Foregone
They gave him a stick with harsh bristles on one end that fanned out to the sides and whipped a milky paste in a leaf and dipped the end in. Miming brushing one's teeth they handed it to him. It tasted sour and had a slimy mucous consistency and mushed under his tongue like congealed grease. He gagged and spat it out in the dirt. One snickered and the other handed him the leaf and both walked away and he balled it up and tossed it a short distance. In the pot sitting in his lap he cleaned the brush and gave heed to breaking and throwing it away but instead put it in his pocket. They had no mirror, of course, but they had metal patterned distinct among the wooden everything. Hammered scraps and varied appliances dispersed and relegated. They could be stolen, he thought. These could be like the horse-men of the plains, like marauding thieves full up of their own caravan. But they weren't men. They hadn't the greed of men. The pride perhaps but not the appetite.
He sat the pot down and put on the river-washed socks draped and drying over the sill. A little moist but he left them on and squished his boots over them. Boots scuffed and the fragmented tread pattern caked with mud rendered immovable. But still they possessed the veneer of when he first wore them. Her sitting tall beside him on the cobbler's bench and the painted blush on her cheek. The raw knuckles entwined in his fingers and the hunched man threading the laces, a mallet hanging from his apron in the dim corner. Polka dots on her blouse and quiet assurance. A size too big. He'll grow into them, she says. He rose from the pallet and looked it over before taking the sword and putting it over his shoulder again. Heavy but maybe not so much as before. He couldn't tell. He left his coat crumpled and suffocated under the pack and went out in the morning in his gray cotton shirt unbuttoned at the top.
He could see them below to the left around a great tree stump. He sat down and let his legs dangle over the logs and he felt the porch sway beneath the breeze and the rustle. The slight, taut croak of the giant tree. Suspended over the encampment and the lingering mist. When he looked up he could see sunshine perforated through the canopy and it cast a shadow random on the bottom floor. His own silhouette full of holes and flickering. Not so high up. He clutched the end of the scabbard with one hand and conjured up the gall to slip off. Much as he could, anyway. He inched himself right up to the edge and his back began to straighten and his legs stretched. He fell by force of counterfeit will and sheer brunt of gravity taking the responsibility from him. The boots pounded the ground and the shock reverberated clear through his feet and gathered about his ankles. A pebble or two lodged shallowly in his palm and the flat, rich soil left a florid imprint. He looked up on his hands and knees to see if they saw but they hadn't. Ever busy colluding round their conference table and he smirked as he got up and wiped his hands.
He walked to them crowded at the stump, their heads bowed and concentrated on a splayed document like they were honoring a holy text. It was the map, unfurled and laid sprawling over the better portion of the cut lumber surface with stones on its corners and their fingers prodding and careful not to touch too much. It was frayed at the edges and yellowed almost brown and of a substance closer on inspection to tattooed hide than ink-graced parchment. Creased in over a dozen squares and some of them barely attached. He passed behind Cale and Wes and another whose name and role he didn't know to their flank where he sat his crossed arms down and then his chin. "Morning." Said Wes.
"What're you doing?"
"We're formulating a route." Cale said. "Based on this map. How best to go from here and pass over the mountain." He scribbled on a slip of paper with an orange pencil; made lists and simple illustrations with labeled names. The writing was choppy and illegible, perhaps a whole other vernacular. The boy looked away and instead at the expanse of the map and its tiny lettering. Woodlands dense on the leftmost side and the beach a thin, vacillating margin as long as his thumb. The ocean. The great plains and the hill valleys taking much of the lower hemisphere and seized by a northern forest drawn darker and more ominous with an X marked and a crude etch of a devil's guise. "That's us." Said Wes.
The boy chuckled under his breath. "Doesn't look like you."
"We didn't make it." He spoke with an apologetic air and gripped a substantial compass, its chain twined through his fingers.
The boy lifted his head and propped his arms up on the stump to see all the way to the other side of the atlas. The storied mountains cleaved a jagged bank top to bottom and its thickness served as a halving divider of east and west, its loose ranges curving and broadening as they rose. The right side was much less varied as much as he could tell. An amorphous group of tremendous lakes broke pattern to the north and rivers ran into them and out again and their curvature and braided causeways were depicted with thin quill strokes. There were sketches of pointed huts of varying size scattered around. Farther south a few were much larger and built like the representations of whole cities but there were no identifiable names branded to anything nor a compass rose to chart. Despite the approximate detail it was the sparest of guides and rudimentary as though it was half finished or made purposefully vague and of little use at all. He glanced on to the small territory at the farthest edge, the upper left corner where the inking became faded and a dotted line denoted a postscript of shunned importance and he turned away before he could get a solid look. He turned from it and leaned on his elbow toward the others. "So this is it", he said. "The whole thing."
"As far as we're concerned." Cale said.
"It's not very big."
"It is, I can tell you."
At the far north a vast impasse of untamed wilderness and flourished rocky terrain ended the map. The traced border, two lines of bold black ceded all on down the rectangular portrait. At the bottom the land narrowed, tapered, and finally yielded to the sea and tectonic chunks smattered like amoebas.
"Like an island. Part of one."
"Everything's an island. Some are just bigger than others."
"Mine was. Where I'm from."
"A continent?"
"I guess. Never saw much of it."
"Then how did you know?"
"It's what they said. It was the whole world."
"There's more out there. Even more than this. Know that to save it is to save everything. All of them."
He put his head back down on his folded arms. "So where are we going?"
He took his pencil and arched over the map and pointed at the supposed haunted wood, his fingertips so lacquered with dirt they may have well been burned. "We're here now. The plan is to follow this river down and eastward." He slowly brought the pencil tip down with his words. "The mountains are most traversable at the middle. That's where we'll go at it."
The child looked at the middle peak, painted larger and more detailed than the rest. Standing high and imposing over all else, the icy cap and the clouds circling beneath it. "That's a long way."
"There are trade routes further south," Said Wes.
"Could we get a ride?"
"They haven't been used in a long time. But the trails should still be there."
The boy stood up again and kicked at the dirt a bit with his heel. "Then I guess we have to go soon."
"Soon as we're able." Cale said. "We've no idea how our enemy moves. We must be swift if we ever hope to contend with it."
"Do we have to go right now?"
Cale looked from his paper to the boy and then to the hurried campgrounds. The animals working and playing in the early dew and the chill. The first sun light low and golden on the ferns and corrugated bark, distant as it was from the fog and filtered. "No." He smiled again.
The boy walked from the stump toward the inner workings of the tent city and wandered a while, never veering far enough for Cale to vanish from view. The immortal. The only one like him here and even he was at a distance, a stranger. He watched among the beasts. A troupe laded water into a bucket from a stream and ferried it up a pulley almost higher than he could see and on the other side an emptied pail made its way back down and a spry creature was riding it. He could see many of these machines astride the bush columns, all rising and lowering again like upright train cars on an endless looping track. Wooden and vertical and rotating in tandem with each other. They transported necessities and construction materials to the hovels and they in turn took them further into the innumerable branches. Engineers, they were. Builders, cultivators, stewards of the earth. From behind he heard his name called. Wes was approaching. Some breakfast. He gave him a bowl and the child looked in it to see granola and blue berries, peanuts and green curved things that he didn't recognize. There was a spoon in it with a ring at the end and when he took it he was given a hollowed shell of water. "You must be a cook."
"I guess so. Something like that."
The boy found a downed and unoccupied log to sit on and he held the bowl on his left palm, his fingers wide like a spider around the domed base. He left the spoon dug into the mix and pinched out the nuts and the berries and ate them with his bare fingers. Wes had his prehensile claws stuck in the belt tied at his tunic and sniffed the air before sitting down next to him. The compass he held hung from its chain square on his chest. "We had chickens and pigs where I lived" The boy said. "That meant bacon and eggs for breakfast. You don't have meat and stuff like that."
"It's complicated for us. Not like it is for your people."
He looked to him while between chews and nodded. He stopped a moment. "I don't think so."
"No?"
"It'd be hard for anybody. I wouldn't wanna eat you."
"Well, thanks." He laughed. "Truth is there's no one else like us anywhere and most of us live here. We live off this land and it's all we have."
"By yourselves."
"It's how we survive. Just what we are, I suppose. I wouldn't know what to do with any pigs or chickens."
"What if they died? You wouldn't eat em?"
"We'd bury them. From whence they came, as they say."
He turned back to the thicket structures and their rotation and further to the golden latticework on the shrubbery that knelt between them. For a moment he considered the loneliness of these people having no seat in the kingdoms of animal or man. A cursed flock cast away and doomed to be alone and demonized, unlike any other. He watched one appear from behind as though from the invisible ether and stride to them, white as a snow peak he stood tall and austere and speaking to Wes in their dialect only. He wore a layered cuirass comprised of four hard plates shaped over his torso that moved and compressed with his lungs and an emerald cape fastened by a chain draping across two discs covering his shoulder blades. There was a long scar on his left temple that dug into the corner of the brow and a slight catch to his gait, both old trophies displayed unabashed from tenured skirmishes. His red eyes winced and narrowed amid the frosty plumes of his face and he led Wes away some paces to converse. The boy put the bowl down as they stammered to each other, the white one over the other with an authority like a seasoned relative bestowing unsolicited guidance. His fixed, straight posture and the harried tone in the sounds telling of his age and his status higher than that of his kinsman.
Wes returned. "He wants to come with us."
"Is he some kind of soldier?"
"He's a guardsman, a great warrior. He thinks its his duty to come."
"It isn't."
"He think it is."
He looked at him, his steely severity. He recognized him from the meeting chamber with the bear and the pedestal where he was mute and impassive as the rote structure. "Can he not speak English?"
"Not many of us do."
The boy stood and veered, orbiting Wes and the other. "Tell him he doesn't have to come if he doesn't want to."
Wes babbled and the white darted his scarlet gaze quick at the child and grunted a response. "He says he's coming".
"Why?"
"He says... He says he has to protect me."
The boy considered a moment and reckoned it was good to have him, whatever the reason. The warrior was called Elias and had been made a delegate of his own volition to escort Wes as a kind of emissary to the tribes across the mountain, those old rivals who had in complacent centuries all but forgotten the strife of the former age and dismissed their kind as hearsay and folklore in the mists of the untamed, imagined west.
"Is there no one else?" Cale said as he approached the three, his quiver strapped on his back and a length of rope coiled and tied round and gray as a spool of thread.
"I believe so." Said Wes.
"Well, if we're begging." He had the bound bow resting on the ground and straddled by his shoes pointed and strange. "A small band will be faster, harder to find." He addressed the boy solely. "Do you want to go now?"
"It's up to me?"
"Yours is the choice. How wrong would it be of me to take it away."
The child studied the two new allies and the slab of a trunk that bore the map and the road within, a sentence decreed for the long days and nights sure to unfurl without a known end. He didn't want to leave, of course. And he could cry and refuse and demand for it but he knew before long it would change nothing. They would go, eventually or otherwise, and he hadn't any power to prevent it. "Okay", he said and though he didn't show it filled him with a sinking feeling unlike he ever had. No strength to wade the bracing tide. He went back up to the room where his coat and his pack lay disheveled and he sat on the mattress, a knit cloth pouch filled with leaves and pine needles that they had prepared for him the night before. He settled as he touched the gourd wall and the sill and breathed in as if to catch the moment from its passing and hold on to it. For already he could sense how time evaporated and how fleeting was tranquility that soon the memory would be all there was. Add to the collection and keep for later use.
He took off the sword and put it on the cushion and he took his coat and shook it out and ran his arms into its sleeves and adjusted the collar, the fleece lining on the hood soured and freckled. He lifted the pack and he unbuckled the top flap open and checked the contents for any missing and when he was sure he rolled up the thin bedding he slept with and tied it with a few lengths of twine. He secured the roll underneath the flap and buckled it shut and surveyed the room a last time before hoisting the canvas parcel over his shoulder and walking out, the sword held by the scabbard and the boots dusting themselves on the boardwalk.
Already there was a congregation at the stump. Cale poised separate at their side and was binding the limbs of his bow in its own string and storing it with the quiver on his back, the bright feathers a mark on him always prominent and akin to innocence. A cloth wrap he wore around his neck wide enough to drape over the disheveled and littered coils of hair and make hidden the pricked ears and protect them from the rain if that was a concern to him. Wes was in the crowd arrayed in a full and burgundy poncho and clattering sentiments among the people while they touched his face and his garments rotating like the spoked turbine of a watermill. The one called Elias leaned by the ribbed and sheared hoof of a timber leg and observed, the cowl of his cloak holding his albino profile shadowed and disembodied. His arms were crossed bearing gauntlets with ornate engravings and a scaled undershirt dressed beneath the armor about his chest and truncated thighs. He stood on multi-jointed legs like little thin stilts, two keen pegs in a dark material bound as footwear of his people's custom. Slender and taller than most he stood, an elegant halberd lilting in his reach and proportioned much the same.
The boy came down and set his personals on the stump. Even before he could address the allies the mass of denizens swarmed and invaded him all around. They moved quickly, near wordless. Only the drumming of their padded feet on the dirt and the soft pine accompanying. Several gray in the beard and feminine in shape. In the maelstrom they took the weapon and were concealing and tying it in linen while they jabbed at the child's face with painted claws, drawing curves and spots with broad strokes. Touching, swiping. A swirl of hair and muddy patchwork. At some point he was handed a wool cap and a pair of gloves but he couldn't tell from where it came or had the chance to give thanks to any before the miasma had dissipated and scattered back to the disguised corners of the redwood as though it had never emerged at all.
"What was that?" He said.
"A goodbye." Wes was behind him made up with similar inscriptions running on his face but the others weren't. A bulbous rucksack knelt at his knee and he heaved it up onto his shoulders with help from Elias and carried the weight on a sturdy and tall walking stick with a balled end like a cudgel and seemed to double in size with the stocked boulder tied to his back. Certain pieces of gear were fastened to the outside of the pannier like a cooking pot and pan and tenting material swaddled between oak skewers and the jangling clack of them followed in a metallic rhythm as he walked. Cale appeared not to have stowed any provisions at all save his weapons and the accouterments on his body. There were a few small bags knotted on the cordage at his waist but their contents remained a mystery as were the limits of his stamina and need. Elias too carried very little. A rigid pouch to his side with food packed tight within overlayed leaves reinforced with strips of cedar hide and a canteen made from a corked gourd on the small of his back.
Cale had taken to the boy's pack and was attaching the veiled sword to its side, cording in his teeth and his knuckles. He took a stitched sleeve and threaded it to the right seam of the distended edge, squatting concentrated and making few incisions. When he was done he slid the blade in the pocket and jostled it some and put it back on the pedestal rolled on its backside. The child could feel the added heft to the burden and the awkward length of it exceeding down his leg and at times he would hold the silken tip to keep it from rocking in the steady march. There was a satchel filled with rations he managed a space for inside the pack and traded it for the canteen he took and with a rope wore to his left hip. He could see Wes had on him more food and water and a wide cleaver with a long handle tucked behind him hidden and he felt a disarming jolt when he noticed it as though he shouldn't have, its intended use a nervous possibility and conflicting an image of his friend.
Then they set their way forward, their gear and supplies ample, bound, and hoarded for what itinerary they could not know the tenure of nor the cruelty. For they were guided by arcane talismans and the withered, narrow proclivities of ghosts and old witnesses spinning for them a thread to follow into the unwelcoming world. Each of them with their own reason left spoken or otherwise if they even knew it at all. A diverted, disparate belief among them. They passed by the creatures jaunting along on moving, mechanic trapeze and other than a brief glance and pause they were met with no farewell, no regard. What was needed was given and the passage made secure and already they had moved on from it. Quiet. Tending to their gardens with their children on their backs. Along the way the boy saw the domed head of a smelter burrowed in a tree's spread undercarriage and a tribesman scooping in it coal or some equivalent while another billowed air inside with an accordion lung he stomped on. Orange heat gurgling and agitated through a lone port centered and breached. Contained magma lapped the hair from their brows and forearms as they extracted metal rods like coughed up tongues and flattened them against an anvil of a black earthen slab and staunched them tame in a cooling barrel. Gray steam roiled and enshrouded their faces and sucked in and out with their breath. Two headless, aproned craftsmen going at melted and shaped ingots alone with chisels and spades of their own making. And back in the iron went, hammered and heated on and over again until the edge was sharpened and a sheen polished in the fuller and it was counted and tossed with sheaves of other armaments.
They went a little farther to a rocky cavity gaped in an upturn in the forest floor where the foliage was thin and filthy walnut wheelbarrows slouched used and drug. A mattock pierced the ground in front of it and two extinguished torches branded the entrance a special landmark, a warning. There the elevated housing was gone and the machinery relegated away in the outskirts of the commune, the border a wall of trees pressed tight and interlocked together. Impassable, trackless. They stopped near it and the boy tried to parse the way through, the width of the openings like hairline slivers in the base boards and foundations so massive they were no more than mice halted by it. Then one plummeted from a guard post somewhere perched above wearing a full helmet and mask of oak and bark with swatches of moss inset on his mail vest so that he looked himself like an infant tree or the growth off of one with the myriad texture and color. Red and gold, purple and green. He led them to a wide gap in the root system of a particular tower and uncovered it with the pull of a vine geared about the carved spindle in a limb and the veil raised with its net of leaves and grass. Beneath there was a slope wide enough for five or so to walk side by side and at the bottom the watchman took a torch mounted to the tunneled earth and struck flint to it and its flickering aura went round in front of them in the catacomb. They huddled and strode through the burrowed fractals like a convoy of insects staying fast to the path, ordered, never slowing. They passed by empty maws of meandering hallways where the light would show the edges and the dim paling of shadow before it disappeared behind them as dark as before. A few others they met digging at the ground wall with their paws and utensils and their eyes like glass dollops caught the fire as it left. Black beads reflecting on their expressionless faces. Long they went and many turns there were to take but they came finally to a walled-off stop and he stuck the torch into a hole dug out for it on the wall. He gripped the handle on the left side of the levee and pulled and pushed it until it cracked loose and kept to it as it shucked open with the dirt raining and the gravel grinding. He stood there with both arms pressed to the hatch as they each exited and he managed a slight nod before he shut it behind them, a last bidding before they were left alone with themselves in the vacant, overrun groves.
The way back was concealed with stones set in an alcove hill and hanging weeds about the circle like a shut and cauterized artery that no outsider would ever breach. They spared a few minutes to bear themselves to the compass and the map that Wes took out and placed back into his hump pack with near-ceremonial care. East then southeast. A two day's road out of the forest, maybe more. Go until dark, continue at daybreak. Conserve the rations and drink your water. From here on we're on our own. Before heading the boy looked behind. Atop the hill the trees were patterned in a vague spearhead with the point standing shorter than the others and crooked, a siphon leading away from the village and into the thinned coppice cut by a running stream. The stream they would take to depart the woodland. Already the child missed the place, the insular safety. Good enough to stay. A place to hedge their boundaries with a generous people, to live and wait for better days. But they were out now and there could be no pause. How he wished for many things that the past had made irrevocable, of a home untouched and a life unsullied. He slouched in his step and his head bowed and he felt no spirit culled for thrill or duty. Cale was in front driving the line as was his habit and Elias was some paces behind, his head constantly shifting and watching like a sentry and his arm curled with the lance resting on his collar. Left in the middle were the boy and Wes, the latter behind and eyeing him as he trundled and balanced on rooted snags and sharp cuts of rock embedded in the mud. The ground leveled and spread with a verdant glade as he neared the child, flanking him on his left just out of periphery.
"I've never left home before", he said.
"Me neither."
"It's exciting, don't you think?"
"I guess."
"You don't seem so happy about it."
"I don't know how I feel."
"Why? I mean, you being who you are."
His eyes glanced back. Wes was sidling up to him and when his face returned to the ground they were equal in step. "Me being who I am."
"You get to be the hero. You get to save the world."
"But nobody asked me what I wanted."
"No, but why wouldn't you want that?"
He said nothing in return.
"If I were you I would enjoy it."
"... I'll try."
He sat the pot down and put on the river-washed socks draped and drying over the sill. A little moist but he left them on and squished his boots over them. Boots scuffed and the fragmented tread pattern caked with mud rendered immovable. But still they possessed the veneer of when he first wore them. Her sitting tall beside him on the cobbler's bench and the painted blush on her cheek. The raw knuckles entwined in his fingers and the hunched man threading the laces, a mallet hanging from his apron in the dim corner. Polka dots on her blouse and quiet assurance. A size too big. He'll grow into them, she says. He rose from the pallet and looked it over before taking the sword and putting it over his shoulder again. Heavy but maybe not so much as before. He couldn't tell. He left his coat crumpled and suffocated under the pack and went out in the morning in his gray cotton shirt unbuttoned at the top.
He could see them below to the left around a great tree stump. He sat down and let his legs dangle over the logs and he felt the porch sway beneath the breeze and the rustle. The slight, taut croak of the giant tree. Suspended over the encampment and the lingering mist. When he looked up he could see sunshine perforated through the canopy and it cast a shadow random on the bottom floor. His own silhouette full of holes and flickering. Not so high up. He clutched the end of the scabbard with one hand and conjured up the gall to slip off. Much as he could, anyway. He inched himself right up to the edge and his back began to straighten and his legs stretched. He fell by force of counterfeit will and sheer brunt of gravity taking the responsibility from him. The boots pounded the ground and the shock reverberated clear through his feet and gathered about his ankles. A pebble or two lodged shallowly in his palm and the flat, rich soil left a florid imprint. He looked up on his hands and knees to see if they saw but they hadn't. Ever busy colluding round their conference table and he smirked as he got up and wiped his hands.
He walked to them crowded at the stump, their heads bowed and concentrated on a splayed document like they were honoring a holy text. It was the map, unfurled and laid sprawling over the better portion of the cut lumber surface with stones on its corners and their fingers prodding and careful not to touch too much. It was frayed at the edges and yellowed almost brown and of a substance closer on inspection to tattooed hide than ink-graced parchment. Creased in over a dozen squares and some of them barely attached. He passed behind Cale and Wes and another whose name and role he didn't know to their flank where he sat his crossed arms down and then his chin. "Morning." Said Wes.
"What're you doing?"
"We're formulating a route." Cale said. "Based on this map. How best to go from here and pass over the mountain." He scribbled on a slip of paper with an orange pencil; made lists and simple illustrations with labeled names. The writing was choppy and illegible, perhaps a whole other vernacular. The boy looked away and instead at the expanse of the map and its tiny lettering. Woodlands dense on the leftmost side and the beach a thin, vacillating margin as long as his thumb. The ocean. The great plains and the hill valleys taking much of the lower hemisphere and seized by a northern forest drawn darker and more ominous with an X marked and a crude etch of a devil's guise. "That's us." Said Wes.
The boy chuckled under his breath. "Doesn't look like you."
"We didn't make it." He spoke with an apologetic air and gripped a substantial compass, its chain twined through his fingers.
The boy lifted his head and propped his arms up on the stump to see all the way to the other side of the atlas. The storied mountains cleaved a jagged bank top to bottom and its thickness served as a halving divider of east and west, its loose ranges curving and broadening as they rose. The right side was much less varied as much as he could tell. An amorphous group of tremendous lakes broke pattern to the north and rivers ran into them and out again and their curvature and braided causeways were depicted with thin quill strokes. There were sketches of pointed huts of varying size scattered around. Farther south a few were much larger and built like the representations of whole cities but there were no identifiable names branded to anything nor a compass rose to chart. Despite the approximate detail it was the sparest of guides and rudimentary as though it was half finished or made purposefully vague and of little use at all. He glanced on to the small territory at the farthest edge, the upper left corner where the inking became faded and a dotted line denoted a postscript of shunned importance and he turned away before he could get a solid look. He turned from it and leaned on his elbow toward the others. "So this is it", he said. "The whole thing."
"As far as we're concerned." Cale said.
"It's not very big."
"It is, I can tell you."
At the far north a vast impasse of untamed wilderness and flourished rocky terrain ended the map. The traced border, two lines of bold black ceded all on down the rectangular portrait. At the bottom the land narrowed, tapered, and finally yielded to the sea and tectonic chunks smattered like amoebas.
"Like an island. Part of one."
"Everything's an island. Some are just bigger than others."
"Mine was. Where I'm from."
"A continent?"
"I guess. Never saw much of it."
"Then how did you know?"
"It's what they said. It was the whole world."
"There's more out there. Even more than this. Know that to save it is to save everything. All of them."
He put his head back down on his folded arms. "So where are we going?"
He took his pencil and arched over the map and pointed at the supposed haunted wood, his fingertips so lacquered with dirt they may have well been burned. "We're here now. The plan is to follow this river down and eastward." He slowly brought the pencil tip down with his words. "The mountains are most traversable at the middle. That's where we'll go at it."
The child looked at the middle peak, painted larger and more detailed than the rest. Standing high and imposing over all else, the icy cap and the clouds circling beneath it. "That's a long way."
"There are trade routes further south," Said Wes.
"Could we get a ride?"
"They haven't been used in a long time. But the trails should still be there."
The boy stood up again and kicked at the dirt a bit with his heel. "Then I guess we have to go soon."
"Soon as we're able." Cale said. "We've no idea how our enemy moves. We must be swift if we ever hope to contend with it."
"Do we have to go right now?"
Cale looked from his paper to the boy and then to the hurried campgrounds. The animals working and playing in the early dew and the chill. The first sun light low and golden on the ferns and corrugated bark, distant as it was from the fog and filtered. "No." He smiled again.
The boy walked from the stump toward the inner workings of the tent city and wandered a while, never veering far enough for Cale to vanish from view. The immortal. The only one like him here and even he was at a distance, a stranger. He watched among the beasts. A troupe laded water into a bucket from a stream and ferried it up a pulley almost higher than he could see and on the other side an emptied pail made its way back down and a spry creature was riding it. He could see many of these machines astride the bush columns, all rising and lowering again like upright train cars on an endless looping track. Wooden and vertical and rotating in tandem with each other. They transported necessities and construction materials to the hovels and they in turn took them further into the innumerable branches. Engineers, they were. Builders, cultivators, stewards of the earth. From behind he heard his name called. Wes was approaching. Some breakfast. He gave him a bowl and the child looked in it to see granola and blue berries, peanuts and green curved things that he didn't recognize. There was a spoon in it with a ring at the end and when he took it he was given a hollowed shell of water. "You must be a cook."
"I guess so. Something like that."
The boy found a downed and unoccupied log to sit on and he held the bowl on his left palm, his fingers wide like a spider around the domed base. He left the spoon dug into the mix and pinched out the nuts and the berries and ate them with his bare fingers. Wes had his prehensile claws stuck in the belt tied at his tunic and sniffed the air before sitting down next to him. The compass he held hung from its chain square on his chest. "We had chickens and pigs where I lived" The boy said. "That meant bacon and eggs for breakfast. You don't have meat and stuff like that."
"It's complicated for us. Not like it is for your people."
He looked to him while between chews and nodded. He stopped a moment. "I don't think so."
"No?"
"It'd be hard for anybody. I wouldn't wanna eat you."
"Well, thanks." He laughed. "Truth is there's no one else like us anywhere and most of us live here. We live off this land and it's all we have."
"By yourselves."
"It's how we survive. Just what we are, I suppose. I wouldn't know what to do with any pigs or chickens."
"What if they died? You wouldn't eat em?"
"We'd bury them. From whence they came, as they say."
He turned back to the thicket structures and their rotation and further to the golden latticework on the shrubbery that knelt between them. For a moment he considered the loneliness of these people having no seat in the kingdoms of animal or man. A cursed flock cast away and doomed to be alone and demonized, unlike any other. He watched one appear from behind as though from the invisible ether and stride to them, white as a snow peak he stood tall and austere and speaking to Wes in their dialect only. He wore a layered cuirass comprised of four hard plates shaped over his torso that moved and compressed with his lungs and an emerald cape fastened by a chain draping across two discs covering his shoulder blades. There was a long scar on his left temple that dug into the corner of the brow and a slight catch to his gait, both old trophies displayed unabashed from tenured skirmishes. His red eyes winced and narrowed amid the frosty plumes of his face and he led Wes away some paces to converse. The boy put the bowl down as they stammered to each other, the white one over the other with an authority like a seasoned relative bestowing unsolicited guidance. His fixed, straight posture and the harried tone in the sounds telling of his age and his status higher than that of his kinsman.
Wes returned. "He wants to come with us."
"Is he some kind of soldier?"
"He's a guardsman, a great warrior. He thinks its his duty to come."
"It isn't."
"He think it is."
He looked at him, his steely severity. He recognized him from the meeting chamber with the bear and the pedestal where he was mute and impassive as the rote structure. "Can he not speak English?"
"Not many of us do."
The boy stood and veered, orbiting Wes and the other. "Tell him he doesn't have to come if he doesn't want to."
Wes babbled and the white darted his scarlet gaze quick at the child and grunted a response. "He says he's coming".
"Why?"
"He says... He says he has to protect me."
The boy considered a moment and reckoned it was good to have him, whatever the reason. The warrior was called Elias and had been made a delegate of his own volition to escort Wes as a kind of emissary to the tribes across the mountain, those old rivals who had in complacent centuries all but forgotten the strife of the former age and dismissed their kind as hearsay and folklore in the mists of the untamed, imagined west.
"Is there no one else?" Cale said as he approached the three, his quiver strapped on his back and a length of rope coiled and tied round and gray as a spool of thread.
"I believe so." Said Wes.
"Well, if we're begging." He had the bound bow resting on the ground and straddled by his shoes pointed and strange. "A small band will be faster, harder to find." He addressed the boy solely. "Do you want to go now?"
"It's up to me?"
"Yours is the choice. How wrong would it be of me to take it away."
The child studied the two new allies and the slab of a trunk that bore the map and the road within, a sentence decreed for the long days and nights sure to unfurl without a known end. He didn't want to leave, of course. And he could cry and refuse and demand for it but he knew before long it would change nothing. They would go, eventually or otherwise, and he hadn't any power to prevent it. "Okay", he said and though he didn't show it filled him with a sinking feeling unlike he ever had. No strength to wade the bracing tide. He went back up to the room where his coat and his pack lay disheveled and he sat on the mattress, a knit cloth pouch filled with leaves and pine needles that they had prepared for him the night before. He settled as he touched the gourd wall and the sill and breathed in as if to catch the moment from its passing and hold on to it. For already he could sense how time evaporated and how fleeting was tranquility that soon the memory would be all there was. Add to the collection and keep for later use.
He took off the sword and put it on the cushion and he took his coat and shook it out and ran his arms into its sleeves and adjusted the collar, the fleece lining on the hood soured and freckled. He lifted the pack and he unbuckled the top flap open and checked the contents for any missing and when he was sure he rolled up the thin bedding he slept with and tied it with a few lengths of twine. He secured the roll underneath the flap and buckled it shut and surveyed the room a last time before hoisting the canvas parcel over his shoulder and walking out, the sword held by the scabbard and the boots dusting themselves on the boardwalk.
Already there was a congregation at the stump. Cale poised separate at their side and was binding the limbs of his bow in its own string and storing it with the quiver on his back, the bright feathers a mark on him always prominent and akin to innocence. A cloth wrap he wore around his neck wide enough to drape over the disheveled and littered coils of hair and make hidden the pricked ears and protect them from the rain if that was a concern to him. Wes was in the crowd arrayed in a full and burgundy poncho and clattering sentiments among the people while they touched his face and his garments rotating like the spoked turbine of a watermill. The one called Elias leaned by the ribbed and sheared hoof of a timber leg and observed, the cowl of his cloak holding his albino profile shadowed and disembodied. His arms were crossed bearing gauntlets with ornate engravings and a scaled undershirt dressed beneath the armor about his chest and truncated thighs. He stood on multi-jointed legs like little thin stilts, two keen pegs in a dark material bound as footwear of his people's custom. Slender and taller than most he stood, an elegant halberd lilting in his reach and proportioned much the same.
The boy came down and set his personals on the stump. Even before he could address the allies the mass of denizens swarmed and invaded him all around. They moved quickly, near wordless. Only the drumming of their padded feet on the dirt and the soft pine accompanying. Several gray in the beard and feminine in shape. In the maelstrom they took the weapon and were concealing and tying it in linen while they jabbed at the child's face with painted claws, drawing curves and spots with broad strokes. Touching, swiping. A swirl of hair and muddy patchwork. At some point he was handed a wool cap and a pair of gloves but he couldn't tell from where it came or had the chance to give thanks to any before the miasma had dissipated and scattered back to the disguised corners of the redwood as though it had never emerged at all.
"What was that?" He said.
"A goodbye." Wes was behind him made up with similar inscriptions running on his face but the others weren't. A bulbous rucksack knelt at his knee and he heaved it up onto his shoulders with help from Elias and carried the weight on a sturdy and tall walking stick with a balled end like a cudgel and seemed to double in size with the stocked boulder tied to his back. Certain pieces of gear were fastened to the outside of the pannier like a cooking pot and pan and tenting material swaddled between oak skewers and the jangling clack of them followed in a metallic rhythm as he walked. Cale appeared not to have stowed any provisions at all save his weapons and the accouterments on his body. There were a few small bags knotted on the cordage at his waist but their contents remained a mystery as were the limits of his stamina and need. Elias too carried very little. A rigid pouch to his side with food packed tight within overlayed leaves reinforced with strips of cedar hide and a canteen made from a corked gourd on the small of his back.
Cale had taken to the boy's pack and was attaching the veiled sword to its side, cording in his teeth and his knuckles. He took a stitched sleeve and threaded it to the right seam of the distended edge, squatting concentrated and making few incisions. When he was done he slid the blade in the pocket and jostled it some and put it back on the pedestal rolled on its backside. The child could feel the added heft to the burden and the awkward length of it exceeding down his leg and at times he would hold the silken tip to keep it from rocking in the steady march. There was a satchel filled with rations he managed a space for inside the pack and traded it for the canteen he took and with a rope wore to his left hip. He could see Wes had on him more food and water and a wide cleaver with a long handle tucked behind him hidden and he felt a disarming jolt when he noticed it as though he shouldn't have, its intended use a nervous possibility and conflicting an image of his friend.
Then they set their way forward, their gear and supplies ample, bound, and hoarded for what itinerary they could not know the tenure of nor the cruelty. For they were guided by arcane talismans and the withered, narrow proclivities of ghosts and old witnesses spinning for them a thread to follow into the unwelcoming world. Each of them with their own reason left spoken or otherwise if they even knew it at all. A diverted, disparate belief among them. They passed by the creatures jaunting along on moving, mechanic trapeze and other than a brief glance and pause they were met with no farewell, no regard. What was needed was given and the passage made secure and already they had moved on from it. Quiet. Tending to their gardens with their children on their backs. Along the way the boy saw the domed head of a smelter burrowed in a tree's spread undercarriage and a tribesman scooping in it coal or some equivalent while another billowed air inside with an accordion lung he stomped on. Orange heat gurgling and agitated through a lone port centered and breached. Contained magma lapped the hair from their brows and forearms as they extracted metal rods like coughed up tongues and flattened them against an anvil of a black earthen slab and staunched them tame in a cooling barrel. Gray steam roiled and enshrouded their faces and sucked in and out with their breath. Two headless, aproned craftsmen going at melted and shaped ingots alone with chisels and spades of their own making. And back in the iron went, hammered and heated on and over again until the edge was sharpened and a sheen polished in the fuller and it was counted and tossed with sheaves of other armaments.
They went a little farther to a rocky cavity gaped in an upturn in the forest floor where the foliage was thin and filthy walnut wheelbarrows slouched used and drug. A mattock pierced the ground in front of it and two extinguished torches branded the entrance a special landmark, a warning. There the elevated housing was gone and the machinery relegated away in the outskirts of the commune, the border a wall of trees pressed tight and interlocked together. Impassable, trackless. They stopped near it and the boy tried to parse the way through, the width of the openings like hairline slivers in the base boards and foundations so massive they were no more than mice halted by it. Then one plummeted from a guard post somewhere perched above wearing a full helmet and mask of oak and bark with swatches of moss inset on his mail vest so that he looked himself like an infant tree or the growth off of one with the myriad texture and color. Red and gold, purple and green. He led them to a wide gap in the root system of a particular tower and uncovered it with the pull of a vine geared about the carved spindle in a limb and the veil raised with its net of leaves and grass. Beneath there was a slope wide enough for five or so to walk side by side and at the bottom the watchman took a torch mounted to the tunneled earth and struck flint to it and its flickering aura went round in front of them in the catacomb. They huddled and strode through the burrowed fractals like a convoy of insects staying fast to the path, ordered, never slowing. They passed by empty maws of meandering hallways where the light would show the edges and the dim paling of shadow before it disappeared behind them as dark as before. A few others they met digging at the ground wall with their paws and utensils and their eyes like glass dollops caught the fire as it left. Black beads reflecting on their expressionless faces. Long they went and many turns there were to take but they came finally to a walled-off stop and he stuck the torch into a hole dug out for it on the wall. He gripped the handle on the left side of the levee and pulled and pushed it until it cracked loose and kept to it as it shucked open with the dirt raining and the gravel grinding. He stood there with both arms pressed to the hatch as they each exited and he managed a slight nod before he shut it behind them, a last bidding before they were left alone with themselves in the vacant, overrun groves.
The way back was concealed with stones set in an alcove hill and hanging weeds about the circle like a shut and cauterized artery that no outsider would ever breach. They spared a few minutes to bear themselves to the compass and the map that Wes took out and placed back into his hump pack with near-ceremonial care. East then southeast. A two day's road out of the forest, maybe more. Go until dark, continue at daybreak. Conserve the rations and drink your water. From here on we're on our own. Before heading the boy looked behind. Atop the hill the trees were patterned in a vague spearhead with the point standing shorter than the others and crooked, a siphon leading away from the village and into the thinned coppice cut by a running stream. The stream they would take to depart the woodland. Already the child missed the place, the insular safety. Good enough to stay. A place to hedge their boundaries with a generous people, to live and wait for better days. But they were out now and there could be no pause. How he wished for many things that the past had made irrevocable, of a home untouched and a life unsullied. He slouched in his step and his head bowed and he felt no spirit culled for thrill or duty. Cale was in front driving the line as was his habit and Elias was some paces behind, his head constantly shifting and watching like a sentry and his arm curled with the lance resting on his collar. Left in the middle were the boy and Wes, the latter behind and eyeing him as he trundled and balanced on rooted snags and sharp cuts of rock embedded in the mud. The ground leveled and spread with a verdant glade as he neared the child, flanking him on his left just out of periphery.
"I've never left home before", he said.
"Me neither."
"It's exciting, don't you think?"
"I guess."
"You don't seem so happy about it."
"I don't know how I feel."
"Why? I mean, you being who you are."
His eyes glanced back. Wes was sidling up to him and when his face returned to the ground they were equal in step. "Me being who I am."
"You get to be the hero. You get to save the world."
"But nobody asked me what I wanted."
"No, but why wouldn't you want that?"
He said nothing in return.
"If I were you I would enjoy it."
"... I'll try."
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