The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  Vero Nihil Verius

  I AWAKENED TO A FIERCE light, snapping to consciousness as soon as the edge of the sunrise knifed through the window and slit open my eyelids. Gosse Read was asleep in a chair at the end of my bed, his feet kicked up and crossed on my footboard. I sat up and his luminous emerald eyes flicked open.

  “Bout time you woke up,” he said. “Your friends are in the bath-house washing up.”

  “Were you watching me sleep?”

  “Yeah, you real pretty, boy. Get up and go wash, we’re gonna go to the bazaar.”

  “Why?” I asked, confused. I slid to the edge of the bed and shuffled into my trousers, shrugged into my shirt. I was putting on my shoes as Read said, “Because I’ve been contemplating what you said yesterday, and something occurred to me.”

  “What would that be?”

  “That maybe the Old Ways were right.”

  The morning was a beautiful beast that romped and shined with a vital spirit, and the very air was like fresh wine, unsullied and intoxicating. The sky was an infinite miracle of deep blue.

  I could not hide my astonishment at how good I felt in this other-world after a good night’s sleep and a hot meal. My face was locked in a half-grin that refused to leave. Leaving the Vespertine, I crossed the path of a woman carrying a swaddled infant and couldn’t help but greet her, which only earned me a confused smile.

  The bath-house turned out to be the large cabin I’d seen the day before and mistaken for some sort of a barn, or a warehouse. It was a central feature of the bazaar itself, and I discovered that it served as a social locus for Salt Point. Mornings here were like blackbirds on a power-line, a multitude of bathers milling in and out of the front entrances and lingering in conversation.

  I almost had a crisis when I approached, because I couldn’t read the signs that indicated which side of the bath-house was for a certain gender. My fears were allayed when I simply chose to enter through the door from which I saw men coming out.

  What a peculiar experience: an illiterate writer.

  When I walked in, however, I quickly realized that I’d had no reason to be confused after all, because both doors led into the same central bathing chambers. It resembled an Olympic-style lap pool, except it was only waist-deep.

  The sides of it were rimmed with a bench where men and women sat talking and sipping pungent coffee out of vase-like ceramic mugs. There was also a square island in the middle with seating. Dark green foliage curled out of a planter inside of it.

  The entire floor, pool and all, was tiled in pearlescent green, and the enormous windows were painted over with white, which caught the golden sunrise and translated it into a clean, rich glow. This was in turn captured by the steam and made into a glowing mass of vapor that hung over the bath like a star-cloud and smelled of lemons and mint. Indistinct shapes lurked inside of it, talking and laughing.

  The second thing I noticed was that no one was wearing any clothes, only a sort of colorless loincloth, a single rectangle of linen that one pulled across their straddle like a diaper, wrapped a piece of twine around the waist to affix it, and let the ends dangle from the butt and crotch.

  I was mortified to realize that I was by far the palest, flabbiest man in the room. Nearly all of the locals were like fashion models back home, slender, dark, and chiseled by a life spent digging up a living.

  I stared myself down in the floor-length mirror in the changing room (which, it seemed, had been indicated by the signs out front: “Changing-Room” on the left and “Coffee” on the right). Between my muffin top, and my darkening shaved head and week-old beard, I looked like I’d grown up in a cave deep underground, in a war with cave-dwelling coelacanths, subsisting on Doritos and a tincture of colloidal silver and flat Sprite.

  I went into the coffee room wearing the loincloth, realized that no one else inside was wearing one, and walked right back out with the urge to shoot myself.

  I escaped to the pool and stepped straight in, hoping I could use the milky-hot water to camouflage my flab, and had to restrain myself from whooping out loud as the heat shocked me. My skin was immediately spank-pink.

  Sawyer and Noreen were in one corner. I duck-walked in their direction and sat next to them. They had both turned as red as lobsters and were drinking coffee out of the flat-bottomed decanters. I was immediately envious, because even though Sawyer was as pale as myself, at least he was thin. Noreen’s arms were folded, and she was holding her breasts with her hands.

  “This is the weirdest thing I have ever done,” said Sawyer in a deadpan tone. “I’m wearing a diaper, I can see at least seven pairs of breasts, and I am drinking coffee out of an urn with the milk of an animal that I’ve never actually seen.”

  I agreed. “It’s weird, but I think swimming out of an elevator ranked pretty high on my Weird List. How you feeling, Reen?”

  She gave me a grateful half-smile and coughed hard, several times. It sounded productive. “I feel a lot better, actually, between the steam and the medicine I’m doing pretty good. You know, Ross, I had no clue that you were such a hairy-ass man.”

  I looked down at the whorls of dark hair on my chest. “I’m part muskrat.”

  “Is that so?”

  I was about to retort when someone came up to me carrying a decanter of coffee. It was one of the people with peculiar blue-tinted skin and large heads, dressed in one of the loincloths. I noticed that there was a line of large pores along his collarbone that flared intermittently.

  I looked into his eyes and I could see his retina through his pupils. It was like reading a map through a pair of keyholes.

  “Here you are, sera,” he said in a breathy voice. The container was too hot to hold by the base, but I found that holding it by its narrow neck kept me from getting burned. It was made of some satiny metal in reds and greens. Feathery designs and rings had been carved into it. “I just wanted to let you know that bathers are not allowed into the kitchen. Wolf protect you.”

  When I finally looked away from the blue guy (waiter? manservant?), my friends were giving me funny looks.

  Noreen arched an eyebrow. “You’re not supposed to go in there. Did you go in there in your towel-thing?”

  “Uhh....”

  “I bet you forgot something to clean with too. Here, you can use mine,” said Sawyer, handing me a bar of gritty soap and a long-handled wooden brush. I smelled the soap and realized that was where the lemons-and-mint smell was coming from. I lathered up with it and scrubbed myself all over with the brush, which turned out to be very soft.

  I decided to finally sample my beaker-vase of coffee now that it was cool enough to drink, and I was astonished at the fact that it was some of the best coffee I’d ever had in my life. A little bitter, and the milk made it frothy-thick, but it had that perfect smoky tang and an added mellow fruitiness besides. It was like drinking an overheated Starbucks mocha out of a hollowed coconut.

  We finished bathing and Read was waiting for us when we got outside.

  “The first orders of business is to get all of you into clothes a little more appropriate for co-mingling with polite society here in Ain,” he said in that erudite way, his words a machine-gun spill of perfect syllables.

  “We are goina make a shopping trip to...the marketplace, and we’ll see if we can’t find the three of you something to clothe—to put clothes, different clothes, on your bodies.”

  We went back to the place in the bazaar where we’d seen clothes the previous day. The merchants were very glad to see us again. After I picked out something that looked more Ainean, I came out to the crowd-choked street where a man in a velvet top hat was playing a rousing jig on a hammered dulcimer with yesterday’s shirtless minstrel, who was now sawing at a fiddle.

  The music took me back to the Renaissance Faires that I’d attended in the past, but I didn’t feel like I was in one here. The world was more than authentic, it was deeply actual. It was vero nihil verius, the real deal. No one here was someone else at home. No one
here drove here from Cincinnati, none of them were selling food made with ingredients purchased at Walmart, there were no candy wrappers on the ground.

  The thought was profoundly refreshing.

  I lingered, listening to the music. After a few minutes, the man playing the fiddle stopped playing and indicated a hat on the ground with his foot. “Oi-ye, if you like our music, spare us a coin, bout it?”

  “I’m afraid I’m tapped out, guys,” I said, shrugging. “I don’t have any money on me.”

  “Nice new garb. Fair talents for it, I wager? High quality, that Salomon Spearing does. Best clot’ier in the market. You look right handsome.”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling awkward. “I guess.”

  “I don’t tink you’re lickin up what I’m trowin down, you,” said the fiddler, “I’m sayin I know you’re carryin, and the music deserves a piece of it, don’t you tink?”

  “I’m sorry. I just don’t have it. A friend of mine bought this, I’m serious.”

  He seemed to think it over, and played a sad little three-note groan on the fiddle.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. Noreen beamed, demonstrating her new sundress, laced corset and boots. As I surveyed her outfit, I felt a swell of affection. She was ethereal, she was gorgeous. “What do you think?”

  “You look good. What about me?” I asked, turning in a circle to show off my vest, flat-crowned hat, and slacks.

  “Hmm,” she said, and rolled my shirtsleeves up high like a Marine. “There, now you look the part.”

  Sawyer came up behind her and tickled her, making her yell and laugh. She turned and hugged him, then held him at arm’s length. He had chosen one of the brown goat-hair ponchos and a Boss-of-the-Plains. A ribbon of colors was embroidered into the edge of the poncho.

  “Wow,” Noreen grinned. “You look like Clint Eastwood!”

  “That was the idea, baby,” he said, waggling his eyebrows. I whistled the trill from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, and they both cracked up laughing.

  “Are you folks finished primping and preening? You kids got expensive taste,” asked Read, appearing out of the crowd. “The Deon wants to get going as soon as possible, our ride leaves just before lunch and we let you all sleep late.”

  The boy snapped awake in the dead of night. Something had hit the roof.

  He sat there tangled in his dank bedclothes, listening for something else, anything, another noise to tell him it hadn’t just been part of his dream. He’d been flying through the clouds over the countryside on the back of a winged creature whose face he could not see.

  Several minutes had passed and he was about to lie back down and try to drift off when he smelled acrid smoke. He got up on his knees and looked out the window.

  Six men stood in the cull pen. One of them was holding a liquor bottle with a rag stuffed in the neck; as the boy watched, he lit the rag with a match and lobbed the bottle high into the air. It struck the roof with a thump and rolled off with a thin rumble, sliding off into the woodpile by the window, where it broke and turned into a blinding fireball.

  “Pack!” shouted his father from somewhere in the farmhouse.

  The boy slid out of bed and moved across the room, but as he took hold of the doorhandle, he heard the rip of gunfire.

  A body hit the floor.

  Pack stood there, frozen with indecision, then turned and opened his closet. He threw himself inside and shut the door, then pried open the hatch in the back and slid into the crawlspace on his belly. He pulled the board back into place and dragged himself to the hole where the pump pipe rose out of the dirt.

  He wedged himself into the ditch by the ice-cold pipe and listened, lying on his side in a grimy puddle.

  —The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 1 “The Brine and the Bygone”

  Bunkers and Battleships

  OUR RIDE TURNED OUT to be a train, a great seething black behemoth that was still loading up cargo when we arrived. I admired it as we crossed the platform of the modest red-brick train station where Walter Rollins was waiting for us. A throng of passengers ebbed and flowed around us, boarding the train, shouting to hear each other over the hiss of the mechanism. There were a handful of green-armored men strolling up and down the platform, checking tickets and helping the elderly with their luggage.

  “It’s a beauty, eh?” asked the Deon, one hand on his hip and the other tapping his leg with his hat. “Top of the line chug-bucket.” It was a standard old-school steam engine, a bulbous coal-fired locomotive with a smokestack and a brass bell, with an Ainean-language designation painted in white on the conductors’ cabin.

  Walter put on his Boss and climbed onboard the caboose. We found a private sitting-room on one of the passenger cars and filed onto the bench seats inside. There was another Kingsman gunslinger joining us that I remembered from the Vociferous.

  His name was Jonty Garrod. He was a short old fellow with big expressive hound-dog eyes, and a thin beard that had yellowed around the mouth from cigarette smoke. He was tapping filler into a rolling paper as we sat down, so I opened the window.

  A wind blew in and made his braided pigtails kick out behind him.

  “What’s a matter, boy? You got tender lungs? Smoke make you sick?” he asked with a tremendous grin, showing off the gap between his two front teeth.

  “No,” I lied. “It’s just such a pretty day, I thought we should have it open.”

  “Anybody ever tell you that you ain’t worth a damn at lyin?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say, so I sat down across from him and folded my arms. Sawyer and Noreen came in and sat by Garrod, leaving Read and the Deon to fill out the rest of my bench. Jonty packed the cigarette and lit it...soon, the private cabin reeked of sweet, pungent smoke.

  It didn’t smell like any tobacco I’d ever seen, so I asked him what it was. The train sighed heavily and began to move.

  “Pear leaves,” Garrod said. Pahr leaves. “No, it ain’t the Acolouthis, so don’t ask. Kids always ask me if it’s the Acolouthis, and I allaway says no, it ain’t. And no, you can’t have any.”

  “What’s the Acolouthis?” I asked.

  Garrod’s face fell. He glanced over to Walter and said, “Where’d you dig this one up?”

  “You know where we got them, you old smokey,” said the Deon. He had his feet kicked up on the bench across the cab, slumped down in his seat with his hat over his face and his arms crossed. “You were there.”

  “Kid, you really are ignorant as shit like they say.”

  “It is because they are from the other-world like Lord Eddick was. The one with the skint head is Eddick’s bastard. They don’t know any better because they are wholly alien to this world.”

  I was blown away.

  I had no idea Rollins had the scoop on us, or that he was even okay with it. What really shocked me was that he knew about my father and that he’d come from Zam/Earth. I registered the disbelief on Sawyer and Noreen’s faces as well.

  Sawyer picked up the Deon’s hat, and there was a stern glare underneath it. “You mean you knew?”

  “I suspected as soon as the bastard told me who he was,” said Walter.

  “Why didn’t you say anything? You knew about his dad?” asked Sawyer, and he let the hat plop back onto Walter’s face.

  “I didn’t know everything. I’d heard stories, when I was a boy, from my father. I overheard them late one night, Clayton, Normand, and Eddick, talking about the other-world, where Eddick had come from. I don’t suppose that’s something that could stay a secret for long between men as thick as they were.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” I said, echoing Sawyer.

  “It’s not exactly common knowledge,” said Walter. “The only people that knew about it were Normand, my father, Ardelia Thirion, myself, and perhaps Jonty Garrod here, the Quartermaster of the Southern Kingsmen. After you told Mr. Read here about it, he came to me as I was getting ready for bed last night and informed me. When I told him I already knew...well, you’ve never s
een such a fit.”

  Read grinned sheepishly. I sat back, my mind awhir, and looked out the window.

  The train had left the station by now, and we were entering a flat scrubland. The wind had kicked up and was sucking the Quartermaster’s smoke out the window. We rode for a little while like that, watching the yellow and brown desert scrub whip past the car.

  “Aren’t you glad I didn’t say anything?” asked Walter. “You know how people get when faced with the unknown. Your weird clothes were enough to set the people on the ship and in Salt Point on edge. If they’d known you three had stepped right out of scripture, they’d peg you for madmen and not have anything to do with you.”

  He sat up and jabbed a finger in my direction, and at Sawyer and Noreen as well. “You might even be dead by the side of the road, with a highwayman’s bullet in your heads. You lucked out, running into us, you did.”

  I had to agree.

  In the next cabin over, there was apparently a traveling band, because presently a raucous music started up with lots of stomping, clapping, singing and swooping of violins. All it took was a sly smile and soon our own cabin had erupted in applause and stomping of feet.

  The train wound through the desert for hours, occasionally passing through little hamlets strewn across the hardpan countryside of Ain like pickup sticks. Some of these villages were little more than a collection of pueblos clustered on a hillside.

  They were populated by dark-skinned, sheepskin-wearing men that perched squatting on the terraces and at the bases of crumbling walls. Sleek, hulking white elk-beasts milled about grazing on the coarse and rare grasses. Their horns curved in great arcs over their shoulders, tremendous loops of bone like ivory scimitars. Read told me that they were the Pohtir-nyhmi beasts they’d mentioned at the Vespertine.

  There were also townships along the way, and several of these we stopped at to disgorge passengers and pick up new ones. A bald man in a long green tunic embroidered with golden threads came into our cabin complaining that there was nowhere else to sit, and we all agreed to let him stay with us. I was discomfited by the way his throat swelled like a balloon from time to time like a toad, turning from a pale pink to a translucent white. He was sitting quite close to me and I realized that his eyebrows were not comprised of hair but of tiny quills.