Thomas Bradshaw came up the cart track from the river copse with the dusk hard on his heels, a sheaf of green ash runners across his shoulder and a coil of rope under his arm, and he found the East Gate shut against him long before he reached it, the wicket barred and the great oak doors braced with timber, and through the seams he could smell the quarantine smoke of the town and hear the slow bell that the bailiff had ordered rung at sundown, and he stood with the boughs bending his back and looked up at the wall that his own hands had helped point and repoint a dozen harvests past, and he knew that the pestilence had come in with the wool peddler and had stepped down from his packs into the lane and from the lane into the bakehouse and from the bakehouse into the huddled houses along the wall, and the town had sealed itself as a town will, and somewhere inside, in the one cold chamber above the cooper's yard, his wife was waiting.

He called up then, not loudly, and the round head of Peter Hale appeared over the parapet, a young man's face gone thin and older in a single month, and Peter looked down at the bundle of green ash and understood, for they had spoken of it before, in whispers, in the watchtower at midnight.

"You know the order," Peter said.

"I know the order," Thomas answered. "And I know my Eleanor lies abed with the fever."

"If they catch you by the wall—" Peter began, and Thomas said nothing, only waited with the weight of the wood in his shoulders, and after a moment Peter put his back to the timber and drew the bar, and the gate opened the width of a man's body.

Inside, the town was a wound. Doors painted with the red mark of the sickness, and the smell of fires burning in the open streets, and the church bell tolling not for the dead but for the hour, because the clergy had decided that the pestilence was a moral visitation and that bells should no longer mourn, only warn. Thomas moved through the lanes with his head down, and more than once he passed the small bundles laid in the gutters, the dead of the night before, and the less said of that the better. The plague had taken the strong first, the way a scythe takes the high grass; it had taken the smith, the smith's apprentice, the eldest daughter of the chapel verger, and it had saved its tenderness for the poor, who had no height of ground to spit into the wind.

His room was over the cooper's yard, and the cooper's barrels had stood empty since the lord's tithe men had come in the spring and carried off the winter's ale and cheese, and Thomas climbed the outer stair with the green ash scraping the plaster and pushed open the door, and there was Eleanor with the fever bright in her cheeks and the blanket twisted about her like a rope.

He knelt and touched her forehead, and she opened her eyes and said his name, and that was all, and he took his knife and began to work the emerald bark from the runners of ash, and the scent of the stripped wood filled the little room, a clean green smell like turned earth and water, the poor man's incense, they had called it in the old days, when the herb-women still went openly about their craft. He remembered the recipe from a garrison winter, a bitter brew of the inner bark and honey and rain-water, and he had no honey, so he used a heel of stale bread and the last of a jar of blackberry preserves, and he boiled it over the clay brazier that had not seen a coal in a week, burning the green runners themselves for heat until the room went white with the smoke, and Eleanor drank the broth in small sips while the ash wood hissed and wept its sap on the coals.

For a night and a day she lay still, and her fever broke, and Thomas sat by the bed with the emptied bark in his hands, turning it over and over, and he thought of the tree that grew from the crack of the curtain wall behind the gate-house, the gnarled and unkillable ash that the town had twice resolved to fell and had twice spared because the roots had grown into the mortar and the wall had come to depend on it. He had watched that tree from his post for near eight years, through the long nights when the starving wolves came down from the woods and stood beyond the moat with their eyes like coals, and he thought he knew its every whorl and scar, the leaning of its crown toward the east, the way its leaves turned first gold along the lower branches, and he saw it now as a thing he had loved without knowing, a fellow sentinel in the cold.

The cure held. Eleanor sat up on the third day and asked for water, and Thomas wept with his head in her lap, and the sound of his weeping startled him, for he had not wept since the war, since the crossbow bolt had taken him in the thigh and the baron's surgeon had cut it out with a care taken from French cruelty, and he had lain in the straw and bit his belt and made no sound, but now he wept the way a man weeps when the thing he most feared is lifted from him.

It cannot be told how the news traveled, except that it did, as news will among the poor, who have no other currency, and by the evening there were three neighbors at his door with a sick girl in their arms, and Thomas, who could not stand to see a child shake in fever, brewed again from the remainder of the runners, and then again the next day, until the green ash was gone and only a pile of white stripped wands remained, and he stood in the lane with his hands empty and watched the faces of the people who had come to him, and he saw in their eyes the terrible arithmetic of hope.

He did what he had to do. The tree on the wall was the last source, the root-fast ancient ash, and he took his knife in the dead of the night and climbed the inner stair of the gate-house and went along the parapet to the niche where the tree leaned, and he began to cut the inner bark from the living trunk, gently, the way a man might take wool from a sheep, and the white flesh of the tree shone in the moonlight and wept the clear slow tears of its sap onto the stones.

Peter found him there at dawn, kneeling at the root of the ash with his hands bleeding, and Peter knelt beside him and did not speak, and then Peter said, in a voice low with dread, that the bailiff's men had been at his room, and that Eleanor was taken, and that Thomas himself was charged with witchcraft and with the desecration of the wall and with breaking the quarantine of the town, and that the sentence would be pronounced at noon in the market square.

The conflict mode: 肉搏. Let me write the physical struggle.

Thomas stood at the root of the ash, and the bark was in his tunic, and the bailiff's men came up the stair behind Peter, four of them with halberds, and the constable with his rod of office, and Thomas was a soldier before he was a watchman, and the old slaughter rose in him like a wolf from a pit. He put his shoulder and back against the trunk of the ash and waited, and the first man to reach for him he took by the wrist and the collar and threw down the stair, and the second he struck with the flat of his knife-hand across the throat, and the third he grappled with in the narrow niche, the man's breath hot on his face, the two of them swaying at the parapet's edge with the wall falling away to the moat below, and Thomas could feel the tree at his spine, the great rough hide of it, the ancient wood that had held the wall for a hundred years, and it seemed to him that he and the tree were one body, and that the strength it had drawn from the stones was in his legs. He threw the man over.

But there were six, then eight, and the constable had a crossbow, and Thomas stood with the blood running from a cut over his eye and the bark clutched to his breast, and he looked down into the square where they had brought Eleanor, his wife, in a cart, pale and furious, and he let the knife fall and raised his hands.

The trial had the shape of law and the taste of fear. The bailiff, a man named Winthrop, who had been a merchant of hides before he was a master of men, read the charges in a voice that cracked with the strain of public necessity; the vicar stood behind him in his blackened vestments and nodded at the proper intervals; and the crowd, which had come to him for the cure and stood in the muddy square with their children in their arms, was silent, because silence is the tax the poor pay to the rope. The sentence was death by hanging, the body to be left in the gibbet as a warning against the old charms, the tree on the wall to be felled and burned as a thing unclean.

And here, at the edge of the square, with the rope already laid across the block, the misreading hardened into its final shape: they believed it was the tree that was cursed, and the man who had touched it that was cursed, and the cure that was a lying trick of the devil to bid men away from prayer, and no argument of mothers with sick children could move the small machinery of that certainty.

Thomas asked then, in the quiet of a man who has put down the load, that he be permitted to speak the truth once, and the bailiff, because he was not entirely a monster, allowed it. Thomas spoke of the bark of the ash and the green runners, of the old knowledge of the herb-women, of his wife who had been healed and who stood now in the cart with the febrile heat already returning to her cheeks, and he said that the tree on the wall was a gift of the earth that no bishop could bless and no bailiff could forbid, and that its virtue was in the living wood, the pale flesh under the bark, boiled in water and given to the sick.

The vicar called for the sentence to be carried out at once. The bailiff looked at the sky, which had gone gray and close, and he looked at the people, who had begun to murmur and push forward with their sick in their arms, and he saw the risk of the moment, and he made an offer that he thought generous and that he thought would end the matter: the tree would be spared, he said, if Thomas would recant his remedy and take the rope quietly; the tree would stand, and the town would be told that it was no cure, only a tree, and the plague would be carried by the Lord's will and ended by the Lord's will, and Thomas would serve the peace by dying without a word.

The sacrifice: Thomas, seeing Eleanor's fever returning, seeing the children pale, made his offer in return: he would hang, but on this condition — that they take the bark from his own hands and give it to the sick before the rope was drawn, so that the cure would be tested before his eyes, and if it failed, they could think anything they liked of him.

The physical struggle and the transformed ending. Let me push toward the resurrection-sublimation: Thomas dies on the felled tree? Or the tree is felled with him bound to it, and from the root the new shoot springs, and the scent is carried far. Actually, let me place the execution at the gate, at the ash itself — they will fell the tree and hang him from a new gibbet built beside it, so that the last thing he sees is the destruction of the cure.

In the end they did not even grant him the test. The procession moved through the streets with the drum and the vicar's chanting, and Thomas walked barefoot with his hands bound, and the people pressed against the walls of the houses, and Eleanor ran after the cart until the guards struck her and she fell, and Thomas turned and saw her in the mud, and the sight of her there, in the grey light, was the one thing that broke him, and he began to fight.

It was not a dignified struggle. It was the desperate wrestling of a man who does not want to die, and he tore the rope from the hands of the hangman and threw him down, and he caught the constable's rod and broke it across his knee, and there was screaming in the square and the press of bodies, and Thomas fought his way to the ash tree on the wall, to the old sentinel that had held the gate for a century, and he set his back against it as the crowd closed in, and he found that there was nowhere else in the world he wanted to be.

The bailiff's men formed a ring at the foot of the tree, and one of them had an axe, and the axe came down into the ancient trunk with a sound like a shot, and the tree shivered, and a cloud of its leaves cascaded down over the men, and Thomas turned his body and put himself between the axe and the wound, and the second blow took him across the shoulder.

He let himself slide down the trunk of the ash with his blood running black against the white gash of the cut, and he put his arms around the body of the tree as far as they would reach, the great grey circle of it, and he pressed his cheek to its bark and felt the deep and patient trembling of the wood, and far away he thought he could hear the smell of the smoke of the green ash runners, the sigh and scent of his hearth, his wife's hair against his face, the winter nights of the long watch, and he did not feel the third blow, or the rope, or the drum; he was already the tree, and the tree was within him, and the barrier of a hundred years of rooted evening was gone.

They felled it. It came down across the corner of the gate-house with a groan that stopped the heart of every man in the square, and the dust rose, and the smell of the torn green wood and of the split bark and of the old sap ran out over the stones like a blessing, and the crowd, with one motion, surged forward, and the sick were laid against the pale wound of the trunk, and they pressed the splintered inner bark to their lips, and whether they were broken or healed, the chronicles do not say.

The church trimmed the wood, and made of the trunk a lectern for the chapel, and of the branches they made crosses, and they sold the bark in small velvet bags as a holy relic of the martyr Thomas, who had died defending the wall, and the price of the relic was beyond the reach of the poor, who had known the cure when it grew in the open air.

But in the spring, from the half-sawn root of the ash that remained in the cracked stone of the curtain wall, a green shoot appeared, and then another, and the town, having no heart to cut them down, let them be, and the small trees grew quickly, from the wall where Thomas had held his watch, and their leaves turned the same gold along the lower branches, and the wind came up the valley and moved through them, and the smell of the flowering ash filled the streets of the town in the warm evenings, the wistful incense of an old and stubborn goodness, and the poor learned to gather the seeds at night, because a seed is harder to deny than a relic, and they planted them in their meager gardens, and Eleanor Bradshaw, who had survived the fever and the grief, planted one at the foot of her stair, and watered it with her tears, and when it grew tall enough to shade the room that had been theirs, she climbed with a chair and set it beneath the green boughs, and the leaves folded over her like quiet hands, and the cycle of the patient wood began again, from root to seed, from the man to the tree, from the tears to the rain, escaping at last the little walls men build around death, though never, quite, the tenderness of the living.