The Ashen Oak Part One

Author’s Note:   

          In “The Mushroom Farmer,” I wanted to establish the world of the story without being too exposition heavy. I tried slipping some important details to the readers into story, while showing that my characters think little of these details. One example is the mention of the London Ruins when Edith is describing her aunt. I really hate exposition dumps and I hope nothing in this chapter came across as such. Along these lines, I also tried veiling the true nature of the manmade weather-controlling tree in this folkloric tale of the “Legend of the Ashen Oak,” while revealing a bit about the culture and thinking of the people of Rol. Finally, I wanted to make these people, or at least Edith’s family, matter enough to the readers to sympathize with her on her quest. I would appreciate some feedback on this, as well as if the Edith’s voice is believable as a teen of about fifteen or sixteen. (And one last note: The misspelling of “ammonia” as “pneumonia” is intentional. I wanted that to be a character quirk of Oddy, who’s had his scientific and agrarian knowledge passed down secondhand.)

Prologue

            There was once a war fought not with iron and steel but with wind and water. From the beginning of warfare, the wisest way to win a fight was not always with one’s fists but with one’s mind. Genghis Khan knew this when he employed Chinese engineers to topple the dams they once built and let the floods do his work for him. Elizabeth’s men stumbled onto this truth when the Atlantic storms laid low the Spanish Armada. Soon, man could shape the weather of the world to his will. Rulers and kings forbade this warfare openly, but secretly they all knew the value of diverting a raincloud here and hurricane there. And as with anything, once a man has the power to command the thunder and lightning, what motivation would he have to give it up?

1. Mushroom Farmer

            “Edith,” Pa shouted. “Edith, wake up!”

            Head groggy and heart thumping, I jumped out of bed, tossing my old quilt to the ground. My foggy mind first leapt to the conclusion that someone had died. But no, my frantic Pa was running about the room, throwing down buckets and stray pieces of cloth. Streams of rainwater cascaded down from the ceiling.

            “Help me patch the holes,” Pa said, as a stream of water poured down onto his back, “or the rain’s going to spoil the whole crop!”

            I snatched the toilet bucket from under my bed and slid it under the nearest waterfall. The rain was coming down hard through the roof and had already filled up some of the buckets, sloshing over their sides. A thin pool of water crawled across our floor of old boards.

            I bunched up my quilt and tossed it onto the floor, soaking up some of the water advancing toward my feet. “What happened?”

            “Got no idea,” Pa said, looking up at me for a moment. “Woke up to the devil taking a piss right through my roof.”

            “The storms are getting worse aren’t they?”

            “Aye.” Pa blinked. “But right now let’s just worry about not floating away like river rubbish, you hear me?”

            I nodded and pushed my quilt along the floor, sweeping up a thin wave of water as I went.

            Pa wobbled to the door as fast as his bum right leg would let him and emptied a nearly full bucket off the front porch. “This isn’t going to let up. Go get your uncle,” he said. “Tell him to bring all the wood and nails he’s got.”

            “What about the buckets?”

             “Forget ‘em. If we don’t plug those holes, the whole house is going to turn into one big bucket. And get a tarp. We’ve got to protect the crop.”

            I dashed past him and out the door, facing the wild storm in nothing but my raggedy pajamas. The rain soaked through the cloth in an instant. I was gone before Pa even told me to take my raincoat.

            My feet sunk into the muddy street as I trudged to the next house, following nothing but my memory of the village in the heartless dark of the stormy night. I regretted not bringing any protection from the rain—the hungry droplets were already stinging my eyes. The house where I was heading belonged to my Uncle Jay and his wife Freja. She had come from another village far away to the north, on the other side of the London Ruins. There the folk were tall and strong, with their hair like gold. Pa said he never liked those Northmen. It was hard to trust a man whose ribs didn’t show. And their home was a haunted and ugly country—the kind of place that ruined a man. Maybe that was why they took to the sea to fish, but it was a strange man that would prefer even so much water around him. Still, my Uncle Jay seemed to like Freja so that was good enough for me, and apparently it was good enough for their daughter Anja.

            I slammed my fist against the front door, hoping they’d hear me in the din of the storm. “Uncle Jay,” I shouted. “Uncle Jay, I need your help!”

            A few moments later and the door flew open and I nearly fell inside.

            “What’s the matter?” Uncle Jay’s hair was unkempt and he was rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Your Pa okay?

            “Our house is flooding!”

            “Damn it all.” Uncle Jay grabbed his raincoat and tossed it to me. “You put that on and head on home. I’ll be right over.”

            “Pa said to bring nails and boards. And a tarp.”

            “I’ll be right there.”

*

            Hours after we patched the roof and soaked up the majority of the rainwater, Pa knelt over our mushroom planters. He ran his hands through the damp soil and shook his head.

“No good.”

            I felt my stomach drop. “How bad?” In the dim lamplight, I looked across the trays arranged on shelves across the entirety of the dark basement. They had set up the new layer of mushrooms a little over a week ago. Only the earliest of them were starting to show their caps from the layer of mulch. They all still had about a week to go before the first crop of the month would be ready to harvest.

            “We’re going to have to dump the whole bloody batch. The rainwater got in unfiltered. Soaked through everything. See this?” He held out a handful of soil interlaced with the thin white strands of mycelium. “It’s too wet. If the water was pure there might be almost no problem. The furnace would do the trick in no time at all. But this water’s hungry. Hungrier than anything I’ve seen in a while. You can even smell it.”

            He held out the handful of soil and I sniffed carefully. My nose crinkled at the sour tinge of the earth. Hungry, that’s how Pa always described them. The water would eat at stone and wood, eroding them out like the banks of a river. When that hungry water flowed into the streams and rivers and seas, it ate whatever the fish had to eat and starved them out.

            “It eats all the food right out of the mulch,” Pa said, his voice hoarse. “Starves the mushrooms before they’re even born. We’ll be lucky if the biggest ones here get even to half their normal size. The next ones won’t even come out at all.”

            “Then let’s just replace them all.” I frowned as I realized we didn’t have the dirt. We had used up all of Oddy’s supply a week ago.

            Pa shook his head. “I’ll talk to Oddy tomorrow about making more compost.”

“I’ll come with you,” I said, cringing inside. I hated going to Oddy’s.

“Until then, we’d better tend these mushrooms as best we can.” He staggered to his feet, steadying himself on one of the shelves and making his way over to the furnace. He shoveled a few scoops of peat into the fire. It flickered for a few moments then blazed bright.

I yawned and got to my feet.

“You may as well get some sleep. Just stay down here. It’s warmer and all the blankets are soaked anyway.”

“Okay.” I settled down on the soft basement floor. In the light of the furnace, I could just make out the dark splotches where the water had soaked through the floorboards of the ceiling.

            “Pa, do you think we are going to be okay?”

            Across the room, I could hear him sigh. “We’ll be fine.”

            He was trying to be tough, but I could hear it in his voice. We’d have to ration the mushrooms we had for at least another month. Pa would end up giving me more than my share and leave little for himself. The hungry rainwater had ruined everything. Even the heat of the furnace wouldn’t do any good.

            “Pa?”

            “Yes?”

            “Can you sing me a song?”

            Silence. Then Pa cleared his throat, just as he always did when he sang.

London Ruins falling down,

Falling down, falling down.

London Ruins falling down,

My dear Edie.

Prop them up with steel and clay,

Steel and clay, steel and clay,

Prop them up with steel and clay,

My dear Edie.

Steel and clay will wash away,

Wash away, wash away,

Steel and clay will wash away,

My dear Edie.

            That song always put me to sleep. Like my Pa, it was one thing that I knew would never change, never wash away like the metal and stone bones of London Ruins. I listened and let my Pa’s deep voice carry me away on the winds of sleep.

2. Hermit

            Oddy’s shack was a good ways from town. No one could really remember when he drifted over to Rol, probably long before I was born. Pa said that he had found him wandering London Ruins. Once he got to Rol, it wasn’t too long until he moved out apparently. It wasn’t so much that he was a hermit (although he most certainly was)—it was just that no one wanted him doing his job around town. And for good reason. The smell hit me like a rock before we were even within eyesight: the aroma of a toilet bucket wafted through the rain.

Pneumonia, Oddy had called it, a byproduct of the composting process. Everyone was pretty sure the big words like pneumonia Oddy threw around were wrong, but no one thought it would be worth hurting his pride. We all needed his compost too much.

            Even Pa seemed bothered by the smell. He ran his hand across his mustache several times as though he were swatting away a swarm of fleas.

            Oddy opened the door before we even had a chance to knock. He was a gaunt, short man, and his arrogant, half-drunken sneer made him ugly. Oddy surveyed us with squinted eyes. “Next load’s not due for another seventeen days. What do you want?”

            “Nice to see you too, Theodore.” Pa said, hands on his hips. “Now would you mind letting us in?”

            Oddy’s face twitched. “Not until you tell me what the devil you want.”

            Pa sighed. “Last night we had a small leak in our roof. Nothing to worry about, so long as you can speed up the next load a bit.”

            “Speed up?” Oddy chortled and choked on the words. “Compost is not something you can just speed up. Do you know how often I have to siphon the gases of that putrid rubbish to make it good enough to grow your mushrooms? Do you know how much time I have to spend on this while you just sit there and grow a batch of toadstools?”

            Pa held up his hands. “Calm down, Theodore. I didn’t mean you any offense. It’s just that for the sake of all of Rol, we could use a mite more of your mulch.”

            Oddy scowled. “I suppose the rainwater got to your crop? How much of it?”

            Pa swallowed.

            “Ah, I see. You ruined the whole lot of it. Well unfortunately, you’re just going to have to wait seventeen days until my processes are completed.”

            “Theodore. We’re talking about all of Rol here. Twenty-three people, including yourself, of course. We need food. There have to be some corners you can cut.”

            “There are no corners. No cutting. Do you know just what goes into taking a lump of mud and peat and turning it into your precious compost? No, of course not. You don’t care so long as you get your mushrooms at the end of the day.”

            “Theodore...”

            “No. No Theodore.” Oddy’s face flared red. “It’s a muggy lot of work that you put on me. First I got to dig up enough dirt and peat to fill my basement. And do any of you ever offer to help? No, that’s my job of course, as Eminent Composter. Then, I have to rely on those morons from across the Ruins to get me the fish guts I need to make my compost healthy for your mushrooms—morons that may I add seem to be getting rather elusive lately—and then wait until you clean the fish’s bones before I can throw in the scraps. And all this going in my house, mind you.”

            Pa entrenched his hands in his pockets and locked his jaw.

            “All this putrescent mess in my house. I And then when I finally have enough material to begin the process, I have to constantly siphon out all those nasty gases that I see you two turning your noses at. Well, surprise! I get to live in them every second of every day. All that pneumonia rising up like clouds of piss. And then when I finally finish with my load of compost, what do I get in return? A few bundles of mushrooms. I am the foundation of all the food in this town. On this rock you build your food stores!”

            Yawning, Pa wiped some rainwater from his face. “Are you done?”

            Oddy sneered at him. “No. You know what, unless I get triple my normal rations, no one in this town will be having any more mushrooms for the foreseeable future.”

            Pa seized Oddy by the collar. “You will get standard rations, just like everyone else.”

            Oddy laughed, then burst into coughing fit. “What are you going to do?” he rasped. “Hurt me? Then who’s going to make your compost? I’m the only one who knows the process.”

            Pa swore and let him go.

            Oddy brushed himself off. “Now, if there’s nothing else.”

            “No. You and I aren’t done with our little chat.” Pa turned to me and tried his best to push the anger from his face. “Edith, why don’t you go on home? Check on the crop and see if your uncle needs any help.”

            I saw the look in his eyes and didn’t want to argue. I bobbed my head and set off through the rain.

*

            On my way back to Rol, I saw my cousin Anja kneeling beside small stream, sifting through its waters with her hand. She was several years younger than me—born when I was old enough to count and notice Aunt Freja’s belly grow big. Anja always had a strange look. Her hair was the harsh gold of Aunt Freja’s and of the other Northmen, but her bones were small like the people of Rol.

            “Edith!” Anja was on her feet in an instant, rubbing the mud from her legs. “Come here. I want to show you something.”

            “What is it?”

            “See those pollywogs there?”

            “No.”

            “Exactly.” Anja turned to me, eyes steady. “They’re all gone. There are not even the two-headed ones. And this brook was one of the purest. It bubbles right out of the ground. It’s one of the last places they could be.”

            “Hmm.” I frowned. Anja was a bit young to handle real work yet, but she had a natural talent for finding those little animals in the water. She knew what she was doing, and if she couldn’t find anything in this stream, then there was nothing to be found.

            “Momma and Pappa were counting on those pollywogs to grow up to be frogs.”

            I noticed Anja’s eyes were beginning to grow damp and it wasn’t from the sting of the rain. Taking her by the hand, I said, “Come on, let’s get back home. Maybe the pollywogs just moved to another stream.”

            Anja wiped her face with her arm. “Maybe.”

            It wasn’t much farther to Rol. The village was hardly visible and that’s how Pa liked it, just six houses covered in mud and peat and arranged in a rough circle along the muddy road. The closest houses were hers and Anja’s. Then was Micah’s house, Herbert’s family’s, Alice’s, and then back to Hayes’s across from ours. Rol was far enough away from the water that flooding wouldn’t be an issue, and close enough that the Northmen’s boats could trade with us. But Oddy was right—it had been too long since the boats had last landed on Rol’s coast.

            I turned to my cousin and swept some water from her golden head. “Anja, does your Momma ever talk about her home?”

            “Sometimes.”

            “Has she said when her family will be back to visit us?”

            Anja eyes flashed to the ground. “She says they’ll be back really soon.”

            I nodded. “I’m sure they will.”

            Eyes brightening, Anja turned to me and smiled. “Let’s play hide and seek!”

            “Okay.” Closing my eyes, I counted, “One hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight…”

*

            Pa didn’t come back until much later. When he did he slammed the door behind him. “That fool,” he muttered. “That complete and utter fool.”

            “Didn’t go well?” I said, offering him a warm cup of mushroom broth.

            “Oh, it went swimmingly. I got the old gasbag to change the terms of his demands. Now he only wants double his normal rations.”

            I cringed. “I’m sorry.”

            “I’m sorry too.” I just can’t fathom a man like that,” he said, massaging his bad leg. “We all need to work together in times like these. There’s no room for any man to get greedy.” Pa took a small sip of his broth then handed it back to me. “How’s the crop?”

            “It’s okay. I’ve been keeping the furnace going. The soil’s starting to dry out a bit. I dried all our linens as well.”

            “Good. We’d best keep the furnace going until tomorrow.” Pa bit his lip. “Edith, it’s not looking good. Even without the Oddy problem, we’re still going to be short a good bit of food. Alice won’t be able to make up the crop in her place, it’s just too small.”

            “Have you talked to everyone yet?”

Pa sighed and rose to his feet. “I suppose now is as good a time as any. You want to come out and give me some moral support? Just…don’t mention Oddy’s demands. We’ll deal with that when the time comes.”

“I’m right behind you.”

            Pa steeled himself and opened the door. Standing outside were the twenty other people of Rol.

            “How are we going to eat, Evan?” Micah said, his face gaunt and weathered. Micah operated the water filter in his hut. On a good day, his system of barrels and sand and boilers dripped out enough water for everyone to drink. “If your crop is really ruined we need to look elsewhere for food.”

            “How about we go into London Ruins?” said Herbert. “There may be small rodents somewhere in the old undergrounds.”

            “We’re not going into the Ruins.” Pa’s face was stiff. “The place is crumbling. It’s not safe.”

            “It’s not safe here!” Micah shouted back. “We’re better off risking some falling rocks than starving ourselves to death.”

            “No one is going to starve,” Pa said. “Alice’s crop is still going strong—that is going to have to carry us for the next month.”

            Alice shook her head. “Evan, dearie, I want you to understand that I’m doing everything I can, but I grow one mushroom for every ten you do.”

            “She’s right, Evan.” Uncle Jay held his wife and daughter close. “There’s no way we’re getting through this one as things are going. The rains have gotten worse and the few fish that were in the creeks and lakes are dead and gone.” He pointed to his daughter’s gaunt body. “We’re already starving as it is. If we want to survive this, we’re going to have to take some desperate measures.”

            Pa frowned. “What are you suggesting?”

            Aunt Freja spoke up. “We find my people. We find out why they have stopped bringing their fish. My brothers will help us.”

            “No.”

            “Why not?” Uncle Jay took a step toward Pa. “This is the best option we have.”

            “And what if they’re all dead?” Pa said. “Aye, I’m being blunt. But the seas are rough, and London Ruins are dangerous. Who’s to say they’re not coming because they’re not any more? What happens if we walk all the way across London Ruins and find their village empty?  We’re not coming back from that.”

            Aunt Freja’s face was red. “I’m going. I will find my brothers even if you only care about them for the food they bring.” She turned back into her house and slammed the door.

            Uncle Jay’s eyes were wide as he stared after her. “Evan, I’m going to have to follow my wife.”

            Pa clenched his fists and stared at the muddy ground. His head sank in defeat. “I know. Take enough mushrooms to last you the trip. If the Northmen are still alive, tell them we need their help. Tell them to send as many fish as they can.”