There was a City, deep in the forest, which had remained hidden for all of history. Nobody knew it was there except the people who lived there, and sometimes even they were not altogether convinced that it was there. None of them had ever been outside of the City; none of them knew anything of the rest of the world. Each of them was born in the City and each of them knew that they would die there.
Circling the City were walls higher than anyone could see over, and nobody had ever tried. In the centre of the circle grew a great Tree, taller than the walls, whose roots formed the borders of streets and neighbourhoods. The City contained everything the people needed: farms, shops, schools, houses, inns, smiths, carpenters, weavers and tailors. They had no need to venture outside. Their food came from their farms, their wood from the low branches of the great Tree and their water from the reservoir that filled up in the rain. They baked their bricks in the mighty Kiln and wove their cotton in the vast Loomhouse. They had never wanted for anything. They were happy.
In a small house near the western curve of the Wall lived a man named Tar. His parents had lived in that house, and he had lived there alone after they died. Tar lived a simple life and was happy in his work as a teacher. But one night Tar had done something most unusual. He had taken out a sheaf of blank paper and a stick of charcoal and he had started writing. Not writing schoolbooks or instructional texts, but stories. They already had stories, of course, in the City, but they were all stories of the City. The Grand Tale of the Building of the Schoolhouse, or The Epic of the Snowless Winter. Tar had been writing different stories. Tar had been writing about what he imagined to be outside the walls.
This was a dangerous thing to do. Nobody ever mentioned the walls, except as a navigational aid. Nobody wanted to know what was outside them, nobody even thought about what was outside them. They had no need to. But Tar needed to. He could not have explained why if you had asked him, but nobody had ever asked him since he had told nobody what he had been doing. He kept his fictions in a small box under his bed, where nobody could find them unless they looked, but they had no reason to look since nobody would have suspected a simple man like Tar to have been engaging in such strange and illicit activities.
Tar almost told somebody once. There was a girl who worked in the Loomhouse and lived close to Tar. He once invited her to his house after work, and he came so close to telling her about his writing that he in fact held the box in his hand until she asked him what was in it, and he found that he couldn't tell even her. She left shortly after that and he never spoke to her again. When Tar came home from work every day he would sit at his small kitchen table and write late into the night by his dim oil lamp, conjuring strange and fantastical worlds from without the city walls.
He of course invented his stories. Nobody knew what was outside the walls. Everybody knew that if you climbed to the top of the tree you could easily see outside the walls, but that wasn’t the point. They simply did not want to know, Tar included. If he knew what was out there he wouldn’t have anything left to write about. Climbing the tree would take his stories from him. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t make his characters climb the tree.
How many hours had he spent as a child sitting on the gargantuan roots of that tree, looking upwards through the leaves, imagining what it would be like to go all the way to the top, to see over the walls and the world beyond. He imagined what was out there: cities of clouds and wooden people and ice houses and strange creatures with the hooves of bulls and the beaks of gulls, but never did he climb the tree. He never wanted to.
Even still as an adult Tar sat in the evenings on the tall roots of the tallest Tree, resting against the trunk, looking into the skies, craning his neck to see the top of the Tree. He ran his hand over a vine that was growing around the root of the Tree, thin as a shoelace, making its home where so many had lived before. It was the beginning of spring and Tar could see juvenile leaves budding on the bare branches high above him. On his way home, he plucked a wildflower that was growing in the cracks in the paving and pinned it to his jacket.
One night, long after the night with the girl, Tar had set up his writing table with its dim oil lamp and low stool and settled in to conjure another world, when there was a great shudder in the ground, as though the earth had sneezed. A cloud of dust fell from the rafters of his house and the oil lamp rolled off the desk. Tar leaped to pick it up, catching it just in time before it set his bedclothes alight. He stood in his room holding the lamp, not really noticing that it had started to burn his hand, puzzling, when the earth shook again, more violently than the first time. This time he was knocked off his feet.
He set his lamp carefully on his desk, shaking his tender hand, and went outside into the street. His neighbours had all emerged shaken from their houses and the entire neighbourhood stood in the streets and blinked at each other. Roof slates lay cracked on the cobblestones and shards of glass sprinkled the small lawns in front of each house. A hole had opened in the ground at the end of the street. The people returned to their homes and quietly repaired the damage. Nobody spoke of the strange drumbeats of the earth afterwards, and everybody silently agreed to ignore the hole in the ground, because nobody could quite make sense of what had happened.
Then it happened again, two days later. This time the Loomhouse was swallowed into the ground and the enormous gears of the Mill slipped their teeth. Tar’s house lost its roof. He repaired it himself, clumsily. He did not want to allow workmen into his house to make repairs, in case they found his stories. On his way to work in the Schoolhouse a day or so later he noticed that the house at the end of his row had not been repaired. It was damaged and abandoned. He did not know where the occupants had gone.
Tar continued to the Schoolhouse and began his lesson. His students would only ask him about the shaking earth and about the holes in the ground. Tar knew as little as anyone else and their questions frustrated him. He shouted at the class that asking about the shaking earth would not make it stop shaking, surprising himself with his own anger. They were all afraid. The earth shook again, knocking books from their shelves and smashing windows. The roof began to fall around them. A chasm opened in the schoolyard. The children hid under their desks until the shaking had stopped. Tar dismissed the class and told them to go home to their families. They were all afraid. Tar walked home alone.
Usually he walked home arc-wise, but today he went radially so that he could stop at the Tree for a while to collect himself. He sat on his usual root and it creaked under his weight. The vines growing along the Tree were as thick as Tar’s arm now, and he tried to lift one but it was attached so tightly that he could not budge it. The Tree creaked again. He knocked on the wood of the root and it sounded like the door to a great, empty hall.
The earth shook again. The wide clay basin of the reservoir—the Kiln’s greatest achievement—that sat near Tar’s house by the western Wall had cracked when the ground shuddered. Water began to drip through the cracks. They widened. Water began to pour out into the streets. Tar watched the mighty bowl split in two and the fresh water that was the city’s lifeblood gush through the venous streets. It ran east along the wide avenue and fell like the waterfalls Tar had never seen into a gaping maw in the ground. The water boiled in the pit, fogging the whole neighbourhood. Slowly, the pit filled to the top with murky, steaming water. The wildflower that Tar had pinned to his jacket had withered, so he took it off.
Walking home, he saw more and more buildings abandoned. The City was falling to ruin and nobody was repairing the damage. Were they waiting to see if this would end? Tar’s house had lost a wall. He did his best to replace it, brick by brick. He was no mason, but he would not allow his home to fall. He would not be like his neighbours.
The earth shook more often. Chasms opened all over the City. It had not rained in weeks, even though the sky was nothing but grey clouds and nobody had seen the sun in a long time. Panic was spreading, people were disappearing, crops and animals were dying, buildings were falling and lying in ruins. Those who remained drank the black water from the pits.
Tar continued to repair his house, even as those around him were knocked to dust. His walls were flimsy, the bricks unmortared, the roof untarred, but he would not let it fall. He would not disappear like so many others.
The ground shook more violently than ever. He was huddled under his writing desk clutching the box of his stories, sobbing silently. Crockery in the kitchen fell to the floor and smashed. Chairs upended themselves. The tall bookcase holding Tar’s schoolbooks toppled. The glass in his windows clattered onto the floor. The slates slid from his roof and crashed in the garden. The back wall fell, the bricks shattering to jigsaws. His oil lamp fell from his bedside table and rolled under his bed.
Tar leaped from his under-desk safety to kick the lamp away from the bed, glass shards digging into his arm and his side. He dug the lamp from under the bed with his foot and kicked it away, but it had already set his bedclothes alight. He struggled to breathe as it dawned on him to find some water. He jumped to his feet and spun round, taking a few moments to really understand the sight of the lamp licking the curling paper under the desk, burning his stories one by one.
He groped in the smoke-filled kitchen for his water jug, half-full. He threw it over the papers and extinguished their flames. He scooped the soggy ashes into his arms and escaped his burning home. He ran some paces down the street and sat on a neighbour’s wall to examine his papers. They were destroyed. He had no stories left. He looked up to watch the remainder of his house burn and, suddenly fearful that the fire may spread to the rest of the City, looked around for some way to put it out, but the other buildings were rubble and dust. There was nothing left to burn.
There were no houses anymore, nor were there any people. Tar thought maybe they had all sought shelter in the Schoolhouse or the City Hall. He put his burning home to his back and walked to the Schoolhouse. It too was ashes. He walked in a full circle of the City. There were no people left. His friends and his family and the girl from the Loomhouse and the children he taught and every mother and daughter and brother and sister and every lover and friend of everyone he had ever known was gone.
Where, he could not tell. They could not have fled the City: there were no gates in the Wall. Had they fallen into the pits that had opened in the ground? Had they been crushed under their falling homes? What did it matter anymore: he was alone. So alone he returned to his home, no more now than any other building that had stood in the City, nor he no more than any pile of rubble that now lay in the street. He crouched over his heap of ashes and took a handful of it, letting it run like hourglass sand through his fingers.
Brushing the dusty remains of the last brick of his house from his hands he looked east to the other side of the City, hoping that somebody would come from the Kiln with a cart of fresh bricks dragged by a tired old ass and help him to build himself a new house. But of course there was nobody. He picked through the ashes and debris looking for the first nail that slipped or the first beam that broke, hoping that he could put it all back together if he knew where it had begun to fall apart. He picked up a bent piece of iron and stared at it. He dropped it, sat down in the middle of the pile of stone and sand and scorched wood, and wept.
A great drumbeat rolled across the floor of the city and shook the bones of the earth. This was different from before: a sound, not a convulsion. He raised his head to see where it had come from but it had come from everywhere. He could see the man-sized stone blocks of the Wall trembling with each boom, the mortar between them crumbling and cascading down to mix with the dancing dirt below. It began to rain, but the rain came in rhythm with the drums. Boom—spray. Boom—spray. The fitful rain ran down Tar’s face and into his mouth. It tasted like tears, and like sweat, and like earth.
He had no stories left, so he decided to find the truth. He would climb to the top of the great tree and see what was outside the Wall. The drumbeat weakening his knees every other step made clambering over the ruins and between the pits difficult. The roots of the tree shuddered. He hoisted himself up on to the largest and found a knot to grab hold of, then one for his foot. He found a scattered ladder of knots all the way up the trunk, pulling himself ever skyward, resting now and then on a bough. It was clear now that the nascent leaves which Tar had taken as heralds of springtime were in fact the leaves of the vine that was choking the Tree and eating it from the inside out.
Tar continued his climb, having to take care now as he rose that the branches he grabbed hold of did not come away in his hands, rotten and hollow. The vibrations of the drums became less and less intense as he rose above the City. He had never seen his home like this before. The higher he climbed, the further the destruction spread. Buildings were no more than heaps of ash and dust, weeds and vines ran rampant through homes and shops and inns. All that was left was the paving on the streets, and even that had begun to come apart, wildflowers sprouting through the cracks. All the way up, he hadn’t dared to look outside the Wall, until he reached the top.
Spread around the City all the way to the horizon was water. In all directions the darkest and most violent water he had ever seen. Deeper and darker than he knew water could be. Further than he knew water could stretch. The same iron-grey as the cloud-covered sky that touched it infinitely far away. He stared across its vast expanse, watching the waves tumble onto each other, breaking in great swells and clouds of spume against the crumbling walls, tearing its way into the City, inevitably and irrevocably violating what little of his home he had left. The ruins of the old buildings—the piles of stone he still thought of as The Mill or The Schoolhouse—washed away as if they were leaves in a rainstorm. The drumbeat ceased.
The water came lapping up against the roots of the Tree, peaceful this far inside, the surf gently rolling across the streets as the dying echo of the crashing tumult outside. He knew that the City would soon be gone, and that he could not stay in the Tree because the Tree too would soon be gone. He climbed down into ankle-deep water, stepping on an exposed root that crumbled beneath his foot. He would not die here. He took off his shoes and waded knee-deep into the water. He dove forward and began to swim. Soon enough the water covered the top of the Tree and Tar was no longer in the City.
