Chapter Ten

Into the Canyons

The morning of the third day after leaving Hustingreen, the three travelers struck a little creek that was struggling across the plain. “This is it,” said Percy. “This is the creek that flows through Sinking Canyons.”

Aidan took another look at the muddy stream. He could easily jump across it. It wasn’t even deep enough to support fish larger than minnows and shiners. He cocked his head and looked questioningly at Percy. “This little creek cut a canyon?” Aidan had seen a canyon once in the Hill Country. Through it roared the Upper Branch of the mighty River Tam, boiling white as it leaped over rocks and plunged into pools, swirling and thundering, cutting its own path through the canyon’s granite walls on its way to the sea many leagues away. Aidan could imagine the River Tam cutting a canyon. But this little stream? It didn’t seem possible.

As they hiked up the stream, however, its banks deepened and grew farther apart. And soon the banks of the creek weren’t banks anymore, but the sides of a little valley through which the stream ran flat and wide, not even ankle deep, in muddy rivulets that crossed and recrossed one another like braided hair.

“Watch this,” said Percy as he stepped into the braided stream. The water ran over the tops of his feet and flowed cloudier a little distance before the stirred-up mud settled out again. Percy pointed where he had just stepped. “Watch my bootprints.” The clear imprint of Percy’s boots melted away as the rivulets braided themselves back together in the soft mud. “A hundred men could troop up this streambed, and a quarter hour later there would be no trace of them.” The stream was forever shifting, constantly flowing into new patterns of its own design. There, out in the open, was a secret passageway of sorts, covering tracks almost as quickly as the travelers could make them.

Before long the streambed had sunk more deeply beneath the level of the plain. The steep sides of the valley were noticeably higher than the three travelers’ heads, and Dobro was growing visibly nervous. “This ain’t no place for a feechie,” he said. “I got no business going underneath the ground.”

“You aren’t underground,” Aidan said, pointing at the mud they were slogging through. “There’s the ground, and it’s under you.”

“That ain’t the ground I’m talkin’ ’bout,” Dobro answered. He pointed up the valley wall to the grass and trees that grew well above them. “I’m talkin’ ’bout that ground.” He began moaning the warning chant that his mother had taught him about Sinking Canyons:

By now the valley had deepened into a canyon. Its sheer walls were so high that not even Dobro could heave a rock up to the canyon rim. Aidan had never seen another place like it. The midday sun reflecting off the sheer canyon walls was almost blinding. Up near the rim, at the top of the canyon wall ran a band of the same red clay that prevailed throughout much of Corenwald. But below that, and all the way down to the canyon floor, the wall was a swirl of colors ranging from white to deep pink to lavender and every combination thereof.

The farther they traveled up the canyon, the higher the walls rose above them, to fifty feet, to a hundred feet, even to a hundred fifty feet in places. On either side the walls folded themselves into fissures and crevices. In places they bulged out in rounded buttresses like the base of a swamp tree. On either hand numerous fingers, smaller canyons, connected to the main canyon like tributaries joining a river. They created a mazelike complex of caves and hidey-holes—a perfect place for lying low, an easy place to defend against a much larger force, if need be. Knife-thin ridges, some a hundred feet high, spurred out from the canyon walls. The canyon floor was dotted with great pink and white chimneys and towers, some round and boulderlike, some so high and spindly they looked as if they might topple over any minute.

“Time to leave these neighborhoods,” Dobro repeated, remembering his mother’s warnings.

But Aidan was fascinated with the place. “What is it made of?” he asked, admiring the breathtaking beauty of the scene. “Some sort of stone?”

“Not stone,” Percy answered, leading his brother to the nearest spur. He swiped his hand across the surface of the wall, and a shower of sand cascaded to the ground. Then he held his hand up to Aidan’s face, showing him the layer of slick white clay that remained. “Sand and clay,” he said, waving his hand to gesture around him. “This whole canyon is nothing but clay and tight-packed sand.”

A hundred strides up the canyon, Percy pointed up at a tree that dangled upside down against the canyon wall, half its roots still clinging to the red soil at the canyon’s rim. “That tree was still standing when we got here two years ago,” Percy said. “Fell in when the ground beneath it collapsed in a rainstorm last year.” He pointed at a second tree nearby whose roots snaked out of the clay and into midair. “That one is liable to go next.”

Dobro swung a few steps toward the far side of the canyon, as if he expected the tree to crash down on him any second. “Time to leave these neighborhoods,” he muttered, but neither Errolson paid him any mind. “Trees falling down,” Dobro continued under his breath, “sand walls liable to drop off and bury us alive...”

“All right, Dobro,” Aidan said, “we know: Sinking Canyons is no place for a feechie.”

“That’s what I been trying to tell you!” Dobro answered. “No vines to swing on. Nothing but scrubbified trees that ain’t hardly worth climbing. Ain’t even enough water to get the hairy part of my foot wet—” He suddenly broke off. “What was that?” he whispered, pointing at a low chimney nearby. “’Hind of that big rock.” He picked up a hardened lump of white clay about the size of his fist, and when the top of a head appeared from behind the chimney, he cut loose with the clay ball, which whistled mere inches from sandy curls that quickly disappeared again behind the chimney.

“A spy!” Dobro yelled. “I ain’t gonna tolerate a feller spyin’ on me like he was a bunny in a brush pile. It ain’t neighborly.” He had already picked up another jagged clay ball when Percy grabbed his throwing arm.

“Hold on, fireball,” Percy laughed. “It’s one of our sentries.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted toward the chimney. “Slider Turtle!” That was the password.

A hand waved from behind the chimney. “You can come out,” Percy called. “All is clear.”

“Arliss!” Percy shouted when the sentry came out.

“Arliss?” Aidan called after him, delighted to see the young miner who once led him through the caverns under the Bonifay Plain six years earlier.

Arliss rubbed his eyes. “Aidan, is that you?”

“It’s me,” Aidan answered, and the two young men stood looking at one another, not sure what to say. “You still don’t look much like a miner,” Aidan finally said, looking up and down his old friend’s long and lanky frame.

“But I still got the miner’s head,” Arliss said, tapping his skull with a skinny finger. “And that’s worth plenty with the boys at Greasy Cave.”

“This is Dobro,” Aidan said by way of introduction. “Dobro, this is Arliss.”

Arliss extended a hand to shake with Dobro, but Dobro didn’t seem to notice as he flashed a greenish, gappy grin at the civilizer and stepped up to give him a head-butt of greeting and good fellowship, in the feechie manner.

Aidan grabbed Dobro’s arm to stop him, lest he should break the taller man’s nose with his forehead. He discreetly gestured at Arliss’s outstretched hand. After a moment of confusion, Dobro placed his clay ball in Arliss’s hand—the same clay ball he had meant to throw at Arliss’s head a few moments earlier.

“Dobro’s a …” Aidan wasn’t sure he was ready to go into the details. “Dobro’s an old friend.”

Arliss kept smiling, but his eyes narrowed the least bit, as if he were trying to figure this strange fellow out.

“From the Feechiefen,” Dobro clarified.

A spark of recognition lit Arliss’s face. “A feechie,” he said knowingly. Now he understood why Dobro looked and talked so peculiar.

“That’s right,” Dobro said. “I’m a natural-born feechie, but I figured it was time I give civilizin’ a try.”

Arliss looked at Aidan. “We been speculating whether you’d bring feechies with you when you come back.”

“Well, one feechie,” Aidan began, “and only because he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

But Arliss couldn’t contain himself any longer. He was too excited to listen to Aidan’s explanation. “Wait till I tell the boys,” he said, then he turned and sprinted up the canyon.

Aidan turned to Dobro. “If you want to pass yourself off as a civilizer, you’ve got to stop talking about the Feechiefen.”

“And you need to know about shaking hands,” Percy added.

“Shaky hands?” Dobro said. “No, thank you. My hands is good and steady, and I aim to keep them that way, whether I’m feechified or civilized.”

“No, Dobro, shaking hands—it’s a civilizer greeting. It’s what we do instead of head butting. If somebody reaches a hand out like this”—Percy extended his right hand—“you grip it nice and firm and give it a shake. Try it.”

Dobro grabbed Percy’s hand and began to shake it violently back and forth, like a terrier shaking a rat.

“No, Dobro, not that way,” Percy yelled, wrenching his hand out of Dobro’s powerful grip. “You’re not supposed to shake the other fellow’s armbone to jelly. Watch how Aidan and I do it.”

But Aidan and Percy never gave their handshaking demonstration. Just then Errol appeared from around the nearest bend in the canyon.

He was running toward the three travelers, and running surprisingly well for a white-haired man in his sixties. Just behind him were Jasper and Brennus. Aidan ran to embrace his father. The old man’s cheeks were wet with joyful tears, and he could barely speak—couldn’t, in fact, say anything but Aidan’s name over and over.

Aidan embraced Brennus and Jasper with all the affection of a long-lost brother, and there were more tears of joy all around. Dobro was so affected by the scene that he, too, began to cry sloppily and loudly.

“Father, this is Dobro Turtlebane,” Aidan began, “the feechie friend I have told you about.”

“You are very welcome to Sinking Canyons, Dobro,” Errol said, extending his right hand. Aidan was afraid for a moment that Dobro would seize his father’s hand and shake his arm out of its socket, but instead he fell on Errol’s neck and buried his face in the older man’s shoulder. “Thank you for them kind words, Mr. Errol,” he sobbed. “Any daddy of Aidan’s is a daddy of mine. And I ain’t had no daddy since the gator down at Devil’s Elbow knocked mine out’n a flatboat and et him—and me no more’n a yearling at the time.”

Percy continued the introductions. “Dobro, this is Brennus, our eldest brother, and Jasper, my twin.” Dobro seized both brothers in a single hug and cried again.

Aidan looked beyond his father and brothers and for the first time realized how many men were living in Sinking Canyons. There must have been sixty or seventy of them, all keeping their distance out of respect for the family reunion. Errol noticed the look of astonishment on Aidan’s face. “Our band of outlaws,” he said, throwing his thumb over his shoulder. “Didn’t Percy tell you?”