Michael J DeLuca - [BCS266 S01] - Forest Spirits (html)

by Forest Spirits (html)

  Forest Spirits

  By Michael J. DeLuca

  At the switchback where Bavda Path crested the first ridge, she paused in pine shadows left of the trail to adjust the fit of the boots. Cole waited, breathing hard, not wanting to push her. They were fine boots but borrowed. He worried her feet would blister. She was strong; maybe she could have done without them. But with the path muddy from torrential rain, she could slip on unfamiliar ground, sprain an ankle. They couldn’t risk that.

  It was calming to watch her. Deerlike, he wanted to call her, here in the high eastern marches of the Forest Argent, where he and his father had hunted the scarce deer when he was a boy, then given up when game got scarcer and his father accepted that Cole couldn’t bring himself to harm them. But Tethas wasn’t a deer, nor a supernatural being, despite her fawn eyes and fawn’s spots and that supernatural grace that had changed Sheralind’s course forever.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “...unless you want to lead again?”

  He shook his head, his heart in his throat.

  Then she stepped close and touched his face, turning it, to show him the view. And he laughed—usually she was the one so focused that she wouldn’t even notice a meal placed right in front of her. Behind and below them, through the tops of maples giving way to beech, broken stormclouds mingled with furnaces’ fumes over Sheralind.

  “It hasn’t changed,” she said, her tone asking how that could possibly be.

  She’d never left the city before. It was what she knew.

  Cole tried to see it as she must: hope confounded by reality. In the hours since the Harvest Masque, since Tethas had delivered the performance of her career in the seditious, arguably treasonous role they’d worked a year together perfecting, the city hadn’t grown. The harbor had sprouted no fresh warehouses or dry docks. The vast industrial district along the river had sprung up no new foundries or furnace piles. But none of the recent construction that already dwarfed the city’s old growth of domes and spires appeared to have died back.

  “I know it looks the same, but just wait. Change takes time. Believe me, Tethas. There’s never been a Harvest Masque like ours. You didn’t see their faces.”

  Pride and uncertainty made her eyes even more like a fawn’s. “The Masque always touched people, even when we were sticking to the script. That doesn’t mean they understood. Art doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t even necessarily make people think. If making people feel was enough, the world would be different.”

  Late light burned Sheralind’s skyline the gold of turning maples; beautiful, but it would be dangerous to linger here. “We’d better keep moving.” That he trusted in her art more than she did was, he supposed, inevitable. When there was time, he would try to make her see. “Careful, this next descent gets steep. Wait for me at the boulder by the brook.”

  She gave him a wry look. Boulders surrounded them. The way Cole’s father told it, these ridges were the remnants of an exploded volcano; the Forest Argent had grown from its ruins, and the forest spirits were its ghosts.

  “You’ll know when you see it. There’s a crevice at the base—my dad always stashed something there for the journey home. Candied pecans, pickled beets. The last waystation, he called it.” There hadn’t been waystations since the war, and Cole hadn’t eaten a pecan in years. That crevice would be empty.

  A last look at the red-gold city, while he let her get far enough down into the narrow vale between this ridge and the next that he wouldn’t take her with him if he slipped. That was when he saw the boars. A pair of bristlebacks, their long shapes unmistakable despite distance, each pulling a green-liveried Forester by a heavy leash across the same leaching field whose silky black refinery muck still clung to Cole’s boots.

  Down. Carefully. Hurrying wouldn’t help.

  She had found the boulder easily enough; it was the same boulder, though tilted on its side, its beard of lichen and moss scoured away by flood.

  He’d wanted to show her this place—this forest where he’d been a boy and hadn’t been back since. He’d expected to find it changed. Not like this. The storms had uprooted whole trees. The brook roared, churning with debris, fighting to drag it all down into the valley.

  “Tell me,” she said, watching him.

  He loved her. He didn’t know where to begin. “There used to be these pillars of stones, making a way across the brook. Thousands, millions of pebbles, piled in the middle of the stream. They were old—I thought they’d be there forever. Every time we passed, we’d add another pebble, for each of us. Sometimes we’d carry it for days.” An ancient tradition, kept up through generations of Foresters. Ending with Dad.

  Tethas took him in her arms. But he was being stupid, sentimental.

  “A lot of people are going to lose more than a pile of stones before this is over,” he said.

  “Cole, just because other people hurt doesn’t mean yours doesn’t matter.”

  The brook rushed, wind rustled the beech tops, and no birds sang. He let himself hold her, breathe her, and he tried to let go of what the Forest had been for his father and could have been for him and wasn’t. He tried to see what it was, what it could still be. While those bristlebacks led their Foresters three steps closer.

  “We need to keep moving. We’ll have to brave the current.” There might be a dry way across the storm wrack, but it wasn’t worth the risk. “Better this way,” he said, to convince himself as much as her. “It’ll wash away our scent. Better chance we’ll throw them off.”

  Tethas went all cold and straight. “Who?”

  He held her tighter. She’d taken such risks. She’d worked so hard. He wanted it to be over. But they’d come up with it together, all of it, the premise and the execution, like no enterprise he’d ever undertaken, or might again. Twenty dancers, forty-seven musicians—over months, Tethas and Cole had convinced them all to betray the government who paid them.

  Then, using nothing but bodies, masks, music, a snatch of seed magic and a stage, they’d tried to convince the whole city at once. Words weren’t needed to tell a story everyone knew, not even to twist it to new ends. The Harvest Mother had birthed a monster. That it was a beautiful, uplifting monster, that it made people openly weep, could not gild or soften what the consequences had to be. They’d both known they would have to run.

  “They’re tracking us,” he admitted, not letting go. “Two Foresters, with bristlebacks. But bristlebacks were bred for hunting seeds, not people, right? Once we’ve been in the water, they won’t be able to scent us. We’ll wade upstream a little, away from the path. Then we can go up into the wild, lose them in the gorges.”

  He watched her decide to accept it. Wealthy families like Tethas’s had once bred bristlebacks to hunt seeds, it was true. These days all the seeds went to the furnaces. Since his father’s time, the Foresters had become something else entirely. So had the Forest. The boars could only have done the same.

  Cole went into the trees and cut them each a beech sapling to use as a staff. “For balance,” he said. Or in case we have to fight, he didn’t say.

  They took off their boots, rinsed away refinery muck in the cold swift shallows. Then, before he could second-guess or doubt, Tethas was stepping lightly into the rushing brown water, staff in one hand, boots in the other.

  Sure-footed and quick, she was safe on the opposite shore almost before he remembered to dread. “Do you want me to show you where I stepped?”

  He laughed, then took up his own staff and followed. Carefully.

  He slipped anyway, plunging in up to his chest. He gave up on the staff in favor of keeping h
is boots. The rapids roared in his ears, dragging him downstream, back towards Sheralind. At a warning from Tethas, he managed to catch the trunk of an uprooted tree rushing past him; with her help, he hauled himself to the far shore.

  He wrung out his clothes. No time to bask in the sun; not much sun left. His pack, with what supplies they’d managed to scrounge in their rush from the city, was dry enough—the oilcloth he’d brought to sleep on had kept out the worst.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said, shivering, “I just need to get moving.” He pulled on his sopping boots.

  She let him lead the way up the next ridge, scrambling over roots and fallen logs and a slippery layer of last season’s leaves, detouring around boulders and nettle thickets, breathing hard—Cole was, at least. Tethas made it look easy.

  She talked, nervously, into wind and breath and silence. “I used to wish that dancing left something behind that lasts. Like your heaps of pebbles. My mother’s buildings—it’s important to her that they outlast her. The way she sees the city, we’re each responsible for a tiny part, and if you don’t add something to that, something tangible, you’re wasting your life. She thinks dancing’s just a way to mark time. I guess—mostly—she’s right.”

  He didn’t have the lung capacity to argue. They both knew it was no easy work leaving ideas that would last, now that they were engaged in tearing them down to make new. Maybe before long, they’d be tearing down buildings too. If the ideas didn’t get them killed first.

  He could already feel blisters forming on his cold wet feet. He paused, heaving, in the shadow of a ledge like a great severed arm. Tethas, leaning on her staff, looking east to where the green ridge hid the city, anticipated him. “I guess everything gets knocked down sometime.”

  Wind, breath, and otherwise silence. No bird songs, because no birds. Not even predatory birds, whose songs were harsh, who ate other birds, chipmunks, or mice. No birds, no chipmunks, and no mice, because no seeds. Because Sheralind needed every seed, every sliver of the kernel of life, to feed its furnaces, to make more magic to power more ships and build more furnaces to burn more seeds and cause more, bigger storms and draw more of the life-spark of the world unto itself. He tried to think what the Forest would become if Sheralind kept growing, if the floods worsened, if there were no new seeds to take root, no new saplings to take the place of the oldest trees when storms brought them down. He looked at Tethas’s freshly cut staff, which might have saved her life already.

  After the Harvest Masque, after the long silence followed by all that unhinged applause, after the crowd that had trailed the parade through the streets kept standing there staring at the empty Conservatory stage until the Council chief got up all white and retreated with half the city government at his heels, Cole and Tethas had paused in mid-flight to look in at the Development Authority and say goodbye to her mother. Mrs. Amnan had been cool, as always. Patient, in the face of their urgency. She had seemed to cultivate the impression Cole was taking her daughter on a weekend retreat, that they would visit his own mother’s family in Bavda then return in a few days, and in the meantime nothing in particular would change. Maybe she knew better.

  He wondered what Dad would have said, a man whose lasting mark on the world consisted of his son and one one-thousandth part of a heap of pebbles that had all been washed away. Dad had thought of himself as a part of the Forest, that was certain: an outgrowth of the ledges, the volcanic soil, the ancient ghosts. Would he have started a new pile of pebbles? What would he think of the city, the furnaces, her mother’s facades progressing further into the baroque as the city grew and the Forest emptied? But even without seeds, with no game to hunt or food to forage, Dad could still have made a living here. As a scout and guide. As a hunter of fugitives.

  From the crest of the next ridge the Forest Argent spread like velvet, bunched into heaps and valleys, slashed with brown streams and gray ledges, Bavda Path winding among them as it always had.

  “It’s... beautiful,” Tethas said. Sweat rolled down her cheekbone past those beautiful freckles, but the hitch in her voice wasn’t from being out of breath.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She shifted on her feet, graceful even in awkwardness. “It’s just... all this is new. I’ve never been this far out of the city. I’ve never been in the wilderness before, and now we’re not even on a path. It’ll be dark soon, and there are Foresters tracking us with boars. You grew up here, I believe you know what you’re doing. I trust you more than anyone, or I wouldn’t be here. But I don’t have to like it. Just... tell me what we need to do.”

  She leaned into him, her head against his shoulder. She was sweaty and warm; her sourness blended with the summer-browned scent of fern. The sky had begun to fade from red, the shadows of the ridges to stretch. The wind blew from the fading sun, carrying their scent back towards the boars.

  He was scared too. He’d grown up here, and everything was different. But she could put on a brave face; so would he. “Come on, then. We can get farther before dark. I know you’re not tired. Boars have stubby little legs. Their noses aren’t so good with stone. We can make things harder for them while there’s light.”

  He found it just where he remembered: another long granite ledge, this one not sheer but broken, fissured enough for his father to have hidden a banquet. They clambered down it into shadow. At the bottom, their boots sank into a carpet of needles, yet no mushrooms sprouted from old logs. Black water collected in gullies and rushed down little rills, yet no late mosquitoes dogged them. As Sheralind’s great hunger for the seeds of life grew, it had begun to feed even on insect eggs and spores.

  Back when he was still doing his job, still representing the will of the council and the “good” of the people, Cole could have spun all this with ease: no more pests. No more mold. Magic bred magic. Too late to take it back, too late to fix it. Maybe not too late to smash it apart.

  “Cole,” said Tethas.

  When he looked up, the darkness surprised him. To their left, a sudden, graceful shape leapt away.

  “A deer,” he said, remembering. It had been a long time, but the way they moved in dusk wasn’t something he’d forget: hesitant, a few almost soundless steps, then great, crashing leaps, agile as if set on springs. They’d scared him, badly, more than once, making his father laugh.

  Tethas was trembling.

  “Just a deer. We’re safe. Boar make a lot more noise than that.”

  Her wide eyes were like the rough caps of acorns. Her skin blended with leaf shadows like she’d been born to them.

  “We’ll make camp,” he said. “No point going farther tonight.”

  He found another little ledge, with a ten foot drop on three sides, a bed of needles and moss under a crooked pine. No fire, not tonight. And none of the other comforts of home Tethas was used to—or that he was used to, for that matter. He hadn’t slept out in years. No fire, and no bath, and no bed but this one, chilly, quiet, wrapped in oilcloth. They ate still-warm levain, slightly crushed, slightly damp, hastily bought at the bakery on Swallow Square, and a pemmican of cranberries, barley, and pork fat, his father’s recipe. They drank water from the flask he’d filled at the public fountain outside the Conservatory. Then they wrapped themselves in the oilcloth and listened to dusk become night.

  More deer moved in the dark beyond their bed, and Cole felt that old, irrational impulse to rise and chase them, knowing it would terrify them, wanting the opposite, to catch them only so he could set them free, to show them what they meant to him, the closest he’d ever be to the spirits.

  The forest spirits were like deer, said his father, but huge, long-limbed as trees, moving like night fog in moonlight, scattering pale stars, the fragmentary souls of the forest’s dead reincarnated in seeds.

  Just a story. Like the story of the Harvest Queen.

  He contented himself with the deer in his arms.

  “One performance isn’t going to be enough,” she murmured. “Even if it worked just like you wante
d, if everybody went home and told their families, started saving seeds, protecting them. If everyone stopped using magic. It’s not enough. We’re going to have to go back.”

  “We will,” he said. “But not tomorrow. I want you to perform again. In Bavda, for my mother’s people. In Reterre. And in Sheralind, eventually. You’re the key, Tethas. People love you. All those kids who grew up watching you dance—we’re going to need them most of all. But I’m not letting anyone make you a martyr.”

  “Not even if that’s what it takes?”

  He shook his head, his face pressed in her hair. “I won’t accept that.”

  She squirmed around in his arms in the dark until he could feel her breath.

  He wasn’t her only lover. Certainly not the most graceful or the best-looking. It was possible he was the cleverest. It was possible he loved her more fiercely than the rest. Maybe she knew that. Maybe that was why she was with him. He wanted to ask. But he let her sleep, or at least let her try.

  When they’d met, three summers past, it was because he’d written her a scene: his first, a fragment of a Harvest Masque that the Council’s chair of propaganda let him pitch to the director. He’d wanted her to play a seed, a maple whirligig caught on the draft of a furnace’s draw then transformed, multiplied into a dozen dancers each in clever costume representing the way its magic could be used: cultivated fields sowing themselves, an ember lighting a Councilor’s pipe, a swarm of tiny iron spheres to fly at an enemy, a pin to build a bridge, a drop of pigment for an artist’s brush.

  And she’d given him that look—the way she’d been looking at him ever since; the way he hadn’t thought it was possible for one person to look at another, outside of a propaganda piece. And she’d shown him, gently, kindly, laughing, how people’s bodies didn’t work that way, how it could work instead, better.

  Shouts in the gray before dawn made him realize he must have slept after all.

  “Cole Telbin. Tethas Amnan.” The voice came from the east, from somewhere above, the speaker invisible through leaves, taunting from high in the branches like a jay. “You’re accused of treason, embezzlement of city funds for seditionist purposes. You are ordered to submit. We are authorized to use force. I’ve a thousand-pound boar on a ninety-pound leash,” added the Forester, mildly as a market vendor offering quince pies from a tray.