Toby and the Secrets of the Tree

by Timothee de Fombelle

  Out of the silence, Maya started singing “Happy Birthday,” and the others joined in as they surrounded Rolden. Their departure was only being delayed. They would all leave with Maya, Sim, and Toby.

  Some guards appeared to make them hush. Their boots rang out on the floor.

  It was almost a relief for old Rolden when the singing stopped.

  He alone knew that, at the age of one hundred and three, he had another great, very great departure to fear, and no surprise would ever be enough to delay it.

  Elisha felt as if a well-wishing wind was supporting her from behind, pushing her across the branches of the Tree. Her epic slide down the straw tunnel had thrown her out onto a jagged branch in the Treetop, from where she had quickly entered a lichen forest.

  There were signs of spring peeping through, but the cold and snow were still holding out. Elisha didn’t stop.

  She came across wandering vagabonds who took no notice of her. She skirted around the edges of several sad estates, which looked deserted but where she noticed whole families hidden in the cracks of the bark, watching her pass by. She picked up the pace, impatient to find nature and the cleaner air lower down in the Branches.

  The only pause she allowed herself was to watch an earwig tending to its eggs. It was a female, of course, since the husbands don’t survive the winter. Elisha knew how much care the mother earwig took over its little ones.

  One spring, she had watched a brood growing up near her house in the Low Branches. Every day, Isha took some food to the earwig family. As a little girl, Elisha had clung to her mother’s skirts, scared of the earwigs’ pincers.

  Gradually Isha had taught her daughter not to be afraid. She passed on her understanding of the world: a simple understanding handed down not through words, but everyday gestures. Elisha would have liked a few words as well, but she knew that trust and tenderness were the finest gifts.

  Right now, Elisha wanted to see her mother again. To do this, she needed to go to the place where she had left her, back to Seldor Farm, at the entrance to the Low Branches. Isha was bound to be there, with the Asseldors.

  And so Elisha had taken the path down to the Low Branches, running for several days and nights. She knew that Toby had undertaken this great journey when his parents were already in Joe Mitch’s hands, so she felt as if she was following fresh in the young fugitive’s footsteps.

  Throughout the winter, Nils Amen’s visits were all that Elisha had lived for.

  It was always the same ceremony. Arbayan would enter the Egg to announce Nils’s arrival.

  “Your visitor is here.”

  Arbayan looked permanently suspicious. He never left the pair of them without first casting a dark look in Nils’s direction. These glances bolstered the trust that Elisha had put in the young woodcutter.

  For the first few minutes, the visitor would recite a moralizing lesson that Elisha barely listened to. He would talk about Leo Blue, about how upright and honest he was, about his courageous battle against the Grass people, who had killed his father.

  “You know, for a long time I didn’t have a good impression of Leo either,” he would say. “But all it takes is for you to hold out your hand to him. . . . Just give him a chance. . . .”

  Each time Elisha would watch out for the moment when Nils started talking in the secret language. The language of memories. It would begin gently, without Elisha quite realizing. . . .

  “For now, you’re a prisoner,” he might say, for example. “You’re alone in the heart of winter. You’ve painted the walls of your cave with all your memories, but you are alone. Someone will come to find you. Someone will chip away at the ice that blocks the entrance. Someone will make you dance on the branch, by the shores of an immense lake.”

  Nils often referred to this lake imagery, which made Elisha feel as if she was listening to Toby’s voice. She resisted the urge to turn to Nils and instead kept her back to him. But, with her eyes shut, she saw Toby’s face.

  Elisha was traveling in the middle of the night; she was exhausted by now and level with Joe Mitch’s Crater. She knew all about the dangers of this region, but she had to maintain her lead over those who were surely on her heels. Elisha was hoping to arrive ahead of them, before the news of her escape could spread.

  She didn’t dare stop.

  Weariness was spreading through her body, and her step became less assured. She was making a concerted effort to get away from this area before morning. At dawn, her head started spinning; she fell to her knees and rolled into a bark ditch.

  She had lost consciousness.

  A strange tapping noise woke Elisha several hours later. It was broad daylight. She leaned on her elbows to see who was passing by on the narrow footpath that she was lying under.

  A platoon of wild ants.

  The ants were advancing very slowly, pushing an object as big as they were.

  Elisha recognized a trap cage: hunters laid these kinds of traps to catch aphids. It was a large, ball-shaped cage that would be left open, camouflaged in the moss; its two halves snapped shut on any animal that ventured inside.

  The ants had seized the cage together with the creature that was presumably trapped inside. They were transporting the cage back home, to force its lock and share the spoils with their sister ants.

  Elisha wasn’t very fond of red ants, which sting you before they devour you. They were one of the few insects that genuinely terrified her.

  She was about to dive back into her hole and let the crowd of ants pass by when she witnessed the cage getting stuck on a wooden stalk. There was a certain amount of agitation among the rows of ants, who weren’t sure which maneuver to perform. They were debating the matter in ant fashion, which is to say by tickling their antennae politely.

  Intrigued, Elisha poked her head out.

  She stuck her hand over her mouth just in time to stop herself from shrieking and immediately disappeared back into her hole. What she had seen made her heart pound in her chest.

  The prey caught inside the trap cage wasn’t a bug or an aphid or even a little beetle. It was a fifteen-year-old girl whose panicked wide eyes had met Elisha’s.

  The ants were having trouble getting the cage out of the rut it was stuck in. Elisha could hear them impatiently rubbing their legs together. Without thinking twice about it, Elisha leaped out of her hole and ran into the middle of the ants. Before they’d had a chance to notice her, Elisha had climbed on top of the cage, where she proceeded to swing a stick around her.

  The young prisoner watched without reacting.

  “I’ll help you,” Elisha called out to her.

  There were already ten ants surrounding her, and they had started to climb up the rungs. Elisha shouted as she hit the first beast on the head; it slithered down the cage and collapsed onto the bark. The strongest kick she could manage sent another ant tumbling, dragging two more in its wake.

  The prisoner still hadn’t moved. Behind the bars, she was much safer than the person risking her own life to free her.

  Elisha’s stick whipped up the air around her, but there were more and more ants. They were advancing relentlessly toward her. When Elisha pushed two back, four more set out to attack her.

  After several minutes of putting up a fight, Elisha realized she wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer. She gave a last thwack with the stick, which shattered on the cage between two ants. She was now unarmed and exhausted as she watched the red-skinned warriors around her. Then she looked up at the sky.

  Elisha thought of her father.

  She’d never allowed herself to give a face, a name, an outline to this father. But for the first time, she felt as if she could hear his laughter echoing in a hallway of her memory. It was a very gentle laugh. She didn’t know anything about him; her mother had never talked to her about him. But his laughter was so clear in her ears that Elisha thought she must have gone over to the other side.

  With her head still thrown back, she opened her eyes and saw a green s
hape hovering above her. She heard something that sounded like a blade cutting through the air. The shape brushed against Elisha and landed on an ant, which it seized and chopped cleanly in two. At the same time, the shape was dragging another ant off by its head. None of the ants was trying to escape this monstrous green force, which was about to destroy them one by one.

  But at the next attack, they started scattering.

  It was a praying mantis. The calmest and most violent of all insects.

  Mantises can eat any creature, even one their own body size. This particular mantis extended its elongated foreleg to catch a fleeing ant and slit its abdomen. As it brought its victim back to its mouth, the mantis shot out its back leg, which made the cage roll.

  Elisha clung to the bars.

  The mantis’s head span around one hundred eighty degrees to contemplate the trap cage that was sliding down the slope. Letting go of the ant it was holding, it started moving like an articulated monster. Sending out one of its pincers, it grabbed the cage and brought it close to its big dull eyes. The prisoner had fainted, but Elisha was still clinging to the outside.

  The mantis tore off a few bars, and Elisha managed to slip inside. The insect stared at the two girls for a while before putting the cage back on the ground. A vibration ran the length of its green frame. Its antennae and hind legs collapsed, and the mantis rolled onto its back, dead.

  Elisha stayed still for some time. By a freak of nature, this mantis had survived several months of snow, forgotten by the winter. It had hidden itself away somewhere, living off its hunting spoils. It had saved these two girls’ lives, and now it had collapsed, without ever touching them.

  This miracle made Elisha feel hopeful again. She dragged the young prisoner, who was still unconscious, out of the cage and covered her with Clot’s coat. The girl’s long, tangled hair fell over the garment’s mud-splattered shoulders. Elisha realized this was a Grass person: every now and then, she caught a flash of the blue lines under her feet.

  Apart from her mother, Isha, this was the first time she had seen someone of her own race. The girl finally opened her eyes to find Elisha scrutinizing her.

  “I’ll stay with you for a while,” Elisha told her, placing her hand on the girl’s forehead.

  The girl pulled the coat over her face.

  Elisha stood up and walked a few steps to fetch some water.

  She came back and crouched down next to the girl.

  “Do you want to drink?”

  No answer. Elisha lifted the coat by the collar.

  The girl had disappeared.

  Elisha looked all around her. No movement in the lichen forest; the silence was almost troubling. Where had the girl come from, this apparition that had just vanished?

  “Come back!” she called out into thin air.

  She heard a noise behind a thicket and went over.

  Elisha discovered hundreds of busy ants, who had come back for the mortal remains of the mantis and were starting to devour it. Ants always win in the end.

  Feeling chilled to the bone, Elisha backed away and grabbed the coat. That girl won’t stay free for long, she thought as she started to run.

  Ilaya was caught the very next day, in fact, by one of Joe Mitch’s patrols.

  Elisha was soon close to Seldor Farm.

  It was still dark, but a few rosy patches were beginning to spread across the sky.

  Entering the Low Branches had brought a great rush of emotions and memories for Elisha. The sharp cold brought back all the smells of her childhood: in the air was the steam from a leaf-tea infusion, the taste of the first mornings of spring, and the smell of wood fires that makes the memory of winter live on.

  Elisha knew exactly what she had to do, and she also knew how risky her plan was, but she didn’t have any choice. Seldor Farm was so well guarded that she wouldn’t be able to infiltrate it secretly in a bid to free her mother.

  She needed to arrive with a fanfare, no holds barred.

  Her coat was lined, so she turned it inside out to make herself look like a grand lady wearing a yellow-and-black fur coat. With her finger, she ran some black dust around her eyes.

  Elisha approached the first guard post, took a deep breath, and launched into the adventure.

  “I’ll have them thrown to the birds!” she shouted. “Where are my stupid idiots of attendants?”

  The two guards who heard Elisha coming toward them were dumbfounded. She was cursing her shoes at the top of her voice, because their heels had broken and she’d had to leave them behind.

  “You’re as stupid as starlings, as wretched as wrens, as limp as linnets!”

  These insulting birds’ names rang out in the lichen forests until, eventually, Elisha noticed the soldiers and called out to them, “And as for you, you’re no help to me either, you bunch of good-for-nothings. I demand to speak with your boss!”

  Intimidated, they began by taking off their caps.

  “I . . . We . . . Let’s see what we can do. . . .”

  “You’ll do what I’m telling you!” shouted Elisha.

  One of the guards nudged the other one with his elbow.

  “Have you seen who it is?”

  “No . . .”

  “It’s the girl prisoner from the Treetop.”

  “D’you think?”

  “I recognize her. I was here when Blue came to get her.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, they pounced on Elisha, each of them grabbing an arm, and marched her off.

  Elisha didn’t call out. She just gave a small disturbing smile and allowed herself to be led away. Who could have imagined that this was exactly what she’d been hoping for?

  The garrison at Seldor woke up immediately. The Garrison Commander, Garric, needed to be informed.

  Elisha looked at the farmhouse out of the corner of her eye. It was a ruin now, and it no longer looked as if anyone was living in it. Elisha turned up her fur collar to hide how distraught she was feeling. Where could the Asseldors have gone? And above all, where was her mother?

  Garric appeared in the farmyard, rubbing his hands. Ever since the Asseldors’ escape, which had made a lot of noise, he’d been looking for a way to improve his reputation with Mitch and Blue. The capture of Leo Blue’s fiancée boded nicely for such an opportunity.

  “I didn’t even know that you had escaped.” Garric chuckled.

  “Me neither,” Elisha came straight back at him.

  “I’d heard that you were going to marry Mr. Blue at last.”

  “So did I.”

  “So what are you doing standing between these two men like a fugitive?”

  Elisha gave a glimmer of a smile and shrugged.

  “I ask myself the same question, Mr. . . . Mr. what?”

  “Garric.”

  She held out the tips of her fingers toward him, to have her hand kissed.

  “Delighted to meet you, Mr. Panic. Leo Blue has told me a lot about you.”

  Garric was flattered and confused at the same time. This young lady almost looked like she was enjoying herself. She had changed a lot since he’d last seen her and now resembled more of a princess with airs and graces.

  “I shall return you safely to Leo Blue,” he said without daring to touch her out-held hand.

  “He’ll be delighted to see you, because for some time now he’s been wanting to chop your head off.”

  Garric nearly choked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m saying that I don’t think your head will count for much,” Elisha explained, “when Leo finds out how you’ve treated . . .”

  Brushing the dust off her fur collar with the back of her hand, she took her time before finishing her sentence.

  “. . . when he finds out how you’ve treated Mrs. Elisha Blue.”

  The soldiers flanking her stared, goggle-eyed at their boss. Was it possible that . . . ?

  “I know that Leo was terribly offended that you didn’t attend our wedding, Mr. Panic.”


  “Garric,” Garric corrected her between gritted teeth.

  “Yes, Garric. I’m sorry, I really should remember your name. Leo is always talking about a certain Garric who’ll never make it through the winter.”

  “You are . . . You are Mrs. Blue?”

  “I suppose my husband hasn’t arrived yet?”

  “No, madam.”

  “What a pity. Could you instruct these two soldiers to let go of my fur coat?”

  “Let her go,” sighed Garric, who was almost in tears. “I am really, totally, absolutely . . . I am . . .”

  “Don’t apologize, dear boy. Why don’t you just tell me if there’s anybody here who actually has a brain in their head.”

  Garric didn’t know how to react.

  “A . . . ?”

  “A brain. I have an important question. But I don’t want to ask it to the wrong person.”

  “I can . . . perhaps . . .”

  Elisha started laughing. Garric tried to join in, but Elisha broke off to say, “You?” She laughed even more. “You are joking?”

  Garric turned red. He had never seen such insolence.

  “Well, I suppose we could always try,” Elisha finally conceded. “Do you happen to know, Mr. Panic, where the people who used to live in this house are now?”

  Garric started twitching and squinted nervously.

  “Those people lift, Mrs. Bli . . . I — I mean . . .” he stammered. “Those people have left, Mrs. Blue.”

  “Really? Isn’t there a single one of them left?”

  “No . . . Well, actually . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “There might have been a little one left.”

  “A little one?”

  “A little one who did some stupid things.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In my cellar.”

  “Show him to me!”

  “He won’t be a pretty sight. I’ve rather . . . forgotten about him.”

  Elisha insisted on being taken to Garric’s cellar. It took a while to find the keys, because the trapdoor hadn’t been opened for months.

  “Smash that lock for me,” Elisha ordered.

  When Mo Asseldor was brought out, he couldn’t even bear the daylight. Garric had locked him up after his family’s escape. Mo had eaten the provisions in the cellar, thinking they’d never let him out of there. He recognized Elisha’s voice, but he was too weak to react; he just heard her giving orders.