The Honey of Souls

Chapter 1: The Foot of the Black Tree

The pine was older than the manor above Lisów, older than the church with its onion-shaped roof, older than anyone's grandmother's grandmother, and Dorota Wilk was sixty feet up its trunk when she heard her brother scream her name.

She sat in her leziwo, the plank seat that hung from her climbing rope, with her knees braced against the bark and her hand-axe hooked to her belt. The board that covered the hollow stood open in front of her. Inside, the wild colony moved over its comb with a warm, sweet, crowded hum. A pot of smoldering punkwood swung from her hip, and the bees, drowsy with smoke, walked over her wrists without stinging. She had her knife out. She had been about to cut the first honey of the year.

"Dorota! Dorota!"

The voice came thin through the trees. Kuba was nine years old, and he did not scream for nothing. He did not scream at adders, or at the old boar that rooted by the stream, and when he had cut his foot on a scythe the summer before, he had only gone very white and said her name quietly. She had heard him scream like this once before, on the winter morning their mother died.

She pinned the board shut with the honey still inside. Her father would have scolded her for wasting a smoked hive, but her hands were already moving: knife away, seat unhooked, rope looped around the trunk. She came down the way Jan Wilk had taught her, in long controlled drops, leather gloves hissing on the rope, bare feet kicking off the bark. Needles and light flashed past. The forest floor came up green and brown and hard, and she landed bent-kneed in the moss.

Kuba stood at the foot of the tree. He had run so far that he could not speak at first. His hair was full of burrs, and his face was striped where he had wiped tears with dirty hands.

"Tata," he said at last. "Klemens found him. At the black tree."

Dorota did not ask which black tree. There were not many, and her father had pointed out every one of them to her before she was tall enough to hold a rope.

They ran.

The Puszcza swallowed half the map of the Borsk March. On the Count's old wall-chart in the manor, so people said, the forest was drawn as a great green stain with no roads in it at all, only a few names around the edges where the villages clung: Lisów, Smolna, Krzywe Pole, Zabłocie. The forest had wolves in it and bison and boar, and lynx that you never saw, and pines so huge that three grown men could not join hands around them. It also had bees. The bees were the reason anyone lived there.

Every child in the March knew the story the way they knew their prayers. When a person died, their soul left the body as a bee. The family opened the window, and in the night a single gold bee crawled out of the dead mouth, rested a moment on the lip, and flew away toward the forest. There, in the Hive Beneath, the Bee-Mother gathered the dead into her comb, and from them she made the honey of souls. That honey was why the March's orchards bore so heavily, why the rye stood thick enough to hide a horse, why the long winters broke on time and the rivers thawed when they should. The dead fed the land. The land fed the living. It had always been so.

And the bortniks tended the forest's bees. They were the tree-beekeepers, the men and a few women who climbed the giant pines with a rope and a hand-axe, carved hollows high in the trunks, and coaxed wild swarms to live in them. Each bortnik had a sign, cut into the bark of every tree they kept. The Wilk sign was a wolf's tooth: two short notches meeting in a point. Dorota passed three of them as she ran, and each one felt like her father's hand on her shoulder.

The night-trees were different. Jan had shown her the first one when she was six. It stood alone in a ring of bare ground, a pine as tall as any other, but its bark was black as charcoal and it bled no resin. No birds nested in it. No moss grew at its foot. There was a hollow high up its trunk, but no bortnik's sign was cut beside it, and no board covered it.

"Some trees have hives that open onto somewhere else," her father had said, crouching beside her so that their eyes were level. "You never climb a night-tree. Not for honey, not for a bet, not for a lord's coin. Do you understand me, Dorotka?"

She had understood. She had never climbed one. Neither, she was sure, had he.

The night-tree where Klemens had found him stood a mile north of the Wilk cottage, near the Smolna track. When Dorota and Kuba broke out of the ferns, she saw the black trunk first, rising straight and lightless out of its ring of bare earth. Then she saw the old man kneeling at the bottom of it with his cap in his hands. Then she saw her father.

Jan Wilk lay on his back in the dirt. One leg was bent the wrong way beneath him. His face was turned up toward the hollow sixty feet overhead, as if he were still looking at something there, and his eyes were open.

Dorota did not remember crossing the clearing. She was simply on her knees beside him, holding his face. It was warm. For a single moment she believed he was alive, and then she saw his chest, which did not move, and the dark stain under his head.

"Tata," Kuba said behind her, very small.

Klemens Wojda was weeping. He was her father's oldest friend, a bortnik like Jan, with a beard gone grey and hands as scarred as bark. He had eaten at their table a hundred times. He had carried Kuba on his shoulders to the Easter fair. Now he would not look at her.

"I found him like this," he said. "I was coming along the track and I found him. Holy Mother, Dorota, I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

She looked up the black trunk. There were fresh scrapes in the charcoal bark, long pale scars where something had slid. She looked around the bare ground. Then she looked again, more carefully, the way her father had taught her to look at a tree before trusting it with her weight.

"Where's his rope?" she said.

Klemens wiped his face. "What?"

"His rope. His axe. His seat." Her voice was rising and she could not stop it. "He never went up a tree without his rope. Never. Where is it?"

Before Klemens could answer, they heard horses.

Three riders came down the Smolna track and into the clearing. Two were the Count's foresters in green coats. The third was Lech Górski, the steward of the Rydz estate, a broad, heavy man with pale eyes and pale stubble and a pale, patient face that never seemed to sweat. He swung down from his saddle and stood looking at Jan Wilk's body with his thumbs in his belt.

"Well," he said. "So the old fool climbed where he shouldn't."

"He didn't climb," Dorota said. "He never climbed the night-trees. He never climbed anywhere without his rope."

Górski looked at her for the first time. His gaze was mild and unhurried. "Then I suppose he flew up there," he said, "and forgot how to come down. It's a fall, girl. Men fall. Bortniks fall more than most." He turned to the foresters. "Get a hurdle. Carry him home for her. The Count will pay for the candles."

He was close enough now that she could smell him over the pine and the blood. He smelled of horse, and under the horse, of something black and bitter. Tar, she thought. Pine tar, the kind they boiled down in the pits at Smolna.

On her father's sleeve, near the cuff, there was a smear of something dark and sticky. She touched it with one finger. It was wax, but not any wax she knew. Honest beeswax was yellow or white or the brown of old comb. This was almost black, and it was cold, colder than the June afternoon, cold as a stone pulled out of a well.

She wiped her finger on her skirt and said nothing more. The foresters cut two saplings and laced a hurdle between them with their belts. They lifted Jan Wilk onto it, and Klemens took one end without being asked, and Dorota took Kuba's hand, and they walked home through the forest that her father had loved, while Lech Górski rode away north without looking back.