BOOK ONE: SCHERDAL
Chapter 1: On the Scherl
“If you want to know the Will of the Wisp, get on the water.”
– Rusalki, (from “Advent Journies across the Seas”)
***
The autumn sun bled through the branches of elm, poplar, and oak like the strings of an orchestra stretched tight against the forest. Their song was birds and insects bounding and chirruping upon their warm, amber gold canopy. Drifting over the air, like a spider forms her web across the wind in fluttering beauty, the branches hung in bated anticipation, hoping to touch and hold one another’s fingertips. Under their warm, crusty palms, a fat, black and blue river ran.
The Scherl. Named for her slow, meandering wind through the forests, towns, and open meadows. Her headwaters were deep in the Ettinskelf mountains where from she rumbled down until losing her mind and leaping off Madloch Falls into the midnight blue, tranquil loch below. From there, she split east and west like the very strength of the falls severed her soul. East, she traveled along open meadows and marshes before turning sharply south toward the Rusalki Sea. West, the Scherl traveled in winding, zig-zag patterns through the dense forests until pouring into the Glaucus Sea.
It was along this river thread that many of the Town of Scherdal’s animals found their nourishment and livelihood; and here, along the placid, deep waters, a fox paddled his raft in quiet solitude upstream the river. He closed his eyes and listened to the dropping walnuts and persimmons on the river, felt the air under his long red ears, and sniffed the aroma of honey and tea from town a wharleigh away.
“Aye, fisher-fox!”
Rasicare winced at the sound of Mutton’s gritty, bad-tempered voice. He kept his eyes shut so Mutton wouldn’t see them rolling and tried not to raise his shoulders when sighing. The ugly, fat muskrat was making his way upstream the Scherl on his log raft; standing next to him was his fishermate, a beaver named Domino, who was busy steering the stern away from some oncoming debris.
“You ketch’em any fish yet ‘oday?” hollered Mutton. “Any worth relic’n? Heh heh heeheehee.” Mutton giggled himself into a fit that nearly tipped him from his log raft. He balanced himself unorthodoxly and pointed back to Domino. “Keep it steady, ya flat-tailed ninny.”
“Weren’t my fault your fat head nearly toppled o’er,” shouted back the beaver.
“Heh heh heh heeheehee—Aye, fisher-fox! ‘teady up fer us ta dock ‘longside a ya.”
The muskrat paddled to Rasicare at the center of the river and dug his claw into the bow of his raft. The rafts notched together and Domino dug his oar into the muddy stream bed to anchor them against the soft current. “Ain’t no reason fer ya’s to be chasin’ off without saysin’ a li’l hello. Heh heh.”
“Hello, Mutton,” Rasicare replied, visibly irritated. He turned to the beaver onboard and nodded. “Domino.”
“‘Ey, Rascal,” the beaver replied and slapped his tail on the deck in a gesture of good faith. “Any luck on the Scherl today?”
Rasicare looked upstream. “Couple of crappies and pinfish. But nothing worth keeping. I think something’s scaring the big fish off these days.”
“Prolly your redheaded wherewithal,” said Mutton, who hadn’t lost his grin yet.
Rasicare smiled sharply. “What about you?”
“Some bream and brownies.” The beaver lifted a ribbon of fish from the boat’s starboard. “Worth keeping, but I agree—game is skittish.”
Mutton sneered, and his face looked rotten and skewed. “Maybay dem ‘roggers from Farnwal got in the water and soiled it upstream. Hate dem, ‘roggers. Can’t trust a blimey, slipperily little frog with your rod, much less your river.” The muskrat spat in repugnance and to Rasicare’s amazement, the disgusting projectile flew thirty paws across the Scherl.
“It weren’t no frogs, you water-rat!” A voice shouted from the southern bay.
“Aye! Who dat? Who daren’t calls me dat?!”
Out from behind a dammed up partition of stuck branches and brush, a spry otter flicked his head into view. His face was cockeyed, and he grinned like a fired up salesmate. “I did!” He shouted. “And I’ll do it again, water-rat. You’re out here shouting and blubbering like a rock dove; there’s no wonder I can’t catch a measly meal. Call on the Wisp! You are a pitiful sight to see on a beautiful river-run day.”
Rasicare smirked and breathed a little easier to have Jands in his company when surrounded by such imbeciles as Mutton and Domino.
“Oi!” shouted Domino, giving his due respect to the better fishermate. “Didn’t see you over there, Jands. We weren’t to be so loud—”
“So loud!” shouted Jands, not through with his verbal abuse. “You mean so loud to harass and irritate a poor fool fox like Rasicare out here on the river?” His voice was so deafening that Rasicare wondered if someone could hear it all the way back in town. He cringed. “Ain’t his fault he’s terrible at fishing,” Jands continued. “What you got—four webbed claws and a flat rear to cut through the water? Pardon me, Rasicare. Just need to put these blasted nincompoops in their rightful places at the bottom of the food chain.”
“Aye, nuff a dat, Jands,” shouted Mutton. “We’s all jus’ havin’ a friendly talk out on da Scherl.”
Jands paddled out from behind the floating partition and revealed his pristine pine-yellow canoe. In a few quick strokes, he was docked against the two log rafts. He lowered his voice finally, drifting back into the smooth demeanor he reserved for fishing.
“The fish are disappearing,” he whispered. “Started up about a fortnight ago, but been getting worse since. I reckon something is going on upriver to deter them. Maybe something big hunting like Rasicare suggested.”
“I’m tellin’ ya’s,” Mutton muttered. “It’s dem ‘roggers in Farnwal.”
Rasicare found his voice again. “What did a frog ever do to you?” he snarled.
“Aye, one of dem done bite my GrandPaw on the leg and ‘eerily drown’d him in the Little Fern when I was but a bitty pup.”
Rasicare shook his head and smirked. “Everyone’s heard that ol’ tale about so and so’s GrandPaw.”
“Serve’s your GrandPaw right, Mutton,” Jands butt-in resolutely. “He shouldn’t be swimming down in the Little Fern anyway. And you never stopped being a bitty, water-rat.”
Rasicare’s mouth dropped and panted, something he carelessly did when excited. Realizing it, he awkwardly closed it and smiled sheepishly.
Mutton bowed his chest out. “Water you grinnin’ at, fisher-fox?”
The fox collected himself and leaned back on his paddle. He hadn’t any desire for a fight; any sensible animal knew that Mutton wouldn’t stand a chance against a fox, but the water beneath their boats gave the muskrat an exceeding advantage.
“Careful mate, Rascal’s been called,” warned Domino the beaver sarcastically, shaking his paws in short frantic motions and staring wide-eyed like a clown.
“‘im?! He’s been called by the Will o’ the Wisp?”
“He told my sister thatta season ago. When he was real little, alone with his Paw.”
Mutton, realizing his upper paw over the fox, found himself giggling again. “Heh-heh-hehehe! Whoever ‘eard a fox that did somethin’ good? Called by the Will o’ the Wisp—what a buncha duck scat dat is!” The muskrat spat a heaping arch of saliva onto the bank. “I says tha ol’ doe’s-tale is just dem fireflies flickern a’ noight. And anybeast’s ‘at sees ‘em is jus’ lookin’ for a reason t’ matter.” He glared at the fox, menacingly. “How is your ol’ Paw anyways, fisherfox?”
Domino, who wasn’t the sharpest to recognize hyperbole, butt-in. “Oi, you thing da Willa da Wisp ain’t real? What ‘bouts that Eorlhart? What you say aboutten him?”
“Pfft! Eorlhar’!” said Mutton. “‘at buck is all show. Ain’t none ‘at cavalier. I says the whole Order is corrupt. Nuttin’ but a buncha thie’es and charlatans.”
“Careful, Mutton,” cautioned Jands. “You’re fishing for everything but on this river. Go in for the night.”
“Bah!” Mutton swiped his claws at midair. “Go crack a clam, Jands.”
The otter grinned and winked at Rasicare playfully. “You stay up too late again, bitty water-rat?”
Mutton kicked the bow board from under him and Rasicare’s raft spun haphazardly around toward the northern bank. Mutton giggled and sang as he spun his toward the south side of the Scherl.
“Oh, there once was a fox who thought he could fish,
but all he did was look like dis—”
The muskrat danced like a fool on the raft, sticking his nose out and extending two claws up over his head like ears. He flicked his rod and cast the line across Jands’ stern. The otter shook his head and dipped his paddle into the water. In a few strokes, he was past the other rafts and soaring down the Scherl toward town.
Rasicare ignored the imbecile on the opposite bank and slowly pushed himself against the current east, hearing the raucous wailing of Mutton and Domino as he went.
“A fox on the sea, that nobodied see’d,
Hoping and a-wishin’, he’d catch just a smidgeon.
But e’s a tod ‘at can’t fish, like ‘is paws cannit swim,
I hope ‘e trips and finally drowns, just like that Frenrick, the ugly clown!
Heh heh heeheeheehee!”
***
A thousand mittans up river, Rasicare was good and far from the foolish wailings of the fishermates, blocked by banks and branches on the winding Scherl. He spotted an unfamiliar embankment that he aimed his paddle toward, hoping to discover a school of trout hiding under her. As he approached, he saw it was not a natural rock formation, but a strange apparatus in the bubbling water.
The current rushed like foam, peculiar for the usually, slow drizzling Scherl. Rasicare pushed his raft as near as he could, but the current kept shoving him away. He aimed his raft at the north shore and grabbed hold of an overarching oak limb that he used to pull upstream around the strange object. As the raft closed in, the dammed apparatus violently buckled and kicked, as if something underneath it had lifted and let it splash down onto the rocks.
He plainly saw it now as the dilapidated remains of a fellow fishermate’s raft; a field mouse named Peter, whom he knew fairly well. It had smashed to bits, and large chunks of flotsam floated toward him. He surmised its sudden buckling came from the water, having been too much for the vessel. But where was Peter? It was very unlike the mouse to leave his raft unattended.
It had been at least a day since he saw the mouse on the water. Shouting over the bristling leaves and windy autumn rush, he waited several minutes for a reply. He paddled eastward another hundred mittans and began to feel both despondent and foolish; how long could he search for something while not knowing if it were worthwhile searching?
Perhaps Peter crashed on an embankment of rocks and had scurried himself back to town through Maidens Forest. That, of course, made the most logical sense. Peter was a good swimmer and no fishermate, as far as Rasicare knew, had ever drowned on the Scherl. But a part of him worried what would happen if he left the area. If Peter was in trouble, might he be just round the next bend, and he close to helping? But with every stroke of his paddle, and answerless response to his cries, he realized this was less and less likely. Was he helping anything at all by sitting here on his raft? If in any danger, the field mouse was more likely to find it traipsing through Maidens Forest and not on the calm Scherl. He glanced down at his string of middling fish floating in the river; they appeared wasted and lifeless. After one last shout for Peter, he turned back to town.
He floated downstream, and eventually felt better about returning to town, as one does after abandoning an open-ended mystery. He could commit a pack of better qualified animals to search for Peter. Soon this thought dissipated further into a natural belief that Peter must be home with his doe, with paws up in front of the fire, telling her about his poor luck crashing his raft and she reprimanding him for it. He laughed at the notion that he was ever concerned for Peter; the fishermouse was far better on the water than himself. Though he still intended on reporting the wrecked vessel, he knew it wasn’t worth getting anxious about.
After several nautical wharleighs filed beneath his raft, he pulled into the Scherldock. The lengthy wooden pier, nestled under rolling canvas roofs between timeworn cypress trunks, harbouring the unique and bizarre vessels of the town’s fishermates; rafts, canoes, skiffs, dinghies, and pontoons for any dog, mouse, or otter along the Scherl. At the end of the easternmost dock, with his paws dangling in the water and his head against a pylon, was a distinguished, albeit bored rat whom Rasicare could never remember the name of, but always held a dislike for, on account of the rat’s bizarre approach to life and his undeserved title of harbourduke.
“Good morning…er—H.D.,” Rasicare said, fuddling his welcome as he pulled his rafter under a canvas roof alongside Jands’ vacant canoe.
The harbourduke didn’t look his direction. “Do you ever watch the clouds on the water like waves within waves that could be everything? Pretty powerful stuff, dog.”
Rasicare ignored the harbourduke’s odd soliloquy, trying to remain hospitable. “H.D., I need to report something on the water.”
“Could be the meaning of life, fox,” the harbourduke said, finally looking Rasicare’s direction.
“About three wharleighs north, I discovered Peter’s raft. Have you seen him on the Scherldock today?”
“Which one’s Peter?”
“Peter! Peter—this tall, a field mouse, rolls out five days a week, usually on the east end fishing bream and walleye.”
“Why do we even have names, fox? You know we are all just a speck here and a speck there, gone one day and floating in the sun’s rays until another morning takes us away…” The harbourduke trailed off and his mouth fell open in nonchalance; his eyes glazed over and his head bobbed up and down like the rippling water moving downstream.
“Harbourduke! I’m here to report the absence of Fishermate Peter and his wrecked vessel!”
“Ow, dog! Stop shoutin’ at me.”
“Can you send a fresh captain up the Scherl to investigate?”
“Yeah, yeah, fox, I’ll send a cap—just stop yellin’ at me.”
Rasicare winced and pulled his stringer over his shoulder. He made his way up the Scherldock, away from the harbourduke who stared into oblivion while philosophizing about butterflies and their effect on autumn’s flowery kiss.
The dock ended at a flight of stairs, made both from stone masonry and the wooden planks that had replaced those ancient steps that time had worn away.
At its peak was the town of Scherdal; a bustling community founded on the rolling hills and treetop valleys of the Scherl that gathered its source of industry from the rich river run, dark hearty lumber, and deep sterling silver within its caves. Linked to the northernmost edge of the Scherldock was a thriving marketplace, Obadiah Square, outstretching its rumbling hubbub through the Suthe Province; full of opossum selling produce, flamingoes squawking about cheap jewelry, a skunk spraying perfume samples over her bizarre den-made candles, jittering sparrows with custom dresses, a squirrel selling healthy nuts from her healthy hut, and a family of foreign wild dogs that had moved to Scherdal recently and gave a whole new meaning to the term: flea market.
Overlooking Obadiah Square, at the top of the sloping hill, was a downtown boulevard equipped with an abandoned theatre, moss-stained community center that strictly attracted elderly mice, and a bedraggled library with an ironically loud goose as its librarian. Main Street meandered north by northwest, lined with groceries, paw’n’shops, parlours, apartments, silver quarries, lumberyards, and the old Scherdally—a hotel carved out of the towering trunk of a tereboak tree that some traveling-weasel had convinced the townsanimals to build as a means to accommodate the touring visitors venturing to see the Will of the Wisp; only the tourists never came, and now the hotel remained as converted apartments for the lower-income fishermates and lumberdogs in town.
Tumbling west, downhill over the once beautiful Scherldowns, was the West Province; a land which in the last four seasons had been uprooted and surrounded by iron bars and high brick walls. Inside was the new construction of a prim community of symmetrical dens and hutches with little room to roam, but countless places to hibernate; each with their own heated nests, automatic nut-collector, vanity, porcelain fireplace, stocked root cellar, and miniature fishery so the flock never had to leave home to forage or hunt.
Across town, the East Province was mostly abandoned except for the odd farmer or fisher who couldn’t let go of their heritage even after nature had given up on it. Its trees were nothing but hollow logs, and its dens were moss-stained dilapidated boulders; but the artist still found beauty in its quiet repose and calm sway under the wind’s sway from Maidens Forest.
Seated above it all, surrounded by a rock wall that kept the secrets and legends of Scherdal’s history and stewardship, was King Dante’s castle, the King’s Ransom; only his servants and the Order of the Ausbury ever had leave to see inside his vast, dark walls.
However, the eye was not drawn to the king’s castle, but beyond it to the ruin of the Aldamere; a magnificent cylindrical tower that looked too thin for its height, bizarrely out of place in a meadow covered in the dried remains of clover, false-strawberry, and crownbeard, on the northern outskirts of the city, connected to the castle by a portion of the wall, yet left in disrepair since its demise. Its broken and rubbled side loomed above the city like a crow watching her hunting grounds; hermitic, ominous, and glorious. Every animal in Scherdal could see its topmost balustrades and finials, from the treehouses in the East Province, to the cookie-cutter huts in the West, and even from the smelly, flea-ridden bustle of the marketplace and Scherldock in the Suthe Province by the river.
Under its distant complacent gaze, Rasicare stepped off the Scherldock’s stairway and maneuvered through a family of browsing moles at market. Opposite the commons, where families, shoppers, browsers, and pickpockets gathered under the open sun, amid the damp, cool breeze of the Obadiah Fountain, he dropped his stringer of fishes on the table of a very obese, clean-shaven, and well-to-do pig whose head was bent over and eyes closely examining the eclectic coins of a recent purchase. The pig chewed on the soaked and piddly end of a very used cigarette.
“What ‘m I s’posed to do with this? Ooinque!” the pig asked, with only a brief glance at the stringer of speckled crappies and striped yellow pinfish before he continued counting and sorting his coins.
“It’s my haul for the day,” answered the fisherfox.
“Ooinque! A haul?” the pig mocked, looking up and grinning like a swindler. His cigarette twisted and spun on his lip about to drip ash and saliva on to the desperate crappie. “This is yes’erday’s lef’overs. I’ll take ‘m off yer paws to feed my garden. But ‘m not payin’ fer ‘em.”
“You don’t have a garden, Sam,” Rasicare retorted.
“You thank ‘m payin’ fer dead minnows. Who gonna buy ‘em ferm ‘e, fox? Ooinque!”
“I got a bit distracted on the Scherl,” said Rasicare. “Look! They are still breathing and good.”
“Read my sign, fox—Feresh Fishes! I ’n’t sellin’ this. And you’s in’t selling a’ me.”
The pig resumed his examination of his coin collection and altogether ignored the fox and his fish stringer.
Rasicare dropped his head in dramatic frustration and pulled the fish over his shoulder. He glanced at a young chipmunk who was staring up at him, presumably observing the whole exchange. “You wanna buy some fish?” Rasicare asked ironically.
Embarrassed, the chipmunk scurried away; Rasicare watched him jump into his Maw’s arms, who was sitting on the wall of the market fountain, deeply engaged with a she-beaver. He followed the pup in a glazed, meandering fashion, unaware of his unconscious action. The fountain’s misty water spritzed his long red hair as he sat on the fountain wall beneath the shadow of Father Obadiah’s statue blessing a group of sweet stone rabbit kittens. A few paws away were the beaver and chipmunk in noisy conversation. He closed his eyes, put his snout between his paws, and before he knew it, was unintentionally engrossed in eavesdropping on them.
“Well, what was it?” The she-beaver nudged her scatterbrained chipmunk friend back into the story she had dropped along the way of conversation.
“Oh, right,” the chipmunk answered, jerked back into her gossip. “Well, about two months ago, her buck Henry was out in Faereton—”
“Oh, that sounds about right.” The beaver shrugged and rolled her eyes.
“Oh, I know,” the chipmunk replied, already distracted again. “I can’t even begin to wonder what the old beaver is doing out there.”
“Is it gambling?”
“It could be anything!
“…maybe even something with the Sisterhood.”
“Oh stop! He wouldn’t be out there in all that.”
“So what happened to him?”
“Tck tck tck. So he’s coming back from Faereton and gets lost in the Faerewode.”
“Oh!” the she-beaver interrupted again, all-knowingly. “So he was drinking at the port.”
“Probably,” said the chipmunk, dropping her pup again to run away through the paws of the patrons. “But while he’s bumbling around—he bumps into some big oak and hears some strange noises…” Her eyes grew big, like her story-telling mattered. “…Shuffling in the bushes. Well, he calls out—”
“Is it the Sisterhood?”
“Hush! Stop interrupting.”
“You know they are out there.”
“Stop! So he calls out for anybeast and not a soul answers. Then, he starts back on what he thinks is the path and wouldn’t you know it—”
“What?”
“He sees it.”
“Sees what?”
“Sees it. —Bernie, stop jumping on other animals!”
“I’m not following.”
“He sees it. It-it.”
The she-beaver stared blankly at her chipmunk friend.
The chipmunk sighed, and then, oozing in mystification, she whispered, “The Will of the Wisp…”
“No!” the beaver shouted in mock disbelief.
“Yes!” the chipmunk squealed.
“Nobeast has seen It for dozens of seasons.”
“Well, Henry the beaver did.” The chipmunk crossed her little arms proudly.
“And you believe him?”
“He came back to the den in a fit and furry, all blustering and blubbering and told Sherry everything.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Well, why would a buck tell his doe that he’s been down in Faereton?—unless, it’s for real.”
“That’s a strong point.”
“Not a strong point—the only point! Henry saw the Will of the Wisp.”
“Well, what did it do?”
“He doesn’t say. He got so frightened and confused that he just took off running until he fell out of the forest an hour later. But listen, the story gets better.”
“How?”
“Well, it started going around. All these animals in the West Province spreading rumors like hens in a coop, and then wouldn’t you believe—a cat, a month later, shows up in town and says, ‘I saw the Will of the Wisp.’”
“No!” The beaver held a paw up to her mouth.
“Oh yes! And she says it spoke to her. Told her to come find it again.”
“So she was ‘called’?”
“Well, I don’t know if you should call it that. But It told her to tell others that It would be back during the next new moon.”
“My goodness.”
“And guess what tonight is…”
The beaver shrieked at the realization and threw her paws over her mouth. “The new moon!”
“It’s the talk of the town. I can’t believe you haven’t heard of it yet. You really need to get over to the West Province more often. Get out of that nasty old apartment in the Scherdally.”
“We are trying. Francis is hoping for a promotion next spring at the quarry.”
“Oh, right,” said the chipmunk with obvious disdain.
The she-beaver curled her lips awkwardly and shifted the conversation back. “Well, is anybeast going to Faerewode to see if it comes back?”
“Oh, of course! I should have told you. Yes! All the West Province is going, I’m sure. And word keeps spreading through the rest of the city. Get this—the Order of the Ausbury is supposed to be there. Tell me that isn’t a sign it’s for real.”
Rasicare leaned closer, ashamed for eavesdropping, but incredibly intrigued. He couldn’t keep silent any longer. “Excuse me,” he interrupted and cleared his throat. “The Order of the Ausbury is going into Faerewode to search for the Will of the Wisp?”
The chipmunk and beaver turned, irritated by the rude intrusion. “She says her friend’s buck saw it two months ago during the new moon.”
“But in Faerewode?” Rasicare asked skeptically. “That doesn’t make sense. The Will of the Wisp wouldn’t be in Faerewode.”
“Tck tck tck! Who are you—a Brethren of the Order?” The chipmunk cocked her head and stuck her lips out.
“Ha! A dingy fox, a part of the Order!” The beaver mocked.
“Ow!” Rasicare spun around to discover the pup had climbed the fountain wall behind him and had just planted his shoed paw into his hip; his tongue was sticking out at him.
“Bernie!” the chipmunk mother shouted past Rasicare. “Don’t kick homeless animals! Come here—no, Bernie, wait, no, don’t run through that sow’s dress. Come back. BERNIE!”
Rubbing his hip, and flopping his dead fish over his shoulder, Rasicare left the beaver and chipmunk who were now busy chasing Bernie through Obadiah Square.
Could it be true? How could it be true? A wandering beaver had seen the Will of the Wisp in a paltry, dim night, deep within the Faerewode. No eye had seen the Wisp for a generation. A rare happening that once never was; merely a myth passed along from generations hence by Paws and Maws. And none had heard its whisper since the Aldamere’s destruction. Well, almost none. He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. What could this mean? Was Scherdal’s glory returning? —But why in the Faerewode?
Keith G. Alderman 