The White Tree

by Edward W. Robertson

  "One last thing," Cally said when they'd hit that final silence between when they'd said everything they needed and when they were ready to ride off. He fumbled in his robes, then produced a wax-sealed letter. "It's for an old friend of mine. He's a monk by name of Gabe. You'll find him in the monastery of Mennok in the town of Shay. It's pretty much on your route."

  Dante took it from him and tucked it under his doublet. His gloom from the previous night had evaporated with the daylight and the knowledge they were on their way to somewhere he'd never imagined he'd see. There was a big horse underneath him. The air smelled like damp earth and was lightly cold from a rain during the night, but he knew he'd warm up once they started moving. He was glad, for the moment, to be who and where he was.

  "Can't you just fly it to him on the wings of a talking crow?" he said down to the old man.

  "Good gods. Just get him the damn letter."

  "I'm beginning to doubt you can do anything at all."

  "Shut up," Cally mused. He scratched the thick gray beard on his cheek. "Don't leave town before he's read it. He may be some help. He used to be a fairly useful man." He bit his lip. "If he hasn't died, of course. It's been a while."

  "We'll die of old age ourselves if we don't head out soon," Blays said. Robert chuckled.

  "Then get the hell out," Cally said. "I'll finally be able to read in peace without it sounding like a war outside my window."

  "We'll miss you too, old goat," Blays called over his shoulder as they started into the woods. Dante turned in the saddle and waved to the old man. Cally held up his time-gnarled palm and watched them go. A cloud passed over the sun, throwing him into shadow. Dante cupped his hands to his mouth and quacked.

  9

  Twelve hundred miles, Dante figured. Between winding roads and the detour to Shay, they could count on twelve hundred miles of travel. Honestly, it sounded insane. It sounded like the kind of trip you started off expecting to lose a third of your men along the way. He shifted his seat, trying to get used to the horse beneath him. The way it bumped, the way its muscles rose with more strength than his entire body. Twelve hundred miles of getting jostled around by this monster. Pilgrims and caravans would take a season to cover that much ground. Robert had looked at the horses and the route and projected they could do it in six weeks of steady travel—not counting snow.

  Snow could change everything. None had stuck around Whetton yet, meaning they could count on the first two hundred miles to be clear at that moment. The slow rise of the plains could be completely different; so could the weather in the valley in the five-odd days it would take to reach those plains. The valley almost always saw snow at some point, though some years the Lower Chanset didn't get dusted until the full thrall of January. Already it was late November. Unless they could gallop so fast they turned back time, there would be snow by the time they reached the north. In that sense, it wasn't worth thinking about: it wasn't a matter of if, but when, and whether they walked or rode hell for leather, they would see snow before it was through. All they had to worry about was reaching the pass through the Dunden Mountains before it got snowed in.

  Cally's shrine was about twenty miles west of Whetton. They traveled northeast, meaning to intercept the northern road a safe distance above town and follow it as far as they could into the mountains. They rode with no particular hurry, both to give Dante and to a lesser extent Blays the chance to learn how their horses reacted to their commands before trying anything fancy (like moving faster than a walk). Dante had done some riding back at Cally's, but by and large the ways of a horse were as foreign to him as those of the neeling.

  Twelve hundred miles. Plenty of time to figure out just how crazy all this was.

  He pulled his cloak around his shoulders. It had grown thinner and more ragged since the night he'd stolen it off the body in Bressel, poorly mended and open to the wind. They'd need sturdier clothes. Take care of it all in Shay: Cally's friend, nice thick cloaks and blankets, fresh food, maybe even a night in a real bed.

  Blackbirds and robins and crows twittered and coughed. Squirrels and rabbits and larger things crackled among the fallen leaves. The sun swung up into the sky and pierced through the bare branches, warming their bodies. They didn't talk much. No sense throwing out their voices on the first day.

  "Good to be out of that place, huh?" Robert said after an hour or so.

  "I was starting to get the stir-crazies," Blays said.

  "Something off about the old man." Robert let the sunlight fall on his upturned face. "Appreciate his help, but I won't miss him."

  "He helped more than you know," Dante said.

  "No doubt about that. Just not my sort of company."

  A stream crossed their path two-odd miles on and they dropped down to drink and let their horses do the same. Dante watched Robert walk up to the stream and stoop to scoop water into his mouth.

  "You don't walk funny," he said. Blays and Robert exchanged a look and a laugh. Fine. Dante drank, flexing his fingers against the cold.

  "It's just a name," Robert said.

  "Pretty weird one."

  They stretched their legs, then got back in the saddle. Robert spent a few minutes rubbing his beard.

  "I'm thirty-some years old now," he said to no apparent cue. "Couldn't say for sure. Split the difference and call it 35. Back when I was a young man, a couple years your elder, I'd been at the pub long enough to be feeling right when I stood up to go tap my private keg and found my right leg was completely numb. Been sitting on it a while, I guess, and when I tried to walk it just dragged along behind me. Couldn't feel a damn thing." He chuckled, running his fingers through his beard. "Earlier that night I'd thrown some lip at a man I'd just met. One of those loud, boastful men who's always watching to make sure everyone's watching him as he goes on about the strength of his arm and the speed of his blade and how big the tits on the last one he banged. The kind you want to stave in their head just to shut them up. I'd just offered my opinion on the likelihood of a canine presence in his maternal lineage, but him being that kind of man and all, he didn't see the restraint I'd employed to keep our differences purely verbal.

  "Well, fellow sees me stand up, or more rightly hobble up, between the booze and my leg, and then limp around the room trying to get back the feeling. He sees his chance: not only am I drunk, but evidently I'm lame. Chance to take back his honor without sticking out his neck. Even a man fundamentally scared inside as him thinks he can best a lamed drunk.

  "He comes up and at once I see the murder in his eyes. Spend enough time at pub and you develop an eye for that pretty quick. Anyway, without a word I've drawn my sword and he's drawn his and we're squaring off. He's dancing this way and that, right and left, taking pokes at me, trying to get me off my balance. I've got half a mind to what he's up to by then and bide my time, letting my leg wake back up. Drunk as I was I knew I wasn't in any real danger. He was decent at best, but I was good. Damn good.

  "Doesn't take long before my leg's tingling and just a few seconds after that it's hurting a bit but I knew I could move it just fine. I kept up the act, shuffling around the same spot, letting him build his spirit, and soon enough he's taking this big swing meant to open my defense for his backstroke. I jump aside like quicksilver on a griddle and strike for his heart."

  The man chuckled some more, gazing back through the years. It was clear he'd told this story often. Dante guessed this pause was part of the telling.

  "Well, for however clear my thinking, however swift my sword, I was still about half a mug short of stinking, and my blade just went through a lung and a few other parts that will kill you but not exactly clean like a good whack through the ticker. I kicked the oaf off my sword and he fell down and gave me a look like I'd cheated him at cards. 'You're no cripple!' he gasped. 'And you're no swordsman!' I roared back.

  "The crowd cheered and rolled him out in the street to die somewhere else. They bought me so many rounds I don't remember much else. Just when I woke up
the next afternoon and slouched back in all scared for the watch the crowd cheered again and hailed out 'Robert Hobble!'"

  Dante joined their laughter. Robert hadn't meant what he'd said about Cally, he'd decided. He'd just been talking.

  "Tried that trick a few times after that," Robert added after they'd settled down. "Every time I realized I'd caused some serious trouble, which wasn't half so often as when I'd actually gotten in the stew. Then I'd catch that look in their eyes and I'd start limping around like a man without a foot. Men are like dogs when they see a man's got something wrong. They'll tear him apart just for being broken. If you can get them to come at you thinking you're somehow less of a man, you'll live a very long time."

  "Didn't they catch on after a while?" Dante said.

  "Sure did," Robert said. He winked at Dante. "Every man in every pub in Whetton knows my name now. These days when I insult them, they just laugh it off. Imagine that, I have to leave my home town just to get in a fight!"

  "It's a cruel world," Dante said.

  It wasn't hard going, but it was slow going. The horses were used to clear fields and plowed dirt and hadn't yet loosened up to the disorderly rubble of a forest floor. Dante kept his eyes sharp for sign of the road. Once they reached it they would be nearly 2% done with their trip. Fifty times as long as that and they'd be in Narashtovik. They'd hardly been in the saddle for any time at all. Fifty times nothing was still nothing, wasn't it?

  Robert stopped them for lunch a little after noon. They tore at strips of salted rabbit, gnawed on lumps of bread that still had some give to them. Dante wandered off a ways to urinate. On the way back he saw a gleam of white within the grass. He knelt beside it. Bones. Sharp teeth. Something small, a cat or a ferret. Just a little dirty black fur sticking to the delicate sweep of ribs. He reached down and brushed away the fur. It was dry as old hay.

  He could see one of the horses nibbling a tuft of grass back where they'd stopped but couldn't see Blays or Robert. He got out his knife, wondered what he was doing, and dimpled his left thumb until a tiny blot of blood sprung up on its end. He wiped it along that knobbly white spine. Black flecks leached from the earth and onto the skeleton. The bones shifted as if in a stiff wind and then the thing was on its feet, narrow skull pointing its sockets at his. He grasped it under the ribs (tendonless, fleshless, how did the legs and paws stay stuck to the body?) and stuffed it in the deepest pocket of his cloak. It hung against his body with a cold weight. Dante brushed off his knees and rejoined the others. They were waiting for him, already mounted.

  "Find anything interesting?" Blays called down from his horse.

  "That's gross." Dante pulled himself up, careful not to crush the slender construct against his body. He ducked the low claws of branches. The trees were getting shorter, he thought. Younger. Within a mile they could see the road. A hundred yards out, a grassy gap in the midst of the woods.

  "You boys see anything odd down there?" Robert murmured, lowering his head to peer through the skein of branches.

  "Yeah," Blays said. "Traffic."

  "It's a road," Dante said.

  "It's ten, fifteen miles from Whetton," Robert said, tracing the road as it arcked to the south. "How many people you seen pass in the last thirty seconds?"

  "I don't know. Ten?"

  "Where were they going?"

  Dante inhaled. What did that mean? Was he supposed to be able to read their thoughts? What had Blays been telling them? He was right about to say something nasty about the nature of roads when he saw it.

  "North," he said. "They're all going north."

  "Funny, isn't it?"

  They watched a while longer. The traffic didn't slow. Dante stopped counting after fifty. Robert raised his eyebrows at them and nudged his horse forward. They cleared the last line of trees and angled their horses down the shallow bank leading to the wide, well-packed road. A few of the people looked up with dirty, sooty faces. Dante glanced north. They speckled the road like rabbit droppings, going on until the path curved and was swallowed by forest.

  "Maybe we should keep overland," he said. "There were an awful lot of witnesses at the hanging." He gave Blays a look. "They might even know our names."

  "I think they've got worse worries than fugitives," Robert said. He nodded south toward Whetton. Great gray columns of smoke billowed into the air, forming a hazy cloud in the clear skies.

  "Perhaps the chimneysweeps are getting a late start," Blays said.

  Dante nudged his horse forward and flagged down one of the men on foot.

  "What's going on down there?"

  "A party," the man said without looking up. "The kind with fire and burning instead of wine and gifts." He continued right on by.

  "It seems," Dante said, glancing significantly between the other two, "the city is on fire."

  "Hey!" Blays called, moving his horse to block the path of an angry-looking man with a sword. "What happened?"

  "Oh, that?" the man said, turning to the mountains of smoke as if he'd just noticed. "Someone smoking a pipe in bed again."

  "Have I gone insane?" Dante said.

  Blays bit his tongue. "Let's pretend it's them for now."

  "We're on horses, you dummies," Robert said. "That makes us look rich." He hopped out of the saddle and waved at a pair of men coughing and leaning on each other's shoulders. "Damn city torched up, did it? Viceroy catch someone squeezing his daughter's ass and go on the rampage?"

  "That would have been worth it," one of the men grinned. The pair stopped and swayed in the road, wiping grime from their faces.

  "Some riders showed up at dawn, way I heard it," the second man said. "They couldn't have done all that, though."

  "Are you forgetting that enormous mob?" the first said. "I haven't seen one like that since the False Succession."

  "Hear what they were up in arms about?" Robert said.

  "I've heard plenty of things."

  "Anything you believe?"

  "No," the second put in. "Just the trumpets of swift-wing'd rumor—they're upset about the viceroy's cut of the grain, or all the Colleners been moving in, or their wives' ankles are too fat. Maybe the end is finally nigh and it's time for the guilty to pay for their crimes."

  "Can't be that," Robert said. "We're still running free, aren't we?"

  "Taim kind of dropped the stick on that one, huh?" the first man said.

  "Well, nobody's perfect," the second shrugged. The three men chuckled.

  "I'll tell you what I saw," the first one said, squaring his shoulders. "I was walking down Balshag Street when all these people started boiling out of the temples. I can understand coming out of church angry, but they had weapons, right? Swords and torches and flails. There was no one sect, it was all of them. It looked like they were fighting each other—a priest of Gashen was punching another man in a red robe, anyway. That's when I started running. I don't know what's going on, but it started in the temples."

  "What's new," Robert muttered. They exchanged agreements and spent a silent moment gazing at the smoke hovering above the southern forest. "Well, we'd best be on our way."

  "Say, what's your name, friend?" the first man asked.

  Robert leaned in. "Robert Hobble," he said from behind his hand.

  "And I'm Lyle's no-account brother," the first said.

  "The one who still lived with their mom while Lyle was out talking to the gods," the second added.

  Robert began to walk in a stiff-legged circle, mumbling curses like a confused drunk. He stumbled, waving his arms.

  "I thought they'd hanged you," the first man said, folding his arms.

  "Never underestimate the power of bureaucratic incompetence," Robert said. He reached into a pocket of his cloak and shook out a couple time-tarnished chucks. "Here, friends. Don't let that trouble catch up with you."

  They doffed their caps. The second bit his lip and grinned.

  "You off to clear it all up, then?"

  "Naw," Robert said, raising a doubting brow
. "Too much anarchy that way lies. People with no respect for the law scare me."

  They laughed again, then clasped Robert's hand and started back down the road. Robert grinned and pulled himself up on his horse.

  "Well, as usual, it's the clergy's fault," he said.

  "That's what we're going to stop," Dante said. "We're 2% of the way there."

  "Sounds horrible when you put it like that." Robert sighed, then brushed off the mood like dirt on his sleeve. "I suppose that means we ought to hurry."

  "Indeed," Dante said, looking north on the hundreds of miles of mountains and rivers and snowfields between them and the dead city. "Let's haul ass."

  * * *

  Night came quickly. They'd made another twenty miles along the road, then spent the twilight penetrating far enough into the woods to where they could light a fire without drawing the attention of the bedraggled masses that kept coming out of Whetton. The sun disappeared behind the trees and hills of the west and they brought in the kindling and roasted some of the uncured meat they'd taken along. Considering all they'd done was ride, Dante was shockingly tired, saddle-raw aching. More than a month of this to go. Whetton was already burning. He had no idea whether the local militias would be enough to quash this thing, whatever it was. This unrest and whatever they were trying to accomplish with it had roots as long as a river. They'd hidden for years, keeping their memory alive in the minds of the people, and finally, for reasons he couldn't guess, they'd taken this thing back to the open. They were ready. Dante had no delusions they'd ride into Narashtovik in a few weeks to find Samarand and all her people had fled to exile or been executed for their perfidy against the southlands. The fight would only get bloodier before order showed its sheepish face.