A Strange Country Read online

  “It’s not what you are looking for,” she said. “Your destiny is elsewhere, but I don’t know how to see it. Unprecedented things are happening in the mists these days, and we have become attentive to unusual circumstances. Perhaps you are one of the pieces of this strange puzzle that is being assembled.”

  Paulus and Marcus adopted the expression of the well-brought-up who must not be rude, and Petrus himself, although flattered, seemed doubtful.

  “Puzzle?” he asked courteously, all the same.

  “The Council issued a new alert yesterday in several provinces where the mist is in difficulty,” she said.

  “Has it affected Hanase?” asked Paulus.

  “As you were able to see from the lock, our mist is intact,” she replied.

  A shadow passed over her face.

  “The day it is affected, we can bid farewell to this world.”

  She made a graceful gesture with her right hand.

  “But these are merely passing nighttime thoughts.”

  They saw that the bowls had been filled with a golden tea that flickered with the same light as the bronze sides of the basin.

  “One of you must choose a flower and recite a poem,” she said.

  Marcus looked mockingly at Petrus.

  “Would Mr. Puzzle feel up to honoring his studious past?” he asked.

  Astonishingly, Mr. Puzzle did feel up to it. Was it the strangeness of the situation, the hollow feeling in his stomach, or the touch of the flake of ash—it seemed to him that the inanity of his years of schooling was being driven against the cliffs of the present moment, releasing a trembling corolla from its gangue.

  “I would like an iris,” he said.

  An iris appeared, lying between the bowls, smaller than those you are accustomed to seeing in your gardens, its white petals dotted with pale blue, its heart deep purple, and its stamens orange.

  “A Ryoan iris,” she said. “They are to be found mainly in the province of Dark Mists, but one can also occasionally come upon them around here. In the tradition of the worlds, irises are messengers, flowers of annunciation.”

  “The tradition of the worlds?” asked Petrus. “What worlds?”

  “The world of elves and the world of humans,” she said. “I have studied the human symbolism of flowers, and it is similar to our own.”

  “Are you acquainted with the world of humans?” said Petrus.

  “No,” she replied, “you can only see it from Nanzen, but I used to belong to the Council’s community of gardeners. In my moments of leisure, I went to the library to read books about humans and flowers.”

  “Humans really exist,” asked Marcus, “they’re not just a legend?”

  “A legend?” she said, surprised.

  “It’s hard to believe in something that only exists in your thoughts,” said Marcus.

  “Existence is not a variable given,” she said. “Reality is the place where hunger and faith, life and death, dreams and flowers all come together and blend. A tree, an elf, a note of music, a chimera born from the night—everything exists while proceeding from the same matter, and all is displayed within the same universe.”

  She fell silent and Petrus suddenly thought of a poem, which he recited to those gathered there.

  The mandate and the realm

  In the heart of an old woman

  An iris from Ryoan

  Paulus and Marcus looked at him, stunned, but their hostess closed her eyes and was contemplative for a moment.

  “I cannot see everything your poem is invoking,” she said. “There are the living, the dead, and strange friendships.”

  “I saw . . . I saw peculiar images,” said Petrus.

  He tried to grasp one of them as it was slipping away, like flowing water.

  “There was a faint sound from another world,” he murmured, troubled.

  She looked at him thoughtfully. After a moment, she made the ritual gesture of invitation by placing her hands, joined at her fingertips, on the floor, and bowing her face toward them. They greeted her by bowing their heads in turn and raising their bowls to the sky. Then they drank. The moon sparkled and sent a silvery flash through the ashes. The tea tasted of clay and chalk turning into dust and dirt.

  “I’ve never drunk anything like this,” said Paulus.

  “This tea is a thousand years old,” she said.

  “A thousand years?” gasped Marcus. “To what do we owe the honor?”

  “To the boatman, and Nanzen,” she said.

  “I didn’t know that a simple boatman could prevail upon Nanzen to serve a thousand-year-old tea to three traveling strangers,” said Paulus.

  “A simple boatman? The channel that connects the Marches to the Ashes is one of the most ancient in this world,” she said, “and it is always remarkable elves who seek to be in charge of it. Moreover, otters constitute a very particular lower house, engendering some of the most extraordinary characters in the mists.”

  “Why is that?” asked Petrus.

  “If you will just take another sip,” she replied, “you’ll see why.”

  They drank again from their bowls. Ever since Paulus and Marcus, still under the effect of the tea from the Marches, had landed on the shores of Hanase, they’d been hearing the distant sounds of the dead all around them, mingled with the effervescence of the living. The first sip of the thousand-year-old tea, making its way to as yet untouched layers of empathy, had transformed the dull echo into a faint clamor, which the second sip evolved into a symphonic uproar. For Petrus, however, who had emptied his last flask from the Deep Woods long before they’d reached the departure lock and, consequently, had no longer been receiving much from the mist for a good while, there was nothing miraculous about the first sip at all, but the shock of the second one was so intense that he thanked the heavens that his stomach was empty. You must understand how the voices of Hanase’s dead resonate. Their song delivers no message, there are merely ashes mingled with air—and this snow into which past lives have been diluted transforms reality into a vague music, a drifting threnody that enters each elf as much as he flows into it, that melts the limits of his being to dilate it beyond what is visible, and transforms the world into a fluid place where the living and the dead move together.

  “I feel like I’m swimming,” Petrus finally managed to say, clinging to his bowl.

  “That is the lesson of the ashes,” she said. “We are all mixed together in the same air. You felt nauseous because you passed without transition from an awareness of the borders to the intuition of the mixture.”

  “Is that where this sensation of being immersed comes from?” asked Petrus.

  “Everything always comes from contact with everything else, through immersion into the vaporous matter. It is through that matter that we can mix with others and be transformed without losing ourselves; it is also through it that life and death are mingled. The thousand-year-old tea simply made this fluidity more perceptible to you.”

  After a moment, she added:

  “Otters swim at the border between earth and water, and live in the heart of the memory of sharing.”

  The vision of an old, wrinkled face crossed Petrus’s mind, then vanished.

  “Do humans have the same appearance as us?” he asked. “I think I just saw the old woman in the poem in my thoughts.”

  “I saw her, too,” she said. “It would definitely seem that you are destined for strange encounters.”

  “It’s just a vision,” said Petrus.

  She did not reply.

  “Does the path to the lock preserve the memory of vanished trees?” asked Paulus.

  “Of all living things, trees best incarnate the reality of mutations,” she said. “They are the motionless vectors of the genesis and transformation of all things. The transparencies of the path are made from the invisib
le presence of trees long dead, but which, like ashes, live on with us in another form.”

  They mused for a moment on this transparency beyond death.

  “What does to be with mean if one is no longer conscious?” asked Paulus.

  “What we are before our birth and after our death,” she said. “A promise and a memory.”

  “For the living,” he said.

  “For the living,” she replied. “Those who have passed are fully fledged members of the great people who are entrusted to us, and the duty to respond to their call is what we call the life of the dead.”

  “Is that what the high-elves do?” asked Petrus. “Respond to this call?”

  “Some are born to assume responsibility for other creatures,” she said. “That is our realm, and our mandate, the ministry that gives life to the powers of death, to their territory and legacy. This eternity and this responsibility are henceforth incumbent upon you, because today you have drunk from the thousand-year-old tea.”

  The garden glittered with shards of moonlight. The sensation of immersion was growing stronger. They drank a third and last sip of tea. Petrus, in spite of his dislike for metaphysical effusions, let himself go to the peace of the mixture and wondered how the ashes were moved to these bottomless urns. At funerals, the bodies of deceased elves were burned, but he’d never known that they were subsequently taken to Hanase. They were scattered from the deceased elf’s favorite mountaintop, and then disappeared from view forever.

  “Nothing disappears forever,” said their hostess. “The ashes are brought here by the mists. The bottomless urns are what is left of the eternity they passed through before returning to mingle with the time of the living.”

  “So, the dead are alive?” asked Paulus.

  “Of course not,” she said with a laugh, “they are dead.”

  Petrus smiled. Indisputably, the trip was improving. His nausea had left him and the shock of the second sip of tea was dissolving into the third. He drifted nonchalantly about, and heard the tumult of the dead without attaching any more importance to it than to the twilight poems from his Woods. The fact she’d laughed at the thought the dead could be alive reinforced his indifference toward mystic effusions. And yet, he thought, I can hear the song of the dead more clearly than I can feel the presence of the living.

  She got up.

  “Your beds are ready,” she said.

  But before taking her leave, she said to Petrus:

  “In Katsura, you will go to the Council library and you will introduce yourself as a friend of the Wild Grasses.”

  “The Wild Grasses?” he repeated, surprised.

  “It is the name of our establishment,” she said.

  They bowed deeply, finding nothing to say that was equal to what they had just experienced.

  “I hope you will forgive us our peasant ways for not knowing how to thank you,” said Marcus finally.

  “Only now is the true experience beginning,” she said.

  She waved her hand toward the bottom of the garden.

  “Your quarters are on the other side.”

  And then she was gone.

  They stood for a moment in silence gazing at the scene. A cloud drifted on a patch of moon and the world’s rhythms had slowed. The ashes rose toward the heavens in lazy swirls, the melody of the stream became more languid, and the light on the maple leaves stopped glistening. As for the song of the dead, it expanded still further, deeper, more solemn—such peace, suddenly, thought Petrus, and he felt the spirits of repose enfold him.

  “Shall we go?” said Paulus.

  There was no visible path to the other end of the garden, and they had to resign themselves to walking on the sand. But although they felt as if they were sinking into it, their steps didn’t disturb the lines. The further they went, the more the distance seemed to increase, and the maples as a whole looked as if they were retreating and growing larger. Above all, there was a different quality to the air in the garden—sharper, giving clarity to one’s thoughts. Perception gained in precision, and crossing the enclosed space became a journey. But a journey to where? wondered Petrus. Or to whom?

  Suddenly he knew he was heading toward someone, that every step was taking him closer to their encounter, and that he had come to this place solely for that purpose.

  At last they reached the end of the garden. On the other side of the row of maple trees, standing on pilings driven deep into the black water, a wooden platform awaited them for the night. As they went closer, the sounds of the garden were stifled, and they felt as if they were entering a bubble of silence. Then the garden behind them also vanished, and they found themselves on a moonlit island, lost in the middle of a dark lagoon. There was not a breath of air; in harmony with the rhythms of the earth, the stars refrained from twinkling. Summoning their courage, they went up the steps; on the floor of the platform, the ripple of an invisible stream swirled around their ankles.

  However, all that interested them were the mattresses set out for the comfort of their night. Soft and thick to look at, they were made of moving ash.

  “Ash mattresses?” murmured Petrus.

  “Night of the dead,” Petrus heard himself reply, just as colossal fatigue came down upon their shoulders.

  If only I could reach that mattress, he thought, before taking another step and collapsing onto his bed of dust.

  It was a strange night, where he wandered in his dreams along a path lined with tall trees, aware that he was stepping on human ground. Whether the light was different or there was a sense of negligence in the woods—a sort of fantasy about the copses and passages, as if they’d been trimmed and traced at random—one could sense a presence there, and its nonchalance was pleasing to him. The path led to the edge of the trees, and came out to face a landscape of verdant hills. In the distance, two sparkling little lakes; all around, vineyards nestling into the landscape; below them, a village in a valley. Thin lines of smoke rose from stone houses with steep, tawny roofs; judging by the tender green hue of the vegetation, it was springtime; seasonal flowers were breaking through the freshly turned earth of the plots. There was an abundance of the veined, purple hellebores much appreciated by elves as the end of winter draws near; but there were also daffodils, tulips scarcely opened and crunchy as oatcakes, and grape hyacinths interspersed with crocuses and cyclamens. Above these lovely carpets, tall irises formed battalions in charge of overseeing the gardens. Their lower petals were puffed out in a hanging curve which seemed to form a face with velvet cheeks, from which a bearded tongue emerged. These were taller, more complicated irises than the ones in Ryoan, with something inexplicably martial and slightly ridiculous about them, but they spread all around them the same fragrance of annunciation and message, turning each plot into the guardian of a secret. They’re growing vegetables that will ripen in summer, thought Petrus, and you can smell the simples which perfume and heal. After a moment, he added: this is a dream, but it is all true, and I can go on ahead without fear of waking. He began walking toward the village. In the blue sky, a little tasseled cloud went by and a breeze began to blow. It caressed his nostrils with the perfume of the tulips, mingled with a touch of lemon balm; the path wound through the springtime trees and he was intoxicated with this unusual display of nature. Here, anything is possible, he thought. When he reached the first houses, he thought again: this countryside is my landscape.

  Then everything faded, because the old woman in the tea poem was coming toward him, her arms laden with wildflowers. She was smiling in the spring light and Petrus liked looking at her aged face, like parchment beneath her headdress with ribbons the color of forget-me-nots. Borage flowers matched their azure cheer, and there was a brisk, mischievous charm about her appearance. She went by him without seeing him and he decided to follow her. After a moment, she paused by a row of pink irises, then went into a farmyard. She glanced over her shoulder, we
nt up the steps to the entrance, and disappeared inside. Petrus stood there for a moment, petrified. Reality was transfigured by this brief gaze, which he alone had seen, into a succession of scenes bathed in an unreal light. He now knew that the old peasant woman had given birth to a daughter, and that daughter to another daughter who, in the future, would conceive her own daughter in turn, until the line of women ended with the arrival, in the fifth generation, of a much-loved son. He knew that the last-born girl would inherit the science of simples from her ancestor, and that the true encounter would be that of the last female descendant, not yet born. And so, the theater of worlds was revealed to him. Gigantic fronts covered an entire continent, endless smoke rose toward the sky, armies gathered beneath a sky of storm, and the much-loved son lay dying on a field littered with corpses. He stood for a moment gazing with horror at this rumbling apocalypse until, without warning, the scene changed. In the sweetness of a summer twilight, tables had been adorned in the garden with large June irises, and a female voice was saying: the lovely evenings around Saint John’s Day, then, after a silence: go, my son, and know for eternity how much we love you. How is it that I can understand her language? he wondered, and at that very moment he woke up. He raised his hand to his heart. Everything is in the dream, he thought; landscape, love, and war. He recalled the words of the hare elf: the day the mist of Hanase disappears, we can bid farewell to this world—and was overcome by a premonition of coming disaster. Come now, he said to himself, I’m raving. But before the last vestiges of the dream could dissipate, he thought again: there you have ecstasy and tragedy beneath a beribboned headdress. Finally, he was fully awake.

  They thought they were resting on mattresses of ash above black water, but they’d slept on layers of cool grass right on the floor of the very first platform. It was raining, and the garden was gleaming. What the showers do to the garden, thought Petrus, and in the world; here, they pass by, they concentrate the universe. Abandoning himself to the music of water falling upon water, he delighted in this liquid encounter, where the ordinary time of the living was erased.