The Best of Comrades

“Razh!” Zal calls out. They’ve gotten tangled up in a hookthorn bush again, caught on at least three separate branches. They’re balancing precariously in such a strange position, trying to wiggle free of thorns made to trap you where you are. Razha laughs.

“Stay still, I got you.” Razha slips back through the bushes, ducking under the branch of a young tree, and reaches them. She starts to extract the thorns from their jacket sleeve, pulling them forward and then out. “It’s because of these clothes Zal, they’re always full of holes and this hemp cloth catches on every little thing.” Razha’s long black leather coat brushes against the thorny branches and slides right by them. “This happens every time we go out.”

“But they’re comfortable--ow,” Zal tries to move but only finds their head at a more awkward angle. “I think they’re in my hair.”

“Of course they’re in your hair, it’s all knots.” She frees their left arm and they start working on the right while Razha tries to free their head. “I don’t know why you don’t just shave it off if you ain’t gonna take care of it.”

“My head would be cold in the winter.”

“Zal, Zal, it is spring.”

“What if we compromise and I only shave the right half?” They get their second arm free.

Razha pulls the last thorn out of their hair. They carefully step away from the bush and lean back against a tree, brushing leaves off of their grey jacket.

“Nah, I’d rather you keep getting yourself into predicaments like this, you have the cutest look when you need my help,” she says.

They press deeper into the dark green undergrowth. At this lower altitude a lot of the plants are infected. Usually this just means they’re sickly and dying as their leaves are overtaken by the veins of black. Just a few will mutate into something dangerous. She passes by a dead, black tree, withering away and strangled by a thick black vine.

“Blight vine,” she says, pointing it out on her right. She stops and waits for Zal to pass.

“Got it.” They give a wide berth to the mutant plant. Its black tendrils have pierced deep into the wood, and its serpentine body has reached the upper canopy and spread to nearby branches. Nobody’s even sure what kind of plant becomes a blight-vine. Some think it is actually several unrelated species. But once they grow this big, they spread out of control very fast.

Razha draws her sword bayonet, a straight single-edged blade the length of her forearm. “It might be too late to save this tree, but...” She raises the blade and strikes, slicing through the vine in one blow. It isn’t hard like wood, it’s soft and flexible, like flesh. She pulls back and makes another cut a Length above the first, then uses the flat of her blade to pry the loose middle piece, ripping out the tiny black hairs sucking the tree dry. The long vine will wither away, and the stem will have to regrow all over again. Cutting can slow them down, but digging up the roots to completely eliminate it is a dangerous and daunting task.

“Wouldn’t it be faster to carve a path through these bushes with our blades?” Zal says.

“What a flatlander solution, just kill things to save time.” She gently lifts up a branch and ducks under it.

“Aw, you know I don’t mean it, I love trees.” They pull aside a branch and force their way through its long leaves. “I just don’t remember Talheim being this spiky and tangled.”

“Talheim was healthy, because my people took care of it, since forever,” Razha says. It’s a bitter thought. Logging of the ancient grove is probably well underway now, so much sacrificed for nothing. It was the right decision to leave, she tells herself. Once the airships descended, it couldn’t be won, not with their remaining strength. They slowed them down, it was something. It will never be enough. But it was something. She tells herself to focus, stay in the present. The current mission is all that matters.

“What smells so...sweet?” Zal says.

“Sweet...Hey, hold on Zal! Watch out!”

“Whoa!” There is a rustling of leaves as Zal thrashes about trying to get a hold of something. Razha rushes over to them and catches them by the wrist just as they fall through the forest floor. They grab a tree root with their other hand. Razha pulls them up to solid ground and they look down into the hole. White roots line its floor and its edges, wet with an aromatic secretion. More inconspicuous brown roots cover the top of the pit, making it hard to see.

“I swear every time you go back to the city you get worse at surviving. You walked right into a honeypot tree’s stomach!” Razha says.

Zal brushes themself off, but there are a few new little holes burned in the outer layers of their clothes. “Fuck, maybe I don’t love all trees,” they say.

“Ain’t it beautiful, though?” Next to the pit is the wide trunk of the tree, covered in a smooth white bark. It isn’t very tall but it stands out, especially now that its bright pink flowers are in full bloom.

“Okay, I’ll admit it’s pretty, even if it kills people,” Zal says.

“The same could be said of a lot of us,” Razha says. “Now let’s go, we don’t want to hang around this pit, because of--”

Zal stabs at the ground by her feet with a long stick, and a snake lets out a long hiss. They pick it up with the stick and fling it back into the pit.

“Because of the venomous pit snakes. Impressive, Zal.”

“It was making this real high pitched noise so I caught it.”

“They do that before they strike, but I can’t really hear it.”

“Nothing escapes my hearing!” Zal says. “So they just live down there?”

“The acid doesn’t damage their scales. They eat whatever vermin fall in there and they kill larger prey that startles them, then the tree eats those. They help each other.”

“I love to hear you talk about plants,” Zal says.

“Come on, before something else tries to kill us,” Razha says.

They back off and Razha looks for a different path.

“Hey, hold on a sec!” Zal heads back toward the white tree.

“Zal! What are you--”

They emerge back out of the dense brush, their head covered in pine needles and maple leaves, and hand her one little pink flower. “For the beautiful mountain flower of Helbender?”

She takes it. “Zal.” She pulls them in and puts her arm around them. “I like that a lot more than the Black Death.”