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"That rock?" The finger of pale stone was the size of a truck—certainly a fairly obvious landmark. "You've seen that before, then?"
Her guide shook her head in frustration. "No. There are lots of rocks like that. But tonight it's a close-to-the-Wood kind of rock."
Now Renie was the one reduced to headshaking. Clearly her companion had knowledge she didn't—perhaps transmitted cues that Renie could not receive, or even precoded information being translated as spontaneous recognitions. Whatever it was, Renie didn't understand it. And if it was something precoded, she would never understand it.
As the Stone Girl led her uphill through the scrub growth, Renie pulled the blanket tight around her to protect herself from scratches and tried to imagine what it felt like to live in such a world. But how can I hope to make sense of it? I can't even imagine what it feels like to grow up the way !Xabbu did, to see normal urban life as something strange, and he's a living, breathing person like me, not an artificial construct.
The sharpness of her separation from him came back, this time with a helplessness she hadn't felt before. Is it pointless anyway? she wondered. I feel so strongly for him, I'm so scared we won't make it out of this together—but what then? Even if we survive, how could we have a life together? We're so different. I don't know anything about his background, his people's lives, except the few things he's told me. What would his family think of me?
Renie's steps slowed as her spirits sagged. She forced her thoughts in a different direction.
I still don't know whether or not the people in this world—the Stone Girl, Weeweekee—are really the missing children. But it certainly seems possible. Maybe the Other brought them all here, their consciousnesses, their minds, whatever. She felt a shiver that was not caused by the cool of the night air. Their souls.
And if Stephen is here in this world, how can I find him? How will I recognize him? Would he even know me?
"The Wood is just begi
"Do you know. . . ." Renie could hardly think of what she wanted to ask. "Do you remember being . . . having a life before this?"
"Before what?"
"Before you lived in the shoe, with the stepmother. Do you remember anything else? Crossing a white ocean? Having a mother or a father?"
The Stone Girl was puzzled and clearly a little worried. "I remember lots of things from before the shoe. Of course I crossed the White Ocean. Who didn't?" She frowned. "But a mother? No. People talk about a mother, but nobody has one." She suddenly became very solemn; the dark holes that were her eyes grew wide. "Where you come from . . . do people have mothers?"
"Some do, yes." She thought of her own, lost so long ago. "Some lucky ones do."
"What do they look like? Are they bigger than stepmothers, or smaller?" Renie had finally struck a topic that interested her companion. "This boy who used to live in the Shoes, but then he went away, he said he remembered a mother, a real one, one that was just his." Her indignant snort was not entirely convincing. "Bragger, we called him."
Renie closed her eyes for a moment, trying to make sense of what little information she'd put together. "Do you all come here as birds? Are you all birds to begin with?"
The Stone Girl laughed loudly, a surprising sound in the evening dark. "All birds? You mean everyone, the people in the Shoes, in the Coats, the people at Bang Very Cross and Long Done Bridge? How could there be so many birds?" She leaned down and poked Renie in the arm. "Now come on. Like I said, there's usually Ji
Like everything else she had seen since finding the black mountain, the Wood was both more and less than reality. A few paces in from the perimeter the trees grew very thickly and seemed to share branches, as though the whole upper forest was a tangled mat of one single growth spread miles wide. Some did not grow so high, but branched sideways farther than any real tree would, like vast green mushrooms covering hundreds of meters. Many of the freestanding shrubs had definite shapes to them, rounded forms as regular as the icons of playing cards, spades and clubs and diamonds, as though the tangled woodland were the preserve of a fanatical corps of topiary gardeners.
Although the high canopy blocked out most of the great blue-white disk overhead, small, warm lights now kindled in the overhead branches as if to replace the lost moonlight. These individually weak lights grew more and more dense until the forest was brighter than the hillside they had climbed, an endless twinkling bower like a gigantic Christmas display.
"What are those shining things?"
"Bugs," the Stone Girl told her. "Wood-candles, we call 'em. They're like the candle Weeweekee has, but smaller."
Will-o'-the-Wisps, Renie thought, that's what they should be called. Whatever those things are that used to lure travelers off the path. They're beautiful. You could follow these lights forever.
"We're close to the Witching Tree now." The Stone Girl spoke quietly, as if the tree were something that might be spooked into flight.
But maybe it is, Renie thought. Who can know around here? She had begun to formulate a guess as to what the thing might actually be. "This Witching Tree," she said. "What do we do when we find it?"
"Make a witch, of course."
"Ah." The weird mangling of Wee Willie Winkie into Weeweekee had not escaped her—the Other seemed to have an idiosyncratic grasp of spoken English, almost childlike in its misunderstandings. She was being taken to a Wishing Tree, "You tell it what you want, is that right?"
The Stone Girl considered. "I guess."
They were deep in the Wood now, the swirl of tiny lights illuminating not just the arabesque of branches over their heads but also open places in the thickening forest, long vistas of lighted tu
This is like that place under that horrible club—Mister J's. Where those strange people, those children or whatever they were, took !Xabbu. She thought back on the Brothers-Grimmish ceiling of roots, the pinpoint lights, the sensation of being tightly enclosed even in a wide space. All of this invented country had that feel—as yearningly claustrophobic as a beautiful clipper ship constructed inside a bottle.
The Other made that place, too, she suddenly felt certain, even though it was in the real world-net, not the Grail network. A little . . . what, shelter? Refuge? Something it created for itself inside that ghastly place. So the children there—Corduroy, Wicket, I can't remember all their names—were they children like the ones here? Stolen children?
There was some key to the Other's personality to be found in comparing the two, she suddenly felt sure, if "personality" was the right word. Some recurring theme in what it made for itself. Something that might actually benefit from an applied use of Renie's engineering smarts.
If I ever get the chance for uninterrupted thought. . . .
"There it is," a
Renie's first thought was that she had stumbled onto another case of complete communication failure, because what lay before her where the forest opened out was not a tree at all, but a wide expanse of dark water, a lake or large pond. It took her a moment even to be sure of that, because although the moon hung in the sky just above, big and bright as some alien mothership preparing to land, there was no reflection of it in the water: except for a crowd of smaller lights gleaming beneath the surface, the lake might have been a huge black hole in the forest floor.