The Meat Tree (13 page)

He

Nona? Is that you? How did you do that?

She

What?

He

I'm on Synapse Log but we can hear each other.

She

What do you expect? Now that we're married we can hear each other all the time.

He

What do you mean?

She

Now that I'm Blodeuwedd and you are Lleu.

*

Synapse Log 9 Feb 2210, 21:00

Apprentice

It's not as if I made a pass at him, or anything, I was just being consistent with the role he asked me to
play. Supper tonight was as awkward as any we've
had on board. But he knows that he can't ask me to be professional in this investigation and then complain
when he gets more than he bargained for in VR.

Inspector of
Wrecks

I'm at a loss what to think of developments this
afternoon. I don't have a theory, find myself para
­
­lysed, especially as now I don't know what Nona can hear or when I have my thoughts to myself.

She

As Gwydion would say, we're all storytellers here and so we can hardly be surprised when our versions dovetail or clash with those of other minds. The strange thing is that we no longer need to go into the VR for the story to be taking place in us.

He

The one thing I do know is that, after the wedding, Math gave Lleu a domain of his own for him to rule over. Good, fertile land. And what was it like? I have no idea.

She

Blodeuwedd stands next to Lleu and turns by tiny degrees towards her husband, like a plant that follows the sun till their mouths meet and, ravenous, she eats the light.

He thinks she looks gorgeous. She thinks he smells of offal.

He

I'm Old School and believe you should never
anthropomorphise plants. They're entirely passive, don't have minds like us, they just react to stimuli.

She

Gwydion and Math's magic is primarily visual. They thought that a woman made from flowers would look good. But the body has a way of taking over the story.

Lleu is the light that, invisible himself, shows up all the other characters: Gwydion, who's determined to make a story for him, Blodeuwedd, who turns to him because she has to obey the sun.

He

If the VR story is, in some way, a symbolic com
mentary on what happened on board this ship,
then why the concept of mixing the DNA of plants and humans? What evolutionary advantage could it
possibly confer on humans? Maybe that light is
plentiful in space, would be endless fuel if the ship…

No, that's ridiculous.

She

Campion thinks that he's so open-minded, but he's only beginning to see it. That the ship didn't come
from Earth but from much further away. That it
came from a place so distant that humans and plants had time to marry, like Blodeuwedd and Lleu, to evolve together. What if we read the VR myth as a literal, not metaphorical, account of what happened on board?

He

Do you have any idea of the distances that kind of evolution would require? It's madness to think it.

I have no idea what's going on. All I know is that Lleu and Blodeuwedd cling to the ship that holds them, as if to the mother that neither of them has ever known.

*

Synapse Log 9 Feb 2210, 23:50

Apprentice

Even when I sleep, I'm not still for a moment. I tango with light and temperature. My mind counts its losses at night and thoughts, like vines, oscillate involuntarily in dreams. There are notions that my
roots evade, like stones in the soil. I simply go
round, seeking out moisture and a place to stand from which I can grow. I don't think, I revolve and
break new ground and the burden I carry is heavy,
as if I were lifting a boulder. Ah, the so-called sleep
of leaves, far from inactive. I inherited habitual
movements in order to seek just the right amount
of illumination.

A plant is an animal that can't yet move. Except if it's in a spaceship. Using a vessel as her legs and a man as her servant.

Gwydion and Math's spells are all very well, but their cunning only gets them so far. They ride roughshod over people to get their way but they are absolutely no match for real, bodily imagination, for a plant intent on travel.

And don't tell me that a plant can't traverse vast distances, manipulating the desires of others to her own end. In that particular survival strategy, beauty is the killer.

*

He

Now that we can hear each other's thoughts, even if we're in separate rooms, I've given up on the Synapse Log and the Joint Thought Channel. It's enough to observe how the story unfolds.

Each day I wait until I hear the scrap of a voice, a clue. Then Nona and I – or should I say Blodeuwedd and Lleu? – start talking. And so what we are begins to take shape.

She

He's getting less formal. I notice that he spends much less time at his instruments. He needs me to be a dream of myself as Blodeuwedd.

I've no choice in the matter. I'm a prop in his
story, never mind the rage inside me. I hide that and present the blank of my petal face. He has no sense of smell, so I weave a fury of fragrance in the air around him – a spite of galingale, used by Arabs to make horses fiery. He talks at me and I exude a cloud of musk for my voluptuousness that he'll never reach. He gabbles again and I reply with a mist of Japanese star anise, the mad herb, used to scent tombs.

Of course, they insist that I learn his talk. But does he ever bother to learn the language I speak
incessantly to him?

He

I still think that the figure of Math might be our
solution, an actual log of what happened on board this ship.

Lleu decides to visit his uncle at his home and leaves Blodeuwedd in the marital home. I think about missing kings and masculine power in the realm of magic.

She

If he'd smelt me, listened, he would never have gone.

The enemy of magic is time. They made me from summer flowers. Have you not seen the rust in meadow­sweet blossoms, the brown of high summer as loveliness turns, as it must, towards its own decay?
Have you not smelt its rank sweetness, like the stink of melon on the turn? Nearly delicious, but sickening.

He

Math the magician, the one who can make a home for the parentless, a kingdom for the rejected boy, cursed by his mother.

She

He knows that Nona's predisposed to drown in a role. So he throws her into a story in which a plant is kidnapped into the human realm to please two magicians, whose only concern is how things look. This she construes as a gross assault. I swore to kill him if I was raped again.

Let him go to Math and let my imagination change the terms of the story. He has no idea how sap burns in the veins of a woman.

*

She

What's the imagination of a flower? A bee.

I'm wandering outside the house one day and I hear a horn and dogs barking. A company of hunters. I follow and watch them, unseen.

The stag they're hunting is tired. It's been a long chase. This is no illusion with humans turned into deer. The animal's panting and I can see a crescent moon in the white of its eye as its pursuers close in from behind.

I gaze, entranced, as the kill is made. The process takes its course. Before working on the body, the hunter removes his outer garments and folds them carefully, so that they don't get soiled. He turns the felled deer on its back, spreading the hind legs. Then he makes an incision from the breastbone to the base of the tail. He slices through the hide, using the knife to keep the intestines away from the rest of the corpse. Then he severs the anus and draws that in to the body cavity, removing the intestines and bladder with great care and feeding them to the baying dogs.

The hunter's forearms are bloody up to the elbow. Here is a man not afraid of death. He thrives on it, feeds from the feast of real time.

Next he works on the diaphragm, cutting into the chest cavity and pulling out the lungs. He spreads that open with a stick, to help the carcass cool. Next he turns the stag on its stomach and lets the blood drain out.

Then he covers the whole with a clean cloth and washes his hands in the nearby stream.

Behind the tree trunk, from where I'm watching,
I smell my arm. The same kind of meat, in need
of dressing.

When he passes the house with his company, I send a servant to invite him in.

He

Math and Gwydion's magic works by distraction. It draws attention away from the undesirable aspects of life, inconvenient hatreds, like Aranrhod's rage against her brother and Lleu.

She

The hunter's a man who makes an art of death. That, I respect. He doesn't use conjuring tricks to get round language.

He made a ceremony of meat and I found that
exciting.

It was only proper that I should invite him in.

He

But what happens when flesh and blood enter the VR? The story takes on a life of its own. A death of its own.

And whose bodies are behind the tale? I look, but I can't find Math or Gwydion, except in the layer of tricks. The narrative has entered an entirely new phase, in my body and Nona's and I feel that sight – realm of magicians – is now a liability. This chapter's written in blood, which has its own plots.

She

As does time. We sit at dinner and gaze at each other. The hunter's unafraid of waiting and takes pleasure in letting things develop in front of him, without interference. I feel myself unfurl.

He smells me.

He

What if everything up to this point has been a
distraction? A cover story to lead us away from
what really happened here? And what if that was a
battle between meat and magic? The body and
imagination?

She

He's a man used to reading the air for clues of an
animal. He kept the stag's scent glands, which he cut out carefully, to help him with hunting. He knows how to hide in the subtle forest of smells.

He

And what if Nona's being eaten alive by this myth? I need to get back to her, but Math and his talking keep me at court.

She

No need to delay, when things take place in their proper time.

He comes to me like an idea and in the darkness we know the same laws. I lean backwards and let the bees of kissing come to me, their parabolas making a fountain that falls back into a basin. My suitor claims the pollen of a nuptial embrace. Labellum, proboscis, bristle and saddle strain to get closer. He feels the silk of my skin, is not afraid to tear the folded pedicle up, it straightens like a spring. I'm rich as an orchid under him. My new lover's a guest at the nectary whose scent makes a conjugal tent above us.

And the shadow beneath us is Lleu's death.

*

She

He breathes me in. The following day I won't let
him go.

He stalks me, the way a hunter should, every day a little closer. He pays me the compliment of hunting
me blind, using only the senses of hearing and smell.

Second night, deeper, he feels me plunging down into the cold earth, seeking out moisture in the dark. Tendrils are a matter of principle, greeting the roots of trees like old friends, dancing with the molecules of birds decayed in the humus. I keep him with me another night.

Then he drinks me fully because he sees how flowers are meaningless in themselves apart from the seed and the falling leaf. The hunter loves me for how I was in bud and for my future descent into dead leaves and litter. And so we talk about how to kill Lleu.

*

He

With Math I learn nothing. At court, everything's going well for Math. He's there with his new wife, Goewin. He has a new footholder, a gorgeous young maid, whose lap he uses now that the war's over.

I'm none the wiser about this case, except that I'm beginning to suspect that I should rethink the timescales involved. Myth is a shorthand for what happens over many generations. What looks, in the story, like a surreal event is in fact a hugely significant change in a society's way of conducting itself. And in space, history means distance.

From exactly how far away did this ship originate?
Forget for a moment how it appears – an Earth vessel
of a certain age. Close your eyes to the design, the period touches, the tiny details which date a vessel. No, Campion, think, for once, with a myth­ical mind.