The Last Green Tree

by Jim Grimsley

  Jessex was too cautious to look her in the eye. “Now it’s you who sound as if you know who I am.”

  She snorted, laying her tea pouch onto the paper cover from which she had torn it. “Who does not know Great Irion? Who has not heard the name?”

  “Now you’re making fun of me.”

  “Quite right. At least you still have sense of humor enough to recognize it.”

  He studied the fire, added a bit of wood, said a Word to guard the flame from wind, which blew strong.

  “Go ahead, drink your tea. It’s a fair blend. Scuppling, you call it?”

  “Yes. A mix of green mint and redberry. From near where the marshes run up to the mountains, in Karnes.”

  She looked up at the bright sky, which had started to fade, running her fingertips along Coromey’s tufted eartips. “Dusk. We’ll have a spell of night, now.”

  “Why such long days and nights?”

  She spoke more sharply; her voice had changed, but now he recognized it. He had called her Commyna when she was his teacher. What her real name might be he had no idea. “The scale suits us, that’s all. Surely you don’t think you’re in real time, in a real country.”

  He shook his head. “No. Or else I’d have been frantic.”

  “Why? Because we’ve kept you waiting so long?”

  “You haven’t kept me waiting.”

  “Then what did you mean?”

  How long had it been since anyone spoke to him so sharply? Since he had to bear it? His pride ached, but there was something necessary about it. “In real time, I don’t have days to spend preparing. I have hours.”

  She sipped from her tea as the sky darkened. After a while, she said, in her driest tone, “Once upon a time you were a very modest child.”

  He flushed. “If I’m less modest now, maybe it’s because I’ve been left on my own too long.”

  “Long? What is it? Three millennia? Not even. And you already feel sorry for yourself.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for myself.”

  She mocked his tone of before. “You have hours. Really, Jessex.”

  “It’s true.”

  She blew out a breath, derisive. “When were you ever given less time than you needed to do what you have to do? It would seem to me you’ve often taken a good deal of time you might have done without.”

  “You mean the long sleep. That’s very cruel. As if it were my fault I slept a century.”

  “Well, if it wasn’t your fault, it was certainly your choice. Never mind,” she held up her hand. “That’s ancient history.”

  “It was the first war you got me involved with, in fact.”

  “I got you involved?”

  “Who else?”

  She stared at him, and he felt a warm glow in the pit of his stomach. “You have the cheek to sit there—well. We’ll see about that.” She sipped her tea and said nothing at all.

  For a long while, under the stars that glittered, a moonless night, scattered flights of cloud, they sat together around the fire. He added wood when the fire burned low; he used most of his stock to make it bright and cheery. “So I suppose you blame us for this current disaster.” She spat the words.

  “I don’t blame anyone. But this is more than I can cope with on my own.”

  She gave no reaction except to hold her cup in both hands near the fire.

  “You know I’m right,” he said. “This creature is another one of her kind.”

  Thin scowled. She drew down the wrap from her head and showed her dark hair, piled in a bun behind, wrapped with pearls. Her ears were covered with fine chains and precious gems, and her hair was bound in a golden net. Her eyes were gray in the firelight, though at times another color pulsed through them. “Creature. Her kind.” She nearly spat. “What kind of language is this?”

  “You know what I mean. If YY is a god, then so is this one. Whatever she is, this is another.”

  “She is the mother of your kind. That is what she is. She is the one who made you what you are.”

  “Does that make her a god?”

  Thin’s face darkened to a deep scowl. “Careful, boy.”

  How long since anyone called him “boy”?

  “I mean the question seriously. I mean no disrespect. But is she a god?”

  “She is herself. Whatever that is, that’s enough for me.”

  “But it wasn’t always,” Jessex said.

  She glared at him, as behind her head a puff of snow swirled in a twist of wind.

  The fire crackled and he added more wood. “You rebelled. You betrayed her. You told me so.”

  She turned down her empty cup and looked at him. He fetched more clean snow and made water of it, heated the cup in his hand, gave it her with a fresh pouch of scuppling. She dropped the pouch into the water. “I do like these Hormling friends of yours. They have the most ingenious ways of packaging things.”

  “They’re very clever.”

  “Cleverer than we?”

  “The Erejhen? Or you?”

  “The Erejhen. No one is cleverer than my Sisters.”

  “No. I suppose not. There are so many of the Hormling, it’s astonishing to contemplate. But we Erejhen hold our own.”

  “Then how does it come about they’ve made you doubt yourself?”

  “Myself? No. It’s God. It’s she.”

  “But how can you have any doubt when you’ve seen her?”

  “I don’t doubt she’s real. I doubt what she is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think she’s a god at all. I think she’s something very old, left over from an ancient race of people like the Hormling, but much older and much more advanced.”

  Thin smiled, swirled the water in the cup, pulled out the pouch and sipped. “Suppose that’s true. How is that not God?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Given who she is. Given what she can do.”

  “God should be more than that—God should be—” The thought felt as if it ought to be clear, until the time came to utter it.

  “God should be God,” Thin said. “Of course. And to most people she is. But to her priests? To you?” She shook her head. “The priest has to explain God to people whom God hurts. The priest has to explain God to herself. The mage has to move God’s power in Words. God can come to seem quite commonplace to her servants.”

  He was gritting his teeth, flushed. “But we could learn the truth about her, about everything we do if we only studied ourselves—”

  “What do you hope we would learn?”

  “Her nature. The nature of Words.”

  She smiled at him very gently. “You really have come just in time, I think.”

  “What? You were expecting me?”

  She sat there looking pleased with herself. The statement might be true; on the other hand, she might simply like to have it appear so. “I’ll take you to Chulion. My Sisters will be happy to see you, in their way.”

  “Will you?”

  She looked in his eyes. She had always been the hardest of the three, the most exacting, but also the most tender. “I already am, child. In my way.” She stroked Coromey’s long neck, and the cat-hound’s purr was audible in the stillness. For a moment there was not a breath of wind and the sky was completely clear, studded with glitter like a jeweler’s vault. She stood. He packed his things. The fire burned low and winked out. Pulling the wrap over her hair again, she began to walk. He followed, covering himself with a cloth the Sisters had given him a long time ago. Coromey stretched on his back, fanned his front paws out, showing his claws, then leapt to all fours and trotted after them, wet tongue licking the top of the snow.

  2.

  They walked along the top of the glacier after climbing a long, criss-crossing stair of ice that appeared in the ice wall as naturally as if it had always been right there, not even a full kilomeasure from the cave. They were headed across the waves of snow along the top of the ice, traveling in a clear night, the wind strong
sometimes but never so much so that their walk was impeded.

  “What is the nature of a Word?’ she asked after a while. “Is it here, or not?”

  “Here?”

  “Yes. And now. Here and now. A thing must always be both, though not necessarily at the same time.”

  “Is a word here. Or do you mean, a Word?”

  They were speaking Wyyvisar, the language she had helped to teach him long ago; parts of conversational Wyyvisar had merged into the formal language of literary Erejhen. The distinction between “word” and “Word” was unmistakable.

  “I believe you know the answer to that question.”

  “No. A Word is not here.”

  “Then where is it?”

  “Beyond. Always.” In the logic of Wyyvisar, this conclusion was inescapable.

  “Exactly. Then why do you doubt my Sister? Because she is my Sister?”

  “No, not—”

  The wind blew up gusts like ice fire in their faces, and even through their cloaks they were cold. Long ago she had taught him how to live with cold, what to do with the feeling, how to keep the body warm enough, on walks like this one, though not so deep in the mountains.

  “You mean, do I doubt that she’s God because I’ve seen her? Do I doubt that she’s God because she has a story?”

  She was watching him for a moment, snow blowing up from the drifts. Everywhere, on every side, white waves of snow lined the landscape to the horizon. They walked on for a long time, his fingers playing in Coromey’s fur. The cat-hound stepped steadily as if there were no wind blowing, no whipped-up flurries and fogs of snow.

  “Suppose it’s true, suppose I do doubt her because she has a story. It might help to know what the story is. You see?”

  “Do you think a question as big as that can be answered? Your head could not contain the answer. No, you want to ask something much simpler, I think.”

  “Leaving out the size of my head—”

  She gestured to him impatiently, as if he were still the gangly boy by the lake, as if he were still fresh off the farm. The thought might have made him angry but instead it made him laugh, and an instant later he realized it might as well be true, he might as well still be that child. That boy had felt clean and new like this.

  “You want to ask me whether she is the leavings of some wise old ancient race of beings. You want to ask me whether she is one of the First of this universe, one of the Primes. You want me to tell you whether who she is and the Words she inhabits are gifts that can be explained.”

  She went on. “I can answer part of the question. The creatures you describe do exist and this Rao who has come to visit you is one of them. We call them Primes because of their knowledge; some of them are individuals and some are not and some are neither-nor. But God is not any kind of First. God is God.”

  “How can I know for sure?”

  “Is a Word here?” she asked.

  “Tell me what you mean.”

  “If the Universe dies, do Words die with it? Do Numbers die with it?”

  When he tried to ask another question, she shook her head, rearranged the wrap to hide most of her face, and led him forward into the snow.

  3.

  In his childhood memory of traveling to Chulion, there was only the fortress, an impression of a flight over tall towers, high walls, a forbidding reach of mountain—fleeting glimpses, since he was supposed to have been asleep and had only barely managed any sense of where he was.

  Even now, knowing what he knew of Words, he had no way to fly. Today, crossing the ice, Thin had shown no signs of helping the crossing to go faster.

  Around Chulion was a city. They arrived in it down another long flight of steps that led to a crowded market, the settlement carved into a crevasse between the glacier and the mountain. “The house is buried beneath the glacier,” she said. “We’ll climb down through the steps.”

  “In the ice?”

  “Yes. You’ll be fine, but you’ll have to help your animal to manage.”

  The market was tiers of stone platforms and colonnades, some open to the sky, some under cloth roofs fastened to the side of the mountain tight as sails on a ship. He saw Orloc and Untherverthen, Smiths and women from Svyssn. A few of the stalls looked as if there were Anin or Erejhen working the merchandise: cloths and foodstuffs, craft work, saddles, bridles, clothing, even some Hormling gadgets. A few working forges belched smoke higher along the mountain. He saw no buildings, only the maze of platforms and colonnades.

  “Their houses are below the platforms, in Undertown. This city used to be located at the foot of the gate to Chulion, but when the glacier covered us, we had to move it higher onto the mountain.”

  “Does the city have a name?”

  “Middle of the Mountain,” she said, and she led him through an armory selling weapons and a bazaar for raw gems and then into a public plaza and down a long causeway. This led, eventually, to a stair leading down through the glacier. Light glowed softly from the steps, hundreds of them, carved of ice. Jessex followed the Sister and helped Coromey, who whimpered a bit at the slick surface.

  For a while there were cross tunnels leading to the residential quarters of the city, but soon enough there was no more traffic, only a bit of breeze coming up the steps. They climbed down, and down.

  “Here we are,” she said, stepping through an arch into an open courtyard, and there, suddenly, was the night sky.

  They were in another pocket not filled by the glacier, a cove of the mountain from which rose a sheer, vertical fortress, walls of fitted stone in the Orloc style rising high, partly hiding the taller towers beyond them. The wall of ice that the stone barrier faced was far taller and higher still, casting a deep shadow over the vale. Gloomy firepots lit the walls, and some of the tower windows gave off a dim glow. Torches lit a causeway from the broken flank of the mountain up to the gate of Chulion, and he followed her toward it in the dark; behind them the road descended, broken by the ice. Maybe the ruined city lay that way, where the road had once led.

  “When did the glacier come?”

  “Over the last two thousand years, give or take.”

  “Might you not have stopped it?”

  She had drawn down her head-wrap and turned to him, lips pursed. “Whyever? Easy enough to live with ice. Better to take the world as it comes, sometimes.”

  At the gates stood Orloc guards, spindle-legged, ice-blue, their heads shaped like winter squash. In the lower house, many other Orloc were living, and the rooms were strewn with their worktables, hard benches, straight-backed chairs; in the upper halls, however, there was no one moving, not a soul. “We don’t like visitors, or company, or servants, or any sort of bother with other creatures,” explained Thin, removing her outer wrap altogether, draping it over her arm; a beautiful, shining cloth that was the equal or better of any Erejhen weave. The bright embroidery gleamed. “Though you and your cat-hound are welcome, to be sure.”

  They had crossed two empty levels of the main keep, hollow stone rooms echoing around them, and had ascended a dark wooden stairway into a high-beamed hall that occupied the entire floor of one of the towers. Windows opened on all sides, some looking out on the mountain, some on the ice, all on the night. What a view these windows must have offered before the glacier came! She led him around piers of stone and abutments from the outer walls that carried the weight of the tower upward. The stones were flat-joined in the Orloc fashion rather than round-joined in the Tervan style. Inside would be a metal skeleton to bear the weight of the stone, also in the Orloc style, to allow the tower to soar as high as the peaks.

  At a circle of couches she stopped, near a series of doors that led outside, where a balcony looked onto the sheer blue-gray of the glacier. She opened the doors but seated him on the couches inside. Behind, chimney vanishing into one of the stone piers, a fire burned in a fireplace.

  “How much of this place do you remember?” she asked. “We brought you here when you were a boy.”

&n
bsp; “I remember bits and pieces. It was during a storm.”

  “You were supposed to be asleep but you were not.”

  “I woke up on a stone slab, I think.”

  “We were trying you.”

  “Trying?”

  “With this and that. Trying you. So you don’t remember this room, these couches?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they’re new, anyway. We get new furniture, too, you know. So you wouldn’t remember these couches.” She chuckled, her shoulders shaking. “It was a test, just a bit of a test, but you passed, you did. Would that they were all so easy.”

  “You look old, Sister. Why? You need not.”

  She smiled with one side of her mouth. “How do you know what needs I have and what needs I don’t?”

  “I know you don’t age.”

  “We are in a winter phase, here. We are old.” She cocked her head, touching a jewel at her throat, a dark blue gem, on a thin, glittering chain, held very close to the hollow above her collarbone.

  “Have you built yourselves a true language tower?” he asked, gesturing to the mass of the place that weighed down on his head.

  “You can’t bring yourself to call it by a proper name. You can’t bring yourself to say ‘wizard’s tower.’”

  “My name for it is very proper. It’s a tower for use of true language.”

  “Which is a silly term you made up yourself. You’ll pay for it, one day. At any rate, no. We have no need for your toys.”

  She found Drii brandy, the smell unmistakable, and poured it into delicate snifters. The couch was warm, though a cold draft blew in through the open doors. Coromey stretched out by the fireplace.

  “Drink,” she said. “It’s from the time of the King, when there was real Drii brandy to be found.”

  “You find the present day stuff to be faulty?”

  “I can’t say I’ve tried it. Why should I?”

  “We live in diminished times,” Jessex said.

  “Surely it can’t be that we agree so well.”

  He inhaled from the snifter, drew in the warm brown. “You had this from Evyynar Ydhiil in the days before the war. How did you keep it so long?”

  “Why would I not use Words for such a worthy preservation?”