Chapter 24 - Out of the Forest

Time melted. Time itself did not melt, because that would cause chaos and disaster for all the worlds in all the universes in existence, and I would not be able to tell the story of Barney’s great escape because I would not exist due to an unfortunate incident in which I fell back in time and killed my own great-great-grandmother. What I really mean was that it became difficult to judge the time due to having their having lost their watches in the City of Thieves. Also, it was dark and the forest all looked the same. They walked around in circles for a long time, attacked from all sides by brambles and rogue branches. Finally, they stumbled upon a thin trail. The trees became less active. The forest grew lighter, although the light still maintained that mysterious green quality that had been present earlier.

It was sunrise when they stumbled at last from the forest. Pink morning light sparkled brilliantly off the magnificent golden palace, glittering in a thousand diamond windows. The city was just awakening, and was quiet and still, but for the sleepy movements of a few dedicated workers trying to beat the rush. A great wall of gold bricks encircled the city, three times the height of a man, and much more dazzling. Barney could just make out a shining road that lead to a pair of ruby gates in the east wall. He did not understand how they had believed the City of Thieves to be this place. The City of Shoes was so rich, so prosperous, so beautiful that it could not be mistaken. They had made it.

Unfortunately, the city was much further away than it appeared. Among Barney’s many failings was an inability to judge distance. He had assumed the palace to be only ten floors high, twelve in the towers, with an area not larger than six or seven of Farmer Johnson’s fields. In reality, it was thirty floors, not including the basements, and thirty-five in the towers. It sprawled over the space a medium-sized town would normally occupy, and was centred upon a courtyard of truly fantastic dimensions. It was also a very long way away.

So it was with resignation and nausea brought on by poisoned brambles that they set off once more. The feeling of elation that had struck them as they emerged from the forest quickly ebbed, and they were left exhausted and suddenly very aware of their bedraggled appearance. The land that edged the forest was unpleasantly brown and muddy. Acres upon acres of desolate tree stumps spread before them. In the distance to the left, a sawmill growled furiously.

Elfin left them there, marching with renewed vigour towards his true calling at the mill. His experience in the forest had only increased his yearning to spend the remainder of his life cutting down trees.

The rest trudged tiredly in the direction of the ruby gates. The poison from the bramble barbs was only now making its effects realised. Sammy, who had suffered the worst, felt his muscles twitching disconcertingly as he walked. Agony seared through his body, the pain radiating in from his scratches. But he walked on, pretending it did not hurt. People who were resurrected by the Gods after being stabbed in the back during a brawl with seventeen armed assailants did not succumb to bramble scratches.

It took them hours to reach the gates. Sun was well past halfway on its journey across the sky when they arrived at the diamond road. It was busy around the gates. Travellers arrived in rich carriages (cars were strictly forbidden on the diamond road, for fear of leaving rubber traces), and left in expensive-looking shoes. Merchants came and went, only the wealthiest and most attractively attired allowed through the gates. Hundreds of people bustled and milled around before the gates, hoping for the privilege of being admitted. Only one area was clear. Nobody stood near Barney, Sammy and Celia. Even the poorest of the merchants who were turned away skirted around them. They were struck by the sudden, horrifying realisation that they would never be let in. No guard would allow into the diamond city a giant in a ripped, bloodied shirt, who was swaying slightly and had a odd, contorted expression of unspoken pain, a twisted young man covered in mud, and a girl wearing a crown made of leaves.

And so, after standing dazedly before the gates of their long-awaited destination for a few moments, they turned away in despair and began the long trek back towards the forest, and the saw-mill.

When they reached the saw-mill, darkness was falling. The mill was enormous. Huge logs lay on conveyor-belts that rumbled as they fed them slowly onto screaming circular saws. A man shouted orders and waved his arms as several workers operated various machines for lifting, sorting, and transporting wood. An enormous truck was being loaded with logs for transport. Sawdust was pouring into another from something that appeared to be part vacuum cleaner and part wood-chipper. The whole scene was noisy, busy, and just a little unpleasant. A haze of exhaust rose in a cloud above it.

The office was constructed out of rough-hewn wood. Obviously no time had been wasted on it. It was not large, and there was no glass in the windows. Surprising really, considering the amount of forest that had been cleared. They must have made a considerable profit out of the clearance, but clearly none of it had gone towards improving the appearance of the business – or, from the look of the sleeping quarters just beyond, into the living conditions of the employees. That did not occur to our heroes at that moment though, because Sammy had just collapsed at Celia’s feet.

A man responded to her cries for help, eventually. He wandered out of the office, apparently unconcerned that a young man was lying unmoving immediately outside his place of work.

“Hello,” he said placidly, “How may I help you?”

Being untrained, and therefore ill-equipped to cope with unconscious young men lying outside his office door, he had decided to ignore the young man and hope that he was just having a snooze while he waited to apply for employment. It could happen, he told himself firmly, turning to Celia. He had decided to pretend Barney was not their either, because Barney was giving off a distinctly unpleasant odour.

“Something’s wrong with Sammy,” Celia said, with a slight hysterical giggle. She slapped herself mentally. This was no time to stop being sensible. But all she could do was say, “make him better, make him better, make him better!” over and over, until the office-worker began to regret his decision to speak only to her.

Barney stepped in then, showing his deeply hidden competence in times of crisis. “He was poisoned by the brambles in the forest,” he told the man. “Do you have an antidote or something? I think he is dangerously ill.”

The office man dithered quietly for a moment, deciding whether to listen to the smelly one or to continue to focus on the girl, who was at least normal looking, if a little unstable. Sammy moaned and began thrashing violently. The office man made up his mind. He retreated into his office and closed the door.

At this, Barney kicked up such a fuss that it drew the attention of the foreman of the work crew, who stopped ordering people about and came over to see why someone was climbing in the office window, yelling at the top of his lungs.

The foreman was an exceptionally competent man. He took over immediately, telling Celia and Barney to step back. He produced a vial of green fluid from his pocket. Kneeling on the thrashing Sammy, one knee on his chest, the other on his left arm, holding him down, the foreman forced open Sammy’s jaws and emptied the contents of the vial into his mouth. Sammy stopped moving and lay limp on the dirt. Celia hiccupped back a sob.

It took all three of them, plus the office man, who was persuaded to leave the office and attend to them under threat of firing, to manoeuvre the unmoving Sammy into a bunk in the sleeping-quarters. They had to stop for a rest three times on the way. They lay him, now an unnerving shade of turquoise, on the closest bed to the door. Barney couldn’t help noticing that very few of the beds looked like they were used frequently: the ones at the back of the room were draped in what appeared to be mosquito netting but turned out to be spider-webs. Sammy was covered with a blanket, and the others herded back to the office.

For three days, Sammy lay in silence. The blue-green faded from his skin. He seemed somehow smaller. He stirred on the fourth day, but no-one rejoiced, because there was no-one there to notice. From the moment of stirring, he recovered remarkably quickly. In seconds, he was awake. In minutes, standing up, stretching, walking a few steps. Waves of tiredness hit him like a line of trucks, but he fought them off and ventured outside. Bright light hurt his eyes and sent stars dancing across his vision. The sky was unnaturally blue, and the sounds were unnaturally loud. He saw Barney gleefully operating the machine that fed logs into the saw, and an unexpected burst of joy hit him. He really was quite fond of the boy. From a distance. He waved, but Barney did not see him. He made his way slowly to the office, stopping every few steps to rest.

Inside the office, Celia sat at the desk. She was clean and pretty. Her curls tumbled glossily over her face as she bent over something she was reading. It warmed Sammy’s exhausted heart to see her. A smile made its way onto his face, uninvited. He stood in the doorway for a moment, just looking. He would have to write her that letter sometime.

“Celia,” he said.

Celia jumped. Then she shrieked and tore across the room, throwing her arms around him with a force that sent him stumbling. She hugged him enthusiastically, then disentangled herself, looking a little embarrassed.

“Good to see you out of bed,” she told him. “Are you feeling better, then?”

“Yes,” he said unnecessarily. He wobbled slightly. Celia made him sit down, even though he didn’t want to. She went back to her work, one eye on him all the time.

Sammy had a bit of a snooze then, just for a few minutes.

He awoke to a strange silence. The machines had been turned off. The sky was dark in the windows, and the lamps had been lit to glow brilliantly. Unfortunately, although they were very bright, the light did not spread far, so the room was a pattern of light and dark, full of shadows and dark figures in silhouette. The buzz of chatter filled the room. Eventually, the buzz thinned and he could make out individual voices. A small, bent figure talked excitedly about his day of cutting logs. Sammy had never seen Barney so happy. There was Elfin, looming over the group and agreeing in an exclamatory fashion with everything a smaller man who yelled a lot said. And there was Celia, telling the group excitedly about how Sammy had got up today, how he was nearly better. He smiled to himself. She really was lovely. He stood up and made his way over to the group.

The next day, Barney and Celia had to work again, to pay for Sammy’s cure; for their board; for their food; and for clean clothes. They would have to stay for two weeks to pay for it, they were told. That did not make much sense to Barney, who for all his faults was not deficient in intelligence. Surely if they were only staying the extra week to pay for their food and board, if they didn’t stay the extra week, they would not need to pay for it. It seemed as though the mill was having trouble finding people to work. Certainly, everyday fewer workers returned from the forest. One day a whole tractor disappeared. But Barney was enjoying getting his revenge by feeding trees to saws, and Celia was insistent about Sammy needing his rest. Barney did not want Celia to be mad at him, so he said nothing, and they went about their work.

Sammy was looking a little peaky, actually. No-one liked to say anything, but he seemed shorter, somehow. Less muscular. Almost normal sized. If by normal sized you mean a normal sized professional rugby player. His torn and bloodied clothes had been replaced with a set belonging to an ex-worker who had failed to return from the forest one day. They were greenish grey and not magnificent at all, but his clothes were beyond repair. He tucked his dagger into a rope about his waist.

While his friends worked, Sammy took a piece of paper and a pen from the office, and set to work. Soon he was concentrating so hard his tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth. He wrote:

Deerest Celia
I love u a lot. Wil u mary me. I mite not get to bee a God but if u mary me i wil not keer abowt that. I wil bee the hapiest man ever. Wen u smile it makes me worm inside. U ar the prettyest girl i hav ever seen, even tho i lived with the Gods and there was serving girls. U ar very smart and allways no wat to do wen there ar things on fire or we ar lost. I think we shud have a wedding lik jo’s only nicer and u can weer a pretty dress. We can find a little howse and hav flowers in the gardin. We wil live happily ever after. I love u mor than i can say. U make me want to rite poetry but i don’t know how. Please love me back and mary me.
Love Sammy.

He put the pen down, brain exhausted. Now all he had to do was give it to Celia. He would just have a rest first. He lay in his bunk and closed his eyes.
While he slept, a rogue gust of wind swept through the building. The letter fluttered off the table and floated gently away.