At the same moment, both men leaped at the trapdoor and pulled it open. But there was nobody there. Brother Warren cursed.
“Headstrong brat,” he hissed. “He’ll make things difficult for us, that Tin. He won’t give away his invention easily, I know him.”
“All treasures can be bought,” purred Father Ralstein, descending the stairs in a bound. “And all boys can be broken.”
Tin was already out in the cloistered courtyard where the boys did their daily exercises. He’d sprinted there faster than he had ever run before. Now he gasped and gulped in rain and air. He couldn’t tell, in the rush of adrenaline, if the heat on his face mixing with the raindrops was anger or tears. His mind spun and he couldn’t quieten it. Why did he feel only dread and terror at the thought of these men using his Fiddleback to somehow rebuild the City’s former glory? Wasn’t it only for the Good of All that gold and perfection be restored, as he was so often taught? Then why was his strongest urge to run down to the cellars and destroy his Fiddleback with a hammer right then? Shouldn’t he just stand there in the rain and wait for them to find him, lead them peaceably to his creation, and let them use him for whatever glorious fate they seemed to have in mind?
The rain fell harder and thunder slammed the sky, followed by lightning, very close. In the flash Tin saw something extremely odd: a pale bird passing low overhead. What was more, the bird was holding a leggy creature with long ears in its talons. Tin gaped at the sky. Was it a rabbit? A hare? He remembered the names vaguely from his books. And was that an owl that carried it? This night was surely one of wonders! What on earth was going on? First the Fiddleback, then the terrifying revelation of Father Ralstein, and now this! Rain fell against his teeth as he gaped and stared at the circling bird and the kicking animal in its claws.
Suddenly the owl let go of its captive, angling it right towards the boy’s arms. Tin was so startled that he leaped sideways. A young hare thudded against his shoulder and with two yelps of shock they both tumbled to the ground.
“You’d best be out with it, Comfrey,” said Maxine to her daughter as she washed their clay bowls clean of porridge in a deep basin of rainwater. “You’re never so quiet and still, except when you want something very badly.” She turned to regard her daughter, wiping strong, dark hands on her trousers. The girl sat very still on a round yellow pillow at the big polished redwood stump where they ate all their meals. She looked fit to bursting with whatever it was she wanted to say. Her tawny hands were clasped and white-knuckled, her black braids already coming loose. A very fierce, almost secretive look glinted in her pale eyes, which were fixed on her mother’s trousers, and not her face, studying their patchwork of salvaged fabrics. Comfrey had always thought her mother’s trousers looked like a map of a thousand colours and places. They held bits of other worlds, from Before the Collapse – a scrap of faded green with tiny curling leaf shapes; a square of pink roses; another of indigo plaid. What had the world been like when people could make such intricate and colourful fabrics?
“I’d like to do the Offering-bundle tomorrow,” Comfrey said all in a rush, unclasping her hands as she spoke and turning her long fingers to worry at her loosening braids.
It was such an unastonishing request that Maxine almost laughed. “Of course, my love, we do it together every year.”
“No, I mean I want to do it alone. By myself,” the girl interjected, getting to her feet. “I’m old enough, I’m twelve and tall for my age! Elspeth is doing her family’s bundle this year. I know she’s fourteen already but really I’m much cleverer than she is, and braver too.” The words were tumbling out. “Remember how she shrieked only last summer when she saw a bobcat on the path near the square, because she thought it was a lion?”
This was getting a little close to the secret Comfrey had clasped inside her heart for the last two moons. But she couldn’t help saying the word, just for the thrill of it. Bobcat. Since that December day two months ago when for the first time in her life she had actually seen one of the Wild Folk – a Bobcat-girl who had watched her from the hills just beyond the road – she’d been sculpting little bobcat figurines from creek clay for this very purpose. To be given as Offerings to the Wild Folk on the day of the Festival of Candles, in the hope that the Bobcat-girl might see them and remember her.
At the eight major seasonal holidays of their year, the Country Folk of the three villages called Alder, Quail and Lupine left Offering-bundles for the Wild Folk on behalf of all of Farallone. This was because their villages sat nearest the boundary between the Country and Olima, the land of the Wild Folk. At the summer solstice people from all eleven of the Country’s villages gathered for three days of feasting and dancing in Alder after the Offerings had been left, so that each village could leave their own prayers and take home a bit of water from the stream that flowed across the boundary from Olima into the Country, to bless their children and their crops.
In exchange, a certain safety net was maintained. Serious illness was rarely a concern. Bees and goats and vegetable plots flourished. If some family forgot to leave out their bundle, or if they gave their second-best bushel of apples, or lumpy candles, a child came down with a case of pneumonia, or worse. A leak appeared almost simultaneously in the roof. Socks grew holes that refused to be darned. Salmon stopped spawning upstream and spawned only up the creeks through the thick fir trees where Wild Folk lived. It was a serious affair, this leaving of Offerings, and one carried out exclusively by women. As to the matter of interacting with the Wild Folk, well, it just wasn’t done.
The Boundary was a fault line eighty kilometres long, where the two tectonic plates that made up the island of Farallone came together. To the human eye it looked like a long flat valley between two ridges and the very narrow Tamal Bay to the north, thin and straight as a blue ribbon. To the Wild Folk, it was a sacred delineation. According to the stories Comfrey had been told, crossing over that boundary into Olima meant you walked into the Realm of Creation, where the Wild Folk made their homes and guarded the heart of the island of Farallone. What exactly this meant she wasn’t quite sure. All Comfrey knew was that everything was not entirely as it seemed in the land of Olima, and magic was real. Among the Country people, crossing that boundary was likened to a death sentence. It simply wasn’t done. Stray across the fault line for what felt like a night, and if you were so lucky as to make your way back by morning, you might find your body an old woman’s, and all your loved ones dead. Or you might find yourself no longer human at all, but a little green frog.
Comfrey had only ever heard second-hand stories about people seeing Wild Folk, told by the old grandmothers, tales their own grandmothers had told them, and much embellished. They sat in the village’s centre amidst the weekly market stalls of wool and carrots and goat’s milk, honey, elderberry wine and cut firewood, spinning wool and gossiping and telling tales to little ones. Hardly anyone Comfrey knew had actually seen one of the Wild Folk first-hand, besides the cobbler’s ancient grandfather. She’d pressed him before for stories of the Egret-woman he had seen on the marsh when he was a young man, but he would only get a faraway look, and speak of his dead wife.
It was considered very dangerous to see one of the Wild Folk. You might be kidnapped, or go mad. You might destroy the delicate Balance if you did something wrong, and bring on the Plagues again, or another earthquake like the earthquake that had coincided with the beginning of the Collapse. And doing something wrong was very easy, because no one really understood the ways or laws of the Wild Folk at all.
That day, two months ago, Comfrey hadn’t just seen one of the Wild Folk. She had spoken to one. And the experience, much to her surprise, had left her neither frightened nor insane. On the contrary, it had left her strangely elated. It had happened a few weeks after her twelfth birthday. She was following her mother and aunt and three of her older cousins up the road from the beach. They’d all spent the morning there gathering flotsam. Comfrey had found three whole green glass bottles, complete
ly unchipped, and was very proud of herself. She held them up to the sun to admire the green, hanging behind her cousins, who were all talking about their breasts growing and the boy named Jonah in the village called Pelican, the one nearest the ocean. Bored by their chatter, Comfrey dragged her feet and stared up at the steep scrubby hills on the far side of the road, beyond the wide patch of marsh. Wild Folk territory didn’t begin until the other, unseen side of the ridge, but still it thrilled Comfrey just to imagine what might lie beyond it.
Her eyes suddenly focused on a girl’s face. It was peering at her from behind a thick patch of coyotebrush and orange poppies. The girl moved into the open. Comfrey saw with a shock in her chest and a tingle in her hands that the girl had the pointed, dark-tipped ears of a bobcat, the hint of stripes down her face, a scrap of green rag for a dress. Her legs were furred and ended in paws. As sun rippled with wind across the hill, the place where the bobcat ended and the girl began seemed to shift. The girl wore a crown made of black spotted towhee feathers and a necklace of bones.
For a second, the Bobcat-girl and Comfrey made eye contact. She had never seen anyone with such mischievous, spritely, lively eyes. They glittered with light.
“Hello, Comfrey,” the Bobcat-girl said. Somehow, even across road and marsh and hill, Comfrey could hear exactly what she said. She gulped and whispered “hello” back in a raspy voice. She quivered with the forbidden thrill of the moment, and the delicious sense of friendship she felt. Nothing bad happened. The Bobcat-girl didn’t bound down the hill at her with sharp claws. The earth didn’t shake. She just smiled. Her teeth glinted. Then she turned and darted back up into the brush. Comfrey saw a striped, bobbed tail sticking out of a slit in the back of her green scrappy dress. It moved as if in an invitation to follow. The Bobcat-girl looked back once more, not the way a cat eyes a bird but the way a girl looks invitingly to a new friend, because she has something marvellous and secret to share.
Just then Comfrey’s mother called for her to hurry up and quit dragging her feet. When she looked back a final time, the Bobcat-girl was gone. And though Comfrey had gone looking almost every day since, all through early winter as the mushrooms grew in the woods and the rains began in earnest, she glimpsed no more of the mysterious Wild Folk girl who had somehow, impossibly, known her name.
She’d always been an inquisitive, independent child, peeking under rocks for salamanders and asking far too many impertinent questions about the Wild Folk when they had guests for dinner, but since that day in December when she first saw the Bobcat-girl, Comfrey had become a tinderbundle of curiosity, and with a short temper to boot. Maxine’s answers about the Wild Folk were never enough, nor those of the old women who sat spinning sheep’s wool in the sun in the centre of the village, nor even those of the old men who smoked wooden pipes over their fishing nets down by the nettle-lined stream. She didn’t dare tell anyone her secret in case someone told her she’d been cursed, or had cursed them all. But she was always darting off before the morning weaving or the afternoon mushroom gathering to peer across the edge of the road into the marsh, towards the hills where, beyond sight, the land of the Wild Folk began.
“Well,” said Maxine after a short pause in which she tried to weigh all the said and unsaid words in her daughter’s eyes. Soft winter light found the kitchen window and moved sidelong in, illuminating Comfrey’s feet in their rabbit-skin slippers, and her skinny girlish ankles. After all, it was a small enough thing, and only just beyond the edge of the village. She’d been helping Maxine lay the Offerings at every holiday since she was a girl of four, and knew all the words by heart. Generally girls did not begin to lay them on their own until after their first bleeding, but that was an old rule and not much mentioned. Besides, it seemed to matter very much to Comfrey, though Maxine couldn’t quite understand why.
“Father would have let me go,” blurted Comfrey, taking her mother’s hesitation for a refusal. She regretted the words almost instantly for the way they made Maxine’s face fall, but she couldn’t help it. Her father was the only person she knew who had gone beyond the boundaries of their world – from the quiet village called Alder to the City’s Wall, driven there by the premonition of a disaster he hoped to prevent. Comfrey had been four. Maybe Maxine knew what it was he had seen, but she never spoke of it. One morning, her father was simply gone. As far as Comfrey had been taught, nobody from the Country was ever let inside the City, and nobody from the City ever came out into the Country. Her father’s going was unheard of. He wants to bring down the Wall! some said. Others called it foolhardy. Still others called it heroic. Maxine, depending on her mood, called it both.
That was eight years ago, and Thorne had never returned. The people of Alder had assumed him dead after a year without word, and held a funeral. For Comfrey’s sake, Maxine went along with the village’s proclamation. But somewhere in both of them, a little spark of hope remained. Maxine and Comfrey never spoke of that spark, and yet they both tended it in their own quiet ways. Their Thorne was too clever and too brave to die. Maybe it was a rash thought, for no man or woman can vanquish death. But Comfrey thought she would know it, if he were really gone. In her heart, she would know.
Now, Maxine struggled with an unexpected seam of tears. “I was about to say yes, child,” she managed at last, trying not to sound harsh, busying herself with a jar of elderberry tincture that needed straining. She was the village herbalist for Alder and several of the children had colds. “Of course I trust you to take the Offerings. Of course you are old enough, my love. Your father – you’re right. He would agree. He would be so proud of the brave young woman you’ve become.”
Comfrey ran to her mother and threw her arms round her waist. There, she burst into tears – of guilt for keeping a secret from her, of sorrow at the thought of her father, and of giddy excitement that felt close to some premonition of change.
The next morning, the first day of February and the Festival of Candles, Comfrey stepped proudly out of their little cob house in her sturdiest walking shoes and her favourite blue walking cape, which she only wore on special occasions. The red cloth bundle of Offerings was tucked carefully into a willow basket which Comfrey made sure not to tip or jostle as she walked, as if it were a cake lit with candles. In the other hand she carried a pail of kitchen scraps for the eleven grey geese that lived in a neat pen beside the earthen walls of the house.
After feeding them and leaving the pail at the gate, Comfrey wound through the vegetable garden she and her mother carefully tended, now mostly brown stalks of summer thistles among rows of kale and winter potatoes, and stopped at the beehives at the garden’s edge. There were thirteen hives in all, wooden boxes painted in reds and yellows and blues and greens. As she did every day, Comfrey stopped at that circle of hives, ringed with leggy rosemary bushes, and told them her news.
“Maybe you’re dreaming more now since it’s cold,” she started, fidgeting the edge of the red cloth bundle in her hands. “I’m off to do the Offerings all by myself. Mother has let me! I’ve got to make sure I do it perfectly and then the Wild Folk will be pleased and it will be a good end to winter. We won’t get hungry and we won’t get sick either.” She paused. Should she keep her secret even from the bees? “And…I’m hoping that the Bobcat-girl might see my gifts for her. That maybe she will come out again and—” Comfrey lowered her voice. “Well, I don’t know. Only I’d like to speak with her again.” Then she blushed, feeling selfish; after all, the laying of the Offerings was for the well-being of the village, and her home, not just her own curiosity. A cold wind came from the west, through the opening in the low hills that led to the willow valley and the Borderland. Comfrey breathed deep into the wind, which had the smell of the ocean and wet alders and mud and green grass and rain in it. She shivered a little, bowed her head to the drowsy bees, and set off down the footpath at the edge of the village, away from the other houses. It wound past fresh patches of nettles and crossed the creek at a shallow point, then passed between the
hills, across a sodden meadow and into the valley.
The Offering places lined the hillside beyond the willow marsh, just on the near side of Wild Folk territory. Even though this borderland was technically still Country, nobody liked to get any nearer to Olima than they needed to, and the western ridge provided a natural boundary. Each of the families of Alder had their own altar-spot along this hillside, and there was some competition for the loveliest display. Comfrey and her mother had an altar on the flat, smooth top of a serpentine rock outcrop. Comfrey climbed the thin deer trail that led to their spot, slipping here and there in the muddy grass, until she was level with the rock. It was a steep short climb, and it made her calves ache. She set the bundle down and unrolled the red Offering cloth. It was striking against the pale green of the serpentine.
She took out the Offerings one by one with trembling fingers. A blue jay called, startling her. No one else was up with their Offerings, nor would they be for a few hours yet. Comfrey had wanted to get there early so she could take her time, and look around in case she glimpsed again the Bobcat-girl’s green dress or her furred face. She set the nine beeswax candles in their nine clay holders on the red cloth, arranging them in a circle. They were painted dark blue with yellow dots like stars. In the centre she set the polished skull of a barn owl she and her mother had found in the alderwood while softening nettle stalks in the creek, upside down so that it created a bowl. Into the bowl she placed a fresh-baked acorn-flour cake, and beside it she poured elderberry mead into a wooden goblet made of dark red bearberry bark. Nine pieces of kale, freshly harvested from the winter garden, she arranged like the spokes on a wheel, radiating out from the owl skull at the centre, and around them she laid a beaded strand of red madrone berries.
All that was left were her clay bobcat figurines. She picked each one up to admire before setting them down on the red cloth. She’d spent a day on each, shaping and smoothing and reshaping, using a sharpened feather to carve eyes and noses, claws, spots.
The Wild Folk Page 3