“Yes, quite honest,” chimed Tin. “Just say the word, and we will offer whatever you want.” Mallow thumped the boy’s chest in warning as he spoke, but it was already too late. The Baba Ithá was laughing again.
“Very prettily said, children, yes, fine words indeed. Offerings, yes, well, it’s rather too late for all that now.” She raised a woolly eyebrow, pulled a long elderwood pipe from the pocket in the front of her dress, scratched her nail to a rock to light it, and began to puff away at a rank-smelling mixture.
“What do you mean, too late?” ventured Tin.
“Well, for one, an Offering is only an Offering when it’s not requested. What kind of gift is a gift that has been demanded?” The Baba Ithá took another long puff. “For two, dear boy, you’ve just offered me anything I desire, and I do love nothing more than a good game.”
Mallow groaned into Tin’s chest. The sun went behind a cloud and the light through the fir boughs shifted.
“But—” Comfrey stammered, a flush rising up her cheeks. “We don’t have time for games!” Was it wise to mention the Fire Hawk’s feather and the Elk of Milk and Gold to this terrifying woman?
“No time, you say? Well in that case…” said the Baba Ithá, scratching her chin in mock thoughtfulness. She had a few white whiskers there, like a goat. “It’ll be hare stew to begin with, a great vat. Throw in some yerba buena leaves to season it, yes, how delectable! And then, well, I can’t quite decide if I’d rather have two strong young children, bones and all, to feed to my hearth – you would keep the hut fed for a moon apiece! – or if I’d prefer to keep you, perhaps change you to two handsome robins, to speak with the worms for me. They can be such trying, slippery things to carry on a conversation with.”
Panic flooded down the children’s spines.
“Why?” Tin blurted, his fear suddenly replaced by anger. He thought of all the things they had yet to do, and all the people he wanted to see again – Seb, Thornton, Anders, Beatrix. “You’re the Wild Folk of the fir forest! You watch over trees. But trees don’t eat hares and children. They are gentle, and quiet. What gives you the right—?”
Comfrey grabbed his wrist and stepped on his foot to stop him from making things even worse.
“Forgive us, Baba Ithá,” she gasped. “He is from the City, and doesn’t understand the respect due your kind. We will play your game, please! Let us play it, let us at least try! We have time! There’s always time for a game.” She tried to smile, but her mouth quivered.
“Good sense, girl,” barked the Baba Ithá. “I might have lost my temper, and eaten you all right here, no soups or fires about it. As for your question.” She spat the word out like a bad seed in Tin’s direction. “Trees feed as much on the decay of the world, passed through the bodies of worms and mushrooms and beetles and tinier things, as they do on sunlight. They of course eat sun first of all, and also each breath you exhale, but their roots need the nourishment of the ancient bodies of the moles and salamanders, robins, owls and foxes that have become part of the dirt. It is a continuum, my boy, life to death to life again, and you, I’m afraid, are part of it. I sow just as many seeds, and caress just as many newborn squirrels, as I reap, and kill.” She chuckled, coming near and pinching Tin’s cheek, hard. Her breath smelled of forest humus and rotten roots. Tin tried not to lurch back, but he went pale at her touch. “So now, let’s begin our game!” With that, she hooted out a final laugh, and gestured for them to follow her and the walking bone house up a hill, towards a clearing beyond the forest.
For a moment, the children couldn’t move. They were stone, watching with timorous awe as the Baba Ithá and her creaking hut ambled up through the trees. Comfrey and Tin looked at each other.
“Should we try to run?” breathed Tin.
“Don’t be an idiot!” hissed Mallow. “Run? The whole forest is her family. Just because you don’t see any other Wild Folk doesn’t mean they aren’t here, watching and waiting. At her command, they would surround us!”
Comfrey exhaled. “Come on then,” she said to Tin and the leverets. Together they hurried up the hill after the Baba Ithá.
“There will be three tasks,” the Baba Ithá said once they had all arrived. She climbed back up to her stoop and waved the spotted owl down to her broad shoulder. The owl mussed at her braid affectionately. She beamed like a child at the word “tasks”, rubbing her hands together. “If you complete each of them in one day, I shall let you pass through the remainder of my woods, and with three blessings too. If you should fail, well, you know how that will go!”
“But…three whole days?” stammered Comfrey, thinking of the Brothers from the City and how far they might get in that time. Oro had seen that the Brothers would not infiltrate the villages themselves until the wild irises bloomed. Another couple of weeks then, at best. But how long would it take her and Tin to reach Tamal Point, where the Elk lived among the Grizzly-witches, and return again? Panic made her voice high. “We have to get all the way to the Grizzly-witches, and find the Elk of Milk and Gold, and – don’t you know our whole existence might be destroyed by the Brothers who are coming from the City? Don’t you know they might kill Farallone itself?” She couldn’t help the whole truth from spilling out now. Tears were close to the surface. “Do you even care?”
“Dare you question my wisdom?” hissed the Baba Ithá. A terrible fury turned her face stony. “Dare you question how I care for the firwoods that I am guardian of? You forget that you are human, and these troubles were made by your kind. Why should I trust you? Why should the fate of Wild Folk rest in hands such as yours? Filthy, traitorous hands, your human hands. Hadn’t I better see that they are worthy? Hadn’t you better prove to me you are better off alive than in my oven? I’m not so foolish as to take your word for it.” Her piercing tone silenced Comfrey completely. Myrtle had gone stiff in the girl’s arms.
“Now, task number one,” the Baba Ithá said in a lighter voice, seeing that she had made an impression. “See that pile of dirt halfway up the meadow hill, by that lichen-covered rock?”
Comfrey and Tin peered up the hill and nodded, mute, their shoulders touching for reassurance. Big clouds shaded and then revealed the sun, making the hill ripple and move. It was flushed orange with newly opened poppies. In the middle was a dark heap.
“That’s only half dirt. The other half of it is the little black seeds of our darling poppy. By morning, I want to see two piles. One of poppy seed, one of soil, and not a grain amiss!”
“But that’s impossible!” Tin protested. “How could anyone—?”
“Not my concern!” the Baba Ithá snapped, and with that, her whole round house of bones leaped once on its feathered owl legs and glided away above the fir-tops, all with no more sound than moving boughs make.
For the first hour, Comfrey and Tin sat on the hill and tediously picked poppy seeds from handfuls of dirt. They tried not to curse when the seeds and dirt got stuck on their fingers. Myrtle and Mallow could do little to help, having no fingers, and so lay belly down in the grass, in the position of hares who have seen a hawk above and don’t know where to run. What a terrible mistake it was to come this way! they whispered to each other in the language of hares. How could we have been so foolish? Their ears were flat down their backs with both remorse and terror, and they tried not to tremble.
A wind came and blew the two-centimetre-high pile of dirt all over the two-centimetre-high pile of poppy seeds the children had managed to make.
Tin jumped up in a rage, kicking at the hillside. “This is impossible!” he yelled, his face scarlet. The wind picked up his blond curls and threw them across his forehead. “How do we know she hasn’t just set us an impossible task, to make us fail?”
“Wild Folk don’t work like that,” said Myrtle. “A game is a game, a bargain a bargain.”
“Except Coyote-folk, of course,” said Mallow. “All bets are off with them…”
“There must be a secret way,” Comfrey said in her calmest tone, th
ough she didn’t feel calm at all. “A trick to all of this.”
“Yes,” ventured Mallow, “there’s often a trick…”
“I’ve never tricked a poppy seed, only a bobcat,” replied Myrtle. She inched nearer to sniff at the piles.
An ant ran across Comfrey’s hand, and she shook it off. Another appeared. She remembered that little raft in the puddle, and how she’d scooped all those ants to dry land. She smiled despite everything, glad she’d done that one kind thing in the firwood before this, before taking Myrtle and Mallow right to the soup pot of the Baba Ithá.
When she looked at her hand once more, a whole trail of ants was marching across it. Mallow, behind her, sneezed and shook his nose, which was covered with ants making their way down to his paws, all heading right for the pile of poppy seeds and dirt.
“This is hopeless,” Tin groaned. “Why don’t we just make a run for it?” He looked over at Comfrey, who sat a few paces away and was now peering intently at the ground, grinning. “What are you so happy about?” he snapped. “Have you gone nuts? Have you lost it?” He went red again with exasperation. “Great, the adventures of Tin and Loony. Wonderful.”
“Be quiet and come see this, Tin!” Comfrey whispered.
Myrtle and Mallow were pressed to her sides, watching too. Before their eyes the ants had begun to carry the poppy seeds, one by one, to a separate pile, leaving the dirt behind. They were so small and moved so delicately that they didn’t disturb a single grain below their feet.
“You clearly made an impression on them, Comfrey!” exclaimed Myrtle, sniffing tenderly at the ribbon of black ants that now stretched past Tin, wide as a finger.
Tin’s mouth hung open as he watched the dexterous way the ants each carried a poppy seed above their heads in ordered columns. “I’ll never make fun of anyone for saving an ant again!” he said as he crouched next to Comfrey. “They’ve called all their ant friends to help return the favour you did them!”
Soon the whole pile was covered in ants. The children and the hares watched the ants work all through the long hours of the day, murmuring little words of praise and thanks until the moon set some time in the middle of the night. By then, the two mounds had each grown thirty centimetres tall. Huddled close, they all fell asleep in the grass with the wool blankets from their packs pulled up to their chins.
When the first rays of dawn touched them, the Baba Ithá’s owl-legged house came stalking back up from the forest edge. Without a sound, it crouched low to the ground right beside them and the old lady hopped down on her broad, furred feet. She came towards the sleepers, clicking her sharp teeth together hungrily. When she saw the two immaculate piles, one of poppy seeds, the other of soil grains, her eyes flashed yellow and she hissed. She leaned close to the mounds, sniffing. Just then a wind picked up, blowing several pieces of dirt back onto the pile of seeds. The leverets both leaped up from their slumber at the sound of the Baba Ithá’s low chuckle of pleasure. Their ears quivered.
A slow smile had spread across the old woman’s lined face. It was not a comforting sight, the way her skin puckered and creased as the smile became a snarl. With a quick movement, she snatched both Myrtle and Mallow by the ears with one hand. The leverets, white-eyed, kicked out their hind legs furiously, trying to scratch at her arms and wrest themselves free.
“Mallow!” yelled Tin, startled awake by their cries.
Comfrey leaped up beside him and they both jumped towards the old woman to snatch the leverets from her grasp. But she was nimble, darting back, laughing terribly, her breath a stench of death. Her smell so close was too much for the leverets to bear; it enveloped them, and they went limp.
“It was a handsome attempt,” she growled, gesturing at the piles. “But I’m afraid the wind was not in your favour.” She pinched the dirt-smudged poppy seeds between the gnarled fingers of her free hand and put them on her tongue. “Yes indeed, it looks like it’s soup for me and worms for you!” She held up the trembling leverets, grinning and licking her lips.
“That’s not fair!” cried Comfrey. Hadn’t they all watched the ants sort the piles out with immaculate precision? “They were perfect when we went to sleep! How are we supposed to know you didn’t sprinkle that dirt on the poppy seeds when we weren’t looking?” She couldn’t bear to see the leverets hanging from their ears that way, let alone the thought of becoming a robin for ever – or worse, being fed to the wood stove! – and of never seeing her mother or her father again. Her father, who was alive! Her stomach seized with fear, and she fought the urge to take Tin’s hand.
“The piles were perfect!” Tin said, doing his best to glare. He didn’t want to appear the coward but it was very hard to stare down such a woman as the Baba Ithá, whose eyes contained all the force of roots and bones. “The ants came from all around and helped us! Isn’t it worth something, that because of Comfrey, a hundred thousand little ants came to our rescue?”
The Baba Ithá hissed again. The sound made the leverets start and kick their legs in a renewed attempt to escape. But the old woman’s grasp was tight. Suspicious, she narrowed her eyes. “Ants, you say? Ants came to do this work for you?” She leaned closer to the children, studying their faces as if she was examining mushrooms after a rain, recording every mark. “Ants don’t lie,” she murmured to herself. Her ancient face softened ever so briefly, but then she looked down at the leverets squirming in her grasp and scoffed. “I won’t stand for trickery!” she rumbled in a voice so low it sounded as if it was coming from deep within the earth itself.
Tin felt his legs going limp, and took Comfrey’s hand to steady himself. She squeezed his hand tightly.
“From now on, you must complete the tasks without the help of your leveret friends!” the Baba Ithá growled. “I will keep them with me, in my house, in a cage. One wrong move and the soup pot is only a step away!” She let out a hoarse shriek, the sound of an owl on the hunt, and with it the smell of old bones.
Myrtle and Mallow keened with fear.
“Please, you’re going to frighten them to death! Let them go!” Comfrey started to beg but quickly realized the Baba Ithá wasn’t the kind to respond to weakness, and changed her tone. “How can we be sure you won’t just eat them right away?” she demanded. “How can we trust you?”
“Trust me? Don’t try my goodwill, girl. Trust me? Do you know who it is that I am?” Her voice had gone deep and loud, like a storm through ancient trees. “Do you know, child, what I have seen? The question is not whether you should trust me, but why on earth I should trust you. Must I repeat myself? What have you human people done to earn my trust?” A note of such absolute sorrow came through the old woman’s words that both Comfrey and Tin almost fell to their knees with the weight of it. There were ancient, slaughtered trees in her voice, cut down and dragged up by the root, so many of them that they were like a graveyard of splintered bones. There were spotted owl mothers whose eggs had fallen to the earth with cut tree limbs, and mole children whose tunnels had been filled with poisons.
Comfrey bowed her head in grief against these visions, and said, very softly, “I am sorry, Mother Ithá. We will trust you. We will do as you ask.” She felt tears coming, and battled them down. “I am sorry, leverets,” she whispered, and though Myrtle was trembling in the Baba Ithá’s hand, she fixed the girl with a look of such trust that Comfrey began to cry after all. Then, with silent horror, the children watched as the old woman carried the leverets up into the darkness of her bone house. Comfrey’s hand found Tin’s and they clung to each other, the dread in the air between them so palpable that neither dared to speak. Tin fought the desire to run after the Baba Ithá, to wrench the leverets free, to attempt an escape. But he knew it was futile. The old woman was the forest. With her eye on them, there was nowhere to hide. Beside him, Comfrey wiped back tears and tried to put her fear somewhere small and far away. It would not serve her or the leverets. But then the Baba Ithá emerged from her bone house again, her ancient face unreadable, her great br
aid thumping against her back, and beckoned for the children to follow her. Fear leaped back out of the small, faraway place Comfrey had attempted to put it, and there was nothing to do but follow. The Baba Ithá led them up to the crest of the hill, where the land became tangled with coffeeberry and toyon, hazel and oak, and then fir again. The forest was very thick there, shaded and damp. A deep, fern-shaped moss surrounded the trunks and cushioned much of the ground. The Baba Ithá bent down and fished a small pearl, luminous as a moon, from the moss.
“Once, very long ago, I had a suitor,” she said in a quiet voice. “A Seal-man who came to visit me at the edge of Tamal Bay. I was silly then, careless and young. I left only the owl to tend the firwood for hours at a time. I was in love, you see…” The Baba Ithá sighed, and Tin, astonished by the tough old woman’s sudden softness, tried not to gape. “He gave me a long necklace I could wrap six times around my neck. It was made of three hundred tiny pearls from the wild oysters of Tamal Bay, which he had gathered one by one with teeth and tongue. I wore them for hundreds of years, long after the Seal-man was gone, until one day they caught on a fir branch, and the string broke, and three hundred pearls fell into the moss.” She held the pearl up to the light. “If you’d like to see those leverets alive again, gather every last one for me by sunup tomorrow.” Her voice was hard and full of the clicking of owl beaks. With that, she dropped the pearl back into the moss and left, a great whirl of bones.
The children crouched against the damp earth all day, elbows to the ground, sifting through soil and moss for pearls. They only exchanged the briefest of words. The thought of the leverets restrained in a cage of bones in the Baba Ithá’s house made them both too sick to speak. Dread sat in their chests, on their shoulders, filling them each with tears they knew they didn’t dare shed, not yet, not while there was still a little hope. But as the sun moved across the sky, and the light grew long and golden through the firs, their hope and their resolve thinned. They had only found nineteen pearls, several of them scattered much further across the dense forest floor than they had imagined. At last Comfrey could bear the dread in her chest no longer, and she ripped at the moss in frustration.
The Wild Folk Page 19