“Sure enough, he speared him a third sturgeon that morning. And this’n didn’t pull the vine outta Granddaddy’s hands. It pulled him clean outta the boat, but Granddaddy wouldn’t turn loose. It dragged him underwater. Granddaddy still wouldn’t turn loose. Ever now and then his head popped out of the water, first here, then there, now way over yonder.” He pointed another zigzag. “But still he wouldn’t turn loose.
“The sturgeon finally played out, and Granddaddy’s buddies fished Granddaddy and the fish both outta the river. They hung Granddaddy upside down from a tree limb just to drain all the water out him. But they figured out why he didn’t let go of that vine: He’d done tied it ’round his waist! He couldn’t have let go if he’d a wanted to.” Aidan and the feechies hooted with laughter. “And from that day to this,” concluded Hyko, “all my people been called Vinesturgeon.”
Aidan applauded Hyko’s performance. He was fascinated by the feechies’ naming customs. “So Dobro Turtlebane,” he asked, “where does his name come from?”
“Oh, the Turtlebanes are a clan of fierce turtle hunters,” answered Hyko, “the bane of turtles’ existence.”
“How about your cousin, Theto Elbogator?”
Hyko was ready with that story too. “There’s a crook of the Tam the feechiefolks calls the Elbow. Used to be a big alligator lived there. We called him the Elbow gator. He’d smash up boats that floated through, eat whatever folks fell out. Theto kilt that alligator. Ate him too. Ever since, his family’s been called the Elbogators. Before that, they was just plain old Sands, like Orlo and Pobo there.”
Aidan was confused. “I thought you weren’t related!” he said, looking at Orlo and Pobo.
“We ain’t,” answered Pobo. “Sands is just the name you get stuck with if you or none of your folks ain’t done nothing special.”
“If you ain’t kilt no ravaging critters or won no contests or half-drownded yourself chasing after a fish, folks just call you Sands,” Orlo explained.
“We’re just as common and no’count as dirt, I reckon,” moaned Pobo. “So folks calls us Sands.” Orlo and Pobo both looked to be on the point of tears, and the other feechies were quick to offer words of assurance.
“You’ll get you a name one of these days.”
“You boy’s ain’t all that no’count.”
Hyko thought about giving Pobo a hug, but Pobo drew back as if to punch him in the nose. Hyko changed his mind, thinking it better to change the subject instead. “Pantherbane,” he called, “how come you’re out here nearbout to Feechiefen, instead of across the river where civilizers belong?”
Aidan decided to tell the whole truth on that score for the first time since he left Tambluff. “I’m going into the swamp to fetch a frog orchid for King Darrow.”
“You?” asked Jerdo, a little sarcastically. “Headed into Feechiefen alone?” The feechies all laughed at the idea of a civilizer-even Pantherbane himself-venturing into the Feechiefen alone.
Aidan ignored their mocking laughter. “I was hoping I could find a feechie guide. Do any of you know where the frog orchid grows?”
The feechies just shrugged. “I don’t know ’bout no frog orchid,” said Hyko. “The Feechiefen is full of orchids-pink orchids, white orchids, yellow orchids, purple.”
“Some of them bigger around than your head,” offered Orlo. “Some of them would set on your finger-nail.”
“There’s orchids that grows on the ground, orchids that grows on trees,” said Tombro.
“Some orchids grows on other orchids,” Hyko continued. “I’ve seen orchids shaped like a turtle, orchids shaped like a gator’s mouth. There’s some that smells like rotten lizard eggs. But the one you call a frog orchid, I don’t know what that is.”
Aidan’s face fell. He had assumed that any feechie he met in the swamp would be able to take him straight to the frog orchid. “So you’ve never heard the Frog Orchid Chant?” The feechies all shook their heads. Aidan recited a couple of lines to see if it jogged anyone’s memory: “In deepest swamp, in house of bears, / An orchid in the spring appears.”
“House of bears?” snorted Jerdo. “That don’t narrow things down too much. Ever dry spot in the swamp’s a house for bears.”
“Unless it’s talking about Bearhouse Island,” suggested Orlo.
“Well, I ain’t guiding nobody to Bearhouse!” yawped Pobo.
There was a general grumble of agreement.
“Me neither!”
“I heard that!”
“Uh-uh, not me.”
“I’m skeered of Bearhouse Island,” confessed Hyko, “and I’m fearless.”
“Where’s Bearhouse?” asked Aidan.
“Spang in the middle of the swamp,” Hyko said. “Five days’ poling from the swamp edge.”
“That’s five days for a feechie, born and raised in the Feechiefen,” put in Orlo. “And that don’t count the time you’d spend fighting off the biggest alligators in the swamp.”
“But even that ain’t the worst part of it,” continued Jerdo. “The worst part’s the feechiefolks that runs things on Bearhouse.”
“Chief Larbo’s band,” Hyko explained. “And them boys is mean.”
“Aren’t all feechies mean?” Aidan asked.
“Well, sure,” said Pobo, with a hint of pride in his voice, “but we ain’t talking about regular feechie mean. Folks that’s too nasty to live with the rest of us, that’s who joins up with Larbo’s band.”
“Folks what don’t care a lizard’s tail for the Feechie Code,” said Orlo.
“Folks what don’t love their mamas.” Tombro shivered as he said it.
The feechies’ description of Larbo’s band of outlaws made Aidan think of the attacks on Last Camp. “Somebody’s been attacking a hunting camp on the other side of the river,” he said. “I think it’s feechies. Could it be Larbo’s band?”
“On the civilizer side?” Tombro shook his head. “Even Larbo wouldn’t attack on the civilizer side.”
“But they shot from the treetops,” said Aidan. “And when they ran away, they ran away through the treetops. Civilizers can’t do that.”
Hyko’s brow wrinkled. “That do sound like feechiefolks…”
“You say they was shooting,” said Tombro. “What kind of arrows did they shoot?”
“I saved one,” said Aidan. He pulled the white-feathered arrow out of his quiver and handed it to Tombro.
“See there?” said Tombro triumphantly. “Cold-shiny arrowhead. Can’t be feechie.”
“But that shaft…” Hyko began.
“What about it?” Tombro retorted.
“It’s black bamboo. Feechiefen’s the only place where black bamboo grows. A civilizer couldn’ta made this arrow.”
Taking the arrow from Tombro, Orlo fingered the white feathers. “Egret feathers,” he observed. “Few days ago, me and Pobo come up on a egret rookery where somebody’d kilt all the birds and left them dead on the ground-just plucked out the big plume feathers and left them there.”
“Pitifullest thing I ever seen,” said Pobo.
“Plume hunters are shooting out the rookeries on the civilizer side too,” said Aidan.
The feechies grew quiet, trying to figure out what it meant. Hyko was the first to speak. “I don’t know what’s going on exactly,” he admitted, “but I do know that there’s feechies breaking the code, and that brings trouble on every feechie in the swamp.”
“Cold-shiny arrowheads…” Pobo’s lip curled in disgust. “Next thing, folks’ll be building civilizer houses all over the swamp and riding around on smelly horses and covering ever dry spot with furball, civilizer sheep. What kind of feechie would shoot a cold-shiny arrowhead?”
“Maybe the same kind of feechie what shoots out a whole egret rookery,” answered Orlo.
“And attacking civilizers on their side of the river…” Hyko shook his head. “That’ll just bring the civilizers to Feechiefen, with their horses and their cold-shiny spears.”
“I
wish they’d try,” boasted Jerdo, puffing out his chest. “Can’t no civilizers whup us in our own swamp!”
“’Course not,” answered Hyko, “but we still don’t want a bunch of civilizers tromping around in the Feechiefen.” He rubbed his head nervously. “We got to hold a swamp council. We got to do something ’bout this before it’s too late.”
Chapter Fifteen
Into the Feechiefen
The swamp council was set to convene three nights later at Scoggin Mound, a tiny island one day’s journey into the swamp’s interior. Leaving before sunrise the day after the brushfire, the feechies dispersed across the northern part of the swamp to recruit feechies from various bands to participate in the council.
Aidan traveled with Tombro. Scoggin Mound was Tombro’s home village, and it was his responsibility to get things in order for the council. He and Aidan were to go directly to Scoggin Mound, or as directly as the Feechiefen would let them.
They continued due south through the pine flats. Then, around noon, Aidan noticed the vegetation abruptly changed. The open forest of big pines and wire grass was replaced by the enveloping greenness of lowland swamp. The ground grew soft beneath their feet and mucky more than sandy. Vines and thickets slowed their progress, and ferocious bugs descended from all sides.
Aidan tried to take the insect bites in stride, but the stinging flies were worse than anything he had ever encountered in the land of the civilizers. He slapped, swatted, and waved his arms, but they kept coming. He could hardly pay attention to where he was going, and twice he fell, tripped by vines that snaked across the ground.
The tanglewood closed in tighter as they pushed southward, and it soon became apparent that Aidan’s backpack couldn’t make the trip. Every low-hanging branch seemed to catch it and snatch Aidan backward, as if the forest itself were reaching out to hinder the civilizer’s progress toward its most secret places.
When Tombro finished disentangling Aidan from a grapevine for the third time, he said, “That’s enough of that, Pantherbane. Either you leave that civilizer back-pouch, or I’m leaving you.” Aidan knew Tombro was right. But he still couldn’t bear the thought of leaving behind everything he had so carefully packed for his quest.
“Whatever you got in there,” assured Tombro, “it ain’t what you need. You headed into the Feechiefen Swamp. Civilizer ways won’t be much good to you. Only feechie ways.” He casually waved away an attacking deerfly. “And the grace of the One God.”
In spite of himself, Tombro did have a look through Aidan’s belongings, just to see if a few things might be of use. He opened Aidan’s water bladder and took a sip of the clear, pure water, fresh from the spring at Last Camp. He spewed it out and staggered around as if he had been poisoned.
“Aaaach!” he choked, twisting his face into a grimace of disgust. “How can you drink that stuff?” He threw the water bladder over his shoulder. “Ain’t no need to haul that nasty stuff all the way to Scoggin Mound. Feechiefen’s full of water, nice black water. And there’s always a surprise floating in it, for extra flavor.”
He found Aidan’s quill pen and palmetto paper in the backpack. He took a bite out of the paper, but chew as he might, he couldn’t get it to go down. “That stuff ain’t fit to eat,” he declared as he balled it up and threw it into the bushes. He held up Aidan’s pen and laughed. “You can get plenty of feathers in the Feechiefen. And a heap prettier than that’un. Ain’t no reason to bring one from over the river.”
He uncorked Aidan’s inkpot and was about to take a swig when Aidan snatched it away from him and threw it into the woods to save Tombro the trouble. Tombro tried to throw away Aidan’s hunting knife, on the grounds that it was made of cold-shiny. But Aidan insisted on keeping it. The feechie relented but only after making Aidan promise to get a proper stone knife at the first opportunity. He did, however, convince Aidan to leave behind his bow and steel-tipped arrows, promising to get him a smaller feechie bow and arrows the minute they arrived at Scoggin Mound.
Tombro laughed at Aidan’s rope, pointing out that every tree was festooned with vines of every size that would do just as well. Everything else in Aidan’s pack met with similar ridicule, except the alligator jerky. That was something Tombro could see the use of.
Tombro was also pleased to find the rattlesnake hide that Aidan had used for a fire beater the previous day. “Hold on, now,” he said excitedly as he unrolled the skin. The smoke and heat from the fire had crudely tanned it. Tombro rubbed the scaly hide between his palms, then snapped it taut, testing its strength. He held it up to Aidan’s waist. It was more than long enough to wrap around; it almost went around twice. And it was broad enough to cover halfway to his knees. “You got yourself a kilt,” he whooped, “just like a natural-born he-feechie. You don’t need that civilizer getup at all! You can dress like one of us.”
Aidan saw the benefit in going native. Feechiefen was one place where it was best to blend in with the locals as much as possible. There was no need to draw attention to the fact he was a civilizer. Tombro went in search of just the right gray mud with which to coat Aidan, both for bug protection and camouflage.
Meanwhile, Aidan took off his civilizer clothes and wrapped the snakeskin around his waist. It was crinkly and stiff, but it was comfortable enough, and in the sticky heat of the wetlands, it would be cooler than his civilizer clothes. Believing he struck a dashing figure as a hefeechie, Aidan felt an unavoidable twinge of pride. But he was eager for Tombro to return with the mud. The mosquitoes and biting flies were making a banquet of his bare chest and back.
When Tombro came back with two big handfuls of foul-smelling gray mud, he hooted at the sight of the big white civilizer standing in his civilizer boots, holding his kilt up with one hand and furiously slapping at bugs with the other. But he applied the mud as quickly as he could. In spite of its smell, the mud soothed Aidan’s existing bug bites and protected him from getting new ones. In his side pouch, Tombro had an extra kilt clasp, made from the fangs of a rattlesnake. He fastened Aidan’s kilt with it, freeing the civilizer’s second hand.
Tombro took a step back to look at his handiwork. “Not too bad,” he mused. “You’re the right colors, at least, and you smell a little more like a feechie.” He looked at Aidan’s close-cropped hair. “Your hair needs some help. But you can’t grow a mane like this in a day.” Tombro ran his muddy fingers along the matted hair that draped down his neck. “Maybe we can skin out a muskrat. You could wear its pelt for a wig,” he suggested. “When we get to Scoggin Mound, you can borrow one of my turtle helmets.”
Tombro tried to convince Aidan to remove his boots. “Ain’t nobody going to mistake you for a feechie with them stump-clompers on your feet,” he said. But Aidan pointed out that civilizer feet were much more tender than feechie feet and that his feet couldn’t survive the rigors of the swamp without the protection of boots. Tombro gave in, but not without wondering aloud how civilizers managed to survive in a place like Corenwald if they weren’t any tougher than that.
With Aidan’s load thus lightened and the vegetation growing thicker, it wasn’t long before he and Tombro took to the treetops. Onward they went, limb to limb toward the heart of the Feechiefen. The understory was so thick that Aidan rarely saw the forest floor. And when he did see all the way to the bottom of the trees, he saw water as often as he saw dry land. On and on it went.
After an hour or so of tree walking, they took a short rest in the top of a big sweet gum tree. “Big swamp,” Aidan remarked. “But the Feechiefen’s not so different from some of the swamps around Longleaf, where I’m from.”
Tombro gave Aidan a quizzical look. “Feechiefen? This ain’t Feechiefen. This is the little scrub swamp that borders it. When we get to Feechiefen, you gonna know it.”
Two hours later, the dense scrub opened into the Feechiefen. And, as Tombro had promised, there was no mistaking it. It was a place of terrible beauty, forbidding and at the same time mesmerizing. Enormous cypress trees-taller even than
longleaf pines-soared into the sky from flanged bases so broad that Aidan could imagine flatboats full of standing feechies completely hidden behind each one.
The still water was as black as night itself, and yet no mirror could reflect the sky and clouds more perfectly. The surface of the water was another world, an upsidedown world. The effect was dizzying. The same cypress trees that speared upward into the sky also plunged downward to an identical sky below. The white-bellied cranes that glided above glided upside down in the lower sky. A heron stood knee-deep in the water, joined at the knee with its upside-down twin, which bobbed its long beak upward to the water’s surface as the upright bird bobbed down.
Aidan had often daydreamed about the Feechiefen. But he hadn’t imagined this. He had pictured the Feechiefen as a bigger version of the swamps and tangle-wood forests he knew so well. But this was another thing altogether. The swamps Aidan knew were borderlands, places of transition between river and dry land. He could see now there was nothing transitional about this place. The Feechiefen was its own place, as self-contained as an inland sea.
There were rivers in the Feechiefen, as Aidan would soon learn. But there were no riverbanks. The rivers that flowed through the vast swamp were bordered by more water, not by dry land. There was dry land in Feechiefen too. But except for a few real islands, most of the land was just floating mats of moss burped up from the bottom of the swamp. A few plants took root and flourished-plants whose seeds blew in, floated in, or rode in on the feet of birds. Sometimes the floating islands joined together to form quite large plots of land. But any sense of permanence on those floating islands was only an illusion. They might sink back into the black water any day.
“Feechiefen,” Tombro whispered reverently at their first sight of the great swamp. Aidan saw a tear form in the feechie’s eye. He could see why this son of the swamp would be so homesick.
The Secret of the Swamp King wt-2 Page 10
