The Skrayling Tree (11 page)

I had been taught that the multiverse had no center, just as an animal or a tree had no center. Yet if the multiverse had
a soul, that was what Ayanawatta seemed to be describing. If the multiplicity of everything was symbolized in a living metaphor,
there was no reason the
multiverse should not possess a soul. I went to unroll my buffalo robe and wrap myself against the cold.

Ayanawatta was enjoying his pipe more than usual. He lay on his side, staring up at a three-quarter moon over which thin,
white clouds floated on a steady breeze from the south. He wore his soft buckskin shirt against the cold. It was of very fine
workmanship, decorated with semiprecious beads and dyed porcupine quills, like the leggings and the fur-trimmed cap he also
pulled on against the night’s chill. Again I had the impression of a well-to-do Victorian gentleman adventurer making the
best of the wilderness.

He had already removed and stored his eagle feathers in a hollow tube he carried for the purpose, but he still wore his long
earrings and studs. His elaborate tattoos did nothing but enhance his refined, sensitive features. He took a deep pull from
the pipe before handing me the bowl into which I placed my own reed to draw up the smoke. “What if that tree-soul which the
Kakatanawa guard were the sum of all our souls?”

I agreed that this was a philosophical possibility.

“What if the sum of all our souls was the price we paid should that tree die?” he continued significantly.

I drew the mixture into my lungs. I tasted mint, rosemary, willow, sage. I inhaled a herb garden and forest combined! Unlike
tobacco, this spread lightness and well-being through my whole body. “Is that what we are fighting for?” I asked, handing
him back the bowl.

He sighed. “I think it is. When Law goes mad and Chaos is the Balance’s only defense, some believe we are already conquered.”

“You do not agree?”

“Of course not. I have made my spirit-quest into my future. I understand how I must play my part in restoring the Balance.
I studied for four years and in four realms. I learned how to dream of my own future and summon for myself both flesh and
form. I have read my own story in the books of the horse-people. I have heard my story called a false one. But if I give it
life, I will redeem it. I will respect the people it sought to celebrate. I will bring respect to both the singer and the
song.”

He took another long, delicious pull on the pipe. He was gravely determined. “I know what I must do to fulfill my spiritual
destiny. I must live my story as it is written. Our rituals are the rituals of order. I am working to give credible power
back to Law and to fight those forces which would disrupt the Balance forever. Like you, I serve neither Law nor Chaos. I
am, in the eyes of a mukhamirim, a Knight of the Balance.” He let the smoke from his lungs pour out to join that of our small
fire, curling gracefully towards the moon. “I have that lust for harmony, unity and justice which consumes so many of us.”

The firelight caught his gold and copper, reflected in his glowing skin, drew contrasting shadows. I was, in spite of myself,
enormously attracted to him, but I did not fear the attraction. Both of us had been well schooled in self-control.

“It is sometimes hard to know,” I said, “where to place one’s loyalty …”

He experienced no such ambiguities. He had taken his dream journey. “My story is already written. I have
read it, after all. Now I must follow it. That is the price you pay for such a vision. I know what I must do to make sure
the story comes true in every possible realm of the multiverse. Thus I’ll achieve that ultimate harmony we all desire more
than life or death!”

Feeling overwhelmed by my own thoughts, I again took the first watch, listening with an attention which had once been habitual.
But I was certain Klosterheim and his pygmies were not out there.

I was ready for sleep when I woke Ayanawatta to take his watch. He settled himself comfortably against Bes’s gently rising
and falling chest and filled another pipe. For all his appearance of indolence, I knew that every sense was alert. He had
the air of all true outdoors folk, of being as securely comfortable in that vast wilderness under the moon and stars as another
might be in the luxury of an urban living room.

The last thing I saw before I went to sleep was that broad, reassuring face, its tattoos telling the tale of his life journey,
staring contentedly at the sky, confident of his ability to live up to everything his dream demanded of him.

In the morning Bes was restless. We washed and ate rapidly and were soon mounted again. We let the mammoth take her own course,
since she evidently had a better idea than we where to find her master.

The only weapon White Crow had taken was his black-bladed lance.

I feared for him. “He might have been overwhelmed by the pygmies.”

Ayanawatta was unworried. “With those senses of
his, he can hear anything coming. But there is always the chance he’s met with an accident. If so, he is not far from here.
Bes can find him if we cannot.”

By noon we had yet to see a sign of White Crow. Bes kept moving steadily towards the mountains, following the gentle curves
of the landscape. Sometimes we could see for miles across the rolling drumlins. At other times we traveled through shallow
valleys. Occasionally Bes paused, lifting her wide, curving tusks against the sky, her relatively small ears moving to follow
a sound. Satisfied, she would then move on.

It was close to evening before Bes slowly brought her massive body to a halt and began to scent at the air with her trunk.
Made long and dark by the sun, our shadows followed us like gigantic ghosts.

Once more Bes’s ears waved back and forth. She seemed to hear something she had been hoping for and strained towards the source
of the sound. We, of course, let her have her head. She began to move gradually to the east, to our right, slowly picking
up speed until she was striding across the prairie at what amounted to a canter.

In the distance now I heard a strange mixture of noises. Something between the honking of geese and the hissing of snakes,
mixed with a gurgling rumble which sounded like the first eruptions of a volcano.

All of a sudden White Crow appeared before us, waving his lance in triumph, grinning and shouting.

“I’ve found him again! Quickly, let’s not lose him.” He began running beside the mammoth, keeping easy pace with her.

I heard the noise again, but louder. I caught a sweet, familiar smell as we crested a broad, sweeping hill. Setting behind
the mountains, the sun turned the whole scene blood red. And there we saw White Crow’s intended prey.

The size of a three-story building, its brilliant feathered ruff was flaming with a thousand hues in that deepening light.
I had never seen so much color on one animal. Dazzling peacock feathers blazed purple, scarlet and gold, emerald and ruby
and sapphire. Such beautiful plumage was the finery of a creature whose nightmare features should have disappeared from the
Earth countless millions of years before. Its brown-black beak looked as if it had been carved from a gigantic block of mahogany.
Above the beak two terrible brilliant yellow eyes glared, each the size of a dressing mirror. The mouth snapped and clacked,
streaming with pale green saliva. As we watched, the thing lifted a yelping prairie fox in its right front claw and stuffed
it into its maw, gagging as it swallowed.

The creature had a hungry, half-crazed look to it. It stretched its long neck down to the ground and sniffed, as if hoping
to find food it had overlooked. It then stood upright on massive back feet which had a somewhat birdlike appearance, though
its forepaws more closely resembled lizard claws.

Any one of the reptile’s neck feathers, erect now as he sensed our presence, was the height of a tall man and layered in rich
reds, yellows, purples and greens. Ulric would have called it a dinosaur, but to me it was a cross between a huge bird and
a giant lizard, its feathered tail
train being by far its longest part. Clearly it was a link with the dinosaur ancestors of our modern birds.

As we watched, the tail slashed back and forth like a scythe, cutting and trampling great swathes in the wild corn. I sniffed
and realized it was the sweet scent I had smelled earlier. Suddenly awash with totally inappropriate emotions, I longed for
the cornfields of the farm where I grew up during the period of my mother’s attempted retirement.

“I think,” said White Crow regretfully, climbing up into the saddle to sit with us, “I am going to have to kill him.”

Do you live the tale,

Or does the tale live you?

W
HELDRAKE
,

“The Teller or the Tale”

W
hy kill him?” I asked. “He is offering us no harm.”

“He is an invader here,” said White Crow. “But that is the business of those who hunt this land. He has moved north with the
warming. That is not why he will die.” He added almost as an aside, “Many years ago, he ate my father.”

The shock which came with this news was horrible. The first time I saw this youth, he had called Ulric “Father.”

There was nothing to do or say. My reaction was entirely subjective. For all their resemblance it was
obvious there was no close connection between Ulric and White Crow.

“But that is not why we hunt him,” Ayanawatta reminded him gently. “We hunt him for what your father carried when he was eaten.”

“What was that?” I asked before I thought better of it.

But White Crow answered with apparent easiness, staring at the thing which rattled its huge ruff in frustration and screamed
its hunger. “Oh, some medicine he had with him when the
kenabik
took him.”

His tone was so inappropriate that I glanced hard at his face. It was a mask.

The feathered dinosaur had our scent, but the blustering breeze was varying and dropping. He kept losing it, turning this
way and that and grunting to himself, drooling. He hardly knew what he was smelling. He seemed an inexpert hunter. His nostrils
were heavy with ill health. His breathing was a rasp.

The last of the sun now poured over the mountains and drenched the plain with deep light. Big clouds came in behind us with
a stronger wind, bringing more rain. Eventually the creature began to lumber away from us, then turned and came back for a
few paces. He was still not sure what he scented. He might have been shortsighted, like rhinos. Clearly past his prime, he
was scarcely able to fend for himself.

When I mentioned this to Ayanawatta he nodded. “This is not their place,” he said. “The
kenabik
do not breed. His tribe have all died. Something as beautiful replaces them, we hope.”

He spoke distractedly as he studied the beaked
dragon, who was still casting bewildered yellow eyes back and forth. “And of a more appropriate size,” he added with a slight
smile.

White Crow pulled in our mount. Bes stood still as a rock while her master studied the
kenabik.
The beaked dragon’s feathers were layered, pale blue on green, on gold, on silver, on scarlet. There were subtle shades of
brown-yellow and dark red, of glittering emerald and sapphire. When that black maw opened it revealed a crimson tongue, broken
molars, cracked incisors. There seemed something wrong with that mouth, but I was not sure what.

Then the sun disappeared. It was suddenly pitch black. From somewhere in that darkness, the
kenabik
began to keen.

That keening was one of the most mournful sounds I had ever heard. The note was absolutely desolate as the monster cried for
itself and for its lost kind.

I looked at White Crow again.

His face was still totally immobile, but I saw the silver trail of tears running to his lips. It was hard to know whether
he wept for the pain of this creature, the thought of having to destroy it or the loss of his father.

Again, that awful, agonized call. But it grew fainter as the thing moved off.

“We will kill it in the morning,” White Crow said. He seemed glad to put off the unsavory moment for a little longer.

How three humans armed with bows and spears were to set about killing the
kenabik
had not yet been explained to me!

Neither was it to happen as White Crow had said.

The monster determined our agenda.

I was awake when the
kenabik
became famished enough to attack. I heard it running towards us over the low hills. It went through the camp in one terrible,
violent moment, even as I tried to wake my friends.

Ayanawatta found his bow and arrows while White Crow hefted his spears.

“They never hunt at night.” White Crow sounded offended.

Bes had stumbled to her feet, still bleary with sleep, her trunk questing about for White Crow. She could not see him, and
the feathered dinosaur was coming in rapidly on her left.

Bes was ready. In time to take the
kenabik’s
second attack, she swung her huge tusks in the direction of the noise. The beast came thudding into the camp screaming its
own terror at our fire and grabbing about for something, anything, to eat.

Bes stepped forward. A sweep of her great head, and a long, deep gouge appeared along the beast’s left side. He shrieked as
those ivory sabers began to sweep back the other way.

The old mammoth staggered and was momentarily knocked off balance, but she held her ground, the
kenabik’s
blood streaming from her massive tusk. Her eyes narrowed, her trunk curling, she displayed her pleasure at her own achievement.
She was almost skittish as she turned to trumpet after her fleeing foe.

“Why would it behave so uncharacteristically?” I was panting, trying to gather up my few possessions
while the others retrieved the rest of our scattered goods.

“It is mad,” said White Crow sadly. “It has nothing to eat.”

“There must be plenty of prey on the prairie?”