The God in the Tree and the Fool of the World

Here's a story in the epic fairy tale (mythpunk) side of things. Going for a humorous Grimm's Fairy Tales spin on a nu-fantasy idea. 

            The god arrived sometime in the night, one week before harvest season. The moon was full and orangey-red like a pumpkin and floated serenely and strangely through the midmorning, and the first that the villagers heard of the god was when the milkmaid practiced a continuation of her damned laziness by leaving for the woods before other chores could be demanded of her. She returned in a quarter hour, breathless with fright and excitement.

            The great sequoia tree that stood north of the village, guarding a fork in the road that led to Angarsburg and Vilevre, had a face now.

            As one, the village shoved their way in a huddled throng down the stony path to where the ancient tree towered over the rest of the forest and stared in awe at the remarkably facelike splits the bark had acquired, seemingly of its own volition. Then, to their great surprise, it spoke.

            “I am Eol, god of the Boreal Waste. I am your ruler, and in two weeks time, you shall all be dead.”

            This was met with some consternation. The villagers weren’t particularly keen on the death idea, nor the ruler idea, truth be told (but that they could live with). They whispered furiously amongst themselves for a moment while Eol waited as patiently as only a tree could, before the blacksmith, Tolliver, spoke up. He stepped to the front of the crowd, removing his leather cap, and wringing it in two blackened hands, he whispered “why?”

            “What?” said someone in the crowd.

            “Tell him to speak up!” shrilled Tolliver’s mother.

            “Why?” Tolliver boomed.

            “Because I can,” said the tree, and then fell silent, and regardless of how much they berated and cajoled the god, it spoke no more.

            They held a meeting an hour hence.

            “Cut down the tree!” shouted the tinker.

            “You fool!” shouted the cobbler, “he took the tree to speak with us, cutting it down will mean he will only find another home!”

            “Can we bribe him?” asked the old, blind seamstress.

            “What can you give a god?” they all wondered aloud.

            “We can trick him.”

            This quiet suggestion came from Alistair. They didn’t like Alistair. Much of the time he made them uneasy. It wasn’t that he was cruel, or even particularly rebellious. He was stupid, by all accounts. It’s just that sometimes he asked a stupid question in the way that sounded so reasonable that it made people squint and stare and grumble to themselves and admit they hadn’t thought of it. There were things he did that made people nervous. He did things that no one should be able to do, but he was just so stupid that it never occurred to him he couldn’t. Last summer, when he spent a day watching the chandler make candles for winter, he asked why one couldn’t catch a jar of sunshine. After a sound laughing-at and ridiculing, he had quietly gone into the meadow and come back with a half dozen jars of sunshine and sold them about for a shilling tuppence. He was lazy, for sure. He fished most days, and sometimes sold the fresh trout and river bass for coins at the market. One day the butcher’s daughter had happened upon him lazing by the river bank, telling a long and pointless story while his rod and basket went on fishing without him, pulling fish after fish from the stream. When she asked him how he did it, Alistair had told her “I just asked them nicely. Wouldn’t you have done the same?” She was a liar, though (and everyone knew it).

            “Perhaps if we talk to the god, we can make him leave.” Alistair never seemed smug, just innocence and blond hair and snake-green eyes. The villagers mumbled amongst themselves a moment and then Tolliver spread the crowd like a curtain.

            “You are welcome to try,” he said, “but if you get us all killed I’ll have you arrested.”

The Butcher and the Alchemist

       This is a little something I'm working on. The endgame is to get this particular piece published; where it finds a home I am less than picky about, save for the twin qualities of being in print and getting a little something for it. I am not sure where this is going, but the style reminded me half of a Xanth novel (By the peerless Piers Anthony) and half of The Witcher series (written by Andrzej Sapkowski). Wherever this leads, I like the two main characters and there is enough chemistry there to carry a short story.

           The Alchemist was known as Rah Gaffer Gospode, to some, but to most he went only by “Frith,” for reasons long since forgotten. The “Rah” was a sign of nobility, but he didn’t seem to have a family, or much of anything else, really. He drifted through the forest, mostly alone, occasionally popping into a town to buy or sell a few trifles. Sometimes strange fungi that seemed to twist towards the moon or little glass bulbs filled with blue liquid appeared in the markets after he had gone, but few could say whether he had brought them or not. He was a tallish, strangeish fellow with eyes that shifted color with the phases of the moon and a strong, angular jaw like a stone in a stream.

            He carried a bamboo pack tight-bound with iron bands and locked with two brass padlocks that clinked when he walked. A sword as long as a short man’s leg hung in a scabbard from the side of his pack, a long blue tassel affixed to the hilt. In winter he grew a beard, knotted and black and rambunctious like a briar thicket. Sometimes he did small favors for people in the town of Silverbone, blessing a gate so it never rusted, or creating some elixir that swelled pumpkins three times their normal size until they looked like fat orange sows in their furrows in back gardens. He never slept in a normal house, only in barns or hedgerows  or propped in the crook of a leaning tree eight paces from the road. He spoke little but smiled brightly and often, even if that smile was a touch too wide and a hair too sharp at times.

            Bufo DeLivre, the butcher, was completely different. Short and fat in the strong, sturdy manner of a boar or bulldog, he was loud and as often jovial as he was enraged, and he had thick brown arms like summer hams that he swung in great arcs when he talked. A broad cleaver swung on a leather thong at his belt, the handle polished from three generations of DeLivre hands. He swore it could slash a maple leaf as it fell but chop through a steer’s neck with one blow. No one ever saw him use it. No one ever saw him work, honestly. He sat in front of his shop and shouted orders through the open door at his niece or the orphan boy who was madly in love with his niece and did all the work she was supposed to. Bufo and Frith got along in the bickeringly friendly way fast friends did, with Bufo roaring insults between laughs punctuated by Frith’s quiet, sharp retorts and flashing smile.

            

WebRep

currentVote

noRating

noWeight