Jonathan Rogers - The Secret of the Swamp King

Breakfast was dried duckweed pressed into a flattened mass. Carpo pulled it out of his side pouch and passed it around in palm-sized squares. It wasn’t so bad-certainly not the worst feechie food Aidan had ever had. They washed it down with swamp water scooped up in their helmets.

While his captors chewed their breakfast and watched the swamp birds come to life, Aidan thought it was as good a time as any to see if his feechiefriend status would carry any weight with these feechies. He raised his bound hands in a series of elaborate morning stretches, in the hope that either Carpo or Pickro would notice the feechiemark on his forearm. But they just gazed blankly across the water.

Aidan decided to use a more direct approach. After all, they might retie the gag at any time. He might as well talk while he could. “You might not have known it,” he said as nonchalantly as he could manage, “but I’m a feechiefriend.” Carpo just grunted a little. Pickro said nothing.

Aidan pressed his case. “You know, ‘His fights is our fights, and our fights is his’n.’” The silence was deafening. But Aidan kept things rolling. “My feechie name’s Pantherbane. You may have heard of me.”

“Sure we’ve heard of you,” said Pickro. It was the first time he had spoken directly to Aidan. “I reckon everybody in the swamp’s heard of Pantherbane.”

At last! thought Aidan. Now we’re getting somewhere.

“But Pantherbane’s pretty old news down at Bearhouse,” said Carpo. “Now that we got the Wilderking on the island, we got some new rules. Wilderking give us a whole new way of doing things.”

Aidan held out his arms again and nodded at the red alligator scar on his forearm. “Does this feechiemark mean nothing to you?”

“In Larbo’s band, we never put much stock in that kind of thing,” said Carpo. “Kind of did our own thing, if you know what I mean. When the Wilderking come to us last year, he was real interested in the feechiemark. He told us that if anybody with a feechiemark ever showed up in Feechiefen, we was supposed to bring him back to Bearhouse.”

Pickro picked up the story. “Word got around the swamp a few days ago that Pantherbane was going to be at a swamp council at Scoggin Mound. Bunch of us seen the chance to look in on the North Swamp boys and bring the Wilderking his feechiefriend all at the same time.”

“This Wilderking,” asked Aidan, “where did he come from?”

“Don’t know exactly,” answered Carpo. “Chief Larbo showed up one day with a civilizer, and he told us he was the Wilderking. We’d all heard about the Wilderking when we was wee-feechies-how a civilizer king would rule over the civilizers and the feechies too. But none of us believed it much anymore.”

“Larbo explained how it was all true, and how this here civilizer was the man hisself,” said Pickro.

“That made us feel good,” explained Carpo. “Larbo’s boys ain’t always been the best-loved feechies in the swamp, so we was tickled to know the Wilderking come to Bearhouse Island and our little band, to get his Wilderkingdom started.”

“He talked so high-flown and smart,” said Pickro. “I could listen to the Wilderking talk all day long.”

“He give us a whole new way to think about ourselves,” added Carpo, “and the swamp too.”

“It’s like the Wilderking says,” Pickro continued, “feechiefolks is good folks, with plenty of good qualities. Loyal, good fighters, we know the woods, got strong backs and a whole heap of energy. But most feechiefolks ain’t got the ambition that God gave a salamander.

“But the Wilderking says that with a little gumption and discipline and a commitment to poor grass, we can make something out of ourselves.”

Carpo thought about what Pickro had said. “I don’t think he said ‘poor grass.’”

“Sure he said ‘poor grass,’” said Pickro. “Wilderking says it all the time.”

“I don’t think ‘poor grass’ is right,” Carpo insisted.

“Commitment to progress?” suggested Aidan. “Was he saying commitment to progress?”

“Maybe that’s it,” conceded Pickro. “Anyway, it’s what feechiefolks need. Just look around you.” He waved his hand toward a stand of giant cypress. “Lot of folks’d call them trees. The Wilderking calls them natural race horses.” He leaned back and watched for the effect of his big words to sink in.

“Natural resources?” asked Aidan.

“Maybe that’s it,” said Pickro. “But, anyway, you cut a few of them trees down, and a civilizer can build a house out ’em. And here’s the best part: Civilizers will trade you gold for a tree!” Pickro cocked an eyebrow at Aidan, judging the impact this revelation might have on the civilizer.

“But what do feechiefolk need with gold?” asked Aidan.

Pickro and Carpo looked at each other for a moment. They had never thought of that before. Finally, Carpo offered a feeble answer: “Because it’s shiny! Ain’t you never seen gold before?”

A snowy egret glided overhead. Pickro aimed an imaginary crossbow at it and shot. “Plume birds is a natural race horse too. We send plumes to the civilizers, and they give us arrows, spears, knives-not the sorry stone kind like the other feechies use but the kind made out of cold-shiny.”

Aidan’s eyes narrowed. “What civilizers do you trade with?”

Pickro shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. The Wilderking knows them. I think some of them live across the ocean.”

Pyrthens, thought Aidan. I knew it.

Pickro shook his head and chuckled. “Can you believe anybody’d be so thickheaded to trade you cold-shiny for something as useless as a bird feather?”

Carpo spoke in a singsongy voice: The plumes go out, The shiny comes in. Larbo’s band Gonna rise again.

Carpo’s eyes gleamed like burnished steel. “And now the Wilderking’s got feechies making their own cold-shiny on Bearhouse Island.”

“What are you going to do with that much cold-shiny?” asked Aidan.

“We going to rule this swamp,” answered Carpo, rubbing his hands together. “That’s what we going to do with it.”

Carpo and Pickro seemed almost intoxicated by the idea of that much power. They couldn’t keep it a secret. “The other feechie bands is going to find out what the Bearhouse boys is made of,” said Pickro. He pounded his chest.

“They not gonna hold their head so high,” added Carpo.

“And then,” whispered Pickro, as if someone might overhear, “after the Wilderking makes Larbo the king of the Feechiefen, a whole army of feechies gonna march on the civilizers.”

“Pickro, I don’t think we’re supposed to be telling folks about that,” warned Carpo. “Especially not civilizers.”

“Who’s he going to tell?” asked Pickro. “He ain’t never gonna leave Bearhouse Island. Anyway,” he continued, “Wilderking says the civilizers is gone soft. Says they couldn’t stand up to a real feechie army.”

“You seen what we done to them foreign civilizers at the Eechihoolee,” said Carpo. “And that was without no training or cold-shiny. Wilderking says that was the powerfullest civilizer army in the world we whupped.”

“He told you true,” said Aidan, but he wasn’t thinking about the Eechihoolee. He was wondering whether he could stop the lunatic posing as the Wilderking.

A plume of thick black smoke billowed up over the southern horizon. “There it is!” whooped Carpo. “There’s Bearhouse.”

“What’s that fire?” Aidan asked.

“That fire,” said Pickro, “is poor grass.”

“Progress,” Aidan corrected.

Pickro nodded. “You sure got that right!”

They were four days’ poling from Scoggin Mound. And though Aidan’s stomach churned with dread at the thought of being handed over to Chief Larbo and the pretended Wilderking, he could take some consolation in the fact that at least he wouldn’t have to spend another day in the boat with these two yahoos. I don’t want to see another flatboat as long as I live, he thought. But he took back his wish when he considered the possibility that he actually might not live to see another flatboat.