Sorbier
(Les Chroniques infernales)
(Les Chroniques infernales)
Esther Rochon
(Chapter 3, p. 30-38)
The Rowan Tree
Ougris, foggy and reserved, closed around its mysteries that did not reach as far as the capitals, supported by the rather unrestrained intuitions of certain by its inhabitants, endured.
The small city was located in a more temperate zone than the Archipelago. It was there that the telepathic birds, thanks to their patience, their sense of observation and their powers, had been able to, without anyone detecting them, discover one person for whom the name Sutherland still meant something. He did not dither. He went through Arxann's portal, paused to become accustomed to the faster time of Vrénalik's world, then climbed without further delay towards Ougris, where he passed himself off as a financially independent, self-taught scholar, with a passion for the ancient history of the Archipelago.
With his body of one of the infernal just, Sutherland was a past master of disguises, invisibility and various spells, so easy to perform for infernals living in the outside worlds. With his memory of one of the just, it had been very easy for him to learn the language spoken in Ougris, and a few others too.
Therefore, taking on the appearance of a man from southern Ougris, with red hair and a pale complexion, which he had been in his previous life, he contacted Sayadena, a primary school teacher in Ougris. She was the one, the archivist of the Daughters of Jeanne, or of Chann, a women's organization the origins of which were supposed to go back to the famous Chann Iskiad. She was the one the birds had noticed. The name Taïm Sutherland appeared in the archives that were in her care.
Sutherland did not suspect what this incursion into the world of his previous life, with its sensations so different from what he knew, was going to lead to. His quest was very minor in comparison to the immense tasks of Rel and Lame, which so many lives depended on. There were also times when he would wonder why he, the just one with the phlegmatic nature, wanted so much to learn more about how his previous life had been perceived. In fact, he had no idea how these different elements would intermingle. By entering Sayadena's home, he had access to a peaceful world, forgotten by all the others, where rarely consulted papers were yellowing on shelves.
He hadn't taken the trouble to really change his appearance; his commanding presence as an advisor to Rel as well as his natural elegance were still there. He had not weighed the implications. At first, Sayadena was not indifferent to the handsome stranger who had just entered her life and showed such a curiosity for the old archives cluttering her bachelor apartment.A dozen files were stacked on her bookshelf. Sayadena picked one up, an orange, dog-eared cardboard folder. In front of the window, she searched among the papers scattered over her desk. Some were yellowed, others looked new. What was she looking for?
Perhaps she was trying to determine to what extent she would open up to him. From the old armchair, a little too small for Sutherland, where she had invited him to sit, he noticed rare drawings of which he could not make out the subject; some were in colour. Maps, maybe, and also no doubt flowers and landscapes; gold and turquoise dominated, contrasting with the paper, which had taken on a cream hue with age, combining with the red, indigo and grass green. He could also make out the sharp lines of black ink drawings. Most of the sheets, of glossy paper, of newsprint, printer, photocopier or notebook paper, were, however, covered in text, mostly printed, but sometimes hand-written.
It was thus possible to see a mingling of different eras and styles, ranging from the florid passion of youth, with its twists and spiral curves, to the melancholy of a few grey, misty landscapes, with the majority of them texts and not drawings, and most did not seemed to be originals. Instead they were borrowed material, disparate copies of which he did not understand the contents, but which gave the impression of a personality that was on the decline, which was borrowing more and more from the outside to the detriment of self-assertion.
He expected nothing more from her; it would have been an exaggeration to say he was disappointed. Indifferent rather, a little ill at ease, he looked at her. Certainly, she was in love with him. She had found a pretext to have him come here. Of course, he also wanted to talk to her. For reasons she did not suspect. A bird had told him to make contact.
Obviously, she wanted to share something with him. All those folders - a youthful project, no doubt, pursued in collaboration with others. People from here rarely undertook such projects on their own. He watched her search through those folders, accumulated over the course of a lifetime, and much longer, because Sayadena kept the archives of the Daughters of Chann. The oldest documents had had all the time they needed to grow yellow. Her hair was beginning to go grey. He felt affection for her.
On the other hand, what she had to show him meant nothing to him, for the time being, no more than the application with which she had pursued a rather ordinary, insignificant interest as an amateur. He had no desire to learn more about the contents of these old files; as for the prospect of making love to her, the less said, the better. However, he would have to, at the very least, go through the files. He, too, had invested in this meeting. He knew well that his current absence of desire and interest was false, the expression of his fear of the answers he had been looking for too long.
He looked outside. It was one of his ways of running away: turn his attention, discreetly, to something distant. He had no desire to hurt her.
The apartment was on the ground floor. A little tree was growing, valiantly, not far from the window. It was still bare of leaves or buds: spring was about to begin. Its illuminated shape was fully visible against the azure sky. The sun shone on the windswept branches, making them shine a pale golden colour, in the humble glory of having resisted winter. Where the rays did not strike, that gold changed to an old patina bronze colour, vivid with tinges of scarlet and emerald. If one's gaze continued following the roundness of the slender branch, the tawny silkiness darkened to black, the bark absorbing the heat of the wind, reaching up from the earth, where the large-crystalled snow dusted with soot had almost finished melting.
The building in which she lived was at the top of the slope that led down to the sea, to the north, which still was not visible from here. The window looked to the northeast. The afternoon sun was shining unseen, illuminating the landscape. The branches of the tree were cut off a bit at the top and on the left by the window frame. Half way between the slender stems and the knotty branches, made for carrying loads, supple and joyous, undisciplined and young, the golden tree spread its leaves against, or rather into the intensely blue sky, cloudless and with no visible sun, entirely made of light and space. The pale gold, bronze and the black of the branches cut into the azure, accentuating its freedom.
Moved by such beauty, again he wanted to take some distance. Tilting his head to get a better look at the top of the tree, he tried to make out whether a bird was adorning those living branches, which he found much more miraculous than the old papers his school mistress continued picking through.
Sayadena observed his movement and what he was looking at. Masking her disappointment - unless she was not feeling any - she pointed to the tree:
"It's a rowan."
Her voice was melodious. He nodded, hiding his feeling that he'd been punched in the heart. A rowan! He hadn't even recognized it! In fact, without leaves, all the trees looked alike. Anyway, was it his destiny catching up to him?
Perhaps he had misunderstood. He had a poor command of her language. It must be another species. This woman meant nothing to him. Could she speak knowledgably of such a tree? Come now! To do this, you had to be handsome, you had to be free, and not be obstinately digging through piles and piles of collected papers, searching for such faded meaning in life that you don't have the courage to discover directly. No, an error must have slipped in somewhere. She could not have said rowan.
He realized that his palms were clammy. If at least there had been a bird in the vicinity. He was far from his points of reference.
She took a step towards him.
He noticed her dull skin, her high cheekbones, her almond eyes, as if he were seeing them for the first time. Her mature, affectionate presence, her stability as a teacher who knows how to comfort generations of children, did not reassure him. Sooner or later, she would offer herself to him. No doubt she was already doing it. In spite of the modesty of her gesture, the simplicity of her ample clothes, she gave an impression of sensuality.
Previously, he would have answered her. Without hesitation, he would have stood up and he would have taken her in his arms. It would have made her happy. She would have stroked his red hair and put her head on his chest, she would have loved being caressed by his big hands and by his whole big, strong, bony body.
He felt nothing, except perhaps embarrassment. The fear was deep down inside him. The volume of reality was becoming too strong. Everything was too intense. This meeting could really be crucial.
After all, the tree was perhaps not even a rowan.
"Does it have red fruit in the autumn?" he asked in a voice he wanted to be neutral.
"Yes. The sparrows come and eat it."
Going back to the table, smoothly and calmly, she picked up a few yellow papers. Old stapled photocopies.
"In fact," she remarked, "I've just found this. In the group I belong to, we like rowans a lot. Do you know that some say they have magic power? Listen."
She read hazy quotations out of the traditions of sorcery, poetry, botany and symbolist psychology. The rowan tree fed the birds as much as the ants. With its white, fragrant flowers, as fine as lace, and its red, acrid, shiny fruit like beads of precious lacquer, it was subtle and passionate, capable of penetrating everywhere, of grasping everything, of enthralling the whole world, from the hells to the heavens. Like love. A variety of tree moreover that was called love rowan.
He sighed.
She continued. The rowan was a kind of ash and, everyone knew, the ash of legends reaches all the way down to hell with its roots and up to the heavens with its crown. Moreover, the rowan, the ash of the mountains, through the spectacular contrast between its fruit and its foliage, represented the union of emerald and scarlet, of fire and ocean, of mystery and passion. A species of rowan was also named "allier," no doubt because of this strange and vital alliance.
Vigorous and supple, it could bend without breaking, resisting a load of ice as it did the load of fruit that bowed its branches in autumn. It could be seen dancing in the storms. Its foliage, almost staggering in the repetitive precision of its composite leaves, showed the most intimate depths of reality endlessly displayed, eternally accessible and quite simple, offered to whoever cares to grasp it.
He had a feeling of panic. Obviously, she realized this. Calm and collected she put down the papers and commented on what she had just read:
"This is what connects with our tradition. Chann's main lover was like a rowan, anchored at all the levels of knowledge, from the hells up to the heavens.
Stunned, he looked at her. She assumed he did not know what she was talking about it and added:
"Chann: you remember, I already told you about her. The group to which I belong is called the Daughters of Chann."
He felt himself floundering. Sayadena had a rowan under her window. And she was speaking now of the Chann he had known. The one of whom he had been long ago, why not, the main lover. The past and the present were really joined here. And it was unbearable.
Without worrying about what she would think, he said he did not feel well, took his leave and left the building. However, walking past the entrance, he glanced at the rowan that was growing near the brick wall.
First he noticed the very concrete appearance of the small tree. It had grown crooked - a common tendency among rowans. This was not noticeable from the window, since it leaned towards it. But, leaving the building, it was impossible not to notice the inclination of the trunk. A storm must have almost uprooted the tree when it was young, no doubt, and no one had bothered straightening it. The trunk was slanting, but the branches, with their broken, whimsical arcs, were nevertheless developing quite normally on the vertical axis: now, the rowan was strong enough to resist the wind.
A twisted, coarse little tree, silhouette tattered by the remnants of bunches already pecked, an urn of scruffy branches attached to a slanting trunk, it looked like it had been developed with a project that ran short of resources before completion. A rebel tree, its branches curving towards the vertical, then towards the horizontal. It didn't look like it knew what it wanted to do.
However, the comparison between Taïm Sutherland and a rowan came from Ivendra himself. It could not be interpreted in a solely negative sense. Sutherland looked more attentively at the tree which, in short, represented him. Set in the earth without any obsession for the vertical, it stood through effortless will. Its zigzagging branches, light, curved towards the outside, towards the inside, or else to the side, scattered effectively for the spread of flowers and the load of fruit, which would be the delight of ants and sparrows. There would be no point in trying to make boards from that wood, nor even seat rails for chairs. But axe handles, on the other hand, yes, curved and strong, shock resistant. The bronze bark, golden under the sun, darkened with the least cloud while remaining as richly lustrous as brocade. To become grounded in all levels of knowledge, one must not confine oneself to one speciality.
Sutherland walked away on the sidewalk, which the frost had cracked. The spring wind, loaded with dust, hit him full force at the top of the hill. He squinted and could not even see the sea horizon, which filled the north half of the space. To his dismay, he noticed that he had trouble staying upright. Stiffness? Humidity? The influence of the rowan?
Perplexed, he left that very night towards the north. He had done it long ago, in a particularly intense period in his previous life. He had a feeling, rich and lustrous like the bark of the rowan in spring, a feeling of going to find his destiny.
In this life, he feared neither cold nor waves. So he threw himself into the sea, at the end of the deserted wharf. The rising moon shone on the calm waters. He started swimming, tirelessly...© 2000 Éditions Alire & Esther Rochon
To find out what happens next...
