Briarpatch by Tim Pratt (33 page)

The bear-people stared at her, but none of them moved to attack, and Echo knew she was going to be all right. People were the same all over.

1

Darrin woke up in a tree. If “woke up” was the right term for emerging from a brief interval of swirling blackness streaked by flashes of light. He reached out and grabbed onto some small branches—he was seated on a broader branch—and looked about him. Nothing but leaves and branches as far as he could see, above, below, and around him, and the sharp smell of eucalyptus, though these rough-barked trees didn’t look like eucalyptus.

What the hell had happened? Had Echo shot at him with some kind of magical gun, some briarpatch weapon that teleported people? And where was he now? There were plenty of branches for climbing, and Darrin began easing his way down, glad again that he’d started walking so much all those months ago.

After he’d climbed down about fifteen feet, a rough plank platform appeared. A probe with his foot proved it stable, so he dropped to the platform, into an area cleared of branches. At first he thought it was just a platform for deer hunting or something, but then he saw the rope-and-board bridges radiating away from it to other platforms in other trees. This was like some Swiss Family Robinson treetop village, complete with lean-tos built against trees, but he didn’t see anyone around. Darrin tried one of the bridges, found it solid, and ventured halfway across. Below the bridge there was a clear view, and he looked down at the forest floor, far enough away to give him a surge of vertigo and make him grab onto the rope guiderails.

Something came trundling out of the brush below, a low-slung scaly thing with a horned crest around its head and a great bony club on the end of its tail. It looked like a dinosaur, and as it disappeared into another clump of bushes—which were actually probably small trees, given how far away the ground seemed—Darrin realized he was still in the briarpatch, in one of those improbable little worlds Ismael had talked about. He couldn’t decide if being stuck in the briarpatch, lost and alone, was better or worse than being up a tree in South America or somewhere.

He went on, toward a large central platform built across the trunks of several trees. There was a barrel filled to the top with clear water, and after sniffing it, Darrin cupped his hands and drank, hoping he wasn’t ingesting otherworldly parasites but too thirsty to worry about it much. He walked across the creaking boards, looking for some sign of habitation—preferably human—and saw, at the far edge of the platform, a man sitting on a bench, holding what looked like a fishing pole.

While Darrin was trying to decide what to do—call out, sneak away, find a weapon—the man gave a joyful shout and began reeling in his line. Something small and furry and distinctly rabbit-like kicked at the end of the wire, which appeared to be some sort of a looped snare rather than a baited hook. The man, who was short but broad-shouldered and compactly built, with a messy shag of brown hair, stood and drew a long knife from his belt. He lashed out at the still-kicking thing (which wasn’t quite a rabbit—the legs were right, but the ears were wrong), sending a gout of blood spraying over the edge of the platform. The animal stopped struggling, and the man removed its body from the line and set the fishing pole aside.

“Well?” he called without turning around, his voice tinged with a slight Eastern European flavour. “Come on, then, if you’re hungry. You can put the pot on to boil while I skin Br’er Rabbit here.”

“Ah, okay.” Darrin approached cautiously, and the man looked at him now. He was clean-shaven, and his grin was boyish.

“English! Good, good. I hoped I would get it on my first try. I hate spending time trying to find a common language—it means less time to talk!”

“So I guess you aren’t, ah, a native here,” Darrin said.

“On the contrary! I was born and raised in the briarpatch.” He beckoned, and Darrin followed him across a short bridge to another platform, this one with a stone-lined firepit in the centre, a few embers glowing. At the man’s direction, Darrin put a few pieces of dry wood from a nearby pile onto the flames and got them burning. He scooped water into the pot from another barrel—“Good clean rainwater!” the man said—and hung the pot on a hook over the fire to boil. Meanwhile, the man skinned the animal on a low stone table. “Rabbit stew. Not quite rabbit, but very much stew. I have some potatoes in my pack there, if you’d care to cut them up. There’s a knife in there too, if you don’t have one.”

“You’ll just let me have a knife?” Darrin said, incredulous.

The man looked up and laughed. “What, you would kill me to steal my rabbit, which I will share with you anyway? You would kill me to steal my fishing pole, perhaps, which I will give you freely if you ask? Go on then, try to kill me with my paring knife! I will wait! Take your time!”

Darrin laughed. “No, no, I just . . . thank you.”

“It is no problem. Company is rare here, and so many of the people I encounter—the wanderers, like you and me, yes?—they are crazy, so deep inside their minds that they have no room left to talk with me. But you do not seem mad, or a poet, so I think you are like me, yes, a child of the briarpatch?”

“I guess so.” Darrin found the potatoes—small, slightly withered, but he was hungry enough to look forward to them—and began cutting them up into chunks and tossing them into the pot. “I just found that out recently, though. My name’s Darrin.”

“It is a pleasure to meet you. My name is Harczos.”

Darrin stopped cutting the potatoes, and gripped the knife more tightly. “Harczos. Ismael told me about you.”

Harczos grunted. He took a handful of rabbit meat, cubed, and dropped it into the pot. “Ahhh. And how do you know Ismael?” He spat. “May the bears eat him and shit him out again. Forgive me. I hope you aren’t
friends
.”

Darrin considered what to say. “He cozied up to my girlfriend, convinced her to kill herself, then convinced my best friend and my
new
girlfriend to betray me, so I’d go crazy with grief and escape into the briarpatch, and he could trick me into helping him. He wants to find an overland route to this better world he’s always talking about.”

“I see.” Harczos sighed. “It sounds like he has not changed much, then.”

“This is just . . . I don’t believe this is coincidence. You’re in on this, aren’t you?”

“And how could I be in on anything?” Harczos said. “You found
me
. It is improbable, I grant you that, but the briarpatch is an improbable place. “

“I didn’t find you. Something sent me here. Someone shot at me, and, and I was just
here
.”

“You
are
new to the briarpatch. Our kind—you, and me, and Ismael, and some others I have met—we are protected by this place. If we are attacked, if death is imminent, the briarpatch gathers us to her bosom and takes us away to safety. We cannot control where we go, but going anywhere is better than dying, yes?”

Darrin mulled that over. It made sense, sort of—it explained that sudden movement when Echo tried to shoot him. He couldn’t quite think through the implications of being unable to
die
, though. “Okay, if you say so. But what are the odds that I’d run into
you
?”

“Absolutely astronomical,” Harczos said cheerfully. “Like finding a grain of gold dust on a beach of golden sand. And yet, here we are. Ismael and I met in a similar way, actually. I’ve often wondered if there are gods here, toying with us—if there are, I’ve never met them, but sometimes I think I see evidence of their meddling. Ismael thought there was just an affinity among those of us who wander the briarpatch, some force that brings us together on occasion. Maybe we’re iron filings drawn together by our personal magnetism?” He paused. “I, myself, am exceedingly magnetic.”

Darrin rubbed his forehead. Life was giving him a headache lately. “Shit. Okay. So now I’m lost here?”

“We are deep in the briarpatch, but I am not lost. I can show you around, if you like. Or I can show you the way out.”

Darrin opened his mouth to say yes, please, show me the way out, and then didn’t say anything. Why go home? What if Echo came and tried to kill him again? What if Ismael came after him? What did he have to return to? Bridget was dead. Seeing her earlier had lit up hope in his chest, but he hadn’t even been able to touch her. She was dead, and the sooner he accepted that, the better he’d feel. His hope of finding Bridget, of repairing their love—it was truly an impossible dream.

“When I was seventeen, I left my foster parents and moved to California,” Darrin said. “I went off to college with nothing but a suitcase, and I didn’t know anybody. I was trying to start a new life. For a while, it was good—I had friends, and hobbies, and a good job, and then I fell in love with Bridget. But . . . everything fell apart. It all went to shit. I was trying to stick it out, trying not to run away from my problems, but . . .”

“There is a difference between running from your problems and starting a new life,” Harczos said. He stirred the pot with a long wooden spoon, and the smell that rose up was savoury and warm. He crumbled a handful of crushed herbs into the water. “I am doing what I always do, travelling, and you are welcome to join me. Or not.”

“Can you tell me about this place, about Ismael, about the better world? There’s still so much I don’t understand.”

“Of course,” Harczos said. “This place is the briarpatch. Ismael was my best friend and my travelling companion, until I discovered some of his true nature. And as for the better world . . .” Harczos shrugged. “It isn’t all that great.” He dipped the spoon again, and tasted, and smiled. “I’ll elaborate over dinner.”

2

Two days later—if “days” could be defined as “periods of time punctuated by intervals of sleep”—they leaned together on the rail of a low-slung ferry, skimming across the surface of a golden sea, toward a city that appeared made entirely of pearl. Darrin had thought of the briarpatch as a largely barren place, but Harczos told him there
were
people, whole societies, some of them aware of the briarpatch, some not. “But they are all
deep
,” he said. “Ismael was never willing to go very deep, especially alone. He became horribly lost, once, and had terrible experiences, and he could never let go of that fear. Helplessness frightens him more than anything. He is always unhappy, but he is
most
unhappy when he is not in control. He liked to be no more than five or six steps from the ‘real’ world—though it would be better to call it the most
plausible
world. Here, we are thirty or forty steps in, and it would take a few days to walk out again.” The air that blew against their faces smelled not of salt but of sweetness. “The people in this city are all very old, and no child has been born to them in a long time. They have golden eyes and teeth of pearls. I think they are not people at all, but intelligent automatons, built by some long-dead race. But do not mention this theory to them. The idea is embraced only by a radical segment of the population, and the others find it offensive in the extreme.”

Darrin nodded.

Harczos was beloved in that city. That night they feasted on fish that tasted like apricots. As he ate and drank beneath the peculiar stars, his most recurring thought was:
Bridget would have loved this
.

3

A week later they huddled beneath Harczos’s oversized poncho, sitting on a rocky outcropping. “Waiting for a train,” Harczos sang. “Just sitting here in the rain, waiting for a train.” The “train” was a mobile passage to the next world, a swarm of black flies that had near-human intelligence and, coincidentally, acted as a moving portal. “The swarm is obsessive-compulsive,” Harczos had explained. “It moves on the same route every day. I brought it some sweets from the market in the black-glass city, and it will gladly give us passage for that.”

Darrin sang with him, in the rain.

4

“The last time I had a drink was in a vampire bar,” Darrin said, sitting at a table on a patio by the sea with Harczos, sipping a mai tai.

Harczos had a lava flow—a piña colada laced with strawberry juice—and munched a coconut shrimp. “There are some nice vampire bars,” Harczos said. “Though they don’t usually have anything I like on tap.”

“So what world is this?” Darrin asked, looking around at the very normal-looking people having lunch.

“This would be Maui, in Hawai’i,” Harczos said. “Welcome home. For a given value of ‘home.’”

Darrin laughed and raised his glass. He looked out at the water. “You know, Bridget and I used to talk about coming here. She wanted to learn to scuba dive, swim around Molokai, but we never did.”

“Just as well,” Harczos said. “Isn’t that where they have a leper colony?”

“We would’ve skipped that part,” Darrin said. He stretched. “Being around people makes me feel human again. A dirty dishevelled human, but still.”

“We can buy you some razors, if you want to get rid of that beard.” Harczos rubbed his own stubble—he’d lost his straight razor in the throat of a shaggy drooling monster several worlds back. “After we stop by to see a jeweller I know. I have some black coral to sell him. It’s much easier to get in some other worlds than it is here, and it’s nice to have a little money.”

“I kind of like the beard,” Darrin said. He’d never grown one before. It made him feel a little bit like a new man. If he couldn’t quite forget Bridget, then maybe the new man he became would be able to.

“Suit yourself,” Harczos said.

5

“It is very odd.” Harczos chewed meditatively on some nuts while Darrin sat on a stump with a sketchbook on his lap, trying to start a map of the places he’d seen in the briarpatch. He thought maybe this place
was
a system, at least as much as it was an art. “But I have not seen a bear in all the time we’ve been together.”

“Ismael mentioned bears,” Darrin said, scribbling out some lines that weren’t right. Trying to map the briarpatch, even crudely, was like trying to think in eleven dimensions. “What’s so special about bears?”

“Some people become lost in the briarpatch and, for whatever reason, become shapeshifters. They change from people to bears and back again. Perhaps it is transmitted by a bite, or a cut, or perhaps it happens to those who drink from a particular stream—people used to believe you could become a werewolf if you drank from water touched by a wolf. Maybe it’s caused by some strange radiation. For whatever reason, there are always bears, wandering in groups or alone, and while they are animals, they are no more dangerous than any animal. But when they become human, they are dangerous as only an insane human can be.”