YAAN-9
“So mudmen are real,” Jake said as we approached Lohu’s field. He said it in a way that somehow expressed both surprise and that he’d always suspected as much.
“A reasonable supposition.” That was Rook.
Lohu had returned to his solitary reverie in the southwest corner of his field, and there he remained as Mom, Jake, and I squished and glooped, and Rook glided, through the snowmelt mud that predominated all but the highest areas of the field, which was otherwise covered with patches of brown grass and hardy bushes. Above the Fierce trees that he faced, above the wild craggy forest beyond, the sky had turned a fierce rolling gray, rolling towards us behind a breeze. I peered into the pattern of the storm, and translated that pattern to images the others would understand. I announced, “It’s going to rain, not snow.”
Mom said, “Nilfnin.”
“What did you say, Mom?”
“Nilfnin?” That was Rook.
“Drud’s not here; you can stop talking Mudman.” That was Jake.
“They’re Nilfnin,” Mom said, “not ‘mudmen.’”
There was a pause behind me (I was leading our procession), a few steps of silence that stretched into half of a field of silence, and then Rook said, “The Lady Yaan and I saw a tiny dragon, and the Lady Yaan talked to him.” A small gust of fore-wind from the coming storm bustled past us.
Another pause followed this revelation, followed by Mom’s expressionless, “Interesting.”
Then Jake, with not a small douse of doubt-drenched sarcasm, said, “A tiny dragon, really? How tiny?”
Jake didn’t doubt Rook. He never doubted him; by the actions of their entity patterns, I knew that both of them had absolute faith in the other. Yet, Jake often acted and talked as if Rook were a child prone to bizarre flights of fancy and irrational, insensible behavior—or just an ignorant bumpkin like the rest of their compatriots working Farmer Green’s land.
This conduct didn’t fit with his usual pattern of behavior. He doubted almost everything all of the farmhands said, and while sometimes obscure or oblique in the expression of his scorn, his behavior towards these men (his insults, in particular) paralleled his opinion of them, which would lead one to predict that if his opinion of someone was high, then his treatment of that person would be respectful. Yet, with Rook, this was not the case; he ribbed him relentlessly about many things that he did or said—about Rushlight, for example.
Once, he’d asked him, “You’re not thinking about marrying that woman, are you?” (On the surface, he disrespected Rushlight to such a degree that he wouldn’t even deign to say her name, referring to her, usually, as “that woman,” in conversations with Rook; and yet I could see by the action of his pattern that his opinion of her was quite favorable.)
Rook replied, with the thoughtful consideration that was a hallmark of his participation in any dialogue, “Well, on Shamokin, there is no such thing as marriage; but I thought that yes, we could perhaps travel together.”
“Really?” Jake said, in a tone that asked, “By the balls of the iron god, how can you be so ignorant?”
“Really.” By his tone and the expression on his face (or lack thereof), Rook would have seemed to any onlooker to be insensible of the expression in Jake’s voice.
“You’re sure that this isn’t your,” he glanced at me, who was watching both of them with keen interest, and with a depth of observation they couldn’t know, “this isn’t the little fellow doing the decision making here?”
“Quite sure.”
Jake snorted, and Rook, perceiving the snort to be an expression of disbelief, explained, with, as he would have described it, his Shamokinite patience, “One shelter is pretty much the same as another to the little fellow, so there would be no reason for him, if he were calling the shots, to have me drag one particular shelter around with me if I were to travel. Therefore, this loose resolution, I would call it, more than ‘decision,’ must be based upon criteria different from that which the little fellow finds important.”
“And what criteria would that be?” Jake asked, as someone who has experienced something and knows the ins and outs of that something might ask someone who thinks they know about that something but that the asker knows they don’t.
Rook gave no answer; at length, Jake said, “Well? Could it be that the little fellow is subtler than you realize?”
“Pleasant company?”
Jake snorted again, with unconcealed derision, but said, “I’ll allow that. But even allowing it, do you truly believe she’s going to want to travel to all the same spots that you do.”
Rook said, “No, probably not,” without a trace of perturbation.
Jake, his eyes widening, said, “You wouldn’t! You wouldn’t just tag along behind her like a puppy dog? No, I suppose you would.”
“No, probably not.” Rook remained unperturbed
Jake spread in his hands in a, “Well, can’t you see the obvious?” gesture, accompanied by a complementary expression, and then said, “You’ve argued yourself out of the possibility, or sense, of traveling with her, then.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Rook said with an expression that while not a smile suggested a smile. “A wise man once told me that you could travel many roads at once, and that if another were with you on any of the roads, it could be said you traveled together.”
Jake harrumphed. “A wise man is just another term for a fool.”
As we returned to Farmer Green’s from the faceoff with the mob of farmhands, it was no different; while retaining, as I could tell by the action of his pattern, absolute confidence in the truth of Rook’s words, Jake seemed determined (on the outside) to prove him a fool. “Tiny, like a beetle? No, a cell. Tiny as a cell, right? That would make sense.”
“I’d say a little larger than a chicken. Different proportions though.”
“A chicken-sized dragon? That’s amazing. Indeed, truly amazing. Was it a baby?”
“I got the impression somehow that it wasn’t a baby, when it flew overhead.”
“I see. And it talked?”
“Indeed so. It conversed with the Lady Yaan for some moments.”
“Did it speak Leniman?”
“I believe I heard it say a few Leniman words, yes.”
“But how did it form those Leniman words without a human tongue and lips? The accent had to have been terrible.”
“I was too far away to observe the speaking apparatus.”
I waited for them at the fence, and then as I clambered over it, said, “He said friends of the son were in trouble, which I took to be you, Jake, and Mom. And he was right. I wonder if he’s still there. And he called himself the ‘eyes of the son,’ and he called me ‘Fajee.’ Do you know what he means by all that, Mom?”
“We’ll ask him if he’s still there,” was all she said.
“Oh, Rook,” I exclaimed, remembering our conversation, about his home planet of Shamokin, that had been interrupted earlier, “tell me about Shamo…” I cut myself off. I shared everything with Mom, but I realized as I was speaking that it was possible that Rook wouldn’t want her to know he was an alien and that by blabbing about it, I would be betraying his confidence. I looked from one of them to the other, hoping I hadn’t betrayed his confidence, and embarrassed that I might be hiding something from her.
Neither betrayed any impression that I’d said something out of the ordinary, however.
Rook started to speak. “Well, where to start? Well,” but Mom interrupted him.
“Later,” she said, “I’ve heard it. Let’s have some silence right now.”
Rook nodded acknowledgment, I noted, without even a raise of an eyebrow.
As we walked on in the silence of the cold wind, I noticed, looking back, that Jake, who moments before had been ribbing Rook with elaborate gusto, looked suddenly grim, and glum—as glum as I was ever to see him, in fact, until our wagon ride north years later.
Mom, noticing this as well, said to him, with a softness that was rare for her, “Not for awhile yet, Captain,” and he nodded.
When we reached the little cowyard, the cows were gone; somebody had taken them in. I could imagine them lowing in the barn as the gray grew, the storm approached. Only Tolan and Estobbias were still there. I looked for the little dragon—Ragahootoo—in the clump of bushes he’d crashed into, but he wasn’t there. Tolan, trudging, staggering after Estobbias in a rote pantomime of a chase, was covered from head to toe in mud: he looked like Drud, only a little smaller.
The wind was beginning to swirl and dance in earnest now, to “kick up,” as Rook liked to say, pulling those gray clouds to the south ever closer. A speck, and then another, of cold rain, pricked the bare skin of my face. I became aware, then, that my fingertips and toes were most of the way from raw to numb, the fabric of my gloves and socks chafing the skin of my wrists and ankles. Estobbias paused a moment in his elusion of Tolan to sniff the wind.
“Estobbias, a storm’s coming!” I called.
His ears pricked up; his head rolled; his eyes found me; and trotting and nickering, he followed Mom, Rook, and me out of the little cowyard.
Tolan gaped.