The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  It was the Elk of Milk and Gold. She’d folded to her knees without a sound when the grizzly-ghosts were at last out of sight and the winds gone. Now she laid her head down on the earth and closed her eyes. Her breathing was slow and laboured. Only her hoofs shone gold. The rest of her looked like pure cream. Where she breathed, the purple irises bloomed right before their eyes, but it was as if something vital was leaking from her with each breath, back into the earth.

  She is leaving. She is leaving us! cried the First Bobcat.

  “But – she created the world!” Comfrey panted, running to kneel at the Elk’s side. “She can’t die!”

  So long as the stargold of making remains, she will never die in essence, replied the Bobcat, her voice a mournful song. But in form she will. She has been dying slowly since the Collapse. She will always be in Farallone and in the stars, but she will not always be the Elk of Milk and Gold. She will be there in the connections between all things. But if the Brothers prevail, and take all the last stargold of Farallone from the bodies of Wild Folk and use it in their Star-Breakers, then the Elk will be destroyed entirely and for ever, and all of Farallone will die.

  Comfrey swallowed hard, looking between the Elk, the First Bobcat, the unconscious Tin and the wounded Myrtle. She couldn’t think of anything to say. Mallow looked back at her, his ears slumped.

  “What a disaster!” the leveret said in a small voice. His eyes were desolate. “The Greentwins gave us such an important task, but what a dreadful mess we’ve made.”

  Despite everything, Comfrey cast him a crooked, desperate smile. “It’s not your fault, Mallow,” she said, trying not to weep. But the tears started anyway. “We’ve all done our best, every bit of the way… It’s just, it must be just—”

  But a shrill, searing cry filled the air above them then, cutting her off. And Comfrey knew without looking up who had made it. Her heart lifted, wildly. She turned her face to the sky. There was the Fire Hawk, wheeling and wheeling in the gathering dusk, his wings molten and bright, casting starry sparks.

  Then she heard the sound of cartwheels and hoofs, and saw the Basket-witches coming round the corner through the pines. A great crowd of songbirds flew in their wake. Tears had left tracks through the dirt on their cheeks. Salix walked in front, her fennel-yellow dress torn from the speed at which they had travelled.

  “Comfrey!” the Basket-witch exclaimed when she saw the girl. Comfrey thought she had never heard her own name articulated with such love and such relief. With a strangled cry, she ran right into Salix’s wide, strong arms. “You are safe, my Comfrey, my sweet human child!” Salix murmured into the girl’s hair. “You have done it, you have brought the Elk.”

  “But – we’ve failed, Salix!” Comfrey said into the Basket-witch’s warm middle. “We were attacked, and now the Brothers know about the gold and – and – the Elk is dying!” Comfrey looked up, her face wet with tears.

  “Oh no, my dear,” said Rush, coming near to lay a kiss upon the girl’s forehead. “You did not fail. If you had failed all the birds of Olima would not have come thronging towards us, crying out your name, and the boy’s, praising your courage, begging that you be saved. The Elk would never have carried you upon her back, nor the Wild Folk come peacefully to walk by your side. It is true, our fight has only just begun, but you and the boy and the leverets have healed a very, very old wound. Now, come along, we will make camp higher up, where the trees are thick and we can be hidden, and see what we can do for the boy and the little hare.”

  The rest of that evening passed in a blur as the Basket-witches gently moved the battered Fiddleback, the weakened Elk, the wounded Myrtle and the half-conscious Tin to a clearing further up the mountain where the young pines grew very thick. They made up two beds in their red cart for Comfrey and Tin and insisted that the girl rest. Myrtle lay at her feet, her wounded side packed with yarrow and usnea and wrapped in a fresh cloth. Mallow huddled beside her, grooming her limp ears. Tin lay in a fitful sleep with a cool, lavender-soaked rag across his head. Comfrey had orders to coax a warm bone broth between his teeth every hour, and this she did dutifully and anxiously, talking to Tin in a low voice. The Basket-witches went back down again to bury the bodies of the dead Coyote-folk and the Mountain Lion-woman, and to clean their golden blood from the ground, burying it carefully in a deep hole beneath a wild lilac tree.

  By the time they returned, Comfrey was already fast asleep. They went to the Elk of Milk and Gold then. She lay breathing very slowly in a fresh patch of purple irises. One by one, Salix, Rush and Sedge threaded yellow wood violets into her fur. Their hands shook and their tears fell freely onto the earth. Under their breath they sang old, old chants that only the willows, the rushes and the sedges knew.

  The Fire Hawk joined them, perching neatly on a rock in the clearing. At his arrival, the Basket-witches turned away, understanding that what was to come was not for their eyes, and walked in mourning back to their carts.

  Little speckled moths flitted in the air around the Fire Hawk, drawn to his light. The Elk opened one eye fully to look at him, and many words passed silently between them. The evening star glimmered, climbing the horizon. And as if it was that star alone which she had been waiting all day to see, the Elk of Milk and Gold gave a final great sigh and settled her old head more fully against the earth. A few violets fell into the grass from her neck. Her eyes, half closed, went still. A very faint shudder ran through the earth beneath her.

  A gentle wind picked up from the east and more stars began to appear. After a time, the Fire Hawk opened his wings and drifted on the breeze, landing gingerly on the Elk’s shoulders. He spread his flaming wings wide and lay them across the Elk’s cold body, from forehead to tail.

  As night darkened completely and the Milky Way began to gleam clearly above, the Elk of Milk and Gold burned in hot blue flames under the smouldering wings of the Fire Hawk. By morning, all that remained of her body was a pile of milk-white ash and a golden book with a thousand rippling pages.

  When Comfrey woke the next morning, from a heavy sleep, it took her a moment to remember where she was. Disoriented, she tried to sit up, but found she was tucked in under several heavy furs. The roof over her head was arched, made of long, woven willow sticks and covered with red cloth. A fire burned in a small stove. Then she saw the dark, kind face of Salix, her tall cone-shaped hair caught with thistles, the chickadee dancing about its crown. Tin stirred, yawning, and she felt a gentle, wet nose pressing into her hand.

  “Myrtle!” she cried. “You’re all right!” And with those words, all the events of the previous evening flooded through her again with a sickening clarity.

  Myrtle lifted up her head and managed to quip, “Well of course I’m all right! You didn’t think I’d leave you to finish all this alone now, did you?” But her voice was a little breathless, and she didn’t leap onto the girl’s lap like she usually did, but stayed where she was, her head half lifted.

  Salix smiled and thrust a cup of bitter-smelling root tea into Comfrey’s hands.

  “Where are we?” came a croaking voice from beside her.

  “Oh, Tin!” Comfrey turned her head and smiled such a sweet, glad, relieved smile at the boy that he felt his heart lurch a little. He felt dizzy and sick, and his head throbbed.

  “Where is the Elk? Is she all right? Did they take my Fiddleback? What—?”

  “Hush, hush,” soothed Salix, dabbing a fresh cloth to his head and handing the boy his own cup of bitter tea. “Your Fiddleback is safe. One of the Brothers is dead, and the other is far away. The grizzly-ghosts will have made sure of that. So the birds told us, and the First Bobcat. But still, ghosts cannot kill a man, and so he is alive, and being alive he is dangerous, because he saw the gold spill out of the veins of the Wild Folk. He will be back for it I’m sure. But I hope we will be ready for him next time. Oh my children, you came just in time. Just in time.” Sadness shadowed her face. “The Elk gave us her Psalterium last night. In its golden pages are t
he last words of creation. Our only hope. So it was decreed long ago. I pray that we know how to read them.”

  “Her Psalterium?” said Comfrey. “But, does that mean the Elk is…the Elk is…no more?” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word dead. She remembered what the First Bobcat had told her – that unless Farallone itself died, the Elk could not truly die, but only change form. Still, Comfrey had come to love the Elk of Milk and Gold, and tears gathered in her eyes.

  A pot of acorn porridge on the wood stove began to bubble. Salix went to stir it, hiding her own tears, and just then Rush burst through the door, flushed and out of breath.

  “They are coming, they are gathering already!” she panted. Then she caught sight of the children and the leverets, and came over gladly to kiss their cheeks.

  “Who is coming?” Comfrey said with a start of fear.

  “All the Wild Folk of every kind!” replied Rush, stroking her hair with a hand that smelled of wild roses. “To honour their Creatrix and to hear the reading of the Psalterium. Mole-folk must have spread the news lightning-fast through their mycelial networks and opened their tunnels for the safe and rapid travel of all.”

  “Perhaps we will see the Greentwins again at last…” breathed Myrtle.

  “The Greentwins are not Wild Folk,” said a sharp voice in the door. It was Sedge. “They will not be welcomed here. If they had not sent the leverets out to fetch these children, and the four of them hadn’t come traipsing across Olima with their contraptions and their meddling human hands, we wouldn’t be in this predicament at all! The Brothers would not have discovered us, the Elk would not have needed to come, and would not have died.” Her voice was loud and thin and anguished, and Comfrey flushed with shame at her words. Tin, lying with his forehead covered in cloth, felt tears of frustration and exhaustion prick his eyes.

  “Sister,” said Rush, and her tone had none of its usual gentleness. Comfrey looked up sharply. The Basket-witch was flushed red with anger. “What a thing to say! Calm yourself. You are speaking from your own sorrow. I think we all owe the Greentwins an apology, and the people of the Country. These children have proven themselves brave, kind, generous and gentle to all Wild Folk. There was no way to stop the Brothers discovering what is in our blood. It was inevitable that they would invade again one day. They could not stay behind their City Wall for ever. The fact that their invasion and the coming of these children and leverets happened at the same time; well, this may be our greatest blessing of all. For without them we would not be standing here together. We would be hiding alone, in hate and in fear. Divided, we would never be able to resist the Brothers again. All together, we just might.”

  Sedge only sniffed with outrage, and whirled out again into the daylight. But Comfrey thought that she heard a single ragged sob escape the Basket-witch’s lips, and she felt a surge of unbidden sympathy.

  All day a crowd of Wild Folk gathered round the Elk’s milky ashes and the luminous book at their centre. By the time the sun had begun to lower over the pines to the west, spilling amber light down through the meadow, the place was brimming with a tatterdemalion gathering of beings – furred and mottled and winged and clawed and strangely clad, with human faces or hands or feet. It was similar to the crowd that had followed the Elk from Tamal Point, only larger, more diverse, stranger and wilder and more solemn too. The Basket-witches built a fire there beside the Elk’s ashes, so that all might gather and keep warm. Sedge held the Elk of Milk and Gold’s glowing Psalterium to her chest, as if it might impart upon her very heart some of the Elk’s ancient calm. She did not speak to her sisters, but sat apart in a daze of grief.

  Salix and Rush insisted that the children rest inside the cart until the sun set, when they would begin the reading of the Psalterium. Tin and Myrtle were still very weak, and Comfrey cared for them both diligently as the sun wheeled overhead, remembering the patience and skill with which her mother attended to those in need back in the village, trying to keep at bay the heavy ache that filled her whenever she thought of Maxine. How many Brothers had invaded the Country? How many Brothers had already found Alder?

  When the Basket-witches weren’t looking she darted to the door to peek at the gathering crowd. She wondered if she would see the Bobcat-girl again. That October day felt like another lifetime. Mallow joined her, eagerly sniffing for the Greentwins on the breeze. But they could make out very little through the dense pines.

  An hour before sunset there was a commotion at the far edge of the clearing. Comfrey could hear Sedge’s voice pealing out high and sharp as glass. She sounded outraged, even a little afraid. A great chattering went up, as the voices of many Wild Folk clamoured all at once, some harsh, some gentle and excited.

  “Mallow,” hissed Tin, who was by then up and about, tinkering with his Fiddleback by the wood stove. “Can you hear what’s going on?”

  The leveret was already at the door, his ears straining. “I’m going to go have a look, it sounds important!”

  “Should we come with you?” said Comfrey eagerly.

  “The Basket-witches were very clear about us waiting until sunset,” said Myrtle, still a little breathless. “I think they want you to make a grand entrance. Part of the ceremony, or some such…”

  “Oh,” sighed Comfrey. “But I’m desperate to see what’s going on! To know what’s going to happen next! It’s been an endless day of waiting…”

  “Go on then, Mallow,” urged Tin with a grin. “And come back quick and tell us!”

  The leveret leaped off at a lean dash, his tail flashing in the golden light.

  “Cheeky fellow,” muttered Myrtle affectionately.

  “You really think they want us to make a special entrance?” Comfrey said, turning back to Myrtle. She looked down at her green wool dress, remembering as if from a great distance that day in her bedroom in Alder when she had pulled it out of her trunk and put it on, thinking she and Myrtle were going for a quick jaunt to check the Offering-bundle, nothing more. The memory made her dizzy now. It seemed to belong to a different girl. She began to undo her braids, which as usual had become unruly and needed smoothing.

  “That’s what it sounded like to me,” replied the leveret, hopping stiffly off the bed to warm herself by the fire.

  “What are you doing?” Tin said, looking at Comfrey curiously. She was combing her hands through her hair with a strange, private expression on her face. She blushed and loosed her hair abruptly. It stood out around her face and shoulders in a black and wild cloud, falling in loose tendrils all the way to her waist.

  “Combing my hair, silly!” she retorted hotly. “Since we have to make a grand appearance and all, I want to look at least somewhat respectable. What? Have you never seen a girl comb her hair before?”

  Now it was Tin’s turn to blush and look away, down at his own torn clothing and ragged appearance. “We look like a pair of ragamuffin orphans!” he said with dismay. Comfrey giggled.

  Just then Mallow came flying up the cart steps and skidded to a halt in the middle of the floor, his long ears swaying.

  “In the name of All Hares!” exclaimed Myrtle. “What on earth is the matter?”

  “Comfrey!” panted Mallow, only half-listening to his sister. “Tin! The Holy Fools are here, Amber and Oro and Pieta and all the others. They’re here, the Mole-folk brought them, they’ve just emerged out of the ground. That’s what all the commotion is about, and they’re with – they’re with—” The little leveret faltered, trying to catch his breath in his excitement and his amazement. He turned to Tin. “They’re with two of the Mycelium,” he breathed, shifting his eyes to Comfrey’s face. “Our friends, and Comfrey’s—”

  “Thornton’s here?” Tin cried, incredulous, leaping to his feet so fast the blood pounded in his head. Comfrey had gone very, very still where she sat on the floor, her hair wild around her face, her hands folded in her lap. She opened her lips to speak, then closed them again because they had started to tremble.

  But before Mallo
w could reply, a man’s voice boomed out through the clearing, and there was the sound of boots running through grass and pine duff right up the steps of the cart. The door latch jiggled. Comfrey sat transfixed, her chest heaving. Tin ran to open the door but it burst inwards before he reached it and Thornton came bounding through with one swift movement, looking more wolf than man in his wild desperation to find his daughter.

  The strange spell that had held Comfrey so still, so transfixed, shattered all at once like thin glass. “Papa!” she cried, and flung herself upright straight into his arms. For a long time she didn’t say anything more, and neither did he. Tears filled their eyes. “I knew it,” she whispered into his shirt. “I knew you were alive.”

  “My sweet child, my Comfrey!” Thornton crooned hoarsely into the tangle of her loose hair, his cheeks wet. “Oh my stars, oh my gods, you are safe.” For a long moment no one moved or made a sound, and Tin looked away, trying not to think about his own lost parents, and whether there was anyone in the world who would love him that way after all this time.

  “Tin?” came a hesitant voice from behind Thornton’s lanky form.

  “Seb!” Tin cried, seeing his friend there for the first time. Seb was paler, more wiry, and his dark eyes, always lustrous, were more striking than ever, perhaps in contrast to his light-deprived skin. They looked like two tunnels, emotive but dark as the underground. The boys hugged fiercely.

  “I thought we’d never see each other again,” Seb said, looking his friend in the face. “And – you found Comfrey! It’s amazing, isn’t it? Like it was all meant to be.”

  Tin went quiet, feeling suddenly protective of Comfrey and their difficult journey together. He realized with a jealous little start in his stomach that he didn’t want to share her with her father or with Seb. Comfrey isn’t mine to share, he told himself sternly, and managed to grin back at his friend. Myrtle limped over to smell at Seb and Thornton’s ankles.