The Skrayling Tree (40 page)

Outside, the entire landscape was filled with the wildly whirling debris. Below, at the apex, stood Gaynor and his men, looking
up at the once invulnerable gates of the city as the wind remorselessly battered them to destruction. I could already see
the gates beginning to bulge and split. Their iron bands and hinges, which hitherto could withstand any attack, now warped
and twisted under the pressure.

We were deafened by the roaring sound, and our hair and clothing lashed violently in every direction. Lord Sepiriz shouted
at me. He signaled. I could not understand what he wanted.

The mercury pool that was a mirror swirled again, and I saw a man’s face in astonishing detail. It was the stranger who had
come with Gaynor and Klosterheim. He stared upwards, presumably at his supernatural ally. His eyes, like mine, were crimson.
They contained profound and complex experience. I wondered how any human soul could bear the burden of knowledge revealed
in those eyes. Only Elric of Melniboné was sorcerer
and warrior powerful enough to consider taking that burden. I doubted if there had ever been a human character equally strong.

The pool’s surface flickered to show, full-length, a black-armored, black-helmed warrior. He had a huge round warboard on
his arm, canvas covering its blazon. With some surprise I saw that he carried a black sword identical to my own. Then, for
the first time, the truth began to dawn on me. It was so enormous it had eluded me. Three of us? Three swords? Three shields?
But who carried the shields?

Sepiriz pulled me away from the mirror pool. “It is drawing you in. You’ll drown in that if you’re not careful. Many others
have.”

“Drown?” I laughed. “Drown in a reflection of myself?”

Ayanawatta came to join me. “So you understand.” He radiated a certain calmness. He represented common sense in all this insanity.
“You would not be the first to do that.” His smile was quiet, comradely. “Some might say that was your friend Gunnar’s fate!”

The more I knew this tall red man, the more I liked and respected him. He was a natural leader. He was unassuming, egalitarian,
but acted decisively and with due caution. All the great leaders, like Alexander, could sit at backgammon with common soldiers
and still have them believe him a living god.

I wanted to ask Ayanawatta where the rest of his people were. His tribal style was familiar to me, but I was not sufficiently
knowledgeable to identify it. This was no time to satisfy such curiosity. Events were moving too swiftly.
We had all been thrown together by our different circumstances. I had no idea how Gaynor and company had reached Kakatanawa
or why they were here.

The shrieking air was painful. My ears felt as if needles were being inserted and twisted in them. I covered them as best
I could and noted that my companions were equally affected. Lord Sepiriz found some wax and handed it out to us. Stuffing
the slick, malleable material into my ears relieved the worst of the howling. I could hear Prince Lobkowitz when he approached
me. Cupping his hand around my ear, he spoke into it.

“We cannot fight Lord Shoashooan or his allies. We lack the necessary tools to destroy him, so all we can do now is retreat.
We must abandon the outer city and seek the deeper reality within. We must fall back to the Skrayling Oak.”

That was all he was able to say before the screeching wind grew even louder and fingers of ice wormed their way into my clothing
and found the flesh beneath. I knew piercing agony and swore aloud at the fierceness of it just as White Crow reappeared in
the doorway. There was something behind him. Something dark and looming. I longed to draw my sword, to run to his assistance,
and then I realized it was a beast with him, his trusty pachyderm, Bes. Fearing for her safety, he had returned for her. Her
saddle was still on her back, and her burdens were covered by a great white buffalo robe edged with blue and scarlet, which
made it seem as if she had a Bactrian hump. Whether she would be better off with us or without us was an open question at
that moment.

Bes moved as rapidly as the rest of us as we dashed through the camera obscura and through various other chambers, all of
which were clothed in different raw metals, many of them precious. Our feet slipped and slid on the floors of these tunnels.
Our reflections were distorted by the curving, polished walls. Twice my own face appeared, enlarged and transformed into something
leering and hideous. The others scrambled to get away from the place. I found myself laughing in my grief-madness. How close
these people had been to changing the eternal verities! What had destroyed them?

At last we were all crammed into a crystal room scarcely large enough to take the curling tusks of the great mammoth, let
alone the rest of us. My hand was on the huge, curved ivory surface of one tusk as she turned her mild, unfrightened eye to
regard me. A wall had fallen away behind her, revealing that we were above an unstable lake of rising and falling crystals.

Sepiriz muttered and growled, motioning with his staff over the crystals. They hissed in reply. Sluggishly they formed a rough
shape and then fell back into the same amorphous mass. Again Sepiriz spoke to the crystals. This time they swirled rapidly
and formed a cone with a black center.

Then we fell!

I shouted out, trying to resist the descent as the entire top of the city was enveloped in a sulphuric cloud. The crystals
opened like a mouth threatening to swallow me. I stared in awe into a world of intense green foliage. Every shade of green,
so vivid it almost blinded me.

The rest of the world roared into a void and disappeared.

We stood in the swaying top branches of a huge tree. The ground was so far away that I could see nothing below. Only endless
leaves. Foliage stretched out and downwards from the canopy. I peered through giant limbs, heavy twigs and myriad leaves,
into the complexity of all that grew from a single, vast trunk. For what might have been miles I could see massive branches,
themselves supporting other branches which supported still more branches. I was dazed with wonder. The city had contained
a mountain that in turn contained this measureless oak!

With a sign, Sepiriz jumped into the foliage. I saw him sink slowly, as if through water; and then I followed, and we were
all descending little by little through womb-rich air, salty and thick with life. Everywhere the branches of that great tree
stretched into infinity. The trunk of the tree was so large we could not see the whole of one side. It was like a wall stretching
on forever. The thickest limbs were equally difficult to accept for what they were.

I was overwhelmed by the scale of it all and wondered if I would ever find my wife again. Impotent fury bubbled in me. Yet
I remembered the admonition I had heard more than once since my adventures began so long ago in Nazi Germany:
Every one of us who fights in the battle, fights as an equal. Every action we take has meaning and effect.
My moment was bound to come. This hope sustained me as we drifted like motes of living dust down through the lattice of intersecting
realities, of dreams and possibilities. We sank down into the multiverse itself and let it embrace us.

Countless shades of green were dappled by a hidden sun. Sometimes a shaft of golden or silvern light blinded me or illuminated
a mysterious, twisting corridor of foliage. Leaves that were not quite leaves, yet which proliferated and reached enormous
distances. Branches that were not quite branches became curling, silver roads on which women and men walked, oblivious of
the intricacy around them. And these branches turned back and put out further branches, which in turn formed a matrix within
a matrix, a billion realities, each one a version of my own.

Oona!
I struggled in the hope of glimpsing my wife.

Down we sank in Sepiriz’s supernatural wake, down through what was at once concrete reality and abstract conception, passing
through countless permutations, each one telling the same human story of conflict without and within: the perpetual conflict,
the perpetual quest for balance, the perpetual cycle of life, struggle, resolution and death which made us one with the rest
of creation. What put us at odds with creation was, ironically, the very intelligence and imagination which was itself creative.
Man and multiverse were one, united in paradox, in love and anger, life, death and transfiguration.

Oona!

Through golden clouds of delicate tracery, through russet, viridian and luminous lavender, through great swathes of crimson
and silver, we fell. Looking up I saw only the wide branches of a tree stretching to where the
roof of the pyramid would be. It became obvious the area enclosed by the Kakatanawa city was far greater than the city itself.
The city could have rested on the topmost branches of the multiversal tree. If it guarded the crown of the tree, who or what
guarded the trunk and roots below?

Where was my wife? Was I being led towards her or away from her?

Oona!

Slowly I fell, unable to decrease or otherwise control my descent. Save for my concerns over my wife, I had no real sense
of fear. I was not sure if I had died or if I was still alive. The question was unimportant. What seemed solid as we dropped
towards it became less dense as we passed through it. And in turn the tenuous grew solid.

I could not imagine the variations in scale involved. Outside the pyramid, I was a speck of dust in the quasi-infinite multiverse.
Within, I was the size of galaxies.

I passed through the substance of the tree as through water, for here mass and scale were the means by which the multiverse
ordered its constantly proliferating realities, enabling them to coexist. Perhaps it was
our
mass that changed as we fell and not the tree’s. I realized that I felt no ordinary physical sensations, merely occasional
electrical pulses from within my body that altered in intensity and rhythm with every breath I took. I had the feeling I was
not breathing air at all but sweet ichor, what some might call ectoplasm. It flowed like oil, in and out of my lungs, and
if it had any effect on me at all it was only to sharpen my vision.

Where was Oona? I had the peculiar impression that I was not only “seeing” with my eyes, but with all my other senses, including
the ordinary ones of touch, smell and hearing. Unfamiliar, dormant senses now wakened in response to some recognizable suprareality,
this vision of a living multiverse.

Perhaps a man of more intellectual bent might have understood all this better, but I was helplessly in awe. In my exhilaration
I felt I was in the presence of God.

I fell through a field of blue, perhaps a sudden patch of sky, and as I did so my soul filled with a rare sense of peace.
I shared a contented tranquillity with all the other human souls who occupied this place. I had passed briefly through heaven.

Once more I floated among green-gold branches and could see my companions above and below me. I tried to call out to Lobkowitz,
who was nearest, to ask where Oona was, but my voice made only broad, deep rolling sounds, not recognizable words.

These tones took on shape and a life of their own, curling off into the depths of blossoming scarlet. I tried to move towards
the color field, but a gigantic hand seized me and set me back on course. I heard only what seemed to be the words “Catch
up cave,” and looking back I saw that the hand was Lobkowitz’s though he seemed of ordinary size and some distance off. The
hand and arm retreated, and I accepted this as a tacit warning that I should not try to stop my descent or change my course.
The peculiarities of scale and mass which seemed so odd to me were clearly the natural conditions of this place. But what
exactly was the
place? The multiverse? If so, it was contained in a single mountain on a single planet of a universe. How could that be?

My emotions seemed to be dissipating. My whole being was evaporating, joining the ectoplasmic atmosphere through which I floated.
Terror, anxiety, concern for my loved ones, became abstract. I lost myself to this sense of infinity. I did not expect to
stop my fall nor ever know an ending to my adventure. I was mesmerized by the experience. We were all in the embrace of the
Tree of Life itself!

I remembered the Celtic notion of the Mother Sea to which the wandering spirit always returned. Its presence became increasingly
tangible. Was this what dying felt like? Were my loved ones already dead? Would I join them?

Unconcerned now, I was content to drift down and down through the verdant lattice and not care if I ever reached a bottom.
Yet increasingly I began to notice areas I could only describe as desolate. Branches had withered and broken as vitality had
been drained from them by Law or by Chaos or by the ordinary, inevitable processes of decay. And slowly it began to dawn upon
me that perhaps the entire tree was truly dying.

But if the multiverse were no more than an idea, and this was only then its visualization, how could it possibly be saved
by the actions of a few men and women? Were our rituals so powerful that they could change the fundamentals of reality?

Below me now I saw an endless flow of pale green-and-yellow dunes racing and rippling, as if blown by a
cosmic wind, crossed by curving rivers of chalky white and jade, dotted with pools which bubbled and gasped. I smelled rich
salt. I smelled a million amniotic oceans. Around me a dark cloud gushed rapidly upwards and spread away, forming its own
tree shape. Another followed it, dark grey, white, boiling foam. Another. Until there was a forest of gaseous trees. A hissing
forest that rose before me and then collapsed into shivering star clusters. More green-gold branches. More peace. Eternal
tranquillity…

The whispering gases arose again, the darkling turbulence, and a shrill voice yelling into a gorge of bubbling blood. I was
losing my own substance. I could feel everything that was myself on the very brink of total dissipation. At any moment I would
join the writhing chaos all around me. Whatever identity I had left slipped towards total destruction. Intellectually I felt
some urgency, but my body did not respond.