Wrath-Bearing Tree

by James Enge

  Well, come to think of it, she had no interest in watching, either. She pointedly turned away and stared back up the way they’d come.

  From the shadows of the narrow street emerged a block of shadow, vaguely man-shaped.

  She lifted her staff—ready to attack—but the newcomer held out hands empty of weapons.

  “Oh!” she said. “You’re one of the Venturers. The barbarian, I think?”

  “I am a barbarian,” agreed the Venturer. “My mother was a priestess of Iänglu-Thërôn, and my father a bookbinder in the same city. But in my heart I am a barbarian. I reject civilized ways and follow the savage urges of my own heart. I chose the name Kremp to signify all this.”

  Aloê wondered if this would have sounded more poetic if Morlock were not gagging and retching in the background.

  “All right,” she said. “What’s it to us? Why are you following us?”

  “You survived,” Kremp pointed out. “You are the strongest. You follow your own self-will and ignore the false cries of mercy and loyalty.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  In the moonslight of the open square, the self-made barbarian could be seen to smile.

  “Anyway, I’d bet that thieving dwarf survived to follow his own self-will.”

  “You’d be wrong,” Kremp replied. “The crowd cut him down. He dropped some of his loot and stopped to collect it. That was his undoing.”

  “Oh.” That sounded likely, in fact. “What do you want with us, though?”

  “You are strongest,” the barbarian said. “I follow you.”

  “That’s a mistake,” Aloê said. “We have an—an oath-sworn loyalty to each other, my companion and I. We can’t afford to extend that to you.”

  “You will betray me if it seems advantageous to you. I understand, and assure you of the same.” He went on to talk at some length of the betrayal of others as a necessary loyalty to oneself.

  That wasn’t what Aloê had meant at all, but the admission from Kremp was useful, in a way. She was wondering whether it was worth it to dispose of Kremp right now, before he became a problem, when she heard something—over the unmusical sound of Morlock’s retching, over the careful exposition by Kremp of his barbarian philosophy. The mob was coming.

  “Morlock!” she hissed. “Company.”

  Morlock spat, then gasped, “Hear them. Where to?”

  That was the question. There were rioters in more than one street leading toward the little square. There was noise from the streets on the opposite side too—but it was more musical, like singing, or chanting. This Festival of Changes the guards had talked about? A festival crowd would a great place to get lost in.

  “This way,” she said, tugging his sleeve as she ran past.

  He lumbered along next to her. Behind she heard, just barely, the catlike tread of Kremp the barbarian following them away.

  The tangled path they took through the streets toward the festival and away from the mob at their heels brought them past a city gate. It was shut and barred, and dark-helmed guards stood before it with their blades drawn. No exit that way, clearly.

  The buildings began to thin out as they ran up a street parallel to the city wall. Ahead was an open space—a great market or a temple plaza. It was densely crowded with purple-robed women who were singing or screaming in a rhythm set by loud but unseen drums. Many of them waved torches, and there was a great bonfire, large but not bright, wreathed with dark stinking smoke like the offal fire they had seen that afternoon.

  Aloê paused at the edge of the crowd to assess the situation. There were few if any males here—she couldn’t see one, except for the two that were with her. This might not, after all, be such a good place to hide.

  Beyond the crowd, built up onto the side of the city wall, was a great slope of marble—something like the curve of a seashell, but vastly larger, the home of a mollusk bigger than a house. There were rickety wooden flights of stairs running up either side of it, and low on the marbly slope were two wrinkled holes, again one on each side. They were steaming in the cool night air. A fence divided the plaza into two sides. On one side were the women. On the other side was a sort of sheepfold, and in it animals of some sort milled about, bleating.

  And, as the crowd chanted and as Aloê watched in mounting horror, the left orifice emitted a spray of dark fluid and muck, squirting it onto the bonfire, which became even darker and smokier.

  The crowd of robed women screamed and applauded.

  From the opposite orifice, a naked gleaming animal was thrust and fell squeaking to the ground. It was taken by purple-hatted priests and herded over with the other . . . the other things.

  The other holes, she saw. Inside the shell was something, a machine or a monster, that made women into holes. Maybe men were changed into poles on another night or another time. But that didn’t matter. What did matter was that she and Morlock had to get out of there. She, in particular, had to get out of there.

  Suddenly, she was seized by either elbow, her staff knocked out of her hands. Two purple-robed guards with spiky mask-helmets had a grip on her; she couldn’t tell if they were male or female, but they were extraordinarily strong. They lifted her straight off the ground and deftly evaded her kicks as they hustled her away.

  Aloê looked back and saw with dismay that Morlock was looking vaguely at the chanting crowd, seemingly unaware of her absence. Kremp was speaking in his ear, one hand on his arm, drawing him away.

  Morlock stared abruptly at Kremp and looked wildly about. He saw Aloê’s staff lying on the ground. He shouted inarticulately—anyway, Aloê couldn’t understand any words.

  She tried to shout out, Hey, I’m over here! but all she managed was a long, drawn-out wavering, “Hey-ey-ey-ey . . .”

  It was enough. Morlock shook loose from Kremp and, when the self-styled barbarian tried to grab hold of his arm again, he grabbed Kremp’s hand and twisted it. Kremp fell to one knee, his face distorted with pain, and Morlock ran on wobbling feet up the narrow walkway.

  By now Aloê and her captors were nearly at the stairs. The women just beyond the fence were screaming and cheering as they watched her get dragged to the hateful stairway. All were excited. One was weeping and naked, massaging her genitals fiercely with both hands.

  Were they here only to watch? Or would they themselves go up the stairs to lose their humanity and become mere holes?

  Morlock was with them, now. He had lost his knife somewhere, but he was waving the notched sword in his right hand. Aloê suddenly remembered that he was drugged and wondered if maybe he would prove an unsafe savior. But his first stroke slashed through the wrist of one of her captors: the aim was too good to be accidental. The hand still clung to her, horribly, but the arm pulled away.

  The one captor who still held her tried to continue up the stairway. But now she had her feet firmly on the ground, and she used their combined weight to push the enemy off balance.

  Face-to-face with her captor, she saw that it was not wearing a mask. The blades had been inserted into, or were growing out of, the skull itself, which was bare in places, like bedrock showing through a field where the topsoil was sandy and thin.

  Well: that meant no face-punches, anyway. She toppled the thing over onto the stairs and stomped on it. There was an audible crunch under her foot, and her enemy spasmed, so she kept stomping until it stopped moving and the purple robe was sodden with some fluid that was not blood—not by the smell, anyway.

  She turned to see that Morlock had finished dismembering his opponent and was moving back up the walkway, gesturing for her to follow.

  Aloê looked past him to see the self-styled barbarian, Kremp (whose friendship was at best conditional) and beyond him a cloud of purple-robed enemies: floppy-hatted priests of the patriarch and with them spiky faced ministers of the festival. They might get past them, but what then?

  “No!” she said, seizing Morlock by one arm. He stared at her as if she had punched him. “Up the stairs!” she said. “O
ver the wall!” She tried to mime the actions with her hands.

  Light went on behind Morlock’s eyes, and they ran together to and up the rickety wooden stair.

  The crowd began to cheer and scream again, misconstruing their intentions. But, underneath their noise, underneath Morlock’s and her own feet, she heard another noise, a lower steadier sound, like breathing. She saw that the surface of the shell, that she had taken for marble, was expanding and contracting slightly along with the sound.

  Machine? Monster? Or god? Were they passing over the Purple Patriarch himself?

  At the top of the stair she got her answer. There was a hole there, like a trapdoor, and as they stood at the edge and peered down inside she saw the god of the city. It looked like a gigantic octopus or squid, but each one of its limbs was a phallus with a many-toothed vulvic mouth opening in its side. It looked upward with the single glowing eye in the center of its shapeless body, and each one of its bloody mouths opened and sang sweetly and sadly, like doves mourning.

  The top of the city wall was tantalizingly near, but they would have to jump for it. She looked at Morlock without words, and he nodded back groggily. He tossed the sword as far as he could, and it vanished on the far side of the wall.

  Aloê jumped, feeling the hopeful eye of the patriarch on her every second. The crowd screamed with disappointment when she found herself standing on the crumbling rim of the city wall.

  “Come on!” she shouted at Morlock. She saw with dismay that the big barbarian was at the top of the stairs, looming just behind him.

  Morlock jumped as Kremp grabbed at him; he passed over the empty space watched by the eye of the patriarch, and landed on the weathered stones of the city wall. The crowd again shouted its disappointment, but the god was silent.

  Kremp stumbled at the verge after he failed to catch Morlock and was forced to jump without using both feet.

  He barely reached the far side of the gap, reaching out with his right hand to clutch at the edge of the wall.

  His wrist was swollen and visibly dark, even in the dim torchy light. That was the hand Morlock had twisted, Aloê realized. As they watched, Kremp lost his grip, and the barbarian fell into the pit with the god. His shocked scream soon changed to a strange cooing sound (did the god drug its victims?) that was drowned out by the rising chant of the crowd.

  Aloê was relieved to see that there was a shell-like protrusion on this side as well. She didn’t like the idea of climbing down the city wall without gear in the dark. She slid down and put her feet on the shell. Its surface was distressingly blood-warm, and moved up and down slowly, as if it were alive. But it was strong enough to hold her weight, and the surface coarse enough that she wouldn’t slide down it. She moved as fast as she could, and kept her eyes open for gaps in the shell, but there were none.

  She turned once to see how Morlock was faring. At first she didn’t find him at all, and began to worry he’d fallen back down the wrong side of the wall. Then she saw, in the moonslight, someone crawling down the outside of the wall like a four-legged spider. She shook her head and continued down her own way.

  When she was near enough to the ground she leapt off the beastlike breathing shell with great relief and ran over to Morlock, who was now on his hands and knees groping around on the ground.

  “Sword around here somewhere,” he muttered when she ran up.

  “No, we’re getting out of here,” she said. “Unless you want to end up inside that thing with Kremp.”

  Morlock grunted. “He said we should leave you. Said it didn’t matter; there were other women. Other women!” He continued in Dwarvish—so she guessed: anyway, it was a long string of hard crunching syllables that she didn’t understand. But he got up and followed her away.

  They went over open fields as far as they could, covering their trail as best they could, in case they were followed. But, in the end, they had to sleep—and Morlock’s drugged state was something deeper than weariness: he kept on muttering in languages she didn’t know.

  She found a stand of trees in sandy soil. She dug a pit and filled it with dry leaves. Then she rolled the groggy muttering Morlock into it and climbed on top on him.

  Hazily reviewing the day’s events, she laughed a little. “I’m glad it was you with me, you crazy crooked bastard,” she said.

  She scraped some more leaves over herself and went to sleep.

  The last thing she remembered was Morlock uttering something between a snore and a curse as the moons looked down with unblinking interest.

  Aloê was dreaming of her pet fish-hound Fnarklo, who used to sleep with her every night back when she was five years old. It was the best dream ever, and when she realized she was dreaming she held onto it as long as she could, and sighed when it left her.

  Good old Fnarklo! They’d found him in the woods on Breakfront Isle with his neck sliced open, that sad summer of her sixth year. No one else ever figured out who had done it—but Aloê had known, of course, and of course they hadn’t listened to her when she told them, because they never did listen.

  She carefully pried open eyes cemented shut by a combination of skin oil, tears, dirt and leaf fragments. She tried to do it with cunning stealth so as not to wake Morlock, but it was all for nothing because the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes were his luminous gray ones looking straight at her.

  “Good morning,” she said, embarrassed. “I see you’ve recovered from, er, whatever it was.”

  “Praise the day,” he replied laconically.

  “Um. Sorry for piling on top of you last night. We didn’t have any blankets, and it gets so cold at night on this deserty ground. I thought it best.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I hope it wasn’t too uncomfortable for you. I’m not exactly a faint wisp of a thing, as my grandmother observes whenever I see her, which is one of four or five reasons I never do that anymore.”

  “Am fine.”

  “Well. I suppose I’ll just get up now. I was hoping there was water near here when I saw the trees last night. I could use a wash.”

  Morlock nodded civilly, and then inclined his head to the left. Now that she listened, she could hear the running water whose sound had been drowned by her running mouth.

  “All right, then!” she said, and rolled off his chest. She scrambled to her feet and wandered off toward the water.

  An awkward conversation, made all the more awkward by her realization, early on, that Morlock was sporting a sizable erection. She understood this happened to men in the morning and there was probably nothing personal about it—and even if there was, who had flopped down atop whom without an invitation last night? She could not blame him for a perfectly natural response. So she told herself sternly as she buried her hysterical snickering—first in her hands, then in the water of the nearby stream.

  The streambed was wide and deep enough (and the water was clean enough) for her to lie down within it, and after scrubbing herself with wet sand, that is exactly what she did, wholly under the water, breathing through her gills. She wanted her blood completely cooled, and her laughter stilled, before she had to meet Morlock’s icy eye again.

  As she lay there (naked, except for the talisman she never took off), letting the water cool and cleanse her, fish began to swim by. She let quite a lot of them pass. But presently there was a school of fat crested fish that looked like some sort of freshwater salmon. Choosing her moment, she plucked two of them from the water and tossed them on the bank. She managed to flip up a third beside them, using her feet.

  She broke their necks and brought them back in triumph to the ersatz campsite, where Morlock had already started a fire and was amusing himself by sorting leaves into various piles.

  “I got breakfast!” she said, holding up her catch.

  “Hoped you would,” he said, grinning back at her. “A moment while I wash.”

  She used one of their elderly clipped coins to split the fish, fillet them, and was arranging them for roasting on so
me greenish sticks when Morlock came back, soaked to the skin: he had apparently washed his clothes as well as his person.

  She put the fish up over the bed of coals and remarked to Morlock (who was eyeing the remnants of fish skin, blood, and bones), “What will you make from the bones this time?”

  He looked at her in surprise, then smiled. “Needles,” he answered.

  “Needles?”

  Morlock had one of the peach-colored leaves in his hand. He pulled at it gently, and a threadlet came loose.

  “Aha!” she said.

  “Aha,” he agreed.

  He had a robe of leaves half-sewn before the fish was cooked. The robe was finished before they stood up to bury the campfire.

  “It may not last long,” he warned. “It depends on how brittle the leaves become as they dry.”

  “Anything’s better than nothing,” she assured him. She was tired of walking around in what was the equivalent of underwear back where she grew up.

  Morlock was an ugly son-of-a-bitch, but he was pretty useful to have around—a good companion, if not much of a talker.

  With a gulp, Aloê realized why she had dreamed of Fnarklo.

  Oh, well. Maybe she could keep this friend from having his throat cut. At least, she was grown enough to avenge him as he deserved, if the need arose.

  Discussing their next move over breakfast, they agreed that their next stop should be one of the cities that had been affected by the Anhikh missionaries—Tekatestömädeien or Gröxengrefzäkrura. That day on the road, they learned from a travelling rünkh-salesman that Tekatestömädeien was the nearest, three day’s walk away on the road they were travelling, so they headed for that.

  Aloê also learned that rünkh was a popular beverage in Kaen that smelled as bad as the name sounded, although Morlock claimed it didn’t taste as bad as it smelled.

  “How could it?” she snapped, and he replied with his usual shrug. Not a talker, this one, but she already knew that.