Hidden Things

Hanging from the thatched ceiling were many rows of assorted rations; carrots, bushels of herbs, fruit with leaves left attached. Half-shadowed by gray light filtering from a wide, oval entrance. By it, over a cooking pot, stood a being round in the waist and wearing a tunic and pants that concealed black hair spotted white. It whistled a melody through its teeth while it cut vegetables and when he woke the boy recognized the tune. He crept out of a lumpy cushion raised above a colossal branch that cut meandering through the wood paneled floor like a pulsated vein and he hugged his back on the curved wall. His neck hurt. The creature appeared not to notice him and in trepidation the boy plotted fast his method of slipping away unseen. But something was missing. His boots were tied together and set aside his neatly folded coat and his pack preceded them. They were there prepared for him, but still it was missing.

"Oh, you're awake. You were out for a good six hours." Said the creature. It turned and saw the boy huddled and gripping the hut framework, petrified. It took a seat on a distended barrel and welcomed him as the child stood in his sweat and his head darting about. It smiled around kind eyes and a warmth imbued in all its rounded features. "I have some stew if you're hungry."

"Wh-what..." The boy said, exasperated.

"It's okay, you don't have to be scared. My name's Wes. This is a safe place. We live here, my people and me." Its soft language was gentle and would pass identical for a human's if not for a low, underpinned growl doubled with the words. An aberrant beast-man, cordial and civilized though he seemed.

"Where's the sword?" Spouted the boy almost instinctively.

"Its safe."

"Where?"

"Your friend took it with him to meet our leader."

"I'm not supposed to let anyone take it."

"That's what your friend said."

"Then why did he?"

"He trusts us. He told us everything he could about you."

"Everything?"

"About your hometown and what happened. How you were lost at sea and washed up on the shore of the old grottoes. And about that sword and what it means for all of us. We won't hurt you, believe me."

"You tried to kill me."

"You won't get this from the others so I'll have to be the one to apologize for the greeting you received. We don't get a lot of visitors like you and the ones we do are rarely peaceful. They were just being careful, honest."

"Being careful." He relaxed his curled posture and squinted. "Did you see anybody chasing us? Like on horses."

"No. Not that they told me. But you are safe here as I said. These old trees have stood for generations and no invader has ever broken through. At least that's what they say." Again he smiled, his accented placation feeling sincere in spite of his barbarian tribe.

"I don't feel safe. I haven't felt like that for a while. You're trying to make me but its not gonna work."

"No, I guess not." He appeared hurt in some precise manner, without irony and deceit.

"My head is spinning. Everybody keeps pulling me everywhere..." He rubbed the top of his head and the short curls of his hair stood disarranged.

"I'm here to help. That's all I'm here for."

"I want you to take me to Cale. I gotta get back to the sword. Can you do that?"

"Okay."

The boy put on his boots and followed Wes out of the kitchen and into the gray mist buoyant among the redwood towers. He breathed it into his lungs and faint aromas of burning spit fires and he felt rejuvenated and a touch woozy upon seeing the height at which the balcony stood. The hut had been erected and shaped around the limb of an ancient goliath stretching its many arms in a jangled spiral pattern up to a mushroomed canopy that presided like the crescendo of the whole forest. Bigger than anything. Bound up by many ropes and pulley systems and structures nailed and built out from the calcified bark. They were houses, alight from within like floating kerosene lamps strung together by bridges. All interwoven and collated from the tree and its shoulders and its denizens' handiwork. Vines and boughs hung low and reached lesser neighboring tributaries and their fingers patterned a dense boundary chassis, shadowing and encasing the commune.

The boy stopped and stared. But the moment was sullied by the halting faces of deformities sprouting out and around the flora. They had the myriad figure of woodland animals but with a stature and intricacy like his own and stood upright in hand-fashioned clothing. Solid colored fabric seeming foolish, unnecessary, but oddly fitting. He could make out recognizable sentience behind their gape and he couldn't prevent himself from gawking back at them, their dichotomous forms a challenge to grasp in the open air.

They walked up steps affixed to the branches and cliff wall. Cliffs made from marbled timber and polished terrace with no safety measure to stop the hard and easy fall. Below them the populous scurried back and forth, up and down along their architecture. On the ground floor there were meals being prepared at tables and some were sitting in chairs eating with utensils. Twitching faces and rotational chewing. Clothes lines twined from branch to branch and the rain sweat beaded off of them. Still others scrubbed linen in wash basins while their offspring clamored against each other in mud around the perpetual campsites. Every now and again one would come in near to the boy and wrinkle its snout and murmur opinions indecipherable. It occurred to the child that they weren't so unlike his neighbor friends who on dark and electric autumn nights would dress up as ghouls and beasts and skitter the town square. Wanting somewhere in them to be those things, however brief. When he saw them this way he wasn't so scared. Their garb and bipedal affectations were mere costume, a game of dress-up played with enough conviction to make it real. The pretend made physical and no monsters to behold.

*****

As they approached a large compartment, one furthest up the monolith, the boy's legs and vertigo began to stifle the ascension. 

"We're nearly there." Said Wes, unimpeded by the height.

"Good", the boy said.

Behind the steps was an opening and a wide pod with a perforated ceiling and a seat curled up and grown from the varicose stemming on the floor, peppered by strands of light sifting through. A voice was there also, gruff and booming, and a hulking body attached to it lumbering in all dimensions only obscured by a draping coat of multiple hues. Cale accompanied it and was dwarfed by the massive being, possessing in him even more the stature of a child. A mound of fur and claw like a grizzly bear. By him were two others, svelte and lanky and brandishing polearms and capes. The boy could see immediately that the bear was a venerated leader of a kind, bigger than all the rest and stronger. The ones at his side must have been guardsmen for their movements were economic and rigid. Already a conversation emanated and the voice bellowed.

"... There was never peace. Never. Not even in the old days before their people came and took up their walls. Before they were here to fight we battled each other." The bear said, consonants cracking and grinding.

"But there can be. This has to be the way. You are unified now like you never were and your quarrel is long gone. It will not be as it was then. It is better now, isn't it?" Cale pleaded. His weapons were elsewhere and he stood on a knot to shorten the distance between himself and the bear. Legs bowed and back arched and hands in front of him pantomiming his words.

"Perhaps. Or perhaps it is no different. We ate one another once. When we didn't walk and speak like they do. Preying and hunting with no thoughts to hold us. They lorded over on moral pillars. But when we rose and met them upright on two legs we saw the same way of life. Killing to live."

One of his watchmen, a white hare lean and steely, pointed toward the antechamber and their expectant guests. Wes and the boy stood with their arms to their sides in a quiet patience and approached the bear and his company when given notice.

"Ah, yes. Good of you to join us." The bear said, increasing his tenor.

"Hello Caius." Said Wes.

"And who might this be?" The bear asked, footsteps pounding and shaking.

"I'm Gavin." The boy said, trying his best not to tremble.

"Are you alright?" Cale asked, stepping down from his platform and consoling.

"I'm fine. Where's the sword?"

It lay on a widened pulpit extending from the roots and the articulated kudzu and the cypress leaves enshrouded it. The boy took to it and put his palm on the scabbard and smoothed it and looked back at Cale. "Why did you take it?" He said.

"I had to show it to them. I knew they wouldn't try and take it."

"You said it had to stay with me. You said."

"I'm sorry. It was the only way I could earn their trust. You're not hurt?"

"I said I'm fine."

"Stop doting the child, Cale." The bear interceded. "We stand in the presence of greatness, isn't that right?" Its speech loomed over the boy.

"... I don't know." The boy said.

"The immortal's told me you are the one to save us all, little man. Cut down the ancient enemy with this weapon here. Do you deny it?"

The boy wouldn't respond.

"Do I frighten you, child? Is it my teeth? My speech?" He knelt down close and the rolls under his neck met the boy's forehead. Heavy, rank breathing out of his nostrils, wider and deeper than his penny eyes. Sedate calm belying his mammoth body. Sheer weight and an ursine engine turning within. He pulled back and a cornered sneer bore a fang, discolored at the tip. "... DO I?" It roared and the sound knocked the boy down and enveloped him from behind.

The boy cowered and the bear grimaced in vague disappointment or pity. No hearty warrior here. But when the child stood up again he took the sheathed blade from the vine and jabbed toward the bear and grunted a battle call.

"I know what you are!" The boy said, his hands gripping the leather and his footing braced. "I'm not afraid of you."

"And why is that?"

"You can't kill me."

"So sure are you?"

"You won't no matter what."

The bear recoiled and staggered up on his feet. He looked at the boy at his knees, his ruddy and simple bravery. Unwieldy, minute. A manifest charade struck at an expectant truth, a hoped-for reality. "There may be fire in you after all." He said. "But if you wish to fight you might want to unsheathe the blade first." His head leaned back into the folds in his neck and from his maw a laugh came out more voluminous even than the roar and alarming in its own way.

"Now, Cale. What was it you were asking of me?" The bear said.

"We need help." The boy said, lowering the weapon.

"The question wasn't for you. If you're to be a savior you'll need show respect too."

"Provisions. Food, water." Cale said. "Travel supplies. There won't be many outposts on the mountain."

"Done. Is that it?"

"No. We were told you have a map detailing the routes to the far wastelands. Where we have to go."

"It is true we have a map. But it can't offer certainty. None are alive today who've step foot in that world, let alone charted its tack."

"Then why keep it?"

"Call it a precaution."

"Well we haven't another choice. We need it."

The bear spoke in a coarse and guttural language to Wes and he went to a compartment behind the entwined chair. A carved and sanded and polished brown chest that he lifted by its bronze grips and opened with a latch unbound by lock or key. The stained and frayed parchment was tied at several points by dull red cords and it was passed to Cale.

"Careful. It's very old. Maybe even older than you." The bear said. "Young Wes here has been steward of it as his father once was. If there were anyone who could decipher it it would be him. Now if that is all you need you are welcome to stay the night before you leave."

"That isn't all."

"How do you mean?"

"We can't go alone." The boy said. "We need travelers to come with us and help us."

"I have given you what you have asked. But that I cannot do". The bear said, turning round to face the seat.

"And why not?" Cale said. "The road will be long and dangerous and you cannot expect us to make it by ourselves."

"You ask to take from my people. Yes, on a hard road. And a deadly one. You ask me to sentence them to suffer in places far from their home where our kind is not welcome. On what. Good faith? It is not enough. I have granted what belief I have."

"How can you say that? If we fail all are doomed. Everyone, no matter the tribe. It will come to your doorstep and you cannot stop it. Why can't you try? What can you lose that could compare?"

"We are few. Hidden that we may survive. It has taken so many years to have that. To be separate and distant to live and to grow. Crossing that line threatens our way of life. No. You are free to live and die however you choose. Do not pull my people with you. It is your burden alone if there be one at all."

"It's not his." The boy said. He wore the weapon slung over his shoulder and held the end with his left hand. "It's mine. Just mine." He walked closer to Cale. "They said I'm supposed to kill somebody. I don't want to but they said I'm the only one who can. They say he's bad." He looked at Cale. "Do you know what'll happen if I don't? Bad things? You don't really know. You just say you do."

"You're right, I don't know." Cale said. "But I believe."

"But why?"

He paused and put his gloved hand on his collar and down the leafy folds in his tunic. Of a thing peculiar and alien to the child. His barbed ears stuck from the dirty hair and the ageless complexion. A knowing, impish smirk. "... My charmed life. Always listening to the wind without care. I never had a thought to give it before you came. Someone new. Why else would I have lived so long? Why else would the waves spit you on my doorstep? My little realm... You've shaken me, you see?"

"I don't... I don't know what to think." The boy said, looking elsewhere. "But maybe if I can do it I can go home. Maybe you can too and anyone else who has to go." He faced the bear. "But if nobody else comes we won't make it. We... I'll die. Then it won't matter."

The bear heard their words and sat entrenched on the coronate stalks with his tribesman still beside nameless and silent. "I... I suppose you will."

"Is that what you want?"

"I want protection."

"As I told you," Cale said. "This is the way."

"Your belief is admirable, Cale. But there are none here who share it."

"... I do." Wes said, his hands held at his front and quiet patience abound in it.

"What?"

"If Cale believes maybe he is. He's an outsider. Not like the rest."

"That makes no difference."

"I think it does. I think it would be a big mistake for us not to try. It could even make amends with his kind and ours."

"What would you have me do then?" A pensive spirit holding the high seat and unmoving.

"Help them."

"And you'd be the one to do it, hmm? Go with them to the bitter end?"

Wes furrowed his snout and looked to the sylvan base as though to cement a decision in his head and brought it back up at the bear. "I think I would, yes. It's the right thing to do."

The bear breathed in deep and husky and his claws formed a pyramid shape underneath his chin. For a time he said nothing and all that was heard was the green clatter of limb and leaf. "... I won't condemn my people. But if any wish it I will let them leave with you, Cale. I... can't control them. No more than I can control you. They are unrestrained. It is their nature, as it is mine."

Cale bowed and without order they departed the chamber. Wes followed and left the bear settled and flanked within white beams like exhibited sculptures. The two outlanders were given quarter in a vacated pod like a giant hollowed-out seed and low to the ground. In the fruitful stream interwoven through the camps the boy doused his clothes and ran a bath in a basin carved from a gourd. Young ones scurried around him and he splashed the water and laughed with them. He broke bread and ate grain and berries with his fingers dipped into a halved walnut husk and they spoke not a word he could understand. But they were there and they gave food and a soft place to lie when the dusk departed. From a cutout hole in the bedded capsule he watched the hundred nightlights blow out hooked on black strings and the spread needles. Swirling upward and out. The right thing, he thought. The right thing. Not the safe thing or the smart thing or even the best thing. Never before had he looked on where he was and the steps that lead there. Those few short hours rife with loss and pain. Count them. I am alone now. The only one. But I'm not. And everyone is depending on me. I don't wanna be here. I wanna go home. I don't believe. Don't believe. Know. Do the right thing. The right thing. The boy lied with his mind aflame and his gaze as wide as it could be. There in the dark he whimpered alone.