The Secret of the Swamp King (11 page)

Tombro poled alongside a little island of floating moss, about six or eight strides across. “See won't that little blow-up hold you,” he suggested. Aidan was alarmed by Tombro's obvious doubt that the floating island could support his weight. He pictured himself sinking into the swamp's dark waters and, before he could clamber back into the boat, being shredded by alligators fighting for his carcass. But he was eager to show that he had the gumption to make it in the Feechiefen, so he stood in the bow of the boat and began to step off onto the island.

“Ipp! Ipp!” warned Tombro. “Hands and knees! Hands and knees! Don't punch through on the first step.”

Aidan crouched and reached one hand toward the moss. The island rocked crazily, sending out waves in circles that nearly tipped the boat. Aidan looked back doubtfully at Tombro, but Tombro waved him forward. “Get along,” he said. “Slow won't work. Got to skitter up there like a muskrat.”

Aidan skittered, trying to think like a muskrat, not like a civilizer in the middle of the Feechiefen Swamp—not like a civilizer in danger of sinking to its murky bottom at any moment. The flexible ground beneath his hands and knees rolled and bucked as if it were trying to sling Aidan into the water. But it didn't sink. Aidan crawled a step, then another, watching for any sign of water seeping through the ground beneath his fingers.

His progress was halted, however, by a hissing sound that he knew very well. When he looked up, his face was two feet away from the gaping pink mouth of an alligator. His first thought was to beat a hasty retreat, but the ground was too shaky for any quick movements. He couldn't run. He couldn't fight. The alligator gave another terrifying hiss and moved another slow step toward him. From where he crouched, head-on to the alligator, Aidan could see only mouth—big, pink tongue, widespread jaws, and two arcs of gleaming white teeth.

Behind him, Aidan heard Tombro chuckling. The end of Tombro's push pole slid along the surface of the moss, past Aidan, to jab at the alligator. The powerful jaws
snapped on the pole end, and then Aidan realized what Tombro was laughing at. The alligator, now that Aidan could see past its mouth, was only a small one, no more than four feet long.

“Scurry off, little gator,” Tombro wheedled. He poked again at the alligator. “Us big gators want your spot.” The alligator left the little island, though it did offer a few bad-natured hisses as it slid off the back edge.

Tombro crawled gingerly onto the island. It held both civilizer and feechie without sinking. It was almost dark by now, and before long Aidan and Tombro were on their backs waiting for sleep to come, awed by the brilliant stars of a Feechiefen night. Below the Hunter's Belt, Aidan imagined he saw a new constellation: the Frog Orchid. Surely he was getting closer to it. Yes, the Feechiefen was daunting, but he had good and capable feechies at his side. Perhaps it wouldn't be long before he could return triumphantly to Tambluff Castle—frog orchid in hand, a hard-won gift for a king who would never again have reason to doubt his loyalty.

Beside him, Tombro chuckled. “When you see them big jaws head-on, every gator looks big enough to swaller you whole, don't he?”

“Yes,” answered Aidan, “he sure does.”

It was an hour past noon the next day when Tombro poled the flatboat to the landing at Scoggin Mound. It was a bustling village. Actually, it was more of a base camp than a village. Most of the feechies who lived there—even the wee-feechies—spent more time elsewhere than they did at Scoggin Mound. Still, it was a more permanent settlement than Aidan would have thought possible for feechiefolk. Huts with palm-thatched roofs dotted the little island, and a few feechies walked back and forth balancing clay pots full of water, berries, or fish caught from the surrounding swamp.

The first people to notice Tombro and Aidan were a crowd of wee-feechies dressed in possum and muskrat hides and kicking a pine cone around a bare patch of sand a few strides from the landing.

“Tombro! Tombro!” they shouted.

“Did you bring me a turtle?”

“Did you bring any sugarcane?”

Then one of the wee-feechies noticed Aidan. “Oooik!” she shouted. “That's a big'un!”

“What happened to your hair, feller?” asked another wee-feechie. Aidan suddenly felt self-conscious of his
bare neck. Even the wee-feechies wore their hair short in the front and long in the back.

“Craney-crow snapped it off, I reckon,” theorized one of the wee-feechies.

“It never did,” retorted one of the others. “You just skeered of craney-crows, Hendo. That's the only reason you'd say such a turtle-brain thing.”

Hendo tackled his tormentor without even bothering to complete the rudeswap, and the two wee-feechies rolled around on the sand for awhile. But the others paid them little mind. They were more interested in the peculiar he-feechie Tombro had brought to their island. One of them elbowed his nearest neighbor and pointed at Aidan's boots. “What happened to your feets, feller?”

“Oooik!” gasped another. “His toes is gone!”

A bold wee-feechie with golden curls and a muskrat dress marched over to Aidan and stomped on the top of his boot. She barely came up to his knees.

“Margu!” scolded Tombro. “You ain't treating our visitor very friendly.”

“I ain't trying to be friendly,” she snarled. “I don't like him.”

“Me neither,” called one of the others.

“I don't like him a bit.”

With that, all of the wee-feechies fell on Aidan, stomping his toes and kicking his boots. One of them bit his knee. Tombro shooed at them as if they were a pack of yippy dogs. “Scoot,” he commanded. “Clear out, you owdacious scapers!”

“I want to know why he's so funny looking,” demanded one of the wee-feechies.

“Yeah, Tombro. How come this feller's so ugly?”

“'Cause he can't help it,” answered Tombro over the offended chatter of the wee-feechies. “'Cause he's a civilizer.”

The little mob fell back a step, flabbergasted.

“But he's a good civilizer,” Tombro quickly added, afraid the little ones would regroup for a second, more ferocious attack. “This here's Pantherbane.” The weefeechies looked dubious. “You know about Pantherbane, don't you?”

“My mama says there ain't no good civilizers.”

“My mama says civilizers don't like nothing but cutting down trees.”

“My daddy says they like sheep and horses better than they like the wild critters what belong on this island.”

Though Aidan had defeated a panther, five plume hunters, and even a seven-foot Pyrthen, the wee-feechies of Scoggin Mound were too much for him. He didn't know how to answer their accusations against him. So he did something that, at the time, seemed an appropriately feechie thing to do. He hooked his fingers in his lips and pulled them wide to show all his teeth, crossed his eyes, stuck out his tongue, and roared like a bear. The weefeechies scattered and ran screaming toward the middle of the island, their long hair streaming behind them.

“Civilizer!” one of then shrieked.

“He tried to eat me!”

“A civilizer's on the island!”

“He's going to civilize us all!”

Tombro and Aidan roared with laughter and followed the little ones toward the island's center where the village fire burned, the center of feechie life on Scoggin Mound.

They had just come into sight of the main hut circle when the
pffffffft
of a flying arrow burned through the air just inches from Aidan's left ear. In the middle distance, a white-haired she-feechie was notching a second arrow to her bow. Tombro threw Aidan on the ground and stood in front of him, blocking him from the old woman's arrow.

“Aunt Seku!” he yelled. “Don't shoot!”

“Move out the way, Tombro,” she squawked. “That feller's tricked you. He ain't a feechie. He's a civilizer spy!” Her teeth were missing, and her collapsing gums made her chin jut out with an extra measure of determination.

“No, Aunt Seku,” pleaded Tombro. “This is Pantherbane. He's a feechiefriend.”

Aunt Seku kept her bowstring pulled taut and kept her left eye closed. She was drawing down on her target, waiting for Tombro to move just an inch to give her a shot. “If he's a feechiefriend, how come he's trying to eat my grandbabies?”

“Those young'uns was just skeered and addle-headed,” called Tombro. “Pantherbane ain't gonna eat nobody. He's got the feechiemark, Aunt Seku. Come over here and look.”

Seku lowered her bow and arrow and walked cautiously toward the civilizer. Aidan rose to his feet, and the
old she-feechie grabbed him by the forearm to inspect it. “I don't see no feechiemark,” she growled.

“Look again, Auntie,” Tombro reassured her. “It's there.”

Seku spat on Aidan's arm and rubbed the foamy glob with two wizened fingers. The gray mud dissolved away, and the feechiemark appeared—the curling alligator, red and fierce, Aidan's passport into the world of the feechies.

Seku's manner softened in an instant. “Bless your goozlum! Bless your innards! You
are
Pantherbane!” She hugged his neck and stood on her tiptoes to pat his head. “Such a fine-looking boy,” she cooed. “For a civilizer.”

Aunt Seku insisted that the travelers come to her hut for a snack before they saw another soul. “I found these grub worms this morning,” she announced proudly as she placed a clay bowl between Aidan and Tombro. “They're still alive.” Aidan could see that for himself. The grubs writhed in a white, tangled mass that made the civilizer's stomach turn. Tombro dug greedily into the bowl, but Aunt Seku slapped his hand with a switch she kept for such occasions. “Get your hand out them grubs till Pantherbane gets some, you owdacious villain!”

All eyes were on Aidan as he pulled a fat white grub from the top of the pile. He tried not to think about the stubby legs that grew from each of its bulging segments or about the black pinchers that served for its mouth. He thought it best just to swallow without chewing, to get it over faster. But on the way down, the grub grabbed Aidan's tonsil with its pinchers and held on for dear life. It refused to go down.

Aunt Seku watched eagerly for Aidan's pleased reaction. When his eyes watered from the pain of having a live grub attached to his tonsil, Seku mistook his tears for tears of joy. The grub went down at last, and to Aidan's relief and gratitude, Tombro took more than his share of the grubs. Aidan was able to make it through the rest of the interview with Aunt Seku without further incident.

“Sorry I was jubulous of you when you first come up, Pantherbane,” said Seku. “It's just that I been seeing some peculiar things around here.” She pushed the grub bowl toward Aidan, who patted his stomach to signal that he couldn't eat another bite. “The other day, little Berdo come in here telling about a man in the trees, wearing a shirt made outta cold-shiny circles. I figured it was just a wee-feechie tale. But then Hendo come into my hut yesterday with a cold-shiny arrowhead he found in the woods.

“When the young'uns set up such a calaberment today about a civilizer on Scoggin Mound, it made me feel a little tetchy.” She pointed at Aidan's gleaming hunting knife. “I seen that shiny thing, and I figured the civilizers was here to get us sure.”

“I'm sorry I scared you, Aunt Seku, and the weefeechies too,” said Aidan. “I'm just glad you fired a warning shot.”

“That weren't a warning shot,” answered Seku. “That was a shaky shot from an old she-feechie what's about wore out.” She laughed a jolly, cackling laugh. “I was aiming to shoot you dead.”

As he had promised, Tombro provided Aidan with a tortoiseshell helmet, a short feechie bow and stone-tipped arrows, and a stone knife. They couldn't do anything about Aidan's unfortunate haircut, and Tombro let him keep his civilizer boots. They left his cold-shiny knife with Aunt Seku for safekeeping.

Throughout the rest of the day, feechies from all over the northern end of the Feechiefen arrived at Scoggin Mound for the next night's swamp council. They came throughout the night, too, and all the next day. Most of them bore stories similar to the ones Aunt Seku had told. A dying deer, escaped from the hunter who shot it, was found to have been wounded with a steel-tipped arrow. A scout had seen what he believed to be the glint of cold-shiny armor in the treetops at Bug Neck. A hunter had heard the unfamiliar clank of metal in the bay forest of Long Strand.

Feechies from the bands that roamed the deepest interior of the swamp reported seeing a near-constant billow of smoke rising from Bearhouse Island—not the smoke of cooking fires but the thicker, blacker smoke of a more intense fire. And feechies from every band told stories of their meanest, most difficult bandmates switching over to Chief Larbo's band.

Throughout the day, Aidan kept hoping Dobro would show up. Feechies came by the dozen, but none of Chief Gergo's band appeared. The little island buzzed with talk of cold-shiny spears, cold-shiny knives, slaughtered plume birds, and falling trees on Bearhouse Island.
Aidan wondered what they would have left to talk about at that night's swamp council.

Fifty feechies or more came up to butt heads and introduce themselves to the great Pantherbane who, they had heard, had skinned a panther alive, eaten an alligator whole, and grabbled three catfish on one dive at Bayberry Creek. They all wanted to tell the great Pantherbane where they were and what they were doing the day the feechies and the civilizers together routed the Pyrthens in the Eechihoolee Forest. Fifty times Aidan explained how it was his quest for the frog orchid, and not a desire to fight Chief Larbo, that had brought him to the swamp. But no one seemed to know anything about the frog orchid.

With every introduction, every friendly head-butt, Aidan kept one eye out for Dobro. Then, around midafternoon, Dobro, Doyno, Branko, Odo, and Rabbo—the delegation from Chief Gergo's band—arrived at last from Bug Neck. “I heard old Pantherbane was here,” Dobro whooped, slapping Aidan on the back. “Come to fetch him a flower!”

After a warm reunion with Aidan, Doyno, Branko, Odo, and Rabbo melted into the crowd to repeat their own stories about the day Pantherbane first fell in with Chief Gergo's band. Meanwhile, Dobro and Aidan sought out a quiet slough away from the hubbub of the settlement, where they would have privacy to catch up on events. Along the way, Aidan told how he came to be in the Feechiefen. He told of King Darrow's jealous rage and his sending Aidan on a quest for the frog orchid, the only cure for his melancholy.

Dobro shook his head at the underhanded, convoluted dealings of the civilizers. “That ain't the feechie way,” he said. “If I want your nose busted, I ball up my fist and I bust it; then I take whatever might be coming to me. I don't tell you to walk into a tree and hope you bust it yourself.”

“That makes for a lot of nose busting, doesn't it?” asked Aidan.

“Maybe so,” answered Dobro. “But you bust a feller's nose, he busts yours, and the whole thing's over. Things don't boil and bubble till you decide you want to kill a feller instead of just busting his nose.” He swished a stick in the water, watching the trail of tan bubbles swirl on the black surface. “I've got my nose busted many times, but I ain't never had nobody try to kill me.” A joree bird trilled in the bushes:
“Tow-heeeeee! Tow-heeeee!”
Aidan pondered whether Dobro was exceptionally wise or just a regular feechie scrapper.

“Pantherbane,” said Dobro slowly, as if trying the name out. “If it's all right with you, I'm just going to call you Aidan of the Tam. That's who you were when I met you.”

“That's who I still am,” protested Aidan.

“‘Aidan of the Tam I am,'” began Dobro, repeating the song Aidan sang in the bottom pasture the first day they met. “‘A liege man true of Darrow.'”

Aidan finished the stanza:

“You a liege man true, all right,” said Dobro. “Ain't no doubt about that. But I got a question. What if the kingdom's foe turns out to be the king hisself? Who you gonna oppose then?”

Aidan didn't answer. “I'm just saying,” continued Dobro, “a king sends the kingdom's best men out to die for no good reason, maybe he ain't much a friend to his own kingdom.”

“I'll never oppose my king,” Aidan said firmly, in a tone that made it clear he wasn't going to discuss the matter any further.

“That's fine,” answered Dobro. “But it looks to me like your king is opposing you. Ain't no cause to get angrified at me.”

Aidan's anger subsided. It had been his choice to come to Feechiefen. He had no illusions about King Darrow. Sure, the king believed he was sending Aidan to his death. But it was the king's melancholy, not the true king, that made that decision. Things would be different when he returned to Tambluff Castle with the frog orchid. The king's melancholy would melt away, and things would be as they should be.