GAVVING COULD HEAR THE RUSTLING AS HIS COMPANIONS tunneled upward. They stayed alongside the great flat wall of the trunk. Finger-thick spine branches sprouted from the trunk, divided endlessly into wire-thin branchlets, and ultimately flowered into foliage like green cotton, loosely spun to catch every stray beam of sunlight. Some light filtered through as green twilight.
Gavving tunneled through a universe of green cotton candy.
Hungry, he reached deep into the web of branchlets and pulled out a fistful of foliage. It tasted like fibrous spun sugar. It cured hunger, but what Gavving's belly wanted was meat. Even so, its taste was too fibrous…and the green of it was too brown, even at the edges of the tuft, where sunlight fell.
He ate it anyway and went on.
The rising howl of the wind told him he was nearly there. A minute later his head broke through into wind and sunlight.
The sunlight stabbed his eyes, still red and painful from this morning's allergy attack. It always got him in the eyes and sinuses. He squinted and turned his head, and sniffled, and waited while his eyes adjusted. Then, twitchy with anticipation, he looked up.
Gavving was fourteen years old, as measured by passings of the sun behind Voy. He had never been above Quinn Tuft until now.
The trunk went straight up, straight out from Voy. It seemed to go out forever, a vast brown wall that narrowed to a cylinder, to a dark line with a gentle westward curve to it, to a point at infinity-and the point was tipped with green. The far tuft.
A cloud of brown-tinged green dropped away below him, spreading out into the main body of the tuft. Looking east, with the wind whipping his long hair forward; Gavving could see the branch emerging from its green sheath as a half-klomter of bare wood: a slender fin.
Harp's head popped out, and his face immediately dipped again, out of the wind. Laython next, and he did the same. Gavving waited. Presently their faces lifted. Harp's face was broad, with thick bones, its brutal strength half-concealed by golden beard. Laython's long, dark face was beginning to sprout strands of black hair.
Harp called, 'We can crawl around to lee of the trunk. East. Get out of this wind.'
The wind blew always from the west, always at gale velocities. Laython peered windward between his fingers. He bellowed, 'Negative! How would we catch anything? Any prey would come right out of the wind!'
Harp squirmed through the foliage to join Laython. Gavving shrugged and did the same. He would have liked a windbreak…and Harp, ten years older than Gavving and Laython, was normally in charge. It seldom worked out that way.
'There's nothing to catch,' Harp told them. 'We're here to guard the trunk. Just because there's a drought doesn't mean we can't have a flash flood. Suppose the tree brushed a pond?'
'What pond? Look around you! There's nothing near us. Voy is too close. Harp, you've said so yourself!'
'The trunk blocks half our view,' Harp said mildly.
The bright spot in the sky, the sun, was drifting below the western edge of the tuft. And in that direction were no ponds, no clouds, no drifting forests…nothing but blue-tinged white sky split by the white line of the Smoke Ring, and on that line, a roiled knot that must be Gold.
Looking up, out, he saw more of nothing…faraway streamers of cloud shaping a whorl of storm…a glinting fleck that might indeed have been a pond, but it seemed even more distant than the green tip of the integral tree. There would be no flood.
Gavving had been six years old when the last flood came. He remembered terror, panic, frantic haste. The tribe had bufrowed east along the branch, to huddle in the thin foliage where the tuft tapered into bare wood. He remembered a roar that drowned the wind, and the mass of the branch itself shuddering endlessly. Gavving's father and two apprentice hunters hadn't been warned in time. They had been washed into the sky.
Laython started off around the trunk, but in the windward direction. He was half out of the foliage, his long arms pulling him against the wind. Harp followed. Harp had given in, as usual. Gavving snorted and moved to join them.
It was tiring. Harp must have hated it. He was using claw sandals, but he must have suffered, even so. Harp had a good brain and a facile tongue, but he was a dwarf. His torso was short and burly; his muscular arms and legs had no reach, and his toes were mere decoration. He stood less than two meters tall. The Grad had once told Gavving, 'Harp looks like the pictures of the Founders in the log. We all looked like that once.'
Harp grinned back at him, though he was puffing. 'We'll get you some claw sandals when you're older.'
Laython grinned too, superciliously, and sprinted ahead of them both. He didn't have to say anything. Claw sandals would only have hampered his long, prehensile toes.
Night had cut the illumination in half. Seeing was easier, with the sunglare around on the other side of Voy. The trunk was a great brown wall three klomters in circumference. Gavving looked up once and was disheartened at their lack of progress. Thereafter he kept his head bent to the wind, clawing his way across the green cotton, until he heard Laython yell.
'Dinner!'
A quivering black speck, a point to port of windward. Laython said, 'Can't tell what it is.'
Harp said, 'It's trying to miss. Looks big.'
'It'll go around the other side! Come on!'
They crawled, fast. The quivering dot came closer. It was long and narrow and moving tail-first. The great translucent fin blurred with speed as it tried to win clear of the trunk. The slender torso was slowly rotating.
The head came in view. Two eyes glittered behind the beak, one hundred and twenty degrees apart.
'Swordbird,' Harp decided. He stopped moving.
Laython called, 'Harp, what are you doing?'
'Nobody in his right mind goes after a swordbird.'
'It's still meati And it's probably starving too, this far in!'
Harp snorted. 'Who says so? The Grad? The Grad's full of theory, but he doesn't have to hunt.'
The swordbird's slow rotation exposed what should have been its third eye. What showed instead was a large, irregular, fuzzy green patch. Laython cried, 'Fluff! It's a bead injury that got infected with fluff. The thing's injured, Harp!'
'That isn't an injured turkey, boy. It's an injured swordbird.'
Laython was half again Harp's size, and the Chairman's son to boot. He was not easy to discipline. He wrapped long, strong fingers around Harp's shoulder and said, 'We'll miss it if we wait here e.rguing! I say we go for Gold.' And he stood up.
The wind smashed at him. He wrapped toes and one fist in branchlets, steadied himself, and semaphored his free arm. 'Hiyo! Swordbird! Meat, you copsik, meat!'
Harp made a sound of disgust.
It would surely see him, waving in that vivid scarlet blouse. Gavving thought, hopefully, We'll miss it, and then it'll be past. But he would not show cowardice on his first hunt.
He pulled his line loose from his back. He burrowed into the foliage to pound a spike into solid wood, and moored the line to it. The middle was attached to his waist. Nobody ever risked losing his line. A hunter who fell into the sky might still find rest somewhere, if he had his line.
The creature hadn't seen them. Laython swore. He hurried to anchor his own line. The business end was a grapnel: hardwood from the finned end of the branch. Laython swung the grapnel round his head, yelled, and flung it out.
The swordbird must have seen, or heard. It whipped around, mouth gaping, triangular tail fluttering as it tried to gain way to starboard, to reach their side of the trunk. Starving, yes! Gavving hadn't grasped that a creature could see him as meat until that moment.
Harp frowned. 'It could work. If we're lucky it could smash itself against the trunk.'
The swordbird seemed bigger every second: bigger than a man, bigger than a hut-all mouth and wings and tail. The tail was a translucent membrane enclosed in a V of bone spines with serrated edges. What was it doing this far in? Swordbirds fed on creatures that fed in the drifting forests, and there were few of these, so far in toward Voy. Little enough of anything. The creature did look gaunt, Gavving thought; and there was that soft green carpet over one eye.
Fluff was a green plant parasite that grew on an animal until the animal died. It attacked humans too.
