THE PLACE OF ROOTS

KIRRITH HAD NOT BEEN MEANT to ride the wind: I was sure of it. All living things must ride it someday, the Loreweavers said, The old and the sick rode the wind, as did the great yellow leaves in the dry season when their edges frayed and they could no longer hold onto the limbs; but Kirith had been my age, barely grown to adulthood.

We saw the wind take her, as she crossed the vine bridge toward us from that slender, leaning trunk which people call the Gray Dawn. It was the Quiet Wind that pulled her through the vines; not any of the soft or raging sideways breezes that can be felt on the skin. It was the Quiet Wind, the one that blows forever downward, in the crownglades and flathomes, indoors and out, silent and absolutely unceasing.

She did not choose to ride it. Her screams, her stretching arms told us that. One moment she had been moving forward at a quick bridgestride, strong brown feet curled to grip the swaying rungs; the next, she was whirling, crashing through woven shade canopies, diminishing in the blue-green vaults below. Dust filtered down, flashing in afternoon rays. For a long time after she was gone, none of us could speak. We could only stare after her.

The Quiet Wind had taken my flute once, when my age was no more than seven or eight sun-seasons. I remembered how the wind stole it from the fork where I had propped it, and how I watched it roll and bounce away, never to be returned; and how I had wept for it, for no flute is exactly like any other. That was how the wind bore Kirith away.

I kept silence while the people mourned for her as they would for an old one, a sick one. It was a strange sending, for there was no still, sleeping body to wrap in leaves and give to the wind; this time the wind had not received, but taken. I sat on the broken bridge, in the chilly shade of the twisted, leaning Gray Dawn. Listening to the mourning songs, I peered down through the jagged hole into the misty void, where sunlight slanted pale and faltering, where leaf upon leaf hid that impossibly distant Place of Roots, to which even most of the Loreweavers had never been.

I touched the shattered rungs, rubbed my thumb over the sun faded ends that had given way. They were as yielding as the dry grasses that grew from bark -- left too long without replacing, overlooked, since this was a little-traveled path beside a stouter mainway. Worms had eaten the wood in places; I saw the circling, haphazard grooves they had bored on the rungs' undersides.

Kirith was gone from her flathome because of forgotten maintenance, because of worms. It had not been her time. There was no rightness in this, no harmony, and I had no peace. Even when the last sending song's echoes had vanished, when children laughed again and harvesters clambered over the trellises and arbors with their knives, I thought of her, and of the family we might have raised together. I broke off branches, hurled them as far as I could upward across the glades, watched as that unfelt downward stream took each one. "Our mothers teach us to fear you," I said to the Quiet Wind. "Nothing that has breath may be given to you. What belongs to you is that from which breath is gone. Why have you taken what was not yet yours?"

The wise ones told me, "Kirith is happier now." Even her mother said so. "She is in the Glades of the Sun, where there is no wind at all, where fruit ripens in every season and need not be tended. The dreams that rise from the Place of Roots to trouble our sleep never rise there."

I considered the wise Loreweavers' words; I tried to imagine Kirith in the Other Trees, light falling golden on her hair. The dry season came with its yellowing, with its lengthening and splitting of pods. In turn, the seed season filled the air with uncountable soft, drifting tufts, each a seed that would nestle in a fork or on a broad, mossy branch and become another trunk. Rains came next, sometimes whispering, sometimes roaring, washing the new leaves to gleam in another season of sun. But Kirith was not here to make garlands of the earliest white flowers, those that glistened in the cool hollows of the old, wind-eaten trunks.

Pushing my face close to one such dim grotto, I remembered the rotten rungs of the bridge. There were worms here, too, devouring the wood, their fat bodies wriggling in the pulp that was no longer wood. This season the worms angered me, and I did that which I had never done, nor ever seen done by anyone: I crushed them under my hands, grinding them into the hard wall, painting the rough bark with the soft slime they became. Then I fell to the moss, my arms slick to the elbows with the horror of that which no one had ever done. In the stillness of the ancient Evening Fork, the vast trunks of Day and Night rising on either side of me, I heard Kirith's voice in the splash of the stream, in the sighing of moss curtains. And I could not tell whether she sang, faint and far away, or whether she wept.

When I rose, my limbs stiff and aching, I knew what I must do. I must follow the Quiet Wind in the direction it had carried her. If she was lost in the Place of Roots far below, unable to climb the trunks, then I must find her. No one, I was sure, would give me a blessing for such a journey; not to that sun-forsaken region from which the night's visions crept.

So on the next morning of gathering, when each with his or her basket would range far from the flathomes in search of the ripening longfruit, I stuffed my belt's pouch with nuts, dried berry cakes, and sweet grasses, enough for a climb of several days. I circled away from my brothers, following the hub of bound branches past the Vineglade and Voss's Fence. Beyond sight of the others, I wedged my basket in an old restfork, where seats polished by generations of passersby lay cradled in aromatic bowers of starbloom.

Then I descended. Hand over hand, by vines, by overgrown trellises, by the steps cut in mighty boles, I departed from the airy realm. The leaves became fewer as I went down -- fewer and darker, larger, like heavy cloaks abandoned on hooked limbs. To sleep, I shared the knothole cave of a twitching silicus, his beard grown long and tangled. He raised drooping eyelids to regard me, then rolled to his other side, covered his face with twiggy paws, and continued his fidgeting slumber. Night fell darker here, where starlight did not penetrate, where the moon peered for the briefest span through a gap high above.

Morning was scarcely brighter, a gray suffusion of the vaults, boldening only to a somber twilit blue at noon. The last leaves gave place to oily vines, their ominous loops thicker than four people could join hands around. There were no steps or carvings here; I made my way by braided trunks, by the natural stairways of arches upon arches. Always I was mindful of the Quiet Wind, which tugged at my ankles on the slippery paths, threatening to pluck me from the trees and make me ride. The fragrance of new growth was gone, and all the world seemed damp, dripping, and tainted. Worms must be here, writhing and chewing beneath every surface. That night I shivered in the open, unwilling to clamber inside any of the odorous holes, afraid of what might lurk in their depths. I scarcely slept, listening to the ticking and scratching of creatures I could not see, things for which I knew no names.

The next dawn was no dawn at all, but the merest paling of the gloom that just allowed me to pick a creeping course down trunks so massive I could hardly see any curve to the faces. Their ravaged walls peeled in out-thrust runners large as platforms, the route faintly lighted by glowing, bulbous growths. Some shelves let my feet plunge through, left me dangling waist deep in bark above the void. Half-glimpsed shapes of unsettling lengths and proportions scuttled away from me, and a dank humidity arose to soak my garments. Vapors formed a hedge so solid that the sounds of my breathing bounced back loud.

Near the journey's end, when my head spun with weariness and the all-pervading stench, the descent became easier. What I supposed at first to be enormous limbs shot out from the boles, dove in sprawling nets of chaos into a mire of blackness. As I eased gratefully onto the uppermost of these sloping paths, I realized the livid carpet beneath me was the endless flat surface from which all trees grow, and that I stood upon those anchoring nether appendages of the trees themselves. I had come to the Place of Roots.

Lower I hurried now, slipping from root to root, floundering through brakes of sickly shining hooded stalks; lower and lower, until the midnight morass rose to meet me, until I came level with the grotesque caves beneath the roots.

Glinting in the pallid light on every side, under every tree marching away into oblivion, rose jumbled mounds of whitish branches...branches, I thought, and yet nowhere could I see any of a form or texture I knew. They linked together, interlocked, some fastened at the ends by gray or brownish cords. I crept to the edge of the nearest heap, overwhelmed by its size. Here, in the first such mound alone, lay more of these age-old things than there were leaves in the crown of the Noon Trunk itself. Some were no longer than my fingers, brittle, porous in places like a rotting twig, hard overall, but soft and dark at the core. Some were large as young trunks, four times my height, dry and rough, half-buried in the muck of seasons unnumbered. But what trunk could produce such bizarre limbs, and why were they gathered here, clutched by the roots of the trees that held our flathomes?

Crawling lower, I circled a third of the great stack, staring into the bars and cracked fragments of its impenetrable shadows. Somehow, I knew, the secrets of the Quiet Wind lay hidden here, locked in the embrace of these shards. Ridiculously, I thought that if I could squirm my way to the center, I might find the flute snatched from me so long before; and finding it, perhaps I would understand.

As I poked and prodded, a sharp length came away, clattered across my foot. I lifted it, turned it in the wan light: a crooked piece bent like my elbow, only curved and flat. On its inner edge grew a strange row of squarish knobs -- no, not grown there, but embedded.

Recoiling with a shock of awareness, I lost my footing and sat down hard on the root, nearly dropping the branch. The squared knobs, I suddenly saw, were teeth. Teeth like my own, but these were larger than my fist. What sort of tree, I asked myself in growing dread, sprouts teeth as its fruit?

I flung the object away, watched it plummet with a soft, liquid sound into the mire below, and lie trapped, a splash of yellow-white against the black. Wiping my hands on my sodden shirt, revulsed at the touch of the tooth-branch, I looked around at the lumpish growths that glowed, at the roots ascending to the trunks. This was the end of all descents, where the Quiet Wind brought all things it stole -- and where its power ended, for here there was no lower places here, growing things started their laborious journeys toward the sky.

When I gazed again into the white branches, I cried out, leapt to my feet: now I saw faces peering out at me. Hard faces they were, dry and white like the teeth and branches, yet unmistakably faces; these were of the same size as mine, though their eyes were empty holes, their noses hollow pits, and they had neither ears nor hair. Yet the teeth...the teeth might have been mine, or those of anyone in the flathomes. Here and there the faces leered out of the pile, though none spoke or moved. None, I saw, had bodies, and with relief I told myself these were not real people at all, but things made, like the husk dolls with which children played.

Then a whisper passed among the roots behind roes something stirred in the stagnant world. I turned, and in my exhaustion, in the unreasoning hope that had brought me to this place, I half expected to see Kirith floundering toward me. Her hair would shimmer even here with the sunlight that clung to her wherever she went. She would call to me, dance over the mud; I would catch her in my arms, and our laughter would ring from the meaningless white branches. The hollow-eyed faces in the roots would watch us climb together.

But it was not Kirith that loomed monstrous over the roots. Tipping back my head, I watched a gyring shape rise higher and higher, a bloated, branchless trunk, horribly segmented and soft -- a tremendous worm. Ropes of ooze trailed from its belly. It squirmed with slick, sucking noises, its weight shuddering the wood. Up, down, in hideous spirals, the beast insinuated itself through the root-caves, through the stacked white branches, which tumbled and rattled away from its thrusting, eyeless head. Its wrinkled flesh exuded the very fetor that had brought my dizziness, that permeated all this rotting gulf.

Shrinking, half-fainting, I pressed myself into a hollow as the plunging mouth -- a circular pit, lined with knife-teeth -- fed on the white branches, on the tree roots, on anything it encountered. I shrieked, heedless of discovery, covering my eyes and ears.

When I raised my head, the thing had quested past, length by rippling length, to other stacks. Still I could hear its ponderous pounding, its slithering wetness, and still I choked on the air it had defiled.

I recall little of my upward journey; only that, before I climbed the trunks, I shouted Kirith's name until my voice failed, and that I searched long among the silent mounds.

Now I am old, and soon I will join Kirith in the Glades of the Sun. I know she waits for me there; my heart is at ease since I learned she is not lost and wandering in the dark abyss. I have been a Loreweaver myself, singing of light and beauty, watching seasons change. Seeds, rain, sun, and drying, the forest renews itself, its music unceasing. But I understand, too, why the Loreweavers speak little when the night wind rages in storms, making the limbs twist with deep groans. There is wisdom in silence, and they find the greatest peace who do not climb too far seeking truth; for behind every answer lies a greater mystery. My journeys are finished now, save one. When my breath is gone, I will be wrapped in leaves and ride the Quiet Wind, borne away amid the sending songs. I will not linger in that place where the vast, colorless worm gnaws at the roots of all that we are and know.