The Thorn Gardener

The bark of QLIPHOTH is crowded with thorns. They are black, long, and curved slightly toward the trunk, as if they are listening to it. Anyone who has climbed the tree has a scar from one. Most climbers think of them as the tree's defence, and resent them a little.

There is an old gardener who would disagree. He has been tending the thorns for longer than anyone has been climbing.

He carries a small curved knife and a pouch of seeds that look like drops of dried ink. Each day he walks a different spiral around the trunk, and each day he does two things. He removes one thorn. He plants one seed. By the next morning a new thorn has grown from the seed, never in the same place as the one he removed.

A young climber once followed him for a full turn of the trunk and finally asked what he was doing. Are you making the tree safer?

No, said the gardener. I am making it honest.

He explained, in the slow way of people who are used to talking to plants, that the thorns are where the tree remembers the sharp silences it passed through as a root. Each one is a small refusal, a place where the tree said: not here, not like that. A tree without refusals would let anything climb it, carve into it, hang anything from it. It would belong to whoever reached it first.

But a tree with too many refusals, he said, becomes a wall. So I take one away each day, wherever the tree has grown too guarded, and I plant one wherever it has grown too careless. The tree tells me where. I only listen.

The climber asked how the tree tells him. The gardener took her hand and pressed her palm flat against the bark, between two thorns, and waited. After a while she felt it: a faint warmth in one direction, a faint chill in the other. Warm where something wanted to open. Cold where something needed protecting.

She climbs differently now. She says the scars from the thorns no longer feel like accidents. They feel like the tree introducing itself.

And on the trunk, about halfway up, there is one thorn that grows the opposite way, curved outward. The gardener planted it the day she understood. It marks the place where she is welcome.