There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  The boy glided easily off the end of a prodigious root that swept down into the Square and dove to the earth, Dob after him. They landed amid a group of Daerian migrants, a family caught at the gates of the outer wall or some other smuggler's ingress without a writ of entry and thrown into the Midden as a cruel form of amusement. Arnem marveled at the cryptic swirls and geometries of their tattoos and bodypaint–grasping to understand the significance of what bore chronicling forever on the flesh and what did not–even as they withdrew from the sudden apparition of Dob. The father whispered words of caution to his daughters, then to his wife, a fierce-eyed woman who chastised him for minding them like sheep. Or so Arnem supposed. He did not speak their language, a fluid and intermingling tongue that sounded to have come from the deepest of deep woodlands and hills. The foreigners hurried on, seeking the source of the smell of stale bread at a nearby stall.

  "I wonder what their homeland is like," he said to Dob, not much louder than a whisper, and the beast looked up at him as if about to tell him. "Why they would come here, when all I ever try to do is get out. What's it that Oren says? 'People have their ways. Don't mind them, and they won't take care to mind you.' Good enough for us, eh?"

  Those crowding the market managed to make way for the shaggy mound that was Dob and nothing else, then fell afoul of one another by gawking at the boy leading the beast. There were many who knew of him, if they did not know him; but for Arnem they had come to be as faded and old as the stone around them. So many had come to the Midden in recent months, many of them exiled from the tiers above to spend their days in the ignominy and miserable hardship of what their former ilk referred to as The Lows. The frail remainders of their number were comprised of Urakeen and Daerian alike and in from a countryside seemingly replete with abandoned hamlets and villages. The boy ignored the rumor this conjured in him, that perhaps nothing remained without the walls to engender another kind of life.

  Arnem craned his neck and darted his eyes as if in search of more familiar and thus more comforting sights, to say the least of those he had learned to fear. He tried in vain to catch sight of his cousin, Verem, or the other Stormcrows and so hopefully one of his friends. It was relief enough to not have spied any of the other streetgangs and one in particular: the Crowbills, whose territory abutted the Stormcrows' and whose lieutenant, Qurzin, knew Arnem better than the boy liked. The Midden was a fecund place for more than just the earth. Wars and skirmishes between its many gangs were as common as the rain in spring and, if one or the other of the belligerents got hold of the relics with which the Midden's ruins were laden, dangerously bloody. Arnem breathed a little easier knowing that the Square was, for the moment, left to less recriminating stock.

  There were the usual vendors, those whose wares benefited the most from the rations and marketdays of the upper tiers and which Arnem's hands knew well; but today, he decided, was no day for filching. Business was afoot. His attentions remained steadfast on the archway that loomed at the Square’s far side and thus the tree-ensconced way to Tulzkr Street. He had no fear of pickpockets of his own as he weaved through the crowds , pickpockets having no love for empty sackcloth or mangy beasts. Indeed the only pockets amid the marketgoers that he watched for were the wide berths given to those whose skin was overcome with such pallor that they appeared smothered in ash, their eyes bloodshot marbles in the white. And so Arnem would have thought if not for the sweat standing out on every part of them. The faded monotony of their skin was broken only by the flushed splotches of red that truly gave the sickness its name: the Embers.

  No one that the boy had asked knew much about the plague, except enough to piece together that the afflicted in the market were those still well enough to stumble and breathe. They were hard put to even that. Some begged, others tried to give what they still had in barter for food they could not keep down. Shambling ghouls of dense rags, trying to stave off the terrible cold they felt despite the fire burning them up from inside.

  Part of him was glad to see them, the part that did not try to keep them as far removed as everyone else did in Marskol. Their presence meant that the uninfected hadn't begun to do the work of the sickness. The boy had seen it before. Family and loved ones, overcome with fever or boils or seizures, sealed away and interred as the already dead; friends driven away from the doors of those they trusted. If it got much worse—and it always did—anyone suspected of coming down with the Embers would be forced from sight by a hail of curses and hurled junk.

  Those healthy or lucky enough to survive always moved on with clean spirits. The plague of the day ended, its dead were burned, and the memory of the terrible time drifted away on the smoke and ash. The Midden forgot and lived in its bliss. But Arnem remembered. He always found the dead where they'd gone to die. They trafficked the same places as he. The boy tried to forget the faces of last year's lost and abandoned places, where only the damned are welcomed. Seeing them in Marskol Square, he tried to forget the faces that he would soon see again and shut them out of his waking eyes.

  A dense jam of people ahead, objects of barter teetering in their arms, blocked the way to Tulzkr Street. He tried to slip around them, but they closed ranks as if the collective parts of an unconscious organism, thinking him a thief or worse: someone trying to cut in line. Frustrated, he gave silent command to Dob. The beast used his weight as a soft ram to push through, but the boy immediately wished he hadn't and that the walls of rags and pale, grimy flesh would close again.

  A man stood rigid and motionless in the complete grasp of ichorous tendrils, ruddy with the color of a person's insides, while his children looked on in sad horror. An armful of goods lay beside him, stacked neatly, and were perused from afar by the manifold sight of the thing arresting him. Arnem soon settled into an easy calm that gave way to boyish excitement.

  "An uroch," he said to Dob, who looked up at him expectantly. "How do they keep getting inside?"

  Its dozen eyes, set deep into a chitinous head that was broad like an arrow's, studied the miscellany of what looked to Arn like family treasures or the loot of some raid into a neighbor's property. He hoped that neighbor, if there was a neighbor, died peaceably or fled or anything else but came under someone's greedy knife. The uroch picked through them with its long and bony fingers, at the ends of many long and bony arms. Its dusky skin ate the light wherever the tattered shift hung loose and ridiculous from its spidery frame, an affectation to keep the Middeners at ease. As with most affectations, the gesture only accentuated what it was to dispel.

  The tendrils let go, leaving behind a viscous film upon the man’s flesh, and he ended their unspoken concourse with a nod. He was like so many others waiting to be graced with the uroch's touch: hunched in a dirty patchwork of rags, bald eyes darting from behind a veil of mangy hair. Only when he bent down, to take from the stack what the uroch wanted, Arnem saw that he did so with only one arm. The boy wanted at that moment to run forward and kick the treasures away and give the uroch something else, something of his own instead of what little this family possessed. But he had nothing of his own. Just a hollow that grew in moments like these.

  A spread of items—an amulet, some old and tarnished rings, a gold pictureframe emptied of its contents—was laid before and picked over by the uroch. In return, it produced from beneath its rags a small and dully shining lump of a substance that was the color of amber but the consistency of dried sap. The man took it greedily, eyeing those around him with care and challenge, then gathered his children with his one arm and marched them off. Arnem wondered how far he would make it and how long he would last. If the uroch ran out, which the creatures often did, and anyone waiting with the man knew him, he would surely not last the night. Arnem did not know why, but the resin was given the highest price by those who desired it. Too often it was paid in blood.

  The boy sped through the hole that the father had made in the surrounding crowd, already closing up again, and spilled out into the road beyond as if from the tides of a fetid sea
. The lofty ruin of the arch, one of four that demarcated the beginnings of Marskol Square and the ends of the streets that led to it, loomed behind. Arnem contemplated briefly the cracked and worn figures anciently carved into the pillars and trestle. Time–and all the horrors time had witnessed occur in the Midden–had reduced their countenances to random knurls and cuts. Nothing-faces of nothing-men and nothing-things. The Square was a holy place once, ornamented and venerated. Everywhere in the Midden seemed a holy place once. The boy looked into the pallid faces which stuffed its expanse now, he looked at himself, and wondered how they all did not go mad together living as the ghosts of another people's city.

  "Good to be out of that mess," he said and Dob looked up at him, tongue lolling and panting.

  But the boy did not quite believe himself. A hush descended onto the cold camp of the air. Quiet gloom enfolded and separated them from the desperate press of commerce at their backs as wholly as if a veil had descended there. The road that led west to Tulzkr Street waited in dismal patience. An hour more, with market ending and ne'er-do-well's waking, the streets would become rivers of a different kind than sewage. The Midden would live again, briefly, and whoever those dullard watchmen posted to guard the bodies of the slain in the viaduct would get bored if they had not already. There was time, but too little of it.

  "We better get going," Arnem said to Dob. "Quickest way is the straight way, but I don't like it. We’ve seen what happens along the straight way, haven’t we?"

  There were many courts and squares and alcoves in the Midden, nestled amid the tangle of alleys that stemmed from any one of the main roads. Foreign eyes, what few dared or managed to breach the real and imagined walls enrounding Sulidhe's lowest tier, found them intimidating in their winding and circuitous sprawl. But once in the midst of a short jaunt or the start of a day's long journey, the legs began to find the gentle arcs of the byways soothing and the mind easeful to navigate wherever flooding and ruin had not totally undone the city's ancient works.

  In those moments, such a traveler had need of the paths laid by younger hands. These highways had been carved out and mapped, repaired and reoriented as they failed time and time again by enterprising Middeners. They ran through and around even the loftiest desolations and integrated the parasitic communities that were grafted onto them, strewn awkwardly wherever they would fit like cobwebs of soot and wood and grime. Arnem knew the routes of this second city better even than those of the first, for all their planned sensibility. Through them there was nowhere in the Midden that the boy could not get, and by them Tulzkr Street was not far. For all that the Midden rotted as it breathed—stilted villages collapsing, new ones thrown up elsewhere, walkways and ascents built and dismantled sometimes in the same day—he launched himself into the snarl of its arteries eagerly.

  Dob, by way of his great claws, was never far behind and the boy did not lead him where his girth could not follow. They climbed hastily lashed-together ladders and slunk through rifts in the faces of ancient gods and kings. They scrambled down rickety stairs bolted straight into the lofty galleries of dusty halls and sped past the squatters and families that resided in their bowels to get to the streets on the other side. Finally, a series of overgrown lanes and descents through the upper caves of abandoned dwellings led Arnem within earshot of rushing water. Like the needle of a compass, he followed the sound to the canal.

  His chosen vantage was the crumbling balcony of a ruin so decayed and near to foundational collapse that not even the Midden's endless squatters dared inhabit it. Apart from the dirty rush and tumble of the canal, there were only the steady fall of rain and the murmur of softly growing things.

  Arnem saw no sign of the thugs that the Provost's men claimed to have hired or the body they were hired to guard. Not even Tulzkr Street, what little of it the boy could see beyond where it bridged the canal, squirmed with any sign of life. He spied the drainage trough that emptied into it and that the watchmen spoke of, one of hundreds that spiraled and trundled through the Midden like hidden capillaries. It was empty but for the water and waste that had lately flooded its bounds. The sight evoked the many who would later draw on it somewhere along its current, to boil for ingestion or washing. The boy fought away a turn in his stomach.

  Dob huffed, and Arnem looked where he looked. The corpse was beating dumb and persistent against the bars of the culvert beneath the bridge, obscured by the shadows weaving through the iron. Its shape was all he could make sense of; but the stench of it fought above even the sewage and muck, the leavings of the receded flood on the canal’s stone walks. That told him enough.

  "Can you smell anything else?" Arnem asked Dob, covering his nose and mouth with the ragged hem of his shirt that did not smell much better. Dob looked at him with pained concentration, and the boy nodded. "Thought not. These bodies stink worse than you.”

  Arnem vaulted over the broken balustrade of the balcony and onto the vines that slithered down the remains of the structure’s facade. Dob leapt straight from the edge, down onto the lip of the canal, and was waiting for him below when he finished his descent. Their bold appearance went unnoticed by the silent doorways and overgrown casements of the empty buildings. The boy let out a sigh and relaxed his guard, letting the nature of that forgotten court fill him up. Only the absence of the sun left him wanting, locked away behind the clouds, and the plants that were everywhere grew twisted and angry in their spite.

  Arnem crossed quickly to the edge of the river of shit and into the shadow of the bridge. Dob trotted close behind and then drew away to patrol a tight perimeter around the boy. A ragged corpse—sagging out of its threadbare clothing, so mutilated that it had lost all definition—tried in vain to flow with the water downstream and toward the black forests to which all the Midden's waste was destined. Tulzkr Street was hard by the creeping pale of that dense woodland, encroaching all the time upon the parts of it that were still settled.

  Arnem shuddered. He hoped none of his paths would ever lead there; but every journey in the Midden seemed destined for the tight gloom under the boughs of the withered trees. Should the rains let up, and the level of the canal sink, the corpse would wind away into the embrace of the Druidic Cults that haunted the forests and be lost to him. They, who waited in grim anticipation of the day that the earth swallowed everything, welcomed the inert dead. There was no better vessel for rehabitation.

  Arnem cast about for something to fish out the body when a gloved hand shot out from the shadows beneath the bridge, clamping over his mouth. Taut limbs pulled him inside. Wet, overused leather filled his nostrils. Dob barked and snarled and scrabbled across the rough stone to find his master. Arn screamed through the fingers that caged his lips and flailed in all the ways a boy might damage a man. At last he laid into some part of him with his elbow that took the breath from his attacker. Whoever it was still struggled to get his breath back as the boy spilled from the shadows and back into the light. A burst of familiar laughter followed that he thought would burst the man's lungs who gave it voice. The look of confusion stayed on his face until the dark-haired rogue stumbled forth into view, bent over onto his knees with the breathless peal still rolling out of him. If he did not know him by his tailored leathers and the pale glint of rings on his fingers, the boy knew that laugh.

  “Verem!” Arnem beat his fists against his cousin’s broad chest, an assault which had only just started to hurt in the past couple years. Little Arnem, he was growing up.

  “You're a ripe old fool, Arnem," his only kin said to him. “Do you know that? For the last time: Tell me when you're hopping down to our little shithole and I'll see to your keeping.”

  “I don't need keeping.”

  “Alright then!” He tousled the boy's hair. “I'll just let you handle it when next someone snatches you up–assuming you're out to be a catamite of the lowest kind.”

  “Shut up,” Arn said to laughter and shoved his cousin's hand away.

  “And besides, what's brought you down here
? Ain't you been told by that Provost not to bother with us Middeners?”

  "I am a Middener, same as you."

  "Well I wouldn't go telling him that." Verem withdrew a long, curving knife from his belt and began to pare his nails, then stopped. He pointed at the boy with the blade. "Does he know you're down here?"

  "You'd know better than me," Arn said and knelt at the edge of the canal, studying the shredded corpse still bobbing against the culvert. "His goons are on their way back to fish this out, so we need to hurry."

  "Hurry? Goons?" Verem leaned against the bridge and resumed cleaning the dirt from under his nails. "Do explain yourself, little cousin.”

  "The Provost's men," Arnem said, looking back at him over his shoulder. The dagger was prettier than his last one, ornate with serpentine stylizations worked in brass and faded script along the blade. Stolen, the boy presumed at once. "They posted you here, I overheard them."

  A rough bark of laughter escaped Verem's teeth. "Whoever do you think posts me? The watchmen threw some silvershot at a couple waifs, said 'you'll get the rest later', and left. When the goons, so-called, were gone and out of sight, the kids kicked the body back into the drainage trough and bolted once they were sure it wouldn’t clog again. I don't blame them for going and getting a crust of bread instead of kicking about. Poor things were scrawnier than you."

  "I'm not scrawny!"

  Verem ignored him. "As for myself, I knew you'd not be far behind. You're the only person in this shithole that pipes up at the telling of mangled corpses. But I ain't in the business of minds. I shall reserve judgment."