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.”
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