Far-bark
Chapter One. Two friends lament the drought that has afflicted their beloved forest, and fear that they may have to risk the dangers of the forbidden fields to reach a new homeland...
Note: Far-Bark is a fantasy tale about two friends who must scope out dangerous territory in order to find a new home for their drought-stricken tribe. I plan on releasing a chapter every Saturday over next two months. I hope you enjoy and thank you for your support! -Battle
“Why has the Northern stream gone dry, my brother, and left the starry lake undressed, dry as a bone with fish bodies splayed on its floor, rotting mouths open, dead eyes ogling the sky its pins of silver light?
“What wicked dam has blocked the fortunes of the tribe, droughted our lives, made the deep pool of blue shimmer into a muddy bog of undrinkable stench? What poor fate we suffer now, if no rain comes, and all our options are sated, that we’ll have to send a troop to the swamp, across the Field of Fiends, to stow our carts of water back to camp and maintain our slim society.”
So said Bear-kin, hunched against a spear on the rock overhanging those old depths he used to swim in as a pup, the bear skin hung on his ruddy cheeks, bunching his tumbles of black-brown hair, hunched like an angry hound before the call for a fox hunt across haunted barrows. And aside him the limber, buoyant Boleo-kin stroked an arrow shaft in his quiver with eyes upturned, not on the empty basin of the long-lost lake, but heavenward, staked on the newborn stars making their evening tents across the universe.
“Cheer alone can’t save your sour attitude, friend, but it might sup your fury yet; though it’s a state of horror we find ourselves in, you may find that an evening of forgetting might do you good. What? Do you think that sulking on the dead shores of our Northern Gemstone will eek the waters back; do you assume your longwinded prayers to the void will cause the headwaters to gush anew?
“No, my brother, come away for the hunt, and sing Orion’s song, why don’t you, and break from your laments for half a day. Spare me from another evening of long complaint of our impending deaths. Maybe we chance upon an ancient well from an old tribe. Escape this sad dichotomy. Admit the hope of a third way, a middle oasis in our own under-studied territory.”
The two hunters, neighbors since birth, a month removed in age, bronze and tawny by the boom of twenty years’ time, stood now on the rock and turned round to face the shadowy glades, the thick columns of pines and oaks, stocked full with thirsty beasts, some with tongue wagging in search of a thimble of water, and Bear-kin agreed to his friend’s honest request. Now that day was dipping away into dep blue repose, now that the forest nymphs were pulling down the shades of the tree-like bastions, now that the belt of Orion and the lumbering Bear and the many-gemmed Pleiades rippled ‘cross the sky, the lads stole into the undergrowth with bow and spear, trod down the subtle maze of paths only they knew, and cast themselves downward from a grazing clan of does, hid among a black crew of boulders. Summer swelter dropped like a cloak, brought globs of sweat upon their brows, brought rivers of it down their bare backs. Bear-kin, the stocky and immoveable, and Boleo-kin, the wiry and quick, became like human additions to that old collection of cracked rock, cloven by Bear-kin’s own grandfather, Root-mock, so long ago, in his defense against the white leopards from the Western buttes. The stars in their young multitude looked down through the branches of the forest as bearers of happier tidings.
“Old Briarbuck may just show his proud antlers tonight,” said Boleo-kin, “and provide us a merry chase through the glades, but we must beware the far swamps where he likes to nestle in his retreats.”
“The swamp,” said Bear-kin, “are as close as we may venture to the Field of Fiends, where the Vulture-men lurk and scavenge, but your address on the North Rock made me ponder that maybe the answer to the sad drought lies in range of that awful bog.”
“Beyond the bog is the field and the ensuring rolling moors and barrows, forbidden, not forgotten by eager youths of Far-bark, yet there have been more bets placed between young Stem-kin and Leaf-eye to venture night the swamp to get a glimpse of a Vulture-man, their evil red eyes and monstrous feathers black as tar, with nose-beaks built to break into flesh, render hearts lifeless, depose bodies to the deep, defile memory of the fallen! I don’t call them fools, though I should; because, young Bear-kin, my own curiosity bids me explore the southwestern pools of our own territory. Maybe it’s only fear of empty forestry that fuels our drought. Maybe a spring of royal foundations breaks forth from the old ducts of the underworld, ever replenishing the fortunate souls who find it, and that these bestial Vulture-men have rescinded their dominion to more distant lands.”
“To journey to the swamp and beyond apart from the council’s behest would be treasonous, brother, and we would have our tongues cut out in consequence,” said Bear-kin. “And all such chatter may now frighten the game. Let’s have silence, and gaze.”
A chill alien to the summer heat fell crassly on the men’s shoulders, made them shudder and bend against the rock, and peer with ever-increasing doubt into the black mode of night. There, a glaring moon beamed into the open grove, confiscated only in part tree branches, but enough to cast a pallor on the moving figure of a hunter nymph, nocturnal and fierce, lovelier than any princess. She fingered a silver bow string as she crept, arrow low to the ground, ivory shoulders like marble mounds, auburn hair an overflow down her ivy-vested back; Cayla-mar’s her name, usually so sure to stay hidden from men, lest they go mad with love, now she chances a sighting out in the open, now ducked low in the sledge of blue jagweed, poised for a kill.
And as though her godly presence beckoned life, out pranced in a dash of fury royal Briarbuck, trophied antlers swinging through the night, followed by a parade of lesser deerlings, swaying through the edge of the open grove to a thick patch of trees. Cayla-mar let an arrow fly, her shooting hand now crimped in expectation above her head, although the silver dart glanced off Briarbuck’s uppermost born and toppled into the grass.
“Ah!” she cried, and melted like the wind into the grove, phantom-like in hot pursuit of the deer, until turning into a wisp in the evening blue.
“Just our fortune, that the goddess would haunt our expedition,” said Bear-kin, spear now set on his knees, “and let slip that gallant Briarbuck through our fingers. A day will come when your arrow and my trusty lance will pierce the creature’s stalwart hide, mark my words, brother!”
“The animals will flee south, by the acrid swamps, to suck on the last moistures they can find, and Cayla-mar will follow, and when the bayou is a dry bone, no other option will the game have but to transfer their company across the Field of Fiends to the Springs of Hallow Frost, where the boulders have creases frothing with new water every day, and drips down through earthen levies to water the downy and misty moors. A weird land, alien to our forests, open as an extended hand, vulnerable like a wound in the side, but dripping, dripping, if reports are true, with the stuff of life.”
“The Field of Fiends, and the bestial nightmares which lurk there, would make the bravest Far-barker pale in terror, what with the legends of old that tell of their love for human fare, their devilish acts, their witchcraft, with legend has it they used on themselves in order to alter their innocence, become perverted forms of life—these tales would have Far-Bark solid in its choice to thirst and starve by the banks of the familiar than risk the hell of that open passage to more fertile lands.”
The perilous choice was only becoming clearer, horrid to consider. Either die at home or die abroad, but die they must, each death awful to endure, one beholden to passivity, the other tortuous agony.
“Council meeting on the morrow and they’ll mull the ways,” said Boleo-kin, turning his fair face once again to the heavens. “I hoped for distraction from the evil on our borders, closing in like a tide, but Cayla-mar steals our chance, makes us brood again on tough truths. Come. Let’s saunter back to the camp, dwell on the notion of being nomads in a parched country, pray to the Great Hunter that the deep ducts will bubble within peaceful boundaries, safe from any evil barrows, trodden by ancient demons.”
