The Skrayling Tree: The Albino in America Read online

  These thoughts went through my head as I lay staring at the multitude of stars in the void above me that night. Sleep was almost impossible, but I finally nodded off before dawn.

  When I awoke, Prince Lobkowitz was gone. He had taken his cutlass with him. Only his saddlebags were left behind. There was a note pinned to one of the bags:

  MY APOLOGIES. I HAVE TO GO BACK TO COMPLETE SOME UNFINISHED WORK. WAIT FOR ME A DAY. THEN CARRY ON TOWARDS THE SHINING PATH. LET NOTHING DIVERT YOU.

  —LOBKOWITZ

  I guessed that the albino crow had gone with him, until for an instant I spied it circling above me before disappearing down into a canyon. Perhaps it followed Lobkowitz?

  With little to do but nurse my fears, I waited all that day and another night for Lobkowitz. He did not return. Superstitiously I guessed we had celebrated too early.

  I mourned for him as I took up his belongings and my own. I wondered where the bird had gone. Had it followed him to his fate or taken another path? Then I began the long climb down towards the frozen lake and the silvery trail which led across it.

  I prayed that I would at last find Oona in the great, golden pyramid the Kakatanawa called their longhouse.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Hawk Wind

  Then he told the deed he’d done,

  Told of all that endless slaughter,

  Red beneath the setting sun.

  W. S. HARTE,

  “The War Trail”

  The trail down to the lakeside was surprisingly easy at first. Then, as usual, the wind came up, and I had to fight it to stay on my feet. It attacked me from every point of the compass. Now I, too, had the strangest feeling that not only was it intelligent, but it actually hated me and wanted to harm me. This made me all the more determined to get down to the valley floor. Gales forced their way through layers of my clothing, sliced me across the throat and drove icy needles into my eyes. My hand felt lacerated from trying to protect my face.

  Several times, on a difficult part of the mountain trail, the gusts sprang from nowhere to grab me and more than once almost succeeded in flinging me down into the distant gorge. Sometimes they struck like a fist into the small of my back and other times attacked my legs. I began to think of this wind as a devil, a malignant personality, it seemed so determined to kill me. In one terrible moment I set off an avalanche I barely escaped, but I pressed on with due care, keeping a handhold on every available crack and clump of grass as the full-force gale tore and thrashed at me. Somehow I eventually reached the valley.

  I stood at last on the flat, staring up a long, narrow gorge towards the lake. I could see a few dots on the shore, and I hoped one of them might be Lobkowitz awaiting me. I could not believe he had betrayed or abandoned me. He had seemed so elated the night before, anticipating our sighting of the causeway and the golden ziggurat of Kakatanawa.

  The ziggurat became more impressive as I approached.

  From this distance I could see signs of habitation. It was evidently a huge and complex city to rival any of the great cities of Europe, yet arranged as a single vast building! From various parts of the ziggurat, which was verdant with gardens, hanging vines, even small trees, I saw the blue smoke of small fires rising into a clearing sky. Everywhere was busy movement. The place was thoroughly self-contained and virtually inviolable. It could have withstood a thousand sieges.

  A huge wall ran around the whole base. It was extremely high and capable of withstanding most kinds of attack. The tiny specks were people amid large, animaldragged passenger vehicles and commercial carts. The general sense was of busy activity, casual order, and unvanquishable might. If such a city had ever existed in my world’s history, then it survived only as a legend. How could something so magnificent and so enormous be completely forgotten?

  In contrast to the order of the city, the activity on the shore was confused. I saw a few figures coming and going. Some sort of dispute seemed to be taking place. I tried to see who was arguing with whom.

  Foolishly I had let my attention focus on the distance rather than on my immediate surroundings. The gorge had narrowed. The trail dipped down into a shallow, green meadow blanketed with a light coating of snow. Enclosed by high rocks, the depression might have once been a pond or old riverbed. I was so busy craning my neck to see the group on the shore that I was taken entirely by surprise.

  I slipped, losing both my bundle and Lobkowitz’s. My feet slid from under me, and I fell headlong.

  When I came to rest I found myself surrounded by a large band of Indians. They were silent, menacing. They emerged from among the rocks, glaring in full war paint. Though they had the appearance of Apache or Navajo, their clothing was that of woods Indians, like the Iroquois. They were clearly intent on butchering me. But there was something wrong.

  As they drew closer, spears and bows at the ready, I began to realize how small they were.

  I tried to tell them I came in peace. I tried to remember the Indian signs I had learned in the Boy Scouts in Germany. But these fellows were not concerned with peace. The tiny men screamed unintelligible insults and orders at me. There was no doubting their belligerence but I hesitated before defending myself. Not one of them reached much above my knee. I had been flung into some children’s fairyland, some elfin kingdom!

  My first impulse was laughter. I began to make some remark about Gulliver, but the spear that narrowly missed my head was unequivocal. I continued to try to avoid bloodshed.

  “I am not your enemy!” I shouted. “I come in peace!”

  More miniature arrows zipped past me like bees. They were not deliberately trying to miss me. I was amazed at their bad marksmanship, as I was not, after all, a small target. They were clearly terrified. After one last attempt to persuade them to see reason, I acted without thinking, without any hesitation, and with a growing frisson of relished destruction.

  Reaching over my shoulder I sensuously slid the shivering, groaning runeblade from her hard scabbard and felt the black silk mold to my hand, the black steel leap to life as she scented blood and souls. Scarlet runes veined her ebony blade, pulsing and flickering within the steel as she sang her terrible, relentless song. And it seemed I heard names in the humming metal, heard great oaths of revenge being taken. All this bonded me even closer to the weapon. My human self remained horrified, distant. Whatever else inhabited me anticipated a delicious feast. As well as drawing on the experiences of Elric of Melniboné I also became, in some hideous way, the sword itself.

  I gasped with the joy of it even before the gleaming metal took her first little souls. Strong little souls. They were helpless against me, yet despite their fear they would not run. Not at first. Tough, hardy bodies pressed around my legs, and I had to force a certain delicacy upon the blade in order to slice away their embracing limbs. They behaved like men who had reached their limit and now did not care if they died. As I pressed forward against them, cutting them down like vermin, they fell back around something they were clearly protecting.

  I was curious, even as I continued to kill. My sword possessed my will. She would not cease her feasting. She would not stop drinking until she had drunk every shred of every soul and drawn them shrieking into my eager veins. Half of me was disgusted with my actions, but that half did not control my bloodlust nor my sword arm. I stabbed and slashed and chopped with slow, steady strokes, like a man stropping a razor.

  They were now entirely fearless, these little men, as if reconciled to their violent deaths. Perhaps even welcoming them. They came at me with tomahawks and knives and spears and arrows. They even used a kind of sling to fling live snakes at me. I let them strike if they chose. There is no venom known which can kill a Melnibonéan noble. We are weaned on venom.

  The snakes and arrows were brushed aside by the sword I knew as Ravenbrand. Her speed was a bloody blur. Flint clubs and short, stone swords grazed me but did not cut me. Every pygmy who died wailed in sudden understanding as he gave me fresh life. I laughed aloud in my killing. I l
et the stolen energy fill me with godlike invulnerability. I lusted to murder and celebrated every stolen soul! Small they might be, but the pygmies were near-immortals and thus rich with supernatural life stuff. After the crude souls of the Ononos, this fairy blood was a delight. It poured into me until I felt my physical form would contain it no longer, that it would all burst out of me.

  I fought on, carrying the attack. I laughed at their agony and their fear. Even those who tried to surrender, I killed. I sighed with the sweetness of their slaughter. The majority, however, battled on with enormous courage, preferring to die bravely, because they knew death was their only future.

  Up and down, my sword arm rose and fell as, driven by my old berserk blood-craze, I pursued groups of the warriors and continued to slaughter even when most of them had finally lost heart for a fight. At last there was only one band left. With their buffalo-hide shields and quartz-tipped spears, they had formed a ring around a pair of large boulders and clearly intended, like their fallen comrades, to defend their position to the death.

  I slipped the blade of my sword between the legs of the nearest warrior and dragged the razor-sharp blade upward to cut him neatly in two. He squealed and wriggled like a tortured cat. Most, however, I simply beheaded. It was hard, precise, mechanical work. The creatures were considerably denser than they looked.

  At last all that was left of the pygmies was what they had defended. He lay in a small clearing formed by the boulders. A wizened old man spread over the primitive stretcher like a stain. Everywhere around him were piled the corpses of his warriors. Not one was remotely alive. Small, headless corpses, like so many slaughtered chickens. Spattered with the blood of his people, the man must have been over a hundred years old. His skin was thin as tissue paper, and his fingers were like picked bones. He was an animated corpse, an unwrapped mummy, a husk of a creature, yellowed and fading into nothingness with none to mourn him. But his eyes burned with life, and his lips moved, whispering violently and with considerable pain in a patois I could barely understand. A much corrupted Old French dialect? I had learned that it was often a mistake in the multiverse to try to identify a language too closely.

  “Would you loot the last of our honor, Prince Silver-skin?” He glared angrily at me and tried to lift a hand weakly shaking a bloody rattle decorated with small animal skulls. All he had left was his mockery. “Your folk have taken everything else from us. You leave us nothing but our shame, and we deserve to die.” He was neither strong nor unreconciled to death. There was no need for me to finish him. I had always had a distaste for killing the helpless, which had made me something of a laughingstock as a boy in Melniboné. The old man was already as good as dead, his raspy breath coming with increasing difficulty and slowness. In spite of his afflictions he was able to whisper at me from the rough stretcher on which he lay. “I am Ipkaptam, the Two Tongues.”

  He was a grey man. The life had been sucked out of him, but not by the sword I now resheathed.

  “Are all my people dead?” he asked me.

  “All those whom you sent against me,” I said. “Why should you wish to have me killed?”

  “You are our enemy, Pale Crow, and you know it. You have no soul. You keep it in the body of a bird. You use our own iron against us. You would steal our best-kept treacheries and learn too much about our masters’ whims. Does it matter where we are or what we face now? All human aspiration is brought low by human greed and human folly. Now we are tainted by the human curse, and so we fade from this sphere. Is our epic to tell of our self-deception, of our certainty in our own superiority? It is the end of the Pukawatchi. There are only two important realities in this world: starvation and sudden death…”

  This speech exhausted him. I motioned him gently to silence. But he said:

  “You are the man the boy became?”

  I could not follow this. I thought he was raving. Then he said clearly, “There are only old people, women and children to weep for the Pukawatchi. Our ancient tribe reconciles itself to the end. We are no more. One day even our name will be forgotten.”

  My impulse, now that the blood frenzy had passed, was to comfort him, but I did not know how to do so.

  I knelt among the raw, red meat I had made of his men and took his withered hand in my gauntleted one. “I meant you no harm and would have gone on my way if you had not attacked me.”

  “I know,” said the old man, “but we also knew that our death time had come. It was written that the black blade would destroy us if we let it go. We have failed in all our ventures. Our oaths lie dry and unfulfilled in dying mouths. It is time for us to die. All our treasures are gone. All our boasts are empty. All our honor has been taken from us. We have nothing to return with save our shame. So we died with honor, trying to take back our black blade. Is it your son, then, who stole it?”

  The old man’s gaunt features were parchment on bone. His eyes sparked and then faded before I could try to answer.

  “Or are you another self altogether?” The shaman rose from his stretcher and reached out, trying to touch me. A soft song whispered on his lips, and I knew that he spoke not to me but to the spirits he believed in. He looked into a world becoming far more real to him than the one he was leaving.

  He died upright in an attitude of pride and did not fall back until I laid him down and closed his eyes. His people had died, as they wished, in battle and with honor against an old foe. Their remains looked frail, like children’s corpses, and I knew a pang of conscience. Yet these people had been trying hard to kill me. They would be stripping my still-warm body even now, had they won.

  In the end I made no attempt to bury them, but rather left them to be cleaned by the carrion-eating birds congregating overhead, drawn in by the stink of a blood-drenched wind.

  Soon I could clearly make out what lay before me, but I was no less mystified. I saw a tall black elephant carrying a huge open howdah with what appeared to be a birchbark canoe used as a canopy. Astride the beast was a handsome Indian whose style of costume and decoration resembled the Kakatanawas and was typical of the Indians who had once inhabited the North American woods. A Mohican, perhaps? I guessed him to be some sort of chief. His concentration was not upon the arriving buzzards but on what lay immediately in his field of vision.

  The scene was made worse by its absolute silence.

  A black, horrible and completely silent tornado, thin and vicious at the base, lowering, thick and menacing above, was almost a perfectly reversed pyramid. This edifice of frozen, filthy air blocked the way from shore to island and, with the city as its background, formed a terrifying harmony. The silver trail ended suddenly, as if the tornado had somehow eaten it up. The path across the ice to the city ended as well. I felt I neared the very center of the world. But compared to this, my journey had been easy until now.

  All the forces who opposed the Balance were gathering to defend against its saviors. We faced not the opposing philosophies of Law and Chaos, but the Spirit of Limbo—the mindless yet profound creature which yearns for death, which aches for death, but not merely for itself. It demands that all creation shall know oblivion, for all creation is the only equal to that monstrous ego. If other persuasions fail, self-murder and the murder of as many others as possible become the only logical option. I knew from Nazi Germany that from small, mean dreams such egos grow until their nightmares become the condition of us all.

  Against all my usual skepticism I was now in no doubt that this barely frozen force was a supernatural tornado. There was also no doubt it intended to block the way of those who confronted it. I knew I looked upon a magical event of some magnitude. From where I had paused, taking what cover I could, I could feel its vibrant evil. A whole world of evil concentrated into this unmoving whirlwind. Were I still a believer, I would have thought myself in the presence of Satan incarnate. I marveled at the courage of the single warrior facing it.

  All around me now was that awful, oppressive stillness. Progress forward was nearly impossible
. I felt as if I waded through heavy water rather than air.

  The great beast was a mammoth, and like the Indian, it was frozen in motion.

  Then I saw a woman’s figure in the shadow of the giant pachyderm. An arrow fitted to her bow, she faced the tornado. Over her slender shoulders was a beautiful white robe, thrown back to allow her the shot.

  Time was standing still here. Even my own actions grew more sluggish by the moment.

  I forced my way forward, hoping that my eyes were not merely trying to console me that the figure I saw was who I thought it was.

  A little nearer and I was certain. It was Oona! I tried to move in her direction when suddenly I was overwhelmed by a mighty, deafening noise. It was like the note of a horn, echoing through every dimension of the multiverse. Echoing on and on forever.

  The tornado shrieked and sniggered and raged. It had come fully alive now! I saw fiendish faces within it and limbs of sorts.

  My hair and clothes were whipped backward. I felt my body sucked at, clutched at, investigated. The wind became even more aggressive. The whole scene was alive now.

  Through all this wild bluster came the sweet, clear note of a flute. My wife was nocking her arrow to her bow. I feared to call out and distract her. What did she hope to do? Did she think she could kill a whirlwind—and a supernatural whirlwind at that—with an arrow? Why was Oona walking so calmly towards her death? Did she not sense the thing’s power? Was she in a fresh trance? Dreaming within a dream?

  And who, or what, had sounded the horn I heard?

  Again, instinct took charge of my will, and without a second thought I ran towards the causeway, shouting to Oona to stop, to wait. But she did not hear me above the terrible shriek of the tornado. She walked slowly, with an odd, unnatural gait. Was she entranced?