Who knows what they look like? They are distant countries, where sparrows land, scrape the fruit off the mistletoe berries, and leave the pips behind…
Two years later, in deepest winter, the mistletoe ball at Saipur dropped off. It was midnight, on the last day of December. A decision was reached to cut off all the other mistletoe balls in the Tree, given the danger they posed. Only Tumble remained to be fitted out as a prison.
The following week, when El Blue, Zef Clarac and Sim Lolness found out their magic world had vanished, they cried all the way home, telling everybody that Professor Bickfort was dead.
Toby had never read his father’s study on “The Sparrow With a Beret”, so he believed he was going to his death as he was carried off in the bird’s beak, still clinging to the pip in the middle of the berry. And it was a relief.
Mistletoe has white berries. But they are like picture windows, with the light flooding in on all sides. The aerial spectacle Toby was experiencing was like the precursor to Heaven. It was an extreme experience, a vision of a new world. All of a sudden, from his vantage point at the centre of his picture window, he could see life from on high. Everything looked bigger and brighter.
Above him was a sky of pure purple, with midnight blue clouds scudding across it. Below was a horizontal world without end, Toby’s only memory of which would be a dream in green and brown.
It was as if the Tree had been placed on top of another Tree, infinitely taller.
Toby hugged the pip with both arms. The landscape was turning to the beat of the sparrow’s flapping wings. Toby was slipping away, becoming less and less aware of his body. How long did the flight last? It could have been an eternity. It ended with a few twirling loops, and Toby losing all notion of anything.
A song.
A short song with no words.
Five or six repeated notes, sung by a woman.
And then the heat. A hot humid bath.
Toby opened his eyes.
A few paces away, a woman was busy darning a shirt. Toby recognised it as his own shirt. He was bare-chested and in the mud. He tried to find something to grip so he could pull himself up, but his wrists were tied together. His ankles wouldn’t work.
He called out.
The woman stopped her song and turned towards him. Her face made Toby shiver. The features were both strange and familiar. She smiled serenely. Then, lowering her gaze, she carried on singing the same refrain. Toby let the notes wash away his fear.
He looked around. The landscape didn’t resemble anything he had ever seen before. A green forest, higher than all the forests in the Tree. It wasn’t a moss grove, but a forest a hundred times taller, where each blade of tapering grass seemed to stretch all the way to the sky. Light flickered in this jungle, and its peaks swayed in the wind.
What was he doing here?
He tried to arrange his last recollections in order. The Tree, the bird, the sky … it was like a dream. And now, on the one hand this gentle voice, and on the other his hands all tied up.
You think your life is over once and for all, but it always turns out to be more complicated than that.
“Who are you?” he called out again.
The woman looked at him. She went on with her song. After the final short note, she said, “They’ll be back. The sun is soft. They’ll be back when the sun is hard. I’m guarding you. I’m sewing your bag.”
Toby’s eyes bulged.
“That’s not my bag. It’s my shirt.”
“Shirt,” the woman smiled, and started singing again.
The woman’s own clothing was odd. The only thing she was wearing was a short piece of bright red material around her body. She looked quite young, but Toby couldn’t guess her actual age even within ten years. She could be twenty. She could be double that. Her eyes slanted towards her temples. A long stretch of eye like a light under the door.
The song had changed now. It was a heartbreaking melody. Still no words. But Toby understood every note: they were telling him he hadn’t left the world yet. Such a sense of nostalgia could only exist in the real world.
The whole of his life came crashing down on him, heavy as an old wardrobe, bitter as crushed bugs. The death of his parents, Elisha’s betrayal… He found his grief just as he had left it. Even his tears tasted the same.
“So, am I alive then?” he asked.
The woman didn’t hear him. He went back to sleep.
When he woke up, it was still daytime. A chorus of a hundred people were whispering all around him. He opened his eyes and a hush fell.
Men, women and children were staring at him in silence. They were all dressed in bright colours. Some of the clothes were bigger than others, some more worn, but they were as bright as if they’d been freshly lifted from the basins of dye. A little boy wearing a yellow belt had hoisted himself above the group by climbing a blade of grass.
“They send out their soldiers with so little linen,” said an old man in a blue cape that came right down to his ankles.
Every face radiated sympathy. They all looked at Toby the way you would a sick child or a prisoner on death row.
“We must keep a hard heart. The Grass is fragile. It is flattened by the wind. It burns under the snow.”
These words were gobbledegook to Toby. All he knew, from the look on the faces leaning over him, was that they wouldn’t hurt him. The world he had landed in didn’t seem hostile. The woman who had been darning his shirt kept humming her gentle refrain. With so many eyes directed at Toby, it was almost enough to lift him off the ground.
“We must keep a hard heart,” some of them repeated.
But they kept looking on sympathetically, and their gestures were peaceful. The child on the blade of grass slid gently down to the ground.
Then silence again, and the old man in blue said to Toby, “You will go back there, Little Tree.”
Toby felt his eyes spinning and his tongue stick to the back of his mouth. He found the strength to speak.
“Go back?”
Why was there never any break from his cruel fate?
“Yes, Little Tree. The Grass is fragile, and you must leave. Your people took away nine of our people last night. And twelve more at the last snow. As well as one woman, three nights ago. Your people killed a woman who was gathering a bit of wood on the bark of the Tree, at the Border…”
Down on the ground, Toby tensed.
The man went on, “If all your people only know is the language of death, then we will have to learn that sad language too.”
Toby tried to raise his face to shout out. “My people! My people hunt me down, my people killed my mother and father, my people tore my friends away from me, my people HATE me! And now I’ve got to pay for their offences?”
He was writhing about in all directions, rolling on the loamy earth he’d never felt against his skin before. Finally, he fell back down again, exhausted. His voice was just a whisper now.
“Kill me. Otherwise they’ll capture me, just like you have. I come from nowhere. I have nobody. I want to stop right here and now. Kill me!”
“You have the glimmer in your eye, Little Tree – I know you have suffered,” said the man in the blue cape, with a lump in his throat.
A cloud of sadness descended on all their faces. The glimmer in the eye, a tiny speck in the pupil, was the sign of those who had lost their parents. Only these people knew how to detect that scar of grief.
Instantly, they disappeared into the green surroundings.
Toby was all alone. He didn’t move. He was covered in earth. In the Tree, earth was a rare powder brought by the wind. People collected it in hollows in the bark. You made small gardens out of it, or dyes. But here… Where could he be then, with so much earth around him?
Toby heard a low whistle, and a rustling to the side. The little boy dressed in a belt of yellow cloth appeared between two stems. He came up to Toby.
“Where are we? What part of the Tree are we in?” Toby asked, with his eyes hal
f closed. “Why were they talking about a glimmer in my eye?”
The little boy didn’t answer. He leaned over him. With his finger, he removed the mud from around Toby’s eyes. He must have been about seven years old. He had a moon-shaped face under his bushy hair. A layer of earth formed a makeshift pair of socks, and his whole body was coloured light brown.
“You want to know where your Tree is? Well, look…”
Moon Boy clapped his hands. An enormous shadow cast itself over them. Toby felt as if they were under a spell. The little boy started laughing.
“What is it?” asked Toby.
“It’s your Tree.”
The child laughed again in front of an astonished Toby, and tried to reassure him.
“It’s the Tree’s shadow. I know when it’s about to reach the Grass, in the evening. Just before, I can feel a cold sigh behind my ears.”
“The Tree’s shadow?”
In this world where the bird had dropped him off, the Tree was just a shadow on the Grass, before nightfall. Just a faraway planet that eclipsed the sun towards sunset. And if you got too close, to pick up firewood or to chase away the ants, you ran the risk of being carried off.
The Tree was a forbidden planet to these people in the Grass. They lived peacefully in the harsh world of the Prairie, and slept where they could, in makeshift shelters that would inevitably get destroyed at the first signs of bad weather. Yes, the Grass was fragile; it got flattened by storms, burned by the snow, flooded by the rains.
These were nomadic people, barely tolerated by the Grass forest that made them lead a hard life. If the people from the Tree started killing them, that would be the end of this delicately balanced life.
Looking at his small companion, whose brown skin was covered in a fine layer of cracked mud, Toby understood why, in the Tree, these folk, whose existence was as fragile as a blade of grass, were referred to as the Grass people.
26
The Last Walk
Toby bore no hard feelings when they came at sunset to take him away.
The young moon-faced boy had never left him. The two of them had just stayed there, lying side by side. Moon Boy sang a similar refrain to the Grass woman’s, but his mouth was closed. He was rubbing two grass shoots together to make the plaintive sounds, and tapping his feet on the ground.
Toby was trying to work out if there was anything still linking him to life.
His parents, his beloved Low Branches, Elisha, Leo Blue and Nils Amen had all abandoned him. Nobody alive cared about him any more. Toby had no expectations of anyone or anything.
The man who approached him didn’t look particularly strong. He was young and slim, with calm eyes. He watched Toby lying in the dust. But then he bent down, hoisted Toby up and tossed him like a haunch of cricket into a cloth hood he was carrying on his back.
Now Toby understood why the woman had mistaken his shirt for a bag. The Grass people had never seen shirts before, but they were kitted out with a sort of knapsack with long sleeves that spread the weight over their shoulders and arms.
The man waved goodbye to Moon Boy and started walking. Toby knew he was setting off on his final journey.
They marched like that for a long time, going through the darkening forest. The porter walked with a steady rhythm, and his breathing made no sound. Doubled up inside the bag, Toby didn’t move. Through a small rip in the cloth, he had noticed the moon-faced boy following discreetly a few steps behind.
Sometimes, the porter would turn back around and call out to the child, “Go back to your own ear of wheat, Strand of Linen! Make sure you don’t get eaten by frogs!”
Ear of wheat. Frog. Still this strange language. Perhaps the boy didn’t understand it any more than Toby did, because each time, after a few minutes, he showed up again behind them, between two creepers, on the bend of a Grass thicket.
“Leave us alone, Strand of Linen! Go and find your sister. She’ll make you some pancakes…”
Toby gave a start in his bag. Pancakes. He couldn’t help thinking about Elisha. He wiped his eyes on the coarse material. The memory of melted honey made his mouth water. No, he would never taste happiness again.
The ground sloped gently downwards. Toby noticed shallow water flowing everywhere. The man had lit a lantern. The forest was reflected in the flooded ground. The Grass seemed to go on forever. Toby was surrounded by the mystery of this new world.
His father had been right. The Tree wasn’t man’s only horizon. This flat, jungle-covered planet also existed. And maybe other worlds did too, somewhere else, even in the stars.
Toby would die with this secret. From now on, he wouldn’t bother defending himself any more. He didn’t want to fight back. He let himself be carried in a bag, tossed about like a doll dressed in mud. He wasn’t resisting any more. He had already taken his leave. He had overstepped all the boundaries of his own life.
Sometimes, he couldn’t help letting a memory wash over him. His mother’s voice, the cracking sound that buds make in spring, the faces of the Asseldor sisters, his father’s hands on the nape of his neck…
His last day with Elisha.
It was the day before Bernie Alzan’s picnic. A clear warm spring day. The two of them were on top of the cliff above the lake. Up there, the moss grew right to the edge. Toby and Elisha had climbed up through the green foliage to perch there.
That morning, the mirror of the lake was disturbed by two water fleas, who looked as if they were dancing a love duet. One of them was going off in a sulk. The other was slowly sneaking up behind in a roundabout way, making big loops on the water’s surface. Sometimes it dived, then reappeared further off, snorting. The first one finally answered by moving its legs, which looked like batting eyelashes. And then the charming dance started all over again.
Propped up on their moss thicket, Toby and Elisha smiled as they looked on.
“I’ll miss all this,” said Toby.
Elisha started. She fixed her eyes on Toby.
“When?”
Toby realised he shouldn’t have opened his mouth.
“When will you miss all this?” she asked again.
“If … if I manage to get my parents out,” he said, “we might have to go very far away for a while…”
“For a while!” groaned Elisha. “So that’s what I’m getting up for every morning, to prepare your departure! Thanks, Toby.”
Abruptly, she looked away. Toby wanted to explain.
“Try to understand it from my point of view. I can’t stay in a cave with my parents for ten years! Life’s for living!”
“So go away, then, if you’ve got to be so far away to start living again. Off you go! Nobody’s stopping you.”
She hid half her face in her collar. Her eyes were fixed on an imaginary horizon. She looked the same as she had during those sad days, when she wore the mask of wild Elisha. Toby kept silent and an unbridgeable gulf rose up between them.
“If I do have to leave, I’ll be back. I swear to you. I’ll be back, and—”
He stopped.
“And?” Elisha asked indifferently.
“And I’ll find you again.”
“Why?” she challenged him, as if she’d thrown him a stick.
Silence again. Toby felt a knot in his belly.
“Why? Do you really want to know?”
But he couldn’t say any more. The ball was stuck in his throat. Elisha realised how far she’d provoked him, but she was hurting too much to backtrack. She wanted to say she was sorry, tell him how sad she was. But instead she heard herself blurting out, “You know what, I haven’t had many friends. Just one, counting you…”
And then she deliberately slid all the way down the moss. Toby followed her.
Watching her bumping ahead of him, as he had done so many times before all over the Tree, Toby felt there was something new happening between them. An unfamiliar bond, which quickened his breath and made his heart race.
She dashed off across the bark, never o
nce looking back, running over crevices. Behind her, Toby was tearing through the air, which had a different quality to it now. Both of them hurled themselves at the slope, without holding back or braking. The lake was getting bigger before their eyes. Their bare feet made the lichen powder fly behind them.
They reached the beach, panting, gasping for air. Bending over, hands on knees, as they tried to catch their breath – they couldn’t take their eyes off each other. They didn’t say anything. They just let the precious thread they had suddenly discovered between them grow taut. Their heads were spinning. The air seemed too rich, like the steam from a soup. They were now back-to-back, leaning against each other to balance. Their swinging arms touched.
Just then, on the other side of the lake, they noticed Isha waving and calling out to them. But they lingered for a few more seconds, back-to-back.
“Me too,” said Toby.
This wasn’t in answer to anything. Elisha hadn’t said a word. But nor did those two words surprise them. They were the seal of a silent pact.
“Me too,” Elisha said in turn.
She was the first to run off.
Down at the bottom of his sack, Toby wiped a new tear on the linen cloth.
The forest they had arrived at was less dense. Each step the porter took prompted a splash accompanied by a little wave, which came crashing over the bases of the reeds. Toby was peering into the half-light through the slit in the knapsack. He felt as if he kept catching people’s eyes in the dark. But the little Grass boy was no longer following them.
Moon Boy was just another person Toby would never see again. This was the law of his life: anyone he liked vanished, and all he was left with was a golden dust that made his eyes sting.
Night had taken hold of the forest. It was different from a night in the Tree; it was teeming with mysterious noises and reflections, and warm too. Toby had no idea how long they carried on forging ahead like this. The water was getting deeper. It was up to the porter’s waist now. He was pushing a float ahead of him, with his lantern swaying on it.