CRABAPPLE
for Sally
Disclaimer: Characters (unamed, such as they are) still belong to Tamora Pierce. Loving references to Norse mythology and Douglas Adams' Marvin the Paranoid Android, and my apologies to Newton.
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The first hundred years were the longest.
He brooded, as well as a young tree of a mere three decades can brood: slender arms quivering in indignation at the merest brush of the wind; dropping apples that never ripened but stayed small and sour.
Occasionally a speckled doe would wander by to stare long and warily at him, with more suspicion than even the timorous nerves of animal of prey would warrant, surely.
It was no ordinary deer. Of this he was sure.
The doe kept returning as the seasons passed—or was it a different doe?—he couldn't tell. As more seasons circled round, it would drink the dew from the hollows of his branches, where they met his trunk.
Annoying creature.
There was also from the very beginning a large black hawk that would stoop down unexpectedly from the sky to perch in his topmost branches. It was a very silent hawk, and refused to be dislodged, even when he did his best to bristle with all the outrage his rooted spirit could muster. Vegetation he may be, but common property for the riffraff of the meadow and surroundings he is not.
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The second hundred years were even longer.
He dropped his small knobbly apples on the heads of random lovers who wandered underneath his spreading branches (now quite a respectable size) to coo and kiss. He got quite accurate with practice, and enjoyed the satisfying Thunk, and the subsequent cursing and scrambling away.
One day he dropped one on the head of a lone man who had been lost in thought against his trunk for several hours. The man uttered the strangest curse—Eureka!—could it be Scanran perhaps?—and started dancing around his roots, gazing at the apple he clutched with the most stunned expression imaginable before tearing away across the meadow.
Somehow, he didn't quite feel he'd gotten the better of that encounter.
Apart from apples, he got quite talented at growing his branches in such a way that the birds who built nests invariably found that the bottoms (and the eggs) had dropped out within a week.
It's the little things in life that one takes pleasure from, after all.
All in all, the second hundred years passed amiably enough, with his initial outrage banked down somewhat as he channeled it with great industry into petty mischiefs.
There was a cheeky birch tree who fluttered flirtatiously at him with her decorative leaves from across the meadow, showing off her white, smooth bark. She reminded him of someone; he couldn't quite recall whom. He was quite glad when the lightening strike one rainy evening reduced her to a charred stump.
Having been stuck in solitude against his will, he wasn't going to have any blatant attempts at light companionship lessening the magnitude of his plight.
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The third hundred years were the longest of them all.
By this time his size was more than respectable. He was vast. His arms were knarled and twisted, and loomed darkly over the meadow. Lovers never came to court underneath his branches. Lone goatherds who chased their flocks into sight quickly blanched and whipped their cloven-footed charges away.
One day a party of large men came bearing axes, led by a priest in orange robes who made a great many gestures and agitated faces. The large men looked grim and pale behind their beards, staring at him out of the corners of their eyes. They looked as though they would never raise an axe, until the priest became apoplectic; his face becoming brighter than his robes as he exhorted and harangued.
The bravest of the large men stepped forwards and swung his axe backwards to take the first blow as the others looked on in silence.
Crack!
He surveyed smugly the downed form of his would-be assailant, still smoking with vile, yellowish wisps on the ground, axe blackened and crumpled. The large men were shouting and pushing in their haste to be gone as fast as possible. Two of them found time to grab an arm each of the hysterical priest, and tow him away, leaving the meadow in peaceful silence.
The body on the ground didn't move. Eventually a crow flapped down to perch on the chest. He dropped an apple at it for good measure, just to hear the crow squawk and fly away swearing violently in crow.
He felt something new after nearly three hundred years of festering vindictiveness that spread as deep and clutched as hard as his roots: a kind of awe at the possibilities.
He hadn't known he still had it in him.
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Annnnnnnnnnnnddd…… villain fic #5 is now officially born. Thanks for the inspiration Sally: I went and read it all in my own good time.
Anyone who wants to know the starting point for this fic can read Sally's short one-shot Once, he was a man. Pen name: Gavingunhold. Story ID: 2511602.
Imogen