The Skrayling Tree: The Albino in America Read online

  I frowned. “Elric is your father?”

  He laughed. “Of course not. How could that be? Sadric is my father.”

  Ayanawatta touched his friend’s arm. “Sadric is dead. You said so. Swallowed by the kenabik.”

  White Crow was genuinely puzzled. “I said he was swallowed. Not that he was killed.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Pathfinder

  Pour the beer and light the feasting fires,

  Bring you in the tall Yule trees,

  Without, let Father Frost and Brother Death reside

  Let Mother Famine fly to farther fields,

  Raise high the trees and high the ale-cup lift,

  Let good will rule and to ill will all folk give short shrift.

  OLD MOORSDALE SONG

  Lord Shoashooan did not merely take shape above the fading causeway. He drew strength from the surrounding mountains. Storm clouds boiled in from north, south and west, masses of dark grey and black shot through with points of white, tumbling swiftly towards us.

  Shale and rocks began to fly towards his spinning form, and from within that bizarre body his grotesque face laughed and raved in its greedy rage, utterly deranged. He was now more powerful than when either Oona or I had fought him. His size increased by the moment. Pieces of ice flew up from the lake to join the whirlwind’s heavy debris. And when I looked deep into it, I saw the twisting bodies of men and beasts, heard their cries mingled with the vicious shriek of the cruel Warlord of Winds.

  Realizing suddenly what he faced, White Crow frowned, murmured something to himself, then turned and began to run back down the long, curving roadway between the tiers. Sepiriz and Ayanawatta both cried out to him, but he ignored them. He flung some cryptic remark over his shoulder and then disappeared from sight. Was he deserting us? Where was Oona? Did he go to her? Was she safe? And who did he think his father was? Gaynor? How did White Crow hope to avoid conflict?

  Questions were impossible. Even Sepiriz seemed flustered by the speed with which Lord Shoashooan was manifesting himself. The maddened Lord of Winds was already ten times more powerful than when he had sought to block our way across the ice.

  Prince Lobkowitz was grim as he hurried up the ramps. Higher and higher we climbed, and the tornado rose to match our height. The causeways grew tighter and narrower as we neared the top of the city, and the wind licked and tasted us, playing with us, to let us know there was no escaping its horrible intelligence, its vast destructive power.

  As we neared the top, heavy pieces of earth and stone flew against the walls of Kakatanawa, chipping at surfaces, slashing into foliage. A large rock narrowly missed me, and Sepiriz shook twice as he was hit. Part of an outer wall fell. Through the gap I saw the tiny figures of the Vikings on the ice moving in closer, but we were momentarily safe from any immediate confrontation with them. We had no way to resist the invader even if we could engage him. Lord Sepiriz carried no sword. Save for Ayanawatta’s bow and Prince Lobkowitz’s cutlass, we had no weapons.

  We had reached a broad-based tower with dark red walls and a deep blue ceiling and floor; a central spiral staircase led like a cord of silver up to a platform and what was clearly an experimental laboratory. An alchemical study, perhaps? Certainly Prince Lobkowitz had expected to find it there. He began at once to climb the stairs.

  “Let’s have a better look at our enemies,” he murmured.

  We followed him up. Here was an assortment of large, chunky machinery, mostly constructed of stone, like an old mill with huge granite cogwheels and smaller ones of beaten gold and platinum. Apparently this people, too, had no notion of smelting iron. The strange, bulky cogs and levers worked a series of lenses and mirrors. There was something familiar about all this.

  Of course. My father had experimented with a smaller version at Bek before the first war. I realized we were looking at a rare form of camera obscura, which, by means of mirrors, could show scenes of the surface around the city. It was not entirely mechanical in nature. There were other forces involved in its construction, more common to Melniboné than Munich. Indeed, when Lord Sepiriz joined the stocky prince, he easily made parts move by a murmured command and a gesture. Gradually the two men brought the scene outside the gates into view.

  I had been right. Gaynor the Damned led them. Near him was his turncoat lieutenant Klosterheim. The third man also wore a helmet, which obscured most of his face, but his eyes were shockingly familiar. He had an edgy, wolfish air, as did all the Vikings, but his was of a different quality. There was something fundamentally self-contained about the figure, and I feared him more than the others.

  The Vikings did not look as if they had slept or eaten well for some time. Their journey here had clearly not been an easy one. I had rarely seen a hungrier bunch of cutthroats. They watched the Wind Demon with considerable wariness and did not look happy to be of Gaynor’s party now. They were almost as nervous of the huge whirlwind as we were! Only the stranger in the black helmet seemed to be in a different mood. His eyes in shadow, his pale lips half-hidden by the upwardly thrusting chin-guard, the man was smiling. Like his eyes, his smile was one I recognized and feared.

  Still larger rocks smashed into the walls, leaving deep gashes. Sepiriz was furious, muttering about the age of the place and what it had meant for so many millennia.

  I think he had believed us safe, at least temporarily, in the remote fortress city, but these events were proving far more dangerous and whimsical than he had expected. He realized he may have underestimated the danger. The developing situation appeared to have defeated his imagination.

  A gritty wind howled into the tall camera and whistled around the complicated confection of copper wires and polished mirrors, the worn granite cogwheels and brass pivots, the pools of mercury. There was a busy humming, a rattling and buzzing as the wind touched the delicate, half-supernatural instruments. Polished glass flashed and blinded me. Thin tubes rattled and hissed and scraped together.

  Lord Shoashooan’s voice whispered through the tall rooms, finding strange, ugly echoes. “Mortals and immortals both, you face your end without dignity or grace. Accept the fact that the Balance is finished. Its central staff has been lost, its scales discarded. Soon the tree itself will die. The regulator of the multiverse has failed you. Law triumphs. The steady calm of complete stability awaits you. Time is abolished, and you can anticipate, as do I, a new order.”

  “The order you promise is the stasis of death,” Lord Sepiriz replied contemptuously. “You it is, Lord Shoashooan, who dishonors your own name. You it is who lacks both dignity and grace. You are a busy noise surrounding a vacuum. To destroy is your only effect. Otherwise you are less than a bird’s dying breath.”

  A groan of anger. The walls rattled and cracked as the whirlwind’s strength increased still more. Outside another great crash as masonry loosened and tumbled.

  Lord Sepiriz’s hands played over the strange instruments. His shoulders were hunched with the urgency of his actions. His eyes flashed from one point to another as if he sought a weakness somewhere.

  He was reading signals within the mirrors, frowning over swirling glasses and tubes.

  The chamber shook. It was like a heavy earthquake. My companions looked at one another. Clearly they had never anticipated such a force. Though outwardly artificial, this city had once been a wild mountain. Within she was still a living mountain. And Lord Shoashooan had the power to challenge this mountain, to threaten its destruction!

  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 coul
d 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.