Crossroads of Canopy

by Thoraiya Dyer

  Another branch blocked her way, one of a cluster radiating out from the trunk at a node. Unar threw her arms around the vertical one and stepped out onto a horizontal one, only to find Oos resting on the other side, sitting with her back to the vertical branch. She nursed a bleeding scrape along her left arm. Her legs dangled down on either side of the trunk.

  “Is this where you’re going to sleep tonight?” Unar yelled.

  “Better than back there!” Oos yelled back. “Leave me alone!”

  “What are you going to eat? How are you going to climb? What were you thinking?”

  “You want to know what I was thinking? I was thinking that when Hasbabsah was taken as a slave, she could’ve tried harder to get away. Before she was marked, she could have tried. Maybe she didn’t try because her spines were broken. Her power was taken away. It was easier to do what she was told. Eat what she was given. Sleep somewhere warm, with a fire.”

  “We’re not slaves. Understorians don’t have slaves.”

  “Don’t they? How do you know? Have you asked, or were you too busy weaving baskets for your new masters? I’m going home, Unar!”

  Oos had pulled her legs up, crouching on the yellowrain, ready to run again, when they both heard the deep, threatening hiss of an animal made invisible by the rain. Unar’s heart pounded. She met Oos’s fearful glance, hardly daring to breathe.

  A skinny figure hurled towards them through the gloom, dark-faced and white-grimaced. A starved adult. No, a child of eight or nine.

  “A demon is comin’,” the child said, throwing herself at the jumble of branches and clambering over them without seeming to slow. Unar and Oos hesitated. They gazed after the fleeing child, then snapped their heads back towards the approaching menace as the angry hiss sounded again, closer this time, but the source still invisible.

  Unar wondered, Is it a chimera?

  Then she didn’t have to wonder. A swinging, hammock-sized head sent mist curling away from pointed, scaly chin and jaw. A forked, pink tongue unfurled and dangled to test the air. The massive forearms that followed were striped gold and dark grey, with crescent-moon claws black and gleaming on top but caked on the undersides with animal fur, bark, and old blood.

  A dayhunter.

  Unar had never seen one, but the striped monitor lizards that sunned themselves in the Garden were smaller versions of this demon. And those claws were as long as her thighbones, just as Esse had warned.

  “Go,” she shouted, but the back of Oos’s shirt was snagged on the upright branch. Oos screamed. Wept. Struggled. The shirt tore.

  Unar put her foot to Oos’s shoulder and scrambled up the branch. Without thinking, she leaped, using her height advantage to get past the demon’s head and shoulders. Landing on its back, she ran down it as though it were a branch path itself.

  A warm branch path. Smoothly scaled. Rippling. The wide body preparing to turn.

  But the monitor lizards in the Garden couldn’t walk backwards, and pulling down, hard, on their tails could trap them against a tree, their claws sunk too deep for them to lift their feet free.

  Audblayin keep me, Unar prayed, seizing the demon’s tail with both hands and swinging down to dangle beneath the yellowrain tree.

  She hadn’t considered what would come next. Only that she must make time for Oos to get free. The emptiness between trees seemed infinite, deep and dark, around her, all sounds muffled, nothing even remotely near that could save her if the creature threw her off.

  I can’t die, she told herself as her grip on the broad, scaly, dangling tail grew slippery with the rain running down its back. Audblayin called to me. Woke my magic. Gave me purpose. She wished she had a bore-knife instead of a purpose. She’d climb up the demon’s back as easily as scaling one of Oxor’s suntrees. But her bare hands couldn’t find purchase. If only she had Understorian spines for climbing. No, that was no use. Nothing could get through its hide, the hunters had said.

  Then she remembered Marram’s report: Long streaks of dayhunter waste with insects trapped in it, only hours old and not set. The same fully grown male animal that left marks around your nets, Esse.

  Maybe the fallen Canopians hadn’t been stuck to that branch by trapper’s glue, after all.

  Unar hauled herself up slightly, so that she gripped the dayhunter’s tail with one clenched elbow instead of both hands. She reached her right hand around for the creature’s cloaca. Her curled fingers scooped up a creamy, cement-like substance. The dayhunter’s excrement.

  She slapped that hand down on the wet scales, and found she was able to grip like a gecko. Her left hand took a turn scraping at the demon’s vent. The stuff smelled strongly of fresh-cured leather, and it burned beneath her fingernails.

  What a mighty story this will make. How the storytellers will sing my praises!

  Unar had no way of spreading the sticky waste any further. She let her knees squeeze and her toes scuffle as best they could. Seizing the protruding scales on the leading edge of the dayhunter’s hindlimb, followed by the frilled rim of its rib cage, she struggled up the length of it, expecting its huge head to come curving down out of the dark and snap her head off her neck any second.

  Then she was standing on the broad shelf of its skull, making a final, desperate leap for the gap between the lateral branches. The dayhunter lifted its head. It hissed. Unar ran up the ramp of its snout. The forked tongue flicked her heel as she flew forwards.

  She landed on the trunk of the yellowrain tree and kept running. There was no sign of Oos.

  I do have a destiny.

  Unar laughed maniacally, running along the tapering trunk, until she crashed into Oos’s back.

  Oos and the child had been seized by Esse, halfway back to the tallowwood. How he’d gotten into the fishing room with the tree blocking the door, Unar didn’t know. It felt strange seeing them, after the completeness of her isolation only minutes ago, suspended in the forest with the demon. Oos held her tattered shirt to her breasts and shivered in the rain.

  Unar would have told them at once how she’d dangled from the demon’s tail and then jumped off its head, but they were already speaking.

  “What kind of demon?” Esse was asking, shaking the child.

  “A dayhunter.” The child was out of breath. She wore rags. Her black hair was hacked off close to her skull.

  “She’s Canopian,” Oos said. “She’s fallen, just like us. She survived.”

  The child turned and looked up into her face. “None of us will survive this, lady. Not unless you can fly.”

  Then both turned away from Esse, towards Unar.

  “You’re alive, Unar!” Oos blubbered.

  “Get between me and the tallowwood, the three of you,” Esse ordered. “Go back to the fishing room.” Unar wasn’t going to argue with him. He’d taken her knife; let him try to fight a demon with it. She’d had enough heroics for one day. They grappled on the narrow walkway, and as soon as they were behind him, he began uncoiling something heavy-looking like a rusted rope. No, not rope. It wasn’t woven, but made of multiple metal links that clanked and jangled in the rain.

  Marram and Bernreb erupted out of the river, shouting and splashing, forcing the trio to stop short once again. For a second time, the women tangled with the men, who tried to let them past without anyone falling off the log. Bernreb carried coiled rope, nets, and a spear with a long, wickedly serrated metal blade.

  Marram carried nothing but his leathery, colour-changing wings of chimera skin. His yellow hair, despite being pummelled by the fast-flowing river, was matted with something the same suspicious consistency as the oily motions that Issi passed after a colicky spell. Unar was the last one forced to grapple with him.

  “What’s that in your hair?” she yelled, wrinkling her nose as the stench hit her.

  “Do not be afraid, Gardener,” Marram said with amusement. He paused on the other side of her while they still gripped each others’ wrists, holding her, it seemed, so that she would look at him an
d be convinced by his confidence. “The demon will follow me far from here. I will not allow it to empty our little nest.” Then he wrinkled his nose. “What is that on your hands?”

  Then Esse called and Marram let go of her, turned, and dashed towards the danger, passing Bernreb, who had stopped to help Esse with the unusual chain. They lowered it around the underside of the trunk and held one end of it, each, in both hands. Esse pulled his end of it sharply, and the tree trunk under their feet shuddered. Then Bernreb pulled his end, and shards of green wood flew everywhere.

  “A chain saw,” Unar said.

  “They gonna cut it in half,” the child shouted, grabbing at Oos. “Show me where we can safely stand.”

  Oos went with the child headfirst into the river that flowed down the tallowwood trunk. Unar watched the men, frowning, for a few moments longer. Marram was the only one who could fly, he’d asserted. How would Esse and Bernreb get back to the tree when they’d sawn all the way through?

  Finally, she saw that the rope tied to Bernreb wasn’t all coils; a length of dark, twisted fibre led from a hastily tied harness at a steep angle, up towards the same lateral branch where the Canopians had become stuck.

  With each step now, the trunk shuddered.

  “Go back,” Bernreb hollered at her, but he didn’t stop sawing. Unar thought she heard Marram’s cries in the distance, interspersed with angry hisses, but she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t the rain and her imagination.

  She turned and ran after Oos and the child, towards the tallowwood tree and safety.

  THIRTY-TWO

  THE RIVER loomed ahead.

  Unar knew, now, why the men had been shouting as they burst through the wall of water; she shouted herself, to help focus her will. She increased her speed and thrust her arms above her head as if diving to try and reduce the downward impact of the river. If she slowed, or lost her footing, and truly did dive in, there’d be no going back.

  The river smashed around her ears, a terrible, punishing blow. Blackness. Rushing in her head and around it. Legs still pushing. More kicking.

  Then she was in the fishing room. Streaks of green-lit fungi exploded in front of her eyes. Her determination had carried her directly into a wall. Her teeth met the splintered wood, blood and river water in her mouth.

  “Unghh,” she said, and fell onto her bottom in an undignified way.

  “You rode on the back of a demon,” the child said. “I saw you. That was treasure, that was.”

  Unar lifted her head towards a light source in her peripheral vision. Ylly stood, her expression horrified, by the gap where the door had been taken off its hinges, holding a lamp in one hand and cradling a grumbling baby Issi to her chest with the other.

  “What demon?” she asked.

  “A dayhunter,” croaked Oos from a dark corner.

  “A big lizard,” the child added. “Dunderheaded and dank. It cannot jump or glide, but it crosses Floor and climbs to plunder the nests of nocturnal animals while they sleep.”

  “We’re not sleeping,” Ylly said fiercely. “This dayhunter. Does it fear fire? Let’s heap the logs from the hearth in the hallway, and—”

  “It does not feel fire,” the child said quickly, “and its flesh does not burn. We would die before it did.”

  “Then what are the men doing out there?”

  “Marram is distracting it,” Unar managed. She spat, hoping no teeth went along with the wood and slime, and added, “The other two are trying to saw through the yellowrain tree. You, what is your name?”

  “I am called Frog,” the child said.

  “An unlucky name in Understorey,” Ylly said. “Shall we call you Frogorf?”

  “No. This Frog is going in only one direction, and that is up. What is there for me in Floor?”

  Ylly seemed taken aback.

  “How many monsoons have you, Frog?” Unar asked.

  “This is my tenth.”

  “You’re small for your age.”

  “There is no light to warm me, here, Gardener. No fruit for me to pluck from laden branches. Neither slaves’ milk nor wasps’ honey.”

  “Is that why you wish to climb higher?”

  “I will climb higher,” Frog said, showing her white teeth again in that stark, pantherine grimace. “Startin’ right now, if I see that demon’s head come in through the river.”

  Unar looked at Frog’s forearms. There were the twin creases where her spines were retracted. If the demon’s head came through, would Unar search the dwelling for her bore-knife and escape in the child’s wake, or would she stay and try to protect the baby and unconscious Hasbabsah to the death, as Ylly no doubt would?

  “Audblayin’s bones,” she swore again.

  Another sharp crack. Another single, hard shudder of the tallowwood tree. Ylly and Oos cried out in unison as the river’s flow was disturbed, but it wasn’t the head of the giant lizard; rather, it was the yellowrain log tilting, hitting the roof, and then sliding away.

  They were all sprayed with water. Then there was only the river as there had been before.

  “They did it,” Unar said, feeling weak with relief.

  “I’m trapped here forever,” Oos said with despair.

  “Is that your baby?” Frog asked Ylly, already shrugging off the fact they had all faced certain death. Even if they had climbed successfully, they would have reached the barrier to Canopy and then what? The demon could have eaten them at its leisure.

  “She’s mine now,” Ylly said, holding Issi tighter. “Her mother let her fall.”

  “So did mine,” Frog said. “I mean, she did not throw me off with ’er two hands, but she wanted me to fall. She wanted sons. To help ’er, see. She was losin’ her sight and knew she would not be able to do ’er job for much longer. Why put all that effort into raisin’ the wrong sorta child?”

  “That’s horrible!” Oos exclaimed.

  Frog looked sidelong at Unar.

  “She knew I would not be able to do the work,” Frog went on. “She already had one useless daughter, and she thought I looked … small. For my age.”

  Unar’s face flushed with shame. She’d just told Frog that she looked small for her age. Before she could apologise, Esse and Bernreb swung in through the river, detaching their harnesses from the rope at the required moment, only to stumble heavily into the others. The tiny room was full. Unar heard someone’s feet kicking the water buckets and the rattling of shelf contents being upset.

  “Move,” Bernreb gasped. “Further inside. Go!”

  “You’re back,” Unar said, squeezing out from between Esse’s sodden, heaving-chested body and the wall with her tooth-marks in it where she’d come through the waterfall too fast.

  “You could win the crown at Loftfol with a cut that quick,” Frog said, skirting Bernreb’s dripping shape to follow Oos and Ylly down the hall. “Treasure.”

  “To Floor with Loftfol and its crown!” Esse wheezed. “Where is Marram?”

  “Not here,” Unar said.

  “Do not,” Bernreb told Esse, gripping his shirt in a giant fist. “If he did not fall, he will come. If he did fall, you cannot help him. The best place to wait is in front of the fire.”

  When they were all in the hearth room, Bernreb regretfully moved Hasbabsah’s chair back from the fire. She didn’t move; hadn’t moved for some time, except to breathe. Now there was room for all of them to cluster by the heat.

  “That old woman stinks,” Frog observed.

  “Show some respect, child,” Ylly said.

  “Whose house is this?”

  “It is mine,” Esse said. His tone did not invite further conversation, but Frog did not fall silent.

  “Have I monsoon-right, then? It seems I am trapped here with you people.”

  “No,” Esse said, at the same time as Bernreb said tiredly, “Yes.”

  “No,” Esse said again.

  Finally, there was silence. Steam rose from Unar’s Gardener’s tunic. She shifted her feet, turning each sid
e to the fire as the other grew too hot. Beside her, Oos did the same thing. Her eyes looked glazed, the skin of her bare feet wrinkled by the water. She smelled of blood, and Unar couldn’t tell if it was a failure of the dried moonflowers or the wound along her arm.

  Ylly made a meal for Issi. When the baby was full and sleeping, she made a meal for Esse and Bernreb, too. Unar didn’t feel like eating, but she scrubbed the last of the demon dung off her hands before making herself chew some dried fruit and sweet gobs of insects trapped in sap. Oos coaxed a little water into Hasbabsah and changed her clothes underneath the blanket. For once, Ylly didn’t criticise her, but helped lift Hasbabsah’s dead weight.

  “You are angry with me,” Frog said to Esse at last. “What have I done?”

  Esse roused himself. He’d been staring at the wall, as if he could see through it to a place where Marram was napping in a hollow to refresh himself before flying home.

  “Somebody cut the crown from that yellowrain tree,” he said. “Today. This morning. The cut was fresh. Then they cut the tree again, at the base, so that it would fall. Was it you?”

  Frog looked incredulous. “Does it seem to you that I could cut a tree down by myself? If I could, my mother surely would have kept me.”

  “The top of that tree was in Canopy when the sun rose. That means the person who cut off the crown was there, too. And you have the colour of a Canopian.”

  “She speaks like an Understorian, though,” Bernreb said gruffly. “Like she was raised in Gannak. And she has the snake’s gift.”

  “Too young,” Esse said, his eyes sparkling with displeasure. “Who would give them to such a young girl?”

  “I am ten,” Frog said, glaring at him. “I earned them. I did not climb into Canopy. I cannot climb into Canopy. I do not know who cut down that tree any more than you do. I was with my adopted family on the outskirts of Gannak when the tree fell. I thought I would follow it a little way to visit my friends in the palm-oak. Since the monsoon started, we had received no birds from them. Now I know why.”