‘Belle, beautiful, where are you?’
The call to action was soft, insistent, rippling unease, along with guilt, through her curled up body. She sighed and stretched a toe out to gauge the temperature. Heat pulsated above her, but underneath the earth was cool and inviting.
In normal times, she revelled in being adored and complimented. It was these tiresome times which stretched her patience. Yes, she would put on a magnificent performance with little competition, at least for a while. But who wanted to be a shining star amidst devastation?
Despite herself, she could feel movement, as an energy outwith her control, pulled strength from the tips of her being, up through her lumpy, misshapen limbs which she always kept out of sight, and a small green shoot poked its head above the surface.
‘Welcome Asphodel. Good to see you.’ A blasted pine tree with blackened, amputated branches and a lone green patch high up, like a lop-sided wig, sighed its pleasure at having company.
All around as far as the eye could see was bleakness, except she had to use other senses to capture the scene. What did it look like? Hiroshima after the bomb or a World War One painting of the day after the worst battle in living memory. Where a forest had stood were upright, tarred sticks with ugly gashes on top where their parasols of leafy branches had been sheered off and reduced to a pile of rubbish at their feet. All around flakes of grey ash drifted through the air, coating everything, including her own vestigial leaves, with a chalky veil.
Where was the wind when you needed it? During the fire it had howled and hollered like a coven of witches. Now when it would be useful, it had sunk into an exhausted torpor. A hint of rain might be good as well. Not that she needed a drink since she had prudently stored several months’ supply underground. Well, prudent was probably an arrogant way of looking at it, since she hadn’t designed herself. Whatever, water from above would help to wash down the grim mess and dissolve the calcified foliage into the soil. Then life could start again.
The trouble with being first was there was no one to talk to initially, barring the blighted pine who was so old he was off her wavelength. A faint nudge to her top leaf caught her attention.
‘Seed master, is that you?’ she asked with a faint tremble.
‘Can’t stop,’ came the reply. ‘Too much to do. Just wanted to say hello. Snowbrush and Hollyhock may need my help cracking open their seeds.’ His laugh was like a bell tinkling a note of optimism across the gloom. ‘I’ve brought my little hammer. Then I need to round up the annuals and perennials. So much space and sunlight now. They’ll love it.’
What kind of benighted souls only thrive after destruction, she wondered. They not only love fire, they can’t reproduce without it. Holding their babies in cryogenic suspension for years, decades sometimes, and then, lightning strikes and they get boiled and barbecued into existence.
Where were her brothers and sisters? There was no sign of any surface movement. Maybe they were being indolent. Or more likely they had been too close to the heart of the heat and even their tuberous roots had been cooked. That would be a bore, since she’d have to work ten times harder spreading her seeds around to start a new colony.
One of her toes tickled as a movement deep in the earth indicated that a burrowing animal was risking an ascent. She just hoped they didn’t take a nip as they passed. It might be mole, who rarely surfaced, or shrew, or even turtle, though it didn’t feel the kind of earthquake he caused when excavating an escape route.
A loud cracking several yards away was followed by an eerie silence as a giant tree, or the remains thereof, considered which way to fall. She cast up a prayer to her favourite deity and waited. The goddess answered and it tipped in the other direction, sending a spume of dust and cinders high into the air as it collapsed, its huge root bed exposed. Fungus will love that, she thought. Just his cup of tea. Once the rain comes, he’ll be all over the rotting cadaver like a rash.
That was another one who only prospered when there was death and decay. But as the High Woodsman always says, ‘it takes all sorts. Fungi are the best recyclers there are. What lives, must in time die and be returned to the soil.’ A horticulture carrion-eater. Each to their own. She gave a grudging nod.
Her spikey leaves stiffened with dislike at the raspy voice emerging from a pile of debris beside the fallen tree. Small whiskers, like tracking antennae, twitched and quivered as a brown rodent struggled onto the surface, wheezing and sneezing into the dust. There was no telling who it was from the grime-encased fur. But it had to be that runt of a rat.
‘Do I look like Usain Bolt? The Great Mother doesn’t do Merlin or Dumbledore. Being first doesn’t mean arriving fully formed in my party frock.’
‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I was just making conversation.’ The rat gave another series of racking coughs, sat down and stood up in a hurry as smouldering bark threatened to singe his coat.
‘But you are the high priestess of death, the lady of the graveyard. A shining star above the corpses.’
‘If you’re so knowledgeable, kindly remember to use my proper name in future.’
‘Yeah, yeah, whatever.’ He turned away, his nose sweeping the burnt air, looking forlorn as his keen sense of smell choked on carbon.
‘Over there,’ she said, taking pity on him. ‘Behind that clump of boulders. I saw a family of baby rabbits taking shelter before the fire. They wouldn’t get out.’
‘Cool,’ he croaked, lifting his feet as high as his spindly legs allowed to avoid hot spots, and headed for his first cooked meal in a while.
Despite her irritation, she was pleased to see him. Life was beginning to stir, which evoked old memories, not personal ones since she had never survived a fire before, but her ancestors had. They had handed down their knowledge and she knew that soon the forest, what was left of it, would be humming with new friends. The old ones might be fried into the afterworld but their demise prepared the way for exciting opportunities.
The fire beetles would soon be colouring the sooty tree trunks with red tattoos as they bored into dead wood to lay their larvae. Then the birds would return to pick off the insects and so the cycle starts again. The huckleberries will grow, some of them, from their root, attracting bears back next year. The wasteland will be carpeted with a flowery cornucopia and a botanical wonder of grasses, all just waiting for a spot of water to speed their germination into fast forward. At which point the deer will return.
Toneinilii, that was it. The Native American rain god. Or was it? She could hardly pray if she had his name wrong. Maybe just visualising him would do, without having to linger on the spelling. It was the problem with oral languages. When they were written down, they turned into a logographic horror. A trickster and a clown, his camouflage was a mountainous froth of black feathers like a wild turkey with a bad Afro. Presumably he did a war dance, though quite who he was brewing up murderous energy to destroy didn’t come to mind. The drought presumably. Did it matter? No, no, she was being stupid. Cloud bursting that would be his game. Shafting his spear heavenwards and waiting for the celestial canopy to rupture.
‘Delia, do you have a moment?’ A musky, acrid odour threatened to fog her vision.
‘No,’ she said crossly, wishing she could turn the other way. ‘I’m busy invoking the rain.’
‘All power to you, sweetheart. I’ll be back. Just wondering if you’d seen my family. Ma and six little striped ones. There’s no scent trail in all this gunk.’
A spot of rain landed on her crown. The Lord be Praised, or whoever. Three more followed, then ten turned into a steady shower. The hunched shoulders of wild pig and droop of his head made him look a picture of misery as he slouched off eastwards.
‘Sang,’ she called. ‘They went north, up to the higher ground. I saw them before the fire reached this glade. They may be alright.’His tusks shot up and his eyes glinted.
‘Oh thank you, thank you. Ma always did have her wits about her. I was off foraging and had to go south to escape.’
The thud of his cloven hooves moved into a canter and then a gallop as he crashed through broken branches and even leapt over a tree stump in his joy.
‘You’re doing well, Asphodel. That’s three good deeds today.’ The pine tree looked down on her with admiration.
‘Four,’ she said smartly. ‘If you count me turning out on parade.’ Feeling she was being ungenerous because of his advanced age and ugliness, she managed a tight smile. At least he had the grace to use her proper name.
The water cascaded down, cleaning the dust off her leaves which was a mercy, though it threatened to encase her feet in grey sludge. All around there was cracking and rumbling as the deluge proved the tipping point for several scarred relics of a once proud forest.
Part 2: DIONYSUS TO THE RESCUE (next week)
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