After a fitful night of sleep (at least it was fitful for me; the other people in the party seemed to be able to handle the beds better than I could), we piled back into the vehicles and headed in a general northerly direction towards the boundary with the Western Forest region. Surprisingly enough, I rode in the vehicle with the prince and along with him was his own chief of staff, with whom he spent much of the trip talking about various matters of protocol, as well as the young woman who had been assigned to take care of the little girl who was adopted and myself. The girl looked at me thinking that I was someone strange and puzzling to her. Thus, to my annoyance, I found myself having someone staring at me and occasionally asking questions to me during the course of the unpleasant trip along some truly awful roads.

I am convinced that given the high quality of roads I have seen elsewhere in Bravia that these bad roads are intentionally left in a terrible state and not maintained or developed as most Bravian roads are. It is not at all difficult why this is the case. The Forester people do not want a lot of people in their territory, the north is the most vulnerable direction that the Bravians have to an invasion from land, and as I had seen earlier, they really do not need to fear an invasion from the sea, which they can generally blast out of the water without any particular difficulty. I do not know if any of the neighbors of Bravia have attempted to invade them from the north–as I have said, information about the sources is sketchy–but this is the most vulnerable direction for Bravia and as a result, this is an area that has not been well-developed. It does appear, though, that if Bravia is able to build a road (or more) through the forest to develop the area beyond the forest, that the area of North Bravia will be much better developed because it will be a road to somewhere rather than the frontier of Bravia, and that would make a big difference. I am not sure that this will make life easier for the people of the area, but they will certainly be far better off if there is a rich transit trade going to places even further north, that is for sure.

The little half-forester girl–I must admit that although she told me her name it was something that I could not pronounce and she did not have a name that I knew of in the regular Bravian dialect, which would probably be Middle Bravian, a gracious enough language that is easy to understand even when spoken by people who are anything but gracious. I have a more complete discussion of the various Bravian languages (they seem too far apart from each other and from too lasting a past to be considered as mere dialects), but the ordinary farming and small town population of the interior of the nation that does not live near the coast nor in the mountains and high hills are generally speakers of Middle Bravian, and it is probably the most common of the languages within the mainland of Bravia itself, even though most of the trading posts that one encounters outside of Bravian speak some variant of Low Bravian or Coastal Bravian, or occasionally Lower Middle Bravian, which is somewhere in-between Low Bravian and Middle Bravian and appears to be a mix between the two, formed by people from both languages settling the same area and developing their own creole. Fortunately, although I am best at Low Bravian, I do speak Middle Bravian as well, though the girl thought my accent was funny, as she would, I imagine.

Looking at the truly awful state of this part of North Bravia, I was concerned that we would be skipping meals, but as it was we drove through a small town around the middle of the day, where we stopped to eat a lunch that included some very tasty venison steaks–the people in the area must be some pretty proficient hunters of the whitetail and other animals that inhabit the region’s woods, washed down with a local drink that was made of what I heard was a sarsaparilla plant that tasted very good, I must admit, and after that and the usual greeting with local people, the area not (yet) being large enough for its own Amphoe, though clearly very close to that status, we were on the road again. Before too long, I could see whenever we came to the top of a high ridge that we were indeed coming close to the largest forest I have ever seen. To be sure, North Bravia is full of forests, but they are somewhat small when compared to the absolutely massive and impenetrable forest that awaited us. Such a forest was a place worthy of being inhabited by an autonomous people, and the Bravians had clearly decided it was better to allow such people a large degree of freedom in exchange for a mutually beneficial alliance rather than seek to destroy such a forest in order to subdue its people. Given that there was a great similarity in their beliefs despite the wide cultural and ethnic divisions, it seems to be the wise choice to me. It was comforting to note that the Bravians pursued peace as the first option and were reluctant to fight wars they did not have to.

It was only when the day was growing short once again that we arrived in the town that abutted the forest, and served as the official trading and diplomatic post between Bravia and the Western forest. The city was by no means large but it was certainly the largest town I had seen since leaving the capital. I am certain, given the well-built state of the town that it served as an Amphoe region for miles around, and probably had received the vast majority of the population that wished to trade and engage with the Forester people. We drove through the city streets, which were well-maintained from what I could see, and found a place to park our vehicles at an area where there was a large open space–probably for town meetings, as well as some particularly nice looking builds that I took to be a religious building of some kind as well as a civil/governmental building. This was precisely the place we should be, I thought, though I did not know whether we would stay in any of these places for the night.

When the prince stepped out of the car with his chief of staff, immediately someone came to salute him and he responded in kind, and before too long it appeared that the mayor or representative of the place came to talk with him. I could not hear their conversation, but it was very enthusiastic and lasted for some time. Although I did not hear it, I can gather at least that the conversation involved the logistics of the diplomacy that was to follow, along with a call for the people of the Foresters to send a delegation to us in order to hear the message that the crown prince brought and act on it. While it would have been nice to hear the conversation, I can understand why it was conducted in the way it was. After a few minutes, Prince Robert walked back over to us and told us that we would be going to the treehouse apartments that we use for this trip. He then asked me if I wanted to join them in conducting the ritual cleansing that would be necessary for me to observe the Forester diplomatic ceremony tomorrow. While I figured that the ceremony would be strange, it would also be a once in a lifetime chance to observe a people that is little known to the world, especially in our part of the world, and so I agreed, which pleased the prince. We all made our way to a nearby group of trees that were all connected together, and climbed a ladder to get into the elevated tree area where the residential units were. Those of us who were going to the ceremony were instructed to go to the sauna rooms, and to choose a room of our own to relax in.

I must admit that saunas were a bit unusual, but being in a wood-paneled sauna that was in a tree was a particularly weird experience. Once I got into mine, I was instructed to take off my clothes, which I did, and to put them on top of the wooden panel that was placed a bit but not too much above my height, which I did. We all sat in the saunas for about an hour or so, and when it was time to finish, I wondered what would happen to our clothes or if we would be able to wear them again, but I saw that my clothes were taken off of the panel and replaced by a robe of some kind as well as underclothes made up of a shirt and some kind of pants. After the sauna was done, I put on the clothes that were laid out before me, opened the door to the sauna, and found a pair of wooden shoes, which I also slipped my feet into. The shoes felt a bit strange, I must admit, but the clothing was extremely comfortable and soft. When all of us were done and had assembled together, I asked the prince what this was all about, and the prince informed me that the Forester people have very specific feelings about the contaminating effects of living with one’s feet on the ground, seeing as they spend their whole lives living in the trees, and so if one is to set foot in their areas and interact with them on a friendly level, it is necessary to purify oneself of the problems that result from life on the ground, and to wear clothing that comes from the trees. The clothes we wear are made of silk that comes from silkworms which grow on the mulberry trees that can be found in the forest, and the wood that our shoes are made of come from branches of the trees of the forest. The same is true of everything that is to be found in the tree apartments, for our dishes and cutlery are all carved of wood from the forest that is to be treated with respect and kept clean in an appropriate manner.

I had never heard of anything like this before, I must admit. Soon, though, our party met together to sit on wooden benches in front of a wooden table to eat a plain broth soup out of a wooden bowl and then to enjoy chicken cooked with vegetables and tree nuts gathered, I assumed, from the forest around us. While I ate and wondered what an unusual but admittedly enjoyable experience this was, I saw the prince teaching the young girl the right words for everything that was being enjoyed, and saw her face light up when she saw how much of an expert he was at her ways. I do not know how or when the acquired this knowledge, but I was impressed to see that the prince had been able to understand this alien culture on its own terms and be able to get along with their ways even though they were much different from his own. I suppose, though, to a royal family who lives in caves, it is not so odd that another people would feel most comfortable living in trees. When one is aware that one is an outlier among others, it is perhaps easier to accept other people who are unusual in different ways but equally as unusual as yourself.

After the meal, I was tired, so I went to my room and rested on the mat that was on the floor. I expected the mattress to be hard and uncomfortable, but it was not, and as I looked around me and appreciated the strangeness of my surroundings, I was nonetheless aware that I was in a place that was not devoid of human comforts. The people of the forest were, it must be admitted, a deeply unusual people. That could not be denied, and I do not think that the prince himself would have thought that the Foresters were an ordinary people on the face of the earth. But they were a people worth knowing about, and especially since the Bravians are looking to bring these people to forest territories in other areas, it would be wise for us to know about them as well, and that is why I took the opportunity to get to know them and to pass a report along to you about them.