The task got much harder once they were into the next chamber, for the sunlight didn’t reach there. They couldn’t safely light their torch, so they felt their way in the dark.
They were only a few steps beyond the squeeze when they heard a faint boom from outside, followed by another and another. “The thunder-tubes!” said Aidan in a hoarse whisper. “They’re firing again.” He thought of the terror of his countrymen, the helplessness they felt against such weapons.
“If they’re firing those thunder-tubes,” observed Arliss, “it won’t be long before somebody comes down here for more powder. We’re out of time, Aidan. We’ve got to touch this thing off.”
“You’re right,” answered Aidan. “But let’s be smart about it. How much powder is left in your helmet?”
“Two or three heavy handfuls, I’d say.”
“Mine’s almost half full. We’ve got to empty these helmets. But we can’t just dump them out. It has to be a nice, even line like we’ve been making.”
Boom! Boom! Boom!
“Aidan!” shouted Arliss. “We’ve got to light this thing! We got no more time!”
Boom! Boom!
“All right,” agreed Aidan. He put the tinderbox and a wood splinter in Arliss’s hands. “You step off ten or twelve strides and light this splinter. Hand me your helmet. I’ll finish the powder line while you’re making fire.”
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Aidan bent to his work, trying to ignore the booming of the thunder-tubes. This was a crucial part of the task. At the other end, the powder line was thick and ropelike; big fire was good as the fuse approached the powder barrels. But at this end, they needed a controlled fire; they wanted to blow up the barrels without blowing themselves up. In near-total darkness, with the booming of thunder-tubes overhead and the threat of Pyrthens uncovering their plot any second, it was hard for Aidan to create the narrow, even powder line he needed.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Tchk … tchk … tchk.
Arliss was striking away with the flint.
Tchk … tchk … tchk.
Aidan could feel the nervous sweat dripping down the slope of his nose. He had emptied Arliss’s helmet, but there were still a couple of handfuls of powder left in his own.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Tchk … tchk … tchk.
Then, from the entry chamber, he heard the shuffle of boots and a murmur of voices.
“Hurry!” he whispered at Arliss.
Tchk … tchk … tchk … tchk … tchk.
The tinder wouldn’t catch.
From the next chamber came a Pyrthen voice. “Oy! Freymerge! What’s this?”
“What’s what?” asked another Pyrthen.
“This line of flame powder!” Aidan could hear the soldiers’ footsteps coming toward them as they followed the powder line.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Tchk … tchk … tchk.
Aidan trailed out the last of the powder from his helmet. “Arliss,” he whispered, “forget the tinder. Bring the flint.”
Arliss squatted beside him, flint in hand. It suddenly grew completely dark in the chamber; the few rays of light coming in through the rock squeeze were blocked by the form of a soldier trying to squeeze through.
“Fly, Pyrthen!” called Aidan. “Fly! We’re lighting the flame powder. Get out!” The soldier stopped, but he didn’t run away.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
“Get him!” came the panicked voice of the other Pyrthen. “Stop him!” Aidan and Arliss could hear the soldier grunting as he tried to push through the narrow space.
“He had his chance,” Aidan whispered to Arliss.
Tchk … tchk … tchk … tchk.
The intermittent flash of flint sparks gave Arliss enough light to find the end of the powder trail.
Tchk.
The powder caught and hissed to life. By the white flash they saw the terror-stricken face of the Pyrthen soldier, who turned and fled from the sparkling fire that came racing toward him.
Aidan scooped up the two helmets and stuck one on his own head, the other on Arliss’s. Still seeing spots, the boys stumbled toward the safety of the pool.
They were no sooner in the water than the cave shook with the force of an earthquake. The cavern grew bright, lit by a fire that shot through the squeeze. The boys pressed themselves against the pool’s rock wall, terrified by what they had unleashed. A hail of rocks, some quite large, rocketed over their heads, propelled by an explosion that rumbled on for half a minute as one barrel of powder touched off the barrels next to it in a chain of explosions that grew stronger and stronger before finally settling down.
Even after the explosion stopped, huge chunks of stone continued to fall, thudding to the cave floor and rocking the pool into high waves that tossed Aidan and Arliss around like chips of driftwood in a stormy sea and finally threw them out of the water and onto the pool’s rocky bank.
Bruised and terribly sore, Aidan lay on the jagged stone, spluttering and coughing in the darkness. The air was so thick with dust that it was hardly more breathable than the water he had just escaped. A few feet away, Arliss was hacking and spitting. In a brief pause between coughing fits, Aidan heard Arliss’s voice, muffled but urgent: “Breathe through your tunic!”
“Pardon?” Aidan’s mouth and throat were so gummy with inhaled cave dust that he could hardly speak the word.
“Pull your tunic over your mouth and nose and breathe through it”—Arliss was interrupted by another violent coughing fit—“or this dust will choke you.”
Aidan did as Arliss instructed. The tunic mask filtered out just enough dust for Aidan to get his breath. But both boys continued hacking and coughing so hard that they could hardly carry on a conversation.
“Can you walk?” called Aidan into the darkness.
“I think so,” answered Arliss, grunting a little as he picked himself up. “Can you?”
Aidan struggled to his feet. Everything hurt, but nothing seemed to be broken. “I think so.”
Their one exit was blocked. A single spot of light illuminated the suspended cave dust where the rock squeeze used to lead to the entry chamber. “We’re buried,” observed Arliss. “If we can’t dig our way out, we aren’t getting out.”
On hands and knees, Aidan and Arliss crawled painfully over loose, jagged rock toward the little slit of light, their only hope of ever seeing the sky again. Arliss pulled a chunk of limestone out of the rubble pile that blocked the cave neck, and the tiny ray became a small shaft of light, no thicker than a finger. Aidan’s eyes filled with tears of gratitude as he looked along the ray that shot past him into the cave’s deeper darkness. He caught the streaming light in his hand as if it were a stream of water. Never had he been so happy to see a shaft of light and floating dust.
Forgetting about the pains in his arms, his legs, his back, his side, his neck, and his head, Aidan attacked the rubble pile. He wanted more light. He had to see more light!
“Whoa!” shouted Arliss. “Careful now!”
But is was too late. The first rock Aidan pulled out caused a collapse and a little landslide that blocked out what little light they had. They found themselves in darkness again.
“Why don’t you let me do this?” suggested Arliss. Aidan watched intently for another sliver of light as Arliss worked methodically at the rubble pile. Soon a new ray of light appeared, then another, then another as Arliss cleared stone and pebbles away.
Before long, Arliss had opened a tiny passage through the rubble, and on their bellies the boys squeezed through to the entry chamber—or what used to be the entry chamber. It was now an enormous crater. Its roof had been blown off by the exploding fire powder and was open to the morning sky.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A Battle, A Rout
Aidan and Arliss stood on the crater floor, blinking against the intensity of the morning sun. Above them, a huge column of smoke hung in the sky. The smell of fire and destruction was heavy in the air. In the
distance they could hear the thundering of horses’ hooves, the clash of steel on steel, the shouts and groans of men doing battle.
The boys picked their way to the crater’s edge and peered out, taking care to avoid notice. But there was little need of that. The camp was deserted. The crater was the center of a circle of utter destruction. The Pyrthens’ supply depot had been in this vicinity—all their food, the fodder for their horses and mules, their arms and armor. Overturned wagons, many of them still burning, lay scattered about. The ground was littered with smoking bits of twisted plate armor and shattered spears and battle-axes.
“Where is everybody?” whispered Arliss. Aidan pointed toward the west. The Pyrthens were fleeing westward across the plain, toward Middenmarsh and their transport ships. The Corenwalder army was in hot pursuit.
Taking advantage of the chaos that followed the explosion in the Pyrthen camp, King Darrow had led a charge across the valley and put the invaders to flight. Now, astride his foaming warhorse, he thundered across the plain at the head of his army. This was the picture of King Darrow that Aidan carried in his heart. This was the Darrow whom Aidan had been taught to love and revere. The Corenwalders who followed him into battle remembered for the first time in a long time why this Darrow had been chosen to be their king, and they were ennobled by the very sight of him.
Both boys wanted badly to catch up to their army, but neither was in any shape to run across the plain. Across the way Aidan spotted a pack mule still tethered to a hitching post. “Come on,” he shouted to Arliss. The two boys clambered out of the crater and ran toward the skittish animal. They untied the lead rope and both climbed onto the mule’s bare back.
In the far distance, the leading edge of the Pyrthen army was melting into the forest of the Eechihoolee River bottom, which formed the western boundary of the Bonifay Plain. Aidan and Arliss urged their mount onward, but the poor mule was a beast of burden not a warhorse, and they never managed to go any faster than a trot. They were still a quarter-league away when the last of the Pyrthen soldiers disappeared into the tangled forest.
The Corenwalders didn’t follow the invaders into the woods. King Darrow halted his fighting men on the verge of the forest. When Aidan and Arliss caught up, the king was arranging the soldiers into a long line. His answer to the Pyrthens’ terrified, disorganized flight would be a disciplined, methodical sweep through the forest.
But the army’s reformation was interrupted by a distant eruption of wild animal calls from the depths of the forest:
Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo … Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo.
Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo … Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo.
Haaaaaaawwwwwweeeeeeee!
Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo … Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo.
Haaaaaaawwwwwweeeeeeee!
Haaaaaaawwwwwweeeeeeee!
These peculiar sounds were immediately followed by thousands of panicked screams. And then, to the Corenwalders’ amazement, they were overrun by Pyrthens coming back out of the woods. The same soldiers who had run into the forest to escape the Corenwalders were now running headlong toward them. But this was a surrender not a counterattack.
Whatever was happening in the Eechihoolee Forest, the Pyrthens found it more terrifying than the battle on the plain. Their eyes were wild with panic, their faces ghostly white. They came out of the forest with their hands raised, to show that they had thrown down their weapons.
The Corenwalders could make little sense of the Pyrthens’ garbled accounts of what happened in the forest. Some sort of mass hysteria had obviously befallen them, probably brought on by the shock of the flame powder explosion and the added stress of their flight across the plain. They babbled about “lizard men” and “gray people” and “tree alligators” that had attacked them from the treetops and from underwater when they reached the river in the middle of the forest. It was as if, in their hour of panic, their minds reverted to the fairy tales and scary stories that old people and nursemaids tell about the feechiefolk.
Aidan chuckled and spoke to himself: “Our fights is their fights, and their fights is our’n.”
“What’s that?” asked Arliss, who still sat behind him on the mule.
“Oh, nothing,” answered Aidan. “I was just remembering something a friend told me.”
Epilogue
Back at Longleaf
Summer was drawing to a close. In the orchard, the apples and pears were beginning to take shape. The sheep’s wool was just beginning to thicken. The meadow grass was turning yellow, exhausted from months of summer sun.
And Aidan Errolson, Corenwald’s deliverer, was back in the bottom pasture, tending his sheep. “What’s a fellow got to do to get respect around here?” he grumbled as he untangled a lamb from a blackberry bush. He deepened his voice in imitation of Bayard the Truthspeaker. “‘Live the life that unfolds before you.’ That’s easy for him to say. He and his goats go where they please. The only thing unfolding before me is more work.”
“Baaahhhh,” said the lamb.
“Oh, so you’re on their side, are you? Maybe you’d like to have a nice Pyrthen shepherd watching you. And a nice Pyrthen family in the manor house. And a nice Pyrthen tyrant living in Tambluff Castle.”
“Baaaahhhh!” said the lamb a little louder, for the blackberry thorns were pricking her.
“Well, next time there’s a giant threatening to enslave the whole country, maybe you’d like to go slay him. Because I’m through with it. I’m telling you, I’m—” Aidan stopped himself. “Oh, good grief. I’m as bad as Bayard, talking to livestock.”
He went back to his work. When the lamb was free, Aidan heard the slow creak of wagon wheels coming from the next pasture. Watching the cart path, he saw two golden plumes come bobbing over the rise, attached to the gleaming bridles of two magnificent draft horses. They pulled a long, low wagon draped with blue silk embroidered with the golden boar.
Running toward the wagon, Aidan saw that the driver was Wendell, the royal gamekeeper. He also recognized the riders who came over the rise behind the wagon: his father Errol and King Darrow.
“Aidan, we’ve brought an old friend of yours,” said King Darrow. “We thought it was time he came home.”
“Climb on the driver’s bench with Wendell,” Errol directed his son, “and show him how to get to the river beside the indigo field.”
With Aidan’s help, Wendell maneuvered the big wagon to the riverbank. Errol and Darrow followed close behind. When everyone had dismounted, Wendell pulled the drape from the wagon. There, inside his heavy iron cage, was Samson the alligator. He had been snoozing under the drape, and he was furious at Wendell for disturbing him. He opened his terrible jaws and hissed menacingly. He thrashed his tail a couple of times and lunged at Aidan with a bellow that echoed over the river.
“Hey, that’s my boy!” cheered Aidan. “That’s my boy!” He clapped for Samson’s impressive demonstration. Here was Corenwald in all its primeval energy—the Corenwald of old, the Corenwald yet to be.
Samson almost looked his old self again. A few streaks of gold paint lingered in the crevices between his scales, but for the most part he looked just the way he did when Aidan first saw him.
“After the treaty feast,” said King Darrow, “the Pyrthens left in such a hurry that they didn’t bother to take home their … ahem … party favor.” The king looked almost sheepish as he gestured at Samson.
“But how did you get the paint off him?” Aidan asked.
Wendell laughed. “He did that by himself. I just turned him loose in the Tambluff moat, and he wallowed it off.”
Wendell opened the cage door and prodded the alligator’s tail with a pole. Samson slid out of the cage and into the water. For a few seconds he floated like a bumpy log, eyeing his captors. Then he disappeared under the water.
“He seems glad to be home,” remarked King Darrow, watching the alligator’s tail ripples dissipate across the water’s surface. Then he turned to Aidan. “
And what about you, Aidan? Are you glad to be home?”
Aidan paused for a second or two before answering. “Yes, Your Majesty … I’m happy to be home. Of course I am.” But Aidan’s uncertain tone revealed more than his words.
“Aidan,” continued the king, “you are no shepherd boy. You have been a faithful and obedient son to your father. But now you belong to Corenwald.
“You believed in Corenwald—and in Corenwald’s God—when I, the king of Corenwald, didn’t. I had forgotten many things, but you made me remember. I need to surround myself with men like you.”
Aidan looked from King Darrow to his father and back again.
“Aidan,” continued the king, “I want you to come live at Tambluff Castle. Join my son Steren in his study of the arts of government—law, diplomacy, warfare. Steren will be king someday, and he will need lieutenants and advisers.” Darrow put a hand on Aidan’s shoulder. “Aidan, you have the heart to serve Corenwald. Anyone who saw you on the Bonifay Plain knows that. I want to be sure you have the skills.”
This was more than Aidan could comprehend at first. “Y-your Majesty, you’re asking me to join your court?”
The king nodded his head. Aidan looked to his father.
“The king and I have discussed this at length,” said Errol, in answer to his son’s inquiring look. “I’ll miss you terribly, son, but King Darrow is right. Go to Tambluff with my blessing. It’s best for you. It’s best for Corenwald.”
Errol smiled at Aidan. “You’ve learned every lesson I’ve ever tried to teach you. But you have many more things to learn—things you can learn only at the court of Darrow.”
“Well, that settles it, doesn’t it?” said Aidan, smiling at his father and his king. “I’ll pack my trunk. On to Tambluff!”
About the Author
Jonathan Rogers calls The Wilderking Trilogy a fantasy adventure story told in an American accent. The wild places of the imaginary island of Corenwald bear more than a passing resemblance to the vine-tangled swamps and forests of his native Georgia. And in the voices of Corenwald’s inhabitants—feechie and civilizer alike—you can hear the echoes of American swampers and frontiersmen.
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