On the eighteenth day they were soaked in a shower. Eole said they should stay in their wet clothes and keep the dry ones in their rucksacks. Rainbow sneezed and miserably agreed. Her nose was sore from blowing it, and Eole’s sniffing annoyed her.
Late that afternoon they reached a village, only to discover the shops were closed. She was exhausted. The idea of walking to the next village was too much, so she knocked on the doors of the few houses they passed to ask for food and shelter. Nobody answered. Then, in the middle of a dripping forest, she tripped and fell, hurting her ankle. She demanded that they stop for the night right there in a sodden glade beside a stream.
She crawled to an old sycamore tree and collapsed with her back against it. They ate some soggy biscuits and then Eole left to scavenge for wild food. Rainbow pulled off her boots and rubbed her aching ankle. She’d had enough. A tear slid down her cheek. Where the hell was this Koad? It had been a month since Amrita told her to ‘go with haste’. They would never reach Koad in time to save the One Tree and Amrita. Even Mary couldn’t be bothered to boost her. In fact, she’d hardly felt anything from Mary since her resistance in the holloway, when Rainbow realised she might die. Mary had lost interest in their mission.
The peeling bark on the sycamore’s trunk made her back itch. It had been too wet to touch a tree all day. She hugged it, and apologised for having wasted so much time. The last One Tree would no doubt have answered, but the sycamore said nothing. Instead, she had the sensation she was balanced on the boundary between life and death. She had to choose one way or the other. Life, of course, she thought.
Energy began to flow out from the trunk, through her arms and into her core. It was the rising sun after a dark night. It was like slipping into a warm bath when you were cold and hungry. Mingled with the restorative energy was hope. She must cling to her mission and keep going. She held on tight, drinking in everything the sycamore gave, and her eyelids grew heavy.
When Eole returned with a bunch of stinging nettles and some dandelion leaves for dinner, he found Rainbow asleep, hugging a tree like Hestia used to hug her teddy bear. He’d stopped calling Hestia every evening. When he’d called on results day and learnt he’d got the highest grades in his exams, she told him not to bother calling again since he was obviously more interested in celebrating his exams with Rainbow than coming home to support her. So he hadn’t. But Rainbow said he should call anyway. He dithered over what to do and decided to leave it a week before he called again.
He lit the gas, fried the nettles and dandelion leaves, and then let them stew in water. He and Rainbow would still be hungry after the meal, but he’d already spent a couple of days without eating a proper meal when he was in the mountains, and he’d survived. They’d find a village the next day.
While Rainbow slept, he examined the broken clip on his rucksack. If he’d had access to Tintin’s workshop, he could have fixed it easily. Instead, he’d collected discarded objects all day and puzzled over ways to combine them in order to mend the clip. Now, he took the clothes peg, paperclip, safety pin and string, and used his Swiss army knife to fashion a makeshift clip. It would last until they reached Koad. He suspected they were nearly there because the anticipation in the voices was rising. They were also only a three-day walk from Paimpont, but he wouldn’t let his mind dwell on that.
Rainbow was still asleep. Dinner was ready and their tents pitched. There was nothing to do. He took out his multiverse book and looked at the cover. He must think of his future, as Rainbow had advised, and not dwell on the past with Tintin. Science wasn’t only his past: it was his future too. He’d told himself this every day since her suggestion, and each time her idea sat a little more comfortably in his mind. He opened the book and looked at the words.
They weren’t just words, as they had been yesterday. They were individual windows, like in a train, and when he strung them together they took him away from the page and into the thoughts of the writer. The quantum physicist was talking to him. He had a direct link into the author’s mind. He was reading again!
Late the next morning they stopped at a signpost. Rainbow listened to a hoopoe’s hollow call while Eole unfolded his map and checked their position. She walked towards the sound and tried to locate the bird so she could draw it. Hoopoes were her and Eole’s favourite bird – he had a nesting family in his garden – although the kingfisher they’d spotted at the river on their rest day had come a close second.
She’d almost finished Gabin’s notebook. Her handwriting wasn’t as neat as his, but her drawings were more detailed. As they walked, she searched for themes. Her current fixation was with exposed roots, and she thought some sketches were quite passable. Before that, she’d had a feather period, a flirtation with moss on rocks, a fungus fascination, and a study of tree stumps.
The hoopoe remained hidden. She gave up and joined Eole at the signpost. A brown tourist sign, decorated with oak leaves in each corner, hung under the official road signs. In the centre were two opposing arrows, each with a forest name beside it. The one ahead was the Forêt de Paimpont.
“Cool! We’ve got another forest coming up,” she said. It was much more pleasant walking in the shade than under the hot sun. “We may find Koad and the One Tree there.”
Eole shrugged. It was the first time he’d seen the name Paimpont on a road sign. His mind stirred up muddy ideas and tried to mix belonging with their together mission. He needed his brain’s calm control to keep the concepts separate.
Rainbow studied his face. He avoided looking at her directly, as if he were hiding something.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
He pointed at the sign and started walking towards Paimpont.
She tried to catch up, but he strode ahead. There was no point pushing him. She didn’t want to upset him and risk a gale. Apart from the moment after the kiss, he’d mastered his moods perfectly over the past weeks. He would tell her what was wrong when he was ready.
Eole counted down the seconds on his watch and then dialled Hestia’s number.
“At last!” said Hestia. “I didn’t mean it about not calling, you dork. Maman’s been worried sick all week. It’s lucky she’s at church, otherwise she’d give you an earful.”
Eole lingered on the sound of Hestia’s voice before he analysed her words, because her voice made him feel warm and safe whereas her words made him feel guilty. He’d only done what she said.
“Rainbow should have told you to call,” she continued. “Or is she too wrapped up in her precious trees to pay you any attention?”
“She did tell me.”
“Oh, Eole! Never mind. So how’s it going? Have you saved the planet and got your leg over yet?”
He blushed at the image her words presented him with and reminded her that their tents were too small. Then he looked back through his mental travel log – which was much more detailed than Rainbow’s – and told Hestia the highlights of each day. When he’d finished, he asked if she and Patrick were back to normal.
“What do you mean, ‘Patrick’? Come off it, Eole. I know they were out of order to keep your adoption a secret, but he’s still Papa. He’s the one who brought you up. Well, tried to. That’s far more important than the minor detail of blood. He was on my side for the abortion – which went fine, since you didn’t ask – and even though it’s over, he still comes and sits on my bed and asks me how I am.”
“I’m sorry about your bab–”
“Don’t say that word.”
Eole was puzzled, but Hestia was speaking again:
“So don’t you dare call Papa ‘Patrick’ again. And before you ask, I don’t want to hear ‘Alexandra’ either. Or ‘Isabelle’ instead of ‘Aunt Isabelle’. OK?”
“OK. But it’ll get complicated when I find my biological parents, because I’ll have to call them Maman and Papa too.”
“Because you’re looking for them?” Hestia asked. Her voice had changed. It made him think of Scatty Cat skulking along the grou
nd when he crept up on a bird.
“No. Paimpont’s on our line, so if we stop there I might look. But it’s a separate mission. I mustn’t mix it up with our together mission.”
“You’re lucky. You’ve got two families instead of being stuck here in the back of beyond. You should go there and make enquiries about them. Who cares about Rainbow’s weirdo tree stuff, anyway? She only thinks about herself. And trees are assassins. I reckon you should let Rainbow get on with her stuff and go and find your other parents. After all the help you’ve given her, she’s done nothing in return.”
Eole’s feet started to itch. He rubbed them together and thought about roots. Rainbow was his soulmate. He had to guide and protect her.
His feet grew calm again and he told Hestia he’d ring her the next day.
“I may not be here tomorrow. I’m going away for a few days,” she said. “Ring me in, say, four days’ time. On Friday, OK? See you soon.”
He said goodbye and hung up.
Rainbow was sitting on the wall by the shops, eating one ice-cream and holding another. He started to tell her that she should have bought the second one after she’d finished the first one, because it would have melted by the time she was ready to eat it. Before he could finish, she made the T-sign and told him it was for him, not her, and put it in his hand.
He thanked her. Hestia was wrong. Rainbow had given him lots of things. He made a list in his head while he ate his ice-cream, and discovered that he owed her two more things than she owed him.
A day later they climbed a hill onto a plateau and Rainbow gasped. A huge forest lay on the horizon. Although Eole had expected it, the extent of trees impressed him too.
‘Koad’, the voices told him.
‘Brocéliande Forest’, indicated a tourist sign.
“Maybe,” said Eole.
“Maybe what?” Rainbow asked. The Brocéliande sign confused her because she’d assumed she was looking at Paimpont forest.
“According to Aunt Isabelle, Brocéliande is a mythical forest from the legends of King Arthur. It’s supposed to be magical, with strange weather systems, and no one is truly sure of its location. I don’t know whether Paimpont really is Brocéliande, but the voices are telling me this is Koad.”
“Woo hoo!” Rainbow dropped her rucksack and danced a jig. “Koad’s a forest and we’re nearly there. Come on, Eole! Aren’t you glad?”
Eole stared at the forest. “No,” he said.
“Cheer up! If Koad is Paimpont forest and Paimpont is Brocéliande, and Brocéliande is magical, I bet we’ll find the One Tree there. Tell me everything you know about Brocéliande.”
He recounted Aunt Isabelle’s stories and the references to Brocéliande in medieval texts for the rest of the day as they crossed the plateau and neared the forest. After weeks of passing trees maimed by Eole’s gale, Rainbow was astonished to notice that there appeared to be no damage to Paimpont forest. She remembered the way the François I oak had sucked in the gale to prevent the other trees in the park from suffering. Amrita’s last One Tree had to be inside the forest. It must be impressively powerful to have protected this huge area.
That evening, banks of cloud built on the horizon and when Rainbow and Eole rose, early the next morning, they were met by a wind that Eole described as ‘westerly’. They walked down a steep hill and crossed a main road. On the far side, an ancient oak tree shaded the courtyard of a restaurant called Les Forges de Paimpont.
“Paimpont forest! Koad! We’ve arrived,” said Rainbow. “And what a beautiful oak to greet us.”
Eole massaged his earholes and then turned his head, listening in every direction. Something was wrong ahead of them. It was as if they were entering a black hole.
“What’s the matter?” asked Rainbow.
“It’s the voices. They’ve stopped.”
Chapter 28
“What do you mean, ‘the voices have stopped’?” asked Rainbow.
Eole covered his ears with his hands. The voices had accompanied him for weeks: he’d tuned into them and begun to vibrate along with them. Now, the lack of them made his ears scream. The silence was unbearable after the weeks of intimate symphonies.
“I can’t hear them anymore. They’re not saying ‘Koad’. They’re not saying anything.”
Rainbow wondered if the voices had stopped because they’d arrived at their destination. If so, the tree in front of them could be the One Tree.
Saying nothing of her hopes to Eole, she walked up to the ancient oak tree in the restaurant car park and stroked its mossy bark. Her hands settled and she opened herself to it. There was horror here: a history of axes and fire and men making metal. But there were no images or words. And no confirmation that they’d arrived at Koad. It wasn’t the One Tree.
“The oak is communicating ‘horror’,” she said “Can you hear it?”
Eole put his ear to the oak. There was no melody of voice or smell.
“No. Let’s go into the forest,” he said. He might hear the voices once trees surrounded him. And there would be more shelter from the coming storm.
They crossed a dyke that separated a lake from a low-lying village. On the far side, the forest was fenced. And silent. Eole glimpsed grand houses between the trees. He touched the wire fencing and read the ‘Private’ signs. He looked at the brambles and bracken and smelt groves of nettles. He listened to the birds. Nothing indicated which way to go.
“Still no voices,” he said.
They’d walked through dozens of private woods without coming across a single barrier, and now, the minute the voices stopped guiding him, he was lost. It was like the week of his arrival in the Pyrenees, when Paul Coutances and his friends had taken him on a walk and had suddenly disappeared, laughing, into the fog. Maybe his and Rainbow’s together mission was over now he’d guided her to Koad. He wasn’t ready for it to end.
Rainbow waded through the nettles to hug a row of trees along the fence. It was such a relief to find trees that were whole, undamaged by the Tree Slayer’s gale.
“I can sense restraint, like tight wire cutting into a trunk and restricting its growth,” she said. “I don’t think they like the fence. Are you sure you can’t hear it?”
Eole shook his head. For so many years he’d wished the voices would cease. Now they had, it felt like failure.
Rainbow sighed. They were so near and yet so far. A line of dark clouds crept over the sun. To cap it all, it was going to rain. She walked to the biggest chequer tree she’d ever seen and sat down beneath it. She didn’t have the heart to take out her sketch pad.
“What do we do now?” said Eole.
Rainbow chewed on a stalk of grass and considered. She’d planned to sneak away from Eole and the Tree Slayer as soon as they found the One Tree, but if he couldn’t hear the voices, he was no more use as a guide. The danger he represented was greater than his value, and there was no reason to stay with him any longer. Except that she couldn’t leave him, not after the intimacy of their last month together.
“We’d better carry on until we get some kind of indication of where the One Tree is,” she said. “I guess it’ll be in the centre of the forest.”
“But I can’t guide you without the voices, and the map doesn’t show any paths in the forest so we’ll get lost, and in any case how can we carry on if we don’t know exactly where we’re going?”
Rainbow glanced at Eole’s feet and saw his right boot rubbing against his left.
“We do know where we’re going,” she said, quickly. “You’re sure this forest is Koad?”
He nodded.
“So we’re going to the One Tree.”
Eole took his eyes from the safety of her face and dared a glance at the countryside around him. In the ringing silence, everything seemed suddenly foreign. He didn’t know this place. There were no mountains, nothing to align himself with. What was he doing here? What was Rainbow doing here? Without the voices, he couldn’t be her guide. If he wasn’t her guide, he wasn�
��t her soulmate. If he wasn’t her soulmate, who was he and where did he belong? He gripped the straps of his rucksack, holding tight so that he didn’t fall off the world. He stared at the forest, at the road, at the verges. The forest, the road, the verges. They spiralled around him, getting closer. Forest, road, verges. Nothing made sense if he wasn’t her soulmate.
His brain came to the rescue of his muddy mind. One thing made sense.
He let out the breath he’d unintentionally gathered in his lungs and pulled out the map. He put his finger on the spot where the road left the dyke and entered the forest. It continued directly to Paimpont.
“OK, Eole?” asked Rainbow. “We’re going to find the One Tree. OK?”
She saw his right boot twitch, then it was stationary again and he nodded without looking at her. He was poring over the map. She’d thought for a minute that he was going to panic. She sighed and spat out her grass stalk.
“We just don’t know how to get there yet,” she added. “I could hug every tree until one responds, but it’d take forever.”
“If we follow this road we’ll reach Paimpont in a couple of kilometres,” he said.
“What’s the point of going into Paimpont? I doubt the One Tree will be in a village.”
Eole didn’t answer.
“Eole? Why do you want us to go into the village?” Rainbow asked slowly. “You’ve spent three weeks avoiding people, and now you suddenly want us to go into a village full of them.”
Tree Slayer Page 22
