Chapter 9
By the time Brine reached the rim of the Harriun, he’d forgotten all about the mercenaries who hated him and the unwarranted abuse they’d inflicted. There was still mud in his hair—drying and crumpling and dribbling into his eyes—but he’d be lying if he said that still ranked high on his list of grievances. Even his disagreements with Godfry seemed impotent and far away.
They were still there, he knew, buzzing about his periphery and swarming at his sides, but for now they had taken a back seat to the horrible landscape to the north.
Of course, with Brine’s eyesight being what it was, the landscape hadn’t looked so horrible from a distance. It had looked no more frightening than a thin line of black on the horizon, a thin black line separating the fields of Arn from the skies of Jashandar. It was not until he’d moved closer that the thin black line expanded and became a nightmare.
At first, there was only the swelling of the blackness as it widened in the middle and drove a wedge of unreality between the green of the crops and the blue of the sky.
After that, the band of blackness began to ripple and bulge at the fringes, developing knobs and protuberances and, eventually, looking like a wall of dead and tangled leeches. Shortly after that, the abysmal darkness within had seemed to seep out from its base.
It’s leaking, Brine had thought, feeling a pang of worry flutter through his chest. There so much of it in there that it’s leaking out.
He might have turned tail and fled right then and there, but he could see the men of Lathia stomping ahead of him, the heathen brutes marching straight through the shifting mess, tendrils of shade swallowing up their legs, and not one of them bothering to look down.
So if they’re going in, Brine had thought to himself, it can’t be too bad.
But it could….and it was.
Standing there now, Brine saw that the blackness on the ground—the stuff that appeared to be leaking towards him earlier—was actually just sand, a fine blanket of ebon grit that washed out from the interior and threatened to choke the adjacent plots.
He looked down the length of the wilderness in either direction and noted the way the sand drifting out at different lengths and created an arcing saw-blade effect. He decided washed was the right word.
Black waves, he thought. Black waves devouring a leafy, green shore.
But if the sands were waves, and the field was a shore, he didn’t know what to make of the things rising out of the waves. He knew what Godfry had called them, and what the good people of Onador would call them, but that didn’t make it so. You could call your toddler my little man, but that didn’t mean he’d go out and split firewood the next time it got cold.
Brine gawked a bit longer at the boles rising from the sand and supposed they were at least tree-like. They were tall and cylindrical and they did spring vertically from the ground, but after that the semblance was a stretch.
There were no limbs on their sides, no leaves of which to speak, and in the place where there should have been wrinkled gray bark and hard grainy knots, there was only a sleek layer of shiny black skin, the sort you might find if salamanders were black.
“These things…,” Brine said at last, his head still craning from side to side, “…these are what we saw in Leresh?”
Behind him, Godfry said nothing.
Ignoring the slight—or expecting it—Brine leaned to one side and scrunched up his eyes. He was intent, now, on searching the interior of the wilderness. If the flora looked like something out of a traveling freak-show, what did that say about the indigenous wildlife?
He titled his head the other way and shielded his squinting eyes. Beyond the first row of boles, he spied nothing but the thickest shadows and the darkest gloom, a level of lightlessness that, at first, he could not believe. Not even the deepest sections of the Shun, with their thick boughs and tangled branches, were this pervasively dim.
Brine thought about what he had seen of the things posing as trees, about the missing foliage and missing fronds, and then he wondered how it was that the rays of the sun did not shed themselves upon the ground.
He cocked back his head to have a look…and gasped.
His mind raced back to the thoughts he’d had while approaching this place, thoughts of the Harriun being an ocean of black and of its sands being the waves of darkness. He wondered if he hadn’t made those analogies because of the things he now saw hovering above him, the things that looked suspiciously like the tentacles of an oily squid.
Without the suckers, he might have said they looked like tongues—long and wet and wolfishly pointed—but that would have made no sense at all. He wouldn’t have been able to wrap his mind around the idea of a thousand gaping mouths poised hungrily above him.
A school of dangling black squid, on the other hand, that was at least plausible. And it did look like a school of black squid, or what he imagine one would look like had he been standing on the ocean floor and staring up at them.
Plausible, he thought, but not possible. And he was right. The squid with which he was familiar, those described by fishermen and the villagers on the coasts, couldn’t have survived in the shallow waters of the Leresh, let alone perched up high on the tops of boles.
But still, possible or not, he’d be lying if he said the idea didn’t worry him. Honestly, what if they were some kind of squid? A land squid, perhaps. Was it so impossible to imagine an air-breathing version of these aquatic octopods? Was that any more impossible than a frog-skinned tree growing out of an ocean of black sand? And was it so impossible to imagine these land-squids crawling up there and waiting for prey to wander along below, waiting for the perfect moment to leap down atop them?
Brine no longer thought so.
Taking a step back from the tongue-like protrusions, he pointed a finger at the hoary boughs and said, in a voice taut with deteriorating self-control, “What, uh…what are we looking at, Godfry?”
Behind and to the right, a page rustled in the air. Brine called his comrade again, waited as the old man’s silence persisting into infinity, then slowly came to grips with what the old man was looking at. It was not the boles.
Brine found it difficult to take his eyes from the suspended horrors—Because that’s what they’re waiting for!—but when he was finally able to do so, he found his teacher standing just as he’d left him: banana-bright and perfectly calm, his attention deeply engrossed in the pages of the Wogol.
Brine was not surprised. This was how the old man had been since they’d stopped to break and he had loaned Godfry the manual. The old man had shoved his face in the pages, began to mumble as he read, and there his face remained, even as Brine grabbed a handful of sleeve and began leading him through the fields.
Still holding said sleeve, the disciple gave it another tug and Godfry’s face came out of the book.
“Yes, what?” Godfry said, his head coming up while his eyes lingered on the page. Brine watched the old man’s sleepy orbs track the last few lines in the paragraph, then slowly rise and take in the scene, pausing only briefly on the disciple as they made their way to the blubbery columns beyond. A moment more and the realization hit home.
“Ah,” Godfry said, his feeble head nodding. “We’re here.”
“We certainly are,” Brine agreed, swallowing hard and glancing at the tongues. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
Godfry looked down at the swath of tracks trampled in the sand. “The tracks?”
“No,” Brine said, pointing vigorously. “The things up there.”
“Certainly are a lot of them,” Godfry mused, still eyeing the ground.
Brine exhaled heavily and dropped his shoulders. This wasn’t right—this couldn’t be right—and whether Godfry wanted to acknowledge it or not, the council would not have sent them to a place where eternal-night abounded and where colonies of land-squid lurked patiently in trees.
Only they aren’t land-squid, the belly-fire crackled, soundi
ng almost kindly. They might look like tentacles, and they might smell a little like fish, but in the end—when it’s all said and done—they’re just trees. Bad trees, yeah, but trees all the same. That’s why they call it what they do, the place—
“…the place of bad trees,” Brine muttered quietly, his expression glum.
It was then, in the silence of his bleak stare, that the distant sound of shouting carried through the boles.
Godfry lifted his head from the tracks. “Did you hear that?” he said, turning to Brine. “Is someone shouting?”
“Yes,” Brine said, not speaking much louder than he had before. He watched the old man from the corner of his eyes, watched him stare a hole in the side of his face. The shouts came again and his childhood hero turned back to the wilderness, his old face wrinkled with alarm.
“Something amiss, do you suppose?” Godfry asked.
“No,” Brine said, speaking a little louder. “They’ve been shouting like that since we got here.” He drew the breath of a man preparing to dive into deep waters. “They’re just setting up camp.”
“Camp?” Godfry asked, his eyes lifting to the bright blue of the sky.
Anticipating the next question, Brine pointed at the wilderness and said, “It’s a lot darker on the inside.”
Godfry squinted at the boles. “Ahhh,” he said. “So it is. So it is.” He grinned mildly. “Well, should we be going then?”
Instead of answering, Brine found himself turning to face his childhood teacher, found himself standing perfectly still in the sands of the Harriun and staring a hole in Godfry’s face for a change.
At first, he didn’t understand what he was doing, but gradually the answer began to take shape. He was waiting for something. He was waiting for a time from his past…a time when he was small, his teacher was great, and life was good…he was waiting for his teacher to take him by the hand, offer some advice, and for everything to be all right.
But what was it old Reets had always told him as a child? Spit in one hand, wish in the other, see which one fills up.
It was a distasteful expression, to be sure, but it did accurately summarize Brine’s dilemma. The past was behind him and the garden was empty. His teacher—the man who used to solve his problems—was now his biggest problem of all, a mindless sack of hair and wrinkles shackled tightly to his ankle.
Brine drew a breath and sighed. “Yeah,” he sighed. “We probably should.” He turned to the wilderness, yellow sleeve in hand, and led them both inside.