The White Tree

  Edward W. Robertson

  © 2011

  GASK, MALLON, & SURROUNDING TERRITORIES

  A larger version of this map may be found at http://www.edwardwrobertson.com/p/map.html

  1

  It was the dog's fault Dante was about to die. The ruins of the chapel hunched behind him, hiding his killer. He was thirty miles from Bressel, ten from the nearest farm, and a world away from help. Despite that, he didn't doubt his body would be found—corpses had gravity to them, as if the vapors released by death were starkly visible to the mind's eye; if the man who'd attacked him didn't find his body lying in the cold grass and colder wind, a farmer or a pilgrim would.

  But they wouldn't know who he was. They wouldn't know he'd left his home because he'd seen a man in a mail shirt bring a dog back to life. When he watched that dog shiver up to its feet, Dante could sense what was happening the way he could smell cold or feel a shadow on his skin. The world was showing him just how big it really was, and that if he wanted it, he would have to come find it.

  He sat up, head swimming. Blood welled from the wounds on his side and thigh, dull black under the overcast night. Been blacker yet inside the chapel—he hadn't known he wasn't alone until the moment the man stabbed him.

  Dante's stomach cramped. He fell back, panting, tears sliding down his temples into his hair. He caught his breath, shrugged off his cloak. The first strip tore so easily he laughed, then stopped cold, staring at the dark chapel. A silhouette against the black wall? The wind hissed through the grass and the pines.

  After binding his wounds, he tried to stand and fell straight down, legs as noodly as the night he'd run out on his one and only whore.

  It was stupid to have come here. Dumb like a severed arm is dumb. But he hadn't been slashed by a looter or squatter—the man had been a soldier, a guard. Guards guarded. It wasn't the chapel of Arawn the man stood sentry over, either. What hadn't been smashed in the Third Scour had been finished off by the following century of weather and vandals. Stonework rubbled the field, fuzzy with moss. Holes shadowed the pitched roof, darker than the clouds. Four generations and a hard day's walk from the last time and place anyone cared about their cult, a man waited in the freezing rain, standing watch over—what?

  Dante braced his knee, shaking, and pulled himself upright. He eased toward the chapel's dark mass, touched damp stone. He drew his knife and walked on, left hand trailing the wall.

  His fingers fell into empty space. He stopped and stared. Later, he'd try to deduce what instinct made him halt and wait, but could only conclude his life had been saved by fear and dumb chance. From the hole in the wall, a man coughed so close Dante could smell his breath.

  The guard emerged into cloud-occluded starlight, gazing at the wind-ruffled trees beyond the grassy clearing. The sword he'd cut Dante with hung from his hip. Probably, he gazed into those woods and imagined the boy he'd injured curled beneath the cold boughs, heat slowly ebbing from his body.

  Dante ducked forward, slashing for the man's hamstrings. The man screamed and fell, rocking in the sodden grass, hands clamped over the backs of his legs. Dante stood over him and wondered what the hell to do now.

  "Where is it?"

  The man's voice caught; he coughed phlegm. "Where's what?"

  Dante leaned a boot into the man's ribs. "The book."

  "What book?"

  "I'll cut your throat," he said. "You'll be a body in the woods. Eaten by badgers."

  "They took it away." The guard pawed a bloody hand at Dante's breeches. Dante jerked back, slapping the hand away, tasting bile. "Years ago," the man continued. "Back to the north with everything else."

  "So they have you here for your health?"

  The guard took a ragged, shuddery breath. He squinted up at Dante. "How old are you?"

  "Would you ask death his age?"

  The man smirked around his pain. "I'd say he looks about fourteen."

  "Sixteen." Dante raised his knife. "My name is Dante Galand. If you don't tell me where the book is, I'm the last man you'll ever see."

  "It's gone."

  "Then so's your stupid life." Dante knelt and dug the blade into the guard's smooth-worn leather shirt. Steel clicked against his breastbone; Dante swallowed down a retch. The guard sucked air between his teeth, eyes white and watery, silent. Dante steadied the knife over his heart. "I hope it's worth it."

  "The basement!"

  "What basement?" Dante glanced at the hole in the wall, the weedy floor beyond. "I didn't see any stairs in there before you tried to kill me."

  "I don't know."

  He jabbed his knife into the man's shoulder. "Tell me!"

  "I remember better when I'm not being cut apart!"

  Dante knelt back, stomach knotting. His leg pulsed hot pain. Blood gleamed on the man's chest. It would be like cleaning a deer, wouldn't it? Focus on the knife's edge. Keep your fingers out of the way. Work fast, think about nothing but the cut. Wash up when you're done.

  "Third row of the graveyard," the guard gasped. "Fourth stone. There's a ladder underneath. Storage—candles, prayer books, mats. I drank the wine. If the book's anywhere, it'll be there."

  They stared at each other in the thin, cool autumn air. Most of the deer Dante'd downed weren't dead when he tracked the blood trail to their fallen bodies. He touched the knife's point to the man's throat. The guard thrashed.

  "You promised!"

  "And you tried to kill me." Dante drove the knife into the man's chest. The guard shuddered, limbs thrashing. Dante leaned down until the body was slack as a summer pond. His stomach spasmed. He felt a thousand feet tall. He wanted to die. He watched the man be dead; frozen, stunned, he waited for someone to tell him what he'd done was right. He touched his own throat. All this for a dog.

  Its body had lain on the bank of the creek some six miles upstream from the village. There the short, skinny trees grew so thick you could barely see the sky. The dog's fur was clumped with blood, its eyes shut, legs rigid. Flies whirred around its nose and lips. A noose trailed from its neck.

  Instinctively, Dante had shrunk behind a birch, gripping its smooth bark. This was his place. No one else came here. Between here and the village lay marshes and ponds, short hills with grass on their crowns and trees in their folds, here and there a one-room hut with the roof staved in. He liked to follow the creek, turning stones in its quiet pools, snatching at waterstriders and poking at snails to watch them suck into their shells. He'd grown too old for this, he knew, and the day he found the dog he hadn't stopped to play with bugs and frogs. He'd just kept walking.

  Leaves crackled from the screen of trees across the creek. Thirty yards upstream from the dog, a man in a bright mail shirt stepped into the gray day and knelt beside the water. He cupped his hand to drink, then flopped back on the bank and plucked burrs from the hem of his black cloak. A silver icon clasped it beneath his neck, rayed like a tree or a star.

  The man stood, stretched, started downstream toward Dante. Before he'd gone ten feet his hand whipped for his sword. Dante breathed through his mouth, rooted. The man stalked forward, then stopped over the dog. He laughed lowly: just a corpse.

  He hunkered down and prodded the blood-clogged fur around its neck. The stream splashed beneath the clouds. The man drew a knife, put it to the dog's neck, and sawed briskly. Dante choked. The man pulled away the severed noose and tossed it into the creek.

  He touched his knife to his left hand. Blood winked from his palm; the air blurred around both hands. Small dark things flocked to his fingers, moths or horseflies or bad ideas, motes that clung and clumped to the blood sliding down the man's wrist, congealing into something round, back, barely translucent. The man lowered his hands to the dog's ribs and the ball of shadows flow
ed into the motionless body. He fell back on his ass and laughed, pressing his bleeding palm to his mouth. The dog kicked its legs.

  The man in the mail shirt got to his feet. After a faltering, stiff-limbed try, so did the dog. The man scratched its ears; it whined; the man laughed again. Still whining, the dog backed up the bank and limped into the trees. The man belted his knife, glanced downcreek, and followed it into the woods.

  At the village, no one had seen the man in the mail shirt and black cloak. The woods and fields looked pale and common. The snails and waterstriders were just bugs. At night, Dante remembered how his dad had made the lights dance in his hands. How he'd told stories of playing bodyguard for dukes and once the prince. In leaner times, and though technically illegal—only royals and the church could employ the wielders of the ether—he'd hire on with shippers to serve as a soldier-doctor. Nine years ago, he'd sailed west.

  Heart pounding, Dante asked the monk of Mennok about living shadows and a silver star or tree. The monk told him to stop shouting, and that before anyone alive in Mallon today had been born, shadow-wielding men carried the book of the White Tree. They had been burnt though, books and men, during the Third Scour, along with their temples and worshippers. As for himself, he'd once read a fragment. And he could tell Dante plenty about the White Tree itself. The rest—that was lost to the ruin of past men.

  The monk retreated into the monastery in search of his notes and two weeks later Dante went to Bressel in search of the book. He spent his pennies bribing the capital's archivists and churchmen one mug at a time until he learned the book wasn't some sort of recipe of spells, but the holy text of the Arawnites, comparable to Gashen's Kalavar or Carvahal's Silver Thief. All known copies had been burnt, but it could be identified by the white tree on its cover.

  So the book of the White Tree had a white tree on it. Useful. Disgusted and empty-handed, out of options, Dante researched the locations of their old temples. He'd come to the chapel in the woods expecting toppled stones and blackened rafters. He'd found that, but he'd stumbled into the guard, too: that and a forgotten cellar.

  Wind rasped the grass between the headstones behind the chapel. The fourth stone of the third row was flinty and black. Dante nudged it with his toe, then dug his fingers under its lip, straining. He pivoted it into the weeds and fell down panting.

  Dante crawled to the edge of the exposed pit and peered into the gloom. The trapped air smelled of dirt and must, faint with the human odor of sweat and skin you could always smell in other people's houses. He shrank back. It wasn't anything as certain as eels or as vague as monsters that slunk through the outlands of his imagination, but something in between: pale things with the tentacles of squid, the intelligence of men, and the cruelty of the stars.

  He leaned over and spat, counting two before it spattered. So it had a bottom. The rungs of a time-smoothed ladder descended from the starlight into blackness. Dante dropped his legs over the edge and scrabbled for a rung. The ladder creaked and he nearly let go just to be done with it all. Hand over hand, he descended, armpits slimy with sweat, until he stood in a circle of faintest light in the musty underchamber.

  His father, before he'd sailed into death or waters too warm to leave, had crafted him a torchstone. Other than his boots, it was the only thing Dante owned worth stealing. He fished the small white marble from his pocket, held it in his palm, and blew. It warmed and glowed and he shielded his eyes. In the soft white light, dust lay thick on slanted shelves bearing bricks of molding cloth and water-spotted candles and braziers and icons. He pawed through the books, found nothing but copies of a manual of common prayer he'd seen in the Library of Bressel. He stuffed the least mildewed in his pack.

  After five minutes he'd swept the small basement wall to wall. After twenty he'd made a second round, piling up the junky relics and prodding the emptied shelves and drawers for hidden compartments. He smashed the rusty iron lock from a scuffed chest and found three sludgy bottles. He searched a third time, slow as he could make himself go, glancing up the ladder for any hint of dawn. At some point the guard's relief would find the body cooling in the yard. Maybe not for days—the chapel was a stiff day's walk from the city and he'd seen no sign of horses—but for all he knew the replacement was already here.

  He was wearing, too. His scabs dribbled blood with every too-quick gesture. He was tired and thirsty and sore. After an hour, the sphere of light began to shrink back toward the torchstone. In thickening shadow, Dante sat down on a desk, noting stupidly it must have been lowered in pieces and nailed together in the cellar itself.

  The light contracted toward the stone and his hope contracted with it. He'd shredded his cloak for bandages. The first frost would come any day. The Library and monasteries had nothing for him. Their scholars were as far from the man who'd resurrected the dog as the torchstone was to the moon. If we went back to Bressel, he'd starve and freeze; if he returned to the village, he'd wonder the rest of his life what he could have done different.

  The moment before the stone winked off and left him blind, a shadow creased the shelves along the far wall.

  He shuffled across the blackened room, bumped into the wooden shelves, and hoisted himself up, candlesticks clattering. The shadow had filled a line just below the shelving's top edge. His fingernails scrubbed the coarse-grained wood, slid into a crack.

  Splinters drove under his nails. The false top fell away, whapping into the floor. Dry paper and earthy leather overwhelmed the scent of dust. Dante reached into the crevice, knowing he wouldn't possibly feel a tug and pull back one less knuckle; his fingers scuffed over a flat, pebbly surface, the first dust-free thing he'd touched since climbing down the ladder. He lifted the book clear and the shelf he stood on snapped in half.

  He shattered another shelf on the way down. He hit hard and stayed down a long time, waiting for the hammerblows to his hip and shoulder to tingle down to a dull ache. By right, he should be broke-legged or paralyzed, trapped beneath the graves. By right, he should be splayed outside the chapel, wounds long done bleeding, his body held down by the wind and the clouds until it merged with the dirt.

  But his bones weren't broken. The guard hadn't killed him. He was bruised and weak and seeping blood from his side, but he stood with a book in his hands. He stashed it in his pack and headed up the ladder. Beneath the charcoal-clouded skies, the book's cover bore the branches of a pale tree.

  Barden, the monk had called it. The White Tree. Grown from a god's knuckle in the twilight valley at the north end of the earth (and wasn't it convenient that it was so far away, where no one could check up on it). The monk claimed it wasn't made of bark and leaves and wood, but grown of bone and bone alone: its knotty trunk hewn from thighs and spines, its long limbs the arcs of ribs and the knobby curls of fleshless fingers, that instead of flowers it budded teeth.

  Over that morbid cover, Dante spooked himself with his own low laughter. Why not just paint a bunch of flames around it, too. Or bind it in skin and ink it in blood—no less ridiculous than all those gleaming bones. Still, he hefted it in his hands, its weight, its age. The power the man in the mail shirt had used on the dog by the creek.

  Goosebumps stood on his shoulders and neck. He willed himself to put the book back in his pack, to haul the gravemarker back over the hole. He straightened, wheezing and sweating, sore in the base of his back and all his joints.

  To the west, the black rim of the mountains hung above the ragged line of the chapel in the clearing. The city of Bressel was a full day's walk for a well-rested man. Dante slunk into the woods, cutting south for the grassed-over path, and as the sun rose and the muscles in his thighs and calves quivered, he balled himself under a squat tree, shaded from the morning's itchy heat.

  He let himself have another look before he slept. By daylight the tree somehow looked less absurd, less crazily morbid, and more like something that could exist if only the world were a slightly stranger place. He had no clue he'd be standing beneath its boughs within ha
lf a year.

  2

  The funny thing about robbery, Dante thought as he crouched in the filth of an unlit alley, is how little the concept of property meant to him once he'd started going to bed hungry. So the watch would hang him if they caught him? That didn't mean he was wrong to do it, that just meant he shouldn't under any circumstances get caught. What kind of rule was so weak it had to be backed up by death threats? Who cares about being hanged when the alternative's starving? And if they really didn't want robbers in the city, why did they build their alleys exactly like the fish-pens that funnel careless salmon into waiting nets?

  He heard footsteps at the other end of the alley and shrank down further. The moment the man passed Dante clubbed him above the ear with the polished horn of his knife's hilt. The man dropped, voiceless. As Dante stripped the body of its purse and the pair of rings on its right hand he noted the man was still breathing. Good for him. The penalty for Dante, if caught, would be the same whether the victim lived or died. He didn't understand that, either. A man of lesser principles would be tempted to kill the man he robbed so he couldn't be identified to the watch. Dante opened the man's jacket in search of a second purse and saw the taut-laced buckskin badge of the tanner's guild. He frowned. He didn't want trouble with guildsmen. They were too close to running the city these days. He hurried to cover the unconscious body with some shredded rags he found among the other garbage, then left the alley in something less than a jog.

  The walk from the chapel had taken three days. He'd managed about ten stiff-legged miles the first day, then no more than two on the second before he collapsed at a waterway so small it was more puddle than lake. He laid down on its cool banks, moaning and burning, and whenever he closed his eyes the crystal-clear faces of men and women he'd never seen swam in his mind's vision. When the fever broke early next morning he shuffled over the roots and rocks toward the city in the east, stopping frequently for rest and water, but he reached Bressel before sunrise and immediately spent the last of his silver on a room for a week. He haunted the corners of its common room those first couple days, snaking from the safety of the wall to nab meat and bread when their owners' heads hit the table or they swayed off to find the privy. That had worked until the boy who worked the mornings threatened to throw him out if he caught him again. Dante nodded, face stony as he suffered the threats of a kid who couldn't be more than fourteen, then retreated to his room to pass the day throwing his knife at the rats that skittered across the floor. It was a pointless task, though; he knew he'd never work up the courage to spit them and set them over the common room fire.