by Dave Rudden
It’s winter. The sky is that blue you only get on winter mornings, glassy and glacial, a blue so blue it’d hurt your eyes. We pick our way through the outskirts of the village, past the squat cottages and the haggard sheep huddled in their barns. The Doctor follows me sullenly, a chain linking my hand to his bound wrists, and the little question-mark umbrella he refused to leave behind.
Hard to blame him for the sulking, either, if I’m honest. It can’t have been an easy night, tied up before Elders’ Keep as the villagers chanted and the fires roared and the torches burned themselves to pluttering stubs. I don’t know why all the ceremony is necessary. Except I do, of course: it’s the way we do things here. That’s a good enough reason for anything.
The Outsmawe road is crowded, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that we’re the only two heading out, while everyone else is heading in – a huge queue of farmers and families beating a path to shelter behind the village walls, their arms laden down with supplies. The Doctor watches them as we pass. Clever eyes. Question-mark eyes. Outsider eyes, I imagine, though he is the first outsider I ever met.
‘Expecting a harsh winter?’
Winter. It’s an old word, a word from the before times, the mythic times when it is said that we sailed here on great ships across a black and icy sea. These days, there are only really two seasons here in Outsmawe – Succour, the easy time, the time of planting and harvesting and preparation, and Siege – the time when we hope those preparations are enough.
Siege comes every year, and Succour is getting shorter all the time.
We walk, and soon the ground begins to rise into the first of the Uppsmarch hills; humped and hairy with brambles, the soil pale and pinched with cold. Every so often I hand him my waterskin, and he drinks, sharp eyes never leaving mine. It’s been hours since the crowds on the road dwindled and, with one last look around the deserted horizon, I take a thin gold ring from my pack and slip it on my finger. The Doctor watches that too.
‘I’m a traveller,’ he says eventually, his breath a little ragged from the slope. ‘I crashed here. I have no quarrel with your people. With any people, really.’ He frowns. ‘All right. That isn’t completely true. But usually I have to at least know what’s going on before I end up in chains …’
I think he’s used to being listened to. It isn’t because he’s a big man, because he isn’t. It isn’t because he’s an Elder, because he’s not – though there are enough laughter lines and worry lines on his sharp face that I wouldn’t like to guess his age.
I think maybe somewhere else he’s somebody. That’s what it is. Somewhere else, he speaks and people jump to. You can see it in the way he stands – hands resting on his lapels like a schoolmaster or a priest – and you can hear it in his voice, fast and particular as stitching thread. He’s somebody, wherever he’s from.
Well. We’re in Outsmawe now.
‘If you could at least tell me where we’re going –’
We come to the top of the first hill. I lift my hand and point.
The Doctor’s gaze follows my finger. ‘What is that?’
My wife had a little book once. It wasn’t strictly allowed, not by the scripture, but the little glimpse of it I got didn’t look too ungodly at all – just a fat stack of pages full of stories about monsters and heroes and cities where the buildings and the bodies were so tightly packed that it never got quiet and never got cold. A silly little thing. Not worth all the trouble it caused.
I remember it had a picture of a forest, and in that picture the forest was green.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Outsiders are wrong about nearly everything. The scriptures tell us so. A green forest, trees all narrow at the bottom and fat at the top, laid out neat as houses in the street. There were flowers. There were shafts of light coming down.
Our forest is not green. It is not neat. There are no flowers between the trees, because those fat old monsters are jealous and choke out all the light. Our forest is black and angry, and it weighs down the horizon like a mountain range, or a bruise. If you squint, you can see the teams of cutters desperately trying to halt its advance.
‘That’s what Sieges us,’ I say. ‘And, every year, it is a miracle when we survive. That, Doctor, is how your death will serve.’
As we approach, the world gets wilder. Technically, this is all reclaimed land. The cutting teams march out at the start of every Succour, fighting and bleeding the stubborn trees to clear ground for the farmers to grow their crops.
But you couldn’t call it civilised. Even though the land’s been cleared, and soil stands bare where turnips and tatoes have been hastily grown. There are still stumps everywhere, pushing through the earth like warts. Vines try and trip you with every step. Roots stand out like veins in a madman’s neck.
Every Siege, we hold less ground. Every Succour, fewer things grow.
‘You’re really not even curious?’ the Doctor asks. Frustration is plain on his face, like I’m a student failing to grasp the obvious. ‘A box falls out of the sky, a man falls out of a box, and your Elders just decide to chain him up and send him to die? Is that how you treat all the strangers who come to your village?’
Ours is not a complicated faith. It dates back to the before times, the Great Voyage, when a soul was chosen each year to serve and die so that the rest could live. Now, though the Voyage is over, the tradition remains. Siege comes, and the forest advances. Only a life’s service can hold it in check, buy us a little breathing space until next Succour.
It’s a trade, just like life in Outsmawe is a trade. That’s what the Elders tell us. We all have to pay to keep the trees from our door. There is no room for selfishness in a Siege.
‘I don’t know nothing about a box, sir,’ I say mildly. I shouldn’t be talking to him at all, but I was raised polite, and it’s hard not to talk to someone who will not stop talking at you. Besides, what does it matter where he’s going? ‘And yes, that is what the Elders do with strangers.’
He stares at me. ‘Why?’
‘Because that means a year when one of us doesn’t have to go.’
The Doctor draws himself up, which doesn’t take long. He really is a small man.
‘Now, listen to me, madam,’ he says gravely. I don’t think I have ever been called madam before. ‘If this … strange forest is waging some sort of war on your people, I can be of far more assistance alive than dead. I’ve travelled the known universe, I’ve –’
‘Can you hew?’ I ask, pointing at the cutting team nearest to us. They’re totally intent on their task. Siege is nearly here. Already the branches are shivering; or jerking out of the path of the axe. Another couple of hours maybe, and these scarred, sweating men and women will sling down their tools and run, laden down with the firewood we’ll desperately need when the temperature falls and writhing, slashing vines are scratching at our doors.
‘I’m more comfortable with an umbrella,’ the Doctor says, and I snort.
‘Not much use here.’
We’re close enough now to the forest’s edge for me to make out the tree trunks, each one wide as a barn, the bark stone-grey and stone-tough. Sheets of moss hang down like green waterfalls, blurring where one tree ends and another begins until you could be forgiven for believing that it is all one tree, a single organism growing outwards in all directions until the whole world is wrapped in its roots, a near-solid mass of tangled, vicious life.
‘It’s beautiful, in a way,’ the Doctor says quietly, which just shows how much of an outsider he is. ‘You humans have a thing about forests. A fear of them, or a love. I think there’s a part of every human that remembers when forests were all you knew, and you lived and died under the eyes of trees.’
He sounds so much like her in that moment I have to fix my gaze on the forest edge until the blurring in my eyes goes away.
That’s when I see it. The tremble in the trees.
‘It isn’t that I don’t understand the concept,’ the Doctor is saying. ‘Plenty of human culture
s attempt to bargain with nature. Samhain, the Viking blót sacrifices, Marzanna, the Chimú tribes …
The cutting teams have noticed it too. Some are backing away. Others are stuffing a last few logs into sacks. A few are already running.
‘But nature isn’t a thug you can buy off or bribe.’ The Doctor is still talking. ‘You’re putting human motivations on a natural process. Forests can’t be bought off with a sacrifice.’ He smirks. Actually smirks. ‘What’s the going rate for a Time Lord, anyway? A few extra turnips?’
The forest erupts. The motion is stilted and painful as a birth, the entire forest edge advancing with a flexing, deafening creak. The rear line of cutters simply vanish. Those caught on the fringes shriek as branches lunge like snakes, tangling in limbs and hair and lifting them bodily into the green and hungry dark. The others drop their tools and flee.
‘That’s … impossible,’ the Doctor says in horror. ‘That’s …’
‘Siege. In two days, all this land will be covered by trees. In a week, the forest will be at Outsmawe’s walls. Unless we do as tradition demands. As we have always done, from the years of the Great Voyage to the long years living at this monster’s edge. Someone is chosen. They are taken to the forest. They serve. They die to soften the Siege.’
I don’t say it to hurt him. I don’t say it to frighten him neither. It’s just the way things are. It’s what we learn as children. It’s what they told me when they took my wife away. If I were a braver woman, I would have asked who reported her for reading that infernal book, but the lessons of our childhood are deep and strangling roots.
We don’t question. Not in Outsmawe. Questions are for sinners.
And everyone around here knows where sinners go.
There are no roads by which you enter the forest, and the fact that we can enter at all proves it is a thinking thing. It’s no accident, the gap we find where a dying tree’s slow, mulchy descent has pushed its smaller siblings out of the way. It’s no coincidence that the ground here is clear of bush and scrub.
The forest knows we’re coming, and it has given us a path.
Beneath the trees, it’s the difference between watching a lake from the shore and swimming in its depths. Outsmawe has a music – the wind’s whistling shriek and the chop and clatter of the cutting teams – but in here there is nothing but the groan of trees and the cacophony of birds. Thousands upon thousands of them flit and dart above us, chattering like raindrops as they shelter from the cold.
It is the only thing about the forest I do not hate. Nature quiets itself when humans are nearby, for fear of being found. Here, the birds are fearlessly and delightedly loud.
‘Explain it to me,’ the Doctor says. He’s noticed the path the forest is leaving. I can almost hear his mind working beneath his sweat-streaked brow. ‘Explain how the process works.’
‘I don’t know what more I can tell you.’
‘Because you don’t want to, or because you don’t know?’
There’s no fear in his voice. I’m used to fear. I expect anger or bargaining or quiet acceptance. It’s a lot like grief, being chosen for the forest, except the person you’re grieving for is yourself. Instead, he sounds curious.
‘The sacrifice of a human slows the growth of the trees. Stops them overrunning your village. Does giving two people stop it entirely? What if you give it a short person? Does that only slow it a little? What about a family? What about a child? If the deal you’ve made with this forest is going to claim my life, I should at least understand the terms.’
His words dig into me like burrs. Speculation is the province of the Elders, but we’ve all noticed that Sieges are getting longer, and Succours shorter, as if the sacrifices we give are pleasing the forest less and less each time.
‘Curiosity,’ I say leadenly, ‘is a sin –’
He laughs, hard and flat. Birds flit closer, amused at the sound. ‘I’ve already been marked for sacrifice. Is there more trouble I could be in?’ His eyes turn shrewd. ‘And what about you?’
‘Me?’
‘Why are you here? I’m here because I’m a sinner, apparently. What about you? Is this escort detail a privilege? Or a punishment?’
He is too small a man to be frightening, and yet I find myself backing away from the iron glint in his eye.
‘Are you the one who does it? Is there a bloodstained altar and a knife somewhere in our future?’
‘No!’ I snap, shocked at the thought.
‘Then who? A high priest? A druid? Does the forest do it itself?’
‘I don’t know, I –’
Now, he could be an Elder. His voice rings out, sharp and commanding, certain, even when questioning, even when digging at the very roots of what I believe to be true.
‘You’ve brought people out here before, you’ve let them be sacrificed, and you don’t know? What do you do when this “miracle” starts? Do you watch? Do you look away?’
It’s already started. The Doctor thinks he is clever. He imagines this forest as merely the ground on which individual trees lie, and not a mind that watches and waits and decides. The heart of our faith. The centre of our seasons. The chooser of who lives and dies. For all the Doctor’s questions, he has not listened at all.
He hasn’t noticed the birds have stopped singing.
‘Goodbye, Doctor,’ I say, snapping my end of the chain round a low-hanging branch, leaving him tethered tight. ‘I have to go.’
‘Back to your wife?’
His voice is idle. Almost cruel. His fingers trace the shape of one of the question marks on his vest.
Do not be drawn in. I have left many people in this place. Villagers I knew. People I liked. Sometimes I think the forest does not open a path to make it easy for the sacrifice to get here. It does so to make it easy for me to walk away.
I am not curious. I am not a sinner. I have no desire to see what happens when the forest takes its due.
Not again.
‘How did you know I was married?’
‘So you are capable of asking questions,’ he says, once again the schoolmaster. ‘Good. Let me tell you what I know.’
‘That’s not what I asked –’
‘You’re human,’ he says, ‘but this isn’t Earth. The soil isn’t right. The winter’s too … cinnamony. But the trees around you are Earth natives, and you’re baseline human, so this must be a colony world.’
‘So?’ I snap. The words he’s saying – Earth, colony – mean nothing to me. But the stories do say we travelled, a treacherous voice whispers. We sailed here, on ships of great iron.
‘So,’ the Doctor says, each word needle-sharp, ‘I’m guessing First Great Human Migration. Twenty … fifth century. I can tell it by the stitching on your tunic and the way you drop your R’s. They genetically engineered the trees they brought with them to be hardier, to grow quicker – but I’ve never seen anything like this. Unless … what did you call it? Service. In service to a miracle. Why not call it sacrifice? Why not call it what it is? Why are you all so convinced it’s the only way?’
‘It is the only way,’ I snarl. The trees are shaking. Something is coming, and it is nearly here.
‘You don’t believe that.’
‘I do.’
The Doctor throws up his hands helplessly. ‘Why?’
‘Because it has to be.’ All the fight goes out of my voice. The shaking has stopped. Everything is quiet now, as if the forest is listening too. ‘I’m no scholar. I just do what I’m told. And if this isn’t the only way, it means that all those people … our fathers, our mothers, our wives, our husbands … their sacrifice meant nothing at all.’
It’s no answer, and he knows it. But whatever question he was about to fling at me has no chance to leave his lips.
From out of the green shadows they come – twice as tall as humans but silent for all that size, towering bodies woven from vines and twisted wood. They look like the dolls Outsmawe children bind together from twigs – fat-bellied and skinny-limbed
, with bobbing heads of bark. The children call them angels. The Elders call them servants, because there is no holier thing than serving the purpose you were given.
Roses bloom where their eyes should be.
The claws of the forest servants close around the Doctor, snipping his chain like shears, and he does not fight as they bear him away.
He just stares at me, as she did all those years ago.
I make my way back, the path the forest cleared for me already becoming overgrown. The Doctor’s umbrella is in my hand. He dropped it when they took him, its red handle bright against the gloom. Shoots are struggling through the soil. Ivy links like fingers, and I have to pick my steps.
Is this escort detail a privilege? Or a punishment?
When I arrive back at Outsmawe, the Elders will be waiting. I’ll receive an extra ration to make up for my exertion. A fair trade, for the work I do.
You’ve brought people out here before, you’ve let them be sacrificed, and you don’t know?
Magdela, last year. She was pious. She went when she was told.
Gunthre, the year before, who was old – older than me – and ready to do his part.
Timon, who fought and begged and bargained, as if there was anything he could give me that the Elders wouldn’t take.
This is my duty, and I perform it for the village.
What do you do when this ‘miracle’ starts?
It is proper night now beneath the trees. Moonlight stabs down like silver thread. The forest’s edge is much advanced since this morning, but it is not long before I see flashes of open ground ahead, tatters of red cloth and tools discarded in the cutting teams’ frantic rush to escape.
I will be at Outsmawe by morning. The Doctor’s death will hold back the Siege. Until next season. And the next. And maybe some day, the bitter questions I hold in my heart will be asked, and then I will be sent here too, to have them answered.
Something glitters at the base of a trunk, half hidden by climbing vines. I kneel, tucking the umbrella under a strap of my pack, and brush away leaves. The glinting thing is already half buried. In a day, it will be like it was never there.