Messenger

“No,” Matty replied quickly. “I have to go alone.”

“Oh, it’s for a message?”

It wasn’t, but Matty nodded. It bothered him a little to lie about small things. But he always had; he had grown up lying, and he still found it strange that the people in this place where he now lived thought lying was wrong. To Matty, it was sometimes a way of making things easier, more comfortable, more convenient.

“See you tomorrow, then.” Ramon waved and hurried on toward his own homeplace.

* * *

Matty knew the paths of Forest as if he had made them. And indeed, some of them were of his making, over the years. The roots had flattened as he made his way here and there, seeking the shortest, safest route from place to place. He was swift and quiet in the woods, and he could feel the direction of things without landmarks, in the same way that he could feel weather and was able to predict rain long before the clouds came or there was a shift in wind. Matty simply knew.

Others from Village rarely ventured into Forest. It was dangerous for them. Sometimes Forest closed in and entangled people who had tried to travel beyond. There had been terrible deaths, with bodies brought out strangled by vines or branches that had reached out malevolently around the throats and limbs of those who decided to leave Village. Somehow Forest knew. Somehow, too, it knew that Matty’s travels were benign and necessary. The vines had never reached out for him. The trees seemed, sometimes, almost to part and usher him through.

“Forest likes me,” he had proudly commented once to the blind man.

Seer had agreed. “Maybe it needs you,” he pointed out.

The people needed Matty, too. They trusted him to know the paths, to be safe on them, and to do the errands that required traveling through the thick woods with its complicated, mazelike turnings. He carried messages for them. It was his job. He thought that when it came time to be assigned his true name, Messenger would be the choice. He liked the sound of it and looked forward to taking that title.

But this evening Matty was not carrying or collecting a message, though he had fibbed and told Ramon so. He headed to a clearing he knew of, a place that lay just beyond a thick stand of bristly pines. Deftly he jumped a small brook, then turned off the worn path to proceed between two trees, pushing his way through. These trees had grown fast in recent years, and now the clearing was completely concealed and had become Matty’s private place.

He needed privacy for this thing he was discovering about himself: a place to test it in secret, to weigh his own fear for what it meant.

It was dim in the clearing. Behind him, the sun was starting to set over Village, and the light that reached down through Forest was pinkish and pale. Matty made his way across the mossy ground of the clearing to a thicket of tall ferns near the base of a tree. He squatted there and listened, leaning his head toward the ferns. Softly he made a sound, one he had practiced; a brief moment later, he heard the sound he had both hoped and dreaded to hear, in response.

He reached gently into the undergrowth and lifted out a small frog. From his hand, it looked up at him through bulging, unafraid eyes, and made the sound again: churrump.

Churrump.

Churrump.

Matty repeated the frog’s throaty sound, as if they were conversing. Though he was nervous, the back-and-forth sounds made him laugh a little. He examined the slick green body carefully. The frog made no effort to leap from his hand. It was passive in his palm, and the deep translucent throat quivered.

He found what he was looking for. In a way, he had hoped he would not. His life would be easier, Matty knew, if the little frog were unmarked and ordinary. But it was not; he had known it would not be; and he knew that things were all shifting for him now. His future had taken a new and secret turn. It was not the frog’s fault, he realized, and gently he replaced the small green creature in the tall ferns and watched the fronds tremble as it moved away, unaware. He realized that he was trembling as well.

* * *

Returning to Village along the path that was deep in shadows now, Matty heard sounds from the area beyond the marketplace. At first he thought in surprise that people were singing. Singing was common in Village, but usually not outdoors, not in the evening. Puzzled, he paused and listened. It was not singing at all, Matty realized, but the rhythmic and mournful sound they called keening, the sound of loss. He set aside his other worries and began to hurry through the evening’s last light to the homeplace, where the blind man would be waiting and would explain.

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DID YOU HEAR about what happened to Gatherer last night? He tried to go back but it had been too long.” Ramon and Matty, carrying their fishing rods, had met for an excursion to catch salmon, and Ramon was bursting with the news.

Matty winced at what his friend said. So Gatherer had been taken by Forest. He was a cheerful man who loved children and small animals, who smiled often and told boisterous jokes.

Ramon spoke in the self-important tone of one who likes being a conveyor of news. Matty was very fond of his friend but sometimes suspected that his true name might eventually turn out to be Boaster.

“How do you know?”

“They found him last night on the path behind the schoolhouse. After I left you, I heard the commotion. I saw them bring his body in.”

“I heard the noise. Seer and I thought it must be someone taken.”

Matty had arrived at the homeplace the night before to find the blind man preparing for bed and listening attentively to the low collective moan, clearly a large number of people grieving.

“Someone’s been lost,” the blind man had said with a worried look, pausing while unbuckling his shoes. He sat on his bed, dressed in his nightshirt.

“Should I take a message to Leader?”

“He’ll know already, from the sound. It’s a keening.”

“Should we go?” Matty asked him. In a way, he had wanted to. He had never attended a keening. But in another way, he was relieved to see the blind man shake his head no.

“They have enough. It sounds like a good-sized group; I can hear at least twelve.”

As always, Matty was amazed at the capacity of the blind man’s perceptions. He himself heard only the chorus of wails. “Twelve?” he asked, and then teased, “Are you sure it’s not eleven, or thirteen?”

“I hear at least seven women,” the blind man said, not noticing that Matty had intended it as a joke. “Each has a different pitch. And I think five men, though one is quite young, maybe your age. The voice is not as deep as it will be later. It may be that friend of yours; what’s his name?”

“Ramon?”

“Yes. I think I hear Ramon’s voice. He’s hoarse.”

“Yes, he has a cough. He’s taking herbs for it.”

Now, recalling it, Matty asked his friend, “Did you keen? I think we may have heard you.”

“Yes. They had enough. But since I was there, they let me join. I have this cough, though, so my voice wasn’t very good. I only went because I wanted to see the body. I’ve never seen one.”

“Of course you have. You were with me when we watched them lay out Stocktender for burial. And you saw that little girl after she fell in the river and they pulled her out drowned. I remember you were there.”

“I meant entangled,” Ramon explained. “I’ve seen plenty of dead. But till last night I never saw one entangled.”

Neither had Matty. He had only heard of it. Entangling happened so rarely that he had begun to think of it as a myth, something from the past. “What was it like? They say it’s hideous.”

Ramon nodded. “It was. It looked as if first the vines grabbed him by the neck and pulled tight. Poor Gatherer. He had grabbed at them to pull loose but then they curled around his hands as well. He was completely entangled. The look on his face was fearsome. His eyes were open but twigs and all had started to enter under the lids. And they were in his mouth, too. I could see something wrapped around his tongue.”

Matty shuddered. “He was such a nice man,” he said. “He always tossed berries to us when he was out gathering. I would open my mouth wide and he would aim for it. If I caught a berry in my mouth he cheered and gave me extra.”

“Me too.” Ramon looked sad. “And his wife has a new baby. Someone said that’s why he went. He wanted to go tell her family about the baby.”

“But didn’t he know what would happen? Hadn’t he received Warnings?”

Ramon coughed suddenly. He bent over and gasped. Then he straightened up and shrugged. “His wife says not. He went once before, when their first child was born, and had no trouble. No Warning.”

Matty thought about it. Gatherer must have overlooked a Warning. The early ones were sometimes small. He felt great sadness for the gentle, happy man who had been so brutally entangled and had left two children fatherless. Forest always gave Warnings, Matty knew. He entered so often himself and always was watchful. If he had one Warning, even the smallest, he would never enter again. The blind man had entered only once, to return to his original village when it needed his wisdom. He had come back safely, but he had had a small Warning on his return: a sudden painful puncture from what had seemed a tiny twig. He couldn’t see it, of course, though later he said he had felt it come forward, had perceived it with the kind of knowledge that had made the people designate Seer as his true name. But Matty, still a young boy, had been with him then, as a guide; and Matty had seen the twig grow, expand, sharpen, aim itself, and stab. There was no question. It was a Warning. The blind man could never enter Forest again. His time for going back had ended.

Yet Matty had never been warned. Again and again he entered Forest, moved along its trails, spoke to its creatures. He understood that for some reason, he was special to Forest. He had traveled its paths for years, six years now, since that first time, when he was still very young and had left the home that had been cruel to him.