Categories > Books > Redwall > The Wicked Ground
Chapter Eighteen
The aftershock lasted only three seconds and did not stir up much dust. The silence that hung over the returned expedition members and the Council of Mossflower compensated for that -- it was heavier than the sheet of dust that the big earthquake had thrown in to the air scarcely over a week earlier. But for all its impenetrability, the silence was far clearer than the dust had been. Rather than squinting through scattered light, all eyes turned to and locked on the patch of ground containing Andreas and Garlock.
Elsinore and Hayward pushed into the clearing and offered their paws to Andreas. The marten's motions were stiff and labored, but he was able to rise to his footpaws with their help and was the first of the trio to approach Garlock's fallen form. While word was still heading off to bring infirmary staff to the scene, Andreas crouched back down and placed a light forepaw on Garlock's neck. Warmth still rose up through the ferret's fur, but the marten could detect no pulsation of the muscles or veins beneath. He lingered in this position for a good two minutes, and with no sign of revival, at last stood and solemnly brushed the dirt off of himself.
"Perhaps we should turn him over," Elsinore suggested. "Just because he didn't respect the urth doesn't mean we should leave him face to the graound."
Andreas nodded dully and he and Hayward approached Garlock's body yet again, moving along with Elsinore to roll it onto its back. Rose red dust clung to the deep red patch on Garlock's short, a fragment of red glass protruding roughly an inch from the center of the mark. More terrible, though, was the ferret's face. Blood trickled and coagulated at the corners of his shattered jaw, compacted, shoved in, and twisted horribly to the left of its natural position in life -- in many ways more terrifying of a displacement than anything on the ground had been.
As he regarded Garlock's body, Andreas felt a shaking in his knees and a churning in his gut that had nothing to do with seismic activity. The dead ferret's twisted visage seemed to smirk victoriously at him, bloody and terrible. Andreas lurched to the side and vomited into a pile of rubble.
To the side of the Council group, Hosgri turned to Fialko and remarked, "Creatures aren't supposed to be killed by these things."
Fialko shook his head and amended Hosgri's statement with, "At least not like that."
The living wall around the body of Garlock parted as Aetantim and Charity from the infirmary at last reached the scene. Elsinore interrupted them. "He's dead. Perhaps you should help Zurr Andras naow."
The mouse and the ferretmaid nodded. Andreas had finished spilling the contents of his stomach, and the two infirmary workers helped him off to the side of the wreckage to sit, administering fluids and herbs from their bags.
In all the chaos and silence in one, Rhynn of the Northridge Horde was the first member of the Council to speak. The silver weasel stood and waved one paw toward Garlock's body and the other toward some of her hordebeasts in the background, who had presumably stepped up at the prospect of a good fight. "Take him back to Darkhill," Rhynn instructed. "If he had to die, it should have been there in the first place, along with the townsfolk that he failed to help. Prepare to do that as soon as you can."
As Rhynn spoke, a peculiar and indecipherable expression came to dominate Councilchair Ruta's features. Once the weasel's speach had concluded, the badger rose stiffly and abruptly. "Don't go anywhere yet," she countermanded. "Decisions have to be made here."
Yet the big badger did not hold to her own instruction. She lumbered away from the makeshift table, the Council, the crowd gathered around the scene, and around what was once one of the corners of Redwall Abbey. Ruta stared hard at the grain of the demolished masonry, piled and scattered, more natural by laws of entropy but less right by all patterns of familiarity. She skirted the shambles that used to be a wall, traversed the tangle of fallen greenery that had been the orchard, passed an apparently bottomless rend in the earth that had bisected and drained the former pond. Grayed and weathered stones carved with eroded letters were distinguishable in the redder debris -- old headstones, the long dead buried once more. And she did not need to go look at the neatly turned ground that had been disturbed by deliberate paws to recall its appearance and to dredge up her last recollections of the bodies within as living souls.
Ruta reached the excavated opening which led down into the infirmary. Feeling a deep longing and compulsion to enter her beloved Redwall once final time, the badger squeezed into the gap. The task was not so easy for her as it had been for Aetantim, Charity, or any of the other infirmary workers, but she pressed forward until she was in the small chamber. There was no light and no order. The air was stagnant and dusty. The whole space resounded only with silence. Not a single sense of familiarity caught in Ruta's mind. Not a single element remained to assure her that this was still, or had ever been, Redwall Abbey.
The badger laboriously extracted herself from the little room, gulping at the fresh air outdoors even though her reemergence into the open meant seeing the destruction again. She shook the dust and chips of stone from her fur, the continued her loop around the ruins, faster than before.
True to orders, nobeast had shifted positions in the span of time that Ruta had been gone. Garlock's body had been pulled to the side and Andreas was standing again, flanked by Hayward and Elsinore, but the Council and all assembled remained obediently expectant. Ruta slipped back behind the makeshift table and again spoke. "In our government, we have two leaders, internal and external. If one dies, the other is to play both roles until an election can be conducted to replace the fallen. The Abbot of Mossflower Country died in the earthquake, and we have been in no condition to hold elections. That places me in charge. That gives me the final word."
The members of the Council began to shift in their seats, but none of them could rightly contradict Ruta. They knew the laws just as well. The badger continued. "And we lost so much more than just our Abbot. So many lives, so many places. It's all dust. For days, we've deliberated on what to make of that dust, and now it is time to say for certain. This is not Mossflower anymore. People, places, history, social structures -- they're all gone and changed. Much of that cannot be rebuilt, and what can will not, shill not be done the same way as before. And now we have physical proof of a single line along which the earth tears, and we have proof that creatures will kill and die over that issue..."
Ruta rubbed her forehead with her forepaws. "That last bit is the most dangerous thing to me. That is what makes our path as clear as that line in the earth. There is no other option to me anymore. We will leave this place. Those who choose to stay here and make what they will of it are welcome to, with my blessing, but that will be your own affair to manage. We, as a unified country, are leaving this place. The Land Across the Water can accommodate our rebirth without the scepter of another downfall hanging over us. Go back to your towns and gather what you can salvage. We have the ships to manage it. Go as swiftly as you can. The sooner that happens, the sooner this is behind us, and the sooner we will live."
The crowd began to bustle and move, discussion arising alongside motion. But it all fell on Andreas as if he had suddenly gone deaf. Ruta's words alone rang through his head, burning away at his mind and sending his heart driving down to his footpaws. Confusion, sadness, and anger all at once tore at the marten from the inside out. Here was the final rejection of Nature, the refusal to understand or adapt to what had always been there before any civilization had evolved. Here was going faster, bypassing details so quickly as to not need to clean them up, let alone comprehend them, rushing from place to place without any care for the route in between. Here was motion without going forward, yet also leaping so far ahead that the wide open opportunity to step back, process, make sense, and progress more steadily wasn't so much being ignored deliberately as not being noticed to begin with. Andreas ached as he considered how this did did not also bother anybeast else.
Swallowing intently, Andreas approached Ruta and asserted, "I think you're wrong. I think there's too much here to ever be abandoned, and I think it's rebuildable in a way that can withstand anything. We've found the creatures who can already do that. We can live with Nature as we have in the past. We can understand it, and it will never dominate us like that again. I think you are wrong."
Ruta rested a forepaw on one of Andreas' heaving shoulders. "You have been the one stronghold that couldn't be toppled in all of this, Andreas. I trust your judgement and am certain that you could be right, but that still cannot be how it goes. We have lost too much, and what we have lost, not what remains, has to determine what we will gain from this."
Andreas shook his head firmly. "I intend to stay. I intend to trace and map this thing to both ends, to find out how it ties in to Loamhedge, to figure out how it works. I, at least, will take on that responsibility."
"I would expect no less of you," Ruta told Andreas with a small smile. "It will not be a wasted effort. I shall expect to hear it, whether you cross the water to tell us or whether we find our own way back here some day." The badger remove her paw from the marten's shoulder and strode off to begin managing the newly certain activities for which she had set the course.
Brother Andreas stood by the collapsed wall of Redwall Abbey, leaning heavily against stone, glass, and woodwork that could no longer be pinpointed as having belonged to any one part of the building, staring distantly in the direction where he knew his decisively straight fault line lay. Gentle spring breezes pulled the dust out of his fur and brushed his nostrils with the breath of fresh blossoms. That was like any spring day, warm and bright, dismissive of the very possibility of a natural disaster. But Andreas now knew with more confirmation and certainty than ever that neither this form of Nature nor the natures of sentient creatures could be taken for granted.
9 January 2007
The aftershock lasted only three seconds and did not stir up much dust. The silence that hung over the returned expedition members and the Council of Mossflower compensated for that -- it was heavier than the sheet of dust that the big earthquake had thrown in to the air scarcely over a week earlier. But for all its impenetrability, the silence was far clearer than the dust had been. Rather than squinting through scattered light, all eyes turned to and locked on the patch of ground containing Andreas and Garlock.
Elsinore and Hayward pushed into the clearing and offered their paws to Andreas. The marten's motions were stiff and labored, but he was able to rise to his footpaws with their help and was the first of the trio to approach Garlock's fallen form. While word was still heading off to bring infirmary staff to the scene, Andreas crouched back down and placed a light forepaw on Garlock's neck. Warmth still rose up through the ferret's fur, but the marten could detect no pulsation of the muscles or veins beneath. He lingered in this position for a good two minutes, and with no sign of revival, at last stood and solemnly brushed the dirt off of himself.
"Perhaps we should turn him over," Elsinore suggested. "Just because he didn't respect the urth doesn't mean we should leave him face to the graound."
Andreas nodded dully and he and Hayward approached Garlock's body yet again, moving along with Elsinore to roll it onto its back. Rose red dust clung to the deep red patch on Garlock's short, a fragment of red glass protruding roughly an inch from the center of the mark. More terrible, though, was the ferret's face. Blood trickled and coagulated at the corners of his shattered jaw, compacted, shoved in, and twisted horribly to the left of its natural position in life -- in many ways more terrifying of a displacement than anything on the ground had been.
As he regarded Garlock's body, Andreas felt a shaking in his knees and a churning in his gut that had nothing to do with seismic activity. The dead ferret's twisted visage seemed to smirk victoriously at him, bloody and terrible. Andreas lurched to the side and vomited into a pile of rubble.
To the side of the Council group, Hosgri turned to Fialko and remarked, "Creatures aren't supposed to be killed by these things."
Fialko shook his head and amended Hosgri's statement with, "At least not like that."
The living wall around the body of Garlock parted as Aetantim and Charity from the infirmary at last reached the scene. Elsinore interrupted them. "He's dead. Perhaps you should help Zurr Andras naow."
The mouse and the ferretmaid nodded. Andreas had finished spilling the contents of his stomach, and the two infirmary workers helped him off to the side of the wreckage to sit, administering fluids and herbs from their bags.
In all the chaos and silence in one, Rhynn of the Northridge Horde was the first member of the Council to speak. The silver weasel stood and waved one paw toward Garlock's body and the other toward some of her hordebeasts in the background, who had presumably stepped up at the prospect of a good fight. "Take him back to Darkhill," Rhynn instructed. "If he had to die, it should have been there in the first place, along with the townsfolk that he failed to help. Prepare to do that as soon as you can."
As Rhynn spoke, a peculiar and indecipherable expression came to dominate Councilchair Ruta's features. Once the weasel's speach had concluded, the badger rose stiffly and abruptly. "Don't go anywhere yet," she countermanded. "Decisions have to be made here."
Yet the big badger did not hold to her own instruction. She lumbered away from the makeshift table, the Council, the crowd gathered around the scene, and around what was once one of the corners of Redwall Abbey. Ruta stared hard at the grain of the demolished masonry, piled and scattered, more natural by laws of entropy but less right by all patterns of familiarity. She skirted the shambles that used to be a wall, traversed the tangle of fallen greenery that had been the orchard, passed an apparently bottomless rend in the earth that had bisected and drained the former pond. Grayed and weathered stones carved with eroded letters were distinguishable in the redder debris -- old headstones, the long dead buried once more. And she did not need to go look at the neatly turned ground that had been disturbed by deliberate paws to recall its appearance and to dredge up her last recollections of the bodies within as living souls.
Ruta reached the excavated opening which led down into the infirmary. Feeling a deep longing and compulsion to enter her beloved Redwall once final time, the badger squeezed into the gap. The task was not so easy for her as it had been for Aetantim, Charity, or any of the other infirmary workers, but she pressed forward until she was in the small chamber. There was no light and no order. The air was stagnant and dusty. The whole space resounded only with silence. Not a single sense of familiarity caught in Ruta's mind. Not a single element remained to assure her that this was still, or had ever been, Redwall Abbey.
The badger laboriously extracted herself from the little room, gulping at the fresh air outdoors even though her reemergence into the open meant seeing the destruction again. She shook the dust and chips of stone from her fur, the continued her loop around the ruins, faster than before.
True to orders, nobeast had shifted positions in the span of time that Ruta had been gone. Garlock's body had been pulled to the side and Andreas was standing again, flanked by Hayward and Elsinore, but the Council and all assembled remained obediently expectant. Ruta slipped back behind the makeshift table and again spoke. "In our government, we have two leaders, internal and external. If one dies, the other is to play both roles until an election can be conducted to replace the fallen. The Abbot of Mossflower Country died in the earthquake, and we have been in no condition to hold elections. That places me in charge. That gives me the final word."
The members of the Council began to shift in their seats, but none of them could rightly contradict Ruta. They knew the laws just as well. The badger continued. "And we lost so much more than just our Abbot. So many lives, so many places. It's all dust. For days, we've deliberated on what to make of that dust, and now it is time to say for certain. This is not Mossflower anymore. People, places, history, social structures -- they're all gone and changed. Much of that cannot be rebuilt, and what can will not, shill not be done the same way as before. And now we have physical proof of a single line along which the earth tears, and we have proof that creatures will kill and die over that issue..."
Ruta rubbed her forehead with her forepaws. "That last bit is the most dangerous thing to me. That is what makes our path as clear as that line in the earth. There is no other option to me anymore. We will leave this place. Those who choose to stay here and make what they will of it are welcome to, with my blessing, but that will be your own affair to manage. We, as a unified country, are leaving this place. The Land Across the Water can accommodate our rebirth without the scepter of another downfall hanging over us. Go back to your towns and gather what you can salvage. We have the ships to manage it. Go as swiftly as you can. The sooner that happens, the sooner this is behind us, and the sooner we will live."
The crowd began to bustle and move, discussion arising alongside motion. But it all fell on Andreas as if he had suddenly gone deaf. Ruta's words alone rang through his head, burning away at his mind and sending his heart driving down to his footpaws. Confusion, sadness, and anger all at once tore at the marten from the inside out. Here was the final rejection of Nature, the refusal to understand or adapt to what had always been there before any civilization had evolved. Here was going faster, bypassing details so quickly as to not need to clean them up, let alone comprehend them, rushing from place to place without any care for the route in between. Here was motion without going forward, yet also leaping so far ahead that the wide open opportunity to step back, process, make sense, and progress more steadily wasn't so much being ignored deliberately as not being noticed to begin with. Andreas ached as he considered how this did did not also bother anybeast else.
Swallowing intently, Andreas approached Ruta and asserted, "I think you're wrong. I think there's too much here to ever be abandoned, and I think it's rebuildable in a way that can withstand anything. We've found the creatures who can already do that. We can live with Nature as we have in the past. We can understand it, and it will never dominate us like that again. I think you are wrong."
Ruta rested a forepaw on one of Andreas' heaving shoulders. "You have been the one stronghold that couldn't be toppled in all of this, Andreas. I trust your judgement and am certain that you could be right, but that still cannot be how it goes. We have lost too much, and what we have lost, not what remains, has to determine what we will gain from this."
Andreas shook his head firmly. "I intend to stay. I intend to trace and map this thing to both ends, to find out how it ties in to Loamhedge, to figure out how it works. I, at least, will take on that responsibility."
"I would expect no less of you," Ruta told Andreas with a small smile. "It will not be a wasted effort. I shall expect to hear it, whether you cross the water to tell us or whether we find our own way back here some day." The badger remove her paw from the marten's shoulder and strode off to begin managing the newly certain activities for which she had set the course.
Brother Andreas stood by the collapsed wall of Redwall Abbey, leaning heavily against stone, glass, and woodwork that could no longer be pinpointed as having belonged to any one part of the building, staring distantly in the direction where he knew his decisively straight fault line lay. Gentle spring breezes pulled the dust out of his fur and brushed his nostrils with the breath of fresh blossoms. That was like any spring day, warm and bright, dismissive of the very possibility of a natural disaster. But Andreas now knew with more confirmation and certainty than ever that neither this form of Nature nor the natures of sentient creatures could be taken for granted.
9 January 2007
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