When the Year is not Kept
and Otters will Show what they can do
Not long after their encounter with the Sig-neagle the fugitives found themselves awash in a spectacular failure from which escape was only the beginning of the struggle. Free of the Shedlands, and free of the bird for the time being, they had no choice but to discuss the obvious while hiding under an awning of moss that had somehow bridged the gap between two boulders, perhaps the loftiest goal moss ever set for itself, akin to humans walking on water.
"She will return," Hygenis assured her ward. "Eventually her madness will overpower her fear of her reflection, and she will have plenty of time to investigate getting her soul back when the mirror lies next to our cold bodies."
"We need not see her again," Loric reasoned, rubbing his arms, sore from waving the mirror like a battle flag. The strain had internally reopened his vassalwood bruises, old spoiled blood oozing into his waterways in a way felt most painfully, and spawning much dread like a poison reaching the mind.
"There are two safe stepping stones," the dentist agreed, completing his thoughts for him when she saw how much of his energy was occupied with recovery. "Plunderoe, during the next ten days or so, and Staircase, where she has no jurisdiction... but she will eventually test both of these boundaries the same way she will the mirror. We are her tormentors as long as we have the bottomless book, and a true beity's spirit does not break like the animals of old. They only die or lash out harder."
"My point is that we can cross the river safely before we need to think any further. The salmon are running, and thus all of the river's curve is the property of bears. No other creature may approach the fish or feed on them, including Tensilharp."
"Yes, but you see what we now face. How do we cross? From now on if we can see the river we can see bears. Allowing each other space to fish sets them up like sentries. There will be no blind spots, and each one has a nose as sharp as a hound even though they rarely use them to their fullest extent, seeing as they don't need to when they weigh more than low-name elephants and perform public executions by sitting on the convicted."
"You slipped us away from Grinjipan, without even taking your weapon out of her mouth, even with me bumbling by your side. I know we can make it. None of these bears know my scent but the Scion, and he will be occupied by his duties and the stink of the fish. Lady Butterfur never attends the run, despising travel as she does... We can make it."
"No you can't," a tiny voice insisted, the kind usually spawned from the fearful back of the mind, but this time it hung between their heads, from the mat of moss, by its fingers no bigger than a grain of rice. Ellapock shivered, the air already chilled from the river's spray, which they could all hear, almost feel like a tide lapping at their toes.
"We did not ask you," Hygenis said, "and you better hope that we can since you're coming with us. You still haven't made yourself useful."
"Because a pathetic naked rat is so vital to have by your side," the lower beity moaned, no longer concerned he was arguing against his own utility. "I can't swim by the way. Every puddle I've ever seen has been forded by steeds much more trusty than you two."
"You'll be in the leathers bag, judging when to hold your breath by the rising water." The marmoset lost his grip and fell, which would've resulted in injury if the dentist hadn't stuck out her hook for him to catch and cling to.
"Please, no," he begged with tears in his eyes and a snivel smeared all over the rest of his face. "I'll die!"
"Along with us... if you're saying your intention is for us to swim across," Loric said. Hygenis's stare leapt up on him, pouncing straight over the little monkey hanging between, and he immediately felt it more intensely than both the smart of his bruises and the trickling of the brooding toxins they had made from his substance. A rare level of frustration shone through her expression, dark and wrathful, not strong enough to break the Bloody Mouth but powerful enough to be its shadow.
"I must work within the parameters you provide," the older woman seethed. "We must keep the bottomless book alive, must keep us alive, must cross Blueguts during the Salmon Run... how would you have us do this except by swimming? A raft will be spotted. We could not possibly coerce or bribe a bear. The Salmon Run is their most sacred rite."
"Are there any other birds the size of the Sig-neagle about?" Loric asked, fishing more aggressively than any of the bears. "They would have no interest in fish they're not permitted to take, and could fly the three of us straight over."
"Offering them what in return?"
"A good story." Hygenis rolled her eyes.
"Loric, there is no story that good."
"All the faith you have in the Bloody Mouth I have in my own take on the mouth, all tongues and no teeth. I had the Scion himself eating out of the palm of my hand back in Compassleaf, and he wasn't eating fish."
"He certainly tells good lies," Ellapock huffed, "I don't know about stories."
"This conjecture is pointless," Hygenis dismissed, "as no such bird exists. These are the Sig-neagle's skies, and none wish to compete. Even birds half her size steer clear of Namstamp, and we'd have to find two of those."
"I guess the eagles aren't coming this time," the storyteller said with a jagged bitter laugh, to puzzled looks from his companions. "It's nothing, from a story I found in the bottomless book... curious as it contained beities before they even existed."
"Only the time between mass extinctions counts as time," Ellapock said. "What you humans did wasn't an age, wasn't history. It was all one event. A disaster best left forgotten."
"We're swimming then," Hygenis said to bring back their focus. She shook Ellapock off her hook, letting him scamper away to the safety of the leathers bag while she used its tip to draw a map in the dark gray mud under their feet. No detail was necessary, as the crescent she drew matched the simple shape of the river's bend.
With her metal point she guessed at their relative position inside the crescent: the rocky cold beaches of Otter's Whip. Then she poked several more spots, mentally constructing routes from what she knew of the places, as none of them had ever actually been. Most of the information came from the Scion's associates resting in Compassleaf, reveling in recollections of runs past.
Salmon were creatures of memory more than intellect or personality. The routes they took were bred into them, sometimes so specifically that they would beach themselves and die if their instincts recalled the previous generation's exact path through what was then a higher water level. As such there were places where they accumulated thinner and thicker, with greater numbers concentrated around landmarks that could more easily be imprinted into the liquid part of their souls that was passed in milt between parent and offspring.
Rocks of course, fallen trees if they were mountain-stumps and thus guaranteed to rot away about as slowly as the rocks, but these landmarks did not have to be detectable to the humans who now wished to understand their exact position. This would be their downfall, failing to understand as they did that a landmark could be wholly chemical, a tendency of a scent to still be present in the same place across fifty seasons.
As their knowledge stood they tried to create a route through the emptiest space, which they believed would be least remembered by the fish and thus less populated by the schools and the bears feasting upon them. With it came the problem of how they would approach the shore without any cover, but that was solved by the accomplished moss overhead, all too willing to go on another adventure now that it had conquered its rocky homelands.
It lifted like a blanket, resisting their pluck less than a sea star, and allowed itself to be wrapped about their entire party and used as camouflage. With it they scurried from position to position until they peeked over a ledge and finally saw the full life of Plunderoe.
The river wore mounds of dead salmon as garters. In these pungent heaps could be seen some fish that were not quite dead, still managing to swim some ways through the liquefying flesh of their kin, even with a few fin strokes being ones of luck that dropped them out of the mass and back into the water.
All of them, come from different oceanic shoals that met and mingled in the brackish mouth, were of the same species, recognizable by depressed green heads curving into odd bulbous snouts tipped with snaggleteeth, like the roots of a startled onion ripped straight from the earth.
Burnt pink traveled the length of their bodies, dappled here and there with brown like they'd been poked with flaming sticks. All of their eyes were gold, but dull and steady for they had already fallen into disuse with memory and scent guiding them. With nothing left to see in their lives, each fish acted as little more than a seed with a speeding tail, all understanding limited to the precise location where they could be planted.
High names were far from unattainable for fish, but those that had them spawned alone, mostly in the ocean depths, refusing to let their natural urges drive them to waters that would signal their bodies to begin a natural living decay. Every fish they saw before them was a low name, and it was the first thing to decay off them, followed by shimmering scales, abandoned eyes, threadbare gills, and then the very flesh from their sides until they were nothing but coated skeletons still paddling forward, capable of releasing milt and eggs all the way up until a most horrific point where they resembled storm-twisted weather vanes of cartilage.
Few did doubt that the bears, though for obviously selfish reasons, were doing the fish an individual service if not a service to their kind. To be snapped up and swallowed down in three bites was far less traumatic than feeling mind and body crumble away piece by piece, yet having the soul unable to depart until the very end, forced to hop back to the spine by instinct even when it wished to remain in the stomach, in the heart, in the mind, in the stem of the mind, in the...
Trapped between these two fates, the fish rejoiced in them both as much as nature allowed, dying in desperate stabs at glee that could only truly exist in the ocean both when they released their spawning materials and when an angelic bear gave them a new warmer home. Some grand pendulum determined which one, and Loric and Hygenis had to cross the river Plunderoe without it ever crossing their path, lest they be discovered and treated much worse than the fish.
At first they thought they'd crept as close to an ideal spot as they would ever find. The walls of the dead, bubbling up with pink foam, glistening with exposed fillets falling off the bone, untouched by the invisible decomposers until the bears moved on, were piled so high that the humans could sneak up to them without giving any bears in the river an angle to witness them.
And of such bears there were but three at this early morning hour. Many more were likely sleeping off the previous day's gorging in the trees, these early risers being smaller, of lower rank, and needing to feed before they were bullied away during the best hours. All manner of bears were admitted for participation, so long as they had a higher name and hailed from a land touching the river.
The three patrolling their escape route were composed of two blacks and a brass, the latter bearing some resemblance to a hypothetical rambunctious and underfed nephew of the Lady Butterfur. Both humans could see these were young bears, and inexperienced too, chasing after specific fish rather than dipping their jaws in the flow and waiting for one to swim in.
Ellapock begged them one last time to reconsider, and Hygenis responded by grabbing the naked little beast and shoving him into the leathers bag, cinching it as tightly as she could before tying its drawstring around the middle of her vassal stick.
"Are you ready?" she asked Loric, hoping he'd learned enough to understand why they couldn't delay. The storyteller nodded, having also learned there would certainly be a technique for this situation somewhere in Hygenis's training, perhaps found staring down a beity's gullet. "Put your mirror between your back and your bag to hold it in place. We enter like pushed canoes, horizontally, and stay that way, backs to the bottom, faces up.
This way our lips can break the surface to breathe. Hold your vassal stick to your chest; the wood is strongly buoyant. Kick with your legs, but do not splash, all while letting the current do most of the work. Let's go."
She barely waited for him to finish arranging his supplies, throwing the moss cloak over her head and running downhill as much as bent knees and tiptoe would allow. Loric grabbed the back of it in time to duck under and follow. Dark sand became rounded rocks underfoot, and those became slick with fish mucus. The scent of their death already coated his insides, but once they pressed themselves against the side of a wall of fish even his thoughts couldn't escape it.
With the creatures too small to see made skittish by the bears' absolute dominion, the smell was not tainted by rot. It filled his throat and wriggled down into his stomach as readily as one of the fate-hypnotized fish themselves would have. The empty cavity within him thrashed in protest, ordering him to take one of the slabs of pink-orange meat and swallow it down.
But he couldn't. Nor could Hygenis. If a bite from an animalcule was too gross an overreach for the bears to tolerate, so too was a nip from Ellapock, and even more egregious was a man's mouthful. Double-thick blood ran most strongly at times such as these, where great beasts gathered and broke a bread of bodies within the only events that could be called traditions of nature.
They would know. Young novice bears would know as immediately as any others if Loric so much as licked the fish. Every bite belonged to the Scion, and every bear that bit had his explicit invitation and permission. If so much as a dragonfly chewed his treasure every bear within a day-march would collapse on their exact position and rend them thumb from thumb and then limb from limb, not even eating the remains to send the message that they did not rise to the level of a doomed and dimmed fish.
The dentist dared to touch it, but only out of necessity, and doing so was technically safe as long as she didn't lick her fingers immediately afterward. Using her forearm she slowly pushed a hole in the wall, swirled to expand it enough that when she pulled it back they could look through and see their path.
The pair of black bears was distracted, tossing the same fish to each other back and forth, watching as it tried to reorient itself to its destined direction midair. That was upstream, and downstream was only the brass bear, head somewhere under the surface, where it might stay for quite some time while they ferreted out the perfect morsel.
"Now," was all Hygenis said, casting off the moss and scrambling over the mound, dead fish cascading down, some realizing they weren't quite as dead as they thought. Such a flawless vaulting climb, utilizing the vassal stick rather than encumbered by it, was beyond Loric's skill set, so he improvised by tossing his through the viewing-tube she'd pressed into the fish to free up his hands.
Once he was over the hump and back on the rocks he reached back to pull it through, but even taking that moment was enough for Hygenis to pull ahead and reach the water. Recent acquisition of the stick didn't stop the dentist from being a master of it, using it once again to pierce the river silently and make way for her bulkier body to do the same.
Loric reached the edge, saw her as nothing more than a floating stick, one whose perfect shape and intricate carving would hopefully escape the notice of the bears. With a deep breath, the kind he used to start a protagonist's final monologue, the storyteller dropped to all fours like a frog and then slid in on his stomach, spinning as soon as there was nothing under him.
An intense chill penetrated his every pore, the current tugging on him insistently, almost solidly, perhaps because of a setting gelatin from the oozing fish fat. The water treated him just as it did the fish, grouping him up with tens of them that paid him no mind. A gentle hand pushed those ahead out of the way so he could watch Hygenis's progress and follow it.
Her changes in direction were subtle, likely implemented with the slightest turns of the vassal stick, and again Loric found himself having to improvise. There was a submerged rock nearby, so he pulled the stick down and struck it to push away and course correct, realizing a second too late that the sound of the impact was both distinct and much louder than he'd anticipated.
If not for the single-minded drive of the fish they may have turned and stared, the shame of which he was thankfully spared, but not the withering glare Hygenis spun in the water just to shoot him, all without slowing down of course. He assumed that meant the brass bear wasn't alerted, and they should continue.
After a quick breath, nothing but his lips feeling the air, Loric redoubled his efforts to stay on course. Teeming fish made it impossible to tell if they'd crossed the halfway point yet, but it felt like halfway by Loric's estimation.
An estimation that was correct, but that fell on a path undetectable to them. A place just upstream, nestled in a bare patch between the black and gray stones, occasionally bubbled. Those bubbles were belches of a gas from deep in the earth, a pocket left over from the blessed moles' initial efforts to banish the world's cleverwood infection to the molten core.
Sometimes piles of it became lost, too encased in stone to detect, and began a process of decay. Many toxic things were in different varietals of cleverwood, and some of them gave off the gases that now slowly streamed out of the bed of Plunderoe.
The bubbles were deeply unpleasant to the salmon, enough so to give them thoughts at a time where they would very much prefer not to have them, with the equipment needed to have them pleasantly already putrefying within their skulls. So the schools veered away, and over the generations they learned to veer out of instinct rather than the painful reminiscence that used to be thought.
And so they veered again, in the reign of Krakodusus the thundercoat, despite that landmark not expressing itself at that time. With no encumbrance to force it, the flow of salmon bottlenecked to an outrageous density, fish forced out of the water by a mat of their brothers and sisters underneath.
The fugitives had their attention turned to the paws and sweeping snout of the brass bear, and their ears underwater, so they had no clue of the tidal wave of salmon until it devoured them and rapidly dragged them off their escape route.
Loric tumbled end over end, nothing in sight but slapping fish tails and gaping thorny mouths. The mirror struck the riverbed, then the vassal stick, each impact threatening to rip one of his weapons away and donate it to the river. A tail to the face was the greatest risk of him losing his grip, and when he received one he finally perceived the size of the fish, with some of them nearly twice the mass of his torso, meaning he couldn't possibly push them aside even if they weren't reinforced by an avalanche of others.
According to Hygenis's map, they had approached Plunderoe at the top of the crescent that was Blueguts, with the Scion and his coterie most likely feeding in the bend where the river was widest. The flood of fish was taking them there, how expediently Loric had no way of calculating. Partly that was because he was out of the fuel he used for calculation, and for everything else: air.
His mouth opened involuntarily, and he was surprised to find a gulp of what he needed rather than water. So torrential was the surge of fish that they'd lifted themselves and their unwilling passengers out of the water completely, but not for long, Loric was forced to accept when his third breath had to be spat back up.
Overwhelmed, confused, panicking, Loric's shifting contact with the fish covered him in scales, decoration bartered in exchange for his ability to tell whether or not he was submerged. If it kept up much longer he would've considered biting one of the animals, if only to get a bear to locate him and rip him free for a few dignified breaths before his execution.
Not once did he run into Hygenis, or so he thought, but there was also a question of whether or not he could notice one of the hides buffeting him being briefly human. There was no way the dentist could have a strategy to get them out of this; it was pure chaos. Now their path squirmed like a centipede caught by the tail, and the Wild was choosing their new direction with no regard for their survival.
But before they could be spilled onto that new path, beities intervened. Loric saw a flash of fur, assumed a bear had thrown itself into the torrent to gorge and that it would be far behind him in seconds. He kept seeing it. And it changed color. Sometimes brown, sometimes gray, sometimes white or black. All these shades fit snugly in the musky rainbow of bear shades, but even in the chaos of hog-sized salmon slapping him in the face Loric took note of characteristics that didn't match that most feared outcome.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
The fur was oilier than a bear's, and it wasn't the grime sloughing off the fish. It was also tighter, denser, bowed close to the skin. Its owner was on the tip of his tongue, but before he could think it the beity was at the tip of his vassal stick, grabbing it in two large but stubby paws and pulling him across the flow of the fish. The storyteller could feel that he was definitely underwater once more, and what's more could see where they were and were going.
Bear paws. Of the aged, experienced, lordly variety. Plodding in and out of the river as pillars of obstacle. The creature that had rescued Loric from the swarming school moved with ten times the grace of Hygenis, weaving in and out of the larger beities' legs, somehow going unnoticed, implying an awareness of where each and every bear was looking despite the choppy surface distorting such things.
The storyteller knew he was clasped in the paws of a fellow intruder, and he counted himself fortunate that the bears didn't even allow birds to patrol overhead for them during the Salmon Run. If they had a scouting hawk or eagle would've seen the sleek dark shapes slithering around the forms of the bears, never breaking the surface lest one whiff of their fur reach a subsidiary snout of the Scion.
They avoided detection despite gliding through the densest feeding ground. Doubtless it was that somewhere in the mix was Krakodosus himself, and Loric briefly thought he felt a tense crackle in the water like minute doses of his lightning escaping between strands of fur. If he did it wasn't sufficient to worry his captor, who never once slowed through the thick of the paws, not even to give the human a chance to breathe.
So much so that Loric's vision was a smear of brown, yellow, and black by the time they reached a shore hidden from prying eyes. His body was prepared to drown, about to open the ceremonial spasmodic dance of it, when he was, in one fluid motion, rolled down the length of the beity's body and flicked off the tail.
The force used was not clear until he broke the surface and kept rising, higher than an elephant shoulder, arcing over a bank boulder. At least slightly unkind his rescuer was, for there was no bed of fronds or straw to catch him, just a nest of unwelcoming stones. Fully aware that crossing his arms and tucking in his legs would do little good, there was no right way to land in his position, he did it anyway.
Impact opened old bruises under the skin, released the toxic blood he couldn't believe was still sequestered in pockets within him, not unlike the ageless cleverwood deposit that got him there in the first place, leaving him stunned and gasping, staring up at a gray sunless sky. A different heavenly body appeared, in the form of Hygenis tossed in much the same manner as himself.
He took some small solace in their shared helplessness, for if she couldn't do anything about it how could he? It was short-lived however, as the dentist managed to free her hook and bury it in the large rock she now slid down, grinding to a halt on its side and getting her feet under her, hanging off it as if she descended a ledge via rope.
Quickly she dropped down and rushed to his side, helping him into a sitting position, but not urging him to run. Whatever had taken them from the river was either inescapable or amenable enough to negotiation by her measure. It didn't take long for them to show themselves, shooting out of the chilly water as spears of fur, then bounding about between the peaks of the rocks like weasels on hot coals.
All the while they snickered to themselves, saving introductions for after they basked in the triumph of another undetected run through Plunderoe. Loric could fill out part of those introductions himself, for it wasn't at all surprising to find a pocket of Otter's Whip bursting with otters.
Numbering five, each was as big as a saltwater crocodile of the old world, an important distinction considering that some crocodilians in the age of beities, upon entering dormant sunbathing phases, often had the word 'beach' tacked onto their names as a descriptor rather than a title.
River otters all, they were devoid of the white fur upon their heads that marked them oceanic, though one did bear a white patch upon the chest. The rest were dark brown, with small sharp ears and big flat noses indistinguishable from the riverbed rocks. They took up positions atop the largest stones, lording over them on their hind legs like scouting meerkats.
"What 'ave we 'ere?" the obvious ringleader asked in a mind-voice like charcoal long stashed under a frozen lake. He was the clear eldest thanks to the white patch, the gray about his muzzle, and the nicks in his paw webbing that were equally of fierce battles and learning experiences with crayfish too large to eat without getting partially eaten in return.
"We knows!" another one said, paw raised as if this was a classroom. The only other male, his eagerness marked him the youngest, though it also could have been stupidity.
"Everybody knows," one of the females, with a mane almost as thick as a sea lion's, chastised him. "Tagalon's just being rhetorical 'e is. I know this pair is on the run." She flicked her head at the two other females in turn. "Myrtelon knows they've fled the thundercoat 'isself; Inkolon knows that the scrawny one's a storyteller and the other's a dentist." She hopped down and prowled a circle around the humans like a lioness while they put their backs together and raised weapons. "And 'opefully both of them are smart enough to know their own names are Loric Shelvtale and 'Ygenis Fixtooth."
"If you know the story as well as I know mine, why go to the trouble of saving us from a grizzly fate?" Loric asked, having raised the true weapon of his wit with more vigor than his vassal stick.
"Grizzly! 'Ah!" the one called Inkolon wheezed with laughter, until the hairy one shot her a quieting glare. "Oh lighten up 'Edfulon. It's a bear joke; nothing's funnier than a bear joke."
"'Ey, 'ow many bears does it take to catch some bait?" the young one interjected.
"Not now Spiltilon," Tagalon said, much more gentle with him than the female had been; perhaps Spiltilon was a blood relative. Eager to deepen their familiarity with each other, hoping it would make violence all the more difficult for them, Loric leapt on the thread.
"I see you have jokes of your own. Passed down through the family? Those are rich wells, and we storytellers often plumb them. Tell me, young Spiltilon, how many bears does it take to catch bait?" The eager otter looked to his elder for permission, mouth hanging open. Tagalon granted it with a sigh and a tilt of his head, bunching the fur and skin under his neck.
"Three! One to catch it, one to eat it when they can't catch anything with it, and one to catch some more!" Spiltilon's laughter rolled him off the boulder and onto his back, tapered tail whipping back and forth. Even the orneriest of the others chuckled, with Loric guessing it was merely a habit, like the fish sticking to their memory lanes, for the joke was very weak by his standards. All the same, he laughed uproariously, slapping his knee and withholding a wince when one of his bruises reminded him it was living there and could not be evicted before its time.
He encouraged Hygenis to do the same by jabbing her side with his elbow, but the best she could muster was an acknowledging hum and a nod. If she'd ever had a reservoir of mirth in her it was likely now a powder hanging in a pouch by a silken thread in the den of Misugot.
"I'll have to remember that one, assuming of course you'd allow me the use of it," Loric said, wiping away a tear that didn't have to be forced thanks to his biting bruises.
"You just tell them that we sent it," Myrtelon said, revealing herself as the most threatening of the romp of otters.
"We send the joke with our best, and keep you with our worst," Tagalon said with a sneer, finally deigning to answer the storyteller's question. "'Is 'ighness the Scion wants you, and you were about to blunder right into 'is fat backside, so we stopped it. We love it when 'e doesn't get what 'e wants."
"The river knows 'e gets it most of the time," Hedfulon added.
"But what were you doing in the water at all?" Loric asked with a sharper point than Hygenis's hook. "Nothing is permitted in there during the Salmon Run but the bears themselves. You were in just as much peril as we were."
"Not a single 'air on our bodies touched a bear," Myrtelon asserted with narrow eyes, picking her teeth with a claw nonchalantly. Loric felt like the gesture was meant to imply that she'd been eating, not just anything, but the finned and snaggletoothed property of the Scion. He called the bluff, hoping it was strategic rather than foolish.
"So you swim among them... because you can get away with it? You certainly don't do it to eat the fish. So much as one bite and you'd all be trampled flat... from sheer numbers of course," he added to soften the statement.
"We swim these waters because they belong to our kind," Tagalon growled, showing an ivory canine under a curled lip, a tooth that impressed Hygenis and more than implied that the creatures had some dental hygiene habits that were very uncommon in the wilds, further indicating their intellects were a cut above as well. "Bears traipsing through it every year makes no difference. We will not be put out."
"In Compassleaf you're known to be on these shores. We do call it Otter's Whip, but Plunderoe is the domain of bears when the season calls them."
"Tell me, in dry little Compassleaf, what do they call the shore on the other side of the river?"
"It is Otter's Whip as well."
"So it's of the otter on one side, and of the otter on the other, but not down the middle? Places aren't split in 'alf. If it's not connected it's not the same place. Imagine calling two lakes the same name. The middle is Otter's whip too."
"I see your point," Loric said truthfully. "In any case, thank you for saving us." The humans bowed, but Hygenis did not lower her hook or her eyes. "We'll have to find some other opportunity to cross, but it must be soon."
"You 'aven't been listening," Inkolon said, now flat on her stomach upon the rock, front limbs dangling. This was boring her. "We can't let the bears 'ave you, so you can't cross. Go somewhere else. South, to Bagogreen, where it's too warm for these lard-pots."
"We're not going south, we're going east."
"And what's east?" Tagalon asked, fishing for something other than fish. The prey information within Loric darted out of the way.
"That's strictly our bus-"
"Baughgh!" A spluttering Ellapock finally squeezed himself through the cinching of the leathers bag, tumbling wetly down Hygenis's arm and then her staff, only barely managing to hang on when she turned the hook so he could rest in the curve of the blade like a hammock. "These are my slaves! I am Ellapock of Weaviranch and I demand you let us through!"
"They already know who we are," the dentist informed the shivering naked marmoset.
"Well excuse me, it was very hard to hear in there... and also to breathe." He found some more water to spit up.
"There's something you don't see everyday," Inkolon said.
"Now see here-" Ellapock started to protest, but Hygenis cut him off.
"Ellapock, meet Tagalon, Hedfulon, Inkolon, Myrtelon, and Spiltilon." The dentist punched the final syllable on each name to make her point, but the marmoset didn't need her to. He was fully aware what constituted a higher name, for despite his position as an owner of humans he was still of a lower one, and trying to vaunt himself above them would result in him disappearing down one of their throats.
It did raise several questions however, the beleaguered trio collectively recognized. Here were five creatures of high name, but living in the wilderness, regularly cast aside by those of greater girth and influence, engaging in surreptitious disobedience of the order of the Wild Trinity. Bluntly, they were dealing with scoundrels. A band of bandits perhaps.
"With names like those you must have slaves of your own," Ellapock said, still trying to make himself useful for reasons that escaped his human captors. "You don't need to bother with us."
"Otters keep no slaves," Myrtelon claimed, "as otters need no slaves."
"We're self-sufficient," Spiltilon bubbled, head bobbing like a trained seal awaiting its reward for remembering a word. Loric knew that Myrtelon wasn't being entirely truthful. Perhaps these otters never did own his kind, but there certainly were otters that did. If he was at all charitable in his assessment it was because the creatures, often too rambunctious for city life, were one of the few known tool users aside from mankind.
They were not averse to taking up natural hand-axes and hand-hammers of stone, using their floating stomachs as tables to steady shellfish before attacking them with the items to get at the meaty innard treasure. The storyteller looked around, found some evidence of such behavior in the form of shattered and scattered shells. This was their home, meaning there was a burrow nearby, likely stolen from another animal and repurposed.
"You keep no slaves and need nothing from us, so let us pass," Hygenis challenged.
"No," Tagalon said with finality. "The Scion will not 'ave 'is prize."
"Is there nothing we can offer?" Loric hastily asked.
"We've no need of metal or vassalwood, pepper-leathers or marmoset snacks, even though you went to the trouble of plucking it. And we don't need an appointment with 'er either." Tagalon's snarling grin showed off his perfect teeth as proof. Self-sufficient indeed, even to the point that they could identify the leathers in the bag from their scent in the water alone.
"And what about a story?" the human confidently countered.
"Once upon a time there was a romp of perfect otters," Myrtelon sniped, sliding down her boulder and waddling menacingly close to Loric's face. "They were forbidden from swimming in their own 'omes, but they did so anyway, and they did so perfectly. No bear was ever the wiser, as no bear was ever the wise. They lived 'appily ever after. The end."
The other otters laughed and slapped their tails against the rocks as applause. Loric's mind suffered a most jarring hiccup, more stunned than when they tossed him into their nest of stones, albeit briefly. Though pathetic by human standards, he'd never heard such a competent tale or creative abstraction out of a beity in his entire life.
For her to reproduce their actual situation, but in an ideal state in regards to their emotional needs, was itself incredible. Absorbing the conventions of the traditional opening and closing statements was impressive as well. Most beities could not recognize them as anything other than sentences, and would at most treat their repetition as a coincidence.
And she tied it up with a bow by saying 'the end'. Beities that tried to tell stories often trailed off, unsure if they were still telling it or if they had exited the narrator role and become themselves again. They could get lost in that space, even suffer mental collapse, with Myrtelon having mastered a safety phrase that cut her off from the imagination space. This romp was its own dentist, its own weapon smith, and even its own storyteller. If Loric was to use his talents to earn their way across it would have to be the absolute best performance of his life, something that would overcome everything Myrtelon the cunning had absorbed.
"Would a good bear joke convince you that I can top that story?"
"Yes!" Spiltilon answered brashly for his compatriots, and Loric continued before they could scold him.
"What does a bear eat during the winter?" The others, Myrtelon especially, would have taken the rest of the evening to try and puzzle it out, but Spiltilon wouldn't wait. Without any fish they needed jokes to nourish them.
"What does a bear eat in winter?"
"They don't know; they have to hibernate to think about it."
With one omnidirectional blow the otters were struck down, knocked from their perches and flipped onto their backs with jaws forced open and limbs thrashing. Only the dust cloud of their laughter differentiated it from a slaughter. Spiltilon in particular was tortured by the throes of it, his body contracted like an inchworm, face screwed up in laughter that had rocketed into silence and now produced tears. His expression begged Loric to retract the joke, but nowhere in the toolbox of prose did Loric have a device capable of such a feat.
Last to be incapacitated was Myrtelon the self-taught, who desperately tried to keep her self taut, mouth closed and expression humorless, but her breath could be heard jetting in and out of her nostrils at a pace bound to overpower the narrow passages. A valiant effort, she nonetheless cracked and fell in with the guffawing of her kin, but she kept her eyes narrow and hateful, aimed at Loric, ensuring he understood that she wasn't happy about being bested, and that her pride was kept safe in a soundproof corner, and at least that one part of her really didn't think it was funny at all.
"B-be-b-because- Because they're so-ahahahahaha! Because they're s-so stupid!" Tagalon managed to say as he dragged himself out from behind his boulder, still lying on his side with joints of jelly. "They spend the 'ole w-winter thinking about it because they can't figure it out!"
"Stop!" Hedfulon shouted at him, for he was only causing a resurgence in the debilitating laughter. But it was too late; the second wave struck them and with it came the snorting as they tried to get adequate air into their lungs. Asphyxiation was now more of a risk than it had ever been underwater, their exhalations sounding like the spurting froth that came from a clam's crack as it begged for its life.
Hygenis took full advantage, strolling about and standing over several of the otters menacingly, moving Ellapock to her shoulder so she could let the hook hang low and loose in her hand like a threatening pendulum. Myrtelon was her first target, as she was the most likely to understand. Clearly from her seething stare, she did. What the most talented otter comprehended was that Hygenis had a clear opportunity to kill at least one of them before the shock of the act roused the others from their paralyzed state.
An opportunity the dentist did not take, her contribution to Loric's strategy, which she had deduced. Devoid of faith in storytelling, nourished as she had been by the most secret of narratives rather than the most open, transmissible only in whispers and during a full moon of turned backs, she nonetheless understood that whatever waterproof yarn Loric might weave stood a better chance of getting them across Plunderoe than the Bloody Mouth did at that time.
While Myrtelon came to understand that Hygenis had deliberately not struck, she still worked to silence her laughter first and reorient her head, then her body. When she cleared her throat it sent a signal that seemed to clear the others', and slowly they recovered, rising on wobbly legs and rolling their lips to get the twang out of their whiskers. Though much of their dignity was restored, there was still fear that Loric would crack another joke and bowl them over again, so they stayed off their rocky perches so as not to risk a second fall.
"Can we hear one?" Spiltilon pleaded with Tagalon, unnecessary as it was. Whatever they'd planned on doing that evening before the humans drifted in, it could no longer be done. The laughing fit had robbed them of the energy for it, of the focus and precision they would need to do it under the watchful snouts of the bears.
"Go and fetch some fish," the romp leader told the youngster, the latter squealing giddily and scampering off. He couldn't have meant any of the salmon, even the bones blown away from the river, so the otters must have had some stores of other kinds in that burrow of theirs. While Spiltilon was gone the river creatures arranged themselves as comfortably as possible.
Inkolon curled up into a crescent and rested her head on a wide flat stone. Tagalon and Hedfulon rolled onto their backs, lounging their shoulders and long necks against a boulder so they were sitting up and looking at Loric. Their paws automatically settled onto their furry stomachs, with the female leaning into the male in a suggestion of intimacy that did not have to be carnal. Loric understood now that he was looking at a family, regardless of both blood and lust.
Myrtelon showed the same comfort with Inkolon, backing up into the middle of her crescent and settling in alongside her, all the while choosing to stare at Loric without blinking. It could've been suspicion, or an avaricious need to examine his technique and incorporate what she could, but was most likely both.
How Loric felt about providing ammunition to the most competent beity storyteller he'd ever crossed was a mystery even to him, but he could not afford to hold back anything if there was the slightest chance it might cost them their trip across Plunderoe, into the lands surrounding Staircase, which was itself frightfully close to Rhadiospir.
So vexing was the female otter to him that he started to wonder about the rules of the Wild and the Tame. From both the lore of the Wild Trinity and the countless accounts of the bottomless book, he knew that mankind had abdicated the Tame somewhat willingly, that it had to at least be called their idea, since in its beginnings there wasn't an animal alive that could have an idea as labyrinthine as a man's.
There was no doubt that the force had shifted, from mankind to beastkind, and that even if a man could still invent, could still vie for power, could still create new masterworks of art, these things could no longer be done beyond a certain scale with their thinned blood. Staircase, a mere eggshell fragment of their former landscape, was likely the height of what could be achieved, and even it only did so under the license and support of Phobopan the fear-full lion.
But what of the individual? Who was to say that a single man, so much less than a society, was limited in how much they could stoke their remaining Tame, or how much they could reclaim from across the line in the cosmic sand that now shown in the night sky in the absence of electric lights?
The storyteller did not think this selfishly, to the exclusion of the animals. It was Myrtelon that inspired the whole idea. She showed a webbed toe stepping over a line beities were not supposed to be capable of crossing, even with double-thick blood, for if all beities could do such things then there was nothing keeping them from becoming exactly as man had.
It was not heresy, he decided, not when limited to the individual. Each life like his, like Myrtelon's, was an aberration, a curiosity. They were not long-lasting enough to be of concern to the forces of nature, and there was no shame in it. A man was himself only by himself, but what would he ever do without an audience? Could he merely draw on a cave wall and consider the stone's willingness to hold the marks reaction enough?
Among these questions was an understanding that he could not shift the Tame back, no matter what he did. That was a collective act, infected as the collective was by dissent. He still didn't know if the old world was better by them and for them, with the Tame's absence suggesting his forebears had decided it wasn't when they handed him off to the true bears.
There was no time for these realizations to continue ravishing his mind, for Spiltilon had returned, even muttered an apology when he waddled by Loric and bumped his shoulder. He couldn't quite see where he was going, hopping along on his hind legs so that his arms could be overloaded with snacks to nibble on during the show.
Not salmon, the humans confirmed as they took a good look at what Spiltilon was both spilling and handing out to the others: flatfish. They could've started that way, as the sideways creatures that fluttered along the riverbed, or maybe these skin-on fillets had been more traditionally shaped animals in their original form and the otters had used rocks to pound them flat.
Again the fugitives were struck by the genius of the creatures, as they smelled salt alongside the potent musk of the aged meat. Not only had they reshaped the food, they had done so specifically to increase its surface area, to maximize its contact with what had to be slabs of natural salt stored inside their burrow that worked to slow decay. Really, it was a miracle the promise of a story could get them sitting and attentive at all: the miracle of telling a joke about their sworn enemies.
"Are you ready?" Loric asked them, hoping they would bring down the volume on their gnawing once he got started.
"Proceed," Tagalon said with false bravado and dainty swivels of his wrists, to a few more chuckles from his romp. They didn't know what sort of tale to expect, understandable given that Loric only knew the broadest strokes, unable to stop himself from informing his ensuing speech with the revelations that Myrtelon's cunning had spurred.
The individual's relationship to the Tame was the impetus for the beginning he selected, which was an early favorite from the bottomless book. It was the tale of the Duckmaster, and, there on a secluded side of Blueguts, it began thusly:
"Long ago, when the buildings of man towered over the trees, a gaggle of birds made their way into the sky... by walking." He paused to see if the otters would interrupt, try to correct him. Beities loved to correct humans, and most could of course volunteer the knowledge that, in actuality, birds flew into the sky rather than walked.
Not the otters. They already guessed an explanation was on the way, that it was all part of the tale. They set the standards for the story higher with every reaction. Loric would have to sweat to win the day. With a stomp and a deep breath he underwent his grand labor.