Treason by Orson Scott Card Page B

consider it an affront to have someone laugh in her face. I decided to be slightly annoyed. “Is that amusing?”
    “Of course you don’t really expect to see the king , lady,” he said.
    He said this with a smirk, but I had had plenty of practice at putting down those who dared to condescend to me. I knew how to make my voice sound like it had been aged all winter on ice. “So your king is invisible. How amusing.”
    His smile dampened a little. “He doesn’t meet with the public, that’s all I meant.”
    “Ah. In civilized countries, emissaries are extended the courtesy of an audience with the head of state. But in your country, I imagine foreign embassies must be content with climbing trees and visiting each other.”
    His smile was gone now. The condescension was all going the other way, and he didn’t like it. “We don’t get many embassies. Until recently, our neighboring nations have regarded us as ‘tree-dwelling apes,’ I believe is the term. Only lately, as our soldiers have begun to make a little noise in the world, have emissaries begun arriving. So perhaps we aren’t acquainted with all the customs of ‘civilized’ nations.”
    I wondered how much truth there was to that. On the great Rebel River plain, every nation had exchanged embassies with every other nation ever since the Families first divided up the world. But if Nkumai had turned outward enough to go a-conquering, surely they had also learned how to deal with emissaries from many nations.
    “We have only three emissaries right now, lady,” he said. “We had several others, but of course the emissary from Allison is now a loyal subject of the king, while the emissaries from Mancowicz, Parker, Underwood, and Sloan were sent home because they seemed far more interested in our Ambassador than they were in promoting good relations with Nkumai. Now only Johnston, Cummings, and Dyal have embassies here. And since we’re quite economical with living space, we’ve had to house them together. We’re a backwater of the world, I’m afraid. Very provincial.”
    And you’re overdoing it a bit, I commented silently. But however unsubtle he had been, I had got the warning well enough. They were alert to what most emissaries were probably looking for, including, most particularly, myself. So I would have to be careful.
    “Nevertheless,” said I, “I am here to see the king, and if there is no hope of that, I shall go home and tell my superiors that Nkumai has no interest in good relations with Bird.”
    “Oh, there’s a chance that you can see the king. But you have to make application at the office of social services, and where that will lead you who can say.” He smiled faintly. We were not friends.
    “Shall we go?” he suggested.
    I advanced warily to the rope ladder that still swung gently in the breeze, moored loosely to the platform by a thin rope tied around a low post.
    “Not that,” he said. “We’re going another way.” And he took off running, away from the platform along one of the branches. If you call them branches—neither of them less than ten meters thick. I walked slowly to where he had climbed up the branch, and sure enough, there were some subtle handholds that seemed more to have been worn than cut into the wood. I clumsily got myself from the platform to the place where my guide waited impatiently. Where he was the branch had leveled out a little more and now rose more obliquely up into the distance, crisscrossed by branches from other trees.
    “All right?” he asked.
    “No,” I answered. “But let’s go on.”
    “I’ll walk for a while,” he said, “until you’re more accustomed to the treeway.” Then he asked me a question that seemed out of place, after so many days’ travel together. “What’s your name, lady?”
    Name? Of course I had prepared myself with a name, back in Allison—but the occasion had never arisen when I was required to use it, and now it had slipped my mind. I can’t