Toby and the Secrets of the Tree

  “Tomorrow,” he said, backing away. “Tomorrow evening. Or I’ll chop you into little pieces.”

  Tiger’s footsteps grew fainter. All the Grass people surrounded Toby. How had he magically made the man give in?

  “We no longer have any choice about it,” said Toby. “We have to leave before midnight tomorrow.”

  Then he went on to say, “I’ll warn my parents and all the others. We’ll take them with us.”

  “Have you found the way out, Little Tree?” asked Jalam.

  Toby smiled. “I think I’ve found the way out for us, but as for them . . . I’m still not sure what we’re going to do. I’ll speak to my father about it first. Right now, we need to sleep and get our strength up.”

  They lay down on their carpets of sawdust and shavings. Sleep carried them away.

  The silence of the night filled the shelter. Only Moon Boy’s eyes still shone in the gloom.

  A few minutes went by.

  His tiny figure sat up. He stayed there, motionless for a moment, and then leaped to his feet. Nobody had noticed anything.

  Without a sound, he glided between the sleepers.

  Moon Boy shivered when he got outside. It was a clear but freezing night. He went in the direction of the barricade.

  A ten-year-old boy walking barefoot under the moonlight through a ghastly work camp . . . His delicate shadow looked almost surreal.

  Moon Boy was walking with a steady stride. His sister was the cause of all this. He had to fix things. He would go himself to talk to the old man with the pancake on his head. He was the smallest, so he could squeeze through the barricade.

  At four o’clock in the morning, Maya left the dormitory. She had just spent two hours in her bed staring at the plank of wood above her, unable to close her eyes. She went to sit down on a step in front of the door.

  For the last few days, she had been living on the verge of tears. Knowing that Toby was alive, knowing that he was so close to her . . . To begin with, she had felt extraordinary joy. But then the joy had stupidly given way to anxiety. She felt responsible as a mother again, that fear that niggles its way into a parent’s happiness — fear that something might happen, fear that the happiness might go away one day.

  She remembered the day when Sim had turned up with a little bundle of swaddling clothes under his coat. A tiny baby wrapped in a blue blanket.

  “He needs us,” Sim had said.

  Maya had only asked herself one question: “How will I know what to do?”

  She had held the little boy clumsily in the bend of her elbow, and from that moment on everything had seemed so simple.

  “His name’s Toby,” said Sim.

  Before he’d even told her where the child came from, Maya had adopted him.

  Now, as she sat at the bottom of the Crater with her chin on her knees, her gaze was lost in the night. She didn’t feel the cold. She just closed her eyes a few times to remember how tiny Toby’s feet were, when she had taken them for the first time in her hands to warm them up.

  Opening her eyes again, she discovered an amazing little character. He was about ten years old, and he was standing in front of her in the cold night. His teeth were chattering and his purple lips trembling. His clothes were ripped, and the skin on his arms was streaked with a thousand tiny cuts.

  Maya smiled at him. “Are you lost?”

  “I am a friend of the person you call Toby,” said Moon Boy.

  In the white light of the half-moon, the scene looked like a painting. Maya put her hands together as if to pray, then she got up and kissed Moon Boy.

  “Come with me, my dear.”

  She made him cross the dormitory on tiptoe and then she woke Sim, who opened his eyes and grabbed his glasses.

  She wanted to introduce the little boy, but Sim stopped her.

  “I know who he is,” he said. “I’m happy to see you here, my young friend.”

  He shook Moon Boy’s hand vigorously.

  Maya put a blanket over Moon Boy’s back. She sat him on the mattress and rubbed his feet.

  Moon Boy was quaking with this newfound sense of well-being. So this was what parents were. They rubbed your feet and called you “my dear.” Luckily, he hadn’t known what he’d been missing, up until now.

  “He says to be ready,” Moon Boy explained. “He’ll come to find you tomorrow.”

  “What about you?” asked Sim.

  “He’s got an idea to get us out.”

  Sim took the time to ponder all this.

  “Tell him not to worry about us. It’ll be too risky for all of us to escape together. We’ve built a tunnel. We can leave from our side tomorrow night. It’ll be a nice surprise for Joe Mitch.”

  Moon Boy agreed. “So, will I see you again?”

  Sim gave him a hug.

  “Yes, my little one. We’ll find each other again.”

  Maya tried to keep hold of Moon Boy for a while longer, but it was nearly dawn. The little boy got down off the bed, flashed a smile at Sim and Maya, and disappeared.

  Jalam found Moon Boy at dawn, sleeping in front of the Grass people’s refuge. His clothes were in tatters and his skin grazed rough as a cheese grater. He hadn’t even had the energy to drag himself inside.

  “What happened to him?” asked Mika when he saw Jalam walk in with the little boy sleeping in his arms.

  “I don’t know.”

  Toby rushed over to his friend.

  “Moon Boy!”

  The latter found the strength to open an eye.

  He muttered something.

  “What?” whispered Toby.

  “Your parents are very nice,” Moon Boy murmured.

  Toby immediately understood. Moon Boy had gone to the other side.

  “I’ll lend them to you,” said Toby.

  It was a calm day on both sides of the Crater. The guards had relaxed their treatment of the prisoners, subjecting them to fewer blows and insults.

  The last night of winter was Joe Mitch’s birthday. Preparations for the big event took place all day long, and Mitch’s men were ordered to celebrate as if the memory of his birth was a cause for rejoicing. Since the man himself found it hard to blow straight, they put only one candle on his cake. Not that anybody knew the exact age of the ugly oaf.

  Strangely, Mitch loved sharing his enormous cake, the only thing he ever shared. But his men could happily have done without this rare show of generosity. Nobody wanted to eat a cake that Mitch had blown, spluttered, and spat all over for half an hour trying to snuff out a single candle.

  Every year, the cake-tasting ceremony prompted grim faces and pinched noses. Barely concealing their disgust, Joe Mitch’s men chewed the thick snot that covered their portion.

  For this reason, the guard on duty at the night school that evening felt relieved to have escaped the birthday party. Most of his colleagues had volunteered to swap places with him, but he had generously swept such offers aside.

  “I don’t mind making a personal sacrifice,” he’d said.

  He glanced through the classroom window to make sure that the lesson was running normally. Sim Lolness was standing behind his desk, and all the elderly students were looking very attentive in their seats. Little Plok Tornett was wiping the blackboard.

  The guard settled down for an evening of sitting peacefully outside the classroom, watching the time go by. He’d never really understood what exactly he was supposed to be keeping an eye out for. Did anyone seriously think there was a risk of this bunch of old madmen escaping?

  He chuckled to himself.

  On the other side of the Crater, the sentry who was guarding the Grass people didn’t complain about his assignment either. Elrom, who wore little round glasses, had tasted Joe Mitch’s cake the year before and had no desire to try it again.

  “Who goes there?”

  The guard squinted through his glasses, trying to recognize the person approaching in the dark. Elrom hadn’t been expecting any visitors this evening.

&nb
sp; “Ah! It’s you. . . .”

  Big Tiger was standing in front of him. Elrom fiddled nervously with his glasses. He was scared of Tiger. What did he want with the Grass people, tonight of all nights?

  “Open up for me.”

  “Again? Have you got . . . permission?” stammered the sentry.

  “I’ve got permission to squash you if you put up a fuss.”

  “But I — I mean . . .”

  He started to open the gate but kept on muttering, “I was told that . . .”

  “Shut it!” roared Tiger.

  Elrom promptly shut the gate again.

  “Open up!” shouted Tiger.

  “Er . . . am I closing it or opening it?”

  “Shut your mouth and open the gate,” growled Tiger, grabbing hold of his harpoon.

  The guard realized there was no point in arguing. He unlocked the gate to let Tiger through, closing it behind him.

  “Don’t stay too long,” he called out to Tiger.

  “I told you to shut it!”

  “I already have,” said Elrom, turning the key in the lock a second time.

  Tiger often paid visits to the Grass people. Only the day before, Elrom had begged him to leave because he was lingering in the shelter. What dubious plot was he hatching?

  The guard knew all about Tiger’s cruel streak. The rumor among some of the guards was that Tiger had killed Nino Alamala, the famous painter. Every evening, Elrom liked to draw in private. He had always been a great admirer of Nino’s works.

  Elrom knew there was a risk of Tiger’s visits to the Grass people ending badly, so it was with a degree of anxiety that he awaited the return of the soldier with the harpoon.

  The noise from the party could be heard in the distance. Stupid shouting, laughter, stamping feet . . . A real hullabaloo. You’d have thought it was a fly taking off. This was an expression used by one of Elrom’s friends, a bumblebee tanner. In his job, he was familiar with the deafening racket flies make when they take off.

  Elrom was trying to imagine what the atmosphere was like up there. The presents, the muted applause, and the big banner with the obligatory: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOEBAR K. AMSTRAMGRAVOMITCH! This was Mitch’s full name, the one that was used on important occasions, but the big tyrant could only get his tongue around the first and last syllables. He didn’t have room for twenty-four letters inside the small empty box of his brain. So he’d only ever been called Joe Mitch.

  When Elrom realized that an hour had gone by and Tiger still wasn’t back, he decided to find out what was going on. He grabbed a torch and opened the gate, then locked it from the inside and put the key in his pocket.

  The light from the torch disappeared into the Crater. Elrom was grumbling into his beard that it wasn’t his job to guard the other guards, and, anyway, how come Tiger got permission to leave the birthday party?

  Elrom was now at the entrance to the shelter, where the Grass people slept. He swapped the torch into his left hand, freeing his right hand to grasp the knife that hung from his belt. The Grass people didn’t really frighten him, but Tiger did, a lot. He had a nasty sense of foreboding.

  “Tiger!” he called out.

  Nobody answered.

  He took a step toward the narrow opening.

  “Are you there?”

  He thrust the torch ahead of him, came to an abrupt halt, pushed his glasses back up his nose, and held his breath.

  He went in.

  “Ooohhhh . . .”

  The cry he tried to let out fizzled into a feeble whimper on his lips. In no time at all, his face was covered in drops of sweat and his eyes got progressively wider than the lenses of his glasses. Was he hallucinating?

  Elrom nearly dropped down like a dead leaf.

  What he saw was hideous. The corpses of the Grass people were piled up in the middle of the room, bathed in a pool of blood. Behind them, wiping his harpoon on a box and with his back to Elrom, sat Tiger.

  Elrom staggered toward him, holding his scarf over his mouth as he tried not to gag.

  “What have you done?”

  Tiger turned around.

  But it wasn’t Tiger.

  It was a much friendlier face.

  Elrom was dealt a powerful blow to the head — a blow that made him crumple and that took him to a faraway place, among the stars.

  “Thanks, Jalam,” said Toby, emerging from the shadows.

  He was still holding the beam that he’d used as a weapon. He looked at brave Elrom.

  “I feel sorry for him. He wasn’t the worst . . .”

  Jalam agreed. He’d rather enjoyed playing the part of Tiger. They both turned toward the pile of Grass people.

  “Are you coming?”

  A body on top of the pile was the first to stir. Then, one after another, the Grass people started moving. In a matter of seconds, all the corpses came back to life. They gathered around Toby.

  His idea had worked. He searched Elrom’s pockets and produced the key. With the help of three men, he rolled the unconscious guard toward Tiger, who was also out for the count.

  Tiger had fallen for the same trick of this nightmarish spectacle, mistaking the famous canteen red soup for blood. All the Grass people had kept their rations from the previous evening to smear over themselves.

  It had been easy for Toby to take a horrified Tiger by surprise.

  At first, Jalam had needed some coaxing to play the part of Tiger. He wasn’t sure about putting on the soldier’s coat. He didn’t like the idea of trying to pass himself off as somebody else.

  “But I’m not him. . . .”

  “No, you’re not him, but you can pretend to be.”

  “No, I can’t, Little Tree, because I’ll still be me, so I can’t pretend to be someone else.”

  “You don’t stop being you; it’s just that you make people believe you’re him.”

  “But then I’d be doing something that wasn’t true.”

  “Yes!” Toby had concluded angrily. “We need you to do something that’s untrue in order to save all of our lives. There are times when the truth doesn’t matter, Jalam.”

  Jalam had been won over, though Toby already regretted what he’d said. For him, the truth always mattered.

  Right now, old Jalam was still wearing Tiger’s coat and strutting around the room like a star actor. He kept making all sorts of faces, playing the bad guy, imitating Tiger’s accent to terrify his friends.

  “Let’s go!” said Toby.

  The group of Grass people formed a line. Silent as a breeze, they walked out of their shelter and stood by the edge of the Crater.

  Toby opened the gate with Elrom’s key: this was the second time he’d tried to escape from the Crater.

  The first time he’d been thirteen years old, back when the Crater was just a few woodpecker holes deep. Now it was an abyss that gutted the Tree, gnawing away at its heart. In the brilliant moonlight trickling through the branches, Toby surveyed the extent of the damage.

  “Do you know the way out?” asked Mika, who was leading Liev by the arm.

  “Yes, I do,” Toby replied.

  A few years earlier, also on the run from Joe Mitch’s barbaric ways, Toby had escaped with Mano Asseldor. He headed for the spot in the Enclosure where he’d been lucky the first time.

  Liev’s smile expressed complete understanding. He didn’t need eyes or ears to sense the wind of freedom. Freedom has a smell; it has a taste. Freedom is something you feel in your body. Mika could feel Liev’s hand pressing on his wrist.

  Meanwhile Moon Boy reached the front of the column of men, having worked his way up the line of Grass people, followed by Jalam, who was still playing the part of Tiger. Moon Boy walked quickly to keep pace with Toby, because he wanted to have a word with him.

  “I’m not leaving without my sister.”

  “What?”

  “Go on without me,” Moon Boy insisted, panting. “I’m staying here to rescue my sister.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” sai
d Toby, without slowing down at all. “You’ll do what I tell you to do. And I’m telling you to come with us.”

  Jalam backed up Toby’s words with a stern look.

  “I’m staying!” Moon Boy sobbed.

  It broke Toby’s heart to see Moon Boy upset in this way, but this time it was his duty to behave like a big brother.

  “It’s not up to you to decide, Moon Boy. There’s nobody left here to rescue. Your sister isn’t a prisoner. She denounced me. She’s with the enemy.”

  Toby’s hard voice echoed inside the small boy’s head. He stopped and looked down. Toby didn’t turn around. Surreptitiously, Jalam followed Moon Boy, pretending to rejoin the Grass people bringing up the rear.

  They reached the Enclosure. The hole had been blocked with only a thin layer of lopped-off branches, and in a few minutes they’d cleared a passageway. This wasn’t an escape; it was a stroll by moonlight.

  Toby stood there, watching his Grass friends crossing the Enclosure, one by one. He knew there was still a long adventure in store, but for now he was enjoying this peaceful victory.

  Toby thought about his parents, who had promised to escape at the same time. Perhaps they were already out ahead. . . .

  The last Grass person stepped into the breach with a small boy on his back. It was old Jalam, who was bright red and didn’t dare look Toby in the eye.

  “I . . . I hit him. . . . I could see he was trying to leave, so I hit him.”

  Moon Boy had fainted, with his head on Jalam’s shoulder. Toby gave the old man a flicker of a smile.

  “You did that?” he asked.

  Jalam could hardly believe it himself.

  “My hand just shot out.”

  “It’s your costume,” Toby explained. “You’re still playing the part.”

  “Do you think?”

  “Without you, Moon Boy would probably have been captured by those oafs. You did the right thing.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt him. . . .” Jalam sniffed.

  He was stroking Moon Boy’s forehead.

  The Grass people were free.