Wrath-Bearing Tree

by James Enge

Who in this world or any other would recruit a crew of demons and follow the Two Powers across the Sea of Stones?

  But that was not his trouble, at least not in this hour. The menace in the east was receding again, and he shifted his course again.

  Everything was going as well as it could. His body was growing weak, its connection to life more tenuous through prolonged absence of his talic awareness. But the journey was nearing its end.

  He was just about to congratulate himself when he saw that he was steering into a storm.

  The storm strode out of the south on crooked fiery legs of lightning. Morlock felt the surge of waters long before the thunderbolts came within striking range. Their force, passed on to the Boneglider’s propellers, drove the boat faster than ever through the water. He drove eastward as fast as he could. In his talic eye he could see the edge of the sea, the dense gold-green of sea-life fading into the colder sparser tal of land-life.

  But the storm caught him before he came to shore. Lightning began to fall like hail around him. He couldn’t direct it away from himself and also drive the propellers with his mind.

  With sluggish, half-aware hands, his picked up his blade Armageddon and held it over himself. If thunder was going to fall on him, or the Boneglider, perhaps he could absorb it into the talic matrices of the glass blade.

  A bolt fell, straight on him. It shattered the lid of the Boneglider’s coffinlike hull, but the aether of the bolt was drawn into Armageddon before it could do any further damage. Three more bolts fell toward the boat, and Morlock drew them with his mind into the blade he now held straight out into the open air.

  The waves were now high and steep, with narrow deep troughs between them. He had to choose between driving on eastward as fast as he could, or turning into the wind.

  Inexperience betrayed him. He thought that, with the speed he had gained from the storm’s own power, he could ride through the troughs between the waves all the way to shore, or at least to calmer waters.

  Soon he was driving the Boneglider along the side of a wave that was rising, rising, rising, and curling at the top as it rose. He realized his mistake by then, that there was no stable course through the waves with the storm-wind on the shoulder of his craft. But it was too late. The wave curled over, and the water like the fist of a giant crushed the Boneglider.

  Morlock shook loose from his vision and found himself floating, deep in dark water, amid the fragments of his dead craft. He kept his grip on Armageddon: it still blazed with implicit thunder and the hot aether would be more buoyant than wood or waterlogged flesh.

  He drove his body upward through the bitterly cold surge of waters. When he came to the surface he was nearly deafened with the roar of the wind, the crash of the waters, the high hissing shriek of the rain.

  He had no notion of west or east or north or south. He had no plan, other than to stay afloat as long as he could.

  How he hated the water, so inimical to the fire in his blood! But that fire sustained him, when many another would have died. In time the wind grew less; the surge subsided; the rain and lightning passed northward. Morlock was left, dog-paddling grimly, toward the black border of the land.

  In the end he crawled onto a long muddy beach, exhausted, waterlogged, and bone-chilled, but with his sword still in hand.

  Awaiting him was a group of tall gray people. They also had swords. He thought they were armored, too . . . but when he looked up at them in the dim gray light, he saw that the flat gray plates on their faces and arms, the row of spikes running down their spines—these were growing directly out of their skins.

  “Mandrakes,” he whispered.

  “We don’t call ourselves that,” said one of them, in the language shared by dragons and dwarves. He swung the mace in his hand, and Morlock fell down into darkness.

  Hope’s shadow strode behind her all afternoon—but it was not Hope’s shadow at all. It took a while for Aloê to be sure of this: the dark shadow dancing on the red-gray ground. But Hope’s fair hair was bound in a long braid. Ambrosia’s dark red hair fell in wild tangles past her shoulders. The shadow outlined in golden light on the gray ground behind Hope had hair like Ambrosia’s, not Hope’s.

  Aloê lifted her eyes from the ground to comment on this to Hope, but the other was looking at her, smiling wryly, and said, “Yes, that’s Ambrosia’s shadow, and she has mine. We see each other in mirrors sometimes, as well. It can be inconvenient.”

  “No doubt.”

  “I don’t suppose you like her much.”

  “Ambrosia? She can be difficult.”

  “She is difficult, and brilliant. I am not difficult, but not brilliant.”

  “That’s a harsh assessment.”

  “It’s my father’s. He had some plan of using us a secret weapon against the Graith.”

  “Oh?” As a vocate, Aloê was interested in the details.

  “Since given up, I believe. He found me teachable, but not talented enough. Ambrosia is wildly talented, but she will not be led.”

  “She says he is always trying to kill her.”

  “That’s an exaggeration, I think.”

  It had never occurred to Aloê to be grateful for her family, but she was, belatedly and begrudgingly, coming to see that they had their points. A lack of any tendency to child murder (exaggerated or not).

  They were walking fairly, but not directly, toward the setting sun. Ambrosia, in one of her intervals of awareness, had insisted she could sense the direction of the talic wave, and added that she was sure anyone with the senses of week-dead beef or better could do the same. Aloê and Hope, after walking due south and then due north again, did agree that the locus of dread did seem to shift a little along the eastern face of the world as they moved at right angles to it. They sketched a map on some bark torn from a dead tree, and drew angled lines that represented fairly well their imprecise sense of where the dread was emanating from, projected back on their northernmost and southernmost positions. In the end, they decided Ambrosia was right. It’s true that it took them most of the day to see something Ambrosia had sensed right away, but they reached their conclusion more amicably, which was not nothing.

  Dead trees were handy whenever they needed them: for shelter, or fires, or anything else. It was live ones that were rare, and even those (when they found them) were oddly gray. The grass of the plain they walked over was an odd mix of dead brown and living gray. They saw few birds, and no land animals.

  “Aloê,” said Hope in some distress. “I’m sorry.”

  “Ambrosia waking up?”

  “Yes. Give her my love, won’t you?” Hope often said that.

  “Yes.” Aloê usually said that, too, but she rarely carried through on it. Conversation with Ambrosia didn’t leave much room for expressions of affection.

  Hope sat down in the dust among the sparse gray grass. She closed her eyes and sighed. Her face clenched in pain. It twisted and twisted until the features themselves shifted like clay being shaped by invisible fingers. Her pale hair burst, dark-red, from its braid. She spoke a wordlike sound of pain, but by the time the word was finished it was spoken in Ambrosia’s voice. Hope was gone.

  “How are you?” Aloê asked.

  “I am,” Ambrosia said, shrugging her crooked shoulders in a gesture that reminded Aloê painfully of Morlock. “It’s better than not-being. Even if it stings a bit.”

  “Is it hurting you worse when you change over? It looks like it does.”

  “Yes. This talic wave—we are especially vulnerable to it then, I think.”

  “Do you want to stay here? I can go on alone.”

  “No. Listen, Aloê, you’re not immune to it. Everything that thinks and feels suffers from this thing.”

  “I know,” Aloê said curtly. The feeling of dread and impending doom was heavier than ever now, growing with every step westward. She carried it like a dead body across her shoulders. She needed no reminder of it.

  She offered Ambrosia a hand up from the ground. The
girl took it and they walked on in silence through a landscape empty of any life but their own.

  Until they came to a little town, a cluster of plowed lands rising from the dead fields. There were posts like Kaenish godstones set up at intervals, marking the edge of the town. But they mentioned no god; they just said the name of the place was the Colony of Truth, in Kaenish runes and several other languages. (So said Ambrosia confidently: it was one of her waking times.)

  The Colonists surrounded their town with a halo of small farms, but everyone seemed to live in a cluster of buildings in the center of the settlement. They arrived at sunset, and the first townsperson welcomed them with an eager, almost frantic, warmth. She had carroty hair and wore a farmer’s smock. She carried a basket of root vegetables under her arm as she walked in from the fields. She caught sight of them and ran up eagerly, her pale speckled face split in a scarlet smile.

  “Good even, new-friends!” she cried in Kaenish. “Or is this tongue unsuiting to ye-twain? I—”

  “The both and all of us like this tongue right well,” replied Ambrosia, falling in with the woman’s odd dialect with breezy confidence. Aloê was prepared to admire her for it, until Ambrosia gave her companion a smug side-glance as if to say, See how bright I am!

  “I hope I can make myself clear to you,” Aloê said. “The Kaenish I know is a little different from what you are using.”

  “Gnaw ye-one not for it,” said the woman, laughing. “’Tis not native tongue-song to me neither. There was a eldern unpriest who taught this babblement to new-friends for a long lifetime. I-among-others was one such, a time and a time ago. The name of me-in-particular is Farna, by the gate.”

  “What manner of lip-melodies dost ye-one-self prefer, o Farna?” Ambrosia asked eagerly. “I-speaking-for-myself would wager I ken of them.”

  “This tongue will do,” Farna said, a little less warmly, and Aloê guessed she was nettled somehow. Maybe Farna didn’t want anyone knowing where she hailed from; the place had the look of a refuge somehow—the buildings were in radically different styles, suggesting builders from different cultures.

  “We are passing through,” Aloê said, before Ambrosia pressed the point and alienated Farna even more. “But if there is a place to stay the night, we would gladly pay in the coin we have.”

  “‘Passing through,’” Farna repeated. “Then ye-twain intend not to stay, to teach and learn and live among the Colonists of Truth?”

  “Sadly, no. We have other business in these lands. Does that never come up?”

  “In truth, where we-universal all are whether we see it or no, I have never seen a new-friend merely passing through. We-in-particular come to stay here, and there are no others at all. Except for ye-twain.”

  “If it’s inconvenient—”

  “No, no, I-for-myself-and-others beg you not to misunderstand. This has not happened before, but whatever is, is right, and we-universal must apprehend it and adapt. All of us-in-particular would wish it.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “I think,” Ambrosia said in a subdued tone, “she’s saying they can find a place for us; the locals are just not used to the idea of passersby.”

  “Ye-one hast grasped it well, and I welcome ye-twain to the Colony of Truth for as long as you would stay, for part of your day or the rest of your lives. Stay ye-twain as guests for nowness: we use not the coin of king or priest here.”

  “Thank you,” Aloê said. “Perhaps we can pay you in work, if our stay becomes longer. We don’t wish to be a burden.”

  “Everything that can be, will be,” Farna said composedly. “And nothing that cannot be, will be.”

  “I’m not sure about the first part,” Ambrosia said, “but the second part is all right.”

  Aloê was pondering ways to unobtrusively tell Ambrosia to shut her pie hole, but Farna turned to the girl eagerly and said, “Then ye-one will wish to speak with Jeuter, our phenomenologist. He has a great interest in what is and is not, what can and cannot be.”

  “Death and Justice,” Ambrosia said. “I am going to love this place!” Aloê was thinking the opposite, but refrained from saying so.

  “I-among-others am pleased,” Farna said, smiling with a pained expression. “But I must ask you to leave all talk of gods behind ye-twain while staying with us.”

  “Is it because you do not believe in them?” Ambrosia asked.

  “No. We-in-particular came thither to escape them.”

  “Excellent,” Aloê said, understanding at last. “The perfect place for it.”

  “And for no other thing,” Farna said, nodding ruefully. “The land, you have seen it: void of beasts, losing its grass and trees. The living it is hard. But we-in-particular live here free, and wish that we-universal could be the same.”

  Ambrosia’s lively face displayed her interest and skepticism. But she held her lively tongue for the moment, which relieved Aloê very much, and they followed Farna to a biggish building in the center of the little town.

  In a torchlit room that ran the length of the building, there were long tables and benches at which many of the townspeople were already sitting and conversing. Mostly the male townspeople were sitting, Aloê noticed, after a moment. The women seemed to be flitting about the room, bringing them things: dishes of food, mugs of drink.

  One group of men turned toward them with surprise and delight on their faces. “New-friends from the wider world!” one with a gray explosion of a beard called out. “Is that what you bring us, Farna?”

  “I am, I am indeed, Old Gnourn,” Farna said. “They-twain would stay only a night or so, however.”

  “Oh!” said Old Gnourn, somewhat baffled behind his barrier of beard. “Well, for a while or forever, new-friends are always welcome.”

  “Thanks,” Aloê said, strangely moved. They were more than a sea’s distance from Kaen and its religion of cruelty. “I am Aloê Oaij, by the way, and this is my friend Ambrosia Viviana.”

  “There was no need to introduce yourselves, you know,” Old Gnourn said. “You can be any name you like in the Colony of Truth. All names are true, or none.” There was a general humphing and pumphing of agreement from the row of beards.

  “You-several might get an argument from our new-friend here,” remarked Farna slyly. “But I must get these thurkle-roots to the kitchen.”

  “Yes, thank you, Farna,” said Old Gnourn dismissively. He turned to Aloê and said, “So you are a logician! Yet as brown as a Qajqapciar! The truth tells us that brown skin and logical abilities are a rare match.”

  “Oh. Does it?” Aloê said frostily.

  “Please don’t be offended. We only deal with things as they are here, not fantasies and poesies and dreams, and it is our experience that—”

  “Do you really know that many people with brown skin? I don’t see anyone like that here.”

  “Well. No. But it’s common knowledge that—”

  “Have you not found common knowledge to be as frequently in error as poetry, if not more so?”

  The beards murmured thoughtfully. “We don’t think much of poetry,” one of the grayer beards remarked. “It is imprecise and rarely yields falsifiable statements.”

  “But she’s got you there on common knowledge, Old Gnourn,” a grizzled but not utterly gray beard observed. “If I went by the common knowledge back in Screevale I would be on my hands and knees and barking at the behest of an entity I will not name. Truth, not familiarity, is the standard for knowledge.”

  “What should we do about it?” asked Old Gnourn grumpily.

  “Well, truth tells us that bad decisions are taken on Fuffnardays and Thebnardays, so suggest we table the question until tomorrow when we can discuss it with the agricultural accounting reports.”

  The beards all agreed with this. But now Farna had returned with a steaming tureen of dark fluid, in which knobbly objects bobbed up and down. “Who would have some affer-nut soup?” she asked.

  All the beards were interest
ed in affer-nut soup, it turned out, and they served themselves from the tureen as Farna carried it around the table.

  Aloê would not have objected to some affer-nut soup herself, but, not having been asked, she waited until Farna said, “If you-several are done charming these young ladies, perhaps I should take them off to the kitchen.”

  “Yes,” said Old Gnourn, through a mouthful of partially chewed affer-nut, “but don’t make them work until they’ve decided to stay. That’s fair according to the dictates of truth, I think we can all agree.”

  There was general agreement, although one beard started to make noises about the universal obligation to contribute to communities, whether one benefited from it or not. But everyone ignored him, apparently from long practice. The beards went on eating the soup, and the three women went to the kitchen.

  The kitchen was an equally large room, warmer (because of the ovens), with benches where many women were already seated, eating with urgency from full steaming plates.

  “We-distinctive serve ourselves back here, if ye-twain don’t mind it,” Farna said apologetically.

  “Of course not,” Aloê said, going with their hostess to a table where, following Farna’s lead, she collected a platter and a spoon and then filled the platter with food from troughs. There was no meat. What looked like bread was a baked crust formed from the paste of some root vegetable. There were some green and yellow vegetables that Aloê didn’t recognize, and what seemed to be a mushroom gravy.

  It all tasted well enough, but it was hard to enjoy anything under the dreadful feeling of impending doom that pervaded the place. But it had been long since their last meal, and anything was better than nothing.

  “Why do you let them treat you like servants?” Aloê asked. “Not that it’s any of my business.”

  Farna sighed as she settled herself on a bench, and some of the women nearby nodded and laughed at Aloê’s question. Others looked outraged. “They-exclusive say it is nature’s law, a dictate of truth, that woman serves man. It is true that many cities are run that way. But it is easier to give them-exclusive what they expect, and, by any gate, this way—”