The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  “Oh, there is,” said Thornton. “There is indeed. Right inside your veins. Everybody has a little, a very little trace. But you, my lad, seem to have more than a little. The leveret, well. He is of the Country, touched by the Greentwins and by Wild Folk. His blood is practically all stargold, like theirs.”

  “What?” said Tin and Seb in unison, lifting up their wrists and hands and holding them to the light. Mallow blinked once, but did not reply. He was remembering a story told to him by the Greentwins. He had not understood it very well as a babe, not having any knowledge of humans or of the City or of gold.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Thornton said, smiling sidelong at Mallow. The leveret flicked his ears in surprise. Had the man read his mind?

  “A story!” cried Seb. “But you said you would tell us about the Country, and about what you know.”

  “That is exactly what I am doing. Sometimes it is better understood in a story,” Thornton said, crouching to a seat beside the Fiddleback and pouring himself another cup of tea. “Listen. It is a long story but it is a very important one and one you have never heard before. Stories matter, my lads. They tell us how to see the world. It’s taken me eight years to piece together this story, for it was lost at the time of the Collapse, and Before, during the many centuries of the rule of the Star-Priests. Here it is. In the Beginning there was only darkness, stargold, and the milk that comes from mothers and from the moon.” The man closed his eyes, his voice taking on a strange, rooted tone that made Tin shiver. Already he knew this story was going to be special.

  “In the Beginning there was darkness, and Old Spider Mother Neeth who spun the dust of stars into matter, into an Elk as vast as mountains and a Bobcat fierce as bones. The Elk made the island called Farallone out of the Spider’s weavings, and out of the milk and blood of her own body. It was an island of steep hills that turned golden under the heat of summer and sang with cicadas; of valleys that gleamed with streams and summer berries; coastlines green and many-flowered and often wreathed in fog; and many coves where the cold, wild ocean foamed and crashed against the rocks. It was a gentle land, though rich and wild with animals and plants. There were leaves on the trees all year round, and there was food in every season too – be it nut, berry, seed, mushroom, fish or fowl – for the climate of Farallone was mild and agreeable. Life flourished in the world the Elk had made.

  “In all of Farallone’s rivers and streams, the stargold of its Beginning lingered, glinting in the silt. The stargold the City Brothers are still so hungry for. Unseen, deep underground below the mountains and valleys, the stargold coursed, and that golden matter of the cosmos gave the island its life. The most ancient people of Farallone – whom the Elk had made with the help of the Bobcat out of mud and a little stargold and the water from the sea – believed that their land was the most holy in all the world, though they had never seen anywhere else in the world because they had no need to leave. Whether or not they were right didn’t matter, for Farallone was theirs, and they were Farallone’s, and they had all they needed.

  “Things went on like this for a very, very long time. The people of Farallone lived peacefully in small villages, mostly along the edges of the three great marshes and in the four great valleys between the low mountains that crossed the island. Families followed the food as it blossomed and ripened and fruited – acorns and salmon in autumn, migrating waterfowl in winter, deer and greens in spring, berries from the forest and seeds from grasslands in summer. Having made things to her satisfaction, the Elk went to live at the furthest northern tip of Farallone among a herd of normal elk, keeping an eye on their Creations for Old Spider Mother Neeth. She looked just like an ordinary elk, except her hoofs were pure stargold, her eyes the violet of galaxies, and she never died from one generation to the next.

  “Now and then a human caught sight of her, and she became known as the Elk of Milk and Gold. She might have made all beings live for ever too, just like she did, if it hadn’t been for the First Bobcat, who thought that this would make for an awfully boring, unchanging world. Change, said the Bobcat, was the nature of the cosmos. Even stars die, or how else would we have the stargold that gives Farallone its life? How else will they savour what has been given to them, without change, and loss, and then renewal? This was pretty wise on the whole, the Elk decided. So she let the Bobcat make an opening in the ground where the souls of the dead would go, all beings returning back to earth and to the seams of stargold deep inside. The First Bobcat went deep into the underworld with them, to watch over the dead. And so the balance was kept for hundreds of generations.”

  The clank and hiss of roots being added to the fire, and the purring sound of several propellers vibrating the floor, interrupted Thornton’s mellifluous storytelling. Tin felt like he had been shaken rudely from a dream, and looked around for the source of the sound. It was Beatrix, starting up the engine to quietly steer the little underground boat downstream. She shot an apologetic look over her shoulder from the small chamber where she sat at the wheel.

  “Word just came through the network that there are unusual numbers of Brothers gathering in the streets on the City’s western side,” she said in a quick, low voice to Thornton. “I’m taking us deeper east and south.” She shot a meaningful look at Tin, then back at Thornton. “Don’t mean to interrupt, captain,” she added, grinning. “You never tell us the old tales; you’d make a fine bard.”

  Thornton snorted. “This I’m telling out of necessity. Don’t get your hopes up for a repeat performance. Take us south, yes. Towards the old pelican graveyard, I think.”

  Seb and Tin looked at each other, round-eyed.

  “Now where was I?” Thornton said, turning back to the boys.

  “The hole to the underworld!” Seb said eagerly.

  “Ah, yes,” Thornton smiled. “I’m afraid it gets worse. But you already knew that.” He let out a long breath, uncorked a bottle of something dark, took a swig, and continued. “And so it went peacefully on Farallone, the balance kept, until one day an enormous ship landed on the easternmost point of the island from somewhere very far away. Many men in gleaming metal armour came pouring out onto the beach. They had come sailing round the whole world in search of gold, for they knew how to break stargold into its most essential parts and extract the power and energy of the stars from it. They found what they were seeking in abundance on Farallone, and a gentle climate to boot, not to mention the great herds of elk, the flocks of geese, the streams full of salmon. It was more plentiful than any land they had ever seen before. They wanted it all, and so they took it all and set about devouring it. And there was nothing that any of the ancient people of Farallone could do to stop them, having no concept of conquest, war or greed. Murder and jealousy sometimes, of course, but always they had kept the original balance among themselves.

  “The new people named the easternmost point New Albion. Before that, it was a sacred place where no one lived because Old Mother Neeth had her cave there. But the invaders found her in her cave, called her a monster, and killed her. Then they built a vast City there, covering up the sand dunes and the deep caves with cobbled streets and towers and bridges and observatories as white as bone, made from the island’s limestone cliffs. They turned the inner valleys to farmland and founded many prosperous towns. The outer coast, with its long point and bay and ridges and prairie grasslands, they filled with cattle so that there was hardly room for any other creature, and the hills were grazed to the root. The streams and the great river that flowed down from the Juniper Mountains they mined for stargold. In their City they had built terrible machines called Star-Breakers, which had the power to break the pieces of gold open and release the energy they carried. Thus they fuelled their City. Those who knew the secrets of the Star-Breakers called themselves Star-Priests, and later, the Brotherhood. Greedily they blasted the stargold out of the banks with violent hoses. They gathered it in pans, in buckets, in carts. They enslaved the ancient people of Farallone to do much of the work for
them, rounding them up from their seasonal homes and forcing them to live in a series of boarding houses, where the wives of the Star-Priests taught them to work hard, to speak the language of Albion, to worship the white towers and the sky. They were punished for telling these old stories, punished until the names of Elk and First Bobcat and Old Spider Mother were all but lost. Most of them grew sick and died – of new diseases brought by the people of Albion, or of grief. Those who survived did so by hiding what they knew and what they had been, until they themselves forgot.

  “Farallone was a feast of stargold, and so the Star-Breakers ran day and night, providing the City of New Albion with seemingly inexhaustible fuel. The Star-Priests, drunk on their power, created an elaborate system of hydraulics to water their carefully engineered crops, and when the rivers started to run dry they built a desalination plant along the ocean and pumped water through the City via a series of aqueducts and canals, out to the agricultural valleys, and via canal all the way to the dairies nearly sixty kilometres away. They called Farallone the Land of Milk and Honey, but the animals, plants, and ordinary people who were not rich with stargold knew the truth. That Farallone was being sucked dry. That it was turning into a wasteland. Century after century for five hundred years it went on, until Farallone was, in truth, a wasteland, and had been sucked dry of her water, her wild animals, her fragrant plants, and nearly all of her stargold, save the gold that lay very, very deep underground. The connections between living beings had been broken. The forests were empty of songbirds and old mother trees. The island itself was dying.

  “For those five hundred years the Elk of Milk and Gold hid and mourned. Even the First Bobcat, who presided over the dead, was afraid. It took all of their energy just to stay alive and out of sight, both Bobcat and Elk. They feared that they would meet the same fate as Old Mother Neeth. They hid in the island’s deepest tunnels, caves and forests. No one remembered their names after a while. No one believed in them, and so their power was much smaller than it had been, broken down further and further as the Brothers broke apart every piece of star.

  “But still, in the end, they had enough strength between them to do what needed to be done. To keep Farallone from dying, the Elk came out of hiding. She stamped down her golden hoof right on the fault line that runs through the island and a terrible earthquake rended Farallone. The earthquake turned half the City to rubble, though it was not strong enough to destroy its Star-Breakers. The Bobcat opened the portal to the underworld and unleashed a terrible, deadly disease known later as the Plague.”

  “The Plagues…” Tin whispered. “They started because of a – Bobcat? And this Elk?” He was having a little trouble breathing, and his tone was incredulous. Despite everything Mallow had tried to explain to him about the Country, and Wild Folk, Thornton’s story was almost too much for him to take in all at once.

  “They started because of your kind!” Mallow said, a little bit miffed that Tin wasn’t more obviously impressed. “The First Bobcat and the Elk of Milk and Gold had to step in, or the whole island would have been destroyed.”

  “So you know these stories too?” said Seb, looking at the leveret with surprise.

  “Of course! The Greentwins taught me well,” Mallow replied, sniffing casually at his paws.

  “So they did,” said Thornton, his voice soft with affection. “So it is, my boys. I know it is a lot to hear, a lot to understand all at once, but it is important that you do. There is more left to say. Have a sip of Anders’s dandelion root cordial, it will revive you so you can listen all the way to the end.”

  As Tin and Seb, with wrinkled noses, took small swallows of the sweet, earthy stuff, Thornton picked up the thread of his telling and continued.

  “When the earth had stopped moving, the Star-Priests of the City of New Albion did everything they could to save their own, quarantining themselves in their towers and their Cloister in the City’s inner sanctum. They built a Wall around what remained of their City by smelting dark metals into a terrible impenetrable fortress. It had only one door, a secret one, so no one could come in and no one could get out, save those who kept the key. Only the most favoured were allowed in as the world outside sickened and flooded and burned. The best workers, yes, and also the families of power. They called themselves the Brothers, and pretended to be saviours.

  “After a year they sent a scout out to investigate the habitability of the island outside the Wall. He came back very ill, and died two days later. Five years later, more cautious, they sent a second scout. He came back sick as well, and with stories that turned even the Brothers’ blood cold. Before he died he described how the poisons that had seeped into the water and the air had created human and animal mutations. How else could he explain the horrible creatures he had seen out there, part human and part animal? It was a toxic waste, it was a danger to civilization and progress and humanity. Heaven forbid any such contaminants reached City water or City air. Some left the City in ships, seeking aid, but none ever returned.

  “Meanwhile, in the Country, something extraordinary had happened. Not poison, but true and organic transmutation. The Elk of Milk and Gold, a very old and weary Creatrix by then, had used what remained of her generative powers to protect the last of Farallone’s heart, the last of its gold. She took that stargold from the ground where men had discovered they could mine it, and turned it into beings, demigods, so that the animals, plants, stones and rivers might be protected from human greed. For every sort of plant and animal and stone, and every stream, lake and river, she created a clan of protectors. She named them the Wild Folk. Their blood was made of gold, and they shared the features of both wild being and human, for they were mediators, and had to speak and move in human ways, so that humans would listen to them and learn from them and revere them. What was more, their bodies now sheltered the last of Farallone’s life-giving stargold, hidden right in sight.

  “All the land west of the recently active fault line, on the peninsula called Olima, became theirs and theirs alone. East of the fault line, in the many valleys, hills and marshlands called the Country, the survivors of the Collapse learned from the Wild Folk and from each other how to live in balance, in reverence, in peace and in abundance. For many years the Wild Folk looked after all the land of Farallone outside the City’s Wall, coaxing seeds back to life, healing deep scars in stone, tending to forests and waters and the last of every animal. But heal Farallone did. Under the hands of the Wild Folk the land began to flourish again. Then, one day, they left all of the land east of the fault line to the Country people, vanishing into the wilds of the west, across the fault line to Olima so that they might live near the Elk, in that land without time, where no humans dared walk.

  “What nobody knew was that when the Elk of Milk and Gold made the Wild Folk, some of that final stargold seeped into the bodies of ordinary humans, ordinary plants and ordinary animals. It was impossible to tell who had some just by looking at them. Only if you could see through flesh right to the blood, and beyond it to the very essence, there you would be able to see a shimmer of gold, and to feel the life-giving power that emanated there. It did not make such a person better in any essential way than another, for all of Creation was made with love. Only it made them able to see more clearly than others, to look sometimes beyond the veil of ordinary reality, to understand the patterns of Farallone itself. Such people often became healers or menders, or were sought out for their miraculous green thumbs, their ability to prophesy small truths about the future, or their uncanny way with animals.

  “You, Tin, have stargold in your blood. I do not know how it got there, but I too have it in mine. I’ve known it since I was a boy, and saw things in my dreams that other children did not. It was this that brought me here to the City as a grown man many years ago. Because of the visions I suffered. Visions of the City invading the Country, tearing up the earth and all the villages to get at the gold again. Only my visions were unclear. It was hard to know what was truth and what was only nigh
tmare. I’d experienced this since I was a lad no older than you – some visions came true, others did not. It tormented me. All I saw clearly was that there was some part for me to play. That the lines drawn across the land of Farallone would be its undoing – the lines made between Wild Folk, Country and City. I came to the City Wall as a foolish young man with the dream of offering myself as a kind of peaceful ambassador. Luckily for me, I was intercepted by the very ones who sent you, Mallow. The Greentwins found me on my way across the Great Salvian Desert, and warned me of the danger I would pose for the Country if I showed myself to the Brothers and thus revealed the health and wholeness of Farallone beyond the Salvian Desert and the Salvian Mountains to the west, which hide the Country’s bounty. They showed me a secret tunnel through an old well and a buried stream bed that burrowed under the Wall, and so I came to the City, and found others there who dreamed of something more, of a life beyond Walls, a life of freedom. They were common people who worked in the watermills or swept the streets, mothers with children to feed and dreams in their hearts, grandfathers who hid the seeds of common weeds in their pockets. Together, we became the Mycelium.”

  Thornton stopped speaking. The fire had died down. Anders’s face gleamed with tears. Thornton’s face was dark for a moment, folded in on itself, inaccessible. Seb sat open-mouthed, looking as if he’d lost the hinges holding up his jaw. Mallow thought of Myrtle, and the Greentwins, and the muddy lanes hung with bay branches, the scrub-covered hills of his beloved Country, lush with twigs and leaves to eat, and keened with longing. Tin sat absolutely motionless. His whole body hummed. He was sure that if he moved, or tried to say a word, it would all vanish – Thornton, the Fiddleback, the story of Farallone and the Elk of Milk and Gold, the stargold in his blood. Stargold, in my blood? He looked at his wrists, at the blue veins, trying to see a hint of gold there.