The Legend Begins (9 page)

CHAPTER 13

The Stone Fairie

Little Fur had fallen into a tumbling river. At first her shock was so great that she did not think to fight. It was as if she had fallen into a chilly dream. But then her heart began to bang and her breath to burn in her throat, and she thrashed her hands and kicked her feet until she reached the surface. She had time to gulp in a great breath of air, but then the current dragged her under again.

She floundered desperately against the force of the water, working her way toward the bank. It was exhausting because if she rested an instant, she was at once pulled back to the center. The battle became harder the longer it went on, and as a deadly tiredness stole through her, Little Fur found herself wondering if it would be so bad to let herself go down into the liquid darkness.

A vision of the Old Ones, stately and green in their hidden hollow, came into her mind. A great longing to see them welled up in Little Fur, giving her the strength to go on fighting, but a moment came when she had no more strength left. She gave in to the flow, only to find that she had made it to the edge. Indeed, her feet were dragging on the ground and, fortunately, the bank nearest to her was curved enough so that the main force of the river passed by.

It took an immense effort of will for Little Fur to haul herself halfway up the bank. She was utterly spent. She did not faint or sleep, but for a time it seemed that her mind had been left behind in the dark, violent water, being smothered and swept along.

When she returned to her senses, the eye of the sun was glaring down at her from overhead and her legs were numb. Little Fur rolled onto her back, dragging her feet clear of the river. The bank sloped gently where she had come ashore, but it mounded steeply upward before her, hiding what lay beyond. She rubbed life back into her legs and then reached for her water bottle, only to find that it was gone. Her pouch was safe, though the seeds in it would need drying out and some would be ruined. She groped anxiously for the stone which she wore around her neck on a plaited reed and was relieved to find that it, at least, was safe. It was all that remained of her mother, as the cloak had been all that remained of her father. Then she chided herself for thinking of
things
when she might so easily have lost her life.

It was not until she got up that it came to her that for the first time ever, her feet had left the earth, when she slid into the river. But she could feel the flow of earth magic still. Was it possible that it flowed through running water? After all, fish lived in water, and green reeds and water plants. It was a mystery that she would have pondered more deeply, except that she heard singing.

A powerful curiosity filled Little Fur as she clawed her way up the mound, but when she lifted her head above the edge, she saw a
human
. She shrank back and froze, until she realized that she couldn't smell a human.

Gathering her courage, she lifted her head again. The human was still standing exactly as it had been, and she saw what she should have seen at once! It was a shape formed out of stone, like the one she had seen in the beaked house. There were other stone shapes around it. In fact, there were stone shapes as far as she could see in all directions, some human and some made into the shapes of animals. Still others were simple stone tablets.

She was so engrossed in them that she almost failed to notice a pack of real humans moving along a grass path toward her. She slipped quickly into the shadow between two square stones, half expecting to hear one of them cry out. She was so close that she could smell their grief.

The humans straggled to a halt and stood close together, their backs hunched against the wind. Little Fur could not see what they were doing but she could smell that the earth lay open in their midst. One of the humans began to speak and some of the others listening wept aloud. Little Fur could smell memories rising and swirling about the group.

Then, to her infinite wonder,
all of the humans began to sing
.

The sweetness and beauty of their song took her breath away, but more than that, she was astonished to smell that as they sang, their grief was gentled and lightened. It was as if their singing was healing them!

She crept away, moving from stone shape to stone shape, though she had the feeling the humans would not notice her even if they looked right at her. Their grief was like the current in the river, pulling them inside themselves. She had never smelled sorrow like that before. When she was far from the group of humans, she gazed up at the stone shapes, seeing how many of the human ones had been made to look kindly and compassionate. Was it possible the stones had been shaped this way to console humans suffering from the blackness of their grief?

She noticed two big trees growing amidst the stone shapes and was suddenly eager for the familiar touch of bark. Maybe there would be a bird or some small creature nesting in them, one that could tell her the way to the human burying place. Then she caught the mouthwatering fragrance of cloudberries. A bush grew in the shade between the two trees, and Little Fur threw herself down beside it and crammed her mouth full of the pale, juicy berries, quenching thirst and hunger at the same time. Then she lay back with a sigh of contentment.

A small, leathery brown face with pointed ears was gazing down at her. Moss-colored eyes widened as they met her startled gaze, and the face twisted with alarm and vanished.

“Hey! Come back and talk to me,” Little Fur called softly, sitting up. She had seen enough of the small creature to recognize that it was a tree pixie. She laid her hand on the bark of the tree behind her, wanting it to reassure its pixie, but its leaves began to rustle.

There was a frightened yelp and the pixie's face reappeared. “How did you do thad?”

“Come down so we can talk properly,” Little Fur invited.

“You mean come down so thad you can eat me, Troll,” the pixie accused.

Little Fur stifled a laugh. “Can't you smell that I mean you no harm?”

The pixie glared at her. “I hab a code.”

“I can come up and shake hands if you'd like.”

“Don't you dare. My tree will drop a branch od your head ad squash you!”

This time Little Fur did laugh. The tree rustled again and the pixie stared at her in disbelief. “My tree says you are going to save all trees frob the human tree burners. Is it true?”

Little Fur said nothing and after a moment, the pixie ran down the trunk like a spider, nose pointed earthward, long twiglike fingers clinging to the bark. “I am Garoldi,” he said. “Cad I offer you something more to eat? I hab little nut cakes ad honeydew to drink.”

“That would be very kind,” Little Fur said politely.

The pixie scurried away, returning a moment later with a cloth bundle. As they ate, he asked her again if she really meant to stop the tree burners.

“I am going to try,” Little Fur said softly, spreading out the contents of her pouch to dry. Seeing he wanted more, she told him of her journey to the beaked house. His eyes grew wide when she described her capture and rescue from the greep, yet when she told him of the metal serpent that had come after her, Garoldi laughed, saying it was only a vessel that carried humans from place to place. A train, he called it.

This seemed so fantastic that Little Fur could not believe it. She asked the pixie if he had ever heard of a place where humans buried other humans. He shook his head, but to her surprise he said that there was a large wood beyond the field of stone shapes. Perhaps that was where humans buried other humans. She couldn't see it now because it began where the ground dipped down, but he would show her.

Little Fur wondered if this could be the wood that the Sett Owl had described. She might have come to it from another direction. Garoldi insisted on packing a little picnic of cakes and cloudberries, and before they went he gave her a gourd bottle to replace the one she had lost. Little Fur refilled her pouch, then used a few herbs she had kept aside to make a tisane for Garoldi's cold. The shadows were growing long by the time they set off.

As they made their way through the stone shapes, Garoldi assured her that humans never came after dark.

Little Fur asked the pixie why humans came to the field of stone shapes at all.

“They plant their treasures here in big boxes,” he answered knowledgeably. “They put them in the ground and cover them with earth. Then they weep.”

This was as mysterious as everything to do with humans. “What about the stone shapes?”

He shrugged. “Perhaps they leave them to frighten other humans away. Come this way and you will see my favorite stone shape.”

He led her from the grass to a wide, neat path of earth that would have made her nervous if Garoldi had not seemed so sure that no humans would come there now. It was not until they were almost under it that Little Fur saw the enormous stone fairie with huge wings folded behind it. As with all of the stone shapes, the smell of human on this one was ancient but unmistakable. Garoldi was gazing up at it in wistful awe. It took a moment for Little Fur to notice that the stone fairie held a stone baby in its arms. The baby was human-sized, but the fairie had been made hundreds of times larger than a true fairie. Its face was beautiful and wise, but its eyes were sorrowful.

As they turned away, Little Fur wondered very much who had made the stone fairie and how they had known what a fairie looked like.

They came quite suddenly to a fence made from metal strands running between posts of old gray wood. Beyond, as Garoldi had described, a grassy incline ran down to a dense line of trees.

“Be careful, Little Fur,” Garoldi said.

Little Fur nodded and ducked under the wire. She had almost reached the wood when an impulse made her look back. The sun had just closed its eye and the pixie was still standing on the other side of the barrier at the top of the slope, a tiny, solitary figure with the stone shapes of humans looming behind him, limned in scarlet.

CHAPTER 14

An Ancient Cut in the Earth

Pushing through trees, Little Fur imagined Crow waiting at the burying place, clacking his beak in frustration, and Sly and Ginger by the river that she had fallen into, puzzling about what had happened to her.

Then her heart quickened and she forgot about the others because through the trees, she could see a clearing and in the midst of it was a great, dark crack in the ground, exactly as the Sett Owl had described. It ran the whole length of the clearing, she saw as she emerged from the trees, and was narrow and sharp-edged, as if a giant had slashed the ground open with his knife. She wanted badly to look down into it, but its edges were cracked and eroded and she knew they would give way at once if she trod on them. It was impossible to imagine that she would be able to climb into the chasm when she could not even get close enough to look into it, but the Sett Owl had told her that was what she was supposed to do.

Little Fur sat down and ate a nut cake and drank some water from the gourd bottle Garoldi had given her, thinking hard. At last she set the food and bottle aside and lay down on her belly. Spreading her arms and legs wide, she wriggled carefully forward until she could look down. Moonlight lit up the top part of the chasm, where weeds and scruffy plants grew precariously on little juts and ledges. Little Fur's spirit fell, for they would certainly crumble if she tried to step on them, but the troll part of her saw deeper and found stone places where she would be able to gain a safe foothold. She tried to see below the moonlit part of the chasm, but there was a brownish murk blocking the way.

Little Fur closed her eyes and sniffed. The first layer of smells was familiar: damp earth and small plants with clutching roots and worms burrowing. She sniffed again, searching under all of those smells, and then she found it: the scent of something utterly strange.

She thought of what Crow had said about things that slept not liking to be awakened, and all the doubts born as she pushed through the trees flocked back into her mind and swelled. The Sett Owl had made a mistake in sending her. How could someone so small and unimportant possibly save all of the trees in the city? That was a task for a hero, like those in the stories Brownie told. Why, if it had not been for Ginger, she would have probably been slain by the greep, or given to the trolls.

Despair was like the current in the river, pulling her under, clogging her eyes and nose and ears so that she could sense nothing else. Little Fur wondered if Sly and Ginger had been secretly laughing at her silliness in thinking that she could stop the tree burners, because of course humans were too strong and strange to be stopped from doing anything they wanted. The only way to survive was to hide from them.

But when she was near to drowning in despair, the earth magic under Little Fur's body surged. It was as if someone had thrown cold water into her face, for she saw at once that the things she had been feeling had been shaped by whatever lay in the chasm.

Something
was trying to make her give up and go away.

Again doubts arose, clouding her mind and strangling her will, but Little Fur forced the tide of dreariness back by thinking of the trees whose minds she had touched on her journey through the city, and the millions that she had not touched. She was not alone because they were with her now; they were part of the flow of earth magic, as she was, the flow that the Troll King wanted to destroy.

No matter how many doubts and fears she had, she had promised to enter the chasm, Little Fur told herself fiercely. She had promised the Sett Owl that she would try to wake the power that slept here. She crawled to the very end of the chasm, where it became a narrow crack, seeing that the ground was more stable here. She would not wait for the others, because waiting would give despair a chance to steal her courage. She must go at once, while she was full of determination.

Little Fur climbed into the crack and began to clamber down. The troll part of her seemed to know exactly where to find handholds and footholds that would support her, and she moved down the face of the chasm as swiftly and easily as flowing water. Doubts still floated into her mind, but the more she resisted them, the easier it was to resist.

Then her foot dipped into something cold and damp. Little Fur looked down to find that she had reached the oily brown murk. She moved and the murk stirred slowly like thick mud. Realizing that she would not be able to see out of the chasm once she went deeper, she looked up. The sky was a long skein of darkness caught in the thin lips of the crack, and because the moon was not visible, she saw only a scattering of stars. For a moment she saw a shape at the edge of the chasm that might have been a cat, but she shook her head, convinced that it was another trick being played upon her mind to delay her or stop her from going farther.

She descended into the gloom and the air was thick and hard to breathe, but her feet and hands were sure. She climbed until her arms and legs ached, and then it occurred to her that perhaps the chasm had no bottom and she would be climbing forever. Fear flickered in her mind. She tried to think about the things the Sett Owl had said but she could not seem to remember them clearly. The elf part of her felt lost, but the stubborn troll part of her nature refused to care what she felt. She had made up her mind to climb into the chasm and she would do that, even if she had forgotten why.

Then quite suddenly, she was at the bottom.

The floor of the chasm was pale and sandy and very cold. The air was cold, too, and so brown and thick that Little Fur could hardly see a step in any direction. The vagueness and sorrow she had felt while climbing were much stronger now, but she recognized them as yet another attack on her will and resisted by concentrating on walking.

She had been going for a good while without seeing a single thing when she almost stepped into a wide pool of water. Its surface was so still that it was as if she looked at herself rather than a reflection. Little Fur knelt and peered into it, for surely all the mysteries of life would be answered if only she could look deeply enough.

A ripple ran over the surface. Little Fur was astounded to see the Old Ones in their hidden hollow. How her heart ached at the sight of them, and how fair they were. She sat gazing at them, and maybe she would have sat like that forever if sharp teeth had not suddenly nipped her ear painfully. She swung around and sprawled sideways into the cold sand, her limbs so stiff that she could not lift a hand to save herself.

Sly peered into her face, green eye narrowed. “What is the matter with you?”

“I . . . I don't know.” Little Fur felt confused as she struggled to sit up. “I looked into the pool and I saw the Old Ones. Then you came.”

“We saw you going down,” Sly told her. “But that was hours and hours ago. We thought something must have happened to you, so I came to see.”

“Hours . . .” Little Fur was stunned. Surely she had only just climbed down into the murk, and yet she was so stiff. Then it came to her. “Something has been trying to stop me coming down into the chasm and this pool must be part of it,” she murmured. She resisted the urge to look again at the mesmerizing surface of the water as she got to her feet.

“Something is over there,” Sly said.

They went on and found nothing but cold, pale sand and more brown mist. Then Little Fur noticed an enormous dead tree standing up against the wall of the chasm. A face had been carved deeply into its bark. Only a human would do such a thing, Little Fur thought; afterward the tree must have been pushed into the chasm, for the Sett Owl said that no human had ever come here.

She reached out, wondering if there would be anything of its dream left in the withered gray bark. She gasped, for the moment her palm touched it, she realized that it was not a tree but some gigantic treelike being. Nor was it dead.

Suddenly certain that it must be the very being she was supposed to wake, Little Fur closed her eyes and let her thought flow into the creature. It was not a tree, but it was very like a tree, and it was so deeply asleep that it was close to death.