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“Of course I am dead. What kind of simpleton are you?”

One of the black-faced ewes snapped at the scrap of fleece that ringed the ram’s neck like a collar.

“He’s a stranger,” she bleated. “Can’t you smell it on him? It’s a wonder you lived as long as you did, old hoof-rot.” She turned back to me. “A sheep knows three smells best: master-bearing-food, stranger, and master-bearing-a-blade.”

The ram snorted. “I lived to a fat old age with a patch of ewes to my name and more young than I could count. I and the missuses made a good mutton for our master’s table, and they buried the bones like sensible farmers. They still come to collect the wool off of the trees, though not so much these days—most humans find this a sad and ugly place, on account of the war.”

“I am sorry,” I said, shading my eyes from the sun which would not let me be, not for a moment, dazzling my vision and my wits. “But you are a tree, are you not?”

“Certainly,” sniffed the ram. His horns gleamed bronze.

The ewe chortled to herself. “I suppose you weren’t well brought up? No education to speak of? Never read the classicks, I’ll warrant. Never learned your letters.”

“Not at all,” I protested. “I read very well, in four tongues and half a fifth. I have read Scripture and much more, Augustine, even pagan books. I know my Plato and my Aristotle.” Forgive my pride, O Lord, but the learning of tongues was hard-won for me, and a man may treasure that which he bled to gain.

The ewe wrinkled her dark, soft muzzle. “But it is Aristotle who teaches: If you plant a bed and the rotting wood and the worm-bitten sheets in the deep earth, it will certainly and with the hesitation of no more than a season, which is to say no more than an ear of corn or a stalk of barley, send up shoots. A bed-tree will come up out of the fertile land, its fruit four-postered, and its leaves will unfurl as green pillows, and its stalk will be a deep cushion on which any hermit might rest. I remember the master’s daughter reciting that for her lessons while she spun my wool, I do. She said it so many times I can’t help but remember, even all these years down the warp.”

“But Aristotle didn’t say that at all! He said a bed-tree could never grow, even if you planted a bed deep in the earth, because a bed is made by man and a seed is grown by nature, and that is how one may tell the difference.” I stumbled in my argument. “If I had a place to sleep in the shade and water, I might recall the quotation exactly.” I felt myself blushing.

“And yet, we are talking, you and I,” the ram opined, cutting the ewe quite out. “So someone here has Aristotle wrong and I rather think it’s the one who thinks God isn’t a sheep.”

My head pounded and ached. “No, I know I have it right, I know it.”

“When you bury a thing, you must tend its tree. You gave it life, and owe it obligation. Achyut, the Saint Under the Root said that,” bleated the ewe, but she was beginning to nod off again. “I know a lot of quotations. The master’s daughter was very clever. They buried our bones, and we grew, and we remember being their sheep, but now we drink rain and feel very fat about things generally, as there’s no chance of being mutton any longer.”

The ram eyed me with suspicion. “We aren’t good to eat if you were considering it. Of course, a man who’ll eat a cannon-ball…”

“Well, at least I didn’t eat the horse-heads!” I pleaded. “And who buried cannons and engines and horses here? What happened that such a vicious orchard was ever planted?”

Behind me, one of those damned horses neighed softly, mournfully, and the wind clanked armor against bough.

“It was before the Wall,” the ram whispered, and cast his eyes away. “Gog and Magog walked here, and where they walked fire followed, and towers rose, and there was no sun or moon but the blaze of their hearts, which they wore outside their bones, like jewels on their chests. When it was all done, the earth covered the wreckage, and nature took its course.”

My mouth dried and the pulp of the cannon-fruit went