BRYTHAN Part 6
Timmys troubles had started from the moment he set off, having been shown a chart of the river by the captain who indicated the best way to go.

Nautical charts never show contours of any lands adjacent to the water they depict in more detail. So having given Timmy the instructions to head nor'east for them hills, he had omitted to consider how much the lie of the land could affect the boys choice of direction.

Brythans landscape was contoured by innumerable gentle rolling hillsides that bordered the shallow, wide valleys left by long ago glaciers whose legacy was the streams and rivers that fed the main waterway of the wide tidal river that led from the coast to the Citadel and beyond.

So climb up one hillside down into the adjacent valley and your course must inexorably divert from the destination indicated!

Timmy was completely ignorant of such geographical facts and so as he confidently set off for the distant purple horizon, having diverted his way to escape the marshy riverside by climbing up one hillside and down into the next he would inevitably become off course and completely unaware of it.

If you stretch out your hand and move the fingers apart you will quickly understand how matters stood. At the beginning of the journey or the base of your fingers to use this analogy, there is little diversion but by the end of the fingers the tips are much farther apart. So Timmys nor'east would soon become north and that would result in a different outcome to that which the good captain had intended.

He had started out with confidence but as the long day drew to its dusky close he realized he was quite unprepared to spend a night without some form of shelter but being a townie he did not recognize haystacks or even small hollows for what they could offer him so he spent a long uncomfortable and almost sleepless night, shivering and hearing all sorts of nocturnal creatures whose myriad strange noises were unsettling and played upon his imagination to great effect.

It finally dawned on Timmy the scale of his predicament which revelation came appropriately at dawn as the light awoke him and he realized how vulnerable he was out in the open countryside knowing nothing about either it or its inhabitants. Previously he had led a sheltered life which had not prepared him for these conditions.

However he was a healthy, optimistic lad not given to introspection. Last night had been a much needed lesson and mild in comparison to what might have befallen him had he been left to survive on the streets of the Citadel with the Port Authority guard looking for him, as the captain had told him, "with that slimy bastard Plant behind whats befallen your family."