room23/FruitTrees

 23.1.2023 :  ROOM TWENTY-THREE :  Fruit Trees

Clay explains along the way how the night-haunts were always a problem but in recent times for this generation there seem to be more of them than the old stories suggest. Nobody knows where they come from. The stories say they come out of the night itself. 

You rest and walk some more. A large boulder breaks the landscape so you huddle around it to sleep without a fire lest the creature return. It is not unbearably cold. 

Next morning you warm yourselves up with combat practise. Clay is quite a good teacher. Fighting with sword and with axe is not how you had imagined it. In movies the fight scenes are more fancy for added drama. Combatants always portrayed as more advanced than necessary. 

In reality one simple stroke is sufficient to kill or maim someone. Dodging out of the way is far more effective than attempting to block a strike and absorb the impact. Clay says it’s all in the footwork and trusting the weight of the weapon to do damage. He also explains this is learned from his experiences not from any soldier who would probably have a better or different way of wielding weapons. 

By dusk you arrive at the edge of a forest. Clay is excited to see a particular type of tree which you do not recognise. He says it only grows in one area of the forests edge which means his sense of direction is good. He was hoping to arrive here as the bandit territory is further south. Some way inside the forest is an old North-South road. 

The particular type of tree is like an Oak but much bigger with different shaped leaves. The fruit is edible and delicious. He does not understand why people do not live in this area when they have this type of tree here. Perhaps people simply do not know about it. So much knowledge was lost when most of the population died in the last few generations. 

Clay gathers sticks and lights a fire for the night. The fruit has an unusual quality of drying out quickly when heated by fire, wrinkling like dried prunes or giant sultanas. It is no less edible this way. Clay says his brother taught him how to resuscitate it in water which is not as good as when fresh but the water tastes good to drink. 

You both collect and dry as many of the fruits as you can carry before setting off next morning deeper into the woods to find the old road. Clays plan is to travel northward along the route where you will have plenty of firewood and perhaps encounter some old villages which may even be inhabited. 

North along the Forest Road. 

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