Starwater Strains

by Gene Wolfe

  “How do you know I’ll need a sword?” The question amused him because he had never expected to say anything of the sort.

  There was no slender girl, only the slender tree. I’m hallucinating, he thought. I’ve never done that in my life, always been less interested in patients’ hallucinations than I should have been. This is fascinating.

  He walked for miles, south as well as he could judge. His clothes, he discovered, had no pockets (like the orange jumpsuits) but the purse on his belt held two small coins, and there was a knife on his belt as well, a short, single-edged knife with a broad, thick blade.

  A phallic symbol? He had never really given much credence to those.

  It was a good, sharp phallic symbol in any event; he used it very carefully to open nuts he brought down by throwing sticks. The nutmeat was small but good; the nuts large and satanically hard. He nicked a finger in spite of all his care, and walked on.

  The sun was almost down when he found the road, a faint dirt road such as men make for themselves where the county will not make a road for them, a single, narrow, dusty track. It revived his optimism, and he followed it with enthusiasm, up a low hill and into a deep valley where the declining sun was lost behind wilder, more ragged hills, so that his own steps brought evening.

  For hours after that he followed the road still, by starlight and moonlight. The moon, a small and pearl-like moon as round as a button, set; another rose, larger and holding a leering face. Leering or not, it shed more light and he resolved to press on.

  Animals that were not wolves howled and bellowed in the forest to either side. As he passed a lightning-blasted tree, he heard a roar he felt certain had come from the throat of a tiger.

  At last there came a time when he could walk no longer. He sat down, careless of where he sat, and pulled off the soft boots and sodden woolen stockings. His feet had blistered. They hurt, and were infinitely tired. His legs ached and throbbed so that, exhausted though he was, whole minutes passed before he slept.

  The light woke him, or nothing. Twilight—nearly night, he thought. Or dawn, perhaps. Dawn seemed more likely. The sun was out of sight behind the hills. He began to walk again, saw a lightning-blasted tree and turned about. He had been that way, and there was nothing save big trees robed in moss.

  Far away, a tiger roared.

  The road wound deeper and deeper into the valley, and it was night. Very near, just around the next bend, a woman screamed.

  He was running toward it even as he told himself that he must run away from it. She screamed again, stirring an instinct he had not known he possessed. A dark form bent above—what? A bundle of rags? A mossy trunk? He saw the flash of fangs, plunged the short blade into something that was not quite a boar, and was thrown backward. He kicked with both feet and somehow managed to regain those feet.

  A half-clothed, frantic woman thrust a cudgel at him. He seized it and struck the beast, great blows with a four-foot stick as heavy as iron, blows each of which would have killed a man. It fled at last, but not before he had felt its claws.

  It was twilight when he woke again, and a woman held his head in her lap and sang, the wordless crooning of wind in treetops. He sat up, weak, sore, and sick.

  “I heal,” she told him. “There is a spring whose waters give strength.” With her help he got to his feet, steadying himself with the broken limb with which he had beaten the beast. She wept beside him; he longed to comfort her and tried to as clumsily as any other man.

  The spring rose among rocks; it was deep, or at least the light of a small and pearl-like moon made it appear so. He drank and drank, and it was cold and pure and good, and it did indeed make him stronger, as she had promised. “I lost some blood, I think,” he said.

  She nodded without speaking. Her robe of green velvet left a shoulder bare.

  “Did it hurt you?”

  “She killed my husband.” The woman in the green velvet robe shrugged, and he knew her sorrow was too deep for words.

  “We’ll bury him,” he said.

  She shook her head. “He would not have wanted that. What he would have wanted is what he now has, to lie in the forest until Nature returns him to the soil. In time, new growth may spring from his root. I hope so.”

  He stared at her for a moment, then recalled that David had sprung from the root of Jesse. “What will you do now?”

  “Follow you.” She glanced at the heavy limb with which he had routed the beast. “As long as you have that, and longer. If I try to go with you, will you drive me away? Throw things?”

  “Of course not.” He picked up the limb and examined the ragged breaks at its ends; he could scarcely see them, so deep was the twilight, and his fingers told him more than his eyes. “This could use trimming,” he said. “I think I left my knife in that animal, whatever it was, but it may have fallen out. If you’d rather stay here while I go back to look for it … ?”

  She shook her head, putting her arm through his. She smelled earthy and sweet, he thought, an odor he associated with Boy Scouts and camping out. It was a clean perfume he had not smelled in a long, long time and was happy to greet again.

  He could not have found the place without her, a fact he admitted to himself long before they found it. “It might be better if we wait’l sunup,” he. said. “I doubt that we can find my knife in the dark, even if it’s here.”

  “If you want to lie down, I will lie with you gladly,” she told him, “but the sun will not rise for many rains.”

  “Then I want to lie down,” he said. “I’m so tired I’ve stopped being hungry.”

  “Rest. I will weep for my husband first.”

  He did not, but followed her to a fallen tree a few steps away.

  She knelt beside it. “They strip away the bark to eat,” she said, “and when the tree is ringed, he dies.”

  A tear fell on his hand, and he put his arm around her. She was—she has been, he told himself—a holy woman in some strange cult in which girls who had been taught to accept such things were married to trees. That seemed plain enough, but he found it hard to imagine a place where such things happened. Where was he, in California? And how had he gotten here?

  “We will rest now,” she said at last.

  “And I’ll comfort you,” he told her, to which she only nodded and wept.

  She spread her gown on the ground. They lay upon it together, and it was soft, furry, and warm. When they were cuddled as one, spoon-fashion his mother would have said, her gown folded itself over them; that covering, too, was warm, furry, and soft.

  For a time she wept on, but he kissed her shoulders and the back of her neck and drew her to him, and her weeping ceased.

  The beast woke him, looming above him, huge and dark, not with a sound (for it was terribly silent) or the brute, dull claws that caressed his torn face, but by the animal stink of it. It was, he decided later, half ape and half bear.

  “I have your knife,” the beast said, “and I’ve cleaned it for you. I thought you’d like to have it back.”

  He froze, certain that he was about to receive it in the chest; half a minute, perhaps, passed until he realized that the beast we holding it out to him in darkness.

  Too numb to speak, he accepted it, pulled it gingerly below the strange stuff covering him, and returned it to its sheath.

  “I was starving,” the beast said. “You have to understand that. Starving, and I attacked a tree. That was all.”

  He spoke without thinking. “If you attacked me now, there wouldn’t be much I could do.”

  “No,” the beast said, “but you don’t have to worry. I killed farther down.” It paused. “We kill only when we have to eat. We’re not like the Night People. Not even like you Sun People.”

  He was about to say that it had attacked the woman, but it vanished into the shadows before he could speak.

  He slept again until the woman awakened him. They made love, and washed afterward in a small, cold creek. “Is it always night here?” he asked her.<
br />
  “No,” she said.

  She had brought the broken limb with which he had beaten the beast; he carried it as they walked deeper into the valley. He had lost the road in the night, and they went by almost invisible forest paths.

  “I don’t suppose you know where we could get some breakfast?” he asked her.

  She only shook her head.

  “What are Sun People?”

  “You are,” she told him.

  “Then you must be a Sun Person too.”

  “I am a Tree Person,” she said.

  A long while after that, while they were looking for a place where they could ford the river, she asked where he had come from.

  “I’m not even sure,” he said, and then, as if a fact that explained nothing explained everything, he added, “I’m a psychiatrist.”

  She nodded encouragingly; the trees were beginning to drop their leaves. One blew past her face.

  “I had an office in the Brighton Hills Mall,” he said. “It was very upscale. Everything there was very upscale. Orthodontists and furriers, and so on. Saks. Gucci. I charged—well, it doesn’t matter.”

  Memories flooding back.

  “I went to prison. I remember now. That’s what happened.”

  “What is prison?” she asked.

  They forded the river. It seemed darker than ever on the other side, but they were going toward the light, which cheered him. Three men attacked them; he fought with the desperate courage of a man who knows he must win or die, killing two with shattering blows of the severed limb. The third fled.

  He picked up the sword one had drawn against him. “A woman was going to get me a sword like this a while ago,” he said, “and I didn’t want it. I want it now.”

  “I don’t like it,” the woman with him told him.

  He searched the dead men, finding soft, thin cakes that were not quite tortillas, and dried meat. “I don’t eat that,” she said when he tried to give her half.

  “For Sun People?”

  “They were Night People.”

  He ate everything, learning in the process that he was ravenous. His meal finished (it had not taken long) he picked up the sword once more and examined it. “Yesterday …”

  Had it really been yesterday? Two days before? Three? He had gone from a changeless afternoon to an unchanging twilight.

  “You said you didn’t like them,” he told the woman. “I didn’t either. To tell you the truth, I thought they were silly. When you’ve needed something and not had it, you don’t think it’s silly anymore, I suppose. If I had a gun, I don’t think I’d know what to do with it. I have a pretty good idea of what to do with this.”

  “I am of trees,” the woman said, “that wars on trees.”

  “I’m flesh,” he told her, “flesh is what this war’s on, not wood. I want it just the same.”

  The blade was somewhat discolored save where it had been whetted sharp, as long as his arm and three fingers wide. He tried to think what that would be in inches and failed.

  He made cuts in air.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Please.”

  “Then I won’t,” he promised her. The grip was bone, the guard and pommel iron. “Do you know,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever told you my name, or asked yours. I’m Tuck.”

  “Nerys.” She hesitated. “I am called Nerys. Is that a good name?”

  He smiled. “Of course.” She seemed to expect something more, so he held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  She took it, clearly uncertain as to what she was to do with it. “May I see your sword, Tuck?”

  “Certainly.” When she released his hand, he held out the sword, hilt-first.

  She took it, holding it level between them. “Have I been a good friend to you, Tuck?”

  “A very good friend,” he said.

  “I am going to ask a favor. It is a small thing, and only one favor—the only one I will ask. Will you promise, before you hear it, to do me this favor?”

  He nodded. “You have my word, Nerys. If I can do it, I will.”

  “You can. That club you have borne was my dead husband’s arm. I have loved you doubly because you bore it, even as he. Should the bone of this sword fail, you must replace it with wood from his arm.”

  He was about to say that it was not likely a bone hilt would fail when he noticed that fine dust was cascading from the hand that gripped the hilt. He said, “I will—trust me,” instead.

  She returned the sword to him, and he looked down at the grip. It had been smooth and polished, he felt sure; it was rough now, and hairy with splinters. He rubbed it, and bone dust fell. He drew his knife, and the bone split and crumbled under the edge, falling away until nothing remained save the steel spike that held the iron pommel.

  When he looked up, she had gone. He called her name and searched for her in a hundred places, and at last he sat down with the club that had served him so well and cut away the smaller end. The pommel was screwed tightly to its steel spike; he had to carve a sort of wrench of the tough wood before he could unscrew it. But he did at last, and managed, with his knife, the end of the spike, and the sharp point of the sword itself, to bore a passage for the spike through the rough wooden grip he had carved.

  When the work was done and the iron pommel back in place, he felt that a full day had passed—this though the twilight seemed neither deeper nor lighter than it had been. “I must go on for a few more miles today at least,” he told himself. “If I don’t reach civilization soon, I’ll starve.” He was about to throw aside his shortened club when he felt (a deep and somehow peaceful emotion he could never have put into words) that it wished to remain.

  He picked it up and ran his hands over the smooth bark, seeing it for the first time as it saw itself: a mutilated tree. He dug a hole in the soft forest loam with the blade of a larger and coarser knife the other dead man had borne, and planted the big end of the club that was no longer his in it; then he dug shallow graves for the two men, one to either side of the thick cutting he had planted, and laid them in their graves and covered them with earth, and the earth with leaves and fallen branches. When all that was accomplished (and it seemed neither darker then nor lighter) he felt that he should pray. He had never been a religious man, but he did his best.

  He had dusted his hands as well as he could and was on the point of leaving when he caught sight of the larger, coarser knife and realized that he had neglected to inter it with its owner. Unwilling to undo much of what he had only just finished, he put it through his belt.

  Which was well. The beast had said it had killed; he found its kill by the odor of rotting flesh—a child, a girl, he decided, of perhaps fourteen. Save for her eyes, her head was largely intact. Little remained of the rest but scattered bones. He collected as many as he could, and began to dig, muttering, “Poor kid,” over and over.

  “Are you going to bury those here?” The voice was a girl’s.

  He looked behind him and saw her half concealed by shrubs.

  “I can show you a place,” there was a long pause, “that she’d like better.”

  “You can?” He had not looked at her as he spoke, and there was no reply. When he looked around at last, she was gone.

  A dress that had once, perhaps, been ankle-length had been reduced to a bloodstained rag. He gathered the bones and the head into it as well as he could, though he had been unable to find one thighbone and the other protruded no matter what he did.

  Then he was ready to leave, but the girl had not returned. He decided to press forward carrying the bones and the head in the hope of finding her, but to bury them when he came upon a particularly suitable spot.

  The land rose, and some light returned. At last he found a hut that was almost a small house, with three plots of vegetables on three bits of almostlevel land. There were roots he did not know, and beans like no beans he had ever seen that most certainly could not be eaten raw. He tasted two of the roots, and decided that he could eat the second
, which he did, scraping the dirt away with his coarse knife.

  Behind him, the girl’s voice said, “This is where.”

  She stood at the door of the hut, starved and insubstantial—“Like a bad hologram” was the way he put it to himself. “There?” he said. “Right where you are now?”

  “At my feet.”

  He nodded, knelt at her feet, and began to dig. “Did you know her?”

  “I thought I did.”

  A hole a foot by two feet would be sufficient, he decided. He roughed it out with the knife blade and began to deepen it. “It’s cold here.”

  “That’s me,” the girl said. She sounded sad.

  “You’re cold?” He looked up.

  “Maybe you’d give me a little blood?”

  She had sounded serious. “If you mean a transfusion … ?”

  “You could just scratch a little line on your arm.” She paused, and in a moment he realized that she was trying to take a deep breath but could not breathe. “A few drops? Please?” (Another deep breath that would not come.) “I’ll be your friend forever. I swear it!”

  He paused, sickened by realization that he had lost utterly the life he had once known. This was a new life, in a new place; and no child—not even she—could have been more hapless and forlorn. “Friends answer questions for their friends,” he said slowly. “Will you answer questions for me? Not just one question, or two, but a great many?”

  “Yes!”

  “I need help,” he continued, “figuring out who I am and where I am. You’ll help me? As much as you possibly can?”

  “Yes!”

  “Okay.” He stood up and took the short, broad-bladed knife from its sheath on his belt. “This isn’t sterile, I’m sure.” He wiped it on his sleeve. “I wish we had some way to sterilize it. But we don’t, and clean steel will have to do.” Carefully and slowly, he reopened the cut in his finger.

  Seconds passed before the first drops of blood appeared. When they did, she bent over the cut eagerly, not licking or sucking it as he had expected but wetting a finger and smearing her nostrils again and again. “Deeper? Please? Just a little deeper? It won’t hurt you.”