A Strange Country

by Muriel Barbery

  One rainy day in England, in 1910, he went to a match of a curious sport the French were playing against the English. Although at the time he only understood one rule—that the aim was to score a leather ball all the way at the far end of the opposing side—he enjoyed the moves and passes for their demonstration of human talent and ingenuity.

  After one play where the French looked like a swarm of ballerinas facing a squadron of sluggish draft horses, the old Englishman who was chewing tobacco in the stands next to him had said: a plague upon those Frenchies, but it’s the rugby that everyone wants to see—and this summed up why Petrus ranked France above all else—in addition to wine, women, and pleasant landscapes.

  Now, twenty-eight years later, at the hour of the last battle, he had a hunch that the war would be won with a strategy of ballerinas.

  WE ARE HEADING TOWARD THE STORM

  Nanzen, dawn of the last battle.

  There were twenty or more elves from a variety of houses, including a unicorn, a beaver, a zebra, and a black panther. The elves of the central provinces do not often have the opportunity to meet their compatriots from the hotter climes, but Petrus, Marcus, and Paulus were delighted to see their old friends from the Northern Marches again, the zebra and the panther, who were serving as officers in the army and whom they’d already fought alongside. As for the humans, they kept a safe distance from the imposing feline, although they were most astonished by the fact that half the staff consisted of female elves. Although the present-day leaders were all male, in the past there had been memorable female Guardians of the Pavilion and Heads of the Council, to the extent that the increasing absence of women from positions of responsibility now appeared to Solon and Tagore to be yet another obvious sign of decline.

  At the center of the elfin detachment, the female unicorn turned into a woman with white hair, black eyes, and very wrinkled skin. She was slender and athletic and, in the end, so stunningly beautiful they couldn’t imagine how age could have produced such a vision.

  “We are ready,” said the female chief of staff to Solon and Tagore.

  They went inside the pavilion, where Hostus, Quartus, and ten other assistants were waiting for them. Like the first time, the place, despite its lack of space, seemed perfectly capable of containing the entire company. The members of staff and the guardian’s assistants took their seats against the partitions, and the same elves as before formed a circle in the center of the room. The unicorn sat on Solon’s right and her first lieutenant, a beaver elf, reported on the army’s movements. All the battalions had reached their positions. The troops would intervene at the final signal from Nanzen, and after that, each unit could count only on itself; but all of them had been posted to strategic points and would have the advantage in most of the decisive attacks. In any case, the enemy couldn’t imagine someone would ever want to destroy the tea; the elves of the last alliance, on the other hand, were prepared to do so. Naturally, the soldiers had been informed that a return through the channels would be jeopardized; the beaver added that no one had succumbed to regret at this point.

  Once the report was finished, Petrus took over and asked Tagore to share a scene showing thirty or more strangely dressed men. Some of them, leaning over the others, formed a confused mass. Others stood to one side, useless and waiting for something to do, on a vast lawn streaked with white lines. There were two teams, one dressed in white, the other in blue, apportioned on either side of the swarming mass, from which one member in blue was trying to remove something. No one was moving, but after a long while, the man in blue succeeded in what he was trying to do and hurled the fruit of his conquest behind him. Everything changed gears and shape. On either side of the melee, the blue and white men began running toward each other, in perfect diagonal lines; the thing that looked like a ball went from front to back along the blue line and, just as the configuration of players met between the two lines, it was transformed and realigned; but the ball was still making its way, bouncing from a forward runner to a back runner in a choreography that drew a whistle of admiration from Father François. Then the man carrying the ball collapsed, tackled in full flight by an opponent and, again, the lads tumbled upon each other while the same player as before struggled to wrest his Holy Grail from the pile. In the rear and in the front, a fluid mechanism wonderfully in tune with the pleasure of watching, the idle players re-formed in diagonal lines and, once again, waited for their time to come. And it came, in the form of a new retrieval very near one end of the terrain that was marked by two gigantic posts. This time, the coveted item was thrown to the right and after a rapid and complicated series of rear diagonal passes, the last blue man on the line flattened himself on the grass, the ball under his belly, and this caused some of the men to raise their arms in victory, and the others to lower them in defeat. Finally, the scene vanished and they all looked at each other cautiously.

  “That was rugby, wasn’t it?” asked Alejandro. “I went to a village match once, long ago, although it’s not a very popular sport in Spain. I didn’t understand all the rules, but the sequence of moves was interesting.”

  “It is rugby,” Petrus confirmed, “and strategy, too, as your military eye will have noticed.”

  “Fixed positions and deployment tactics,” said Jesús. “Do we need rugby for that?”

  In the center of the circle Hostus placed a round ball made of interwoven maple twigs.

  “The maple trees from the Northern Marches are known to catch fire a few minutes after they are placed near a tea leaf,” said Petrus.

  You will also see plant life becoming fire, Jesús recalled.

  “We will have to progress in a linear fashion by leaving the seeds to the fire behind us,” continued Petrus, “like in a game with several balls, where the lines move forward and the opponent cannot stop their progress. If we attack from all sides, or concentrate our attack, we cannot set fire to the perimeter without burning ourselves to a cinder at the same time. But if we invite the enemy to a scrum with our rear lines in support, we have a chance of attaining our goal.”

  “Anyone who takes part in the melee will be sacrificed,” Alejandro pointed out.

  “It is my hope that the first engagement will incur no losses,” said Petrus. “We will be the masters of a game where the enemy doesn’t know the rules. They will think we are attacking them, but we will be unarmed, equipped only with our legs for running and our arms for throwing.”

  “What weapons do they have?” asked Alejandro.

  “Bows, swords, spears, and axes,” answered the unicorn elf. “And their mastery of the climate.”

  “They’ll chop us to bits if we’re unarmed,” said Jesús.

  “Not necessarily,” said Paulus, looking at Petrus, “we’ve been trained in an art of evasion designed by the only alcoholic elf in the known world.”

  “Very effective in close combat,” added Marcus.

  “We can do a great deal of harm by falling,” Petrus reassured them.

  There was a silence, disturbed only by the sound of the wind in the trees in the valley.

  “It could work,” said Jesús slowly. “In any case, I’m in.”

  Alejandro nodded.

  They went to the bridge. Dawn was breaking. Far behind the pavilion, beyond the valley, brief flashes of lightning were expiring with the night. Day was coming and the lightning drew fiery streaks upon the sky that faded into the dawn. Then they heard a distant rumbling between pauses in the thunder.

  “We’re heading toward the storm,” said Petrus.

  Out of the mist on the middle of the bridge, there came a team of eight elves—three squirrels, two bears, a wild boar, and two otters—and after respectfully saluting Solon and Tagore, they joined Petrus’s commando. Alejandro looked at Clara, Jesús looked at Maria, the squadron, now at full strength, bowed to the rest of the assembly and moved forward onto the bridge.

  There was a pow
erful thunderclap.

  A few members of staff now entered the mists of the arch. The others went back to the pavilion.

  The last battle was beginning.

  On the other side of reality, Petrus’s commando landed at the edge of the gray tea plantations in Ryoan. On yet another side, the staff materialized around the plantations in Inari. At the far end, or side, or quadrant of the world, Aelius and Santangelo, in the golden pavilion, were beginning to suspect that something was brewing.

  And so, the action got underway in Ryoan. The only interspecies rugby team ever was deployed with lightning speed and efficiency, increased tenfold, I must say, by Petrus’s gift for encouragement. No sooner was he back on his feet, crouching behind the rows of tea, than he pulled a bottle from his bundle and generously shared out the contents, then stood up straight, like the very devil, brandishing his first ball of maple twigs—at which point the team swarmed onto the plantation and almost immediately encountered the opponent. Alejandro and Jesús closed the diagonal on the left, keeping the right distance from the last elf on the line. They saw the first ones, including Petrus, collide head on with a group of bears armed with spears, then deceive them with the art of evasion Paulus had praised—and it was magnificent, because the elves of the alliance fell like drunks between the enemy’s paws, then slipped away like eels, leaving their opponents behind them, now busily hitting each other. For a moment Alejandro and Jesús only had to run, but finally, they drew level with the ruck and faced their first adversaries. Ordinarily, higher-ranking officers do not excel in close combat, but Alejandro de Yepes and Jesús Rocamora were the sons of arid lands, where lords and serfs labor under the same yoke and the same rigorous climate. They were as agile as any survivor of hostile conditions, and they knew when to fall to the ground and twist sideways to avoid a blow with an ax, a toss of the spear, or those odd whirlwinds, miniature tornadoes, that whistled like arrows in flight then disintegrated on reaching the ground. After a moment, real arrows began to fly, aiming at random above the rows of tea, and new tornadoes came swooping down in bursts, sometimes coming close to the very enemy they were supposed to protect. But it was all happening very quickly, and it would have taken a clever soldier on Aelius’s side to thwart the plans behind such a mysterious attack. The commando spread out by passing, dodging, dropping, passing again, with a diabolical precision that no doubt would enthrall numerous coaches in human lands, and I must say that this match, absurd as it was for being played only by one side, was nevertheless an impeccable incarnation of the essence of rugby. Petrus didn’t like chivalry and its moral sentimentality; he thought that, of all the evils, war was the ugliest and vilest; that one must win quickly, brutally, and absolutely; and that spies and assassins were the true artisans of victory. But he hated these requirements of war as much as he hated war itself, and since he knew that the aftermath would be as hideous as the enemy’s hatred, he was not sorry that the opening scene was a good performance. The beauty of rugby stems from its organic quality: the team is nothing without its members, who are nothing without the team. When, after lengthy entanglements, endless scrums, and pitiful advances, the line spreads out and covers giant portions of the field, it’s not just the fluidity of movement, but also the combined effort of heart and legs that rouse the spirit, because the player who scores is heir to the precision and enthusiasm of all the others. And so, Petrus of the Deep Woods, this meticulous and fiery elf, sly and crafty, but also frank and amiable in the company of friends, and ultimately passionate about elsewhere, although he was loyal to his fathers and his mists, had in this war at least one battle which, like French rugby, suited his nature and evinced a refinement and panache that Scotch whisky truly had not spoiled. He knew that a succession of massacres lay ahead, and he was savoring this last engagement, fought without damage or casualties. At the dawn of a tragic time, he put the heart of despair into his work and saw it as a tribute to the courage of the just.

  When the two Spaniards broke enemy lines for the first time and, gliding like fish in a river, found themselves on the far side of the battalion of huge hares, they felt such jubilation that the first ball of maple passed to Alejandro really felt like the Holy Grail to him. He carried it one hundred yards or so and put it on the ground between two tea plants. Then he went on running behind a row that was shorter because of the dislocation of the initial lines. Arrows whistled and fell at random, Aelius’s side had given up on the tornadoes, and if they hadn’t been running with the wind in their ears, they would have heard the sounds of alarm all around the perimeter. Our heroes had already run a league when enemy reinforcements descended on the plantation. Alejandro passed the ball he’d just received from the forward to Jesús, and ran smack into the stomach of a wild boar. The shock dazed him and he had difficulty getting quickly back on his feet. Jesús watched with horror and shouted as the boar raised his ax; Petrus, in front of the line, turned around, and with a classic skip pass, took aim and hit the pig right in the snout. The ax fell an inch from Alejandro’s skull; shouting with relief, he rolled over and got promptly to his feet.

  Opposite him, armed with a huge ax, stood a gigantic elf who didn’t look like he was in the mood for sipping tea.

  “Grizzly!” shouted Paulus from the other side of the field.

  The ax was raised. Alejandro plunged between the monster’s legs and felt his right shoe fly off into the air. He scrambled frantically forward, but the elf had turned around and Alejandro knew, from considerable experience, that the next strike would split his back open.

  Hopelessly crawling, he waited for the blow.

  Behind him, Jesús shouted again.

  The blow didn’t come.

  To the south, behind them, the plantation caught fire.

  The rows of gray tea went up all at once. There was a huge rushing sound, a wind of flame, and the plantation began to burn. Petrus started shouting too and, tearing himself away from the spectacle, the alliance team continued to advance. The enemy, horrified, froze on the spot. They could hear a bell ringing—a bucket brigade was being formed—but the commando reached the end of the first crops without incident. They’d gone a league and a half, and had a clear path for the two remaining leagues. They distributed their last maple balls, then reached the deserted storage barns. Petrus tossed the last vegetal fireball into the bales of tea hanging in the air, where it stayed calmly swinging and vibrating among the packaged leaves. Before giving the signal for the transfer, Petrus stopped at the edge of the burning tea plantations. The sky now had a wild, tawny hue and, in the shimmering of fire, tongues of flame resembled swaying flowers.

  Then they all went back to Nanzen.

  At that moment, the unicorn chief of staff of the mists was gazing at Inari’s demise. From the vast fields of green tea, a hundred times more expansive than those at Ryoan, billows of smoke were rising, the likes of which they’d never seen in the mists, and she watched them rise skyward as the world of her youth vanished in the dawn. She who had observed the other world from the pavilion, who had visited the Head of the Council on human land, admired the genius of humans, their prodigious art and the hope it gave its people, knew, in the end, of nothing more beautiful than the mists rising over the front at Katsura. In these absolute, gilded dawns, as the community of elves, dusted by the ash of Hanase, whispered among themselves with every drift of mist, the voices of the living and the dead joined in a communion that no humans—and this she was sure of—could ever equal.

  Embers from the fire fell at her feet. She took two steps back and felt a tear flow down her cheek.

  The first phase of the last battle was over. On the horizon, thick clouds of smoke gathered and sat stagnant over the land. The atmosphere changed subtly, and everyone could hear Solon’s final address to his people.

  “The plantations at Inari and Ryoan are burning,” he said. “Never before have the leaders of the mists had to make such a painful decision, but we hope for
times of rebirth like those we have always known after a hard fall. I ask those who have never doubted our wisdom not to fear change. To those who went over to the ranks of the enemy, I will say how saddened I am by this disaster orchestrated by hatred. We are a dream, a magic place of trees and stones, the reverie of a spirit swept with mist, the vapor through which the energy of life circulates. We are a breath of atmosphere, a glittering of dust on the rivers of time that unite things and beings and cause the living and the dead to mingle. We are a harmony traversed by the winds of dreaming, an infinite plain welcoming roses and ashes. But we are also a nation more ancient than all others, old and disenchanted, imprisoned in a modern world where we no longer know how to live. Through the logic of decline, our ancestors entered into lethargy just as our mists were beginning to weaken. Twice, a footbridge built to the shores of human land regenerated the mists. Tragedies have always come of divisions and walls, rebirth from bridges built on unfamiliar shores—thus the fall of the tea must be the gate to new alliances, if it is not to remain vain and tragic forever. Inhabitants of the mists, I know your reservations regarding the human race. Are they not to blame for every negligence in their management of the world, for every display of cruelty toward the living? And for how many massacres and wars? And for such cynical exploitation of other kingdoms, when they have neither mist nor tea to bring about a concord of consciousness? And yet, they do possess one treasure we do not have. They have the faculty of painting that which does not exist, and of telling that which will never happen. As strange as it may seem to our spirit immersed in the flow of the world, that faculty creates a parallel truth that enhances the visible and shapes their civilizations. We must invent the future now, and that visionary gift, allied with our natural harmony, will have the power to save our worlds. At present the tea is burning, and I do not know how much longer we will be connected in consciousness, but I am confident that when words no longer suffice, thought will continue. As for me, I will do what I must: I shall maintain.”