The Wanderer's Tale

by David Bilsborough

  It suddenly raised one hand to its mouth and produced a sharp whistle – some form of signal, presumably – which bounced off the trees and echoed into the distance. As it did so, Gapp was struck by the semi-transparent web of skin that joined its raised upper arm to its side. This was not so much like a bat’s wing, more like the membrane of a flying squirrel. Gapp stared in fascination; he could not quite bring himself to believe this thing could actually fly . . .

  They both continued to stand there, quietly waiting. Again it put its fingers to its mouth, but this time Gapp did not hear a thing. Shlepp, however, whined irritably, and growled at the creature in sharp rebuke.

  Moments later, several more of them detached themselves from the surrounding foliage and moved to stand next to their kin. Gapp stepped back in alarm. They seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. Twelve of them, he now counted, all standing motionlessly before him, watching him guardedly, weapons unraised but at the ready. Some wore ill-fitting tunics of wool and fur, probably taken from humans or Polgs, but most stood ‘sky-clad’. All carried short spears, but some in addition to this held simple bows, blow pipes and, in one case, a bola.

  The oddest thing, though, was that none of them paid any attention to the huge forest hound that had struck such terror into an entire clan of Jordiske. Thoughts of Yulfric and his words earlier that day (was it really only that same day?) suddenly came back to the nervous Aescal youth:

  ‘. . . there are others . . . that are not so shy . . . The riverbanks are the haunt of the Vetterym. They are a strange race, one that has never bothered me, but one that I have always felt pressing in . . . a fleeting glimpse . . . a shadow in the trees . . .’

  Well, they were certainly more than fleeting glimpses or shadows now, but whether they intended to ‘bother’ Gapp on this occasion, he could only wait and see.

  Ah, Yulfric, he sighed, why can’t you be here now? You’d know what to do . . .

  He wondered then if either he or the dog would ever see Yulfric again, and the thought that they might not sent a chill running through his body. He had grown used to the towering strength of the Gyger these last few weeks, and now without him he felt dismally alone.

  Now there was only the dog.

  Please, Shlepp, he prayed, eyeing the great beast in all its equanimity as it continued snuffling through the dead leaves, stick with me – you’re all I’ve got now.

  The first Vetter that he had encountered now advanced, and pointed its spear directly at Gapp’s chest.

  ‘Shlepp!’ the boy spat, and finally whipped out the sickle-headed fruit-pruner that he had never had a chance to use on the Jordiske. At the same time he flattened himself back against the rock wall.

  But neither the Vetter nor the hound reacted, or seemed in the slightest bit impressed by his defiance. Gapp was beginning to wonder if he were mistaken about Shlepp’s loyalty to him. In the caves he had seemed a veritable myrmidon, but now, so far away from his master . . .

  Judging by how easy they were with each other, he could have sworn Shlepp and the Vetters had encountered each other before.

  He turned his attention back to the Vetter leader – if this assumption was right. Behind it, the rest of the Vetter brigade drew back slightly and parted, as if to let the boy through.

  He gave them all, including the dog, a long, hard stare.

  After a while, he felt satisfied that they meant him no immediate harm. If they had, surely they would have done something by now; his fruit-pruner was not, after all, the most terrifying weapon in the world. They looked neither evil nor threatening; it could well be that they were just curious. And they would probably be more favourably inclined towards him if he permitted himself to be led away than if he continued to stand his ground with a weapon in front of him.

  Taking a deep breath, he slid the pruner back in place and went with them.

  With Shlepp following happily behind, Gapp Radnar the esquire from the South was led through the forest into a deepening gloom. Despite this he found that his trepidation was beginning to lessen. Whatever happened, he sensed, the Vetterym could not be anything like as evil as the Jordiske. But still he let his hand rest lightly on the haft of the pruner, for his own assurance more than for any realistic protection, and the Vetters seemed happy to allow it.

  The journey lasted well over an hour, taking Gapp through an entirely new territory to that which he had seen on his journey from Yulfric’s home. For, though he did not know it yet, his jaunt through the caverns behind the waterfall had not only taken him over to the other side of the river, it had also brought him out on the far side of the mountain, and on this northern side the terrain was a different kettle of fish altogether.

  The trees here were truly massive. Their trunks measured up to twenty feet in diameter at the base, and soared up to inconceivable heights. Indeed, their tops were nowhere to be seen, lost to sight in a dense canopy, far above, that screened away all daylight. Down below, everything was cloaked in darkness like eternal night, and what little light did somehow filter through illumined a dim, eerie, alien world.

  This was a world of saucer-like eyes that glowed luminously in the dark; a world where ants roamed large enough to carry off a man, but too heavy to move as fast; it was a place where spiders built traps large enough to ensnare a buffalo, and hung cobwebs from the higher branches that were long enough to reach the forest floor, swaying like pale phantoms in the gloom; it was the home of worms and beetles large enough to roar, and snakes the size of a small dragon. Invisible fliers – truly invisible, not merely experts at camouflage – silently winged their way through the trees, navigating spaces between the trunks barely wide enough to allow the passage of these ghostly, sylvan manta rays. It was a murky, prehistoric world where Man was not permitted, and even the Vetterym huddled furtively like fugitives.

  Even the sound here was not of the world Gapp knew. Roars from many miles away could often be heard as though they were close by; clicks, squeaks and moans might be amplified or deadened, seemingly at the whim of the forest, so that it could never be discerned for sure how far away lay their source. There was a Spirit to these woods far more ancient and powerful than anywhere else in Fron-Wudu, and the ghosts were not of humankind.

  So it came as a great surprise to Gapp when he heard the sound of music from just up ahead.

  Music – jolly and energetic, the kind that immediately made one want to dance and sing. The Vetters visibly brightened, lightened, and stopped looking so nervous; they quickened their pace, eager rather than anxious now to reach the source of those sprightly tunes. Gapp glanced across at Shlepp, and saw that he too seemed to have shaken off the air of grim alertness that had settled on him for the duration of their trek.

  It appeared that they had reached the Vetters’ lair. A narrow track between the ferns led down a steep bank; in the forest gloom it was difficult to see beyond that. But there did appear to be an intenser patch of darkness up ahead. A wall of darkness, to be more accurate. Gapp again glanced at Shlepp, but he could read nothing of the hound’s mood.

  On reaching this dark barrier he discovered that they had come upon a line of trees growing very close together. These were not in a straight line by any means, and were of all shapes and sizes, some even growing into one another, but there was something in their arrangement that hinted strongly at purpose, at conscious design. They were as colossal as any of the mighty trees Gapp had already beheld on his journey here, and were clearly very ancient, so if they had been planted as a stockade wall, just how long had the Vetterym been settled here, he wondered.

  The gaps between them, such as there were, had been skilfully barricaded by sturdy walls of logs lashed tightly together, and overgrown with a specially cultivated hedge of some unknown variety of creeping plant. Over the centuries these walls had been gradually compressed even tighter by the growth of the massive boles, so they now surely constituted as solid a defensive wall as could be found anywhere in the world.

  The pa
rty of hunters headed up to one section of this gargantuan sylvan bastion-wall from which, Gapp noticed, one of the creepers had been pulled away, and tied around a nearby pine. From this tendril hung a line of drying laundry, and right by the wall itself they could make out a large mat with several pairs of sandals on it.

  It was from the total darkness just beyond that two sentinels now emerged. They hailed the returning patrol in low, guttural tones, and beckoned them forward.

  ‘R’rreui htoau auell! Qaeu sss theua!’

  ‘Aanyo goiyou R’rrahdh-Kyinne!’

  Gapp regarded these newly encountered Vetters in surprise, as he was led on; the last thing he had expected from these Polg-faced weasels was such goblinesque voices.

  One of the two sentinels approached the largest trunk and rapped out a quick message on its bark with the blunt end of his spear. After a brief pause, his signal was answered from within by another rapid message thudding hollowly. The sentinel cocked an ear diligently, then in turn followed it up with a third cipher. A moment later there was a snik, and a narrow portal opened up before them. Through it seeped a soft yellow light, and the joyful music suddenly grew a little louder.

  On entering, Gapp was surprised to find not a narrow, roughly hewn tunnel leading through the trunk, but quite a capacious room inside. It was well lit by lanterns, and furnished in an orderly if somewhat spartan manner. Apart from the inner door-ward who had let them in, it was currently occupied by three other Vetters, one of whom, judging by the surprisingly ornate footwear, Gapp presumed to be a female, and the other clearly a child. All three came up to the returning party and welcomed them warmly by stroking their underarm webs between their fingers and alternately patting them rapidly on the head.

  As soon as they set eyes on the human at the door, they all froze and simply gaped. The child gave a short, croaky gurgle and scuttled away behind the female’s legs. The hunters made a purring noise that could have been a laugh, next indicating to the wayfarer that he should take his sodden boots off, then ushered him inside.

  His bare feet fell upon the soft, dry, luxuriantly spongy wood chips that bestrewed the floor. They filled the air with a clean, domestic fragrance that induced in the boy a sudden surge of homesickness. (The wood chips, not his feet.) Other items too in this guardhouse reminded him of what he had left behind: sturdy oaken benches, some with old sandals piled beneath – beeswax candles set in niches around the walls – racks filled with spears, bows and even the odd clothesline pole – a sheet of pulped inner-bark pinned to the wall, crudely adorned in crayon with the image of two big Vetters and one little one, all standing smiling atop a tree with a big yellow sun just above their heads.

  Steps carved into the inside wall of the tree-hole gatehouse wound their way up until they disappeared from view through a hole leading to a platform above. On the opposite side of the room were a doorway and two circular windows. The thick door, hung on leather hinges, was propped open by a wedge. It was through there that the music came. Though curious to find out where the little staircase led to, Gapp was escorted through the open doorway instead . . .

  . . . Out into a world that might well have come straight from the most fabulous tales of the Herbal Storytellers of Friy.

  After the darksome forest, Gapp was about to find himself wandering through a world of light, sound and movement that grew brighter and noisier with every few steps he progressed. The further he went, the more he would realize he had not entered some secret lair but an entire town.

  From the other side of the trunk, they had emerged on to a stony path that was fenced along both sides by heavy barricades of hedge-grown planking. The Vetters had indicated that he could now put his boots back on before they set off down the lane. A short distance along it reached the base of two great karsts of rock, and thence continued along the narrow cleft running between them.

  Down this ‘street’ he was escorted, past the open doorways and windows of the cave-houses that had been tunnelled into them. Most seemed empty, or at least too dark for a prying stranger to see what exotic things might lie within. Some, however, were lit by oil-lamps, and inside them Gapp caught brief, tantalizing glimpses of huddled figures scraping hide, building fires or scrubbing floors. From other windows the occupants leant, smoking pipes and scratching their tree-rat pets fondly behind the ears. As Gapp passed, they stared agog at this outlandish creature the hunters had brought back with them.

  Then the lane exited the narrow cleft and opened into a world that no living man had ever seen or heard of or even dreamt about before.

  Gapp felt as if suddenly assailed by a tide of dancing lights and shapes, weird and exotic odours, and a head-spinning array of unguessable noises. Here was a world filled with things that not even the wildest, tallest, most exaggerated tales of the most imaginative soldier of fortune could ever encompass.

  Gapp’s first impression of the main town was one of bewilderment and confusion; the light was wrong, the dimensions did not make sense, and gravity appeared to have taken a day off. How he wished he had not lost his spectacles! To his dazzled eyes, there appeared to be trees sprouting out of houses, houses sprouting out of trees, houses within trees, and jagged rock-karsts, pinnacles, knolls and pillars all covered in trees, covered in houses, or excavated into houses. Between all these, Vetters thronged any open spaces, glided through the air from higher places, climbed down tree-ladders from their tops to their bases, ran along walkways with gleeful faces, and in all cases put the poor traveller through his paces.

  Too much, he thought, too much . . . He just could not take it all in. His eyes went up and up and up, and no matter how far up he looked, still there seemed to be yet more up, each hut, tree-house, rope bridge and escarpment house picked out and defined by the multitude of torches, lanterns, candles and sun-catching crystals that adorned them. He felt that he was standing at the bottom of the world’s most enormous, verdant and over-populated well. It was astonishing, weird, unreal and dream-like all at once, and within seconds he was forced to lower his gaze right back down to earth, to focus on normal ground-level, in order to recover some sanity.

  Instead of trying to take in everything at once, Gapp concentrated on one thing at a time, disentangling the thousands of images and sensations that were flashing through his brain, until such time as his befuddled senses could sort themselves into some coherent order.

  He was eventually brought to a wide open space amid great pillars of rock wherein Vetters constantly darted this way and that, some across the ground itself and some gliding above. There were fewer trees here, mainly of smaller, deciduous varieties, each supporting a couple of tree-houses reached by solid-looking wooden ladders, or sometimes just a single rope. Here and there were much larger trees, wide enough lower down the trunk to be hollowed out to provide dwellings for several families. Though there were merely one or two portals at the base of such giants, lights shone from countless windows as high as fifty feet up the trunk.

  Free-standing, there were long, low huts constructed of wood or stone, glowing inside with candlefire in a rainbow of colours. All with a partial growth of moss covering them, these huts looked almost as ancient as the gargantuan trees that barricaded the town. They had a definite air of permanency to them.

  But still, for the most part, the Vetterym appeared to prefer dwelling in the cave-houses that had been hollowed out into just about every available rock surface in sight. Everywhere, single conical pinnacles rose like termite mounds, pocked with doors, windows, ledges and smoke-holes. The cliffs of the numerous karsts were even more densely populated, with innumerable abodes occupying the entire surface from top to bottom, some of these only visible as openings in the jungle of vegetation trailing from above. At street level these were clearly the shops and workplaces of tradesmen and artisans.

  Many of these trades were instantly recognizable to the young Aescal: builders, brewers, carpenters, coopers, tanners, weavers, potters, fletchers . . . But there were others whose business he co
uld only guess at: mushroom ‘processors’, frog-fat renderers, resin-caulkers, tree-rat trainers, snake-slitters, cane-splitters, bark-oasters, strobile-roasters and ‘living-rope’ growers.

  From the regular sound of metal ringing upon metal that was audible above the general hubbub of music, laughter, shouting, creaking, bubbling, sawing and seething, it would appear that there was also a blacksmith of sorts operating somewhere in town. By Gapp’s estimation, this unique Vetter smith must surely have just about the highest social standing in the whole community, and a similar recognition that in human towns would have been accorded a great magician.

  From each workshop emanated an odour all of its own, but over all, amid this churning cauldron of sights and sounds, wafted the dizzying aroma of Vetterhome in general, a unique blend of honeycomb, sweat, blossom, urine, broiling, burning, yeast and dung, and probably a hundred other unidentifiable scents that in Gapp’s mind created that very essence of all things ‘foreign’.

  Had he realized just how gormless he must appear, standing there gazing at the scene with his mouth open, Gapp might well have felt extremely self-conscious. As it was, as soon as his escort interrupted his trance by goading him on with a pointed stick, he suddenly became aware that a hundred pairs of eyes were now fixed upon him, and he did begin to feel extremely self-conscious.

  At every step he took, Gapp was met with instant astonishment from every green-eyed, whiskered face. As soon as the company appeared, whatever the townsfolk were currently engaged in was now completely forgotten. They just dropped everything, including their jaws, and gaped at this freak in utter amazement.

  It then occurred to the traveller that he was probably the first human that they had ever seen. He must appear as bizarre to them as a creature from another world would to him. He tried reaching out to some of them gently with an open palm, a gesture he considered to be beyond misinterpretation. This was, however, instantly misinterpreted, and greeted only with swift recoiling, baring of fangs and, in the most extreme case, by screaming headlong flight.