Trespassers

Gavin drank from his canteen and ate pinches of bread as Cale crouched in a bush and fished for berries. The ones he knew to be edible were grouped in a wide leaf upheld on his palm and handed to the boy. They were a dark purple and almost bitterly sour but they'd be ample and rare sustenance for the labyrinth they found themselves in.

"Eat some of these." he said. "Something different than wet bread at least."

"What about you?" the boy asked.

"I'll be fine. There should be food where we're going."

"Should be?"

"Will be."

"Good." He looked to the rear boundary and the grasslands therein.

"We go until the trees are like towers. Then they will show themselves to us."

"They will?"

"... They should."

There were eleven berries in total and the boy forced four of them down while puckering his face. Cale took a stem from the plant and with it tied those remaining in a pouch and placed that alongside what morsels were left of the bread and sheathed both in a cloth package. The boy nestled it snugly in his rucksack alongside the canteen made from rounded leather and little bronze lamp still filled with oil. He took the lamp out and shook it a bit. A last remaining fragment from a past life.

"Those men back there", the boy said. "They were bandits weren't they."

"They won't find us", Cale spoke. "Men don't venture through these woods."

"You don't know that. You've never been here."

"I know enough. This is not their territory. It's too dangerous for them. Those here aren't very welcoming to strangers."

"And for us?"

"They know we're coming. You shouldn't worry about it... Just let me talk to them." He smiled a leavening smile.

"We can't let anybody take anything."

"I know." He took the sword from where it lay on a pile of dead branches and handed it to Gavin. "This least of all."

For the first time the boy considered what power he held, if any. The weapon more than a treasure and he its coveted master. He thought about the scalped horse in the field, like the clydesdale his father petted in the stable by the windmill. Colossal and stoic. Maybe he could have saved it had they come sooner. Stood against the rugged caravan in authority and with the sword sent them back to wherever they came from. Maybe he could still.

He put his pack back on with the blade in tow, his mind present with those brave fables. Now that's all they could be. Only youth's passing imagination. Of horseback abandon and fearless determination personified.

*****

This forest was unlike the choking confusion that the child had first gnashed through, finding there atop the overgrowth and ruins an advocate enigmatic as the terrain. These trees were spread and brawny and rained down a bedrock of pine needles with the season's wind. Somewhere among them there'd be an allotment of solace, however small, and the constant fear wavering in its intimacy would be subsided. He crept and panted like a dog, thirsty to greet its deliverer.

There was no cut swath of a trail to be seen in any direction. Sequoia and redwood like pillars meandering in a coliseum without walls. The boy looked up at the canopy, scraping the sky and vertigo-inducing. He stopped and glanced back down to Cale who was walking in the foreground with apprehension in his body. Before Gavin had a chance to say anything Cale ceased and turned. Very quietly he said: "We're here."

"I can't see them." The child said.

"Don't look around because they have us surrounded."

"Where are they?"

"Stay close behind me."

"What're you gonna do?"

"I'll walk forwards and put my hands in the air. But you don't have to. I'll get their attention."

Cale did as he said and called out to the elusive void for the phantoms to show. At first there was nothing save the breath slipping among the timber and the birds and insects and their countless niches. Then, shapes stared to manifest and intersperse between shrubbery and trunks, camouflaged with wooden plating and forested garb. As they neared more began cascading down from the treetops and fashioning a circle around what was to be their prey. Some wore masks made out of slabs of auburn bark ornamented with jittery twigs like antlers or a demon's horns. The boy could see shears of furred skin underneath the costuming on their tall, slender builds. One stepped forward to Cale, still with his hands up and shaking, and removed his mask to show his head, oval in shape with a wet nose and thick bridge rounded with the skull. On top were two ears sticking straight up, gaudy and unmistakable. A creature neither animal nor man but a savage amalgamation thereof.

Its hand forced Cale to his knees. The boy hadn't the time to gasp before he was swept up from behind by hirsute arms and a knife was brought just underneath his jaw and held there. Pawed hands but with digits articulated like a man's. Painted markings on the armor decolletage. His whole body tensed rigid and completely.

"No! Don't hurt the child! Please!" Cale shouted at the chimeral assailants.

The one tangent to Cale, a chieftain perhaps, spoke something to the one holding the boy but it was in an aboriginal tongue and neither seemed to give any consideration to them both.

"Please don't hurt the boy..." Cale pleaded again. "We are not your enemies... Please."

There was a hesitation. Cold, trembling. A little glint hew into the chieftain's amber-colored eyes, stern and sullen though he was. He approached the child and as he did Gavin's mute desperation turned to panic and he began writhing from within the abductor's grasp like a feral animal even among his present company. His captor wrestled with him before tightening his arm and putting him in a sleeper hold. And so he slipped away in the rabid struggle to his ally's screams and their foe's offsetting silence.