The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (33 page)

Ioreth pulled out an anchoring pin. Susan put her burdens down and took her place at one of the cranks without needing to be directed; she’d never been shy about chores. The doctor nodded at an unasked question.

“This isn’t the only way up,” she said. “Just the easiest for people. One of the big trees is hollow, and we’ve rigged a spiral staircase in that one. And there are rope ladders and simple climbing ropes all over the place, and baggage hoists. This is the one that, ah, visitors usually use, though. The trees are strong, but you have to be careful about balancing the lateral strains above the base or you could pull one right over the way storms do. A redwood makes a very long lever.”

They turned the cranks. It wasn’t much effort, and the platform rose steadily though rather slowly. From that smoothness and the low whining sound, Susan guessed the cranks were linked to high-ratio worm gearing within. Mostly she watched as they rose, her lips shaping a silent whistle.

She’d heard they used treehouses a lot here. The
flets
were treehouses, she supposed. Just as the
makol
was
rather flat and quite wide
.

The lowest looked to be around fifty feet up, the highest twice that. In shape they were more like burls or pods, each supported by a circle of graceful curved wooden beams that started in a broad support collar built around the bark and fanned out to end in a ring-beam around the outer edge of the building. Most of the
flets
were one-story, surrounded by wide verandahs overhung by the mossy shingle roofs, though she saw a couple that were taller. Flowerboxes or similar constructions for small herb-gardens ringed the balconies, often dropping long tendrils of flowering vines.

Walkways joined them, light airy flexible things rigged like suspension bridges, looking shaggy and green for some reason. The trees often grew close together anyway, in tight clusters like sections of a circle
where they’d sprouted from the roots of some ancient fallen ancestor. A few lanterns had already been lit as the sun dipped westward, and they glowed in cool complement to the warm yellow of the last sunbeams slanting down into the enormous stillness around them.

The wooden surfaces of the lift’s structure had all been carved, in lacy patterns of interlocking tendrils. As she rose higher she saw that the structures of the houses and walkways had been decorated likewise, images of leaf and vine, bird and beast, warriors and spirits, all in a elongated style a little like what Mackenzies used but more delicate and intricate. Some of the larger ones showed scenes from tales, a giant wave overwhelming a mountain, two huge wolf-like beings fighting, a one-handed man with a star on his brow, a tall kingly figure kneeling before a shorter one.

The basic construction material was crimson-tinged gold-brown redwood, which she knew was light and strong and easy to work and very resistant to decay. It had been generously supplemented with other woods, and just touched here and there with decorative tile or glass. It was a substantial settlement . . . and it was lost in the immensity of the trees, ramming home the scale of what she was seeing again. Her mind kept stuttering that way at what she was seeing.

“It isn’t as grand as
Tham en-Araf
over on the other side of the valley, but we at Eryn Muir like it,” Ioreth said.

The words were modest, but pride rang underneath them. Susan found she didn’t mind that in the least.

“I’ve seen a lot of big, pretty stone buildings,” she said.

Though she had been rather impressed with
Hîr
Ingolf’s dwelling at Wolf Hall, recently built on the ruins of a structure burned long before the Change in the Valley of the Moon. And more with its surroundings, mountain-backed grove and vineyard and woodland. Though the household had been understandably quiet and serious, with his eldest son so newly dead.

“I’ve never seen
anything
like
this
before,” she added honestly.

There was a
click
as they came level with the middle of a walkway. The lift wasn’t secured to it; instead cables stretched out to half a dozen
trees from a big multilooped steel anchor-point just above, and those were in turn braced with more thigh-thick ropes to others to spread the strain. The arrangement wasn’t rigid, and neither was the walkway. Everything was moving as the trees swayed, very slightly and slowly but continuously, to a murmur and sough and creak. Susan swallowed slightly—she wasn’t afraid of heights, but she’d been raised on very solid, and mostly very
flat
ground where the highest place was your head when you were sitting on top of a horse.

The Dúnedain opened a door in the side of the lift, and another in the walkway. The walking surface was planks and it was about ten feet wide; the railings to either side were latticework with openings just large enough to pass a thumb. Every six feet or so the lattice arched over the walkway in a high curve; the side-walls and the roofed sections were both thickly overgrown with Morning Glory vines rooted in wicker tubs hanging a little below. Round pink-and-white flowers starred the glossy green, busy with bees and hummingbirds and big colorful moths of some sort.

“The last time
Hiril
Eilir visited, she said that
Hiril
Astrid would have loved it,” Ioreth said; the note of pride was in her voice again, and Susan recognized the names of the Dúnedain founders.

When they were on the planks of the walkway Ioreth jerked a cord and the lift sank away with a mechanical whine. The cranks freewheeled, but the bottom struck the stone rest below with only a muffled thudding sound, cushioned by a matt of shredded redwood bark.

Half a dozen children a few years either side of six ran past playing some game, giving a little pause in mid-stride to bob their heads to the doctor. As they walked on another—about twelve this time, in practical mottled hunting gear with a light bow over her shoulder—nodded to Ioreth, gave Susan a curious glance, then tossed a coiled rope over the edge, swung herself over and slid away downward. Ioreth stopped to pull the rope up and coil it again and hang it from a wooden hook, apparently a chore everyone did if they passed one.

Susan could see some of the other walkways clearly from here. The passages were busy without being crowded, here a man carrying a wicker
basket of white-feathered chickens, there a woman with a bundle of spearshafts over her shoulder and a serious expression, or a young girl with flowers in her hair, a frown and a hot pot held between two pads. Woodsmoke drifted from under the conical tops of the tile chimneys, and cooking-smells made her stomach rumble to remind her that it had been a long time since breakfast and that lunch had been hard-tack and jerky in the saddle. Families and groups were eating at tables on their verandahs, laughing and talking; it made her feel a little lonely.

The music of some stringed instrument sounded in the distance, and a song rang. More and more of the parties took it up, until the words were plain:

“So leave the fire and come with me

To walk beside the dreaming sea—”

They turned onto a shorter branch walkway that ended at the verandah gate of one of the
flets
, flanked by two structures that turned out to be nest-boxes for a colony of purple martins. A cat was sitting looking at the birdhouses with the tip of its tail twitching slowly and steadily, obviously trying to figure out how to get around the sloped wicker barriers, until it darted away as they walked up.

“This is
ohtar
housing,” Ioreth said. “For young warriors who don’t have a family dwelling here. North is twelve o’clock, right here. Jakes are at three o’clock, bathhouse at eight, the kitchen and common dining area at nine. You’re assigned to seven, and Morfind is in ten. Faramir will be there soon if he isn’t already—his mother and father have a
flet
here, but they’re out with a patrol right now. I’ll let them know you’re coming if you want to wash up first.”

“Thanks, ma’am,” Susan said sincerely; a courier or a herder or hunter spent a lot of time being grimy and smelly, but she’d grown up washing when she could. “See you later, maybe.”

“Certainly,” Ioreth said, making the hand-to-heart gesture again before she left. “It’s been a pleasure.”

Round housing plans didn’t confuse Susan either, the way they would
have many people. These days Lakota used tipis for ceremony, and built permanent structures in rammed earth for their few small towns and to store bulky goods at selected spots along their seasonal migration paths. Most of the time they lived in
ger
, a type of circular lattice-work tent with double-layered felt walls and conical tops. An exchange student from Mongolia who’d been a friend of her grandfather’s at SDU in 1998 had shown him how to make them, and they’d spread like wildfire afterwards since they were simple to make and maintain from available materials and suited the harsh climate perfectly. They were easy to move around either knocked down or on wheeled platforms, too. Even the biggest weren’t as large as this
flet
, but the principle was the same, and at the summer hunt and festivals thousands might be parked near each other.

Number Seven had a number
7
carved into the plank doorway, and two glass windows to either side of it. Inside was a compact room shaped like a wedge of cheese with the point bitten off. There was a bed across the inner wall with brackets that showed it could be converted to multiple bunks, a cupboard, a table and chair and a lamp on a bracket, and a shelf with some books. She didn’t even recognize the
alphabet
in the three fat leather-bound volumes, but from the illustrations it was from what the Dúnedain called
The Histories
, sort of like the way you’d find a copy of the
Book of Mormon
nearly anywhere you stopped in New Deseret. Graceful carvings ran around the edges of the furniture, and in bands under the ceiling. It looked comfortable, especially for summer, and even on a cold wet day it would beat hell out of a lot of barracks that she’d seen.

A bell sounded, but she couldn’t see where for a moment. Then a bump under the floor accompanied it, and she realized that the inset bronze ring marked a trapdoor. When she opened it a pulley-and-basket arrangement with a rope loop running to the ground was revealed, loaded with her kit; when she’d heaved that out onto the floor she could see Ioreth’s son waving from far beneath.

She waved back and spent a few moments arranging things. When she had two remounts she usually put a light saddle pack like this on one and switched things around when she transferred her gear to a fresh horse. Thirty pounds didn’t burden a good animal of the sort the Courier
Corps used, and it made her life a lot easier. After she’d thought for a moment, she decided to wear her good clothes once she’d used the bathhouse.

It was gear from home, a bleached deerskin tunic with fringes and beadwork, leggings likewise fringed and strap-up moccasins decorated with colored porcupine quills. Her work involved taking hospitality fairly often, and while she had to maintain the credit of the Royal Household you couldn’t possibly carry sets of dinner-guest garb in all the dozens—possibly hundreds—of different local styles current in Montival.

Anyone who didn’t like Lakota formal dress could do that other thing. For that matter, this was pretty much
men’s
fancy dress back home, except for the blue-and-red yoke of beadwork and elk teeth over the shoulders, and so were the two feathers she pinned over one ear when she re-did her long braids. Anyone who objected to that could do the other thing too, and she wasn’t going to drag a three-skin robe around. When she came out of the bathhouse wearing the garb—the facilities were much better than nothing but she suspected that something more elaborate was down on the ground at the nearby creek—she walked around the verandah to where Number Ten should be, holding the dispatch in her hand with the High Kingdom’s seal—the Sword of the Lady and a crown—prominently displayed.

The
flet
was largely empty, which she’d expected from what Ioreth had said about everyone being out; if it hadn’t been, she’d have suggested a stroll out on one of the walkways to get a little privacy.

The two she was after were sitting at their table on the verandah; or rather Faramir Kovalevsky was. His cousin was doing a handstand on the railing, with her legs extended and ankles crossed in the air, lowering herself slowly until her forehead touched the carved wood and then pushing up again until her arms were straight. When Susan came in sight she flipped up in the air and did a back-summersault with a nonchalance that made the young Lakota woman blink, given the seventy-foot drop at her back, and landed lightly on the balls of her feet. She was wearing soft loose trousers and elf-boots, but not the shirt-tunic, and the knit sports bra showed the long lean muscle rippling on her torso and arms. The face
above it would have been striking except for the long red-purple mark of a fresh deep scar that wound from just beside her nose to her left ear.

It’s a badge of honor,
Susan reminded herself, as they made the introductions.

Faramir smiled.
Whoa, cutie!
the Courier thought, then made herself turn objective.

They’re both actually sort of cute, in a
wašicu
sort of way,
she thought.

Not that she had anything in particular against
wašicu
; it wasn’t like the old days. Nobody pushed the Lakota around anymore; the last to try had been the Prophet’s killers before she was born, and that hadn’t ended well at all . . . for them.

Her father’s
ger
had a ceremonial war-shirt in it with twelve scalps from that time.

And it didn’t do to be prejudiced. For that matter, her own maternal grandmother had been a green-eyed redhead. People had moved around a lot right after the Change. There were sure-’nuff Lakota who looked pretty much like Faramir, though usually not among the most prominent families.

Though
he’s
looking sort of grim underneath the smile and that cut makes it hard to read
her
expressions.