Once more, Emmeur took off into the sky, shooting up from the ice ledge outside the cavern. As he soared upward, Stormy pressed her head against his warm, feathered sides and tried to rest her mind. But all she could think was they were going to war. For there is war even in sort-of fairy tales. This would be her first. But not, alas, her last.
Chapter 16
THE BELLS OF WAR
Back at Bald Mountain Castle, things were more frenzied with each new message bird from Rockport. In the last two days, as the Oosarian longship army progressed northwards up the western sea, the message birds came from closer and frantically closer to home.
After the departure of Nukeander and the Oosarians, and more updates from King Jude, Geraldo had put the Morainian defense program on full alert. Based on the reasonable premise that the defense of Morainia against outside aggressors was spies and traitors excepted in the interests of all Morainians, it was an organized program of mutual aid.
All who could help did. All who were willing, which meant almost everyone, and all who were able, which really meant everyone over the age of nine to even the oldest grandparents, were being mobilized. It was how Morainia pretty much functioned under the normal circumstances of daily living, and this was all the more heightened by the Oosarian threat.
Morainians were a peace loving people. But they didn’t like being pushed around.
There were jobs for all abilities. Feeding those in frontline positions, cleaning and sharpening weapons, relieving troops and scouts on a shift basis. Most people over the age of fifteen had some experience of active patrol service, occasionally repelling spies in the foothills where the Bald River Falls cascaded into the Lumbiana.
On rare occasions there had been skirmishes along these frontlines. The few older men and women still living, who had been young when Jakerbald became King and Walterbald was a boy, remembered the last full-scale defense of the kingdom.
Gwynmerelda had trained in Morainian defense exercises, but never the real thing. She retrieved her armor from the storehouse the very morning that Stormy and The Fool had taken to the air with The Gricklegrack.
The armor lay on the bed now as she wiggled herself into deer hide breeches, which she would normally not be seen dead in. She pulled the hip straps tight, and picked up the breastplate. As she stood adjusting the straps there was a knock at the door.
“Enter.”
“It’s only me,” said Geraldo. He came in, a smile chasing the wearylines across his faithful-comrade face. “You look—“
“I look like shit,” the Queen groaned. She pulled her hair back and tied it behind her head. That made her look even less the glamorous Queen that Morainians knew her as. She did, however, look imposing.
Geraldo bowed. “I bring you something for the battle.” From behind his back he presented a hatchet.
Gwynmerelda studied it. “It was hers, wasn’t it?”
Geraldo nodded.
It was a light, sleek, hatchet, specifically designed to be wielded by a woman. There was no jewel-encrusted hilt, but the metalwork was of exceptional quality, and there was an inscription on the handle:
To Ursula, with all my heart. Walterbald. xx
“But this belongs to Stormy,” protested Gwynmerelda.
“Stormy is with the Bird by now. There is no greater weapon than The Gricklegrack to protect the Princess. This hatchet is a queen’s hatchet and you are the Queen.”
Gwynmerelda fought back a tear and held still. And then the muscles in her cheeks quivered, as she relented and the tears came.
Geraldo half moved towards her, she towards him. It was awkward. She still had the hatchet in her hand. He was tentative, but they managed a hug of sorts. Geraldo felt the mountains of the breastplate digging uncomfortably into his chest, but the Queen hung on with all her might.
“Morainia has never given up before, dear Queen, and there is no reason that we should do so now.”
“But some of us will die?”
“Probably. But we have no choice.”
“I know,” she winced. “I just can’t bear the thought of it all.”
Geraldo kissed Gwynmerelda on the forehead.
“You are a true queen,” he said.
Before the Queen could reply there was a new knock on the door. Jakerbald and Gigi burst into the room.
“Bad news,” said the former King, “from The Witch in the Ditch. And this .” He gave some small pieces of paper to Geraldo.
“It’s Walterbald,” said Gigi. “He’s been kingnapped from the northlands.”
Gwynmerelda said nothing. She gave a faint shudder and pulled herself up to her full height, as if to meet whatever came.
“It seems that the Oosarians have some flying creatures in their employ. They took Walterbald this morning,” said Jakerbald.
“And that’s not the worst of it,” said Geraldo, looking up momentarily from the paper he held in his hand. “This is the Oosarian ransom note.”
We, the Oosarian fleet, will be anchored by Bald River Falls before dawn tomorrow. You are probably aware by now we hold your King Walterbald prisoner, and will not release him until the battle force of the Oosarian guard have been granted safe passage up the Falls Road. Any sign of aggression will seal Walterbald’s death.
signed, Your humble conqueror, Prince Toromos, servant of Queen Nukeander of Oosaria. Lion of the South.
“They’re bluffing,” assured Jakerbald.
“Maybe,” said Geraldo.
“Anything else?” asked the Queen, straightening her back and chasing the worrylines away with a look of determination.
“Yes,” said Jakerbald. “Rogerley Bishop and his clique are gone. The kitchen girl Sonia betrayed us. They plotted Walterbald’s kingnapping, and the Oosarian battle fleet sailed north as we were sitting down to dinner with Nukeander.”
“To Eagle Cave then, comrades,” said Gwynmerelda, standing up, clutching the axe she still held. “And we’ll see what schemagems we can make to throw at them.”
Chapter 17
TRANSKINKERY AND THE CHICKEN MAGICIAN
By early evening The Gricklegrack and his passengers were nearing the northwestern fringes of the wider Morainian kingdom. As the Bird had suggested, they came back to earth for shelter and sustenance in the forest before nightfall.
The Bird disappeared for what seemed a short while, and came back with a redfish, maybe three feet long.
“Shall I do the honors?” asked The Fool. Taking a knife from his belt, he slit the belly of the fish and began gutting it.
“I took the liberty of eating,” said the Bird. “You’ll have to eat yours raw of course. Your human predilection for cooked food? We can’t afford …
“… the smoke signals,” finished The Fool. “No problem,” and he looked to Stormy.
“I know, I know,” said Stormy, “good brain food.” The Fool handed her a piece of the pink-red flesh. She winced as she took a bite, but it tasted far better than she’d thought.
Then the questions began again. Brain food indeed. The Gricklegrack had told her many things as they flew, with her ear pressed to his feathered side. But she had a lot more things she wanted to know now. “You said my dad had a theory that intelligent life existed before the dark times. I don’t understand how all the stories could be wrong, how everything I learned at school, all the books in the library could be wrong.”
The Gricklegrack preened his feathers and considered how to answer.
“They’re not all wrong. But there are other stories than the ones you know. We grickles have a whole library’s worth of our own. Then new discoveries change what we thought we knew. Twenty winters ago everyone to a man would swear that water could not run uphill. But your father invented a machine that made water run uphill. The story changes in good ways and bad ways. Ask The Fool here. A master of stories. The story changes as it gets passed along.”
The Fool was busy chewing on a hunk of fish, and he grinned with his mouth full. Stormy wanted to
ask the Bird if he and his kind had a completely different beginning story to the one she had been taught, but Emmeur was on a roll now. Even The Fool could not get a word in.
“Take your own story. We, your father and I, got the message from Gwynmerelda. You accidentally killed a prince in self defense, but already, in a couple of days, the chittle-chattle tells how you brutally murdered him while he slept.”
“Did not. I—. It was an accident.”
“I know that, and you know that, but the story itself does not know that. The story adapts to what its listeners want to hear. You pass the story down across tens of winters, and it travels across land and sea where beings have different languages, and before you know, it’s a tale of how the brave princess, disguised as a boy-jester, made it her business to travel the west, ridding the land of corrupt princes.”
“But I don’t want that. I don’t want to kill princes. I hate the story.”
“Ah yes, but the story has a life of its own now. However some things remain more or less intact. The essence of the story, which in this case is the unusual fact that the Princess kills the prince, is, well, in fact … ’er, a fact.”
“He was the one who came prowling and groppelling into my bedroom,” Stormy protested.
“Yes exactly!” the Bird agreed. “The devanimal is in the details, but the real details remain invisible to everyone else,” said the Bird. “So when the story gets out into the world, the people hearing it, the audience, re-imagine the invisible details to make the story fit their situation or their way of thinking. They make it their own.”
“But they can’t!” said Stormy stormily.
“But they do,” said The Fool. “We all do. It’s the way we are.”
“After hundreds of winters,” the Bird went on, “there is no telling how different a story is from the way it was first told. We wouldn’t even know if the story was based on real happenings, or just grew out of a pretendsuppose night tale.”
The Fool nodded vigorously in agreement as he chewed more of the fish.
“Now, leapfrog for a moment. Think of the passage of hundreds and thousands of winters. Your father has a theory that creatures, flowers, and trees are like stories. We all possess a fundamental essence made up of invisible details, or kinks as Walterbald calls them. Then as the forces of nature change the earth belches and spews lava, the sea rises and falls, the ice advances or retreats these kinks change, too, and shape what creatures and plants look like. What we look like.”
“Over millennia, those invisible kinks made you a girl, and me a bird. However, if we went far enough back, you and I might once have been fish.” In this, The Gricklegrack was closer to the truth than he knew. The Fool paused, then shrugged and took another piece of the redfish.
“Nooo!” said Stormy as she saw dream pictures of strange creatures in her head. “That really is devanimaltalk.”
“The way your father describes it, we creatures become transkinked, according to how our invisible details respond to nature. It’s a leap of imagination, but we have been uncovering facts that seem to back it up. You see the process speeded up in how your actual experience has become transfigured into the folk tale of The Three Dead Princes.”
“What? What?” Stormy could not believe what she was hearing. It seemed that, whether she liked it or not, she had been cast as the prince-killer extraordinaire. The play had been written, and they were already performing it in the streets. It was not a good feeling.
“For instance. Your mother grew roses,” said the Bird. And suddenly Stormy was rapt with attention again. “She spliced red and lilac roses, and cross-bred them and cross-bred them again, until eventually she grew a deep purple rose that had never before been seen.”
Stormy had seen that rose growing in the gardens at Bald Mountain Castle. The story people told was that Ursula had been able to grow a purple rose, because of the enchantment that she felt for Waltherbald, and he for her.
“Ursula was as clever as she was beautiful. She saw qualities in each rose, for each individual rose is different, as each person or bird differs from his kin. Over successive growing seasons she brought out certain kinks that enabled her to make a new rose.”
“Your grandfather is a chicken magician,” piped up The Fool, finally finished with his fish and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “The Mountain White, which gives us eggs in winter. Most chickens don’t lay when it is cold like the Morainian cold. But Jakerbald is a great cross-breeder. A hardier chicken than that the world has never seen.”
“It was Ursula’s rose growing and Jakerbald’s chickens that led Walterbald to his theory,” said Emmeur, “that all living things can be and have been transfigured by nature. That a certain rogue quality can become stronger in a creature down through generations. And if it is useful in how that creature deals with the changed nature of the world, it becomes part of that creature’s essence. If the earth were old enough, the creature could be changefigured again and again over hundreds and thousands of winters. It happens so slowly we never see it happening before us unless we are growing roses or raising chickens.
“Sometimes a new creature emerges, and maybe meets up with the old one, and they are two different creatures. Gricklegrack lore tells of many different creatures on the eastern side of the Mezzala Ice Mountains. Like people, like birds, but different in some way. Perhaps whoever, or whatever is on Nukeander’s longships are transkinked humans?”
“Or, maybe, we are transkinked from them,” offered The Fool.
“But how can the world be so old? My wangodmatist teachers say it is sixty-two hundred summers old,” insisted Stormy.
“The dark times happened. Whatever caused them, whoever was around before, during or after, godmatists and scientics alike agree, that they happened. I have seen the evidence with my own eyes. Far to the north a whole mountainside collapsed after an earthrumble. There are thousands of winters of white ice lying over what seems like a thin strip of black ice, which could be a few hundred winters thick. Below the black ice are thousands upon thousands of winters more of deeper gray-white ice. One can read it, like the rings in a tree. It was bogglingly too many layers to count.
“You humans tell tales of the Black Cat and his mountains.”
“You’ve seen the Black Cat?” quivered Stormy, suddenly remembering the talking cat from her dream.
“Yes. But an old proverb says that you will not find the Black Cat because …”
“… because he found the sun and changed his coat,” sang Stormy, finishing the line.
“I have seen the Black Cat. He was frozen dead in the Great Ice Wall. That does not mean he no longer exists. However, my fellow grickles and I have travelled the northlands for generations. We know of many strange beasts, but no black cat bigger than a castle cat. But ,” and here The Gricklegrack paused for effect, “… I have seen the White Cat. He is indeed a giant among beasts. I did not stick around long enough to see if he talked.”
“Could it have been an albino?” spouted The Fool. “Like the white man who sells white rabbits in the marketplaces of the south. Like a juggler I once knew. White with pink eyes.”
“No. There were a whole family of them, almost invisible against the snow. I saw their red eyes coming just as I took to the air. Just in time. A moment before I smelled them two moments after, they would have been upon me. It may be that, like the snowfoot hare, the black cat changed his coat for winter, and now because he lives on the fringes of the Ice Wall, he stayed white.”
“But you are black. You live up north. Why aren’t you the great white bird?” protested Stormy.
“Why aren’t I black and white, like the snow-capped eagle, or the magpie, or the white-walled dolphin? Most Morainians are fair skinned. Your mother, though not originally from Morainia, was fair skinned, like most northern peoples. But you, Stormy, have darker skin than either your father or your mother. Yet you look like both of them. Somewhere in your story, your mother’s father, or his mother’s m
other, or someone along one of the lines, travelled from across the world. And part of the traveler is in you.”
Stormy was boggled by such wild thoughts. But as they came from The Gricklegrack, and were sprinkled with remembrances of her mother, she also felt strangely comforted.
“It is a mystery,” The Bird continued. “It may be that the wangodmatists are right, that the creator came and put man on the earth to teach the animals a lesson. If that were the case, however, then I would not be talking to you now. I have read the wangodmatist Book of Life and there is no talking bird in any of its myriad tales, before, during, or after the dark times. The problem is that some wangodmatists believe, or pretend to believe it really doesn’t matter which that their story is rigid as a metal pole. Worse, given the chance, they would use their book as a weapon to beat your father around the head with.”
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