neetha Napew - The Paths Of The Perambulator

An uncertain Jon-Tom unsnapped the pack, located the bottle in question, and handed it to its owner. The stopper was loose but still in place. Colin held it up to the fog-diffused light, examined it critically for a moment, then grunted and began searching the ground around them.

“We need some good-sized branches with the needles still on them.” Jon-Tom bristled at being ordered around by someone they’d just had to rescue, but he kept silent as he helped the koala and Mudge collect several healthy evergreen boughs.

“Now what? They’re hardly big enough to hide behind,”

he snapped.

There was a jauntiness to the koala’s manner and a twinkle in his eye that defused any real anger on Jon-Tom’s part. “That’s what you think, man.”

After sprinkling a few drops of the colorless liquid on each branch, he had Jon-Tom replace it in his knapsack. The powerful odor made Jon-Tom’s nostrils flare, even at a distance.

“Do like so,” Colin instructed them. Jon-Tom and Dormas brought up the rear, the three of them sweeping up their footsteps with the branches. Eventually they tossed the boughs aside.

Mudge’s sensitive nose was running, and he wiped at it continuously. “Blimey, mate, wot were in that bottle, anyway?”

“Intensely concentrated oil of eucalyptus,” Colin informed him. “If they do try to track us, they’ll sniff up a nice healthy whiff of that stuff and spend the rest of the day sneezing themselves silly.” He grinned first at Mudge, then up at Jon-Tom.

An interesting character, and that was an understatement, Jon-Tom told himself as he considered their stocky new companion. Not gruff exactly but not given to small talk, either. Straightforward and no-nonsense. He’d be able to find his own way back to civilization without much trouble.

As it turned out, however, that parting of the ways was not to take place for some time yet. As they paused in the shelter of a rake tree later that day, they discovered that they shared something in common with the koala besides a dislike of barbaric hospitality.

He was sitting against the thick, deeply scarred bole, chatting with Sorbl and Dormas. Clothahump was off by himself, meditating within his shell, visiting that sorcerous never-never land that only he could enter. It reminded Jon-Tom of hibernation. The wizard called it taking a metaphysical sighting. He was, he had explained on more than one such occasion, checking their position by judging his relationship to certain stars. When Jon-Tom had protested that it was absurd to imagine one small individual having a personal relationship with several incredibly distant suns, Clothahump had informed him that it depended upon the mental size of the individual in question, not his physical stature. As a result, Jon-Tom was half convinced that the turtle was bluffing him. But it did not make him feel any bigger.

He was sitting slightly away from the tree, using the usually concealed blade of his ramwood staff to whittle at a chunk of dead pine. Wood and grain fascinated him. Maybe he ought to give up the idea of being either a lawyer or a rock guitarist and settle for a contemplative life of carving. Not a very practical vocation to try to make a living at where he came from, he reflected. If he’d lived in greater Los Angeles, Gepetto would doubtless have been forced to go on welfare.

Footsteps sounded nearby. He looked up to see Mudge approaching. The otter wore his usual expression of concern.

“Wot say you, mate?”

Jon-Tom glanced skyward. They had long since climbed out of the fog, and the sky overhead was a brilliant, pristine blue. “Everything seems to be going pretty good, Mudge. We’re not being followed, we’ve managed to rescue a fellow traveler in need, and we haven’t suffered a perturbation in days.”

“Aye, seems as though our luck ‘as changed, wot? That’s just wot I were wonderin’ about.” As he spoke he kept glancing back toward the tree, to where Colin was laughing and joking with Sorbl and Donnas. “ ‘Asn’t the coincidence struck you?”

“To what coincidence do you refer?” He sighed. The otter’s capacity for paranoia was exceeded only by his capacity for drinking, eating, and wenching.

“You just think on it a minute, mate. I’ll spell it out for you. Don’t want you to think I’m jumpin’ to conclusions or nothin’.”

“What, you, jump to conclusions? Why would I ever think that?”

“Try an’ stifle the sarcasm a moment and look at this thing objectively, mate. ‘Ere we are trippin’ merrily along, lookin’ like ourselves for a change instead o’ a bunch o’ purple bugs or somethin’, when we ‘ear this chantin’ and follow it to find this Colin chap all bound up an’ in the process o’ bein’ smoked for a holiday roast by a bunch o’ savages. Wot does that suggest to you?”

“That we did our good deed for the day and that I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re getting at.”

“I’ll try an’ be more specific. We’ve no way of knowin’ for ‘ow long this Colin was a prisoner. Might’ve been for an hour, might maybe ‘ave been for a day. But just suppose ‘e’d been stuck down there for several days. Tis been several days exactly since the last bad perturbation. Maybe whoever or wotever ‘as imprisoned this ‘ere perambulator can’t use it on us anymore. Maybe we’re too close to ‘ome or somethin’. So wot might ‘e do, especially if ‘e’s gettin’ worried about us? Mightn’t ‘e look for some other, subtler way o’ stoppin’ us? Maybe by gettin’ us off our guard first?”

It didn’t take a two-hundred-year-old wizard to see what the otter was hinting at. “You’re reaching, Mudge. In the first place, there was no guarantee that we would have taken the risk of rescuing Colin. In the second, distance has no eifect on the perambulator’s perturbing effects. You can’t be too close to be affected, and you can’t get far enough away to escape it. And lastly, Colin just doesn’t seem the type an insane sorcerer would choose for a servant. He’s too independent. That’s not a put-on. It’s the soul of his personality.”

“Then it don’t strike you as suspicious that in this dangerous and cold northern land where we ain’t encountered so much as a decent restaurant for days, we suddenly ‘ave a run-in with someone whose species prefers much warmer country? Not to mention that ‘e’s runnin’ around ‘ere all by ‘is lonesome.”

“Of course, I’m curious as to what he’s doing up here. He’s probably just as curious about us.”

“Then why ain’t ‘e asked about it? And why ain’t he told us what ‘e’s doin’ “ere?”

“Maybe,” Jon-Tom suggested, “it’s none of our business.”

“Cor, don’t ‘and me that one, mate! We saved ‘im from the cook fire, if ‘e is as independent as you think. ‘E owes us an explanation.”

“What if he’s on some kind of private pilgrimage, something religious, say?”

“Wot, ‘im? The wanderin’ preacher o’ the Church o’ Leather and Studs? Now who’s reachin’, mate?”

“I think you’re way off base, Mudge. But if it’s troubling you that much, why don’t you ask him what he’s doing here?”

“Uh, well, you see, lad, you’re so much better versed in the diplomatic arts that I, I was kind o’ ‘opin’ that you’d put the question to ‘im.”

“I see. Because I’m more diplomatic, is that it?” The otter nodded. “Not because if he takes offense, it’ll be me he runs through with that saber of his?”

The otter looked outraged. “ ‘Ow could you think such a thing o’ me, mate?”

“I don’t know.” Jon-Tom put his whittling aside as he rose. “Repeated experience, maybe.”

Mudge sidled up close. “ ‘E’s not wearin’ that long sword just now, but we’d best keep an eye on that pack o’ ‘is.”