The Throne of Bones (6 page)

He seemed to calm when we came into the forested hills of your domain. I believed that he sensed he was coming home and would soon be in the better care of his maternal relatives. He gurgled and cooed at the trees.

Near the place where you found me today, I paused to collect my thoughts and rehearse the speech that would introduce Dendrard to his grandparents. I bathed him at a spring and set him naked on soft moss while I washed myself. When I returned to pick him up, I found that I could not. The earth gripped him.

I didn’t know what to think. An animal, a snake, something held him to the ground. I pulled, and he screamed more loudly than ever before. I babbled at him, fussed over him and managed to calm him, but at the same time I very gently rolled him to one side to determine how he was caught, and by what.

My knife was out, for I didn’t know what I would see, and I’m glad—I suppose I’m glad—that I refrained from striking at once, for my first sight suggested that the foul tentacle of some underworld creature gripped my child at the base of his spine. What stayed my hand, I think, was Dendrard’s apparent contentment. Not even my screaming changed his look of pure happiness.

Though my hand cringed, I forced it to explore the thing that held my son. I expected a texture of scales, a chill of slime, but the reality was worse. What I felt was the firm pliancy of young wood. No creature had seized my son from the earth. It was he, Dendrard, who gripped the earth with the root sprouting from his backbone.

I stumbled backward, cursing and praying with equal futility. My eyes remained fixed on him, on his calm, empty gaze as he stared up at the blue sky, opening his little fists and spreading his fingers like branches.

I ran. Roots tripped me, branches raked me, trunks battered me. I fought my way free of the angry forest, but the first men I met on the open road were a press-gang from the Lord Admiral’s fleet, wandering far inland in their desperation for recruits. They thought I was mad, but they told me lunacy was no impediment for an oarsman on a trireme, nor were they much impressed by my assumed cough. They had seen real plague, they said, as I would.

I vowed to go back and find Dendrard one day. I never imagined that thirty years would pass. I hadn’t remembered that your lands contained so many hills, so many springs, so many trees. Nor had I foreseen that Cluddites would rearrange the landscape.

Ringard’s tale was ended, and so was the wine. The servants had long since gone to bed, but I took him up to the room they had prepared. The candles had burned out; it surprised me to see that the glowing sky made them unnecessary. The forest beyond the window nevertheless looked very dark.

“If you find him,” I said, “what do you propose to do?”

“Listen to his voice—although it’s been a very long time since I last heard the voices of trees, I may have an ear for that of my own son.” He flashed his unpleasant smile. “If not, perhaps I’ll merely sit for a while in his shade.”

I left him, and in the morning he was gone.

Several days later I heard that the Snake Man had fallen afoul of the Sons of Cludd. Anyone with a good word to say for an accused witch becomes a suspect, but I felt that the man had a claim on me. And I was curious to learn if any trees had spoken to him.

The smell of burning wood, burning flesh and righteously unbathed bodies led me inerrantly to the Holy Soldiers’ encampment. Easing my horse through a mob draped in white robes and droning dissonant hymns, I bitterly regretted the good old days when my father would set the hounds on Cluddite preachers. Now they were more numerous than those hounds’ fleas, and not even a lord of the House of Sleith would dare to throw one down the stairs if he came calling.

They had transported much of the forest to their camp, stripped the trees of branches, set them in rigid ranks, and decorated each with an unlucky victim. Some were already choking on the smoke of their feet as it rose to their nostrils, but I was not too late. The pyre around the distinctive figure of Ringard lay unlighted.

“Take heart!” I called to him when I came near enough to be heard. “Your nephew is here, Lord Fariel.”

They hadn’t quelled his wit. “I wouldn’t boast of our connection in this company, if I were you.”

Before leaving to seek someone in authority, I asked, “Did you find him? Dendrard?”

“No, fortunately. They would have liked him even less than his father.”

Talking to the victims was forbidden, I learned from the men who rushed up to unhorse me and hustle me before their captain. He was in a good mood—he didn’t smile, of course, they consider that a sin, but he didn’t tie me to a stake—but that was all I could gather from his barbarous accent and Zaxoin turns of phrase, some of which, I believe, he made up as he went along to confuse an unbelieving outlander like me. I did pick the words “talk” and “tree” out of his rapturous gabble, but even if he speaks perfect Frothen, it’s hard to concentrate on the words of a man whose sleeves are decorated with the dried tongues of blasphemers and ears of heretics.

“Wroken word on writhen tree spoken, burn on broken tree witch writhen!” he bawled, winding up his spittle-spraying harangue in fine Cluddite style and gesturing toward the stake where Ringard hung.

I cursed, I wept, I took it less nobly than Ringard himself when the torch dipped and his pyre blossomed up to contain him like a crystal cup. His head twisted, probably to deny these zealots the sight of one more tortured face, but it seemed to me that he was pressing his ear to the stake in an effort to hear a last message from the medium he had loved so much.

Then he turned back toward us, and that face, crawling with unknown flora, held an expression of such torment that it must have gratified even the most jaded of the Holy Soldiers. Yet his words, when they rang across the distance and over the roar of the bonfire, were absurd: “Not the stake! No, no, not the stake!”

It was over quickly enough, although the victim’s sense of time may have differed from mine. The black stake bore a black gnarl, and it was all so much indistinguishable charcoal. The sudden reports that made me cry out were only the eruptions of boiling sap, or marrow.

His last words had puzzled me. He was no imbecile, he had been alert to the end, he had known what they meant to do, so why had he protested against the stake? Trying not just to examine my memory but to relive the moment just past, to catch the words still ringing in my ears, I convinced myself that I had misunderstood him.

A prudent man would have made his exit, but I was so distraught that I seized the chief fanatic and demanded, “What was it he said? Did you hear the man’s last words?”

“’Deafen your ears to the words of wisdom, and to fine phrases be as stone,’” the captain quoted quite clearly from
The Book of Cludd,
and the import of his hard stare was even clearer.

There was much I would have asked him, but I had outworn my welcome. They kept my horse, my weapons and my clothing to further their good works, and I was forced to pick my cold and painful way through the sighing and creaking forest far longer after dark than I would have liked. Countryman though I am, I had never noticed that the riffle of leaves and clitter of loose bark can sound exactly like human conversations, whispered with earnest intensity. I paused often to listen, but I could identify no single, coherent word, with the doubtful but disturbing exception of my Tribal name:
Sleith.

In the days that followed I noticed, too, that certain leaves, when they flashed their pale sides to the bright sun, could suggest hair the color of rain; and that the slim grace of some trees, the firm molding of others, the quality that I can only describe as the joyful nature of still others, stirred memories of a girl who had once romped with me and the hounds when she should have been counting her jewels. If Ringard had been mad, his madness had been metaphorically apt.

And he had surely been mad. The Cluddites had felled hundreds of trees and burned hundreds of victims. Coincidence can be stretched only so far. Yet I had convinced myself that his last words, after he had listened to a cry from the tree they had randomly chosen for him, had not been, “Not the stake!,” but, “Not
this
stake!”

“Several faces I recognized; though I should have known them better had they been shriveled or eaten away by death and decomposition.”
—H.P.Lovecraft: “The Tomb.”

You’re moving good,
But you just fell down;
You’re moving good,
But you’re thrashing round;
You’re moving good,
But you’re spewing gore;
You’re moving good,
But not no more.
—“Song of the Graveyard
Watchmen”

As a child I was told not to gather souvenirs from the cemetery, but it was hard to determine where our overgrown garden blended with the overgrown fringe of Dreamers’ Hill. I had found skulls that clearly lay on our property. If Mother permitted me to collect them, although she would shudder and urge me to find a healthier pastime, why shouldn’t I pick up skulls that lay in plain sight a few steps farther on? If it was right to uncover relics with the toe of my boot when I glimpsed them protruding from the earth, why was it wrong to seek them out actively with shovel and crowbar? The inability to make such fine distinctions has forever been my undoing.

I once believed that my graveyard rambles were the first steps to a career in science. Our home lay under the massive cliff of the Anatomical Institute on River Avenue, where scholars were not only encouraged to give the closest scrutiny to such beguilements as skeletons and naked bodies, but were also held in the highest respect for doing it by everyone but Mother, who called them lechers and necrophiliacs.

The students of art and medicine were a more than usually high-spirited bunch, it’s true, and it’s true that they sometimes trespassed through our property with suspicious bundles or vomited on our front steps, but Mother, as she did against so many things, had a special grievance against the Institute. The building that blocked our sunlight until midday and disgorged rowdy trespassers at all hours was formerly the palace of the Glyphts, and she was a Glypht.

Unless you come from Crotalorn you have probably never heard of that tribe, but whenever I mentioned my name to a stranger in my native city, it provoked a look of thwarted recognition, usually succeeded by one of embarrassment. Nobody said, “Oh, you’re the fellow whose family was massacred by an unknown intruder when you were a baby, aren’t you? As I recall, only you and your mother were spared, unless she was the one who did it. I myself am inclined to think your father was guilty, for who but a moron would believe that his body was carried off by the killer?” Gossip, even more than the crime itself, may have caused Mother’s mild unhingement.

I am called Glyphtard Fand, my late or absent father having been associated with a much-decayed branch of that truly Great House, but Mother was correct when introducing me, to my embarrassment, as Lord Glyphtard. The title derived from her great-grandfather, who was governor of Orocrondel, a post that in those days meant being a broker for pirates. It was he who built the palace, but his son gave it away, and we lived in what was formerly the gardener’s lodge. Although a queer statue of her grandfather dominated the lobby of the Institute, the students surely remembered his philanthropy far less often in their prayers than Mother did in her daily maledictions. To hear her talk, you’d think he had left his heirs naked in a thatched hut, but the gardener of the original estate had been an important man, marshaling an army of slaves and artisans, and he had lived in fine style in a mansion with twenty spacious rooms. Real lords from the Houses of Crondren or Vogg, dwelth teammates whom I have brought home from time to time, have seemed impressed by the magnificence of our
lodge.

It was a faded magnificence. The roof leaked all the way down through four floors to the cellar. Opening any one of the thousands of volumes from our library, you would find inside the covers a wet wadding like cheese curds. The smell of rotting carpets and soggy wood filled the house, for we couldn’t afford to repair the chimneys and burn off the damp. The half-dozen or so servants who remained were really pensioners: if one of them spent a full day doddering through a dimly remembered pantomime of household chores, Mother would have to spend the next week nursing her.

I learned at an early age that we had little money, but money was a subject discussed only by the sort of louts who came around to bang on our door and demand it. I thought my fortune lay in science, not realizing then that it was just a pastime for unworldly cranks. If knowledge was power, as the cranks maintained, and if power was money, which was self-evident, then knowledge should bring money. The gentlemanly education I enjoyed, parsing classics and stressing penults with a series of cheap tutors, hadn’t equipped me to untangle that syllogism.

So I collected skulls, delighting especially in those that were malformed in odd ways or had been pierced by weapons, measuring them and labeling them and entering jejune speculations on them in notebooks. Rarest of all were perfect specimens, since almost all that I found had been gnawed by animals, as my tutors said, or by ghouls, as Mother and the servants insisted.

“I won’t have that thing in my house,” Mother said when she saw one that had been furrowed especially deeply by fangs. “What if the ghoul that gnawed it developed a taste for it? What if he comes back looking for it? ‘Where’s my skull?’” she creaked in a singularly hideous whisper, “’Where’s the boy that stole my nice, tasty
skulllll?’”

Mother could be fun when she wasn’t lamenting all her grievances, but she was quite put out when I laughed at her performance. She didn’t realize that she had succeeded in scaring me, but that I enjoyed being scared. I didn’t laugh from disrespect, but from delight in my fear and from appreciation of her talent. Unfortunately I didn’t have the words to explain that when I was twelve, and my reaction enraged her. My entire collection was shoveled into the trash; whence I retrieved it and transferred it secretly to the loft of a disused stable. She would never have entered such a dark, cobweb-draped refuge, and it was far beyond the range of our most robust servant’s totter.