The Bone Forest Read Online Free PDF Page A

her, she picked out two of these pieces of wood, held them in her left hand. She sang something softly and the glade seemed to shiver. A coolish breeze whipped quickly through the foliage, then danced up and away; an elemental life-form, perhaps, summoned then dismissed.
    From the second bag she poured out the bone, forty or fifty shards of ivory. From these she picked a single piece. Holding wood and bone in her hand she shook the three fragments, before threading a loop of thin, worn leather through the holes and passing the necklet to me. I accepted it, remembering, with no clear understanding, the gift she had left by the gate during the winter. I put the necklet on.
    She sat back and replaced the rest of the wood and ivory into their respective bags. Then she stood and gathered her fox-fur cloak, and with a knowing smile, stepped out of the glade and into the silence and darkness of the forest. Her last gesture before departing was to rattle a tiny wrist-drum, a double sided cylinder of skin, beaten by small stones attached to thongs.
    I had no idea what to do next. She had seemed to dismiss me, so I rose, intending to leave the glade and return to Oak Lodge.

SIX
    Huxley got no further than the first overpowering oak. As he ducked below its heavy branch, heading toward the narrow track outward, his world—the wood itself— turned inside out!
    From the warm and musty odor of summer, suddenly the air was sharp and autumnal. The light from the foliage was stark, brilliant; the drowsy green luminosity had gone. Trees, dense and dark, rose straight and bleak around him. These were birches, not oaks; thickets of holly shimmered in the lancing silver light. He stumbled through this unknown world, scratched and torn in his panic to orientate himself. Above him, birds screeched and took to wing. A cold wind swept through the upper branches. Unfamiliar smells struck at random, damp leaf mold, pungent vegetation, then the crystal sharpness of autumn. The light from above was startling in its brightness, and if he glanced up, then looked around him, the trees showed as black pillars, without feature, almost formless.
    He suddenly heard horses crashing through the forest, their lungs straining as they ran, their whinnying screams telling of the burden of pain and bruising inflicted by this tangled, ancient wood. Huxley glimpsed them as they struggled past, immense creatures, each impaled on its back with what he assumed quickly were the signs of
taming
: one carried flaring torches, spears with burning heads that had been stuck deeply through its thick skin; another was decorated with stems of corn or wheat; a third with tight bundles of greenery and thorn, blood seeping from where the sharpened stalks of some of these plants had been pushed too deep. The fourth carried in its flesh the slim, quivering shafts of a pale wood—
ash
perhaps—that were arrows, each trailing rags of the skin of creatures, the gray, white, brown and black of furry hides.
    What had sounded like the frantic passage of a
herd
of these wonderful creatures was in fact the furious bolting of four horses only.
    One came close enough to show Huxley the gray and bloodied hide of its flanks. This was the creature "decorated" with burning and smoldering torches. It towered over him, its mane full, flowing and lank; it reeked richly of dung. The horse turned briefly to stare at him and its eyes were filled with a feral panic. Huxley pressed himself against one of the great birches, which shuddered as the beast kicked at the trunk, turning to expose huge, cracked teeth that were the color of summer-ripened wheat; it moved on, then, working its way inward, escaping its tormentors.
    The tormentors, following close behind the horses, were humans, of course. And Huxley was soon to realize what Ash had done.
    There were four men, dark haired and heavily cloaked. They moved through the forest, uttering shrill cries, or gruff barks, or resonating song fragments that