by P. J. Atwater
in Issue 135, April 2023
“My good friend, I pray you take leave of this madness,” said Rickus, the small Alleenian. He wrung his hands like a pair of clammy rags. The young Mutangarder ignored him. Towering in the autumn breeze, red and firm as the mountains in which he was bred, his green eyes gazed pensively over the sacred wood. The distant trees seemed to return their own pensive glare.
Sliding a wet flop of jet hair from his forehead, Rickus tried again. “Hear me, Rød, if you have indeed been my friend these past months, traveling in this realm where we both are strangers. You are misled, either by fancy or by greed–”
“A treasure worth more than gold,” the stony voice of the red-haired youth rumbled. “That is what the sages say lies beyond those trees.”
“… ‘A beast guards the treasure, and the treasure guards the beast,’” the short man reminded him, finishing the prophecy. “You are ignorant of the ways of these Western sages. They speak as in riddles, with layers of meaning. If you hear only what they seem to say, you will be misled.”
Rød turned on him. “What ill can come of discovering treasure?” He was defensive, yet his emerald eyes flared with an almost flippant spark.
“And what of the beast guarding it? It is ominous.”
“‘Omens,’ you say? Have you forgotten the omen I received from the oracle last spring?”
“I have not, though we seem to remember the seer’s words differently.”
“We recall the same words: ‘Rød of Mutangard shall be known as the Lanseritter, and shall ride as a great general.” His thick hands creaked with militant pride about the shaft of his lance.
Again, Rickus finished for him: “… and he shall perish, bathed in blood, surrounded by enemies,” he recited with dread; but Rød remained sanguine.
“Indeed, we remember the same; and I am not yet a general.”
“The other half may yet come true.”
“Yet I am not so ignorant as you assume. When I was in the city, I heard the philosophers teach about the Fates. I saw plays, the great tragedies you retell. Do you remember the fate of King Lajos, who learned through prophecy that his only son would live to overthrow him? He ordered the Prince murdered, but the boy survived, became a man, and took bloody revenge. If I am fated to die in battle, must I flee from battle? Nay–I must go into it. And I must find riches enough to lead an army.”
Rickus demurred, totally stumped. The youth indeed seemed to have embraced the stoical logic of the Alleenians – insinuating it smoothly into his alien and barbaric ethos.
“I need know only one thing,” Rød went on; “Will Rickus of Atteno ride to join the glory–or shall he flee from Fate like wicked King Lajos?”
Without the Atteni’s awareness, they had begun moving. The youth’s intractable tread led them down the sloping vale toward the edge of the wood. The morning sun yearning toward the zenith passed between two distant crests, and its golden beam sprayed through the mountain mists to dapple the spires of a towering citadel built among the valley stones at the foot of the forest. Rickus pointed to the granite walls, seizing on one last track to aim his friend away from his folly.
“None go into that forest, save the youths who dwell in that temple,” he argued. “They dwell from childhood within that tower as in a city, never leaving, until one by one they go into the woods to be swallowed up.”
This time Rød finished the thought, recounting the rumor they both had heard. “The parents of the village give them over willingly to the priests. They are raised to learn the duties of their cult, the powers of their mysterious god. When the signs in Heaven are right, a youth who has come of age is sent into the trees, to never return. It is believed they are transformed, and join the protectors of the forest.”
Rickus stopped walking. He could tell from the youth’s unchanging gait and tone that his warning had failed. “I return to the village,” he said: his final appeal. “I will wait for you, if I can. But I fear they will question me.”
“They surely will. You should not go back.”
Helpless, Rickus stood until the sun was high, and the shadow of the temple tower passed from his feet. He watched the silent spot in the treeline where his friend had vanished. He felt again that his gaze was returned – and not by eyes on the tower wall.
Though the sun was rising, under the canopy the forest seemed locked in twilight. The trees were all pine, yet drifts of brown leaves from places beyond rolled like desert dunes across the low, shuddering growth. The must of rotting needles wafted from each crunching step. Rød of Mutangard gripped his spear, his senses alert, his heart thrilled with the sin of trespass and the uncanny threat of exposure.
Despite his bravado in the glen, instinct kept him wary. The pine boughs looming seemed to harbor an army of furtive eyes. The carpet betrayed no trace of any beast, and no bird call violated the misty air. The solitary crackle of his own feet – even the beat of his heart – seemed ruinously loud in the necropolitan silence.
In the maddening quiet, Rød began to ruminate on his plan, deconstructing it. He had no knowledge of this wilderness, no information on what direction to take. He had assumed the “beast” spoken of by sages could be tracked; but how large was this forest? He might spend days here, cut clear across the wood, and encounter no trail. The pack on his back now felt perilously light–and this forest, abounding in greenery, was barren of game. Not so much as a mouse or bullfinch left its trace.
The wind was unceasing. It would trail away into a soft whisper, then muster a gritty and leafy gust that tore at his hair and stung his cheeks. It was balmy and acrid, and it seemed either to come from every direction or else continually to shift, so as he wound through foliage and thicket it always hit his face.
When he came upon the first strange tree, he pulled up short. Its riot of color pierced the evergreen shield like a pilum. He was instantly wary of it. There is magic in the world which transforms men into the shapes of trees, and this he knew well. Yet his revulsion sunk to a deeper, visceral level. The leaves would appear to be shading their hue in accordance with the autumn fall – yet the blood reds and golden golds were too lustrous, too vibrant, as though painted in mockery of nature’s course of death and rebirth. Its parchment-gray limbs hung and twisted in uncanny angles, like a macabre dancer petrified in pose. Glossy, blood-red fruit adorned its limbs and littered the little knoll where its thin roots gnarled into the flesh of the earth.
The strange fruits were immaculate – no worm nor rot had found their incorruptible skin, even as they lay in the brown carpet of vaporous ruffage – but to these Rød felt the strongest revulsion of all. The scene reminded him of death – or of something worse. He somehow could not imagine that the seeds of such a plant would grow into anything, not foul nor wholesome. He realized he had seen nothing new growing all day – old, ancient, and middle-sized trees and hedges, but no bright green seedling or sapling breaking the rust-colored floor. Nonetheless, his belly rumbled; he had taken nothing to eat since the break of day. His thoughts flitted to the food in his pack; yet he decided to fast and stretch the rations as long as he could.
He was about to move on, when he started at a rapid movement in the boughs of the queer tree. Its gold and ruby leaves shivered and shook loose, disturbed by a gaunt creature that flashed along beam and bough, too quick for the eye. He could trace it only by the fleeting trail of rustling it left. No mere tree squirrel or bird, it was far too large for that. Before his heart could still itself, the wood had once more donned its comfortless stillness.
As he progressed, the strange new breed of tree appeared again and yet again, phasing out the natural pines which grew increasingly dwarfish and ill. The blight carried by the queer trees affected not only the pines, but the grasses, briars, and rushes too. Eventually, he could no longer pick his way effectively around their radii of toxic fruit, so close were they together; and the air became rancorous with corruption and mold. He proceeded with intent along their thickening number, reasoning by instinct that they would lead him to his mythical quarry. He came at last to a line of the gay-painted shades, beyond which no green survived, but all was gold and red bejeweled with gleaming poisonfruit. Between the new treeline and his grove was a narrow, barren strait, like dead-man’s land on a battlefield. Footsore and weary he settled his pack near the familiar pine in a space clear of fruit and took rest. True twilight fell over the groves.
As he leaned against the pine, upright to keep watch even while he dozed, the wind continued to harry. He made no fire, for he intended only to sit and relieve his limbs a minute. He took enough food to dull the ache in his belly only slightly and left the pack at his side. Across the barren strait, the misshapen trees loomed awkwardly under a half-moon, drooping oddly like puppets on tangled strings. Despite the eerie scenery, he felt his eyes grow heavy in the mild warmth.
It remained dark when he was disturbed from a deep slumber. His first thought, unfettered by reason, was that many days and nights had passed, that the moon had gone through its phases and darkened; but it had merely sunken behind the mists clouding the mountaintop. He snapped to alertness then, recognizing the rustling that had drawn him from his dreams.
Limned in the failing starlight, a spindly creature was hunched over his pack, carelessly left open on the forest floor. The creature was glossed in pale scales that iridesced in sickly hues. It was the size of a child, though hideously gaunt, with knobby knees and elbows splayed to its sides as it rummaged through his ration kit. As the Mutangarder started into motion, the creature went rigid. Round, oversized eyes flashed crimson as they passed through a moonbeam. They were set in a drawn face that was unsettlingly manlike, with a pointed nose that moved about like that of a vermin. A protuberant mouth peeled back around the edges to reveal a narrow jaw set with sneering, needle-fine teeth. In a gesture of warding it extended a long claw-like a hand, five slender flanges more reminiscent of spider legs than of fingers, with coarse tufts at the bulbous knuckles, tipped in hooked claws.
Rød lurched forward into a crouch, with a scattering of pine bark stuck to the back of his wools and pulled loose. He fumbled for his spear in the darkness, but it had fallen into the brush. Before he was ready to respond, the imp had torn hissing like a cat into the nighted treetops.
Cursing himself for carelessness, Rød gathered up his sack. It was difficult to tell in the darkness, but he couldn’t find anything missing. He set the goods back the way they had been arranged prior, and settled up once more against the trunk. This time, he nestled the pack inbetween his legs, with the flap secure. He gripped his spear tight across his chest, determined that he should not lose it again. He sat alert for many minutes, his pulse throbbing in his fingertips against the wooden shaft. Then he slept once more.
He came to with a start when the morning sun hit his face. He gripped his spear and turned all about, fending off the gaunt and death-colored sprites that clung to his person in dreams.
But it was a peaceful morning, and not so much as an inchworm crawled across his sleeping arms. Silence had reasserted its sovereignty over the woodland. He rose swiftly, for the sun was high. Reaching absently into his pack, he crunched a handful of dry beans, a little surprised at their slightly softened texture and mildly sour taste. It was as though they had decocted in the midnight dews, or his own nightmare sweat. He sipped some of his water, then crossed the ravine.
The pines were gone on this side of the forest. The garish, paper-skinned trees leered over him, their hanging limbs encumbered by unwholesome fruit. Aside from the wind, which had never quit, and the man’s overcautious tread, the only sound was the leaves themselves, whispering to each other the rumor of his going. The air was filled with the cloy of rot. The fallen fruits nestled in nests of moldering foliage and decayed undergrowth, their pristine sheen untarnished by the corruption which spread from them. The trees crowded so tightly that he could no longer pass without brushing the tips of the leaves, leaving a queasy disquiet deep within his perspiring thews.
He passed a hill ringed with boulders when a soft shuffle and tread brought him to alert, his spear poised in an instant. From between the tall granite stones emerged a pale being, tall and horridly gaunt. Its features were distended mockeries of humanity, and reminded him of some hybrid form of the little ghast he’d seen the prior night. Wispy hair fell in uneven strands, so thin he could scarcely judge its color, over a face hollow and drawn. Only the eyes, bizarrely, held a firmly human aspect. Undersized, flaxen robes draped in soiled tatters from its bony frame. Rød was ready to do mortal harm, but to his surprise, the wight approached slowly, and addressed him in a rasping yet meek voice:
“Stranger – and I ought to know any youth who passes this way – put down your spear and have speech with me. For I have been long alone, wasting with hunger and with solitude. Be not shocked – I know how I look to you, but I am a man! My name is Acastes.”
Rød relaxed a touch but kept the spear ready. “I am called Rød, which means ‘Red’ in my homeland.”
Acastes grinned, a disarming expression among less cadaverish features. “Your homeland is far, I judge, Rød the Red, though you have come to a place that suits your name. I will not ask what madness brought you here, for I come with a needy hand. I am starving, and I judge you carry something which may help. I beg of you, I openly beg.”
Rød relaxed his guard, though he kept his distance and made no move for his pack. The stranger’s unnerving features gave him pause, true – yet something in the cadence riled a suspicion that was deeper in him. Acastes’ speech was not quite consonant with the tenor of his plea; yet in the struggle over revulsion and suspicion, pity won out. He nodded, lowered his spear, and slowly slung his pack over with one hand. The skeletal miscreation took an eager step, eyes alight, but Rød shrewdly withdrew.
“Before I help you,” the Mutangarder said, “I would know what you can tell me about this wood, and the treasure which the sages tell it holds.”
Acastes watched the dangling food bag with a fleeting look of longing; then his face firmed, and resumed the sanguine expression that seemed so inconsonant with his desperate circumstance. He nodded. “I will tell you.”
Thus spoke Acastes to the Mutangarder, answering each question in turn:
“We who live our lives in the Temple are sent to journey here, once we come of age. We spend our youths learning the mysteries of the god of the forest. There is no path – to mark the way to the Sanctum is forbidden – we must find our own lonesome way through the wilderness, but we are given warnings of the dangers we will face.
“We must fast all the way along our journey, for the fruit of the trees is foul. Those who starve before finding their way, join the Little Ones; yet to eat the fruit that falls from the trees is to add your flesh to the wood.”
Rød glanced around at the multitude of red-and-gold trees, choking out all other flora with their numbers, and shuddered to think of the countless youths cursed into tree form. All at once, the trees slid together their paper twigs in a sibilant shudder. Acastes gave his savoring, needly grin.
“The trees hear; they remember. They pray we will eat the cursed fruit, as they did. It is their only hope of increasing their number.
“I have tasted the fruit. I was desperate and weak. Yet the curse comes on little by little, and I ate of it only once. My only hope is to reach the wood god before my time runs out.” They walked as the cultist spoke. Sucking his dry fangs and grasping his gnarled talons after the pack, he said, “Now, have I satisfied you? I hunger so…”
“I have one more question,” said Rød, keeping the food out of reach. “What treasure does this god guard, that you dare so much to reach it?”
“‘Treasure’? When my parents sent me to the Temple, they were paid in mere gold; yet my reward is the only /true/ treasure. That is… power and self-discovery.”
Rød pondered deeply. Absently he allowed the greedy claws to snatch the pack away. Was this the meaning of the sages’ words? he wondered. He recalled his own prophesied fate; would this wood god grant him the power to fulfill his destiny? Somehow, he doubted it. As he pondered, Acastes pried open the pack. The ghoul was chuckling; then his belly rumbled with laughter. By the time Rød became alert, the laughter was full-throated – the pitched, giddy pealing of a madman. He was peering down into the open pack, howling like a jackal, his rail frame wracked with baleful mirth.
Rød lunged for the pack. With a single, swift motion, Acastes pulled out of reach. Raising the pack high, he upended it.
“Had a visit from the Little Ones, had you?” he shrieked, delirious, and shook loose its contents. An ooze of rotted meat and mulched grains streamed from the bag onto the forest floor. The ubiquitous stench of decay had masked the corruption of the viands entirely, until the moment they splattered in blue-green lumps among the odiferous ruffage. Rød looked on, aghast.
“They love their pranks,” Acastes decreed; “And now you’ve swindled me out of a story. Look! Look at the gift they brought you!” His mouth split wide in a hideous, triumphal cackle, as the last of the filth plopped out to splash Rod’s boots. The Mutangarder’s eyes popped wide, and his breath caught in his throat. The little creature he’d caught in the night, rummaging through his pack – he had thought he had chased it away before it could steal anything – yet the imp did not come to steal.
The last item that tumbled from the bottom of the pack was a round, cursed fruit, immaculate among the decay its magic had wrought.
“Acastes, if you know the fruit is bad, then why do any of your brothers and sisters eat it? Why did you?”
“Have you never been so tempted by hunger that you would eat anything, anything at all?”
They had traveled some distance. Acastes looked as if he would pitch sideways from hunger at any moment; Rød was ravenous, though the miasmic air kept his stomach in continual upheaval. The farther they went along, the worse the stench became – even as all undergrowth vanished and the land became choked with hedgerows of the poison-trees. The odor of rot seemed to emanate from the trees themselves. Yet no thought of turning back ever crossed the stubborn Mutangarder’s mind.
Cutting their way around a dense thicket, they nearly blundered right over the carcass of a sheep. Shreds of crusted wool were plied across the forest floor, and the hollowed cage lay open. The limbs too had been picked nearly clean. Eagerly Acastes fell upon it with a cry of “Meat!” Yet Rød lingered back, noting with interest the lazy paths beat through the air by fat, black-bodied flies.
Meanwhile, Acastes had picked through the carrion but pulled away contemptuously. “Naturally, it is all spoilt,” the freak complained. He spat dryly at the fruits that nestled the kill. Rød nudged him aside and dug his fingertips under the corpse.
“Did you hear me?” Acastes whined sharply. “I’ve said it’s rotted through and through!”
“I know,” Rød grunted. “Help me.”
Acastes did not help, but the bones were light enough. With an easy shove, the Mudangarder peeled the stiff underhide up and away, revealing a slick, bald patch of black earth. A host of clicking beetles and pale worms skittered and wriggled for the fringes of the patch. Rød tossed the hide and bones away and snatched up as many vermin as he could, forming a pouch to trap them in the front of his shirt.
“You see?” he said calmly, holding one beetle up between his fingers. The beetle clacked its mandible and scrabbled its feet against his skin. “Meat!”
Acastes balked. “You cannot possibly…”
Rød shunned the squeamer with a dismissive look. “Too fancy for bugs, yet he’ll eat poisoned fruit,” he shrugged to the beetle in his fingers. Despite himself, he shuddered. He could not deny it was a grim repast. He was leery of his own plan; but hungry enough to run the risk. His senses were overwhelmed with the stenches of rot and carrion, and he could scarcely contain his revulsion. Nonetheless, he popped them one by one into his mouth, chewing as little as possible, and forced a swallow in coarse chunks.
Rød began to feel ill immediately, but stubbornly willed his gut to move the repulsive meal in the single, natural direction. He felt, perhaps not for the first time, but for the first time /acutely/, that he no longer pitied the wight who called himself Acastes. Before they left the carcass, he took a femur and cracked it in two. The marrow let out a sharp, yellow smell, but the break formed a jagged edge with a suitable handle below. He held this crude knife as they traveled, marking the trees with brutal slashes to show his way back. The sap oozed like caustic molasses. The treetops susurrated their outrage.
“It is forbidden to mark your trail!” Acastes protested.
“So hang me,” Rød replied irritably, without so much as a pause in stride.
Acastes became irate. “It would be justice!” he rasped. “Who are you, to go tromping over sacred land where you have no right, plundering after power you do not even understand?”
“I understand,” said the Mutangarder–slowly, patiently, but with mounting venom– “That you have no power to tell me what is sacred, or what is /right/. Your feckless parents sold you away, Acastes, to fools in a stone temple who bred you to feed a beast – and you call it a god. With no guidance, you waste away pitifully in this place of rot; but I am guided by a firm destiny.”
Acastes narrowed his jaundiced eyes. “I see now, you are nothing more than a sophomore, a half-baked catechumen of philosophy. Seen enough of the world to make you tight in the britches, but you know not what it is to create yourself.”
Pushing aside a branch of riotous leaves, Rød answered him. “Indeed. Yet I notice only one of us is leading.” He was serene as he said this, for he was smug in himself for having thought of it. Passing by the bent branch, he let it swing back behind him, and the hand-like leaves slapped against his companion’s bony, gawking face. Flourishing the bone knife, he slashed his mark upon the tree and pressed on alone.
Rød smiled as the dawn’s hazy light touched his face. He had gone walking through the night; hunger, alertness, and the choking atmosphere made sleep impossible. He was lightheaded with deprivation, sore from the balls of his feet to the orbs of his eyes. Despite all this, he smiled, exultant in misery; for each ache, hurt, and wanting need was as a badge worn. Every turn of a fool’s-gold branch brought him nearer to the treasure worth more than gold.
He smiled for another reason, for he heard the clumsy footsteps in his trail, and knew Acastes was stalking him still. Oh, Acastes, if your pride could only nourish you! Yet you are more starved than I.
He emerged through a dense treeline and sensed a bald embankment sloping away into the hanging mist. Far below him, massive shapes loomed over a wide, uneven clearing. He slashed a deep cross on the nearest tree, honed the crude blade a bit on a nearby rock, and slid it back into his belt. He stood, catching his breath and his swimming head. He realized he heard the sound of rushing water. His dry lips smacked at the sound. He unstopped his canteen and shook the last drops onto his bloated tongue, anticipating the chance to renew his reserve.
Then the rays of the new sun shone over the dell in earnest. A purple stream frothed serpentine across the basin, lapping the edges of a towering, uneven castle, its sinuous turrets as milkily hued as the wood of the grove. It was like a cave painting – off-color because the brutish painter could not mix the precise pigments he needed, and the stone behind would corrupt them anyway – of a scene of an ash-gray volcano with violet lava circling it. The cinder field glittered hotly with the fruit gathered under the surrounding slopes. Beyond the stream, a scattering of great, lopsided mounds like brutal sepulchers formed uneven alleys which wound as randomly as the fast-rushing stream. The entire scene, with its washed, uncanny colors and the unlikely, somehow-deliberate asymmetry of every crude edifice, made the young adventurer’s guts want to churn over.
As Rød went down to the bank, he felt the forest’s myriad eyes on his back; inwardly blind, the sentient wood seemed to notice him only as he departed. The wide expanse between the wooded crest and low-lying river was carpeted in thorny stubble and dotted with bone-white stumps. With the cork and canteen still in his hands, he knelt at the stream, which ran a foot or so beneath a deeply eroded bank. He saw that the current was inconstant, speeding up and slowing at a regular rhythm, as though propelled and hindered by the breathing of a sleeping giant at or near its source. The effect of the changing tide was at once hypnotic and disorienting, and somewhere in his core, he seemed to sense a distant pounding like a drum out of time with the throb of his temples.
Fighting a wave of fresh nausea, he got close to his belly to reach the canteen down. Here he could see the stream’s murky color was no trick of the rosy dawnlight, and a metal stench curled his nose. His fingers came up red from the river of blood.
He recoiled, springing to his feet in revulsion. The canteen slipped between his slick fingers and vanished below the eddies of pink froth. A violent parting of the foliage at the hillcrest drew his attention; in haste he wiped his fingers on his grimy tunic and spun, spear in hand, to meet the charge of Acastes.
It was indeed Acaste who came bowling down along the stubblefield, though his appearance had changed. His skin was now nearly as pale as the prevailing treebark; his features had further elongated and attenuated: the nose now blended into vague cheekbones, the bridge sloped evenly into the planar angle of a browline, resembling not so much a human nose as a snout ending in a small, fine point, like a blade honed abusively long until the grindstone had stripped away all substance. His shredded robes clung and bunched at the joints, while the hems flew widely from decrepit limbs. Only his eyes were the same as before, seeming ill-sized in both directions at once: uselessly small compared to the length of the skull, yet too wide and far too wide-set for its breadth. The wide cast of these crimson orbs was accentuated as they popped with terror. Dashing in the skeletal cultist’s frantic wake came a host of the milky-scaled Little Ones, their features all the more hideous as they ran like slavering monkeys into the goldening rays of day.
Rød stood his ground, awaiting the next development. Acastes spotted him, and desperate he ran toward him. He stumbled over a white stump, cartwheeling once down the hillside, but righted himself before the screeching little ghouls could seize him by the heels.
Dry grass crackled at Rød’s flank. During all the distraction, a Little One had stolen to his side and sprang. He was alert at the final second, but the beast was past the point of his spear, flying toward him with jet talons leading. The red-haired youth pivoted and slapped it with the butt-end, by luck crushing an orbital and the pupilless eye within. The creature spun feet-over-head, bruised its spine against a stone, and lay draped across it.
The mob chasing Acastes broke away as he slewed again, spotting a narrowing point in the stream. A single bound of his long, bony legs saw him three-fourths across, and he paddled and waded to the far shore. Gnashing their teeth with a hideous titter, they marked Rød standing alone before the bank.
Rød took a pace forth to meet the charge. The closest imp he skewered easily, pinning it writhing against the arid earth. Its fellows rushed like waters around the corpse; a dozen or more. He whipped the sharpened femur from his waist and thrust it into the heart of another which leapt with its needlish fangs bared for his face. Even for its tiny size, its weight was appallingly scant; he directed its momentum over his head, drawing his knife from its chest, and heard it splash into the crimson river. He had not an instant’s reprieve before the next was upon him, and then another. He struck aside an onslaught of talons with the legbone, then with his fists and forearms, and then his elbows. One clasped its arms about him, cold and hard as an iron rail, and dug its fangs in for his neck. It instead pierced his shoulder, and, for a gruesome instant, he felt its tongue like a dry rag probing into the bleeding cuts. He snatched the imp by one spindly limb, which felt like matchwood in his steely grip. With a crack, he tore it loose from his arm, and flung it viciously into the stream. Even as he did so, half a dozen pairs of claws raked and scratched at his limbs and chest. He stomped one beast that tried to wriggle low and up toward his groin, while another leapt at his eyes. Unconsciously he had given ground inch by inch, until he felt his back heel crunch through the brittle overhang of the river bank. The rhythm of the current had increased to a frenzy, and violent eddies erupted and splashed redly into the air, like hungry dogs snapping at a quarry cornered beyond reach. He remembered the words of the seer: “He shall perish, bathed in blood and surrounded by enemies.”
His head turned, and he spied a number of the corpses he had cast into the crimson. They twisted in the chaotic currents, swollen like sponges, their abdomens bobbing like overripe grapes whose skins are like to split in the sun. One, maimed but not killed, paddled by and lapped at the flowing blood with greedy vigor until its belly ruptured and it vanished beneath pink-frosted waves.
\His back against the brink, Rød fought viciously until most of the beasts lay slain or crippled about him. Their claws were painful but not outright deadly, and even in their greatest numbers they lacked the weight to overwhelm; yet after long travel and fasting, bleeding from a score of vicious cuts, he heaved from exhaustion. The bite he’d taken on his shoulder burned savagely. His knuckles were the worst, pulped and shredded, embedded with pulverized fang and scale. Another host broke the treeline, eager and bellowing shrilly. He looked back to the river, searching for escape. Acastes stood at the opposite bank, propping up a long, white log. Letting it drop to bridge the banks, he cried breathlessly, “They wanted me to eat the fruit. Damn it, they nearly forced it on me; but I wouldn’t – not after the first time. I’m already doomed–they wanted me to eat again, but I wouldn’t – I couldn’t do it again.”
Rød was already halfway across, finding his nimble footing on the narrow beam. Light as switchwood, it sagged under his weight. Bits of soil crumbled away at both banks. He risked a glance back, and the Little Ones mobbed the shore, hopping and gibbering. Some dug their claws under the beam, but they lacked the strength to move it. One dug into the round surface and scurried toward him squirrel-like, but made it only a short distance before it lost its grip and fell into the river. Others threw themselves straight into the current, lapping rapturously with their scabrous gray tongues as their sightless eyes rolled.
The beam jolted suddenly, and he nearly lost his balance. He glanced forward to see Acastes, grinning madly, his twiglike fingers digging out the earth that supported the log bridge.
“What is this?” Rød demanded.
“Idiot!” cried Acastes gleefully. “Did you think we would let you tread on the hallowed Sanctum?”
“These beasts turned on you!” Rød protested. He inched forward. The beam wobbled and he bent, supporting himself on his hands.
“You yet understand none of our ways. It is true what you say. But I am safe; I have made the Sanctuary–and you are out on a limb. Now go into the river!”
With a desperate lurch, Rød sprang for the bank, just as Acastes gave a kick that sent the log tumbling away. Two or three Little Ones went in with it, having inched up to Rød’s back. They raked the air behind him as he leapt. There was a great splash; Rød’s burly chest collided with the raised bank. He scrabbled at the weeds to pull himself out, even as soil cascaded under his bulk. Acastes let out a terrified yell and scampered into the winding ways between the mounds. A second later Rød was after him in a trail of blood.
On each side the gray mounds cast their long, dappled shadows, creating stark beams of dark and light that glared off the surface of an unquiet fog. The mist rushed against their faces or eddied into troughs and reared up into ghostly hedgerows. The mounds themselves were constructed of crisscrossing beams of bone-white logs. The interiors of the logs were porous and webbed, and the construction of the monuments seemed to mirror this motif on a macrocosmic scale. The improbable, seemingly haphazard arrangement gave each mound a perilously imbalanced look, like crudely stacked pyres, the artless fortifications of a child’s play castle, or the heaped-up altars crafted by some half-aware, apish race for the appeasement of a dimly conceived-of spirit. Like the trees in their natural forest state, the towers gave the vain impression of articulateness held in pendulous stasis, as if awaiting either the hand to guide the strings overhead or the scissor to sever them into collapse. A gout of dense, liquid cloud came blowing over the lofty treeline, pouring into the defile like a flood.
Rød huffed in the miasmic air, felt his wounds clot against his drenched clothing. He lost any sense that he was closing the distance in the fog, but the trail remained clear enough. Then he rounded into a wide expanse where the wind-tortured mist writhed along the ground. Beyond this plain the gray castle erupted like a spur from the earth, its acerbic turrets scraping furrows in the low-hanging clouds above.
Acastes was on his knees at the heart of the field. He laid himself prostrate at the feet of a giant that strode from the edge of the castle’s shadow. Taut and pallid, the ogrish form stretched his shadow over the prone form at his feet. He in many ways resembled the Little Ones of the forest; though where they were cadaverous, he was lithe; where they resembled men approaching a mockery of beastliness, his countenance somehow embodied both the manly and the feral, though with a ghoulish wanness; while their malevolence was ferocious and unfettered, his was stony and cool. Rød could see that the Little Ones, the white-trunked trees, and even the red fruit in their own unnameable way, were but his imperfect copies – perhaps adulterated by the imitation of more natural forms. His head was ringed crown-like by short, barbed horns. His wide, ruby eyes cast fixedly along the ground as he stood, regal and austere as a distorted icon in a temple’s colored window-glass. The wood piles leaned around the fringes of the clearing, like bowing courtiers or misshapen cousins. Here was the god of the forest, surrounded by the works made ham-fistedly in his own image.
“Master, my pilgrimage is complete,” Acastes proclaimed as if reciting verse into the soil. “The trials of the wild I have surpassed; my worth proven; discovered you and myself–myself and you. I am ready to be remade into my own image, to come into the power and glory I deserve.”
The giant gave no more regard to the twisted shape than one would to a toad who had belched at one’s feet. His luminous eyes scrutinized the barbarian standing across the fog bank. Rød felt bathed in their choleric beam.
“Child, you know the words, and have learned the steps.” Though gazing at Rød, the devil addressed Acastes, in a voice full of muted power, like the whisper of great stones rolling far below foot, or an unfelt gale tearing the leaves from a canopy beyond sight. “What have you discovered? Answer.”
Acastes trembled and stuttered, but dared not lift his head. The giant repeated his command. At last daring to lift his gaze, he answered feebly, “I have discovered you.”
The giant-thing responded with a caustic bark that may have been laughter. Acastes quailed as its terrible lamplight gaze met his own. “What have you discovered within yourself the giant demanded; “For how can you create yourself anew before you have learned of yourself?”
“Master, I know not – I thought – I only–”
“There you have your discovery,” the giant said with a sneer. “Go and lie among the lumber, you log.”
Even as Acastes pleaded, his limbs convulsed, his spine stiffened with a crack; his robe unraveled as his proportions distended, his marred skin calcified into bleach-white bark, and before his final cry rang its last against the distant beams, he had become as them.
Rød’s mind reeled from the ghastly drama. For the first time, thoughts of flight occurred to him – but proved momentary. The god of the forest called to him: “Approach me.” Rød complied, not groveling like he who had gone before, but bold and upright, painting over his pain and fear with the pride of the savage.
“Tell me why you have come.”
Leading with his bearded chin, the bloodied youth reached the loathsome gaze with his own. Stifling his revulsion, he answered boldly: “I came to discover riches, and to slay a beast, which I have heard wise men say lie guarded in this place.”
The giant betrayed no surprise. “All the wiser are these men who speak of such things but from a distance.”
Rød hardened his gaze, and discovered the exercise hardened his heart as well. “I am not afraid,” he answered, “for it has been prophesied to me that I shall be a hero, and a leader. The oracle too forespoke of my death, which is not in your power to deliver.”
So evenly, so convincingly did he speak these words, that Rød found – almost to his surprise – that he trusted in them fully. The gangly giant, for his part, seemed pleased if anything. “Thus you are proven worthy,” he said. “You have but to kneel, and I shall make of you that which you see within yourself.”
Rød balked with a quizzical eye toward the freshly transfigured form between them. Unconsciously he began to shake his head.
“I see. You think me a liar. You fear sharing the fate of that fool. For he was a fool: he ate of the fruit, and thought that I would not know. And he broke his tenets by leading you here. Further, he had not the capacity to discover what you and I know – he, created by civilization, could never have discovered the true power of self-creation. For only he who knows himself free of constraints may create himself anew.”
Rød’s quizzical eye fell over the logs in their thousands, each one a part of a monument, and each a monument to the soul which had failed such a test. Was that what this was, he wondered: a final test all his own? It seemed to him that in the act of kneeling, he would cast away the very thing for which he had been named worthy.
Now growing agitated, the giant rambled on: “A liar, that’s what you think me; you say in your heart I have not the power I promise. Yes, I see your heart, filled with doubts – forsake your doubts, lest they make you unworthy! – You say I am a mere ogre, luring forth hapless fools for my own use in building castles – heirs to but a sad reflection of their glorious predecessor. Innocents! Innocents came to my priests in the temple, but never has an innocent set forth into this wood, since time began!”
Rød detected a sense of desperation, of defensiveness, creeping into the giant’s speech – subtle at first, yet building until it could not be denied. And with this realization came another: that nothing may create itself, not even this “god” of the forest; and what an inadequate giver this seemed for such an unattainable gift!
“I will not kneel.” He said.
The self made god did not blink. “I do not understand you,” he said. Menace was clear in his tone.
“It is not my will to kneel,” the Mutangarder repeated. His empty hands clenched at the ready; his spear and bone knife had been lost before the river.
“No soul has ever dared defy me,” the giant warned.
“That, I can believe,” said Rød; “in fact, I think that is your power. All your might is bluster and fear, and you have no more steel to you than a common poisoner.”
“Common!” spitting back this pejorative, the giant leapt forth over the prostrate tree that had been Acastes, leading with claws. Bald luck may have saved the Mutangarder then; for although he ducked too slowly, they raked narrowly above his head. He stepped in close and hammered his frame against the bony knee, locking his arms about. The skin felt like wax over bone that was light but not supple. He heard the woosh of the great claw at his back and pivoted around the foot. The claw sped past. He drove his heel down against the giant’s ankle and tugged with a bodily twist. With effort, the giant foot lifted to shake him loose. He redoubled his strain with a backward lurch, but in the tussle, he was kicked free. He landed on his feet, and rushed back in while the giant staggered onto a knee. He heaved his shoulder into the rear of the giant’s hip, lurching him over, sprang across his back, and wrapt his arms about the neck, turning and pulling the chin viciously. The giant straightened, and reached over with a claw; Rød gave up his grasp and let himself fall. The god-thing raked his own shoulder in his heedless fury. He stumbled, further off his balance, as Rød landed in his shadow among Acastes’ branches. The Mutangarder struggled, twined in the tree limbs as the giant’s form came tumbling over him.
Frantic, he flexed aside the brittle wood and pulled himself fro, to narrowly miss being crushed. There was a great shattering, as sundered branches and gold-and-red leaves spun in the air. The giant thrashed his feet, sloughing deep trails in the earth. He slapped the earth blindly as he wriggled about, scratched, and cut all about his trunk, clumsily seeking to free himself from the tangle of wood and branch. Rød scrambled, but could not reach his footing in the tumult. With a groping hand he found a branch, split longways into a shard, and rolling dangerously close he plunged it between two of the giant’s ribs. The beast recoiled, rolling away with more snapping of wood. The tree was in ruins, its trunk buried, its canopy stripped but for a few bare leaves hanging on. Rød had his feet now and took up a spearlike bough that was more or less straight. The giant was back on his knee, doubled over with a hand against the earth, the other to his pierced side, gasping and heaving heavily. He saw the furious youth and extended his palm, leaving the wounded ribs oozing and bubbling. Whether a gesture of warding, defense, or submission, Rød neither knew nor minded. He pierced the palm of that hand with the splintered tip; extracting the point, he pushed his way inside. He killed the giant by driving the beam through his neck.
The castle was fit for a giant, its lofty halls too numerous and large for the expeditions of one injured, hungry man. But he did find treasures beyond counting, whose origins died with the memory of the self made god.
With the giant’s onerous, ear-splitting rattle, Rød had almost expected the turrets to tumble into the stream; the shapeless monuments to shiver into dust; the poisoned pseudo-trees to shrivel down, or spring back into their native, two-footed shapes. But the spell was not to be broken this way; the mist still spilled over the trees and the trees still spilled their corrupting, seedless fruit – though the wind settled, and the river went stagnant until its surface congealed like the skin of blistered, purple fruit, and the descent of flies in hordes filled the dell with their toneless music. But all in all, the changes wrought on the forest by the devil were done and would last; which maybe, Rød thought, was preferable–he did not know what he would do with a million mad cultists suddenly about.
The castle yard held a large pen with a herd of sheep. Though desperately hungry, his first mad impulse was to set the creatures loose, on the fancy they were human victims transmogrified like the others. But then, remembering what kind of man Acastes had been, he decided he would eat.
There were no tools to be found in the courtyard, save tools for carpentry and woodwork, oversized and useful to no man of mortal stature. He spent the remainder of the day, with his belly rumbling and his senses faint, crafting crude tools from wood and stone. He planed down a serviceable wood-tip spear, honing it on a giant’s adze, and chipped away a few stone knives. His clothes were ruined by tooth, blood, and clay, so he cast them off. On the second day he slaughtered a sheep with his spear, and carved it with blunt knives. He ate the flesh raw, for he feared using the tainted wood for a cookfire. He dressed himself in the raw skins. For a night and a day, he lived as an unclad primitive in the shadow of the colossal tower.
He dared stay no longer, for though he drank the blood of the herd his thirst was overwhelming. His belly wretched and ached on raw mutton, and many of his wounds grew tender and inflamed. The second night he took no rest, for the Little Ones were active in the trees. But though they raged against the usurpation of their sovereign, there came no onslaught.
Before leaving, he draped himself with a number of precious necklaces from the castle, and fitted his knuckles with encrusted rings. He wove ivory combs and trinkets into his hair and wound intricate baubles into the locks of his beard. Finally, he crowned himself with a diadem of crystal inlaid with gold. When it all was done, he looked the savage mockery of a king all sallow, lean, and scurfy, barefooted, crusted in blood and filth beneath a robe of uncured sheepskin, laden in resplendent jewels. He wrapped a shank of mutton in a sheepskin, and hung it from his belt – the one piece of clothing he had saved. The sun remained a vague rumor beyond the hills when he departed, walking with his spear like a cane. He passed the corpse of the god-thing, and halted, transported on a sudden wave of contempt.
“Sages,” he spat, rasping aloud. “For what are their words – they who in their towers speak of things they might never see? Damn their lore – pah! – and damn the oracles, with them. And damn me with them, if ever again I repeat a word from a seer’s mouth. Does not every man know his doom? Let me be done with seers and prophesiers. Let Rød be what he will be.”
“And that is all that happened,” Rød finished. He rubbed his bandages. After another bite of stew, he said, “I had a rough go of it, getting back – it’s good I marked a trail. And I thank the gods I found you – haven’t had a decent meal–” he shuddered at the memory of his last few, and left the thought unfinished.
Rickus leaned across the small campfire, ladled more thin stew into Rød’s bowl. The stars were out in full over the mountainside, and the moon was new. “At any rate,” said the red-maned youth, “you cannot imagine how good this stew tastes.”
“An amazing tale,” Rickus said, resting the ladle back in the pot. “Of course, I believe hardly a word.”
Rød cast him a quizzical eye. “You don’t believe it?” he said. “Do you believe in this?” He hefted the bulging sack in its place between them. The contents gave a jingle.
“You might have robbed a priest for those.”
“I couldn’t rob these off a dozen priests.”
“No, I guess they might fight you if there was a dozen,” Rickus joked. Then he added, almost seriously, “You do look like you fought a dozen men. Or tree-imps. Or more likely bush-shrews.”
Shaking his head, Rød leaned back. “Why is it you were afraid to set foot in that wood, if you thought it was only full of foxes and owls and priests?”
Rickus chuckled. “A fair point, my friend. It is good to have you with me again.”
Rød was quiet for a space. Rickus let him stare long into the coals, saying nothing.
Then he said, “What will you do next?”
Drawn slowly from whatever reverie, the Mutangarder looked up. For a moment, it was as if he barely recognized Rickus, or had forgotten he was there. Then his visage became the hard, stubborn visage he knew for Rød’s.
“Well, whatever you believe, believe this: I will go into a city. Atenos or Mitron or Ilyom or Tutaros, or even back to Mutangard, if I must. I will gather a force of men to me. There is more gold in that forest, now unguarded, save by frightful legend. We’ll plunder the sanctum and burn that cursed wood to the roots. The temple holds more treasure yet, I suspect – they pay a fortune to those villagers in exchange for sons and daughters to sacrifice to their foul patron – I wonder if they’ll ever know he’s been slain. But I know they are now defended only by old men and children. My men – The Riders of Lanseritter – will lay waste to the whole valley, and ride off with saddlebags fat with riches.”
Rickus took a careful look at his friend’s face. He searched for any trace of wavering, the slightest falter of doubt, a twitch of deception. At last, he grinned – but his voice was serious when he said, “That, my friend, I do believe.”
© April 2023, P. J. Atwater
P J Atwater‘s work has appeared in Tales from the Magician’s Skull, and in previously in Swords and Sorcery Magazine.