Though always hurtling, they were trapped; trapped in the incessant Baugn migration, which, frustrated by the destruction of their anchoring mountain, caromed oasis to oasis, as if in sitting on every planetoid, one might incubate a newly hatched Hravak. Whatever bubble the world-beasts were in never burst, and they shuttled through the Abyssal archiplago with unfailing desperation, a dark enthusiasm which was not contagious to the unwilling unfortunates, whose mood was dark, but curious at best.
"Do you suppose these are all the Baugn in the Five Worlds?" mused Leitara.
"I don't follow," said Khyte.
"In my voyage from Ielnarona, I saw dozens, but now we see hundreds of Baugn at every landing, and thousands on the larger oases."
"You think they've abandoned our worlds?" asked Elani.
"I don't know. But surely traffic between the Five Worlds is affected by this congestion of Baugn at the oases."
Khyte said, "I expect those damnable Alfyrians are once again delighted to have a monopoly on Abyssal travel."
"Do Alfyrian Ladders run to the oases?"
"I don't know," said Khyte. "If such a thing isn't rendered impossible by the shifting oases themselves, the elves keep this route a secret."
"If I was the High Tzhurarkh, I would use it to source strange plants and animals," said Elani. "We should keep our eyes open for just such a route."
"And rest our hopes on your baseless speculation?" growsed Khyte.
"A vain hope is better than no hope," said Leitara. "And it might make the time fly."
"A better idea would stop our flight," snapped Khyte. Silence fell on all three for long hours.
After unknown days scrutinizing every spinning crumb for signs of elves, they turned their sunken eyes and gaunt faces toward the thought of setting their own table. The novelty of their meager movable feast, scrounged from the back of the migrating world-beast, had faded, and on next alighting on Xulcia, by far the largest oasis in the Abyss, they dismounted, and finding that it teemed with life despite the trampling fury of the foraging world-beasts, and seemed their best chance at a modest life and a satisfying diet, they slept on the grass that night, in the cool Abyssal air.
They built their house by magic, through Elani's talent at summoning and shaping fire, for by shaping a fiery blade toward a tree and away from the brush, the Wood-witch felled trees with greater exactitude than the sword. For though Khyte retrieved the Inamu sword in one of their visits to Flower, and they repurposed it into an axe, it proved more encumberance than tool, for it was tiresome to swing, wouldn't hold an edge, and its metal proved softer than the hard boles of Abyssal trees. Moreover, when it snapped, Elani mended it by magic over a half-hour, a task which the Wood-Witch resented with a caustic humor.
Reduced to this ignoble sword, Khyte resumed sparring with shadows. Though his hand had healed, Khyte complained that his sword calluses were burned away, and his new, softer hand didn't provide the same purchase, resulting in a slipperier grip, and many moans of an unfair disadvantage in his shadow bouts.
"Nine times out of ten," said Khyte, "the shadow gets me."
As day and night were each little more than an hour on breezy Xulcia, and the bright Abyss-light so haloed the night side that even the dark hour was fringed with pale illumination, they could only acclimatize to this hurly-burly rhythm by working catnaps into the shadowy peaks of their daily schedule, and splitting their tasks into a two part structure. In hunting, they marked their prey in daylight, and bagged it in the night hour, while in physical labor, day was for breaks and meals, and the backbreaking work was done while on the cool side.
When they had built their house and shaded its windows with gigantic feathery fronds, they chose their own night and day.
Not that Tree-Women needed sleep; nor would Leitara trust either oversexed housemate to oversee her sleeping body longer than the dormant hour she sometimes desired. Even when the newly-rejuvenated Wood-Witch, having hacked the white ends of her spreading coal-black hair, bathed in a bubbling pond, rubbed her skin soft with a powdery leaf that smelled of chocolate, dressed in the cast-off efflorescence Leitara grudgingly allowed her to collect (even slightly wilted, her garments were colorful bouquets, as if oasis air was pregnant with enough water to fill them with life), and, by bungling her rusted girlish graces in such a way that awkward seemed coy and cunning seemed winsome, made herself so fetching to Khyte that, despite his marriage to one Tree-Woman, and the clear preference of his roving eyes for the Tree-Woman at hand, he was soon fetched, and they took to rutting whenever they could--and more often when Leitara was there, as if she was the fistful of blossoms given as part of the mating ritual.
Despite their coupling, she trusted neither meat-man nor wood-witch, for their forlorn looks said they only sated, never satisfied, their desires, and when Leitara dubbed this, the largest of the oases, Eivinar, she said only that it meant arbor or woodland, not that it also signified a pen for mating kiuvathi.
As her worst enemy on Eivinar was not their offhanded copulation, but boredom, Leitara often accepted Khyte's invitation to spar, which was accomplished in the Baugn mating grounds, the largest, most suitable clearing for swordplay given the absence of rutting Baugn. As often as not, Elani watched their sport, and rooted for the Tree-Woman, despite constant disappointment in her champion.
Leitara soon found a sublime terror for Khyte's swordcraft, which could be appreciated neither as art or skill, having not only exceeded Khyte's ability to instruct, but approached the instinctual, with unlearnable transitions, slashes so fluid that they seemed alive, and a hilt that flitted from one hand to the other as he ranged from a touch on one side of the field to another a moment later on the other side.
When Leitara fell into a frenzied fit of bounding, dashing, and branch-swinging to get the better of Khyte, and could not overleap the vast territory marked by Khyte's blade, she began to believe the crude weapon a magical thing of thinking metal. Unable to accept that the meat man's dumb, guileless face had outwitted her, she conceived an irrational hatred for the blade, which was forged anew, in her intellect, into an unbeatable opponent.
When her wooden sword split into dangling splinters, she hurled it into the overgrowth, turned around without a word, and headed back to their house.
Elani called, "you almost had him this time!"
Leitara could care less, having passed the point of frustration—for weeks her only motivation in her fruitless attempt to give Khyte a single tap—to utter exhaustion. Having squandered whatever interest she had, she headed home with the thought of settling in and not stirring a muscle. If they enjoyed her companionship so much, let them water her like a houseplant.
After weeks with no world, boredom had conquered the Tree-Woman.
"Where's Khyte, Tree-Woman?" A bearded meat-man leaned on their house and winked his one eye. A golden half-helm rested on one side over his left ear, parted his scalp front to back, and over the covered, sightless eye, a false eye was etched and garishly painted orange and red. Though his back was stooped, and his shoulders slumped over a sunken chest, his legs were knotted with muscle, and his wiry arms ended in white-knuckled grips on his sword and dagger.
Leitara took a step back, and when she lifted a cumbrous branch, it flaked shreds of white bark.
"While I'm not here for you, forgive my not sheathing my blades. These are for Khyte, should he prove unreasonable." He stood away from the house, but did not step toward Leitara.
"How did you find us?"
"Until you walked up, I wasn't sure I had, Tree-Woman."
"Don't call me that."
"We haven't been introduced." The one-eyed Drydanan saluted her with not only his sword, but his dagger, which he touched to his nose with a goggle-eyed grin that provided a rakish and sarcastic commentary on his courtesy. "I'm Iulf. I've known Khyte as long as he's lived. Having taken that mewling baby from battlemad Kulunun, I fed him a shank of lamb, changed his soiled rags, and took him from the battlefield. In a way, I was his first mother...his first Drydanan mother." While his laugh was easy and guileless, as if he heard nothing macabre in what he said, his eyes glinted, and he held the smile overlong.
"You can call me Leitara—though I wish you wouldn't."
Iulf's choppy laugh sounded like a death rattle. "That's two wishes already. Though I take your meaning—I'm unwanted in your unwelcoming, ramshackle house—I must call you something, so let it be Leitara."
"As you say—let it be. Let me be."
"There he is!" When Khyte brushed back the bramble, he could be expected to bear the sweaty look of a sparring partner, but Elani's face seemed oddly flushed for one who walked a mile over grassland. Though they stepped into their clearing holding hands, Khyte flung down Elani's fingers and drew his sword. Elani's whispers poured herself into a green dollop, a slinking serpent that plopped in the thicket.
As Khyte hurtled the grasses and the thorny overgrowth, Iulf raised his blades and crouched on tense calves, as if he coiled every spring in his lean, crooked body. "Hold, Khyte."
"Where is Ryggion?"
"Not Kulunun and Verea?"
"My parents didn't strike my friend."
"No heart for your old swordsmaster?"
"There's only one swordsmaster here, Iulf."
"I'll always be better than you, boy."
"You've forgotten the basics, Iulf. Staying loyal after Ryggion's treachery is like holding the blade and swinging the hilt."
"Heaven help you if I did, Khyte, because you'd still lose if I was so armed."
"Let's put it to the test." When Khyte sliced with devastating speed and force, a flick of Iulf's wrist lodged the point in the jamb of the door.
"Khyte, I'm here to talk."
As Iulf stepped away from the door, Khyte scowled and wrenched free the Inamu sword. "Talk, then."
"We're not sheep, Khyte, to talk with our heads hung pensively, like we're waiting to be shorn or slain. Where is your Drydanan hospitality? No food or drink for a hungry, parched man?"
"There's only water, but you're welcome to it."
When Elani sprouted from the greenery, the snakeskin mottled blue and green before spreading into her orange-brown hue. "No he's not! Tell him he's not wanted, Khyte."
"While I've made that clear, and Leitara before me, we're not savages, Elani."
"On this rock, we're anything we wish!"
"There's the third wish," chortled Iulf. He leered at Leitara. "Are you so free with your desires that the wood-witch works them out for you?" Though Leitara expected to hate this twisted duelist, when his squinting, one-eyed glance pricked her vanity, her vehemence shattered the unwilling triangle of her affections, so that she forgot her confused feelings for Khyte and Elani in a loathing so focused that it was indistinguishable from fascination.
Khyte held open the door, and Iulf stepped inside. When Elani stepped in, Khyte gestured to Leitara to leave, but she gave him a withering glance, then brushed past him into their ramshackle house.
"Elani, bring our guest his refreshment," bade Khyte.
"Am I a scullery maid?" Elani sneered through an astonished glare.
"I would like to keep my hands free."
"Yours are not the only hands that work ill will, Khyte."
"But his are the fastest at it," said Khyte. "Please, Elani."
"Why not ask the Tree-Woman?" Elani scowled at Leitara, who wondered when she had again become 'the Tree-Woman.'
Elani sighed, bent to their stores of food, and on a plate chipped from stone, placed cold slices of meat, two oblong gourds, and a root that was only edible charred, when its liquified interior became a nectarous syrup.
"Here." Elani dropped the plate in Iulf's lap. "It's too good for you."
"I'd ask what I've done," snickered Iulf, "but my life's long enough to deserve it for some odd piece of viciousness here and there."
"You were a good man once," said Khyte.
"Not even once. It was only that I hadn't yet offended you."
"Since we're in agreement that you're an unpleasant person," said Leitara, "let's move on to why you're here. You came to talk. So talk."
"This is very good," said Iulf, smacking his lips. "Though your womenfolk gad about as they'd like, and you could loot better plate, the victuals are toothsome."
"Why do you stall, Iulf?"
"What if I said I came to speak of Drydanan secrets?"
"I'd say, 'what Drydana?'" When Elani hooted, Khyte gave her an ugly glare.
"With that black cloud still brooding, we can't be sure what death and destruction it hatched. Hravak may have turned just far enough for that rock to crack elsewhere."
"Even if Drydana escaped its doom, I'm never going there," said Elani. "So tell us your secret. And if it's boring, I promise to forget all about it."
"What is the point, Iulf?"
"Ryggion commands it."
"No, I mean why share this secret? Whether Drydana is no more, or we are only worlds away from it, what can it mean to us here and now?"
"There's an old song, Khyte. Not that I've ever sung it, but I've heard it sung, as my father was Lord Segra's bard, and meant me to follow in his footsteps. While I was to laugh in his face and take up swordcraft, the damage had been done."
"What damage? It's just a song."
"This song is meant only for Drydanan lords and Drydanan bards. As I recite it, imagine yourselves in that august company." Iulf's jocose manner faded to a sober calm as he intoned the verses:
From the abyss she tumbled,
her hair streaming green
and her eyes fed on light;
though she rooted on Juntawni,
she blossomed to join with our lord,
until she stoned him in the ground
and Drydana grew from the vine.
When Leitara flinched, stealing a quick glance at Elani, the wood-witch took in her blanched expression and realization stole across her face.
"I have the key." Elani's smile was sly.
"What do you mean, wood-witch?" barked Iulf.
Elani turned to Leitara. "Remember my spell in the workshop? Not this one"--her arms swept up and down her tall, curvaceous frame--"but the other. You were looking for Sarin Gelf."
"I remember." Leitara hissed. "Say no more."
"You have no reason to be jealous."
"I would never be jealous."
"Embarrassed, perhaps--you might have kissed your distant cousin." It was not the first time Leitara wished to slug Elani's smug smile by reflex, as if it was a creeping vermin that had alighted on her face.
Khyte gaped incredulously. "Are you suggesting my people have dryad blood?"
"Not at all. The poem suggests it. I'm only laughing at the joke." When they gawked at her, Elani added, "obviously I'm not literally laughing."
"Elani, it's not funny at all."
"It's a little funny, when you consider that I wanted her, you wanted her, and she wanted nothing to do with us—until this tendril of dryad mystique." When Elani's barking laugh of frustration degenerated into a screech, for an instant Leitara had a crystal-clear vision of the wood-witch as the withered crone she should be by right.
"There's another who'd like to graft the Tree-Woman to his own family tree." Iulf paused to bend his twinkling leer to the rim of his mug, took a deep swig, sighed, and continued. "Lord Ryggion wants to do as his ancestor did, and renew the Drydanan spark."
"I'm not a corsage to be tied to a fat lout after a pretty story," said Leitara indignantly.
"We're all much leaner after weeks in the Abyss, Lord Ryggion included," said Iulf. "But I expectd as much. My heart is heavy, but you've been honorable, and I will pass this on." When the grizzled swordmaster winked at Leitara, she shuddered and turned her shoulder, then did not stir until his carefree footfalls and merry whistling dissolved in the breeze rustling the window fronds and the tangled Abyssal trees, shrubs, and vines.
"We should leave tonight," said Khyte with a resigned tone.
"If I wanted to leave, I would," said Leitara.
"Whatever you're doing here," said Elani, "you can do anywhere."
"That's not true," said Leitara, "as in travel, here becomes there. If I leave, I will only remember these trees, while if I stay, Eivinar is my soil."
"You will be buried here. My tribe is unforgiving," said Khyte.
"What tribe?" said Elani. "Those disgruntled refugees? If they were many, they would not send your crotchety teacher to reason with us."
"That was honorable parley," said Khyte, "which I no longer merit by our laws, having abandoned the tribe, Lord Ryggion's service, and worst of all, my parents."
"The only meaningful merit with such rabble is the fear you inspire," snorted Elani. "If they had the strength to overwhelm their great warrior, not to mention one infamous Wood-Witch,"--she smiled, batted her eyes, and embraced Khyte, but rested her gaze on Leitara over his shoulder--"they would have no reason to negotiate. As some of us have never been in Drydana, and none of us may ever be again, this is no matter of law, but power. And we have it, or they think we do, which is even better."
"If neither of you will go," said Khyte, "I will stay."
"I might go just to be free of this chatter. It's like nesting with birds." When Leitara leaned the window fronds aside, the streaming Abyss-light reddened the floor, the far wall, and their lustful faces. One not numbed by the hourly spooling of day and night and the monotony of animal lust might have thought this sunset magnificent. Having fluffed the mat of dry grasses and petals which served as her bed, she turned her face to the wall. Although sleep was her infrequent visitor, contemplation was not, and she soon drifted into that dryadic restfulness possessed more of timelessness than repose, so that while she couldn't tune out Khyte and Elani's unwilled lovemaking, in her aesthetic state of mind, each snort of delight and pleasure-seeking sigh fell in series like musical notes, so that their instinct was no longer beastly, but as pure as the pairing of birds, and her aural voyeurism as innocent as birdwatching.
In this dream-like reverie, which not only had the clarity of consciousness, but was whetted by their sighs into a heightened awareness, she realized that being no animal, she could not so easily conform to this cage. While she might mate for pleasure, in mating for mating's sake, sex took on its own life, as if Leitara had another housemate, a demonic torrent of blood; even when their bodies were spent, their snores gusted restlessly as if still fitful, unfulfilled, and pursuing a forbidden flower in their dreams.
Being not tired, but only idle, and contemptuous of the jittery lovers, she wandered her hall of memory, wistfully envying each past self's life of complacent conformity to the now deceased desires of the Tree-Mother. In the serenity of her hall of memory, Leitara eavesdropped on remembered conversations--or rather half-remembered, for in the accumulated solipsism of elapsed centuries, the past Leitaras remembered their own words, and their own moments of recognition, better than the ephemeral insights of her conversational partners, who she retained as vague, shapeless impressions, as if they never truly lived but as ghosts of memory. Leitara felt the gross injustice of her forgetfulness, felt less that she had lived many lives, than that she had groped at life with numb hands and deaf ears, and been yanked back into darkness. For an instant only, she felt this lack as desperate loneliness; in each unblinking self she saw only a shapely oblivion. If her memory was statuesque, it was also a gallery of broken relics, whose pretended omniscience was only the wisdom of death, of knowing that the fate of a statue is only to stand, or perhaps to be shattered, not so unlike the living who totter until they die.
Though she turned from one whispered monologue to another, she found not one moment of solace, not one instance when she was loved, and having closed the doors on her hall of memory, she heard rustling and dull chatter in the bushes, then the coarser snores of Khyte and Elani.
Knowing that if she roused them, they might wake with a noisy start, and if she stood, her dull shadow might be seen, Leitara snatched the sword, crawled to the back door, and listened at a knothole; hearing nothing, she lifted the bar and creaked the door until there was just enough breadth to scrape through to the woods, a cool copse of bluish trees so gangly that the tops swooped to their roots.
In the misshapen shadows of those bent trunks, many hands clapped to her arms, smacked the sword loose, then shoved her against the rough grooves of a trunk so coarse that it ripped the back of her violet and acacia garment.
When she shrieked, her mouth was squelched by a rank, meaty hand. "Cursed Tree-Woman! Lay the torches!" Ryggion's cruel eyes swirled with glee. "Not you! But I'll be damned if I don't light a fire under you yet!"
As Leitara flailed in their grasp, she counted only five heads, though in her rage, shock, and the frightening threat of flame, it seemed a hundred hands held her fast. But Ryggion's hated face curdled her heart into a bitter desperation, and planting her feet, she swept her torso right, grinding Ryggion and her captors against the tree trunks.
When the house flickered long streamers of flame, Leitara shook her arms wildly, but the grapplers held on with cruel persistence, and she dragged them into the woods. At the scent of smoke, Elani whipped her arms again, but though one fell into a bush, Lord Ryggion—blood seeping from his cheek and forehead—glommed on in his place, and his white-knuckled grip threatened to break her forearm.
When gushing smoke darkened the flames, Elani moaned, shrieked, then coughed and coughed, so that if she had the presence of mind for a spell, Leitara doubted she could speak it. Though still clasped by three Drydanans, and fiery death lay behind her, she heaved them back the way she came.
"Aren't you fleeing, Tree-Woman? Cowards die in chains; flames are a traitor's death."
Having wrung enough slack from those grasping her on the left, Leitara lurched right, headbutting Ryggion with a ferocious explosion of blood from his nose and a few glinting slivers of teeth, the jagged remains of which furrowed bright green gashes acoss Leitara's forehead, leaking over her eyes and mouth. While she was half-blind, and licked away a small taste of herself, she was also half-freed; swinging her remaining captors into a heap, she plunged the Inamu sword in the guts of one, and between the shoulder blades of another, who remembered his feet two seconds too late, and dragged the sword from her hand in the few moments of flight that marked the end of his life.
When the grass rustled, and her foot was grasped, she kicked into Lord Ryggion's face, blackening his eye with a shuddering force that stilled his outstretched form.
As she staggered toward the fire, her menagerie of memories rattled their cages in a clamor of alarm and shivered her mind with dead screams, and she closed her mind's eye to redirect her vision toward the smoking blaze. Though the back door's shriveled wood crawled with tendrils of fire, she forced herself toward the flames.
When a tremendous bam rocked the walls of their shanty, flapped the door towards Leitara, and vomited smoke, she darted into the woods, where a torch lay smoldering, having singed the surrounding thicket, and scarred the bark of the enormous tree barring her path. While the only way out was up, when she climbed the dry tree beside her, it crackled and leaned into the conflagration, and she swung from its creaking branch to yet another tree, where a thunderous second blast froze her in place though fire was everywhere.
As her perch was already warmed by the creeping, crackling combustion, she crouched, ready to bound to the next branch, when she saw Elani facedown at the clearing's edge, writhing and choking weakly in her unconsciousness, and Khyte, clutching a smoking plank in each hand to fend off six Drydanans.
When her flanking trees sparked and smoked, Leitara leaped to the one behind, then the warm grasses, which rustled around her ankles in the hot waves emanating from their buckling house. Dashing around smoldering tufts and under boughs blossoming with flame, she lifted Elani across her shoulders and ran for the tall grasses, ignoring Khyte's pained shouts and the yelling Drydanans. Though streamers of fire now erupted from the grasslands, she prepared herself to crash into the foliage and push forward. They would lose the concealment of the tree canopies, she told herself, but if they made it to the Baugn mating grounds, its scrubby grasses might not succumb to flame.
She was thinking this to herself when two Baugn, fanning their wings, leaned into the forest fringe, absorbed only in grazing the spotted, irridescent fruit. Acting utterly on instinct, Leitara heaved Elani across the older and larger world-beast, whose muscles were knotted in thick folds of loose skin, as if constant migration had dislocated its stomach. Mounting behind the wood-witch, Leitara leaned over her to grasp the Baugn's neck, hoping to hold Elani fast under her arms when it shot into the Abyss.
As the wafting smoke fanned Leitara's fears, she pounded the Baugn with her hands and goaded it with her knees and heels, then thought nonsensically of dragging it into the groves at the other end of the mating grounds. Elani moaned under Leitara as she thrashed the Baugn.
Better to heed the lowing of these black-furred beasts than the entire clamoring concert of her past selves, who begged her to dismount and flee the fire, so that only by cleaving to the naked blade of reason—that scanty growth all her instincts told her to yank out by the roots though its keen edge scored her brain—did she remain mounted on her salvation. She wept in frustration, ground her teeth, and shrieked in the few moments before the scent stirred the Baugn's wings, and it soared into a night pregnant with Abyss-light and a dark sea of oases.