Tree Slayer

by Harriet Springbett

  The aroma of rain on dry ground rose all around her, and darkness was falling, even though it was only late afternoon and they should have hours of daylight ahead of them. The slopes around the lake were decorated with multicoloured sheep, and the hut – which had been dour in the sunshine – now looked welcoming compared to her flimsy, flapping tent. She checked the tent pegs were all firmly wedged into the ground and then carried her rucksack of dry clothes towards the hut.

  There was a sharp crack followed by a rumble. Deafening retorts reverberated around them, and she clapped her hands to her ears.

  Eole cocked his head to one side. “Rockfall.”

  The rain intensified, causing both ridge and mountain pass to disappear into misty dusk. Eole hovered beside the door, his hesitancy making him look nervous.

  “Can we go inside?” she shouted above another rumble. “I’m getting drenched!”

  “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  His invitation sounded like a line from an eighteenth-century play. It couldn’t be a joke, because his face was blank. He was serious. Of course he was serious.

  “That would be lovely,” she said.

  He motioned her inside. She edged past him and dumped her rucksack on the floor. Darwie snuck in behind her, shook himself – which soaked the few parts of her legs that were still dry – and curled up on a hessian sack in the corner. When Eole came inside, there was just enough room for the two of them in the space beside the bunk beds.

  “Please have a seat,” said Eole.

  She sat on the planks of the lower bunk and watched him light a gas burner and heat some water. Gusts of air filtered through the cracks in the walls, causing the photos of an old man, presumably Tintin, to flap and jostle. The echoing thunderclaps made conversation impossible. She listened to the wind howling around the hut, and shivered. At least there were no trees for the Tree Slayer to kill: only Rainbow herself.

  Eole passed her a mug of black tea, lit some candles, and sat down on the far end of the bunk, where he took out his multiverse book and looked at the back cover. The candles guttered and cast devilish shadows on the walls. It was a little cosier now, but Amrita’s words about the Tree Slayer haunted her. Would the hut withstand its force?

  “How long will the storm last?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. The average time is twenty-eight minutes. The normal distribution spreads from ten minutes at its lower limit to three hours at the upper limit. Are you frightened? Hestia gets frightened.”

  Rainbow asked who Hestia was and learnt she was a ‘kind of’ sister. She tried to understand if she was a sister-in-law or step-sister, or even a religious sister. But Eole studied the cover of his book and wouldn’t explain.

  When she’d imagined being with her soulmate, she’d pictured them sharing their deepest feelings without restraint. She’d expected to learn from him, to share the same worldview, and for them to explore the magic of trees together. She hadn’t envisaged this difficult exchange of basic information. She was probably wrong about him being her soulmate. What was she even doing here on this treeless mountain? She’d forgone a job with Thierry and she’d given Christophe to Emilie without even fighting for him.

  Inside her head, Mary rapped on the mental box and told her off for looking backwards instead of forwards. Saving Amrita was their only future, now that life at home had been ruled out. Rainbow conceded that Mary was right. She must concentrate on her mission and think how to persuade Eole to show her his gift. She sipped her tea and watched him.

  He looked up. “Because if you’re frightened, tell me.”

  A tingle of excitement rippled up Rainbow’s spine.

  “I am frightened, actually,” she said.

  He closed his book and took a folded yellow anorak out of his rucksack. He put it on, closed the zip and all the poppers, and then opened the door. Darwie raised his head, whined and stood up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Outside,” he said.

  “Can I come?”

  “No.”

  Mary’s rebellious trait flared up inside her, but Rainbow didn’t need any encouragement. As soon as he and Darwie had left the hut, she yanked jumpers, flip-flops and underwear out of her rucksack. Her raincoat was at the bottom. She put it on and followed him out into the storm.

  Chapter 13

  The wind had changed direction and was rushing up towards the pass, reminding Rainbow of the suck and drag of last week’s tree-slaying gale. Eole had told her that storms sometimes caught in a valley and spun round and round, gathering strength until they could escape – but was this actually the Tree Slayer coiling like a snake in preparation for attack?

  She retreated to the safety of the hut doorway and squinted through the rain. Something moved beside the lake. It was Darwie, galloping towards her with his tail between his legs. He was alone. Had Eole had an accident?

  A flash of yellow caught her eye. Eole was high on the lakeside slope, near the pass. It took her a while to find him with Domi’s binoculars, but eventually her rain-blurred circle of rock and grass showed a yellow figure with his back to her. It was difficult to keep the binoculars still, and he didn’t seem to be doing anything. She lowered her aching arms.

  The storm was passing and she could see blue sky in the valley below the hut. She raised the binoculars again. Eole was facing her now, his lips pursed, his chest thrown out as if he was about to launch into a song. Something weird was going on here, something that had sent Darwie racing to safety. Was he calming the storm by singing to it? This must be his special skill. Why else would he have forbidden her to watch?

  The gale in Cognac had redoubled in force when she’d shouted that she hated it. If the wind reacted to shouting, it may also react to singing. It made sense. Eole had the physique of a singer, with his barrel chest and broad shoulders. By singing to the wind he could control it, like a snake charmer controlled snakes with music. He had a wind gift, not a tree gift. This was amazing!

  Amrita hadn’t actually said her soulmate could communicate with trees, just that he had a gift that was equal to hers. Eole had to be her soulmate, the person who would help her vanquish the Tree Slayer. It was obvious, now she’d seen the effect of his singing.

  Amrita, I’m coming to save you, she thought.

  Should she join Eole and get him to destroy the Tree Slayer immediately? Mary resisted the idea, pointing out the danger of exposing herself to it. And Rainbow didn’t know if the wind outside actually was the Tree Slayer. It could be a helpful wind, or just a normal one.

  Eole would know. As soon as he returned, she’d tell him he didn’t need to break his promise to Tintin because she’d guessed his special skill. They would devise a way to vanquish the Tree Slayer and then she’d get him to take her to Koad. With a bit of luck, they could go there without stopping at Cognac, where they risked seeing Christophe and Emilie.

  She watched Eole turn his back again and strained her ears for song, but the whistling wind masked any other sound. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t have to trudge up any more mountains in search of shepherds. Eole might not be the wise old shepherd she’d expected, but she rather liked him. All she had to do was convince him to help her and coax him away from his pastures.

  The last black clouds floated past and a blue sky, dotted with fluffy white clouds, prevailed. She may have to be patient, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to enlist his help.

  Eole bent over and breathed normally while he waited for the thumping in his head to cease. Wielding his special skill had never given him a headache before. He was always careful to allow enough oxygen for his brain to function correctly when he breathed in for a big task. He didn’t want to black out.

  Something had changed inside his lungs. Their capacity was exactly the same, but they felt weaker. Was he losing his skill? Perhaps God did exist and this was his punishment. But no: there was no God, only the queue of unknowns waiting to be explained by science.

  He walked back
down to the hut, planning the evening ahead. Tintin had said he shouldn’t tell anyone about his special skill but, despite his promise to Tintin, he wanted to tell Rainbow. He wanted to share everything with her because that’s what soulmates did. She’d made a good, logical point about not breaking his promise if he showed her rather than telling her. He could compromise and let her see his art. It might keep her with him, keep them together. Once the grass had dried, he would show her and then, when darkness fell, he would share the names of all the stars he knew.

  Rainbow was shaking the rain off her tent when he arrived at the hut, and Darwie stood beside her. Tintin said animals didn’t need to be intelligent like humans because they trusted their instincts. Eole didn’t think he had many instincts, but if Darwie liked Rainbow, she must be a good person.

  She smiled at him, looking sparkly. “So, you’re a singer,” she said.

  He didn’t know why she was talking about singing, but it wasn’t a question so he didn’t answer it.

  “It’s time for dinner,” he said. “Then I’ll show you my art and after that I’ll tell you the names of the stars.”

  “OK, but we need to talk.”

  He paused. “I’ll make dinner, then we’ll talk, then I’ll show you my art before it gets dark, and then I’ll tell you the names of the stars. And then we’ll sleep, and tomorrow we’ll look for shepherds again.”

  “I don’t need to see the other shepherds anymore,” she said.

  He recalculated. “OK: I’ll make dinner–”

  She made the T-sign and took a bag of packaged food from her rucksack. He explained the harmful effect of additives and excessive salt and sugar on the human body and told her he’d already organised dinner. He brought the gas cooker outside onto the stone bench, cooked the box of pasta Alexandra had left him, and mixed it with the rest of the chilli and rice. Rainbow opened a bag of crisps and offered them to him, but he refused. For dessert, she took out a cake.

  “Quiz cake!” he exclaimed.

  “Sorry? It’s fruit cake. Want some?”

  He nodded, smelt it and then listed the ingredients, certain he’d guessed them all. But Rainbow said she had no idea what was in it. She asked what he meant by quiz cake and so, because she’d said they had to talk, he explained.

  They washed up in the stream, and then Rainbow told him they had to talk.

  “But we’ve just done that! I must show you my art.” He checked his watch. “It’ll be too late in forty-six minutes.”

  Her mouth made a downward shape. “Does it involve walking? Because I don’t think my legs will take me anywhere else today.”

  He looked down at her short little legs and up at the sky. “No. I can show you right here.”

  Rainbow put on her fleece, sat on her raincoat, and followed Eole’s instructions to lean back against a rock. She looked up at the clouds and thought about his gift as she waited for him to get out his art. What kind of songs did he sing, and what kind of voice did the wind respond to? Nothing would ever respond to her own tuneless voice – apart from cats, perhaps.

  The clouds were flocculent and higher than the wispy ones she’d noticed transclouding yesterday morning, before she spotted Dizzy and met Eole. They looked solid, like cotton wool.

  Eole stood up and breathed in. He was going to show her his special skill, not his art. Perfect! She sat up straight. Darwie obviously didn’t like his singing, because he whined. She waited for Eole to burst into song, but he simply leant his head back. He breathed out a long, slow breath directed towards the sky. A very long breath. At the same time he moved his head around, as if he had stiff neck muscles and was stretching them.

  She looked up. The shapeless cloud had become the letter ‘R’, and the one beside it was transclouding into the other letters of her name.

  “Wow! You’re a cloud artist. How cool is that?” He hadn’t sung to the storm: he’d blown it away. “You must have massive lungs.”

  “I do. It feels like I have a world of wind in them,” said Eole.

  “Let me try,” she said.

  She took a deep breath and blew up at the ‘R’. Nothing happened. She laughed and turned back to him. “Is this your special skill? To be able to blow really hard?”

  Panic flashed in his eyes and his feet shuffled as if he were struggling not to walk away.

  “You don’t have to answer,” she said. “You needn’t break your promise to Tintin because I know this is the special skill that makes you my soulmate.”

  His feet stopped shuffling.

  “It’s really cool to meet someone else like me,” she said.

  He smiled.

  It was the first time she’d seen him smile, and it transformed his face. She let her eyes linger on his illuminated features, wondering if this was his aura, and memorising the change so she’d be able to draw him like this.

  “Does anyone else know about your skill?” she asked.

  “No. I would have told Hestia, except that sometimes I tell her secret things and then Alexandra knows about them. Ninety per cent of the time they either argue or ignore each other. But occasionally when I go into the kitchen, they’re sitting with their heads close together and giggling, and they stop and it’s like when I don’t understand a facial expression. Tintin said that if I told people–”

  “You’d be exploited,” she finished. Michael had said exactly the same thing to her when she’d revealed her tree gift in his garden at the Drunken House. The ache of losing him burned inside her heart.

  Eole hesitated and then resumed as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’d be exploited. But I didn’t tell you, I showed you.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t exploit you. But cloud art is risky. What if someone sees?”

  “Hardly anyone notices clouds. And if they do see a shape, they think it’s their imagination and congratulate themselves on their pareidolia – that’s what it’s called when you make patterns out of random shapes.”

  “Can you make me a tree cloud?” she asked.

  “Yes. What kind of tree?”

  “Any tree.”

  He looked consternated.

  “A silver maple?” she suggested.

  “I don’t know what that looks like.”

  She listed a few trees – avoiding ‘chestnut’ in case it made him sad about Tintin again – until he nodded at the suggestion of an oak tree. He breathed in for ages, and then started carving.

  His cloud art was quite similar to her branch-shaping art, which made his gift ‘equal to her own’ – though, luckily for her, his wind control was much more powerful than her healing gift. And it didn’t impinge on her territory as the tree specialist. Would she have been jealous if his gift had proved more powerful with trees than her own? No, of course not: she loved trees, and any gift that could help them would have been a cause for celebration, not jealousy. Still, she preferred it this way.

  She needed to broach the subject of the Tree Slayer, but she didn’t want him to panic at the idea of having to use his skill to destroy something. It didn’t seem to be in his nature to be destructive. Mary wanted her to get on with it, but Amrita had said she must be patient.

  “When you’re ready, I’ve got something to tell you,” she said.

  He didn’t answer. He was standing doing absolutely nothing. She’d never seen anyone do nothing. She took out her sketch pad and sketched his figure, contoured with its heavy black lines, and tried to recapture the radiance of his smile.

  Eole had only discovered his special skill when his voice broke. He didn’t know if he’d always had it, if it had simply appeared, or if his lungs had just kept growing when all his other organs had stopped.

  He’d started blowing away wisps of condensing water particles while he was minding the sheep, and when Tintin had noticed, he’d said Eole was doing something special. Eole already knew he was special, thanks to Alexandra, but this was different because it was a skill, and skills had to be maintained and developed. Tintin had helped him understand
the anomaly in his lungs and nose. He’d explained his theory of how they allowed him to gather and store so much air. It was plausible, he said: plausible, but unusual. This meant it was scientific and not a present from God, which is how Alexandra would interpret it if he told her.

  He heard Rainbow’s voice from a distance, floating towards him on the breeze like a promise. It blew away the cobwebs of the times he and Tintin had sprawled in the heather, him practising cloud art while Tintin talked about meteorology. His brain reached out and grasped her words. She had something to tell him. The sun was low, but he’d left a time-buffer before showing her the stars because part of being together was allowing space for the other person to be illogical and disorganised.

  She put away her coloured pencils and he glimpsed a picture of a boy holding hands with a small Indian girl dressed in pinks and reds. Pink and red didn’t go together, which was a clue that her drawing wasn’t any good, but he needed to ask Hestia before he commented on it. He’d have liked to discuss Rainbow’s special skill with Hesita as well, but Rainbow didn’t want him to mention it. Either it was in her head, like reiki, or she had an anomaly too.

  The best scientists keep an open mind, Tintin had said, so he put aside the feasibility of Rainbow’s special skill. He told her he was ready, sat down opposite her, and concentrated on achieving a perfect him-her-him-her rhythm to their conversation.

  She repeated what she’d said about a soulmate, except this time she wasn’t speaking in conditionals. She said that now she’d seen his special skill she was convinced they were soulmates. Their future lay together, and they had an evil force to fight.

  He imagined black holes, spacecraft, and laser beams. His heart beat faster. She talked about him guiding her, though he didn’t understand where he was supposed to guide her: perhaps around his mapopedia? She talked about trees and spirits, and mentioned that strange name ‘Amrita’ again. And then she said she needed his special skill. She needed him! The evil force was a wind, and without his help it might kill her.