The Secret of the Swamp King (10 page)

The swamp council was set to convene three nights later at Scoggin Mound, a tiny island one day's journey into the swamp's interior. Leaving before sunrise the day after the brushfire, the feechies dispersed across the northern part of the swamp to recruit feechies from various bands to participate in the council.

Aidan traveled with Tombro. Scoggin Mound was Tombro's home village, and it was his responsibility to get things in order for the council. He and Aidan were to go directly to Scoggin Mound, or as directly as the Feechiefen would let them.

They continued due south through the pine flats. Then, around noon, Aidan noticed the vegetation abruptly changed. The open forest of big pines and wire grass was replaced by the enveloping greenness of lowland swamp. The ground grew soft beneath their feet and mucky more than sandy. Vines and thickets slowed their progress, and ferocious bugs descended from all sides.

Aidan tried to take the insect bites in stride, but the stinging flies were worse than anything he had ever encountered in the land of the civilizers. He slapped, swatted, and waved his arms, but they kept coming. He
could hardly pay attention to where he was going, and twice he fell, tripped by vines that snaked across the ground.

The tanglewood closed in tighter as they pushed southward, and it soon became apparent that Aidan's backpack couldn't make the trip. Every low-hanging branch seemed to catch it and snatch Aidan backward, as if the forest itself were reaching out to hinder the civilizer's progress toward its most secret places.

When Tombro finished disentangling Aidan from a grapevine for the third time, he said, “That's enough of that, Pantherbane. Either you leave that civilizer back-pouch, or I'm leaving you.” Aidan knew Tombro was right. But he still couldn't bear the thought of leaving behind everything he had so carefully packed for his quest.

“Whatever you got in there,” assured Tombro, “it ain't what you need. You headed into the Feechiefen Swamp. Civilizer ways won't be much good to you. Only feechie ways.” He casually waved away an attacking deerfly. “And the grace of the One God.”

In spite of himself, Tombro did have a look through Aidan's belongings, just to see if a few things might be of use. He opened Aidan's water bladder and took a sip of the clear, pure water, fresh from the spring at Last Camp. He spewed it out and staggered around as if he had been poisoned.

“Aaaach!” he choked, twisting his face into a grimace of disgust. “How can you drink that stuff?” He threw the water bladder over his shoulder. “Ain't no need to haul
that nasty stuff all the way to Scoggin Mound. Feechiefen's full of water, nice black water. And there's always a surprise floating in it, for extra flavor.”

He found Aidan's quill pen and palmetto paper in the backpack. He took a bite out of the paper, but chew as he might, he couldn't get it to go down. “That stuff ain't fit to eat,” he declared as he balled it up and threw it into the bushes. He held up Aidan's pen and laughed. “You can get plenty of feathers in the Feechiefen. And a heap prettier than that'un. Ain't no reason to bring one from over the river.”

He uncorked Aidan's inkpot and was about to take a swig when Aidan snatched it away from him and threw it into the woods to save Tombro the trouble. Tombro tried to throw away Aidan's hunting knife, on the grounds that it was made of cold-shiny. But Aidan insisted on keeping it. The feechie relented but only after making Aidan promise to get a proper stone knife at the first opportunity. He did, however, convince Aidan to leave behind his bow and steel-tipped arrows, promising to get him a smaller feechie bow and arrows the minute they arrived at Scoggin Mound.

Tombro laughed at Aidan's rope, pointing out that every tree was festooned with vines of every size that would do just as well. Everything else in Aidan's pack met with similar ridicule, except the alligator jerky. That was something Tombro could see the use of.

Tombro was also pleased to find the rattlesnake hide that Aidan had used for a fire beater the previous day. “Hold on, now,” he said excitedly as he unrolled the skin.
The smoke and heat from the fire had crudely tanned it. Tombro rubbed the scaly hide between his palms, then snapped it taut, testing its strength. He held it up to Aidan's waist. It was more than long enough to wrap around; it almost went around twice. And it was broad enough to cover halfway to his knees. “You got yourself a kilt,” he whooped, “just like a natural-born he-feechie. You don't need that civilizer getup at all! You can dress like one of us.”

Aidan saw the benefit in going native. Feechiefen was one place where it was best to blend in with the locals as much as possible. There was no need to draw attention to the fact he was a civilizer. Tombro went in search of just the right gray mud with which to coat Aidan, both for bug protection and camouflage.

Meanwhile, Aidan took off his civilizer clothes and wrapped the snakeskin around his waist. It was crinkly and stiff, but it was comfortable enough, and in the sticky heat of the wetlands, it would be cooler than his civilizer clothes. Believing he struck a dashing figure as a hefeechie, Aidan felt an unavoidable twinge of pride. But he was eager for Tombro to return with the mud. The mosquitoes and biting flies were making a banquet of his bare chest and back.

When Tombro came back with two big handfuls of foul-smelling gray mud, he hooted at the sight of the big white civilizer standing in his civilizer boots, holding his kilt up with one hand and furiously slapping at bugs with the other. But he applied the mud as quickly as he could. In spite of its smell, the mud soothed Aidan's existing bug
bites and protected him from getting new ones. In his side pouch, Tombro had an extra kilt clasp, made from the fangs of a rattlesnake. He fastened Aidan's kilt with it, freeing the civilizer's second hand.

Tombro took a step back to look at his handiwork. “Not too bad,” he mused. “You're the right colors, at least, and you smell a little more like a feechie.” He looked at Aidan's close-cropped hair. “Your hair needs some help. But you can't grow a mane like this in a day.” Tombro ran his muddy fingers along the matted hair that draped down his neck. “Maybe we can skin out a muskrat. You could wear its pelt for a wig,” he suggested. “When we get to Scoggin Mound, you can borrow one of my turtle helmets.”

Tombro tried to convince Aidan to remove his boots. “Ain't nobody going to mistake you for a feechie with them stump-clompers on your feet,” he said. But Aidan pointed out that civilizer feet were much more tender than feechie feet and that his feet couldn't survive the rigors of the swamp without the protection of boots. Tombro gave in, but not without wondering aloud how civilizers managed to survive in a place like Corenwald if they weren't any tougher than that.

With Aidan's load thus lightened and the vegetation growing thicker, it wasn't long before he and Tombro took to the treetops. Onward they went, limb to limb toward the heart of the Feechiefen. The understory was so thick that Aidan rarely saw the forest floor. And when he did see all the way to the bottom of the trees, he saw water as often as he saw dry land. On and on it went.

After an hour or so of tree walking, they took a short rest in the top of a big sweet gum tree. “Big swamp,” Aidan remarked. “But the Feechiefen's not so different from some of the swamps around Longleaf, where I'm from.”

Tombro gave Aidan a quizzical look. “Feechiefen? This ain't Feechiefen. This is the little scrub swamp that borders it. When we get to Feechiefen, you gonna know it.”

Two hours later, the dense scrub opened into the Feechiefen. And, as Tombro had promised, there was no mistaking it. It was a place of terrible beauty, forbidding and at the same time mesmerizing. Enormous cypress trees—taller even than longleaf pines—soared into the sky from flanged bases so broad that Aidan could imagine flatboats full of standing feechies completely hidden behind each one.

The still water was as black as night itself, and yet no mirror could reflect the sky and clouds more perfectly. The surface of the water was another world, an upsidedown world. The effect was dizzying. The same cypress trees that speared upward into the sky also plunged downward to an identical sky below. The white-bellied cranes that glided above glided upside down in the lower sky. A heron stood knee-deep in the water, joined at the knee with its upside-down twin, which bobbed its long beak upward to the water's surface as the upright bird bobbed down.

Aidan had often daydreamed about the Feechiefen. But he hadn't imagined this. He had pictured the
Feechiefen as a bigger version of the swamps and tangle-wood forests he knew so well. But this was another thing altogether. The swamps Aidan knew were borderlands, places of transition between river and dry land. He could see now there was nothing transitional about this place. The Feechiefen was its own place, as self-contained as an inland sea.

There were rivers in the Feechiefen, as Aidan would soon learn. But there were no riverbanks. The rivers that flowed through the vast swamp were bordered by more water, not by dry land. There was dry land in Feechiefen too. But except for a few real islands, most of the land was just floating mats of moss burped up from the bottom of the swamp. A few plants took root and flourished—plants whose seeds blew in, floated in, or rode in on the feet of birds. Sometimes the floating islands joined together to form quite large plots of land. But any sense of permanence on those floating islands was only an illusion. They might sink back into the black water any day.

“Feechiefen,” Tombro whispered reverently at their first sight of the great swamp. Aidan saw a tear form in the feechie's eye. He could see why this son of the swamp would be so homesick.

“How long have you been away?” Aidan asked.

“Four days,” answered Tombro. “Four long days.”

Aidan followed Tombro through a few more treetops along the edge of the swamp. “There's one,” Tombro declared, and the two of them scampered to the base of a tree where a little flat-bottomed boat was pulled up into the bushes. A boat pole was there, too, and in quick order
Tombro had situated Aidan in the front of the boat and slid it into the water. Tombro stood in the stern, and with quick, nimble strokes he poled toward open water.

“Is this your boat?” asked Aidan.

“That's one way to say it, I reckon,” the feechie answered.

“You didn't steal it, did you?”

“Can't steal a boat,” said Tombro, exasperated once again by the civilizer's peculiar notions. “Boats don't belong to nobody. So how could you steal one?” The feechies, Tombro explained, had an ingenious method for handling the ownership of boats. On his tenth birthday, and every tenth birthday after that, every feechie was required to build a flatboat and give it to the chieftain of his band. The chieftain, in turn, gave all boats to the Feechiefen. So then, any feechie who needed to make a crossing was welcome to any boat he could find. After crossing, he left the boat where it landed, and any feechie who came along later was welcome to use it. The boat Tombro was plying across the water, therefore, wasn't his exactly, but it wasn't anybody else's either.

The boat slid as smoothly and soundlessly as a water spider across the still water. Behind, Tombro's push pole stirred up a little cloud of bottom litter in the shallow water. But ahead, the water was a sheet of black glass. Tombro nosed the craft between the funnels of the cypress trees, turning right and left, confidently navigating by a method Aidan didn't understand.

Feechiefen wasn't a tangled mess like the floodplain swamps around Longleaf. The cypress trees and gum
trees grew close together, as closely as the trees in the densest forests. But the forest floor was black water, not the rich soil of the floodplain. So the vines that often choked the forest were uncommon in the Feechiefen, except on the islands. Instead, the trees were draped with air plants that need no soil to grow—graybeard moss that swayed in great dangling masses, tree ferns shaped like hanging deer antlers, and orchids of seemingly infinite variety, the most splendid flowers Aidan had ever seen. But he never saw one that looked like a flying frog.

And the alligators! On every side, their eyes and rounded nostrils knobbed out of the water, and their broad, ridged backs looked like little islands in the swamp, ever-shifting, appearing and disappearing as the boat traversed their territory.

In time, Tombro guided the little boat to an opening in the cypress trees, and Aidan could make out a narrow channel of slow-moving water where trees didn't grow. Tombro put the boat in the channel and headed down its stream. It was easier poling here, with no trees to steer around and a current, however slow, to help them along. Tombro felt exuberant, and he belted out a yodeling swamp holler:

In the west, a blazing orange sun descended to meet its twin sun in the surface of the water. In the east, the high-piled clouds reflected the rays of the setting sun in fantastic gold-trimmed pinks and purples.

As dusk approached, however, the stillness was shattered by the beginnings of the swamp's night song. The frogs in their thousands—tens of thousands—set up their spring holler, a pleasing cacophony of a hundred different pitches and timbres. The alligators, too, began their bellowing and boasting, which echoed across the swamp like thunder. The big bull alligators wagged their massive heads in mutual threat. Swamp water cascaded from their open jaws, and to Aidan it appeared that steam was billowing from their nostrils. Their lashing tails whipped the black water to froth.

Tombro seemed unconcerned, even though any one of those crashing tails could smash their boat to splinters. He glanced up at a flock of wood storks sailing overhead toward their rookery. “Baldheads coming to roost,” he remarked. “I reckon we ought to too.”