The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  “Was the vision I saw in the feather true, then?” said Comfrey. “Or false? How can we stop the Brothers from coming here? Don’t you realize that your very presence might be the thing that makes the vision I saw come true?”

  “Visions,” interjected Myrtle, who had been trying to keep up with the twists and turns and emotions of human conversation, “are notoriously fickle. The Greentwins taught us so. They show possibilities, warnings, hopes and, only sometimes, truths. It doesn’t much matter whether what you saw in the Fire Hawk’s feather was true. It just matters that it’s possible. And that’s plenty bad enough!”

  “Perhaps,” added Mallow through a mouthful of young yarrow leaves, “we might chat about the end of the world and all that while we move? According to the laws and wisdom of harekind, standing about doing nothing is never a good idea unless you are eating, in which case you are decidedly not doing nothing.”

  Myrtle nipped her twin affectionately. “Glad we don’t have to make a go of it alone, Mal,” she whispered. He looked at her with affectionate golden eyes.

  “That makes two of us,” he replied.

  “Good idea,” Tin said with a rueful smile at Mallow. Comfrey scowled. The boy made himself busy spinning each golden wheel and checking the tightness of hinges and screws.

  “New terrain,” he muttered. “The thing’s going to take a beating.”

  “Myrtle,” said Comfrey quietly. “Can we really trust him?” She eyed Tin, and the bright wheels of the Fiddleback. Despite herself she felt a small tug to ask him what it had been like to live in the City as an orphan boy, working for the Brothers.

  “Mallow’s my twin,” Myrtle said, ears back, not meeting Comfrey’s eyes. “And the Greentwins – I don’t think they would have sent my own brother to help someone untrustworthy.” She paced around Comfrey’s feet, worried. “Besides, we need all the help we can get, crossing through the land of the Wild Folk!”

  “Fine,” said Comfrey loudly, so Tin could hear her. “Let’s go.”

  He grinned and, with a gallant bow, gestured for the girl to climb into the Fiddleback, followed by Myrtle and Mallow. Almost at once it surged to life, more golden than ever.

  “Woah!” the boy exclaimed. “Looks like all four of us have a bit of stargold in our blood. It’s going to be a wild ride!”

  Comfrey flushed with pride, and smiled back, and Tin felt his stomach lurch at the sight of her open, lively grin. He slipped into the steering seat beside her and then they were off downhill through the firs and deep hills, wheels spinning. Comfrey let out a small shriek, first of fear, then of delight, as the small wind-stunted firs sped by them, the Fiddleback swaying and bouncing over rocks until it found the damp dirt of the path.

  “Which way are we going?” said Tin once they’d reached the pathway. Comfrey fumbled for the madrone-bark map the Basket-witches had drawn for her.

  “Straight along this footpath until it turns inland at the alders,” interjected Myrtle as Comfrey peered at the tattered bark. “Then we follow the creek until we reach a great meadow and some barns from Before. From there, we’ll be close to the old road, the one that runs dead north.”

  “Guess you really do know the way,” the girl said.

  “Weren’t you listening?” replied the leveret, “of course I do!” She flicked her ears smugly and settled against her brother’s flank, enjoying the comforting warmth of his nearness, and the wordless peace of hares.

  Up the eastern ridge, a Coyote-woman and her three sons watched the Fiddleback make its oddly graceful way along the path. They breathed the wafts of dust stirred up by the strange eight-legged contraption. They breathed the boy and girl smells, the leveret smells, the smells of metal and hinge and pedal and invention, and looked at one another, intrigued. With a pinch at her sons’ long, black-tipped tails, the Coyote-woman led the way at a trot along the crest of the ridge, keeping her ears cocked for the skittering, whirring sound of the Fiddleback.

  It took the children and the leverets until sundown to reach the meadow at the edge of the alder-lined creek. They stopped once for lunch where the path first turned inland, travelling under the deep alder-shade where the air smelled of sweet bark and water. Comfrey laughed at Tin’s face when he took his first bite of acorn cake mixed with a handful of dried huckleberries. His eyes watered with the rich vibrancy of the flavours on his tongue. They didn’t encounter any Wild Folk on the footpath, nor sense them watching from the trees and hills, save once when Comfrey glimpsed several very tall, very green women deep inside the alders bending over a fringe of new nettles. But the Fiddleback moved so quickly, and with such relative silence, that they were nothing but a blur behind her. They managed to startle up several flocks of quail, to whom the leverets apologized profusely out the front window, and after which Tin stared with open wonder. Their bronze and grey feathers! Their whirring cries!

  The boy was intoxicated by the sights and smells of the wild land that whirred past the Fiddleback’s window. The shapes of alder trees and their shadows; the muddy roughness of the footpath; the rich smells of forest humus and new grass and fir needles and moss. The largeness of the land unsettled him only a little, and its utter lack of discernible pattern – no walls or brick floors or beakers of mercury or terrible gleaming Wall in sight – made him feel light-headed, while his thoughts felt easy and free and glad.

  They stopped in the meadow where their dirt footpath met a broader one to make camp for the night. Comfrey had grown easier around the boy. It had been such a peaceful, uneventful day, spent largely in silence staring out at the moving land. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so hard, this task to find the Elk of Milk and Gold. Perhaps Olima wasn’t at all like people had told her. Perhaps those were just stories. Perhaps they could succeed…

  In the twilight, Comfrey set about looking for dry twigs and brush to create a small fire, eager to demonstrate her skill in such matters in front of Tin, who, as a City boy, would never have seen such a thing before. From a distance, the Fiddleback looked small and spindly and very strange in the middle of that meadow, like a great skeleton or a dream-creature, looming up out of the shadows.

  “Comfrey!” came Myrtle’s shrill cry. “Look up!”

  The girl whirled, not knowing which direction the leveret meant for her to look. Standing right in front of her in the near-dark were four lean, very tall Coyote-folk, ears tall and perked. Three were young males with muscled, furred arms, who brandished little bone knives. The fourth was a female with a long scar across her face from one eye to the opposite jawbone. She grinned, showing sharp teeth, and Comfrey screamed. Behind her she heard another shout, this time from Tin.

  “Quick, Comfrey, come quick!” he yelled.

  She broke into a run. Now four more Coyote-folk surrounded the Fiddleback where it sat alone in the meadow not ten paces from where they’d laid down their packs.

  “I don’t know where they came from!” Tin cried.

  “Astonishing sneakery!” moaned Mallow. “How did we miss them?” He jumped into Tin’s arms.

  “What do you want?” demanded Comfrey, striding towards the Coyote-folk who surrounded the Fiddleback. She gave them her very best glare. But they were fierce-eyed, and danced and leaped around the spider-legged vehicle on long, nimble legs, howling. When she tried to come nearer, one snapped his teeth at her and shot a furred hand out, almost catching her braid. She saw the jagged rim of those fangs in his human face, and leaped backwards just in time. “Go away!” she yelled, and threw a rock. They howled with laughter.

  Tin scrambled to join her, tossing more rocks, but the four other Coyote-folk – the mother and her three neargrown sons – were all around them now too, yipping and shrieking their hunting cries.

  Myrtle went still as death behind Comfrey’s cloak, while Mallow hid himself in Tin’s coat. Comfrey and Tin knocked into one another with panic at the sound and clasped hands without thinking. Then, quick as light, all eight Coyote-folk were upon the Fiddleback, each grabbing a long sp
indled leg. The Coyote-woman looked hard at Comfrey with star-bright eyes, and her tail brushed the girl’s legs. Then she, her three sons, and her four brothers were off at a lope, the kidnapped Fiddleback lumbering and jerking along amidst them.

  After a head-spinning instant of shock, Tin bolted after them, his skinny legs outstretched in a desperate gallop. Mallow, revived from his panic, leaped down to the ground and tore after the boy. Comfrey scrambled to gather up their backpacks and followed them with a cry of dismay. Myrtle bounded at her heels, her ears laid flat, her whole body streamlined in the night air. In the distance a chorus of long, high-pitched howls split the darkness.

  It didn’t take long for Comfrey to catch up with Tin. She flew down the road, feeling the power in the gasp of her breath, the muscles in her legs, the trust she felt in her body as she sprinted through the dark, her braids thumping on her back.

  The hares were now far ahead, just two creamy backsides down the dark road, sniffing at the ground and the laurel-scented air for the trail of the thieving Coyote-folk. For a good kilometre, their scent led straight down the centre of an overgrown old road from the time Before. The hares kept to it easily, pausing every so often to pant small misty breaths into the cold night air and wait for Tin and Comfrey to catch up. The Coyote-folk were quick, even with the clattering Fiddleback between them, and already the sound of their howling, the hiss of wheels, and the breaking of twigs and stirring of brush ahead of them, had grown faint.

  The leverets’ ears quivered with every other rustle and thump of sound as they ran. They followed the Coyote-folk’s scent through a flat and scrubby meadow where cows had grazed in the time Before. Comfrey cursed as a remnant scrap of fence tore her green wool hem. At last she caught up with the hares, her lungs burning. They raced through a stand of willows, got wet to their knees in a creek, and emerged dripping and gasping at a crossroads in the middle of an abandoned ghost town from Before, with Tin close behind.

  Comfrey stared in astonishment at the ruined houses that lined the road, now just skeletons of wood and stone that had collapsed inwards with the weight of time and blackberry brambles. She had never seen ruins like this in her life. All the towns of Before had been burned, she thought. One of the houses still stood here, and its elegant wooden walls amazed her. It was so tall, with a covered porch and balcony and windows made of glass that were bigger than she was, not just one row but two, the second high up beyond the height of the porch, as high as the trees. The dark grey paint peeled off the old building in great strips, giving it a mottled appearance. The porch leaned dangerously on the far side and half the balcony’s railing was broken, held up by a just-leafing wisteria vine, but Comfrey still stared in amazement. A haphazard sign made of driftwood hung from a hook above the porch, with words painted red across it: The Holy Fool’s Inn.

  “Where are we?” she breathed. But Tin had hardly stopped to look at the old building – to him it was nothing unusual, only another half-decayed house like the many he had seen lining the City streets out of the Cloister windows. And the hares were busy sniffing the ground and night air.

  “They’re nowhere!” cried Myrtle.

  “Coyotes have a habit of doing that,” said Mallow. “They are consummate tricksters.”

  “What if they’ve figured out how to work the silk?” Tin said, running to the base of an oak tree and peering up. He heard a sudden, loud rustling and gasped. “They’re up here! I can hear them!”

  Mallow raised up onto his back legs and sniffed the air cautiously. It didn’t smell like one of the Coyote-folk, but there certainly was something in the oak tree, and the leveret took a few more steps forward, listening.

  A large, silvery being leaped from the branches and landed with the swish of a striped tail next to Tin. It was a Raccoon-woman in a dress all of scraps and bones, big and hunched and cackling with delight.

  “Well well well,” she crooned in a voice that rattled. “Look at this fine specimen here, are you a human boy, are you indeed?” She reached out two strong, long-fingered hands and seized Tin’s throat, pulling him very close. She had a woman’s face, but grey-furred, with a black bandit stripe across her eyes and several long canine teeth that clicked and flashed as she spoke. Her breath smelled of fish and earth and rotten fruit, and Tin gagged, swallowing down a cry. She pressed her fingers a little tighter, scratching him with her nails, feeling along his throat and neck and down to his shoulders with busy, terrible hands, all the while talking. “I’ve always wondered what I would do if I could only get my hands on one of you,” she muttered. “If I would dunk you in the stream and break you into pieces like a crayfish to eat juicy and raw, or if I would keep you as my pet on a string, and make you dance for me round my fire? Or maybe you’d be better seared on the fire and fed to my children, yes, perhaps that would be best, perhaps that would be fair, after all your kind did to ours long ago… And oh, I do wonder about all these strong bones… How nice they would look among my collection.” She sniffed him with a strange, black-rimmed nose and flicked out her tongue to taste his skin. Tin screamed.

  “Let him go, you nasty old creature!” Comfrey yelled, unable to bear the sight, or Tin’s scream of fear. She picked up a willow stick, took a deep breath, and ran straight at the Raccoon-woman.

  “Comfrey, don’t!” cried Myrtle behind her. “You can’t just beat off one of the Wild Folk! Don’t you know what she might do then?”

  “Listen, ma-madam,” Tin was stammering, trying to think how he might escape. “Let’s make a deal. You tell my friends whether you’ve seen a group of Coyote-folk go by with a big golden-wheeled spider, and I-I will come with you.”

  “No you won’t, Tin!” Comfrey said, her willow stick raised, not sure what to do. The Raccoon-woman was very large and strong, and her hands flashed with sharpened claws. She turned towards Comfrey now, shrieking with rage and excitement.

  “Do I smell another human child? Two at once! Indeed, indeed, I must have these lovely bones of yours, they will clatter and clink so beautifully in the wind, and what tales they will sing to my children!”

  Suddenly the door of the dark grey inn opened with a loud creak. Golden light from within and the sound of music poured out across the covered porch and down the steps, illuminating them all.

  “Delilah!” came a deep, rasping voice. A man with an unusually oblong forehead and no hair anywhere on his body stepped out into the pool of light on the porch. The Raccoon-woman looked up, her black eyes flashing.

  “Can’t you see I’m busy, you old Fool?” she hissed with disgust.

  The man on the porch pulled three oranges from the pockets of his multicoloured, patchwork robes, juggled them once, then tossed them to Delilah. With a little distracted cluck of delight she let go of Tin and caught them in her long fingers.

  “Let the children alone, and leave our doorstep at once,” the man said. Although his voice was steady, Comfrey heard a hint of dread in it. “We Fools have only this place, and it belongs to no one but us. Unless you behave in a kind and gentle and tolerant manner, you may not come so near our Inn. These children are human and they are on our territory. Leave them to us.”

  “Very well, very well,” Delilah muttered, looking irritated. “The boy tasted foul anyhow.” She spat at Tin’s feet, sliced an orange open with one long nail, and ambled into the darkness of the willow trees on the far side of the road, leaving the scent of citrus in her wake.

  “Praise to all Hares!” wheezed Mallow, grooming at his fur to soothe himself.

  “Who on earth are you?” said Myrtle to the man on the porch. “You are not one of the Wild Folk.” She sniffed the air, appraising him.

  “No, no,” replied the man with a chuckle. “I’m Oro, and this is The Holy Fool’s Inn.” He spread his hands wide. “Come, come, get out of that darkness where Wild Folk lurk. Delilah is not all bad, but you must know that the Wild Folk are not overfond of your kind.” He was looking at them closely with his light eyes. “I assure you though that
you are very welcome here, with us. It is long since we have seen another human being. What a delight it is! Do come up, children and leverets, do come up.”

  “We’re in a desperate rush as it turns out,” blurted Tin. “Would you mind just pointing the direction a pack of Coyote-folk and an odd eight-legged vehicle went, not more than twenty minutes ago? A vehicle like a spider?”

  “Manners, manners,” whispered Mallow, nervous at the sight of this strange outpost in Wild Folk land, trying to remember if the Greentwins had ever spoken of it. The Holy Fools, they did sound oddly familiar, but the Greentwins had told them so many tales, it was hard for a hare to keep them all straight. This man smelled human, but very strange, and humans in greater numbers and by firesides did, he knew, have a special fondness for roasted hare.

  Oro cocked his oblong head, which made his forehead glint. “Is our Oddness already rubbing off?” the man said, bemused. “What a strange description. Makes me downright anxious with anticipation for the stories which lie ahead!”

  “Well, have you seen them or what?” Tin persisted.

  “Nothing of the sort, lad, I’m sorry to say. But night has fully descended, and as you have learned already, it’s best not to be abroad in the dead of it, not as a human being, oh no. Much worse than Delilah, I can assure you, roam the darkness. If she had been a vengeful Mountain Lion-woman, your throat would have been slit before you could make a sound. A good rest and a meal, and you can be off again in the morning. And perhaps the laws of hospitality will oblige you to give us your story before carrying on. Stories make the world go round, eh? What a delight they are for us Fools. We take tales like other men and women take tea, or toddies. It’s not often that Country Folk pass this way. Do come up, my friends. You look half-dead with weariness.”

  “But – my Fiddleback!” Tin said, his voice strangled.

  “Hush, Tin,” whispered Mallow. “The man is right. Nights in Olima are no place for hares or children to be abroad. And besides, the Coyotes are Wild Folk. Well, weren’t we meant to bring the Fiddleback to the Wild Folk?”