“Well…,” I said, about to give Duncan my next objection.
But he was already off, tramping through the bramble like some miniature version of the Kalif, determined to claim everything he saw for the Empire. He had always been fast, the kind to set out obstinately for whatever goal beckoned, whatever bright and shiny thing caught his eye. Usually, I had control over him. Usually, he wanted to stay on my good side. But when it came to the forest, our relationship always changed, and he led the way.
So off he dashed into the forest, and I followed, of course. What choice did I have? Not that I hated following him. Sometimes, because of Duncan, I was able to do things I wouldn’t have done otherwise. And, such a relief, when I followed him, the weight of being the eldest lifted from me—that was a rare thing, even BDD.
The forest in that place had a concentrated darkness to it because of the thick underbrush and the way the leaves and needles of the trees diluted the sun’s impact. To find a patch of light in the gloom was like finding gold, but those patches only accentuated the surrounding darkness. The smell of rot caused by shadow was a healthy smell—I didn’t mind it; it meant that all of the forest still worked to fulfill its cycle, even down to the smallest insect tunneling through dead wood. It did not mean what it would come to mean in Ambergris.
Duncan and I fought our way through stickery vines and close-clumped bushes. We felt our way over fallen trees, stopping in places to investigate nests of flame-colored salamanders and stipplings of rust-red mushrooms. The forest fit us snugly; we were neither claustrophobic nor free of its influence. The calls of birds grew strange, shrill, and then died away altogether. {As if we had gone through a door to a different place, a different time, Janice. I could not believe, sometimes, while in the forest, that it existed in the same world as our house.}
At times, the ground rose to an incline and we would be trudging, legs lifting for the next step with a grinding effort. The few clearings became less frequent, and then for a long time we walked through a dusk of dark-green vegetation under a canopy of trees like black marble columns, illuminated only by the stuttering glimmer of a firefly and the repetitive clicking of some insect. A smell like ashes mixed with hay surrounded us. We had both begun to sweat, despite the coolness of the season, and I could hear even undaunted Duncan breathing heavily. We had come a long way, and I wasn’t sure I could find the route back to our familiar paths. Yet something about this quest, this foolhardy plunge forward, became hypnotic. A part of me could have kept on going hour after hour, with no end in sight, and been satisfied with that uncertainty. {Then you know how I have felt my entire adult life—except that we’re told there is no uncertainty. No one makes it out, we’re told, from birth until our deathbed, in a thousand spoken and unspoken ways. It is just a matter of when and where—and if I could discover the truth in the meantime.}
The sting, the burn, of hard exercise, the doubled excitement and fear of the unknown, kept me going for a long time. But, finally, I reached a point where fear overcame excitement. {You mean common sense overcame excitement.}
“Duncan!” I said finally, to his back. “We have to stop. We need to find our way home.”
He turned then, his hand on a tree trunk for support—a shadow framed by a greater gloom—and I’ll never forget what he said. He said, “There is no way to go but forward, Janice. If we go forward, we will find our way back.”
It sounded like something Dad would have said, not a nine-year-old kid.
“We’re already lost, Duncan. We have to go back.”
Duncan shook his head. “I’m not lost. I know where we are. We’re not there yet. I know something important lies ahead of us. I know it.”
“Duncan,” I said, “you’re wearing sandals. Your feet must be pretty badly cut up by now.”
“No,” he said, “I’m fine.” {I wasn’t fine. The brambles had lacerated my feet, but I’d decided to block out that discomfort because it was unimportant.}
“There’s something ahead of us,” he repeated.
“Yes, more forest,” I said. “It goes on for hundreds of miles.” I thought about whether I had the strength to carry a kicking, struggling Duncan all the way back to the house. Probably not.
I looked up, the long trunks of trees reaching toward a kaleidoscope of wheeling, dimly light-spackled upper branches, amid a welter of leaves. In those few places where the light was right, I could see, floating, spore and dust and strands of cobweb. Even the air between the trees was thick with the decay of life.
“Trust me,” Duncan said, and grinned. He headed off again, at such a speed that I had no choice but to follow him. In the shadows, my brother’s thin, wiry frame resembled more the thick, muscular body of a man. Was there any point at which I could convince him to stop, or would he stop on his own?
Another half-hour or so—just as I could no longer identify our direction, so too I had begun to lose my sense of time—and a thick, suffocating panic had begun to overcome me. We were lost. We would never make it home. {You should have trusted me. You will need to trust me.}
But Duncan kept walking forward, into the unknown, the thick loam of the forest floor rising at times to his ankles.
Then, to my relief, the undergrowth thinned, the trees became larger but spread farther apart. Soon, we could walk unimpeded, over a velvety compost of earth covered with moist leaves and pine needles. A smell arose from the ground, a rich smell, almost like coffee or muted mint. I heard again the hawk that had been wheeling overhead earlier, and an owl in the murk above us.
Duncan stopped for me then. He must have known how tired and thirsty I was, because he took my hand in his, and smiled as he said, “I think we are almost there. I think we almost are.”
We had reached the heart—or a heart—of the forest. We had reached a place that in a storm would be called the eye. The light that shone through from above did so in shafts as thin as the green fractures of light I can see from the corner of my eye as I type up this account. And in those shafts, the dust motes floated yet remained perfectly still. Now I heard no sound but the pad of our feet against the earth.
Duncan stopped. I was so used to hurrying to keep up that I almost bumped into him.
“There,” he said, pointing, a smile creasing his face.
And I gasped, for there, ahead of us, stood a statue.
Made of solid gray stone, fissured, splashed with light, overgrown with an emerald-and-crimson lichen, the idol had a face with large, wide eyes, a tiny nose, and a solemn mouth. The statue could not have been taller than three or four feet.