The White Oak (5 page)

As I struggle to free myself, the voice speaks to me. It’s the voice I used to hear in the caves, the same one that helped me on the plains of Asphodel. “Stop struggling,” it whispers, “you’ll only make it worse.” I freeze, and when I do, the pull on my legs lessens.

“Where are you?” I yell at the voice, “Who are you?” My questions go unanswered and I feel the anger rise up in me. “Why can’t you just talk to me?” I yell. The lack of response frustrates me so much I want to start kicking again, just to get his attention.

The tree is quicksand. I feel myself sinking in very slowly even though I am holding still. To get more of my body outside the tree, I lean back. My legs float upward and my torso shifts down until my whole body is parallel to the ground, sticking out of the tree like a twig. Buried in the trunk from the waist down, I stare up at the slate-colored sky. Something shimmers on a branch high above me.

“Minotaur!” I yell. “Get me out!” I see someone standing on the branch with him, but he doesn’t make a move to come get me.

I don’t know if it’s the stress of being near death, or something about the tree, but I’m feeling everything intensely—the pain in my feet, a powerful thirst, and a burst of anxiety that radiates through me as I try to find the will to fight death yet
again
. The tree closes around my legs.

“Help!” I yell, not knowing what else to do. I look up at Minotaur’s branch again and see six or seven Simurgh perched alongside him and what I now recognize as a woman. She points at me and two Simurgh, a couple, dive off the branch. In an instant they are hovering near me. I am now buried up to my shoulders and sinking faster. The Simurgh look at me, then at each other. They seem to be communicating with their eyes. One nods to the other as though they’ve agreed upon their plan. He draws in his sharp talons like a cat retracting its claws. Digging his bird feet into the tree, he grabs me under my arms, flapping his powerful wings as he tries to pull me out. He pulls so hard I’m afraid my spine will snap, but in spite of his efforts, my body doesn’t budge. In fact, I sink in deeper. The tree is swallowing me and there doesn’t appear to be any way to stop it. From high up, the woman yells. I can’t hear what she says, but as soon as she finishes, the other Simurgh dives into the tree headfirst. As the bird’s body is pulled in, mine is pushed out, as though the tree is making a trade—the Simurgh in exchange for me.

As the Simurgh sacrifices herself, the tree’s grip my legs lets go, and the other Simurgh wrestles me free. He gives a piercing cry as he watches his mate disappear into the trunk. His scream ends in a whimper. I stare at the tree’s trunk with him, feeling his sorrow and thinking of Lucas. After a few moments of silence, he flaps his powerful wings and soars upward, holding me by the shoulders. He sets me on the high branch.

From up here I can see everything: the mysterious river that brought me here, the barren plain of Asphodel, and the black river Tartarus—wide as an ocean, with a giant leaden sphere, the size of a small planet, rotating in its oily waters.

Minotaur hovers like a silver hummingbird next to a woman who must be Sybil. “I am,” Sybil says, as though reading my thoughts. At first glance, she looks about my mother’s age, but as I stare, I become less certain—she is both youthful and ancient at the same time. She wears a gray linen tunic over narrow linen pants. Around her neck is a silver flask encrusted with precious stones. It hangs from a thin leather string. Her salt-and-pepper gray hair is twisted and piled on her head in a messy chignon secured by a golden twig. “Cora,” she says. “I’ve been expecting you. Welcome.” Reaching into the bark, she turns a handle and opens a door in the side of the tree. “Please come in,” she says. Minotaur immediately flies in through the open door, but I hesitate. “Don’t worry,” Sybil says. “The tree is carnivorous only near the base. Up here, it’s perfectly safe.”

I watch as Sybil steps inside. She turns and looks at me in a reassuring way, sweeping her arm toward the interior to indicate that I should come in. Her face is striking, not because it is beautiful but because it is eerily familiar. It’s an elegant face, with a thin, aquiline nose that stands out against her regal features like a sharp crease in a clean sheet of paper. Her skin is clear and luminous, with crow’s-feet forming at the edges of her eyes and laugh lines deepening next to her wide, generous mouth. The eyebrows are perfect arcs drawn like calligraphy over serene velvet gray eyes. “Come in,” she insists, and I step cautiously over the threshold into her home.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she says, gesturing toward a chair by a fireplace. Her movements are graceful, and her bare arms are lean and sinuous, like a dancer’s. I walk over to the fireplace and stand with my back to it, enjoying the warmth but taking care not to overheat the seeds embedded in the fabric of my bodice. The thin dress dries quickly as I take in my surroundings. Sybil’s home is an enormous library with large leather chairs, a plush Persian rug, and a big stone fireplace. The curved walls are lined with shelves packed with books. The ceiling rises as high as the tree itself, disappearing into the darkness above.

“There must be a million books in this library,” I whisper.

“More than that,” Sybil replies.

I stare into what seems to be an infinite space and wonder at how she could have accumulated so many books in this empty wasteland. Where did they come from, and what are they about? Minotaur is flying from shelf to shelf, looking for something.

“What’s he looking for?” I say out loud.

Sybil watches the silver light dart from the shelves to her desk, where it buzzes around the open books. She shakes her head and comes toward me; I can see laughter in her eyes—she’s laughing at Minotaur. “He’s looking for this,” she says, handing me a book she has taken from her enormous, ancient-looking desk, which is the size of a church door and cluttered with works in progress. Some of the volumes are open, and I can see the handwritten text on the pages. Dozens more are piled on and around the desk in pillars taller than I am.

I look down at the book in my hands. It’s beautiful. The cover feels like old leather softened by use, but it’s made of bark from this very tree, tanned and bound as though it were skin. A keystone pattern is tooled along the edges. The book’s title,
Cora Alexander
, is inscribed in gold leaf on the cover. I run my fingers over the raised letters, wondering how Sybil even knows my name, let alone anything about me.

“Did you write this?” I ask.

Sybil smiles and gestures toward the surrounding stacks. “I wrote them all,” she says.

I stare up at her prolific body of work and gasp in disbelief. Reading is easy, but writing has always been a struggle for me. Jotting down a few sentences in my journal makes me uncomfortable, and writing papers for school is pure torture. I write and rewrite, but I can’t get what’s in my head onto the paper. It takes me forever to finish even the shortest piece, so I can’t imagine writing a whole book, let alone thousands. “How is that possible?” I mumble.

Sybil smiles gently, the way one would smile at a child who has just begun to learn something. Her superiority shouldn’t annoy me, but it does. I hate not knowing things.

“Go ahead and read it,” she says, nodding toward my book.

I hesitate for a moment, not sure I want to read what this stranger has written about me, but curiosity gets the better of me and I open the book. The moment I do, the wail of a baby’s cry fills the room and I’m overcome with feelings of joy and melancholy. A three-dimensional image springs off the page and hovers above it like a hologram. It’s a newborn, still covered in blood. The image turns slowly in midair, floating above the book, which I hold as far away from my body as I can. The book itself whispers the story of my birth, as the baby turns slowly, suspended in midair. The narrator’s voice sounds familiar. I listen closely and recognize it from the caves.
The voice.
My heart skips a beat and I can feel the adrenaline pulsing through me. Does Sybil know who it is? How did she get him in the book? Or did she create him? I open my mouth to ask, but before I can get the words out, a thousand spidery threads burst out of the baby’s tiny body. They extend in every direction to connect with the books on the shelves—some even stream out the front door. The child’s body is open in the center, radiating light. I’m so startled by the disturbing image that I drop the book. When it hits the floor, it slams shut and the baby disappears.

“What was that?” I ask, completely forgetting the voice for a moment. I stare at the book that lies at my feet.

“Your story,” Sybil replies. “Your
Book of Life.
It’s a record of everything that has happened, and it helps me figure out what should happen next.”

“What do you mean it helps
you
figure out what should happen next?” I ask, angered by the suggestion that anyone else has a say over my fate.

“You make the decisions,” she reassures me, “but I mold the story—the larger story.” She gestures up toward the stacks of books. “Of course, it changes when something unexpected happens, like your fall through a sinkhole into the underworld.” She smiles and shakes her head at the improbability of my adventure. She pulls two library ladders, fitted into runners along the wall, to where I’m standing.

“Each destiny makes up a separate book,” she explains, “but the stories are interwoven. When I started, I meant to write only one book, but I quickly discovered that if I wanted to be absolutely truthful—.” She pauses, looking past me to reach into her memories. “If I wanted to tell even one person’s life story with complete accuracy, I would have to consider the lives of everyone who had influenced her, and the lives of those who had influenced them, and so on. I had to go all the way back to the beginning, and the project became epic.”

She pushes the ladders next to each other. “I’ll show you what I mean,” she says, starting to climb.

I wince in pain as I try to follow her lead. The pressure of the rungs on my injured feet is excruciating. I have to take a deep breath before each step. Some of my wounds crack open, and blood and pus ooze out. I distract myself by examining the books as I climb. They are packed three or four deep on the shelves. Their covers are made from the same soft, velvety bark that mine was. Along each spine a different name is etched. I notice cobwebs connecting the volumes to each other. Some of the webs stretch across the room. I swipe at the air to clear away the strands, but the webs are made of light, not spider’s silk. The gossamer light passes through me as I stand there trying to understand what is happening.

Sybil is several feet above me. She reaches for a book with an extraordinary number of threads connected to it. “This is an ancestor of yours,” she says, holding the ancient book and waiting for me to catch up with her. “An important one, I don’t think you know about him.” Sybil smiles in a friendly way. “But then, you don’t know much about your family.” She pauses, considering me with her soft gray eyes, and says, “They weren’t all bad; you should know that.” A shiny thread emerges from the book, reaches toward me, and plunges into my sternum. I draw a sharp breath as it pierces me. Reflexively, I grab the thread and try to pull it out, but my hand passes through it like a shadow.

“Look behind you,” Sybil says. When I turn to look, I see the thread coming out of my back and stretching downward to connect with my own book. Minotaur is hovering next to the fireplace, watching as the beam touches the gilded name on the cover. Then suddenly, he snatches up my book and makes for the door.

“Stop!” Sybil commands as she slides down the ladder. She pulls the golden twig from her hair—it’s a pen, and she brandishes it like a magic wand. “This is what you are
really
after,” she says. Minotaur pauses when he sees the pen. When he moves toward her to grab it, Sybil lunges for the book. I scramble down the ladder.

Minotaur and Sybil have a tug-of-war over my book that ends when Sybil loses her grip, sending Minotaur tumbling backward. He hits the stone fireplace and the book flies into the fire. I feel my skin tingle and burn. Racing the rest of the way down the ladder, I run to the hearth and try to save the book. Minotaur is dragging it out of the fireplace, and Sybil is standing over her desk, writing furiously with her golden pen. Minotaur pulls the book onto the hearthstones, where it continues to burn as we search for a way to extinguish the flames.

“Get the blanket over there,” I yell to him, but on his way to fetch it, he disappears.

“He’ll be waiting for you at the ferry,” Sybil says calmly. “We don’t have to worry about him anymore. I’ve arranged it so that he can’t come back here.”

“My book is burning!” I scream, furious at her for seeming so uncaring. She walks slowly, gracefully to one of the leather chairs, takes the wool blanket draped over it, and smothers the flames. When she is finished, we look at what’s left of my book. All the pages are burned, and when I nudge them with the poker, they crumble like dry leaves. Bits of ash float on the air like the broken wings of a gray moth. The cover is still smoldering, orange embers creeping toward the center, where only a few letters of my name remain. I feel a pain in my chest as I crush the cinders against the hearthstones and examine what’s left of the cover, just a bit about the size of my palm.

“Am I going to be okay?” I ask, feeling short of breath. I don’t know what the destruction of my book means.

Sybil places a hand, reassuringly, on my shoulder. “Come sit down,” she says. “I’ll make us some tea.”