Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(39)

“I said all this to you?” asked Dirk.

“No,” said Mesmer. “This much is known by scholars of the ancient world. I am sketching it out for you to suggest the significance of your experience.”

“Shhh,” said Felix to Dirk, “let him go on.”

Mesmer: “One day, back in those times of Attic glory, I don’t know how long ago, the ludic demi-urge Pan traveled from Arcadia, which is to the south of Delphi, and requested something of the Pythia. I’m not sure what, but does it matter? Who knows what we really ask of one another? Pan may have been in search of sexual favors, perhaps, or word of the prospects of some cunning king or lithe maiden in which Pan had an interest, unseemly or otherwise. Pan is the god of rural heights, with tenderness toward shepherds and their sheep, but his eye strays to mortal maids and the naiads and dryads, too. With his goatish undercarriage he seldom enjoys romantic success—not even with the sheep. Who are not as stupid as they look. I hope not to offend. I shall continue.

“The Pythia refused Pan his suit for reasons of her own. Perhaps he’d propositioned her. I couldn’t make that bit out. But Pan stamped his hoof in anger and started a panic. Panikos, you know: the mischief of Pan. That tremor that causes sheep in a meadow to scatter, that causes human hearts to tremble, and fingers to drop goblets to the floor, that causes Gaia’s seizures. Gaia, the great earth herself, in all her moods and mysteries. Today’s scholars think the Oracle at Delphi was a handmaiden of the ancient goddess Gaia, whom Zeus and his broody, inbred, self-involved cohorts ignored. Gaia, perhaps, took umbrage at the insult to her priestess, the Pythia. Panic: the sense of being in the grip of—something terrific—sometimes terrible, sometimes overwhelmingly sweet and capsizing.”

“I know of panic,” Dirk averred in the quietest voice.

“So what I am telling you is that this has become your story, this is what you have said to me. Are you listening? The Pythia picked up Pan and threw him down with such force he was embedded in the ground. Like a knife. When Pan struck the earth, Gaia shifted and groaned in her hips and breasts, causing an earthquake as dreadful as that of Lisbon sixty, seventy years ago. That bad. The very paling of the hillside at Delphi split. The ground up high separated from its moorings. An entire hill-face of forest slid as one section of soil, one portfolio of many kinds of trees. Severed from the ridge-top, it dashed itself down upon the temple housing the Pythia. The Greeks have always known the trees are full of spirit—the dryads—but when this slice of forest rolled over the great vapors that Gaia sends up to inspire the Pythia, to tell the future and to warn blind humans about their blind behaviors, the severed forest was liberated from its common imprisonment, chained by roots and memories. Though enobled, it was also made migratory by the gusty inspiration of Gaia. It was free, but it was exiled. It couldn’t reclaim its homeland—”

“None of us can get back to childhood,” murmured Felix, “not Nastaran, not you, not I—”

“Hush, you. Or I’ll strike you! I’m trying to say this to young Drosselmeier while it is clear. The forest was liberated, but it was homeless. It was—it is—free, and forlorn. A sacred grove, peculiarly lacking in fundament. Searching for—I don’t know. A place to be established.”

“The Little Lost Forest,” said Felix. “It sounds like one of those household tales published by those lexicographer brothers. One of the m?rchen, a folk belief, a fairy story.”

“How could I have said anything like this?” asked Dirk. “You’re mad.”

“You told me all this,” said Mesmer. “For when you died, that day in the forest when you were a small boy, you went to the sacred grove. The Little Lost Forest, as your friend has it. You took something from that unreachable land. I believe you may have it still.”

Dirk said, “I believe you have been hitting the schnapps for reasons beyond the medicinal. You’re making a joke of me. Come, Felix. I can’t be party to this nonsense.”

“‘What fools these mortals be,’” said Mesmer, a bit sadly.

“But wait.” Felix grabbed his cape and held Dirk by the wrist to keep him from bolting. He pivoted Dirk back to Mesmer. “Was there a motive in their releasing Dirk from death? Was there a gift they gave him, a challenge they set him upon?”

“Life is challenge enough,” snapped Dirk, “come—”

“You’re right to ask,” said Mesmer. “If you never see me again, young man, listen to this anyway. Some good may come of it. Or not. They want a home. This magic woods—the unrepentant Pan, the unforgiving immortalized Pythia. If that’s who they are. The male and the female demi-urges. The progenitors. Pale Eve and swarthy Adam, if you prefer. They cannot go back. None can go back—neither the figures nor the trees of the sacred forest. That congress of inspirited trees! Migrating now for several thousand years, stumping with the speed of glaciers up the hardscrabble Balkans, wading through the Carpathians, forging the streams and storming the valleys a foot or two every decade these hundreds of years—they have now reached a time and a world unknown ever before, an edge of mills and factories. The lip of industry. Europe has become too populated for them. The living timber that wanders . . . it wants you to colonize a place for it. However secular it becomes, the world still needs a sacred grove. You were there. You saw it. They have given you your life in exchange for your mission.”