A Short, Sharp Shock

4. Beauty Is the Promise of Happiness

And the only happiness is action. So he roused himself and headed west, thinking that a bend in the peninsula out that way might hide Kataptron Cove. The sun fell just to the right of the rock, slowing as it fell, flattening as if reluctant to touch the horizon, breaking into bands of glowing orange light that stretched until they were sucked down by the sea. The twilight was long, a mauve and purple half day, and he hiked rapidly over the crest’s shattered granite, which was studded with crystals of translucent quartz. As he walked over the rough edges of stones, feeling liberty in the twisting ligaments of his ankles, he kept an eye out for some sort of shelter for the night. The trail he had followed onto the spine had disappeared, no doubt because the crest itself served as a broad high trail; but at one point a deep transverse cleft had been filled at a single spot by boulders, confirming his notion that the trail still ran, and would reappear when needed.

So he was not surprised when he came upon a low circular stone hut, next to a small pool of water. In this area stone broke away from the bedrock in irregular plates, and a great number of these had been gathered and stacked in rings that grew successively smaller as they got higher off the ground, until a final large capstone topped things off. The stones had been sized and placed so precisely that it would have been difficult to get more than a fingernail between any two of them. A short chimney made of smaller stones protruded from one side of the roof.

Opening a wooden door in the wall opposite the chimney, he entered and found a wooden shelf circling the interior of the wall. Next to the fireplace was a stack of kindling and logs; other than that the hut was empty. He was without the means to start a fire, and it was fairly warm in any case, so he went back outside and drank from the pool, then sat against the west wall to eat the last of the fisherwoman’s grunion, in the final hour of twilight. As the light leaked out of the sky it turned a deep rich blue, dark but not quite black: and across this strangely palpable firmament the stars popped into existence, thousands upon thousands of them, from bright disks that might have been nearby planets to dots so faint that he could only see them by looking slightly to the side. Eventually the sky was packed with stars, so densely that they defined perfectly the dome of sky; and frightened him. “Where I come from there are not so many stars,” he said shakily to the hut, and then felt acutely his solitude, and the emptinesses inside his mind, the black membranes he could not penetrate. He retreated into the hut. After a long time lying on the hard wooden shelf, he fell asleep.

Sometime before dawn he was awakened by a crowd of folk banging in the doorway. They held him down and searched under his skirt. They had broad hard hands. Cloaks made of small leaves sewn together clicked in the dark, and it smelled like oranges.

“Are you the spine kings?” he asked, drunk with sleep.

They laughed, an airy sound. One said, “If we were you’d be strangled with your own guts by now.”

“Or tossed down the cliff.”

The first voice said, “Or both. The spine kings’ hello.”

They all had lumps on their left shoulders, irregular dark masses that looked like shrubs. They took him out of the hut, and under the sea-colored sky he saw that the lumps were in fact shrubs—miniature fruit trees, it appeared, growing out of their left shoulders. The fruits were fragrant and still reminded him of oranges, although the smell had been altered by the salt tang, made more bitter. Round fruit, in any case, of a washed-out color that in better light might have been pale green.

The members of this group arranged themselves in a circle facing inward, took off their leaf cloaks and sat down. He sat in the circle between two of them, glancing at the shoulder tree to his right. It definitely grew directly out of the creature’s skin—the gnarled little roots dove into the flesh just as a wart would, leaving an overgrown fissure between bark and skin.

With a jerk he looked away. It was almost dawn, and the treefolk began singing a low monophonic chant, in a language he didn’t recognize. The sky brightened to its day blue, slightly thickened by the sun’s absence, and the wind suddenly picked up, as if a door had banged open somewhere—a cool fresh breeze, peeling over the spine in the same moment that the sun pricked the distant gray line of the horizon, a green point stretching to a line of hot yellow and then a band of white fire, throwing the sea’s surface into shadow and revealing a scree of low diaphanous cloud. Before the sun had detached itself from the sea each member of the circle had plucked a fruit from the shoulder of the person on their right, and when the sun was clear and the horizon sinking rapidly away from it, they ate. Their bites caused a faint crystalline ringing, and the odor of bitter oranges was strong. He felt his stomach muscles contract, and saliva ran down his throat. The celebrant nearest the sun glanced at him and said, “Treeless here will be hungry.”

He almost nodded, but held himself still.

“What’s your name?” the celebrant asked. He had been the first speaker in the hut.

“I don’t know.”

“No?” The creature considered it. “Treeless will be good enough, then. In our naming language, that is Thel.”

In his mind he called himself Thel. But his real name… Black space, behind his nose, in the sky under his skull.… “It will do here,” he said, and waved a hand. “It is accurate enough.”

The man laughed. “So it is. I am Julo.” He looked across the circle. “Garth, come here.”

A young man stood. He had been sitting opposite Julo, facing out from the circle, and now Thel noticed his tree grew from the right shoulder rather than the left.

“This is Garth, which means Rightbush. Garth, give Thel here an apple.” Garth hesitated, and Julo strode across the circle of watchers and cuffed him on the arm. “Do it!”

Garth approached Thel and stood before him, looked down. Thel said to him, “Which should I choose?”

With a grateful glance up the youth indicated the largest fruit, on a lower branch. Thel took the round green sphere in his fingers and pulled sharply, noting Garth’s involuntary wince. Then he sniffed the stem, and bit through the skin. The bitter taste of orange, he sat in a small dark room, watching the wick of a lamp lit by a match held in long fingers, the flame turned up and burning poorly, in a library with bookcases for walls and a huge old leather globe in one corner.… He shook his head, back on the windy dawn spine, Julo’s laughter in his ear, behind that a crystalline ringing. A bird hovered in the updraft, a windhover searching the lee cliff for prey. “Thank you,” Thel said to Garth.

The treefolk gathered around him, touched his bare shoulders, asked him questions. He had nothing but questions in reply. Who were the spine kings? he asked, and their faces darkened. “Why do you ask?” Julo said. “Why don’t you know?”

Thel explained. “The fisherfolk pulled me from the sea. Before that—I don’t know. I can’t…” He shook-his head. “They pulled out a woman with me, a swimmer, and sold her to the spine kings.” He gestured helplessly, the thought of her painful. Already the memory of her was fading, he knew. But that touch in the moonlight—“I want to find her.”

“They have some of our people as well,” Julo said. “We’re going after them.” He reached into his bag and threw Thel a leaf cloak and a pair of leather moccasins with thick soles. “You can come along. They’re at Kataptron Cove, for the sacrifices.”

The boy’s fruit was suddenly heavy on his stomach, and he shuddered as if every cell in him had tasted something bitter.