[Tags: Fiction, fanfic]
1
There’s a story in a lot of families about a nest of bees.
A man comes home from the field. He sees a nest of bees underground.
I have to do something about those bees, he thinks, but I’ll do it tonight. Right now I need to get back to work.
So he puts a stick in the hole and off he goes.
Before he can come home, his son, who’s anywhere from 2 to 15 years old, comes out of the house. The son finds the stick and starts to spin it around in the hole, work it up and down like a dash in a churn.
You know what happens. The bees pour out.
In the sad versions, the little boy dies. In comic tellings, he’s a lazy teenager who should have been working in the field with his father, and he gets his comeuppance for sure. In my version, the little boy, my cousin, was ill for a very long time, but he lived. Today he’s 6-foot-5 and allergic to bees.
2
Years after the warlord Tor married the elf princess Talis and sent her into battle — or maybe it happened the other way, maybe she fought the egret to win his approval and he married her when she got back —
— anyhow, if she ever tried to start an argument about anything, all those years later, he would tell her it was all her fault to start with. She dropped straight down onto his front porch from the heights of Mount Aerie. He didn’t summon her, and if he made her his hostage after the fact, that was her own fault. She just had to stir the bees.
What, that doesn’t make sense?
Well, then, I’ll tell you briefly that in those days the creatures the Men had awakened to serve them had mostly ganged up together. They’d driven the Men away (they told themselves) and then, Man-like, they prayed themselves up some gods and those gods told them to destroy all the echoes Men had left behind. Dryads, fairies, elves, gnomes — all the Man-shaped folk still walking around.
So the talking animals — the fierce animals, the wildcats and coyotes and herons, since those were the ones Men mostly bothered to talk to — were looking to eat up all the Men’s little ghosts. Their biggest god was named Maenad and she gave them lots of good advice. They had a head start, too. But some of the more lowly animals woke up. Toads and frogs and raccoons — animals that scrounge for flesh but just as likely might become a meal themselves.
And the big animals started to woo them. Join us, and you can have all the flesh you want to eat. We’ll feed you blood and magic.
What they meant was: Fight for us, and we might let you live to serve us, just like we served Men. Or at the very least, we’ll eat you last.
Talis, who was the elf king’s senior ranger, found that out and after some centuries of looking here and there and watching this sign and that sign she saw that some of the toads were hiding in the mud and stopping their ears up and just pretending to pay tribute to Maenad’s animals. (By then Maenad’s army included ogres and giants and a lot of hungry folk besides animals, but by then everyone just wanted to eat everyone or at least avoid being eaten, so those distinctions didn’t really matter any more).
And after a lot more years of hiding and spying she figured out who was in charge — a warlord the toads called only Tor. It wasn’t a toad name, that’s for sure. Toads have long, beautiful names. But Tor seemed to move from pond to pond, cave to cave, and wherever he stayed for a decade or two — that’s generations in toad years — those toads began to resist the Maenad and to protect those of their neighbors who chose to do the same thing. Other toads, water rats, ducks, moles, mice, blackbirds, even frogs.
So she started working on her father, the elf king, and on her uncle — his name was Nestor — who was really in charge, until she got them to send her along with an offer of peace to the toads.
3
Strangeness. Darkness after light. Smells of sweat, ale, coal smoke, rotten meat, mud, shoes. She had met toads many times over the years, camped with them, worked with them, but almost always out of doors, on her own ground, under the stars. Almost always only women. The men had their own dialect, their own smells.
The toads had been guarding their front step with the help of a little fire — they were sluggish and had trouble staying awake in winter. They moved slowly and fell right asleep if they got too cold.
She’d come down the ice face, she said. A descent no one had made before, for Mount Aerie, they said, touched the sky in winter.
Why that way? She didn’t have to explain. The most dangerous path is the safest — if you alone can travel it. Talis had a message of peace from the fairies for the warlord Tor, the Great Toad Under Mount Aerie. She didn’t want anyone to know where she was going, or hinder her along the way. And she didn’t want the toads — who had grown mighty suspicious of strangers lately and could spit poison — to know she was coming until she was right on their doorstep.
So in her mind the safest way was the loneliest way, and that was the untested cliff on the east face of Mount Aerie — the Toadfell, they called it. The cliff dropped a sheer mile to a high perch overlooking a great horseshoe pond. That perch is the front door to Mount Aerie Saltpeter Caves, where the warlord Tor had his stronghold.
4
Talis took four days to climb Mount Aerie, three to make the descent.
The way up, though not a real climb, is a grinding incline, more clambering than walking for the last miles. She took it easy, going 40 miles out of her way up onto the plateau and coming around from the west. The sun was bright, the wind keen. Out from the pine canopy of the lower slopes the short days spun like a kaleidoscope around her, sun moving from east-south-east to west-south-west, tracking the midwinter hours.
She slept long at night.
She judged the distance to the peak — mostly concealed in mist or behind the lower ridges — as carefully as she could, and measured her food every night, dividing it into equal portions to match the days she judged she had left.
On the descent to the toads’ porch, she planned to eat no food. She would leave everything she could behind — all but her climbing gear, the sealed diplomatic letter, and a canteen. She could not risk dropping a crumb. The loss of a single piton — singing like a bell against granite for hundreds of feet to the toads’ porch — would be the end of the quest.
She would climb by night. During the day, when the weak sun might wake some of the hibernating toads, she would place a couple of anchors, rest as best she could in harness, still, silent, gray on gray.
On the way up, she didn’t think about the descent. She had scouted it as well as she could, from multiple angles, venturing within range of Tor’s net of scouts several times, her eyes keen to note every detail. She had studied her notes and sketches, made her plans, and reviewed them in her mind dozens of times. There was no need to think them through again.
Instead, she planned what she would say to the toads.
She needed them not to kill her — not at the gate, which was the chief danger, and not at the order of Tor or whatever lieutenant he had left in charge. She would have to use very few words to make a very big impression very fast. If she those first few words took, there was a good chance someone might listen to her argument.
And she believed completely in that argument: that fairy folk and toad folk should abandon their long conflict. That they should be allies, for their own sakes and for the sake of better resisting the Maenad and her armies.
She studied the land as she went. She covered her tracks, though that was little work in this steep, bleak country. She trudged up, up — a long, gradual slog. She thought about how she first met toads, five hundred years ago.
A party of half a dozen women, toad-wives, had come out into the wild to gather grubworms. Two had waterproof baskets strapped to their backs, and in these baskets, tadpoles were swimming, lulled like Moses in his little boat.
Talis was a ranger, devoted to protecting the all who needed it in the lands she roamed — the modest folk who meant no harm to others most of all. That mandate typically meant gnomes and deer and bunny rabbits — pretty folk, not toads. But these women were defenseless, smaller than toad men, about knee-high to Talis, in fact, armed only with their spades and the short knives at their belts, burdened by children on their back or at their heels. And they were venturing further and further into the lands of big animals who would kill them on sight, like mice creeping into a barn.
She fell in love with them before she ever spoke with them. Before she learned their language and became their friend and protected them whenever she found them in need.
Their eyes were so bright, their words — what she could pick up — so pungent and practical, their small deeds of sustenance so bold.
She held them in her heart, those first toad friends who had died centuries ago (she who lived to see oak trees tower and fall could reckon her friends’ years on her fingers).
She thought: I cannot fail them.
She thought: I will succeed, because this is the path for which I have given my life.
Two futures went like sundogs before her: first, that she would make peace between elves and toads, and second, that this was the last thing she would do.
She did not think about dying, exactly. She only thought that she would climb the mountain, make the descent, find this Tor, whoever he was, say what she had to say, and that would be that.
5
Going down, she thought about nothing but the descent.
It was a hard, technical climb. Almost every second required all her strength and concentration. At the same time it was hellishly boring. And slow, so slow. Grind an anchor in (no hammering, no noise). Get a few feet further down. Place the second anchor; retrieve the first. Over and over.
The icy wind blew, the sun beat down.
Once she turned far over her right shoulder and saw the world, north to east to south, as a bird must see it from an aerie. A mist had risen lower down; a few hundred feet below her feet she could see nothing but a wheat-colored haze.
She took no food; she husbanded her water; and at the last she made her final sleep (though she did not sleep) a couple dozen feet above the toads’ front porch. She had a little screen of rock, not even a lip, where the rock face angled out over the wide mouth of Aerie Saltpeter Cave. She was so close she heard the guards breathing.
Then the sky lightened, she wriggled out of harness, leaving her last two bolts behind, and took the last few angled feet in a slither and dropped down on the front porch, behind the guards and facing the open door, as the sun rose behind her.
6
Now picture Tor on his throne of rough black marble. His skin is white, his black hair lank. He hears Talis’ message. He thinks: “Elves, what are elves? A bunch of silly talkers.”
Of course, he’d rather have allies than not. It was never the toads’ fault the elves found them repulsive.
Of course, he was always going to say yes.
Unless the Maenad had a better offer. Then, he would say no.
He could always say yes to both.
But then he looks upon Talis, who has spent several hundred years discerning his existence, tracking him from bog to pond. Who has persuaded the king of the elves and his formidable counselor to send an ambassador to a bunch of toads. Who has just performed the feat of the age to drop onto his front porch unexpectedly — all for the chance of saying a handful of words before the poison hits her in the eye.
Tor, who thinks only of his people, says to himself: “Here at last is a sword for my hand. It doesn’t matter whether I join the fairy folk or the Maenad. With this elf to fight for me, I will not lose. To have Talis, I must join the elves.”
You see what she did, don’t you?
Without thinking about herself at all, Talis made herself the more valuable than the peace she came to offer.
7
Speaking before that toad — who’d lived for centuries as his people flowered and died around him like mayflies — Talis thought: “I have achieved my quest.”
Then as her words echoed into silence she thought, “It was all a mistake.”
Tor licked his eyes and prepared to speak.