Patricia Wrede - Across the Great Barrier

“But yes,” Pierre replied. “Without a warning or any signal. It was most sudden and mysterious.”

“I’d call a bunch of spooked horses something of a signal,” Mr. Macleod said dryly.

“Might be,” Wash put in. “Though it’d help to know exactly why they spooked. And not all of them did spook, right at first, if what Mr. Le Grise says is true.”

“Of course it is true!” Pierre said indignantly. “I do not lie!”

“It’s just a turn of phrase, Pierre,” Mr. Macleod said. “Nothing to get peeved about, especially since we’ve more important matters to hand.”

“We don’t know enough about this critter,” an older man grumbled.

“You are welcome to go back to the ford and investigate further,” Greasy Pierre said politely. “You cannot miss it; there are three stone packhorses in the middle of the path.”

“Barely a day’s ride away,” a woman whispered. “What if it comes here?”

“There’s no reason to think it will,” the hard-faced man snapped. “We’ve been here for three years now. We’d have seen some sign of it before, if it was common. Or the trappers would have.”

“Perhaps,” Professor Torgeson said reluctantly. “However, there have been indications that some animals that usually live in the unexplored West have been moving eastward over the past four or five years. Possibly longer than that; we don’t have observations from much earlier.”

“Indications?” the hard-faced man said, narrowing his eyes. “What kind of indications?”

“Over the past five years, the Settlement Office reports have noted more frequent sightings of unique and unknown animals within settlement territory or within sight of settlements,” the professor said with more assurance. “The number of unusual creatures brought in by trappers such as Mr. Le Grise has also increased by a small but significant amount along the entire length of the Mammoth River during that time.”

“The Settlement Office has adjusted the protection spells twice in the last five years,” Mr. Macleod commented. “Both times on account of needing to keep out new critters.”

“Why haven’t we heard of this?” a woman cried angrily.

“Because it’s my job to handle the settlement spells, not yours,” Mr. Macleod shot back.

Professor Torgeson cleared her throat. “Be that as it may, it seems at least possible that this incident may, like the mirror bugs, be a case of a previously unknown creature moving in from the wilds of the West.”

“Why? Why would it come here?”

“I have no idea,” Professor Torgeson said in her best classroom lecture voice. “There are a great many possibilities, but we do not have enough information to speculate about which of them might be true. There may have been a fire in the Far West that’s driven animals eastward, or some other act of nature. We know little about the country between here and the Grand Bow River, and nothing at all about the unexplored land west of that.”

I thought of the pride of saber cats we’d killed that shouldn’t have been anything like so far east. I could surely understand why they’d come east, if some creature that turned things to stone was moving in from the Far West. But what would drive a critter east if it could turn things to stone?

“Why isn’t important at the moment,” said a man who’d been quiet up till then. “Why is for later on, when we can stop worrying over what’s happening and start worrying over how to keep it from happening again. The real question right now is, what can we do about it if this thing that turns people to stone shows up here?”

“I still say it’s unlikely,” the hard-faced man repeated. “Why would it come farther east after Nils and Pierre here gave it such a scare?”

“Why not?” the quiet man said. “Better to be ready for trouble that doesn’t come than have trouble arrive when we’re not ready.”

“There’s another possibility to consider,” Wash said, “and that’s that these critters are more drawn than driven.”

Half the settlers looked at him with blank expressions.

“The most recent batch of critters that we know came from the Far West were the mirror bugs,” Wash said. “We still don’t know all the hows and whys, but we do know they were attracted to strong magic. Could be that there’s other critters that are like that.”

“That’s speculation,” the professor said sharply. “There’s no evidence for it in this case whatsoever.”

Some of the settlers looked relieved, but then the woman in the blue calico said, “There’s no proof against it, either. And it’s like Christoffer said — better to be ready than not.”

The talk ran on like that for quite a while. Mr. Macleod let it go without saying much, except when someone’s temper looked to be running a mite high. About all that happened in the end was that the settlers decided to call the stone-making critter a “medusa” after the old Greek stories about the lady with snakes for hair who turned folks into stone with a look. Nobody knew what the critter looked like, though we were pretty sure it wasn’t a lady of any kind, but putting a name to it made folks feel a bit better.

Eventually, the meeting broke up so people could get back to their everyday tasks, though most everyone who’d planned to head outside the settlement palisade decided it’d be a better day to stay home and fix up something they’d been putting off. Professor Torgeson went off to Mr. Macleod’s place to look at the stone leg and double-check the preservation spells Mr. Macleod and Wash had put on it. She asked if I wanted to join her, but I turned her down.

Mr. Macleod and Wash set up a roster of folks to reinforce the settlement protection spells, which gave everyone something constructive to do and perked a lot of them right up. I noticed Lan didn’t volunteer to help, which he normally would have, so when the settlers filed out of the longhouse at last, I took him aside to ask about it.

“The last time I tried helping with settlement spells, it almost got me and everyone else killed,” he said.

“The last — oh! At the Little Fog settlement two years back,” I said. “But if you hadn’t helped, we wouldn’t have worked out how to stop the mirror bugs.”

“And if you hadn’t been at Oak River for me to call on, or if you and Wash and William had been a little later getting there, the whole settlement would be dead, and me and Papa along with,” Lan retorted. “You can say ‘what if’ as much as you like; it was still a harebrained thing to do.” He hesitated. “Besides, I think Wash could be right.”

“About what?”

“About that medusa thing being like the mirror bugs. Drawn to strong magic,” he explained. “The way it took down the travel protection spells … well, it sounds awfully similar. If it is —” He shivered.

“If it is, the medusa will be following along after Mr. Anderson and Mr. Le Grise,” I said slowly.

“Speed travel takes a lot of power,” Lan said, nodding. “And it leaves a trail for at least a day. Even if the medusa can’t move very fast, it’s had plenty of time to get pointed in this direction.”

“And once it gets close enough, it’ll sense the settlement spells,” I finished. “I can see why you wouldn’t be keen on pumping a lot of extra power into them just now.”

“Of course, the settlement spells may keep it off, the way they’re supposed to,” Lan said. He didn’t sound any more convinced than I felt.

“At least there’s only one medusa,” I said after a minute.

“Probably,” Lan added.

I nodded very slowly. We were both in a very sober frame of mind when we left the longhouse to see what help we could be.