by Rebecca Rupp
“You wouldn’t be able to help yourselves,” he said. “It pulls at you. You feel as if you’d do anything in the world to just keep listening to it, forever. My father heard it” — his voice wavered —“and he just walked into the black lake. When we get closer, close enough for you to hear them, it could happen to you too.”
They sat silently, looking at one another.
“I should never have let any of you come,” Tad said. He felt awful. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Eh, we could give them a song of our own,” Ditani said stoutly. “Singing, all four of us, we could drown out the sound of yon fishy ladies.”
She began to sing at the top of her voice.
“There was a deermouse in the grass
A deermouse, fat and sweet.
A Hunter crept up with her bow
And took it home to eat!
Oh . . .
“Come on, sing.”
Pippit began a rhythmic blatting.
“Deaf-man’s leaf,” said Birdie.
“What did you say?” Tad said.
“There was a deermouse in the grass —”
“Deaf-man’s leaf,” repeated Birdie, louder. “Stop it, Ditani. Pippit, stop. That’s a dreadful song.”
“What’s deaf-man’s leaf?” asked Willem.
“It’s for poisons of the ears,” Birdie said. “It’s a little creeping plant, so big” — she measured with her fingers —“with blue flowers. You chew the leaves. But they taste good. Sweet, like wintermint.” She sounded knowledgable, confident. “It’s good for earaches, but it does other things too.”
She scrambled to her feet. “I’ll show you. I saw some, just down the path.”
She was back almost immediately with a handful of small pointed leaves. The Drying was killing them — all had withered stems and shriveled brown edges — but there remained a stubborn heart of dark green. Tad took one and put it in his mouth. Cautiously he bit down. It crunched unpleasantly. Then — Birdie was right — it tasted sweet and minty.
“It’s good,” he said, munching. “Try it.”
Birdie, Ditani, and Willem popped leaves in their mouths and chewed.
“Better than firepeppers, eh?” Ditani said.
Tad made a face at her. He helped himself to another leaf.
“But how do you know it will help?” he asked.
Birdie looked puzzled.
“Somebody must have told me,” she said blankly.
She dangled a leaf temptingly at Pippit. “Here, Pippit, pretend it’s a fly.”
Pippit threw her a scornful look.
“Poisons of the ears,” Will said. “Well, it makes sense. Poison sounds like Tad’s Witches, right enough.” He winked at Tad.
“Not my Witches, you rock-headed earthworm-eater,” Tad said smiling.
By the time they reached the edge of the forest, the sun was well above the horizon. The lantern was long out, and the cloaks, now grown too warm, were folded and stuffed bulkily into Willem’s bags. The path opened before them, and then, abruptly, ended. Before them lay the shore of the black lake.
They crowded together, peering out from under a concealing clutter of dead leaves and bracken. The water of the lake looked as thick and black as tar. The water’s edge was strewn with bones, large and small — the great bones of deer, the tiny remains of birds, mice, and squirrels. Half buried in mud was a broken wooden wheel.
Ditani gave a horrified gasp of dismay. The spokes and rim of the wheel were painted in bright alternating stripes of yellow, red, and green. Tad had seen that wheel before, parked beside a campfire in the forest, while an old man pulled berries out of nothing and turned scarves into butterflies.
“Uncle Czabo,” Ditani whispered.
They stared miserably at the broken wheel.
“He must have heard her,” Birdie said in a small voice. “Heard her singing and just pulled his caravan right into the water.”
“May Death wait on her wagon step,” Ditani said fiercely. Her eyes were bright with anger. “He was my blood kin, of my clan and Tribe, a cousin. I shall avenge him.”
Willem put a warning hand on her arm.
“Not now,” he said quietly. “Don’t make any noise.” He tugged at Tad’s tunic sleeve and pointed. “Look at that,” he said, barely moving his lips. Tad followed the direction of Willem’s pointing finger.
They were not alone.
Some distance away, a crude fortress had been erected on the lakeshore. It was surrounded by a palisade of saplings that had been stripped of bark and branches and shaped to vicious points. On either side of the entrance gate stood a pair of armored soldiers, stiffly at attention. They wore leather helmets, leather jerkins stitched with disks of iron, and tall leather boots with iron buckles, and they carried shields and spears. Slung across their backs were bows — strung and ready — and quivers full of black-feathered arrows.
“Sentries,” Willem whispered.
Tad nodded. “Grellers,” he whispered back.
As if on some unspoken signal, the sentries, in unison, took two steps forward, turned sharply to the right and left, facing away from each other, and marched briskly to the corners of the palisade fence. Then, still in unison, they reversed themselves and returned to their original positions.
“Keeping watch,” Willem muttered. “How will we be able to get to the lake’s edge without their seeing us and raising the alarm? It’s all open ground from here to there, flat as a rock-thumping fry-pan cake.”
Tad nodded, frowning.
The sentries, moving like automatons, repeated their inspection of the perimeter, then returned to their posts.
“Could we do it while they’re turned away?” Tad asked. “If we put on the breathing tubes and things here in the forest and made a run for the water just as the sentries reach the farthest point of their patrol? They’d never reach us in time.”
“They’d never reach you at all,” Ditani said. “Not with me and Birdie to cover your backs.”
Willem looked doubtful. “We’ll clank,” he said. “They’ll hear us. And we won’t be able to run very fast. They have a long range with those arrows.”
“So do we have a long range with ours,” Ditani said ominously.
Tad could think of no better plan.
“Then let’s get ready,” he said. “Quietly now. You’ll have to show me how to put it on, Will.”
“Wait a minute,” Birdie said. “Something’s happening.”
The doors of the fortress were opening. As they swung wide, the sentries leaped back, snapped smartly to attention, and thumped the hafts of their spears on the ground. A small procession moved past them. It was led by a Greller in a long black robe with a hooded cowl pulled so far forward that his face was hidden in shadows. Behind him marched four more robed figures, walking two by two, their faces disguised by narrow black masks embroidered with silver. The procession advanced steadily down the lakeshore toward the children’s hiding place. As the Grellers drew nearer, Tad could see that the leader carried a roll of parchment in one hand.
“I wonder where they’re going,” Willem whispered.
Tad had a foreboding feeling that they were about to find out.
The procession halted some twenty paces from the bracken pile where the children crouched, and arranged themselves in a line with the hooded Greller in the middle. Pippit, crouched at Tad’s feet, began to mutter and twitch nervously. Birdie put a warning hand on his head. Then the leader raised the hand holding the parchment, threw back the folded hood of his robe, and took one step forward.
“I bear a message for the Sagamore,” he cried in a loud voice.
Birdie gave a gasp of horror and clutched Tad’s arm.
“They have our scent,” Ditani whispered urgently. “They know we’re here. What are we going to do?”
“I bear a message for the Sagamore!” the robed Greller cried again.
Then his voice changed. It grew higher, colder, clear as a bell
made of Hunter steel and black ice. The black-masked Grellers fell to their knees and dropped their foreheads to the ground.
“Come out, Fisher, and parley!”
Tad’s heart began to pound. Slowly he straightened.
“It’s no good,” he said. “She knows I’m here. I might as well go out and talk.”
“Don’t be a hollow head,” Birdie whispered at him angrily. “The frog doesn’t parade itself before the heron.”
“Nor the mouse before the fox.” Ditani backed her up.
“I am not a mouse,” Tad said. He had a sudden vision of the fallen deermouse, dead, Nobono’s arrow lodged in its chest.
“I am not a mouse,” he repeated.
A Remember answered from somewhere deep within his mind, a voice tinged with amusement. No more you are, lad.
Or was it Will’s voice? Tad hesitated, caught for a confused instant between past and present. Will, feeling Tad’s eyes upon him, shifted a worried expression to a defiant grin.
“We’re more than a match for Grellers,” Will said bravely. “They’re all thick as posts.” He let his mouth sag open in a vacant stupid expression and crossed his eyes. “That’s what my grandfather always says about them. Too dense to tell gold dust from mustard seed, he says, and fools enough to follow a blind mole. Let’s go see what they want.”
Tad started to protest that he didn’t want company, but Willem waved him aside.
“He has his followers,” he said, “and you should have yours. Come on, Tad, don’t keep them waiting. You’re the Sagamore. You go first. I’ll be right behind you.”
They thrust the tangle of leaves and twigs aside and strode out into the open. The morning air was growing warmer and the breeze off the lake carried a smell of rotting meat. The masked Greller stood motionless, watching Tad and Will walk toward him across the packed sand and dead grass.
“It has been a long time, Sagamore.” The Nixie’s high cold voice sounded almost wistful behind the blank fish-scale mask.
“Aye, Lady,” Tad said. “A long time.”
“The offer still stands.” A barely perceptible note of music had crept into the cold voice. It sounded like silver syrup.
“What offer?”
The masked Greller thrust the rolled parchment into his hands.
“Our terms,” the Nixie said.
Tad unrolled the parchment and held it out so that Willem could see it too. It was covered with writing in silver ink and stamped on the bottom with a black wax seal.
“I can’t read it,” he muttered to Willem under his breath. He felt as if he were confessing a shameful secret.
“I can’t either,” Willem muttered back. “I’ve never seen anything like that before. It doesn’t look like letters. It looks like crab tracks.”
Tad handed the parchment back to the waiting Greller.
“Tell us what it says,” he said.
Laughter. A cascade of silvery notes like fat raindrops falling into a silent pool.
“So forgetful, Sagamore? Perhaps I can help you.”
“Help me how?” Tad demanded suspiciously.
You are not as they are, the voice went on, secretly, sweetly, inside his head. They do not believe in you, Sagamore. They scorn you. They will never accept you. Your gift will set you apart. You will be envied, hated, feared. You will be alone. The Tribes will not unite for you, Sagamore. They are lost to you. Leave them behind. Leave them.
Faintly, as if it were very far away, a voice began singing.
Come and be a king in the deep water. You will have a castle of coral and pearls and a throne of crystal and gold. You are of our kind, Sagamore, not theirs.
The singing swelled up, an enchanted cascade of indescribably beautiful sound. But somehow it had lost its power. It is poison, Tad thought.
Do you accept, Sagamore?
Accept! Accept! Accept! The music urged him.
“No,” Tad said.
Ah, the Nixie’s voice said. Ah, I see. You miss your pond. That little driblet of water.
Scornful laughter like silver bubbles.
But I could spare it for you, Sagamore. Cease to trouble me and go home, and all will be as it was before. Your pond will fill.
“What about all the other ponds?” Tad said. “What about the forests? And the Diggers’ waterfall?”
The singing faded to a tuneful murmur.
What does it matter? the Nixie whispered conspiratorially. What will you see of it, Fisher? Stay at home by the banks of your pond and let the world beyond go by as it will. It is nothing to do with you.
“You mean go by as you will,” Tad retorted.
The singing rose again, piercingly sweet, but it bothered Tad no more than the buzzing of a honeybee.
Save yourself, the Nixie murmured seductively. You, Sagamore, you shall have water. Your tree will remain green. Go home.
“No,” Tad said again. “There’s water enough for all of us, Azabel. Give it back. Give up the Waterstone.”
For a long moment nothing happened.
Then die!
The masked Greller tipped back his head and gave a long howl of fury. Behind him Tad heard Pippit squawking hysterically and Ditani frantically shouting a warning. As if the howl had been a signal, the wooden gates of the Grellers’ fortress slammed open and a horde of armed warriors poured out, bows and spears at ready. The bowmen in the lead broke ranks, stepped smartly to the side, and dropped to one knee, taking aim.
“Tad! Will!” It was Birdie, shrieking. “Look out! Run!”
A bowman fired.
The arrow flashed through the air, but it never reached its intended target. There was a blow against Tad’s back as he was violently thrust aside, out of harm’s way. It was Will, shouting a warning — and Will, crying out and falling backward, a black-feathered arrow protruding from his shoulder.
AaaaOOOOaaaa!
From the edge of the forest came the wail of a snail-shell horn. A Fisher horn.
AaaaOOOOaaaa!
Tad looked up, astonished, from where he had dropped to his knees at Willem’s side. The roots of the great trees were suddenly alive with moving figures. There were Fishers in battle dress — vests and helmets awkwardly cobbled together from sheets of birch bark. They carried bows, fishing spears, and stone hatchets sharpened to a razor’s edge. Among them were the tense crouched forms of Hunters, their dark faces fierce with stripes of scarlet paint, bows and bone-handled knives in their hands.
The Greller army halted in its headlong rush down the shore. This was a far more formidable force than they had expected and they were no longer sure what to do. Soldiers in the rear — still charging blindly forward — crashed heavily into soldiers in front of them, who were suddenly charging backward. There was a flurry of contradictory orders. There were cries of “Forward, Grellers, forward!” and, at the same time, shouts of “Back, men, back!” Grellers in the very middle of the formation, who had been bumped into the hardest and from both sides, had turned angrily and started fighting with their neighbors.
In the resulting confusion, Fishers and Hunters attacked. They burst from the cover of the woods and raced toward the fort, shrieking at the tops of their lungs. “Water-thieving swamp pigs!”
“Eh, stand and fight, you fur-faced traitors!”
“For the ponds and forest!”
“For the Tribes! For the Tribes!”
In the midst of it all, the wail of the snail-shell horn sounded again.
AaaaOOOOaaaa!
Arrows filled the air.
Tad crouched at Willem’s side.
“I thought they weren’t coming,” he said.
Willem gave a ghost of a grin.
“I guess they weren’t so cowardly after all,” he said faintly. “I thought that Hunter in the red pants — the one who gave you such a hard time, Tad — was looking pretty ashamed of himself at not offering to help. Some of the others were too.”
He gave a gasp of pain. “Some of them believed in you,” he
said. “Don’t think they didn’t, Tad. They just had to hammer it out a bit, that’s all. Like the story of what’s-his-name, Birdie’s Magic Mudbug.”
Tad laid a hand on his arm.
“They’ll have brought healers with them,” he said. “People who can help you. I’ll go find one of them, Will.”
Willem shook his head.
“No,” he said. “You have to go now, Tad. It’s a diversion they’ve made for you, don’t you see? It’s your chance to get to the lake. But you have to go now. Take the breathing tubes.”
“I’m not leaving you like this,” Tad said.
Another voice, a remembered fur-soft voice, now choked and twisted with pain, spoke in his ear.
Go now and do as you must, old friend, and we will meet again around a campfire in Great Rune’s garden.
Tad’s eyes filled with hot tears. Burris. And now Willem. The tears spilled over and ran down his cheeks.
“I’ll stay with him, Tad.” It was Birdie. “I’ll stay with him until you get back.”
Ditani stood behind her, arms awkwardly filled with metal tubes and dangling hoses. “And I’ll go with you,” Ditani said, struggling with the tangled breathing tubes. “I have no powers like yours, but I am of the Blood, and mayhap you’ll have need of a good Hunter spear.” She wrenched at the tubes, pulling one set free. “Here, put this thing on.”
“Do it, Tad,” said Willem.
Tad reluctantly buckled the odd-shaped goggles behind his ears, settled the air hoses, and strapped the air canister over his shoulder, while Ditani did the same. We sure don’t look like warriors, Tad thought ruefully. We look like a pair of bulgy-faced waterbugs.
Ditani kicked off her leather boots.
“I’m ready,” she said.
The shouting grew louder near the gates of the fortress, where Fishers, Hunters, and Grellers clashed in battle. The dusty ground was scattered now with crumpled bodies.
“I wish the Diggers had come,” Willem said weakly. “I would have liked to have seen a true rally of the Tribes, like they had in the olden days. You’ll have to tell them about this, Tad, back at Stone Mountain. Tell them what happened.”
“You can tell them yourself,” Tad said.
The corners of Willem’s mouth twitched in the beginning of a smile.