Tree Slayer

by Harriet Springbett

  “She was real and I’m going to prove it,” she said.

  “Hey, Rainette. I’m not saying you’re making it up. I’m just concerned about that bump.”

  He leant forward to check her wound. She pushed him away and sat up. The ice pack fell to the floor, making Acorn jump.

  “I’m fine. I’d better get back to Le Logis before they start to worry.”

  “I guess so. Do you want me to drive you?”

  She shook her head, stroked Apple and Acorn one last time, and then kissed Christophe briefly.

  He held onto her. “Come back tomorrow morning, yeah? We can spend the day together.”

  He looked sad. Maybe she was being too hard on him. It wasn’t as if he’d actually seen Amrita. She relented and agreed to bring her revision with her the next day.

  She drove the long way back towards the commune. It would be cool to meet someone totally on her own wavelength, as a soulmate with a gift like hers was bound to be. A soulmate would believe in Amrita. They’d be able to heal trees together, and share their knowledge. He might even be young and handsome.

  Mary’s displeasure cut into her daydreaming, reminding her that Christophe was everything she could ever need. Rainbow conceded that Mary was right. She must imagine her soulmate as a wise, old shepherd.

  Back home at Le Logis, which was plunged into darkness from a power cut, she asked Domi if she could consult him. He took one look at her face and agreed. He was her guru, her confidante in everything that concerned trees, and she told him all about the vision.

  “Don’t take this lightly,” he said. “The fact that you’ve got a part of Amrita inside you explains where your gift comes from, but if her life force disappears, your own life is at risk. As for Mary, I don’t think you should give her too much space. Keep her separate with that mental wall I suggested you build, and be careful her personality doesn’t take over.”

  Rainbow decided never to let Mary’s feelings overcome her again. She’d only allow her to make minor decisions: that way, she’d recognise and accept Mary, as Amrita wanted, and still follow Domi’s advice.

  Domi made her write down Amrita’s message on a page of her sketch pad, and then, while she held up a candle, he took a road map from the commune bookcase. They couldn’t find Koad, and she wondered whether it was an object or a person rather than a place. But Koad and the last One Tree were secondary. First, she must deal with her shepherd in High Azun.

  They discovered that Azun was the name of a valley in the Pyrenees Mountains, renowned for its green pastures. There would be plenty of sheep in the Val d’Azun. The seed of doubt Christophe had sown in her mind withered. She’d hardly have imagined such an unusual place name. Amrita’s message was real. She may not be part of this world, but Rainbow knew she existed somewhere. She existed, and she needed Rainbow’s help.

  When Domi calculated it would take five hours to drive to the Val d’Azun, and that she’d have to negotiate Bordeaux, Rainbow’s bravado about going alone faltered. It was a long way to drive, and she was useless at map reading. She’d have to persuade Christophe to come with her, even if he didn’t believe in the vision. They could leave on Friday evening, as soon as Christophe finished work for the weekend. Her final exam ended at midday, and Thierry had promised her a restaurant lunch as a late birthday present. She’d be able to pack her mum’s camping equipment afterwards, in the afternoon. They’d return to Cognac on Sunday evening so Christophe could be back at work on Monday morning. It was a perfect plan.

  If they found her shepherd and vanquished the Tree Slayer, Christophe would have no choice but to accept her mission was real. If they didn’t find him – well, she preferred not to consider that option.

  At dawn the next day, after a dream-free night, Rainbow took a deep breath and then opened her bedroom shutters. Yesterday it had been too dark to see all the damage from the gale, and she dreaded what daylight might reveal.

  It was a thousand times worse than she’d imagined.

  She stumbled downstairs, her whole body stiff and bruised, and opened the front door. The air was calm, but the woods around Le Logis were a wasteland of debris. Her legs gave way and she slid to the ground, her back against the wall. It took a lifetime for a tree to grow. She would never again see the wood as it used to be. A few hours of ferocious wind had been enough to destroy the trees she’d loved and healed, climbed and shaped. They’d been her friends.

  She struggled up on wobbly legs, and walked around the house to her silver maple. It was still standing, thank goodness. Had Amrita made sure it was protected? She sent her a silent message of thanks and hugged the tree. She didn’t know what power she had to help Amrita, but she would do her best to find out.

  In François I park more than half the trees had fallen, according to the radio report she heard as she ate a quick breakfast. The gale had swept the whole of western France, from the northwest coast to the foot of the Pyrenees mountains. It was the most catastrophic French storm in living memory.

  She slung her revision notes into the Mini and drove towards Christophe’s flat. The view as she drove past François I park made her gasp. The radio statistics were nothing compared to the sight of solid-trunked oaks and beeches skewed across each other. Those that remained upright had lost their crowns. The wind had ripped off their leafy branches and now their bare trunks speared the sky.

  The sap inside her body rose to boiling point. The wind had indeed been an evil one, as Amrita had said. No other gale she’d known had done so much damage. Amrita hadn’t been clear about the form of the Tree Slayer, but she had talked about the evil wind slaying her trees. The Tree Slayer could be the wind. Rainbow remembered how it had reacted when she’d shouted that she hated it. It had heard her! Would it recognise her as Amrita’s ally and try to kill her too? Her shepherd had better devise a good way to destroy it, because she had no idea how to fight the wind.

  At Christophe’s flat she scooped up Apple and Acorn and smothered them with kisses, then she tearfully described the gale’s devastation to Christophe.

  “The Tree Slayer’s storm has even hurt ancient trees that seemed too solid to be affected,” she said. “I bet the last One Tree Amrita mentioned is one of them. Imagine if it’s another mother tree like the François I and Drunken House oaks. I must find it quickly and heal it before it dies.” She added that she’d discovered Azun was in the Pyrenees mountains, and asked if he’d come with her.

  “Now?”

  “I wish we could, but it’s too far for a day trip.” She tickled Acorn’s ears. “We can’t go until next weekend. You will come with me, won’t you?”

  He sighed and emptied the grounds from his coffee maker.

  “Please?” she pleaded. “Then I can prove that Amrita wasn’t a hallucination. It’ll be fun with you.”

  “Sometimes I don’t understand you, Rainette,” he said. “For years you’ve been desperate to find a way to help trees. And now you can truly help the trees that suffered in the storm, you want to go to the mountains. Thierry will probably offer you some clearing-up work next weekend. If you don’t help him, he’ll find someone else. If you do, there’ll be more chance of him giving you a proper job. Isn’t that what you want?”

  It hadn’t occurred to her that Thierry might find someone else. “Of course. You know it is.”

  “Then forget this Amrita business,” continued Christophe. “Have you even thought how you’ll find this stranger in a whole valley of strangers? Are you going to ask everyone if they’ve got a gift like yours?”

  Put like that, her plan sounded naïve. She could feel Mary gathering her strength to side with Christophe.

  Rainbow looked out of the window. The road a little further along was closed because a cedar tree had blown down. It was the tree she’d climbed to rescue Sylvia’s cat, three years ago. The tree in which she’d had an out-of-body experience. The tree Amrita had shown her in yesterday’s vision.

  “All I can do is try,” she said. “So, are yo
u coming or not?”

  Chapter 6

  Before Christophe could answer her question, the doorbell buzzed and Thierry appeared. He wanted Rainbow to help him clear up the storm debris today, even though it was a Sunday.

  “I’ll pay you double time, of course,” he said.

  Christophe passed him an espresso coffee, which he swallowed in one go, while Rainbow tried to catch Christophe’s eye to see what he thought. He wouldn’t look at her.

  “I’d planned to spend the day revising with Chris,” she said. She didn’t add “and the kittens” because that was hardly a reason to turn down tree work.

  “Fair enough. I just asked on the off chance,” said Thierry. “Those exams are important.”

  Christophe cleared his throat, but still wouldn’t look at her.

  “Though I suppose it’s too late to learn anything more for tomorrow,” she added.

  Christophe took back Thierry’s empty cup. “If you go with Thierry I guess I could call the apprentice to help me do some work on my bike,” he said to Rainbow.

  She stepped in front of him so he was forced to look at her. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  His eyes slid away. “Of course not.”

  He did mind, even though he’d just told her she should make herself available to Thierry. It was impossible to please everyone. She had a whole day in front of her, and helping the trees would be more useful than going over her revision notes again.

  “Let’s go,” she said to Thierry. She gave Christophe a quick kiss and pulled away to follow Thierry downstairs.

  He grasped her hand. “Rainette–”

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. Thierry was already in the street.

  Christophe held on.

  “You know I’d do anything for you,” he said. “If you’re serious about going to the Pyrenees next weekend, of course I’ll come with you.”

  She stopped resisting him. “Really?”

  “I’m not leaving you to drive all that way alone and get lost in the mountains.”

  She hugged him. “Thanks loads. You’re the best, Chris. I’d be useless on my own.”

  “You’d better think up a good plan to find this shepherd,” he said.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got all day to work it out while I’m clearing up the poor trees.”

  She kissed him, properly this time, and then hurried after Thierry.

  As Thierry drove them towards his client’s house she studied his weatherbeaten face, creased with laughter lines, under the baseball cap he wore in winter and summer. She knew better than to tell him about her vision: he wasn’t open to spiritual experiences, and wouldn’t understand its importance. If he asked her to work with him next weekend, she’d say that she and Christophe had booked a mini-break. It sounded so grown-up!

  The more time she spent with Thierry, the more she wanted to be his assistant. His wife Claudette had invited her and Christophe for a meal the week before, and the evening passed in an instant because she was so absorbed in Thierry’s tales about the trees in Massane forest, where he’d worked for thirty years. Who’d have thought that trees were capable of migrating when the climate got too hot or cold? Or that forests created so much transpiration from their leaves that they made clouds, which carried rain inland? She’d told him he should write a book about his knowledge, but he laughed, claimed he hardly knew how to hold a pen, and added that he was counting on a Canadian scientist to catch the world’s attention once she’d got some solid results from her research.

  He stopped the van near Cognac golf course, where his client’s garden resembled the aftermath of a tornado. Tears pricked Rainbow’s eyes and she struggled not to break down in front of Thierry.

  “You’ll have to use the chainsaw today,” he warned.

  She straightened her shoulders and ignored her bruises. He needed a workmate, not a blubbering kid.

  “OK. As long as it’s only for dead branches.”

  They sawed up wood and piled the logs in stacks. The client soon lost interest in watching them, and went indoors. In normal circumstances, this was the point she anticipated. Once the client had gone, Thierry would let her climb into the trees and do her healing and rebalancing work. Today, however, he needed her to clear the ground.

  Isolated by her ear defenders, she started to think about a plan to find her shepherd the following weekend. She remained convinced he was a man, and hoped to prove Mary wrong, even though Domi had advised her not to imagine her other half’s age, gender or physical features because it would blind her to recognising the person. Domi added that she might see an aura around her other half, and that she must keep her eyes open for signs.

  She had no idea what an aura looked like, but she imagined it as a golden light. It would illuminate her shepherd as he sat hugging a mountain pine tree with his sheep at his feet, infusing both tree and human with glowing light. She and Christophe just had to find the sheep pastures and walk around them until they saw the golden glow.

  She wished she had a better idea of how long the mission would take. It was impossible to plan anything, and difficult to speculate on how to vanquish the Tree Slayer until she met her shepherd.

  She continued cutting up dismembered branches and lugging logs until she could no longer lift the chainsaw. She made a T-sign to Thierry, who nodded. Once she’d taken off her ear defenders, she climbed into an injured beech tree, which she soothed, rebalancing its branches and stroking its trunk. She could sense damage in its roots, but she couldn’t do anything for them except send energy downwards.

  Thierry joined her a few minutes later.

  “I always forget to take a break. Claudette is right: you’re good for me.”

  “I’m actually working,” she reminded him.

  “I know. And even if I don’t understand what you do, I can see it’s fundamentally right. There’s so much we don’t know about trees. We’ve picked up fragments of information but we need scientists to do more studies. Most of them aren’t interested or can’t get funding to do extended research.”

  “Tell me one of the fragments.”

  “This is just a short break, right?”

  “Of course,” she said, grinning.

  “OK. You know trees communicate with each other?”

  “I know,” she said. How else could the beech tree near Le Logis have known about the beech tree she’d maimed in Dorset? “But I get sideways looks when I tell other people. How do you know?”

  “It hasn’t been scientifically proven yet, though that Canadian researcher I told you about is working on it. But my experience has convinced me. In Massane forest, some of the beech trees had far less light than the other trees around them. In theory, less light means less sugar from photosynthesis, and so these beech trees should have had problems growing. But – get this – they actually grew just as well as those in full sunlight. I reckon those trees share their nutrients. I’m sure something connects the root systems to each other. Perhaps they work in symbiosis with the mycelium network under the forest floor. That would explain why some of our Massane tree stumps continued to live, despite having no leaves.”

  “What’s mycelium?”

  “The vegetative part of fungus. It’s made up of millions of threads called hyphae, which absorb nutrients from the soil.”

  Rainbow thought back to the oak tree in François I park. She recalled the murmured thanks from the other trees pulsing upwards from a silver underground network. It could have been these mycelium hyphae threads.

  Thierry continued. “In ancient forests, trees grow close together. Survival comes down to teamwork, you see – you’d do well to remember that, by the way. You’re a bit too much of a loner.”

  “It’s not my fault. No one ever wants to be on my team,” said Rainbow. Even Mary, who had no choice, didn’t want to be on her team.

  “Perhaps you should learn to trust other people the way you trust trees. Anyway, this Canadian scientist suspects there are hub trees with connections to
all the trees in their forests.”

  “It’s true! There are,” she said, thinking of the François I oak tree again. “Mother trees.” He wasn’t talking about the spiritual kind of communication she had experienced. But it was fascinating, even if he did reduce everything to science. “Can you tell me more about mycelium?”

  He stood up and grunted. “You ought to do an arboriculture course after your Baccalaureate. That would teach you all the basic facts – and how to work in a team.”

  “Couldn’t you teach me? I’ve already learnt loads from working with you.”

  “I could. But you need a qualification. Come on, back to the chainsaws.”

  She’d had enough of books and classrooms, but if Thierry gave her a job afterwards, it would be worth it. Manual courses were much shorter than academic ones. It would be useful to be able to talk about trees like Thierry did, in words people would accept more easily. She’d have to investigate courses and hope her literary Baccalaureate – if she passed next week’s exams – would be sufficient to get her a place on one.

  She put aside all thoughts of her mission and mentally revised the different philosophers’ ideas in preparation for her first exam the next day.

  Chapter 7

  On Friday, Thierry and Claudette picked up Rainbow from the lycée to take her to lunch. Thierry had chosen the restaurant in François I park, and although Rainbow thought it heartless to celebrate her birthday among the orphaned trees, she lacked the courage to act on Mary’s desire to tell him.

  As they drove to the park, she answered Claudette’s questions about her exams, which had been neither disastrous nor easy, and told her the results would arrive in mid-July. Now her exams were over, she could concentrate on her mission.