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  Chapter XI

  …The time is more than a hundred years ago today. The boy’s name is forgotten. We shall call him Gee.

  He had no home before he found the White Tree. He had no memory of a family but for the mountains and the rivers and forests and the vast plains, the sky, the rain. He ran with beasts that had antlers like trees. He spoke to the moon with wolves. He rode on the backs of whales, the eldest of all creatures.

  He found the garden on a care-free afternoon, which was the only sort of afternoon he partook in. In those days the first thing you saw when you came around the last turn of hills was the White Tree, pure as driven snow and taller than a castle turret. He found its branches–seen through the leaves when the wind blew just so–were grown like a man looking to the hills as though to keep vigil. As big as the White Tree was, Gee thought it strange he had not seen it from a distance along back on the path. His suspicion was fleeting; as boys will so often do, he shrugged it off and ran and jumped to the lowest branches and climbed the day away.

  In the hidden world of the White Tree’s bough there were a thousand nooks to explore and cozy corners to curl up in. The jungle maze of limbs and leaves and things to eat, the canopy pierced in a scattered array of dust-speckled sunbeams, all seduced and enchanted him.

  Gee’s decision to stay was the easiest of his life. Outside, the kingdom he roamed was grown haggard and stony, both the land and the people, but the garden whispered to him that it need not be so in this one hidden corner of the map.

  He lost count of days and seasons and years. It rarely rained, never stormed or snowed. His skin grew brown in the sun for he spent as much time out in the garden as he did in the reclusive shade of the White Tree’s bough. His hair grew long. His senses expanded and sharpened to all that lived around him, such that he could smell a rose still inside a seed or hear his heartbeat beside a din of crickets in the night. This is when he realized he was thoroughly and powerfully lonely.

  Birds were his only company. He lived among them so long that he learned their language near completely, and it’s few men or women as can say that. But birds come and go. They live and die in the blink of an eye, it often seems. Their flighty chatter only fanned the isolation that was smoldering in his heart.

  Gee considered leaving the White Tree and the garden altogether, but something told him that if he left he would never find his way back. Did the garden itself reveal this to him? Or the well, groaning up silent warnings from the abyss? Perhaps. But if they did it was never in words, only in the quietude of the White Tree’s long shadow, where his thoughts tended to trail away like leaves in a river.

  Seasons carried by. He never left. The abundance of the garden and the White Tree provided all the food he needed. He was lonely, but contented to stay, letting his mind float in and out of daydreams like a ghost through cellar walls. Years drifted along. Until…

  One day–one day, as the boy was fond of thinking, when it seemed the sun rose earlier than usual–he heard a bell. Then he caught a scent of something new and decidedly pleasant in the garden below. He peeked down from his loft in the bough and saw a girl was there. He thought she is the reason why the sun has woken early.

  Gee dropped from the tree, surprising the girl very much, though she hid her fright well. He told her his name and she told him hers, but it is long-forgotten. We shall call her Pea, if only because the setting is so appropriate.

  She wore a shimmering green dress under a white apron and her golden hair flowed to her waist in loops and braids.

  It was this particular instant when Gee realized that his own hair was what a proper lady must regard as an utter disaster and his clothes–what remained of them–were in shambles and his feet were covered in… well, his feet were… fertilized. So he nearly feinted when she was willing to meet his eye. He blushed, having forgotten what it was a boy is supposed to say to a girl.

  She grinned like a cat. He laughed like a donkey. Of course they fell in love, at least for the one quiet day fate afforded them. But the day flew by and at dusk, as she readied herself to depart, Gee asked her to stay in the garden with him for a little while more. To leave even once was to risk never finding the way back, he told her, at once painfully aware how desperate his words would sound.

  Pea insisted she had to return home. Gee wanted to know why. So she told him she was the daughter of the King and she would already be in enough trouble for sneaking off all the day without her Honor Guard. Nevertheless, she promised to slip away from her father’s custody and come back the next morning. Gee believed her, although he was inclined to think the bits about the King and an Honor Guard were a yarn.

  As Pea was getting on her seat, Gee took her hand and pulled her to his side. He grabbed the knife that hung at her apron-strings and pressed it against the smooth, pale skin of the White Tree. Slowly, slowly as the dead march, he carved into his beloved tree a heart. Green sap oozed onto his hand as he dragged the knife across the wood. He told Pea it was a charm to ensure she found her way back safely.

  In truth it was no such thing. It was just a boy stalling, afraid to feel alone again.

  He should have kissed her then; instead he waited, doubting himself, and she only smiled and returned to her seat. As she rode passed him, she unfastened her two small, green earrings in the blink of an eye and dropped them into Gee’s hand. They were to be his charms, to ensure he remained safely in the garden for her, she teased.

  When she was gone, the boy climbed up to his favorite crooked branch and lay awake all through the night. Earrings? Honor Guards? Was her story true? It would certainly explain the unique contraption she rode in place of a horse, he supposed.

  In the morning, Gee found something worrisome had happened to his hand: there was a vivid scar on his left palm, yet he had felt nothing during his night-long daydream, and certainly it had never been there before. Equal to the size and shape of the heart he had carved upon the White Tree, the scar was green as grass with no trace of blood or scabbing or even an underlying cut or burn.

  His first thought was worrying about Pea. Had the same thing happened to her? If so, would she still return? The boy did not yet understand the symmetry of fate–he fretted all through the long, cold sunrise without comfort.

  When there was enough light, he brushed his teeth with a white twig. He combed his hair with another white twig. White leaves served to wipe his cheeks.

  Pea returned shortly after dawn with the ringing of a bell, to Gee’s immeasurable relief. Without a word she dismounted and turned to the boy and raised her right hand–there she held his own scar’s twin, grass-green and bright as flame. Her face was streaked with tears, and in one of life’s all-time most dimwitted of moments the boy asked her how come it made her cry.

  It was not the heart that upset her, she explained. Rather, her father, the King, had discovered the scar first thing in the morning and thrown a brutal fit. For she, Pea told Gee, was to be married away to a foreign kingdom and how would it do for her to arrive on her wedding day bearing a sign of love for another man–or boy–permanently seared inside her hand?

  Although he asked for no proof of her story, Pea took from her pocket a penny and bade Gee study the engraving thereupon. It was a picture of Pea, her smile as sad as the purple sea.

  Gee could not speak when he looked into her eyes, but she came to his rescue and filled the silence: the pennies were a sort of token for those who would seek her hand in marriage, one hundred in all, each hand-crafted. But, she told him, none of the indentured artisans had been able to make her look joyful, try as they might. This made the King furious. The craftsmen were all of them thrown out the window, but the pennies were minted and sent on their way regardless, his majesty being supremely impatient. One-a-piece in purple coaches the coins were delivered to all the kingdoms of man. On the back of each penny was a direct query: What will you pay for her hand?

  Only one penny was not sent, the Princess told Gee as she took the selfsame back from his hand
.

  Gee could not think what to say, having no mind for politics, but Pea assured the twig-brushed boy that she had no desire of any kind to marry a grown man, especially one she had never met, and especially one who would himself be all too willing to wed under such atrocious conditions. She left Gee’s side and approached the well. She would cast the penny in, she said, and make her wish to stay in love with the boy in the garden forever and never grow old.

  That is the crescendo of any happiness to be found in this story. Before the penny left her hand, she was interrupted by an uninvited visitor who stole his way into their sanctuary with no intention other than to deliver his wickedness upon the garden and all therein.

  It was the Prince, her younger brother, second in line to inherit the Crown. He had followed Pea to the garden under their father’s duplicitous orders. The King, according to the Prince, had always had an ear for tales about the mysterious garden and he was thus keenly aware that artifice, guile–these were not the traits of the men and women who stumbled their way to the cusp of the ancient well and lived immortally in shade under the stewardship of the White Tree; so, too, the King knew the color of his own son’s heart–he knew the Prince would never be beckoned to the garden by fate’s good grace alone.

  Perhaps the King allowed Pea to abscond again that fateful morning–when it was clear where she would choose to go–because he believed it was the only chance for the Throne to gain the privileges and the powers of the garden. Whatever his motivation, let her go he did, with the Prince loosed soon after to hunt.

  Robed in a rich satin cloak, the Prince waltzed into the garden as though he owned it, or as though he believed his father owned it. He trampled flowerbeds and spat into the well. He told the Princess she was commanded to return to Court and never see the boy again.

  Gee jumped in between the Princess and her brother, but the Prince had all the advantages. He had been around the playthings of war all his life. He flung the boy aside effortlessly and laughed as though it was a lark to tear apart a pair of hearts.

  The Prince grabbed Pea by her wrist and even as she screamed and pummeled him, he pulled her to his horse, bound her hands in chains, and tied her to his saddle. He unclasped the purple-handled knife from her belt–the one that had carved the heart into the White Tree–and returned to Gee.

  Gee made another feeble move to reach the Princess and somehow free her, but he never stood a chance. The Prince threw him against the White Tree, rushed into him and stabbed the knife fast into his breast, driving it deep and twisting it in like a corkscrew.

  Blood poured from Gee, dark and red as the King’s best wine. The Princess shrieked and never has the garden heard a sound like that before or since. She tried to bite and claw herself free, as if possessed.

  Gee felt his mind begin to unravel itself from his body like roots unclasping clumps of soil as their flower is pulled from the earth. He saw blood at Pea’s mouth and fingernails where she fought against her chains. In his liminal state he thought this a terrible shame, and for some reason very silly of her.

  The Prince returned to his horse and mounted, lifted his reigns to leave, but hesitated, just as Pea had done the evening prior. Silently, he dismounted and strode back to the White Tree, cradling a double-bladed axe with a wooden handle as black and sleek as tar. Set between mirrored crescent blades–shaped as twin dragonheads–was a purple jewel that flashed with rich shadows like a living eye.

  He looked down at Gee, who must have been very nearly dead by now, and announced, “I am your Prince, whom it pleases to dally in your garden. Have you anything to say before the Crown?”

  Gee spoke not. All he could think was how unusual it was that the Prince wore long pajamas under his cloak with grass-stains on his knees.

  “As I thought,” said the Prince. “Too in awe of your future King to speak. Very well. The Throne is… satisfied… with your loyalty this day.” Standing astride the gasping boy, blocking out the sun and smiling ear to ear, the Prince wound back and recoiled, sinking the axe into the White Tree, cleaving the carving of the charmed heart in two.

  It took him until sunset to cut the tree down. The earth shook and a thousand-thousand leaves rained down in sheets that covered every corner of the garden. The cracking of a hundred branches, the ruination of the great stronghold of birdkind, this was the penultimate tragedy–the felling of the White Tree–as much with hatred as with the strength of steel. Yet who else would ever shed a tear? The world itself may have its heart divided and men will never hear, but for the ones at the axes.

  The Prince tied his sister’s riding contraption to his saddle with a length of rope, then he mounted his horse and left the garden behind and Gee for dead. Pea was dragged away by her chains. Her screams faded one hill at a time.

  What happened to the boy? Did he die? His heart was ripped apart like butcher’s meat, yes, but no, it was not his day to die. And yet he may as well have. He never saw his princess again and his life, although long and peaceful, has sorely thirsted for her love.

  But no, he did not die. That would be a fate without balance. No… in place of a death so imminent, an unexpected thing occurred as he lay in the dirt, staring at the sky, inhumed in a white sepulcher of fallen leaves: once again there was an unfamiliar something in his hand. Inside the scar of the heart, in the center of his palm, Gee felt a minuscule pulse. Craning his neck as much as he could manage, he saw what he held was a small white seed.

  He knew at once it was a gift from the White Tree. He closed his fingers around it gratefully and fell asleep for days.

  When he next awoke he felt death no more. His body was his own and as heavily mortal as ever and he knew, somehow, that as long as he held onto the seed he need not fear what had happened to the heart in his chest, whether the flesh and fibers within mended or not.

  Right at once he dashed off in pursuit of Pea and the Prince, but within a hundred paces he felt a twinge of pain in his chest, a warning shot from the underworld. The seed stopped beating for an instant.

  It only took another moment to verify that he was trapped. Beyond a certain span from the stump the seed could not survive. Without the seed, Gee would die as certainly as the earth without the sun, he knew. It hit him then: he could never leave the stump. He could never take up the Prince’s trail. He would never see his beautiful princess again. She would marry another. Gee would diminish and perish alone in the garden.

  I believe that is when he vomited, but it was very long ago and difficult to say now.

  By days the wound in Gee’s breast sealed itself and scabbed over, although no beat would ever again echo from those savaged chambers. He wandered among what was left of the garden, what had not been covered in splintered debris, retracing every step he had taken with a girl’s hand in his own.

  The birds left the garden to find new trees and build new homes, but they visited the boy and promised him they would find Pea no matter how long it took.

  Her purple-handled knife and the jewel from the Prince’s axe–knocked free amid his mad chopping–both lay on the ground beside the stump as a constant reminder of what crimes had been rendered there. The boy loathed looking at them or thinking about them, but after days, then seasons, and more than a year, this feeling waned. One gray day like any other he put the jewel in his pocket alongside Pea’s earrings, picked up the knife, and set to work restoring the garden.

  He never counted the days or seasons that he labored, but unmeasured time saw the boy cut off the arms of the fallen tree and trim, smooth, and shape them, all with merely a dagger and a lone hand to hold it. In a great circle he built a fence as far from the stump as he could walk without feeling the seed begin to dwine.

  No word came of his princess. The old birds died. A new generation learned to fly and the search recommenced, but with half the heart, and soon they too passed on. And with every blink a new generation took wing, each with less care for old vows than the last. In time the promise was broken. Gee stopped listening
, and the birds stopped visiting, but who can say which happened first?

  There he remained and grew old, talking to himself and to the flowers. There he abides–the most resplendent prison in the world, perhaps, but a prison withal.

  The Princess is alive. She is out there, somewhere–he knows this. It is the one thing he learned from the white seed, for a man keeps his love in his heart…