by Scott Toney
The Fruit
Dense mist draped around Thomas, the young king of Havilah, as he rode his steed through an overgrown trail of serpentine vines and luscious vegetation. The gray air smelt of ash and honey. Flowers bloomed through the land’s mists and fog. His personal guards; Pine, Juniper and Cypress, rode steadily behind him. Their horses had hair the color of coal.
“We should turn back, sire,” Juniper spoke to his king as his horse neighed and threw its head, trying to dislodge its reigns. “There is nothing here but dense woods.”
“No, just a short distance further,” Thomas called back to his men, wiping dampness from his face. Why was it that he felt pulled to this land? He did not know what it was that had made him desire to leave his kingdom, but he had felt something unknown pulling him toward this foreign land for many days. He had sailed on the Pishon River to another river and then to this forest of great beauty and mists. But for what?
His horse stumbled on a decaying log and he had to force its head up to stop it from bolting. It picked its way through the roots and vines littering the ground. Thomas looked around him. There were no birds here, no animals of any kind that he could see. As he rode his horse farther, the lure he felt to this place grew. Some unknown attraction called to his soul from the earth below and the taste of ash grew in the air.
He was here.
He dismounted. His leather boots sank into a swamp-like mud. A sucking sensation tickled at their soles. Cautiously, Thomas stretched his cloaked arm into mists drifting about the ground next to a decaying tree. The tree’s bark was charred and its crooked, rotting form leaned to the side. He felt around the cool air and moist soil until his hands touched on something firm but malleable. As he withdrew his hand from the mists there were three shriveled, greenish-brown objects in his palm.
“Figs sire?” Pine called to Thomas as he rode near. The guard’s horse stomped its hooves in the swampy earth.
“Are they not wondrous,” the king said. ''They rival any growing in our gardens and here they grow wild, without care.” A surge of strength pulsed through Thomas’s hand. They feel like sacks of skin, he thought. “I don’t know how I know, but these are what we’ve come for.”
“We should have care, my lord,” Juniper said. “It shall be dark soon.”
“Yes,” he wondered at the figs. “We should make haste.” Thomas collected seven figs from the ground and placed them in a sack strapped to his steed’s side before remounting her. Eerie warmth exuded from the fruit as he turned his horse and headed back toward their ship. He felt grateful to have found what he had come for.
As the group of four rode quickly from the dense woods, leaves from trees around them became brittle and fell. Thomas and his guards reached the unknown river and the young king turned his steed around so that he could better see the land. Darkness hovered over the place and he suddenly saw shadows moving restlessly through the trees. “Board and pull up the plank quickly,” he instructed his men.
Once their horses were safely led below deck Thomas helped lift anchor and secure the rigging. The rope braids burned against his hands as he worked them. There was something inherently wrong about this place and he didn’t want to find out what those shadows were.
Below deck their horses whinnied as the men and their servants released grand white sails into the winds and began directing the vessel back to the river Pishon. At the port side of the bow of his ship, Thomas stood leaning against the sturdy wood of the railing. He listened to the sound of the sails catching the wind. He shivered as he watched the shadows leaping through the trees along the shore where they had come from. Beastly howls came from the shadows and the woods.
A cool nervousness ran up his spine.
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