The Skrayling Tree (27 page)

Indeed, as I came to know them, I discovered I had more in common with the Pukawatchi than with some of the crew of
The Swan.

Preparations made, routes discussed, plans laid, we helped the Pukawatchi strike camp. Our somewhat ragged army slowly made
ready for its long trek north. More pipes were smoked. More talks talked. The
Vikings and the skraylings, as they still called their new allies, developed a reasonable camaraderie—good enough for the
expedition, at least. Morally they shared much. The Pukawatchi understood the need to make a good death, just as the Vikings
did. The warriors prayed for the right circumstances and the courage to display their virtues while they died.

These ideas were far closer to those of my immediate ancestors. Among the rest of what I still considered the Young Kingdoms,
there had been developing a tradition which was as mysterious and as attractive to me as my own was familiar and repellent.
It was that culture, not my own, I fought to save. It was those people whose fate would be decided by my success or failure
in this long dream. I had no love for the millennia-old culture which had borne me. I rejected it more than once in preference
to the simpler ways of the human mercenary. There was a certain comfort in taking this path. It demanded little thought from
me.

There was some urgency to my situation, of course, as I hung in Jagreen Lern’s rigging waiting to die. But there are no significant
correspondences between the passage of time in one realm and another. I had elected, after all, to dream of a thousand years,
and now the full thousand must be endured even if my object were achieved sooner. It is why I am able to tell you this story
in this way. What I achieved in this dream would reflect through all the other worlds of the multiverse, including my own.
How I conducted myself in this dream was of deep importance. A certain path had to be followed. When the trail was left it
had to be left knowingly.

The path had already taken on a certain relentless momentum. From being a group of raiders or explorers, we were now an army
on the march. Egyptians and Norsemen tramped side by side with the same extraordinary stamina they showed at the oars. Asolingas
and the Bomendando jogged ahead with the Pukawatchi scouts.

Ipkaptam, Gunnar, Klosterheim and I marched at the center of the main group. The Pukawatchi went to war in finger-bone armor,
with lances, bows and shields. They had jackets of bone and helmets fashioned from huge mammoth tusks decorated with eagle
feathers and beads. The bone armor was decorated with turquoise and other semiprecious stones and was lighter than the chain
mail most of our crew favored. Some warriors wore the carapaces of huge turtles and helmets made from massive conch shells.
Braids were protected by beads and otter fur.

Just as I had noted the size of some of the huge pelts within the wigwam, I wondered at the size of the sea-life which supplied
the Pukawatchi with so much. Klosterheim said somewhat dismissively that sizes were unstable in these parts, something to
do with the conjunction of various scales. We were too close to “the tree,” he said.

None of this made much sense to me. But as long as our journey took us forward to where I hoped to find the original of the
black sword, I scarcely cared what rationales he presented.

We were now an army of about a hundred and fifty experienced warriors. Some of the women and youths
and old people were also armed. At the far end of this mixed force of pirates and Pukawatchi came the unarmed women, the infirm,
children and animals who would follow us until we began to fight. From what I had seen thus far, I expected the city to be
a primitive affair, probably a stockade of some kind surrounding a dozen or so longhouses.

The Pukawatchi had no real beasts of burden, unless you counted their coyote dogs that pulled the travois on which they carried
their folded lodges. Women and children did most of the work. The warriors rarely did anything except, like the rest of us,
march at a steady, dogged pace. Those women who had what they called “men’s medicine” dressed and armed themselves like the
men and marched with the men, just as one or two of the men with “women’s medicine” walked with the group at the back. Klosterheim
told me such practices were common among many of the peoples of this vast land. But not all tribes shared values and ideas.

Ipkaptam, joining in, spoke of certain tribes who were beneath contempt, who ate insects or who tortured animals, but even
those peoples they had exterminated he spoke well of, as people of honor. We Melnibonéans had never experienced noble feelings
for people we sent to oblivion. Melnibonéans never questioned their own ruthless law, which they imposed on all they conquered.
Other cultures were not of interest to us. If the people refused to accept our scheme of things, we simply slaughtered them.
But we had become too soft, my father complained, looking always at me, and allowed the Young Kingdoms to grow arrogant. There
had been a
time when the world never dared question Melniboné. What we defined as the truth
was
the truth! But because it suited us to have fat cattle at our disposal, we allowed the people of the Young Kingdoms to proliferate
and gain power.

Not so, the Pukawatchi! They believed in the law of the blood feud, so gave their enemies no chance to retaliate. Every member
of the rival tribe had to be eliminated or the babies taken to substitute for any Pukawatchi killed. Once they had been so
few they had stolen infants from stronger tribes. Now they needed no foreign babies.

Yesterday the Pukawatchi had been despised, said Ipkaptam, both for their stature and their intelligence. Today all took them
seriously. Their story would survive. And when the Kakatanawa were conquered, the Pukawatchi would dominate all worlds. They
had grown strong, he said, until they were the strongest of all.

They were certainly sturdy. When walking and water were the only two means of traveling long distances, the calves and the
arms became capable of enormous endurance and power. Their means of transport ensured them success in battle.

The Pukawatchi would have preferred the greater speed of water, but we were moving north and upstream of a small river which
was too narrow to take any kind of craft. Klosterheim said there was a mooring rendezvous about two days ahead of us where
we would acquire canoes so that the war party could make better progress. He seemed to have a greater sense of urgency
than the rest of us. Of course, it was his magic, his energy, which was holding our rivals at bay. He suggested that soon
the army should move on at a trot to the rendezvous, leaving the armed women and children with a small guard of warriors.
I elected to command this guard. The idea of trotting did not appeal to me.

For the time being, we all continued at our regular pace.

Again I was impressed by the size to which everything in the region grew. Plants were far larger than anything I had seen
before. I should have liked to have stopped and examined more. The terrain we were crossing was wooded and mountainous, and
we traveled through a series of valleys, still following the winding course of the river, as we drove deeper and deeper into
country nobody was familiar with. It had been deserted of people, Ipkaptam told me, since a great disaster had struck here.
He believed that the whole country around the Kakatanawa land was dead, like this. As you got closer, even the game began
to disappear. But he had only heard this.

Before the beginnings of this war, no Pukawatchi had ever been allowed to cross the human lands, let alone visit the land
of the Kakatanawa. They had come east in his grandfather’s time. Equally, the Kakatanawa were forbidden to leave their own
land. Until recently they, too, had kept to their pact. But others, such as the Phoorn, had done their work for them. Some
of these Phoorn adopted human form and bore a resemblance to me, though my physique was different. Others were monstrous reptiles.
Now that he knew me, said the
sachem, he realized I was more like a Pukawatchi, yet it was still difficult, he said, to trust me. His instinct was to kill
me. He could not be sure this was my natural form.

The Pukawatchi had never been this far north, and Ipkaptam worried that he did wrong. But wrongdoing had become the order
of the day. Once the people of the south, north, west and east had respected one another’s laws and hunting grounds. They
had a saying: The West Wind does not fight the East Wind. But since White Crow had come to the world, Chaos threatened on
all sides. In their fighting the Lords of the Air produced the hawkwinds which destroyed whole peoples and created demons
who ruled in their place. These demons were called Sho-ah Sho-an and could only be defeated by the lost Pukawatchi treasures.

Ipkaptam also admitted that he was nervous of being sucked off the back of the world. At some point you must tumble into the
bottomless void, fall forever, eternally living the sharp, despairing moment when you realize your death is inevitable. Far
better to die the warrior’s death. The clean death, as some called it. To Pukawatchi and Viking alike a noble death remained
more important than longevity. Those who died bravely and with their death songs on their lips could live the simple, joyous
warrior’s life for eternity.

My own responses to these notions were rather more complex. I shared their idea that it was better to make a noble death than
lead an ignoble life. There was not one among us, save Klosterheim, who did not think that. The Ashanti, the Mongols, the
Norsemen knew the
indignities and humiliations of old age and preferred to avoid them, just as a promise of inevitable defeat made them anxious
to take as many of their enemies with them as they could.

The Pukawatchi, so provincially self-important and so certain of their imperial rights, had a shared sense of afterlife which
favored those who had died bloody deaths and sent as many others as possible to equally bloody deaths. The fate of women and
children in these cosmologies was vague, but I suspect the women had their own more favorable versions which they told among
themselves. For all their domestic power, they were more frequently the unwilling victims of the warrior code. Certain warriors
prided themselves on their skill at dispatching women and children as painlessly as possible.

As we began to speak the same language I learned more about the skraylings, as Gunnar still insisted on calling them. The
supernatural understanding of these natives was sophisticated, though their powers of sorcery were limited and usually restricted
to needs of planting and hunting. Only the great line of shamans, of whom Ipkaptam was the latest, understood and explored
the world of the spirits. This was where he drew his power.

Ipkaptam’s was not an especially popular family. They had often abused their privileges. But the Pukawatchi believed in the
family’s famous luck. When that luck failed, I suspected, Ipkaptam would no longer be revered, tolerated or perhaps even alive.

Gunnar walked by himself much of the way. Few
sought him out. The Pukawatchi suspected him to be some kind of minor demon. They displayed an instinctive dislike of me as
well. Some were still convinced I was a renegade Kakatanawa.

Our alliance could break down at any moment. Gunnar and Klosterheim had common goals, but there would come a day when they
would be at odds. Equally, no doubt, Gunnar was scheming how he would dispatch me when I had served my turn. Like my late
cousin Yyrkoon, Gunnar spent a great deal of time planning how to gain the upper hand. Those of us who did not think competitively
were always surprised by those who did. For my own part I responded with appropriate cunning or ferocity to whatever situation
I found myself in. When one has had the training of a Melnibonéan adept, one rarely needs to anticipate another’s actions.
Or so I thought. Such thinking might well have led to our extinction as a people.

Yet Gunnar’s weakness was also typical, as he believed me to be scheming as hard as he was. This might have been true of Klosterheim
and Ipkaptam, but it was certainly not true of me. I was still prepared to believe that I could easily be following a chimera.
The black blade’s maker was my only interest.

The Vikings remained fairly cheerful. They had seen enough to know that there might be a city somewhere which could be looted,
even if it was not made of gold. They knew the superiority of their iron weapons and had a fair idea of the way back to the
sea and their ship. They probably believed a longer sailing would avoid the more terrifying aspects of the journey here. So
most of
them saw this as a standard inland expedition from which they might emerge with wealth and knowledge. They knew the value
of the Pukawatchi furs and quickly understood how the Pukawatchi valued iron. The only iron the Pukawatchi worked was moon
metal or ingots chipped from the rock. Somehow they had lost their legendary power to mine and smelt metal. As a result, a
small iron dagger would buy a lot of valuable furs.

In my company, at least, the Vikings also had the sense that they carried secret power. I was surprised that my shield, the
Pukawatchi stolen Shield of Flight tight under its cover, had not been sensed by their shaman, seemingly so sensitive to the
supernatural. It remained to be seen whether it would give the gift of flight to anyone who carried it or whether spells and
chants were involved to invoke the spirits associated with the shield.

Experience shows most magic objects depend far more upon the gullibility of the purchaser than on any blessing by the spirits.
The shield could have no particular properties at all, except those of superstition and antiquity. How Gunnar found it in
Europe, he refused to explain, but I had the impression he had come by it in trade some while ago, perhaps from one of the
People of the West to whom, Ipkaptam said, it had been given. But here the People of the West would live far away from the
sea, unless we were on a large island. If we were on an island, then it was possible the People of the West had somehow sailed
around the rim of the world, as Gunnar would have it, from the China Seas, as he himself had done with the Rose. Or was this
a treasure Gunnar had brought back from the expedition they
made, when he had returned in
The Swan
while the Barbary Rose captained her own twin-prowed ship,
The Either/Or?