IGMS Issue 11 (19 page)

The Urn still lay at my feet, a reminder of how my two worlds had come together. Whether or not it had ever held dead men's bones, it held
me
. I picked it up, marveling at how ordinary it now felt. Had the Urn changed, or had I? With all my strength, I smashed it against the tree. It splintered into gold-streaked shards which rained down onto the ground becoming nearly indistinguishable from the sand.

Awkwardly, I ran through the soft sand to catch up to my captain.

He didn't break stride, but looking out of the corner of my eyes, I saw him smiling with satisfaction.

"So much for tradition, eh?"

"Tradition had us wasting a thousand years guarding a clay jar full of sand. Tradition would lock me behind walls where I'd never feel the sea spray on my face again. I can't give up magic, it seems, but I can't give up the sea either. If you need a carpenter's apprentice, I'm your man."

"I was thinking of something with a little more responsibility. A pirate-mage would make a formidable first officer, at least till you set your sights on your own ship."

I started to say that I'd never want such a thing, then stopped, unwilling to close any doors till I'd at least tried to walk through them. "Done."

I looked back at the remnants of the Urn lying alone and abandoned on the beach. The tide was coming in, each white-tipped wave drawing closer and closer to where it lay. Sand. Just sand. At least, that's what I told myself as I turned my back on it.

The Port of Bees and a new life lay ahead of me.

The kingdom of Iceway has no eastern border. It runs up against Icekame, the frozen mountains that are always deep in snow, and its glaciers creep downward year after year, plowing the poor soil and stony earth of the high valleys before them.

Many miles below these valleys, in his city of Kamesham on the Graybourn, King cares nothing for that edge of his kingdom. Beyond Icekame there are no marauding hordes eager to pour over the high passes. There is only the Forest Deep, where no one dwells but thornmages, who seek no visitors and never leave.

From a king's point of view, Icekame was better than a border. On that edge of his kingdom, there was no one who coveted his crown or his lands, and he need not spare thought or money to guard that border. And the higher you journey up the valleys, the poorer the people are, so there's no purpose in trying to tax them. You could only do it once, and then, deprived of the slight margin of survival, they would either die or become expensive refugees farther down the valley.

So the people in the high valleys were left alone. Poor and powerless, scrabbling in their poor soil for food enough to last out the winter, eking out a bit of meat by killing a bird or a squirrel now and then, they buried many a child, and a man was old at forty.

Between hunger and loss, however, they found time to live. The children had games and rhymes and contests and grand adventures between the work they did to help their families survive. They got older and felt the stirring of the hot sap of love rising through them like trees in spring. The women built their mud-daubed hovels and symbolically sang their lovers into husbands at the hearth, and then babies came and they delighted in them and taught them and raged at them and clung to them for however long they might survive.

The people in the King's city of Kamesham would think these highvalley folk lived like animals. But in truth these villagers lived pure human life. They needed each other to survive, and knew it. They had no conspiracies and no secrets, no ambitions and no feuds. They couldn't afford the luxury of treating any man or woman or child as expendable.

The highvalley villagers knew what the King in Kamesham did not think about: every passage over Icekame into the Forest Deep. In high summer, when the crops were doing well and could take care of themselves, families would pack up a bit of food and hike over a pass and then down the other side.

As they walked, the parents taught the children what they could and could not take in this place: Food enough for meals while they were there, but nothing to carry away. Water enough to drink, but nothing for the return journey.

"Will we see a thornmage?" a child would ask. Always they hoped to see one, or feared to see one.

"We will tread in their homes and their hearts," the parents would always answer, "and you will never see one because they are the whole forest. Nothing here goes unseen or unfelt by them. They tend it all."

"And they share with us?"

"They see that we take nothing from their land, but only live here for a day or two as honest as the animals. We live here like squirrels or birds, and they let us be."

Since most children had licked the last scrap of meat and fat and marrow from the bones of squirrels and small birds in order to survive a hard winter, this gave them a bit of a shiver. No wonder they came only in summertime. Who knew how hungry the thornmages would be in wintertime?

Such was the family of Roop and Levet, a man and woman married long enough to have had seven children, and astonished that six of them were still alive. Their oldest was Eko, a girl of eleven, who had a bit of a knack with root vegetables; not enough that anyone would call her a mage, but she could find edible tubers even under the deepest snow, and that was part of the reason they survived. The other children looked up to her and endured her endless bossing, because they knew she loved them and looked out for them.

The family always went to the same place, the meadow of the Man in the Tree. Other families had come with them in years past, but the Man in the Tree unnerved them and they never came back. That was all right with Roop and Levet. It was a lovely meadow for children to romp in, and fruit trees and berries provided sweetness and tartness that could never be found in their high valley.

Why didn't the Man in the Tree frighten them?

The great oak stood alone in the middle of the meadow, as if all other trees had shied away from daring to grow too close. The massive trunk proved the tree to be of great age -- the whole family could not join hands around it, or even get halfway around the trunk.

Ten feet above the ground, the bark was distended in the shape of a man, as if someone were imprisoned between the bark and the heartwood. This was not a vague impression of a man, a trick of the eyes. The man was in perfect proportion, with knees slightly bent, one more than the other, and hands splayed so that in a certain cast of light you could count all five fingers. But he had no nose or eyes, no mouth or belly, no toes sticking out, because his face was inward, toward the heartwood, his back turned to the meadow.

"I think," Eko told the younger children, "that he is a tree mage who defied the thornmages and came to the Forest Deep and tried to turn this great tree into his clant. And the thorn mages punished him by trapping him inside the tree, not just his outself, but his inself too."

"You don't know anything about magery," said her next sister, Immo. "How could a man live inside a tree?"

"Then what do you think it is?"

"I think it's a fungus growing under the bark," said Immo.

"That's silly. You don't really think that."

Father heard them and came over. "I think the tree eats children who play too long around its roots, but it takes so long to digest the children that they have time to grow up into fullsized men."

The children laughed, for it was always fun when Father told them a story. Mother even turned to face them, as she sat in the grass, in the sunlight, nursing the youngest.

"How long, Baba?" asked Eko. "How long has this child been inside the tree?"

"My parents brought us here," said Father, "and the Man in the Tree was already there. But not as high as he is now. My father was as tall as me, and he could still touch the man's heel without standing tiptoe." Father stood up against the tree but could not touch the man at all, even when he jumped a little. "He's been there for hundreds of years. Our family always comes here to watch him. My father said that our family was the first to notice him, back when his head first rose up here."

"There?" said Immo skeptically. "But that's not even on the same side of the tree."

"He hasn't just been rising through the bark," said Father, "he's been circling the tree. All the way around, the long way. They say that when he completes the circuit, he'll be set free."

"Who says that?" asked Eko.

"My father's father. Or someone in the family. Or some stranger who visited this place with our family. Or me."

"Is there really a man in there?" asked Bokky, the oldest boy, who was only six.

"Yes," said Father. "I believe it is. Because why else would a great oak like this bother to make the shape of a man in its bark? Trees have no reason to lie to us. Does a sycamore pretend to be a hickory? Does a walnut pretend to be a willow?"

"But how could he live?" asked Immo.

"Who says he's alive?" challenged Bokky.

"Well what's the point of having a dead man in there, then?"

"I've heard two stories about that," said Father. "One is that this man is the one who invented fire and burned the first tree. The treemages couldn't stop others from learning the secret and burning wood, but the trees took their vengeance by holding the man inside the heart of the wood."

"What's the other story?" demanded the children.

"That he was a hunted man, and a great king sought him to kill him because he had dared to love his daughter. He was slain against this great tree, and his blood soaked into the roots, and in pity the oak opened its heart to him and brought him back to life. The king's daughter came here every year in those days, in a great procession up the valley, and here she wept beside the tree, and inside the bark he heard her, until at last she grew old and died. It broke the heart of the man in the tree, and that's when he turned his back on the world. He still lives, but he sees and hears nothing, because his love is dead and gone, and he still lives on inside the tree that saved him."

Eko brushed a tear from her eye, and Immo jeered at her, but Father held up a hand. "Never mock a tender heart," he said.

Abashed, Immo rolled her eyes but said no more against Eko and her tear.

"Isn't the bark getting thinner over him now?" asked Bokky.

"It might be," said Father. "But it might just seem that way because he's so far above us."

"What if he comes out of the tree while we're here?" asked Bokky.

"Then we'll greet him," said Eko, "and ask him which of the stories is true."

"You wouldn't dare talk to him," said Bokky.

"I think she might," said Father, "because your sister is a brave one."

"She wouldn't jump across the runnel in the north glen," said Bokky.

"It doesn't take bravery to do every foolish dare that someone puts to you," said Father. "Only stupidity."

They all laughed at Bokky for that, because
he
had taken the dare and Father had to climb down and get him where he dangled from a branch over the runnel far below. Half the village men were in on that rescue, holding the rope that held Father, and then dragging them up together.

That night they slept without blankets, the night was so warm. The moon was high and in the middle of the night, Eko awoke and looked at the oak and for a moment did not realize what she was seeing. She thought it was a snake in the tree, and she glanced around quickly to make sure that none of the children was too near. Only when she was sure that the snake couldn't drop onto anybody did she look again and realize, through her sleepy eyes, that it was not a snake at all. It was an arm, and elbow and arm, and the palm of the hand was pressing against the bark, pushing inward as if the man were trying to pull himself out of the tree.

Which is what he was doing. Only the arm looked smaller than it should have, and as the shoulder emerged, as the body turned sideways, Eko could see that it was a slender boy, not a man's body at all. Taller than Bokky, but no thicker, no more manly.