The Secret of the Swamp King wt-2

by Jonathan Rogers

  Across the way, Aidan could see the false Wilderking dancing with rage. “You fools!” he screamed over the din of the battle. “Strike! Kill!” Every jerk of his head, every twist of his body was so magnified by his elaborate costume that the figure he cut was more comic than commanding. Larbo, seeing that the battle was being fought the old feechie way, couldn’t resist and left the Wilderking’s side to join the fun. The bodyguards, on the other hand, stood as if their feet were glued to the sand. They were confused and terrified by the feechies’ primal ferocity. The civilizers had weapons, and they didn’t mind using them, but they had underestimated what feechies could do in a free fight.

  The battle raged. Feechies flew through the air, some leaping to the attack, others being thrown and flipped by their adversaries. In several cases, Aidan noticed that both of the combatants in a hand-to-hand fight were Bearhouse feechies. Because they outnumbered the North Swamp boys, there weren’t enough opponents to go around. Some of the Bearhouse feechies had to fight one another-the way girls at a ball sometimes danced with one another when there weren’t enough boys. As the battle swirled around him, Aidan noticed a new light in the Bearhouse feechies’ eyes. The old, fiery feechie spirit had chased away the dullness born of overwork and a love of cold-shiny. Their swampy exuberance made them more formidable enemies than their flashing weapons ever could.

  Dobro Turtlebane, recovered from his earlier setback, now tangled with an unusually large feechie wearing an alligator-claw necklace. And things weren’t going well for Dobro. The Bearhouse feechie lifted Dobro over his head and hurled him against Aidan’s cage with such force that the whole structure collapsed in a heap. Aidan went to the ground, covering his head against the falling poles, and Dobro landed beside him with a thud and a clatter. He rolled over and moaned. “See, Aidan?” he groaned, holding his ribs. “I told you I’d get you out of this cage.”

  Aidan spied the false Wilderking across the way. He was still stomping, raging, and waving his arms. Aidan rose to his feet and started walking a straight line toward him. Fists and feet and feechies flew all around him, but on he walked, driven by a single purpose. He stared unblinking at the gyrating, gesticulating fraud, stalking closer, closer, yet the Wilderking was too self-absorbed to notice. Some of the feechies noticed, however, when Aidan stooped to pick up a discarded club. Hyko left off his combat and fell in step behind Aidan, and so did Pobo, Orlo, Tombro, and Odo Watersnake from Chief Gergo’s band. Even Dobro joined in as best he could, limping and holding his ribs.

  Aidan was thirty strides away when the Wilderking’s bodyguards hustled him inside the stockade. They drew their swords and waited for Aidan and his following. But Aidan kept coming, undeterred, and his following grew. The guards were well armed. But they could count, and it was obvious that they couldn’t hold back what was quickly growing into a feechie mob. They, too, retired to the safety of the stockade.

  Still Aidan kept coming. His step was quicker now. When he arrived at the stockade door, he raised his club high and brought it down on the doorframe with all his might. Thwack!

  “I am Aidan Errolson of Longleaf Manor.”

  Thwack!

  “I have come for the impostor who calls himself the Wilderking!”

  Thwack!

  “I am Pantherbane!”

  Thwack!

  “You have enslaved a free and happy people!”

  Thwack!

  “You have defaced this swamp, God’s creation!”

  Thwack!

  “You are a liar!”

  Thwack!

  “You are a fraud!”

  Thwack!

  “You are a coward!”

  Thwack!

  The feechie battle had stopped altogether by the final time Aidan struck his club. All eyes were on Pantherbane at the door of the stockade.

  The long silence was broken at last by the voice of the Wilderking, not quite as clear as before, from inside the wooden walls. “Take care you do not talk yourself to death, Pantherbane. You meddler. You ignoramus.”

  This was what everyone was waiting for. “Rudeswap!” called Chief Larbo. “The Wilderking finished the rudeswap!”

  “Hee-haw!” called a feechie voice. “We gonna see a civilizer fight!”

  The feechies-North Swamp and Bearhouse alike-stampeded toward the stockade.

  “Do you hear that, Wilderking?” shouted Aidan over the confusion. “Your subjects await you.” The feechies surrounded the stockade, bruised and bloodied from battle. But there was no response from inside. Dobro, who stood at Aidan’s right hand, rapped his knuckles on his helmet, one fist, then the other in a steady rhythm: Tock… Tock… Tock… Tock…

  The feechies around him joined in. Tock… Tock… Tock… Tock… The tempo was like a great clock ticking out the seconds toward a showdown between Pantherbane and the man who called himself the Wilderking. Fighting out a rudeswap was the most basic point of honor in the Feechie Code. Every second the king remained in the stockade, every second he refused to fight out his rudeswap, his power over the Bearhouse feechies dissolved a little more. Now all of the feechies were pounding their helmets with a deafening urgency: Tock… Tock… Tock… Tock…

  At last the stockade door cracked open. The helmet banging stopped, and the feechies waited eagerly, expectantly for the Wilderking to appear and do his duty. But the man who stepped out of the door wasn’t the Wilderking. He was Lawmer, the Wilderking’s big, thick-necked lieutenant. He read from a piece of paper: To tussle with a common ruffian is beneath the dignity of your king.

  There was a general grumble among the feechies, but Lawmer continued. The Wilderking desires you, his subjects, to continue with the battle and drive the invaders off the island. He will address you when your task is complete.

  Chief Larbo was livid. He hopped in a circle around Lawmer, who did his best to maintain a dignified indifference. “Beneath his dignity?” the old feechie barked. “I tell you what’s beneath his dignity: hiding from a free fight like a bunny in a brush pile!” He snorted. “Beneath his dignity! I don’t care who he is. He swaps rude with a man, he better be ready to fight it out!” Larbo darted behind the big civilizer to push through the stockade door. He meant to have it out face to face with the Wilderking. Lawmer, quick as a cat, struck Larbo across the back with the flat of his sword. The feechie chieftan sprawled to the ground.

  That was the blow that ended the reign of the false Wilderking on Bearhouse Island. The sight of a civilizer striking down a feechie was like a shot of cold water in the faces of the Bearhouse feechies. It jolted them out of their shiny-hungry daze and demolished the last remnants of the false Wilderking’s hold over their conscience. The atmosphere was thick with their anger, like the air before a summer storm. Lawmer felt it down his whole spine. He ducked through the door and barricaded it behind him.

  The feechie storm broke with terrifying suddenness. Feechies closed on the stockade and climbed the palisades elbow to elbow, one right behind the other. Pobo Sands and Orlo Sands led the way, one on either side of the stockade. Feechies swarmed over the palisades like ants on an anthill. Before the first climbers reached the sharpened tops of the poles, the whole structure began to sway beneath their weight. The stockade had been built by feechie hands, and being the first wooden structure they had ever built, it wasn’t very sturdy.

  The stockade collapsed on itself in a jumble of falling poles and tumbling feechies. The civilizers were as exposed as soft, pink crawfish that had shed their shells. They flailed about them with their gleaming weapons, and several feechies fell. But it was only a matter of seconds before they were swarmed under by the very people they had lorded over for two long years.

  But the Wilderking somehow slipped away from the melee. A flash of white at the edge of the clearing caught Aidan’s eye. He saw the robe of egret plumes drop to the ground, and a tall civilizer in boots and tunic, now unencumbered by the trappings of the Wilderking, disappeared into the woods.

  Chapter Twenty-one
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  Revelation

  The false Wilderking ran south, toward the end of the island he and Larbo’s band had not yet ravaged. Aidan picked up a bodyguard’s sword and plunged into the forest after him. The ground on Bearhouse Island gave rise to a riot of vines and entangling brambles. Aidan tried to hack his way through with the sword, but there was little use.

  The Wilderking had obviously taken a hidden trail. Aidan couldn’t find a path. So he tucked the sword in his belt and climbed a nearby tree. Through the treetops he swung and soared, watching the forest floor for any sign of movement. He was within sight of the island’s edge when he saw a rustling in the bushes below. Then, above a stand of sparkleberry bushes, a clump of brown, curly hair appeared.

  Swift and light as a bobcat, Aidan tree-walked toward his prey. The Wilderking had made it to the shoreline. A flatboat was waiting for him at the water’s edge. That’s when Aidan crashed down on him from the treetops. The impostor fell hard onto his face. Aidan scrambled to his feet and stood over his prostrate enemy, sword raised and ready to strike if need be. But the Wilderking made no sudden moves. He hardly moved at all.

  “Turn around!” Aidan ordered. “Look at my face.”

  The man who called himself the Wilderking turned his head slowly to the side, then lifted one shoulder to face his conqueror.

  Aidan peered into the narrowed eyes of his enemy, and his face turned white. He had known those eyes since the day he was born. Those eyes had watched Aidan grow up. Aidan had seen those eyes sparkle with laughter many years before. He felt his head grow light. “Maynard,” he whispered.

  The impostor twisted his mouth into a sneering smile. “Hello, little brother.”

  Aidan staggered back a step. The sword hung by his side, loose in his grip. “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t understand,” Maynard snarled. “How could you understand a man going out and getting what nobody meant to give him? You’ve never had to work for anything. You’ve been given everything you’ve ever had. How could you understand?”

  Aidan stood blinking. He couldn’t begin to make sense of what was happening.

  “You don’t know what it’s like to be a second son,” Maynard continued. It seemed he had practiced this speech many times to himself. “To come so close to being the heir to Longleaf Manor, but instead to spend a lifetime knowing that Brennus is going to get it, that self-satisfied moron, because he was born fifteen months before you were.

  “That’s bad enough. But then a lunatic shows up pretending to be a prophet and convinces everybody that your baby brother is the Wilderking.” He waved a hand dismissively at Aidan. “You! The Wilderking!” He barked one short syllable of a laugh. “The fifth son! That was the last act.” Maynard pushed up from his elbow and rose to his feet, looking Aidan in the face. “I wish you’d explain one thing to me: How do you deserve to be the Wilderking more than I do? That’s one thing I don’t understand.”

  Aidan didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. Maynard’s diatribe went on. “Then I saw what the feechiefolk did to the Pyrthens in the Eechihoolee Forest. I realized that if I could train them, arm them, I wouldn’t have to depend on any half-wit prophet to make me the Wilderking.” He shook his head slowly, condescendingly at Aidan. “Where did you think I’d been these two years?”

  Aidan spoke at last. “You have broken Father’s heart.”

  Maynard’s smug little smile cracked for a second, but he recovered himself. “Father doesn’t have a heart.” Then he added, more quietly, “Not for me.”

  The two brothers stared at each other: the future Wilderking and the false Wilderking. A realization dawned on Aidan. “You wrote the letter to King Darrow, didn’t you?”

  Maynard laughed out loud. “Of course I did! One of my plume hunters dropped it in the mail wagon.”

  Now Aidan was the one smiling. “It was your letter, you know, that made King Darrow send me to the Feechiefen.”

  The irony wasn’t lost on Maynard. His scheme to destroy Aidan had instead destroyed his own little kingdom. But he merely shrugged. He gestured at the sword in Aidan’s hand. “So are you going to stab me? Run me through? Cut me into little pieces?” Maynard stood with outstretched arms, baring himself to his brother’s sword. Aidan didn’t raise his hand. Maynard snorted. “I didn’t think so.” He turned toward the water, stepped into the boat, and began to pole away.

  Aidan stepped to the water’s edge. “But, Maynard,” he called after him, “how did you do it?”

  Maynard laughed his mean laugh. “Ask your feechie friend,” he called back. “Ask Dobro.”

  Aidan stood at the verge of the island and watched his brother disappear around the buttress of a cypress tree. He didn’t move, just stared at the upside-down world reflected in the black water. He was so confused. His dead brother was alive. And yet it didn’t seem like good news. He thought of his father, who was so nearly broken by Maynard’s death. What would it do to him if he ever found out about Maynard’s life, the wickedness to which he had applied his energies these last two years? Maynard could hardly have hatched a scheme better suited to hurt his family, to violate everything Father had taught his sons about the responsibilities of Corenwalder nobles. But one question kept nagging Aidan: Was this all his fault? It was Aidan, after all, who planted the seed of this scheme in Maynard’s head. Maynard would have never believed feechiefolk existed if it weren’t for Aidan.

  Aidan turned and ran into the forest. Low-hanging boughs closed above his head, blocking out the light and making it impossible for Aidan to tell east from west, north from south. But Aidan didn’t care. Ground vines reached up and slung him to the forest floor time and again. But he staggered on, unseeing. He pushed through thorny thickets, unmindful of the briars that raked across his bare chest and back. He sweated off the gray mud that had been his only protection from the vicious insects of the Feechiefen. But he didn’t even swat at the bugs or slap at their stings. He was too confused and grief-stricken to care. For hours he blundered in the forest on the south end of Bearhouse. He was broken, bleeding, lost-both inside and outside. He couldn’t even remember how to pray.

  Then he blundered into a clearing. He stood on the sandy bank of a blackwater pond, a lagoon in the middle of the island. Huge live oaks, hundreds of years old, sprawled their sturdy branches over Aidan’s head. Their beards of gray moss nodded reassuringly in the gentle breeze. The birds that roosted in their tops had begun their warbling evensong.

  The pond was a perfect circle, a little spot of order and symmetry in the teeming, chaotic wildness of Bearhouse. This, Aidan realized, was Round Pond that Carpo and Pickro had spoken of, the planned site of a new, bigger forge that would use the pond for a cooling pool and the great oak trees to feed the fires. He rejoiced that this place of tranquility and beauty had been rescued from his brother. He threw back his head to gaze high into the crowns of the overarching trees. The most beautiful white flowers he had ever seen were suspended in mid-air, soaring from branch to branch. And Aidan remembered what had brought him to Feechiefen in the first place.

  Here was the spot described in the Frog Orchid Chant, where oak trees bordered a perfectly black and perfectly round pond. In deepest swamp, the house of bears, An orchid in the spring appears On oaken limb around a pond As black as night and round as sun. It floats in air, a ghostly white. It soars and leaps like frog in flight. And in the orchid’s essence pure Is melancholy’s surest cure.

  Each orchid was a dazzling white, its wide mouth and three petals forming a body about the size of a bullfrog. And from that main body, two long streamers dangled, long and bent like the legs of a leaping frog. They grew on long stems arching from the high branches of the live oaks. When the breeze blew, the frog orchids bobbed up and down in midair like leaping frogs, their long legs coiling and stretching with the motion.

  There were hundreds of them in the treetops, a whole squadron of frogs flying through the evening air. Aidan laughed for the joy of the frog orc
hids. He cried, too, for their beauty. His melancholy was cured. And a prayer was answered that he hadn’t been able to pray.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The Way Back

  The next day, the feechies lit the Bearhouse forge fires again. But this was the last time. They fanned the fires to a white heat only so they could melt their cold-shiny weapons and implements back to raw, unformed metal. North Swamp feechies and Bearhouse feechies alike spent a festive day throwing things into the fire and watching them burn-steel swords and axes, arrows and spears, iron shovels and hammers, padlocks and hinges-anything made of cold-shiny.

  They planned a big fire jumping for that evening, but Aidan was anxious to leave. He had King Darrow’s frog orchid, still attached to the tree limb it grew on, and he didn’t want to wait a day longer than he had to, lest the orchid not survive the trip.

  The feechies left the forge fires long enough to see Aidan off. He was nearly senseless from the head butting by the time he actually made it to the landing. Before stepping into the boat, Aidan sought out Orlo and Pobo, who no longer answered to the name of Sands. Their heroics leading the attack on the false Wilderking’s palisades had earned them last names. “Orlo Polejumble,” Aidan intoned with exaggerated dignity, “Pobo Smashpine.” He bowed deeply. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  Tombro, Hyko, and the rest of the fire crew from the pine flats all cried, howled, and carried on to see the feechiefriend leave. Tombro tried to give Aidan directions to the spot where they had left Aidan’s backpack and civilizer clothes, but all his landmarks were stumps and fallen logs, which mostly look alike to a civilizer. Carpo and Pickro offered to pole him back as far as Scoggin Mound because, as Carpo put it, “We was the ones what brung you here.” But Aidan was looking forward to a long boat journey with Dobro, his first and best feechie friend.

  When Dobro poled off from the landing, a much-humbled Chief Larbo led the crowd in a farewell cheer: “Hee-haw for Pantherbane! His fights is our fights and our fights is his’n!”