FicWad

The tapestry of Redwall lay unrolled on a piece of the Abbey itself -- large, smooth-topped, and situated in a place that allowed it to serve as a crude and unfortunate table. The rock easily accommodated the entire cloth, with room left behind for the members of the informal Council to rest their paws and consider. This assembly of creatures could only be considered an informal one in that all of them were leaders of something, but they had not all worked together as a legislative body before the quake. The official members of the government were not required to be at Nameday, as the yearly sessions were in autumn rather than in spring, and the ever-growing casualty list included many beasts of office within Mossflower City and Redwall, with some representatives form other parts of the country as of yet unaccounted for.

The makeshift council consisted of the otter Admiral Streamrunner, the badger General Winfield of Salamandastron and his hare lieutenant Walden, the fox Rakarde, Foremole Skoilkill, Rhynn of the Northridge Horde, and several leaderly-types of various species from around the country. The mouse Wesley took it upon himself to record the discussions and deliberations of the assembly. And, naturally, the badger Ruta served as the Council's chairbeast. Even Ruta herself did not feel like the most credible of creatures, however, as she cited the damaged tapestry and the placement of the great sword (now held protectively in one of her massive forepaws) as significant with relation to the issue of whether to remain in Mossflower or rebuild elsewhere.

All of the Mossflowerites understood the significance of these artifacts, so the long gash in the tapestry was a sorry thing to behold in each of their minds. But the prophetic significance to which Ruta hinted in her testimony only clashed with them. Yes, the medieval records contained all sorts of accounts of spirit mice running through pathways of dream, and creatures suddenly producing extensively cryptic rhymes that they could not recall devising. Yes, some of the very rhymes had been retained for posterity. But no such thing had occurred in recent memory, nor in the recorded memory of several generations beforehand. The whole principle of precognition and guardian spirits seemed out of place to their increasingly analytical modernized minds. No matter what their ancestors had written and experienced, the temporal gap between the last such occurrence and the present day made it easy to write such things off as medieval naivete and attempts to explain peculiar natural things in a supernatural manner. The modern creature must know better, and thus no more Martin premonitions.

If Ruta had not been venerable and trustworthy in so many other cases, her mention of Jacinth's hysterical fit on the night before the earthquake would have certainly been scoffed at. Yet the badger had never fallen short on things in the past, so the makeshift Council heard her out as she explained the correlation between mad outbursts that mentioned swords and shaking, the quake itself, the specific orientation of damage on the tapestry, and the reported alignment of sword and cloth relative to the mouse singer's dead body. This explanation even warranted a period of silence for consideration after it was given.

Proving that he had the attention for detail required of a Recorder, Wesley timidly spoke up to counter Ruta's offering. He noted that all the known accounts of Martin-induced precognition occurred as bursts of eerie calm rather than disruptive insanity, and that the important information had always been divulged in a dream or in the form of a verse. Jacinth had been anything but calm, and there was no poetic element in her outburst other than the straight repetition of phrases. Furthermore, both sword and tapestry were symbols of the same power and legacy that was Martin the Warrior, so it would make no symbolic sense whatsoever for one to bring destruction upon the other. And the placement of all the key factors was no more than chance, Wesley proposed, just as the timing and location of the earthquake had also been chance.

It is fortunate that the council's discussion had moved away from the specific issue of Jacinth to the more generally-termed matter of premonition versus insanity when Maestro Liedswelt approached the makeshift table from behind. The marten's bearing was timid, forepaws pressed into each other and eyes tightly squinted, so different from his characteristic proud bearing. At some distance behind him stood the survivors from the Grand Opera, singers and orchestral musicians alike, dressed in everything from nightclothes to salvaged costumes, only some holding the sheet music and instruments with which they came to Redwall.

Liedswelt aimed first for Winfield, then caught on to his own myopia and redirected at Ruta. "We are leaving now," he told her, accented voice subdued, maybe even ashamed. "Here was never our place and I feel we have done all we can on the scene itself. We do not wish to burden you, and we have other places that await. But I will do all in my power, whatever the musical world holds within the political, to have any further aid sent to you once we have returned home. This was the ill will of Nature, and as Art is Nature's pinnacle, the good will of Art is what I can give."

Ruta considered the squinting conductor and his bedraggled company. "I am sorry to see you go," she said at length. "But as you will always carry these events with you, you will always have a place with us. Best of luck on your journey."

Liedswelt stood still, not even turning to leave. His squint relaxed, eyes focusing on something that did not require spatial distance vision. The marten's temporal distance vision was intact despite his lack of spectacles. He spoke again, his voice softer but also more focused. "I wrote a piece once, when I was younger -- one of my first solidly complete works. Full orchestra with choir and solo voices. I meant it as a depiction of what I thought would happen to those poor creatures lost in some sort of cataclysm -- or in any frame of life, really. It is very programmatic -- sinister marches, herald bugle calls, the last sounds of nature before mortality...and there was an earthquake in it. That's what I seriously meant it to be. But it was three measures, only three, just a crescendoed drumroll, soft to loud..."

The marten shook his head, smiling weakly. "I did that wrong, I see I won't change it, since it was so self-integrated, but I'd do it differently now that I know. I mean, I have no idea how such a thing could be translated to musical sound, but not as I did it in that piece. And yet...after the earthquake in my piece, the fallen wake up from the crevasses and rubble -- they are aimless at first, but then they are lifted beyond that mortality to newer and greater places. My earthquake is all wrong, but I can only hope that resurrection holds out as accurate."

Liedswelt nodded and looked up, blurred eyes meeting Ruta's. In that gaze, there was a good long silence; it was only when Ruta opened her mouth to breathe heavier rather than to speak that Liedswelt ventured to add, "That's the part with the choir alone. I'd like for us to sing it to you."

There was no protest, and thus Liedswelt beckoned to his musicians -- the cast of the opera, even Enruso and Crysantema, arranged in an equally-voiced choir, with the ferretmaid Aetantim supplying the missing mezzo-soprano voice. The maestro shut his eyes as he gave the upbeat, not requiring spectacles or score in this case. The score came, pure and homophonic: "Arise, yes, you will arise, my dust, after a short rest! What was created must perish! What has perished must rise again! Tremble no more! Prepare yourself to live!"

The pure sound hung in the spring air even after the maestro's cutoff. For once, Liedswelt did not object to the sound not following his every paw motion. The whole ensemble themselves stood silent as their earlier sound waves projected outward. It was only when the last vibrations trickled away that they moved wordlessly away from their choral rows and back into procession. Aetantim passed her music back to Liedswelt, expression somewhere between a grateful smile and the sort of contemplation that dare not allow for that smile, then slipped back off toward the infirmary. Liedswelt nodded solemnly to Ruta and the Council before joining the rest of the group, giving them the cue to move on.

The beasts of the Grand Opera trailed away from the remains of Redwall like in a scene from one of the music dramas the produced -- bedraggled, silent, and carrying the body of Jacinth -- laid out on a salvaged door and draped in a curtain -- like it was that of an epic hero.

The Council matched this degree of silence until the column of musicians fully disappeared into the green of Mossflower. Ruta pressed her paws together and looked among them Councilbeasts, at last clearing her throat gently and proposing, "Perhaps we have had no premonitions in several hundred years because we simply have not needed them."

-----

The train steamed through the Mossflower night, gleaming black-painted metal slipping through natural darkness, heavy column of smoke diffusing out of visibility between the trees and the sky. The whistle mutedly called through the scene, though more because Hayward wanted to operate the whistle than to clear any beasts away from the isolated tracks. The travelers had already well established how abandoned or dead the settlements along their way had been.

Andreas, Hayward, Garlock, and Elsinore had been received with interest and excitement in Parkfield; even as they declared their urgency in terms of returning to Redwall, the citizens insisted upon feeding them heartily before loading further rations and passengers onto the train. Thus, between that and the leisurely pace of preparation that could only be expected by a town that is barely shaken into action by actual physical shaking, darkness had already almost overtaken the countryside by the time the train pulled out of the station.

With Hosgri and Fialko keeping the engine fed with coals, Andreas found that, while running a train was uncomfortable temperaturewise, it did in fact work precisely how the schematic diagrams and manuals for conductors said it would. Confidence thus bolstered, the marten was able to convince himself that he had nothing to fear if he was controlling the power of that machine, and that he wouldn't be able to see the scenery at night anyway. He did, however, retain enough nervous energy that, along with the blistering heat of the coal fire and Hayward's glee at the sound of the whistle, he was able to keep himself awake and driving as night streamed on toward morning.

Andreas' study of routes and timetables also told him that all tracks, when taken straight, headed to Redwall and the city behind it, and that switches and turnoffs would only lead the expedition astray. He was glad for this, too, as he hadn't the slightest idea how to make a switch or a turn on a train. He only knew that he could keep the thing going forward and upright on its one designated track.

As night began to brighten into predawn, Andreas even lost his ability to do that. The track, thus far unaffected by broken ground, had been bisected by a ridged ground crack running perpendicular to the fault. The ground slanted suddenly upward, the track split and twisted to either side of the new landform. Train wheels can handle gradual slopes, but sudden kicks upward are never favorable for rail routes. The train lurched violently as it hit the rift, iron screaming, coals leaping out of the furnace and narrowly missing the occupants of the cabin. Another form of narrowness was a saving grace here -- the railroad cut cleared through the dim forest was not particularly wide, practically claustrophobia-inducing. Therefore, when the train, which had been moving at a slower rate than a trained engineer would have driven it, creaked sideways and rocked to the side into the forest. The smaller saplings in its way topple with it, but the more venerable old trees supported the locomotive at an angle more upright than capsized.

Creatures slid their way toward the doors of the train and piled out into the dim predawn, fully awake and jarred from the collision. And the coals from the engine's fire, very much live themselves, poured out onto the forest floor, glowing and smoking, already causing grasses and quake-fallen foliage to smolder threateningly. Elsinore, one of the first off the train, seemed to be one of the the few to notice this in the genera panic of regrouping on the other side of the fallen vehicle. The mole dropped to all fours, digging all of her paws into the same sort of soft soil that had nearly overcome her during the quake, tearing it upward onto the threat of flames and not ceasing until the coals could not be seen gleaming under the pile of dirt. Breathing heavily, she trundled around to the other side of the train.

Hosgri and Fialko were frantically chattering orders at the citizens of Parkfield who had chosen to come along; even though this was not a terribly large number, the two squirrels were still only achieving minimal organization for the time being. Andreas and Hayward had given up on getting any information out of the squirrels and were conversing between themselves, gesticulating down the track and into the darkness of the forest. Garlock skulked, leaning against the side of the capsized locomotive. Elsinore approached the marten and the hare, speaking nothing of her heroism. She only piped up when it was apparent that Andreas and Hayward were attempting to determine their location and the next step from there.

"Zurrs," Elsinore inserted. Andreas and Hayward stopped, looking at the mole in worried expectation. "Oi know the feel of this soil Oi was on the crew that dug this part of the loine. We're not so far, perhaps ten moiles."

Before Andreas could get in a word on Elsinore's revelation, a figure shot past him, down the track at full speed. Garlock did not utter any words either as he took off, grim determination set in his jaw, his gait pounding and frantic, his action decisive in itself. A small group of the Parkfield squirrels, still disorganized, took this as a sign to follow and scooted afterward. There were not enough of them to be considered a stampede, but their number was still enough to be a decisive factor. Elsinore, Hayward, and Andreas took off after the rest of the group and away from the stricken train. It was easier to run fast toward Redwall with the ground unwavering under their footpaws.