A Beautiful Friendship-ARC by David Weber Read Free Book Online

and they required certain kinds of plants to remain strong and fit.
    Unfortunately, some of the plants they needed couldn’t live in ice and snow, which made the cold days a time of hunger and death, when too many of the very old or very young died. Although there was usually prey of some sort, there was less of it, and it was harder to catch, and the lack of needed plants only made that normal hunger worse. But that was changing, for the eating of plants was yet another way in which two-legs and People were alike . . . and the two-legs had found an answer to the cold days, just as they had to so many other problems. Indeed, it often seemed to Climbs Quickly the two-legs could never be satisfied with a single answer to any challenge, and in this case, they had devised at least two.
    The simpler answer was to make plants grow where they wanted during the warm days. But the more spectacular one (and the one that most intrigued Climbs Quickly) were their transparent plant places. The plant places’ sides and roofs, made of yet another material the People had no idea how to make, let the sun’s light and heat pass through, forming little pockets of the warm days even amid the deepest snow, and the two-legs made many of the plants they ate grow inside that warmth all turning long. Nor did they grow them only during the cold days. There were fresh plants growing in those plant places even now, for Climbs Quickly could smell them through the moving spaces the two-legs had opened along the upper sides of the plant places to let the breeze blow in.
    The People had never considered making things grow in specific places. Instead, they’d gathered plants wherever they grew of their own accord, either to eat immediately or to store for future need. In some turnings, they were able to gather more than enough to see them through the cold days. In less prosperous turnings, hunger and starvation stalked the clans, yet that was the way it had always been and the way it would continue. Until, that was, the People heard their scouts’ reports of the two-leg plant places.
    The People weren’t very good at it yet, but they, too, had begun growing plants in carefully tended and guarded patches at the hearts of their clans’ ranges. Their efforts had worked out poorly for the first few turnings, yet the two-legs’ success proved it was possible, and they’d continued watching the two-legs and the strange not-living things which tended their open plant places. Much of what they observed meant little or nothing, but other lessons were clearer, and the People had learned a great deal. They had no way to duplicate the enclosed, transparent plant places, yet this last turning Bright Water Clan had found itself facing the cold days with much more white-root, golden ear, and lace leaf than it had required to survive them. Indeed, there had been sufficient surplus for Bright Water to trade it to the neighboring High Crag Clan for additional supplies of flint, and Climbs Quickly wasn’t the only member of the clan who realized the People owed the two-legs great thanks (whether the two-legs ever knew it or not).
    But what made his whiskers quiver with anticipation was something else the other scouts had reported. The two-legs grew many strange plants the People had never heard of—a single sharp-nosed tour of any of their outside plant places would prove that—yet most were like ones the People knew. But one wasn’t. Climbs Quickly had yet to personally encounter the plant the other scouts had christened cluster stalk, but he was eager to do so. Indeed, he knew he was a bit too eager, for the bright ecstasy of the scouts who’d sampled cluster stalk rang through the relayed songs of their clans’ memory singers with a clarity that was almost stunning.
    It wasn’t simply the plant’s marvelous taste, either. Like the tiny, bitter-tasting, hard-to-find fruit of the purple thorn, cluster stalk sharpened the People’s mind-voices and deepened the