The Skrayling Tree

by Michael Moorcock

  As we watched, the tail slashed back and forth like a scythe, cutting and trampling great swathes in the wild corn. I sniffed and realized it was the sweet scent I had smelled earlier. Suddenly awash with totally inappropriate emotions, I longed for the cornfields of the farm where I grew up during the period of my mother’s attempted retirement.

  “I think,” said White Crow regretfully, climbing up into the saddle to sit with us, “I am going to have to kill him.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Feathers ana Scales

  Do you live the tale,

  Or does the tale live you?

  WHELDRAKE,

  “The Teller or the Tale”

  Why kill him?” I asked. “He is offering us no harm.”

  “He is an invader here,” said White Crow. “But that is the business of those who hunt this land. He has moved north with the warming. That is not why he will die.” He added almost as an aside, “Many years ago, he ate my father.”

  The shock which came with this news was horrible. The first time I saw this youth, he had called Ulric “Father.”

  There was nothing to do or say. My reaction was entirely subjective. For all their resemblance it was obvious there was no close connection between Ulric and White Crow.

  “But that is not why we hunt him,” Ayanawatta reminded him gently. “We hunt him for what your father carried when he was eaten.”

  “What was that?” I asked before I thought better of it.

  But White Crow answered with apparent easiness, staring at the thing which rattled its huge ruff in frustration and screamed its hunger. “Oh, some medicine he had with him when the kenabik took him.”

  His tone was so inappropriate that I glanced hard at his face. It was a mask.

  The feathered dinosaur had our scent, but the blustering breeze was varying and dropping. He kept losing it, turning this way and that and grunting to himself, drooling. He hardly knew what he was smelling. He seemed an inexpert hunter. His nostrils were heavy with ill health. His breathing was a rasp.

  The last of the sun now poured over the mountains and drenched the plain with deep light. Big clouds came in behind us with a stronger wind, bringing more rain. Eventually the creature began to lumber away from us, then turned and came back for a few paces. He was still not sure what he scented. He might have been shortsighted, like rhinos. Clearly past his prime, he was scarcely able to fend for himself.

  When I mentioned this to Ayanawatta he nodded. “This is not their place,” he said. “The kenabik do not breed. His tribe have all died. Something as beautiful replaces them, we hope.”

  He spoke distractedly as he studied the beaked dragon, who was still casting bewildered yellow eyes back and forth. “And of a more appropriate size,” he added with a slight smile.

  White Crow pulled in our mount. Bes stood still as a rock while her master studied the kenabik. The beaked dragon’s feathers were layered, pale blue on green, on gold, on silver, on scarlet. There were subtle shades of brown-yellow and dark red, of glittering emerald and sapphire. When that black maw opened it revealed a crimson tongue, broken molars, cracked incisors. There seemed something wrong with that mouth, but I was not sure what.

  Then the sun disappeared. It was suddenly pitch black. From somewhere in that darkness, the kenabik began to keen.

  That keening was one of the most mournful sounds I had ever heard. The note was absolutely desolate as the monster cried for itself and for its lost kind.

  I looked at White Crow again.

  His face was still totally immobile, but I saw the silver trail of tears running to his lips. It was hard to know whether he wept for the pain of this creature, the thought of having to destroy it or the loss of his father.

  Again, that awful, agonized call. But it grew fainter as the thing moved off.

  “We will kill it in the morning,” White Crow said. He seemed glad to put off the unsavory moment for a little longer.

  How three humans armed with bows and spears were to set about killing the kenabik had not yet been explained to me!

  Neither was it to happen as White Crow had said.

  The monster determined our agenda.

  I was awake when the kenabik became famished enough to attack. I heard it running towards us over the low hills. It went through the camp in one terrible, violent moment, even as I tried to wake my friends.

  Ayanawatta found his bow and arrows while White Crow hefted his spears.

  “They never hunt at night.” White Crow sounded offended.

  Bes had stumbled to her feet, still bleary with sleep, her trunk questing about for White Crow. She could not see him, and the feathered dinosaur was coming in rapidly on her left.

  Bes was ready. In time to take the kenabik’s second attack, she swung her huge tusks in the direction of the noise. The beast came thudding into the camp screaming its own terror at our fire and grabbing about for something, anything, to eat.

  Bes stepped forward. A sweep of her great head, and a long, deep gouge appeared along the beast’s left side. He shrieked as those ivory sabers began to sweep back the other way.

  The old mammoth staggered and was momentarily knocked off balance, but she held her ground, the kenabik’s blood streaming from her massive tusk. Her eyes narrowed, her trunk curling, she displayed her pleasure at her own achievement. She was almost skittish as she turned to trumpet after her fleeing foe.

  “Why would it behave so uncharacteristically?” I was panting, trying to gather up my few possessions while the others retrieved the rest of our scattered goods.

  “It is mad,” said White Crow sadly. “It has nothing to eat.”

  “There must be plenty of prey on the prairie?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “There is. And as you saw, every so often he devours some. What we probably will not see is the kenabik disgorging most of what he eats. Unfortunately he was not born a meat eater. What he misses is the rich foliage and lush grass of his native south. The transition from herbivore to carnivore is impossible. The meat he eats is killing him. What vegetation grows here is too sparse and too hard for him to harvest. Even if we did not kill him, he would be dead soon, and it would be a bad, ignoble death. His shame would be great. It would weight his spirit and keep him bound to this realm. He would have long to brood on the ignobility he has brought to himself and his tribe. We can offer him better. We can offer him the respect of our arms. You could say it was his own fault for leaving his grazing grounds, but predators were moving up behind his kind, picking them off as they weakened. He was chased from his homeland. I wish to try to kill him mercifully.”

  “You show much forgiveness for the beast that ate your father.”

  “I understand that it was an accident. The kenabik probably didn’t even know he was eating him. There was no malice involved. My father took a risk and failed.” Two red stones shone in White Crow’s rigid face.

  I turned away.

  Ayanawatta had recovered his bow and quiver while White Crow collected all the fire he could find back into the pot. The little lean-to we had put up against the rainy breeze was totally trampled, so again Bes gave us her massive bulk for shelter. The two of us slept warily as White Crow elected to keep watch until dawn.

  I woke once to see his profile set against the grey strip of light on the horizon, and it seemed to me he had not moved. When I woke again, his face and head were set exactly as I had seen them hours earlier. He resembled one of those extraordinary, infinitely beautiful marbles of the Moldavian Captives Michelangelo had carved for the French pope. Infinitely sad, infinitely aware of the cold truth of their coming fate.

  Once again I felt an urgent wish to take him in my arms and comfort him. An unexpected desire to bring warmth to a lonely, uncomplaining soul.

  He turned at that moment, and his puzzled gaze met mine. Then, with a small sigh, he gave his attention back to the distant mountains. He recognized what was in my eyes. He had seen it before. He had a cause. A dream to live out. His destin
y was the only comfort he allowed himself.

  When we woke it was drizzling hard. White Crow had pulled a robe over his shoulders as he struggled to settle the great saddle on his mammoth’s back. Ayanawatta moved to help him. Everything smelled of rain. The whole sky was dark grey. It was impossible to see more than twenty yards ahead. The mountains, of course, had vanished.

  I wrapped myself tightly against the cold and wet. The mammoth rose to her feet, groaning and muttering at the winter wind stiffening her joints. We had not tried to make a fresh fire the night before, and our firepot was low, so we ate cold jerky as we rode.

  We followed the kenabik’s bloodstained trail. Bes had injured him enough at least to slow him down.

  We were warier than usual, because we knew the kenabik might be waiting in cover to attack. The steady rain finally stopped. The wind dropped.

  The world was strangely silent. What sounds there were became amplified and isolated as the going became harder through the soaking grasslands. Occasionally the sky cleared and thin sunbeams banded the distant tundra. The mountains, however, remained hidden. We heard the splash of frogs and small animals in the nearby water. We smelled the strong, acrid aroma of rotting grass from an old nest, and then once again came the sudden hissing wind bringing rain. We heard the steady sound of Bes’s feet as she carried us stolidly on after our prey.

  We reached a kind of wallow, a muddy bayou filled with weed. It was clear the monster had rested, attempting to eat some of the weed. We also found the half-digested remains of various smaller mammals and reptiles. White Crow had been right. This creature was too specialized to survive here. Also the wound was clearly more serious than we had originally guessed. There were signs that he had made a crude attempt to stanch a flow of blood with some of the grass. How intelligent was this creature?

  I asked Ayanawatta his opinion. He was not sure. He had learned, he said, not to measure intelligence by his own standards. He preferred to assume that every creature was as conscious as himself but in different ways. It was as well, he said, to give every creature the respect you would give yourself.

  I could not entirely accept this view. I told him that I could not believe, however conscious they might be, that animals possess a moral sensibility. And the most unstable of rocks are poor conversationalists.

  Almost immediately, I found myself smiling, amused by my own presumption. Not long before, I had been accusing my husband of being insufficiently imaginative.

  Ayanawatta was silent for a moment, raising his eyebrows. “I may be mistaken,” he said, “but I seem to recall an adventure I once had among the rock giants. They are, indeed, extremely laconic.”

  The sideways glance he threw in my direction was humorous.

  White Crow slipped suddenly down Bes’s flank without stopping her progress and began to pad beside her, studying the muddy creek. It reminded me of what Ulric must have seen in the trenches at the end of the first war. The kenabik had clearly been in agony, rolling over and over in an effort to stop the pain.

  Our hunt took on a peculiar gravity. It had something of the air of a funeral procession.

  The rain came down harder until we could scarcely see for the sweeping sheets of water. As we descended a long hill, we confronted a stand of tough, green grass that reached almost to Bes’s shoulder. She found it difficult to walk on through. White Crow told her to turn and move back to a better place. Slowly she crushed her way out of the confining growth and made for the high ground again.

  Then through the pounding rain we heard the kenabik. No longer did it squawk and scream and moan as it had done. No longer did its voice have the fading note of pain and self-pity. The sound had the fullness of a baritone, rhythmic and slow, the noise of a bull-roarer, booming from that massive diaphragm.

  White Crow took a slender spear from the long quiver. The edges were tipped with silver, the shaft bound with ivory and copper. With this, he again dismounted and was quickly lost in the rain and deep grass.

  Bes came to a stop, turning her head as if she feared for him.

  “What is the kenabik doing now?” I asked Ayanawatta.

  “I am not sure,” said the warrior, frowning, “but I think he is singing his death song.”

  The beast’s voice grew deeper still, and something connected with me. I could feel his bewildered mind reaching into mine, questing for something. Not me. Not me. There was a mutual repulsion. Curiosity. An almost grateful quality as the monster tasted tentatively at my identity.

  All the time that song went on. Somehow I believed he was telling the story of his people, of their glory, of their virtue and their destruction. A psychologist would consider this transference, would argue that the beast could not feel such complicated emotions and ideas. Yet, as Ayanawatta said, who are we to measure the value or quality of another’s perceptions?

  I could not bring myself to bond with the kenabik’s brain. It was too unlike anything I understood. It dreamed of tall fields of cane and thick, nourishing ferns, and its song began to reflect this dream more and more. A harmony grew between the strange view of Paradise and the thrumming voice. Whatever it is in sentient creatures that needs to communicate, that is what I heard. It was a confused, frightened mixture of half-understood images and feelings. Who else could the dying creature reach out to? Another voice entered the song, taking the melody until it was impossible to tell which was which.

  In response to this, the monster abruptly shifted its attention elsewhere. I was, I must admit, deeply relieved. While it could not be the first time I had attended a dying spirit, this strange, anachronistic being found little comfort from me.

  The clouds parted for a moment or two, and the rain passed. We saw that we stood in waist-high grass. Some distance off, with his back to us, was White Crow. From his stance and the position of his head I understood the kenabik to be somewhere below him. Then, out of the misty foliage, I saw a beaked head rise. Huge yellow eyes sought the source of the other song. The eyes were filled with baffled gratitude. As it died, the monster received grace.

  The clouds rolled in again. I saw White Crow lift his silver-tipped spear.

  Both songs ended.

  We waited for a long time. The rain lashed down, and the wind blew the grass into glistening waves. We had become used to these blustering elemental attacks. At last Ayanawatta and I made a decision. We dismounted, telling Bes to remain where she was unless she needed to escape danger, and pressed on through the fleshy stalks surrounding us, our moccasins sinking into the thick, glutinous mud. Ayanawatta paused, cautioning me to silence, and he listened. Slowly I became aware of soft footfalls.

  White Crow came crashing out of the grass. Over his shoulder he carried his lance and two huge feathers, gorgeous against that grey light. He was covered from head to foot in blood.

  “I had to go inside it,” he said. “To find the medicine of my father.”

  We followed him to where Bes waited. The mammoth was visibly pleased at his return. He took the two gigantic brilliant feathers and stuck them into the wool near her head. Her hair was so thick that they did not fall, but White Crow assured her he would attach them more securely later. Bes looked oddly proud of her new finery. White Crow was acknowledging her victory. Then he went back to the creek and washed the blood off his body, and again he sang. He sang of Bes and her hero-spirit. She would find her ancestors in the eternal dance and celebrate her deeds forever. He sang of the great heart of his finished enemy. And it felt to me as if that monster’s spirit were at peace leaving the world to join its brothers in some eternal grazing grounds.

  White Crow spent the rest of that day and part of the night washing himself and his clothing. When he came back to the camp he seemed grateful for the fire we had made. He sat down, took a pipe, and smoked for a while without speaking. Then he reached to where he had placed his pouch on top of his freshly washed clothes and slid his hand inside. His fist closed on something, and he withdrew it, opening the palm to show us what he had ret
rieved.

  The firelight threw wild shadows. It was hard for me to see.

  “I had no choice but to go into his guts,” said White Crow. “It was difficult. It took some time. The kenabik had three bellies, all of them diseased. I had hoped to find more. But this was what there was. Perhaps it is all we need.”

  The fire flared, lighting the night, and I saw the tiny object clearly. Turquoise, ivory, scarlet. Round. It was horribly familiar…

  I recognized it.

  I had an immediate physical reaction. My head swam. I gasped. My mind refused what my eyes saw!

  I looked at an exact miniature of the huge medicine shield on which I had made my way into this world. I had no real doubt that it was the same. Every detail was identical, save for the size.

  “It was my father’s,” said White Crow, “when he was White Crow Man. I am truly White Crow Man now.” This statement was made flatly. His voice was bleak. He closed his fingers tightly around the talisman before putting it away in his bag.

  I looked at Ayanawatta, as if for confirmation that I was right in recognizing the tiny medicine shield, but he had never properly seen it as I had. He had merely glimpsed it in his summoning dream. Every detail was the same, I was sure. Yet how had it become so tiny? Was it some process in the animal’s belly? Some supernatural element I had not perceived?

  Was Klosterheim a dwarf? Or was I the giant? What had gone wrong with the scale of things? The workings of Chaos? Or had Law, in its crazed wisdom, wished this condition upon the world?

  “What is that you hold?” I asked at last.

  White Crow frowned. “It is my father’s medicine shield,” he said.

  “But the size…”

  “My father was not a large man,” said White Crow.