Tundra

My second day began at dawn, when mist draped the forest like a shroud and the birds were songs in animal disguises. The air was crisp, and my breath curled in it when I exhaled. Pine trees stretched in all directions, their black points protruding like arrowheads from the fog. We were at the forest. Normally, forests welcomed me with open arms, but today this one seemed cold and impassive. The silver birches were stark and skeletal. The mottling of leaves, both on the ground and overhead, was camouflaging something. I wasn’t sure what.

I shifted uncomfortably, testing my soreness where I had slept against the packed earth. Three new figures were with us where we had camped. Judging by the clothes of the first, which were all fur and skin, stitched with thinner strips of leather, his long, braided hair and the permanent appearance of the tents, I grasped that he was different to the druids I had mostly encountered in the south-east of the tundra. The most distinguishing thing he wore was a long cape made from huge feathers, which swallowed his shoulders like armour rather than plumage. The second one, the woman, had strands of grey in her hair, which was braided just like his. The young man by comparison was bare-chested, with a chiselled jaw set as sternly as a jutting cliff. Both of these other also wore shawls of enormous feathers in startling spectrums of grey, ochre and brown. I wondered what kind of birds they could have come from.

I rubbed my eyes. I remembered arriving at the forest’s edge by evening, but nothing after that. Splayed branches winked in the setting sun then, as though the forest’s various hands had spread their fingers and offered me their upturned palms. Rocks were poker-faced. Regiments of trunks were stiffly aligned, guarding secrets.

We had come to the forest after the druid, Reshrin, insisted that we stay out the night. I could have ridden back on my own, but I was engaged by the mystery, and the apparent sadness, of what had happened at the gorge. I felt it necessary to stay with my acquaintance, and I was intent on discovering the meaning of what we had seen.

‘Is this something you’ve done?’ He asked me at first. ‘Some Tower man plot to interfere with the order of things?’

‘I can assure you it’s not,’ I replied, sensitive to his grief. I thought of how I would have felt to see a library burning. ‘I don’t even know what you were expecting to find here.

‘Understand, Tower man, that you are meddling with things far beyond your comprehension. If I find out you’ve lied to me, the retribution of the land will be swift and terrible! Your people won’t even write down what happened to you, it will be so horrific!’

The druid shook with rage, but I stayed calm. ‘I promise you,’ I said, ‘this is nothing to do with me and mine.’ I hesitated, and then felt game to ask, ‘What are we looking at?

‘Something that should not exist,’ he swore.’ Not here and now, anyway. I will need to consult the others.’

And so we had come to the forest, struck up a fire and camped alone, only to wake up in company. From the edge of the clearing, as I mused, a fourth druid came lumbering out. This one was truly something unlike anything I had ever seen. His greying bulk slumped out from where he had been hiding, admiring the eddying dust and the kaleidoscope patterns refracted in every shade of orange, yellow, blood-red, pink and gold.

He was enshrined in autumnal chaos, so that when he stepped out of the clearing into the forest’s wider, shadowy hallway, he put me in mind of a saint stepping out of a gilded portrait. Age had bleached his feathers so that they gleamed like the pearly scales of a giant fish. He was large as a bear, and similar in shape. Horns rear from behind his fluted ears like a pair of branches, forming a forked corona, or a crown. As nodded, the rising sun was clasped between their prongs. It glowed, suspended, like a swollen gem– more ancient and magnificent than amber.

One glance at his hulking body and the cape he wore was enough for me to confirm where the feathers in the others’ cape had come from. It was as if the garment had moulded itself to his body, so that his face was swallowed up by his bristling mane, the feathers of which smoothed themselves down his shiny front so that he might have been a puffed up rooster.

Then, the druid beast transformed into a man. He was more streamlined in his new form, but his face was unchanged, with the exception of claw-like markings scraped across his cheeks, as though he had been mauled. The same scars burned reddish on his chest. From the waist down, he was also feathered, like some kind of avian satyr.

Reshrin stood to greet him. ‘Brothers and sisters,’ he said. ‘I bring blessings from Skavisfjord.’

‘We accept them,’ said this oldest and most venerable creature. ‘Welcome to country, brother.’

‘What’s this?’ asked the woman, in a tongue that lisped animal.

‘A Tower man,’ Reshrin replied.

‘Why?’

‘He says he’s seen the giants walk. Whose country is this?’

‘Mine,’ replied the old owlbeast.

‘So you can tell me what’s happened here?’ Reshrin asked eagerly, and angrily. ‘Why this has bloomed so wildly and so wrongly? Why is the blood of the Otherworld spilled all over these rocks?’

The woman shook her head sadly. ‘We don’t know. It’s not unknown for it to bloom out of season, surely?’

‘Sister,’ Reshrin assured her, ‘we’re not talking about a few scrapings on the underside of a rock, are we? This is a violation, and you’ve allowed it to happen.’

‘Not your country,’ the old owlbeast grunted. ‘Not your concern. Not Mossen Grove’s concern, either.’

‘If the giants are walking now, it is my concern. It’s all of our concern, and it’s definitely Mossen Grove’s concern.’

‘Mossen Grove knows,’ whispered the youngest man.

Reshrin rounded on him fiercely. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’ he demanded, and then softened his voice in treaty. ‘Maybe I can help.’

‘This…’ The woman splayed her hands, helplessly. ‘It should not be growing at this time of year, in the same way that the giants should be dormant at this time of year. Without this fungus, the blood in their veins is too sluggish for them to move, and they sleep in the earth.’

‘So it’s out of season?’ I asked, hoping not to meet with retaliation. ‘That’s not that unusual. We have a garden in the Nameless School where we grow plants that normally need three hundred days of sunlight to flower.’

To my surprise, the druids seemed upset. ‘He does this,’ piped up the youngest, ‘and you bring him here?’

‘You don’t understand.’ Reshrin replied, shaking his maned head. ‘How much do you know about our calendar?’

‘Not a lot,’ I admitted. ‘There isn’t much to delineate the seasons here.’

‘You say that because you don’t know anything,’ he said. ‘To us, the difference between the season of this world and the Otherworld is clear as the difference between night and day. What you’re looking at is the blood of the Otherworld. It’s the heart of our ways. During the sacred season, we ingest it and it breaks down the barriers between us and the Otherworld.’

‘I see.’ It was all I could manage.

‘No, you don’t,’ Reshrin snapped. ‘This is what makes us who we are. This is what makes the giants walk. This is the fungus that can only grow in the light of the aurora, the light that pours through from the Otherworld during the sacred season, the season of giants and gods and monsters.’

‘So what’s it doing here?’ I pleaded.

It was the oldest owlbeast who answered my question in a deep-throated, malevolent rumble. ‘Indeed.’