The Key

30

Brother Gardener threw another broken branch on to the fire and picked up the last, hoping this one might reveal something the others had not.

Following the earlier meeting he had organized a team of gardeners to scour the grounds and collect all fallen branches and leaves while there was still some light left in the day to see by. He knew from bitter experience that the only way to stop the spread of blight was to act fast and burn it out.

As each diseased branch was brought to him he had carefully dismantled it, like a pathologist examining a corpse, looking for clues that might reveal the cause of the contagion. He had found nothing. There was no fungus residue, no burrowing insects or weevils nor any of the other parasites that plagued a garden and spread disease such as this. He had never seen anything like it before. It seemed more like a dry rot than anything else, but he had never known it take hold so quickly in living wood. It was as if the life had just left it — the sap turned to poison, the wood to dry pulp.

He stamped on the last branch, poked through the dry splinters then added it to the pyre and stood staring into the flames. If anyone had asked, he would have explained away the tears in his eyes as smoke, but the truth was he loved the garden better than any person. He had tended it, nursed it and nourished it for over forty years, until his own name had been forgotten and he had become simply Brother Gardener.

And now it was dying, and he had no idea how he could stop it.

When dawn came the men would return and the surgery would begin. They would have to cut deep to make sure the disease could not spread. It was necessary, but no less painful for it. He imagined himself as a father on the eve of an operation where his child’s limb would be sacrificed to spare its life. But his children were many, and there were no guarantees that any would survive.

So he stood in the dark, with smoke in his eyes, catching a strange whiff of oranges every now and again like a taunting memory of the orchard when it was bursting with health. He watched the fire until the bell rang in the mountain calling everyone inside for Vespers. It was the moment when the Citadel went to sleep for the night, a night he wished would never end, for he feared what the new dawn would bring.