Page 58 of Into the West

“Don’t relax until everything has got through,” Angia said, a little sharply. “That’s when bad things happen—when you let down your guard short of the goal.”

But she said that as they got to the cooking barge where he was spending the night, and instead of commenting on her words, he just wished her a sound rest and climbed aboard.

After all, what was the point in commenting? He knew she meant well. He knew the forest had gotten on her nerves. She probably couldn’t help herself; it was her fear speaking, not any comment on his capabilities and sensibilities. Angia trusted him.

But he couldn’t help thinking, as he found his pad and the couple spare blankets he was being loaned, that she was wasting her breath. Not likely I am going to let down my guard at any time in the near future, he thought, pulling a corner of the blanket over his head to block out the night lamp. In fact—I am not likely to let my guard down until I am six feet under the earth.

And honestly, probably not even then.

Don’t let your guard down. Don’t let your guard down. Don’t let your guard down. Those words kept echoing through Kordas’s mind as he rode up and down this last segment of the convoy, watching for trouble, watching for problems, watching for anything out of the ordinary. One eye on the forest, one eye on the convoy, and he wished desperately that he had a third eye to employ on the herds. Yes, there were herd dogs and their human masters, but suddenly the riverbank was packed with living beings, and what if the forest could sense that, without any of them setting foot under those unsettling limbs? Thank the gods Arial was what she was, and was as good or better than a dog at keeping track of her human, or he might have disgraced himself by falling out of her saddle, the way his head kept swiveling. All the Valdemar Golds were like that; they’d been bred for endurance, intelligence, and good temper. The glorious metallic gold of their coat was just a happy accident. He’d have valued them just as much if they’d all been harsh-coated, mud-colored, jug-headed nags.

Rose rode along as usual, and engaged in pleasant conversation after each report. She had a knack for sifting the useful bits from the chaff; when there was a fight among the expedition’s complement, she skipped the “why,” except if it involved critical resources or discontent with Kordas and his senior advisors. Attrition just from the rigors of travel was considerable. The convoy’s barges were taking a beating, and today alone they’d had to transfer cargo from eight of them to several strings at the tail of the convoy, and just let them break up and sink once towed aside. As simple as staging for the passage through the Red Forest sounded, actually accomplishing it was a hurried exercise of expertise. Weights were estimated, Dolls helped carry the loads from one vessel to another, and lining the vessels up side by side, string to string, was backbreaking work. All too literally, in two cases; with motion came injuries, and nobody would heal quickly enough to return to work for days or weeks—leaving even more work upon the shoulders of those who were still able.

Rose reported that the Gate uprights were secured atop a materials barge, third to last, in the last string. That meant the Old Men overseeing that dismantling and loading would join the rest of the flotilla by the time Kordas reached the last string of eight barges. There was no point in waiting any longer. Ten strings remained before the end of the convoy, and the last of the civilians and cage animals had already gone through. Guards, ship hands, Kordas, and Rose would be the last people left to enter the Red Forest, accompanied ashore by the hoggees guiding the Tow-Beasts.

“Rose, relay the order, please. Sail descending, downbound apace.” Almost immediately, the sound of Tow-Beasts and their hoggees reached them, and the string was underway.

It wasn’t until his third turn-around at the end—the end at last!—of the convoy that he saw it. One single young boar, trotting behind the last barge at a distance. Definitely alone. And clearly very interested in the forest. There was an aged shepherd-dog with him that did not care for the pig’s interest in the forest at all, and kept nipping at him to keep him moving, even interposing itself between the boar and the woods if the boar ventured too close.

The boats back here were full of duplicate, bulky tools, like looms and a disassembled pit-saw for cutting planks. To Kordas’s eye, the whole string looked overloaded and sat deeper in their mean drafts than they should, but if the experts had cleared them, it must be acceptable. Kordas spotted someone sitting on the stern of the last of the boats—and directed Arial over there to talk to him. “What—” he began.

“Dog’s mine,” the old man said, his beard almost the same color as the wool of his coat, his head tucked so far down into the collar that he looked like a turtle disinclined to come out of his shell. “Pig belongs to Cass Pommery, from Coldspring, my village. Damn thing slipped its charm and bolted, didn’t like the wilderness after all, but won’t let anyone near it to put a new charm in its ear. Cass said to jest let him run along behind, but ever since we got into these damn trees, my old dog decided that there pig ain’t got the sense the gods gave a goose, and he’s been tryin’ to herd him.”

Kordas studied the pig. Were teenage pigs like teenage humans? If so, the blasted thing thought itself immortal. “I think your dog has the right of it,” Kordas replied. “It looks as if the pig wants to get in under those trees and start rooting.”

“Prolly does.” The old man shrugged, which looked more like his head was sinking into the wool than like he was raising his shoulders. “Cass says it’s a truffle pig, which’s why it prolly ran away in the first place. Truffle pigs like to be loose an’ huntin’ their favorite food. Gray morels, truffles, sagbacks. We find ’em, you eat ’em.”

Don’t let your guard down.

“I don’t think it should go in there, in the forest, I mean,” Kordas said carefully. “We’ve been very lucky so far . . . but if something of ours goes in there and starts messing about, we might not be lucky anymore.”

“Aye. That’s why I ain’t washed my hands of the fool bastard, and why Howler’s shepherdin’ him.” The old man spit over the side of the boat, and made a sign that Kordas recognized as one against evil.

“Don’t let your guard down,” Kordas said, echoing the words in his own head, and turned Arial to ride back up the convoy.

“Won’t,” the old man grunted.

Kordas’s nerves were stretched just as tightly as they had been in the Capital, and for pretty much the same reason. In his own mind, potential disaster loomed over him and everyone else he was responsible for, and he had no true idea if the disaster was only in his head or was very real, what form it would take, and if it could be avoided. This entire trip had been like that; there had been brief respite at Crescent Lake, but even then he had known in his heart that the respite was only temporary. And now . . . if he was to be honest with himself, he had to admit he had recklessly taken nearly fifteen thousand people off into the unknown without a map or any goal besides “find somewhere we can live,” largely on the assumption that whatever happened, he could improvise a response.

The fact that nothing catastrophic hadn’t happened yet was minorly due to his leadership, but largely due to good luck, and good luck never lasted.

I wonder if the best idea isn’t to shed people and their property wherever we find a spot that can support a village. Wouldn’t that be kinder to everyone, rather than dragging people across the face of an increasingly hostile landscape trying to find the kind of choice spot that can support us all?

But . . . I promised them that Valdemar was never the land. It was always the people. And a village isn’t large enough to protect itself from a serious threat. Look at that village back at the last Gate we built—and it was an already established one!—that couldn’t handle those snake-dogs on their own!

There weren’t as many herd-beasts on this last, tail-end piece of the convoy, which made riding up and back along the strings of barges much quicker. The barges back here weren’t for individual families, and consisted mostly of cargo they would want when they all settled, but would not necessarily need. Duplicate tools, for instance: extra lumbering tools, extra farming tools, extra crafting tools. “One to take and one in case it breaks” seemed to have been the rule with most people, and all the “one in case it breaks” things were here at the back. It was a kind of “sacrificial tail” so if anything attacked the convoy from the rear, the barges could be abandoned for the attacker to deal with while the rest of the convoy escaped. There was only one barge tender for each string of about eight barges, and they rode their towing animals. If the worst happened, they could cut the traces, set the barges free, and be off. Each tender had a bed in the lead barge and they all shared a single kitchen, which was manned by a second-rank cook of Valdemar manor. Kordas was making sure the men—they were all men back here—had no complaints about how they were treated.

And thinking about these mundane—but needful—precautions, and how he had followed the advice of his mages and worked out every disaster he could think of and a plan for dealing with it did keep the tension at arm’s length.

More or less, anyway.

I certainly didn’t anticipate an enraged forest of sinister trees.

On the other hand . . . how could I possibly have anticipated this? Outside of adventure stories, we’ve always assumed the world was the same as the Empire.

In all the time it had taken to get each section past the woods, nothing had changed in the woods themselves. It was still ridiculously warm. The musty, bitter scent did not change. The dragonflies—if that was what they were—continued to ignore the caravan and flitted among the trees at a distance from the river. And the rage . . . the rage was always there. Never decreasing. Never increasing. It was as if the forest slept here, dreaming, and its dreams were always angry.

And there is no doubt that the last thing we want to do is disturb it.