The Mother of the Tree of Life, Aleister Hanek [best way to read ebooks txt] 📗

Heaven waits for those who run.
-Chris Cornell

Prologue

Mercadia was picking berries with Andun when first she was hunted.
She was nine years old and he was eleven. He was reaching puberty faster than the average boy so he wanted to kiss her face a whole lot, but she felt nothing sexually corrupt in his affection, so she welcomed it and kissed him back very much. He never touched her when they were children save for the hugs and the kisses, for he loved her and wanted never to scare her away, and certainly not with his affection.
They were hiding in the great vineyard where a hundred different kinds of grapes and berries were grown for all sorts of confectionery uses. The berries she picked were perfectly round like marbles, and the lightest shade of violet imaginable. They tasted just like grapes but they were as pungent and tart as pomegranate. These were the same berries that would be used to make wine for their wedding celebration in seven years.
They were not supposed to be here. Legally they could be punished for trespassing here despite their age and her royal status. But Andun has always been very good at running and Mercadia has always been very good at sneaking around. She plans entry and escape and the locations for hiding and he moves his feet so that they don’t get caught. Andun has also grown quite a lot for a boy his age and Mercadia is only a little bit of girl, he carries her when they sneak around in here. In fact he carries her a lot in public.
Mercadia loves to be carried.
“They’re such a cute couple” passers-by say, when they are in the market together with their parents whether Andun is holding Mercadia or not, but they joke not. With people their age, the public likes to joke when children are thusly affectionate with each other. But these children are famously engaged and have been since Mercadia’s infancy. When the passers-by say this to them, or about them, they mean it the same way they would with an adult couple or teenagers with an approved relationship.
Andun is holding her right now. His arms are around her stomach which is flat and very warm, he is holding her against him so his face is pressed against her back which he kisses occasionally, she does not notice. Her dress is thick and fluffy cotton so she cannot feel his arms around her very well either, she just feels the gentle pressure of being held by him; she is not old enough to feel the pleasure of it.
Mercadia works her finger between the leaves and plucks another fine ripe berry and drops it into her hand basket. These berries do not expose themselves to the elements; they hide inside a gathered fold of leaves like a rose, so you need to separate the leaves with your fingertips to see if the berry is ripe. These berries are delicate as though they were rotting already when they are in the final stage of ripeness, so it takes love and delicacy to harvest them. Mercadia can only touch with love and delicacy; she feels no other impulse to touch anything and does not have the fierceness to touch any differently anyway.
She reaches in and takes another berry away but this one she pops in her mouth. The juice is so very strong but not dark at all so there will be no stain inside her mouth, no evidence of her trespassing for when her parents inspect her mouth when she gets home soon.
She is a sneaky one and she always will be.
Mercadia plucks one last berry and wants Andun to let her down.
“I’m done” She says. Her voice is soft and sweet as sponge cake. Andun gets to his knees so that her feet touch ground, and when she turns around she pops a berry into his mouth.
Because he loves to touch her and because his affection is not frightening or invasive, Andun keeps his arms around Mercadia. She reaches into the bag on her back and places a heavy sheet over the basket of berries. It is course cloth filled with stuff like lead that is heavy but not toxic. She swings the basket around in circles around her wrist and none of the berries spill out.
“Mercy?” Andun asks, she loves it when he calls her that. She is pompous and loves to be referred to as universal goodness “Yes, Andy?” she asks, loving him for whatever he is about to ask, not caring what it is he may want.
“Can I kiss you?”
At first Mercadia is quiet. Her head tilts a bit; she hoods her eyes and sighs softly against his face. Her countenance is sagely; this is not out of place in her nine-year-old body, nor is it due to her pompousness. He wants something that he is not allowed to have, but she knows that his yearning and intentions are true. He does deserve what he is asking for but higher authorities would have him hanged for asking this.
In fact Mercadia’s parents, despite adoring Andun and his friendship with Mercadia, would have him disemboweled at once and on location for daring to ask this.
In the realm Milera, no girl must be kissed before her wedding day. Throughout the realm it is believed zealously that any girl who kisses or does anything more intimate than a kiss before her wedding day is cursed to give birth to something that is not human. Every plague, every touchable nightmare, every abomination, that has come upon this world has come from the loins of a girl or woman.
Girls and women who are shaped like or similarly to pears or hourglasses are considered safe temples for sex and conception. If you have shapely breasts and or hips -the hips are necessary in this judgment but the breasts are not—then you are a normal girl. If your body looks like it was designed by god to give birth to another human body then you are good, you are safe.
Mercadia is a skinny girl from her scalp to her toenails, and she is going to stay that way.
She wants him to kiss her. What is the harm? It is believed by all adults in this world that premarital affection of that caliber is what makes girls stay skinny, and give birth to catastrophes but there is no proof. Love and affection can only create goodness, is that not true? Mercadia knows this is the boy who she will marry when she is a woman and he is a man. She knows that her duty in life is to give birth to his child, to raise it and protect it to keep the species and religion alive. She feels as though he is her husband now, she felt that way when they were infants playing together in the pen.
So why has she not kissed him yet?
“I love you Andun.” she says, and this is meant to invite his lips and he understands her. His lips touch hers, the kiss is chaste and spills love between them like the warm sugar running down a pastry.
Then the loudest sound they have ever heard destroys the air behind Andun’s head and leaves sparks behind that burn his hair. In the next second their eyelids are opened wide the way paper is shrunk by heat, all sound is zeroed out and replaced by a high pitched sound. It is the same note in each of their heads.
Andun breaks away from their kiss and dives through the bushes behind Mercadia. Mercadia turns her head to the source of the noise, and her neck creaks like thousand-year-old gears. She cannot run by herself, she needs Andun to carry her, she needs somebody to help.
Several yards away is a muscular black figure with no face. His sensory organs are invisible but in perfect health; he can see her plain as day, he can hear her panting like a dying dog, he can smell her sweat-like fear. In his right hand is a wooden weapon designed to launch flaming metal balls at high velocity to destroy bodies. In his left hand there is a sack flung over his shoulder that is filled with balls of lead.
He slams the sack on the ground and pulls another ball out of the sack with his bare fingers which looks like they are protected by white armor. Much of his flesh is thick and bonelike, but not his face.
Mercadia does not find her voice; it leaps out of her like a cat that has just struggled out of the river.
“Andun!” she screams, as the man slides a golf-ball-sized hunk of lead into the gun coiled around his forearm.
Andun wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her inside the bushes in one swift motion. Less than a second later the spot where Mercadia was standing is a smoldering hole fifty yards long.
Much wine for the future is lost.
Andun brings Mercadia into a part of the vineyard where the berries and grapes are grown are not in rows. Much of this vineyard had grown naturally so only about half of it is in rows. Andun and Mercadia have been sneaking in here since they could walk on two feet; they know the grounds as well as they know each other. And Andun is a fast boy.
The hunter will not be able to catch them as easily as he expected.
The hunter kicks off of the ground and launches a pound of dirt into a long vine. Another future bottle of wine is lost.
He slips between the trunks of the tree and vines like a squirrel and the enormous sack of bullets brushes gently through the foliage. No wine is lost to the bullets that are not fired from the pistol. The hunter does not know just what direction Andun went in but he is fast. Andun is very fast but the hunter is much faster and the bullets are faster than either of them. Andun is not yet in the hunter’s sights.
Twenty feet away Andun is running clumsily in fear and Mercadia’s weight. She only weighs between sixty or seventy pounds at her age but Andun is only a fast boy, not a strong boy. He is not strong in any sense of the word in fact, just very, very fast, however clumsy.
Andun has Mercadia ten feet away from civilization when the hunter can see his feet.
He is nine feet away when the hunter takes aim.
He is eight feet away when the bullet flies.
The bullet touches his heel and Andun’s left foot is blown off. It rolls several feet ahead of him, the blood is disintegrated by the heat of the blast before it can splatter anywhere, the ankle wound on his leg and disembodied foot are sundered black and dry.
Mercadia falls out of Andun’s arms and they both scream as though they were both wounded by that bullet. Andun is stopped by his pain and he has forgotten about Mercadia completely, his brain is shaking from his own screaming and he cannot think.
Mercadia gets up. Andun’s foot is reeking like cooked meat in front of her face. Seeing the foot of the boy she loves makes her heart shudder, but she does not scurry away from it. She is one foot away from the gate that will lead her to civilization and help.
But she is too brave and protective to do what anybody else would have done, to do what Andun would