In the Realm of the Midnight Gardener
Chapter 12: Back Along the Garden Path

When at last he managed to open his eyes, he was half-washed on the shore of the river, his boots lodged in the hook of a river stone, his face gooey and mud-stained in the shore’s muck. “That,” he announced to no one in particular. “Was bloody awful.”

He dislodged his boots, spat out muck and wet river grass, and dragged himself up on to the shore. It was a long while before he was able to stand, shattered as he was, but when he managed it, he no longer felt the leeching effect of the blood turnips. He rolled back his sleeve, and the blood turnips were gone. All that remained of them were dark, burnt-looking marks up and down his arm, tattooed by the plants’ roots on his flesh. What he could see of his shoulder and back were by far worse, blackened and burnt by those things’ ministrations, but there was no sign of the turnips, their stalks nor stems. It was just blackened, stained flesh.

So he trudged back along the riverbank, and in due course found the satchel Inside, the two blood turnips were safely ensconced. He nodded, glanced up at the hill from which he’d leapt, and half-expected the burning dead and the unnatural beasts to be looking for him. But all was dark and silent.

Now all he had to do was get across this damnable river and back to the road out of this place without getting the turnips wet.

“I must say,” Juan Polino cackled from his grave. “You’re a bastion of good fortune. ”

“Stow it,” he snapped, watching the current. It was moving fast, and was deep. He could swim it, but not easily, and certainly not without destroying the turnips in the process. He’d have to wade it. He just needed to find the right spot.

He walked up and down a stretch of the river, then spied what seemed to be a sand bar across the central portion of the river. It was just visible under the water, a thin stretch of stones and silt. It was the only way this could work. He’d be in deep, no doubt, but it might at least allow him to keep from having to brave the deeper waters at the river’s heart. He’d have to risk it.

Wading in, arms holding the satchel up high, he trudged inch by inch across the fast-moving waters, digging his boots into what purchase he could find in the river bed. The water rose from his boots to his waist to above his chest in short order.

His boot got caught in a crevice between two stones and he nearly went in, but managed to lunge his other leg in front of him and balance there, careening with the current as he freed his trapped foot. The water sloshed up to his neck and over his face, and he came out spitting and coughing. Inch by inch he crept, digging his feet in to the sand bar to hold steady when the current pushed hard against him.

A gush of water hit him hard just as he thought he was in the clear, and raged up and over his head, over his arms. He took two long strides, and he came up into the growing shallows, and finally on to the far shore.

He anxiously examined his prizes. By the luck of the gods, the satchel and the turnips inside were still dry. The waters had drenched him up to his palms, but the satchel had been spared. As he gazed in, several droplets pattered from his face on to one of the turnip’s leaves, searing small brown marks into it. He quickly leaned away, closed up the satchel, and set it on a dry spot nearby.

He removed his cloak and shirt and wrung them out. He then shook or slaked off what water he could from himself, redressed, and donned the satchel once more.

He trekked back, heading along the river towards the trail that had led him into this tumult in the first place.

When at last he found it, and wandered back to the forest trail, he found the Tindalosi waiting for him. “You live,” one of them said matter-of-factly, a mad grin chittering at him.

“Apparently so,” Domingo said. “And I’m only a thousand times the worse for wear.”

“Do you have them?” the other hissed, coming closer.

Domingo nodded, too weary and wet and cold to step back. “I have two of them.”

“Two!” the Tindalosi exclaimed, their dead voices raising a moment in exclamation. A chittering silence clung between the three of them.

“So,” Domingo asked, sighing. “Are we going to get a move on, or not? This blasted journey has been about as much as I signed on for. So if it’s all the same to you, let’s get going.”

“You give us the turnips,” one of them commanded. “Then we take you.”

Domingo huffed. “Please. Let us not waste time with inanities. I am in sore need of a warm bath, a bed, a drink and a couple of tavern girls to erase this whole sordid affair from my memory.”

The Tindalosi’s elongated teeth chattered evilly. “We could kill you, take them from you. None would know.”

Domingo smiled back. “True, but of course there is the contract. Not to mention that you don’t know what I’ve learned to keep these things alive. Without that, these plants will not grow for you. Unless I’m mistaken, that is your intent.” He paused for the effect. “You do want to grow these blood turnips, don’t you?”

Oh, that set them to a frenzy of chatter and clack. “Let us see them,” one of them said. “Proof,” the other added. Domingo nodded, then produced the blood turnips for them to see, and the Tindalosi hissed with their evil pleasure.

“Now can we please get this show on the road?” he sighed.

So they went.

He remembered almost none of it, that bleak journey back. It was as winding, as exhausting and as long as the trip there, only coupled with the overwhelming weariness that clung to his body and mind. He followed the Tindalosi with the desperate exhaustion of a man near death, but follow he did. His mind, wiped as it was, played tricks with him. Pumpkins lashed at him from the darkness; black leaves blossomed from his eyes. Burning undead appeared and disappeared; a maize stalk walloped him in the face. And always the retching scent of soil and blood, a distant throbbing of something not quite his heart.

He screamed but the sound stayed choked in his throat. He lashed out at his attackers, only to find them smoke, which dissipated in his grasp. Rare glimpses of reality showed that he’d nearly been left behind by his infernal guides, and he stumbled to catch up. Breathless and miserable, he dreaded yet another drone of the roots, another whisper of leaves, one more decussation across the Garden Path to tear at the shredded edges of his sanity.

Lost and hopeless and weak, he hadn’t the strength or the resolve to even reach for the stimulant that had kept him going this long. He knew it would kill him, another dose of that stuff, and yet he needed something to take away this fever-dream weariness. Red grasses sprang up around him and a thousand flashing creatures dashed around him, hissed and ran and snarled. He fell back, tripped, and was sure he would not get up again. But the tree, that pitch-coloured tree filled his vision, stared through him with its enormous, all-seeing eye. Go on, it told him without words. Go on, and do not let the corpse dwellers succeed. Do not let them set it free.

From the tree’s branches, Juan Polino’s maggoty mouth appeared, laughing as he watched Domingo’s unending misery. Domingo forced himself with each step, death-weary and without hope or place, to keep going, keep going. He went, he followed, twisting and turning the Garden Path until he was sick with it, ready to fall and be lost forever. His eyes fluttered with unrequited dreams, and it was no surprise to him when he caught himself moaning indiscriminately along the edge of a tree-lined cliff as they went. His mind slipped and sloshed, his feet stumbled beneath him. He was sure he would collapse with the next step, and was surprised that he put another step before him.

On and on he went, a hacking, gibbering lunatic shaking with fatigue. His thoughts, his words, his purpose, they fell away one by one, so that soon even his clumsy footfalls faded into the grey. In this death dream, he was a scrawny boy again, looking down at the symbol scrawled in a book, while inscrutable Juan Polino stood nearby. There in that Faer translation of the Jualafh, he saw the symbol for the first time. The Cremzahujya, the mingling of the root and the leaf, he saw it, that skinny youth more lost and confused than anything. He hadn’t understood the bizarre, curvilinear glyph back then, only stared stupidly into its inky, squirming form. Now, looking again, he could see it. See what that idiot adolescent had been too thick-skulled and inexperienced to see. He felt himself shriveling down inside its painted, gilded shape on the rough-hewn page. He saw the infinitesimal, forgotten speck on its eternally unfurling fronds that he was.

It hit him, the realization of his place in it all. He was nothing. No matter how hard he followed, no matter where he might go or what he might do, he saw his insignificance, a scurrying germ across the unceasing corpus of life. He was the tiniest of mites on the unimaginable expanse of the Garden Path, a voiceless fleck of life struggling hopelessly to find a way to survive. Alpha to omega, alpha to omega, across unimaginable eons that went before him, life and death that would go on eternally after he was gone and so absolutely forgotten. The Garden Path was and always would be the river gushing from the Source. And then there was him. He was nothing, a meager droplet in the transient spray of human evolution. In an instant of long eternity, all of them, all they had done and known and been, all of it would be gone.

Gone.

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