Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1) - Orson Scott Card Page 0,137
tree,” said Uncle Mook. “And you seem to have neither your shirt nor the clants of two disobedient and stupid girls.”
“I tied the shirt to a branch and climbed down and I was just going to fetch Uncle Poot and turn their clants over to him when Great Uncle Zog and Grandpa Gyish attacked me.”
“No grandpa of yours!” shouted Gyish, though this was only partly true, since Danny’s mother, Gerd, was Gyish’s firstborn granddaughter.
“I believe you,” said Mook. “But what you don’t know—what you could not possibly understand—is how terrified those girls are now. There’s nothing worse for an inexperienced child than to have your outself trapped and be unable to bring it back. It’s like you’re suffocating and can’t draw breath.”
The others present murmured their agreement.
“I’m sorry,” said Danny. “I really am. It’s not as if I planned it. I only did what came to mind, to try to get them to work on what they were assigned. I didn’t know that it would hurt them.”
“Look at his shoulder,” said Auntie Tweng. “Look at that bruise. It’s like a truck ran over him.”
“He was trying to get away!” said Zog defensively.
“He was in agony,” said Tweng. “How dare you punish the boy before the rest of us were called?”
“I didn’t punish him!” Zog roared. “I brought him!”
“You know your strength, and you’re responsible for what you do with it,” said Tweng. “You and Grandpa Gyish did this to him? It’s at least as bad as anything he did to those two girls—why, I wouldn’t be surprised if his clavicle was broken along with a few thousand capillaries.”
Since neither Zog nor Gish was even slightly educated in the drowther sciences, they had no idea what they were being accused of having done, but they were clearly angry and abashed at having the tables turn like this.
“And while you’re torturing this child,” said Tweng, “and refusing to let him speak, has anyone thought that only he knows where he hung that tee-shirt with a brace of stupid disobedient fairies inside?”
Danny could have kissed her then and there, if he’d thought that Auntie Tweng would stand for it. Within a few moments, uncles Poot and Mook had Danny on his feet and helped him keep his balance—he was faint with pain—as he led them back to the tree.
It was farther than Danny had remembered, or perhaps pain magnified the distance, since every step jostled him and made it hurt worse. But finally they were there, with all the aunts and uncles—and now a fair entourage of cousins, too—staring up into the tree.
“I don’t see it,” said Zog. “He’s lying.”
“He said he put it high in the tree,” said Auntie Tweng. “Of course you can’t see it. The leaves are in the way.”
“I can’t climb that thing,” said Uncle Mook.
“Can you get the tree itself to bring them down?” Aunt Lummy asked Uncle Poot.
“Is it on a living branch?” Poot asked Danny. “Green with leaves?”
“Yes,” said Danny.
“Then we should try another way,” said Poot, his voice now gentle, “before we ask this scarlet oak for such a sacrifice.”
“Then Zog,” said Auntie Teng. “Send up a bird to untie the shirt and bring them down.”
Zog whirled on her, but then seemed to swallow the first terrible thing he had meant to say. Instead he spoke softly. “You know my heartbound died in the war. Such birds as I can speak to now have no such skill as the untying of a knotted shirt. I can make them attack and kill, but not untie a knot.”
“Then someone has to climb the tree,” said Uncle Poot.
“Make a clant first,” said Auntie Tweng, “and see how high it is, and how dangerous the climb might be.”
Uncle Poot was one of the foremost clanters of the Family, and he must have been showing off a little, for he sat down at the base of the tree and formed his outself into a clant using the leaves and twigs of the living oak. The smaller branches merely bent toward each other to form the leaves into the vague shape of a man. It progressed up the tree by joining higher leaves into the shape and letting lower ones fall away behind it. Soon it came back down, little more than a rapid quivering of the leaves and branches, yet always shaped like a man, and Uncle Poot opened his eyes again.
“How could you climb so high?” he asked Danny. “How could such slender branches bear your weight?”