The White Tree

by Edward W. Robertson

  He smiled and with his gray beard and bright eyes Dante thought he looked like a grandfather who'd spoil a boy hardened by the father's tough love. He shifted his feet.

  "Every man of Arawn I've met so far's wanted to make my head a separate entity from my body."

  "Indeed. And when you tried to throw that little trifle at me, what did you feel?"

  "You barely had to think to deflect it," Dante replied. "You could have smashed me to bits."

  "Tiny ones! But then I'd have blood and bone all over my cloak." Cally cracked with laughter as he stroked his grime-streaked rags. Dante shut his eyes. He'd resigned himself to flinging himself at the men who held Blays in chains and dying in the attempt. Ever since he'd run out on the village he'd felt hemmed in, a minor part in an infinite play, casting out blindly for a force that could never be his. Three months since he'd left them behind. He could still see the grasses turning yellow in the heat of high summer as he ran down the path that led to Bressel, still smell the dairy-like stink of his feet when he'd unbooted them after that first day's travel. Before he left he'd been taught nothing more than what the monk of Taim who'd housed him had seen fit: the stories of the gods, how they'd created man and then been betrayed by men's foolish arrogance, how we wouldn't know peace until we learned to return to them on our knees and seek forgiveness—a weak-minded lie the monk told himself so he could accept his meager place. Dante owed nothing to anyone. And so he'd left, chasing the story of the book, but when he'd found it the monk's threat of a mediocre existence had been replaced at once by the mortal threat of the men of Arawn. Never in his life had Dante been left alone to find his own way.

  "I want to learn," Dante said, gazing into Cally's mirth-wrinkled face. "I'll burn the whole city if they stand in my way."

  6

  The vault was as good a place as any for their work, Cally had declared, if a little dramatic, so there they went. Cally swung the door shut behind them, closing them in darkness. Dante reached into his pocket and his torchstone bathed them in a pale light.

  "Where'd you get that?" Cally said, seating himself on the pedestal near the front of the room.

  "I've always had it."

  "I may have made it, for all I know."

  Dante lowered himself to the cold stone floor and tried not to sigh too loud.

  "Made a lot of them, did you?"

  "I did, actually, so stop making that face. We all need money." Cally puffed out his cheeks and looked around himself. "So. Let's see about tying some terminology to these vague things you've taught yourself so far. We'll start at the beginning."

  "Oh good."

  "Modern understanding says the ether is the force that illuminates the firmament and bestows motility to man and beast. Some schools take this a step further, equating this original force with jurisprudential order, explaining that just as the laws of our courts are derived from the reflection of the perfection of the revolution of the heavens, so are the laws of man's nature a reflection of the animatory power of the Belt of the Celeset. So. Personally, I feel these schools are unnecessarily harmonious, establishing a false dichotomy of order meant to reinforce the position of the elite in the minds of the blank-slate boys they're supposedly educating. Any idiot can see this school is an artificial imposition of the human mind. As if the mishmash of vengeance and despotism we witnessed this afternoon bears any resemblance to the unabridged consistency of the stars. Do you think the ether's responsible for poor Blays' fate?"

  "No," Dante said, face stony. Cally barely noticed, launching into the next phase of his lecture with the intensity of a man who's spent decades thinking without an audience to relieve the pressure of his head.

  "Tell me what I just said," he said some ten minutes later.

  Dante turned his hands in his lap.

  "You said the nether—"

  "The ether."

  "You said the ether," Dante said, pausing until he was certain there'd be no interruption, "lurks behind all things, and that's where we draw our power."

  "That's not what I said." Cally snatched his cap from his head and twisted it in his bony hands. "You're just parroting the book. Treating the ether like a mirror image of the nether. Is gold the opposite of silver? Is the sun the opposite of the moon? You've got it all backwards."

  "Backwards?"

  "First the ether, then the nether. How can you define the primary when your view of the secondary's all warped up? You don't even have the grounding to understand the words 'primary' and 'secondary' are themselves gross assumptions of a Taim-based perspective!" Cally scowled, combing out his beard with his fingers. "Listen, I've got some things to go do."

  "But I haven't learned anything," Dante said, rising to his feet.

  "I'm beginning to understand how true that is. I'll be back by dark." Cally pushed his frail back against the door. It grated open and he wormed into the gap. "Meditate on what it means to be a duck," he called back into the tomb.

  "A duck?" Dante said, but the old man was gone. Dante wandered from the door and propped himself on a shelf. Somewhere across town Blays was in a room like this. Probably it was smaller, darker, had been home to more of the dead than this mausoleum. Dante punched the stone shelf, then sucked his bleeding knuckles. A duck? What the hell was that supposed to mean? If this was a game, why didn't Cally just spell out what he wanted? If Dante was supposed to do all the work without any guidance, what was Cally doing there in the first place?

  He took a long breath. There was a chance Cally knew what he was doing. He was very old, after all. If he wanted ducks, Dante would give him ducks. He'd give him so many ducks the old man would be ashamed he'd ever given him such a juvenile exercise.

  Okay. A duck had wings. It had webbed feet, like the neeling, but that couldn't be important. A duck had a bill. Feathers. Liked water. Could travel by land, sea, and air. Was that it? That its home was everywhere and thus nowhere? That sounded like the kind of shallow paradox that would send Cally twittering. What else? What made a duck a duck? Was it the feet, the bill, the feathers? The sum of its physical features? If you chopped all the duck-like parts from different animals and sewed them into one new animal, would you then find yourself holding a duck? Or was the opposite true—a duck was created with an inherent element of duckiness that informed its growth from the egg itself? Dante glanced at his torchstone as its light grew dim and found he was no longer angry. He dug a hunk of bread from his pack and chewed.

  It wasn't a chicken or a goose or a swan; it was close, but the differences were enough to earn it a separate name. It walked on two legs, but it wasn't a man. It swam, but it wasn't a fish. Dante traced a mallard in the dust on the shelf. He didn't think Cally intended him to define it by what it wasn't. In the end, a duck was very few things. There was a whole world it wasn't.

  Was a duck its quack? Nothing else he knew of quacked. Geese honked, but that was different. Hens clucked and roosters crowed and chicks peeped; meadowlarks sang and starlings chirped and crows cawed; a duck, it seemed, was the only thing that quacked. That must be a part of it. If a duck walked up to him and asked him about the weather, that would make it, in some sense, a man. Still a duck, but less duckish. He bounced his heels against the stone wall beneath his seat. How long could you spend sitting around thinking about ducks? Was there a point where you'd know everything there was to know? He decided to go back to basics. Ducks lived in pairs, but sometimes they lived in flocks. Ducks laid eggs. Ducks also hatched from eggs, which he thought might be a slightly different thing from laying them. A duck ate water-weeds and bugs, he thought, though he wasn't certain of that. He realized he was just listing their traits without conclusions. Duckiness was something more than what it ate or how it looked or lived or quacked. All those things were true, but if he told someone who'd never seen a duck all the things he'd just thought, they might be able to visualize one, but they wouldn't really know what made a duck a duck, would they? How could he explain the nature of duck-kind so an outsider would unders
tand?

  Footsteps jarred him from his maze. How long had it been? The sun was all but set. Dante stuck his head out the door, hand on sword, and saw Cally's bent-backed figure trudging up the hill through the drizzle.

  "Have you dwelt on the nature of duckhood?" he said as he entered.

  "I have."

  "What have you learned?"

  "A duck is a duck," Dante said.

  Cally pinched the bridge of his nose. "Go on."

  "It's not a chicken or a goose or any other bird, though if you told someone that's what a duck is like they'd start to be able to see one. It's got a bill and feathers and wings. It swims, flies, and walks; so what element can be said to be its home?" He stuck his tongue between his teeth and waited for a cue. Cally screwed up one eye, shrugged. "It quacks," he tried. "Nothing else quacks."

  "Except a duck call."

  Dante went pale. He hadn't thought of that. "I don't think you can ever define a duck," he said slowly. "If you could, you'd have created one. I think all you can do is describe it, piece by piece, until you've got an animal like nothing else."

  "An interesting theory," the old man said.

  "Well? Am I right?"

  Cally pulled back his chin and snorted. "How the hell should I know?"

  "Well why did you make me do all that thinking about ducks if you don't know what one is yourself?" Dante said, pounding his fists against his thighs.

  "You weren't doing well with the discursive approach. What else do you want?"

  "Why ducks?"

  "To hear you quack," Cally shot.

  "That doesn't—" Dante snapped his jaw shut. He walked to the back of the room and glared at the inscriptions on the wall. His face felt hot as a branding iron. "Making sport of one's students doesn't strike me as enlightened instruction."

  Cally laughed brightly. "Were you so petulant with whoever taught you to talk like that?"

  "Do you always expect the ones you teach to read your mind?"

  "Youth," Cally spat, a grunt so hateful Dante's scalp tingled. He spun around and Cally's pinched face opened with laughter. "You take yourself too seriously, do you know that?" He rubbed his hands together and got the look of a man who's just had his first puff on a pipe. "I suppose you want to get down to business."

  "That had crossed my mind."

  "Double-crossed it, maybe," Cally said, looking worried. His eyes flicked to Dante and he smiled tightly. "Think about the nether the same way you taught yourself to think about the duck."

  "That's it?" Dante's mind flashed with the notion this had all been a mistake, that he was wasting what short time he had left. "What about this ether stuff?"

  Cally waggled a hand. "Forget it. We're taking a new approach. Dwell long on the nether and we'll see where you are in the morning."

  "But the night's just started. You haven't shown me anything!"

  "Patience!" he thundered. "It's a week from now till your destiny becomes known. That's as long as it took the gods to build the world. Do you really think this will be harder than the creation of everything in existence?" Dante worked his throat and Cally stepped forward, craning his thin neck. "You know what happens to apprentices who try to work gold before they've hammered iron, don't you?"

  "They're commended for their initiative?"

  "Their masters stuff them into the forge." Cally patted his palms against his stomach. "If you unravel all the secrets of the nether tonight, read your damn book. Lyle's wrinkly, sweaty sack, boy, haven't you ever heard the tale of the tortoise and the hare?"

  He spun on his heel and left the tomb. Dante closed the door and lit a candle. He yawned, tired as he'd been after a full day's march through the woods. He didn't think the shadows would help. He sat down on the cool stone floor and let his mind unspool. What was Blays doing at that moment? Sleeping? Staring at the ceiling? He had no doubt the boy was alive, at least. If the condemned died before they could be killed the whole process was thwarted.

  The man they'd killed to get them in this mess, the long-haired man at the inn, had said the priests of Arawn had infiltrated the shrines of the other gods. Somehow this inclined Dante to believe Cally's ludicrous assertion that they wanted people to find the book. There was a strange intuitiveness to it all, a compelling alternate logic in sacrificing a few pawns to expose the people like Dante and draw them into the fold. What were they after? Rebellion? Build influence in the temples while they scared up talented men to—he still didn't know if he believed it—to release Arawn from his starry prison? How would they do that, exactly? Build a really tall ladder? Or better, hold a fake olympics to find who could jump the highest and then launch him into the heavens. He tried to laugh. They were going to take a shot, though, no matter how stupid their plans sounded. Where did they get that kind of power?

  It would come from the nether, he knew that much. What was it? He stretched out on the floor and plumped his pack under his head. He closed his eyes and tried to picture what it looked like when he called the darkness to his hand. It was darkness, yes. Intangible, but it moved less like light and shadow than like water. Flowing where resistance was least, pooling in the low places, filling the gaps between things like water filling up a box of pebbles. But it wasn't water. It moved with a mind of its own. What was it? When he drained his thoughts and let the black tide take their place, what was it he held inside his head?

  * * *

  "Get up! It's the guards!" Fists pounded on the door. Dante's heart jump-started itself right off a cliff. He couldn't see a damn thing, just the faint light wriggling through the chinks in the wall and the narrow line that traced the door. Pretend he wasn't here. They might be dumb enough to believe it. More likely they'd force their way inside and chop him into geometry. He'd need to think fast. Act fast. He cleared his mind and let the nether come. He rose then, drawing his sword with a steely hiss, left hand wrapped in darkness, and swung open the door.

  "No, it's just me," Cally said in his normal nasal pitch. "Be proud. You looked like you could have scared someone."

  "I suppose this is a lesson on the virtue of vigilance," Dante mumbled, sheathing his sword. He stepped out into the yard.

  "I just thought it would be funny." Cally blew into his cupped hands and stood in the feeble sunlight. "Make any progress with the Cycle?"

  "I fell asleep."

  "Good. Sleep's more important than history, as evidenced by the fact the latter puts you to the former." Cally spent a minute gazing over the graves. The morning was foggy, the grasses bent with dew. Their breath roiled from their mouths and hung in the air. One of the yard's many crows cawed out, waited, then cawed again, as if it were asking if anyone was home. "Did you think on the nature of the nether?"

  "It's like the ocean at night," Dante said. His face bunched in thought. He shook his head. "I feel like the moon, in a way. When I look on the dark water with the fullness of my face, it rises and heaves to meet me."

  "Poetic," Cally judged, "but ultimately as inaccurate as all poetry."

  "What do you think it's like?"

  "Were you listening at all yesterday? What do you think all that talking was for, my health?"

  "Maybe it's not the subjects that are slippery," Dante said, a thrill in his skin, "but the manner of their instruction."

  Cally frowned at him. His gray eyebrows were so thick Dante worried they'd pull his brow right over his nose. The old man looked away, letting it pass.

  "It's not the answers, it's that you remember to seek them. Each definition you find brings you one step closer to an unreachable ideal. Don't take that to mean you shouldn't try just because you can never reach it, of course. That's what babies do. Are you a baby?"

  "No," Dante said through his teeth.

  "Of course not! Who said you were a baby?" He sighed like all hope had faded from the world. "Don't think of it as hopeless. If you had no name for it, would that mean it doesn't exist? We have no single word for this pre-winter breeze that teases you into thinking it might snow althou
gh it's not really that cold and which kind of buffets against your face rather than streaming or lashing," he took a breath, "but does that mean you don't feel it, and in a different way than you'd feel a dozen other kinds of wind'? Defining the nether's the work of a lifetime. The only way to keep reaching closer to its central duckiness is to know you'll never be done."

  Dante waited to see if there was more. "So you'd define the nether as semantics."

  Cally shook his head. "Just—keep trying to think about it in new ways, but don't get so wrapped up in trying to understand what it is you stop learning how to use it. That's all I'm saying." He blinked, chuckled. "Well, not really. But let's pretend that's what I said."

  Dante thought, and not the first time, taking the man as a teacher might have been a blunder. So the old man had thoughts so deep he couldn't capture them with words. Cally whistled something mournful and keening, ignoring him for the moment. Dante's eyelids fluttered. He clumped the shadows in his hands and unleashed them on the old man, just a sort of probe, and before it reached Cally it disappeared like spit on a summer flagstone.

  Cally stopped whistling. "What was that?"

  "Just how much do you know?"

  "Enough to know how little you do."

  Again Dante gathered the nether. This time it boiled off his hands before he could unleash it.

  "I said stop that." Cally's voice echoed against the walls of the vault.

  "What's your mind like, when you call out to it?" Dante asked, clasping a coin-sized pool of the stuff between his palms.

  "You're not used to it yet. That's why you have to think so hard." Cally regarded him with one eye closed. "To me it's like scratching my ass, my hand's there before I have to tell myself I'm itchy."

  "That's beautiful." Dante opened his hand and blew the shadows at Cally in a puff of tiny motes. Cally flinched, scowled.

  "You could punch me in the stomach and it wouldn't make a difference," the old man said, tossing his head. "You could probably stick a sword through my heart and I'd still strike you down, though that must remain a regrettable hypothetical."