The Way Out of the Woods

I can feel their heartbeats surging through the ground as they run. It seems as though their hearts propel them onward while the muscles in their legs pump their blood. There is something unusual about these two fragile figures, that much is certain. I can hear four separate rhythms; two rushing hearts and two pairs of pounding feet on the forest floor. The trembling pulse of the soil and the air rings through me and tells me all I need to know about the two children. Humans can hear music and know what thoughts were in the composer’s head when it was written hundreds of years before, I hear the sounds of living things and I know more about what they are now than a human ever could. More than that, I become what they are now. At this moment I am awoken by the two children, drawn up above the level of consciousness that comes from the quiet, whispered thoughts of the insects and the birds and the crackling of the trees as they draw in the time that flows around them, store and compress it and ripple the earth that surrounds them with the strength of it.

Whether I exist or not is a question best saved for some other being. If you asked me I’d be certain to lie. All I know for sure is that for now at least I have a voice, although the only proof I have of that is the fact I can hear it. Whose voice this is would be another question entirely. I know that I am apart from the two beings fleeing through my woods. I know I am apart from these woods themselves, just as I know that without them I would be nothing. It is possible I was once like the children, or like the adults who pursue them; the monsters who have yet to reach the woods but that I can already see, at least in the form that the fear of them takes in the children’s minds. I have no eyes and yet I know more than mere eyes could ever tell me. I can tell from the ripples in the wind the shape of the sea many miles from here; I can tell from the sound of the earth when the rain will fall; and I can tell from the heat on the children’s brows that they are in love, and that they are afraid. Love or fear, it is the same heat either way. If I were to make a blade of the air and slice the children in two I would find fifteen rings running through each of them, one for each time they have seen the world shrink and dilate with the seasons.

A new fear is growing in the children’s minds now that darkness is falling. They are lost. The woods contain more space than they ought to; a full circle here contains perhaps two dozen degrees more than it would out on the open fields beyond. There are the same three dimensions here as elsewhere of course, but they are of little use when there are neither even planes nor straight lines against which to measure their extent. One may safely blame the trees for the confusion; in their slow lives they accumulate too much time without the necessary space to keep it in. It is only natural that the air and the soil around them should be forced to twist themselves oddly to make room. This is the sort of problem that the creator of things, if ever there was one, clearly never took the time to think through. A place designed for the trees is not always ideal for quicker beings and humans are in many ways quicker than most, with none quicker than these two.

They are running, as far as I can tell, from a contradiction. What they are and what they are required to be are not merely different, but utterly irreconcilable things. The boy, he is to be a carthorse. He will grow strong legs and thick skin and he will work. He will not ask why he works, in fact he will say as little as possible. If the king requires it he will go to France or elsewhere and die for a country of which he has yet to see more than ten square miles. The girl, her fate is to be a prize sow. First pampered and fattened, then given to some family or other of noble breeding for the favours to be gained from the transaction. She will be provided with a well-appointed stall in which to produce a steady supply of thoroughbred piglets. But everyone knows that livestock are seldom as thankful as they ought to be for what is done on their behalf. Sow and stallion alike, they are to be spared the agony of choice. Neither need make another decision again, save in the matter of whether or not to have an egg with breakfast. But no, they are not thankful for this. They run instead.

Manifest destiny should not need enforcers and yet they are here now, or on the borders at least. There are more of them than there are of the children they pursue, but I could not guess at a number. They are all too alike in their minds, full of purpose where thought might otherwise be found. They all move in much the same way; legs like baulks of timber, backs unyielding to the roll of the terrain. To slow their advance is hardly a challenge. They do most of the work themselves as they seek to impose themselves on this place, on my place. I am not impressed by the exhibition of strength or of solidity, not by humans at least. What is stronger or more solid than a tree? Branches and roots that the children swept past without thinking minutes earlier, these now grasp at ankles and tear at bootlaces. Firm ground becomes mud, a liquid gravity concealed by the scatter of leaf litter. Ancient paths choose this very moment to yield and slide away down the hillside towards to river, and the river itself grows so loud as to stifle all other sounds. One way or another I have enough human nature about me to enjoy the results immensely. Anger swells within the stumbling men's hearts. I am not impressed by anger either, nor its ally determination. The children are not determined. They are too busy running for that.

Woodland steals the light from the sky faster than the sinking sun. The children have already run for longer than they can see to do so, but even I can guide their passage no further. I can hide them though. They find a steep-sided gully bridged by various fallen trees. Most of these are too rotten to take the weight of a squirrel let alone a human, so I show the children to a place where exposed corners of rock form a sort of ladder. The boy climbs down into the gully first and then wordlessly encourages the girl to follow him, extending his arms towards her as if he could somehow carry her down. I feel a single fearsome punch of the girl's heart as her foot slips on one of the stones, but either I somehow hold her in place or she finds the strength to do so herself. At the bottom of the gully the darkness flows and gathers like the stream now soaking the children's shoes. With their outstretched hands they find shelter below a shallow overhang of mud and stone held together by time and force of habit. They are afraid, and yet somehow they are not. The wet, iron-stained mud soaks the warmth from their clothes and the strength from their bones, but still they are strong. Stronger than the men crashing towards them, stronger perhaps in this moment that the trees or the rocks or the wind. Their strength is my strength, and some distance away an old tree happens to fall across a path and block the progress of a group of men. It is not my place to fell trees of course, but who can say that I was even responsible? The tree must have been all but ready to fall anyhow, or no whim of mine could have convinced it to do so. It is clearly just a part of the nature of things that these two children should find a little good fortune in their flight, and such matters are as much a mystery to me as to the humans. Of course the children affect my thoughts, but even the part of me that was here before they came to these woods knows that I must help them as far as I can. Why I should help them? I'll settle for it being a way to pass the time, but there is undoubtedly more to it than that.

The children are unmoving, each imprisoned by the encircling arms of the other. They can barely see now to tell the ground from the sky, both of which lie some distance above their heads as they cower in the ragged little gorge. They can still hear of course, and what they hear above the crackle of the stream and the hiss of the wet earth is the sound of footsteps, curses and cries. They cannot know how easily they might be seen from the forest floor above them, they cannot know whether the men carry torches. They do not know, and dare not think, what will happen if they are found. They do not know that the girl is carrying a child of her own, indeed at present only I can know that. All they know is that they must not be found. Only as the footsteps draw closer to them do they know what they must do. It is a rare thing indeed to see magic even when you are arguably a being of magic yourself, although let us not forget that the one thing in this woodland that I cannot see is myself. The children have not seen magic of course; there is none to be found in the tame and tended lands they inhabit or in the sturdy, warm homes where they shelter from the real nature of things. Perhaps they think that magic depends upon words, upon fussy mixtures of herbs and roots; perhaps they think that it must be learned, or that it is evil. The world, of course, has neither a use for words nor any understanding of their purpose. It has no taste buds with which to check the quantity of nightshade in a broth, no eyes to read symbols scratched in the dirt nor the inclination to note what implement is used for the scratching. An owl learns to fly without recourse to words, and is happy to do so without first asking for permission. Without words then, to each other or to the world at large, the children do what they know they must, abandoning all concern for what is merely possible. Without releasing their hold on each other they move from the shadows and the gloom to another place, and somehow I am taken with them.

There is light here, not the light of day or of the moon but rather a vague and gentle glow with no identifiable source. The gully is the same, only every rock and clump of moss glistens with colour in this light that has no colour of its own. The water in the stream moves like heavy smoke. The children draw themselves to their feet and gaze around them with a strangely fearless fascination. The sounds of the advancing men have gone. The men are now a hopelessly long way from us. They can no more find us now than they can leap from the treetops to the moon. There is something else about this gully now; something else has changed besides the light and the gently writhing colours. It takes the children to show me what has happened, for they are both looking at me now. This gully and the children and the sky above are all that I can see. I am a fixed point looking out at the world. The lurch of nausea this revelation brings to me tells me that I also have a stomach. Not only can the children see me, but I am something that is there to be seen. I turn my eyes, for it is eyes I now see with, downwards. I find legs and arms and the sundry other components of a human body, and I see that they are encased in clothing of a kind. There is too much complexity of colour, too much density of texture and of detail, to determine whether I am wearing the most pitiful rags or the most glorious finery. It hardly seems to matter, for although there is a wind here it is a wind that brings no chill. The girl speaks to me, and it is the first time I have heard her voice;
'Did you bring us here?' she asks, her voice a melody.
'You brought me here,' I answer, surprised to discover that I have a voice and that it can speak in the human tongue.
'What is this place?' she asks.
'I do not know, or perhaps I cannot remember, but they cannot follow you here.'
'No, they cannot,' the girl says, and looks to her companion with a smile that ripples through the air. The boy smiles back at her, his face quite pathetic with happiness.
'You helped us,' the girl says. This is not a question.
'I think that I did.'
'What is your name?'
'I do not know. I would not know my own face if I saw its reflection.'
'Can we stay here?'
'I doubt that there is anyone to stop you. Your homes will not be in this place, your family will not be here, I do not know what lies beyond the woods in this world.'
'We do not need to leave these woods,' the boy says evenly, his gaze still fixed upon the girl beside him.
'And I have never been able to. Perhaps I can now that I have legs to carry me,' I say, somewhat taken aback by the thought as I hear it spoken aloud.
'You cannot leave here without a name,' the girl says, and she is right. There is something about this place that makes things clear, both to see and to know. The children should be frightened of a strange world, but they are not. They know that there is nothing in this place for them to fear. The girl stares into my eyes for many long moments.
'Your name,' she announces at last, 'is Faran.'

I do not ask their names. With my new legs and my new name, or perhaps my old name restored to me, I leave the two children in peace. I walk for miles through the woods, passing familiar sights that I have never seen before, until I reach the sea. As I step from spongy earth onto rocky beach the light of the woods is replaced by the glow of the morning sun resting on the horizon. There is an island adrift in that sea, the green of its grass made gold by the young sunlight. I keep walking until the cool water is lapping at my waist and draining the dull ache from my tired legs and then I dive in and swim towards the island without stopping to look back at my little forest. It belongs to them now.