Chapter Twenty-One

Gate Stone

Aidan just wanted to rest when he got back to Sinking Canyons. It had been a long trip from Tambluff. But Jasper wouldn’t wait. He grabbed Aidan by the arm and began leading him down-canyon. “Aidan!” he said. “You’re not going to believe this!”

“Can it wait?” Aidan asked. “I really need to see Father.”

“See Father later,” Jasper insisted. “You’ve got to see this.”

“Are you taking me to the diggings?” Aidan asked.

Jasper nodded eagerly.

“Jasper, we’ve got a lot of things to do that are a lot more important than digging up old timbers and broken pottery. You’re supposed to be helping train an army.”

“I have been helping train an army, Aidan,” Jasper retorted, a touch of indignation in his voice. “You’re the one who’s been gallivanting all over the place.”

They soon arrived at the diggings, which were significantly bigger than they had been when Aidan left for Tambluff. “Looks like you’ve put the new recruits to work,” Aidan observed.

“Every good soldier needs to have some practice digging fortifications,” Jasper said. “They might as well practice here.”

“But this is what I wanted to show you,” Jasper continued. He pointed at a blue-gray granite block, about two feet in height, depth, and width.

“You dug this up?” Aidan asked.

“Yes. It took eight men to drag it out of the hole.”

Aidan marveled at the great block of granite. What kind of flood brought it into the canyon? “It looks almost like a gate stone,” he said.

“It is a gate stone,” said Jasper. “Look at this.” He tapped the far side of the stone.

Aidan walked around to that side of the stone, where he saw an inscription: “New Vezey.”

“Didn’t I say you wouldn’t believe it?” Jasper whooped.

“New Vezey,” Aidan read again. “What is New Vezey?”

“It’s carved on a village gate stone, so we figure it’s the name of a village,” Jasper answered. “But nobody’s heard of a village called New Vezey. We’ve got men from all over Corenwald here, and I think I’ve asked every one of them. But nobody knows of a place called New Vezey.”

“And nothing from the old lore?”

“There was a village registry among the manuscripts I brought from the library at Longleaf, but it makes no mention of New Vezey.”

Aidan concentrated on those words, New Vezey. Something was on the tip of his tongue, but it just wouldn’t come.

“So what do you think?” Jasper asked.

Aidan raised his hand for silence. “New Vezey,” he mumbled, his eyes closed, “New Vezey … Vezey … Vezey … Vezey …”

Suddenly, Aidan’s eyes popped open, and he raised an index finger. He recited:

“What are you talking about?” Jasper asked. His expression showed genuine alarm, as if he thought his brother had gone crazy.

“Dobro’s sadballad,” Aidan answered. “About Veezo and the magical plow.” He repeated the stanza again:

“I think that legend might tell what happened here.”

Jasper stared at his brother. Yes, he thought, he’s finally lost his wits.

Aidan looked up at the band of red clay just below the canyon rim. He rested his fingers horizontally across the bridge of his nose to shield the rest of the canyon wall from his vision. “Pretend there’s no canyon here,” he told Jasper. “Pretend there’s just a clay bank cut into the ground.”

Jasper shielded his own vision the way Aidan had and gazed up at the bank.

“Have you ever seen anything that looked like that?” Aidan asked.

“Just looks like a plain old gully when you look at it that way,” said Jasper.

“Dobro and I saw one yesterday. A man had plowed a furrow straight down a slope instead of terracing across it.”

“Not very smart,” Jasper observed.

“That was only four years ago. Four years of rains washing down that slope, and that furrow has become a gully you can’t jump across. Every bit of topsoil has washed away, off down the hill somewhere. Topsoil ten feet deep, all the way down to the bedrock, just gone.”

“I still don’t see what you’re getting at,” Jasper said.

“Let’s say you put a farm—no, not a farm, a whole village—on a spot where that nice red topsoil isn’t sitting on bedrock or hardpacked clay but on a layer of sand and loose clay a hundred feet thick.” Aidan pointed straight up in the air, where he imagined this village might have once stood. “And let’s say there’s a farmer whose fields border the village, and he plows his furrows the wrong way—down the slope, not across it.

“When the topsoil is gone from that farmer’s field, can you imagine how quickly the sand below it would wash out? You saw how much sand and clay moved through here in a single rainstorm.”

Jasper looked as if he was starting to get the picture. “So you’re saying this farmer is the Veezo from Dobro’s story?”

“No, I’m saying the song isn’t about a man named Veezo. It’s about a village called New Vezey. It must have gotten garbled through the years. It wasn’t a farmer who got swallowed up by the clay. It was a whole village. This gate stone, these timbers, the plow blade didn’t wash up. They fell down, just like that pine tree did.”

Jasper wasn’t yet ready to accept all of Aidan’s theory. “It just doesn’t make sense, Aidan.”

“It makes more sense than any other explanation we’ve come up with,” Aidan insisted. “It explains a lot of the feechies’ peculiar ways. Think about how many superstitions Dobro has about this place.”

“Time to leave these neighborhoods,” Jasper mimicked in his best Dobro voice.

“Exactly,” said Aidan. “Probably the worst disaster in the history of feechiedom. A whole village abandoned, then swallowed up by the earth. Even if they don’t exactly remember what happened here, you can imagine the superstitions that would grow up around this place.”

“Dobro did say the feechies started out as farmers and villagers,” Jasper remembered.

Aidan raised both hands to gesture at his surroundings. “And then this happens. No wonder they gave up farming and took to the forest. This is what made them feechiefolk.”

“I’ve just got one more question,” said Jasper. “Why would farmers—even bad farmers—try to farm the Clay Wastes?”

Aidan shrugged. “Maybe they weren’t Clay Wastes three hundred years ago. Maybe they only became Clay Wastes after the topsoil washed away.”

Jasper smiled. “Perhaps it was for the best that the feechies gave up farming. There may not have been any topsoil left on this island by the time the civilizers got here.”