The Tree

The Tree 2647 words

The wind raged through the winter-blackened branches of the great forest with the ferocity of the sea-wolves, from whose land it came. The oaks creaked and swayed with the blast, acknowledging the force, but holding fast against the attack - just as the humans, who lived on the forest fringes, held fast, trying to repel the warriors from over the water - warriors who came in dragon-ships to destroy, pillage, steal - and then retreat across the eastern sea.

The humans loved the forest, it sustained them throughout the year with its bountiful provision: they revered its maternal presence; its wood for building homes and warming the hearth; its thickets and glades in which to hunt and forage; its summer shade and wild honey to collect from the split heart of the biggest tree; the medicinal plants and dyes for wool; and finally, as a place of autumn rooting - acorns and beech-mast for fattening the hogs before the Winter slaughter. Even during the long nights of the solstice on the the dark side of the year, they knew that life's wheel would turn to begin the cycle anew.

The storm increased its force under slaten clouds, slashing the upper branches and sending ice-bound rain to soak the crevassed bark of the patriarch, the special one, the proudest, most ancient of the stand. The humans had garlanded it at the equinox, revered its presence, drew comfort from its enduring strength, but now, like a cold breath through the teeth of the edge of the world, the tempest stripped off the mistletoe and holly tributes - as if cursing feeble human endeavour. Lightning cut the darkness as the storm ripped off twigs and whole limbs, spitting ice and debris along the forest floor. Small animals within the colossus, whimpered, trembled and huddled together.

For centuries the sacred oak had provided, sheltered, shaded, nurtured, fruited, but finally, aged and weakened, it shuddered and split with a sickening crack before the power of the storm. The heartwood, fresh and vital even now, splintered as the mighty trunk fell onto a carpet of its own progeny, biting into the fecund, acorn-rich litter of the earth and causing the whole forest to shake.

Calmness settled over the trees; chill water dripped, but the greatest one of all lay shattered. The

spared ones sighed, bereft, as their branches swayed into stillness. A red squirrel scampered off, seeking refuge and a startled fox slunk away to find a new territory to claim. Task accomplished, the wind abated, leaving those that remained to mourn. Winter sunlight, wan, but penetrating, touched the forest floor for the first time in centuries, allowing a new story to begin.

*

As the days lengthen into Spring a jostling crowd of pink-tipped shoots pierce the earth, tiny frilled leaves seek the sun; slender roots reach for moisture, grappling for a foothold in this new arena of opportunity, this new fight for existence. But, even in death, the fallen tree, and its heap of amputated limbs, continues to shelter the red deer and their young; the fawns nibbling all but the hardiest of the seedlings which are now competing for prominence in the clearing. Through the heat of the Summer, worms, ants, beetles and a myriad forms of life colonise the tree's entrails, thriving, multiplying, seething, but slowly, inevitably, hastening its decomposition. When the year's cycle again reaches the time of harvest, the humans create a new sacred grove, and spill the sacrificial bull's blood beneath a different tree, hoping to assert the old regime. But times are changing: the forest people are moving westward and the sea-wolves come upriver, abandon their dragon-boats and stay, to cut and carve the oaks to decorate their long-houses, and to coppice the under-growing hazels and willows for wattle and fencing. The strongest of the oak's saplings, the one growing closest to the fallen trunk, where it is protected from the searching lips of the fawns and the squashing weight of the adult deer, continues upwards straight and vital.

Life in the greenwood goes on: birds find nesting places; men hunt; pigs root; women collect herbs and berries whilst their children gather moss and bracken for the home. Monks from the new priory, their dark homespun robes tied up with twine to avoid the briers, pick galls to stew for ink. Charcoal burners arrive clearing the undergrowth around their encampments, coppicing alder and

maple and collecting young oak branches to set up their smouldering heaps. Lumbering ox-carts gouge tracks along the forest floor, and, at the edge of the trees beside the new houses, bird-song is silenced by rhythmic raspings from a saw pit.

To the newcomers, who pass along the widening track, the mouldering remains of the sacred oak are barely discernible from the rest of the undergrowth, but are a Garden of Eden for tiny creatures: voles; rabbits; hedgehogs and mice. The funereal humped mounds of moss, almost hidden amongst towering bracken and advancing brambles, cloak a fodder of decayed wood, a russet compost nurturing all manner of growing things - and one silver barked little oak tree showing its first immature acorns to the Autumn sun.

The humans no longer throng the sacred grove at harvest time: different rituals are enacted amongst the cornstooks. But one year, the land is uneasy – new invaders threaten, this time from the South. The villagers come into the forest with a sense of panic, of fear, to hack at the stands of ash, choosing only the longest and straightest of the branches, searching out lengths of fallen oak with swollen, gnarled ends to carry off into battle. Then there is silence. A waiting time. A bated breath, as the forest regains its solitude and, even in the village, there is no sound. Badgers, deer, squirrels and small mammals continue their innocent existence and the little oak reaches ever upwards.

At the dark time of year, when the nights are long and the sun so pale and low, that the light barely reaches the forest floor, bands of armed horsemen clatter along the cleared track, with a fierce

urgency. Shouts come from the village, drifts of wood smoke, the acrid stench of burning thatch, of timbers - and of something else - hangs amongst the skeletal trees. The forest animals go to ground and the deer twitch nervously in the trampled bracken.

When summer raspberries hang heavily in the dappled shade, the charcoal burners return.

Lumbering ox-carts laden with earth and gravel - and later with white building stone - creak along the road towards the expanding settlement, hampering other travellers. Armed soldiers wearing acorn-

shaped helmets with long nose coverings, gallop and shout, to clear the way. Many of the tallest oaks are felled and, once again, the saw pit emits its rasping snarl. New stands of evergreen-oak, elm and beech are planted to replace the increasing number of trees being felled, the wood is needed for houses and furniture, weapons and coffins, vehicles and ships. Coopers come to choose and cut the perfect timber for their barrel staves.

The village grows, surrounds the white stone castle and extends eastwards, almost to the water meadows, where masons are lodged to work on the construction of a new abbey. Fewer and fewer people come to enact magical rituals in forest and field. Beltane fires are rare, but now a bell is rung, at the beginning and end of the working day, in the tower of the squat little church, where the people go to receive solace and fear, in equal measure. The peaceful rhythm of the year is no more - unrest is rife and there is clamour in the market place - no invasion this time - but a call to travel, to fight in a distant, heathen land. By the abbey gates, cloth tokens are handed out to be sewn to clothing. Serfs are pressed and freemen are mustered, their hymns echoing around the vault of the forest, as they depart in a fervent throng.

Our little tree, heir to the fallen veteran, flourishes, now providing a home to a colony of bees, who prosper in a fungus-eaten cavity where a young branch was pulled off by a foraging stag, years earlier. Strong and sturdy, it is still too small to be worth the labour of felling for timber, too insignificant to be noticed by the increasing number of soldiers and hunters, carters of grain and wool, or carriages and processions passing between the trees. But, even with its lower branches trimmed by nibbling deer, its foliage-roofed cave is well able to shelter outlaws or fugitives who seek sanctuary in the greenwood, easing their starvation with the bounty of the bees, whilst starlings and jays shriek in the upper canopy.

Years later, the tattered remnants of the hymn-singing company straggle home to pick up the pieces of the life they left, to find solace in home and hearth - but not for long. Soon, when the crop of

acorns hangs heavily on our little tree and the town is eerily silent, the monks and the women steal through the forest to collect willow bark, wild garlic and black nightshade. A family comes to take shelter under the oak, willing to risk the threat from prowling wolves, content to sleep in the open, to breathe the clean air away from the pestilence. A large pit is dug outside the town walls, and carts creak out by night to unload unknown lumpen cargo. Later, the pit is closed, filled in, but the forest remains unvisited. No garlands hang in the sacred grove: these are turbulent times. One summer, troops of men with longbows of yew, unstrung against the rain, march off at the start of more than a century of war and conflict. The rhythm of life is disrupted, fancy cavalcades no longer venture through, but a ragged crowd of shouting peasants, clutching farm tools for weapons, marches to the town to ransack and destroy the castle and the grand buildings. Summer breeze lifts charred fragments to drift on the air and settle on the pristine foliage and on the abandoned hovels at the forest edge.

The people return, but not so many, some to scavenge, some to hide, and some, once again, to cut trees for building. The forest track is busier and the sound of galloping hooves is commonplace. There are smaller deer now, fallow and roe - hunting parties come and set up pavilions, and then the greenwood rings to the sound of horns and clamour. Eventually an area is cleared some way to the west of the place where the great giant fell five hundred years earlier. A hunting lodge is built, using oak spars in decorative angular patterns in the walls. Some days, cavalcades of opulently dressed riders make the ground vibrate under the hooves of their brightly caparisoned horses. Very few ordinary people come here these days, and then only under cover of darkness, for the penalties for trying to feed a starving family are brutal. The new enclosures make life more and more difficult for those who seek the traditional maternal bounty of the forest, but Nature is resilient: the deer multiply and, when all is calm, will gather beneath the spreading branches of the adolescent oak which is slowly becoming the new colossus. One year there are no horns or galloping hooves. Ordered work-gangs with carts, axes and saws, set about felling the oaks – but not for houses. Over the next century, thousands of trees are cut and hauled across country to the shipyards. New trees are planted and harvested in turn to fulfill the burgeoning need for ships. The heart of oak of one flagship alone consumes six thousand trees on forty acres of ground, but, for some reason, our new giant is spared - perhaps its serpentine branches are the

wrong shape​? - and it is left to tower incongruously above the new plantations. The saplings thrive but the tallest tree takes the brunt of the winds from the East and its heavy crown groans in the winter storms. In Spring each year, tiny red flower buds, yellow catkins, and startlingly bright, lime-green, leaves adorn the dark twigs, but when the wind is in the West, the air is not so pure. The settlements beside the little streams on the slopes of the western hills, are creeping, merging, expanding: water-powered workshops and coal-burning, satanic, furnaces, belch soot, which blows eastwards, darkening and choking the tender foliage. The spreading city, which was once a town, which was once a village and once a hamlet, now blankets much of what is left of the forest.

Suddenly, one year, sirens wail, and concrete shelters are built and painted green to ape the canopy of leaves. The deer are gone from the woods. Searchlights take their place and rake the dark sky when droning engines are heard overhead and the city is alight with leaping flames. But, in a twinkling of an eye, the buildings and lights disappear. Peace returns and the great tree is revered once more. A fence is erected around it and the ancient limbs are supported by chains, for fear of collapse. In summer, tourists and picnickers arrive. They park their cars on a gritty patch where the voles, rabbits, badgers and foxes used to live amongst the greenery. The visitors read the notice, which bears a nosegay of the tree's own distinctive leaves, and seem content to admire what is left of the majestic wild wood as they try to stop their children ignoring the fence and climbing too far up into the gnarled branches, where the bees still hover. The track which once saw the passage of bare feet, of hooves, of wooden wheels and marching boots is no more; in its stead are four lanes of black tarmac edged by shining metal barriers and unhappy grey bushes. The constant roar of vehicles passing along it ensures that silence has disappeared from the greenwood - perhaps for ever?

The forest has shrunk. The winter storms arrive with increased vigour, unpredictable violence and inflict greater punishment. The winds howl with primeval energy to attack the pollution-blackened limbs of the major oak causing it to bend before the blast. The storm renews its force under slaten clouds, slashing the upper branches and sending ice-bound rain of unprecedented, biblical, intensity to soak the crevassed bark. Like a revengeful breath through the gritted teeth of the injured world, the tempest rages – as if to curse invasive human endeavour, interference and self interest. Lightning cuts the darkness as the wind rips off, first twigs, then whole limbs, spitting ice and debris along the old forest floor.

For almost a millennium the oak has provided, sheltered, nurtured, fruited, but finally, isolated, aged and weakened, it gives a last shudder and splits with a sickening crack before the power of the storm. The heartwood, fresh and vital even now, splinters as the great timbers fall onto the carpet of its own shattered self, biting into the fecund, acorn-rich litter of the earth and causing the land, again, to tremble.

*

In the days that follow, humans, holding clip-boards, and wearing plastic helmets, yellow jackets and rubber boots, pick their way around the sad debris, the broken remains of the old tree. They climb over the corpse, heedlessly, unseeingly, trampling on the delicate, hexagonally-patterned, fragments of the bees' nest. They take photos. Shout into phones. One of them kicks a fallen limb of the ancient one and turns to his colleague:

“No problem now then with Conservation Issues - or planning gripes. I'm sure we'll get the go-ahead ASAP.” He grins. “Then we can clear the lot.”

The other man looks around at the destruction, slips his phone into his pocket.

“ Yeah. Best result we could hope for really.”