Around noon, Danali left the stream and led us by secret paths through more thickly growing woods. Here the predominance of the oaks gave way to elms, maples and chestnuts, which, though still very tall, seemed stunted next to the giants of the deeper Forest. We walked along the winding paths for quite a few miles. The sun, crossing the sky somewhere above us, was invisible through the thick, green shrouds of leaves. I couldn’t tell west from east or north from south.
After some hours, Danali finally broke his silence. He gave us to understand that the Forest could be almost as difficult to leave as it was to enter. Unless the Lokilani pointed themselves along certain, fixed paths out of it, they would find themselves wandering among the shimmering trees and being drawn back always toward its center.
‘But it has been many years since any us has left the Forest,’ he said. ‘And many more since anyone, having left, found his way back in.’
Another couple of miles brought us to a place beyond which Danali and his people wouldn’t go. Here, in a stand of oaks sprinkled with a few birch trees, we felt a barrier hanging over the Forest like an invisible curtain. There were only a few Timpum about, lingering among the oaks and shining weakly. It was hard to look beyond them into the dense green swaths of woods. For, only a few hundred yards from us, we could see nothing – only leaves and bark and ferns and other such things.
‘We’ll say goodbye here,’ Danali said. He pointed down the narrow path cutting through the trees. ‘Follow this, and do not look back. It will take you into your forest.’
The Lokilani embraced each of us in turn. After Danali had pressed his slender form against Maram’s belly, he smiled at him and said, ‘Take care, Hairface. I’m glad, so very glad, that we didn’t have to kill you.’
And with that, the Lokilani stepped off into the trees to allow us to pass. I continued walking Altaru down the path, with Maram and the others following me. I listened as my horse’s hooves struck deep into the soft loam of the forest floor. It was good to move without the pain in my side that had bothered me all the way from Ishka; but it was bad to have to leave friends behind, and as we made our way down the winding path, we tried not to look back at them.
After only a few hundred yards, the air lying over the woods grew heavier and moister. The leaves of the trees suddenly lost their luster as if some clouds had darkened the sky above them. Everything looked duller. The colors seemed to have drained from the woods and flattened out into various shades of gray. Even the birds had stopped singing.
The path ended suddenly about half a mile farther on. Despite Danali’s warning, we turned to look back along it. We knew well enough that it should lead back into the Forest. But the scraggy scratch in the earth, crowded with bushes and vine-twisted trees, seemed to lead nowhere. In gazing through the thick greenery behind us, I felt repelled by a strong sensation pushing at my chest. It was as if I should proceed in any other direction but that one. And so I did. I walked Altaru through the woods toward what I thought to be the northwest. After a few hundred yards, the path vanished behind the walls of trees. A mile farther on, where the trees opened up a little and some dead elms lay down like slain giants, I would have been hard pressed to say exactly where the unseen Forest lay.
‘We’re lost, aren’t we?’ Maram said when we had paused to take our bearings. He turned this way and that toward the dark woods surrounding us, and the look on his face was that of a frightened beast. ‘Oh, why did we ever leave the Forest? No more sweet wine for Maram. Not an astor to be seen here. Nor any Timpum.’
But this last proved to be not quite true. Even as Maram stood pulling nervously at his beard, a little light flashed in the air above us. It seemed to appear out of nowhere. Suddenly, framed against the leaves of some arrowwood, the little Timpum that had attached itself to me floated in the air and spun about in its swirls of silver sparks. We all saw it as clearly as we could the leaves on the trees.
‘Look!’ Maram said to me. ‘How did it come here?’
Atara took a step closer to it, all the while fixing the little lights with her wide blue eyes. ‘Oh, look at it!’ she said. ‘Look how it flickers!’
Maram, inspired by her words, took this opportunity to give a name to the Timpum. ‘Well, then, little Flick,’ he said to him, ‘look around you and you won’t see any of your kind. Sad to say, you’re all alone in these dreary woods.’
Master Juwain pointed toward Flick, as I now couldn’t help thinking of him. He said, ‘Pualani was quite clear on this matter: the Timpum can’t live outside of the Forest.’
‘Nevertheless,’ I said, looking at Flick, ‘here he is, and here he lives.’
‘Yes – but for how long?’
Master Juwain’s question alarmed me, and I suddenly let go Altaru’s reins to step forward toward the shimmering Timpum.
‘Go back!’ I said, waving my hands at Flick as if to shoo him away. ‘Go back to your starflowers and astor trees!’
But Flick just floated in front of my eyes spinning out sparks at me.
‘Maybe he’s lost, as we are,’ Maram said. ‘Maybe he followed you here and can’t find his way back.’
He proposed that we should return to the Forest in order to rescue Flick and spend at least one more night drinking wine and singing songs with the Lokilani.
‘No, we must go on,’ Atara said to him. ‘If we did return to the Forest, even if we found our way back in, there’s no certainty that Flick would follow us. And if he did, there’s no reason why he wouldn’t just follow us out again.’
Her argument made sense to everyone, even to Maram. But it saddened me. For I was sure that as soon as we struck off into these lesser woods that covered the earth before us, Flick would either die or slowly fade away.
‘Do you think he might come with us a little farther?’ Maram asked. ‘Do you think he might follow us toward Tria?’
‘We’ll see,’ I said as I planted my boot in Altaru’s stirrup and pulled myself up onto his back.
‘But where is Tria? Val – do you know?’
‘Yes,’ I said, pointing off northwest into the woods. ‘It’s that way.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I smiled with relief because my sense of direction had returned to me.
‘But what about the Stonefaces?’ he asked me. ‘What if they find us here and follow us, too?’
I closed my eyes as I listened to the sounds of the woods and felt for anyone watching us. But other than a badger and a few deer, the only being that seemed aware of us was Flick.
‘The Stonefaces must surely have lost us when we entered the Forest,’ I told Maram. ‘Now let’s ride while we still have some day left.’
For a few hours more, we rode at a fast walk through the thick woods. No paths cut through the trees here, and in many places we had to force our way through dense undergrowth. But toward dusk, the trees opened again and the going was much easier. Our first concern was that we should keep to our course, bearing more north than west. And our second was this little array of lights that Maram had named Flick.
‘Do you see?’ he said when we had stopped by a stream to water the horses. He pointed at Flick, who hovered above the stream’s bank like a bright bird watching for fish. ‘He still follows us.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And he still shimmers, as before. This is hard to understand.’
‘Well, we’re still close to the Forest,’ Master Juwain said. ‘Perhaps he still takes his substance and strength from it.’
We decided to make camp there by the stream. It was our first night outside the Forest since our flight from the Stonefaces. As before, we took turns keeping watch. But no one came through the blackened trees to attack us. Nor did any dark dreams come to disturb our sleep. Even so, it was a hard night and a lonely one. Without the Lokilani’s evening songs and the company of the Timpum, the hours passed slowly.
During my watch, I listened to the crickets chirping and the wind rustling the leaves of the trees above us. I
counted the beats of my heart even as I looked for Flick in the dying flames of the fire or above me in the darkness, twinkling like a lone constellation of stars. I didn’t know whether to resent or rejoice in his presence. For he was a very poignant reminder of a brighter place, where the great trees connected the earth to the sky and I had felt fully and truly alive.
During our next day’s journey, we all suffered the sadness of leaving the Forest. As Pualani had warned us, the woods here seemed almost dead. And that was strange, because they were nearly the same woods through which I had walked as a child in Mesh and had loved. The maples still showed their three-pointed leaves, and the same gray squirrels ran up and down them clicking their claws against the silver-gray bark. The horned owls who hunted them were familiar to me, as were the robins singing their rising and falling song: cheery-up, cheery-me. Perhaps everything – the birds and the badgers, the thistles and the flowers – were too familiar. Against my memory of the Forest’s splendor, the trees here were ashen and stunted, and the animals all moved about in their same pointless patterns, dully and listlessly, as if drained of blood.
As we rode through the long day, we, too, began moving with a measured heaviness. It grew cloudy, and then rained for a while. The constant drumming of the large drops against our heads did little to lift our spirits. The whole world seemed wet and gray, and it smelled of the iron with which my armor had been made. The trees went on mile after mile, unbroken by any path and oppressive in their thick swaths of grayish-green that blocked out the sun.
Our camp that night was cheerless and cold. It rained so hard for a while that not even Maram could get a fire going. We all huddled beneath our cloaks, trying in our turns to sleep against our shivering. During my watch, I waited in vain for the sky to clear and the stars to come out. I looked for Flick, too. But in the dark, dripping woods, I couldn’t find the faintest glint of light. By the time I fell off to sleep, I was sure that he was dead.
When dawn came, however, Atara espied him nestled down in my hair. It was the only brightness that any of us could find in that cool, gray morning. After a quick meal of some soggy nutbread and blackberries rimed with newly grown mold, we set out into the rainy woods. The horses’ hooves made rhythmic sucking sounds against the sodden forest floor. We listened for the more cheery piping of the bluebirds or even the whistles of the thrushes, but the trees were empty of any song.
The woods seemed endless, as if we might ride all that day and for ten thousand days all the way around the world and never see the end of them. We all knew in our heads that if our course were true, we must eventually cut the Nar Road. But our hearts told us that we were lost, moving in circles. We each began to worry that our food would run out or some disaster befall us long before we reached the road.
That afternoon the rain stopped, and the sun made a brief appearance. But it brought only a little thin light and no joy. As the day deepened toward dusk, even this glimmer began to weaken and fade. And so did our spirits weaken. Maram told us that he would have been better off letting Lord Harsha run him through with his sword, thus saving him from death by starvation in a trackless wilderness. Master Juwain sat astride his swaying horse staring at his book as if he couldn’t decide which passage to read. Atara, whose courage never flagged, sang songs to cheer herself and us. But in the gloom of the woods, the notes she struck sounded hollow and false. I sensed her anger at herself for failing to uplift us: it was cold, hard and black as an iron arrowpoint. Compassion for other beings she might have in abundance, but for herself she spared no pity.
My despair was possibly the deepest for having the least excuse: I knew that we were moving in the right direction but allowed myself to doubt whether we would ever see the Nar Road or Tria. In my openness to my friends’ forebodings, I allowed their doubts to become my own.
What is despair, really? It is a dark night of the soul and the remembrance of brighter things. It is a silent calling out to them. But the call comes from the darkest of places and is often heard by dark things instead.
That night as we camped beneath an old elm tree, we had dreams of dreadful things. Creatures of me dark came to devour us: we felt worms eating at our insides, bats biting us open and mosquitoes smothering us in thick black clouds and sucking out our blood. Gray shapes that looked like corpses torn from graves came to take our hands and pull us down into the ground. Even Master Juwain moaned in a tormented sleep, his meditations and allies having finally failed him. When morning came, all misty and gray, we spoke of our nightmares and discovered that they were very much the same.
‘It’s the Stonefaces, isn’t it?’ Maram said. ‘They’ve found us again.’
‘Yes,’ I said, giving voice to what we all knew to be true. ‘But have they found us in the flesh or only in our dreams?’
‘You tell us, Val.’
I stood up from my bearskin and pulled my cloak around me. The woods in every direction seemed all the same. The oaks and elms were shagged with mosses, and a heavy mist lay over them – and over the dogwood and ferns and lesser vegetation as well. Everything smelled moist: of mushrooms and rotting wood. I had an unsettling sense that men were smelling me as from many miles away. I couldn’t tell, however, how far they might be or whether they stalked the woods to the east or west, north or south. I knew only that they were hunting me and that their shapes were as gray as stone.
‘We can’t be far from the Nar Road,’ I said. ‘If we ride hard for it, we should reach it by dusk.’
‘You’re guessing, my friend, aren’t you?’
In truth, I was guessing, but I thought it to be a good one. I was almost certain that the road couldn’t lie much more than a day’s journey to the north, or possibly two.
‘What if the Stonefaces are waiting for us on the road?’ Maram asked.
‘No – they left the road to follow us through the forest. Probably they’re as lost as you seem to think that we are.’
‘Probably?. Would you bet our lives on probably?’
‘We can’t wander these woods forever,’ I said. ‘Sooner or later, we’ll have to return to the road.’
‘We could return to the Forest, couldn’t we?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘if we could find it again. But likely the Stonefaces would find us first.’
Over the embers of the fire that had burned through the night, we held council as to what we should do. Atara said that all paths before us were perilous; since we couldn’t see the safest, we should choose the one that led directly to Tria, which meant making straight for the Nar Road.
‘In any case,’ she said, ‘none of us set out on this journey with the end of dying peacefully in our sleep. We should decide whether it’s the Lightstone or safety that we seek.’
She pointed out that we must be nearing the civilized parts of Alonia; if we did reach the road, she said, likely we would find it patrolled by King Kiritan’s men.
‘We must have come as far west as Suma,’ she said. ‘The Stonefaces, whoever they are, would have to be very daring to ride openly against us there. It’s said that King Kiritan hangs brigands and outlaws.’
Maram grumbled that, for a warrior of the Kurmak, she seemed to know a lot about Alonia. He doubted that King Kiritan kept his roads as safe as she said. But in the end, he agreed that we should strike for the road, and so he set to breaking camp with a resigned weariness.
We were all tired that morning as we rode through the woods. As well, we all had headaches, which grew worse with the constant pounding of the horses’ hooves. Twice, I changed our course, to the east and due west through some elderberry thickets, to see if that might blunt the attack against us. But both times, my sense of someone hunting us did not diminish, and neither did our suffering. It was as if the sky, heavily laden with clouds, was slowly pressing at us and crushing our skulls against the earth.
By noon, however, the clouds burned away, and the sun came out. We all hoped to take a little cheer from its unexpected radiance. But the blazing orb dr
ove arrows of fire into the forest, and it grew stifling hot. The sultry air choked us; gray vapors steamed up from the sodden earth. In the flatness of the land here, we could find no brook or stream, and so we had to content ourselves with the warm water in our canteens to slake our raging thirsts.
As we made our way north, the woods in many places broke upon abandoned fields on which grew highbush blackberry, sumac and other shrubs. Twice we found the remains of houses rotting among the meadow flowers. I took this as a sign that we were indeed approaching the civilized parts of Alonia that Atara had told of. We all hoped to find the Nar Road just a little farther on, after perhaps only a few more miles. And so we rode hard all that afternoon through forest and fields burning in the hot Soldru sun.
We came upon the road without warning just before dusk. As we were riding through a copse of mulberry, the trees suddenly gave out onto a broad band of stone. The road, as I could see, ran very straight here east and west through the flat forest. From the emptiness of this country, I guessed that Suma must lie to our east, which meant that we had bypassed this great city by quite a few miles. After some miles more – perhaps as few as eighty – we would find Tria down the road to the west.
‘We’re saved, then!’ Maram cried out. He climbed down from his horse, and collapsed to his knees as he kissed the road’s stones in relief.
‘Shall we ride on until we find a village or town?’
I dismounted Altaru and stood beside him along the curb of the road. The day was dying quickly, and for the first night in many nights, we had a clear view of the sky. Already Valura, the evening star, shone in the blue-black dome to the west. In the east, the moon was rising: a full moon, as we could all see from its almost perfect circle of silver. The last time I had stood beneath a moon so bright had been in the Black Bog. I couldn’t look upon it now without recalling that time of terror when I had feared that I was losing my mind.
The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom Page 34