful,” said Mwabao. “Careful, she’s a soiler, she might fall.”

“Who are you?”

“Mwabao Mawa and Lady Lark, the soiler emissary from Bird.”

A grunt of recognition, and I found myself being pulled toward the platform, until my shin struck the edge. I stepped clumsily onto the wood, falling to one knee.

“What are you doing, wandering in the dark like this?” the voice insisted. I decided to let Mwabao answer. She explained that she was leading me to meet with Official Who Feeds All the Poor.

“Nobody has torches out now,” said the voice.

“He will.”

“Will he now?”

“Two torches,” she insisted. “He is expecting a guest.”

Whispers, and then we waited while quiet feet scampered off. A guard—or two, I realized, as the breathing patterns broke up—stayed with us, while another ran to check. It wasn’t long before he returned and said, “Two torches.”

“All right then,” said the voice. “Go on. But in the future, Mwabao Mawa, carry a torch. You are trusted, but not infallible.”

Mwabao mumbled her thanks, and so did I, and we were on our way again.

When two torches shone in the distance, Mwabao Mawa said good-bye.

“What?” I said, rather loudly.

“Quiet,” she insisted. “Official must not know that I brought you.”

“But how do I get there from here?”

“Can’t you see the path?”

I couldn’t, so she took me closer, until the dim light of the torches illuminated the rest of the way. I was glad that Official didn’t have the same penchant for narrow approaches that Mwabao did. I felt safe enough following the path in the dark, as Mwabao Mawa slipped off into the night of the trees.

I came to the door and said, very softly, “From the earth to the air.”

“And to the nest, come in,” said a soft voice, and I stepped through the curtains. Official sat there looking very, well,
official
in his red robe in the flickering light of two candles.

“You came at last,” said Official.

“Yes,” I said, and added truthfully, “I’m not very good at traveling in the dark.”

“Speak softly,” he said, “for the curtains conceal little, and the night air carries sounds a long way.”

So we spoke softly as he asked me questions about why I wanted to see the king and what I wanted to accomplish. What could I say? No need to see the old boy now, Official, already got what I wanted. So I answered all his questions, until at last he sighed deeply and said, “Well, Lady Lark, I’ve been told that if you passed my screening, I was in no way to impede you from further approach to the king.”

Yesterday I would have been delighted. But tonight—tonight I just wanted to take my deformed body with the new arm it was growing and get out of Nkumai.

“I’m grateful, Official.”

“Of course you don’t go straight from me to him. A guide will come and take you to the very highly placed person who gave me my instructions, and that very highly placed person will take you higher.”

“To the king?”

“I don’t know exactly how highly placed this person is,” Official said, not smiling. How could they conduct government this way, I wondered.

But a boy appeared when Official snapped his fingers, and led me off another way. I followed gingerly, and this time there was a swing—but the boy lit a torch at the other end, and I made it, though I landed clumsily and twisted my ankle. The sprain was mild, and it healed and lost its soreness in a few minutes.

The boy left me at a house which had no light, and he told me to say nothing. So I waited in front of the house, until finally a low whisper said, “Come in,” and I went in.

The house was absolutely dark, but once again I was asked questions, and once again I answered, not having any idea who I was speaking to or even where, precisely, he was. But after a half hour of this, he finally said, “I will leave now.”