Beside a copse of oaks, where there was a jolly babbling stream carrying along the fallen leaves like little boats, we came across a wild boar. He was a mature tusker—two men could easily have sat on his back at the same time. If a beast like that ended up on the dinner table, two companies of ravenous soldiers would have had a hard time finishing him off.
Deler, as the most intelligent and agile, was up a tree in a moment. And that despite the fact that the beech had no branches near the ground, which any self-respecting dwarf would have needed for climbing up. The tusker gazed at us with his small, black, malicious eyes, grunted furiously, and came for us.
But Miralissa only had to flash her yellow eyes and hold out her hand for the boar to stop dead and then just walk away, grunting apologetically.
Deler looked down at the elfess with sincere admiration from the height of his refuge and then climbed back down. We moved through the forest in single file, following Egrassa’s lead, with the rear of our little column brought up by Alistan Markauz. The count’s hand never left the hilt of his beloved sword, but the triangular oak shield hung behind his shoulder.
The elf said that moving in this way had already saved our lives three times. With true gnomish stubbornness, Hallas objected rebelliously that that was absolute nonsense, and he definitely didn’t like seeing a dwarf’s backside right under his nose. Egrassa simply laughed at that.
“As soon as I get the chance, I’ll be glad to demonstrate the surprises of Zagraba to the respected master gnome,” he said.
His chance came soon enough. Egrassa jabbed at the ground ahead of him with a stick that he had picked up, and it collapsed, revealing to our gaze a deep wolf pit, with its bottom set as thick with spikes as a hedgehog’s back.
“Just think, gnome, what would have happened if you weren’t walking behind me,” the elf said merrily, flashing his fangs to emphasize the point.
Hallas grunted in bewilderment, took his helmet off, and scratched the back of his head, but he only took his words back after the elf had disarmed another two traps in front of his very eyes—a bow rigged with a tripwire, hidden in the bushes, and a huge heavy log hanging high up in the leaves of an oak right above the path. If that had come tumbling down, someone would have been crushed.
“But who set up these traps?” Lamplighter asked, shifting his terrible two-handed sword from his left shoulder to his right.
“Who knows?” said the elf with a cunning smile, looking down at the short man. “There are too many paths to follow every one.”
“But you know where to find a trap like that!” said Mumr, determined to get an answer to his question.
“Just a little magic—that’s all there is to it,” said the swarthy elf, adjusting the s’kash behind his shoulder.
Egrassa was clearly not prepared to share the secrets of his people with outsiders.
Once, after Kli-Kli sank up to his chest in a swamp (when he got the bright idea of wandering away from the path) an elk came out onto the path in front of us. It was a king of the elk, with horns more than three yards across. The beast sniffed at the air, glanced at us indifferently with its huge velvet eyes, and trotted off briskly into the young fir trees. Hallas grunted in annoyance and regretted he hadn’t thought of felling the massive beast.
“What a feed of meat we’d have had then.”
Deler laughed merrily and said that all the gnome’s brains must have gone onto his beard, or he’d realize what a bad idea it was to tackle a huge monster like that.
All day long birds chirped and twittered and sang in the branches of the trees. When we lay down for the night the oak trees whispered a forest lullaby to us and the owls hooted soothingly in the silence of the night. On the fourth day of our journey Miralissa said that we had to pick up the pace, and from now on our group would travel at night, too. Someone groaned quietly (I think it might have been me) but, naturally, no one took the slightest notice.
The full moon appeared in the sky, so there was plenty of light in the forest, and in any case the elves seemed to see in the dark as well as cats. Now we walked for most of the night and lay down to sleep in the hours before dawn, in order to continue on our way to Hrad Spein after midday.
It was at night that I learned about the magic of Zagraba. During the hours of darkness the forest was transformed into a world that was wild, alien, and mysterious, but very beautiful in its own way.
The dark branches of the oaks and maples were like arms, and there was a mysterious murmuring in the crowns of the trees—either the leaves rustling or some mysterious creatures talking to each other. We could hear low whispering and squeaking and faint laughter from the trees, the bushes, and the tall grass. And sometimes we were followed by the bright sparks of tiny eyes. Green, yellow, and red. The nocturnal denizens of the forest observed and exchanged opinions, but they were in no hurry to come out of their little hidey-holes and meet us.
“Who’s that?” I asked Kli-Kli in a whisper.
“You mean those little chatterers? My people call them the forest spirits. Every tree, bush, forest clearing, and stream has its own forest spirit. Take no notice of them, they’re perfectly harmless.”
“They’re small fry,” said Deler, testing one of the blades of his poleax with his thumb. “You should see the kind of forest spirits we have in the Slumbering Forest! You never know what to expect from them, but these just sit there and don’t bother anyone, they just…”
“They just watch,” Hallas concluded for Deler.
“That’s right,” said the dwarf, agreeing with the gnome for once.
But the spirits weren’t the only things in the Zagraban night. Once we saw the air in the forest burning. There were thousands of fireflies soaring between the trees, flashing with emerald, turquoise, and scarlet fire. Kli-Kli caught a dozen or so of these harmless creatures and put them on his shoulders, and for a few minutes the goblin shone like a holy character from the priests’ stories, then the glowworms got tired of riding on the royal jester and flitted off to join their brothers in the living kaleidoscope.
Night was the time of the owls, who drifted silently above the meadows in the moonlight. The birds were looking for food, listening to the sounds coming from the grass.
Night was the time of the wolves—we heard them howling in the distance several times. Night was the time of creatures whose names I didn’t even know. The cries of the night birds sounded like a madman’s laughter; there was roaring, hooting, chattering, growling. All sorts of different creatures lived in the night, and they weren’t always welcoming to uninvited guests.
Four times Egrassa and Miralissa led us off the path and we hid and waited for danger to pass. The elves didn’t condescend to explain what we were hiding from in the bushes alongside the track. But at moments like that even the fidgety goblin and the argumentative gnome fell silent and obeyed all the elves’ instructions.
At night Zagraba became multicolored. The colors were bright and lush—fresh, pure emerald, delicate turquoise, icy blue, sweet fiery red, and poisonous green. Flaming auroras of cold fire filled the forest with a magical, enchanting life. The glowworms glimmered with all the colors of the rainbow, a gigantic spider’s web glinted bright blue, and the body of the spider that owned it shimmered with purple (the beast was at least the size of a good pumpkin), rotting tree stumps glowed bright green, and the veins on the emerald caps of the huge mushrooms—big enough for a grown man to shelter under during a shower—pulsed blue and orange. Pink fire wandering through the branches of willows by a lake was reflected in the water.
The cold fire of wandering lights, the bright blue sparks in the crowns of the trees, the glimmering of the forest spirits’ eyes, the scent of the forest, the grass, the damp earth, the half-rotten leaves, the fir tree needles, the resin of the pines, oak leaves, and the freshness of a stream. Whatever I might say to Kli-Kli during the daytime, I was completely overwhelmed by the incomparable, wild beauty of the Zagraban night. Although most of the time at night Zagraba was almost black, and then we had to walk by the pale silver light of the moon.
In the evening of the fifth day the narrow track winding between moss-covered larches finally led us to the Golden Forest.
“The gods be praised!” exclaimed Lamplighter, dropping his sack on the ground. “It looks like we’ve arrived!”
“You’re right,” Miralissa confirmed. “It’s only one and a half days’ march from here to Hrad Spein.”
For some strange reason, when she said that I got an unpleasant prickly feeling in my stomach. So this was it! We were almost there! What had seemed so distant that it was almost out of reach only two hours earlier was
