Tarzan: The Heartwood Across Europe

London wore the fog like a second skin, a damp pelt that softened the angles of stone and steel. The river slid under its bridges with a patience old as tide and moon, and the gulls marked circles overhead, calculating possibilities. On the Embankment, a hansom cab shuddered as the horse stamped and snorted at a scent that did not belong to the city—leaf-rot, rain on bark, a musk of living earth that clung to the man who stepped down from it.

He moved with an economy that made strangers look twice. Bareheaded and bare-throated against the chill, he was ringed by London’s curiosities: a bootblack freezing mid-polish, a flower girl biting a ribbon and forgetting to speak, a policeman’s eyes narrowing not with suspicion, but with a hunter’s recognition. When Tarzan turned his face toward the river, it was as if he listened to a forest wind the city could not hear.

“John,” said a voice behind him—soft, precise, warm with relief. “You came.”

Jane, in a wool coat the color of ash leaves, stood beneath a gas lamp with a parcel tucked under one arm and the other hidden in a fox-fur muff. In her, the city had never quite buried the field. He smelled ink on her fingers, resin on the parcel. He took her free hand and felt its steadiness, then its tremor.

“Show me,” he said.

They walked along the river where the fog opened occasionally, as if a large animal were pushing its way through. The bells of St. Paul’s were far but present. Jane’s voice threaded the vapor, telling him what the telegram could not: a theft quiet as frost, from a museum drawer that had not been opened in public for years. The Heartwood Sigil—a palm-sized disc carved from an oak whose rings were older than Rome, whose sap had drunk the blood of both hunter and hunted in oaths no court acknowledged. “A curator found the case unlatched at dawn,” Jane said. “No glass broken. No marks. Only the smell of green.”

“Green?” he said.

She nodded. “Like a hedge clipped an hour ago. The guards remember nothing between two and four.”

“Drugged,” Tarzan said. “Or sung.”

“Sung?”

“In forests thick with memory,” he said, “some things answer to sound.”

They reached a door marked by nothing at all, save a brass keyhole that looked as old as the river. Jane fitted the key and led him into warmth: a narrow room, oil-heated and cramped by books. A man rose from a desk among them, spectacles flashing, beard like thistle.

“Lord Greystoke,” he said, as if greeting a title rather than a man. “Or do you prefer—”

“Names are nets,” Tarzan said. “Use whichever holds water.”

The bearded man laughed once, surprised, and extended a hand. “Professor Alistair Murray. Druidic survivals, Stone-Age continuities, and the crimes of the present.” He gestured to Jane’s parcel, which she laid on the table and unwrapped. Inside, on felt the color of wet moss, lay a delicate rubbing: concentric rings carved with little notches like teeth, and a radial groove that resembled a path trodden by bare feet. At the center, a void.

“This is the Sigil,” Murray said. “At least, its face. The real one weighs three hundred grams, oak heart cut clean and healed somehow—no split, no checking. The grove it was cut from was in Brittany, long gone to farm years ago. The piece has passed through abbeys and cabinets until we, in our arrogance, gave it a label and a drawer. And now—”

“And now,” Jane finished, “a man named Drašković wants it for something he calls a corridor plan.”

Tarzan’s jaw shifted. He was listening. Not to Murray. Not to Jane. To the floorboards, where the small, ordinary mice that lived between books had gone still. To the street beyond the door, where a stray dog circled twice and lay down but did not sleep. To the smudge above the window, sparrows plastered under eaves whispering—whether to each other or to him, even he wasn’t sure anymore. Cities were noisy, but they had their own silences, too.

“Drašković,” he said. “The Carpathian quarryman made banker.”

“More than banker,” Murray said. “He buys land where the wild still runs like unbroken thread: Black Forest, Białowieża, even the marshes near the Venetian lagoon. He calls it progress. I call it consolidation before the blow. Imagine a chain of ironworks from the Rhine to the Prut, fed by timber and ore, guarded by men hired to hate silence. Now imagine if such a man held a thing that could coax animals to gather or flee on command.”

Jane’s eyes flashed. “Professor.”

“It is not myth,” Murray said. “In the margins of a twelfth-century missal—an abbot’s hand—there’s a drawing of the Sigil laid on a stump, deer stepping out of alder as if to listen. The text speaks of convivia silvarum: forest councils. Perhaps nothing. But the men who stole the piece left us another clue.”

He produced a narrow slip of paper from an envelope. On it, a schedule. Times and places, columns of them, with a stamp at the bottom: Compagnie des Chemins de Fer de l’Est. The last entry: Paris Est — Officine 17 — consignments: mechanical parts; agricultural implements; crates of live capture.

“Game?” Tarzan said.

“Wolves, maybe lynx,” Murray said. “For men who like their private menageries, or for fur farms disguised as research.”

Tarzan set both palms on the table, on either side of the rubbing. He had no need to close his eyes to see the shape of what waited for him: rails, tunnels, glass roofs, pigeons, soot, and, within that, the living seam of things that cities forgot. He looked at Jane. There was no jungle here, but there was edge—between stone and river, between wealth and want, between the last oak in an alley and the men who would cut it for sport.

“Why me?” he asked, though he knew the answer and wanted to hear her say it.

“Because you speak two languages,” she said, a smile like sunrise at the corner of her mouth. “The wild’s, and ours.”

Murray pushed a map across the felt: London to Folkestone, a line across the Channel, then a web around Paris. A little X near a rail yard: Officine 17. Another chain of destinations traced eastward like migration: Strasbourg, Freiburg, Konstanz, Innsbruck. The line split, tilted south toward Venice, and east toward the Carpathians. On the margin, in a clerk’s cramped hand: ‘Aurelian Combine.’ The name had the gleam of a beetle’s back and the hunger of men who liked to rename what they did not make.

“Aurelian,” Jane murmured. “Gold-bright and insect-hard.”

“Or emperor,” Murray said. “Either way, a man who claims the world by writing his name on it.”

Tarzan picked up the rubbing. The concentric rings were not simply rings. They were paths—clearings, routes, maybe even river courses, simplified to their spine. He traced the radial groove and stopped where the center turned to absence. He felt the old ache of trees he had not climbed and the precise ache of ropes he had once broken in anger and the unnameable ache that came when something more than sight told him where to go.

“The Sigil calls councils,” he said. “Or it disrupts them. A herd can be heard. A pack can be turned.” He glanced at Jane. “Will you come?”

She held his gaze. He knew the cost, because he read it the way he read crushed grass: danger, hunger, a sun that rose in a different place for those who followed men like Drašković into their castles. But Jane Porter wore risk as she wore the gray—without fuss, as if the shape had always been hers.

“I will,” she said. “But I will also write. The world must know what’s being attempted, not only what we stop.”

“Words are snares,” Murray muttered, but not unkindly. “Sometimes they catch more than teeth can.” He went to a cabinet and returned with a slim cylinder of smoked glass capped in brass. “A speaking tube of a sort. Paris makes toy wonders for the well-heeled. This one belongs to a falconer by the name of Amélie Renault, whose loft near Montmartre sometimes receives messages, sometimes pigeons. If you can reach her, she can tell you which rail sheds have been busy at hours when no tickets are sold.”

Tarzan took the tube, rolled it in his palm, and listened to the way the glass sang when tapped. Tools were only extensions of what hand and mind intended. The question was always intention.

Outside, the fog thinned. On the Embankment, a rag-and-bone man’s cart rattled, and the horse that had balked before now flicked an ear and settled. Tarzan stepped to the window and drew in a breath the way he did in forests before a leap. The city’s scent palette arranged itself: coal, cabbage, cold iron, and, beneath those, the green of a winter hedge bruised by a careless sleeve. He set the glass tube down, fastened the map into his coat, and slung a rope coiled like a living thing across his shoulder.

“Pack little,” he said to Jane, “and warm.”

“You forget with whom you speak,” she said, eyes bright. “My little is still a small library.”

Murray snorted. “Take this as well.” He palmed a wafer-thin compass encased in horn. “It misbehaves around lodestones but loves old trees. Point it at the ground; if the needle leans, you’re near a deep root.”

“You’ve named it?” Tarzan asked.

“The rootseer,” Murray said. “Scholars must name our mistakes so the next scholar can avoid them.”

Back on the street, they took a cab only as far as the station, then walked. Tarzan preferred to watch a city’s feet rather than its face. Boots told the day’s history: where the mud clung, where the polished stones betrayed a slip, where a child had danced through a puddle and a man had not. The station threw up a glass arch like a whale’s rib cage, and inside it the machines waited like penned animals, huffing and stamping. The horse at the cab’s pole rolled an eye when Tarzan passed; he paused to place a hand against the velvety spot where cheek met jaw. The animal sighed, a sound like leaffall in late autumn. In return, Tarzan let his fingers speak without words: I see you. I will not misuse you. Your work is not your worth.

Jane watched him and made a note in her head: this, too, was diplomacy.

“Tickets?” she asked.

“Two,” he said. “And room to move.”

She acquired them with a speed born of many crossings and rejoined him at the platform where the train’s lungs made clouds. As they boarded, a boy with eyes like flint embedded in damp coal stepped too close and slipped a hand toward Tarzan’s pocket. The boy’s wrist was caught so quickly he did not feel movement, only inevitability.

“What for?” Tarzan asked, not unkind.

“Bread,” the boy blurted. “And to see if I could.”

Tarzan considered him. “You could,” he said. He placed a coin in the boy’s palm and closed the fingers around it. “Now use that to prove something else.”

The boy stared, then vanished into the fog of steam.

They found their compartment and sat. The map lay between them like a river. The whistle made its thin, decisive cry. As the train began to move, London slid past—a parade of brick and soot and laundry on lines that looked like flags of nations no one had drawn yet. Tarzan leaned forward and put his ear to the thin wood of the compartment wall. The language here was new to him, but not incomprehensible: the click-song of rails, the whale-breath of pistons, the city’s subterranean pulse transmitted through metal bones.

Jane touched his arm. “What do you hear?”

“Path,” he said. “And something at the end of it.”

“Drašković?”

“Maybe.” He paused. “Or the oak that lost a piece and wants it back.”

The river kept pace for a while, then parted from them like an old friend who had errands upriver. Fog poured backward in ribbons as if the city were shedding its second skin. Ahead lay salt, gulls, and a crossing. Beyond that, roofs the color of wet slate, a hill tipped with a white basilica, a pigeon loft with a woman who understood air, and an iron shed where men stacked crates labeled with lies.

Tarzan rested his forehead against the glass and watched the hedgerows begin. He did not smile. But something in him rose—the way sap rose, or a wolf lifted its head when the world changed direction.

“Paris first,” he said.

“Paris first,” Jane echoed, and tightened the strap of her satchel as if she tied a knot in the fog itself to hold their place in it.

The train gathered speed. London let them go with a last, long breath, and Europe, in all its ancient, stubborn wildness braided into stone, rolled toward them like a forest remembering its own name.