Authors: Jonathan Rogers

The Bark of the Bog Owl (18 page)

BOOK: The Bark of the Bog Owl

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Before long, Arliss had opened a tiny passage through the rubble, and on their bellies the boys squeezed through to the entry chamber—or what used to be the entry chamber. It was now an enormous crater. Its roof had been blown off by the exploding fire powder and was open to the morning sky.

Chapter Twenty-Seven
A Battle, A Rout

Aidan and Arliss stood on the crater floor, blinking against the intensity of the morning sun. Above them, a huge column of smoke hung in the sky. The smell of fire and destruction was heavy in the air. In the distance they could hear the thundering of horses’ hooves, the clash of steel on steel, the shouts and groans of men doing battle.

The boys picked their way to the crater’s edge and peered out, taking care to avoid notice. But there was little need of that. The camp was deserted. The crater was the center of a circle of utter destruction. The Pyrthens’ supply depot had been in this vicinity—all their food, the fodder for their horses and mules, their arms and armor. Overturned wagons, many of them still burning, lay scattered about. The ground was littered with smoking bits of twisted plate armor and shattered spears and battle-axes.

“Where is everybody?” whispered Arliss. Aidan pointed toward the west. The Pyrthens were fleeing
westward across the plain, toward Middenmarsh and their transport ships. The Corenwalder army was in hot pursuit.

Taking advantage of the chaos that followed the explosion in the Pyrthen camp, King Darrow had led a charge across the valley and put the invaders to flight. Now, astride his foaming warhorse, he thundered across the plain at the head of his army. This was the picture of King Darrow that Aidan carried in his heart. This was the Darrow whom Aidan had been taught to love and revere. The Corenwalders who followed him into battle remembered for the first time in a long time why this Darrow had been chosen to be their king, and they were ennobled by the very sight of him.

Both boys wanted badly to catch up to their army, but neither was in any shape to run across the plain. Across the way Aidan spotted a pack mule still tethered to a hitching post. “Come on,” he shouted to Arliss. The two boys clambered out of the crater and ran toward the skittish animal. They untied the lead rope and both climbed onto the mule’s bare back.

In the far distance, the leading edge of the Pyrthen army was melting into the forest of the Eechihoolee River bottom, which formed the western boundary of the Bonifay Plain. Aidan and Arliss urged their mount onward, but the poor mule was a beast of burden not a warhorse, and they never managed to go any faster than a trot. They were still a quarter-league away when the last of the Pyrthen soldiers disappeared into the tangled forest.

The Corenwalders didn’t follow the invaders into the woods. King Darrow halted his fighting men on the verge
of the forest. When Aidan and Arliss caught up, the king was arranging the soldiers into a long line. His answer to the Pyrthens’ terrified, disorganized flight would be a disciplined, methodical sweep through the forest.

But the army’s reformation was interrupted by a distant eruption of wild animal calls from the depths of the forest:

Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo … Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo.

Haaaaaaawwwwwweeeeeeee!

Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo … Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo.

Haaaaaaawwwwwweeeeeeee!

These peculiar sounds were immediately followed by thousands of panicked screams. And then, to the Corenwalders’ amazement, they were overrun by Pyrthens coming back out of the woods. The same soldiers who had run into the forest to escape the Corenwalders were now running headlong toward them. But this was a surrender not a counterattack.

Whatever was happening in the Eechihoolee Forest, the Pyrthens found it more terrifying than the battle on the plain. Their eyes were wild with panic, their faces ghostly white. They came out of the forest with their hands raised, to show that they had thrown down their weapons.

The Corenwalders could make little sense of the Pyrthens’ garbled accounts of what happened in the for
est. Some sort of mass hysteria had obviously befallen them, probably brought on by the shock of the flame powder explosion and the added stress of their flight across the plain. They babbled about “lizard men” and “gray people” and “tree alligators” that had attacked them from the treetops and from underwater when they reached the river in the middle of the forest. It was as if, in their hour of panic, their minds reverted to the fairy tales and scary stories that old people and nursemaids tell about the feechiefolk.

Aidan chuckled and spoke to himself: “Our fights is their fights, and their fights is our’n.”

“What’s that?” asked Arliss, who still sat behind him on the mule.

“Oh, nothing,” answered Aidan. “I was just remembering something a friend told me.”

Epilogue
Back at Longleaf

Summer was drawing to a close. In the orchard, the apples and pears were beginning to take shape. The sheep’s wool was just beginning to thicken. The meadow grass was turning yellow, exhausted from months of summer sun.

And Aidan Errolson, Corenwald’s deliverer, was back in the bottom pasture, tending his sheep. “What’s a fellow got to do to get respect around here?” he grumbled as he untangled a lamb from a blackberry bush. He deepened his voice in imitation of Bayard the Truthspeaker. “‘Live the life that unfolds before you.’ That’s easy for him to say. He and his goats go where they please. The only thing unfolding before me is more work.”

“Baaahhhh,” said the lamb.

“Oh, so you’re on their side, are you? Maybe you’d like to have a nice Pyrthen shepherd watching you. And a nice Pyrthen family in the manor house. And a nice Pyrthen tyrant living in Tambluff Castle.”

“Baaaahhhh!” said the lamb a little louder, for the blackberry thorns were pricking her.

“Well, next time there’s a giant threatening to enslave the whole country, maybe you’d like to go slay him. Because I’m through with it. I’m telling you, I’m—”
Aidan stopped himself. “Oh, good grief. I’m as bad as Bayard, talking to livestock.”

He went back to his work. When the lamb was free, Aidan heard the slow creak of wagon wheels coming from the next pasture. Watching the cart path, he saw two golden plumes come bobbing over the rise, attached to the gleaming bridles of two magnificent draft horses. They pulled a long, low wagon draped with blue silk embroidered with the golden boar.

Running toward the wagon, Aidan saw that the driver was Wendell, the royal gamekeeper. He also recognized the riders who came over the rise behind the wagon: his father Errol and King Darrow.

“Aidan, we’ve brought an old friend of yours,” said King Darrow. “We thought it was time he came home.”

“Climb on the driver’s bench with Wendell,” Errol directed his son, “and show him how to get to the river beside the indigo field.”

With Aidan’s help, Wendell maneuvered the big wagon to the riverbank. Errol and Darrow followed close behind. When everyone had dismounted, Wendell pulled the drape from the wagon. There, inside his heavy iron cage, was Samson the alligator. He had been snoozing under the drape, and he was furious at Wendell for disturbing him. He opened his terrible jaws and hissed menacingly. He thrashed his tail a couple of times and lunged at Aidan with a bellow that echoed over the river.

“Hey, that’s my boy!” cheered Aidan. “That’s my boy!” He clapped for Samson’s impressive demonstration. Here was Corenwald in all its primeval energy—the Corenwald of old, the Corenwald yet to be.

Samson almost looked his old self again. A few streaks of gold paint lingered in the crevices between his scales, but for the most part he looked just the way he did when Aidan first saw him.

“After the treaty feast,” said King Darrow, “the Pyrthens left in such a hurry that they didn’t bother to take home their …
ahem
… party favor.” The king looked almost sheepish as he gestured at Samson.

“But how did you get the paint off him?” Aidan asked.

Wendell laughed. “He did that by himself. I just turned him loose in the Tambluff moat, and he wallowed it off.”

Wendell opened the cage door and prodded the alligator’s tail with a pole. Samson slid out of the cage and into the water. For a few seconds he floated like a bumpy log, eyeing his captors. Then he disappeared under the water.

“He seems glad to be home,” remarked King Darrow, watching the alligator’s tail ripples dissipate across the water’s surface. Then he turned to Aidan. “And what about you, Aidan? Are you glad to be home?”

Aidan paused for a second or two before answering. “Yes, Your Majesty … I’m happy to be home. Of course I am.” But Aidan’s uncertain tone revealed more than his words.

“Aidan,” continued the king, “you are no shepherd boy. You have been a faithful and obedient son to your father. But now you belong to Corenwald.

“You believed in Corenwald—and in Corenwald’s God—when I, the king of Corenwald, didn’t. I had for
gotten many things, but you made me remember. I need to surround myself with men like you.”

Aidan looked from King Darrow to his father and back again.

“Aidan,” continued the king, “I want you to come live at Tambluff Castle. Join my son Steren in his study of the arts of government—law, diplomacy, warfare. Steren will be king someday, and he will need lieutenants and advisers.” Darrow put a hand on Aidan’s shoulder. “Aidan, you have the heart to serve Corenwald. Anyone who saw you on the Bonifay Plain knows that. I want to be sure you have the skills.”

This was more than Aidan could comprehend at first. “Y-your Majesty, you’re asking me to join your court?”

The king nodded his head. Aidan looked to his father.

“The king and I have discussed this at length,” said Errol, in answer to his son’s inquiring look. “I’ll miss you terribly, son, but King Darrow is right. Go to Tambluff with my blessing. It’s best for you. It’s best for Corenwald.”

Errol smiled at Aidan. “You’ve learned every lesson I’ve ever tried to teach you. But you have many more things to learn—things you can learn only at the court of Darrow.”

“Well, that settles it, doesn’t it?” said Aidan, smiling at his father and his king. “I’ll pack my trunk. On to Tambluff!”

About the Author

Jonathan Rogers calls The Wilderking Trilogy a fantasy adventure story told in an American accent. The wild places of the imaginary island of Corenwald bear more than a passing resemblance to the vine-tangled swamps and forests of his native Georgia. And in the voices of Corenwald’s inhabitants—feechie and civilizer alike—you can hear the echoes of American swampers and frontiersmen.

The Bark of the Bog Owl,
the first book of The Wilderking Trilogy, has already found a receptive audience among Rogers’s own six children. The Rogers clan lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Jonathan Rogers received his undergraduate degree from Furman University in South Carolina and holds a Ph.D. in seventeenth-century English literature from Vanderbilt University. Although he has contributed to other book projects in the past,
The Bark of the Bog Owl
is his first novel.

The Wilderking Trilogy