The Wild Lands: Legend of the Wild Man (15 page)

Things have not always been this way, nor will they
remain so forever. Names change... stories are born... the past is
as alive as the future.

Halfway up the mountain, the hermit grows too
tired to continue.

“The moon wanes,” he gasps.

Kao glances at the pearly half moon hanging
in the night sky and grunts. Without the perfect alignment of a
full moon, both of their strength is lessened, same as the trees,
the insects, the animals, the earth itself. His hunt of the trophy
prongelk had culminated on the full moon, as was his people's way.
Power fights power. Kao is young and healthy. The full moon makes
him twice as strong. A new moon makes him no weaker.

The old hermit is not as virile and Kao
offers to tie him to his back like a infant. Without complaint, the
hermit climbs on Kao's back, clings to the hunter's warm fur and
dons the buckskin and skull helmet. They look like a two-headed,
horned monster, worse than the hermit's story of the bear and wolf
heads that share a body. Kao wonders if that too was a true tale.
It is more believable than a race of men who live among the clouds
and play with beasts and storms like sticks and stones.

With the hermit's weight, Kao feels the thin
air. The cold stings each time he fills his lungs with more and
more empty space. No matter though, they feasted before the vision
quest on the bodies of the animals killed in the flood. They dried
much of the meat into jerky for the voyage. His body makes fresh
blood to fuel his ascent.

He had no idea what lay atop the icy peak.
The hermit said it was a place of visions, a place to see, but had
been uncharacteristically quiet since. They agreed to travel at
night. The cold was little danger compared to a flock of kingcrows.
The hermit told him the Hidden would be watching, and it is best to
hide themselves.

Kao climbs on the hermit's word alone. He
smells nothing of the birds nor his sister. He hopes the hermit
guides him towards her, but he has no plan of his own. It hurts to
think. The death of his people weighs more in his mind than the
hermit's husk of a body in the thin air.

The hermit answers no questions.

All he says is, “up,” and his crooked finger
points higher. Kao grunts and climbs. Part of him, the killer, the
survivor, knows he can fling the old man from the mountain if he
betrays him. Kao is no tool. He does no bidding but his own. These
thoughts sting like needles and weaken his grip.

A rock pulls loose and he slips. The hermit
shrieks, but Kao just hangs by his other arm. The prongs are nearly
healed. They sting as his muscles flex, but less than before.
Another few suns and they will be part of him like Father Mountain
is part of the Earth.

They are higher than all of the peaks of
their mountain home. Kao marvels at the moonlit landscape below
him. He can see the plains to the south, grassy fields between
rivers that glow like fish in the moonlight. He sees where he
chased the prongbuck that changed his fate. The jungle spreads in
all directions. It scales the mountains high as it can until the
air grows too cold. All that rises above it is the mountain range
that hides all to the east. They passed that threshold a day ago.
Kao misses the sounds of the insects and birds. He thinks he can
see the tops of blooming fig trees, bright and orange even in the
moonlight, but he knows he cannot. They are buried in mud with all
the people he loves. The moonlight plays tricks on him. He
climbs.

His mind whirs as he ascends. He tries not
to, but he must think, and all he can think of is the Hidden. Are
they really responsible for everything? The rainstorm that flooded
his valley, both kingcrows, the prongelk in that harem? The prongs?
Scars grow around them. He can see his skin and knows fur will not
grow back there. His arm hurts less since the death of his family.
That pain makes all others seem numb. He hopes he can save his
sister. Maybe then his mind can scar over all that he has lost.

Step over step he climbs.

“Hermit,” Kao barks.

“Mm?”

Kao can tell from his voice he was
asleep.

“A story.”

“Let's stop for the night.”

“Sleep Later. Story now.”

“Mm hmm... well since you asked
nicely...”

Kao grunts as the way grows steep. He digs
his hands and feet into the stone. The hermit feels each step.

“Do you remember the story of the name, 'The
Hidden?',” the hermit begins.

“Don't like words.”

"Mm... Listen and learn to. When I was a boy,
a very young boy, before even my father was a story teller, before
the flood, The Hidden lived somewhere different.”

“You saw flood?”

“Listen boy. You wanted a story, let me tell
it,” the hermit pauses for Kao to grunt, “When I was a boy, the
Hidden did not hide in the skies or behind animal's eyes, they hid
in the jungles.

“Seen them?”

The hermit raps Kao's head with a knuckle for
silence.

“The Hidden lived in the jungles and the
mountains, and they never ventured into the plains, ever. For in
those days, the plains were home to different sort of beast. There
were thousands of them, more than there are stars in the sky. They
were smaller than you and hairless, and lived in big lumps and
played with things that stunk of death and were hard as stone.

Kao climbs on.

“In those days, the Hidden ate mostly nuts
and fruit, rabbits and birds, for there were few prongelk and none
as big and fierce as there are today. The beings that lived down on
the plains in their lumpy homes defended their elk fiercely. They'd
hunt and kill anything that threatened them.”

“The Hidden...afraid?”

“Mmm... not so much as they knew they must
hide. Same as today, they hide because they must. The Hidden in
those days watched the plains people closely, for they could work
magic. They made things that scratched the sky, grew beautiful
plants, even flew with birds.

“The Hidden steal magic?”

“Oh no. The Hidden gave them a gift. For they
knew the flood would come and they knew how to survive high in the
mountains. It is how they have always survived. The plains people
would be washed away and indeed they were. The flood washed almost
everything of them away, and what was left was changed. I think
their power came from a great curse that was locked away, and the
flood set it free. What was left melted back into the earth as
quickly as it sprung up from it. The Hidden thought nothing
remained of the plains people, that they had been washed to sea by
Lord Chaos, never to be seen again, but we were wrong. They used
our gift.”

“
Your
gift?” Kao manages to grunt.

The peak of the mountain is sheer rock. Hand
over hand climbs, clinging to what even goats cannot. His fingers
search out cracks and crevices to haul the last of the tribe's
weight up the rock. Sometimes there is nothing to grip at all, and
in rage and desperation he claws out handholds from the mountain
itself.

Father Mountain will forever remember his
ascent.

Finally he can reach no higher and pulls
himself onto the top of the mountain. The side they climbed was the
only face not covered in ice and snow, surely scaling the other
sides would have been more deadly than treacherous. He groans as he
pulls him and the hermit to the top of the cliff.

A long time he only breathes. His lungs ache,
but feel good. They will be stronger for the climb. Finally he
asks, “who are Hidden?”

The hermit looks to the moon and howls, loud
and true. Kao cannot believe the little man can make a sound so
powerful. Not one to step down from a challenge, he looks to the
moon, fills his lungs and howls even louder than the hermit. The
two go back and forth, the hunter's raw strength battles the
hermit's experience in an animal duel that Father Mountain
reckons.

The moon rises another finger in the sky by
the time the two stop. They listen to their echoes. Birds call,
rocks and snow slide, wolves howl. Nature trembles at their
strength.

“There,” the hermit says, then sits down and
wraps himself tightly in the prongelk leathers. The young hunter
looks West and past the mountains. A field lays inside a caldera.
It is round as a melon, and bordered by two rivers, one to the
north, one to the south. A single stone towers high, whiter than
bone. It reaches higher than the mountain, up and up and up into
the clouds. Weeks of travel away, it is wider around than the tree
that sheltered the tribe for hundreds of summers. It glows brighter
than the moon, and the clouds above it crackle with
electricity.

“They became a legend, a story for children.
A people who would forever sleep in the depths of the ocean. Our
people left the mountains and moved out into the world. Only my
father and a few others remained. Someone had to keep our stories,
our cave.

“No one believed my father when he claimed
they survived. But he knew only the plains people could have made
the stones that give them magic over the beasts. He gave them our
name as gift. The Hidden. For now they are the ones hidden away in
a world being stolen from them.”

Kao sits for a long time. Words grow more and
more twisted, like the ends of an oak branch grown from the thick
and sturdy trunk. Finally, he asks the only question that matters,
“Why sister?”

The hermit shrugs. “I do not know, but I fear
the worst. When they ruled the plains they treated us no better
than animals, and you have seen what they do to animals...”

Kao looks again to the towering stone. It is
like the bone of a giant, dug into the earth and balanced with
clouds. It is beautiful. He does not have to destroy it for a
little girl who is probably dead, but he will.

The Hidden will curse him as they fall to
earth.

The hermit sleeps. It is after midnight, but
still long before dawn. The waning moon will soon rest below the
horizon. The air is cold. The shriveled old man lies underneath the
elk skin. He propped up the skull before he went to sleep and now a
dead prongelk sits with Kao. It watches its killer with fleshless
eyes. Plumes of steam come from the specter's nostrils.