The Seed Tree
2

The invaders took many of our people as slaves, then killed them when they would not serve. In most western provinces our people had been so decimated by starvation and disease that few survived. Of the provinces to the south, Norann had heard nothing. At this I despaired; my brother and his family live in the southernmost district.

As she spoke, my mind burned with images of blood and conflagration, of the invaders whose eyes glittered white-cold like stars and knew no mercy. The refugees who brought ghosts with them. I buried the burned and ruined bodies, but the ghosts stayed and walked uninvited through my dreams. The enemy had not come here but they had found me nonetheless.

My stomach twisted into knots and my hands clasped each other fiercely. I could only think of annihilation. But, Norann's next words were like a cool hand against the fever of my dread. I tried to listen as she told me the invaders were like fleishah blown here by the wind. And suddenly I saw an image of myself as a boy holding in my hand bits of that wispy insignificance--so light I could not feel it, so insubstantial it could be puffed away by the slightest breeze, or a child's breath. Like the fleishah, she told me, the season of the invaders would be short.

I don't know whether I truly believed her, but her words were a refuge from the pain and horror threatening to overwhelm me. They offered hope of continuation when I could see none.

She spoke of the animals here, some of which are found nowhere else in the world. Of bird species which migrate here to have their young. Only here. And she told me other things that I have never written down anywhere. Things about the trees . . .

The wind is rising now as it always does at night in this season. There is barely enough light to write by. I hear sounds coming from the far end of the grove. I must go and see what has happened.

Sixth Day of Shamath in the Season of Winds:

Last night the wind broke one of the Sleepers. I had to use a light tube (I have only three left) to dig the proper root and harvest the tree's own sap to make the balm. I wept at the jagged top lying on the ground; I would never have thought to weep for a tree before Norann came.

It was, of course, because I had to touch it.

It is said there is a part of the mind that never sleeps. I am sure now that Norann spoke to that part of me so I would not forget.

She said the trees here do not know what they truly are, except for a very few that have somehow been brought awake. I learned the truth of this last season while I walked the grove, looking for storm damage. Suddenly, I began to hear the breeze far above me as whisperings, and I felt that I was in a living corridor. I stopped and leaned against the gray, rivuleted bark of a familiar tree and looked up.

Immediately, it was as though I looked through other eyes, and on another level not quite physical I saw the bare, leafless limbs overhead as a manifestation of this place and time only. But that in another reality, they are the veins and arteries of the sky, branching out, their energy extending impossibly far beyond my power to see. Disappearing but not ending. And I knew there to be similar veins and arteries in the earth, perhaps extending to the very heart of the world.