Buying Trouble
The Tree's Tale - by Ruth Gifford
I have endured.
My roots planted deep in the rich soil, I have watched as the sons of Aeneas founded a village on one of the seven hills I look over.
I watched as that village, like the ground covering plants around me, grew to become first a city, then a Republic, and finally, an Empire. It mattered little to these men, these Romans, with their short-spanned lives, that they deprived me of my Etruscan worshippers. In truth it mattered little to me either, although I missed the snakes from the nearby temple.
I do not need or require worship. I'm not some jealous Roman Goddess, fighting her siblings and parents for worship of the Roman mob. I'm a Tree. I endure. I will reward those who come to me with an open heart and their own enduring spirit, but I cannot be swayed by unthinking or careless sacrifices made on the "correct" days, while everyone in attendance thinks on something else.
We Trees tend to have too much patience to be bothered by those who have none.
Sometimes, however, like the lightning that has split my branches on more than one occasion, even a Tree in the Roman hills will be surprised by one of the short-lived folk.
He actually jumped with joy, the small cypresses tell me. This small, scarred man who had been seeking me for a whole night. I had felt something of his seeking, but had been willing to wait. I have no choice but to wait, and, while, as a sapling, I had resented the restrictions placed on me by The Mother, time had led me to learn a patience known to few living things. So I waited for this scarred one to find me.
He was no Roman, that much was certain. No Roman would laugh with sheer joy at the seeing of me, and certainly no Roman would put his arms around me or lean against me as if he were a child coming home to his mother.
And he was just that. A child, somehow, of Trees, who had been taken in violence from his place in the great northern forests. I learned this and so much more in that first moment of contact. It is a rare person who is open enough, or is trained to be open enough, to let a Tree read his soul. I unwittingly thought of the last child who had held me like this, letting me see her soul. A very different child, Roman through and through, a girl on her way to a wedding she had not wanted. But she was one of her people, a Claudian, determined to do her duty to her family and marry her cousin, even if he was known for his eccentricities.
Now, reading the soul of this boy, perhaps the same age as Claudia had been, I hated Romans even more than I had when the girl had found me and sobbed under my branches until her father's voice called her away from me. Why must they do everything just so, these hard men and women? Why must they "make their own way," never caring about the softer ones or the weak ones they drag with them?
Not that this boy was weak. I saw in his mind that he had fought and continued to fight, only now he fought a much more complicated enemy than those soldiers who had stolen him, abused him and then sold him for a small handful of coin once they'd returned to their Eternal City. I could remember it when it was an eternal collection of mud and brick huts and I was not impressed with it now.
Neither was the young man who was even now stripping off his clothing apologetically. I could hear his thought that this was not the way to approach a great Mother Tree like myself, that they did this quite differently at home. Had I been able to, I would have smiled.
Approach me as you will, young man, I thought to myself, carefully shielding him from the power of my voice. It matters not.
He washed, and the time he took at it and the pain in his mind told me more than he knew. And yet, perhaps I could learn something of patience from this former acolyte. Before he came to me, he carefully put his man-things away and then sat and breathed for quite a while. I could feel his thoughts calming, like the nearby stream in mid-summer, when nothing existed but the deep pools full of water grass and fish.
And then he came to me, murmuring something in a language I had never heard, but that mattered not because it was all reverence for myself that he brought to me. Reverence and the strange struggle in which he found himself.
He climbed me easily, but carefully, never simply assuming that I would make his way easy. In turn, I did make the way easy, softening bark as we can should we wish, and guiding him to the most comfortable break in my branches. He laughed when he found his seat, another laugh of joy and homecoming, and for the first time in years I wished I could wrap my branches around him and simply hold him close, healing and tending to him the way a mother would tend to her child. But perhaps I was being unfair. This young man needed no such tending; he needed a place to Be and to Think.
The problem was his thoughts ran around in his head like mice running around my roots. He loved, and didn't know if he was loved in return or if he had any unsullied part of himself to offer his love. Part of him wanted to remain here, hide in the temple and live off the land. Part of him wanted to return home, even knowing that his people would not accept him as a Tree Priest.
I spent a quick annoyed moment thinking angry thoughts about a people who demanded so much of their priests; surely no Tree would care of one of their own had blemishes or if he had been violated. We all have our blemishes and the lightning that has violated me more than once has hurt me deeply, yet left me strong. But lightning and Roman soldiers are two different things; at least the lightning acts solely at the command of Nature, unfettered by the morals Humans say they have, which they then turn and violate when they so feel like it.
And still, as the Sun climbed in his daily journey, I tried to give the boy my strength. As he slept, his mind calmed even more, and I fed him dreams of my life. I tried to show him that I too had suffered, and I too had been helpless, and yet here I was, strong and rooted in the rich Earth, blessed by the bright Sun and Mothered by Nature, She who bears us all. I had grown strong and wise, I told him in dreams, and should he be willing to work on it, he would too.
And then his dreaming shifted. Aided by me, his soul fled his body and knowing that, in this at least, Morpheus and his sand could be trusted, I allowed it. As the black cloack fluttered over the boy in my arms, I smiled, lending the Dream Lord my own not inconsiderable strength.
Instead of dreaming of the great forests of his home, the boy, Eab, dreamt of a Roman, his Roman master. I would have been angry that he could dream of a man who believed in owning another soul, only this Roman was so ... harmless and un-Roman, not to mention so owned by the boy sleeping in my branches, that I didn't have it in me to hate him. And, drifting near him, hovering just out of mortal perception was the shade of that brave little girl I'd known. Claudia, a woman grown and now dead, who smiled sadly, but with love on the untidy figure who sat, surrounded by cats, on a small pallet.
All know that dreams are often aided by Morpheus, who, guided by his own strange sense of logic and honor, changes things from the real to the near-real, or perhaps the more-real.
So I didn't think that Quiaius Claudius Junius, Roman nobleman and scholar, really put the slave chains on his ankles, but I dared to assume that he really did sit on that small bed and cry himself to sleep.
It was easy, guided by Eab's thoughts, to see why someone with cause to hate Romans should love this one. Quiaius Claudius wore his hair long and went unshaven, no doubt a tribute to the old scholar-Emperor Aurellius. Cats, many of whom limped or bore signs of hard use, surrounded him. Eab's mind told me that the man rescued the cats, and further that when Eab had acted like a cat, biting his master and knocking him head over heels like an uprooted young cypress, there had been no consequence to Eab. If Eab was still owned, it was probably because it either hadn't occurred to Quiaius Claudius to free his slave, or because the man knew of no other way to keep the beautiful boy with him.
I wanted to reach this un-Roman Roman, to see what his thoughts were, but there was too much distance between us. Eab saw him as a good man, if a bit scatterbrained, and he had treated the young man the best way he knew how. He probably didn't even know that he was as chained by love, if not more so, than the young slave he supposedly owned.
And now that I had let Eab see my strength through my dreams, and had helped Morpheus let the boy see over distance, I felt the Dream Lord reach for more sand, blowing a puff lightly so that the young Celt would see a desired future. I could feel both Morpheus and myself anticipating what Eab's wish dream would be.
Quiaius' bed and cherries and a basket that had been made by Eab's mother and then stolen by older boys? I rustled my branches closer, wishing yet again to hold this young man close to me. For a moment, a brief one, I was jealous of Quiaius Claudius Junius. I could heal what had been done to Eab ... but if I did I'd be no better than those boys or the Roman soldiers. Eab would stay with me and live in the temple and maybe even coax the snakes back until they coiled once more around my branches. But a part of him would always be down there in that horrible city, with a man who had taught my Claudia to smile.
Perhaps the Mother sent the rain to cry for me. Certainly, by sending me Eab, she had shown me how lonely I was, how much I hoarded every memory of young Claudia, and how much I would hoard every memory of Eab. And would that city kill him, as it had killed Claudia?
The rain fell, coiling through my leaves and branches to trickle and then pour on the young man. He dreamt still of cherries, perfect cherries hand-fed to him by a lover. Not surprisingly, he responded, his body growing warm against my branches and the hard proof of his desire showing at the branch between his legs.
A faint chuckle, a sweep of a black cloak, and the Lord of Dream (far more terrifying in his own way than any mere god or goddess) dropped the boy back into my care. Half awake, with a smile compounded of pleasure and surprise on his face, Eab touched himself in the pouring rain. It is to his credit that he thought not of his body's pleasure as some promise to his "Kais" but as an offering to me. He shouted with sheer happiness and poured himself over me, his seed mixing with the rain and washing like life over my trunk and to my roots.
He shivered, more in pleasure than with the cold, and then he turned and hugged me, pressing his soft Human skin against my Tree bark. I loved him then and saw how this generous young man who had learned my lessons about spirit, perhaps even before I had sent him the dream of my life, could enslave his Roman.
When the Sun arose, he seemed surprised and I could feel him worrying that he had dreamed for a century, safe in my branches. But Morpheus had been kind to him and had taken only one night. Perhaps he too loved the boy and I hoped then that the Dream Lord would not separate Eab from his Roman. If I could not have him, then no one but his rightful love would do.
As he pressed his lips to my bark once more, before climbing down, he murmured "thank you" over and over in his strange northern tongue. He bowed to me once he reached the ground, thanking me again and calling me "Mother of Trees."
When he turned, he turned back to Rome.
I saw him again, but only twice.
I was there, the Sun warm on my branches, my mistletoe wrapped around me as if it were Saturnalia and not the beginning of the summer months, when I felt the rush of a black cloak and light sand thrown on my trunk. I could have thrown the dream off – Morpheus used his power but lightly that day – but my own curiosity and loneliness made me let the dreaming take me.
Eab, in a garden in the city. I didn't know they had gardens, those Romans, but even if most of them didn't Quiaius had one. And now he was showing it to Eab, love written plain over both their faces. So they had talked, and perhaps done more. I watched as Eab crowned his Quiaius with myrtle and then kissed him. It was almost blinding and I thought that perhaps each of their gods of love had manifested briefly in them.
And then Eab saw the Tree. She was no Mother like myself, but a young thing, a girl of a Cherry Tree who had bloomed in Claudia's garden. When Quiaius, showing great good sense, left Eab alone, I saw her, Claudia, brush her husband's hair in passing, look up at me and then, with a faint kiss to the top of Eab's head, she had disappeared. Eab knelt before the Tree and prayed in his strange Northern way, and She spread her branches and preened for her new priest, stopping only to gaze at me in awe.
There was another swirl of black cloak and I woke to find the Sun many hours further along and Morpheus was nowhere to be seen.
The last time I saw Eab was a few weeks ago. He rode a gray horse to the edge of my grove, dismounted and walked unerringly up to me.
"He died," he said softly. "It was very quiet, very peaceful."
I rustled my branches.
"I'm going home now. Maybe someone there won't care about my body's scarring or my virginal state. Maybe my knowledge of other places, other Trees," and he reached out to reverentially stroke my age-hardened bark, "will be enough. Who knows, maybe there are those, who, having known the ways of the world for too long or who have had great hurt come upon them, wish later in life to serve the Trees. I would help them and all who have been sent down Destiny's road would be welcome in my temple.
"I find it in me, Great Mother of Oaks, to wish that my temple could be here. Both You and the Cherry Tree I served in our garden spoke of your loneliness. I would so like to salve that loneliness and form a priesthood to serve you here."
He shook his head, his short ruffled hair touching my lower branches; a combined caress from both to the other. "But, Mother, you know we can't; you're too close to Rome and Master Quiaius saw things as he left us. Rome is dying, Mother, and I would not leave innocent priests outside the wall, unsafe in the face of barbarians. You will survive, even to being more properly worshipped; but no matter, I believe nothing could kill you, but any others ..." He paused and then smiled. "But enough, Great Mother. The Great Sun pours his light into the sky and I must begin my first journey."
He looked down, a little shy, now that he'd made his decision.
"I left some of this with Cherry Tree, I would more with you. Far more."
My branches rustled even more purposefully and he smiled, a smile to make the years fall away and leave me with the face of the young boy he had been when we first met. He hummed tunelessly as he dug through a couple of the small pouches hanging from his belt to his side.
Smiling, this time in triumph, he held up two handfuls of hair, one a rich honey brown with a touch of amber to it, the other almost all silver, with just a few strands of old bronze to darken it. He rolled them together and then began to braid the one strand he'd created out of two. "Acorn to mother to acorn's fall, acorn to mother to acorn's fall ..."
While he chanted I felt some need deep within me to chant this fundamental truth, and so he became the first Human since the early Etruscan to actually hear my voice. He didn't even blink, merely nodded, and raised his voice so the life/birth/death/life cycle rang loud and clear in my clearing.
Finally the braid was done and he smiled at me again holding up his making. A ring of hair that was the size of a person's head. A crown, I realized, a crown of Eab and Quiaius' hair. A crown for ...
"The priest who is coming. You will know him the way you knew me and Claudia, only he'll be able to stay here once he's trained." Suddenly shy. "I have seen it."
"You could not lie to me about such things here, Eab."
"I know, Great Mother. Nor would I wish to lie to You." So saying, he easily climbed my branches and left the crown of hair in the main branching of my trunk. He reverently kissed each daughter branch and bowed his head low, and gravely, to the mistletoe. I was not surprised that my consort acted as he did; I know my love far more than I know anything. Eab, however, looked a little surprised when a crown much like that which he'd made out of hair appeared before him briefly and then moved behind and up, to rest against the ivory-frosted amber of his hair.
"Go," I said softly, more to his spirit than to his Human ears, "and know that you shall always be in our hearts. And know that, by the crown you shall wear or at least make visible as you ride, those of the forests shall recognize you. Paths will appear before you but not your foes, the fog will ever be your friend, and the small animals will not make you work hard to catch them, for even they know their place in the world. Also, by this crown and much concentration, you may join us in speech on certain days when the Wheel of Change wills it so."
One more rustle as my lower branches reached for him and he pressed back against them, and then he backed off, bowed the triple bow of the Empire, raised his head, winked at me and vanished into the fog.
"Here, Mama, here. I know he came here when he left Rome. Please Papa believe me." The young boy turned to his sister, who always sided with him.
"It's possible," she said, her educated accent matching and sometimes even rising above her mother's. "Lord Eab did love trees so much, I can think that, on a journey such as his, he might have paused."
Anakin looked at Amidala.
"Well, regardless of whether or not our young arguer is correct, there is a beautiful stream and a lovely clearing. Perfect for a picnic, don't you think?"
"Mmmmm," Amidala Rutila replied voicelessly. "You know me far too well, and it's just not fair. I never should have begged Papa to free you."
A chuckle from her husband followed by a contented sigh. "And think of all the extra sleep we'd have gotten. And of course no Leila or Lucius ..."
"I was wondering, my love, should we try for a third?" Anakin gasped a little as his wife rolled over and lifted a pin from her stola, baring smooth onyx skin. "Run along and play, children; take the basket in case you get tired ..."
Leila had seen her parents getting all mushy and had already planned to find her brother and clear out. Only it looked like the brat had wandered off on his own. She scowled, she missed Qui and Eab too, but her brother had always been closest to their two "uncles." He was still glum most of the time and it was only when they'd neared this clearing had she seen anything like his normal level of energy and ... the light that she sometimes saw from him seemed to be back.
"Leila," he called, "I'm up here and come see what I found!"
She looked up, a little hesitant, but he was only displaying something that looked like a garland. She looked at the tree's trunk and thought of climbing up to her brother, but didn't have the first idea as to where to start.
"Oh, all right, I'll come down there."
A few seconds of shinnying down the tree and her flushed, solemn-faced brother appeared before her.
"It's a crown of hair. Like they sometimes put on the burial couches at funerals."
"Both couple's hair," she nodded, understanding that much. "But what's it doing here?"
"Leila, look at the hair. It's Eab's and old Qui's. He was here and he cared about this Tree. In the ancient days our ancestors honored the great trees of Rome. And there's a temple here too. Maybe I could ..."
"What if the Tree wants to be left alone? What if mother and father, or worse, grandfather, don't want you to be a Tree priest?"
"I'm going back up. If anyone asks, I'm napping in those branches. Waiting to talk to Her."
I hear that the great city is in ruins, and all the temples looted of their fine god images. And yet, at the Temple of the Trees, we feel no danger. The Visigoths and their kin appreciate people who worship in the same way they do at home. And anyway, what moneys or treasures could they grab from us? We have the fresh stream, and its fish, our corn patch and our beehives and our berries and later, vines heavy with grapes. We trade these for flour and meat. We're never a huge community, but we thrive, we endure.
Endurance is the true way of Trees.
THE END
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