Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,185

of your wings,” she remembered.

“But this is a different thing from the kind of punishment you have in mind for the killers of the bees,” Egdod said. “In time I came to understand that you were bettering the place in ways that had not occurred to me yet. The Land is now much better because you were not punished.”

“I fail to understand how the wanton destruction of bees betters the place.”

“It troubles me too,” Egdod admitted, “though I cannot yet make out why.”

“Perhaps it is for the reason mentioned when we first spoke of food, and eating apples,” said Ward. “That discourse put me strongly in mind of eating, and I knew hunger for the first time. But through the wisdom of others at this table I soon understood that for souls such as we to eat food is without purpose. Bees require food in order to be bees. Souls such as we do not, and so if we eat, it is only to pleasure ourselves.”

Greyhame was nodding. “The souls who killed the bees,” he said, “took food from creatures that needed it, for no purpose other than to satisfy their cravings.”

“Now that you have put it in those terms,” said Egdod, “I judge their actions to have been wrongful and I see that once again Freewander has exceeded me in the quickness of her thinking. But to mete out punishment is a different matter altogether. I shall think on it. First though I would appeal to the wisdom of Spring concerning a matter that is closer to hand.”

Spring had been quiet to this point, though the behavior of her aura suggested that she had listened closely and was pondering these matters with much care. She turned her gaze upon Egdod. Being so looked at gave Egdod pleasure, for he saw great beauty in Spring, and in respect of her had begun to feel cravings of a different kind from hunger. Putting such matters out of his mind for the time being, though, he asked her, “Do trees need apples in the same way that bees need honey? Is it the case that to pick an apple is to steal food from a tree?”

Spring did not ponder it for long before shaking her head. “Trees get their food from the ground and from the sun. The apples are akin to leaves. They will fall to the ground and wither and the trees will not miss them.”

“In that case,” Egdod said, “before rendering any judgment or punishment in the matter of the killing of the bees and the stealing of the honey, I propose that we have our feast so that we too may know what it is to eat food and to satisfy our cravings.”

Knotweave had cleverly woven twisted bundles of grass into containers called baskets. The souls of the table went out to the Garden and filled several of them with apples. As Egdod had predicted, these were now of a size to fit in the palm of a hand, and mostly red. They carried the baskets into the Palace and upended them onto the table, which Knotweave had covered with a woven cloth the color of autumn leaves. Thingor had made a tool called “knife,” which he demonstrated the use of in cutting the apples into smaller pieces. They discovered hard pellets in the middle of each fruit, which Spring caressed with a fingertip for a moment before announcing that life was within them and that they were the beginnings of new trees of the same kind, and therefore should not be eaten. Then finally they began to experiment with introducing the pieces of the apples into their mouths, which until then they had used only for the shaping of words.

Thus did Egdod discover yet a new way in which the Land could talk to him. He had begun with seeing and hearing, then learned to feel the ground with his feet, and with his nose to smell the fragrance of the pine trees in the mountains. Now he tasted food for the first time since he had died. As always when he discovered, or rediscovered, a new sense, the astonishment of it lasted for some time. But when he had recovered his ability to think about these matters, he began to wonder where the pieces of the apple, having been swallowed, had gone. They were in him now. New forms must come into existence within his body to digest the apple and expel the parts of it