Forest Mage

I suddenly did not want to go any further. I’d seen enough. It was all adding up to something I didn’t want to admit. The old nobles had been right. This was a futile, senseless project. It would never be completed, no matter how long we worked on it or how much the king spent. It was wasteful, stupid, and cruel to the men dragged from their city lives to toil in a foreign wilderness. I wanted to turn Clove around and go back. But in the distance, I could hear men’s voices raised in command and the creak of heavy wagons. Hitch had told me to see the end, and I resolved that I would, if only to satisfy my curiosity as to why he would give me such a strange command. It did not take me much longer to come to the work site.

I’d seen my father’s much smaller road crew at work and knew how it was supposed to operate. There was a rhythm and order to good road building. The best route should have been marked out, the trees taken down, and the ground surveyed to grade. In some places, earth would have to be scraped away and in others, wagons would dump the excess to build up the roadbed. Rock and gravel would be brought in, to lift the roadbed above the lie of the land. Done right, the operation was almost like a dance as some men prepared the way and other workers followed.

The operation before me was chaos. The overseers were either ineffectual or did not care. I saw a wagon driver shouting at men who were digging in the path that his laden wagon must traverse. Further on, two groups of workers had paused to watch their foremen come to blows. The men were fighting doggedly, trading heavy blows in a sullen, mindless way. No one tried to stop them. The convicts in their ragged shirts and trousers leaned on their shovels and picks and watched the fistfight with dull satisfaction. The workers wore leg irons that limited them to a short stride. It struck me as barbaric.

Discord and disorder surrounded me. Weeds and brush grew on heaped fill dirt beside the road. An overturned wagon, its load spilled beside it, had simply been abandoned where it fell. I came at last to where the road was only a raw scar in the earth, with stumps of trees sticking up to show where it was supposed to go. The stumps were silvery, and on some moss had started to grow. These trees had been logged at least a year ago and more likely three. It made no sense to me. The road should have been growing much more swiftly than that.

A uniformed guard oversaw a coffle of convicts ineffectually grubbing up the stumps. He waved an arm at me as I rode through. He wore a corporal’s stripe on his sleeve. “Hey! Hold up! Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded of me.

I reined Clove in. “Just to the end of the road.”

“The end?” He gave a great haw of laughter, and around him his fettered prison crew joined in. It took him several moments to get his merriment under control.

“Is there a problem?” I asked him. I cringed as I realized that I’d addressed him as a noble son would address a common worker like himself. That was a reflex I’d best learn to control. Once I’d donned the uniform of a common trooper, I doubted it would be tolerated. But he didn’t appear to notice.

“A problem? Oh, no, none at all. You just go your merry way. Usually we only get new recruits visiting it, but for myself, I think every visitor to Gettys should go out to the end of the road. It really takes you to the heart of our mission.” He grinned broadly as he looked around at his work crew, and I saw his dispirited workforce nodding and smirking sourly among themselves, doubtless over my fat. I nudged Clove, and we passed through the midst of their work. Beyond them, all work seemed to have come to a complete halt.

The road ended in a tangle of three fallen trees. I had never seen logs so large, nor stumps so wide. They must have been cut years before. The dead bare limbs and the stumps of the trees had gone gray. Their giant bodies were a barricade of death against the road’s progress. The standing trees beyond them were even bigger. No wonder the logging crews had given up. No one could cut a road through trees that size. It was an insane task. This was the king’s great vision? Anger was growing in me beside a sudden self-loathing. It suddenly seemed that everything I had been taught, all my pride in being a soldier son, was a part of this fallen ambition. Stupid. I was stupid, the king was stupid, and the road was a folly.

I sat on Clove’s broad back, disillusioned and discouraged, staring up into the ancient forest. Then I dismounted and walked forward, trying to see beyond the fallen giants. The ground was uneven, and underbrush of thistles and thorns had grown up swiftly when the ground was granted sunlight. The bushes were so dense and evenly spaced, they almost seemed a deliberately planted hedge against intruders. These brambles had sharp-tipped leaves as well as thorns all down their flexible canes. I made a halfhearted attempt to push into the thicket, but soon tangled in their barbed branches like an insect in a spider’s web. Withdrawing cost me snags in my trousers and long bleeding scratches on my arms. I’d wakened a horde of tiny stinging gnats and they swarmed about me. I waved at them wildly and retreated to the road.