The Forestwalker

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5

• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10

• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15

• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20

• Epilogue

Chapter 1

“Gareth! Wake up, sleepyhead! You're going to be late for school!”

Gareth Elmwalker yawned and opened his eyes. The dappled green sunlight streaming through his bedroom window hadn't quite reached his face, but he knew why his mother was waking him up early this morning. He was wide awake in an instant, calling, “Don't worry, Mum. I'm up!” as he swung out of his hammock. As he stripped off his nightshirt and filled his wash basin from the spigot that brought water from the rain-barrel on the roof, he couldn't stop glancing over at the corner of his room, where a bulging knapsack sat expectantly. He washed as quickly as he figured he could get away with, paying special attention to his neck and behind his ears – where his mother always checked – then he pulled on the brand new linen shirt, sheepskin trousers, and wool jacket that his mother had made him especially for today. He traced the delicately embroidered vines and leaves running down the sleeves and lapels of the dark green jacket with a smile. The same leaves lined the collar of the cream-colored shirt and the cuffs of his dark brown pants. Just like his mother, always wanting him to look his best. He turned back to his wash basin and studied his reflection in the water as he combed his dark black hair back from his face. The embroidered leaves were the exact same shade of green as his eyes. That made him blush a little, but he knew his friends wouldn't make fun of him. Not today. They would all be too busy being that exact same shade of green with envy, he was certain.

He grabbed his knapsack from where it sat by the wall and swung it over his shoulder, testing its weight as he did so. It shouldn't be too onerous a burden, he decided as he ran through its contents again in his head. Two weeks' worth of survival gear – a blanket, a few essential changes of clothes, some bandages and medicine, a waterskin, some dried meat and fruit rations, and a knife, - each item carefully chosen and packed by him, then repacked, then packed again more than a dozen times over the last week in anticipation of this day: his eighth birthday and the day of his first solo trip into the forest. It was a rite of passage; one he had been looking forward to for months. And since he was the oldest of all his friends – only by a month or so, but it was enough – he was the first to experience the freedom of the forest on his own. He was looking forward to coming back and having them hang on his every word about the experience almost as much as he was looking forward to going in the first place.

“Gareth! Breakfast!” That was his father's voice.

“Coming, Da!” As Gareth headed for the door, his eyes fell on the bow and arrows hanging on the wall. He had helped his father make it last year for his birthday; his first step on the road to growing up. Today, he would take the second. He had debated whether or not to take the bow and arrows with him, but had decided against it in the end. He wasn't out there to hunt, after all, just to travel and survive. His knife would be enough for that. But he brushed his hand over the bow as he passed it – for good luck, he thought briefly, though he'd completely forgotten about that momentary fancy by the time he'd descended the rope ladder to the main room of the house. His mother and father were sitting on cushions around the low table near the fireplace, talking quietly, but they both looked up with big smiles on their faces when he came down into the room.

“Happy birthday, son,” Gareth's father, Malcolm, said as he rose from the table.

“You look so grown up!” Gareth's mother, Helena, got up as well and embraced him fiercely as he came over to the table. “Where does the time go?”

“Ow, Mum, you're breakin' my ribs,” Gareth mumbled into her shirt, his face red. She released him as his father laughed good-naturedly, then they all sat down to a hearty breakfast of nutbread, fruit preserves, and poached eggs.

“So, do you really think you're ready for this, son?” his father asked him as they ate.

“Of course I am, Da,” Gareth reassured his father. “You've taught me everything I need to know, and I already know the forest out there like the back of my hand. I'll be fine, I promise.”

“But you remember what we told you about not traveling too far south, right, dear?” his mother asked as she fussed with his hair and his shirt collar. “The border is a very dangerous place right now. More people disappear down there all the time, and the rumors...”

“Now, Helena,” Gareth's father said gently as he took her hands and pulled them away from Gareth's shirt, which she was now compulsively straightening. “There's no reason to scare the boy. He's eight years old today; he's ready for this, just as we were and as all his peers will be soon enough. He knows the dangers, and most of those stories are exaggerated anyway.”

“But Mable Springdancer told me that the nomads are getting bolder all the time. And the rumors... that they're slavers and cannibals... there's talk of not letting the children do this any more, or of waiting a few years, until they're older...”

“Mum!” Gareth said, trying not to sound too confrontational or desperate, in case she decided he couldn't go after all. “I know all about the rumors, and I promise I'll be careful. I was planning on going north anyway. The guys and I have already picked out the place we're all going to travel to. I'm gonna be the first, Mum. Please, you can't take this away from me!”

“Don't worry, Gareth,” his father said, and his mother looked instantly apologetic. “Your mother was suggesting nothing of the sort. Of course you're going. We just want you to be safe, is all. We're your parents; it's our job to worry about our only child.”

Gareth tried not to sigh with relief as he smiled at his father. “I know, I know. I said I'd be careful. It's not like I'm the first to ever do this, ya know.”

“You cheeky scamp!” his father said as he hugged Gareth to him. “I'm sure you'll be just fine. You know everything you need to. Of that I'm certain, because I taught you everything I know, and your good old da is the expert, naturally.”

“Sure you are,” Gareth said, grinning as he rolled his eyes. “You and everyone else's da.” That made everyone laugh, and lightened the tension considerably, though both his parents still grilled him on everything he needed to know and be careful of during the rest of their breakfast. He knew they cared, though, so he didn't mind their worrying over him, though he did protest a little when his mother insisted on saying goodbye and hugging and kissing him in front of all his friends in the doorway of the house when he finally left that morning. “Mum, come on, not in front of the guys,” he muttered as he struggled out of her arms.

“Alright, alright,” she said with an exasperated sigh as she straightened his jacket and shirt collar one last time. “Just stay safe, son, and don't forget that we love you. We'll see you in two weeks.”

“I love you guys too,” Gareth said as he kissed her on the cheek and gave his father a quick hug. “I'll be back before you know it.” Then, he turned away and ran off to catch up to his friends, who had moved off while Gareth and his parents were saying their goodbyes. “Hey, guys, wait up!”

He caught up with them halfway along the path leading to the first crossover bridge they had to take to get to school. As he walked, he couldn't help but look up and around, marveling as he did every day at the village that he called his home. The trees that sheltered and protected and provided for them - the trees whose branches he was walking along right now without a care in the world in order to get from one place to another - were enormous. They towered far above his head, disappearing into a thick canopy of green leaves that gave the light that filtered through them a dappled emerald hue, and their trunks were so large that it would take half an hour to walk around one if he were standing on the ground. His home was built against one of these trees, almost a quarter of a mile above the forest floor, its trunk serving as the back wall and one of its wide branches making up the floor of the house's main room. Those same branches were also the paths and roads that all the villagers traveled along to get from place to place, supplemented occasionally by rope ladders and bridges, as the village's many buildings were built on several distinct levels of the trees that surrounded the large clearing in the forest that allowed this place to be their home.

Unaffected by vertigo, Gareth glanced down to the floor of the forest. One of the great trees had once stood in that large empty circle. When it had died, special nutrients in its fellow trees and in the soil had caused it to quickly decompose, leaving a clearing of rich topsoil that was perfect for farming and cultivating small crops of grains and fruits and vegetables that were difficult to harvest from the forest. Down there, on the forest floor, people moved among small garden plots, tending to the crops, or cared for small herds of domesticated forest goats and sheep, whose wool, milk, skin, and meat had many uses. In the very center of the large clearing, carefully protected, was a sizable sapling – the old tree's replacement. It would take hundreds of years to grow as large as any of the surrounding trees – this village had been here before Gareth's parents were born – and until the day that it began to take the soil's nutrients away from the crops, the villagers would protect it and help it grow. When it finally asserted its right to this space in the forest, though, the village would be dismantled and all the people would move away to other villages, or they would find a newly-made clearing and settle down there. The forest was vast, after all, and there were less than two dozen settlements like this one, so a new home would not be impossible to find. But Gareth knew he would not see that happen to this village in his lifetime, and his children would probably not see it in theirs. Time gave the illusion of stability to this world where everything was always changing, his father had told him, but everything in life was transient, and Gareth felt that more acutely today – the day in which he got a little older and closer to adulthood – than he ever had before.

But those grown-up thoughts were still fleeting, and easily forgotten once he caught up to his friends and started showing off his new clothes, and his knapsack, and the knife his father had made for him with the elmwood handle carved with the same leaves and vines that his mother had embroidered on all his clothes. Their jealousy radiated off them in waves, but he didn't taunt them about it, because their turn would come soon enough. Instead, he fielded their questions about his upcoming trip, promised he would bring back great stories and advice for them, and ignored their attempts to needle him in their jealousy. When he got to school, he was the center of attention there as well. Everyone knew what today was for him – the way he was dressed would have given it away even if he and his friends hadn't been talking about it for weeks. The older kids were ready with advice, the younger ones bombarded him with the same questions that his friends had been asking, and his teacher gave him proud and approving looks similar to those his parents had been giving him. He was also very understanding about the fact that Gareth had trouble concentrating on his work that day.

As soon as school was out for the day, Gareth said goodbye to his friends and his teacher, then headed around the trees and north out of the village. Fortunately, there were not a lot of people around, so he didn't have to field too many more stares and congratulations and words of advice. It didn't feel that different, leaving the village and heading out into the wild forest... at least not at first. But when he got to the first fork in the tree-branch path and turned back momentarily to get his bearings, he found that the village had disappeared from view, and suddenly it hit him. He was really out here, on his own, for two whole weeks. He was going to have to find his own food and shelter, make his own way out into the forest to the agreed-upon spot that he and his friends had picked out – a trip that should take about a week – then find his way back home. It would be dangerous, and difficult, and probably a bit lonely, but at the moment his heart was racing with nervous excitement as he looked back and forth between where he'd come from and where he was going and took his first independent steps out into the wide world.

Some things were harder than he had expected – such as finding water – and the forest did prove to be a bit more dangerous than he had realized it could be. The spider monkeys that he and his friends had played with and chased and teased with treats around the village became positively fierce and quite dangerous further off in the forest where contact with humans was minimal, and Gareth had to fight off more than a few of them whenever he sat down to eat those first few days, until he taught enough of them a lesson and they learned to leave him alone. He also found that traveling was slower when he had to find his own food, and travel down to the forest floor to get water, and search for safe places to stay at night. His father and the other adults had known all the best places and safest havens, the paths to follow, where the streams and groves of fruit trees were, and they didn't have to study every plant and nut and root and berry to make sure it was edible. Gareth knew these things would come with time and experience, but that wasn't much comfort to him the first night he spent out in the rain because he hadn't found a decent shelter before dark, or the first day he went hungry because he couldn't find enough food, or the first afternoon he spent puking his guts out because he ate the wrong mushroom that he found beside a stream.

But the fact that all his inexperience slowed him down was what bothered him the most. He and his friends had planned this route out so carefully – the one they all would take – but their trips had been taken in groups with their parents, or older siblings, or their teacher or other adults, so they hadn't known that they would need to plan for it taking them longer on their own. And he was the first; if he didn't do this right, he'd never live it down. When he realized on the fifth day that he was at least four days away from his final destination instead of two, he made what he knew even at the time was a reckless decision: he would press on and reach the clearing they'd chosen as their halfway point, no matter how long it took, then he'd race back home in order to make it back by the end of the two weeks.

He found the clearing in four days, as he had predicted, and as he had planned with the others, he carved his name and an elm leaf on a dead piece of wood and stood it upright in the center of the small grassy hill that marked the clearing. He had made it, and he had been here first. Then, figuring a few extra hours wouldn't hurt, he went over to the stream that ran around one edge of the hill, stripped, and washed all his clothes and the blanket he'd brought with him. While they dried in the sun, he went swimming. Thanks to the high canopy blocking most of the sunlight, the forest was not excessively warm, but the water was refreshing all the same. He and his friends had sneaked away from school a couple of times to go swimming in the small lake that fed the stream that ran by the village, which was how he'd learned, and he was glad that he no longer flailed around like he was drowning most of the time. He swam out to the deepest part of the stream, then flipped over on his back and floated there, staring up at the trees towering above him, reveling in the freedom he was experiencing for the first time since this trip began. He felt like the squirrels and the birds that he saw leaping and flying through the branches of the trees above him. He hoped that every day of his life could be this perfect and happy and peaceful.

After getting dressed in his clean, dry clothes, he scoured the surrounding trees for all the food he could find, packing it away in bundles of leaves to be eaten on the move during his trip home. He filled up his waterskin, and made sure to drink his fill before he left the clearing, because he was going to try not to stop for food or water on his way home. Then, he returned to the trees and traveled south until dark before finding a safe hollow in one of the trees to curl up in for the night. The next morning, he was up at dawn, and he traveled all day without stopping for any reason until dark. It was exhausting, running and climbing through the trees without stopping, but he knew he had a lot of time and distance to catch up on if he was going to make it home in four days. So, every day, he traveled from sunrise to sunset without resting, then slept like a log every night, huddled in various tree hollows. If he was lucky, he would get close enough to be able to slow down and clean himself up before getting home, so they wouldn't know what he'd done.

But the four days passed, and he ran out of food and water, and he still wasn't home. When the sun began to set on the day that he was supposed to be back in the village, he was still at least a day behind. He pressed on through the night that night, heedless of the danger of doing so, visions of his parents sitting up waiting for him, of all his friends going to school the next day wondering why he wasn't back yet, of search parties being sent out swimming in front of his eyes as he tried to ignore the dryness of his mouth and the rumbling of his stomach. Unfortunately, doing this ended up being a worse idea than any he'd had so far, because when the sun rose again, he found that he was completely lost. He didn't recognize his surroundings at all, he had lost all sense of direction, and he was too hungry and thirsty to think straight any more. He had to stop, no matter how late it made him – it was too late to get back on time anyway. He felt his cheeks burn with shame and humiliation as he slowly climbed down to the forest floor and began to search for a stream, drinking out of puddles and sucking water from the broad leaves of bushes to sustain himself as he searched. Unfortunately, it took most of the day to find one, and he was so exhausted by the time he reached it that he just collapsed on the bank, slurped up water from the stream until he felt his stomach bulging, then closed his eyes and immediately fell asleep.

When he woke up, the sun was rising again, and he still didn't know where he was. He found berry bushes by the stream and ate his fill, then drank more water and filled his waterskin before climbing back into the trees and trying to get his bearings. He picked a likely direction, traveled until he didn't recognize anything any more, then picked another likely direction and tried again to find the way home. But he was too disoriented, and getting more scared the more lost he became, and that made it difficult to concentrate on what he was doing and what he was looking for. As two more days and nights passed without a recognizable path or landmark, Gareth began to despair of ever finding his way home. But he had to find his way somewhere eventually, some place where he could at least get his bearings, so he finally decided after days of futile searching to just pick one direction and go with it until he found out where he was.

His first sign that he was getting somewhere, almost a week after he was supposed to have been home, came when the smell and taste of the air changed. The breeze began to blow hot and dry – the opposite of the cool dampness he was used to – and it carried in it the scent of something foreign. His curiosity aroused, Gareth pressed on, hoping that he had found a different village or settlement, or maybe a clearing that would be open enough to the sky to help him find his way again. But when he stepped around the trunk of a tree several hours later to find that the branch ahead of him ended abruptly, he realized that he had made a horrible mistake.

The branch he was standing on led nowhere but the open sky. He had reached the southern border of the forest, the one place he had been warned about for as long as he could remember, the one place that all forest-dwellers avoided if they valued their lives. Fear nearly stopped his heart as he looked out over the flat, brown plain that stretched out in front of him for as far as he could see. It was such an alien landscape to him, without a tree or a speck of green anywhere in sight. The wind coming off it was hot and dry; it scratched his throat as he breathed and the dust in it made his eyes water. And yet, despite his fear, he couldn't help the intense feeling of curiosity it sparked in him as well. He had to see more of it, drink in every detail so that he could save face with his friends back home when he finally made it back. This was the compass-point he had been looking for; finding his way back to the village would be easy now, but he had to bring back a good story or he would never live down the fact that he'd gotten so badly lost. Besides, he was safe up here in the trees. The nomads who lived on those plains may be terrifying and dangerous, but there was no way they would be able to see him all the way up here, especially if he was careful and quick, and what were the chances that there were any nearby anyway?

Gareth took off his knapsack and set it carefully in the small hollow where the branch met the tree-trunk, then he slowly and cautiously walked out along the branch as far as he could, to the point where it got too narrow for him to maintain a steady perch. From here, he could see that the brown undulating ground was actually a uniform carpet of tall, dead-looking grasses that moved and swayed in the wind, and from the shadows that it cast over bare patches he guessed that that grass was almost as tall as he was, if not taller. The sky awed him almost as much as the barren plain did. He had only ever seen fleeting glimpses of the sky through the forest canopy before; to realize that it was actually a vast blue expanse stretching out in every direction, dotted with wispy grey and white clouds that danced around it with the wind was a revelation to him. He was riveted, simultaneously amazed and terrified by the openness of everything in front of him. He could have stood there for hours, drinking in the strangeness of it all, and still not get enough of it.

Suddenly, there was a whooshing noise, and a second later something hit Gareth hard in the chest. He stumbled backwards, fighting to stay balanced on the narrow tree branch, and looked down to see a leather thong weighted by metal disks at each end encircling his chest, pinning his arms to his sides. He struggled to get it off, still stumbling backwards towards the safety of the trees as he did so, but before he had taken more than two steps, there was another whooshing sound and a second bolas wrapped itself around his legs, just below his knees. Gareth screamed in shock and terror as he lost his balance and fell out of the tree. It was almost half a mile to the ground. Branches whipped him on all sides as he plummeted downward, screaming uncontrollably, knowing that, any second now, the very last thing he felt in this world would be pain beyond imagining as he hit the ground...

And then he woke up.