Dawn redwoods before the new Götterdämmerung (page 74)
There are ferns by the Baltic Sea. And everyone knows unicorns eat only ferns. The way silkworms eat exclusively mulberry leaves, which was why so many mulberry trees had been planted in Prussia by Friedrich the Great, so that Prussia could have its own silk capacity. Many textile workers of great skill had earlier come from France, especially the Huguenots, and they, making use of the ramped up production of silk in Prussia, wove silken parachutes for the great Prussian zeppelin fleets. In preparation for war.
I did say Emil’s killing of the Danish prince unleashed all the war gods old and new, upon war paths cyclical and reincarnative. But perhaps it was only an excuse, for the war gods would be active, for their nature is like ours, hearts of darkness as birthright, perpetually dueling with the dawn.
Walking through the fern forests of the Baltic coast, Tang Lili remembered the first times she had brought Wilhelmina here. Wilhelmina had looked for unicorns then, in her childish wonder. Wilhelmina had been shy and skittish, like a unicorn foal herself. One knows each fern forest can only host one unicorn (they are territorial like that), and through each patch of forest, Wilhelmina asked her mother if she thought this would the forest they finally find a unicorn in. Tang Lili showed her daughter how to distinguish animal tracks on the sandy soil, and how to set up their Soochow-silk bivouac at night against the biting insects. It had been a mother-daughter camping trip, with the balance of the maritime powers on the line. But that’s an earlier story. Maybe I’ll tell here just a little of it:
The ferns at knee-level and the moss at their moccasined toes were soft and green deep into the ur-forests, where the unicorns indeed lived. Over by Ralswiek the pirate Klaus Störtebeker (whom Wilhelmina will meet again much later) was just coming into his own as the lord of the Lord of the Seven Seas.
Ralswiek, along with Reric by the salt lagoon, and Barth in-land of the island Zingst, all claimed direct descent from the ancient city Vineta, which was buried a long, long time ago beyond the reefs. Vineta the seaside resort where Emil Hering made his living as inn-keeper was also named after the sunken Vineta of old, and equally laid proud and vociferous claim to that heritage. But in this earlier story of ours, Emil is still a toddler, scared of the dark, of loud noises, and of separations, since his mother Undine left him and Captain Hering.
It’s a hard thing, to leave one’s child. The peeling away of small, strong arms around one’s neck. The disentangling of stubborn little limbs around one’s middle. The placing on the ground then holding at arms’ length of determined, distressed, and devoted little persons from their greatest comfort and greatest betrayal.
It is not for us to speculate why Undine left. She had her reasons, she had her unhappinesses. She had her impossibilities and her thousand decisions and indecisions. Perhaps life on land was no longer feasible after so long, perhaps she longed for the return to her sea, to her folk, to her element. Perhaps after the years, the wear and tear of strife, of toil, of disappointments, of her own native melancholies, she thought it was a price worth paying. But we don’t always see the full cost right away of our actions, nor the full group foto of all those who end up paying. Had she known of the ineradicable scar on Emil, the lifelong redirection, I’m not sure what she would have done differently, but other paths would have been open, including the road less traveled by.
At that time Tang Lili was down the coast, in the ur-forest, camping with Wilhelmina Wang, and the young girl loved it. They were planting a sapling of Cathayan red wood, as a marker. And in the middle of the birch, pine, and hazel, there already grew six, and only six, Cathayan redwoods, by the old sacrificial stone, by the hallows, by the barrows. Wilhelmina didn’t know what they were marking or why, but Tang Lili did, and she told her daughter their story, as they planted the seventh, the last in the row, of the Cathayan dawn redwood tree.
Once upon a time, there had been seven swordsmen of surpassing skill. Not all the swordsmen were men, it was just the professional title of the roving adventurer. But of their surpassing skill there was no doubt. Like the eight immortals who left their name for all of posterity by crossing the East Cathay Sea each in his or her own way, the seven swordsmen who had come down the Tianshan mountain made a racket from the sea to the desert places, from the grasslands to the rainforests, along camel caravans and in harbors and ports.
It seemed so long ago, for to little Wilhelmina all stories of her mother’s youth started with once upon a time, especially because the other characters in those stories are dead.
(Check out the seven dawn redwoods of ancient Cathay, exactly where little Wilhelmina and her mother Tang Lili planted them, before the new Götterdämmerung began.)