"Where are your bonsai?" Thea asked the young women.
There were exchanged glances. "We don't follow the bonsai here. We feel it is taming the Tree and should not be done. Don't you think you can damage the Tree that way?"
Thea shook her head in a way which meant, I never thought of it that way, and will never do so. After the welcomefire, where the jasmine oil was exchanged for nut oil, they talked about fire as the cook gave them further instruction.
"Listen. You know the sound a fire makes. You know how hot it is by the way it sizzles and crackles. Now we put the bread on."
The cook threw little round rolls of dough into a square pot on the fire and shook it in a frenetic motion until they darkened.
"Every part of the Tree is edible if you cook it right."
The bread was perfect with the nut fish. Lillah soaked up the last of the wonderful sauce with it. She felt very full, not ill. She felt so well and great she wanted to climb to the top of the Tree and shout.
There was more food, though: sweet things and salty, things fried in the nut oil and served in great mounds.
Borag and Lillah watched, taking it all in.
"Not everyone will share their knowledge," Lillah said.
"Knowledge not shared is wasted," the cook said. "I am happy to have people listen to me and to pass on this food."
The teller told the story of an old man who loved to eat the tender flesh of babies. He deep fried them whole and crunched them, bones and all.
"They still hear him. They say he's inside the Tree, crunch crunch, you can hear sometimes." The teller took a piece of fish, cooked with all its bones, and crunched it, swallowing it dramatically, eyes rolling.
"They say his brother took to the sea, fishing out water babies all salty and sweet. They say if the brother ever comes to land, just his foot on the sand will turn the grains to poison along the Tree and all children will die a throat-parched death."
He touched his ears as they all did, to honour the missing.
Thea swam for seaweed, and they used that to soothe tired feet and sore muscles. Thea sat watching, refusing treatment.
"Thank you for the seaweed," one of the men said.
Thea said, "There would have been more if any of the children helped to collect it."
The men were larger here. Fleshier. They seemed to breathe more loudly, but they were busy, active all the time. They made the teachers laugh with their antics.
Corma, feeling for kicks in her belly, watched it all, sighing sometimes. Hippocast sat with her, brought her treats and told her happy stories. She felt her stomach more frantically, stopped, looked at him. "My baby isn't kicking."
They roused the Birthman and he looked at her carefully. "It's ready to come. Sleeping, ready to come. We must prepare."
Lillah found all of the men attractive. There was one with curly, wild hair, and she wondered what it would feel like to get her fingers tangled in it.
He noticed her smiling at him, and jumped up with a sweet for her. She shook her head, so full of food she couldn't have any more. He popped it into his own mouth and led her off to show her the kitchen in his small house in the roots of the Tree. A small monkey sat on the roof, chittering. It watched her carefully.
"Is that your wife?" Lillah said. "She looks angry."
He shook his head. "That is not my wife." He didn't smile when he said this, and Lillah lost some interest in him. A man without humour was not so attractive.
"You don't use the caves here?"
"No! Never! It's dangerous inside the Tree. Once a teller stepped in there to speak more closely to the Tree and he was never seen again. We found a clump of his hair three days later; that's all. It was stuck in a clump of sap and we knew this meant that the Tree is blood and flesh and bone inside. We like the Treehouses. They are warmer. Who would sleep inside the Tree?"
"You have no courage. I would sleep in the Tree." This from another man, one Lillah hadn't noticed before. He was grey about the temples, although he didn't seem old.
"Don't listen to him. He's gone grey with terror, can't you see? From stepping inside the Tree."
"There's a place where the Tree whispers. You can sit and listen if you like. If you close your eyes, you can almost make out the words sometimes," the grey man said.
"Is it the ghosts?" Lillah asked.
"I think it's people living on the other side of the Tree. I think the island is around, not along, and that if we tunnelled through the Tree we'd be able to visit each other." Lillah looked at the grey-haired man with admiration. His thoughtfulness reminded her of the sensitive market holder.
The curly haired man said, "He knows that if he tunnels through the Tree he'll kill it, so his crazy theory will never be disproved."
The grey-haired man said, "Sometimes I whisper back. Tell them things I don't want people to know."
Lillah chose him. At least he was brave, and curious.
"I try to scratch the words as I hear them," he said. She saw his walls were a mess, scratched lines lifting squares of Bark away. There was nothing readable. "In other homes, they press coral in to make shapes and patterns. That is all it is though; patterns. There is no meaning."
He stopped to listen, standing still, unblinking. It frightened her; she felt if she collapsed to the floor in a faint he wouldn't even notice.
She took off her shirt and began massaging her nipples, rubbing them roughly and enjoying the allover tingle when they hardened. This he noticed; took one of her nipples in his mouth.
His sucking was too loud, almost squeaky. Lillah wondered how she could get away from here. Could she just push him away and say no? But her body took over and she desired sex after all. It's very addictive, she thought.
Afterwards, she said, "Aren't you more afraid of the sea than the Tree? Of what dwells in the sea, what lies beyond the sea?"
"That's not our business. The Tree is our business. We think nothing of monsters of the deep here."
He had a second small room in his house, walls lined with metal, and the floor was hard, too, striped through with metal and tough on the feet.
"You are clever with metal, all right."
He nodded. "We have to be. We are taming the Tree by not being so reliant on it. The Tree grows each year, towards water. Stealing our land sliver by sliver."
Lillah found this adversarial relationship with the Tree odd, and wondered if other Orders she'd visit would have a similar attitude. They carved symbols into the Trunk, things she didn't understand.
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