The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  I had to answer no to all these questions, and so did Dendra, who even seemed to understand them.

  Only once during the meal did his jollity falter, and I sensed a threat as he said, “I must implore you to spare my beloved trees for your masterpieces, especially those in the Bower by the south wall. The gardens of my absent neighbors can provide you with all the wood you’ll need.”

  * * * *

  Wandering in his garden the next day, I was amazed by my ignorance. Trees were like members of my family, and yet I could hardly identify one out of every five I saw. The strange ones were indeed strange, like sculptures that called for no further attention from my knives, but they were twisted as if in bondage and torment. Despite the vivid blooms that burst around us, despite the bright sunshine that dappled through unquiet branches, I was oppressed by the feeling that I was straying in darkness through an unknown forest. These trees might have said much to the boy who had understood their language, but I was no longer that boy.

  Dendra shared none of my disquiet. She laughed and exclaimed over the beauty of the garden, distinguishing the roses from the pavonias for me, who had never paid much mind to flowers.

  “And what’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s a tree, silly! What a question!”

  We had come to the Bower that Dwelphorn Thooz had spoken of, a ring of graceful trees whose branches intertwined above a pool. I was reluctant to enter. The trees disturbed me, the smooth-skinned trees that neither she nor I could name. Whether I was upset by their unfamiliarity, or by some curiosity of their shapes or proportions or arrangement, I couldn’t say. I felt like a dog I once owned, who would gleefully charge a bear but sometimes tremble at the shadow of a passing cloud.

  Dendra felt nothing of this. She romped forward through the grass, thick and green despite the gloom of overarching limbs, and dropped to her knees at the edge of the pool. I wanted to call her back, but I wanted even less to evoke the look of sorely-tried noblesse oblige she put on whenever I hinted of omens or intuitions.

  She leaned forward to admire her reflection in the pool, and her beauty caught my breath. Clear eyes sparkling in the water-light, pink lips parted, she could have been the naiad who haunted the glade. In the next instant she screamed, and no omen or intuition could have kept me from dashing to her side.

  “What is it?”

  “Oh—I thought—” She seemed confused, like one roused from a dream. “I thought I saw something in the well.”

  I looked. It was in fact a well, perfectly circular and lined with pink stones, its water clearer than the air around us in a shaft of sunlight that pierced the Bower directly overhead. I felt at first that I might reach in and touch the pebbles lying at the bottom. In the next instant I saw intervening shimmers that hinted of fearful depth. The pebbles were boulders. Dizzied by the shift in perspective, I stumbled and almost fell, or—as it seemed then—was almost sucked in.

  “No!” I cried when she scooped up the water in her palm, but I was too late to keep her from drinking.

  “You’re mad!” she laughed, splashing me.

  I thought she might have been right. Swiftly as one of that dog’s dreaded clouds, my vapor had passed. What if the trees did look like men and women stretched on some wizard’s rack that denied the limitations of flesh? I was familiar with such fancies: they were visible only to an artist’s eye. A plain man would have seen only trees.

  Several shipboard floggings later curbed the tendency, but in those days I invariably did whatever I was told not to do. I always thought I had a good reason for defying my betters. In this case, I felt a craftsman’s need to test an unfamiliar wood.

  “Oh, Ringard!” Dendra sighed when I drew my knife, knowing my ways too well to say more.

  The boughs were too high above me, and there were no windfalls in this well-kept garden, so I slipped the knife into the bole of a tree, into what might have been the tormented muscles of a woman’s calf. I recoiled instantly, not just from the sickly feel of the tree’s flesh and the flow of pinkish sap, but from the shrieking in my head. My inner deafness had been suddenly, horribly cured, and I was denounced and importuned by a choir of wailing voices.

  “Forgive me!” I cried. The pain of those phantom screams was more than I could bear. The Bower darkened, the tall shapes spun around me like demoniac dancers in a constricting ring.

  “Are you ill? Ringard?” Dendra’s voice restored me. I turned into her arms and gripped her. The other voices fell still as leaves in a faltering breeze.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “We can find somewhere else to live.”

  “Don’t be silly. We can go elsewhere when you’ve sold some of your carvings, if that’s what you really want.”

  “At least let’s avoid this Bower. It’s—”

  “But I love it! It’s so weird. I think a god must live here.”

  “Something must.” I knew better than to argue with her. She could be no less contrary than I.

  * * * *

  While Dendra happily played at housewife, I sought wood for my work. No sooner had I dropped over the wall to a neighboring garden than I felt a jolting realignment of my senses, like one emerged from the enthrallment of a dark puppet-theater to mix with real people in a daylit street.

  It was a jungle floored with sodden leaves, but it grew only normal plants. No fruits or flowers shocked me with their shape or coloring. I breathed in the honest mold and damp as if I had been denied air for a day and a night. If Dendra hadn’t remained behind, I might have kept on walking to the farthest end of the city.

  Fallen branches lay everywhere, I had brought an ax to cut them to manageable lengths, and without even trying I saw a hundred shapes—friendly, healthy shapes—begging to be freed. I ignored them and pushed through the undergrowth to the house. It was no airy fantasy of spires and bubbles, but a forthright home of solid timbers. Walking through an open door to find myself among elegant furniture, I feared that the householder would presently seize me for a thief. Then I noticed all the dust, the rain-streaked carpet, the leaves that crackled under my feet.

  The inhabitants must have fled without closing the windows or finishing a meal whose desiccated relics cluttered a table. Animals had trooped through to gnaw and claw and defecate, and even as I considered this evidence I was startled by a scurrying rat. Snatching up a handy bit of litter to throw, I dropped it with an oath. It was a human skull.

  My first thought was that a derelict had crawled in here to die, but that seemed less likely when I considered the childish proportions of the skull; and when I noticed the other old bones and once-splendid garments that lay near the five chairs around the dining table. Although animals and the weather had disordered it, the picture of diners arrested by death in mid-bite was easy to reconstruct.

  Similar sights awaited me in other mansions: a chamber-pot holding the bones of its last user; two lovers twined in an embrace whose moisture and warmth had been anciently sucked into the unloving sky; a child’s hand, melted to an inartistic stain on the half-drawn picture of a tree.

  I could stand no more horrors. I ran back, scrambling over walls, stumbling in ditches, remembering only at the last minute to lop off some of the wood that had caught my eye. Death had snatched all these unfortunates with a plague, I told myself, or with poisoned water. That his neighbors had earned the enmity of our host might be purest coincidence, but I nevertheless resolved to quit his hospitality as quickly and politely as I could.

  No sooner had I climbed into his garden and breathed its perfumed air than urgency faded. I had no desire to linger here, but I no longer itched to run. A sense of peace beguiled me as I walked the winding path to our fine new house.

  That peace vanished when I found that Dendra had gone to bed, where she lay pale and drawn.

  “It was that water you drank,” I said. “If ever I saw a well haunted by an evil spirit, that was it. We must leave this place at once. We—”

  I saw that she was giggling at me as I pac
ed and fumed. She said, “I didn’t get this way from drinking water.”

  “What way?”

  “Pregnant.”

  I was stunned. I sat and gaped. I had wanted to pour out my adventures in the street of the dead, but now I could not. It was bad enough that our child might be marked by a fish-faced wizard and his demon plants without filling her head with images of rats and skeletons. I pasted a grin on my face, kissed her and made much of her, but for the first time I resisted when she tried to draw me into bed. I told her she looked ill, that she should rest, and this was true, but I wanted to start on the work that would free us.

  I labored for hours, fascinated but appalled by the creatures that begged for release. I thought I’d seen a shy rabbit in the wood I had brought home, a dancer from Lilaret, a hound biting its paw. What emerged were a snarling rat, a demon capering on a skull, a ghoul gnawing a bone.

  I was surprised to see that Dendra had joined me to paint my demon. She looked well enough, but her glances at me were apprehensive. I had no idea how to explain the work I was doing, so I pretended to be absorbed in it, and soon that was true.

  When I next looked up, she had retired. Stretching my fingers, I nearly screamed from the pain. Without noticing, I had worked beyond the limits of flesh. The world outside was gray, stung by the flashes of brilliant blossoms.

  She painted while I slept, so that my wares were ready for the public when I rose at noon to breakfast on bananas and figs.

  “I wasn’t sure what color to paint that ... thing,” she said, indicating my ghoul.

  “Green looks right.”

  “You don’t like this place at all, do you?”

  Careful not to sound like the grumpy bear she sometimes called me, I said, “I’d be happier if we weren’t beholden to a patron. And you must admit that we’re far from the center of things. Just getting to the theater—”

  “I think I need peace and quiet now,” she said. “And this lovely garden—wouldn’t it be so much nicer for a child than a noisy street full of whores and cutthroats, with musicians over our head and opium-eaters next door?”

  This was not an entirely unfair picture of our former home, but she’d once praised its urban diversions. I restrained myself from telling her what I knew and suggesting that even our old neighbors on Ashclamith Square would have been preferable to plague-stricken corpses. Though I was horrified by the length of the stay her words implied, I said mildly, “You don’t want to put down roots here.”

  She laughed. “That’s exactly what I feel like doing!”

  It seemed wiser to get the money we needed to move before we argued about moving. Her lips tasted oddly bitter when I kissed her, like privet leaves. I had heard that pregnant women ate curious things.

  Heading for the gate with my armload of carvings, I met Dwelphorn Thooz.

  “But what have I done,” he said when I told him where I was going, “that you should deny me the first chance of buying your creations?”

  “After all your kindness, I can’t ask you to buy my work.”

  “You mean, my kindness has denied me a right enjoyed by the first wretch you meet? Would you oblige me if I were a monster of cruelty? Why then, trolls lusting to couple with infants and posthumes gorged on virgins’ blood will tremble at the whisper of my deeds! Should Dwelphorn Thooz be written on the earth and the word kindness inscribed on the remotest star, the universe will crumple with shame for holding so inapt a juxtaposition.”

  I believed he was joking, but how could I know? Reading a Sythiphoran face is impossible, I have since learned, even for the owner of another one. I arranged my pieces on the grass, resigned to the necessity of offering a gift. He seized on the ghoul and scrutinized it from every angle.

  “Have you been perambulating our necropolis at midnight, young man?” He studied me even more intently than he had my sculpture. “Where, then, have you seen a ghoul?”

  “In the wood,” I said, and explained how I worked.

  Excepting Dendra, no one had ever heard me out with such alert interest and apparent comprehension. “Extraordinary,” he said. “And it’s an extraordinary likeness, although the color is wrong. They’re gray, you know.” While I again debated whether he was making fun of me, he said, “Some day we must have a serious talk about your future. Your talent is perhaps greater than I supposed. I had thought of taking on an apprentice....”

  “An apprentice botanist?”

  “Yes.” He laughed. “Something like that.”

  I gave him the ghoul, but then he insisted on buying the other pieces for a sum that staggered me. It so staggered me that I failed to notice that no money changed hands. Instead of real silver from the market, I was left with promised gold from my host. But how could I press him for payment while I accepted his free room and board?

  These thoughts crushed me only later, and I was still grinning as he said, “I would highly recommend the water from the Bower to your wife. Strength, grace, stature and long life are the least of the gifts it imparts.”

  I blurted, “I hate that place!”

  “I thought you might, and so I must warn you to stay away from it. Trees are sensitive, too, you know, and I wouldn’t want my darlings upset by your hostility.” I blushed with guilt for the test I had made with my knife. I think he knew about it. “But I’m sure they would welcome your charming wife. Women are different.” He pinched my arm playfully before scurrying off with the work that had cost me a sleepless night and the strength of my hands.

  * * * *

  Dendra scoffed at my suspicion that our host had taken my work to keep us from leaving. She scorned my suggestion that he meant us no good.

  “You’re just not used to dealing with the upper classes,” she said with an infuriating sniff.

  “Polliel spare me from the upper classes, and may Sleithreethra tear out their ribs for needles to knit their shrouds!”

  This group included her and all her relatives, and she lectured at length on the proper handling of bumptious churls. I stamped about and grumbled, then attacked my work with a vengeance. My mood soured further when I realized that I was acting just like my father, who would chop trees with especial vigor after quarreling with my mother. I took a perverse pleasure in the pain I inflicted on my cramped hands.

  I freed a botched creature like a cross between a man and a shark. Dendra criticized it with slapdash painting, and we both laughed at the absurd result. We ended by embracing tenderly, but I knew that our argument had only been put aside. I had to convince her that this place was unhealthy. Perhaps it was only the light diffused through the plants crowding our windows, but I thought her skin was taking on a greenish tinge.

  I worked through the night again. Before dawn I gathered those pieces that Dendra had already painted into a bag and lowered it over the wall into Amorartis Street, where I doubted that any sane footpad would lurk. If our patron again relieved me of my creations on my way to the gate, I would at least have those figures to sell.

  As I returned home stealthily, a pale form shimmered from the Bower. I froze, imagining things worse than a human intruder. It was nothing but a man, however, whom I failed at first to recognize in his pasty nakedness as Dwelphorn Thooz. His halting gait was bringing him directly towards me, and I withdrew into the shelter of a plant whose red mouths parted slackly as the darkness faded. Perhaps I could have fled unnoticed, but I was curious to see if his body displayed fishy anomalies.

  He looked normal enough, but as he passed close by me I saw that his skin was scored with fresh scratches and welts. A gleam lit his eyes, and a smile flickered on his bruised lips as he muttered a litany of female names. In those days, on the rare occasions when I gave any thought to the topic, the amorous practices of the old amused me; but at that moment my impression that he was stumbling home from an orgy gave me a chill. I stayed in hiding until the sun was fairly risen, desiring a glimpse of the ladies who had frolicked with the ancient lecher, but no one else walked away from the slim and
swaying trees of the Bower.

  * * * *

  I don’t remember if I kissed Dendra goodbye, or what words we said. I was preoccupied with the details of my escape, as I saw it: which pieces I would offer our host if he stopped me, how I would word my refusal if he asked to buy them all. As it happened, I never saw him, and I walked through the gate like a free man. My other bag of sculptures lay undisturbed outside the wall. I slung it over my shoulder and began to whistle as I tramped to the lower town.

  My whistle soon dried in the plaza fronting the Temple of Polliel, a notable marketplace for handicrafts. Not just the permanent stalls, but pillars of the surrounding colonnade had been claimed by the craftsmen’s ancestors and passed down to them, or so they maintained with words, fists and feet. Trying to do business here, I was told by a priest whose sanctity cowed my attackers, was like barging into a stranger’s home and sitting down to his place at the table. For a fee, he said, the Temple would assign me a space, but I calculated that the rights to the darkest shadow of the remotest column would cost me more than I would earn if I lived forever.

  The gods took note of the priest’s rebuke and heaped my shoulders with a massive weight of dead, hot air that stretched to the very top of their pitiless dome. I wandered into streets undisturbed by merchants and buyers alike, a desert of brick and stone with not one cool tree for shade and no undisputed place to sit down, where householders practiced art criticism with dogs, cudgels and slop-buckets. My carvings seemed hammered from iron, as did my shoes. When the morning crawled into the furnace of afternoon, bloated clouds piled themselves to phantasmagorical heights and blackened the green slopes beyond the city.

  Darkness fell long before sunset. Hot air gusted randomly. I knew that a storm was coming, but I clung to my purpose. Even though I managed to sell a few things, I was engaged in folly, for how long could I carve all night and walk all day?