The Raven Warrior (44 page)

My hand dropped and Albe strolled toward the narrow end of the fallen tree, fishing pole and line in hand. I watched her, troubled by what I had just done. I thought the thing was a fallen branch, black and waterlogged, until it moved. It took me a few seconds to comprehend that it was the largest snake I had ever seen.

It was lying in wait among the submerged branches of the fallen tree, and it was exactly the color of the mottled sun on the brown water—black and gold with touches of red. The head lifted and the blunt nose slammed into Albe’s chest. She went down, and in one ghastly instant, a coil as big around as a tree trunk was looped at her arm and chest. The rest of the snake was flowing over the log, preparing to take Albe into deep water.

I heard Ilona scream. My left hand shot out, and the snake became suddenly semitransparent. The whole world dimmed as I pulled Albe and myself back from the world where the snake was.

Albe slid out of the reptile’s grip like smoke and began crawling toward me. The snake managed to look startled, baffled, and frightened at the same time. It had, after all, had a large prey animal in its coils only a second before. So he hurried his massive bulk over the log and into the lake beyond.

Albe stood staring after it. She seemed as surprised as the snake had been.

“Not so wonderful,” I said. “Not wonderful at all.”

Magic! I remembered my visit to Ure. He’d warned me that every action has consequences, intended and unintended. Beware.

I was shaking. By bringing Albe almost completely into the lake’s strange world, I had inadvertently almost made her the serpent’s dinner.

“I’m further away now,” Albe said calmly. “Will I be able to touch anything here? I mean, how can I fish?”

“Give me the pole and line,” I said. I made them more real, but left her as she was, even though, later on, between chopping the gigantic roots into saleable lengths, I had to visit Albe every time she hooked a fish, catch it behind the gills, and lift it out of the water. Her hands went right through them.

Tuau had no problem in this other world. Once introduced, he ran along the log and shocked me by jumping into the water, where he swam out into the drowned forest. He returned with a small, black pig. I was helping Ilona pull in a coiling, ten-foot root, and was smeared from head to toe with mud.

“How is it?” I asked.

He interrupted his meal, raised his bloody muzzle, and said, “Lakes, swamp, marsh, more lakes, more marsh, more swamp. That’s all I saw. And birds, all sort of birds I couldn’t catch.” He looked annoyed. “Nothing else.” Then he went back to gorging himself.

When we were finished and we had enough fish for supper, a whole roomful of what Ilona called broad root, we dipped up lake water and poured it over ourselves until we were clean. The sun was a distant scarlet smudge among the towering black silhouettes of the forest and Ilona had become uneasy.

“What’s it like here at night?” Albe asked.

“I don’t know. None of us, the keepers of this doorway to the lake, have ever cared to remain here after dark.”

Something screamed in the distance, a fierce, primal cry. Tuau, who had been sleeping off his earlier pig feast, lifted his head. His eyes glowed brilliant green in the last light of the dying sun.

“Cat,” he whispered. “And a big one.”

“How can you tell?” Albe asked.

“Werrrrrr!”
The sound conveyed annoyance. “The distance, depth, the number of echoes. The throat is big. It couldn’t carry this far across water if . . . I don’t think I want to meet it. My kind get nasty if they catch you trespassing.”

Ilona had the rope ladder down. “You go,” she said, and Albe began the climb with Tuau draped over her shoulders like a scarf. I went last. I would like to have seen the stars, but I didn’t dare to press my luck. And there were those snakes. . . .

The place where we bathed was a stone room with an insect eye—that’s all I can think of to call it—that’s what it looked like. At any rate, it warmed a tank of water all day. We soaped, then dipped buckets of water out of the tank and poured them over our bodies.

The tank was made of wood and had been hollowed out of a gigantic tree root. The walls were covered with the small leaves that decorated the table in the central room of the house. When I looked down into the tank, I saw the root was living and the water itself oozed out of the white, living tissue of the root.

I rested my fire hand on the wet, hard root and felt the tree. It didn’t speak. Trees don’t. I realized that later. But in its silent contemplation of necessities human and otherwise, I realized it was the city’s life. It had—or I wasn’t sure what my mind was touching upon—drawn the city out of the rocks. Someone had requested that it do so long ago.

Its systems—the tree’s systems—made the city live. The water spilling around my hand from the root was pure, pure enough to drink even though the humans who lived in the city spilled waste, blood, garbage, dirt, and refuse into the river that bathed the trees’ trunks and saturated their roots. The tree took up the water, purified it, and released it back through springs, wells, fountains, ponds, pools, and spigots, so that it could nourish crops, quench thirst, bathe flesh, cook food, evaporate, and pass into the wind to be drawn to polar caps where, as ice, it formed glaciers that melted and began the whole cycle again.

I pulled my hand away, afraid. Because I wasn’t sure that the all-powerful being I had connected with couldn’t swallow me up or create a seduction, a peace to which almost any living being might wish to yield.

There is so much to be said for a centered, silent consciousness, always vibrantly alive yet always at rest. But I lifted my hand from the tree’s life, separated myself from its consciousness, and went to the practice room. Albe had proceeded me there. She was fencing with Ilona; they were using wooden swords. It was time for war.

Ilona said, “You will not be left in peace. I’m sure that tomorrow the Fand will come.”

Ilona was right. She did.

Where must a forest end?
Arthur asked himself. Not in a valley. There it might get thicker or become a swamp. But if he turned and followed the sloping ground on the mountainside, he might just be able to emerge above the tree line and find his way back down into the valley where his people lived.

The forest was as terrible a trap as he had ever been in. After his journey up the mountain and his destruction of the War Song, he’d been forced into it by the fire. Both he and the war dog, Bax, had been so exhausted when they escaped the flames that they both drank from a pool in the hollow formed by a twisted oak root, then slept until the woods filled with a pale, white light.

The fog was thick in the treetops, and he couldn’t see where the sun was. He shivered because the air was damp and cold.

The trees were oaks that bore a very rough fissured bark, dark brown and shading to black. He knew it must be wet here most of the time, because their trunks and lower branches were colonized by thick swatches of very green moss and a sort of vining fern that grew in thick masses in spots where the gnarled and twisted branches were free of leaves.

In places high up, pearled by the drifting mist, he saw mistletoe with its white berries and light, ovoid green leaves. Except for the sloping ground, there was no indication where he and Bax had entered the forest. But he was sure they couldn’t be far in, because when he’d knelt to drink and shared his water with the dog, he had seen the fire caused by the War Song’s death glowing between the tree trunks.

But in which direction? Had he stumbled over the oak root as he came from the left side or the right? He couldn’t tell. In fact, there were a half dozen similar twisted roots that formed small hollows filled with water. Bax was up and drinking from one now.

He turned and saw the nearest oak was a bit smaller than the rest and the bark offered good handholds. So he climbed as high as he could, up to the crown where the branches were too small to support his weight. He found himself almost drowning in fog. He could see nothing. In moments his face was wet, his hair drenched, and his shirt collar and sleeves sticking to his upper body.

He eased back down, knowing that he was indeed caught up in the ancient forest of dark enchantment. In some places there were warnings to wayfarers not to stray from the trails lest this lethal place claim them. It haunted his people’s legends. Here heroes had pursued the boar and, trapped in this pathless waste, died of hunger and thirst.

The mesh of branches above guarded the sleep of goddesses, princesses, and Valkyries. Here the one-eyed slept by day and rose with the hounds of hell to lead the wild hunt across a stormy, midnight sky. Here rode the nightmare and her ninefold who troubled the sleep of heroes and lesser men.

And here the warrior’s bane, the Morrigan ford, stamped the bloody linen into the stony streambed and scarlet stained the clear, mountain water.

His eyes met the dog’s. Arthur wondered how long it would take the big mastiff to starve and turn on him. But right now, the yellow-brown eyes were clear and the fine, dark ears were pricked as he stared into Arthur’s eyes.

Arthur looked left, but the dog looked right and pranced away over the corrugated surface of the ground. Indeed, the roots of the ancient oaks were so thick it was impossible to see the soil.

Uphill,
Arthur thought. That would be better. He might stand some chance of emerging above the tree line. But Bax moved downhill as though he knew what he was doing, and Arthur followed.

The forest grew thicker and the trees bigger. Arthur had, when he hunted and fished as a young man, often moved through almost trackless wilderness. He had never seen a forest without game trails. This one had none. Walking amounted to clambering, sometimes slipping over the root system of one giant oak, later another, an exhausting task. But Bax led him on, seeming to know where he was going. So Arthur followed.

Sometimes he paused to drink at one pool or another formed by the tree roots. The water was tannic and left a bitter taste in his mouth, making him feel as though he hadn’t drunk at all, since his thirst seemed unassuaged. Once he found a large acorn still in its cup. Its shell gleamed with a rich brown glow. But when he picked it up, the letters—or whatever sort of symbol they were—flared into the palms of his hands as they had when he cupped the water in the mountain meadow. The acorn vanished in a puff of smoke.

The dread forest tortured him with its sameness. The trees, all oaks, were alike and the same kind of oak. There was none of the individuality and variety of a normal forest. Above, the fog lingered, seeming sometimes too thin, and once he believed he saw the distant orb of the noon sun through the blowing swaths of vapor.

Bax seemed expert at picking a path, and since Arthur had only the dog’s instinct (if instinct it were) to depend upon, he followed. At some time in the afternoon, he realized the wood through which he struggled was growing darker and darker.

Night,
he thought. This was its only intimation here. No sunsets or sunrises, only damp, dripping trees, fog, and an encroaching blue twilight that slowly became thick, smothering, impenetrable darkness.

When he could no longer see, he found Bax had returned and lain down on a bed of tree roots. He knelt, and as animals will, Bax invited him to put his arm around his body and share its warmth. He did and found he was so tired that even the bumpy surface of tree roots seemed comfortable. His mouth had been dried by the bitter water and he was a bit frightened that even though his lips felt leathery, he felt neither hunger nor thirst.

This terrible forest couldn’t continue forever, could it? But then his mind replied,
Why not? For some it had.
And they lost their way and wandered until they died or perhaps even didn’t die but struggled forever, each day a perfect copy of the last, dull misery forevermore.

But Bax was warm and Arthur was lying against his back. The dog gave his hand a swipe with his moist tongue.

Why, if the only peace left is sleep,
he thought,
why let me sleep?
And he did.

The first gray light woke him, and he found the hollows formed by the twisted roots around him filled with water. Again, both he and Bax drank. As he looked around at the fog curling in the treetops, the ancient trees that pressed in on him and the strange pale light that was all the omnipresent fog would let through, he thought,
I will lose my sense of time in this place.

He hadn’t been burned badly by the fire that drove him into the dark forest, but he did have a raw patch of skin on his right arm. It was healing now and itched. He scratched it idly and felt the sharpness of his nails.

Yes,
he thought. Then he used his sharp right thumbnail to slice a mark into his skin on the inside of his left forearm. One today, one tomorrow—that keeps track of time.

Then, oddly, he felt stronger than he had yesterday. He felt no hunger and wondered if the massive dog Bax was also free of the need to eat. The dog stood quietly on the high roots of the tree before him. Then, when Arthur indicated he was ready to begin walking, Bax led him away into the dark-pillared, misty forest.

He decided he was stronger because he found it easier to deal with the trees. At first he had seen them as nightmare shapes in the gloom, hemming him in. But now, as he had grown to know them, he became expert at finding footholds among the multiple twisted roots that formed the valleys between each mountainous trunk.

Just as well, because the ground began to slope downward more and more steeply and the thick, tortured roots became a stair. Often he found himself stepping down the root system of one while looking into the crown of another. Sometimes the fog blew away for a second and he looked at the daunting view—a precipice clad in the living armor of the giant oaks that drove impossibly massive roots into the stony soil and held the iron-hard trunks and shiny, reflective green leaves to a foggy sky. Strong, they were strong in the way that the trees that composed the tower were. Burgeoning life-forms that ever renewed themselves, century after century, millennium after millennium, for all time.