“It ain’t Aidan Errolson’s fault you ain’t home on the farm, Cordel,” said Luther. “That was King Darrow’s idea.”
“I don’t care whose idea it was,” said Hadley. “We got no business this side of the river. The thousand of us ain’t going to catch him, even if he’s still alive- which I doubt.”
“We couldn’t catch him in the Feechiefen even if there was a hundred thousand of us,” Cordel agreed. “Even if all hundred thousand of us actually wanted to catch him.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Luther asked. “You don’t want to catch him?”
“Aidan Errolson can go about his business, as far as I’m concerned,” said Cordel. “If I can just go about mine. I got hay in the field, and I got a baby needs dandling, and if King Darrow got a beef with Aidan Errolson, I wish he’d leave me out of it!”
“Seems to me,” said Earl, “a fellow plans to invade my country, burn my crops, carry off my children, he deserves what he gets. King Darrow’s right, we ought to be taking the fight to him before he overruns all of civilization with a crowd of stinking feechies.”
“Feechies!” Wat scoffed. “Feechies! This ain’t play nursery, Earl. Why you telling nursery stories?”
“What?” asked Earl. “You don’t believe the Feechiefen’s full of feechies?”
Wat snorted. “Only thing full of feechies is the minds of babies and half-wits. Feechies! It’s all hokeypokey. It’s all oogey-boogey.”
Dobro couldn’t possibly resist such an invitation. He sailed from his perch in the tree and landed on the bale of uniforms where Wat was sitting. Then he flipped over Wat’s head and landed on the ground in the middle of the soldiers. “Hokey-pokey!” he yelled. “Oogey-boogey!” He whirled around the civilizers like a dust devil, his arms gyrating, his long hair flapping behind him, roaring and yodeling. Then he jumped on Wat’s back and rode the poor civilizer until he tripped over a cypress knee and planted himself in the mud. The rest of the soldiers scattered into Tamside Forest.
Aidan and Percy, meanwhile, scrambled down the tree and climbed down the riverbank into a little rowboat that floated in the eddy. In a matter of seconds, Dobro sailed from the bank and into the boat in a single catlike leap.
Percy nearly had the mooring rope loose when Aidan yelled, “Wait!” and scrambled up the root tangle and disappeared over the bank again. He returned in no time and jumped back into the boat. “Here,” he said, handing each of his companions a blue tunic he pulled from the uniform bale. “We might need these.”
Percy rowed the boat a quarter league downstream, well beyond the last of the civilizers’ dying cooking fires, before rowing across to the north side, where they beached their craft on a sandbar.
“Home again, home again,” Percy said softly. He seemed genuinely relieved to be back on the civilizer side of the river, in spite of the danger.
Aidan’s feelings weren’t so straightforward. He was born and bred in civilizer country. He had spent fifteen of his eighteen years there, most of them happy. But the Feechiefen had begun to feel like home. It certainly felt like sanctuary.
Dobro, of course, had been to the civilizer side of the river before, but he had always stayed in the forests and swamps. Soon he would get his first taste of actual civilization.
Aidan stood in the river and squatted to wet himself all over. He grabbed a handful of sand and scoured his bare chest, back, legs, and face. A cloud of gray swamp mud-a feechie’s protective coating against bugs and sunburn-spread in the water around him and drifted downstream toward the Eastern Ocean.
“Come on, Dobro,” Aidan said. “It’s time for you to get cleaned up.”
Dobro took a step back, away from the water. “I don’t believe I will,” he said. “I done made it eighteen years without getting bathified, and I don’t reckon I’ll start now.”
“Come on, Dobro,” Aidan repeated. “You can’t get civilized if you’re covered in mud.”
“How’s that civilized,” Dobro asked, “to walk around all pink and shiny? Like a boiled crawfish? Naw, I’d sooner walk around nekkid.”
Percy joined in. “How do you figure to get a civilizer girl to marry you if you smell like swamp rot and look like a lizard?”
Dobro crossed his arms and looked just over Percy’s head with an air of exaggerated dignity. “Any gal don’t love me for my own self, she ain’t worthy of me.”
Aidan’s tone betrayed his exasperation. “Dobro, we don’t have many hours before sunup. The camp will be waking soon, and then they’ll start crossing the river into feechie country. There’s the rowboat. You’re welcome to it if you want to go home. But if you want to come with us, get over here and let me wash you off.”
Dobro walked slowly toward the water, holding his head down and looking at Aidan through his eyebrows. He put one toe in the water, testing it. This, the same Dobro who thought nothing of diving into the black, alligator- infested waters of the Feechiefen in pursuit of a muskrat. “Ooh!” he moaned. “It’s wet!”
Growing impatient, Aidan grabbed Dobro by the arm and dunked him in the water. “Help!” Dobro spluttered, flailing the water to a froth. “He’s drownin’ me!”
When Aidan began scouring Dobro’s muddy back with sand, the feechie wailed like a wounded animal. “Awww! Awww! He’s skinnin’ me alive! I’m ruint! Awww! Leave a little skin on me, you cannibal! You monster!”
“S-s-s-h-h-h!” Aidan hissed. “If you don’t get quiet, a thousand civilizers are going to be down here to watch you bathe.”
“Nine hundred and ninety-five,” Percy corrected.
Dobro finally got quiet. Dripping and sulking, he had the look of a cat forced to submit to a bath at the hands of a child. Aidan finished the job in short order. Dobro, it turned out, was shockingly white under all that mud; his skin had never been exposed directly to the sun, after all. He looked like a second moon, like a creature made to be camouflaged on a sandbar. Aidan wondered if he would ever get used to a Dobro who wasn’t gray skinned. Dobro, for his part, looked mournfully at his arms and legs, as if they were the limbs of a foreigner.
When baths were finished, Aidan fetched his side pouch from the sandbar and pulled out his prized possession, the steel hunting knife he had hidden there three years earlier. Out of respect for the feechies’ aversion to cold-shiny implements and weapons, he had never used it in the swamp; he had pulled it out only to clean and sharpen it every month or so. But now that he was back on the civilizer side of the river, he was glad to see it again. He handed the knife to Percy and pointed to the hair that draped down the back of his own neck. “Cut it off, Percy,” he said. “Make it look like civilizer hair.”
Dobro sobbed quietly while Percy performed the same operation on his hair-his “mane” as he-feechies liked to call it. When the Errolsons weren’t looking, Dobro picked up a matted hank of his hair and put it in his side pouch, a memento of the life he had left behind.
The three travelers all donned blue army tunics; Aidan and Dobro wore theirs over their snakeskin kilts. Only Percy’s disguise was halfway convincing, since Aidan and Dobro had neither leggings nor boots. Even by moonlight it was clear Dobro wouldn’t pass for a civilizer in the daylight. But he was a little less feechiefied, and for the time being that would have to do.
Leaving the sandbar, Percy, Aidan, and Dobro entered the forest and tree-walked upstream, with the river on their left. Some thirty feet above the ground, they traversed Last Camp, where nine hundred ninety-five soldiers slept their last few hours before stepping off the edge of civilization and into the unknown-or so they thought.
The cooking fires had all burned to ashes, and from such a height, Aidan, Dobro, and Percy could see very little. But as they passed over the center of Last Camp, Aidan saw the least glimmer of gold embroidery catch the moonlight; he knew it could only be the battle standard of King Darrow himself, the golden boar under which King Darrow led his troops. It almost made Aidan dizzy to think of his king down there, so far below him-and dreaming of what? Was he dreaming of Aidan’s destruction?
The three travelers hurried across the treetops, in only a few minutes coming to the Overland Trail that led to River Road. Alighting on the ground, they agreed to hide in the forest and sleep until daylight. They would need to be as rested and as clearheaded as possible when the army awoke in a couple of hours.
Both Percy and Dobro were breathing heavily and slowly mere seconds after lying on the moss bed they had found. But Aidan couldn’t sleep for thinking about the king who slept just a few hundred yards away. He quietly arose and shinned up a nearby tree. He swung and leaped from limb to limb until he was back at the center of Last Camp. He slunk to the lowest branch of the tree under which King Darrow slept. He could hear his king snoring.
