Jonathan Rogers - The Way of the Wilderking

“That’s gal’s a loud talker!” Dobro observed. “I can hear her all the way up here!”

“Not half as loud as you!” hissed a theatergoer behind him.

The ferry keeper’s daughter poured out her troubles in that opening speech. Her father had been too sick to operate the ferry, so he had missed two months of payments to the moneylender. Now the moneylender wanted a bag of gold before midnight, or he would take away the ferry keeper’s house, leaving the old man and his faithful daughter with nowhere to go.

Dobro was struck to the heart. He leaned across Sadie to whisper in Aidan’s ear. “Did you hear that gal? We got to help her.” He snatched Aidan’s side pouch and started digging around in it. “You still got that bag of gold you had when you bought them horses?”

Aidan grabbed his side pouch back. “Dobro, it’s just a play. She’s just acting. She’s not really in trouble.”

The actress was stretched out on the floor, convulsed with sobs. Dobro started crying too. “Look at her!” he said through his tears. “You gonna sit there and tell me that gal’s troubles ain’t real?” The look he gave Aidan dripped with disappointment and reproach. “Your heart is as cold as a cottonmouth, Aidan Errolson, and as black as a squirrel’s eye.”

The theater erupted with boos and hisses when the villain strode across the stage. The moneylender was a tall man in a black cape and a black hat, with black, curling mustaches. He stood over the crumpled, shuddering form of the ferry keeper’s daughter, his hands on his hips, his feet spread wide. He told the beautiful girl he would cancel her father’s debt if only she would marry him. She spat on the ground where he stood. Dobro loved her for it.

The ferry keeper’s daughter turned to run, but the villain caught her by the shoulders and turned her roughly around to face him.

For Dobro, that was the last straw. “I’ve seen enough of this!” he shrieked as he jumped onto the back of his chair. “Come on, boys, let’s get him!”

“Dobro, sit down,” Aidan ordered in a loud whisper.

“I ain’t settin’ down until after that moneylender’s whupped,” Dobro declared. “I don’t aim to watch that feller insult and abuse a sufferin’ innocent another minute.” He raised a fist in the air. “Who’s with me?”

To Dobro’s astonishment, nobody was with him. Everybody in the whole place seemed content to sit and watch the moneylender insult and abuse the poor ferry keeper’s daughter.

The play had come to a halt by now. The actors had stopped acting and were staring up into the darkness, trying to see what the commotion was. The musicians in the pit had stood up, too, and were peering toward the nasally voice shrilling thirty feet above their heads.

When Aidan realized what Dobro was about to do, he lunged to stop him. But he was a split second too late. Dobro jumped from the balcony and made a high, beautiful arc out over the patrons in the lower-level seats. At the top of his leap, he grabbed a thick curtain rope that looped down from the ceiling. He hurtled down toward the stage in a great swoop. “Haaa-wwwweeeeee!” he yodeled, as he let go of the rope and landed on all fours in front of the moneylender. The black-clad blackguard tried to run, but Dobro caught him by the cape and flung him to the floor. Then he rolled him, wrapping the cape around him like a black cocoon, and threw him into the orchestra pit. The xylophone shattered under him. Plink! Thunk! Crash!

Dobro turned to say something chivalrous to the ferry keeper’s daughter and was surprised to find her staring daggers at him. “How could you!” she snarled through her teeth. “You ruined my show.”

Dobro was even more surprised to see a dozen stagehands closing in from all sides. A cabbage, thrown from the audience, whizzed over his head, and an overripe tomato splatted against his shoulder blade.

Soon it was raining rotten vegetables. Dobro was dodging black squash and green sweet potatoes and trying to decide which of the stagehands to whip first when Aidan and Sadie flew into the circle of the stage lights on a second curtain rope and sent two of Dobro’s attackers sprawling with two perfectly placed kicks. The three of them shot through the gap before the remaining stagehands closed it, and Sadie led them through the maze of old scenery and props until they found an exit. The theater manager had already sent for the castle guards, who were still in the neighborhood searching for Aidan and Dobro.

Sadie pointed to the low roof of a cottage behind the theater. “That way,” she directed. Dobro scrambled up onto the thatch. Aidan climbed up behind him. They had crested the roof and were running down the slope of the other side before they realized Sadie hadn’t climbed up with them. Peeking over the ridge of the roof, they saw that she had run in the opposite direction. She was creating a diversion to aid their escape, bouncing paving stones off the helmets of King Darrow’s guards.

“Reckon we ought to help her?” Dobro gasped.

“I have a feeling Sadie can take care of herself,” Aidan said.

“That gal’s got gumption, don’t she?” Dobro marveled. “That gal’s got what it takes.”

The houses in that quarter of Tambluff were close together, and Aidan and Dobro had no trouble running rooftop to rooftop almost all the way to the south gate. The uproar in the city grew as word spread of the strangers who set off the ruckus in the Swan Theater. More torches were lit and more voices raised in shouts; more people wandered into the streets to see any excitement that might come their way.

Aidan and Dobro were a hundred strides from the south gate before they were noticed, running across the roof of the tailor’s shop. “There they are!” someone shouted, and a dozen voices joined the chorus. With concealment lost, Aidan knew speed was their only remaining hope. He and Dobro dropped to the ground and pelted the remaining distance as hard as they could go. “The gate!” someone bellowed behind them. “Southporter! Close the gate!”

Through the window of the gatehouse, they could see the short, round silhouette of Southporter heaving away at the wheel that lowered the portcullis. But the portcullis didn’t drop. Aidan smiled as he ran. He realized that Southporter was only going through the motions, only pretending to turn the wheel. The instant they were through the gate, it thundered down behind them.

“To the left!” Aidan could hear Southporter shouting to the guards patrolling outside the wall. “They’ve run into the thicket on the left!” Aidan knew what that meant. He and Dobro lurched to the right. And there, in a copse of low-limbed oak trees, they found their horses-fed, watered, rested, and ready to gallop down the Western Road and toward the safety of Sinking Canyons.

The Western Road cut through a series of gentle hills just east of the Bonifay Plain. There Aidan and Dobro met a farmer working in a great, deep, red-banked gully that opened onto the road. His son stood in the bed of a wagon drawn by a heavy farm horse. The son heaved sandbags down into the gully where his father stacked them into a knee-high wall that cut across the floor of the gully from one bank to the other.

“Hello,” Aidan called. He and Dobro dismounted from their horses. The sweat-slick farmer stopped, wiped his brow with the back of his wrist, and waved. He was glad for the break.

“What you doing?” Dobro asked the farmer.

“Trying to slow down this gully, hopefully save the road from washing out,” the farmer answered.

Dobro sighted up the gully. It was a hundred strides long and arrow straight, ten feet deep or more in most places, ten long strides across. Its red-clay banks dropped vertically down to a rocky floor.