"The Grove" Part 3

I might have changed some of the text in earlier passages, but don't worry about that. Here's the next installment from where we left off.

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In the village that was closest to the Grove lived a woman by the name of Runa. She  was in her middle years at the time she enters this story. A woman with black hair in a long plait and eyes the blue-grey of winter skies. She had no child or husband, no family and, aside from the old raven who visited once or twice a month, few friends. She lived on the outskirts of the village, at the threshold between the human world and the world that still, sometimes, escaped the people’s control.

Runa was not, as far as she knew, related to the Heeders. Indeed, she did not know of the Heeders: no one did. They had long gone. Nor was she closely related to anyone. Her parents had withdrawn from the life of the world before she knew enough to build memories of them.  Runa had been cared for by an old woman well versed in the uses and possibilities of the plants that grew in the valleys and dales, on the hillside and in the woodlands. She was as close as Runa had ever come to family, this woman Radamata. But Radamata herself had died more than two decades before Runa’s connection with this story begins.

That connection began with a dream. On the night of the full Third Moon, Runa dreamt of a hare. The hare was knocking at the window of her cottage. In the dream, she rose from her chair and walked to the window and the hare knocked frantically against the glass. Runa went to the door in the dream but, when she opened it, the hare had disappeared and then she woke up. At the fullness of the Fourth Moon, Runa had the same dream but this time, when she got to the door and opened it, she saw the hare just down the path, leaving her vegetable garden. Runa followed. She got to the end of the vegetable garden and looked around but the hare had disappeared and she woke up. When the Fifth Moon was full, again she dreamed of the hare and this time she got beyond the vegetable garden, down the track away from the village, and along the path that led west. And then the hair ran into a thicket and she lost the creature once more. When the Sixth Moon was full, she followed the hare into the thicket. The animal was running, but slowly, often stopping, turning back to look at her and then loping again uphill, ever uphill. Again, though, she lost the hare – who had leapt over a small rill and away into the gorse.  On the night of the Seventh Moon, she crossed the stream, pushed through the gorse, and saw that the hare was bounding through boulders, granite stones such as she had seen when Radamata took her to a Shrine of the Old Ones. But these rocks slept still in the soil: they had not been woken and made to stand by humans. Distracted, in her dream, she forgot the hare and her purpose. She woke. The Eighth Moon was full when she dreamt her way beyond the boulders. She saw the hare enter into a space between a young oak and a silver birch. Runa followed, but at the gap between the trees, she stopped. It was dark and she was afraid. She saw the glint of the hare’s amber eyes in the darkness but she did not go on. She knew, in the dream, that the time was not yet right. The time was right a month later.  At the fullness of the Ninth Moon, in her dream, Runa passed between the shimmering birch and the sturdy young oak. Following the rangy hare, she  wound through trees, small oak saplings, shining hazel, rough-barked elder, and one rowan bearing berries. Just a short walk, it was, through the trees, and there was open ground. A space smaller than her vegetable garden, smaller even than her cottage, but an open space into which moonlight poured like milk. The hare sat on the fallen limb of a great oak, licking her paws, until she saw that Runa was there, in the glade. One bound and she was on a part of the oak’s trunk that was balanced over blackness. The hare sat on her brindled haunches, head tipped, as though looking at her reflection in some water deep below. Her ears were up and turned to the darkness beneath her. She was listening. And Runa stood transfixed… until she woke.

The next morning, after Runa had slept again, she had no memory of the dream. Instead, she had the desire to find oak mazegill. The day before a man from the village had made his way to her home. He told her that his son had discovered that bees had made their nest in his barn. The son, who thought, in knowing how to build barns and milk cows and kill chickens, that he knew all there was to know, had approached the bees with a spade and struck the nest, planning to knock it from its position. The bees, alarmed, had come out and stung him. Angry and in pain, the son raced into the farmhouse to get a lit torch. When his father learnt what had happened, he told the son they should ask Runa who had knowledge of bees they lacked. But the son did not believe he lacked knowledge, he just lacked the right weapon. He returned to the barn with a flaming torch, but as soon as he approached the nest the bees attacked him in greater numbers, so many that he fled and was, the father said, being cared for by his mother. Runa had shaken her head and moved to gather the plants that could ease his pain.

“That would be welcome, I thank you,” said the man. “But more than medicine, I know we lack knowledge.”

This was always Runa’s role: to work with the absences. For she sensed, with a grief she could not quite contain, the pain of all that which was lost. And, for those whose absence was harmful to many, she tried, if she could, to welcome them back or ease the damage of the withdrawal.

In any case, Runa had gone down to the barn and heard the terrified anger of the bees. She knew that normal smoke would not be enough. She needed the smoke of the oak mazegill.  Burning oak mazegill, Radamata had told, would produce a smoke that could send bees to sleep. The only problem was that she could not recall the last time she had seen oak mazegill. Perhaps it was as long ago as when Radamata told her about its properties. Good for inflammation, too, the older woman had said. Indeed, she used to collect it to ease the pain in her joints on damp winter days. Runa shook away the memories. Oak mazegill.

She set out and found herself walking through her garden along the track that headed west. Her feet, without her asking, took her through a thicket and up the hill. She jumped over a small stream and passed between gorse bushes, only know letting drop their yellow flowers. Beyond the gorse, boulders and something moved in her mind. Her eyes too caught movement - the flickering ears of a hare. And it all came back. Runa looked into the animal’s huge eyes and saw reflected in them her six dreams. The hare’s eyes shone with something that seemed at once ancient and strangely amused. The creature blinked once, turned and loped up the hill, slipping secretly between the stem of a silver birch and the slim trunk of a young oak. Runa followed.

The earth under the trees was rich and loamy. Runa’s footsteps whispered with the subdued crackle of largely decomposed vegetation. She breathed in the sweet scent of natural decay. A hazel stem shimmered in the low light under leaves turning from green to gold, copper, bronze. She ran her hand down the smooth bark, smiling. The small tree, it seemed, bent toward her. A few steps further on and scarlet rowan berries glistened above her. Three more paces and she was through the trees and in a glade, small yet rich, she could tell despite the season, in flowering plants. She cast her eyes over leaves that once were so familiar and which now she seldom saw. She wished Radamata were here, and then realised that Radamata had not experienced the fullness of the loss. This glade would have been almost normal to her. And, astonishingly, in front of her on the fallen limb of a huge oak, she saw what she had been looking for. The fungal body, rounded and suggestive, crouched like a satisfied toad.

She moved forward, reaching for her knife in the pocket of her coat. And that is when she noticed the hare sitting on the downed trunk. The animal, who did not approach or flee, glanced at her, but the creature’s attention was directed downwards. The great black-tipped ears were turned to a place of darkness below the oak’s dead half-stem.

Runa felt the spinning of the earth. She stumbled, caught herself, span arund, for it seemed the trees were subtly rearranging themselves around her. She was not afraid, not exactly, but she was aware that something was expected of her here. The place, the trees, the hare, all seemed to be waiting for her to notice a hidden something that she had been tending for years.

“I am here,” she said, for she could think of nothing else to say.

At her words, the hare leapt from the trunk toward her. Runa instinctively reached out her arms to catch, not to defend herself from, the animal. And as she did she felt a pain like a knife entering her heart, but it was gone as soon as it came. Gasping she fell to the ground. She looked for the hare. The creature had disappeared.

“No, I haven’t,” a voice said. “I am just appearing otherwise. Close your eyes.”

Runa did as she was told. And as she closed her eyes, her mind’s eye opened. And in that place, the hare sat, licking her paws, reaching up to grasp and clean her long, long ears. The hare turned her gaze to Runa, and then gave a small, almost imperceptible movement, like an elder seeing that a younger member of the family has finally recognised herself. “Ah, there you are,” said the hare. “I have been deputised to guide you in certain ways because you and I, well, we have some things in common.”

“We do?” asked Runa.

“Well, obviously,” said the hare, rolling eyes that glistened with the colour of the sky just after sunset.

And Runa understood. She did not have words for the understanding, instead it was like a dropping of her shoulders and a release of tension.

“Yes, exactly,” said the hare.

Runa pushed herself up into a crouch, turned her head to the right and then to her left, where she found herself eye-to-eye with a fox. Or at least, she thought it was a fox. Eyes like green embers between the two fallen branches of the oak. One, Runa saw now, dead and decaying; the other alive, leaves turning, buds already formed for next year’s spring. She looked back, but the eyes had gone. A rustle, and the silence that sweeps back after sound. A blur of red-brown beneath the brambles. She stood and walked to the blackberry bush. There! A russet hair caught on a thorn. The fox had withdrawn and Runa felt his absence like a splinter in her heart.

“Yes!” said the voice of the hare.

Under the bramble, in the damp ground, a fox footprint pointing north. Forgetting the mazegill and the bees, forgetting even the hare in her head, Runa pushed through the scrub, briars catching her coat and the red drops from her torn hands laying a track of their own. A tail that had been dipped in chalk disappeared into long grass. The stems showed no trace of the sinuous passing of the fox, but Runa sensed the animal turning east… and then south and then west… and she realised she had walked around the outside of what seemed to be a circle of trees and here she was, back at the place where she had forced her way through a riot of brambles. And there, nipping a low hanging berry, which he chewed and swallowed, sat the fox.

She met his eyes, flares in the shadows, green fire.

And then she saw that there was a path through the berry bushes, narrow, winding, unseen when she had followed the fox.

“Nothing returns the same way that it left.” She did not hear the words, yet she understood them. They fell into her like a key into a lock.

She waited. Expecting the fox to move, to lead her on. He did not move. He did not lead her on.

“Think!” said the voice of the hare. “Or, rather, don’t think!”

Runa stepped onto the path between the thorns and sensed that the fox was behind her, stepping lightly, his neat black feet turning return into advance, for to go back can also be to go forwards. And to go around can sometimes be the only way to go properly in.