Desolation Road

53

There was a wall. Built of old grey stone, mortarless, high as a man’s waist, it did not look very important. But it was important. As with all walls, it was what was on either side of it that gave the wall meaning; whether it was a wall that shut out or a wall that shut in or a wall that merely separated. On one side of the wall was a field of potatoes, morning misty, grey, and cold as an old potato. In this field stood Bethlehem Ares Steel Transport Dirigible BA 3627S Eastern Enlightenment, powered down, empty, hatches open, cold fog swirling around its landing pods and into its open hatches. On the other side of the wall stood the Forest of Chryse, the Ladywood, oldest of all the world’s young places, where St. Catherine herself planted the Tree of World’s Beginning with her steel manipulators. The trees pressed close to the wall, leaning over the perimeter, dense and dark as the stones. Their branches reached toward the open potato field, in certain places their roots had tumbled sections of the old dry stone wall, yet the boundary persisted, for the boundary between forest and field was older than the wall that commemorated it. It was an exclusive wall, built to keep the world out of the forest rather than the forest out of the world.

That was to prove to be important to the three men with backpacks threading through the outmost fringe of trees. Their first footfalls on the tree side of the wall made them men without state or station; exiles. They heard their explosive devices destroy the ’lighter, the blast oddly muffled by the trees, and they were glad, for now they could not go home again. The smoke of the burning rose from the potato field like an indictment of guilt.

In their first hours they found many signs of the passing hand of man: small heaps of grey wood-ash, animal skins half gone to rot and leather, an unsightly litter of tin cans rusting to forest brown, but as their course drew them away from the wall toward the heartwoods the touches of humanity grew fewer. Here the mist seemed to defy the sun, lingering in damp dells and hollows, and even the sun itself seemed remote and impotent beyond the ceiling of leaves. The forest clung to itself, absorbed in a great root-dreaming, and the three men walked warily between the world-old trees. Here no bird sang, no vixen yelped, no jaguar mauled, no wombat grunted: not even the voices of the men disturbed the dreaming.

The exiles camped that night under huge beech trees older than the memories of any man. The moonring glittered incredibly high and remote in the leaf-patterned sky, and the campfire seemed very small and foolhardy; drawing the dark things out of the woods to hover around the edge of the darkness. Rael Mandella Jr. sat watch and held the darkness at fire-length by reading extracts from the books his father had given him before the escape.

“Take them,” he’d said. “They’re for you, do with them what you will. Read them, bum them, wipe your ass with them, they’re for you. For all useless years. I give them back to you.”

Page after page was filled with arcane mathematical propositions written in his father’s beautiful hand. They were his transpositions of Dr. Alimantando’s workbooks, his life’s labour. They meant nothing to Rael Jr. He stowed them in his pack and sat staring into the dark until Sevriano Gallacelli relieved him.

That night the exiles dreamed an un-dream, an anti-dream of emptying in which the symbols and allegories of the dreaming mind were drained away, leaving only exhausting vacant blackness, like empty eye sockets.

The next morning the three men marched through a pavilion of light held aloft by pillars of oak. Shafts of green sunlight shone through the canopy of leaves, rippling and dappling like green river water as the branches moved in the wind, but not one rustle of the great arboreal commotion reached the forest floor. Even the exiles’ trudging footfalls were swallowed up by the thick soft leaf-mould. In the afternoon Sevriano Gallacelli discovered a crashed reconnaissance helicopter impaled on a tree. Its crew lolled from open hatches, dead so long their eyes had been picked out by silent magpies and green moss had grown on their tongues. A small hole, thin and straight as a pencil, had been melted through canopy, pilot and main engine.

“Lasers,” said Sevriano Gallacelli. Sufficient epitaph pronounced upon the old tragedy, the three men pushed on toward the heartwoods. Until then no word had been spoken that day. In the successive hours they came upon many memories of war and outrage: streamers of ripped parachute silk waving gently from the branches of a stand of elms; a combat-fatigued skeleton with a fern growing out of its grin; charred circles in the trampled leaf-mould of deepwood clearings; bodies perched in the forks of branches, peculiar weapons propped at the ready. Toward evening they came upon the grimmest memento mori: at a path’s crossing, the forked limb of a tree thrust into the earth, impaled upon its tines, human heads, eyesockets empty, lips torn away by weasels, skin peeled into shreds and tatters.

In the night the trees drew close around the campfire and again drained the exiles dry of dreams.

All the next morning they travelled through a landscape shattered by war. A great battle had been fought here. Trees were blasted into white splinters, the earth was torn and ripped into craters and foxholes. The land was heavy with fresh memories of atrocity: a burned-out one-man airbike, no sign of the one man, a framed photograph of a handsome woman with “All my love, Jeanelle” written in the bottom left corner, a cleared swathe of forest where a two-man fighter had crashed, ploughing up a furrow of muck and greenery. Rael Mandella Jr. picked up the photograph of the handsome woman and placed it in his breast pocket. He felt he needed a friend.

Yet even in the middle of destruction the Ladywood was still strong. As if trying to exorcise evil remembrances, ropes of woodbine and clematis were reaching to cover the derelict war machines, and fresh bracken had sprung up to conceal the fallen beneath a green coiled shroud. Batisto Gallacelli found an operable military radio beside a dead radio operator. The boy was no more than nine years old. The three men ate their lunch to the accompaniment of the Jimmy Wong show. The sun shone down, the late dew pinpricked the grass, and an enormous peace flowed out of the east across the deserted battlefield.

Rael Mandella Jr. left the photograph of the handsome woman with the dead radio operator. He looked as if he needed a friend the more.

Early in the afternoon they passed from the battle-stained lands into the secret hertwoods of Chryse. Here stupendous redwoods rose one hundred two hundred three hundred metres into the sky, a city of soft red towers and wide needle-strewn boulevards. The three travellers should have been joyful so close to the heartwood and the legendary Tree of World’s Beginning, so far from the war of the Powers, but a brooding sense of horror mounted minute upon minute, step upon step. Among the grandeur of the heartwoods it felt like a poison, a poison that had been drawn out of the air into the soil and the trees and communicated through the dream-draining nights into the exiles. They began to tread cautiously, eyes and ears alert, mistrustful as cats. They could not have said why. The pulse of an aircraft engine passing far to the east had them running shrieking for shelter amid the root buttresses of the redwoods. Drop by drop their humanity was being drained from them, drop by drop the forest was filling them up with its spirit, its horrifying, poisoned, blasted, inhuman spirit. They broke into a trot, a run, they did not know why they ran, or where, there was no pursuing enemy save the darkness of their hearts inside them. They ran from the fear, they ran from the horror, plunging heedless through bramble and thorn, stream and dyke, running running running to be free from the horror, but they could not escape it for they were the horror.

Plunging through an enclosing ring of stupendous redwoods, they entered a circular clearing at the centre of which stood the mightiest tree of all, the Father Tree, head and shoulders taller than its strongest children. Branches swayed and swished in the wind cloud-high above them, beams of stained-glass light reached down through needles and lit the forest floor. The three men stood beneath the Tree of World’s Beginning and looked up into the moving branches with unalloyed awe and joy. The holiness of that place had touched their buried humanity and released them from the horror. The branches moved and passed blessing over them.

A figure in white stood among the roots of the tree, face lifted to the sun, a figure turning slowly, ecstatically, illuminated in a column of light. In its holy revolving the figure glimpsed the three spell-caught men.

“Oh, hello,” said the figure in white, stepping out of the light to greet them, no longer a mystical angel but a middle-aged man in soiled samite. “What the hell kept you?”