The Land Between Walls
There was a great tree at the center of it all. And at the edges, three walls, one to each side. Left, Right, and South. Together they cut the shape of birds flying in formation. Along most of the Right wall was green and open country. While a dark and thorny bramble lay in the land to the Left, running up against the wall on that side. From there were the lowlands, in and towards the center. Wet in the rains with swamp. Then a gentle rise up to the heart of the North. Here the tree stood enormous at the place where the land came to the final height of its long plateau.The dry highland rolled on until it winnowed into just a sliver at the corner of the world where the Left wall met the Right. This place - his country - all of it taken together, was everything he knew.
A hundred families lived in burrows under the roots of the tree. A few dozen more were scattered in the lowlands, but these were mostly scraggly loners. Always hungry. They fled to the tree in the rains and were pushed out in the dry season. There was not enough to feed them. There was one family who made a life for themselves in the bramble. No one else knew the paths, and it was dangerous to go there. The open land was dangerous too, the young mouse had been told this all his life. But he only came to understand the lesson when one day he was snatched in the talons of a hawk.
He thought he was dead, but the talons wrapped around him and he saw the ground was very far away now. He couldn’t see one blade of grass for another, just the enormous field of it. The hawk turned and the young mouse was sure the speed of it would kill him. Then the tree was in front of him. It was huge, the size of everything. And the hawk was at the top of it. Above the tree! Then the young mouse was falling, and he was scared he’d fall the height of the world. At least, he thought, this was a wild way to die. Far better like this than wracked with hunger or drowning in mud.
But then he was on his feet. It was some place at the crest of the tree, a twist of twigs and grass that curled up at the sides and was at least as large as any hollow he had ever seen. This was the home of the hawk. A nest. He had only heard stories. He crawled to the edge of it and looked down. He could see nothing of the world though, since the huge branches and countless leaves of the tree blocked his view. And so instead of looking down, he looked out. There he saw the shock of his life.
For as far as the young mouse could see, there was nothing but green. A hundred hundred trees, going on as far as the sky. This one now, the great tree, was just a one. Huge but almost nothing against the horrible mass of the rest. He might have died.
He didn’t know what to do so he went back down into the nest where the hawk had dropped him. He hadn’t seen it at first, but off to one side there was a bundle of feathers not much bigger than the mouse himself. It unfolded and he saw that it was more than just feathers, and anyway far larger than him. A beak and ugly grey eyes came out. Scrawny legs and wings that looked nearly naked. It was a young hawk, gross and more awkward than its parent. But still, it was a hawk. It clicked and moved towards him.
The young mouse was faster though and he darted onto the long branch that reached up from the tree and held the nest in its place. He was on it fast as the grown hawk swooped low again to grab him. He was in the leaves now though and then to a hollow where the wood ruffled and curved in on itself. It was dark and he was inside the tree and the wood underfoot was wet and soft. There was no light except from behind him, and he knew that that way there was only death. He ran at a sprint down the slant and the hollow narrowed. Through a tight pokehole and there he stopped and all he heard was the sound of his own panicked breathing. He sucked air in and held it. It was quiet.
There was the whistling sound of a breeze and all the wood of the tree creaked around him. There was nowhere to go but down. He went slowly, moving by feel in the dark. It was a long way but after a while he could smell the familiar scent of other mice, and then he was in tunnels that he recognized but only faintly. As if he hadn’t come this way since he was small. Then onto the wider paths where smell was strong and memory faithful and here he could move fast with confidence. Around a bend and he was in the great hollow under the tree. His blood was still pounding and he called out for help. Soon there was a crowd around him and he told them what he had seen. He did not speak or use words, but they understood him in the way that mice do.
“I have seen something horrible and beautiful,” he said, “The hawk took me as prey to its nest above the tree. I escaped, but from up there I could see that our tree is not the center of everything, but only one of many. As far as there was, there were trees. Beyond the three walls, there is a world beyond the three walls, there is a great forever. Our world is a lie.”
There were shouts from the crowd and a mother grabbed her child and darted back down a tunnel. He started to talk them down again when a silence fell over them. He knew the smell and the sound of the old mouse as he came slowly to the front. He walked with a long dragging limp.
“It is true,” the old mouse said, “there is a world beyond our walls. But it is only horror, not beauty. There is nothing for us there, nothing but death and desperation.”
“How do you know?” the young mouse said.
“I have seen it,” the old mouse replied, “When I was young like you, I went out and I saw the horror. No one else survived. I beg you. Do not go.”
“I hear you,” the young mouse said, “but I do not believe you. Either you have not seen what I have, or you are made of smaller stuff than I. Now that I have seen the world as it is, how could I stay the slave to ignorance that I once had been? We are not worms, we are mice! What would I be if I did not press the edge of what is known? Ours is to build and to explore. To grow and to dream. Without that, what are we? What would you have me be?”
The old mouse tried to speak but the young mouse was tired of his fear and cowardice. He pushed him back and shouted to the crowd.
“Who’s with me?”
A rowdy few ran forward. Some of the old and the mother were horrified, but that was their way, and his was to dare to live in spite of them. They readied themselves to leave and the little group was out on the march within the hour. In the open field he could see the hawk circling above. But even she must have sensed the power in their newfound force of will. She did not dive or try to stop them.
From what the young mouse had seen, he knew that it did not matter which way they went. The world was free and enormous all around them. But they made for the place in the North where Left and Right met, not out of necessity, but simply out of feeling. It seemed to the young mouse and the rest that they should head northward, onward, upward, and out into the world. Left or Right would do the job, but didn’t seem nearly bold enough.
And so they came to the place where two of the old world’s three great walls met. They were sheer rock, grey stone rising from the grass to a height not as tall as the tree, but still higher than any mouse could climb. About halfway up the face of the right wall there were great symbols and signs drawn across the face of the rock in bright yellow and red. The colors had faded and chipped in places. These symbols were as old as the world. No one could read them. And yet every mouse knew them, had stared at least once and tried to guess at their meaning. Now the young mouse looked up with the daring hope of understanding. Maybe all the secrets of this world lay just beyond the walls that made the edge of it.
At the very foot of them the ground was wet and slick with mud. Almost no grass grew here in the shade. None of the mice had spent too much time this far North. There had always been nothing for them here. Until now. Where the mass of rock -the edge of everything- met the ground, the young mouse stared up undaunted at the face of existence. The others looked to him as a leader, and then for the first time since he’d been carried to the top of the tree, he felt helpless. There was no way he could lead his people over the wall. And yet then, he remembered. They were mice. They were not like other creatures, the cricket, the squirrel, or even the hawk. No, their way was to shape the world, to make it as they needed it to be. With power in his voice he told them to dig.
The ground was wet and the going was hard, but they were strong and sure and many, and they had a dream of a new world inside of them. Soon they were underground and the old world was behind them, the walls were overhead, and the new dream was only as far away as they could dig themselves. There was no way they could know when they had gone far enough, and so he decided their only choice was to go on digging. In the heat of the dark he finally reached a place where the dirt was dry. He kept going. Then before he knew how or why, the ground shifted, and in the dark he could not see what had happened. But he felt the earth collapsing, sliding fast behind him now and he heard the rest of them shouting, screaming as the dirt muffled their life and the darkness and the mud fell in around them. And then the sound of them was gone but still he did not stop digging. All of them were dead, and still he did not stop digging. Until with tears in his eyes he felt the ground grow soft again. And then it was easy now to dig and he could see the edge of sunlight peeking through ahead of him. He clawed into the air.
The young mouse was breathing hard and he was blind in the light of the new world. But as sight came back to him he wished that he could not see. He saw that it was night now, but light shone down beneath the black sky from strange trees that grew above him. The great walls lay just behind, and he had come out in a narrow strip of grass. Beyond that the breath caught in his lungs. There was a great expanse of stone and ages beyond, countless great green trees. Just as he had seen. But between here and there, only horror. It could not be. Monsters chased each other across the expanse of stone. Faster than a rain, faster than a hawk, faster than God, the strange and enormous great wheeled beasts thundered after each other, their eyes bright and blinding like suns, and their skins shining black and silver and every other color there ever was or never had been. The young mouse collapsed at the sight of this great death, the scale and horror of these demons. The ground shook at their power, and he shattered before them. Their roar so loud he could not hear his own wailing. There was no way forward. For him, no way back. The old mouse had been right. There was nothing beyond the edge of the world.
