The Woods Out Back
"EEE YA YIP YIP YIP!"
It resounded off of every stone, coming at the companions from every direction.
"What is it?" Gary cried again, more frantically. He pulled and tugged at his spear, but it wouldn't come free from the impaled wolf.
Geno rushed over and pounded on the spear's butt end, pushing it nearly all the way through the gory mass. The dwarf ripped it out of the creature's body the rest of the way and tossed it, covered in blood, to Gary. Gary caught it tentatively and started to bend, to wipe the bloodied shaft on the wet grass, but then Tommy scooped him up and flew off in pursuit of Kelsey.
"EEE YA YIP YIP YIP!"
"What is it?" Gary demanded of Mickey, sitting atop Tommy's massive shoulder just above him.
The leprechaun, his face ashen and his expression more grave than Gary had ever seen it, ignored him and whispered something into Tommy's ear. Without slowing, the giant reached down as he passed Geno and scooped the dwarf into his other arm. Even carrying all three, the giant had no trouble in keeping pace with Kelsey, who was sprinting at a dead run.
Having no time for their original route around the base of both Crahgs, Kelsey scrambled for the pass between the Witch's Teats. The going was rough and the ground broken, but every time Kelsey got to a shelf or sharp ravine that would have slowed him, Tommy came up behind and hoisted him, or even tossed him, across.
"Crahg wolves!" Geno called, peering around the giant's wide girth to look behind.
"Run on!" Kelsey replied. "They cannot climb very well!"
Gary looked back and saw the truth of the elf's claims. The wolves were indeed in pursuit, but were lower down on the mountainside than the companions. With their long front legs, their progress was severely limited; some of them had even taken to trotting backwards up the slope, possibly the most curious thing Gary Leger had ever seen.
Despite their gains ahead of the wolf pack, none of Gary's companions breathed easier. They were not fleeing from mere Crahg wolves, the young man realized, but from something much more powerful.
Something much more terrible.
Up and down, around boulders and across sharp cracks in the weathered stone, they ran and they jumped. They came to the lip of a drop, perhaps fifty feet, above a brown pool of muddy water - or was it just mud? Gary couldn't be sure.
The path wound down to the side, steep and treacherous, and terribly narrow, promising slow going indeed.
"EEE YA YIP YIP YIP!" It came from every rock; the creature sounding that terrible call was behind them, beside them, in front of them - they just did not know!
Kelsey cried out and jumped. Still holding tight to Gary and Geno, and with Mickey holding tight to him, Tommy blindly followed.
They hit in a rush of mud and muck. Filthy water burst right under the lip of Gary's too-big helmet, splattering his face and flushing up his nose. He fumbled out of the helmet and saw Mickey gently descending below an umbrella, tilting the unorthodox parachute to catch the crosswinds and float him clear of the murky pool.
Gary shook his head at the leprechaun, always amazed. But not complaining, for he, too, wasn't really very wet. Nor was Geno, for Tommy continued to hold them up high, out of the muddy pool. Tommy had sunk in deeply, though, with just his head and shoulders up above the water level, and Kelsey, though he had managed to quickly scramble out of the water, was brown from head to foot.
"Keep moving," the elf instructed them. "We are still near to the Crahgs and can afford no delays."
Geno and Gary waited for a moment, then the dwarf looked curiously at Tommy. "Are you going to follow or not?"
Their gigantic friend seemed truly perplexed. "Tommy cannot move," the giant admitted after a brief struggle with the gripping mud.
Without a moment's thought, Gary slipped down from Tommy's arm into the pool. The water was only shoulder-deep to him, which should have put it somewhere around Tommy's knees. Yet, here Gary was, staring the giant directly in the eye.
"Oh, begorra," Mickey moaned, coming to the pool's edge and immediately comprehending their newest dilemma.
"He's ten feet into the mud," Gary reasoned gloomily. "At least."
"Oh, begorra," Mickey moaned again.
Kelsey looked fearfully back up towards the pass, then turned and considered the brown plains looming in the east.
"Not to worry," Geno asserted as Tommy carefully lifted him over to the edge of the water. The dwarf hopped around to the back side of the pool, inspecting the rock wall that formed its western border. "I can get him out," Geno claimed, nodding confidently at Tommy.
With that assurance, Tommy smiled widely as he hoisted Gary to the water's edge.
"Ye'll not pull him from that mire," Mickey replied to the dwarf. "Not if ye had a dozen ropes and a hundred dwarfs."
Geno agreed with the leprechaun's assessment wholeheartedly, but he had no intention of trying to pull Tommy out - not yet. The dwarf grabbed his largest hammer and began pounding furiously on the rock wall behind the pool. Kelsey grimaced at each resounding smack, glancing nervously up to the higher passes.
"The beast'll not come out o' the Crahgs," Mickey said to calm the elf. "The Witch's Teats marks the end of its domain."
"What beast?" Gary demanded.
"Ye heard it," Mickey replied casually.
"Heard what?" Gary shot back, frustration evident in his near-frantic tone.
"The haggis," Kelsey whispered softly.
"Wild hairy haggis," Mickey added grimly.
"Haggis?" Gary echoed incredulously. "Haggis?" The name was not new to Gary. In his bureau back home, he even had a sweatshirt depicting three small caricatures of Scotsmen and proclaiming them to be "Haggis Hunters Unlimited."
"You mean the little hairy creatures that run around the Scottish Highlands?" Gary asked.
"Not so little," Kelsey remarked.
"But more than a little hairy," added Mickey. "And mean, lad. Ye've never seen anything so mean as a wild hairy haggis."
Gary's incredulous stare did not diminish. Several times, he pinched himself on the arm and muttered, "Wake up."
Geno's victorious grunt turned them about. The dwarf had cracked a hole in the rock wall, and the water of the muddy pool was fast draining, leaving behind a quagmire, with the giant buried to the hips.
Kelsey produced some fine cord, while Geno began laying stones around the giant, giving Tommy something solid to use for leverage and giving the industrious dwarf a firm base from which he could begin to dig out the mud trapping his giant companion.
Gary could hardly believe the sight: the taciturn dwarf working frantically and determinedly to free a giant - a giant that Geno not so long ago had considered an enemy. And more than simple pragmatism was guiding Geno's actions, Gary knew, though none in the group would deny that Tommy was a valuable companion. Geno's determination now went beyond what the dwarf would do for a pack mule. Something wonderful had just happened back in dangerous Crahgs and here, now, in the muddy pool.
An undeniable bond of friendship.
Even with the teamwork, it took them more than an hour to get Tommy out of the mud. No more chilling cries came from the Crahgs, though, and no visible pursuit, of Crahg wolf or haggis.
Glad to leave the Crahgs behind, the companions cleaned themselves and their supplies as best they could and set out across the brown and blasted plain, with the Giant's Thumb, the lair of Robert, clearly in sight every step of the way.
In all his life, Gary had never seen such total desolation. The land was scarred, brutally and completely. They passed one long and wide patch of charred tree skeletons, once a teeming forest, and they came down into a flat region, a clay bed dotted with long puddles and small clumps of scraggly grass and weeds poking through at uneven intervals.
Many bleached bones lined the clay bed, fish bones, and before long, Gary realized that this area had once been a huge lake, as wide as Lock Devenshere, perhaps, though not as long.
"Aye, and so it was," Mickey confirmed when Gary asked him about it. "Loch Tullamore, she was called. Full of fish and full of beauty.
"But Robert, he did not like it," Mickey went on, his tone a combination of anger and sadness. The leprechaun paused and again came that faraway longing look in his gray eyes.
"What did he do?" Gary prompted after a while, honestly intrigued. After all, what could any beast, dragon or not, possibly do to a lake?
"He hissed it, lad," Mickey explained. "Breathed his fiery breath upon the waters until they were no more. Day after day, Robert the Wretched came here, steaming the waters of Tullamore away."
Gary had no comment to offer in response. The sheer scope of what Mickey claimed the dragon had done overwhelmed him, and his sense of dread only heightened when he looked up again at the distant obelisk-shaped mountain. Every step came harder to him then, every step towards the lair of Robert the Wretched. Fortunately for Gary's rattled emotions, the sight of the mountain was soon lost, for Kelsey led the troupe into a long and narrow crevice, a great crack in the clay-like ground. The walls, tight about Tommy's shoulders, rose up twenty feet on either side of his companions, and the trail wound on for many miles.
They camped that night on the plains above the crevice, the sheer stillness of the region serving as a testament to the dragon's ultimate desolation. Not a cricket chirped, and the fog came in early and thick, defeating any starlight offered by the evening sky. The next day, like the first, came hot and dreary, and unnervingly quiet. The mountain loomed much larger when the group gazed upon it before descending again into the crevice walkway, but Gary paid it as little heed as he could, preferring to keep his thoughts far away from the dragon and the dangers that lay ahead.
He could not ignore the sight late that afternoon, though, when the group emerged from the crevice, turning a final bend that again put them in direct line with the Giant's Thumb. Directly before them lay a small vale, cluttered by the charred remains of long-dead trees and a few patches of weeds and grass. And beyond the vale loomed the mountain.
"We're going up that?" the stunned young man asked to anybody who could give him a rational answer.
"There is a more gradual road around the mountain's other side," Kelsey answered. "But we would find it crossing between the barracks of Robert's slave soldiers. This is our path."
"It must be five hundred feet," Gary protested.
Mickey lifted his tiny foot before him, comparing it to the scale of the enormous cliff. "Oh, five hundred feet at least," the leprechaun remarked. "Twice that'd be me own guess.
"Or just a hundred of his," Mickey added with a wink, casting a glance Tommy's way.
"We can't climb that," Gary asserted, his mood not improved at all by Mickey's attempted humor. "And what if there are guards on those castle walls?" Gary imagined buckets of hot oil rolling down at him, or a storm of arrows plucking him from a cliff that he had no desire to climb even if Kelsey could assure him that no monsters waited atop it. "And what kind of a dragon needs a castle anyway?" Gary protested.
"Our path is up," Kelsey announced, having no time for Gary's obviously terror-inspired rambling. "And the daylight is fast waning." The elf led them on, asking Geno to see what the stones would tell him concerning the swiftest and easiest path.
Tommy stood perplexed at the edge of the small vale. As soon as Gary looked at the pitiful giant, he understood, for Tommy had no chance of scaling the cliff all the way up to the dragon's castle. Even if he did manage to find giant-sized handholds, a climbing Tommy would certainly present an easy and obvious target for any castle guards. With the huge giant hanging out so many feet from the stone, guards up above could hardly miss him, even under the cover of night.
"Come along!" Kelsey instructed Gary sharply.
"Tommy cannot follow," Gary argued.
"Tommy was never meant to follow," Kelsey retorted. "We allowed him to come to the base of the mountain - that is all."
"Kelsey's right, lad," Mickey put in. "We've telled ye already why the giant should not be going near to Robert's lair. It'd make the dragon uneasy and dangerous."
"We can't just leave him out here," said Gary.
"He'll be safer than the rest of us," Mickey reasoned.
Looking up at the imposing cliff and knowing what waited atop it, Gary couldn't honestly argue against the logic. He stared at his huge friend for a long moment.
"Tommy will wait," the giant assured him. He scratched his huge head, then pointed back to the crevice. "In there."
Gary nodded, managed a weak smile, and rushed to catch up to the others.
Kelsey led them through all the cover as he could find in the vale. There wasn't much, actually, but the elf was not too worried, for if there were any guards along this side of the castle, the elf's sharp eyes couldn't spot them.
Without incident, the companions, now four again, made the base of the rock wall and started up. They discovered that the wall, which had looked so sheer from across the vale, was lined by many small ledges and walkways, but all of these seemed to lead nowhere and after a half hour of stretching up to reach the next handhold and inching their way along impossibly narrow ledges, they found that they had really made very little progress.
"Do the rocks tell you anything?" Kelsey whispered to the dwarf in frustration. "Is there no way up?"
Geno grunted and put his ear to the stone. He took out a small hammer and gave a series of light taps, which sounded to Gary like some strange code. The dwarf listened for a moment, then tapped again, then listened some more.
"Hmmm," the dwarf grunted, looking up at the distant castle walls and then back to his friends.
"The rock is not solid," he said evenly, though too loudly for Gary's or Mickey's liking. Both glanced nervously upwards to the castle, expecting a shower of arrows to come whizzing down at them.
"It seems sturdy enough to me," Kelsey replied quietly.
"Of course it is," Geno huffed, and he banged his forehead against the stone to accentuate that obvious point. "What I mean is that the mountain is not a solid block. It is honeycombed by caverns and tunnels."
"That would make sense," Gary concurred, his unexpected reasoning turning both Mickey and Kelsey to him.
"From the same volcanic pressures that formed the mountain," Gary explained. "From the steam and the pressure of the hot lava." Mickey and Kelsey looked to each other and shrugged incredulously, then turned back to Geno for an explanation.
"He speaks the truth," the dwarf said, giving Gary a sidelong glance. "I knew that there were caves before we ever started up, but I did not believe that they would aid us much. Now, though, I believe that some of them probably climb fairly high within the mountain. That might be a better path than out here - in the open."
Those words again inevitably turned their attention to the castle. A lamp was burning in one of the towers up above, and even Kelsey had to honestly admit that he felt vulnerable out on the ledge. While the elf was not fond of caverns, he had to admit as well that the climb would be long and handholds would not be easily found in the coming darkness.
"Ye're leading, elf," Mickey said. "But I'm thinking that the dawn will find us hanging halfway up the mountainside."
"Where will we find an entrance?" Kelsey asked Geno.
Geno put his ear to the wall and tap-tapped again, ever so lightly. "Down and around to the south," he announced a moment later.
They had spent the next few minutes clambering back to the ground and working their way along the mountain's base. After crossing one rocky outcropping of tree-like pillars of broken stones, they found themselves on the edge of yet another pool, this one wide and steamy and crimson red, even in the fast-fading light.
Geno and Kelsey, at the lead, did not dare to touch the water.
"Red from the blood of Robert's victims, no doubt," Mickey reasoned, and Gary suspected that a legend had just been born. He knew, too, that there was probably a quite natural explanation for the coloring of the water, an excess of iron oxide, or something like that, but after the looks he had received during his "volcanic pressures" lecture, he decided to keep the thoughts private. Besides, Gary thought, Mickey's explanation seemed more romantic and more fitting for the land of Faerie.
"We have a bit of a problem, elf," Geno said, pointing diagonally across the pool to the mountain wall behind it. "There is your cave entrance."
Kelsey determinedly knelt down and dipped a hand in the ominous water. "It is warm, but not too hot," he said, as though he meant to hop right in and cross over.
"But how deep?" Mickey was quick to ask.
Gingerly Kelsey turned about and lowered one leg into the pool. Up to the hip, he had still not touched bottom.
"We're to have a rough time getting through that," the diminutive leprechaun remarked, aiming his voice mostly Geno's way.
"Tommy could cross it!" Gary piped in, somewhat loudly.
"Hush!" Kelsey scolded him, but the elf's ire faded away as Gary's idea rang true to him. "Go get your giant friend," he bade Gary, and the smiling man didn't have to be asked twice.
Tommy had little trouble carrying the four across the warm-watered pool. He kept his snorkel handy on his wide belt, but he found no need for it, for the water never got deeper than the middle of his chest. Still, the other companions were genuinely appreciative of the giant at that time - Geno even patted Tommy on the head once (when the dwarf thought that no one was looking).
They were at the tunnel entrance in just a few short minutes, and there, a few feet above the level of the pool, they had to say goodbye to the giant once more. Again, Tommy promised to wait back in the crevice. He turned about in the crimson water and strolled away, leaving great ripples in his wake.
The companions watched him for just a moment before he was lost in the gathering gloom, then they turned to their own path, the winding cave.
Already Kelsey, more accustomed to dancing under an open sky, seemed unnerved. He produced a tinderbox from his pack and a torch and quickly lit it, despite Geno's warnings that the light would "bring in every critter in the whole damn mountain!"
Kelsey ignored him and pressed in. The cave was a curious formation, its arcing walls scalloped and winding.
"Like the inside of a worm," Gary muttered under his breath, not wanting the others to hear that rather uncomfortable, though accurate, description.
The light bounced back at them from a dozen angles, flickering ominously, and Gary held his breath around every corner, imagining that a great dragon's treasure hoard, complete with a great dragon, awaited. When he took the time to remind himself that they were still in the outer and lower chambers, not far at all from the cave entrance, Gary thought himself incredibly foolish.
Until he realized that his companions were holding their breath, too.
Still not so far in, the group came upon some bones lying scattered in the corridor.
"Just fish bones," Kelsey assured them on closer inspection.
"But what brought them here?" Gary had to ask, and his answer came not from any of his companions, but from the gigantic crab that rushed at them suddenly from around the next bend.
Tommy plodded slowly back across the crimson pond, paying little heed to his surroundings and thinking of nothing at all (Tommy was good at that).
Even if he had been alert, though, the giant would have had a difficult time in distinguishing the red-shelled crab moving effortlessly under the red-colored water.
A great vice-like pincer locked around Tommy's waist; another found a stubborn hold on his shoulder. The giant tried to scream out in the hope that his companions were not so far into the tunnel, but before Tommy hardly knew what had happened, he was pulled under the suddenly not-so-tranquil crimson waters.