The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  Morlenden commented, “We Derens are not such masters of Multispeech. We keep the records and Singlespeech will do for that. I can listen to it, but I don’t like to give up to it and to its speaker35 and I’ve never had what I’d call a successful transmission.”

  Tas disregarded Morlenden’s disclaimer. “Mael knows it real good. I mean, she was good before, but since she met Kris, she’s been able to do really wild things.”

  “For instance?”

  “You know visual-mode? How you can send holistic pictures with it? These pictures seem like life, but aren’t, because they’re not movable. Or is that just stuff the elders tell the children?”

  “As far as I know, it’s true.”

  “Mael could make them move. Not so fast as real, slower, but they moved. I let her in once and she showed me.”

  “I had heard once that two or more elders who had worked long at it could do movers. I never saw one.”

  “I heard that your mind isn’t ready for it until you can control auto-forgetting.” Morlenden winced at the boy’s remark. Autoforgetting was a phenomenon they did not mention openly. Taskellan, for his part, caught a trace of Morlenden’s discomfort and lapsed into silence, mumbling monotones when spoken to, or more rarely, subvocalizing, as if talking to himself. Morlenden followed behind, walking on through the frosted morning of the cold winter day.

  Along the way from Yos-Perklaren, Morlenden had not once seen anything remotely resembling a yos or a dooryard, a bower, or even a widened place at the junction of paths where strangers might meet and speak without omen. They walked, seemingly, through a trackless, leaf-strewn hardwood forest, illuminated by a pearly, translucent sunlight filtering through a high deck or finely detailed altocumulus. Morlenden could remember hearing Fellirian call such a sky in some old human terms she had heard from an antiquarian. Mackerel sky, they called it, or sometimes buttermilk sky if the cloudlets were larger. They themselves in Singlespeech said Palosi Pisklendir. Pearl fish-scale sky. And the other they designated Hlavdir—curd-sky. After all, they were much the same in either method of speech.

  When they had started, the forest had been the artificially cultivated parasol pines, but out of the lake country, it soon reverted to nature and became a forest of oak and hickory, gallbarks, shagworts, mossycups with cupleaves, on the poorer soils and rocky outcrops. As the sun neared, attained, and began to pass the zenith, there was further change, and the trees appearing were beeches and ironwoods, wild-privets and planetree, sure signs they were in stream-dominated country. Not bottom-land. There were still no paths. They walked on, in silence now, saving their breath, making only the small forest noises of rumpled leaves underfoot as they went. Shortly after what Morlenden thought was noon, they stopped, their breath steaming lightly in cold air as limpid and trembling-clear as spring water. Morlenden thought on it a moment, and realized with a start that he was hungry. He slid out from under his pack and retrieved the fine wayfood Plindestier and Klervondaf had thoughtfully provided—a small mesh bag of apples, sausages and bread.

  Their lunching-place seemed little different from most of the lands they had been walking through all day, since firstlight. Save that here, of course, the forest was predominantly beech, and that they were in the shallow valley of a small stream, surrounded by the silvery naked trunks with their suggestions of the ropy strandings of muscles, broken only by the darker, more somber boles of ironwood, with its bluish bark color, or the deep, vibrant green of aborvitae. More rarely, there were scraggly junipers.

  Despite the cold of the day, Morlenden was relaxing, wrapped well in his hard-winter pleth and traveling cloak, and full of a fine sausage as well. But Taskellen broke into his meditations. “We’re likely to find Kris somewhere around here, if we find him at all.” The boy waved his arm about freely, indicating the general area one could see through the network of smooth trunks and bare branches, some still holding a cluster of this year’s browned leaves. “The treehouse is a lot farther, but it’s on this creek, and the last time I saw him, he was working this area. We passed the way Kris usually goes over to the Hulens, but I saw no sign he’d been there.”

  “We could miss him easily in these pathless woods. Are you certain that this is the area?”

  “No doubts, no doubts at all, Ser Deren. We would find him somewhere around here if for no other reason, than that he’d wait for Maellenkleth. She wouldn’t wander all over the place with him. No! Not at all! She sat him down and told him to light in one place and stay there—and he did. After all, it was Kris who was being wooed, not the other way around. He was the one who had to learn the new role, not her! Ha! As if she would!”

  Taskellan looked about, as if to reassure himself. He saw a forest floor covered with beech leaves, tree trunks, their numbers growing with distance until they formed a solid barrier and blocked out all sense of horizon. Tas looked back at Morlenden, not quite so sure. “This is where he’d be . . . but even if he was here, we could miss him if he didn’t want us to see him . . . they say that he can disappear, just like that. Zip! He’s there; and then he isn’t. I came with Mael once and he showed me. He just got still, a minute, and then he was gone. No noise, no nothing.”

  “People can’t just vanish. How does he do it? What’s the trick?”

  The boy shrugged. “Just his way . . . I don’t know. Kris is strange. He and the Hulens alike are hunters and they eat a lot of meat, so they need to be sneaks, wood-crafters. They wander around in all kinds of weather and can’t be bothered with carrying around a lot of provisions with them on their treks to the clay-pots.”

  Morlenden nodded, acknowledging what Tas said, but nevertheless, he was surprised. True hunters were rare in ler society, for several contributory reasons, not the least of which was their basic orientation toward farming, with its commitment to a fixed plot of land. They had long ago chosen this life. More, the restriction against the use of any weapon which left the hand weighed heavily against those who might have been so inclined. “Kill not with that which leaves the hand,” went the stern injunction, reaffirmed by generations of Revens and their interpretations of the basic tradition. And so far as Morlenden knew, it was always obeyed, never broken. It was their most serious individual act of crime. To break it in any fashion made one outcast; against a person called for death by any means, fair or foul. . . . No doubt this made a hunting existence extremely difficult, or an interesting problem of discipline. He observed, after thinking it over for a moment, to Tas, “Then they and Kris must be very good at their hunting.”

  “You bet they are! Quick. They use hands and knives and tengvaron36. Graigvaron, too, though I’ve never seen one. All kinds of animals, small and large, although they don’t hunt the larger ones so much, unless they have time and feel like smoking it. But if Kris is anywhere around here, he knows we’re here, probably what we came for as well. He’s spooky; I think he can read minds.”

  “Road apples!” said Morlenden.

  “That’s what I heard!”

  “So is Kris like the Hulens?”

  “No. Much more so. I don’t know what he was before he came here and started bartering with them, but he learned from them. And became something more than them . . . they’re afraid of him now and avoid him, not for what he does, because he’s very quiet and restrained, but for what he now knows. That’s like him all over; I mean, I know Mael deep, a lot better than Kler, and I knew that he would have to be something special of himself for her to have anything to do with him, much less have dhainaz with him, even less integrate as they have done. . . . I don’t think you’ll get much out of him; he knows more than Kler and is a lot more secretive.”

  Morlenden asked casually, “Do you know what Maellenkleth was doing?”

  “No. I don’t know. I heard some stuff, but I always thought that it was all made-up, legends and fairy tales. It doesn’t fit together so well and as for its zvonh37 . . . it’s just not.”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to separate lack of zvonh from
a lack of more facts, or perhaps degree of subtlety.”

  “It’s as you say, I know . . . but I never worried about it. Mael knew what she was doing and Mael trusted him and that was enough for me. And I know she took her oaths as a Zanklar seriously. She was a Player of the great Life Game, and would not betray guild secrets. But she had taken him far into it. They were in it deep.”

  Morlenden had been sitting with his legs folded under his body. He now unfolded and arose, stretching. “Well,” he said, “we should go on a little farther, shouldn’t we? At least to the treehouse. It’s past noon already, and I don’t care to sleep in the open in this wild country and the cold.”

  Stretching more, brushing leaves off his cloak, Morlenden bent over to pick up his traveling-bag, feeling different parts of his body readjusting to the new repose of his clothing, new patterns of warmth and cold. The day was cold, indeed. Cold and still and beginning to be damp, and though it was yet not far from midday, a bite lingered in the air of the beech forest. He looked along the shallow valley, upstream, trying to make some estimate of how far yet they had to walk to the treehouse. He could not. All he knew was that they had covered an impressive distance on foot in half a day, and that much more remained, in an empty forest without trail or path or blazon. He looked again, trying to get some better feel for the distances of the forests . . . and saw, standing not ten feet away, a person who very definitely had not been there before. It was not the exact way he had been facing, but likewise it had not been behind him either. Yet there he was. Morlenden stared at the silent figure, feeling an odd prickling along his backbone, and in the center of his fundament, a hollow tickling sensation. The person returned his gaze without expression or apparent comment, with all the impersonality of some natural object, a stone, a leaf, a tree trunk. The person appeared to be an adolescent, one of the people, a boy, very fair-haired, although not so pale of skin nor so gold of hair as Cannialin, he caught himself thinking. He was dressed in a patched and well-worn winter overcloak and felt boots, although the clothing was very clean and well cared for. He was hardly different from any other mop-head adolescent; slender and wiry, an angular, stony, serious face, muscular and hardened from years of exposure to the weather and the uncaring that had driven him here to the edge.

  Morlenden spoke quietly, so as not to disturb the apparition. “Taskellan?” The boy looked in the direction Morlenden was looking. He also got to his feet, and said, “I see. That’s Kris. Come on, I’ll acquaint you. And then I have to go back. Long way homeward, you know.”

  They gathered their things and moved slowly, cautiously, to the place where the other boy was standing, waiting for them; the still, silent figure nodded, virtually imperceptibly, now acknowledging their interest.

  Taskellen said, “I present the worthy Krisshantem to a Ser and Kadh of the Braid of Counters, Morlenden Deren.” All in the proper order. And as soon as he could estimate that the two strangers were measuring one another, he turned, abruptly, as if afraid this fragile meeting were going to suddenly evaporate, that one or both might bolt and run and return back the way they had come. The younger boy waved to Morlenden. In a moment, he was gone. In a few more moments, his scuffles in the winter-fallen leaves could be heard fading away. Then there was silence, at least to Morlenden’s ear.

  The two stood and watched one another. In the light falling through the clouds and branches, the impression was of being under water, a very cold and clear water. Morlenden watched the still, angular face before him with its sharp definitions, planes, and angles, and felt a tension, a wariness. Not danger. He was being weighed to an exquisite level of discrimination, and it was disturbing. He broke the silence of the forest. “And you, then, are indeed Krisshantem, who was the lover of the girl Maellenkleth Srith Perklaren?”

  “Dhofter,” the boy corrected. The correction was offered in a self-confident clear pleasant alto voice. The term dhofter surprised Morlenden somewhat, for the dhof was a specific category of personal relationship among lovers which went rather further than the usual pledges of undying desire that such persons were prone to utter in the salad days of their affairs. Far beyond the casual meetings, affairs, sharings, puppy-loves, however intense the sexual desire that went with them was. Dhof was a serious thing, neither done nor said lightly. There were obligations. . . .

  Krisshantem asked, “Who sent you to me here?”

  “The Perwathwiy Srith, hetman of Dragonfly Lodge, presented us with a commission to locate Maellenkleth or determine her fate. I went to her yos. Klervondaf recommended me to you.” Morlenden added as tactfully as he could, “Although he was not overly fond of so doing.”

  The words seemed to make no impression on the stony face before him. “She is not here,” Krisshantem said after a long pause.

  Morlenden also paused, trying to synchronize somehow with the boy. He said, after a time, “Where is she?”

  “Outside. Had you not guessed by now?”

  “I suspected. Do you speak from knowledge?”

  “Just so, no more.”

  “Will she return?”

  “I think not . . . no.”

  Morlenden persisted. The replies were coming a little faster, now, reluctantly to be sure, but faster, as if the act of conversing were warming up some little-used mechanism somewhere deep within the boy. “Could you find her?”

  “. . . No. I do not know where to go, outside, in the human world. I do not know the texture of it. If I went, I would enmesh myself more deeply than was Maellenkleth. I do not think I could bring her back.”

  Morlenden breathed deeply. What a mess to stumble through! The hetman says nothing. The outsibling evades. The younger outsibling worships. And the lover is stunned and withdrawn, waiting here in the deep forest for that which he knows will never come back. . . . Nothing. Outside! The whole planet Earth, Manhome, teeming with billions, miles and miles of cities, labyrinths, procedural jungles of the mind of which they collectively knew nothing. She could be anywhere, and the closer he came to the flesh-and-blood body of the girl he sought, the more invisible she became. And the more crucial she seemed, but to what? What was this thing, and why was everyone associated with her so much . . . such a . . . Morlenden searched frantically for a word. Yes. Basket-case.

  Krisshantem sensed some of Morlenden’s exasperation, and volunteered, carefully neutral, “You intend to go out, then? For her?”

  Morlenden felt some tentative stirrings of hope. He said, carefully, “Yes. We hold just such a commission. We will honor it. My word as Toorh, with that of my insibling and co-spouse Fellirian. But it is not an easy thing, and it promises to get harder, Krisshantem, for I have found so far in my studies that this simple girl, this didh-Srith, hardly older than the Nerh of my own children’s Braid, is an enigma greater than the Braid of the Hulens or the passings of a certain outcast boy.”

  Krisshantem smiled faintly, but unmistakably. “I agree, Ser and Kadh Deren. Aelekle was full of destiny, as we have said, she and I. And others. Fate walked arm and arm with her and conversed with her daily. I do not know the substance of these conversations. But the Hulens? Myself? I am no mystery; I am as plain and obvious as weather. I live deep in the woods and partake of its essences.”

  “You are quieter in the day than a good thief in the night.” Morlenden recalled the tale of Plindestier, of followers and silent listeners under the curve of the yos . . . someone woodswise and crafty. The thought submerged before it could emerge clearly. Morlenden thought, No, not this one. He’d not sneak and lurk under yos-curves, listening at the doorway, and slipping off. No This one Plindestier would never have seen.

  “I can teach you tree-ness in a day; it is nothing.”

  “But the girl; I cannot know where to pick up her trail outside until I discover what she was. And no one will tell me.”

  The boy looked sharply away from Morlenden, now attending to the distances, into the background of naked beech-limbs, the tracery of branches and twigs, of curdling buttermilk skies,
as if weighing, calculating something obtuse and difficult, amorphic and ineluctable. A truth, they might say, that could be approached only along a ladder of parables and enigmas and silent little explosions of enlightenments. He turned back and fixed Morlenden with a burning gaze that made Morlenden acutely uncomfortable. Something had shifted.

  “What is it you wish to know, Ser Deren?”

  “Everything you can tell me, will tell me. We must know what we are going into.”

  “Of course. Everything I can. And there is much. Some things I know, others . . . I know not. But all of them alike, one and all, you and I will explore and project from. We will listen to the voices of the night. Will you do thus with me in a treehouse far in the forest? Otherwise we shall have to seek shelter for you with the Hulen guesthouse, and it is far.”

  “I would not wish to walk so far, but I will sleep in a treehouse. I have not done so since I was a buck.”

  Krisshantem nodded, vigorously now. “Come along, then. Follow me as you may.” And Krisshantem turned and began walking up the stream-valley, silently, not looking back to see if Morlenden was coming along. They did not speak again until they had reached, much later, their destination.

  TEN

  Tragedy is intimately associated with freedom; we only find its depiction in art by people who experience it. Collectivists, when moved to emotion at all, prefer to substitute disasters and calamities, which invariably and inexorably “happen” to masses, multitudes, and other assemblies of crowds. Tragedies, on the other hand, are just as invariably caused by individuals, and so felt by other individuals.