The Meat Tree (15 page)
I see Campion and Lleu now as one mind. I search high and low for where he might be after that fatal blow. Am I looking for Campion or for Lleu?
*
He
I reach the zenith of my flight and hang there a
moment in space. I'm perfectly balanced between two minds. Suddenly, I'm out in space, standing on nothing. I seem to float.
Campion looks down at the surface of Mars.
Wind
shadow streaks make craters look like comets. I take in Noctis Labyrinthus and the chasms bitten out of the rocks. Dust devils streak the rippled flats
of
Argyre Planitia. Phobos passes over the volcano Ceraunius Tholus.
Then I fall back into gravity. Lleu, the tumbler. A bird of prey, I stoop toward my end.
As Lleu I pick the most remote valley I can find on Earth. It's a cwm with a waterfall. Thirsty mosses thrive in its spray. Dense sessile oaks hide the floor. I pick one whose branches can hide me, away from everyone. There I rest and grieve.
*
She
Where would a man who's been betrayed go?
Out in the wilderness. Gwydion hunts him with
his empathy and love. So I wander all over the region,
using my mind to see how Lleu would perceive.
*
He
Better to be a dying eagle than an imaginary man, a character made up by others.
I hide because I hate the tricks that have kept me viable till now. Blodeuwedd saw through them because she, like me, was kidnapped by Gwydion's plans. I love her still; she gave me the one way out, into reality.
*
She
When all else fails, turn to animals.
I stay with a peasant who has a pig of remarkable girth and health. At night, when she's let into the house, the heat from her glossy flesh keeps us cosy. I ask my host where the sow grazes. He doesn't know. I regard her eye, so human under its blonde eyelashes.
*
He
Except I'm finding it hard to die. My eye sees everything on the valley floor: voles and mice venturing
out of cover, small flocks of songbirds feeding on
insects in high branches, nuthatches creeping headfirst down trunksâ¦
I refuse them as food and feel the wind pass through me.
*
She
I follow the sow when she's let out of the house in the morning. She rushes into the woods and it's hard to keep up with her, she's so greedy.
I come to a hanging valley. In a grove one
particular tree draws my attention and that of the sow. She's standing under it eating â what? I look closely. The tree is flush with scarlet and deep gold leaves and yes, they fall, but with them are meat and maggots. The sow is feasting on flesh. I crane my neck, look up and there, in the foliage, I see the dark brown of a bird. It's so emaciated that it's scarcely alive. I've found the wounded Lleu.
He
Nona, that's great that you've found Lleu, but I'm at the entrance to the interface.
She
This is the boy whose mother named him Light. He's living his autumn. No magic of mine could ever have avoided that.
He
Nona! It was staring us in the face all the time!
She
These falling gobbets of flesh are Lleu's flowers. Just as Math and I created Blodeuwedd, caused blossoms to become flesh, now Lleu is flowering into meat and I can't stop it.
He
The answer's in the characters that everyone forgot!
She
I must coax him down by talking. Can't use a spell, he's too weak. Besides, I think he's had enough of that. I'll tell him instead what he really is.
He
They've come together and have altered the rules of the game.
She
My darling, I see you as an eagle high in the top of the tree.
He
They are the context that make perfect sense of everything else.
Nona, I see Gwydion below me. His mouth is
moving, but I don't understand what he's saying to me.
She
I see you Lleu, and though it's good to be here for a while, you don't belong in the forest.
He
Now I hear Gwydion's voice. It makes me homesick. I hop down to hear more of its melody.
Nona, I need to tell you, everything we believed about this game is wrong.
She
I've hurt you. I've been too intent on having my own way. I beg that Lleu would come to my lap and forgive his uncle.
He
Oh, he speaks softly and I long to be close to this person who's so warm. What I've seen is true but cold.
She
Gwydion strikes his nephew with his wand and makes him a man again, though pitiful to see, thin and wasted.
And Campion opens his eyes and screams, Nona, we need to get off this ship. I've seen its core. The meat tree is eating us alive.
She
He's beside himself, so terrified that he makes no sense. He's raving.
So I sedate him and take his place.
*
He
I talk to Nona in my mind. I try to warn her but she goes ahead, reckless as ever.
She
The meat tree. Where Gwydion found the wounded Lleu. But he meant something else.
Gwydion and Lleu return to court for Lleu to
recover his strength and to think how to take their revenge. Blodeuwedd and the hunter are living openly together in Lleu's own house. It's a scandal.
As Nona, I return to the tree and stand there alone, listening to the rustles in the grove. Somewhere a woodpecker drills. Moss grows on the northern side of the trunk, a vegetable shadow. The birds decide
I'm worth ignoring and begin to sing. The glade settles down and I hear a small cry, a death in the
underbrush. I begin to see.
First, a fawn-like pair of eyes that become a
young man. Then another boy, just to his right,
with the blonde eyelashes of a hog.
Then a third with the startling yellow eyes of the wolf. I've no doubt that, had they so chosen, they could have remained invisible to me. The three boys born in the forest,
Gwydion and Gilfaethwy's forgotten children:
Hyddwn, Hychddwn and Bleiddwn.
And suddenly I think I know what Campion tried to tell me. It wasn't Math who was the Mastermind
behind the VR games but these three sons. I'm looking
at the centre of the game, its authors. Still silent, they look at me with curiosity, as if I were a strange animal.
I'm feeling uneasy and I don't know why. I saw these boys christened, so they should be no threat, nor even strangers to me and yet their stares are so alien that I feel my hands sweat. The boys seem to smell my fear and this brings tiny smiles to their mouths. One licks his lips. They circle me.
I should have waited for Campion. He'd know what to do.
He
Can't you see that these three shouldn't be here? They're monsters that look like children. Gwydion and Math's original sin is that they've mixed their stories with their own flesh and blood.
She
I step back and imagine how I appear to these boys.
I see one breathe in, as if he's savouring my scent.
It's terrifying.
He
That's it!
You've got exactly the right connection. It's the imagination!
She
I must look strange to them, an interpolator from another age. A gatecrasher, someone who's changed the plot of their favourite story.
He
Yes, it's all to do with the plot!
She
Do they see me as on the side of the magicians who conjured them into being then left them alone? They move closer and I feel a rage â it must be from them â at being taken out of one realm in which they were happy, had parents and put into another where they were treated as orphans.
He
That's what they want, your empathy!
She
I look down at myself through their eyes and I'm
startled to see how luscious my flesh looks, like
orchid petals. My skin is translucent and I see my blood vessels throb with my goodness. I feel like prey.
He
That's it! They're hungry and you're their sport.
She
They're standing too close now and even if I tried, I couldn't break away from them.
He
Don't you see? They feed on your imagination. All the time we've been inside the game, we've been nothing but fuel. They used the plot to draw us in, like insects on the slippery ledge of a Venus flytrap.
She
We thought we were the investigators when, all the time, they were probing our minds.
He
Think literal, Nona, it's your only defence! The VR game has been one huge trap to lure us to the place where these three can use us completely.
She
They seem to be hypnotising me. I feel the pupils of my eyes dilate and I let them in. This is something like rape but more subtle, because they're feeding on⦠on - could it be⦠the story I've made up about them?
He
Think species of bird! The names of planets! Any
thing to take you away from the visions they're
hunting.
She
I hear him! Think birds. Ah! Blackbird, sparrow, robinâ¦
He
That's it! Carry on. What they hate is facts. Chaffinch!
She
Chaffinch! Uh⦠goldfinch! Woodpecker! Willow warblerâ¦
He
They pull away from her and widen the circle.
Tree creeper!
She
Heron! Barn owl! Crow!
He
Nona, take your chance and run!
*
She
When I get back, Campion's just stirring.
He
So, you've seen the interface now. What do you think?
She
That the game's not human.
He
It's not an Earth vessel at all. You tried to tell me, but I wouldn't listen.
She
It's come from much further afield, from outside this solar system. Maybe from somewhere like the Great Attractor, or the Coma Cluster because you need that much timeâ¦
He
That's about three hundred million light years awayâ¦
She
Yes, long enough for the ship and crew to have evolved into something so strange we didn't recognise it.
He
It disguised itself, using what was in our own heads to look familiar.
She
You mean, it made itself look like our own ideas of a standard Earth ship of a certain period?
He
And that's the key. It used our own ideas.
She
But the VR stories. We didn't make those up.
He
No, they're part of the ship. The marriage of human beings with animals and plantsâ¦
She
So we can read that as a kind of parable of the
vessel's history?
He
That's right. The ship's been travelling for millions of years. Since it set off there have been many
generations of children born on board. They've
grown up and had their own offspring time and
time again. With such a small population, the gene pool must have become impoverished.
She
But where would they find more of their own species to mate with? We're not talking humans here, are we?
He
No, they must have come across some inhabited places â the odd colony or even stray ships, and bred with the species they found there, incorporated them into their genome.
She
You mean, like Gwydion and Gilfaethwy turning into various creatures in the forest?
He
Yes, it must have happened several times, and the story reflected it.
She
They must at some point have come across plants which then travelled with them.
He
And when two forms of life have so much time in a closed environment with each other â remember, we're talking millions of years â it's not strange to find⦠I can hardly think it.
She
That they evolved together?