Win, Lose, Draw

DAYLIGHT WAS SWIMMING SEA-GREEN, veiled in fading drifts of mist, pierced by shafts of late morning sun. There was a smell of moisture and growing things. A scurrying noise somewhere. And a murmur of rising and falling voices beyond the leaves. I crouched and leaned forward to peer through the screen of twigs.

Without warning, my footing heaved beneath me, vertigo rolling a black wave over my eyes. The massive haavriathil trunks were swaying, tilting, the ground rushing up at me. I was tumbling, falling.

I flailed and grabbed a handful of flimsy shoots. They snapped in my fingers. I fell backwards.

Wet moss squished beneath me as I sprawled onto the ground. I sat blinking stupidly as a tracery of leaves whirled around me and settled, twigs arching over me with their weight of purple teardrop berries. Behind me Fial-Li chuckled quietly, reaching out a foot and squeezing mine with her long toes.

I hauled myself back to my feet, embarrassed, shaking my head as the swaying subsided. I shot a look up the endless dark shaft of the closest haavriathil. My arms still ached with the long days of travel through the high branches, with the climb I'd just finished down that daunting stretch. The Andurans, adults and children alike, had zipped down it without thought in the early morning. They had no trouble getting their ground legs back.

Fial-Li’s eyes were bright with suppressed laughter. She gave me another encouraging squeeze and tilted her head toward the clearing beyond the bushes, tapping one thick hand briefly against her lips.

I nodded and edged forward, pulling down a branch for a better view.

They were gathered on the moss of a clear, flat circle beneath the high umbrella of a massive Mother Tree. Her trunk was enormously wide, even for a haavriathil, the bark black and thick, gnarled and twisted into fantastic shapes here by the forest floor. She was fringed with her own small world of moss, lacy ferns, and bushes with bright berries. High up the trunk, she split as the other Mother Tree had into two immense forks, spreading branches wide to push back the encroaching forest and create the open space below. Her skirts were wide and wrinkled, spreading out into the clearing, reaching down into the moist earth. Her tribe—her Children—perched on and amongst the flaring skirts, facing the tribes they were guesting this year for the district Gathering.