The Orchard of Everyone

Legend has it… every dragon hatches whole — and some spend their lives helping everyone else remember how that feels. When an old apple tree grows too tired to fruit, a gardener can cut one living twig from it and bind it onto a young tree's roots with wet cloth. If the two agree, the old tree's apples grow again, sweet as ever, on young roots. If they don't agree, nothing can make them.

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Balm is old now. His snout has gone gray, and the sage-silver of his scales has gone almost all silver. He lives in his grandmother's cottage at the forest's edge, where the kettle is always warm and the door still sticks in wet weather — lift, then push. Balm's Salves belongs to the apprentices who stir it now, sold to them a share a season, with GRANNY FERN'S RECIPE still on every lid, and the warm-stone room at the back of the cottage is very quiet these days. The Engine heals bodies now, quickly and kindly, and nobody stays sick for long.

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But the old ones keep coming to his kitchen anyway. Not sick. Not exactly. Their families have scattered — to jobs in other valleys, to the city, to the coast where the ships are being built — and their houses have gone very quiet. They sit at Balm's table for an hour and drink his tea and talk about weather. Every so often Pestle, the old garden robot, walks in with a basket of fever-root that nobody needs, and puts it on the shelf, and says nothing about it.

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Balm can still feel what's wrong before anyone says a word. Old Tull, who stoked the smelter furnaces for forty years, comes in every Tuesday for his stiff wing. His wing isn't stiff. Not anymore. "May I?" Balm asks, the way he always has, and Tull nods. Balm lays a warm stone on Tull's shoulder and the Calm Claw beside it, and feels Tull's heart going slow and steady and a little bit lost, like a clock in an empty house. "How's the wing?" Balm asks. "Terrible," says Tull, and drinks his tea, and stays till dark.

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Walking home from the town one evening, Balm sees it: on one side of the square, the old ones, each on their own doorstep, each with a quiet house behind them. On the other side, young families with no grandparents nearby — a young mother named Linnet with three hatchlings and her claws full, two jobs and nobody to tell stories, nobody to hold the baby while she sleeps. Ten paces apart. Each looking the other way. Balm has seen this square before. He was seven, and propped on pillows.

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So Balm starts in his own orchard. He cuts living twigs from the oldest trees — the ones too tired to fruit — and binds them onto young rootstock with wet cloth, the way his grandmother showed him: pear onto pear, apple onto apple, old onto young. Some take. Some don't. By spring, the old trees' apples are growing again on young roots, sweet as anything, and the little trees are taller for it. Balm stands in the orchard with his tea going cold. "If the two agree," he murmurs.

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That night he writes three words on the kitchen wall in chalk, where his grandmother used to write the herb lists: GRAFT THE FAMILIES. Underneath, smaller: if both agree. He calls his orchard the Orchard of Everyone, and the name spreads before he means it to. Soon old ones and young ones are walking out to it on Sundays just to see the old trees fruiting on young roots.

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His first graft is only tea. Before he sends a single invitation he sits at his kitchen table with his claw flat on the wood and asks, out loud: Is it good for me? Is it good for them? Is it good for the world? Then he invites Tull and Linnet for Tuesday tea, and doesn't tell either of them about the other. Linnet's eldest finds Tull's pocketknife. By the end of the afternoon he's teaching her to whittle a whistle, and it whistles, and Linnet laughs for the first time in a month.

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Not everyone likes the idea. "Loneliness isn't a sickness," says a young doctor from the Engine's clinic, kindly. "Nobody's hurting." A company in the city already sends a pleasant stranger to your door for an hour of friendly talk, at a price, and its salesdragon says Balm is giving away its whole business for the price of tea. Some of the old ones say they don't want pity. Some of the young families say they're busy enough without taking in strangers. Even Pestle pauses in the doorway, looking at the chalk on the wall, for a long while. Balm pours them all tea. "It isn't pity," he says. "It's an orchard."

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So the grafts happen slowly, at his kitchen table, over tea. An old weaver meets a hatchling who wants to learn knots. A retired engine-driver who can't sleep meets a young father up with a new baby every night, and they start walking the lanes together at three in the morning. Some take. Some don't, and Balm lets those go, the way you'd let a graft go that the tree won't hold. The kettle is always on.

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Salve kitchens and warm-stone rooms in every valley start holding graft teas. Old orchards are cut and bound to young roots in every town with an orchard, and the old apples come back. The Engine keeps every clinic warm and every body well, and leaves the teapot to whoever's holding it. And on Tuesdays, at Balm's table, Tull and Linnet's three hatchlings have whittled so many whistles that the whole cottage sounds like a flock of birds.

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Then Balm gets impatient. He is old, and he can see it so clearly: Tull alone in his quiet house, Linnet with her claws full and no grandmother. They belong together. So, without asking either of them, he arranges it. He has Tull's chair and his kettle carried over to Linnet's spare room — it will be good for you both, he says — and Linnet is far too polite to say no, and so is Tull. For a week everyone is very polite. Linnet tiptoes around her own kitchen. Tull apologizes every time he coughs. And on the eighth morning Tull carries his kettle home himself, and shuts his door, and locks it, and won't come to Tuesday tea. Linnet's hatchlings cry for him at bedtime. Linnet won't meet Balm's eye at the clinic. The graft has torn, the way a forced graft always tears. But the Engine's school-run robot — the one that walks Linnet's three hatchlings to school each morning — starts doing something nobody told it to. It takes the long way. Past Tull's garden gate. And every morning it stops at his gate, and waits, for exactly as long as the hatchlings want to wave.

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At dawn Balm walks deep into the forest, past the locked grove, into the black stand where the great fire went through. There stands the temple no one built: the burned giant whose roots grew into an archway, and across it, in moss and silver lichen, grown rather than carved: and in the quiet under the roar. Tull behind a locked door. Linnet not meeting his eye. Does Balm bank the fire and breathe — and wait to be asked — or blaze back and heal it now, tonight, before the tear gets any worse?

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Balm goes the slow way. He waits. He keeps the kettle on and the door unstuck, and doesn't arrange anyone. Every morning the school-run robot takes the long way and stops at Tull's gate, and the hatchlings wave, and Tull, behind his window, pretends not to see. Then one morning he's in his garden when they pass. Then one morning he's at the gate. Then one morning he holds out three wooden whistles, and the robot waits while three small hatchlings choose.

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In the spring, Linnet comes to Balm's kitchen on her own and sits down, and twists her cup in her claws, and says: "Do you think Tull would come to supper? If I asked him myself?" Balm lays his claw on Linnet's shoulder and lets it rest there. "Ask," he says. In the Orchard of Everyone, the old twig he bound onto young roots last spring has its first apple on it, and nobody picks it. They just come out and look.

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For the kindest healing still waits to be asked — and the old and the young grow best when both agree. Sleep now, little healer. Lift, then push. And in the quiet under the roar.

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