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

were coming.”
For a second she can’t speak –not out of surprise, goodness no—but she thinks this proves her so-called guardian’s corruption. “You’re not my guardian,” she begins like a volcano dribbling lava before the eruption, “you’re just a wicked thing that toys with me and wants me dead!”
“No Mercadia.” Melkam says, but Mercadia interrupts him with an uproarious scream.
“You just want me dead!”
“No, Mercadia.” he says again, but he waits for her screaming to stop before he continues. He feels that her esophagus is hot and abrasive but refuses to pity her. Pity is the modern malignancy. “You needed to grow up. Children cannot give birth to other children.”
“This is no child!” Mercadia protests clutching her rotund belly.
“It is your child, and like any other child deserves an adult mother.”
Begrudgingly, Mercadia quiets herself because she knows he’s right. But she still wants to protest him. She didn’t deserve this; nobody deserves the suffering she’s gone through. Paradise wasn’t worth this.
“Why did I have to go through this then? Why did I have to suffer?”
“Maturity is the way we carry our knowledge, and knowledge is largely obtained by suffering. I might have just brought you to the Birthing Grounds. I might have sneaked you past the hunters and their commander. But you wouldn’t have been able to give birth. Instead of the healing plant you’ve worked for, you would have been destroyed by the murderous flora, it would have taken root through your corpse and felt no remorse. Milera is depending on your suffering Mercadia.”
“…am I still a girl to you?” She asks, her voice still acidic for this spirit.
“Yes. Your third trial approaches.”
“What is it?” She clearly doesn’t want to know, but Melkam is proud that she asks out loud anyway. He almost wants to not tell her to spare her feelings. But he knows she’ll never grow up with that treatment.
“Give up true love.” He says, then his presence is gone from the forest.
Mercadia is sure that he’s still here though. She’s sure that he’ll smile when she starts to run.
And he will.

16

Mercadia squeezes Jared’s hand tight as a wrench. If he clutched her just as hard her bones would be crushed. Mercadia cries an uninterrupted stream; it reddens her cheeks, jaw, her neck. The cloth over her breasts darkens and clings to her. She digs her fingers into the cut in Jared’s hand, minding his pain not. He doesn’t flinch or make a noise.
“Jared.”
“Yes, Mercadia?”
“Please carry me.”
For the first and last time with her, Jared smiles. She couldn’t have asked anything simpler of him.
Jared puts her arms behind her knees and shoulders and she leans back into him. He hefts her as easily as Malk ever hefted Ning’s breasts. Mercadia curls up as close as he can to him and he looms over her, trying to guard as much of her body as he can with his massiveness.
He sees the hunters in the field scattered like gunpowder after the blast. They’re throwing down their sacks and loading their pistols. He knows they’re watching him too. They’ve been expecting him. He sees some of them taking aim already but nobody fires. Apparently they know that this forest is part of Melkam’s territory. If any of those bullets came within inches of Mercadia it would shatter like a chestnut inside a fire.
“Run.” Mercadia says, and he takes the first step out of the forest.
Had the commander found Jared before Melkam he would have wanted to turn the giant into a hunter himself. He is just their size and runs just as fast, which is the last thing the hunters expect.
The first volley of bullets misses him entirely. He covers twenty feet of ground by the time the battalion needs to reload for the first time. As soon as they pull their triggers Jared has moved out of the line of fire. He makes ten more feet by the time they take aim again, and this time Jared’s speed is of no help.
The second volley of bullets almost topples him. They bury themselves in his arms and legs, his back is riddled with holes in a matter of seconds, but he keeps running. Six clever hunters aim for his kneecaps but each bullet narrowly misses him. His clothes are seared by the shots that nearly hit him, and some of the cloth falls away. Mercadia snuggles against him –and her baby snuggles inside her; tears are shaken from her eyes whenever a bullet strikes him.
Jared is studded with lead and soaked red but the volleys of searing hot metal do not stop him. They don’t even slow him down; he sprints as fast as a frightened gecko from the start and doesn’t stop until he’s reached the wall. Once he does stop, Mercadia looks up at her final task, and regrets that Jared suffered for her.
She can’t do this.
This is no wall: it’s a grotesque tapestry of suffering people, naked and sewn together with leather strips by their bones. The grass has absorbed so much blood that the green is gone and all the plant matter is a decadent red. Everybody’s looking at her, everybody’s judging her.
“It’s everyone I love.”
“It’s a hallucination.” Jared says panting, bullets sliding out of his wounds and bouncing on the ground. “Melkam said that it’s the people who love you, this wall does not represent your love for others.”
Another volley of bullets penetrates Jared but he stands strong just like concrete and gossamer. Bullets ricochet off of the bullets still imbedded in his back and more blood squirts out of his wounds. The sound is brain-shaking; the smell is burning peppercorns popping in boiling blood. Jared’s flesh sizzles miserably.
Mercadia sees Murcilla and her other friends all sewn together by their thigh and breasts. Murcilla herself look like a Cyclops, her left eye sewn tight against the nipple of a girl she’s not seen for seven years. She sees Malk and Ning, sewn together by their spines so they can’t look at each other or make love. She even sees Jared. And Andun, she sees Andun. He pleads her to help him down, and why is she letting herself be held by that bloody monstrosity stuffed with bullets?
And mother… mother is asking just the same thing Andun is. Except she’s asking something else too, she wants to know:
“Where’s your father, Mercadia?”
“Daddy?” She looks over the wall frantically, recognizing face after face, growing less sickened by the macabre nakedness as she searches for her father. Murcilla, Malk, Ning, Jared, Andun, Mother, Murcilla, Malk, Ning, Jared, Andun, Mother, MurcillaMalkNingJaredAndunMother…
“Where’s my father?”
Jared is quiet, waiting for the next volley of bullets that might actually kill him, or for Mercadia to finally pass the wall. “Look away from the wall, Mercadia.” He is looking in the distance himself, and she looks with him.
Hundreds of feet away Mercadia sees a familiar shape like a pole covered in a flapping black sheet. The man she didn’t see at the party … the man she thought who loved her.
Mercadia’s inner child shrivels then, dries up in instant mummification, then dissolves. She has no father.
We are all sons and daughters.
“You were right, Melkam.” She whispers, and even Jared can’t hear her speak. She lifts her head up and kisses Jared, a kiss he deserves. He deserves so much more, so much more. “Put me down.” She commands and it is her last command for him, he obeys instantly. By the strength with which he sets her down, one would think that he isn’t injured at all.
Mercadia squeezes his hand on last time. They are surrounded by the sound of bullets sliding down gun barrels.
“Good-bye Jared.” She says then lets go of his hand. Then she turns around and plunges her body between Murcilla and her mother. The two hallucination women wail like they’re being disemboweled through their loins but Mercadia isn’t slowed down. She vanishes through the unreal flesh just like a worm slithering into the ground.
When he turns around six of the hunters have surrounded him and seem to look without eyes. He grins at them, bullets slide out of his wounds and roll down his enormous body like stones; he is a living mudslide of blood and lead.
“Failures you are.” He has the breath left to say.
One hunter smashes Jared in the head with his sack of bullets. Jared falls over without struggle or protest. He bleeds and bleeds like a disembodied heart but he does not die.
He has ages yet to live.

17

Mercadia crawls through six layers of bodies before she falls out the other side. She slides out by sweaty lubrication and falls onto the grass on all fours. The first thing she notices -other than the searing chill throughout her body- is how dim the wailing is on this side. The misery of the wall of loved ones gets quieter by the second over here.
Soon she won’t hear it at all.
She stands up, hefting her load in both arms and she starts toward the black soil hill. She takes the first step and it squishes, molds to her foot like avocado pulp. This soil is all give, offers no resistance.
The plagues will end where they began.
Mercadia doesn’t know there is a city beneath this mountain. History from that time is gone, all records of the city are rotted with the city itself. She doesn’t know that this place is so fertile because it has absorbed every corpse that was buried alive by it. But this is the richest dirt in Milera, she knows that, and if she knew how this place came to be she wouldn’t care.
It would all be worth it for her baby.
She doesn’t care that it’s not human. In fact, based on most of the human behavior she’s seen –and by how she herself has behaved—she is now proud that her baby isn’t human. Better to give birth to plant life. Something peaceful. Her precious child probably won’t even know how to speak. Good.
“My baby won’t waste words.”
At the top, the give stops at her knees. Mercadia trudges up the hill with her swelling belly gliding over the top of the soil. She turns around to look for her enemies, but the wall is too high, they won’t be able to shoot her up here. It’s so high up she can only see the night sky, not a forest or mountain range in sight.
Mercadia closes her eyes. The soil at the top goes up to her waist, it feels chilling and inviting, it sucks all of the excess heat out of her from the top of her head down to her vagina.
Before the first contraction, the last membrane of childhood is stripped from her, pulled down just like a rabbit skinning. Her mind feels totally exposed to the open air and the powerful smell of soil.
“I’m going to die.”
There is only one contraction.
The baby literally grabs her spine then crawls down it like a sloth squeezing itself down a hollow tree. She feels two hands grab her hip bones from the inside and push them apart. Her muscles stretch and the pain is incredible but not one sinew snaps, her bones don’t split. The baby is careful not to damage its mother.
She feels not ten, but dozens of gnarly fingers squirm out of her and push her legs apart and all of the amniotic fluid rushes out and feeds this soil more. Her belly shrinks back to its normal size emptied of that saltwater. She feels it crowning.
Milera’s prince is coming, as it were.
Then, quick as a fish the baby slips out of her and