I never sleep either. It is a good time to continue writing, while Tara is resting. I won’t write about what we just did, though. It’s too fresh, and will feel like an invasion of our privacy.
What difference does it make? asks Mickey. You’re writing about everything else, and being brutally honest about it.
No, he’s right, says Dermot. As usual, Patrick has an unfailing instinct for tact. To humans, the past becomes faded in intensity over time. Memory is a distancing mechanism.
It’s such a strange concept to us. Each branch stores its own memory, as real and immediate as the day it was grown. To remember is to re-experience, as if pulled out of time and into eternity. It’s as though it is written, encoded, in the rings of the wood. Of course, it can’t be. Our wood is little different from the wood of an earthly tree. Memory must be part of the consciousness of I and I. He must possess a memory distinct from the forms we temporarily hold.
And yet.
She hears the roar in the distance, only faintly. Her hearing is not as good as ours. And then Ailann drops, twisted on the floor. She cries out to him – something that could do this to Ailann must be bad. Very, very bad.
“The Atlas Tree,” Ailann gasps. She looks out the grand picture window. The curtains to that window are never drawn. It’s because she can see straight down the beach to where Starbright Mountain meets the sea. It’s because she can see the Atlas Tree, which had consumed the ledge which birthed it, which is in the process of consuming the mountain which birthed it, the enormous, nineteen-branched Atlas Tree some four hundred meters above the churning waters.
The Atlas Tree is on fire.
She spins to see Ailann stagger to his feet, sees the flash of weird light in his ice-blue eyes, feels the electric rush through the Staff of the Matriarch. And then it is raining on Dolparessa, pouring, furious rain.
“It isn’t so bad,” says Ailann, lying. “I felt it coming, and was able to dampen the blast. Not nearly as bad as the time General Panic opened fire on Starbright Mountain, and the whole thing came tumbling down on top of me.”
“Highness,” says Lord Danak, “if you would just wait…”
“I need to see it. I need to see it before we make a public statement,” Tara says, lying. She also needs to see it because of the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, but she’ll never admit to that.
“A show of strength is wise at a time like this. An honor guard…”
“Would be seen as a show of weakness, Lord Danak,” Ailann cuts in. “A god does not worry about assassination attempts.”
Danak wants to say that god or no god, clearly the Archon should be worried. But a part of him agrees with Ailann – the public’s confidence was already sorely tried during the Suibhne fiasco – although Tara did an excellent job of passing it off as a deliberate ploy to flush out traitors. Danak is close enough to know the truth: Ailann is not as strong as everyone thinks.
But Danak is also close enough to know another truth: the Archon’s power is beyond comprehension, and his stubbornness is beyond reason, and Danak is terrified of him.
Tara and Ailann go in the hovercar alone to inspect the damages. The blast went straight down the center of the tree, narrowly missing Ailann’s branch, but splitting Whirljack’s trunk down the middle. “Oh God,” she says. “Oh God.” But the only god she believes in is here and couldn’t save himself.
It’s worse than that. From the palace, there is one branch that cannot be seen. It’s Owen’s branch, grown that way intentionally, when Ash needed to keep secrets from Tara. It’s not until she goes to the opposite side of the tree to check the extent of Whirljack’s damage that she sees it.
Most of Owen’s branch is gone.
She needs to know what this means, the impact of it. But Ailann can’t tell her. It’s going to take time to heal, take time to see in which direction things will grow.
And the branch does grow back, but it grows in a way that it can be seen from the palace. And then one day, Tara discovers a new man in her quarters.
Well, not quite a new one. His name is Lugh, but he has some of Owen’s memories. He’s also a mining engineer. But where Owen was roughhewn, Lugh is slick. Owen’s shaggy, unkempt brown hair is replaced with Lugh’s stylish pompadour, bleached blonde with intentional dark roots. Owen had paid no attention to dress, wearing rugged, practical clothes. Lugh dresses like like a parody of James Dean. The icy electric of his eyes is concealed behind a pair of cool sunglasses.
“I and I decided to take this branch in a different direction,” he explains. Tara thinks she knows why, and she is furious. Not at Lugh, and so she does her best to hide it. She hasn’t seen Owen since the incident at the Skarsium mine, and she’s sure that Ash blames Owen for what happened. She’s sure that Ash saw Owen as a failure – and therefore expendable.
Tara may have been being too hard on I and I. There was simply no way to recover the part of Owen’s memories and personality that had been destroyed – or so we thought.
There’s a lot more to Owen’s story, both before and after his branch was lost. But I can’t get to it now. I have to go back to bed for a little while.
In her sleep, Tara stirs. “Ash?” she murmurs.
“I’m right here, my love,” I say.
She sighs and coils up against me. It’s this way every night. I asked her about it once.
“Do I do that?” she said. She looked thoughtful. “I vaguely remember. I think because I spent so many years alone. A part of me needs to make sure that I haven’t been abandoned.”
“I’ll always be with you,” I say. “I always have been, since I took the grand jeté, except for the times that you travelled so far from Dolparessa I couldn’t reach you. And the times you left me.”
“Liar. Whenever I left you, you just grew another branch and sneaked back.”
That is sort of what Whirljack did when she left Evan. And definitely what Cuinn did when she left me. Maybe Chase falls into that category, too.
“You call for Ash.”
“Probably because I never know which one of you I’m going to wake up with.”
“I never understood just why you call us that. I mean, I understand that you’re addressing me in totality – the mothman, the Atlas Tree, all of the emanations. But why Ash?”
“Well, it’s short for Ashtara, obviously. But it also is the root word for “lover” in ancient Skarsian. As in Cu’enashti – “the leaping lovers.” “Lover,” is an appropriate pet name among humans. And ash is also a kind of a tree – an old Earth tree that was never brought to the Domha’vei. In fact, it was the same kind of tree that was in a myth – a giant ash called Yggdrasil, a tree that encompassed the whole universe. The heavens were in its branches, and the hells beneath its roots, and a race of men sprung from its trunk. In short, just like you.”
Nice bit of exposition, says Evan. Patrick is much better at storytelling than Ailann.
It was an easy one, I say. Not at all traumatic. But someone else could try writing, too.
No, let’s leave it, says Ailann. It’s confusing enough without another change in the narrative style.
Can we say autocracy? says Cillian. Let someone else have a go.
We could have everyone submit a writing sample, says Cuinn.
If Cuinn is making motivational posters, maybe I should draw manga, Driscoll muses.
Lorcan hands me a poem. It reads:
i worship the ground
on which You walk
the pebble pressed in mud
the crushed narcissus
the sorry twitching remains of ant
but most of all
i worship the blessed broken piece of glass
which will soon bathe in your blood.
There is a moment of silence. Patrick is writing, Ailann declares autocratically.
As should be plain, it’s not really a dedication to literary quality that motivates him. He just doesn’t want to leave the writing to the wrong person. Like Lorcan. Or Suibhne. But most particularly Cillian.
I honestly don’t mind Cillian, as obnoxious as he can become. I’m grateful to Cillian. He carries my guilt. Because of him, I don’t have to feel anything about killing that man.
Ailann is not the least bit grateful to Suibhne for carrying Ailann’s grief, Ailann’s failure. Ailann doesn’t want to be reminded of it. In a way, although he commands the most power, the power of life or death over an entire star system, Ailann is the weakest of us all.
There was, for example, the time that Tara decided she needed a royal portrait.
“I don’t like it,” said Ailann. “I’ve heard about artists and their models.”
“There’s a portrait of every ruler of Sideria in the Stella Maris Hall of the Grand Palace of Vuernaco,” says Tara. “Who am I to buck tradition?”
“I hate Vuernaco,” said Ailann, remembering Sloane’s devastating unhappiness. “If you hang your portrait there, your uncle will use it for darts.”
“He wouldn’t dare,” said Tara. “You’re being ridiculous.” Ailann did not realize that he was coming smack against the vanity of a woman of forty who looked not a day over thirty-three. Tara was proud of the fact that she hadn’t had genework. Tara did not yet realize that she would never look a day older than thirty-three since I and I had frozen her metabolism. So there was no rush on the painting, really.
The artist Tara chose was a hot young property named Driscoll Garrett. Garrett was flamboyant, catty, used a cigarette holder, wore eyeliner and patterned scarves. He was the sort of man that made you feel special by telling you the dirt on everybody else. And Tara was a co-conspirator. Between them, they seemed to know everything about everyone in the Domha’vei. Everyone that was anyone, at least.
Garrett and Tara shared another interest. Garrett was a strong believer that his art was enhanced by the generous use of a variety of jazz cigarettes. He mixed and rolled them himself, in specially made wrappers of dried leaf paste, sealed with a line of hash oil.
If anyone knew home xenopharmacology, it was Tara. All the years she’d spent living with her first husband, Tenzain Merkht, her primary interest was her poison garden. It was a tie to her childhood, the lush foliage a piece of beautiful Dolparessa in the frozen wasteland of Volparnu. And unlike a library, a laboratory, or access to any real computing power, it was something Merkht allowed her to have. Raising plants was a properly nurturing and trivial occupation for a woman.
As the name might suggest, she did raise poisonous plants. And she did, on occasion, make poisons. Not nearly as often as everyone thought, but she encouraged the misconception. A reputation as a poisoner made everyone stay very far away from her, and since a lot of them had reason to wish her dead, it was quite a useful illusion. Most of what she did in the garden was grow drugs, and ingredients for drugs, everything from marijuana to ripscorch. She made Gyre, too, but she had to import the Arya apples from Dolparessa. Nau’gsh species simply will not grow anywhere else in the galaxy.
It’s because our consciousness won’t develop without exposure to nul-energy, of course. But that was discovered by Tara and St. John. Really, the nau’gsh should’ve guessed it, but there wasn’t a nau’gsh that cared about science until Cuinn Cleary. Or maybe more to the point, there wasn’t a nau’gsh who cared about going anywhere off Dolparessa until Mickey Riley.
For Tara’s indulgences, many have called her a degenerate. Humans have a way of getting moralistic about drugs. Does it help to say that her life then was nothing but despair, and boredom, and repressed grief? She had to have something to do, something to take the edge off. Something other than the daily practice of the combat exercises she had despised as a girl.
For my part, I don’t feel a need to make excuses for her. Humans tend to be suspicious of recreational drugs because they move the mind from the realm of doing and into the realm of feeling or contemplating. They provide pleasures and distractions which seem more vivid than the business of everyday life; they isolate from social ties with others.
All of this makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If animals don’t do things – like find food and shelter – they die. If fragile humans don’t make ties with their fellows, their chance of survival is greatly reduced.
In case the subtle point has somehow been missed: I am a branch on a tree. This is the kind of life we have: light and water come to us. For mineral nourishment, we extend our roots. Basically, we stand there. We don’t have to do a damn thing. There’s only one thing that concerns us – the flower-fruit cycle. When we’re not doing it, we’re dreaming about it. If you’ve ever walked through a forest, wondering what the trees were thinking, now you know. Reproduction.
Which brings me to the third thing Tara did in her poison garden. She made an abortifacient. She may have been forced to marry Merkht, but she’d be dammed if she ever birthed any of his spawn. This was an enormous secret. If Merkht had known why she’d had four miscarriages, if he’d have known the reason for the curse which made his healthy and fertile wife unable to get him an heir, he would have burned the garden and Tara along with it.
Lugh is worried that if Tara is portrayed as a drug-addled abortionist she will seem unsympathetic to the reader. I think that is like saying Pompeii makes Vesuvius seem unsympathetic to the reader. And it’s another thing I can’t get my twigs in a twist about. Trees aren’t exactly attentive parents. We just drop our seeds on the ground, and it’s good luck and sayonara, kid.
Yes, Lugh, that isn’t fair. Many Cu’enashti are very good parents to their human children. It makes them more valuable in the eyes of their Chosen. Also, there’s the phenomenon of the grandmothers and grandfathers, Cu’enashti who have lost their human lovers to accident, disease, death. They dedicate their lives to their children, their children’s children, their children’s children’s children. After a few hundred years, and a handful of emanations, they fall into the role of wise man or woman of their villages, the gentle guide everyone comes to for advice. But that isn’t a path we would ever have picked. It’s a coping mechanism, a way to avoid falling into insanity or the despair that leads to immolation.
A significant number of Cu’enashti report wondering about the fates of their seedlings, says Tarlach. Some have even begun to plant them in family groves.
Family groves? squeaks Cuinn. Hell-ooo overpopulation…
Tarlach isn’t finished. And that immolation bit is greatly exaggerated. My studies proved…
You need to tell everyone the fucking truth, interrupts Cillian. That most of those people could have been saved. That we were forbidden to keep our lovers alive indefinitely by the Arya Archon, who made us keep our existence a secret. That all those grandmothers and grandfathers living in the worst hell a Cu’enashti can imagine are because of the fucking Arya. And that’s why we hate them. That’s why – if Tara would let me – I’d burn their fucking forests to the ground.
But there’s another truth, says Evan, almost inaudibly. Theresa and Ashtheresa.
Fucking propaganda, says Cillian. Fucking Arya propaganda.
Driscoll jumps in. If the Arya were gone, there would be no Gyre. And I thought you were telling my story…?
Sorry. Anyway, the portrait basically took forever because Tara and Garrett would spend most of their appointments getting high and gossiping. And then she realized that it wasn’t going to be the sort of portrait that she could hang in the Stella Maris Hall anyway. Royal portraits tend to be pretty conventional – stolid and boring, trite, bad art, basically. This was not. It was a work of genius. Her body, her face were abstracted, and yet in such a way that subtleties of her personality were clearly expressed. The image glowed with light, a light which illuminated everything in the universe, at the same time folding it up and storing it inside of her.
Also, it was a nude.
Tara sensed that things were going in that direction, and the night the portrait was finished, she allowed him to make his move. “Are you certain you want to do this?” she asked between kisses. “The Archon is very jealous.”
“So the rumors are true – the Archon is your lover. But what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” Garrett has his hand up her skirt now. As you might imagine, we were all feeling pretty ambivalent about this. We’d like to give him moral support, but, well…
“But he spies on me, and sets traps for me,” she said in a honeyed voice. “For example, he isn’t above wasting a whole emanation to see if he can get me to stray.” And then – bang. She popped Driscoll Garrett a good one in the jaw.
“How long have you known?” he asked, when he could talk again.
“From the moment I met you. Don’t you think I can recognize you by now, Ash? You always have the same eyes.”
On her way out, she stopped to look at the painting. “I want it,” she said. “I can’t use it as a royal portrait, but it’s beautiful.”
“It’s nothing,” said Driscoll. “I just painted exactly what I see.”
Driscoll isn’t the only one with artistic talent. Whirljack’s made a fortune on his songs. And then he and Blackjack went on to make a second fortune together.
Tara first spoke with him after one of his shows. Since the riot at the winegrove, Jack only surfaced to give concerts. Somehow, Tommy managed to get backstage passes to his show at Woodstick, an enormous pro-nau’gsh rock festival. Tara is impressed; it’s a big deal. For the first time, Jack is performing the entirety of his prog-folk opera, The Return of the Summer King’s Empire. Honestly, it wasn’t too difficult. Tommy has connections. But Tara didn’t know that.
Tara has come to talk politics, but she loves music, and is knocked away by his energy, his stage presence. She thinks of how it felt for that brief moment, his strong arms lifting her to the sky. Being on top of him was nice. In fact, she wants to climb him like a tree. She doesn’t think Clive would be too happy with that, though.
There’s an instant connection between them. It feels to Tara like she’s known him all her life. Of course she has, short about seven years.
They talk into the small hours. They talk as the small hours become bigger. Jack knows everything about politics. Jack knows everything about people. Jack speaks passionately about the culture and traditions of Dolparessa, so different from anywhere else in the galaxy. He speaks about the nau’gsh, their uniqueness as a form of life, their value as a cultural symbol.
Tara thinks he makes it all sound magnificent. He’s really playing it down to the point of prevarication. Dolparessan culture is the nau’gsh, and the trees are not only unique, but sentient. He wishes he could tell her that, but he’s still under the Great Silence.
He tells her that Dolparessa needs a leader who will fight for the trees. “Have you tried the Lorax?” Tara asks. He doesn’t get the joke.
I get the joke, says Driscoll. How could anyone not have heard of The Lorax? It’s a tractate of groundbreaking political importance.
Yeah, says Cillian. The poetry is incredible. Minimalist, sorta like Haiku.
Anyway, Jack’s point is that Tara is that leader. She has a destiny to fulfill. But that’s a sore point with her. Still, she doesn’t have to be Matriarch in order to make a statement. She loves the nau’gsh. She’s not about to let some sexless, short-haired Earthers in their grey uniforms and greyer attitudes tell her people that they can’t have the wine which fills them with life.
That’s when she gets an idea. The Nau’gsh Festival is coming. It’s the perfect time to take a stand.
As Marquesa of Dolparessa, it is Tara’s right to open the festival. Sadly, she last attended when she was seventeen. Tenzain Merkht wouldn’t allow her to go.
At this point, however, Merkht is still her husband in name only. She does everything in her power to embarrass him. She lets him plead with the Matriarch for a divorce. It’s the one endeavor in his life where she wishes him success, but she doubts he’ll accomplish anything. She doesn’t seek to help him because knowing the Matriarch, the more Tara begs, the less likely it will be granted. The best chance is for her to feign indifference.
It mattered, but it didn’t matter. If she got a divorce, she’d have to deal with her uncle. She’d been avoiding that her whole life. She knew he killed Daniel; she was there. But that wasn’t illegal. Cetin Urhu was Regent of Sideria, Daniel was an itinerant farmworker. Tara’s other suspicion is that Urhu murdered her parents. If she could prove that, she could have him drawn and quartered.
Tara is thirty-seven years old. It has been twenty years. She has no way of knowing, but she will go another ten years before attending the Nau’gsh Festival again. She will say it is the happiest day of her life.
The festival is planned and run by a society called Apple and Rose. They are responsible for the elaborate dances, the wild, hypnotic music, the gaily colored streamers strung along the trees in the capital city. Their leader is a woman called the Cantor. It’s notoriously hard to join the group. It’s because every last one of them is Cu’endhari.
It is through means like these that we have controlled the culture of Dolparessa for nine centuries.
The most famous celebration takes place at Court Emmere. The ruler (or her representative) and the Cantor (or her representative) close the gates and signal the start. For three days, no one enters or leaves. There is feasting, and dancing, and gaming, and theatrical productions. Poems are read, art is displayed.
Most of all, there is a bottomless supply of nau’gsh wine, the most notorious aphrodisiac in the galaxy.
Clive refuses to go. Part of him sees the political expediency; part of him thinks it is a savage custom, and he will have no part of it. Tara is disappointed. She’s also a little disgusted. Clive claims that he’s working towards freedom for Earthers. It seems that to him, freedom is the right to buy a gun and to shoot your mouth off. Try to bring anything life-affirming to it, and he pulls away. His attitudes are too ingrained: productivity is good, pleasure is a distraction. Tara can’t understand. She’s half-Dolparessan, where productivity provides the means for pleasure, and half-Skarsian, where might provides the means to do what you damn well please.
Jack puts an enormous amount of effort into publicizing the festival, and Tara spends a small fortune on it: the lights, the music, the productions, everything will be extravagant. It is also publicized that Tara will open the festival herself. And then, in a surprise decision, the Cantor announces that Jack will represent Apple and Rose.
The humans on Dolparessa are surprised. The Cantor has always represented the society. Some are disappointed at the violation of tradition, especially at a politically volatile time when traditions should be upheld. Others are delighted that the festival is moving forward, and that such a universally well-loved figure will represent Apple and Rose. Still others smile knowingly. If the Marquesa is opening the ceremony, then another woman certainly shouldn’t do it. The sexes need to be balanced. That’s a euphemism. What everybody seems to know (except Tara and Clive) is that it would be enormously auspicious if Jack were to plough Tara like a field of juicy javamelons.
The Cu’endhari, on the other hand, are shocked. They know what it means. It means that the Cantor is acknowledging Jack as their leader.
They all know who he is. They all know he’s Ashtara. They know his history, his suffering. They know the prophecy is about him. They know he didn’t found PLANT to save the nau’gsh. They know that he founded it to make Tara understand she was essential to Dolparessa’s survival. He had to bring her back, even if it meant changing the whole world.
They know he’s stronger than the Cantor, but not wiser.
The Cu’enmerengi are hoping, hoping so hard for Jack to tell Tara the truth, to end the Great Silence forever. The Cu’enashti are terrified of it. They are impressed with Jack’s power; they adore him for his n’aashet n’aaverti – impassioned loyalty – to his Chosen. And yet…he’s a failure, isn’t he? The meekest girl living on a farm with her Chosen, making his breakfasts, raising his children, has done better.
They half-expect Jack to save them. They half-expect “Tara and Ashtara” to be their next cautionary tale.
The festival procession leaves the capital city. It is a joyous whirl of light and noise. All over Dolparessa, the drums echo. They echo through the forests as well. All over the world, many saplings will make the grand jeté this night.
All over the world, people leave tanzaku – letters asking the trees for favors. And all over the world, the Cu’enashti are filled with joy that for three days, they can perform miracles without suspicion. In the morning, somebody’s blind aunt will see again. Some poor boy will find his shoes full of sapphires – enough to buy a farm and propose to that sweet girl who seems so devoted to him.
In the procession, Jack and the Cantor are singing. Her voice is clear and sharp, like a hawk cutting through clouds. Jack’s voice is pure and deep, the dark throbbing of the soil beneath them.
Tara is waiting at the gate to welcome them. The drums pound and surge. Jack and Tara close the gates together. Tara offers Jack the traditional welcome: the first glass of wine. Jack drinks and passes it back to her. She drains the cup.
The people roar with joy. The festival can begin! The drums lunge into a swirling beat. Tara throws aside her cloak and begins to dance. It’s not the dance of a spoiled aristo. It’s not the dance of a scientist. It’s the dance of a warrior.
Jack dances with her. They don’t touch, but their bodies mirror each other. It is a frenetic dance, a violent dance. The Cu’enashti are astonished. No tree has ever danced like that before.
It is a dance of power. It is the dance of a tree who has chosen a woman who will rule the Domha’vei. The Cu’endhari don’t know how to react at all. The Cu’enmerengi understand freedom, taking spontaneous joy in their surroundings. The Cu’enashti understand devotion, giving of your life and your strength to another person.
They’ve never seen ambition before, not in one of their own.
They can’t figure out whether Ashtara’s ambition led him to choose Tara, or whether Ashtara’s choice resulted in his ambition. And if they asked, Jack wouldn’t have been able to answer. None of us would.
It’s a dance of power, but to humans, power and sex are inextricably connected, and Clive wouldn’t come, and Tara has wanted Jack since the day they met, and festival lovers are sacred. Jack senses the moment this turns in his favor; he grabs her and shoves his tongue into her mouth. The crowd roars its approval.
It is the morning of the third day. They are in Tara’s enormous bed, where they have spent the better part of the last two. The servants just keep bringing them food, traditional Dolparessan fare. Roasted sucksow stuffed with nau’gsh apples. Delicate wine candies.
They are so drunk, drunk on the wine, drunk on each other.
Jack makes a drunken confession. “Everything I’ve done, everything, is for you.” There’s so much more he’d like to say, but he can’t.
Tara buries her head against his chest. She doesn’t want him to see the memory flash across her face. She is seventeen years old, and in the same bed, and Daniel is saying, “I will always be with you, always. Even if they take you away to Volparnu, I will wait for you, and I will find you.”
When the festival is over, she will go back to Clive, who promises nothing.