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When the Faun Fell in Love

There is a forest in Galicia so ancient some of the trees remember a time when animals took the shape of men and men grew wings and fur. Some men, the trees whisper, even became oak and beech and laurel and drove their roots so deeply into the ground they forgot their names. There is one fig tree especially whose story the others like to tell when the wind makes their leaves murmur. It grows on a hill at the heart of the forest. One can spot it easily, as the two main branches bend like the horns of a goat and the trunk is split, as if the tree gave birth to something growing under its bark.

Yes! the forest whispers. That’s why the trunk is split open like a wound. This tree did give birth, for it was once a woman who danced and sang under my canopy. She picked my berries and braided her hair with my flowers. But one day she met a Faun who liked to play his flute under my trees in the moonlight. He’d fashioned the flute from the finger bones of an ogre and his tune sang of the dark underground kingdom he came from, so different from the light the woman carried inside.

All this is true, and she fell in love with the Faun nevertheless, with a love as deep and inescapable as a well, and the Faun loved her back. When he finally asked her to come with him to his underground world, however, she dreaded the thought of spending the rest of her life without ever seeing the stars or feeling the wind on her skin. So she decided to stay and watched him leave. However, the love she felt filled her with such longing, her feet grew roots to follow her beloved underground, while her arms reached for the sky and the stars she’d chosen over him.

Oh, the heartache she felt. It made her soft skin turn to bark. Her sighs became the rustling of the wind in a thousand leaves and, when the Faun came back one moonlit night to play his flute for her, all he found was a tree whispering the name he had never told anyone but her.

The Faun sat down between the tree’s roots and felt his own tears like dew on his face. The branches he sat under showered him with flowers, but his lover couldn’t throw her arms around him or kiss his lips anymore. He felt such a pain in his wild and fearless heart that when he caressed the tree his own skin—once covered with silken fur—became as rough and wooden as the bark of his lost love.

The Faun sat under the tree all night until the sun rose and drove him away. Its bright light had never become him and when he had returned to the dark womb of the earth, the tree bent her branches deeper and deeper in sadness until they resembled her lover’s horned head.

Eight months later, on a full moon night, the trunk of the tree split with a soft moan and a child stepped out. It was a boy, graced with the beauty of his mother, while the horns in his green hair and the hooves on his slender legs gave away his father. He pranced and danced down the hill like his mother had once danced under the trees, and he made himself a flute from bird bones to fill the forest with a song that sang of love and loss.

Deep underground, where he was instructing a princess in the tasks of her parents’ court, the Faun heard the flute’s music. He excused himself and rushed through secret passageways known only to him to the Upper Kingdom. But when he arrived, the sound of the flute was nowhere to be heard, and all he found was a track of small hooves on the wet moss, washed away by the rain after a few dancing steps.