by Jeffrey Ford
Just as he was considering forsaking the wild pig and stopping to make camp in the next clearing, they came upon the site where they had left their kill. He realized that while he had been walking, his mind turning wildly with thoughts of the day’s pursuit, he had been unconsciously following Wood. The dog obviously knew all along where he had been headed, driven by a desire to eat roasted pork.
Luck was with them, for no scavengers but the ants had bothered the meat. These were easily scraped off. Firewood was searched for and a fire started. In their toil to prepare for the coming night, Cley did not notice the hat sitting atop a large bush off to the right of the clearing. Just as the dark completely swamped the oasis, and he was carving up the kill into strips to affix to his makeshift spit, the hunter noticed the hat. In astonishment, he began to laugh out loud and shake his head.
“Our neighbor is a trickster,” he said to Wood.
The dog looked where Cley was looking, saw the hat and walked over, lifted his leg, and urinated on the bush.
“Revenge,” said the hunter, and turned his attention back to preparing dinner.
That night a sweet wind carrying the narcotic scent of blossoms slithered again through the forest. Cley had already read the sleeping Wood a confabulated nonsense story from the missing pages of the book cover the dog had insisted on carrying in his mouth all day. The hunter leaned back on a tree trunk well within the flickering bubble of light cast by the fire’s glow. He was exhausted by the day’s exercise. Through lowered lids he looked across the clearing at the hat perched atop the bush and let his thoughts unravel. In his hand was the stone knife and lying next to him in the sand was the bow and quiver of arrows.
The sizzle of a moth in the flames woke him from a doze, and he looked around the clearing to see that everything was as it should be. He glanced at the hat and jerked himself forward to sit upright. Squinting in order to focus his sight, he scrutinized the bush atop which the lid rested, and confirmed what he, at first, could not believe. Some inches beneath the broad black brim, two burning eyes, like tiny fires recessed in twin caves, had opened in the matrix of leaves and seemed to be staring straight at him. Confusion paralyzed the hunter, and though he wanted to stand, he could only sit where he was and stare back.
A moment later, a dark opening, obviously a mouth, appeared below the eyes. Then, the bush began to slowly move in unnatural ways. A leafy arm spread itself from the whole and reached out, followed by another on the right side. There were hands of tangled vine with delicate sprouts continuing like thick hairs from the tips of root digits. The body of the bush began to rise on incredible legs composed all of leaves and tangled twigs. It stood upright, like a man, but a man of vegetation, with tiny white flowers growing here and there amidst the thatch of its body. The black hat riding atop this green impossibility was the most absurd thing Cley had ever seen, and he could not help but smile through his amazement and terror.
The plant creature walked toward him, and still he could not move. Already he sensed that it did not mean to attack. Its movements were as gentle as the wind-rocked fronds of the tree above him. It stepped carefully over the sleeping dog and came to a halt before the hunter, where it slowly lowered itself to sit only inches away, facing him. Then the two arms that seemed cut from a hedge rose simultaneously and lifted the hat with leafy hands off a head of spiraling, tendriled hair. It reached over and placed the hat on Cley’s head, and the dark opening that was the mouth almost formed a smile.
Cley was reeling, but in the whirlwind behind his eyes, he suddenly remembered Arla Beaton’s writings about her grandfather’s journey through the Beyond. In certain fragments of that story there was mentioned a man of green, what Beaton had referred to as a foliate, named Moissac, who guided the beleaguered party of miners toward their elusive goal of Paradise.
“Moissac?” asked Cley.
The thing shook its head, reached to its viney throat, and plucked a leaf. It motioned putting the green oval in its mouth and then handed it to Cley. The hunter accepted the gift, and without hesitation opened his lips and placed it on his tongue. The taste was rich with the essence of fruit and flower. Like a perfume he was smelling with his taste buds, this vapor rose through his palate, infiltrated his sinuses, and gathered in his mind to form sounds that slowly evolved into words.
“I am Vasthasha,” said the voice in Cley’s head.
“Do I hear you through this leaf?” asked the hunter.
“No, you understand me,” it said. “The leaf carries me to you.”
“Why are you here? Why did you steal my hat?” Cley asked.
“I had to know if you were the one. The hat carried the residue of your thoughts and dreams. I needed to be with it for a time to discern if you were my liberator,” it said.
“Your liberator?” asked the hunter.
“The seed you planted back in the place you think of as the demon forest. In the new green time, after the ice, that seed produced a plant, which grew and grew with the speed of rain falling, until, in the early days of the sun’s strength, when I had become complete and the spark of life burned in my head, I pulled my legs up by their taproots, snapped off those anchors, and began my search for you.”
“You have found me,” said Cley.
“And now, I am to serve you,” the voice said.
“I am heading to the village called Wenau,” said the hunter.
“I know,” said the foliate, “the green veil? I thought it in your hat.”
“All of it?”
“Much.”
“Am I close to Wenau?” asked Cley.
“In comparison, if you were a child beginning on the journey of your life toward your goal of death, and you were to live a hundred years, you would not yet be born for a hundred years.”
“That close?” said the hunter.
“There are some places in this wilderness you call the Beyond that cannot be reached by traveling through space. The possibilities will simply not align for you to arrive,” said Vasthasha.
“Then I will not reach Arla Beaton?”
“I am here to guide you. The woman, Pa-ni-ta, whose necklace pouch you found my seed in, was the last of a lineage who could direct the energy of the Beyond to her will.”
Cley recalled the last word of the queen of the Silent Ones.
“Yes, her spirit has been with you throughout your journey. She needs you to help her. If you come with me and perform the task she requires, you will reach your destination.”
“And what is that?” asked Cley.
“I cannot reveal it to you until the time of new growth, the spring. While I lie in the frozen ground, the snow piled upon me, she will tell me in my dreams what we are to do.”
“I thought she was dead,” said Cley.
“You might have considered me the same until you put my seed in the ground,” said the foliate.
“How does she know me?” asked the hunter.
“She knows you through your desire. She knows what you want …”
Here the leaf in Cley’s mouth began to lose its flavor and the foliate’s words quickly diminished in volume until they were replaced by a sound like barren branches scraping in a winter wind. Vasthasha reached over and touched one of the gnarled, tapered roots that were his fingers to the tattoo on Cley’s forehead.
“We will talk more tomorrow,” the hunter heard the foliate say. “You must sleep, for with the sun, we must leave this place if you intend to find your way.”
“Through the desert?” asked Cley.
“The desert, indeed,” said the green man. Following his words came the sound of rain falling on dry autumn leaves, and Cley realized that the foliate was laughing.
While he slept, the hunter unconsciously chewed on the leaf given to him by Vasthasha and its sap flowed through him, into his dreams. There, he saw the woman, Pa-ni-ta, as she was in life—black hair flowing in the wind, eyes bright with knowledge. She walked through a field of growing foliates still attached to the
ground. Some were only half-formed, and some were near maturity, but as she passed, they turned their leafy heads and reached out, the tips of their branches brushing against her legs and arms. Even in sleep, Cley was somehow aware that they had been created to serve as an army.
Cley woke the next morning, half-expecting all that transpired through the night to have been no more than part of one fantastic dream, but when he opened his eyes, he saw the foliate sitting in front of Wood, lightly stroking the dog’s back.
The hunter rose and walked over to them. As he approached, Vasthasha pulled a leaf from his throat and offered it to Cley, who placed it under his tongue.
“You have become friends with Wood,” said Cley.
“The name is interesting considering the circumstance,” said the foliate, and Cley heard the laughing sound again.
“That dog has saved me more than once,” said the hunter.
“Yes, your fates are bound together,” said Vasthasha. “I just told him that it was I who fetched the book for him the other night.”
“I thought that was his work,” said Cley. “Can I give you a message for him?”
“There is no need for that with a creature like this. He knows all you would tell him.”
“Do we leave then?” asked the hunter.
“We must go now if we are to make progress.”
Cley gathered up his fire stones and put them in his pocket. He took a quick bite of a piece of pork left undevoured by Wood and then slipped the stone knife into his boot. Lifting the bow and arrows, the waterskin, he whistled around the foliate’s talking leaf and motioned for Wood to take up the book cover. With Vasthasha leading the way, they headed for the northern side of the oasis.
Before setting out across the pink sands, each of them took a long drink from the waterskin. Cley was amazed, watching the foliate tip his head back and gulp like any other thirsty man. Although he was seeing it before his eyes, it remained as strange to him as if some piece of furniture in a parlor had suddenly come to life—like a large rock writing a letter or a fence post making love.
Vasthasha handed Cley another leaf for his mouth, and as soon as the verbal effect commenced, he told him that after a few more of the leaves, the hunter would not need them anymore for days to come.
“Aren’t you especially concerned with the heat of the desert?” asked Cley.
“After we have traveled through the sands for a few days, you will have to carry me,” said the foliate, and stepped out of the shade of the oasis and into the bright sun.
Cley was troubled by the thought of hoisting the foliate on his back while traipsing through the deep sand. “We’ll never make it,” he thought to himself.
“Why should I believe all you have told me?” said the hunter.
“At the end of the autumn, when I have to leave you, Pa-ni-ta has arranged to show you a sign so that you will believe that she understands your desire. Until then, you must trust me,” said Vasthasha.
Cley realized right then as he began to walk in the hot sun that he had no other choice but to follow.
The travelers climbed a set of tall dunes like a miniature mountain range, descended into a valley of sand, then faced another three times the size of the first.
Even Wood had a hard time getting a foothold in the shifting sand. The ascent was steep, and with every two steps they took, they slid back another. Cley stopped climbing three-quarters of the way to the summit and worked to catch his breath.
“It’s got to level off soon,” he said to the foliate, who slid back down the incline to help him.
Wood kept charging and sliding back and charging until he reached the top. Once there, he turned back and barked down at the hunter and the man of green.
Vasthasha stayed with Cley on his climb, helping him along. The hunter looked down and saw that the foliate had grown, in mere minutes, wooden spikes out of the bottoms of his feet. By the time they reached the top, Cley had been reduced to crawling. As he came up over the top of the rise, he saw spread out below him the shoreline of a violet ocean. The water sparkled in the bright sun all the way to a distant horizon, and waves rolled in and crashed in foam explosions on the pink sand. A half-mile to the north, along the beach, there was a tree line and the beginning of grass-covered hills.
“You knew all along,” said the hunter. In his head, he heard the foliate laughing.
“We made it, Cley. There are no deserts so unforgiving as those that lie within.”
Vasthasha told the hunter that they would follow the shoreline of the inland ocean northward, for he knew of a place a few hundred miles ahead where Cley and Wood could winter with members of their own tribe—an expeditionary force from the western realm that had some years earlier come to the Beyond to set up a base camp.
“Then I am not alone,” said Cley, as they walked side by side along the edge of the violet sea.
“There have been others. There will be others,” said the foliate. “The wilderness is more ancient than you can imagine. I will show you something in our time together before the season of frost that will help you understand. There was a war in the Beyond, a disruption to the balance of nature that changed everything.”
“I believe I saw in my dream last night that you and others like you were created to be warriors in that battle. Am I right?” asked Cley.
“You were not the first, Cley, but I am most assuredly the last. We were brought to life by Pa-ni-ta, physical manifestations of nature energy. Imagine how difficult it is to defeat an opponent that regenerates itself every spring. Still, our enemy was powerful enough to find a way. Moissac was a deserter. That is why he was still alive to help those who came in search of Paradise.”
“And what about you?” asked Cley.
“It will become clear in the days to come,” said Vasthasha.
The foliate turned away from the shoreline and headed inland toward a grassy plain. He motioned for Wood to come to him and relieved the dog of the book cover. Putting the empty binding under his arm, he pointed toward the trees.
“We will stay near the ocean but travel where you can hunt for food,” he said.
“Tell me,” said Cley, hurrying to catch up to the foliate, “why does the dog care about that damnable piece of book?”
“He thinks it is a device that helps you to tell stories,” said Vasthasha, and the twin fires of his eyes blazed for a moment.
“Why would a dog care about stories?” asked Cley.
“He knows they are what the world is made of,” said the foliate.
They traveled on through open country for days, the sea always to their left. Each time Cley encountered the sight of it from the top of a hill or when rounding a thicket of trees he was startled by its immensity and beauty. The landscape they passed through was teeming with game—white deer, wild pigs, long-legged turkeys, and a type of diminutive, three-toed, striped horse. The hunter found Vasthasha to be a first-rate teacher in how to survive in the Beyond. The foliate expounded on the properties of the exotic flora they passed, and Cley questioned how the specimens might interact with an animal system. Since the green man had a root in both worlds, so to speak, he could readily surmise their effects.
At night, around the fire, Cley related the wonders and terrors he had lived through in the realm, and the foliate questioned him about human love and treachery. While they conversed, Vasthasha grew, in the course of an hour, from the root that was his left index finger, perfectly straight shafts of branch that Cley could turn into arrows.
No night was complete until the book cover was opened and Cley extemporaneously confabulated a tale for the dog and their green friend. The foliate wanted to hear about the stars, what they were made of, and why they were there. He told Cley that Wood liked best those stories with at least one dog in them. The hunter became adept at creating such yarns, and spun them with greater and greater ease as the days passed.
One afternoon, he heard the foliate warn that a giant bird was diving for his head. Cley fe
ll face first on the ground as the huge creature, a yellow sparrow the size of a fox, with a razor beak and piercing talons, swooped dangerously close to him. He came up with an arrow on his bow but missed the shot. As he watched the monstrosity fly off, he realized he did not have a leaf beneath his tongue.
At the top of a wooded hill overlooking the ocean, they found a pickax jutting straight up out of a mound of stones. Hanging from the head of the ax was a rusted miner’s helmet. Cley thought back to Anamasobia and to Arla Beaton. He saw her in his memory, walking down the main street of that now-ruined town.
“She was beautiful,” he told Vasthasha. “I wonder what she looks like today,” he said.
The foliate pulled a small white flower from his chest and placed it on the miner’s grave. “Like the summer, now,” he said, “moving toward autumn but still carrying a bright sun.”
There was a moment of silence, and then they turned and continued down toward the sea. Wood urinated on the ax handle before running to join them.
It was a night of falling stars, and Vasthasha feared the heavens were collapsing. Cley took an object from his pocket and held it up in the light of the flames in order to divert the foliate’s attention from the meteor shower.
“We are in no danger, my friend,” said the hunter. “Think of it as the sky shedding old leaves. They will burn to cinders before they reach the world. But here, look at this.” In the palm of his hand rested the crystal given to him by the body scribe of the Silent Ones. “What do you make of it?”
Vasthasha nervously diverted his attention from the sky and looked at the stone. “Where did you find it?” he asked.
Cley told him the story of his rescue and stay among the tattooed people—how they ate the book, disposed of his fiercest weapon, duped him, and marked his forehead.
“Yes,” said the foliate. “I know of them. They have lived in the wilderness longer than I can say. The other tribes of the Beyond call them Shantrei. It means ‘the Word.’ They worship language in all its forms. The fact that you thought of them as the Silent Ones is not without humor, since they know a multiplicity of languages—human, animal, and vegetal. Each of them is decorated with an array of images that combine to form an original idea, and each individual body is the expression of the word for that idea.”