Categories > Books > Redwall > The Wicked Ground
Hayward awoke to the sun filtering down through the leaves and flickering irregular patches of light across his snout and eyelids. Wriggling his whiskers as if the light itself tickled, the hare stretched out to his full height along the ground, even his fingers, toes, and eartips engaging in the motion. He yawned loudly and luxuriously, at last opening his eyes to the fresh new morning. He squinted into the light upward, looked ahead into the foliage, and then glanced to the side at the half of the maple tree that stood directly next to him.
Eyes flying open to their widest possible point and ears pointing vertically, the hare bolted upright and scooted forward on his tail, only looking back after several yards. Hayward let out a squeak of alarm in the realization from afar that he had, indeed, shifted positions in his sleep and spent goodness knows how long with his back on the fault line itself. Though it was quite evident to any other creature that he was still in a single undisplaced piece, he carefully felt up and down his back to be absolutely certain.
"If it had moved during the night, you probably would have felt in time to move away before you went the way of that tree." Morbid statement though it could have been, Andreas' voice carried a strong current of amusement as he addressed the hare. The marten rested against a solidly round-trunked tree to the side of the crack, the black notebook in his lap and Lontano's map spread out beside him.
Hayward's already-stiffened ears swiveled toward the marten and only began to relax when he was certain that his traveling companion was speaking, rather than some sort of malevolent earth spirit. "Sure bally well didn't warn us like that the first time, eh wot."
"I suspect it would have done a little more clarification of its intentions if we had been this close several days ago." Andreas spoke with comforting logic, though he internally thanked fate tat he had not been directly across the moving line at that time.
Hayward rose to his footpaws and came up next to Andreas, peering over the marten's shoulder. "Wot are you writing about there?"
Andreas lifted his paws off the book, indicating dense writing on one side of the page and a carefully-rendered (though somewhat simplified) copy of Lontano's map on the other. The Recorder had added dark lines across the known streams, roads, and rail lines that they had crossed and found to be displaced. "I'm keeping track of where we've been and what we've found," he explained, hovering a claw over their route so far. "That's our responsibility as inquirers into the workings of Nature. The only way we can hope to understand is by keeping track of what we see." Andreas shut his eyes and gently closed his notebook. "And if we do not make the best map possible of this thing, there would be no way to rebuild taking it properly into account."
Hayward bobbed his head in reference to the marten's explanations. "You get this all marked up and sorted out like you say you will, old chap, and you'll be bally well saving Mossflower and we'll sure and certain be seeing things named after you in the history books, wot wot."
Andreas turned his smile on Hayward, then gestured toward the still-sleeping forms of Garlock and Elsinore. "Perhaps. But now we need those two awake. Tell them that you'll be appropriating their breakfasts if they don't get ready to move on."
Elsinore and Garlock did comply under the hare's dire warnings and did manage to secure their rations for the rest of the expedition. Sore muscles from walking and from night after night without a proper bed were a shared complaint, yet the intrepid quartet persisted onward, their goals ranging from the most lofty of beneficial aims to the most critical of scientific measurements to the most personal of rationalizations and appeasements.
Mountains loomed on the horizon even early in the morning, their gray rock faces first misinterpreted as low clouds between the leaves ahead, then discernable as solid as the distance before them decreased. As far as Andreas could recall in his extensive but nod exhaustive readings, there had not been much proper exploration of these southwestern peaks and ranges. He could vaguely recall one article on the matter - one several centuries old that spoke only of a range split by a narrow valley with straight lakes along it. Lontano was even strangely silent on the matter, having only indicated the presence of this band of mountains on his map. Thus, as the four travelers followed the fault trace into the foothills of the looming range, Andreas in particular felt a sense of excitement at the further uncharted wonders welling up within him.
The members of this range were not the classic sharp-edged peaks that an artist might provide if one requested a representation of mountains. Their distant silhouette might have been cut out against the sky that way, but their otherness became apparent when one surrounded oneself in this scenery. The faces of these peaks were not cleaved out of the earth but seemed to ripple up through it, starting low and bubbling up higher and higher in general contour, then the same rippling process manifested again across the faces of the individual mountains, and sometimes again within that. The soil and rock were waved and folded, practically a crystallized version of the terrible ground waves that had set the whole adventure off, only with the occasional sharpened edge on a crest or the twisted path of a trough, and occasionally the whole system warped to one direction. This rippling on the mountain face did not ease out at an angled slope from the valley floor, but rather, after similarly rippled flat-topped hills, rose nearly perpendicular to the ground.
Curling in around the topographical curves of the mountains were bands of color, clear in the spring air and brought out by the spring foliage. Different sorts of rocks layered their way through the range, striping grays and beiges, oranges and reds, and even whites and blacks. Sometimes the alternation was straightforward, sometimes it curved lazily, sometimes one band would jut abruptly across another, and sometimes, as with the rippling, the whole sequence would be offset from itself. Shrubs clung tenaciously to the steep mountain faces, sprinkling verdancy and also floral whites and pinks against the dusty hues of rock.
The valley between the bookends of folded mountains was as it had been described so basically in the account that Andreas had read. It was far narrower than any valley any of the four had ever seen before, with the vertical orientation of the mountains serving to make it seem even more closed in for the lack of space above. The sky was straight up, but it manifested as just as narrow of a strip as the valley itself was, the other end of the box formed by the mountains. Peculiar elongated lakes stretched periodically along the valley floor, always longer than they were wide and oriented in the same direction. Some were barely ponds and others stretched on for long enough to give the impression of walking a long a stream rather than a self-contained lake. When these finally did come to their ends, the appearance was puzzling, like a river that was simply ceasing to go anywhere. This impression was detracted from mainly by the fact that investigations showed these pools to be motionless and mirror-still on the surface, despite the puzzling lack of stagnancy or buildup of algae and plants.
And the fault trace, too, became a different sort of physical feature when it transitioned into the narrow valley that it had indeed created nearly by itself over the eons. What had been a relatively flat feature for the journey thus far, kicking up narrow ridges that were not even as tall as most full-grown creatures and directing everything that crossed it to the right, took on quite a bit more vertical character. The occasional upward tilting of one side of the trace became a constant in the valley, at first by several inches, then by a foot, then by several, forming a feature that was too large to be called a step but not quite so imposing as to be called a genuine cliff. The vertical plane that now represented the fault rater than just a disturbed line on the ground was an exposed swathe of soil. The top edge was weathered and loose, crumbling and eroding at wind and rain and shaking along it, but the dirt at the very bottom of the long escarpment, where it met the properly horizontal ground, was darker and more compact, streaked with scrape marks and tiny fissures. This was soil that had had very newly been extruded from the earth's inside, a layer of skin that had been laid bare for the first time by the massive earthquake.
The four travelers had thought wisely to pick a side of the divide and stay on it as the altitude of the one side relative to the other changed. They found themselves on the higher of the sides, following a path neatly delineated by the upward-thrusted vertical mountains to the one side and the downward-plunging wall of the escarpment to the other. While there was in all actuality a perfectly safe amount of space in which to travel, the tricks of angles in this environment, considering the landforms and also taking the sun into account, made it feel more precarious.
As darkness climbed up the valley, Andreas, Hayward, Garlock, and Elsinore came to a weary stop at a point along the escarpment that looked down over one of the drawn-out lakes. The sun was setting behind the mountains, bringing the cool of evening with it as it cast its last streaks of warm color over the lake. Garlock slumped down against a boulder, too worn for a dignified posture. Elsinore came down on all fours and trundled about near the edge of the ledge, occasionally feeling over its side with an exploratory digging claw. Hayward plopped himself down on the edge as well, footpaws dangling over the drop like a child on a swing; the hare apparently did not relate this position to the one in which he was so alarmed to find himself that morning.
Andreas remained standing for a little while longer, gazing down the length of the mountain range in the last glow of light. It continued as far as he could see, the more distant peaks shadows behind the clear ones as the cool-edged starry darkness overtook them one by one. "It certainly is beautiful here," the marten observed out loud, though he may as well have been addressing the scenery itself as much as he could have been addressing his comrades.
"Beautiful?" Garlock looked critically over at Andreas, though his own intensity was also dimmed by the encroaching night. "How can you call it beautiful when it just systematically broke down every outpost of normal life we've ever known personally, and also every one we passed along the way? How can you be thinking about the scenery when you saw just as well how many creatures were slaughtered in this thing?" The ferret neglected to mention that he had not remained in Darkhill to support his own - indeed, he had practically convinced himself otherwise.
"Of course there is beauty and order in the following of chaos," Andreas responded. "All of the arts take that up as their pivotal points. One loses interest in a piece of music without dissonant buildup, one keeps reading a story to see what finality comes after all the characters' travails, and one would not even go to a play if one did not expect dramatic chaos. But then they all resolve, satisfying and wonderful and that makes them works of art rather than of destruction. And all creative artists have Nature as their prime model for inspiration. Nothing does it better. This place is the art in the aftermath."
Garlock had little use for Andreas' rhapsodizing. "We're still following a trail of destruction, clearer than any deep artistic meaning, and this thing swallowed creatures' wives alive." The ferret wrinkled his nose and threw his back harder against the rock.
Elsinore, through with her investigation of the edge of the escarpment, chose this moment to stick her digging claws into the discussion. "Oi foind it to be pretty amazing that the graound where we're standing and the graound daown there," she pointed off the edge, "used to be flat and level. Oi would have never thought it until Oi saw it in the soil like naow." The mole gave a tired a smile, managing to support both arguments at once.
With the implication of that great of a motion, even Andreas stepped back from the edge, choosing a sleeping spot closer to the mountains. And Hayward, having overheard Elsinore's comment, used his last energy to spring away from the ledge, a near repeat of that morning's performance, only ending in sleep rather than waking.
Eyes flying open to their widest possible point and ears pointing vertically, the hare bolted upright and scooted forward on his tail, only looking back after several yards. Hayward let out a squeak of alarm in the realization from afar that he had, indeed, shifted positions in his sleep and spent goodness knows how long with his back on the fault line itself. Though it was quite evident to any other creature that he was still in a single undisplaced piece, he carefully felt up and down his back to be absolutely certain.
"If it had moved during the night, you probably would have felt in time to move away before you went the way of that tree." Morbid statement though it could have been, Andreas' voice carried a strong current of amusement as he addressed the hare. The marten rested against a solidly round-trunked tree to the side of the crack, the black notebook in his lap and Lontano's map spread out beside him.
Hayward's already-stiffened ears swiveled toward the marten and only began to relax when he was certain that his traveling companion was speaking, rather than some sort of malevolent earth spirit. "Sure bally well didn't warn us like that the first time, eh wot."
"I suspect it would have done a little more clarification of its intentions if we had been this close several days ago." Andreas spoke with comforting logic, though he internally thanked fate tat he had not been directly across the moving line at that time.
Hayward rose to his footpaws and came up next to Andreas, peering over the marten's shoulder. "Wot are you writing about there?"
Andreas lifted his paws off the book, indicating dense writing on one side of the page and a carefully-rendered (though somewhat simplified) copy of Lontano's map on the other. The Recorder had added dark lines across the known streams, roads, and rail lines that they had crossed and found to be displaced. "I'm keeping track of where we've been and what we've found," he explained, hovering a claw over their route so far. "That's our responsibility as inquirers into the workings of Nature. The only way we can hope to understand is by keeping track of what we see." Andreas shut his eyes and gently closed his notebook. "And if we do not make the best map possible of this thing, there would be no way to rebuild taking it properly into account."
Hayward bobbed his head in reference to the marten's explanations. "You get this all marked up and sorted out like you say you will, old chap, and you'll be bally well saving Mossflower and we'll sure and certain be seeing things named after you in the history books, wot wot."
Andreas turned his smile on Hayward, then gestured toward the still-sleeping forms of Garlock and Elsinore. "Perhaps. But now we need those two awake. Tell them that you'll be appropriating their breakfasts if they don't get ready to move on."
Elsinore and Garlock did comply under the hare's dire warnings and did manage to secure their rations for the rest of the expedition. Sore muscles from walking and from night after night without a proper bed were a shared complaint, yet the intrepid quartet persisted onward, their goals ranging from the most lofty of beneficial aims to the most critical of scientific measurements to the most personal of rationalizations and appeasements.
Mountains loomed on the horizon even early in the morning, their gray rock faces first misinterpreted as low clouds between the leaves ahead, then discernable as solid as the distance before them decreased. As far as Andreas could recall in his extensive but nod exhaustive readings, there had not been much proper exploration of these southwestern peaks and ranges. He could vaguely recall one article on the matter - one several centuries old that spoke only of a range split by a narrow valley with straight lakes along it. Lontano was even strangely silent on the matter, having only indicated the presence of this band of mountains on his map. Thus, as the four travelers followed the fault trace into the foothills of the looming range, Andreas in particular felt a sense of excitement at the further uncharted wonders welling up within him.
The members of this range were not the classic sharp-edged peaks that an artist might provide if one requested a representation of mountains. Their distant silhouette might have been cut out against the sky that way, but their otherness became apparent when one surrounded oneself in this scenery. The faces of these peaks were not cleaved out of the earth but seemed to ripple up through it, starting low and bubbling up higher and higher in general contour, then the same rippling process manifested again across the faces of the individual mountains, and sometimes again within that. The soil and rock were waved and folded, practically a crystallized version of the terrible ground waves that had set the whole adventure off, only with the occasional sharpened edge on a crest or the twisted path of a trough, and occasionally the whole system warped to one direction. This rippling on the mountain face did not ease out at an angled slope from the valley floor, but rather, after similarly rippled flat-topped hills, rose nearly perpendicular to the ground.
Curling in around the topographical curves of the mountains were bands of color, clear in the spring air and brought out by the spring foliage. Different sorts of rocks layered their way through the range, striping grays and beiges, oranges and reds, and even whites and blacks. Sometimes the alternation was straightforward, sometimes it curved lazily, sometimes one band would jut abruptly across another, and sometimes, as with the rippling, the whole sequence would be offset from itself. Shrubs clung tenaciously to the steep mountain faces, sprinkling verdancy and also floral whites and pinks against the dusty hues of rock.
The valley between the bookends of folded mountains was as it had been described so basically in the account that Andreas had read. It was far narrower than any valley any of the four had ever seen before, with the vertical orientation of the mountains serving to make it seem even more closed in for the lack of space above. The sky was straight up, but it manifested as just as narrow of a strip as the valley itself was, the other end of the box formed by the mountains. Peculiar elongated lakes stretched periodically along the valley floor, always longer than they were wide and oriented in the same direction. Some were barely ponds and others stretched on for long enough to give the impression of walking a long a stream rather than a self-contained lake. When these finally did come to their ends, the appearance was puzzling, like a river that was simply ceasing to go anywhere. This impression was detracted from mainly by the fact that investigations showed these pools to be motionless and mirror-still on the surface, despite the puzzling lack of stagnancy or buildup of algae and plants.
And the fault trace, too, became a different sort of physical feature when it transitioned into the narrow valley that it had indeed created nearly by itself over the eons. What had been a relatively flat feature for the journey thus far, kicking up narrow ridges that were not even as tall as most full-grown creatures and directing everything that crossed it to the right, took on quite a bit more vertical character. The occasional upward tilting of one side of the trace became a constant in the valley, at first by several inches, then by a foot, then by several, forming a feature that was too large to be called a step but not quite so imposing as to be called a genuine cliff. The vertical plane that now represented the fault rater than just a disturbed line on the ground was an exposed swathe of soil. The top edge was weathered and loose, crumbling and eroding at wind and rain and shaking along it, but the dirt at the very bottom of the long escarpment, where it met the properly horizontal ground, was darker and more compact, streaked with scrape marks and tiny fissures. This was soil that had had very newly been extruded from the earth's inside, a layer of skin that had been laid bare for the first time by the massive earthquake.
The four travelers had thought wisely to pick a side of the divide and stay on it as the altitude of the one side relative to the other changed. They found themselves on the higher of the sides, following a path neatly delineated by the upward-thrusted vertical mountains to the one side and the downward-plunging wall of the escarpment to the other. While there was in all actuality a perfectly safe amount of space in which to travel, the tricks of angles in this environment, considering the landforms and also taking the sun into account, made it feel more precarious.
As darkness climbed up the valley, Andreas, Hayward, Garlock, and Elsinore came to a weary stop at a point along the escarpment that looked down over one of the drawn-out lakes. The sun was setting behind the mountains, bringing the cool of evening with it as it cast its last streaks of warm color over the lake. Garlock slumped down against a boulder, too worn for a dignified posture. Elsinore came down on all fours and trundled about near the edge of the ledge, occasionally feeling over its side with an exploratory digging claw. Hayward plopped himself down on the edge as well, footpaws dangling over the drop like a child on a swing; the hare apparently did not relate this position to the one in which he was so alarmed to find himself that morning.
Andreas remained standing for a little while longer, gazing down the length of the mountain range in the last glow of light. It continued as far as he could see, the more distant peaks shadows behind the clear ones as the cool-edged starry darkness overtook them one by one. "It certainly is beautiful here," the marten observed out loud, though he may as well have been addressing the scenery itself as much as he could have been addressing his comrades.
"Beautiful?" Garlock looked critically over at Andreas, though his own intensity was also dimmed by the encroaching night. "How can you call it beautiful when it just systematically broke down every outpost of normal life we've ever known personally, and also every one we passed along the way? How can you be thinking about the scenery when you saw just as well how many creatures were slaughtered in this thing?" The ferret neglected to mention that he had not remained in Darkhill to support his own - indeed, he had practically convinced himself otherwise.
"Of course there is beauty and order in the following of chaos," Andreas responded. "All of the arts take that up as their pivotal points. One loses interest in a piece of music without dissonant buildup, one keeps reading a story to see what finality comes after all the characters' travails, and one would not even go to a play if one did not expect dramatic chaos. But then they all resolve, satisfying and wonderful and that makes them works of art rather than of destruction. And all creative artists have Nature as their prime model for inspiration. Nothing does it better. This place is the art in the aftermath."
Garlock had little use for Andreas' rhapsodizing. "We're still following a trail of destruction, clearer than any deep artistic meaning, and this thing swallowed creatures' wives alive." The ferret wrinkled his nose and threw his back harder against the rock.
Elsinore, through with her investigation of the edge of the escarpment, chose this moment to stick her digging claws into the discussion. "Oi foind it to be pretty amazing that the graound where we're standing and the graound daown there," she pointed off the edge, "used to be flat and level. Oi would have never thought it until Oi saw it in the soil like naow." The mole gave a tired a smile, managing to support both arguments at once.
With the implication of that great of a motion, even Andreas stepped back from the edge, choosing a sleeping spot closer to the mountains. And Hayward, having overheard Elsinore's comment, used his last energy to spring away from the ledge, a near repeat of that morning's performance, only ending in sleep rather than waking.
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