The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  Below them, they heard the sound of voices and the clatter of boots. The Brothers, accompanied by Father Ralstein, burst through the side doors with an unwieldy net. Three Officers of the Peace mounted on sleek bicycles zoomed round the corner onto the big street named Fifty-Second.

  “Push, left!” yelled Tin as he let out the last of the line. The Fiddleback fell fast and flipped as the boys threw their weight against the leather walls of the seat cab. The hook and golden line fell with it. Tin let the legs out just as they landed, buoying the impact, and frantically began to reel the silk in as the Fiddleback zoomed on, wheels spinning like suns on long silver legs. One of the Officers skidded away from them with surprise and spun out of control. A pistol clattered against the asphalt.

  “I’m going to be sick,” came Mallow’s voice from behind Tin’s shoulder, where he had tucked himself amidst all the spinning, glowing chaos.

  “Where are we going?” yelled Seb as they sped down Fifty-Second Street, open and smooth in the hour before dawn.

  “No idea!” Tin hollered back, and both boys laughed at the absurdity of their plight. “Didn’t you say there was a door in the Wall, Mallow?”

  The leveret groaned. “Yes, but I haven’t the faintest idea where it is! My brain’s scrambled by all this bounding around and dangling upside down, and I’ve never been in a City before! It’s utterly disorienting!”

  “Now look who’s Mr No Plan!” Tin teased.

  “So long, suckers!” Seb called out over his shoulder. Two Officers sped close behind them, and a shot rang out just shy of one of the Fiddleback’s legs.

  “Don’t damage it, you morons!” screamed Father Ralstein from somewhere behind them. “Just scare them!”

  Tin cursed, guiding the Fiddleback in a quick right turn down a small side street. Several of the legs skidded off the ground, and Seb began to look a little green.

  “They know the City so much better than we do, Tin, we can’t hide,” Seb said, swallowing the sick feeling in his stomach. “How much more conspicuous can we get?” He gestured at the round, golden walls of the Fiddleback and at Mallow, who sniffed haughtily at his hand.

  Tin bit his lip. You’re the storyteller, he thought to himself. You’ve dreamed up a hundred escapes. What does a person do? Where does a person hide? They’d lost the Officers for a moment, and the Fiddleback bumped slightly as it skidded over a protruding manhole cover. Tin pulled the brake hard, causing the vehicle to spin.

  “Holy Mother of Haredom!” wheezed Mallow as Tin’s weight pressed suddenly against him. “What are you doing?”

  “I’ve read about this kind of thing,” muttered Tin, leaping out. Seb followed when he saw his friend grunting to lift the manhole cover.

  “Isn’t that where sewage goes, or something?” Seb asked, grimacing.

  “It beats where we came from,” said Tin, trying to joke. He pulled several levers and the Fiddleback’s legs tucked into a golden ball. “We’ll have to squeeze it in.”

  They grunted and shoved the Fiddleback in through the manhole, its shape compressing into a long oval.

  Mallow sat nervously on the cold cement street, sniffing at the black tar. “Where’s the ground?” he said. “Where’s the dirt? Is this City just one big human house?” His hare senses were disoriented, without any real soil nearby.

  Tin clambered down into the manhole, finding a ledge to crouch on. “Mallow, come on,” he called from inside the shaft, his voice echoing.

  The hare leaped down onto the boy’s shoulders. Seb followed, squeezing onto the ledge as well. Tin dragged the manhole cover back over them, getting his hands out of the way just in time. Three Officers sped overhead, pressing the metal grate securely back in place.

  The darkness that closed in with them was thick and complete. The boys shivered. Seb’s mouth felt dry, and Tin found that his breathing was shallow. The air smelled sour and rank, far worse than the mildewed showers the boys used after exercises in the courtyard. Tin lowered a foot cautiously and found a metal ladder extending into the darkness.

  “Brilliant,” said Mallow. “I’m afraid I’m not going to be much help, guiding us anywhere in this hare-forsaken underground. Can’t hear or smell a useful thing, without earth around me or under my feet.” He was doing his best to sound indignant rather than afraid.

  “Nothing to do but climb down further, then find a place to rest. We can plan what to do next from there,” said Tin, trying to stay calm.

  “Indeed, as I expected. Carry on, Mr No Plan,” said Mallow.

  “I’d say it’s gone pretty well so far, Mr Hare,” objected Tin.

  “Come on, you two,” chided Seb, smiling a little. “This is no time to argue.”

  They began to climb down the ladder. Tin kept hold of the silk, and half shoved, half lowered the squashed Fiddleback as they went. Mallow balanced on Tin’s shoulders. The rungs were slippery and had to be found by foot and faith alone. The scrape of the Fiddleback’s metal against the narrow walls, and the clanking of their boots, echoed.

  Little beads of sweat formed on Tin’s forehead when he began to wonder how far the shaft extended, and what would happen if he fell.

  “I hear running water,” said Mallow, breaking the tense silence. “Below us,” he added, with mock cheerfulness.

  Tin’s stomach knotted at the thought of dark moving water somewhere far below them, possibly thick with sewage, and in the same instant his foot slipped. As he reached up for a rung to steady himself, he grabbed Seb’s leg instead, causing Seb to lose his footing and come crashing down on top of him. Tin lost his grip completely then, and fell onto the Fiddleback which was wedged below them. Mallow leaped out of the way, off his shoulders, and landed on the compressed top of the Fiddleback just as Seb landed too. The weight of the two boys loosed the vehicle from where it had been stuck, and they all tumbled five metres further down into the darkness of the shaft, clutching at each other and at the Fiddleback, which hit the water first, breaking their fall but breaking all eight of its legs too.

  For a split second before splashing down, Tin wondered desperately about that little spider tucked below, and whether she had scuttled out of the way of the water in time. Seb fainted in panic in mid-air. Tin, on impact with the water, hit his head on the side of a pipe and lost consciousness. The spider silk was still wrapped round his hand. Mallow, better built to land from a height, crouched on top of the bobbing Fiddleback and stared down in horror at the two boys drifting, unconscious, in the fast-moving water.

  “You mean I can never go home?”

  Comfrey stood at the top of the hill, trying to keep her voice steady. Myrtle was clutched in her arms. The Coyote-men were still ranged and snarling behind her, and the camp of the Basket-witches was just down the slope in front of her. She was perched at the edge of the Wild Folk territory, and the reality of what she had done made her want to cry. She hadn’t meant to abandon her mother for ever in this way, only to ask the Wild Folk a few questions! The Basket-witch in the fennel-yellow dress beckoned her nearer, one hand on her hip. On the woman’s shoulder the fiery hawk opened his beak and hissed, his tongue an orange flame.

  “Don’t show you’re afraid, don’t show weakness,” whispered Myrtle. “Creatures like that Fire Hawk can smell fear.”

  “Fire Hawk? It has a name?” Comfrey whispered back, her eyes wide on the shining bird.

  “Of course he does, silly! We are in Olima now!” retorted the leveret, shivering.

  Comfrey took a deep breath. Hadn’t she just been boasting the other day of her own courage? She sniffled, blinked several times to clear the tears from her eyes, and began to walk downhill, placing her feet carefully one after the other along a narrow deer trail to the base of the slope, away from the Coyote-men and towards the camp of the Basket-witches.

  “I won’t throw you in my soup and eat you, girl, cheer up,” said the woman in the yellow dress as Comfrey drew nearer. She stirred at the pot of nettles, dandelion greens and the bones of deer. �
�And never is a very strong word,” she added. “But what would have been the point in coming here, only to turn around and run home again? No one is ever allowed out of the land of the Wild Folk so easily. The Coyote-folk guard the borders well.” She grinned as if this was perfectly amusing. On the woman’s shoulder, the Fire Hawk opened his beak and a single flame curled from his mouth. Somehow, the flames of his feathers did not singe the Basket-witch at all. Myrtle quaked and squirmed deeper into Comfrey’s cloak.

  “Then…” stammered Comfrey, dizzied by the Hawk’s bright feathers. “I’m not the first one to come here, to break the rules?” She was standing close to the fire now, and the pot of bubbling dark green soup. The woman set down the ladle with the force of her laughter, and the chickadee in her hair flapped its wings, cheeping, which sent the Fire Hawk flapping off into the sky.

  “Oh my dear Comfrey, oh my dear Myrtle! Yes, you, little leveret, you can come out now.” Myrtle popped her nose out of Comfrey’s cloak. “You may be the first girl and hare combination to come here together. Yes, that is unusual, it’s true. But how, child, do you think the tales about the Wild Folk got formed? How can you know where an edge between places really is unless somebody steps over and never returns, or returns in fifty years as an old grey man, with another piece of the map?”

  “You – you know my name too?” Comfrey exclaimed. Myrtle eased herself slowly to the ground and stayed close to the girl’s ankles, sniffing the ground and the air, where the Fire Hawk circled lazily.

  “Just like the Bobcat-girl, and the Greentwins! How do all of you know who I am? See, that’s why we came – that is, we were trying to find you…”

  “Soup?” the woman said. She grinned at Comfrey’s startled expression. This was not the reply the girl was expecting. It was not a reply at all. The Basket-witch held out a basket woven all of bracken-fern root fibres, big as a tea mug, and watertight. It was full of steaming green broth. The Hawk swooped lower and landed on the edge of one of the wagons. He lifted his head and the edges of his wings with a ripple of ember orange, a gust of heat. “Not for you, love,” said the woman to the bird. “We are not making hare soup today. These are our guests. Now sit down, Comfrey,” she said, turning back to the girl and the leveret. “Eat first, questions later.” The woman placed the bowl in Comfrey’s hands and gestured for her to sit on the ground and drink. Myrtle tucked herself away behind Comfrey’s ankles.

  Comfrey was about to make some impatient reply, but a warning nip from Myrtle stilled her, and she sat obediently. The taste of the soup filled her up like nothing she had ever eaten: dark-mineralled greens, salt and cream and the tang of the blood of deer bones. The woman laughed at the look of delight on Comfrey’s face, and sat down with her own soup, reaching a hand to pat Myrtle’s head amiably. Myrtle ducked round the other side of Comfrey in alarm.

  “As for your name,” the woman said after she’d slurped almost the entire bowl. “Well, that’s the simple part. Wild Folk can see right into ordinary folk, didn’t you know? And your name’s right there on the surface, easy to pick out as a smell or a colour.”

  Comfrey looked up from her soup, startled. She found the woman’s dark face solemn. Up close it was covered in a hundred fine lines.

  “You can call me Salix,” the woman continued, “and my sisters Sedge and Rush.”

  “Oh,” stammered Comfrey, watching the two women Salix had just named emerge from the far side of the wagon. They carried tall bundles of tule stalks, of sedge roots, of young willow sticks.

  “Can you tell me what you meant yesterday about the basket of my own fate?” the girl ventured, eyeing the other Basket-witches shyly.

  Salix looked at her with a little smile. Then she ladled soup into two more basket bowls and handed them to her hungry sisters, her yellow dress hushing along the grass. The other Basket-witches had just laid their bundles down and were now seating themselves with contented sighs in the meadow.

  “Careful what you ask for,” said the one called Rush. “You never know what you might learn.” Her fibrous hair was pale like oatgrass. She was creamy-skinned, the colour of the milk of mammals and certain flowers, and round hipped, and wore a braided skirt of pale cattail stalks. Comfrey had never seen anyone so white before. Her eyes were paler blue than the winter sky. In her tangled hair perched the yellow flashing body of a goldfinch.

  “Well, what about the fate of Farallone?” Comfrey persisted. “The Greentwins say a danger is coming. The risk of another Collapse, worse even than before. That Farallone might die!”

  “Nonsense, child,” said the one called Sedge. She was slim as sedge grass, her hair the same green as the soup in its coiled cone-basket headdress, her skin the colour of acorns. She wore all green and her bare feet were covered in silver toe rings. Her voice was sharp and without humour. In her reedy hair a marsh wren rattled her call. “Don’t you know your histories, and all the Elk sacrificed to keep Farallone safe? Those meddlesome Greentwins. One can’t trust the sort who choose to go among your kind. You humans proved your foolishness and your inability to take care of Farallone long ago. You should be ashamed of yourself and of your people. If there was anything amiss we would be the first to know, not you, and not the Greentwins either, who do not respect the boundaries laid by the Elk at the time of the Collapse.”

  Comfrey turned to Myrtle, wide-eyed with both hurt and awe. So the Elk of ancient legends was real?

  “Told you they were hard to talk to,” the hare said, tentatively wriggling free of Comfrey now that the Fire Hawk had settled a good distance away. “They are Basket-witches, after all. As a general rule, Wild Folk aren’t greatly fond of humans. They have good reason.”

  “But I’m not bad! And neither is my mother, or the old ladies who tell stories in the village, or the cobbler who has been to Tule. And I thought you said the Greentwins were doctors! I know it was very terrible, what happened between the City and the Country, but the people I know are good people…” She trailed off, eyeing Sedge, who eyed her back coldly, arching a disdainful brow.

  A great cackling laughter rose up from the two other Basket-witches. Salix had her hands and eyes busy splitting willow switches, but her face folded with mirth, and the chickadee in her hair flapped and chirruped.

  “Sedge is a bit hard going,” said Salix, chuckling. “You are an innocent-enough young thing. Perhaps it isn’t fair to blame you for the entire history of your kind. After all, before the coming of the Star-Priests, those men of Albion now called the Brothers, the ancient people of Farallone were quite respectable on the whole. But still, we Wild Folk have good reason not to trust humankind.”

  Just then, the Fire Hawk swooped low, his talons extended. The wind from his wings moved Comfrey’s braids, singeing them.

  “Great Hare-mother above!” exclaimed Myrtle, flinging herself back into Comfrey’s arms and hiding in her cloak once more.

  “You seem to have caught his attention,” said Rush, watching the Fire Hawk with interest. She smoothed absently at her braided tule skirt, then turned to her sisters. “Perhaps we might see something useful in the girl’s weaving. The Fire Hawk has been listless of late. These two have excited him.”

  “I’ll say,” muttered Myrtle. “It’s called being a hare.”

  “Who is the Fire Hawk, anyway?” said Comfrey, gazing after the luminous bird. Myrtle nipped her from inside the cape.

  “Impertinence!” the leveret hissed. “For goodness’ sake, Comfrey, be careful. Asking the wrong question of the Wild Folk never ends well, and nobody even knows what the wrong question is! All the more reason to take care.”

  Salix smiled, her broad face crinkling, and handed Comfrey a bundle of fresh willow. Biting her bottom lip to keep back more words, and breathing deeply, Comfrey took the bundle and sat down among the Basket-witches by their fire.

  “The world is very much bigger than you can fathom, Comfrey,” said Salix. “You do not know how one question, one particular path taken or decision made, can affect
the whole. How that one little hermit thrush now singing in the firs speaks of the life of the whole forest, and the bobcat hunting voles at the meadow’s edge.”

  Comfrey opened her mouth to retort that this was no answer, and to ask another question, but then remembered herself and shut it again.

  “Now, help us split these willows, there’s a good lass,” said Rush, touching Comfrey’s hand with a pale finger. “Then you may weave your own basket, and we will read it for you at dawn.”

  That night Comfrey and Myrtle lay under a sky clear of rain, cold with frost, and full of ice-pale stars. Comfrey’s bed was a mat made of tule fibres, with a blanket of river-otter skins and goose feathers.

  “Myrtle?” Comfrey whispered to the hare, who was tucked warm under the covers. “Have I got us into a mess?” It had been a long day, and her basket had come out lopsided, with many holes. She realized how impatient she normally was with her weaving at home, and how rarely anyone entrusted her with the making of burden-baskets there, for this very reason. All of her subtle proddings had elicited little more information from the Basket-witches for the remainder of the day. They’d spoken of the birds calling in the forest, of how nicely the grasses and reeds were growing after the rain. Their words wove in and out and around like the fibres of a basket, making Comfrey dizzy and more confused than ever.

  Myrtle remained silent for a moment, licking carefully at the place on her shoulder where the Fire Hawk had singed her.

  “Well,” said the leveret at last, peeping her ears and her nose out from under the blankets. “They are letting you weave a basket. Surely there will be something useful in it, once you’re done and they can read it. But that Fire Hawk is taking a toll on my nerves. He had his eye on me all day!” Myrtle shuddered, and ducked back under the skins at the thought.

  Comfrey lay awake for a long time watching the constellation called the Hunter move down the southern sky as the moon waxed across the dark heavens. She thought of her mother making milk cakes alone, her strong arms stirring at the dough, her smell of lavender and salt when she tucked Comfrey in and kissed her. Tears came hot down her cheeks, and she felt an overwhelming longing to be home with her mother, among people who loved her and valued her. Sedge’s harsh words still cut at her: You should be ashamed of yourself and of your people. There had been so much hatred in her voice. All the stories that had seemed so clear and solid in her life felt unsteady now. Wasn’t it the City people who were bad, not the Country people?