Wrath-Bearing Tree

by James Enge

  “Then you came out of the sea and killed the One with fire. I returned with my rats and fought with the emissaries of the Two Powers in the burning streets. But in the end, I could only recover the most deeply wounded of my former citizens, the ones discarded as hopeless by the Two Powers. I healed them and punished them. Most I sent out into the world as missionaries, to bring my faith to the world again. This one I speak through, whose guilt was the greatest, I have rewarded and punished most of all. The rats can barely see me, barely hear me, and only the wisest of them. So she has become my audible avatar, my visual voice. It is a great pain to her and, I believe, an almost equally great pleasure. Almost. Almost.”

  The avatar of the rat-god reached out its forepaws. They were skeletally thin. It lifted itself out of the sewer-like hole and crawled onto the ground on all fours. Its long tail hung behind: limp, gray, and nerveless.

  “And now,” said the white mouth on the weeping woman’s shoulder, “how shall I reward you, Morlock Ambrosius? Yes, and punish you, too. You benefited me by slaying the One. But you shamed me, yes, shamed me, because I could not do the same. Yes, I think I shall punish you now and reward you later. . . .”

  Like the spectator at a quench-ball match, Aloê turned to see what sort of response Morlock would make. She saw with surprise that he was making no move at all. His eyes stared fixedly at the hole Thyläkotröx had emerged from. The god had spellbound him somehow; he didn’t seem to be able to move.

  Aloê drew her staff from its shoulder sheath and stepped between the crawling god and the spellbound man. She spun the staff to build up its freight of impulse energy and said, “No further, Thyläkotröx.”

  To her surprise, the rat-god’s avatar stopped its crawl. It looked at her with its red burning eyes.

  “I visualize that you are protected from binding spells,” the gray mouth on Masösa’s shoulder said. “How wise. And you believe in other gods; that is also a protection from my influence. You believe in the Creator, Sustainer, Avenger?”

  “I suppose so. I haven’t thought about it much.”

  “That is the safest way to be, in a world full of gods. Your friend has thought about it, thought about it too much. He can neither believe nor disbelieve, and through those doors of doubt I have many ways of entrance.”

  “You are lying, I think, rat-god. Otherwise you could control him as you do poor Masösa there.”

  “Poor Masösa here,” said the pale mouth on Masösa’s shoulder, and laughed as she writhed under the weight of her god’s amusement and scorn. “But I do not control poor Masösa, here. She has chosen to pledge herself to me, in fear and hope, as you may soon do. After I punish your friend.” And the rat-god’s avatar began to creep forward again.

  Aloê would never have chosen to fight a god, and she did think briefly about leaving Morlock to his fate. It might come to that, in fact. But she could not bring herself to flee without striking a single blow.

  So she struck one, lashing out with her staff to release the impulse power.

  The god’s avatar rippled like a candle flame. The gray teeth of the god’s mouth gnashed in anger, and Masösa screamed. The rats in their recesses chittered sadly and put their paws over their faces.

  The god’s avatar disappeared to re-form slowly on the other side of Morlock.

  “Direction means nothing to the gods, reckless enemy,” the gray mouth whispered. “I can come from any side, even below. Flee my wrath, as you have imagined doing, and my reward to you shall be your own life.”

  “Sleep and death are brothers,” Aloê replied, spinning her glass staff again. “I stand beside my comrade. My intention protects him, in all directions and none. Chew on that, rat-god.”

  “I will slay you, and you will find the truth of death, which is other than you imagine.”

  The god’s avatar leapt through the air at her. It changed direction in midflight to attack Morlock. If she had struck at its first leap, she could not have recovered in time, but this was not Aloê’s first fight. She struck at the avatar’s humped back, and now the white mouth screamed in harmony with Masösa as the avatar vanished again. The avatar reappeared beside the sewer hole—diminished in size, if Aloê was not mistaken.

  “Flee like a rat, rat-god,” Aloê sang out. “Live in accordance with your nature.”

  The white mouth extruded from Masösa’s shoulder, riding the end of a long flexible snout. It turned and bit the rat-woman on her furry neck. She screamed, and the rats in their holes wailed in despair.

  But the god’s avatar grew. Now it towered over Masösa, its forearms bulging with muscle and bristling with black hair, its claws glittering like black glass. The mouth vanished and Masösa fell, shrunken like a burst bladder, to the rocky ground.

  The avatar moved forward, its red eyes blazing, lighting up the interior of its hood to reveal its grinning rat skull of a head. It rose up on its hind legs, shuffling forward as it extruded the claws of its forelegs.

  Aloê lashed out with her staff, striking the avatar on its bony snout. It shuddered but did not vanish. The skeletal grin did not change, and it moved forward. Aloê stepped back and felt her back against Morlock’s still-frozen form. Maybe she had mocked the rat-god once too often: it seemed to have extracted enough tal from its lone semihuman worshipper to face down the worst her sole weapon could do.

  But she would not flee. Maybe sleep and death were brothers, like the old song said. She hoped so.

  Then Masösa screamed, “Thief! Thief! Give me my own back! Give me my life back or kill me!” And her emaciated form leapt onto the rat-god’s avatar, tearing at it with her claws.

  It shook her off and turned vengefully against her. Its claws caught her and slashed her deeply, belly to neck, and then the rat-snout sank deeply into the rat-woman’s dying body. The avatar grew taller than ever as it drank the dying woman’s last life and cast her aside.

  “Traitor!” Aloê shouted. “Liar! False god!”

  The words struck Thyläkotröx’s avatar more deeply than her staff blows had done. “False god!” she shouted again. “You reward your enemies and punish your friends!”

  At first Aloê thought the god was responding with a thousand anguished rat-voices. Then she saw that the rats were descending in a dark many-hooded wave from their holes in the cliff. Thyläkotröx’s avatar turned to face them, raising its forelegs in aversion or threat.

  The wave of rats swept over their god, screaming and snarling as they leapt up to bite him.

  Thyläkotröx screamed, the first and last time Aloê heard him speak through his avatar, the last hopeless cry of a dying god. Then his avatar fell down to feed the members of his last congregation.

  Morlock fell too, released at last from the god’s spell.

  The god died. Aloê felt the spiritual cataclysm; it almost struck her from full consciousness into the visionary state. She saw a wheel turning with a man (or something like a man) in the middle of it. . . . She fought to keep her eyes open, to see what was merely present, to reject the vision.

  The hooded rats were feeding on their god, swarming over the vanishing avatar. They were growing, not in size but somehow in clarity, intensity, ferocity.

  Regular rats were bad enough, in Aloê’s biased view. What would god-fed rats be like? What were they feeding on, since gods were immaterial beings? She didn’t want to know.

  She turned to Morlock and shook him where he lay. “Come on, Morlock,” she said. “We’ve got to get out of here. They’ll be done with him soon, and maybe they’ll come for us.”

  Morlock muttered something that made no sense, and did not otherwise move.

  Aloê swore, briefly but sincerely, and sheathed her staff. She grabbed her fallen partner and hustled him to his feet. She half-dragged, half-carried him downslope. There was no reason to prefer it to upslope except that they could move a little faster.

  Morlock was as heavy as a dead man. His eyes were glowing slightly, shining through the closed lids: he hadn’t been
able to refrain from being swept into visionary rapture by the cataclysm of Thyläkotröx’s death. That meant he wouldn’t be of much use any time soon: “The flight must take its course” was what seers said.

  Aloê’s course, with Morlock dragging her down, was uneven and slow. It was only midafternoon, but the dry high mountains to the east blocked out the light, and the slope downhill was rough, nothing like a road, or even a path.

  A long arm reached out of the shadows and grabbed Morlock’s shoulder from the other side.

  Aloê reached for her staff, but a voice she instinctively trusted spoke from the shadows and said, “Let me help. It’ll go faster this way.”

  “All right,” Aloê said. “Thanks.”

  “No thanks needed. I act for my own reasons, and according to my own nature.”

  This caused the hairs on Aloê’s neck to bristle a bit. But: help was help. She wanted to get away from those rats.

  “You are wise,” the voice said approvingly, after it was clear she was going to say nothing. “That pleases me.”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “My name is Wisdom. I came here with some friends of mine, a pair of sisters: Death and Justice.”

  “‘Death and Sleep are brothers,’” Aloê quoted, a little desperately.

  “A different Death, perhaps; a different Sleep.”

  They travelled together for a while in silence.

  “Death and Justice are two of the Strange Gods of the Coranians,” Aloê observed eventually.

  “Yes. There are many Deaths—there is so much death to go around, you see. But we found the Kaenish god of Death to be an inconvenience and had him disposed of.”

  “Oh. Did you?”

  “Yes. You might ask your friends in the Graith—Illion and Noreê and Jordel. They had something to do with it. Though perhaps they did not visualize it as we have done.”

  “No doubt.” Aloê tried to see the shadowy figure across from Morlock, but the outlines would not resolve themselves. Even the hand lifting Morlock up from the other side seemed different from moment to moment: a shadow shifting among the shadows.

  “I visualize it was when we destroyed the Kaenish god of Death that the Two Powers, whom I do not name, became aware that gods could die, and moved to invade other lands, slay other gods. That has been bad for us. I visualize it has been bad for you as well.”

  “It has. Do you . . . ?”

  “No, we don’t visualize their motives. It may be hate. They mostly hate each other, but at times they have shared a hate for something or someone else. It may be fear: they may fear that what happened to the Kaenish god of Death may happen to them. But I speculate there is a factor, hidden from our visualizations, which is the true cause of these events.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have not come here to tell you that. I only speculate. I visualize that you will be in a position to learn. Perhaps one day you will tell me.”

  “If I can, without violating my loyalty, I will.”

  “Loyalty. How strong it is in you. It makes me sad.”

  “Why?” Aloê asked sharply.

  “I have not come to tell you that.”

  “What have you come to tell me?”

  “When your partner awakes, ask him about the Apotheosis Wheel. Remember the Wheel.”

  “Why should I do that?”

  “Don’t you want to know about it? I visualize that you do. And—yes—tell him about this.”

  The shadowy figure reached out a long misty arm and touched with one outstretched finger the twisting knotlike charm that hung from her neck.

  “Why?”

  “The knowledge will benefit you, and him. I am a god of Wisdom, Aloê Oaij, and I act in accordance with my nature. I help my friends and harm my enemies. Gods who do otherwise may end as Thyläkotröx did tonight.”

  “It’s only afternoon.”

  “You are mistaken. It is night; we have come many miles; you are safe from the rats.”

  Aloê looked about and saw that it was night, deep night: the moons were visible in the sky, and the Hands blazed out in bright stars overhead. The mountains were merely shadows embroidered on the edge of the starry sky behind them. Morlock lay snoring on the grass, and Wisdom was nowhere to be seen.

  “My turn to make camp, I guess,” she remarked to the sleeping man, and set about the mundane tasks of evening.

  Morlock slept the night through and awoke blearily next morning a few moments after Aloê.

  “Praise the day, Vocate,” he said, yawning. He looked around vacantly at the camp and its environs, his expression soon changing to alarm. They were in an open field of peach-colored grass, the mountains many miles behind them.

  “What happened?” he asked flatly.

  It wasn’t a rhetorical question—Morlock, thank God Avenger, did not waste time with those. So Aloê began, in order of importance, “We have been having sex—and you are not to stop bringing me off, by the way. We ran into an old friend of yours in the mountains. Do you remember that?”

  “Masösa,” he said. “Ah. Poor Masösa.”

  “Then you do remember?”

  “I remember something. Did we reach Thyläkotröx?”

  “The god-in-exile, not his city. It got a little tricky there.”

  “I remember. I remember. The god was going to . . . to kill me or something.”

  “Or something.”

  “And you fought the avatar and killed the god.”

  She waved a modest hand and said, “I did a little. Masösa and the rats did more.”

  “No. I was in rapport with the god. It was when you accused him of betraying his own nature, that was when he burst apart like an overheated sausage.”

  “Urm. Beautifully put.”

  “Then the rats ate what was left, but you struck the crucial blow.”

  “It was nothing really. You’d have done the same.”

  “If I could have. But . . .” He looked at her searchingly, and she thought he was going to say, But I love you and you don’t love me. And what the hell was she going to say to that?

  “But,” he actually said, “then I felt his death. We were mind to mind when he died. I saw his life come apart, and when it did . . . when it did . . . I saw the arc of it.”

  “You saw the Wheel,” she said flatly.

  “The Wheel!” he shouted, seizing her arms with his hands. “The Wheel! Did you see it?”

  “I glimpsed it,” she said, a little short of breath. She hadn’t often seen him like this. She was reminded, suddenly, that this was a man who could strike a dragon from the sky with lightning (if there was any lightning lying around waiting to be used). It was a little frightening, and very exhilarating.

  “It was the Wheel that changed him into a god. He was born a man—like you or me!”

  “Well. Not like me.”

  “It’s a device. A mechanism to make a mortal into a god.”

  “If that’s the right word.”

  Morlock’s eyes focused on her. “Why do you doubt it?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s just . . . You say ‘god’ and all sorts of things come into your mind with the word. What do we really know about these beings that come off the Apotheosis Wheel?”

  “Hm. They can be killed.”

  “Right! And they must act in accordance with their nature. It’s what gives them tal somehow, sustains their life.”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s odd. I always thought they got it from prayer—feeding off their worshippers.”

  “I wonder if prayer is more for the worshippers’ benefit—makes you more like your god.”

  “Eh.”

  “Yes. Whether it’s really a benefit might depend on the god.”

  “You get to use the word, I see.”

  She’d have raised her hands if he didn’t still have a grip on her arms. “Hard to avoid! But the rock-rats and Masösa seemed to become more like Thyläkotröx, so maybe . . .”

  “I agree. And you’r
e right about ‘god.’ It begs the question. We have to know what we don’t know—see what we haven’t seen. Not use words to cloak ignorance.”

  He frowned, deep in thought, and closed those glorious eyes. She didn’t want to move, really—but she had to. Her side was sore from lying on the ground all night. She needed to wash and eat. She waited a while longer, though. The moment was precious to her: body to body, mind to mind they lay. It had never been like that for her, not with anyone.

  When she had waited as long as she could stand she said gently, “Morlock. I need to move.”

  He opened his eyes wide in surprise, looked at his hands as if he had no idea how they got there, and released her. “I’m sorry. I—”

  “Shut your stupid face,” she said, and kissed him on the mouth before she rolled away and left him on the bed cloak.

  Much had changed in a single night. Morlock took a while to look around and orient himself. They were a very long way from the mountains, certainly. Behind them two streams converged to make a river, the biggest they had seen in rock-red rock-dry Kaen. It flowed between two highlands out to an open plain where the grass glowed a pale autumnal gold.

  “I think this must be the Pöylma River,” Morlock said, after gazing long at sky and ground.

  “Oh,” Aloê replied, clearly relieved. “Then you know where we are.”

  “Eh.”

  “Could you expand on that a little?”

  “The Pöylma runs from Kaen into masterless lowlands and thence into the sea.”

  “Thence?”

  “But if this is the Pöylma, we have crossed more than half of Kaen in a single night.” He looked at her and waited.

  She fidgeted but did not speak. He thought this unlike her.

  “Something happened,” he said after a time, “but you don’t wish to speak of it.”