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

is tending to another woman, it isn’t right.
“But Mercadia needs help.” He whispers apologetically, sorry to himself and to his wife.
In life, his wife declared that if another woman passed through their forest he should hole himself up somewhere and let her care for the visitor. The reason she agreed with Melkam, that they should live out here, was so she’d be the only woman he’d ever lay eyes on. In fact, she told him to stop thinking about other women at all. He swore at the altar he would, and he lied. It had never occurred to Jared that his thoughts could be stopped. He imagined the human mind as an ocean; sometimes still, sometimes storming, but not stoppable, no. Never stopping.
Jared sits and the bride’s bedside and drops his face between her breasts. They still feel healthy and robust but she is quite dead. They rise not, fall not, they just shake a little when he lays his head down. Her face is not so beautiful –except to Jared—for its sternness. Her brows are close together, her nostrils wide and her lips narrow.
Even in death it looks like she is judging him.
Oh, but he loves her. He can’t but love her, and his love can’t but preserve her corpse. He won’t see her decay; he’ll sooner see his own body dissolve before a single flake of her skin falls away. This work of art must last forever.
Permanence is what marriage is all about after all, isn’t it?
“Nothing is permanent.”
The voice Mercadia dreads is too quiet for her to hear, but to Jared his words fill the whole cabin. He looks up and sees the spirit Melkam looking down on him with eyes inhuman, and without judgment.
“But she deserves it.” He whispers, pleads as though the spirit had any authority over longevity.
“Your wife needs you not, Jared. The Mother needs you now. Humanity depends on her, and she depends on you.”
“I know, and I shall help her with all my body and soul… but.”
“But?” Melkam doesn’t understand. Jared understands what he must do, and he will do it. What third factor could there be? Melkam is not human after all, and does not understand all of our subtle selfish disappointments.
“I shouldn’t have to, Melkam!” He ejaculates and almost pounds his fists but remembers his wife. “It’s not fair, Melkam, life isn’t fair!”
“Life is fair, Jared. Life and death are a process that happens continuously, and evenly. People aren’t fair. And for reasons that even I can’t decipher, that unfairness is part of life’s cycle.”
Jared won’t hear it, won’t respond.
“Just remember that you must turn around after you have escorted Mercadia to the Birthing Grounds.”
Jared doesn’t say anything for a long time, he hates himself for what he is about to say. Mella would not approve, but it is the truth, and no matter how much he loves her, the truth is always more important than the stubbornness of the dead.
“I want to be with her at the end.” He whispers, so ashamed he is saying this that he doesn’t even want to hear himself say it. But, of course, he does hear his own mouth, and it clutches his own mind with thorns.
“If you do then she will fail.” He says passively and begins to dissolve out of the cabin.
“How?” he asks refusing to believe this spirit who has not lied once.
“Because her third task is to give up true love.” And he is gone. Jared clutches his wife as the black fog drifts out of the cabin sparing the house his ruinous touch.
Mercadia screams the second he is gone.

14

Jared grabs the towels and leaves the dress in the bedroom. The bride, in her deathly stillness, seems to disapprove.
When Jared throws the door open Mercadia is on the floor hurling venom into the already acrid corner –how she got out of the tub on her own he’ll never know. For just a second he sees the bride there instead, and he moves all the faster. He grabs her hair and holds it all above her head gently with expert dexterity. He had a few hours of practice this morning after all.
The venom Mercadia is spewing parts the dry vomit all over the wall. There’s so much it looks like bits of scrambled eggs floating on green water past their knees and into the living room. This feels limitless; Mercadia is like a hose linked to a lake. The bride was only in here for about fifteen minutes, but Mercadia soaks the washroom for the better part of an hour. When she finally stops there’s an inch of rejected fluid on the floor. Jared hates to think how much of it has soaked into the living room by now. His pants are soaked; he can feel the stuff seeping into him now. But he is made of tougher stuff than this girl, he may get a little sick but he won’t be vomiting.
She whispers then, she lurches and he fears that she will puke more but she doesn’t. “Put me back in the tub will you?”
Jared lifts her up and sets her back in the water as she wishes. He waits to see if the weight of her belly will drag her face below the water. She holds herself up well enough. “I’m going to get your dry clothes.” He says and she nods.
Back in the bedroom the floor is just as wet as the bathroom. This place is such a mess. He isn’t sure that he wants to clean it up. He’s not even sure if he wants to come back after he’s escorted Mercadia to the Birthing Grounds.
But he will. He knows he will. Somebody needs to tend to the dead bride. Because that is what she deserves. It’s what he deserves.
The karma in Milera is harsh.
Jared steps back into the bathroom, the poison and stomach acid splashing beneath his feet and contaminating his shoes. He’ll have to change his own clothes before they leave. Mercadia must be tended to first though. The Mother needs him, to put it Melkam’s way.
He sets the dress on the window sill and kneels next to the tub again. Mercadia hasn’t even wiped her mouth she’s so exhausted. She certainly doesn’t look like somebody who’s visited paradise. It’s no wonder she needs help, this poor girl wouldn’t have even made it as far as paradise without Melkam, just as she won’t make it as far as the Birthing Grounds without him.
Mercadia looks at him and he is instantly seduced by her again. If Mella weren’t in the next room he’d kiss her now, and he would ignore the bile and poison smeared on her lips. She says, “Wash me Jared, change my clothes for me.” She pleads not, orders not, but she speaks to him just like she is his lover. Just like she is the lover he just lost.
Without a word, with his enormous soaking hands he brushes away her filth. It feels abrasive and sickening but she is so soft he doesn’t care. Mercadia deserves to be clean.
He hesitates at first to remove her dress but she smiles and nods; he’s like a child hesitating to take his gift. He unbuttons her dress and peels it away, lets it sink to the bottom of the tub where it will stay until this part of the world dissolves.
In Milera, skinny girls are not considered extraordinarily beautiful, but Jared has never seen such a girl before, so Mercadia shocks him.
Unlike other pregnant girls Mercadia herself has gained no weight because her baby is not nourished like human babies are. Her body is still a slender shape; her breasts are small pert cones just large enough for the average man’s mouth.
For the first time, both of them feel free, they don’t feel like they are cheating on their spouses. Hers was a coward –THE coward in fact—and his wife is dead. They are two open wounds pressed together, trying to protect each other from infection.
Mercadia adores him already. She feels no shame in showing him her body.
Once she is clean Jared lifts her out of the tub and brings her into the living room. He sets her down on a large chair and dries her off with a towel, she smiles at him the whole time and he is so embarrassed he can’t look at her face. She gasps when the towel brushes over her nipples and Jared makes himself stop.
“I’m sorry.” He says, he’s adorable to her. But this timidity is unbecoming of him.
“Jared.” She whispers, sounding so in love.
Jared just looks up, unwilling to touch her. He’s crushing the towel in his hands.
“It’s her isn’t it?” She gestures with her head to the corpse on the bed. Jared nods, so like a child is he.
“My wife.”
Mercadia watches him, can’t help but smile at such husbandly honor. “You don’t need to touch me in front of your wife.” Mercadia takes the towel out of his hand and dries herself off herself. Jared watches her run the towel over her body without blinking. He doesn’t look at his wife.

15

As soon as they were both dressed and dry Jared kissed his wife good-bye and they set off through the forest. By the absence of bullets, and the ease with which Jared walked with her, Mercadia became suspicious of something. She looked at the forest around them, saw bright colors and leaves darker and fuller than she’d seen anywhere else, but for one place of course.
“This is Melkam’s territory too.” She said and Jared nodded.
“Much of this forest is I think.”
“He told me before I reached paradise that he wouldn’t be able to protect me everywhere. But I’ve been within his territory this whole time.” She pauses and thinks for a moment. “Come to think of it I’ve probably been in his territory my whole life. I’d never left the city until a few weeks ago when the hunters came.”
“That part of your quest is coming. Otherwise I don’t think you’d need me.” Mercadia looks at Jared and smiles, but he keeps looking straight ahead and doesn’t see it.
“I think I’d need you anyway, Jared; Melkam has no sense of tenderness.” Mercadia takes Jared’s hand and squeezes it. He hesitates for a long time; Mercadia thinks that he’s thinking shamefully about his wife, but he squeezes back eventually.
While they’re still safe, Mercadia wants to stop Jared and kiss him at least. She would make love to him, but she has a feeling that he won’t be with her at the end. Oh, but she wishes he would be. Never has she met a man such as this. She hopes that somewhere else they can meet again, and next time be lovers as they should have been here in Milera. Safe, as they should have been here in Milera.
But their time together is too short, for when she looks away from Jared they have reached the clearing on the outskirts of the forest. Beyond the clearing they see a world of normality; fields of grass and nothing else untouched by the plague Melkam. There is a great hill of soil so fertile it’s as black as an eclipsed sun. The sky is poisonous green swirling with vomit-yellow clouds. This she envisioned, this she expected, but she has to stop on the outskirts of the forest, she is just one step away from leaving Melkam’s protection. She has to stop because she wasn’t expecting that.
“Melkam, you never said there would a wall.”
Melkam does not manifest, but he does speak. The clearing they stand in serves as his mouth. “I told them you