YAAN-8
The lead aggressor strand of the group pattern reared up as if to strike.
Then, the black and beaten oak door of our little hut swung open, and Mom stepped out, covered in an overlarge gray-brown woolen coat that made her seem even smaller than she was. Her hood was down, however, revealing the freckled face that seemed to unnerve many of the farmhands with its paleness, and she regarded the mob, which had grown to eight men, with utter dismissal, not even with scorn—as if scorn would be more of an acknowledgement than they warranted. She was carrying a long, heavy object, which as she handed it to Jake, became apparent was a sword, long and straight and broad, blackened and pocked with age and use, with a worn gray hilt and pommel. I learned later that it was a practice sword, blunt, and almost twice as heavy as most fighting swords. Jake told me, “The idea is that you use the same muscles to swing it as you would with the real thing, and the extra weight really builds up those muscles. If you ask me, that’s a pile of pig feces—you’re not going to swing something heavy the same way you swing something light, so if anything, it’ll cause you to swing the lighter blade incorrectly. But what do I know? I’m just a simple farmhand.”
“It’s hers,” Mom said, as Jake accepted it; then as she returned to the door, which closed and snapped locked, he brandished it. It was heavy enough that it took both of his thick arms to swing it easily.
“That’s nice,” he said, regarding it warmly, “I’m more of a bludgeon man myself, but this’ll do.” Rook raised an eyebrow, perhaps, of everyone present, recognizing the irony of Jake’s statement: it was more of a bludgeon than a sword.
After drawing a heavy sideways arc in the air, the sword point catching the eye like a silver dragonfly, he dropped one of his hands from the hilt, and with what seemed an expert turn of his wrist, reversed his hold on the sword, and drove it most of an arm length into the ground beside our chinked and creviced cobblestone patio. It oscillated there with a faint cold thrill of sound, its gray pommel level with Jake’s waist.
The men’s individual patterns shrunk away from this display, reaching homeward, but were held in place by the group pattern, which however, in its turn, continued to be held in place by Jake’s ever-more powder-brilliant entity, this hold, in fact, solidifying as he put on his performance with the sword.
Somebody murmured, “I heard he was a Leopard, got kicked out.”
Somebody else said, “If he’s a Leopard, he’d kill us all in a heartbeat!”
“He’s not a Leopard!” That was Hector.
“What about the fight?” A rumor had circulated the previous summer that a couple of Leopards had stopped by the Interest Town Tavern on their way from one important place to another, and that Jake, who along with Rook had stopped at the same tavern on the way home from a long day’s work at Farmer Green’s, had antagonized the Leopards so relentlessly that a fight had broken out. Jake and Rook, the rumor went, had fought the two Leopards to a draw. Rook told me that nothing of the sort had happened. “I imagine any two Leopards would have carved us up like roast beef. That’s if they could be provoked to a fight at all, which I doubt. Those Leopard guys are super-disciplined, all the ones I’ve seen, anyway,” he said, “I doubt they’d respond even to Exeter.” But some people believed the gossip even so.
As the farmhands murmured amongst themselves, Rook, who kept sort of sidling in front of me so that I couldn’t see what was going on, cleared his throat.”
“Now boys,” Jake began, his breath billowing about his head, “Ol’ Drud…”
Rook cleared his throat again.
Jake threw him a questioning frown.
Rook tilted his head in a way that I interpreted as a nod at the sword.
The men continued to mumble amongst themselves, unsureness giving way to stalling argumentativeness.
Jake shrugged, in a “So what?” sort of way, then began again, “As I was saying,” but once more Rook cleared his throat, this time adding a meaningful eyebrow raise to his nod at the sword.
Jake spread his hands, frowning again, with his best “What on earth?” expression.
Rook whispered, “The sword.”
Jake repeated his “What on earth?” expression, and Rook, with his hand shielding his voice from the men, whis-pered loudly, “In the ground like that, that’s bad form.”
His expression somewhere between bafflement and annoyance, Jake pulled the sword from the ground with some effort, looked around as if not exactly sure what to do with it, and finally laid it, blade flat, on his shoulder. The tip almost scraped the wood of our hut.
“Now, as I was saying,” he said to the men, whose attention had finally returned to him.
One of the men interrupted. “Exeter, that thing’s been killing our sheep!”
“And cows!”
“It laid open Farmer Green’s best bull!”
Jake was unmoved. “You sure about that?”
Somebody spluttered, “What else could it be?”
“It couldn’t be Drud, he’s got bad teeth, and no claws.”
“Come, on Jake,” Magristic Stoat objected, “He could have used a knife or something! What else could it be?” Others supported his protest with nods and utterances of assent, but I could see that the hold Jake’s pattern had on them was tight-ening, strengthening. They were farmers, not warriors; they didn’t really want to fight.
Jake shrugged. “A wolf?”
“No wolf could do what I saw to a full grown bull.”
“A yelg wolf?”
“What?” somebody, a Gerbil, Herb was his name, I think, said, with some alarm. This was a credible statement, and if true, cause for alarm. Jake’s pattern’s hold on them tightened yet further.
Somebody else said, in a tone meant to be reassuring but which betrayed a complete lack of assurance, “There’re no yelg wolves less than three days travel north of here.”
“I don’t know about that,” Jake said, “Rook heard up in Interest that they’d been sighted as far south as Clarks Hill. Maybe one came down a little farther.”
Magristic made bold to say, “I don’t believe that for one instant, Jake,” but his protest did nothing to break Jake’s pattern’s hold on them.
Jake said, “Personally, I think it’s a cay rafer.”
“A what?” That was Hector.
A man who worked for Hector whose name I didn’t know added, “What in the name of the Iron Testicle is a cay rafer?”
With a negligent gesture towards me and Rook, Jake said, “Shamodes?”
The attention of the men diverted to Rook, and he said, “It’s a wolf with the mental acumen of a human. Some say they can change their shape into that of a man, or that they’re men who can change into a wolf.”
Jake added (and the men’s attention turned back to him), “Drud says it was a wolf that killed that bull. He says that he killed it—he and another wolf. You ought to be thanking him! The corpse is over on Green’s land, he says; and I mean to go have a look, if you turkeys’ll leave poor ol’ Drud alone.”
The door opened, and Mom came out, leading the man of mud by the hand. He was at least a full head taller than Jake, and thickly built by human standards, thicker, easily, than Jake, and with a big, thick head. Other than his size, though (Mom looked like a little child beside him), he could have been a human who had rolled around in river mud until a thick coat covered his entire body, face, and head—although his entity pattern, peculiarly fine, with thousands upon thousands of green and brown threads bound to each other, and to the earth itself in a way that the pattern strands of humans never are, wasn’t a human one. A large white cloth bandage applied to his hip was particularly noticeable against the mud-brown of his body, the white and brown both quite striking in the cold gray of the quickly approaching dusk. He was naked, I think, though I couldn’t see any genitals.
The men drew a collective breath, but he looked upon them with gentle brown eyes, and smiled, a broad friendly toothy adorable smile, bowed a little, and put up a hand, his long thick brown fingers spread wide. Then he spoke in a surprisingly high voice, in a language that gave the impression of being finer than Leniman, with long sinewy words many of which rhymed, and a rising and falling cadence, like a poem, punctuated with ear-caressing chuffs.
Mom spoke to him in the same manner, which drew gapes of astonishment and bafflement from the men, and even a “what the?” frown from Jake. Translating the action of the men’s patterns to words, I murmured to Rook, “They like him—sort of.” They were afraid of him, both of his alien-ness and his size and strength, which when combined with Jake’s possible swordsmanship, would make the two of them a formidable opponent; but they were intrigued by him as well, the benevolence of his manner and the charm of his smile checking their group-induced aggression every bit as much as the threat of his size and the strength of Jake’s presence.
“He says hello to all of you,” Mom said. “Shall I tell him you say hello, or shall I tell him you want to kill him.” She eyed them with ironic reproval.
Jake said, “Ask him to describe the creature he fought.”
A beautiful, intoxicating exchange followed, and then Mom said, “It was a wolf, but not a Yelg wolf, I don’t think. It wasn’t big, it was sheer black, or nearly so. He fought it because it’s been killing deer and other little animals in the woods, and not eating them—like with the bull.”
“That is a cay rafer,” Jake stated, flatly, “or was, he killed it, right? He and this other wolf?”
Mom nodded.
Up until this point, the temporary group pattern the men had formed had held fast, even as the aggressor strands of each of their individual patterns had begun to settle down; but now it began to weaken.
I whispered to Rook, “They’re gonna leave, now,” and he, still watching them with relaxed yet vigilant scrutiny, gave me an uncertain nod.
Hector Dallidoe was the first to disentangle himself. I watched, transfixed, as his pattern slipped out of the group pattern, the group pattern holding its form, however, until he spoke, which was, in clock time, only moments later. He murmured something to the others, one of whom murmured something back to him, this response generating a wave of murmurs flowing from one man to the next, puffs of breath mingling in the increasing cold, as, one by one, their patterns withdrew from the group pattern until it ceased to exist except as a dim red echo fading in the air.
Jake waited for them with outward indifference, but refrained from making any inflammatory remarks, seeing, I think, that things were going his way.
Drud said something to Mom in his incongruent native tongue, and she replied to him in the same delicate chuffing language.
Rook murmured to me, “Your mother seems to speak Mudman.”
From within the murmurs of the farmhands came the clearly enunciated words, “I guess he seems friendly enough,” followed by, “He hasn’t hurt anyone, after all,” the latter I recognized as Hector’s voice.
Jake asked Mom, “What’d he say?”
From the crowd came the strained whisper, “But what the hell, is that a mudman? Are they real?”
Mom said, “He’s tired; he’d like to get some sleep.”
“In there?” Jake nodded at our hut.
“I’ll offer; he may feel well enough to head back to the woods, though.”
The group’s powwow complete, Hector said, “Where’d you say that carcass was, Exeter?”
Jake shrugged. “Well, the way Drud described it to Mrs. Yaan here, I’d say it was over east of Green’s back meadow, somewhere in there.” Mom nodded corroboration.
Opening his hand as if instructing me to take it, which I did, Rook at last started towards Jake and Mom, me following.
Hector began, “I’ll send a couple of my guys out there,” then hesitated.
Rook offered Drud the same hand greeting the mudman had given the men moments earlier, and Drud returned the gesture. I waved at him, and he mimicked my motion, smiling at me. I thought he was lonely; I returned his smile. His pattern reached out tentatively to all of us, but only Mom’s returned the overture; and now mine.
“Yeah, I’ll go too,” one of the Gerbil guys said, seeming tired, or just confused.
Hector continued, “And if they can substantiate your story, then I guess he—your new friend—can stay.”
Ice as clear as the metal of the sword on his shoulder shone in Jake’s blue eyes, I could see that, now that I was beside him, and I assumed it had been there throughout the faceoff; but he didn’t say what he wanted to say; he held back, for once. “That’s mighty generous of you, Hector, but he’s not going to stay; his home’s the forest, he’ll be going back there soon.”
“You know what I mean, Exeter.” He wanted to say more, or so it seemed to me, but he was too tired, or beaten, to continue.
By this time, the men were dispersing, some heading north to Gerbil territory, some, including Hector, south to the Dallidoe farm, and a couple northeast to Farmer’s Green’s. They seemed aimless, confused, as if they were oxen hitched to a plow that had been deserted by its driver. One Gerbil began wandering onto Dallidoe territory, then started, shook his head at himself, and headed in the opposite direction, just sort of shuffling along—as were all of them, even Hector.
Once the last man was gone, Jake handed the sword back to Mom, commenting, “Well, that was something, eh?”
She just raised an eyebrow, Rook-style, at him, and lugged the weapon back inside the house, leaving Jake, Rook, Drud, and me, all standing there looking at each other, more or less in a circle.
Jake sucked on his upper lip. Rook raised both eyebrows. Drud eyeballed all of us, then smiled nervously. I waved at him again, and smiled, and he mimicked my actions, as he had done earlier.
“You faced ‘em down, eh?” Rook said. I could see that he was prompting Jake rather than praising him.
Jake snorted. “Good thing they’re gentle folk around here. At heart. They were upset that their livestock was getting killed, and so were looking for a scapegoat, but even then they didn’t really want to have to fight.”
Rook nodded. “Cost versus gain. Maybe with them, they needed to be absolutely sure.”
“You mean that Drud had killed that livestock?”
“Yeah, for the cost, having to get past you, which would have been to risk injury. If you hadn’t been there, they might have killed him even without being completely sure. If they were completely sure, they might have killed him even with you there. Another group might have killed both of you even without being completely sure. Maybe. One never can tell with you humans.”
Mom tromped out of the house holding a bottle of salve, and throwing Jake, Rook, and me a quizzical look, as if to say, “Are you just going to stand around staring at each other,” started talking to Drud in “Mudman,” as Rook had named the language. With my ears, I examined the pattern of her words, and knew at a level outside of language that she was telling him he could sleep in our house tonight if it suited him, but she wouldn’t be offended if he didn’t want to, and in either case he should take the salve to treat the wound in his hip, in case he couldn’t find any horsemoss. He accepted the bottle with much thanks, and told her he would sleep in her abode with gratitude until he awoke, at which point he would go home.
After their exchange, he graced us with another wave and smile, and then ducked inside.
“He’s a gentle-hearted individual,” Mom commented, “Very refreshing.”
The brightest path of the combined ribbon flower of the four us led back to Farmer Green’s little cowyard, so I headed that way, skipping along, the three of them falling into step behind me without really knowing why, Jake, Mom, and I bundled up, and cold—at least I imagined that they were both as cold as I was—and Rook dressed in nothing but his thin-knit gray-blue pants and shirt yet seeming, still, as comfortable as ever. I trotted ahead so that they would talk about adult stuff, and I could listen in.