Chapter 5 - The Weavings Of Mysterious Agency

THERE IS A SORT of emptiness that fills things just as well as solidity. A zero must circle something and fill a space to aid numerologists in want of a digit.

 

"We are missing someone?" Sister Tinker Flosstooth said, eyes sharply evaluating mistiness that refused to solidify into regularity.

 

"Speak for yourself," came a comfortable reply.

 

"I am," Flosstooth quickly countered and frowned at the space where for one brief moment a sense of presence had lingered, then melted away like a change of mood.

 

"Always dissipating, that one," another voice added a reassuring detail.

 

"Nevertheless, matters do not engender malingering. What say you Merryhop? Anything good to lighten the mood as we go forward? I note you are due a sojourn in the merry land of Arbornica."

 

Those with eyes to see and could see with them, despite the strangeness all around, turned their collective gaze upon a jauntily swathed figure who had remained silent since the tasks in hand were portioned out by mysterious agencies that would bear no scrutiny.

 

"Spiders," was all Sister Tinker Merryhop said with a leaden-toned voice of distaste.

 

"Ah," someone sympathised. "The jumping ones can be fun, especially when they miss their aim."

 

"I'll bear that in mind. No time like the present, whatever that might be," Merryhop said and waved her varnished staff at swirls of vapour before she wandered through a maze of light and energy and found herself amid the sinister forests of the legendary land of Arbornica. "Oh joy," she added as she pondered her next move.

 

Moon spiders.

 

It had a nice sound to it, if one could interchange meaning, perhaps by turning spiders into cakes with pale pink topping.

 

Cakes though, no matter how one looked at them, could never be persuaded to swarm.

 

Scooping up a spider trapped in some slippery bath and sending it on its scuttling way seemed a good deed in the eyes of some, especially spiders themselves. Were they grateful? Would they ensure a plague of boring beetles cease to drill holes in precious tomes in search of digestible knowledge?

 

Yes. They would.

 

It had been Tinker Dozen's idea to engender a sense of kindness and reciprocity among the gloomy folk of Arbornica some decades back. As his name suggested, he liked to work in multiples, but sometimes such manipulations could get out of hand. Population control was a tricky business at the best of times. Population explosions were a different order of chaos all together.

 

In this particular Summer Pause, seriously sultry in such a climate as Arbornica was heir to, matters were multiplying indeed.

 

Sister Tinker Merryhop shivered as she pondered the rippling shadows of a land where darkness was merely another word for reality.

 

***

 

BARKING IN Arbornica was a means to communicate. Drums of barkwood were shaped into resonant hollows and beaten to convey messages through the dense forests, carrying many times farther than the most powerful of human voices.

 

This was the sound which greeted Sister Tinker Merryhop when she found herself amid dim forests of a primeval land. The superstitions that plagued the land were in full swing as the time of year brought celebrations that more resembled acts of appeasement than anything else.

 

For it was once again the time of the Green Moon.

 

Green Moon festivals were sometimes so lengthy and frequent that no sooner had one ended than another began. It was an exhausting time for the doomsayers in the Creeper Realm for amid the thickest, most tangled copses in the whole of Arbornica their solemn messages could barely be heard while the people worshipped the mother trees with due reverence and lingering sanctity.

 

It was a place of sweet aromas, sickly mists and chanting voices.

 

It was also a place much loved by spiders.

 

When Serenity hung big and low, as if settled in the treetops, the greenish light flooded through the branches. Anyone gazing up would see the patterned scintillations of a dozen beautifully crafted webs lit by the light of the moon, and upon their woven patterns sat countless spiders silhouetted in Serenity's glow. Moon spiders.

 

Yet even in this place of deepest despair there were streams of scintillating hope and joy. Young lives, gathering to themselves a defiant future, a determination to find some kind of happiness in the shadows. It was a delight for Sister Tinker Merryhop to trace these threads of brightness, to see how they coalesced, strengthened and parted with renewed vigour as she gazed into a deep pool near where she had arrived. It was a sacred spot and she knew it well.

 

A touch of a ringed finger and the weavings of mysterious agency revealed themselves to her.

 

There was one thin, enfeebled little stream of hopefulness wending its way through the darkness with a wavering uncertainty. So slender it was that every moment she expected it to break, to sunder a tender dream and end a wakefulness so full of potential joy. Snuffed out like a candle on the edge of an abyss. Yet somehow, as it wandered among perils unseen, stretched across dangers that threatened, the tiny song that lifted its spirit seemed somehow to keep it going, on and on, until she traced it to a moment of merging with others so that its peril was shared and its strength reinforced by the support of others.

 

This scattered society of Arbornica, so often plagued with inner conflict, was underneath the surface a thing of incredible resilience. Merryhop smiled and gently rippled the star-speckled surface of the pool so that the firmament danced beneath her fingers. Then she withdrew her hand and grimaced.

 

"That's quite enough of that," she said seemingly to herself. Actually she was addressing a half dozen spiders that had decided to tickle her skin with their attention. She brushed them off and pondered her next move, dreaming herself of somewhere else where the song of expectation was loud and blindingly bright and somehow just as precious in its robustness as the delicate filagree of this struggling land.

 

***

 

"IT IS SUMMER then?" a small voice asked amid the tight little gathering in what passed for a clearing in this part of Arbornica.

 

"Indeed child," the great wisdom affirmed. "There are flowers upon the mother trees, just up there, beyond your reach. Our harvesters would gather the nectar from them in due course if not for the Green Moon."

 

"Then we'll starve," a teenage lad said angrily. "Why did we squander the fruits of last autumn so we have no stores left before the next fruitful season?"

 

"I think Plumpy Missalbird might be able to answer that."

 

Everyone looked at the large figure wrapped in plainspun as she sat comfortably upon a rock at the edge of the clearing where dew dripped upon her shoulder unregarded. The people of Arbornica favoured plainspun, a simple fabric that served many purposes, even the sifting of moss pudding. Extravagance had its shortcomings in such a land as this.

 

"I was hungry," she defended herself with a quiver of indignation. "Takes a lot to keep a body together it does. Perhaps a migration is in order?"

 

"Another one?" someone sighed near the centre of the gathered villagers.

 

This meeting of the settlement presided over by the village wisdoms was not going well. As soon as a doomsayer had passed through the area spouting warnings of another plague of moon spiders all the settled routines had been overset. Rations were scattered, harvests neglected and festivals of appeasement poorly managed. And Plumpy Missalbird had found her way to the communal stores to pass her final moments of doom in her favourite way. In the chaos no one had sought to stop her of course.

 

Thus it was deemed the settlement had inevitably outgrown its immediate resources yet again. There was not enough food to go round and the families would have to split. Usually it was the young, with a few wise heads for guidance, who abandoned the known territory to make a trek through the forests over hills and across valleys in the hope of finding a better place to settle and perhaps to live. Time was short for with the harshness of winter if no suitable place could be found the whole caravan of travellers could be wiped out by the cold.

 

"A drawing!" someone declared for once the decision had been made there could be no more hesitation. It was summer, or so the wisdom suggested by the infallible signs of nature, and the seasons would wait for no tourist party in search of thrills.

 

"I'll forgo that bit," Plumpy Missalbird suggested and belched softly.

 

"Too right. You'd only slow everyone down, except downhill of course, yuk yuk," someone added a pinch of Arbornican humour.

 

Youngsters were gathered and then they were numbered. Parenting in the village was a collective effort yet it was no less painful to know one's child or one's charge were both to be separated by an unknown fate amid the greeny wastes of Arbornica's Creeper Realm.

 

The children were selected, twenty of them, boys and girls of equal number. The youngest was only six. Ten adults provided protection and guidance. Some wanted fewer to go for it was ten workers removed from the settlement, so a compromise was agreed upon. Five of the adults would be elderly, active enough to keep up but less of a loss to the workforce among those staying behind.

 

And then the agony truly began, for those who stayed and those who departed might never see each other again. Quite possibly both halves of the settlement of Moss Cleft might perish in the coming winter.

 

One wisdom who was staying summed up matters succinctly.

 

"Don't fancy your chances much. Glad I'm staying. Enjoy your wander and don't touch them yellow mushroom things to the east of the Faithless Streamlet."

 

"Are there poisons of which we were unaware?" came a worried comment.

 

"No. It's just that they taste bloody awful they do."

 

With this final parting piece of advice the small contingent now named the Mossy Clefters till they could find some better and more original name, set off amid sobs and the waving of brown-speckled lettuce leaves that would be eaten in a festival of remembrance once they were out of sight.

 

***

 

TRAVERSING THE Arbornican landscape during the time of the Green Moon was a terrifying thing. So was hunger, drowning in summer floods and being struck by creeper lightning, devoured by doodly bugs and hunted by the weirdy spirits that glowed and teased and led into swamps any unwitting soul nor awake enough to realise their danger. All in all, travelling in the land was generally avoided unless one intended to spread misery and despair.

 

Spider nests were to be avoided too, but they were rare things so little regarded. Only this summer it appeared the regular doomsayers, who happily traipsed the landscape in search of misery so easily found, were a great deal more right than the previous five and a half thousand times over the last century.

 

There were nests aplenty. And just like the little settlement of Moss Cleft, when population pressure encouraged migration, moon spiders did not simply migrate, they swarmed. And they made a quite pleasant rustly sound as they did so.

 

As for the Mossy Clefters, they had soon reached the limit of their resources. It was dark and sultry and silent in the glade they stopped at. Some of the youngsters sobbed as a feeble attempt was made to make camp. A wisdom, the only one wise enough according to their lights, who had chosen to join the expedition by the arcane instrumentality of a short straw, surveyed the tired figures before him. The adults had slumped down as if empty stomachs weighed so much more than full bellies. The children clustered together in tight little groups and squabbled and one of the elders seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep which looked nigh on fatal.

 

The moon was high and a ghostly green light filtered through from above, the light of another world. Manth Pollard saw this through despairing eyes and knew the end had been reached. They were passing over into that other world and Arbornica would know them no more.

 

Then the whisperings began.

 

Little sibilant sounds that sprang from the surrounding trees, first in one place, then another. Moving slowly amid the green shadows, merging, growing in volume and completing a circle of doom from which there could be no escape.

 

"We must gather," Manth said in a cracked voice which sounded otherworldly already. "We must all be together so that no one is left alone."

 

The squabbles ended and the youngsters centred upon the elder wisdom. Their plaints were replaced by sobs of despair, monosyllables of farewells and prayers for forgiveness for any harm done in a life past and now about to cease. The sleeping elder was not forgotten. He was dragged to the circle and held by someone who cared, for even if there was no life left just then in that frail old body, there was something of the soul symbolised in the presence that would not be abandoned at the last.

 

Everyone who could was kneeling now, facing the centre where the elder wisdom shook a dry twig and intoned words of passing over. The whispering, rustly sounds were so loud they almost drowned out his words of appeasement.

 

"Let this be painless," he said. "Let this be quick so none feels abandoned and alone."

 

He closed his eyes and bowed his head and waited.

 

And continued to wait.

 

The rustling, clicking whispering sounds abated a little and Manth Pollard, daring not to hope, opened his eyes nonetheless.

 

A figure stood on the edge of the clearing, limned in a ghastly greenish light which danced up and down a great staff held in the creature's hand.

 

"Are you a weirdy spirit," the man choked out, "come to lead us to our doom?"

 

"I hope not," came a succinct reply. "Well, this is as miserable a scene as ever I've stumbled upon. Would anyone like some cake?" and Sister Tinker Merryhop produced from her voluminous robes a tin so colourful it scattered the green light in a kaleidoscope of rainbow tints and chased rustling shadows away like as if they had never been there at all.