The Runes of the Earth

Facing the cliff, Anele let his anger flow. His head leaned, first to one side, then to the other, as though he followed a tune that passed from stone to stone around him.

“Then was not the age of men and women in the Land, and neither wood nor stone had any knowledge of them. Rather it was an era of trees, sentient and grand, beloved by mountains, and the One Forest filled all the Land.

“Its vast life spread from the ancient thighs of Melenkurion Skyweir in the west to the restless song of the Sunbirth Sea in the east, from the ice-gnawed wilderness of the Northron Climbs to the high defiance of the Southron Range. Only at the marges of Lifeswallower did the One Forest stand aside, for even in that lovely age evils and darkness seeped from the depths of Gravin Threndor, leaking harm and malevolence into the Great Swamp.

“And in that age, the spanning woodland was cherished in every peak and fundament of the Land, held precious and treasured by slow granite beneath and around it, for the One Forest knew itself. It had no knowledge of malevolence, or of humankind, but of itself its awareness was immense beyond all estimation. It knew itself in every trunk and limb, every root and leaf, and it sang its ramified song to all the Earth. The music of its knowledge arose from a myriad myriad throats, and was heard by a myriad myriad myriad ears.”

Linden listened as if she were ensnared. She moved only to eat the viands min handed to her. In the rhythm of Anele’s voice as much as in his words, she recognised the Land she loved.

She knew little of the Land’s deepest past: even this much of its history was new to her. But she had sojourned in Andelain, her every nerve alight with percipience and Earthpower, and she felt the fitness of Anele’s story. It was condign: it belonged. She could believe that the Earth’s gutrock would remember such things.

At her side, Liand crouched down to listen, caught by wonder; but she hardly noticed him. For a time she forgot pursuit and black storms. The tale of the One Forest had no bearing on her immediate plight, but she drank it in as if it were hurt loam and aliantha; another form of nourishment.

“Yet in those distant years,” Anele related, “neither men nor women had true ears.” His anger sharpened as he continued, as if he had absorbed the passion of the stones. Linden heard his heart in every word. “When they came to the Land, they came heedless, providing only for themselves. And the malevolence within Lifeswallower had burgeoned, as all darkness must, or be quenched. It had grown great and avid, and its hunger surpassed satiation.

“No tongue can tell of the shock and rue among the trees when human fires and human blades cleared ground for habitation. The mountains know it, and in their hearts they yet protest and grieve, but mortal voice and utterance cannot contain it. A myriad myriad trunks, and a myriad myriad myriad leaves, which had known only themselves in natural growth and decay, and which had therefore never considered wanton pain, then cried out in illimitable dismay-a cry so poignant and prolonged that the deepest core of the peaks might have answered it, were stone itself not also defenceless and unwarded.”

Anele clasped his arms around his knees to contain his distress. “Yet men and women had no ears to hear such woe. And even if they had heard it, their single minds, enclosed and alone, could not have encompassed the Forest’s betrayal, the wood’s lamentation. Only the malice within Lifeswallower heeded it-and gave answer.

“For a time, those who had come to the Land felled trees and charred trunks only because they knew not how else they might achieve space for homes and fields. Thus was their cruelty at first restrained. But their restraint was brutal and brief by the measure of the One Forest’s slow sentience. And after those generations, humankind discovered malevolence, or was discovered by it. Then the murder of the trees was transformed from disregard to savagery.

“Hence came Ravers to the Land,” the old’ man rasped bitterly, “for they were the admixture of men and malevolence, an enduring hunger for evil coalesced and concentrated in transient flesh generation after swift generation until they became beings unto themselves-spirits capable of flesh, yet spared the necessities of death and birth. Thus they gained names and definition, three dark souls who knew themselves as they knew the One Forest, and who aspired above all things to trample underfoot its vast and vulnerable sentience.

“And humankind had no ears to hear what had occurred. Men and women were only ignorant, not malefic, for their lives were too brief to sustain such darkness, and when they perished their descendants were again only ignorant.

“Yet even that renewed and ever renewed ignorance could not spare the One Forest. Humankind was as deaf to malevolence as to lamentation, and so it was easily led, easily mastered, easily given purpose, by the three who had learned to name themselves moksha, turiya and samadhi. Therefore the butchery of the trees swelled and quickened from generation to generation.”

There Anele paused; released his knees in order to scrub unbidden tears from the grime on his cheeks. His blind eyes stared at the broken rocks as if he could see the ancient moment of their shattering. Around him, the breeze flowed slowly, and the chill of high ice seeped into the rift, as the westward peaks began to bar the sun.

Linden waited for him in a kind of suspense, as though she needed the old man’s tale.

When he had gripped his knees again, he said, “Still the One Forest could only wail and weep, unable to act in self-defence.” Voiceless tears spread anger and sorrow into his torn beard. “Despite its vastness, it, too, lived in ignorance. It knew only itself and pain, and so could not comprehend its own possible strength. Born of Earthpower, sustained by Earthpower, knowing Earthpower, the One Forest could not grasp that Earthpower might have other uses.

“Thus the destruction of the trees grew as the ambitions of humankind and Ravers mounted. And with that bereavement came another loss, inseparable from the first, but more bitter and deadly. In the slaughter of each tree, one small gleam of the Forest’s Land-spanning sentience failed, never to be renewed or replaced. Thus the wishes of the Ravers were fulfilled. As the butchery of the trees increased, so the One Forest’s knowledge of itself diminished, lapsing toward slumber and extinction.

“That grief was too great to be borne.” Anele himself seemed hardly able to contain it. His voice rose to a low cry. “Even mountains could not endure it. Peaks shattered themselves in sorrow and protest. This very cliff split as a heart is torn asunder by rage and loss, and by helplessness.”

For a moment, he gaped at the riven walls. Their yearning had come upon him like a geas. They needed his mortal tongue to articulate their interminable rue. Cold exhaled down the rift like a sigh of protest and loss.

But then his head jerked to the other side, and he seemed to find a new vein of song. His voice dropped to a murmur which Linden would not have been able to hear if he had not chipped each word off his stone lament like a flake of obsidian, jagged and distinct.

“The Earth itself heard that cry. Every knowing ear throughout the Earth heard it. And at last, when much of the Lower Land had been slain of trees, and the devastation of the Upper had truly begun, the cry was answered.”

Abruptly Anele leaned forward, shifted the angle of his head. “There.” With one trembling, gnarled finger, he pointed into the centre of the sloping rubble. “It is written there-the coming of the Elohim.”

Gloaming filled his moonstone eyes. “Many centuries after the rising of the Ravers, at a time when much of the One Forest’s sentience had dwindled to embers, a being such as the trees had never known came among them, singing of life and knowledge, of eldritch power beyond the puissance of any Raver. And singing as well of retribution.

“Why the Elohim came then and not earlier, before so much had been lost, these stones cannot grasp. Yet come she did-or he, for the Elohim are strange, and such distinctions describe them poorly. And with her song, the remaining leagues of the One Forest awoke to power.”

This part of the story Linden had heard before. Findail the Appointed had told it to the assembled Search for the One Tree aboard Starfare’s Gem. Still she listened with all her attention. Anele conveyed an impression of urgency, of necessity, which she could neither name nor ignore.

“The trees,” he told the gathering shadows, “could neither strike nor flee. Their limbs were not formed to wield fire and iron.” Findail had said, A tree may know love and feel pain and cry out, but has few