CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

DEAD MAN’S QUEST

I thought I walked aimlessly. I crossed a stream and drank there, but it did little for my hunger. There were probably fish in the stream, and I thought of trying to tickle a few. But I would have had to eat them raw; I was not yet that hungry. It was too early in the year for berries, but I found a few greens I recognized growing there and picked and ate them. I recalled that once Soldier’s Boy had eaten vast quantities of the water-grass that grew along the bank. I sampled it. Even the youngest, most tender shoots seemed unbearably bitter. Another food that belonged only to the Speck Great Ones.

I left the stream and walked on, staying in the shade under the trees. The touch of sunlight on my thin skin was still uncomfortable and when I touched my hand lightly to the top of my skull I found it was still sore there. The skin was thicker over my muscles and bones today than it had been yesterday. It was not as gruesome to look at myself as it had been. So, I was healing rapidly, but not in the miraculously quick way in which the magic had healed me. It seemed obvious to me that I had a physical body, and it moved, so I could not be dead. Yet, if I was alive, who was I? What was I?

Jodoli had told me to go back to my tree. Coincidence or an unconscious intention led me back to Lisana’s ridge overlooking the Valley of Ancestor Trees. I stood for a time looking down on it before the silence intruded on my brooding thoughts. I squinted, peering at the King’s Road in the distance. All was silent there. No. Not silent. Merely bereft of the sounds that men always bring to the forest. Neither shouts nor axes rang, no wheels ground along over a rough roadbed, no shovels bit into the forest turf. Birds sang and swooped through the afternoon light. I could hear the wind blowing lightly through the trees. The leaves whispered softly to one another, but the voice of mankind had been muted.

Curiosity picked at me. Then I wondered what day of the week it was. The thought rattled oddly in my brain. It had been so long since I’d thought of days fitting on a calendar and having names. But if today was a Gernian Sixday that would explain the quiet. Not even the prisoners were made to work on the Sixday. I turned away from the Vale of the Ancient Ones and made myself walk toward Lisana and my tree.

I felt a strange antipathy to both of them. In the end, it seemed that Soldier’s Boy had stolen all that he wanted from me, and managed to keep it and Lisana, too. I felt spurned by Lisana. I had loved her, I thought, just as truly as Soldier’s Boy. But in the end, she had taken part of me, and left this part to wander. Could she have done that to me if she loved me? Or was the me who walked the earth now the parts that she had found unlovable, even useless? I opened my hands and looked down on them. How could I ever even know what she had chosen to hold fast to? Those parts of me were gone now, lost to a self I’d never know.

I thought of all the things I’d always imagined I lacked during my years at the Academy and afterward: courage under duress and the aggression needed to seize control of leadership and wield it. I’d seen other men fueled by anger or ambition, but had never glimpsed those fires in myself. Soldier’s Boy possessed a ruthlessness that had horrified me. I recalled the sentry’s warm blood running over my hands and guiltily, reflexively, wiped them on my cloak. Had he taken those things with him when he left?

Oh, useless to wonder what I had or didn’t have in me. This self was what I had left. Could I make anything of it?

I walked past my tree with its sodden pile of rotting flesh at the base of it. It hardly even stank anymore. A few flies buzzed, but I had no desire to walk closer or poke at the maggots rendering my former body down into compost. A vengeful man, I thought, would have girdled the bark around the tree. I had no knife or tool to cut it, but even more, I had no will to do it. Such vengeance would bring me no joy.

I did walk up to Lisana’s tree. Like my tree, hers had taken on new life with spring. It was noticeably larger, with glossy green leaves, and the flush of moving sap in the new tips of her branches. Gingerly, I reached out and put my palm to the bark of her trunk. I waited. It felt like a tree. Nothing more. No surge of connection. A memory stung me suddenly and I snatched my palm away from her bark. But no questing roots sought to suck the nutrients from my body. The tree was probably fully occupied with the rich soil and the warm sun of the spring day.

“Lisana?” I said aloud. I don’t know what sort of response I hoped for. Silence was what I received. I followed the fallen trunk her tree had sprung from back to where a wide strip of bark and wood still attached it to her old stump. Soot still blackened one side of the trunk, but the ashes and burned wood of Epiny’s fire had been cloaked over by spring grass. I looked down at the fallen trunk of her tree, to where she and my other self reached welcoming arms up to the day’s light.

I sighed. “You both got what you wanted. I don’t suppose it matters to either of you that you left me wandering this world as a ghost.” A light breeze moved through the treetops, and when it reached the two trees, their leaves rippled in the sunlight. The leaves were deep green, glossy with health. Their trees were beautiful. I felt a moment of hate-edged envy. Then it passed. “For what it’s worth to you, I wish you well. I hope you live for centuries. I hope the memories of my family live with you.”

Tears stung my eyes. Foolish tears. The trees had no reason to hear me or heed me. They were alive and growing. I was more like Lisana’s old stump. I looked at the weathered and rusted cavalla blade still wedged there in her wood. Idly I took hold of the sword’s hilt and gave a sharp tug. It didn’t come free, but the corroded blade snapped off. I looked at the hilt and the few inches of pitted and broken blade attached to it. Well, now I had a weapon, of sorts. Peculiarly appropriate. Half of a rusted sword for half of a ruined man.

I was using its rusty edge to saw a strip from the edge of my cloak, to make a crude sword belt, when I suddenly realized that I was holding and using iron with no ill effects on me at all. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I thought about it briefly, decided I had no idea what that meant, and went back to my crude tailoring. After I had a strip for the belt, I abandoned all caution and attacked my cloak, cutting the fabric into a smaller rectangle and making a hole for my head. I ended up with a sort of tunic, open at both sides but belted, and with a second sash to hold my rusty sword. My “new clothes” were more suitable for the warming spring day. I rolled up what was left of my cloak and took it with me as I left Lisana’s ridge. I made no farewell. I decided I was no longer the sort of man who talked to trees.

It remained to be seen what type of man I was.

Evening was falling by the time I neared the construction camp at the end of the road. Frogs were creaking in the dammed-up stream by the road’s edge, and mosquitoes hummed in my ears. As I scrambled up onto the partially completed roadbed, I squinted through the dimness at what I saw. It was all wrong.

Long runners from ground-crawling blackcap berries had ventured up and onto the sun-warmed roadbed. No traffic had trampled them flat. Grass sprouted in the wagon ruts. It was short, new grass, but it should not have been growing there at all if work was continuing on the road. As I walked toward the darkened equipment sheds, everything rang wrong against my senses. I glimpsed no night watchman’s lantern. The smells were wrong; there was no scent of smoke from burning slash piles or cook fires. The manure I accidentally stepped in was old and hard. Everything spoke of a project abandoned weeks if not months ago.