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Dusk had not yet fallen, but dusk would come soon, as Faramir and Éowyn came at last to the clearing in the forest of Fangorn, dirt on their boots, gentle sweat on their shoulders, knives in their sheaths under their vests, rucksacks over their shoulders, secure in their straps. The pair had arrived just in time: such formal entreaties should not be attempted by night. They did not even stop to set up camp, standing instead entirely straight and still, looking up to the old growth canopy, and then down, bowing their heads to the strongest, oldest, throne-like incurving of roots.
“Treebeard,” said Faramir. “Treebeard, if you and yours may hear us, come to us or send some smaller messenger. We have returned with thanks to what you and yours have named the Watchwood, where you need watch no longer for Saruman, who cast off his name, took a new one, and lost his life by evil choice. We have come from the South, from Minas Tirith, and it is not sadness we bear, but perhaps glad news.”
The arches above, the mature oak forest with its leaf-tiled canopy, the equal majesty of each trunk, said nothing. A chipmunk chirped; a few jays protested the lack of worms, or the scarcity of new-grown fruit. As winter nears an old growth forest grows quiet, and it seemed to Faramir that winter here might not be far away.
“We will camp here,” said Éowyn to Faramir, “and wait.”
“How long?” said the steward of Gondor’s surviving son.
“That is up to the Ents. If they call you hasty, it’s over.”
Éowyn drove the slender brass poles she carried into the soft dirt, avoiding any visible roots, one, two, three, four, and then a fifth in the center, a quincunx. Then she began to stretch her soft roof of tanned rides over the poles to make a shelter, an open tent to keep out rain, wide enough to preserve the supplies she fastened to hooks in the poles: good dwarven work, these poles, and a way to avoid exhibiting anything, around the sensitive Ents, that might look like a stripped trunk.
“Dried cherries, dried apples, oats, venison strips,” said Faramir. “Salt and black peppercorns. A fresh spring within earshot. We could… we could camp here for a week, if we must.”
“It pleases me to journey with you,” answered Éowyn, “where we need not run from something, nor fight.” Éowyn let Faramir take her hand, and they drew close, still standing, then separated long enough for Faramir to roll out the linen bedroll that would give them a place to sleep.
On the second day they fed each other dried cherries, and remembered to walk the perimeter of the tent, and then the wider perimeter farther outside the tent, to see whether any trees had begun to walk.
On the third day Faramir had run out of songs he remembered, and started to classify rocks, not by their mineral composition (as Gimli might have done) but by their shapes: the greater arrowhead, the lesser arrowhead, the lute-stock, the lizard’s toes. Éowyn listened to chipmunks, squirrels, crows, jays, as if she could hear the stories they told one another: sometimes she told them stories too. She told the story of the first herd, and of the three inseparable mares, and of the stallion who could only gallop.
On the fourth day Faramir asked if any herb in the forest might season, or change, the taste of the venison: nourishing in itself, and pleasantly gamy, the strips might risk monotony were Éowyn and Faramir to camp and wait much longer.
“You did grow up royal,” Éowyn said. “With kitchens. I grew up with the horses: the scene can change, but the journey-food remains the same.”
“One might think you were speaking of lembas,” Faramir said.
“Listen,” said Éowyn. “I give it one more day.”
On the fifth day Treebeard came.
“I have heard you,” he said to the couple. Faramir stood at attention, as befits a meeting of dignitaries; Éowyn looked around her, making sure the clearing stayed clear. “We do not want news; we have completed the task of the Watchwood. We are in no hurry, but have no hope. Many of your lives from now, as you know, as we know, we will cease to know, and cease to be: we will become as trees without language or consciousness, without saplings, without young, without the future known to humankind. Then we will no longer mourn the Entwives, nor look for their signs in the mud, nor at the forest’s edge; for we know they are gone. Andf Fimbrethil my own Entwife will never more visit me.”
Faramir, keeping his eyes resolutely forward, saw, between the great rifts that made up Treebeard’s bark, a rivulet of sap that had not been there a moment ago. Could Treebeard weep?
“If so you and all the Ents of this land wish,” said Faramir, “so it shall be. But it need not be thus. My bride and I have brought, for you and yours, another way.”
The lowest branches of Treebeard’s physique seemed to rustle, and when the low voice sounded from among Treebeard’s roots it rose up with a new tone, resonant, as if a baritone flute—such instruments were known in Minas Tirith— could accompany its throaty syllables. “What other way is there? The Entwives have gone for good.”
“Those Entwives have,” Éowyn spoke up. “And we cannot unite the land across the sea to bring them back. But we have discovered a way, with roots and shoots and leaves and twine and buds, that you and yours may make new Ents, right here.”
“Surely your hurry has led you astray,” said Treebeard. “How is this thing possible?”
“When we humans spoke largely with other humans,” she said, and Faramir nodded, “we did not know. But we have met, as you have met—you have even made new songs about them, if our short-lived hurry has not tied knots in our memory— the ones called hobbits, who know so much about gardens. And the hobbits have spoken in turn with the elves of the northern woods, and one of them has spoken, low and long, before they went away, with the dwarf called Gimli, who knows with his metals”—here Treebeard’s low branches shuddered, as if in warning—“not how to wound and separate good wood, but how to open it, so that new shoots, and leaves, and young wood may emerge. And together they have taught those in Gondor who are willing to learn.”
Here Éowyn trailed off: such a long speech, delivered before an Ent, requires volume, and projection, and can make even a seasoned rider hoarse: and to speak of new things, to an Ent, one must be slow, and loud, and firm.
So Faramir took up the speech they had practiced. “It is called grafting,” Faramir said. “With a twig, and a root, and twine, and a bud or a leaf, and patience, and a sapling—called a rootstock—from the trees who lack speech and consciousness and emotion, a new tree, even an Ent, may grow without making a fertile seed, nor bearing a fruit. With grafting, you may raise new young and make more of your kind. Among the hobbits fruit trees grow in this way. Some can grow only in this way.”
“With your permission,” said Éowyn, holding out the flat of her knife. Treebeard’s lowest branch, its leaves dangling, seemed to nod, up and down, like a yes, in no wind.
Then Éowyn took her knife and sliced from its trunk the top of a silver maple sapling, so weak that it might have failed in the next strong rain. And from a healthy maple she took a strong twig, and cut into the twig, so that it split like a whistle, or a vertical flute, turned upside-down.
“We call the top segment the whip,” she explained, “and the lower part the stock.” And she tied, fast, with twine and with sap-gum, the whip, so that it seemed to grow out of the stock. “Now a red maple will grow, where a silver might have grown, or failed. And such things can take place, with your consent, on the stocks of new trees that lack consciousness, or feeling, or will, or history, as you know it among the Ents, so that new Ents, if you wish, and even Entwives, may come to be.”
“We may so wish,” said Treebeard, slowly. “We shall require… a mini-moot.”
“A what?” Faramir spoke too soon.
“We will confer, without a formal assembly.” And Treebeard fell silent.
Éowyn and Faramir passed the evening quietly, alert to any movement in the trees. They set up a fire, and made a marsupial stew, and enjoyed together, in their spacious tent, such a night as cannot be detailed in stories such as these, though other tellers may say. And in the morning, high overheard, came a rustling with first light.
“We have conferred,” Treebeard said. “And we have questions.”
“May the ways of the forest permit us to answer,” said Éowyn. And she grasped, loosely, Faramir’s hand, feeling the strength of her fingers, and his own, in the palm of her fingerless glove.
“If we are to make Entlets from grafting, as you call it, and thus come into the new age of the world, so that our songs may survive, and we may even make new songs, we should like to attempt it, with your expert gardeners’ help. We may need to meet more gardeners among the hobbits.”
“Which can certainly be arranged,” Faramir declared. Already in his mind were the routes of messengers, who might travel to the Shire so that a hobbit or three—perhaps one old enough to know grafting, to have known Merry and Pippin, but too young to have ever met Bilbo—might prepare for a journey east and south.
“But.” The one syllable, spoken by Treebeard, resonated like the notes of a great cave organ, through the old-growth arches and empty spaces where only high branches could reach. “We are unused to raising a sapling… collectively, all together, though we know such things are done among humankind. And none of us wish to nurture a sapling alone. We have done such things only as couples, an Ent and an Entwife. And there are here in Fangorn no Entwives. I speak not only of my Fimbrethil, forever lost to the water and the South, but of my friends. For among us we have now no Entwives.”
At this objection Éowyn grinned. “Indeed. Ents may raise saplings with other Ents, in pairs or in otherwise. Such things are known among humankind too, who may send our roots out to make couples of such wise. And long have such ways been known among the elves. Indeed we know of an elf and a dwarf named Gimli and Legolas who are, to each other, as wife and husband, though they will likely raise no young.”
“Indeed,” said Treebeard. “But those who like myself are Ents and will not couple with other Ents, who would raise young and couple only with Entwives: what shall we do? What may we do?”
“There is another way yet,” replied Éowyn. “For there may well be Entwives among you already, though they do not call themselves by that name, for they have not known that it was permitted.”
At these words some other high branches, not Treebeard’s, shook, first slowly, then faster. Faramir, looking east, saw how fast the shadow of a maple, with its broader canopy, covered and then revealed the brightening sun.
“It seems that you have,” remarked Éowyn, “Entwives among you already. They have only to let you know.”
Faramir said “I am new to such knowledge myself. For though the Rohirrim have long been aware, it has seemed to us a new thing in Minas Tirith. But in truth in Gondor too we have long had men who as children were told they were girls, and women—some of them wives—whose fathers and mothers and uncles once thought they were boys.
“In the time of the old kings such discoveries would prompt feasts, as such people’s truth made itself known, though my own father Denethor—a man of virtues and faults, mixed together—did not want the knowledge passed on. Since his passing and the return of the king Aragorn we have learned of an old song about it.” And Faramir, haltingly—a man of kindness and strength, but without a voice to carry great melodies—nonetheless sang.
We may discover who we are, and take on our true names, soon after birth
But some among us come to learn long after.
Thus among the violets and mosses of the forever-fertile earth
Some sprout amid ice, and some when warm rains grow softer.
When Treebeard spoke again it sounded almost like a laugh. “We have, indeed, we now see, Entwives among us. I will miss my Fimbrethil forever, I think, but others less ancient than I… may find new Entwives. Or be Entwives. Indeed some now say they have always been. Some of us are, in your language, she and her, though we have mis-called them he and him. And some of us have dreamed for your centuries that they may have two trunks, or a trunk with two sides. And they will be both Ents and Entwives, or neither, and we will find a new word for them in our speech. We are in no hurry to find such words, but we believe that we will find them, as the slow brook to our west makes its way to the sea.”
And a great oak beside Treebeard spoke up, a deep warble such as the forest had not heard before. “I am an Entwife,” she said. “I shall be known as Pome.”
“I am an Entwife,” said a plum tree, the tiny tufts along her bark shimmering in the still-rising sun. “I shall be known as Winterleaf.”
Then spoke up another oak, whose shade intersected with Treebeard’s, a gentle moiré. “I am Rivtovon, an Ent. Winterleaf and I shall raise the first grafting together. And the Ents shall not die.”
“We are Entwives and shall raise a sapling together,” two others said, a chestnut and an elm. “I shall be called Metafiona,” added the chestnut, proudly, facing the sun.
“All things must pass away, and new things shall arise,” sang Pome. “New things in the shade of the old. A kind of permanence, and a kind of transience.”
“Transience,” repeated Faramir, hand in glove with Éowyn.
“The Ents shall not die. Our songs shall not die,” declared Treebeard.
Then Faramir and Éowyn together drew their hands into a bag they carried, and in their hands together they held a roll of twine, and a folded cloth, and they looked first at the oak, and then at the plum three, and then at Treebeard, and then at Winterleaf and her husband, the oak Rívtovon. And Faramir said to the Ents and the Entwives and the both-at-once and to Éowyn, “We have what we need. If we may, now let us begin.”