The Alchemaster's Apprentice

The Tree of Nutledge


Echo found it an effort to open his bleary eyes. When he finally ungummed them, Ghoolion was standing over him, staring down with a face devoid of expression. Bright early morning sunlight was streaming in through the kitchen windows. As motionless as if he’d been struck by a bolt from the blue, the Alchemaster resembled one of his own stuffed mummies. Roused at last by this sinister sight, Echo rolled over on his side - and promptly regretted it. He had spent all night lying on his back, just the way he’d gone to sleep, and his muscular reaction to this sudden movement was painful in the extreme. Laboriously, he scrambled to his feet.

‘I take it you aren’t feeling too much like food at present,’ Ghoolion said coldly. He had reverted to his role as a forbidding Alchemaster and looked as if their binge had left him entirely unaffected.

‘That’s why I’ve prepared you only a frugal breakfast,’ he went on. ‘I trust that’s acceptable.’

‘Absolutely,’ Echo grunted. The kitchen floor seemed to sway beneath his paws as he strove to get his bearings. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Your current physical condition’, said Ghoolion, ‘is known as a monumental hangover.’

Echo didn’t reply. The Alchemaster’s voice sounded unpleasantly loud.

‘Breakfast is on the table. If you regain your appetite in the course of the day, I advise you to go to the roof and help yourself. I have some important experiments to carry out - they won’t wait.’

‘That’s all right,’ Echo mumbled. He scrambled on to the table by way of a chair instead of jumping straight up in the usual way. All he found when he got there, grunting and groaning, was a bowl of warm milk and a plate containing three shrivelled nuts.

‘Just nuts?’ he said petulantly.

‘They’re no ordinary nuts,’ Ghoolion replied. ‘They come from the Tree of Nutledge.’

‘Aha,’ said Echo. He proceeded to munch the nuts without enthusiasm. They were dry and tasted of nothing, not even of nuts.

‘The Tree of Nutledge grows in the Valley of Cogitating Eggs,’ Ghoolion explained. ‘That’s an arid, desertlike depression in the neighbourhood of Demon Range. The highest temperatures in Zamonia can be recorded there - if you’re crazy enough to cross it in summer. Towering into the sky in the very centre of the valley are a dozen enormous eggs. They’re arranged in a perfect circle, and some astronomers claim that its coordinates would enable one to calculate the dimensions of the entire universe.

‘Nobody knows how the eggs got there, but the long tracks they’ve left in the desert floor seem to indicate that they did so under their own power. On the other hand there’s an ornithological theory that they were laid by giant birds and that one day something unpredictable will hatch out of them. They emit a humming sound suggestive of profound thought, hence their name.’

Echo gulped down the last dry morsel. ‘But where do the nuts come in?’ he asked.

‘Well, it’s assumed that the intellectual radiation given off by the Cogitating Eggs has endowed large tracts of the valley with intelligence. Some of the animals there can talk as well as you do. I own a cactus from the area - we play telepathic chess together and it wins every time! One day a nut landed on this intellectually fertile soil. No one knows where it came from. It may have been dropped by a traveller or jettisoned by a passing bird. It may also have been a tiny asteroid from outer space. All we know is, it must have rained heavily soon afterwards, because the nut germinated and took root in the desert floor, and from it grew the Tree of Nutledge. A tree with blood-red timber found nowhere else in the whole of Zamonia, it grew like mad, both upwards and outwards, and put out snow-white leaves that make you very mentally alert if you chew them. Druids have settled in the tree and live in its branches. Naked, weather-beaten fellows with long hair and beards and demented expressions, they climb like monkeys and screech like cockatoos. Their consumption of nuts has rendered them so brilliantly clever that they’ve lost the need for speech and communicate by telepathic means. Scientists, artists and politicians from all over Zamonia make repeated pilgrimages to the tree when confronted by knotty problems. They write their questions on slips of paper and put them in wickerwork baskets, which the Druids let down on strings. Having been hauled up into the tree, the baskets are generally lowered soon afterwards, complete with answers. Suggestions from the inhabitants of the Tree of Nutledge were responsible for ending the Florinthian Choral Wars. They also led to the invention of the Aeromorphic Barograph and helped to crack the Cucumbrian Cryptogram.’

‘I see,’ said Echo. ‘So how do the nuts get here if the Druids eat them?’

‘A few of them fall to the ground from time to time, and the Druids are too mentally preoccupied to pick them up. They’re then collected and eaten by pilgrims, but a handful reach the open market. Each nut imparts a priceless insight.’

‘The ones I’ve eaten have left me none the wiser,’ Echo said sullenly.

‘They don’t work like that - they have a delayed reaction. Believe me, enlightenment will dawn in due course - it’s guaranteed. It sometimes takes a day or two.’

‘But that’s like eating something which doesn’t fill your belly till next week.’

‘Exactly!’ Ghoolion gathered his cloak around him and turned to go. ‘You’ll have to excuse me now, I’ve got things to do in the laboratory. There’s more food waiting for you on the roof, as I said.’

Echo spent the rest of the morning roaming aimlessly around in a thoroughly bad mood. He took refuge in dark corners, waiting impatiently for his body to regain its equilibrium and his nagging headache to subside. Early that afternoon he made an excursion to the roof, where he ate a fish pie and some chocolate cake. Although he didn’t really enjoy his meal, it made him so sleepy that he stretched out in a gutter and let the sun warm his fur until he dozed off. He slept for the rest of the afternoon and half the evening.

It was long after sunset when he awoke feeling thoroughly refreshed - almost newborn, in fact. He was in such a good mood that an audacious idea occurred to him: he decided to needle Ghoolion a little.