by Tad Williams
Like everything else she had seen since finding the black mountain, the Wood was both more and less than reality. A few paces in from the perimeter the trees grew very thickly and seemed to share branches, as though the whole upper forest was a tangled mat of one single growth spread miles wide. Some did not grow so high, but branched sideways farther than any real tree would, like vast green mushrooms covering hundreds of meters. Many of the freestanding shrubs had definite shapes to them, rounded forms as regular as the icons of playing cards, spades and clubs and diamonds, as though the tangled woodland were the preserve of a fanatical corps of topiary gardeners.
Although the high canopy blocked out most of the great blue-white disk overhead, small, warm lights now kindled in the overhead branches as if to replace the lost moonlight. These individually weak lights grew more and more dense until the forest was brighter than the hillside they had climbed, an endless twinkling bower like a gigantic Christmas display.
"What are those shining things?"
"Bugs," the Stone Girl told her. "Wood-candles, we call 'em. They're like the candle Weeweekee has, but smaller."
Will-o'-the-Wisps, Renie thought, that's what they should be called. Whatever those things are that used to lure travelers off the path. They're beautiful. You could follow these lights forever.
"We're close to the Witching Tree now." The Stone Girl spoke quietly, as if the tree were something that might be spooked into flight.
But maybe it is, Renie thought. Who can know around here? She had begun to formulate a guess as to what the thing might actually be. "This Witching Tree," she said. "What do we do when we find it?"
"Make a witch, of course."
"Ah." The weird mangling of Wee Willie Winkie into Weeweekee had not escaped her—the Other seemed to have an idiosyncratic grasp of spoken English, almost childlike in its misunderstandings. She was being taken to a Wishing Tree, "You tell it what you want, is that right?"
The Stone Girl considered. "I guess."
They were deep in the Wood now, the swirl of tiny lights illuminating not just the arabesque of branches over their heads but also open places in the thickening forest, long vistas of lighted tunnel, paths that bent out of sight and vanished. A mist rising from the ground softened the gleaming points to something out of a sentimental winter scene, a holiday card. The memory that had been nagging at Renie for hours finally rose to the surface.
This is like that place under that horrible club—Mister J's. Where those strange people, those children or whatever they were, took !Xabbu. She thought back on the Brothers-Grimmish ceiling of roots, the pinpoint lights, the sensation of being tightly enclosed even in a wide space. All of this invented country had that feel—as yearningly claustrophobic as a beautiful clipper ship constructed inside a bottle.
The Other made that place, too, she suddenly felt certain, even though it was in the real world-net, not the Grail network. A little . . . what, shelter? Refuge? Something it created for itself inside that ghastly place. So the children there—Corduroy, Wicket, I can't remember all their names—were they children like the ones here? Stolen children?
There was some key to the Other's personality to be found in comparing the two, she suddenly felt sure, if "personality" was the right word. Some recurring theme in what it made for itself. Something that might actually benefit from an applied use of Renie's engineering smarts.
If I ever get the chance for uninterrupted thought. . . .
"There it is," announced the Stone Girl. "The Witching Tree."
Renie's first thought was that she had stumbled onto another case of complete communication failure, because what lay before her where the forest opened out was not a tree at all, but a wide expanse of dark water, a lake or large pond. It took her a moment even to be sure of that, because although the moon hung in the sky just above, big and bright as some alien mothership preparing to land, there was no reflection of it in the water: except for a crowd of smaller lights gleaming beneath the surface, the lake might have been a huge black hole in the forest floor.
Renie moved forward, squinting as though studying a dusty mirror. The lights in the water were not points like the wood-candles, but something more like active waveforms, shimmers of faint purple and silver that were either moving swiftly or turning on and off in sequence. She lowered herself to a crouch and stared at the hypnotic movement of light in the blackness, then stretched out a hand to the dark water.
"Don't!" the Stone Girl said. "We don't go in it. We have to go around it."
"Why? What are those lights?"
Her companion wrapped small cool fingers around Renie's arm. "They're just . . . they just belong there. Don't you want to go to the tree?"
Renie allowed herself to be drawn upright. "I thought you said it was here."
"No, silly. It's over there. Can't you see it?"
Renie followed the girl's gesture. Halfway around the lake,, something a good bit larger than the surrounding vegetation loomed over the riverbank, half-sunk in the water like a giant cooling its feet. It was hard to see it clearly: the other trees wore their crowns of sparkling fairy-lights, and the water itself was alive with glimmers of faint color, but the thing the Stone Girl pointed at was dark.
As they waded along the spongy lakeshore, Renie could not shake the idea that the lights in the water were following them like curious fish, but she could not be sure it wasn't merely her own changing vantage point. She leaned over and violently waved a hand over the water, half-expecting the lights to startle back, but if the dull gleams were some kind of creatures, they were not much impressed.
Of all the unlikely shapes of living things Renie had encountered since entering this simworld, the Witching Tree seemed the poorest copy of a real-world object. It was scarcely a tree at all: only its roughly vertical middle section, which might have been a trunk, and the way it flared at the bottom and the top, seemed to fit the bill. Its hide was shiny and smooth but for the places it wrinkled at the bends of branch and root, resembling the skin of some black dolphin more than it did bark. At the end of their forking subdivisions the limbs disappeared among the branches of other, more normal looking trees; the rubbery black roots dangled in the murky water like the tentacles of an octopus dragged halfway onto land. The thing gave an impression of not quite belonging, a piece of alien life dropped into the environment.
Considering how weird everything else is around here, that's saying a lot, she decided, "Are you sure that's . . . a tree?"
The Stone Girl frowned. "It's the Witching Tree. Do they look different where you come from?"
Renie could think of no useful reply to that. "What do we do?"
"We make a witch and ask a question." She looked at Renie expectantly. "Do you want to go first?"
"I have no idea what to do." Something about this strange, lonely spot suddenly made her aware of how tired and used-up she felt. "I'll just watch you, for now."
The Stone Girl nodded. She rucked up her shapeless dress and sat on the ground, composing herself. Then, in a dry and touchingly off-key voice, she began to sing unfamiliar words to a familiar melody.
"Hush-a-bye, baby,
Your cradle is green,
Daddy's a king,
And Mommy's a queen;
Sister's a lady
Who wears a gold ring;
Brother's a drummer
Who plays for the king."
In the moment's silence that followed, Renie thought she saw a slowing and dimming of the flashes in the dark water, but the tree itself, as if it were somehow absorbing the light, began softly to glow, the merest hint of a rich grape-skin purple beneath the Witching Tree's smooth black rind. It creaked and shuddered. For a frightened instant Renie thought the tree was going to stand up on its roots like some nightmare vision, but it was the branches that were slowly bending. Something came rustling down from the heights where it had been hidden in the foliage of the surrounding trees—a fruit that glowed like a lantern with a deep, fleshy red shine
, dangling at the end of a long black branch.
The Stone Girl reached up her small hands and let the fruit nestle in her palms. She gave a small sharp twist; when the twig snapped free, the black branch sprang back into the heights. The Stone Girl looked up at Renie, her smiling face bathed in strawberry-colored light, her dimple-eyes round. Although she had been expecting it, the little girl's expression clearly said, it was nevertheless a thing of wonder.
The sparkle in the surrounding trees grew dimmer, so that the fruit, an ovoid about the size and shape of an eggplant, seemed now to be the brightest light. Renie found herself leaning forward as the Stone Girl clutched the glowing object firmly and split it in half.
A tiny shape lay at the center of the fruit—a baby, or something shaped like a baby, its shrunken body markedly female, the eyes closed as if in sleep. Its hands were laid across its stomach, the little fingers translucent as threads of glass.
"I made a Witch!" the Stone Girl whispered, thrilled and a little scared. The infant thing wriggled in its glowing bed at the sound of her voice.
"A . . . witch. . . ." Renie fought against the dreamy illogic of the scene. She had thought it a simple mispronunciation, but clearly it was more, somehow.
The Stone Girl held up the homunculus, cradling it close to her chest so that she nearly touched it with her lips as she asked her questions. "Will the Ending come any closer?"
The little thing stirred again. When it spoke, eyes still firmly shut, the voice was eerily out of keeping with the infant form, a lost moan that seemed to echo across great distances.
". . . Ending . . . is only beginning. . . ."
"But what will happen to us when all the world is gone into the Ending? Where will we live?"
The tiny mouth curled in a half-smile, then the Witch began to sing. "Boys and girls come out to play, the moon is shining as bright as day. . . ."
Renie fought down a superstitious shudder. Despite the small, ghostly voice, the entire fantastic setting, this was something that existed for a reason—or at least its creator had once operated under direction and intention. It might be weirdly unsettling to listen to the murmuring pronouncements of what was essentially a machine, but she had too much at stake to be tricked into forgetting. Underneath all this hoodoo ran the binary blood of a comprehensible system: she was not going to be sidetracked by what was little more than game design gone badly astray.
The Witch in the Stone Girl's hand had begun to wither, shriveling into a wrinkled mass like the stone of a peach. Grotesquely, it continued to talk and sing, but the voice had grown so faint now that although the Stone Girl was still listening intently, Renie could no longer make out any of the words. After a while it became clear that even the Stone Girl could not hear it anymore; she stared at it sadly for a moment, then dropped it unceremoniously into the dark, unreflecting water.
"Will the tree work for me, too?" Renie asked.
The Stone Girl seemed disturbed, but not by the question. "Suppose so."
Renie seated herself on the ground beside the girl. She couldn't remember the words the Stone Girl had sung. "Can you help me sing?"
Her small companion prompted her with the unfamiliar words about kings and queens, and Renie followed along, trying to make up for her hesitation between lines with clarity and volume. When she had finished, the air around the lake fell silent. A wind, perhaps, moved the branches of the trees so that the lights wavered. After a moment the branches of the dark tree began to move again: one of the shining, globular fruits was gliding down to her out of the hidden spaces overhead.
As she cradled the warm, smooth thing in her hands and tugged at it, watched it split open like a biology illustration to reveal the little creature within, Renie had a brief but powerful flash of memory. The childish solemnity of the experience, the crude images of death and birth, brought back to her the games she used to play with her friend Nomsa—elaborate, mock-Egyptian funerals of dolls, somber ceremonies out behind the flatblock where the weeds would hide them from mothers they somehow knew would disapprove. This was much the same, another flirtation with the forbidden that seemed not quite adult.
The miniature infant opened its eyes, startling her back to the present.
"Too late. . . ." it said, the voice airy with distance. "Too late . . . the children are dying . . . the old children and the new children. . . ."
Renie found herself growing angry, although she was a little distracted to realize that her baby was male. "What do you mean, 'too late?' That's a lot of shit, after everything we've been through." She looked to the Stone Girl. "Don't I get to ask it a question?"
Her companion was watching the baby's eyes, which filled the lids like pearls, without irises or pupils. The Stone Girl seemed frightened about something and did not answer, so Renie turned back to the strange fruit,
"Look, I think I know what you are, and I think I may even understand a little of what is going on." Renie was not sure if she was addressing the homunculus, the tree, the air. It's like talking to God, she decided. Although this one goes out of its way to communicate. Sort of. "Just tell me what you want from us. Are we supposed to find you? Was that what the black mountain was all about?"
Tiny limbs twitched slowly. "Wanted . . . the children . . . safe. . . ." It flailed again, as though drowning in a deep, unfriendly dream. "The new children . . . nowhere to be. . . . Now the cold. . . ."
"What about the children? Why don't you just let them go?"
"Hurts. Going to fall. Then warm . . . for a little while. . . ." Terrifyingly, the small perfect mouth opened wide and a rhythmic, wheezing hiss filled the air. Renie could not tell if it was laughter or gasping misery; either way, it was a horrible sound.
"Just tell us what you want! Why did you take the children—my brother Stephen, all the others? How can we get them back?"
The noise had ended. The tiny arms moved more slowly. The homunculus was becoming loose and flabby, collapsing in on itself in dreadful, high-speed putrefaction.
". . . Set free. . . ." The voice was a whisper that barely reached her ears. ". . . Set . . . free. . . ."
"God damn you!" Renie shouted. "Come back and talk to me!" But whatever had spoken was silent. Renie tried to remember the song that had summoned it, but the words were a jumble in her head, adding chaos to the rising anger. It was like dealing with Stephen at his most truculent—the child that simply would not obey, who almost dared you to use force. She gave up on the unfamiliar verse and began hoarsely to sing the words she did know, determined to drag the thing back from wherever it was hiding, force it to deal with her.
"Rock-a-bye, baby,
in the treetop,"
The fruit in her hands liquified and ran between her fingers. With a grunt of disgust, Renie threw it down and wiped her hands in the dirt, singing all the while.
"When the wind blows,
the cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks,
the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby,
cradle and all."
"Do you hear me?" she snarled. "Cradle and all, damn it!"
For a long moment there was only silence. Then a whisper, thin as a death-sigh, rose all around her.
"Why . . . hurting? . . . Called you . . . but now . . . too late. . . ."
"Called. . . ? You bastard, you didn't call anyone—you stole my brother!" Anger was bubbling out of her now, confined for too long in too tight a space. "Where is he? God damn you, you tell me where Stephen Sulaweyo is or I'll come find you and take you apart piece by piece. . . !" There was no reply. Furious, she opened her mouth to begin the verse again, to drag the thing back by its metaphorical ear, but was stopped by a sudden convulsive shudder up and down the tree's smooth black trunk—a peristaltic spasm that made the branches whip and snap overhead, knocking leaves and twigs from the other trees even as the black roots stirred the lake to froth.
Then, with the suddenness of a frightened ocean creature retreating into its
shell, the tree collapsed—a lightning parody of what had happened to the witch-babies, but unlike them, the tree did not merely shrivel; it shrank from something into literally nothing: one moment it stood before them, the next it was gone, with only the torn, muddy ground and agitated waters to show it had even existed.
The Stone Girl turned to Renie, eyes wide, mouth a dark gape.
"You . . . you killed it," she said. "You killed the Witching Tree!"
CHAPTER 19
The Bravest: Man in the World
NETFEED/NEWS: ANVAC Arrests Own Customer for Noncomptiance
(visual: defendant Vildbjerg's house, Odense, Denmark)
VO: Danish music producer Nalli Vildbjerg was briefly jailed and is being sued by the security corporation ANVAC for violating his contract—failing to notify them of a crime that occurred on the premises they protect.
VILDBJERG: "These people are mad! I had a party, and someone took a coat that didn't belong to them—by accident, I'm certain. These ANVAC madmen saw it on the surveillance, and not only had this person arrested—a guest of mine!—but now they're prosecuting me, too!"
(visual: anonymated attorney from ANVAC's international legal firm, Thurn, Taxis, and Posthorn)
ATTORNEY: "When you sign one of our contracts, it says very clearly on page one hundred and seventeen that all crimes that occur onsite must be immediately and accurately reported to the company. Mr. Vildbjerg does not have the right to ignore crime—to appoint himself judge and jury in a matter of Danish and UN law."
I'll just remember Orlando, Sam told herself for perhaps the twentieth time in the past few hours. Then I can keep going. She might be stumbling with fatigue and miserable with worry, missing her parents and her home so badly she wanted to scream, but that was nothing compared to what Orlando had shouldered every single day.
But it killed him, she could not help remembering. So what good did it do him being brave, so brave. . . ?
