The Reluctant Champion

3. Yggdrasl's Child

Galen felt his heart lift as he walked through the woods. He was never lost here, having stamped their paths into his mind as a child. He followed the forest tracks and country roads as they served his purpose, bearing always toward the particular hill that was his goal. He had no hope of reaching it before nightfall, but that didn't matter. Open till sunrise, the gnome had said, and he took that to mean it would not be open until sunset. When evening fell, he stopped by the side of a brook, ate a quick supper, and then moved on through the darkening woods.

The first stars were already out when the ground started to rise toward the hill he remembered. Soon he was climbing over ledges and scrambling carefully over rock screes. Close to the crest of the hill, fir trees crowded round. He walked easily over their needles. No underbrush survived in their shade.

Standing at the highest point was the tree he sought. She stood in a little clearing made by her own mighty branches, crown invisible from the ground. The clearing was hushed and still, the space it held inviolate, like that of a cathedral.

What now? Three times widdershins and one time sunwise. Pausing for hardly a moment to take thought, Galen paced around the tree once, twice, three times. Then he turned and walked back around it once.

That last circuit was strange. Each step seemed awkward, as though it hit the ground at an unexpected angle, or as though the ground twisted away from his foot as he set it down. A tension rose in him as he walked, drew tighter, and tighter yet, until the last step seemed impossible, set over a yawning gap, pushing through an impenetrable wall—but there was only leaf mould under his feet, only air before his face. He took the step.

What had changed? Nothing. Everything? The stars still stood at their places in the sky. The firs still held their silent convocation. The ash still stood immense and alone. Why did the air taste different on his tongue?

Unaccountably tired, he dropped amid the tree's great roots, staring up and letting his mind explore the question. The vast listening silence of the forest reassembled itself about him, enhanced rather than broken by the small noises that punctuated it. In the silence a determination came to him. What now?

The steep road, he said to himself. Very well. You can't get steeper than straight up. He walked around the tree again in a slower, more measured way. Choosing his place, he seized a burl where a branch had fallen away before he was born and he started to climb.

The first section and the last were the worst. The lower part of the trunk carried no full branches at all. He climbed by finding precarious imperfections in the trunk or by jamming fingers and toes into the vertical crevices of the bark. His breath was coming in hard gasps by the time he reached the first great bough.

Then, after climbing from branch to branch up the body of the tree, he mounted into the crown. Here each step was more precarious than the last as he asked more and more slender limbs to bear his weight. Yet still he did not stop, driven by an imperative without reason. He had decided to climb. Climb he would.

At last he found himself clutching a spray of twigs no more substantial than his broom at the farm. Under him the tree swayed, its great length whipping him across the sky in sickening swoops. But it swayed less, he told himself, than the maintopmast in a storm. The branches that held him up were more substantial than the footrope he walked to handle sail. Stubbornly he looked up into the sky. Yggdrasl's child. Is your road a dead end after all?

How close the stars seemed now. They glowed like pebbles in the sky, not like the twinkling points of light he was used to. They crowded above his face as if they clustered there to mock his efforts to get close to them. To the east came the moon, barging through the sky like a monstrous fish. It would sweep through the air far above his head shortly, by the look of it.