by Jane Yolen
“Shut up and leave us alone,” Patricia said.
“You can talk. I never met a human who could talk before. Give me that bird!”
“No,” Patricia said. “I know where you live. I know your owner. If you are naughty, I will tell. I will tell on you.” She was kind of fibbing. She didn’t know who owned Tommington, but her mother might. And if Patricia came home covered with bites and scratches her mother would be mad. At her but also at Tommington’s owner. You did not want Patricia’s mom mad at you, because she got mad for a living and was really good at it.
Tommington had landed on his toes, his fur all spiked and his ears like arrowheads. “Give me that bird!” he shrieked.
“No!” Patricia said. “Bad cat!” She threw a rock at Tommington. He yowled. She threw another rock. He ran away.
“Come on,” Patricia said to Dirrp, who didn’t have much choice in the matter. “Let’s get out of here.”
“We can’t let that cat know where the Parliament is,” Dirrp whispered. “If he follows us, he could find the Tree. That would be a disaster. We should wander in circles, as though we are lost.”
“We are lost,” Patricia said.
“I have a pretty reasonably shrewd idea of where we go from here,” said Dirrp. “At least, a sort of a notion.”
Something rustled in the low bushes just beyond the biggest tree, and for a second the moonlight glinted off a pair of eyes, framed by white fur, and a collar tag.
“We are finished!” Dirrp whispered, in a pitiful warble. “That cat can stalk us forever. You might as well give me to your sister. There is nothing to be done.”
“Wait a minute.” Patricia was remembering something about cats and trees. She had seen it in a picture book. “Hang on tight, bird. You hang on tight, okay?” Dirrp’s only response was to cling harder than ever to Patricia’s overalls. Patricia looked at a few trees until she found one with sturdy enough branches, and climbed. She was more tired than the first time, and her feet slipped a couple of times. One time, she pulled herself up to the next branch with both hands and then looked at her shoulder and didn’t see Dirrp. She lost a breath until she saw his head poke up nervously to look over her shoulder, and she realized he’d just been clinging to the strap farther down on her back.
At last they were on top of the tree, which swayed a little in the wind. Tommington was not following them. Patricia looked around twice in all directions before she saw a round fur shape scampering on the ground nearby.
“Stupid cat!” she shouted. “Stupid cat! You can’t get us!”
“The first person I ever met who could talk,” Tommington yowled. “And you think I’m stupid? Grraah! Taste my claws!”
The cat, who’d probably had lots of practice climbing one of those carpeted perches at home, ran up the side of the tree, pounced on one branch and then a higher branch. Before Patricia and Dirrp even knew what was going on, the cat was halfway up.
“We’re trapped! What were you thinking?” Dirrp sang out.
Patricia waited until Tommington had reached the top, then swung down the other side of the tree, dropping from branch to branch so fast she almost pulled her arm out, and then landed on the ground on her butt with an oof.
“Hey,” Tommington said from the top of the tree, where his big eyes caught the moonlight. “Where did you go? Come back here!”
“You are a mean cat,” Patricia said. “You are a bully, and I’m going to leave you up there. You should think about what you’ve been doing. It’s not nice to be mean. I will make sure someone comes and gets you tomorrow. But you can stay up there for now. I have to go do something. Goodbye.”
“Wait!” Tommington said. “I can’t stay up here. It’s too high! I’m scared! Come back!”
Patricia didn’t look back. She heard Tommington yelling for a long time, until they crossed a big line of trees. They got lost twice more, and at one point Dirrp began weeping into his good wing, until they stumbled across the track that led to the secret Tree. And from there, it was just a steep backbreaking climb, up a slope studded with hidden roots.
Patricia saw the top of the Parliamentary Tree first, and then it seemed to grow out of the landscape, becoming taller and more overwhelming as she approached. The Tree was sort of bird shaped, as Dirrp had said, but instead of feathers it had dark spiky branches with fronds that hung to the ground. It loomed like the biggest church in the world. Or a castle. Patricia had never seen a castle, but she guessed they would rise over you like that.
A hundred pairs of wings fluttered at their arrival and then stopped. A huge collection of shapes shrank into the Tree.
“It’s okay,” Dirrp called out. “She’s with me. I hurt my wing. She brought me here to get help.”
The only response, for a long time, was silence. Then an eagle raised itself up, from near the top of the Tree, a white-headed bird with a hooked beak and pale, probing eyes. “You should not have brought her here,” the eagle said.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Dirrp said. “But it’s okay. She can talk. She can actually talk.” Dirrp pivoted, to speak into Patricia’s ear. “Show them. Show them!”
“Uh, hi,” Patricia said. “I’m sorry if we bothered you. But we need your help!”
At the sound of a human talking, all of the birds went into a huge frenzy of squawking and shouting, until a big owl near the eagle banged a rock against the branch and shouted, “Order, order.”
The eagle leaned her white fluffy head forward and studied Patricia. “So you’re to be the new witch in our forest, are you?”
“I’m not a witch.” Patricia chewed her thumb. “I’m a princess.”
“You had better be a witch.” The eagle’s great dark body shifted on the branch. “Because if you’re not, then Dirrp has broken the law by bringing you to us. And he’ll need to be punished. We certainly won’t help fix his wing, in that case.”
“Oh,” Patricia said. “Then I’m a witch. I guess.”
“Ah.” The eagle’s hooked beak clicked. “But you will have to prove it. Or both you and Dirrp will be punished.”
Patricia did not like the sound of that. Various other birds piped up, saying, “Point of order!” and a fidgety crow was listing important areas of Parliamentary procedure. One of them was so insistent that the eagle was forced to yield the branch to the Honorable Gentleman from Wide Oak—who then forgot what he was going to say.
“So how do I prove that I’m a witch?” Patricia wondered if she could run away. Birds flew pretty fast, right? She probably couldn’t get away from a whole lot of birds, if they were mad at her. Especially magical birds.
“Well.” A giant turkey in one of the lower branches, with wattles that looked a bit like a judge’s collar, pulled himself upright and appeared to consult some markings scratched into the side of the Tree, before turning and giving a loud, learned “glrp” sound. “Well,” he said again, “there are several methods that are recognized in the literature. Some of them are trials of death, but we might skip those for the moment perhaps. There are also some rituals, but you need to be of a certain age to do those. Oh yes, here’s a good one. We could ask her the Endless Question.”
“Ooh, the Endless Question,” a grouse said. “That’s exciting.”
“I haven’t heard anyone answer the Endless Question before,” said a goshawk. “This is more fun than Question Time.”
“Umm,” said Patricia. “Is the Endless Question going to take a long time? Because I bet my mom and dad are worried about me.” It was hitting her all over again that she was up way past her bedtime and she hadn’t had dinner and she was out in the middle of the freezing woods, not to mention she was still lost.
“Too late,” the grouse said.
“We’re asking it,” said the eagle.
“Here is the question,” said the turkey. “Is a tree red?”
“Uh,” Patricia said. “Can you give me a hint? Umm. Is that ‘red’ like the color?” The birds didn’t answer. “Can you give me
more time? I promise I’ll answer, I just need more time to think. Please. I need more time. Please?”
The next thing Patricia knew, her father scooped her up in his arms. He was wearing his sandpaper shirt and his red beard was in her face and he kept half-dropping her, because he was trying to draw complicated valuation formulas with his hands while carrying her. But it was still so warm and perfect to be carried home by her daddy that Patricia didn’t care.
“I found her right on the outskirts of the woods near the house,” her father told her mother. “She must have gotten lost and found her own way out. It’s a miracle she’s okay.”
“You nearly scared us to death. We’ve been searching, along with all of the neighbors. I swear you must think my time is worthless. You’ve made me blow a deadline for a management productivity analysis.” Patricia’s mother had her dark hair pulled back, which made her chin and nose look pointier. Her bony shoulders hunched, almost up to her antique earrings.
“I just want to understand what this is about,” Patricia’s father said. “What did we do that made you want to act out in this way?” Roderick Delfine was a real-estate genius who often worked from home and looked after the girls when they were between nannies, sitting in a high chair at the breakfast bar with his wide face buried in equations. Patricia herself was pretty good at math, except when she thought too much about the wrong things, like the fact that the number 3 looked like an 8 cut in half, so two 3s really ought to be 8.
“She’s testing us,” Patricia’s mother said. “She’s testing our authority, because we’ve gone too easy on her.” Belinda Delfine had been a gymnast, and her own parents had put several oceans’ worth of pressure on her to excel at that—but she’d never understood why gymnastics needed to have judges, instead of measuring everything using cameras and maybe lasers. She’d met Roderick after he started coming to all her meets, and they’d invented a totally objective gymnastics measuring system that nobody had ever adopted.
“Look at her. She’s just laughing at us,” Patricia’s mother said, as if Patricia herself weren’t standing right there. “We need to show her we mean business.”
Patricia hadn’t thought she was laughing, at all, but now she was terrified she looked that way. She tried extra hard to fix a serious expression on her face.
“I would never run away like that,” said Roberta, who was supposed to be leaving the three of them alone in the kitchen but had come in to get a glass of water, and gloat.
They locked Patricia in her room for a week, sliding food under her door. The bottom of the door tended to scrape off the top layer of whatever type of food it was. Like if it was a sandwich, the topmost piece of bread was taken away by the door. You don’t really want to eat a sandwich after your door has had the first bite, but if you get hungry enough you will. “Think about what you’ve done,” the parents said.
“I get all her desserts for the next seven years,” Roberta said.
“No you don’t!” said Patricia.
The whole experience with the Parliament of Birds became a sort of blur to Patricia. She remembered it mostly in dreams and fragments. Once or twice, in school, she had a flashback of a bird asking her something. But she couldn’t quite remember what the question had been, or whether she’d answered it. She had lost the ability to understand the speech of animals while she was locked in her bedroom.
ABOUT THE ANDRE NORTON AWARD FOR YOUNG ADULT SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY
The Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy is an annual award presented by SFWA to the author of the best young-adult or middle-grade science fiction or fantasy book published in the United States in the preceding year.
The Andre Norton Award is not a Nebula Award, but it follows Nebula nomination, voting, and award rules and guidelines. It was founded in 2005 to honor popular science fiction and fantasy author and Grand Master Andre Norton.
ANDRE NORTON AWARD FOR YOUNG ADULT SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY WINNER
EXCERPT FROM
ARABELLA OF MARS
DAVID D. LEVINE
David D. Levine is the author of the novels Arabella of Mars, Arabella and the Battle of Venus, and over fifty science fiction and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the Hugo, and he has been shortlisted for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and Sturgeon. Stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Tor.com, numerous Year’s Best anthologies, and his award-winning collection Space Magic.
PROLOGUE
The Last Straw
Mars, 1812
Arabella Ashby lay prone atop a dune, her whole length pressed tight upon the cool red sands of Mars. The silence of the night lay unbroken save for the distant cry of a hunting khulekh, and a wind off the desert brought a familiar potpourri to her nose: khoresh-sap, and the cinnamon smell of Martians, and the sharp, distinctive fragrance of the sand itself. She glanced up at Phobos—still some fingers’ span short of Arcturus—then back down to the darkness of the valley floor where Michael would, she knew, soon appear.
Beneath the fur-trimmed leather of her thukhong, her heart beat a fast tattoo, racing not only from the exertion of her rush to the top of this dune but from the exhilaration of delicious anticipation. For this, she was certain, was the night she would finally defeat her brother in the game of shorosh khe kushura, or Hound and Hare.
The game was simple enough. To-night Michael played the part of the kushura, a nimble runner of the plains, while Arabella took the role of the shorosh, a fierce and cunning predator. His assignment this night was to race from the stone outcrop they called Old Broken Nose to the drying-sheds on the south side of the manor house, a distance of some two miles; hers was to stop him. But though Khema had said the youngest Martian children would play this game as soon as their shells hardened, it was also a sophisticated strategic exercise . . . one that Michael, three years her elder, had nearly always won in the weeks they’d been playing it.
But to-night the victory would be Arabella’s. For she had been observing Michael assiduously for the last few nights, and she had noted that despite Khema’s constant injunctions against predictability, he nearly always traversed this valley when he wished to evade detection. Its sides were steep, its shadows deep at every time of night, and the soft sands of the valley floor hushed every footfall—but that would avail him little if his pursuer reached the valley before he did and prepared an ambush. Which was exactly what she had done.
Again she cast her eyes upward. At Michael’s usual pace he would arrive just as Phobos in his passage through the sky reached the bright star Arcturus—about half-past two in the morning. But as she looked up, her eye was drawn by another point of light, brighter than Arcturus and moving still faster than Phobos: an airship, cruising so high above the planet that her sails caught the sun’s light long before dawn. From the size and brightness of the moving light she must be a Marsman—one of the great Mars Company ships, the “aristocrats of the air,” that plied the interplanetary atmosphere between Mars and Earth. Perhaps some of her masts or spars or planks had even originated here, on this very plantation, as one of the great khoresh-trees that towered in patient, soldierly rows north and east of the manor house.
Some day, Arabella thought, perhaps she might take passage on such a ship. To sail the air, and see the asteroids, and visit the swamps of Venus would be a grand adventure indeed. But to be sure, no matter how far she traveled she would always return to her beloved Woodthrush Woods.
Suddenly a shuff of boots on sand snatched her awareness from the interplanetary atmosphere back to the valley floor. Michael!
She had been careless. While her attention had been occupied by the ship, Michael had drawn nearly abreast of her position. Now she had mere moments in which to act.
Scrambling to her feet in the dune’s soft sand, she hurled herself down into the shadowed canyon, a tolerable twelve-foot drop that would give her the momentum she needed to overcome her brother’s advantages in size and weight.
But in her haste she misjudged her leap, landing instead in a thorny gorosh-shrub halfway up the canyon’s far wall and earning a painful scratch on her head. She cursed enthusiastically in English and Martian as she struggled to free herself from the shrub’s thorns and sticky, acrid-smelling sap.
“Heavens, dear sister,” Michael laughed, breathing hard from his run. “Such language!” He doubled back in order to aid her in extricating herself.
But Arabella had not given up on the game. She held out her hand as though for assistance . . . and as soon as he grasped it, she pulled him down into the shrub with her. The thorny branch that had trapped her snapped as he fell upon it, and the two of them rolled together down the canyon wall, tussling and laughing in the sand like a pair of tureth pups.
Then they rolled into a patch of moonlight, and though Michael had the upper hand he suddenly ceased his attempts to pin her to the ground. “What is the matter, dear brother?” Arabella gasped, even as she prepared to hurl him over her head with her legs. But in this place there was light enough to see his face clearly, and his expression was so grave she checked herself.
“You are injured,” he said, disentangling himself from her.
“’Tis only a scratch,” she replied. But the pain when she touched her injured scalp was sharp, and her hand when she brought it away and examined it beneath Phobos’s dim light was black with blood.
Michael brought his handkerchief from his thukhong pocket and pressed it against the wound, causing Arabella to draw in a hissing breath through her teeth. “Lie still,” he said, his voice quite serious.
“Is it very bad, then?”
He made no reply, but as she lay on the cool sand, her breath fogging the air and the perspiration chilling on her face, she felt something seeping through her hair and dripping steadily from the lower edge of her ear, and the iron smell of blood was strong in the air. Michael’s jaw tightened, and he pressed harder with the handkerchief; Arabella’s breath came shallow, and she determined not to cry out from the pain.
