There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  “A long, long year it has been,” a voice said that was not unlike tumbling rocks, if those rocks tumbled through the insides of an old and weary tree. Arnem glanced to the door. “Do not worry for your master. A harmless, peaceful sleep binds him tight.”

  “He’s not my master,” Arnem said and, as if to punctuate him, Dob barked. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

  “I am Hjaltimar.” The light at its heart resonated with its words. “I live in the earth.”

  “We won’t trespass in the forest again, I swear. Just go away from me,” the boy said, fighting his fear. “Please.”

  “You are the boy called Arnem?”

  “I’m just a boy.”

  “A boy who holds the Seed.” Arnem became aware of the thing entwining his fingers again and tried to hide the hand from sight. “Whom the seed has chosen.”

  Slowly, the boy brought the seed back into the light and stepped into the light himself. He dug his free hand into Dob's mane in a show of restraining him, but in truth only hoped that the closeness might keep his legs from shaking.

  “Take it,” he said and held the seed out to the thing called Hjaltimar. “If that’s why you’re here. I don’t even know what it’s for, and I’d rather have my friends back anyway." Arnem gritted his teeth against the heat welling in his eyes. "Gifts aren't supposed to cost anything.”

  “I do not know what suffering the giver of this gift authored, but the story is not mine. I am here to protect the bearer of the seed, not rob him.” The light of its core redoubled with the pronouncement. It warmed the boy more than the hottest flame. “I am the bark that shields the Tree, the barb which cuts the Eater, and no harm shall come to you til my light be extinguished.”

  “I don’t need protecting. I don’t even want this,” Arnem said and thrust the seed out toward Hjaltimar. The tendrils clung tighter to him, so that if he tried to throw it he thought they might crush the bone. “You say you don’t know anything about the spirit in the forest or my friends, but you know something. Or else why would you be here? Why did you mean this for me?”

  “None but the Sleeping Father know. And the Sleeping Father does not speak. Those days have passed and have been forgotten. We know what we feel of him and of the earth. There is a seeping wound at the heart of this place. Its chasm seeks to fester and grow until there is only the wound and, at its edges, only pain. It is why a hate fills the Mother now. Once she was called Merciful.”

  Its words lilted as they came to a close and as if the spirit staved off some unbearable exhaustion. The light at the center of the tangle of roots and brambles began to fade, shape and form to unravel until Hjaltimar was reduced again to the indistinct mass from which it had grown.

  “Why did you come if you’re just leaving me with more questions?”

  “To make a greeting,” the fleeting voice said. “And give a warning: Mind yourself. You are welcome among the trees, but not in the Eaters' company. Find solace there, for an hour of pain is coming, and you must beware the servants of the Squid. They will try to capture more than just your heart now.”

  Hjaltimar's light dispersed. The ropy tangle of its roots seeped back into the crevice they had made in the floor. Dob looked to him in confusion before trotting over to the rift. New wood began to close over its ingress, as a wound. Buds sprouted and then flowered. The dog pawed at them, grumbling.

  Chapter Nine

  The Growing Cup Within Us

  The Matron Sohrabaia indulged the hymnal choir. Hands upraised amid the beryl smoke of the censers, burning with dried clumps of moss found only within the seaside caverns of the Urakeen coast, she basked in their cadences. The singers themselves were kept hidden. Their song instead rose up from the vault that obfuscated them, held deep within the monolith that loomed massive behind the Matron. The melodious chants reverberated through vents in the hollow tendrils that weaved down from the darkness of its heights and ensconced her pulpit. The seawater kept in the troughs of their undulations took them and mutated them into a strange sort of song, a groaning dirge uttered from the deepest of the deeps of the world: the voice of Utquod itself. Sohrabaia knew the riddle of the song and the voice, the mystifications of the Church, but she allowed her flock their indiscretions.

  Utquod’s worshipers knelt before the pelagic altar and lost themselves, each in their own way, to their god’s lowing song. Some wept quietly amid the grey and huddled mass. Others wavered with their arms in reaching supplication, eyes closed to everything but the homes in their minds that they made for the god. A few, a devout few, held their hands tight to their breast and clenched everything about themselves in solitudinous prayer. Sohrabaia smiled to look upon them, these believers. There were tears in their eyes that cried out for rain, the kind only she could give. The Matron wanted to look upon them and be there forever, caught in that eternal moment of the holy unspoken. But faith did not subsist on itself. One must nurse it in themselves, in others too. Faith begged contrition—and contrition demanded sacrifice.

  The Matron counted it a shame that the penitent would, all of them, be escorted by her Church-Oppugning to the lifts that led down into that workman degradation called the Tradesmen’s Tier. Their stay was only ever temporary, their rapturous joy only a fleeting freedom from the drudgery of quotas and trade and shipments. All in the name of fulfilling an edict laid down by a clutch of fearful inheritors at the dawn of Sulidhe, enforced forevermore by their pretender-stewards in the Hall of Adjutants. The stymieing effect was such that the innermost cloisters of the Sundered Faith often mused the time was long since come that the Provision of Tiers be revisited. Sohrabaia looked to the men and women whose confidences she would and had yet to gain, those who did not make obeisance to Utquod at the god’s feet, but sat at his knees in mock submission.

  Lounging in primitive recesses along the walls—rough-hewn slabs of a nameless grey-green rock, hauled forth from the deepest trenches along the Urakeen coast—the hard-fought converts from the ranks of Sulidhe’s scholars and faithless bureaucrats. They reposed unseen by the flock in the diminutive uniformity granted by shadow and voluminous robes. Only the ambient light stemming from within the walls divulged them from the outer dark of the transepts. Foreign crystal dredged from the bed of the Descidian Sea, far to the west, fissured the stone in man-made intimation of veins. Their sinuous tracks gave off a diffuse glow as if the cathedral were erected at the bottom of a moonlit cove. Great shapes tumbled indistinctly across the uneven walls, carved to give only the barest suggestion of shape, and played host to the privileged of Utquod’s faithful as if to a colony of insects. They responded in no way to the hymnals, but bent and whispered, dark shapes leaning into one another in perverse unions. Utquod's tendrils did not hold their hearts. The grifting functionaries and attendants to impossibly remote rulers, maggots feasting on the ghost of empire, their presence was an imposition that broached upon conscious impunity. Sohrabaia’s hands tightened into fists. She let them fall when the song ended, before they did worse.

  “Remember this song,” Sohrabaia called out from the altar, from among the embrace of Utquod. “Now is the Season of the God. The deluge cometh again, and we are not without life-giving water: that holy alchymical product of Utquod’s suffering at having been Sundered.”

  A sonorous tide, rapt with the god’s name, echoed back at her.

  “And yet it is in these times, when our world mirrors not at all our condition, that we must remember our convictions. It is in this season, the season of storms, when the rains fall most and fall hardest, that I am reminded of Ulbad, the First Man, and Nej’Ud, the Fruitless Plain, in which He aboded and humankind was reared away from the succor of Giants and rivers and trees.”

  The mass gnashed their teeth and called out in riotous complaint against their denial from paradise. “Our lot may no longer be to dwell at the feet of Sarkoldol, the Living Mount, who nurtured us in the life-giving pools atop His slopes, looking out on the barren desolation of our birthright.
”

  Her flock made the Sign of the Mount, hands interlaced above their bowed heads. A single finger stood erect erect from the peak of their knuckles to symbolize the Tongue That Was Severed, in memory of the greatest crime of the Giants against Man in his infancy.

  “But not every dead place is one foreign to our bodies, our minds and hearts. Turn inward! There is drought enough in you to drink all the seas and lakes of the world and still thirst for more. Like Ulbad, whose thirst could only be slaked by drinking of the pools of Sarkoldol which birthed him, we must turn forevermore to Utquod, whose Salvation is His Water and His Well, to fill the ceaselessly growing cup within us.”

  These last words she meant most for those who were entombed in their capuli in the walls, the stone tumultuous in effigy of their roiling and seabound god. The grovelers at the feet of the Mageblooded, so remote as to be nonexistent, slaked their varied thirsts at pools that could never satisfy the maws chewing in their breasts and were as far removed from Utquod as the sun is to the darkness under the earth. Dens in the Midden, where dignities are traded for the precious sum of food for tomorrow; pleasures from beyond the horizon that none but those who sleep upon silks ever tasted; and demon-haunted temples where masses swayed amid the mists of green fires, ravings in tongues that the uninitiated listener held little desire to understand. These were not the ways of Utquod, whose love was ever-flowing from the song of the sea at evening tide. The well-appointed thralls of the Mageblooded did not hear its melodies. But in time, Sohrabaia promised herself, they would sing the song themselves.

  “Now,” the Matron breathed, echoed into the highest heights of the cathedral, “go back, as the sea does come the morn. Roll back into the grottoes and hollows in which you dwell til the eve. Now is the neap tide. Contemplate the wells within you and within your dwellingplace, then spring forth anew.”

  Her flock rose like stones thrown by the coursing of a river and became aware of themselves again, no longer held in the perfect sublimity that was Utquod. They saw the stains of their craft on their bodies and aprons and clothes—soot and sawdust and pigs’ blood—and the weight of it all fell across their shoulders so that they slunk to the huge doors at the far end of the narthex. The stone gateway, worked so ornately that their faces were thought to have been carved by the secret tides of Utquod’s dreaming, ground open by way of hidden machinations. The obscure chaotic forms graven on the gates, languishing in deepest seas, seemed to peer through every part of them as they departed. The grey people of the lower tiers filtered out into the wide halls of the atrium, where the Church-Oppugning already waited in a column before the outer doors to lead them away. The recesses in the walls where dwelt the dwellers of the Hall of Adjutants were already emptied, and Sohrabaia sneered at their emptiness.

  “Time,” she snarled to herself. “Only time.”

  The Matron did not close the tome that sat open upon the altar, nor did she disturb the other devices of her raiment. Not the staff from which dangled dead, dried ends of tendrils, not the mirror that stared back at her and which only ever showed the single eye of a being that could not be countenanced. Sohrabaia had no need of these things, beyond to display them as emblems of her peremptory office. She let them lay where they lie and descended the long and narrow stair that wound down and away from her place at the altar, passing between the fluted pillars that upheld it.

  The dank and the cold announced the presence of the second stair before she rounded the next turn of the first and came to stand at its threshold, a soft and unassuming darkness. Sohrabaia descended, having no need to see, having gone this way many times before. She reveled in the obscene power that leaned from without onto the walls of the passage, not so much wider than her shoulders. She breathed in the air with sharp gusts and wanted to feel the cool damp on her tongue, full in her stomach. She wanted the waters to rush in through the cracks and drown the world.

  She wanted the promise of the Well, which at last she came to.

  The twilight corona of its lip shimmered against the low ceiling of the chamber, a rough chamber of bare stone hollowed out of the earth as if by the eking of the light itself. In the Well, there was nothing. In the house of the Well, there was everything. The trunks of great veins slithered out of its blackness and into the walls and roof of the cave. Their interiors coursed with the same light as bled from the dark mouth of the well, semi-solid and semi-sentient. The Well and the light of the Well was always there, as it was always in the hearts of every man since man was born. The Church merely dug down to its egress and tapped into its presence, a presence in which Sohrabaia wanted to bathe and hated its light for not allowing the nothingness to encapsulate and destroy her. She had it in her power to at least only admit what was natural into the House of the Well, and bring neither torch nor sorcery into its depths.

  And yet the flicker of a flame grew from the doorway behind her and came to bristle against the upturned palms of her hands.

  “Yrsted,” she said. “I have told you about the touch of a flame.”

  “That you would make me feel it, should I bring one again into the House of the Well.” The nervous sibillations of the voice slanted through the air in strange half-echoes, as if drifting toward and distorted by the mouth of the Well. “But the stairs, my Matron, I cannot abide them in the dark as you can. But here is my cheek.” An interminably hairless and pale head sank into view at her knees, bobbing above a pile of raggedy brown robes. The purple veins standing out on the man’s temples pulsed with commitment to pain. “Punish me if you must.”

  “Stand up, Yrsted, you worm.” Sohrabaia took the torch from him and the man did so. “Understand what I show you.”

  The Matron tossed the flaming sacrilege into the Well and watched it buoy a moment atop the weightless black, eliciting not even a murmur from the surface. The eternal night drank down the light and, when the dark was complete again, the wood of the torch fell and without either of them ever hearing the end of its plummet.

  “I often make this descent to the Well, even when it is not a matter of ritual. Any true devotee feels its calling.” Sohrabaia brushed a hand against Yrsted’s cheek and the acolyte shivered from the cold of it. “I contemplate the moment that Ulbad rose from Yrsa’s reflection in the Pools of Sarkoldol and saw her before him. Beautiful and afraid. Mother and lover.” The Matron’s eyes became distant, watchful. “What questions did he ask himself? What Well did he contemplate?”

  “‘He saw the sires and children of his race locked inside her womb and did violence and great changing to free them,’” Yrsted intoned, quoting haphazardly from the Book of Nej’Ud that earlier Sohrabaia had read from to her congregation. “‘Seven young were thus given forth and these became the heirs to Khadirath and the Kingdom of Ulbad.’”

  The Matron took in her disciple’s words and fell to consideration of the Well, bracing herself against its edge with one hand and guiding Yrsted to it with the other.

  “Yrsa became the world,” she said. “And we, like Ulbad, are her imperfect creations. We must dominate her for the crime of bringing us into existence. Only then may we transcend the need for the things of the earth, in that time when even the earth no longer knows itself.”

  Yrsted nodded sagely, having heard everything and giving the appropriate impression that he understood everything that he did not. “How deep does the well go?” he asked and peered well over the lip, down into the impermeable blackness. "Is it far?"

  “Precious Yrsted,” Sohrabaia said and patted the man’s shoulder. “Who can say? But who would ask the question? Save a provincial who did not read his scriptures. Here you are in the bosom of our faith, profaning it with insipid questions beneath the dignity of argument.”

  “I am sorry, mistress.” The acolyte bowed his damp skull, downcast his bald and wild eyes. “I will try harder.”

  “Liminality is the province of twilight and shadow. The Well may go on forever or the end may be its beginning. The passage over the threshold, into a spa
ce without thought for space, is a thing of immediate change. Immediate conclusion. The transversal of the depth in a single movement. This is the lesson of the Well. This is the lesson of Ulbad, the depravity in which Man was born.” Sohrabaia extended a hand, slowly and importunately, to the darkness before them. “The Well is fathomless, and yet the end rests at its beginning. If we have the strength to hasten its inevitability.”

  Yrsted followed the hand of his master, the lull of her words, toward the reverberating black of the Well. He held his fingers out over its mouth, danced their tips across its lip. Ultimate insight into the mysteries of the Church, the complete transposition that lay at the end of decades of learning, was within his grasp. One touch, he understood Sohrabaia to say, and his would be the apotheosis. That which only comes with insight into the illimitable, into the liminal vaults in which are housed the saints of the Sundered Faith. One touch, and he would know how his god breathed.

  The dark did not feel like nothing, rather the absence of things. A cold shot through him that had little to do with the damp chill of that deep place. It was the sort of cold that one could not hope to find even in the most frigid places, born instead of a vast loneliness and emptiness. An interminable void sprawled outward in his mind’s eye. Black seas smashed against black shores under a starless sky, and a dark sun bathed the world in a light that died forever. Of the things that roiled in those realms, deep beneath the waves and deep within the rocky clefts carved by the tides, only his tears could speak.

  The flitting of eyes turned over inside the veins of his hand. He felt them on the innards of his skull, watching the traces of thought dancing through the grooves of his brain. His mind had returned from whence the Well cast it. Only Sohrabaia was there with him at the edge of its secretive depth. But they were not alone, as Yrsted would never be alone again.