The Sacred Plant

THE SACRED PLANT

Once there was a garden - wild, seductive, luxuriant. Unfathomed as a jungle, it smelled of honeysuckle and damp earth. The garden had evolved from rock and lava over centuries. It had been there before any human. All day it was tended by the alchemist and his wife, the mage, who went wandering through its ferns and mosses and archways; those archways made by trees struck by lightning. In the morning the mage would sharpen her knives; in the evening she would slice the lavender and the garlic, pulverising them into ointments with a pestle and mortar.

One day in autumn a plague came and it was swift and cruel. There was no cure to be found in any book, or in the memory of any wise elder, man or woman. The burial grounds echoed with the clatter of gravediggers’ shovels on frozen earth. The islanders wept for their sick children and mourned in unison when they died. The bells rang. The people locked their doors. None dared go out. So the alchemist and the mage searched the garden for a remedy. The alchemist says, “I wish we had a cure. Then we can stop the children dying.” The mage says, “We must find a magical plant or else we too shall die.” Day after day they picked herbs, mixed them with oils and administered them to the sick. The victims sipped the elixirs, lay back, sighed. Eventually their eyes, full of tears, closed for ever.

But in the garden there were some herbs that had never been tried. They were kept in a glass house in a secret corner of the garden, hidden behind emerald willows and phantom mists. In desperation, the alchemist and his wife searched the glass house. One plant was thick stemmed, yellow spotted with black roots, another was purple spiked, smelling of fish, with a globe for a head, still another had leaves like a cherub’s face with two black eyes. The pair picked and crushed the leaves, collected them in bottles then took them in a horse and cart to the village. At once, the villagers came to meet them, snatched the vials and hurried inside their houses. The village waited. In the morning screams resounded from all houses but one. The occupants of this one house opened the door and walked out into the village square. Grasping his son’s hand the father says, “It has worked! Look! Our boy was dying and now he lives!” The alchemist and the mage exclaim, “At last we have the cure!” This cure was the sacred plant and they named it Beatha.

The alchemist and the mage returned to the garden to cultivate the sacred plant. They planted it by the pond in the most fertile part of the garden. The next day it had grown to twice its size and the next it had doubled in height again. And the mage says to her husband, “We have so little money. If we sell the sacred plant we can buy a castle and I can buy silk clothes and jewels and I shall be the most beautiful woman on the island. We can have many children to tend the garden and we can rest and grow old in comfort.”

So the alchemist did as his wife wished because he was secretly afraid of her. He uprooted the plant and took it to the chief apothecary of the island and sold it to him for five caskets of gold coins. In turn, the apothecary cloned the plant and sold it to all the farmers of the island for fifty caskets of gold coins. And the plant took root quickly and it grew with vigour until it took over the whole of the island, overshadowing all the other plants. Starved of sunlight the crops died. Soon there were no more wheat fields, no vegetables and no fruit, for even the apple trees were smothered by Beatha. The islanders began to die of hunger. Weeping, the alchemist says, “Beatha is too powerful. The garden cannot save us this time!” In the cavern of their ruined house, the alchemist and the mage weakened and their hearts failed and the sacred plant encased them; binding them in its green and yellow twines until they could be seen no more and there was nothing else left on the island but Beatha; luxuriant, seductive and wild.

~~End~~

(This short story was inspired by the writing of Angela Carter, one of my favourite authors).