Orson Card - Maps in a Mirror - The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

He climbed all one day and slept in a cleft of a rock. He moved slowly, for climbing in sandals was clumsy, and without his great toes Cer could not climb barefoot. The next morning he climbed more. Though he nearly fell one time when falling would have meant crashing a mile down onto the distant plain, at last he reached the knifelike top of the Mitherkame, and heaven.

For of a sudden the stone gave way to soil. Not the pale sandy soil of the drylands, nor the red soil of Greet, but the dark black soil of the old songs from the north, the soil that could not be left alone for a day or it would sprout plants that in a week would be a forest.

And there was a forest, and the ground was thick with grass. Cer had seen only a few trees in his life, and they had been olive trees, short and gnarled, and fig sycamores, that were three times the height of a man. These were twenty times the height of a man and ten steps around, and the young trees shot up straight and tall so that not a sapling was as small as Cer, who for twelve years old was not considered small.

To Cer, who had known only wheat and hay and olive orchards, the forest was more magnificent than the mountain or the city or the river or the moon.

He slept under a huge tree. He was very cold that night. And in the morning he realized that in a forest he would find no farms, and where there were no farms there was no food for him. He got up and walked deeper into the forest. There were people in the High Mountains, else there would be no king, and Cer would find them. If he didn’t, he would die. But at least he would not die in the realms of the Nefyrre.

He passed many bushes with edible berries, but he did not know they could be eaten so he did not eat. He passed many streams with slow stupid fish that he could have caught, but in Greet fish was never eaten, because it always carried disease, and so Cer caught no fish.

And on the third day, when he began to feel so weak from hunger that he could walk no longer, he met the treemage.

He met him because it was the coldest night yet, and at last Cer tore branches from a tree to make a fire. But the wood did not light, and when Cer looked up he saw that the trees had moved. They were coming closer, surrounding him tightly. He watched them, and they did not move as he watched, but when he turned around the ones he had not been watching were closer yet. He tried to run, but the low branches made a tight fence he could not get through. He couldn’t climb, either, because the branches all stabbed downward. Bleeding from the twigs he had scraped, Cer went back to his camping place and watched as the trees at last made a solid wall around him.

And he waited. What else could he do in his wooden prison?

In the morning he heard a man singing, and he called for help.

“Oh ho,” he heard a voice say in a strange accent. “Oh ho, a tree cutter and a firemaker, a branch killer and a forest hater.”

“I’m none of those,” Cer said. “It was cold, and I tried to build a fire only to keep warm.”

“A fire, a fire,” the voice said. “In this small part of the world there are no fires of wood. But that’s a young voice I hear, and I doubt there’s a beard beneath the words.”

“I have no beard,” Cer answered. “I have no weapon, except a knife too small to harm you.”

“A knife? A knife that tears sap from living limbs, Redwood says. A knife that cuts twigs like soft manfingers, says Elm. A knife that stabs bark till it bleeds, says Sweet Aspen. Break your knife,” said the voice outside the trees, “and I will open your prison.”

“But it’s my only knife,” Cer protested, “and I need it.”

“You need it here like you need fog on a dark night. Break it or you’ll die before these trees move again.”

Cer broke his knife.

Behind him he heard a sound, and he turned to see a fat old man standing in a clear space between the trees. A moment before there had been no clear space.

“A child,” said the man.

“A fat old man,” said Cer, angry at being considered as young as his years.

“An illbred child at that,” said the man. “But perhaps he knows no better, for from the accent of his speech I would say he comes from Greetland, and from his clothing I would say he was poor, and it’s well known in Mitherwee that there are no manners in Greet.”

Cer snatched up the blade of his knife and ran at the man. Somehow there were many sharp-pointed branches in the way, and his hand ran into a hard limb, knocking the blade to the ground.

“Oh, my child,” said the man kindly. “There is death in your heart.”

The branches were gone, and the man reached out his hands and touched Cer’s face. Cer jerked away.

“And the touch of a man brings pain to you.” The man sighed. “How inside out your world must be.”

Cer looked at the man coldly. He could endure taunting. But was that kindness in the old man’s eyes?

“You look hungry,” said the old man.

Cer said nothing.

“If you care to follow me, you may. I have food for you, if you like.”

Cer followed him.

They went through the forest, and Cer noticed that the old man stopped to touch many of the trees. And a few he pointedly snubbed, turning his back or taking a wider route around them. Once he stopped and spoke to a tree that had lost a large limb—recently, too, Cer thought, because the tar on the stump was still soft. “Soon there’ll be no pain at all,” the old man said to the tree. Then the old man sighed again. “Ah, yes, I know. And many a walnut in the falling season.”

Then they reached a house. If it could be called a house, Cer thought. Stones were the walls, which was common enough in Greet, but the roof was living wood—thick branches from nine tall trees, interwoven and heavily leaved, so that Cer was sure no drop of rain could ever come inside.

“You admire my roof?” the old man asked. “So tight that even in the winter, when the leaves are gone, the snow cannot come in. But we can,” he said, and led the way through a low door into a single room.

The old man kept up a constant chatter as he fixed breakfast: berries and cream, stewed acorns, and thick slices of cornbread. The old man named all the foods for Cer, because except for the cream it was all strange to him. But it was good, and it filled him.

“Acorn from the Oaks,” said the old man. “Walnuts from the trees of that name. And berries from the bushes, the neartrees. Corn, of course, comes from an untree, a weak plant with no wood, which dies every year.”

“The trees don’t die every year, then, even though it snows?” Cer asked, for he had heard of snow.

“Their leaves turn bright colors, and then they fall, and perhaps that’s a kind of death,” said the old man. “But in Eanan the snow melts and by Blowan there are leaves again on all the trees.”

Cer did not believe him, but he didn’t disbelieve him either. Trees were strange things.

“I never knew that trees in the High Mountains could move.”

“Oh ho,” laughed the old man. “And neither can they, except here, and other woods that a treemage tends.”

“A treemage? Is there magic then?”

“Magic. Oh ho,” the man laughed again. “Ah yes, magic, many magics, and mine is the magic of trees.”

Cer squinted. The man did not look like a man of power, and yet the trees had penned an intruder in. “You rule the trees here?”

“Rule?” the old man asked, startled. “What a thought. Indeed no. I serve them. I protect them. I give them the power in me, and they give me the power in them, and it makes us all a good deal more powerful. But rule? That just doesn’t enter into magic. What a thought.”

Then the old man chattered about the doings of the silly squirrels this year, and when Cer was through eating the old man gave him a bucket and they spent the morning gathering berries. “Leave a berry on the bush for every one you pick,” the old man said. “They’re for the birds in the fall and for the soil in the Kamesun, when new bushes grow.”