Uprooted(111)
Author: Naomi Novik

He sat down with his back to the Wood and said, “Keep time for me.” I sang Jaga’s quickening song in a low voice while he pulled, and the banks went blurring by.

The Spindle ran clear and straight under the rising hot sun. It sparkled on the water. We slipped quickly along it, half a mile with each oar-stroke. I had a glimpse of women doing the washing on the bank at Poniets, sitting up with heaps of white linens around them to watch us dart hummingbird-by, and when we passed Viosna for a moment we were under the cherry-trees, small fruits just forming, the water still drifted with fallen petals. I didn’t catch sight of Dvernik, though I knew when we passed it. I recognized a curve of riverbank, half a mile east of the village, and looked back to see the bright brass cockerel on the church steeple. The wind was blowing at our backs.

I kept singing softly until the dark wall of trees came into view ahead. Sarkan put the oars down into the bottom of the boat. He turned and looked at the ground before the trees, and his face was grim. I realized after a moment that there wasn’t a line of burnt ground visible anymore; only thick green grass.

“We had burned it back a mile all along the border,” he said. He looked south towards the mountains, as if he was trying to judge the distance the Wood had already come. I didn’t think it mattered now. However far was too far, and not as far as it would be, either. We’d find a way to stop it or we wouldn’t.

The Spindle’s current carried us along, drifting. Up ahead, the slim dark trees put up long arms and laced fingers alongside the river, a wall rising on either bank. He turned back to me, and we joined hands. He chanted a spell of distraction, of invisibility, and I took it and murmured to our boat, telling it to be an empty stray boat on the water, rope frayed and broken, bumping gently over rocks. We tried to be nothing to notice, nothing to care about. The sun had climbed high overhead, and a band of light ran down the river, between the shadows of the trees. I put one of the oars behind us as a rudder, and kept us on the shining road.

The banks became thicker and wilder, brambles full of red berries and thorns like dragon’s teeth, pale white and deadly sharp. The trees grew thick and misshapen and enormous. They leaned over the river; they threw thin whips of branches into the air, clawing for more of the sky. They looked the way a snarl sounds. Our safe path dwindled smaller and narrower, and the water beneath us ran silent, as if it, too, was in hiding. We huddled in the middle of the boat.

A butterfly betrayed us, a small scrap of fluttering black and yellow that had gotten lost flying over the Wood. It sank down to rest on the prow of our boat, exhausted, and a bird like a black knife darted out of the trees and snatched it up. It perched on the prow with the crushed butterfly wings sticking out of its beak, and snapped them up, three quick clacks, staring at us with eyes like small black beads. Sarkan tried to grab it, but it darted away into the trees, and a cold wind rolled down the river at our backs.

A groaning came from the banks. One of the old massive trees leaned deeply down, roots pulling free from the earth, and fell with a roar into the water just behind our boat. The river heaved underneath us. My oar spun away. We grabbed at the sides of the boat and clung as we went spinning over the surface and plunged onward, stern-first. The boat dipped, and water came pouring in over the sides, ice-cold on my bare feet. We kept spinning, buffeted; I saw as we turned a walker clattering out on the fallen tree, from the bank. It turned its stick-head to see us.

Sarkan shouted, “Rendkan selkhoz!” and our boat straightened itself out. I pointed a hand at the walker, but I knew it was already too late. “Polzhyt,” I said, and a fire bloomed suddenly orange-bright along its twiggy back. But it turned and ran away into the woods on its four legs, smoke and orange glow trailing away behind it. We’d been seen.

The full force of the Wood’s gaze came down on us like a hammer-blow. I fell back into the bottom of the boat, struck, the cold water soaking like a shock through my clothes. The trees were reaching for us, stretching thorny branches over the water, leaves coming down around us and gathering in the wake of our boat. We came around a bend and up ahead there were half a dozen walkers, a deep green mantis at their head, all of them wading out into the river like a living dam.

The water had quickened, as if the Spindle would have liked to carry us past them, but there were too many, and still more coming into the river beyond. Sarkan stood up in the boat, drawing breath for a spell, ready to strike them with fire, with lightning. I heaved myself up and caught his arm and pulled him with me over the back of the boat, into the water, feeling his startled thrash of indignation through my hand. We plunged deep into the current and came up again floating as a leaf holding on to a twig, pale green and brown, swirling with all the others. It was illusion and it wasn’t; I held it with all my heart, wanting nothing more than to be a leaf, a tiny blown leaf. The river seized us in a narrow swift current and carried us on eagerly, as if it had only been waiting for the chance.

The walkers snatched up our boat, and the mantis tore it apart with its clawed forelegs, smashing it into splinters and putting its head in, as if trying to find us. It took its gleaming faceted eyes out again and looked around and around. But by then we had already shot by their legs; the river sucked us briefly down through a whirling eddy into murky green silence, out of the Wood’s gaze, and spat us out again farther down into a square scrap of sunlight, another dozen leaves bursting up with us. Back farther upstream, the walkers and the mantis were churning up the water, threshing it with their limbs. We drifted away on the surface, in silence; the water took us along.

We were leaf and twig for a long time in the dark. The river had dwindled around us, and the trees had grown so monstrous and high that their branches entwined overhead into a canopy so thick that no sunlight came through, only a filtered dim glow. The underbrush had died away, starved of the sun. Thin-bladed ferns and red-capped mushrooms clustered on the banks with drowned grey reeds and snarled nests of pale exposed roots in black mud, drinking up the river. There was more room among the dark trunks. Walkers and mantises came to the banks to look for us, as did other things: one of them a great snouting boar the size of a pony with too-heavy furred shoulders and eyes like red coals, sharp teeth hooked over its upper jaw. It came closer to us than anything else, snuffling at the banks, tearing through the mud and heaped dead leaf mulch only a short way from where we drifted carefully, carefully by. We are leaf and twig, I sang silently, leaf and twig, nothing more, and as we eddied on I saw the boar shake its head and snort in dissatisfaction, going back into the trees.