“You mean you have never found it?” Trak asked.
“No, I mean I haven’t found it in the last seventy years. The plant was once easy to find in the valley where my ancestors lay buried,” she replied.
***
He once asked if there were any stories about heroic cross-breeds. “No.” she said, but then, after a pause, added, “Of course, there is the Prophecy of the Betrayer, but that is only a superstition.” When Trak looked puzzled, she added, “According to the legend a half-bred will be born who becomes a great leader but eventually betrays his people.”
It didn’t sound like a story that Trak wanted to hear, but he asked, “Which half of himself does he betray—his human or his Spore half?”
“I couldn’t say, but apparently both Spore and men come to believe he has betrayed them. It is foretold he will unite the two races and wage an apocalyptic war against evil. The prophecy is a core belief among the people on the mainland who still practice magic and the old faith.
“Real magic?” asked Trak.
“Well perhaps, but not the incredible magical feats recounted in the legends. The followers of the ancient faith live in Holy Mountain in a temple called the ‘Septantrak’ because they follow the teachings of Septan, the first Thaumaturgist. The title means Wonder Worker. The Thaumaturgist is the head sorcerer of the temple. He, or sometimes she, advises the high king, the Ard Ri, and accompanies the royal army into battle. Septan was such an important ancestor that we call ourselves the ‘Spore of Septan’ or just ‘Spore’ for short.”
“The faithful speak of two spirits, Shenal Ken, the Earth Spirit and Tironock Kan, her divine opposite, as supreme deities, but they believe a spirit inhabits all things, both animate and inanimate. No spirit ever dies. When you eat, the spirit of the food joins with the eater’s spirit. If a food makes you sick, it is because its spirit is fighting yours.”
“When a person dies and the flesh decays, their spirit stays in the world. It doesn’t journey to some other place or to some other dimension. Your ancestors are always about. If you are worthy, they will watch over you. If you offend them, they torment you. Ancestors rarely make themselves visible to the living, but you know they are here because if you stand quietly, you can feel their presence. Spore attribute all manner of phenomena to their ancestors. When something strange or unexpected happens, it is probably because an ancestor is telling you something. When the wind blusters or it hails, the ancestors are angry. When a sunbeam breaks through a cloud, it is a sign that your ancestors are warning you to be vigilant.”
The goblins on the Isle of Uisgebeatha have an innate spirituality, but they adhered to no structured belief system and followed no religious leader. Magic is a part of their everyday lives, although much of what Spore call magic, the old goblin regards as superstitious nonsense and nothing more than chance coincidences. “Real magic is the ability to control natural forces.” She has spent years seeking in her plant world the source of the power that brings forth new life each spring. “To possess this knowledge is to have power over life itself.”
Trak catches her enthusiasm and dreams of wielding magic. “If I possess magic, I can command respect.”
“Did the Wonder Workers create the stone circle that sits on the cliff overlooking the Western Sea?” he asks. The circle of stones is one of Trak’s favorite retreats. He goes there to stare out over the ocean and dream. It is his liminal space where the boundary between his life on the island and all that ever was or could be imagined is easily crossed.
“No,” the old goblin replies. “The stones be from the age when elves lived on the island. The elves worshiped the moon. That be why there are thirteen stones in the circle, one for each of the full moons that make up a lunar year. The legend that the stones are thirteen maidens petrified by a sorcerer be a local superstition.”
***
Baelock taught Trak a trade, but the old Spore taught him how to survive in a world that despised cross-breeds. Trak asked, “Mother, why spend time thinking about the past or speaking of legendary realms.”
She answered, “A person in the here and now lives only once. A person who dreams lives a thousand lives. In my life, I have journeyed to lands that no one else has ever visited, fought dragons and seen the back side of the moon.”
She sensed Trak’s need to belong and understood his longing to excel and be accepted. Like other insecure children, Trak was eager to show off. The old goblin never rewarded this behavior. Instead, she praised him when he employed the strategies that would allow a cross-breed to succeed in a world split by racial hatred. She would say, “Don’t strut like a barnyard cock” or remind him that his opinions were less important than understanding what someone else was thinking.
The old Spore posed moral dilemmas for Trak to ponder. For every situation she expected Trak to formulate multiple responses, each reflecting a different point of view. She taught, “There are no correct answers, only courses of action that can successfully negotiate complex situations.” It was hard for Trak to approach problems obliquely. His natural inclination was to challenge whatever stood in his way, but with practice he became adept. As she had predicted, he received greater rewards by using her temporizing strategies than if he pursued his objectives directly. Baelock was the usual target of his manipulations. Trak would express support and enthusiasm for whatever Baelock wanted, and then by asking just the right question cause Baelock to rethink and even to reverse his position. Mostly, Trak enjoyed pleasing Baelock, but if needed, he could divert Baelock just enough to achieve his personal goals.
***
The villagers couldn’t say from where the old goblin came, but some remembered the first time she entered the village. Fifteen years ago she disembarked from a mainland fishing boat and came plodding up the hill from the dock with a sack strapped to her back and a bundle of books in her arms. She looked old even then, like the cracked and worn grey rocks on which she walked. She would take ten steps and pause to catch her breath. In front of Baelock’s hut, she laid down her bundles and sat on a flat rock. She never turned her head. Only an occasional blink betrayed that she was not part of the rock upon which she rested. After a while, Baelock emerged from his hut carrying a bowl of soup and offered it. When she finished sipping her soup, Baelock picked up her bundle and her books and together they walked into the forest.
No one knew her name or cared to ask it. Those who thought she was harmless referred to her as “the old goblin in the woods” while those that feared her labeled her “the witch.” Some thought she was a woodwose, a goblin that had done something so terrible that her family had cast her out.
She stayed to herself in the forest and was all but forgotten until the year a sickness swept through the village. It afflicted mostly the young and the very old. The sickness filled its victim’s lungs with frothy fluid so they couldn’t breathe. After two villagers died, Baelock fetched the old goblin. She brought an herbal remedy made of ephedra, purple coneflowers and meadowsweet that drew the water out of the lungs, relieved the fever and soothed the chest pain. The sick recovered and were grateful, but others became even more convinced that she was a witch, and one of considerable power.
A fissure inside the cave provided a natural chimney for her cooking fire. Her only furniture was a small table and two chairs. Her books sat on a rock ledge above the straw-covered pallet where she slept. On warm days she would admit sunlight by drawing back the fur pelts that covered the door. In the winter snow drifted against the pelts and insolated the interior she warmed with the dry wood she’d stacked at the back of her cave.
She was clever with her hands. From goat willow and birch bark, she created with no more than a small knife baskets and boxes in which she stored the dried plants she collected for food, seasonings and medicines. She made her clothing from the pelts of rabbits she snared or from bog cotton that she gathered and spun into cloth. Trak asked her why she didn’t make clothes out of the pelts of cats. He offered to steal some cat
s the village kept for mousers and help her skin them. She declined saying, “It would be cruel; some villagers get attached to their cats.”
Her greatest pleasure was to sit at her table and with quill and ink and draw the plants she collected. She made an array of pigments to record the colors of her specimens. Her large magnifying glass was her most prized possession. It revealed a plant’s tiniest features. Trak would sit at the table opposite the goblin and watch the glass distort her face as she drew her plants and extracted their secrets.
The old Spore thought of illness in terms of imbalance and used herbs to restore equilibrium. She was forever pouring herbal tea into a cup and pushing it at Trak to drink. “But I’m not sick,” he complained.
She would remind him, “Waiting until ye be sick to take medicine is like digging a well when ye be thirsty. By the time the well be dug, it is too late.” Trak found it disconcerting the way she caressed the bumps on his tongue, stare at his pupils or count his heartbeats, anticipating the effects of the tea.
Some teas were disgusting even though the old goblin added mint and other flavors to disguise their bitterness. Her most powerful tonics were prepared from the distillates she collected using the copper still Baelock made for her. She called it her copper worm after the coil that condensed the gases into concentrated liquids.
Time moved slowly for the old mother. Through a child’s eyes, she moved in slow motion. She could take all morning to walk a league as she stopped to collect plants and check her snares. She liked to talk about her childhood, but Trak could never tell if she was the daughter of a serf or a high born.
The old Spore would sit on the floor beneath sprigs of Sheppard’s Purse, Myrrah, Gravelroot, Skullcap, Maidenhair, and Hyssop that hung drying from the roof of her cave. While Trak read, she sat motionless listening to the forest speak. She said the trees spoke of a primordial time when the Earth Spirit brought forth onto the world goblins and men. As she listened, she allowed the Earth’s Spirit to enter her body. Trak witnessed a faint blue light envelop her motionless figure.
When Trak asked her how she could remain so still. She answered, “I am soaring. My body stays where I leave it, but my spirit be far away.” When Trak asked where she went, she would say, “to my childhood home and to the meadow where my ancestors rest in their tombs. The ancestors be happiest in the strath where their spirits were born and where their bones lie. My visits reassure them their grandchildren and great grandchildren be well.”
Trak figured that the old she-goblin was just daydreaming. Many years later he would understand she was, in fact, the guardian of a great lineage that stretched back to Septan, the first Thaumaturgist.
***
Today, as Trak approaches her forest cave, he sees the old mother standing hunched over her herb garden. She is noticeably more stooped and wrinkled than when they first met. Her pale skin sagged beneath her fur smock. “Greetings, young one.” she signed with her right hand without ever looking up to see him approaching. “What brings ye to the forest this beautiful day?”
“I had my guild examination last night. It didn’t go well. Baelock will not need me until he has had a chance to rest. I was hoping to ask you a question.”
“And what be that?” she replies with a hint of amusement on her face and without questioning him about his examination.
“I know I am a cross-breed, but just what does that mean?”
“Hech hinnie, child! Ye know the answer well enough. One parent be a Spore and the other a man.” She replies matter-of-factly and, noticing his look of frustration, continues, “Spore and men were once one race that eons ago split in two. Hatred between the two groups be so strong that intermarriage is not tolerated, but sometimes in war, a female be raped by an invader and a child results.”
Trak visualizes the grim image and replies, “Are men as brutish as the stories say?”
“Yes, brutes they be; they live for war and seek domination over all creatures, even each other. But remember, your mother may have been a human female forced by a goblin. In your case, that seems unlikely because it be hard to imagine how a cross-breed born to a human would find his way to this island.”
Trak tries to make a joke. “Well, my father may have been a brute, but I bet he was a great whistler,” he laughs. He enjoys reminding others that he has a talent that no goblin can equal.
Trak’s dilemma is immediately obvious to the old Spore. How could he hate the man who raped his mother and not hate a part of himself? She had no solution to offer. “Come! Walk with me and help me gather mushrooms.” They had made many walks in the past where she insisted he name and describe the uses for every plant they passed. The exercise seemed as arcane to Trak as learning a chronologic list of the goblin kings. He never understood why he had to learn to name a hundred types of mushrooms, when only a dozen were edible and there was no conceivable use for the other eighty-eight. Fortunately, he had a good memory and the task was more like a game than a chore.
“Look there,” she says as they walked through a Rowan grove. “Do ye recognize this plant?”
“It is agrimony,” replies Trak. “From its serrated leaves you can make a decoction for treating hot conditions, such as bronchitis and burning bladder. It is good for skin inflammations and is used to treat battlefield injuries.” But then he adds, “The ancients say that if you put dried agrimony in your pillow, you will sleep as though you were dead.” He asks, “Do you remember when the leaves must be gathered?”
“In the summer during early flowering,” his ancient friend replies.
“Yes, and one must not forget to mix the decoction with a gut stimulant or you end up with a blocked bowel.” After years of studying the old goblin’s books on plant lore, he enjoys playing the teacher as well as the student.
It is spring, and Trak realizes that she would be seeking the morels, an ugly, wrinkled fungus that is particularly tasty but hard to find. They talk as Trak leads her to the peaty ground beneath a stand of birch he found fruitful in the past. “What do men look like? What part of me came from my father?” Trak asks as he fills her basket and keeps a few back for Baelock’s dinner.
“Well, for one thing; men stand a head taller, and it looks to me that ye will be taller than any goblin I’ve seen, even taller than Krage who be as tall as a man. Your ears and nose be small and rounded like a man’s. Men be broad-chested and hairy—even the women. Their bushy, facial hair adds a troll-like ferocity to their appearance. Men be clever and often cunning, but they be also unrefined and undisciplined and, therefore, easily tricked. They eat and drink to excess and be fond of crude speech and rough play. This be probably more a consequence of their upbringing than their innateness,” she qualifies so that Trak will not think he is by nature brutish. “Perhaps the greatest difference between men and Spore be in their approach to life. Men strive for what they lack; Spore enjoy what the Spirit has given them. As a cross-breed your features will fall somewhere between the two.”
It is then that Trak resolves to shave off his facial hair. The less he looks like a pig face the better. “How is it that you know so much about men?”
“When I was a girl on the mainland, a human trader would occasionally visit. He spoke the common tongue. I even learned a few of their customs. It is remarkable that they use the word “mourning,” both to refer to grief and as a greeting. Death be never far from their thoughts.”
“Is it true that men have pig tails,” Trak asks.
“If they do, they keep them hidden in their trousers,” the old goblin responds.
Trak sits on a rotten log speaking with his ancient friend. The log is heavily infested with termites. He breaks off a chunk of decayed wood and licks a fingertip that he uses to pick up the white grubs and pop them into his mouth. They have a pleasant, nutty taste. At his feet Trak notices the mud tunnels the worker termites have constructed to connect the rotten log to their underground hive. Seeing the tunnels reminds Trak of how years ago the old mother recounted the my
ths of the first goblins.
“Termites be the brothers of the Spore,” she said. “They taught our ancestors how to build tunnels and form social units. From the termites we learned that each of us has a role to play in the community. Some be born as soldiers, others to rule, but most be workers. The workers’ task be to excavate the subterranean hive, build the tunnels that connect the underground world to the world above, and provide for the needs of the rulers and soldiers.”
Trak watches the pale bodies of the workers crawl over the rotted wood he holds in his hand. “They are trying to rescue the larvae before I can pick them up with my finger. Why do they build mud tunnels? Do they hate bright light?” he asks.
“Actually, termites be blind. They build their tunnels to shelter their thin skins from the drying heat of the sun and to protect their communities from their eternal enemies, the ants. Watch!” She uses a stick to scratch through a tunnel. After a couple of minutes, large soldier termites appear and form a defensive perimeter around the workers as they repair the damage.
“The soldiers are much larger than the workers and have huge jaws,” Trak observes.
“Yes, their jaws be so massive that the soldiers can’t feed themselves. Feeding the soldiers be another task given to the workers.”
“How does the termite community maintain the correct balance between workers, soldiers and breeders?”
“That be a question worthy of a naturalist,” she responds. “It seems that the larvae ye so enjoy eating have the potential to develop into a member of any caste. The spirit inside each individual senses what the community needs and guides the larvae into becoming what be required for the community’s survival. We call termites our brothers because they taught us how to build tunnels and divide tasks between workers, soldiers and rulers.
“Are you telling me I’m supposed to be a worker?” Trak asks with a hint of resignation.
“Hech hinnie! No,” laughs the wizened one. “The point of the story be that each of us has a spirit that can sense what the community needs. Ye need to develop into whatever the community requires. When ye are born ye are like a bear’s whelp, just a formless ball of fur. It is the job of their mother to lick the cub into shape.