Beyond the glein was the hingamort grove, where succulent, fungoid-looking yellow fingers, swollen with sugary juice, pushed up weirdly through the soiclass="underline" light-seeking organs, they were, that carried energy to the plants buried far below. And all along the borders of the estate was Etowan Elacca’s glorious orchard of niyk trees, in groups of five laid out, as was the custom, in intricate geometrical patterns. He loved to walk among them and slide his hands lovingly over their slim black trunks, no thicker than a man’s arm and smoother than fine satin. A niyk tree lived only ten years: in the first three it grew with astonishing swiftness to its forty-foot height, in the fourth it bore for the first time its stunning cup-shaped golden flowers, blood-red at the center, and from then on it yielded an abundance of translucent, crescent-shaped, tart-flavored white fruits, until the moment of its death came suddenly upon it and within hours the graceful tree became a dried husk that a child could snap in half. The fruit, though poisonous when raw, was indispensable in the sharp, harsh stews and porridges favored in the Ghayrog cuisine. Only in the Rift did niyk grow really well, and Etowan Elacca enjoyed a steady market for his crop.
Farming provided Etowan Elacca with a sense of usefulness; but it did not fully satisfy his love of beauty. For that he had created on his property a private botanical garden where he had assembled a wondrous ornamental display, taking from all parts of the world every fascinating plant that could thrive in the warm, moist climate of the Rift.
Here were alabandinas both of Zimroel and Alhanroel, in all the natural colors and most of the hybrids as well. Here were tanigales and thwales, and nightflower trees from the Metamorph forests, that at midnight on Winterday alone produced their brief, stupefying display of brilliance. Here were pinninas and androdragmas, bubblebush and rubbermoss, halatingas grown from cuttings obtained on Castle Mount, and caramangs, muornas, sihornish vines, sefitongals, eldirons. He experimented also with such difficult things as fireshower palms from Pidruid, which sometimes lived six or seven seasons for him, but would never flower this far from the sea, and needle trees of the high country, which waned quickly without the chill they required, and the strange ghostly moon-cactus of the Velalisier Desert, which he tried in vain to shelter from the too-frequent rains. Nor did Etowan Elacca ignore the plants native to his own region of Zimroel, merely because they were less exotic: he grew the odd bloated bladdertrees that swayed, buoyant as balloons, on their swollen stems, and the sinister carnivorous mouthplants of the Mazadone forests, and singing ferns, cabbage trees, a couple of enormous dwikkas, half a dozen prehistoric-looking fern trees. By way of ground cover he used little clumps of sensitivos wherever it seemed appropriate, for their shy and delicate nature seemed a suitable contrast to the gaudier and more assertive plants that were the core of his collection.
The day he discovered the withering of the sensitivos had begun in more than ordinary splendor. Last night there had been light rain; but the showers had moved on, Etowan Elacca perceived, as he set forth on his customary stroll through his garden at dawn, and the air was cloudless and unusually clear, so that the rising sun struck startling green fire from the shining granite hills to the west. The alabandina blossoms glistened; the mouthplants, awakening and hungry, restlessly clashed the blades and grinders that lay half-submerged in the deep cups at the hearts of their huge rosettes; tiny crimson-winged longbeaks fluttered like sparks of dazzling light through the branches of the androdragmas. But for all that he had an odd sense of foreboding—he had dreamed badly the night before, of scorpions and dhiims and other vermin burrowing in his fields—and it was almost without surprise that he came upon the poor sensitivos, charred and crumpled from some torment of the dark hours.
For an hour before breakfast he worked alone, grimly ripping out the damaged plants. They were still alive below the injured branches, but there was no saving them, for the withered foliage would never regenerate, and if he were to cut it away the shock of the pruning would kill the lower parts. So he pulled them out by the dozens, shuddering to feel the plants writhing at his touch, and built a bonfire of them. Afterward he called his head gardener and his foremen together in the sensitivo grove and asked if anyone knew what had happened to upset the plants so. But no one had any idea.
The incident left him gloomy all morning, but it was not Etowan Elacca’s nature to remain downcast for long, and by afternoon he had obtained a hundred packets of sensitivo seeds from the local nursery: he could not buy the plants themselves, of course, since they would never survive a transplanting. He spent the next day planting the seeds himself. In six or eight weeks there would be no sign of what had occurred. He regarded the event as no more than a minor mystery, which perhaps he would someday solve, more likely not; and he put the matter from his mind.
A day or two later came another oddity: the purple rain. A strange event, but harmless. Everyone said the same thing: “Winds must be changing, to blow the skuvva this far west!” The stain lasted less than a day, and then another rainshower, of a more usual kind, rinsed everything clean. That event, too, Etowan Elacca put quickly from his mind.
The niyk trees, though—
He was supervising the plucking of the glein fruit, some days after the purple rain, when the senior foreman, a leathery-looking, unexcitable Ghayrog named Simoost, came to him in what was, for Simoost, amazing agitation—serpentine hair madly tangling, forked tongue flickering as though trying to escape from his mouth—and cried, “The niyk! The niyk!”
The grayish-white leaves of niyk trees are pencil-shaped, and stand erect in sparse clumps at the ends of black two-inch stems, as though they had been turned upright by some sudden electric shock. Since the tree is so slender and its branches are so few and angular, this upturning of the leaves gives it a curious thorny look that makes a niyk tree unmistakable even at a great distance. Now, as Etowan Elacca ran with Simoost toward the grove, he saw while still hundreds of yards away that something had occurred that he would not have thought possible: every leaf on every niyk tree had turned downward, as though they were not niyks but some sort of weeping tanigale or halatinga!
“Yesterday they were fine,” Simoost said. “This morning they were fine! But now—now—”
Etowan Elacca reached the first group of five niyks and put his hand to the nearest trunk. It felt strangely light; he pushed and the tree gave way, dry roots ripping easily from the ground. He pushed a second, a third.
“Dead,” he said.
“The leaves—” said Simoost. “Even a dead niyk still keeps its leaves facing up. Yet these—I’ve never seen anything like this—”
“Not a natural death,” Etowan Elacca murmured. “Something new, Simoost.”
He ran from group to group, shoving the trees over; and by the third group he was no longer running, and by the fifth he was walking very slowly indeed, with his head bowed.
“Dead—all dead—my beautiful niyks—”
The whole grove was gone. They had died as niyks die, swiftly, all moisture fleeing their spongy stems; but an entire grove of niyks planted in staggered fashion over a ten-year cycle should not die all at once, and the strange behavior of the leaves was inexplicable.
“We’ll have to report this to the agricultural agent,” Etowan Elacca said. “And send messengers too, Simoost, to Hagidawn’s farm, and Nismayne’s, and what’s-his-name by the lake—find out if they’ve had trouble with their niyks too. Is it a plague, I wonder? But niyks have no diseases—a new plague, Simoost? Coming upon us like a sending of the King of Dreams?”