Weasel's Luck

by Michael Williams

  “What’s most peculiar about this, Galen, is Father says the body was all decrepit and mummified, as if the prisoner was a good year or more dead.”

  “But …” Double shudder.

  Alfric nodded.

  Suddenly I didn’t want to be still in any spot, especially in this raven-infested swamp. I moved toward one of the trails that branched from the clearing—any trail. I was no longer particular. But Alfric stepped in front of me.

  “Just where do you think you’re going?” demanded Alfric, gripping his knife threateningly.

  “Why, to find Sir Bayard,” I said, as convincingly as I could, “and confess.”

  “How’re we going to find Sir Bayard?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Follow me. I know where he is,” I lied.

  I had not taken two steps when Alfric’s hand came crashing down upon my shoulder, holding me in place.

  “Don’t try to go nowhere without me, Weasel,” he muttered ominously. It was back to the old brotherly ties.

  So we began to walk in a random direction, Alfric’s left hand resting heavily on my shoulder, his right at his belt, on the handle of the sheathed knife. Or at least that’s where I suppose his right hand was. By now, it was really too dark to tell.

  We walked slowly, in silence at first, away from Bayard, of course, or so I hoped. Far ahead of us, the swamp was alive with insects, with the bellowing of bull frogs, with the sound of awakening owls. Around us it was constantly quiet, except for occasional splashing or cries of alarm or fluttering of wings—sounds that were always moving away from us. Yet if we were making enough noise to silence or scare off the smaller animals, we were making enough to draw the larger ones.

  If a larger animal drew near, it wouldn’t hurt for me to be more quiet—and for Alfric to be louder. All the better to focus the attention of that larger animal.

  “How did you do it?” I began, not whispering but keeping my voice low.

  “Do what?” my brother asked, his voice like a foghorn in the darkness of the swamp. Something directly ahead of me skittered away in panic, leaving behind it a trail of shrill noises.

  Good. My brother was loud.

  Bring on the carnivores.

  “Why, how did you escape, Alfric? It’s no mean trick to slip out of the moat house under Father’s attentions. I’d like to know how you managed it.”

  “Only an hour or so after you left,” Alfric began his story serenely, his large hand digging uncomfortably into my shoulder, “I take stock of the situation and realize that it is time to call in a few debts owed me. For you see, little brother, you are not the only one who has debts to collect.”

  He laughed, laughed with what the old stories call a rising hysterical laughter. Believe me, it is as disturbing as it sounds, especially when you are alone in a swamp with someone who is doing it. Again I was sure I was about to be portioned. I kept walking, carefully testing the ground in front of me.

  Then Alfric’s laughter faded, as suddenly and as disturbingly as it began. He said nothing more for a while. We walked farther, the only sounds around us the shrill winding noise of the crickets, which grew slower and slower as the damp night air grew colder.

  “It was scarcely an hour after you left that I just walked over the drawbridge and out across the grounds. You see, Father was feeling a mite sorry for me on account of losing my squirehood and all, so he wasn’t as watchful as he usually is. So I was off after you almost before you was out of sight, following the tracks of the horses until I noticed them tracks was crossed by the tracks of others …”

  “Centaurs,” I interrupted, and received a box on my ears for the information.

  “I know that, Weasel! How come you think I stayed so far behind you when old Molasses dropped over? I could of caught up then, but I wanted to catch you alone and I couldn’t be sure what was going to happen.

  “So when they took you off to that clearing and judged you I was not that far behind, and when you was ambushed and my saintly middle brother came through to save the day and complicate things, I was where I could see that, too.

  “Oh, yes, I been watching all along,” he said ominously, and pushed me from behind.

  But at the moment I wasn’t moving.

  “Alfric, there is something in front of us that might be dangerous.”

  I stopped completely. Alfric did not. The heavy breastplate jarred against the back of my head. The metal on the breastplate rang. So did my ears.

  “What is it?”

  “I hear something moving up there. Something bubbling, the gods help us!”

  “Go on, Galen.”

  “No, it’s true.”

  “I mean, go on!” And he pushed me in the direction of the noise. I paused uncertainly, took one step, then took it back.

  My loving brother pushed again. Toward quicksand, lava, a pit of adders—it was all the same to him.

  “You heard me. Go on. Don’t worry. I’ll protect you. At least until we find Bayard.”

  It was scarcely reassuring, like being one of those legendary sparrows the dwarves take down with them into the mines. When the bird drops dead in its cage, the dwarves know that the air in their tunnel is too thin, too unhealthy, and beat a quick exit.

  I stood fast, resisting the push of the armor behind me, until the push of the breastplate was joined by the push of a knife blade.

  “Very well, Alfric. I’m moving. I’m going forth into uncertainty and very possibly death. You are responsible for this, of course. For whatever happens to me.”

  My brother chuckled in the dark behind me.

  “Well, Galen,” he drawled, “I expect I can live with that.”

  I expect it was a quagmire—a pool very much like the ones we had passed over and around in the daylight, more dangerous in the darkness simply because you could not see where it began, where it left off. The first step into it was enough to confirm my fears: the bubbling sound, the feel of something sucking and dragging at the bottom of my boots. It was dangerous—could take you under to the ankles, to the waist, take you under entirely, depending on how deep it was.

  Quickly I ducked, slipped my shoulder out from under Alfric’s hand, and rushed across the mud, trusting that it was only a larger version of what I had seen before.

  So it was. Only larger than I had figured. After a while of running, I felt myself sinking. Frantically I tried to recall what I knew about quagmires.

  Do not move. Movement gets you in deeper trouble.

  Hold still, completely still, and wait for help.

  Help from a dim-witted oaf wearing a hundred pounds of armor?

  My legs churned even more quickly. I windmilled my arms, hoping devoutly that I could outrun the present terrain.

  Twice I sank to my knees, once to mid-thigh, but each time I managed to scramble out of where I had been mired. All the while Alfric called behind me—his voice not quite clear above the bubbling noises of the pool—shouting names, commands, threats.

  It would make for a good story to say that my feet found dry and solid ground just as I was about to give up. But it was long after giving up, I suppose, that I discovered I was no longer sinking—that knee-deep in mud I had found a bottom to the quagmire. My body had kept moving out of reflex, out of sheer panic, even after my spirit had failed completely.

  It had failed embarrassingly. By that time I was shouting for help from anyone—Bayard, Agion, Brithelm, the satyrs, the Scorpion, Alfric, and whoever else might be within earshot. I prayed to the gods, then bargained with them, promising to spend the rest of my life in an obscure priesthood, after having surrendered all my possessions to one of the temples of Paladine in Solamnia. My next thoughts had been scarcely as profound, as I peeled the bark from the nearby cedars, with language that would have made stable hands blush. I had tried weeping, blubbering, even rising hysterical laughter.

  I am grateful for whatever prayers or promises or cries or curses got me to the other side of the quagmire. For I do not know how I c
overed the last few yards to safety except that it involved pulling myself out by a long, thin vine that lay atop the pool, a vine I had entangled around my waist, my shoulders and neck, until I had stood a great chance of being hanged by my own lifeline.

  Whatever happened, I lay on solid ground at last, wrapped almost completely in leaves like some sort of elf dinner, gasping for air and listening, as the rest of my senses recovered from the strains and the shocks, to the sound of something behind me in the dark—a noise rising above the churning sounds of the pool I had just passed over and through.

  The sound of cries for help. Which were pretty familiar by now. But this time they weren’t mine.

  Alfric’s cries—pitiful, yes, but music to my ears.

  “Galen, are you out there? Galen? Help me!”

  I sat on the wonderfully dry earth and disentangled the wonderfully strong vine from around my elbow.

  “Help me! I know you’re there! Father’s armor is heavy, and I’m going down!”

  Quickly, I fashioned the vine into a lasso.

  “Galen, for the sake of Paladine and Majere and Mishakal and Branchala …”

  His voice trailed off. Alfric had always been poor at theology; he had run out of gods, evidently.

  “What do you expect me to do?” I shouted out across the quagmire.

  “Throw something out on this mud or quicksand or whatever it is, something I can grab onto and pull myself out.”

  “Alfric?”

  “What, Galen? Hurry up! I’ve stopped sinking for now, but I’m up to my waist in soil!”

  “What’s in this for me, Big Brother?”

  Silence across the quagmire.

  “But, of course,” I continued, “there is brotherly affection, which I so deeply cherish …”

  “Stop toying with me, you damn Weasel, and cast out a life line!”

  “A little more … respect out there, Alfric! All right. There’s a vine set to come in your direction. Now, I don’t know if I can throw vegetation that far, or if it’s long enough to reach you, or even if you can see it in the dark, but I’d say that once I cast it out there, your odds will leap from nothing at all to just this side of slim.”

  I cast the vine in the direction of the voice.

  “Be of good faith, Brother. Things grow quickly in this swamp, as you said yourself. If the vine doesn’t reach you, maybe it will grow in your direction.

  “And if that fails, surely you’ve found the bottom of the quagmire. Just stand there until someone comes along.”

  I turned, walked off into the darkness, unsure of my direction, but filled with a deep and satisfying sense of poetic justice.

  The things Alfric called behind me I should not repeat. I suppose that I deserved the new names he was inventing. After all, I relied on trust—and on trust only—that he’d eventually be able to wade his way out of the fen in which I had left him. If it turned out that he was a little worse off than I had foreseen, that Father’s armor was a little heavier than I had thought … well, it calmed me to realize that if the vine and the darkness failed Alfric, if it turned out I deserved worse than simple name calling, my punishment wasn’t likely to arrive soon. At least not by his hands. I walked confidently off into the darkness, away from the sound of Brother’s curses and shouts and, finally, his screams.

  Darkness, though, does all kinds of terrible things to confidence. It was the kind of night with nothing to offer the traveler, the kind you should sleep through or wait out. Around me, Alfric’s shouts and curses faded, to be replaced by other noises less certain, more threatening: the sounds of quick scuffling and quicker movement; of things I could not see splashing and swimming in waters I could not see; the sound of those waters themselves moving; and the occasional, threatening laughter of some marsh bird. I was good and lost.

  After about an hour, the trail I had been following dwindled into nothing but a snakelike crease through the reeds. I stopped on the rapidly narrowing path, wondered at what kind of creature had made the trail in the first place, and then, faced with no other choice, continued in the same direction, though soon entirely without direction or even the sense that someone or something had been here before me.

  Remembering a fragment of the advice Father had hurled at me when we left the moat house, I crouched and checked the bole of a cypress tree. Moss grew on all sides. North, it seemed, was everywhere.

  A snorting sound brought me to my feet, clutching my sword and expecting mayhem. I gripped the trunk of the cypress, eager to get behind it if I could figure out where “behind” was—where the sound had come from in the first place.

  A louder snort followed, and a strange stirring that seemed to come from somewhere off to my left and below me. Cautiously I moved to my left, prepared for centaurs or satyrs or the legendary carnivorous birds that were supposed to infest this swamp. Down on my hands and knees I went, crawling toward the source of the noise.

  But not slowly enough, evidently. I had not crawled ten feet before the ground in front of me gave way under my hands. For a moment I stood over a yawning incline of mud and flattened reed, looking below me into a clearing darker still, where something large and indefinite glistened as it moved.

  Just when it dawned on me that I did not want to go down there, I had no choice, sliding rapidly face first over the mud and the slick, leafy surface down into a puddled depression.

  Where something monstrous splashed and snorted.

  I lay still for a moment, having heard the old story that predators will not harm you if they think you’re dead. I hoped devoutly that the predator would think that my fall had killed me.

  For a long minute I lay still, hearing nothing but the breathing and slow movement of a large creature. Then I felt warm breathing on my neck, and a wet snuffling that was anything but predatory. It was like a dog or a calf …

  Or a horse.

  I turned onto my back quickly, and stared into the wide-eyed face of the pack mare.

  We had been traveling for some time, wrestling and kicking at one another, as I tried to steer the stubborn pack mare through the dense undergrowth and she, burdened by my weight and that of the armor, struggled to leave one of us behind on the soggy ground of the swamp. I was clinging for dear life when the darkness finally began to break ahead of us. It was nothing like morning, which was still hours away. Nor was the green light in the trees anything like sunlight filtered through leaves and through the needles of evergreens—that fresh color I was to remember fondly in the darker times up the road. Instead, this green was a timid and unhealthy one, fading to a yellow or an off-white I had never seen in nature, unless it was the color of a snake’s belly.

  The color was that of phosfire. I can tell you that now, though at the time I had never seen the lights in the wilds.

  Phosfire was what the elves call “midnight blaze,” the burning gases that rise from the scraps and remains of the dead things a swamp consumes. Phosfire gives off heat only when it has been condensed, when it drips from the tubing of the still (like the one in Gileandos’s library, which of course he seldom used to distill phosfire, but which could be used in any way an enterprising student cared to use it, as his incandescent farewell from the battlements had proven).

  As a liquid, phosfire is highly flammable, burning within minutes after contact with air. As a gas, it is only a harmless source of light, not unlike the luminescent powder found in a firefly’s abdomen, though it does become more thick, does look more bright and fevered, the closer you travel to the center of a swamp and the center of all the death it has swallowed through the years.

  At the time, I was encouraged by the light, as was the mare, and we both followed it eagerly. I urged my mount on, sure that the light had a source somewhere on drier, safer ground—a dwelling, perhaps, or the campfires of a surviving Bayard, Brithelm, and Agion.

  Of course, I did not notice (or refused to notice) that the green light gave off no warmth, moved nervously ahead of me, and illuminated nothing but its
elf. It was only when the phosfire gave way to firelight, when the green faded into the friendlier glow of reds and of yellows, when the smell of woodsmoke greeted me, and finally the warmth of actual campfires, that I began to recognize that the light which had led me farther and farther into the swamp had been something unpleasant and lifeless.

  I dismounted and led the mare into concealment behind a small cluster of laryx bushes. I surveyed.

  Below me now, probably at the lowest point of the swamp, lay a small rise, as though having bottomed out, the swamp intended to take heart and return to sea level. Lowlands these were indeed, but surprisingly dry from the looks of it; dry enough to support what appeared to be a circle of smudges, small campfires designed to provide light and warmth and also drive away the last insects of the season. Piles of unlit kindling lay strewn from one fire to the next, completing the sense that whatever lay within the band of flames was protected and encircled.

  But within that circle of fires stood only a rickety cabin on stilts, its near wall nursing a large hole near the back corner, its roof nearly ruinous, smoke rising through its many holes. Indeed, at first I assumed the cabin was on fire. Such was not the case; perhaps the chimney suffered from a damaged flue. Whoever lived there was most unfortunate, dwelling in misery beneath the constant layers of smoke.

  About the house I saw a herd of goats—at most a dozen, including the kids—trotting about within that circle of fire and wood, as though somehow the fire contained them, kept them from wandering off.

  It looked as though the goats were right at home in those ramshackle surroundings. They were a long-haired breed, the kind you would expect in the highlands or the mountains, but here in the marshes their long hair was streaked and clotted with mud, with vines and lichen dripping from their beards and horns. They were almost frightening to look at.

  There was fire nearby, and a promised warmth. The pack mare snorted with yearning. My boots were soaked through, my trousers muddy and wet well above the knees, and despite the cold discomfort I felt, the insects still seemed to relish me.