Chapter 29 - Travels of Hermits

What has happened to the hermits since we last encountered them? Have they been slain by enormous angry things? Have they tamed the EATs? Have they accepted Joseph as their leader? Or have they all mysteriously died of fish poisoning shortly after his arrival?

The answer is that none of these things happened. As you may recall, Joseph’s defeat of the Enormous Angry Thing brought great glory upon him, and he was elevated to the illustrious position of community leader. He was given the best of brides, and there were great hopes for him to provide children who were as brave, heroic, averagely intelligent as he so obviously was. However, after a few weeks, the hermits began to catch glimpses of Joseph’s true, cowardly, nature. He refused to hunt another Enormous Angry Thing. He would not fish from the rock in the fastest flow of the river, the rock specially designated as the fishing spot of leaders, for fear of being washed away. The hermits were denied the best fish in the river, because they hid under the leader’s rock. They began to become disillusioned with their new leader. As winter came upon them, they grew cold, and there were rumblings of revolt.

But Joseph was a navigator, and his true talent lay in steering people in the direction he thought they should go. He saw the true reason his people were unhappy. It was not that he had refused to fight another Enormous Angry Thing. It was not that he would not swim the rapids of an ice-cold river in which lurked untold monsters, in order to bring fish to them. It was not that he had not supplied any children in the few months since his arrival. The people’s anger stemmed from the need to worry about these things. They had been exiled a great many years ago, for minor wrongs that had mostly been forgotten. And now this small group led a lonely, inbred existence in the isolated caves of the Eastern reaches, punished for the sins of their grandparents. Now they knew no other life. They were cold in winter, and lost family to exposure every year. The Enormous Angry Things were becoming more and more daring, and soon would force them out of the relative comfort of their caves. And above all, they were sick of all the fish. Fish, every day, nothing but fish. And though they were friendly to the few strangers who arrived, welcoming them into the fold and sharing their fish, honouring those who defeated the beasts, and helping them on their way, the hermits were always disturbed by strangers. Strangers reminded them of what they were missing.

And so Joseph thought and thought. He watched his people shiver. He saw the Enormous Angry Things become even more enormous as they put on weight and grew thicker fur for winter. He asked subtle and tricky questions of his wife and few friends, gleaning from them all the information he could about the origin of the community.
The society from which their ancestors had been banished was the very city towards which Barney, Sammy, and Celia had been travelling when they had left the hermits. Barking mad people were obviously not conducive to the manufacture of quality shoes.
Joseph came up with a plan. He spent weeks on it, making sure it was watertight, and writing his speech. A good speech takes time. A leader does not just stand before his people and make it up as he goes along. He works on his speech for ages and ages, until the floor of his cave is littered with screwed up paper (or in Joseph’s case, leaves and animal hides, because paper was very rare in that part of the world). Then he practices in front of the mirror, over and over, until he can recite the whole thing without a mistake, even adding expression and hand movements, and in places of extreme importance, shouting. Only then can he appear omnipotent before his audience.

Then, after weeks of practicing, perfecting his movements by staring at his distorted reflection in the ice at the edge of the river, Joseph called a meeting of the community and incited rebellion.

“People!” He shouted, “There is a world out there! A world where winter does not mean shivering in caves amongst the skins of the few animals caught over the year! A world where winter does not equate with starvation because the fish are trapped beneath the ice! A world where people need not live in fear of being gored to death and eaten by Enormous Angry Things, in the night! This is a world in which you believe you are not welcome, but this is not true. It is not you that is exiled, it was your ancestors. There is no reason for your suffering! Come with me, and we will journey to the land of your fathers, where there is warmth and freedom of choice at mealtimes. We will cross the seven rivers! We will pass through the mountains! We will skirt the edge of the desert, so we don’t die of thirst! Who’s with me? Who is claiming their rightful place in the world?”

A fearsome howling filled the air, as the hermits, in their excitement, reverted back to their ancestral type and were overcome by the urge to bay like dogs.
Joseph began to have doubts about the wisdom of his undertaking.

However, these doubts were soon alleviated. Throughout their final winter in the caves of the Eastern Reaches, the hermits occupied themselves with preparation for their journey. Sammy, Barney, and Celia may have gone with only small bags of belongings and some leftovers, but that was not how the hermits rolled.
They rationed themselves, and dried what fish they had left. A large band of the more physically able young men gathered together and felled an Enormous Angry Thing while it was sleeping. They dried the meat for provisions, and made new clothes from the skin and fur. When spring first came, they were ready.

And so they set out. The journey was long, and hard, but they were well prepared. Maps drawn long ago by the first ancestors to be exiled had lain unused in the deep recesses of the caves for years, except in particularly harsh winters, when the oldest and driest would be used to get the fires started. They followed an easier path than they had chosen for their visitors, moving downstream to cross the river at its widest but shallowest point. After many long days of trekking through barren lands and climbing sheer rockfaces with full packs, the view began to change. Where craggy golden hills had formed the horizon, they were replaced by a flat line of green fuzz that stretched out as far as the eye could see, in both directions. They were nearing the forest.

The plan was simple. They would approach the city by the back gate, where unwanted citizens were ushered out of the city, thus avoiding both the confusion of the two golden roads, and the strict security system at the main gate. They would make camp in the forest near the gate, biding their time and slowly infiltrating the city. The women had been practicing making slippers out of the hide of the Enormous Angry Thing for weeks. Once a comfortable position had been established, they would stage an uprising from inside the city, enlisting the help of those on the fringes of society, under threat of expulsion from the city. It could not fail.

As they drew closer to their goal, the land flattened. Straggly weeds began to grow, and intermittent shrubs. These were replaced by taller trees, thin and sickly, which in turn gave out to bigger trees. It grew dark in the forest, as thick leaves began to block out the sky, solid boughs forming a roof above the travellers. The path became indistinct in the prolific undergrowth, and landmarks became few and far between. One moss covered tree trunk looks very much like another, in the dark.
But Joseph was a navigator by profession, and would never admit he didn’t know the way. He tramped confidently on, deep into the forest, ignoring the misgivings forming in the back of his mind, cast by the smothering silence and the odd blue glow the brambles seemed to be giving off. His trusting tribe cheerfully followed their leader into the depths of hell.

For the last day or so, occasionally, out of the corner of his eye, Joseph had seen things. A bramble had seemed to visibly grow. A bough had seemed to move position. Joseph put these things down to the wind, even though he knew that there was no wind that could pass through the thick forest. But now, the trees seemed to watch him. The knots and craggy bark of their trunks formed faces, with eyes that followed him as he marched into doom. He gave the order to stop their trek for the night, claiming to believe that they could not find a better campsite, although they were not in a clearing, and the ground was choked with vines, and bushes whose thorns leaked a disturbing blue liquid. In reality, he stopped because he was a coward and he knew it. It was in his nature to hide from what he feared, and the only way he could think of to do that was to wrap himself in blankets, close his eyes, and wish very hard that he was at home with his mother.

As they placed down their packs, Joseph slowly became aware of two things. The first was that the forest was no longer silent. Vines hissed as they snaked towards the intruders. Branches cracked and snapped as they moved. The trees seemed to murmur, and then to growl. Joseph began to question the wisdom of his choice of campsite. The second was that somewhere along the way, one of their number had been silently and surreptitiously claimed by the forest.

Joseph closed his eyes. He pictured his bedroom clearly and in great detail. He pictured his mother, smiling at him, and handing him a plate of food. He willed himself back into his bedroom, concentrating on it like he had never concentrated before. He opened his eyes. Nothing had changed, except the forest had closed in even more. It was completely black now, except for the strange blue light given out by the thorns. Vines were strung between the trees, separating him from all his companions except Arnold, who stood next to him. There was the scrape of flint, and a spark lit up a few metres to their left. The spark lit a prepared torch, bringing some welcome light to the forest. The torch lit up the man’s face, showing joy at the light turn suddenly to surprise and horror, as a thorn bush leapt from the ground and buried its sharpest spines into his scalp.

It was his screams that did it. Joseph had seen his face before he dropped the torch. The man attacked had been called Jack, and had come to be almost a friend over the past few months. And so, although his hands were shaking, and his lungs did not seem to be working properly, Joseph decided that the time had come to take action. His mother had always told him of the importance of being assertive. Now was the time to make her, and his people, proud. Now was his time to be a hero. Although, said a little voice in the back of his head, my mother won’t actually find out if I die a hero. I could just run for my life.

He did not run, though. He began to think. First of all, he told everyone to be quiet. It seemed that if you did not draw attention to yourself, the forest did not know you were there. Then, as the forest quietened, he honed his navigational skills. He had never been a very good navigator, but as we all find, in stressful times, hidden knowledge begins to surface. Unfortunately, most of it was useless. The square root of sixty-four is eight. Eighty percent of a iceberg’s volume is underwater. There are twenty-eight species of clownfish, which make their homes among the sea anemones, eating scraps of fish. Joseph stifled a groan. Interesting, but irrelevant. He needed something that would help him navigate the endless maze of twisted trees and sneaky vines. Navigation was hard enough on the sea, under clear skies, with the stars as guides. Here, the stars could not be seen. There was no river to follow. The climate was uniform inside the forest – north could not be found by judging the amount of moss on each side of the trees. Not that he had any desire to touch the trees if it could possibly be avoided. He imagined it would result in a lot of pain. And to top it all off, the trees in this forest moved! There was no question of following the path they had made, or using landmarks, because they were all in different places, and would probably lead them straight into the heart of the forest, where the Gods only knew what waited for them. And suddenly, a thought came to him. They had seemed to be walking in a straight line. People walk in a circle when lost because one leg is the tiniest fraction shorter than the other. If he could work out which of his legs was shorter, and by how much, he could adjust their path for the amount they had turned, and lead his people back out of the forest, compensating for his shorter leg by turning in the opposite direction every now and then. He whispered his idea to Arnold, who began to measure Joseph’s legs with a strip of cloth. They were going to escape.