by Victor Poole
"Jay," Delmar said hesitantly. Ajalia pushed aside a thick branch. Lim's grotesque face was exposed beneath it. She caught her breath; the stench was overpowering. She began to laugh. She backed away from the body, and sat against a tree. The smell was spreading through the whole area; she saw Delmar's face wrinkle.
"What?" Ajalia asked.
"What are you doing?" he asked. Ajalia sighed.
"If I told you," she said breathlessly, "you wouldn't believe me."
"You don't know that," Delmar said quickly. The horse was near the edge of the clear space, before the copse of thick trees; his eyes were rimmed with white, and his hooves shifted uneasily.
"He doesn't like the smell," Ajalia said, nodding at the horse. Delmar got the horse's reins, and stroked the scruffy black neck. The horse snorted and danced in place. Ajalia kicked aside the branches near the ground, and dragged another rock out of the way.
"Why are you doing this?" Delmar asked again. "This is disgusting."
"Yes," Ajalia said, "it is."
"You don't answer my questions," Delmar complained.
"No," Ajalia agreed, "I don't." She got hold of Lim's flabby arm, and dragged his body out of the pile of rocks and branches. The smell became too much to bear; Ajalia coughed, and bent over double. Her eyes were streaming with tears. The horse threw his head up and down, his black ears pinned back. "Hold the horse," Ajalia said hoarsely. She heaved Lim's heavy form across the clearing. The dead slave's body made a horrible dragging noise.
Delmar put his hand on the reins below the horse's mouth; the horse snorted. A fleck of white foam gathered at the corner of his mouth.
"The horse isn't going to enjoy this," Ajalia said, as she heaved Lim's body upwards. Delmar watched her struggle with the corpse. He seemed fascinated with the way that she piled Lim's body upright, and pushed him up onto the horse's back.
"How are you doing that?" he asked her. She grunted; the horse moved his feet anxiously beneath the awful-smelling burden.
"Okay," Ajalia gasped, when she had draped Lim over the horse. She reached for the reins and coughed violently. "Show me the tree."
"I probably shouldn't," Delmar said. A cloud of flies had followed the body from the tree-piled grave to the horse; the horse snapped his tail violently from side to side to discourage them.
"Then I will have a fine time," Ajalia said, pulling the horse into the trees, "finding it myself."
"You won't find it," Delmar said quickly. Ajalia kept walking. She had entered a kind of zombie-like state; she was so tired, and she was so hungry, and she was so annoyed with everything in the whole world, that she had hit a kind of rock-bottom in her inner resources, and the lack of anything even vaguely approaching okayness had given her a measure of strength. She felt as though she had already died, had passed through a sort of darkened doorway into the night, and now she could move her body easily. A part of her realized that she was going to pay for this later; she could feel a grinding in her hips, and through her center. She imagined herself lying in some quiet corner of the forest, hosting her own congregation of insects, and she laughed. Delmar was following her, his face a mask of misery.
"What's funny?" he asked.
"You're unhappy," Ajalia observed.
"You're going the wrong way," he said impatiently, and crossed in front of her. She smiled and followed him. He crashed through the trees for a long time before coming to a long dirt path that wound in a wide curve through the forest. "This connects through to the main road," he called over his shoulder. "We'll have to watch for strangers." Ajalia saw his eyes flick uneasily to the moldy form of Lim that was slung unceremoniously over the back of the horse.
"I'm glad Philas brought me my horse," Ajalia commented. Delmar said nothing. "I didn't know how I was going to get Lim to the pool," she said.
"There isn't a pool," Delmar said, "not really."
"What is there?" she asked. He turned and looked at her.
"I wish you would have left him there," he said. His voice was strained. She looked at him calmly. "And you are being different," he added. "You are like a different person."
"Then tell me things," she suggested.
"I don't like this," he said. She looked at him, her face neutral. "What did Philas say to you?" he asked finally.
"He wanted to know why I was sent here," Ajalia said. Delmar considered her eyes.
"Why were you sent here?" he asked finally. Ajalia looked at the trees. She could feel Delmar's gaze on her, steady and searching.
"My master is ambitious," she said at last. "I don't mind telling you," she said, "but I will have to start by telling you a story."
"I like stories," Delmar said evenly.
"Show me the tree," Ajalia said.
"Story first," Delmar countered.
"He stinks," Ajalia said. Delmar glanced at Lim, whose collection of flies was becoming epic.
"Okay," he said. He took the reins from Ajalia's hand, and pulled the horse off the path.
"I thought you said it was on this path," Ajalia said.
"Shortcut," Delmar said over his shoulder. Ajalia followed the madly twisting tail of the horse; his furry black ears were still pinned back against his neck. She left a space between the horse and herself; she did not want to be kicked in the teeth, and the horse was exceedingly annoyed at the ripe burden on his back.
"Do people dispose of each other in the poison tree often?" Ajalia called forward. Delmar replied without turning, his voice carrying over the buzzing of the flies, and the dampening heat in the leaves.
"Only officially," he said.
"Does your father use the poison tree?" Ajalia asked. A crushing sound of leaves behind her made her freeze in her tracks; she spun, and dropped down in the leaves. A pair of men came into view some distance behind her on the path they had just left. She was sure they had not seen her; she crawled silently into the underbrush.
"Hi! Delmar!" one of the men shouted. Delmar froze. He turned very slowly; Ajalia saw from behind a tree that his eyes were vague, and his jaw slack. She admired the facility of his features to change so suddenly. She almost didn't recognize him.
"Is that the Eastern slave?" the second man asked. Ajalia studied the features of the two men; one of them was heavily built, and wore a blond beard. The other man was several inches taller, and had short dark hair, and piercing black eyes. His face was like a chiseled stone; Ajalia thought his skin looked hard and cold to the touch. She thought both men seemed dangerous; the carriage of their shoulders was too brusque and pushing to belong to harmless bodies. She thought they looked red inside, like predators who killed for sport.
Delmar stared back at the two men, his jaw slack.
"Yes?" he said. The shorter man with the blond beard laughed, and jostled his companion on the arm.
"We thought you'd be bloodier than that," the dark man told Delmar, gesturing at the stains on Delmar's tunic.
"I didn't kill him," Delmar said absently. The tall man with dark hair came through the leaves towards Delmar. Delmar stood still and watched him approach. Ajalia had thought Delmar was keeping the slack expression on his face on purpose, and she would have been very impressed if he had been, but the cloud over his eyes made her begin to believe the response was involuntary. She began to pity him. She thought he must have spent a lot of time hungry, or scared, for his cheeks to go as slack and blank as they did when he interacted with members of his father's household.
"Your mother says go home," the man with black eyes said, in a low voice. Delmar looked at him blankly. "Do you understand?" the man demanded. Delmar blinked, and nodded.
"Here," Delmar said, pulling a silver chain that dripped and glistened from his pocket. "Lim stole this from her," he said, holding it out to the dark man. The dark man grinned, and took the chain.
"I'll give it to her," the dark man said.
"I'll tell her I gave it to you," Delmar said. His eyes were cloudy, but Ajalia saw a kind of tremor in the base of his jaw; the da
rk man saw it, too. His teeth bared in a grim smile, and his eyes twinkled.
"I shan't steal from your mother, pup," the dark man said. His voice was friendly, but Ajalia could hear a growl in it.
You aren't a good person, Ajalia told the man in her mind. Her lips were turned back; the backs of her hands tickled with the desire to beat the dark man into a pulpy pile of bruises and blood. She was not, she thought, normally so cranky, but today, just now, her arms throbbed, and her face hurt, and her whole voice felt locked up, and hidden behind a cloud of shadows. She wanted to hurt something. The dagger in her waist beckoned to the man's blood; she could see the man trying to intimidate Delmar.
Ajalia stood up from within the shadows of the bushes; she hesitated for a moment; unsure of what she was thinking of doing. She wanted to step out; she wanted to see the look on the dark man's face. The blond bearded man had a funny smearing sneer on his face; he was watching the dark man who stood next to Delmar. Ajalia felt the whole universe swirling around her. She stepped out of the growth and ferns, and she saw that none of the others saw her. She looked at herself, and saw that her skin had changed color, and her shoulders moved in a colorful robe of lights. She had entered a different place, a kind of mid-realm between dream and reality. Ajalia looked down at her hands; they were still clasped in the dirt and the roots of two ferns in front of her. She saw that her body was still crouched in the wild trees. But another part of her, a part of her that felt more like herself, more real than she had thought she could be, was standing up, approaching the dark man. Gone were the aches and pains in her arms; gone was the feeling of terror at her back. Ajalia walked towards Delmar and the dark man; the bearded blond man was still back on the path, and the dark man had come into the crowded leaves and saplings to stand beside Delmar. The black horse was shuffling his hooves; his tail swished erratically from side to side. The flies budged and hovered in great swirls. When she had come partway towards the dark man, Ajalia saw that she could not step forward anymore. She saw that the ties that bound her to the body she had left behind, the body still bound up with bloody rags and a dirty cream robe, the body that ached and spun with angry scars and hurts, were stretched to their greatest limits; these ties stretched like gleaming golden threads from her spirit self to the bruised and broken body crouched behind a tree. Ajalia drew her spirit knife, which shone like a kind of evil black star. Ajalia turned back and looked behind her; she saw herself, crouched in the ferns, her eyes like a wild thing.
"Magic is not real," Ajalia whispered to herself. She heard the words she had spoken; Delmar's eyes snapped over to the place where her spirit stood; she saw him looking at her, a crease between his eyebrows. He spoke briefly to the dark man, and the pair of dangerous bodies, the blond bearded one and the tall dark man with the black eyes, walked back towards the path and into the forest. When they were gone, Delmar's eyes watched the place where they had been for a long time. He spun the reins around the trunk of a tree, and stepped quickly to the place where Ajalia stood.
"Not here," Delmar said earnestly. "Get back."
"No," Ajalia said. She felt free, and strong. She did not have a piece of pain anywhere in her spirit body; the black shining triangle of the knife was still in her palm. She looked down at the knife.
"Get back!" Delmar hissed. He strode to the place where Ajalia's real body crouched, and he pulled her roughly up by the arms. Ajalia felt his hands on her upper arms, his fingers digging against her ribs. His touch hurt her somehow, like fire burning into her eyes.
"Stop," she said. Delmar lifted the body; Ajalia saw her real eyes, blank, and empty. Delmar carried the limp form with the dangling arms towards the place where the spirit Ajalia stood, and he thrust the body at her. "No!" Ajalia cried, and her spirit, the long shadow of her that stood free of pain and constraint, slipped back into her mortal form, like shadows slipping under the water.
"Ow," she said. Her knees went watery, and she stumbled. Delmar caught her around the ribs; he held her upright.
"What were you thinking?" he demanded.
"What did I do?" she asked him. Now that she was within her own body, her whole range of vision was jittery; she felt grainy bits of something like sand beneath her eyelids. "Where was I?" she asked.
"You stepped out of your body," Delmar said. His voice was angry. "You mustn't do that."
"I can't do magic," Ajalia said. Her lips felt thick and heavy.
"You can now," Delmar snapped. He pulled her towards the horse, and looped the reins out from around the tree. "Come on," he said. She stumbled along next to him. A renewed headache made her wish she had never been born into a body at all; she felt turned inside out.
"I can't do magic," she said again, watching fixedly at the dirt pass beneath her feet.
"I told you," Delmar said angrily, "I put part of me into your side, to save your life."
Ajalia blinked hazily. The forest swam around her.
"You said that once before," she said. "Where's the poison tree?"
"Up there," Delmar said, dragging the horse by the reins through a narrow opening between two boulders. Ajalia watched the black haunches of the horse squeeze through the gap; the horse had his ears pressed back. He kicked behind him in temper as soon as his legs were free of the tight space. Ajalia watched the sharp flash of his hind leg snap out and back. She imagined the horse kicking her, and laughed. She went through the boulders, and caught up to Delmar. A crazy sense of unreality had set in around her; she was sure she was having a dream, or seeing a vision in some fever-induced rage.
"I'm in the hollow, aren't I?" she asked Delmar bemusedly. "Philas was never here, and you're giving me some kind of plant medicine to make me heal. Is that it?" She watched his face. He turned away from her, and pulled Lim's decomposing body from the horse. Ajalia snatched up the horse's reins, and stroked his neck. "You aren't real," Ajalia cooed at the horse, scratching him under the jaw. The black horse snorted indignantly, and tossed his head up and down. His eyes were still rimmed with white, and he turned his cheek to stare with one eye at the fly-infested body of the dead slave, as Delmar heaved the body over the forest floor.
Ajalia looked up in time to see Delmar dragging the body into a shallow pool of violent, bubbling black fluid.
"Is that the poison tree?" she asked incredulously. She thought that perhaps she was not dreaming now. The tree stretched wide and white, a curious sculpture of human bones bleached white with time and the scorching kiss of the black-as-pitch stuff that lay in a shadowy puddle around the base of the roots. She narrowed her eyes, and examined the trunk of the tree. She saw that it was, indeed, a tree, but that it had been covered, every inch of bark, with tied-together bones. Thigh bones and arm bones, pelvic bones and tiny finger bones, all rattled together, fitted into each other like rows and rows of violent teeth.
"Who made this?" Ajalia asked. She reached out one hand; the tree was far away from her; she stretched her fingers out in front of her eyes, and watched the white bones between her pink flesh. "Are those your ancestors?" she asked. There were human skulls, not children's skulls, buried far down beneath the other bones, deeply enough to glare out with wide and empty eye sockets, down against the trunk of the tree.
"Did your father build this?" Ajalia asked.
"No," Delmar said shortly. He pushed Lim the rest of the way into the bubbling puddle; Ajalia watched in disgust as the slave's body burbled and melted, his face sinking down, his blood rising up in rapid swirls of steaming red foam.
"What is this place?" Ajalia asked. Lim's bones began to protrude, thick and white and grotesque, from the black surface of the puddle. "Are you going to hang his bones?" she asked. She could feel a heated flush over her face; the glow in her arms was stronger now than it had been. The old scars and the new wounds itched. She could feel a buzzing in her side, where Lim's poison had pierced her.
"There," Delmar said, when, with a hiss, Lim was nothing but slowly dissolving bones. Delmar turned sharply away from the tre
e, and took the reins from Ajalia's hands. "Are you happy now?" he asked her, moving away from the tree.
"Wait," Ajalia said. She stepped closer to the tree. "Do you know any of these people?" She picked up a stick from the ground, and stuck it into the pool. The stick crumbled almost instantly into a swift curl of wet steam. "How does this not eat through the whole forest?" she asked, watching the lip of the puddle. The tree was as wide around as a tiny house; the heaps of bones were clustered over the whole trunk, and more bones hung like jewels from the branches. "Delmar?" she asked.
"What?" Delmar asked. She looked at him. His face was wild, and pinched. He looked strangely distressed.
"Do you want to help me get on the horse?" she asked lamely. She had meant to hunt down answers in his eyes, but his cheeks were so hollow, and his eyes so haunted, that she didn't have the heart to do it.
"You're fine," Delmar said shortly. He led the horse back the way they had come. The horse stamped his forefoot, and rattled the rings of his bit. Ajalia saw that the wooden bit had been changed for a metal one in the Eastern bridle; she hoped Philas had changed all the bits in the caravan's harness. The wooden bits wore through quickly, and were tiresome to replace. Ajalia took the leather reins from Delmar, and coaxed the horse towards the narrow gap between the boulders.
"Who were those men?" Ajalia asked.
"Who?" Delmar said. His voice was hard. Ajalia smiled back at Delmar; he grimaced at her.
"Why did you say I can do magic now?" she asked. Delmar was behind her; she waited for him to catch up. He clearly hung back, showing a fixed reluctance to come near her. "Come up here," she said. He avoided her gaze. Ajalia waited; when he continued to stare into the trees, she laughed.
She led the horse towards a low branch, and set her feet on the thick rod of wood. She put her hands on either side of the saddle, and dragged herself over the horse's back. The saddle stank; she coughed. She thought that she would have to air it out, or scrub it with some kind of fragrance to get the smell and the smeared gore out of the leather.