by Michael Shea
Hex and Sarf, imitating their fellow drinkers, were clambering over the nearest railing and vacating the patio, discreetly withdrawing from the intimate marital discussion that was obviously about to take place. The tapster began to bleat some feeble dissuasions, but when she vaulted on to the patio he followed his patrons. She marched up to one of the shed’s walls, thrust spike-like fingers between two planks, and ripped a six-foot section of siding off the structure’s frame. Through this, disdaining the natural door, she lunged, and from the door, in the same instant, the ragged man darted. From the railing he vaulted back across the cableway. The Throttler re-emerged, roaring, a two-hundredweight wine cask brandished overhead.
“Is it wine you want, Wimfort? Well by the black, greasy Death, it’s wine you’re going to get!”
Tucking the cask under one arm, she vaulted from the platform in pursuit. The forest swallowed both.
“What strength!” marvelled Hex to a fellow-drinker who had shared the shelter of the same tree with them. The man nodded tiredly.
“He drinks; she beats him,” he explained.
The patrons, for the most part, returned to their tables, and Hex and Sarf with them. The tapster stood with sagging shoulders, mutely looking at his shed. The wall’s breach had somehow slipped the rafters, and the roof now gently canted. Hex called him gently:
“I say, could you pour us another pair of sweet-mulls?” The man turned him such melancholy eyes Hex added, “Best look to your custom after all. That’s going to be cost!y to fix.”
“My counter’s smashed,” the tapster reported when he brought the pitcher. “That raging sow has been warned. I’m closing early today and lodging a formal complaint down at the—”
From deep in the trees a wet concussion echoed. A perfect silence fell on the patio. Four heartbeats later, a man said in relieved tones: “That came from near Old Mangler. We can thank our—”
A crackling, wrenching noise—dreadful in its duration and complexity—sounded from the site of the concussion. The sound suggested the crushing of an extensive structure. The wail of many voices rose in accompaniment.
“A strangling!” cried the tapster. “So near! If a riot starts, I’m ruined!” He and the other drinkers were over the railing and swarming towards the uproar before the two foreigners dazedly found their feet.
“Come on,” Sarf said. They followed towards a noise so eloquently terrible Hex couldn’t repress a qualm that they were hastening in the wrong direction, They quickly lost sight of the citizens ahead, whose powerful limbs took them smoothly up ladders and across ropewalks. While Sarf moved nimbly enough, Hex scraped a shin on the first fence he climbed, and had to fight the wobbly ladders for his footing. The incessant snap of shattered wood was beginning to be drowned out by a human din of shouts and screams. As the pair followed a high catwalk, the strangling came in view. The two combatant trees, in intertangling their branches, had shrunk by half their leafy volume, and their struggle was bathed in new-admitted sunlight.
Each multiple gripped the other, their branches groping with jerky flexibility, like spastic snakes. The jerrybuilt hives that crammed the groins and elbows of their boughs were now a mass of buckled walls that rained down in pieces, some glinting wetly red.
One tree seemed somewhat smaller, and at the same time more densely inhabited. The bigger tree neighboured two massive stumps, and thus was two-thirds surrounded by comparatively clear ground. Spectators filled this with a turbulent periphery, or stood on adjacent rooftops of buildings based on the ground. Everyone visibly shunned arboreal perches. Hex and Sarf took the hint, and went down to join the crowd.
There was a kind of beauty in that slow, majestic vegetal hate, that stubborn, murderous torsion of boughs thicker than a man’s body, that Antaean power and multibrachiate complexity. But viewed from below, this beauty was obscured by the human ruin and pain that rained down from the battle.
The crowd cheered as a man, having wormed himself free of his house, dropped from the straining limbs of the battlers and sprinted over the trash-littered ground to safety. He was embraced with a fervour that expressed the crowd’s general sense of powerlessness to help. The furious and unpredictable movement of the lower boughs made it very dangerous to stand under them. Nevertheless there must have been a dozen people with long poles darting in and out of the fight, and reaching up what aid they could offer those trapped above. With a thrust one man broke open the jammed door of a torqued hovel. A woman’s hasty arms thrust two small children out, who were caught and borne to safety. The woman herself, making her leap just before her house collapsed, was harder to catch and seemed to have broken her leg, but limped out smiling nonetheless. Another pole-man, spying an arm thrust from some wreckage and groping the air for purchase, supplied the hand his pole tip. Firm hold was taken, a second hand joined the first, a man’s head and shoulders were hauled free—and then the tree shifted its grip and crushed the prisoner’s chest. He jerked, and slumped, and three runlets of blood poured out his sleeves and mouth, like rain from gutterspouts.
“An ugly irony.” Hex and Sarf turned and found the man they’d shared the tree with at the wineshop. “For stability we have to build right at the joints and crotches, and of course that’s where all the crunch is in a strangling.”
“It’s monstrous!” Hex shouted, realizing the shock he was in. More quietly he asked, “Can’t they be saved?”
“The axe-squad will be here any moment. They might kill the littler one in time to snuff out the trouble before it spreads. The big one is Old Mangler. See those stumps? The Mangler’s work—a very crusty, touchy tree and generally agreed to be one of the strongest in the whole slum.”
This man was slight and shrivelled but hale. His seamed face had a tart, lemony pucker, a touch of satire in it. “In a way there’s luck in this spot—see how clear most of the near ground is? If the little one dies fast enough, the thrashing might not start any of the others off.”
“They ought to kill Mangler—it seems the more aggressive.”
“It would take far too long to kill a brute that size. Time’s of the essence. Look, here’s the squad.”
Men in black shortcapes, led by a cape-less man with a tall white plume in his hat, flowed speedily along a high catwalk and jumped nimbly down to the clearing. The crowd, cheering, clove to make a runway which the plumed man, after quick survey, designated. Here he stood his men in single file. They tossed back their capes to reveal broad-bit axes with three-quarter hafts strapped across their shoulders.
The leader turned treeward, studied his course to the giants, and sprinted in. Crouching near the smaller tree, he plucked his plume from his hat and with it smote the trunk, leaving a white slash of chalk-dust on it. As he ran back the first man of the squad sprinted forward, axe at ready. With strength matched only by his speed he crouched and gave the trunk two strokes, knocking a fat chunk from the wrestler’s side. Pain rolled through its embattled frame, and wrung new sharps and flats of agony from its strange fruit, those eerie sandwiches of planks and men jutting from the clutches of its reptilian arms. Detritus plopped more thickly on to the sticky litter-heaps below and—unmistakable here and there in the sunlight—fell fine, whispery drizzles of pure blood. As the axemen hit a rhythm, darting dodgily to and from their frenzied, two-stroke assaults, the seamed man shook his head unquietly.
“That little one’s tough, too. It’s going to be a near thing. It’s been so sunny and breezy lately—prime riot conditions. That raging sow! If a bough hadn’t half-brained her, she’d have climbed up after him and carried her assault right into Old Mangler’s lap! They bound and dragged her off first thing, and I hope they give her the gibbet!”
“What do you mean? Is he—?”
“Oh! You didn’t notice Wimfort up there?”
The acrobatic little sot was halfway up Old Mangler. A snarl of laundry line and ropework had him—he hung head down from a shifty cat’s-cradle crazily strung between two restless branches. He coul
dn’t just wiggle loose and fall—the fifty-foot drop would kill him. However, were he unentangled, there was—two boughs away—a branch less mobile than the rest that he might shin down thirty feet to a jumpable height. His fierce but eerily patient efforts to untangle his legs were a spectacle of painful fascination. In tearing his eyes away Hex saw, in the crowd’s front rank, the bathcrone of yesterday. Her walnut-in-white-wool head was tilted back—she was talking to someone trapped above, and… laughing? And what was this? Was that other, pilloried twelve feet overhead, also laughing?
“Back in a second,” he told Sarf. He moved towards the old women, for the crone’s interlocutor was another crone, though her face was festively—even garishly—refeatured with cosmetics. A rampway of rope-strung slats, anchored at either end to flexible and active boughs, had flattened her shack against a straighter, less mobile limb that jutted between them. The woman had got her upper half out of a narrow gap in the pinch of her walls, but then Old Mangler’s wakening rage had stopped her at the hips. Like a bright-painted puppet clutched in wooden fingers, she clapped her hands and sent down squawks of laughter to her friend at some joke the bathcrone had just told.
“Oh peace, peace! If you make me laugh any harder, you’ll unmaiden me before this tree does!”
At this both shrieked anew—the bathcrone doubled at the hip with laughter, echoing how the trapped one too was rocking.
“What rogues and vixens we were!” the bathcrone fondly cried.
“Well, you at least still are, dearie,” the other mocked. “The fruit being somewhat wrinkled, of course, you’ll have fewer nibblers squeezing it.”
A groan, thousand-throated, caught their attention. A downward spasm of a lower branch had brained an axeman going in. Hex just saw the man’s fall—his legs still staggering a moment after his skull flattened and his brain diffused through the circumjacent air. The smaller tree’s pale wound was two feet deep already, and the pain-fluxes it sent skyward were, unavoidably, productive of greater torment for some of the victims. The pain-chorus there kept bansheeing into the upper registers. Ribbons and rivulets of dark blood now thickly zebra-ed its half-cloven trunk. A thicker rain of more grisly trash pattered around it.
“You know, dearie,” the merry, kohl-eyed hag called down in a more musing tone, “I’ve often wondered why I never got back. Remember how we both swore that we would?”
“And I, at least, still might!” the bathcrone crowed, mocking her friend’s previous words. Both laughed again, shaking their heads as at some enduring folly both shared knowledge of. Something in the easy intimacy between these two, a shared remoteness from the enveloping disaster, held Hex half-rapt, watching them as much as the cataclysm.
“It is strange, though, isn’t it—how we never went back?” the victim prompted.
“It is that, dearie.” The bathcrone, grave now, nodded. Something caught her eye. “Oh my! Hang tight, dearie, I fear it may come soon now.”
“I hope it doesn’t hurt too long,” the other said, and gripped her coffin’s edge. Hex saw where a dozen bystanders had been knocked forward off their feet. The Throttler, trailing broken cords from her arms and wrists, surged roaring into the battle zone.
“Wimmy!” she thundered, looking up to her rope-webbed mate.
Wimfort had, in fact, just plucked his left foot free from his body’s last entanglement. Clamping one writhing bough with both legs, he had reached both arms at a perilous stretch and half-hugged the next bough over, also writhing. He had just loosed his straining thighs to make the giddy transfer when his wife’s thunder jolted him with a powerful reflex of recoil and escape. Both his arms’ and legs’ grips equally dislodged, he scrabbled one suspended instant to catch hold with either set of limbs, and then dropped. Skidding twice down the back of a pythonesque branch, he lodged in the crushing crotch of the giant and there, an instant later, was pinched in half.
The Throttler’s anguish tore the sky far above the leafy turmoil.
“Wimmy! Oh my Wimmy! You! You wooden vermin!” She now addressed Old Mangler while, reaching down one hand, she took up the dropped axe of the brained squad-man. “You cankered splinter! Log of Hell! Eat Steel!”
Lunging forth, brushing aside like chaff the axemen who rushed to intercept her, she, at full run, flung the axe two-handed at the tree. Its crescent bit slammed so deep into Old Mangler’s trunk the head was wholly swallowed, and the haft left quivering like a down-grown branchlet of the giant. Geyserlike, a wave of pain billowed up the gargantuan vegetable’s anfractuous skeleton, and made its leafy top snap like a whip. The bathcrone’s friend got half a cheery chirp out, a truncated squawk of good-bye, and then the tree’s surge hauled her up and inwards, breaking her against the bough that racked her, and she died very quickly indeed.
The bathcrone, with a grieving twist, turned her face aside and downward. Looking up, she stared unseeing in Hex’s eyes a moment, till presently humour rekindled in her own.
“You’d best be away, dear Pinkness! This town can’t serve your purpose now.” She pointed to Old Mangler, and turned away.
The giant had killed the Throttler with one downward spasm, the merest footnote to its rage, which was all now bent on its opponent. Before, its reptilian digits had bored and rooted and gouged for their purchase. Now the Mangler’s smallest twiglets lashed and twisted and tore at the smaller tree. Now its vast, knot-muscled arms ripped, wrenched and ransacked the foe. In a moment, its convulsive wrath had torn a major bough from its weakened and half-felled adversary. A forty-foot length of living limb, weighing tons, was ripped free and flung triumphantly abroad by the frenzied titan. Like a sundered lizard’s tail it galvanically thrashed in the air before striking two neighbour trees simultaneously. Its contortions, smashing ground-level shanties to bits, woke both trees to a furious, wrestling assault on anything they touched. Hex jumped to feel his arm clutched.
“Foreigners have no place here now,” Sarf told him. “Soon there’ll be all too little room for all too many workers. Give me an answer about joining us, and I’ll take you to our movement’s headquarters. It’s waterside, and out of this.”
“What’s this, extortion? Give me more details before asking me to decide.” He paused, struck by a thought. “Mainly, I need to know more of the precise location of Slimshur.”
Sarf gave a laughing snort. “Join or not, you should come waterside. Come on and I’ll tell you more.”
Walking seaward was an upstream fight along the cableways, for civic attunement to conjoint action in these crises was intense. They were lithe, however, these half arboreal folk—fluid in the tightest bottlenecks, deft in making room for each other in even the closest defiles. Still, the pair made no better than a stroller’s pace, and the splintery noise of riot could be heard behind them, broadening, probing outwards through the woods, its leaping, cancerous spread sounding even swifter than fire’s.
Most of what would follow would be property damage, for the alarm had long been sounding overhead—a sweet, brisk trumpet melody, its tunefulness, Sarf explained, designed to carry without aggravating the trees. For these were known to share some tenuous, empathetic field, and grow generally more restive at any local flare-up. So the horns’ incongruous sweetness soared overhead, and the slumfolk rivered riotward, as smooth and agile in their urgency as the sprightly brass that summoned them.
The pair made steady way, sometimes sheltering in side eddies.
“What makes them live here?” Hex asked, curiously vexed by the suffering that thrived around him. Sarf grimaced as if to greet a reiterated idiocy.
“Why do the poor live anywhere? Look you, friend scholar. Who consumes the most slother and marinated eel locally? Who owns the ships that carry excess slother and eel abroad? The rich upon yon heights. Where else is it convenient for these poor to live, save in these slums whence they can both farm the littoral and serve the ships as longshoremen?”
“Why not live inland of the heights—come shoreside just to throttle and
sponge?”
“Inland of this range is Vampire Valley, where they ineradicably thrive. And nerve-grass grows so lush there you can’t take a step without the thickest hip-boots.”
En route to the harbour Sarf added various details to his description of his movement’s enterprise, but there was only one which really penetrated to Hex through the excitement of the wakened woods around him: Sarf was fairly sure that Slimshur, while it lay of course more than a thousand leagues east, also lay some few hundred leagues north of Ungullion’s latitude.
“Then your enterprise fits mine as well as any,” Hex announced on hearing this. An ardour woke in him. “It coalesces, Sarf! A certain clue I received yesterday, then this fortuitous… eviction from the city just as you come along with this intriguing northbound mission.”
“Only the most niggling cartographer would call it anything but an eastbound mission.”
“Better and better! Even your casual words ring like omens in my ear. Of that more later. Right now I can say, count me in! What have I to lose? I am rootless, a scholar at large in the world. Men of my kidney do not cringe from the cup of Chance, but boldly grasp the goblet and quaff the dram!”
“Fine. Come on then. When you meet the league and take the oath you should stress your enmity to Snolp and not your scholar-at-large character. I don’t care about your motives. I just want you aware that it’s a dead-serious allegiance you’ll be swearing.”
9
An Early-Morning Incident
“They always wear such an astonished look,” Jazm said, smiling, of the harpooned slouch-calf they towed astern of their skiff. He stowed under a thwart the megaphone through which he had uttered the flatteries that had brought the creature—after the wont of its kind—within their range, bubbling shy disclaimers as it came. Its ears, which had stood erect to catch the fatal blandishments, now floated limp on the placid waters that muttered against the scattered crags through which they rowed. The man at the oars, Hossle, did not want to talk about their catch. He reverted to the talk their sighting of the calf had interrupted.
