“We will have it out soon. It is fine eating. It makes its home by rasping away the soft heartwood of a tree until it kills it, and it is dangerous when it is chased from its lair. But we are a brave people.”
While some of the forest folk danced on one side of the tree, provoking the tree-creeper to lash out with its long, whip-like tongue from various splits in the tree-trunk, the rest built a fire of green wood at the base on the other side of the tree, and cut into the trunk to let in the smoke. The tree-creeper was soon in distress, mewling and howling to itself. The forest folk darted in, dodging the lashing tongue and drumming at the base of the tree with stout clubs, raising a great noise.
At last the tormented tree-creeper sprang from a slit high up in the trunk of the tree, just beneath the first branches. It moved very quickly; Yama did not see it until it was on the ground. It reared up on the two hindmost pairs of its many short stout legs, very tall and very thin. Its back was covered in overlapping bony plates; its belly in matted hair. Its sweetish, not unpleasant smell filled the clearing.
The forest folk surrounded it, one man or woman darting forward to strike two or three quick blows to its legs while the others cheered. Pandaras joined in, cheered twice as loudly as anyone else. The tree-creeper went down by degrees, mewling querulously. Its tiny eyes were faceted, glinting greenly in the matted pelt which covered its head. Its long scarlet tongue snaked across the trampled ground and Yoi Sendar ran forward and pinned it with a stake.
After that, the forest folk swarmed over the tree-creeper, jointing it while it was still alive and carrying the meat back to their camp in triumph. Pandaras was caught up in their excitement, his ragged shirt bloody and his eyes shining.
Yama did not join in the feast of fruit and tree-creeper meat. He thought that he was like the kapok tree and the Shadow was like the tree-creeper, rasping away at his self’s soft core. And yet he knew that he would need the Shadow in what lay ahead. He could not drive it out until he knew how to obliterate his unwanted powers.
He wished he could be like the forest folk, who were dancing and singing with uncomplicated happiness in the fern-filled clearing. It was twilight. Red light from a great trench of fire beat across the bodies of the dancers. Trees stood quietly all around, woven cocoons pendant from their lower branches. How sweet life was for them, how simple, how innocent! A few hours of hunting or searching for fruit or tubers each day, the rest for play, for singing songs and telling stories. Their life, the life of their fathers and grandfathers, always the same from the beginning of the world to its end.
Yama had forgotten that the bandar yoi inoie were in thrall to the Mighty People, but two days later they finally reached the valley where the Mighty People lived, and he saw how bad things were for their slaves.
Chapter Fourteen
Slaves
“They may be a mighty people,” Pandaras said, “but they must like a snug house. Even I would find one of those huts cramped.”
He stood beside Yama at the edge of the forest, looking across the valley which stretched away on either side, a wide flat grassland studded with little villages that were linked by narrow red paths running beside ditches of green water, each village a cluster of mud-walled huts and strips of cultivated land enclosed by thorn hedges.
“I don’t like the look of it,” Pandaras added. “See how thick and tall the hedges are. These people must have fearsome enemies. Surely now is the time to call on something that will take us far from here.”
“That would be too dangerous,” Yama said. “Prefect Corin may have survived the fall of the garden, and he must not know where I am.”
In fact, there were very few machines here—fewer than Yama had ever known in a world where innumerable machines sped everywhere on unfathomable errands; not a tree might fall in the most remote forest without a witness.
“I don’t see how he could have survived,” Pandaras said. “I’d like to think it possible, because that would mean poor Tibor might have survived too. Forgive me for my presumption, master, but you cannot live in hiding forever. You cannot waste your gift.”
“Do not speak of what you do not know,” Yama said sharply.
“I know a bad feeling when I get one,” the boy said. “Look at our friends. It’s as if they’re going to their doom.”
It was early in the morning, with the sun only just clear of the peaks of the Rimwall Mountains. The forest folk had risen before dawn, and had been uncharacteristically subdued as they walked the last two leagues to the edge of the forest above the valley where their masters, the Mighty People, lived. Now they were removing the flowers and quills and feathers with which they had adorned their squat bodies, scrubbing away patterns of mud and pigments with bunches of wet grasses, combing out mud which had stiffened their coarse hair in ornamental spikes. They had walked naked through the forest; now they took loincloths from pouches and packs and stepped into them. Their torcs had been carefully wrapped up in oilcloth, and buried on a rocky point beneath a flat slab of sandstone.
The forest folk lined up, shivering in the chill gray air. Their chief, Yoi Sendar, went from one to the next, checking that every trace of adornment had been removed. When he reached Yama and Pandaras, he said formally, “Below is the home of the family of Mighty People which owns us. We go to them with our gifts from the forest. You do not have to come with us, my friends. We have enjoyed your stories and lies and boasts in the forest, but we take up a different life now.”
“I need to find the temple,” Yama said.
Yoi Sendar shook his massive, ugly head from side to side. It meant yes. His baggy skin was bleeding from the places where he had drawn out his decorative quills. He said, “Perhaps you can please the Mighty People in some way, and they will let you visit it.”
Pandaras said, “Why are you so afraid of them? If they rule by fear, then they are not worthy to be your masters.”
Yoi Sendar would not meet the boy’s stare. “They have always been our masters. It has always been so, ever since the long-forgotten day when the Preservers set us in our domain. Our masters have changed, but they still need us, as you will see if you come with us.”
“There are many different peoples on the world,” Yama said, as Yoi Sendar stumped off to the head of the line of his people. “Why do you deny that simple fact, Pandaras?”
“People everywhere are all the same, if you ask me. They are scared to be free. They make themselves slaves to stronger men because it is easier to be a slave than to be free. It is easier to worship the past than to plan for the future.”
“You have some extraordinary notions, Pandaras.”
“You taught me that, master, but I think you have forgotten it.”
“Did I? Well, I was younger then, and more foolish. Perhaps my bloodline ages more quickly than even yours, Pandaras. I feel as old as one of the Ancients of Days.”
Pandaras said, “I have kept one of their stone blades. Please don’t stop me, master, if I have to use it to help us escape. The thing in your head wanted you to be its slave, and I don’t think you’ve quite shaken off the notion.”
Yoi Sendar raised both hands and gave a hoarse shout. His people lifted up their heavy packs of caterpillar meat and followed him into the valley, walking in single file down a narrow path that snaked through tall yellow grasses toward the nearest of the villages of the Mighty People. Yama saw that the mud huts inside the thorn hedge were separated from each other by an intricate arrangement of walls and courtyards. Each had its own exit tunneled through the thorns, and as the bandar yoi inoie came down the slope, figures began to emerge from the tunnels, scrawny and stooped and gray-skinned.