Uprooted(140)

It saw me and held still, wary, but it didn’t run away. I held out one of the fruits from my basket. The walker crept towards me little by little on its stiff legs. It stopped just out of arm’s reach. I didn’t move. Finally it stretched out two forelegs and took the fruit and ate it, turning it around and around in its hands, nibbling until it had cleaned it down to the seed. Afterwards it looked at me, and then tentatively took a few steps into the forest. I nodded.

The walker led me a long way into the forest, into the trees. At last it held aside a heavy mat of vines from what looked like a sheer stone cliff face, and showed me a narrow cut in the rock, a thick sweet rotten stench rolling out. We climbed through the passage into a sheltered narrow vale. At one end stood an old, twisted heart-tree, grey with corruption, the trunk bulging unnaturally. Its boughs hung forward over the grass of the vale, so laden with fruit that the tips brushed the ground.

The walker stood anxiously aside. They’d learned that I would cleanse the sickened heart-trees if I could, and a few of them had even begun to help me. They had a gardener’s instinct, it seemed to me, now that they were free of the Wood-queen’s driving rage; or maybe they only liked the uncorrupted fruit better.

There were still nightmare things in the Wood, nursing too much rage of their own. They mostly avoided me, but now and then I stumbled over the torn and spoiled body of a rabbit or a squirrel, killed as far as I could see just for cruelty; and sometimes one of the walkers who had helped me would reappear torn and limping, a limb snapped off as by mantis-jaws, or its sides scored deeply by claws. Once in a dim part of the Wood, I fell into a pit trap, cleverly covered over with leaves and moss to blend into the forest floor, and full of broken sticks and a hideous glistening ooze that clung and burned my skin until I went to the grove and washed it off in the pool. I still had a slow-healing scab on my leg where one of the sticks had cut me. It might have been just an ordinary animal’s trap, set for prey, but I didn’t think so. I thought it had been meant for me.

I hadn’t let it stop my work. Now I ducked under the branches and went to the heart-tree’s trunk with my jug. I poured a drink of the Spindle-water over its roots, but I knew even as I began that there wasn’t much hope for this one. There were too many souls caught inside, twisting the tree in every direction, and they’d been there too long; there wasn’t enough left of them to bring out, and it would be almost impossible to calm and ease them all together, to slip them into dreaming.

I stood with my hands on the bark for a long time, trying to reach them, but even the ones I found had been lost so long they had forgotten their names. They lay without walking in shadowed dim places, blank-eyed and exhausted. Their faces had half-lost their shape. I had to let go at last and step away, shivering and chilled through, though the hot sun came down through the leaves. The misery clung to my skin, wanting to climb inside. I ducked back out from beneath the tree’s heavy branches and sat down in a patch of open sunlight at the other end of the vale. I took a drink from my jug, resting my forehead against the beaded wet side.

Two more walkers had come creeping through the passageway to join the first: they were sitting in a row, their long heads all bent intently towards my basket. I fed each of them a clean fruit, and when I started working they helped me. Together we heaped dry kindling against the trunk, and dug a broad circle of dirt around the limits of the heart-tree’s branches.

I stood up and arched my tired back when we were done, stretching. Then I rubbed my hands with dirt. I went back to the heart-tree and put my hands back on its sides, but this time I didn’t try to speak with the trapped souls. “Kisara,” I said, and drew the water out. I worked gently, slowly. The water beaded up in fat droplets on the bark and trickled slowly down in thin wet rivulets to sink into the ground. The sun moved onward overhead, coming ever more strongly through the leaves as they curled up and went dry. It was dipping out of sight by the time I finished, my forehead sticky with sweat and my hands covered with sap. The ground beneath my feet was soft and damp, and the tree had gone pale as bone, its branches making a noise like rattling sticks in the wind. The fruit had all withered on the boughs.

I stood clear and kindled it with a word. Then I sat heavily and wiped my hands on the grass as well as I could, and pulled my knees up to my chest. The walkers folded their legs neatly and sat around me. The tree didn’t thrash or shriek, already more than half gone; it went up quickly and burned without much smoke. Flakes of ash fell on the damp ground and melted into it like early snowflakes. They landed on my bare arms sometimes, not big enough to burn, just tiny sparks. I didn’t back away. We were the only mourners the tree and its dreamers had left.

I fell asleep at some point while the bonfire went on, tired from my work. When I woke in the morning, the tree was burned out, a black stump that crumbled easily into ash. The walkers raked the ash evenly around the clearing with their many-fingered hands, leaving a small mound at the center where the old tree had stood. I planted a fruit from my basket beneath it. I had a vial of growing-potion that I’d brewed up out of river-water and the seeds of heart-trees. I sprinkled a few drops over the mound, and sang encouragement to the fruit until a silver sapling poked its head out and climbed up to three years’ height. The new tree didn’t have a dream of its own, but it carried on the quiet dream of the grove-tree the fruit had come from, instead of tormented nightmares. The walkers would be able to eat the fruit, when it came.