She spotted Rauc and Brow, huddled together on the far side of the little group. Rauc waved briefly to her, but quickly returned her attention to her husband. Glancing around discreetly, Dura saw that most of the party had separated out into couples, bonded loosely by conversation. Alone, she turned to stare into the steady glow of the fire.
There was a tap on her arm. She turned. Kae had settled into place next to her. She was smiling. “Will you eat?”
Dura couldn’t help but glance around surreptitiously. There seemed to be no one with Kae, no partner. There was no sign of Kae’s earlier flash of hostility — she had the impression that there was a core of deep unhappiness in Kae, hidden not far beneath the surface. She smiled back, eager to show good grace. “Thanks. I will.”
Kae reached toward the fire-trenches cut into the wood. She drew out one of the bowls embedded there, taking care to keep her fingers away from the hot wood itself. The bowl was a small globe carved of wood, and it held food, a dark brown, irregular mass. She held the bowl out to Dura.
Dura reached into the bowl and poked at the food tentatively. It was hot to the touch. She took hold of it and drew it out. The surface was furry, but the furs were singed to a crisp, and they crackled as she squeezed.
She looked at Kae doubtfully. “What is it?”
“Try it first.” Kae looked sly in the green underglow.
Dura picked at the fur. “The whole thing?”
“Just bite into it.”
Dura shrugged, raised the lump briskly, opened her mouth wide and bit into the fur. The surface was elastic, difficult to pierce with her teeth, and the furs tickled the roof of her mouth. Then the skin broke, and bits of hot, sticky meat spurted over her mouth and chin. She spluttered, but she wiped her face and swallowed. The stuff was rich, warm, meaty. She took a bite from the skin and chewed it slowly. It was tough and without much flavor. Then she sucked at the remaining meat inside the shell. There was a hard inner core which she discarded.
“It’s good,” she said at last. “What is it?”
Kae let the empty bowl hang in the Air; she poked at it with her forefinger and watched it roll in the Air. “Spin-spider egg,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t recognize it. But it’s the only way to eat it. It’s actually a delicacy, in some parts of the hinterland. There’s even a community on the edge of the wild forest who cultivate spiders, to get the eggs. Very dangerous, but very profitable. But you have to know how to treat the eggs, to bring out the flavor.”
“I don’t think I would have recognized this as a spider egg at all.”
“It has to be collected when freshly laid — when the young spider hasn’t yet formed, and there’s just a sort of mush inside the egg. The hard part in the center is the basis of the creature’s exoskeleton; the young spider grows into its skeleton, consuming the nutrient.”
“Thanks for telling me,” Dura said drily.
Kae laughed, and opened up a sack at her waist. She drew out a slice of beercake. “Here; have some of this. In Parz, there’s a good market for exotic deep-hinterland produce like that. We make a good side-profit from it. Now. How about some Air-pig meat?”
“All right. Please. And then you can tell me how you came to join these lumber caravans.”
“Only if you tell me how you ended up here, so far from the upflux…”
With food warm inside her, and with the exhilarating buzz of beercake filling her head, Dura told Kae her tangled story; and a little later, in the steady glow of the nuclear-fire Wheel, she repeated her tale for the rest of the lumberjacks, who listened intently.
The food globes, nestling in the fire trenches, were finished. The conversation gradually subsided, and Dura sensed that the gathering was coming to an end.
Rauc drew her hand from her husband’s, and pulled forward, alone, into the center of the little group. She faced the Wheel cut into the tree trunk in silence.
The last trickles of conversation died. Dura watched, puzzled. The atmosphere was changing — becoming more solemn, sadder. The lumberjacks drew away from each other, their postures stiffening in the Air. Dura glanced at Kae’s face. The lumberjack’s eyecups were wide, illuminated by the fire-glow, fixed on Rauc.
Slowly Rauc began to speak. Her words consisted of names — all of them unknown to Dura — recited in a steady monotone. Rauc’s voice was tired, quiet, but it seemed to enfold the intent gathering. Dura listened to the lulling, rhythmic chant of names as it went on, for heartbeat after heartbeat, read evenly by Rauc to the great Wheel carved into the wood.
These were the names of victims, Dura realized slowly. Victims of what? Of cruelty, of disease, of starvation, of accident; they were the names of the dead, remembered now in this simple ceremonial.
Some of the names must go back generations, she thought, their deaths so ancient that all details had been forgotten. But the names remained, preserved by this gentle, graceful Wheel cult.
And people who lived in the sky could have no other memorial than words.
At last the list came to a close. Rauc hung in the Air before the fading glow of the Wheel trenches, her face empty. Then she stirred and looked around at the faces watching her, as if waking up. She Waved back to her husband.
The group broke up. Brow enfolded his wife in his arms and led her away. All around the group, couples bid farewells and drifted off.
Dura observed Kae surreptitiously. The woman was watching Brow and Rauc, her expression blank. She became aware of Dura. She smiled, but her voice sounded strained. “I’ve the feeling you’re judging me again.”
“No. But I think I understand your compromises now.”
Kae shrugged. “We’re together, Brow and I, for most of the time. Rauc knows it, and has to live with that. But Brow — loves — Rauc. This day with her is worth a hundred with me. And I have to live with that. We all have to compromise, Dura. Even you.”
Dura thought of Esk, long dead now, and a similar painful triangle. “Yes,” she said. “We all have to compromise.”
Kae offered her a place to sleep, somewhere in the tangle of nets and ropes that comprised this strange, linear City. Dura refused, smiling.
She said farewell to Kae. The lumberjack nodded, and they regarded each other with a strange, calm understanding.
Dura pushed away from the trunk and kicked at the Air, Waving for the ceiling-farm and her secure, private little nest.
The caravan spread out beneath her, Wheel-shaped fires burning in a dozen places.
13
Accompanied by a nervous-looking nurse from the Hospital of the Common Good, the injured old upfluxer diffidently entered the Palace Garden. When Muub spotted him he beckoned to the nurse — over the heads of curious courtiers — that she should bring the upfluxer to join him at the Fount. Then he turned back to the slow ballet of the superfluid fountain.
The Garden was a crown perched atop Parz City, an expensive setting for the Palace of the City Committee. The Garden had been established generations before by one of the predecessors of Hork IV. But it had been the particular genius of the current Chair, and his fascination for the natural world around him, that had made this place into the wonder it was. Now it was a lavish park, with exotic plants and animals from all around the Mantle brought together in an orderly, tasteful display. The low — but extravagant — buildings which made up the Palace itself were studded around the Park, gleaming like Corestuff jewels set in rich cloth. Courtiers drifted through the Garden in little knots, huddling like groups of brightly colored animals.