The Mother of the Tree of Life by Aleister Hanek (best romance ebooks txt) 📖

wraps her body tight around her swollen stomach and rolls all the way down the hill like a lumpy cannonball.
Back up the hill the spirit dashes as fog left and right, slashing at every bullet sent Mercadia’s way. The poison he leaves behind dissipates slowly, and still floats invisibly in trace amounts where the hunters think it has evaporated. He dashes as fast as the bullets, and the sound when they are broken is twice as loud as when they are fired.
The hunters leap from the castle walls and land together, tip toe, on the soft ground without sinking an inch. They rush forward in scattered formation several feet apart from each other, their faces as low to the ground as their running feet. If Mercadia looked over her shoulder she would not be able to count how many there are, she wouldn’t even be able to tell if they were coming from anywhere other than the castle.
The hunter’s bullets come even faster now but the spirit can move faster still. The bullets come closer now in great sprays like huge sparks. The sound of their breaking is deafening now, sounds like a thousand knives being sharpened at once on rough stones. The smell of burning pepper is noxious in the air. Even with her face filled with sticky grass goop and mud she can smell the gunpowder; she feels it’s disintegrating her lungs to ash, that she’ll be coughing them up as spicy muck.
The bullets fly in fewer spurts now but Mercadia is too drowned in her misery to notice. As the hunters pass through the fog left by the spirit they slow down, poison stuck in their flesh like so many flea eggs, enough to immobilize a joint. Some of them have to stand up as they run, and half of them stop shooting altogether.
One hunter drops its bag of bullets, which is as full as a scrotum now.
Mercadia comes to a very slow stop at the base of the hill. She feels so stiff she thinks she can’t lift her head, but she tries and does, and her hair hangs from her like loosened seaweed. She looks up directly into the eyes of the spirit, who has stopped paying attention to their pursuers.
“Kill them.” she hisses and she does not sound like a young woman anymore, her voice is guttural and wicked now like the voice of a phantom from a hundred years before.
“They will die soon,” he promises. He is impassive and noble looking, like the Easter Island heads of Earth.
“Now!” She hisses so loud she hurts her throat, and she feels a wad of something wet climb up her throat.
“I already have, Mercadia. They will die soon; now pass the crack in the mountain.”
Mercadia stares at him just for a minute. She stands up and her every muscle is infested with soreness. She’ll be as stiff as a log as soon as she rests. If she gets to rest.
The hunters pursue them still, but slowly like drugged turtles.
Mercadia turns around, belly in hands, and she is in new territory after just one step. The whole world is light brown beyond the green grass hill it seems, everything is emaciated; it smells like smooth fruity shit.
If her life were not in danger then Mercadia would turn right around and shout at the one forcing her this way. She is too important to walk through the land of shit, too sweet and merciful to be made to step on unholy ground.
The trees loom low over her and sway in the wind like perverted grasping hands.
Mercadia passes through the crack and feels the whole world tighten around her. The smell is gone as soon as she has stepped into the mountain path. Everything beyond the unholy ground smells like dew and ancient stone. She is in frozen air all of a sudden but she welcomes it because it calms the deathlike blaze beneath her skin.
She senses that her spirit is not following her. She turns around and sees that he is waiting by the entryway for their pursuers to catch up; they have nearly reached the bottom of the hill.
They have stopped shooting altogether. They really do look like they are dying on their feet now.
“What are you doing?” she asks quietly, too tired now to show the spirit her anger. A human would not have heard such a quiet whisper for it was too low even to echo in these stones, but the spirit heard.
“I am showing them what they face pursuing The Mother.” And just as they step on the foot of the hill he thrusts one arm to the sky, sickle of rust pointing to the moon.
And the mulch bursts like exploding fruit, transforming into the greatest most beautiful trees Mercadia has ever seen. The transformation is instantaneous, as if the trees were waiting in the ground and shot up by a mechanism. The colors are vibrant and impossible to count. The shapes and sizes differentiating each tree are marvelous in the way they clash. Part of Mercadia finds it more beautiful than the courtyard she just left behind, more beautiful even than her wedding ceremony.
Their pursuers will never get through forest that thick. No matter how many bullets they have to spare.
The spirit turns around, “There is a cave nearby. You can rest there.”
And rest she will, but she will not sleep. Never again will Mercadia have sleep.

3

Mercadia’s pompousness has been shocked out of her forever, so she doesn’t mind that she must rest in a cave.
It is a narrow but deep pocket in the mountain. It is frigid, the ground and walls are dusty and dissolve to the touch but the foundation feels as dense as steel. Mercadia’s body gives off steam like will o’ the wisp when this cold atmosphere touches her scorching hot skin, but she does not feel any real relief until she has collapsed in the corner at the end of cave and presses her back against the dusty stone.
The grass jelly and mud on her body stiffens in the cold but she is too sore to peel any of it away. Her whole body is rigid with soreness; she has a thousand aches that feel like tooth cavities lined with acidic sugar that erode her further. It is like syphilis, except in every part of her body but the brain. She needs to rest, she needs to rest.
And the worst pain is in her loins. She feels as though her sexual organs have been scooped from between her legs with a sharpened shovel. Yet, in reality, that opening is as tight as can be, so narrow it has become that not even urine could pass out of her right now.
But her baby is safe.
“But can I even call this a baby?” This is the first time she has spoken about her child as though it were not here. Always she coos adorable, motherly affection at her belly. But the idea that this is no child has starved that affection.
Baby or not it has swelled inside her noticeably in the past twenty minutes since her pain has had time to set in. She feels as though her eyes and loins will vomit, her muscles are starting to contract both in her stomach and her head.
For a whole minute she fears that she is going into labor and she can’t breathe. Her brain spins wildly in her head and she thinks that she’s having a seizure. After that painful tingling stops, after that seizing discomfort drips from her brain and down her throat, her stomach becomes a volcano of bile and bonbons. Now she has to vomit in the literal sense.
Her head tilts up involuntarily and she pukes on the floor next to her. Brown and green sparks of liquid bounce off the floor and splatter on her dress but she doesn’t even feel it. Her pain is as armor to all of her senses, touch in particular.
She spills her champagne and chocolate all over the floor, then she sits up and breathes heavily again, pressing herself against the jagged freezing wall. The vomit seeps across the floor and soaks her legs but she doesn’t feel it. She feels nothing but the pain and the blessed icy air relaxing the fire of her body.
“I need to rest, I need to rest.” she whines, and the baby replies by rolling over in her belly.
“So rest, Mother.” That dreaded voice is just calling her a mother, not his mother, but nonetheless it reminds her that she may give birth to something like him.
Sleep is beyond her now; she knows that, she cannot but stay wide awake no matter how tired she may be. But she cannot even rest with him here. She wonders now, briefly, if he is even capable of being apart from her, but shoves that horrible thought aside.
“Get out.” she whines. She can only whine now, her every other tone of voice was left behind at the party.
Mercadia’s vomit begins to bubble with life of its own then evaporates all at once into a mushroom cloud of black and purple mist. If her senses were working, she would notice the putrid smell is gone. The fog shifts to the floor in front of her, and the spirit fades into the physical plain through it; the fog becomes hair and cloth then falls around a shape that was not there before, and the spirit raises his head.
He looks just the same, he is not an entity who ages.
Seeing him again Mercadia’s face, wet with sweat and acrid chunks, scrunches up so much that in this dark cave she closely resembles a mean-tempered pug. She can still only whine, her voice holds no authority at all.
Perhaps, her pompousness has not been shocked out of her completely.
“How dare you?” she says.
“How dare I?” he states, contemplating that. He doesn’t understand the question, doesn’t understand why there is a question.
Mercadia shakes enraged. She wants to hit her head against the wall to smash it open to spite him, but he seems too heartless to be touched by self-mutilation. She fills her lungs as much as she can, she feels them stop as they inflate against the life in her belly, and she screams a cyclonic wail that could be heard in the valley if not for the newly grown jungle there.
“I’m somebody’s mother!” Some of the dust falls to the ground around her, the spirit is still untouched by her rage.
The spirit looks to her belly then back to her eyes.
“I’m sure you are.”
She is too delirious to decipher if he doesn’t understand her implication or if he is pretending not to understand. “I mean I’m not a girl anymore!”
The spirit is quiet.
“Run along, little girl!” She tries to make mock but even if she were not restricted to whining she could never imitate his diction, but she mocks nonetheless –her mouth is the only part of her not too sore to work—“I’m a mother now!”
“Not yet.”
Mercadia shivers and screams louder than before but the spirit is like a rod impaled in the bed of a rushing river.
“You don’t understand,” she declares like royalty spitting on a peasant, “you’re not a thing that suffers. You’ll never know what I’m going through.”
“On the contrary, Mercadia.” She keeps looking away but she is listening to him, spitefully wishing she couldn’t. “I am one with this planet, and you are part of it –granted not more than a hair follicle is to the human face. The crust is the earth’s skin, the trees are her hair, and the lava at the center is her heart and