by Gene Wolfe
One night I awoke staring, closer than I am to you, into the yellow eyes of a wolf. It stared back for a moment, then fled in terror. I examined myself, my gnarled and battered limbs, my burr-snarled hair, my twisted mind. I had no liking for the creature I had carved from my own being. I had freed a real troll.
In the morning I scrubbed myself with sand and water, hacked away a year’s worth of hair and whiskers, and draped my body in the hides of the spotty cats who had controverted my claim to their kills. I passed among the farms and villages as a solitary hunter, odder perhaps than most of an odd breed, but not implausibly so.
The whirl and clamor of a carnival drew everyone from the countryside, and me with them. Only when I stood beneath the snapping banners of yellow and blue, shielding one ear against drums and horns to hear the shouted answers to my questions, did I understand that the gods had led me to this very seat of the Sleiths on the day of Dendra’s wedding.
I resisted the impulse to dash headlong against stone walls and steel, for the wilderness had taught me patience. No one wanted the friends I had freed during my Savage Period, some would have paid me to put them back in my bag, but many desired the skins I scarcely valued. In an afternoon of bored haggling, I collected more silver than my unlucky father had seen in his whole lifetime. I bought fine clothing and a handsome horse. (At least I thought them fine and handsome, but Dendra later sniggered at both.) Then I waited.
When the last drunken sentry had tumbled into the moat, I strode boldly into the castle and picked my way through a tangle of snoring Sleiths on the elegant stairway. I breasted a wave of fruits and flowers until it burst against the door of the bridal chamber. Inside, a naked man chased Dendra around the blossom-smothered bed. He was so fat and clumsy that he might have pursued her all night if I hadn’t snatched up his traditional bridegroom’s scepter and broken his head with it.
I planned to escape to the wild crags and sunless glens, but Dendra would have none of that. “Let’s go to the city,” she said. “It’s noisy and crowded and not as pretty as the woods, but at least we’ll have bread. And music. And plumbing.”
It was a happy thought. I’m sure our pursuers displaced every boulder and uprooted every bush in the west country, never suspecting that a rogue bumpkin would make for Crotalorn. It wasn’t the imperial capital then, just a provincial city that had been decaying for centuries in the shadow of the mountains, but it was grand enough to awe me. Gazing up at the dome of Ashtareeta’s temple, I lost my balance and sat down heavily on the pavement, to the amusement of all the pinched and foul-mouthed midgets who had been jostling us.
Never having felt its need, Dendra knew even less about money than I did. We used ours to take a fine apartment near Ashclamith Square, where we dined on Lomar melons and worrells’ eggs. I planned to carve and she to paint, until we had earned such wealth and fame that her kinsmen would beg us to forgive them, but we divided our time between making love and gadding about the theaters and fighting-pits. Although we gave our landlord a handsome sum, only a month passed before he surprised us by demanding a second payment. The bailiffs who heaved our things out the window assured us that his was the common practice of the greedy city.
We had nothing but my knives and her paints. Thieves had snatched our clothing, our bedding, even our pots and pans before they hit the street; but, being young, we welcomed our new adventure. We failed to see our future in the wretches who begged for coppers and fought dogs over garbage. It was their hard luck not to be Ringard and Dendra, but we suffered no such handicap.
We debated our prospects, but they shrank when she forbade me to become a hero of the pits and I denied her a career as temple nymph. I could always skin more spotty cats, but the forests they prowled were a long way away. Hugging each other to keep from falling down laughing, we competed to invent grisly details for a ransom note we might send her father.
“We could sell apples,” she said.
“Where would we get apples?”
She pointed. We had wandered into Amorartis Street, where mansions crumbled among gardens run wild. Above our seat at the base of a wall stretched a bough from the orchard within, bent with the weight of fat and glossy apples. Why had the beggars who disputed husks and scraps in the lower town not come and picked them? Because they lacked brains and enterprise, obviously, or they wouldn’t have been beggars. No people, no dogs, no life at all disturbed the street that twisted between leaning walls. We persuaded ourselves that the orchard had been abandoned.
After tramping all five hills of the city without an apricot or a lark’s wing to share, we were more interested in eating the fruit than selling it. I couldn’t reach the apples, so I lifted her to the top of the wall, where she sat and tossed them down to me. Between bites, she twittered of her plan to occupy one of these vacant houses and make money by playing the lute on street-corners.
“Do you know what a lute costs?”
“You could carve one from apple-wood, and—“ Her words ended in a shriek as she fell backwards over the wall.
I was set to laugh, for she had fallen as suddenly and comically as if jerked by an unseen hand, but when I heard nothing more, when she failed to answer my shout, I flew up the face of the wall. In the garden below, a disgusting old man, his hand clamped to Dendra’s mouth, was dragging her into the bushes.
“Oh,” he said, with a grin so false they would have hooted him off the stage of the cheapest theater, “is this lady with you, young fellow?”
Though soiled and tarnished, his robes and ornaments were those of a nobleman, and my father’s fate at the hands of the ruling class was still vivid in my memory, but rage hurled me at him with no second thought. I was the lad who had fought panthers in the mountains, and a snake could have counted on its fingers the heartbeats left to this doddering lecher, but he slipped aside and left me to imprint the ground with my face.
“What an unfortunate fall!” he said, helping me up while I was too dazed to remember my homicidal intent. “Are you all right? I’m so sorry, that wall is so old and neglected it was bound to give way. You won’t sue me, will you?”
Dendra was free, but she didn’t run; my strength had returned, but I didn’t break his neck. I wondered why I had first thought his silver beard tangled and filthy, his kindly smile oily. Fluttering light and shadow among the leaves must have deceived me. We had been deceived, too, in thinking this garden abandoned. Unlike its neighbors, it had been lovingly tended inside its neglected walls. I was dazzled by the strange shapes and colors that rioted around me, dizzied by an almost forceful exhalation of unfamiliar perfumes.
“We should apologize,” Dendra said with the contrite condescension that only a great lady can bring off, “for stealing your apples.”
“Why, then, you must be hungry!” cried Dwelphorn Thooz. “Come, apples are for horses, come inside and eat a proper meal.”
Later it struck me that he’d been stealing my wife, never mind the apples, but she assured me that my fall had rattled my brain. She had fallen, he was helping her, it should have been obvious. She convinced me, for I could hardly believe that such a gracious old gentleman would drag her into the bushes, even though I’d seen him trying.
He led us indoors, where the garden pursued us through rooms capped with bubbles of sweating glass. Dendra trilled over the bizarre surprises around every turn, but I fretted and twitched at the clusters of horse-heads no bigger than my thumbnail, with flossy manes and perfect little teeth, or the vines that stirred restlessly at our approach and erected purple pricks. The sweetness of the blooms was cloying, but it muffled all but the hint of an underlying, fishy odor that might have been nauseous in its unmasked form.
Such misgivings seemed no more urgent than doubts whether I had found ten gold coins or only nine. Our host called for a meal of a dozen exotic dishes, served by oddly listless and abstracted slaves. He could barely contain his outrage that artists like us should be homeless and poor, and he promised us the use of a garden-house
that would have been called a palace back home. He praised our work before we had done any.
“How could two young persons, so beautiful, so intelligent, so sympathetic, fail to create anything less than masterpieces?” he demanded, as if I had insulted him by doubting his faith in us.
His own situation was lamentable, he disclosed as we picked our way among the claws and tentacles of sea-creatures and the spikes of vegetables whose flesh was so difficult of access that I feared I was trying, given my ignorance of social graces, to eat table ornaments. He told us he came from Sythiphore, which we had never heard of, but whose natives are victims of slanders on their customs and religion. Had he not denied that his people were descended from sharks, I might have overlooked how widely his eyes bulged in his flat face, or what thin lips he partly masked with his beard.
“You wouldn’t believe the lies my neighbors whispered about me, just because I spend my time reading books and pottering in my garden—”
“Where are they all?” Dendra asked.
“They died, I suppose, or left. We seldom spoke, as I cared nothing for their japes and follies.”
“And why do you read books and potter in your garden?”
“Why, young man, because I’m a passionate botanist! It took study, as well as hard work, to produce the apples that tempted you, and can you deny they were delicious? Do you know of any other gardener who can grow sarcophage or selenotropes in Crotalorn? Have you ever before seen necrophiliums blooming so gloriously any farther north than Fandragord?”
I had to answer no to all these questions, and so did Dendra, who even seemed to understand them.
Only once during the meal did his jollity falter, and I sensed a threat as he said, “I must implore you to spare my beloved trees for your masterpieces, especially those in the Bower by the south wall. The gardens of my absent neighbors can provide you with all the wood you’ll need.”
* * * *
Wandering in his garden the next day, I was amazed by my ignorance. Trees were like members of my family, and yet I could hardly identify one out of every five I saw. The strange ones were indeed strange, like sculptures that called for no further attention from my knives, but they were twisted as if in bondage and torment. Despite the vivid blooms that burst around us, despite the bright sunshine that dappled through unquiet branches, I was oppressed by the feeling that I was straying in darkness through an unknown forest. These trees might have said much to the boy who had understood their language, but I was no longer that boy.
Dendra shared none of my disquiet. She laughed and exclaimed over the beauty of the garden, distinguishing the roses from the pavonias for me, who had never paid much mind to flowers.
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a tree, silly! What a question!”
We had come to the Bower that Dwelphorn Thooz had spoken of, a ring of graceful trees whose branches intertwined above a pool. I was reluctant to enter. The trees disturbed me, the smooth-skinned trees that neither she nor I could name. Whether I was upset by their unfamiliarity, or by some curiosity of their shapes or proportions or arrangement, I couldn’t say. I felt like a dog I once owned, who would gleefully charge a bear but sometimes tremble at the shadow of a passing cloud.
Dendra felt nothing of this. She romped forward through the grass, thick and green despite the gloom of overarching limbs, and dropped to her knees at the edge of the pool. I wanted to call her back, but I wanted even less to evoke the look of sorely-tried noblesse oblige she put on whenever I hinted of omens or intuitions.
She leaned forward to admire her reflection in the pool, and her beauty caught my breath. Clear eyes sparkling in the water-light, pink lips parted, she could have been the naiad who haunted the glade. In the next instant she screamed, and no omen or intuition could have kept me from dashing to her side.
“What is it?”
“Oh—I thought—” She seemed confused, like one roused from a dream. “I thought I saw something in the well.”
I looked. It was in fact a well, perfectly circular and lined with pink stones, its water clearer than the air around us in a shaft of sunlight that pierced the Bower directly overhead. I felt at first that I might reach in and touch the pebbles lying at the bottom. In the next instant I saw intervening shimmers that hinted of fearful depth. The pebbles were boulders. Dizzied by the shift in perspective, I stumbled and almost fell, or—as it seemed then—was almost sucked in.
“No!” I cried when she scooped up the water in her palm, but I was too late to keep her from drinking.
“You’re mad!” she laughed, splashing me.
I thought she might have been right. Swiftly as one of that dog’s dreaded clouds, my vapor had passed. What if the trees did look like men and women stretched on some wizard’s rack that denied the limitations of flesh? I was familiar with such fancies: they were visible only to an artist’s eye. A plain man would have seen only trees.
Several shipboard floggings later curbed the tendency, but in those days I invariably did whatever I was told not to do. I always thought I had a good reason for defying my betters. In this case, I felt a craftsman’s need to test an unfamiliar wood.
“Oh, Ringard!” Dendra sighed when I drew my knife, knowing my ways too well to say more.
The boughs were too high above me, and there were no windfalls in this well-kept garden, so I slipped the knife into the bole of a tree, into what might have been the tormented muscles of a woman’s calf. I recoiled instantly, not just from the sickly feel of the tree’s flesh and the flow of pinkish sap, but from the shrieking in my head. My inner deafness had been suddenly, horribly cured, and I was denounced and importuned by a choir of wailing voices.
“Forgive me!” I cried. The pain of those phantom screams was more than I could bear. The Bower darkened, the tall shapes spun around me like demoniac dancers in a constricting ring.
“Are you ill? Ringard?” Dendra’s voice restored me. I turned into her arms and gripped her. The other voices fell still as leaves in a faltering breeze.
“Let’s go,” I said. “We can find somewhere else to live.”
“Don’t be silly. We can go elsewhere when you’ve sold some of your carvings, if that’s what you really want.”
“At least let’s avoid this Bower. It’s—”
“But I love it! It’s so weird. I think a god must live here.”
“Something must.” I knew better than to argue with her. She could be no less contrary than I.
* * * *
While Dendra happily played at housewife, I sought wood for my work. No sooner had I dropped over the wall to a neighboring garden than I felt a jolting realignment of my senses, like one emerged from the enthrallment of a dark puppet-theater to mix with real people in a daylit street.
It was a jungle floored with sodden leaves, but it grew only normal plants. No fruits or flowers shocked me with their shape or coloring. I breathed in the honest mold and damp as if I had been denied air for a day and a night. If Dendra hadn’t remained behind, I might have kept on walking to the farthest end of the city.
Fallen branches lay everywhere, I had brought an ax to cut them to manageable lengths, and without even trying I saw a hundred shapes—friendly, healthy shapes—begging to be freed. I ignored them and pushed through the undergrowth to the house. It was no airy fantasy of spires and bubbles, but a forthright home of solid timbers. Walking through an open door to find myself among elegant furniture, I feared that the householder would presently seize me for a thief. Then I noticed all the dust, the rain-streaked carpet, the leaves that crackled under my feet.
The inhabitants must have fled without closing the windows or finishing a meal whose desiccated relics cluttered a table. Animals had trooped through to gnaw and claw and defecate, and even as I considered this evidence I was startled by a scurrying rat. Snatching up a handy bit of litter to throw, I dropped it with an oath. It was a human skull.
My first thought was that a derelict had cra
wled in here to die, but that seemed less likely when I considered the childish proportions of the skull; and when I noticed the other old bones and once-splendid garments that lay near the five chairs around the dining table. Although animals and the weather had disordered it, the picture of diners arrested by death in mid-bite was easy to reconstruct.
Similar sights awaited me in other mansions: a chamber-pot holding the bones of its last user; two lovers twined in an embrace whose moisture and warmth had been anciently sucked into the unloving sky; a child’s hand, melted to an inartistic stain on the half-drawn picture of a tree.
I could stand no more horrors. I ran back, scrambling over walls, stumbling in ditches, remembering only at the last minute to lop off some of the wood that had caught my eye. Death had snatched all these unfortunates with a plague, I told myself, or with poisoned water. That his neighbors had earned the enmity of our host might be purest coincidence, but I nevertheless resolved to quit his hospitality as quickly and politely as I could.
No sooner had I climbed into his garden and breathed its perfumed air than urgency faded. I had no desire to linger here, but I no longer itched to run. A sense of peace beguiled me as I walked the winding path to our fine new house.
That peace vanished when I found that Dendra had gone to bed, where she lay pale and drawn.
“It was that water you drank,” I said. “If ever I saw a well haunted by an evil spirit, that was it. We must leave this place at once. We—”
I saw that she was giggling at me as I paced and fumed. She said, “I didn’t get this way from drinking water.”
“What way?”
“Pregnant.”
