Tombro tried to convince Aidan to remove his boots. “Ain’t nobody going to mistake you for a feechie with them stump-clompers on your feet,” he said. But Aidan pointed out that civilizer feet were much more tender than feechie feet and that his feet couldn’t survive the rigors of the swamp without the protection of boots. Tombro gave in, but not without wondering aloud how civilizers managed to survive in a place like Corenwald if they weren’t any tougher than that.
With Aidan’s load thus lightened and the vegetation growing thicker, it wasn’t long before he and Tombro took to the treetops. Onward they went, limb to limb toward the heart of the Feechiefen. The understory was so thick that Aidan rarely saw the forest floor. And when he did see all the way to the bottom of the trees, he saw water as often as he saw dry land. On and on it went.
After an hour or so of tree walking, they took a short rest in the top of a big sweet gum tree. “Big swamp,” Aidan remarked. “But the Feechiefen’s not so different from some of the swamps around Longleaf, where I’m from.”
Tombro gave Aidan a quizzical look. “Feechiefen? This ain’t Feechiefen. This is the little scrub swamp that borders it. When we get to Feechiefen, you gonna know it.”
Two hours later, the dense scrub opened into the Feechiefen. And, as Tombro had promised, there was no mistaking it. It was a place of terrible beauty, forbidding and at the same time mesmerizing. Enormous cypress trees—taller even than longleaf pines—soared into the sky from flanged bases so broad that Aidan could imagine flatboats full of standing feechies completely hidden behind each one.
The still water was as black as night itself, and yet no mirror could reflect the sky and clouds more perfectly. The surface of the water was another world, an upsidedown world. The effect was dizzying. The same cypress trees that speared upward into the sky also plunged downward to an identical sky below. The white-bellied cranes that glided above glided upside down in the lower sky. A heron stood knee-deep in the water, joined at the knee with its upside-down twin, which bobbed its long beak upward to the water’s surface as the upright bird bobbed down.
Aidan had often daydreamed about the Feechiefen. But he hadn’t imagined this. He had pictured the Feechiefen as a bigger version of the swamps and tangle-wood forests he knew so well. But this was another thing altogether. The swamps Aidan knew were borderlands, places of transition between river and dry land. He could see now there was nothing transitional about this place. The Feechiefen was its own place, as self-contained as an inland sea.
There were rivers in the Feechiefen, as Aidan would soon learn. But there were no riverbanks. The rivers that flowed through the vast swamp were bordered by more water, not by dry land. There was dry land in Feechiefen too. But except for a few real islands, most of the land was just floating mats of moss burped up from the bottom of the swamp. A few plants took root and flourished—plants whose seeds blew in, floated in, or rode in on the feet of birds. Sometimes the floating islands joined together to form quite large plots of land. But any sense of permanence on those floating islands was only an illusion. They might sink back into the black water any day.
“Feechiefen,” Tombro whispered reverently at their first sight of the great swamp. Aidan saw a tear form in the feechie’s eye. He could see why this son of the swamp would be so homesick.
“How long have you been away?” Aidan asked.
“Four days,” answered Tombro. “Four long days.”
Aidan followed Tombro through a few more treetops along the edge of the swamp. “There’s one,” Tombro declared, and the two of them scampered to the base of a tree where a little flat-bottomed boat was pulled up into the bushes. A boat pole was there, too, and in quick order Tombro had situated Aidan in the front of the boat and slid it into the water. Tombro stood in the stern, and with quick, nimble strokes he poled toward open water.
“Is this your boat?” asked Aidan.
“That’s one way to say it, I reckon,” the feechie answered.
“You didn’t steal it, did you?”
“Can’t steal a boat,” said Tombro, exasperated once again by the civilizer’s peculiar notions. “Boats don’t belong to nobody. So how could you steal one?” The feechies, Tombro explained, had an ingenious method for handling the ownership of boats. On his tenth birthday, and every tenth birthday after that, every feechie was required to build a flatboat and give it to the chieftain of his band. The chieftain, in turn, gave all boats to the Feechiefen. So then, any feechie who needed to make a crossing was welcome to any boat he could find. After crossing, he left the boat where it landed, and any feechie who came along later was welcome to use it. The boat Tombro was plying across the water, therefore, wasn’t his exactly, but it wasn’t anybody else’s either.
The boat slid as smoothly and soundlessly as a water spider across the still water. Behind, Tombro’s push pole stirred up a little cloud of bottom litter in the shallow water. But ahead, the water was a sheet of black glass. Tombro nosed the craft between the funnels of the cypress trees, turning right and left, confidently navigating by a method Aidan didn’t understand.
Feechiefen wasn’t a tangled mess like the floodplain swamps around Longleaf. The cypress trees and gum trees grew close together, as closely as the trees in the densest forests. But the forest floor was black water, not the rich soil of the floodplain. So the vines that often choked the forest were uncommon in the Feechiefen, except on the islands. Instead, the trees were draped with air plants that need no soil to grow—graybeard moss that swayed in great dangling masses, tree ferns shaped like hanging deer antlers, and orchids of seemingly infinite variety, the most splendid flowers Aidan had ever seen. But he never saw one that looked like a flying frog.
And the alligators! On every side, their eyes and rounded nostrils knobbed out of the water, and their broad, ridged backs looked like little islands in the swamp, ever-shifting, appearing and disappearing as the boat traversed their territory.
In time, Tombro guided the little boat to an opening in the cypress trees, and Aidan could make out a narrow channel of slow-moving water where trees didn’t grow. Tombro put the boat in the channel and headed down its stream. It was easier poling here, with no trees to steer around and a current, however slow, to help them along. Tombro felt exuberant, and he belted out a yodeling swamp holler:
Hoo lee ooo lee,
Hoo lee ooo lee,
Pappy’s coming home.
Hoo lee ooo lee,
Hoo lee ooo lee,
Put my supper on!
In the west, a blazing orange sun descended to meet its twin sun in the surface of the water. In the east, the high-piled clouds reflected the rays of the setting sun in fantastic gold-trimmed pinks and purples.
As dusk approached, however, the stillness was shattered by the beginnings of the swamp’s night song. The frogs in their thousands—tens of thousands—set up their spring holler, a pleasing cacophony of a hundred different pitches and timbres. The alligators, too, began their bellowing and boasting, which echoed across the swamp like thunder. The big bull alligators wagged their massive heads in mutual threat. Swamp water cascaded from their open jaws, and to Aidan it appeared that steam was billowing from their nostrils. Their lashing tails whipped the black water to froth.
Tombro seemed unconcerned, even though any one of those crashing tails could smash their boat to splinters. He glanced up at a flock of wood storks sailing overhead toward their rookery. “Baldheads coming to roost,” he remarked. “I reckon we ought to too.”
Tombro poled alongside a little island of floating moss, about six or eight strides across. “See won’t that little blow-up hold you,” he suggested. Aidan was alarmed by Tombro’s obvious doubt that the floating island could support his weight. He pictured himself sinking into the swamp’s dark waters and, before he could clamber back into the boat, being shredded by alligators fighting for his carcass. But he was eager to show that he had the gumption to make it in the Feechiefen, so he stood in the bow of the boat and
began to step off onto the island.
“Ipp! Ipp!” warned Tombro. “Hands and knees! Hands and knees! Don’t punch through on the first step.”
Aidan crouched and reached one hand toward the moss. The island rocked crazily, sending out waves in circles that nearly tipped the boat. Aidan looked back doubtfully at Tombro, but Tombro waved him forward. “Get along,” he said. “Slow won’t work. Got to skitter up there like a muskrat.”
Aidan skittered, trying to think like a muskrat, not like a civilizer in the middle of the Feechiefen Swamp—not like a civilizer in danger of sinking to its murky bottom at any moment. The flexible ground beneath his hands and knees rolled and bucked as if it were trying to sling Aidan into the water. But it didn’t sink. Aidan crawled a step, then another, watching for any sign of water seeping through the ground beneath his fingers.
His progress was halted, however, by a hissing sound that he knew very well. When he looked up, his face was two feet away from the gaping pink mouth of an alligator. His first thought was to beat a hasty retreat, but the ground was too shaky for any quick movements. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t fight. The alligator gave another terrifying hiss and moved another slow step toward him. From where he crouched, head-on to the alligator, Aidan could see only mouth—big, pink tongue, widespread jaws, and two arcs of gleaming white teeth.
Behind him, Aidan heard Tombro chuckling. The end of Tombro’s push pole slid along the surface of the moss, past Aidan, to jab at the alligator. The powerful jaws snapped on the pole end, and then Aidan realized what Tombro was laughing at. The alligator, now that Aidan could see past its mouth, was only a small one, no more than four feet long.
“Scurry off, little gator,” Tombro wheedled. He poked again at the alligator. “Us big gators want your spot.” The alligator left the little island, though it did offer a few bad-natured hisses as it slid off the back edge.
Tombro crawled gingerly onto the island. It held both civilizer and feechie without sinking. It was almost dark by now, and before long Aidan and Tombro were on their backs waiting for sleep to come, awed by the brilliant stars of a Feechiefen night. Below the Hunter’s Belt, Aidan imagined he saw a new constellation: the Frog Orchid. Surely he was getting closer to it. Yes, the Feechiefen was daunting, but he had good and capable feechies at his side. Perhaps it wouldn’t be long before he could return triumphantly to Tambluff Castle—frog orchid in hand, a hard-won gift for a king who would never again have reason to doubt his loyalty.
Beside him, Tombro chuckled. “When you see them big jaws head-on, every gator looks big enough to swaller you whole, don’t he?”
“Yes,” answered Aidan, “he sure does.”
Chapter Sixteen
Scoggin Mound
It was an hour past noon the next day when Tombro poled the flatboat to the landing at Scoggin Mound. It was a bustling village. Actually, it was more of a base camp than a village. Most of the feechies who lived there—even the wee-feechies—spent more time elsewhere than they did at Scoggin Mound. Still, it was a more permanent settlement than Aidan would have thought possible for feechiefolk. Huts with palm-thatched roofs dotted the little island, and a few feechies walked back and forth balancing clay pots full of water, berries, or fish caught from the surrounding swamp.
The first people to notice Tombro and Aidan were a crowd of wee-feechies dressed in possum and muskrat hides and kicking a pine cone around a bare patch of sand a few strides from the landing.
“Tombro! Tombro!” they shouted.
“Did you bring me a turtle?”
“Did you bring any sugarcane?”
Then one of the wee-feechies noticed Aidan. “Oooik!” she shouted. “That’s a big’un!”
“What happened to your hair, feller?” asked another wee-feechie. Aidan suddenly felt self-conscious of his bare neck. Even the wee-feechies wore their hair short in the front and long in the back.
“Craney-crow snapped it off, I reckon,” theorized one of the wee-feechies.
“It never did,” retorted one of the others. “You just skeered of craney-crows, Hendo. That’s the only reason you’d say such a turtle-brain thing.”
Hendo tackled his tormentor without even bothering to complete the rudeswap, and the two wee-feechies rolled around on the sand for awhile. But the others paid them little mind. They were more interested in the peculiar he-feechie Tombro had brought to their island. One of them elbowed his nearest neighbor and pointed at Aidan’s boots. “What happened to your feets, feller?”
“Oooik!” gasped another. “His toes is gone!”
A bold wee-feechie with golden curls and a muskrat dress marched over to Aidan and stomped on the top of his boot. She barely came up to his knees.
“Margu!” scolded Tombro. “You ain’t treating our visitor very friendly.”
“I ain’t trying to be friendly,” she snarled. “I don’t like him.”
“Me neither,” called one of the others.
“I don’t like him a bit.”
With that, all of the wee-feechies fell on Aidan, stomping his toes and kicking his boots. One of them bit his knee. Tombro shooed at them as if they were a pack of yippy dogs. “Scoot,” he commanded. “Clear out, you owdacious scapers!”
“I want to know why he’s so funny looking,” demanded one of the wee-feechies.
“Yeah, Tombro. How come this feller’s so ugly?”
“’Cause he can’t help it,” answered Tombro over the offended chatter of the wee-feechies. “’Cause he’s a civilizer.”
The little mob fell back a step, flabbergasted.
“But he’s a good civilizer,” Tombro quickly added, afraid the little ones would regroup for a second, more ferocious attack. “This here’s Pantherbane.” The weefeechies looked dubious. “You know about Pantherbane, don’t you?”
“My mama says there ain’t no good civilizers.”
“My mama says civilizers don’t like nothing but cutting down trees.”
“My daddy says they like sheep and horses better than they like the wild critters what belong on this island.”
Though Aidan had defeated a panther, five plume hunters, and even a seven-foot Pyrthen, the wee-feechies of Scoggin Mound were too much for him. He didn’t know how to answer their accusations against him. So he did something that, at the time, seemed an appropriately feechie thing to do. He hooked his fingers in his lips and pulled them wide to show all his teeth, crossed his eyes, stuck out his tongue, and roared like a bear. The weefeechies scattered and ran screaming toward the middle of the island, their long hair streaming behind them.
“Civilizer!” one of then shrieked.
“He tried to eat me!”
“A civilizer’s on the island!”
“He’s going to civilize us all!”
Tombro and Aidan roared with laughter and followed the little ones toward the island’s center where the village fire burned, the center of feechie life on Scoggin Mound.
They had just come into sight of the main hut circle when the pffffffft of a flying arrow burned through the air just inches from Aidan’s left ear. In the middle distance, a white-haired she-feechie was notching a second arrow to her bow. Tombro threw Aidan on the ground and stood in front of him, blocking him from the old woman’s arrow.
“Aunt Seku!” he yelled. “Don’t shoot!”
“Move out the way, Tombro,” she squawked. “That feller’s tricked you. He ain’t a feechie. He’s a civilizer spy!” Her teeth were missing, and her collapsing gums made her chin jut out with an extra measure of determination.
“No, Aunt Seku,” pleaded Tombro. “This is Pantherbane. He’s a feechiefriend.”
Aunt Seku kept her bowstring pulled taut and kept her left eye closed. She was drawing down on her target, waiting for Tombro to move just an inch to give her a shot. “If he’s a feechiefriend, how come he’s trying to eat my grandbabies?”
“Those young’uns was just skeered and addle-headed,” called Tombro. “Pantherbane ain’t gonna
eat nobody. He’s got the feechiemark, Aunt Seku. Come over here and look.”
Seku lowered her bow and arrow and walked cautiously toward the civilizer. Aidan rose to his feet, and the old she-feechie grabbed him by the forearm to inspect it. “I don’t see no feechiemark,” she growled.
“Look again, Auntie,” Tombro reassured her. “It’s there.”
Seku spat on Aidan’s arm and rubbed the foamy glob with two wizened fingers. The gray mud dissolved away, and the feechiemark appeared—the curling alligator, red and fierce, Aidan’s passport into the world of the feechies.
Seku’s manner softened in an instant. “Bless your goozlum! Bless your innards! You are Pantherbane!” She hugged his neck and stood on her tiptoes to pat his head. “Such a fine-looking boy,” she cooed. “For a civilizer.”
Aunt Seku insisted that the travelers come to her hut for a snack before they saw another soul. “I found these grub worms this morning,” she announced proudly as she placed a clay bowl between Aidan and Tombro. “They’re still alive.” Aidan could see that for himself. The grubs writhed in a white, tangled mass that made the civilizer’s stomach turn. Tombro dug greedily into the bowl, but Aunt Seku slapped his hand with a switch she kept for such occasions. “Get your hand out them grubs till Pantherbane gets some, you owdacious villain!”
All eyes were on Aidan as he pulled a fat white grub from the top of the pile. He tried not to think about the stubby legs that grew from each of its bulging segments or about the black pinchers that served for its mouth. He thought it best just to swallow without chewing, to get it over faster. But on the way down, the grub grabbed Aidan’s tonsil with its pinchers and held on for dear life. It refused to go down.
The Secret of the Swamp King Page 11