Chapter One
Ally, Garibart and the Great Tree
Ally sat on the top of the stone wall and ate her sausage roll while she watched the Grand Market wake from its short slumber and stir to greet the dawn. Shop keepers threw back shutters from the store fronts that lined the edge of the plaza while the tented kiosk owners untied the heavy canvas flaps to reveal their brightly dyed interiors. Semi mobile pushcarts sent incredible smells of baking bread , simmering herbs and frying sausages into the air as their owners prepared for the imminent flood of hungry drivers and early morning marketers. Durffa drawn wagons and electric trucks formed columns as they queued up to drive under the stone arches that marked the north and south entrances into the immense plaza. With long practiced efficiency they rolled along the main promenades, dropping off the goods, ingredients, and raw materials that fed the machine of industry and commerce that ran here. For Ally, this was the heart that pumped the life’s blood at the center of Omen City. Everyone, rich or poor, came to the Grand Market eventually.
The first rays of the sun stabbed across the sky and touched Ally’s bronze skin. She smiled, shook back her unruly mop of ebony hair and raised her palms to catch the energy in her fingers while she said silent blessings to Father Sun, guardian of the sky and Mother Serpent, keeper of the earth under her feet. Duty done, she swung her leg over the wall and dismounted with the grace that spoke of long practice. This was her wall in the mornings. The other market runners knew where to find her and knew not to take her favorite perch for their own if they knew what was good for them. That the wall happened to be part of the wide stone staircase that led up to the Meetpoint Inn’s rear facade was neither here nor there. It was her wall in the morning, before the guests stirred and came looking for their morning meal. The inn’s gardeners and groundskeepers did not bother her. After all, she was their runner. The Meetpoint was part of her territory.
Dahni was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. A little kid that looked to be no older than seven hid behind him. Ally marked the size of his nose and the cut of his ears and figured the kid to be Dahni’s smaller sibling, Cleg. Dahni, one of the market’s more experienced runners, tugged the brat out from behind and gave him a little shake.
“This is Ally. She is the Headrunner. Mind your manners,” Dahni said sternly.
“Ma’am,” the boy said, bobbing his head.
Ally snorted and Dahni groaned, giving his sib a gentle cuff upside the head.
“Dope. Just say ‘Blessings of the OneMother, Ally-siggeh’.”
The little boy repeated this dutifully.
“May Father Sun warm you heart, little one,” Ally greeted him solemnly in return.
“Ally, I gotta train him.” Dahni said apologetically. “You know any extra territory we can run?”
Ally pursed her lips and thought for a second, eying the little squirt.
“I got Chick and Wendal covering Gredda’s territory ’til she gets over the her virus,” Ally mused.
Gredda’s territory was a wedge shaped piece of the great circular plaza nearest the south arch. It was prime real estate for sellers and runners alike since it was the first stop for all market goers coming out of the more affluent Southcity.
“Go tell them I said it was OK to share the load..” Ally said, waving them off. “Keep track of your take and give Gredda her tenth when she comes back. When she comes back, I’ll see about expanding your patch.”
“Your the best, Ally,” Dahni said with heartfelt gratitude as he grabbed his sib by his collar to guide him back into the well ordered chaos of the market.
“Hey!” Ally yelled after them. “Keep your nose clean, pipsqueak. Don’t make me come looking for you!”
The kid look suitably scared but Dahni grinned at her over his shoulder. She let the stern frown slide away to replace it with a gentle smile. Dahni was definitely one of her favorites. It was going to be a shame to lose him next year when he turned thirteen and had to go to Academy to learn a trade. Ally did not know what she would do when she turned thirteen. A clever person could always figure out a way around any system. The idea of being stuck inside, staring at four boring walls all day long gave her the shudders and she fully intended on avoiding Academy at what ever cost. She figured being an orphan gave her a certain advantage since there was no one but herself who knew how old she was, therefore there would be no one making it their mission to drag her to Testing Day with admonitions to do well because so much of the family honor depended how you got sorted in the exams.
Ally had lived in and around the market ever since she could remember. She had no memory of a mother and what dim memories left in her mind of her father were at best vague and at worst incoherent. As she grew, the people of the market had become her parents and her teachers. They had taught her the way of commerce and honorable dealings. They taught her how to carry lists and numbers and rows of calculations in her mind without the need of paper or ledgers. They taught her how to know a face and put a name to it in an instant. They taught her to value the honest man above all else and despise the thief.
Now, being twelve years old, she was all grown up, with no one to tell her what to do but her own internal compass. That was just the way she liked it and she had no reason to change. Besides, who else would take care of the runners and keep track of all their clients and territorial patches? Not only was she smart enough to carry all her business information in her head, she managed to know precisely what was going on in everyone else’s. Nothing escaped her notice in the market from the most mundane details to the secret politics of the big players of Omen City. All gossip eventually found its way to her ears and since information was a runner’s main commodity, she used it to every advantage.
The long and short of it was she was good at what she did and the kids who ran the Grand Market’s errands depended on her just as much as the merchants who required their services. If the Market was the tick-tock heart of the City, the runners were the grease on the cogs that made it run efficiently.
Ally jogged down the main promenade towards her own patch. Mira, the flower seller waved her down.
“Ally! I got a cart coming up from the Midlands this morning and I gotta get them into water the minute they arrive. Be a dear and get me a gaffeh from Jik’s stand before I keel over.” Mira pressed a quarter-cred into Ally’s outstretched hand.
“On it,” Ally said. She jogged down to Jik’s gaffeh cart, placed Mira’s usual order and handed him the cred. Chick was there on a similar errand. Jik made the best gaffeh in the Market. The high end customers paid well for a runner to come this far from Southmarket.
“You talk to Dahni yet?” Ally asked.
“Yeah. Gave him the booths nearest the tree wall. He grumbled a bit but he took them.”
Ally raised an eyebrow. Nobody liked running the areas along the tree wall, which was why she split it up and made sure everyone shared the burden. Still, she was a little annoyed with Chick. It was dangerous to put a greenhorn in a place where they could get into so much trouble.
“Chick…,” Ally said, a worried frown on her face.
“Oh, don’t go all mother hen on me, Ally. Dahni knows what he’s doing. He’ll keep the little ankle biter under control,” Chick said, as he scooped up his drink cup, pocketed the change and headed back into the crowd.
Ally stared off towards the center of the plaza. A huge tree dominated the skyline, its center branches stretching up towards the heavens while the lower branches spread wide over the plaza, forming a dense matte that cast the ground beneath in total shade. At midday, on a hot day, the shade was so complete it seemed as if night still clung to the underside of the tree. The spread of the branches ended exactly at the place where a knee high stone wall marked a great circle. The tree stopped growing in a line so precise it looked manicured. But nothing, man or machine, crossed the line delineated by the stone wall. As far as Ally knew, no human hand had ever touched that tree. Ever.
Some said the Wizards who lived in the upper stories of the Central Library long ago cast a spell that kept the Tree in its place. Others said there was an ancient treaty between the Great Trees and Man, which kept Man on his side of the wall and the Tree on it’s side. Other stories were far more sinister. The older runners liked to scare the younger kids by telling them the more lurid and gruesome myths. Half the kids on the plaza were unshakably convinced that the Great Tree had a taste for human flesh. Ally was a skeptic. All she knew was there were few laws that required a penalty of death in her world, and crossing the tree wall was one of them.
She gathered up Mira’s drink, delivered it, but did not stop for Mira’s usual gossip, though the flower seller seemed busting to share some piece of exciting gossip, this morning. Ally needed to check on Dahni. The shortest route between Mira’s flower booth and Dahni’s patch was a straight line that led across the tree wall. Since that route was not possible, Ally headed for her shortcut. She wound her way through the tents towards the section of the tree wall that was closest. Once there, she ran down the clear space between the wall and the back of the kiosks, jogging counterclockwise towards the south arch. The Tree was viewed with such fear and trepidation that even with space in the plaza going at a premium, no one dared the verge of it, leaving a circular path free of encumbrances. The bravest runners knew this and took advantage of it.
This was the avenue of the seers and the crystal gazers, the potion makers and the lucky amulet sellers who needed the presence of the Tree to add mystery to their questionable professions. Ally had no interest in the wares they sold. It seemed, from her own experience, that luck was made by one’s own actions, not a commodity to be bought and sold like a pair of shoes. As for the seer’s wisdom, it seemed that self knowledge was free for the taking if one listened to one’s own heart.
Ally skidded to a halt. An old man sat on a rug in the middle of her path, his back against the wall, his walking staff propped carelessly against its edge so that the twisted burl at its top hung out under the edge of the tree. This breach of etiquette was so shocking, Ally wondered that the man had not been beaten and tossed from the market by the irate shopkeepers. She cast a quick glance around but everyone seemed to be looking in the other direction. His crime, it seemed, had, as yet, gone undetected, or perhaps, was being studiously ignored by everyone concerned. Was it fools luck or the tainted air of insanity that kept him safe?
Ally studied him carefully, trying to decide which was true.
He wore the dust colored garments of a desert walker, the under tunic a lighter shade of ocher than the outer robe. The raiment might have been splendid once, but too many washes, too much sun and too much use had frayed the hems and faded the expensively embroidered edges. His boots were stained and dusty, the leather gone soft and fuzzy from the constant scuffing of sharp edged rocks. This man had walked far to get here.
He was busy peeling a dawgfruit with careful, precises motions and did not look up when she squatted just beyond arms reach. Papery skin stretched over the gnarled bones of his hands, speaking of great age. A lattice of scars wound over the skin from the peak of his knuckles to wrist, where they disappear under his sleeves. They seemed oddly familiar, those scars, but she could not place them in her memory. Was he a member of some fringe religious sect that practiced scarification to appease one of the many desert gods?
“Are you lost, Old Father?” Ally asked respectfully.
The old man did not look up from his task while he replied.
“I know exactly the when and the why of me. To my mind it is the rest of the world that is lost.”
Ally pursed her lips and blew out a long breath. Crazy seemed very likely.
The old man, finished with the peeling, broke off a section of the dawgfruit, popped it into his mouth and looked up at her as he chewed the sweet pulp. He was looking into her eyes when, without a change of expression, he tossed the peels over his shoulder.
She leapt to her feet as the offending objects arced through the air and landed in a puff of dust on the ground under the tree, dust otherwise unmarked by print, either animal or human, and untouched by grass or twig or petal.
Ally stopped breathing while she waited for the world to come to an end. The dust raised by the rind drifted on the breeze. Allie took a careful step backwards with a vague notion that if she could get far enough away from this lunatic she would not be held culpable for his crime.
She glanced around to see if anyone noticed and then quickly glanced back at the old man. He had not moved. He sat, smiling serenely, watching her reaction with quizzical interest. She wanted to throttle him.
“Run, old man!” she hissed at him, taking another careful step backward, eyes darting about to catch the first sign of trouble. Lightning did not rain down from heaven. Hoards of demons did not come pouring out of the Underworld to consume them. The dust settled without anyone in the busy marketplace noticing, thank all the gods. The imminent threat of being torn apart by an angry mob seemed to be fading. Ally took a deep breath.
She took another step backwards, then froze in terror. Something….unspeakable…writhed under the thick dust around the fruit rinds. Her mind grasped at explanation. Sand snakes lived under the sand of the deep dunes but their trails were serpentine. Giant worms perhaps? She had never heard of worms growing quite this large. Pale tentacles the color of maggots poked out of the ground, fluffed the earth under the rinds and then settled back into the ground, taking the rind with them.
In the back of her mind, the part of her that was not gibbering like an idiot, she thought to herself, oh, wow, so that’s how it stays so clean under the Tree.
Ally, with the wisdom of a born survivor, pivoted and started running. She passed Ammalia, the fortune teller. Ammalia was looking over the top of the tree wall, her mouth opening wider and wider. As Ally passed her, a high pitched scream came hissing out of the old woman’s mouth.
Ally spared a glance over her shoulder. Something skull shaped was rising out of the ground under the tree. She also saw the old man still sitting there, his back to the tree, totally oblivious to the danger he was in. She took one more step and then swore loudly as she skidded to a halt.
She couldn’t. She could not run away and let him die.
Returning to the old man meant she had to watch the monster growing under the tree. Maggoty fingers had turned into writhing vines that coiled into a grotesque parody of a skull. The vines coiled to form eye sockets, the hollow caves filled with seething vegetable matter. The skull grew a neck and then shoulders. Arms grew from the shoulder joints. Hands formed to bury their fingers into the dirt and push up, wrenching the chest clear of the dust. Thick roots curved inward to form a ribcage to contain the pulsing, writhing mass of tendrils inside.
Ally looked away. She was not sure she would still be sane if she had to watch the thing grow legs and start ambulating about. Instead she bent down and reached for the old man’s arm.
“Come, Old Father. I have a cup of sweet cider chilled and waiting for us. Let’s get you out of the dust, eh?”
He rose willingly enough, but he moved less like an old man and more like an acrobat, full of fluid grace and power. When he was standing it was his hand that was around her arm and not the other way around.
She looked at him, puzzled and tried to pull away but the grip was strong and the old body surprisingly unmovable. She looked over his shoulder. The vine man was growing taller as it grew a pair of knees and flexed its hips as if it were fighting the ground that birthed it.
Ally tried to pry the old man’s fingers out of the flesh of her upper arm.
“Look behind you!” she hissed. “The tree is angry and is growing a walking man to chase you down. Let go!”
“This Tree,” the old man said in a quiet, conversational way, belying the death grip he had on her arm, “is quite a puzzle. It will not talk to the other Trees of its kind. No. It broods here, in the center of this city, full of dark thoughts and secrets that it will not whisper to any but the night stars. Why is that I wonder?”
“I am sure I do not know. I know nothing about the ways of holy trees. Come away. Come away!” Ally insisted. She planted her feet and tugged with all her twelve year old strength but it was as if her arm was encased in stone. She looked frantically towards the monster. The thing had feet, now. The feet began to slide across the ground bringing it step by step closer to the wall where they stood. Ally wanted to scream but only a soft moan escaped her frozen lips. She wanted someone to yell at the top of their lungs and break the spell of this nightmare but Ammalia had stopped screaming and a deathly quiet had settled upon the plaza.
“I have crossed a thousand miles of desert so that I might talk to this tree, in person.” the crazy old man continued, “yet all it can tell me is that it nurtures something, something precious. It claims pregnancy as a reason for its silence. Pregnancy. Pregnant with what I ask. Life, it says. Love, it says. Completion, it says. Now, what is a Treetalker like me supposed to do? What kind of place is this, that your Great Tree has gone bonkers and no one has noticed?”
Ally had no time to figure out what the old man was talking about. The vine man now stood on the other side of the wall. It raised its arms and planted its fists on its hips and seemed to be tapping one foot in impatience. The old man ignored it. The vine man cocked its head. Ally watched it in horrified fascination.
“Where are your Treetalkers? Who is in charge here?”
“I don’t know. All the wise men live in the Omen City Library. Perhaps he lives there.” Ally suggested, hoping this would get the old man moving. She watched as the vine man crossed his arms across his chest and began drumming his vine fingers against his arms in a surreal parody of someone impatiently waiting for a bus. Ally’s heart was still drumming in her chest but amused curiosity was rearing its ugly head in the back of her mind. If she was not careful, she just might forget to be afraid.
Apparently, even vine people did not have an endless fountain of patience. This one unfolded its arms and reached out, putting its hand over the old man’s hand on her arm.
The old man finally decided the vine man was worthy of his attention.
“Yes?” he asked. “Can I help you?”
The vine man very carefully pried the fingers out of Ally’s arm.
“What do you mean, I can’t have her? I am a Treetalker. I can take whomever I please,” the old man snorted, obviously affronted by some imaginary conversation he thought he was having with the vine man.
Ally watched the fingers come free of her arm one by one and when it looked like she was just about free, she planted her feet and threw herself backwards.
What should have been a neat little backwards somersault ended in mid air. The vine man would make a great magician, Ally thought, as she hung upside down. She would introduce him to Manny the Magnificent when this was over. Manny had taught her all about misdirection, about making people watch one spot while you slipped a card into their pocket with the other. The vine man’s misdirection had been brilliant. While one hand had been setting her free, the other hand must have secretly crept around her back and snagged her around the waist as she pushed off.
The monster pulled her close and righted her so that she was head up, without ever letting go. It was quite gentle as it did so. The old man did not attempt her recapture. This was good. She did not relish the idea of being used in a game of tugwar. There was just one problem. She was now on the wrong side of the tree wall.
Ally thought of her favorite swear words and decided to use all of them. The old man ignored her, addressing the vine man instead.
“I am sorry, but you cannot kidnap children anytime you want,” the old man said. “Give her back to me and we will forget this whole incident.”
The vine man hugged Ally against its side. It began to glide slowly backwards, the vines shifting and heaving against her back, an altogether disquieting sensation. He was tall and she was small, so this left her feet dangling three hand spans above the ground. She struggled, trying to shift the vine arm wrapped around her middle. The strands of vines shifted and moved but the arm, as a whole, was a steely band. Short of hacking the arm off with an ax, she had no idea how she was going to get out of her predicament.
“Help me,” Ally yelled in fury at the old man. He ignored her, intent on the vine man. Beyond him, a sea of pale, frightened faces just stared at her like she was already dead. It seemed everyone she knew now stood just beyond the verge of the tree wall, witnessing her crime. Great. She was going to get eaten by a great stupid tree and someone was sure to sell spicenuts and beer at twice the going rate to all the thirsty spectators.
“What do you mean, she is yours to keep? What are you going to do with a human child?” the old man yelled in annoyance. “Bring her back here at once!”
The vine man turned ever so slowly, sliding one foot at a time carefully forward before it shifted its weight to it.
“Don’t be ridiculous, of course she is human,” the old man yelled loudly at the vine man’s retreating back, his frustration apparent. “What else could she possibly be?”
Ally saw his face for a few seconds after that, just before the vine man shifted her around to put its body between her and the nearest people. A look of deep, core shaking, shock crossed the old man’s face. Then, his face crumpled and his knees gave out. He sat down hard in the dust and clung to the top of wall, silent at last.
Well, that ruled out rescue from that quarter, Ally thought. Time to work a new angle.
Ally twisted in the vine man’s grip and tried to look into the surreal face.
“Let me down, please, sir,” she said politely. “My clients are not patient people and my patch will go to others if I am not there to tend it.”
She cocked her head and tried to listen really hard for whatever the old man thought he had heard but all she could hear was the sound of her breath whistling in panic from between her lips.
Ally glanced around. They were almost to the massive tree trunk. Something smelled sweet, like a cross between freshly mowed hay and honeyflower. The smell filled her nostrils and clung to her tongue, making it hard to breath. The resulting headache burned between her eyes. Things started to get a little blurry.
She blinked hard and shook her head to clear it. Then the sky opened up and rained pink tears. They drifted past her face and settled softly to the ground. That scared her. She did not like hallucinogens. For a moment, the fear burned her mind clean, long enough to see clearly. It was raining petals. Pale pink petals. She looked up. The tips of the lowest branches of the tree swelled, burst open, unfurled a spiral of petals and then dropped the flower only to repeat the process over and over. Impossibly fast. It was raining sweet scented flowers, in numbers so large the air became thick with them, obscuring the plaza beyond behind a curtain of pink.
Ally’s brain decided it had had quite enough excitement for one day and shut down. This was quite pleasant. Like watching the world go by while under water. Any anxiety she might have had washed away under the onslaught of the euphoric the plant exuded. There might be a business angle in this, she mused, if only she could remember the details after she sobered up. If there was an afterwards. The vine man might still eat her. That unpleasant thought drowned in a wash of pinkness and flushed away.
The vine man set her on her feet but her knees would not hold her. She sat down and curled her feet under her knees, the animated root ball imitating her. They sat facing each other, human knees touching vegetable.
Ally considered her knees and considered what it meant to be human. They did not seem unusual, her knees, even though she thought them a little bony under the bruises and scrapes. She’d gotten a sand burn in the last ragball game, stealing the ball from Chick. Worth the pain. Her team of runners had won that night. She liked playing ragball. She was good at it.
She wanted the vine man to know that. She wanted to give him a reason for letting her live. She looked up into the vine man’s empty eyes and wondered what vine men did for fun.
“Humans like to play games,” she said.
The vine man cocked his head and then held out his hands, palms up.
Was this a game? She put her hands in his, palms down and waited expectantly. If this was going to be a game of slap hands, she was absolutely certain she would loose. The drug was making her fingers and toes go numb.
The vine man closed its fingers around her hands and held them. She looked up into its face and wished once again that she could hear what the old man could hear. The vine man seemed sad, if that was possible.
“I don’t understand you. You know that, right?” she said gently.
The vine man squeezed her hands as if to reassure her that he understood. But the pressure did not ease. Ally looked down with a frown.
“Oh, gawd!” she breathed, tugging frantically, trying to get her hands away from what was growing out of the vine’s fingertips. Pale thin tentacles slid up her wrists, spiraling around her arm, weaving a net like sleeve as they crossed and crossed again, climbing inexorably toward her shoulders.
The more she struggled the tighter the vines squeezed around her arms. Ally forced herself to relax and the effort brought a sheen of sweat her face. Adrenaline warred with the soporific effects of the drug making her nauseous.
“Please, sir. If you are going to eat me, kill me first,” she panted.
The vine man somehow managed to look sympathetic. Did he understand? The vines on her arms slowed and stopped just short of her armpits. Ally breathed a sigh of relief, but her relief was premature. Two stray tentacles broke free and climbed over the crest of her shoulders to snug up against the arteries in her neck. She could feel her heart pounding against them.
Did he need her to be afraid, so the blood would pump hot and strong out of her veins when he opened them up? She closed her eyes and waited to die.
The tentacles tightened painfully and began to sting, a sensation that burned through the numbing haze of the drug. She opened her eyes and stared down at the tendrils on the back of her hands. They were growing tiny thorns. As she watched, each thorn oozed a bead of amber fluid that glistened ominously in the pink light. She felt the spines press against her skin, felt the pop as they broke the surface and buried themselves in her flesh, felt the burn as the amber poison flowed into her bloodstream.
The pain became two rampaging durffas, racing up her arms, crashing through her body, to explode in her brain, blinding her. She felt her spine arch and her skull snap back. A horrific animal howl escaped her lips as the vines at her throat tried to dig their way through her flesh.
The ground underneath her shifted and suddenly she was supine, cradled and supported by the living vines.
Perhaps she passed out. Perhaps her brain took pity on her and stopped relaying the damage reports.
Was it a dream, or merely hallucination that followed? The fog that filled her mind lifted, drifting away on the tendrils of a breeze. She found herself sitting in deep forest glade, on the mossy bank of a small stream that tinkled softly around time smoothed stones. Immense trees, as wide as a truck at their bases, stretched up into the sky all around her, making what little light there was seem green and liquid.
“Poor, sweet Ally,” a soft sad voice whispered to her out of the shadow. “Alimanda Silverhair, first and last, daughter of my heart. I had hoped to give you more time, but circumstance, it seems, is not our friend. Time and luck have run out.”
A woman, elegantly draped in pale silk from head to ankle, stepped out of the shadows and picked her way gracefully over ferns, orchids and wild strawberries. She stepped onto a patch of moss across the stream from Ally. Ally noticed her weight did not crush the delicate spiked tips. The woman was an illusion.
Ally stared at the dream woman. She was beautiful, her hair the color of burnished copper, her skin pale and translucent. The fabric of her ivory robes fell like water around her tall, lithe form, held here and there by a touch of gold.
“Who are you?” Ally asked.
“I am Le’alba, First of the Tree brethren. I am your mother.”
Ally blink in surprise. The Tree was inside her head. Neat trick, that. She opened her mouth to ask, then remembering the vine man, she scowled. This dream promised to be a lot of fun but she had left a body somewhere, being consumed by acid.
“I don’t look anything like you,” Ally said reasonably, not believing this craziness anymore than she believed the old man’s talk. What kind of fool did they take her for? Someone like Ally did not have a mother that looked like this. Even in her wildest daydreams, Ally had never allowed herself a fantasy mother as perfect as this one. The Tree was inside her head mucking about with her dreams.
“On the outside perhaps,” the lady conceded, “but that was intentional. It made your father happy, nurturing a child that looked so much like himself.”
Ally, the perpetual cynic, could not stop her heart from leaping for joy.
“You knew my dad?” She could not hide the hope and longing in her voice. Ashamed of her weakness, she bit her lip and looked away. It did not pay to encourage the delusional fantasies of the crazies. They always took it as permission to expand on the lies.
“He was one of my husbands. I gave him his scars on his twentieth birthday. He was my closest companion for the rest of his life.”
The scars. That was it! That was the memory she could not place. A memory as old as Ally herself. The raised welts on the back of her father’s hands as he lifted her out of the cradle. Just like the old man’s scars. Just like the pattern of burns being etched into the back of the hands of the body she’d left under the tree in Market Plaza. The vine man is giving me my father’s hands, she thought. This was anything but comforting. Her memories of her father were tinged with madness. Panic brought a bitter taste in the back of her throat and she struggled to wake herself from this dream.
She had not thought of her father for ages. Now, all the bad memories were returning. A slow simmering rage rose up in her gut. She felt it grab the panic and stuff it back into its box.
Ally gritted her teeth and snarled at the memories, wishing them away. She had not yet forgiven her father for being crazy, for being absent, for being weak, for dying, for going away and abandoning her to her own resources at the age of five.
Ally sprang to her feet.
“Let me out of here!”she yelled. “You have no right to mess up my life like you have! Do you think you can sashay into my life and claim to be my mother? You are a plant! Plants do not have kids! Do you think just because he was my father, that I should go all mushy inside when you mention him?” Ally was secretly appalled that she was being rude to an adult, but too angry to care. “I don’t want to be a part of your crazy story. Go kidnap someone who cares. I don’t!”
Ally turned and marched off into the trees. She had only gone ten steps when the trees parted, revealing the woman in pale robes standing by a stream that looked suspiciously identical to the one Ally had just left.
Ally scowled and marched up to the woman.
“Stop it! This is a stupid game. Let me go!”
“This place is an illusion, little one. You helped me create it inside your own mind. Your body still lies in the dust, buried in sleeping petals. The drug must run its course before you can wake. Until then, you must content yourself with my companionship,” the lady said patiently. “Will you not sit and talk with the mother of your flesh?”
Ally bit back the angry things that wanted to burst from her mouth. Instead, she turned and stalked away again, heading up stream this time. She climbed a tumble of boulders by a small waterfall and found the lady looking back at her from the wooded glen.
Ally turned and stalked off into the trees again. Her anger burned away with every step, until, at last, she began to plot her own survival.
If this was her own mind, then she knew this game, this game of creating an island of safety out of the chaos ridden seas of life. The world was what you made it. That lesson had been beaten into her from the age of two. Had she not crawled out of the gutter and become head runner? She had done this at great cost to herself and her dreams. People did not give you a place to stand just because you existed. No. You had to take it. You had to hold it. You had to defend it against all who would take it from you.
There were tricks to getting what you needed if you were small and powerless: always be careful not to bite off more than you can chew yet always push the limits other people have set about you to fence you in; no one gave up their space without a struggle but if you asked, they would let you in to help share the load; once in, insinuate yourself into the next level of trust, and the next; adapt; be adept; learn fast and keep on running. Ally had taken all these lessons to heart.
Ally suddenly became very sure that her entire life had been a dress rehearsal for this moment. She calmed herself and tried to remember the details of everything she knew.
The lady said this place was an image from her own mind. It was time to play the Imagine Game her father had taught her. Ally stopped and breathed in deeply. She imagined that the air, the light, the dirt under her feet were part of her body. She hissed out a long slow breath and wiggled her fingers, imagining them digging deeply into the fabric of this place. Then she pushed.
A breeze caught at her blouse and swirled around her bare knees. Heartened by this, Ally raised her hands into the air. The wind picked up sharply, whipping the branches around, high over her head. She closed her fingers and shook her fists at the sky. A gale swooped down to worry at the trees. The trees bent before it. With a loud crack, a large branch snapped and went sailing away.
The lady appeared before her, her robes untouched by the wind.
“What are you doing, Alimanda?” A worried frown now marred those perfect features.
“The world is not soft or kind,” Ally said. “I decided to fix your illusion.”
Somewhere, just beyond seeing, a great tree groaned as it swayed too far and began to topple. Ally pushed harder. The sound of a great giant crashing to earth washed over them while the earth under her feet vibrated like the skin of a giant drum. She grinned fiercely at her mother.
“This is your mind. The damage you do is only to yourself,” the lady said reasonably.
“If you don’t like it, get out,” Ally growled, pushing a little harder. Another tree toppled nearby.
The lady disappeared.
Ally had won. But it did not make her feel happy. No. Far from it. She was alone. Again. Something terrible hurt inside her chest. She curled in around that hurt, trying to breath, trying to scream, fighting to get it out. Finally, the tears came and she cried as only invisible children can cry, silently, with great shuddering breaths and absolutely no sound. Rivers of snot and tears ran down her face. She pressed her forehead against her knees, rocked back and forth, and let her grief consume her.
“What do you think you are doing, you crazy pile of leaves!” a voice yelled in anger.
Ally looked up and wiped her eyes. The lady was back. She had the old man by the scruff of the neck. Great, she thought. More people stomping about inside my head.
The lady let him go and he stumbled, looking around.
“Whoa,” he breathed, looking a little scared.
Ally glanced around. The trees were gone. The stream bed was dry. Drifts of ash blew across the seared ground and soot rained down from an angry yellow sky. Well, that answered the question of what happens when you push too hard. Part of her was secretly pleased at the destruction and wondered what she could have accomplished if she had really been trying.
That was a sobering thought. She used the hem of her blouse to wipe her face. Glancing up, she found the old man staring at her, his face gone impassive and unreadable.
“Had a bit of a temper tantrum, did we?” he asked, stepping carefully over the treacherous ground towards her. Ally said nothing. A great shuddering sigh washed through her. Suddenly she felt very, very tired.
It began to snow.
The lady looked up, a worried frown on her face.
“Do something, Garibart,” she hissed.
“Do something? I think quite enough has been done, already, don’t you. Did you think she was unbreakable? Did you not think that some damage just might be irreparable?”
“I survived. So to have all the Tree brethren. We wake into this life, sentient yet immobile. We cope and we deal with it. It is our limitations that drive us to leap out among the stars.”
Ally sat up and listened. Adults did this all the time, with kids. They would argue about you, among themselves, as if you did not exist. If a kid sat very still, they would forget you were there altogether and then all sorts of interesting things could be gleaned from their conversations.
It stopped snowing. No one noticed.
“You are Tree. Trees sleep. Trees dream until it is time to wake. Human children, even half breed human children grown by Trees, must grow into their understanding. What would happen to a Tree if we woke it before its dreamtime had ended? What would happen to a sentient being unprepared for the immensity of understanding that is the birthright of all the Tree brethren?”
“Madness. Death,” the lady said. “But I know her mind. She is ready.”
“It is not the mind that matters, in human children. It is the heart. Look about you, Lady Le’alba. This is what you have grown in that twisted garden you call a Treeheart. What kind of love have you given her, you unnatural mother? Has she suckled at your breast? Has she been rocked in your arms as you sang her lullabies?”
“I held her in her womb long past the time of birthing for humans, telling her all I know. She knows the songs of the stars and the language of the winds. When she budded, her father, my Treetalker, cared for her. She has heard the words of the Oneverse as only the ‘verse can sing it. What more is there to know?”
Ally frowned. She had no memory of this and wondered if the lady was lying just to win the argument.
The old man scowled at woman in ivory.
“If I had known the madness of what you were plotting, I would have stopped you,” he said levelly.
“And well we knew this, therefore you were not informed. We kept her hidden. Now, it is too late. You cannot kill what has taken root.”
“She is not a Tree. Do you discount how fragile human bodies are? A knife between the ribs can solve all of this.”
“You would not dare,” breathed the Lady. Her robes swirled around her and tendrils trailed from the hem to wrap around the old man’s throat.
Garibart choked, pulling at the tightening cloth.
“Alright! Alright! She is safe from me. Let me go!”
The cloth unwound a bit, slipping down to imprison his arms.
“Fix this,” the lady insisted. “Mend her heart. Time is slipping out of our fingers, here.”
“Fine. On one condition.”
“Name your condition and I will tell you yeah or nay.”
“Tell me the truth. Why?” the old man asked. “after all this time, after ten thousand years of symbiosis, why did you feel compelled to grow a child with human legs and a human heart?”
The Lady Le’alba looked at him for a very long time, a solemn yet sad expression on her face.
“It was time. The shift has begun,” she said.
The old man waited expectantly but the lady just looked at him, saying nothing more.
“Shift? What shift?” he prompted.
“Ask my child. Perhaps you will listen to human lips better than Tree thoughts.”
The old man looked down at Ally.
“Do you know what she’s talking about?”
Ally snorted in disgust and looked away. Adults. And they thought kids lived in a fantasy world. The crazy in this conversation was amazing.
The old man looked back at the lady, scowling.
“Flesh of my flesh,” the lady said, “she carries the genetic memory of Tree brethren, yet she is still a sapling whose dreamtime is not yet complete.”
The old man looked at the angry child at his feet and tried to see what the Lady saw. He shook his head doubtfully.
Ally was equally unconvinced.
“I don’t know what she is talking about. Maybe she has me confused with some other kid,.” Ally said, hoping to add water to those seeds of doubt.
He looked back at the Lady.
“Is that possible?” he asked.
She hissed in annoyance.
“Ask yourself this: when you came looking for the answer to your questions who was the first person to initiate a conversation with you? The power of the stars placed you in her path. If you cannot believe in the stars, then look about you. In the history of Treetalkers, has there ever been an acolyte who controlled the communal mind the first time they entered it? The veil over her place of power has barely been lifted. What do you think will happen when she is complete? I will tell you this freely. This child of mine is a message. A message and a messenger. A gift of incalculable worth to those who will understand. But she is also a warning. Ignore her at your own peril. The message, if left unheeded, will surely turn into a weapon. The shift will happen. The shift must happen. I have spent ten thousand years trying to ensure that it does.”
Ally looked down at her toes. She did not like the idea of being a weapon. No, not at all. She did not want the power to destroy things. She poked her fingers into the dust and wished wellness upon the Oneverse. The ‘verse wished back. Cool, clean energy flowed through her, washing out the sadness and the anger and the hard edged wishes of the two adults arguing over her head.
Something green pushed its way out of the ground. The seedling unfurled a pair of leaves and spread them wide to catch the light. A soft rain fell from a suddenly overcast sky to settle the dust and ash. Tiny green things sprang from every drop. Soon, they stood on an endless green plain.
Ally cocked her head and considered this. It was not a full grown cedar forest but she was just learning. What had been consumed with a thought would take patience and attention to detail to regrow. It seemed, even in the fantastical landscapes induced by hallucination, it was easier to destroy than to create.
The adults had become ominously silent. Ally looked up. Both were staring at her, faces inscrutable.
“Having fun, are we?” the old man asked acidly.
Ally rose to her feet, wiping her dusty fingers on the seat of her shorts. She didn’t bother explaining herself, as it seemed, in her experience, that adults were not ever really interested in a kid’s explanation because they had already decided on their own version of reality and in that reality, everything was neat and orderly and had to make perfect sense to be ‘good’, which automatically relegated all things misunderstood into the category of ‘bad’.
“Can I go home now?” Ally asked truculently.
“When it is time,” the lady said.
“What am I supposed to do with her? She has no discipline or manners,” the old man growled.
“Teach her,” the lady suggested patiently.
“She is too old for the School of Acolytes. Not to mention she is the wrong gender.”
“You are the wisest of the Wise, Garibart. Convince the other wise men of her value. All our lives depend on it,” she replied, in a tone that signaled the end the discussion. The lady reached out with a hand and did something Ally could not quite see. The air folded around the old man, spun him around and took him somewhere else. Neat trick, that, Ally thought.
“I would tell you to trust Garibart, but I think you know your own heart. Let him teach you but do not allow him to browbeat you with his opinions. What passes for human wisdom these days is full of gaps and obfuscations. Learn what you need, leave the rest. Think of learning as a treasure hunt. Everyone you will meet, every book you will read, carries a piece of a greater puzzle. Find that piece and move on. They will wish patience on you. Do not heed it. You have hills to climb and places to go. Rest when you are weary but never tarry overlong. You already know what you need to know. You just need help remembering it.”
The lady bent slightly and looked into Ally’s eyes. She reached out a hand and brushed the ebony mop back from her daughters forehead.
“Long have I wanted to do this,” she whispered softly as she kissed her daughter’s forehead.
Ally closed her eyes. Such a simple thing, that touch. Ally found her heart going a long way down that road to forgiveness.
“Do not think badly of me. It was a cruel thing I did, wishing you born,” her mother sighed. “I did not do it lightly. Come back to me if you get stuck. I cannot think of any more motherly advice. Open to me, now, and I will send you back.”
Ally reached out to touch a perfect cheek with a hesitant finger, wonder filling her mind. This had been the best dream ever. She looked deep into her mother’s eyes, eyes that sucked her into their watery depths. Ally sank towards the bottom, instinctively holding her breath. Lights exploded behind her eyes, tiny flashes that merged into a sunburst in which all knowledge was held. It filled her to bursting and for a moment, just for a moment, she understood what it was to be divinely all knowing and omnipotent. Then it was gone.
Ally opened her eyes. She lay, once more, under the Tree in the center of the Great Plaza. The feeling of understanding began to fade. She tried to hold on to it for a moment longer but it fled from her grasp and was gone.
She sat up, wincing. Her arms were tender from fingertip to neckline. Her sleeves were in tatters. She shook them back and studied her arms. A tracery of scars marred the bronze skin, but they were not angry welts like the old man’s. Instead, thin pink lines, like well healed cuts, traced a delicate vine pattern from knuckles to arm pit. As she watched, the pink faded to pale. Oh, well, she thought, it could have been worse.
She looked around to get her bearings.
The vine man was gone. She looked up above her. The flowers were gone. In fact, no trace lay in the dust around her of any disturbance at all. She rose and brushed the dust out of her hair and off the seat of her shorts, her eyes searching the crowd at the edge of the tree wall.
The old man, Garibart, still sat beyond the wall, clutching the edge in a white knuckled grip. He seemed oddly frozen. Beyond him, like the chorus of a street play, stood all the familiar faces from the market and like a chorus, their faces were pulled into parodies of tragedy and horror. The only thing missing to make this tragic opera complete was a badly out of tune pump organ and a flute player.
Ally sighed. No use postponing the inevitable. If she was in trouble, she wanted to know about it now.
She looked down at her feet and took a single step. Nothing happened. The vines were silent. She took that as a good sign and walked quickly towards the outer edge of the tree. As she drew closer to the Treetalker, she realized a twisted vine hand still protruded from the ground at the edge of the wall, its fingers buried in the old man’s throat. His eyes were open but oddly blank.
Ally squatted in front of him and watched as the vine carefully untangled itself from his flesh, sinking back into the ground. The old man coughed and blinked twice.
Ally cocked her head and smiled encouragingly.
“Brat,” the old man greeted her, rubbing his neck.
“Old man,” she replied with a grin.
“I need a drink. I don’t suppose you know of a place where a man can drink in peace.”
“I know many. But my services are not free.”
“Mercenary creature. I am your teacher. Show me courtesy.”
“A body has to eat,” Ally said, shrugging, as if to say her hands were tied.
“Trust me, if you are who your mother claims you to be, you will not want for bread or bed for the rest of your life.”
Ally rose and stepped over the wall, a small smile playing around at the corners of her mouth. Adults. They were so crazy.
