and look out towards your King’s Road. See where it will go as they push it onward. Then come back, and tell me if I will live.’
The pain in my hands was already lessening. I wiped my sleeve over my forehead and felt the roughness of scabbing. The magic was again healing me with an unnatural swiftness. I was grateful, and also a bit surprised, not that the magic could heal me but at how easily I accepted it now.
I was full of trepidation as I walked to the end of the ridge. The soil there was stony and as I approached the end, the trees became more stunted until I stood on an out-thrust of stone where only brush grew. From that rocky crag I could look out over the valley below me. The vale cupped a lining of trees, but intruding into that green bowl, straight as an arrow, was the chaos of the King’s Road. Like a pointing finger, it lanced into the forest. To either side of it, trees with yellowing leaves leaned drunkenly, their side roots cut by the road’s progress. Smoke still rose from an equipment shed, or rather, from the ashes of one. Epiny had been thorough. She’d set off three explosions down there in an attempt to distract the town from my escape. Wagons and scrapers were a jumble of broken wood and wheels in one area under the scattered roof of a shed. Another collapsed building still smouldered and stank in the sweet summer air. And it looked to me as if she had exploded one culvert. The road had collapsed and the stream that had once been channelled under it now seethed through the rocks and muck. Men and teams were already at work there, digging the muck away and preparing to lay a new conduit for the stream. They’d have to repair that section of road before they could push the construction any deeper into the forest.
My delicately raised girl cousin had struck in a way that I, a trained soldier son, had never even imagined. And she’d succeeded, at least for now, in halting the progress of the King’s road builders.
But as I was smiling at her success, my grin suddenly stiffened into a sort of rictus. This road, cutting through the mountains and to the sea beyond them, was my king’s great project. With that road, my king hoped to restore Gernia to greatness.
And I looked on its delay and destruction with pleasure. Who was I?
I gazed down on the aborted road again. It pointed straight towards me. Well, not precisely straight. It would cross the valley and then climb the hill I was standing on … Slowly I turned my head to the left, to look back the way I had come. Tree Woman. Lisana. Her stump and fallen trunk were exactly in the path of the road. If the tree cutting continued, she would fall to the axe. I looked back at the road, cold flowing through my veins. At the end of the construction, two freshly fallen giants sprawled in a welter of broken limbs. They’d taken other, smaller trees down with them as they fell. From my vantage point, the new rent in the forest canopy looked like a disease eroding the green flesh of the living forest below me. And the gash was heading directly towards my lover’s tree.
I watched the men toiling below. The sounds of their cursing and shouted commands could not reach me here. But I could smell the smoke of last night’s fire and see the steady procession of wagons and teams and road crews as they toiled like ants mending a nest. How long would it take them to fix the broken culvert and patch the road? A few days, if they were industrious. How long to build new wagons and scrapers, how long to build new sheds? A few weeks at most. And then the work would press on. The magical fear that the Specks had created still oozed down from the forest to deter the workers and sap their wills. But, fool that I was, I’d given the commander the means to overcome even that. I’d been the one to suggest that men half drunk on liquor or drugged with laudanum would not feel the fear as keenly and could work despite it. I’d even heard that some of the penal workers now craved the intoxicants so much that they clamoured to be on the work details at the road’s end. The drugged and desensitized men would push the road on into the forest. I’d enabled that. It had almost earned me a promotion.
I recognized uncomfortably that my heart was turning more and more towards a forest way of thinking. The divide in me ran deep now. I was still a Gernian, but that was no longer sufficient reason to believe that the King’s Road must be pushed through at all costs. I glanced back towards Tree Woman’s stump. No. The cost to me alone was too high. It had to be stopped.
How?
I stood for a long time as the afternoon waned, watching the men and teams flailing away at their tasks. Even at this distance, I could see that the workers were impaired. No one moved briskly and mishaps abounded. A wagon trying to turn too tightly with a load of rock turned over and dumped its cargo. An hour later, another wagon mired, and a third driver, trying to get past the mired wagon, drove his team into the ditch and overset his load there.
Yet for all that, the work was progressing. It might be tomorrow before they had replaced the culverts, and perhaps even another day before they had a drivable surface on the road there. But eventually, like patient insects, they would get it done. And then they would push on once more, cutting inexorably into the forest. Did it matter to me if they cut down her tree next week or three years from now? I needed to stop them.
Yet no matter how I wracked my brain, I could not come up with a plan. I’d gone to the Colonel before the plague descended on us and begged him to stop the road. I’d explained to him that the kaembra trees were sacred to the Specks, and that if we cut them, we could expect an all-out war with the forest people. He’d dismissed me and my concerns. Silly superstitions, he’d told me. Once the trees were cut and the Specks discovered that no great calamity befell them, he believed they could more readily adapt to the civilization we offered them. Not even for an instant did he pause to wonder if there might be a grain of truth in what the Specks believed about their trees.
When I asked if the road could not go around the kaembra trees, he pointed out that engineers had mapped out the best route, and it went past Gettys and through the mountain pass that traders had once used. For years, the resources of Gernia had been committed to building the road on that route. An alternate path had once been considered, one that would have gone past Mendy and the Fort to cut through the Barrier Mountains there. But to redirect the road-building effort to that route would mean adding years to the King’s project, not to mention absorbing the waste of all that had gone into pushing the road as far as Gettys and beyond it. No. Nothing so trivial as a stand of ancestral trees would halt the King of Gernia’s grand vision.
The Colonel was dead now, a victim of the Speck plague. The Specks had struck back at the tree cutters in the only way they had. They’d done the Dust Dance for the visiting officials from Old Thares and the inspection team, and in the process had infected everyone with the plague. I’d warned him of that, too. If the Colonel had ever reconsidered my words, he’d taken all such thoughts to the grave with him. Even if I’d been able to go into Gettys and talk to the new commander, my words would make no impression on him. The two realities, Gernian and Speck, simply did not meet. The Colonel had not even been able to grasp that the Specks were at war with us. He had thought that because they came yearly to trade with us, we’d reached an accord of sorts, and that they would slowly adopt our ways. I knew better. Each year, in the course of that ‘trading’ time, they attacked us, deliberately spreading Speck plague among us.
Our peoples couldn’t even agree on what constituted a war.
I doubted the Specks knew of the magnitude of the blow they’d dealt us with the latest outbreak of plague. The Speck plague had struck down every visiting officer on the reviewing stand. General Brodg, our Commander in the East had fallen, as well as his predecessor, the venerable General Prode. Those losses would echo throughout all of Gernia. And within the fort at Gettys most of our resident officers had fallen sick, drastically reducing the ratio of officers to enlisted men. The command at Gettys had been passed down three times in the space of a month. The man who had it now, Major Belford, had never commanded a post before. I wondered if the King would bother to replace him, and who would assume the position of Commander in the East. I wondered who would want it. Then I decided that such decisions no longer concerned me. I was a soldier no more.
