“When the rosette first emerges from the ground, it is proud and it is many. When there is no fresher beauty about it, we call it Yarrow.”
“And Myrtle, she is my mother.”
“Once, long ago, I grew from her roots long after the harrows of the Del took her.” The voice of a birch is a song that is distant and sorrowful. Like wind through a dense but naked grove. The despair has grown like brambles into the ancient echo of my memory, after winter has ripped the last of the foliage off of every branch in the form of hungry, desperate deer teeth.
There is nothing I can offer the tiny pair of listening ears, but a glimpse into history so draconian it has slipped the reaches of the ancient libraries, has captivated the young heart who stands at my hearth.
The tale of the predative and somehow savage beginning which ultimately leads into the domesticated and civilized world that it has come to be. When Gods were young, mortal, and primitive. Young Aspara does not need my words to know it, the woods will tell her how it all came to be. The trees will speak to any who will listen, for the surviving few that we are, know it all. Although I am one of the first, I am not the last.
Our deer move through black and white and black and white, it is so strange to see something so dark and differently shaped disappear within the sound of silence. All my many eyes can see them, they can feel their shadows pass over the flickering peels of paper bark. Like prey, the trees silence in their presence, but the deer’s black and white limmed lips strip away thick patches of dried bark from the easiest reaches. Still, no sound comes of it. Only the scattering of leaves marks their passing.
“You stand so still I can swear to the stars that I hear you growing roots. Are you listening to the air around you? young heart of wood? Only the wind knows how to tell their names, their truth.”
And I know a thing or two about that.
Wiry roots creep out of my ears and sew themselves in and out of the papery flesh of my neck, they grow at night after I have had my fill of daylight. Chlorophyll sustains me more than the grass between my toes. My ears grow round and curved in like the dead leaves on my tines, they flicker when a borer creeps out of them. This is my magic, I grow tall and I grow strange.
“Once, not too long ago, I became unstuck from the ground. Before the uprooting, my grove called me Duir.” There was no possible way to remember the way my name sounds when I speak it. No two airs breathe alike. No two birds sing the same.
And I know a thing or two about birds.
A coupling of nuthatch join us in the grove together, and like the deer, they are silent as they gather amber resin within the rills of my weeping boughs. They only titter over the closeness of each other, possessive of the gold that bleeds from my horns.
My gospel has only just begun,
“When I first awoke in my skin, I was not in my grove. I now came from a cedar which grew from the base of my grave. The pine calls me Cernunnos now.” I have taken to looking at Aspara now, the deer warily move around us, the youngest and most brave dare to pick at the rummage closest to us. They are so close that their smells mingle along the gentle breeze, sage and cedarwood, bergamot and fresh rain.
“So a queen and a soldier,” I muse. I know little about societal roles, but I know about bees, and I wonder then, “ - so your home is like a hive, then? Is it not in the forest?”
@
