The White Tree (2 page)
Dante crawled to the edge of the exposed pit and peered into the gloom. The trapped air smelled of dirt and must, faint with the human odor of sweat and skin you could always smell in other people's houses. He shrank back. It wasn't anything as certain as eels or as vague as monsters that slunk through the outlands of his imagination, but something in between: pale things with the tentacles of squid, the intelligence of men, and the cruelty of the stars.
He leaned over and spat, counting two before it spattered. So it had a bottom. The rungs of a time-smoothed ladder descended from the starlight into blackness. Dante dropped his legs over the edge and scrabbled for a rung. The ladder creaked and he nearly let go just to be done with it all. Hand over hand, he descended, armpits slimy with sweat, until he stood in a circle of faintest light in the musty underchamber.
His father, before he'd sailed into death or waters too warm to leave, had crafted him a torchstone. Other than his boots, it was the only thing Dante owned worth stealing. He fished the small white marble from his pocket, held it in his palm, and blew. It warmed and glowed and he shielded his eyes. In the soft white light, dust lay thick on slanted shelves bearing bricks of molding cloth and water-spotted candles and braziers and icons. He pawed through the books, found nothing but copies of a manual of common prayer he'd seen in the Library of Bressel. He stuffed the least mildewed in his pack.
After five minutes he'd swept the small basement wall to wall. After twenty he'd made a second round, piling up the junky relics and prodding the emptied shelves and drawers for hidden compartments. He smashed the rusty iron lock from a scuffed chest and found three sludgy bottles. He searched a third time, slow as he could make himself go, glancing up the ladder for any hint of dawn. At some point the guard's relief would find the body cooling in the yard. Maybe not for days—the chapel was a stiff day's walk from the city and he'd seen no sign of horses—but for all he knew the replacement was already here.
He was wearing, too. His scabs dribbled blood with every too-quick gesture. He was tired and thirsty and sore. After an hour, the sphere of light began to shrink back toward the torchstone. In thickening shadow, Dante sat down on a desk, noting stupidly it must have been lowered in pieces and nailed together in the cellar itself.
The light contracted toward the stone and his hope contracted with it. He'd shredded his cloak for bandages. The first frost would come any day. The Library and monasteries had nothing for him. Their scholars were as far from the man who'd resurrected the dog as the torchstone was to the moon. If we went back to Bressel, he'd starve and freeze; if he returned to the village, he'd wonder the rest of his life what he could have done different.
The moment before the stone winked off and left him blind, a shadow creased the shelves along the far wall.
He shuffled across the blackened room, bumped into the wooden shelves, and hoisted himself up, candlesticks clattering. The shadow had filled a line just below the shelving's top edge. His fingernails scrubbed the coarse-grained wood, slid into a crack.
Splinters drove under his nails. The false top fell away, whapping into the floor. Dry paper and earthy leather overwhelmed the scent of dust. Dante reached into the crevice, knowing he wouldn't possibly feel a tug and pull back one less knuckle; his fingers scuffed over a flat, pebbly surface, the first dust-free thing he'd touched since climbing down the ladder. He lifted the book clear and the shelf he stood on snapped in half.
He shattered another shelf on the way down. He hit hard and stayed down a long time, waiting for the hammerblows to his hip and shoulder to tingle down to a dull ache. By right, he should be broke-legged or paralyzed, trapped beneath the graves. By right, he should be splayed outside the chapel, wounds long done bleeding, his body held down by the wind and the clouds until it merged with the dirt.
But his bones weren't broken. The guard hadn't killed him. He was bruised and weak and seeping blood from his side, but he stood with a book in his hands. He stashed it in his pack and headed up the ladder. Beneath the charcoal-clouded skies, the book's cover bore the branches of a pale tree.
Barden, the monk had called it. The White Tree. Grown from a god's knuckle in the twilight valley at the north end of the earth (and wasn't it convenient that it was so far away, where no one could check up on it). The monk claimed it wasn't made of bark and leaves and wood, but grown of bone and bone alone: its knotty trunk hewn from thighs and spines, its long limbs the arcs of ribs and the knobby curls of fleshless fingers, that instead of flowers it budded teeth.
Over that morbid cover, Dante spooked himself with his own low laughter. Why not just paint a bunch of flames around it, too. Or bind it in skin and ink it in blood—no less ridiculous than all those gleaming bones. Still, he hefted it in his hands, its weight, its age. The power the man in the mail shirt had used on the dog by the creek.
Goosebumps stood on his shoulders and neck. He willed himself to put the book back in his pack, to haul the gravemarker back over the hole. He straightened, wheezing and sweating, sore in the base of his back and all his joints.
To the west, the black rim of the mountains hung above the ragged line of the chapel in the clearing. The city of Bressel was a full day's walk for a well-rested man. Dante slunk into the woods, cutting south for the grassed-over path, and as the sun rose and the muscles in his thighs and calves quivered, he balled himself under a squat tree, shaded from the morning's itchy heat.
He let himself have another look before he slept. By daylight the tree somehow looked less absurd, less crazily morbid, and more like something that could exist if only the world were a slightly stranger place. He had no clue he'd be standing beneath its boughs within half a year.
2
The funny thing about robbery, Dante thought as he crouched in the filth of an unlit alley, is how little the concept of property meant to him once he'd started going to bed hungry. So the watch would hang him if they caught him? That didn't mean he was wrong to do it, that just meant he shouldn't under any circumstances get caught. What kind of rule was so weak it had to be backed up by death threats? Who cares about being hanged when the alternative's starving? And if they really didn't want robbers in the city, why did they build their alleys exactly like the fish-pens that funnel careless salmon into waiting nets?
He heard footsteps at the other end of the alley and shrank down further. The moment the man passed Dante clubbed him above the ear with the polished horn of his knife's hilt. The man dropped, voiceless. As Dante stripped the body of its purse and the pair of rings on its right hand he noted the man was still breathing. Good for him. The penalty for Dante, if caught, would be the same whether the victim lived or died. He didn't understand that, either. A man of lesser principles would be tempted to kill the man he robbed so he couldn't be identified to the watch. Dante opened the man's jacket in search of a second purse and saw the taut-laced buckskin badge of the tanner's guild. He frowned. He didn't want trouble with guildsmen. They were too close to running the city these days. He hurried to cover the unconscious body with some shredded rags he found among the other garbage, then left the alley in something less than a jog.
The walk from the chapel had taken three days. He'd managed about ten stiff-legged miles the first day, then no more than two on the second before he collapsed at a waterway so small it was more puddle than lake. He laid down on its cool banks, moaning and burning, and whenever he closed his eyes the crystal-clear faces of men and women he'd never seen swam in his mind's vision. When the fever broke early next morning he shuffled over the roots and rocks toward the city in the east, stopping frequently for rest and water, but he reached Bressel before sunrise and immediately spent the last of his silver on a room for a week. He haunted the corners of its common room those first couple days, snaking from the safety of the wall to nab meat and bread when their owners' heads hit the table or they swayed off to find the privy. That had worked until the boy who worked the mornings threatened to throw him out if he caught him again. Dante nodded, face stony as he suffered the threats of a kid who couldn't be more than fourteen, then retreated to his room to pass the day throwing his knife at the rats that skittered across the floor. It was a pointless task, though; he knew he'd never work up the courage to spit them and set them over the common room fire.
Robbing, from there, and after what he'd done at the chapel, came easily. His nerves had threatened to give out on him on his initial try, but when he left his first mark in forceful slumber in the shit-caked gutter of an alley, he wondered that it took so little effort to turn things they owned into things he owned. An average purse could feed him for a week—and this was just the money people carried around for luxuries and whims—what did they need it all for? He limited his own expenses to food, room, and candles to read by, but he knew he could have more if his interests had been in things instead of in the book. Whatever authority had given these men their wealth was no more substantial than the power of a rabbit's foot—it felt good to carry, but when things went bad, it turned out all you were carrying to protect you was a lump of meat too nasty to eat and the knowledge that somewhere a bunny had left the warren and never come home.
He walked on. Bootsteps rasped from behind him in the alley and he started. He fingered the knife beneath his doublet, but let it be. Men who showed blades without a landed title or writ of the guild of arms were taught the things a whip could do better than a sword. Dante turned onto an arterial road and huddled in a doorway until the man passed without a glance.
He knew he'd been jumpy lately, but how else should he act after a killing, the possession of a banned book, and multiple acts of armed robbery? It sounded terrible when you said it all at once. Most of the time he carried it lightly, knowing any deed done out of necessity couldn't be wrong, but other times he was struck by an emotion so powerful he wanted to cease existing altogether. At those times he muttered to himself, walking through the streets as if in a dream, drowning in the memory of the short shouts of those he'd robbed, the slackening face of the dead man at the temple, the snore-like expulsion of his last breath. It was clear he couldn't go on like this. It wasn't how he'd meant to live when he'd left the village for Bressel, but it was what circumstances had forced him to. His only hope was with the book. If it could somehow teach him what the man in the mail shirt had known, he'd no longer have to look over his shoulder at every footstep or risk his life in the alleys just to keep from starving. His thoughts on how that power would help him were vague—he could hire himself out at the courts, he supposed—but he knew that once he had it, the opportunities of great men would find him on their own.
The book was dense. Not just in the literal sense of its thick-as-a-brick 800 pages, but dense with dozens of unfamiliar places and names, with warlords and sorcerers and tales he dimly remembered hearing as a child, cluttered with huge but bizarrely precise numbers like 432,000, stuffed with scores of words from a language he didn't recognize. Even its title was gibberish. Dante found some references to the book's people and places in the other book he'd taken, the prayer manual, but three or four hours of careful reading and cross-checking would let him read no more than ten or twenty pages of the book itself. Yet when he tried to read it straight through he found he'd absorbed nothing more than an occasional phrase or, more often, an illustration. He went to bed angry, handling the words in his head for an hour before he could fall asleep.
After three days of sluggish and haphazard reading he understood he didn't know a damn thing and set to copying all the foreign words and names out of the forty-odd pages of the book's first section. He bought a ream of paper and a bottle of ink with a week's price of food and spent a full seven days in the Library at Bressel, the onion-domed, marble-faced structure meant to gather the wisdom of the world. It was well-stocked, he found, for works composed in the fifty years since its founding, and he filled his blank pages with the histories and places in the book of the White Tree's beginning. The foreign words remained obscure: similar to the dialects they spoke up in Gask, he thought, maybe an archaic form, but far enough apart to render the study of Gaskan useless. Many of the book's stories reminded him of Mennok, the mopey old god of grief and blackbirds. Dante had always though its followers were a joke, the kind of guys who groaned through the streets, whipping their own backs with supple reeds to remind themselves of the agony of the physical world. They just had to shove it in your face. He thought they could learn a thing from the supplicants of Urt, the more fanatical of whom spent 23 hours a day sleeping and meditating in dark rooms with planks hammered over the windows. Its saints had been known to seal themselves in barrels for months at a time. Most faiths, he thought, could stand to learn the virtue of keeping their devotion to themselves.
He bought the collected cycle of Mennok from a run-down storefront in the book district and then a clean, simple doublet and trousers so he wouldn't be thrown out of the monastery's open archives before his second foot hit the threshold. Then the money was gone, and rather than scavenging at the inn, he robbed again, splurging that night on roasted beef. He woke mortified at his opulence, vowed to skimp through the rest on bread and cheese, and spent the day rereading that first section. At its conclusion he felt closer to his desire, as if this time he could see the shadow of what a wise man was supposed to glean from its contents, and here and there he even felt elevated by a glimpse of a world much wider than the one he'd known. Still he felt helpless with idiocy, like understanding the book was like trying to move a mountain with a bent fork and two broken arms, and he slammed the cover (after marking his place) and pounded to the common room, where four cups of ale floored him. He woke flushed and sweaty, sicker than the day after he'd been at the crumbling chapel, and wasted the day sipping water from the comfort of his bed, amazed that men could spend a life at the drink. After that, when he saw the men drooping over the smoky tables, shambling outside to vomit on the streetstones, he curled his lip, hating whatever weakness caused them to poison themselves that way.
