by Michael Kerr
CHAPTER THREE ―
THE LIVING FOREST
Ben woke up, and for a second he thought he was back at home in his own bed. He wiped the sleep from his eyes, opened them and groaned aloud at the sight of the smooth oak ceiling high above him. What he had thought to be a fantastic dream was not a dream at all.
“Sam! Frog! Wake up,” he called, sitting up in the cot and swinging his feet down onto the floor, to push himself up and hurry over to where Sam was curled up with the sackcloth bag containing the chalice grasped tightly in her arms.
“Oh my goodness,” Sam said. “What will my mum and dad be thinking? We’ve been away a day and a night. They’ll be worried sick.”
“Yeah,” Tommy said through a yawn, sitting up in the cot alongside hers. “My mother’ll be screaming blue murder. The police will be out combing the countryside with the mountain rescue people by now.
“They’re sure to find our bikes,” Ben said.
Sam began to cry. “But that’s all they will find,” she said. “We aren’t there anymore. We might as well be on the moon.”
“We were supposed to be going to Grimwith Reservoir,” Tommy said. “Police divers will be searching the bottom for our bodies. It could take weeks for them to realise that we aren’t in it.”
Ben shook his head. “Don’t be such a numbskull, Frog. Our bikes are miles away from there. And even if they don’t find them, no one is going to waste time looking for us in the reservoir. Not unless they’re daft enough to think we rode into the water.”
“We need to get this stupid chalice back to where it belongs, and find a way back home,” Sam said. “It’s as simple as that.”
“Simple!” Tommy said loudly. “I don’t think you appreciate that I’m not the numbskull here. I read enough science-fiction books to know that we probably went through a wormhole. We could be a trillion light years from Earth, and a million years in the past, or the future.”
“We don’t know that, Tommy,” Sam said. “We have to hold on to the belief that we will get back to the place and time we left.”
There was a tapping at the door. They stopped talking and looked towards it.
“Come in,” Sam called out.
The door squeaked open. Figwort appeared with another younger looking and much taller fairy, who gave them a huge lopsided smile that disclosed a mouthful of triangular, serrated teeth, almost identical to those of a great white shark’s.
“This is Speedwell,” Figwort said. “He’ll be coming with us to the Crossroads of Time. Let’s go and eat, and be on our way.”
After a breakfast of hot, brown bread, dandelion jam, and cups of blackberry juice, Figwort took them to see King Ambrose.
“Wear these,” the king said, handing each of them a necklace made of small, polished ruby-red stones threaded onto strips of leather. “They are charged with the power of good, and will help you stay true to your quest. In what may prove to be difficult times ahead, these necklets will give you the strength of will to keep going.”
“Are they magical, your Majesty?” Tommy asked the king.
“Not in the sense that by wearing them you can ward off evil, or make spells of your own,” King Ambrose replied. “Whortles can’t do magic. But they will give you the determination, courage, and above all the belief that what you are attempting to do is the right thing, and that you may save the inhabitants of Allworlds.”
“They’re very pretty,” Sam said, tying the two ends of the leather cord into a reef knot at the back of her neck.
“I’m glad you think so,” the king said. “I make them myself. It’s my hobby, along with woodcarving and badger riding.”
They bid the king good-bye and left the oak palace to set off on their journey, only for Figwort to bring them to a stop next to a nearby stream.
“You need to mix some mud and leaves together and smear the chalice in a thick coating, whortle,” Figwort said to Sam.
“I don’t like being called a whortle,” Sam said. “I’m a girl, and my name is Sam. Please use it to address me from now on, or I will call you…Grumpy.”
Figwort smiled. Even though she knew he could turn her into anything that took his fancy, she had the strength of spirit to speak out against him.
“Very well, Girl Sam it shall be,” he said.
“Just Sam will do nicely. And I shall call you Fig, if you have no objection.”
Figwort shrugged.
Following Fig’s instructions, Sam went down the bank to kneel at the water’s edge, and gathered up handfuls of dark, sloppy mud that smelled worse than rotten eggs.
Ben and Tommy backed away holding their noses as Sam added dead leaves to the mud and kneaded the sticky mess together with her fingers – in much the same way she would sometimes do with a lump of pastry, when helping her mum to bake –and completely covered the chalice, inside and out.
“And why did I have to do that?” Sam asked Fig, who was sitting above her on a stone-built humpback bridge, with his legs dangling over the edge of it.
“Because the ringing it sometimes makes is a signal that can be heard far and wide. When the mud has dried and hardened, it will stifle the sound from all but the most keen-eared creatures.”
When the heat of the sun had dried the coating of mud into a rock-hard, grey shell, Sam replaced the chalice in the bag, then washed her hands in the murky water and wiped them dry on a clump of grass.
“Good,” Fig said, getting up and flying down to them. “Now all we need to do is disguise you three, and we can be on our way again.”
“Disguise us as what?” Ben asked him.
“Why as fairies, of course. You would attract unwelcome attention as you are, with skin as pink as baby mice, and those funny little blunt ears.”
Without giving them time to even begin to argue, Fig (as all but Speedwell now addressed him) touched each of them on the tips of their noses.
Sam felt a mild electric shock, and for just a second her ears throbbed. She was facing Ben and Tommy, and saw both of them change. Ben winced and cupped his ears with his hands, and Tommy made a funny high-pitched squeak.
“Do I look like you two do?” Sam asked them.
Ben giggled. “You’ve turned green, and your ears are like Fig’s,” he said.
All three of them ran to the edge of the stream and looked down at their reflections in the tea-brown-coloured water.
“You have no right to do this to us,” Ben said.
“Shut up, Ben,” Fig said. “I did it with your safety in mind. There are creatures that would roast you alive over a wood fire if they thought you were whortles and couldn’t protect yourselves against them.”
“Wings!” Tommy said, staring at Sam’s back. “We’ve got wings. We can fly.”
“No, you can’t,” Speedwell said. “You only look like fairies. We can’t make you into real ones. You’re the same as before.”
“Come on,” Fig said. “We have a long way to travel before moonshow.”
They walked for hours, with Fig leading, and Speedwell, whose name they shortened to Speedy, bringing up the rear. The time passed quickly as they marvelled at the many strange flowers, insects and birds they saw along the way.
As dusk fell, Fig stopped and pointed to a large burrow in the side of a hillock. “We’ll spend the night in there,” he said.
“What made it?” Sam asked.
“Night wolves,” Fig said. “They dig out these warrens, live in them during the day, and hunt at night. Once they have eaten all the wildlife in the area, they move on.”
“And how do you know they’ve moved on?” Ben asked.
“Their scent is stale,” Speedy said, sniffing at the opening. “And so is the smell of animal blood. I would think that they quit this lair at least seven turns of the moons ago.”
“I hope you’re right,” Tommy said. “I don’t fancy meeting up with them.”
Speedy chuckled. “Don’t worry, Frog, they never ta
ngle with fairies.”
Tommy was not amused. Both of the fairies were calling him by his nickname. Ben had a lot to answer for.
Inside the sour-smelling warren, they made themselves as comfortable as possible in the underground wolf den, unconvinced that the animals would not slink back into the tunnels and view them as food. Even if the fear of being eaten had not kept them awake, Fig’s snoring did. It was like a car horn honking, and they were relieved when the first pink light of dawn arrived, to filter through the tunnels.
Leaving the warren, they set off in the direction of a distant mountain range, and by what Sam, Ben and Tommy thought of as being midday, they broke out of the forest, to be faced with moors that were covered in a thick carpet of knee-deep purple heather.
The sun above them was the colour of a peach, and ten times bigger than the one in their own world. The clouds were a soft, yellowy-orange, and the sky was a blaze of gold and violet. It made all day appear to be a bright sunset.
“Have you ever been to another world?” Sam asked Fig as they tramped uphill to the top of the moors.
“No, Sam,” he replied. “Some fairies have, but few return to speak of what they saw. Perhaps they did not survive, or most likely could not find their way back home.”
“But how can more than one universe exist? It doesn’t make sense.”
Fig raised his bushy, white eyebrows. “And how would you know what does or does not make sense, young Sam? You have to think of time and space as being like the weather; swirling, shifting, merging forces that overlap each other and cause raging storms, balmy sun-kissed days, flooding, snow, drought and famine. Allworlds is one place really. Try to imagine anywhere you have never seen or been to. Just because you don’t know of its existence, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Sam said, trying to understand. It was all a bit mind-boggling.
“Good,” Fig said. “Because there is nothing you can think of that doesn’t exist, somewhere. Don’t always look for answers to things that are beyond question. It will only cause you mindache.”
Sam knew what Fig meant. Her dad had once said that if a tree fell down in a forest, and no one was there to see or hear it fall, then had it really fallen. She thought he was explaining that, unless something was witnessed to have taken place, who would ever know that it had. Awesome. She was getting mindache just thinking about it, which was Fig’s way of describing a headache.
All of a sudden a dark shadow swept along the ground towards them with the speed of an express train. Far too fast for a cloud to make.
They looked up to see something that could have been a cross between a pelican and a prehistoric pterodactyl out of a Jurassic Park movie. It had the wingspan of a plane, and the flapping of its blue, leathery wings caused a down draft powerful enough to knock them all off their feet. The bird’s head was pointed, and a deep pouch hung below a long, sword-sharp beak.
“Stay still,” Speedy shouted, and flew away from them, zigzagging a few feet above the top of the heather to lead the creature away.
The giant bird spotted Speedy and swooped down like a jet fighter, to snap him up in its beak and soar up high into the sky again. The rest of them watched as Speedy was carried off.
“Stupid bird,” Fig said, shaking his head. “It has bitten off a lot more than it will ever get to chew.”
The great blue-winged goat gull – so named for its habit of eating the goats that roamed the moors, and obviously because of the colour of its wings – flicked its head, threw Speedy into the air, opened its beak wide and caught the flailing fairy in its pouch.
“Speedy’s been eaten,” Tommy cried out.
“I think not,” Fig said, and an instant later the giant bird exploded in mid-air, and a snowstorm of feathers and lumps of bloody flesh rained down on them.
“That’s disgusting,” Sam said.
“No, Sam,” Fig said. “That’s tonight’s supper.”
Speedy flew down through the blizzard of feathers and alighted next to them. He was covered in gooey bird spit and blood and feathers.
“Best collect up some of that overgrown bird’s meat, and then find somewhere to wash off this mess,” Fig said.
They found a fast flowing stream, cleaned up, and carried on towards the foothills of the mountains.
It was almost dark when they stopped for the night in a large cave. Fig got a fire going, lighting it by using a spell, which dispensed with the need for matches, and before long, and except for Sam, they were all tucking into barbecued gull meat.
“It tastes like chicken,” Ben said to Sam, who had refused to eat any of the dead bird.
“It’s excellent,” Tommy said. “Better than KFC.”
Ben held out a chunk of the roasted meat, and Sam took a small bite, ready to spit it out. Instead, she ate it. It was succulent, and her rumbling tummy insisted that she eat more.
“Are we safe here?” Ben asked Fig after they had eaten their fill and washed it down with blackberry wine.
“We should be all right,” Fig replied. “But the farther we go from the Oak Palace, the weaker our fairy powers will become. A lot of the dangers that may lie ahead will not be overcome by any quick fix magic.”
“How did you blow Big Bird up?” Tommy asked Speedy.
“When it gulped me into its pouch, I just pushed hard with my mind in every direction. I didn’t mean to harm it. I panicked a little and overdid it. We only resort to using such force if we are threatened.”
With the log fire burning brightly, they made themselves as comfortable as possible, to spend their third night in ‘Weirdworld’, as Ben had christened the place.
It was perhaps another week before they caught sight of the Living Forest.
Sam began to feel that her past life had been a dream. It was becoming harder by the day to bring the faces of her mum, dad and Emily to mind. She reckoned it was ten days since they had first set off on the bike ride. But time here was not the same. She knew that the days were of different lengths. It was no good comparing where she came from to where she was now. All the things she had grown up to understand were of no help to her.
They approached the forest, but had to stop at its edge. The trees were so tightly packed together that they could not pass between them.
Fig spoke to the trees. “I am Figwort,” he said. “And with my friends here, am on a mission that could save Allworlds from a great catastrophe. I wish to speak with Sempiternal, the tree of all knowledge.”
The trees’ leaves began to tremble and make a loud rustling sound.
“What’s happening?” Ben asked Fig.
“They are passing my message through the forest to the wisest of all trees, which lives at its centre.”
“You are to follow the path we make,” a voice that could have been a breath of wind said, and the trees opened up in front of them to form a narrow trail.
They walked single file into the very heart of the forest, and looking back, Sam saw the path closing up behind them, as the turquoise lake had. No living creature could enter without permission.
It was maybe an hour later that they came to a house-high, dense wall of black thorny bushes that ringed a lush, grass-covered glade in the middle of which grew a giant red tree that was the width of a cooling tower and as tall as St Paul’s cathedral.
The twisted branches of the bushes began to unravel.
“Stand well back,” Fig said to the others. “The thorns of these sentry bushes are loaded with a poison that has no antidote. Just one scratch, and your blood would turn to jelly, and you would swell up and rot like an overripe melon in the blink of an eye.”
A gateway formed as the bushes shrunk back, and the five of them rushed through it, arms close to their bodies, and scant inches from the lethal thorns. They approached the enormous tree and looked up, but were too close to it to see its top.
“It’s a redwood,” Tommy said. “The tal
lest tree in the world...Well, in our world.”
“And in ours,” Speedy said.
A second later, thick branches snaked down to form a cradle in front of them a few feet from the ground. Fig and Speedy flew up to it and reached down to help Sam, Ben and Tommy to climb onto the living platform.
“Hold hands,” Fig said as the branches began to rise like a lift up the side of the mighty tree at dizzying speed.
When they came to a stop, the dark, fissured bark of the trunk began to change, and the features of a face appeared in front of them.
“It must be quite a while since you visited the Living Forest, Figwort,” Sempiternal said through bark lips that creaked as they opened and closed.
“Yes, I was a mere youth when I first ventured this far from the Oak Palace.”
“Time passes slowly around me, Figwort. But I can see that your beard is now white, and that you have spread a little around the middle. What is this mission you are set upon, that is of such importance?”
“These whortles are in possession of an ancient chalice that is said to have the power to stop evil from overrunning Allworlds. And I fear that if the Dark One knew of its whereabouts and was able to take it from them, then he would destroy it and all that is good.”
“Ah, humankind. I have never met one,” Sempiternal said. “Let me see them in their true form, Figwort.”
Fig clicked his fingers, and Sam, Ben and Tommy changed back to how they truly looked.
“Where did you find the chalice?” Sempiternal asked them.
“At the bottom of a lake, behind a waterfall,” Sam replied. “It led us from our own world to wherever we are now.”
“Then you have been chosen by the spirit that dwells within the chalice to deliver it into the Keeper’s hands,” Sempiternal said to them. And to Fig, “How can I be of help?”
“We need to reach the Crossroads of Time, and do not know the way,” Fig said.
“It will prove to be a perilous undertaking,” Sempiternal replied. “One that you will be lucky to live through. You must go west, between the twin peaks of Doom Mountain, and then due south across the Desert of Storms to the Valley of Mist. That way will eventually bring you to the Lake of Life, where you will need to convince the Ferryman to take you to the Crossroads.”
“Thank you, Sempiternal,” Fig said.
“Don’t thank me, brave fairy. For I fear my directions will only send you on a course that will lead to your downfall.”
“We have no choice, great sage of trees. The chalice is the symbol of all that is good, and it is said that it may bind together the very fabric of existence.”
“I believe it was cast out of this world by a priest, so long ago that many think it is no more than a myth, Figwort. It is a pity it did not allow itself to stay lost.”
“I agree,” Fig said. “But it has other ideas.”
Lowering them gently to the ground, Sempiternal wished them good luck and bade them farewell.
As they left the Living Forest, Fig once more gave the three of them the appearance of fairies, and they headed west, determined to deliver the chalice to the Keeper and to save Allworlds from a terrible fate. They struck out in the direction of Doom Mountain, mercifully unaware of the fearsome perils that lay ahead.
―