Once upon a Summer Day

12

Down the long slope hurled the river to roar and shout and rend the air with the thunder of water storming apace, as it crested and rolled and broke over hidden barriers and smashed around great rocks to leap and fall crashing, only to hurtle into the next barrier and the next and the next. And amid the crests and troughs and rolling swells came the raft, lurching this way and that as it smashed into rocks and spun about, completely ensnared in fury. “Look out! Look out! Oh, my lord, look out!” cried Flic, flying above and followed by Buzzer, though Borel, clinging tightly and thoroughly drenched, heard nought but the bellow of a river run amok as the craft pumped and smashed over roiling, roaring billows; yet e’en had he heard the cries of the Sprite there was nothing Borel could do. Again and again the raft leapt up, to pause, and then to plummet back to the water; and Borel was jolted and jarred each time the timbers smacked down or crashed into or over a rock. Time after time Borel was knocked to his knees, but he held on tightly to the stanchion and lifted himself up before the next massive hammering crash. And the foaming river water funneled this way and that through gaps amid the great rocks and whelmed the float into jut and boulder and slab, and it began to disintegrate, as one after another the slender thwartwise struts broke in twain, and the logs began to separate.

The turning, pitching, fragmenting craft bucked and plunged and bashed downriver, the outermost logs breaking away, the innermost ones separating… and then the bulk of the raft smashed into a great midstream crag and pitched Borel off and into the chaos, the furious water tumbling him this way and that and hammering him into rock and stone and down into gravel and then hurling him back up through the water again to toss him into the air, only to reach up and drag him down and plunge him under once more, great logs and shattered timbers tumbling before and after.

Hacking, coughing, spewing water, Borel crawled out from a great, wide eddy pool to collapse ashore amid rounded river rocks a furlong or so below the last of the rapids.

Battered and bruised, he lay there panting, completely ignoring Flic’s entreaties of, “Are you all right, my lord?” and “I thought you drowned, my lord,” and “Is anything broken, my lord?”-the Sprite fretfully flitting about and hovering momentarily only to begin flitting about again.

Buzzer, on the other hand, said nothing, but puttered among the nearby flowers ashore as she gathered nectar and pollen.

Finally, Borel groaned and rolled over and stared at the sky.

“My lord…?” said Flic, now alighting on a broad blade of a single cattail reed standing alone amid the river pebbles along the shore.

“I think I would have been better off to have been spitted, roasted, and consumed,” said the prince at last.

“Oh, my lord, certainly not,” said Flic.

Bracing himself against the pain, Borel sat up, sucking in air through clenched teeth. He turned to the Sprite. “Flic, within the last candlemark or so, I have been shackled in a prison, been poked and prodded by Redcap Goblins, fought my way free just in time to fall down the face of a cliff to nearly be buried by a rock slide and almost be slain by a runaway grapnel that then jerked me off my feet and dragged me through even more rocks; I have been chased by Trolls and barely escaped only to be slammed into boulders by an angry river and all but drowned. So, when I say that I would have been better off had I been-Ah, zut! My long-knife. It’s gone.”

Flic looked at the empty scabbard yet strapped to Borel’s right thigh, then said, “But you still have your bow.”

Borel hauled the weapon ’round and examined it. It was undamaged. Next he upended his quiver. Nothing came out but water, his last arrow and the remains of the broken ones gone, swallowed by the rapids.

“And your hat,” added the Sprite, pointing at the shallows, where, caught in the eddy, the tricorn, half-submerged, slowly circled.

Groaning, Borel painfully stood, then, cursing at the river, hobbled out into the wide swirl and fetched the sodden hat. Water streaming, he slapped it onto his head. Flic began giggling, and Borel smiled, then winced, for his right cheek was bruised.

Clk! Clk! Borel, unclothed, sat by the fire and struck a stone against a shard of flint, shaping a primitive knife. His damp leathers and cloak and silks-shirt and undertrews and socks and linens-now nearly dry, hung on nearby shrubs, and his boots sat at hand.

Perched on a twig of one the shrubs, Flic nibbled on a grain of pollen.

Chk! Clak!

“Tomorrow, Flic, I would have you and Buzzer find a flower called ‘viburnum.’ Its blossoms come in small white clusters and-”

“I know viburnums, Prince Borel,” said Flic, sighing and rolling his eyes and silently appealing to Buzzer, the bee turning about on a nearby leaf to settle down for the evening. “After all, I am a Field Sprite.”

Borel grunted, and- Clk! Tkk! — continued to knap flakes from the flint.

With Flic’s help, the prince had found an outcropping of the stone, and had collected some pieces and then had made camp nearby. Using the carrying thong of his bow and the bow itself and a slightly hollowed rock cupped in his hand to steady a straight stick, he had spun the point of the wood against a piece of dry bark laden with dead grass to start a fire in a ring of stone on a wide patch of bare ground he had cleared. Nursing a glow into a small flame and carefully feeding the tiny blaze with more grass and then dried twigs and finally dead branches, he at last had a campfire. He had then used the very same carrying thong to set a clover-baited snare on the trace of a trail at the edge of the woods a distance away. Returning to the fire, he had doffed his togs and draped them on nearby bushes, and had then taken up a suitable knapping rock and had begun shaping one of the larger fragments of flint into a primitive but sharp-edged stone knife. And while he was setting the fire and doffing his clothes and had begun chipping flint, Flic and Buzzer had flown back upstream to see if the remaining Troll and Goblins were following; they were not. Flic and Buzzer had returned and the noontide had turned to midafternoon, and it in turn had drifted into evening.

Flic frowned. “I say, Lord Borel, you being the prince of a demesne-the Winterwood-where flowers do not bloom, how came you to know of the viburnum?”

Borel glanced at his bow and then at the Sprite and said, “The viburnum plant, with its long, straight stems, is also known as arrowwood, and I need arrows, else I might just starve out here in the wilderness.”

“Ah,” said Flic, “I see. Too bad you don’t live on pollen and nectar and honey as do Buzzer and I, though I must admit, it would take many, many blossoms to feed you, my lord, perhaps an entire field.”

“It would indeed,” said Borel, chipping away at the stone. He held up the flint knife and examined it. Grunting in satisfaction, he laid it aside and then began tapping away flakes from another shard of flint, fashioning an arrowhead. “Too, I might need a number of shafts to rescue the Lady Chelle.”

“Oh,” said Flic. “I had forgotten.” He glanced at the bee, now adrowse in the twilight. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to wait for the morrow ere we see if Buzzer has ever plundered Lord Roulan’s gardens. Yet this I ask: if Buzzer knows nought of those beds and blooms, which way shall we go then, my lord?”

“Would that the Fates smile down upon us,” said Borel, “but if not, then we follow the river, for streams are thoroughfares of commerce, and can we find a hamlet or town alongside, or even a croft, someone therein might know.” Borel glanced at the scrapes and darkening bruises over much of his body, especially his arms and legs, and he had a long, narrow discoloration running from his crotch ’round his thigh and up across his chest and down his back, there where the rope had snapped taut. “Yet travelling will be a bit slow, hammered as I was by rock and rope and river. But as sore as I am, worse yet I am stiffening, and I fear on the morrow I will be even more afflicted. Nevertheless, we must set out, for the moon does not halt in her journey, her face ever changing, and time diminishes for Lady Chelle.”

Borel continued to chip away at the shard of flint, Flic watching in silence, and moments passed. Of a sudden there came a whistling squeal in the near distance, and Borel grinned and took up his flint knife and grunted to his feet. He hobbled away to the snare, and took from it a coney, and shortly had it dressed out and spitted above his campfire. He rolled up the rabbit skin and set it aside.

As his meal cooked, Borel continued to knap flint, though occasionally he turned the makeshift spit. And by the time the coney was ready, the prince had managed to fashion three sharp points for arrows. “Now all I need are shafts from the arrowwood plant. As for fletching, I’ll cut a bit off the bottom of my shirt and make rag tails.”

He pulled the spit from the fire and tore off a haunch and offered some to Flic, but the Sprite looked on in dismay and refused. “I neither kill nor eat dead things, my lord. Hummingbirds, though, eat mosquitoes and gnats, and at times both butterflies and bees feast on meat. Even so they are all my friends: butterflies, hummingbirds, and bees.”

Borel frowned and glanced at Buzzer and paused in thought and then said, “Are all bees your friends?”

“Well, I do not know all bees, Prince, but those I’ve met are quite friendly.”

“Could you ask them to search for Roulan’s estate or even for Lady Chelle? I mean, could you ask the bees in concert to look for her? Send messengers out and have all bees search? Or the hummingbirds, for they are swift?”

Flic shook his head. “Were it like in some stories, where a mythical ruler of all bees-or one of all hummingbirds-is repaying some favor, perhaps then it could be done. Hummingbirds, my lord, they keep to their nests and fields, and are quite territorial, and squabble o’er certain stands of flowers. They do care for their mates and brood, yet I know of none who cooperate with any others. And I know of no sovereign they have. But they do migrate, and perhaps they will have seen a turret with daggers about in which a demoiselle is trapped. I will ask those we come across.

“And as to the bees, some are solitary but most live in individual swarms, each with its own queen, and queens are quite jealous of one another, and oft there are wars between colonies. Hence, for bees throughout Faery to go on a quest is but an amusing tale told to younglings, or so I do think. Besides, I remind you, my lord, bees are loath to cross the twilight borders, Buzzer being an exception. No, in this task, if we are to rely upon a bee, it has to be Buzzer who leads the way.”

“I see,” said Borel, returning to his meal. He took a bite and chewed awhile and swallowed, then said, “I suppose the same is true of ants, eh?”

Flic smiled. “Most likely. Oh, one might convince a queen of a single colony of ants or bees or the leader of a school of fish or a flock of birds or a pack of animals or the like to send the entire group on a search within their own territory, but for creatures of a single kind-or even creatures of different kinds-to go throughout all of Faery on a hunt to repay a favor, well… that would be quite extraordinary; it might even require the gods themselves to intervene.”

Borel nodded and sighed and finished the remainder of his meal in morose silence.

As the nighttide deepened, Borel hobbled down to the river and washed his face and hands, then returned to camp and donned his now-dry clothes. He refreshed the fire with two more logs and, as the moon, two days past full, climbed into the sky, he wrapped himself in his cloak and settled down upon a bed of grass.

“Remember, my lord,” said Flic, “should you see daggers afloat in the air, you are in a dream.”

Borel grunted in acknowledgement and swiftly fell into an exhausted sleep.

As Borel’s breathing deepened, Flic watched. Then he took to wing and began searching by moonlight for blossoms and mosses and herbs most rare.