The White Tree

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Yeah, but it's all just stories." Blays moved to his knees and overturned a stone. Pale pink worms wagged their tails in the last of the sunlight before sinking into the murk. "They're not real."

  "Doesn't their belief in the gods make them real?"

  "No," he said, "it makes them stupid."

  "I guess everyone in the world's stupid, then." Dante dropped his eyes to the waters around the reeds. Now and then a trout weaved through their stalks, nibbling at the seeds and bugs caught in the net of plants. "It doesn't matter if they're stories. The priests tell the stories that will make the people eat out of their hands and the kings have power because they have the authority to say which priests are right. They don't like it when the stories that give them all this control are threatened."

  "You know who you sound like right now?" Blays said, grinning up at him. "The guys back at the arms house I was with after they'd been drinking all night. The kings this, the priests that. Everyone's stupid but them. Then they sleep it off and when they wake up they're back out selling their blades for pennies and getting turned down nine times out of ten even then."

  "I'm not saying I thought it up." He threw a pebble at the water near the point of Blays' reed. A shadow of a fish darted into the deep. "I'm just trying to explain why people get so mad when you start talking about this stuff."

  "Lyle Almighty, get on with it."

  "So Arawn gave us the fire," Dante said.

  "You've said that five times," Blays sighed. Dante glared at him. The boy sat three-quarters turned, but when he ducked his chin Dante could see he was smiling.

  "The histories of the Third Scour paint him as a bloodthirsty death-god. That's how they explain the revolts, that Arawn ordered the serfs to kill the lords and the guards and the followers of all the other temples to satisfy his own need for blood. But see, I don't think that's right. In the Cycle—the book—it mentions Arawn a lot and he never talks about wanting people dead. In fact, he's not very interested in us at all. I mean, everyone dies eventually, right? If you're an immortal god, who cares if a soul finds you in the stars today or twenty years from now? Even if he wanted to build an army, and I don't see anything to support that either, it's not like he's in a hurry to do it before he dies of old age."

  Blays plopped a rock into the waters. "I'm going to be seeing Arawn myself pretty fast if you don't quit being so boring."

  "Well, does that make sense to you? That a god would be in a rush about a thing like that?"

  "Of course not. But we're the image of the gods, aren't we? So obviously they think like us. That must mean they're pricks like us, too. Who wants to wait fifty years when you can snap your fingers and poof, you've got an army of the dead? For that matter," Blays said, tapping Dante's chest as he built up steam, "if they're so high and mighty, how are we supposed to guess what they're thinking? We're probably like ants to them. Can ants understand what we're thinking?"

  "That's different."

  "How is it any different at all?"

  "It just is," Dante shrugged. He groped around for his place. "So whatever Arawn was, nobody else liked him anymore, what with the dangerous belief your standing in this brief wick doesn't mean hell-all to the one that comes after, and once things got so crazy in Collen the counter-army practically conscripted itself. They smithied up a few thousand pikes for the rabble and promised the land to the nobles and off they went. Needless to say all the heretics in Collen were killed. That only stirred up the ones everywhere else all the worse, but to make a long story slightly less long, they were all killed too. The traditionalist armies burnt their temples and their books, beheaded the priests who renounced and quartered the ones who didn't. That's where the Fellgate came from."

  Blays dropped his jaw. "What, those little black knobs are their heads?"

  "Yeah," Dante laughed. "Look like old apples, don't they?"

  "And they get to spend the rest of their years watching the asses of horses ponce down the street."

  "And the thing is, they were wrong. They lied about Arawn, and when his followers objected, some of them were killed, and then when they tried to fight back, all of them were killed. It's like people care more about preserving their power than serving the truth."

  Blays bobbed his head. "The powers that be wouldn't be the powers that be if they didn't."

  "Yeah." Dante grinned a moment, then realized just what he was grinning at and made his face go serious. "I took the book from one of the ruined temples of Arawn."

  "Ah," Blays said, nodding sagely. "The kind of crime where it's a race to see who can hang you first."

  "The best kind."

  "You'd better hurry up and become an invincible wizard, then."

  "I don't know how," Dante flushed. "I wish I'd had more time in Bressel before they found me."

  "And I wish I had a princess in her skivvies. In fact, forget the skivvies." Blays chuffed at himself, then looked down. "Actually, I want to see some damn food, then eat it. What've you got?" He reached again for the pack.

  "Let's catch some fish. Before it gets too dark."

  "Great idea," he said, standing and contemplating the pond. "Where's the hooks?"

  Dante got to his feet. "Can't you sort of stab them?"

  "Yeah." Blays whipped out his sword and the metal rang in the quiet. He brandished it at the banks. "Come on, you cowardly fish! Come up on dry land and fight like a man!" He slashed the waters, sending droplets hissing. "I missed!"

  "Well maybe if you actually tried."

  "I thought you were Nature Boy," Blays said, flipping water at him with the weapon's point. Dante shrank back. "Can't you whittle up some bones or something? Lure them out with the song of the sea?"

  "If I catch any you can't eat them," Dante said, unsheathing his own sword. He trailed the bank, eyes on the lurking shadows.

  "A challenge!" He heard mud slurping and jumped when the rock Blays had thrown catapulted into the pond. He spat water from his face.

  "You ass!" He brushed uselessly at his soaked doublet.

  "I'll catch twice your stupid fish," Blays said. He turned on his heel and stalked the opposite way. Dante hurried to a tall stand of reeds some thirty feet down. Within moments his eyes set on a trout hovering in the shallows. He lunged at it with his sword and fell to his knees in the water. He splashed back ashore, checking to see if Blays had seen, but the kid was occupied with his own prey. He scared away a second fish, then a third before he moved further along the shores, and it wasn't until it was so dark he was beginning to see fish where they weren't there that he drew back his sword after a strike and found a trout speared on its tip.

  "I hope you enjoy your carrots," he said a few minutes later when he found Blays at the far point of the pond.

  "Screw your carrots," Blays said, displaying his sword over a stomped-down basket of grass. In the gloom he saw the silver bodies of three cleaned fish. A wind riffled the waters, stirred the dry leaves of the trees against each other. They retreated into the woods where a fire wouldn't be seen from the clearing at the pond and bit into the crackle-skinned fish while they were still so hot they burned their mouths.

  * * *

  For days they stayed at the pond, content to fish with branch-cut spears in the morning and the evening, scrubbing around for plants in the woods when the noon sun drove the trout into deeper waters, sometimes swimming, sometimes crashing around the undergrowth until their trousers were thick with burrs, running around for the simple sake of running around. Most days Blays went off for an hour or more in his own explorations while Dante plunged into the Cycle. Without references and histories and his own footnotes, he feared he couldn't grasp more than the surface of what he read, but the further he pressed the more he understood. His progress was slow as ever; he was often forced to flip back to earlier sections, interrupted by the frequent need to forage for things to fill a stomach that seemed to empty every couple hours at the book, but he was building toward a new peak. He could feel it in the hollows of his b
ones.

  When Blays got back from his solo trips Dante shut the book and came at the boy with sword in hand. He learned the delicate mechanics of the parry and riposte, to watch the hips of his opponent to know where he was going, to use his footwork to create the balance that would be the difference in who died on whose blade. Dante didn't know much, but he could tell Blays was better than he should be at fifteen and a half. He had a natural grace, a quickness to his wrists that never let his blade stray too far to leave himself open. Compared to that, Dante's relative clumsiness with the sticks they used for their full-contact duels was a constant frustration that filled him with a shame he hadn't felt since the night at the temple. He'd carried that feeling for as long as he could remember, that solitude, that sense that whatever he did was being judged by things he couldn't see. Before he'd met Blays he would have given up swordplay the moment he realized he wasn't any good at it. He was aware of his foolishness now, that Blays had to hold back to keep from disarming him the moment they began, but he sparred on until his arms were so noodly he could hardly lift them above his shoulders. The memory of the temple began to fade, lurking beyond the edges of his sight.

  "Not great," Blays said, bending over to plant his hands on his knees after one of their sessions, "but maybe you'll keep them from killing you long enough for me to run away."

  "Not fair. That's what I hired you for.

  Dante went to bed exhausted, rose with the dawn and read through the pink filter of sunlight. The days were mild. The frost stayed gone for a week, then reappeared in their sleep without warning, waking Dante a half dozen times. Each time he woke he pulled his knees tighter to his chest or added another tent of branches to the fire. He got up for good a half hour before dawn, cold and tired and sore, and he watched the flames blacken the thin kindling they cut each day, the odd hunks of wood they sometimes found sunk in the dirt, the wet fibers of which crackled like crumpling paper and spat smoldering knots of embers their way. All the wood would be too wet before long. A pre-morning breeze kicked up, bearing the smells of damp leaves and the stark cut of cold. The snows could come at any time. They'd be early if they showed today, and he thought the air would stay warm enough when it was mixed with sunlight and hard work, but it was there, biding behind the mountains, marching from the north.

  He'd spent time in the wilds around the village before, but mainly in the summer, and when he tried to think about where they'd go when the snows came his mind turned its face from his worries. Years later, when Blays was gone and so was his youth, he'd look to this time as a beacon, the single span of his life after the warm haze of childhood that he could remember without the twin shadows of doubt and regret. These couple weeks in the woods would hold the weight of entire seasons of the years before and after; when he thought of these days, allowing himself the memory like an old dog getting up to bark at a fox he'd once chased, he thought of the yellow touch of sunlight through the trees, tasted the sweet, clean flesh of lake trout caught that day, heard the twitter of blackbirds and the laughter of two boys, saw Blays' sword flashing before it crashed against his own.

  A snake in every garden, the death of every pet. A day when one wakes to find his parents are gone. The bitter tail to those memories, all those years later, after the gray passage of decades, after everything had changed. There would have been a way to make things different, if he'd known enough to make them run to far-off lands and so avoid the treason and bloodshed and heartache to come, but then that would come at the cost of the man he'd become. He'd close the memories like a book, an irrelevant story from a place that no longer existed. There was no room for looking back on what couldn't be undone.

  * * *

  When they saw what he'd done they clapped Jack Hand (as he came to be known) in thirty pounds of chains and locked him in the lowest level of the oubliette, where he was to be kept until his eldest brother's hourglass ran dry, which was said to be fed by the sands of the endless Mandal Desert. He lived in darkness, fed once a day, nipped by lice and by rats. Before enacting his imprisonment they took the index finger from each hand—one finger for each of his brothers' wives. There had been calls for more drastic justice, but royal blood was royal blood, which was more than could be said for the wives of his brothers, and not lightly spilled.

  Dante looked up and wondered whether it were all right to laugh at history, and more specifically a history of the killing of women. The Cycle had taken a strange turn, abandoning the lumbering attempts to explain the skies and the encyclopedic catalogue of names and kings for digressive stories. Not that he'd read many of the Second Classical authors that had prospered in Gask centuries before, but that's what its tone reminded him of. It read with a certain ironic distance, not so stiflingly self-serious as the recent works he'd absorbed back in Bressel. He hadn't known books could be written in anything but the artless blunder of the holy books, the juvenile wit of romances and adventures, or the overelaborate posing of poetry and history—these last of which frustrated him most of all, seemingly written more with the intent of intimidating whoever opened them than to say anything—and he read on with half a smile and the small but sharp fear this new tone was an aberration, something that would disappear as soon as the story was over.

  Jack Hand's cell was as dark as the caves under the earth. They'd intended it as punishment. He recalled the things he'd learned, dwelled on the last few hours with the bodies. He hailed the shadows to slay the rats and plague the lice and sooner than later they no longer swarmed his cell. After a while he likely went mad, though the lack of observers and Jack Hand's own questionable temperament render the status of his mind a matter of philosophy rather than fact. Who knows how we'd act, locked away, locked alone. The mind is a vast place and its hungers far sharper than the body's.

  The mind is a vast place and the black of his world was vaster. He drew that darkness, shaped it, and when, three years later, they opened his cell because the growing stink, reportedly legendary even by the spongy standards of dungeons, could mean little other than its occupant had died and was rapidly being converted to the kind of brown sludge kept only at bay by the continual intake of breath, his captors were met by a chattering horde of rats.

  Skinless, fleshless, bloodless, the creeping bones of 72 life-sucked rodents flooding from each of 30 different cracks in the walls, forming into two streams of surging beasts that overwhelmed the guards as saplings before a tsunami. It's been wondered how so great a force could be stowed in all the space of his constricting cell, but what is not under debate is how they maimed and murdered every living occupant of the keep. There they ceased, and Jack Hand took his throne; their bodies fed his armies, and he, in turn, was fed by that shadow that lurks behind all things.

  Blays was off trampling grass, but for now Dante marked his page. He'd kept a smile till the final sentence, when at once he knew, in the same way he knew if he jumped he'd come back down, that if he stared hard enough and right enough at the deep morning shadows cast on his knees by the leaves, something would happen. Before the blushing hand of stupidity could grab him by the neck, he blanked his mind and settled his hands in his lap. He felt a pressure, a tangible presence, like water were being squirted into the front of his skull. Somehow it didn't hurt—it felt wrong, but not so wrong to tempt him to stop.

  Sweat welled from his temples. A hand's span of the nearest shadows stirred as if by the wind. The illusion was so real he didn't register shock until another part of his mind told him his hair wasn't moving and he didn't feel colder like he would if air were moving over his sweat-slick skin. He raised a hand and he had the queasy sensation of going blind as the dark substance swelled, casting him into a darkness as deep as the space between constellations.

  His breath came hard but he stood slowly, not wanting to spook it, for as little sense as that made. He still felt nothing against his skin, not like if he were wading through something solid. He took a trial step. It wasn't a disaster. He took another and tripped on a root. Pain shot
through his palms and knees when they pounded ground and the delumination weakened till it was more like a gray fog than like he had no eyes. Dante saw the condensed shadow was roughly spherical, highest a few feet behind him—it had stayed put when he started moving.

  He emptied his mind and the darkness ate up the light. After five paces in a straight line the world winked on again. When he looked down he saw his body rising from the mass of shadows at an angle across his waist, centaurian, as if his dad had mated with a globby black hemisphere. He wouldn't put it past him.

  "Hey! Dante!" Blays' voice reached him in a hissed shout.

  "I'm here," he called back, matching the boy's volume, and when he looked down the shadowsphere was gone. He picked up the book and walked toward where he'd heard Blays' cry.

  "What were you doing?" Blays peered past him into the trees.

  "Reading."

  "Not riding horses?"

  "Not recently," Dante said, eyeing him.

  "Then someone else is here. There were tracks down at the pond."

  "Travelers?"

  Blays quirked his mouth. "We're miles from any road."

  "Maybe it's someone's land. They're out for a bit of fishing."

  "And maybe you're about to get an arrow through your neck." Blays rubbed his mouth, then his eyes. "We've got to go."

  "All right," Dante said, spooked by the boy's seriousness. They headed for the camp. A stone's throw from it Blays barred an arm across his chest and pressed him down into the bushes. "What is it?" he whispered.

  "Maybe nothing, but if it's a damn trap I don't want to walk right into it."

  The grounds looked empty. Their fire had gone out during the night and any smoke was hours gone. The stillness of the wood pressed on his ears like he'd dived underwater. Blackbirds chirped at each other. He heard the furtive rustle of small animals tracking through the fallen leaves. A crow cackled and he jerked his arms to his body. A sour tightness took his chest. He'd come to think of themselves as the only two in this place.