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

part of Mercadia speaks to her.
“You wish Murcilla could be your lover instead of Andun.” it whispers with cruel honesty.
“Yes, I do.” Mercadia whispers to nobody, without shame. She whispers not because of fear, but because of the emotional exhaustion born from unhappy union.
Just for a second, while nobody is looking, they do look like lovers. With Mercadia adoring Murcilla, and Murcilla pining to Mercadia from her belly, they do look like they are in love.
“You’re going to have a baby Mercadia, I know it.” Murcilla promises with heavy emphasis on baby. She is so quiet that only Mercadia can hear her: it is considered catastrophically bad luck to mention the Mother Plagues during any stage of the wedding ceremony.
“Yes.” is all Mercadia says. She speaks absently as though she isn’t actually listening to her friend but she is. She continues stroking Murcilla’s hair and giving her the immortal adoration she promised to Andun twenty minutes ago.
My friend is right, she thinks.
“But she isn’t.”
Mercadia’s eyes shoot ahead and her very soul shrinks and shrivels as though frozen in an instant. She has not heard that voice for seven years, and she thought that her nightly prayers had promised she would never hear him again.
She forgets that Murcilla is there and she turns around, letting go of her friend. Murcilla looks at Mercadia hurt, and asks her what is wrong. But Mercadia does not hear her, and never will again.
Mercadia looks behind her but the spirit is not there. She does not see him nor sense him in any way. But she knows he –or “it” perhaps, she doesn’t know what the hell the spirit qualifies as—is here with her, he is here as surely as she is chilled by his voice.
He speaks again, “Run along, little girl,” and that chill contracts a migraine that will swell in her brain for the rest of the night.
Murcilla screams but Mercadia still doesn’t hear her.
Then the first bullet of the night shatters one of the great windows, diving for Mercadia’s skull.
She hears the sound of hot metal clashing next to her ear and she jerks her head with inhuman speed to see the bullet right before it splits. An arm the color of the ocean has caught the bullet with a sickle of rust. The walnut-sized bullet looks like it is stuck to the blade like a burr in that instant. Then with a flick of the wrist the sickle breaks the bullet and the two halves hit the checkered floor before the screaming starts.
Mercadia backs away from her guardian, staring at him horrified, as though he were the one who fired the bullet.
He looks exactly the same, and he leans toward her the same way he did seven years ago, “Run along, little girl.” His voice is abrasive with impatience now; she thinks that if he says it again, he will scream it.
Mercadia looks around her.
Murcilla is gone, and her father still isn’t here at all. In fact not a one of her loved ones is in sight.
Andun.
“Andun!” She screams and another bullet that would have destroyed her pregnant stomach breaks, hits the floor in front of her. She didn’t even see him do it this time. Her guardian is in front her suddenly and he is staring at her just as her father does; with bitter masculine authority she thinks belongs in no man.
“Your husband is not the one in danger, Mercadia!” He shouts and hacks another bullet without even looking at it. When the two halves start blossoming with gorgeous red leaves the crowd disperses around it as though it were a man eater. “I cannot guarantee your safety, little girl; RUN!”
Mercadia bolts, but not out of the building. She needs to find Andun, she won’t leave without him, she couldn’t leave him last time this happened and she won’t leave him now.
“Andun!”
She screams but her voice is caught in the collective cacophony with everybody else’s screams.
Andun does not have a hope of catching her voice in this mess, never.
“Andun!”
She pushes through, moving against the crowd. She is much stronger and more agile than one would expect a pregnant girl to be. Nobody is facing her now; nobody is even trying to help her escape. It is every man for himself now and the women are no exception, not even the bride.
Mercadia runs out onto the balcony where Andun was drinking and talking with his friends. I’ll grab him, she thinks, we’ll find a carriage or something and daddy will get us somewhere safe…
But there is nobody out on the balcony.
Mercadia’s body shivers but her thoughts are outside her body: it takes the sound of another blast to snap her back to reality.
“The Coward is gone.”
The spirit is behind her again and the chill becomes roiling hatred. He calls Andun a coward as though it were his title.
“Andun is no coward!” she screams, but she is screaming just to defend her husband. She knows that he’s a coward, and she knows that she failed to help him conjure his courage as they grew up together.
It’s my fault he’s a coward, she thinks.
“No, Mercadia.” The spirit says “You are wrong. But this is no time to cast judgment, let alone talk.” The spirit walks towards her and she hears the sound of heavy boots as he walks. She thought that spirits floated, and made no sound except when they spoke.
But this one makes footsteps, and breaks bullets in half with sickles of rust.
She only sees him make the first few steps towards her. All of a sudden he is clutching her by the arms and his hands feel just like flesh without temperature, while still pulsing with the vitality of life. She is on his cloaked shoulder which feels like animal fur, and she feels as though she is being carried away to be raped and eaten.
“Put me down!” She screams for help, but her voice is instead a lure for her hunters.
“Quiet.” the spirit says, and his voice is just like a nail buried by a hammer, “The more you scream the more they will chase you.”
He steps up the stone rail of the balcony and just for a second, they are in full view of every hunter in the immediate area.
And Mercadia sees them. The great hall is encased in a rectangular dome of glass and artistically twisted metal. Her hunters are perched all over it in humanly impossible ways, like spiders and flies, clinging with inhuman agility. In one instant they look to her like black acne on her fathers beautiful courtyard.
In the next instant there is a bright flash then a bullet in front of her face.
The next instant that bullet is stopped by rust just inches from her face and she has stopped breathing, her heart feels it has been chiseled in two by the air pressure of the bullet. Then the blade is swiped back beneath the spirits cloak and the bullet is two halves of a walnut shell spinning on the marble deck.
The spirit jumps off the balcony and against his advice she screams as though she has fallen into the great pit and Abaddon is waiting for her where she thinks the bottom is.
At this point, the spirit Melkam understands that Mercadia is not going to listen to him.
They fall twelve stories. The spirit feels nothing but the instinct to save Mercadia, but Mercadia feels the powerful wind that eagles feel in flight when they dive for their prey. She hates the spirit that has captured her, but she clings to him for dear life. Her life is very dear to her.
Too much so.
There is no impact when they land. The spirit hits the ground with all the force of shredded parchment, and the only reason Mercadia can tell they landed is that they have stopped. Her body absorbed no impact, and she did not feel any stress in the spirit that carries her. All of his stress is in his mind, which is a landscape she cannot set foot in.
The spirit sets Mercadia on the grass which crunches beneath her bare feet -her shoes came off when he picked her up on the balcony. The grass fills the space between her toes with juice thinner than water.
Mercadia is shivering; the night is freezing and all the heat of her body crawls into her belly to incubate her baby.
Mercadia’s skin tightens against her muscles from the cold, and the moonlight makes her skin gray-blue. Her brown eyes stand out in her face like bon-bon’s imbedded in ice. The spirit is impassive, and is not moved by her misery and immature innocence.
“What are you doing, you said I was in danger?” she asks. She is quiet now; she has finally caught on that she needs to escape.
“Run.”
She thinks that he doesn’t understand her so she says, “Why aren’t you carrying me?”
When she screams she shakes her head and her hair tangles in the frozen wind. The spirit is still impassive, not insulted that she thinks he does not understand her misery.
“Though I am not flesh, Mercadia, I do tire. I am here only to protect you, so you must bear this weight on your own.”
“I can’t run like this!” She yells grabbing her hanging stomach, as though the spirit needs this pointed out to him.
“You were running earlier.” He states matter-of-fact, “You need only run as far as the old battlegrounds.”
Mercadia turns around. Down the hill, perhaps one hundred feet away, is a crack in the great mountain where a territorial war was waged between her city and the people of the hills beyond the mountain decades ago. It is said that at the height of the conflict, the ninety-ninth plague rushed through and wiped out every single soldier. It is a vertical chasm of useless fertilizer now. Though it is pungent with human mulch, in these few decades not a thing has sprouted there. It is considered unholy ground, nobody ever goes there.
Mercadia and Andun once swore to each other they would certainly never go there, not without each other.
She starts to say his name but the spirit cuts her off like a whirling saw.
“The Coward is gone, Mercadia; I am your companion now and I say GO!”
The sky shouts fiery snaps at them and he spins around to protect her. He is a small tornado of noxious gas and rust, and the wind of that spinning almost knocks her down. The bullet halves hit the ground at his feet and they are so heavy that they imbed themselves into the earth.
Mercadia thinks about something that heavy, and that hot, moving that fast.
She thinks about Andun’s foot.
And that is what it takes to make her run.
Mercadia grabs her pregnant stomach and runs down the hill so much faster than pregnant girls normally can move. She can lift her knees a whole foot up which makes her load swing up and slap her cleavage. She hugs her hanging stomach close to her breasts as though she can hold her baby already so that it doesn’t hit her as she escapes.
She feels the baby nestle comfortably inside her as though going to sleep.
Mercadia only makes it twenty feet down the hill before her foot hits a sharp rock pointing at the castle like an accusing claw. It cuts her foot down the center between her big and index toe and catches her shoe. She hits the ground face first and feels her nose pushed inside her face. She rolls down the hill uncontrollably, cut by tiny stones and smeared with soft grass and runny mud. She