A Strange Country

by Muriel Barbery

  He fell silent, and Tagore projected the faces of the humans and the elves of the last alliance into the mist. In return, the community loyal to Nanzen sent the message of their allegiance, mixed as much with worry and sorrow as with their refusal to hate and their trust in the integrity of their leaders. Finally, they voiced their unexpected enchantment with the two little girls born on a night of snow.

  Before leaving the pavilion, the chief of staff put her hand on Petrus’s shoulder.

  “Your little incursion with backward passes was quite clever,” she said.

  “When this is all over,” he replied, “I’ll take you to see a real match.”

  “Who knows what we’ll be watching, a joust or a battle?”

  “One must be blind to see,” said Petrus. “Maybe we are too clear-sighted.”

  We are headed toward the storm

  Book of Battles

  TREES

  Plant life is existence in the absolute, the integral communion of nature with itself. Plant nature turns everything it touches into life. It transforms the radiance of the sun into a living thing. Far from adapting, it engenders. It creates the atmosphere through which everything comes into being and mixes without melting into one. It fabricates the fluidity without which there can be neither coexistence nor encounter. It gives birth to the matter that makes mountains and seas. It exposes the life of one to the life of all the others. It is the source of the first world, of breath and movement, of misty regions and the divine creation of climate. It is the paradigm of the vital immersion and liquid circulation of all things.

  We inhabit the air, thought Petrus, after his fall into the mist in the channel in the Southern Marches. A tree, in its solidity, immobility, and power, is simply the most material, most poetic expression of that truth, the boatman of respiration, the native figure of the life of air—in other words, of the life of the spirit.

  STONES

  Stars wander across the sky, and trees will change them into life. This is why stones and mist enjoy such close solidarity, and why Clara, given her childhood in the mountains, has conceived of her art as a melody of pebbles in a stream.

  And so, the gardens of liquid stones found long ago in the mists are what we have just described: the root of life, the mineral nature of the heart, and the path to redemption.

  FLAMES ARE OF CLAY

  The community loyal to Nanzen swore allegiance to the last alliance; the elves’ flow of sympathy toward Alejandro swept away, in a great gust, any last vestiges of his old solitude; for Jesús, the water of a stream bathed the wounds of treachery; but the people of the mists were immeasurably enchanted by the two young women.

  The girls were awakening to romantic love and they were in charge of the battle of the era. Those who are loved can bear the rigors of winter; those who love, find the strength to fight: Maria and Clara knew love in every conceivable way, and saw that their turbulent fate was bringing its just reward of caresses and gifts. What was more, their fate had bonded them like two branches of the same bough, and only Clara understood what terrified Maria; she alone knew how to calm her fears, and only Maria, in return, gave Clara the strength that forges boatmen—what I mean is an absolute, blind trust, with neither hesitancy nor doubt; and I believe that this mad bond explains why Maria’s impertinence and gaiety spread to Clara, through a sort of transfer where the stronger of the two took care, for a while, of the other’s most precious possessions. Despite physical separation, the young women added to the merging of their souls the singular trait of their foreign blood or appearance which, over and above the ineffable alchemy of encounters, made their friendship indestructible—to a degree that ordinary humans, or elves, could not even imagine.

  Let us look at them through the eyes of the two Spaniards, who give no thought now to their absence from the League, for they are driven by the certainty that the real battle is being fought alongside the magicians of November. They are beautiful, the way all beloved women are beautiful, but the fairness of one, the golden skin of the other, their sleek, natural elegance are merely the rough outlines of their invisible grace. Fortunately, Alejandro and Jesús, because they were soldiers and came from poetic lands, wanted to die in the sun and see the invisible quality burning their gaze. They wanted to become acquainted with that land which they could just make out at the edge of their perception—that invisible land that has neither soil nor borders, known as the female continent. The fact that two young women born in the snow and the wind could bear that name so proudly will surely come as no surprise to those who have followed the story this far, for snow, wind, and mist are the filters that reveal the secret contours of things, unveiling their constantly changing essence, and offering a vision of it that penetrates the ages.

  Who knows what we are looking at? thought Alejandro. All we want is to burn there or die.

  In the meantime, the conflict had begun in every part of the world, and Petrus, to whom the question of women did not seem a thorny one, declared at that very moment:

  “The enemy has reacted.”

  “If it was still necessary to prove that Nanzen has gone mad,” said Aelius, “the fact that our sacred plantations will soon be reduced to ashes will amply suffice. Our dead, our eras, our ancestors spoke through the tea, and now they have been insulted by a bunch of demented leaders, a false prophecy dug up by a flea-ridden vagabond, with the iniquitous reinforcements of foreign mercenaries. Humans are beasts, a baneful copy of animal nature, the mutation of its virtues into vices. They spread death, lay waste to the nourishing earth, and threaten their own planet with annihilation. They are the survivors of ruinous wars that have taught them neither the vanity of force nor the virtue of peace. To hunger, they respond with repression; to the poverty of all, with the wealth of the few; and to the call for justice, with the oppression of the weakest. Tell me, you madmen who seek to ally yourselves with those madmen: do they not deserve death? and if not a single one remains, would it really be a tragedy for our mists? I remember what Ryoan was like before the tea’s downfall and I weep. Is it conceivable that this splendor is gone forever? At dawn, the dark mists passed through our city; the gold of the sky fell upon the silver streams, we would savor our shared tea in silence; the channels opened and a world of tranquil souls lived together. But the snows of Katsura will not return, and we will not hear our deceased anymore. We will live on our lands instead of living in our mists, we will forget the air and its lightness, the song of trees and the connivance of kingdoms, we will err like humans in indigence and the opacity of the other, because humans are merely gregarious, whereas we, in essence, are communitarian creatures. Thus, Nanzen’s actions force us to resort to tactics good elves find repugnant, until the only ones remaining on the field of battle will be the brave elves of the winning side.”

  Aelius fell silent.

  “He’s better as an orator for misfortune than he was as a speechifier in times of peace,” said Petrus.

  “To resort to tactics good elves find repugnant,” Marcus repeated. “The battle will not be a pretty sight.”

  “We won’t forget that the greatest war of all time was desired and started by an elf,” said Petrus, “who worked to make humans exterminate one another in the name of the purity of races, and to ruin the world with camps devoted to total crime. And by the way, let us not forget that he himself destroyed his beloved mist.”

  “Humans are beasts,” quoted Sandro. “Some will believe it.”

  “I don’t care what they believe,” said Petrus. “Wars are won with friends.”

  In successive waves, the elves’ tide of appreciation for the young women helped to ease their unquiet souls. Its vibrations swelled then died in a sweet lament and, in the end, one could only remember having heard: here you are. All the same, a faraway rumble now covered the threnody of allegiance and sympathy of the Nanzen faithful.

  “All the units are engaged in combat,�
� said the chief of staff.

  And Tagore shared the vision of an apocalyptic scene.

  “Shinnyodo in the province of the Northern Marches, the granary of our mists,” he said.

  As far as the eye could see, there were blood-splattered fields of wheat and dead elves. Above the slaughter, a sky of lightning snapped like a storm jib. Dull explosions resounded, and the earth steamed and vibrated incessantly. The plains were littered with bows, and with equal numbers of elves, their throats pierced by an arrow or stabbed by a sword. The inhabitants of the mists don’t wear armor or carry shields—the energy required to remain in a single essence would distract them from the combat at hand. Obliged to change form, their fatal vulnerability must be offset with dexterity and speed. The others continued the massacre, openly fighting hand-to-hand, forming a melee where the rumbling rose in volleys toward the storm. Eddies of air and water crossed the plain, bringing in their wake all the desolation of a wildfire. When they met, a silent explosion pulverized a considerable area of elves; their blood went on flowing long after the passage of the silent explosion. In the forefront of the battle, those who were crossing swords contended with gaping chasms that opened beneath their feet and engulfed entire cohorts. In places, the earth seemed to be crawling, like some frantic mole, then towered like a mountain to strike the adversary headlong. The speed of arrows and spears was increased by an in-draft that opened a dizzying channel where weapons pierced twenty bodies before ending their flight in one last throat.

  At that very moment, in the west, a clamor arose from the enemy camp. Huge clouds of mist drifted up and began to move eastward. Aelius’s soldiers went through the mist and raised their arms to the sky, screaming vengefully.

  “The very depths of abomination,” murmured Tagore.

  When the clouds of mist reached their target, they were transformed. For one second, they swirled around, like in more fortunate times, dancers coiling inward, then fanning out with all the grace imaginable on earth, until they formed walls of stunning beauty. Gaining speed, they moved into the ranks of the last alliance, Dantesque blades mowing down the fighters as if they were mere rushes in a stream, and Alejandro, horrified, thought that human weapons cut a sorry figure in comparison with these thunderbolts of depraved nature.

  Suddenly the sky exploded with red gashes, oozing their stench into the storm, and waves of mist now went by from east to west, mowing down the enemy elves.

  “What about us, what are we waiting for to act?” asked Jesús.

  “A sign,” answered Solon.

  “After waiting for two centuries,” said Petrus, “the final hour seems to be lasting a thousand years.”

  The final hour, good Petrus, is the only one that does not belong to time. The hour for waging the battle, the hour for dying and watching others die: these are the infinity of pain held in an infinitesimal amount of time. Thus, time is transfigured and, in its transfiguration, delivers us to absolute pain.

  “An hour in which we will see the worst outrages,” said Tagore.

  On the western horizon of the battle, a dark stain was spreading like a flood. To the east, the troops had frozen, and then a loud cry arose from all sides. Orcs! Orcs! shouted the soldiers, and in their clamor, surprise could be heard as much as scorn and rage. These orcs were joined together, moving like a giant, wobbly cockroach. Aelius’s elves stepped aside to let them through, but their repulsion and shame was evident.

  “If you still believed in it, this is the day to contemplate the ruins of elfin chivalry,” said Petrus.

  The orcs, shorter and broader than the elves, had neither hair nor fur, but an ant’s cuticle studded with sticky spots. They walked heavily, almost limping. Oddly, blue wings fluttered intermittently in the background of their repugnant forms.

  “Orcs are insects, prisoners of their chrysalis, half-beasts that have never managed to become the animals dormant inside them,” said Solon.

  “Can you imagine these abject creatures becoming cerulean blue butterflies?” asked Father François.

  There was no scorn in his voice.

  “In this world, everything is possible,” said Petrus, “but at present they don’t seem to be in a nymph-like mood.”

  They could clearly hear a song made up of grunts and panting.

  “Or a nightingale mood,” said Paulus.

  “I cannot imagine how Aelius managed to win them over, nor how many envoys he must’ve lost during the negotiation,” said Solon.

  “Where do they live?” asked Jesús.

  “In the borderlands,” answered Petrus. “It’s a hybrid zone that belongs to neither the mists nor the land of humans, and where other similarly aggressive species live.”

  Father François looked at the wheat. The soldiers’ feet had pressed the ears to the ground, but here and there, the rumpled spikes stood up from puddles where soldiers lay dying, pointing their bloody sheaths at the sky; scarlet drops fell like pearls and, one after the other, returned to the earth. Bit by bit, the blood changed; it turned black and hardened, spreading over a large area, reflecting the lightning from the storm as the elves died. Despite the terror of it, there was something magnificent about this explosion of the sky’s rage into shooting stars flung against a dark ink. Father François turned to the north, where the plain vanished into the mist, bordered by rows of wheat that were intact, as if exempt from the darkening blood. His gaze embraced the struggle between whiteness and darkness, his heart embraced the battle of the worlds, where the plum tree flowers were being engulfed, his soul embraced the end of the era of great elm trees and mist, and, finally, his entire being embraced the desolation of lands where neither leaves nor petals grow.

  He thought of death, which always comes too soon, and of war that never ends, for he had come into the world during the great conflict of the past century, and while still a young man, had lived through the first war of this century. While looking for a guide that might advise him how to survive during times of disaster, he was convinced he had found it in the religion of his brothers. He had believed in an ark of the alliance of souls united by a love of Christ, and he had lived to entrust them to God and shield them from the machinations of the devil. He saw the universe as a battlefield, where the desire for good repulsed evil, where the realms of death retreated from the charging steeds of life. But one day in January, eight years earlier, an old woman had died in the village, and when it came time to recite the last prayer, he had searched his memory in vain for the usual antiphonies. It was a strange moment; in the distance, a new war was coming in the form of a storm sent by the enemy. Now it was up to him, with this coming threat, to proffer the last words for a sister who lost her son on the battlefield; and then he saw things as they really were, draped in darkness and blood, empty and cruel as the sea; and he had known that there is nothing on this earth, nothing in the heavens, nothing in people’s hearts save the huge solitude of humankind, where the illusions of the devil and the good Lord have come to stay; nothing but hatred, old age, and illness, to which he no longer wanted to attach the cross of a sin, a crucifixion of a resurrection. For a moment that was deeper than despair, more painful than torture, he faltered, beneath a sky deserted by faith. If he no longer believed in anything, what was left to make him a man? Then he looked around him and saw the cemetery crowded with men and women standing straight in the icy gusts of wind. He looked at each face and each brow and, in a great blaze of light, he wanted to become one of them. Now that eight years had gone by, he remembered the cemetery flooded with peasants come to pay tribute to their departed sister, and he thought: what is greater than one’s self is not in heaven, but is standing there before us, in another’s gaze, and we must live at their pace. There is nothing on this earth but trees and forests, tall elms and dew-laden mornings, nothing but sorrow and beauty, cruelty and the desire to live—there is nothing but elves, hawthorns, and humans.

  The scene van
ished, and when another one replaced it, the pavilion gave a violent tremor. Tagore’s vision left the battle of Shinnyodo and looked over at another arena of combat. The earth was shaking, a powerful pounding, and the landscape was streaked with a crimson glow, shreds hanging from the ruins of the sky. Batteries of cannons were positioned on the hills above the field. The plain was swarming with soldiers, tanks, and units of both mounted and portable machine guns. Beyond the field, other verdant hills could be seen and, farther still, a blue expanse bordered by light shores and chalky cliffs. The sea: were it not for its presence, you might think you were in the Aubrac. The hills were gleaming with light, a green velvet covered the folds of earth, and the breath of the wind brushed the coves and outcroppings.

  “This is the plain of Ireland, its beauty and its fall,” said Tagore. “There are many others now that look like this, but I chose this place because it is a land of spirits and fairies, a harsh, enchanted, poetical land of the kind this story seems to favor. It has been home to great poets, one of whom wrote these lines, which, today, seem apt.”

  It is snowing on the plain of Ireland and the flames are of clay

  Snow on the hollows and the blind rivers

  Cemeteries raised on the mire of black blood

  A louder explosion than the previous ones shook the scene of the fighting. Infantry and gunners were concentrated in the center of the plain behind their cannons and machine guns. Now we could see the men busy at their wretched task, which we call war, or lying dismembered in mounds on the ground ravaged by shells. The men were heavy and feverish, brown with mud and blood. In addition, there was a pouring rain that had nothing to do with the natural rain of Ireland, for the enemy was transforming the rain into spears that froze the moment they reached their targets.