The Gathering in The Woods – Chapter 50

Find the road.  Find the trail.

These were the two objectives that the young woman, her two unnamed compatriots and Matthew, and Will were turning to pursue when Dominic, Miray, and Mason, halted them.  The three were focused on the canyon rim and the area near the spillway of the falls when they spotted the figures silhouetted on the edge of the cliff, under the strobe flash of the pealing lightning.  They waited for the next flash of light to be certain they weren’t just seeing things, but the time between the rumblings and the light display was lengthening.  The strange storm had pushed back the approach of the dawn, sliding a sheath of high atmospheric clouds over the bright eye of the rising sun, like a grey, swollen eyelid.  But the dawn was peeking through again, revealing the land below once more, shredding and stretching the clouds with its golden rays.  The figures they had seen might be who they hoped they were, but they could also be spies or agents of the Protectorate Overwatch and they were worried.  As O’Brian had admonished them, be wary of strangers.  Everyone is not your friend.  Now that they were unarmed and isolated, that admonishment seemed more pertinent now than ever.

“It’s them,” Miray stated emphatically.

“Don’t be too sure,” Dominic cautioned, but he too felt the rising hope and a deep need for her words to prove true.

Miray started to cup her hands to her mouth and shout to the figures on the cliff, but Mason spoke up quickly, “Wait, Miray!  We have to be sure.”

“It’s them.  I know it is,” she turned, “You’ll see.  We have to get up there.  Tell Mister O’Brian about the others.”

Matthew had come back down toward the shore, and knelt down, facing Miray, whose eyes were beginning to tear up.

“Hold on, princess,” he softly touched her shoulders, “O’Brian would want us to be cautious.  We don’t know who else might be around in these parts.  If we call out to them, others who we don’t want to hear us might get to them before we do.  Much as you and I want it to be them, even if it is, we don’t want to put them in further danger, now do we?”

Miray wiped a tear from her eye, and shook her head ‘No’.

“Let’s be careful and quiet,” he took her hand, as he and Dominic led her up the muddy bank towards the area where they had once parked the wagon.

“If it’s them,” the young woman smiled down at Miray, as they came up to the more level area, “we’ll find them.  Wait and see.”

“Guys, we do need to get back from the lake,” one of the young men said, “If it’s O’Brian and the others, they’ll come back down to us.  They do not know the others have been taken.  We need to get out of sight.”

***

I scanned the horizon, seeing that while one of the sky lines had begun to cloud and dim, many of the others were still very dark and jagged as if the canopy of the diffuse atmosphere were the stretched fabric of a tent that had gashes in it revealing the blackness of space and the endless night beyond.  These were the sky lines, the scars in the sky, that worried me the most.  One, in particular, was not only dark but widening, bleeding the atmosphere out into the void beyond.  To the southern horizon, a series of nine dark marks scored the edge of the cliffs stretching away from us as if chased into shadow by the growing sunlight.  There had always been signs in the heavens here, but the tale they revealed to me while comforting in some respects was disheartening in others.  There was a prophecy written in the stars beyond the day sky, but its message was being lost in time and memory.  If he’d been more aware of the situation and less distracted by his dread of losing Maeven, he might have thought to ask Hanokh again of those mysteries which he’d shared with him so long ago.  The Ancient Hebrew Mazzaroth.

“Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?  Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season?  or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?  Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven?  Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?” (Job 38:31-33 KJV)

The shocking parallel of its signs pointing forth to the prophecy of the ages revealed in the One’s coming and mission within the Surface World.  The crux and center-point of all journeys converging into Purpose.

The pulling away of the nine dark bands meant something, and I was determined to find what it portended.

The light from the dawn grew stronger and we were able to see more into the shadow of the basin below.  I scanned the shoreline looking for movement or some sign of our party waiting in the shadow of the shore below.  The edge of the lake looked different than I’d remembered it from before going out in pursuit of the Moon Sprites.  The surface of the lake had returned to its liquid state, as I suspected it would have, with the Pearl now safely tucked away in the pouch on my belt.  I scanned in dread as well, for the evidence of floating bodies, possible of Matthew, Mason and Will and the three others that had come to our aid in saving Maeven.  No sign, but that did not free me to hope yet.

The Trathorn Falls were alive again, roaring down into the lake below, but the face of the cliff seemed to have imploded, more than I remembered as if the force of the water had carved away a large cupola from the rock face.  Water still fell from the precipice about, but it no longer danced down the surface of the canyon face.  A jagged assemblage of broken stone jutted sharply out from the strike point of the water, building further froth into its white-crested beard streaming away down the mountainside.

“Begglar, do you still have one of those astrolabe sextant devices, you told me about?”

Begglar turned, unslung his pack from his shoulder, turned the flap and rummaged about in it for a moment before he produced the odd metal object with a sighting glass-lensed loupe on one side and a hinged half-moon shaped gage on the other.  I brought the instrument to my eye and looked through the loupe, scanning the lakeshore and riverbank.  The water had overflowed the banks, and I could see the muddy evidence that it had receded almost as fast as it had risen above its shores.  I found the place where we had left our party but could see no sign of them standing under the tree line.  Where had they gone, I wondered.  Since the water had broken over the shore, my guess was that they had retreated further back under the canopy to avoid being swamped and drawn into the lake.   I watched for a few moments, seeing no movement or visible sign of our party.  Nine sky lines had moved away to the far south.  Eleven of our party had remained on the banks as the rest of us had come out onto the lake.  Eleven minus two left nine.

“We need to get down there,” I said, handing the instrument back to Begglar, “Something’s wrong.”

***

“This is absolutely ridiculous,” the young woman said, “I am leaning more and more to Miray’s position.  They have to be them.  Who else could they be?”

Mason, Matthew, and Dominic, along with the other young men, and Will, who had not said a word, since the argument with Matthew, stood upon the covered road, where the wagon ruts had climbed the bank and many more horses, and large animal prints tracked up and down the bank from the lake to the hollows.

Dominic offered, “I hope it ’tis, more than you all, but there are dangerous men about, and Da and Mum taught me to hold until certainty shines true.”

“What does that even mean, you bog-trotter?!” Will groused.

Dominic stiffened at the slur, his farmer’s hands and fists clenching, as he struggled to bite his tongue.

He’d been told that Surface Worlders could be insensitive, clumsy and rude, and not to mind too much what they said, but this stung and felt deliberate.  He’d never encountered someone so full of nastiness, that he literally begged to get a clout right in the mouth, but there was always a first.

“Stop it!” Miray cried, covering her ears.  “You’re a mean idiot!  People try to be nice to you, but you’re mean to everyone.  Your daddy should have taught you some manners or beat your butt!”

“My daddy is dead,” Will said flatly with an even voice devoid of emotion, “Forgive me if he wasn’t around long enough to teach me much of anything.”

Will stalked away, leaving the others quietly looking from one to the other.

“Well, I am sorry about that for you,” Miray said in a softer voice to Will’s receding back, and Will halted, but didn’t turn.

“Well get used to it, kid.  Life is cruel.  If you want to survive it, you have to quit caring so much.  Sooner you learn that the better.”  And with that he proceeded further down the dark road, leaving them to their decisions.

“Wait,” the young woman spoke up.  Will kept walking as if he hadn’t heard her.

“My name is Lindsey,” she said, moving after him, but Mason put his hand on her arm.

“Let him go, Lindsey,” he said quietly, “He’s not in a place where he cares.”

She turned sad eyes to Mason, then back to Will and then sighed.

“We didn’t…”

“Does it matter?  Bad things and circumstances happen to all of us.  He’s not the only one.  We can let those things make us stronger or make us bitter.  It’s still a choice.  O’Brian said that he suspects Will is still sorting through those choices, but he needs some space to make up his own mind.  Leave him be, for now.  It’s his decision whether he wants to be part of us or not.”

Matthew stepped forward and offer her his hand in friendship, “I’m Matthew.  Nice to finally meet you, Lindsey.”

Mason grinned, “He’s the lady charmer.  You gotta watch this one.”  But before Matthew could say anything, Mason offered his hand to her as well, “Mason’s my name.  Pleasure.”

Lindsey shook both of their hands simultaneously, offering each with a smile.

“My name is Tiernan,” one of the young men came forward.  And the other followed.  “Christopher,” he said, “but call me Chris.  And call me when dinner’s ready, too.”  Mason, chuckled as he shook Chris’s hand, “Nice to meet you, Chris When-Dinners-Ready!”  And they both share a laugh, which the others joined.

Introductions were made all around, and a feeling of togetherness seemed to bond them in the sharing and exchange.

***

The trees covered the rutted road as it coursed through the woods running alongside the sounding distance from the river Trathorn and lakes and streams beyond.  A bluish twilight covered the shadowy road, though the sun had emblazoned the sky with light over the tops of the forest canopy.  Branches twisted and rose to archways like the solemn nave of a gothic cathedral, yet the tangle of the limbs, bathed in ghostly blue light, added a sinister quality to the roadway that descended into the gloom.  As we cautiously wound our way down the forested path, eschewing the trail closer in along the edge of the lake we had previously traversed, it was with some trepidation that we received the noises beyond us.  Laughing.

At one time a joyous sound, and in another context an eerie one, we could not yet determine from which context the sounds should be taken.  The voices were blended, male and female, yet weighted more so on the masculine scale.

For at least one of us, that balance had shifted, and Nell, being the Seer among us, and holding some degree of respect in perception, she gathered her skirts and began to run ahead of us down the roadway, getting far enough ahead that she rounded a bend and was out of sight for a full minute before we caught up to the eclipse in the road.

A cry of nervous delight sounded, as she sighted what must’ve brought on her certainty that the noises heard were to be welcomed rather than feared.

As Begglar, Maeven, Christie, Laura, James and I rounded the bend, we saw Nell running with enraptured delight, laughing to herself as she spotted the figures gathered in the roadway ahead of her.  “Dom!  Dominic, my boy!” she bubbled, relief and joy intermingled with her voice, pirouetting around the delight in her step, her arms spread wide in preparation for an anticipated reuniting embrace.

“Mum!  Da!” came the replied answer back, as I noticed Begglar breaking away from us hurrying to join the reunion.

It was touching and warming in such a way that only the moistening of my eyes could express, to see Nell fall into her son’s arms, and their father join them all in a bear hug around them.  One of those he had been famous for, as a much younger and larger man.

Matthew, Mason and young Miray saw us approaching from the distance behind, and Miray launched forward into a run, the sheer delight of a child accentuating every step as if she skipped along towards us with short leaps, squealing with both affections and giggles that could melt through any toughness we might wish to pretend we had.  The girl bounded up to me, throwing her arms around my leg, hugging me fiercely and disarming me from keeping any sense of professional distance in leadership, as I had once thought was so foolishly necessary.

“I love you, Mister O’Brian,” she said unreservedly, and I melted, leaned down, picked her up into my arms and hugged her back every bit as fiercely as she hugged me.  “I love you, too sweet girl!” I said, finding it impossible not to say those words without tears streaming down my face.

“I knew you weren’t dead.  I just knew you weren’t!” she hugged me without reserve as only a child can, and I squeezed her tight, laughing and spinning her around and around.

“Not yet, my dear.”

Miray twisted back, looking at the others, Mason, Matthew, Dominic, and whom I would come to be introduced to as Lindsey, Tiernan, and Christopher, though I would be told, by Mason, to call him Chris When-Dinners-Ready, whatever that meant.  With her own degree of Miray’s unique impish panache, Miray cast accusatory eyes back at the others, and said, “See!  I told you so!  I know things too, y’know!”

Which brought its own level of laughter equally shared around.

***

I have delayed saying much about Miray, but now I feel the time is right for it.  Miray is something else.  I don’t mean that in a negative way, or in the sense that one other semblance of a little girl appeared to be.  You know who I mean.

What I mean is she is something extra special.

She was the first of everyone joining me on the beachhead, back at the beginning of this quest to give me her name.  She just up and approached me and announced emphatically with her hands on her hips, “I’m Miray.”

I knelt down to her level, extended my hand and said, “Well, hello there my dear Miray.  My name is Brian.”

She shook my hand, one emphatic pump only, smiled crookedly and said, “I am not a deer.”

And I responded, “Well then, are you a rascal?”

She beamed, winked at me and said, “Maybe.”  And then she skipped away back to the group to make other acquaintances.  I do believe Miray is the only one who knows all of the names of the people in our company, sly fox that she is, but I have refrained from exploiting the gathered intelligence of her free-spirited approach because I understood what giving names do here.

Miray did admit to a few things, however, that I have thought about, but was hesitant to think about more.  I am afraid I dismissed what I thought was the playful ramblings of a child, but in hindsight should have given them more weight.

The two men who were killed on the hillside, who had deserted our company.  Miray said they would not tell her their names, so she called them what she got from the exchange.  Mr. Go-Away-Kid, and Mr. Seen-and-Not-Heard.  I doubt the exchange had been pleasant, but Miray was not one to hold grudges, so she jokingly dismissed their rudeness, with branding them according to their given appellations.  But the one man, of the three who had left, who was disarmed enough, and charmed by her to let down his guard, did give her his name, but I asked Miray not to tell it to me, in case there was still hope for him.  The two who were killed died here, and since they had not given her their names, so did their memory of this world, upon reawakening.  But the one unaccounted for, the one man who had turned back to go to the Inn for a drink for the road, before leaving…he was still unaccounted for.  We did not see him brutally killed, but I had assumed he had been.  If not, he was being held a prisoner of the Xarmnians, and that might as well have been a death unto itself.  Depending upon what he had learned or been forced to tell them under torture or duress, I could not be certain that what we faced on the road ahead, might be the very path right into a trap.

***

“Where’s the wagon?” Begglar asked.  “Did ya move it?”

The temporary celebratory atmosphere suddenly took an ominous turn.

Maeven, who had been quiet and subdued, had softened somewhat during the reunion of those who had joined us on the ice, and she had been especially moved and brought to uncharacteristic tears when Miray, unabashedly ran up to her, threw her arms around her and said, “I knew you would be alright.  I prayed for you.”  Maeven too, picked up the little girl, holding her fiercely, burying her face into her hair, silently weeping a mix of gratitude and loss, drawing from a reservoir of unspent tears.  She held Miray for a few minutes before the girl squirmed and moved to be released.  Miray was not one to be held still for very long.  When Miray was down, I saw Maeven stand a little straighter than she had since we’d proceeded down through the forest.  Her eyes seemed more focused again like she was more in this reality than the one from which she’d returned.  She quietly, spoke an odd word, more to herself than to anyone else, which further seemed to bolster her reserves of strength.  “Geese,” she had said simply, without qualification or explanation.  Remember the tale she had told us on the way to Azaragoth, I believed I had an idea of what she meant by it.  Or at least the meaning the word signified for her personally.  I could not be sure, since the forested canopy covered the sky, but I believed there was another darkling sky line beginning to mend and fade.

As grief so often does, it hits us in waves, cycling the emotional pressure of loss into a tide that both crashes in and recedes as we phase through a day or moment coping with the new, unwelcome, tragic reality.  Maeven’s shift from a widow and grieving mother to focused and assessing warrior, tracker, and hunter, came at the brief relenting of that tide, as she moved forward, towards where the path down into the side shoal had been where we had left the wagon and the others.  Without a word she knelt down, under the shadowy canopy, studying the wheel tracks, the clusters of footprints, not expunged by the lake water that splashed and washed out the former prints leading down to the lakeshore.  Mud and seagrasses, moss and small fish lay strewn about the shore.  The wave that had carried these inland had struck the ground with a powerful blow, but the evidence was not limited only to within the reach of the water.  She moved forward to the two trees that had stopped and lodged the branch she had insisted that they bring with them onto the frozen lake.  She placed a hand upon its weathered surface, saw the fracture of the wood, where the fork had almost split it in two.

Mason and Matthew came behind her, observing her as she studied the signs of what had happened, before offering their account.

“You saved us, Maeven,” Matthew said, “If you had not insisted that we bring that log, we would have all drown out there.”

“I really need to take swimming lessons,” Mason offered his two bits worth, “Thank you.  Do you have anything else you want me to carry?”

Maeven, turned, gave him a short smile, and then walked past them back up to the road and knelt down, studying the prints once more.

After a moment, she asked, “Have any of you been further down this road, going south?”

Begglar harumphed, “Guys, what happened to the wagon?”

“It was taken by the soldiers!” Miray broke in.  “They took everybody, ‘cept me.  I got away.  They had big, mean dogs.  Scary dogs.  Not like Ms. Benson’s Rottweiler down the street, back home, but much scarier.”

“What’s this?” Nell asked.

“Uh-huh,” Miray nodded emphatically, “There were these big mean men, that took them.  They beat up Cheryl.  Sic’d the dogs on her.  Said that if we didn’t come with them, we would all die here and now.”

I approached Miray and knelt down to her, “How long ago was this?”

She wrinkled her nose and looked to Mason and Matthew for help.

“She came running across the lake when we found her,” Mason said.

“Couldn’t have been more than two hours ago,” Matthew guessed, “I don’t know how long it had been before she saw us gathered at the log.”

I looked up at Begglar, “What do you figure?  Three hours lead?  Four?”

Begglar nodded, “Give or take.”

Lindsey spoke up, “We’ve lost most of our weapons when the Falls collapsed.  They’re at the bottom of the lake.  We had all we could do, just holding on to the log when the water rose and pushed us towards the shore.  We didn’t know if you all had survived.  Look out there.  The face of the falls seemed to have sunken in.  We had planned to try to make it back to Azragoth or hoped to be picked up by one of the Azragothian patrols and brought back.  They took everything.  Our wagon, our supplies, we’ve no weapons and we weren’t sure where we were or where those Protectorate soldiers might be taking them.  We needed help.”

Maeven stood and turned back to us, “You are exactly right.  We all need help.  We need rest, and we need both weapons and supplies and a way to transport them.  Fortunately, there is a place ahead where we can get all of that.  A hidden cache we keep in the Forests of Kilrane.  Kept by someone you know, O’Brian.  You too, Begglar.  Though he may or may not be happy to see you.”

“Seems to be my lot,” I mumbled.

Maeven dusted her hands upon one another, and rose to her full height, “And there is something else you need to know.”

Tiernan spoke up, “What is that?”

“There are other things following that group of soldiers.  Perhaps for different reasons, but still they are ahead of us.”

Chris chimed in, “What things?”

“Those mean dogs, you mentioned, Miray,” Maeven continued, “They are called Cerberi.  These things hunt and eat those dogs.”

“Cerberus was described as a hell hound, some are depicted with three heads” I offered that bit of literary knowledge.

I turned to Maeven, “What eats a devil dog?”

Maeven pointed to a half-twisted print in the dirt, and a series of others that came out of the forest, cutting through the grass with spike-tipped points, making a large, splayed hoofprint with a cleft in the front depression.

“Those aren’t horse-hooves.”

I came closer and peered down, recognizing the characteristic signature print, and my breath left me for a moment.

“Satyrs,” I closed my eyes remembering for a half-second, “We need to hurry.”

***

Will had not gone far before he heard the murmured sounds of low conversation coming down through the blue hollows of the roadway, and the laughter of the “fools” he had left behind him.  Miray was too naïve and simple to understand anything.  He regretted being harsh with the little girl, she didn’t deserve it, but neither had he deserved half of what had been coldly served to him in his life, even when he was her age.  Pay it forward, right?  But he took no satisfaction in that.  It only deepened his secret self-loathing.  One more thing for him to be ashamed of.  Why couldn’t he seem to keep from spewing venom at every opportunity?  The dig he’d made at Dominic: bog-trotter.  Where had that come from?  Dominic was born here.  He’d never been to the fens of Ireland.  Probably didn’t even know what a fen or a bog was.

He had thought to step aside and climb back a little way into the forest by the roadside, and then come up behind the approaching group, just to show them all how foolish they were for letting down their guard.  None of them really appreciated the dangers of this place as he did.  None of them had suffered as much because of those dangers here.  He had crouched low behind some wayside ferns growing along the ditch, and behind a nest of trees block the view of travelers from seeing his hidden position.  So it was with some degree of surprise, consternation and self-recrimination that Will suddenly found himself suffused with a foul odor of something burned to char, the gust of horrendous breath breathing over his shoulder, brutally jutting its rough bristled and sandpapered jaw against his cheek, his hair pulled up and back and a knife’s blade pressed sharply against his throat.

A guttural voice, growled into his ear, “Make even one little peep, Boyo, and I’ll cut you from glim to gullet!”