when she was eleven. It was strange. She remembered that day in fragments. It had begun with an encounter at the trunk market. As she recalled it now, it was the last time she had ever brought her mother flowers from the Top to sell at the market, and accompanied her there. The trunk markets were the best places to sell. Close to the trunk of the trees, the platforms were large and they were often the crossroads for hanging bridges from other trees. The traffic was good, and of course, the farther down one went, the wealthier the passing customers. The flowers she had gathered were deep purple and brilliant pink, as large as her head and brimming with fragrance. Their petals were thick and waxy, and bright yellow stamens and sepals extended past them. They were bringing a good price and twice her mother had smiled at her as she pocketed silver coins.
Thymara had been squatting beside her mother’s trading mat when she noticed that a pair of slipper-shod feet below a blue Trader’s robe had remained in front of her, unmoving, for quite a time. She looked up into an old man’s face. He scowled at her and took a step back, but his blunt, scolding words were for her mother. ‘Why did you keep such a girl? Look at her, her nails, her ears – she will never bear! You should have exposed her and tried for another. She eats today but offers us no hope for tomorrow. She is a useless life, a burden upon us all.’
‘It was her father’s will that she live, and he prevailed in it,’ her mother said briefly. She lowered her eyes in shame before the old man’s rebuke. By chance, her gaze met Thymara’s. She had been staring up at her, hurt that her mother offered so poor a defence of her. Perhaps her look stabbed a drop of pity from her mother’s shrivelled heart. ‘She works hard,’ she told the old man. ‘Sometimes she goes with her father to gather, and when she does, she brings home almost as much as he does.’
‘Then she should go out daily to gather,’ he replied severely. ‘So that her efforts may replenish the resources she consumes. Everything is dear here in the Rain Wilds. Have you lost sight of that?’
‘And a child’s life is most dear of all,’ her father had said, coming up behind the old man. He had come down to meet them at the end of their day’s trading. He had just come from the canopy; his clothes were bark-smeared and leaf-stained from his climbing. Thymara was far too old to be carried, but her father had scooped her up and carried her off with him as he strode away from the market. The carry basket on his other shoulder was half full. Her mother had hastily rolled up her mat with their unsold wares inside it, and hurried along the walkway to catch up with them.
‘Stupid, sanctimonious old man!’ her father growled. ‘And what, I’d like to know, does he do to be worth what he eats? How could you let him speak of Thymara like that?’
‘He was a Trader, Jerup.’ Her mother glanced back, almost fearfully. ‘It wouldn’t do to offend him or his family.’
‘Oh, a Trader!’ Her father’s voice was scathing with feigned awe. ‘A man born to position, wealth and privilege. He earned his place here exactly as any eldest child did; he was wise enough to be first to grow in the right woman’s belly. Is that it?’
Her mother was panting as she tried to keep up with them. Her father was not a large man but he was wiry and strong as were most Gatherers. Even carrying her, he crossed the bridges and climbed the winding stairs that circled the trees’ big trunks with ease. Her mother, burdened only with her market bag, could scarcely keep pace with his angry stride.
‘He saw her claws, Jerup, black and curved like a toad’s. She is only eleven, and already she is scaled like a woman of thirty. He saw the webbing of her toes. He knew she had been marked from birth and it offended him that you had – kept her. He isn’t the only one, Jerup. He simply happened to be old enough and arrogant enough to speak the truth aloud.’
‘Arrogant indeed,’ her father said brusquely, and then he had stepped up his pace again, leaving her mother behind.
On that long ago evening, Thymara had finished her day alone on their tiny veranda, fingering the budding wattles that fringed her jawline. Her knees were drawn up to her chest. Occasionally she flexed her webbed toes, regarding the thick black claws that ended each of them. Inside the house, all was silent, the silence that was her mother’s most potent anger. Her father had fled it, to do late bartering with what he had brought home. One could argue with words, but her mother’s silence denied everything. The silence left plenty of room for the old man’s words to echo in her mind.
Around her, the canopy of the rainforest rustled and bustled with life. Leaves stirred in the wind. Iridescent insects crawled on bark or flew from twig to leaf. The subtle-coloured lizards and the jewel-toned frogs basked or crawled or simply sat still, pulsing with life. All the living beauty of her forest home surrounded her. Thymara looked out past her curved toenails to the shadowed distance of the swamp that floored her world. She could not see the ground. In the thicker, safer branches below them, the sturdy homes of wealthy people clustered, offering their yellow window light to the gathering night. That, too, was a sort of living beauty.
She had tried to imagine living somewhere else, some city where the houses were built on the ground and the bright hot sunlight touched the earth. A place where the ground was hard and dry, and people grew crops in the earth and rode on horses to travel instead of poling a raft or boat. Bingtown, perhaps, where people kept huge animals to pull wheeled carts for them, and no proper lady would think of climbing a tree let alone spending most of her life in one. Thymara thought of that fabled city and imagined running away to it, but as swiftly as her smile came at the thought, it faded away. Rain Wilders seldom visited Bingtown. Even those of them who were not marked strongly by the Wilds knew that their appearances would attract stares. If Thymara ever went there, she’d have to go cloaked and veiled at all times. Even so, people would stare at her and wonder what she looked like beneath her shrouds. No. That would not be a life to dream about. Strong as her imagination was, Thymara still could not imagine a beautiful or even an ordinary face and body for herself. She had sighed.
And then, it seemed to her, she had simply leaned forward too far. She remembered that first moment with an odd kind of ecstasy. She had spread out her limbs to the wind’s rush past her, and almost, almost recalled flying. But then the first branch slapped her face stingingly, and then another thicker branch slammed into her midsection. She curled around it, gasping for air, but flipped past a hold and fell, back first, onto the next lower branch. It caught her across the small of her back, and she would have screamed if she’d had air in her lungs. The branch gave and then sprang up, flinging her into the air.
Instinct saved her life. Her next plummet was through a swathe of finer branches. She clutched at them, hand and foot, as she passed through them, and they sagged down with her, giving her grasping hands time to clamp tight on them. There she clung, mindless but alive, gasping and then panting, and finally weeping hopelessly. She was too frightened to seek for a better hold, too frightened to open her eyes and look for help or open her mouth and cry out.
A lifetime later, her father had found her. He had roped up to reach her, and when finally he could touch her, he had tied her body to his, and then painstakingly cut the thin branches that she would not let go of. Even when they no longer served any purpose, she had held tight to those handfuls of twigs, and continued to clutch them until she fell asleep that night.
At dawn her father had woken her and taken her with him for the day’s gathering. That day and every day after, she was always with him. She thought on that now and a chill question rose in her. Had he done so because he thought she had tried to kill herself? Or because he thought her mother had pushed her?
Had her mother pushed her?
She tried to recall that moment before the fall. Had a touch from behind given her momentum? Or only her own despair drawing her down? She couldn’t decide. She blinked her eyes and ceased trying to recall the truth. The truth didn’t matter.
