The tree-cutters came again that night. Bikendi had tried desperately to secure the square, dragging disused furniture and crumbling bricks from ruined buildings nearby to shore up his self-made barricades. There were three main entrances to Xaho Square that were wide enough for the cutters' transport and while Bikendi's efforts in the humidity of the summer evening would buy him meaningless time, he knew that they had bulldozers now and their advance was inevitable. They would not stop until the saplings had fallen and their lean trunks and slender branches dragged away, a precious asset to be bartered, among the city states in the south for food or arms.
It was shortly before midnight when the noise began, the brutal mid-range whine of a chainsaw singing through the still night air. Crouched in the second floor of the empty shopping arcade that looked out onto the east side of the square, Bikendi saw the nearest barricade wobble and disintegrate as a construction vehicle edged determinedly through the debris. Standing on the roof of the cab was a lone figure clad in the full-body protective armour of the cutters. As if steeling itself before rushing into battle, the figure pointed its droning chainsaw at the moon before jumping deftly off the slowly moving vehicle and running towards the orchard, blade aloft. Two more armed cutters dismounted from the bulldozer, the buzz of their chainsaws joining that of their leader's in an atonal wall of discordant sound.
From his vantage point, Bikendi watched powerless and numb as the nascent orchard of almond trees was destroyed. He had planted them around the square's central fountain, among dug up flagstones, in the shape of a lauburu, the hooked cross, that could be seen all over the town for many years before the fires came and the people left. The living symbol of his heritage now lost that he had cultivated and tended for the past five years was dismembered, the branches and trunks tied and bundled and loaded into a van that had followed the bulldozer.
In twenty minutes the cutters were gone, their vehicles heading out of town to the hills and beyond, their brutally efficient task complete, leaving a mess splintered of ragged, splintered stumps in their wake. Never again would delicate the pink and white almond blossom grace the uneven paving and rusty tram tracks of Xaho Square. Bikendi's lone crusade to bring life and colour back to his empty town was over. It lay silent once more, home to one man and his decaying memories of a community that existed only in the minds of a few people scattered across the land. Bikendi's footsteps rang out as he descended to street level to survey the damage. Sitting on the stone lip of the fountain's empty pool, he took one of his last remaining cigarettes from a shirt pocket and lit it with a match, struck on the rough granite. The one reason for staying had been plucked out of the earth, if his life was to now meaning anything he would need to move on.
Bikendi awoke with the sun. His last night in the town was spent sleeping fitfully on the cool paving stones of the square, his frayed satchel a makeshift pillow. The early rays had begun to warm the granite, rousing him from his slumber, ending a patchwork dream from his childhood of cherry-picking in the slopes to the west. Waking was often bittersweet, his sleeping mind fixated upon and magnified miniature scenes from his youth, sight and smells of the world that lived on in memory only.
Bikendi's life had been defined in simpler terms since he had become the sole remaining resident of the place of his birth. He had scavenged enough resources to sustain his own existence and had tried to fight back against the ghostly stasis that had engulfed the town by cultivating new life from the fragile vegetation that had survived. The attempted chicory meadow by the river, transforming a scrappy patch of bare scrubland where children used to play had not been particularly successful, the soil had degraded beyond meaningful use and his suspicions about pollutants in the water had been proved right. The sunflowers near the church, planted in potholes in the road had needed careful attention and worrying amounts of precious clean water to keep from wilting. The square, however, was his masterpiece, coaxed into life by the untainted natural spring that lay beneath the fountain in the heart of the town.
The vandalism could not be left unanswered, to not respond would be itself an act of surrender. A series of fantastical revenge scenarios flickered across Bikendi's mind. He dismissed them with a rue smile. He was not a violent man and his own survival was part of the deal. His retaliation would need to be an indirect defiance. Having packed a modest amount of food and drinking water, Bikendi scaled one of the untouched barricades to carry out his final duty before his departure. Finding himself on a modest residential street, Bikendi whistled to himself as he entered an abandoned cantina. He headed down a flight of stairs into a cellar. Dragging a wine rack away from a wall, he knelt down and removed a number of loose bricks. Removing a lumpy sack the size of a football, he stowed it into his satchel and continued his journey through the town towards the river.
In the early days of his time alone, Bikendi had used a small boat to travel a few miles up and down river to monitor the direction and strength of the fires that had brought destruction to the region and triggered the mass evacuations. He had declined to depart in the voluntary first wave of airlifts and hidden for three days in an attic to avoid the second, risking his life for the place he loved and gaining immense, if isolating, freedom in the process. Through reasons beyond his understanding the town had been spared but it had become rapidly clear that the population was not planning to return. He knew that their corner of the world was not alone in this suffering and before the net connection had dropped permanently he saw reports of blazes sweeping the continent, water shortages in the lowlands, industrial poisoning of farmland far to the east. The immediate landscape had been reduced to ashes, but this damage was part of a much larger scarring of the earth. It had soon become clear that his river patrols were neither necessary or of much use and he had brought the rowing boat ashore. Now he would undertake one last journey that would take him away for good.
His sense of the wider world had always been fuzzy, a vast complicated otherness that could be ignored and pushed out of his mind through immersion in the life on his doorstep. Over the years that poorly-defined gap of knowledge had grown into a vacuum. He knew that, at the time of the fires, his country was fragmenting and reverting to the small states from which it had been formed historically, but since he had cut himself off completely he had no idea what was happening out there. The only knowledge that he had learnt was won firsthand. The trees which he nursed had become such a rare commodity that gangs of cutters were scouring the countryside looking for sources of timber in a violent and perverse plundering of the death-spiralling ecosystem. First to fall was the beech-lined avenue by the empty town hall. The sound of an engine had alerted Bikendi to their presence and he witnessed the cutters from a nearby rooftop, grimly aware that further incursions would lead them inevitably to Xaho Square. One week later his fears were confirmed and now his world had been turned upside down.
Pushing off from the river bank, Bikendi steered eastwards. He did not know where his journey would take him, or what exactly he planned for his prized cargo, (other than) only that nothing else now mattered.
The surrounding landscape had remained unchanged for several days. Either side of the river lay undulating hills peppered with the scorched remains of the region's ancient forests. Fragments of ash, picked up by the warm summer breeze skittered among the charred stumps offering the only signs of movement in a burnt out world. Bikendi had begun the voyage with a heightened sense of alertness, trying to take in every aspect of the land near the river, but the monotony and the strain of rowing in the heat had dulled his senses. He veered towards the bank, dragged the boat onto the sand and lay down, closing his eyes. Bikendi's reverie was interrupted by a high-pitched buzzing noise. He gasped and sat up, the image of cutters at work replaying in his mind. Overhead flew two cigar-sized insects, unaware of the resting oarsman below, following a semi-circular arc, before heading off further downstream. It was an unusual sight. Although his replanting in the town had allowed some of its insect inhabitants to stay put, beyond the outskirts there was hardly any untouched organic matter to support them and his river passage had been devoid of the midges, flies and early season wasps that had been an unavoidable part of similar trips in the summers of his youth. Bikendi watched them disappear into the distance and saw, around the peak of a low hill, a lone plume of vertical grey smoke rising into the air. It was no forest fire. He relaunched the boat and paddled onwards with a new sense of caution. Using a steep riverbank as cover, he inched the boat forwards until he had a clear line of sight beyond the curve of the hill. Here the land flattened out and some hundred metres from the water stood a nondescript stone building. Signs of life were clearly visible, from the smoking chimney and the bulldozer parked outside. Bikendi froze, he hadn't expected to cross the path of the cutters, he had assumed that they would have taken their bounty well beyond the boundaries of the charred forest and away towards the towns to the south. However, he had to admit that finding them here made some sense, a temporary base from which to plan their exploratory raids on abandoned places and to stockpile their wooden trophies. Nevertheless, it presented a problem, he could hardly walk over to the house and wreak vengeance with a half-rotten oar. To be spotted would be to risk his life. Yet he needed to pass down this stretch of the river in order to progress and there was little cover to hide him if he went any further. Bikendi decided to wait until either night fell or the cutters left on their next sortie. Realising that paddling back behind the hill would give him a safer space in which to pass the next few hours, Bikendi pushed away from the bank. As he did so, something caught his eye above the house. The two hornets that had flown by moments earlier were hovering perfectly still in the air a few metres from the chimney stack. With a sudden dart one of them arced upwards before dropping vertically down the chimney and into the building. A few moments later the front door opened and a man ran frantically from the house. From a distance, Bikendi could identify the grey-green suit of the cutter as the man lurched forwards in an act of desperate escape. A small airborne cylinder exited the house a moment later, it paused, rotated on an invisible axis, plotting a course towards the fleeing man, and effortlessly sped through the air towards him. Bikendi saw the hornet seemingly pass through the man at throat height. The man lost momentum in an instant, brought his hands to his collarbone and crumpled to the ground. The second hornet had remained in place near the chimney now sprang into life. It rose several metres into the air, assumed a vertical position and, emitting an angry whine, plunged viciously downwards, smashing directly through roof tiles below and into the building. The walls of the house appeared to contract momentarily in on themselves before exploding in a brilliant white flash. Bikendi was thrown backwards, smashing his head into an oar handle, and passed out in a heap on the deck of his rowing boat, cradling his satchel.
Bikendi came round and found that he could neither move nor see. His hands were bound behind his back and he was lying face down on a metal surface that rose and fell quickly, giving the impression of movement. Despite the ringing in his ears, he could make out the sound of an outboard motor and the rippling of water. He was in another boat. A low murmured question and a curt reply, in a language he couldn't place, let Bikendi know that whoever had taken him sat barely a metre away. To spend so long without human contact and to find himself caught like a poacher’s quarry was a profound shock and Bikendi lay still, trying in vain to piece together any further clues on current situation from the meagre sensory information available. The journey continued for several hours with little variation as the boat maintained a steady speed as it steered its course downstream. The two men rarely spoke. Sometime later, shortly after Bikendi had noticed that the air had grown cooler, convincing him that night had fallen, the boat finally began to slow. It came to a stop and after a muffled discussion, which Bikendi took to imply a minor point of disagreement, he felt a needling sensation in his lower back and blundered once more into the dense fog of unconsciousness.
Bikendi opened his eyes. He was no longer blindfolded and his arms could move freely. He was lying on his back on a sofa in a cramped room piled high with computer hardware of various designs and functions, interlinked by a thicket of cables. Bikendi had no real interest in technology but knew that this was a setup more powerful than everyday automation and entertainment needs. Rolling onto his side in order to turn and look behind him, he came face-to-face with a tanned, wiry man of around forty whose rigid posture had a military formality to it, even if his unkempt appearance implied that he was some years beyond any active duty.
"Easy there. No harm’s gonna come to you. The old lady says you're a guest. You act nice and you'll get that in return,’ said the man firmly.
Bikendi gulped loudly. "Wha …"
"Ruzdhi and Pretash found you floating in a coracle when they took out a cutter station up in the north-west yesterday. They figured you weren't part of the gang but they had no data on anyone living up that way so they brought you in. To be safe, y’know. They've done it before, but it's usually stray dogs that have wandered into the dead zones that haven't a hope of getting by without food."
‘The hornets, they attacked a man, the house it-’
"Ah, so you saw Ruzdhi’s handiwork up close, when you meet him be sure to mention it, he likes the attention. He’s ex-Albanian Special Forces, he left under a cloud and brought his little toys with him. Military-grade micro-drones, they might look like ugly bugs, but they've all got Russian serial numbers on ‘em, if you look close enough. The range on those things is crazy."
"Where is this? Who are you people?" Bikendi sat up and swung his legs to the floor, placing his feet in the gaps between dusty circuit boards and battered hard drives.
"All in good time. The old lady will speak with you later, but she wants you to know that we're like-minded souls, I think that’s how she put it," said the man with a gruff chuckle. "Most importantly for now, its food time. Follow me." He got up and opened the only door in the room. A sudden thought hit Bikendi’s frazzled mind and he reached around himself frantically.
"Oh yeah, we got your things, don't worry. You got some real interesting stuff. Real interesting." The man laughed again and walked through the door.
Bikendi followed gingerly. He felt sluggish from the immobility of the last few hours but, despite a dull throbbing pain above his left eye, felt otherwise uninjured. The man led him down a featureless corridor to a larger room in which two men, of a similar age to Bikendi’s genial warder, were sitting at a table eating in silence. One of them, a shaggy-haired hulking figure, with several digits missing from his right hand, offered a grunt of acknowledgement and pushed a bowl of food towards an empty chair. Bikendi accepted the invitation, sat down and inspected the bowl. It contained a hunk of overcooked lab-grown meat in a synthetic bright red sauce, of a similar quality to the tinned variety that Bikendi had stockpiled in the town from the kitchens of abandoned houses. He regarded it as a cheap, artificial act of blasphemy towards the memory of tomatoes, but wasn’t in a position to turn down such an offering and quietly ate the meal.
Bikendi’s guide had also joined them and revealed himself as Shev, an apparent countryman of the duo who, Bikendi quickly realised, were the two men who had ferried him to his current location. The trio spoke to each other intermittently, trading friendly barbs and switching language every so often in order to comment privately over the head of their new guest. The meal was concluded and the men began to relax, Pretash swung his booted feet onto the table, Ruzdhi’s head sunk into his chest and he began to snore. The door opened suddenly, shattering their postprandial reverie. In swept a tall dark woman, seemingly a little older than the three men, with a poise and demeanour that Bikendi recognised immediately as a mark of leadership, followed by a younger woman with a rifle slung over her back. She walked up to Bikendi and, with an enigmatic smile, extended her hand.
"Our floating stranger is awake," she announced to the room before addressing Bikendi in a quieter tone. "Your presence enriches our humble home, gardener. Although you don’t yet know us, I suspect we share similar aims and you’ve seen how we work."
"I came here carrying something precious to me, I need it back,’ said Bikendi, feeling outnumbered and defensive.
‘We do not wish to take what is not ours to take, but in exchange we seek to understand each other. Please, tell me your story."
Sensing that he was not in immediate danger, Bikendi complied and starting with the first evacuations, told the group of his years of work bringing fragile life back to the heart of his hometown and how it had all fallen apart in a matter of minutes. His audience was silent and thoughtful. Ondina, the newly-arrived leader of the group, nodded empathetically as Bikendi told his tale.
"The act you wish to make," said Ondina responding to what she had heard, "to defy those who stand against nature, those who burn, pillage and prevent the wounds of the land from beginning to heal, that is the same battle that we fight. It is being fought all over Europe and beyond. Power in this world is fragmenting and this makes men scared. Scared that they will lose what they need to survive, that someone stronger will take it away. Time and again, this fear leads them to make terrible choices, driven by the insecurities of today and forsaking the needs of tomorrow. We are few, but with friends in many places, we aim to correct the worse injustices where we can and, blade of grass by blade of grass, try to rebuild what is being lost. Come, let me show you the world you’ve hidden away from." Ondina took Bikendi by the hand and, followed by the other members of the group, lead him from the room, through the corridor, to a spiral staircase heading up. At the top of the stairs a set of double doors led to the roof of the building. Bikendi stepped through into the evening air and retched. A hazy smog hung in the atmosphere, cloying his sinuses with a bitter taste. Through the miasmic fumes Bikendi could see they were standing on top of a three-storey building in a built-up residential neighbourhood. It was a city far bigger than his hometown and infrequent dim lights radiating from other buildings told him that it had not befallen the same empty fate. Taking in further details, he could see that many of the buildings were damaged, and jagged gaps between them spoke of destruction.
"This place is dying," Ondina spread her arms wide gesturing at the forlorn vista, "a few years ago the water supply failed. Dark red algal blooms, driven by the heatwaves and chemicals from the industrial quarter made the taps drip blood. The soil turned bad and plants refused to grow. The supply of food broke down overnight. Many people died of hunger and in the violence that accompanied it. This story is not unique, your town may have lost its people, but many others places have lost their souls. The land burns or is too toxic to farm. We can’t fix this city, we can only hope to stay here as long as our resources hold out and to chip away at all these problems a little more each day. Little pockets of resistance in places, here and there, that have the potential to lead to the rebirth of things. But alone we cannot achieve anything, we need everybody we can who recognises what’s at stake to help us. Can you?"
The younger woman who had arrived with Ondina and had not yet spoken dropped Bikendi’s satchel at his feet. He reached down and drew out the sack. It bulged in his hands.
"The seeds you have here," said Ondina "may be the last of their kind in this region. On the black market you could buy a palace and yet starve to death in an empty kitchen of marble. Men may kill you for it if they find out this bag exists, its value to them differs from how you perceive it."
"Then it is my burden, until I find a way to use it," said Bikendi.
"Let us help you find the way," implored Ondina.
A rising electronic tone caused Bikendi to turn around. The younger lady had pulled a communications device from her pocket and was tapping it urgently.
"Chief, we gotta call from Johannes’ team on the secure channel, sounds like things are happening much more quickly out there than they thought," said the woman offering her device to Ondina who stared at with concern.
"Downstairs everyone. You too, we hold no secrets from you today," said Ondina nodding towards Bikendi. Several minutes later the group were crowded into a room similar to that in which Bikendi had slept. In the corner stoof a large video screen, balanced precariously on a packing crate. The screen flickered into life and the fuzzy image of a pale young man in a state of agitation appeared.
"They’ve blown the dam, the murderous idiots. Right now we think about four villages in the valleys, maybe a thousand people, are about to be swept away by a tide of mud. The hydroelectric system, that’s gone completely. Our biosphere in the river delta won’t stand a chance. All for what? A petty territorial dispute, to stop one side getting better drinking water and hamper their plans of expansion. Theses morons are killing themselves."
"My child, do not blame yourself," said Ondina, "the Andorran mission ends today, take the whole team out as quickly and safely as you can and disperse, when we can we will reach out to you and reassign those of you who can still fight. Go Johannes, until we meet again."
The call dropped, the image on screen vanished and the room fell silent. Ondina pursed her lips and turned to Bikendi. "This happens too often to our friends across the continent. A few people operating outside the law in unstable territories is a dangerous business. Any small victories we gain can be wiped out in a moment. You will know how that feels, of course."
Bikendi nodded and blinked, his cheeks were wet with tears. He realised he had made his choice.
A thousand miles to the east, deep in a forest that had been ravaged by fires, scarred by cutters and blighted by new forms of arboreal disease, lay a small lake of clear water, protected by a steep cliff wall and surrounded by dark green conifers. Its location had made it inaccessible to human incursion, and it had maintained a fragile ecosystem that had elsewhere fallen into ruin. The sound of the wind rustling the branches of the pine trees was interrupted by an incessant high-pitched hum. Three small objects, moving through the air in a precise triangular formation appeared from over the cliff wall and came to a halt, hovering several metres above a patch of earth beside the lake. In perfect synchronisation they tilted vertically and smashed into the ground, the momentum driving them several inches below the surface. Once underground they performed their final task, a central compartment on each device clicked open, exposing the seeds within to the damp oxygenated soil.
This was not the only flight undertaken by Ruzdhi’s drones that day, eight further launches took off from the roof, carrying Bikendi’s treasure to quiet, hidden corners of the continent, carefully selected spots, where the natural order had not yet begun to unravel, and the blossoms of Bikendi’s square could flower again. Bikendi watched each set of drones rise into the dirty, mottled sky staring after them until they disappeared into the beyond.
