Return

by Peter S. Beagle

  He bowed formally, as he had done so often upon leaving my cell, and went back into the mansion. I lay still for some time.

  I did take advantage of the twilight’s sweet-smelling warmth by slipping back into the woods to tend to dinner. Without my bow or the trimoira dagger, I was not only defenseless, but faced nourishing myself on tilgit for what might well be my last meal. That thought being completely intolerable, I fashioned a snare from a V-shaped branch and a few supple twigs, caught a plump starik, and devoured it raw.

  Death had been much on my mind all that day, in the most practical sense. Giving Master Caldrea proper credit for intelligence, and for having known me in my childhood, I assumed that he would expect me to attempt to recover my weapons, and would have them all under heavy guard, inaccessible, as I would have done in his place. But I could not even find out where they were being kept, no matter whom I followed, no matter how many risks I took to spy on hurrying monks and tantalizing clumps of sentries. Barring a stout tree-limb trimmed into some sort of bludgeon, I was shortly about to face empty-handed an unknown number of the most gifted and pitiless killers I had ever encountered. Utterly absurd frustration at one end of the day, suicide at the other: Soukyan to the life, Lal would have said.

  At one point I even crawled as close as I dared to the stable, thinking that the weapons might have been hidden in the hayloft, but heard only my own mare, who nickered when she sensed me near. Any guards who knew horses, Hunters or no, would have been out and swarming on the instant, so I discounted the stable and moved on.

  Somewhere around that time, with dark coming on, I realized that I was beginning to look seriously at promising branches.

  Dusk is a bad time for me—always, since I was very young, long before I became whatever exactly I am. I have never known why that should be, and it still irritates me. A mercenary may grow wistful, even sentimental, regretting losses and mistakes, stupidities and misjudgments and crimes that cannot easily be remembered as mistakes…but what kind of regrets can a small boy possibly have who begins to cry as the sky turns slowly violet and the first twinge of cold comes into the air? I have no more fear of midnight than Lal-after-dark does, and the deep hours before dawn have often been my own high noon. But twilight can be hard, and right then I was desperate enough to determine on a completely insane gamble in order to acquire at least some weapon. I focused on one guard, younger than the others, who seemed not to be guarding anything in particular, but rather strutting here and there, striking poses with his long broadsword. As he wandered increasingly close to the shadow where I lay, I prepared to pounce, catch him by the neck, strangle him silent, and drag him into the woods to finish him. I am good at this. If I were not, I would have been long dead myself.

  But with that boast on record, let me report further that as I crouched, behind me a wheezing old voice rasped quietly, “Stir an inch and die, traitor Soukyan!”

  Brother Laska.

  I turned my head and saw him there, twenty feet behind me, grinning his splintery brown grin and holding my bow by the end, like a spear. I had heard nothing of the old gatekeeper’s approach; as my nerves were astretch to their greatest possible extent, this implied more skill on his part than I knew. Nevertheless he did nothing when I took the bow away from him, but only muttered, “I have the arrows. Come for them two hours after sunset, when the Masters have gone.” He turned away, standing straighter and walking more firmly than I ever remembered seeing him. Over his shoulder, he added, “Then I will take you to the Tree.”

  And so I hid once more, and waited. Brother Laska did not lie: after sunset the Masters did leave, one by one, through the great doors, apparently in order of rank, for Master Caldrea was the last.

  When it was true moonless dark, dark enough for me to hope I might be taken for a guard if I were seen—though none of those carried bows—I stole toward the great door, meeting no one on the way, and slipped inside for what I knew would be the last time. Brother Laska was waiting for me at the closet under the stair, my dagger, my pack, my arrows and the quiver in his trembling hands. I took them with gratitude—he even had my flint and steel as well—asking, “Have they been here all the time? Since Master Caldrea took them?”

  Brother Laska shook his yellow-white head, grinning again. “He hid them, but I found them. I find everything.” He watched as I tested and adjusted the new string and sighted along several arrows, to make sure that no dampness had warped them. He said, “I knew you would come for them.”

  “My weapons?”

  “The Hunters.” I heard footsteps and ducked into the closet, shielding my face, as a pair of apprentices passed, teasing Brother Laska and chattering about the shapeshifter who could be a man or a woman, and make himself disappear altogether, when he chose. Brother Laska growled them along, and I asked him bluntly, “Why are you helping me? What game are you playing?”

  “Don’t like Hunters. Never did, never did. Shouldn’t be here!” Brother Laska had suddenly gotten violently aroused, the way very old people sometimes do. “Master Krelim’s fault—Master Krelim, before you, you wouldn’t know. Woke up the Tree. Shouldn’t have.”

  I turned and stared at him. Some grow transparent with age, but Brother Laska had become perfectly opaque since my childhood—you could see nothing of him beyond the liver-spotted skin and scalp and the sunken, faded yellow eyes. Brother Laska said, “The Hunters’ Tree. I will take you.”

  He calmed down as quickly as he had caught fire, and would have turned from me, but I put my hands on his shoulders and held him there, as gently as I could. I said “Tell me about the Tree, Brother Laska. Please.”

  Brother Laska fussed and fidgeted under my hands at first, but then he grew quiet and curiously thoughtful: here and not-here; present, but not entirely accounted for. He studied me for some moments before he spoke again. “Power. Power. Who says no to having power, great power? Invincible assassins when you need? Master Caldrea wants somebody dead, the Tree drops three Hunters right into his lap—finished, they go right back in—”

  “They go back?”

  Another nod, so fierce that I actually heard his neck creak. “Tree draws them in. With target dead, Tree draws the Hunters back inside itself, gets nourished both ways. Everybody feeds—Tree, Masters, everybody, right?” He gave me one of his terrifying grins. “Well, so, maybe not target, not exactly, but target has his part to play too. Because each death, each killing, something goes into the Tree, something the Tree needs—I don’t know what to call it.” He peered elaborately sideways at me, like a boy serving as lookout while his companions raid a fruit stand. “You understand me? You can hear?”

  “I think so,” I answered him. “The Tree draws power from every death, taking it back through the Hunters. And the Masters plan to…feed me to the Tree?”

  No nod this time, but the clear, level stare of a much younger man. “Have to. Because the Tree serves one task at a time—only one, only one killing at a time. And you survive and survive and survive like nobody else, never. So the Tree goes hungry, hungry. The Tree dies.” He grinned at me again, like a badly-healed wound slowly reopening. “Your doing. You live, the Tree fails. Live much longer, kill too many more of its Hunters, the Tree dies.”

  And more than that I could not get out of him, except for occasional bursts of anger at the very existence of this Tree. He kept blaming Master Krelim, gone decades before my time at that place, but greatly revered in my youth, almost as a saint. “The bow is not enough,” he told me. “They will come at you too fast, you must have a sword.” He offered me his own: a classic Corcorua two-hander, a true prize, which he seemed barely able to lift himself. I declined, checking to make certain that my trimoira dagger was still properly sharp and well-balanced, while hoping earnestly that I would never need to throw it.

  When Brother Laska finally said, “We will go now,” I hooked the bow across my left shoulder. It felt good there, like a friend’s arm around me.

  “From this time we say nothin
g,” Brother Laska said when we emerged into the darkness. “Follow me closely—must not lose each other. It is very hard to find, that Tree, you must stay close to me.” Indeed, I could barely see him. He put his hand on my arm and confided, in a whistling whisper, “I got lost, you know, that first time I went alone looking for that Tree. I never found my way back.” He winked, which was a strangely frightening sight: that one eye slowly closing by itself in that melting candle of a face, and then suddenly popping open again, like some kind of quick little animal or insect. He said again, “Do not lose me.”

  I expected that he would lead me in the general direction of the marshes; but in fact we went the opposite way, crossing the path toward the stable, but then veering sharply to the left and working uphill into country I had never really known when I lived in that place. The hills were rustly-dry in all seasons, pocked with dangerous holes and ruts in which one might easily break an ankle—especially on a moonless night—and there were always rumors among the apprentices that lourijakhs prowled there by night; though what they would have found to live on, I cannot imagine. There may have been some scratch of a path, but I never saw it, not in this darkness, and not under the drifts of sima leaves, so long dead as to be colorless and make no sound underfoot. I held onto Brother Laska’s shoulder, somewhat gingerly, because he had brought the great Corcorua sword with him, slinging it down his back, scabbardless. If he tipped over backward—which he very well might, on this ground—that monster would be bound to slice one or the other of us.

  I heard birds: tarshis, the only nightbird you will find this far southeast. They make a high, grunting sound, like a sleeper turning in bed, not loud, but persistent. Once they start they’ll keep it up all night, just at the edge of your ear. I still thought I was hearing them when Brother Laska suddenly stopped and hissed, “Listen!” The Corcorua sword banged my nose.

  It took a moment, but I heard them.

  Voices. I could not say how many—several, certainly, but it was a murmur, not the rumble of a large crowd. And there was firelight; and one song rising out of the murmur and above it, high and clear and quite distinct, though the words were in no language I knew. But I recognized immediately the voice of Master Caldrea.

  He was as much chanting as singing: a curiously angular, slippery melody that kept sliding sideways, changing pitch each time; almost repetitious but never entirely so. After a time it began to hurt my ears and hurt my mind as well, though I know there’s no explaining that. Beside me, Brother Laska muttered, “There, there, do you see what they do? Do you see them now?”

  “I hear them,” I said, “but I see nothing. I need to get closer.”

  “He calls to it. Calls the Tree.” Brother Laska’s voice was flat and low. I crawled forward, using my elbows and my feet to push the rest of me along, until I got a good look at the scene taking place a mere hundred feet or so ahead—and at the Tree. It stood alone in a clearing: not as tall as I had vaguely imagined it, but seeming as massive as a cathedral, its many broad, low branches decked prominently with long, wicked black thorns. Its bark and leaves were of the same deep, deep red; but its roots, bulking up out of the ground like a countryman’s great swollen knuckles, were as black as those thorns, and looked somehow as dangerous. A group of monks—no more than eight or ten—stood in a ring around the Tree, but the only one speaking now—still chanting, rather—was Master Caldrea. He stood a little way back from the others, beside a small fire whose flames made his face seem constantly to leap out of the darkness and then recede, like the retreat of a wave.

  Brother Laska nodded jerkily, like a puppet, pointing ahead. “The branches. See the branches!”

  You have seen how, in the spring, caterpillars will eat their way through thousands of leaves, until one morning there is no caterpillar—only a chrysalis or a cocoon dangling from a twig, a flower stalk, a wall? So it was with that strange and terrible tree: I counted nine such chrysalides—all an unpleasant greenish-yellow, all man-sized, each suspended from a black thorn, and each beginning to ripple and shudder as I stared, as something inside each one fought to break free. Their struggles grew more intense as Master Caldrea’s chanting heightened and rose in pitch. One chrysalis was just starting to split at the top.

  Beside me, Brother Laska moaned, “Master Krelim…I was small, I followed him everywhere.” I remembered once hearing that Brother Laska had been brought to that place as an infant, though I never learned any more detail than that. His voice was like a hot, wet wind in my ear. “I followed him—I was there when he found the Tree. He knew magic, old magic from old times, he knew how to wake deep, old, angry things. He sang, he woke up the Tree, he said to it, we have enemies, we need protection, you must create defenders for us. So the Tree makes the Hunters—it bears them like fruit, do you understand? Apples…plums…pomegranates…Hunters, so. Do you understand?”

  I nodded, unable to take my eyes from that one chrysalis, opening so slowly. Beside me, Brother Laska mumbled, “Nine for you, what an honor! Nine Hunters called for only one man.”

  “Eight,” I said. The chrysalis had cracked almost halfway down the side. I saw a hand emerge, and then a face, still shadowed by the branch just above it. I fitted an arrow to my bow, whispered what I do at such times, and fired. The shaft sank to the feathers just below the opening, and a body tumbled through, splitting the chrysalis the rest of the way. The Hunter fell directly at Master Caldrea’s feet, dead before he was born, and the singing stopped.

  I had three more arrows in the air as the monks turned and saw me and Brother Laska—who promptly ducked down into a hollow. They uttered a massed cry of rage and sorrow and started to rush toward us, but Master Caldrea shouted. “No! Back, and leave him to me!”

  He whirled to face the Tree, chanted several phrases that would have broken my throat to repeat. Every one of the remaining chrysalides cracked wide open at once. Five Hunters leaped to the ground, all landing as lightly as cats, but three remained within their fleshy wombs, already dead or dying, pierced through by my arrows. One of the Hunters, apparently the destined partner of the first I had killed, bent briefly over the body. He looked up at me with his mouth open in a silent scream, and raced in my direction. I aimed for the heart; but the dim light and his speed threw off my aim. My arrow took him in the throat instead, and he died choking on his own blood.

  Then they were on me, all the rest of them. I dropped the bow and shrugged free of the quiver, but never had a chance to get the trimoira out, nor did they even bother to snatch it from my belt. I fully expected to die on the spot at their hands; but Master Caldrea roared orders, and, like the monks in the stable, they pressed close around me, glaring and grinning, their light eyes brilliant with such hatred as I’ve never seen again, nor ever expect to see. Seizing me by shoulders, hair, and arms, they brought me to Master Caldrea where he stood by the Tree, and he smiled at me with the bright clarity of madness. He said, “Welcome, Soukyan. Welcome to your great destiny.”

  “I would have been here much later,” I answered him, “if I had recognized your invitation. My most sincere apologies.”

  Master Caldrea actually laughed outright, though no one else in the clearing did. “Yes, yes, more than accepted. You are without a doubt the most important person here tonight—the Tree is happy to see you.” He swung out an arm, gesturing toward the Tree, as though he were introducing us. “He is come,” he said to the Tree, crooning, confiding. “I said he would come. The wait is ended.”

  Standing this close to it, surrounded by Hunters, their hands on me, I noticed—as I could not have done from a distance—that, for all its apparent burly vastness, there was also a strange air of instability about the Tree, hard to depict even now. The night breeze stirred its branches more easily than it should have; paradoxically, the dark-red leaves drooped wearily, hardly responding at all; and only the great knuckly roots seemed truly alive, thrusting up defiantly to support and shelter the oddly fragile-seeming trunk. Further, for all the speed with whi
ch they had overcome me, and for all the strength of their hands on me, these Hunters also felt somehow not right, any more than seeing four of them at once felt right. I could not have said what alerted me to the difference; but I knew that Master Caldrea knew it too. I could see that knowledge in his bright, bright eyes.

  “You have hurt the Tree,” he said, not accusingly, but in a casual, conversational manner. “The more Hunters you killed, the more the Tree had to produce—it is like asking a wheatfield for two and three crops a year, a sheep to be ready for shearing every week or two. Even our House is not what it was, as you have noticed, for we bled as best we could, trying to sustain it against privation. This is your doing, Soukyan, year on year.” He gripped my wrists and squeezed hard, still smiling, just as though he were welcoming me to his home.

  “You do me too much honor,” I replied. “I have only done what I could. And I am not finished yet.” I was sure I was going to die, and young enough yet to wish to leave on some note of bravado. Silliness.

  Master Caldrea smiled affectionately. “No, indeed, you are far from finished yet. I envy you.” Without turning, he beckoned, and from the circle of monks on the far side of the Tree, the third Hunter came to stand beside me like some kind of shadow brother. He even leaned on my shoulder, gripped the back of my neck lightly, and whispered in my ear, “Soon…soon. All well now.”

  Then the grip tightened, tightened hard, and Master Caldrea strode forward and tore my shirt open to the navel. He had a small silver knife in his hand.

  No divided tip here: this one came to a single point, with a channel on both sides of the blade, to lead the blood away. Master Caldrea employed it as an artist does his brush—or a seamstress her needle, for the matter of that. It was fine, delicate work, centered over my heart, and it took a long time. None of the cuts were at all deep—you would not be able to see them today, save that the third Hunter then poured a thin gray-green liquid, which vanished as it touched the skin over my chest. As the Hunter did this, Master Caldrea began to sing, but not as he had done before. The melody was as simple as a child’s counting rhyme, and as adhesive. I could sing it for you today, but I have never met anyone who could recite the words, or tell me what they meant.