The Wild Folk Read online

  In the land of Farallone, City boy Tin and Country girl Comfrey are guided on a quest by two young hares.

  Their task is to save the mystical Wild Folk from destruction. But the Wild Folk don’t trust humans, and the children face impossible challenges and meet extraordinary creatures as they battle to save the land they love.

  A timeless and magical fantasy adventure.

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1. THE GREENTWINS

  CHAPTER 2. THE FIDDLEBACK

  CHAPTER 3. THE BASKET OF FATE

  CHAPTER 4. MALLOW

  CHAPTER 5. MYRTLE

  CHAPTER 6. SPIDER SILK

  CHAPTER 7. THE FIRE HAWK

  CHAPTER 8. THE MYCELIUM

  CHAPTER 9. COYOTE-FOLK

  CHAPTER 10. THE HOLY FOOL’S INN

  CHAPTER 11. THE CABINET OF WONDERS

  CHAPTER 12. THE BABA ITHÁ

  CHAPTER 13. POPPY SEEDS, PEARLS AND GRANITE SHOES

  CHAPTER 14. THREE GIFTS

  CHAPTER 15. THE GRIZZLY-WITCHES

  CHAPTER 16. THE ELK OF MILK AND GOLD

  CHAPTER 17. THE WILD FOLK

  CHAPTER 18. THE PSALTERIUM

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  Two newborn hares dreamed against their mother’s belly in a nest of grass. The spring moon was bright as milk above them. The mother hare dozed lightly, one ear cocked for danger, rousing now and then to groom her small, sleeping children with a rough tongue. Near dawn, she heard a blue jay loudly declare news of a coyote sneaking across the meadow. Sitting up to sniff, she caught the unmistakable scent of him on the breeze – the damp, rank coat; the sourness of his breath; a hint of blood. She strained to hear which direction the coyote was coming from and made out the faint hush of his paws through the grass to her left. Her great ears, fully alert now, trembled.

  Her little ones slept on: two curls of pale gold, four soft white ears. But she could hear the coyote’s panting breath. Fear shot through her body in a hot streak. She leaped sideways from the nest with all the force in her. The coyote, startled, stepped back a few paces. The mother hare zigzagged in mad, desperate arcs across the meadow, doing all she could to distract him from her sleeping babies. The coyote tore after her. It was early spring, the grass short and green. The hare had little cover, and though she ran fast, darting on strong legs, she stumbled once at the mouth of a badger hole. One stumble was all it took. The coyote was upon her.

  The meadow fell silent.

  A while later the coyote moved on, leaving only three splashes of the mother hare’s blood behind in the dawn light.

  The twin hares woke as the sun was breaking over the ridge. They turned sleepily to drink from their mother, but found a great cold spot where she had been. The sky over them and the ground under them felt suddenly very large and very empty. The brother twin began to shake. His sister made a small noise of comfort, her best imitation of their mother, and burrowed closer to him. Mother would be back. She always came back. Whenever she went off to graze, she told them never to move. No matter what, she said, remain silent and still. So they waited, and fell asleep again.

  When the little leverets woke next, a warm hand was scooping them up from their nest of grass. At first, the sister thought to bite the hairless thing that grabbed them, but the hand smelled of grass seeds and milk. From above, a voice hummed in familiar tones – wind through firs, mother’s breathing. The tones sounded like the hare-words for Be still, little hearts. Be at ease. And so the twin leverets, drifting into dreams again, let themselves be carried away from the meadow of their birth, across a rushing spring creek, to a green-painted wagon in a patch of alder trees. Two glass windows tinted a reddish-rose gave the wagon the appearance of a creature with eyes. Smoke coiled from a silver chimney pipe. Four elk, unhitched from their harnesses, grazed on hedgenettle in the shade.

  The leverets woke a third time feeling famished, and found themselves in a nest of grasses and hare fur in an old rusted tin by a wood-stove fire. A man and a woman sat side by side in front of the hearth. They looked almost identical, the male and female versions of the same broad-cheeked face, the same short-cropped fringe of fir-green hair, the same dark skin and pale, round eyes. They were called Angelica and Gabriel, and long ago they had been named the Witchtwin Doctors of the Land by the Wild Folk. But among the Country people, to whom they were little more than a legend, they were known simply as the Greentwins. Just now, they were feeding sticks into the flames with the hand they shared between them.

  Being only infant hares, and therefore never actually having seen a human before, the leverets found this conjoined hand no more alarming than the green wagon itself or the fire held in the iron box; the ancient jars of herbs macerating in dark wine on low shelves; the piles of skins and rush-woven sleeping mats in a corner; the speckled old enamel pots and pans by the wood stove; the great basket of acorns by the door. All of this was an entirely new landscape of shapes and smells and colours. The leverets sat up, their little pale ears quivering, blinking their golden eyes and sniffing the air carefully, as they had seen their mother do.

  Immediately the shared hand was near them again, this time offering a scrap of cloth that dripped with milk. They drank greedily.

  “Welcome to the house of the Greentwins, small leverets,” a voice murmured in words that they could understand. “Do not be afraid. We have been waiting for you.”

  All through the spring, summer and autumn, the Greentwins raised the two leverets like their own children, letting them sleep by the fire or out in the shelter of the bearberry bushes as they chose. They spoke to them in the languages of both humans and hares, and gave them human names. The sister they called Myrtle, after the silver-green bush that grew on ridgetops, and the brother Mallow, after the sweet weed that grew all along old roadsides.

  Those months were gentle, full of succulent chickweed breakfasts in wet meadows and long evenings by the fire. There, Gabriel and Angelica told the leverets many human stories. They told the ancient creation myths of Farallone, about the Spider-woman who spun the dust from fallen stars down to earth, about the Elk who mixed that stargold with dark and milk and made all the animals, plants, waters and stones; about the many thousands of years of peace among human, plant, animal and sky; about the coming of the Star-Priests and the making of the City of New Albion, and their hunger for the energy they had figured out how to extract from pieces of stargold mined from rivers and hills and streams; about the time of the Collapse, when the City overreached itself and everything fell apart, when disease swept Farallone and the Star-Priests of the City built a giant wall to protect themselves; about the birth of the Wild Folk to heal the ravages done to Farallone by the hungry City, and the laws that presently kept the life of the island in a tenuous balance. They did not tell the leverets what they feared – that the Breaking was not over. That by building walls of fear and hurt between City, Country, and the territories of the Wild Folk, Farallone had become only more fractured, more wounded, and therefore more endangered than ever before.

  Hares normally do not need stories to understand the world, for they live in the thick of each moment, ripe as new grass. But the Greentwins had chosen these hares for a purpose; for nobody is as good as a hare at getting over, under, round or through a wall. But for this they needed to understand the world in a human way. Stories helped them to see things in a human way, because it was through stories that humans understood their own world.

  One evening in winter, a herd of thunderclouds came to sit above the ocean on the eastern horizon. The Greentwins and the leverets were camped on the Country’s eastern-most ridge, the one that look
ed down over the Great Salvian Desert to the walled City of New Albion. Even two hundred years after the Breaking, the valley remained a desert. Only sagebrush grew there. No one ever crossed it. Even the hardy deer avoided it, and most of the lizards. The thunderclouds cast a black shadow over the distant silhouette of the City, where it sprawled across the far eastern peninsula. The long metal wall that surrounded it, sealing it off from the Country, gleamed ominously under the gathering darkness. Its rim of fluorescent lanterns flickered, illuminating one of the Star-Breakers. There were six in total along the City’s Wall, great, round metal towers crowned with eight points. Each contained a reactor that could break the molecules of a flake of stargold into pure power, the power that the City had run on for many centuries before the Collapse. Now, the last beam of the setting sun split amber along the crowned top of one of the towers, its rays wheeling like the threads of a web.

  Gabriel and Angelica looked at one another over the basket of acorns they were shelling under the sunset. They glanced at Myrtle and Mallow, who were grazing on fresh miner’s lettuce at the edge of the wood, chattering to one another between mouthfuls. The two leverets were leggy, exuberant adolescents now, with strong muscled haunches and enormous ears with inner skin so thin that the setting sun shone through it, illuminating many small veins.

  After a long silence, Angelica pursed her lips into an O. With quiet hoots she called down two barn owls from the winter sky. They landed, claws clattering, on the roof of the wagon.

  It was time.

  In the far corner of the room, there among the dust and dark of the catacombs’ deepest chamber, Tin’s invention gleamed. It was the middle of the night on the first day of February, and a storm thrashed the Fifth Cloister of Grace and Progress where it brooded just inside the City’s wall. But Tin was underground, far from the storm and wholly absorbed in his secret invention. He called it his Fiddleback, and had kept it hidden under old rugs and a bit of canvas for the last three months, sneaking away nightly to add to it bit by bit. Tonight it was all but finished. He had only to connect the final wires of its circuitry, and polish it to a shine for good measure with a bit of oil from his lantern. But now, poised to pull off the rugs and close its looping wires, Tin felt a strange apprehension. Light from his lantern danced across the spindled legs where they peeked out under the carpets. Something about the Fiddleback felt different, almost alive. Like it might shake off the rugs all on its own. It must just be the way the lantern is gleaming on it, Tin thought to himself, and yanked off the coverings. But the impression was only stronger than before. The vehicle was luminous and strangely unfamiliar, as if he hadn’t made it himself but had only found it in the catacombs like some impossible treasure from the time Before.

  Don’t be silly, he told himself, taking the loose wires very gingerly in his hands and setting to work. You wanted it to look like a spider, didn’t you? Well, maybe you just did a good job!

  It did look remarkably like a spider, a very large one, large enough to hold at least two twelve-year-old boys in its round body. Its shining, spindled legs folded up just like an arachnid’s, with a small bronze wheel at each tip. They were attached to a round cab made of carefully quilted scraps of leather, wool and old tarpaulin, with an open-air viewing window and a door fashioned from an old polished piece of stained glass. On top he’d tried to make the shape of a violin out of thin sheets of copper, like real fiddleback spiders have on their heads. There were two seats inside, a small metal steering handle and eight dials that controlled the direction and speed of each of the eight wheels. Another lever stopped them all simultaneously. Beneath the outer layers of fabric, wires connecting the inner controls to the legs looped and netted every which way. There was a little engine hooked up to an old battery under the seat compartment, wishful additions given the fact that he had no source of energy to run them with. Next to the engine he’d attached a big bobbin from an old electric spinning wheel he’d found in a heap. He’d wound some thread around it and tied a grappling hook to the thread for fun. It was useless, of course, save that he could wind and unwind it from within, but it resembled the thread-making abilities of a real spider, and it made him smile.

  Tin closed the circuit, hooking the final two wires into the rusted battery. He half anticipated some magical spark, but nothing happened. The Fiddleback was made, after all, entirely of scraps and wires that didn’t really match. Mostly it was a dream-beast, made of his own imaginings. He’d put the wiring in for a sense of completion, a gesture towards the veins of a real body. All those odd pieces together could never actually work, but he liked the idea of the wires all the same. With a rag, Tin went over each of the Fiddleback’s parts, rubbing the oil gingerly, as if his creation really was alive.

  As part of their schooling, the orphan boys of the Fifth Cloister of Grace and Progress were taught the precise ways to use all the tools in the Metals Studio so that they could disassemble machinery from Before. None of them ran any more, given the shortage of energy, but their parts were endlessly recycled into new human-pedalled contraptions, or melted down for metal to supply the Alchemics Workshop and to provide the City people with nails and tacks and buckets and cans. Until the Fiddleback, Tin had only made very small contraptions from the scraps he found lying around the Metals Studio at the end of each day – a minute box that rang a bell when it opened; a tiny model of the sun with wings that could be moved up and down with wires. All in secret, for his own pleasure. The much larger Fiddleback had required thefts from the catacombs themselves.

  “I never thought about what I’d do with you once you were actually finished,” Tin said to his creation, oiling the wheels one by one. “If only I could get my hands on some of the Brothers’ stargold. Then you could run!” He paused, watching the way the lantern light danced on the newly oiled parts. The shadows cast by the Fiddleback’s legs seemed to dance too. Tin’s chest felt light with the magic of that sight. “There’s hardly any stargold left you know,” he went on conversationally. “That’s why they have us slaving all day in the Alchemics Workshop, to see if we can make any more. But even if I could get hold of some I wouldn’t know what to do with it. The Brothers keep their secrets very secret. You have to have a Star-Breaker in order to extract power from stargold, and you’d be killed before you ever got inside one on your own, or learned how they work. Nobody knows how they break the stargold open up there in the Star-Breakers. I wish I did. Once the whole City was run on it, they say. The power made in the Star-Breakers fuelled everything. Once you could press a button and wash the dishes, wash the clothes, run a bath, send a message to someone on the other side of the City. The whole City was perfect, everything was connected, nobody wanted for anything. That’s what they say…” Tin trailed off. Down here alone in the Cloister’s old catacombs, full of dead machines that the City no longer had the energy to run, the words felt hollow. They echoed strangely. The room was very dark, the stone walls oppressive with shadows.

  Suddenly nervous, Tin picked up his lantern, opened the Fiddleback’s door, and climbed inside. The light from the oil lamp illuminated the stained glass from within, glancing blues and reds and greens off the careful stitch-work of old scraps, the silvery steering wheel, and the many small levers. Looking around, he sighed. Now that the Fiddleback was finished Tin felt oddly empty. It had been the thing he looked forward to each night, the thing that got him through the drudgery and danger of each morning’s work in the Alchemics Workshop and each afternoon’s grinding shift in the Metals Studio. He had filled it with his own most hidden dreams. Of adventure, of escape, of the lives of animals and stars. He smiled, remembering the little fiddleback spider he had encountered three months earlier in Hall Brother Christoff’s closet, the first real animal he had ever seen and the inspiration for the creation of his own secret Fiddleback.

  The only animals allowed inside the walls of the City were the cattle raised in sterile warehouses on sterile grain that supplied protein for the citizens. No one except their k
eepers ever saw them, and it was said their lifespans were very short, just long enough to become milk and meat. Still, Tin had always been obsessed with animals, with the strangeness and beauty of their bodies, which he had only seen in the few, censored books he and the other orphan boys were allowed to read as part of their narrow education. Mostly the books showed images of dangerous animals, animals the Star-Priest Brotherhood had eradicated after the Collapse. Even insects were forbidden within the City. It was, after all, the mosquitoes and flies that had been partially responsible for the devastating spread of the Plagues in the time Before. That’s what the Wall’s enormous, deadly lanterns were for – a defence against any and all insect-borne diseases. Any mosquito or moth or fly that passed by the City was drawn irresistibly to those lights, and promptly immolated with a quick spark and the smell of burning insect flesh.

  How that little fiddleback spider had found her way into Brother Christoff ’s closet was still a mystery. It had been Tin’s most recent stint of many in the Brother’s closet, punishment for keeping the other boys up until sunrise telling stories. This time, Tin figured, someone had ratted, and that’s why Brother Christoff had his ear pressed to the door at precisely the secret story-gathering time: when the clock struck eleven-eleven. Maybe it was Thomas, who acted tough and had strong muscles because he was always doing push-ups, but who only the month before had wet his bed from a nightmare.

  “Do you know, Martin Hyde, just how many rules you are breaking at this very instant?” hissed the Brother, a young man with a balding patch in the middle of his head, who had pulled on his blue habit hastily over checked pyjamas. He stormed into the centre of the dormitory and all the boys scattered except for Tin and his best friend Sebastian, who glared at the Brother with fierce eyes.

  “One for staying up past curfew, one for burning candles past curfew, one for telling a story, another couple for goading all the other boys to stay up with me. Baiting and abetting or whatever. So, I guess, five or so?” Tin had said with mock diligence, counting off on his fingers. His curly hair glinted in the candlelight and he faked a sweet smile.