Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,311

other side, bipedal rock piles, animated whirlwinds, and other oddments.

Low down, the trunk of the tree pushed out an ungainly side branch that looked as if it really ought to have been pruned off for starters. Chiseled into its bark in one of the Runic Alphabets were the number 12 and a word that meant something like “Great Ones” or perhaps “Giants.” It forked in two; its lower fork had six branches all labeled with names that sounded masculine, and its upper fork six that were more feminine seeming. The former were all dead ends, but the latter produced various subbranches. Meanwhile the tree’s main trunk went straight up for a bit, throwing out eight major side boughs. The eight boughs likewise sported an even mix of male and female names, and most of them forked and reforked profusely, so that the total number of little branches, out at the periphery, must have numbered in the hundreds, if not thousands. But unlike a real tree, this one included countless places where twigs from different branches came back together. To Corvus of a year ago this had made no sense, as real tree branches never did this, but he now understood that this was not a tree. It was a way of explaining how the descendants of Adam and Eve had recombined to populate the Land. And so in a case where, for example, the second son of Adam and Eve had mated with their third daughter to produce a child, it was necessary for those branches to bend together and merge in a distinctly non-treelike manner. More than two or three generations along, these had become impossible for the artists to keep doing and so beyond that point they had resorted to drawing lines between widely separated branches or simply duplicating names. This did not make the tree any easier to make sense of. Once Corvus got the overall gist of it he began to feel that the more he stared at it, the less he knew. But one good big patch of it was labeled PEOPLE BEYOND THE FIRST SHIVER, and right in the middle of that was CALLADON and not far away was BUFRECT, which Corvus gathered was the family name shared by most of the visitors. In relatively clean, fresh paint, BRINDLE was assigned a leaf of his own, but no one seemed to have got round to filling in any more recent arrivals. Likewise the most recent addition to the Bufrect family was PARALONDA, which was the name of the lady who had been seated at the other end of the table from Brindle.

Corvus was tired and desirous of sleep, but before his eyes closed he devoted some effort to tracing the branches backward from Brindle and Paralonda, working his way down the tree. Finally he traced the connection he was searching for, all the way back to the root, and then traced it back outward again, confirming that it led to the people who had built this Hall. Then his eyes closed and he slept, lulled by the dull roar of arguing Sprung. For in most of the Land, that was the term for souls who were descended from Adam and Eve.

“Quests are a thing that we do; it is a point of pride with us, in fact,” Brindle told him a week later.

They had attained the high point of a pass through the mountains. Weather was good for a change; though, on Calla, this only meant that the clouds were higher than the tops of the mountains. So, at the suggestion of Corvus, Brindle had scrambled up to the summit of a nearby peak whence a better view could be had. Much of this Bit (as islands were called in this part of the world) could be surveyed from here. Directly below them was the stopping-place where the other members of the party were resting their legs, drying out their clothes, and making tea over a little fire. Looking to the south they could see the winding valley up which they had been toiling for the last several days; somewhat hazed-over in the greater distance was the rolling green country where the Calladons’ house stood. Turning about and looking then to the north, they could see another ridge, and another one after that. Brindle knew from maps, and Corvus knew from actually having been there, that those eventually gave way and dropped into a green valley where the going would be much easier, all