The Skrayling Tree: The Albino in America

  “What is his power over them?”

  “He it was who stole the Chaos Shield which should have brought your wife to this place. Lord Shoashooan waylaid her and took the shield. That was all he needed to focus his strength and conquer the winds. Had it not been for Ayanawatta’s medicine, she would not have been with us at all! His magic flute has been our greatest friend in this.”

  “Lord Sepiriz, I undertook to serve your cause because you promised me the return of my wife. You did not tell me I would kill her.”

  “I was not sure that you would, this time.”

  “This time?”

  “My dear Count Ulric.” Prince Lobkowitz had entered the room. “You seem much recovered and ready to continue with this business!”

  “Only if I am told more. Do I understand you rightly, Lord Sepiriz? You knew that I would kill my wife?”

  The black giant’s expression betrayed him, but I saw the sadness that was there also. Any blame I felt towards him dissipated. I sighed. I tried to remember some words I had heard. Was it from Lobkowitz, long ago? We are all echoes of some larger reality, yet every action we take ultimately decides the nature of truth itself.

  “Nothing we do is unique. Nothing we do is without meaning or consequence.” Lobkowitz’s soft, cultured Austrian accent cut into Sepiriz’s silence. The black giant seemed relieved, even grateful. He could not answer my challenge and feared to answer my question.

  The ensuing silence was broken by a loud noise from outside. I walked past the dais on which I had been sleeping. I was almost naked, but the room was pleasantly warm. I went to the window. There was a courtyard outside, but we were many stories above it. Old vines, thicker than my legs, climbed up the worn, glittering stonework. Autumn flowers, huge dahlias, vast hydrangeas, roses the span of my shoulders, grew among them, and it was only now I understood how ancient the place must truly be. Now it was a better home to nature than to man. Large, spreading trees grew in the courtyard, and tall, wild grass. Some distance below on another terrace I made out an entire orchard. Elsewhere were fields gone to seed, cattle pens, storehouses. There had been no one here for centuries. I remembered the tales told of the Turks capturing Byzantium. They had believed they brought down an empire, but instead found a shell, with sheep grazing among the ruins of collapsed palaces. Was this the American Byzantium?

  In the courtyard the great black mammoth, Bes, was being washed down by the youth, White Crow, and his older companion, Ayanawatta. The two men seemed good friends, and both were in the peak of physical fitness, though White Crow could not have been more than seventeen. His features, of course, were those of an albino. But it was not my family he resembled. It was someone else. Someone I knew well. My urge was to call to him, to ask after Oona, but Sepiriz had already assured me she was no longer dead. I forced myself to accept his leadership. He did not simply know the future—he understood all the futures which might proliferate if any of us strayed too far from the narrative which, like a complicated spell involving dozens of people in dozens of different actions, must be strictly adhered to if we wished to achieve our desire. A game of life or death whose rules you had to guess.

  Looking up, the youth saw me. He became grave. He made a sign which I took to be one of comradeship and reassurance. The lad had charm, as had the aristocratic warrior at his side. Ayanawatta now offered me a faint, respectful bow.

  Who were these aristocrats of the prairie? I had seen nothing like them in any of the wonderful historic documents I had studied about the early history of northern America. I did, however, recognize them as men of substance. Warriors and superbly fit, they were expensively dressed. The quality of workmanship in their beaded clothing, weaponry and ornaments was exquisite. Both men were clearly prominent among their own people. Their oiled and shaven heads; their scalp locks their only body hair, hanging just so at an angle to the glittering eagle feathers; the complicated tattoos and piercings of the older man; the workmanship of their buckskins and beading—all indicated unostentatious power. I wondered if, like the Kakatanawa, they too were the last of their tribes.

  Again I was struck by the sense that, from within, the city seemed totally deserted. I looked back at tier upon tier fading into the clouds which hid the city’s upper galleries.

  Turning I could see beyond the great walls to the lake of ice and the ragged peaks of the mountains beyond. The whole world seemed abandoned of life. What had Sepiriz said about the inhabitants of this city? It must have housed millions of them.

  I asked Lobkowitz about this phenomenon. He seemed unwilling to answer, exchanging looks with Lord Sepiriz, who shrugged. “I do not think it unsafe, any longer,” he said. “Here we have no control of events at all. Whatever we say, the consequences will not change. It is only our actions which will bring change now, and I fear…” He dropped his great chin to his chest and closed his brooding eyes.

  I turned from the window. “Where are the Kakatanawa, the people of this city?”

  “You have met the only survivors. Do you know the other name for this city—the Kakatanawa name? I see you do not. It is Ikenipwanawa, which roughly means the Mountain of the Tree. Do you know of it? Just the tree itself, perhaps? So many mythologies speak of it.”

  “I do not know of it, sir. It is mainly my wife who concerns me now. You suggest she might live. Can time be reversed?”

  “Oh, easily, but it would do you no good. The action has already taken place. And will take place again. Your memory cannot be changed so readily!”

  “What has changed within these walls?” I asked him.

  “Nothing. At least, not in many hundreds of years. Perhaps thousands. What you saw from the ice was an illusion of an inhabited city. It is one which has been maintained by those who guard the source of life itself. The reflective walls of the city serve more than one purpose.”

  “Has no one ever come here and discovered the truth?”

  “How could they? Until recently the lake was constantly boiling with viscous rock, the very life stuff of the planet. Nothing could cross it, and nothing cared to. But since then cold Law has worked its grim sorcery and made the lake as you see it now. This is what Klosterheim and his friends have been doing. In response the pathway was conjured by Ayanawatta and White Buffalo, but of course, it is now being used by our enemies. We make the paths, but we cannot control who uses them after us. It will not be long, no doubt, before they realize the trick and find a way of entering the city. So we must do all we have to as quickly as possible.”

  “I understood that time, as we know it, does not exist.” I was becoming angry, beginning to think they tricked me. “Therefore there is no urgency.”

  Prince Lobkowitz allowed himself a small smile. “Some illusions are more powerful than others,” he said. He seemed about to leave it at that, then added, “This is the last place in the multiverse you can find this fortress physically. Everywhere else it has transformed itself.”

  “Transformed? This was a fortress?”

  “Transformed by what it contains. By what it must guard. At one stage in the multiversal story, this was a great and noble city, self-contained and yet able to help all who came to it seeking justice. Not unlike the city you call Tanelorn, it brought order and tranquillity to all who dwelled here.

  “The human story is what changes so drastically. Passion and greed determine the course of nations, not their ideals. But without change we would die. So simple human emotions, those which have brought down a thousand other empires and destroyed a thousand Golden Ages, worked to bring about the destruction of this stability. It is a story of love and jealousy, but it will be familiar enough to you.

  “This fortress—this great metropolis—was built to guard a symbol. First, a symbol was chiefly all that it was. Then, through human faith and creativity, the symbol took on more and more reality. Ultimately the symbol and the thing itself were one. They became the same, and this gave them strength. But it also gave them dangerous vulnerability. For once the symbo
l took physical shape, human action became far more involved in its destiny. Now symbol and reality are the same. We face the consequences of that marriage. Of what, in essence, we ourselves created.”

  “Are you speaking of a symbolic tree?” I asked. I could only think of old German tree worship, still recalled in our decorated Yule pines. “Or of the multiverse itself?”

  He seemed relieved. “You understand the paradox? The multiverse and the tree are one, and each is encompassed by the other. That is the terrible dilemma of our human lives. We are capable of destroying the raw material of our own existence. Our imaginations can create actuality, and they can destroy it. But they are equally capable of creating illusion. The worst illusion, of course, is self-deception. From that fundamental illusion, all others spring. This is the great flaw which forever holds us back from redemption. It was what brought an end to the Golden Age this place represented.”

  “Do you say we can never be redeemed?”

  Lobkowitz brought his hand to my shoulder. “That is the fate of the Champion of Humanity. It is the fate of us all. Time and space are in perpetual flux. We work to achieve resolution in the multiverse, but we can never know true resolution ourselves. It is the burden we carry. The burden of our kind.”

  “And this dilemma is repeated throughout countless versions of the same lives, the same stories, the same struggles?”

  “Repetition is the confirmation of life. It is what we love in music and in many forms of art and science. Repetition is how we survive. It is, after all, how we reproduce. But when something has been repeated so many times that it has lost all resonance, then something must be done to change the story. New sap must be forced into old wood, eh? That is what we try to do now. But first we must bring all elements together. Do you understand what we are hoping to achieve, Count Ulric?”

  I had to admit that I was baffled. Such philosophies were beyond my simple soul to fathom. But I said, “I think so.” All I really knew was that if I played out my role in this, I would be reunited with Oona. And nothing else much mattered to me.

  “Come,” said Sepiriz, almost taking pity on me. “We will eat now.”

  We walked outside to a wide path curving around the city.

  “What is the exact nature of this place?” I asked. “Some center of the multiverse?”

  Lobkowitz saw how mystified I was. “The multiverse has no center any more than a tree has a center, but this is where the natural and the supernatural meet, where branches of the multiverse twine together. These intersections produce unpredictable consequences and threaten everything. Size loses logic. That is why it is so important to retain the original sequences of events. To make a path and to stick to it. To choose the right numbers, as it were. It is how we have learned to order Chaos and navigate the Time Field. Have you not noticed that many people out there are of different dimensions? That is a sure sign how badly the Balance is under attack.” Lobkowitz paused to look up. Tier after tier, the vast building disappeared into wisps of white cloud.

  “The Kakatanawa built this city over the centuries from the original mountain,” Lobkowitz told me as we continued past deserted homes, shops, stables. “They were a great, civilizing people. They lived by the rule of Law. All who sought their protection were accepted on condition that they accepted the Law. All lived for one thing—for the tree which was their charge. They devoted themselves to it. Their entire nation lived to serve and nurture the tree, to protect it and to ensure that it continued to grow. They were a famous and respected people, renowned across the multiverse for their wisdom and reason. The great kings and chiefs of other nations sent their sons to be educated in the ways of the Kakatanawa. Even from other realms they came to learn from the wisdom of the People of the Tree. White Crow, of course, follows his family’s long tradition…”

  I said that I understood Kakatanawa to mean ‘People of the Circle’. Why did he say “tree”?

  He smiled. “The tree is in the circle. Time is the circle, and the tree is the multiverse. The circle is the sphere in which all exists. Space is but a dimension of this sphere.”

  “Space is a dimension of time?”

  “Exactly.” Lobkowitz beamed. “It explains so much when you realize that.”

  I was saved from any further contemplation of this bewildering notion by a sharp wailing sound. With sinking heart, I rushed to the nearest balcony. I saw dark clouds drawing in on the jagged horizon, gathering around one of the tallest peaks and writhing and twisting as if in an agonized effort to assume some living form. The clouds were making one huge figure, drawn by all the winds now in thrall to Lord Shoashooan. A long streamer of cloud sped from the central mass, across the ice, over the walls of the great fortress city, and lashed at our flesh like a whip, then retreated before we could respond.

  Even Sepiriz bore a thin welt across his neck where the cloud had caught him. I imagined I saw a flash of fear in his eyes, but when I looked again he was smiling. “Your old friends march against us,” Lobkowitz said. “That is the first taste of their power. From this moment on, we shall never know peace. And if Gaynor the Damned is successful, we shall know agony for eternity.”

  I raised an eyebrow at this. Lobkowitz was serious. “Once the Balance is destroyed, time as we know it is also destroyed. And that means we are frozen, conscious but inanimate, at the very moment before oblivion, living that death forever.”

  I must admit I had begun to close my ears to Lobkowitz’s existential litany. A future without Oona was bleak enough to contemplate.

  Food forgotten, we watched the blue-black bruise of cloud forming and re-forming around the peaks of the mountains. A shout from another part of the gallery and we could see over the great gateway to the city, to the half-faded path which Ayanawatta had created with his flute. It now spread like dissipating mercury across the ice with men moving through it, leaping from patch to patch. The figures were tiny. They were not Kakatanawa. I thought at first they were Inuit, bulky in their furs, but then I realized that the leader had no face. Instead the light reflected from a mirrored helmet which was all too familiar to me. Another man strode beside him, one whose gait I recognized, and on the other side of him a smaller man, also familiar. But they were too far away for me to see their faces. They were without doubt his warriors.

  The same Vikings who had tried to stop us reaching the fortress.

  “Time is malleable,” said Lobkowitz, anticipating my question. “Gaynor is now Gunnar the Damned. Merely a fraction of movement sideways through the multiverse. He has gathered himself together, but he dare not live now without that helmet—for all his faces exist at once. Otherwise he is here in your twelfth century, as indeed is this city and much else…”

  I turned to look at him. “Does Gunnar still seek the Grail?”

  Lobkowitz shrugged. “It is Klosterheim who longs for the Grail. In his warped way he seeks reconciliation. Gunnar seeks death the way others seek treasure. But not merely his death. He seeks the death of everything. For only by achieving that will he justify his own self-murder.”

  “He is my first cousin, yet you seem to know him better than I do.” I was fighting off a creeping sense of dread. “Did you know him in Budapest or Vienna?”

  “He is an eternal, as you are an eternal. As you have alter egos, fellow avatars of the same archetype, so he takes many names and several guises. But the relative you know as Gaynor von Minct will always be the criminal Knight of the Balance, who challenged its power and failed. And who challenges it again and again.”

  “Lucifer?”

  “Oh, all peoples have their particular versions of that fellow, you know.”

  “And does he always fail in his challenges?”

  “I wish that were so,” said Lobkowitz. “Sometimes, I must say, he understands his folly and seeks to correct his actions. But there is no such hope here, my dear Count. Come, we must confer. Lord Shoashooan gathers strength again.” He paused to glance out of another opening in the great wall winding
up the ziggurat. “Gaynor and his friends bring considerable sorcery to this realm.”

  “How shall we resist them?” I looked around at the little party, the black giant, Prince Lobkowitz, the sachem Ayanawatta and White Crow. “How can we possibly fight so many? We are outnumbered and virtually unarmed. Lord Shoashooan gathers strength while we have nothing to fight him with. Where’s my sword?”

  Sepiriz looked to Lobkowitz, who looked to Ayanawatta and White Crow. Both men said nothing. Sepiriz shrugged. “The sword was left on the ice. We cannot get the third until…”

  “Third?” I said.

  Ayanawatta pointed behind him. “White Crow left his own blade down there with Bes. His shield is there, too. But again, we lack the necessary third object of power. There is no hope now, I think, of waking the Phoorn guardian. He dies. And with him the tree. And with the tree, the Balance…” He sighed hopelessly.

  The silence of the city was suddenly cut by a squealing shriek, like metal cutting metal, and something took shape above the ice directly behind where Gaynor and his men were moving cautiously along the dissipating trail.

  I was sure we could defeat the warriors alone, but I dreaded whatever it was I saw forming behind them.

  It shrieked again.

  The sound was full of greedy, anticipatory mockery. Lord Shoashooan, of course, had returned. No doubt, too, Gaynor had helped him increase his strength.

  White Crow turned away from the scene. He was deeply troubled. “I sought my father on the island, in my crow form. I thought he would help us. That he would be the third. But Klosterheim was waiting for me and captured me. At first I thought that you were him, my father. If you had not been near… The Kakatanawa came to rescue me after Klosterheim went away. They released me and found you. My father is, after all, elsewhere. He followed his dream and was swallowed by a monster. I thought he had returned to the Dragon Throne, but if he did, he has come back for some reason. This must not be.” He lowered his voice, troubled. “If that man is who I am sure it is, I must not fight him. I cannot fight my own father.”