Tree Slayer

by Harriet Springbett

  Eole made the T-sign three times in quick succession.

  “What?” she said, crossly.

  “You didn’t tell me you understood trees’ feelings. It’s given me an idea. We can do a scientific study to see if we can interpret the voices. You can tell me what the trees feel and I’ll make a dictionary to associate each feeling to a noise and smell combination. We can stay together and I can protect you one hundred per cent from the Tree Slayer. We’ll soon see if it’s the trees or not. Shall we start now?”

  Mary was chiming warning bells inside Rainbow: it was too much of a coincidence. She was convinced it was a needy Eole trick or a Tree Slayer ruse. Rainbow didn’t know about tricks or ruses, but she did know that Eole didn’t care about trees. He called them assassins and kicked them and said they stank, whereas she knew trees and loved them. She would do anything to help them. She’d have worked on understanding them, not put on headphones and ignored them. Or killed so many of them.

  “No, we can’t start now,” she said. “I’ve got more important things to do.”

  She didn’t want to see him having friendly chats to trees while she stood by, powerless to understand. She didn’t need to know more about the voices that he could hear and she couldn’t. And she didn’t need his protection. She would find Koad on her own.

  She revved the engine hard and accelerated out of the lay-by, glaring at him when he told her that nine thousand people were killed on the road each year and that she should drive more slowly.

  If the voices hadn’t stopped him being able to concentrate on what people were saying, Eole might have continued the voice research he’d started in Paris. But a key had been missing, a key to break the code. If the voices did come from the trees themselves, which he doubted with Tintin’s healthy-scientific-doubt-but-open-minded attitude, Rainbow could be the key.

  Tintin had told him that scientists follow up many false trails before finding the right one. In the interest of science he had to test whether Rainbow was the key. Therefore he must stay with her. He was eighteen and didn’t belong to Alexandra. He didn’t have to obey her.

  He practised reciting these reasons as he walked from the workshop across the grass to the commune table, where Alexandra was shaking hands with Rainbow, Domi and Jasmine, Rainbow’s mum. Alexandra had her back to him. His feet wanted him to go faster and get close to her, but his brain told them to slow down.

  Rainbow had only spoken seventeen words to him since his code-breaking suggestion yesterday. None of the seventeen had been in agreement with his idea. Her near-silence was like cumulonimbus clouds overhead.

  Alexandra looked up and saw him.

  “Darling!” She made the love-hug sign and checked him over, like Tintin used to check over lambs before he bought them at the market. “Are you all right? You look thin. Haven’t they been feeding you?”

  He told her he’d eaten every meal and was fine. “I’m so fine that I’ve decided to stay here with Rainbow,” he added.

  “But darling, the hypnotherapy is over. I’ve driven all this way–”

  “Which is why you must stay to lunch,” said Domi. “Come and join us.”

  “Anyway,” said Rainbow, “Eole can’t stay here with me because I’m leaving.”

  Eole stepped back from the group. There were too many illogical sequences and unsaid words. He looked at Rainbow’s frown, at Domi’s hand on Alexandra’s arm, and at Alexandra’s face, which made her surprised expression before giving Rainbow a purposeful smile. Where was Rainbow going?

  “You see, Eole?” said Alexandra. “Rainbow’s going away too. We’ll have a quick lunch, then you can pack up and come home with me. Charles must be missing his sheep.”

  She patted Darwie and accompanied Domi and Jasmine to the table.

  Eole stood, rooted, as the arrangements for his life spun out of his control. Whenever other people were involved in his plans, they always went awry. It was so much easier to live with the sheep up on the pastures. The thought of long summer days, free of confusing confrontations, made him ache. He wanted to go to the hut and think about Tintin and science. But he wanted to be with Rainbow too. He wanted to go back in time to last week, when she’d camped beside his hut and everything had been easy. In a parallel universe, that’s exactly what he was doing.

  “It’ll be fine, Eole,” whispered Rainbow. “Remember: you have the winds to manage.”

  He sat on Alexandra’s right side, from where the commune group seemed much less intimidating than before. He answered her questions about the voices, telling her that Domi hadn’t found a solution and then explaining Rainbow’s theory. Nobody else was listening to them at the beginning, but as he got to the part where Rainbow was convinced the voices were the trees, he realised that everyone else was quiet. He stopped, mid-sentence, and stared at the lettuce leaf on his plate. Itch. His brain sent messages to his feet, telling them to uncurl their roots.

  “Well, that’s extraordinary,” said Alexandra. She was good at filling the silences after his monologues. “It makes me think of the oak trees in the Dodona wood at home in Greece, where priests used to go to a sanctuary and listen to Zeus giving his oracles. That was before they understood there was only one God. They heard his words via the whisper of the wind in the leaves. I told you it was God speaking through nature, darling. Rainbow’s almost right.”

  Eole wondered how to turn Alexandra’s story to his advantage so she would let him stay. If he’d had Hestia in his brain, like Rainbow had Mary, she would tell him to use Alexandra’s belief in God.

  “That’s why I need to stay here,” he said. “Because Rainbow has a special tree skill and she can help me understand the voices. Between us, she and I will be able to decipher God’s message. And spread God’s Word,” he added, as an afterthought, since it made him sound more like Père Laurent.

  He felt a kick on his ankle, but it obviously wasn’t a sign because Hestia wasn’t here.

  “I doubt Rainbow wants to spread His word,” said Alexandra.

  “I don’t,” said Rainbow. “I’m far too busy.”

  “There you are, darling,” said Alexandra, and finished her salad.

  “I wonder,” said Domi. He glanced from Eole to Rainbow and back again, but didn’t explain what he was wondering.

  Rainbow’s cumulonimbus clouds darkened over Domi. It was as if she and Domi were talking together without saying any words. He thought back to what he’d read about telepathy in the Cognac library book.

  “No, Domi,” Rainbow said out loud. “I’m going to Massane forest with Thierry tomorrow.”

  “Then you have all afternoon,” he replied.

  “No, I don’t. I’m seeing Apple and Acorn.”

  Domi folded his arms, looked at her and sent another telepathic message.

  “It’s pointless,” she replied. “It couldn’t possibly work.”

  Eole decided they were arguing about his plan to interpret the voices. “It could,” he said. He stood up and pushed back his chair.

  Domi told Rainbow to go on.

  Alexandra told Eole to stay put.

  Eole watched Rainbow roll her eyes up to the sky, as if looking for help from God, which was good acting and would surely help convince Alexandra. He turned and walked towards the woods.

  Chapter 20

  Rainbow wanted to ignore Domi but, deep down, under the layers of resentment and suspicion about Eole’s voices, she was curious to know what the trees were saying.

  His idea probably wouldn’t work, and she’d have preferred to hear the trees’ voices herself. But if she did this test with him, and it succeeded, he could share their words with her. They might give her some advice, though of course the Tree Slayer would hear it too. But all this presumed his far-fetched plan was feasible. She would spare him a few minutes. Only then, if it worked, would she think about what to do next.

  She sighed, stood up and joined Eole beside an alder tree in the woods.

  “So what’s your plan? I’ve onl
y got five minutes,” she said.

  He checked his watch and pressed a couple of buttons before he answered: “You hug a tree and tell me what it’s feeling, and I’ll listen and breathe in the smell. Then you hug another tree and we do the same. Each time, I’ll note the results as a correlation between the tree’s feelings and the noise-smell combination I detect. After a certain number of trees – I can’t estimate how many, yet – a pattern should emerge, which will permit us to make a kind of dictionary. Let’s call it a treeopedia. We don’t have to analyse the source of the voices for this part of our study because we’re just collecting data.”

  “That’ll take more than five minutes.”

  “We’ll start with a five-minute pilot test.”

  It sounded horribly scientific … and yet: imagine if his dictionary would allow her to understand what the trees were actually saying herself! But no. There was no point getting excited. The trees in Dorset had refused to respond to her gift in front of a scientist. The same was bound to happen here.

  Eole took off his headphones. His face scrunched up and the colour gradually drained from it. He put his hands to his temples and didn’t respond when she asked if he was all right. She’d better do this quickly.

  She closed her eyes and concentrated on stroking the alder’s trunk until she found the right place to lay her hands. Warmth filtered through its bark and her palms moulded its trunk. Usually, she waited while the tree’s feelings permeated her – a kind of tuning-in – until she was vibrating at the same frequency as the tree. Then she would feel where it needed healing or how to shape it. This time, however, she asked it to express a single feeling.

  Alders were quick trees, and a feeling of speed and agility filled her.

  “What you can hear and smell is quickness and lightness,” she said to Eole.

  There was no answer.

  She thanked the alder and opened her eyes.

  Eole was lying on the ground, a curled embryo, his eyes closed and his hands covering his ears.

  “Eole!” She crouched down. Had the trees detected the Tree Slayer inside him and punished him?

  His eyes opened into a squint. She retrieved his headphones, which were out of his reach, and put them onto his ears. He pressed them to his head with trembling hands, rolled over and shakily stood up.

  “Are you OK?” she asked.

  He stumbled along the track, away from the woods and towards the house. She followed.

  “Eole? What happened?”

  He rubbed his forehead. “There are too many voices, all shouting. And an acrid C3.”

  “C3?”

  “It’s from my classification of voice-smells. There aren’t enough words to describe all of them.” He looked at his watch. “We still have one minute and twenty seconds. Let’s try a solitary tree.”

  “Forget about the five minutes. I can stay a little bit longer, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea. You look terrible.”

  He pressed a button on his watch and then pointed at her silver maple. “That one.”

  Rainbow felt a frisson of fear. One day, Mary might reappear. Or she may disappear completely. A few months ago, Rainbow would have been glad to see her disappear. Now, after Mary’s support in the Pyrenees, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to lose her. When they were in agreement, it was easy to be whole.

  She stroked the silver maple’s bark and let her hands rest just below the split. Eole took off his headphones and then scrunched up his face again.

  “Can you hear it?” she asked.

  “I can still hear all the voices shouting.”

  “Then come closer. You could put your ear against the bark.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? You’d hear the silver maple’s voice on its own.”

  “I’m afraid it’ll shout down my earhole. And it stinks. I don’t want to stink of tree.”

  “Try,” said Rainbow, biting back her retort that there was no better fragrance than that of trees. “You can always pull away if it’s too loud.”

  He held his ear a few centimetres away from the trunk.

  “Quick! Hug it now,” he said.

  Rainbow closed her eyes and hugged. Mary seemed to expand in her mind, as if she were gathering strength from the tree and pushing the limit of their mental wall. Rainbow squeezed the wall back into place and concentrated on the silver maple’s feelings. It was warm, comfortable and irresistibly hollow.

  She became aware of Mary’s yearning to melt into it. For the first time, she wondered if Mary was happy inside her. There was no reaction from Mary, other than this craving to enter the tree. Was Mary’s body still stuck inside the silver maple? Could Mary rejoin it?

  The maple’s interior was as enticing as an empty bed when you’re tired, as tempting as an open door into a cosy cottage when you’ve been travelling for days. It was … she tried to find a word to sum up its alluring comfort, a word she could give Eole. Yes, ‘welcome’. The silver maple was emitting a feeling of welcome. She thanked it and opened her eyes.

  Eole was vomiting at the foot of the tree, his headphones back on. She handed him a tissue and stood back from the repulsive smell.

  “This is ridiculous. It’s making you ill,” she said.

  “What feeling did you get?” he croaked.

  “I think it was ‘welcome’. But we can’t carry on. It’ll take a hundred years to understand their language and you’ll be dead before we’ve got ten words.”

  He threw up again and Rainbow heard a cry behind her. Alexandra was hurrying towards them.

  “Mother alert,” she whispered.

  He sat back on his heels and wiped his face.

  “Darling! I knew it! You’re ill. You must come home so I can look after you properly.”

  He staggered to his feet. “I need to lie down,” he said. “I can’t face a car journey.”

  ‘It’s a migraine. You haven’t had one since Paris,” said Alexandra. She pushed past Rainbow and led Eole back to the house.

  Rainbow followed and watched Mum take them up to her bedroom so Eole could lie down in the coolness of the stone house. She fetched a bottle of water, took it upstairs and knocked on Mum’s bedroom door. Alexandra snatched the bottle and closed the door in Rainbow’s face.

  Eole woke up to darkness. It was 1:14 a.m. His headache had passed and he was ravenous. Alexandra was stretched out on the bed beside him and Darwie lay in the corner of Jasmine’s room on a blanket. Eole sat up. He was still dressed, except for his trainers.

  Alexandra reached out to him. He whispered that he was going to the toilet.

  Before going back to bed, he paused at the foot of the staircase leading to Rainbow’s loft. A scratching noise came from Jasmine’s room. He opened the door and Darwie nosed his way out. Eole picked up his trainers, told Darwie to lie down, and crept up the staircase.

  He knocked on Rainbow’s door. There was no reply. He turned the handle and opened it a crack. A sliver of moonlight made his hand glow white. He whispered her name.

  Her bed creaked. He went and stood over her. She looked like a younger version of herself, her brown hair loose around her face. Before he could find a metaphor, her eyes opened. She stared at him, then cried out and bunched her sheet over her mouth.

  “Jesus, Eole! What are you doing?”

  “I’m looking at you. Shall we carry on?”

  “Carry on what? It’s the middle of the night.”

  He corrected her and then pointed out that they only had tonight to see if his idea was feasible. She argued, in a whisper, that they’d already seen it wasn’t, and grumbled about having to get up at seven o’clock the next morning to meet Thierry. He told her his headache had gone and he wanted to make their treeopedia.

  “You said my part in the mission was over,” he added. “But maybe this is our real mission: to use my hearing and your understanding of trees to invent a device for translating the voices. Once we understand them, we can deduce where they come from and publish a scientific
paper.”

  She blinked three times, then sighed and said she’d see him in the kitchen.

  He went downstairs with Darwie and made himself a cheese and ham sandwich from a stale baguette while he waited for her. He much preferred the commune at night, when everyone was in bed.

  She looked a little more sparkly when she tiptoed into the kitchen, as if his mention of their mission had cheered her up, and they sneaked outside into a surprising brightness. The air was still, the sky clear and the moon almost full. Night-time here smelt of mist and pesticides as well as a mossy odour similar to Rainbow’s own scent. She led him away from the woods and towards the vines, where there were fewer trees.

  He listened to the voices before he put on his headphones. They were urgent whispers, rather than the aggressive shouting he’d suffered from earlier on, but they still jumbled together and made it impossible for him to isolate a single voice. Rainbow asked him if he was all right, which was pointless because of course he wasn’t all right. He ignored the muted voices and concentrated on the sound of his and Rainbow’s footsteps on the stony track.

  An owl screeched. A kerfuffle in the hedge made them both jump, and then a fox streaked across their path. Rainbow stroked a tree that reflected the moonlight and explained that the silver birch’s bark was made to reflect sunlight so that the birch didn’t get too hot and dry out. Her face looked devilish in the shadows, but in the light of the moon she resembled the Virgin Mary.

  She stopped at a solitary evergreen oak tree and asked if he was ready to begin. He nodded, gritted his teeth and took off his headphones.

  “Try hugging it,” she said. Her own hands groped up and down its trunk and then she hugged it with her whole body.

  He fought his instinct to put his headphones back on, reached out and touched the trunk with one palm.

  The voice pain was no stronger.