“You always said you wanted me to be happy,” she murmured. “Probably you never noticed I was unhappy? This had to happen sooner or later. Isn’t it better that it happened before we got married? You’re still free now. Don’t worry about hurting me.”
George tried to take her hand, but it was so cold! As if blood were, ever so slowly, receding from it.
“How can you talk like that? Don’t you know I love you? I would’ve died for you. But I can see that doesn’t mean a thing to you; you’re deliberately destroying yourself. What can I give you now?”
Despite everything, she was touched. But she was tired. The darkness had been a terrible ordeal for her. She turned her faded eyes to the sun, made an effort to speak.
“You’re generous, George. There’s something you can do for me, if you want. My mother won’t admit it, but I know she wants bring things to an end as soon as she can. But I need food! Bring me things to eat and drink.”
She was still a bit of a carnivore. Her fiancé brought her flies, mosquitoes, sometimes spiders. She swallowed them whole, hurriedly, craning her neck forward, snapping at them with sudden movements of her jaw. It was a peculiar sight, which her fiancé had a hard time watching. He turned discreetly away. But she soon lost her taste for meat. All that remained was a yearning for pure water, a dream of springs. Her ideas took the shape of leaves. Vague desires for silence. She spoke less and less. A bit embarrassed by her muteness, the fiancé spoke for them both.
One day he said, “If you’d wanted. Ania …”
But he didn’t finish his sentence. He saw quite well that she no longer wanted a thing. In fact, she no longer even needed his presence. She possessed it forever, behind closed eyes. But he was still talking. They were all talking. How badly she wanted to drive off this insufferable swarm of words, as if waving away harmful insects!
Downstairs, they were saying, “Where’s Ania?”
“Oh, in her room.” “At a boarding house.” “Traveling.” “She’s so shy, painfully shy!”
She was waiting for her roots. She shouldered the suffering of plants. The thirst of cut flowers torqueing their stalks toward the light. The moist dream of seaweed abandoned on the sand. The cold of rosebushes in November frost. The passing madness of indoor plants devouring walls and windows. The furious proliferation of exotic blossoms, brought over like slaves, strewing the four corners of the yard with the sinister fruit of their revolt. The sighs of men, stuck in the mud of futile acts.
Her fiancé conscientiously brought her water every day before going to work. He grew discouraged about talking, but she didn’t notice. Sometimes he looked worried, but she was too preoccupied to notice. She was waiting. How long it was, the sitting still and waiting! We fill our days with distractions, but perhaps it would be better to be faithful to waiting—to wait without moving, speaking, lifting a finger, in a room bare as this one.
Her roots grew overnight. She felt them everywhere piercing the earth. What joy, alas, and what pain! She felt like she was traveling backward up the river of time. Odors assailed her, shifting essences. Her adolescence had an anxious scent, like bitter linden. Some had grown in the school playground where she’d always felt so bored. Her childhood smelled like sorb trees. She saw herself going down a curving path. A blackbird cackled from deep in a bush. Sorb apples lay bleeding in the grass. She squashed them underfoot. What world would spring forth when she rounded the bend? She advanced cautiously. With one final push, her roots punctured soil. Now she descended, heart pounding, toward an odor, the odor of the day she was born. Her birth had a dull smell, like the smell hanging over iron quarries. Her birth smelled like ferns. She saw a glittering fern, its crozier erect, scratch at the sky with its palm of light.
The next morning, her leaf hands were open. Her fiancé came to see her, looking vexed. He sat down beside her, head lowered.
“Look … I’ve given this a lot of thought. I think I owe it to you to tell you this. I’ve met someone … a young woman, the sister of someone at work. She’s sweet, serious-minded … she looks like you a bit. You’re the one who told me life goes on. But I can’t just abandon you. Our lives are intertwined, Ania: do you want to come to our wedding, come live with us?”
A light breeze came in through the window. It caressed the trunk, played in the branches. The leaves up top bent forward a bit, in silent approbation. George bent over, lifted up the heavy stoneware basin. For a moment, the leaves grew flustered, shuddered. But they soon recovered their dreamy stillness. As Ania crossed the doorsill in the young man’s arms, the mother, deep in her kitchen, closed her fist around a saucepan and turned her back to the couple.
George planted her in his yard, in the middle of the lawn. The roots breathed freely; she thanked him with a happy nod of foliage. One sunny morning not long after, he got married. The little pale-cheeked bride floated among the guests, light as a waterlily. There was dancing beneath leaves bathed in moonlight.
That summer, the tree put forth splendid blossoms.
KELLY BARNHILL
The Men Who Live in Trees
Kelly Barnhill is an American writer. She currently has published three fantasy novels for children: The Witch’s Boy, Iron Hearted Violet, and The Mostly True Story of Jack. She has also written several well-received short stories for adults, which can be found in Postscripts, Tor.com, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Clarksworld, and other publications and anthologies. In “The Men Who Live in Trees,” Carmina searches for an answer to her father’s death. This story was first published in Postscripts 15 in 2008.
Of all the cultures, subcultures, clans, gangs and sects that are bounded and protected by our Glorious Empire, none is more puzzling than the Molaru, known to the residents of Acanthacae as the men who live in trees. They have no recognized language, save for a complicated pageant of gestures and movements, accompanied by a codified set of facial expressions. Similarly, they have no recognizable tradition of the arts or music. That which, I suppose, is to pass as music is played on instruments not tuned to create melodies, but created instead for the express purpose of making a sound nearly identical to that of the wind pushing ceaselessly through the heavily canopied trees. Sometimes, one can even hear the rain dripping from the jungle’s broad leaves, stretching darkly into the world, into the end of the world.
—From the Notes and Journals of Tamino Ailare
When Carmina Ailare was born, her father laid her in a green cradle. Patterns of vine, leaf, and heavy blossom twined along the curved edge, and twisted their runners into the cavity where the babe slept. When the cradle rocked, the leaves seemed to blow in an effortless wind. And when one looked closely, it sometimes appeared as though a pair of green eyes gazed back—unblinking, flickering, and gone.
The cradle had been fashioned from a thousand interlocking pieces of wood, cut from a single tree, which had crashed into the south side of the house when everyone was asleep, injuring two servants, though only slightly. Her father, in his typical fashion, said that he never liked the south side of the house anyway, and that the servants in question were in need of a much deserved day off, and since recuperation is as good an excuse as any, they were ordered to recuperate. In truth, he cared only for the tree, and believed that its arrival into the servants’ quarters was a sign.
“What sort of sign,” his wife asked as she leaned into the overstuffed chair, her tawny eyes bloodshot with heat and hope and something else that she could not name.
Tamino shrugged vaguely and stared out into the misty green just past the garden wall.
“What sort of sign,” she asked again, but he said nothing and she gave up.
During the length of his wife’s pregnancy, as she sweated and moaned for her home and family in the familiar and licentious chaos of the Emperor’s City, Tamino Ailare cut wood. He sawed and split and sanded and planed. He baked each piece, allowing the sap to pool out of its veins, sink deep into the wood’s firm flesh, giving it a peculiar sheen. Indeed, the wood from the tre
es of the Oponax river was unlike any that Tamino Ailare had ever seen. Once cured, it was fragrant, luminous and dark. In a quiet room, Tamino swore that one could hear it breathing.
The day the cradle was finished, Carmina was born. Shaking with excitement, he extracted the bound babe from the protesting arms of her mother and laid her in the cradle. Immediately, a breeze blew up from trees just over the garden wall. The babe in the cradle made a sound—a sound like the wind in the overburdened branches. A sound like the creaking of wood.
Carmina’s father had been a professor of discrete mathematics and applied philosophy of language. He had served at most of the major universities that spanned the boundless Empire, which is to say, he taught at every university that mattered. Which means, as well, that he was subsequently fired from every university that mattered.
With nowhere else to send him, the sages of the Empire sent him to the farthest corner possible, where he would no longer be a nuisance, and his tendency towards heresy and sedition could be chalked up to jungle fever, and therefore ignored. Acanthacae. Guardian of the penal colony. Gatherer of rubies. Overseer of the wide and fragrant Oponax River. He was sent to study the men who live in trees. He was sent to discover their secrets. He was to report regularly to the Emperor by way of His governors, ministers and mages as to why the Molaru had not been, nor, it would seem, could not be, subdued. He had not been instructed to love them, and yet he did. And then he died. Carmina supposed that she could take a lesson in that, but what that lesson was, and how it applied, well, this was mystery.
The men who live in trees have no women. Ask anyone. The Governor, the Warden, the Bishop, the Provost of the University, even the proprietress of the estimable House of Ladies: They agree, and have agreed, on nothing, of course, save this. That a tribe or a nation or even a supper club could be comprised only of men, is clearly a mad belief, and yet all assert the same. The men who live in trees are men. No women or children have ever been sighted, mentioned, let alone examined for study and publication.
—From the Notes and Journals of Tamino Ailare
On the day of her betrothal, Carmina went to the window to look for the men who live in trees. She would see nothing, of course, which is to say that she would see the slicked leaves of the jungle pressing up and over her garden wall, its great green and blossomed bulk sighing, panting, sweating. She shuddered.
Somewhere, beyond—no, inside, the skin of the jungle lived the men who live in trees. In her sixteen years she had only seen them four times: Twice for the protocol and pomp that surrounds the signing of a treaty, once for the show of friendship with the slaughter and roast of a wild pig—or perhaps it was a bear—and a demonstration of song and dance, met with much wincing and gritting of teeth for most everyone involved. Most everyone but Carmina, who loved the stylized bow and sashay, the overly gestured hunt and evasion, slicked as always with sheen upon sheen of sweet sweat.
The last time that she saw the men who live in trees was two years ago, when they climbed the walls of the city, sliced the bellies of the guards and laid the grin of their blades against her father’s throat. She stood in the doorway, her white nightdress fluttering about her body like translucent wings. She opened her mouth, felt her lips stretch against her teeth, but no sound came. The men who live in trees clustered around her kneeling father. One held his sparse hair, one his shoulders, and one the blade. Her father choked, then gasped, then grunted something that sounded like, forgive me, please, forgive me. The men who live in trees had faces that did not move. Their mouths were stone, their faces, sky. With a quick flick of the wrist, the blade slid neatly into her father’s neck, and sliced a clean arc from one side to the other.
Her father did not weep, nor did he scream. Instead he spread his fingers, curved the pinkie and ring finger inward with a fluttering motion, and brought both hands to his chest. Carmina knew the sign. Her father had taught it to her. The men who lived in trees knew it too. They spoke not in words. They spoke with their hands. Carmina’s father, in their language, told them one thing. Thank you.
It is said that each man lives for three hundred years. That they emerge, fully formed and rational, from a slit in the side of the tree. That they do not die as we do, but rot from the center outwards as they inch towards death, dropping limbs as they do so. This, of course, is ludicrous, and yet. And yet. Once I saw a man while I traveled deep into the jungle’s green heart. He had no left arm and no nose. He inched down the overgrown path. He creaked in the wind.
—From the journals of Tamino Ailare
Given that this was the day that she would be presented to her future husband and her future husband’s family (which is to say, this was the day that she was to be presented to her future mother-in-law, who would, in a series of codified gestures, display her approval, indifference, grudging acceptance, open distain, downright hostility, or abject refusal), Carmina was particularly alone. Normally, she would be escorted from the garden doors of the compound with her mother at her left hand and her father at her right. She would have a cacophony of relatives giggling behind her, covering their white teeth and spreading lips with the backs of their salty hands. Behind that would be the household servants, leading the household animals, and likely, after that would be a musician and singer, or even a choir, hired specially for the occasion.
Instead, it would only be Carmina and her aunt, which meant that Carmina would be completely alone.
Deborah, the servant waited quietly at the dressing table. This was not surprising. Deborah never spoke. None of the servants did. She simply waited for Carmina arranging and rearranging the various tools for the intricate performance that was Carmina’s toilette: A boar’s bristle brush, a jar of grease made from the fat of a lamb, scented with bergamot, jasmine and lime. She had fourteen silver combs and ten ropes of tiny pearls that would shortly twine through her black hair, binding it fast. There were eight jars of fine powder in varying degrees of pallor. With each successive application, Carmina would become paler and paler until she was the color of stone. There were also jars holding an assortment of fine, smooth pastes, as silky as custard with a pleasing grit. There was a berry colored paste that would be applied to her lips (on her wedding night, this would be applied to her nipples as well), a seashell pink paste for her high cheekbones, and a sunset of blues and purples and iridescent greens for around her eyes.
There was, of course, much to do, but she stood at the window instead, watching the mounded green exhale in clouds of heat and mist towards the high, white sky.
It was in this moment that the door to the room opened as though by a force of nature and hit the opposite wall so hard that it cracked the plaster in a dusty puff.
“Clean that up,” Carmina’s aunt said to the silent servant without glancing over. Deborah stood, bowed and went for a broom. “This,” her aunt said, hooking her head downwards like a vulture, “is what I am to present to your future mother-in-law? I came here looking for a bride-to-be. If it weren’t for that ill-behaved tongue in your wretched mouth, I might have mistaken you for one of the servants.”
Carmina leaned against the window sill, tilted her head and smiled mildly at her aunt.
“It shouldn’t matter either way,” she said. “I could meet his family wearing nothing but fig leaves and they’ll still pant for the match.” Her aunt snorted and reached for the powder, but Carmina continued, emboldened mostly because she knew she was right.
“I think I’ll do just that,” she said as sweat pooled and dripped between her bound breasts and down the fine ribs of sliced whale bones that caged her middle. “I’ll make a dress of leaves and burlap. And I’ll anoint my hair with last year’s tallow. Oh and ashes too.” Her aunt laid a long-nailed hand at the small of Carmina’s back and led her—with more than a bit of firm insistence at the tips—to the chair. “Behold the bride,” Carmina said bitterly as her aunt began with the first jar of powder.
“Selfish,” her aunt said with a hiss at her teeth. “Selfi
sh and stupid. Just like your father. Think of your mother, for a change. Think of your mother, and do your duty.”
Carmina’s mother lay in bed, weak with fever. She had suffered from fevers for the last two years. When she saw her husband lying on the ground, his blood pooling on the cool flagstones, she fell into a swoon. Her body fell hard upon the stones, her father’s blood flowing towards and around her head like a halo. Later, when the doctors and apothecaries, and even twelve women from the penal colony who were jailed as witches, examined the barely conscious woman, the diagnosis was unanimous, which is to say that each had his or her own particular theory, and they agreed in their utter lack of agreement. The doctors blamed a parasitic infection, and prescribed a draft of quinine, drunk morning, noon and night, followed by a second draft of strong spirits, and followed again by a tincture of morphine. The apothecaries blamed an over abundance of humor, and insisted that she be bled for fifteen minutes every day until her condition improved. At half past two every afternoon, she was to have a draft made from the petals of lilies, hibiscus and bitterroot, combined, of course, with the dried petals of roses imported from the beating heart of the Empire, to feed the poor woman’s dying heart. The witches declared that it was from the shock of heartbreak and the unintentional ingestion of blood. They required a measure of seawater to be flushed to the eyes every day to wash away sorrow, the oil of poppy to be placed under the tongue to replace joy, and the presence of a singer in her bedchamber every day for at least two hours, to clear the head and soothe the heart.
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