by Rebecca Rupp
Slowly the clearing began to fill with people. They came alone or in pairs or in little family groups, drifting in quietly and settling down on mats or blankets spread out on the ground. Tad, followed by Birdie, Willem, Ditani, and a persistent Pippit, skirted the edges of the crowd, looking for a place to sit where they all would have a good view of the Speaking Rock. Finally they settled at the far left-hand end of the front row.
The first speaker was already climbing onto the Rock. It was a Fisher named Eelgrass, a tall thin man with a heavily lined face and a mouth that pulled down droopily at the corners. He held up his hand for silence and, as the voices slowly died away, began to speak.
“The ponds are drying,” he began. “Doom and disaster are upon us. The Earth itself is turning to dust.”
At the word dust, someone began to cough dustily in the front row and somebody else began to pound the cougher on the back. Eelgrass paused, looking annoyed.
Tad leaned over to whisper in Willem’s ear. “I remember him,” he muttered. “He always sees doom and disaster, even when everything is perfectly fine. He’s the sort who can’t see the blackberries for the thorns.”
“I have had a vision!” Eelgrass continued, his voice growing louder. “A vision that came to me in a dream! I saw great trees, broken and falling; and the ponds, dead and empty. I heard the wind blowing across a barren land and its voice told me that this was the Great Drying, the End of All Things. Then above me in the sky, I saw the sun itself grow dim and flicker like a candle flame” — Eelgrass dropped his voice to an ominous whisper —“until at last it blinked out and all was dark forever.”
A murmur of horror swept over the Fisher side of the crowd.
“Eh, it sounds like you’ve been eating bad mushrooms to me!” a voice called out from the center of the Hunter assembly.
As the speaker moved forward, Tad thought at first that it was Ditani’s mother, Branica, but as she clambered onto the Speaking Rock, he saw that this woman was older and stouter and her braid was flecked with gray. She wore an orange dress belted with red and green, and heavy dangling necklaces of carved bone beads.
“I am Enelda of the Hunter Tribe,” she announced, “and I have seen more summers and winters than many, some dry and some in floodtime, some fat and rich, some poor and thin. There are good years and bad years, eh? This Dry, it too will pass over, no matter this Fisher doomsaying about the end of days. You pond folk take the dismal view, no?”
She nudged Eelgrass in the ribs with her elbow, and he looked outraged.
“And if it doesn’t pass?” he demanded in an affronted voice. “What then, Hunters?”
“Yes, what then?” someone else echoed.
“We move!” It was another Hunter. “Up caravans and on to greener forests beyond the reach of the Dry! What else?”
A babble of protest arose from the clustered Fishers.
“Move?”
“Move?”
“Leave the ponds?”
“Move?”
Birdie turned to Tad. “Can they do that?” she whispered. “Move out of the Nixies’ reach? If the Waterstone is as powerful as Treeglyn said . . .”
Willem had gotten to his feet. There were cries of surprise as he climbed onto the Speaking Rock.
“A Digger!”
“Eh, are the Diggers here, then?”
The voices quieted as Willem began to speak.
“The Drying isn’t just here,” Willem said. “It’s everywhere. You can’t move away from it. Even many leagues from here on Stone Mountain, the land is dry and the rivers are empty.”
Eelgrass looked smug.
“But that doesn’t mean it’s the end of everything,” Willem continued.
Enelda nodded in agreement and threw a triumphant glance at Eelgrass.
“We think we know what’s causing the trouble,” Willem said.
“The Diggers always think they know everything,” someone said from one of the front rows.
“Mad,” said someone else firmly. “All of them, mad. Mad as May mosquitoes.”
“And where are the rest of them, I ask you? Not one Digger here but this lad, barely half grown.”
“Too good for the likes of us, those Diggers.”
The tip of Willem’s nose had turned pink.
“And we may know how to stop it,” he said loudly. The voices hushed.
Willem turned toward Tad.
“Tell them, Sagamore,” Willem said.
Tad knew that they hadn’t believed him.
He could see it in their faces, Fishers and Hunters alike. Almost all wore identical expressions: skeptical and suspicious. Here and there was a face with an angry, scornful expression, and one or two looked amused, as if they had just been treated to a foolish, but entertaining, tale. Many were talking in low voices among themselves.
“Moonshine and shadow, that’s what I call it. Not a particle of truth about it . . .”
“Hardly a time to be joking, with the streams dried up and the ponds as low as a grass snake’s belly . . .”
“Fishers. What can you expect, eh? Living as they do, never budging from the banks of their ponds, raised with their heads in water . . .”
“Never heard of such things, not in all my born days. Sagamores and invisible witches and shiny magicstones . . .”
A few — a very few — faces looked thoughtful, as if they were seriously considering what Tad had told them. An old Fisher magicker — an ancient woman, wrinkled as a walnut — claimed to remember an old tale about the Sagamore, but her story became more and more confusing and finally trailed away altogether. Anyway, she seemed to think that the Sagamore had been a giant white squirrel.
“Eh, then, Fisher boy, if you have such a knack for magicking, show us!”
It was a tall sullen-looking Hunter with shaggy black eyebrows and stripes of yellow paint on his cheekbones, wearing floppy scarlet pantaloons. His voice was mocking and hostile. “Show us how you plan to fight this witch, Fisher!”
Tad stood on the Speaking Rock, the uncomfortable center of all eyes. The voices of the crowd swirled around him.
“Deluded . . .”
“Poor lad, he lost his father. . . .”
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: No boy never made a magicker . . .”
Tad caught sight of Ditani and Birdie, sitting side by side on the ground below. Ditani’s face was filled with sympathy and concern. Birdie looked mad and her lower lip was sticking out. Pippit was trying to climb into her lap.
The sullen-looking Hunter laughed, nastily.
Tad felt a wave of despair. How could he ever make them understand?
“So bring the rain, then, Fisher!” someone shouted from the rear of the crowd. “If this Sagamore has such special powers, use them! End the Dry!”
“I can’t end it that way,” Tad said. “No one can bring the rain. The water’s gone. There’s nothing there, so long as the Nixies have the Waterstone.”
From the crowd, there were cries of anger and disgust. Scattered arguments began to break out, mostly among the younger men, some of whom were shouting and shaking fists at each other. People stood up slowly, gathered up children and sitting mats, and turned their backs on Tad, heading back toward the campsites, muttering unhappily together. Tad caught bits and pieces of disjointed conversations as they passed.
“Waste of time, this is, a three-days’ journey and naught but flitty-headed fairy tales at the end of it . . .”
“Water on the brain, those Fishers; daft as the Diggers, if you ask me, Bevo . . .”
“Mayhap tomorrow we’ll have talk with some sense to it, and no more youngers, who ought better to stay home and tend the minner nets. . . .”
In hardly any time at all, it seemed, the torches had been extinguished and the clearing was empty. Tad slid down from the Speaking Rock and sank miserably to the ground.
“They didn’t believe me,” he said.
“Stupid as pillbugs,” Ditani said stoutly.
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Pippit grakked loudly as if in agreement.
Willem shrugged. “People believe best what they’re used to believing,” he said. “New things take time, Tad. It’s always the way.”
Birdie nodded at him vigorously. “Like the story about Driftbud the Windmaker,” she said. “Nobody believed her at the beginning, and they all laughed and laughed, and then she put the green sail on her boat and whenever she called, the wind would come and take her wherever she wanted to go.”
“Exactly,” said Willem, nodding back.
“Or the Magic Mudhopper,” Birdie said.
Willem stopped nodding and looked confused.
Tad was too worried to discuss the Magic Mudhopper.
“It doesn’t really make any difference,” he said. “I have to go to the black lake whether they believe me or not. I still have to go after the Waterstone.”
“But how?” Ditani asked. She threw her dark braid back over her shoulder and shook her head at Tad. “Fleet as you pond folk are as swimmers, you are not fishes, eh? How will you go into the dark water and not drown?”
“Like this!” Willem reached for his bulky saddlebags. Hastily he unfastened their flaps, turned the bags upside down and shook them. A tangle of metal tubes and coils tumbled out, with an awful clanging and clattering sound.
“It’s a breathing machine,” Willem said. “I brought two of them.”
He scrabbled through the mass of metal, wrenched out an odd-shaped piece, and waved it in the air.
“You put this part over your nose and mouth like this. It buckles in the back.” It was a cup-shaped metal mask with leather straps and a pair of waving hoses that curved back over the ears. “Then you fasten it to this tube” — as he gestured enthusiastically, the tube unwound itself unexpectedly with a loud sproing —“and the tube connects to a canister of pressurized air. You wear it on your back. It lasts for hours.”
He dropped the tube, picked up the metal mask, settled it over his nose, and buckled it behind his head. It made him look like a furry grasshopper with a pair of bobbing silver antennae. His voice became muffled.
“Mtt mmt mmppttee,” Willem said.
“What?” Tad said. “We can’t hear you. What did you say?”
Willem snatched off the mask. “I said it works perfectly,” he said. “I tested it in the bath-pools at home.”
Ditani muttered something under her breath in which Tad could only distinguish the words Digger and mad.
“We’ll be fine if we wear these,” Willem said confidently. He held the mask out toward Tad.
Tad took it gingerly between two fingers and dangled it in front of him. The hoses bobbled foolishly. Birdie giggled. When he finally met the Nixies, Tad reflected dismally, he was going to look awfully silly.
The stars were out, silver-bright in the black sky. Directly overhead, through the opening in the trees, Tad could see the handle of the Fishing Net and the brilliant blue-white star that the Fishers called Rune’s Kindlestick. The Hunters, Ditani said, called it the Firefly.
Behind them, in the encampments, people were settling down for the night. The campfires were banked and the blanket bundles rolled out. A breeze set the bells of the Hunter wagons chiming, and from one of the Fisher lean-tos came the sound of someone softly singing a lullaby. It was the song about the silver moonfish that Tad’s mother used to sing when he and Birdie were little. Hearing it made Tad’s throat feel tight.
Birdie, Willem, Tad, and Ditani were still sitting on the dusty ground, their backs against the Speaking Rock. Pippit crouched sleepily beside them, his bulgy eyes slowly drooping shut. Every once in a while he gave a sighing little croak, seeming to say that it had been a long day for a small frog. Willem, with extravagant hand gestures, was telling Birdie about the Winter Festival inside Stone Mountain, and Birdie was looking suitably awestruck and asking lots of questions. Ditani was sitting silently, her arms wrapped around her ankles and her chin resting on her knees. They had been making plans. It was decided that they would leave for the Nixie’s lake at daybreak of the coming morning. It was not yet decided who was to go.
For a moment a silence fell. Then Birdie leaped back into the unfinished argument.
“Of course Ditani and I are going too,” she said. Her lower lip was sticking out. “There should be more than just the two of you. What if something goes wrong and you need help? It’s not as if there’s anybody rushing to back you up.”
That was right enough, Tad thought.
Ditani pulled herself upright.
“Cowardy as deermice, the lot of them,” she said scornfully. “And stupid as toadstools, to boot. Why shouldn’t I be there, eh? A Fisher and a Digger to go, but none of the Hunters?”
“Willem only has two breathing machines,” Tad said. “Enough for just two of us. There’s no point in more going.” He paused, trying to make his argument more convincing. What had the hawk said? “It’s foolish to take risks unnecessarily.”
“Among the Hunters,” Ditani said, looking outraged, “friends do not stay with the wagons when friends are in danger.”
“Among the Fishers,” Birdie said, in a voice that Tad immediately recognized as unpeaceful, “they say that only a fool goes into deep water without a friend to watch on the bank.”
Pippit, abruptly awakened, chimed in with a protesting bleat.
Tad looked from one to the other.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s so dangerous. I remember terrible things. We could die, any one of us. You know what happened to Father, Birdie. If anything happened to you too —” He made a gesture of despair. “Not even Willem should go,” he said.
Birdie shook her head. “You can’t choose for other people,” she said. “You have to let us choose for ourselves, Tad.”
Ditani stretched out her hand, palm upward.
“I choose,” she said.
Willem leaned forward and laid his hand on Ditani’s.
“In the Epics,” he said, “they will call us the Band of Four. There will be many stanzas written about us in bad Digger verse, and our story will be recorded in the House of Skalds.”
Birdie put her hand on Willem’s.
“They will sing about us around the campfires,” she said. “Beside all the ponds on summer evenings.”
“Eh, they will,” Ditani said. “And beside the caravans.”
Pippit butted his green head against Tad’s knee.
Tad found that he couldn’t speak.
So instead he stepped forward and laid his hand on top of theirs.
The black lake lay to the west.
They had left before sunrise, creeping stealthily out of the still-sleeping camp. No one woke to see them go. Probably, Tad thought glumly, no one cares. The early morning air was chilly, and each wore, warmly draped around his or her shoulders, a mouseskin cloak, fur side in. The cloaks had been borrowed the night before from Plumrose and Wallow of Deep Pond. Plumrose and Wallow had talked a great deal, nervously avoiding all mention of Nixies, Waterstones, or Sagamores.
The four children walked along the forest path in single file, with Ditani in the lead. She had abandoned her scarlet skirts and was dressed in loose silkgrass trousers, a belted blouse, and soft leather boots. The painted stripes on her cheekbones were scarlet instead of turquoise-blue, and there was a red feather tied in her braided hair.
“Battle colors,” she said, when Tad asked. “When the Hunters fight, they paint in battle colors and wear the blood feather.”
A bow was slung across her back. In one hand she carried a wickedly pointed spear; in the other, an acorn lantern that contained the flickering stub of a beeswax candle.
She was followed by Birdie, who carried a small bow and a bark quiver filled with red- and blue-feathered arrows; then came Willem, burdened with his clanking saddlebags; and finally Tad, with an anxious Pippit, bringing up the rear. They trudged along silently in the predawn darkness, each lost in thought. Tad kept his eyes on Ditani’s lantern flame, bo
bbing dizzily up and down, up and down, like a pond-sick firefly. Then Tad heard the singing.
It was a single flutelike voice, singing a melody so simple, so haunting, and so piercingly sweet that it brought tears to Tad’s eyes. Now that he had heard it, he realized that he had never known true music. The tune tugged at his heartstrings, sang in his blood. He would do anything, anything, to hear more of that silver fairy music. It was almost more than he could bear.
Ahead of him the lantern light vanished abruptly. Ditani had blown out the candle. Tad tripped over a root and almost fell on his face. The music stopped dead. Tad moaned aloud in dismay. What had happened? Into his mind crept a whisper of cold laughter.
This time you cannot win, Sagamore. Come listen . . .
With an effort, Tad shut the voice out. He could have kicked himself for being such a puddleheaded idiot. Tumbling into the Nixie’s trap like a fat buzzfly into a spider’s web. He called himself names, silently. Mudhead. Wormbrain.
In the gray half-light of almost-dawn, they paused by the side of the path for breakfast: cold bread and a swallow of tea. Everyone was quiet and subdued. Even Pippit was silent, crowded behind Tad, nervously rolling his eyes. A faint rustle of wings above them signaled Skeever the bat, prowling watchfully overhead.
“How much farther?” Birdie questioned.
Tad shrugged.
“Not very,” he said. “Not much longer now.”
He reached out cautiously with his Mind, questing, like a shellfish poking out a curious tentacle. He could feel the black lake. He could sense a presence in the near distance — cold, wary, hungry. Determined to survive.
Azabel?
The sense of presence sharpened, turned toward him, but before it could come closer, Tad jerked his Mind away.
“We have to talk,” he said. “Before we go any farther.”
Quickly — as best he could — he explained about the singing.
