Part 58 - The road
And so it is that they leave Charyk again, though this is a different Charyk, and in somewhat better repair than the last one.
Beyond the gate, shelters are being erected. More substantial than the simple canvas ones where the people spent last night, but still not true houses... though those will come, given time. Most of the refugees are too busy, or too far away, to notice the strange troupe of riders as they head out along one of the paths into the surrounding forest. A few, though, do notice. They offer words of thanks, and gestures of respect, and a few of the braver children attempt to run alongside the trotting panthers.
They fall behind, long before the group are under the shelter of the ancient woodland.
The track runs as straight as possible, considering that it must, perforce, weave around the great trees. Accelerating now, the questors move through a world of slanting golden bars and green shadows. Occasionally, at least at first, distant shouts reach them, or the sound of axes, far off, in the gloom. Soon though, even those distant noises are gone, leaving only bird song, the sounds of their own presence, and, once, the warning bark of a fox, startled by their passage.
On they ride, and the forest grows denser around them, though their path remains clearly visible. The trees are more gnarled now, and draped in great curtains of moss and strangling creepers.
For hours they ride through this primaeval woodland, and the sun, all but invisible above the canopy, moves across the sky in its appointed course. There is a brief pause at noon, or thereabouts, for food and water, and then they move on again. They are making good time... the odd weakness of the boundaries between worlds near Charyk makes the journey far easier.
The road, when they run onto it, is something of a surprise, appearing so suddenly... a broad band of black material, hard and rough, with two incongruously bright yellow bands running along its centre. A small dead animal lays flat, across the bands. Above the riders, the sky is clearly visible for the first time in hours, though it is more turquoise than blue, now, and there is a band of thousands of tiny, jagged moons laid across it, visible even in the daylight.
They follow the road for only a few hundred yards, certainly less than a mile, before turning back into the forest on the same side from which they first came onto the strange highway.
The road they travel now has a surface of packed dirt beneath the softer layers of dead leaves. It climbs slowly, and then, eventually, starts a steep descent, zigzagging down the hillside. Once they are forced to cross a fast-flowing stream which has worn a gulley across their path, but it doesn't reappear to cross their route again after the next turn of the switchback.
Eventually the trees start to thin out, and the road becomes less steep, taking a more direct route now, emerging from the woods into open farmland, in late afternoon sunlight. At their backs, above the treetops, the mountains rise, until their ice crowned peaks scrape at the sky itself.
Something which is almost, but not exactly, a cow watches over a gate, as the band of strange travellers pass it by.
Ahead, there are houses, raised on piers of stone, a village. Green tiled rooftops sparkle like wet glass, and beyond them a river can be seen, flowing lazily in broad, slow loops and meanders across its broad flood plain.
A wooden post, alongside the cobbled road, supports a weathered board which bears the faded legend, "Village of Rachenby - Saddler's Inn, Best Foode In Skund Vale - 2 Myles."