A chrome distance bid us farewell, then was the sun’s tumble scheming, scarlet, groped in a riot of spindle-bark. Wanton drapes, that in so skeletal throes sought to climb and craft kingdoms from their shadows. Night was hours apart, though already was its dye gushing, immeasurable as the bucket tipped across the canvas and all its fine strokes and all its tidy esoterics, drowning interpretation. I’ve not a mind for art, but under lecherous trees is felt an ode true; some organic enormity we all know to churn our soles, and our engulfing by it—near to a poem. Onwards, do we march. A coming to right petulance, the in-earth foreseen assembly, like disastrous but undeniable and root-proven concord. This cold is damning. It does seek us all.

  The dirt feels barren, inhospitable, quite below coveting, indeed content to sprawl its avoidant pasture forever, to taste only the cycles of the moon. Far off yet, I reminded myself. Porvhuud was not come to us, though in telling which branch marked the signpost, the sigil of the snickering border we were all of us helpless, journeymen no more. An indiscernible bulwark, its jousts the gale, the perplexing allowance. We were not rebuked, though Garl Drudgefoot cried with the birds and Molt was a ram of drudgery, persistent, bashing to no end but more satisfied desecration. I am gripped by my every wanton inclination, I fear. How many times must a man see the wilds to know their threat? The storm did not pester our new march. No, it did not dabble over this earth. Perhaps those dancers, celibate slits, pure maroon amidst cloud-breaks, had cast their claim already. Perhaps already did we belong. I never believed such a bitter, quivering collective.

  Arthryd sensed the unease and swooned with story. “Behold, but another backroad. Rabdour is a little land of little fears, no? They have let the rattle of treetops be their sentence, to inept fortunes. To only what the bracken can bestow. I knew a boy, in a city far East, who sought in clean passions the rooftops. Up brick he crawled, bleeding from the nail, ducking the windows what held eyes, to find high and flat ground. Of course he did, for who might lay asunder burning want? Not greed, not lust, but a spirit’s desire? No force of touch, certainly. And his father worked the roofs—to his son, the inspirer and the reprimand. His accolade, the bruise, in some dozens. But I met him again as a man, and he worked the gutters with a long fork, jabbing and privating dross. He allowed that dread of tight brows to buckle him, flick at his spine, and now, I’ve no doubt, while we delve to Porvhuud, the boy climber has called sewers his promotion.” Arthryd spat and leveled the land with his palm. “And would you believe, good company, that there are folk grown who yet let in that weight of exterior doubt? The tall, who bend to hear mice-frets? Not us, of course. Never such, in the day so young.”

  By his tale were some fetched. Others wary, fighting the colour of his tongue. The both of us knew he did not speak to me. He loathed my earned doubts and I soured to his every verse. The way did wield us in such a way that we guessed at the opacity of our own path, its striations there then in flight to the neighbour minute. It swayed, bobbling as if with titanic weight, improvising its balance. To us, the route appeared pressed, stamped flat, sun-bleached, wilted over an ancient span and then embittered to the stars, though groves all the same rifled, in a hymn amidst warbling agencies, beside, adjacent, and behind our stalk. Trunks spasmed in the eye’s edge, like a mirage of deep heat. There was no noise to the wind; only the rhythm of boots, then the rhythm of boots joined to cold air. It seemed a space without action, belonged to soundless currents, stirred by the echo alone as if we already trekked far below stone. The quiet of speculation aids me none. I turn to conversation, cover my haste.

  “Night will be upon us in some hours, though we must find camp earlier. It is not the wizened who walk through foreign twilights. Not in the backwood’s abduction, certainly. Keep an eye for the raised and guarded patch.”

  “Need it be guarded?” pondered Garl, thwacking a stick upon passed trees. “I thought it heard the wolves do not hunt in Porvhuud…”

  “We are not in Porvhuud yet, Garl,” said Sphia. “And I place little stock in wives’ tales.”

  “Hrmph,” cracked Orolm, wrapping his leash tighter to his wrist. “She did not name it barren, the crone. Her fret was of worse dwellers.” At that, the party glared amongst one another, some eager, some sullied. “But again, she is old and well deserted to her hut. My mother raised her lantern every night, after all—to catch silhouettes in the crops, for when the wind blew and the drapes raised, there were shades of corn upon her windows, she believed to be men astride.”

  “So your mother was a loon,” said Sphia. “Should we shirk too what your mut sniffs, soon as there’s grey in his hide?”

  “He has my aid. Miss Hort sat alone.”

  “We’ve your aid, too,” said Beryll. “And see how sure it’s left us.” He exhaled his humours away. “There is an arbour, home, in my fellow’s yard. My sister’s long coveted it, though she knew her own wants like hearsay. Eyeing it embarrassed, on our walks. That is my shame, I think. When I return, whether with Porvhuud’s wealths or its scars, bare hands or much coin in my fists, I will take to it. Bargain, or begging, if my fortune proves so low, and to her I’ll gift a painted, bright place. There, her faiths will let out from under that fool’s taint. There she might dream. For Porvhuud, I have my wish.”

  Good Barb snickered, her own wrong applaud. The rest would not prove Beryll’s charm. Evening crept and its croak encouraged Sphia enough, to speak before shadow took and we could only guess who spoke, in what mood, with what sum of buffers. The wilds were thick then tendrils, slobbering their catch. Twigs snapped under us.

  “That is good,” said Sphia. “Perhaps I will buy myself some quiet, if Porvhuud is kind. A house to a cliff, where rain deters the peddlers. Where the jackals slip and hit the waves. And I step out and sniff the end of storms, see what colours dress the sky, then retire indoors again. Soft, lightless. Some dread such a respite, like purgatory, but there is nowhere I would sleep more sound.”

  “I can see it,” said Beryll. “And I’d come to visit, and in your dark you’d pretend to be away, hiding at the edge of your window, no?”

  “You, I would always welcome. In the shed, out back.”

  “Ha! Fine, fine. Indeed, soon I might hope for such lodging.”

  “I’ve gone without a bed so long I would not trust the boards. Good sleep be damned. The pillows hold none of the thrill, nor wonder of the wood. Yes, Beryll? My dreams are stale anyways, and seldom recalled.”

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  “Time and again, I am appalled how readily my needs are demands, then my demands are urges. Greeds. A month ago, steak seemed my right, bedside. Now, I gnaw at stems, and tongue around the rot.”

  “And still, somehow, you see that great belly fed.”

  “The one favour of the cold is that, eventually, it will sully even your jeers.”

  “And ardent will they thaw. Gives me time to imagine sayings more clever.”

  “Hear that, Arthryd? There is much more than ingots to look forward to.”

  Though Arthryd was gouging the peripheral, tugging to and forth against some hundred totems of the cascading black. He was awkward, stifled, like in the grudge of an unrighteous ceasefire. Watching, through the cracks, for the first of the next thousand sparks. He pretended to be privy to the break of the wild, the stellar cataclysm, ordained in and by but after their shunning of his constant forward query. Always, I sniff at his circling fantasies; circling to the offal, the bulge of plump, inveigled brains. Fumes of the smouldering hoax, doubts but snotty embers, greyed and too late. He remembers there are words meant for him.

  “Yes, angst belongs to the befores,” he said. “When travel begins in its heart, but you’ve bet already on travesty, there are many things to stumble on and be delighted by. I know I will have pleasures faster, richer than the prize buried. Certainly.”

  “And what prize is that?” asked Orolm. “We have come far. What awaits us, Arthryd?”

  “There is an old place in the wood,” he said. “Collapsed, long ago. Evaded, by suspicion, then bastioned with its unknowns. A vault, by now, with the many years that have snubbed it. Now are its keepsakes aged. Imagine good wines, fed their good century. No, the time is nigh its stones are ruffled.”

  “Stories dry out, eventually.” concurred Orolm. “Nothing shut is meant to expire. It is so. Otherwise, the old world would immolate its every wealth, rather than lock her away.”

  “You understand. Another piece of the grandfather’s puzzle, cast adrift. And its shore is Porvhuud.”

  Theirs is the gossip of sages, too senile to recall what circumstance might swell beyond the hut, beyond the pipe-mists, in the plain white gasses of the paretic eye. Drunk, dancing on ale-glass and calling cracks their route’s fated resonance. Drunken, blurring the ignorance of ancients with elected blasphemy. They will look at gold and see a chrome reflection of the skies above, and find no storms, and know no punishment. It is not providence when in our thefts the purse does not spill. It is only good stitchwork.

  At some point has Garl collected berries and so every lip slaps. Ripe indigo scars, nostril to the chin. Perhaps it is a resentful mind that finds its blemish in pure sustenance. That suspects every stretch of the arm corrupted, every vein to sport poison. Some bewilderments are not to be solved. There are the chests buried, then there are the dead. The graves announcing, by the charred abscess, that fire will not do for penitence. That the hollow of forgone earth alone might appease what light dies in the skull’s twin pits, gentle it back into its depths. But ambition prides itself on the abolishment of quiet custom. To conquer what does not oppose, for with no outcry can be no crime and no law be called asunder. Our march is a trickling in the lesser wood. A dire solemnity, that I know is dangerous.

  I feel a cold more powerful. A progress of demotion, enveloping us all. And the ground comes uncouth and the trees topless, and the sun burns and dies and there is no ash in the ever-dark. The bush is the bear, cuddling your bleeding fellow. The branch is the edge of the bat’s wing, as it squeals a rabid fret. There are silvers of imagined casts, forgotten starlights, riding corners of night. Valiant jabs against the crevasse, but snubbed and then never believed to begin with. You hear a step and count every body in its sleeping bag. You guard your desperate plot of earth against the nightmare, that is strange and malformed but cunning and fluid. Capricious. But raw. Mercy, Forglair. Mercy, to might. We made our camp in good time.

  In leafless mangroves, we slumber, though in the breeze they scratch at the tents. Garl will kill the dwindling flame. He listens for the birds. When all of us cluster, we obscure the song, I wager. Garl Drudgefoot holds in him a bashful discontent, for man. There are those of us spared. Those of us with the power to beggar or bloody him, mostly. The flame seems so loud, a desolate flicker in a soundless deep. Yet without, the deep will begin its grating. I must hope sleep has found me by then.

  There is a shuffling. It is nervous, dragging some knot of leaves clumsily behind it. The Cystbug, who fears our company above the isolated wild, returned from more late duties. We guess at him, but there is a simplicity in his watch wholly incapable.

  “Cystbug,” greets Garl, in clenched disdain.

  “Hello, Garl!”

  “Shh!” hisses Garl Drudgefoot. “Everyone’s sleeping, you damned little fool. Why not come up with a bell and clapper, while you’re at it?”

  “Sorry…”

  “What’re you up and about for, anyway? You don’t need sleep like the rest of us?”

  “A queer thing, a shrub in distress,” said the Cystbug, fondling the chin’s contemplation. “Her fronds… dressed all in tassels. Red thread. An ornate bloodletting, in the backwood. Rabdour’s craft, you wager?”

  “Rabdour?” Garl Drudgefoot was displaced, begrudging in his confidences. “They do not stir so west, I thought. A deviant’s work, must be… The town’s straggler…”

  “Then a busy straggler, he is.”

  “How?”

  And the Cystbug said not a word. His scrawny finger raised, above all the snores and sleeping rolls and the foxholes of prostrate fellows. A giddy craving laid in his batty gaze, and as Garl followed it scornfully I chased it through the slit of my tent. Above, it aimed, to the baskets of etiolated willows, cast across our camp like wreaths in festival, where hung a myriad of cloths: A thin army of tassels, red as the malefic sunset, just above our dreaming heads. A plotted decor of the deep night. We all did feel the chill of wind, yet the tassels were unmoving. Marking us. Staining sentries, taints over our lay.

  “What!” Garl Drudgefoot shouted, leaping up in disbelief. “What is this? What game do you play, Cystbug!” Vicious, he drew upon the leper. “What toying have you done in the night!” He lifted the Cystbug by the collar and beat a fist through the bone of his cheek. A grunt, a spout of blood, a tumble to the twigs. Garl gave his ribs a boot, then I was sprung upon him.

  “Are you mad!” I demanded, stealing his shoulders and throwing him to the trees. “So soon offset that you’d assault your fellow?” And to my shame I brought a blow to his chin, and behind did the Cystbug quiver and wail.

  There was an awakening, some rifling through the tents. Garl took indignant flight, wiping blood from knuckle and nose. I was left clutching half-fists, finding the jumped eyes, searching the scrambling-off Cystbug. There was that silence of unfathomed disturbance, but my head was high and the company did join me. There was no greater quiet I believe in my life, then upon that shivering night, where all of us found in the treetops the touch of the visitor.

  The red drift, that claimed us all.

  _____