by Ron Miller
After the balloon has lain on the forest floor for an hour or two, an inquisitive squirrel approaches and cautiously sniffs at the folds. The smell is peculiar and the squirrel lopes back into the forest, its curiosity satisfied, the event already long past the statute of limitations for its attention span.
The storm above passes and there is a brief glow of amber light before night falls. The forest at night is as dark and silent as the interior of a block of black marble. All that night, nothing disturbs the collapsed balloon.
As the dusty light of dawn filters through the forest’s canopy, there is at last a stirring from beneath the envelope. Princess Bronwyn’s head is the first object to emerge. She draws her body out after it, wobbles a little on all fours, staggers a few steps and sits down with a thump on the resilient moss. She holds her head in her hands, turning it slowly side to side. All things considered, she could look much worse for having plummeted hundreds of feet from the sky. As she takes stock of her various bits and pieces, she comes to much the same conclusion. There are bruises and abrasions everywhere (she looks much like a patchwork quilt), but nothing important or necessary appears to be broken or even seriously out of order. Her rusty hair looks like a feather duster, what parts of her that aren’t bruised are covered with dirt, and she is dressed, if only technically speaking, in what little remains of her clothing; what had not gone overboard in the futile attempt to save the balloon had been torn away by the trees.
There are further rustling sounds from within the envelope.
“Baron? Gyven?” she calls, then: “Thud?”
Though she is still unsteady, she manages to get upright and began tugging at the edges of the fabric.
“Where are you? Thud? Baron? Someone answer me!”
There comes an answer, but it is too muffled to be decipherable. Actually, there are two muffled sounds, from opposite sides of the mound. Therefore at least two of her companions are still alive, or at least conscious, but which two?
A partial answer to that question comes with the appearance of a woolen-clad rear end, backing out from beneath the fabric. It is the less-than-elegant rebirth of the baron who, when he turns and sees the princess watching him with a smirk, gives her a courtly bow and says, “Her Highness the Princess surprises me in dishabille!” As indeed he is, his gangly frame covered solely, albeit from ankles to wrists, by a shapeless red woolen undergarment. His hair sprays from around the crown of his bald head, looking like a photograph of a bowling ball dropped into a pool of ink. His normally jaunty moustache, rather than looking as sharp as a pair of dividers, now looks more like a large squashed insect. Still, it would take a great deal more than this to divest the Baron Milnikov of his style.
There is a groan from within the envelope and both the baron and the princess turn in time to see Gyven emerge from an enormous rent in the heavy fabric.
“Gyven!” the princess cries.
The man merely sways like a reed, his head swinging from side to side like a snake’s or a precessing gyroscope.
“Are you all right?”
He takes his head in his hands and then holds it steady for a moment.
“Yes. It is just difficult to focus on anything immediately.”
He wades across the crests and deep folds to join the other two castaways.
“You don’t look all right.” And he doesn’t. He still bears the wounds and bandages of the previous day, to which are added an additional share of bruises and scrapes. His clothing has been reduced to pair of long underdrawers. Bronwyn thinks he looks like a vandalized statue.
“Where’s Thud?” she asks.
“Thud?” repeats the baron, exchanging a glance with Gyven.
“What is it? Where’s Thud?”
“You don’t remember?”
“No! I . . . Oh, Musrum, I do . . . Oh, Thud!” She collapses onto her knees and bows her head as tears burst from between the fingers of her clenched hands. Her friends can only look on in silent distress.
“What do we do now?” she is finally able to ask.
Seizing this change of subject, Gyven replies, “First thing, we need to find out where we are.”
“How’re we supposed to do that?” argues the baron. “We can’t see either the sun or the stars.”
“I know where we are,” says Bronwyn.
“Oh? and how is that?” asks the baron.
“I spent more time reading geographies than dime novels, which is one reason.”
“Touché, Princess!”
“Where do you think we are, then?” asks Gyven, interested.
“We’re in the Dark Forest.”
“Well, I can believe that,” Gyven replies. “But it only narrows our position down to somewhere within an area of four or five hundred square miles.”
“I know. And half of it lies in Londeac and the other half in Ibraila.”
“So we have a fifty-fifty chance of wandering right back into Londeac.”
“No, not quite. If we’re in the Ibrailan section, then any direction we take other than due west will take us either out of the forest into Ibraila or to the Bay of Pemm. When we left Toth, the prevailing wind is directly out of the west. If we’re in the Dark Forest, then we must be in Ibraila.”
“If you say so. Which way do we go, then?”
Bronwyn extends her focus beyond the local group and for the first time examines the immediate surroundings. The balloon had dropped into one of the flat, open spaces between the vast trees. The black trunks overlapped one another into the distance, so that one’s vision never penetrates far into the forest, but is instead absorbed by the misty greyness. It looks exactly the same in every direction. Above her head, the unswervingly vertical boles look like narrow cliffs that ultimately plunge into the confused mass of tangled limbs and foliage that begin more than a hundred feet above her. She feels like a mouse in a cathedral.
Other than the fact that it is daylight, there is no way to determine the direction of the sun.
“Well,” she says, finally, “we have three chances in four of coming out right, not one in two. I say we go . . . that way.”
“Sounds fine to me,” says the baron.
“Is there anything worth taking from the balloon?”
“I doubt it. We threw everything overboard before cutting away the basket. And I doubt we’d have any chance of finding that.”
“Let’s go, then,” says Gyven.
“You know,” says Bronwyn, suddenly. “This is ridiculous.”
“What?” asks the baron.
“‘What?’ This what! Look at us here, half-naked, in the middle of a trackless forest in nothing but our underwear, no food, no weapons, and talking about taking a hike that, for all we know might take weeks! We don’t even have any shoes, for Musrum’s sake!”
“Well, we have to do something. What else do you propose we do?”
“Nothing, I guess. I just wanted the two of you to know that I think that this is ridiculous.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I agree.”
“And so do I.”
“All right then, so long as we’re all agreed. Let’s go, shall we?”
To avoid walking in circles, a sighting is taken on the most distant tree they can see, then they walked toward it. Upon reaching that goal, the next tree beyond is targeted and so on. Hopefully, moving from point to point in this fashion, a reasonably straight line might be followed. But there is no real way of telling for sure.
The soil beneath their feet is a soft and resilient mold that is as comfortable to walk upon as a carpet. The thick woolen stockings the three are wearing provided, for the time at least adequate protection. The forest floor is altogether clear of the least undergrowth and there is nothing to impede their progress, unlike the thickets of brambles and vines that Bronwyn had to struggle through when she had been lost the previous autumn. Nothing green could compete with the perpetual twilight and only mushrooms in countless varieties grew profusely. Gyven has some knowledge
of these and the fungi provided what little nourishment the trio got.
They walk without ceasing for as long as they can, never stopping for more than a few minutes at a time. The forest’s atmosphere is mild and moist during the day, but at night became chilly and damp. The three huddle together as tightly as they can, but there is little warmth to be shared.
The forest is monumentally boring; the topography is almost perfectly level, there is only a slight roll to the landscape to give it any relief. They cross neither streams nor rivers. The huge trees are almost perfectly uniform in color, breadth and height and spaced seldom closer than ten and never further than thirty feet apart. Any given area of the Dark Forest would not look substantially different from any other.
This monotony, and the shadowless twilight, combined with the lack of any colors other than warm greys and browns, create a state of sensory deprivation. Conversation stops after the first day or two and Bronwyn discovers with a start that she has walked for miles without being wholly conscious, or that night has fallen without any recollection of the day that has just gone by. She has no notion of the number of days that have passed since leaving the wreckage of the balloon, other than that thirst is becoming more and more of a problem, there is little moisture to be gotten from the mushrooms. Little nourishment, either, for that matter, since she is growing weaker by the day, by the hour, by the mile and by the yard. Enough time has passed for the soles of her stockings to have worn through; only the soft humus saves her feet.
Bronwyn realizes only much later that it is probably the mental anesthetic caused by the acute monotony that saved her and her friends. In a trance-like state they walk scores of miles further than they would have had they been entirely in possession of their wits.
While the princess’s brain might have been shut down so far as outside stimuli are concerned, it is all the more susceptible to those it produces on its own accord. Her mind wanders up and down paths of its own, some of which are familiar, but most are shadowy and unexplored. Many of the paths seem to end with Thud’s heroic sacrifice, the second time he had freely given his life for her. The first time neither he nor she could have suspected that a hitherto unknown, if not unsuspected, world of Kobolds would save him. So far as he had known when he turned his back to his princess, to face the enemy, he had also turned to face his death, and he did this as cheerfully and willingly as he had ever performed the slightest task for her. She owed her life many times over to the big man, who had joined his fortunes with hers unhesitatingly and unquestioningly. For her part, she had never questioned Thud’s motives if, indeed, she ever assumed he might have had any. No more, to be truthful, than one would question the servile obedience of a faithful dog.
It is just within the realm of imagination to see how Thud might have survived the landslide, given the Kobolds’ intervention, but how more than a quarter of a ton of flesh could resist a fall of hundreds of feet through empty space is not so easy. Her mind’s eye shies away from that ultimate scene, at the same time morbidly coming back to it again and again, like a spectator irresistibly drawn to a horrible accident, in spite of all her repugnance at the sight. Bronwyn visualizes Thud dropping through the treetops like a five-hundred-pound bomb. Who knew but that on the far side of the next tree might be the crater excavated by the violent bursting of the hitherto gentle changeling?
Other cerebral footpaths lead her to Gyven, the strange man to whom her body seems to have an irresistible and unexplainable attraction of its own, more often than not in direct and faithless contradiction of her conscious dislike for him. She considers it a kind of betrayal, since she hates reacting to her senses like an animal. Reason told her she has a list of justifications to dislike Gyven long enough to compile into a small volume, but his appearance, an expression, a glance, a gesture, his smell, his touch, in other words an equally long list of purely physiological, animalistic, earthy stimuli, all conspire to override what she considers to be good sense. Her mammalian brain is repelled by the man, but buried in its core is a primal reptilian nodule that understands nothing but the promulgation of the species. In its quivering, irresponsible paws are held the controls that operate her hormones. Bronwyn, who prefers to be in control of everything, hates this internal dichotomy. Then, suddenly, for a change of pace apparently, her mind will take a few leaps and bounds, frisking down less serious pathways. Then she is aware of the utter ludicrousness of her position, rather than its peril. All that is required to do this is a mental image of herself which, accurate or not, causes her more amusement than despair: she imagines a tall, lanky girl with tangled red-brown hair; a pale, bony face piebald with a colorful mixture of dirt, bruises and stains; long legs protruding from torn, knee-length underdrawers, ankles encircled with the remnants of her stockings, long arms and neck protruding from the ragged flannel undershirt that barely covered the remainder . . . a clown-like creature striding through a primeval forest pretending that it is a princess on a mission. She laughs, though there is more madness than humor in it.
Days go by and the three refuse to admit they are dying. Thirst, hunger, exhaustion and exposure have taken their toll. A mile’s progress in a day is remarkable. Bronwyn and Gyven walk like somnambulists, a disconnected, shambling shuffle. They stumble and fall more and more often, even when there is nothing but their own exhaustion to stumble and fall over. They have to rest at every tree they reach. The baron, being much older than either of the others, is faring proportionately worse. Every few minutes, it seems, either Bronwyn or Gyven would turn to discover the man a hundred or two hundred paces behind sitting on the ground or leaning against a tree, his face as white as a mushroom, wheezing like a teakettle on its last spoonful of water.
The pain of hunger and thirst has long since passed for Bronwyn. Instead, she feels as though she were filled with balloon gas . . . light and insubstantial. She no longer possesses nerves or exhausted flesh, just a paper-thin shell that awaits the slightest breath to break its contact with the earth forever.
They are all dead; they just have not yet realized it.
Bronwyn reaches the end among the gnarled roots of a tree that is a giant among giants. She curls into a leafy pocket like a kitten snuggling into the crook of an arm and prepares to take a nap from which she will never awaken. Her starved, dehydrated body relaxes; she burrows her face into the fragrant humus, inhales the perfume of its decay, feels the universe collapse until its size and form are defined by the parameters of her own surface area. Freed from any constraint, she begins her last dream. . .
As a disembodied viewpoint she is aware of her body lying among the tangled roots. It saddens her to see how terribly it has been abused. She has never thought herself particularly pretty, but it still seems a waste to have been reduced to this gaunt, hollow-eyed, tattered thing. It looks like a rag doll in the palm of a giant’s hand. To either side lie her friends; whether alive or dead she can not tell.
“Well, look here,” her mind’s eye says to itself, if that is not stretching the metaphor a little too much, as it circles the big tree and sees what lay on the other side. “If I’d just managed to get to the other side of this tree, see what I would’ve found? Damn, if that isn’t just what I would’ve expected to happen!”
The opposite side of the mammoth tree faces a clearing of perhaps half a square mile. At its center is a gently sloping mound, almost five hundred feet in diameter one or two hundred feet high. Its grassy surface is host to dozens of fruit trees of all kinds, and all of which are bearing fruit just coming into ripeness: apples, lemons, limes, oranges, tangerines, apricots, figs, olives, cherries, plums, pears, avocados, to say nothing of almonds, chestnuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, pistachios, hickory nuts, pecans and cashews. Springs of water so cold and fresh they crackle like cellophane gush from piles of mossy rocks. These are spaced at equal intervals around the circumference of the mound. Surrounding the springs are bushes and vines heavy with strawberries, currants, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries and
both white and red grapes.
Bronwyn’s mind’s eye is perfectly justified in thinking it unfair that her body had been unable to manage the few yards it would have taken to reach this paradise. Heaving the deepest sigh possible to a noncorporeal viewpoint, she briefly allows her subjective perception of time to slow. As a result, night falls almost immediately. The mound is flooded with a silvery light that takes her by surprise until she glances upwards. The sky is clear above the mound, a pewter-colored dome supported by the surrounding pillars of the forest. It has been so long since she had seen them, she had nearly forgotten the existence of the two moons. They are nearly in conjunction, centered on the zenith, looking like a pair of slightly mismatched spectacles peering down into the verdant clearing. As she watches, the nearer, smaller moon drifts in front of the larger, catching up with and obscuring the black disc of its own shadow. The smaller moon is the darker of the two, appearing all the darker now because of contrast, and for a moment the sky is graced with a vast ring of phosphorescent mother-of-pearl, a great, amazed “O!”
At the apex of the mound is a deep, stone-lined well. Gnarled apple trees normally shade its perpetually dark shaft, but now, just for a heartbeat, a narrow, vertical beamlet of moonlight penetrates the leafy awning, and a thread as fine as one extruded by some electric spider drops like a plumb line exactly along the well’s central axis. Somewhere beyond the point where the glowing blue line is absorbed by the darkness appears a violet scintilla. It is joined by a second: blue, a third: pink, then there are ten, twenty, a cloud of swirling points of light of every color that stream up the shaft, following the silvery thread. The cloud hovers above the mouth of the well, like unblinking fireflies, like sparks blowing from a forge, like jewels heated to incandescence. They swarm down the hillside, into the forest, circle the grandfather of all trees and find the seemingly lifeless body that lies in its embrace. They settle on the princess like hot coals, their lambency illuminating her, lending their color, the shifting patterns of light and shadow giving the motionless form the illusion of movement. The smoldering fireflies alight on the face. They touch the brows, the eyelids, nostrils, lips; they land on the ears, cheeks and chin, on the throat; they run like marquee lights down the arms and legs, and out to the tips of the fingers. They make a zodiac on the pelvis, turn breasts into birthday cakes, and make candelabra of the toes.
