The Skrayling Tree (26 page)

These treasures they kept in their city, deep within the complex of caves, in chambers they had hewn and elaborately decorated
from the living rock. Pukawatchi cities could be defended easily against attack by abandoning the lower levels and defending
the upper. No other tribe had ever defeated the Pukawatchi, who had gloried in their treasures, celebrating them each year
with the stories of how they came to be won by the heroes of the tribe in deeds of extraordinary warfare.

Ipkaptam began to draw in the air. He painted pictures there for us to see. He showed us the perpetually filled redstone pipe,
which had belonged to the green people who lived along the lakes in stilt huts and who refused to pay the Pukawatchi a tribute
of fish. So the Pukawatchi hero Nagtani went against the green people and destroyed their villages and took their pipe as
a trophy. The green people were driven from the land.

Next the Kakatanawa, far in the north, asked the Pukawatchi to fashion a great lance of magical iron which the Kakatanawa
had cut from the mother metal. This was the first great treasure of the Pukawatchi, for they had made it themselves. The Kakatanawa
sent the magic metal to be made into a lance, but they refused to pay the higher price the Pukawatchi asked. The blade was
more valuable, so the Pukawatchi kept it.

He showed us a vision of the lance, its shaft carved and decorated, its black blade running with scarlet
letters. I was shocked. It was my sword, but turned into a spear! Then he showed us the Flute of Reason, and it seemed to
me that Klosterheim responded with surprised recognition. I, too, experienced a flash of memory. And then Two Tongues showed
us the Shield of Flight, the shield which allowed its owner to travel through the air. It was identical to the one I carried.
I knew that the stolen artifact was only a few hundred yards from us at most, in the safekeeping of Asolingas.

Ipkaptam continued. “All these were our treasures and our history. Then White Crow came, and he was smiling. White Crow came,
and he told us he was our friend. White Crow promised to teach us all his secrets and because he did not seem a Kakatanawa
and therefore not our enemy, we accepted him. His medicine was brought to us, and he was our good luck. Because he was not
of our people, he could not take a wife among us, but he had many friends in the great men of our tribe, and their daughters
admired him. Our people welcomed him, for he said he came only to learn our wisdom. We understood that he followed his dream-journey,
and we wished him well.

“And White Crow went away. We said: It is true. White Crow desires nothing from us. He is a good man. He is a noble man. He
is a man who follows his way. He runs his own path. And we said that some great man was lucky indeed to have such a son.

“Then the next year and the year after that, White Crow returned. And still he was a model guest. He helped with the hunting,
and he lived among us. What was difficult for us to do was easy for him. His strength
and his height and his cleverness were such that we were glad of his company.

“Then the fourth spring White Crow came again and was welcome among us and shared our food and lived in our city and told
tales of all the places he had visited. But this time he asked to see our sacred treasures, the Black Lance of Manawata, the
only spear which can kill spirits; the Shield of the Alkonka, the only defense against the spirits; the Cherooki Pipe, the
great redstone pipe which brings peace wherever it is smoked, even with the spirits. And the Flute of Ayanawatta, which, if
the right notes are blown on it, will confer on the owner the power to change his ordained spirit path, even from death to
life. It will heal the sick and bring harmony where there is strife.

“And White Crow tricked us and stole our treasures and took them away with him. An evil spirit seized him. He journeyed to
the great wilderness, where there are no trees. There, at the foot of the mountains, White Crow called a great gathering of
the Winds. He planned to make the Winds his friends. So he called to the South Wind. And the South Wind came. He called to
the West Wind. And the West Wind came to his calling. And to each spirit of the wind he gave a gift to take back to their
people. Even before we knew he had stolen them, he had given the Perpetual Pipe to the People of the South; the Shield of
Flight he gave to the People of the West. He himself took the Flute of Reason to the People of the East. And each of them
gave him a gift in return.

“Now he has set violent events in motion. There are prophecies, omens, portents. It is the end or the beginning
for the Pukawatchi. So much is confused. But there is hope that we can recover our treasures. To the Kakatanawa themselves
in the north, White Crow planned to carry the Black Lance. They are his most powerful friends, and his folk have always been
allies of their folk, since the beginning of things. His people also made their great obscene pact with the Phoorn and so
began the rule of ten thousand years. But if White Crow fails to take the Black Lance back to the Kakatanawa, then all our
destinies can be changed. Thus we do everything we can to stop him and his allies. Already they stand on the final part of
the path to the city of the Kakatanawa…”

“Where,” Klosterheim told us, in more normal tones, “our magic defeats them. White Crow is prisoner, but his brother and sister
carry the lance. We must stop them! They are held captive on the Shining Path by a great ally of mine, who makes it impossible
for them to continue on the last part of the Shining Path. Time does not pass there. They are unaware of it, but they have
remained under that spell for half a century, allowing us to grow strong again. They have tried all their sorcery against
my ally, but he is too powerful for them. Only White Crow escaped, but I was too clever for him. Yet even my pact with Lord
Shoashooan is finite, and that busy elemental will soon grow hungry. He must have his promised reward. So we must reach Kakatanawa
as soon as possible. Alone we might not defeat White Crow and his talented friends, but together we will make their end inevitable.”

“What of your other lost treasures?” I said. “How will you get those back?”

“It will be easier once we have the Black Lance,” said Klosterheim. He added softly to me in Greek, “The treasures of the
Pukawatchi are as nothing to the prize to be found in the city of the Kakatanawa.”

“I am only interested in one damned treasure,” said Gunnar, to Ipkaptam’s disapproval. “And that’s a jeweled cup I’ve been
seeking for some centuries. Failing that, I have some business with Death.”

I had sudden insight. “You call it the Holy Grail! The Templars were obsessed with it. Supposed to contain some god’s blood
or head? The Welsh also have a magic bowl. My erstwhile comrade Ap Kwelch told me he once discovered it. There are too many
of these magic objects loose in a world so ambivalent towards sorcery! Your learned priests say it’s a myth, a will-o’-the-wisp?”

“I know that it is not, sir,” said Klosterheim disapprovingly. “There are many legends but only one Grail. And that is what
I expect to find in Kakatanawa.”

Again the shaman was singing. He sang to apologize for our behavior to whatever spirits he had summoned. As we became quiet
he spoke of his own destiny, the dream he had dreamed in his youth: to revenge his grandfather, who had died in the summoning
of Lord Shoashooan. In that dream he had sought his people’s treasures and he had led his people home.

“That is my destiny,” he said. “To redeem my father’s house. To reclaim our treasures and our honor. For too long we have
followed a false dream.”

I am the God Thor,

I am the War God,

I am the Thunderer!

Here in my Northland,

My fastness and fortress,

Reign I forever!

Here amid icebergs

Rule I the nations.

This is my hammer,

Mjolner the mighty.

Giants and sorcerers

Cannot withstand it!

L
ONGFELLOW
,

“The Saga of King Olaf”

Behold, this pipe. Verily a man!

Within it I have placed my being.

Place within it your own being, also,

Then free shall you be from all that brings death.

O
SAGE
P
IPE
C
HANT

(L
A
F
LESCHE
’
S TR
.)

G
unnar the Doomed was in good spirits as we stumbled from the heat of the lodge out into the cold slap of a northern autumn
evening. “By Odin,” he said, “we are lucky men this day!” But I hardly heard him. I was still stupefied by the smoke and the
heat of the lodge. I felt I was on the verge of understanding some great truth.

I looked up and almost reeled at the sight which met us. It took me a moment to realize that the Pukawatchi were decorated
for battle. They looked like a hive of human-sized insects. They buzzed faintly. In all my travels I had never seen a people
quite like this.

A sudden wilder buzzing—an ululation went up from the gathered warriors. Layers of different-colored paint in this light gave
their faces the same quality I had noticed in that of their sachem, Ipkaptam the Two Tongues, as we sat in the lodge. Their
eerie, insectlike quality was given further substance by a translucent black sheen which spread over the surface of the other
colors. They had the dark iridescence of a beetle’s wing. Some wore insectlike headdresses. The black overlay was symbolic.
It meant they were prepared to fight to the death. The red-rimmed eyes announced they would
show no mercy. Ipkaptam told me with some pride that they had named their path the Trail of Honor and would return with the
nation’s treasures or die nobly in the attempt.

Again something nagged at the million memories which shadowed those of my immediate incarnation. Who did these people remind
me of? Was there a Melnibonéan folktale I had read? About machines become fish who became insects who became human? Who had
followed a Trail of Honor to establish a city in the south? I was unsure of all I could recall. With somewhat sentimental
notions of intelligence, sensibility and virtue, the story did not feel like a Melnibonéan tale. Perhaps I had heard it in
the Young Kingdoms or in another dream of baroque life and rococo death spent in a realm far less familiar to me than this?

In my youth I performed the five journeys and dreamed the Dream of Twenty Years, then the Dream of Fifty Years and then the
Dream of a Hundred Years. Each of those dreams I had to dream at least three times. I had dreamed some several more times
than that. But this was only the second time I had dreamed the Dream of a Thousand Years, and this was no longer the quest
of an education but the hope of saving my own life, and that of most of surviving humanity, from unchecked Chaos.

Perhaps this moment was what one trained for? It seemed I was born and reborn for crisis. It was what the nun had told me
at the Priory of the Sacred Egg in the Dalmatian highlands. She had read my fortune that night in the light of a tallow candle
while we sat naked
in the bed. Fetching the cards had been her response, as passion was satisfied, to her first real sight of my physique, of
its scars and marks. She asked in some seriousness if she had shared herself with a demon. I told her that I had been a mercenary
for some time. “Then perhaps you yourself have slept with a demon,” she joked.

Fear the Crisis Maker, she had warned, by which I had decided she meant that I should fear myself. What was worse in a fully
sentient universe than one who refused thought, who feared it, who was sickened by it? Who inevitably chose violence and the
way of the sword, though he yearned for peace and tranquillity?

Fear the child, she had said. Again, the child was myself—jealous, greedy, demanding, selfish. Why should her God choose such
a man for his service?

I had asked the matronly prioress this question, and she had laughed at me. All soldiers she met seemed to be soul-searching
in one way or another. She supposed it was inevitable. “In some eras,” she said, “the sword and the intellect must be as one.
Those are our Silver Ages. That is how we create those periods we call Golden Ages, when the sword can be forgotten. But until
the sword is fully forgotten, no longer part of the cycle, and men no longer speak in its language of gods and heroes and
battles, every Golden Age will inevitably be followed by an age of Iron and Blood.” She had spoken of the Prince of Peace
as if he might actually exist. I asked her about this. “He is my soul’s salvation,” she had said. I told her without irony
that I envied her. But it was hard for me to understand the
kind of man who was prepared to die on the chance that it might save others. In my experience, such sacrifices were rarely
worth making. She had laughed aloud at this.

Her kind of Christianity, of course, was almost the apotheosis of what we Melnibonéans see as weakness. Yet I had also seen
ideas growing from the common soil which, when examined, actually had the hope of becoming reality. It was not for me to denigrate
their softness and their tolerance. My father frequently argued that where you exalted the weak above the strong, thus you
turned your nation from predator into prey. However much the thinking of the Young Kingdoms influenced me, it had never occurred
to me to choose to become a victim!

A Melnibonéan of my caste is expected to put himself through at least most of the tortures he will in the course of a long
life bestow on others. This produces a taste, an intimacy, a conspiracy of cruelty which can give a culture its own special
piquancy but in the end brings it to collapse. Imagination rather than inventive sensation will always be a nation’s ultimate
salvation. I had tried to convince my own people of this. And now the Pukawatchi faced a similar dilemma.