THE MEMORIES OF TREES
Mary SanGiovanni
The Faithful intended to hang the child at dusk.
She was a ward of the old woman of the glen, the reclusive widow who put her faith in the ancient religions instead of the new. The old woman, one Martha Weede, had been arrested the week prior, and after extensive questioning, had been found guilty of witchcraft. It was the mind of the village elders that both Weede and her young ward, Ellena, be hanged together.
Ellena was a sweet young girl of about thirteen, round and pink of face with soft blue eyes and pretty red lips. The old woman would not promise her as a wife to any young man in the village of New Ipswich despite the Third Law, which was to propagate the human race with strong, eligible specimens as soon as they were of the age to conceive. Ellena certainly seemed to be able to bear children; she had already developed breasts and Cora Rawlins had once reported seeing the girl rinsing blood from her undergarments in a nearby stream.
It was not the Weede woman’s violation of the Third Law, though, which made her and her adopted daughter the targets of the townspeople’s disdain. Few of the proud families, particularly those whose elders had survived the wars and plagues of the early Twenty-First Century, would have sought the lovely Ellena as a wife for their sons. They wanted no part of a young godless harlot who wore only a shift when prancing about the woods alone and unchaperoned. Instead of binding up her long blond hair, she let it stream freely behind her as she danced and ran. She and old Mother Martha never attended the New Church in town, either. Their monuments of worship were made of wood and stone, out in the forest. They did not believe in the New Church teachings or the God of technology. Their gods did not care about the electronic debris scattered across the land, nor did they demand it be gathered and repurposed. Their gods were ancient, older than the gods of the extinct religions of the Christians and Muslims and Jews. Their gods were old when the world was new, or at least when those fumbling first steps of human technology were fire and spears and the wheel.
It was said Martha and the girl gathered herbs and plants from the woods to make potions to poison cattle and cause babies to abort themselves from their mothers’ wombs, and that they talked to forest devils and spirits and cavorted naked with them at night by moon-and firelight. It was said they could conjure the forest spirits to protect them and to exact revenge on those who had wronged them.
Of course, those were just stories, so much swirling smoke from fires stoked by fear and jealousy. Science and technology had seen to erasing any silly, childish notions of the existence of magick long ago. If the women were conducting any kind of sorcery, it was of a manipulative, imaginative, and psychological kind.
Nevertheless, those stories made the people of the village uneasy. To them, the feral world before the Final War of 2021 was the stuff of terrifying and sinful myth, and Ellena and Martha were haunting phantoms of that myth.
The village schools did not teach about the world before the Final War, beyond a few pivotal turning points in its history. They were instructed—or perhaps, catechized—regarding the Digital Deadzone Plague, when the New God was angry at the wanton ways of the world and sent balls of fire and electromagnetic pulses from the sun to render dead and useless the technology that He had bestowed upon them. Every aspect of society had been connected like a great spiderweb—banks, businesses, defense systems, electricity, plumbing, even the production of food. All was leveled by God’s pulses of wrath, and it was only a matter of time before the Faithful understood that their Lord wanted to wipe the slate clean, just like an old god of myth had once wiped out the earth with a flood. Thus, the creation of the First Law of the Faithful: all technology developed or recovered should be put into the service of worshipping God.
The children were also taught about the Culture Battles, the dissention between the Faithful and the Heathens, which led to a Final War to claim the world that was left and its scant resources. The history books—they’d had to go back to books once the iPad textbooks lost their charge—said the Plague of Invisible Mouths was actually a flesh-eating virus, a weaponized biological agent that halved the population and then halved it eight times more.
It is not only history that is written by the winners of war but also the future. The Plague of Invisible Mouths was the hand of the New God, devouring the flesh and brain tissue of the enemies of the Faithful and scattering the surviving Heathens and their ancient beliefs to the wind they honored so much. So the wind blew the Heathens to the forest, where the trees have long memories. The trees are patient.
Mother Martha remembered the time before the Final War and knew all the stories not told in schools. She had been a girl then, a child much smaller than Ellena, but she had a memory like the trees. Martha would recount those stories to her daughter and the other children, forbidden fairy tales that they passed on to each other behind small, cupped hands, the myth and history of the Heathens. The village children liked the old woman’s tales about the ancient gods and the world before the Final War. They liked that she had a memory like the trees.
To the village elders, Martha and her stories were a poison, sinister and downright evil. Since evil had once dismantled the world, it had to be rooted out and destroyed before it could take hold again.
* * *
In the dank cage of cold metal and hard edges, Ellena did as Mother Martha suggested. She closed her eyes, relaxed her body from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, and imagined a great altar in her mind’s eye. Then she swept all the fear off that altar, all extraneous thoughts, all distractions, like so much collected dust and cobwebs. She tuned out the heavy, labored breathing of Mother Martha and of the abused women and men all around her. In the silent darkness that engulfed her inside and out, she smelled the stone of the prison and felt the soft breath of the wind as it tried to reach her through the tiny barred transom above her. She heard the rustling of leaves from the nearby trees and in it, heard their words of comfort, of promise.
She and Mother were not alone. It would be all right.
I’m scared, the girl thought.
Fear is natural… but unnecessary, the trees’ rustling told her.
They mean to kill us. The girl felt a heavy panic try to settle in her chest and she swept it away.
The trees replied, We will protect you…
The girl wiped at the unspilled tears in her eyes and added, Their weapons are of iron.
Our weapons are older, stronger, the trees responded. We will not let you fall, little one.
* * *
Not all were unsympathetic to the suffering of Martha and Ellena. Jonah Harwood, whose family once lobbied against developing rainforests before repenting and turning to the New Church, went to visit the women in their jail cell. He brought biscuits and a jug of water in a small basket. He felt it was his religious duty to tend to the sick, imprisoned, and suffering, though many whispered that was a holdover from his family’s old Christian roots.
The jail was a large holding cell once called “the Tank” in the crumbling remains of an old municipal building in the center of New Ipswich. It stank like stale sweat and urine, rotting food and rotting sores, and other less pleasant things. It had grown jagged from rust and age, its metal flaking and splintering, but it was nevertheless a formidable barrier to the outside world. As it was in the basement of the old building, it was exceedingly dark and damp. The tank held a grave and weighty sense of timeless suffering unlike anywhere else in New Ipswich. It was as if decades of people’s miseries had bled from their bodies into the ground, cooled, and grown hard, layer after layer, forming the very prison that continued to leech others dry.
Harwood picked his way over bodies either unconscious or dead and found the women in a far, cobwebbed corner of the cell. Both had been stripped down to their shifts and had their hair crudely and unevenly lopped off close to the scalp. The girl looked scared and pale, but otherwise unmarked. Harwood was glad for that; some of the jailers had a tendency to avail themselves of the bodies of pretty young things, particularly those accused of witchcraft, since none of those women was ever set free. To the jailers, the pity of a conviction was often a waste of good flesh.
The old woman was in a far worse condition. Having been further accused of the corruption of an innocent soul through teachings of witchcraft and nature magick, she had been beaten, and possibly worse. The village of New Ipswich had managed to repair an old generator, and put its ability to power brief electrical sparks through metal prongs into the service of cleansing souls. Mother Martha bore the burn marks of such a cleansing. Further, her left eye was nearly swollen shut and three of her fingers looked broken. Her dry lips were split in two places and her bare arms and legs wore patches of bruises. A remaining strand of her long, silvery hair fell against a bruised cheek.
She cradled the scared girl and was singing a lovely, soft song in a strange language when Harwood approached.
“Miss Weede? Miss Ellena?” he asked.
The old woman stopped singing and looked up at him. The abject coldness in that one good eye chilled him. In it he saw a steel will, an authority and power born of dignity, and for a moment, he both admired and feared her.
“Yes?”
“I brought food. Water. For you and the girl.”
The old woman looked skeptically from Harwood to the basket and back again. “Why?”
“I… I think you’re innocent of the charges against you.”
Those lips, still full, still somehow beautiful, smiled painfully. “I assure you, I am not.”
Harwood blinked. He wasn’t sure what to say, and while his mouth worked open and closed in attempting an answer, she continued.
“However, your kindness is appreciated, Mr. Harwood. It will not be forgotten.”
Flustered, he said, “Please, take the basket. Innocent or not, you need water. The girl—she needs to eat.”
Ellena looked up at him. Unlike her adoptive mother’s, her eyes were soulful and scared, an endless blue like sky and water and the blended place where they met. Perhaps Mother Martha was guilty of witchcraft, but surely the girl—
“The trees remember. The wind remembers. The water and land and sky remember. And I, too, will remember, when those who came before come again, to save us.”
Perhaps the old woman was crazy. She let the girl take the basket, though, and smiled fondly down at her little blond head as Ellena devoured a biscuit and drank from the waterskin.
He left quickly. Martha had begun to hum, and Harwood could have sworn he’d heard a low humming in reply, carried by the wind through the rustling leaves of trees.
* * *
On the morning of their execution, the sun rose with reluctance, taking its time to fire up its glow; the waiting dawn was a bleak fog of chill and colorless countryside. The oaks and pines and maples surrounding New Ipswich stood back and waited, patient but seething, a gray-green army gathered on the hillside.
The place where the elders of the village had been executing condemned Heathens lay just beyond their fields and farms but before the edge of the forest. It was a barren spot where neither shrub nor grass would grow; it was said that the blood and rotting bodies of the condemned had soured the ground, and in that hard spattering of dirt, they had erected a gallows.
“Mother, I’m scared,” Ellena whispered as they bumped along over the rocky path. The dust from the road kept getting into her nose and throat and mixing with the tears on her cheeks. She and her mother had been bound and put in the back seat of a convertible 2021 Volkswagen which Joseph Abbott and Creedence Burnell had found out on the old toll road one day. It had wheels but no engine, and that was right in the eyes of the New God, as it was to be a ceremonial vehicle pulled by their mules.
“No fear,” Mother Martha whispered back through her cracked lips. “You’ll see; all will be as it should. You remember the words, in case you need them?”
The girl nodded. “Are you sure they’ll come?”
Her mother didn’t answer. They had crested the hill and now the gallows were in full view. The villagers had found pictures in old books from the ruins of the library, and they had cobbled together a serviceable set-up from scraps of old telephone poles. Frayed wires served as a noose. Ellena saw that and could take in little else. She imagined what it would feel like, having those wires tighten around her little throat, imagining her air cut off and the bones in her neck snapping and—
The mules brought the car to a sudden stop, rocking the passengers within.
Rough hands grabbed and pinched and yanked them from the car. Ellena recognized two of the men to whom the hands belonged: Liberty Baker’s father, Obedience, and Prudence Pickering’s uncle, Jeremiah. The men shoved her toward the gallows and her stomach wrenched itself into a knot. Her mother, whose ankle had been broken with a hammer when she refused to elaborate on Ellena’s involvement in magick rituals, was dragged toward the gallow steps by Cotton Pratt, whose wife once came to the glen to buy a poultice for the bruise he had given her. When Martha fell, they kicked her and dragged her to her feet again.
It hurt Ellena’s heart more to see how they treated her mother than to suffer any personal indignities at their hands. Her mother’s moon was waning from abuse at the hands of monsters, and it wasn’t fair! Ellena hated them. She hated them! And her hate was strong because she was strong, because her moon was waxing. If they did manage to string her up, it would take a long time to kill her, and she was scared that it would hurt for all that time, but she wouldn’t cry because her anger wouldn’t let her.
The wind blew and the trees rustled. We won’t let them hurt you. It is our promise. We won’t let you fall.
On the stage of the gallows, Ellena was shoved to the ground near the prostrate form of her mother. The other villagers had gathered before them to watch. Ellena clutched her hands into little fists. They were judging her and her mother—there, Chastity Parke, who had come for a potion to stop the baby growing inside her, and there, Zebede Ratcliffe, who had once come, hat in hand, to beg Mother Martha to remove a curse on his land and put it instead on his neighbor’s. Perhaps they felt guilty; more likely, they were afraid of being called out. They shouted to drown out whatever they felt, and their cruel words were sharp slivers of metal in her ears.
“Now, Mother? Will you say the words?” she whispered.
“Not yet,” Martha replied.
The trees rustled impatiently.
“Why? Why not now?”
“Silence!” Elder Barrow said from a pulpit built near the gallows. “Your sin has bound you thus, and your magick has no power here.”
“Soon,” Martha whispered as Obedience Baker and Jeremiah Pickering yanked her to her feet.
Ellena looked up at her, confusion holding her tongue.
“I am speaking!” Elder Barrow roared, and Ellena couldn’t help flinching. “You will respect the law.”
“Your law has no bearing on us,” Martha said. Despite her injuries, her voice was loud and clear and silenced the shouting of the crowd.
Elder Barrow glared at her, his face red. “Martha Weede, you stand accused of witchcraft and corruption of another’s soul. You have been tried and found guilty, and now you are condemned to death according to the Eighth Law. Have you anything to say for yourself or your ward?”
Martha stared silently above the heads of the villagers to the line of mountains, hazy in the distance. Ellena knew she was clearing the altar in her mind.
“By the power vested in the court of New Ipswich, your sentence shall be carried out this twentieth day of MidSummer beneath the gaze of our New God.”
Mother Martha finally began to speak the words, and the dawn sky grew dark again. The stone-colored clouds elongated into sharp blades across the sky. The villagers of New Ipswich looked up and muttered anxiously to each other. The Elders looked worried, too, but their uneasy gazes were fixed on the villagers, not Martha and Ellena.
“I said, your magick has no power here!” Elder Barrow shouted, his red face turning berry-purple. To the men holding Martha up, he added, “Cut out her tongue.”
It was the first time Ellena had seen her mother look afraid since she had been arrested. She struggled against the iron grasp of her captors as another man she did not know approached her mother. He punched the old woman in the face and then squeezed her throat until she opened her mouth to gasp for air.
“Stop!” the girl cried out, terrified for her mother. “Don’t do this, please! Stop this!”
Elder Barrow’s expression didn’t waver, except to allow a tiny, almost imperceptible smile. He would not be moved. If anything, he would enjoy the pain and suffering of helpless women on his stage of paraded sins, and her anger swelled.
Ellena rose to her feet but before she could do anything to help her mother, Zebede Ratcliffe had jumped the gallows stage and taken hold of her. His grip was strong; it hurt her ribs. She turned her head to other faces she knew in the crowd, the ones who looked just as surprised and horrified as her mother. “Please, somebody—help her!”
No one moved or spoke as the man used a pair of pliers to take hold of the old woman’s tongue. Once he had a good grip on it and had pulled it over her lips, he let go of her throat and drew a knife from his belt. Then he cut Martha’s tongue out at the root.
The old woman screamed, but the sound was drowned by a gurgle as blood spilled from her mouth and over her chin, splattering the metal tools. The lump of bloody muscle was tossed aside, and all three men stepped away from Martha, letting her sink to the ground beside Ellena. The old woman did not cry, but her eyes were wet and shining and large with pain. She extended a hand to her daughter and the girl took it and held it.
The old woman tried to speak, but managed only to send fresh waves of blood over her chin and neck.
All around them, the trees rustled angrily. Now, they whispered. Say the words… say them now…
“Now?” the girl echoed, and her mother nodded. Martha had only a moment to squeeze her daughter’s hand before Elder Barrow was barking orders and the men were on her again, dragging her toward the wire noose.
Ellena turned her head. She didn’t want to see. She had to concentrate, and her time was running out; once they were finished with Mother Martha, they would turn their hate on her.
She began to speak, softly at first while they were distracted with hanging her mother, then louder as the angry fire in her bellowed outward.
“Rí agus Banríon na Foraoise páirt a ghlacadh linn inár n-am gá! Cuimhnigh dúinn le linn na bhflaitheas agus cuirimid naimhde a mharú!”
* * *
And so we came. Though it was not our custom to get involved in the affairs of mortal men, we had grown fond of our little Martha and her girl-child. They had long been good to us and protected our trees from axes and fire. They had looked after the Little Ones and fed them when the forest buried itself beneath the snow. Further, we had grown tired of the village’s endless persecution of those they called Heathens, those who sought the old ways and invited us back into the world we had once ruled.
We are endless like the water, and immortal. We move with the wind. Our memories are longer than those of the trees or rocks.
And we keep our promises.
So I led my people, the people of the woods, made of elements and stars and ancient magick, into the village of New Ipswich. My soldiers called blue fire up from the places outside the earth to burn their homes and fences of dead wood. They froze their monuments until rust engulfed the metal and devoured it, like the Plague of Invisible Mouths, and razed them to the earth.
As the wind carried us along the streets, I spread my fists and the earth opened. Thick roots of the nearby trees sprang from deep within the ground, wrapping around Joseph Abbott, Chastity Parke, Cora Rawlins and other fleeing forms and yanking them back into the hole. The displaced dirt rushed back in to bury many of the villagers alive. We watched as their clawing, scrabbling forms sank beneath the dirt. Cora’s mouth gaped open and then filled with dirt and she was pulled under.
The roots, however, had laid claim to Joseph and Chastity. The dirt, hard now like stone, held both at the waists while the roots tightened around their necks and ribs and crushed their bodies. They dangled limply toward the earth like starving plants, and the roots, with a taste now for blood, sought more villagers to ensnare.
I commanded thorny vines to loose their hold on the woods and snake through the village, spearing eyes and lungs and hearts. Some, glowing pale green and blue with rage, took hold of villagers’ limbs and tore bodies apart.
Blood washed the dirt streets and the moans and wails and screams of Mother Martha’s enemies mixed with the howl of our savage winds. We spared the children, who ran away into the woods. Little Ellena had asked for that, and we obliged. The men and women of the village, able-bodied farmers and strong-backed workers—the breeders of the new human race—we slaughtered and left where they fell.
We made our way to the gallows.
Creedence Burnell, Obedience Baker, and Jeremiah Pickering huddled on their stage, watching with frozen, horrified faces the carnage swirling around their village. The limp, mangled body of our little Martha hung from their gallows pole like a broken branch from a dead tree. I cut Martha’s wire-rope with a gesture and she fell, a lump of rags and beaten flesh. Then I sent others to sweep around Ellena in whirling dervishes of wind and protect her. She stood very still among them and covered her eyes with her hands.
Those three men of the village cowering before us were not like the men of old, who in facing our wrath stood firm and stoic with their weapons drawn, ready to greet death. These wept and begged, and then they fell like kindling when we caused their gallows to splinter and spear their eyes and throats.
The village elders had fled to their New Church. Decades ago, they had built it from sheets of tin and metal and iron, from old shipping containers and scraps of ships and cars and trucks. Electronic circuitry, long dry, formed an arch over the doorway. Cell phones lined the windows like frames of blind eyes. Braided electrical cables had been furnished as architectural embellishments. Taking in so much of the technology of the New God, I couldn’t help but remember the fear that had once driven us into the ground and the deepest shadows of the forest.
And then I remembered the anger.
My army at my back, we burst through the doors.
The village elders we found huddled near the altar, clutching each other behind the 72-inch flatscreen television which formed its front face. Some prayed to their New God. Others looked ready to fight.
Ellena was right; they brandished iron. They had also fashioned crude weapons from remnants of steel and tin and other alloys of metal. They had charged up their generator, and the metal prongs of their soul-cleansing device sparked almost like magick.
“W-What are you, woman?” Elder Barrow asked in a voice part bluster and part terror. “What manner of Heathen devil are you?”
We did not answer. Instead, we swept toward the altar.
They swung their weapons and the prongs of metal vibrated and sizzled with electrical sparks, but we were practiced in avoiding their machines. Zebede Ratcliff thrust at us with his iron spear. I gestured with my fingers and his head turned all the way around, snapping his neck. Cotton Pratt, who beat Martha worse than he had ever beaten his wife and daughter, swung at me with an iron axe. I flew out of its way, and with a nod, raised him above the ground and dashed him against the stone floor. We crushed them, broke their bones. We used the old magick, the substance of our souls from the dimensions we in ancient times called home. The secrets of that substance were many, perhaps too many for most whose bodies and minds had so short a memory.
Elder Barrow fell to his knees. “Oh, ancient goddesses and gods, forgive me! Please forgive me! I didn’t understand before, but now—now I see!”
“You will never see again,” I said, and a fog overtook his eyes. He cried out, clutching at his face, whimpering that he was blind. I considered slitting his throat. Instead, I caused his right hand and arm to shrivel and curl up to the elbow, as well as his left foot to the ankle and his testicles.
He might not have the memory of trees, but I would make sure he remembered who he had angered that day.
When the bodies of the Heathens’ enemies lay in a bloody heap on the altar like the sacrifices of old, their remnants of technology scattered about them like a halo, we looked around. One man was left, cowering in a corner. When he saw us, he didn’t beg. He didn’t fight.
He simply looked up at us, nodded, then closed his eyes and said, “Please be merciful and make it quick, Ancient Ones.”
“Jonah Harwood,” I replied. “You will let the girl return to the house in the glen and live as she has lived, and you will protect her. You will allow no harm to come to her as it did to her mother. Do this, and we will let you live.”
Harwood opened his eyes. They shone with relief and surprise. “Yes, yes, of course. Of course I will. I will protect her until my dying day.”
“Then we will remember you,” I said, and at that, we returned to the trees.
* * *
Ellena tells that story to her children, and her children’s children. Sometimes, Grandpa Jonah tells it, though his eyes don’t sparkle quite the same way when he does. Sometimes, when he finishes, he stares out the window of the little house in the glen and worries that the cities of the Faithful will hear about the little village where the Heathens won, that they will come out and try to make things return to the way they were.
More often than not, when he looks out that window, he sees us, and the anxious lines in his face soften a little, and he turns back to the children and smokes his pipe and tells them about the rainforests his family once tried to save.
He has no need to worry, because we are still here, among the trees, watching. We still sing the songs in the old language and speak through the rustling of the leaves. We have memories that go on, longer than that little house in the glen will stand, longer than bones will hold up those who live in it. We remember.