Tree, Gall, SongWren Douglas
1700 words Making the ink for the prophet’s scriptures is an easy task. First you pick the peaches from the tree that shades the walls of the inner garden; the gods themselves planted the seed that germinated it, nursing it to health with twelve days of rains followed by twelve days of sun, and commanded a monastery to be built around it once the first sprout broke the soil. It’s the pride of the church, the tree, and the fruit in your wicker basket its most prized possession. Every week, lords and ladies come to offer you a dowry’s worth of riches in the hope you’ll take their daughters as apprentices, so persistent in their pursuit of divine favor you’re running out of ways to say no. A marquis recently threatened to gift you a harpsichord with real ivory keys and enough gold leaf to double its weight. The memory makes song itch under your tongue, but you squish it between your cheek and your teeth. You have to choose the right peaches, as the procedure demands. Also, the prophet’s gaze is tracking you. He approaches with placidity in the curve of his mouth, his figure cutting a narrow white line through the grass and the tuff walls; the light dances in green swaths across his face as it passes through the leaves. No member of the church is allowed to stand in the shadow of the tree, except for you. “My dear,” he says, stretching the sound wide. His eyes lower from your face to the neckline of your robe, which folds outward as you bend to paw at a peach. “Must you always do the tedious work yourself? The sun will bake your skin at this time of the day.” You adjust your grip and pull, balancing yourself on a low branch as the bark rubs against the soles of your feet. The peach comes off its stalk with ease, warm and golden in your hand: it’ll do. “None of the children are of age to help yet,” you say, careful to turn around so your hair won’t get caught or your eye poked. The last peach you need is higher up, but you can reach it fine with a bit of maneuvering. The prophet scoffs. “Of age? The oldest girl is twelve,” he says. “Surely that’s enough.” You shift your weight to your knee and pull yourself up onto the branch, ignoring the spike of vertigo as you snatch the last peach you need. Again, it comes off smoothly. The tree rustles around you in recognition. “Not for holy things,” you say. Oil-slick artifice coats his lips, the sign he’s caught your meaning but intends to ignore it. When you swing your legs down, he catches your waist before you can make the leap and presses your bodies together, slowly lowering you to the ground; by the grace of the gods, your skirt doesn’t bunch up past your mid-thigh. “Why the hurry?” he asks in your ear. “The inkwells are empty,” you say, though you don’t mention you’ve been draining them down the privy each night, careful not to skim off too much. “They need replenishment.” A sigh that tastes of sweetened wine ghosts over the line of your neck. “Married to her duties, my priestess,” the prophet says, but he puts space between the two of you at last. He makes an effort to look the pious part when he’s in the open. “You’ll come later, then?” You bow your head in deference. “Of course.” 
After setting the basket of peaches aside on the kitchen counter, you go to the fireplace and gather the charcoal in a sack, scraping the rake against the blackened bricks. The sound comforts you, after the prophet’s honeyed words. You heap the charcoal into a mortar, grateful for your gloves, and glance at the pan waiting on the stove. Usually, you’d slice the peaches open, crush their pits and toss the innards in the pan to cook the amygdalin away. The prophet used to make sure you’d do that every single time, back when you’d only just succeeded the previous priestess. Years of making perfectly safe ink for him have eased his fears away, though, so he’s not here to watch as you skip the pan and add the softer bits directly to the charcoal, followed by water and gum. You grind the pestle until everything is even and well-meshed, indistinguishable from the usual. Your heart only trembles slightly. After you’ve taken your gloves off, you pop a slice of peach into your mouth: it tastes like nectar, glazing your palate in sunlight, and you resolve to share the rest with the children before you go deliver the prophet his new batch of ink. 
When you succeeded the previous priestess, she explained to you the full scope of your role. You’re the tender of the tree, tasked to nurse it like the gods and mesh its blessing with the prophet’s ink so that he may always write the truth, but you’re also the tender of the monastery. You take in children who have nowhere else to go and you make sure the granary is full; you handle payrolls and keep an eye out, at all times. “One day,” the old priestess said to you the day she divested her robe, “something will grow bent out of shape, like an oak gall full of grubs.” You still remember her unmoving stare when she said the next words, the chill in it forever fizzling where it meets your warmer memories. “It shall fall upon you to excise it, lest it fester in our home. This, too, is your duty, as it was once mine.” The prophet’s at his desk, his quill scratching the parchment in a familiar pattern of starts and stops. Earlier he greeted you by grabbing your chin and pressing a wet kiss to the corner of your mouth, emboldened by the privacy of his quarters. This is the second time he’s done that, and it won’t be the last. So you watch him write. It’s a long hymn he’s composing, stanza after stanza of future floods, landslides, bouts of hail so violent the farmers will have to swaddle their crops in thick, waxed cloth. It used to surprise you, how mundane his scriptures were. He’s a messy writer too. His hands are painted black, ink seeping through the skin and into his bloodstream, and he licks his index finger each time he has to turn the page. His tongue flicks over the pad, comes up stained. You wish the previous priestess had told you how long it’ll take for his body to convert the amygdalin into cyanide, because the wait is crawling over your bare arms like ants. “You shan’t rely on anyone’s help,” the old woman’s voice whispers in your ear. “Given an inch, they would argue you’re blowing things out of proportion. They would call you hasty, hysterical. Frigid. So you shall act alone, and dispose of their useless concerns.” You’re so busy steadying your breaths you almost miss the signs. The prophet hunches over the desk, a hand pressed to his forehead, smearing ink all over the sweat-slick skin. His other hand goes to his stomach and he looks at you, addled like one of the kids when they wake up from a nightmare. “My dear,” he says, “would you fetch me a glass of water? The pitcher’s on the sideboard.” “Of course,” you say. Your feet carry you across the room as if they’re the only thing keeping your head from floating off your shoulders to bump into the ceiling. Your hands shake when they close around the pitcher, but the condensation is blessedly cool against your palms. You focus on the shape of the droplets while the prophet vomits, moaning syllables that could slur together into your name. If the poison isn’t enough to kill him, you’ll have to finish the job yourself. Excise the gall and crush the grubs under your heel. The prophet once showed you where he keeps his knife—an exquisite mother-of-pearl blade he was gifted by a heiress, likely in the hopes he would write of her land in his hymns or put in a good word with you. You unglue your hands from the pitcher, wiping them on your robe, and turn to the desk, ready to rifle through its drawers with a poisoned man writhing on the floor next to you. Your nerves are not so frayed you wouldn’t kick him in the head if he grabbed for your legs. When you look down, though, he's crawling to the door. There is a frenzied light in his eyes, his mouth dribbling with bile as he cries for help. Panic streaks through you. How would you explain this, if he got a hold of someone? If he got a hold of the antidote he demands you’re always fully stocked with, and then branded you a crazed heretic? Your lungs gasp for air, as if submerged. You need to get that knife before he gets to the door, but your body is rooted in place, cursing the prophet for his lechery and the former priestess for her burden and most of all yourself, for this gutless display in the face of your duty. Your skin is cold and you can’t breathe through the stink of puke. Then, children’s laughter fills the room. They must be racing down the hallway, calling for each other like a flock of birds as they rush to the mess hall for dinner. Their chittering drowns out the prophet’s pleas with talk of cakes and roasted yam. He sucks in a stuttering inhale, but blood sprays out instead of words. One hand claws at the wood of the door, pale as bone and just as rigid; it falls with a wet slap when the prophet slumps forward, face-down in his own sickness. A second passes in which you can only stare, obsessively checking for any movement in his chest. Then time starts again and you lurch forward, lunging for the curtained window; when you yank it open, the sight of the tree greets you, unchanged by your act. Its branches stand solid and its leaves strive upward, their edges tinged gold by the light. Your lungs fill again. You don’t spare the body a second glance as you climb onto the windowsill, nor as you leap down into the grass. No hands grab fistfuls of your flesh, and your skirt sways gently at your ankles. When you put your hands to the bark, the tree sighs. It was just a gall, it murmurs in its wind-chime language of rustles and creaks. The shade of the canopy cools the nervous heat on your skin, slows your squallish heart. I’ve endured many and many more I will endure. You close your eyes as the sweetness washes over you, breathing in the peaches and resin and soil. Chasing away the taste of sickness. When song itches under your tongue again, you let it go. |
|
Wren Douglas
Wren Douglas is an SFF author based in Italy, where they live with their devilish cats and one sprightly old dog. Their work has been featured in the 2023 Lambda finalist anthology XENOCULTIVARS: Stories of Queer Growth, among other venues. When they're not writing, they like to spend their free time going on walks, napping with their cats and playing tabletop RPGs.
|
|
Baubles From Bones © 2024
|