by Peter Harris
They quickly descended to a level where the grasses and dainty alpine flowers gave way to thick clumps of thorns, through which they had to carefully pick their way. Shelley was surprised to see how many types of thorn there were, sometimes all one kind together, like little armies holding a ridge or outcrop, and sometimes a confusion of many kinds, with long or short thorns, sharp bristles like cacti, and trailing, bristling tendrils. Some were flowering in shades of blue and violet, thistle-like, attracting bees and hornets. Others had seeded and handfuls of silky parachutes were starting to lift off into the wind.
‘Are these all the Aghmaath’s thorns?’ asked Shelley.
‘Yes, they are the lesser thorns, trial offspring of the Mother Thorns, mutations to test the environment. If some perish, others will flourish in the soil of this place, and prepare the way for the Mother Thorns.’
‘What happens when they’ve spread all over? How will anyone be able to go anywhere?’
‘The Aghmaath put out a scent from their feet which stops the young thorns from growing where they have recently walked. In this way paths and tracks are kept open.’
‘That means, wherever there’s a path, there’s probably going to be Aghmaath?’ asked Shelley with a shudder.
‘Of course. That is why we avoid their paths, wherever possible.’
‘Well, how do we get through that, down there? It looks like a whole wall of thorns, a creeping kind. It’s like mum’s worst nightmare for her back garden! And she thinks wandering willy is bad!’
‘That is now called the Dead Forest, or (by the Boy Raiders), the fungal forest. There is a smothered wood beneath that canopy of thorns, and until the trees all rot away, it is possible to walk underneath.’
‘Possible, but not pleasant, right?’
‘Well, it will be dark under there, and there is gograth (fungus) of course – a lot of that – and some creatures that are not so pleasant, but…’
‘What kind of creatures?’
‘Land crabs, mostly, and the odd dragon-snake.’
‘Land crabs?’ Shelley didn’t mind ordinary crabs, as long as they stayed in the water where they belonged. She had sometimes walked round the rocks fishing with her father and heard them scuttling for cover as she approached, and seen them sitting in the crevices, their big pincers open, ready to attack.
‘Yes. I have heard they started to move up from the beaches where they lived on the fruit of the palm trees…’
‘Coconuts, I guess,’ thought Shelley.
‘…and they thrive in the semi-darkness under the thorns.’
‘What do they eat now?’
‘Fungus and fallen seeds, perhaps, and dead creatures.’
‘Would they bite people?’
‘Only in self-defence. Like nearly all animals.’
They picked their way down the long thorn-infested slope in silence. The thorn wall got nearer and nearer, until finally they stood at its edge, and as far as the eye could see their way was blocked.
‘Now we must find a way under the thorns,’ said Korman. He pulled out his knife. ‘Luckily, these are not the Mother Thorns, which move and entrap. Luckily, too, we have these knives from the Trader. Any ordinary knife would soon become useless: the thorn stems have tiny crystals of a substance like sand which blunts almost any blade.’ Shelley saw that the edge of his knife was made up of a glittering material like glass, which she realised was a row of diamonds, marvellously fitted together, finely serrated like a stay-sharp knife. She unsheathed hers, and saw that it was the same. Now that they were on the way, it didn’t seem nearly as bad as she had imagined, and she found all the new things she was learning helped her forget the fear.
Their knives cut easily through the outer layer of curling creepers, revealing a dark hole beneath. Korman crawled in first, and after some hesitation Shelley followed. They were able to stand up after a few feet, and as their eyes adjusted to the gloom, they saw, stretching out before them and sloping off into the darkness, a forest of decaying trees. The white lichen hung in tatters from their branches, and bark was peeling off and lay in piles at the feet of the trunks. It was a dismal sight, and smelled of fungus and decaying wood. Shelley kept looking out of the corner of her eyes for any sign of scuttling creatures.
They carefully pulled the cut thorns over the hole they had made, taking one last look at the daylight, then went on down the slope, their feet scuffling through the decaying leaves and bark. Some of it got into Shelley’s shoes, which she had got at the market at Baz Apédnapath, but which already had holes in them. They went through a patch of puffballs which, when trod on, made the air white with spores. Korman put some of the smaller puffballs in his pack. ‘To eat later on,’ he said.
‘Ugh, you can!’ she replied.
The way became steeper, and they slithered down through slimy leaf mould and rotting branches covered with clammy, rubbery fungi until they came to a gully in the hillside, angling down to their right. The dead tree-boles were higher here, standing tall and fluted like cathedral pillars, pale and barkless. It took a few seconds for Korman to decide which way to take, and in the stillness their breathing sounded loud.
Then they became aware of a clicking sound all around them, and to her horror Shelley saw the outstretched pincers of the huge landcrabs, higher than any crab pincers should be. She saw for a split second their pale fat carapaces and their black eyes on stalks, then she was screaming and running for her life down the gully.
‘Wait! They’re not after you!’ called Korman, running after her, ‘They’re just eating the fungi. Look!’ Shelley saw she was kicking into many white and pale yellow growths on the forest floor, and then she screamed again as her shins bumped against a cluster of crabs, all busy devouring a large white fungus. Instantly their pincers went up, and she heard them snap as she leaped over them, went to run, and fell headlong into the musty-smelling mould. She shut her eyes, expecting to feel the clamp of sharp pincers on her body, but nothing happened. Korman came running and bent over to help her up.
‘It never helps to panic,’ he said calmly, and helped her to brush herself down.
‘Sorry, Korman, I just freaked,’ she replied, blushing in the semi-darkness.
‘All is well,’ he replied. But just then she saw the bag which had fallen from his pack.
‘What’s that you dropped?’ she asked, picking it up. ‘It looks like a torture kit!’
‘I did not want to alarm you, Shelley. It is a surgical kit I bought with the knives in case…’
‘In case what?’
‘A Mother Thorn should become stuck in either of us.’
‘I think I’d rather put up with the thorn.’
‘I think not. They are very painful, and migrate inwards to the heart. But let us hope we do not need to use these.’ He put the bag back in his pack. ‘Now, we must go on, carefully. The trees, and the thorn covering, are beginning to thin.’
Shelley saw shafts of sunlight ahead, filtered through leathery thorn leaves which gave the light a brownish-green tinge. They were coming to more level land, sloping slowly down towards the Valley of Thorns and Lake Deadwater. The air felt thicker, somehow, stifling and still. They had left the crabs behind and there was no sign of life, except for the shrill mournful piping of the occasional unseen bird in the thorn canopy high above. The patches of light increased, and they hurt Shelley’s eyes. She had not slept very well, and something in the air – the spores of the fungi, perhaps – had irritated her eyes.
All that day they travelled under the gloomy cover of the dead forest under the thorns. When the light had faded from dim to almost non-existent, Shelley finally flopped down on a drift of decaying leaves and said, ‘I can’t go any further! Not even if all the crabs in this horrible place are after us!’ She listened, just in case, but all she heard was Korman’s slow heavy breathing as he opened the packs and fumbled for the gear.
‘There can be no fire – apart from the danger of discovery, this whole forest is dry as
tinder,’ he said as he set up their cheerless camp. They ate and drank a little – neither of them was really hungry. Korman conserved their supplies by eating some of the puffballs, but Shelley ate only fruit. The leaves, when they lay down to sleep, stank of mould, and rustled annoyingly under Shelley’s head as she tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable.
‘What is that smell?’ Shelley asked, sitting up. She was also beginning to feel odd, and there was a taste on her tongue she could not identify.
‘It is the blue fungus, Bela gograth. It glows with a blue light in the darkness, and its spores are what you can smell. Never eat it or touch it! It is a potent hallucinogen, and will open you to very dangerous places in the Dreamweb, where the Aghmaath would easily find you and take over your mind.’
‘As if I would eat that stuff!’ Shelley laughed at his concern. She watched the treetrunks begin to glow bluish as the light failed, before checking her helmet and lying down again to try and get some sleep. She was feeling so tired she fell asleep well before she had settled on the least uncomfortable position. Neither she nor Korman noticed Bootnip crawl out of Korman’s pack, waddle over to investigate the alluring, crystal-like glow, and start nibbling at the fungus. It was not much to his liking, so he waddled back to the pack, crept inside, and fell asleep with a disappointed grunt and a sigh.
In the night there were various loud rustlings, and a wind got up, sighing in the thorns and dead branches overhead, then died away. Bootnip stirred in Korman’s pack, then went back to sleep, curled up around a crystal, dreaming of bright blue female anklebiters he was wooing with Shelley’s blue diamond (which he had finally managed to steal). The exhausted humans slept on, but Bootnip was feeling restless. The female anklebiters, now multicoloured and singing like moonbirds, scampered off into the darkest places of the forest. Bootnip followed them and was gone.
In the dead of night the humans were startled awake by a strange, unearthly howling, thin and shuddering, ending in a rhythmic sound like an angry wurrier, but deeper, as if it came from the throat of a much bigger creature altogether. The sound came from not far ahead in the dead forest, in the direction they were to travel the next day. ‘What was that?’ whispered Shelley, trying not to move and make the leaves rustle. She did not want that thing, whatever it was, to discover them.
‘I do not know… I can only guess…. it sounded like… but they were all hunted down and killed long ago,’ whispered Korman. Shelley thought he sounded afraid, and this worried her even more than the nasty sound itself. Korman had told her and Rilke a story about werewurriers once by the campfire, but it had scared Rilke so much that for a while he was eyeing Worriette suspiciously, as if she might turn into one at any moment. Then for a few nights, Shelley had Worriette all to herself: Rilke had been too worried to sleep with her draped over his neck (as she loved to do), in case she strangled him in his sleep…
‘You don’t mean… you think it’s a werewurrier, do you?’
There was another shuddering cry, from further away. The first creature answered, and Shelley listened, hardly breathing, to the sound of loud scampering feet receding into the night.
‘Are they gone?’ she whispered at last.
‘We can only hope so,’ said Korman. ‘They were rogavala all right, or I’m an anklebiter. Speaking of which, where’s Bootnip? Surely he did not sleep through all of that?’ They got up, both cursing the little nuisance, and cautiously started to look around under the trees. There came a loud rustling and heavy scampering footsteps as a small dark thing hurtled unsteadily towards them, then veered off and dived into Korman’s pack. ‘Well, Bootnip’s back,’ said Shelley.
‘Bad boy!’ said Korman, but the anklebiter just growled from the depths of the pack. ‘He had better not have led the rogavala to us!’ thought Korman, but he said nothing.
Korman did not sleep for the rest of that night, but sat with his back to a tree with his hand on the hilt of Arcratíne, watching the dark under the trees – and the branches overhead, from which the hunting rogavala could drop – while the blue gograth glowed on the decaying treetrunks and their sickly scent drifted through the darkness.
In the Dreamweb, a strange multicoloured anklebiter wandered down endless tunnels, making the plaintive mating call of his kind, holding a blue diamond in his teeth. The Aghmaath mindprobers who saw it were amused, in spite of themselves, and smiled, and had to do penance for their sin. None of them thought to probe its mind to find out what it was doing in the Dead Forest, so far from home.