Zalmon, Elez and Hezro began to yell.
Naharai ran toward his friends and saw that the tubers had turned on them. The three men were hopelessly bound in the mass of tangled rootwork. Naharai saw the barbed ends sliding around their necks and creeping up their faces, rearing to plunge into their mouths like striking serpents.
Naharai followed the twisting roots back to the thick trunk, which was cleft in the middle where the tubers disappeared. There was a strong, rancid smell here, the same stench they had detected all morning, overwhelming here at its source. The white mist that encircled them billowed out of the open trunk like smoke. He hacked at the tendrils with his sword, but they were tough and coated with a viscous sap. It was like trying to cut a wet hay bale in half with a dull knife.
Gareb and General Joab joined him. Every blow they struck against the tubers caused the tree to shudder. Above their heads, the great limbs swayed violently as if buffeted by a storm. One heavy branch came down like an axe and struck Gareb on top of the head with such force Naharai heard the disquieting sound of the man’s bones crunching together and was splashed on the cheek by a jet of blood from his ear. He narrowly avoided becoming the tree’s next victim when the General pulled him away toward the road.
“Obed!” the General shouted as he dragged Naharai past Zalmon and the two other trapped warriors. Zalmon’s eyes watched him pleadingly, half his face torn away by the branches, the tubers packing his bleeding mouth.
As Naharai and Joab regained the road, Obed rushed out of the mist to meet them.
“Fire arrows!” Joab yelled, shoving him back with one hand to the opposite side of the road nearly out of the tree’s reach.
Obed nodded and hastily turned to break open a wax-sealed jar from his pack with his knife.
Naharai pulled away from the General, but felt himself jerked back again by his breastplate.
“Zalmon!” Naharai cried.
“Avenge him,” said Joab, releasing him only when Naharai ceased struggling.
“Rally!” he shouted at the others.
The four men who had been knocked to the ground came running at the sound of their commander’s voice, raising their round shields and staggering against the blows the tree directed down on them.
Ira ben Ikkesh was slammed down on his belly by a great bough, which battered him again and again until his broken body was driven partially into the dirt.
Elhanan, Joshaphat, Hiddai, and Naharai put their backs to Joab, raising their shields and hacking at the questing ramage with their swords and axes, batting it away with their spears. Obed plunged a fistful of arrowheads into the open jar.
Joab dug into his own pack and came out with flint. He tore a scrap from his cloak and began to strike the flint against the blade of his sword.
The tree whirled and struck at them, the branches hissing like knives through the air but unable to mount a viable attack. Only the spindly ends found their mark. These raked ineffectually at the bronze shields or were quickly cut away.
Then there was a tremendous crackling sound. The entire tree canted abruptly. Another great shearing noise and the lower portion rose to meet the first.
The tree was uprooting itself.
It began to inch towards them, tilting as it clambered slowly up onto the road, its muddy roots slithering beneath it, carrying it like the legs of a ponderous millipede.
Joab’s curses became more desperate as each clink of flint yielded nothing.
“Master, let us flee!” Elhanan whined.
But his protest was barely heard in the wordless yell of triumph that burst from the General’s lips as the bit of his cloak flared into fire. They smelled the smoke and felt the flare of heat behind them.
Joab held the flaming cloth out to Obed, who fitted an arrow to his bow. Joab touched the fire to the dripping arrowhead and shouted for them to get down.
Obediently, they crouched. The first of Obed’s flaming missiles hissed across the road and struck the trunk of the advancing tree with a hollow sound, punctuated by a terrible groan.
The tree wavered in the road and began to retreat, slow as a snail.
It almost made Naharai laugh to see, especially when Joab ordered them to pursue.
They crept behind the thing, just out of its reach. Obed fired arrow after arrow, till it was lit up and streaming fire, bellowing its distress with an unnatural, beastly babel.
Black smoke joined the white mist issuing from the thing and a noisome stink of burning rot filled the air.
By the time the Gibborim had reached the other side of the road, the thing was blazing about twenty paces out into the forest. It shambled and staggered to get away, howling and jiggling, pushing over lesser timbers in its plodding retreat.
“Shall we give chase, sir?” Naharai asked eagerly.
“Yes, by God!” Joab exclaimed, his blood up.
“Wait, General!” It was the voice of Eliam, behind them.
He alone crouched in the road, rummaging in his pack.
“Listen! Look!”
It was something of a struggle to turn their attention away from the stumbling, burning monster, but Naharai’s blood iced when he did.
The trees.
All around them, the trees were moving in the mist, though there was no wind. The forest sounded as if every timber were falling, every trunk creaking and rubbing against each other.
The whole Wood of Ephraim was moving towards them, pale, swaying limbs and slithering roots already encroaching upon either side of the road.
“God! What do we do?” Elhanan gibbered.
Obed, out of arrows, knelt in the road and began to pray.
“Here!” Eliam beckoned from the road.
Seeing no other course, Joab led the way, pulling Obed to his feet. Soon they were surrounding the Wizard’s son.
“My father warned me about Ephraim,” Eliam said rapidly, drawing something from his pack and holding it out to them. “He gave me this. Said if ever I found myself here, it would protect me. Maybe it will keep them back.”
In his hand was a smooth, greenish stone almost the size of the General’s fist, a faint, star-shaped design etched whitely upon it: a flaming eye in the center of a pentagram, with a smaller figure within, like a stylized branch.
“Philistine deviltry!” Joshaphat declared, spitting into the dirt.
“What is it?” Joab asked warily.
“My father told me it was a piece of the Foundation Stone and that the sign was the Lord’s own.”
“Don’t listen to this one,” Joshaphat protested. “His father was a damned wizard! Everyone knows — !”
“What choice do we have?” Joab thundered. “Get in front of us, Eliam. We’ll go back the way we came. Shields! Be firm! And may God defend us!”
Shoulder to shoulder, they encircled Eliam in their round shields like the palisades of a fortress. He held the stone before him and over his head, and began to drone a low, strange incantation, in a tongue none of them knew.
They advanced, huddled close together.
After a few steps, Elhanan whimpered and dropped his shield. He ran, gibbering, straight into the woods like a fire-maddened deer. Obed lunged to catch him, but Joab pulled him back and ordered the gap closed.
They heard Elhanan shriek wildly somewhere off in the mists, and then there came a terrible sucking and snapping sound.
After that, only Joab dared to look. He urged them on with news that the trees were holding. Eliam’s arm began to tire. As with Moses stretching his staff over the battle of Rephidim, Naharai and Hiddai reached up to steady his wavering arm. Obed prayed in a loud voice the whole time, as if to counteract Eliam’s bizarre incantations.
Naharai glanced once past the rim of his shield and saw a pair of the monstrous trees rocking at the edge of the road, the tendrils waving slowly, like hair underwater. The smoking, gaping vertical clefts in their trunks yawned like hungry mouths, slavering sap as they passed.
Their branches were strung wi
th garlands of corpses, rebel Israelites who had fled into the woods from the previous day’s battle. All of them were shriveled, desiccated, bone-thin and skeletal, every jaw cruelly broken, opening and closing in mute entreaty, the teeth clacking together like macabre wind chimes as they pendulated in the lurching trees.
Naharai did not raise his head again until Joab announced they were safely out of the forest.
No one mentioned the shocking whiteness of the General’s beard.
Behind them, the forest menaced, swaddled in stinking mists. The crackling of timber could still be heard faintly, as if a herd of great beasts were negotiating the dense woods.
“What are they, Eliam?” Joab asked.
“I know only what my father told me,” Eliam said, hunkering down breathlessly and removing his helmet to run a shaky hand through his dripping hair. “He said that David heard an Old One’s call and thought it was the Lord. He broke the Temple ground and moved the Foundation Stone. My father replaced it but not before an Old One and her dark young were freed. They must have come to these hills as the waters receded. He told me that as trees inhale the exhalations of man and renew the air, those things draw the life of men and spew death, a kind of chaos that unmakes everything around them.”
“That’s why no flies or birds, no game of any kind,” whispered Hiddai.
“And why the temple was never finished,” Obed added lamely.
“We must tell David,” Naharai said.
Joab put his fist to his mouth, staring back at the wood. When his hand came away, he said, “No. When we rejoin the armies of Abisahi and Ittai, I will order these woods burned. No one will speak of this to the King.”
“But what of Absalom?” Naharai asked. “He will think you murdered his son.”
“Will he believe this wild story?” said Joab.
“We will all vouch for it, General,” Obed said.
The other men voiced their agreement, but Joab waved them quiet.
“You would all be named accomplices to my crime,” Joab said tiredly, “and lose the King’s trust.”
“As my father did,” Eliam said quietly.
“We will rejoin the army and burn the Wood of Ephraim,” said Joab. “I alone will take the blame for Absalom. Now let’s be gone from these cursed hills.”
With that, he turned and marched off down the road, his cloak torn, covered in blood like a common soldier.
Naharai was the first to follow, with tears in his eyes.
That night, the horn of General Joab sounded.
The Judahite armies broke their vessels and fired their arrows, sowing the hills of Gilead with seeds of flame.
The Wood of Ephraim blazed through the night. A great groaning was heard. The smoke that poured down into the valley was putrid, and black ash fell like snow.
Just before dawn, the smoke cleared and the stars shone briefly in the deep-blue sky.
TRUTH IS ORDER AND
ORDER IS TRUTH
BY NADIA BULKIN
I didn’t go alone into the outer darkness. A huddled legion came with me, men and women and children, all of whom would have been purged for their devotion to my mother. My mother was dead, so she could not summon any army. My father was dead as well, so he could not protect me. But I was alive, their only child, and I’d promised my mother’s followers that I would deliver us to strength and sanctuary in my mother’s homeland, Jungkuno. Because all the rivers flow north and Jungkuno is on the southern shore, we had to go overland.
We had no soldiers. Those men were loyal to the Prime Minister, Jaya Megalang. He was their god. They would have followed him anywhere. It was to my parents’ credit that the soldiers let us pass through the brick split gate. We had one healer, a very old man who I didn’t think understood what he was giving up. There were my mother’s friends, disgraced and confused and clinging to their jewelry, more convinced than I that we would rally an army in Jungkuno and re-take the Alunijo throne. There were farmers. I’d expected them all to be farmers, because they were the ones whose crops my mother blessed with irrigation. Then there were my mothers’ servants, some of whom would have been gladly buried with her, others who just had no family to vouch for them — these few slogged behind, bemoaning their fate and the insects and the heat.
Except for the reluctant servants, they came of their own accord. No, they didn’t choose to trek through the infested rainforest toward a half-forgotten kingdom. But they did choose to bow to my mother Dyah, to call her “Mother of Kingdoms,” to see divine providence in her. They saw her Truth, as stark as the silent face of a cold, white moon. Once you have looked into her eyes, once her fingers have grazed your scalp, she is hard to shake. She was my mother. I should know.
When I walked away from Jaya Megalang for the last time, when he laid bare his sordid accusations against my mother, he yelled, “Who knows where you come from? You belong to the outer darkness!” I bit my bottom lip until my mouth filled with blood so he would honor my request to rebury my mother’s bones. Then I forced myself to continue walking past the dead kings’ banyans, through the brick split gate, and into the wilderness that birthed me.
Jaya Megalang called my mother a shaman queen. He dug her up and looked under her shroud and said her skeleton was misshapen, that her eyes were too large and her mouth too wide. He said her fingers and toes had grown too long from “too much magic.” He said she consorted with demons while my father secured Maluku and her body paid the price. This was ludicrous because my mother had been agelessly beautiful. The concubines stood no chance against her, which is why they pinned their hopes for power on their sons, my half-brothers.
I wasn’t worried, at first. I didn’t care that Arda and Murti were men who looked like my father, because I was his only legitimate child. And then he — Jaya Megalang our Prime Minister — said my mother, the “sorceress,” had been unfaithful. That I wasn’t really blood.
As early as my father’s funeral procession, I could feel the landscape shifting — temples coming down, houses going up, clouds moving fast as warships. I realized after I screamed at a maid who brought the garden’s last jackfruit to Arda instead of me that I had lost my footing. Jaya Megalang had a far stronger voice and reach. Amassing power was not a skill I’d been taught between courtly dance and batik painting. Sycophantic courtesans went slithering after Arda’s heels, whispering things about my mother, each more terrible than the last. My ministers would not meet with me. I had been buried, alive, with my parents.
A gap-toothed child grabbed my hand and asked, “What will Jungkuno be like?” I didn’t have an answer. So I murmured, “My mother’s people will meet us. Do you remember my mother? She was the Queen. We will hear them singing. They will give us crowns of seashells. We will eat fish. We will swim home ...” I don’t know what I was saying after that. The air was so heavy, the ground so unsteady. I remember squeezing the child’s hand until someone snatched the sprite away. I heard whispers of “Princess” and didn’t know who that “Princess” was.
I had never been to Jungkuno. None of us had. All I knew was that my mother ate spiny purple crabs in what she called “harbor-style” — raw and salted — and told only one story about Jungkuno, and only when I was feverish. It began, “My Mother and Father live under the sea.” I don’t remember the rest, except for bone-fragments about a thousand siblings, whirlpools and swimming “all the way up” to Father’s golden eyes. They were an opiate. I asked her for them nightly — even pretending to be sick — until she shook me off.
“You aren’t ready,” she said.
She’d come inside Alunijo’s brick walls to pay tribute and renew ties, on the 20th anniversary of Jungkuno’s acquiescence to the Alunijo Empire. By then, the man who’d subordinated Jungkuno, King Tungga, was dead, and it was my father Sora who was sitting in the pavilion when she emerged from under the banyans, this wide-eyed woman wearing so much gold she was shining. Sea-music, the kind you hear from a conch, flooded his ears. The hermits said it meant
she was the Mother of Kingdoms, so my father married her right away. Her few attendants disappeared soon after. She never went back. I asked if she got homesick and she said, “The water is too shallow here,” which I took to mean, “Yes.”
Maps couldn’t decide exactly where Jungkuno was — behind that cove, on that headland? On some days, trees didn’t seem to change and bad thoughts would worm in like ants chewing under fingernails: Jungkuno does not exist. My mother was insane. I have killed us.
Jaya Megalang cast his wives aside like rotting fruit, and hated kneeling to my mother and me. I felt the sourness of his hate and snapped my teeth at him like a cornered dog. Once, I called him an impotent ogre. He called me a demon. I was 17.
“You need to humor him,” my father said. This was years before he was trampled by the elephant — my father believed he could control everything, and had indeed expanded the empire to Maluku and tamed the Bugis, but his mind weakened after my mother died. “What proud general wants a little girl talking back to him?”
“My brothers don’t have to kiss his feet and they’re not even princes.”
“Arda and Murti also don’t argue with him. Consider the battles he’s won for us.”
Jaya Megalang once subdued a small, restless kingdom in western Java by arranging a marriage between their princess and my father, and then deciding after their ship docked in Alunijo that their princess was to be a concubine instead. They objected, so he killed the entire royal family. My father, only 15, sent them riches in atonement.
Sword & Mythos Page 6