The Skrayling Tree: The Albino in America

by Michael Moorcock

  Friar Tristelunne had met Earl Gunnar, he said, when the captain was a mercenary in Byzantine employ. The monk had been fascinated by his mixture of intelligence and rapacity. Indeed, Gunnar had tried to get him involved in a scheme for robbing a wealthy Irish abbey said to be the home of the gradal sante. But his methods ultimately disgusted the Byzantines, who outlawed him. He had worked for the Turkish sultan for a while but was once again sailing on his own behalf, getting a new expedition ready. He was busy promising every man who would sail with him that even their fleas’ shares would be worth a caliph’s ransom.

  Friar Tristelunne had considered joining the adventure, but he knew Gunnar to be notoriously treacherous. “The chances of returning alive to the civilized world would be slim indeed.” He had a passage on a ship leaving Omis for the Peninsula in a few days’ time. He had decided to strike out for Cordova, where he could get plenty of translation work and study to his heart’s content at their great library, assuming the caliph was still well disposed towards unbelievers.

  The friar, like so many in that region, knew me as Il Pielle d’ Argent or ‘the Silverskin’, and my sword was called Dentanoir. Many avoided me for my sickly looks, but Friar Tristelunne seemed untroubled. He spoke to me with the easiness of an old, affectionate friend. “If, against the good prioress’s advice, you choose the short route to the coast, it might be to your advantage to pause when you meet the Grandparents. They might have something to tell you. They speak briefly but very slowly. There is a trick to hearing them. Each deep note contains the wisdom of a book.”

  “The Grandparents? Your relatives?”

  “They are the relatives of us all,” said the redheaded monk. “They knew the world before God created it. They are the oldest and most intelligent stones in this part of the world. You will recognize them when you see them.”

  While I respected his beliefs and judgment, I did not pay a great deal of attention to his words. I was determined to take the shortest route I could through the mountains and down to the port, so was already prepared to ignore the nun’s warning.

  I thanked the warrior-monk and would have spent longer talking to him if he had not made an excuse and headed for his bed. He could stay here, he said, for only a short time. He had a dream of his own to follow. And I was already engaged for the evening.

  In the morning, the prioress told me he had left before dawn, reminding me to pay attention to old stones. Again she warned me not to cross the Devil’s Garden. “It’s a place of ancient evil,” she said. “Unnatural landscapes, touched by Chaos. Nothing grows there. This is God’s sign to us not to go there. It is where the old pagan gods still lurk.” She had stirred her own imagination; I could tell from her eyes. “Where Pan and his siblings still mock the message of Christ.” She squeezed my hand almost conspiratorially.

  I assured her that I was comfortable enough with most excesses of Chaos. I would, however, watch for treachery and cunning aggression along the way. She kissed me heartily on the lips. Pressing a bag of provisions and sustaining herbs into my hands, she wished me God’s company in my madness. She also insisted on presenting me with a precious text, something from their holy books, which made some mention of the Valley of Death. With this reassuring parchment tucked into my shirt below my chain mail—which I had donned more as a means of quieting the prioress than of guarding against attack in the Devil’s Garden—I kissed her farewell and told her that I was now invulnerable. She answered in Wendish, which I hardly understood. Then in Greek she said, “Fear the Crisis Maker.” It was what she had told me last night when she had laid out the cards for us both to read.

  The other nuns and novices had gathered on the walls of the priory to see me leave. They had, it seemed, all heard tales of the Silverskin. Had their prioress committed the saintly act of sharing her bed with a leper? I suspected those who believed it, believed she must have her place in their Heaven already reserved.

  With respectful irony, I saluted them, bowed and then spurred my massive black stallion, Solomon, along a rocky road populated in those days by deer, bears, goats and boar, all of them hunted by local farmers and bandits, who were frequently one and the same. The road would take me through the Devil’s Garden and down to the western coast.

  The local Slays were in the main a coarse, rather pale people. They had wiped out most of their best blood-stock through complicated and extended family feuding. When they had that romantic touch of Mongolian blood, Dalmatians achieved a stunning beauty.

  Elsewhere powerful cultures had arisen and influenced the world, but these rocks offered solace only to the troubled visionary. Along the coasts were a few pockets of civilization, but most of that was in decay, exhausted by tributes to a dozen powers.

  Isprit itself had been the retirement palace of the Emperor Diocletian, who had famously divided the Roman Empire into three, then left its running to a triumvirate who quarreled and killed one another, as well as Diocletian’s daughter. His confusing stamp on the politics of the region would last for millennia. The hapless ex-emperor, who had hoped to balance power between the various warring factions, was the last real inheritor of Caesar’s authority. Now the old Empire was sustained chiefly by those who had rallied to Charlemagne after he had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope. Their translation of their greed for booty into a chivalric ideal created an extraordinary expansion whose conquests, frequently under the banner of religious reform, would not stop until they owned the Earth. Already the Normans had imposed their haughty and efficient feudalism onto much of France and England. They in turn would carry these methods across the world. Opinion in Rome agreed that the unruly Saxons and Angles needed the strong hand of the Dukes of Normandy to form them into a nation which might one day balance the power of the Holy Roman Emperor.

  At the abbey, in exchange for their hospitality, I had retailed the gossip of the day. Of course, I had only so much curiosity about their world, and most of that related to my search. But much small talk is picked up in the taverns, which a wanderer like myself, largely shunned by all, is frequently forced to use. I had little interest in the details of these peoples’ history. It was raw and unsophisticated compared to that of mine, and I was still Melnibonéan enough to feel a superiority to mortals of most persuasions.

  Through my senses Count Ulric had the opportunity to witness the genesis of his clan into a nation, and in his dreams he experienced my dreams as if they were his own. He dreamed my dream as I dreamed his. But he did not live my dream as I did, and I suspect he remembers even less. How much he chooses to remember is his own affair.

  The late summer sun was surprisingly hot on my overarmored head when I became aware of the nature of the landscape changing. The crags were sharper, the cliffs more terraced, and little streams echoed through deep valleys, giving the place an unearthly music. Clearly I had entered the Devil’s Garden. The shale became much harder for my horse to negotiate.

  The stark landscape was astonishingly beautiful. Little grew here. The smell of the occasional fir invigorated me. The great limestone crags sparkled in the summer sunshine. All the trails were treacherous. Narrow rivers dancing with vivid life poured in falls from level to level among strangely shaped rocks.

  The sun cast dense shadows, contrasting extremes of black and white, on the massive glittering cliffs which rose into the sky. Sudden lakes, icy blue beneath the sun, were turned by passing clouds into blinding sheets of reflective steel. Rock pools shone like coral in their delicacy of color. Groves of dark blue pines and fleshy oaks grew in the few spots of soil. Frequently I heard the rattle of loose rocks as a goat leaped for cover. Crumbling earth on worn stone. Ferns and willowherb growing in crevices. These were the familiar landscapes of a childhood when, as von Bek, I had holidayed here with my family, who kept a villa on the coast. It was also reminiscent of the hinterland of Melniboné, where the Phoorn, our dragon allies, had built their first magnificent city from fire and rock and little else.

  As the day grew hotte
r still, the steady blue sky threw extremes of color everywhere. I began to feel an unlikely nostalgia. The experience was not entirely pleasant. All I understood was a sense of invasion, as if other intelligences attacked my own. Not merely my dream self intruded, but something older and heavier, something which reminded me again of Mu Ooria and invoked images, memories of events which perhaps had not yet even occurred in the history of this particular world.

  Used to controlling myself in such circumstances, I was still very uneasy. My horse, Solomon, too, was growing nervous, perhaps reflecting my own mood. I wanted to get out of the place as soon as possible. Doggedly, we continued westward, the horse holding with uncanny ease to the path. Loose grey shale skittered and bounced steeply away from us. Sometimes it seemed we clung to the walls of the rock like lizards, staring down at the radically angled slopes, the glittering, weirdly colored waters far below.

  That night I camped in a natural cave, having first made sure it was not the castle of an incumbent bear. It had not seen any kind of human settlement. Nothing in this landscape could sustain human life.

  I rose early in the morning, watered, fed and saddled Solomon, set my war-gear about me, changed my helmet for a hood, and again was struck by the supernatural quality of the valley. At the far end in the distance was a wide, shimmering lake.

  As I urged Solomon forward, I sensed other presences. I knew the smell of them, the weight of them. I had instinctive respect for them even though I was not really conscious of their identity. They were nearby and they were many. That was all I could be sure about. Beings seemingly older than the Off-Moo, who had seen every stage of the Earth’s history. They remembered the moment when they had been expelled from the Sun’s gassy Eden to begin the forming of this planet.

  Even the stars of this world’s firmament were subtly different from mine. I knew it would be better to learn what the Devil’s Garden had to tell me rather than impose my own Melnibonéan speculation on the place. I sensed that this had once been a great battlefield. Here Law and Chaos had warred as they had never warred until now. It was one of the oldest supernaturally inhabited regions in this realm. It was one of the most remote. It was one of the most enduring. I was at last recognizing it for what it was. Its denizens were unaffected by the major movements of human history. They were philosophical beings who had witnessed so much more than any others, and they had seen all human ideals brought low by human folly. Yet they were incapable of cynicism. I knew them, just as I knew their young cousins, still hiding goat-footed in the rocks, still sliding in and out of trees and streams, still asking favors of Nature rather than making demands on her, the old godlings whom the Greeks had known, half-mortals who sensed their own extinction. These ancient creatures had such old, slow thought processes they were all but undetectable, yet they were the Earth’s memory.

  Their name for themselves took several mortal lifetimes to pronounce. Adepts gave them considerable attention. Few consulted them, though more knew how. Their answers were usually slowly considered, and the one who had asked could be dead before they reached a conclusion. When they slept it was for millions of years. When they awoke it might be for a few seconds. And they never wasted words. I was beginning to understand what Friar Tristelunne had hinted at.

  I had passed part of my apprenticeship among such ancients, but I was still uneasy. If Moonglum had been with me, he would have expressed reasonable fear and I should have mocked him for it, but now I was alone. I had survived a hundred great fights with less fear than now.

  As I dismounted and led Solomon down to one of the deep valley streams to drink, I looked around me and saw that the sides had widened. I was effectively in a steep, white amphitheater, scarcely touched by vegetation. A few hardy wildflowers grew here and there, but otherwise the great glade was empty save for the carpet of soft green itself. It had that cultivated atmosphere about its lawns which I had noticed in other places where sheep and goats habitually grazed. Here the limestone crags had split away. Much of the rock stood like tall independent heads or figures. Fancifully I thought I detected expressions. Emotions, life of various kinds, stirred in those huge natural pillars. It was easy to see how the region was rife with tales of ogres.

  Old maps referred to the place as Trollheim. Half the legendary giants of Europe were believed to originate here. Remembering the redheaded priest’s words, I sought for inscriptions on the stones. I could read Greek, Latin, Arabic easily but had far more trouble with some other languages.

  I found no inscriptions. As I ran my hands over the surface of the rock, however, I felt a distinct but very deep vibration, a kind of grumbling, as if I had awakened a sluggish hive. I dropped my hand and stepped back, seeing faces everywhere in the high cliffs, feeling a certain panic. Should these rocks prove sentient and antagonistic, I knew I could not cut myself clear with my sword.

  Though my senses were sharper than most mortals’, the horse heard the sound before I did. Solomon snorted and whinnied. Then I detected it. A deep, even rumbling, as if from far underground. It rose rapidly to a heavy hum, and the whole valley swayed to it. All the hillsides shimmered with movement. The stones were dancing. They were singing. Then the note deepened again, and I felt a shock as tremendous vitality flooded up to fill the canyon, as if Mother Earth herself were coming awake.

  Solomon, who had been unusually quiet, now voiced a huge snort. I could see that his huge back legs were trembling, and his eyes had begun to dilate badly. My brave beast was actually too terrified to move. His enemy seemed everywhere.

  My own emotions were quieter. I still found it difficult to coordinate my actions. Then, quite suddenly, the whole vale became suffused with an extraordinary sense of benign good will.

  A single enormous throb! The great slow heart of the world had given a beat. The vibrations filled my body with joy and meaning. My hand fell away from my sword, where it had remained from habit. Now with wizard’s eyes I saw their faces. I was an actor on a stage. These stones were my audience. Rank upon rank of them, rising up the flanks of the vale, their eyes hidden in deep shadow, their mouths showing a kind of eternal irony that was not judgmental of humanity yet spoke of a wisdom born of their age. As gases they had been conscious. As molten lava they had been wise. As the still-animate crust of the planet they had been moral. And as mountains they were contemplative. That consciousness, old and slow as it was, carried their experience. Their lives had been devoted, down the millions of millennia, to observation and understanding.

  Something of great importance to the fate of the multiverse, to their world and my own, had stirred them to speak. Little of their words could be heard by any mortal ear.

  They spoke four words, and those words took four days to utter; but that was not our only communication. The mighty heads looked down at me. They studied me and compared me and no doubt recalled all the many others who, seeking their wisdom, had come this way. My horse grew calm and cropped at the grass. I sat and listened to these Grandfathers and Grandmothers, the very spirits of our origin, who in their roaring youth had fled away from the parent Sun to form the planets.

  Their love of life had slowed, but it had not faded. Their thoughts were as substantially concentrated as their physical forms. Each word translated became several lines in even the most laconic of languages. In comparison old Melnibonéan was baroque and clumsy. Only a trained ear could detect the slight differences of tone. I was forced to recall an old spell and slow down my own perception of time. It was the only way to understand them.

  With what they communicated supernaturally, I began to understand a little of what they told me. Why these first stone men and women of the world had chosen to speak to me I did not know. I understood, however, that this was an important part of my dream. I sat, and I immersed myself in a strange, but not unpleasant, communication. In those four days, heedless now of Gunnar’s imminent leaving, I listened to the stones.

  The first word the Grandparents spoke was:

  WHERE THE WINDS MEET


  A WOMAN’S HORNS DEFY

  THE DESTROYER OF DESTINY

  AND MAKE HER YOUR BEST ALLY

  I had an image of a white beast, a lake, a glittering building, the whole lying in another natural amphitheater. I knew this must be my destination, where I would discover the meaning of my dream.

  The second word the Grandparents spoke was:

  THE BLADE PIVOTS THE BALANCE

  THE BOWL SUSTAINS IT

  THE DRAGON IS YOUR FRIEND

  I had the impression of a sword blade without a hilt, its tip immersed in some kind of basin while in the shadows a great, yellow eye opened to regard me.

  The third word the Grandparents spoke was:

  ROOT AND BRANCH THE TREE SUSTAINS

  BALANCE AND ALL LIFE MAINTAINS

  I saw an enormous tree, a spreading oak, whose branches seemed to shelter the world. Its roots went deep into the core of the Earth. Its branches covered another image, which was the same thing in a different form. I knew it was the Cosmic Balance.

  And the fourth word the Grandparents spoke was:

  GO MAKE TRUE

  For a fleeting moment I received a glorious image: a great green oak tree against a sky of burnished silver. Then that special vibrancy faded, leaving only the natural grandeur of the stark cliffs and the soft grass below. The Grandparents were silent. Already they returned to sleep. With a sense of added burden rather than revelation I paid them my respects. I assured them I would think upon their words. I admitted to myself that they made little sense. Had the rocks reached a state of senility?

  Suddenly I was struck by the stupidity of my excursion. I had crossed the Devil’s Garden to save time. I had then lost a day rather than gained one. The Norseman might already be leaving Isprit. From the slowest of mortals, I became one of the fastest. I needed my stallion to do his best.