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

picks the fruit and eats it without peeling. The skin is tender and thin like the skin of the berries she used to eat back home, but the pulp is layered with thin membranes and pure juice. She swallows it in a couple of bites getting some of the juice on her dress. She wipes it away and licks her fingers.
Mercadia parts the green curtains and walks into the bush and all at once she hates Melkam again. She screams and jumps back, staring at the center of the bush.
“You sick bastard!”
The core of the bush is a cage of hooked thorns. Each wooden claw must be the size of Malk’s hand, the tips drip with green poison just like the fangs of a drooling snake. Each one drips every few seconds, the sound is sickening and…
…and none of it is absorbed by the soil.
Mercadia listens carefully, there is a hollow whistle, and in the distance something smacking against soil.
“I’m supposed to crawl down that.”
“Precisely.” His voice is next to her though his body is still outside the bush.
“Couldn’t you have grown a reasonable tunnel, like a rabbit hole or something?”
“It’s been done.” She feels him smile.
“That’s no excuse.”
“I choose not what grows in my wake, Mercadia. If I could then there simply would have been a bridge to bring you from the ball directly to the Birthing Grounds.”
Mercadia sits down, wishing she could cross her legs. She was never taught any geography, nor history, nor mythology of Milera that suggested a place called the Birthing Grounds. “Where am I going?” She asks.
“To the most dangerous place for you in the world.”
Mercadia shakes. He hates the way he said that more than what he said. It wasn’t blasé, it wasn’t haughty; he makes it sound as if she can’t but move on. He makes it sound like destiny.
“What are the Birthing Grounds?”
“It is a land empty of sentient existence. No human has ever dared go there for fear of sinking in the soil, for that is just what happens when they have seen animals set foot there. It is a mountain of rich soil, richer than the soil here. It is the only place where your child can properly be birthed.”
Mercadia can imagine that place. The way Melkam talks about makes it seem as real as the poison dripping before her. She imagines a green sky with yellow clouds. She imagines that not even birds dare to fly overhead lest they crash and become part of the malleable mound.
If she is imagining this place properly then it really is the right place to have her baby. Maybe the only place.
“How do I get through these thorns?”
Outside, Melkam feels pride for Mercadia for the first time. “The fruit you ate is the antidote to that poison. You’ll have to crawl through those thorns. I imagine you’ll have to throw up again later.”
No, she thinks. “I’ll get Malk to help me. He’ll hack them away.” And I’ll get to say good-bye.
“Those thorns will move for no hands but yours, and no knife shall cut them without the wielder stung a dozen times.”
“…no help at all.” Mercadia says, her whine crawling back into her tone. “I have to do all of this alone.”
Melkam is silent.
“Fine!” she says with steel in her voice for the first time. “I wish I could have the baby here with Malk and Ning but I guess your soil isn’t fertile enough for my baby, is it Melkam?” She gets on her belly –which does little for her point of view but her reach is better—and grasps the base of one stem. It’s thick and feels jointed like a wrist, and like a wrist it has limited opposability. She bends it one way and the thorns snap against each other flicking droplets of poison every which way. One drop hits her in the eye but instead of letting go and skittering away, she grips it with strength she didn’t know she had and nearly busts the wooden wrist.
It doesn’t feel acidic, but she feels something seeping from the poison and into her body. This must be the vomit catalyst Melkam mentioned. She really needs to move now; there will be time for puking later.
Mercadia hooks that wooden claw into other thorns not in her way and lets it go. She rejoices when it holds, smiles even. She does the same with every thorn in her way and every one covering up the tunnels mouth. Poison soaks her dress and runs off her skin like rivulets of sweat, and her pores drink it like unassuming infants with drain cleaner.
When every thorn is bent away Mercadia crawls to the lip of the tunnel, she dives in without looking inside.
And Melkam feels pride for her once more.

8

Jared slices the orange in half in the palm of his hand. The knife cuts into his skin and smoldering citrus burns into his cut. His hand doesn’t flinch and he doesn’t drop the orange, doesn’t even throw down the knife. Jared is a man made of stone: if his spirit were made of flesh he would be a golem of concrete with gossamer joints.
He is sitting on the porch of his cabin where he has lived with his mute wife for a month. It was an arranged marriage –so many arranged marriages in Milera- but not unwanted, which in Milera is common. Sexual independence is uncommon in Milera these days, since the horrors of the Outcast.
The bride is inside.
Jared sucks on the first wedge of his orange, then chews the pulp without swallowing as though it were tobacco. It’s from one of the trees she planted here when she was a child, and she planted many. He plans on eating each and every orange in her grove, then burning the trees in memory of her, for that is what his father would have told him to do. Sacrifice and blazing images, he was taught, is the proper way to honor the dead.
Jared poisoned Mella to death by accident. He knew very little about her so he did not realize that she was deathly allergic to the food he cooked for her this morning. It was no wonder she had insisted on doing the cooking up until today. Why she agreed to eat his food today is beyond him. He dreads that she expected culinary death, and preferred that over a lifetime with him.
But even if that is true he loves her. He will love her until he dies and his misery, like strangling thread, is undone from him.
Jared sucks the last drops of juice from the orange wedge and spits the pulp into the grass. The citrus in his palm feels like a blade severing his hand but he will do nothing for his pain. The heat of the acid feels comfortably warm compared to the oozing grief pulsing in his heart.
Jared’s love will preserve his wife’s body until he dies and he loves her no more. She will look like she is sleeping with still lungs as long as he is still sucking in breath. He will not move her body from their bed, no matter who comes and finds him grieving.
This is how Jared is found by his true love.
In other realms, ‘Jared’ would mean ‘The Lover.’

9

Mercadia falls into the underground lake of mud and poison and disappears beneath the surface as soon as she touches it. The sludge is so thick that there are no ripples, and no visible disturbance of something having fallen in.
Mercadia rises out of the muck covered in an inch of deadly mud. She looks like a glistening rock formation. She slaps her face with both hands and the mud absorbs all the impact, and she flings the mud away from her face with dignity she thought she’d lost. When she opens her eyes she is surprised.
It’s gorgeous down here.
After seeing Melkam’s wake firsthand at the part in the mountain Mercadia was expecting another terrifying land of shit. But this cavern is extraordinary. She feels like she’s in a naturally formed cathedral, where the pews are a pool and the music is the dripping from thorns above.
The shit lands were light brown much like infantile secretion –smelled that way too—but this place is a deep dark brown, it would be easily mistaken as a cavern of copper colored jewels. And the only smell is soil, fragrant, earthy, and invigorating. She takes a deep wonderful breath and feels like she’s just drunk a tall glass of ice water.
She’s not sure how there is so much natural light in here. The only opening she sees in the immediate area is the hole she just fell through. Perhaps the walls and ceiling here are made of ore and reflect endlessly what little light trickles in.
Mercadia looks around her but sees no exit. Behind her is a great wall with no cracks or crevices and the walls to her side look the same. In fact, this whole place is oval shaped… she is inside an egg of earth.
Straight ahead the cavern only becomes narrower. If the way out is that way then she‘ll have to submerge to get out…
“This better not be a trap.”
This is not the first time Mercadia has thought Melkam the villain, but this time the feeling is powerful. A pregnant girl trapped beneath the earth, nobody looking for her but mutants with pistols, no way out. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time in Milera’s history that an innocent was tricked and murdered by a wandering spirit.
But maybe she’s just being suspicious. Still… her distrust is justified.
Melkam is proud.
It takes Mercadia the better part of an hour to cross the lake of mud and poison, but her bundle is buoyant and the mud carries it for her. This is perhaps the easiest part of her quest thus far –not including being doted on by Malk and Ning, that doesn’t count—this poison proves to be a blessing before it hurts her.
Mercadia feels something lurching in her stomach that is not the bundle, and her pores spit out real sweat this time. The nausea hits her in an instant; she dawdled too long, she can’t know how much of that poison has seeped into her while she’s been wading in it. It’s been seeping into her pores, her ass, her vagina. No wonder it’s her stomach that’s wrenching.
Mercadia swoons at the end of the earth egg and falls forward. She hits her head against the wall but it doesn’t cut her, it gives, like soggy, shattered Styrofoam. Conscious but swooning, Mercadia sinks into the mud and feels for an opening against the wall, she scrapes her fingertips over the brittle wall and pounds her fists against the floor. She can’t stand up, she can’t stand up…

10

“No Mercy.” He whispers to himself, he’s scarcely said anything else for days.
The wizard gardener kneels down exactly twelve feet from where he planted the last patch of seeds. He plants other things: hairs, teeth, scabs if he can get them. The supple parts are always the best for planting spells.
And this one is decadent. There is scarce a person still living in Milera who could face it. He’s sure The Mother won’t.
He parts the earth with his hands and drops the bits into the hole and covers it up again, pats the soil without packing it tight.
From a distance he appears to be a pole wrapped in a flapping black sheet. He’s a skinny one this wizard, it runs in the family.
In the distance is the Birthing Grounds sticking out of the