Batch 47

The path meandered past the woodworking shed, then the goat pens, then worked its way up to the upper terraces where Linnea's coffee plantation lay quiet under the morning fog. It crossed the cleared zone where the old electric pylon stood, three cantennas bolted to its crossarm and aimed at sister nodes too far off to see. Then it ran straight into the laurisilva forest.

It was a quiet, ancient, mossy place Saga had been walking in for thirteen and a half years. The forest itself was over forty million years old ~~ which she knew because Maddy had told her. Maddy taught her many things, in the patient way she had.

Back when the continent was young, Maddy had said, laurel forests covered most of Europe. They thrived for a stretch of time too long to picture, and then, about two and a half million years ago, the ice age came and they perished across the whole continent ~~ all of Europe ~~ except for three small clusters of islands out in the Atlantic where the cold never reached. The laurels had outlived their world. Tenerife, Saga's island, was one of the places they'd done it. She'd carried that around for a week.

The laurisilva surrounding Querencia de los Helechos was also a cloud forest. It rose into the mar de nubes [mar deh NOO-bess], the sea of clouds that came up off the Atlantic and caught on the north slope of the mountain every morning, and the trees here drank water straight out of the fog. The leaves were silver underneath and dark green on top, and in the morning fog they shed water in fat slow drops you heard rather than felt: plick, plick (pause) plick. The lichen on the lava rock was the color of milky green tea. Underfoot the path was red volcanic earth, soft with a carpet of crunchy pine needles where the older laurels had given way to the younger pines, and stepped at intervals by short flights of mossy slate wedged into the slope.

Sirius darted ahead in and out of laurel shadow, then ran back to Saga, made a muffled ruff, then darted ahead, the way Sirius did. He'd been like this since he was a puppy and Saga was six years old.

She passed the crossing where the path forked. The left fork went up to the Cebolla Sister's cat colony, with the small black cat that walked with a limp and always knew when Saga was nearby. The right fork was a stone lined, tidy little path curving upwards towards Anna's. She took the right.

A few hundred meters above the fork, the trees opened, and Anna's house appeared.

Anna's house was made of stone and warmly painted strips of wood, in roughly equal proportions. The stone was the same volcanic stone of every other building above the line of cultivation: local, blocky, dark, plastered in places and bare in others. The application of pallet wood was masterful. Anna had collected it, first piece by piece and then in larger lots; she'd cut and trimmed and joined and weather-treated each piece, with the help of Linolada [LEE-no-LAH-dah], a Croatian carpenter, and now the upper half of the house, the loft level and the long porch facing east, was a kind of woven thing of dark plastered stone below and warm fitted reclaimed pine above. It looked like nothing else. It reminded Saga the way a banana was, botanically speaking, a berry, but quite unlike a berry at the same time.

The roof was solar panels, twelve of them, which Anna and Stef had installed one grueling summer weekend in 2028 when they'd finally got the converter to behave. There was a small cantenna, a potato-chip-can wrapped with copper wire at the ridgeline, pointing sideways down the slope toward the pylon at Querencia. There was a chimney with a thin column of smoke rising from it ~~ Anna was cooking down something. There was a stone path through ferns and a sizeable herb garden, and at the door there was a rotund orange striped cat.

The cat looked at Sirius.

Sirius, who'd been swatted on the nose more than once, developed his own quiet understanding with the striped cat at Anna's years ago. He sat down at the edge of the herb garden and looked at the sky.

Saga went up the path.

"Buenos" she said, to the cat.

The cat blinked at her, twice, in a way that meant I've known you since you were six. I accept your presence

The door was open.

Inside, the noren over the inner doorway parted as the breeze from the porch moved through, and the air of Anna's front room reached out to meet her. It didn't smell of orange this morning. It smelled of something deeper and a little stranger ~~ anise and carob and the dark molasses note of palm syrup at a long slow simmer. The smell sat on Saga's tongue before she'd even crossed the threshold. It was a smell she'd known her whole life, and she'd never identified it as belonging to any food she'd ever eaten. Anna called it "root beer".

The room was, as it always was, festooned.

Long printed cottons hung from the rafters ~~ old Japanese furoshiki cloths, faded batik panels in vermilion and indigo, a single embroidered length of Romani caravan textile that Anna had traded an herbalist for one autumn afternoon in La Orotava with no negotiation Saga had been told the full details of. The cottons moved when the door moved, and when the door moved decisively the whole ceiling swayed by an inch, like a gentle shrug.

Across the doorway between the front room and the back hall hung the indigo noren with the white kanji ~~ izakaya [ee-ZAH-kah-yah] 居酒屋, which Saga couldn't read and had never asked about; she'd just grown up around it. Across the doorway to the back porch was the long brown one with the white kanji that said the best grilled pork in the world, which she also couldn't read. Anna didn't eat pork; Anna kept it for the calligraphy. Above the herb-drying shelf, in a corner of the kitchen where it made no architectural or commercial sense, hung the tall blue one Anna carried home from Tokyo long ago. Weathered and tattered, at the bottom of the flag stood an excited and determined cartoon rabbit pointing up at speech bubble over his head. (It said "Old Used Cars")

Saga liked the Japanese noren. Saga had built her own private taxonomy of them when she was eight (the one over the back hall, the one over the porch, the funny one above the dill) and hadn't revised it since.

Above the long counter under the east window hung the Mononoke print ~~ Moro the wolf-mother, white and enormous, set in a forest of laurels almost identical to the laurels Saga had just walked through. The print was faded. The frame was a piece of pallet wood lovingly made by Linolada [LEE-no-LAH-dah].

Anna didn't survive the bad years by being bitter. She'd survived them by being loud about color.

Anna was at the counter beneath the wolf. She was wearing her seawater cardigan over a long printed dress and a square of cotton printed with koi tied around her hair the way she'd tied it for nine years, since the morning she'd decided she wasn't going to brush her hair in the mirror of a country she couldn't get back to. She had reading glasses slipping forward on her nose. She had her copper pot ~~ the hammered one she'd brought back from a dealer in Las Chafiras ten years ago ~~ set on the small wood stove with the trivet under it, and she was stirring slowly with a wooden spoon stained the color of dark tea.

"There you are!" Anna said, glancing briefly up with a smile. "I knew it. The pot's been telling me." She clanked the pot with a spoon like a bell.

"What did it say."

"That you were close. That you had the roots. That I should keep stirring."

"All three are true."

"The pot never lies to me!" She doubled-tinked the wooden spoon on the side for extra effect.

"Tía," Saga said, and set the basket on the counter at Anna's elbow.

Anna set the spoon down and turned to the basket. She lifted out the small bowl of strawberries first. She held it up to the morning light, admiring the color. Then she set the bowl on the counter and looked at Saga, smiling already.

"Two strawberries," she said.

"They're from Mamá ~~ there were only fifteen on the plant."

"How generous of her to share! They look .. perfect."

She picked up one of the strawberries and put it directly into her mouth. She eyeballed Saga and blissfully mumbled something with her mouth full. It sounded like cartoon Swedish. She paused a beat, held up a hand, swallowed, regained her composure, then said again, "Tell her thank you. Tell her she's amazing. I want you to tell her she's a powerful princess of permaculture.."

Saga laughed. "Tía. She'll be embarrassed."

Anna grinned and nodded. She lifted out the loaf of banana bread next, sniffed it once, and set it on the bread board, eyes wide but without comment. Then she lifted out the bundle of zarzaparrilla roots ~~ knobby, pale, the soil of the laurisilva still clinging to them in small dark crescents ~~ and held them tenderly for a moment in both hands.

"Where'd y'all find these?"

"Above the upper terraces. The patch near the old water tank."

"Nice." She turned the bundle once, holding it under her nose for a second, eyes half-closing. Then she set it down beside the copper pot. "Great timing. Today they go in. I've been holding the syrup for them."

She returned to the spoon. Saga sat on the high stool by the counter and watched.

What Anna was doing ~~ and what Anna had been doing, on and off, for eleven years, in the determined way she had with anything that mattered ~~ was trying to make something called "root beer" which came from, in her words, "the old country".. Root beer barrel candies, more precisely: the small amber hard sweets she'd loved as a child in a land she hadn't seen since 2026 and wouldn't see again. She'd told Saga about them once, when Saga was eight: they look like little wooden barrels and they taste like a sweet forest on a warm afternoon.

Eleven years. Forty-six previous attempts. Whatever was in the pot today was syrup attempt forty-seven.

On the counter sat the bundle of Smilax canariensis, the climbing sarsaparilla vine of the laurisilva understory. It's the root in root beer, which Anna had spent three years figuring out how to use and was still figuring out. Next to it, on a copper tray, lay the rest of the day's palette: a small jar of dandelion root Saga had helped roast on a low oven sheet last Tuesday, dark and brittle; a bowl of carob pods ground to a fine powder; a small bottle of aguardiente de caña from the distillery near Vilaflor, into which Anna had been steeping gentian and burdock for a fortnight as a tincture; a tied muslin bag of anise and wild fennel seed; a small ceramic jar of almond honey from the upper Granadilla apiaries; a clay bottle of dark miel de palma sent up from a friend on La Gomera who Anna hadn't seen in nine years but corresponded with weekly on the mesh. And the tall, thin, empty jar, marked with a printed paper label from before the collapse: Vanilla pods. It sat completely empty.

Above the working counter, on a high shelf, a row of small bottles: each labeled in Anna's odd, irregular handwriting. Capitalized and clean like an architect's handwriting, but also swoopy and flowery. Each bottle contained a slightly different shade of brown extracts, each numbered. No. 41 ~~ too sweet, no body. No. 42 ~~ better, anise dominant. No. 43 ~~ close, missing something. No. 44 ~~ closer! burdock too strong. 45 ~~ tonka bean (no more vanilla). (Here she'd drawn a sad face emoji.)

Below the syrup shelf, on the working shelf where Saga's eye actually went, was the other row. The candies. The successes.

Six tins and four jars, lidded, labeled in the same hand. The glossy violet hand-pulled wild blackberry taffy, twisted in waxed paper, made from the moras Saga foraged along the upper laurisilva paths in late summer, and which Linnea, who claimed not to eat sweets, was known to pinch a twist of when no one was looking. The slightly smoky miel de palma toffees that the cooperative on the north coast asked for by name. The carob and almond bark, broken into rough shards and wrapped one shard to a piece in the waxed paper Stef had brought up from a stationer's office in Icod that nobody had cleared out yet. The pale yellow anise drops that old men at the cooperative bought by the handful and that Saga had, to her surprise, witnessed Padre Ramiero put in his cassock pocket with a look of complete unrepentance. And the tuno pastilles ~~ made of sweet and tangy prickly pear fruit, jellied, dusted in gofio powder and dried mountain herbs.

Anna stirred the pot. She tipped a slow thread of a schnapps-like tincture into the syrup. She watched the color move.

"Mamá says they're growing vanilla near Garachico," Saga said.

Anna's hands froze. She set down the spoon and turned to face her.

"What? Seriously? Where in Garachico?"

"On the slope above town. Towards Los Silos. A small plantation, just starting. She heard at the cooperative meeting last week. They're going to begin trading next harvest."

"Well then..." she said, trying to dial back her excitement, "I've got to get some!" she said widening her eyes. "We could make more vanilla syrup for the coffee."

"Mmh, Mama wanted to ask you about that."

Anna considered this. "Incredible." she said.

She picked up the spoon and resumed stirring. She kept stirring. Saga watched the surface of the syrup wrinkle and re-smooth, wrinkle and re-smooth.

"Forty-seven," said Saga.

"Forty-seven."

"You keep them all?" Saga gestured at the cabinet.

"Yep, except the burned ones. But I especially keep the failures. The failures are educational. and funny."

"how many were failures?"

"Well.. most of them are kind of like.. acceptable candy on their own? but all have failed the root beer test. One got close, though." She looked at the shelf of syrups and considered.. "There's only just three I'd call real failures.. like.. super gross, and completely inedible failures. The rest are just not right, one way or another."

"Three?"

Anna set the wooden spoon on the rest. She wiped her hands on her apron. She turned to Saga the way she did when she was about to admit something.

"MMh. Three of forty-six." She opened a cabinet and reached for a small brown jar. "This one was pretty bad. It was 2031 and I'd used a lot of eucalyptus oil. "

"Eucalyptus?"

"Yeah" she laughed with slight embarrassment "from those trees down at the grove down at Santiago? I thought ~~ menthol. Brightness. Wintergreen."

"How'd it turn out?"

"Feeling brave?" She opened the top wiggled it temptingly. "Find out yourself. Take a whiff." she held it under Saga's nose. Saga raised her eyebrows, then frowned slightly. She would have said it smelled something like a clinic, but she couldn't, because she'd really never smelled a clinic.

Anna picked up the wooden spoon again, then put it back down.

"Stef came by while I was working on it and asked me to pour him a teaspoon from the pot. I warned him it was.. strong but.. you know he'll swallow anything right?" she shook her head. "I mean, really... he slurped it up and then he was like.." Anna put her hands around her throat in pantomime and contorted her face. "ANNA.. WHAT IS THIS... WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME" she made fake choking coughing noises. She snorted, then sat on the stool next to Saga, and ate the second strawberry.

"Still," she looked off into the distance, "it was better than the batch with cumin in it." She was reaching for another jar with a cartoon skull and crossbones. "You've gotta smell this.."

Saga quickly changed the subject:

"The plantation is flowering."

Anna stopped, then something briefly danced across Anna's face. Saga had seen this look a few times before: once when Stef brought up a small video file on his phone showing a city Anna hadn't seen since 2026, and the Mateo had played a particular song at one of the night festivals. It was the face of a person being, for half a second, struck by something they hadn't felt in years.

Anna stood. She crossed to the working shelf and opened the smallest tin labelled Pastilles - 44. She fished one out with two fingers. It was the color of strong tea, small, and irregular, and slightly cloudy where it had been touched while still warm.

She set the candy down in front of Saga.

"This batch is closer than it's ever been."

Saga picked it up. She held it for a second between her thumb and forefinger, looking at the way the light went through the amber. Then she put it in her mouth.

She thought for a long time.

The cat, who'd come in behind her and was now sitting on the stool that had been Anna's, watched without moving.

The candy was sweet. It was woody. It was ~~ there was a moment when Saga thought it tasted like the laurisilva sprinkled with sugar. Underneath there was something that wasn't anise and wasn't carob and wasn't honey, and which Saga, who had a thirteen-year-old's perfect honesty in matters of flavor, didn't know the name of because she had no name for it and never would.

Anna watched her face. Anna didn't ask.

Saga sucked thoughtfully. The candy slowly went away.

"Mmh?" asked Anna.

Saga didn't answer right away. She manipulated what was left of the candy with her tongue to between her teeth. There was, faintly, somewhere at the back, a sweet earthy coolness.

"It tastes..." Saga paused, "like .. forest candy."

Anna laughed. "Right? That's the idea! But it's still way too much forest and not enough candy. It needs.."

Anna pointed at the empty vanilla jar. Then, a beat later, a look of emptiness on her face.

She paused for a moment.

"Would you like to talk to her?" she said, turning to Saga.