"The Grove" Part 4

This time, as she made her way into the Grove, hearing with every step she took more creatures moving, calling, complaining and explaining, with the fox at her left heel and the hare’s presence in her very being, she saw the space differently.

Yes… an ancient oak, riven in two; half dead and half alive. A ring of younger trees, as kith and kin surrounding the broad expanse of the mother tree’s once vast canopy. And a clear space, like a hidden message, where more flowers had grown than Runa would have expected.

She felt a stirring at her side and looked down, and back. The fox sat, his ears flat and eyes narrow. Runa bent to him, “Come,” she said. “Come.” The fox would not move. He raised a paw as though to set it on the earth of the open space, but drew it back as though scorched. Runa frowned. The animal confounded her. “What?” she asked. “What is frightening you?” He glared up at her. “I apologise, Fox. Of course, this is not fear. It is… what?” The fox spun like a red apple on a string, a flame of fur at her feet and then he was gone.

Runa, once more, felt absence like a weight in her gut. And she understood.

She turned to face the clearing. The question was not what was here, but what was not. Back when she was learning herbcraft with Radamata, the old woman had praised her for not always wanting to know the exactness of things. “The villagers, they get an upset stomach and they eat the mallow, because they say the mallow is the stomach-healer. And that is true as far as it goes, but the mallow offers much more and sometimes much less. You see, child, you have to see things slant-wise and know that all openings are also closings. You know this because you understand that this is how grief must be approached, and love too. Always with the opposite of what it is.”

Clearly, thought Runa, the oak was no longer standing. But it wasn’t that. She walked toward the bough that bridged a strange darkness.

“Yes!” said the hare in her head.

Leaning forward, Runa listened.

Once she had been to the big town to buy glassware. In a public house, she had sat to rest and take some food. Around her, human voices in a blur of indistinguishable confusion. Every now and they, she could make out a word, “cow” and “wife” and “money”. Here, leaning over the Heeders’ Hollow, it were as though the voices spoke in a language not hers. Or, they spoke in a language not human. Or many languages that were not languages. In amongst the melée, one sound made sense. It was the sound of something not human and not animal weeping.

She thought of the hare, who had been listening there. “And that is why you can hear!” said the voice. But I cannot understand, she thought.

“Hrow, hrow, hrow!”

Fox! Runa span around, but the fox was not at the end of the winding track.

“Hrow, hrow, hrow!”

He was slipping wraithlike through branches that rose from the living part of the fallen tree. Ahead of him, movement. Tiny, chestnut-coloured, valiant. The bird with the out-sized song.

“Little Winter King!” said Runa to the wren and the bird, tail set up chair-back straight, opened his beak. Tinkling trills and whistles rushing after one another in a rapturous rush and finished off with an exclamation mark brrrrrrr. The wren crouched, leapt, landed, briefly on the nose of the fox, and, then, as the fox twisted and snapped, flew to a perch in front of Runa. She looked at him. He looked at her, from his right eye, his left eye, and his right eye again.

Those who are very small can make a very large sound, thought Runa. From the hollow, I hear many sounds, but soft sounds… so what is absent is many and is tiny. Looking at the bird before her, she understood that the smallest shift in the world could reverberate loudly. The shift that had happened here was not the falling of the oak, but the cause of the oak’s fall.  And the shift that had happened here was different on the outside and on the inside.

Runa ran along the small track between brambles and heard the quite outside the Grove. She had left bird chatter, mouse rustle, and weasel whisper behind. Beyond that lay a deeper heaviness. The silence of withdrawal. She returned to the clearing, and now, thanks to the wren’s lesson, heard the out-sized silence beneath the animals’ and the playful breeze. This was a silence that was alive, and waiting. And what was waiting, she knew, could only be accessed via the hollow.

“Yes!” the hare’s voice confirmed it.

“But, well, what now?” she asked.

Somehow, the day was already reaching its end. Runa rose, thinking she must go. She needed food and water, warmth and comfort. She needed to see a man about some bees. She couldn’t understand how morning had turned so swiftly to evening, and the strangeness of it crept into her heart as a warning. The dimpsy time of dusk made all places thin places and this place was quite thin enough as it was. And so, she pulled closed her coat, pushed her scratched hands in her pockets and set out, again, on the winding path. And that was when she sensed it. The pull of the land itself. She felt tendrils of life coiling around her like bindweed. A call in coils. A voice in vines. As real and as unreal as starlight.

In such situations, there really is no decision to make.

Runa sighed and turned to her left, to face the setting sun, a glow through the trees, about to slip under the crest of the hill. She sighed and retraced her steps, knowing, as she did so, that again the fox trotted at her left heel; knowing that when she stepped into the dusky clearing the creature would not cross that inner threshold; knowing that the wren would have retreated into scrub and she would be alone with the voice in her head and the whispers from the well. She shivered, preparing to face fear.

That is when the robin sang. His voice like the clear stream for the thirsty stag, who draws in courage and stamina with every draught of its sweetness. And so Runa drew in courage, the courage of love despite the likelihood of loss. She raised her eyes to the serenading bird and in the ruddy breast knew the secret of holding warmth in cold places and the secret too of gentleness in response to harm. “A strange lesson,” she thought, “from such a battle ready bird.”

“He fights, yes,” said the hare, “but just as much he tends. The one with the other, human, always. The wisdom lies in knowing which when and how much. Your kind do not much need the lessons of battle, we find.”

“Indeed,” said Runa, thinking of the man’s son and the bees. “We take up weapons too quickly.” She saw two green eyes dip and rise. The fox nodding his agreement. He was not where he had been. The creature moved like wildfire. The normal rules of things could not contain foxes, and this fox was more mercurial than most. A flash of white. The animal smiling. He was curled, she saw, as her vision accepted the shadows, that he was curled between the living fallen stem and one of its great branches. Of course he had the sense to find shelter. Runa crossed the clearing and sat in the space he’d left free for her, warmed by the fox’s closeness and the robin’s song. Something that she had not realised was frozen was thawing within her, and Runa let it thaw. As she did, and as the bird’s melody shaped new meanings, she thought of gentleness and harm. Her medicines could soothe sick humans and their animals. Runa herself used the tinctures and balms for wild creatures who required healing. She had even, following the half-remembered teachings of Radamata, helped her apple tree heal its wounds. But the harms suffered were not restricted to the harms of human and animal persons and plants. No, the whole land was hurting. There was an ache in the soil itself and in the waters and the skies. She considered the whispering well and the coiling call.

Half-light, the moon not yet risen. The in-between time. The robin’s voice quieted and now the blackbird welcomed the deeper dusk. The darkling bird whose very eyes were the pattern of a solar eclipse. The depth of his voice pierced the very soul of the woman sitting on tree limbs now horizontally growing, beside the breathing body of the most wraith-like of mammals, and housing in her head the moon-gazing epitome of wariness and flight. As the wren helped her listen and the robin helped her warm her heart for healing, the blackbird reminded her not to mistake darkness for emptiness and to be certain of nothing but the infinite variability of the world.

“We tried to tame it all,” thought Runa. “Or rather, humans did… and what am I if not a human?”

“You are sprung-born,” said the hare.

And the full Ninth Moon rose above the birches and the alders.

The fox stirred. He turned his pointed muzzle to Runa, to the moon, to the hollow beneath the fallen bough, and as her gaze followed his to a darkness within darkness she saw in her mind the path of the moon. In a few hours, its light would shine down into the well. Light, reflected light, would sink into the earth below where the tree had been. Would it silence the whispers or rouse them into greater wakefulness? She brought her eyes back, but the fox was no longer there. And now her mind traced the trickster’s tracks as though drawn into his withdrawal. But what was it that had withdrawn, for it was not the fox she was here to the find, although his shape-shifting and disappearing foreshadowed or re-enacted some part of the tale she was trying to untangle.

She sat in the night-time Grove watching time pass with the course of the moon, preparing herself for she did not know what. Except that it would take place there, in the deep heart of this clearing.

Now she was up, standing against the bridging bough, leaning over the hole and seeking the mystery, as the moon’s light, in a moment she had forgotten expecting, flowed down to greet the ghosts of rivers and Runa heard words, except that the words were not words she could ever repeat or explain. It was something like this:

We were the first listeners. Attuned to the flows between. Hearing this need and that longing. We were the weavers, carrying breath and memory, nourishment and messages, binding beings into the bigness. Not time nor space matter to us. Not life nor death. All that is can be part of the weave.

And Runa saw in the hare’s eye of her mind the great white moon above and the immense blackness below. She felt the tiniest of shifts in the earth and knew that this miniscule alteration sounded as thunder. She felt the warmth of her heart combatting the cold glow and the black gloom. And she let herself be in the complexity.

That is when the whispers called her. She climbed onto the tree’s fallen trunk, feeling in the old wood the past that had been: centuries of communion and a pact now broken. Runa looked down. Her legs hung into the hollow. She hesitated under the watching moon. Around her, the silence of expectation and beyond the silence of degeneration.

Just a short walk, and she could be back in her cottage, with the comforting light of an oil lamp and the scent of dried lavender, dried rosemary, dried bay. She could break open the loaf she’d baked before leaving this morning and dip it deep in strawberry compote. Runa licked her lips at the thought and then snatched her left hand up from where it had been resting on the corrugated bark. Looking down, she saw the grinning fox, who’d licked her fingers as she’d licked her lips.

“You scared me,” she said.

He sat on his haunches, head cocked.

“OK. You didn’t scare me. But I am scared.”

The fox flicked his head to one side and snapped his jaws, just as he had done with the wren. And Runa remembered then the Winter King’s lesson of deep listening, of sensing the smallest shifts.

“Now,” said her inner voice and Runa pushed herself forwards and fell.

The landed not in water but in soft dampness. The chill was intense and the darkness would have been too had not the moon at that instant edged into position directly above the mouth of the hollow. Runa wrapped her arms around her body, shivering.

“Hrow, hrow, hrow!”

She looked up, the pointed head, the sharp ears and something dropped from his teeth. Runa opened her hands and there, rowan berries. The very colour of the robin’s breast and she remembered then the lesson of holding her warmth within. She exhaled, relaxing, allowing herself to be where she was without resistance.

In the silver light, she could see little but shimmer. She could smell old leaves, tannin, a faint mineral tang, clean water, rich earth and something else, as of bodies, as of flesh.

This is not a place, she thought, it is the memory of a place and the promise of a place. It is place without time.

And, she thought, it is not empty, though it may appear so. There are presences all around me…. All the presences of the vast word up there in the long past and the still to come future… but not precisely all… the presences of those who did not see this place as an absence.

Her mind fluttered in confusion, a creature trapped, ricocheting between this and that. How as she to make sense of a place that was all contradiction.

A huff from above, and she glanced up to see the silhouette of the fox curled into himself as he had been when the blackbird sand of the dusk-sense, the ambivalent liminality, that paradoxical peripheries, the threshold nature of what is, in its always becoming what it isn’t.

Her breathing slowed and that was when she noticed that in the hollow her own breath echoed back to her in a way that made it not her breath. She, instead, was the breath of the being that embraced her in this damp earthen chamber. She was inhaled and exhaled by the earth and she let herself be breathed into the porous soil, tracking the trails of roots and the burrows of worms. She let herself be breathed back out into the still moonlight. And at the same time, the hollow was entering and leaving her, finding, mirrored in Runa, a like absence.

Or rather, not an absence. Runa understood in those inspired moments that what had withdrawn were the first listeners and first messengers, the world weavers, the mycorrhizal elders. They were not absent, but they had retreated deep into themselves. And she too, sprung-born though she was, acknowledged that what she had felt as an unspoken absence, that ancestorless ache, the sense of being rootless, was not a lack, but her own protective retreat.