Tablecloth

There is a forest spread across a forgotten land, like a green stain on the corner of a banquet cloth. The guests are long gone, the food is old and rotten. The wine has dried to a crust, and the dogs war over the scraps that are still sometimes discovered, buried deep in the threadbare carpet beneath the overturned chairs.

Many of the trees are world-spanning. Stars tangle in their tops, bones wrestle in their roots. There are tunnels between the roots that loop back and forth, over and under, between the worlds, built by Layonidel in her great war against the old kings, now banished to myth. Uncanny creatures crawl across the ways. They walk, and they drift, and they billow in a wind that no longer blows.

A river pours from the living heart of the forest. It is a thread of blue-grey, half drowned in an endless rustling ocean. Villages cinch up along its length: Netherport, The Sisters, the Firepot. Painted barges shuttle endlessly back and forth, carrying skins and charcoal, forged iron and uncut stone, swords and arrows and axes and ale. Ginger and pepper and black spiced vanilla.

The river winds Southward, out of the forest, onto the Barrowlands. Here, farmers plough between the tombs of long-forgotten kings. Hills muscle up from the grassland like the lonely shoulders of giants, each crested with a ring of stones. The dead and the living, and each tries to ignore the other.

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Further South, it opens onto a wide, shining bay. A curved beach cups the ocean as a white hand cups a breast. Chalk-painted cottages encrust the coast like dried salt, and black-tarred warehouses shuffle in close to the docks. This is Teleth Kier, the trading city, and all who come this way pay the King’s taxes.

In the harbour, a great granite rock thrusts into the sky, crowned with a grey fortress. This is Centester, where Lord Morgan sits enthroned. His balistieri keep the bay - and his taxes - safe from the privateers who rule the open waters around Belonosia and the Summer Lands.

All this I know now, but back then, I was a fool boy, wandering South, fleeing away from my hopes and dreams, with her voice sounding in my ears. And what had she said? I couldn't even remember, except that it had hurt my feelings.

I sat a while on the bank and watched the barges go by. A big one drifted downstream laden with charcoal from the Netherby Stacks. The sailors called out to me, "Passage for work! Passage for work!" I waved as the boat came near. When they came close enough to see my face, they stopped calling and floated off south again.

The barge drifted on and soon was lost amongst the sparkles and low swinging branches at the next river bend.

It was fifteen miles to the Firepot. Three hundred more to Teleth Kier. And what would I do when I got there? "Take a ship", Mack had said. Perhaps I could make my fortune on the high seas, return rich or ruined, maybe both. Perhaps if I were rich enough, I might buy a fine house, then she could come out from her ring of stones and live with me, drink my foreign wine, eat my food, maybe overlook my other shortcomings.

There would be no easy barge down the river for me though, that was clear. If I was to get there, it would be on my own feet. I climbed down off the bank and began walking.