Dawn, like the first time. The lead-grey clouds are armoured hands with the weak sun moist and limp inside them. The night still sits in the high branches, huge and muscular, rain and dew dripping to the pungent floor. It is the hour when night’s memory goes, and with it the gravity that keeps its shawl spun over everything in the forest. The crescent-eyed hunters sense the shift, feeling the glory of darkness being leeched and, ultimately, robbed of its purity. The vulgar gate of day gives no quarter, and its insistent brightness will tell lies about all, forcing the subtlety back into the interiors of trees and the other side of the sky.
The brightness lets the humans out and all those who are like them, as well as those who walk in their stead. The trees breathe and accept it all again. Unnatural greens cuckoo the sensible blacks, where all the great forests live. Men, and other, weaker beasts, grow in confidence and dare to believe that the place is theirs. For a few hours they stride and hack at the rim, shouting to match the sunlight. Twilight will soon shush them away and return the forest to its true condition. The sap still rises in the dark; the sun’s pump sucks in the veins, long after the fire is hidden. It is this squeezing, from root to leaf, that finds sympathy in the stenotic memory of men. It is this force field, like magnetism or pressure, that influences all similar structures inside it. The effect on modern men could be explained thus, the persistent rumours of subspecies, living comfortably inside the rings of trees, could find a foothold.
Herodotus and Sir John Mandeville had already written of the unthinkable: “the anthropophagi” and “men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.” Beings such as they would thrive in this environment, where evolution was robbed of memory, hope, and purpose, and distortion was not ironed out by the Darwinian uniformity of blind greed.
The Frenchman and Seil Kor stood on the platform. It was painted grey. It had always been painted grey. The layers of its skins had boiled every summer, sleeping when the sun set and freezing in the freak, imported winters, waking in fear in the uncertain times that many called spring. They stood in the flapping colours of their robes, in the weird entanglement of midday wind and pulsing steam. The engine was at the back of the train, its heartbeat reverberating through the wooden ribs of the nameless station. The trio of carriages were next, followed by three simple boxcars with SLAVES stencilled on their sides. The words had been painted over, but their message bled through, making them all the more conspicuous. Far beyond them and the boundaries of the station extended the flatbeds, each gently hungry for their cargo of tons of bleeding wood, some still wet from their previous journey. Like a perspective drawing, they pointed towards the lush darkness of the Vorrh.
There were four other passengers on the platform, but it was the solid bunch of men standing in a compacted block next to the boxcars that held their attention. These were the core workers, the ones who had made the trip many times. They no longer had homes or families, but only work and sleep. They stood shoulder to shoulder to resist the cold, facing predators en masse, like the legendary musk ox. Here, it was not the freezing arctic wind or the wolves, but some other external agency that seemed to threaten them. The Frenchman could not take his eyes from their expressions of agitated blankness, and he spoke without moving.
“Who are they?”
Seil Kor was pretending not to see them, and it took him some time to answer, which he did by turning his back on them and speaking through his teeth. “They are the Limboia, some call them ‘Die Verlorenen’—the lost.”
“But what has happened to them?” the Frenchman asked.
“They have been to the Vorrh too many times. Some part of them has been erased, forgotten. It can happen if you go too often or too deep.”
“Are we in danger of this, Seil Kor?” he asked worriedly.
“No, effendi. These men have been hungry for work, or have hidden themselves in the forest, disobeying the scriptures and offending the angels. We make only one return journey and will stay close to the rails.”
They turned, instinctively, to look more intently at the Limboia, who instantly stopped moving and turned into their enquiry, staring back. Then, in unison, the workers unbent the index fingers of their left hands, raised their arms, and pointed to their own hearts. The Frenchman was amazed and embarrassed at such a poignant answer to the question that he had been about to speak, a question that had formed between his mouth and his mind, in the vapour of his heart, and evaporated in exact proportion to the intensity of their physical response.
The doors of the slave carriages opened. The huddle of men dropped their hands and eyes to the ground, turning from their unified gaze to move forward into the train. There were no seats in the boxcars, just racks of narrow bunks. The Frenchman watched as they climbed into their shelves and fastened wide leather straps over their prone bodies. His melancholic curiosity was violently bleached by the engine’s whistle, its shrill steam sounding departure. They climbed into their carriage and prepared for the long, slow journey away from the reluctant city. The Frenchman fussed in the wooden luggage rack over his head, moving and adjusting his wrapped possessions against the elaborately carved scrolls of ivy and oak leaves that decorated the shelf. He was still rearranging when the train began to move. Seil Kor touched his arm and guided him back to his seat, where he could cool down and stop his breathy mutterings.
After the first hour, the Frenchman had stopped looking out of the windows. The view was of trees, only trees, passing by in incessant uniformity. The track had been cut in a straight line through the density of the forest, forming a tunnel within the living mass. The train was built for power and the movement of great weight, not speed, and they travelled at an unhurried pace, gently rattling along the tracks. The driver sat at the back, reversing them forward into the forest. The long line of clattering flatbeds had no human guard or observer at their head, no one to look out for obstacles or problems, because there would be none. The sharp wedge at the front of the train would push aside any twigs or debris that might have drifted onto the track, but nothing would. The dull, insistent velocity never changed.
“How many times have you been here?” the Frenchman asked Seil Kor.
“This will be my second complete journey. I made the first pilgrimage when I was a child, with my father. I was twelve years old then. It was the week before my confirmation.”
“Oh. I thought you had been many times,” the Frenchman said, unconcealed disappointment stealing his volume.
“No, a man may only visit the heart of the Vorrh three times in his life. I have told you, more is forbidden.”
“But you said that it is forbidden to go beyond a certain point in the forest, not the number of times you visit.”
“It is the same thing.”
“How is it the same thing? How can trespass into a sacred place be the same as the time a man spends arriving?”
“It is the same because all of the Vorrh is sacred, from its outer rings into its core. The time and the space are an intrusion: all will offend.”
“Then how can all this industry survive? Surely it intrudes more than a single man could, and takes far more from this sacred place?” The Frenchman was becoming increasingly perplexed.
“What the city takes is material,” Seil Kor answered. “Lone men enter the Vorrh for more than trees; they seek something else. This track and the eastern lung, where the trees are cut at the moment, are a given. They are a balance between the Vorrh and the world of men, between those who dwell here and those who dwell in the city.”
“But how can there be a balance, when the forest and its gods don’t need the city to exist?”
A vertical furrow appeared on Seil Kor’s forehead. He did not like “gods” in the plural; he had explained all this before. “Essenwald is a library to the forest, an appendage. It was attracted here when the Vorrh was already ancient. The physical closeness of so many people gives God a direct index to the current ways of mankind; his angels can learn there. It is an open shelf.”
The Frenchman frowned back at Seil Kor. There was another question, and he let his gaze drift to the window to formulate it, but the shifting trees shredded it, like the movement of the Limboia.
He sat back in his seat and imagined a silent giant, walking in a clearing, one hand stroking his long, white beard in deep thought. He saw angels in flowing robes, walking the noonday streets of the city; standing in a public garden, staring up at his hotel, where a woman stood on the balcony. He jarred out of the stupidity of the picture, amazed at its naïveté.
He looked back to Seil Kor for a whiff of reassurance, but he, too, had relaxed back into the journey; he had lost his frown and was watching the movement outside. His eyes flickered with the trees and a mesmeric calm filled his body and radiated in his face. The Frenchman felt his power and his resolve, saw how it illuminated his presence and made him shine in an untouchable perfection. He could watch this man for hours. Every nuance of his poise and expression fed his delight; in his company, he could forget his clawing anger and the spiteful visions in his head.
Seil Kor turned to look at the white man dressed in a pantomime of coloured robes. He saw a change in the eyes of his friend, and a look of uncertainty crossed his face. The Frenchman responded with a faint, unguarded smile.
They were asleep before twilight as the carriage rattled forward at its constant speed. There were no lanterns in their compartment or in any other. All were sleeping before the ultimate darkness arrived, and would remain in their slumber to a far-off dawn. Nothing could be seen of the train but a few sparks and a blush around the smoke as it left the chimney. The trees ignored its dark progress; the animals were too busy to notice it. Some of the nocturnal tribes of the rim stopped briefly to listen to its rhythmic, linear voice. Most knew it to be part of the Vorrh’s day-to-day business and kept their distance. Once, in its early history, a few of the unspeakable ones had tried to kill it, standing on the track with spears to confront the monster’s speed. Their time was short-lived and messy, and the legend had bled back into the future generations, keeping them away.
Thus, unassailed by plants, beasts, or anthropoids, the train was almost automatic in its continual shuttle back and forth. There was only the trouble with the engineers and firemen, who took shifts to be awake over the rattling miles. Something objected to their vigil, something that made its presence felt on the confined space of a footplate. It stared between the shovelled coals, stoking the fire, spitting embers. It leaned, annoyed, against the burning oil and steam. Voices worried the pipes and handrails; voices from the rushing night, which could not be heard over the thunder of the engine. Some said it was the angels becoming anxious about consciousness trespassing the Vorrh. Others said it was the ghosts of the Limboia, looking for their hosts. Those who worked the engine said less and less, as they heard more and more.
They did not wake the next day. Nobody ever did. The next day was always dimmer, maybe because the forest grew thicker the deeper the train travelled, its huge canopy thrust up against the sky by greater and greater trees. Or it could have been the murmuring speed that never changed pulse or velocity, the rhythmic, chanting tracks sending the passengers into a haze of hypnotic coma, much like the metronome of a piano is said to do. Or perhaps, in this strangest of places, the natural laws of the world, which were known and trusted, came unbound and bent. Night here might have a different saturation, so that the dawn, which had begun to fragment onto the leaves, had taken forty hours to arrive.
They blinked and rubbed their eyes against the new light, standing and stretching as the train whistled. There was a strange smell in the compartment, one that goes unnoticed in normal life. He knew the scent from his younger days, when he had attempted caving in Switzerland. He and his athletic guide had been forced to enter a shallow crawl space, deep in the arteries of the Nidlenloch. It had taken them an hour to crawl through its pinching tunnel. That was when he had first noticed it.
“What is that stench?” he had asked his guide at the time.
“It is us, mein herr. Humans.”
The young Frenchman had recognised the truth in those words almost before they had been spoken. It was the smell of something inherent, innate.
Yet this was a scent that was altogether new; another, higher note, complex and thrillingly shrill; he thought it might be the breath of the Vorrh itself. As he turned to his guide, intent on asking more about it, his eyes alighted on the luggage rack, and his query was lost. He stepped onto the plush seat like a fretful lapdog and reached up, yanking at his case. It did not move. The fears of his first sight had proved correct: The rack had grown tendrils and stems, delicate branches, which extended from its hand-carved foliage and gripped his possessions, entangling themselves about the leather in licentious affection. The same thing had happened along the entire length of the rack, and the few other passengers present, noticing his reaction, realised that they were in the same predicament. They joined him, pulling and worrying their belongings away from the lustful new shoots. The Frenchman would have hacked at the foliage if he could have found a suitable tool, but Seil Kor stepped in to help him, bending back the stems and unwinding the tendrils, before lifting the unnecessary luggage and setting it down at the little man’s feet.
The train slowed to a standstill, the hissing brakes dragging against the dreary momentum with a squeal that made singular ears turn, in the impenetrable distance of trees. There was a raised wooden platform for the passengers and a ramp for the slave carriage. The low flatbeds continued, into a distance of scarred tracks and rutted furrows. The station had no name; none was needed. A small wooden house lay beyond the platform. They gathered themselves and walked towards it, legs stiff from the carriage, their heads still dazed from sleep; a wooden hangover, badly nailed together by amnesia.
The house was a waiting room, barren and empty. It contained only benches and a flyblown map of the Vorrh, pinned to one wall. They peered at the large, simple paper, which was wrinkled and made frail by sun and rain. It showed the city and the forest, balanced in ridiculous, improper proportions; the railway was delineated, as was the house, and there were a few lines leading away from it that faded into nothing. The course of a river was suggested by an uncertain, faded blue contour; there was a shaded area, labelled “Forestry,” and a vague dotted line that roamed about near the middle of the paper, accompanied by the word “Forbidden.”
The map should have been informative and authoritarian, but its poor execution ensured that it had the opposite effect. It looked like a lost insect had fallen into the cartographer’s inkpot, crawled out, and made its bedraggled route across the paper.
Seil Kor put his finger on the largest of the lines that faded away to blankness and said, “This will be our way.”
His finger rested in a small grey crater, almost a hole in the map, where countless other pilgrims had indicated their journey in the same manner. They stepped outside and smelt the air, looking at the clear, even sky before turning onto the track. Behind them, three of their fellow passengers, insignificant until now, stood staring at the map, one with his finger on the same indentation identified by Seil Kor. The Frenchman saw this and increased their pace into the waiting forest.
After three hours Seil Kor slowed and began to sniff the air and move his hands in all directions, as if feeling the textures of the space around him.
Seil Kor raised his right hand.
“We must turn here,” he said. “Either back, or to the right.” His body strained towards the right, one foot already on the track.
The Frenchman looked up into his friend’s gleeful face. “I think we are going right,” he said.
They headed down the narrow path, wanting more of the wonders they had already seen. The day was unpredictable, but the allure was worth a dark return. They had witnessed the flowing winds of the Vorrh, long, singing currents of turbulence that flew and rippled between the contoured ground and the vast canopy of still leaves. Its profound, limited hurricane was still in their lungs, the cleanest air ever breathed; as sharp as lime, as soft as new snow. It bore youth and purity in its rushing particles, setting the eye clean and level. When it first hit the Frenchman, he choked as the corruptions of the cities and his own store of malice were dredged from his tarry crux. Scales fell from his cemented being, and he gave up all in a cough. There were no words to glue the two friends’ experience together; it was all shared, in moments that existed forever.
They entered a small clearing that felt virgin, untouched—the animals and plants seemed surprised to see them and dropped their normal attention, their continuum, to acknowledge the presence of the strangers, before vanishing into the sound of parting leaves. Seil Kor walked ahead and into the middle of the clearing, looking intently at the ground.
The Frenchman examined the perimeter and was amazed to find dozens of tracks leading away from the space. They were regular but overgrown, like paths leading out from the centre of a clock face. The path at four o’clock was the widest, as if made by a beast much larger than the others. He assumed the assortment of animals had come from various directions to drink or eat at the clearing, but he could find no trace of water or food, nothing that might obviously attract them. He turned to his friend and found him standing in the middle of the space, a yellow book in his hand: Here was the answer. He walked over to the black man, who was gleaming blue in the mottled light and wore an expression of agitation tinged with magnitude.
“Seil Kor?” he asked. “What is it?”
“This is the place,” the black man said quietly. “I was here before. This is where he lived.”
“Who?”
“Saint Antonius,” he said, barely whispering. “See the ground, look! There is still a scar of his shelter.”
The Frenchman’s eyes examined the space, which did seem to have an indentation, or a scar. It looked like the rectangular footprint of a hut or small house, drawn in the plant growth of discolouration, faint and without significance. He might have walked straight across it without noticing anything was there.
“This is where he lived, centuries ago; his simple home was in this place.”
“How do you know?” questioned the Frenchman uneasily.
“This is the place I told you about, that my father brought me to, when I was young; he told me the story, showed me the signs, just before I was confirmed into the true faith. We prayed here together that day.” Seil Kor looked at his friend. “This is why I agreed to come with you here, so that you might touch this sacred place and see the way. We can pray together here. That is why I brought you.”
The Frenchman was astonished with this outburst. He felt a shiver of anger against his friend, an emotion he thought he had shed, something that felt most out of key in this place. The moment was a towering mistake that shuddered louder than the trees and longer than the metal rail that brought them here, to the centre of nowhere.
“I came to see the forest,” he said with controlled limpness.
Far too quickly, Seil Kor answered: “This is not a place for seeing, for curiosity! Nor is it a place to be observed and then forgotten. It is sacred and all-knowing; men must give themselves here, sacrifice some part or all of themselves. You cannot walk in and out as you please; it is not a park or a city garden.”
There was a pause, when only the ringing in their ears was present, sounding the sudden iron in their distance. The jaw locks at such moments, as if waiting for the noise and hurt to stop resounding. The animals and birds that first held the clearing had long since departed, the rising tidal wave of conflict driving them out through the trees. Seil Kor’s next words were far too loud, but they snapped the tension.
“I told you, journeys here are limited; this will be my last and I give it to you. I have never met a more needy man. I bring you for salvation; it is your only chance.”
He then knelt, opened the book, and began to read out loud; the book was of vellum and loosely bound. He read about Eden after the expulsion; it was a different version of Genesis, one the Frenchman had not heard, dense with local details and obscure references. His patience waned; he was disappointed by his friend’s motivations. Their expedition had been spoiled for him, turned into a grotesque, evangelical ruse, a trick to convert him to a gibbering Christianity of Old Testament nonsense. He turned his back and walked out of the clearing, leaving the droning voice to recite the names of angels. He would wait for him at the station and there explain his inbuilt resistance to this kind of thing.
He marched down the track, talking under his breath, rehearsing all the lessons he would have to teach Seil Kor if their friendship was to last. Low vines and abundant foliage dragged at his ankles as he stormed through, and he faltered on pebbles and flat stones that had gone unnoticed on their smooth, leisurely walk here. He pushed harder against the path and its growing resistance, all the while muttering his embarrassment of the situation. The dialogue stopped when the track ran out. He stood, silent, eyes wide open, staring at the blank wall of vegetation before him, at the end of this, the wrong track. A tiny trickle of panic sped coldly through his blood. Looking around, he heard his own laboured breathing. He struggled to see the track he had just walked, though he had not deviated from it and stood on it still. He knew he must control the moment. Closing his eyes, he tried to remain calm, laying his hand on his heart and letting his blood flood the fear away. He opened his eyes to an impenetrable jungle. Slowly, he began to walk back the way he thought he had come, expecting at any moment that the path would clear and become smooth and straight like before, that it would blossom out onto the chanting Seil Kor and the way home. But his footsteps led him to the trunk of a vast, dark tree, the path ending in the way that paths never do. He turned with his back to the tree and stared into the tangled forest, dread now rising like fumes from its pathless floor.
Over the next tangled hours, which felt like a decade, he shouted and called until his voice ran out. He had walked in all directions, seeking a path or a sign, but there were only trees and the growing wind. Surely his wise friend or one of the workers would find him? Even the Limboia would be a welcome sight. He thought he heard calling and had hurried towards it, but it had faded back into the other sounds, leaving him no closer to an escape.
He was irretrievably lost, with very few provisions, the main bag being in Seil Kor’s possession. He stopped to ferret in his shoulder bag, expecting to find hope, along with solution, in its cramped interior. Instead, he found the secreted derringer, loaded, and with two extra bullets in the snug of its holster. He could afford only one to signal his position; the others he would need for protection. God knew what horrors lived in this matted place; he had seen the paintings, had heard the tales.
He took the little gun out, carefully cocked it, and held it above his head. He fired into the sky, or where the sky must be, on the other side of tons of leaves. The sound stopped the quiet and gave him silence back for a moment. He bellowed “Seil Kor!” with the last cracked and serrated edges of his voice. Then the quiet gushed back in, carrying the small foam of a sound: the long-distance whistle of the train. It seemed miles away and unfocused, without direction. For a few moments, he thought it must be in response to his signal, that they had heard the report of his gun from this dismal patch, determined his whereabouts, and begun their search. Then it sounded again, and in its reverberation he heard movement—it was leaving the forest, laden with wood and a few exhausted passengers, and he had been left behind, forgotten, maybe never seen at all. All those who cared and knew he existed were in another time and place, all except the one he had walked away from and would now never find. His legs buckled and he slumped against the ancient tree, sliding down into the hard, veined nest of its serpentine roots.