The Way of the Wilderking

by Jonathan Rogers

  Dobro said, “Me and Aidan just run up with a sure-enough modern day Veezo, Bayard. Feller says he dug this whole gully with a plow.”

  Bayard nodded. “I have seen such things before. But what are you doing in this part of the island? I knew the two of you had come out of the Feechiefen. But I thought you were in Sinking Canyons.”

  “Don’t that beat all you ever heard?” asked Dobro. “A feechie living in a big hole in the ground!”

  “‘Fallen are the Vezeyfolks,’” Bayard quoted. “‘In a gully, down a hole. No more fistfights, no more jokes.’” Dobro joined in on the chorus: “‘In a gully, down a hole.’”

  “Every night I go to sleep with my mama’s voice in my head,” said Dobro. “‘Fallen are the feechiefolks, in a gully, down a hole.’ I wake up in the morning, and there I am, down a hole. Ain’t no place for feechiefolks, I can tell you.”

  “But, Bayard,” Aidan said, “you said Vezeyfolks. ‘Fallen are the Vezeyfolks.’”

  “Did I?” Bayard shrugged. “Dobro was talking about Veezo a minute ago. I must have confused ‘Veezo’ and ‘feechiefolks’ into ‘Vezeyfolks.’”

  Aidan eyed Bayard. It wasn’t like him to mix up the old lore, whether it was feechie lore or civilizer lore. Was the old prophet starting to lose his wits in his old age?

  “I understand you have an army now,” Bayard said.

  “Yes,” Aidan answered.

  “You’re going to need it. The Pyrthens are coming, you know.”

  “Is that a prophecy?” Aidan asked. “Or just an observation?”

  Bayard smiled. “You don’t have to be a prophet to predict that the Pyrthens are coming when a kingdom grows weak. Are you ready to fight?”

  “We’ll have to be ready, won’t we? You make do with what you have.” Aidan began to think of everything he and his officers needed to do before the militiamen could really be called a serious fighting force.

  “Old Errol’s been working them villagers pretty good,” Dobro offered. “Marchin’, shootin’ arrows at just-pretend soldiers, diggin’ tunnels. And when they ain’t doin’ that, Jasper’s got them diggin’ up timbers and cold-shiny pots and rubbish like that.”

  Bayard laughed, though he had no idea what Dobro was talking about. “Aidan,” he asked, “what’s Dobro saying about digging up timbers and pots?”

  Aidan was deep in thought about the inevitable battles against the Pyrthens. “Timbers and pots?” he repeated absently. “Oh, that. A flood in the canyons uncovered a piece of a shingled roof. We got to digging around, and we found what appears to be part of two or three cabins, an old plow, some pots and pans.”

  “Cabins?” Bayard asked. “Why would there be cabins in the Clay Wastes?”

  “We was hoping you might be able to tell us, Bayard,” Dobro said. “Arliss found a coin the other day had a picture of Harvo Hornhead on it.”

  “Dobro says it looks like Harvo Hornhead,” Aidan said. “I think it looks like Halverd the Antlered, first king of Halverdy. It wasn’t a Corenwalder coin, though, or Halverden either. Had the word Veziland engraved on it.”

  Aidan noticed that Bayard was gazing into the gully. He had a faraway look in his eyes. Aidan had seen that look before—on that day, six years earlier, when Bayard came to Longleaf, searching for the Wilderking. The day he foretold that Aidan would be the Wilderking. The old prophet seemed to be in another world. Aidan couldn’t tell whether Bayard could even hear what he was saying.

  “‘Fallen are the Vezeyfolk,’” Bayard muttered, still staring at the opposite bank of the gully. He turned on his heel and strode along the edge of the gully toward the Western Road. His goats trotted to keep up.

  “Bayard!” Aidan cried, a little alarmed at the sudden change in the man. “Where are you going?”

  “To the library!” Bayard shouted without looking back.

  “Wait, Bayard! Come to Sinking Canyons with us!” Aidan called after him. “We need you!”

  Bayard didn’t answer, but kept walking with the long, fast strides of a man with a purpose.

  “Bayard, I need your help!” Aidan was almost begging now, trying to push past the goats to catch up with the Truthspeaker. “I need advice, Bayard.”

  Bayard kept walking but turned his head to speak. “Live the life that unfolds before you.”

  “Not that kind of advice, Bayard!”

  “Love goodness more than you fear evil.”

  “No, Bayard! That’s what you always tell me. I need some new advice!”

  Bayard stopped dead at the edge of the road and turned to face Aidan. “No, Aidan,” he said firmly, “you don’t need any new advice. You need to heed the old advice.”

  “But, Bayard, everything has gotten so complicated. I try to lead, but people don’t always follow. I try to follow, and nobody seems to be leading. I just don’t understand what I’m supposed to—”

  Bayard quieted Aidan with a raised hand. “Well then, Aidan, here’s my advice: Do what you were doing already. Hurry to Sinking Canyons. Be ready to fight. The Pyrthens are coming.”

  Aidan nodded.

  “Did you need a prophet to tell you that?”

  Aidan shook his head no.

  “The future is a dark path, Aidan. It’s even dark for me most of the time, and I’m a prophet. But the living God always gives you light to get to the next turning. Stay in the path, Aidan. There’s light enough. When you get to the second turning, the third, the twentieth, they’ll be lit too.”

  Bayard put a hand on Aidan’s shoulder. “You don’t need a prophet as much as you think you do, Aidan. You need to live the life the living God is unfolding before you.”

  Bayard turned to go east, the direction from which Aidan and Dobro had come. Then he turned back for one last word. “This was no chance meeting.” He pointed up the gully. “Remember this place. Here is written the history of Corenwald.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Gate Stone

  Aidan just wanted to rest when he got back to Sinking Canyons. It had been a long trip from Tambluff. But Jasper wouldn’t wait. He grabbed Aidan by the arm and began leading him down-canyon. “Aidan!” he said. “You’re not going to believe this!”

  “Can it wait?” Aidan asked. “I really need to see Father.”

  “See Father later,” Jasper insisted. “You’ve got to see this.”

  “Are you taking me to the diggings?” Aidan asked.

  Jasper nodded eagerly.

  “Jasper, we’ve got a lot of things to do that are a lot more important than digging up old timbers and broken pottery. You’re supposed to be helping train an army.”

  “I have been helping train an army, Aidan,” Jasper retorted, a touch of indignation in his voice. “You’re the one who’s been gallivanting all over the place.”

  They soon arrived at the diggings, which were significantly bigger than they had been when Aidan left for Tambluff. “Looks like you’ve put the new recruits to work,” Aidan observed.

  “Every good soldier needs to have some practice digging fortifications,” Jasper said. “They might as well practice here.”

  “But this is what I wanted to show you,” Jasper continued. He pointed at a blue-gray granite block, about two feet in height, depth, and width.

  “You dug this up?” Aidan asked.

  “Yes. It took eight men to drag it out of the hole.”

  Aidan marveled at the great block of granite. What kind of flood brought it into the canyon? “It looks almost like a gate stone,” he said.

  “It is a gate stone,” said Jasper. “Look at this.” He tapped the far side of the stone.

  Aidan walked around to that side of the stone, where he saw an inscription: “New Vezey.”

  “Didn’t I say you wouldn’t believe it?” Jasper whooped.

  “New Vezey,” Aidan read again. “What is New Vezey?”

  “It’s carved on a village gate stone, so we figure it’s the name of a village,” Jasper answered. “But nobody’s heard of a vi
llage called New Vezey. We’ve got men from all over Corenwald here, and I think I’ve asked every one of them. But nobody knows of a place called New Vezey.”

  “And nothing from the old lore?”

  “There was a village registry among the manuscripts I brought from the library at Longleaf, but it makes no mention of New Vezey.”

  Aidan concentrated on those words, New Vezey. Something was on the tip of his tongue, but it just wouldn’t come.

  “So what do you think?” Jasper asked.

  Aidan raised his hand for silence. “New Vezey,” he mumbled, his eyes closed, “New Vezey … Vezey … Vezey … Vezey …”

  Suddenly, Aidan’s eyes popped open, and he raised an index finger. He recited:

  Oh, Veezo, you is ruint,

  Covered up in clay.

  With choppin’ and plowin’

  You tore up the ground

  And now it’s washed away.

  “What are you talking about?” Jasper asked. His expression showed genuine alarm, as if he thought his brother had gone crazy.

  “Dobro’s sadballad,” Aidan answered. “About Veezo and the magical plow.” He repeated the stanza again:

  Oh, Veezo, you is ruint,

  Covered up in clay.

  With choppin’ and plowin’

  You tore up the ground

  And now it’s washed away.

  “I think that legend might tell what happened here.”

  Jasper stared at his brother. Yes, he thought, he’s finally lost his wits.

  Aidan looked up at the band of red clay just below the canyon rim. He rested his fingers horizontally across the bridge of his nose to shield the rest of the canyon wall from his vision. “Pretend there’s no canyon here,” he told Jasper. “Pretend there’s just a clay bank cut into the ground.”

  Jasper shielded his own vision the way Aidan had and gazed up at the bank.

  “Have you ever seen anything that looked like that?” Aidan asked.

  “Just looks like a plain old gully when you look at it that way,” said Jasper.

  “Dobro and I saw one yesterday. A man had plowed a furrow straight down a slope instead of terracing across it.”

  “Not very smart,” Jasper observed.

  “That was only four years ago. Four years of rains washing down that slope, and that furrow has become a gully you can’t jump across. Every bit of topsoil has washed away, off down the hill somewhere. Topsoil ten feet deep, all the way down to the bedrock, just gone.”

  “I still don’t see what you’re getting at,” Jasper said.

  “Let’s say you put a farm—no, not a farm, a whole village—on a spot where that nice red topsoil isn’t sitting on bedrock or hardpacked clay but on a layer of sand and loose clay a hundred feet thick.” Aidan pointed straight up in the air, where he imagined this village might have once stood. “And let’s say there’s a farmer whose fields border the village, and he plows his furrows the wrong way—down the slope, not across it.

  “When the topsoil is gone from that farmer’s field, can you imagine how quickly the sand below it would wash out? You saw how much sand and clay moved through here in a single rainstorm.”

  Jasper looked as if he was starting to get the picture. “So you’re saying this farmer is the Veezo from Dobro’s story?”

  “No, I’m saying the song isn’t about a man named Veezo. It’s about a village called New Vezey. It must have gotten garbled through the years. It wasn’t a farmer who got swallowed up by the clay. It was a whole village. This gate stone, these timbers, the plow blade didn’t wash up. They fell down, just like that pine tree did.”

  Jasper wasn’t yet ready to accept all of Aidan’s theory. “It just doesn’t make sense, Aidan.”

  “It makes more sense than any other explanation we’ve come up with,” Aidan insisted. “It explains a lot of the feechies’ peculiar ways. Think about how many superstitions Dobro has about this place.”

  “Time to leave these neighborhoods,” Jasper mimicked in his best Dobro voice.

  “Exactly,” said Aidan. “Probably the worst disaster in the history of feechiedom. A whole village abandoned, then swallowed up by the earth. Even if they don’t exactly remember what happened here, you can imagine the superstitions that would grow up around this place.”

  “Dobro did say the feechies started out as farmers and villagers,” Jasper remembered.

  Aidan raised both hands to gesture at his surroundings. “And then this happens. No wonder they gave up farming and took to the forest. This is what made them feechiefolk.”

  “I’ve just got one more question,” said Jasper. “Why would farmers—even bad farmers—try to farm the Clay Wastes?”

  Aidan shrugged. “Maybe they weren’t Clay Wastes three hundred years ago. Maybe they only became Clay Wastes after the topsoil washed away.”

  Jasper smiled. “Perhaps it was for the best that the feechies gave up farming. There may not have been any topsoil left on this island by the time the civilizers got here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A Skirmish

  Three weeks after Aidan and Dobro returned from Tambluff, a convoy of Pyrthen ships landed at Middenmarsh and disgorged four legions—twentyfour thousand fighting men. They took the port city without any real resistance and, after leaving a small occupying force behind, began raking eastward toward Tambluff. As they marched, they burned the farms and villages along the Western Road.

  It was not a complete surprise, therefore, when Ottis ran up to the washing pool from his guard post at the mouth of the canyon. “Pyrthens!” he called. “Pyrthens! A troop of Pyrthens is headed this way!”

  “Are you sure they’re Pyrthens?” Errol asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Ottis answered. “I’ve seen enough Pyrthens to know them when I see them. Black-andred battle standards. Black armor.”

  “I suppose you do know a Pyrthen when you see one,” said Errol. “How many men?”

  “A hundred or so, on horseback.”

  “A hundred,” Errol repeated. “A small cavalry unit.”

  “Why would they be coming this way?” Brennus asked. “We’re twenty leagues off the Western Road.”

  “They must have heard about rebels holed up in the canyons,” Aidan surmised. “They’ve sent a party to find out whether we’re friend or foe.”

  “I can answer that easily enough,” said Errol, instinctively feeling for the sword at his left hip. “How long before they get here, Ottis?”

  “A quarter hour at the most,” he answered.

  Errol began giving orders. “Percy,” he said, “you go up the canyon and alert the main camp. We’d rather hide than fight if we can help it, at least until we know what we’re up against.” He gave Percy a little push in the direction of the camp. “Brennus,” he continued, “I want archers on the canyon rim. Fifty here”—he pointed to a stand of trees above them—“and fifty on the north rim. And stay hidden.” Brennus sprinted off to do his duty.

  Errol pointed to the brushy pine boughs stacked nearby. “Start covering our tracks,” he said. “Even if we can’t hide the fact that we’ve been here, we can at least keep the Pyrthens from knowing how many of us there are.”

  Down the canyon he could see a cloud of dust rising. The Pyrthens would be coming around the bend any minute. “To the caves and crevices,” Errol ordered, not quite so loudly. “I don’t want to fight unless we have to, not this time. I don’t yet want the Pyrthens to know the full extent of our presence here. But if we have to fight—well, I won’t make a speech. You know what we’re fighting for.”

  The men looked at Errol. The light of battle shone in his eyes, and he was beautiful. They all knew what Errol meant. If they had to fight, they would fight for Corenwald, even if it didn’t feel like Corenwald anymore. The old man loved Corenwald; that was reason enough to love it, even if they had somehow forgotten how to love Corenwald for its own sake.

  Silently, dragging pine boughs behind to cover their tracks, the men
disappeared into the folds of the canyon walls behind them. Aidan and Dobro hid behind a dirt chimney that stood nearby. Errol and Jasper tucked themselves behind a clay wall that spurred out from the canyon wall.

  They could hear the Pyrthens picking their way through the canyon’s maze well before they could see them. The Pyrthens were less than fifty strides away when they emerged from behind the nearest turning of the canyon wall. They were all on horseback, except for the man who led them. He was dressed in the rags of a slave. His bushy beard and wild, matted hair created a sharp contrast to the clean-shaven, close-cropped men who trailed behind him in tight formation. He kept his eyes on the ground; any tracker-guide would keep his eyes on the ground, and that was obviously what this man was. But Aidan could tell from the man’s shambling, defeated gait that he always looked at the ground. Still-oozing lash marks were visible through the holes in his tattered garment. His frame was broad; he should have been a big man. But hunger had gotten the better of him. He was mostly bone and skin.

  Aidan somehow knew that the slave was a Corenwalder, perhaps a sailor captured by Pyrthen pirates or a mercenary captured in one of Pyrth’s unending wars. His heart went out to this countryman, forced to betray his own people by leading the enemy to their doorstep.

  The shaggy, stooping slave stopped near the washing pool. “I have led you to Sinking Canyons,” he said. His voice was husky with thirst, but there was no mistaking his Corenwalder accent. “Now, by the general’s orders, you’re supposed to set me free.”

  The Pyrthen commander looked over the scene. “You were to lead me to the rebel camp. I don’t see any rebels.”

  “These canyons are vast and complex.” The slave spoke with some heat, though he never looked into the face of the commander. “I have no more idea than you do where the rebels are. My orders were to lead you to Sinking Canyons. That is what I have done.”