by James Enge
Aloê bent down and fetched up another stone from the seafloor. She held it toward the Green Man—she had no idea what the thing used for senses, but it was worth a try—and said distinctly, “Nyaah, nyaah!” She lifted the stone as if to throw it.
Abruptly the Green Man entered the water. Aloê dropped the stone and dove. She swam like a seal toward the dark line in the west where the sky met the sea.
Over her own swift strokes Aloê could hear the even swifter progress of her enemy. She glanced back and saw the Green Man oiling through the hard whitecapped waves even faster than a seal. A seal with oars, perhaps: the leafless branches swung along in fierce circles, propelling the Green Man through the water. Awed, Aloê, who had some interest in ship-building, speculated on the possibility of a ship driven by mechanical oars—perhaps a series of oar-blades in a circle, like the blades of a windmill . . .
Then the enemy was upon her, and the invention of the propeller was struck out of her head by one of the Green Man’s branches. Aloê retained the presence of mind to dive below the surface. There, she guessed, the Green Man’s clublike blows would lose their force, slowed by the medium of water. And this was true enough. But she hadn’t bargained on the Green Man’s untreelike suppleness in the water. She found the Green Man coiling about her chest like a slimy green snake. When she realized she was being constricted she reached under the body of the Green Man and tried to push herself out through the tightening coil. But the barky skin was too slimy in water; her hands could get no grip. Then her right hand closed on something: the handle of the glow-knife she had left in its hide. It gave her the purchase she needed to push free. As she kicked herself away from the Green Man, toward the seafloor, she winked, through the stinging sea-water, at the knife blade glittering in the hide of her enemy.
Glittering with reflected light. Aloê opened her eyes wider, despite the stinging salt, and saw that the water all around her was alive with blue-green light. The dawn storm was beginning. She dove deeper, down to the ocean floor itself, and held onto the biggest rock she could find.
Looking up, she saw the dark form of the Green Man floating ominously above. Whatever it was, it knew something about the tactics of hunting. Its position was strong: it stood between Aloê and the air she would need. Eventually. But the gills on her neck had already opened; she could breathe the air dissolved in the water for some time before she needed to come up for an ordinary breath. She hoped the Green Man would be gone before then.
Aloê waited. She engaged in the dreamlike thought-exercises with which seers preface Withdrawal, which are supposed to reduce the body’s needs. She reflected that her death might be a fair price to pay for the removal of this monster from the Wardlands. She reflected that, on the other hand, if she died and the Green Man was not swept out of the world, she would have died for nothing. It occurred to her that thoughts like these were not nearly as nourishing as air.
And the water grew brighter, green-gold to sun-bright. The gateway in the west was open. The Green Man began to wave its boughs to struggle against the current, but it was swept resistlessly westward.
Aloê would have laughed if she could have spared the air. The counter-current struck her in turn. It was not pulling her westward but pushing her eastward, striking her like a cold watery fist, knocking her loose from her rocky perch.
She fought upward to the air as the cold current carried her to shore. Suddenly she had passed into the upper current, and her body was twisted around, dragged toward the west. But the water was growing dark, the surface above her head dazzlingly bright, broken by a shower of cloudless rain.
Aloê burst into the air spouting like a porpoise. The shore was surprisingly far away, considering how briefly she had been in the westward current. She lay supine on the surface of the water, half-submerged, basking in the morning sun until the sea currents grew quiet.
The Green Man was gone. Somehow she knew it—the same way she had sensed the thing’s presence; she knew it was gone into the wilderness of worlds beyond the gateway in the west.
She wished good luck to whoever had to deal with it next. Perhaps it would land in a world too hostile to let it live. In any case, it was no longer a danger to those she had sworn to guard. She rolled over in the water and struck out wearily for shore.
Jacques Le Boeuf and John Lilly were tending the stream by the sawmill of the Great North Lumber Co., and nasty work they found it. Partly because they were doing it together—there was no man in the whole lumber camp that either one detested as much as the other—but mostly because of the odd things that came down the river.
Jacques lost his footing and fell in among the logs. Quickly he heaved himself out again (knowing that the lumber jostling in the stream could crush him, and that he would wait a long time before John Lilly fished him out). He put one hand on one of the logs (an odd, oaklike thing), and his hand sank mushily into the greenish bark.
Jacques hissed in disgust and vaulted out. He stared in horror at the green slime on his hand and smeared it on his shirt. “Some damn weird things come floating down the river after a fog,” he said to Lilly. “Look at that damn green oak. It never came from the damn lumber camp: it’s still got its damn branches. We should haul it out—it’ll jam in the damn flue.”
“I think it will pass,” said John Lilly stiffly. “If the Lord grants us bounty without labor, shall we refuse? Please do not say ‘damn.’”
“Why the hell not?” replied Jacques truculently. He saw, with annoyance, that John Lilly was right and that the green slimy oak passed easily along the flue. “Next you’ll be telling me not to take the Devil’s name in vain.”
“Please don’t.”
“There’s nothing in your English Bible against it. I was reading it last night—”
“I told you not to read my damn Bible!” shouted John Lilly, and he might have continued if at that moment there had not come a high-pitched inhuman scream from inside the sawmill.
“Your damn green oak has bound up the damn buzz saw!” Jacques shouted, with enormous satisfaction, and they ran into the mill to see.
Jacques was right and wrong. The saw was jammed, but not by the oak: it was caught on a knife with a weird glittering hilt. Beneath the buzzsaw they found the remains of the green oak, or so they guessed. But there was little wood, just an envelope of greenish bark—severed by the buzzsaw—and flowing from it quantities of red stinking fluid that looked like blood, but wasn’t. And swimming in the fluid were quantities of bone fragments, deeply etched as with acid. This was what they saw, but they could not explain it, then or ever.
Meanwhile, in another world, Aloê Oaij took the coast road southward, bringing the news to the frightened town by the sea.
Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.
—G. K. Chesterton
Tower Ambrose, ancestral home of the Ambrosii in the Wardlands, was struck with lightning seven times in a single night, after a month of increasingly frequent lightning strikes. The next morning, half the remaining workers there quit.
“It’s a bad omen,” one of them told Deor syr Theorn as he paid her off.
“Personally, I don’t believe in omens,” said the next one. “I just don’t want to get struck by lightning.”
“I know what you mean,” said the dwarf. “Silver or stones?”
“Stones, thanks.”
When they were gone, Deor sadly eyed the household’s depleted stock of silver and gemstones and then flipped the strongbox shut. The eye on the lid winked at him and clamped the bolts shut like teeth.
Deor climbed the long winding stairway to the top of the tower where Morlock’s workshop was. The lock on the door recognized him as he approached and loosened its brazen fingers from the doorpost, allowing him to enter, which he did cautiously.
Morlock Ambrosius lay in deep visionary withdrawal on the floor of the workroom. The Banestone, the gem whose final mak
ing had killed Saijok Mahr, glowed luridly on his chest: Morlock was using it as a focus for his vision these days. Over him a cloud of black-and-white crystalline fragments floated in the air. In their center was about half of a longsword made of the same black-and-white crystal. As Deor watched, one of the fragments settled into place and seemed to grow into the sword.
Deor picked up a long wooden stick he kept by for this purpose and reached out with it to prod Morlock. “Hey!” he shouted. “You! Descend from your vision! We need to talk.”
Deor know that Morlock heard him—he was not asleep, after all—but he expected the process to take some time. He sat down on a nearby bench and watched the half-made sword descend into a long lead-lined box, and the crystalline fragments followed it in a steady rain, each one fitting into place on the sword like a piece in a three-dimensional puzzle.
When that was done, some more time passed. Deor thought about what he’d had for breakfast, and what he was going to have for lunch.
Eventually, Morlock’s eyes opened and he rolled to his feet. His dark-ringed eyes were bloodshot; his face was paler and thinner than Deor had ever seen it. The dwarf was worried for his harven kin, though he hardly knew how to say it, what question to ask.
“Praise the day, Vocate Morlock,” the dwarf said. “I suppose you were at that nonsense all night.”
“Most of it,” Morlock admitted. “Couldn’t sleep. How are you?”
“Unhappy. Half the workers quit this morning. I’ve got some of the dwarves running the impulse wheel, and the cleaning staff has mostly stayed on (thank you, God Sustainer). But there is no one working in the kitchen at all.”
Morlock thought of food as fuel and was more or less indifferent to its form. His response in full was, “Eh.”
Deor’s opinions on food were wholly different, and he gave Morlock a selection of them now. “That won’t do, harven Morlock. There are people in this tower besides yourself: the workers who braved lightning bolts to stay here deserve something better than dried meat and stale bread. So do I, if it comes to that. What if you have one of your colleagues over for dinner? What are we to offer them?”
“There’s a cookshop down the bluff that could cater a meal.”
Deor thought for a moment and then said with horror, “You can’t mean the Speckles? You understand they got their name from the condition of their produce? When they brag about their fresh meat, they are talking about the things living in their uncooked vegetables. The meat proper is cooked on a biannual basis, and I have it on good report that they harvest it exclusively from swamp rats.”
“I ate there all the time when I was a thain.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. No, that won’t do either, Morlock.”
“We’ll have to hire new people, then.”
“With what? Our stocks of silver and gemstones are very low. You’re sure we can’t make a little gold? Just a little gold?”
“No.”
“It’s quite easy.”
“Yes. So easy that it would be of no value. Silver passes as currency only because people believe that artificial silver can be detected.”
“I bet we can make silver that would pass any test, Morlock.”
“Yes. Except the most obvious one. A convenient and indefinite supply of silver with no known source will inevitably raise suspicions.”
“So? It’ll get us through our present difficulties. And then . . .”
“And then no one will want our money. No, we’ll just have to sell some things.”
“Sell what? The shelves are bare, Morlock.”
“Go to a few markets today; see what people are paying good money for. We’ll make it better and sell it for less. I’ve been drawing templates for a new deck of cards, also. We can run up a few of those; the original packs were pretty well-liked.”
“When will we do all this? Your Graith resumes its Station in a few days, if you haven’t forgotten.”
“There’ll be time.” Morlock looked at Deor and said, “What’s really wrong?”
“I don’t like all this lightning,” Deor admitted uneasily. “I don’t understand what you’re doing with that.” He gestured at the lead-lined box. “It’s no kind of making I can understand. Why do you have to use that damn Banestone? Can’t you just swing a hammer, like the old days?” He was half joking, half not.
Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders. For a while, Deor thought that was the only answer he would get. At last Morlock said, “It’s the kind of making this work needs. I meditated long over the nature of Gryregaest. When I found it in pieces on the Hill of Storms, I thought it was broken.”
“And it wasn’t?”
“Not exactly. It was . . . dead. The pieces were once united by a talic bond, like the one uniting soul to flesh. I am . . . reweaving them again, piece by piece. But when it is whole, if I can make it whole, it will not be Gryregaest anymore. I will give it a new name. One to honor Oldfather Tyr, I think.”
Deor bowed his head in honor of the late Eldest of Theorn Clan, Morlock’s harven father. The old dwarf had died recently while Morlock was out in the unguarded lands, and Deor knew his harven kin was still in grief. So was Deor, for that matter.
“And the lightning?” he asked presently, thinking Morlock’s attention had wandered.
“Deortheorn,” Morlock said, without seeming to reply, “have you read Lucretius?”
“No. What is it?”
“A poet from my mother’s world. He lived four or five hundred years before she was born. I’ve been reading a lot of Latin lately.”
“No wonder you look sick.”
“I look sick?” Morlock seemed dismayed. That dismayed Deor: he had never known Morlock to worry about his appearance. Never.
“Yes. You were telling me about this Latin poet, Lucretius.”
“He claimed that everything was made up of invisible particles called atoms.”
“God Avenger! What do the superstitious maunderings of a deranged poet have to do with these lightning strikes?”
“When I am deep in my vision, reweaving the blade . . . I seem to see them. The atoms, or . . . or something. They dance in the air like motes of dust. There is a darker kind, implicit with some physical energy that is just subtalic, on the verge of the immaterial. They cluster about like flies as I reweave the blade. They seem to call the lightning to them somehow. Or they are a silence the lightning strives to dispel. I don’t know. I don’t know. But I am starting to know. I summoned most of those thunderbolts last night; the aether from the lightning was useful in binding the blade.”
“You”—Deor hastily revised what he was going to say—“always surprise me, Morlocktheorn. But in the interests of keeping our workers—”
“Do they have relatives?”
“I don’t know who you mean,” Deor admitted.
“The workers who stayed.”
“I don’t know. I suppose some of them must have.” Deor still didn’t see what Morlock was driving at.
“Maybe they are also unafraid of lightning. You might ask if they are interested in working here. I also have friends in the League of Silent Men. You might send a message to them, seeing if any of their people need work.” Morlock’s bloodshot eyes peered at his harven kin. “I’m not giving you too much to do?”
“Not really. Anyway, I’ll repay you double when you get back here tonight. I suppose you’ll be off on your usual rounds?”
“Yes.” Morlock ran one hand through his dark tangled hair, another over his stubble-laden chin. “How do I look?”
“I told you; you look sick. You should stay home and get some rest, but you won’t.”
“I’m not sick. But I’ll wash and shave before I go. Change clothes too, I guess. Is there hot water in the washroom?”
“How would I know, Vocate Morlock? I washed before dawn, with cold water in my closet, as God Creator intended. But the impulse wheel has been running for hours, so I assume the hot water reservoir is full.”
“The
n.” Morlock nodded to his harven-kin, punched him gently on the shoulder as he passed, and ran down the stairs.
“Don’t forget to eat something!” Deor roared after him, without any hope he would be listened to. Heard, yes; listened to, no. If Morlock was not sick, what in the canyon was wrong with him?
Deor wandered through the workroom, looking for the templates Morlock had talked about. If they were anywhere near complete, he could get some of their kin to start working on them right away: dwarves liked to do things with their hands, even (or especially) when they were running on the impulse wheel.
He found some of the new cards on a drawing table. Deor found them disturbing, but that didn’t mean they weren’t good. There was one of Tower Ambrose being struck by lightning; a dwarvish figure with a bundle in his arms was seen jumping from the tower. “Watch over us all, Oldfather Tyr,” Deor said, smiling, when he recognized the figure, remembered the story.
Next to the sketches was a piece of Latin (Deor could recognize it, if not read it), and on the same page a bunch of scribbling in Morlock’s hand. It looked as if he was trying a translation from Latin verse into Wardic. The clearest part ran like this:
But my tongue can’t talk;
a slender fire sears me under the skin;
ringing re-echoes in my ears;
my two eyes are touched by twin night.
Was it a medical text? Deor wondered. These sounded like pretty unpleasant symptoms. Something from that Lucretius fellow? Deor didn’t like to think about atoms bouncing around inside his nose and ears; it seemed unsanitary. Maybe that’s what it was about.
But there were a few other words on the page that stood out clear, among many that were struck out or smeared with ink: “like a god” and “sweetly laughing.”
Slowly the pieces of the puzzle came together, like the pieces growing into Morlock’s damn sword.