1.

Today there was only fog where usually there are buzzards.

Today they came to the oak trees seeking figs. They left with curses in their mouths, berating others for their ignorance and the abundance of acorns.

Today people stared up at the sky until it turned pink, listening as though it spoke for them all. In the distant mountains, the village burned. Tomorrow there will be new cloud formations to be named.

Today the last villagers scratched out their pledges in the rain-darkened dust. No-one remembered the old injunctions, or their totems. The child watched the tortoise pull in its head, before cradling it from the rain.

‘These flowers will not bloom,’ she said today, ‘for they reek of blood and penance.’ There had been other sacrifices over the years, but none fit for a vase. In the village, adults banished children from their presence before rehearsing hard truths in harder words.

Today the tally of things they owned was dwarfed by all they had disowned. On the kelp-thick foreshore, seven men sat counting seven fish until they each had none. In sleep, the tortoise matches the peregrine for speed as they encircle the sun.

Today this brave band, this noble band, this mighty band totted up their victories, and winced. ‘We did not expect them to fight,’ someone said. The Captain wrapped the smoking moss into a large, dry leaf, and blew. ‘No enemy is quite so dangerous as an unarmed patriot,’ he said.

Today there were only buzzards, alive with their own animus.

***

2.

Today seven men left by moonlight, parting in several ways. In a hessian sack, each carried a seed the size of his hope. They said nothing, for there was nothing to say that the sky had not already refuted.

Today the scent of charred acorns filled the clearing, like a prayer-less incense. Only the child heard the trees’ reproofs, sharp as truth, and offered up one last pearlescent shell. Bathed in an immense light, the youthful lips stammered out new words.

Today fishbones littered the beach, the brittle runes of a silenced race. The Captain squinted as he took a bearing from the rising sun, ‘The same sun that warms us warms them too,’ he said. The shingle growled and spat beneath their boots.

Today the tortoise spent the afternoon scouring the village in search of shade. It padded from its sleeping place to the old well and back again until it met its own shadow returning. The child had gathered cool, dewy leaves in the morning. In the early starlight, the tortoise ate.

Today one of the men fell in the mountains, finally beaten by the heat and the journey and the thirsting. The rough sack slipped from his fingers, and the seed escaped and rolled away from him and gathered pace and plummeted over the cliff-edge and was gone in a moraine of flint.

Today the child found a bundle of green stems in the ashes of a shack. Pressed within a slab of molten glass, they were as incongruous as faith. ‘These might be flowers tomorrow,’ the child thought, like one who mistakes a fossil for an augury.

Today the fog crept in from the sea, stealthy as banditti, making grotesqueries of all it subdued. The child watched the fog’s mute puppetry from an oak bough and gasped as the ground disappeared.

Today six men made camp in the wild dunes, moulding pillows from the dust. When the night came, they welcomed a dreamless sleep, warmed by the heat of their own great purpose. The seeds lay silent at their sides.

***

3.

Today one of the men met a woman on the track carrying water for the day. Asking for news, he learnt of the last fog, and of the strange light in the morning skies. With the earnestness of parable, she spoke of a child who communes with the trees and walked on.

Today, in the clearing, there was the sound of birds once more. One, and then tens, and then hundreds of birds. Birds in the skies; birds in the trees; and a solitary blackbird hopping through a field riven by a single sunbeam.

Today the Captain spoke of wild rabbits to his men. He spoke of their common behaviours, the asymmetry beneath each skin, and of field-craft butchery. ‘Take no more than you need,’ he said. ‘We are not the largest hunters in these woods.’

Today the tortoise slept all afternoon, while a raven sat in a tree, and a buzzard circled in the gentle breeze. There were stories once about such happenings: elders shared them in the warmth of firelight before the children slept. There are no fires now.

Today the child found a crop of mushrooms, soft as figs, in the shade of an oak tree. Pale in the gloom, they were sudden as fox-song. The child gently lifted three from the ground, and wrapped them in a linen cloth, with the care of a wound-dresser.

Today the mountains spoke. The Captain looked up and stopped; the child peered up through the branches; the blackbird halted; the raven tilted upwards; the buzzard rose on the thickening air; the tortoise slept on. Not all speech comes as words.

Today one of the seed carriers fought a maddened snake and lost, for panic has its own venom.

Today a woman washed her children and filled their cups and soaked their clothes until there was no water, gifts won on badly hewn paths in uncharitable sun. Some lives are an object lesson in sacrifice.

***

4.

Today there was rain. The seed carriers awoke from hidden places, surrounded only by their task and the prospect of their task. Each seed remained perfect and entire, unblemished, in each scarified palm. Five palms bearing five stigmata.

Today the child had a dream about the earliest days, days before eating and speech and consequences. The dream filled the entire afternoon and echoed through the clearing, enfolding the sky and the trees and the clouds until the sunset brought oblivion.

Today a raven dropped from a nest in the tallest tree, then picked up a stick, and rapped out its solitude in an insistent staccato. Dew-beads meandered down the leaves of nameless plants. Some myths begin this way.

Today one of the Methuselah oaks lost its topmost bough; resignedly, with the faint groan of the elder’s disputation, the branch broke, then plunged through the evaporating mist. It landed deep in the fresh leaf-fall, then lay still and noiseless.

Today a solitary beetle made its home among the dead wood, its gleaming abdomen measuring out every split in the bark and every new mushroom. Nature knows that most wounds heal, just as fires expire and passions cool. Extinction is a rare creature.

Today the Captain brewed a bitter tea, torn from sun-blanched bushes, and addressed his men. ‘We will find them,’ he said, ‘or what remains of them. But not without the forest’s help. There are few truths a tree will not share.’

Today the rabbits gathered in the woods. Ranged in a tight circle, they sat swelling with breath, casting strange shadows upon the mist; as the sun descended through the trees, these shadows lengthened into one elaborate frieze of ears and limbs.

Today the blackbird sang five clear notes before the rainfall and five clear notes after the rainfall.

***

5.

Today the Captain outlined his plan while the men finished their rabbit, a stew of meat and broth. Then he rose, scrutinised the sky, and said ‘Remember men. It’s the decisions you make at breakfast that determine how well you sleep at night.’

Today the child saw a party of men enter the clearing. They approached the village slowly, weapons over their shoulders. The child looked on from behind an oak tree.

Today five seeds were planted in five places: they were planted in the mountains and on the shore; in the forest and in the desert; the fifth was sown beneath the shade of the east bank of the widening river.

Today they discovered weird cyphers in the dust, freshly darkened by recent rains. Tracing them slowly with a finger, the Captain assumed the deep, wondering silence of the illiterate. ‘Whatever this says,’ he jabbed, ‘it says “We were here yesterday”’.

Today the child was found by the men, asleep in the wreckage of a shack. The child opened both eyes and sat up, and crossed both legs, and looked meekly at the Captain and, smiling, offered him three blooming flowers.

Today the Captain’s men and the child sat around a bundle of logs and struck flint together until there was heat enough and light enough to drive the hunger from their guts. They ate rabbits and mushrooms and dried kelp and shared their stories in campfire hand-shadows.

Today five men saw smoke above the clearing, a single line ascending towards the stars. Visible from the mountains and the shore, from the forest and the desert, and the shade of the east bank of the widening river, it was the greatest promise the sky had ever made them.

Today the tortoise descended the valley. At noon it found a sapling among the flint, green stems swelling and purpling. Craning its neck, the tortoise took a single leaf, wistfully, like one acquainted with this contested fruit: this fica, this ficus carica, this fig.