The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  “It is precisely for this that we must trust her,” said Salix, and she laid a gentle, dark hand on Myrtle’s brow. The hare didn’t flinch, but only blinked and moved her broad nose.

  “Well, out with it then,” the leveret demanded. “What are we meant to actually do? It’s all beginning to sound a bit doom and gloom round here!”

  Salix snorted, and even Comfrey couldn’t help but smile.

  “You must go north,” said Rush, her voice ringing. “To the very end of the land, the very tip, the point called Tamal, where our sisters the Grizzly-witches dwell. They are tenders of the elk herds, of the prairie meadows, and of the northern star. In the middle of their herd is the Elk of Milk and Gold herself, but she will not necessarily be easy to find. She is very, very well guarded. Easy to spot, though. Her hoofs are gold. Her eyes are violet. Her fur is cream. You must find her, and you must give her this feather, and you must tell her what you’ve seen, and ask her what must be done.”

  “It won’t be easy, child,” said Salix, cupping Comfrey’s cheek with a sturdy hand. Her eyes were sad, and old. “The Grizzly-witches have sworn to hate humankind for all time, for what your people once did to theirs. They will kill you if they can, not caring that you come as a friend. They are powerful and strong, but short-sighted. And the Elk might turn you directly to a pile of embers before you ever have a chance to speak to her. It depends on her mood. She is, after all, a Creatrix, and all Creatrixes wield destruction just as easily as birth, like the earth. And she carries much sorrow. Nevertheless it seems it is you who must go, and quickly.”

  “But – why not the Fire Hawk himself? He’s magnificent and strong and ferocious. Shouldn’t he just go and tell her? I’m only a girl! If so much is at stake, surely it’s better someone magical goes to fetch this Elk!” Comfrey blushed. “I mean no disrespect, only—”

  “It is precisely because you are a human girl that you must go,” said Rush in a quiet voice. The yellow goldfinch in her hair sang a sweet, sad note. “Don’t underestimate the power of a human hand, reaching out in friendship and in peace. I think that it is precisely because these ills are human-made, that their healing must therefore be human-made too.”

  When Tin woke up, a full twelve hours later, head throbbing, he found himself in a warm bed covered with wool blankets and one faded but sturdy red quilt. The bed was in a lantern-lit chamber made of salvaged wood and the old metal parts of a forgotten vehicle. He could hear the lap of water beyond the walls. For a moment he wondered if he’d died and woken up in a new life, a sort of all-at-once reincarnation. He turned his head and through blurry eyes saw a tall, lean, dark-haired man sitting close to his bed. The man was holding a warm cloth covered with a paste of crushed leaves, which he had been applying on and off to the boy’s bruised temple.

  “Hello, Tin,” said the man, smiling. Tin lurched his head up and was relieved to see Seb in the bed next to him, still asleep. Across the small room, Mallow was crouched near the wood stove beside an older man and a woman with a mound of grey hair. The hare sensed Tin’s eyes and glanced over at him with a look of affection and relief. Tin felt a warm slip of happiness in his stomach, and turned back to the dark-haired man at his bedside. Mallow bounded over to the bed and leaped up.

  “Where are we?” said Tin. His voice came out cracked and thin with sleep. “And…who are you?”

  The man chuckled. “I’m called Thornton,” he said. “And as for here – well, that’s top secret. But as you were unconscious from the moment you hit the water until now, and since, according to your extraordinary friend Mallow, it seems you were running from the Brothers, I will tell you at least a little bit. You’re underground, in the old waterways of the City. Water’s nasty in these aqueducts – don’t drink it – but it makes for a great mode of transportation. You’re in the company of some of the Mycelium.” Thornton gestured his hand around the warmly lit room. The older man and woman by the wood stove looked up and smiled. Tin noticed that their skin, like Thornton’s, was so pale from the lack of sunlight underground that it was nearly translucent. “There are close to fifty of us in total, spread throughout the underground.”

  “The Mycelium,” said Tin, savouring the word on his tongue like a riddle. “What does that mean? Are you a secret society? What do you do down here?”

  “Easy there, lad,” said Thornton, chuckling. “Seems the head injury hasn’t slowed your wits at all! And as your rescuers, it is we who should be questioning you.” A certain intensity infused his features, like a kindled flame, and he looked at Tin keenly. His eyes were a very pale, piercing green.

  Tin went red in the face, embarrassed and uneasy all at once. Could these people be trusted? But he had liked Thornton immediately, even before he was awake, just from the feeling of his hand, fatherly and capable, pressing the compress to his forehead. He liked that the man’s black hair was scraggly and peppered with silver, and that it glinted here and there with a thin tight braid. He liked Thornton’s voice – deep and commanding, but also calm and soft. He liked that Thornton looked lithe as an animal, able to slip through anything, any tunnel or grate. He looked every bit the part of an outlaw. He looked nothing like one of the Brothers. He looked like somebody Tin might tell a story about.

  “Mycelium are little fungal root filaments, and when they fruit they make mushrooms,” Thornton said into the silence, softening. “But meanwhile, underground, the mycelium are really the ones doing all the work – finding water and minerals and decomposing animals.” He grinned at Tin, and Tin smiled back at the suddenly exuberant expression on Thornton’s face, though he hardly understood what the man was talking about. Thornton continued. “They connect all the roots of all the plants, bringing them water and nutrients in exchange for sugars. They’re like an underground secret trade network, or communication network. They know how every piece fits. There, your biology lesson for the morning.” He stood, stretching.

  “And…you live down here in the City’s underground passageways and tunnels, all the time?” Tin stammered, trying to pretend this whole mycelium concept made perfect sense to him, even though he had never seen more than a stray dandelion sprouting in the Cloister’s courtyard. “Do the Brothers know you are down here? How do you get around without anyone seeing you? Are you secret traders?” The words gushed out. Mallow tried to shush him with a leg-thump, but the boy ignored him.

  “You certainly know how to ask the right questions. But that’s all top-secret information, kiddo.” Thornton winked. “Maybe I can answer some of it later. Right now, we’ve got to get this show on the road. We’re heading south today, to an old buried creek.” Thornton turned now to the old man and woman by the wood stove. “I hear there are bear bones in the strata there, very old ones with a ghost and a story,” he said, addressing the woman in particular. Tin looked over with excitement at Seb, and saw that his friend was awake, and leaning nearer to listen.

  “Seb!” he exclaimed. “We got found by underground pirates who are named after mushrooms and trade in bear bones!”

  Thornton laughed. “Sort of,” he said. “Hungry, boys?” Tin and Seb caught eyes again, both gleaming. On top of the wood stove an iron pot of soup bubbled. Thornton ladled some into two beaten-up tin bowls and brought it over. Mallow sniffed at them in disgust, and leaped off the bed to go and examine the room for any other titbits he might eat.

  “Stolen meat and dandelion roots,” said Thornton. “Don’t ask how we got either. Trade secrets.”

  The bitter roots felt nourishing right to the boys’ bones, the soup buttery and well seasoned with flavourful herbs. Tin drank his so fast he got overheated and broke a sweat. He was thinking about mycelium networks underground, and what sorts of information these people might be gathering, and what mycelia looked like, as he drank his soup. Did they look like spiderwebs, but underground? Then all at once he remembered how they had got here, and choked.

  “My Fiddleback!” He turned desperately to Mallow.

  “Ah, yes! We
have it, it’s safe, not to worry, just some broken legs. Easy to fix,” said the older man who had been sitting by the fire. He came and stood between the two beds. “I’m Anders, and this is my wife, Beatrix.” The woman joined him, smiling, her great pile of grey hair moving like a cat. She was stouter and taller than her husband, who was short and lithe. Beatrix looked to Tin like she could lift the whole wood stove over her head in one motion, without effort, but her green eyes were softer than any eyes he’d ever seen. They held what he could only imagine was a motherly look of concern.

  “Did you make the soup?” asked Tin, not knowing what to say to a woman the age of a grandmother, having never encountered one before, and remembering some vague association between grandmothers and soup, from hearsay perhaps.

  She laughed. “Oh, heavens no. Can’t cook to save my life. It’s all him.” She gestured towards her husband.

  Tin, surprised, looked back at Anders with new respect. “Where is my Fiddleback? I need to see it, I need to make sure…” He stopped himself, wondering how much to tell these Mycelium. He tried to get up, then realized his legs were bruised too, and ached terribly.

  “It’s there,” Thornton said, pointing to a far corner beyond the wood stove. The intense, kindled-flame look was on his face again, and his eyes followed Tin.

  “It’s a genius piece of machinery,” said Thornton carefully, narrowing his eyes.

  “That’s high praise, coming from him,” said Anders. “He’s the one who rigged most of our little canal boats so that they run on a combination of wood-fired steam and our own pedalling. Wood is exclusively old dead roots we find underground and dry.” He smiled at Tin, then glanced a little uneasily back at Thornton. “Perhaps you lads can join them eventually. It will be a great help to our cause. We always need more young hands.”

  Tin’s fingers tightened against Mallow’s back. The hare stiffened too, looking quick and sharp at the two men. “You don’t understand,” the boy said. “We can’t stay in the City at all.”

  “What?” said Seb, his slim face, coppery in the oil light, falling. “I didn’t think we really meant it, Tin. Not that part, not really.”

  Anders let out a snort of laughter. “You didn’t expect we’d let you go so easily, did you? Not now you know about us.”

  “Especially since we still know so little of you,” said Thornton, his tone and his face suddenly very hard. “You boys have some explaining to do.” He wheeled the Fiddleback into the centre of the room with a swift, angry movement, despite Tin’s protestations. “Something very strange is afoot. A change in the pattern of things. This Fiddleback of yours. You boys trying to leave the City. The talking hare. I am a seer of strangeness, of patterns, and of change. And Tin, I must tell you, you’ve created something very powerful, and therefore very dangerous. So I must ask you to begin at the beginning, and tell me exactly what is going on. There will be no more talk of coming or going, until we understand each other better.” His eyes flashed, and Tin felt queasy. This was not a man you wanted to make your enemy.

  “But I don’t have any idea what is going on!” he retorted. A bright anger was rising in him. How did he know that Thornton and his crew weren’t just as greedy as the Brothers? How did he know they didn’t just want the Fiddleback for their own ends? “Mallow has a better idea than I do,” he continued, trying to calm his voice. “Mallow was sent by the – the Greentwins. From the Country.” He paused, watching Thornton’s face to gauge his reaction, to see if he could read anything there that would help him know whether or not the man could be trusted. To see if he might frighten him with talk of the Country. What he saw on Thornton’s face took him entirely by surprise. It was a look of pure shock, followed by a sorrow, which filled the man’s eyes to the brim. An expression of longing, love and loss settled there, the likes of which Tin had never known.

  “The fiddleback spider who made the golden silk,” he stammered, trying to figure out what to say. “I promised to get her out of the City, to freedom. I won’t go back on my promise. Not after what she did for us.”

  Thornton seemed to be only half listening now. There was a faraway look in his eyes, as if he’d been spooked. He sat back on his heels.

  “I didn’t think anybody ever left the City,” interjected Seb. “Can we really trust a hare’s word that it isn’t dangerous? Filled with people who are still infected with the disease of Before? Plus gangs and lots of violence?”

  “Excuse me, young lad,” cried Mallow, thumping his back feet on the ground. “My word is impeccable, how dare you!”

  The sorrow on Thornton’s face dissipated as he broke into a loud laugh. His teeth were crooked and sharp. Mallow jumped back several paces, alarmed by the sudden outburst, and the display of so many teeth.

  “What’s so funny?” said Seb, a little frightened.

  “Will it kill you of shock to learn that I, my boys, am a Country lad?” Thornton said. Tin felt a tingle run from his feet to his spine. Mallow sat straight up.

  “I thought there was something familiar about you,” the leveret said, bounding off the bed to sniff at Thornton’s trouser-cuffs and bare feet, which were filthy and covered in black hair.

  “I should have expected that was the sort of nonsense they taught in the Fifth Cloister of Grace and Progress, diseases and gangs and all,” said Thornton.

  “How can you be from the Country, but live here?” stammered Seb.

  Tin sat silent, feeling a lightness rise through his body at the thought of Thornton, and the Country, the little spider and his Fiddleback, somehow all wrapped up together. Despite the darkness of the tunnels, the closeness of the canal boat, he felt himself expanding in every direction. The City’s Wall no longer felt like the end of the world, but only the beginning.

  “An eye for an eye,” replied Thornton. “You first, my lads. Tin, tell me of your Fiddleback; tell me how it is you came to make such a thing. Then I will tell you more of who I am, and what I know.”

  The hanging lanterns shifted as the canal boat took a sharp turn, flashing long shadows across Thornton’s face. Beatrix called out an apology from the front, and Anders brought a battered kettle from the wood stove and poured a pot of tea, pushing cups towards the boys with a wink.

  “Well,” said Tin, taking a deep breath. The air smelled of rapeseed oil and woodsmoke and the steeping dark tea. And something else too, a fresh and marshy scent. It made him feel suddenly and inexplicably glad. And so he told the man everything, from the very beginning, from the fiddleback spider he saw in the closet three months past to the moment his own Fiddleback had glowed gold and begun to run, and all the way to the end, when they had fallen down the manhole into the underground.

  “When the Spider makes Gold the Land will Behold the return of the Old,” repeated Thornton when Tin had fallen silent, his face suffused with wonder. “We are doubly blessed today, my dear boys!”

  Tin and Seb looked at each other, and Mallow thumped a foot on the ground in alarm.

  “Unwittingly the Brothers have given us a great gift,” Thornton continued. “For even among evil men there are good ones lurking, or at least wise ones. This Solomon Pierce they spoke of…he read the stars truly, only did not properly understand their meaning. I know because I too once heard of this oracle, but only in part. You have completed it for me. All I ever knew was the first part. Wait for the Spider of Gold, it was said to me. The return of the Old – I take it your Brothers think this means themselves?” Thornton swallowed down the milky dark tea in one swift gulp and began to laugh.

  “They aren’t my Brothers!” Tin objected, eyeing Thornton uneasily. Why was the man laughing like that? Was he mad? “But yes, that’s what they said. Something about perfecting all the land again, raising it up from savagery. Only I can’t imagine they could perfect anything. Everything I’ve ever seen the Brothers touch turns to poison, or to sorrow. We orphans are hardly better than their slaves. I don’t know what it used to be like out there in the times Before, but I bet the
y would have treated us orphans just the same, only used us for something different. Put us down in the mines maybe, digging for stargold. I know that, for the good of the City, I should give them my Fiddleback, but I can’t. I know we need more stargold to make the City great once more. But I don’t want them to have it, not after seeing a real spider, and meeting Mallow and – and you! There’s a mystery in the world that has more to do with wonder than with their kind of progress. That’s what I made my Fiddleback for, I think…”

  “… and that is why your Fiddleback is so miraculous,” cut in Thornton. “That is why your Fiddleback runs the way it runs. The Brothers will never understand that. Come, let me show you something.”

  He turned to the Fiddleback and opened its door. Tin began to protest, but Mallow thumped him in the stomach with his back legs to quieten him.

  “Mallow,” said Thornton. The hare started up in surprise. “Come here and hop in.”

  “Me?” said the hare.

  “Him?” said Tin, trying to contain his irritation. What was Thornton trying to prove?

  Mallow leaped in and settled down in the driver’s seat, moving his whiskers and nose all about. The Fiddleback flashed to life in a single surge of gold. Then it began to move, though it was hobbled by its broken legs. Mallow thumped the seat in alarm and bounded right back out again. The Fiddleback stilled.

  “Confounded human contraption,” he snapped. “Taking a creature by surprise like that! It’s indecent.”

  Thornton laughed. Tin stared.

  “What does it mean?” the boy whispered. “What makes it turn on like that, without me in it? You know, don’t you, Thornton?”

  “It runs on stargold,” replied Thornton.

  “Well, yes,” said Tin. “That’s what I thought too. But how? There is no stargold left!” replied Tin. “At least, not that I could ever get my hands on to use. Although the little fiddleback made some, didn’t she…?” He trailed off.