Chapter 23 - Sammy versus the Forest of Silence

One of the benefits of being a demigod was that, along with a great many other more obvious and magnificent traits, Sammy possessed both excellent night-vision and better than average balance. Consequently, he returned to his starting point much cleaner, and much more quickly than Barney and Elfin had. By the time he got back, his eyes had adjusted so much to the dark that he could make out a small side tunnel leaving the main tunnel just after the eel vat he had managed to avoid falling into with a well-timed leap. Since there appeared to be no other way his friends could have been taken, he turned down it. It was a medium sized tunnel, but it seemed very small to Sammy, who had to hunch over to fit. He was glad when he came to the thick dungeon door at the end. He slammed his fist into the metal, sending the door flying. It looked magnificent, but was a rather silly thing to do, because if his true love had been imprisoned, the door would have landed on her and crushed her. Also, the door was unlocked anyway. But part of being heroic is looking magnificent, and he felt sure that if there had, in fact, been bad guys in the room, they would have all fainted in terror.

Finding the dungeon empty, he pulled the only other door in the room off its hinges and flung it aside. He marched into the tunnel. This, too, was rather cramped and smelly. He wretched slightly, and shook a rat off his leg. He would have liked some light, but with unusual acuity he foresaw that there was a distinct possibility of a fireball if he lit a torch in the stench. He held his breath and continued to run as fast as he could in the small space.

Finally, with great relief, he saw the light at the end of the tunnel. He sped up.
When he finally burst out of the tunnel, he was in a clearing. Trees and other plant-life were gathered a few metres away. The forest was unnaturally thick, huge trees much too close together. Sammy paused for a moment, pondering his next move. It was not immediately obvious where Celia and Barney had been taken. However, as you may have gathered by this point, Sammy was not much given to pondering. “CELIA! WHERE ARE YOU?” He bellowed with impressive volume. The trees turned to look.

The trouble with people as magnificent and heroic as Sammy is that they often do not realise they should be frightened. This was one of those times. A particularly nasty bramble leaped at him. If it had had a voice, it would have snarled. It bit his leg, tearing his already ragged breeches. Sammy pulled it up by the roots and ripped it to pieces. He looked at his hands. They were covered in tiny scratches, each with a slender line of blue in it. It was quite pretty he thought, wiping his hands on his shirt so the blue poison would come out. It was quite painful, but not as bad as being stabbed. “CELIA!” He bellowed again.

The brambles became ferociously angry at this cavalier reaction to their poison, and surged forward as one. They surrounded him, attacking his legs in the manner of several hundred small dogs with very sharp teeth. Sammy pushed through them towards the dark forest, kicking out and uprooting a bramble bush every few seconds. More surged in to replace them, and they became less like a pack of small dogs, and more like a see full of swimming needles. One of them reached through the rip in his breeches, and made a deep painful scratch down his leg. He lost his temper.
“GET OUT OF MY WAY!” He yelled, unleashing the full power of his voice on the brambles. His voice rumbled and reverberated across the land. The brambles hurriedly retreated. The thick forest split in two, trees gliding left and right, leaving a bare trail ahead of him. On the other side of the forest, a river suddenly changed course, as a mountain range slowly rumbled to the right. In his palace in the clouds, Rufus Pegasus, God, sighed in exasperation.

Sammy was utterly astonished when the trees moved for him. He gaped like a fish for several seconds, before quickly coming to terms with his omnipotence. He loped off down the cleared path, calling desperately for Celia. She did not answer. Eventually, he came across a large, hairy, and perplexed man, who was standing vaguely in Sammy’s path, looking lost. He looked a bit frightened when Sammy came running up to him, especially when Sammy tackled him to the ground and held him there.

“What did you do with her?” Sammy growled.
“What do you m-mean?” stammered Elfin. He had only just been recovering from the attack of the trees, and beginning to think about forming a plan, and now he was being attacked by someone so powerful the very trees were afraid of him.
“What have you done with her, you evil, kidnapping fiend?” Sammy pressed his hand down on Elfin’s throat.
“I didn’t kidnap anyone!” Elfin gasped. He was short of breath due to a combination of terror and the hand on his throat. “We were rescuing Celia! But th-the trees...”
“Oh.” Sammy removed his hand and helped the perplexed man up. “Do you know where she is?”
“The trees - they got her. Took her...” Elfin massaged his throat and waved his hand vaguely in the direction Celia had been carried off.
Sammy plunged into the woods in that direction, and the trees parted smartly for him.
“Wait!” cried Elfin, and hurried after the man. It seemed safest, now he was not being throttled.

The trees did not stay frightened for long. The power that moved them was old, far older than the Gods themselves, and evil. It was rooted in the very veins of the earth, where the demons had sprung from when they had wreaked havoc upon the earth, before the Gods had risen and defeated them. It would not be held back by some young half God for long. The forest closed in behind them.

They went for the weakest point, roots hacking at Elfin’s legs, vines winding about his body. Sammy had to keep turning around and freeing him, ripping the plants off with superhuman strength. The tenth time he did this, an enormous low branch swung round and thudded into him, sweeping both men off their feet. Before they could stand, dozens of vines and roots grew over them, holding them to the ground. Sammy could only struggle feebly under vines as thick as his legs, and Elfin could not move at all. A big tree bent over them. Sammy couldn’t remember what kind. He wished he’s paid more attention in lessons. He couldn’t remember anything about them having teeth. It was the second most terrifying experience of his life. He consoled himself with the thought that he would never again have to climb down a solid wall in the dark.

A girl screamed then, from quite near. The tree paused. Celia! Sammy mustered all of his strength, and wrenched himself from the vines. He freed Elfin, and ran towards the screaming, crashing through vines that were slung through the branches like spider-webs. The desperate strength that had gripped him earlier, when he had been faced with the wall, gripped him now. She was very close. He ripped up a tree with a trunk as round as a dinner-plate, and tossed it aside. He burst into the clearing.

There was no-one in it.

Another scream reached his ears. “No!” she was crying, “No, please!” Sammy changed direction and hurtled through the trees. Elfin trailed exhaustedly through the wreckage he left in his wake.

When Sammy hurled himself into the clearing where the screams were coming from, an astonishing sight met his eyes. A tree so enormous it could have been hollowed out to make a sizable house stood in the centre of the clearing. It had twisted itself forward so its leaves formed a dark canopy, but greenish light filtered in around it. Several sturdy, black boughs had grown or knotted themselves into a chair. A throne, realised Sammy. And in that chair sat Celia.

She didn’t look like she wanted to be there. Her dress had somehow been replaced by a shimmering green shift that seemed to change colour every time you looked at it. It seemed almost silver at first, before moving through grey-green and pale green to darker shades. A wreath of silver leaves encircled her head like a crown. She was screaming and struggling, but vines wound around her arms and legs, holding her to the throne. Sammy ran to her.

It was difficult to get her free. The great tree objected, and kept swinging its branches between them, blocking Sammy’s view of her. He had to bellow a lot and hack at it with his sword, which he had forgotten he had until Celia pointed it out. From the corner of his eyes, he could see the trees moving in. With one last jab of the sword, and a final yell of “FREE HER!” that had thundered twice as loudly through the forest, and caused twenty captured princesses to be suddenly released from their towers, Celia’s bindings came loose. Sammy took her in his arms and carried her free of the throne-tree.

Sammy held her close, never wanting to let her go.
“I love you! I love you so much it hurts! I can’t live without you. I was so terrified for you. Come on, we have to go before they get us. We can go to the City of Shoes and get married, and live in a little white house with a thatched roof, and have our own little shop, and you can have babies, and we’ll live happily ever after. I don’t care about being a God, as long as I have you. Oh, I’m so glad you aren’t dead! I love you, Celia!”
“We have to find Barney,” said Celia.

Sammy was a bit disappointed. After all, he had just climbed down a wall in the dark for her. He had hoped she would be a bit more enthusiastic than that. But, maybe she was just in shock, and would be more excited about his plan later. At any rate, she didn’t fight him off when he took her hand. They set off to find Barney, moving in the general direction that Elfin was pointing.

It was even harder leaving the clearing than it had been getting there. The plants did not seem to want Celia to go. They kept grabbing at her, so Sammy had to fight them off with his sword, with Elfin hacking away with Sammy’s spare knife on the other side, apologising profusely whenever he missed and accidently got Sammy’s arm. The brambles had caught up from their congregation by the tunnel entrance, and bit at their legs with poisoned thorns. Celia had trouble with that bit, because her shoes had disappeared and she shrieked in pain every time a thorn touched her. Sammy picked her up and put her on his back. The plants kept trying to pull her off, but she clung like a limpet and almost strangled him.

Slowly, but surely, they cut a path through the forest. They trees closed in behind them. It was hard to know if they were heading in the right direction to find Barney, because it was dreadfully dark, and the trees kept moving. Elfin insisted that he had a reliable sense of direction though, and they had no choice but to trust him.

After hours and hours of traipsing around the forest, when it must have been night-time, but they couldn’t tell because no light came through the trees, they reached a dip in the land. They could only tell it was a dip because they went to step forward, and for a horrible second, the ground wasn’t where it was meant to be. They came to the horrid realisation that the plants were not the only things they had to beware of in the forest. They moved more cautiously, Sammy feeling the way with his sword, then viciously swinging it at the plants ahead of them.

A whimper crept through the trees to their ears, followed by a sniffle. Someone was quietly weeping. Barney! Alive! They were all very relieved, although Sammy rather wished Celia wasn’t quite so pleased. It made him feel a bit hard done by that he had done all the heroic rescuing and she was still more excited about knowing Barney was alive than she had been about seeing him. And he was such a wimp! All he would do was cry and slow them down. But all the same, Sammy was glad he wasn’t dead. You get used to people when they tag along on your mission from the Gods.

“Help?” came Barney’s rather whiny voice, pathetically, from somewhere up a tree. His rescuers felt their way further down the hill. To their right, through a thick hanging of spider-web vines, hung Barney. He was almost entirely wrapped in vines, so he could not move, and hung upside down from one of the upper branches of the tree. The branch drooped ominously under his weight. He looked very difficult to get down, especially because Sammy was the only one who could see him properly, and the painful brambles kept snapping at their feet.

Neither he nor Sammy knew it, but that day, Sammy had that day postponed Barney’s fate, which was why Barney was hanging uncomfortably from a tree, instead of being digested by a large Sycamore. First, the trees had moved aside for Sammy, and had been briefly distracted from their task. Then, they had had to move again, to close in on him as he raced after Celia. And, by saving Celia, Sammy had truly postponed Barney’s fate, because Celia was fated to save Barney. And that is what she did.

The tree Barney hung from was tall but slender, and would not hold Sammy’s weight. Elfin was a poor tree climber at the best of times, but he had no hope when all the branches were moving, and anyway, he was nearly as heavy as Sammy. So it was decided that it would be Celia who would climb the tree. Sammy was a bit loath to let her do it, having just expended a lot of effort to save her, but Celia turned out to be quite stubborn, so he boosted her into the branches. She wore his belt, knotted about her waist because even on the first hole it was much too large, with his golden dagger in it. He hadn’t let Elfin use that one – he had made him use the spare one from his boot. Celia climbed easily up the tree, dancing between branches. Sammy concentrated all his Godly powers on not letting it eat her. When she reached Barney, she lay flat along the branch, which creaked worryingly. With one quick slash of the golden dagger, Barney was free. He thudded painfully through the tree, hitting every branch on the way. Celia sheathed the dagger and climbed gracefully from the tree.