Read The Word for World is Forest for Free Online

having dreamed it many times, before he met Davidson in the ashes of Kelme Deva, and since. There was nothing to that dream but relief. A sip of bland water. It was the bitter he needed. He must go clear back, not to Kelme Deva but to the long dreadful street in the alien city called Central, where he had attacked Death, and had been defeated.
    Ebor Dendep hummed as she worked. Her thin hands, their silky green down silvered with age, worked black fern-stems in and out, fast and neat. She sang a song about gathering ferns, a girl’s song: I’m picking ferns, I wonder if he’ll come back. . . . Her faint old voice trilled like a cricket’s. Sun trembled in birch leaves. Selver put his head down on his arms.
    The birch grove was more or less in the center of the town of Cadast. Eight paths led away from it, winding narrowly off among trees. There was a whiff of woodsmoke in the air; where the branches were thin at the south edge ofthe grove you could see smoke rise from a house-chimney, like a bit of blue yarn unravelling among the leaves. If you looked closely among the live-oaks and other trees you would find houseroofs sticking up a couple of feet above ground, between a hundred and two hundred of them, it was very hard to count. The timber houses were three-quarters sunk, fitted in among tree-roots like badgers’ setts. The beam roofs were mounded over with a thatch of small branches, pinestraw, reeds, earth-mold. They were insulating, waterproof, almost invisible. The forest and the community of eight hundred people went about their business all around the birch grove where Ebor Dendep sat making a basket of fern. A bird among the branches over her head said, “Te-whet,” sweetly. There was more people-noise than usual, for fifty or sixty strangers, young men and women mostly, had come drifting in these last few days, drawn by Selver’s presence. Some were from other cities of the North, some were those who had done the killing at Kelme Deva with him; they had followed rumor here to follow him. Yet the voices calling here and there and the babble of women bathing or children playing down by the stream, were not so loud as the morning birdsong and insect-drone and under-noise of the living forest of which the town was one element.
    A girl came quickly, a young huntress the color of the pale birch leaves. “Word of mouth from the southerncoast, mother,” she said. “The runner’s at the Women’s Lodge.”
    “Send her here when she’s eaten,” the headwoman said softly. “Sh, Tolbar, can’t you see he’s asleep?”
    The girl stooped to pick a large leaf of wild tobacco, and laid it lightly over Selver’s eyes, on which a shaft of the steepening, bright sunlight had fallen. He lay with his hands half open and his scarred, damaged face turned upward, vulnerable and foolish, a Great Dreamer gone to sleep like a child. But it was the girl’s face that Ebor Dendep watched. It shone, in that uneasy shade, with pity and terror, with adoration.
    Tolbar darted away. Presently two of the Old Women came with the messenger, moving silent in single file along the sun-flecked path. Ebor Dendep raised her hand, enjoining silence. The messenger promptly lay down flat, and rested; her brown-dappled green fur was dusty and sweaty, she had run far and fast. The Old Women sat down in patches of sun, and became still. Like two old gray-green stones they sat there, with bright living eyes.
    Selver, struggling with a sleep-dream beyond his control, cried out as if in great fear, and woke.
    He went to drink from the stream; when he came back he was followed by six or seven of those who always followed him. The headwoman put down her half-finishedwork and said, “Now be welcome, runner, and speak.”
    The runner stood up, bowed her head to Ebor Dendep, and spoke her message: “I come from Trethat. My words come from Sorbron Deva, before that from sailors of the Strait, before that from Broter in Sornol. They are for the hearing