Bekka of Thorns

by Steve Shilstone

  “Bek, we don’t have to eat those nasty magic thorns yet,” she said after her first cautious nibble on a red circle leaf.

  “I wish that I had some fresh thorns, salted and honeyed,” I said, yearning with a sort of hope to be back at the hedge and repairing chonkas in Zinna’s shop. “I wish I was with my chonka at home.”

  “Bek, Bek, look over there on that faraway hill. Those are hedges, I bet. Look at ’em. Here we are, beyond anyplace ever seen by any bendo dreen, even Bandy himself, and you feel tugged home? Such, so. Let’s wade across the fields of flowers and see about those hedges. Hedge to hedge might be the story’s span. Maybe Med? Maybe the garl? Over there. I bet the lair of the garl is under that hill. I bet it,” stated Kar firmly.

  “That would be a story. Start and end in hedges. That’s a story,” I said, boosted by Kar’s confidence. “We escaped the platter trap. We crossed the seep and climbed the mossy steps. We burrowed through the roots. We should go on. Yes, I agree, we should. Maybe there is an ending over there. We might be close.”

  “Such is surely so. Now listen, Bek,” said Kar eagerly, her yellow green eyes twinkling with a familiar jark dweg sparkle. “We’ll start by walking backward ten steps, then switch to forward for twenty, then backward ten again, and so on and so forth and ever onward until we reach the hedge hill. That way, if other bendo dreen adventure here after we tell ’em our story, we will still be the first and ONLY bendo dreen to cross the plateau of grasses and blooms forward backward forward backward!”

  We exchanged grins. Mine announced happiness at seeing my own cracked melon Kar again. Kar’s announced a gladness at seeing my spirits lift. Such, we backed into the grasses. Our highboots disappeared, swallowed entire by the meadow. Such was how high the grasses grew. We fell into fits of giggling as we counted and turned, counted and turned. I laughed because I could imagine what we looked like and I was getting dizzy and because I simply had to when Kar started up. Her laugh makes me go. It’s the way she snorts when she falls down empty of air. Such is so. How many times did we get banished from Assembly Bower because of giggle fits? Too many to count. So such, halfway across the meadow we just spun ourselves dizzy and fell on our packs and watched the sky spin and laughed until we couldn’t breathe and almost died. It didn’t qualify as the most important part of the adventure, but I liked it the best. Truth.

  As the day moved on, the hill on the far side of the plateau grew, and we saw that the dark green wandering lines WERE hedges. They seemed to be laid out in winding thickets with stripes of gap in between. They looked truly inviting, so such that Kar suggested we run the rest of the way without any backward. I didn’t need convincing. I ran past her, and we raced for the hedges. I heard Kar close behind me, shouting at me to wait. I did stop at the base of the hill. Kar came

  gasping alongside of me.

  “You should be the first,” I said.

  She gave me a smile of thanks and headed for the nearest thicket of hedges. They loomed tall and bristling, taller than ours by a goodly span. And the leaves were a darker green, almost black. The thorns were lovely, black with curved tips, gleaming, and double the size of ours. Kar squeezed low, pushing through and into the hedge. I followed as always, as usual, the second bendo dreen ever to enter the strange bristle thicket. We crouched in a wonderful gloom.

  “Oh,” I whispered, “it feels….”

  “Like home,” finished Kar.

  It did feel like home because we were crouching on a worn path which twisted away from us deeper into the hedge. True, it felt like home because we were inside a hedge, folded into safety. And more, it felt like home because I snapped off two thorns, handed one to Kar, and crunched mine with my teeth. It tasted such and so tingle fresh and crisply familiar. We both of us stopped chewing because from deeper in the hedge we heard someone or something singing.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Jrabe

  “In loomy bloys I’ll case my toys, ya dum dee dum dee dee, la da dee da dee da dee da, ya tum tum doobly dee.”

  Kar’s eyes got round. Mine, too, I bet.

  “The garl,” whispered Kar.

  The garl, I thought.

  We crept along the corridor. The well-worn path was messy with scatterings of twig bits and dried leaves, not at all like our neatly swept hedge. Of a sudden the singing stopped. So did we. Such.

  “Helloooo! Helloooo! I heard ye! I heard creeping! And yet now I hear nothing save breathing,” cried out the same high-pitched voice which had been singing the clue song. “Step into my space and examine my ears. Ye cannot hide from my ears. Step in quick lively. Strangers here be rare. I would hear ye closer.”

  Kar, being Kar, lunged forward and threw herself through an opening in the corridor’s twining wall. I, being Bekka, inched ahead to peek into what turned out to be a cluttered bower nest. A strange creature floated there, not at all like a garl, more like a water sorceress from the Gwer drollek story where the witch lost her carven flute. The creature sorceress hung upside down in the air. Her enormous pale purple ears stuck out from the sides of her head. Her tumbling mass of orange hair fell up all around ’em, in front and in back. Her nose was narrow and long, her mouth thin-lipped and small. Her unseeing milky eyes stared, unblinking. A green mantle, wrapped around her tall body, puddled on the ceiling above her. The green was dark like the leaves of the hedge.

  “What are you? Who? Why did you sing that song?” asked Kar bluntly.

  A long bony lavender hand slid from the mantle and flicked at us. Kar and I sailed backward, tumbled to the floor.

  “Sit ye down, my curious visitors. I hear two of ye, not more,” said the whoever whatever it was. “I have clamped your tongues. Do not struggle. I will answer your questions. Now, let me see… Rather I should say, let me hear… Or I might say, let me sense… And yet, and yet, ah well. What be I? ye ask. I be the jrabe, I answer. Who be I? Again, the jrabe. I be the jrabe, a sort of jroon, a sorceress of water. I dwell in this valley. Ask another question. Ye may.”

  “This isn’t a valley. It’s a hedge on a hill,” blurted Kar, her tongue magically unclamped.

  “No, youngling. Ye be wrong,” said the jrabe. “When ye be standing on your head, it be a valley. Hill for ye, valley for me. Ye sound something dreenish. Be ye bendo dreen?”

  “How can ye…you tell? I am Karro of Thorns and this is Bekka. We are searching for the racketous garl and the greenwings. They left Rumin. You sang the garl’s clue song. How do you know it? Are we the first bendo dreen you have ever seen? Am I the first to talk to you? Where…,” babbled Kar.

  “Many questions,” said the jrabe, flicking her fingers to silence Kar. “Bendo dreen be well known to me but not for a length of one or two thousand bar years, I forget which. Greenwings, ye say. To me they be dragonwings. As so, I sensed a great flight of them soaring under the valley ago in years, some few bars. And yet, one with a flash of boldness sought me out and bothered me for knowledge. She sang that clue song. The melody stuck to me, but not all of the words. It be a pleasantness for me to sing it as I think. What does it mean? Bendo dreen, Karro and Bekka, Bekka whose silence be loud, I will say to ye what I said to that dragonwing. I do not know what the song means, but I do enjoy singing it. So said, I will ask. Be I as great a disappointment to ye as I was to that dragonwing? What was her name? And yet…yes, Med of the East! A relief to remember. Your tongues be loosed. Ye may speak.”

  Such was not so. Our tongues may have been loosed, but we couldn’t speak. I watched Kar thinking, eyes narrowed, nose scrunched, and what I did was wait for her to lead me on in this Gwer drollek story.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  To The Tricklestream

  “Which way did the greenwings…dragonwings fly?” Kar asked finally.

  “Ah, my worries dissolve. I did not by mistake clamp your tongues permanently, though I be not certain with the one of ye called Bekka. Will ye speak, youngling, and bring me to comfort? Could I have been so careless?” said the jrabe,
addressing me.

  “No,” I said in a tiny small voice.

  “There then! Good! I must be going. I be late! I sense a gathering of rain clouds deep down below in the sky. Duty cries out! And oh! The dragonwings flew west, of course. Where else would they go?” announced the jrabe.

  With a flick of her fingers she flung us against the back wall of the bower, efficiently clearing us from blocking her pathway to the hedge corridor. She drifted out like a cloud scudding, leaving us alone, two shaky heaps of bendo dreen.

  “An upside down sorceress! She threw us around like nothing! There has never ever been an upside down sorceress in ANY story. Oh, Bek, I was the first to talk to a jrabe!”

  “She said she met others thousands of years ago. She said so.”

  “But wouldn’t we have known? She would be in the stories. Wait! I know! She wasn’t upside down then, I bet! SHE STOLE THE WITCH’S CARVEN FLUTE! Oh, that’s it! That’s it!”

  “Kar, calm down! How did you get so smart so fast? How did you? You’re supposed to be a cracked melon. But such is so, I think you’re right! She matches the water sorceress in the story perfectly except for the upside down. The ears, the hair, the mantle. I bet she was holding the carven flute in her other hand inside the mantle! This is Gwer drollek! It’s enough! Truth! I have enough to write. We can go home now.”

  “Bekka, Bekka, Bekka. The story has no ending. You know that such is so. The jrabe—the water sorceress!—talked to me! Right here! We heard her singing the clue song. She told us that the greenwings flew west. It’s another clue, Bekka! We keep going west.”

  “But you said the story would probably end here. Hedge to hedge is a story. Now you want to go hedge to hedge to something else.”

  “Who wrote down that it’s only TWO hedges? It might be hedge to hedge to HEDGE! That’s what I bet. Here, I know, we’ll weave another walking hedge to travel under. You liked that, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. Kar didn’t want to turn back. Such was easy to see. I was the one who wanted to turn back. I had plenty of story with which to entertain the bendo dreen. And it was Gwer drollek, too! I imagined ’em all gathered in the Assembly Bower and the five-sided mirror down and spinning and all of ’em cheering and dancing and banging on their chonkas and all of ’em amazed that Silent Bekka could perform such and so a Gwer drollek tale. That, truth, is where I wanted to be. But now, right now, as I write these words in the strange other world language, I’m double glad that Kar forced me to go on. An ending wasn’t so very far away.

  We left the bristle hedge thicket and climbed to the top of the hill. Clouds had gathered. Our search of the sky looking for the jrabe met no success. Such was so. We shrugged and went to work to weave a better walking hedge than we had done before. The dark leafed hedge branches were strong and supple. They bent back in full loops without breaking. As we wove, I looked back and saw the plateau of grasses and blooms we had crossed. A turn of my head and I looked to the other side of the hill where yet another flatness stretched away to the horizon. Flatness not of grasses and blooms, but of low gray scrub bushes and a single thin snaking meander of green reeds, stretched out before us. A light rain began to fall.

  “That’s a tricklestream, I bet, Bek.”

  “Hidden by those reeds.”

  “Yes. We’ll walk alongside it. It’s going west.”

  “Such is so. Do you want to go sideways or backwards some of the time, Kar?”

  “No.”

  We lifted the walking hedge and positioned it, Kar in front, me behind. We went down the hill and found that, yes, the green reeds did hide a tricklestream. So flat was the land that the stream barely trickled. We crunched beside it over the gray scrub bushes and the sandy soil. We crunched beside it until night fell. We slept comfortably dry under our hedge. The rain stopped sometime during the night, and the next morning we crunched beside the tricklestream again. Another day passed. Another night. The third day brought us closer to the ending.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Lake

  On the morning of the third day I forced a promise from Kar. I made her vow we would turn back if the day brought us nothing new. She so vowed. As we trudged along under our walking hedge, I munched methodically on the long and shiny curving black thorns I had plucked from the bristle thickets and paid no heed to anything else at all. My legs seemed to weigh a thousand pounds each, and the walking hedge, being made of lusher stuff than our first one and therefore slightly heavier, made my neck ache with the task of supporting it on top of my head. My eyes focused in a kind of a daze on one wavy coppery swirl of hair dangling above the green of Kar’s collar. Kar talked and talked and talked. Her words drifted by me unnoticed until I got nudged to attention by a splush.

  “What’s this?” I croaked.

  We stood ankle deep in still water. We lifted the hedge high enough to look around. Still water, a clear mirror of the blue sky, stretched out in front of us to the western horizon, a span of water such and so as we had never known. And in the distant middle of the water rose a singular golden tower.

  “This is a lake,” said Kar. “We’re the first bendo dreen to see this lake. I bet it’s bigger than Longthin Lake. Bandy of Thorns never saw a lake this big.”

  “And the tower,” I added.

  “What tower?” asked Kar, twisting her head around to stare at me.

  “Why, that one right…,” I sputtered and pointed. “It was there! It was there! I saw it! Now it’s gone!”

  Kar gave me a raised eyebrow. We retreated to the shore, put the hedge on the ground and faced each the other.

  “Now tell me slowly, Bek. What did you see?” said Kar, and she put her hand on my shoulder.

  “Clear as clear, there was a golden tower in the middle. It was there!” I told her.

  “Let’s sit down and think,” said Kar calmly.

  We sat. My jark dweg best friend rubbed her chin. She was the leader. I was the follower. Such was so. Somehow, sometime, the switch had taken place. In the silver platter dome, I suppose. Or maybe earlier. I can’t remember. I waited yet one more time again to do whatever she said.

  “Can you lead me to where it was?” she asked after a stretch of wrinkled brow silence.

  “It’s in the middle of the lake! We can’t swim. We’re bendo dreen. Kar, we’re just bendo dreen. We should go home,” I whimpered.

  “The story needs an ending,” said Kar. “I am going to walk out into the lake and discover whether or not it gets too deep. It might be shallow all the way. Maybe the garl just wants us to think it’s deep. Point me to where you saw it. You saw it, Bek, I know. You aren’t jark dweg. I am. You stay here and if anything… You stay here.”

  She got to her feet, waggled her eyebrows and smiled at me. My voice was stuck in my throat. I touched her highboot with one hand and showed her where I had seen the golden tower with the other. Kar retreated backward into the water with her tongue sticking out and her eyes crossed. She spun away from me and waded off. I discovered I wasn’t breathing and gasped for air to fill my lungs. The water swallowed her highboots, and where she waded, the face of the lake broke in gentle ripples. So gradually did the lakebed slope that when the water was at her waist, she was a distant lone shape far away. She’d reached somewhere close to where I had seen the tower. I stood and again discovered myself not breathing. I gasped and filled my lungs to shout.

  “There! Right there! It was right there!” I shouted, cupping my hands around my mouth.

  Kar’s arms went up and waved. She heard. Behind her the golden tower shimmered into existence. Solid it loomed for a splinter of time, and before I could scream, it was gone. And with it, Kar.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Tower

  I rushed into the water, splashing wildly, and fell. Drenched, coughing and spluttering, I got up and pushed forward with better control. I locked my knees and moved my legs like clown stilts. I used my arms as sorts of paddle oars. Such was so. Thusly I thrashed, grimly determ
ined, to the spot where I guessed the tower had loomed. Reaching it, I whipped around, turning and turning, screaming Kar’s name. My reward was a fullness of silence, a silence I soon ceased disturbing. Waist deep in despair and water I stood. The sky stretched high above me and it surrounded me, too, reflected in the mirror of the vast shallow lake.

  Oh, Kar, I thought. Oh, the books!

  I slung my dripping pack around and tore into it. The books remained dry, a magical relief, while all else in the pack was sopping, including Zinna’s little box of unending dry tasteless thorns. Roamer Harpo’s books had been magic encased, I suppose, powerfully so, by waterwizards deep in the past. The fact that I held ancient magic in my hands brought to me a measured part of comfort.

  “Something will happen,” I said aloud. “Something must happen, and I will stand here until it does.”

  I rearranged the contents of my pack, secured it, and slung it to my back. I folded my arms across my chest and waited. I looked at the sky above the lake and the sky on the lake. I waited. The sun baked my back and my jacket dry. I waited. The sun sank to the horizon. I kept my arms folded. I waited. And when the sun threw a stripe of gold across the water straight at me, the dazzle forced me to shut my eyes. I turned my head and squinted a peek. What a shock! My eyes flew open!

  No more did I stand waist deep in water! Instead, a golden spiral stairway of stones supported me. I stared at a curving wall of golden stacked blocks of marble. Inside the tower! Some magic how I found myself inside the tower! I heard the sound of singing rising from far below me! With no nince of delay, I raced down and down, around and around, fairly flying, taking the steps three at a leap, balancing myself by catching the railing lightly with one hand and brushing the wall with the other. The railing, smooth solid gold to the touch, circled down and down. A golden dimness pulsed all around me. In time I got dizzy and tired. I had to stop and sit and breathe. The sounds of song still drifted up. The melody was that of the clue song. I could not hear the words. The voice singing was not Kar’s. Such was most so.