And All Between (4 page)

Traalya Harp nodded in firm agreement. “I, too, have heard of such sudden and temporary gifts of Spirit, but I think they happen very rarely.”

Then Kir Oblan, an elderly Councilor with a great mass of curly white hair, cleared his throat and began to speak, his sagging cheeks trembling with emotion. “I feel,” he paused and swallowed with difficulty, “that it is wrong to bring such grief to a young child. Perhaps in this one instance we should—”

But at that point Herd, himself, interrupted. “No,” he said, “we must recognize that we are in crisis throughout Erda, and there are steps that must be taken, however painful, to prevent the crisis from worsening. It has long been our greatest failing, as Erdlings, that we feel too much, too urgently, with no thought for tomorrow and with no—”

Kanna put her hand on her bond-partner’s arm, and he paused, blushing at his own presumption. “We ask only,” he said, “that the Council decree a free day for some of the workers in the mines and craftcaves, that they might aid us in our search.”

The free day was quickly granted; the message went out to the criers; and the Elds, after offering their thanks to the Councilors, prepared to leave the chamber. It was not until then that they noticed that the Verban, Hiro D’anhk, was still standing at the back of the gallery, near the doorway. As the Elds approached, he stepped forward.

Extending both hands in the Kindar manner, Hiro D’anhk greeted them. His words were warm and kindly, and beneath the words the Elds were able to pense a deep involvement with their grief and anxiety. “I wish to offer you my sharing of your pain,” he said. “I will release my assistants in the laboratory and my students at the Academy to join in the search of the tunnels. And I myself will search with them. I know what it is to wander alone in the tunnels of Erda.” He paused, and the dark brilliance of his eyes seemed to focus inwardly, intensifying the pensing that passed between them, until they seemed to hear the words he next spoke with their Spirits as well as with their ears.

“And I, too, have known the loss of a beloved daughter,” he said, and then he turned away quickly and disappeared through the double doors of the chamber entryway.

Thus it was that, by the second day of Teera’s flight, hundreds of Erdling men and women were beginning to gather to search the many miles of charted and uncharted tunnels, and the forgotten or undiscovered caverns of Erda. But it was on that same evening that Teera, in frantic pursuit of her runaway pet, became the first Erdling to stand above the Root and below the green and open sky.

T
HE SKY WAS NOT
green and bright, but dark and wet. Teera lay beneath the dome of a giant mushroom on damp spongy moss. Far, far above her seven moons of Green-sky shone with gauzy brilliance, but swift-flowing rain clouds, rooftree, grund, and Vine, shut out even the faintest ray of light. And yet it was a soft gray darkness, unlike the thick oblivion of the caverns. Huddling against the stem of the mushroom, Teera waited, dozing and waking, for the time of light to return.

She was damp and chill and very much afraid. Accustomed to the deep silences of the cavern, where almost all sound was man-made, she found the constant muted symphony of the forest floor mysterious and terrifying. Blending with the hushed whisper of the rain were rustles and squeaks, distant cries and close intimate scurryings. Time and time again Teera tensed in panic, only to hear the encroaching noise die away into the underlying rhythm of the rain.

But just as the faintest tones of light began to dilute the darkness around her, a sound came closer than ever before, and suddenly something warm and wet and consolingly familiar pressed against her chest. It was Haba. Hugging him tightly, Teera cried softly into his warm fur.

She slept then, briefly; and when she awoke, the forest was full of soft green light. Jumping to her feet, Teera stared in awed amazement. It was so bright and beautiful. The air moved and breathed, and colors seemed to swarm around her like bright flocks of birds. Dazzled, she drifted from place to place, looking, touching, smelling, transported for the moment beyond worry or fear or even hunger.

On every side were flowers and fern, soft green turf and spongy moss, raindrops glittering on leaf edges, brilliantly colored flying insects with long trailing wings, flocks of fat plak hens, small streams of diamond-clear water flowing over beds of jewellike pebbles. Everything everywhere dazzled Teera’s eyes and mind. But most wonderful of all, most strange and new and exciting, was the air itself. Like the air of Erda, it could be breathed, and stirred by waving hands, but it seemed entirely unlike in every other way. After the still, earthy air of the caverns, forever tinged with smoke and the corrosive odors of burning coal and gas, the air of the forest was a miracle of light and motion. Warm and spicy and yet pure and clean, it seemed to live and breathe of itself, moving and glowing all around her. Moving with it, drifting from place to place, she kept putting out her hands to touch it and feel its freshness against her skin.

For quite a long time she did not think at all. Dazzled, mindless, like someone deep in trance, she had no thought of Erda, of her parents, sad and grieving for her by now, of the long dark stretches of tunnel between her and her home cavern, of the opening in the Root through which she had come and the need to remember her way back to it. She had, in fact, no thought even for herself, a child, hungry and alone in an alien world. It was as if the Teera of the past were gone, leaving only a bodiless phantom, composed of wonder and delight.

Hunger returned first, and slowly and reluctantly, Teera began to recognize the need to look for food. Releasing Haba to forage for himself, she began to dig in the soft earth and, before too long she had found several tarbo roots and some very small earth mushrooms.

With her hunger somewhat satisfied, she thought next of the opening in the Root through which she had come. She began to search for it, aimlessly at first, and then with greater diligence, but to no avail. As she searched, she felt more and more frightened; but when, at last, she sat down to rest, the fright faded. Even if she found the opening, she reasoned, it was quite possible she would not be able to force her way back through it. And even then, she would still be lost, with no assurance that she would be able to find her way to Erda. It might be better to search for Erda here, above the ground, where it was possible to find food. By watching for rising smoke it should be possible to find the part of the forest that overlay the city; and once there, it should not be hard to locate an Erdling lookout. The lookout could then be sent to tell her parents—and perhaps the Council, too. What would happen next, was, in truth, uncertain, but full of intriguing possibilities.

Teera pictured herself holding court at a tunnel mouth, while one by one, her parents and all the members of the Council, and perhaps, all her friends and acquaintances, climbed the tunnel to speak to her and offer comfort and advice. She pictured their amazement at finding her above the Root, and the many conferences that would be held to consider how to get her home to Erda. Surely there would be a way. Surely the Council, in all its wisdom, would be able to solve the problem. And in the meantime, she could stay awhile above the Root. Her parents would know that she was alive and well, and Haba would not only be safe, but growing fat and sleek on the lush forest grass.

So Teera began to wander slowly through the forest looking for the column of smoke that would indicate an Erdling fire somewhere down below. From time to time she stopped to dig for roots or mushrooms and, now and then, she rested, lying on her back and staring up through vast glowing spaces to where grund and Vine formed an alien world, intriguing and terrifying.

Up there in beautiful, bright airy chambers, provided with wonderful things to eat, and with garments as soft and fine as the hair of newborn infants, lived the Kindar. And there Teera’s own grandmother had been born, and had lived in green-lit splendor until, when still a toddler, she had fallen to the forest floor. From there she had been rescued and adopted into an Erdling family. Surely, Teera thought, the Kindar, too, would welcome and feed a lost and hungry Erdling child. The Kindar were, as all Erdlings knew, a happy gentle people, who sang and danced and never frowned or cried. A people who loved and honored children for their gifts of Spirit. Lunaa D’ohn, herself, had said that it was true.

Such thoughts occurred again and again to Teera as she lay on her back, staring upward, or as she wandered past large tangled masses of Vine-stem that looked as if they might be climbable. However, there were two things that kept her on the forest floor.

The first was, of course, the Ol-zhaan. Besides the kindly Kindar, the Ol-zhaan, also, lived in the high forest. The powerful wizards, dressed in their shimmering white shubas adorned with seals of green and gold, lived apart, in a special grove full of temples and palaces. But they did not stay, always, in their temples. They went out daily to lead and teach the Kindar—to the orchards to see that the Kindar harvesters kept their eyes averted from the forest floor—and to the Gardens, where they taught Kindar children to hate and fear the dwellers below the Root, calling them Pash-shan and believing them to be monsters of inhuman shape and form.

The thought of the Ol-zhaan was enough, or almost enough, to keep Teera on the forest floor. But even if there had been no Ol-zhaan, there was, it seemed, another barrier between Teera and the world of the Kindar. This barrier she discovered in the afternoon of her first day above the Root.

Passing an extraordinarily thick and interwoven stand of Vine-stems, Teera decided to climb up it. Telling herself that she would not go far, at least not far enough to risk a meeting with an Ol-zhaan, she began her ascent. The Vine was full of loops and intersections that provided firm footholds, and for a few minutes she moved upward without difficulty. It was not until she decided to look back to see how far she had come, that the trouble began. Looking down, far down, to where the giant fern had shrunk and blended to a smooth green mossy carpet, she was suddenly overcome with a terrible meaningless panic. For the next few minutes, endlessly long and terrible minutes, she clung to the Vine in frozen fear.

Teera had no way to understand and adjust to the fear that gripped her, paralyzing her muscles and her mind. Born in a close, enclosed world, she had never experienced the fear of heights. This ancient inborn terror, relic of an ancestral world where all life moved in the grip of a much stronger and more deadly gravity, was unknown among the Kindar. They unlearned as tiny infants their inherited fear of falling. But to Teera who, at the age of eight, had never before experienced height, a dim ancestral voice spoke, telling her that she was about to die.

When, at last, she managed to unclasp her frozen fingers and move slowly and tremulously downward, she thought no more of climbing up to the world of the Kindar. And after a while she began to think more urgently of Erda and of her parents. But although she began to search more diligently, she saw no sign of smoke and found no tunnel openings. When night fell, she again slept beneath a mushroom with her lapan cradled in her arms.

During the second day, the wonders of the forest gradually lost their fascination. Not that it was less beautiful and inviting, but it seemed somehow to have lost its power to distract Teera’s mind from other needs and hungers. The food on the forest floor, roots and mushrooms, while fairly easy to find, was light and unsatisfying as a steady diet, and there were other hungers, too. The thought of family and friends and familiar places was once more becoming a constant gnawing pain, and her search for any clue to the whereabouts of Erda became more and more frantic. During the day she came across several tunnel mouths, dark holes between the tightly woven Root, but they were empty and deserted, and only empty echoes answered her frantic shouts.

The day stretched on and on, and it was sometime during the long eternity of the afternoon that Haba once more disappeared. He had been foraging nearby not long before, but suddenly he was nowhere to be seen, and there was no response to Teera’s calls and whistles. As time passed, her search became more and more frantic. Without the familiar presence of her pet, anxiety and depression were suddenly transformed into grief and terror. After stumbling aimlessly from place to place, crying and calling, she found herself at last, leaning against the trunk of an enormous grundtree. The trunk seemed endless, and Teera was suddenly overcome by its gigantic presence. Sinking to the ground, she cradled her head in her arms and pleaded inwardly for someone, anyone, to come to her aid.

She had been crouching there for some time when she became aware of a thudding noise coming closer and closer. Leaping to her feet, she shrank back against the trunk, staring in the direction of the approaching sounds. Then, directly in front of her, the fern fronds were dashed aside and two figures bounded into the clearing.

Teera saw at once that they were men, young men, and that they were dressed in long flowing robes made of a fine and shimmering material. Their eyes were wide and staring, and Teera had returned their stares for several seconds before she realized, with dawning horror, that they both wore on their chests the dazzling green-gold seals of the Ol-zhaan.

T
EERA GAVE HERSELF UP
to die.

Only a few steps away the two Ol-zhaan stood motionless, slightly crouched as if ready to spring, their eyes dark and huge in their pale faces. There was no hope of escape, and nothing that Teera had ever heard gave her any reason to hope for mercy. But still, even as she cowered against the grundtrunk, in hopeless despairing panic, her sturdy Erdling Spirit had not surrendered itself completely. Against all reasonable expectation, it still asked to live.

An eternity of terror had crept past before one of the Ol-zhaan moved slightly. A gesture of hand and eye caught and held Teera’s attention, and as she stared back into the dark eyes, she became aware that she was pensing—even through the blind barrier of fear she was receiving a message of comfort and goodwill.