Текст книги "Believing Is Seeing"

Автор книги: Diana Jones

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THE GIRL WHO LOVED THE SUN

There was a girl called Phega who became a tree. Stories from the ancient times when Phega lived would have it that when women turned into trees, it was always under duress, because a god was pursuing them, but Phega turned into a tree voluntarily. She did it from the moment she entered her teens. It was not easy, and it took a deal of practice, but she kept at it. She would go into the fields beyond the manor house where she lived, and there she would put down roots, spread her arms, and say, “For you I shall spread out my arms.” Then she would become a tree.

She did this because she was in love with the sun. The people who looked after her when she was a child told her that the sun loved the trees above all other living things. Phega concluded that this must be so from the way most trees shed their leaves in winter when the sun was unable to attend to them very much. As Phega could not remember a time when the sun had not been more to her than mother, father, or life itself, it followed that she had to become a tree.

At first she was not a very good tree. The trunk of her tended to bulge at hips and breast and was usually an improbable brown color. The largest number of branches she could achieve was four or five at the most. These stood out at unconvincing angles and grew large, pallid leaves in a variety of shapes. She strove with these defects valiantly, but for a long time it always seemed that when she got her trunk to look more natural, her branches were fewer and more misshapen, and when she grew halfway decent branches, either her trunk relapsed or her leaves were too large or too yellow.

“Oh, sun”—she sighed—“do help me to be more pleasing to you.” Yet it seemed unlikely that the sun was even attending to her. “But he will!” Phega said, and driven by hope and yearning, she continued to stand in the field, striving to spread out more plausible branches. Whatever shape they were, she could still revel in the sun’s impartial warmth on them and in the searching strength of her roots reaching into the earth. Whether the sun was attending or not, she knew the deep peace of a tree’s long, wordless thoughts. The rain was pure delight to her, instead of the necessary evil it was to other people, and the dew was a marvel.

The following spring, to her delight, she achieved a reasonable shape, with a narrow, lissome trunk and a cloud of spread branches, not unlike a fruiting tree. “Look at me, sun,” she said. “Is this the kind of tree you like?”

The sun glanced down at her. Phega stood at that instant between hope and despair. It seemed that he attended to the wordless words.

But the sun passed on, beaming, not unkindly, to glance at the real apple trees that stood on the slope of the hill.

I need to be different in some way, Phega said to herself.

She became a girl again and studied the apple trees. She watched them put out big pale buds and saw how the sun drew those buds open to become leaves and white flowers. Choking with the hurt of rejection, she saw the sun dwelling lovingly on those flowers, which made her think at first that flowers were what she needed. Then she saw that the sun drew those flowers on, quite ruthlessly, until they died, and that what came after were green blobs that turned into apples.

“Now I know what I need,” she said.

It took a deal of hard work, but the following spring she was able to say, “Look at me, sun. For you I shall hold out my arms budded with growing things,” and spread branches full of white blossom that she was prepared to force on into fruit.

This time, however, the sun’s gaze fell on her only in the way it fell on all living things. She was very dejected. Her yearning for the sun to love her grew worse.

“I still need to be different in some way,” she said.

That year she studied the sun’s ways and likings as she had never studied them before. In between she was a tree. Her yearning for the sun had grown so great that when she was in human form, it was as if she were less than half alive. Her parents and other human company were shadowy to her. Only when she was a tree with her arms spread to the sunlight did she feel she was truly in existence.

As that year took its course, she noticed that the place the sun first touched unfailingly in the morning was the top of the hill beyond the apple trees. And it was the place where he lingered last at sunset. Phega saw this must be the place the sun loved best. So, though it was twice as far from the manor, Phega went daily to the top of that hill and took root there. This meant that she had an hour more of the sun’s warm company to spread her boughs into, but the situation was not otherwise as good as the fields. The top of the hill was very dry. When she put down roots, the soil was thin and tasted peculiar. And there was always a wind up there. Phega found she grew bent over and rather stunted.

“But what more can I do?” she said to the sun. “For you I shall spread out my arms, budded with growing things, and root within the ground you warm, accepting what that brings.”

The sun gave no sign of having heard, although he continued to linger on the top of the hill at the beginning and end of each day. Phega would walk home in the twilight considering how she might grow roots that were adapted to the thin soil and pondering ways and means to strengthen her trunk against the wind. She walked slightly bent over and her skin was pale and withered.

Up till now Phega’s parents had indulged her and not interfered. Her mother said, “She’s very young.” Her father agreed and said, “She’ll get over this obsession with rooting herself in time.” But when they saw her looking pale and withered and walking with a stoop, they felt the time had come to intervene. They said to one another, “She’s old enough to marry now, and she’s ruining her looks.”

The next day they stopped Phega before she left the manor on her way to the hill. “You must give up this pining and rooting,” her mother said to her. “No girl ever found a husband by being out in all weathers like this.”

And her father said, “I don’t know what you’re after with this tree nonsense. I mean, we can all see you’re very good at it, but it hasn’t got much bearing on the rest of life, has it? You’re our only child, Phega. You have the future of the manor to consider. I want you married to the kind of man I can trust to look after the place when I’m gone. That’s not the kind of man who’s going to want to marry a tree.”

Phega burst into tears and fled away across the fields and up the hill.

“Oh, dear!” her father said guiltily. “Did I go too far?”

“Not at all,” said her mother. “I would have said it if you hadn’t. We must start looking for a husband for her. Find the right man, and this nonsense will slide out of her head from the moment she claps eyes on him.”

It happened that Phega’s father had to go away on business, anyway. He agreed to extend his journey and look for a suitable husband for Phega while he was away. His wife gave him a good deal of advice on the subject, ending with a very strong directive not to tell any prospective suitor that Phega had this odd habit of becoming a tree—at least not until the young man was safely proved to be interested in marriage, anyway. And as soon as her husband was away from the manor, she called two servants she could trust and told them to follow Phega and watch how she turned into a tree. “For it must be a process we can put a stop to somehow,” she said, “and if you can find out how we can stop her for good, so much the better.”

Phega, meanwhile, rooted herself breathlessly into the shallow soil at the top of the hill. “Help me,” she called out to the sun. “They’re talking of marrying me and the only one I love is you!”

The sun pushed aside an intervening cloud and considered her with astonishment. “Is this why you so continually turn into a tree?” he said.

Phega was too desperate to consider the wonder of actually, at last, talking to the sun. She said, “All I do, I do in the remote, tiny hope of pleasing you and causing you to love me as I love you.”

“I had no idea,” said the sun, and he added, not unkindly, “but I do love everything according to its nature, and your nature is human. I might admire you for so skillfully becoming a tree, but that is, when all is said and done, only an imitation of a tree. It follows that I love you better as a human.” He beamed and was clearly about to pass on.

Phega threw herself down on the ground, half woman and half tree, and wept bitterly, thrashing her branches and rolling back and forth. “But I love you,” she cried out. “You are the light of the world, and I love you. I have to be a tree because then I have no heart to ache for you, and even as a tree I ache at night because you aren’t there. Tell me what I can do to make you love me.”

The sun paused. “I do not understand your passion,” he said. “I have no wish to hurt you, but this is the truth: I cannot love you as an imitation of a tree.”

A small hope came to Phega. She raised the branches of her head. “Could you love me if I stopped pretending to be a tree?”

“Naturally,” said the sun, thinking this would appease her. “I would love you according to your nature, human woman.”

“Then I make a bargain with you,” said Phega. “I will stop pretending and you will love me.”

“If that is what you want,” said the sun, and went on his way.

Phega shook her head free of branches and her feet from the ground and sat up, brooding, with her chin on her hands. That was how her mother’s servants found her and watched her warily from among the apple trees. She sat there for hours. She had bargained with the sun as a person might bargain for her very life, out of the desperation of her love, and she needed to work out a plan to back her bargain with. It gave her slight shame that she was trying to trap such a being as the sun, but she knew that was not going to stop her. She was beyond shame.

There is no point imitating something that already exists, she said to herself, because that is pretending to be that thing. I will have to be some kind that is totally new.

Phega came down from the hill and studied trees again. Because of the hope her bargain had given her, she studied in a new way, with passion and depth, all the time her father was away. She ranged far afield to the forests in the valleys beyond the manor, where she spent days among the trees, standing still as a tree, but in human shape—which puzzled her mother’s servants exceedingly—listening to the creak of their growth and every rustle of every leaf, until she knew them as trees knew other trees and comprehended the abiding restless stillness of them. The entire shape of a tree against the sky became open to her, and she came to know all their properties. Trees had power. Willows had pithy centers and grew fast; they caused sleep. Elder was pithy, too; it could give powerful protection but had a touchy nature and should be treated politely. But the oak and the ash, the giant trees that held their branches closest to the sun’s love, had the greatest power of all. Oak was constancy, and ash was change. Phega studied these two longest and most respectfully.

“I need the properties of both these,” she said.

She carried away branches of leafing twigs to study as she walked home, noting the join of twig to twig and the way the leaves were fastened on. Evergreens impressed her by the way they kept leaves for the sun even in winter, but she was soon sure they did it out of primitive parsimony. Oaks, on the other hand, had their leaves tightly knotted on by reason of their strength.

“I shall need the same kind of strength,” Phega said.

As autumn drew on, the fruiting trees preoccupied her, since it was clear that it was growth and fruition the sun seemed most to love. They all, she saw, partook of the natures of both oaks and elders, even hawthorn, rowan, and hazel. Indeed, many of them were related to the lowlier bushes and fruiting plants, but the giant trees that the sun most loved were more exclusive in their pedigrees.

“Then I shall be like the oak,” Phega said, “but bear better fruit.”

Winter approached, and trees were felled for firewood. Phega was there, where the foresters were working, anxiously inspecting the rings of the sawn trunk and interrogating the very sawdust. This mystified the servants who were following her. They asked the foresters if they had any idea what Phega was doing.

The foresters shook their heads and said, “She is not quite sane, but we know she is very wise.”

The servants had to be content with this. At least after that they had an easier time, for Phega was mostly at home in the manor examining the texture of the logs for the fires. She studied the bark on the outside and then the longwise grains and the roundwise rings of the interior, and she came to an important conclusion: an animal stopped growing when it had attained a certain shape, but a tree did not.

“I see now,” she said, “that I have by no means finished growing.” And she was very impatient because winter had put a stop to all growth, so that she had to wait for spring to study its nature.

In the middle of winter her father came home. He had found the perfect husband for Phega and was anxious to tell Phega and her mother all about the man. This man was a younger son of a powerful family, he said, and he had been a soldier for some years, during which time he had distinguished himself considerably and gained a name for sense and steadiness. Now he was looking for a wife to marry and settle down with. Though he was not rich, he was not poor either, and he was on good terms with the wealthier members of his family. It was, said Phega’s father, a most desirable match.

Phega barely listened to all this. She went away to look at the latest load of logs before her father had finished speaking. He may not ever come here, she said to herself, and if he does, he will see I am not interested and go away again.

“Did I say something wrong?” her father asked her mother. “I had hoped to show her that the man has advantages that far outweigh the fact that he is not in his first youth.”

“No—it’s just the way she is,” said Phega’s mother. “Have you invited the man here?”

“Yes, he is coming in the spring,” her father said. “His name is Evor. Phega will like him.”

Phega’s mother was not entirely sure of this. She called the servants she had set to follow Phega to her privately and asked them what they had found out. “Nothing,” they said. “We think she has given up turning into a tree. She has never so much as put forth a root while we are watching her.”

“I hope you are right,” said Phega’s mother. “But I want you to go on watching her, even more carefully than before. It is now extremely important that we know how to stop her becoming a tree if she ever threatens to do so.”

The servants sighed, knowing they were in for another dull and difficult time. And they were not mistaken because, as soon as the first snowdrops appeared, Phega was out in the countryside studying the way things grew. As far as the servants were concerned, she would do nothing but sit or stand for hours watching a bud, or a tree, or a nest of mice or birds. As far as Phega was concerned, it was a long fascination as she divined how cells multiplied again and again and at length discovered that while animals took food from solid things, plants took their main food from the sun himself. “I think that may be the secret at last,” she said.

This puzzled the servants, but they reported it to Phega’s mother all the same. Her answer was, “I thought so. Be ready to bring her home the instant she shows a root or a shoot.”

The servants promised to do this, but Phega was not ready yet. She was busy watching the whole course of spring growth transform the forest. So it happened that Evor arrived to meet his prospective bride and Phega was not there. She had not even noticed that everyone in the manor was preparing a feast in Evor’s honor. Her parents sent messengers to the forest to fetch her, while Evor first kicked his heels for several hours in the hall and finally, to their embarrassment, grew impatient and went out into the yard. There he wondered whether to order his horse and leave.

I conclude from this delay, he said to himself, that the girl is not willing, and one thing I do not want is a wife I have to force. Nevertheless, he did not order his horse. Though Phega’s parents had been at pains to keep from him any suggestion that Phega was not as other girls were, he had been unable to avoid hearing rumors on the way. For by this time Phega’s fame was considerable. The first gossip he heard, when he was farthest away, was that his prospective bride was a witch. This he had taken for envious persons’ way of describing wisdom and pressed on. As he came nearer, rumor had it that she was very wise, and he felt justified—though the latest rumor he had heard, when he was no more than ten miles from the manor, was that Phega was at least a trifle mad. But each rumor came accompanied by statements about Phega’s appearance which were enough to make him tell himself that it was too late to turn back, anyway. This kept him loitering in the yard. He wanted to set eyes on her himself.

He was still waiting when Phega arrived, walking in through the gate quickly but rather pensively. It was a gray day, with the sun hidden, and she was sad. But, she told herself, I may as well see this suitor and tell him there was no point in his coming and get it over with. She knew her parents were responsible and did not blame the man at all.

Evor looked at her as she came and knew that rumor had understated her looks. The time Phega had spent studying had improved her health and brought her from girl to young woman. She was beautiful. Evor saw that her hair was the color of beer when you hold a glass of it to the light. She was wearing a dress of smooth silver-gray material which showed that her body under it when she moved was smooth-muscled and sturdy—and he liked sturdy women. Her overgarment was a curious light, bright green and floated away from her arms, revealing them to be very round and white. When he looked at her face, which was both round and long, he saw beauty there, but he also saw that she was very wise. Her eyes were gray. He saw a wildness there contained by the deep calm of long, long thought and a capacity to drink in knowledge. He was awed. He was lost.

Phega, for her part, tore her thoughts from many hours of standing longing among the great trees and saw a wiry man of slightly over middle height, who had a bold face with a keen stare to it. She saw he was not young. There was gray to his beard—which always grew more sparsely than he would have liked, though he had combed it carefully for the occasion—and some gray in his hair, too. She noticed his hair particularly because he had come to the manor in light armor, to show his status as a soldier and a commander, but he was carrying his helmet politely in the crook of his arm. His intention was to show himself as a polished man of the world. But Phega saw him as iron-colored all over. He made her think of an ax, except that he seemed to have such a lot of hair. She feared he was brutal.

Evor said, “My lady!” and added as a very awkward after-thought, “I came to marry you.” As soon as he had said this, it struck him as so wrong and presumptuous a thing to say to a woman like this one that he hung his head and stared at her feet, which were bare and, though beautiful, stained green with the grass she had walked through. The sight gave him courage. He thought that those feet were human after all, so it followed that the rest of her was, and he looked up at her eyes again. “What a thing to say!” he said.

He smiled in a flustered way. Phega saw that he was somewhat snaggle-toothed, not to speak of highly diffident in spite of his gray and military appearance, and possibly in awe of her. She could not see how he could be in awe of her, but his uneven teeth made him a person to her. Of a sudden he was not just the man her parents had procured for her to marry, but another person like her, with feelings like those Phega had herself. Good gods! she thought, in considerable surprise. This is a person I could maybe love after all, if it were not for the sun. And she told him politely that he was very welcome.

They went indoors together and presently sat down to the feast. There Evor got over his awe a little, enough to attempt to talk to Phega. And Phega, knowing he had feelings to be hurt, answered the questions he asked and asked things in return. The result was that before long, to the extreme delight of Phega’s parents, they were talking of his time at war and of her knowledge and laughing together as if they were friends—old friends. Evor’s wonder and joy grew. Long before the feast was over, he knew he could never love any other woman now. The effect of Phega on him was like a physical tie, half glorious, half painful, that bound him to respond to every tiny movement of her hand and every flicker of her lashes.

Phega found—and her surprise increased—that she was comfortable with Evor. But however amicably they talked, it was still as if she was only half alive in the sun’s absence—though it was an easy half life—and, as the evening wore on, she felt increasingly confined and trapped. At first she assumed that this feeling was simply due to her having spent so much of the past year out of doors. She was so used to having nothing but the sky with the sun in it over her head that she often did find the manor roof confining. But now it was like a cage over her head. And she realized that her growing liking for Evor was causing it.

If I don’t take care, she said to herself, I shall forget the bargain I made with the sun and drift into this human contract. It is almost too late already. I must act at once.

Thinking this, she said her good-nights and went away to sleep.

Evor remained, talking jubilantly with Phega’s parents. “When I first saw her,” he said, “I thought things were hopeless. But now I think I have a chance. I think she likes me.”

Phega’s father agreed, but Phega’s mother said, “I’m sure she likes you all right, but—I caught a look in her eye—this may not be enough to make her marry you.”

Saying this, Phega’s mother touched on something Evor had sensed and feared himself. His jubilation turned ashy; indeed, he felt as if the whole world had been taken by drought; there was no moisture or virtue in it anywhere from pole to pole. “What more can I do?” he said, low and slow.

“Let me tell you something,” said Phega’s mother.

“Yes,” Phega’s father broke in eagerly. “Our daughter has a strange habit of—”

“She is,” Phega’s mother interrupted swiftly, “under an enchantment which we are helpless to break. Only a man who truly loves her can break it.”

Hope rose in Evor, as violent as Phega’s hope when she bargained with the sun. “Tell me what to do,” he said.

Phega’s mother considered all the reports her servants had brought her. So far as she knew, Phega had never once turned into a tree all the time her father was away. It was possible she had lost the art. This meant that with luck, Evor need never know the exact nature of her daughter’s eccentricity. “Sometime soon,” she said, “probably at dawn, my daughter will be compelled by the enchantment to leave the manor. She will go to the forest or the hill. She may be compelled to murmur words to herself. You must follow her when she goes, and as soon as you see her standing still, you must take her in your arms and kiss her. In this way you will break the spell, and she will become your faithful wife ever after.” And, Phega’s mother told herself, this was very likely what would happen. For, she thought, as soon as he kisses her, my daughter will discover that there are certain pleasures to be had from behaving naturally. Then we can all be comfortable again.

“I shall do exactly what you say,” said Evor, and he was so uplifted with hope and gratitude that his face was nearly handsome.

All that night he kept watch. He could not have slept, anyway. Love roared in his ears, and longing choked him. He went over and over the things Phega had said and each individual beauty of her face and body as she said these things, and when, in the dawn, he saw her stealing through the hall to the door, there was a moment when he could not move. She was even more lovely than he remembered.

Phega softly unbarred the door and crossed the yard to unbar the gate. Evor pulled himself together and followed. They walked out across the fields in the white time before sunrise, Phega pacing very upright, with her eyes on the sky where the sun would appear, and Evor stealing after. He softly took off his armor piece by piece as he followed her and laid it down carefully in case it should clatter and alarm her.

Up the hill Phega went, where she stood like one entranced, watching the gold rim of the sun come up. And such was Evor’s awe that he loitered a little in the apple trees, admiring her as she stood.

“Now,” Phega said, “I have come to fulfill my bargain, sun, since I fear this is the last time I shall truly want to.” What she did then, she had given much thought to. It was not the way she had been accustomed to turn into a tree before. It was far more thorough. For she put down careful roots, driving each of her toes downward and outward and then forcing them into a network of fleshy cables to make the most of the thin soil at the top of the hill. “Here,” she said, “I root within the soil you warm.”

Evor saw the ground rise and writhe and low branches grow from her insteps to bury themselves also. “Oh, no!” he cried out. “Your feet were beautiful as they were!” And he began to climb the hill toward her.

Phega frowned, concentrating on the intricacy of feathery rootlets. “But they were not the way I wanted them,” she said, and she wondered vaguely why he was there. But by then she was putting forth her greatest effort, which left her little attention to spare. Slowly, once her roots were established, she began to coat them with bark before insects could damage them. At the same time, she set to work on her trunk, growing swiftly, grain by growing grain. “Increased by yearly rings,” she murmured.

As Evor advanced, he saw her body elongate, coating itself with mat pewter-colored bark as it grew, until he could barely pick out the outline of limbs and muscles inside it. It was like watching a death. “Don’t!” he said. “Why are you doing this? You were lovely before!”

“I was like all human women,” Phega answered, resting before her next great effort. “But when I am finished, I shall be a wholly new kind of tree.” Having said that, she turned her attention to the next stage, which she was expecting to enjoy. Now she stretched up her arms, and the hair of her head, yearning into the warmth of the climbing sun, and made it all into limblike boughs, which she coated like the rest of her, carefully, with dark silver bark. “For you I shall hold out my arms,” she said.

Evor saw her, tree-shaped and twice as tall as himself, and cried out, “Stop!” He was afraid to touch her in this condition. He knelt at her roots in despair.

“I can’t stop now,” Phega told him gently. She was gathering herself for her final effort, and her mind was on that, though the tears she heard breaking his voice did trouble her a little. She put that trouble out of her head. This was the difficult part. She had already elongated every large artery of her body, to pass through her roots and up her trunk and into her boughs. Now she concentrated on lifting her veins, and every nerve with them, without disturbing the rest, out to the ends of her branches, out and up, up and out, into a mass of living twigs, fine-growing and close as her own hair. It was impossible. It hurt—she had not thought it would hurt so much—but she was lifting, tearing her veins, thrusting her nerve ends with them, first into the innumerable fine twigs, then into even further particles to make long, sharp buds.

Evor looked up as he crouched and saw the great tree surging and thrashing above him. He was appalled at the effort. In the face of this gigantic undertaking he knew he was lost and forgotten, and besides, it was presumptuous to interfere with such willing agony. He saw her strive and strive again to force those sharp buds open. “If you must be a tree,” he shouted above the din of her lashing branches, “take me with you somehow, at least!”

“Why should you want that?” Phega asked with wooden lips that had not yet quite closed, just where her main boughs parted.

Evor at last dared to clasp the trunk with its vestigial limbs showing. He shed tears on the gray bark. “Because I love you. I want to be with you.”

Trying to see him forced her buds to unfurl, because that was where her senses now were. They spread with myriad shrill agonies, like teeth cutting, and she thought it had killed her, even while she was forcing further nerves and veins to the undersides of all her pale viridian leaves. When it was done, she was all alive and raw in the small hairs on the undersides of those leaves and in the symmetrical ribs of vein on the shiny upper sides, but she could sense Evor crouching at her roots now. She was grateful to him for forcing her to the necessary pain. Her agony responded to his. He was a friend. He had talked of love, and she understood that. She retained just enough of the strength it had taken to change to alter him, too, to some extent, though not enough to bring him beyond the animal kingdom. The last of her strength was reserved for putting forth small pear-shaped fruit covered with wiry hairs, each containing four triangular nuts. Then, before the wooden gap that was her mouth had entirely closed, she murmured, “Budding with growing things.”

She rested for a while, letting the sun harden her leaves to a dark shiny green and ripen her fruit a little. Then she cried wordlessly to the sun, “Look! Remember our bargain. I am an entirely new kind of tree—as strong as an oak, but I bear fruit that everything can eat. Love me. Love me now!” Proudly she shed some of her three-cornered nuts onto the hilltop,