by Tom Crockett
“You’re not sure why you’re here are you?” he asked.
Marina observed Téves carefully. He looked to be in his early sixties. He seemed a rather round and bearlike man. He had wild gray hair and a short gray beard. He was dressed in a rough brown shirt that had long sleeves and only one button up near the collar. It fit him loosely, more like a tunic than a shirt. He wore dark green trousers that were baggy and loose as well. He was barefoot, but she noticed leather sandals set neatly beside him.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry,” he added, “all of this can be confusing. Do you know why you’re here?”
Marina was not sure what question Téves was asking.
“Do you mean why I’m here?” She opened her arms to embrace the space around her. “Or why I’m here?” She put special emphasis on the word here and pointed to her feet. She was repeating the same semantic conundrum she had stumbled upon when answering Atana’s questions.
Téves laughed, and it was a big laugh, hearty and reassuring. “Come, share some food with me. I’ll give you a place to sleep and you’ll give an old man some conversation. Maybe we’ll find out why you have come to Adytum Wood.”
She had been walking all day and she was tired. She hadn’t thought about what she would do when night came. Somehow, she’d always been provided for. She just assumed she’d find food and shelter as she needed it, and here it was being provided for her again.
“Thank you,” she said as she watched Téves stand up and slip his feet into his sandals. A gnarled wood staff leaned against the tree trunk behind him and he took it up. He did not appear to need the staff. He seemed healthy and vigorous. There was life in his step and he strode purposefully. Marina had to walk quickly just to keep up.
They didn’t walk far. Téves often turned around and walked backward so that he could look at her and point out plants along the way. At first this made Marina nervous. She was sure he would trip over exposed roots, rocks, or downed branches, but he’d been looking at it. Sometimes he’d stop and lay his hand upon a tree. Then he would lean close to the trunk and whisper something. Sometimes he would appear to have heard an answer, and sometimes Marina thought he was actually conversing with the tree. Other times he would reach out and caress a tree trunk in passing.
It was perhaps because she was looking down at some flower or shrub that Téves had drawn her attention to that Marina did not notice the three great trees until she was right upon them.
“Well, here’s home,” Téves said gesturing to the trees.
The trees were huge, like redwoods she had seen. They were so big that she had to step back just to take them in. When she looked up into the tree closest to her, she almost lost her balance trying to find its top. Something coiled around the trunk like the pattern on a barber’s pole for as far up as she could see. She had to follow the pattern back down the trunk to realize that it was a ramshackle circular staircase made of wood and heavy vines, tied in place with rope.
“Don’t worry,” Téves said, touching her shoulder gently, guiding her toward the stairs without pushing her. “If it’ll hold me, it’ll hold you.”
Before she knew it, Marina was climbing. She wasn’t normally afraid of heights—she had dangled from many precarious perches to get just the right angle for a photograph—but this climb made her dizzy. The steps seemed sturdy enough, but the whole staircase slipped and shimmied against the trunk every time they moved. She tried not to look down, but looking up was equally disturbing. They seemed to be climbing toward a shadowy platform that was suspended on several thick branches between the three trees, but for most of the climb she concentrated on where she would place her foot next.
When they reached the platform Marina was breathing heavily and perspiring from the climb, but Téves seemed undisturbed. He led her onto the platform and to her relief she found it much sturdier than the stairs had been. The platform was a triangle of rough-cut logs tied together like an oddly shaped raft. There was a heavy railing that ran around all three sides and a triangular hut sat back against two of the edges.
The hut had a simple door and small windows shuttered with twig panels. The roof was thatched. Two low stick chairs with sloping backs sat on the widest side of the platform in front of the door. A black iron brazier sat on a tripod of iron legs to the side of the door next to a pile of fatwood, twigs, and small cut logs.
“Come,” Téves gestured as he opened the door to the hut.
It was bigger inside than Marina would have guessed. There was a wooden bunk with a rough mattress and wool blanket. There were several wood hutches and cabinets, a counter space that seemed to be reserved for preparing food, and a workbench. On one wall hung an assortment of handmade saws, axes, and other tools she didn’t recognize. Aside from the tools, there were few personal possessions in evidence. In the center of the room were a rough triangular table and two chairs.
“Sit and rest. I’ll make us something to eat.”
Marina set her shoulder bag down against the wall and sat in one of the chairs. “Did you build all of this yourself?”
Téves stood preparing food with his back to her. He took a long time to answer and Marina was about to ask the question again.
“It was here when I came, but I suppose I’ve rebuilt it twice since I’ve been here. It seems like such a short time, but then I’m most used to the time of trees. Even a full life is a breath to some of these trees.”
He turned and set two wooden plates and two wooden cups down on the table. The plates had fresh fruit, bread, and a salad of mixed greens. He poured a pale golden wine from a clay carafe and sat down opposite her. He bent his head for a moment, murmuring a quiet prayer.
She had not grown up with prayer before meals but always had the odd suspicion that she should pray. It made her vaguely uncomfortable when other people did it. She often found herself bowing her head as well, though she had no clear notion to what or to whom she was praying.
They ate in silence, and though Marina had questions for Téves she appreciated the chance to taste the food. It was a simple meal. The bread was crusty and textured with nuts and seeds. The greens had a slight bitter taste offset by a fruit vinaigrette. The fruit itself included sliced apples, pears, figs, and a small red fruit she couldn’t identify. The wine was sweet and tasted of honey and the nectar of summer clover. While the sensation of eating and tasting was not as intense as it had been with Rafael, she was glad to see that she could still really experience the tasting of things.
After they finished, Téves cleared their plates, brushing the few scraps into a clay pot. He poured them each another cup of the sweet wine and led Marina to the low chairs on the wide edge of the deck. The sun was fading fast, and with it, the day’s warmth. Téves placed the blackened brazier between the chairs down by their feet and started a small fire.
“Now I’ve fed you, lit a fire for you, and given you a roof for the night. You owe me a story,” Téves said as he settled into his chair. He slipped his sandals off and extended his feet toward the fire.
“A story?”
“Your story. Tell me how you came to my woods. I’m always interested in the stories of travelers.”
Marina hardly knew where to begin. How far back should I go? she wondered. Does he know that I’m dead? How would I explain that? Am I still dead? All of these things ran through her mind, but she found herself beginning the tale anyway. “I came here on the back of a sea turtle. . . .”
Téves listened intently as she told her story. Sometimes he interrupted her to ask her a name or to have her retell a part of the story, but he never questioned her version of what happened or how. Even the parts of her story that seemed, now, as she retold it, most improbable, he accepted as absolute fact.
She told the story in great detail and, when she finally completed it, ending with her meeting Téves, she found that the sky was black and the only light came from the brazier. She had a blanket over her legs, though she couldn’t recall either
of them fetching it, and yet another full cup of the honey wine.
She was sleepy and perhaps a little intoxicated. She could not remember how many cups of wine she had drunk.
“So how about you? Where do you come from? What’s your story?” Marina was not slurring her words, but it seemed an effort to get them out.
“Me, I’ve always been here. At least it seems like that. I took my vows here when I was a boy.”
“What do you mean, your vows?”
“My Greening vows. Do you not know of the Greening?”
“Are you a priest, then? Is it a religious order?”
“Ahh, I see you come from one of the times when the Brothers and Sisters of the Greening kept their order a secret.”
“Perhaps there is no Greening where I come from.” As she said this, she wished she had put it more gently. She had no idea of whether he would be offended or not, or even whether he could handle the idea that his religious order was not universal. He seemed unshaken, however.
“No, the Greening is everywhere. In some places the order is secret. In some times the order exists as a heartfelt belief with no organization, no code, no Landbond, but it is always there.”
“What is the Greening, then? Who do you worship?”
“Worship?” Téves seemed perplexed by this question. “We worship nothing . . . and everything . . . all of this.” He gestured to the trees around him. “We keep the Landbond. We tend the sacred trees, the rivers, the mountains, the seas.”
“I don’t understand. How do you tend them?”
Téves began again as he might have spoken to a child. “When I was very young, my family saw the gift in me—that I could feel the living places. Now I believe this is not so much a gift. Most children are born with this sense. We can only lose it. Well, it was strong with me so my parents let me study the Greening.”
“I’m sorry,” Marina interrupted. “What’s the Greening?”
“The Greening is a path, a way of seeing the interconnectedness of all things. It teaches that the air, the water, the stones, the soil, and especially the plants and animals are part of us. They are vessels for universal spirit. Resting places for when we are between lives.
“So I studied the Greening and decided to take my vows. As a young man I traveled to many places before coming to Adytum Wood. The caretaker before me was old then and ready to pass on. This was my special place. It called to me, so I made my Landbond here.”
“And what is a Landbond?”
“The Landbond is a vow and a relationship. I am the guardian of this place, but I do not own it. I may take nothing more than sustenance from it. I may marry, and I may have children, but my children have no claim to this place. I have my duties, my sacred tasks. I help others pass on and I speak for the land. That is the Landbond.”
“Does someone own this land, then? I mean, what if someone wanted to cut these trees down and sell them?”
“That is what the Landbond is for. It is a relationship. At present Adytum Wood is owned by no one, but it has been owned by people in the past. It may come to be owned in the future. The Landbond says that a person may own land and take a livelihood from it, but any alterations to the land must be negotiated between the caretaker, a Brother or Sister of the Greening, and the owner. In this way the land has a voice.”
“That’s more like a story, a fairy tale, than anything I know of the real world. It’s too beautiful. But, I wish it were so where I come from.” Marina was gazing up at the stars that peeked through the canopy of trees. Her eyelids were getting heavy and she knew she would sleep soon.
“But it is so where you come from.” Téves’s voice sounded far off. “You may not have the Landbond, but the Greening is alive. There are those who can feel the pulse points of the earth, the sacred energy. They are the living seed of the Greening.”
Marina closed her eyes. Half in dream already, she imagined people as radiant seeds, seeds in her hands, glowing seeds tossed from the tree-house platform, falling away like fireflies in the night, landing softly, sprouting fast, rising up, strong vines shooting past her, wrapping around her, carrying her off the platform, lifting her up past the canopy, into the night sky, surrounded by more radiant seeds and stars.
* * *
She woke in the morning to light coming through one of the windows. She was on the mattress in the bunk inside the hut. The blanket was pulled over her and she was warm, but she couldn’t remember getting herself to the bunk and was suddenly embarrassed at the idea that she had needed to be helped. She also wondered where Téves had slept. He was not in the hut and she could hear no movement outside.
Slowly, she stretched and slid her legs over the side of the bunk. She stood up and folded the blanket neatly over the mattress. There was water in a pitcher on the table and a clean wooden cup. She drank some of the water and wandered out onto the platform.
It was frightening and exhilarating to be so high up. The three trees to which the platform was attached were each so large that half a dozen people with arms outstretched still couldn’t encircle the smallest of them. Though the platform on which she was standing was already high up, these three trees seemed to continue up so far that she could not tell where they ended.
She walked over and put her hand against one of the trees. She felt a pull, a kind of tingling in her palm and she drew back. She pressed her hand against the rough bark again and again she felt the odd sensation of something pressing back. She crossed the deck to the second of the trees that supported the front side of the platform. She pressed both hands lightly against the trunk.
At first she felt nothing. This is silly, she thought to herself, and started to pull her hands away. She felt the tremor coming from a long way off. It seemed to begin at the root of the great tree and ripple up the trunk. Leaves and branches vibrated. Birds flew up in alarm and squirrel-like creatures flung themselves to other nearby trees.
She could not have removed her hands now if she had wanted to. The whole platform began to shift back and forth. It was inconceivable that something so huge could actually sway, but that was what the three trees were doing. It was frightening but also exhilarating to be riding such a powerful force. She held on.
After a few moments the tremor seemed to recede. It rolled lazily back down the tree and into the ground. As Marina disengaged her hands from the tree, she shuddered, expressing a deep involuntary tremor of her own.
Shaken, but not afraid, Marina started down the twisting spiral staircase to the ground. She didn’t so much want to get away from the trees as she wanted to tell Téves what had happened, or ask him about what she had experienced. From the platform she had not been able to see him below, but as she got closer to the ground she could make him out. He was methodically stacking cut circles of wood into little pyramid piles.
“Did you feel that?” Marina called down as she got within range. She was flying down the steps now. Whether it was the difference between going up and coming down, she wasn’t sure, but she seemed to have lost her uneasiness over the way the steps bounced and swayed against the tree. “The trees, I mean. Did you feel the trees shake?”
“Having a conversation with old Jeremiah, were you?” Téves seemed to have completed his stacking task and was taking a long draft of water when she finally reached him.
“No, it was the tree. I put my hands on the tree,” she gestured to the large second tree, “and it started to shake. I thought the whole platform would come down.”
“I doubt that Jeremiah would have let that happen. Anyway, you should consider yourself lucky. Jeremiah doesn’t speak to just anyone. . . .”
“Who’s Jeremiah?” Marina interrupted. “Do you mean the tree?”
“Of course, Jeremiah is one of the old ones. He was caretaker here long, long ago.”
“The tree?”
“The tree holds his spirit now. That’s what you felt. You did feel something when you touched the trees, didn’t you?”
Marina didn’t kno
w what to make of this. She wondered if the old man was crazy. “Well, yes. When I touched the first tree—”
“Sybil,” Téves interrupted to supply the name.
“When I touched the first tree,” she began again; she was not yet prepared to use the name Téves had supplied, “I felt a kind of tingling or vibration in my hand. But when I touched the other tree it seemed to come alive.”
“They are alive. They’re all alive. Most people forget how to listen though. They forget how to talk to trees and stones. ”
“I’m not sure I spoke to anything. I just put my hands on the tree.”
“Ahh, but you listened, you see. You had an open heart when you touched the tree, so you could hear it. There is nothing more flattering than having someone who truly listens to you.”
“But I don’t know what I heard. I don’t know what was said to me.”
“From Sybil, I would say you got a simple greeting, an acknowledgment of life energy. Sybil is a bit shy and takes time to open up. Jeremiah on the other hand is much more verbose. He’s like a living library. There’s little that he can’t comment upon.”
Marina had to laugh. “I’m sorry. This is just too much for me. I’ve seen a lot since I’ve been here, but I’m not sure I can believe in talking trees.”
Téves was not angry or perturbed. He only smiled and said, “Come, walk with me. Perhaps I can explain better.” He shouldered a long saw and tucked his hand ax through his belt. He also pulled a knapsack over one shoulder. He began walking and Marina followed.
They walked through the morning forest for about an hour. Marina saw more of the strange trees with twin trunks. She also saw more of the beautiful sunlight filtering down through the trees. They were not following any path she could see, but Téves seemed to know his way.