Jonathan Rogers - The Secret of the Swamp King

Tombro poled alongside a little island of floating moss, about six or eight strides across. “See won’t that little blow-up hold you,” he suggested. Aidan was alarmed by Tombro’s obvious doubt that the floating island could support his weight. He pictured himself sinking into the swamp’s dark waters and, before he could clamber back into the boat, being shredded by alligators fighting for his carcass. But he was eager to show that he had the gumption to make it in the Feechiefen, so he stood in the bow of the boat and began to step off onto the island.

“Ipp! Ipp!” warned Tombro. “Hands and knees! Hands and knees! Don’t punch through on the first step.”

Aidan crouched and reached one hand toward the moss. The island rocked crazily, sending out waves in circles that nearly tipped the boat. Aidan looked back doubtfully at Tombro, but Tombro waved him forward. “Get along,” he said. “Slow won’t work. Got to skitter up there like a muskrat.”

Aidan skittered, trying to think like a muskrat, not like a civilizer in the middle of the Feechiefen Swamp-not like a civilizer in danger of sinking to its murky bottom at any moment. The flexible ground beneath his hands and knees rolled and bucked as if it were trying to sling Aidan into the water. But it didn’t sink. Aidan crawled a step, then another, watching for any sign of water seeping through the ground beneath his fingers.

His progress was halted, however, by a hissing sound that he knew very well. When he looked up, his face was two feet away from the gaping pink mouth of an alligator. His first thought was to beat a hasty retreat, but the ground was too shaky for any quick movements. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t fight. The alligator gave another terrifying hiss and moved another slow step toward him. From where he crouched, head-on to the alligator, Aidan could see only mouth-big, pink tongue, widespread jaws, and two arcs of gleaming white teeth.

Behind him, Aidan heard Tombro chuckling. The end of Tombro’s push pole slid along the surface of the moss, past Aidan, to jab at the alligator. The powerful jaws snapped on the pole end, and then Aidan realized what Tombro was laughing at. The alligator, now that Aidan could see past its mouth, was only a small one, no more than four feet long.

“Scurry off, little gator,” Tombro wheedled. He poked again at the alligator. “Us big gators want your spot.” The alligator left the little island, though it did offer a few bad-natured hisses as it slid off the back edge.

Tombro crawled gingerly onto the island. It held both civilizer and feechie without sinking. It was almost dark by now, and before long Aidan and Tombro were on their backs waiting for sleep to come, awed by the brilliant stars of a Feechiefen night. Below the Hunter’s Belt, Aidan imagined he saw a new constellation: the Frog Orchid. Surely he was getting closer to it. Yes, the Feechiefen was daunting, but he had good and capable feechies at his side. Perhaps it wouldn’t be long before he could return triumphantly to Tambluff Castle-frog orchid in hand, a hard-won gift for a king who would never again have reason to doubt his loyalty.

Beside him, Tombro chuckled. “When you see them big jaws head-on, every gator looks big enough to swaller you whole, don’t he?”

“Yes,” answered Aidan, “he sure does.”

It was an hour past noon the next day when Tombro poled the flatboat to the landing at Scoggin Mound. It was a bustling village. Actually, it was more of a base camp than a village. Most of the feechies who lived there-even the wee-feechies-spent more time elsewhere than they did at Scoggin Mound. Still, it was a more permanent settlement than Aidan would have thought possible for feechiefolk. Huts with palm-thatched roofs dotted the little island, and a few feechies walked back and forth balancing clay pots full of water, berries, or fish caught from the surrounding swamp.

The first people to notice Tombro and Aidan were a crowd of wee-feechies dressed in possum and muskrat hides and kicking a pine cone around a bare patch of sand a few strides from the landing.

“Tombro! Tombro!” they shouted.

“Did you bring me a turtle?”

“Did you bring any sugarcane?”

Then one of the wee-feechies noticed Aidan. “Oooik!” she shouted. “That’s a big’un!”

“What happened to your hair, feller?” asked another wee-feechie. Aidan suddenly felt self-conscious of his bare neck. Even the wee-feechies wore their hair short in the front and long in the back.

“Craney-crow snapped it off, I reckon,” theorized one of the wee-feechies.

“It never did,” retorted one of the others. “You just skeered of craney-crows, Hendo. That’s the only reason you’d say such a turtle-brain thing.”

Hendo tackled his tormentor without even bothering to complete the rudeswap, and the two wee-feechies rolled around on the sand for awhile. But the others paid them little mind. They were more interested in the peculiar he-feechie Tombro had brought to their island. One of them elbowed his nearest neighbor and pointed at Aidan’s boots. “What happened to your feets, feller?”

“Oooik!” gasped another. “His toes is gone!”

A bold wee-feechie with golden curls and a muskrat dress marched over to Aidan and stomped on the top of his boot. She barely came up to his knees.

“Margu!” scolded Tombro. “You ain’t treating our visitor very friendly.”

“I ain’t trying to be friendly,” she snarled. “I don’t like him.”

“Me neither,” called one of the others.

“I don’t like him a bit.”

With that, all of the wee-feechies fell on Aidan, stomping his toes and kicking his boots. One of them bit his knee. Tombro shooed at them as if they were a pack of yippy dogs. “Scoot,” he commanded. “Clear out, you owdacious scapers!”

“I want to know why he’s so funny looking,” demanded one of the wee-feechies.

“Yeah, Tombro. How come this feller’s so ugly?”

“’Cause he can’t help it,” answered Tombro over the offended chatter of the wee-feechies. “’Cause he’s a civilizer.”

The little mob fell back a step, flabbergasted.

“But he’s a good civilizer,” Tombro quickly added, afraid the little ones would regroup for a second, more ferocious attack. “This here’s Pantherbane.” The weefeechies looked dubious. “You know about Pantherbane, don’t you?”

“My mama says there ain’t no good civilizers.”

“My mama says civilizers don’t like nothing but cutting down trees.”

“My daddy says they like sheep and horses better than they like the wild critters what belong on this island.”

Though Aidan had defeated a panther, five plume hunters, and even a seven-foot Pyrthen, the wee-feechies of Scoggin Mound were too much for him. He didn’t know how to answer their accusations against him. So he did something that, at the time, seemed an appropriately feechie thing to do. He hooked his fingers in his lips and pulled them wide to show all his teeth, crossed his eyes, stuck out his tongue, and roared like a bear. The weefeechies scattered and ran screaming toward the middle of the island, their long hair streaming behind them.

“Civilizer!” one of then shrieked.

“He tried to eat me!”

“A civilizer’s on the island!”

“He’s going to civilize us all!”

Tombro and Aidan roared with laughter and followed the little ones toward the island’s center where the village fire burned, the center of feechie life on Scoggin Mound.

They had just come into sight of the main hut circle when the pffffffft of a flying arrow burned through the air just inches from Aidan’s left ear. In the middle distance, a white-haired she-feechie was notching a second arrow to her bow. Tombro threw Aidan on the ground and stood in front of him, blocking him from the old woman’s arrow.