Wrath-Bearing Tree

by James Enge

  They arrived in Tekatestömädeien much better equipped than when they had fled Khecür Tnevnepü. While Aloê felt a certain honest pride in finding them everything that they ate from day to day—Morlock hunted about as well as he made light conversation—she was in awe of her companion’s ability to make wealth out of practically nothing.

  As they walked, for instance, he whittled with a sharpened coin on some hollow sticks he gathered from the side of the road. When they arrived at a farmstead that evening, they paid for their lodging with a pocket full of wooden flutes. (The farmer had many children. He may have regretted the flutes before too long; God Avenger knew that Aloê did, trying to sleep in the barn as the children of the house ran around in the dark, tootling like demented geese, as Morlock snored in the haystack next to her.

  The farmer had a small forge, and Aloê persuaded the farmer to let Morlock use it for part of a morning.

  Morlock melted sand from a nearby sandpit into glass, then hammered a semi-molten piece of glass into a sword and quenched it in a bath of well water.

  “It’s pretty,” Aloê said doubtfully from a distance. (She hated fire.) “But will it be any use in a fight?”

  Morlock took the blade and whacked it against the forge. The iron rang like a bell and was visibly notched. “Won’t take much of an edge, though,” he said regretfully. “If I had more time . . .”

  “Are you making one for me? I prefer a staff.”

  “Right,” Morlock said, with a remembering look.

  The staff took longer. He braided much of the molten glass with his bare fingers (a process Aloê could neither bear to watch nor look completely away from). And for a larger part of an hour he simply sat with his hands folded and looked at it. She suspected he was in a visionary trance for some of that time.

  When he arose and handed it to her he said, “Be careful. It has an impulse well at either end.”

  “You mean impulse wheel?”

  “Well. It stores physical impulses. Spin it around and hit something with it.”

  Bemused, Aloê went out into the farmyard. She spun the staff like a baton in her fingers, and she knew there was some kind of power in it from the feel alone. She stilled the staff and brought one end down on a stone in the ground. The glass staff shuddered, and the gray stone shattered like glass.

  “Champion—!” she shouted, almost adding Morlock before she remembered that might be an error. Some people might have heard of Merlin’s son.

  The farmer, watching all this in wonder, tried to persuade Morlock to make some weapons for him. Morlock was reluctant, but in the end agreed to make shoes for the farmer’s animals.

  When they left the farm, the farmer was contentedly shoeing his beasts of burden with glass. Aloê and Morlock had considerable silver jingling in their pockets and weapons at their sides.

  Maybe he wasn’t so pretty, but her companion was indeed useful to have around.

  They reached Tekatestömädeien in the early morning of the fourth day. The left side of the gate was festooned with stone mouths, in honor of the city’s god: Tekätestu, the Many-mouthed Rememberer. (So the inscriptions said.) The right side of the gate showed deep scars in the stone, as if other images and inscriptions had been there, but were now removed.

  Had this been a city with more than one god? Was there an internal war between the gods, with the defeated one cast out? Was there some other explanation?

  They might have asked the guards there about it, but there were no guards or anyone else at the gate at all.

  “This looks weird,” Aloê said quietly in Wardic to Morlock.

  He shrugged his crooked shoulders.

  She continued, “You’d expect to find someone on duty here to collect tolls—sound the alarm in case of attack—answer questions . . .”

  Morlock nodded. “Open city?”

  “Odd. Odd for the Kaen I’ve come to know.”

  “The Two Powers at work, maybe.”

  She nodded and their eyes met. They needed to be careful. But they needed to go in. She drew her staff and used it as a walking stick; he rested his hand on the glassy hilt of his sword. They walked side by side through the wide gaping gate.

  The first people they met within the unguarded walls were a youngish woman and a young boy walking hand-in-hand.

  “Tell them, Rydhböku!” the woman whispered to the little boy.

  The boy looked away, his fair-skinned chubby face red with embarrassment.

  “This isn’t my son, if that’s what you’re thinking,” the woman said to Aloê confidingly. “I found him in the street and I’ll abandon him there later. But he’s such a wonderful liar! Such a devotee of the Rememberer, and still so young! Go ahead, Rydhböku! Lie to the nice people!”

  “I have twelve mouths!” the boy squeaked nervously, glancing at Aloê and Morlock with dark empty eyes.

  “Oh,” Aloê said. “Um. Hello, Rydhböku. I’m called Gÿnzne and my cousin-by-oath here is named Znabnu.”

  They had taken some care in choosing their pseudonyms, and had tried them out on several travellers and farm-people they had passed on the road.

  The boy, however, seemed displeased by them. “No you’re not!” he said truculently, and stormed away into an alley, dragging the woman with him. Her indulgent laugh could be heard long after the odd pair had disappeared.

  “Sometimes I think I’m going crazy,” Aloê said out of the side of her mouth to Morlock. “Then I remember we’re walking through Kaen.”

  “The local god is honored by lies, I guess,” Morlock said. “That will make it difficult to find out any fact for certain.”

  “Yes,” she said, pleased that she could out-laconicize him for once. Then she realized she could have just grunted concessively at him . . . when he grunted concessively back at her.

  “Canyon keep you!” she snarled, and punched him on the arm.

  He laughed, and they walked together deeper into the city of lies.

  They were walking down an empty street looking for the marketplace when they met a young man—almost a boy—whose shaven head was painted in tones of yellow and pink. He was leaping out of a tenement stairway and nearly ran them down.

  “Your fault!” he said apologetically, as Morlock fended him off with one arm. “Entirely your fault!”

  “Eh,” said Morlock, with his usual conversational brilliance.

  “Listen, youngster,” said Aloê. “We’re looking for the marketplace. Can you tell us where it is?”

  “Down that way, past Twelve-Tongue Square,” replied the young man heedlessly, pointing at a street leading eastward. “And then you—” He stopped short and after a moment said, “Oh, damn! Damn! Damn! Damn! I insincerely-and-only-for-rhetorical-purposes wish I were flayed alive and the skin sold to cobblers!”

  “We wish that, too,” Aloê said, just to be polite.

  “I’m afraid I’ve incautiously told you the truth about something, and I am already several days behind in my Obligatory Deceptions. I don’t suppose you would care to look down this way for the Market?” he said, pointing down the street they were travelling. “I can guide you there and give you other helpful advice as we go?”

  “Good luck to you,” Aloê said. She and Morlock exchanged glances and walked across the way toward the street the particolored youth had first indicated. They stopped as soon as they were out of sight of the youth and exchanged glances. As soon as the young man was going on his way, Aloê and Morlock stealthily followed him. He had turned up yet a third street.

  The sounds and noises ahead soon declared the presence of the city’s main market. As soon as the young man with the two-colored scalp-painting entered the market he ran over to a man wearing a saffron robe and high-crowned hat. It was much like the garb of the priests of the Purple Patriarch, but this priest’s clothing was embroidered in red thread with the likeness of mouths—a cacophony of gaping mouths all over his garments.

  “Master Förndhyl!” he shouted. “Master Förndhyl! I score
d two more major deceptions on my way here! A pair of out-of-towners were asking about the market, so I feigned sincerity and pretended to cover up with the False Alternative, creating an unsolvable False Dilemma! By now they are on their way to the eastern wall, or down in the river docks! I’ll swear a self-binding oath to the particulars! Do I win the prize for this market-cycle?”

  Aloê and Morlock were following him closely, and both the priest and many in the crowd eyed them with some amusement.

  Aloê reached out with her staff to tap on the youth’s shoulder.

  He spun around and gaped at them as the crowd behind him roared with laughter.

  “Thanks for your help,” Aloê remarked under cover of noise. “Finding the place was easy, thanks to you.”

  “Thrynglu,” Master Förndhyl said in a reedy voice, as the laughter began to subside, “I assign you two points of merit for your intention to deceive these strangers. I assign you fifty points of demerit for your egregious failure. Better luck on the next market-cycle. But you must remember that a dupe is as intelligent as he is—not as stupid as you would like him to be. I attest to the truth of the foregoing statements by my self-binding oath to truthfully relate matters of the great god, the many-mouthed rememberer, Tekätestu. And let me add a few words of personal advice—”

  Morlock was already turning away from the crestfallen youth’s humiliation, and Aloê followed suit.

  Near at hand, a grim-faced man was selling sausages from a cart. Aloê didn’t read Kaenish as well as she spoke it, but she thought the sausages were advertised as basted with the nectar of heaven and costing fifty thousand silver coins each.

  They might not be nectar-basted, but they smelled wonderful. Three locals were standing and waiting for sausages.

  There was an unobtrusive sign attached to the cart. Morlock inspected it and said, “The seller self-binds his food and drink to be non-toxic and non-intoxicating and made solely of healthful meats, spices and condiments.” He held the sign between his thumb and forefinger, closing his eyes for a moment. “The oath is valid,” he said, opening his eyes.

  “All right, then,” Aloê said, trying not to hate him for his very useful visionary prowess. “If we can talk him down in price, let’s get something. I’m dying to eat something I didn’t kill personally.”

  “I hate sausages,” Morlock remarked, almost conversationally, but stepped into line to oblige her. She decided she didn’t hate him after all, in spite of his dangerously unsound attitude toward sausages.

  The locals were paying a couple of copper coins per sausage, so that’s what Aloê gave the sausage seller, too. And she spotted a slab of roasted meat that looked like it came from some sort of bird, along with some brown bread, on a wooden plate near at hand. She bargained with the sausage-seller for that. It was the man’s own lunch—it turned out that he shared Morlock’s aversion for sausages—but half a silver coin convinced him to surrender it to Morlock.

  She stepped aside to relish her savory sausages skewered on convenient spikes of wood.

  Morlock eyed the bread and bird-meat, then deftly tore the loaf in half with two fingers, inserted the meat between them, and proceeded to eat without any obvious pleasure or displeasure.

  Aloê, unaware that she was present at the invention of the sandwich, was unimpressed with Morlock’s attitude toward food. It was just stuff to keep him going—timber for the fire within, but nothing more. For a man with powerful esthetic impulses toward things made of wood, or stone, or metal, or glass, he seemed to have little interest in either food or sex. He had expressed no inclination for her own person, for instance—apart from that embarrassing morning when she woke up atop him, and she wasn’t so vain as to take that personally.

  She wondered if his ugliness forced this attitude on him: a blindness that protected him from seeking out or sensing rejection.

  Of course, in spite of his ugliness, some people might be attracted to him. Ugly women, for instance. And, in spite of his awkwardly made frame, he could move with remarkable deftness. He was certainly stronger than Naevros physically, for instance, and there were bound to be women shallow enough to find that kind of animal power arousing. Not Aloê, of course, but others. She’d known the type. The Honorable Ulvana, for instance. Ick.

  Morlock made eye contact with her for a moment, then raised his eyebrows slightly. She realized she’d been staring at him as she ate, and blushed fiercely. It was possible that he couldn’t see it—many a pale-skinned northerner could not—and he certainly didn’t comment on it. He just inclined his head and said, “Odd.”

  She listened, and in the middle distance, over the rumbling of the market crowd, she heard someone shouting, “Stinking fish! Stinking rotten fish for sale!”

  Swallowing the last ambrosial chunk of sausage she said, “All right; let’s go see. But let’s stand upwind.”

  They wandered toward the voice through the milling crowd. They came presently on a woman dressed in a black robe with white sashes inset, sitting in front of an indisputable basket of stinking fish. Her face and hands were terribly scarred. Her voice was already weary, but determined.

  “Stinking fish!” she shouted. “Stinking fish for sale!”

  Few stopped to listen; none bought. Most hurried past without looking at the woman, expressions of distaste or even fear plastered across their faces.

  “How much?” Aloê asked the woman, after they had stood there for a while.

  “Whatever you want to pay to haul them away,” the woman said frankly. “Not too many people wanted them when they were fresh, which was several days ago. I went to catch them only because the false gods of Kaen said that I should not. But I could and I did. And here they are.”

  “I don’t want any, either,” Aloê admitted.

  “Well, no one does.”

  “I just ate,” Aloê apologized.

  “That may be factually accurate, but you imply that this is the reason you don’t want the fish. That’s a lie. But there’s no need to lie. Tekätestu the liar is a false god who will be driven from his city, as Mädeio and Thyläkotröx and Gröxengrefzäkrura were before him.”

  Morlock twitched a little at this remark; Aloê wasn’t sure why. Maybe because he realized what she had already guessed: this was a missionary of the Two Powers.

  “If Tekätestu is a false god, who is the real god?”

  “There is no real god,” came the inexorable reply. “That is a logical absurdity. All things that are real (and only two things are real) summon into being their eternal opposites. You cannot have fire without ice, light without dark, good without evil, fate without chaos. All is duality. The god-power is dual: both fateful and chaotic, itself and other, until time ends.”

  “What happens then?”

  “As it was in the beginning, the one true god will defeat or be defeated by his enemy, and time will stop as there will be oneness, impossible as time runs.”

  “And which of the gods is the one true god?”

  “There is no one true god. But there was, and there will be again.”

  She glanced aside at Morlock . . . only to find he was no longer at her side. He had retreated into the crowd, well away from her. He leaned against a booth with a shuttered front, that looked rather like a puppet theater, and gestured to her to go on.

  She shrugged and turned back to the fish-hawker, who had resumed her weary relentless cry of “Stinking fish! Stinking rotten fish!”

  “Do you mind if I ask . . . ?” Aloê ventured.

  “Go ahead,” the fish-hawker replied.

  “Where did you hear about the masked gods of Fate and Chaos? Are you yourself from Anhi? I understand they are worshipped there.”

  “God Torlan, power of Fate, be praised: I am not an Anhikh!” The fish-hawker raised her scarred hands above her head. “I am a Kaenish woman by my birth and death! I was a citizen of Thyläkotröx and a worshipper of that foul rat-god until . . . until the One came, from beyond the Sea of Worlds. He came, and with hi
s soft sharp tendrils of joy and his deep strong roots of death, he defeated the god Thyläkotröx and banished him from his own city! Then we all belonged to the One, and he planted his seeds in us, and they grew and ate us from within, even as the drug of his thorns kept us happy and content. It was a joyous dark time. I have never been so happy. I have never been so afraid. I have never been so lost.

  “Then he came. Agent of chaos or minister of fate, he came: the crooked man, the destroyer with bloody burning feet. The One attempted to defeat him, attempted to devour him, but he slew the One: with fire, with cunning, with the One’s own hunger to devour all.

  “The One died in fire, and when it died the roots of the One planted within us also burned, crawling out of us like fiery worms. The terror of it, the pain of it: you cannot understand, all you who were fated to be elsewhere in that terrible bright hour. Many died. Many lived. But those who lived were free at last, and the missionaries from Anhi came to us with kindly cruelty and healed us and taught us the Two-fold Truth, the consolation of the Two Powers.”

  Now Aloê knew, or guessed, why Morlock had sneaked his crooked self away from this woman. Apparently Morlock had enjoyed a more interesting summer than he had let on, at least during the Station.

  She also knew, or guessed, that Thyläkotröx City was the place they needed to go next. If there had been missionaries from Kaen there before, maybe there still were. Anyway, she and Morlock would go and see.

  Aloê thanked the fish-hawker for her news, and she promised (at the other woman’s urging) to ponder the lie in the world that revealed the Two-Fold Truth, and she managed to avoid promising to come to the next meeting of Torlanists in the city, and she promised not to be taken in by the lies of the Zahkaarians, who told the truth in an unscrupulous way that was not in accord with the dictates of Fate, and finally had to pluck the other woman’s stinking scarred hands from her leafy sleeve so that she could get away and rejoin her companion.

  Morlock was leaning against the puppet theater, ruefully contemplating Aloê’s conversation with the scarred woman (who must be from Thyläkotröx) when he heard someone whisper his name—his real name.