Fiction
Monday, February 07, 2005
In The Wastes
(This is the next segment in The Warm Lands. Since the entire novel will be titled that, I’ll refer to it that way henceforward.)
They trudged through the wastes without speaking, heads bent into the eternal wind from the west. The need to shield their faces from the keening onslaught precluded conversation, had they been disposed to make it. Whorls of dust and grit assailed them unendingly, probing their cloaks, scouring their eyes, prying at their noses and mouths in search of moisture to steal. He never released her hand.
As darkness stole over them and the night-gale rose, Gregor would search out the best shelter available: a gully from a long-dead river, or a crevice in a rock formation, or the leeward side of a mound of dirt if there was nothing better. At full dark the two of them would huddle together in their chosen refuge, arms around each other and Laella's face buried in Gregor's chest, and shiver away the night. The silence of their day persisted into the night; they would whisper a bare handful of words of endearment and encouragement to one another before surrendering to exhaustion.
Gregor had learned how to sleep in the wastes. He'd learned how to blank out the wind, how not to feel the cold, how to close his mind to the terrors that came with darkness. It was much harder with Laella trembling against him.
Each night as he shared her warmth and sheltered her with his body, his back between her and the gale, he fought down the need to ask her why her friends had cast their lives away, and whether she'd known what they'd intended to do. He fought just as hard not to ask himself why he hadn't intervened.
She never looked back toward Anam, not even a fleeting glance.
Each dawn found them thickheaded from their shallow, fitful sleep. In their condition of perpetual fatigue it seemed impossible to disentangle themselves and rise for another day's travel. Yet they would open their eyes at first light, share some dried meat and a sip of water, and plod westward through the dead brown land, cloaks pulled tightly around them, their backs to the sun and their heads bent against the wind.
They came upon the tree on the afternoon of the sixth day.
Gregor saw it from more than a mile off. At that distance he couldn't identify it. It was merely a tall, bulky mass, vaguely green, that stood near their line of travel. From the moment he first spied it, he steered them directly for it. If nothing else, it would be shelter for the night.
When they were within half a mile of it, he began to doubt his sanity. Even at that distance, it was plainly a tall, broad, immensely vital tree, luxuriant in its foliage, rooted firm against the wind, at home in the midst of a desolation so hostile to life that even insects were not to be found. It confounded what he knew about the wastes.
The light was fading when they came under its boughs.
Gregor could hardly accept the reality of it. It was many times the height of Semmech's castle in Anam, and as broad as it was high. Its lowest boughs were a yard over his head, high enough that he'd have to jump mightily to touch the lowest-hanging leaves. The leaves themselves were a dark, shiny green, with many points and veins, and broader than his hand. They hardly stirred in the wind, but the wind seemed strangely muted in that place.
He approached the trunk of the tree cautiously, as if it were an animal that might bolt from surprise. The trunk was as thick as he was tall, and was covered by a finely knurled gray bark. He laid one hand gingerly against it, let his fingers trail along its subtle serrations.
The sense of a powerful life-field, a vitality that matched the resources of Beluz or Anam, flowed through him like a benign torrent. He felt swelled beyond his physical size, momentarily dizzied by the coursing energies of that impossible creature.
The tree had no right to be there. There was no mana to sustain it. Around it, the wastes stretched for miles in every direction, with no hint of other life.
Laella moved up beside him, laid a hand on his shoulder. "How does it live here?"
"I don't know," he said. "Nothing else does."
He stared upward through the branches. They were dense and heavily laden with leaves. His sight could not penetrate more than a yard or two into them.
He thought of the settlements and their common properties. They were concentrated. They possessed a significant mass of living matter. They were almost always walled against the surrounding desolation by some natural feature: canyons, mountains, or rivers. When he probed beneath them with his etheric vision, he always found either a unitary pool of mana, or a number of pockets linked by streams.
Could a single tree, alone in the wastes, isolated from all other life, possess enough vital mass and energy to be self-sustaining, as the oases were?
The idea seemed absurd, yet here it was.
"I wonder," he began, and trailed off.
"What?" Laella said.
"Does it try to reproduce?"
She stared hard into his eyes for a moment, then looked upward as he had done.
"How would it reproduce?"
"I don't know." He scanned the lower branches for nuts, fruit, or seedpods. There were none.
He was about to send his consciousness down into the tree's root system, to probe for the mana pool that had to lie beneath it, sustaining it, when Laella released his hand and pressed her body full length against the tree. Spread to their widest, her arms could not go halfway around the trunk. She laid one cheek against the bark and allowed her eyes to close.
"It's so alive," she murmured.
He started to respond, choked it off and opened his etheric eye.
Laella's life-field melded smoothly with that of the tree. He could find no boundary between them. Animal and vegetable vitality fused into a single pool of energy that assaulted his sorcerous sight with brilliant, riotously shifting colors.
She had the gift.
"Laella," he said, struggling to keep the worry out of his tone, "step back a moment, please."
Her eyes opened, questioning.
"I need to probe for the mana source."
She broke contact with the tree with obvious reluctance.
He allowed his consciousness to flow into the tree and down into its root system. There was an enormous central tap root, fully as thick as the trunk above ground. It arrowed downward through the earth, with lateral roots and tendrils trailing from its sides in all directions.
He could find no mana effluent from the tree itself.
He pressed downward along the taproot, probing as he went for any hint of a mana flow. The earth around the root was as bare of energy as the deepest part of the wastes. Though he drove the front of his consciousness deeper than he had ever gone in any oasis, his etheric vision detected nothing but parched, lifeless soil and crushed rock. There was no spoor to indicate that mana had ever pervaded that soil. Despite the presence of the largest living creature Gregor had ever seen, the surrounding earth was as virgin as volcanic rock.
The root seemed to go on forever, without diminishing in girth.
After an endless time, he withdrew from the root and returned to the use of his normal senses. Laella was clutching his hand once again.
"What's the matter?" he said.
"You were gone for a long time."
He nodded. "I found nothing at any depth. Either the tree is self-contained and self-sustaining, or it taps a mana resource hidden far deeper in the earth than any I've known."
She stared at it with a blank expression.
"That's important, isn't it?" she said.
"It could be."
The leaves rustled above them as if stirred by a breeze they could not feel.
"Will it shelter us tonight?"
He smiled. "It will serve. And tomorrow will probably bring us to the next oasis."
Her face clouded at that. She stepped forward to lay her hand on the tree trunk again.
"Gregor, could we...stay here?"
"What?"
"With the tree." She pressed her body against the trunk as she had before. "If it can live here, surely we can too. It will provide for us. It's lonely. It's been alone in the wastes for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands. How can we leave it alone again?"
His mind's eye filled with a misty vision of the two of them building a nest beneath those swaddling branches, gleaning nourishment directly from the tree's stupendous life force, learning to live without other society. Why leave, after all? What would they require, with this titan of benevolent energy for their patron?
Alarm flared in his brain. He thrust his arms between her and the trunk, pulled her back from it against her considerable resistance. She twisted in his arms, trying to escape his grasp for the first time since they first touched. Despite her struggles, he slung her over his shoulder and headed out from under the canopy of branches. He marched grimly to the west for half a mile, face unshielded against the rising wind, until she ceased to writhe against his grip.
When she had relaxed in his arms, he set her down, and they huddled together under a flap of his cloak, shuddering from their exertions.
"How," she gasped, "how did it do that?"
"It did nothing," he said. "It has no mind or will. You responded to its life-field. It was the largest, least threatening creature you've ever seen. Its vitality called to yours, and you fell in love with it."
"How did you know?"
"Because it called to me as well. Laella," he said, running his fingertips along her jawline, "you have the gift."
"Gift?"
"The sense for the powers that the eye cannot see. You can learn the arcana -- the techniques for manipulating mana -- and become a sorcerer." He clenched his jaw. "I should have known in Anam. Your virgin conception was no random occurrence. The energies sought you out."
He thought of Marti, Luisa, and Karine, who had probably been similarly gifted but had spent their lives for blood vengeance, and pulled her tightly against him. "Perhaps, once you've been trained to your gift, you too will take part in the Great Renewal. But I am only a journeyman, not a master competent to train you. The only masters I know are a hundred leagues and more behind us."
Her expression was completely blank. "I could become...like you?"
He nodded. "You have the inner eye, the sense for the energy flows that living things produce and consume, or the tree could not have affected you thus. Life calls to life, but only those with the gift can be seduced that way, robbed of their volition. It's the other face of the coin, the price we pay for our power. The more power one possesses, the more vulnerable he is to the call. Especially before he's been trained."
She shuddered against his encircling arm. "Then where shall we go?"
He pulled his cloak back into place, sought the disk of the setting sun, and set his face against the renewed wind.
"West."
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