He got into the AV and prepared to set off again, but the owl didn’t move from the vehicle roof. Apparently, this was it for the day. He climbed out again, asked aloud if they were done, waited for an answer—as if there might be one—and finally climbed back into the cab, secured the locks, and went to sleep.
When he woke next, it was not yet dawn. Trim was perched on the hood of the Ventra staring at him through the windshield, saucer eyes glowing like lamps. It was the stare that had brought him awake, he decided, pushing himself upright. He was stiff and groggy, but he made himself get out and walk around until both conditions had disappeared. The forest was a lush damp curtain, filled with new smells and muted colors. There were wildflowers growing all around him, an impossibility, a miracle. He stared at them as if they were something born of an alien world. He stared at the huge trees surrounding him, some with trunks so massive they dwarfed the stone columns of the abandoned government buildings he had seen in Chicago as a boy. The trunks were twisted and gnarly and had the look of something that had been tall and straight once but had been melted by the sun. They were all different, each one a sculpture carved by an artist of endless imagination.
He walked over to one, a giant with limbs that stretched so wide they brushed up against the other trees surrounding it, and he touched its rough bark with his fingers. He looked up into its center where shadows and leaves intermingled and everything felt hushed and hidden. He could see shards of starlight slanting through its multilayered canopy, dappling its limbs. He moved to one side and let a slender ray fall across his face. He smiled in the softness of its glow.
When he stepped away again, there were tears in his eyes. He couldn’t explain what had caused them, couldn’t understand how they had surfaced so quickly. Maybe they had been triggered by a memory from his boyhood or a dream he had forgotten. He brushed them away with the back of his hand. It was too much, he thought. This forest, with its smells and tastes and look and feel—it was too much. Everything was so overwhelming. No wonder he was crying.
Then Trim gave a small screech, and he glanced over to find the owl perched on the roof of the AV. Trim was ready to go. Logan sighed, turned away from the trees, and walked over to the bird. Immediately it flew away into the forest. Logan watched it go, waited for it to circle back in the way it did when telling him he needed to follow, saw it reappear higher up in the trees, and started to get into the AV. But then he realized that the road that had brought him in ended at this clearing. He scanned the landscape for signs of another road, then a trail, and finally a pathway or anything that resembled one. Nothing. Moreover, the trees were too thickly massed for the Ventra to pass. Wherever he was going, he was going to have to get there on foot.
Stuffing food and water containers into a backpack he slung over his shoulder, he picked up his black staff and set out.
He walked for about an hour, wending his way through the dark mass of the trees, climbing over fallen logs and in and out of shallow ravines, fording streams and skirting thorny brush, all the while following his winged guide. Trailers of mist curled through the forest like ethereal snakes. Starlight shone down through the screen of the leafy canopy, made pale and diffuse. Shadows layered the earth, climbed the trunks of the trees, crawled out on limbs, and disappeared into the ether. Birdsong followed after him, rose ahead of him, spread out around him in lilting welcome, brought to life by dawn’s approach. He found himself smiling. Where would he rather be than here, whatever the reason for coming?
Nowhere, he answered himself. Nowhere else.
He came upon the clearing unexpectedly, his eyes following Trim’s flight through the trees, only half paying attention to what until now had been an unchanging forest. But all at once he was standing in an open space on the high slopes of the mountainside, looking down on a forestland that stretched away for miles.
He was also staring at a hot-air balloon.
He recognized it for what it was immediately. The basket was sitting upright in the clearing with the air bag lying uphill on the ground in front of it, all of its stays attached, a compressor motor situated with a hose end funneling into the bag’s mouth, everything ready to fill the bag and take flight. He walked over to the balloon and stood looking down at it, wondering what it was doing here, who had flown it in, and why it was set out this way.
Trim had flown back again and was roosting on one edge of the basket, round eyes fixed on him.
“Another Knight of the Word,” a voice said from behind him. “What’s your name?”