The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  Then she felt the warm breath on her neck. The lap of velvet lips. The smell of sweet grass. She turned. The Elk of Milk and Gold was nosing the neck of her cape. A sense of well-being, golden as dawn, spread throughout the girl’s body from where the Elk touched her. The creature’s eyes were fixed on her, liquid and kind.

  “Oh,” breathed Comfrey. She fumbled in her pocket for the pearls, and held one out. The Elk didn’t lap it up, but only pressed her nose against Comfrey’s arm. The warmth and light that spread out from it made the girl able to think straight for a moment.

  Climb onto my back, daughter of the Country. Climb onto my back, son of the City. Climb up, all of you, and I will carry you to safety.

  Myrtle let out a small hare-cry of surprise. This time, the Elk had made her words audible to all of them. Tears pricked in Comfrey’s eyes. She looked at Tin. One of her hands was still in his. The Elk butted her shoulder more urgently this time. Thick fog pulsed up from the ocean in new tendrils, seeping between the grizzly-ghosts, turning everything cold and indistinct. Several more ghosts were turning towards them again. An enormous male with scars all down his pale belly was rearing up on his hind legs, pawing at the air, readying to charge.

  “Better be quick about it!” croaked Myrtle.

  Comfrey turned towards the Elk, doing her best to stand up on wobbly legs. The Elk’s eyes were very old and very calm. Comfrey felt tears falling down her cheeks.

  “Up you go now. No time to waste! See how she is kneeling for you?”

  It was true. The Elk of Milk and Gold had bent her forelegs so the children could hoist themselves up. Tin, who was bigger, climbed in front, and Comfrey settled behind him, taking hold of the back of his coat. The leverets jumped up onto their laps. And all at once the fear that had turned them cold and sick began to thaw. The Elk was a star all of her own orbit, shedding warmth into the sea of ghosts. The charging male bear pulled up short before the Elk and, like the others around him, moved aside to let her pass, his terrible, scarred face bowed to his chest, his ghost-claws drawn in.

  “They are so sad,” Comfrey whispered, looking out at all of them. “What a terrible world it must once have been.” Her tears fell quietly, and she couldn’t stop them. Tin, thinking of the City, of the Brothers, didn’t have the heart to reply that the world he’d come from was worse still.

  The Elk was moving faster now, at a gentle, dignified trot. Grizzly-ghosts clamoured at her heels, not with aggression and hatred this time, but something like love. In the dark, in the mist, their faces glowed.

  “She honours them,” Mallow whispered, for the Elk had slowed and was reaching her golden nose towards the outstretched muzzles of the ghosts.

  “Why?” said Tin, feeling a strange tightness in his chest. He thought he might cry too.

  “She is the Creatrix of the world, silly,” whispered Myrtle. “She is their mistress, their sustainer, their Queen. Now they are nothing but sorrow and fear left to roam in the wind. She is easing their pain.”

  All night they moved through a tide of grizzly-ghosts. The Elk walked a snaking path in and out among a thousand silver wraiths. The children clung to each other and the Elk’s neck, exhausted beyond hope. Despite the protection of the Elk’s radiant back, every touch from a grizzly-ghost made their limbs weak. Myrtle had found a safe place tucked inside Comfrey’s cloak, and Mallow had made himself very small under Tin’s coat. The Elk had to walk very slowly, as if the ghosts really were a tide of salt water, and not air.

  Just before dawn they reached the edge of Tamal Point. Comfrey and Tin were half-asleep, leaning into each other, trying not to fall off the Elk’s back.

  “Psst! Wake up!” came Myrtle’s voice from inside Comfrey’s cloak. Tin felt a nip on his thigh.

  “Ow!” he grumbled. “What—?”

  But Comfrey had seized his hand, and the Elk herself had come to a complete stop. The largest grizzly-ghost they’d yet encountered stood guard over the old cattle grid that marked the end of the Grizzly-witches’ territory. And the Elk’s warm light showed no sign of dissipating it. Strange, grating sounds came from him, as if he was speaking. The Elk watched the ghost with a level violet eye.

  “What is he saying, Myrtle?” Comfrey hissed. “Can you understand?”

  The little hare’s ears were quivering as she listened, but in a thin voice she replied. “He calls the Elk Creatrix and Mother. He says it will be a betrayal if she leaves with you, with us. He calls you traitors and cheaters of life and says she can’t abandon them all for us.”

  The grizzly-ghost bowed low before the Elk, beseeching.

  I must, came the voice Comfrey had grown used to hearing in her head, like bells turned to embers, ringing. I abandon no one. I am always here, I am everywhere. I am not leaving you, only changing, for a time. These ones will not betray us. Let me show you. And the Elk turned her head to regard the children and the leverets with a single violet eye. Daughter of the Country, Son of the City, Hares of the Greentwins, come down from my back and go into the arms of the grizzly-ghost.

  “What?” sputtered Mallow.

  “Holy Mother of Hares protect us!” wailed Myrtle.

  “Has she changed her mind about us?” Tin said in alarm.

  Only Comfrey did not sigh, or swear, or tremble. Very steadily, she slipped down off the Elk’s back. She thought she understood what the Elk meant. Something had changed in Comfrey since she had held the pearls out to the Elk the night before; since she had ridden on her back through the tide of ghosts. Something had clarified in her, though she didn’t know what it was that was clarified, or how. Only that she felt pure, a part of everything. And she could see that underneath the grizzly-ghost’s hatred and sadness and rage was the desire to be loved once more as kin, as a part of something that could never be broken.

  So Comfrey walked right up to the grizzly-ghost, and opened her arms. Terrible, aching cold splintered her. She thought her body would fall to pieces. But instead of shrinking into her fear, she took a deep breath and opened her eyes.

  She could see nothing but a kind of silver mist. She was inside the grizzly-ghost. Her breathing hitched. Why couldn’t she see anything, any way out? She could hear Tin’s voice, calling her, but very faintly. How could that be? He was only a few metres away! Cold lanced through her again, that deadening cold. She had meant to embrace the grizzly-ghost, to meet fear with love. But she could hardly breathe. She thought she would die from the cold, the hurt in her chest. All she could think to do was sing an old lullaby her mother had once sung to her. She hadn’t thought of the song in a very long time. Now she sang it, breathless, and remembered her father singing it to her too, and realized that it was a love song.

  “Sometimes I’m a fir tree

  With the robins in my arms

  And sometimes you’re the robins

  You’re the soil and the sun

  Just light us the fire

  And brew us the tea

  Come on my love

  Come walking with me.”

  Comfrey felt a hand on her back. It was a warm human hand. The ears of a hare brushed her ankle. She reached for Tin’s hand and hung on to it, hard. At the touch he began to sing too, stumbling, half-humming, trying to join his voice with Comfrey’s, trying to remember his mother’s face, and if she had ever sung to him. They heard a great, bear-like sigh. The cold mist around them eased, brightened. Then it was gone, and the grizzly-ghost with it. Comfrey, Tin and the leverets found themselves standing on the far side of the cattle grid in the light of the rising sun. A long curve of ocean coast stretched far below them to the west, white with foam and the first light.

  Well done, young ones. With a song, and with your love, you have eased his soul as well as I might have done. The Elk’s voice came through them all like warm light. You have proven to the grizzly-ghosts, and to the Grizzly-witches, that humans have the capacity to heal others. It is not only Wild Folk who know how to tend. Now, climb on my back again, for time is short and I can m
ove much more swiftly than you.

  As the Elk walked, everywhere she stepped an unseen word unfurled through the ground, a little filament of starlight. Only the Elk herself knew the language of those threads, though if Comfrey had peered through her spectacles at the earth beneath their feet, she would have seen a golden web spreading through the soil. Still, even without using her Oddness the girl could feel it. Tin could too. It was like a sunrise underground. Invisible to the eye, but clear as daylight to the heart. It was the presence of life itself, suffusing the earth with each of the Elk’s hoofbeats.

  After a time, Comfrey gasped and tugged Tin’s sleeve, pointing. Behind them a crowd of animals was gathering. Flocks of quail, their topknots bronze in the morning light, skittered along on quick feet. An extended family of grey foxes, their silvery faces shining as they trotted near, nipped their children to behave, black eyes fixed on the Elk. A clan of acorn woodpeckers with their flashing red heads darted from bush to bush, calling out their laughing calls. Myrtle made herself very small when she noticed the foxes, and several sharp-beaked hawks, swooping along on enormous wings. With every step the Elk took south across the land of Olima, more animals materialized from the brush, the tall grass, the firs and pines, the sky itself, and the underground too. Voles crowded at her hoofs, as did the blue-streaked fence lizards. Swallowtail butterflies flitted around the children’s heads, their yellow wings suffused with sun. Hummingbirds with ruby throats buzzed back and forth and around in circles on blurred wings. Badgers with their great, sharp, shovelling claws, bobcats on quiet spotted paws, rattlesnakes with white diamonds on their backs, green-bellied chorus frogs, blind black moles, flocks of every kind of sparrow, enormous bumblebees, the quick, striped chipmunks and silver squirrels and soft-eared woodrats – they all gathered round the Elk and walked beside her, setting aside their own antagonisms for a time, so that rattlesnakes slithered beside mice, bobcats next to brushrabbits, without any violence. They all walked together in peace, and the air and earth were tangled with their songs and cries and barks.

  Then it was Tin’s turn to gasp, and shake Comfrey, and point. Where there had only been a crowd of animals before, there were now suddenly Wild Folk too. They seemed to have emerged out of nowhere, out of the shadows or the songs of birds. Raccoon-folk like Delilah, with bandit-masked faces and cloaks of bone; Owl-folk with very round eyes and great feathered arms; a being Comfrey felt sure was a Hill-woman, with a petticoat of roots and a body as rounded and green as a spring slope; Poppy-men who wore tall pointed green caps and left a wake of orange pollen behind them. Mallow moaned when he saw a family of Mountain Lion-folk in the crowd, and even Tin gasped. They moved with a muscular grace, their bodies entirely golden and long-limbed, their faces human, but with kohl-dark eyes and broad noses. They were both beautiful and terrifying. Comfrey watched them breathlessly, thinking of the Bobcat-girl. She scanned the crowd – surely the Bobcat-girl would be among them, somewhere?

  It seemed that the presence of the Elk had sent forth a kind of clarion call across all of Olima. She wondered if the Basket-witches would hear it too, and come to meet them. Tin, with a similar thought, scanned the gathering throng of creatures and Wild Folk for the Coyote-folk. Surely they would come too, and at last he could ask about his Fiddleback.

  The road had narrowed from the grasslands and open hills of Tamal Point to a winding trail that led up through pines at the foot of the Vision Mountains. To their right, thirty kilometres distant, Olima narrowed into the hook of the far western headlands, and the long fingers of an estuary gleamed. The Elk’s pace slowed, and Comfrey scanned the path in front of them, wondering if the Bobcat-girl and her family might emerge from somewhere up ahead. She saw a glint of purple. She took in a breath. She looked more closely and the purple glint came closer into her view. It was a rich, dark, silken purple: the purple of a wild iris blooming like a crown by the side of the trail.

  “Oh,” Comfrey gasped. “Myrtle, look. An iris. The first iris.” She felt a tremor move through her whole body, remembering what the Holy Fool, Oro, had said, and what he’d seen in the feather. It was early still for the iris to bloom! And it was warmer inland; what if the iris had been blooming all week in the land of the Country already? The Brothers – did this mean that the Brothers were already at the Alder village? But Myrtle didn’t seem to hear her. Both of the leverets’ ears were trained in the direction Tin was looking, off to the left, towards a grassy clearing amidst a handful of old and twisted pines.

  An enormous Bobcat sat beneath the pines, watching them very keenly. Her coat was the russet of bracken, with tawny spots all over like stars. Her ears were tipped with lustrous black tassles of fur, her face striped and thickly whiskered, her eyes two pale green planets. Beside her bloomed half a dozen more purple irises. The Elk came to a stop. She lifted her head high and let out a little snort of recognition, moving through a low stand of brush into the clearing.

  My old friend, came her bell-like voice.

  Well now, the Bobcat said, her eyes very level and very sharp. Her voice, like the Elk’s, seemed to move invisibly through the children, right down into their bones. Myrtle and Mallow simultaneously hid themselves inside Tin and Comfrey’s clothing. The Bobcat turned and bowed her head low to the Elk, then raised it abruptly with a purr and circled her, teeth bared with excitement, short tail swaying, pawing at the Elk’s ankles.

  Comfrey couldn’t breathe. Was this one of the Bobcat-folk? But it was so enormous, as big as the Elk herself. The Bobcat-girl Comfrey had seen was smaller than she was, and regular bobcats were not much larger than house cats.

  “Is that…the First Bobcat?” Tin asked, hesitating, remembering the stories Thornton had told. Comfrey looked at him sharply.

  “How would you know?” she hissed.

  “It is,” whispered Mallow. “From the beginning of the world, just like the Elk. The one from Thornton’s tale. Don’t you see how…big…she is?” He quivered in Tin’s lap.

  The Bobcat whirled back on Comfrey, snarling for real now. Like the Elk she seemed to glow. But when her green eyes met the girl’s, they softened, flashing with recognition.

  Impetuous kitten, this one is, the First Bobcat said, and purred between her sharp teeth. But we’ve no time for disagreements or trifles now. I come with bad tidings. I see you are on the move, and so you must already know. She raised her eyes to the Elk’s and swished her bobbed tail to the left once. Two Coyote-men and one Coyote-woman emerged from the trees behind her, pulling the dusty, battered Fiddleback between them. Tin made to leap from the Elk’s back and run towards his creation, but Mallow stopped him with a nip at the thigh so hard that it broke the skin.

  “Don’t move, you idiot!” the hare snapped. “For once, just watch, and listen, and wait. We are in far, far over our heads, hadn’t you noticed?”

  My old friend, came the Elk’s voice, fluid through them where the First Bobcat’s was ragged and startling. What is this thing of metal that you bring before me? Is this your tiding?

  This is only the beginning, replied the Bobcat, nudging the Fiddleback with her black nose. Or maybe, in truth, it is the end.

  Tin suppressed a moan and the terrible urge to throw himself between the Coyote-folk who dragged it and straighten his Fiddleback’s bent legs, clean its muddy wheels and round seat compartment, test its levers and steering wheel.

  The First Bobcat sighed, continuing. The Brothers are after it. They are after us. This thing was made by the City boy who sits astride your back. The Coyote-folk, my old friends in chaos, my messengers from the underworld, took it from him when they discovered it and brought it down to me in order to protect Olima. It is a thing of power, a thing of danger and possibly death. It runs on stargold, on the stuff of creation. An accidental discovery on the boy’s part, no doubt. When they showed it to me, it reminded me very much of Old Mother Neeth, the Spider who made us, who the Star-Priests killed. It smelled of both creation and destruction, like she did. But I could make no sen
se of it, for it is a human thing. I thought to bring it to the Greentwins, they who are both human and Wild Folk, they who all along have been studying the wholeness of Farallone, from the tip of Olima to the City’s underground. But I and the Coyote-folk made it only as far as the Country village called Black Oak, and there met face-to-face with the Brothers who had arrived that morning, dressed in Country clothes. But under their clothes they hid our old enemy: the gun, the terrible black gunpowder. We caught one glimpse of them and their machines, and ran. We intended to run north to the land of the Grizzly-witches, to you, though I know we agreed of old that only the fall of the Fire Hawk’s feather should bring you forth from your hiding, and I from my underworld. Yet you are here, carrying human children and strange hares… And behind me come the City’s Brothers, while behind you walk the wild hordes of Farallone, all unarmed.

  With these words, the First Bobcat lowered her great, striped head all the way to the ground. Two silver tears fell from her eyes.

  The Fire Hawk has indeed dropped a feather, replied the Elk, very calmly. Her violet eyes kindled with a low and gentle light. Behind her the rippling crowd of feathered, furred, clawed and winged beings made not a sound. And it is these human children and their leveret friends who brought it to me, braving the old anger of all the Wild Folk of Olima, and succeeding. We go to the Basket-witches and to the Fire Hawk, where the Psalterium will be given over to be read. There is nothing else that can be done. It is the last hope, and the last of my power. You know this too, my old friend. You have known it from the beginning.

  I have, replied the First Bobcat, her head still bowed, her ears flattened back in grief. Only I thought it would be many thousands of years away, millions maybe, when the sun itself went out. You cannot leave us so soon.

  “Leave us?” Comfrey stammered, putting her hands on the Elk’s neck, no longer able to hold back her words, or her fear. “Where are you going?”

  But even as she spoke, she heard a distant droning made not by bees or hummingbirds, but by something far larger. At the same moment, an alarm cry went up among the many birds that had gathered round the Elk of Milk and Gold. It was a terrible, cacophonous, many-voiced cry – mournful, screeching, resonant and shrill. An osprey wheeling far overhead dived suddenly, whistling terrible warning notes. Quail-folk, with their indigo-dark headdresses and their wide hips, began to wail their own alarm, herding all the animals and Wild Folk around them into the bushes.