The Way of the Wilderking (5 page)

The mob was so raucous, so joyous, the people didn't seem to notice Aidan's protests. There was such jostling and bumping the men carrying Aidan didn't even pay any mind to his wiggling efforts to get off their shoulders. Percy steered his bearers toward his brother, and when he was next to Aidan's ear, he shouted, “Stop struggling! Let's just go with it! You'll get your chance to make a speech. Then you can set everybody straight!” He nearly fell off when one of the men carrying him tripped over a dog. “But shouldn't we find out as much about these Aidanites as we can?”

Aidan nodded. For the moment at least, he had no choice but to “go with it.” And Percy was right: The more he knew about his “followers,” the better he could undo the damage they had done. But he also had the nagging suspicion that his brother's suggestion was motivated not by prudence but by his appetite for the ridiculous.

Dobro, for his part, was having tremendous fun. To a feechie, a roiling mob looked a lot like a regular
party. The scene was downright homey for Dobro, unaware as he was of the larger trouble it represented. He took every hand that reached up to him. He waved at the children, many of whom ran away in terror. Dobro was almost as big an attraction as Aidan himself, being the only feechie the Hustingreeners had ever seen.

The buglers were joined along the way by a drummer and a xylophone player. It wasn't clear, however, whether they were trying to play the same tune. The mayor, in his self-important way, led the procession to the middle of the village square, where trading was done on market days. A general murmur quickly grew into a loud, rhythmic chant: “Speech! Speech! Speech!”

Aidan was more than happy to make a speech. It was going to be a stem-winder too. He was going to set these people good and straight. But before he could collect his thoughts, the mayor bounded to the platform in the middle of the square (he was surprisingly agile for a man of such roundness) and raised his hands for silence.

“For years we have labored in the dark shadow of tyranny,” he began in deep, dramatic tones.

“Tell it, Mayor!” came a woman's voice from the crowd.

“No more tyrants!” A man in a wool cap shook his fist in the air.

The mayor raised his hands again in acknowledgment of his hearers' comments and kept going. “Too
long have the wrongs of an unjust ruler been heaped on the backs of hardworking villagers like yourselves.”

“My back's killing me!” called a voice in the crowd.

“Hear him!”

“Yes-s-s-s!”

“Where are the young men of Hustingreen?” asked the mayor. Moans from the audience. “I ask you, where are our young men?” Young wives throughout the crowd began to cry loudly. Aidan noticed for the first time that, except for Percy, Dobro, and himself, the crowd was composed entirely of children, women, and men over forty.

“
Drafted into Darrow's army,
that's where!” The mayor shook with indignation as he answered his own question. “Dragged off to the Feechiefen Swamp to fight for a king who doesn't care if he throws away the lives of his own subjects!”

The wailing of women grew louder. The mayor paused for silence. Or was he just enjoying the effect of his own oratory? “But today a new light has dawned!” An approving murmur rippled through the square. “The Wilderking prophecy has been the only hope of an unhappy people. Today it is coming true!” The murmur grew louder. “Today Aidan Errolson has come out of the swamps and forests—just as the Wilderking prophecy said he would—back to his people, who have longed for his return!” The mayor had to shout to be heard over the rapturous crowd. “Hail to the Wilderking!”

“Hail to the Wilderking!” the people replied in a deafening shout.

Aidan's face was ghostly white. This was much worse than he had imagined it would be. He felt as if he might faint.

A group of schoolchildren was herded onto the platform. A polite silence fell over the crowd as the spectators turned their attention toward the children who, as their tutor proudly explained, had memorized the Wilderking Chant in class.

The recitation got off to a ragged start. One of the boys obviously didn't have it down yet; he appeared to be mouthing the words “Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon,” and his hand motions were a full second behind those of his peers. But the rest of the children's confidence grew, and by the time they had reached “Watch for the Wilderking,” the crowd joined in on the refrain in a kind of responsive reading.

It would have been quite a moving experience, this public recitation from the old lore, if Aidan didn't understand what it all meant. When the children reached the line “Watch for the Wilderking, widows and orphans,” a widow in the fifth row raised her hands and fainted rapturously away.

When the children had shuffled off the stage, a mime troupe reenacted the Battle of Bonifay Plain. The players had to cut it short, however, when the mime playing Greidawl the giant fell off his stilts and wrenched his knee. It was all so ridiculous, Percy couldn't help howling with laughter.

Eighteen years old,
Aidan thought,
and I've already
passed into legend.
The villagers, in fact, were so taken with the legendary version of Aidan being presented on the stage that they paid surprisingly little attention to the real Aidan. They gave a very warm welcome to the bard who stood to sing “The Ballad of Aidan Errolson.” All of Hustingreen seemed quite familiar with this versified (though not precisely accurate) account of his first expedition into the Feechiefen:

The crowd was delighted, but Aidan had heard enough. He pushed his way to the front and mounted the platform. The crowd roared at the sight of him, and the chant quickly arose again: “Hail to the Wilderking! Hail to the Wilderking!”

“Quiet!” Aidan shouted over the noise. “Be quiet! Let me speak!”

Gradually the noise subsided enough for Aidan to make himself heard. “People of Hustingreen!” he yelled. “You have a king! His name is Darrow!”

Hissing sounded from the audience. “Darrow ain't my king!” a voice called.

“Hail to the Wilderking! Hail to the Wilderking!”

“No!” Aidan shouted. “No! This is treason! This is a gathering of traitors!”

Percy watched with some concern as smiling faces turned sullen and grumbling rumbled across the village square.

But Aidan didn't care. “I will have no part of this.” He remembered something Bayard the Truthspeaker had told him years before, and he repeated it to the Hustingreeners. “A traitor is no fit king. How can a man be king of Corenwald if he betrays the king of Corenwald?”

Quizzical looks contorted a few faces as Aidan's hearers tried to work out the tricky logic of the question.

“Looks to me like Darrow's the traitor,” the village blacksmith shouted. “The way I figure, he's the one who ain't fit to be king!” Heads began nodding
again. People were slapping the blacksmith's back and shaking his hand.

Aidan could tell he was losing them again. “People of Hustingreen! Aidanites!” he yelled, straining to be heard. “It is not your job to make the ancient prophecies come true!”

“We ain't making the prophecies come true,” Wash yelled back. “You're doing a fine job of that your own self!” The crowd laughed and whooped in appreciation. Wash pressed his advantage. “Aidan Errolson, did you or did you not kill a panther with a stone?”

“Well, yes,” Aidan admitted. “But …”

“He did, he did!” Dobro yodeled. “I seen it with these two eyes!” Dobro had gotten caught up in the mob's enthusiasm. But a stern look from Aidan silenced him.

“‘With a stone he shall quell the panther fell!'” Wash triumphantly quoted the Wilderking Chant, sticking his chest out and jabbing a finger in Aidan's direction.

“‘He will silence the braggart, ennoble the coward,'” piped an old veteran, also quoting from the chant. “I was there at Bonifay, young man. I saw that braggart giant go silent. I was one of the warriors of Corenwald who were ennobled again in our most fearful hour.”

“Where you been these three years, Aidan Errolson?” asked a woman Aidan recognized as the village baker.

“Feechiefen,” Aidan mumbled.

“I'm sorry,” the woman called sweetly. “I didn't hear that last part.”

Aidan cleared his throat and spoke more loudly. “The Feechiefen Swamp.”

“Interesting,” the woman said. Then she lowered her voice for dramatic effect and recited the last three lines of the Wilderking Chant:

“I'm ready to get my land back!” bellowed somebody in the back.

“Me too!” yelled another. “When do we get started?”

The village square erupted again with raucous laughter and good-natured jostling.

“Hear me!” Aidan screamed as loudly as he could. “Hear this well! I will have nothing to do with any rebellion against the king! I will not stand by, either, and let anyone revolt in my name!” But nobody heard him or paid him any mind.

Aidan jumped off the platform to rejoin Percy and Dobro. “Let's get out of here!” he still had to shout to be heard, even though he was standing beside them. “These people are all fools or traitors!”

“That may be!” Percy shouted back. “But that doesn't mean they've got it all wrong!”

Aidan, Dobro, and Percy gave up on getting supplies for their journey to Sinking Canyons. Now all they wanted was to get away from Hustingreen; but that proved to be no easy matter. A group of boys noticed them trying to slip out of the village and followed them, whooping, capering, and pushing each other. Soon the whole village was following them north on the River Road, as if they were on a pleasure outing.

“To Tambluff!” somebody yelled. They were, after all, headed in the direction of the capital city.

“Hurray!” the crowd shouted in response.

Aidan could hear the boisterous, happy conversation between several old men near the front of the
crowd. “You gotta like his style,” said one of them. “Bold, determined.”

“I'm with you,” said another. “We know the king ain't there; he's off at the swamp with our boys.”

“Hee-hee,” laughed the first. “King Darrow's in for a surprise when he gets home, ain't he?”

“But don't you reckon he left somebody guarding the castle?” suggested a third man.

But the other two seemed unconcerned. “Don't you worry about that, old boy. If I know Aidan Errolson, he's got a plan.”

Aidan Errolson did have a plan, but it had nothing to do with storming Tambluff Castle. Taking the River Road was only a ruse. The last thing they needed was a whole village of Aidanites following them to their hideout in Sinking Canyons. Their true destination lay many leagues to the west and south, far from the River Road—far indeed from any road.

On Dobro's signal, the three disappeared into the forest on the left side of the road, clambering up a convenient tree and soaring through the treetops, hidden from the wondering eyes of the Hustingreeners.

Dobro led the way to the banks of Bayberry Creek. They waded the creek, pausing to cool themselves and to drink of the black water before pushing on to the west and south.

The tangled forest of the bottomlands opened up into a great pine savannah a few leagues below the Bayberry. Confident that the Aidanites couldn't possibly have tracked them, the three travelers returned
to the ground and continued their trek on foot, careful to avoid the few small farms, turpentine camps, and other tiny settlements that dotted the landscape in this part of the island.

By midmorning on the second day after they had left Hustingreen, even those small, isolated settlements were nowhere to be found. Aidan, Dobro, and Percy were entering Corenwald's Clay Wastes. Unlike most of the island, here the soil was too poor for farming. Even the forests looked thin and degraded. The stately old longleaf pines of the upland savannah were replaced by scrubby second-growth pine trees. A few trees were as tall as seventy or eighty feet, but even those were so spindly they looked as if a good strong wind might snap them in two. In some places the trees formed dense thickets. In others, they were so far apart that even a person with a strong arm could hardly throw a rock from one tree to the next. Without the protection of the longleaf overstory, the waving wiregrass was overrun by vines and briars. It was exactly the kind of vegetation that made tree walking necessary, but the trees were too irregularly spaced for that.

“You won't be finding no feechies in this part of the island,” Dobro grunted as he slashed through a briar bush with a pole he had cut from a turkey oak. “Can't swim, can't boat, can't tree-walk.”

“So we're going to be living in a place that's too wild for the feechiefolk,” Aidan mumbled.

Dobro slapped at the back of his neck and danced with rage. His skin, so white after his first bath, was
now an angry red from sunburn and splotched with the purple welts raised by mosquitoes and other biting insects that swarmed in all of Corenwald's wild places.

“These bugs is about to chaw me down to bones and tallow,” Dobro complained. “How can you civilizers go pirootin' around without no mud cover and not go crazy account of the itching?”

“We're just tougher than feechies, I suppose,” Percy said, cutting his eyes over toward Dobro to see his reaction.

Dobro slapped at another bug. “If I wasn't so miserable,” he said, “I'd whup both of you and show you how tough a feechie is.” He gave a little wiggle, rubbing his knees together to scratch matching mosquito bites on the inside of either knee.

Dobro moaned, “I don't mind telling you, these skeeters done whupped and defeated me.”

“Dobro, you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Percy chided. “A full-grown feechie defeated by mosquitoes.”

“There ain't no shame in that,” said Dobro. “No shame at all. You know who's the boss of the forest, don't you?”

“I don't know,” said Percy. “A bear? A panther? Certainly not a mosquito.”

Dobro gave another slap at his bare arm and launched into a story meant to educate his fellow travelers and keep his own mind off his troubles.

“Mr. Wildcat and Mr. Alligator got to argufying about who was the boss of the forest. Up and down
they had it, back and forth, who should and who shouldn't. They got so aggravated till Mr. Wildcat finally reached back with his off-paw and fetched one across Mr. Alligator's snout.
Ker-blip!
”

Dobro reenacted the blow, swinging his open hand in a sweeping, roundhouse motion.

“Well now, Mr. Alligator was astonished that his old friend Mr. Wildcat would strike a blow against him. His eyes filled up with tears. He turned tail like he was headed back into the water, and Mr. Wildcat figured he'd made his point. He sat down on his hunkers and mewed out a song:

“But Mr. Alligator's tearfulness was just a trick he learnt from Cousin Crocodile. He didn't even feel that cat's furry paw against his bony snout. And he sure didn't have it in his mind to skedaddle from such a fight as that. Naw, he turnt tail so he could reach that sassy wildcat better.

“Mr. Wildcat was strokin' his chin whiskers and feelin' mighty bumptious when Mr. Alligator's tail come whippin' 'round like a harrycane. That poor cat was flung nearbout to the other side of the river. And by the time he'd paddled to the far bank, lookin' droopy and bedraggled, Mr. Wildcat decided not to pursue the question no further with Mr. Alligator.

“Wasn't too much longer before Mr. Bear come by and seen Mr. Alligator looking biggety. He asked him, ‘What makes you hold your head so high, Mr. Alligator?'

“Alligator given him one of them long smiles of his, and then he sings out,

“Mr. Bear figured on that a while, and then he suggested maybe Mr. Alligator weren't the boss after all, and they commenced to argufyin'. Up and down they had it, back and forth, who can and who can't, who is and who isn't. They got so aggravated that Mr. Alligator reached way back with his tail and frammed Mr. Bear across the hunkers.

“That hurted Mr. Bear, you know. But mostly it made him mad. Mr. Bear's a big feller and don't fling so easy as a wildcat. He reached up high with his near paw and
kerflunked
it right down betwixt Mr. Alligator's knobbly eyes just like he was swingin' a hammer. Knocked all the bubbles out'n him. Sunk him all the way to the river mud. Mr. Alligator figured he'd had about all he wanted, and he moseyed a good piece down the river afore he knobbed his nose out'n the water again.

“Mr. Bear couldn't help bloviatin' a little bit.
He stood up on his behind legs and grumbled and growled so as to get his pitch, then he sung out:

“Then Mr. Bear figured that if he was going to be the boss of the forest he better go ahead and start bossin' some folks. So he gathered up all the critters in a clearing where he could give everybody their 'signments. The critters didn't like it very much, and they all was grumblin' in their goozlums, but they'd seen what Mr. Bear done to Mr. Alligator, and them what didn't see it had heard about it. Nobody figured he'd be the first person to backchat Mr. Bear.

“Mr. Bear said, ‘You folks probably heard already, I'm the boss of this here forest.' That made the critters feel uneasy in their minds, but nobody said nothin'. They just kind of shuffled their paws around a little bit.

“Then, when Mr. Bear was about to start with the 'signments, somebody hollered out, ‘I don't reckon you the boss of me, old Bear.'

“Mr. Bear's brow went wrinkly and he stared from critter to critter. He asked, ‘Which one of you folks is givin' me sauce?' All the critters just looked down at their paws, afraid Mr. Bear would think it was them what said he weren't the boss. Mr. Bear said a
little louder, ‘Which one of you critters is givin' me sauce?'

“The voice hollered out again, ‘I'm the one what's givin' you sauce, Bear. That's the way I like my bear meat—with a little sauce.'

“Mr. Bear ain't grumblin' no more. Now he's roaring: ‘Who said that?!'

“The voice hollered out a third time: ‘It's me, it's Mr. Flea. And I don't mind saying, I'm a better man than you, Mr. Bear.'

“Mr. Bear squinched up his eyes and soodled down close to the ground and sure enough, he seen Mr. Flea standing on the top of a daisy flower with his chest poked out and his fists balled up. Mr. Bear give a snort, then he commenced to hee-hawing.

“That just made Mr. Flea mad. ‘I ain't a man to be laughed at,' he told him. ‘You better 'pologize to me, and in a hurry too.'

“But Mr. Bear'd done flopped down on the ground and was tee-heein' and haw-hawin' like he just couldn't help hisself.

“Mr. Flea poked out his chest farther and balled up his fists harder. ‘You stand up and show me some respect, Bear, or you gonna find out why!'

“But it weren't no use. Mr. Bear guffawed and rolled around like somebody was ticklin' him in the short ribs. Well, Mr. Flea weren't one to make idle threats. He was a man of action. He hopped off that daisy flower and onto Mr. Bear's nose. Found a nice soft spot and got hisself a whole mouthful.

“You can believe Mr. Bear stopped laughing then. He raised up a paw and swatted his snout so hard that he knocked his own slobber all over Mr. Possum. But Mr. Flea was long gone. He hopped up to Mr. Bear's ear and got hisself another plug of bear hide. Mr. Bear 'bout knocked hisself cross-eyeded punchin' at his own ear, but by that time Mr. Flea had done attached himself to Mr. Bear's hindquarters.

“Mr. Bear flopped on his back and wallowed around, but Mr. Flea already commenced to chawin' on his belly. Then he got him up under the chin, then up under his left armpit.”

Dobro paused for dramatic effect. “And do you know what that bear done then?” Percy and Aidan shook their heads, eager to hear the end of the story.

“He sat there and took it, that's what he did. What else could he do? Mr. Flea was gnawin' the hide off'n him, and he couldn't do one thing to stop him.

“Finally Mr. Flea spit out a mouthful of bristle and gristle and hollered out, ‘How 'bout it, Mr. Bear? You surrender?' And you can believe the critters perked up to hear the answer to that question.

“Mr. Bear moaned, all humble-come-tumble, ‘I surrender, Mr. Flea! Mercy!'

“Mr. Flea stood on Mr. Bear's nose and looked him in the eye. He said, ‘I ain't a hard man, Mr. Bear, but I ain't gonna let nobody boss me or my people. You hear me, Bear?'

“‘I hear you, Mr. Flea.'

“And the flea sung a different song:

“And so,” Dobro concluded, “if a flea can be a better man than a bear, I ain't going to feel so bad about getting whupped by a whole swarm of mosquitoes.”

Dobro looked up and down his exposed arms and legs. He still couldn't get used to them being any color but the gray of swamp mud. “I was plenty pink after you tried to scrub my skin off at the river,” he said. “But I keep gettin' pinker by the minute. Next seep hole or stagnant pool we come to, I aim to wallow in it.”

“No, you won't!” Aidan and Percy said in unison.

“If you want to live among civilizers, you've got to live
like
civilizers,” Aidan said. “You aren't subjecting my family to that feechie stink. Your breath alone is going to be as much as most civilizers can stand.”