The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  “Mallow!” cried Seb, upon seeing the leveret. “What happened?”

  “Ah, no, that would be my twin. I’m Myrtle,” said the leveret, miffed. “Just a little run in with a gun, you know,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Oh! How terrible!” said Seb, blushing. For a moment he and Tin searched one another’s eyes, feeling a draught of distance between them which they’d never felt before. They both had stories now that the other didn’t know or understand, and that realization made them both grow suddenly shy.

  “Seb, so much has happened, there’s so much to tell you,” Tin stammered, wanting that distance to go away. “And – how did you both get here so fast? I thought Thornton said he would never leave, not until the work of the Mycelium was done. Did he call the Greentwins? What’s happening in the City?”

  There was a long silence as Seb tried to begin. But Thornton, releasing Comfrey from his embrace, cut in. “The Greentwins are missing,” he said, sitting down heavily on one of the beds while Comfrey, her heart in her throat, rushed to bring him a cup of warm milk from the pan over the wood stove, adding a generous dash of brandy from the Basket-witches’ cooking shelf. Then she sat down again beside her father and, feeling a little shy, took his hand in hers. Seb, seeing her fully for the first time, stared, his ears going pink.

  “A week after you left us, my dear boy, you and your extraordinary Spider, I called them,” Thornton continued. “But they did not come.” His face went dark, its lines drawn.

  Mallow and Myrtle let out twin keening cries.

  “But – the Greentwins can’t die! They can’t be dead, surely!” said Mallow in a thin voice, his legs quivering.

  “Worse, I fear,” replied Thornton. “I think they’ve been captured. I think they’re in the hands of the Brothers. I don’t know how, but I sense it, for we could find no trace of them, no matter how many times I asked the Mole-folk to consult their own mycelial networks. By some terrible twist in the order of things, it seems they are being held in the City. But by the time I realized this, I had already witnessed and learned many more terrible things. I had seen the beginning of the Brothers’ infiltration of the Country and could do nothing about it without giving myself away. It was so much worse than I had anticipated. And somehow they knew that you were here, Tin. Someone had seen that flight of white pelicans. The Mole-folk took me into their tunnels and told me all they knew about the Brothers, about the fate of the Country and the Greentwins and the Wild Folk. It broke my heart to pass beneath the village called Alder, but I vowed that once I had made sure the Fiddleback was safely hidden, I would return for my daughter and my wife at long last.”

  “But I’m not with Mother! How did you know we were here, together?”

  “The Mole-folk, my child,” said Thornton. “It was from them and their mycelial webs, which pass stories to and fro all across Olima, that we learned of your quest. That I learned of you, my sweet girl – you and the Fire Hawk’s feather and the Elk of Milk and Gold. And that you were with Tin, of all wild and perfect fates! This was only yesterday evening. News came to us of the Brothers’ attack at dusk. Of the Elk of Milk and Gold’s arrival with human children on her back. We travelled all night and all day through the tunnels of the Mole-folk.”

  “Oh, Papa,” whispered Comfrey, leaning her head against his arm, full of so many words and worries and hopes that she didn’t know what to say.

  “It is time,” came Rush’s voice from the doorway. She stood there in her pale skirts, glowing with the last light of day. “Come, my dears, it is time for the reading of the Psalterium. All are gathered, waiting for you.” She nodded to the children and the leverets, and bowed her head to Thornton. Outside, they could hear a howling cheer beginning to rise through the trees. It was a sound unlike any Comfrey or Tin had ever heard; a thrumming chorus of barks and songs and wails and hoots that together created a startling and heartbreaking harmony.

  Thornton kissed his daughter’s hand and gave her a gentle nudge towards the crowd.

  “It’s for you they cheer,” he murmured. “You four. Go on, they’re waiting.”

  Comfrey and Tin looked at each other, their eyes wide, and both felt a little spark of pleasure at that shared look, for it held all the terror and wonder of their adventure together. Everything they had seen and spoken of and shared. Seb, watching them, felt an unexpected needle of envy, and tried without success to push it away.

  “You’re going to have to carry me,” said Myrtle. “I’m still weak as a hareling!”

  Comfrey smiled then, a wide smile suffused with a happiness she thought she’d never felt so fully before. Here she was with her father, who had returned to her at last, and the three who had become her dearest friends in all the world, and although the threat to Farallone was no less than it had been the day before, she felt for the first time that all together they might, just might, be able to overcome it.

  And so the children and the leverets descended the wagon steps, escorted by Rush, and made their way through the thick young pines into the clearing where the crowd of Wild Folk stood waiting. Thornton and Seb hung back, watching.

  Tin thought he could feel the power of that crowd before it had even parted to let them through. As if the air itself was full of stargold, humming and gleaming. A Bombus-man was the first to catch sight of the children and leverets, and he let out a sweet-toned whoop of celebration. Then everyone was cheering all over again, and a dozen furred hands touched their arms and cheeks. Dizzy, Tin glimpsed faces like alder bark, the dark-rimmed eyes of foxes, wings like those of swallowtail butterflies, feet as long as fence lizards’. Amidst the cacophony, Comfrey heard a familiar, rasping voice holler out her name. Peering through the shifting mass of bright bodies, she caught the green eye of the Bobcat-girl, waving a furred, sharp-nailed hand in her direction. Her heart lifted and lurched, just as it had done the first time she’d seen her a lifetime ago. But then the yipping crowd surged around them again, pushing them towards the fire at the centre. Above them all, the Fire Hawk circled. Myrtle and Mallow sensed his sharp eyes above them, but puffed their chests out and ignored him. Now was no time to show fear! Tin saw Oro’s great round head shining amidst the crowd, and Amber beside him, grinning and waving, with Pieta clinging starry-eyed to her hand.

  In the centre by the fire, Sedge stood holding the Psalterium open in her arms, cradled there like a child. Her green headdress swayed in the sunset light. Salix herded the children and the leverets right to her side, near the heat of the fire. Up close, the Psalterium looked like no book they had ever seen. Its pages were as rippled and lined as spiderwebs. They glowed with a sourceless, creamy light. Comfrey held back a sob, thinking of the violet eyes of the Elk of Milk and Gold and the gentle warmth of her breath. Was this truly all that was left of her? How could that be?

  “These children and their leveret friends,” began Salix, pitching her voice to carry to the distant treetops. The crowd of Wild Folk and Holy Fools and animals quietened. “They have done a very extraordinary and a very brave thing. Something we all thought impossible after the Collapse.” The chickadee in her hair sung a sweet, high note. “They have shown us the true kindness, courage and generosity of the human heart. They won the trust and love of the very Creatrix of Farallone herself, the Elk of Milk and Gold, who carried them on her back across her land to reach us. They won the trust of all whom they encountered throughout Olima. They were sorely tested, but they proved themselves every step of the way, and taught us something of our own prejudices and our own fears. We are living through a dark and terrible time, a time of great sacrifices. The Elk of Milk and Gold has sacrificed her body to give us her last and greatest wisdom, her Psalterium. I know that some of you are angry at her passing. That you seek to blame these children. But something far larger is at work and at stake, and in her passing she has taught us about coming together. For here we all are, together. She offered herself, and all the knowing that her body holds, for the good of us all. Let us not
forsake her.” There was a great murmuring through the crowd, and a wind pushed through the tops of the trees, whispering. The sun’s last rays caught their swaying tips, turning them molten. Salix turned to Sedge. There was a little warning in her eyes, for she knew that her sister still did not fully trust the children, and bore them no love. But Sedge’s own eyes were lost in the pages of the Psalterium, already far away.

  “The words of making and unmaking,” she said in a drifting, high voice. Comfrey craned to peer over the Basket-witch’s shoulder at the strange pages, and glimpsed marks like golden runes shifting there. “With these words we honour creation, with these words we seek to bring wholeness, to bring peace, to do no harm.”

  “Wholeness, peace, no harm,” came the reply of the murmuring crowd, a kind of prayer. Comfrey and Tin found themselves stammering along.

  Sedge turned her face back to the golden pages of the Psalterium, and its light in the gathering dusk illuminated her sharp, long features, her woven green hair. “We have been studying these pages since daybreak. Their words are many, and strange. I who am mistress of patterns, with the help of each of your kind, still can read only a single page. Perhaps these are the only words the Elk wants us to read and understand. For these are clear as day, while the rest are a tangle of strangeness like the distant and unknowable bottom of the sea. Here is what I have read: By the web, by the wheel, by the hand, by the dead. The spider weaves her veil where the world began. Go to where the world began, go to where the world will end, go the steepest way, after broken threads. By the Country, by the City, by the weaver, by the root. As above, so below, the spindle will show. When the Spider makes Gold the Land will behold the return of the Old.”

  Comfrey looked at Tin then, and Tin looked back at Comfrey, and the haunted expression in his wide, light eyes made her take his hand. In the girl’s arms, Myrtle cocked an ear forward and gave an exasperated snort, breaking the luminous silence.

  “I liked the Elk better when she wasn’t a book!” the leveret said crossly. “Riddles make my head hurt!”

  Sedge whirled, glaring at Myrtle, but it was as if the leveret’s words had released some heaviness from the air. Rush began to laugh. Laughter moved suddenly through the crowd under the first star of evening. Comfrey grinned.

  “I know what you mean,” she whispered. “But I think she made it for humans, not hares. Humans like riddles. This one sounds like a kind of map…”

  “You know how I feel about maps,” sniffed Myrtle, but her tone was affectionate.

  “I think,” said Salix, resting a hand on each of the children’s shoulders, “that your journey has only just begun. I think it’s your hands that must do this weaving, and your wheels.” She smiled at Tin. “Why else would the Fire Hawk have dropped his feather for you, and not us? Why else would the Elk have borne you across the land? Why else would this boy have created a machine that seems to have a soul – his Fiddleback? It seems clear to me that in these four is the salvation of all Farallone.”

  “The Psalterium speaks of Old Mother Neeth!” came a familiar, rasping voice from the back of the crowd. In the far shadow of the pinewood stood a house of bones with two owl legs. A broad old woman with a thick silver braid leaned from the doorway. Small furred ears poked out through her hair, and her feet were long and furred as well.

  “It’s the Baba Ithá!” Comfrey exclaimed to Tin, catching hold of his shoulder. The leverets instinctively bounded into the children’s arms.

  “I can smell the bones of that hut from here!” moaned Myrtle.

  “Not again!” chimed Mallow.

  “Surely not, Grandmother,” chorused several Wild Folk at once, Salix and Rush among them. But Sedge only looked down at the Psalterium in her arms again, her eyes far away.

  “Was she not killed a thousand years ago, with the coming of the Star-Priests of Albion?” rumbled Amurra, who had come up beside Sedge to examine the Psalterium.

  “So the legends say,” replied the Baba Ithá, leaping to the ground like a squirrel and making her way through the crowd. “That one of the invader’s heroes killed her in her cave and set about building the City on top of it. They called her a monster, the terrible Arachnid. But did not the oldest stories call the place of her dwelling the beginning of the world? And did not the oldest stories say it was she, Old Mother Neeth, the Great Spider, who spun the gold of life down from the stars, and gave form to what was formless with her woven webs? Was it not from this that the Elk herself, and the First Bobcat too, were created? Was it not her threads that once held the life of Farallone together, as one?”

  A low murmuring stole through the gathered Wild Folk.

  “Am I the only one among you who still remembers? Are we old women a country apart?” the Baba Ithá bellowed, her face going dark. A cluster of Quail-people near her shrank away visibly, clutching one another’s plump hands.

  “No, you are not,” murmured Rush gently. “All the old stories speak of Mother Neeth. The ancient Spider Creatrix whose webs hold the fates of all beings. Only it was so long ago that the Star-Priests killed her. If she is in fact still alive, why has she remained in hiding all this time? Where is she? And why has she allowed the destruction of the stargold of Farallone?”

  “I thought the same as you,” the Baba Ithá said, somewhat appeased, turning to the Basket-witch. “That is, until a little fiddleback spider entered my firwood the day I sent these children and twin leverets on their way across Farallone to the Elk of Milk and Gold. A fiddleback spider carrying a heavy egg sac on her back, who spun golden thread from her body, and had come a very far way, ferried by none other than the boy Tin who I had only just had the pleasure of meeting.” Here her sharp teeth flashed with the memory of the three tasks she had set to the children, and the delight their terror had given her. “Ferried from the City. Well, then the stories began to come back to me about Old Mother Neeth, and I started to find it very strange that a City boy would meet with such an extraordinary spider, and create such an extraordinary vehicle in her likeness that ran as if by some invisible source of power. Something else, something older and more powerful, must be at work here, I told myself. However, I got quite distracted from these thoughts by word that reached me from the wood pigeons who roost in my most ancient trees. The Brothers had breached the Salvian Mountains… Only just now has the thought returned to me, that Old Mother Neeth is somewhere, somehow, still alive. And that the little fiddleback spider with her babies was sent by her.”

  “Well, what do you have to say?” Sedge demanded, turning to the First Bobcat. “Wouldn’t you know if she were alive or dead?”

  “Indeed, I would,” said the sonorous, purring voice of the First Bobcat from behind Comfrey. She shivered at the sound and Myrtle, still in her arms, tried to make herself very small inside the girl’s elbow. The ancient cat padded into the centre of the gathering and sniffed for a long while at the open pages of the Psalterium. Sedge did not flinch back, but her eyes, to Comfrey’s satisfaction, did go rather wide. The First Bobcat was an arresting sight. The children were only as tall as her shoulder, and Sedge, though able to meet the First Bobcat’s gaze at eye level, still looked insubstantial beside her.

  “I remember Mother Neeth well,” she purred. “You are right. It was from her threads I was woven, as was the Elk of Milk and Gold, her threads spun down from the stars to the earth at the beginning of time. She sent us forth from her caverns to create the rest of Farallone, to give life as well as death to the plants, animals, stones, waters and winds. To watch over all of creation, while she spun her threads between the stars and the earth, the threads of stargold that spelled the fate of all things, that kept Farallone itself alive and whole. But neither the Elk nor I have felt her presence since the coming of the Star-Priests and their Star-Breakers. So I don’t know how it can be she that the Psalterium speaks of. Though I could not say for certain she is dead, for one such as she would not be found in my Underworld.”

  “But how could she have been kil
led?” blurted Tin, the thought suddenly occurring to him. “Isn’t she a – a god? An immortal?” His thoughts were wild with the memory of the little fiddleback spider and her bobbin of strong golden thread, of the Fiddleback’s wheels and wires whirring all around him as he and Seb had careened through the Cloister’s catacombs.

  “Even stars die,” replied the First Bobcat, her great, pale green eyes swinging to meet Tin’s. Oddly, their colour and intensity reminded him of Comfrey’s, and this made them a little bit easier to look into. “And did not the Elk die beneath the wings of the Fire Hawk? Though this fate she chose for herself. It is true we do not have lifespans like yours, nor is it time and age that kill us. But we are not immune to violence. And all cycles must end.”

  “What we need to do,” cut in the Baba Ithá, “is find that little fiddleback spider and ask her outright what the riddling Psalterium is trying to tell us, and if Old Mother Neeth is, in fact, still alive. After all, would not that spider from the City be the one to know? And if she is, then it seems clear to me that these children must go directly to her cave where the world began and consult her.”

  “But isn’t that buried underneath the City? Can it even be found?” said Mallow, craning his head and ears out from the shelter of Tin’s arms. “I’ve smelled the tunnels of that place, and I can tell you, finding an ancient Spider-woman in her cave would be no mean feat. Surely if she was there Thornton’s Mycelium would already have discovered her?”

  “First things first,” interrupted the Baba Ithá with a scowl at the loquacious leveret. “We must find the little fiddleback. Who now, very likely, has a host of small spiderlings by her side. I can bring the children back to my forest with me in my bone house. It’s only a morning’s walk, in such a vehicle.”

  “Forgive me, witches and Wild Folk, all,” Comfrey broke in, trying to make her voice very loud and certain. It faltered a little on the word wild, but she swallowed hard and kept going. She’d never addressed so many people before, let alone such powerful beings as these. “Before anything else, we have to go to Alder. My mother is in danger. I-I saw it in the Fire Hawk’s feather.” As she spoke, Tin slipped his hand into hers, and squeezed it. She stood up a little straighter, blushing. “I’m not going anywhere without warning her first. I think my father would agree.”