Believing Is Seeing (10 page)

Mr. Smith smiled at her through the back window of the car. The car was already swinging round backward into the driveway. Anne stood where she was, with the poker raised. She held her breath. The heroes were standing about halfway up the drive. Marlene was pointing at the car and gasping as usual. “Another monster!”

“Go for its big black feet!” Enna Hittims shouted, and she led the three heroes at a run toward the car.

Mr. Smith never saw them. He backed briskly down the drive. Halfway there, the heroes saw the danger. Marlene screamed, and they all turned and ran the other way. But the car, even slowing down, was moving far faster than they could run. Anne watched the big, black, zigzag-patterned tire roll over on top of them. There was the tiniest possible crunching. Much as she hated the heroes by now, Anne let her breath out with a shudder.

Before Anne could lower the poker, there was a sharp hiss. The enchanted sword, and perhaps the magic spike, too, could still do damage. Mr. Smith jumped out of the car. Anne ran across the lawn, and they both watched the right-hand back tire sink into a flat squashiness.

Mr. Smith looked ruefully from the tire to Anne's face. “Your face has gone down, too,” he said. “Did you know?”

“
Has
it?” Anne put up her hand to feel. The mumps were now only two small lumps on either side of her chin.

While she was feeling them, her father turned and got something out of the car. “Here you are,” he said. He passed her a fat new drawing book and a large pack of felt tips. “I knew you were going to run out of drawing things today.”

Anne looked at the rows of different colors and the thick book of paper. She knew her father hated going to the drawing shop. There was never anywhere to park, and he always got a parking ticket. But he had gone there specially and then come home early to give them to her. “Thanks!” she said. “Er—I'm afraid there's rather a mess indoors.”

Mr. Smith smiled cheerfully. “Then isn't it lucky you're so much better?” he said. “You can tidy up while I'm putting the spare wheel on.”

It seemed fair, Anne thought. She turned toward the house, wondering where to start. The macaroni, the china lamp, or the milk? She looked down at the pack of felt tips while she tried to decide. They were a different make from the old lot. That was a good thing. She was fairly sure that it was her drawings that had brought Enna Hittims and her friends to life like that. The old felt tips would not have been called Magic Markers for nothing.

T
here was a girl called Phega who became a tree. Stories from the ancient times when Phega lived would have it that when women turned into trees, it was always under duress, because a god was pursuing them, but Phega turned into a tree voluntarily. She did it from the moment she entered her teens. It was not easy, and it took a deal of practice, but she kept at it. She would go into the fields beyond the manor house where she lived, and there she would put down roots, spread her arms, and say, “For you I shall spread out my arms.” Then she would become a tree.

She did this because she was in love with the sun. The people who looked after her when she was a child told her that the sun loved the trees above all other living things. Phega concluded that this must be so from the way most trees shed their leaves in winter when the sun was unable to attend to them very much. As Phega could not remember a time when the sun had not been more to her than mother, father, or life itself, it followed that she had to become a tree.

At first she was not a very good tree. The trunk of her tended to bulge at hips and breast and was usually an improbable brown color. The largest number of branches she could achieve was four or five at the most. These stood out at unconvincing angles and grew large, pallid leaves in a variety of shapes. She strove with these defects valiantly, but for a long time it always seemed that when she got her trunk to look more natural, her branches were fewer and more misshapen, and when she grew halfway decent branches, either her trunk relapsed or her leaves were too large or too yellow.

“Oh, sun”—she sighed—“do help me to be more pleasing to you.” Yet it seemed unlikely that the sun was even attending to her. “But he will!” Phega said, and driven by hope and yearning, she continued to stand in the field, striving to spread out more plausible branches. Whatever shape they were, she could still revel in the sun's impartial warmth on them and in the searching strength of her roots reaching into the earth. Whether the sun was attending or not, she knew the deep peace of a tree's long, wordless thoughts. The rain was pure delight to her, instead of the necessary evil it was to other people, and the dew was a marvel.

The following spring, to her delight, she achieved a reasonable shape, with a narrow, lissome trunk and a cloud of spread branches, not unlike a fruiting tree. “Look at me, sun,” she said. “Is this the kind of tree you like?”

The sun glanced down at her. Phega stood at that instant between hope and despair. It seemed that he attended to the wordless words.

But the sun passed on, beaming, not unkindly, to glance at the real apple trees that stood on the slope of the hill.

I need to be different in some way, Phega said to herself.

She became a girl again and studied the apple trees. She watched them put out big pale buds and saw how the sun drew those buds open to become leaves and white flowers. Choking with the hurt of rejection, she saw the sun dwelling lovingly on those flowers, which made her think at first that flowers were what she needed. Then she saw that the sun drew those flowers on, quite ruthlessly, until they died, and that what came after were green blobs that turned into apples.

“Now I know what I need,” she said.

It took a deal of hard work, but the following spring she was able to say, “Look at me, sun. For you I shall hold out my arms budded with growing things,” and spread branches full of white blossom that she was prepared to force on into fruit.

This time, however, the sun's gaze fell on her only in the way it fell on all living things. She was very dejected. Her yearning for the sun to love her grew worse.

“I still need to be different in some way,” she said.

That year she studied the sun's ways and likings as she had never studied them before. In between she was a tree. Her yearning for the sun had grown so great that when she was in human form, it was as if she were less than half alive. Her parents and other human company were shadowy to her. Only when she was a tree with her arms spread to the sunlight did she feel she was truly in existence.

As that year took its course, she noticed that the place the sun first touched unfailingly in the morning was the top of the hill beyond the apple trees. And it was the place where he lingered last at sunset. Phega saw this must be the place the sun loved best. So, though it was twice as far from the manor, Phega went daily to the top of that hill and took root there. This meant that she had an hour more of the sun's warm company to spread her boughs into, but the situation was not otherwise as good as the fields. The top of the hill was very dry. When she put down roots, the soil was thin and tasted peculiar. And there was always a wind up there. Phega found she grew bent over and rather stunted.

“But what more can I do?” she said to the sun. “For you I shall spread out my arms, budded with growing things, and root within the ground you warm, accepting what that brings.”

The sun gave no sign of having heard, although he continued to linger on the top of the hill at the beginning and end of each day. Phega would walk home in the twilight considering how she might grow roots that were adapted to the thin soil and pondering ways and means to strengthen her trunk against the wind. She walked slightly bent over and her skin was pale and withered.

Up till now Phega's parents had indulged her and not interfered. Her mother said, “She's very young.” Her father agreed and said, “She'll get over this obsession with rooting herself in time.” But when they saw her looking pale and withered and walking with a stoop, they felt the time had come to intervene. They said to one another, “She's old enough to marry now, and she's ruining her looks.”

The next day they stopped Phega before she left the manor on her way to the hill. “You must give up this pining and rooting,” her mother said to her. “No girl ever found a husband by being out in all weathers like this.”

And her father said, “I don't know what you're after with this tree nonsense. I mean, we can all see you're very good at it, but it hasn't got much bearing on the rest of life, has it? You're our only child, Phega. You have the future of the manor to consider. I want you married to the kind of man I can trust to look after the place when I'm gone. That's not the kind of man who's going to want to marry a tree.”

Phega burst into tears and fled away across the fields and up the hill.

“Oh, dear!” her father said guiltily. “Did I go too far?”

“Not at all,” said her mother. “I would have said it if you hadn't. We must start looking for a husband for her. Find the right man, and this nonsense will slide out of her head from the moment she claps eyes on him.”

It happened that Phega's father had to go away on business, anyway. He agreed to extend his journey and look for a suitable husband for Phega while he was away. His wife gave him a good deal of advice on the subject, ending with a very strong directive not to tell any prospective suitor that Phega had this odd habit of becoming a tree—at least not until the young man was safely proved to be interested in marriage, anyway. And as soon as her husband was away from the manor, she called two servants she could trust and told them to follow Phega and watch how she turned into a tree. “For it must be a process we can put a stop to somehow,” she said, “and if you can find out how we can stop her for good, so much the better.”

Phega, meanwhile, rooted herself breathlessly into the shallow soil at the top of the hill. “Help me,” she called out to the sun. “They're talking of marrying me and the only one I love is you!”

The sun pushed aside an intervening cloud and considered her with astonishment. “Is this why you so continually turn into a tree?” he said.

Phega was too desperate to consider the wonder of actually, at last, talking to the sun. She said, “All I do, I do in the remote, tiny hope of pleasing you and causing you to love me as I love you.”

“I had no idea,” said the sun, and he added, not unkindly, “but I do love everything according to its nature, and your nature is human. I might admire you for so skillfully becoming a tree, but that is, when all is said and done, only an imitation of a tree. It follows that I love you better as a human.” He beamed and was clearly about to pass on.

Phega threw herself down on the ground, half woman and half tree, and wept bitterly, thrashing her branches and rolling back and forth. “But I love you,” she cried out. “You are the light of the world, and I love you. I
have
to be a tree because then I have no heart to ache for you, and even as a tree I ache at night because you aren't there. Tell me what I can do to make you love me.”

The sun paused. “I do not understand your passion,” he said. “I have no wish to hurt you, but this is the truth: I cannot love you as an imitation of a tree.”

A small hope came to Phega. She raised the branches of her head. “Could you love me if I stopped pretending to be a tree?”

“Naturally,” said the sun, thinking this would appease her. “I would love you according to your nature, human woman.”

“Then I make a bargain with you,” said Phega. “I will stop pretending and you will love me.”

“If that is what you want,” said the sun, and went on his way.

Phega shook her head free of branches and her feet from the ground and sat up, brooding, with her chin on her hands. That was how her mother's servants found her and watched her warily from among the apple trees. She sat there for hours. She had bargained with the sun as a person might bargain for her very life, out of the desperation of her love, and she needed to work out a plan to back her bargain with. It gave her slight shame that she was trying to trap such a being as the sun, but she knew that was not going to stop her. She was beyond shame.

There is no point imitating something that already exists, she said to herself, because that is pretending to be that thing. I will have to be some kind that is totally new.