Read Online Polystom by Adam Roberts - Free Book Online

since his father’s death, and he still could not evade the sense that he was only playing at being Steward in the old man’s absence. Here . . .
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    . . . thoughts [of his] father. These thoughts were somehow – he knew not how – inseparable in his mind from thoughts of the woodlands that his father had loved so completely. The dark, shadow-sated forests, the elegant shafts of trees planted in the rich earth like javelins, and in the air the interlocking thick bushes of fir leaves. Seventy thousand hectares of new planting north-east of Moss Cove between the coast and the mountains, now seven years old, bristling sticky saplings covering the curve of the hills like stubble. Six hundred thousand hectares of ancestral forest, to whichthe Old Man had devoted all his energies and most of his love.
    Polystom had wandered through those forests as a boy and as an adolescent; solitary, most especially the woodland between the Neon Mountains and the sea, to the west of the house. He still did, now that he was a man and Steward of the whole estate. The solitude there seemed cloistered by the trees themselves, an almost sanctified tranquillity. Their great black stems, around which Stom could just about throw his arms for his fingertips to meet. Their pure reach of height, fifteen or twenty metres before branches appeared. They were like sword-blade epitomes of the shadows they cast, like shadows themselves made material and tangible. Polystom could walk through the cool fragrance of the woods for hours, the brown fir-needles under his feet like springy gravel. He might catch himself, head back, staring up the length of a trunk to the starburst spread of branches and needles above him, with only shreds of blue-mauve sky visible in between, might catch himself staring upwards, and feel foolish. He wasn’t a child!
This sort of mooncalfing around isn’t dignified
(this was his co-father’s voice in his imagination, this chiding).
It doesn’t befit a Steward, a ruler
. But the shade of his father, in this shady place, didn’t rebuke him. The spirit of his father would say to him that it was not displeased: drink the peace of the trees, this would be the Old Man’s advice. Not words he had ever spoken to his son in life, of course, for Stom had never had the wisdom to solicit them when Old Polystom was alive. But his father had never considered it beneath
his
dignity as Steward to wander the trees. His arboriphilia hadn’t diminished his gravitas as local ruler. Polystom tried to take consolation from this thought as he meandered amongst the tree trunks. He walked, and walked, until he emerged from the other side of the forest and strolled down to the shoreline of the Middenstead sea. Intensely thoughtful.
    Polystom sat, that afternoon, for a long time, looking out at the unquiet Middenstead sea. Or not looking, really, but rather hearing the sound the wind made as it moved through mauve-dark sky. The sifting noise of wind brushing the trees behind him. The noise of the water touching and touching at the beach, and the sound of the sand itself, the sound of the sand lessening.
    His father and co-father had died within weeks of one another. It was a sort of revelation to Polystom. He had only seen their relationship from the outside, and had taken the bickering and emotional turbulence for the entirety of their connection. So it is we mistake tics and superficial habits for a deeper truth. But Polystom’s father sickened and died over six months, and by the seventh month co-father was gone too. It was as if his prop had been knocked away. Polystom realised, belatedly, that there were depths in his two fathers’ relationship (and by extension, in any relationship) of which he had been unaware. For all their bickering, the two of them had been together without breaks