Toby spent the day in his refuge, sleeping and tending his wounds with strips of fresh leaf. Three times he woke at the vibrations of noisy, disorderly troops. Three times he stayed there, petrified, panting for breath, until long after the hunters had moved on.
They were still looking for him. And they were more determined than ever.
There had never been a more unfair battle in the Tree: one child against the whole world.
At nine o’clock at night in September, the Tree is already covered in darkness. That was when Toby left his hiding place for good. He knew which way to go. In fact, his sense of direction was so strong, it was as if he’d swallowed a compass. He started walking and, after a few steps, his determination to survive overcame his aches and pains; he ran along the branches the way he used to.
Toby was like a moth as he raced along the branches. Silent, unpredictable, but always accurate. He had learned everything in the Low Branches. The Tree was his garden.
Toby knew the inhabited areas, and how to avoid them. In particular, he bypassed the sprawling estates made from wood chippings, which were springing up on the outskirts of the Tree’s cities.
The different groups of men hunting him, who were actually ahead of him now, sometimes pitched camp for the night in the wilderness. So Toby also had to watch out for the glow of their campfires.
Before he saw anything, he heard the voices.
It was at a crossroads that he couldn’t avoid without losing precious time. He needed to reach the other side.
Crawling on his knees and elbows, he began his approach. About ten men were slumped around a fire that had almost gone out, where tasty-looking chunks of cricket were roasting on a spit. There must have been almost half a cricket for just ten men, and plenty of alcohol flowing.
Toby was hungry. He listened to their songs. They were beautiful: real old hunting tunes. Beauty sometimes sneaks into the hardest of hearts. Toby recognised these as songs from his childhood.
The great hunts, which had been his grandfather’s pride and joy, no longer took place on the Summit estates where Toby used to spend his summers. But the governesses employed by his grandmother had sometimes taken him to the peasants’ hunts that were still held on the neighbouring branches. Toby had ridden on the hunters’ backs, nudging their arrows in the wrong direction. He had tickled the best archers, and because he was young, people had forgiven him. Once, he had even kept a tiny fly hidden in his shirt for a whole day, so he could free it when evening came, far away from the hunters.
At dusk, he liked to stretch out under the inn table. He was only five or six at the time, and when he listened to the singing and ballads, he felt like a true hunter. He loved the songs and old stories, and the smells of food grilling and old boots that joined him under the table.
But tonight, rashly listening to his pursuers singing, he was no longer small Toby who got passed from hand to hand around the table and made everybody laugh. This time he was the breathless prey itself, drawing near to the hunters’ camp.
Toby lay on the ground for some time. A rustling noise suddenly caught his attention. It was coming from the right, very close by. He turned his head and nearly screamed. His blood froze.
Two red eyes were staring at him out of the dark.
He rolled to the side. The hunters carried on with their songs. After burying his head in his arms, Toby poked it back out again and dared to look at those eyes. The noise was getting more aggressive.
It was a soldier ant.
Penned in an enclosure, it was starting to grow restless, and trying to beat down the barrier. Toby noticed another pair of eyes looking his way. And then he saw a third ant lurking in the shadows. The scent of Toby must have woken these three giant monsters, each of them glowing red as embers.
So, the hunters weren’t alone. They were accompanied by these terrifying beasts. Toby was getting ready to slip away, but the sounds of the revelry suddenly stopped. The nervous ants had attracted the hunters’ attention. A hairy giant, at least two and a half millimetres tall, got up and walked over to the enclosure.
“Oi! Quiet in there.”
Toby did another roll in the darkness. The ants had clustered on his side of the enclosure, and the man was trying to find out what they were so worked up about.
“Falco! Enok! Shut up, can’t you?”
The man started walking around the pen, talking to the creatures. Toby was trying to think what to do. Something needed to happen. Anything. He rummaged around in his pockets for a distraction. Nothing. Not even a twig to throw in the other direction. The hunter continued to pace the fence. Just behind him, the others were getting ready to join in. What on earth could be attracting the ants to this dark corner?
Toby glanced at his plasters. The action that saved him took less than a second. Ripping off his bloodstained dressings he scrunched them into a ball, which he tossed over the fence. The ants pounced, the blood driving them into a frenzy. They were fighting each other now.
“A scrap of leaf! They’re fighting over a leaf!”
The man kicked the pen and went back towards the fire, to put his companions’ minds at rest.
A minute later, Toby was already far away.
He had escaped. He wasn’t going to stop. He ran full pelt, as if the ants were on his heels.
He gave himself completely to the call of the Low Branches and let his mind wander. Action frees up ideas. He had run like this during the six years of exile in the Land of Onessa. Whole days in the Low Branches, where distances had no meaning.
He suddenly remembered a particular morning when young Plok Tornett had turned up at the Lolness household, unrecognisable. His face covered in mud, he kept groaning and pointing to where he had just come from. Sim Lolness tried to calm him down, but Plok’s grunting got louder and louder. Still pointing towards the west, he grabbed hold of the professor’s chin. Toby understood in a flash. For the young man who couldn’t speak, the chin was his way of referring to his uncle’s beard.
Something had happened to Vigo Tornett.
Toby decided to set out alone, to find out what, as fast as possible. There was no time to ask for help from the Asseldor family or from the Olmechs, friends who lived higher up. Reluctantly, his parents let him go, before ushering poor Plok inside.
It was Toby’s third year in the Low Branches. He reached old Tornett’s place in half the time it used to take. He knew how to navigate the risky slip-branches, shortcuts made from twigs wedged between the branches, so he didn’t have to make any detours, and he darted from branch to branch, leaping from one leaf to the next.
When he got to the Tornetts’ home, he didn’t notice anything unusual. The fire had gone out in the hearth and the table was laid for two. It wasn’t until he walked round the branch, towards the grubs’ sheds, that he found the old man.
He was a sorry sight.
Tornett was lying on the bark, motionless, his clothes in tatters.
Toby was ten at the time, and he had dealt with many difficult situations, but he had never found himself face to face with a man in that kind of condition. He threw himself on him.
“Tornett! Mr Tornett!”
He took the old man’s bearded head in his hands.
“Talk to me, pleeeease.”
Tornett didn’t move. It was too late. Toby laid his elderly friend’s head to rest. A cold breeze made him shiver.
“Farewell, Tornett,” he exclaimed theatrically.
Just then, he felt the man’s fingers pressing on his arms. More than pressing. Tornett was digging his nails into Toby’s flesh. If he tried much harder, his fingers would come out the other side. Toby would never have believed an old man could possess such strength. He cried out in pain, making Tornett wake up properly and release his grip.
An hour later, Toby was wiping a damp sponge over brave Tornett’s bruised body. He was definitely alive and didn’t appear to have sustained any serious injuries, but a fine network of grazes meant he was covered from h
ead to toe in red streaks. Lying on his bed in his long johns, old Vigo Tornett’s scratches looked like a spider’s web. Toby tried not to laugh. It was slightly comical.
“When I was at Tumble…” Vigo Tornett began, when he was finally able to speak. “When I was at Tumble … they beat me up like this and I’d done nothing. At Tumble they hit me so hard…”
Toby didn’t really understand. Tornett was only half-conscious. The shock must have brought back distant memories. Memories of Tornett’s other life, when he’d been a troublemaker. He had spoken about it to Toby. He’d spent ten years in Tumble prison. Ten terrible years that could never be forgotten.
Vigo Tornett opened his eyes fully. After a while, he explained what had happened to him this time.
Being a grubber requires you to be very meticulous. Grubbing is all about knowing what you were doing. You have to take a white sheet to wipe down the grub. Next, you wring out the sheet in a basin to collect the milk. But the grubber’s most delicate task is keeping an eye on the grubs.
Everyone knows that a grub will eventually become an insect. But sometimes not even the best grubber can tell the difference between one grub and another. So it is important to pay close attention to how fast the grub matures, in order to dispose of it in time. Kind-hearted Plok sometimes became so fond of his grubs that he kept them beyond a safe time limit. More than once, his uncle had rushed to help him with a grub whose shell was already cracking, its twitching antennae and jawbones starting to appear. Together they would push it into the void.
But this time, Vigo Tornett had found himself face to face with a rhinoceros beetle in the middle of the night. The beetle still had gloopy white shreds stuck to its shell.
Caught off guard by this first encounter, and barely out of its pupa, the insect was not in a friendly mood. It could easily have chopped Tornett up into little pieces. The old man tried hurling himself at the beetle’s head. But he had got caught on the beetle’s single horn instead Tornett was shaken in all directions, whipped against the boughs, and left for dead where Toby eventually found him.
From then on, Tornett only let his nephew breed small Nosodendron grubs.
Toby remembered how frightening this adventure had seemed to him at the time. He had told Elisha about it the next day, leading her to believe he was the one who had seen off the rhinoceros beetle single-handedly, even though it was “fifty times my size”.
Elisha had listened.
“What about Plok?” she whispered.
Elisha was very touched by the story of Plok, Tornett’s mute nephew. Sometimes, Toby wondered if Elisha would have preferred it if he couldn’t speak either. Here was the hero and saviour of Vigo Tornett standing before her, and all she could do was ask about Plok.
“What about Plok? Did he fight with the rhinoceros beetle?”
“No, and nor did you.”
From that day, Toby realised he would never lie to Elisha again.
Now, as he leapt through the night, he would willingly have entered into a bare-knuckle fight with any bloodthirsty preying mantis, rather than flee the hatred of his own people.
He ended his second night as a fugitive in a narrow hole, after chasing out a drowsy furniture beetle. He curled up into a ball to go to sleep. Day was beginning to break. It was time to disappear, like the unseen, unheard animals of the night he belonged with now.
6
Balina’s Secret
“What are you doing?”
Elisha jumped into the lake, and Toby looked away, embarrassed, until she had disappeared underwater.
“What are you doing, Toby? Aren’t you coming in?”
“No.”
She swam a few strokes towards the waterfall that was tumbling over her now. You could hardly hear her voice under the cascading water.
“Come on, Toby!”
But Toby stayed on the beach.
Sometimes, Elisha dived beneath the blue-tinted mirror to touch the bottom. She would resurface, gasping for air but radiant, her eyelashes glistening with water droplets.
But on this particular morning, Toby barely glanced at her. His face was closed, lost in thought.
It was the fourth year of his family’s long exile in the Low Branches and life there had taken on a regular rhythm.
During the worst of the cold winters, everybody hibernated at home. Toby forgot that light even existed and locked himself away to work with his father. His body became a dormant branch, while his brain sprouted ideas.
He was a greedy learner, and he gobbled up Sim Lolness’s bulky files in record time. Sometimes, Toby even had to work on the same subject over and over again, so as not to get through his knowledge rations too quickly. Professor Lolness knew that knowledge is always outgrowing itself. Sometimes, he likened knowledge to the Tree itself.
Toby’s father subscribed to the crazy idea that the Tree was growing. It was an extremely controversial notion, and the professor’s favourite subject. All the scientists argued about it. Does the Tree change? Is it eternal? Where did it come from? Will the world end? And, most important, above all: is there life beyond the Tree? These questions prompted a great debate, in which Sim Lolness always failed to agree with the fashionable viewpoint.
His book on origins hadn’t been well received. In it, he told the story of the Tree as if it were a living being. He said that leaves were not independent plants, but the outermost tips of a mighty life force.
Readers were shocked that a book claiming to be about origins was, in fact, about the future. If the Tree was alive, in the same way that a moss forest is alive, then it was terribly vulnerable. They should look after this living organism, which embraced them with open arms.
As soon as spring showed its face, Toby poked his nose outside.
He stopped thinking and started sniffing things out instead.
He abandoned his heavy files, and tried to follow Elisha, who was caught up in a whirlwind of projects and adventures. Together, they explored the Low Branches, until they reached the Main Trunk, and camped in the Shady Regions. They ventured as far as the Border, which completely fascinated Elisha. They made their way through marshes and discovered light-filled caves formed from deserted wasps’ nests.
“Come and swim!” Elisha called out.
This time, it sounded more like an order, but Toby still didn’t move from the beach. He felt sad, but he didn’t really understand why. He stared at a twig that had half fallen into the water. For the first time, Toby thought about his old life. The Low Branches had taught him everything, but suddenly, four months before his eleventh birthday, nostalgia for his childhood suddenly got the better of him.
He wondered about Leo. He’d had no news of him all this time.
What happens to a friendship that is catapulted to the opposite ends of the world? Toby hadn’t thought about it like that before. As far as he was concerned, Leo Blue was part of Toby. Tobyleo. Nothing could separate them. One autumn evening in the Heights, they had made a vow, forehead to forehead. Toby knew that his father and Leo’s father had made the same vow of friendship, forty years earlier. They had never broken it, not even when El Blue died.
Blue and Lolness: a friendship handed down from father to son, forever.
Four years had slipped by without Leo and Toby exchanging a single word. But Toby hadn’t forgotten a thing. Sometimes, he would wake up with a jolt in the middle of the night he’d been dreaming about his best friend.
In his dream, he no longer recognised Leo. His friend had turned into a stooped old man, with Leo’s shorts and Leo’s woolly hat, and Leo’s broken tooth that always made his smile look more like a wink. Toby didn’t like this nightmare.
Now, sitting on the shores of the lake, his mind was dipping back into his previous life. He would have given anything to have been able to visit his house in the Heights again, The Tufts. It had a small but perfectly tended garden, with two well-raked paths. At the bot tom of the garden hung a small hollow branch that was strictly out of bounds:
a hollow branch hanging above the void. It was too narrow for an adult, but Toby could easily slide inside it. His father had grabbed hold of his foot one day, terrified when he had tried to explore it. Toby had scraped his face, leaving a horizontal scar on his cheek. It looked like a continuation of his lips.
Toby used to get very bored in the house and garden at The Tufts, but, four years on, he dreamed fondly of that time because it had been snatched away from him. Even his Grandmother Alnorell, whom he hardly knew and liked even less, had become part of the big picnic hamper of happy memories, along with teatime in the Summit, children’s games, and making dens.
Elisha got out of the water and Toby looked away. When would she understand he didn’t want to see her like that? Not that she minded, in fact she always waited as long as possible before putting her clothes back on. She was amazed when he tried to explain the reason for his embarrassment.
“It’s just not the done thing,” was all he could come up with.
She didn’t understand a word of this odd expression. That kind of thinking made no sense to Elisha. So she amused herself instead, making Toby keep his eyes closed for hours on end, long after she was already snugly wrapped up in her cape.
But on this particular afternoon, she realised Toby wasn’t in the mood to play her game. Fully clothed, her wet hair tumbling down her back, she sat next to him.
“Is something the matter?”
“No…”
“Are you in a sulk?”
“No…”
“Are you sad?”
Toby didn’t answer. He was thinking YES very loudly, but he didn’t say it.