"Something stood at the edge of the path this afternoon. Tall, taller than the stones on the sledge, grey-brown and shaggy the way moss grows on the north side of the mill, standing just where the trees begin. Off the path. I looked at it for three steps, and when I looked again there was a tree there, and I could not have told you which tree."
The Basogur is told about. A path that was a path yesterday and is a stream this morning, an expedition that went in with forty and came out with nine, a surveyor's notch on a tree that stood somewhere else by dawn: every traveler who has come out of the canopy has carried a story out with them, and the stories are older than the Empire and older than the Thousand. The tellers were afraid, and they were in awe, and they told it at every hearth on both sides of the trees.
The tribes of the jungle say a god walks it, and they call him Basajun. He is seen at the edge of a path and never on it. He is tall, he is shaggy, he stands where the trees begin, and each people tells a different shape of him. Some tribes pray to him; the druid tribes pray to him above any other. Scholars outside the canopy have argued for three centuries over whether the jungle's god is a god, a spirit, or a story.
Every people of the jungle has seen him, and no two have seen the same thing. The Anadi say he is a strand across the path at dawn that no one in the hold strung. The Vanara say he is an old grey-muzzled Vanara who walks beside you, off the path, keeping pace, and who is gone when you turn to thank him. The druids say he is a tree that stands one step nearer each time you look. The Lizardfolk say he is a reflection in still water with nothing above it. The Red Tusks at the gate say he is shaggy and the size of a vigross, and that he watched them build their palisade and let them.
When a traveler sees something at the edge of the path, the guide whistles two notes, low then high, and everyone who knows the road whistles them back without turning to look. The Roadwards say the whistle tells the thing at the edge that it has been seen and that the party is staying on the path. The Vanara say that if no one whistles back, it follows.
"In the taproom they told me the loveliest thing. When a Roadward dies they are buried in the jungle, every one of them, by the Principality's own law. The whole bench said it together like a grace before supper: 'The road keeps its own.'"
The long road runs through the Basogur. It enters the trees at Greenmouth, the Kaosadaemi gate, and comes out eleven days later at the northern gate by Veidrath, and the Roadwards of the Principality take a party through on that schedule with the number of people it went in with. A Roadward walks the whole crossing. The paths between are walked by Vanara guides, who come down out of the canopy and take the lead from one web-hold to the next, and the web-holds are the overnight stops, strung high enough that the beasts and the freight sleep below them with a guide on watch. Freight goes through on sledges; the canopy takes wheels apart. The road carries what an airship cannot lift and a stillship cannot reach in time: millstones for Veidrath, stone and iron and anything heavy bound north or south that cannot wait for the sea.
Every party is written into the roll at the Roadwards' hall at Greenmouth, the people on one line, the beasts on a second, the freight on a third, and counted off the same roll at the other end. The road ran before the Principality's Roadwards ran it, and parties went in and came out on no schedule anyone could promise; the road began keeping time under Princess Hildrun Ringhold Thornhollow, in the season the Principality still calls the season the road first held.
The Principality's law buries every Roadward in the jungle, beside the road. Greenmouth tells it as a Roadward's honour, the road keeps its own, and the Roadwards greet certain trees along the way by name as they pass, the way a traveler nods to a grave. The holders of Ringhold go into the trees once, at their accession, with one Roadward, and come back out with a streak of grey from the crown; Ringhold credits the road.
"Irmen stopped this morning at a big old tree with a split in its bark like a smile and laid her hand on it as always. Then she took my wrist and put my palm beside hers. 'This is Walbert,' she said. 'He taught me the road.'"
The road holds because the Prince pays the jungle. Basajun is real: a demi-god who walks the Material Plane, coalesced over ages out of every traveler who ever feared the churn. Princess Hildrun made the first covenant with him, and every holder of Ringhold since has made it again. At accession the holder walks the road with one Roadward as guide and witness, steps off the path where the Roadward stops, and meets Basajun face to face. The covenant is made with the holder, so each new holder makes it anew, and a page of the Second Book records each meeting.
Basajun chooses one love the new ruler holds or might hold and takes the possibility of it: the Prince comes out remembering the person, and unable to love them. The page records whose love it was. No ruler of Ringhold since Hildrun has married the love of their childhood.
The Prince also comes out with a streak of grey from the crown, and Ringhold sees it and credits the road.
Powers from beyond the trees have come to treat with the jungle and found nothing to treat with. Basajun has shown himself to the house and to no other power from outside the Basogur. The tribes pray to him and are answered as any small god answers worship.
The Roadwards pay their share at the end. The Principality's law, written in the Second Book beside the covenant page, sends every Roadward at the end of life to rest in the jungle, and there each becomes a tree beside the road that still knows the way. The road keeps its course because it is lined with them.
The Roadwards know it: it is taught in the hall, and a Roadward greets her teachers by name as she passes. The covenant and what the Prince pays belong to the house, and the hall knows only its own half.
"The trees leaned in the night. The web has to agree with them."
The road crosses the Basogur along one line, and the peoples a traveler meets on it are the few who live beside that line. The canopy runs from coast to coast. Most of its holds have never had a Roadwards' party sleep under them, most of its clans guide their own ground and nobody else's, and most of its groves have names no outsider has written down. The chronicle knows the jungle's peoples by what the road shows of them.
The web-holds of the Anadi stand across the whole jungle, thickest in the deep interior. A hold is a village hung between the trunks, thirty trees or more: a floor of grey silk for each household, walkways between them, a common floor at the middle where the cooking is done, and silk ladders to the ground. Each dawn the Anadi go out along the strands and re-string what the night pulled loose, a walkway on one day and a family's floor on the next, so that a hold stands a hand's width from where it stood the night before and in the same place in the jungle. A path in the Basogur runs from hold to hold, and the road's overnight stops are the handful of holds that stand along it.
The Vanara walk those paths, in more clans than the road has names for. Each clan guides its own stretch of the jungle and hands a party on to the next, and a Vanara guide reads which way the ground has moved overnight the way a sailor reads the wind. The Marutar and the Kapisar are the clans that guide the road, and a young guide of theirs walks whole crossings behind an elder before leading a leg.
The druid tribes are mixed, every ancestry the jungle holds, and they plant a tree at every birth. The child and the tree share a name, and a tribe lives in the groves where its trees stand, each grove named for what happened there. The Greyroot at the Grove Where the Road Turned and the Mossback of the Drowned Steps and Three Springs are the two tribes whose groves the road passes.
The Lizardfolk jungle clans hunt with the armiar, the great spider, whose web spreads a hunter's senses across a hundred yards of canopy. They are many, and they are most numerous in the interior. Myrkvid Long Web crosses the road in the middle of the jungle; the Frogged Tribe floats the Skoga on the Ehizahar side, hunts the jungle's edge for days at a time, and keeps a silent feud with the other Lizardfolk clans over the river.
The Orc clans ride the jungle's fringe on the low, broad vigross, which goes through ground a runner cannot cross. One of them, the Oihandar Red Tusks, settled where the road leaves the trees and holds the northern gate: a palisade of whole trunks, and a kinrider who counts each party off the Roadwards' roll.
"The Guild came with maps and asked all of us to the same fire."
The road's long bend at the middle of the crossing goes around the Stitchery, the sealed dungeon of the Flesh-Sculptor, the one of the Corrupted God's Nine who remakes flesh to its master's design. It lies under the Nashavel side of the canopy. When the Nine Dungeons erupted in 2524 MR it opened into the deep interior, and what came out was stitched from what the jungle had: its beasts and its lost.
The jungle's peoples fought it together. An Adventurers' Guild captain came in with maps and called the web-holds, the Marutar and Kapisar, the druid tribes, and the Lizardfolk clans to one fire. The Anadi strung the corridors shut, the Vanara drew the spawn off the paths, the druids closed the ground over the gate, and the Guild's deep-teams painted the perimeter red over black. The fire broke up when the seal held.
The seal is a web, and Thousand-Eyes Hold re-strings it every morning. Spawn still come up through the smaller ways the web does not cover. Downwind of the bend the air smells of a tannery.
The Flesh-Sculptor remakes its halls as it remakes flesh, and the Stitchery churns below the way the jungle churns above: a corridor mapped at dawn is a different corridor by dusk. That is why the Guild sealed it and never cleared it, and why the only seal that holds is one re-strung every morning. A stone seal cracks against a dungeon that changes its shape; a web agrees with it.
"Two posts today, so close together I stood between them and put a hand on each. One is cut with the coin-mark of Nahaskel and the other with the antlers of Veidrath, and each says the ground belongs to it. Both are green to the top with moss."
Nashavel claims the Basogur and so does Ehizahar, and the claims meet under the canopy where their surveyors' posts stand in moss. Neither domain governs a tree of it. The Golden Empire ruled around the jungle for eight centuries and never held it; the chronicles place Lost-Era kingdoms under the canopy through those centuries, keeping their own laws, and the Dark Era ended them.
The jungle is why Talan has two rail networks. Consortia have tried the crossing for decades, and the attempts fail three ways. The churn warps the rails and scrambles the runes on the sleepers. The holds, clans, and tribes take the works apart as they are laid, each for its own reasons, without a council among them. And neither domain will sanction a right of way the other has not, so no consortium can buy one. Lengths of bent rail lie in the fern along the road, the oldest forty years in the green. North and south cross by stillship over Midarra, by airship over the canopy, or on foot with the Roadwards.
Three registers belong to the jungle's own peoples; the Lizardfolk clans and the Red Tusks keep the Villtur register.
The Anadi: given · story · hold. An Anadi's given name is her own. The second is the title of the first story she wove whole, taken when she comes of age, and replaced only if she weaves a grander one; for a year after, the hold says both. The third is the hold she was strung in, and it never changes.
The Vanara: given · clan · the name the led gave. A Vanara carries a given name and a clan. The third name comes from the travelers she first brings through, in their tongue, and it is kept in their tongue. A Vanara who has not led a crossing carries two.
"Then Ravi stood Nikhil in front of me and said he had led his first crossing, and his third name was mine to give, in my own words. I named him for the fifth day: Stepped-Between. He said it back to me twice, trying it on, and Irmen wrote it into the roll after his other two."
The druid tribes: tree · grove · tribe. A child's name is her tree's, and her tree's is hers. The grove is where the tree stands, named for what happened there, and the tribe comes last. When one of the pair dies, the other keeps the name.
Anadi · given
Anadi · holds
Vanara · given
Vanara · clans
Druid · tree-names and tribes
Whole names
The Anadi re-weave, and in the Basogur the weaving is the village. A hold is re-strung in part every morning and stands where it stood, and the Anadi who live in it take the day's mending as the day's work, unbothered by what the night undid. The Vanara guides steer from hold to hold.
The Vanara ride the change, and in the Basogur the change is the ground itself. A Vanara guide knows which way the jungle moved in the night and walks a party along it, and the third name she carries is given by the first travelers she brings through, in their tongue.
The web-hold that keeps the Stitchery's seal.
An overnight stop on the road; hold-mother Zawadi The Night the Web Held.
Vanara guide-clans of the road; Ravi Marutar Eleven-Days, an elder guide, and Nikhil Marutar Stepped-Between, named 2532.
A druid tribe at the Grove Where the Road Turned, by the Stitchery's bend; Ilarra is one of its children.
A druid tribe of the Drowned Steps and Three Springs.
A Lizardfolk clan of the interior; Jargal Slowwater of Myrkvid Long Web.
A Lizardfolk river-clan on the Skoga, at the jungle's Ehizahar edge.
The Orc clan of the northern gate; Khulan Deepfoot of Oihandar Red Tusks, the kinrider who counts the parties.
A Roadward of Kaosadaemi.
A Guild Silver of the Thousand Kingdom, whose letters from the crossing are the most-copied account of the road.
Lisette Carrow's letters to her father, in order, from Greenmouth to the northern gate. Twelve days, five on the roll, and four millstones. Open any day to read the letter whole.
Dear Papa,
You told me to write every day and I told you I would write when there was something worth writing, and here I am on the very first day, so you win. I am in Greenmouth! It is a gate, a hall, and a row of stables, and then the jungle begins all at once, like a wall somebody forgot to finish. The trees are taller than the mill tower. Taller than two mill towers stacked, Papa.
And the contract. You will laugh. Four millstones for Veidrath, on two sledges. Of everything on the Guild board, I drew your trade. The clans up there have stopped riding and want to grind their own flour, and a millstone is too heavy for any airship that will take one. I told the factor my father dresses stones and she said, "Then you can carry one." She is Aveline Marchand, out of Brisemont, dry as a ship's biscuit, and I like her already.
The Roadwards' hall wrote us into their great roll: me, Madame Marchand, her drovers Wat and Hobb, and our Roadward, Irmen Greenmouth Baxter, who has hands like yours and a laugh she keeps for special occasions. Five of us. The beasts go on one line and your stones on another. Irmen made me read the number back to her twice.
In the taproom they told me the loveliest thing. When a Roadward dies they are buried in the jungle, every one of them, by the Principality's own law. The whole bench said it together like a grace before supper: "The road keeps its own." Imagine loving a road enough to want to lie beside it after.
And I saw the Prince in Ringhold! Young, and a streak of grey straight back from his crown like frost along one furrow. The clerk beside me said they all come back from the road like that. I mean to ask Irmen which road.
We go in at first light.
Count on the roll: five.
The light went green inside the first hour, Papa, green the way the millpond goes in June when you look up at the sky from under it. Sound does something odd under the leaves: a bird beside you sounds a field away, and the sledge-runners sound like they are coming up behind.
Irmen talks to the trees. Every hour or two she stops at one, lays her palm flat on the bark as if she were feeling a stone for true, and says a name. Walbert. Hedwig. Old Sawyer. Wat and Hobb snigger at her back. I think it is the kindest thing I have ever seen a grown woman do, so at the noon halt I asked if I might say good morning to them too.
She looked at me a long moment and said, "They don't know you yet."
At midday we stepped over a length of old rail lying in the fern, bent round like a hairpin, its rune-plates gone the colour of old teeth. Irmen says a consortium laid it forty years ago and it looked like that by spring. Somebody had a very big idea here once.
Count at the fire: five.
Papa, the forest moved the furniture in the night.
I cut a notch in a tree by our camp yesterday evening, the way they taught us, so the next party knows where the water is. This morning the stream was on the other side of the camp and my notch was on a tree forty paces off, looking very pleased with itself. Irmen was already packed and waiting. She let me look for as long as I liked before she said we were going.
At midmorning two Vanara dropped out of the canopy and took the lead as easily as you take the reins from me at the gate. The elder is Ravi Marutar Eleven-Days, grey at the muzzle and quick as a wren. The younger is Nikhil Marutar, only two names yet, a year or two older than me and trying hard to look bored. Ravi says Nikhil leads the last leg if he is ready, and comes out the far side with a third name. I asked what the third name would be.
"Whatever you call him," Ravi said. I am still thinking about it.
Count: five, and two Marutar, who are not on our line.
Two nights in a web-hold, Papa! I thought a web-hold would be one web. The Hanging Hold is a whole village strung between thirty trunks or more, as high up as the church roof at home: floors of grey silk for each household, walkways between them, a round common floor in the middle where the cooking is done, and ladders of silk that move when you breathe. The beasts and your stones sleep below with one of the Marutar watching them.
At dawn the Anadi go out along the strands and re-string whatever the night pulled loose. This morning it was a walkway on the east side and one family's floor, which came down and went back up a hand's width from where it had been while the family sat on a branch and ate breakfast. The hold-mother is called Zawadi The Night the Web Held, and I asked her how they know which strands to mend.
"The trees leaned in the night," she said. "The web has to agree with them."
Her middle name is the title of the first story she ever wove, and she says it takes a whole night to tell. Madame Marchand went to bed. I stayed up. It is the best story I have ever heard and I promised Zawadi I would not write it down, because it is hers, so you will have to come and hear it yourself.
Count: five.
I am going to write this part plainly, Papa, because my hand still is not steady.
Something stood at the edge of the path this afternoon. Tall, taller than the stones on the sledge, grey-brown and shaggy the way moss grows on the north side of the mill, standing just where the trees begin. Off the path. I looked at it for three steps, and when I looked again there was a tree there, and I could not have told you which tree.
Irmen whistled, two notes, low then high. Ravi and Nikhil whistled the same two notes back without turning their heads. Then Nikhil dropped back and walked between Madame Marchand and the trees for the rest of the day, and let on as if he had only felt like a change of company.
At the fire I asked Ravi what it was. He said one word, Basajun, and passed me the pot. Irmen said I had seen the edge of the path.
Count: five. I counted three times.
The road swung east today in a great slow curve, most of a day's walking, round ground the guides will not set foot on. And Papa, I knew the marks on the trees along the edge of it. They are ours. Guild sealing-marks, red over black, cut and painted, the pattern a deep-team leaves round a seal. I have only ever seen them drawn on the chalkboard at the hall in training. The paint is eight years old if it is a day. Somebody from my own Guild stood exactly here and painted them while the war was on. The wind came off that side once around noon and smelled like the tannery below the weir, and I stopped feeling proud and walked a bit faster.
We camped with a druid tribe, the Greyroot, at a place they call the Grove Where the Road Turned. A little girl brought us water and then took my hand and showed me her tree, a young one with silver bark, exactly as tall as she is. The tree is called Ilarra, and so is she. When one of them dies, the other keeps the name. I have decided that if I ever have a daughter, I will plant her a tree.
The Greyroot elder told me their grandparents and parents fought at the seal, beside the web-holds and the Marutar and a Guild captain whose name none of them could get their tongues round.
"The Guild came with maps and asked all of us to the same fire," she said.
Count: five.
Two posts today, so close together I stood between them and put a hand on each. One is cut with the coin-mark of Nahaskel and the other with the antlers of Veidrath, and each says the ground belongs to it. Both are green to the top with moss. Irmen says the surveyors who set them came a very long time ago, and nobody has come to look at either since. Two whole domains, Papa, and the moss is winning.
In the afternoon a line of Lizardfolk crossed the path carrying fish on poles, eleven of them. Their leader stopped, looked at Irmen, and counted us with one finger. So I counted them back with mine. He liked that, I think; he gave me his name in the Villtur way when I gave him mine, Jargal Slowwater of Myrkvid Long Web, and then they were gone into the green on the other side.
Count: five. Theirs: eleven.
Irmen stopped this morning at a big old tree with a split in its bark like a smile and laid her hand on it as always. Then she took my wrist and put my palm beside hers.
"This is Walbert," she said. "He taught me the road."
So I said good morning to Walbert, Papa. I felt a bit of a fool and very honoured at the same time.
In the afternoon the trees opened and there was water, Aintzir, the lake, and sky, the first sky in eight days, so bright on the water I had to look at it through my fingers. Wat and Hobb walked straight in to their waists with their boots on, and Madame Marchand laughed out loud, which I did not know she could. An airship went over the lake heading north, steady as a barge on the canal at home. Irmen says it is one of the Occultech kind; the other kind shake like a leaf over the canopy and come down wherever they please.
Nikhil led today. His first leg. Ravi walked at the very back and said nothing all day long, which Irmen tells me is how it is done.
Count: five.
We came out of the trees at noon on the eleventh day, exactly as the roll said we would.
The northern gate belongs to the Oihandar Red Tusks: a wall of whole trunks, orcs on low broad beasts they call vigross, and a kinrider named Khulan Deepfoot of Oihandar Red Tusks, who took Irmen's roll and counted us off it with her thumb. Five. The beasts. Four millstones, Papa, every one of them whole. Irmen signed under the count, hugged me hard enough to hurt, and turned round to walk the next party south.
Then Ravi stood Nikhil in front of me and said he had led his first crossing, and his third name was mine to give, in my own words. I had been turning it over for four days and in the end it was easy. I named him for the fifth day: Stepped-Between. He said it back to me twice, trying it on, and Irmen wrote it into the roll after his other two.
Nikhil Marutar Stepped-Between.
Count at the gate: five.
Kiss the dog for me. Your Lisette.