There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

  Dob slid down so that Arnem could climb onto his shoulders, huffed to recall him from his thoughts. The boy grit through the pain of even bending and contorting to do it. His joints were beginning to seize, his pride to wane. He would not have made it to the top of the hill save atop the beast and, looking down at the growing redness and swelling of his arms, he madly wondered if he would still.

  The way was straight and easeful enough once the street plateaued, but Arnem started to shake with more than fever. Camp was too near the edge of the Witherwood for his liking. An unavoidable hazard of the trade, Verem called it. The places least likely for the watchmen to chance searching them out were the places most likely to traffic in cultists and gol’yem patrols. But a steadily growing part of the boy felt that such a fear was wrong, too. The seed made itself known in his pocket. Not a warning this time, but a reminder. He could feel its tendrils animate the nearer they came to the black, twisted forest. That comforted him where it did not before.

  He guided Dob by slight tugs on his hackles, though the beast knew the route as well as he did. Camp was tucked behind a nest of squat stone dwellings and shops that were once freely standing, but now integrated into one root-enshrouded whole. Such overgrowth marked the border of every divide in the Midden between that which still cleaved to fire and metal and that which had fallen back into elder days. No one lived there anymore, victims of the metastasis of the Witherwood that grew and branched out farther with every season.

  The tower that Verem called Camp was alone in its nakedness. Arnem often wondered the wisdom of keeping it so sheared of vegetation; but he knew the risk was a calculated one. Good, reliable shelter was among the Midden’s most penultimate commodities. The notice attracted by a finger of stone and metal, thrusting from the otherwise earthen hues of the verge, posed a fraction of the threat endemic to the verge itself. The creep of root and shoot promised slow but eventual destruction.

  Still, the tower had not escaped the touch of time. Its stout walls bowed farther out than even in the boy’s younger days. The Stormcrows disarmed their concern by betting with one another over how long before the ancient masonry failed and the metal dome at its apex collapsed. Enough stones had fallen away already to provide makeshift windows here and there along its heights. Through them, Arnem could see nothing but shadow.

  “Muro!” he shouted up at anyone who was there to listen. He rapped weakly on the corroded metal doors which barred the tower’s only entrance. “Dura, Quarr? Anyone?”

  Rust shook free at his insistence and uncovered the sigil that cut up the faces of the doors: a lantern orbited by three stars. The symbol was not unfamiliar to him. It was uncovered at odd intervals such as this until the decay of the metal covered it back up again, and in any case was visible now only as slight valleys cut into its surface. Its adornment enthralled the boy, as anything did that bespoke the stars, remote in their multitudes and divorced from the lugubrious earth; but, like so much else in the Midden, the tower was only a gravemarker—the name on it, the anciently interred beneath it, only motes adrift in the voiceless fathoms of time.

  Arnem limped about to face Dob. “I’m going inside. I’ll be safe. Go and find some trouble to get into. I’ll call for you once I’m done here and Verem knows, then we’ll go and tell Oren. For all he’ll listen.”

  The beast whined, a pathetic sound in the throat of so massive a creature, and grumbled when he saw in the boy’s eyes that there was no argument. It reared around and bolted off and Arnem smiled to see him go. Dob kept so close to him, to keep him safe, that he never had a chance to just be Dob. Or so Arnem imagined. Only sometimes did he know what the beast thought. Only sometimes did the beast know what he thought. Rarer still were the moments that their minds connected and, for the boy, it was as though he lived in two bodies at once and may travel however he chose. A part of him that was almost his whole wished for such a moment then and perhaps in the days to come, such a moment always. The way would be hard, he felt, and long with just the use of his little bones.

  There were enough holes punched into the walls of Camp that the boy had to choose which to climb through. The choices were narrowed by their known quantities. Arnem knew which of the unofficial ingresses would send him flying, bludgeoned back out into the street with a deadfall; which stairs would give way on the other side and drop him into blackness; and which were not stairs at all and merely pressure plates that would send a poisoned dart deep into his gut. But these gave him the least trepidation. More than a few ways into and throughout the tower were trapped with artifacts the Stormcrows had found in the ruins, of which even they could only guess the use.

  Inside, the boy peered into the shadows that clothed the ascent and listened. Only the rain pattering in the streets and upon the rooftops was there for him to hear. Light from the breaks in the stone and what passed for spying holes interrupted the dark, revealing nothing. Arnem pulled his steadily seizing body up one step and then another and wished for the top around every bend in the spiraling stair.

  The silence met him there, too. He leaned onto the threshold that led to the dim chamber at the apex of the tower. Strangled daylight, pouring through gaps left from fallen stone and rents in the metal dome above, competed to light its vastness with the flicker of three braziers set at random around its interior. The assemblage of the Stormcrows’ lives was cast amid their pockets of light, the miscellany of their existence and the priceless hauls from their many treks into the Midden’s most desolate and dangerous reaches.

  The obscure relics were absurd alongside the stashes of rusty blades, baskets of what little food they could afford to keep on hand, piles of reclaimed rope and half-full barrels of rainwater. But as the years passed and the ground beneath his feet grew lesser ahead than behind, absurdity was not the word with which he remembered the sight. The tools belonging to one age of man or another, no matter how wide the gap between them, was next to nothing beside the iron cosmos that was strung across the heights of the tower.

  How the machine was built, what its spheres and satellites and orbits were meant to represent, the boy had only the vaguest knowledge. The tower was nearly alone in all the Midden for maintaining the best part of its constitution and continuing to protect what it contained. The characters and stylizations which covered every part of the metal construct still clearly described an unknown something. The orbs in all their various natures, inert upon what could only be their individual orbits, laid claim to the chamber’s entirety in their mission to represent a complex system of spatial relationships.

  Save for the awe he held for it, the model meant nothing to Arnem except that once there was movement and meaning. He looked up at the silent giant as perhaps a beast looks upon the busy pale of settlement or a nomad upon the ghost of a once proud fortress. A thought, endlessly recurring, worked through him: that if anything looked down on him then, it surely saw no difference between the knives his people kept for cutting bread and the most precious artifact unearthed from the ruins of Sul.

  “Is anyone here?” Arnem cried out. The voluminous quiet enfolding the spheres of the machine took his words greedily. “Anyone? It’s me. Just me.”

  “Arnem?” a small voice asked from the parts of the room he could not see. “Fucking hell. It was only you out there? It’s only me in here.”

  “Kurr?” Arnem pushed off from the stone, stumbled through the threshold.

  “I thought I was done for when I heard you banging around down there,” she said.

  She was laid up on such a berth as the Stormcrows could provide for her, an agglomeration of sackcloth stuffed with leaves atop a hastily made pallet. Arnem hurt almost as much as she to see her that way. He struggled over to her side and could only look for so long at the bandaged stump of her arm, the makeshift splint of twigs and twine holding her broken leg together. Her skin was pale with the blood she had lost, damp with the fever running through her. A wet cloth was draped over the edge of a basin of water set beside her, and he set t
o the work of whoever had been washing away the sweat from her brow.

  "You bludgers sure got some nest here," Arnem said.

  "Yes,” Kurr said and tried in vain to sit up on the litter before finally submitting to the boy’s help. “Old Mystikrachos did well by us, he did."

  "Mystikrachos?"

  "Some Lantern-watcher," she said and waved the hand left to her. Arnem watched its delicate arc rise and fall. "Left behind all sorts of this wonky nonsense when he up and snuffed out ages ago. Sheaves and sheaves of parchment, jotted with stuff I certainly can’t make sense of. And this big hunk of iron, of course. Quarr says it’s called an 'orrery', but who can say how that fat drunkard knows." Her breath caught. “Arnem,” she said, and he was surprised to hear concern struggling into her weak voice. “Your arm.”

  The boy’s voice shook, along with the rest of him. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I can’t do shit with your sorry, and anyway it doesn’t hurt. You should’ve seen me a few hours ago.” Kurr batted away the washcloth and grabbed the hand that held it. “What’re you going on all normal for? You can barely stand. What happened to you?”

  “It’s what I came to tell Verem,” the boy said. “Where is he?”

  “Tell him what?”

  “I figured it out, even more than before. I proved it.”

  “You don’t look set to prove anything to anyone. You look worse than I do, and I can’t even tell you what I look like.” He winced as she turned his arm this way and that to inspect the skin in the frail lamplight. “I’d ask if you came across a nest of snakes that so happened to be on fire, if not for the swelling and the pus. This is bad. Looks like infection. And so soon? I only just saw you.” She dropped his arm, which fell limp to both their surprise, and then pointed off at a table behind him that was replete with bottles, vials, poultices, and unctions. “There on the table. The amber stuff. You’ll know it. It looks like sap.”

  Arnem found the substance half-melted and stewing with its juices in an old cast-iron pot that looked hastily pulled from whatever fire did the work and thrown onto the pile of junk strewn across the table. He was more surprised than he was bewildered: The gilded, congealed mass was known to him. The uroch was the only merchant in Marskol Square that retained its customers, and the boy knew why. Some said the gelatin was a salve to the Embers, others a cure, but no one disagreed that it produced some effect in the plagued.

  “I’m not sick,” Arnem said, taking the pot by the handle and rolling it around to inspect the contents.

  “Neither am I,” Kurr said. “Come here. I want to show you something.” When the boy did, she grabbed him roughly by the waist of his breeks and almost tore the raggedy hem. “Tell anyone about this and you’ll be missing more than your arms.” He nodded without being asked. “Undo these bandages if your fingers can still do the job.”

  They could, but barely. Even his knuckles had started to complain at the impetus to move. He tugged and pulled at the wrappings more than he undid them, and to his surprise Kurr winced not at all. The linen was damp and discolored, but not by blood. There were the sour metallics of blood and sweat and other excretions of the wound, though these rose from the heap of cast-off bandages beside the bed. A sweetness hovered in the air around her and not of rot. But as of newgrown meadows whipping in the summer wind, as of the deep forest just swept with tranquil rains, such that he wanted to be among them and remain among them.

  “Be careful,” Kurr hissed at him, calling his eyes back to the task at hand. He’d been tugging absently on a strip of bandage and such that the edge started to tear. “I need these to go back on the way you fucking found them.”

  “Why? Whatever you’re hiding I won’t be here to change them next time.”

  “There won’t be a next time. What?” Arnem had stopped taking away the bandage, having come to the last layer that wound around her body. The shape of her was unearthed. He felt himself teetering at the precipice of the pit he had dug, wanting to flee but ultimately to plunge. “Nothing under here you haven’t seen a hundred times before, I expect. This is the Midden. There’s whores on every corner. Besides, I weren’t much older than you before I had my first introduction. I’m not much older now.”

  The sweetness came to him again, tugged at him again. “I know,” he said, but his hands were frozen as if they both were, she and him, caught in time.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  Finally she batted his hands away and started to undo the rest of the bandages as best she could with her one arm. “You won’t be a kid forever, Arnem. Enjoy it, as I know your cousin wants you to. He’d have you a kid forever, and he’s done a fair job. Most kids down here don’t stay kids half as long. But your time is coming. You won’t see it on any horizon. It’ll just be here. Like it was waiting for you all this time and you just didn’t see it.”

  Kurr dispensed with the last of the bandages and, despite the strange lightning wrestling within him, Arnem did not stare. He gaped instead at the meager nub attached to her shoulder that now bristled with flowering moss, fungi, and brambles—a motley of vegetation that occurred nowhere else in nature but upon her wound.

  “I know you’re hurting awful,” Kurr said. “But I wanted you to see what was what before we went ahead and just slathered the stuff on.”

  “This is from the uroch’s stuff?”

  “Not a word to anyone.”

  “I wouldn’t even know what to say,” the boy said absently, reaching out to brush the flowers and few mushrooms that stood erect above the thorns. “Do you feel anything?”

  “Everything,” she said, and he felt her eyes on him. “The next part I won’t tell you. Not unless that sap finds its way onto your arms too.”

  Arnem woke up to his pain, shoved aside in the new strangeness Kurr confronted him with, upon mention of it. The fire bloomed anew and his joints stiffened further. He snatched up a gob of the amber gelatin, communicated a question with his eyes that she answered with a nod, and proceeded to slather his wounds in the thick paste. He winced in preparation for a sting that never came. The sap worked its way deep into the ruts where the creature had laid hold of him and replaced the burn with a seeping warmth, absorbing any presence of pus and blood. When he was done, his arms looked as though he had shoved them deep into the luminous innards of a tree overflowing with the spirit that lived inside.

  “Is it magick?” the boy asked, holding his arms out as if they were no longer a part of him or never had been.

  “If you’re asking after glyphs and sigils and calculations,” Kurr said, “this ain’t that. I can’t say what it is except for where it comes from, but I know for certain that it ain’t our magick.”

  “For certain,” he echoed. “What were you going to tell me?”

  She gestured for him to come closer, as if there were anything more than the silence to hear them, and he did.

  “I told you already I’d gut you if this got to any of the others, especially Quarr, dumb as he is,” Kurr said. Her eyes were absent of bluster. “I can see him, when I dream. Hear him, too.”

  “Who?”

  “My brother. He ain’t dead. It’s like I’m seeing through his eyes, things I know he’s never seen, sure as I am his twin. They can’t find him on a scry. Paid wizards plenty to try. But I can.”

  “But it’s just a dream. You’re dreaming.”

  “I know how it sounds. And I don’t care if you believe me, but I’ve got to tell someone. It’s eating me up.” She placed a hand on his shoulder. “He talks to me. And, and I talk to him. There’s a place not far from here. Filled with a light like the sun, but darkness all around it. And there are growing things in the dark. Like how there used to be in the old stories and carvings, not the withered poisoned drek we’ve got now. It’s like a hollow at the roots of the greatest tree there is, and he wanders there for hours talking with the spirits that are still left in the land.”

  “What if it’s just Druids’ tricks?”

  “T
he Druids took him there and healed him. Now he wants me to join him. There are others with him. Dozens, maybe hundreds more.” She drew him closer, herself closer, so that their noses almost touched and their eyes danced in each other's. “I don’t think the ancient hierophants went anywhere at all, Arnem. I hear the drums, just like we hear at night from the forest. Only different. Maybe you’ll hear them too. You’ll tell me if you do?”

  “I’ll tell you. I’ll keep it a secret, too. I can’t pay back what you did for me, in the forest or just now, but I can do that for you. Thank you, Kurr,” Arnem said and leaned and embraced her, heedless in his gratitude of what the gesture entailed. He felt the press of her against him only as her one arm entangled him. It made him squeeze harder. “I know I don’t deserve it, after what happened, but thank you.”

  They began to part, but suddenly Kurr held him fast. “You want me,” she whispered and sent the thunder tumbling in him again. “Don’t you?”

  He nodded, slowly at first, as if time was lately arrested and steadily came back into sync. “I’m going to be a man soon. That’s what this means. I think.”

  “You’re a man now.” Her foot brushed his thigh. He did not flinch, felt every part of him falling forward. “That’s what I think.”

  Her lips danced across his, soft as the rest of her was not, and something came alive within him that was like the bursting through of flowers from the dead skin of the Tree of Sul. A vault had opened in him that was concealed so deep, so long that he did not remember its existence or its purpose anymore. When they parted, it was like the parting of doors and her eyes, only her eyes, glittered inside. On their mouths were the smiles they had stolen away from the murk outside. One of the many, many more that remained taken from them. But never more than in that moment was he determined to one day win them all back, and Kurr started to speak.