The Secret of the Swamp King (15 page)

“Who are you?” Aidan asked.

The visitor answered in a whisper. “I am you.”

“I am you?” scoffed Aidan. “Nobody talks like that.”

“All right then,” continued the stranger, still whispering. “I am what you might have been if you hadn't been so stupid.”

Aidan tried to get a look at the stranger's face, but the night was dark and his face was mostly obscured by the egret plumes anyway. The headdress seemed to glow with its own light, but it didn't illuminate its wearer's face.

“I am the Wilderking,” the stranger continued. “The boss of this swamp, as the feechiefolk say. And before long I'll be the boss of all Corenwald.”

Aidan strained to hear any trace of a Pyrthen accent—indeed, any clue to where this impostor had come from. But any such clues disappeared in the whispered speech.

“You could have so easily been where I am,” the pretender continued. “But you didn't seize your chance when you had it. That's the only real difference between you and me.” He shook his head, and the egret plumes waved extravagantly. “After Bonifay, you had a lot of
people convinced you were the Wilderking—civilizer and feechie alike. But you frittered it away. Did you think somebody was just going to hand you the kingdom?” He snorted a short, mean laugh. “And now it's too late. Your moment's past.”

Aidan racked his brain. A courtier? Was this someone he knew from King Darrow's court? “You know a lot about me,” he said.

“I have made you my study,” the false Wilderking hissed back. With that, he left and made his way back to the stockade. Aidan lay listening to the raucous snoring of Pickro and Carpo, whose sleep was undisturbed. It wasn't long before Aidan joined them in sleep. He dreamed of feechiefolk in Tambluff Castle.

While Aidan was trying to eat his breakfast the next morning, a fist-sized rock came sailing into Pickro's helmet.
Thwack!
He slumped into a pile in front of Aidan's cage. Pickro had scarcely hit the ground before Dobro Turtlebane whirled in like a tornado from behind the one tree remaining on the north end of the island. He snatched Pickro's spear from the ground and cracked the butt across Carpo's helmet. Carpo, too, dropped to the ground before he realized what was happening.

Dobro rattled the cage door, looking to make a quick getaway with Aidan. But he had never seen a padlock before—he had hardly ever seen a door—and he didn't understand why the door wouldn't open. “I'm gonna get you outta this cage,” he said, breathing hard. “I'm gonna get you out.”

Four Bearhouse feechies patrolling nearby heard the commotion. They saw their comrades lying motionless on the ground and a strange feechie trying to open the civilizer's cage. They started running for Dobro.

“Oooik!” their leader barked. “What do you think you're doing?”

“It's locked!” Aidan shouted at Dobro. “It won't open. Run away!”

But Dobro didn't run away. He kept rattling the lock, pushing and pulling against the door that wouldn't budge.

“I shouldn'ta left you at Scoggin Mound,” he kept repeating. “I shouldn'ta left you!”

“It doesn't matter, Dobro. Run!”

The feechie patrol had Dobro surrounded, but Dobro paid no mind. He worried the lock and rattled the door, as single-minded as a raccoon. Cold-shiny spearpoints gleamed all around him, but he paid no mind.

The lead feechie gave the signal, and all four patrollers attacked. Preferring to capture him alive, they flipped their spears around and struck Dobro with the handles rather than the spearpoints. Dobro soon lay battered on the ground, unable or unwilling to rise.

The lead feechie was about to ask Aidan a question when the still, black water behind the cage erupted in a frothing tumult. A hundred feechies from the North Swamp had been lying beneath the surface since before daylight, breathing through reeds, and now they lurched up as one and charged, dripping clubs in hand, on the unsuspecting Bearhouse feechies.

They overwhelmed Dobro's four attackers in short order, but the alarm went out across the island, and two hundred Bearhouse feechies answered the call. They came with swords, spears, and axes, all of shining steel. Their bowmen notched steel-tipped arrows to their bowstrings and pulled them tight. They laughed cruelly at the stocks
and clubs of the North Swamp feechies; old-fashioned weapons had no place in the new world ushered in by their Wilderking.

But the North Swamp feechies were undaunted. They formed a line and faced their adversaries without flinching. The air crackled with tension as the two ferocious armies glared at each other across the clearing.

Behind the line of Bearhouse feechies, the door to the stockade swung on its hinges, and Aidan got his second look at the man who claimed to be the Wilderking. Stepping into the morning sunlight, he was a dazzling sight. A long robe of fuzzy white egret plumes trailed behind him, and around his head, egret plumes shot out in all directions like the rays of a fuzzy sun in the headdress he had worn the night before. Even in the daylight, the false Wilderking's face was more or less obscured by the plumage. Beside him stood an old feechie in a wolf-hide cape—Chief Larbo, Aidan figured. Six thick-bodied civilizers, his bodyguard, formed a protective semicircle.

With a clear voice the false Wilderking addressed the Bearhouse feechies: “For this I have trained you, my hearties. You are strong of arm and strong of heart. Your steel is strong too.” He raised a plumed spear above his head. “For Bearhouse! For Larbo! For the Wilderking!”

The North Swamp feechies braced for the onslaught. But before it came, a wild cry echoed across the clearing:

Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo… Ha-ha-ha-
hrawffff-wooooooooo.

All eyes turned to the bamboo cage from which the watch-out bark had come. Aidan stood with his face
pressed between the poles of his cage. Chief Larbo's voice was the first to break the silence. “A watch-out bark!” he called across the battleground. He glanced at the spearheads and arrowpoints glinting all around. “If you don't mind my saying, young civilizer, it looks to me like you the one ought to watch out.” The Bearhouse feechies snickered.

“That may be,” answered Aidan. “But you'd better watch out too. All of you.” The authority in Aidan's voice captivated the attention of every feechie within earshot. “Things will never be the same if you turn those cold-shiny weapons on other feechies.”

“That's what I know!” shouted one of the Bearhouse feechies. “Larbo's boys gonna rise again!” A rumble of agreement rose among the Bearhouse feechies, punctuated by two or three enthusiastic whoops.

But Aidan's voice silenced the crowd with a single word: “No!”

All eyes were once again on the civilizer's cage. “If you win this battle for this pretended Wilderking, no feechie will ever rule in this swamp again.”

The false Wilderking's plumage shook with rage, and he began to speak: “This fool has—” But a glance from Chief Larbo silenced him, and Aidan went on.

“If you turn a cold-shiny weapon on another feechie, you won't be just killing a feechie. You'll be killing all feechiedom.”

The Bearhouse feechies had been foolish, but they weren't altogether stupid. They were listening to Aidan now.

“Today you have a choice to make.” Aidan waved his hand in a sweeping gesture to indicate all of Bearhouse Island—the forges, the desolate landscape, the Wilderking's stockade. “Choose this, and you can never go back to the life you lived in your home band. You can't have both.”

Aidan noticed that the forest of spears across the battleground were held a little lower. He pressed his advantage. “And you're not just choosing for yourself. You're choosing for the mamas and sweethearts you left behind. You're choosing for your daddies and your granddaddies, for the wee-feechies who can't choose for themselves.”

Aidan looked into the silent faces of the Bearhouse feechies. “That's all I have to say.”

In their training, the Bearhouse feechies had used their swords and spears to do all sorts of horrible things to fake enemies stuffed with graybeard moss. But now that real enemies were in front of them, they looked more like cousins and former bandmates than enemies. It's not that they minded attacking the invaders. North Swamp boys had no business, after all, on Bearhouse Island. But how much fun could it be to cut them up with cold-shiny weapons?

The Bearhouse feechies threw down their swords, spears, and bows. The North Swamp feechies threw down their clubs. And the two lines rushed headlong toward one another with flying fists, flying feet, and flying leaps. The Battle of Bearhouse was on, and it was ferocious. Aidan had witnessed a few feechie fights.
There was nothing in the civilizer world to compare to a feechie fight for sheer brutishness. Fighting bears would be more civil. The Battle of Bearhouse was a hundred such fights, raging in every direction.

Aidan hung from his cage poles, whipped into a frenzy by the fracas around him. On one hand, he longed to get at the impostor who had tricked and enslaved the Bearhouse feechies. On the other hand, he was thankful for the protection afforded by his bamboo cage. He did his best to cheer the North Swamp boys, but it was hard to tell who was who.

Across the way, Aidan could see the false Wilderking dancing with rage. “You fools!” he screamed over the din of the battle. “Strike! Kill!” Every jerk of his head, every twist of his body was so magnified by his elaborate costume that the figure he cut was more comic than commanding. Larbo, seeing that the battle was being fought the old feechie way, couldn't resist and left the Wilderking's side to join the fun. The bodyguards, on the other hand, stood as if their feet were glued to the sand. They were confused and terrified by the feechies' primal ferocity. The civilizers had weapons, and they didn't mind using them, but they had underestimated what feechies could do in a free fight.

The battle raged. Feechies flew through the air, some leaping to the attack, others being thrown and flipped by their adversaries. In several cases, Aidan noticed that both of the combatants in a hand-to-hand fight were Bearhouse feechies. Because they outnumbered the North Swamp boys, there weren't enough opponents to
go around. Some of the Bearhouse feechies had to fight one another—the way girls at a ball sometimes danced with one another when there weren't enough boys. As the battle swirled around him, Aidan noticed a new light in the Bearhouse feechies' eyes. The old, fiery feechie spirit had chased away the dullness born of overwork and a love of cold-shiny. Their swampy exuberance made them more formidable enemies than their flashing weapons ever could.

Dobro Turtlebane, recovered from his earlier setback, now tangled with an unusually large feechie wearing an alligator-claw necklace. And things weren't going well for Dobro. The Bearhouse feechie lifted Dobro over his head and hurled him against Aidan's cage with such force that the whole structure collapsed in a heap. Aidan went to the ground, covering his head against the falling poles, and Dobro landed beside him with a thud and a clatter. He rolled over and moaned. “See, Aidan?” he groaned, holding his ribs. “I told you I'd get you out of this cage.”

Aidan spied the false Wilderking across the way. He was still stomping, raging, and waving his arms. Aidan rose to his feet and started walking a straight line toward him. Fists and feet and feechies flew all around him, but on he walked, driven by a single purpose. He stared unblinking at the gyrating, gesticulating fraud, stalking closer, closer, yet the Wilderking was too self-absorbed to notice. Some of the feechies noticed, however, when Aidan stooped to pick up a discarded club. Hyko left off his combat and fell in step behind Aidan, and so did Pobo, Orlo, Tombro, and Odo Watersnake from Chief
Gergo's band. Even Dobro joined in as best he could, limping and holding his ribs.

Aidan was thirty strides away when the Wilderking's bodyguards hustled him inside the stockade. They drew their swords and waited for Aidan and his following. But Aidan kept coming, undeterred, and his following grew. The guards were well armed. But they could count, and it was obvious that they couldn't hold back what was quickly growing into a feechie mob. They, too, retired to the safety of the stockade.

Still Aidan kept coming. His step was quicker now. When he arrived at the stockade door, he raised his club high and brought it down on the doorframe with all his might.
Thwack!

“I am Aidan Errolson of Longleaf Manor.”

Thwack!

“I have come for the impostor who calls himself the Wilderking!”

Thwack!

“I am Pantherbane!”

Thwack!

“You have enslaved a free and happy people!”

Thwack!

“You have defaced this swamp, God's creation!”

Thwack!

“You are a liar!”

Thwack!

“You are a fraud!”

Thwack!

“You are a coward!”

Thwack!

The feechie battle had stopped altogether by the final time Aidan struck his club. All eyes were on Pantherbane at the door of the stockade.

The long silence was broken at last by the voice of the Wilderking, not quite as clear as before, from inside the wooden walls. “Take care you do not talk yourself to death, Pantherbane. You meddler. You ignoramus.”

This was what everyone was waiting for. “Rudeswap!” called Chief Larbo. “The Wilderking finished the rudeswap!”

“Hee-haw!” called a feechie voice. “We gonna see a civilizer fight!”

The feechies—North Swamp and Bearhouse alike—stampeded toward the stockade.

“Do you hear that, Wilderking?” shouted Aidan over the confusion. “Your subjects await you.” The feechies surrounded the stockade, bruised and bloodied from battle. But there was no response from inside. Dobro, who stood at Aidan's right hand, rapped his knuckles on his helmet, one fist, then the other in a steady rhythm:
Tock …
Tock … Tock … Tock…

The feechies around him joined in.
Tock … Tock …
Tock… Tock …
The tempo was like a great clock ticking out the seconds toward a showdown between Pantherbane and the man who called himself the Wilderking. Fighting out a rudeswap was the most basic point of honor in the Feechie Code. Every second the
king remained in the stockade, every second he refused to fight out his rudeswap, his power over the Bearhouse feechies dissolved a little more. Now all of the feechies were pounding their helmets with a deafening urgency:
Tock … Tock … Tock … Tock…

At last the stockade door cracked open. The helmet banging stopped, and the feechies waited eagerly, expectantly for the Wilderking to appear and do his duty. But the man who stepped out of the door wasn't the Wilderking. He was Lawmer, the Wilderking's big, thick-necked lieutenant. He read from a piece of paper:

There was a general grumble among the feechies, but Lawmer continued.

Chief Larbo was livid. He hopped in a circle around Lawmer, who did his best to maintain a dignified indifference. “Beneath his dignity?” the old feechie barked. “I tell you what's beneath his dignity: hiding from a free fight like a bunny in a brush pile!” He snorted. “Beneath his dignity! I don't care who he is. He swaps rude with a man, he better be ready to fight it out!” Larbo darted behind the big civilizer to push through the stockade door. He meant to have it out face to face with the
Wilderking. Lawmer, quick as a cat, struck Larbo across the back with the flat of his sword. The feechie chieftan sprawled to the ground.