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"I'm going to be a tree when I grow up," Alvis said, holding his arms out wide.
His mother sighed a small breath, pausing in scrubbing the inside of the giant iron pot she cooked in everyday. She peered down at him. Alvis was small, as most of the children in the tunnels were, rising barely to her hips. "You can't be a tree, child. You're going to be a miner, like your father."
Alvis was eight. He hadn't seen his father since he was very little. He frowned, and opened his mouth to speak.
"Leave the child alone, Mariah," his aunt spoke up from where she was gently trying to shush the baby cradled at her chest. Then she peered at him. "Alvis," she added, "have you ever seen a tree?"
Alvis had to think about that. He knew what a tree was, or he thought he did. The others in the tunnels spoke of them fervently every day. His mother never did, remaining silent as the others prayed, murmuring remembered passages of how the sprawling Mother Tree cradled all of Westerley in her roots. Alvis thought roots must be something like an ashel snake, long and thin and wriggling in the dark, everywhere you couldn't see.
Once an old monk had come through the tunnels offering blessings, and he'd spoken of a moon that was nothing but trees as far as the eye could see. Alvis thought he might like to go there someday.
*
Alvis took his first job in the mines when he was sixteen.
"Address," the administator prompted, and Alvis shrugged. She peered at him over her glasses, her stern face made more dour by the company black she wore, then looked down at her screen. Alvis imagined she typed three letters: R-A-T.
The foreman was a Westerlyn who spoke like a Qreshi, or how Alvis thought the Qreshi might, as if Alvis and the other miners were less than nothing. They were never fast enough, never strong enough, as they dug up the bones of their home to place on Company scales.
"Akari!" the foreman yelled, and Alvis took a deep breath, keeping a grip on his tools so that his hands wouldn't curl into fists. "Too slow. I'm docking your pay. Ten joy."
Alvis wouldn't spend another night in the Company jail. He'd promised his mother. His mouth moved silently, with the first words he could think of to calm his simmering rage.
The seeds traveled from a home we had forgotten, finding soil on Qresh. And the roots grew. From one world to two moons, one mother tree to unite us all.
*
The Scarbacks' monastery was on Leith, a place that could have been as far away as Qresh, or the other side of the galaxy. The monks came to Old Town sometimes, though, leaving prayers and murmured Blood blessings in their wake.
"They could bring food," his mother complained. "Medicine. Something we actually need."
A Scarback still came to bless her when she died, a trickle of blood running down his arm as his mother closed her eyes.
Alvis was eighteen. When the monk came through Old Town again, weeks later, Alvis asked if he could follow him when he left. The Scarback, named Taren, looked at him, and didn't say anything for a while. He didn't seem surprised. But no one else had ever left with him that Alvis could remember.
The monk spoke, and his voice was a low, gravelly murmur. "You'll need to talk to Brother Nyle," he said.
*
The elder Scarback was on Leith. Alvis had no way to leave Westerly for Leith. His papers said miner, and a miner could never travel freely between the moons. Taren handed Alvis his PDD, then walked a polite distance away and fell into silent meditation.
Brother Nyle's lined face stared up at Alvis through the screen. His arms were visible past the yellow of his robes, lined with knotted scars. His words held the distinct trace of a Westerlyn accent.
"Why do you want to join the order?"
"I believe in the Mother Tree," Alvis said, and when it seemed that answer wasn't enough, he thought it over, his mind tugging on scraps from the books he had read. "I want to help people relieve the weight of their sins."
The Scarback's gaze flickered knowingly, as if it could pierce Alvis' thoughts. "Their sins, or your own?"
Alvis considered the question carefully. "I think my sins are as heavy as anyone else's, if that's what you're asking." He didn't say the rest, that he loved Westerley but if he had to stay on her soil another minute he might burst.
The old monk shook his head. "No one cares what you leave behind, son. Only what you bring with you." He sighed, then added, "The monastery is no easy escape, son. Know that."
"Does that mean you'll accept me?" Alvis asked.
Brother Nyle nodded slowly. "It is not my job to accept or reject you. If you Believe, then the Great Tree calls you. If you have been called, then the choice has long been made."
*
A tree stood at the gates of the Leith monastery. Its giant branches shadowed the path to the door, with more trees ringing the old building and leading into the distance. Alvis had not imagined that trees could grow so tall, but the tree in the garden was nearly as old as the monastery, looming too tall for Alvis' eyes to scale.
He had also never imagined that trees demanded so much work. The initiates swept up the trees' fallen leaves in the autumn, and picked their fruit in the summer, taking full baskets to the kitchens where their work would continue. In between his daily tasks, Alvis knelt, and prayed, and bled.
*
The monastery was full of Leithians, easily identified by their farmers' accents and the ease with which they tilled the soil in the gardens. There were many Westerlyns as well, reminding Alvis of Old Town every time a miners' curse or familiar piece of song slipped from their lips. There was even a Qreshi, a lesser family's discarded fourth son who fell silent when the discussion turned to politics, as it did most nights.
"It doesn't matter how hard they work in the mines," said one of the brothers. His name was Ennis, and Alvis had come to recognise him as one of the loudest. "The Qreshis will never recognise their land claims, or their freedom."
Alvis remained silent, sipping his mug of cider that was brewed by the brothers from the sun apples that grew in the garden. The night was balmy, with a breeze coming down from the hills, growing season weather on Leith. Qresh was a soft blush of colour in the dark sky above them.
Another monk spoke up, scowling. "You're right. But we're here to serve the trees, to tend the souls of the Quad. Not to fight the Qreshi."
There were a few hisses of disagreement from around the table, as other Scarbacks nodded.
"Do you think what happens in the Quad doesn't also happen to us?" one asked, disbelievingly. "We also live in the Quad. What point is tending to those souls if the souls aren't free?" He muttered something from the Scriptures.
Another, a young Scarback barely older than Alvis, shook his head. "The Qreshi stripped the trees from Westerley. Their own trees are drowning underwater. They don't take care of anything, and they'll do the same to Leith one day."
"That is why we bleed," the first monk answered, unwavering. "That is what we're called to do. The politics, we leave to others."
It was the same argument every night. Alvis stared into the murky froth of his ale, and said, "You wouldn't say that if you'd ever watched a man's air filter fail in the mines. Watched him slowly choke to death, and watched the Company give his wife and family nothing."
There was silence. Finally the monk smiled, lifting his glass as if in salute. "You may be right, Alvis. You may be right."
*
Alvis had been an initiate for over a year, the first time that he returned to Westerley. He walked with Taren in Old Town, delivering his first Blood Blessings. Alvis couldn't hide his surprise when on the second day they drove into the Badlands, and traded twelve casks of sunapple cider for joy. Then Taren headed west through the ceaselessly stark terrain to the camp of another warlord, and traded all the joy for a small crate of weapons. Alvis had grown up in Old Town, and the sight of weapons didn't scare him.
Taren caught the flicker of surprise on his face, and his own pale eyebrows went up in return. "I thought you knew," he said.
Alvis shook his head.
Taren nodded. "If Brother Nyle sent you on this mission then he must have thought that you understood. Or that you wanted to understand."
"I always wish to understand," Alvis said quickly.
"And to free Westerley?" Taren asked. Cautiously, carefully, though he must have already known how Alvis would answer.
"Can that be done?" Alvis asked. The strength of the Company and its Qreshi leaders still seemed as unshakeable as they'd been when he was a child. The sights of the uniforms in Old Town were familiar, and Alvis still thrummed with as much anger as he'd had the day he'd left for Leith. The Tunnel Rats had whispered of liberation his whole life, but it had never been more than words.
"The first step to anything is to believe in its existence," Taren said. "Don't you think?"
*
Leith's Day of First Blooming fell at the start of the seventh week of the year. It was on one of those days, in the shadow of the leaning boughs of the old tree by the gates, that Alvis took his oath. He shed the pale blue robes of an initiate and donned the yellow robes of a true Scarback. Brother Nyle wrote his new name in Old Word on the rough, thick paper used for the monastery records: Alvis the Penitent.
"Welcome," he said, and wrapped his scarred arms around Alvis' shoulders.
*
Dutch's strong fingers raked across his wrist, the sharp burst of pain making Alvis wince involuntarily.
Dutch pulled back immediately from their kiss and looked down at his skin, to see that she had drawn a small drop of blood. "We'll skip the restraints tonight," she said, in the light tones she always used to hide what she was thinking. Beneath the floor under them, the engine of Dutch's spaceship hummed.
"I've had some things on my mind," Alvis explained.
"And that helps?" Dutch asked.
If you sought the answer to a question, you had to be prepared to offer a sacrifice. Alvis wiped the small drops of blood away, and murmured a prayer without meaning to.
"It's funny," Dutch said. "Sometimes I'm not sure if you really believe, or if this is all a cover. For the Rebellion thing."
"Why does one of them have to be more real than the other?" Alvis asked her.
Dutch made a face, wrinkling her forehead, the way she always did when he spoke about philosophy or mysticism. Practicalities were the only language that she spoke, though Alvis didn't know exactly what had made her that way. "I didn't grow up with all this," she said.
"Faith?" Alvis asked her.
"Certainty," Dutch answered. "In the meaning of things. That what you did meant something."
Alvis shook his head. "I didn't grow up with that either. But with the brothers, I learned--we make the world we want to live in, and the tools to make it are inside us."
Dutch's eyes glanced over Alvis' scars and healing wounds. "I suppose," she said, but Alvis could read the doubt on her face.
*
Johnny Jaqobis had a lot of questions. Alvis couldn't answer all of them. Johnny leaned across the table at the Royale, his face flushed pink from cheap hokk.
"Be real," he said, gesturing with pointed fingers. "The tree's like, a metaphor, right? There's not actually a tree."
"There's a tree," Alvis said, and watched Johnny's face contort as he processed the answer. John came from far across the J, Alvis knew, but he had no idea what they believed there.
"Like a tree, tree? Growing out of the ground?"
"Well, from that perspective, there are many trees," Alvis pointed out. The tree at the gates of the monastery was one, a towering reflection of the Mother Tree.
Johnny scowled at the obscure answer. "What other perspective is there?"
"The perspective of a man who doesn't see everything with his eyes."
Johnny hummed drunkenly, turning the answer over. "Okay, so there's a tree. How does the, you know, fit into all this?" Johnny made a stabbing motion with his hands, as if he held a sharp tool and wanted to break skin.
There was a shout from the corner of the bar, patrons bursting into song. It was a familiar Westerlyn ballad, the lengthy, bawdy tale of a miner and his lover. Alvis had to raise his voice to make his answer heard above the din. "It's how we show ourselves." That was what Alvis had been taught.
"Show ourselves how?" Johnny Jaqobis pressed. "To who?"
"Why do you assume it's a person?" Alvis asked, and Johnny groaned.
"Don't tell me we're back to the tree thing."
Alvis shrugged.
*
The scripture books spoke repeatedly of evil, an evil that ran so deep that only blood could cleanse it. Alvis had always assumed that the books meant the evil inside men, and sacrifices that cleansed hearts. Thirteen went to Arkyn to fight the devil. Alvis, the first Scarback to set foot on the barren moon in centuries, finally understood that the books didn't always speak in symbols. The Devil was real, and she wore the face of his friend.
*
"I believe in a free Westerley," Alvis said to D'avin Jaqobis, paying no attention to the scoffing expression that the man returned.
Perhaps D'avin was right, and the rebellion was doomed. Alvis understood that, but he couldn't spend too much time on the thought. Reckoning Night would come, and a day when Old Town would free itself. When he prayed he bled for the idea of it, steadying himself for any greater sacrifice.
Then bombs fell on Old Town, shaking the Westerlyns even as they cowered in the tunnels. Alvis closed his eyes as the ceiling trembled, and considered for the first time that perhaps the sacrifice would be the dream of Westerley herself.
*
Only when a seed dies does it finally bear fruit.
*fin.