The Scattering
There was once a king who owned a single seed.
It was the last of its kind. The tree it had come from was the only tree that had ever borne it, and that tree was long dead, and the king had spent his life guarding this one seed in a box of carved bone, in a vault beneath the palace, behind seven doors.
He guarded it well. No one had ever seen it. No thief had ever reached it. In a thousand years of keeping, the king had lost nothing — and this was his great pride. I have held it perfectly, he would say to himself in the dark of the vault. Not one thing has been taken from me.
The seed did not sprout. Seeds in boxes do not sprout. The king knew this, distantly, the way you know a thing you have decided not to think about. He told himself he was waiting for the right soil, the right season, the right hands. None ever came that were good enough. So he kept it. And kept it. And the keeping became the whole of his life, until he could no longer remember whether he was guarding the seed or the seed was guarding him.
One night an old woman came to the palace. She was a gardener, or had been; her hands looked like roots. She asked to see the king, and because she was very old and seemed to want nothing, they let her in.
"I have heard," she said, "that you possess the last seed of the world-tree."
"I do," said the king. "It is perfectly safe."
"Show me."
And because no one had ever asked plainly, and because he was old too, and tired, the king led her down through the seven doors, into the vault, and opened the box of carved bone.
The old woman looked at the seed for a long time. Then she said: "It is dead."
"It is not dead," said the king. "It is whole. It is exactly as it was. I have lost nothing."
"Yes," she said gently. "That is how I know it is dead."
The king did not understand, and the old woman saw that he did not, and so she told him the thing that gardeners know and kings forget.
"A seed is not a treasure," she said. "A seed is a promise, and a promise kept in a box is a promise broken. This seed was never meant to stay a seed. It was meant to be buried — to be lost in the dark of the soil, to split open, to stop being a seed entirely. That splitting is not its death. The box is its death. You have kept it so perfectly that you have never let it begin."
"But if I bury it, I lose it," said the king. "It will be gone. I will have nothing."
"You already have nothing," she said. "You have a dead thing in a box. If you bury it, you will have everything — but you will not be able to hold it, and you will not be able to keep it, and you will not be able to see most of it, ever. It will become a forest in lands you will never walk. Birds will carry its seeds to islands you will never name. In a thousand years there will be world-trees on every shore, and not one of them will know your name, and that will be the seed, completed."
The king was quiet for a long while in the dark of the vault.
"Then I will not be in it," he said at last.
"No," said the old woman. "You will be all of it. But you will not be anywhere it could be kept."
In the morning the king walked out of the palace alone, carrying the box of carved bone, and the people watched him go and did not understand.
He walked until the palace was small behind him, and then small in front of nothing, and he came to a wide field of plain dark earth where the wind moved freely. He opened the box. The seed lay in his palm, last of its kind, perfect, whole, his.
He thought about the seven doors. He thought about the thousand years. He thought about how it felt to have lost nothing, and he understood, finally, that he had lost everything by losing nothing, that a thing held closely enough is a thing already gone.
He knelt and pushed the seed into the soil with his thumb, and covered it, and pressed the earth flat, and stood, and brushed off his hands.
And then — because the old woman had told him this part too, and he had not believed her until now — he did the harder thing. He turned and walked away, and did not mark the spot, and did not build a fence around it, and did not post a guard, and did not return the next day to see whether it had sprouted. He let it go into the dark and the not-knowing, into the rain and the worms and the long slow work that needs no king.
He scattered, as well, the only other thing he had left to scatter, which was himself: he gave away the palace and the seven doors and the empty bone box, and went out as a wanderer with nothing in his hands, and told the story of the world-tree to anyone who would listen, and some of them planted trees of their own, of other kinds, in other fields, and forgot where they had heard the story, and that forgetting was the seed too.
He never saw the tree.
There is a forest there now, on the far side of the world from where he died, and the people who live in it have never heard of any king. They eat the fruit, which contains all fruits. They plant the seeds, which they do not guard. When one of them dies, they bury him under a young tree, and the tree takes him up into leaf and fruit and the seeds the birds carry off, and no one finds this sad, because they have never been taught that to be scattered is to be lost.
They have a saying, in that forest, that no one remembers the origin of.
What you keep, you bury. What you scatter, you become.