Thornton took a deep breath. He wasn’t quite finished. “I do not know quite how you did it, my boy,” he said, turning back to Tin. “But you have created a thing of great magic, fuelled by your own wonder, that responds to the stargold that lives in your blood, the lifeblood of Farallone itself. And it can be no accident that it takes the form of a spider, like the oldest of the Three Creatrixes of this land. Unfortunately, such a creation in the hands of the Brothers would mean certain disaster, for they would soon figure out how it works. The Brothers, for all their greed, are very, very clever men. If they were ever to discover that all the gold left on Farallone is hidden away in the blood of the Wild Folk, and to a lesser degree in the animals and a handful of human beings. Well…it is terrible to think of the carnage that would result.”
“Are you asking me to destroy the Fiddleback?” Tin said. His voice came out broken and hoarse.
Thornton didn’t reply for a moment. At last he said, “No, though at first I thought it best. Until I saw the spider and her egg sac. That little fiddleback spider has given this creation of yours her blessing and her trust. She has chosen it as her vehicle out of the City. She has given it all the stargold in her body. Old Mother Neeth was killed long ago, but still, this spider is very extraordinary. There are unseen things at work that we cannot fully understand. What I do know now is that you need to get out of the City, and fast. You need to go to the land of Olima and speak with the Wild Folk. They will not want to speak with you. They will probably try to kill you. They mistrust humans, and loathe City people. They are harsh in their hatred, but that hatred was born of real fear and loss. Still, you must make them listen to what you’ve told me, and even entrust your Fiddleback to their protection, if that is what they ask, far, far away from the Brothers.”
“Will you come with us?” said Tin, soft. “If you’re from there, and all? If you know the Greentwins too?” Immediately he regretted it, for Thornton turned abruptly away. Tin saw all the muscles in his neck tighten.
“I’m not leaving here until my work is done.” The man’s voice was harsh. “If I leave, I will not be able to come back, and the Mycelium will fall apart. If I leave, there will be no one to lead the resistance from within when the time comes. It is important that resistance comes from within the City as well as without, or what was broken will never be whole. I have made a promise.”
“But why wouldn’t you be able to come back again?” said Seb. “You must know the way.”
“It wouldn’t be my feet that couldn’t get me back here, child,” whispered Thornton, his voice soft again. “It would be my heart.”
Tin, who never cried, wanted to. He didn’t ask why Thornton had left and never gone back, for fear the older man might actually begin to weep. He only nodded, and acted as though he understood what this would mean: your heart belonging somewhere else.
“We are mapping the whole underside of this place,” Thornton continued, steadying his voice, “making a web down here of every buried ghost of a creek, every ghost, really, of every creature or human buried under here long ago, who are nothing more than bones now. We are connecting each dot. And when we’ve mapped the whole underside of it and understood what it used to be, it’ll be as easy as pulling one string in a web. The old creeks will flood the streets. The sand dunes will rise up. The City will be pulled apart by its own, buried wildness. It will be returned to that wildness. The people who live here will be freed from the yoke of the Brothers and their worship of stargold. We will create a new community, a new order. The Brothers do not worship the life force in the gold, but only their own power over it. Our mapping is just months away from completion. It’s taken us eight years, because we must go so stealthily, so secretly, through the underground. When it is done I will call the Greentwins. It is they who will pull the string. It was they who told me how and where to begin, that day I met them in the Desert. We will come, they said, when it is ready. When you have put back together the story of what the City once was. We will help it to live again. Wait for the Spider of Gold. Call for us then, and we will come.”
“It was the Greentwins who told you?” whispered Mallow, a shiver running through his fur. “They never mentioned any spiders to me!”
“They told me once they are good at seeing glimpses of a bigger wholeness, little snatches of vision only,” said Thornton. “They go around collecting these pieces. That’s what they’ve done the last two hundred years. I learned all the stories I know from them. But their visions are never detailed, never specific. Perhaps they didn’t know that sending you to Tin, in the City, had anything to do with the spider they described to me. Only that both pieces of knowledge were important.”
“But – what is it that’s going to happen?” asked Seb in a small voice. He had crept onto Tin’s bed, and the boys were holding hands, pretending not to acknowledge the fear they felt, but comforted by their clasped palms. “Is – is there going to be a war? Will we be sent to fight? What happens if Farallone…dies?”
It was Mallow who replied. “Everything dies with her,” he said, and a long shudder passed from his ears to his black tail.
Tin and Seb spent the remainder of the night resting in bed at Thornton’s orders. The next morning – the boys had no way of knowing whether it was night or day, but Thornton did, by way of several hourglasses and a series of peepholes – Thornton and Tin repaired the Fiddleback’s broken legs. Thornton tipped an imaginary hat solemnly to the small spider nestled against the bobbin. She’d made herself a tiny web tunnel, an ordinary white one. Anders brewed up a strong concoction of bitter herbs, which he told Seb and Tin would speed up the healing of their bruises and muscle aches. When they asked him where he got the herbs, seeing as he lived underground, he grinned and told them that all moles come up to the surface in the dead of night, and even the Brothers themselves could not stop the weeds from growing. That he knew the out of the way corners where they didn’t dump their poisons. The boys choked down the dark cups of sludgy tea, but felt much revived.
Beatrix navigated the boat through the flooded old underground tram tunnels and culverted stream pipes towards the City edge, where Thornton would help them make their escape.
“Are we going over the ocean?” said Tin when Thornton told him where they were.
“Indeed,” said Thornton. “You’ll need to go south and then west, along the coast, to Olima, which juts out into the sea.”
Seb had grown quieter the more Thornton spoke of the boys’ escape, and the nearer they came to the edge of the City. He sat apart from them on the bed, his nose close to a map of the underground that Thornton had let him study. Mallow dozed by the wood stove. Tin – caught up in his own dreams about the grass and the wind and the fir trees and the creeks that Thornton described to him as they worked on the Fiddleback – didn’t notice his friend’s strange silence.
“Will we have to go by boat?” asked Tin.
Thornton paused and looked at him with a glimmer in his eye. “My hope, Tin, is that you will be able to go by wing.”
They reached the northern edge of the City in the darkest hour before dawn. Anders packed the boys a worn denim sack full of roasted roots, rice and several pairs of warm socks. Beatrix placed her hands on their cheeks, whispered words they didn’t understand, and kissed their foreheads. Thornton led them to a packed dirt chamber just below the surface of the ground. Tin pulled the Fiddleback behind him along the damp, sandy earth. He thought he could hear the gentle swoosh of water close by. Mallow looked uneasy, and Seb stared down at his hands. Thornton lifted the lantern he carried to illuminate the walls. Suddenly they could see sliver after sliver of slender pale bones tucked into the dirt, and long orange bills.
The air around them moved, as if full of fog. Tin drew in his breath sharply. The fog took the form of a half-dozen huge white birds with long, ample bills. They unfurled right out of the bones themselves. Ghosts!
Thornton bowed his head low. The boys mimicked him.
“Greetings, White Pelicans,
” said Thornton. Then the ghosts of the white pelicans spoke at the same time, as one being. The sound resonated, wind in reeds, wind on waves. The words were unintelligible to Tin and Seb, but Mallow and Thornton listened closely. After several moments, as the boys stared wide-eyed at the ghostly birds, one of them winged off, right up through the soil.
“The pelican ghosts are generous of heart,” Thornton said. “They do not trust people, but they do trust the Mycelium. They have sent a messenger to ask their living brethren from the Country to carry you boys, in the Fiddleback, down the coast. I’ve told them to drop you near a place I know in Olima, just beyond the border from a village called Alder.” The name seemed full and heavy with meaning as he spoke it.
“I’m not going,” blurted out Seb, trembling.
“What?” said Tin, turning to grasp his friend’s arm. “Seb, what?”
“I can’t come. I can’t go out there. I don’t belong out there. It’s not my Fiddleback. And I don’t have stargold in me, like you do.” He was crying, avoiding Tin’s gaze. Thornton, silent, placed a hand on his shoulder. “I want to be a Mycelium,” Seb continued in a trembling voice. “I’m good underground, with maps and things.” He looked up at Thornton. The man smiled sadly, and nodded, seeming to understand the desperation in the boy’s eyes as well as his words – that his heart was breaking, that it wasn’t his journey at all, but Tin’s.
Tin didn’t say anything. He felt angry and betrayed and lost and ready to cry himself, but he kept his face impenetrable.
“Suit yourself,” he said through clenched teeth. “Have a good life.”
Seb’s face fell into a deeper sadness, and he turned away. Mallow kicked Tin’s leg then, and gave him a nip too. “Don’t be a baby,” hissed the leveret.
Tin balled his fists and ignored the hare, looking up instead as the rush of ghost-wings slipped back down through the soil, and the pelican ghost who had gone as a messenger returned.
“They’re here,” said Thornton. “We have to get you out before light, while you’re just an odd shape hidden within a flock of pelicans, and not a Fiddleback and a boy and a hare dangling from the sky.”
Suddenly, with a small sob, Tin turned and threw his arms around Seb. His friend’s narrow chest quivered uncontrollably.
“You’re my only brother,” muttered Tin, choking back his own grief. “I expect to see the City overgrown with dandelions when I come back.”
Thornton and Seb helped Tin push the Fiddleback through the narrow, sandy tunnel and out onto the beach, where fifteen living white pelicans floated like fallen pieces of moon. Tin gasped at the sight and Mallow leaned back onto his hind legs to snuff at the air, wondering if they were the sorts of bird who liked to eat rabbits. Satisfied that they smelled only of fish, he settled down again and groomed, nonchalant.
“Bless you, child,” Thornton said, taking Tin’s hand and cupping it a moment. “May you hide your Fiddleback well, and may we meet again.” Thornton smiled very tenderly at the boy and opened the Fiddleback’s triangular door. Tin didn’t know what to say. There was so much in his mind and in his heart. He only nodded, and felt his throat tighten.
“I’ll do my best,” he whispered.
“There is nothing else to do,” Thornton replied. But his eyes belied a flash of doubt, and of sorrow. “Take good care of him,” he said to Mallow with a small bow. The hare inclined his head regally.
Tin looked back once at the edge of the tunnel for Seb and waved. Then, with a deep breath, he climbed into the Fiddleback with Mallow in his arms, and was lifted with a sudden swoop into the winter sky by fifteen white pelicans. Their wings spanned two metres and their white feathers glowed in the moonlight.
Up and up the pelicans flew, and Tin clung dizzily to his Fiddleback as it glowed through the sky. At last he felt brave enough to look down. The City Wall was already far behind him. Below was the impossibly vast skin of a grey ocean. To his right stretched the Great Salvian Desert, silver in the starlight, and the soft, endless folds of the Salvian Mountains. In front of him the coastline was jagged and huge and fringed with green. The ocean crashed white against it. The sea air filled the Fiddleback and Tin breathed and breathed the smell until he was dizzy. It felt more like drinking than smelling. Suddenly the boy began to cry, first just a little bit and then in great, breathless sobs. The tears dripped down his chin. Mallow watched the tears and the boy with confusion at first – for hares never cry – and then with sympathy. He curled on the boy’s lap and let the tears fall into his fur. Tin cried with sorrow for Seb, who was the only family he had ever known, and he cried for himself, for fear of what lay ahead, but mostly he cried because in all his life he had never imagined that the world could be so enormous and so beautiful.
Far away on the City’s west-facing wall, a lone man stood by an old Star-Breaker with a spyglass to his eye, watching the extraordinary flight of fifteen white pelicans and the strange, spider-shaped contraption held between them. After a time, he put the spyglass away, satisfied, and descended back into the City.
The following morning, Comfrey and Myrtle set off from the camp of the Basket-witches. The girl didn’t look back, afraid that if she did she might lose her nerve entirely. She clutched the bit of madrone bark upon which Salix had drawn a map of Olima, peering at the lines scrawled there.
“Aren’t I guide enough?” huffed Myrtle, bounding ahead through old fir trees and out into the open, where a grassy meadow gave way to cliffs and the ocean far below. “Isn’t that why I’m here? Or do you not trust my hare ways?”
“Hush, Myrtle,” said Comfrey, studying the map and not the path in front of her. “You yourself said a map might be useful when Salix drew it for me. After all, you haven’t been everywhere. And certainly not among Grizzly-witches!”
“Watch it!” Myrtle cried. The path wound very near a steep cliffside ragged with coastal sagebrush and lupines. Far below, the ocean boomed. Comfrey started back with a gasp. “Honestly…” Myrtle groaned. “We’re ages from the Grizzly-witches yet. Days and days and days of walking. I know the way at least as far as the top of the Vision Mountains. There we can get our bearings.”
“All right,” sighed Comfrey, tucking the madrone bark into her pocket. “So far my judgment hasn’t served us very well, though yours has been little better…” She adjusted her pack and kept walking, trying not to feel afraid. The leveret sniffed and leaped ahead, nosing the path for succulent greens. Comfrey’s bag was heavy with provisions the Basket-witches had carefully packed – a bundle of acorn cakes, several strips of dried meat, a small woven bag full of dried huckleberries, the otter-skin blanket, a fresh flask of water. Her shoulders ached already with the load.
For a time she kept her eyes on the path and on her boots, but doing so made her think of the nice shoemaker who’d been making her shoes since she was a girl, and that made her think of her mother’s warm kitchen on a rainy morning, and that made her think of her mother’s face and gentle hands and her smell of earth and lemon balm. Tears knotted her throat. Would she ever see her mother again? Maxine would be desperate by now. Had she sent out a search party? Would she think to look beyond the boundary? Had such a thing ever happened before? Her father had gone beyond the boundaries of the Country, but not into Wild Folk land…
Myrtle hopped beside the girl, not taking much heed of her quiet. She was too relieved to be out of sight of the Fire Hawk to think about anything at present but the taste of the new grass along the side of the footpath, and the little sour leaves of sorrel. For a hare, it isn’t possible to worry and to eat at the same time. A covey of quail cooed and rustled from inside a bush, and Myrtle thumped a friendly greeting.
“Myrtle,” said Comfrey after another while, as the path passed through a thicket of young fir trees, their boughs tipped with bright new green from the winter rains. “What will happen if we fail? If we don’t find the Elk or she won’t help us, or we get eaten by Grizzly-witches first? Or any other number of other Wild Folk? And why us
? How can a Country girl and a little hare possibly do something so big as all this?” Her voice shrilled at the end.
“To start with,” the leveret replied in a haughty tone, “the Greentwins trusted me enough to send me to your window ledge in the talons of an owl. I may be little, but I am pretty fierce, on the whole. The Greentwins are wise, though it’s hard to follow what they’re on about half the time. As for the Fire Hawk, well, he made himself pretty obvious, dreadful sack of kindling and embers though he is. He dropped that feather right at your feet. He knew you wouldn’t be able to resist. Who knows why he did it, but he did, and that’s that. And as for the rest, you’ve clearly never been a hare. You humans are so good at worrying about every possible little detail that might or might not go wrong. For a hare, every day is a gamble! It makes things simpler. All we can do is go forward, and do our best, and enjoy the fine tastes of the leaves!” At this, Myrtle took another great mouthful of grass, and sighed happily.
Comfrey snorted, imagining herself down on hands and knees savouring the taste of leaves while such a task lay before her, but she couldn’t help smiling at the leveret’s good spirits. In a way, Myrtle was right. There was nothing to do but carry on. What was she going to do, run home at the first hint of a challenge? She, Comfrey, was being asked to bring the feather of a Fire Hawk to the Elk of Milk and Gold, a Creatrix of Farallone! Hadn’t a part of her always longed for an adventure, to do something brave and important like her father had wanted to do? To meet the Wild Folk, face-to-face? Then the vision of burning destruction she’d glimpsed in the Fire Hawk’s feather flashed before her eyes again. The bodies of Wild Folk bleeding across the ground. The hordes of metal-clad men, descending… She felt sick, and forced herself to put her mind to other things. It was too much to think about all at once. One foot in front of the other…
She looked out over the big blue skin of the ocean. She smelled the salt air. A flock of enormous white pelicans winged towards them along the cliff ’s edge. Their wingbeats were heavy and slow with prehistoric grace. As they flew nearer, Comfrey noticed that they carried something bulky and round and very odd-looking in their many feet.
The Wild Folk Page 12
