“Look!” Arlen pointed.
At our feet lay a brace of rabbits, freshly killed.
We made a fire and cooked them, so impatient that in the end we ate them half raw. And we found some greens and cresses to have with them. When we had devoured them, we traveled through what remained of the day. But the food seemed only to have awakened our stomachs and set them to grumbling, and by evening we were ravenous. A rabbit ran in front of us and we watched it, hungry and helpless. Arlen had never learned a hunter’s craft, no more than I had, for the killing of animals lay of all desires farthest from his heart—though, being human and full of unreason, he loved to eat meat.
The rabbit bobbed away into twilight leafshadow, and we sat watching after it as if entranced. Where it disappeared stood a stubby hazel tree—no. It moved. A mouth opened, and a laugh more eerie than a hawk’s scream echoed through the dusk. A stocky old woman in a rough brown peasant’s dress stood there, her shoulders stooped and rounded as if by toil, her weathered face creased in mockery and merriment. As we blinked she was gone, as if swept away on a horse of wind like Briony, and her witch’s laughter floated behind her.
“Ride!” I hissed at Arlen.
We rode until we could no longer see the way, and went to sleep hungry. The next morning when I awoke, there was a bear sitting at our feet, a great grizzled bear with curved black claws. The bear lifted a forepaw when I stirred, and the sight of the shining claws made me catch my breath.
“Arl!” I shook him awake, and he blinked groggily at the bear. It greeted him with a querulous growl.
“What is it, grandfather?” Arlen got up, went vaguely over to the bear, and began to examine it for parasites. The creature lowered its head to him.
“Oh, I see, the ears.” Arlen set to work. There were dozens of ticks to be plucked off. I lay still under the blankets until he was done.
“Thank you for the gift, grandfather,” Arlen told the bear gravely.
Food! Letting go of caution, I sat up to look. A large fish lay at my feet. At once I began to think of gathering firewood.
“But we are very hungry, very, very hungry,” Arlen went on. “If in your kindness you could find us something more …?”
The bear muttered darkly and slouched off. Nor did it bring us anything else; that must have been a lean season for everything but the bloodsuckers. We ate the fish and were glad of it. But by evening, still riding through forest, we felt faint with hunger again.
“Am I dreaming,” Arlen murmured, glancing about him, “or do I smell the aroma of a roast? Seasoned with scallions? I must be going mad.”
“What is that shadow,” I whispered at the same moment, “moving yonder?”
It could have been anything, in the dusk. A young deer, perhaps. Something tawny and slender. It slipped away, and a moment later, a little farther on, a weird light appeared: faint and greenish, rather like a very dim star somehow fallen to the forest floor.
“Wisp light,” I gasped. “Do not go near it!”
“I swear, I smell cookery,” Arlen declared, and he sent Bucca forward. The wisp bobbed on before us.
“Stop!” I protested. “Or turn aside.”
“Rae,” Arlen said, “have you never noticed how all things go to contraries for us? We eat elderberries, wolves and bears bring gifts—what else can we do but follow this—envoy?”
We followed.
Within a few moments there shone many such lights in the dusk, ahead of us, clustered and orderly, almost as if they illuminated a structure, a castle. And as we drew nearer I could see what it was. The immense jagged stump of a great old tree, an oak, lighting-felled, and all about it, growing up from the roots and from the stump itself, a coppice of new shoots—for the oak is one of the immortal trees that never truly dies. And upon the stump and sitting in the branches of the coppice were many small folk with their oak-apple lamps filled with wisp. They wore tight leathery garments of brown and green, their hands were twiggy, their faces sharp and snaggletoothed and too big for their small bodies. With much merriment and a great spate of talk they welcomed us—I could not understand a word of what they said. And there was the aroma of good cooked food, and a feast spread before us.
I slipped down from Bucca, and Arlen got down and unsaddled him. When the horse was cared for he seated himself on a grassy hillock, and the oak elves swarmed about him, petting him and bringing him sweetmeats. But I stood uncertainly. Food, the choicest of food, lay within reach. Yet something in my mind urged me away. No, not my mind! A summons exerted on my mind, within my mind, by something not me: Lonn.
“I don’t care,” I told him aloud. “We might as well die of treachery as starvation.” And thrusting my hair back from my face, I seated myself. Arlen was right. It was time to take the bold course. And, angry, I grew determined to oppose Lonn for once, to test the limits of his meddling.
So, though he continued to pester me, I ate. Arlen ate. We ate for hours, feasting on viands that could not possibly have been there, in the midst of a vast forest, with no hearth in sight—we knew that and gave no further thought to it. We ate roast capon, roast venison, roast lamb dressed with mint leaves, roast duck. We ate poached fish, braised veal, boiled sausage. We ate freshly baked buttery breads, sweet green grapes, strawberries, apples out of season. We ate soup and trifle and custard. I ate the creamy porridge my mother had prepared for me as a child. Arlen claimed it was currant jelly on one of Erta’s scones. How could that be? It did not matter. None of it mattered. Sleep did not matter. We would eat all night.… From somewhere came the sound of the most exquisite music played on lutes and pipes and viols.
When dawn touched us, though we had ceased to eat, we were still sitting on our hillocks, staring at the remnants of the feast.
Wisp lights were gone. Platters, merriment, music, oak elves, all had faded away. Before us lay piles of fungi—toadstools, redcaps, the bracket fungi that grow on the trunk of dead trees—all the most poisonous sorts, as venomous, some of them, as asps. Broken bits of them lay about us, and I held a large orange one in my hands, half gnawed.
I dropped it slowly, looked at Arlen. One would think we should have been shocked, horrified. But not so—nor were we much frightened, for in a perverse way we had known all along. The oak elves are the vengeful spirits of the felled tree; everyone knows that. By their glamour they disguise dead leaves as dishes, the creaking of insects as music, deadly mushrooms as delicious food.
“I feel quite full, very satisfied,” Arl said softly to me.
“So do I,” I told him. “Quite content.”
“Well then,” he asked, “shall we ride? Or must you sleep?” He spoke stiffly, formally. We felt foolish.
“Let us ride.” I did not wish to stay any longer in that place.
We rode, and made a long day of it, and it was dusk before we spoke any further of our feast. We had found a dry dingle to camp in, and Arlen was looking wistfully at the shoots and bushes that surrounded us.
“Contraries being what they are,” he said, “do you think we could eat all sorts of things and they would nourish us?”
“I would not try it,” I said sharply. “Perhaps the wolves will bring us more game.”
They did, from time to time. But it was a long passage through the wilderness, and we were often hungry. Forever Forest, I named that place in my mind.
TEN
The leaves had thrust entirely out of the bud before we came out of the deep forest and onto meadowland and open woodland where herding animals roamed.
“Look,” Arlen gasped in greatest wonder. “Yaels!”
A herd of perhaps a dozen of them, a sort of white deer, or nearly white, with amber mane and tusks like those of a boar and tall, curving horns, which they could turn in any direction at will. Small and fleet, they ran swiftly away before us, bounding out of view. We never saw them again.
But everywhere grazed the wisent, great brown lumbering beasts with cleft hooves and short horns; they neither challenged us
nor fled. I watched them warily as we rode, but found we had more reason to be wary of the aurochs, the huge black wild oxen with their long and wickedly forward-curving horns. The first day we came upon a cluster of them beneath some trees, and they bellowed and charged us, those horns coming at us like so many lanceheads.
Arlen wheeled Bucca and sent him galloping in a wide circle, fleeing and seeking at the same time to continue onward. But the aurochs would not be outflanked; they veered at us from the side. Bucca could not outrun them, no matter how Arl chirruped and urged him, not with two riders on his back. The wild oxen were as fleet as he and perhaps even longer of leg, for they stood as tall as a horse and were all bone.
“Wait,” Arl murmured, more to himself than to me. “There’s a lame one.”
“Arl,” I protested, knowing already what he was thinking.
“We cannot outrun them. There is nothing for it but to brave them. Moreover,” he added, “these are only my cousins, the ones with the sharp toes. They shall not hurt us.”
I felt not nearly as sure as he seemed. But Arlen would be Arlen; it was no use to reproach him.
He kicked Bucca and circled around to where the lame aurochs lagged, then pulled the horse to a quick halt and slid off, leaving me where I was, only slightly safer on the horse’s rump than I would have been on the ground. Arlen took a few steps forward, and the lame aurochs floundered in panic at his approach. It was a cow great with calf, and her foot evidently caused her much pain for she could scarcely walk, but she swung her black head at him and bellowed in threat.
“There, now,” Arlen murmured, walking over to her. “Hooo, now.”
The herd of her fellows thundered up and plunged to a halt, surrounding us with a circle of sharp horns. Bucca flung his head up and trembled with fear. I spoke to him softly, trying to calm him, quiet my own tense breathing, soothe the wild kine crowded all around us, pitch black except for white gleam of horns and rolling eyes. Aurochs stamped and snorted but did not move as Arlen approached the hurt cow.
“Easy, now, my lovely,” he murmured as he reached her, and, sweating and trembling, she let him lift her heavy foot. Caught between the halves of the cloven hoof jutted a flint, cutting sharp and so firmly wedged that with all his strength Arl could not dislodge it. He groped down and found another stone with which to knock it loose, and all the while none of the aurochs moved. Blood and pus dripped from the swollen flesh of the foot once the flint fell away, and Arlen would have bound it, but the moment he loosened his hold the cow lunged away, still limping. He forebore to follow her further.
“You should soak that in cold water,” he told her, and he came back to Bucca. I helped him mount. The herd of aurochs parted and let us pass.
“The cut is full of contagion,” Arlen muttered. “I hope she has the sense to lick it clean.”
“I am sure she will,” I said curtly—danger made me short-tempered. “Those wisent, I suppose they are your cousins too?”
“Certainly. The lads with the brown beards.”
I found myself hard put to be civil with him that night.
The next day we came in sight of the mountains. In the distance we saw the odd, aspiring shapes of them, dark storm-cloud gray against a blue sky. But it took a week or longer before we reached them, and there were no more gifts of food from any of Arlen’s “cousins” or other kin, only what we could forage for ourselves, and that was little enough. We grew weak.
“Mountains of the Mysteries, forsooth,” Arlen grumbled, though in a hushed tone. “It is a mystery, I suppose, how they came to be here.”
They rose as abruptly as a wall from gently sloping woodland and meadowland all around. I thought of the eskers and forebore to wonder more.
The mountains loomed gigantic, towering so far above our heads that we could not take them in, the greatest of great rocks, sculpted by weather into dizzying shapes, curves and hollows and caves and arches and spires. Balanced on some of the spires and sculpted edges were boulders the size of wisent or larger, poised so delicately that one would have thought a stray wind would have sent them crashing down, and yet they had been there, I suppose, nearly forever. Under them ran terraces where wood violets and ferns grew and small trees—or perhaps the trees only looked small against the vastness of the gray mountains, the peaks that soared until they faded into mist or sky. We could not find a limit to them, and I, for one, felt very puny.
“Well, now that we are here,” Arlen continued in peevish tones, “where are we to go and what are we to do?”
He was not asking me, just voicing a plaint in case the powers of sky were listening. Hunger had made him irritable. I, however, felt a nudge and answered him.
“This way,” I told him, starting off to the left and upward. We were afoot, looking for food, with Bucca trailing along behind us, making his way riderless over the rough terrain. Though verily I believe the terraces made better going than the wilderness had.
“Why this way?” Arlen grumped.
“Why not?” I countered. I was not willing to tell him that Lonn was leading us.
We toiled upward for some time before the way put us featly under one of the balanced stones. As we approached it I could see that it was moving, forsooth, slowly rocking in its perilous place. Stiffening slightly, I hoped Arlen had not noticed, for I had made up my mind not to turn back. But he gave a shout and stopped so suddenly that Bucca blundered into him, sending him stumbling forward.
“It won’t—” I started, annoyed.
“A face!” Arlen declared.
I looked where he pointed, under the lee of the gently swaying rock, and saw nothing.
“It—it’s gone,” he stammered, pushing me. “Go on, hurry, before—”
He shoved me out from under the swaying stone, and I believe we went onward only because it would have taken too much time to turn Bucca somehow and go back.
“Before what?” I flared, vexed by his fear. Before something sent that stone down on top of us, he had meant. Such nonsense. But he would not answer me, and I did not fully comprehend until I had seen one myself.
It happened the next day. We had to pass under a teetering stone again—no wonder folk called them rocks, I jested dourly with myself—and just as we drew abreast of it I glanced up and saw—a face, a small, gray face right under the slowly moving rock, peering over the edge of its pedestal at us, a glance as hard as the stone itself and as barren. Then it was gone as if it had never been.
And there above us shivered a stone the size of a small cottage, balanced on the edge of fear, and mind had to wonder: Would a touch really send it down on us? And I stopped and stood shivering like the stone.
“Go on,” said Arlen grimly in my ear. “Going back is no better than going on.”
So we went on, and the rock teetered and did not fall as we passed under it and left it behind us.
“Briony said we would meet strange folk,” I remarked after a while.
“We are insane to come here,” Arlen burst out. “This is a guarded place, a forbidden place, can you not feel it? The forest, the aurochs, and now these—whatever you call them, that dwell under those uneasy stones—”
“Call them logans,” I said for no reason, walking in a trance of hunger.
“All right, logans. The goddess only knows why they are letting us pass. Probably to lead us to a worse fate farther up. We are out of our minds.”
“You call me insane?” I cried with unnecessary heat. “You, who banter with wild beasts?”
We quarreled, a meaningless quarrel. Greens suited Bucca, but they left us snappish, half starved, and there had been nothing else to eat for days. The starvation made us feel always cold—or perhaps it truly was cold, for it was wet; whenever there was not fog or mist there was rain, those days. And although we found caves and niches to shelter in at night, they felt as damp as the outdoors, and there was little wood for burning, and none dry. We shivered through the nights without a fire, wrapped in sodden blankets, not taking much
comfort even in each other. I slept fitfully, and in my dreams I saw gray faces.
We have that miserable weather to thank for saving us from my gentle father, Rahv. I learned later that he had reached the edge of the Forever Forest and a herd of hostile aurochs before turning back. He could see nothing for mist, least of all a gray horse on a gray mountainside. But if we had been able to light a fire I am sure we would have, wretched as we were, and it would have led him straight to us. Him and a dozen men.
Not knowing our own good fortune, we felt heartily sorry for ourselves. My head reeled with hunger, my unborn child feeding on me, my belly beginning to swell but the rest of me very thin, haggard. Arlen could have felt no better, for he had been giving me the larger share of our meager food throughout the journey. When we had strength to speak, we quarreled, blaming each other for being where we were.
“We could have gone around,” Arlen said in smoldering tones, “but no, we needs must climb up past teetering rocks, wearing out what little strength is left in us. With the horse, yet! Now there is no way out.”
“You are the one,” I pointed out, “who always took the contrary ways. Eating elderberries. Following wisp lights—”
“Following a death dog? It is Lonn who leads you, admit it!” He sounded savage.
“Jealous,” I coldly retorted, “of a dead man?”
“Belike leading us to join him.”
So small wonder that, when I took a notion to go crawling into a crypt, Arlen refused to have anything to do with such folly.
It was on the day when wet had at last given way to a hazy sunshine that cast gray shadows. Lonn, the voiceless urging, led my eye to the entry within one such shadow. I saw the spiral snake design carved on a rock, as I had seen it once before at a certain cenotaph, only this time it was mostly hidden by a leaning slab, and in my light-headed state I would never have noticed it on my own. “Wait,” I said to Arlen, and I went over to it. There was a low dark crevice of an entry in the shadow of the slab, and I grew excited. “Arlen, come here!” I cried. But instead, he sank down to sit where he was.
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