Seventy days had passed since Clave's citizens had departed Quinn Tuft.
The tree fed a myriad parasites, and the parasites fed Clave's team. They had killed another nose-arm, easily, chopping through its nose, then jabbing harpoons into its den. There were patches of fan fungus everywhere. Merril had slept a full eight days after eating from the red fringe of a fan fungus. The subsequent throbbing headache didn't seem to affect her climbing, and presently it went away. So the fan fungus served them as food, and they had found more of the shelled burrowers and other edibles.
The Grad saw it all as evidence of the tree's decline.
They had found a jet pod bush, like a mass of bubbles on the bark.
Clave had packed a dozen ripe pods in a pouch of scraped nose-arm hide.
They had taken to camping just outside the water-washed wood.
Clave laughed and admitted that they should have been doing that all along. They'd slept three times more on the tree: last night in a nosearm's den, twice before in deep wounds in the wood, cracks overgrown with 'fuzz' that had to be burned out first. The char had turned their clothing black.
They had learned not to try to boil water. The bubbles just foamed it out in a hot, expanding mass.
Tidal gravity continued to decrease until they were almost floating up the trunk. Merril loved it. Recovering from the fan fungus hadn't changed that. You couldn't fall; you'd just yell for help, and someone would presently throw you a line. Glory loved it, and Alfin smiled sometimes.
But there were penalties. Now water had grown scarce too. There was no wind this high, and thus no leeward stream of water. Sometimes you found wet wood, wet enough to lick dry. There was water in fan fungus flesh.
Here was the mark Jinny had found. Good: it looked nearly clean.
And half a klomter farther up the trunk, a fan-shape showed like a white hand against the sky. It must be huge. The Grad pointed. 'Dinner?'
Clave said, 'We'll find smaller ones around it.'
'But wouldn't it look grand,' Merril asked, 'coming into the Commons?'
The Grad was pulling himself toward the tribal mark when Clave said, 'Hold it.'
'What?'
'This mark isn't overgrown like the others were. Grad, doesn't it look funny to you? Tended?'
'There's some fuzz growing, but maybe not enough.' Then the Grad was close enough to see the real discrepancy. 'There's no takeout mark. Citizens, this isn't Quinn territory.'
Gavving and Jiovan had been left behind to tend the smokefire.
Hard-learned lessons showed here. Bark torn from the rim of a patch of fuzz served as fuel. Healthy bark resisted fire. A circle of coals surrounded the meat, all open to the fitful breezes. A sheltered fire wouldn't burn. The smoke wouldn't rise; it would stay to smother the fire. Even here in the open, the smoke hovered in a squirming cloud.
The heat of burning stayed in the smoke, so the fire didn't need to be large. Gavving and Jiovan stayed well back. A shift in the breeze could smother an incautious citizen.
The meat should be rotated soon. It was Gavving's turn, but it didn't have to be done instantly.
'Jiovan?'
'What?'
Even Gavving wouldn't ask Jiovan how he lost his leg-nobody would; but one thing about that tale had bothered him for years. And he asked.
'Why were you hunting alone, that day? Nobody hunts alone.'
'I did.'
'Okay.' Topic closed. Gavving drew his harpoon. He pulled air into his lungs, then lunged into the smoke. Half-blind, he reached over the coals with the harpoon butt to turn the nose-arm legs-one, two, three. He yanked hard on his line to pull himself into open air. Smoke came with him, and he took an instant to fan it away before he drew breath.
Jiovan was looking in, past the small green tuft that had once enclosed his life, into the bluish white spark that was Voy. His head came up, and Gavving faced a murderous glare. 'This isn't something I'd want told around.'
Gavving waited.
'All right. I've got…I had a real gift for sarcasm, they tell me. When I was leading a hunt…well, the boys were there to learn, of course, and I was there to teach. If someone made a mistake, I left him in no doubt.'
Gavving nodded.
'Pretty soon they were giving me nothing but the fumblers. I couldn't stand it, so I started hunting alone.'
'I shouldn't have asked. It used to bother me.'
'Forget it.'
Gavving was trying to forget something else entirely. This last sleep period he had wakened to find three citizens missing. He'd followed a sound…and watched Clave and Jayan and Jinny moor lines to the bark, and leap outward, and make babies while they drifted.
What lived in his head now was lust and envy balanced by fear of Clave's wrath or Jinny's scorn (for he had fixed on Jinny as marginally lovelier.) He might as well dream. Any serious potential mate was back in Quinn Tuft, and Gavving couldn't offer anyway; he hadn't the wealth or the years.
That would change, of course. He would return (of course) as a hero (of course!). As for the Chairman's wrath…he hadn't been able to send Harp. Possibly Clave could have resisted him too. If they could end the famine, the Chairman could do nothing; they would be heroes.
Gavving could have his choice of mates. 'So I was hunting alone,' Jiovan said, 'the day Glory busted open the turkey pen.'
For an instant Gavving couldn't imagine what Jiovan was talking about. Then he smiled. 'Harp's told that tale.'
'I've heard him. I was down under the branch that day, with one line to tether me and another loose, nibbling a little foliage with my head sticking down into the sky, you know, just waiting. It was full night at the New Year's occlusion. The sun was a wide bright patch shining up at me, and Voy drifting right across the center.
'Here came a turkey, flapping against the wind, still moving pretty fast, and backward. I put a net on my free line, quick, and threw it. The turkey's caught. Here comes another one. I've got more nets, and in two breaths I've got a turkey on each end. But here come two more, then four, and they're coming from above, and by now I can guess they're ours. I throw the end of the line I'm moored to, and I get a third turkey—'
'Good throwing,' Gavving said.
'Oh, sure, there wasn't anything wrong with my throwing that day. But the sky was full of turkeys, and most of them were going to get away, and I still thought it was kind of hilarious.'
'Really.'
'That's why I never told this story before.'
Gavving suddenly guessed what wascoming. 'I can live with it if you don't want to finish.'
'No, that's okay. It was funny,' Jiovan said seriously. 'But the sky was full of turkeys, and a triune family came to do something about all that meat on the wing. They split up and went after the loose turkeys.
There wasn't a thing I could do but pull in my three.'
Jiovan certainly wasn't smiling now. 'The male went after one of my turkeys. Swallowed it whole and tried to swim away. It got the wrong line…picture one end of a line spiked deep in the branch, and that massive beast pulling on the other, and me in a loop in the middle. I suddenly saw what was happening, and I pulled the loop open and tried to jump out, and the loop snicked shut and my leg was ripped almost off and I was falling into the sky.'
'Treefodder.'
'I thought I was treefodder, all right. Remember, I still had a line in my hands? But with a turkey on each end, flapping like crazy, and I was falling. I tried throwing a turkey, I really did, I thought it might get caught in the branchlets, but it didn't.
'Meanwhile the triune male's been caught by something, and it doesn't know what. It pulls back against the
