The Secret of the Swamp King (8 page)

Bedroll, hardtack, water bladder, alligator jerky, tinder box …” Rocking with the flow of the River Tam and the push and pull of Massey's oar strokes, Aidan took one last inventory of his backpack's contents. He felt for the hunting knife at his belt and counted the arrows in his quiver.

“I don't like this one bit, Aidan,” said Massey as he leaned back on the oars, propelling the little skiff across the water. “Not one bit.”

“I know you don't,” answered Aidan, “but if you don't row me over, I'll just swim across.”

“And get et up by gators,” Massey grumbled. “Which, for all I know, ain't no worse'n what's going to happen to you once I've handed you over to the swamp critters on the south bank.” He nodded back toward Last Camp. “There's a reason we call it Last Camp. It's because you can't go no further. Because when folks go past it, it's the last time you ever hear from 'em.” He was hurt that Aidan had waited until this morning—the very morning of his departure—to mention he was crossing the river. Three days on the raft together—three days Massey could have had to talk the boy out of
this foolishness—but he had waited until this morning to spring it on him. And Aidan still hadn't revealed the real nature of his mission.

“King Darrow sent me across the river,” said Aidan matter-of-factly. “And I'm going across the river.”

Massey grunted but said no more. Neither of them spoke for the remainder of the crossing. The river was broader here than it was at Longleaf, and deeper, too, swelled by the waters of countless creeks and smaller rivers that joined the Tam along its twisting course.

When the little boat nosed into the high bank on the other side, Massey tied up to a root tangle, clambered to level ground, and reached a hand down to pull up Aidan and his gear. The old alligator hunter looked at the moss-hung trees and shuddered. “I ain't never been on this side of the river,” he remarked.

“Looks a lot like the other side, don't you think?” answered Aidan, shrugging into his backpack.

“Aidan,” said Massey suddenly, “Darrow ain't king of Feechiefen.”

Aidan smiled at Massey. “Darrow may not be king of Feechiefen, but he's king of Aidan Errolson, whether I'm at his table or out here past the edge of civilization.”

Massey nodded. He wouldn't try again to talk Aidan out of his foolish mission, whatever it was. “You better get going then,” he said. He embraced Aidan awkwardly, patting his backpack with a hamlike hand. Then, not really knowing what else to say, he added, “We sure showed them plume hunters, didn't we, Aidan?”

“We sure did, Massey.”

Massey turned and strode quickly toward the river. But before the old alligator hunter disappeared down the steep bank, Aidan thought he saw him swipe at his eyes with a hairy hand. “Thanks, Massey!” he called after him, but Massey made no answer.

Aidan was alone now. Very alone. He stood on the far side of the River Tam, where even the rough customers of Last Camp never dared come. He told himself what he had told Massey: Things looked the same on the south side of the river as they did on the north side. The same birds
thirrruped
in the same gum trees and sweet bays. The same lizards skittered across the same palmetto fans. The same thick-bodied cottonmouth snakes left the same meandering tracks in the sticky mud beside the wet places.

But every step took him away from the familiarity of the river, from the comforts of the hunters' comradeship. Every step made it harder to convince himself that things weren't so very different on this side of the river. Every treetop rustle became ominous, a prelude to another attack like the previous night's barrage on Last Camp. Every movement in the bushes made him think of a feechie ambush.

“No,” he said aloud in an effort to calm his own fears. Real feechies wouldn't make any noise in the treetops, and they surely wouldn't let themselves be seen if they were setting an ambush. But that realization did little to comfort Aidan, for now he was spooked by trees that
didn't
rustle, by bushes that
didn't
move. And every step
took him closer to Feechiefen Swamp, from which no one had ever returned.

It took Aidan nearly an hour to push through the dense, vine-tangled forest of the bottomlands. But when he reached the edge of the floodplain, a gain of just a few feet in elevation produced a whole new landscape. The density of the swamp scrub gave way to the shaggy openness of a vast pine savanna. The land was as flat as the open plains. And, as on the open plains, the high grasses rippled and shimmered with every shifting breeze. But there was no mistaking this place for open plain. This was a forest, populated by massive, high-canopied pine trees with long, drooping needles that sighed softly when the breeze played through them. These were the longleaf pines for which Errol's estate was named, and being among them made Aidan feel as if he were home again.

The trees offered a dappled, shifting shade to the traveler while leaving plenty of space in the understory for the breezes not found in the swamp. Though not as dense as the river-bottom forest, these woods were no less alive. Great black-masked fox squirrels, the size of small dogs, dashed along the lower limbs as Aidan made his way through the forest. Enormous red-plumed woodpeckers, as big as crows, sailed high over Aidan's head to hammer away at dead branches where bugs were most abundant. The claw marks by which bears marked their territory marred the trunks of many trees.

The ground in the pine flats was pocked with the holes of gopher tortoises, big, lumbering, high-shelled
tortoises that burrowed underground to live. The burrows would have been a hazard to a horse, had Aidan been riding one. A foot or so across, these black holes leading to a subterranean coolness stood in stark contrast to the bright, hot sand from which they were dug.

Here, out of the humid greenness of the floodplain, the light was different—clear, bright, intense where it stabbed between the needles of the pine trees. Aidan decided to make himself a sun hat. He cut two palmetto fans and wove their fronds together to make a peaked cap. He left the stem on one of the palm fans and let it trail along behind—a stiff and prickly plume, a nod to the Tambluffer fashion in hats.

Aidan whistled a merry tune as he trekked through the forest. He felt better able to think now that he was out of the ominous tangle of Tamside Forest. He couldn't explain the irrational fear of feechies that had overtaken him before. His whole mission depended on his connecting with feechies. He couldn't find King Darrow's frog orchid without guidance from the feechies who lived in the swamp. Besides, he knew many feechies and liked them. And all the feechies he had ever met liked him too. At least, they liked him eventually, after he had broken through their natural suspicion of civilizers. He glanced down at the alligator-shaped scar Chief Gergo had seared into his right forearm. He bore the feechiemark. Any feechie he met was bound by the Feechie Code to be a friend to him.

But still, he was in the feechies' world now, and he didn't know whether the rules might be different here.
Before, the feechies he had met were just passing through. They were at the edge of his world. But he was beyond Last Camp now, where feechies were in charge of things, where civilizers weren't welcome. Even if Chief Gergo's band was glad to see him—and even that wasn't a given—what about the other bands of feechies who populated the vast Feechiefen? Would they all honor Chief Gergo's feechiemark?

Aidan couldn't stop thinking about the previous night's attack on Last Camp. It was the work of feechies; it had to be. They shot from the treetops and escaped through the treetops. What civilizer could do that? And the feechie battle cries sounded authentic to him. But on the other hand, those weren't feechie arrows that were shot into the camp. They were steel-tipped. Aidan knew from Dobro that feechies didn't work with metal; not that they couldn't, but that they wouldn't. They thought it was cheating to use cold-shiny weapons, to use any materials they couldn't find in the swamp or in the river-bottom forests where they traveled.

Then there was the matter of the egret feathers. Arrow fletchers used whatever feathers were most readily available to them. Every arrow Aidan had ever seen was fletched with the wing feathers from ducks or geese, sometimes chickens—barnyard birds, not forest birds. What civilizer—for Aidan was convinced the arrows were made by civilizers, even if they were shot by feechies—would find it easier to get egret feathers than duck or goose feathers?

The question had just begun to form in Aidan's mind
when a sudden dry buzzing near his feet drove out all conscious thought and replaced it with unthinking fear. It was a rattlesnake coiled on the sandy apron of a tortoise hole. Aidan stopped in his tracks, afraid even to step backward for fear the movement would incite the great snake to strike. The grinning snake wagged its head a foot above its heaping coils and fixed Aidan with its black eyes. It meant to strike.

Moving slowly but as smoothly as he could, never breaking eye contact with the snake, Aidan reached behind him and slipped his palmetto hat off the back of his head. Gripping the stem that he had left on the palm fan, he slowly, fluidly extended his right arm to its full length, the hat a foot or so beyond that. The snake had thought to mesmerize Aidan with its slitted, unblinking eyes. But now it was Aidan who held the snake enthralled. The snake flicked its tongue and continued waving back and forth, tenser and tauter with every touchy second.

Then, with the least twitch of his wrist, Aidan rattled the palmetto hat. Jarred out of its spell, the snake lunged for the big, bristling target. The force of the flying snake knocked the palm fans out of Aidan's hand as violently as a blow from a club.

Laid out to its full length, the snake was at its most vulnerable. Aidan's boot plunged down on the snake's head before it could recoil for another strike. Aidan felt the snake's head crack beneath his boot. Its tail whipped up and the writhing body twisted around his legs. But the rattlesnake was dead.

When Aidan held the snake's crushed head at shoulder height, its rattles—nine of them—dragged the ground. Aidan was amazed at how heavy it was. But then again, it was as big around as Aidan's calf and five feet long; it ought to be heavy.

When his heartbeat finally subsided to something like its normal rate, it occurred to Aidan that he was hungry. It was well past noon. Aidan looked at the huge snake. Father had always frowned on killing an animal one didn't plan to eat. He didn't see how he could eat that much snake meat, but he might as well eat what he could and save what little smoked alligator jerky he had in his backpack.

Using deadfall branches and the previous year's dry pine straw, Aidan got a fire started in a patch of thick sand where no grass grew. While the fire grew to cooking heat, he skinned the rattlesnake and cut it into chunks that could be skewered on small branches and roasted over the fire.

It wasn't long before the smells of roasting snake meat began to waft up from the fire. Aidan closed his eyes, savoring the smell, growing hungrier by the moment.

But Aidan wasn't the only one in the forest who was tantalized by the sizzling snake meat. When Aidan opened his eyes, he saw three red wolves, attracted by the smoky aroma, stalking a tightening spiral around him, one slow step at a time. They slunk with heads lowered, reddish fur bristling on their high-jutting shoulder blades. Foaming slobber dripped from their teeth and curling lips, and their yellow eyes were locked intently
on Aidan. They appeared to be under the impression that Aidan was giving off the mouth-watering, irresistible smells that had attracted them.

Aidan fumbled for his bow and arrow leaning on the backpack beside him. He notched an arrow to the string, knowing he couldn't drop more than one of the approaching wolves, but praying that the other two would run away if he did. He pointed his arrow at the closest wolf, a mere twenty strides away. But even as he did, he could feel the wolf behind him come on a little more quickly. He wheeled around to face that wolf, exposing his back to the first wolf. He wheeled again. Three wolves, one arrow; he was bewildered. Aidan's indecision made matters worse. All three wolves were coming faster now. He could see the pink of their tongues.

Aidan was about to let fly with his arrow when the forest around him exploded in shouts.

“You stay away from my snake meat, you red-fur varmints!”

“That's my supper, you mangy pine-dogs!”

“Haaa-wwwweeeeee!”

Distracted from Aidan, the wolves looked over their shoulders, but before they could react, they were set upon by three he-feechies who appeared from behind trees. Each grabbed a wolf by its bushy tail and slung it into the woods. The wolves ran yelping into the forest.

Aidan stood with his hand over his heart. “Hallelujah!” he gasped. “You saved me! And just in the nick of time.”

“Saved you?” snorted the biggest of the feechies, the one wearing a bear-claw necklace. “Hek, hek, hek, you ain't saved, civilizer.”

“Naw,” said the short one. “Your troubles is just getting started good.”

You think we'd risk life and liver to save a civilizer from a pack of wolves?” chuckled the biggest feechie. He seemed genuinely amused at the idea. “But roasted snake meat, that's something worth saving.”

“Mmmmm,” the third he-feechie chimed in dreamily, “I do love roasted snake meat.”

The short feechie spoke. “We was going to leave you to mix it with them wolves, for the sport of it, you know.” He smiled good-naturedly as he said it; it obviously didn't occur to him that Aidan may not see the sport in being torn to bits by wolves. “But we was afraid that if we did that, the wolves might get to the snake meat before we could.”

“Mmmmm,” repeated the third feechie, “I do love roasted snake meat.”

“Now, give me my snake meat,” snarled the bear-claw feechie. He pushed roughly past Aidan and snatched a skewer off the fire.

“Hold on there,” said Aidan, indignantly. “I've got more than enough for everybody, and I'm glad to share, but I don't like being talked to that way.”

“Humph!” grunted the feechie as he pinched off a piece of sizzling meat and thumbed it into his mouth. “Ain't your snake meat to share. It's mine. And I don't believe I'm gonna share any with you.”

“It's not your snake!” Aidan's voice was rising both in volume and pitch.

The feechie clinched his fists and stuck out his chin in a posture of challenge. “You calling me a liar?” he growled.

Aidan's eyes flashed as he answered the feechie's belligerent tone. “I killed this snake. I skinned it. I cooked it.”

The bear-claw feechie looked toward the short one. “You heard that, didn't you, Orlo? This civilizer just admitted to killing, skinning, and cooking
my
rattlesnake.”

Aidan stared at the he-feechie and shook his head. “That's ridiculous,” he muttered.

Aidan's challenger brightened considerably at this remark. “You heard that, Pobo?” he said excitedly to the third feechie. “I'm ridicaliss.”

“You're ridicaliss, all right,” answered Pobo. Then he thought for a moment. “What's a ridicaliss?”

“Well, I don't exactly know,” answered Bear Claws. “But it's a awful rude thing to call another person.” He looked to Orlo for confirmation.

Orlo obliged. “No question about it, Hyko. This civilizer has insulted you something terrible.” He shook his head, shocked at Aidan's rudeness. “To stand right there and call a man a ridicaliss right to his face!” He
made a clucking sound of disapproval. “The rudeswap is done. Hyko, you got no choice but to fight him.”

“Hee-haw!” shouted the exultant Hyko. He balled his spidery fingers into hard fists and whirled them around like a windmill. Orlo and Pobo whooped and waved their arms and egged Hyko on.

“Eat him up, Hyko!”

“Skin him out!”

“You show that civilizer what a ridicaliss can do!”

Aidan sighed. He really didn't have time for a feechie fight, but he saw that there would be no way out of it. He had been tricked into a rudeswap, and the feechies would see it to its conclusion. Hyko swirled around him in ever smaller circles, waiting for Aidan to present his fists. Aidan thought it best to use an old favorite method of the feechies: surprise. Rather than raising his fists, he lowered his head and rammed Hyko right below the breastbone, like an angry billy goat.

Hyko went down on his back, the wind knocked out of him. Orlo and Pobo fell silent, astonished that a civilizer could be getting the better of a feechie in a free fight. Before Hyko could recover, Aidan was on top of him. He grabbed the feechie by the long hair at the nape of his neck and ground his forehead into the sand.

Orlo and Pobo were back at it now, screaming encouragement to their fellow feechie.

“Don't let a civilizer whup you, Hyko!”

“What would your mama say if she saw you beat by a civilizer?”

“Think of your mama, Hyko!”

Their words of encouragement—plus the fact that Hyko had finally gotten his breath back—revived him. He caught Aidan's left thumb in his mouth and bit down at the first knuckle. Aidan cut loose with an anguished scream that set a covey of quail burring from a nearby galberry bush. Afraid that the feechie would bite his thumb off, Aidan reached his free hand over the top of Hyko's head and hooked a finger into each of his nostrils. Then he yanked back for all he was worth. Hyko opened his mouth to scream with pain and rage, and Aidan was able to pull his thumb free.

Hyko writhed on the ground, holding his nose, and Aidan held his swelling thumb, praying that the feechie fight was over. But Hyko answered the call of his shouting comrades and rose again to come after Aidan. Aidan raised his fists to be ready for him.

“Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!” The high, grating voice of Pobo interrupted the combat. He was staring at Aidan. When he walked over and grabbed Aidan by the arm, Aidan tried to jerk away, afraid that he was about to have to take on all three feechies at once. But Pobo wouldn't let him go. With his finger he traced the alligator-shaped burn scar on Aidan's forearm. “This civilizer's got a feechiemark,” announced Pobo. “He's a feechiefriend!”

“A feechiefriend?” exclaimed Hyko. “Why didn't you say so?” He rubbed his nose. “Might have saved me a nose ache.”

Pobo asked, “What's your name, friend?”

“It's Aidan, Aidan Errolson of Longleaf Manor.”

“Well, I'm Pobo Sands. This is Orlo Sands, and the feller what's been gnawing on your thumb is Hyko Vinesturgeon.” The three feechies butted heads with Aidan by way of greeting, then Aidan said, “Pobo Sands, Orlo Sands—are you brothers?” Both Sandses looked down at their bare toes and shook their heads. “Cousins?” asked Aidan. Still looking at the sand, they shook their heads again. Aidan realized he had touched a sore subject.

Hyko quickly intervened. “Aidan,” he said, “how 'bout you tell us how you come by that feechiemark?”

“Chief Gergo gave it to me,” he answered. “In Bayberry Swamp.”

“Gergo … Gergo …” Orlo was trying to put a face with the name. “He the one-legged feller with the scar across his forehead?”

“Naw,” answered Hyko. “That's Chief Pardo you thinking about. Gergo's the one missing two fingers and a eye. I got a cousin in Gergo's band. Name's Theto Elbogator.”

“Sure,” said Aidan. “I remember him.”

“So what'd you do to get made a feechiefriend,” asked Orlo, “instead of, you know, getting fed to alligators?”

Aidan laughed. “It was because I killed a panther, saved the life of a fellow named Dobro Turtlebane.”

“Ahhhhhww!” all three feechies gasped in recognition. Their eyes, previously narrowed in suspicion, now shone with awe. “You the one what's called Pantherbane, ain't you?” asked Hyko.

“That's right,” answered Aidan. “That's the feechie name Chief Gergo gave me, since I killed a panther.”

“Everybody in Feechiefen knows about Pantherbane,” explained Pobo, growing more excited. “How he kilt a panther with a rock slinger and grabbled a catfish bigger than he was…”

Ever modest, Aidan clarified: “It wasn't
that
big!”

“He won the gator grabble the first time he ever tried it,” added Orlo. Both feechies spoke of him as if he weren't right there.

“It was because of Pantherbane that we got to hide in the Eechihoolee Forest and scare off them foreigner civilizers with the black shirts made outta cold-shiny.”

“I don't reckon I've had more fun than that in all my born days,” said Orlo. He smiled, remembering the terrified Pyrthens crashing through the forest, bouncing off trees, and falling over roots to escape the feechie ambush. Orlo quoted the feechiefriend ceremony: “His fights is our fights, and our fights is his'n.”

Hyko touched his nose with reverence. “Pantherbane hisself nearbout tore my nose off!”

“Say, Hyko, that reminds me,” said Pobo. “You and Pantherbane ain't finished with your fight yet.”

“Awww, Pobo,” groaned Hyko, “I ain't so interested in fighting him now that he's Pantherbane.”

“Don't start that foolishness,” shot back Orlo. “You know the rules. You boys has swapped rude. It ain't over till somebody's whupped.” Neither Orlo nor Pobo was willing to be cheated out of a chance to watch a first-rate fistfight.

“Well, how 'bout we just have a rassling match?” suggested Hyko. Pobo and Orlo reluctantly agreed, and Aidan, questioning the need for such strict and unbending rules regarding rudeswaps and fistfights and wrestling matches, squared off again against the feechie with the bear-claw necklace.

Orlo laid the ground rules for the match. Actually, there weren't really any rules, except that the winner would be the first to pin his opponent's shoulders to the ground for a count of three. At the last minute, however, Pobo thought of a new rule, a second way to win the match: If either competitor could stuff his opponent's head into a tortoise burrow, he would be declared the winner.

The combatants locked up for the start of their match, face to face, arm on arm, hands on one another's shoulders. They circled one another once, then twice, looking for any advantage to press. Aidan was much bigger than Hyko, even though Hyko was quite big for a feechie, but Aidan knew better than to put too much stock in a size advantage. Feechies could whip a bigger man out of pure caginess and meanness, and they were much stronger than they looked.

“Stop dancing and start rassling,” called Orlo, who had been named the referee.

“You look just like a couple of civilizers,” jeered Pobo, but he looked a little sheepish when Orlo elbowed him and reminded him that one of the wrestlers
was
a civilizer.

Hyko made the first move. He lunged to butt Aidan on the bridge of the nose. But Aidan was too quick. He
bobbed his head out of the way, then lurched backward, pulling the off-balance Hyko on top of him. He grabbed the wiry feechie and easily twisted him in a knot. It was Aidan's signature move, the one with which he had won the kingdomwide wrestling tournament. Hyko's arms and legs were bent back in a contortion that had always caused Aidan's opponents to surrender in tears. But Hyko was so limber, he seemed not to be bothered in the least. Aidan clamped down harder, determined to break the feechie's stubbornness. But Hyko paid him little mind. In fact, the strain of the difficult hold seemed to be greater on Aidan than on his supposed victim. His forehead glistened with sweat, and his grip grew slippery. Hyko, on the other hand, actually smiled as Aidan wrenched his limbs into ever more strenuous contortions.

Aidan hoped Hyko was about to beg for mercy when the feechie twisted his head around so that his nose was a mere inch from Aidan's. And when the feechie opened his mouth to speak, the word he spoke sounded at first like a cry for mercy: “Hhhhhelp!” It was a cruel trick. Hyko's breath amounted, really, to an unfair advantage. The long, breathy “Hhhhhelp!” was like the opening of a furnace in Aidan's face, except that it wasn't just heat that blasted forth, but the nose-stinging, eye-burning vapor of old fish and wild onion that was the defining characteristic of feechie breath. Aidan reeled backward in horror, clutching his mouth and nose, trying to get his wits about him.

Hyko wasted no time. He mounted a fallen log, leaped from it, and laid his staggering opponent low with
a smart elbow to the back of the head. But as Aidan fell, he grabbed Hyko's ankle and by sheer strength spun the feechie to the ground beside him. He flopped onto Hyko and pinned his shoulders to the ground.

Though Orlo was supposed to be the referee of the match, he was so enthralled with the rough-and-tumble action that a couple of seconds passed before it dawned on him to start counting. And when he did start, he counted very, very slowly: “Ooooooooonnnnne… .” The truth was, Orlo wanted to see one of the wrestlers stick the other's head in a tortoise hole. To Orlo, that seemed like a wrestling match with real style. He didn't want to see the match end with a pin. That was boring, unimaginative. And he certainly didn't want to see the match end so soon. So he slowed the count even more: “Twoooooooooooooooo….”

Meanwhile, Hyko broke free and scrambled to his feet. He bulled Aidan to the ground, and the two of them writhed and rolled on the ground like a pair of fighting snakes. Orlo and Pobo cheered the match. Reluctant to take sides, they shouted words of encouragement without specifying whom they were intended to encourage.

“You get him, boy!”

“Stuff him down a turtle hole!”

“I saw that!”

The wrestlers migrated dangerously close to the cooking fire, which was still burning. Hyko's flying leg scattered hot coals and burning sticks well beyond the banked sand that formed the boundary of the fire. But soon they flopped away from the fire. Hyko was getting
the better of Aidan now and was having some success cramming the civilizer's head into a tortoise hole. By Pobo's rule, a head-cram was deemed complete—and the match over—when both of the losing wrestler's ears were completely in the hole and not visible above ground. Hyko's head-cramming task was complicated because the tortoise hole wasn't as big around as Aidan's head.

Aidan's ears, like his mouth and nose, were full of sand, so it was hard to understand the chant Orlo and Pobo had struck up while he was being stuffed into a small hole in the ground. But when Hyko suddenly let go of his hair, Aidan raised his head and saw a broad sweep of wire grass being consumed by an orange flame, just a few feet from the cooking fire. Now he understood what Orlo and Pobo had been chanting: “Fire! Fire! Fire!”