| Bret T. Norwood |
The Arboretumor the Book of Sacred Treesread by bret t. norwood ~I~ Twenty times ten thousand nights were yet to come before Ilion’s fall when the twilight-eyed paced the ground from Aryan Land of his native Steppes to wild Iberia by Ocean’s grip through western forest and frozen glade to subdue the world beneath his boots of oxen hide. These, our memories, still sing of him. So Proficient Father, you Horned One, regale us now with clear unimpeded, prodigious sight. May unknown priestesses, now unborn, like ravens sing these words I write. ‘Neath locks of nightsbelly hair, the twilight-eyed, Aryan son, gazed on woods of the Horned One, incomplete thoughts in wary mind. The trees; pines, hawthorns, elms, like foreign pillars or totems of gods known to ancient, inscrutable minds, reminded Ironraven of why he’d left. He’d headed, with abandon, west to the wilds beyond the River Rhine – as later Germans would invoke it – the boundary-line of Aryan lands. He would make the world his home. It was a world like a winter flower, losing petals before a watchful eye, an hour-blossom – something ephemeral; as the vain called the world “Arya” the world was coming to an empire’s end. Ironraven only wanted – wanted to remember the cosmos before that name was spoken. Primordial trees, older than gods (the younger generations) spoke unerringly of that ancient universal, the pre-human infinity, as Ironraven’s steed set the world to spin beneath those drumming hooves in the forest called No More Regrets. No tongue had called the land “Iberia” or “Hispania” yet; the men of the soil only knew names of fragmentary tribes with unrelated tongues and competing gods. Though now it is merely “the Old World,” this was the frontier of knowing then. Then there was magic still, unknown gods, virgin forests and veiling mountains, indigenous tribes of immortal occupancy and legends that outgrew shadows of truth. The Aryan son flew far from kings whose names would perish with dead Arya. It was not easy - the grey warrior had broken the boundary with astounding force to escape Arya’s monster jaws. Beyond the Rhine they even speak of it, like children speak of heroes or beasts. The old witchdoctor of the western plateaus had Aryan coins on his fetish staff. The Werewolves of splendorous Arya brought war west to conquer them in ages past when the kings wore gold and it was still honor to serve the Cult. The Wolfgod and the horse alike were signs of terror unto the Pyrenees. Old warriors once conquered trading cities by their horse’s reins, seizing the thrones set up by others. It was the horse and the ethic of the Wolf , both Steppe-born, good old Aryan traditions and rites, that took Kaneš, brought the Hellenes, conquered the Rhine and the Indus people. Under imposed peace the people prayed to Dyeus, the Thunder-Warrior. But the shadow of success is the distance of fall of the rider from horse. The wilting flower was the lightning bolt fading wistfully away in the waxing night as Ironraven rode the world, his home. Before the Pyrenees, north, by the coast, he’d met the shaman who clumsily spoke of the terror he foretold in the fountain cave. The holy man’s fire shot up sparks, and star-shaped bronze tokens rattled on his staff as he fearfully spoke. The old witchdoctor used the tongue of Arya with awkward, backwards mastery, but he was understood well by Ironraven. Calmthirst, his sword, would avenge this evil for the lives of girls raped and killed by a monster so easily recognized by his deeds, a disease borne in Aryan blood. He rose to his feet with a final nod and went to the forest to bind a torch. The night-birds of the nameless Girl sang and shifted in ancient trees. The twilight-eyed Aryan son beneath the shimmering sky’s vast herd, beneath attendant Venus and Silver Queen, lit his swathed wand and brandished sword to face the faceless thing that Arya left when her steeds withdrew from failing wars. For in the cave he met what he foreknew in the tribesman’s words, the aging form of an Aryan soldier, gone mad alone. Calmthirst dispatched the monster well; the sword of Ironraven, meteor-stone, had flown as a falcon stealing hares in an open field. The Wolf Soldier fell without fame; the immortal glory remained Ironraven’s, for victory smiled on Arya’s son, and human-pressed wine watered the soil of Earth’s bowels. The man was a Teuton, of the Rhineland tribes, a western people to submit to Arya. Those fought fiercely at first, preventing all subjugation from the Steppe. But the Teuton knee which did not bow soon marched for Dyeus. ~ II ~ So the twilight-eyed Aryan son crossed the forests of endless tribes in unnamed Iberia. He made himself free of the range of Wolves with his sword at side. Sappy pines, nearly innumerable, were at his fleet horse’s flanks when he noticed the rings in the rough bark. “These have to be,” he said aloud, “a human work, by knives and tools.” Ironraven slowed his horse to look; the carvings in the trees were ubiquitous around the hoof-tamed trail his horse was taking. Men and things were in those rings. “I am curious,” he said to no one, “what foreign fables these pictures show.” He watched them pass with measured awe. At first mere fantasies were all he found – warriors and demons unknown to Arya. Some giant hero, perhaps the Horned One, comes to birth in a cosmic blossom that rose from the sea. By the next image, his offspring are born, waging mighty wars for the cryptic boons the Horned One left. More passed by. Ironraven took in pictorial histories that none could believe. Cities and societies assembled and fell. A hero fords a heaven-sent flood, and recognition came to Ironraven’s mind. The epic poems of Aryan seers continued to recall the sailing wine-maker whose three sons were the first kings of Arya and Shinar and exotic Egypt, and in the next frame he saw these too, walking the Earth to found the empires that would recall their fame in their royal courts. “This is incredible,” the twilight-eyed remarked quietly. “These carvings recall with inhuman detail the history of the world!” He admired, amazed, his world, his home. He saw Arya arise from the Steppe, sweeping across the foreign lands. The warhorse led the Wolfgod’s legion to conquer the realms recalled in compositions of Arya’s poets, and warriors’ lives were retold consistently, to immortal glory. He saw Arya turn and decline as heroes’ spirits abandoned the lands they had named after their own hearts. The kings lost control of the people’s lives; they began to wander and a lone westerner rode out across the River Rhine. The rider crossed the world alone. In the carved-out ring on that ancient tree, stiff Ironraven stopped his cautious gaze. He stayed his horse and touched his iron sword. His twilight eyes searched the trees and shadows for a sign to explain the demonic treachery against all reason: Ironraven saw himself in the round carving on that sacred pine. Frantic, he searched the next ring, and the next; he found only puzzle upon puzzle upon mystery. Baffled, the rider saw Achilles kill Hector and a wooden horse desolate Aryan Troy. He saw the ships leave and wise Odysseus get lost by the wrath of Apam Napots. He saw Aeneas escape the falling city to set Roman society upon the Italian Tiber. It was all meaningless to Ironraven’s eyes – mere people and things mistakable for occurrences already done and passed; mere useless heroes and superfluous cities that would assemble and fall just like endless others since creation’s birth from the cosmic blossom of the Horned One. Pines and centuries passed by the horse’s flanks, while white ravens like women sang. Ironraven watched the wrath of Teuton sons spill across the Rhine to infect the lands and an immeasurable war laid waste to history. When many trees passed, the pictured people became small and gray and there were no heroes. The last pines showed the things crawling away in shame to hide in pyramids and cubes. Finally, there came a tree at the end of the forest, in Ironraven’s way, its evil image maliciously facing him. It held a carving he couldn’t comprehend; he was disturbed by the inhuman artwork he encountered before him. A plain of solid, gray shapes, sparse and regular – spires and cylinders, orbs and cubes – was all it showed. He could make nothing of it. ~ III ~ Beyond the forest the twilight-eyed Aryan son found a grassy plain at the foot of imposing, godly mountains, inhabited by a curious, backward tribe that painted themselves with sulfuric mud, a color reminiscent of mustard flowers. They talked to him, but he couldn’t understand; he talked to them, and they seemed horrified. The salty smell of an unseen sea wafted in the air across the purple mountains. The yellow people chattered like birds or rattling wheels; their red hair resembled flames, their eyes, oceans. Ironraven called them “Sparrowtongues.” Their gangly chief, dusted in saffron, kept cheetahs as pets and hunted cocks. They mistrusted Ironraven immediately and wholly and their blue eyes, with naïve wonder and inclement suspicion, never left him. The wary and shy Sparrow girls, even after several weeks with the yellow tribe, would not near him like the eastern girls who knew hospitality for foreign guests. They never laughed or sang for him. He was something unclean and dangerous for being alien to their world and home. Aryan poets taught that dreaded Dyeus had drowned the Earth for its inhospitality. The worldwide flood of the wine-sailor must never have touched the yellow-skins, Ironraven reflected. Sitting by a fire, he had a side alone on his granite seat while Sparrow people piled man on man across the flames to keep away. They roasted fowl but fed him radishes; he was unwelcome at the sacred meal. “I cannot stay here,” he said to himself. Ironraven was close to the farthest reaches of all there was – the Gates of the World. The twilight-eyed made hand signs to inquire the nature of things beyond the purple mountains of the setting sun. The life drained fast from the chief’s body and faint women left the crowd, afraid. The angry chief, a gangly man, led Ironraven by arm across the village in a fit of haste to see the mortuary that Sparrowtongues used for corpses. He watched the chief making hand signs. “Right, mŗtōs,” he said: “dead.” And the yellow chief was saying a word like a raven would: “kha, kha!” Then the gangly chief brought Ironraven by arm to a hill above their huts. He watched the chief making hand signs, a hand to one end, a hand to the other, far end of town. Ironraven understood. “Right, weīks,” he said: “town.” The yellow chief pronounced a word like a ground-bird might: “deez, deez!” Ironraven put the two words together now as the Sparrowtongue, impatient, glared. “City of the Dead,” he said, in wonder. The chief put a finger on his azure feather, ensign of royalty, and said only, “Pana.” ~ IV~ Ironraven left at dawn for the mountain mist before the Sparrow chief could stop his steps. The supernatural haze was solid no matter how high Ironraven ascended. Mixed up in white, mysteriously waxing until nothing else remained clear, he trudged up slopes, rocks crumbling beneath his boots of oxen hide. Somewhere unknown songbirds sang, recalling incantations of the Sparrow chief so much that Ironraven mulled in wonder whether the chief followed behind in the misty whatever, so expansive and white. His muddy ascent took most of the morning; his calf muscles burned with thorough fatigue. At noon a bluebird emerged from nothing and fluttered confused in Ironraven’s face before vanishing entirely in the mountain mist. His boots began to point downward instead of up but the mist remained as thick as water on the mountain’s face. Gravity his compass, the Aryan exile came down the mount with rolling stones and washed-out dust that echoed throughout the unseen world like dead man’s deeds. Ironraven wandered the world alone. No family, no home, no honor of aristocracy, he had nothing to bind him to society, the city, the assembly of creatures called humans who built monuments and memories that meant nothing to gods, to nature, to being, but he wandered free, alone and afar without a tinge of longing for his native Steppes; only a bit of sorrow, emptiness, or loneliness… The price of civilization, the cost of the polis: alienation and death. Ironraven, stubborn – hopeful – hiked on as the mountain mist withdrew its veil slowly but surely as azure skies appeared ‘tween clouds that yielded themselves to the steadfast will of the outcast man. The mystery unfolded like so many doors to show the figures, the feared shapes – rods and spires, cubes and spheres – inhumanly perfect slabs of gray slate arranged as a city, assembled so straight, so errorless, featureless, terrible and feared, foreign and strange. The City of the Dead expanded before him with no regard for land or sea or hill. The city filled earth and water indifferently; buildings marched into sea as if it were no matter, so purely geometric, consuming and devouring, growing like fungus across the hopeless world, its home. Ironraven stopped. The Dreaded City stayed his steps with god-sent terror. The inconceivable thing he saw in the tree was before him now, unavoidable, evil. Imaginations of the gray, pitiful things of the ring-shaped carvings hiding in the solids caused him to shudder, like spiders in nests, or aborted fetuses, unforgivably dead, contorted unnaturally in canopic jars. If the cosmic blossom congealed or birthed, or assembled, this city, this abomination of man, the elder gods should be condemned to death. The world, corrupted, could rot alone! “This is the end,” he said, a sigh. The city, perhaps of a previous cycle, left over in secret from even older times, when the sea was not here and mountains unformed, the end of an identical, lost aeon, reminded Ironraven of the pre-Aryan infinity where all cities fall, even this one, the last one, leading to a new one, born of new heroes, recalled in compositions of new lines of poets, their esteemed glory restoring the cosmos again and again only for certain death to wipe them away in the eternal currents of the river Creation. The City of the Dead was just like Arya. Whether it was a fossil or a demon’s mirage, the Dreaded City, a future or a past, was consumed by clouds as Ironraven cried on his knees in dirt. Tired of loneliness, an enemy Calmthirst could not dispatch, he turned his heels from the damned city. Before him stretched the open world of wild Hispania. Some white hinds crossed a brook beside the leaning larches and willows, where a raised range of country continued into the forest as the white fog wisps faded away. Bret T. Norwood lives in Wyoming. His work has also appeared in Distinct Issue One. |