Authors: Usman Ijaz
“You live here by yourself?” Adrian asked as he
pushed a branch out of his way.
Milen nodded rapidly, though whether it was to
the sound of the woodpecker or his question, Adrian couldn't tell. They all
soon found out for themselves, however.
Adrian became aware that he could hear the sound
of rushing water. The sound became louder the farther they followed their
guide, and was clearly audible as Milen led them into a wide clearing. In the
center of the dirt clearing was a large conical hut with a thatch roof.
“Milen, what took you so long?” came a woman’s
voice from around the hut.
Milen’s face broke into a large grin as he ran
towards the voice. Adrian exchanged a wondering look with Alexis and Connor.
“Ma! Ma!” Milen shouted in his rumbling voice.
“I brought friends!”
“What are you talking about, Milen?” the woman’s
voice suddenly grew cautious.
From around the hut stepped an old woman, her
gray hair tied in a bun. She wore a faded green dress that had seen many
washings and sandals that looked ready to fall apart. She startled as she saw
them standing there just on the edge of the clearing. She began to back away
from them, shaking her head in disbelief, her eyes wide with horror. She
tripped over her own feet and collapsed to the ground. Milen ran to her side,
jabbering in worry.
“What do you want?” screamed the woman from
where she lay. “Leave us alone!”
Adrian looked at his companions, startled, and
then back at the woman. It was clear how much they frightened her.
But why?
Alexis stepped forward. “I’m sorry, madam, but
we don’t want anything from you. We simply met Milen and we are hoping to find
a way out of these woods.”
“Ma, they’re friends!” Milen cried, kneeling
beside the woman.
“No they’re not, Milen!” cried the woman. “Stay
away from them! They lie!”
Adrian stepped forward, and the woman cried aloud
and fell back, trying to drag Milen back with her. Adrian retook his former
position. “We don’t mean you any harm.”
What’s the matter with her?
“You lie!” she shouted at them. “You all lie!”
Tears began to overspill her eyes and roll down her weathered cheeks.
“Ma, they’re friends,” Milen said, and stood.
The woman grabbed him by the arm and tried to hold onto him, but Milen gently
pulled his arm free and walked towards Adrian and his friends.
“Milen, no! Don’t go near them! They’re bad
men!”
“See, ma? Sanin, Alessi, and ... and Cotton!”
Milen said, pointing at them and matching them with completely wrong names.
Adrian looked at him in silent wonder.
He can’t even remember our names
clearly.
“They’re my friends. And he’s a whistling-man!” This last Milen added
with clear excitement as he pointed at Alexis.
“No,” the woman sobbed, “they’re not your
friends.”
Adrian watched as the Legionnaire stepped
forward with a determined step. He went to the woman on her knees and she
shrank away from him. Alexis peeled off his left glove as he bent down before
her.
“I don’t know what’s happened to cause you to
react like this,” Adrian heard him say, “but I want you to see that I am a
Legionnaire, and I promise not to harm you or yours as long as my companions
and I are unharmed.” He showed her the mark on the back of his hand. From where
he and Connor stood, Adrian watched the woman’s eyes grow wide with recognition
and understanding.
For a long time the woman simply stared at the
mark. Then she looked up into Alexis’s face. “But you’re too young.”
Adrian saw Alexis give the tiniest shake of his
head and understood how tired the Legionnaire was of hearing that. Yet when he
spoke his voice had a tinge of amusement. “I realize I’m young, but I’m still a
Legionnaire.”
The woman’s eyes slid to Adrian and Connor. “And
those behind you?”
“Companions,” Alexis explained simply. “Now, do
you believe that we don’t mean you harm?”
The woman nodded slowly. “Yes. I know what the
Legion stands for.”
Alexis helped her to her feet, and then had to
step aside as Milen ran over and hugged the small woman. He seemed to swallow
her up into his immense arms, and Adrian feared that he would break the woman
in two, emitting the dry snap of bones breaking, but when Milen put her down
she was smiling.
“Ma, they’re my friends, see?”
“Yes, Milen, I see,” said the woman, wiping away
her tears.
Once they had introduced themselves they were
invited to sit down and eat. As they sat around a small fire on wooden logs
pilfered from the woods and eagerly wolfing down bowl after bowl of vegetable
stew, the Legionnaire asked the questions that were on all their minds.
“Rebecca, where are we?”
Her voice was as steady and composed as her
features as she watched them. “We’re deep in the heart of Bramble Woods.”
“How long have you been living here?” Alexis
asked
“Since Milen was a small boy.” She watched
Adrian and Connor eat with a smile. “My, you two could almost match my Milen
for how much you eat.”
Adrian turned red immediately. He began to
stammer an apology but Rebecca cut him off.
“Don’t be sorry at all, it’s good to have
company.”
“Why live all the way out here?” Connor asked.
Rebecca was quiet for several minutes. She
looked at Milen, playing with his small toys, which were no more than pieces of
wood tied together to give them some semblance of human form. Her voice was
soft and sad when she answered. “Some people are not so eager to accept those
who are different.”
Adrian felt a bitter twinge as she said those
words. He looked at Milen, who seemed oblivious of their stares, and thought he
understood all the scars covering his body.
“You three are the only people we have ever had
out here,” Rebecca said. “I feel that that is a good thing. I don’t want Milen
to be ... viewed as different again.”
Adrian’s mood darkened and grew heavy. He
understood too well what Rebecca was saying. They ate in silence for a few
moments. Adrian looked up once and saw that Rebecca seemed to be studying him.
“You are also quite different,” she told him, setting him on edge at once.
“It’s in your eyes.”
From the corner of his eye Adrian noticed Alexis
tense at once, as he himself felt, though he didn’t understand why. There was
no harm in Rebecca’s words or in her tone, but the simple fact that she knew
what he really was made him wary.
“I used to know a few Ascillians back when we
lived outside of the woods,” Rebecca said with a smile. “They were good
friends, kind to Milen. This was before the--.” She looked away from him with a
small shake of her head.
Before the slaughter began
,
she had meant to say, Adrian knew. She gave him an apologetic look that was
full of sympathy. It didn’t make him feel any better.
“They’re dead,” Adrian said quietly and bluntly.
Rebecca’s smile had waned and disappeared, now a
deep sadness ruled her face as she looked at him. Adrian wanted to hide from
that look, to flee before her sympathetic gaze.
“The world has changed since then,” Alexis said
into the silence.
Both Adrian and Rebecca looked towards him, and
Adrian felt sure the words that they both wanted to ask were:
Has it, has it
really?
Alexis perhaps caught some of this in their steady gazes for he
lowered his own eyes and commenced eating.
Connor pulled them all back to the present. “You
couldn’t have constructed the hut on your own, or maintained the garden.”
Rebecca had shown them her garden on the other side of the hut.
Rebecca gave him a small smile. “No, we couldn’t
have. My husband constructed the hut and began the garden. Milen helped, of
course.” Milen looked up at his mention and gave a hopeful grin. His mother
returned it. “We have much of everything we need here. My husband made sure of
that before he died. He’s buried just beyond the garden. As for foodstuffs,
when we run low I journey out west through the woods and go to the market in a
small village called Enin, where I trade my woven baskets for seeds and flour.”
“But aren’t you lonely?” Connor asked in wonder.
Rebecca gave him a small smile, humored by the
question. “Lonely, yes. But also peaceful. It all depends on what you want from
the world around you. I learned long ago the best thing for me and my son was
to seek peace and solitude.”
“Does he ever get lonely?” Alexis asked.
“He will forever be a child in his mind ... so
he is lonely all the time.”
Silence settled in the brief pause of words.
Overhead the night was still and cloudless, a sickle moon clear amidst a sea of
stars. All around, the woods surrounded them, making Adrian glad for the light
of the fire before him. The flames danced shadows across their faces and
lighted them in a peaceful orange glow.
Rebecca looked from Milen to Adrian and Connor.
“You boys must be tired. Come, I’ll show you were you can lie down.”
Adrian looked towards Alexis and waited for the
Legionnaire’s nod before rising and following Rebecca. She led them inside the
hut, which Adrian found was more spacious than it looked from outside. Rebecca
fetched some blankets and laid them on the ground.
“I’m sorry, but this is the best I can do.”
“It’s as good as we need,” Adrian told her,
attempting to rid the shame he saw in her eyes. “Thank you.”
Adrian lay down on his little pallet as Connor
sat down on his. Rebecca tried to coax Milen into his cot, but he insisted on
staying awake and talking with his new friends.
“It’s all right,” Adrian told her. “We don’t
mind talking a little.”
Rebecca gave him a grateful smile and left them.
3
“Rebecca, what’s wrong with Milen?” Alexis
asked.
Rebecca didn’t seem to mind the bluntness of the
question. “He has been different since the day he was born. It was not much
when he was a babe, but as he grew he did so faster than the other children,
and as you can see quite differently. I remember when he used to come home with
bloody gashes upon his face because the other children had been throwing rocks
at him. The older he grew, the worse it became. We were driven from town to
town because no body wanted a mutant living close to them. They said to take
him to the Ruins and leave him there.” She seemed unaware of the tears that
filled her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Alexis said. He wished that he had
never asked the question.
Rebecca waved the apology aside as if it were
not necessary. She fixed him with a curious stare. “What are you doing this far
into the woods?”
Alexis found himself telling her the truth, or
as much as he could. “I have a mission to guide Adrian safely to a certain
destination. We were with others, but were attacked and became seperated.”
“You should go back the way you’ve come,”
Rebecca told him in a grave voice. “You cannot go on the way you are.”
“Why not?” Alexis asked. He poked at the flames
with a small stick.
“That sound you hear is the Rye River” Rebecca
explained. “It flows from the north and winds west. To continue as you are you
would need to cross it. To travel north along it will bring you only a little
farther from this forest, and to travel south-west along will lead you back the
way you’ve come, I’m assuming.”
Alexis nodded. “And what if we cross the river,
where will that take us?”
“I don’t know,” Rebecca said. “But I would
advise against crossing it.”
“Why?”
Rebecca stared long into the fire. At last she
looked up and met Alexis’s gaze with a solemn face. “Would you guess that these
woods have been here since the early colonies from Naban? They have shrunk
through the centuries, true, but they are still a remnant of the great forests
that our forefathers cut down. When I was little, my father used to scare me
with stories about these woods, to keep me from wandering into them. Mind you,
we didn’t live near here, but this forest covers much ground. That is why I
brought Milen here, because I knew no one dares to stray too far into Bramble
Woods. And for good reason.”
“And what reason would that be?”
Rebecca studied the flames long, and when she
spoke she looked past his shoulder and into the darkness of the woods.
“Sometimes Milen and I hear ... strange sounds from across the river. It sounds
like feral dogs snapping at one another ... and howling, especially if the moon
is up. I don’t know what lives beyond the river, but I pray it stays there and
leaves us be.”
Alexis thought it over for a long time, shadows
flickering across his face, brown eyes staring intently into the fire. To
travel north along the river would bring them only a little further from Haven
... and he had no idea what would be waiting for them there. God knew, if he
was their pursuer and had a map it would be easy to estimate where they would
exit the woods. To travel south along the bend would bring them behind Haven
...
and then we would have to constantly worry if we were not walking right
into our attackers’ hands
. The worst of it was that he knew there could be
enough in the party after them to cover a great distance and spot them.
Obviously there had been many involved in the ambush in Haven.