The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  Comfrey let out a little cry and sank right down to her knees in the grass. This was the Elk who had made the world out of Old Mother Neeth’s spun stargold. This was the Elk of Milk and Gold. For a moment the Elk appeared vast, as vast as all of Olima, all of Farallone, all the sky and ocean crashing far below. Then she took a small step forward and was an ordinary size again. Tiny flakes of gold fell from her hoofs.

  Tears filled Comfrey’s eyes. The Elk took another step forward, her gaze fixed on Comfrey. The girl sucked in a ragged breath. She felt suddenly then that no matter what happened to her, no matter if in the next moment the Elk annihilated her with a single searing bolt of starlight, the experience would be worth it – to have been blessed by the gaze of those violet eyes. She felt unutterably and incandescently whole. Tears fell freely down her cheeks.

  Tin, kneeling beside her in the grass, put his arm round her shoulders. He’d never seen anything so beautiful in all his life. He’d thought similarly of the stars, the open green, of fir trees and the ragged coastline falling away to ocean, of pelicans and alder trees. But the Elk of Milk and Gold seemed to hold all of these things in her eyes, her moon-pale fur, her glinting hoofs, as she took another step nearer. From where they crouched amidst the grass, Myrtle and Mallow regarded the Elk of Milk and Gold with similar expressions of deference and love. Around her they could see a light the human children could not, a thousand luminous strands hitching the Elk to the night sky.

  Tin remembered then that they were still wearing the granite shoes, and he wondered if the Elk understood that they were human at all. It did seem extraordinary that she would walk so calmly towards them, if she knew what they really were. This thought made Tin’s heart hurt. Why did being human mean all the wild ones automatically mistrusted them? Why couldn’t they be like hares? How had they become so cut off from the rest of the creatures of the world that every new interaction was tainted by mistrust and fear?

  The Elk was now standing very near, and Comfrey, as if in a dream, had risen shakily to her feet, hypnotized. The Elk lifted her head up higher. She snuffed the air with her broad, dark nose. Her violet eyes flashed and her whole body quivered as she took in their human scent fully. Then she lifted a sharp, golden hoof. Myrtle thumped the ground in warning. After all, it had taken only one stamp of the Elk’s golden hoofs to send earthquakes shuddering through the fault line at the time of the Collapse. But none of them could move from where they stood, they were transfixed, and neither the leverets nor Tin could find the voice to speak.

  It was Comfrey who moved at last, very slowly holding out the Baba Ithá’s three hundred pearls. The Elk sniffed the air again as she caught sight of the moon-white strand. Her nostrils flared. Her eyes changed. Gingerly, she lowered her raised hoof and stepped nearer. Where her hoof touched down the grass shuddered and turned gold. The Elk walked right up to Comfrey’s outstretched hand, then snuffed at the offered palm, then moved her furred lips against the strand of pearls.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Comfrey, because it tickled and because, this close, it was a little hard to breathe with the force of those violet eyes upon her. Tremors ran through her body. “These are for you,” whispered the girl, unknotting one end of the string so she could slip the pearls off into her palm. They looked like pieces of moon. The Elk caught them in her lips and crunched. As she chewed, she regarded Comfrey and Tin, then Comfrey again, then the leverets. Each pearl seemed to bring a brighter lustre to her fur, and a new strength to her old body. She looked larger than she had before and when she stepped a little closer, Comfrey felt the ground beneath her quiver.

  I know the one whose pearls these are. I did not think she would ever give a human girl her blessing. These words came into Comfrey’s mind and she blinked, looking around. The Elk was watching her. It was hard to tell if the expression in her violet eyes was one of gentleness or terrible anger, or both. Comfrey bowed her head. What do you want, human girl? I had not expected to see one of your kind again.

  Comfrey heard the centuries of sorrow in her voice, of regret, of weariness and of loss. She also understood, with a strange calm, that it mattered very much how she replied. The Elk of Milk and Gold was poised on the edge of flight and of violence. Her whole body shone. Comfrey didn’t say anything. Instead she grappled with her backpack and pulled out the white buckskin bundle, unwrapping it with one hand. The smell of singed lichen filled the air. She shook the lichen free, and lifted the Fire Hawk’s feather between her fingers, holding it up. It flared in the darkness. She heard Tin gasp behind her. For a moment the feather filled the night and its light gilded every fur on the Elk’s body.

  The Elk stood perfectly still, her violet eyes fixed on the feather. But all through the ground ran a shudder, and Comfrey understood, without knowing how, that the shudder was the Elk’s. That she extended far beyond the physical form that stood in front of them now.

  Lay it before me, came the voice into Comfrey’s mind. Lay it before me, daughter of the Country. The Elk said these words with a tenderness that seemed to hold in it every mother’s touch that Comfrey had ever known. The tears fell again down Comfrey’s cheeks. She crouched to place the feather at the hoofs of the Elk of Milk and Gold.

  “The Basket-witches sent me,” Comfrey whispered. “I-I saw this feather fall from the wing of the Fire Hawk and picked it up without knowing what it meant, but only because I found it beautiful. Then the Basket-witches explained to me what it was, and some of them didn’t want to send me. But the Fire Hawk burned my basket, and you had told them that the one who found the feather was the one who must bring it to you, and…” The girl trailed off, embarrassed by her own stammering. Her voice sounded so thin and young and quavering in the darkness, crouched at the glowing hoofs of the Elk of Milk and Gold. She lifted her head, trying not to look into the feather. The Elk had lowered her face to it, so that her nose almost touched its surface. Three tears fell, drop by drop, from her violet eyes, three tears that were liquid gold. They fell onto the embered feather. Its molten fibres swirled and hissed.

  Oh my children, oh my leverets, oh my Farallone. The Elk’s long, creamy nose was gilded with tears. The feather’s light danced. Tenderly, tentatively, Comfrey reached up her free palm. She wanted desperately to lay it against the long neck. She wanted to lay her whole cheek against those creamy flanks, as she would against her mother’s skirts.

  Myrtle and Mallow, who had been silently transfixed by the Elk of Milk and Gold and all that was transpiring between her and Comfrey, both snapped to attention, making thin sounds of distress, as Comfrey raised her hand towards her fur.

  “You can’t touch her, you daft girl!” cried Myrtle.

  But it was too late. She only turned back at the noise the leverets made after her hand had already fallen onto that milk-pale fur.

  “Comfrey!” Mallow snapped, thumping the earth. The girl still hadn’t taken her hand from the Elk’s neck, but was kneeling, mesmerized, that velvet nose to hers, breathing the smell of grass.

  “A Grizzly-witch is coming!” Mallow wailed. “How can she be so near already?” he cried to Myrtle, then bounded towards Comfrey. “There’s hardly any use running, but for the sake of All Hares, get your hands off that Elk!” The little leveret was practically screaming, his whole body quivering. Tin lunged forward and took Comfrey by both shoulders, wrenching her away from the Elk’s soft, mothering warmth.

  Daughter of the Country, I will go with you to the Basket-witches. I will go with you to the Fire Hawk. It is time. My body is old and failing. It is time. And with these words ringing their deep bells in Comfrey’s mind, the Elk took the embered feather between her teeth and ate it in three smouldering bites.

  Comfrey, shaken from her reverie, gasped and looked around frantically through the darkness until, with relief, she found the leverets behind her.

  “Didn’t you hear what she said?” stammered Comfrey. “Weren’t you listening? Didn’t you see her…eat the feather?”

  “Didn’t you hear Ma
llow?” exclaimed Tin. “A Grizzly-witch is coming!”

  “What she said?” Myrtle repeated, dazed. “But she was perfectly silent, my dear girl. You seemed to be doing all the talking.”

  Comfrey fixed them all with an astonished green gaze. “But – how—”

  “I’m not so easily drugged to sleep as my sisters,” came a deep voice from behind them. Comfrey shrieked and leaped, whirling to look over her shoulder, causing the leverets to scatter and Tin to stumble. The Elk of Milk and Gold only cocked her ears, calm. As Amurra approached, appearing slowly through the fog, the Elk’s old, matriarchal eyes grew tender and sad at once.

  “I am blind, after all,” the Grizzly-witch continued, in that low voice with its rasping edges, the same voice the children had listened to while eavesdropping through the barn walls. “I see beyond what you see. I see what others don’t. I sensed something amiss with that soup after my second sip, so my slumber was short. Clever, using oil of poppy. Clever little hares. I should eat you now, for bringing human children here, for daring to sneak under the noses of your own wild kind. You are traitors.” The Grizzly-witch spat the last word, her voice full of hatred.

  The leverets flattened their ears along their backs in fear, trembling so much that their whiskers were a blur. Amurra turned on Comfrey then, who was clasping Tin’s arm and trying to breathe steadily. She had never been so near a being of such danger and power and wildness in her life, all muscle and shaggy coat and tooth. Even the Baba Ithá had been tamer, somehow. In the dark, Amurra looked almost entirely bear. The night air around her was electric.

  “But you,” she growled at Comfrey, leaning near so the girl could smell the root and meat and rankness of her breath. “You have laid your dirty, accursed human hands upon the Elk of Milk and Gold. You have dared to lay not just one finger but your whole palm upon her neck, like a blight, like a sickness. The shape of slaughter, your human hands. I will not let your kind kill another of the Three who made Farallone.” Amurra paused, frothing at the mouth with her anger, her blind eyes roving.

  Comfrey felt like she might faint with terror. Tin put his arm round her shoulders, trying to keep it steady, to quell his own shivering panic. Were these to be their last moments? Would Amurra bring them all back slung over her shoulders for tomorrow’s dinner?

  “It’s only because of the Basket-witches and the Fire Hawk’s feather that we’re here at all,” Tin found himself saying. “Comfrey doesn’t have dirty hands or killing hands. Sh-she has the gentlest hands of anyone I’ve ever met! If you are going to punish anyone, punish me. It’s my hands that are dangerous, trained by the Brothers.” It came out in one gush, and a note too loud, ringing in the muffled, foggy night air like a set of shrill bells.

  Comfrey looked at him, her heart in her mouth. Amurra’s ears had pricked forward, despite their human shape.

  “The Fire Hawk, you say?” she repeated more softly, settling back on her haunches in surprise.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Comfrey hastily, her voice quivering. “The Fire Hawk dropped his feather – and I picked it up—” She turned, wondering why the Elk did not intervene and explain to Amurra what was going on. But the Elk only gazed back at her, impassive and ancient. For a moment, she looked as big as the night itself; her fur was tipped with stars, her eyes were pieces of moon. She watched with the stillness of the night and the earth, her nostrils smoking.

  “Ah. Naturally, another trespass on your part caused all of this,” hissed Amurra, but her derision hid the beginning of dread.

  Comfrey shifted uncomfortably and the granite shoe still on her foot hit another rock. A look of slow realization crossed Amurra’s fierce, furred face.

  “Where did you get those granite shoes?” the Grizzly-witch snapped.

  The children looked quickly at each other. How did she know, without sight?

  “I-I made them, ma’am,” stuttered Tin. “For the Baba Ithá, and then she gave them to us.”

  “The Baba Ithá,” said Amurra in a broken voice. “Indeed…” Her face had become pensive, some of its venom gone. “Something is at work here,” she murmured. “And you’re at the heart of it.” She turned to the Elk as she said this, and the reverence in her voice startled the children. “The Fire Hawk calls you. The Baba Ithá of the firwood has given two human children a pair of granite shoes to fool us all. There are two leveret-hares at their side, leading the way. Perhaps this is what the bones spoke of, and I misread them, distracted by my own old angers…” She was talking to herself now, low and faint. Though her eyes were already milky with blindness, they clouded further, possessed by an old memory of the time when men on horseback shot and killed every last grizzly bear in all the land, so that they went extinct. The Grizzly-witches had no animal brethren left to tend and guard; they were the last and only beings resembling the old wild grizzlies of Farallone, and that knowledge was a sad and bitter weight upon their hearts.

  “I should prefer to kill you now,” she snarled, turning back to the children, her pale eyes flaring. “We could remain distant from the happenings of humankind. We could keep ourselves apart, as we have always done.” For a moment her growling voice filled the whole night. But that softness passed over her milky eyes again, and she quietened to a grating murmur. “But I fear that time has passed. Now the Basket-witches and their Fire Hawk have reached their hands to us, and the Baba Ithá too. The Elk is very old. She is tired, and has grown weak. I dread what any journey will do to her.” Amurra was quiet for a moment, moving her own gnarled hands against the dark ground. She turned to the Elk, who lowered her soft nose against the Grizzly-witch’s shoulder.

  Tears came to Amurra’s eyes. At last she said in a low voice, “The Baba Ithá trusts you. The Elk trusts you. But we Grizzly-witches guard her because we know the true treachery of humankind better than any other creature. The Elk may go with you of her free will, but I will let the land be the judge of you. I will let the old ghosts of this place test you. The only way you will make it out of our land alive is by taking the ghost roads. The ones that pass through the Shadow Lands. Where the wraiths of the grizzly bears walk. Once you leave the grasslands of Tamal, you will be free to travel in the realms you know. But the ghosts of this place must prove to me that you are worthy to escort the Elk across Olima, or I will hunt you all myself and bring you back to my sisters for breakfast.”

  The Grizzly-witch didn’t give them time to argue or ask a single question. She only made two quick, sharp patterns with her clawed fingers against the earth, and a terrible keening note deep in her throat. Suddenly, great silver wraiths surrounded them, lit with the waning moon. Amurra was nowhere to be seen. Only the Elk of Milk and Gold remained calm and did not baulk. Tin and Comfrey both let out muffled shrieks. Myrtle’s eyes rolled white and she and Mallow threw themselves flat against the ground in fear. As far as they could see across the grassland in the moonlight, they were surrounded by a tide of massive, silver grizzly bear ghosts. One lunged at Comfrey, his face half ruined, blown open by the bullet that had killed him hundreds of years before. She froze, and her heart stopped entirely.

  “Comfrey, move!” Tin yelled, pulling her down with him to the ground.

  But the ghost bear’s huge jaws and blunt teeth had already passed through both of them, bringing a seep of sickening, cold lethargy to their bodies. The children lay panting beside the leverets. Now all of their eyes were wide and white. The Elk stood very still, her head raised high, her eyes gleaming bright. The grizzly-ghosts seethed and swelled around her, but didn’t touch her. Comfrey struggled for words, her hands pressed against her chest to warm the place that had gone so cold at the grizzly-ghost’s touch.

  “It’s like his teeth cut me somewhere I can’t see,” she moaned, clutching at her heart. “Like all the hope has gone out of me.” Her face was pale, and she struggled to sit up.

  With great effort, Myrtle pulled herself off the ground and came to Comfrey’s side.

  “I don’t think they can actually
hurt us physically, though,” Tin said quietly, trying to rally his own courage. “They can only freeze us with fear.”

  “The boy’s right,” Myrtle said in a ragged voice so different from her usual cheerful tone that the children stared. Mallow was by his twin’s side now, his haunches quivering but his eyes firm. “Physically, we can walk through this place without a hair harmed on our heads,” Myrtle continued. “It’s fear we’re up against. Clever old Grizzly-witch, setting us against our own fear. Nothing paralyses like fear.”

  “Tin!” Comfrey exclaimed, a little colour coming back to her face. “Your Oddness! Will it help? Isn’t there a knife? Can it cut through ghosts?”

  But as she spoke three more grizzly-ghosts – an old mother and her half-grown cubs – came towards them at a lumbering gallop, full of moon and wind, their snarling jaws open. Tin, fumbling for the penknife, felt his hands go slack with panic. He could hardly use his fingers, let alone set one clear thought in front of another. The ghosts swept through them, and the sickness and dread they left behind made Comfrey wretch.

  “We can’t do this,” Tin whispered. “Their hatred is too big. I can hardly move my fingers, let alone open my penknife and even try!” His hands were still shaking and he was leaning on the ground again.

  Myrtle and Mallow had both leaped onto his lap, and they cowered there. Comfrey had never seen the boy so afraid, and she instinctively took his hands in hers. Their warmth made the sickness in her chest ease. He looked up at her, his light eyes strange and bright in the moonlight. She saw them widen and fill with wonder, and something in her shivered softly. Why was he looking at her like that?