The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy

by Gene Wolfe

  “What a question! My plants are finer creatures, almost human themselves.”

  We had used a noose on a pole to extend the cat to this “finer creature,” but now I leaned into the great tub where it sprawled and thrust my hand among its unoccupied claws. They closed on my wrist, but I was almost disappointed when they released it.

  “That’s right, test every assertion for yourself,” he said, thumping me on the back. “You have the makings, sir, of a scientist.”

  * * * *

  I grew fond of the swollen tree in the Bower, whose deformity subtly altered and enlarged from week to week. It said nothing to me, but I felt almost at peace when I sat leaning against its trunk and listening to the meaningless prattle of its branches.

  I came and went stealthily, a trick I knew well. Wizard or not, my host never surprised me, though he once came close.

  Sitting against the tree, lost in some reverie of Dendra, I felt a sudden tingle, and I couldn’t say whether the skin of my back or the bark had crawled. Whatever its source, the sensation alarmed me. Not a leaf stirred, and I was struck by the fancy that the trees had fallen still with anticipation. At the same time I glimpsed movement, frighteningly close, a flash of color that I recognized as my host’s robe.

  I withdrew into the hedge outside the ring. Just then Dwelphorn Thooz entered with a group of slaves bearing barrels that slopped and gurgled. He muttered endearments as he ladled out portions of raw meat and entrails at the base of each tree.

  Although the fate of the cats and rabbits hadn’t disturbed me, I was sickened to see him feeding raw meat to these trees. I had come to love them in spite of my first impression, because Dendra had loved them. I wormed my way backward as quickly and silently as I could.

  “You must keep your strength up, my dear,” I heard him saying as I slipped free of the hedge. “You can’t just think of yourself now, you know.”

  I cast a last look at the Bower as I skulked off, and saw that the trees, so unaccountably still a moment before, were tossing their heads in the windless air and bending their limbs low as if to feast.

  * * * *

  The moon glared pitilessly through my window that night, commanding me to be up and doing. When I covered my head with the bedclothes and clenched my eyes, its imprint on my eyelids became the face of Dendra. Springing up and pacing the day-bright room did no good. I felt her breath and smelled her sweetness in the warm breeze from the restless garden. She was near.

  Why had he spoken to the tree in just those words, urging it to eat: “You can’t just think of yourself...?” Had that fearful storm taken Dendra, or had it expressed the outrage of the gods at a gross breach of their laws?

  I thought I heard a cry. It was a cat, perhaps, a rutting cat, but it would have been the first such cry I had heard from the enchanted garden. No animals ventured there, no birds, not even the insects that my host had told me were so essential to the propagation of plants. I threw on my clothes and thrust my stoutest knife through my belt.

  I didn’t dare strike a light as I crept through the palace, but the carnivores stirred all around me. I jumped at shadows, cringed from phantom caresses. I imagined the footsteps of my host in every click and slither from the tubs where the monsters grew, but I took heart from the thought that these loathsome noises masked my own footfalls.

  Outside I heard again the screaming I had mistaken for a cat, and ran straight to the Bower. A white thing writhed at the foot of my favorite tree, no longer swollen. I recognized it as a newborn infant, I guessed its origin, but the shock of this blasphemous miracle was driven from my mind by a greater wonder. My talent had returned. Within the tree, pleading for release, I saw Dendra.

  Perhaps I should have roused the sorcerer and begged him to reverse the spell. Perhaps I should have sought help from another wizard. Such possibilities occurred to me only later. At the moment I saw nothing but a challenge that I had met thousands of times before, to liberate a captive from wood. I drew my knife and attacked the tree that bound her.

  It began to go wrong from the start. The grain of the wood was erratic, its density unfamiliar. I cut too deep, and sap flowed black in the moonlight. Not fluidly, as a human expression would evolve, but as a jolting succession of static images, Dendra’s look changed from elation to horror. I had no way to stop her bleeding until I had freed a human body whose wounds I could bind, so I hacked more desperately, but I only cut her more.

  She might know something about the conditions of her enchantment. If she could speak, she might help me free her. I concentrated on her mouth. I shaved and pared with an intensity of concentration and a steadiness of hand that I had never known before as I tried to free her lips, her teeth, her tongue.

  As I said, my talent never ran to likenesses of individuals. In this case the pattern lay before me, her very face was visible under my knife and my fingers, and I don’t know where I could have gone wrong, but I did. From the ragged caricature I had made of her mouth, a scream burst forth, a scream strangled by the blood that sprayed over me. In a sudden burst of anger and despair whose onset gave no warning, I drove the heavy blade between her eyes. Sometimes I can delude myself that I did it to cut short her suffering, but it was my own pain that impelled the knife into the wood.

  Unable to look at her, I turned my attention to the baby, a perfectly formed boy. I cut the cord and tied it, I washed him in the water of the cursed well, I wrapped him in my shirt and rocked him, but he wouldn’t stop crying. I suspected he was hungry. I turned to his mother. Now I saw nothing but a tree, a dead tree whose drooping branches trailed silky leaves on the moss.

  “Oh, you wretched man!” screamed a voice beside me. “You miserable fool! What have you done to my finest creation?”

  I didn’t care that I had been discovered, that I had enraged the wizard or that his hulking slaves stood near at hand. I watched the old man’s frothing, stamping rage with curious detachment, and I hardly heard his threats as I noticed that his body held images begging to be freed. The shapes that I saw were those of bones, muscles and entrails, and I seized him in order to liberate each and every one of those images with my knife.

  I succeeded brilliantly.

  When I came to my senses, I wondered why the slaves had not defended him. They seemed to be lying dead or stunned, but when I examined them, I found that the things I had mistaken for fallen men were nothing but heaps of rotting vegetation. I snatched up the baby and fled, not liking the way the branches thrashed and clawed the face of the moon. As I ran from the Bower, I saw the trees bending as if to feed.

  All but one.

  * * * *

  I left Crotalorn that night, taking only a milk-goat from the wizard’s menagerie to provide for my son. It was my intention to bring him to this castle and claim for him the status of a Sleith, whatever it might cost me.

  It was an unfortunate journey. Perhaps goat’s milk disagreed with him, or perhaps my clumsiness and ignorance did, but the baby fretted when he wasn’t screaming. Busybodies pestered me until I found that I could discourage them by explaining, between suppressed coughs, that the poor child’s mother had died of the plague.

  He seemed to calm when we came into the forested hills of your domain. I believed that he sensed he was coming home and would soon be in the better care of his maternal relatives. He gurgled and cooed at the trees.

  Near the place where you found me today, I paused to collect my thoughts and rehearse the speech that would introduce Dendrard to his grandparents. I bathed him at a spring and set him naked on soft moss while I washed myself. When I returned to pick him up, I found that I could not. The earth gripped him.

  I didn’t know what to think. An animal, a snake, something held him to the ground. I pulled, and he screamed more loudly than ever before. I babbled at him, fussed over him and managed to calm him, but at the same time I very gently rolled him to one side to determine how he was caught, and by what.

  My knife was out, for I didn’t know what I would
see, and I’m glad—I suppose I’m glad—that I refrained from striking at once, for my first sight suggested that the foul tentacle of some underworld creature gripped my child at the base of his spine. What stayed my hand, I think, was Dendrard’s apparent contentment. Not even my screaming changed his look of pure happiness.

  Though my hand cringed, I forced it to explore the thing that held my son. I expected a texture of scales, a chill of slime, but the reality was worse. What I felt was the firm pliancy of young wood. No creature had seized my son from the earth. It was he, Dendrard, who gripped the earth with the root sprouting from his backbone.

  I stumbled backward, cursing and praying with equal futility. My eyes remained fixed on him, on his calm, empty gaze as he stared up at the blue sky, opening his little fists and spreading his fingers like branches.

  I ran. Roots tripped me, branches raked me, trunks battered me. I fought my way free of the angry forest, but the first men I met on the open road were a press-gang from the Lord Admiral’s fleet, wandering far inland in their desperation for recruits. They thought I was mad, but they told me lunacy was no impediment for an oarsman on a trireme, nor were they much impressed by my assumed cough. They had seen real plague, they said, as I would.

  I vowed to go back and find Dendrard one day. I never imagined that thirty years would pass. I hadn’t remembered that your lands contained so many hills, so many springs, so many trees. Nor had I foreseen that Cluddites would rearrange the landscape.

  * * * *

  Ringard’s tale was ended, and so was the wine. The servants had long since gone to bed, but I took him up to the room they had prepared. The candles had burned out; it surprised me to see that the glowing sky made them unnecessary. The forest beyond the window nevertheless looked very dark.

  “If you find him,” I said, “what do you propose to do?”

  “Listen to his voice—although it’s been a very long time since I last heard the voices of trees, I may have an ear for that of my own son.” He flashed his unpleasant smile. “If not, perhaps I’ll merely sit for a while in his shade.”

  I left him, and in the morning he was gone.

  * * * *

  Several days later I heard that the Snake Man had fallen afoul of the Sons of Cludd. Anyone with a good word to say for an accused witch becomes a suspect, but I felt that the man had a claim on me. And I was curious to learn if any trees had spoken to him.

  The smell of burning wood, burning flesh and righteously unbathed bodies led me inerrantly to the Holy Soldiers’ encampment. Easing my horse through a mob draped in white robes and droning dissonant hymns, I bitterly regretted the good old days when my father would set the hounds on Cluddite preachers. Now they were more numerous than those hounds’ fleas, and not even a lord of the House of Sleith would dare to throw one down the stairs if he came calling.

  They had transported much of the forest to their camp, stripped the trees of branches, set them in rigid ranks, and decorated each with an unlucky victim. Some were already choking on the smoke of their feet as it rose to their nostrils, but I was not too late. The pyre around the distinctive figure of Ringard lay unlighted.

  “Take heart!” I called to him when I came near enough to be heard. “Your nephew is here, Lord Fariel.”

  They hadn’t quelled his wit. “I wouldn’t boast of our connection in this company, if I were you.”

  Before leaving to seek someone in authority, I asked, “Did you find him? Dendrard?”

  “No, fortunately. They would have liked him even less than his father.”

  Talking to the victims was forbidden, I learned from the men who rushed up to unhorse me and hustle me before their captain. He was in a good mood—he didn’t smile, of course, they consider that a sin, but he didn’t tie me to a stake—but that was all I could gather from his barbarous accent and Zaxoin turns of phrase, some of which, I believe, he made up as he went along to confuse an unbelieving outlander like me. I did pick the words “talk” and “tree” out of his rapturous gabble, but even if he speaks perfect Frothen, it’s hard to concentrate on the words of a man whose sleeves are decorated with the dried tongues of blasphemers and ears of heretics.

  “Wroken word on writhen tree spoken, burn on broken tree witch writhen!” he bawled, winding up his spittle-spraying harangue in fine Cluddite style and gesturing toward the stake where Ringard hung.

  I cursed, I wept, I took it less nobly than Ringard himself when the torch dipped and his pyre blossomed up to contain him like a crystal cup. His head twisted, probably to deny these zealots the sight of one more tortured face, but it seemed to me that he was pressing his ear to the stake in an effort to hear a last message from the medium he had loved so much.

  Then he turned back toward us, and that face, crawling with unknown flora, held an expression of such torment that it must have gratified even the most jaded of the Holy Soldiers. Yet his words, when they rang across the distance and over the roar of the bonfire, were absurd: “Not the stake! No, no, not the stake!”

  It was over quickly enough, although the victim’s sense of time may have differed from mine. The black stake bore a black gnarl, and it was all so much indistinguishable charcoal. The sudden reports that made me cry out were only the eruptions of boiling sap, or marrow.

  His last words had puzzled me. He was no imbecile, he had been alert to the end, he had known what they meant to do, so why had he protested against the stake? Trying not just to examine my memory but to relive the moment just past, to catch the words still ringing in my ears, I convinced myself that I had misunderstood him.

  A prudent man would have made his exit, but I was so distraught that I seized the chief fanatic and demanded, “What was it he said? Did you hear the man’s last words?”

  “’Deafen your ears to the words of wisdom, and to fine phrases be as stone,’” the captain quoted quite clearly from The Book of Cludd, and the import of his hard stare was even clearer.

  There was much I would have asked him, but I had outworn my welcome. They kept my horse, my weapons and my clothing to further their good works, and I was forced to pick my cold and painful way through the sighing and creaking forest far longer after dark than I would have liked. Countryman though I am, I had never noticed that the riffle of leaves and clitter of loose bark can sound exactly like human conversations, whispered with earnest intensity. I paused often to listen, but I could identify no single, coherent word, with the doubtful but disturbing exception of my Tribal name: Sleith.

  In the days that followed I noticed, too, that certain leaves, when they flashed their pale sides to the bright sun, could suggest hair the color of rain; and that the slim grace of some trees, the firm molding of others, the quality that I can only describe as the joyful nature of still others, stirred memories of a girl who had once romped with me and the hounds when she should have been counting her jewels. If Ringard had been mad, his madness had been metaphorically apt.

  And he had surely been mad. The Cluddites had felled hundreds of trees and burned hundreds of victims. Coincidence can be stretched only so far. Yet I had convinced myself that his last words, after he had listened to a cry from the tree they had randomly chosen for him, had not been, “Not the stake!,” but, “Not this stake!”