Forest of Wonders

  “She’ll understand,” Raffa said, with more hope than certainty.

  “Wait. . . . No. . . . Don’t do it,” Garith said in a monotone. “There. Now I can tell her that I tried to stop you. And don’t you even think about touching mine.”

  It didn’t take long for Raffa to cut up the whole tunic and tie the strips together firmly into a long rope. He found a rock the size of his two fists together and secured it to one end. Taking hold of the rope, he whirled the rock around his head, then let it fly experimentally.

  “Hey—watch it!” Garith yelled as the rock whizzed past him.

  “Sorry,” Raffa said, and reeled the rock back in. “You’d better move.”

  After several tries, Raffa still hadn’t managed to fling the rock over the lowest branch. “Oh, for quake’s sake, let me try,” Garith said. He tossed the kerchief to the ground and got to his feet.

  He took up a stance a few yards away. Holding his arm out away from his body, he whirled the rock and released it.

  “Ha!” Garith shouted, and raised his arms in triumph as the rock soared over the branch on the first try.

  It was no surprise to Raffa; Garith had always bettered him in athletic ability. Still, he couldn’t resist a little jab. “Isn’t luck a wonderful thing?” he said, and grinned when Garith pretended not to hear.

  “Here, let me,” Garith said, holding out his hand for the rope.

  Raffa maneuvered the rope so it was positioned at the bole. “No, I want to do it,” he said.

  “But I’ll be faster.”

  Garith was probably right, and Raffa wavered for a moment. Then he took firmer hold of the rope. “I saw it first,” he said. He didn’t add the real reason: that it was his mission to save the bat. His alone—not his father’s, not Garith’s.

  “Oh, fine,” Garith said. “But if you can’t get it, you should come down and let me try.”

  That seemed fair enough, and Raffa nodded. Holding the rope with both hands and leaning backwards, he walked up the trunk and made it safely onto the first branch.

  It took a while, but at last he hauled himself onto the third limb. He was now quite high above the ground. After a quick glance, he gripped the limb more firmly with his legs and resolved not to look down again. He wondered if Garith would have been nervous up here, too. Probably not, he thought with an inward sigh.

  Raffa turned his attention to the vine. It had an abundance of small scarlet leaves.

  “It’s the right one!” he called down to Garith.

  “Good,” Garith called back. “So gather it and let’s get out of here.”

  Raffa used the leather rope to tie himself to the branch. He held his knife in one hand and prodded the vine with the other.

  A sharp burning sensation stung his fingers and shot all the way up his arm, shoulder, and neck—right into his brain. For a moment he saw red, as if fiery sparks were exploding inside his head.

  “OUCH!” he yelled, and yanked his hand away.

  “What’s wrong?” Garith called from below. “Are you all right?”

  Raffa blinked. He stared at his hand, then flexed his fingers. Nothing. No itching or burning or redness. Bracing himself, he gingerly touched the vine again. This time, it felt . . . like a vine.

  Could he have imagined the burning feeling? He frowned, thinking hard, until the realization came to him: The sting had been an intuition, like those he sensed when making botanical compounds. He had never before felt it on touching a plant.

  Weird upon strange, he thought.

  “Hi, my name’s Garith. What’s yours?” Garith shouted, clearly impatient.

  “Sorry,” Raffa called back. “It’s fine. I’ll be done in a minute.”

  He levered the knife under one end of the vine, then slid it gently along a section of the stem, keeping the blade hard against the branch’s bark. With the end of the vine free, it was easy to unwind the rest of it and dislodge its roots from the mulch.

  From his pocket he took a piece of cloth and wrapped the vine, then tucked the little parcel safely away. Before descending, he searched the trees nearby. He saw no other streaks of red. But at least he would know where to look next time—if indeed it was the right plant.

  Raffa looped the rope over the branch on which he stood, and with a combination of sliding and hand-over-hand, he quickly dropped to the ground.

  “Took you long enough,” Garith said.

  “Well, I got it, anyway,” Raffa said. He glanced up at the sky. Not many of the sun’s rays could penetrate the canopy, but those that did were angled low.

  “Let’s go,” Garith said. “And keep your eyes open for lunatic owls.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  IT was sunfall by the time the boys approached the cabin. Both of them raised their heads and sniffed the air as the house came into view.

  “Meat?” Raffa said, puzzled and incredulous.

  At the same moment, Garith said, “Do you smell meat?”

  Most of Obsidia’s populace subsisted largely on a diet of grains and vegetables. There were several types of grain crops, and vegetables grown in countless small holdings. Many families kept chickens for their eggs; milk and cheese and clabber could be bought at the market from the dairy farmers. Fisher folk seined the river and the Vast, and brought their catch to market as well. But meat was reserved exclusively for special occasions. Despite their fatigue, the boys ran the last stretch of the path.

  As curious as Raffa was about the meat, the little bat was foremost in his mind. When they reached the cabin, Garith headed around the side of the house to the back dooryard, as they usually did.

  Raffa pulled up short. “You go on,” he said. Without waiting for a reply, he entered the cabin through the little-used front door.

  The box was where he had left it, on the corner shelf above the stove. Holding his breath, he moved it carefully to the table and lifted the rag.

  The little bat lay there, limp and inert. Raffa saw no movement, not even in its tiny chest. He touched the bat’s body with a trembling finger—and held it there gently in relief. The bat was still warm!

  He moved his finger so he could feel the bat’s heartbeat, although it was not so much a beat as the weakest of flutters.

  The back door opened, and Mohan strode into the room. “Well?”

  Raffa pulled the vine from his pocket. “Is this it?” he asked anxiously.

  Mohan bent over and inspected the vine. “I think so,” he said. “Mind you, I never saw it myself. But it fits the description.”

  Raffa watched closely as his father picked up the vine. He turned it in his hands to look at it from all angles, then began to speak. “The first thing—”

  “I thought I would take some clippings first,” Raffa said hurriedly. He knew it was rude to interrupt, but he wanted to do this work without his father’s prompting.

  He had thought about the vine the whole way home. Now he took a breath and spoke again before he lost his nerve. “Da? Could I— would you let me do this on my own? I’ll say what I’m thinking, and if I’m right, I’ll go ahead, but if I’m wrong, you could tell me?”

  Mohan stared at him for a moment. Then he held out the vine with one hand. “As you wish,” he said.

  Raffa took the vine. He hesitated before speaking, wanting to be sure of his words in front of his father. “A hand’s breadth per clipping,” he said slowly, “and leave enough over to work with.”

  After snipping the vine into even lengths, he put each clipping in a jar of water. If the vine proved useful, the clippings would, with luck, grow to provide a continuing supply.

  “It was living in shade. That means the north window.” He took the jars two at a time and placed them on the window ledge.

  Then he used a mortar and pestle to begin grinding the rest of the vine into a paste. He sniffed it curiously, but there was no strong odor.

  “You said the child was badly burned, so to start with, your grandmother probably added it to the usual combination for bur
ns.” Raffa was talking more to himself than to his father. He found that speaking his thoughts aloud was actually helpful; it forced him to think more clearly. Besides which, if he viewed it as thinking aloud, he could almost pretend that Mohan wasn’t there.

  “So I’m going to try the combination I used already—the one for slashes, plus arnicullus, because of the owl, plus the vine.”

  He did not look at Mohan as he gathered the jars and utensils he needed. There was still a quantity of the poultice he had used on the bat earlier. He pounded the stem and leaves of the scarlet vine to a pulp, then added some to the poultice.

  As he stirred, the paste began to take on a gentle vermilion glow, and in his mind he heard something that sounded like a faraway cowbell—not musical, but not unpleasant. He gave the paste several more turns with the pestle, then drew in his breath sharply. “Da, look,” he said.

  The paste was glittering and flashing in every shade of red. Sparks seemed to dance and move through the paste, keeping time with the gentle clinking in his inner ear. It was like nothing Raffa had ever seen before.

  The paste glittered even more fiercely for a mere blink of time, then subsided to a dull glow again.

  “Odd upon strange,” Mohan said.

  That was all he had to say. Raffa had hoped for at least a crumb of praise; he fought his disappointment by reminding himself that he didn’t even really want his father there in the first place. He turned his attention to the bat, undoing the bindings, applying the new poultice, then rewrapping the wounds.

  The next step was to make an infusion to feed to the bat. Raffa began work on this with no comment from his father. Normally with an unknown botanical, an apothecary would make several poultices before creating an infusion. It seemed that Mohan was willing to let Raffa skip several steps because the patient was a bat, not a person.

  Raffa pondered for a few moments, then decided to add the vine pulp to a standard combination used to stop bleeding. As he began to stir, his brain was assailed by a chaos of splotches and blots so ugly, it seemed to him that they even smelled bad.

  “Wrong,” he said hastily. Then he looked up at his father. “I mean, I changed my mind. I—I have a better idea.” He knew that Mohan would not take kindly to any mention of an intuition.

  He tried again, combining the vine with a solution of mummer petals and mellia, the usual ingredients for a strengthening tonic. This time when the vine pulp was stirred in, he experienced only a relaxed, tranquil feeling.

  He often felt this when working with botanicals. It had nothing to do with his body; certainly his hands were always busy at such times. It was hard to describe—a silent but harmonious hum in his brain, not nearly as definite or dramatic as when he saw lovely colors or heard music. Before, with standard combinations, it had meant that he was close to an ideal mix. He hoped it meant the same thing now.

  The infusion turned red and began to gleam. Now Raffa took up a tiny spoonful . . . and paused with the spoon held before him. It wasn’t that he was afraid, but he had never before tested an unknown infusion. What if it burned his tongue? Or made him vomit, or—

  Mohan stepped forward and held out his hand for the spoon.

  “That is the correct procedure,” he said. “But we don’t know for certain that this is the right plant. If so, it is unusually powerful. You are not yet full grown, so the crucible is mine.”

  Emotions tumbled over each other in Raffa’s mind: resentment at his father’s interference, a flicker of relief at not having to taste the infusion, and then a blast of annoyance with himself for feeling relieved. Did this mean that he wasn’t really ready to work on his own yet?

  Lost for a moment in those thoughts, he gave a little start when he felt Mohan take the spoon from his fingers. His father put a few drops of the liquid on the tip of his tongue, then emptied the rest of the spoon’s contents between his lower lip and gum.

  Together they waited. Many harmful poisons were bitter on the tongue, and the human body would often begin rejecting the substance at the first taste of it, by producing a flood of saliva.

  “A little bitter,” Mohan pronounced. “But no more so than, say, any of the brassinels. I would guess that at the very worst, it’s a cinder.”

  Raffa grinned in recognition of an old family joke. Cinder was a cat who had lived with them for several years. Named for the color of her fur, Cinder was a mild-tempered creature who possessed not the least shred of hunting instinct. The mice population in the house and yard had thrived during Cinder’s tenure. One day she had wandered off and never returned.

  In Raffa’s family, a cinder was something at once both harmless and useless. Many plants growing in the wild were cinders; it was an apothecary’s business to distinguish them from the useful and the harmful.

  With a hollow reed, Raffa sucked up some of the infusion, using his tongue as a stopper to keep the liquid from draining out. He pried open the bat’s tiny mouth, inserted the other end of the reed, and released the infusion. Then he gently held its mouth closed while he stroked its throat to make it swallow.

  To his delight, he felt the bat’s throat working under his finger. Only a little fluid trickled out of one side of its mouth. He dosed it again, then covered the bat and took it back to its warm corner.

  “Heal, little bat,” he whispered. “Please?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  RAFFA and Mohan stepped outside to join the others around the fire pit. Along with Ansel and Salima, Garith was admiring the roast of lamb whose drippings hissed and sizzled appetizingly.

  Salima’s smile of greeting quickly vanished as she tilted her head in puzzlement. “Raffa, where is your tunic?”

  “Uh-oh,” Garith said under his breath.

  Raffa went back into the cabin and came out again with the coil of leather rope. He held it up wordlessly.

  “Oh, Raffa,” Salima said. “What happened?” She reached out and touched the leather sadly, as if saying good-bye to the tunic.

  “Mam, it was for a good reason, I swear,” Raffa said.

  Salima’s face was stern. “I don’t doubt that,” she said, “but deer hide is not easy to come by, and that tunic was a whole season’s labor. I will be thinking of how you can work to help replace it.”

  “I’m sorry, Mam. Truly I am.”

  If there had been any other way, he would never have cut up his beloved tunic. While he hated disappointing his mother, he still did not regret what he’d done.

  “We’ll speak of it later,” Salima said. “Now, all hands needed.”

  Mohan and Ansel moved the table and benches out into the yard. Garith hung green-glowing lanterns from the eaves. Their light source was an essence distilled from phosphorescent mushrooms, an invention of Salima’s.

  Raffa followed his mother’s directions to set out every available trencher and bowl, then scattered flower petals and fragrant herbs on the ground around the table. His curiosity mounted: Why the celebration? He was glad for the distraction. Otherwise, he might have done nothing but worry about the bat.

  When at last the family drew up to the table, the yard looked and smelled very festive. For the first several minutes, there was no talk, only eating. Mohan carved the roast into generous slices. Salima served Raffa’s favorite vegetable dish: shredded red cabbage simmered in cider, with chunks of apples. There were biscuits, too, instead of the usual bread. After their long and eventful day, both boys were famished. Raffa ate twice of the lamb and the cabbage.

  With the sharpest pangs of hunger banished, the talk began, Ansel speaking first. “So, how was your day in the Forest?” he asked the boys.

  “Something strange,” Raffa answered.

  “No, two somethings,” Garith said.

  Raffa cast a quick look at his cousin. He wanted his parents and Uncle Ansel to know about the day’s discoveries, but not that the owl had attacked them. Garith’s wound was hidden under his hair, and so far as Raffa could tell, he hadn’t mentioned it yet. If Mohan and Salima found out
, it would be a long time before Raffa would be allowed to return to the Forest without them.

  Garith caught his glance and gave him the tiniest of nods. He went on to describe the clearing.

  “The track went north, you say?” Mohan asked.

  “Yes, and we tried to follow it but there was this owl. . . .” Garith told how the bird had flown at them, but he stopped short of saying that he had been attacked. Raffa looked away from him pointedly, which he knew Garith would take as a silent thanks.

  Mohan looked sharply at Raffa. “The owl prevented you from following the track?”

  “I didn’t think of it at the time,” Raffa said slowly, “but that’s what it seems like—”

  “Ridiculous,” Ansel said. “Why ever would it do such a thing?”

  “Perhaps its nest was somewhere nearby,” Salima said.

  Raffa remembered a time when he was much younger, playing in a meadow not far from the cabin. A partridge had burst forth in a flurry of feathers almost underneath his nose. Then it had staggered and flopped awkwardly a few feet away, dragging one wing. Certain that he could catch the injured bird, Raffa had chased it for a good few minutes, the bird continually flapping just out of reach. Then, suddenly, it had taken wing and soared over his head, clearly not the least bit injured. When he told his mother about it later, she had chuckled and said that the bird had feigned injury to lead him away from her nest. “She probably had either eggs or chicks,” Salima explained, and Raffa had marveled at the bird’s cleverness.

  Now he frowned. “But it wasn’t like that. I’ve never seen a bird act this way.”

  “Can birds get foaming sickness?” Garith asked.

  Mohan shook his head. “Only fur-bearing animals get foaming sickness,” he said. “I’ve never heard of birds getting anything like it.”

  Raffa could tell that both his parents were disturbed by the news about the clearing and the owl. But Uncle Ansel could contain himself no longer.