“Like guardians,” Comfrey said out loud, shifting the clay bobcats so that they sat on opposite sides of the circle, between the madrone berries and the outer round of candles. Then she struck a flint to light the candles, put her palms down by the two clay cats, and said the proper words. “Bless the sun through the night, bless the dark through to light, bless the green, bless the rain, bless the land come to life at the turning of the light. May the roots in the ground, may the birds flying south, be held in the comfort and shelter of dark. Thank you new seeds, thank you rain, thank you salmon, thank you stars. Thank you alder, nettle, deer and green. May we walk all in beauty. Blessed Be and Scree.”
The last part, “Blessed Be and Scree”, Comfrey and her mother had made up and added in when Comfrey was around seven at the summer solstice, and a red-shouldered hawk had wheeled above them so close they could see the snake in her talons. The bird had called out once, a sound like “scree”.
“She’s saying a blessing too!” Comfrey had exclaimed, and Maxine had laughed, and so it stuck.
Today, just as Comfrey finished saying the words and was beginning to wonder whether she should whisper any additional ones about the Bobcat-girl, she heard laughter. Deep, ragged, howling laughter. Coyotes, she thought at first. Then she heard the cadence of women’s voices. Comfrey blushed and looked around. Were the other women starting to arrive already with their Offerings? Were they laughing at her, thinking her too young to leave them by herself? She stood, ready with some sharp retort. Then she realized that the laughter was coming from up the willow valley where it widened and the ridge lowered, and where humans never ventured. The footpath did not go any further north, south or west. It ended here, beyond Alder. If you wanted to get to one of the other boundary villages, you went back inland and took the well-worn paths east of the fault line, safely on the other side of the low hills that lay between them and the marshland. The Olima Borderlands were a kind of no man’s land. All willow thicket, tule marsh, meadow and sudden mists. Villagers only ever ventured into them for the leaving of Offerings, and then very quickly, using the same well-tested footpath.
But there it was again, that strange and ragged laughter! And it was most certainly coming from up the marsh. Could the laughter be the Bobcat-girl and her mother and aunts and grandmothers, feasting around their own holiday fire? Comfrey wondered. What harm would it do if she went just a little further to peek and see? Wasn’t this what she had hoped for?
Comfrey bowed quickly to the Offerings and the altar and leaped from the rock. As she slid down the hill her boots got covered in mud, and when she tried to tiptoe up the path they squelched. The sky was growing dark with rain clouds, and the sun passed in and out of them, making patchy shadows on the ground. Comfrey made her way through a sodden, newly greening meadow. The laughter got louder. She smelled woodsmoke. Somebody belted out a soulful tune amidst a murmur of talk, and then more laughter. It sounded like it was coming from just beyond the willow thicket she could see on the other side of the meadow, which backed into the deeper hills of Olima.
Breathless with excitement, forgetting how far she had strayed into the borderlands, Comfrey clambered between the bare yellow branches and looked. On a flat bit of the grassy hillside, surrounded by low-growing sagebrush and lupines, she saw a group of three women sitting in front of two wooden carts. One cart was ox-blood red, the other yellow. While the carts were stationary, the wheels doubled as spinning wheels, their bobbins full of golden thread. Big deer, eight of them, were grazing nearby with leather harnesses unhitched but still attached to their necks. The carts had rounded canvas tops and metal chimney pipes. The women sat in the grass cross-legged, making baskets from straight, split willow sticks. They hooted with laughter and chatted and poked at a fire they’d made in a pit of stones.
Wild Folk.
The only thing that made Comfrey certain they were Wild Folk at all, and not odd human people from another village, was that their hair was done up in elaborate four-plait braids woven into cone shapes like beehive baskets. In fact, their hair wasn’t hair at all, but fine fibrous plant stalks, growing right from their scalps. When one of them turned slightly, Comfrey saw that her hair-basket was hollow inside, and sheltered a chickadee.
The women grinned and joked like Comfrey’s cousins, but she could see that their lined eyes and hands were ancient. Their lips were youthful though, as were their easy, fluid movements. Watching them, Comfrey felt full of more yearning than she had ever felt in her young life. More even than she’d felt at the sight of the Bobcat-girl. She wanted her hands to be so sure, so fast and strong, making baskets of such beauty. She’d never heard anyone laugh the way they laughed. She leaned forward more and her foot slipped. It broke a branch with a snap and her shoe slapped the mud.
One woman looked up. Her eyes were darker than her beautiful skin, which was the colour of bearberry bark. Her fennel-yellow dress stood out bright in contrast. Her quick hands kept steadily at their weaving.
“Hello, you naughty village-girl,” she said in a rich voice, the kind of voice with woodsmoke in it. “Would you like to come join our fire? Would you like to learn to weave the basket of your fate? Isn’t it your own destiny you are after, girl?” She winked a dark eye and flashed Comfrey a smile that made the girl’s stomach flip upside down. She had been seen!
With a gasp she turned, slipping in the mud, batting aside the willows, and ran all the way home. As she ran, her heart leaped with a mixture of panic and a deep, wild excitement.
“What was that?” came a scolding voice from beside Tin’s left elbow. “You have hands, don’t you?” It was the little rain-drenched hare, hissing as he disentangled himself and his long ears from under Tin’s wrist. “I was the one falling from the sky! That demoness of an owl even did her best to drop me near your hands. What a blasphemy to all Haredom, to be carried by an owl!” The rain had let up a little, and the leveret shook himself as if to get rid of a bad smell, then leaned forward to sniff Tin’s outstretched palms. The boy gaped. “Much talked of, the hands of your kind. Very clever, very dangerous, it is said. Well, at the moment they seem rather overrated to me.”
Tin sat up slowly and looked down at his hands. They smarted from the fall, and he opened and closed them as he peered closely at the hare, who was looking right back at him with expressive, dark-brown eyes.
For a moment Tin thought he’d hit his head when he fell. The hare’s voice must be some hallucination made of the rain splattering the cobblestones and his own spinning thoughts.
The leveret sniffed again at his palms. “It smells as though you are in some sort of trouble. Good timing, I should say. Off with a bang. Hope I’m not a roast over someone’s fire by dawn. Well, let’s see what we can do to get you out of whatever predicament is causing your palms to sweat. The Greentwins were clear that I am to help you.” The hare sat up tall even as the rain coated his fur. His proud black tail quivered. “You can call me Mallow, by the way.”
Tin kept staring. The wild loops of the boy’s hair, normally an unruly golden mass, were flattened to his head. His work clothes clung to his skin, revealing the outline of his young chest and shoulders, which years of hunger had made bony and lean.
“What, you don’t talk, either? A strange human indeed you’ve landed me with, old Greentwins. We always suspected life was unpleasant inside the City Wall, but this is more dire than I—”
“No, no, I talk. I’m sorry,” Tin blurted out, leaning forward into a crouch with a burst of energy that scared Mallow backwards. A sweet simple wonder had stolen over him while staring at that perfect wild hare. “I’m Tin. You’re from…outside the Wall? I thought all the animals were dead! I thought it was a dangerous place, full of sickness and—”
“All dead?” the leveret exclaimed, flashing his ears with mirth. “All dead! Oh no, far from it my friend. Outside, well, it’s far lovelier than in here, that’s for certain. Not a bit of green to be seen in this terrible place, and I’m ravenous!”
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They both started at the sound of heavy, running footsteps in the tunnels below the courtyard.
“I’m in quite a lot of trouble, as it turns out,” said Tin, still wide-eyed. “I don’t have any idea how I’m going to get out of this one.” He ran his hands through his wet mop of curls, and even though his heart surged with panic at the sound of those footsteps, something in him had gone light and clear. It was as if the leveret had come in answer to a prayer he’d never known he had said. The creature was another piece of a mystery he hadn’t realized he was bent on unravelling.
“Come on then!” said Mallow, already bounding away. “Nobody’s better at a brilliant escape than a hare.”
“It’s not an escape!” called Tin. “It’s a rescue!”
“Whatever you say!” retorted the hare.
Dripping wet, Tin and Mallow dashed down the staircase that led under the library at the far end of the courtyard, Tin leading the way towards the catacombs. They left wet footprints in the tunnels as they ran. Tin paused to light the little rapeseed oil lantern he carried in his knapsack with a stolen scrap of flint. It cast a flickering muted glow, enough to navigate the tunnels. In gasping whispers, he tried to explain the wheeled Fiddleback, and how he knew it was crazy to be running right towards his pursuers, but he couldn’t let them get it, his beautiful machine, his miracle. Suddenly Mallow skidded to a halt. Further down the dark corridor, down one more crumbling flight of stairs, was the secret room that hid Tin’s eight-wheeled invention. Mallow cocked his ears forward.
“They’re already inside, talking,” he said.
“How can you tell?” Tin couldn’t hear anything.
“Big ears, silly. They’re meant for such things.”
Tin felt his heart torque with despair, and his stomach too. They were already there. It was too late. He was trapped. Worse than that, Tin thought, they would take away his Fiddleback.
“You can’t give up so easily!” said Mallow, reading Tin with his veined ears and white whiskers. “We’ve hardly begun!”
“It’s not like we can just waltz in,” Tin said, distracted. “Trust me. You don’t want to get caught by these guys.”
“No, no. We have to be craftier than that. Like foxes or ravens,” said the hare, smug. “We hares learn everything we can from listening to the Ones Who Would Eat Us. Anyway, you yell, like you’ve fallen down and broken your leg. Tempt them towards us.”
Tin snorted, thinking this was the stupidest idea he’d ever heard, but all the while in the back of his mind he thrilled at the mention of ravens and of foxes.
“Then we’ll duck right here,” Mallow continued, ignoring the boy. “Into this clever dip in the walls, this little cleft of bedrock.”
Tin lifted the lantern and the light shone on a cramped crevice in the wall. “How did you know that was there?”
“Air currents. Smells different.”
“So long as they don’t look behind them,” Tin muttered.
“Yes,” said Mallow. “I’ll show you how to freeze just like a hare. A tried and true technique. Go so still and vacant in your eyes, barely even breathing, vacant in your head too, so utterly uninteresting, that even if they do look over their shoulders, they will be too uninterested to process your presence.”
Tin eyed the hare. His ears only reached the boy’s knees, yet he was standing there, nose moving, full of perfect confidence.
“Then what?”
The hare flicked his ears back. “No idea.”
Tin smiled at the leveret’s cocky bravado, recognizing himself in it. Then he screamed, as if with great pain.
“Good,” whispered Mallow after the echoes quietened. “They heard you. They’re coming.”
He directed Tin into the depression in the wall first. It was only a slight dip, a layer of stone that doubled back to make a cleft. Tin’s left shoulder was still clearly visible, and his foot. The leveret tucked himself between Tin’s calves. The boy blew out the lantern, and total darkness fell.
“Okay, now start emptying your head. Think of it like a pool of water just draining until there’s nothing. And when I say so, don’t move a muscle. Hold your breath.”
For what felt like for ever but amounted to only a scant minute, Tin tried to quieten his mind. He pictured his thoughts like streams of water flowing down from his head and out of his feet, but an image of his friend Sebastian kept slipping in as everything else emptied. Sebastian, posted as a sentinel while Tin murmured stories into the dim candlelight. Sebastian, creeping through these same hardpack tunnels just a step behind, always a little bit more nervous, and a good fifteen centimetres shorter, but quick and clever and good with maps, stealing extra oats from a barrel in the cellars with a snicker.
“Hey, shh,” Mallow whispered to Tin, breaking into his thoughts.
“I wasn’t talking!” said Tin, startled.
“No, but your mind was. I could hear the sound of all that busy-ness like cracking twigs underfoot. Empty, quick, they aren’t far!” The leveret nipped Tin’s ankle for good measure. Tin let out his breath, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Sebastian.
Escape, he thought. What does the hare mean by “escape”? Could they really escape the Cloister? Could they really escape the City itself? But then Seb came back into his mind. I can’t leave Seb behind, he thought. He’s my only friend.
Mallow glared, just a dark flicker of eyes. Footsteps clip-clopped round the corner.
Tin went totally still. A faint glow of lantern light skittered across the walls.
“Where could the little brat have got to?” came Brother Warren’s voice just a little bit ahead of his feet, a high edge in it, nervous and under pressure. “That scream was so close by.”
“He’s a hardy lad,” Father Ralstein replied, “maybe he tripped but kept on running, right back up to his dormitory, thinking we’d never be the wiser. Not wanting to get in trouble for eavesdropping.”
Brother Warren paused in his stride suddenly, just alongside the crevice where Tin and Mallow had pressed themselves, frozen and vacant-eyed. Brother Warren stiffened and began to turn his head and the lantern in his hand. Tin’s mouth went dry, but he remembered Mallow’s soft voice, his perfect stillness, and filled his head with clouds, with sky, vast and empty.
“Strange,” said Brother Warren after a long moment, sniffing. He began to walk again. Father Ralstein looked sharply to both sides where the younger man had stopped, scanning in a general way.
“I’m sorry, Father. I felt something, somebody near, like a shadow. Thought I smelled a whiff of burned rapeseed oil.” He looked over his shoulder. Tin saw the man’s eyes fall right on the edge of Mallow’s golden haunch, but process nothing.
“Ghosts, Brother?” chuckled Father Ralstein. “Boy must’ve run this way back to the dorms.” There was an edge of irritation in his voice, a cold metallic tone. “Why treat him like a thief in the night?” he continued. “If we want him on our side, if we want him to tell us the secret of his golden machine, which hardly looked golden to me though you have assured me that it was when you saw it, why not pull him from the Alchemics Workshop tomorrow morning, talk to him in the meeting room with a cup of chicory-root coffee, man to man, a treat. Flatter his ego a bit?”
Brother Warren was silent. “I sense he is wily,” he said, after a moment. “I sense he will fight us. We should capture him and take his machine now.”
“Nonsense, Brother,” murmured the Father, their voices getting fainter. “Nothing we can’t break. Nothing we can’t bribe. And I know about the egos of young men. I understand these things. We don’t want to make a scene, chasing him through the dormitories, making the other boys take up his side against us. We don’t want them to think we are thieves, Brother. We want the boy to bring us his invention of his own free will. It will go much easier, thus. We must coax him, butter him up. Come now, Brother, it was a good attempt, but I’ll take over from here.”
Tin and Mallow stayed still, breathing shallowly for a
good few minutes after the voices and footsteps echoing through the tunnels had faded away. Then Tin looked down at Mallow and grinned.
“That was close!”
“It’s always close,” said the hare, shaking out his long ears and grooming at his chest with nervous relief. “You get used to it. You learn to go so quiet even your heart isn’t thundering. You rein it in.”
Tin shook his shoulders, which had gone stiff, and began to walk in the same direction his pursuers had gone.
“Hang on just a minute!” cried Mallow, settling back onto his haunches. “I’m not hopping another step until you tell me what in the world is going on. And what this Fiddleback is. You were talking so fast the first time round all I understood was that you’d made a – a thing out of old bits that looks like a spider but isn’t really a spider, and has something called an engine which is like a heart, and that when you sit inside it the whole thing turns to gold and comes to life? This sounds like utter madness! But I’m new to City things. Do enlighten me.”
Tin smiled a little at the leveret’s earnest expression, his big liquid eyes and quivering ears, and tried to explain – about the Fiddleback, about the Alchemics Workshop, about the Brothers and their gold and their Star-Breakers. As he spoke, the leveret’s eyes grew wider and wider, until at last he interrupted.
“This is very bad, very bad indeed,” Mallow said. “The Greentwins were more right than they even knew to send me to you. Do you know the true nature of stargold? Did they ever teach you that, or the stories of the Wild Folk?”
“The what?”
“Oh, dear…” The leveret sighed. “Well, we can talk about it all later. For now, escape is the name of the game! This Fiddleback of yours, we have to get it out of here. It’s very dangerous in the wrong hands.”
“Dangerous?” Tin was starting to feel afraid, and in very much over his head. Mallow had already started to bound back down the hall towards the Fiddleback. “Wait!” called Tin. “First we have to get Sebastian. He’s coming with us. Wherever it is we’re going.”
The Wild Folk Page 4