The Kingdom of the Bears

by Michael Wallace

  “I have a plan. I think we can escape, but you must do exactly what I say.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I need you to pretend to be dead.”

  King Greatclaw let out a sound that might have been a chuckle. “Pretend? Much longer in this dungeon and I won’t need to pretend.”

  It was too true to be funny. Another week would finish him off. “You won’t die in here,” she said with sudden resolve. “Now, listen, my king. It’s dark in these tunnels. If we can put out their torches, the weasels will be just as blind as you are, but you know the tunnels. You can find our way out. But first, lay on the ground and don’t move until I give a shout.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then fight with all your strength.”

  She pounded on the door. “Help! Guards. Someone come, quickly.”

  There was no answer at first, then a sleepy voice snarled from the other side of the door. “Shut up, you! Or I’ll give you something to shout about.” His voice was thick, groggy.

  “But you don’t understand. It’s the king.” She made her voice choke up, as if overcome with grief. “He’s dead.”

  “And what’s that to me? You didn’t think they put him in there to recover from his wounds, did you?” The weasel chuckled and Brownia wanted nothing more than to wring his neck. “So he’s died. One more problem settled. Now shut up and get to dying yourself.”

  With that, the weasel guard walked away. He wouldn’t answer any more cries.

  Brownia turned glumly back to Greatclaw. “So that’s it, then. I’d hoped to trick him into opening the door to take a look. With only one guard, I thought for sure we could overwhelm him.” She sank back to the ground with a clank of chains. “Maybe he’s right. Maybe there’s nothing left to do but die.”

  “No,” the king said from the darkness, his voice holding a curious tone as if he’d just thought of something. “There is something else we can do.”

  Brownia lifted her head. “Oh? What?”

  But Greatclaw was inching across the floor on his hands and his knees. If the guard hadn’t walked away, the rattling chains would have surely drawn attention. She made her way to his side. The king felt along the wall, throwing aside rubbish and groping along the floor.

  “Of course! Here it is.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Give me your paw!”

  He guided her paw to the wall. There was a damp, slimy hole, about the size of her head. She put her arm inside, and extended it as far as her shoulder before she could reach no more.

  Greatclaw explained. “When the pit was filled or it started to stink up the manor, servants would come with shovels and dig out the filth. Then they would divert water from the cisterns to flow through the window up there.” He stopped to cough, before continuing, “The water would wash away the dregs that couldn’t be shoveled. It occurred to me that there must have been somewhere for the water to drain. I think we’ve found it.”

  “It’s too small. We’ll never fit.”

  Greatclaw scratched at the rock. Bits fell away under his claws. Years of damp had rotted the stone. Brownia joined him, and the two widened the hole as if they were digging through partially dried mud, rather than stone. They dug and dug until they reached harder, drier stone that would not yield.

  Exhausted from the effort, Brownia felt at the hole and realized with dismay that it was still too small. Big enough to fit their heads, but not large enough to squeeze through. Maybe for a weasel, or one of Brumbles’s human children, but not big enough for a bear. Reluctantly, she said as much to the king.

  Greatclaw grunted. “Even a bear grows skinny on a diet of moldy bread and water.” He turned and began to back his way down into the hole.

  Brownia stopped him. “Let me go first. I’m smaller.”

  She wasn’t sure if that was true or not; the king had become very gaunt, indeed. But she didn’t want him to crawl down only to become stuck. That would be a horrible fate, and a risk she would rather take herself.

  At first, the hole was so tight, in spite of their efforts, that she never thought she would make it. But the tunnel grew wider just past the initial opening. And here, beyond where they’d dug at the stone, the rock was still intact, and covered in a nasty smelling slime that lubricated her passage.

  Greatclaw crawled in behind her. He was gasping and wheezing, and groaned as he forced his still large frame through the hole. Again, the chains made a terrible racket. But their guard did not come to the door. Perhaps he was asleep again, or maybe he’d moved farther away, the better to ignore Brownia crying for help.

  Suddenly, she was flailing in water, sliding. The tunnel dropped into a wider stream, and she bobbed under before resurfacing with a gasp. It was one of the many streams that flowed through River’s Edge to eventually join the Alonus. Just as quickly, the stream came out of the hill, running into an alleyway, where she found herself among buildings in the open night air. The stream crossed the alleyway before disappearing below the building on the lower side.

  She splashed her way free and onto the cobblestoned street. As the king passed, she grabbed him and dragged him out, too. They lay gasping in lungfulls of the sweet night air.

  There was a footbridge over the stream, maybe five feet wide. “What was that?” a voice asked sharply from atop the bridge. There were several shapes. Garmley’s night guard. Weasels.

  It was so bright that she thought the enemy would see them, lying motionless though they were on their bellies. But they’d spent so much time in the darkness, that even the moon and a few torches were like the noonday sun to her eyes. The weasels wouldn’t see as much.

  “Just a rat,” said another of the shadows. “Nobody’ll be out on a night like this. Garmley would have their ears if they break curfew.”

  “Too loud to be a rat,” said the other voice.

  There was some arguing over just how much sound a rat would make, and then they returned to an earlier conversation, about how their captain had cut their ration of ale, and how he was probably drinking it all himself.

  King Greatclaw whispered to Brownia, “How many?”

  “Three weasels...” she began.

  “Only three? We can take them. I will find them by touch.”

  “Three weasels,” she continued, “and a wolverine.”

  Greatclaw was silent then. He would be weighing his own strength, and that of Captain Brownia. Together, they might just best the weasels, but a wolverine would be too much in their weakened state. At last, he said, “Ah, if only I had my mace, and the sky stone embedded within it. Then I would lay those weasels low.”

  “There is nothing for it now,” Brownia said. “We have no sky stone, and no weapons but what every bear is born with. Yes, and we have the blood of our ancestors flowing through our veins. That must be enough.”

  Greatclaw’s voice was low and reverent. “The blood of our ancestors. That is it. King Prestor is with me, even now. I don’t need the Sky Stone.”

  What was he talking about? Had he lost his mind?

  The king lifted his face to sky, letting the wind wash over it. A rumble started from his belly. And then, to Brownia’s shock, his body rippled and convulsed. He let out a cry of rage and pain. The enemy turned at the sound. They drew weapons and came with a snarl.

  Chapter Nineteen: A Struggle in the Dark

  The knife thrust at Aaron as he lay gasping on his hands and knees, his stomach pitching with nausea. He grabbed the weasel’s wrist just in time. The knife stopped inches from his throat. He tried to wrestle it away, but the sudden illness had weakened him and his enemy was too strong.

  The weasel grinned at him from the darkness as it forced the knife up next to his throat. It was a ferret, Aaron saw now, with black spots surrounding the eyes. It leaned its weight into the blade and the knife pressed right against his flesh. Aaron was fighting with every bit of his strength to hold the knife away, but it was already dimpling his flesh and would s
oon break the skin.

  “Don’t send a weasel to do a ferret’s work,” the ferret said. “And don’t send Half-Paw when only Snark will do.”

  It was then that Aaron realized that his enemy was toying with him. This Snark was speaking with little strain in his voice. He could press the weapon down at any time, slice through Aaron’s throat and kill him. And he was doing just that, but slowly, so as to preserve the boy’s agony until the point when Aaron’s muscles simple failed.

  “That’s right,” Snark said, as if seeing the looked of horrified understanding in Aaron’s eyes. “First you and then your sister. You will still be alive, suffocating through a cut throat when I kill her. How touching that you’ll die together.”

  But even as he said these last words, Snark’s eyes widened in surprise and alarm. He drew back, startled.

  Suddenly, Aaron felt the nausea passing. His muscles had been trembling with exhaustion, but now they burst with energy and strength. He threw the surprised ferret backward with a snarl and a roar. His night shirt and pants tore as he moved his arms and legs. He stood up, feeling completely whole again, but strange. Everything looked–and smelled–different. Aaron looked down at his hands, only they weren’t hands. They were paws. Black fur covered his arms, now powerful and rippling with muscles. He was a bear, a wild bear, tall and strong, like the ones that roamed wild and dangerous through the Green Mountains of Vermont. In his paw–had it been there the whole time?–he held the bit of sky stone that Bethany had given him.

  He lifted his head back and roared. A second roar joined his own. Bethany rolled out of her bedroll and joined him. She, too, had become a bear. Together they stood, filling the tent, a pair of enraged, wild black bears.

  Meanwhile, the ferret had been backing toward the tent door. As Aaron and Bethany turned their angry gaze in his direction, he turned and fled.

  “Follow him!” Aaron ordered. His words came out in something between a grumble and a growl, but she understood him. Aaron and Bethany dropped to all fours and raced after the escaping ferret, as if they had been bears all their lives.

  The camp was in a tumult. Others had heard their roars and discovered weasels slinking through their camp with murderous intentions. Here and there small battles broke out. Aaron thought he saw Brumbles, locked in a struggle with a big, dark shape that must have been a wolverine. Badgers saw the two bears and moved out of their way with haste and alarm. He spotted Snark, a low, slinking form, taking advantage of the confusion to escape the camp. The ferret slipped right past two badgers who had seized a white mink by the tail and were throwing him down, then binding his paws behind his back. It was obvious Snark didn’t care about his fellow weasels, or what happened to them.

  Aaron vowed not to let him escape, and so long as he was in the form of a bear, he felt nothing could stop him. And he had his sister with him, also a bear. They would catch Snark and finish him off. They would have to hurry; the ferret was already in the scrub brush that ringed the hill, disappearing into the darkness. If they hadn’t been bears, blessed with excellent hearing and smell, they would have lost him for certain. Instead, they stayed right on his trail.

  Broken Keep sat atop a hill, surrounded on three sides by rocky fields. The eastward facing slope was dense woodland, the final, stretching fingers of the great forest that stretched east and north for hundreds of miles. Snark fled into the woods, hoping, surely, to lose them among the trees and the blackness. The bears followed.

  A face peered out from a rotten hollow in a log when they paused to sniff at the trail. It was a gnome. A green beard grew from its face, looking like moss trailing from a tree. “Why? Why did you do it?” Or at least that’s what the gnome started to say. It got a good look at the two angry bears and the second ‘why’ turned into, “Eek!” squealed like a pig. It disappeared with great haste into its hollow, covering itself quickly with damp leaves.

  Deeper and deeper into the forest they chased Snark. There were gnomes all around, but they didn’t dare to bother the bears. Once they even stumbled through a mushroom patch and here Aaron had to pause. Each mushroom stood about two feet above the ground, with cones as big as Thanksgiving turkey platters. There was almost an acre of them in all, growing cone to cone, and they gave off a rich, loamy smell. The mushroom field was guarded by twenty or more gnomes, and here they had to move quickly to avoid being drawn into a fight. Once again, the creatures stopped grabbing for them as soon as they ran beyond the mushrooms. Just ahead was the ferret.

  At last they caught up with Snark in a clearing. A giant boulder blocked his path, so thickly covered with trees that it was hard to see in the darkness until it was right on top. Snark had come to the boulder and while he’d been searching for the path, a gnome reached out of a hole and grabbed him by the ankle. He snarled, slashing at the hand with his dagger. The gnome released him with a yelp of pain, but Snark was stumbling away from the hole and he ran right into the Merleys.

  Aaron seized him between his paws before he could weasel away. He gave Snark a shake. He opened his mouth and roared. The ferret writhed in his paws, biting and scratching viciously at paws, belly, neck; anything he could reach. But Aaron just held on tighter. He shook the creature back and forth, then opened his jaws. He bent to deliver a killing bite.

  “Stop!” Snark begged. He stopped struggling. “Please, I beg of you. Don’t do it.”

  Aaron stopped. “Why shouldn’t I?” He felt little pity for the creature, mostly just scorn. “You deserve to die for what you’ve done. And you were going to cut my throat. I heard it from your own mouth.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you were going to cut my throat and leave me to suffocate while you killed my sister.” Beside him, Bethany let out a low growl.

  “It was only to frighten you,” Snark whined. “I came to talk, not to fight.”

  “To talk? In the middle of the night? No, I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true. Garmley wanted me to kidnap you, and take you to River’s Edge, but only so he could talk to you away from the badgers and the bears. Garmley is tired of this war. He wanted to talk to you so that you could help him arrange a truce with the bears and the badgers.”

  Aaron knew the words were a lie. He’d seen the look of wicked delight in the ferret’s eyes when he’d promised to kill Aaron and his sister back in the tent. He was just saying whatever it took to save his own life. Aaron should kill him now. One fewer enemy to fight. But the problem was, he couldn’t do it. Not like this, with the creature powerless in his paws.

  “What are you doing?” Bethany asked.

  “I can’t.”

  “Finish him.”

  “No,” Aaron said. “We’ll take him back to the camp. A prisoner. I don’t think he’s telling the truth, but we can’t just kill him without being sure. Maybe he is carrying a message. Our risk is small.”

  “That’s right,” Snark said. “Just talk. That’s the only reason I came.”

  “But you don’t understand,” Bethany continued. There was urgency in her voice. “We don’t have that kind of time.”

  “What?”

  “Look around you,” she said. “We’re alone, in the middle of the woods. At night.”

  “But we’re bears,” Aaron said. “We have nothing to fear from...”

  She cut him off. “No, Aaron. We’re not bears. We’re kids.”

  It was then that Aaron realized what his sister was talking about. Too late. A shudder worked its way through his body. He was shrinking, growing weaker. Even his head was changing shape. To his side, Bethany was undergoing her own transformation. Whatever force that had overcome them earlier was fading. With it came a return of the gut-wrenching nausea.

  Snark squirmed free as the children fell backward, transformation completing itself. They were just kids again. Aaron’s head cleared slowly; the nausea passed. His eyesight had dimmed; he could scarcely see Snark now, standing in the shadows. There was the hint of dawn to the east, but it wasn’t enou
gh.

  He couldn’t see it, but it wasn’t hard to imagine an evil sneer on the ferret’s face as he said, “So, here we are. You are just human cubs after all.” He laughed. “Unarmed, barely even dressed. And I have a knife. It looks like my job will be easy enough after all.”

  Aaron scrambled to his feet. He looked around for a stick or something with which to defend himself. “Don’t do this. You said you wanted to talk. Now is your chance.”

  The ferret chuckled. “You fool.”

  “Please. I was willing to let you live.”

  “Only proving that you are twice a fool. Soon to be a dead fool.”

  A voice came out of the darkness, then. It was low and mournful, disappointed sounding. “Why? Why did you do it?”

  “Let go of me you vermin,” the ferret snarled. Snark was slashing at something with his knife. From all around them there was rustling in the leaves covering the forest floor. Voices were whispering. They sounded hurt and offended.

  “Why did you do it? Why?”

  “Do what?” Snark cried. “Why did I do what? What are you talking about!” He kicked and thrashed at the shadows. There were too many of them.

  “Yes, why?” Aaron wanted to know. The children stood back to back, away from the ferret and his struggles, with their backs against a tree. “Why did you do it? Why did you come here just to murder us? Is that all you weasels are about anyway? Killing and enslaving other people?”

  Snark ignored him. The hands were grasping, insistent, rising from the shadows. They were all around him and it was all he could do to fight them off. “No! No, you can’t do this to me. I didn’t do it. Do you hear me? I didn’t do it!” His voice raised in a high-pitched scream. “Aaron,” Bethany said in a worried voice.

  Aaron’s common sense got the better then, of his horrified curiosity as to what would become of Snark. He turned to her, and said, “Run!”

  They fled into the darkness. Though they tripped and stumbled and scraped against bushes and stubbed their shins, they continued to run as fast as they could.

  Behind them, Snark screamed and yelled. The forests echoed with a thousand whispers, drowning out his cries. “Why? Why did you do it?”