The Forest (47 page)

‘That was the oak tree that Walter Tyrrell’s arrow glanced off before it killed King William Rufus.’ So people said, and for all Albion’s life, at least, the forest folk had called it the Rufus tree.

Could it be so, Albion wondered? Did oak trees really live so long in the rather poor soil of the Forest?

‘The life of an oak is seven times the life of a man,’ his father had long ago told him. His own guess was that few of the great rotting, ivy-encrusted hulks with their twenty-foot
girths were above four centuries old; and in this estimate he was roughly correct. The Rufus oak did not look five hundred years old to him.

Yet there was certainly something wonderful, even magical about the mighty tree.

The tree knew many things.

It was nearly three hundred years since Luke the runaway lay brother had planted it in a place of safety. Since then the wood had moved a little, as woods may do; deer and other grazing animals had eaten up the new shoots in the grassy glade and in this way the tree had been granted an open space of its own in which to grow. While its brethren in the wood, therefore, had grown up tall and narrow beside their neighbours, as oaks in natural woodland usually do, the branches of the Rufus oak had been free to spread outwards as well as upwards, seeking the light.

Despite the name that men had foolishly given it, the Rufus oak had begun its life two centuries too late to play any role in the dramatic death of the red-haired king – which had anyway taken place in quite another part of the Forest. But its life was already old, and complex.

The tree knew that winter was coming. The thousands of leaves, which had gathered in the light, would soon become a burden in the winter frosts. Already, therefore, it had begun to shut down this part of its huge system. The vessels that took the sap to and from the leaves were gradually closing. The remaining moisture in them was evaporating in the September sun, causing them to grow dry and yellow. Just as, in its different season, the male deer seals off the supply of blood to its antlers so that they dry out and are shed, so the tree in a similar fashion would shed its golden leaves.

Before the leaves, however, there would be two other fallings.

The acorns were already dropping in their green
thousands. The crop of acorns for any oak will vary, depending mostly on the weather, from year to year; but unlike most other species, the oak as it grows older increases its production of seed, reaching the height of its fecundity in late middle age. Already the pigs were feeding upon the acorns as they pattered down below the spreading branches and scurrying mice would nibble them at night; and others would be taken further away by squirrels, or by jays who might fly some distance before burying them for safekeeping in the ground. Thus the oak was dispersing its seed for future generations.

The other falling was subtler and scarcely noticed. For during the spring the tiny gall wasp, which more resembles a flying ant than the common wasp, had laid its spangle-galls on the underside of the oak leaves. Now these galls, like little red warts, were detaching themselves and flittering down so that they could lie for the winter, hidden and insulated by the leaves that were about to fall on top of them.

Meanwhile, in the bark of the tree, the sap containing the essential sugar was sinking down to its roots, deep underground, to be stored there through the frosts.

Yet if it seemed that this was a season only of closure, it was not so. True, the falling of the leaves would see some of the oak tree’s companions of the spring and summer depart: the various warblers, the blackcaps and redstarts, would leave for warmer climes. But the hardy year rounders, the robins and wrens, the chaffinches, blackbirds and bluetits, although they might diminish or end their song, would still remain. The tawny owl had no thought of leaving the ancient oak; weeks had yet to pass before the myriad bats settled down into their winter sleep within its crevices. Others, thrushes and redwings, were just arriving in the Forest on their way from much harsher habitats. And the ivy that crept along its lower branches would actually use this season to flower, thus attracting the insects
who would have been too busy, before now, to pollinate its flowers.

Indeed, the oak tree was about to supply the Forest with a prodigious quantity of food. It was not only the acorns. Upon the tree itself, its bark presented a continent of cracks and crevices in which countless tiny insects and other invertebrates moved about. In autumn the tits would descend upon this territory in flocks to feast upon them. Nuthatches would walk down while tree creepers went up, so that nothing was missed. But most important of all were the dropping leaves.

Death is not final in the Forest, but only a transformation. A rotting tree trunk lying on the ground provides home and food for a thousand tiny invertebrates; the falling leaves, as they decompose, are broken down by many organisms, especially woodlice and worms – although because of its acid soil, the Forest has few if any snails. But the greatest breakdown of material takes place afterwards and at a deeper level. For then it is the turn of the fungi.

Fungus – pale, loathsome, connected with mildew and rot, and poison, and death. And yet it is not. Is it a plant? Of a kind, although it is seldom green like the plants that sustain themselves, for the fungus contains no chlorophyll. Its cell walls, strangely, are made not of cellulose but of chitin, which also forms the walls of an insect’s body. It lives upon other organisms, like a parasite. The ancients, uncertain how to classify the fungus, said that it belonged to chaos.

And in the Forest the fungi are everywhere. Mostly they exist as strings of fungal matter, almost like bootlaces, called hyphae. Under the tree bark, under the rotting leaves, under the ground, they spread into a tangled web known as mycelium. And it is this hidden mass of mycelium that converts the rotted leaf mould, returning the nutrients – nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus – to the soil to nourish the forest’s future life.

It is only the fruit of the fungus that is normally seen and
at no time did so much appear as at the autumn season in the oak woods. In the vicinity of the Rufus oak there were hundreds of species: the beefsteak fungus, like a raw steak on the base of an ancient oak bole; edible mushrooms and the poisonous death caps that mimicked them; red-and-white-spotted toadstools; the friendly penny bun, which is edible and whose mycelium draws sugar from the oak roots and gives them minerals in return; and the evil-smelling stinkhorn which, growing from a round underground pod called a witch’s egg, bursts into the upper world in a single day, with a slimy cap that draws the flies, before collapsing and shrivelling back only a day or two after its appearance.

These and many others shared the forest floor beneath the oak with tufted grass and moss, and yellow pimpernel.

When Albion reached the tree he dismounted. He had taken his time. After his mother had turned eastwards towards Romsey and Winchester, he had come slowly down into the Forest, pausing at hamlets here and there, hoping that the wood’s great quietness might calm his spirits. But it had not worked. Not only had his mother terrified him, but after her revelation, the business he must conduct the next day made him still more apprehensive. He was glad, therefore, to come and rest under the spreading oak. Perhaps that would bring him peace.

Why was it, he wondered, that the great oak had this power to revive him? What was its magic? Was it just the huge, gnarled strength of the tree? The fact that it remained there, a living thing yet unchanging, like an ancient rock? Both these things, he thought; and the falling acorns, and the rustling leaves. There was, however, something else – something he had often felt when he stood by the trunk of some full-grown spreading oak. It was almost as if the tree were enclosing him within an invisible sphere of strength and power. It was a strange feeling, yet palpable. He was sure of it, even if he could not say why.

In a way, his sense of the tree was accurate. For it is a fact
that the roots of a tree mirror the spreading crown of its branches. As the branches spread out, so do the roots in proportion. If the tree’s branches die back, the roots do too. As above, so below. In this respect the system of the tree as a whole rather resembles, at top and bottom, the magnetic field of a bar magnet, or indeed of the Earth itself. And who knows what force fields, as yet unmeasured by man, may surround the physical manifestation of a tree?

After a little time, therefore, somewhat strengthened, Albion emerged from the oak to face the dangers of the coming days.

Jane Furzey was happy because she was with Nick Pride who was tall and handsome, and going to marry her when she said yes. She was going to say yes, but not until she had made him wait; that was what every girl did if she could.

‘Make him wait a year, Jane,’ her mother had told her. ‘If he loves you truly, he’ll want you all the more.’

She wasn’t going to give herself to him until they married either. She was going to get married in style. And in this exciting state they went about together often.

It had been kind of Clement Albion to allow her to come with the men this morning. There were just three men including Nick, and herself, bumping along in the little cart, while Albion rode his horse beside them. She was proud that Albion should have selected Nick for such special duties. She dangled her sturdy legs over the back of the cart. She had taken off her sandals. The sun was warm on her legs; the cool, salty air on her bare toes was delicious.

This expedition was rather an adventure and she looked about her with interest. They had already passed Lymington; she had never been down here before.

Jane was sixteen, Nick Pride eighteen. He lived in the village of Minstead, a couple of miles north of Lyndhurst, she in the hamlet of Brook, a mile and a half north of that. Their parents who, like most parents, were wise in these
matters, thought they were perfect for each other; and so they were.

During the centuries the Prides had settled in many parts of the Forest, but the Furzeys had mostly stayed down in the south. Except for Jane’s family. For some reason – no one could remember when – the descendants of Adam Furzey had moved up to the Minstead area. ‘The Furzeys up at Minstead don’t get along with the other Furzeys,’ the Forest people would remark. And although in that region, where all the smallholding families intermarried, such differences usually got ironed out, it remained true that the Minstead Furzeys were a bit unusual. During the Wars of the Roses one of them had become a priest; and in the reign of old King Harry another had gone to Southampton. ‘He became a merchant,’ Nick’s father had told him. ‘Did very well, they say.’ The other Furzeys might mutter that the Minstead family thought too much of themselves, but this was no problem for the Prides, who thought well of themselves too. Nick Pride’s father and Jane’s father had always got along well and on the day, ten years ago, when Jane’s father had moved up to Brook, Nick’s father had remarked: ‘I reckon your Jane and my boy Nick would make a nice pair.’ And Jane’s father had agreed and told his wife, who knew it anyway. So there it was.

There was nothing very remarkable about Jane. She had a broad brow, brown hair parted in the middle, deep-blue eyes; she was short, with wide, well-shaped hips. Men were drawn to her. She cooked and baked and sewed; she looked after her little brothers and sisters; she had a dog called Jack who liked to chase squirrels; and there was nothing about the family’s smallholding she didn’t know.

She could also read, which was unusual. No one else in the family could, nor in any of the families like hers in Minstead or Brook. Had her father lived in a city like London as a small merchant or craftsman at this date, he would probably have been able to read. But in the country
there was still little need. A rich yeoman with a big farm of his own might be a man of considerable substance but still mark his name with a cross, while the penniless clerk wrote it out in full.

No one had taught her to read. She had just, somehow, picked it up herself, from a Bible she had pored over in Minstead church, and from other written material she had found in visits to local markets. She did not prize this knowledge highly, since it was of little practical use; but it had amused her to learn something new. Nick Pride was rather pleased, though. ‘My wife can read,’ he could hear himself saying. It was an accomplishment, enough to show the world that he had married a superior woman. These things were important to a man.

When they married Jane would not be bringing any gold or jewellery or silken clothes with her: there was no need for such things in the Forest. But there was one small and humble ornament which she had begged and she had been promised for her wedding day.

It was a strange little wooden cross that hung on a string round her mother’s neck. Jane’s father had given it to her when they married.

‘I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s always been in the family,’ he had told her. ‘Hundreds of years, they say.’ He had shaken his head. ‘Funny old thing, really, but my grandfather told me: “You keep hold of that. That’s your birthright.”’

The cedarwood cross with its curious carving had been worn on the skin of so many generations now that it was almost black. But there was something about this family talisman that had always fascinated Jane since she was a little girl. She loved to touch it and hold it in her hand. She would try to decipher its carving as though it might hold some secret meaning. For she felt that it must, even if she could have no idea of the message that had been sent her, by a monkish ancestor, nearly three hundred years before.