The Family Tree (12 page)

T
he Biwot house hunkered up Chilliburn Creek, its threshold well above the reach of even the highest waves. Nigh two hundred winters of storm had not conquered it, but the slow rip of the seasons had taken their toll: the rafters that held the sod roof were rotten, and woodworms had made powdery tunnels through the lord and lady beams on either side of the door. During the mild weather of midsummer, wrack relaxed upon ruin
and all seemed homely enough, but when the gales of early autumn came, a rampageous seawind tongued the roof off like the peel of a fruit and spit it into the outgoing waves while the Crawling Sea slithered up the creek bottom and onto the moor, where it lapped its wet tongue across the threshold of the house.

The Biwot family, fisherfolk who were accustomed enough to being wet but didn’t like sleeping in it, scurried for the cover of the boat bed and huddled within it, at least one of them awaiting an end that the roaring wind declared to be imminent.

“Oh, Lord Wind, have pity,” cried Sleekele, bumping her head on the bedframe. “Oh, Lord Wind, great Lord Wind…”

“Shut face, woman,” her mate, Diver, rejoined. “Lord Wind is too full of his own noise to hear thee talking.”

“Enough, both thee,” growled Grandmama. “I’m glad it’s happened, do you hear? We’ve worried over it long enough. Now the roof’s gone, we can quit worrying and do something with ourselves.” She laid her head back on the hastily flung pillow that had preceded her own stringy self into the boat bed and stared at sloping sides around her, as though taking count of the seams that might, or might not, hold out the flood. “Now we can do something.”

“Oh, we’ll do, all right,” said Burrow, the oldest boy. “Crawling Sea will crawl in here and float us out the door and down the creek and onto the sea, where we’ll sail away forever on the boat bed, to the land where the bombats live.”

Grandmama snorted at him, waving her webbed fingers in front of his nose. “Why float, boy? Swimming’s easier. Just because we’re shore people doesn’t mean we’ve forgot our heritage.”

“Onchik-Dau would like to hear you say that!”

“Onchik-Dau has nothing to say about it. Our roof’s gone. We’re homeless, boy.”

Legally, she was right, of course. Onchikiel people
followed the home laws: due regard for shore and pasture, due regard for roof and floor, due regard for hearth and kinfolk, not to leave them evermore. So long as onchiki had a roof over their heads, their movements were restricted to the three Fs, fishing, flocks, and folk, which meant just what it said. Fish was what they caught and dried, eating some and selling some; veeble flocks were what they sheared the wool from; folk were what they kept company with in festive seasons, visiting back and forth. With no roof, however, they became homeless, and a homeless onchik was a wild onchik, able to go places and work or not as he pleased. Some had even been known to change their names and leave lifemates and children to go off into the unknown by themselves. After the long boredom of homefast life, the attraction of venturing was so great that some had been accused of weakening their own roof pins, no matter how the Onchik-Dau fulminated against such behavior.

“What’ll we do with the veebles, Grandmama?” This was Lucy Low, the oldest girl child. “We can’t leave the veebles for the cowjers to eat.”

Mince giggled from his place near the bottom of the bed:

“Shush, Mince,” said Grandmama. “Do thy rhymes when the sun’s up. In all this wind, I’ve no patience with it. Now see, thee’ve made her sorrow!” She stroked the girl’s smooth head and wiped her bright brown eyes, saying, “There now, there now,” until Lucy Low gave over being sorrowful. It was the idea of a cowjer eating the veebles that had done it, for she had best friends among the veebles: Chimary and Chock, Willigong and Gai.

“Shush, child,” murmured Grandmama. “We’ll see
to the veebles, bless you. Your friends are safe.”

Lucy Low managed a gasp. “Will we open the box of fortunes, Grandmama?”

“Why, certain we will, child. When the roof goes, what else can a family do?”

Inside the boat bed, protected from the wind and mostly from the rain—for the bed had a canvas cover though it wasn’t boat-tight as it should have been—snugged down they lay: Grandmama, and her son Diver, his wifemate Sleekele, the three girls: Ring, and Bright, and Lucy Low. And the two boys, Burrow (who was near enough a grown male to be all trouble and no sense, so said Grandmama), and Mince, (who might never make it to his growth, irritating as he was). The veebles were out in the shed, and Uncle Wash, Grandmama’s stepson, was abed in the shed loft, had the shed still a roof, praise Lady Heaven, and that was the lot of the Chilliburn Biwots, though not for long, for with the loss of its roof, Biwot had become a no-place.

Even with a roof, it hadn’t been much.

Chilliburn was a small stream, barely more than a trickle oozing down from the Sharbak Mountains to make murmurous meanders over mossy rocks and through bits of marshy moor, into peaty pools, dark as tea, and out once more, past the legs of the herons and the bellies of the frogs, thence whispering over a fall onto a pillow of ferns, finally transforming itself into a silver song that lilted among the smooth shore stones, across the pebbly beach to the high mirror of the Crawling Sea. The sea was green with algae, but Chilliburn was drinking water, washing water, water for the garden, water for the veebles, and thank the Cloud Ladies for that, all in their billowy dresses with their big hats, floating across the sky on their way to meet the sky king, somewhere over Gosland.

Chilliburn had only the one fishing croft. There’d been another, farther up, years ago in Grandmama’s youth, but it’d been gone now a lifetime, eaten by the wind. Onchik-Dau had refused to rebuild it back then.
He’d said it wasn’t worth it, so the crofters had gone.

“Couldn’t we put the roof back on?” asked Burrow. He was deep in a bottom corner of the bed, and his voice came out of the darkness like a haunting. “Wouldn’t that be the thing to do? Wouldn’t the Onchik-Dau want that?”

“Whoosh, lad, and get on with this nonsense?” said Grandmama. “The Onchik-Dau? Why would he be so silly? What’s the rent he gets from the croft? Nothing plus nothing, and that’s only when we’ve had a good season. Sale price of fish that nobody’s buying. Sale price of wool, likewise. Without us in the way here, he can rent the hills to guz herders, and besides, aren’t you sick and all of it? Fish for breakfast and fish for lunch and fish for dinner, with an onion if we’re lucky. Feast days there’s a hen that’s all muscle and no meat, and odd times maybe we take the throat out of a veeble that’s about ready to drop dead anyhow. Whoosh, lad, you want to go on with it?”

“Never been noplace else,” he said.

“Nor me,” said Grandmama. “And I’d say it’s about time.”

“You’re so brave,” wept Sleekele. “You keep your spirits up so.”

As somebody had to do, said Grandmama to herself, for if left to Sleekele, their spirits would all liquify and run down the Chilliburn into the sea to become weepy ghosts, lamenting ladies, blow-arounds for the Lord Wind, willow-wraiths to flow away down the Fraiburne into the distant ocean, way south, past Isfoin.

“Yes, Grandmama, you are brave,” whispered Ring and Bright, as in one voice. They were twins, and Grandmama was of the opinion they had but one brain between them. Certainly it took both of them to do what one sensible person might manage.

“H’loo,” came a voice from the wind. “H’loo. ’Ny-body in there?”

“Wash, you fool,” cried Grandmama. “Course we’re in here. Where’re you?”

“Shed roof blew away,” he said, leaning down where he could peer in at them, his nose wrinkled back, his teeth showing white in the dim. “You got any room left in there?”

“How’s the veebles, Uncle Wash?” Lucy Low asked. “Are they scared?”

“All curled up with their noses under their paws and the little ones snug in the middle. Veebles lived here on this poor moor long before folk, Lucy Low. They got their ways.”

“There’s room for half of you, Wash,” said Diver. “Top half or bottom, it’s up to you.”

“Naw,” he said. “I’m wet now. What I’ll do is, I’ll curl up under the washtub. Likely that’ll do me until morning.”

They heard him rumbling about and cursing for a time, with a rackety bang from the washtub, then quiet came and the wind settled and they heard only the
thunky-tunk
of raindrops on the bottom of the washtub as the storm drummed its fingers, trying to decide whether to start over or finish up. Evidently it chose to finish up, for it wasn’t long before the rain ceased and then they could hear the sound of the sea crawling onto the shore, lisping to itself about all its secrets. The Crawling Sea was shallow and wind driven, and tonight it had crawled farther than any would have thought possible. Once the wind died, it began to hush itself away in little gravelly rushes. Lucy Low was between Grandmama and Diver with scarce room to breathe, but it was warm there, and before she knew it she’d drifted off to sleep to dream about waking in warm daylight and opening the fortune box.

Many families in the Shore Counties kept a fortune box. Fortunes were the acceptable coin of the place, the value placed upon them varying with the seer and the season. Fortunes not immediately needed to buy food or some such were put away against a rainy time, and seldom had one come as rainy as last night. Grandmama and her grandmama and even her grandmama had been
saving sorts, always tucking a fortune away against future need.

“When a family can’t eat something new or change a word from what’s been said a thousand years,” Grandmama often said, “it matters mightily to have a fortune box to open when luck gives out. People set in their ways as a root into stone can take hope from the time the root rots and the stone cracks.”

The fortune box of the Biwots was at least five generations old, so it was bound to have a good many adventures in it. They didn’t even wait for breakfast the morning after the roof went. Diver took up the flagstone from the floor, and Wash and Burrow dug up the black bog-oak box from where it had lain between diggings these long years. The last fortune had been put in the box ten years or more ago, by Grandmama herself, and it hadn’t been dug up since.

They all sat in a circle on the floor. Grandmama was oldest, so she got to shuffle the fortunes, new with old, old with new, mixing them up, then putting them in a stack. She would pick from the stack, one at a time, and if the fortune didn’t fit this one, why then, that one might take it. Some fortunes didn’t fit any circumstances, and some fortunes were terribly dire, but direness and unsuitability were no bar. What was forecast, always passed, so said the Sworpian Society of Seers.

“All right,” breathed Grandmama. “We don’t want to open any more of these than need be, for we’ll need some to spend on our way wherever we’re going. I’ll read out the one on top. I mind me this one. My mama won this at a fair when she was just a girl, kept it always, showed it to me time on time. It has a golden egg on the seal, that’s how I remember.”

She broke the seal, opened the flap, and took out the folded parchment. That took some time to be unfolded and laid down flat as Grandmama turned it this way and that, finding the right way up of it. Grandmama was a pretty good reader. There were hardly any words she couldn’t make out if she took her time about it. “‘High
ladies need sharp eyes to tend their geese,’” she read at last. “I think it’s geese.”

Lucy Low gave it a look. “It must be geese, Grandmama.”

Diver sniffed. “No job for a man, goose tending. More a girl’s job.”

“Well, shall we give it to Lucy Low or to the twins?” asked Grandmama.

“We don’t want it,” said the twins in one voice.

“I do,” said Lucy Low.

“Lucy Low’s it is, then,” Grandmama decided, handing over the parchment.

Lucy Low took it and smoothed it out, admiring the bright colors around the edges and the jiggery way it had been folded to make a long necked bird, and when she waggled the tail, the legs moved. Perhaps it was meant to be a goose. She’d never tended geese, but she’d seen them flying over, sometimes landing outside the reed beds and spending a day along the marshy shore, eating and gabbling to themselves. Goose tending would be fun, and it would keep her out of doors, as well. Lucy Low preferred the out of doors. Most onchiki did, truly, except for a few like Ring and Bright. The onchikiel heritage was an out-of-doors way of life, water and reed beds and fish and even the wild wind that pushed the sea. House living was nice when it was cold and drear, but out of doors was best most times.

Meantime Grandmama had unfolded the next one in the pile. “This says, ‘Treasure on Hovermount.’ Where’s Hovermount?”

“In the Dire Mountains, past the Dread Marches,” said Uncle Wash. “East of the Crawling Sea. I knew a peddler used to go back and forth through there. Wicked awful country, he said.”

“Uk,” said Sleekele. “I won’t go there. Where do you suppose we got this fortune?”

Wash said, “Grandaddy got it, for some smoked fish he sold at market. See there, on the corner, there’s his name and the year. Lord Wind, but that was a long time
ago. I’ve always wanted an adventure, so can I have this one?”

Grandma gave it to him, with her blessing.

“A chimney needs mending in the sea town,” said the next one. All the sea towns were west and north, past Isher and Fan Kyu Cyndly, all the way to Estafan, where Diver had often wanted to go. He perked up his ears. He was a good mender of most anything, and he thought it might be worth the trip.

And so it went, until they each had taken a fortune written on good official parchment and sealed with the signet of the Sworpian Society of Seers, certifying that the contents were true and binding, effective upon the breaking of the seal. There was an ale house fortune for the twins, and a fishing fleet destiny for Burrow, who said Mince could come along. Sleekele and Grandmama each had housekeeping fortunes, so it seemed likely they’d find their future in whatever sea town Diver found a chimney in. None of the family were holding any uncomfortable fortunes—though both Burrow’s and Sleekele’s were rather vague—and they were pretty well satisfied with the way things looked.