Going Through

Go back the other way: Villages

Follow this back to: River People

Manueline and Wals stayed on the northern side of the forest for over a month while the following was taken to the other side. People kept coming in from other parts of the country and at times it seemed as though they were losing ground, with more people joining than were taken through the forest. Slowly the crowd diminished, people started moving back into the nearby village. Towards the end of the month, the crowd started shrinking rapidly even though fewer people were taken through. Manueline had the sense that some of the people were going home, returning to the desert and the villages they came from.

Manueline and Wals continued to live in the tent. The wolf came and went though Manueline now insisted they provide food for him as well. The old woman watched them and did as she was told, providing anything Manueline asked for. Towards the end of the month, with people beginning to drift off, Manueline decided they should go through. The man from the forest who they spoke to originally reappeared every few days and the next time she saw him, Manueline told him they would be leaving that day.

He nodded his head saying it was a good thing. The people on the other side were getting restless and the forest people were nervous about having so many people in the forest; they wanted the people to move on and would probably take action on their own to persuade them to move if Manueline and Wals did not come and do it for them.

It took six days to get through the forest. It was a strange journey for Manueline. She was well accustomed to handling the boat by now but that was out on the open river. The river in the forest seemed to slow down, becoming shallower and wider, with thousands of little islands all covered in moss and creepers; some of them seemed to float in the landscape rather than being anchored in the ground. Sometimes, stepping onto one of the islands, it felt like the ground moved under them as though the world had become covered in moss and there was no longer any solid ground to stand on. Manueline felt uneasy, she felt her grip on the world was slipping away from her. Wals went even quieter than usual, slipping away into himself. The wolf liked it least of all, being stuck in a boat for days on end with nothing to hunt but frogs.

The first day they traveled down the river in the forest, the river steadily getting wider and slower. Towards the end of the first day, the river divided into many smaller channels some of them apparently leading nowhere, some leading into broad shallow lakes where the shore was just some place where the reeds became thick enough to stand on. At the end of the first day, they camped on an island. It was quiet. In the middle of the island, there was a grove of huge trees. Manueline thought they must be almost a hundred paces high. She stood under them with Wals beside her with the guide watching them both.

They walked round the grove of trees, touching the rough bark, looking up the soaring height of the trunks, which were free of any growth or other encumbrance. This was because the first branches on the huge trees were forty or fifty paces above ground. Creepers and other parasitic plants covered all the other trees around them. The creepers seemed to be constantly trying to pull down the trees they grew on just as the trees seemed to constantly strive towards the light. The giant trees were above it all.

Manueline turned to the guide and was about to ask, 'How did they get to be so big? Why are there no creepers growing on them?' when she had a sudden thought and asked, "Do your people come here and care for them?"

He looked at her for a while before nodding his head, replying, "Sometimes we care for them. Mostly they care for themselves, they need nothing from us." He went on, as though he heard Manueline's unasked question, "They may be so big because we care for them but I don't think so. They are the power and life of the forest. They have been here long past the memory of my people. The trees are old in all the stories we know. They were here long before we came."

Manueline walked around a little more and then came back to him, "None of the other people in the following have seen this have they? Why did you bring us here?"

He nodded his head again as though acknowledging that it was a reasonable question. "You are the first outsiders ever to see these trees. I brought you here so he could touch them."

Manueline looked at him in astonishment as she realized what he had done, what he had been prepared to risk. "You wanted to see if the trees would die if he touched them?"

He nodded his head again and smiled, looking up, up at the trees. "They are the life of the forest. I wanted to know if this death was our death as well. He looked down, his face turning serious and then he smiled again. "When death comes it is important to face it. That doesn't mean you have to embrace it or stand idly by and let it eat you up. Sometimes life demands that we deal with what comes to us and I believe this was one of those times. We live by letting the land shape us rather than us shaping the land. We do not make the world in our image. There is no other way to live here." He laughed quietly, "You have seen it, you will see more before you come through to the other side. How could you shape the land here? There is no land only marsh and swamp. We live with what we find around us. The people that pass up and down the river are a part of that landscape, so we live with them as well." Manueline understood he was telling her why they were being helped, why the following was taken through the forest.

"What if the following was an army? Would you still help them?"

He smiled again, shaking his head, "No if we help one army we will be seen as an enemy by another. When armies come, we disappear. Taking the following through the forest was different. They have destroyed villages and killed people but that is not their purpose. I think the people of the lowlands, the people south of the forest will not welcome them and may even try to destroy them. They will not thank us for bringing them but they cannot accuse us of bringing an army."

Suddenly something seemed important to her and Manueline challenged him, "Isn't it the same? You bring an army and people die. You bring the following and people die. It amounts to the same thing."

He shook his head. "It is not the same. There is a path that led to the following. You and this man are a part of that path. We of the forest are not. We discussed it. We came here and we talked. We could stand by and see the forest take in the following; they would all die and do much damage in the process. We could deny passage to you and let the following go through. We thought of many things but in the end decided it was not for us to shape the world anymore than it is for us to shape the forest. This thing is not of our making and does not touch the forest, you have seen, he has touched the trees and nothing changed."

Manueline listened watching his face seeing many images in her mind as he spoke. She saw images of the people of the following on the river, converging on a village; the following at night on the beach. She remembered the old man who died when he touched Wals, the eight men who attacked them and how they died; the other journey through the forest and beyond that the village and fetching Wals from the death hut. It came to her looking at him and listening to his words that she was cut off from what she had been before the death hut. The Manueline who took Wals into the courtyard and sang the courtyard song was lost to her. She could not reach him because she could not reach herself. The Manueline of the courtyard was unreachable, just as distant from her as the man who came to her at the fountain and carried water for her, singing for her as he did so. They were lost to themselves and lost to each other. She found she was weeping standing looking at the guide seeing her own loneliness in his face. He turned away and left her knowing it was not for him to comfort her anymore than he would shape the earth around him.

To follow this thread in the story go to: Touching Water

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