The Way of the Wilderking (11 page)

Everyone froze, like statues arranged around a dinner table. “Spies,” Lynwood hissed. “King Darrow has spies in the neighborhood. They must have seen you come in.”

The first person to act was Sadie. She grabbed Dobro by the hand and, motioning for Aidan to follow, ran out of the dining room and down the corridor, away from the entry hall. They dashed through the rambling house and out a back door opening onto an alleyway. It was dark already, and they were able to get to the street without being detected. But
just barely. Armed men in the blue uniforms of King Darrow's castle guard seemed to be everywhere.

Following Sadie's example, Aidan and Dobro didn't run but walked as calmly as they could manage. Any second, though, one of these guards was going to realize who they were. Or perhaps the guards would just start arresting everybody on the street.

When they turned another corner, they saw a great crowd of people congregated on the sidewalk. Aidan's first impulse was to run, to seek seclusion. But Sadie, the city girl, knew there was no better place to hide than in a crowd. She led Aidan and Dobro straight into the throng. Then Aidan realized what had drawn the crowd. They were standing outside the Swan Theater where, according to the sign above,
The Ferry
Keeper's Daughter
was playing.

Sadie walked boldly up to the ticket seller's booth and bought three tickets for the balcony.

It was dark in the theater. There was little chance of anyone recognizing them here. Aidan could see from Sadie's silhouette that her hair had given up all efforts at respectability. Some of it hung in limp curls, and some jutted out at odd angles, like the hair of a she-feechie. Dobro thought she was beautiful.

When they were settled in their seats, thirty feet above the stage, Sadie lost all composure and folded herself over in her seat. Her face was covered in cupped hands, and her shoulders were shaking.

Aidan and Dobro, seated on either side of her, stared at one another. They had handled plenty of
sticky situations together, but neither of them knew what to do about a crying woman. Sadie had reason enough to cry, poor thing. Her whole family no doubt was in the clutches of King Darrow's men. What's more, her father was guilty as charged. Dobro raised a hand to pat her on the back, but when she raised herself up, they realized it was giggling, not sobbing, that shook her frame.

“Have you … ever had … this much fun?” she whispered between fits of laughter. “Supper with a feechie … escape from the castle guard … now a play!” A nearby patron of the theater shushed her, but Sadie couldn't help herself.

“But what about your family?” Aidan whispered. “Aren't you worried about them?”

“Not at all,” she whispered back. “Not at all. Papa's been ready for this for years. He dug a tunnel. Everybody pops down the tunnel. They pop back up in one of our other houses. Perfect escape. No, don't worry about them.”

When the orchestra struck up, Dobro jumped a foot off his seat and clutched his ears. He liked music well enough, but he had never seen more than a pipe and drum at a feechiesing, or the occasional fiddle by the campfire at Sinking Canyons. The sound of a whole orchestra in an enclosed place was overwhelming. “Where is that racket comin' from?” he demanded.

“Down there.” Aidan pointed to a spot in front of the stage. “In the pit.”

Dobro peered over the balcony railing and saw, just below the dimmed foot lanterns, the violinists sawing away, the trumpeters blowing for all they were worth, a xylophonist running up for the high notes and down for the low notes, and a drummer pounding at a big bass drum.

“Whoever flung them folks in the pit had the right idea,” Dobro judged, “but it don't seem to have slowed them down none.”

A woman in a neighboring seat shushed him, but Dobro, who had never been shushed before, thought she had sneezed and kept talking at the same volume. “What is all these folks setting here in the dark for?” he asked. “Who they hiding from, you reckon?”

“They're not hiding,” Aidan whispered. “This is an entertainment.”

“Like a feechiesing?”

“Sort of. But not exactly. It's a play.”

“Play?” Dobro looked around the darkened theater. “I don't see what game this many folks could play. If they all took turns at a gator grabble, the poor gator'd be slap wore out before they got halfway through. And these folks ain't dressed for fistfights.”

“No, they're not here
to
play,” Aidan whispered back. “They're here to
see
a play.” He couldn't figure out how to explain a play to Dobro. The feechies did a lot of storytelling, but they didn't do drama or playacting. As it turned out, however, he didn't have a chance to explain. The foot lanterns were brightened, the curtain rose, and the play explained itself.

The scene was a ferry landing, complete with cutout trees standing in front of a painted backdrop of a muddy river. Dobro was spellbound. “How they get trees to grow inside a building?” he wondered aloud.

The lead character, the ferry keeper's daughter, was played by a fresh-faced girl in a peasant dress. She paced up and down the front of the stage and fetched a long sigh before launching into a soliloquy.

“That's gal's a loud talker!” Dobro observed. “I can hear her all the way up here!”

“Not half as loud as you!” hissed a theatergoer behind him.

The ferry keeper's daughter poured out her troubles in that opening speech. Her father had been too sick to operate the ferry, so he had missed two months of payments to the moneylender. Now the moneylender wanted a bag of gold before midnight, or he would take away the ferry keeper's house, leaving the old man and his faithful daughter with nowhere to go.

Dobro was struck to the heart. He leaned across Sadie to whisper in Aidan's ear. “Did you hear that gal? We got to help her.” He snatched Aidan's side pouch and started digging around in it. “You still got that bag of gold you had when you bought them horses?”

Aidan grabbed his side pouch back. “Dobro, it's just a play. She's just acting. She's not really in trouble.”

The actress was stretched out on the floor, convulsed with sobs. Dobro started crying too. “Look
at her!” he said through his tears. “You gonna sit there and tell me that gal's troubles ain't real?” The look he gave Aidan dripped with disappointment and reproach. “Your heart is as cold as a cottonmouth, Aidan Errolson, and as black as a squirrel's eye.”

The theater erupted with boos and hisses when the villain strode across the stage. The moneylender was a tall man in a black cape and a black hat, with black, curling mustaches. He stood over the crumpled, shuddering form of the ferry keeper's daughter, his hands on his hips, his feet spread wide. He told the beautiful girl he would cancel her father's debt if only she would marry him. She spat on the ground where he stood. Dobro loved her for it.

The ferry keeper's daughter turned to run, but the villain caught her by the shoulders and turned her roughly around to face him.

For Dobro, that was the last straw. “I've seen enough of this!” he shrieked as he jumped onto the back of his chair. “Come on, boys, let's get him!”

“Dobro, sit down,” Aidan ordered in a loud whisper.

“I ain't settin' down until after that moneylender's whupped,” Dobro declared. “I don't aim to watch that feller insult and abuse a sufferin' innocent another minute.” He raised a fist in the air. “Who's with me?”

To Dobro's astonishment, nobody was with him. Everybody in the whole place seemed content to sit and watch the moneylender insult and abuse the poor ferry keeper's daughter.

The play had come to a halt by now. The actors had stopped acting and were staring up into the darkness, trying to see what the commotion was. The musicians in the pit had stood up, too, and were peering toward the nasally voice shrilling thirty feet above their heads.

When Aidan realized what Dobro was about to do, he lunged to stop him. But he was a split second too late. Dobro jumped from the balcony and made a high, beautiful arc out over the patrons in the lower-level seats. At the top of his leap, he grabbed a thick curtain rope that looped down from the ceiling. He hurtled down toward the stage in a great swoop. “Haaa-wwwweeeeee!” he yodeled, as he let go of the rope and landed on all fours in front of the moneylender. The black-clad blackguard tried to run, but Dobro caught him by the cape and flung him to the floor. Then he rolled him, wrapping the cape around him like a black cocoon, and threw him into the orchestra pit. The xylophone shattered under him.
Plink! Thunk! Crash!

Dobro turned to say something chivalrous to the ferry keeper's daughter and was surprised to find her staring daggers at him. “How could you!” she snarled through her teeth. “You ruined my show.”

Dobro was even more surprised to see a dozen stagehands closing in from all sides. A cabbage, thrown from the audience, whizzed over his head, and an overripe tomato splatted against his shoulder blade.

Soon it was raining rotten vegetables. Dobro was dodging black squash and green sweet potatoes and trying to decide which of the stagehands to whip first when Aidan and Sadie flew into the circle of the stage lights on a second curtain rope and sent two of Dobro's attackers sprawling with two perfectly placed kicks. The three of them shot through the gap before the remaining stagehands closed it, and Sadie led them through the maze of old scenery and props until they found an exit. The theater manager had already sent for the castle guards, who were still in the neighborhood searching for Aidan and Dobro.

Sadie pointed to the low roof of a cottage behind the theater. “That way,” she directed. Dobro scrambled up onto the thatch. Aidan climbed up behind him. They had crested the roof and were running down the slope of the other side before they realized Sadie hadn't climbed up with them. Peeking over the ridge of the roof, they saw that she had run in the opposite direction. She was creating a diversion to aid their escape, bouncing paving stones off the helmets of King Darrow's guards.

“Reckon we ought to help her?” Dobro gasped.

“I have a feeling Sadie can take care of herself,” Aidan said.

“That gal's got gumption, don't she?” Dobro marveled. “That gal's got what it takes.”

The houses in that quarter of Tambluff were close together, and Aidan and Dobro had no trouble running rooftop to rooftop almost all the way to the
south gate. The uproar in the city grew as word spread of the strangers who set off the ruckus in the Swan Theater. More torches were lit and more voices raised in shouts; more people wandered into the streets to see any excitement that might come their way.

Aidan and Dobro were a hundred strides from the south gate before they were noticed, running across the roof of the tailor's shop. “There they are!” someone shouted, and a dozen voices joined the chorus. With concealment lost, Aidan knew speed was their only remaining hope. He and Dobro dropped to the ground and pelted the remaining distance as hard as they could go. “The gate!” someone bellowed behind them. “Southporter! Close the gate!”

Through the window of the gatehouse, they could see the short, round silhouette of Southporter heaving away at the wheel that lowered the portcullis. But the portcullis didn't drop. Aidan smiled as he ran. He realized that Southporter was only going through the motions, only pretending to turn the wheel. The instant they were through the gate, it thundered down behind them.

“To the left!” Aidan could hear Southporter shouting to the guards patrolling outside the wall. “They've run into the thicket on the left!” Aidan knew what that meant. He and Dobro lurched to the right. And there, in a copse of low-limbed oak trees, they found their horses—fed, watered, rested, and ready to gallop down the Western Road and toward the safety of Sinking Canyons.

The Western Road cut through a series of gentle hills just east of the Bonifay Plain. There Aidan and Dobro met a farmer working in a great, deep, red-banked gully that opened onto the road. His son stood in the bed of a wagon drawn by a heavy farm horse. The son heaved sandbags down into the gully where his father stacked them into a knee-high wall that cut across the floor of the gully from one bank to the other.

“Hello,” Aidan called. He and Dobro dismounted from their horses. The sweat-slick farmer stopped, wiped his brow with the back of his wrist, and waved. He was glad for the break.

“What you doing?” Dobro asked the farmer.

“Trying to slow down this gully, hopefully save the road from washing out,” the farmer answered.

Dobro sighted up the gully. It was a hundred strides long and arrow straight, ten feet deep or more in most places, ten long strides across. Its red-clay banks dropped vertically down to a rocky floor.

“Friend, I believe you got the master gully I ever seen,” Dobro announced.

“Why, thank you,” the man said with mock modesty. “I dug it myself.”

Dobro raised his eyebrow. “Must have takened you a long time.”

“Not really,” the old farmer said. “I finished in a day.”

Dobro whistled. “Mister, I'd surely love to watch you work a shovel.”

The man laughed. “I didn't use a shovel. I used a plow.”

Dobro gave Aidan a significant look. “See,” he said, “I told you working a plow was a dangerous way to pass the time.” He looked at the looming walls of the gully. “Veezo hisself couldn't have done this much damage with a plow in a single day.”

Aidan laughed and cut a look at the farmer. “He's teasing you, Dobro. He didn't dig this gully, certainly not in a single day.”

“I reckon I did too,” the farmer shot back. “That ain't the sort of thing I'd lie about. And it sure ain't the sort of thing I'd brag about.”

“He's telling true,” said the boy before lying back in the bed of the wagon and covering his eyes with a floppy hat. He knew the story his father was about to tell and figured the old boy could tell it fine without his help.

The farmer pointed up the gully. “This is the property line between my farm and my neighbor's—from here up this slope to where those two hills divide. About four years ago, I decided to plow a furrow
right down this line to show where my farm ended and his farm began.” He made a slicing gesture with his hand, following the line of the gully.

“I knowed to plow a field across the slope, to keep the dirt from washing away. But I didn't figure it would hurt anything to plow two or three furrows straight up this slope.”

He shook his head, as if to indicate how wrong he had been. “This here's a natural drain anyway,” he said. He swept his hands down to a point to indicate the flow of water off the hills on either side of the gully. “First rainstorm to come through, half the topsoil in my furrow ended up in the road down there. Wasn't many more rains before this gully was cut all the way down to the bedrock. Started widening from there.”

They had walked halfway up the gully by now, stepping over little sandbag walls every twenty strides or so. The ground level was a good four feet above their heads. Dobro was looking a little nervous about being “in a gully, down a hole,” as the old rhyme put it.

“How long ago did you say you plowed this spot?” Aidan asked.

“Four years ago.”

Aidan shook his head slowly. He was amazed so much had happened so quickly.

“But it only took a year or so for it to get this deep,” the farmer clarified. “It don't take but a few freshet rains to cut all the way down to bedrock.” He
stomped his boot on the flat chunk of rock where he stood.

The farmer looked up at the sun. “It's getting late,” he said, then he gave a loud whistle for his horse. “If I aim to lay more sandbags today, I better hurry back to the barn for another wagonload.” The horse and wagon jangled up to the gully rim, and the farmer climbed up to ground level and into the driver's seat. His son was still asleep in the bed of the wagon.

“Good-bye and good travels,” the farmer called as the wagon started moving. “And don't plow down the slope!”

Aidan and Dobro took their time making their way back to the road. There were few really good flinging rocks to be had in Sinking Canyons, and Dobro was filling his pouch with rocks scattered on the gully floor. Aidan enjoyed a few minutes of shade beneath the western bank before they had to get back on their horses. He was crumbling a handful of red clay when he heard a most unexpected sound:
Maaaaaa-aaah!

Aidan looked up into the yellow-green eyes of a nanny goat peering over the edge of the gully. The head of a billy goat appeared beside her with its curving horns, and then a spray of white hair and the brown, wrinkled face of Bayard the Truthspeaker.

“Bayard!” Aidan and Dobro shouted in joyful unison. They clambered out of the gully to embrace the old man. He still seemed strong and hearty.
How
old must he be now?
thought Aidan.

“What a pleasant surprise!” said Bayard. Aidan wondered, however, if anything ever really surprised the old prophet. “Aidan Errolson and”—he looked over Dobro and pretended to have trouble recognizing him—“Dobro Turtlebane? But you're so pink! Dobro, you haven't gone civilized, have you?”

“Well, I …” Dobro began modestly.

“Not nearly as civilized as he thinks,” Aidan offered, “though he has become something of a theatergoer.”

“If you don't mind my asking,” said Bayard, “what are you doing in a gully?”

Dobro said, “Me and Aidan just run up with a sure-enough modern day Veezo, Bayard. Feller says he dug this whole gully with a plow.”

Bayard nodded. “I have seen such things before. But what are you doing in this part of the island? I knew the two of you had come out of the Feechiefen. But I thought you were in Sinking Canyons.”

“Don't that beat all you ever heard?” asked Dobro. “A feechie living in a big hole in the ground!”

“‘Fallen are the Vezeyfolks,'” Bayard quoted. “‘In a gully, down a hole. No more fistfights, no more jokes.'” Dobro joined in on the chorus: “‘In a gully, down a hole.'”

“Every night I go to sleep with my mama's voice in my head,” said Dobro. “‘Fallen are the feechiefolks, in a gully, down a hole.' I wake up in the morning, and there I am, down a hole. Ain't no place for feechiefolks, I can tell you.”

“But, Bayard,” Aidan said, “you said Vezeyfolks. ‘Fallen are the Vezeyfolks.'”

“Did I?” Bayard shrugged. “Dobro was talking about Veezo a minute ago. I must have confused ‘Veezo' and ‘feechiefolks' into ‘Vezeyfolks.'”

Aidan eyed Bayard. It wasn't like him to mix up the old lore, whether it was feechie lore or civilizer lore. Was the old prophet starting to lose his wits in his old age?

“I understand you have an army now,” Bayard said.

“Yes,” Aidan answered.

“You're going to need it. The Pyrthens are coming, you know.”

“Is that a prophecy?” Aidan asked. “Or just an observation?”

Bayard smiled. “You don't have to be a prophet to predict that the Pyrthens are coming when a kingdom grows weak. Are you ready to fight?”

“We'll have to be ready, won't we? You make do with what you have.” Aidan began to think of everything he and his officers needed to do before the militiamen could really be called a serious fighting force.

“Old Errol's been working them villagers pretty good,” Dobro offered. “Marchin', shootin' arrows at just-pretend soldiers, diggin' tunnels. And when they ain't doin' that, Jasper's got them diggin' up timbers and cold-shiny pots and rubbish like that.”

Bayard laughed, though he had no idea what Dobro was talking about. “Aidan,” he asked, “what's Dobro saying about digging up timbers and pots?”

Aidan was deep in thought about the inevitable battles against the Pyrthens. “Timbers and pots?” he repeated absently. “Oh, that. A flood in the canyons uncovered a piece of a shingled roof. We got to digging around, and we found what appears to be part of two or three cabins, an old plow, some pots and pans.”

“Cabins?” Bayard asked. “Why would there be cabins in the Clay Wastes?”

“We was hoping you might be able to tell us, Bayard,” Dobro said. “Arliss found a coin the other day had a picture of Harvo Hornhead on it.”

“Dobro says it looks like Harvo Hornhead,” Aidan said. “I think it looks like Halverd the Antlered, first king of Halverdy. It wasn't a Corenwalder coin, though, or Halverden either. Had the word
Veziland
engraved on it.”

Aidan noticed that Bayard was gazing into the gully. He had a faraway look in his eyes. Aidan had seen that look before—on that day, six years earlier, when Bayard came to Longleaf, searching for the Wilderking. The day he foretold that Aidan would be the Wilderking. The old prophet seemed to be in another world. Aidan couldn't tell whether Bayard could even hear what he was saying.

“‘Fallen are the Vezeyfolk,'” Bayard muttered, still staring at the opposite bank of the gully. He turned on his heel and strode along the edge of the gully toward the Western Road. His goats trotted to keep up.

“Bayard!” Aidan cried, a little alarmed at the sudden change in the man. “Where are you going?”

“To the library!” Bayard shouted without looking back.

“Wait, Bayard! Come to Sinking Canyons with us!” Aidan called after him. “We need you!”

Bayard didn't answer, but kept walking with the long, fast strides of a man with a purpose.

“Bayard, I need your help!” Aidan was almost begging now, trying to push past the goats to catch up with the Truthspeaker. “I need advice, Bayard.”

Bayard kept walking but turned his head to speak. “Live the life that unfolds before you.”

“Not that kind of advice, Bayard!”

“Love goodness more than you fear evil.”

“No, Bayard! That's what you always tell me. I need some new advice!”

Bayard stopped dead at the edge of the road and turned to face Aidan. “No, Aidan,” he said firmly, “you don't need any new advice. You need to heed the old advice.”

“But, Bayard, everything has gotten so complicated. I try to lead, but people don't always follow. I try to follow, and nobody seems to be leading. I just don't understand what I'm supposed to—”

Bayard quieted Aidan with a raised hand. “Well then, Aidan, here's my advice: Do what you were doing already. Hurry to Sinking Canyons. Be ready to fight. The Pyrthens are coming.”

Aidan nodded.

“Did you need a prophet to tell you that?”

Aidan shook his head no.

“The future is a dark path, Aidan. It's even dark for me most of the time, and I'm a prophet. But the living God always gives you light to get to the next turning. Stay in the path, Aidan. There's light enough. When you get to the second turning, the third, the twentieth, they'll be lit too.”

Bayard put a hand on Aidan's shoulder. “You don't need a prophet as much as you think you do, Aidan. You need to live the life the living God is unfolding before you.”

Bayard turned to go east, the direction from which Aidan and Dobro had come. Then he turned back for one last word. “This was no chance meeting.” He pointed up the gully. “Remember this place. Here is written the history of Corenwald.”