Her shriek stretched in the unending Abyss, so that it seemed an eon yawned between her chilled, hoarse breaths. By reflex, her fingers twisted in the Baugn's black hair, as if she took root in its broad back, just another sinuous growth stemming from the gangly world-beast.
Though she unkinked her fingers, she couldn't so easily unknot her fear, and when she leaned stiffly to clasp its neck, her vaporous blue breath jetted into the vermilion streaked darkness.
Though the beast sought warm currents through the cool airs of the Abyss, terror iced her face, numbed her wrists, cracked her procession of past selves, and shattered their continuum of memories, so that in that moment, she lived not in series, but in the simple now of a seed. Though the other worlds' dim silhouettes were no nearer, she could feel their unbelievable progress. Her fear was uplifted by speed, an infant joy so enthralled by the Abyss folding over the world-beast that the reality of her situation didn't strike her for what was surely hours, and maybe a day.
That grim truth was this--a directionless newborn rode a purposeless beast who knows where. She not only had no idea how to get to the Human World, she knew nothing about this creature's instincts, behaviors, or life cycle. While it might fly to Hravak, it might prefer Alfyria, visit its remote nest, or strand her on the first oasis, then seek out unknown passions. The only clue to her destination was the diminishing disc of pale green Ielnarona behind them, and the burning swath of Abyss-light flickering on the faint but hulking shadows of the other Worlds.
"Where are you taking me?" she murmured. "As my first and only friend, you should take it easy on me. I've had an interesting day." Though the Baugn had no comment, it arched its neck backward to stare at her topsy-turvy, its fringed mouth purring above the eight eyes trained on the Tree-Woman. She patted its neck. While she still felt off-script, she began to feel more her self, though having never gotten to know that person very well, this sense of familiarity had its own discomforts, not unlike deja vu.
"I suppose I must trust you. I barely trust myself." When the neck stretched closer and their foreheads bumped, she felt much better, if no wiser. Against her will, she relaxed her hold and slumped in the soft fur between its wings. While burgeoning Tree-Women do not dream their own dreams in their seed hulls, Tree-Mothers always dream, and so Leitara was no stranger to dreaming, having joined in with the communities of wild wishes the dryad's fancy forged from memories and the varying personalities it had lived over the centuries, vicariously, through its Tree-Women. If Leitara was a stranger to dreaming, Tree-Mothers were estranged from life, for while Leitara's eyes were now open, her Tree-Mother had died without ever seeing the lives of Tree-Women through eyes of its own. Which is not to say that the Tree-Mother does not have a powerful life of its own, for its life of the mind is even occasionally enriched by sentient participants as its infants wander into the imagined bowers of its dreams.
There on the Baugn's back, drifting through the Abyss, Leitara dreamed for the first time, not as a helpless spectator of or actress in her ancient forerunners' unrequited lives, but of her own desires.
For a moment, she thought she was still in her hull, for there was only an orangish-red hue along a featureless horizon, and in place of Worlds, there were Faces, cosmic masks glowing with cruel personalities--there were glimmering past Leitaras, the insolent and murderous Inglefras, the smugly supercilious barbarian Khyte, with his head cowled in white owl feathers, and there was a sneering woman whose pupils were black skulls and whose teeth were white skulls. While this apparition was nameless to her, her heart lanced out, as if in its fear it threatened to sprout, take life in the dream, and flee from whatever future this dream portended.
When she awoke with a start, her convulsing hands clenched its tufted fur. Now nearer to the Abyss-light, its bright, warm rays were spotted by scudding oases—the grassy, free-floating islands cluttering the Abyss—then eclipsed by the vast, rocky underbelly of an enormous Abyssal planetoid so that they were suddenly flying blind through a darkest night toward its darkling blue.
As the Baugn veered around the tenebrous gray, the giant oasis spindled along its axis at such a rapid clip that the same craters looked up when they swerved around it to face a bright archipelago of oases, each planetoid as green as the Dryad World. As they skimmed the verdant surface, something dark roiled the grasses, and the oasis enlarged at such an accelerated rate that it seemed to swell upward.
They hurtled in the nap of the green slopes, undulating over hills and down winding ridges. When a fine spray drenched her legs, forearms, and chin, but only misted her hair, Leitara wiped her face, then looked down where the rain had bubbling up from an agitated pond.
While the oasis had weak gravity, the rippling caused by the pond's constant, tepid boiling repelled the droplets to cascade over a region marked by a prolific and abundant vegetation that then encroached on a shore creeping with algae, water flowers, and reeds that swayed tree tall, tapered to needle-thin points, and scratched wildly at the air.
While Tree-Mothers have no mother's milk, and send sprouted Tree-Women into the world with no other nurture than the dead whispers of past selves, the gurgling waters stirred a profound thirst in Leitara, who at half a day old had not had her first drink. In desperation, she clung tighter to the black mane, as if fighting her vegetable surge toward nourishment; even a Tree-Mother might have thrown herself at that much water, although its rush might have taken a hundred years.
Why wasn't the Baugn stopping? Though she tapped it frantically, then pounded its flanks, it flew on, whistling its strange, susurrating shriek, like a hissing flute that trembled its whole body and shivered in Leitara's legs. If not hunger or thirst, what purpose quickened its shadow over the oasis?
They hurtled toward a rustling patch of tall, gangly grasses, where the Baugn alighted like a cat, and walked on its toes, parting the grass. Though the brush was so overgrown that, even astride the Baugn, Leitara could not see more than five feet, the grasses murmured as they meshed in their passage through the overgrowth, shadows flickered through the bent blades, the ground shook, and when the Baugn whistled, the alien susurration echoed.
When they broke through to the violent meadow, Leitara pushed hard with both hands against the Baugn's back and dropped to the ground in a staggering, backward run that crashed back through the fronds.
Having never traveled to other worlds, and having never studied the Baugn, she only knew by hearsay the most general things, but it was a commonplace that they feared landing on the surface of a world. While the steep curvature of oasis horizons relieved these anxieties, even on a mountaintop a world went on forever and terrified the Baugn. They feared being closed in by surfaces, the scholars said.
How would scholars account for this behavior?
It was impossible to determine where one Baugn began and another ended in this claustrophobic mass of rutting world-beasts, each striving to plant itself in another, as if they were one gigantic, unending Baugn, all neck and thigh and wing and whispering shriek. The gentle beasts had become berserk in their penetrating desires, their muscular legs grinding those underneath the mating mass, and their eye-ringed mouths drawing blood in clamping necks and the world-beasts' starfish-shaped udders.
Having ridden, herded, and studied kiuvathi and the other acephalous animals of The Dryad World in her past lives, Leitara was not unaccustomed to such brainless behaviors in beasts. However, the furious coupling of the animals on her world was a mechanical propagation that satisfied only their biological imperative to replace their species. If a kiuvathi tore at another in reproduction, it was an agricultural accident. The orgiastic joining of the Baugn was of an entirely different order, displaying not only a passion for pain and pleasure, but a desire to see their mates so stimulated. While not proof of intelligence, it was proof of passion.
Would this rage continue after the satiety? Would they be hungry? While Leitara did not want to be stranded, if she waited on their passion to be spent, she would be more likely to be consumed by the love-drunk world-beasts than to get a ride to Hravak. If she fled, however, how long would she wait for a lucid Baugn?
While there was water enough for centuries, she was no shrub or fig tree that could thrive without civilization. Cultivating the resort city Wywynanoir, and admiring tourists from other worlds,was her Tree-Mother's favorite hobby. In both successive and concurrent incarnations, Leitara had served humans, goblins, elves, and giants; not only by waiting on their tables and feeding their curiosity, but she had read sagas to them and acted out the dramas and philosophical dialogues of the Five Worlds. Leitara liked to read and liked conversation even more. While she might not die of thirst on this oasis, she would wither of inattention and inactivity.
She would time it perfectly. Even if the mating dwindled the instant their instincts subsided, the solitary Baugn would not leave as one, but according to their differing hunger and thirst. But they would all visit one place before continuing their sojourns.
The browning, brittle vegetation of the oasis proved both more flexible and durable than Leitara had imagined, for as she turned from the shuddering animals to dash through the tall, quivering grasses, they snapped back to sting her as she brushed past. At the rumbling and the hoarse fluting of more Baugn, Leitara slowed to a jog and drew Khyte's dagger.
The blade polarized Leitara's many selves, for while she had as of yet no personal experience with any weapon, each past Tree-Woman had a strong opinion: to some, the keen edge, subtle grip, and perfect balance were comforts that told of fallen enemies, while to others, the steel was obscene, a naked passion to arouse prudent indignation, but most died feeling that a dagger was an artifact as if from another world, and that Leitara should have no part in such a brutal instrument. With an internal effort, she silenced all but the bravado of the Leitara warriors, for she needed a good steady hand to wield the blade, and to these minds, it was less that she was armed than that her hand had grown a foot of steel. A growth of second nature, the blade nestled in her hand so organically that it seemed natural to allow its expression, to stab, to lunge, to let flesh envelop it. She instantly hated it. If the violent thoughts were hers, they were not only in answer to her day of terror, but a reflection traced as the blade followed the outline of her rage, as if she was a mindless silhouette found for its bloody outlet.
The stinging grasses not only thinned, they tapered, becoming flexible and more yielding, so that their whistling smacks were now rustling, crackling, and dissolving into puffs of black filament. As the whip-cracks of the weeds died down, Leitara heard the strange gurgling noise, aspirated by hissing and effervescing which presaged the vast, agitated lake where a dozen Baugn cupped their mouths and noses to the churning waters, and four figures waved to the Tree-Woman from shore. Though she approached with dagger in hand, none drew the swords dangling from their belts.
As they walked towards her, the Baugn drank their fill, then flew over the tall grasses toward the mating ground.
"Stop them!" she called.
"Stop who? There's only us," said a dark skinned human with red hair and beard streaked with grayish white. "Where are your seed-sisters? For what purpose did your Tree-Mother send but one Tree-Woman?" While he spoke Ielnaronan without an accent, he did not speak her tongue like a dryad, so she could not say he was fluent. While he did not sound like a dryad, he had a familiar look, not only having a fullness in his chin and cheekbones reminscent of Khyte, but that warrior's dark complexion as well. "And who are you to give us orders? We are the ones with a claim to this oasis."
As the others approached, they flanked their leader, who was the most imposing of the four despite being the shortest by a hand's width. While the others were of noble make, with high, aristocratic brows, probing eyes, thickly muscled chests and thews, and a haughty bearing, his superiority was evidenced by an austere demeanor that encouraged worship in the yoinger men, who now stood behind him as immobile as if they were struck whole from cast iron fallen from a mold in an attitude of waiting
"Forgive me," said Leitara. "I did not come by choice. Not only do I not know where I am, but until you mentioned your claim, I thought of it not as a proper place, but as a no-place hidden in the Abyss."
"You are a prophet," said the older man. "We call it Xulcia, which in Inamu means 'the night land.' While the Inamu will not welcome you, I am their king no longer, and we would enjoy your company, Tree-Woman. I am Lord Kuruk, and these are Lords Hauca, Klyr, and Drunga."
Though Leitara knew many curtsies, this body had not practiced, and she managed only a stiff bow. "You are gracious, your highness."
"Gracious? When I name you unwanted and unwished-for? While it is only natural for an outcast to empathize with a stray, I am no better than curious. Keep your gracious, and any other flatteries, Tree-Woman."
"Yes, your highness."
"Nor call me highness. And where are your manners?"
"My manners?"
"What are you called, Tree-Woman?"
While Tree-Women are warm-blooded plants, and Leitara had the equipment to blush, the red tint in her green cheeks was not shame, but anger, to be demeaned by a vagrant meat man king. "If you must, call me Leitara."
"If I must?" The old man's nose and brow wrinkled, then he sighed. "If I struck a nerve, I apologize. In truth, we are as rootless as you. Having left Alfyria in the throes of war with the Dryad World, having no welcome among our own people, and having neither the taste for eating monsters nor goblin food, we had thought to try our luck in a remote tribe of Hravak."
"Inglefras wages war on all sides, Lord Kuruk. Like a tree, she spreads her roots greedily and hurls her armies wherever they can take root. Do not think you are safe on Hravak. Even the Dryad World itself withers from her insidious thirst for power, as she assassinates her rivals with torches."
"Have not dryads always feuded?"
"Until Inglefras, Tree-Mothers only sent Tree-Women into battle, and never turned their conflicts directly on each other."
"Even when I was king, I might not have understood this war that entangles five worlds."
"While I was never in a position of power, my many lives are piecing it together. When Inglefras fell in love with a human, our Queen denounced her, and Inglefras consolidated her supporters, but when she was besieged in Wywynanoir, she reached through the ancient Doorways to the giants of Uenarak and a would-be usurper on the Elven World. Having conquered Julaba, the seat of the High Tzhurarkh, her allies have converged on Ielnarona, conquered its other hospitality city, and assassinated Inglefras's political rivals."
"You make it sound so simple," laughed Lord Kuruk.
"Be glad you were ousted when you were," said Lord Klyr, the tallest and leanest of the Inamu lords. Lord Klyr's hair and beard were sandy-brown, and while there was levity in his tone, his smile was thin. "Or you would have to make it sound simple to the elders when this war reaches Hravak."
Lord Kuruk's eyes narrowed, as if looking at Leitara for the first time. "Where are you heading, Tree-Woman?"
"I was making for the Human World when the Baugn was drawn here for this prior engagement."
"You mean the truko-zalig," said Lord Hauca.
While Leitara had waited on Inamu in Wywynanoir and remembered the Inamu words for beer, wine, ale, and meat, and, following an obscure Tree-Mother directive, had coupled with, then led on for months, an Inamu archer, she only had an imperfect understanding of Inamu. As it was not a written language, she had only auditory memories of it, and auditory memories did not translate from incarnation to incarnation with the hallucinatory vividness of visual memories. If she ever knew what this compound word represented, she did not now. While she could not bring herself to say so, her confusion must have been written on her face.
"It means the 'carnal current,'" said Lord Huaca. "The vitality of life. Not the moments the living are in repose or meditation, but the tale told by their passions. The decadent Alfyrians, or the aristocrats of Antreitu castles, live lives of ease and indolent reflection, but cannot hear the roar of truko-zalig, while beasts hear nothing but its drum."
"Baugn have no moments of reflection?"
"The grace you assume to be noble is only the calm appetite of a driven beast."
"You think they are lofty when they are only driven. What you think is noble grace is only the calm appetite of a driven beast. Come watch us hunt."
"What?" Silence creeped as Leitara realized she had shouted that exclamation.
"You should not have mentioned it, Huaca," said Lord Kuruk.
"You already invited her."
"Why hunt the Baugn? They neither eat your food, drink your water, nor dwell on your land."
"As I have told you, we claim Xulcia."
"The Baugn bring you here, and you recompense them by putting them on the menu?"
"We eat not these great beasts," said Lord Hauca, "but clad ourselves in their noble skins."
Lord Kuruk added, "while we were rootless barbarians without the blessing of the Baugn, we are nothing without our traditions."
"The hunt honors them greatly," said Lord Klyr.
"Did a Baugn tell you that?"
"Let us leave this crank," said Lord Huaca.
Lord Kuruk sighed. "No. We will escort her to Hravak."
"While I am grateful," said Leitara, "if I accept, it is for the sake of the world-beasts."
"They are so different from you. Why do you care? While I sometimes admire their greatness, it's not when they're churning like worms in a bucket for the sake of rutting."
"If the Baugn are debased, so are humans," said Leitara. "I was once the guest of honor at a human orgy not much different from this."
"Dryads live too long," said Lord Kuruk. "You live so long that you see all peoples at their lowest point, and forget their best moments."
"This is probably true, although I was only born yesterday, and what you call my longevity is only the perpetuity of memory. Still, it is difficult to think of your sins, and from my small allotment of personal experience, not think that it defines you. Tree-Women only live five years, seven at the most, and never become wise."
"Do Inamu become wise?" laughed Lord Klyr. "Does any mortal?"
Lord Kuruk frowned. "It blasphemy to say we cannot think or choose, Klyr. Even the deceiver gods desire us to know when we choose wrong over right. Though they want us to live deluded, they crave recognition and authorship. Even the great corrupter, the spinning Spider-God, expects us to mirror her divine cunning, and so be entangled in her causes and effects."
"My knife itches in its sheath," said Lord Drunga. "If we howl at each other like cats, the world-beasts will try to mate with us."
"Do you accompany us?" Lord Kuruk said to Leitara. "We do not expect you to use a knife."
"I will not watch," said Leitara. "I will stay here. The Baugn will come soon enough. I wish I could warn them, as to my outsider's view, you seem the meat, and they seem the aesthetes."
"As the heart is red meat," said Lord Drunga, "and the Inamu are the heart of the Five Worlds, I will take your insult as a compliment."
"If I have offended you," said Lord Kuruk, "I apologize." He turned to Lord Drunga. "I have seen too many hunts. Go without me, and I will wait with the Tree-Woman."
"My Lord," said Leitara. "I do not ask..."
"Do not ask me for anything," said Lord Kuruk, "as you are not my subject, and I am no king. This is my will. I do it not for you, but my own honor."
Lord Drunga had a pained look. "Are you certain, my Lord?"
"You goad me like a mule because you think I am too old."
"No, my Lord." After Drunga's grimace twisted his face to the limits of its elasticity, he looked away from Lord Kuruk.
"You are no hypocrite, Drunga. Say it. I have grown too old. Do not patronize me, like my spoiled son, who only holds a sword in show."
"Klyr, Hauca," said Drunga. "Our hunt will be short this year."
"Not on my account," Kuruk called after the hastening lords. "Keep to custom."
After the others walked into the overgrowth, the tall grasses folded back, and they were as if they had never been, leaving Leitara and Kuruk by the bubbling pool. When the last Baugn moseyed away, there were still ripples along the edge from their drinking mouths, and these eddies dissolved into rising globules of water. Once the ascending droplets wafted to just overhead, they drifted back to the surface, bursting into expanding wavelets.
"What is the custom of this hunt? Why are you here?" said Leitara.
"If I came for the hunt, you tainted that with your newly sprouted conscience. Right now, I have no purpose but to escort you to the Human World."
"You avoid my question. Why would you want to be my escort?"
"You assume much, Tree-Woman. I do not want. I simply will what is right."
"Remember, I am not your subject."
"That is correct. I pretend to nothing, and you follow one pretender or another. Do you flee Inglefras, Tree-Woman?
"You know I do."
"Is it so complicated to serve the right side on your world?"
"I mean no offense, Lord Kuruk, but your tribe is small, while the tribe of dryads covers our entire world."
"Nonsense. How do you send messages?"
"We send through the Evermind." At Kuruk's bemused look, Leitara continued. "It is like the root network between a grove of trees, except the Evermind is world-ranging. While Tree-Women are not connected to the Evermind, the Tree-Mothers are in constant communion, though they choose what to communicate, and withhold secrets from the flow. While Tree-Women write and read, the life of the mind is different for Tree-Mothers, who remember what we read and conversed, but also share in common this fount of shared remembrance. That which is not shared is not true, but..." During this lecture, the Baugn trickled back to the pond, then bent their mouths to its rippling surface.
"You also answer my question in a roundabout way."
"What do you mean?"
"I asked why you and Inglefras are on opposite sides. Or perhaps I only inferred it, in which case I again present the question."
"But I just told you how we send messages."
"Although your flower-like thinking conceals my question in your wordy display, I am no less curious as to how you fell out of favor with Inglefras."
When a sudden gust agitated Xulcia's gentle winds, the tall grasses bent before the blowing, then fell under the Baugn blasting through the overgrowth, their wings thrashing, their necks flailing, and the effervescing pool surging in foaming waves sent by their stampeding steps along the beach.
In two steps, Leitara sprang to a flat boulder, then to a Baugn's back, where she clung like persistent vines with one crooked arm while seizing Lord Kuruk's forearm with all her vegetal strength to heave him across its back. When the Inamu elder draped his arms and legs over the beast's jerking back, Leitara covered him with her body until the contortions of its terror smoothed. While the ebon fur still quivered, and the Baugn was not truly placid, it stood belly-deep in the hissing water, and its lowing soothed Leitara in a way that she had not felt since her Tree-Mother's excitement at sowing a new crop of walking, wakeful selves tingled in her shell. Leitara sympathized with the Baugn's simple, bestial hope in continuing its arrow-shot life of flying, feeding, and mating, for her future was a bleak examination of yesterday, when despair embedded in the moment of her escape.
From that shuddering vantage point, that living precipice to which they clung, Leitara glimpsed the teeming Baugn massing towards them, trampling the tall grasses and covering the thin sky of the oasis with their impassioned, scudding flight, as if sexual release now sought the continuation of life by physical escape.
As their Baugn drifted into the seething pond, its floating wings undulated on the bubbling surface. When the world-beast bobbed left, then right, Leitara knew its long, columnar legs no longer touched, and the waters must be very deep.
"Take a breath," Lord Kuruk commanded, but Leitara had already seen what was coming. Why had the Baugn stopped? Was it surrendering to life's primal thrust toward death? She wished she could see its hall of memories as clearly as the dead Tree-Mother who whispered in Leitara even now, its breath stirring a thirst for life. The whisper roared in the hall of memories:
Leave the dead and escape the slaughter;
find my grove, my favored daughter.
Mind the root and burn the reed,
crush the crown and bear the seed.
Despite this needful hallucination, when the pool churned, then swelled under the forefront of the flailing multitude, Leitara could only cling to the Baugn's back as they were drenched in the vigorous squall, but when Lord Kuruk lost his grip and nearly slipped from under her, she clutched his heel and dragged him back.
Though their quiescent Baugn moved not at all to save itself, the influx of impassioned Baugn flooded them to the opposite shore, where they arrived more sodden than seaweed and entangled on the bedraggled world-beast.
"Lord Kuruk!" Lords Hauca and Drunga sprinted around the lake's edge. Hauca's forearms were covered with blood, and he held a gory swath of ebon fur. The small trophy seemed hardly worth the effort.
"Where is Klyr?"
"He is here," said Hauca gravely. "As is his last trophy."
Drunga glared at Leitara. "The Tree-Witch cursed our hunt."
"Without the dryad, I would have drowned." Lord Kuruk could not meet their eyes.
"Kuruk of the Wall of Heads was saved by a woman?" Hauca's eyes were agape and his jaw dropped low before both snapped shut in his normal mask of reserve. "And Klyr grasps the last honorable Abyss. Drunga may blame the Tree-Woman without reason, but he does not lie about the curse, my lord."
"Be that as it may, she will be honored."
"I care little for honor," said Leitara, "but for the sake of life, we should attend to our journey, as the Baugn begin to abandon this oasis." The turbulent pond settled by degrees as each agitated world-beast took to the violet skies. "For myself, I choose this wild-eyed world-beast, who feared the hunt but was curious of death. He reminds me of myself." She straddled the Baugn and waited. While she would have liked to leave without turning her head, and let the meat men chase her or follow their own path as they willed, the bedraggled Baugn also seemed to be waiting for something.
"Some Baugn won't fly wet, Tree-Witch," grunted Lord Drunga. "Your symbol is half-drowned." When his grunt became a snicker, then a belly-laugh, Hauca bellowed, then bent double, nearly losing his grip on his gory satchel. Not only did Lord Kuruk not laugh, he had a dour, inward look, and seemed shrunken, as if his body caved inward to accomodate his depressed mind. In mounting the Baugn, his stiffness reminded Leitara of Tree-Women about to go to seed.
Leitara looked into the Baugn's oddly out-of-focus eyes. Was it simply old? One day away from death, as she was one day away from her beginning? The other Baugn flitted into the violet oasis sky, then darted so quickly that they seemed to dissolve into the vermilion Abyss. Drunga and Hauca mounted a split second before their chosen Baugn vaulted into the Abyss.
"Ride with me, Tree-Woman. Not that this discharges my debt to you." While Kuruk would not look at her, and rested his eyes over her shoulder, the Baugn's ring of eight eyes seemed to scrutinize Leitara.
"I wouldn't dream of letting you off the hook so easy," smiled Leitara. "Though you can't deny my gratitude." After she climbed behind Lord Kuruk, the Baugn's neck looped forward, its wings unfurled, and it bounded into the Abyss.