The Lie Tree

by Frances Hardinge

  This I dismissed as plainly fantastical, and was surprised when my companion did not share my scepticism. When I asked him how a plant could be fed’ a lie, he said that the falsehood needed to be whispered to the Tree, and then circulated widely. The more important the lie, and the larger the number of people prevailed upon to believe it, the larger the fruit.

  Should anybody consume that fruit, they would be granted knowledge of a most secret sort, and on a matter close to their heart.

  Faith stared. What was this fairy tale? Why had her famously rational father written of such a thing? At the same time, her thoughts slid to the shrouded plant pot her father had been so desperate to conceal.

  When I pointed out the absurdity of such a notion, Winterbourne showed me apiece of dried peel, not unlike that of a lime, and assured me that two years before he had purchased a Mendacity fruit at considerable price and consumed it. He would not divulge the ‘secret’ he had learned, but grimly assured me that it was of no small import.

  He said that he had bought this fruit from a Dutchman named Kikkert, who had set himself up in the Indies as an information broker. Winterbourne believed that Kikkert had been feeding’ the Tree by passing false information to some buyers, so that he could sell the fruit to others, or learn secrets worth a high price. It was a dangerous game, and Kikkert fled town before Winterbourne could learn more.

  Winterbourne believed that he had traced the Dutchman’s movements to Persia, but there had lost track of him. It was by the merest chance that he had recovered the trail. Winterbourne had come to China to assist with an excavation, but on the verge of departing had heard reports of the sudden and suspicious death of an old Dutchman matching the description of Kikkert. Now Winterbourne was travelling upriver to investigate, and to see whether he could find any trace of the legendary plant.

  That night I retired, filled with the conviction that Kikkert had been a charlatan and that my new friend was little short of a madman. Nonetheless, as I attempted to sleep I found that the notion of this plant had taken possession of my imagination. His very earnestness, after the fact, impressed itself upon me. All those who thirst for knowledge must be tempted by the thought of learning untold secrets with one bite.

  I rose next morning, interested in speaking with Winterbourne again, only to discover that he had chartered a boat at dawn and departed upriver with his entourage. By the time I heard of the British victory, I had decided to abandon my erstwhile plans, Instead I resolved to follow Winterbourne and learn more of his mysterious plant.

  When at last I arrived at the town that had been mentioned to me, I made enquiry and discovered that –

  Faith jumped as a loud bang sounded at her door, causing her travel chest to jump half an inch.

  ‘Faith!’ It was Howard’s voice, sounding petulantly hoarse. ‘Fa-a-aith!’

  ‘Howard . . . I am asleep!’ Faith looked around her at the papers scattering her lap. ‘I am ill! I am lying down!’

  ‘I stepped on a grave,’ came the plaintive cry. ‘My foot is muddy. Can I come in?’

  Howard’s voice tugged at Faith. He did not want to be alone, she knew it. His world had ended just as hers had, and he did not understand how or why and the phantasms of his own mind were bellowing at him from the dark places. But when Faith thought of opening the door she felt terror. There was a pit outside, filled with his fears, his confusion and his misery, and if she fell into it she would tumble down, down, down, until there would no Faith left for solving mysteries, or righting wrongs. She would lose this strange wild fire, and right now she needed it.

  ‘Never mind your foot!’ she called back as evenly as she could manage. ‘Just . . . be a good boy, and . . . copy out some scripture.’ It was all she could think of to say, to pretend that it was just another Sunday. ‘If you are very good and quiet, and write out your lines, everything will be better in the morning. Oh – write with your right hand, How!’

  Faint, scuffing steps moved away across the landing. A moment later Faith heard the nursery door shut quietly and with painful care. She felt a numb ache at the sound. There seemed to be no guilt left in her, just a bruise where it should have been.

  All was quiet again. Faith prised open the journal again, and found her place once more.

  . . . and discovered that the Winterbournes had taken rooms in a shabby inn. When I visited it, however, I found the establishment in disarray. Hector Winterbourne had been discovered raiding the house of a man thought to have been murdered, and was under arrest on suspicion of involvement in that murder.

  I prevailed upon the local authorities to let me visit Winterbourne, and found him in a pitiable state. Like many confined to those noxious cells, he had contracted malaria, which was rife in those parts. I promised to do all I could to secure his freedom, and he confided in me his latest suspicions about the location of the Mendacity Tree, begging me to find it if he could not.

  I was unable to save him. His fever killed him in his cell before I could arrange his release.

  Following his instructions, however, I found a little stone hut in the bamboo forest a few miles from Kikkert’s house. Within its dark, dank recesses I discovered a dry-looking, vine-like plant that appeared to have dropped most of its leaves.

  My extrication of the specimen from this murky enclosure was nearly catastrophic, both for the plant and for myself. While I had noted Winterbourne’s comments regarding the Tree’s preference for darkness, I had not anticipated the violence of its reaction to daylight. Only by hastily covering the plant with my coat did I avoid disaster. Never again would I be so incautious.

  It took a long while for the specimen to recover from this incident. Through careful experimentation I discovered that it thrived on dank or moist air and was best nourished by slightly brackish water. Rather than relying on the sun’s rays, it suffered ill effects from all brilliant light and most particularly the beams of natural daylight. By nurturing it in the right conditions, I eventually succeeded in coaxing it back to health.

  There followed several meticulous sketches of a plant at various stages of recovery. First a small tangle of blackened, dead-looking vines, stripped of foliage. Then sketches of tiny scroll-like buds, which gradually unfurled into slender, forked leaves.

  I must ask myself why I devoted so much time to this project, and neglected so many others. It is possible that from the earliest moment I felt a yearning to discover something of wonder.

  I have lived long enough to see the death of wonders. Like many others, I have dedicated my life to investigating the marvels and mysteries of Creation, the better to understand the designs of our Maker. Instead, our discoveries have brought us doubt and darkness. Within our lifetime, we have seen Heaven’s lamp smashed and our sacred place in the world snatched from us. We have been dethroned and flung down among the beasts.

  We thought ourselves kings of the ages. Now we find that all our civilization has been nothing but a brief, brightly lit nursery, where we have played with paper crowns and wooden sceptres. Beyond the door are the dark wastes where Leviathans wrestled for millennia. We are a blink of an eye, a joke amidst a tragedy.

  All these thoughts were unspeakable torment to me.

  Faith had never, never heard such despairing words uttered by her father, or anyone else for that matter. She sometimes sensed the great cracks of doubt that the revelations of science had opened up under people’s feet. But nobody mentioned them, not directly. They stepped over them or edged past them and said nothing.

  Thus I began my experiments with the Tree, which of course necessitated the use of falsehoods. It was not my habit to indulge in deception, but in the event this acted in my favour. Since deceit was known to be contrary to my nature, none was expected from me. I began with a small lie, which I whispered to the plant, conscious of the absurdity of the proceeding. I adopted a counterfeit illness, and feigned a limp for the better part of a month.

  For the very first time since its germination, the plant flowered
, producing a small white bloom resembling that of a lemon tree. The petals fell away, and it bore a tiny fruit, slightly smaller than a common cherry, which quickly ripened to olive green streaked with gold.

  I resolved to pluck and eat the fruit, taking all reasonable precautions. The flesh was surpassingly bitter. As to the effect upon my faculties, I have never eaten opium and thus cannot compare the experience, but I suspect it was not dissimilar.

  In this state of bedazzlement I found myself a traveller in the country of my own body, my veins red-gold and fierce as lava streams, my spine a mountain ridge, my lungs catacombs. I travelled all the way down to the promontory of my left big toe, and there discovered simmering, noxious green lakes that turned my stomach.

  Not two months after this vision I suffered pain and swelling in that toe for the first time. My doctor confirmed that it was the onset of gout, a condition that I have suffered ever since. My vision, therefore, had conveyed to me a truth which at that time was known to nobody, least of all myself. However, it was not a particularly edifying, useful or impressive truth.

  Considering the matter, however, I had a moment of insight. The lie I had told pertained to my own personal health, as did the secret I had been granted. Was it possible that lie and secret were linked, and that the plant fed a certain lie would release a secret on a connected matter?

  My first experiment had been an attempt to learn whether the Tree truly possessed the bizarre qualities that Winterbourne had claimed. Now that it began to seem possible, I dared to ask myself another question. What secret unfathomed by man did I actually wish to uncover?

  It was easily answered. There was one thing I wanted, nay, needed to know.

  For a long time I had been losing my grip on the rock of my faith, as wave after wave of new knowledge struck me cruelly. My former certainties were now broken timbers on the tide. I needed to know, once and for all, wherefore came Man. Was he crafted in God’s image and given the world, or was he the self-deluding grandson of some grimacing ape? If I knew, then my turbulence of mind would be over. I could recover my peace of mind, or resign myself to despair.

  Faith halted, staring at the page. She felt shocked, as if she had seen her father break down in front of her. The Reverend’s faith had always seemed vast and invulnerable as a cliff-face. She had never guessed at the doubts secretly quarrying their way into the heart of the rock. It was like learning that God had ceased to believe in Himself.

  I resolved that I would wrench this knowledge from the Tree. It would be done to calm not only my mind, but all those similarly tormented and bewildered.

  If I wished for a secret relating to the origins of Man, then my lies must relate to it also. To earn a secret so profound, I would need to tell momentous lies, and make as many people as possible believe them. My great project unfurled before me, and I could see what needed to be done. I was respected as a natural scientist, consulted, trusted. If I made claims, they would be believed. If I presented fossils or finds, they would not be questioned. I could fabricate at will, and I would not be doubted.

  In the interests of Truth, I would lie. I would deceive the world, then bring back knowledge that would benefit all of Mankind and perhaps save its soul. I would muddy the waters for a time, so that in the end they might run truly clear. I would borrow from the Bank of Truth, but in the end would pay back in full and with interest.

  ‘No,’ whispered Faith. ‘No. No. No.’

  But the next page and the next were filled with meticulous details of his falsehoods. There were careful sketches of fossils, before and after his painstaking alterations.

  The largest picture showed his most famous find, the New Falton Nephilim, as it had been before he assembled it. Not a winged human shoulder, but a faint tracery of fossilized feathers glued to the stony shoulder of another creature, with a precision and artistry that were almost beautiful.

  Choose a lie that others wish to believe, was written beneath it. They will cling to it, even if it is proven false before their face. If anyone tries to show them the Truth, they will turn on them and fight them tooth and nail.

  And he had chosen such a lie. A beautiful proof of the truth of the Bible story of the Nephilim. Faith remembered the old man at the Lambents’ house, so feverish in his belief in the fossil, so devout. The ‘Nephilim’ had been a floating timber in the cruel new seas of doubt. Of course people had clung to it.

  The scandal, the outcry, the accusations of fraud . . . it was all true. Her father had faked fossils. He had lied about his findings. He had deceived his friends, his colleagues, his family and the world.

  Nothing less than this would have convinced Faith. Nothing less than this confession in her father’s distinctive, precise hand. She could no longer feel shock or surprise, only a sense of ever-spreading darkness. A frail, lost part of her wheeled helplessly in that dark, like a dove in a shadowed vault, crying, Who was this man, then? Whom have I loved all these years? Did I know him so little?

  But she had loved him. She had loved him too hard and too long to loose her hold even now. She had nailed her very heart and soul to his mast.

  Faith wrapped her arms around the little journal and held it tight to her chest, eyes squeezed shut. She imagined him soldiering on towards truth through a poisoned jungle of concealment, danger and enmity, courageous but solitary. How lonely his secrecy must have been!

  ‘You did it to help mankind,’ Faith whispered. ‘They did not understand you, but I do.’ She could forgive him, even if nobody else could. That made him more human, and brought him closer to her.

  She flicked hastily past the drawings of his false fossils, unwilling to look at them. They were followed by records of his visions. These were generally vague and difficult to comprehend, and this appeared to infuriate him.

  The first showed him a shadowy jungle where a cruel-beaked shadow glided slowly downward, light flecks catching on its reptilian eyes and its blue-and-scarlet feathered wings. The second showed islands boiling into being like swelling bubbles in a porridge pot, their volcanoes spewing white smoke. Another revealed a skirmish, a band of small, unshaven men in rough hides battling larger, man-like creatures with thick necks, their sloping faces and limbs so thickly muscled that they looked unreal.

  The last vision was the most detailed.

  I was at my club, and somebody placed On the Origin of Species in my hands. I tried to read it, but the words skimmed and danced before my gaze. When I raised a hand to rub at my eyes, my fingers tickled my face. They were covered in fur.

  In the silver back of my snuffbox I saw my own face reflected. Above my cravat yawned a tawny, wolfish jaw with long incisors and canines. Hurriedly I raised the book before my face to hide my disfigurement and peered over it to see whether anybody had noticed my transformation.

  The club was in disarray. The footmen swung from the chandeliers, monkey-faced and cackling. One member bared rodent teeth in a snarl, fighting a toad-featured rival for a plate of oysters. Another flailed his arms, upsetting crockery, and gobbled everything within reach of his pelican bill and slack, sack-like throat. A dropped cigar set a curtain on fire, but nobody moved to put it out. Instead the smoke only caused more howls, roars, hisses and screeches.

  I tried to keep my head, and made my way out of the room. I was looking for the old man whom I knew ran the club and lived on the topmost floor. He would explain everything and put things to rights.

  With every set of stairs I climbed, however, things became worse. On the first floor the members had torn off their waistcoats, crawling and capering in their shirtsleeves. Their faces were distorted to the likeness of beasts I had never seen before, some with scale-crested brows or monstrous tusks. On the second floor the members were all but naked, sliding and slithering through puddles of spilt port, slender tongues darting from their lizard mouths.

  On the third floor I found myself before a door with gilded panelling, and knew that beyond it I would find the old man.

  As I reached
for the door, my name was spoken. My daughter Faith was standing beside me.

  I felt terror and outrage at the sight of her. She should not have been in the club at all, and I did not wish her to see my fangs and fur. The greatest horror was seeing her succumb to the curse of that place. As I watched, the youthful skin of her face started to split, showing the scales beneath.

  This apparition owed itself to the fact that my daughter had intruded into my library and interrupted my vision. I believe that she nearly roused me from it, but as my mind started to surface I was coherent enough to banish her hence.

  Faith swallowed. Now at least she understood the strange, quiet savagery of her father’s response when she had roused him from his stupor. But what damage had she done in interrupting him? Had she robbed mankind of an eternal truth?

  When my daughter was gone, I opened at last the gilded door.

  There was no chamber beyond. Instead a terrible foaming cataract struck and engulfed me. The room filled with water in an instant. I was spun around and over and then drifted down, down, down. I was no longer in a building but an interminable murky sea. My lungs breathed the water, and I knew with despair that I would sink into an ever deeper darkness for millennia multiplied by millennia, and never drown. I was alone, but for tiny motes of gold that swam, circled and hunted each other.

  And that was the whole of my vision. That was the entire reward for my efforts, sufferings and trials.

  I had entertained high hopes of this vision. It was the fruit resulting from my fabrication of the so-called New Falton Nephilim, and I had left it to swell and ripen far longer than any of the others. I felt entitled to expect that it would justify all the sacrifices I had made. The fickle world was turning on me, but at least I would achieve my goal.

  Instead, this latest magic-lantern show has filled me with further turmoil and dread. I am not blind to the interpretation that can be placed upon its images: the relentless turning back of the clock, the regression of Man into Beast, the return to a primordial slime. That is the easy explanation, but to accept it is to resign myself to despair. I must seek further. My quest cannot end thus.