The White Tree

by Edward W. Robertson

  "I feel tired," Dante said. "Is that a revelation?"

  Blays gave him a sharp look. "I'm not kidding."

  Neither am I, Dante didn't say. He drew a deep breath and tried to ignore the throbs of pain throughout his body. After a moment he understood the pain was a part of whatever Blays was talking about and he stopped trying anything at all, letting his eyes see the men gathering bodies, his ears hear the murmur of their low voices and the weeping of the dying, letting his nerves feel the shell of his body telling him the pulse of its pain. Everything about the battle had been so fast. Where was the glory? Before, at the end of things, he'd often felt a thrill so deep it was like being touched by the hand of the god. It was as if something had been proven. If a god touched him now, he thought his bones would crumble. The wind picked up, hissing through the pines, tousling the grasses. In fifty years, no one would remember this. The earth had forgotten it already.

  "Your father was right," he said.

  "He died, you know. A few years ago. Hired for border work in one of the baronies. He just didn't come back."

  "I didn't know that," Dante said.

  Blays nodded. He unsheathed his sword and planted it point-first in the ground. He leaned on it, watching the men stack the bodies.

  "It was odd, with all the fights he'd been in, he'd die in one of those jokes they called a war."

  "Someone shot my horse from under me today. I should have died."

  "Why do you think you didn't?" Blays smiled with half his mouth. "Fate?" He glanced to where Samarand was ordering men around. "Destiny?"

  "I taught myself to do things other men can't," Dante said. Blays' smile faded and Dante reached into his pocket and touched the torchstone he'd had since he was a kid. "My dad died when I was young, too."

  "That's too bad. He must have been something."

  Larrimore bounded up to them out of the gloom. He had a handkerchief pressed against the still-leaking wound on his forehead, but he smiled at them through the blood drying on his face.

  "Oh good," he said. "I'd heard you were dead."

  "Wouldn't want to trouble your sleep," Dante said.

  "Why so glum? Did you have to kill someone?"

  "I lost count."

  Larrimore chuckled, then stepped closer and bent to examine Dante's face.

  "You're all torn up! Go and see a priest, will you?"

  Dante waved a hand. "They've got bigger problems."

  "I don't want your humors all corrupted by some little stab. You already seem to have a preponderance of bile."

  "I can take care of myself," Dante said. Larrimore looked skeptical. "How'd the battle go?"

  "They had numbers and terrain, so I'd call it a success," he said, shrugging at the bodies being dragged into piles. He considered Blays. "Rettinger says you did all right."

  "All right? I saved your pet's life here," Blays said, tipping his head at Dante.

  "We'll get you a medal."

  "I'd prefer some whiskey."

  "Whiskey's fleeting. Badges of honor last until you have to pawn them." Larrimore removed the handkerchief from his wound and turned a critical eye on whatever it had sopped up. "What am I talking to you two for? I've got things to do. If you're not too busy sitting on your asses, you could lend a hand out there."

  "Sorry," Dante said, stretching out his legs. "Single-handedly winning the battle is exhausting work."

  Larrimore snorted and left them to go confer with Samarand over in the road. They spoke and nodded at each other for a minute and a minute after that a rider trotted south back toward the dead city. An hour later the troops had finished gathering the corpses. The field stunk with the dizzying smell of oil. They laid a torch to the bodies and the smell got much worse. Samarand marched them a couple miles north, just enough to get upwind and find a decent hill to camp on if the rebels surprised them with another attack. Behind them, the fires kept burning, spitting greasy smoke into the night, clogging the skies between them and the lights of Narashtovik. Like that they were gone, the ashes of their bodies mingled with the ashes of the earth. Were their spirits with Arawn? Dante stretched out beneath his cloak, watched the columns of smoke cast a haze over the stars, dulling their bright points to dying embers. How old was the world? How many men had fed it with their bones in hopes their children wouldn't have to do the same? He meant to stay up till the fires burnt themselves to darkness, but sleep slapped him down like a rogue wave. For the first night since he'd killed the assassin, he didn't wake once before it was time to move on.

  17

  The northern road stretched on. Mounted scouts came and went and exchanged words with Samarand and Larrimore and Rettinger. They'd scared up a new horse for Dante and he and Blays rode a few yards off the road on the right edge of the column. Other than a sporadic breeze, the woods were silent. The surviving soldiers joked in low tones, but the proud sense of purpose that had filled their spirits the day they'd left the city had been replaced by something more somber, a humorless wariness. Dante's entire body ached like he'd been sewn in a bag and rolled down a mountain. He checked the cuts on his shoulder and ribs for excessive redness, but other than some dried blood and angry bruising they looked all right. He touched the nether, meaning to soothe his wounds, but the powers felt stirred-up, fickle, and he let them be. Best to be rested, if another attack came.

  It started to snow late that morning, at first with a few small flakes no more likely to accumulate than the ash drifting around a campfire. Within minutes fat, amorphous bits were dashing against Dante's face. He pulled up his hood. It was a wonder (or maybe just a tendency of coasts, for Bressel's weather was just as weird) it had held off that long. By the afternoon two inches coated the ground. He heard a scout tell Larrimore they'd found a few tracks a couple miles east, but nothing indicative of the remaining rebel troops, and when they encamped on a small hill that night they slept without interruption.

  The land swelled and dipped in old, gentle hills, masking the riders that trailed them until the foreign troops crested a ridge less than a mile behind Samarand's force. Dante freed his blade. Larrimore rode up and down the column, loosing orders like arrows; the pikemen dropped to the rear, but the procession marched on. The riders advanced with no apparent haste and it was the better part of an hour until Dante could make out the white icons of Barden stitched into their cloaks. He let his horse plod on while he counted men. Forty more riders, hoods raised against the snow that continued to spit from the low clouds. The foot soldiers saw their colors and smiled, some for the first time since the battle. The riders caught up before noon and Rettinger dropped back to exchange greetings and news. Not many men at all, in the scheme of things, but enough, Dante would wager, to hush the schemes of any enemy scouts.

  They paused that afternoon to hack a shallow grave from the frozen dirt for the dozen-odd men who'd died of their wounds during the day's march. Once the grave was refilled, Samarand stood at its edge and cast a plain iron ring on the upturned earth.

  "Don't weep for these men," she said, voice carrying through the assembled troop. "There can be no higher glory than to die in the service of Arawn. We should someday be so lucky to have our names written in the same stars as theirs."

  She said more in that vein, but Dante had heard similar sentiments plenty of times before, and as with all conventional wisdom he couldn't be certain whether he'd once believed it because it were true or simply because he'd heard it so often it had driven all other thoughts from his head. He tried to think how a eulogy should sound, but was able to draw no truths. They were dead. What was there to say?

  By the end of the fourth day from the city Dante could see snowcapped peaks peeping through the fog of cloud and snow that shrouded their path to the north. It was almost improper that they hadn't been attacked again, he thought. They marched with no less a purpose than to unlock a god. Where was the conspiracy of the world to stop them? Were he and Blays its last weapon? It was like the southlands were slumbering, waiting for spring
thaws to sniff out the roots of the recent unrest—either that or were simply too stupid and disorganized to do anything at all. It was obscene to think that for all Mallon's strength, the king and his many lords hadn't sent a single man to stop the Arawnites—didn't even know, perhaps, the scope of their intent.

  On the other hand, Dante himself considered this whole trip to be nothing more than an impressive example of the insanity of crowds. He expected they'd find a warped old tree clinging to life on some ice-swept hillside and start bowing down and chanting. Once their ritual was complete, how would they even know whether they'd freed their lord? Would Arawn appear in a poof of smoke and brimstone, twenty feet tall with a blade as long as a man's full height? Ready to scourge all Mallon for its hubris? Or would Samarand be infused with his essence, be able to stretch out her hand and see her will be done from sea to sea? Most likely, they'd make a lot of noise and fire and become so excited by their own power they'd convince themselves they felt Arawn's celestial touch. These people put an awful lot of stock in things they'd never seen. Lyle was the last man to have claimed to speak to a god (excluding the rum-drunk ravings of the lunatics that camped out on the corners of every decent city around the globe), and now he rotted in the ground while men invoked his name as a joke. "By Samarand's snowy tits!" they'd swear a century from now. "By the whiskers of Samarand's moles!" Dante snorted, glanced over at the carriages.

  "What?" Blays said.

  "What do you think's going to happen when we get there?"

  "Weirdness," Blays said. "And lots of it."

  "An almost demonic insight. What else do you foresee, o great prophet?"

  "Well what about you, Holy Man?"

  Dante smirked in the direction of the deluded priests. "Sound and fury. I don't think we're in any danger of a starry-eyed god with a beard as great and white as the ocean's foam showing up and laying waste to us heretics."

  "That's what Arawn's supposed to look like?"

  "Don't they all look like that?"

  "Well, then no wonder everyone's so impressed with him."

  Dante woke the next morning to find his blankets thick with snow. The road continued straight ahead, but the land to their west began to fall away until they traveled no more than a hundred feet parallel to sheer cliffs, and below that the gray sweep of the ocean. To their east the forest fell back until it was a smudge of dark green behind a veil of falling snow, leaving them to travel on through open hills. Ahead, the mountains were a wall of white and blue, too close to disappear from sight no matter how thick the weather got. They were running out of room, Dante thought; surely the land would end with those peaks. They trudged on. The snow crested the ankles of the men on foot. He pulled his cowl tighter.

  Shortly before noon, as best as he could judge it through the clouds, the leading edge of the column reached the top of a hill and drew up short. Those at the front pointed to something blocked to Dante by the hill's white mass. Talk rippled back through the men; he could hear their voices but couldn't make out the words. He glanced at Blays. They swung up the side of the hill, halting on its flat head, a few feet away from the line of men, who themselves were leaving the orderly column to bunch up and lean their ears together and murmur in tense tones. Below them lay a broad, treeless valley, blank with drifted snow, the faint outlines of the road tracing ever to the north. A great snow-streaked peak rose up behind the hill at the far end of the valley. White-capped waves tossed the waters to the west. For a moment Dante couldn't see whatever the men were straining their fingers toward. He looked at Blays again, saw him frowning at something on the far hill. He followed the boy's gaze and saw it, then, the obscure outlines of a white, branched object just below the crown of the opposite ridge.

  "What does that look like to you?" Blays said.

  "It could be a snowy tree." Dante bit his lip and strained his eyes into the snowfields. It was a tree, he thought, the only one he could see between them and the mountains. Rather than the lumpy cones of the pines they'd been riding alongside for days, it had the wide, globular boughs of an oak, which spread away from its trunk like outstretched hands. Leafless—he thought he could see the hill behind it through its limbs—though that was hardly a surprise given that it was midwinter in the furthest north of the continent. Solid white. A shade duller than the snows everywhere else in sight. Dante dropped his hood to his shoulders, as if that would help him see.

  "That doesn't look right," Blays said distractedly. Dante nodded. A call cut through the cluster of men and they began to shift back to their lines. Larrimore rode along the broken column, insulting those he deemed too slow in the same tone he gave encouragement to others. After a minute they were moving again, beginning the slippery descent into the featureless valley. The tree loomed larger as they went down. With no points of reference to provide a scale, Dante could tell no more than that it was very tall.

  At the low point of the long saddle between the hill they'd left and the one they were about to climb, Dante's horse balked, stamping its hooves into the snow. He gave it a tap on the flank and it tossed its head. Blays' mount stuttered to a stop, too, snorting mist from its nostrils. To his left he saw other horses halting and the glowering faces of their riders as they tossed helplessly at their reins. The footmen went on a short ways before realizing what was happening behind them, then turned around with questions stamped on their faces. Dante led his horse crossways to a handful of mounted men talking and nodding to each other.

  "Good a place as any," Rettinger said. "They're not going another step."

  "All right," Larrimore nodded. "Post a couple riders back up on the hill. This would be a bad time for someone to sneak up on us while we're gawking."

  Rettinger nodded and pointed a couple of his cavalry back up the road. He sent three others east, into the open land, in the general direction of the woods that began five or six miles out.

  "We'll bivouac here," Larrimore called out to the men. "Tie the horses to the wagons. They're too smart to go any further."

  The mounted men hopped down, passed their reins to pages. Dante dropped out of the saddle and wandered over to the body of action. The doors of the carriages swung open and old men in thick robes eased their way down into the snow. Samarand got down from her private conveyance and engaged Larrimore's attention. Dante set his mouth and gazed out at the sea, where the horizon met the water in a blur of gray clouds and gray waves. It looked, he imagined, like what the gods had seen before they'd separated one from another and put order to the elements of the world. In all his travels, he'd never been able to escape a vague sense of disappointment that even the farthest-flung lands, exotic and mysterious on the clean lines of a map, turned out to be peopled with the same general range of nobility and serf, of merchant and armsman and farmer and wife, as he'd seen growing up. They might dress a little oddly, or look a shade lighter or darker, or speak a little funny, or in another tongue altogether, but Dante could never shake the idea he could find a scene just like it if he turned the right (or wrong) corner in Bressel. In all the miles he'd traveled, through all the walking and running and riding he'd done in the past couple months, the only moment that had hit him with any kind of real wonder or sublimity had been the bright green waters of the glacial lake in the mountains between Mallon and Gask.

  But this moment here, the raw wind off the ocean, the spine of mountains ahead, the silent valley and its skin of snow, it finally felt like something wondrous, like the true end of the world; he knew if he tried to walk past the hill ahead and up into the mountains he'd always find himself in the gentle rise and fall of a white field, never a foot closer no matter how long he walked. The northern mountains, as real as they looked, would come no nearer than the seven moving heavenly bodies, or perhaps the fixed stars themselves: things you could look on with awe, could hope to calculate and understand given patience and discipline, but bodies that would forever be beyond the touch.

  He paced around the snow. He felt small things snapping and crumbl
ing under his boots, buried branches or hardened dirt. They rolled like stones, though, and he knelt and brushed away the snow and picked up a white pebble. One end was knobbed, the other cracked. The broken end was filled with a spongy weave of marrow. He kicked away more snow. The bones were scattered, far too few to make a second carpet over the dead grass, yet there were far too many for these open meadows, which to his eyes looked barren, trackless, lifeless. Blays came up to join him and saw what he was holding and gave him a weird look.

  "It was just lying on the ground," Dante told him. He dropped the finger-sized bone back into the snow.

  "That sounds like a fine reason to pick it up."

  "Oh, like you're so much cleaner," Dante said. He glanced back toward the road where priests flapped their cloaks and bunched their fists against their chest. Blays grunted. They stood in silence.

  "Come on, pups," Larrimore called to them after a few minutes had gone by. They rejoined the group. Samarand took the lead, the six other priests at her heels, followed by a small hand-drawn wagon bearing sacks of food and a few rattling bags. A dozen soldiers took up the rear.

  "That's it, isn't it?" Dante said to Larrimore in the kind of voice people use in airy, echoing cathedrals. "Barden."

  "Unless they swapped it out since the last time I saw it," Larrimore said, unable to keep the reverence from his voice. "Why? Do you see any other immortal trees of life and death around here?"

  "Maybe."

  "Move your ass. The council's going to need us to watch their backs while they're indisposed."

  Wind gusted over the clear ground, driving dust-like snow into their faces. Less than a mile to the top of the hill. By the time they'd climbed halfway up Dante could tell the branches weren't snowy, they were actually white. A slight nausea perched in his stomach. The older council members picked a careful path through the squeaking snow and blustery wind and the upward slant of the ground. Dante tried to match their pace, but found himself constantly moving ahead. He dropped his eyes to his feet and made a game of trying to plant his feet in the exact steps the swordsman ahead of him had made. He thought for a while of Fanna, a pretty, dark-haired girl from the village who had a bright, friendly way that used to seem like encouragement. For months she consumed his every thought with the clever things he might say to her. She'd thought him quick and funny, but had broken things off before they'd really started, saying there was something dark about him that she'd never be able to heal even if they were one day married. He still hadn't understood what she meant or what had happened by the time he'd left the village for Bressel and the book.