Page 85 of Uprooted

The walkers snatched up our boat, and the mantis tore it apart with its clawed forelegs, smashing it into splinters and putting its head in, as if trying to find us.

It took its gleaming faceted eyes out again and looked around and around.

But by then we had already shot by their legs; the river sucked us briefly down through a whirling eddy into murky green silence, out of the Wood’s gaze, and spat us out again farther down into a square scrap of sunlight, another dozen leaves bursting up with us.

Back farther upstream, the walkers and the mantis were churning up the water, threshing it with their limbs.

We drifted away on the surface, in silence; the water took us along.

—

We were leaf and twig for a long time in the dark.

The river had dwindled around us, and the trees had grown so monstrous and high that their branches entwined overhead into a canopy so thick that no sunlight came through, only a filtered dim glow.

The underbrush had died away, starved of the sun.

Thin-bladed ferns and red-capped mushrooms clustered on the banks with drowned grey reeds and snarled nests of pale exposed roots in black mud, drinking up the river.

There was more room among the dark trunks.

Walkers and mantises came to the banks to look for us, as did other things: one of them a great snouting boar the size of a pony with too-heavy furred shoulders and eyes like red coals, sharp teeth hooked over its upper jaw.

It came closer to us than anything else, snuffling at the banks, tearing through the mud and heaped dead leaf mulch only a short way from where we drifted carefully, carefully by.

We are leaf and twig, I sang silently, leaf and twig, nothing more, and as we eddied on I saw the boar shake its head and snort in dissatisfaction, going back into the trees.

That was the last beast we saw. The terrible beating rage of the Wood had lightened when we fell out of its gaze.

It was looking for us, but it didn’t know where to look anymore.

The pressure faded still more now as we were carried onward.

All the calls and whistling noises of birds and insects were dying away.

Only the Spindle went on gurgling to itself, louder; it widened a little again, running quicker over a shallow bed full of polished rocks.

Suddenly Sarkan moved, gasped out of human lungs, and hauled me thrashing up into the air.

Not a hundred feet away the river roared over a cliff’s-edge, and we weren’t really leaves, even if I’d been careful to forget that.

The river tried to keep pulling at us, coaxingly.

The rocks were as slippery as wet ice. They barked my ankles and elbows and knees, and we fell three times.

We dragged ourselves to the bank barely feet from the waterfall’s edge, wet and shivering.

The trees around us were silent, dark; they weren’t watching us.

They were so tall that down here on the ground they were only long smooth towers, their hearts grown ages ago; to them we weren’t anything more than squirrels, poking around their roots.

An enormous cloud of mist rose up from the base of the falls, hiding the edges of the cliff and everything below. Sarkan looked at me: Now what?

I walked into the fog, carefully, feeling my way.

The earth breathed moist and rich beneath my feet, and the river-mist clung to my skin.

Sarkan kept a hand on my shoulder. I found footholds and handholds, and we worked our way down the ragged, tumbled cliffside, until abruptly my foot slipped out from under me and I sat down hard.

He fell with me, and we went slithering together down the rest of the hill, just managing to stay on our rears instead of tumbling head-over-foot, until the slope spilled us out hard against the base of a tree-trunk, leaning precariously over the churning basin of the waterfall, its roots clutching a massive boulder to keep from toppling in.

We lay there stunned out of our breath, lying on our backs staring upwards.

The grey boulder frowned down at us, like nothing more than an old big-nosed man with bushy-eyebrow roots.

Even bruised and scraped, I felt an immense instinctive relief; as if for a moment I’d come to rest in a pocket of safety.

The Wood’s wrath didn’t reach here. The fog rolled in thick gusts off the water and drifted back and forth, and through it I watched the leaves gently bobbing up and down, pale yellow on silver branches, desperately glad to rest, and then Sarkan muttered half a curse and heaved himself back up, grabbing me by the arm.

He dragged me almost protesting up and away, ankle-deep into the water.

He stopped there, just beyond the branches, and I looked back through the fog.

We’d been lying beneath an ancient gnarled heart-tree, growing on the bank.

We fled away from it down the narrow track of the river.

The Spindle was barely more than a stream here, just wide enough for us to run together splashing, the bottom of grey and amber sand.

The fog thinned, the last of the mist-cover blowing away, and a final gust cleared it completely.

We stopped, frozen. We were in a wide glade thick with heart-trees, and they were standing in a host around us.