Chapter Two
One day when young Sputz was something more than a boy and yet not quite a man, the wanderlust came upon him and, as he always did, he gave himself to it. He stepped outside the door of his wobbly fishmonger hut and set off to find something he hadn’t before. That was always the point of a good wandering off. To find something one hadn’t. But of late, it was a difficult thing to accomplish. After all, Tummudge was very small, and very deplorable, and after so many years of wandering, he feared he’d seen all there was of it.
Sputz followed his feet down one street after another. Each time he turned a corner he hoped to discover he’d found something new, yet each corner he turned revealed nothing more than Tummudge at it’s most bland and decrepit.
After hours of meaningless wandering he slumped against an alleyway wall and became sad. He sat down upon a splintery crate and crossed his too long arms and made a terrible face that no mother would have approved of.
Then from a window high up in the alleyway wall Sputz heard the sound of people talking and he listened. The voices were a clamoring hum from which he could rarely pick out more than a disjointed word or syllable but occasionally he was able to snatch entire sentences from the flutter of sound even though they made little sense by themselves.
He heard the ends and beginnings and middles of conversations and didn’t have any way to put them together and understand them, things like, “…and that’s when I knowed it was an orange.”
and
“She got no time to make three more of ‘em, they’re too big, I says.”
and
“…then that monkey come out and sat and wouldn’t be moved.”
and
“Don’t bring that nowhere near me!”
and
“…so that’s why sneezin’ makes you shiver?”
and
“This is surely not a biscuit.”
Sputz tried to pick out the different threads and weave them together into a meaningful conversation but he had only small success until the sun went down and the many voices dwindled to only a few. He leaned his head against the alleyway wall and let his mind wander through the window to follow the voices along as they told their tales.
One man spoke of his long dead wife and how he never took the risk of telling her she drove him crazy because he so loved her sweetmeat pies and feared she’d withhold them if she knew. Another told of his three sons and how they’d all gone off to fight for the king and how one had returned with a wife, and one had returned with a crippled limb, and one had never returned at all. One spoke of a great, stone house in the mountains that was the wonder of all the land until it collapsed in the winter long ago. Yet another man spoke of nothing but how much he loved the delicious cheeses he made and how he thought of them as children and was always sad to see them married off to customers at market.
When the hour approached midnight the voices had all faded except for a single speaker. His voice crackled and popped like a dying fire riding low on its embers. Through the window, Sputz could hear the shifting and rustling of other people but they were silent, listening as he was.
“When I was young, and strong, I went to the North Wood. I went to see whether it’s like they say. To see if it’s true no man can pierce it through and see the other side. Three days I crept inside the Wood, in the shade of the shambling trees. I slept the darkest nights of all my days and though I struck at her with my scythe and hewed her with my sword, the Wood would not give way.”
Sputz heard the other listeners grunt in agreement.
“So out I come while still I could. If the Wood could be pierced then I’d have run her through. But she’s an uncrossable ocean. A peak too high. A desert too wide. I crept her. I know.”
When Sputz heard the old man’s tale of the North Wood it was very much like the first time he heard his affliction named. His mind seized upon it. He framed it in the window of his mind and heard it call to him. The North Wood. A thing unfound, a frontier undiscovered, and not only to him, but to everyone in Tummudge.
The next day, Sputz’s father and mother, as always, left for market.
“Stay you put!”
And Sputz set out to wander the North Wood.
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