Enchanted Forests by Katharine Kerr Page B

out
    around us, as the heat leaped from valley to mountain, from
    grass to leaves to bark, the wind pulling at our leaves, sucking
    the very air toward the Fire's hunger, the sun turning cold, gone
    out as it did in the night

    Then would come the pain, as the fire consumed our wood
    bodies, scorched our plant bodies, worse than any Tinybiter or
    Gnawer, so fast, so sudden! The strategies we used against
    fleshbeasts were useless: the Fire did not crave our sap or our
    seeds, and we could not pull it under the ground to smother it.
    Our only hope was to conserve our sap and essence in the roots
    that would not bum.

    Time and again, in the long seasons, we were burned down to
    those roots. We despaired for the continued existence of our self,
    but our roots lived, and sent up new shoots, or our half-burned
    trunks recovered. We grew back each time, adopting new lives
    into ourselves, until our strength was full—and full of wrath.

    We were angered by the unfaimess. The Green about us did
    not seem to suffer nearly so much as we from the Fire, for all
    they were dumb and silent, and infested with fleshly life.

    Eventually our anger gave way to observation. While the
    fleshbeasts thieved the Green, they gave back in several ways;

    clearing away deadwood, spreading seed. On a tentative basis we
    allowed back in a few Tinybiters and Gnawers, watching, weigh-
    ing their swift activities. We studied them, took their fleshly bod-
    ies apart, meditated on their structure.

    Then we turned our Thoughts on them. It seemed impossible,

    68

    Connie Hirscn

    and yet we had patience on our side, and time. First we had to
    team to Listen, so very subtle and strange, like and not like the
    communication among our selves. We had to divine the minds of
    the fleshbeasts, to look through their eyes and hear through their
    ears, senses so foreign, beyond all comprehension—almost. We
    had not known senses beyond those we possessed before: the
    warmth on our leaves, our roots extending through the soil, the
    moisture that the sky sent to us, that we drank through our roots.

    But we persevered. We learned from the shadows of their
    beastly senses, ruminated on the cells of their fleshly essences,
    and finally experimented. Could we affect the tiny individual
    minds, so insignificant in their aloneness before ourselves, as we
    were in turn small before the Green?

    The fleshbeasts could never be a part of us, but we found we
    could affect them. We could bend their small minds, influence
    them to leave healthy limbs alone, to cause the Flitters and the
    Peckers to find the Tmybiters more efficiently, make the Gnawers
    spread our seed far afield to the bare patches, gnaw at deadwood
    until it fell free.

    Seasons passed as we experimented, generations upon genera-
    tions of the swift-living fleshbeasts, generations of our individual
    members even. As the years passed, so passed our deepest re-
    sentment; we had adapted to life besides the fleshly ones. They
    had become more than interlopers, servants that we depended
    upon. Peace had come again.

    We prospered under the sun again. We kept our land reason-
    ably free of the buildup of dead leaves and deadwood that the
    Fire loved too much, moved our branches just enough to permit
    a healthy undercanopy to slow the spread of fire with wet sap
    and slow burning leaves.

    Yet we wondered at how we were changed- It gave us pleasure
    now to look upon the beauty of ourselves, to hear the wind in
    our boughs through the senses of our pets. We grew trunks of
    prodigious size, standing tall, symmetrical, lush, and proud. We
    were content within our demesne. We could not expand beyond
    certain boundaries, no more than a Gnawer can grow longer
    from nose to bushy tailtip: it is the size it is, and no more. We
    covered our acres, and were content.

    New beasts passed from time to time through our domain, and
    we paid them scant attention so long as they left us alone. The
    ones we called Two Legs may have