Chapter 34
Desperation had driven Keram to it. Hadur had stood before him a terrible silver-blue flame, snorting and pounding. Keram could almost have gone mad just from looking at the beast. Its sides heaved and each breath smelled of rotten fruit and leaves long dead, of water long spoiled and still. The air around it tasted like blood, heavy with metal. Hadur towered over him and Keram thought vaguely of the elephants hired to clear the roads of his village after storms. The horse flung itself at Keram, furious that he did not transform into a slavering beast nor flee in terror. Keram thought desperately of Ganit. If he ran for help Ganit would descend into madness. But he had no means to fight Hadur alone. Alas, that he had so long waited to plan this moment. So he flew at the beast as it hurtled toward him, and leapt. Keram was no rider and he landed halfway across the back of the horse. It was only Hadur's bewilderment that allowed Keram to stay on. He scrambled toward the silver neck and clung as tightly as he could, unable to sit up as the horse began again to run, flinging itself forward and back, twisting, trying to bite at him with hideous teeth caked in black gore. Its hide was not the smooth, soft flesh Keram had expected, but sharp, sliding scales that bunched and prickled beneath Keram's bare chest. The smell of blood was even worse from its flesh and Keram could feel the terrible shudder when Hadur screamed. Keram almost let go and slid beneath the trampling hooves. His arms were exhausted quickly and he was sore, as if he had been dashed against stone, but he suddenly felt the air grow warmer and the sky was brighter than he had ever seen. Keram struggled for a clear view as Hadur continued to rear and writhe. The light was so bright that Keram seemed blinded, though he squinted against it. The light pulsed toward him like a great warm wind whisking over his face. He turned away, bracing for the explosion he knew must come. But Hadur stopped and stood silent a moment. Then the beast turned and raced toward the bleak, swarming darkness. Keram wept in great gasping breaths as he squeezed the dry, scaly neck with all his remaining strength.
Too soon they reached the darkness and Keram felt the warmth and day receding from him. He was chilled, as if this pool of night had never been touched by the sun. The horde of beast men surged and grabbed, gnashing and grinding like a great dark wind. They scrabbled for his feet, for his arms that strangled their god. Keram wept as he kicked them away. "I don't want to die in the dark," he thought again, and his mouth gaped in a noiseless cry. He wanted to close his eyes, not to see what his heart told him was going to happen, but his terror had grown too great and he watched them close in, trampling each other to reach him. He felt the great, hurling screams of the horse beneath his chest as it flung itself against the violet tree that arced over them. The bark of the tree smashed on his arm and a smear of black sap spread over his skin. It looked like blood and Keram was sick, the sweet berries turned sour in his throat and burned there. He could see the blank faces of the beasts that had once been mothers and fathers, wives and husbands. They flashed before him over and over as they scraped at the horse to get at Keram, a rolling, tumbling avalanche of need.
Hadur bled, his scales flaking like sharp snow. The horse's army was tearing at him, frenzied trying to grasp his rider. Even those caught and crushed beneath the weight of their fellows still bit at Hadur's leg in a last desperate madness. Keram was too dazed to understand his enemy was failing until one of them opened Hadur's neck. It was biting Keram's hand and he pulled back in quick shock, but he had left a trail of blood upon the neck of the horse where he had grasped it. The mob leapt at the animal with long, sharp nails and ripping teeth. Hadur tried to rear but he was sinking beneath the weight of hundreds. They pulled at the silver flesh despite heavy hooves and the screams of the horse. Keram was sliding into them, drowning in them, but he grabbed at the tree and with one last great wrench, pulled himself from the back of Hadur onto a low lying branch. He stood upon it, gripping the trunk of the tree though it pulsed with dark cold and tried not to look down as the silver horse was devoured, stripped to clean bone in minutes. He looked toward the eastern sky, hoping for some sign of Ganit, for some small light to pierce the gloom, but the air was as a shroud of evening and he could see nothing besides the occasional flash of a hand reaching for him or a frantic face snarling. He stood and wept, wondering if he ought to let go of the trunk and fall into the mass. He tried to search each face, tried to imagine what it had looked like once, laughing or crying, in sleep or in toil. "I don't want to die in the dark," he thought again, but he was not afraid any longer. Instead, a terrible stone of sadness fell upon him for all these beasts that had once loved and thought and been gladdened by each other, and whose minds had died in the deepest dark, each alone, though all around them their fellows fell. Keram closed his eyes. He tried to remember swimming in the sunlight and the smell of green grass being cut and the warm damp of the jungle. But all his mind could see was Ganit, limping on one leg, a blazing beacon for these mad wolves below. All he could see was the light being swallowed and the dark blood and shadow of the tree spreading over all the empty world.
They were getting closer, their gnawed fingertips brushing his feet, their nails made a scratching shudder along his shoes. He opened his eyes and loosened his hold on the trunk. He turned his back to the tree, balancing on the limb and looked out over the flood of bloody, torn faces. He thought he saw a lightening in the eastern sky, but he convinced himself it was only wishful thinking. Keram took a deep breath and it chilled him deep in his chest. The eastern sky crimsoned and then burst into dawn, as if the shroud of night were torn suddenly open. Keram's heart leapt and he began to laugh with relief. He could not see Ganit, the light was too bright. But he knew Ganit could see him, a small man caught in the dark limbs of a twisted tree, a violet star like the flesh of night. He watched with horror as the mass of wild men turned as one body toward the light. Their faces were lined with terrible brightness, bloodied and dripping with drool, teeth and nails black with old blood. Keram paused a moment to bang a shoe against the trunk of the tree. He hoped it was a loud noise that he made. He looked last upon the eastern sky and tried to imagine he was diving into a summer pool, the village boys behind him, laughing. And then he leapt.
Chapter 35
The beasts about him scattered and fled as Ganit struggled toward the creeping patch of night. His light grew ever brighter as he tried to pierce it, tried to look behind its heavy veil. His heart was thunderous in the sore flesh where his leg had been and his breath already burned against his ribs, as if, at last, Ganit could feel the star he carried in his belly. The stick that carried him flowered with flame but harmed him not. It held him only a few paces more, then puffed away, a swirl of blinking cinders. Ganit teetered but stood still and his light at last pierced the shadow that lay against the west. It ran away to either side, like dark water from shattered eggs or a fall of snow sliding from rock. He saw the clawing mass of madmen swallowing the tree with the press of their bodies. He heard a great murmuring among them, a roar of meaningless sound, and Ganit stood and trembled. But of Hadur, there was no sign. He had been wholly destroyed by his own horde, his blood and bone, scale and mane divided, scattered amongst them, trampled underfoot, discarded as the crowd turned its lust to some new object. For it was neither hunger nor greed that drove them so. The wild men starved or fell and cared not. Instead they existed only to rend and crush. Without new beasts to focus their hatred on, they were as likely to turn and mutilate each other. Everywhere there was blood and torn flesh, crooked limbs and a heavy, thick reek of gore. But now they scrabbled at a lone, laughing figure upon the tree. Ganit was stricken to see Keram so caught. But the light attracted the beasts and they turned, their faces a muddy, snarling, cracking wave and Ganit felt his breath stop at the base of his throat. Over the curling, rising growl of the beast men Ganit heard a steady thud, a deep and throaty heartbeat and he saw Keram frantically beat the tree as the mass turned back. Without hesitation, Ganit sent a great billow of light from his skin. Everything it touched sparkled a moment with flame
and then puffed into a cascade of dust. Ganit saw Keram for only a second, leaping, flying over the mass of beast men and then he was a flurry of white blowing far into the sky and was gone.
The horde of wolf men was no more, a drift of gray soil, a pile of silent ash blown against the Midnight Tree that still stood cold and dark in the heat of the blaze. Ganit's chest ached, raw and bursting as if he breathed the flame forth through his lips. He felt his skin melting with the heat of his blood as fat melts from the wick of a candle. He collapsed into the gray ash pile and his light dimmed and retreated from the Midnight Tree. He sat many hours unknowing, weeping gray, clotted tears for Keram that hissed and rose from the heat of his skin. But his breath no longer burned his throat and Ganit's flesh was whole.
The ash shifted in restless breezes and clung to him until he was caked in a second skin of dead men. He was a gray moving stone that continually cracked and blazed forth with a broken light, so that the world was bathed in sea-light, moving reflections of water that carried all the warmth left in the world. At last Ganit raised his head and looked around him. All was desolate, the spring of Brone unmade, blank and burned and flat as far as Ganit's eye could reach. How he thirsted, throat and sight and heart for a glimpse of green, cool grass and a taste of clear, swift waters. But all that stood amid the dust was the chilled shadow of the Midnight Tree. Ganit shuddered to look upon it, for he knew it was Brone's, a relic left behind, yet as powerful as he. His chest ached when he saw the trunk bore a woman's face for he feared it was Brone trapped within.
"What terrible fate met her here?" he wondered, and slowly crawled through the terrible dunes of ash, choking as he dragged himself toward the twisted trunk. The dark of the tree swallowed him, for he was vastly weakened, and as he drew toward its center, his light pressed in about him, sucked in towards his skin and the outer world was plunged into night again.
Chapter 36
A burst of light in the eastern sky had woken Brone at last. It splashed upon her sleeping face, a golden pool that seeped beneath her eyelids. The heat of Enik's fires wrapped around her and Brone gasped for air but drew searing dust into her chest. She cried out and an old woman brushed her hand, but said nothing. Brone saw half built walls around her for a second in clear daylight, their stone new hewn and clean, but scattered, unmortared and askew. And then the eastern light faded and all was dull and blooded again in firelight. Brone looked for the distant star that she knew must be Ganit, but she found only a tiny, graying spark. As Brone watched, her eyes blearing with dust and panic, the spark doubled and wavered before blinking out, consumed by the Midnight Tree. She tried to stand, to follow the path where Ganit had been, but the weight of her children overcame her and Brone sank, crushed with dizziness. Water gushed from her and pain squeezed in around her belly, a whickering flame that wouldn't die but grew stronger and pulled even tighter. Brone wept with despair and her voice hit the broken walls and fractured, splintering back into her ear. The world was silent except for her cry. No bird or beast called, no wind or water moved, even the crackle of Enik's fires seemed to fall away into vast emptiness with only the grief of Brone to fill it again. But Hanna, the old woman, broke Brone's loneliness and touched her again on the hand. "It will all be over soon, my dear. It will all be coming to an end within hours."
But Brone was maddened with grief and pain and cried in guttural streams, a low animal. The world crushed against her belly and ground about her like churning water and stone. Hanna tried to calm Brone, brushing her back with cool, quiet fingers and making soft breezes against Brone's forehead which was thickened with pain. But Brone only bent her head and tore at her clothing and at the jade vines that curled tighter around her shoulders and hips. She bled as she tried to rip them from her and moaned. Hanna removed the thick, battered clothing that Brone wore, thinking it would cool and calm her. But the older woman recoiled in horror when she saw the hard, spiraling branches twining themselves in dark veins across Brone's skin. Yet they did not pierce her flesh, but framed the warm globe of her belly where Hanna could make out the shadow of babies twisting and pushing.
Brone's belly became hard as stone and she cried out, curling her bare toes against the dry earth. Lichen sprang up where she touched, silver and flaking and spreading in great patches. She cried out for water and Hanna sprang away in terror toward the well. The old woman sent her bucket scraping down the side of the well and it echoed with the plinking of dust into shallow water. Hanna felt shrunken and tight, mummified in the blazing air and the bucket returned half full of sand with only an inch of clear water sitting on top. She could hear Brone crying out as the babies swirled insider her swollen belly. Joints cracking like drying clay, Hanna dragged the murky water back.
Brone sat on her knees in the baking dust in temporary relief. Her eyes were ever on the eastern sky, but it remained dark and still. She tried to delay, to hold back, but her flesh was as crumbling sand against the rumbling tide of her children. Pressed from without by the clenching vines that sprang from the jade seed and hollowed from withing by the constant tumbling of her babies against the wall of her belly, Brone felt like a thinning shell, a softening shard of glass. Her world faded and was swallowed by the boiling core of her body. She dropped her eyes without realizing it, and she did not see the eastern horizon grow bright again, nor hear the old woman's cool voice in her ears.
Many hours Hanna crouched near Brone trying to bring some small comfort to her. She wiped the younger woman's face with the thin, dark well water and held Brone up from the dust in the midst of her worst pains. But she shuddered at the writhing gray-green vines circling and squeezing Brone's flesh. Hanna tried to pull them off or snap them free but Brone only cried out the louder from pain, so she left them as they were and tried not to touch them. She was not a healer, nor a mother herself, having been a holy woman all her life, living with other holy women, but even Hanna knew Brone's children were not arriving as they ought. Hanna looked around her, the dry dust floating, baking in the half life of Enik's retreating flames. With a sea of blackened glass before them and all the desolate darkness of the empty world behind, the two women were as alone as Ganit himself. And though Hanna had witnessed all of her sisters and people of the surrounding land steadily march into the fires days before, she had never felt so abandoned as in those agonizing hours. She watched Brone struggling to push life out into the dead, ashen world. Hanna wondered if it were better for her to carry Brone to the edge of the sharp, sharded valley where rock and flame met the receding sea, and cast them both into the abyss. And Hanna wept as only small children do.
Chapter 37
Ganit woke deeply chilled. The tree's darkness seeped into his skin while he slept and the very light of himself seemed to gutter and choke in his chest. He had drooped into the dreamless sleep that only deep sorrow can bring, thinking he slept in Keram and Brone's grave, thinking he slept in his own. But now he raised his head to see the awful outline of a woman in frozen pain and horror who made the heart of the Midnight Tree. The face of the woman was indistinct in the gloom where he had sunk in the dust. The cold, stony outline of her frame caught in an unnatural bow, as if her back had broken with the agony of her death, as if the tree had grown alone in the endless gale of a high peak and bent itself ever away from every gust. He grasped the trunk to pull himself up and shrieked as the bark bit his skin with a crackling frost. Ganit forced himself up and let go of the tree, hugging his arms into his warm core. He concentrated as hard as he might upon the face of the woman caught in the tree, his light flaring weakly beneath the gray soot covering him. Her face was twisted and only a dark shadow of what it's warm flesh had been, but Ganit's heart quickened as he realized it was not Brone. He felt her stamp upon the place, a powerful growth even in the dark. He knew something terrible had happened in this place of perpetual night, but this was not where Brone had died. Ganit suddenly wished himself far, far from the smothering chill of the place, out in the free air. He had neither staff nor support,
so he crawled through drifts of ash trying not to cough in its taint. It clung to him, lined his lips and eyelids, gritty and dry, yet as heavy as if it were wet snow gathered and clumping. He was exhausted again by the time the darkness of the Midnight Tree opened to release him, but his heart was not so burdensome. The burning light of his flesh remained hidden beneath the cracking shell of soot and for a few moments he saw the faint scarlet far, far to the west of Enik's fire. The light within him kindled again and the ash broke, sloughed off, whipped away in a warm breeze and the East again knew dawn.
All the land stretching before Ganit was a spreading, newborn green that begged for light and warmth. Ganit realized Brone had survived and walked into the west, miles and miles from the foul tree. Though it was far and Ganit could only creep slowly upon the grass, he would not stop. He crawled westward many hours before he felt a great shuddering in the dirt. He began to hear a buzzing, a flapping, a thumping and the great swishing wave of tall grasses parting as the animals that had wandered away were gradually drawn again to the moving light and heat and to the great swathe of Brone's spring plants. Seeing the cow and calf at last, still tied with Keram's rope, Ganit pulled himself up onto the larger beast's back and let it wander westward as he slept, exhausted on its warm hide.
Chapter 38
Brone had rallied at last just as the light burst forth over the eastern horizon. She curled her feet into the dirt and pushed her daughter forth. Silver and dark rose, Adya cried out in the still, heavy air. But Brone was not finished and could not take Adya to her breast, so Hanna wrapped the child in the Brone's discarded clothing. Brone ached to to hold her daughter and wept as she labored with her son. He took a long time to spring forth, many, many hours, so that Brone was haggard and pale before he emerged. Hanna believed Brone was dying from the inside out. But Janak arrived at last, the purple and gold of twilight. Brone lay upon the warm earth, soft, dry moss springing up beneath her. Though the air around her hung like a thick wool and her blood still burned upon her thighs, Brone suddenly felt chilled. She still gasped for air in exhaustion but as she gazed upon her own moveless belly, she wept for the emptiness there. Hanna helped her bring each baby to her breast and Brone was a little soothed, clasping their small warm backs in her arms.
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