Wrath-Bearing Tree

by James Enge

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “It involves one of the gods of Kaen.”

  “A god. But not of Kaen. I think he meant to help us, for reasons of his own, no doubt.”

  “Did he place a geas on you?”

  She shook her head slowly. “No. There’s a specific reason I didn’t want to mention it.” She was absentmindedly fingering the talisman hanging from her necklace as she spoke.

  Morlock nodded, waited.

  “Is it all right if I think about it, and tell you later?”

  “It is,” he said, “if you think it is.”

  She seemed unsure, but did not say anything more.

  The water from the rivers was a little murky; Morlock decided to boil it before using it to wash or drink or fill their bottles. While he was doing this Aloê went out and trapped two sinister toothy reptiles from the river, which she assured him would be good eating. After being cleaned, skinned, cut in pieces, and roasted, they weren’t bad.

  Morlock did not expect to find any guards blocking the way in or out of Kaen, and there seemed to be none. The Kaeniar were as insular in their way as the Wardlands were, but they did not guard their borders so much as ignore them and most things beyond them. The country had been invaded over the centuries, but the invaders either left or stayed behind to become Kaeniar themselves.

  There was an odd open building on the banks of the Pöylma, between the two rocky red headlands that were the gates of Kaen. The building was floored with polished blue stone, and pillared with white marble columns. There was no roof at all, except for the lintels connecting the columns. They formed an oval, and in the center of the oval, in the middle of the blue floor, was a green stone bench.

  As the vocates approached, Morlock saw four people sitting on the bench. When they got closer, he saw that three of them were clearly dead, and the fourth one was watching their approach with a bright hopeful gaze.

  “Welcome, young Ambrosius!” the stranger said. “Welcome to Lophopöylmata, and well-met!”

  “What is Lophopöylmata?” Morlock asked. “And who are you?”

  “This is Lophopöylmata. When a priest has risen to the height of the Court of Heresiarchs and ruled there for a time over the peers, he or she is taken here, either to be slain or to walk the golden road of Talazh Rame, to ascend the Apotheosis Wheel and return to Kaen as a god.”

  “And are you leaving, or returning?”

  “You shall know, in time. You shall know all, in time. Perhaps you, too, will walk the golden road of Talazh Rame, in time. But, for this moment, I think you will be the perfect messenger for my truth.”

  The stranger’s smile was broad, too broad to be pleasant. In fact, it was not really a smile at all: the stranger’s teeth were bare because he had no lips, no flesh covering the bare bone of his skull. He spoke without moving his mouth at all. His eyes lurked deep in the bare bony sockets.

  “Morlock,” Aloê broke in. “Who are you talking to?”

  “Don’t you see them?” Morlock said vaguely. “They must. They must.”

  Aloê swore by God Avenger and, unsheathing her staff, stepped between him and the skull-faced stranger.

  Only then did Morlock realize what was happening: another god was taking him over. A deep, smoking fury woke within him. He summoned the visionary rapture so that he could fight against the god in its own sphere.

  As he ascended into vision Morlock felt/saw the carnal shadow of his body fall to the ground. He stood, a pillar of monochrome flames, and faced the skull-faced god.

  Aloê stood between them: her talic self a copper cloud of glory. She was speaking with her mouth, but he didn’t hear it. But he heard her defiance, mind to mind.

  There were long webby threads reaching from the skull-faced god’s fingers, stretching around Aloê as if there was something pushing them aside. But they ran onward to Morlock, sinking hooked anchors deep in his talic self. He forced himself to attend to these: there was an anchor that stank like Khecür Tnevnepü, a tiny mouth with razor-teeth clenched tight (a memento of Tekätestu?), a crooked ratlike claw that reminded him of Thyläkotröx, other anchors, perhaps from other gods he didn’t even recognize. He had walked through Kaen collecting devotions like ticks. And it was these anchors that the skull-faced god was using to try and master him.

  One by one Morlock turned on the anchors in his spirit, focused his fury on them and dispelled them. The veins of influence broke when their anchor was destroyed. In the end, Morlock stood free, himself again.

  He turned his awareness outward to see that Aloê had struck the skull-faced god with her weapon and (even more deadly) her intent to reject him. She was stepping forward to renew the attack.

  But there were other gods advancing toward Lophopöylmata through the talic gloom. One carried a reaping sword, another an executioner’s axe, the third a long glittering razor of argument and a deep cloudy shield of doubt.

  Morlock reached out and impinged his awareness on Aloê’s.

  The contact was blistering. Her fury more than matched his own, and it was tangled up with skeins of guilt and desire. These, in turn, emanated from an ugly distorted image buried deep in her awareness: an image of himself.

  He could not speak to her: the process of verbal thought was alien to the process of vision, hostile to it. But he tried to let her share his vision: the approaching gods, the cloud of their anger, the danger in this place.

  She shook him loose, almost frightened, it seemed, and a long bright streak of physical pain shot through the coppery cloud of her talic self, like lightning in a sky lit by sunset.

  He turned back to his body and lay down in it like a grave, rejecting the vision, pulling the mask of matter and energy over the true face of the world.

  He opened his eyes and saw Aloê’s dark face hovering over his. “If we need to go, let’s go,” she said.

  He rolled to his feet and they ran, hand in hand, down along the banks of the Pöylma, through the unguarded gates of Kaen, into the golden fields where no writ ran.

  “But we don’t know where we’re going,” Aloê gasped.

  “We do,” Morlock said. “Skull-face told me. We’ll take the road of Talazh Rame, the road that runs into the sea.”

  “The sea!” shouted Aloê, and seemed to draw fresh strength from the word itself. “The sea!” She ran ahead, releasing Morlock’s hand, and danced down the banks of the Pöylma, plunging straight into the broad blue water and swimming across to the other side.

  Morlock followed her: less swiftly, less joyously, but equally intent.

  Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

  “But which one is the stone that holds the bridge up?” asks Kublai Khan.

  “The bridge is not held up by this stone or that stone,” replies Marco, “but by the arc that they form.”

  Kublai Khan remains silent, thinking. Then he continues, “Why do you speak to me of stones? It’s only the arc that matters.”

  Polo responds, “Without stones, there is no arc.”

  —Calvino, Invisible Cities

  That night it rained. The storm came on suddenly, but it was the kind of long soaking rain that promised to last all night (if not longer)—cold rain with the first faint flavor of winter in it.

  Morlock levelled several trees growing by the river: as narrow as saplings, as tall as oaks. He cut them up and rapidly built a shelter, roofing it with their cloaks and sleeping blankets.

  Aloê helped as much as she could, but she could hardly keep from laughing at the grim determination on Morlock’s face.

  “We won’t die, you know,” she said at one point, “just because we get a little wet.”

  He shook his head and said something inaudible over the voice of the rain.

  In the end they were inside, damp but not soaked, huddling together for warmth, and she had to admit it was better than being outside.

  Noticing that Morlock was suffering from an erection, she said, “Hey! You know what we haven’t done
in a while?”

  He brushed away her questing hand and said, “No.”

  “Your mouth says, no, but your penis says—”

  “I saw something in you.”

  She stopped what she was doing and looked him in the eye. “What do you mean?”

  “When I was in vision. I had to make you see . . . see those others.”

  “The Strange Gods. Yes.”

  He was silent for a while and said, “Is that who they were?”

  “I think so.”

  “Interesting.”

  “But irrelevant, partner. You were talking about something much more interesting: me.”

  “I saw something in you. I’m sorry, but—”

  “You said all that before. What did you see?”

  “It was about me.” He paused.

  She smiled at him, and felt a little sad. Had he seen something of her feelings for him? Had he been offended? She couldn’t help it if he wasn’t Naevros syr Tol. She wished it was enough for him that he was what he was—that they had what they had.

  “I didn’t understand it,” Morlock said. “But there was a halo of guilt, and fear, and pain. I don’t. I don’t want. I don’t want you to hurt like that. Not for me. Not for anyone.”

  “You’d rather do without me than cause me any pain?” Aloê reflected wryly on her limited experience with men. This Morlock was an odd one, all right. “Don’t worry, partner. It was all my fault. I should have told you something. Because I didn’t, you came in danger from that god. I hated the thought of it.”

  She waited for him to ask, but he just lay there and looked at her with those damn eyes of his.

  “It’s like this,” she began heavily, and told him everything about her conversation with Wisdom.

  When she was done he said, “So that was Wisdom we saw.”

  “And Death and Justice, yes. They seem to have something against the Kaenish gods—maybe this was a new Kaenish god of Death.”

  He nodded.

  “You don’t seem surprised by any of this,” she observed.

  “Well. We had passed over much of the country in one night. I knew something had happened.”

  “But you didn’t ask.”

  “I knew you would tell me when you thought the time right.”

  “But—” She glared at him. “How did you live so long, trusting people like that?”

  Now he was surprised. “I know who to trust.”

  She looked away from his eyes, those luminous eyes. “So this,” she said, touching the talisman around her neck, “is a charm against binding spells.”

  He nodded.

  “I wear one because—Anyway, they seem to give some protection to me from the influence of these gods or whatever we are to call them.”

  “‘Gods’ will do.”

  “‘Gods’ with a hesitation. ‘Gods’ with a note in the margin.”

  He smiled and opened his hands, which apparently was supposed to mean something.

  “Do you know how to make one?” she said, a little sullenly. “A charm against binding spells, I mean.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll show you.”

  She used some of the long grass lying about and made the long winding symbol at the heart of the talisman. She explained that the material didn’t matter, only the shape of the symbol and the intention woven into it. Teaching him how to weave the intention with the matter was the hardest thing, but it wasn’t particularly hard to teach him that or anything else, except how to speak in something other than grunts.

  “So,” she said, putting it around his neck, “there you go. Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

  He didn’t say that, or anything else. Just smiled and touched her face.

  “There’s something Thyläkotröx said that’s bothering me,” she said.

  He looked his question and waited.

  “It’s about you—not believing, or disbelieving, in any god. Apparently it’s not safe.”

  “If he wasn’t lying.”

  “Maybe. But maybe you should—decide, one way or the other.”

  His gray eyes looked at her now out of two dark wells of doubt. “I was raised to believe in Those-Who-Watch and in God the Creator, Sustainer, Avenger. I like to think that my harven father’s ghost stands beyond the rim of the world in the west, watching and protecting me.”

  “But you can’t.”

  “No. But, sometimes, in vision, I feel . . . a kind of immanence, a soul within the world. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a reflection of my own mind; that’s what some seers say.”

  It was her turn to say something, and she wasn’t as comfortable as he was with silence, and anyway part of her wanted to tell him. She had always wanted to tell somebody, but she never had.

  “God did a miracle for me once,” she said.

  “So that’s why you believe in him?” he said, clearly surprised.

  “Her. Yes. I was—I was—I was . . . God Avenger, I sound like you.”

  “Not that bad,” he offered with a smile.

  “Well, no one could be. All right. All right. Since you ask. I—there was this older man on my family’s estate. Some rich cousin of my father’s. This was when I was a little girl.”

  “Yes,” he said, and there was iron in his voice.

  “Don’t get upset. It was a long time ago, and the good guys won. Nothos was this old bastard’s name. Cousin Nothos. He was always bothering me. I hated his stupid face and everything about him, but he was always putting his face on me and bothering me when I was five. He even tried to sneak into my room sometimes at night. But no one would believe me except Fnarklo.”

  Morlock eased up a little. “Who is Fnarklo?”

  “Fnarklo was my pet fish-hound. He slept in my room, and he would never let this old bastard in. When I was almost six, somebody killed him, killed Fnarklo, I mean—cut his throat right through to the bone. I tried to tell people it was Cousin Nothos, but no one would listen. How I hated them all. I hate them still. They let it happen.”

  She stopped speaking, and he didn’t say anything.

  “Well!” she said. “Do I have to paint you a picture? Do I have to go over every disgusting detail?”

  He opened his hands, said nothing, and waited.

  “He raped me most nights for about a. About a. For about a year, I guess. It started in summer and it ended in summer. I remember that part.”

  He nodded, watched, waited.

  “When I realized no one was ever going to listen to me, I tried lots of different crazy things. I tried a few times to kill Cousin Nothos, but he just thought it was funny. I guess he’d been through it before, seen it all before. I could never outsmart him. So then I figured, maybe I’d kill myself. So I went to the island where old Fnarklo died. Hard to explain why. Thought maybe they’d believe me after I was dead, though I don’t know now why I thought that. I was going to drown myself. Go under the water, breathe in through my mouth not my gills and just go down, down down in the dark, till I was dead.”

  Morlock nodded as if this was a very reasonable plan and said nothing.

  “I was going to do it. I was, I swear I was. But”—she balled up her fists and pounded her knees—“but it wasn’t fair. He was the one who should be dead. There was this philosopher who lived on the estate, and he said that it wasn’t right to pray for harm to others and we had to put up with Cousin Nothos’ little ways and someday I would grow up and understand things better. But I thought that old philosopher was a lying sack of snot. What about people who are doing bad things? Is God Avenger just supposed to sit by and do nothing?”

  If Morlock had any solution to the Problem of Evil, he didn’t offer it at that time. He didn’t offer anything, but waited for Aloê to continue.

  Eventually she did. “So I. So I said. I said to God. I said, ‘You do something about it. It’s your job. You do something.’ And that was when I found it. It was a book. It was half-buried in the mud. Most of the pages were destroyed. But it
was a book of binding spells. It was Cousin Nothos’ book: he put his name on the flyleaf. You know, ‘Please return to; reward offered.’ And I knew then how he fooled everybody, why everyone was so blind to what anyone ought to be able to see. It had to be magic; he was binding them with magic. People don’t act that way. They don’t turn away, and let someone get hurt, and do nothing when they could stop it. They just don’t act that way without a reason. Anyway, I was sure of it then. Less so now.”

  Morlock didn’t venture an opinion. He waited.

  Aloê went on. “He must’a—He. Must. Have. Dropped. It. That night, when he was killing Fnarklo, he dropped it and lost it in the dark and the mud. And then a year later I found it. It was a kind of miracle, wasn’t it?”

  Morlock shrugged and waited.

  “There wasn’t a complete spell in the book. It was almost entirely ruined. But there were parts of spells I thought I could fit together. And I knew that people who use binding spells are subject to them in turn. So I. So I made a spell up out of the different spells I could read part of in the book. That was dangerous. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Morlock quietly. “It was.”

  “But it worked! Whenever he got aroused, his penis hurt. Like fire, he said. Kept on trying to dip it in cold liquid. My grandma found him dipping his erection in some cold soup in the pantry. That’s when they decided that Cousin Nothos was crazy and his little ways couldn’t be tolerated anymore. Ruin a granddaughter, so what. Ruin the evening soup, that’s different. I hate that old woman. So anyway they locked him up until he died.”

  “He’s dead then,” said Morlock, with unmistakable satisfaction.

  Somehow, after everything she’d said and remembered, that was what made her break down and start weeping like the little girl she’d had to give up being long ago. He held her and waited and waited. God Sustainer, how the man could wait.

  “I was so glad when Nothos died,” she said, when she could talk again through the tears and snot, though she was still weeping. “I knew I was all screwed up inside, broken, ruined. It was because of the magic. You have to use part of yourself to make it.

  “And I never could . . . I never. Not once. It was like. Like with you, before, that first time. It hurt so bad whenever anyone was inside me, sometimes when I only thought maybe someone wanted to be.