The Skrayling Tree (38 page)

“Let me see her!”

“No. It is too soon. There is more to do. And unless you play your prescribed role, you will never see her.”

I could only trust him, though his assurances had hidden aspects to them. He had promised me I would see Oona again, but he
had not told me she might take a different form.

“Do you understand, Count Ulric, that the Lady Oona saved your life?” asked Sepiriz gently. “While you fought Lord Shoashooan
most bravely and weakened him considerably, it was the dreamthief’s daughter who dealt him the final, dissipating blow, which
sent his elements back to the world’s twelve corners.”

“She shot those arrows, I remember…”

“And then, after you precipitously attacked the demon duke, thinking you saved her, she aided you again. She at last took
the shape of the White Buffalo whose destiny was to make our final road across the ice. She had the greatest tradition of
resisting Lord Shoashooan. Do you understand? She became the White Buffalo. The Buffalo is the trail-maker. She can lead the
way to new realms. In this realm, she is the only force the wind elementals fear, for she carries the spirit of all the spirits.”

“There are more elementals?”

“They combined in Lord Shoashooan, who was ever a powerful lord with many alliances among the air elementals. But now he has
taken them in thrall. Although the twelve spirits of the wind are conquered by his powers, they can still re-form. All the
winds serve him in this realm. It is why he succeeds so well. He commands those elementals who were once the friends of your
people.”

“Friends no longer?”

“Not while that mad archetype enslaves them. You must know that the elementals serve neither Law nor Chaos, that they have
only loyalty to themselves and their friends. Only inadvertently do they serve the Balance. And now, against their will, they
serve Lord Shoashooan.”

“What is his power over them?”

“He it was who stole the Chaos Shield which should have brought your wife to this place. Lord Shoashooan waylaid her and took
the shield. That was all he needed to focus his strength and conquer the winds. Had it not been for Ayanawatta’s medicine,
she would not have been with us at all! His magic flute has been our greatest friend in this.”

“Lord Sepiriz, I undertook to serve your cause because you promised me the return of my wife. You did not tell me I would
kill her.”

“I was not sure that you would, this time.”

“This time?”

“My dear Count Ulric.” Prince Lobkowitz had entered the room. “You seem much recovered and ready to continue with this business!”

“Only if I am told more. Do I understand you rightly, Lord Sepiriz? You knew that I would kill my wife?”

The black giant’s expression betrayed him, but I saw the sadness that was there also. Any blame I felt towards him dissipated.
I sighed. I tried to remember some words I had heard. Was it from Lobkowitz, long ago? We are all echoes of some larger reality,
yet every action we take ultimately decides the nature of truth itself.

“Nothing we do is unique. Nothing we do is without meaning or consequence.” Lobkowitz’s soft, cultured Austrian accent cut
into Sepiriz’s silence. The black giant seemed relieved, even grateful. He could not answer my challenge and feared to answer
my question.

The ensuing silence was broken by a loud noise from outside. I walked past the dais on which I had been sleeping. I was almost
naked, but the room was pleasantly warm. I went to the window. There was a courtyard outside, but we were many stories above
it. Old vines, thicker than my legs, climbed up the worn, glittering stonework. Autumn flowers, huge dahlias, vast hydrangeas,
roses the span of my shoulders, grew among them, and it was only now I understood how ancient the place must truly be. Now
it was a better home to nature than to man. Large, spreading trees grew in the courtyard, and tall, wild grass. Some distance
below on another terrace I made out an entire orchard. Elsewhere were fields gone to seed, cattle pens, storehouses. There
had been no one here for centuries. I remembered the tales told of the Turks capturing Byzantium. They had believed they brought
down an empire, but instead found a shell, with sheep grazing among the ruins of collapsed palaces. Was this the American
Byzantium?

In the courtyard the great black mammoth, Bes, was being washed down by the youth, White Crow, and his older companion, Ayanawatta.
The two men seemed good friends, and both were in the peak of physical fitness, though White Crow could not have been more
than seventeen. His features, of course, were those of an albino. But it was not my family he resembled. It was
someone else. Someone I knew well. My urge was to call to him, to ask after Oona, but Sepiriz had already assured me she was
no longer dead. I forced myself to accept his leadership. He did not simply know the future—he understood all the futures
which might proliferate if any of us strayed too far from the narrative which, like a complicated spell involving dozens of
people in dozens of different actions, must be strictly adhered to if we wished to achieve our desire. A game of life or death
whose rules you had to guess.

Looking up, the youth saw me. He became grave. He made a sign which I took to be one of comradeship and reassurance. The lad
had charm, as had the aristocratic warrior at his side. Ayanawatta now offered me a faint, respectful bow.

Who were these aristocrats of the prairie? I had seen nothing like them in any of the wonderful historic documents I had studied
about the early history of northern America. I did, however, recognize them as men of substance. Warriors and superbly fit,
they were expensively dressed. The quality of workmanship in their beaded clothing, weaponry and ornaments was exquisite.
Both men were clearly prominent among their own people. Their oiled and shaven heads; their scalp locks their only body hair,
hanging just so at an angle to the glittering eagle feathers; the complicated tattoos and piercings of the older man; the
workmanship of their buckskins and beading—all indicated unostentatious power. I wondered if, like the Kakatanawa, they too
were the last of their tribes.

Again I was struck by the sense that, from within, the
city seemed totally deserted. I looked back at tier upon tier fading into the clouds which hid the city’s upper galleries.

Turning I could see beyond the great walls to the lake of ice and the ragged peaks of the mountains beyond. The whole world
seemed abandoned of life. What had Sepiriz said about the inhabitants of this city? It must have housed millions of them.

I asked Lobkowitz about this phenomenon. He seemed unwilling to answer, exchanging looks with Lord Sepiriz, who shrugged.
“I do not think it unsafe, any longer,” he said. “Here we have no control of events at all. Whatever we say, the consequences
will not change. It is only our actions which will bring change now, and I fear…” He dropped his great chin to his chest and
closed his brooding eyes.

I turned from the window. “Where are the Kakatanawa, the people of this city?”

“You have met the only survivors. Do you know the other name for this city—the Kakatanawa name? I see you do not. It is Ikenipwanawa,
which roughly means the Mountain of the Tree. Do you know of it? Just the tree itself, perhaps? So many mythologies speak
of it.”

“I do not know of it, sir. It is mainly my wife who concerns me now. You suggest she might live. Can time be reversed?”

“Oh, easily, but it would do you no good. The action has already taken place. And will take place again. Your memory cannot
be changed so readily!”

“What
has
changed within these walls?” I asked him.

“Nothing. At least, not in many hundreds of years.
Perhaps thousands. What you saw from the ice was an illusion of an inhabited city. It is one which has been maintained by
those who guard the source of life itself. The reflective walls of the city serve more than one purpose.”

“Has no one ever come here and discovered the truth?”

“How could they? Until recently the lake was constantly boiling with viscous rock, the very life stuff of the planet. Nothing
could cross it, and nothing cared to. But since then cold Law has worked its grim sorcery and made the lake as you see it
now. This is what Klosterheim and his friends have been doing. In response the pathway was conjured by Ayanawatta and White
Buffalo, but of course, it is now being used by our enemies. We make the paths, but we cannot control who uses them after
us. It will not be long, no doubt, before they realize the trick and find a way of entering the city. So we must do all we
have to as quickly as possible.”

“I understood that time, as we know it, does not exist.” I was becoming angry, beginning to think they tricked me. “Therefore
there is no urgency.”

Prince Lobkowitz allowed himself a small smile. “Some illusions are more powerful than others,” he said. He seemed about to
leave it at that, then added, “This is the last place in the multiverse you can find this fortress physically. Everywhere
else it has transformed itself.”

“Transformed? This was a fortress?”

“Transformed by what it contains. By what it must guard. At one stage in the multiversal story, this was a
great and noble city, self-contained and yet able to help all who came to it seeking justice. Not unlike the city you call
Tanelorn, it brought order and tranquillity to all who dwelled here.

“The human story is what changes so drastically. Passion and greed determine the course of nations, not their ideals. But
without change we would die. So simple human emotions, those which have brought down a thousand other empires and destroyed
a thousand Golden Ages, worked to bring about the destruction of this stability. It is a story of love and jealousy, but it
will be familiar enough to you.

“This fortress—this great metropolis—was built to guard a symbol. First, a symbol was chiefly all that it was. Then, through
human faith and creativity, the symbol took on more and more reality. Ultimately the symbol and the thing itself were one.
They became the same, and this gave them strength. But it also gave them dangerous vulnerability. For once the symbol took
physical shape, human action became far more involved in its destiny. Now symbol and reality are the same. We face the consequences
of that marriage. Of what, in essence, we ourselves created.”

“Are you speaking of a symbolic tree?” I asked. I could only think of old German tree worship, still recalled in our decorated
Yule pines. “Or of the multiverse itself?”

He seemed relieved. “You understand the paradox? The multiverse and the tree are one, and each is encompassed by the other.
That is the terrible dilemma of our human lives. We are capable of destroying the raw material
of our own existence. Our imaginations can create actuality, and they can destroy it. But they are equally capable of creating
illusion. The worst illusion, of course, is self-deception. From that fundamental illusion, all others spring. This is the
great flaw which forever holds us back from redemption. It was what brought an end to the Golden Age this place represented.”

“Do you say we can never be redeemed?”

Lobkowitz brought his hand to my shoulder. “That is the fate of the Champion of Humanity. It is the fate of us all. Time and
space are in perpetual flux. We work to achieve resolution in the multiverse, but we can never know true resolution ourselves.
It is the burden we carry. The burden of our kind.”

“And this dilemma is repeated throughout countless versions of the same lives, the same stories, the same struggles?”

“Repetition is the confirmation of life. It is what we love in music and in many forms of art and science. Repetition is how
we survive. It is, after all, how we reproduce. But when something has been repeated so many times that it has lost all resonance,
then something must be done to change the story. New sap must be forced into old wood, eh? That is what we try to do now.
But first we must bring all elements together. Do you understand what we are hoping to achieve, Count Ulric?”

I had to admit that I was baffled. Such philosophies were beyond my simple soul to fathom. But I said, “I think so.” All I
really knew was that if I played out my role in this, I would be reunited with Oona. And nothing else much mattered to me.

“Come,” said Sepiriz, almost taking pity on me. “We will eat now.”

We walked outside to a wide path curving around the city.

“What is the exact nature of this place?” I asked. “Some center of the multiverse?”

Lobkowitz saw how mystified I was. “The multiverse has no center any more than a tree has a center, but this is where the
natural and the supernatural meet, where branches of the multiverse twine together. These intersections produce unpredictable
consequences and threaten everything. Size loses logic. That is why it is so important to retain the original sequences of
events. To make a path and to stick to it. To choose the right numbers, as it were. It is how we have learned to order Chaos
and navigate the Time Field. Have you not noticed that many people out there are of different dimensions? That is a sure sign
how badly the Balance is under attack.” Lobkowitz paused to look up. Tier after tier, the vast building disappeared into wisps
of white cloud.

“The Kakatanawa built this city over the centuries from the original mountain,” Lobkowitz told me as we continued past deserted
homes, shops, stables. “They were a great, civilizing people. They lived by the rule of Law. All who sought their protection
were accepted on condition that they accepted the Law. All lived for one thing—for the tree which was their charge. They devoted
themselves to it. Their entire nation lived to serve and nurture the tree, to protect it and to ensure that it continued to
grow. They were a famous and respected people, renowned across the multiverse for their wisdom
and reason. The great kings and chiefs of other nations sent their sons to be educated in the ways of the Kakatanawa. Even
from other realms they came to learn from the wisdom of the People of the Tree. White Crow, of course, follows his family’s
long tradition…”