The Withy - the full short story

I did not know why the trees were dying, and I did not know why the sea was rising. I believe they would have told the Grand Father – perhaps they did – but they would not tell me.

I do not know why I was expected to put the Grand Father’s finger bone in his tomb, once the wilds and the weather had taken away his flesh. I was told that the time had come to forget, to walk among the living and leave the dead behind; but the colours of those words were not right, and there was nothing to believe in them.

If only the Grand Father had lived long enough to teach me what I needed to know. They condemned him, the villagers, for not choosing a Withy earlier, leaving it until it seemed like his last season was upon him. Yet he spoke in the colours of fire about there having been no Withy at all until I was born; and when he spoke in those colours the villagers dared not even look him in the eye.

When his last words faded to the deep blues of night, and he died, they performed his first burial with respect, laying his body in a shallow pit on the beach and covering it loosely in leather. When his flesh was gone they continued their respectful ways, allowing his son – and me – to carry one of his bones. The bone of his finger, which had pointed through the times of alarm and pain towards the times of light and plenty, still glowed with some of his energy, and so I chose it. 

Their respect ended when the Grand Father’s son died. Ignoring my presence, they said the time of forgetting had come, since all direct family members were dead, and told me to return the bone to the tomb, for it to be sealed for ever in the second burial. I did not know why, and none could tell me, and so I refused to release the bone (which I still wear on string round my neck); and so began the trying time.

In the absence of a Grand Son, and the presence only of me, a part-tutored Withy, they elected an elder – a man whose words seemed bright but were not, and whose sounds and patterns carried little truth. He could not explain why the trees were dying and the sea was rising, but would only say that I could not explain either, and there the discussion must end. I saw the colours around the villagers changing under the effects of his words –– but what could I do? A child of fewer than forty seasons, lacking the knowledge to understand and direct the sounds and colours, as the Grand Father had done.

No one dared deny me the right to enter any home and partake of whatever I needed; although I near died myself from the fear of attempting to exert the right and being refused. The man with four children was condemned when he asked me to empower his hearth stone, yet every other household had asked the same of me, even the elected elder, and I had done it. (I had done it well, learning and understanding the flow of energy in the same moment, and for the first time beginning to see why the Grand Father had chosen me to replace him.)

I could make no sense of the silence in the trees and the seas, and the colourless words of the village. The only sense I could see was in the slight struggling glow in the finger bone, one of the Grand Father’s own hearth stones within the home he had worn in this life. I realised that, while all other things confounded me, stone did not; and I began to believe that if I could pass the Grand Father’s energy from the small finger bone stone to a larger stone, I might find enough colour to continue my learnings alone.

It took countless days to find the piece I needed. In those days I climbed the cliffs, hoping perhaps that the trees higher up might still talk (they did not) and I stepped along the shore, unable to ignore the signs that the sea was becoming bigger and so our island was becoming smaller; and the sea would not talk, although its colours were changing, as if carrying a message it could not yet explain to itself, and I came to believe that the younger trees high on the cliffs were changing too.

When I believed that I would find the stone I needed at the point where the water meets the land, I found it. It lay flat and had been listening to the life around it for a time I could not count (although I could see it) and its own colours were in balance with the Grand Father’s finger bone. I took it to the quiet place among the silent – but still healthy – trees, and I set it upright. It stood to the height of my knee, almost like a finger from a hand buried deep in the land; and, over time, and with a great effort of belief, I transferred what remained of the Grand Father’s glow from the bone into the stone.

When the movement was complete the first lesson I learned was that I did not have the language to understand everything that was there for me to learn. It took me a little time to believe that I needed other stones, into which I could instil what I knew of other people, so that I could see many words and so expand my language. I found a stone where I placed my memories of my mother; and another where I placed the memories of the guard who lost her life in protecting me from another village’s attack in a dark time; and another where I placed the memory of the woman who had cared for me while the Grand Father taught me. Then I found a stone to act for the trees, and one for the seas, and one – left empty – for myself.

For twelve seasons I simply listened to the colours and watched the sounds, gradually understanding more of each movement, sitting in the centre of the circle of living stones. In time I began to believe that, underneath those movements, I could behold an older, deeper movement of more truth: the language of the stones themselves. For the stone inside us all, like the finger bone, helped me believe that we all originated in stone, and will return to that state, and we always have and always will.

The trees continued to die and the sea continued to rise, and the village entered a darker time than any could remember. The elected elder’s colourless words offered no help, and soon, no hope; and eventually he came to me. He came with his guards, an ever-increasing number of people, none of whom worked for the village’s good, meaning that others had to carry greater weights. He laughed with his guards as he pretended to hold a superior position to me, and the words seeped like cold out of his barely-glowing self; and they did not enter the others, but only seeped through them, leaving them colder and with less of their own glow; and I could see how many seasons it would take to utterly end all their glowing, and that the seeping of cold, forever-death would continue into the world even when the glowing had ended.

The elder could not understand what he saw in the circle of stones. He asked, but I had nearly lost the understanding of the words of the villagers. When he called me Withy and threatened me with pain if I did not explain the secret to how the circle made him feel, I made him believe I had become Grand, and I spoke for the first time with words the colour of flame. The elder was rightly terrified; but then I saw he was more terrified that the artifice he had created would collapse under the energy of my words. So he told his guards to destroy the stone circle. I was Grand, and no longer a Withy, and I had words the colour of flame, but not yet the power of flame itself –– I was yet less than a third of my life in age. I could not prevent being held down as the guards took the stones and broke them, leaving me alone in the quiet place, with just the echoes of all the colours that had surrounded and taught me as they faded into forever.

And then I understood why the trees were dying and why the seas were rising, and why they could not explain the intention behind it to anyone of my sort. Almost immediately I came to believe how long it would take for the wrongs to be righted, how long it would take to push back the seeping cold; and I knew the village had to be left behind as lost.

It took another season to believe in where I had to go. It took that long for me to learn to listen to the distance of the ends of sight, all those countless seasons ago before the village or even the trees or sea existed. As I strained to listen I saw the sounds of the Grand Father’s glow, somewhere to the south – not too far, less than a moon away, or perhaps a little more. (I had come to know the distance of a moon’s travel to be almost nothing.) 

As I moved through the village for the last time, I saw the elder had persuaded them to build their own stone circle. Larger, much larger, than my own, but with the wrong stones and no glow of truth at all. There was no meaning or colour to the shapes and sounds the villagers made around it, and the act of my passing near to them caused them to stop and stand in bewilderment, feeling nothing and left with the impossible task of believing in that feeling.

Perhaps, when I arrived at my destination as a new Grand Son, my new stone circle would be larger than the first. Yet more importantly, it would be built of the proper stones, and I would put the proper energy into them, until the time came for me, as a Grand Father, to put my own energy into them; and then, at that moment, there would be thousands of years before the true colours would start to come back.