Renou's squad perched in the branches above us with bows out and chalk-tipped practice arrows nocked, scanning the trees. Josha had climbed… he was way up there.
The rest of us took our boots off beneath a tree like a thousand trunks in a maze of wood with nooks and passageways. Overhead, a web of massive trunks crisscrossed high into the upper canopy where a handful of bright green leaves permitted spears of sunlight through. Beside me, thin columns of wood fused together erupted from a tangled cluster of roots with only small patches of black dirt yielding tiny tufts of grass. All throughout, plants with dark-green, rubbery leaves burrowed sprawling roots into cracks and sent out long stalks with pink-and-white flowers that filled the air with a delicate perfume.
To one side, a small creature squawked, waited a few seconds, squawked, waited, then squawked again. Aside from that the forest was quiet but for the wind in the trees and the chorus of insects that filled the world.
Squawk
Rolon sat on a massive shelf of a root. Dark, wavy hair fell loose behind his back as he held his boot up to look inside. "So my stepdad knows all kinds of mushrooms and stuff. Like he knew the mushrooms back home, and when he came to Heralia that was one of the first things he did was learn about the mushrooms."
Squawk
"He even said that to me that when I go somewhere else make sure to learn all about the local mushrooms. That was how he and my mum started talking, you know, 'cause he made a cheese with some local mushroom and it turned out so good he gave everyone a piece and they started talkin' and he was surprised that she'd lived on the nut farm her whole life and didn't know nothin' about the mushrooms we got in central valley."
Squawk
"But yeah he knew all about 'em and he knew which ones gave you energy and which ones heal a rash and which ones made you sick and everything. That one right there…"
A few feet above our heads, a cluster of large, red, semi-circles with bright-blue rings grew out from the side of the tree.
Squawk.
"Shanani told me that one'll put you to sleep. She said that if you extract it and refine it you'll make a poison that'll kill someone but just eatin' it raw like that you'll pass out before you can eat too much."
Squawk
"She was a cutie, man." Daemon raised his face to him.
"pʊ fɪða 'uxuwida!" Tenae snapped his fingers. He sat cross-legged over a relatively flat tangle of roots, arching his back, stretching his arms out all the way, and twisting his torso back and forth. Vayance and Ajak, the other two on his squad, grinned.
"Sorry," Daemon nodded. "Uh… neh-thoo-shee-yeh. za-neh noo-veh?"
Rolon turned to Kaye, who explained. "zaŋe ŋuve is mean eh… what happin."
Squawk
"Crazy needy, man. How do you say that?"
"Needee!" Kaye grinned. "I know this: ki'i mofo!"
"mofo?" I asked. "Which one is more a lot? toto or mofo?"
The bird or lizard or whatever it was that had been squawking stopped, and tiny scratches skittered over the bark.
"Shh!" I raised my hand to silence them and picked up my bow.
Tenae snatched his bow and, in one motion, nocked a practice arrow and stood. Haron had squeezed his muscular body into a narrow tunnel in the wood; he pried free and did the same. Rolon, Turic, Kaye, Daemon, Ajak, and Vayance joined us to scan the surrounding jungle while above, none of Renou's squad seemed to notice.
"Hey!" Haron spoke. Loudly. When Aydel looked down at us, Haron gestured to his eyes and pointed to the forest around.
Aydel snapped his fingers. Loudly. He gestured for the others to do the same. Renou watched him and nodded, tightening his fingers around the string and squinting into the trees.
Beside the wall of wood, a light gray-blue lizard face peeked through a thick cluster of spikey palm leaves and croaked at us. She was Invisible.
We all breathed out and lowered our weapons while she stepped over the cluster of roots carrying Ghuni on her back only to rub her butt back and forth against the tree.
"Don't do that, you'll mark the spot!" ɣʊŋi admonished the creature in Uhuida.
Invisible chirped and clicked in reply.
"Whatever." Ghuni closed her eyes and shook her head before asking us in Herali. "Did Dayumi not come through here?"
"If she did," Haron grinned, "we'd'a slaughtered her!"
She shifted her one-blue-and-one-yellow eyes around in thought, then sat up straight. "We have to move! Quickly!"
As for quickly, Josha began his long descent through the branches high above while the rest of us wrestled our boots back on. I stretched out my knees, donned my pack, and re-slung my bow, while the rest of my team did the same.
Ghuni watched us with a deep breath and pursed lips, furrowing her brow up at Josha, who was still climbing down from his perch.
Eventually, we followed her through the trees single-file, creeping through ferns and broken branches. We passed a patch of large, copper-colored leaves like circles that covered the ground before coming through dried sticks and branches. Lifting her talons high, Invisible stepped through without a sound, but the thirteen of us heralded our presence to the rest of the forest in a symphony of snapping twigs.
They led us through a tunnel of branches covered in large, thick, dark-green almost black leaves that blocked any hint of sunlight and muted the chorus of birds and insects above. Those thick leaves broke on the right to an open plain of brown-yellow grass beneath the oppressive dry-season sun, and Ghuni snapped her attention to the left. Invisible lifted an eye with a black vertical slit towards the same direction and froze.
We all froze.
Beads of sweat travelled down my chest, and I raised my bow, tightening my fingers around the string.
ɣʊŋi held one hand up and whispered. "Wait here!"
She slowly raised her bow. Invisible stepped out, craned her neck high, and jumped into the canopy and out of sight. The sound of her talons ricocheting over the branches above us made a beeline off to our left before fading into the wind in the trees.
Before I could look at Tenae, he'd already directed his squad to take the next watch. Beside the tunnel of thick leaves, Ajak who spoke nothing and understood nothing, nocked his bow with the same thumb technique Rolon used. Daemon found a pair of large trees with a nook offering a view above the tunnel, and Vayance went further down, keeping his back to the thick leaves to watch over a dense patch of bushes.
With precious little cover and numerous angles of attack, I joined their watch. My corner covered a patch of forest about ten feet wide that looked as if it had burned down, surrounded by high trees and bushes that gobbled up the sunlight. From the dried mud below, thousands of dark-green leaves shot up and split into two.
All around me, wind played with the trees in the high canopy, and some animal screeched in the distance.
Kaye and Turic the Big Fat Guy chuckled loudly over something.
"Quiet!" Tenae barked at them.
"Come on, man!" Turic shrugged, and they went back to their conversation.
Haron squinted at the other squad leader. He looked back and forth between him and the men he was in charge of, glanced at me briefly, lifted his canteen for a drink, and splashed some water over his face, rubbing it over and pulling water through his hair with his fingers.
Tenae clenched his jaw and looked out over the brown-and-green forest behind him. His chest lifted from a deep breath. His toned arms bearing the number 858-471 held the dark wood native bow, from which an arrow tipped with a bag of red chalk and sand waited.
Beside me, barely above the mens' voices, something browsed through the leaves. A shuffle, another shuffle, then a scratching of sorts crept beneath the bushes. From around a tree, a small, furry yellow animal with a pointed nose and long, bushy tail of black and yellow rings froze, pointing its tiny black eyes at me.
After what felt like several minutes, the creature decided I wasn't a threat and resumed digging through the piles of dried leaves. It found a long, half-buried root and burrowed its claws frantically into the soil. From the frenzy of flying dirt and shuffling leaves that followed came a squeak. The furry yellow creature rose up from the ground with a slimy lizard-worm-thing in its mouth and brought it to a nearby tree trunk. The slimy thing's mouth gaped open and closed repeatedly while the furry creature's jaws ripped it open.
After a time, Haron stood beside me with his bow ready. The rest of his squad had joined with Tenae's to relieve our watch when suddenly, the furry creature looked up and stared at something to my right. I raised my bow and faced that direction. The furry creature took up its snack and scampered off in the opposite direction.
Montus was still talking.
"Shh!" I snapped.
Tenae had already raised his bow against the sound, and soon all of us were ready. Renou directed his squad to take up their bows and duck into the tunnel of thick leaves, finding narrow gaps to peek through.
Kaye held his bow up and drew, pointing an arrow into the bush. Renou raised his bow but kept his fingers at the nock, ready to draw. The sweat over his arms in the shade gave his skin a sheen. Daemon's fingers tugged gently at the nock, barely pulling the string into an angle.
Everyone was quiet. The steady chorus of insects died down when we all readied our bows, but went back to normal after a few seconds. Nothing beyond the wind in the trees presented itself. Spears of sunlight shot through the upper canopy, casting a circle of heat on the back of my shoulder where my hair didn't fall.
And we waited.
A high, squeaky voice. "Ahmi's not looking!"
And we saturated the forest with practice arrows.
Wood shredded leaves. A lizard hissed. A young woman grunted in agony. Then, "I'm on your team!"
Beyond the thick trees, Ghuni and Invisible were covered in red splotches. Ghuni had dismounted and sat upon the ground clutching her knee and gritting her teeth. Invisible had two splotches on the side of her leg, with another one on her neck. She yawned her jaws open, baring jagged, serrated teeth, and hissed hard.
Above us, perched on a branch, was a green bird with a large, round bill. "You're a talking human!" and it flew off.
Tenae burrowed his black eyes into the creature and pointed. "It go Dayumi!" and we crashed through the forest after it.
It flew through a gap in the trees and landed on a branch some fifty yards out. Our whole unit raced through bushes, hopped over logs, and something hard smacked into the side of my chest.
Arrows came at us from both sides. Half my unit had taken a hit in the first volley. Josha drew back and returned fire until another arrow slammed into his back. Ajak sent an arrow to the other side, then caught another on the back of his skull. He clenched his jaw and rubbed the spot, falling to his knees with his eyes squeezed shut.
Once we were good and massacred, Dax stepped out from the trees with a big grin across his face. "That felt good! You guys OK?"
Haron winced hard and cupped his fingers over a red splotch on his ribs. Aydel fell to the ground clutching his groin in agony.
Dax chuckled lightly and turned back to his men. "Let's move!" and they disappeared into the jungle.
"FUCK!" Tenae threw his bow onto the ground and snapped a practice arrow over his knee.
I grinned. "How's it feel to be the one who gets everyone killed?"
Tenae glowered, turned the back of his hand to me, and raised his middle finger high.
Haron laughed and slapped his shoulder. "Good answer!"
Soon, we gathered our things, slung our bows, and looked around for the direction of the Avenue of the Dead, that special trail reserved for the slain, though I knew for a fact Kurt had been using it. I wasn't the only one, either—Ta'o asked me if I'd seen anything, and yeah, he'd been using it; we both saw.
"Do we have to go back to Carthia already?" Montus's voice was physically, mentally, and emotionally drained. He wiped the sweat from his big forehead. "It's been what… how long we been out here? An hour and a half? Maybe two? Tops? Two days in a row we're the first ones killed out here, and tomorrow, it won't be practice arrows. I can't do this."
Behind us, the trail we'd left behind was so bad you could roll a ball through it.
Rolon was the one who said it out loud. "We were bested by a parrot, man. I know you all see that."
"We should talk about this," Renou raised a finger. "We have to work out why we keep getting destroyed out here, and what we need to change. If we go back to Carthia now, they'll have us doing all kinds of weird stuff, and we won't have another chance."
"Where do we," Daemon shook his head. "zih-vih-dhee noo-veh?"
"You know what?" Haron looked with sadness at the valley we'd carved through the underbrush. "That tree we just came from had some places be great for talkin."
Renou shrugged and looked among Aydel, Montus, and Josha. "My squad is going back to that tree.
No one hesitated. We all followed them into the jungle through a thick tangle of broken sticks.
We hadn't far to go.
Deep within the sprawling maze of wood, we found a cavern. Overhead, scraps of twigs from a thousand nests filled the cracks amid a twisting chaos of thick branches, casting us in darkness. A chorus of chicks blended into a wave of sound that sloshed back and forth, and those plants with dark-green rubbery leaves clung to the walls and shot out pink-and-white flowers that filled the world with a delicate perfume.
The ground was soft, cool, smooth black mud held by roots and stretching out at multiple layers throughout the cavern.
I found a spot towards the bottom long enough to stretch my legs out all the way; a large cluster of those plants with the rubbery leaves crowded around a root shooting up from the mud and sent out a thick bundle of pink-and-white flowers. "First thing I noticed, we were loud."
"Turic!" Vayance pointed. He leaned his back against the wood wall of the cavern with his face between two thick clusters of those flowers. Beside him, another of those furry yellow animals sat still; its tiny black eyes pointed straight ahead. "Had to step on every damned twig there was!"
"Won't shut up." Tenae added.
Vayance, Daemon, even Ajak corrected him. "You must speak Uhuida!"
Tenae looked up at them. Daemon's bony arse was leaned back against a wood knob, Ajak lay his head down in the mud between clusters of those flowers, and Vayance was feeding scraps from his pack to the furry creature, who ate eagerly from his hand. "I pray his enemies bleed as badly as his mouth bleeds words. His voice is one with the siveko, never ending."
"And his silence heralds grave danger!" Kaye sat on a higher shelf with his dark-green legs hanging over a long root.
Haron sat beside him with his own legs dangling down. "That's your squad-mate, man. They makin fun of him and you gonna join, man?"
The Big Fat Guy lay down in the mud with his head propped up on a cluster of those rubbery leaves. "It's alright, man, I'm used to it."
Montus lay down on a shelf beside me. Hair fell from both sides of his big forehead and into the mud, and his hands were up. "Now wait a minute, this is interesting. Turic, how does it feel to be the butt of the joke like that?"
"Yes," Renou added. "That's an interesting question."
Turic gave it some thought. Overhead, the chorus of chicks got quiet on one side, loud on the other, and they went back and forth like that in waves. "I suppose I've always gotten that. I'm so used to hearing it from someone, I dunno, but I can't live in a box where I'm so afraid of people correcting me that I'm afraid to just relax."
"That's interesting!" Half the team nodded in agreement.
"I admire that in you, man." Vayance lay down on his side, watching the creature eat and stroking its fur all the way down to its black ringed tail. "A lot of times, that's exactly how I feel. Like should I say something? And there's a part of me that's afraid to speak up or do anything unusual because someone's going to say something, and I just clam up. I believe I put too much weight on the opinions of others. The risk-reward balance doesn't align with the way I go about things, and I can say that, consciously, but I still can't get the nerve to speak up."
"That's really interesting, man." Came the voices that followed.
"Yeah, that's interesting."
The chorus of chicks sloshed around in circles, back and forth. Beside me, a dense cluster of pink-and-white flowers filled my senses with perfume.
Haron leaned over with his elbows on his knees. His hair fell on both sides, shrouding his face in shadow and half-covering the Cougar brand on his shoulder. "You wanna hear somethin interesting? Last night, I couldn't with a girl."
"Woman," Kaye nudged his shoulder. "She like at you, what happin?"
"Nothin, man. With her, nothin at all. She was gorgeous. But I couldn't. I felt responsible for my men. And that's a weird feeling. I hadn't felt that before, but I felt like someone needed to watch out for them, and that was me. So she's there, and she's pretty, and she's talking somethin, I don't know what, and she gets up and goes to talk to some other guy, and they go off together. That's it
"And last night I was there wonderin, is that it? It's just that easy? Is there nothin more to it? I understand why she did that, and that's the thing. Normally, I'd be that guy, but that night, I watched it all… and it all… all of it looked so… empty. Why is it so empty?"
"That's interesting!" Rolon's voice echoed off the wood walls of the cavern. He had a red splotch on one arm and another in the middle of his tummy.
"That's interesting, man!" Turic's dark-green eyes gazed up through a cluster of pink-and-white flowers.
"That reminds me!" Montus added, still lying his head in the mud and talking with his hands. "Aydel, do you remember that book we found?"
"Yeah, man." Aydel sat on a shelf higher than the others, leaning his back into a thick patch of flowers. "That was interesting!"
Montus nodded. "Real interesting. It was in the forbidden section. It talked about how everything that exists is subject to the Law of Natural Selection. Those things with traits advantageous to survival pass on those traits to their offspring, and those unfit to survive don't. And it's just, whichever is stronger wins out."
"That's interesting, man!" Renou nodded. He sat up and leaned over one of those wooden knobs coming up from the ground and covered in those flowers.
"That's very interesting!" came a chorus that followed.
Ajak lay his back down in the mud with his head against a cluster of flowers and his feet propped up on a small knob. I asked him, "isn't that interesting?"
"It's very interesting!" He nodded.
"I wonder how that applies to religion," I felt myself asking. "Like hear this. Your god commands you to sacrifice your firstborn, my god commands me to have sex with everyone everywhere all the time, and between the two of us, whoever beats the other up worships the true god. That, right there, is how religion works, isn't it?"
"Is interesting!" Tenae nodded. He sat cross-legged, slumped over, with his arms nearly collapsed in his knees.
"That's very interesting!"
"What you might find interesting," Ahmi crouched on her knees, leaning over one of the wood knobs with her hands at her sides. "Is that this tree is called dewɪma; it derives from the ancient 'uxu that means nourishing mother, and she is sacred."
She tilted her head into a patch of flowers and breathed in deep. Behind her, Blue bobbed his head about, chirping and squawking. Now? You've got to be kidding me!
"You can babysit for one hour, just bring her here."
Ahmi sat cross-legged beside a shelf of roots. A cascade of feral white hair framed her sharp face and fell behind her shoulders. "The way it works is that animals come in here, they… stay, and they die. Sometimes your rotting corpses bring scavengers, and they stay, and the cycle begins anew. Soon, the monsoon rains come, and this whole cavern is flooded, and everything is buried in silt. The worms devour you, and this nourishes the tree. Makes her strong. Allows her to build more caverns like this."
"That's really interesting." Vayance leaned back. The small yellow creature was on his chest, and he stroked its fur with both hands.
Ahmi giggled lightly. "Yes, it's very interesting! Tell me: how long have you been here?"
She fought back a smirk and watched us grapple with the question.
"Uh…"
I asked Ajak. "How long have we been here?"
He shrugged. "Did we arrive at some point?"
Montus answered. "We've always been here."
A chorus of affirmation followed, and Ahmi giggled in reply.
"So listen carefully." She turned to Ghuni, who settled her one-blue-and-one-yellow eyes on the teacher. "Always have a spotter. It's not difficult to coax someone to come out of this place, but without a spotter you will lose all time. Now. dewɪma are mentioned throughout Scripture; all the prophets came here to receive Mother. I have seen some caverns large enough to host a wedding, and I have seen spotters paid off by an assassin to leave you in here."
"That's interesting!"
"pofawuxe!" Kaye added.
Ahmi scrunched her eyes and broke out in laughter, leaned forward to take in a good smell from the flowers, and continued. "Miyani and I came to a dewɪma the day we swore to always be on the same side. Up there," she lifted her face to the swirling chorus among the nests above us. "The parents have to drag their chicks to come out. Some of them don't make it and fall down here."
She pointed beside Renou, where a cluster of plants with dark-green rubbery leaves shooting out clusters of flowers had some blue-and-white feathers trapped beneath it. Beneath the cluster Turic laid his head upon, a blackened claw thrust out from a prison of green roots.
"Oh," Turic nodded gently. "That's interesting!"