The Empire of Ice Cream (38 page)

“Not quite,” said the king, and with a simple yank, pulled the fruit free from its stem.

Instantly, the face of Vertuminus went blank, his branch arms dropped to his sides, lifeless, and his head nodded.

Pious sat back in his throne, unable to believe that defeating the weird creature could have been so easy. He held the fruit up before his eyes, turning it with his fingers, and pondered the idea of the word of God trapped beneath its thin, blue skin.

Minutes passed as the ruler sat in silent contemplation, and in his mind formulated a metaphor in which the acquisition of all he desired could be as easy as his plucking this blue prize. It was a complex thought for Pious, one in which the blue globe of the world from the philosopher's contraption became confused with the fruit.

He nearly dropped the precious object when suddenly his lifeless guest gave a protracted groan. The king looked up in time to see another blue orb rapidly growing on the chest of the tree man. It quickly achieved fullness, like a balloon being inflated. He gave a gasp of surprise when his recently dead guest smiled and brought his branch arms up.

“Now it is my turn,” said Vertuminus, and his root fingers began to grow toward the king.

“Guards,” called Pious, but they were already there. Swords came down on either side, and hacked off the wooden limbs. As they fell to the ground, Pious wasted no time. He dove across the table and plucked the new blue growth. Again, Vertuminus fell back into his seat, lifeless.

“Quickly, men, hack him to pieces and burn every twig!” In each of his hands he held half of his harvest. He rose from his throne and left the pleasure garden, the sound of chopping following him out into the corridor. Here was a consolation for having lost his Red Knight, he thought—something that could perhaps prove far more powerful then a man encased in metal.

When Pious ordered that one of the forest people be brought to him, he had no idea that the young woman chosen was the daughter of Moren Kairn. She was a tall, willowy specimen of fifteen with long, blonde hair that caught the light at certain angles and appeared to harbor the slightest hues of green. Life in the stockade, where the remaining rebels were still kept, was very difficult. For those who did not willingly choose the executioner over conversion to the faith, food was used as an incentive to keep them on the path to righteousness. If they prayed they ate, but never enough to completely satisfy their hunger. And so this girl, like the others, was exceedingly thin.

She stood before the king in his study, a low table separating her from where he sat. On that table was a plate holding the two blue orbs that had been plucked from Vertuminus.

“Are you hungry, my dear?” asked the king.

The girl, frightened for her life, knowing what had become of her father and having witnessed executions in the stockade, nodded nervously.

“That is a shame,” said Pious. “In order to make it up to you, I have a special treat. Here is a piece of fruit.” He waved his hand at the plate before him. “Take one.”

She looked to either side where soldiers stood guarding her every move.

“It's quite all right,” said Pious in as sweet a tone as he was capable.

The girl reached out her hand and carefully lifted a piece of fruit. She brushed her hair away from her face with her free hand as she brought the blue food to her mouth.

The king leaned forward with a look of expectation on his face as she took the first bite. He did not know what to expect and feared for the worst. But the girl, after tasting a mouthful, smiled, and began greedily devouring the rest of it. She ate it so quickly he barely had time to see that its insides, though green, were succulent like the pulp of an orange.

When she had finished and held nothing but the pit in her hand, Pious asked her, “And how was that?”

“The most wonderful thing I have ever tasted,” she whispered.

“Do you feel well?” he asked.

“I feel strong again,” she said, and smiled.

“Good,” said Pious. He motioned to one of the soldiers to escort her back to the stockade. “You may go now,” he said.

“Thank you,” said the girl.

Once she and the soldier had left the room, the king said to the remaining guard, “If she is still alive by nightfall, bring me word of it.”

It tasted, to him, something like a cool, wet ball of sugar, and yet hidden deeply within its dripping sweetness there lay the slightest trace of bitterness. With each bite he tried to fix more clearly his understanding of its taste, but just as he felt on the verge of a revelation, he found he had devoured the entire thing. All that was left in his hand was the black pit, shaped like a tiny egg. Since the blue-skinned treat had no immediate effect on him, he thought perhaps the secret word lay within its dark center and he swallowed that also. Then he waited. Sitting at the window in his bedchamber, he stared out into the cool spring night, listening, above the din of his wife's snoring, to the sound of an unseen bird calling plaintively off in the forest. He wondered what, if anything, the fruit would do for him. At worst he might become sick unto death, but the fact that the girl from the forest was still alive but an hour earlier was good insurance that he would also live. At best, the risk was worth the knowledge and power he might attain. To know the secret language of the Almighty, even one green word, could bring him limitless power and safety from age and death.

Every twinge of indigestion, every itch or creak of a joint, made him think the change was upon him. He ardently searched his mind, trying to coax into consciousness the syllables of that sacred word. As it is said of a drowning man, his life passed before the inner eye of his memory, not in haste but as a slow, stately procession. He saw himself as a child, he saw his parents, his young wife, the friends he had had when he was no older than the girl he had used to test the fruit. Each of them beckoned to him for attention, but he ignored their pleas, so intent was he upon owning a supreme secret.

The hours passed and instead of revelation, he found nothing but weariness born of disappointment. Eventually, he crawled into bed beside his wife and fell fast asleep. In his dreams he renewed his quest, and in that strange country made better progress. He found himself walking through the forest, passing beneath the boughs of gigantic pines. In those places where the sunlight slipped through and lit the forest floor, he discovered that the concept of the green word became clearer to him.

He went to one of these pools of light and as he stood in it, the thought swirled in his head like a ghost as round as the fruit itself. It came to him that the word was a single syllable comprised of two entities, one meaning life and one death, that intermingled and intertwined and bled into each other. This knowledge took weight and dropped to his tongue. He tried to speak the green word, but when he opened his mouth, all that came out was the sound of his own name. Then he was awake and aware that someone was calling him.

“King Pious,” said the captain of the guard.

The man was standing next to his bed. He roused himself and sat up.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The forest people have escaped from the stockade.”

“What?” he yelled. “I'll have your head for this!”

“Your Highness, we found the soldiers who guard them enmeshed in vines that rooted them to the ground and, impossible as it sounds, a tree has grown up in the stockade overnight and the branches bend down over the high wall to touch the ground. The prisoners must have climbed out in the night. One of the horseman tried to pursue them but was attacked by a monstrous black dog and thrown from his mount.”

Pious threw back the covers and got out of bed. He meant to give orders to have the soldiers hunt them down and slay them all, but suddenly a great confusion clouded his mind. That ghost of the green word floated and turned again in his mind, and when he finally opened his mouth to voice his command, no sound came forth. Instead, a leafed vine snaked up out of his throat, growing with the speed of an arrow's flight. He clutched his chest, and the plant from within him wound itself around the soldier's neck and arms, trapping him. Another vine appeared and another, until the king's mouth was stretched wide with virulent strands of green life growing rapidly out and around everything in the room. At just this moment, the queen awoke, took one look at her husband, and fled, screaming.

By twilight, the palace had become a forest. Those who did not flee the onslaught of vegetation but stayed and tried to battle it were trapped alive in its green web. All of the rooms and chambers, the kitchen, the tower cell, the huge dining hall, the pleasure garden, and even the philosopher's hiding place were choked with a riot of leafy vine. The queen and those others who had escaped the king's virulent command traveled toward the south, back to their homes and roots.

Pious, still planted where he had stood that morning, a belching fountain of leaf and tendril, was now the color of lime. Patches of moss grew upon his face and arms, and his already arthritic hands had spindled and twisted into branches. In his beard of grass, dandelions sprouted. On the pools that were his staring eyes, miniscule water lilies floated. When the sun slipped out of sight behind the trees of the forest, the last of that part of the green word he knew to be
life
, left him and all that remained was
death
. A stillness descended on the palace that was now interrupted only by the warblings of real nightingales and the motion of butterflies escaped from the pleasure garden into the wider world.

It was obvious to all of the forest people that Moren Kairn's daughter, Alyessa, who had effected their escape with a startling display of earth magic, was meant to take the place of the witch. When they saw her moving amidst the trees with the crow perched upon her shoulder, followed by Mahood, they were certain. Along with her mother, she took up residence in the cave beneath the stand of willows and set to learning all that she could from what was left behind by her predecessor.

One day near the end of spring, she planted in the earth the seed from the blue fruit, the origin of her magic, that Pious had given her. What grew from it was a tree that in every way emulated the form of Vertuminus. It did not move or talk, but just its presence was a comfort to her, reminding her of the quiet strength of her father. With her new powers came new responsibilities as the forest people looked to her to help them in their bid to rebuild their village and their lives. At the end of each day, she would come to the wooden knight and tell him of her hopes and fears, and in his silence she found excellent council and encouragement.

She was saddened in the autumn when the tree man's leaves seared and fell and the bark began to lift away from the trunk, revealing cracks in the wood beneath. On a cold evening, she trudged through orange leaves to his side, intending to offer thanks before winter devoured him. As she stood before the wooden form, snow began to lightly fall. She reached out her hand to touch the rough bark of his face, and just as her fingers made contact, she realized something she had been wondering about all summer.

It had never been clear to her why the fruit had been her salvation and gift and at the same time had destroyed King Pious. Now she knew that although the king had the green word, he had no way to understand it. “Love,” she thought, “so easy for some and for others so impossible.” In the coming years, through the cycle of the seasons, she planted the simple seed of this word in the hearts of all who knew her, and although, after a long life, she eventually passed on, she never died.

The Green Word

Story Notes

“The Green Word” was my first attempt at writing for a young adult audience. Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow were starting an anthology series, the first volume of which would deal with the folkloric figure of the Green Man, and they kindly invited me to submit a story. I'd never written with a specific age range in mind, so the prospect of doing so was a little daunting at first. Luckily, my two sons were in the demographic the book was aimed at, so I thought about the kinds of things that they liked to read themselves or have me read to them. I also tried to think back into the distant, misty past of my own youth and remember what it was like. Here are a few of the items that appeared on my inventory—magic, weird creatures, sword battles, good witches, evil kings … With these and a few more in mind, I began
.

My story of the Green Man was going to borrow some ideas from the legend of the mystical mandrake plant. I hit a roadblock, though, when the mandrake was about to enter the story. The legend has it that the mandrake plant only grows at the foot of the gallows, planted from the ejaculated seed of hung men. It is a fact that when men are hung and the neck is broken they automatically ejaculate. This fact seemed a little too much for a young adult story, but I was unsure because I knew that young adult fiction, in recent years, had been taking on some very adult subject matter, as well it should. In addition, I knew that Terri Windling is a real expert on folklore. I convinced myself that I was in a jam. If I have a dead man ejaculating in my story for kids, I was afraid my editors would think me a creep. On the other hand, I was worried that if I left this detail out Terri might think I was lame, trying to meddle with the integrity of the legend just because I was dealing with younger readers. So I wrote to Ellen and asked her what she thought. She wisely told me to bypass the gallows ejaculation, which I did. I came up with a solution that everyone could live with, except the poor character. Instead, he simply gets his head cut off, and his spilled blood carries the seed that gives birth to the plant, which grows into the Green Man figure
.

When I finished the story, I realized that there was something to this writing for young people and, in the process, for my younger self. Kids are not unaware of the darkness in the world, the tragedy and evil that lurks outside their doors or sometimes behind them, but recognizing this, they have a tendency to have their antennae always up for those instances of wonder, miracles of humanity, and mysteries of nature that we lose track of as we get older. The story made
The Green Man
anthology and featured a great illustration by artist Charles Vess, as did all the other pieces in the volume. It's since been reprinted in Datlow and Windling's
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Annual Collection
and in Hartwell and Cramer's
Year's Best Fantasy 3. The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest
went on to win (in a tie) the World Fantasy Award for best anthology
.