In the Deep of Night

After a long spell of peaceful sleep, an unfamiliar creak jolts her awake.

She stays lying down, one hand beneath her cheek. In the darkness of the house she hears her mother breathing and something brushing against the roof. She waits for a second sound that might help her recognise the first. There is a blow, then another. Drufmna sits up. She searches for the window with her eyes, still dulled by sleep. The shutters are open and, beyond them, the treetops merge with the dark sky.

Another blow. A pause. Another. She gets out of bed and crosses the room. As she leans out, she hears a distant voice, too muffled for her to make out the words. Then she hears a man laugh. Her mother stirs in bed.

“What’s happening?”

Drufmna is already at the door.

She goes out barefoot. The night is pitch-dark in the eternal forest of Fenoidfenifur. Above the treetops, the vault of the heavens holds a violet, star-studded glow, lit chiefly by the immense Zammön that dominates the centre of the sky. Off to one side, Kava adds to the nocturnal radiance with its very white surface and crimson scratches. Along the horizon, as gloomy as ever, lies dark Zuvvön with its blazing accretion disc, which sheds only a faint light on whatever it touches.

The air presses her nightdress against her legs, and the damp ground chills the soles of her feet. She takes a few steps before finding the path. At first she walks quickly, her arms outstretched to push the branches aside. When she hears the blows again, she starts to run. The sound comes from the stream. She trips over a root, falls onto one knee and gets up without looking at the wound. Leaves lash her face.

She knows the path, knows where it narrows and where she has to duck, but that night she cannot judge the distances. She runs with one hand in front of her eyes. There is a long cracking sound, followed by several overlapping snaps. An impact travels through the ground into her feet. For an instant everything seems to move around her. She stops. Something small brushes her shoulder: a shower of leaves and broken twigs.

She raises her arms to shield her head. When she lowers her hands, the space above the stream is open. Ánsaflys lies across the current. Its highest branches have sunk into the opposite bank; some are still swaying from the fall. The trunk, severed from its base along a pale, uneven surface, has torn up some of the plants growing beside the water. In desperation, Drufmna moves forward beneath Kava’s light until she touches a branch.

She pushes it aside, finds another and tries to climb over it. A broken point cuts her forearm.

“Hey!”

Her cry comes out shrill, and she barely has enough breath to repeat it. Behind the trunk, a man moves. She makes out his bent back and the arm he lifts to pull something free of the wood. One metal object strikes another. Drufmna sees the outline of a tool, a shadow that turns towards her and then retreats.

“You! Wait!”

She tries to reach him by going around the branches. Her nightdress catches, and she pulls until it tears. She hears a snort, the thud of hooves. Farther off, something creaks over the stones of the path. The man laughs again. The laughter breaks off as he moves away, drowned out by the rattling of wheels.

Drufmna reaches the edge of the wide path and finds only darkness. She runs a few steps, stops and listens. The noise fades among the trees. She looks back and takes in the devastation. The stream is blocked. Water gathers against the leaves of the fallen crown and begins to spill over the bank she protected that morning. She returns to Ánsaflys. She kneels before the cut and rests her hand on the exposed wood. It is damp.

The smell is strong, a smell she recognises from small broken branches, but now it fills her mouth and turns her stomach. The trunk’s final wrench has left a strip of bark attached to the base. Drufmna lifts it. There are splinters on its inner surface. She tries to bring it back against the place it tore away from and has to hold it with both hands because it bends. When she stops pressing, it falls again.

She stays looking at it. Farther up the fallen trunk, she searches for the buckle scar. She has to crawl between two branches to find it. When she reaches it, she rests her palm on its ridges and bends until her cheek touches the bark. The water soaks her knees. The branches behind her keep sinking slowly.

“I’m here, Ánsaflys.”

It is all she can manage to say. Her tears fall into the stream. She says the same thing once more, then again, her voice growing fainter each time. She tries to embrace the trunk as she always does, but the position is awkward and she cannot reach around it. She cuts one hand as she searches for a hold. Her breathing grows short and loud; her chest hurts when she tries to fill it. When her mother arrives with a candle, she finds her daughter in her torn nightdress, lying over the wood, clinging to the scar.

The light reaches her feet first, then her legs and the torn nightdress. The woman stands motionless at the edge of the stream. Her free hand searches for the trunk that should be standing there.

“Drufmna…”

She comes as close as she can, pushing branches aside. When she touches her back, Drufmna turns and grabs her wrist.

“I saw him.”

Her mother looks at the cut in the wood, the splinters in the water, the gap between the treetops.

“I saw him,” Drufmna repeats. “He was right here.”

The woman sets the candle on the bank and kneels beside her. Drufmna tries to explain which way he went, her words spilling out chaotically, but she cannot draw enough breath to finish each sentence. She points to the path and opens her mouth without managing to speak. Her mother brushes the damp hair from her face and supports the back of her neck.

They stay there until the candle flame begins to burn low in the deep of night.