The White Tree (52 page)

They paused that afternoon to hack a shallow grave from the frozen dirt for the dozen-odd men who'd died of their wounds during the day's march. Once the grave was refilled, Samarand stood at its edge and cast a plain iron ring on the upturned earth.

"Don't weep for these men," she said, voice carrying through the assembled troop. "There can be no higher glory than to die in the service of Arawn. We should someday be so lucky to have our names written in the same stars as theirs."

She said more in that vein, but Dante had heard similar sentiments plenty of times before, and as with all conventional wisdom he couldn't be certain whether he'd once believed it because it were true or simply because he'd heard it so often it had driven all other thoughts from his head. He tried to think how a eulogy should sound, but was able to draw no truths. They were dead. What was there to say?

By the end of the fourth day from the city Dante could see snowcapped peaks peeping through the fog of cloud and snow that shrouded their path to the north. It was almost improper that they hadn't been attacked again, he thought. They marched with no less a purpose than to unlock a god. Where was the conspiracy of the world to stop them? Were he and Blays its last weapon? It was like the southlands were slumbering, waiting for spring thaws to sniff out the roots of the recent unrest—either that or were simply too stupid and disorganized to do anything at all. It was obscene to think that for all Mallon's strength, the king and his many lords hadn't sent a single man to stop the Arawnites—didn't even know, perhaps, the scope of their intent.

On the other hand, Dante himself considered this whole trip to be nothing more than an impressive example of the insanity of crowds. He expected they'd find a warped old tree clinging to life on some ice-swept hillside and start bowing down and chanting. Once their ritual was complete, how would they even know whether they'd freed their lord? Would Arawn appear in a poof of smoke and brimstone, twenty feet tall with a blade as long as a man's full height? Ready to scourge all Mallon for its hubris? Or would Samarand be infused with his essence, be able to stretch out her hand and see her will be done from sea to sea? Most likely, they'd make a lot of noise and fire and become so excited by their own power they'd convince themselves they felt Arawn's celestial touch. These people put an awful lot of stock in things they'd never seen. Lyle was the last man to have claimed to speak to a god (excluding the rum-drunk ravings of the lunatics that camped out on the corners of every decent city around the globe), and now he rotted in the ground while men invoked his name as a joke. "By Samarand's snowy tits!" they'd swear a century from now. "By the whiskers of Samarand's moles!" Dante snorted, glanced over at the carriages.

"What?" Blays said.

"What do you think's going to happen when we get there?"

"Weirdness," Blays said. "And lots of it."

"An almost demonic insight. What else do you foresee, o great prophet?"

"Well what about you, Holy Man?"

Dante smirked in the direction of the deluded priests. "Sound and fury. I don't think we're in any danger of a starry-eyed god with a beard as great and white as the ocean's foam showing up and laying waste to us heretics."

"That's what Arawn's supposed to look like?"

"Don't they all look like that?"

"Well, then no wonder everyone's so impressed with him."

Dante woke the next morning to find his blankets thick with snow. The road continued straight ahead, but the land to their west began to fall away until they traveled no more than a hundred feet parallel to sheer cliffs, and below that the gray sweep of the ocean. To their east the forest fell back until it was a smudge of dark green behind a veil of falling snow, leaving them to travel on through open hills. Ahead, the mountains were a wall of white and blue, too close to disappear from sight no matter how thick the weather got. They were running out of room, Dante thought; surely the land would end with those peaks. They trudged on. The snow crested the ankles of the men on foot. He pulled his cowl tighter.

Shortly before noon, as best as he could judge it through the clouds, the leading edge of the column reached the top of a hill and drew up short. Those at the front pointed to something blocked to Dante by the hill's white mass. Talk rippled back through the men; he could hear their voices but couldn't make out the words. He glanced at Blays. They swung up the side of the hill, halting on its flat head, a few feet away from the line of men, who themselves were leaving the orderly column to bunch up and lean their ears together and murmur in tense tones. Below them lay a broad, treeless valley, blank with drifted snow, the faint outlines of the road tracing ever to the north. A great snow-streaked peak rose up behind the hill at the far end of the valley. White-capped waves tossed the waters to the west. For a moment Dante couldn't see whatever the men were straining their fingers toward. He looked at Blays again, saw him frowning at something on the far hill. He followed the boy's gaze and saw it, then, the obscure outlines of a white, branched object just below the crown of the opposite ridge.

"What does that look like to you?" Blays said.

"It could be a snowy tree." Dante bit his lip and strained his eyes into the snowfields. It was a tree, he thought, the only one he could see between them and the mountains. Rather than the lumpy cones of the pines they'd been riding alongside for days, it had the wide, globular boughs of an oak, which spread away from its trunk like outstretched hands. Leafless—he thought he could see the hill behind it through its limbs—though that was hardly a surprise given that it was midwinter in the furthest north of the continent. Solid white. A shade duller than the snows everywhere else in sight. Dante dropped his hood to his shoulders, as if that would help him see.

"That doesn't look right," Blays said distractedly. Dante nodded. A call cut through the cluster of men and they began to shift back to their lines. Larrimore rode along the broken column, insulting those he deemed too slow in the same tone he gave encouragement to others. After a minute they were moving again, beginning the slippery descent into the featureless valley. The tree loomed larger as they went down. With no points of reference to provide a scale, Dante could tell no more than that it was very tall.

At the low point of the long saddle between the hill they'd left and the one they were about to climb, Dante's horse balked, stamping its hooves into the snow. He gave it a tap on the flank and it tossed its head. Blays' mount stuttered to a stop, too, snorting mist from its nostrils. To his left he saw other horses halting and the glowering faces of their riders as they tossed helplessly at their reins. The footmen went on a short ways before realizing what was happening behind them, then turned around with questions stamped on their faces. Dante led his horse crossways to a handful of mounted men talking and nodding to each other.

"Good a place as any," Rettinger said. "They're not going another step."

"All right," Larrimore nodded. "Post a couple riders back up on the hill. This would be a bad time for someone to sneak up on us while we're gawking."

Rettinger nodded and pointed a couple of his cavalry back up the road. He sent three others east, into the open land, in the general direction of the woods that began five or six miles out.

"We'll bivouac here," Larrimore called out to the men. "Tie the horses to the wagons. They're too smart to go any further."

The mounted men hopped down, passed their reins to pages. Dante dropped out of the saddle and wandered over to the body of action. The doors of the carriages swung open and old men in thick robes eased their way down into the snow. Samarand got down from her private conveyance and engaged Larrimore's attention. Dante set his mouth and gazed out at the sea, where the horizon met the water in a blur of gray clouds and gray waves. It looked, he imagined, like what the gods had seen before they'd separated one from another and put order to the elements of the world. In all his travels, he'd never been able to escape a vague sense of disappointment that even the farthest-flung lands, exotic and mysterious on the clean lines of a map, turned out to be peopled with the same general range of nobility and serf, of merchant and armsman and farmer and wife, as he'd seen growing up. They might dress a little oddly, or look a shade lighter or darker, or speak a little funny, or in another tongue altogether, but Dante could never shake the idea he could find a scene just like it if he turned the right (or wrong) corner in Bressel. In all the miles he'd traveled, through all the walking and running and riding he'd done in the past couple months, the only moment that had hit him with any kind of real wonder or sublimity had been the bright green waters of the glacial lake in the mountains between Mallon and Gask.

But this moment here, the raw wind off the ocean, the spine of mountains ahead, the silent valley and its skin of snow, it finally felt like something wondrous, like the true end of the world; he knew if he tried to walk past the hill ahead and up into the mountains he'd always find himself in the gentle rise and fall of a white field, never a foot closer no matter how long he walked. The northern mountains, as real as they looked, would come no nearer than the seven moving heavenly bodies, or perhaps the fixed stars themselves: things you could look on with awe, could hope to calculate and understand given patience and discipline, but bodies that would forever be beyond the touch.

He paced around the snow. He felt small things snapping and crumbling under his boots, buried branches or hardened dirt. They rolled like stones, though, and he knelt and brushed away the snow and picked up a white pebble. One end was knobbed, the other cracked. The broken end was filled with a spongy weave of marrow. He kicked away more snow. The bones were scattered, far too few to make a second carpet over the dead grass, yet there were far too many for these open meadows, which to his eyes looked barren, trackless, lifeless. Blays came up to join him and saw what he was holding and gave him a weird look.

"It was just lying on the ground," Dante told him. He dropped the finger-sized bone back into the snow.

"That sounds like a fine reason to pick it up."

"Oh, like you're so much cleaner," Dante said. He glanced back toward the road where priests flapped their cloaks and bunched their fists against their chest. Blays grunted. They stood in silence.

"Come on, pups," Larrimore called to them after a few minutes had gone by. They rejoined the group. Samarand took the lead, the six other priests at her heels, followed by a small hand-drawn wagon bearing sacks of food and a few rattling bags. A dozen soldiers took up the rear.

"That's it, isn't it?" Dante said to Larrimore in the kind of voice people use in airy, echoing cathedrals. "Barden."

"Unless they swapped it out since the last time I saw it," Larrimore said, unable to keep the reverence from his voice. "Why? Do you see any other immortal trees of life and death around here?"

"Maybe."

"Move your ass. The council's going to need us to watch their backs while they're indisposed."

Wind gusted over the clear ground, driving dust-like snow into their faces. Less than a mile to the top of the hill. By the time they'd climbed halfway up Dante could tell the branches weren't snowy, they were actually white. A slight nausea perched in his stomach. The older council members picked a careful path through the squeaking snow and blustery wind and the upward slant of the ground. Dante tried to match their pace, but found himself constantly moving ahead. He dropped his eyes to his feet and made a game of trying to plant his feet in the exact steps the swordsman ahead of him had made. He thought for a while of Fanna, a pretty, dark-haired girl from the village who had a bright, friendly way that used to seem like encouragement. For months she consumed his every thought with the clever things he might say to her. She'd thought him quick and funny, but had broken things off before they'd really started, saying there was something dark about him that she'd never be able to heal even if they were one day married. He still hadn't understood what she meant or what had happened by the time he'd left the village for Bressel and the book.

Fanna might be engaged to another boy by now, even dead. Dante knew that thought should make him sad, but he doubted if she ever thought of him anymore; leaving people behind and forgetting them piece by piece was just the way life worked. His past fixation on her struck him now as almost pathetic. He was glad to be gone from her, glad to be older, but he wished he could have met her all over again now that he'd begun to grow into his age—or that she could see him here for just a moment, compare what he'd become to the odd, nervous boy she'd known. He thought she'd like what she saw.

Dante bumped into the back of the man whose footsteps he'd followed and saw they were nearly at the top of the hill. Without warning, someone vomited noisily to his right. Before he had time to laugh his eyes fell on the trunk of the tree that stood a mere thirty yards away and his mind went empty as it struggled to categorize the thing he saw.

The trunk was wider than his arm was long. White and gnarled, it looked at first glance like a rope of spines twisted around each other. He thought it might be one of those tricks of nature where a fly paints its wings to look like a wasp, or a harmless plant grows its leaves in the pattern of the poisonous one, but there were no leaves on this tree, none of its branches swayed in the winds. Instead it was starkly empty, horribly motionless in a way every other tree he'd ever seen wasn't.

The main branches appeared composed of ribs and humeri and femurs—not as if they were each a single big bone, but rather a fused line of thousands, like a hundred corpses had been forged into the curve of a single limb; the branches forked into smaller versions of themselves like a normal tree, terminating in willowy fibulas and ulnas and radii and individual ribs, and sticking out from those delineated bones were the prongs of tarsals and metacarpals and knuckles and toes and teeth, looking like twigs and pale blooms. Barden stood a hundred feet high or more and every inch as wide across its branches, casting still, sharp-edged shadows on the snow. Dante fell back a step, struck by a guts-deep revulsion. His boot caught against a rock-hard root, a jumble of jawbones and backbones.