Chapter 5 The Hollow Tree
The Hollow Tree
Osric
Osric liked to be aware that he was dying, as a general rule.
“How are we in the Threefold Death?” he asked around an uncooperative tongue.
That was what he was doing now: arguing with trees.
The tree rustled its answer. “You have been impaled. That’s why you can’t move. You are stoned. It’s why you can’t think. And you nearly drowned and finished the job.”
“Oh,” said Osric.
Fairhrim, with her eyes out of focus, remarked, “The Druids built the Threefold Death into the place.”
“That is correct,” said the oak.
“Clever,” said Fairhrim. “Lucky you stopped us.”
“There is purpose in the accidental,” said the tree.
Osric, concerned that he and Fairhrim had simultaneously gone insane, asked the tree, “How are you talking?”
“I’m not talking,” said the tree. “You are in an altered state. You’re able to interpret things your sort normally can’t.”
Fairhrim wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees. She looked at the tree with a soft wondering gaze, as a child lost in a daydream. “Are you the Green Man?”
“Do I look like a man?” asked the tree, in a tone that could only be described as leafy annoyance. “I am an oak from the Dodona grove.”
“That’s in Greece,” said Fairhrim.
“Yes. I was brought here by the Druids.”
“Why did they bring you here?”
“To consult me for their divinations. We are at an edge here. The veil is thin and does not cumber passage Between.”
“Between what?”
“Between,” repeated the tree. “Things can be in both places at once here. Separate existences, but only one root. And time here is an infinite circle.”
“Stop speaking like a bloody oracle,” said Osric.
“But I am an oracle,” said the tree.
“What happened to the Druids?” asked Osric.
“I don’t know,” said the tree. “I want you to find them. That’s why I didn’t let you drown, though I would have liked to feed on you. I can’t exactly go looking for them, you know. I don’t know where they’ve gone. I can’t feel them anymore. Perhaps it was the Odious Ones.”
“The who?” asked Osric.
“I do not know what you rootless creatures call each other,” said the tree.
“Well, what do they look like?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t any eyes, though I can See. I can hardly differentiate between you and a common earthworm.”
Fairhrim twirled a reed between her fingers. “Why would anyone harm the Druids?”
“Because of what’s below,” said the tree.
“What’s below?” asked Osric.
“Answers,” said the tree.
Osric was woozily infuriated by these vague responses. “Why can’t you See where the Druids have got to?”
“What do you think I am,” asked the tree, “a common fortune teller? I can See vast possibility, not the smallness of now.”
“Someone’s coming,” said Fairhrim.
“If it’s the Odious Ones, you had better hide,” said the tree. Round the back of me. Get in. Quickly.”
Why must they hide? Why was Osric taking advice from a tree?
Fairhrim was now deeply engrossed in contemplation of a point in the air three inches from her nose and did not move.
Osric prodded her. She and Osric, their pupils blown wide, their limbs uncontrollable, flopped and crawled derangedly to the back of the tree.
Osric felt himself on the verge of a laughing fit.
They found a fissure in the tree’s trunk: its heartwood had rotted out long ago. Fairhrim slipped in first. Osric, feeling witless and compliant, followed.
The tree pulled itself shut. The fissure that Osric and Fairhrim had used to climb in round the back disappeared entirely. Its interior was dark and cramped. He and Fairhrim stood chest to chest.
Outside the tree came the sounds of lurching and scraping. A suitably horrible rattle of breath would have been comforting somehow, but the things outside did not breathe.
“Unnatural,” tutted the tree quietly. “The dead should be allowed to sleep their long sleep.”
As Osric processed this clue, a second one came quickly: something swung towards the tree, and there was a crack, and the tip of a curved blade materialised inches from Osric’s nose.
“Oh, Hel,” whispered Osric, recognising the scythe. “They’re Dreor.”
Fairhrim did not respond with the desired reaction. Instead of immediate alarm, she yawned.
The Dreor twisted the blade cruelly before pulling it out. Then came more swings—more impacts against the oak’s ancient bark—more scythes piercing through, left and right, up and down. Osric and Fairhrim squeezed against each other. Bark creaked and cracked.
Something shifted and rumbled beneath their feet. Osric held his tācn out to read the shadows. A long, narrow tunnel had opened.
“Go down,” said the tree.
“Why?” asked Osric.
“Answers,” said the tree.
It shuddered; more scythes were being swung into it. A Dreor found the fissure in the trunk; gauntleted fingers appeared, prying it open. The tree squeezed itself shut and the gauntleted fingers were crushed like old tin.
“You must go down,” said the tree. “I know what happens next.”
“They’re hurting you,” said Fairhrim. “They’re going to kill you.”
“A hundred years hence, none of this will matter,” said the tree.
The tree shook, pierced by scythes from root to crown. The tip of a scythe narrowly avoided Fairhrim’s temple. It was too dangerous to remain here. Osric snatched her by the hand and pulled her down.
The tree’s dreamy voice followed as they tumbled down. “I Saw you coming long ago…”
Down, down went Osric and Fairhrim, into the depths of the Tor. The tree’s roots nudged them along left and right until they emerged into a sort of cellar, where they landed in a heap.
Fairhrim lay unmoving and groggy.
Osric tapped her cheeks (the upper ones). “Oi. Stay awake.”
Fairhrim shook her head and held up her lit tācn. They were in a large earth-floored storeroom. She pressed her other hand to the curve of the tree’s largest root and asked, “Are you still there?”
There was no answer.
“They’ve killed it,” said Fairhrim.
“Pity,” said Osric. “I wanted to ask more questions.”
He glanced at Fairhrim and saw that his levity was out of place. Silent tears ran down her face. “That tree was a marvel. It died protecting us.”
Osric did not know what to do with himself. Fairhrim rarely showed emotions, and when she did, it was annoyance. Her sadness was new and unknown.
He looked away to afford her a bit of privacy. She ran her hands gently along the root, and said, “I am so sorry.”
She dried her tears with the heels of her palms. After a bit of sniffing, she said thickly, “We almost d-drowned ourselves. We’re idiots.”
“Those flowers were potent; they made us idiots.”
“Those s-spines that impaled us were full of some paralytic substance,” said Fairhrim. “Slow acting. I didn’t even notice. I thought I was tired. Come here.”
Osric stumbled towards her. She pressed her tācn to the tears in his trousers. Her seith flowed into him with cool authority, chasing away the heaviness in his legs.
Then she lay back down and said, “I’m going to have a nap.”
“No, you aren’t,” said Osric.
He pulled her to her feet. She slumped against him.
“I think we’re somewhere under the Tor,” said Osric. “Somewhere in your persistent mythological tunnels.”
The cellar’s walls were lined with shelves. Some held perfume bottles, others tins of soup—and then, in a corner, he saw rather familiar-looking bottles of Scotch. They looked exactly the same as the ones he had found at Wellesley Keep, which had turned out to be holding the Pox in transport media.
“No,” said Fairhrim, when Osric pulled one out.
Osric opened the bottle. The chemical whiff was as un-Scotch-like as possible. “It’s not Scotch. It’s the same stuff we found in Wellesley Keep.”
Fairhrim tripped away from him, shaking her head, as one in a nightmare. “I don’t believe it.”
Osric broke the lid of a perfume bottle and smelled its contents. “Not perfume.” He smashed a tin of soup. Clear liquid seeped into the earth. “Not soup.”
“The Druids can’t be responsible for the Pox. Please, no, they can’t be—” Fairhrim looked ready to cry again. “The Druids would never. Never. And how could they? It makes absolutely no sense.”
Osric was keener on escaping the Faerwundor than dealing with Fairhrim’s outraged confusion. He held her against him and shadow-walked out of the cellar amid her disbelieving sputters.
They emerged from a low door into an underground maze of hallways.
The underside of the Tor had nothing of the natural rusticity of the Faerwundor above; it was corridor after corridor of white tile and glass windows giving onto laboratories with gleaming steel worktops.
Osric could only describe the place as a production facility.
Pale electric lights quivered off and on as they walked, leaving them alternately blinking in light or stumbling in the dark.
Fairhrim asked, “Since when have Druids got facilities for endotoxin testing? And aseptic filling? Since when have they got electricity?”
They passed a clean room air lock plastered with instructions regarding gowning, hairnets, and shoe covers.
“So much for your mortar and pestles,” said Osric.
“This is a sho-sophisticated pharmaceutical complex. We don’t have half this stuff at Swanstone. We’re the cutting edge. Not Druids.”
“Where are the Druids?”
They made their way through the subterranean maze.
The lights flickered off, then turned back on to reveal a large sort of foyer, one or two stories high.
It was somewhere below the tree in the Faerwundor; the tree’s roots circled the ceiling.
Spiral stairs twisted down around a tumbling waterfall in the centre of the room.
The answer to Osric’s question came, morbidly, as they entered the foyer—lines of dead Druids upon white tiles, killed, based on the stench, around the same time as the sentinels above.
Fairhrim muffled a groan in the crook of Osric’s arm. “Mordaunt—this was a—this was a mass execution—”
An old Druid lay on the floor like a gory Vitruvian Man. He had been bashed upon the head; dried blood trickled down his white beard and crusted upon his green robes. He wheezed as they neared.
“He’s alive,” gasped Fairhrim.