YAAN-7
I whispered, “There’s somebody else.”
Moments before the wraiths came at Jake, I had seen, at a background layer of seeing—from a corner of your eye, I suppose you could equate it to—another entity coming across the field of boulders. Her steps strong and sure, her pace faster even than Rook’s had been, she ran, her familiar cloak, as red as the boulders of the field and laced with green like the dark switchgrass of the slopes beyond, whipping behind her like the leaves of a bloodwillow.
Focused on Jake and the wraiths, however, my sense of her remained distant, until, as the wraiths made their move, she crested, at a full run, the boulder behind which the slaughter was about to take place.
Her face was slack, utterly relaxed, her eyes green fire, her pattern as still as that of a giant walnut tree. As she leapt from the boulder, still at a near-full run, her left hand shot left, her right hand right, and from each a silver circle flew. They sliced the air with a thin scream, opening into three-pointed stars, atrices, as I learned such weapons are called; the air around them bled with the red light of the falling sun, and both disappeared into the dark throat of a wraith.
This happened as her leap from the boulder reached its summit; as she started downward, a long black sword appeared in her hand; and as she plummeted to the earth, she slashed first to the left, then to the right, altering the course of the second slash to get around the twisted weapon of the wraith, which was raised in defense.
She landed about three paces from the boulder, and rolled forward, tossing her sword aside as she did, crossing her ankles, and, as she came to her feet, pivoting, so that she faced Jake. All four of the wraiths were dead before she hit the ground. They fell together in front of Jake like the poles of a tent.
When she came to her feet, a tildoya bow was in her hand, and as Jake looked on, she ran up the side of the boulder, and from a perch atop it, with the low red sun behind her, pulled an arrow from a quiver on her back, nocked it, and loosed it, all with such swiftness that it seemed one motion; this procedure she followed three more times, felling the remaining wraiths, who alerted by the commotion were coming across the boulder field. Their shrieks gave way to a silence bordering on serenity.
Still whispering, I said, “She killed them.”
Rook let out a long, slow breath. “Vonnae?”
Knowing by the shape of his connection with her who he meant by Vonnae, I nodded.
Turning, she regarded Jake, and by the slack blankness of her face, he could have been her next prey. Unabashed by this, but frowning, and with a sincerity he seldom evinced Jake said, “Impressive. But you’re supposed to be…”
With the barest shimmer of a smile, she interrupted, “Sorry, you don’t get to be a martyr today.” Nodding at her blade, which lay, streaked with wraith blood, in the grass, she added, “Take my sword. It’ll work better against those donks than that thing.” She nodded at his axe.
Then, pulling two needlepoint daggers from her red-brown boots, she ran without any more pleasantries than that down the boulder, and up the slope of violet and switchgrass above it, which was, by then, covered by the evening shadow of the Tweltalla forest, as I called the wood between Twell and Latalla.
It was then that I became aware that another entity had joined us in the glade. Or that I became fully aware of him, I should say: I had perceived his arrival, a few moments before, pre-consciously. That is, I had at some non-thinking level noted his presence but had yet to incorporate it into my interaction with my surroundings.
He had come up beside us as I watched Jake and the wraiths and relayed the main points of the encounter to Rook; he had come up beside us without a sound, without even the snapping of a twig or the soft tump and scrape of feet stepping across the loam to announce his arrival, as if materializing from the deepening shadows of the wood. He waited, standing, to my left (Rook was sitting at my right), at the end of the souse log, like a child waiting for his mother to finish a task.
“Romulus!” I exclaimed.
He tilted and half-turned his head in acknowledgement of my greeting, but his expression didn’t change and he said nothing. He blended in with the forest like another tree, or plant, his loose two-blossom leggings similar in color to the groundcover and his shirtless brown body not far from the color of the bark of the oaks around us. His entity pattern, too, was intertwined with the pattern of the forest with such an intimacy—an intimacy, in fact, that reminded me in some sense of my own connection with Mom—that it would have been easy to mistake him for a child of the wood.
“Rook, it’s Romulus!” I was filled with excitement at the prospect of two people I loved meeting each other.
Meeting Rook’s eyes, Romulus duplicated the tilt of the head he’d given me, and Rook said, “A pleasure,” just as Jake might have said it. I felt sure, in fact, that it was a greeting he’d learned from Jake; but while it would have come across as insincere from Jake’s lips, it seemed genuine, even heartfelt, when Rook said it. If he was surprised by Romulus’ presence and the truth it revealed, that Jaji were real, he didn’t show it, he just accepted what he saw, as he always did, even when it was something unexpected.
I prompted, “Remember that day we went out to Latalla a long time ago?”
“Of course.”
“Well, the next time I went out there, I met Romulus. And we’ve been friends ever since.” Romulus just stood there, as still as the oaks surrounding us. Some days he was more talkative than others, but today he seemed disinclined to speak. He was never one to find silence uncomfortable.
Rook said, “I see. What did the little captain…”
His words dissolved into a suddenly dark, harsh air; and in any case, I had already ceased to hear him. Both of us had become aware that yet another entity had joined us in the oak grove, and this one not as friendly as Romulus.
The grove was a fat ellipse, or slightly elongated circle, the fallen souse bisecting it, more or less, lengthwise. Relative to the direction we were facing, Rook was sitting just left of center, I was to his left, and Romulus to my left, within arm’s length of an oak that was growing a step or so inward of the main arc of the circle. The new arrival was facing us, at the fringe of the oaks, just about on the same X-axis as me. Four or five running steps across the acorn-strewn loam would bring him to me.
Physically, he appeared to me to be more wolf than human, with features of both, but his pattern was human—as hideously distorted as those of the wraiths, but human nevertheless. And distorted in a way that was different from the wraiths: whereas their patterns were discolored, wasted, rotten, and on the verge of disintegration, the pattern of this man-beast was strong, just scrambled. That is, while each strand of his entity was twisted about in a way that seemed both painful, and, to me, unnatural (in the sense that the character of its distortion restricted it from intertwining with surrounding patterns in a manner not intrusive, dominating, or destructive), it retained what I perceived as its original pulse and color
As I, and Rook, regarded this creature, his features began to shift and melt, his hair to recede into his skin; and in no more than the blinking of an eye, he became fully human, naked, regarding us with a shrewd, mocking, wolfish face. His pattern didn’t change with the change of his body.
Rook made no discernible move, but I could see his weight, and butt, come forward off the log, so that while appearing still to sit, he was crouching, his hand loose around the hilt of his sword. Romulus, also, made no immediate move, but I could sense that he was taut, and see, from the corner of my eye, that the coils of his entity had slowed in the central places of his pattern, while thrumming at the edges.
The man who had been a man-wolf spoke, then, his voice at conversational volume, yet seeming a whisper, with the texture, somehow, of a whisper: “It’s delicious!”
“What are you eating?” I asked, “Berries?” While they were easy to miss if you didn’t know what you were looking for, Romulus had shown me a great variety of tasty berries you could find in the briars and low-lying bushes of the forest’s fringes, clearings, and creeks: cherries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, redberries, porpberries, elderberries, bloodberries, and, tastiest of all, little golden spatchies.
Flashing a humorless mask of a smile, the man said, in a tone of dismissal, as if casting aside what he knew, and knew that I knew, was meaningless drivel, “Your fear, little girl, your fear!” He paused, and then, as he morphed back into the half-man, half-beast thing again, added, “Sooo goooood. Yum, yum!” In half-and-half form, his voice became a growling hiss, the words difficult to discern.
“If you’re eating my fear,” I argued, “then I should have less of it. But I don’t. I have more.”
Rook effected the double-eyebrow raise nod that he often did when Jake made a good point.
The creature, in man-form again, throated, “Oh, you’ll be feeling none at all, soon. Sooooooon.”
Rook waited. Romulus waited.
I became aware of yet another entity who had joined the increasing population of the oak grove: While the creature was taunting us, a boy of eighteen or nineteen, not a Jaji but dressed in Jajian greenpants, dark-skinned and dark-haired but bright-eyed, a compact physique, not so much muscular as sturdy, limber, and most of all, tough-looking, in the sense of a badger or donkey, had stationed himself at the end of the souse log upon which Rook and I sat—the end opposite from where Romulus stood. He made no acknowledgement of Romulus, Rook, or me. His eyes were for the man-beast.
Then, several things happened at once:
In a rattling of bones, a cry of a tortured hawk, a reverberation of a giant drum, and an icy waft of sweet awfulness, the smell of brown sugar and dead, rotting animals, the beastling changed into a great monster that one might call a wolf but which wasn’t an actual wolf, but a horrible exaggeration of one, a mockery of wolf-form, and came at us with a speed I can only call magical, because no living thing could move that fast.
Rook stood, bringing up his sword with the fluid strength that marked everything he did.
Romulus grabbed me with extraordinary quickness, and with the strength and agility of an acrobat, pulled himself, and me, into the lower branches of the nearest oak.
It seemed to me that as fast as he moved, and as strong and fast as Rook was, that their efforts to defend me would have been futile against the monster, such was its strength, ferocity, and speed; but we never found out, because in the instant that the man-wolf became the monster, the boy changed into a similar creature, and met the other halfway across the grove in a clash of claw and fang. They rolled, snarling, biting, scratching, in a blur of fur, claw, and tooth, across the grove and into the dappled shadow of the forest.
With the deftness of a squirrel, Romulus climbed higher into the tree, somehow keeping a hand on my arm at the same time, as if ready to catch me should I lose my footing. Mimicking his movements as best as I could, I followed him. Though obviously lacking Romulus’ skill, I was a good climber, having spent a fair amount of time clambering about in the trees of the Brushknot and Farmer Green’s land, so it wasn’t as if Romulus had to cajole, or carry, me along. We moved in steady increments along the solid oak branches, and soon got a good vantage point, where amid the smell of mature leaves and young acorns, we watched the goings-on below.
Rook, with a foolhardiness I wouldn’t have imagined, followed the two creatures into the forest, rounding them as they fought, watching them, his sword at the ready, as if waiting for an opening to kill one or the other, or both.
Meanwhile, across the boulder field from us, in a clearing of weeds and wildflowers, Jake was engaged in a skirmish of his own. Three creatures that looked like river rock molded into bulky, humanoid forms, harried him, or he harried them, I wasn’t sure which. They had body patterns that contained elements of rock and metal, as well as scraps of human, horse, and cow, but which was primarily cloth—plant matter rearranged by a variety of processes—and they had entity patterns, as well, but which were so simplistic that if one were to liken the entity pattern of a human to a masterpiece of art, then these beings would be stick figures, or a few blots of ink from the pen of an infant. They were closer to inanimate objects than to humans, or even animals, and yet they moved of their own volition. They walked, they talked, mouthing the word, “donk,” over and over again, they swung heavy stone swords at Jake in aggressive attacks, which he blunted with the sword that Mrs. Camden had left behind for him. Though moving without the grace, quickness, and sureness of Rook, he had a deftness of foot, a sharpness of eye, and a seeming skill with the sword that allowed him to ward off the things’ attacks while yet, busy with this defense, finding no opportunity to attack of his own accord.
The beast that had been the boy was darker of fur than the beast that had talked to me, near-black as opposed to gray-brown, so it was easy to tell them apart from our perch in the tree, though not necessarily to determine who was winning, so fast did they move, in and out of shadow, growling and screaming, clawing and biting, like cats fighting more than wolves or dogs, the sounds of their struggle the only sounds in the forest. It seemed, though, that while receiving its share of bites and deep scratches, the gray-brown one had gained the advantage. The black one, the boy, had received a claw across the face, and now blood ran into his eyes, impeding his vision, rendering his attacks less sure, less accurate. But then, with an incredible rake across the throat, he seemed to weaken his older opponent.
And just then, at the same moment that Mrs. Camden arrived, I called to Rook, “Jake’s against three rock things; go! He’s at the other edge of the boulders!”
Rook looked to Mrs. Camden for guidance, she gave him a quick nod of confirmation; and as he hurried away with long, bounding steps, Mrs. Camden took his place in vigil of the fierce battle of the wolf-monsters.
The boy one pursued the advantage he had gained with the blow to the throat, throttling the other one as its movements slowed, finally throwing it with incredible force against the trunk of a huge, rough-barked wambawam tree. Half-conscious, the beaten monster, its fur more red than grey-brown now, snarled in hatred and defiance, and as it stumbled forward, still trying to fight, the boy one, roaring with the voice of the fabled gorlion, reached back to deal, presumably, a death blow; but Mrs. Camden, suicide-like, grabbed his arm.
He spun around roaring in her face, but she ignored him, instead throwing one of her needle daggers at his opponent, and throwing it not just with her arm but with her whole body, as one throws a rock or walnut. Thwump! It disappeared to its hilt in the monster’s throat. Without waiting to see if that had finished it off, she threw her other needle dagger, which disappeared into its throat as well. The monster, as far as I could tell, still didn’t die immediately, but fell, tried to rise again, and finally lay still at Mrs. Camden’s feet. I thought that in death, it might resume its human form, but it didn’t.
Meanwhile, as Jake warded off blow after blow from the rock creatures, Rook raced across the boulder field. He began his swing perhaps two steps from the site of the action, and from behind, in full flight, took the head clean off one of the creatures, his momentum carrying him (as well the creature’s head, as it toppled forward) past the other two, to Jake’s side, where spinning around, he made it a two-against-two battle instead of one-against-three.
Jake got inside the defense of one of them almost negligently, dispatching it with a hard slice to the thigh, an inconsequential blow, I thought, compared to a beheading, but effective in this case, as, with blood pouring out of the gash, the thing went limp. Its arms dropped to its sides, its head drooped, and it fell in a heap. As Rook engaged the last one, Jake circled behind it, and there stabbed its thigh as well, whereupon it, too, went limp, collapsing, motionless, to the ground.
As, sheathing his sword, and withdrawing a small knife from his belt, Rook began digging around in the skull of one of the creatures, Mrs. Camden, weaponless, now faced the boy-beast, who roared at her again, his fangs brushing against her cheek. I could almost smell his breath from up in the tree. Mrs. Camden didn’t recoil, however, just looked at him, holding his gaze, it seemed like. The boy roared again, but not with the same ferocity this time, more of a growl, and then, with audible retraction of bone, his face began to shift.
He had what at first I thought was two entity patterns but which upon further investigation I could see was more a double-pattern, two connected patterns, one superimposed on the other, that by color and size I thought had been identical once, but one, now, as twisted and distorted, and in a similar fashion, as that of the monster, the other beautiful, green and orange, with a music so sweet and loving that it filled my eyes with tears to behold.
There was a strange patternless substance in both his body pattern and that of the monster, that in the case of the monster, flowed through the strands connecting the body pattern to the entity pattern, and into the entity pattern, where it had, as I perceived it, wreaked havoc, confusing the pattern, and causing strands to tug this way and that until the pattern was a twisted wreck.
In the case of the boy, the same thing had happened to one of his patterns, but the other one was protected by a third pattern, or a portion of one, of shining white and gold. Then, to my surprise, I noticed something else: As my curiosity got the best of me and I began examining all of his patterns more closely, I discerned that the distorted pattern wasn’t really his. It was connected to his by a dark tail of the third, white-gold, pattern, but it wasn’t a real entity pattern at all, but a sort of faux replica of one; its substance, while very similar to that of an entity pattern, was different, its color the slightest bit duller. It seemed to me, although this was just a hypothesis, that the white-gold pattern had somehow created a duplicate of the boy’s pattern, and it was this one that the strange patternless substance had attacked while the white-gold pattern wrapped the original in an impenetrable embrace.
As the boy became a half-and-half thing, I could see how many scrapes and cuts and evulsions decorated his body, and how torn his face was. Still, Mrs. Camden held his gaze, now whispering to him, the words of a mother to a son, I suppose, because I could see by the number and nature of connections between them that they were mother and son.
He tilted his head back and screamed in agony, and in that moment became the dark, bright-eyed boy again. In that moment, also, the white-gold pattern released the faux pattern, and it dissolved.
The boy smiled, as if embarrassed by his own scream, and then, blowing out some air, as of one releasing tension, said, “That was...interesting.” Mrs. Camden embraced him, heedless of the blood that got all over her face and clothes.
Pulling a white cloth from her cloak, she began tending his torn face; then, noticing the plethora of wounds upon his torso, said, “You’re a mess. Come on, there’s some callaweed over here, and I’m sure some horsemoss.” Together, they began walking deeper into the forest.
I watched them with fascination, and I must, in my ardent observation, have departed time for a moment, for Rook and Jake returned sooner, in my mind, than they could have traversed the field of boulders, even at a dead run. And the forest shadows were deeper than I had heretofore marked. And Romulus was gone.
Rook and Jake did return at a run, but closer to a jog than a sprint. Jake’s hands were loaded with weapons: his own axe, and Mrs. Camden’s sword, atrices, and arrows.
After surveying the area and surmising that all was well, not the least evidence of this the return of a subtle undercurrent of activity, rodents and birds and spiders not so much scuttling about as watching us, creeping in hidden places, keeping eye, ear, and nose on us, that had replaced the grotesque silence that had risen in the presence of the wolf-things.
“Where did your friend go?” Rook asked
I shrugged. “He does that. He doesn’t like good-byes.”
Jake nodded approbation. “A wise man.”
Rook raised both eyebrows. “Indeed.”
Rook and I had begun to migrate into the damp ferny shadow of the forest, towards Mrs. Camden and her son, but Jake ordered, “Leave them,” and seeing by the play of their patterns that while they would welcome our company, their one-on-one interaction was incomplete, I obeyed—as did Rook.
“Help me with these things,” Jake said, indicating his armload of weapons. Using some cloths that Jake got from a pouch on his belt, which we dampened with our saliva, the three of us cleaned the blood from Mrs. Camden’s sword, atrices, and arrows, and made a neat pile of them on the souse log, in the place where Rook and I had been seated before.
By the time we headed home, the forest was smattered with only a few stripes of gray light, Mrs. Camden and her son, in fact, lost in falling shadow. Even when we crossed into the flat open-ness of Farmer Green’s territory, with its familiar aromas of hay, manure, cow, and corn, the diffuse red above the forest, which was now behind us, provided but little light to guide our way.
“Knowledge shall be our guide,” Mom often said. Pattern was my guide.
Discerning that Jake and Rook wanted to discuss something but were restraining themselves from doing so, and that this unusual conversational reticence was related to my presence, I ran ahead, pretending to be carefree—far enough that in the high weeds and gathering darkness it would seem as if I were farther away than I was, beyond earshot if I were lucky.
They walked in a silence marked only by the swishing of weeds against their legs, though, and the crunching of dry grass below their feet, until, prompted by the evening’s first crickets, Rook asked, “Crisis averted?” his velvet voice curling into the dampening air of nightfall.
“It would seem.” Jake’s gruff but higher voice seemed harsh, angry, in the emotionless dusk that, it always seemed to me, amplified, or pulled out, the underlying emotions of people’s words.
“A long time until the next one, at least.”
“Not long enough, if you ask me. Anyway, what am I saying? That’s your concern, I have no role in the next one; I wasn’t supposed to make it through this one.”
“That’s true,” Rook said, agreeably, “Are you mad at her?”
“At who?”
Rook didn’t answer. I could imagine him raising an eyebrow. Then, Jake said, “What, for changing the script? No, that’s up to her; one script is as good as another. It may have been the librarian’s idea, anyway. Or the poet’s.”
“No, I think it was hers.”
“I’d rather be alive than dead, if it comes to that. But the little captain might be upset with her.”
“Ahhh,” Rook said, with affection, “and where is the little captain?”
“I missed the meeting,” Jake replied, with a subtle, amiable, accepting variety of sarcasm.
Their words bounced off me. I had gone ahead for the distinct reason of eavesdropping on them, but I was listening to them only as background music. My mind was elsewhere, so much so, in fact, that the now-raucous chorus of crickets and cicadas, which usually I so delighted in, was nothing more than a distant background murmur, and certain shade trees, silage bins, sheds, and fence posts, a broken wagon, an upside-down wheelbarrow, that drew the pattern of my path home, I passed without noticing. I led the way home by habit, alone.
Something didn’t fit. I couldn’t put the pattern of it together—and this was consuming my thoughts, my attention. Had it not been, had I been in my usual state of mind, I would have been walking gaily with Rook and Jake, asking them about the armor they were wearing and what they knew about the various monsters we’d encountered.
But I was thinking about Mrs. Camden’s son. Not so much that he’d existed as two patterns at once, or even that a third pattern was protecting his true pattern from the pattern-killer substance that had distorted his faux pattern. These were new things to me, but I had learned from Rook to accept things as they came, and if they didn’t fit in with previous notions of reality, to receive them as an expansion of my knowledge of the world. But in this case, I was having trouble doing that; I couldn’t integrate what I’d seen with what I knew to be true, for the pattern protecting the boy’s pattern was mine.