The Hundred: Fall of the Wents (2 page)

He stumbled along for the last few blocks.

Then, finally, he was through the door and home, and down on the floor on his knees, his head in his hands. The light in the dim room still stabbed at his eyes, so he shut them. He breathed out and his breath felt hot against his hands. He shivered uncontrollably.

Hands caught him up and carried him to his bed. He heard the soft voices of the Wents:

“The fever.”

“I heard that three Efts have died.”

“Don’t speak of that. He can hear us.”

But it was more like a dream than anything else, and he forgot their words as soon as he heard them.

Even the comforting water of his own bed felt hot and hurt him. His head rested on a soft pillow of woven reeds and grasses. These hurt him as well; he turned within his watery tub in an effort to keep his antennae from touching any surface.

On the first day, as his temperature climbed, the jagged stones in the wall of his room slyly changed into creatures of strange shape and character, staring at him over his little water bath. His head felt hot and he closed his eyes, but when he opened them again the figures were still there.

On the second day someone came to change the water in his bed, and he cried out as they gripped him. He heard the water rushing out into the drains and fresh, clear water piped in from the cistern.

“Hush, little one,” said a voice. It was Hindrance. He opened his eyes and could see the white blossoms framing her face. They seemed to shift and open into cruel, gaping mouths. He shut his eyes.

Someone came to him in the evening and had him sip a bitter tea—it was Hindrance again, with the other Wents hovering behind her in the gloom. Tully felt hands on his forehead. Turning his face into the water of his bed, he instinctively dunked his entire face into it, feeling the heat behind his eyes escape briefly into the cool liquid. He opened his eyes into the water and could see the smooth base of the bed and the bubbles from his breath streaming up from the sides of his mouth. Finally, he came up for air. The water droplets from his hair and antennae made him shiver and sneeze. He was terribly cold, and they warmed the water with heated rocks and dripped more of the hot tea into his mouth.

He slept for a long while, and when he woke the walls had strange shadows and crevices, soft in the fading light through the window. There were the shapes of living things hiding there, staring at him with bold eyes. He tried to blink the figures away but they would not go. They had the delicate limbs of Efts, and fine features, but they were taller. He called out to them, finally.

“Who are you?” shouted Tully. “Why are you staring at me?” He laughed wildly, and then collapsed into spasms of coughing.

“Hush,” said someone in the gloom. It might have been Kellen. “Sleep—it is nothing but shadows.”

Tully slept and dreamed of great, dark things humming and moving beneath him in the water—of something Hindrance had once called
whales
. But whales were dead and gone and only their bones remained, abandoned like broken white smiles on the ocean floor.

On the fifth day, Tully’s fever crested and broke. All the strange figures were gone, winked away, and the walls of his home were ordinary again. He sat up.

Hindrance shuffled over to his bedside and touched his forehead lightly.

“Something to eat?” she said, in a voice that reminded him of chiming bells. Hindrance loved to sing and she did so often: little tunes about flowers and plants and weather.

“Yes,” said Tully, who realized that, for the first time in days, he actually had an appetite. Hindrance handed him a slab of pasty, gray bread on a wooden board, and he ripped off a hunk and chewed it; it was flavored with some kind of exotic fruit. Hindrance’s cooking was always good. She could manipulate the bread with poundings and tinctures from fresh herbs, vegetables, and fruit—one bite would reveal a rich, savory taste, while the next a completely different flavor. The bread gave Tully energy, and he drank a cup of water, which Hindrance had brought from the cistern, to wash it down.

Hindrance sat on the edge of the bed, taking care to keep her garments from falling into the shallow water. She was dressed in a simple white sheath that hung close to the floor, and her pale feet were bare. “I’ve made a new puzzle for you,” she said, and handed Tully a small, wooden box. Her hands were soft and white, like lilies floating in water. He turned the box over and over in his hands but could see only a small hole in one side surrounded by a pattern of letters and symbols.

“You’ll like this one,” said Hindrance. “It will keep you busy while you stay in bed.”

“In bed!” said Tully, sitting up straighter. “But I’m better now.”

“You’re still tired. No need to rush things.”

Tully frowned and accidentally tipped the little box from his palm onto the floor. His muscles felt weak and useless. It made an unexpected chiming sound as it tumbled.

“I’m bored already,” he said.

“The puzzle won’t bore you,” said Hindrance, her small dark eyes shining. She picked it up and handed it to him again. “It’s a special one—for your dream day. It passed while you had the fever.”

Tully had forgotten all about his dream day, but he was stung by the fresh indignity of it. One’s dream day was special: the day of the year when a creature was first brought into being. It often involved new songs and games, and presents and parties as well. And he had slept right through it.

“Did any of my friends come?” asked Tully, hopefully.

“Only Copernicus and Aarvord, and that dreadful little Louse—”

“Fangor?”

“Yes, that one. I had to send him away three times. He would have woken you.”

Tully was pleased that Aarvord and Copernicus had come, despite the fight. And he enjoyed the thought of Fangor the Sand Louse—an annoying little mite—getting shooed away by Hindrance. Fangor was constantly tagging after Tully and his friends, piping away in an irritating squeak and leaping onto unwilling shoulders.

“They left presents, too,” said Hindrance. The three other Wents who shared the home with them—Kellen, Bly, and Sarami—came bustling over and crowded around for an impromptu party. They leaned over Tully, swaying in that gentle way of theirs that suggested they were still planted in the earth, as their ancestors had been so many years ago. They each presented small gifts, wrapped in coarse brown paper.

“Open mine first,” said Bly. She bent down and thrust her package into Tully’s hands.

“Happy dream day,” said Sarami. “Belated, of course.”

Kellen, characteristically, said nothing at all, but stared at Tully in a searching manner. Her small black eyes darted over his body, assessing and cataloging, bright in her white, moon-shaped face. She did not smile or show him any kindness, though. Tully wished for the hundredth time that it were Hindrance, and not Kellen, who was his true blood relation. He had very little in common with the thin, morose Went who was had brought him into being. He did not have a sweet name for her. She was Kellen and that was all.

Tully opened each gift, trying to reclaim some of the excitement that usually belonged to a dream day party. But, without his close friends there, it did not feel like anything special. And the gifts were rather poor. Copernicus had given him a small length of string. Aarvord had left a shiny rock. Fangor had left nothing but a grain of sand—all that he could carry, no doubt. And each of the Wents had baked various delicacies in the shape of a Nimbus Swan, a Grout, a Roach, and an Ugwallop. He was sure they would taste good, but who wanted to eat something shaped like an Ugwallop? Other than Hindrance’s mysterious little box, the gifts were dreadfully dull. Tully sighed and leaned back upon his pillow. This was his twelfth dream day, and it should have been his best of all.

When he woke hours later the room was silent. Normally, all the Wents would have rushed to see that he was fine—something which occasionally irritated him but which was as reliable as the sunrise. No one came.

Tully pulled himself out of his bed and his body dripped water over the stones. His arms and legs felt odd and unfamiliar. He made his way to the large wooden table and sat down, cradling the puzzle box in his hands. His body felt weak, but his head was clear. He longed to get out and see the sun again.

Tully heard a small sound, like paper slipping over stone, and he turned to see the snake Copernicus Holland slip through a crevice in the rock wall. Copernicus whippled over the stones to Tully and shot up his leg in one swift movement.

“Coper!” said Tully. “I’ve been very ill. Sick with the fever.”

“I was watching you, from time to time,” said Copernicus. “But you were in a bad state. You couldn’t see me at all. You thought I was your old Grand-Ell Bepsiba.”

“I didn’t!” protested Tully. “You look nothing like Grand-Ell. She was always nice and fat, tiny as she was. She had wings, too, and you don’t. And you’re so skinny.”

“I came for your dream day. Did you get my gift?”

“Yes, thanks,” said Tully. “It was a decent piece of string. Maybe I’ll use it to tie a gift for you, one day.”

“I found it,” said Copernicus. “It was down in the Underbelly. A treasure!”

“Special,” said Tully. “What luck.”

There was a silence.

“I’m sorry about that. The thing I said,” said Tully. “I wasn’t feeling well.”

“Don’t mention it. It’s forgotten,” said Copernicus.

“I don’t think Dualings are savages.”

“No more than I think the Trilings are the greatest miracle ever produced by the richness of our planet,” said the snake.

Tully pursed his lips.

“What did you have, then?” asked the snake. “The sloping sickness? The faints? The bendy-jigmies? The stammers and jags?”

“I don’t know,” said Tully. “The Wents talked about a fever. A fever from the insects, or the air, or maybe the water. No one knows. Trilings and Dualings getting sick and nothing to be done for it except wait….” He shuddered and said: “It was awful. I thought I might die.”

Copernicus ignored this dire statement.

“Where are the Wents?” said the snake, craning his head to peer around the room.

“Not sure,” said Tully. “I fell asleep, and now they’ve all gone.”

Now Tully sat on the edge of his bed and considered the situation more deeply.

“It’s not right, that they’ve all gone. All at once,” he said.

Copernicus slithered down to the floor and sniffed the edges of the room.

“They haven’t been gone long,” he said. “An hour or two, I’d guess.”

“Well,” Tully said. “We should find Aarvord and go out on a little adventure. Before they come back.”

Copernicus knit his brow, which is rather difficult for a snake to do.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I smell something else. I smell Ells, and pollen. And something not…good.”

Tully opened the door and the snake slipped out. Tully, glancing back, suddenly doubted his impetuous mood. Maybe he should rest a bit longer and recover. But how dull that would be. He felt quite well, at the moment. Let the Wents see how he could handle a bit of adventure without one of them coddling him. He was twelve now!

But something gave him pause. He went back and retrieved the new puzzle box and a small wooden bucket that sat by his bed, which he had used to keep his toys since he was a very young Eft. The bucket was empty except for two other gifts that Hindrance had given him on previous dream days: One, a pair of glasses with colorful lenses, which had come in the form of a puzzle that he’d spent hours folding and twisting to find out what secret was inside. The glasses had a special trick. When he looked through them, he was able to see if someone was truly a friend or not—a false smile would appear as a deep frown through the lenses.

The other gift was a thin wooden telescope, through which he could see a great distance through wind and fog, and even in falling darkness. It, too, had come inside a puzzle-gift that Tully had been challenged to decipher on a dream day a few years ago. He had mostly used these toys to play tricks on his friends. Other gifts that Hindrance had shared with him (one for every year that he had been alive) had been broken and lost through play over the years.

The only other gift that still remained was already about his neck, dangling on a thin cord. It was a very small sphere of a shiny, bluish metal, roughly shaped and pocked with scars. It hung in a thin pocket of rough fabric, sewn tight at the top, to which the cord was attached. It had been his dream day gift for his fifth year and he still remembered Hindrance placing it around his neck and saying: “Keep this safe.” It had no magical properties, but it never left his body.

Tully put the new box inside the bucket, and as he walked the bucket banged against his legs—uncomfortable and familiar all at once.

*

Aarvord Benniwick considered himself one of the most handsome of the entire race of Fantastic Grouts. He was stout and tall, with those bulging eyeballs on short stalks atop his head. His paws were wide and flat, like spatulas, and he used them to groom a small tuft of hair along the back of his neck. Aarvord’s face was wide and pleasant; he grimaced at himself in his mirror-pool of water, and sucked his triple chin in for as long as he could hold his breath. Then he puffed it out and it unfolded fatly over his chest. “A fine fellow you are,” he thought. “A fine fat fellow.”