The White Tree

by Edward W. Robertson

  Robbing, from there, and after what he'd done at the chapel, came easily. His nerves had threatened to give out on him on his initial try, but when he left his first mark in forceful slumber in the shit-caked gutter of an alley, he wondered that it took so little effort to turn things they owned into things he owned. An average purse could feed him for a week—and this was just the money people carried around for luxuries and whims—what did they need it all for? He limited his own expenses to food, room, and candles to read by, but he knew he could have more if his interests had been in things instead of in the book. Whatever authority had given these men their wealth was no more substantial than the power of a rabbit's foot—it felt good to carry, but when things went bad, it turned out all you were carrying to protect you was a lump of meat too nasty to eat and the knowledge that somewhere a bunny had left the warren and never come home.

  He walked on. Bootsteps rasped from behind him in the alley and he started. He fingered the knife beneath his doublet, but let it be. Men who showed blades without a landed title or writ of the guild of arms were taught the things a whip could do better than a sword. Dante turned onto an arterial road and huddled in a doorway until the man passed without a glance.

  He knew he'd been jumpy lately, but how else should he act after a killing, the possession of a banned book, and multiple acts of armed robbery? It sounded terrible when you said it all at once. Most of the time he carried it lightly, knowing any deed done out of necessity couldn't be wrong, but other times he was struck by an emotion so powerful he wanted to cease existing altogether. At those times he muttered to himself, walking through the streets as if in a dream, drowning in the memory of the short shouts of those he'd robbed, the slackening face of the dead man at the temple, the snore-like expulsion of his last breath. It was clear he couldn't go on like this. It wasn't how he'd meant to live when he'd left the village for Bressel, but it was what circumstances had forced him to. His only hope was with the book. If it could somehow teach him what the man in the mail shirt had known, he'd no longer have to look over his shoulder at every footstep or risk his life in the alleys just to keep from starving. His thoughts on how that power would help him were vague—he could hire himself out at the courts, he supposed—but he knew that once he had it, the opportunities of great men would find him on their own.

  The book was dense. Not just in the literal sense of its thick-as-a-brick 800 pages, but dense with dozens of unfamiliar places and names, with warlords and sorcerers and tales he dimly remembered hearing as a child, cluttered with huge but bizarrely precise numbers like 432,000, stuffed with scores of words from a language he didn't recognize. Even its title was gibberish. Dante found some references to the book's people and places in the other book he'd taken, the prayer manual, but three or four hours of careful reading and cross-checking would let him read no more than ten or twenty pages of the book itself. Yet when he tried to read it straight through he found he'd absorbed nothing more than an occasional phrase or, more often, an illustration. He went to bed angry, handling the words in his head for an hour before he could fall asleep.

  After three days of sluggish and haphazard reading he understood he didn't know a damn thing and set to copying all the foreign words and names out of the forty-odd pages of the book's first section. He bought a ream of paper and a bottle of ink with a week's price of food and spent a full seven days in the Library at Bressel, the onion-domed, marble-faced structure meant to gather the wisdom of the world. It was well-stocked, he found, for works composed in the fifty years since its founding, and he filled his blank pages with the histories and places in the book of the White Tree's beginning. The foreign words remained obscure: similar to the dialects they spoke up in Gask, he thought, maybe an archaic form, but far enough apart to render the study of Gaskan useless. Many of the book's stories reminded him of Mennok, the mopey old god of grief and blackbirds. Dante had always though its followers were a joke, the kind of guys who groaned through the streets, whipping their own backs with supple reeds to remind themselves of the agony of the physical world. They just had to shove it in your face. He thought they could learn a thing from the supplicants of Urt, the more fanatical of whom spent 23 hours a day sleeping and meditating in dark rooms with planks hammered over the windows. Its saints had been known to seal themselves in barrels for months at a time. Most faiths, he thought, could stand to learn the virtue of keeping their devotion to themselves.

  He bought the collected cycle of Mennok from a run-down storefront in the book district and then a clean, simple doublet and trousers so he wouldn't be thrown out of the monastery's open archives before his second foot hit the threshold. Then the money was gone, and rather than scavenging at the inn, he robbed again, splurging that night on roasted beef. He woke mortified at his opulence, vowed to skimp through the rest on bread and cheese, and spent the day rereading that first section. At its conclusion he felt closer to his desire, as if this time he could see the shadow of what a wise man was supposed to glean from its contents, and here and there he even felt elevated by a glimpse of a world much wider than the one he'd known. Still he felt helpless with idiocy, like understanding the book was like trying to move a mountain with a bent fork and two broken arms, and he slammed the cover (after marking his place) and pounded to the common room, where four cups of ale floored him. He woke flushed and sweaty, sicker than the day after he'd been at the crumbling chapel, and wasted the day sipping water from the comfort of his bed, amazed that men could spend a life at the drink. After that, when he saw the men drooping over the smoky tables, shambling outside to vomit on the streetstones, he curled his lip, hating whatever weakness caused them to poison themselves that way.

  It took another week of eye strain and the glares of white-haired monks to find a match for the words he'd never heard. Narashtovik, an old language, a dead language, indeed from the north, from the kingdom of Gask's earlier age, seen now in little more than the frostlanders' convoluted laws and nonsensical meal-rites. No dictionary, of course (they didn't even have such a thing for the local language of Mallish, other than a few vanity projects by wealthy men with no other diversions), but Dante found enough matching words to know he'd found their source. And there the lore stopped: nobody had books on all that old junk, or if they did, they were clapped away in the private libraries of nobles and the obsessive collectors of the scribe's guild. For now Dante set his search on hiatus and returned to the cribbed script of his stolen book, a book he now knew was named the Cycle of Arawn.

  The mere act of finding its name shed fresh light on the first section that had so far given him such trouble. That night he read with mounting excitement, beginning to understand that Arawn was a god of death who didn't in any way seek it, a notion that ran heretical to those who'd won the Third Scour and denounced Arawn as a bloodthirsty monster ever since—but was nevertheless the undeniable interpretation of the text. This time when he finished those first forty pages, a chill of something close to ecstasy ran up the base of his neck. He had proof that at least one thing the other sects said was dead wrong. What else had he been taught on the basis of a mistake? How many lies had Dante taken on a faith that would prove unfounded? Did anyone know anything at all, or finding times when the truth didn't suit them, had they all been repeating falsehoods and nonsense for so long they no longer remembered what was fact and what was invention? In his enthusiasm, he nearly brought it up with a monk of Mennok he'd become friendly with, thinking his learning would be greatly hastened by a man who'd spent his life studying such things, but Dante had the sense to ask questions about Arawn would be to invite a slew aimed back at him, and it wouldn't be long after that he'd be locked in the stocks, and the only things aimed his way then would be airborne cabbage and the stroke of the lash.

  He already had enough attention. Since the night in the alley when he thought he'd been followed, he often saw a face in the morning when he ducked into the Library and the same face waiting for him when he returned to the street in
the afternoon. They'd pretend not to notice him, but when he paused to haggle over pennies on a loaf there they'd be again, gliding up to a stall like one of the flat-bottomed boats taking port in the river. Even in his new clothes Dante couldn't be mistaken for rich; he looked like an apprentice at best, possibly a young scholar out on an errand. He might be easy enough to rob, but he hardly looked worth the effort. Nor did he know a single soul in town, wasn't old or important enough to have earned any enemies, excepting the guard at the ruined chapel, and he was too busy rotting to hold a grudge. But for however little sense it made, people were following him, and every day he spent in the stacks he sweated buckets into his formerly-clean clothes, certain his knife would slip from his waist as he bent for a book and out him to the monks who hovered over their written treasures like robed dragonflies. Yet he didn't dare leave his room without it.

  The attack came the night after he translated the title. The blow should have killed him, but he saw the flash of steel and moved with a quickness he hadn't known he possessed to raise the book of Mennok like a shield. It too was thick, bloated with footnotes and appendices and interpretorial digressions, and the attacker's dagger buried itself in the cover and stuck fast. Dante met the attacker's eyes and saw he wasn't a man but a neeling, the sharp face and elongated muzzle meant for cleaving the waters of the marshes and tide flats, the bumpy, translucent, toadlike skin, the thick glaze of a third eyelid over its wide and watery eyes. Web-footed things from the western archipelagos, they made good sailors and decent wharf rats, and though their light bones put the biggest of them in Dante's weight range, when the merchants of Bressel's bursting docks could hire three for every one real man, there were times on the wharfs when those froggish faces outnumbered their captains and mates ten to one. No one asked questions when they ended up dead, either, something that happened more and more the more they crowded the city and found themselves enmeshed in the crimes of the hated and despised.

  The thing gave a panicked grunt when it saw what had blocked its blade. Dante had two inches and ten pounds on the neeling, and when he twisted the book the dagger popped from its hands without a fight. He lashed its knee with his boot and put a thumb to its throat as it fell, knife held high in his other hand.

  "Wrong book," Dante said. It bared its poky teeth at him, watching his knife. "How did you know?"

  Its hairless brows pinched together and Dante felt a pure instinct to cut its throat.

  "They told me to follow you."

  "How did they know it was me?"

  "Dante Galand," it said.

  His mind hung. Probably this creature had no idea who "they" were, but they had Dante's name and they knew his rounds through the city. The neeling's half-sphere eyes bulged in the hatchet of its face and a base anger kinked in Dante's guts. He brought his blade across the neeling's throat and a hot fan of blood spat over his hand and he jumped back and squealed. He wiped his hand on the thing's jacket, then wiped his blade, and by the time both were clean it was dead. Steam curled from the gash in its neck, from the pool spreading beneath them on the grimy cobbles.

  He picked up his book and stashed the creature's dagger under his shirt. It was late and the streets were empty. He stuck to the broadest ones, the ones with oil lamps dangling on the corners. What few men he passed ignored him. By the time he reached the inn he understood. The error hadn't been telling the chapel guard his name, it was in not making sure the man had stopped breathing before Dante left to find the book.

  The common room was stifling, full of braying laughter and clanking earthware. Dante paused at the bar, staring at the casks and cups.

  "Your poison?" said the keeper.

  "Keep it," Dante said, starting. He tromped up the steps and locked his room and braced a chair against the door, for whatever good that would do. He sat down on his straw pallet, shaking from his shoulders to his toes, and set the two blades out beside him. Twenty minutes later he'd reread five pages of the Cycle of Arawn and couldn't remember a word. He spit on his fingers and snuffed his candle and opened his shutters to the street. Men stumbled down the thoroughfare, concentrating hard on keeping themselves upright. None of them raised their eyes to the shadow of his face in the dark window. By morning the men of the chapel would know their agent had failed.

  * * *

  Dante woke with a jolt. The light through the open window was gray, fuzzy. He was freezing. There was something he was supposed to do. He pulled the coarse blanket over his face, then opened his eyes wide, heart galloping. That was it. He was supposed to run away.

  He gathered his minor library, shoved the books and bread and dagger into his pack. He took his candles, his coinpurse, and his spare set of clothes, dressing himself in his new ones. Already they were dirt-streaked, sour with old sweat, but at least they had no holes or patches. He wrote an obscenity on a piece of paper and put it on his pallet, then, worried the innkeep might find it before the men of the chapel came here, snatched it up and crumpled it into his pocket. Dante liked the keep, didn't like the thought of the man's jowls drawing up at the kid who'd left his room a mess and insults as his only goodbye.

  He left the inn and made a loose spiral around the old quarter, giving himself time to sort out his thoughs and watch for pursuit. The cool air and light morning breeze off the river kept the stink of the city to a tolerable horror. Already men plied oxcarts toward the docks or scurried between districts with wax-stamped letters in their hands like the blades of angels or dragged themselves home to begin sleeping it off. Dante didn't see anyone trailing him, but he knew he couldn't stay in his room. Nor could he leave the city without losing the resources he needed to understand the book. Where else could he go, the village? They were morons. He could count the ones who could read on two hands. The woods would be safer, but the men there lived like animals, preying on foot traffic like wolves, rutting like dogs, and dying, when their short wicks burnt out, like rats.

  So he'd stay in the city, try to lose himself in a place where he couldn't carry a proper blade without being arrested within the day. Not that he'd know how to use a sword even were he licensed—he was more likely to cut off his own fingers than fend off the swords of whoever the chapel men sent next—and there would be others, bought with heavier coin than that neeling pawn. Men who knew more about fighting than how to run and how to lay in wait.

  He paused at the corner of a broad avenue that led all the way to the docks. If all it took was money, why not hire an armsman of his own? Someone who could wear a blade without the watch hounding him for his papers? Bressel was huge, bulging with trade, and with it foreign merchants with more money than friends. The guild of arms was growing faster than all but the shippers'. If these people wanted their book back so bad, let them try to take it from the kind of security only silver could buy.

  The sun hauled itself above the mists of the horizon, stuck behind buildings that sprung from two and three stories to four and five as Dante made his way toward the docks. At the end of the arrow-straight street, the thin pikes of riverboat masts bobbed in the swells. The roads clogged up with people on foot and single riders and the clop of teamed carriages. By the time he reached the vast markets that crowded the shores all the way down to the mudbanks, the roofs of the wares-houses reared to eighty feet above his head. Dante hunched his shoulders, gazing at them as if he could hold the looming walls upright by force of will alone. He turned a corner and the babble of commerce clobbered his ears like thunder after the flash.

  Men clustered in loose knots, shaking pages in each other's faces like the paper were no more valuable than leaves scraped from the gutter. Courtiers banged in and out of the doors of shops and warehouses that stood without a foot's room between their undecorated eaves. Mounted retinues jounced through the throngs and the throngs parted without looking up from their business. Dante noted, with no small embarrassment, he appeared to be the only one fazed by the yammering crowds. He wandered around the square, not knowing where he was going but with both eye
s out for the crossed swords of the houses of the guild of arms.

  He found the first with little trouble. Men lounged at the walls of its mostly-clear court, oiling their swords, occasionally shoving themselves upright to tangle blades for the benefit of the traders, who were easily distinguished by their dress, a bizarre confusion of flower-bright colors and the plain practicality of travel wear. Dante threw back his head as he approached, trying to mask his face with the same professional detachment he saw in the eyes of the merchants.

  One armsman stood out at once, a well-built man somewhere around thirty (though to Dante's eye everyone over twenty looked the same), his face and arms scar-crossed but intact, a couple shades duskier than most of the olive-toned Bressel locals, like he'd come up from the Golden Coast. After a moment's indifference, he glanced Dante's way and Dante nodded.

  "What's your fee?" Dante said, folding his arms. The man raised a brow and Dante knew he'd made a mistake.

  "Two chucks a day," the man said, referring to the silver of the late Charles III that had displaced most of the old coinage, "and board."

  "Why don't I just buy a horse and an armada while I'm at it," Dante reeled. He shot a glance at the waistpurses of the nearest traders.