Unexpected Magic (14 page)

Evor looked up as he crouched and saw the great tree surging and thrashing above him. He was appalled at the effort. In the face of this gigantic undertaking he knew he was lost and forgotten, and besides, it was presumptuous to interfere with such willing agony. He saw her strive and strive again to force those sharp buds open. “If you must be a tree,” he shouted above the din of her lashing branches, “take me with you somehow, at least!”

“Why should you want that?” Phega asked with wooden lips that had not yet quite closed, just where her main boughs parted.

Evor at last dared to clasp the trunk with its vestigial limbs showing. He shed tears on the gray bark. “Because I love you. I want to be with you.”

Trying to see him forced her buds to unfurl, because that was where her senses now were. They spread with myriad shrill agonies, like teeth cutting, and she thought it had killed her, even while she was forcing further nerves and veins to the undersides of all her pale viridian leaves. When it was done, she was all alive and raw in the small hairs on the undersides of those leaves and in the symmetrical ribs of vein on the shiny upper sides, but she could sense Evor crouching at her roots now. She was grateful to him for forcing her to the necessary pain. Her agony responded to his. He was a friend. He had talked of love, and she understood that. She retained just enough of the strength it had taken to change to alter him, too, to some extent, though not enough to bring him beyond the animal kingdom. The last of her strength was reserved for putting forth small pear-shaped fruit covered with wiry hairs, each containing four triangular nuts. Then, before the wooden gap that was her mouth had entirely closed, she murmured, “Budding with growing things.”

She rested for a while, letting the sun harden her leaves to a dark shiny green and ripen her fruit a little. Then she cried wordlessly to the sun, “Look! Remember our bargain. I am an entirely new kind of tree—as strong as an oak, but I bear fruit that everything can eat. Love me. Love me now!” Proudly she shed some of her three-cornered nuts onto the hilltop.

“I see you,” said the sun. “This is a lovely tree, but I am not sure what you expect me to do with you.”

“Love me!” she cried.

“I do,” said the sun. “There is no change in me. The only difference is that I now feed you more directly than I feed that animal at your feet. It is the way I feed all trees. There is nothing else I can do.”

Phega knew the sun was right and that her bargain had been her own illusion. It was very bitter to her; but she had made a change that was too radical to undo now, and besides, she was discovering that trees do not feel things very urgently. She settled back for a long, low-key sort of contentment, rustling her leaves about to make the best of the sun's heat on them. It was like a sigh.

After a while a certain activity among her roots aroused a mild arboreal curiosity in her. With senses that were rapidly atrophying, she perceived a middle-sized iron-gray animal with a sparse bristly coat, which was diligently applying its long snout to the task of eating her three-cornered nuts. The animal was decidedly snaggle-toothed. It was lean and had a sharp corner to the center of its back, as if that was all that remained of a wiry man's military bearing. It seemed to sense her attention, for it began to rub itself affectionately against her gray trunk, which still showed vestiges of rounded legs within it.

Ah, well, thought the tree, and considerately let fall another shower of beech mast for it.

That was long ago. They say that Phega still stands on the hill. She is one of the beech trees that stand on the hill that always holds the last rays of the sun, but so many of the trees in that wood are so old that there is no way to tell which one she is. All the trees show vestiges of limbs in their trunks, and all are given at times to inexplicable thrashings in their boughs, as if in memory of the agony of Phega's transformation. In the autumn their leaves turn the color of Phega's hair and often fall only in spring, as though they cling harder than most leaves in honor of the sun.

There is nothing to eat their nuts now. The wild boar vanished from there centuries ago, though the name stayed. The maps usually call the place Boar's Hill.

M
other was always having crazes. Since she was a strong-minded lady, this meant that the rest of the family had the crazes too—until, that is, Father put his foot down.

This particular craze started as a Hand-Made craze. About the beginning of the summer holidays, Mother suddenly decided that they were going to do without things which were made in factories. “We are going to use,” she declared, “things which are made by people who loved every stitch and nail as they made them.”

This meant that there was suddenly almost no furniture in the house, except the Persian rug in the living room and the stool Paul had made in Woodwork. The stool wobbled. Paul explained that this was because he had
not
loved every nail as he made it. He still had the bruises. Father told him to shut up, or they would have nothing to sit on at all.

After that, Mother threw away most of their clothes. The clothes she got instead were handwoven and large, and in peculiar colors. Paul was glad it was the holidays, because he would not have dared go to school in them. Nina wept bitterly. Mother had thrown away her pink fluffy slippers, because they were made in a factory. Nina loved those slippers. They had pink fluffy bobbles on the front, which Nina stroked every night before she went to sleep. Father raised an outcry too, and refused to go to the office in his new trousers. They were baggy, green sackcloth sort of things, with pink stripes round the legs. Mother let him keep a pair of office trousers on condition he wore the baggy ones at weekends. She made all of them wear flat, handmade sandals that fell off when they walked.

The only one who did not mind was Tim. He was too young to care. He wore his floppy, purple tunic quite happily and, when his sandals fell off, he ran about barefoot, until the soles of his feet were as hard as leather, only rather more yellow. He was fascinated by the clothes Mother wore, too. Mother got a long, long skirt, which looked like dirty lace curtains. Tim found he could see Mother's legs walking through the skirt. He followed her about, watching for the moment when she bent down and the net-curtain trailed on the floor. When she stood up again, her feet always went walking up the front of her skirt inside, and she had to stop and walk backward.

Tim was the only one who did not mind going shopping with Mother that summer. Because, naturally, Mother began insisting on Natural Food. She would trail her gray net skirt into the bread shop, with her handmade basket on her arm, and ask sharply: “Is your bread stone-ground?”

“Oh no,” said the lady. “It's made of flour. Wheat ground, you know.”

Mother had almost no sense of humor. She made her own bread after that, and it
was
rather like stones that had been ground.

In the butcher's she asked: “Has this meat lived a natural life?”

“About as natural as yours, lady,” the butcher said crossly.

Mother swept out of the butcher's and did not buy meat again. She did most of her shopping in the vegetable shop instead, where she would prod each vegetable and each fruit and ask: “Has this been grown with natural manure?”

The greengrocer, who found Mother a valuable customer, always assured her that everything was left entirely to Nature. All the same, Mother never bought anything from abroad, because she was not sure that foreigners had the right, Natural ideas.

Soon, there was almost as little food in the house as there was furniture. There were a great many nuts and raisins, because Mother had not noticed that these things come from foreign parts, but almost the only ordinary food was cornflakes. Mother kept on buying cornflakes because it said on the packet:
Made from finest natural ingredients.
But one can get tired of cornflakes quite easily. Father was so tired of them that he used to take all three children for secret trips to the chip shop. Usually they stopped at the ice-cream van on the corner on the way home, and came back feeling much more satisfied.

It had been a very sunny summer. By the end of it, the brambles at the bottom of the garden were full of ripe blackberries. Mother became inspired. “We should be living off the Fruits of the Earth,” she said. “There is nothing more Natural or more nutritious.” She bought a number of books to find out just what Fruits of the Earth were most good for you, and grew very excited. “We must all go out into the woods and pick things,” she said.

“Good,” said Paul, who had by now eaten most of the blackberries in the garden. “I fancy a blackberry tart.”

“Even with ground-stone pastry,” Nina agreed.

Unfortunately, the nearest woods were ten miles away. Mother would not hear of going by car, because that was not Natural. Her first idea was that they should all cycle there, but she had to give that up when her gray net skirt kept getting tangled in bicycle chain. So she said they must all walk.

“Nonsense,” said Father. “Tim can't possibly walk twenty miles.”

“Besides,” muttered Paul, “people grew quite naturally from apes, so everything people do is natural anyway, even cars.”

Before there could be an argument, Father put Tim in the car and told the other two to get in as well. Mother gave in with dignity, and they all drove to the woods.

There, Mother became strong-minded again. She refused to let them pick blackberries, because there were blackberries at home. She gave Paul and Nina a handmade basket each and set them to pick sloes. She set Father to gathering wild onions on a sunny bank. She herself, with Tim trotting beside her, wandered through the shadier parts of the wood with a shiny new book called
Toadstools for Dinner
open in front of her nose. From time to time she would pounce on an earlike fungus growing on a tree. “These are wonderfully nutritious!” she would call out. “You beat them with a hammer, and then they taste almost like turnips.”

Tim got the idea. He pattered happily about, bringing Mother yellow toadstools, shiny black fungus, and things like purple mushrooms. Some of his finds even looked like proper mushrooms. Mother looked each one up carefully in her book, and said things like: “Oh yes—but you have to boil those for ten hours,” and “Here they are—Oh, put them down at once, Tim! They're deadly poison!”

Meanwhile, Paul and Nina were not very happy picking sloes. First their sandals fell off their feet and their feet got pricked. Then their handwoven clothes seemed too hot. Then too, they soon found that sloe bushes have long spines—sharp ones. Then they tried tasting a sloe each and—Ugh! It was so sour that it made the inside of their mouths ragged.

Father had a better time. He fell asleep on the sunny bank, with a bunch of wild onions draped over his green striped trousers.

He never saw the strange brown face that peered at him through the hedge, and grinned a pitying grin. Shortly, the same face peered through the sloe spines at Nina and Paul. It chuckled, but Nina and Paul did not notice it either. Mother, with her toadstool book in front of her face, never saw or heard anything, even though the face burst into peals of wicked laughter when it looked at her. But Tim saw a crooked hand come out of a bush, with a long brown finger, beckoning. He went where it beckoned. He had a marvelous time. He found a long rope of beautiful shiny red berries. Luckily he dragged the rope along to Mother before he tried to eat the berries. “Look! I found some pretty blackberries.”

“Put them down!” Mother screamed. “Those are bryony. They're deadly poison!”

Tim dropped the beautiful berries as if they were red-hot and hurried away, thinking Mother was very angry.

Maybe this was what made Mother decide they had picked enough of the Fruits of the Earth. She picked up her basket of toadstools, called Paul and Nina, and woke Father up. Then nobody could find Tim. They called and shouted until the woods rang.

Finally, Tim came trotting up from a quite unexpected direction. He was smiling broadly and clutching a plastic bag with something bright pink inside.

“What have you got there?” Mother said suspiciously.

“Mushroom,” Tim said proudly. “A funny man gave it me, with trousers like Father's.”

Father was very cross from sleeping in the sun. He hustled everyone back into the car, and, by the time anyone thought to ask Tim about his funny man, Tim had forgotten. He was only very young.