by Стив Хиллард
“There yet lives but one Worm known to the world outside this valley. Grimmer and more terrible than all others. His lair is unseen by any that walk on two legs. He is hidden in perpetual fog. He sags forth to tear and rend.
The lands beyond this valley, bare and bleak, stripped of trees for a thrice-score of furlongs, are his domain. But that is not all.”
Ara shivered in the dawn chill. She felt a fear, throbbing through these now clutching tendrils, limbs that had lasted a thousand years.
“It has allies, a plague of locust-like hornets, red-striped and each the size of a sparrow. They bite and chew as well as sting with a bitter venom. They ensure all is ruined. Though a multitude, they are as one. They live as a single being even with the Worm. They fly in a great black cloud that turns and wheels as if guided by a single instinct. They are his eyes and outliers. Worst of all, they confuse and disable his victims by their constant buzzing and stinging. For their reward, they are his scavengers. Perhaps we are wrong in this. Perhaps it is they that control the Worm as their own instrument.”
“But where does it live?” Ara spoke, but somehow felt that she could now pass this thought back through her body.
“Where? Once, a great army of men sought the answer. They marched into these lands. Marauders. Strong and well armed with the greatest machines of death. They came in search of his lair and treasure. They were wise in their plans. The plague of hornets they lured to a herd of bison, which they drove before them. The wheeling multitude came to test and harass, and stayed a moment to feed. That was their undoing, for the Men had poisoned the carcasses. The insects died with their jaws full of torn flesh, and others fell from the sky as they escaped in panic, realizing this trickery. A scant remnant of the dark cloud blew away eastward, against the wind.”
“And so the men found the Worm?” Ara questioned.
“No. The Worm found them. The next night, camped near the shore of the Flat Sea, a dense fog rolled into their camp. It extinguished their campfires. The handful of survivors who fled into the high war engines where they had the vantage of strong timbers and a view unto the camp below, later described the encounter to us:
“‘The Worm came in the stillest moment of the night, and was everywhere at once. His tail and taloned wings, and the great sail on his back we saw above the white shroud. The cries of our comrades and the clank and hew of their swords we did hear, but only for a moment. Then all was still. The night and the fog receded in equal stealth, until the dawn saw the bitter remnants of a massacre. Weapons and bodies were strewn in great confusion. A trail of blood and discarded parts of men, bisected by the groove of a great, lazy tail, led unto the sea. We wept at this sight and fled in panic back toward the Misty Wood. The insects, though fewer in number, harassed us and picked at one warrior at a time until he fell. Then they would select another. Five of a force of two thousand did survive. The rest sleep the sleep of the sword, and their spirits float in the slop and gore of this evil thing.’
“Thus do we believe that this thing abides beneath the salty face of the Flat Sea.”
“And you stay here?”
“Yes, for the Worm knows we must pass unto his barren soil to make good our escape. Some have tried this passage and none returned.”
“Maybe they made it to safety.”
“Perhaps, but none other has dared leave in many lifetimes of great trees. And so we stay here. Arriving by folly, we are contained now by fear.”
Ara responded, “Do you not think that this, too, is folly, for in time you will lose all by your fear?”
“As have you. You left with a mistaken heart and now are as lost to your loved one as we to ours.”
“No,” said Ara, “for with your leave, I am departing this valley to find him. Now! “
He watched her finish reading, then said, “OK, enough of dragons. Here is something more recent.” He handed Cadence fresh pages of ink-covered Algonquin stationary.
It is said by a few bards, though vigorously disputed by the dwindling guild of Scholars of the Red Book, that the famous halfling traveler Aragranessa learned much of the secret lore of trees. Of her wisdom the details are all but lost. Only the dimmest reference to the Lost Vale survives as a lyric in nursery rhyme.
One surviving fragment, however — attributable to students of the self-proclaimed wizard Colorfall — tells of the orphans of the wisest and most agile trees, the Treoheord. As these “keepers of the forest” became indistinguishable from old and surly trees, and their mates were lost in time, so their last offspring, perhaps never more than a few in number, wandered the forests as unlearned orphans.
In time, some of these tree-orphans longed for discourse and company, and so grew closer to men. They attended men’s parleys and the tellings of sagas. They put down deep roots and spread immense sheltering canopies. In time they became known as “council trees.” They hosted many momentous meetings and came to have esteemed names. Some were ascribed a spirit of their own.
Should you or your heirs visit one of these last sentinels, perhaps ravaged and cracked by long years, honor them as venerable orphans that chose their own destiny.
From an account in 1720:
After the Scattering of the Halflings some centuries ago, and the recent opening of the Froelboc Mine, there remains in this area, in a park surrounded by low hills of coal and hardscrabble mine tenements, a single, immense ash tree. It is gnarled and oddly shaped where predominant limbs have cracked and fallen. It bears its leaves late, and old men wager as to whom, it or they, will survive another year. But every year, like the sluggish steam engines working nearby, it finally warms to its job. It slowly drives sap to the highest branches and a nimbus aura of green emerges. By late summer it bears a rich canopy of leaves. By the second week of frost, it is the first to go scarlet and drop them all.
It stands in the unmarked park known locally as Shirecommon, and is called, for reasons unknown, the Party Tree.
Osley held up the original document, which had angry smears across it. “It isn’t just cut off here. It’s obliterated by black dye. Maybe we’ll catch up with it later, but this part is lost.”
Cadence babysat Osley the rest of the day.
He had shed his coat, and his stink was only slightly muffled by the new long-sleeved T-shirt he was wearing, as if he dressed up for the occasion. He was in a zone of intense concentration.
Looking at him, she could see remnants of the young chemist focusing on his lab work, developing techniques. Yes, the spark, so long diluted with psychedelics and God knows what else was still there.
There was more, too, a heavy pall of sadness, but this was well hidden. She wondered how many different lives one old man could hold. She decided to quit hovering.
“Os, I’ll be back in a little while. You all right?”
He turned and smiled, saying, “Yeah, I’m great,” and then turned back to the papers. Scratch, think, write, his free hand pumping out some long ago rock and roll rhythm on the desk.
As she left, Cadence felt good. There was progress. In the quiet lobby, she took a bouncing skip and step and edged through the ponderously closing brass doors of the Algonquin. The doorman fussed belatedly to help, but she was gone.
Outside, she inhaled the city smells and heard the city noises and saw the city bustle all around her. Horns honked. A siren wailed a few blocks away.
At that moment, several things happened.
Across the street, a dented and city-worn delivery van was pulled up. It was going to double park. Its color was some faded and lesser version of green. On its side it bore what had once been an extravagant image of a sunlit garden, overlaid with arching, three-dimensional letters that read “SANTI’S VEGE’S”.
Cadence’s mental sketchpad took in these details, adding verisimilitude to the scene that was about to unfold.
The van slowed. The street was otherwise surprisingly empty. Down at the corner, two taxis were laboring around the turn from 6th Avenue. Before them lay
the wonder of an entire block of empty Manhattan cross street.
Taxis in such a situation could proceed with caution, or they could proceed at the posted speed, or they could take the imperative third choice: Gun it! Both taxis complied fully. They simultaneously jammed accelerators and jockeyed for position.
Meanwhile, a kid, skinny and good-looking — he could easily be one of Cadence’s fifth-graders — stepped toward the slowing van. He was silky smooth and confident in his motocross jacket. He casually moved in front of the van. He collided with the last bit of its momentum, tumbled head over heels, rolled once, and lay dramatically still. The van nose-dived and screeched as the driver stood on the brake pedal and the tires skidded the last foot before stopping. The driver was a balding man in his fifties. He jumped out, his arms making hysterical waving motions. A terrified and somehow sad “AAAaahh!” cycled from his open mouth.
The van door was open. Quick as a shadow, another kid appeared at the open door, reached in, and grabbed a small leather bag from the front seat. The size and shape suggested it might hold cash receipts. He fled down the sidewalk.
The taxis were oncoming.
The fallen boy got up, seemingly fit and healthy. The van driver grabbed the kid’s jacket with one hand, pointing in the direction of his moneybag evaporating into a crowd of pedestrians. He yelled a futile, “Hey. Hey!”
The boy was trying to slip the driver’s grasp as he sized up his escape route. Cadence knew fifth graders. She could read his eyes. She saw that at any moment he was going to bolt out into the street in front of her.
The taxis were hurtling toward them.
Cadence didn’t think. She ran. She flashed in front of the first taxi and collided with the kid. This time, his backwards flip was unpracticed. They both rolled clear as the taxis slammed on their brakes and skidded and fish-tailed and swerved past them, tires screaming, white smoke boiling, the air filling with the tang of hot, abraded brake pads. The long teeth-grinding, shoulder-wincing sentence stopped. There was a void. The inevitable punctuation mark — the hollow whomp and glassy jingle of impact — didn’t happen.
On the pavement, the kid looked at Cadence. His eyes were saucers overflowing with fear and, that most fleeting thing, kid gratitude. He scrambled up and was gone.
She pulled herself up, slowly, legs like rubber. She brushed herself off and reached down to pick up her Borunda bag, surveying the deep scrapes along the sides. The driver scurried around her. A cluster of passerby milled for a moment, but the event was just a close call, not even meriting a decent gawk. She stood there, received five, maybe ten seconds of New York accolades— the maximum allowed in this City of Haste — and it was all over. The taxis moved on. The van driver had gone somewhere. The Algonquin doorman, fussing and faithful, stayed with her.
It dawned on her, as she replayed the high-def tape of what just happened, that she probably saved a life. She was wrong. She had saved two.
Thirty feet away, Barren milled with the crowd. He had seen it all unfold. The kid with his accomplice, practicing the bump and roll to fake an accident. The stuntman’s art of timing a slowing vehicle, bouncing with it, and topping the move with a fine comic book death sprawl. Then the playing-for-gold part, his buddy’s quick reach and grab heist. They were pretty good!
Just like he had been at that age.
A memory rushed through him. He and his best friend. Inseparable, they were destined to escape their little village and conquer the world together. They stole from the first incoming circus wagon, Barren got caught, and then the circus suddenly packed up and took him with them. Barren remembered the stink of the dancing bear’s urine and feces and its low grunts as he lay tied next to its cage. He remembered the lolling wagons and ox carts trying to out-pace the plague. He remembered leaving his best friend behind to dance with the Black Death.
The memory passed. Barren had stationed himself here to complete his task. Return the scribbles entire with bloody showings in hand.
He looked at Cadence and felt a hunter’s admiration for his prey. She was quick to move and selfless. A fair steward— worthy but fated — to the vile remnants of the Saga of Ara. For this moment only, he would stay his hand.
Cadence thanked the doorman. Her adrenaline was still in full flow. She needed to move. As the crowd dispersed, she decided to walk for awhile. What she really needed was to jog, find that solid, earnest conversation of feet and earth. But that would have to wait.
She walked the streets for an hour, then came back and sat in the hotel lobby. She was coming down. The adrenaline fading into an exhausted, pensive mood.
A cat, evidently a perpetual guest at the hotel and probably a mouser, watched her from its perch on the check-in desk. She purposely ignored it. Resting in the big, plush chair, enjoying the quiet and comfort, her thoughts turned to her father and his own absent, almost mythical father. She closed her eyes and felt a desert wind.
The man who was her grandfather and who was almost always gone, so the story went, sometimes came home. At those times he was quiet. Not morose, exactly, but subdued, as if gathering strength between the legs of the unfolding journey that took him, like an alcoholic, to drink on months-long benders of wandering in search of his soul. How his soul got lost was a story untold.
Nonetheless, in those times at home he had a country man’s eye for simplicity and unspoken elegance. Things he pointed out to his son, as simple as a knowing glance or a nod, were passed on, gesture for gesture, through that soundless language, to the son’s child. So might it be for generations, a kindred nuance, none knowing the source.
There was a day’s drive from their home in Western Colorado a sagebrush desert. It was set amidst low broken hills cut by tumbleweed-clogged arroyos that flanked the high green massif known as Grand Mesa. These hills and gorges, known locally as the Dobies, grew into larger canyons that dropped to the thick willow banks lining the brown flow of the Gunnison River. In some off-road spot, amidst these low hills, Jess pulled over. The jeep, rickety and open-topped, waited like a panting horse. He cut the engine and the tick and gurgle of the radiator measured the minutes as he and nine-year-old Arnie just sat there.
The air was warming up to the century mark as the shadeless silver gray desert readied to endure another blast-furnace day. The man sucked his pipe, got out and knocked out the dottle on the fender. He fingered the pipe, letting the calabash knot bowl cool, its seasoned yellow familiar in his hand.
He put on a battered straw hat and nodded. The boy got out, hefted the water bag, and they began to walk.
They went toward the river, with its distant promise of cool breeze. A high tumble of sandstone clefts — giants’ play blocks — stood in their way. There were scores of narrow cracks, man-sized and water-worn, leading into the maze of baking rock.
The man stood and looked and then picked one, otherwise unpromising and indistinguishable. The word for such, lemon-squeezers, was not said. Usually compressing to nothing, these openings offered just enough room to wiggle in sideways. Once in there — and one exhaled to squeeze in — one’s breath mingled with the smell of rock. Sometimes there was just enough room to get in and get caught, so the fear of getting stuck was always there.
Some hikers had tried this solo, gotten lodged in the vice, and felt the illimitable strength of all the earth pressing closer against them. Mother Earth’s strong hug refusing to let go. Adrenaline and panic expanding the body, cementing their imprisonment.
But the passage chosen by the man did not close, and they wriggled left, then right, as it turned and jogged. They came into an opening, a perfect secret hollow of a hundred foot radius, cut improbably into the middle of the tumbled rocks.
The top of the walls leaned inward, sheltering the sides. On these were etched thousands of pictographs: lizards, scorpions, eagles, vultures, people with two heads, bison, elk, deer, big cats with long teeth, rising suns with splayed rays. Archetypes of a world ruled by privation and magic. The library of a people that lo
ng ago decamped, never to return. Some of the figures were twenty or thirty feet up bare sandstone cliffs. Not a sign of “Jim Bob was here 1929” or “Class of ’42” or the like.
Dotting the enclosed field were large yellow-topped mounds. The yellow was the remnant rock layer left from eons of water and wind erosion.
They stopped at one of the mounds. It was full of shark’s teeth — big, medium, little, tiny. The sharks that left these ranged from Jaws down to trout size. The bigger teeth would span your palm, the serrated edges as knife sharp as the last day they tore into flesh, millions of years ago.
Holding such a tooth in your hand brought the picture into full definition. One saw a flat sea-lagoon stirred by warm breezes, lapping at a palmed shoreline, perhaps a fresh water tributary spilling in nutrients to create a cove full of life. Then the sea retreated one summer, never to return, and the cove beshored into a small lake over-populated with the sharks as alpha predators. The lake became a pond, concentrating all life as the food chain began to eat itself. Soon sharks ate sharks. All that was left was some boiling cauldron of thousands of thrashing sharks.
The teeth, the only hard parts of a shark, survived. And now they were left in a fossil hot spot in an eroding formation beneath the merciless sun.
As relentless curators, the ants were doing their thing — mining the gravel, creating ant hills of tiny teeth as meticulously cleaned as if worked by a lifetime of tweezers beneath a magnifying glass.
The man and boy picked through some teeth, each selecting only one. Then the man reached into a pouch in his khakis and pulled out a small, washed jar. This he filled with tooth-laden gravel, sealed the lid, and gave to the boy.
They returned to the jeep by mid-afternoon, looking back once at the small mountain of boulders and the lacework of lemon-squeezers.
Not a word had been said since they left home at seven in the morning. It was in the boy’s mind as perfect a day as he could imagine, and as he would ever experience.