March
The pyres burn all day, smoke greying out the sun. We walk through the sooty veils, our grimy faces cut in half by scarves. We are masked reapers. We cut what was once alive and feed it to the flames. Fire-smoke smells acrid, diseased, but the masks are to protect against the Rust. Breathed over time, the microbe reforms mammalian lungs into bloated, lacerated bellows. So, we cover up. Our faces uncovered at night are always strange and pale.
There’s nothing green or pleasant about this land now. It’s become an ugly patchwork of dirty russet, dull bronze and toxic-orange. The plants are dying. The towering oaks in the forest, the stately rhododendrons in the park, the hybrid-tea roses in the gardens. Everything is infected. The shushing fields of wheat, the fragrant orchards and leafy ranks of crops. Nothing floral is immune. The pinhead fungi under leaf-litter, the shivers of lichen on crumbling walls, the scraps of bitter cress greening oily puddles. The Rust takes it all. Ruins it all.
So, we must reap the blistered land. Burn everything. Our smoke-stained tears come too late for a butchered world.
June
Blair – Northwest Quadrant, Zone C
I’ve been set to work a once-pretty Victorian terrace with my wheelbarrow. Ten back-gardens between low walls – most are paved, just some tenacious weeds. A few wilted pot plants, some orange-pocked campanula spilling from cracks in brickwork. I work efficiently, my gloved hands tearing. My trowel unearthing the more defiant, scabrous roots. We leave nothing infected behind. My face sweating and freckled with Rust, I drink water from a squashed bottle and press on to the last plot.
As I pass the penultimate battered wall, I look up from my wheelbarrow to survey my workload. Then my breath hot and sour behind stained cotton, leaves me. I drop to the hard, dead soil on scuffed knees. Wheelbarrow tilted and spilling. My eyes sting with dirty tears. A woman – bent as a shepherd’s crook with a cloud of lavender-grey hair and gleaming mahogany skin – emerges from behind whitewashed trellis, offers me a calloused hand. A smile creases her leathery face as I stand shakily.
‘So green.’ I croak, gripping her hand.
‘You took your time,’ her voice is musical, lacking the smoke-rasp of a reaper, ‘but I knew you’d find me.’
#
I explore the garden hesitantly, fearful of damaging its pristine beauty with my embedded grime. The old woman, Tansy, says there’s nothing to fear. The plague is impotent here. Grinning, I rip my ratty scarf away and my senses are reborn in green.
I run my hands across espaliers of apples, plums and pears, thorny clumps of gooseberry and bramble, scented cherry. The almost unbearably fresh smells filling my nose, cleansing. I circle lush vegetable beds, borders of intoxicating herbs, slip inside a greenhouse bursting with produce. Tansy hands me a tomato and the scarlet flesh exploding across my dry tongue is green-sweet and vibrant. The juice runs down my chin, carves pink lines in the dirt.
Along the back wall of the house, Tansy has crowded the patio with a panoply of odd containers – dented buckets, rusting cake-tins, a vintage porcelain bedpan – that overflow with annuals abuzz with insects. I realise I haven’t heard the sound of their urgency in some months. There are pungent, sticky petunias and delicate sweet peas. Vanilla-scented nemesia and marigolds in every shade of the sun.
Glaucous-leaved buddleia and climbing roses drape blossom around a faded blue door. I press a huge lilac froth to my nose and let tears come. It’s the scent of summer. Of garden picnics and playing out late with the dog, sketching butterflies under tree-shade and eating golden slabs of pineapple.
I feel suddenly very tired, sit on a step beside a row of chipped ceramic sinks. Absently brush my fingers through soapy lemon-balm and mint. Tansy is dead-heading the roses, I look up and ask,
‘How?’
#
When science failed the plant kingdom, Tansy turned to magic.
To the spells she’d inherited but long abandoned. A modern world having no place for even gentle sorcery. But with the insidious Rust creeping ever closer, blistering the old maple beyond her gate, scattering the starlings to the smoke-filled winds, she realised it was time to bring the old ways home.
She created a potent decoction from Nature’s own ingredients. Hastily plucked from hedgerows and railway embankments, pavement cracks and dank woodland corners. All the forgotten places. She recited ancient words over the jars, the pages of a foxed book forever in her mind. That night she splashed the acid-green ichor onto the earth between her walls. Her garden prevailed, then flourished, then it sprouted anew. The plague was halted at the gate. An invisible demarcation between death and life. Between reaping and harvest.
I’m wonderfully lost in this sliver of paradise, my eyes cleared and full of colour. My mouth still zinging from the scarlet tomato flesh. Hope stretches out a lemony-green tendril, but I find I’m scared to reach for it.
‘We’ve burned so much.’ I say to Tansy. ‘Decimated the woods and fields. It’s just ash. Will the spell even work’ I point beyond the insect-filled oasis, to where orange-grey plumes rise from pyres, ‘out there?’
Tansy moves through her garden, touching a dark crenulated leaf, a white trumpet flower, her eyes are bright as new peas. ‘Everything we need is here.’ She hands me a seed-packet, something bushy and green faded on the paper. She cups my chin with a nut-brown hand. It smells of growing things. ‘We turn the ash of loss through the soil, then we start over.’
My hands itch for the crumble of lifegiving earth, the magic of the hard kernels I can feel inside the packet. I picture an army of reapers using their tools to turn the soil, their hands to plant and prune. Once pale faces burnishing in the sun. Tansy lifts a trug of paper-skinned bulbs, hands me my trowel: it has new purpose. Her smile is a slice of rosy apple.
‘We bring back all the green.’
