The Grinding of Gears

It faded away, then. It comforted me, though, to hear my name spoken once more. It has been so long since anyone spoke my name.

I went to wake the goats. The doves slept in their nests, and were probably safe enough, but the goats would be found. Though it was late, they all got up and followed me without complaint.

I gave them all water from the well, and drank myself. The water makes our eyes and tongues glow, but it also makes night as clear as day and gives us strength for the rocky path up to the trees. The goats all follow me up that path, uttering soft bleats from their blackened mouths.

My mouth is black too. The shoots do that. Gilly told me once that we look frightening to other people, with our blackened mouths and glowing eyes and tongues. It was hard for me to understand. I've never seen anyone who didn't look like that.

We were halfway up the path when I heard noises down below. When I looked down, the farmhouse was burning. It would have broken my heart, if I did not already know the time for Scattering had come. Everything I had ever known was gone... but I could still save the ghost trees. And the goats, in a way.

We reached the trees. There are only four, but they are taller than the tallest pines, their long feathery branches reaching up and up as if they would stroke the clouds. They're bigger around than the farmhouse, now, because every year the new shoots emerge from the outside, snaking up the great blackened trunks like vines before becoming part of the tree. That's one of the reasons we eat the shoots - they have to be thinned, or the tree's new growth might choke its heart.

This year's shoots are already darkening, but they still stand out against the black of the trunk like veins. They won't get a chance to blacken in winter, and I mourn them in my heart as I lead the goats towards the great trunks.

I know the ritual. A tiny nick, enough to draw a few drops of blood, on each goat. A tiny nick, enough to draw a few drops of sap, on each shoot. The goats are bound to the trees by magic, and each goes to a spot to lick the sap, then lies down by the trunk.

By the time I have finished with the last goats, and the last tree, the goats at the first are no longer breathing, and the roots of the trees are already creeping up to draw them down. But it didn't hurt them, I know that. It would have hurt them if they'd burned in their shed, or been slaughtered by whoever is coming. The ghost trees feed on death, but they are not cruel. The goats will live again, on some other mountain.

I will live again. I believe this. I know this. I have talked to the trees since I ate my first shoots at the age of three, and heard their keening voices in my mind. Theirs is the power of life and death, but a farmer doesn't fear death. Death and life and death again, that is the nature of farming. Everything dies. But then seeds grow, and eggs hatch, and babies are born, and spring comes.

When Gilly got sick, I brought him up here so that he could die under the trees, and they sang him to his rest and promised him that he would live again, and drew him down with their roots so his bones would become a part of them.

The trees are agitated now, I can hear their keening. They are afraid, but excited too, for they know it is time for Scattering. They are only given living blood when it is time to die, and live again.

When all the goats are dead, I go to the place between the trees where four channels fan out from a central bowl, one running to each trunk. This is the way I give them water from the well, pouring the buckets hauled up on my shoulders or the filled skins tied to the backs of the goats into the bowl and allowing the water to run down to each of them. Tonight they will drink something else.

The trees do not allow me to feel pain, when the blood begins to flow into the bowl. They protect me from it. My blood will give them the strength they need. I hope it’s enough. As far as I know, no Scattering has ever been performed by only one person. A whole family of farmers should be here, giving their lives to the trees. I don’t know if one is enough.

The slow trickles of red have almost reached the roots when the first men come scrambling up the path. They see me, standing among the trees, but I don't think they can see what I'm doing. My blood glows like the well water, but it's a faint glow, like starlight, and the moonlight drowns it out.

"What are you doing, creature?" One of them steps forward. He is holding a great axe, but his voice sounds uncertain. It is strange to me that a big man, armed and armoured, could be afraid of a little creature like me. His face is strange and featureless in the moonlight, with no shadow around his mouth, no light in his eyes. His face is all one colour, flat and plain like a baby's face. I could have laughed, seeing it.

But he asked me a question, and I need a little more time. "I am tending my trees," I tell him, words coming slowly to my tongue. I do not speak often, except to the well.

He looks up at the nearest tree, then shudders and looks away, "The trees are evil," he says, his fingers flexing on the handle of his axe. "These... these *things* are poison, full of wicked magic."

I blink, really confused. "Trees are not good, or evil. Trees are only trees," I tell him, frowning. "Many have fruits or leaves which are poisonous, or roots which strangle other roots, but that is not because they are evil, it is because that is their nature."

"Not these. these are not natural trees, they are the product of wicked magic." His voice shakes a little, when one of the newest and lowest branches moves a little, though there is no wind. "They will burn."

"Yes. I thought you would burn them." I sigh. It's sad. I hate to see something that has spent so long growing, something alive and beautiful, destroyed. But I look up into the branches, and faint, cream-pale lights are beginning to glow among the branches. "But you are wrong, you know. They are not made of wicked magic."

He sounds angry. "Of course they are! Look at them! They are not natural trees, and you. you with your ghost eyes and twisted body and mouth stained with blood, sorceress, you are their keeper."

I want to tell him that I am not a sorceress, only a farmer. I want to tell him that the trees are just trees, and that magic is just magic, and that evil and good are human ideas that mean nothing to either.

I want to tell him that the ghost trees are the conduit by which magic, wild magic, the magic of life and death and order and chaos, enters this world. That they have been farmed for countless centuries because they are *needed*, because their roots hold the world together.

I want to tell him that this is all a mistake.

But his axe drives into my chest, and I cannot tell him anything. I can only fall foreward, across the bowl, as my blood fills it and runs down the four channels into the trees.

The trees do not let me die. The roots rise out of the ground again, wrapping around me and holding me up. They will not let me go. Not until I see what they do to the men, the first and those who follow after, draining the blood from them with hungry roots to feed the Scattering. Not until I see the glowing fruit ripen on their branches and then break away, rising up into the sky like tiny glowing lamps, letting the air carry them away.

When the men are wise enough to stand back and shoot flaming arrows, and my trees begin to burn, the hot air only carries the fruit away faster.

This is Scattering. The last duty of the farmer. Ghost trees fruit only once, at the end of their lives, and their fruits blow away to take root somewhere far from the danger that destroyed their parents. This is why they are called ghost trees, for they need living blood, life's blood, to fruit, and they die of it.

At the last, I look down at the scene. The burning trees, the dead men, and my own body being drawn under the soil away from despoiling hands. Then I am floating away, with the other fruit of the ghost trees, on my way to a new life.

*

Lina had never entirely believed that Gilly really knew where he was going. She was willing to accept that there were ancient springs of untamed magic in the mountains. It didn’t sound any more implausible than the very fact of magic itself. She *had* doubted that Gilly, the half-wild boy a few years younger than herself, who claimed not to be human at all, but ‘a child of the trees’ and whose eyes glowed in the dark, could find one.

But he had. He’d led them there, straight as an arrow, through thick forest and rocky crags, until they found a high plateau not so far below the snowline. It was gone to the wild, now, but there were still signs for eyes that knew how to look. The remains of a low stone wall. A great stone still marked by fire. Plants growing that should not have been there, where a garden had once been. And in the center of the plateau, a well. It looked ancient. The stones piled up into a crude wall had never been shaped, and she saw no signs of mortar, though perhaps the moss and lichen hid it.

Gilly slid down off his pony, looking up at Lina with his bright, strange eyes. “There’s a spring over there,” he said, pointing. “You can get water for yourselves and the ponies there. Don’t go near the well, and whatever you do, *don’t* touch the water. It’s… dangerous.”

They made camp, while Gilly wandered around, grubbing up pieces of charcoal and small stones. Akal wanted to make him help, but Lina shook her head. Whatever he was doing, it was probably important.

At sunset, when the sky was full of colour that turned the snowy mountain peaks pink and orange and gold, Gilly went to the well. Lina followed, though keeping a little distance, and she saw him lower a bucket into the well and draw it up again on a rope. What was in it didn’t look like water - it wasn’t clear but as pale as milk. It glowed like the moon, and when Gilly drank from it the glow of his eyes brightened perceptibly.

Then he leaned forward, laying his hands on the stones of the well’s lip, and looked down into it. “Antorune…” he whispered, such sorrow in his voice as Lina had never heard. “Antorune…”

And then Lina’s very bones chilled, for a voice came up out of the well, and though it was a whisper she heard it clearly. "Antorune is bright. Who are you?"

"Antorune..." Gilly’s voice was almost calm, but when she moved a few steps to the side to look at his face, Lina saw an expression so terrible that she looked away, shocked. How could Gilly, distant and standoffish with everyone, be brought to such anguish by a voice from a well? "Antorune, they're coming,” he whispered. He was holding one of the small stones he’d picked up, she saw, his knuckles white with the force of his grip. “They're coming."

"Who's coming? Why?"

"Yours is the last farm. The last trees. Do you know how to scatter?" Lina took a few steps towards Gilly, but stopped when he made a brief slashing gesture with his empty hand, warning her off. His voice was still calm, but now tears were running down his face.

The hollow voice from the well held what might be a note of fear, but the answer was as steady as the question. “I know. Is it time?”

"It is time." Grief leached into Gilly’s voice now, and Lina’s own eyes stung with tears at the sound of it. "Be brave, Altorune. Be resolute. You must save the trees."

"I must save the trees.” For a moment there was silence, and then the voice spoke again, the whisper fainter. "Voice... my name is Tula. I am the last farmer. I... I wanted someone to know my name."

"I will remember your name, Tula." Gilly’s voice broke. "I will remember your name..."

No answer came from the well, and he dropped to his knees beside it, weeping, clutching the small stone to his chest. It was only after several minutes that he seemed able to speak again. “I left her,” he sobbed. “I left her.”

Lina watched him, and as mad as it sounded even now, she had no doubt. “Tula,” she said softly. “You… knew her.”

“She was my cousin. My family. And I died and left her all alone.” And while Lina was still blinking in shock, he snatched up the still half-filled bucket and scrambled to his feet and towards the edge of the plateau, to what looked like a craggy, impassable cliff face.

But it wasn’t. There was a path there, narrow and winding, a path more suited to goats than men, but Gilly scaled it as if he’d done it a thousand times… and perhaps he had, Lina thought, following him. She tripped and stumbled many times, but he didn’t. Back and forth across the cliff face the path went, and when they came out on the higher place, Lina caught her breath. She’d seen ghost trees - one that had been discovered and burned out when she’d been a child, and Gilly’s own tree, which he had only reluctantly left to help her on her quest. These had to be the remains of ghost trees… and yet they were huge, as big around as a cottage, the shafts of the branches bundled together making a trunk black and broken-looking. When she moved closer, the remains looked more like stone than wood.

Gilly went to a place in the middle of the four great, dead stumps, where the worn remains of a stone bowl lay in broken pieces. He poured out the whitish, magical water on the ground, and then raised his hands. “Show me,” he said commandingly, and then almost pleadingly he repeated it. “Show me!”

And it did show him.

Lina watched, captivated, as the very dust rose around him, outlining shadowy shapes in the darkening twilight. She saw the small, hunched figure leading a trail of goats up to the trees. She watched the goats lie down, and disappear into the ground, and then the figure - a woman, though there was no guessing her age, with a hunched and twisted spine, who stood over a bowl and let her own blood run into it.

Then more figures, shadows of armour and of axes, and she watched the woman - Tula, she deserved her name - stagger as an axe struck her chest, and the twining roots that wrapped around her and held her up.

And then there was nothing, only Gilly, whose face was still wet with tears but who looked strangely, unaccountably relieved. “She did it,” he breathed. “She escaped.”

Lina stared at him. “She *died*.”

“Oh yes. That’s part of the Scattering.” Gilly went over to one of the stony, broken stumps, laying his hand against it gently. “The trees fruit, and die, and the farmers die. But the fruit fly away, to let the seeds grow far from danger, and they take the souls of the farmers with them.” He turned to look at her. “I was human, once,” he said, and for the first time she truly believed that he wasn’t. Not because of his black-stained mouth and strange, glowing eyes, but because of what she’d just seen.

“I lived a mortal life, and died. And when I was dying, Tula brought me here, to the trees of Antorune, which is the name of this mountain and this farm, and the trees took my body and my soul, and the first became a part of them, and the second they kept until the time of need, so that when the seeds were sent forth, as many as possible might have a keeper with them, to be born from among the branches, to tend them, and teach those who followed why the ghost trees are important.”

Lina looked at the broken stumps, and the boy who was not entirely human, and knew in every fiber of her being that this was why she’d been chosen. This, here and now, this knowledge that had been preserved even after death by a poisonous tree, and brought back again. “Tell me, then,” she said quietly. “Tell me why they are important, and what they have to do with the terrible magic that rampages through our land.”

He shrugged. “They are what prevented the wild magic from ravaging all this world, until foolish men forgot why they were important and named them wicked.” He sighed, and then he moved to the edge of the small flat place, looking out over the great valley below them. “And that is why we scatter their fruit, and ourselves with them, so no matter what happens, someone will remember why.”

“How?” Lina frowned. “How can a tree… even one as strange as a ghost tree… change the nature of magic?”

He picked up the bucket. “The same way you change the nature of water,” he said dryly. “They drank it. This water… the wells are places where magic comes into the world. Once, it poured in wild and uncontained, and all the world was as this land has been in the last hundred years. Magical storms, and monsters, and lands breaking apart and seas pouring in. Magic, in its wild state, is as dangerous as lightning, or the sea, and even more so, for it follows no laws.”

Lina frowned. “Laws?” The word seemed incongruous.

He nodded. “All things have their laws. If you plant a seed from a tree, what will grow is the same kind of tree, not a flower, or grass. If you pour out water on a slope it will run down, not up. Water will only harden into ice when it is cold, not when it is hot. The laws of the world are not like the laws of men, and nothing may disobey them… except magic. And that disobedience is very dangerous, for it unmakes the world itself.”

“I think I know what you mean.” She had never thought of it in that way, but… yes, it was a good way to explain the mayhem of the last century. The very fabric of the world being warped, unmade…

“Yes. You’ve seen it.” He tapped the bucket again. “Magic that has passed through a living creature is different. It… it learns the laws. It learns the shape of the world. It is tamed. But there are few living things which can endure more than a taste of wild magic without dying of it. It is a poison to them, as it is to the world.”

“And that is why magicians are dying? And dying so… so horribly?” She shuddered, and tried not to remember what had happened to Cengolant, his terrible screams…

“Yes. There is not much tame magic left. And when they use the wild magic, it unmakes them.” Gilly sounded different, here and now. More confident, and somehow much older. She wondered how old he’d been, when he’d died. “The ghost trees are different. They drink the magic-infused water, and the magic passes through without harming them. They are called poisonous, but it is the magic in them that makes them so, just as mushrooms grown in unclean land are poisonous, but leave the land clean.”

Lina looked at the bucket. “But you drank the water. Why didn’t it kill you? Because you came from a ghost tree?”

“In part. In part because I have eaten the shoots.” He touched the blackened rim around his mouth. “That is the source of this stain, and the light in my eyes and my blood. Those who eat the young shoots of the ghost tree are changed by it, and we, too, can endure the touch of wild magic without harm. We would feed the shoots to our goats, and our pigeons, so that we too could pass tame magic into the world, and prevent harm.”

Lina laughed suddenly, almost hysterically. “I remember once… when we were in that rat-hole city, I saw you piss up against a wall and I was *sure* it glowed.”

He laughed, too. “It does,” he said, amused. “My dung, too. And that is magic, safe and tame, passing from my body and into the world.”

Lina shook her head, still laughing a little. “Like… like running water through sand and charcoal, to make it clean?”

“Just like.” He was still looking out, but when she went to stand beside him he looked up at her. “Lina, lightning is dangerous, but mage-light is not. A tidal wave is dangerous, but water turning a wheel is not. And that does not make the lightning evil, or the tidal wave malicious. It is only… too much. And thus it is with magic. It is not doing all this damage with intent.  It is only too powerful, too wild, for our fragile world to hold. Never forget that. There is no malice here, no foe that can be fought. Replanting the ghost trees, restoring the farms, that is what will save us.”

Lina nodded slowly. “It is like a flood, coming down a river,” she said softly. “When there is too much water upstream, and it rages down and washes all away.  But the river is not angry, it does not *want*… it just is. You cannot fight it. You can only build better levees and dams and bridges, for the next time.”

“Or plant many mushrooms, on poisoned ground, to draw the poison out.” Gilly nodded. “Which is not to say that fighting the monsters and the mad wizards is not important, any more than rebuilding what the flood has destroyed is not important. But it will not solve the problem.”

She nodded. “So. Where do we start?”

Gilly looked at her. “We?”

Lina shrugged, spreading her big hands and muscled arms. “You’ve been listening to me complain for the last two months about how foolish it was to send a farmer’s daughter, however big and strong, to fight magic. But it wasn’t, was it? This was never truly about fighting. The fighting is only to buy time to grow more trees.” She grinned down at him. “And if there is one thing I know, it is how to grow. I *am* a farmer, and this is the work for me.”

He grinned back at her, and it was the first time she’d ever seen more than a tiny sliver of a smile on his thin face. “We, then. I have some cuttings, live shoots from my own tree. Tomorrow, we will plant them. And then we will begin to search for the other reborn farmers.” His face softened. “I would like to see Tula again,” he said softly.

“She would have been reborn like you, from a ghost tree?”

“Oh, yes. Or will be, perhaps. It takes time.”