Tree Slayer

by Harriet Springbett

  He let his other palm rest against it. Still no pain: in fact, there was a little less pain, though it was still enough to make him nauseous. He put his arms around the trunk.

  It was like opening the sluice gate at the Lac du Tech dam. The pain rushed from his head down through his arms and gushed into the tree, and the voices reduced to a burbling in the background.

  From deep inside the tree came a single voice. He closed his eyes to concentrate better. It was the gravelly voice of an old man, but it was also a solo flute like the melody from Bach’s Sonata in A minor. It was the smell of new grass shoots in spring and the texture of velvet water on skin. He filled his receptors with the multi-sensory pattern of the voice.

  “Eole! Eole!” he heard Rainbow cry. Her voice was a thin strand compared to the complex voice coming through the tree.

  He opened his eyes. “I don’t want to let go. The pain has gone.”

  She clapped her hands and danced a sparkly kind of jig.

  “I got a feeling of hope from the holm oak,” she said. “Steadiness with hope sprouting all over it. Can you hear a voice?”

  He fixed the voice pattern into his brain and matched it with the words ‘hope’ and ‘steadiness’.

  “OK, I’ve got it,” he said.

  She stopped dancing. “Aren’t you going to write it down?”

  “There aren’t any words to write. Don’t worry: it’s safe in my head. Each time I hear that particular voice-smell I’ll know it means ‘hope’.”

  “So I don’t get to see anything?”

  “No.”

  Her sparkles dulled.

  “What were you expecting to see?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. The phonetic spelling of the voices? Something that would help me understand them.”

  “But that’s illogical. You can’t hear or smell them, so even if I wrote down what I heard with its translation, you couldn’t use it.”

  “I suppose not. So how will you make your device? How will I know what they’re saying?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not at that stage of the experiment yet,” he said. “Can I let go of the tree now?”

  She folded her arms. “Do what you want.”

  “I want to carry on.”

  “Well, I’m going back to bed,” she said.

  He eased his arms away from the trunk. The other voices flooded back and the nausea returned. He retched.

  “Just stop fighting them,” said Rainbow.

  It was like when Hestia told him to be normal: easy to say but difficult to define and therefore impossible to do. The voices weren’t needling into Rainbow’s brain, nagging her like a class of whining children. He held out for a few seconds, then gave up and put his headphones back on.

  “I’m fine now,” he said. “Please don’t go. I need you.”

  She muttered something he couldn’t hear properly, but stayed. They threaded through the woods, stopping every few metres to hug a tree together. Darwie followed them at a distance with his tail between his legs.

  Rainbow’s sparkles increased with each hug. She said the trees must understand his treeopedia idea because they each communicated a different feeling. Occasionally Eole sensed a pattern of voice-smells he’d experienced a few trees earlier, and he immediately knew what words Rainbow was going to give him. It was like a progress test. When two different species of tree expressed the same feeling, he could distinguish a part of the voice that was different, as if each tree had its own variant of a single melody.

  After an hour, he asked if he could listen and guess before she checked, and a few times he guessed correctly. After another hour, the voices became more complicated.

  He wanted to spend the rest of the night translating, but Rainbow started to yawn. She laid her head against the trunk of the horse chestnut tree they’d just listened to, and told him it was time to get some sleep.

  All the excitement of the past three hours together evaporated in the heat of his rising panic. She couldn’t leave yet. He was just starting to appreciate the nuances within the voices.

  “We must stay until we understand one hundred per cent,” he said.

  “Your treeopedia thing is interesting, but it’ll take years to understand a whole language. I need to get some sleep before I leave with Thierry tomorrow.”

  Eole wondered how old Thierry was and whether he would be Rainbow’s next boyfriend.

  “I’m coming to the Pyrenees with Christophe in ten days’ time,” she added. “We’ll carry on with your treeopedia then.”

  Eole had thought that the treeopedia mission would keep her beside him. If he couldn’t persuade her with words, he would have to find another way. He might have to kidnap her and hold her hostage until she understood she was his together.

  “Please stay,” he said.

  She yawned again. “One more tree, then bed.”

  Chapter 21

  Under the moonlit sky, Eole followed Rainbow to the last tree. It had several trunks, and Rainbow said it was an ancient yew tree. It taught him the collective noun for trees: a long, dusty, complex sound-smell that Eole had difficulty committing to memory.

  He yawned. His brain was too tired to come up with a new plan to keep Rainbow beside him. He watched helplessly as she stroked the tree goodbye and turned towards Le Logis.

  As he put on his headphones to follow her, there was a change of pitch in the babble of voices. A pungent odour like a rotten egg caught in his nasal receptors.

  “Come on,” said Rainbow. “It’s almost dawn.”

  “Wait! Something’s happening.” He put his ear back to the yew’s trunk. “Hug it again,” he said.

  She sighed and then put her hands back where they’d been. He watched her and listened, hugging too. She opened her eyes wide.

  “It’s changed,” she whispered. “It’s trying to communicate something, just like during your gale.”

  “Its voice has changed too. It’s like the roar of the wind when you put your head out of a train window.”

  “I’ve had that feeling before,” said Rainbow. “I can sense urgency.”

  “And I can hear the voice pattern we translated as ‘one after another’ earlier on.”

  Rainbow was hugging the yew tree hard. He copied her, closed his eyes and concentrated on a new, faint voice coming up from the tips of its roots. It was a single strand, totally different from the original voice – which implied that he was right and the voices spoke through the trees. This particular voice was misty, almost human, and contained the familiar smell he’d noticed when he first saw Rainbow. The voice spoke. A single word strained towards him, whipping and bending, until …

  “Koad,” he said.

  Darwie howled. Eole opened his eyes. He’d never heard Darwie howl before. He held out a hand and Darwie slunk towards him and pressed himself hard against his legs. He started to tell Rainbow about Darwie, but stopped short. Rainbow’s mouth was in an ‘O’ shape.

  “Koad!” she said. “What do you know about Koad?”

  “Nothing. I’m just repeating what the misty voice said. What is it?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, made a series of different facial expressions and then sighed. “I’ve no idea. Amrita said my other half would guide me to Koad.”

  “What’s your other half?”

  “I fear that you may be.”

  “No, I’m your soulmate.”

  “It’s the same thing, Eole. Soulmate, other half, guide. You’re supposed to lead me to Koad.”

  She didn’t look very sparkly at the idea. He told her he didn’t know what or where Koad was, but if it meant they could stay together, he’d look for it immediately. He added that he preferred ‘soulmate’ to ‘other half’, which was an illogical term because he was whole and Rainbow was double, given that she had Mary inside her brain too. He started to explain the details of his reasoning but she made the T-sign and asked if he’d heard any other words through the yew tree, which he hadn’t. This total lack of mathema
tical logic on the part of Rainbow’s Amrita didn’t seem to bother Rainbow.

  “The yew was definitely different this time around,” she said. “It stood back and let something possess it, like when spirits speak through Aziz during his séances at the commune. It was a sign. It may have been Amrita, reminding me about Koad. You must know what Koad is. Think hard.”

  He’d never have forgotten such a strange word. He listened to the other voices around him while he thought. They weren’t the jumble of noises he’d originally thought them to be. Each was communicating the patterns of ‘Koad’ and ‘urgent’ in its own way. It was the urgency that was making him sick.

  He put his headphones on and walked a few steps one way. Then he walked the opposite way, lifting his headphones slightly away from his head so he could hear the voices without being overwhelmed by them. He turned right, backed up and turned left. He broke into a run, heading towards the commune, then stopped and listened again. Then he jogged back past Rainbow.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  It all made sense, like the pieces of a jigsaw: the voices, his special skill, Rainbow’s talk about a mission, his role as her soulmate.

  “This way,” he said, pointing away from the commune.

  “This way what?”

  “The voices. I think they’re telling us to go this way to reach Koad. Come with me and hug a tree. See if you get a feeling of confirmation.”

  Her face clouded with cumulonimbus, her expressions shifted, as if she was having an internal conversation, and then her eyes narrowed.

  “How do you know?” she said. “And how do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  He explained that the intensity of the voices was different according to which way he turned. When he turned away from the commune, towards the north, they were calmer and less urgent, whereas when he went towards the commune, they screeched ‘Koad’ at him in nauseating protest. It was clear. He just needed to be sure that he’d interpreted the meaning of intensity correctly, and he could only do that if she helped him.

  “This is it! Our together mission,” he added. “We must follow the voices to Koad.”

  She swore, muttered something about Thierry, and then turned and walked back towards the commune.

  He followed her. Of course he followed her. Getting rid of him was like trying to pull chewing gum from your hair: the more you yanked at it, the tighter it clung.

  It wasn’t fair. Any doubt about Eole being her soulmate had been eradicated when he’d spoken the word ‘Koad’. But he didn’t know anything about it. Where was the enlightenment she’d hoped for? Of course she wanted to heal the last One Tree and save Amrita. But if Amrita expected her to give up her exciting future with Thierry for the mission, she could at least have given her the power to carry it out alone. Instead, she was supposed to follow in Eole’s shadow. Eole, who could control the winds and hear the trees’ voices, but who didn’t even care about them. She, Rainbow, was the trees’ friend, not Eole.

  If she went with him – having no idea of the distance, or whether it was a trap laid by the Tree Slayer – she would let Thierry down, once again. He’d warned her that he wouldn’t take any more nonsense from her. If she left with Eole, he would never forgive her.

  A potion of frustration boiled inside her, releasing fumes of resistance: this was a plot for the Tree Slayer to kill her before she could heal the One Tree and restore Amrita; the true path lay with Thierry in Massane; Christophe would hate her going away with Eole; Alexandra would never let Eole go anywhere with her.

  Perhaps Koad could wait until she returned from Massane.

  But Amrita had told her to hurry, and both Rainbow and Eole had understood the yew tree’s message of urgency. ‘Trust the trees,’ Amrita had said.

  Mary would want her to stay with Christophe. Rainbow tensed in preparation for her protest, but she was silent. In fact, Rainbow hadn’t felt anything from her since they’d hugged the silver maple. Was she still there, or had she disappeared into the tree?

  It wasn’t the moment to wonder about Mary. This was a crisis point in her mission. It was obvious what she had to do, whether Mary liked it or not: she had to follow Eole to Koad. Now the Tree Slayer knew her destination, she’d have to be really careful. There was no need to tell Eole what she had to do in Koad. The less information he passed to the Tree Slayer, the better.

  Back at the commune, Eole followed her indoors.

  “Get some sleep,” she whispered to him when she reached the landing. “We have some tough work tomorrow to convince Alexandra.”

  He nodded and went into the bedroom. She climbed the stairs to the loft, wondering if he understood that she’d made her decision, or even that she had a decision to make.

  A few hours later she hit her alarm clock and dragged open her eyes. The bag she’d packed for Massane sat beside her drawing desk.

  Koad.

  Her surge of excitement was dampened by the prospect of the tasks immediately ahead of her, as if she were in prison and could see a forest of freedom laid out before her, but had to climb the barbed wire fence before she could reach the trees.

  The first task was Thierry. It would be easy to ring him and say she was ill. She looked at herself in the mirror as she brushed her teeth. She’d feel worse in the long term if she lied. She left a note on the kitchen table telling Eole not to leave before she returned, and then drove to Thierry’s house.

  Thierry had always been understanding. He’d accepted her way of treating trees when no other tree surgeon would consider her applications, and had forgiven her when she’d disappeared to the Val d’Azun for a week. He’d trained her and encouraged her and taken her into his life like a daughter.

  Rainbow nodded when he reminded her of this. She nodded when he said he was disappointed in her. She sighed when he said she was throwing away her future, and that voices from the trees sounded like hippie nonsense. And she dug her fingernails into her thighs when he told her that if she left, he’d be obliged to revoke his offer of sponsorship.

  She apologised again, and said goodbye. His disapproval hung over her. If Eole didn’t lead her to Koad, she really would kill him. She slumped into the Mini and drove towards the motorbike shop. What was Christophe going to say?

  A tall, blonde girl was walking up the street. Rainbow parked the car and watched her approach. It had to be Emilie. Rainbow sank down in the seat and tried to hide, which was impossible in a Mini, even for someone who was only five feet tall. Emilie looked up at the sky as she walked. There was the freshness of a little girl about her, and she looked dreamy, smiling away at the clouds scudding across the sky. She was probably daydreaming about gears, engine oil and the greasy innards of motorbikes. Or, more likely, she was looking forward to spending the day with Christophe.

  Rainbow should get out and face her. That’s what Mary – wherever she was – would do.

  Emilie passed the Mini without spotting her, and Rainbow angled the rear-view mirror towards herself. She looked awful, with bags under her eyes and a spot welling right in the middle of one cheek. She sighed and smoothed down her boring brown hair.

  Emilie didn’t stop at the back door to the motorbike shop, but went around the corner towards Christophe’s front door. Rainbow jumped out of the car and followed her.

  Emilie rang Christophe’s doorbell. Rainbow took a deep breath and walked up to the door. She managed a cool hello to Emilie and rang Christophe’s bell too. Then she stepped up onto the doorstep so she was the same height as Emilie and fixed her eyes on the white plastic button with Christophe’s name written under it in his childish handwriting. She had no idea how to start a conversation. It was much more difficult than approaching strangers in the Val d’Azun.

  “You’re Rainbow, aren’t you?” said Emilie in a little-girl voice.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Emilie, Christophe’s apprentice,” she said with a smile. “I recognised you from the photo in Chris’s wallet. He’s always talki
ng about you.”

  Rainbow smiled back. That had to be a good thing, didn’t it?

  The intercom clicked and Christophe’s voice greeted them. He sounded sleepy.

  “Just your wake-up buzz,” said Emilie. “And Rainbow’s here for you.”

  “Rainbow? Cool!” Christophe’s voice brightened and he said he was on his way. Emilie’s smile disappeared. She no longer looked dreamy. “He’s crazy about you. Don’t hurt him, OK?”

  How dare Emilie judge her? Of course she wouldn’t hurt him. Before Rainbow could think of a cutting retort, Emilie had gone. Where was sarcastic Mary when Rainbow needed her?

  Christophe pulled open the door and swept her into a bear hug. She clung onto him. If only they could stay like this forever. Once she’d finished her mission, she would spend all the time in the world with him. She followed him upstairs, fed Apple and Acorn and, after putting it off for as long as possible, told him about her night-time research and Eole’s conviction that he could lead her to Koad.

  “What about Massane? How long would this trip to Koad take?”

  “I don’t know. Eole doesn’t know.”

  He folded his arms. “I think it’s a terrible idea. I know this Amrita thing is important to you, but you can’t give up a career opportunity for something so vague. What would Thierry say if he knew you were thinking of letting him down again?”

  She looked down at her trainers. She should have talked to Christophe first.

  “I don’t believe it! You’ve already told him!” He sat down, suddenly. “Don’t I mean anything to you? I thought we were together, that we discussed stuff. We’re supposed to be going on holiday at the end of next week, and now you’re heading off with another guy for God knows how long. How’s that supposed to make me feel?”

  “Don’t be jealous–”

  “Of course I’m jealous. I love you! But I’m not sure I understand you anymore.”

  “I love you too. I’m not going off with another guy, Chris. It’s only Eole, and there’s nothing between us. Anyway, we’ll probably be back in a couple of days. I’m the only one who can save Amrita, and Domi says if she dies, my own life is at risk.”