Seven Pockets
The linen was rough under Zaid's thumb, slubbed where the thread had knotted itself into little beads. He had sewn the pouch himself, badly, seven small pockets in a row, each one the size of a walnut. Now he carried it open across both hands like a tray of eggs, and the starlit forest breathed its cold green breath over him. River walked at his ankle, whiskers forward, tasting the air the way otters do, which is with the whole face. Moss gave under their feet and sprang back. Above them the lanterns of light between the branches swung a little, then held. Zaid stopped where the path forked and lifted the pouch to his nose. Empty linen. Dust and thread. "Seven," he said. "One for every night, so it never runs out." River flowed on ahead.
The first pocket was easy. Zaid pinched a green handful of pine needles and rolled them between his palms until they broke, and the smell came up sharp and bright, like something cold being sliced open. He folded them in and pressed the flap shut with his thumb. River rose on his back legs to check, nose working, then dropped and ran three steps and looked back over his shoulder. "One more pocket, and the forest comes with us," Zaid said. He had started saying it at the edge of the trees and had not stopped. The path went down between roots as thick as his arm. The dark was not dark, exactly. It was blue, and it moved, and it smelled of wet bark and yesterday's rain drying slowly out of everything.
They heard the stream before they reached it, a thin cold thread of a stream, no wider than Zaid's two hands. River went in without deciding to. He rolled once, twice, and came up green about the shoulders, and the smell that came with him was so strong that Zaid sat down. Mint. A whole low bank of it, bruised under otter weight. Zaid picked three leaves, then thought better of it and picked one more, because the pocket was deep. He rubbed them between finger and thumb until they went dark and soft. "You found that," he told River. "That one's yours." River shook himself, and cold drops landed on Zaid's wrists and on the linen, and the second pocket closed over mint and river water together, which turned out to be better than mint alone.
The third smell was hiding. Zaid walked a long way without finding anything worth keeping, and that was fine; the walking was pleasant, and River kept stopping to look under things. Then the trees went pale. Birches stood in a loose crowd like people waiting, their bark peeling into curls, and one curl lay on the moss with its inside turned up. Zaid crouched. He did not tear it from the tree. He lifted the fallen one and held it under his nose and found something faint and sweet, like cold sugar, like the ghost of a kitchen. River pushed his blunt head in to smell it too, and sneezed. Zaid laughed, quietly, because the forest was quiet. The curl went into the third pocket, and the pouch began to have a weight he could feel.
Juniper grew in a low stubborn mound where the path turned. Zaid had walked past it a hundred times and never touched it. Tonight he pressed one berry between his nails until the skin split, and the smell that came out was blue and serious, the way medicine is serious, the way a very old book is serious. He liked it immediately. He took four berries, no more, and rolled them into the fourth pocket, and they made a small hard sound against each other, like beads. River had found a beetle and was following it with great attention and no plan. Zaid waited for him. Overhead, something soft moved through the branches and did not come down, and the lanterns of light shifted and settled, and the night went on smelling of resin and cold stone.
The fifth pocket wanted earth. Zaid knew it before he knew why. He knelt where a flat stone sat half-sunk in the moss and worked his fingers under the edge, and River came to help in the way otters help, which is with the whole body. Together they tipped it. Underneath was dark crumbled ground, threaded with white roots, busy with small lives that did not mind them. The smell that rose was the oldest one yet: rain from years ago, beetles, the underneath of everything. Zaid took a pinch. He set the stone back down exactly as it had been, and pressed the moss flat around it, and told the underneath he was sorry for the draught. "One more pocket, and the forest comes with us," he said, and River shoved his wet face against Zaid's ear.
The sixth took patience, which Zaid had more of than he expected. There was a vine that only opened after dark, high up where the starlight fell through in coins, and its flowers were still shut when they arrived. So they waited. River lay along a root with his chin on his paws. Zaid counted the lanterns of light he could see, lost count, started again. Then the smell arrived before the sight did, heavy and honeyed, almost too much, and when he looked up the flowers had gone loose and open like small sleeves. One petal came down slow as a feather. He caught it on his palm. It smelled of syrup and dust and summer, and it went into the sixth pocket without being pressed, because pressing it would have spoiled it.
One pocket left, and nothing left to put in it. Zaid tried. He held the linen to a wet log, to a cushion of moss, to the split end of a fallen branch, and each smell was good and none of it was right. He sat down on a root with the pouch open on his knees and felt the dissatisfaction settle in him, small and itchy. Six was a strange number to stop at. River climbed into his lap, heavy and damp, smelling of mint and stream and warm animal, and put his chin on the linen. "You can't go in a pocket," Zaid said. River did not move. The lanterns of light hung above them, patient as lamps in windows. Zaid breathed in, out, in, and tried to name what the whole night smelled like.
It was not pine, though pine was in it. It was not mint, or birch, or juniper, or earth turned over, or the heavy honey of the vine. It was all of them at once, plus the cold, plus the water, plus whatever the dark itself gave off when nobody was collecting it. It had no name. You could not pick it. You could not break it between your fingers to make it stronger. Zaid sat very still with that thought, and River sat still with him, which is the useful thing about River. Then Zaid took the seventh pocket between his finger and thumb and opened it as wide as it would go, and held it out into the air, and did not put anything inside.
They stayed like that a long while. Long enough for the moss to print itself on the backs of Zaid's legs. Long enough for a moth to come and look at them and go. The forest moved gently around the open pocket: a drift of cold off the stream, a breath of resin, the honeyed vine sending down another petal somewhere out of sight. River's whiskers twitched in his half-sleep. Zaid watched the linen tremble and thought, that will do. That is going in. He folded the seventh flap shut over a pocketful of ordinary night air and pressed it with his thumb the way he had pressed all the others, and the pouch was full, and it weighed almost nothing, and it smelled, when he lifted it, like the whole forest standing close.
He carried it to the hollow between two roots where the moss grew deepest, and hung it from a low twig above his head, where it turned slowly on its thread. River arrived and arranged himself along Zaid's side, damp and heavy and warm, and sighed like an old door. Zaid put one hand on him. Above them the lanterns of light between the branches dimmed by degrees, the way lamps do when a house is settling. The stream went on saying its one word. "One more pocket, and the forest comes with us," Zaid said, though there were no more pockets, and nothing to go in them, and he was only saying it now because he liked the sound.
The pouch turned above him, and every time it turned, a different smell came down: mint, then juniper, then the dark underneath of the flat stone, then honey. Zaid stopped trying to tell them apart. His eyes closed on their own. Under his hand River's ribs rose and fell, slow and certain, a tide with nowhere to be. Zaid matched it without meaning to. In, and out. The moss held him the way a hand holds a bird. Somewhere above, the last lantern of light let itself go soft. The forest kept breathing its cold green breath over the two of them, in and out, in and out, and Zaid breathed with it, until his breathing and the forest's were the same slow thing.
