A Strange Country Read online

  This was the first encounter between Petrus and the elf who would soon become the greatest Guardian of the Pavilion ever known in the mists and who, one hundred and twenty years later, would father an extraordinary child called Clara. At that moment, the wild boar exchanged a brief glance with the storm-eyed hare that attested to an enduring friendship. Then they walked past the foursome and disappeared onto the veranda. After a moment, passersby on the veranda whispered among themselves, then returned to their business.

  “What a shock,” said Paulus.

  “You were lucky to see them,” said their guide. “This was the last council meeting before the start of the campaign, each one of them will now return to his stronghold.”

  His brow creased with concern.

  “There has never been a more fraught election,” he said.

  “Who is your champion?” asked Marcus.

  “Champion?” echoed the elf. “Are you for the garden? Their partisans use that term.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Marcus. “We are from the Deep Woods, we know little about what goes on here.”

  “The distribution of the professions of faith will only start tomorrow, that’s true,” said the hare. “You will have a better idea of who is in the running once you’ve read them. As for me, I’ve been serving the library for five hundred years. I know who my candidate will be.”

  “So it’s Katsura against Ryoan, the library against the garden?” asked Paulus.

  “What garden, I do wonder,” said their guide. “That which shines does not maintain.”

  “Aren’t you concerned about the decline of the mists?” asked Petrus, recalling what the piglet had told them.

  “Must we adapt our behavior because of that concern?” replied the hare. “We are not a warlike species, and our leaders shouldn’t be warriors.”

  “The champion of the garden is a warrior?” asked Petrus, surprised.

  “The best of us all,” answered their guide.

  He wiped his hand across his brow.

  “But the war is mainly in his mind.”

  “I’m curious to see what his gardens are like,” said Paulus.

  “You’ll see an example at the library,” said their guide. “And perhaps you will think that purity is not always the best ally of the heart.”

  He motioned to them to go ahead, and followed them into the room.

  The room extended over three thousand square feet, protected by large picture windows that looked out onto the inner gardens. Bamboo blinds could be adjusted at varying heights depending on whether one wanted to meditate on the floor, or read at the tables set up below the invisible shelves. In the center of the room, scrolls and tomes were suspended in the air, neatly stored on an immaterial frame.

  “There aren’t any walls,” thought Petrus, “just windows and books.”

  “And readers,” said the hare, with a smile.

  And so, he understood why he had come.

  Wild grasses in the snow

  Two children of November

  Book of Battles

  MAINTAIN

  The candidates’ professions of faith were disseminated throughout the entire territory of the mists one hundred days before the election, in which every elf over the age of one hundred could take part. Later, in the provinces, assemblies would be held, where the programs could be discussed. On the day of the election, Nanzen would tally the votes and the Guardian of the Pavilion would come to Katsura to announce the results.

  Let us agree to call our candidates of the moment the councilor and the gardener respectively, and let us hear a few words about their vision for the future of the mists.

  The councilor’s profession of faith was magnificent, for it was written in the style of the wild grasses, with a melodious turn of phrase that resonated in every heart. The hare elf of Katsura may have appeared cold and austere, but his prose and manner were warm and kindly.

  I shall always maintain, he wrote at the end of his speech. More unexpected was the phrase that preceded his motto: the older our world gets, the more it is in need of poetry. When was the last time anyone had read the word poetry in a leader’s profession of faith? I will leave this question to the historians and, for the time being, look forward to this tribute to the spirit of childhood.

  POWER

  Inversely, the gardener’s profession of faith reflected none of the brilliance of his person. It was as devoid of heart as he seemed to have been fashioned with love, and as drearily dry as he was insolently youthful. One must be glad of this lack of subtlety in the prose, when the elf was such an expert in the conviction of his gaze and his acts, since it would cost him this election and the next one, thus demonstrating that the mists were not yet prepared to sacrifice their multi-millennial soul.

  Elves are less inclined than humans to act under the influence of fear, for tradition, with them, is not opposed to progress, nor is movement opposed to stability. When the gardener wrote, I shall be the protector of the continuity of our culture against the threats of modern times, he could not hope to win over a species used to thinking in circular terms. Some even suspected that he was driven—perhaps without even being aware of it—by that force that undoes more than it maintains: a thirst for power.

  However, he was right about one thing, and it would soon earn him enough partisans to build an army: the mists were declining and it was becoming ever more difficult to keep the avenues of this world together.

  A DREAM SO LOFTY

  1800–1870

  I have come here to read, that’s the message, thought Petrus, who two days earlier would have thought it extravagant that messages could be spread throughout the world.

  “I’ll take my leave of you now,” said their guide with a bow, “someone will be coming to look after you.”

  The three friends stood there for a moment, but no one came, and they went over to the large picture window to admire the garden.

  It was a centuries-old jewel, embellished over time by the Council’s successive gardeners, an elite respected among the mists because each one of them had completed an interminably long apprenticeship, kept up a permanent commerce with trees, and made art that worked with the legacy of the ages—all things the elves believed were vital and to which they devoted themselves by tending their gardens and respecting their trees. The enclosure of the Council was sealed with a velvety moss that covered the roots of specimens so old that on the very ground they formed a miniature landscape of valleys and hills. On this late autumn day, the maple trees were ablaze; in the foreground, all along the building, a strip of sand streaked with arabesques gave the garden its waves; beyond it began the ocean of greenery. Here were a few azaleas that had already lost their leaves; there, heavenly bamboo in bunches of red berries; and everywhere, those pine trees that are pruned over the centuries until they have taken on a singular shape—their essential form, which is found inside and requires a gardener who will listen to what the tree is whispering to him, while winds and storms speak only to its bark. They resembled the trees in the Deep Woods, but at their extremities the contortions of their dark branches produced needle fascicles, trimmed by the gardener’s art to form delicate lashes, and against the dry wood they seemed to be winking, while singing a hymn that was refined and graceful—it was something to see, the openwork wings reaching out from the bare, rigid tree trunks, then branching out in the air like figures so graphic that for the third time in two days Petrus wondered whether the world were not murmuring a poem in his ear.

  In the middle of the scene, the mercury waters of a pond reflected the heavens and the branches, but it took Petrus a moment to understand the strangeness of what he was seeing. He had to blink several times to adjust to the aberrant color scheme that lost its hues in the water, reflected back as black branches on a gray mirror of waves. From this alloy of metal and ink a ballet from the foundries of the u
niverse emerged, where the streaks of pine trees performed a monochrome choreography on the liquid silver. Harmonizing with the scene were stones of various shapes and sizes that formed ageless mineral promontories and bridges along the shore or above the surface of the pond. There one knew the fraternal flow of rock and river; there one felt the tremor of a powerful vision, of a dream of mountains and shores—this is the essence of our world, thought Petrus, and the dream is so lofty that it will never die.

  Beyond the pond, a lane bordered with slopes of bamboo led to a gate with a thatched roof. Ryoan irises had been planted there, and were nodding at winter camellias that had just bloomed, set in rows along the avenue and flanked, to the rear, by tall bamboo and slender maple trees. The Katsura maples are particularly elegant, because the capital of the elves is sheltered from strong winds by the rampart of its mountains of mist. Thus, the leaves are the same as everywhere, so delicately carved that their veins and edges form a living lace; but the absence of storms means that that the branches do not need to strengthen to resist the gusts, they remain slender, can bow to the breeze, languid dancers. A swarm of mist rose, slipped between the branches, then evaporated, swirling lazily on itself, and the friends mused it must be a pleasing thing, to come and admire this garden during the long winter. Similarly, they supposed there were other jewels within the annexes to the central building, for through the leaves and needles they could see its verandas. To the left of the pond, the picture windows offered a glimpse of a sunlit room and, to the rear, a raised, interior garden consisting of three large stones set on gray sand. They seemed to have been tossed in the air to fall again at the perfect distance from each other, and the precise form and precise gap between things must certainly be known to achieve such perfection: Petrus did not doubt that it was the work of the young chief gardener. It had the same sparkling purity to it as his very person, and Petrus understood how one might become fascinated. Those who wish to reach the summit barefoot must have a heaven-sent talent, he thought, astonished at all the elevated thoughts he’d been having since his arrival in Katsura, and mentally he scoffed at himself. This moment of distraction changed everything, and he no longer saw the mineral garden in the same way as before. The arrangement that had so delighted his gaze now seemed fossilized, and the stones emitted a message of death which gave him the shivers. Purity is not always the best ally of the heart, their guide had said, and this absence of love, now so obvious, made his hair stand on end.

  “It’s magnificent,” said Marcus.

  Petrus saw he was looking at the stones.

  “It’s cold,” he replied.

  “It’s frozen,” said Paulus.

  “Yes, it’s cold and frozen,” said Marcus slowly, as if he were waking from a dream.

  “How may I assist you?” asked a voice behind them.

  They turned around and found themselves facing a tall female elf with red hair and light gray eyes.

  “I am the Council’s steward,” she said.

  Turning into a squirrel, she was such a striking replica of his mother that Petrus, fully aware that he’d left his Woods without saying goodbye, blushed violently from the tips of his claws to the top of his ears.

  She looked at the cloth he was clutching in his paws.

  “Is there something wrong with your clothing?” she asked.

  The crimson squirrel in which Petrus was trapped gave out an indeterminate gurgling sound and Paulus, feeling sorry for him, came to his rescue.

  “There was an incident during the crossing,” he said.

  “That is the first time I’ve ever heard of an incident involving clothes,” she said.

  “The same for us,” said Marcus, looking at Petrus mockingly.

  But when he saw Petrus’s despair, he resumed his serious air.

  “Our hostess from the Wild Grasses asked this temporarily mute gentle-elf to introduce himself to you,” he said.

  “Yes, but why?” she asked.

  “Were you not informed?” asked Marcus.

  “We were simply informed of the arrival from the Deep Woods of two squirrels and one bear,” she replied.

  Dumbfounded, they fell silent.

  “Do you not know, either, why you have been sent?” she said, turning into a bay mare with rounded hindquarters.

  She studied them, thoughtful.

  “The Wild Grasses never do things without a reason,” she continued, “particularly during such a troubled period.”

  “Might you have some work for me?” asked Petrus, his voice so clear that Paulus and Marcus stood there gaping.

  “I don’t see what’s so astonishing about that,” he added, in response to their stupor. “I intend to stay here, and I have to make a living.”

  “What can you do?” she asked.

  It was his turn to stand there openmouthed.

  “Well,” he said, “I don’t know. Anything, I imagine, that doesn’t require any particular skill.”

  “You are not good at job interviews,” she said, somewhat put out.

  She thought for a moment.

  “These days, with the elections, I have enough to do without trying to make sense of all this. I may as well keep you on hand, after all.”

  She frowned.

  “Does he really not know how to do anything?” she asked Marcus and Paulus.

  They looked embarrassed and she sighed.

  “Can you sweep?” she asked Petrus.

  “I suppose so,” he replied.

  She clicked her tongue, annoyed.

  “Tomorrow at dawn, west door,” she said.

  Then, turning into a squirrel and looking just like his mother when she was angry, she turned and was gone.

  “You really have some nerve,” said Marcus.

  “Are you serious?” asked Paulus. “Do you really want to stay in Katsura and spend your days sweeping paths for the Council?”

  “I am serious,” answered Petrus in a huff. “I don’t see why you won’t believe me.”

  They looked at him doubtfully for a moment.

  “Let’s go,” said Marcus in the end, “let’s leave this place, we have to find an inn before nightfall.”

  They agreed, and set off. Before leaving, Petrus cast one last gaze at the books and scrolls floating in the air, and it seemed to him they twinkled faintly in a knowing farewell.

  “See you tomorrow,” he murmured.

  Finally, they went through the gates and back into the streets of the city.

  That is how Petrus’s life in Katsura began and, although the time has come for us to proceed more speedily with our tale, and return to the protagonists of the last battle of the war, we must say a few words about those years in the capital of the elves, simply because the world they embodied is now gone forever. For the last seven decades, those who have been in charge of the intrigues of fate relentlessly asked themselves this burning question: should they die to make way for a new era, or had their very world come to its end?

  “We always believed that individuals and civilizations perished, but that the species would survive,” the Head of the Council would say one day to Petrus. “And what if our species has reached its own limits and is meant to die without leaving a trace? Should we not view this war differently?”

  However, seventy years would pass before this conversation took place, and while they may have appeared to be monotonous years, for Petrus they were a constant adventure. Every morning he did his sweeping while he daydreamed, and during the seasons when snow covered the paths and the moss, he worked at the library, archiving scrolls and books. Then he read. Twice a year, during his leave, he went traveling. Sometimes Paulus and Marcus came with him on a joyful escapade; most often, he went off on his own and connected with other good souls he met along the way; and he was certainly the elf with the greatest number of friends in faraway places of all the mi
sts, for the species, as a rule, rarely leaves its native province. In Katsura he’d found a place to live at the top of the town with an old unicorn elf lady with whom he shared breakfast every day at dawn, laughing and conversing. From the window of his room he could see the mist rising and falling over the great city. In the morning, it took on tints of bronze that caused his heart to leap, and he enjoyed those sunrises so much that for all his laziness he would wake up early. When he set off down the deserted streets in the brisk air, he forgot the endless tedium of the task before him. On his way down to the Council headquarters, he looked out over the city as it fanned out below him, at the foot of the snowy peaks and the cliffs of mist. The rising sun fringed them with an incandescent edging that frayed above their dark crest; the streets and bridges of the white city were enveloped in amber fog, great vaporous exhalations that disintegrated above the streams, and it was a long dream of water and wood, in a luxuriance of sunlight. Petrus would stop by the dew-lit trees to perform his devotions to beauty, greeting a bird perched on the stone, the swaying bamboo, the camellias in improbable winter. But there were also dawns when the great blaze from some activity in Nanzen (renovations, or major cleaning in the channels) gave everything a fiery glow. There was wind then, too, and brief hailstorms, which left the city purple and steaming; transparent spears of mist soared at great speed toward the sky; and these tantrums of climate strengthened the proof that his life was in search of some missing intensity. He did not know how to define it, but before long it propelled him toward the channels, and caused him to travel all over the country.