disclaimer - Watership Down (c) Richard Adams.
warnings - spoilers up to ch17. The Shining Wire
author's note - comments and/or concrit all very much appreciated. thank you.

'Hazel was more at a loss than ever. He had never seen a laburnum and was puzzled by the name, which in Lapine is 'Poison-tree'. How could a rabbit be named Poison? And how could stones be El-ahrairah? What, exactly, was it that Strawberry was saying was El-ahrairah? In confusion he said, 'I don't understand.' '- Watership Down, ch13. Hospitality

The Poison Tree

He was born under an evil star at the hour of Inlé rising and they say his mother must have been delirious with dread at the time (for why else would she have named him a curse to the warren?); the curious sequence of events that follows does nothing to dispel their worries.

At little more than two months old Laburnum is out dragging carrots and lettuce with the rest of them, but the vegetables seem unnaturally soft and tear themselves out easily from under his teeth (or perhaps it is his bite which is unnaturally hard). It is as difficult to hold on to a leaf of lettuce (too beautiful and white and strangely fragile) as it is to his own thoughts in this warren where they think with one mind and have one purpose, unnatural and wrong though it so seems.

The poetry recitations of the Honeycomb gatherings disturb him.

Laburnum moves on to other things, harder things, stalks and bark that are much less edible but also much easier to hold on to, drags them to the mouth of the burrow before snapping clean out of the trance and noticing the others eyeing him with a gleaming wariness. He mutters an inaudible apology and heads back to the pile of carrots and lettuce that never seems to shrink, careful to nudge his load back delicately and carefully with nose and soft paws, never teeth and claws.

He fancies that the other rabbits disapprove but leave him well enough alone because the concept of earn-your-keep is warped and twisted here (or perhaps it (he) has never existed), and they do not begrudge him the little he nibbles away from the soft grass that lines the openings of the warren.

In time he is taking from the field as many stones as leaves of lettuce and heaps them in an un-obstructive pile near the entrance of his personal burrow. Sometimes he takes one or two to the Honeycomb gatherings, which unsettle him so much he scratches into the hard, hard ground little welts that he realizes would just fit the stones he carries.

He pushes them into the ground and the walls because it is a comforting reminder that the Honeycomb is not invulnerable, that this hard suffocating shell between what the warren is and what the warren could have been too has its weaknesses, and he fancies that if he makes enough holes in the ground it will give him a chance to breathe.

They whisper and drift, all voices, singing and dancing and dreaming in the dark.

He feels the weight of another's eyes on his furtive paws, but the rabbit watching him—whom he recognizes as one of the more spirited young ones, who would have been considered a presumptuous upstart if there had been any semblance of hierarchy in this suffocating world— is neither indignant nor disapproving. Silverweed's gaze roves over the stones with little more than a bored disinterest.

But soon the others begin to notice and say things like those look just like a pair of ears and if you close your eyes and look from the side like this, that bit over there looks almost like a rabbit's tail, as if his desperate furtive deeds are another aspect of the twisted unnatural rituals they call art, ghostlike.

I know, I know! That's El-ahrairah and the King's Lettuce—and he can't believe the name had been uttered, El-ahrairah, who by now was little more than a memory of a memory of the thrilling trickster, living only faintly flickering in their collective mind. And before he can even think of a reply another voice answers for him yes, of course that's what he means, and nothing more is said, and that is that.

Silverweed just sits there and stares.

In the Honeycomb they tear a rabbit's heart asunder and consume clean the flesh that surrounds it.

Laburnum never says a word about the stones. He falls back into that hypnotic routine, clutches tightly and painfully to every load of carrots and lettuce as if afraid they would tear themselves out from under his teeth if he only dared loosen his grip.

The Honeycomb warps intention, and the fear still resides.

He can no longer remember the purpose of those stones. Only at the Honeycomb gatherings does he notice that they are made out to be art but they were never meant to be, and that Silverweed stares at him so intense and pleading.

But he remembers so little, and less, and nothing. And then the metal jaws snap shut around his leg while he transports yet more carrots and this time he just lets go.