Hall Canker

Overview

Hall Canker is a fungus that enters the living boughs of the Crownboughs through the cuts of pruning and training and kills them from the wound outwards. Because the halls are grown into one another and the boughways run from house to house, a canker in one hall can reach the next, and every outbreak is a quarrel about whose knife let it in.

Appearance

It begins as a sunken, darker patch of bark around an old cut, sometimes weeping a thin amber sap that dries in beads. Over a season or two the patch spreads into a long lens-shaped wound ringed with ridges of swollen bark, as the bough tries to grow over it and fails, and small orange-red pustules break through the dead bark in wet weather. Beyond the canker the bough's leaves turn yellow early and hang on dead into winter. A cankered bough sounds hollow under a knuckle and smells sour where the bark has split.

Habitat and Range

It lives in the trained great trees of the courts: walkway boughs, braided hall walls, and the bent galleries of the shaped canopy, wherever living wood has been cut and bound. The untouched great trees of the deep groves rarely take it.

Behaviour and Temperament

Its spores ride the rain and the knife. A cut made late in the season, when the bough is slow to close it, lets it in; a blade carried from a cankered hall to a clean one carries it along. Once in, it creeps along the bough's living layer, and where shaped boughs have been grafted and braided together it crosses into the next tree.

Uses and Dangers

It gives nothing. A bough it girdles dies beyond the wound, and in the Crownboughs that means a walkway that sags, a wall that opens, a terrace that becomes unsafe long before it looks it. Tenders cut cankers out to clean wood and seal the wound, burn the cut wood, and clean their knives between halls, and a house with a bad outbreak may have to cut away growth that took generations to shape.

Lore and Belief

Tenders blame late cutting, and they are right. The court-minded blame the neighbouring house, whose shaping crowded the bough or whose tenders carried the knife. A boughway belongs to the house whose growth carries it, so a canker that crosses one is settled between the houses, by the stronger house's word or by feud, and the oldest feuds between houses are said to have begun at a single cankered junction. Some tenders hold that a house that shapes in haste invites the canker; the houses that shape in haste reply that tenders say so of everything.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Plants and Fungi