In case you are interested in starting this story at the beginning, Kinderling 1 can be found here:
The Tricycle of Thought: Kinderling 1
Please don't judge the story or the writing too harshly, this story is written with little to no editing. It is just meant to get me writing regularly for practice.
Now back to our story, already in progress..
The next day, Mama and I scouted the tree line looking for the place where Flower and I crashed through on our crazy flight off of the cliff. We passed it twice before I finally recognized it. Gimme a break, I was rather distracted with trying to not die horribly the first time I crashed through there, so I only had a vague blurry image in my head of what the place looked like. Frankly, I was amazed by the lack of evidence of our passage. It felt like we crashed into half the branches in the forest, although thinking about it, we couldn't have hit anything all that big or we wouldn't have survived.
We had been luckier than I realized.
The reason I wanted to find the place was because from there, I would be able to find the cliff, and with it the passage into the Mountain Gorf's stronghold. Or at least I hoped I would. I didn't know if that place was still guarded by Gorf soldiers or not, but I knew a bit more about how the harnesses worked now than I did before, and I had a plan.
Hovering up the cliff on our go-sticks wasn't easy. When I created the original go-sticks, I imagined using one to fly between and up into trees, and perhaps occasionally fly a little above the forest canopy. I never even conceived of using one to float all the way up the side of a mountain. As we have already established, the intention of the creator comes into play when it comes to the capabilities of the device. My monster-go-stick, on the other hand, didn't have that problem. It was specifically designed for this mission. That meant flying up the mountain, over the walls of the Mountain stronghold, and any other contingency that I could think of. Eventually, Mama had to give up on her little go-stick and ride on the monster-go-stick with me until we reached the top of the cliff.
We quickly found the entrance to the Watcher's passage, and settled on an out of the way place to hide and watch the entrance. Initially we didn't see any movement, and I started to get my hopes up. Then two Gorfs emerged from the entrance. They were dressed in the manner that was starting to become familiar. These were overseers. I explained to Mama that this meant there would probably be at least two squads of the Gorf slave soldiers nearby, probably in the cave where Mouse, Flower, Watcher, and I had been ambushed before.
"No way we're getting past that." Mama said. Sadly, I had to agree.
"I guess we go the long way around then." I replied.
The long way around consisted of further backtracking the path of the escape from the King's mushroom farm. I hadn't wanted to go that way because I believed it would be watched more closely since the escape. I was right.
Mama and I made our way back to the forest for cover, being out in the open was nerve wracking and we had a ways to go. Before we even found our path we encountered Gorf Soldiers in the forest. Mama and I saw them at about the same time and quietly signaled to each other to head for the canopy. The forest was thick there, so we were able to use the branches and leaves for cover. I pulled out my no-see-me for some added protection, but it probably wasn't needed. The Gorf Soldiers seemed to be sniffing around on the ground looking for something or someone. Not for the first time, or the last, I found myself wishing I could understand all the sniffings, grumblings, and mutterings coming from below.
It occurred to me that when I encountered the Gorf soldiers before, they were mostly quiet. I got the impression that when they were controlled by the harness the soldier's ability or desire to converse was inhibited, but these were sniff sniffing and grumble grumbling up a storm. I peeked out and took a closer look at the harnesses, but I didn't see any difference between them and the harnesses I saw before.
"Mama, these ones are talking to each other. I wonder what that means." I whispered to Mama.
"I don't know Tandy," She replied. "These soldiers look older than the ones I've seen before."
"How can you tell?"
"See the wrinkles around their eyes, and the greying patches of skin?" Mama replied, "As far as I know, those aren't usual aging patterns for Gorfs, but they look to me to be signs of hardship. Also look at their fingernails. See how split and broken they are, and how limp their hair is? And I swear that one over there has some moss growing on his shoulders and back. The one that is moving real slow."
I looked and could see what Mama was talking about. The Gorf in question did look almost comically slow, as if he had to think about every movement and only move one limb at a time.
All of that made me look even closer. Mama was right, these Gorf soldiers looked a lot more ragged than the ones I had seen before. Many of them bore stripes across their backs that looked like scars that came from being lashed with a whip repeatedly. If the Gorfs had harnesses, why would they resort to whipping them? That didn't seem very logical.
Out of curiosity, I started looking for the overseer. Because of the forest, I wasn't able to get a very accurate count of how many soldiers were below us, but I knew there would be at least one and if there were more than one, the overseers tended to gather together.
It was pretty easy to stay out of sight up in the canopy, moving from tree to tree looking for the overseers. I hung my no-see-me from one of the handles that Tommil had helpfully formed into the side of the monster-go-stick where it should help some if I accidentally exposed myself more than I intended to. No way to know if it was needed or helped at all, but no alert was raised from below.
After a short time, I found an overseer. Just one. Sitting alone in the forest while his squad of slave soldiers searched. I almost missed him. He wasn't wearing the bright colors or nicer clothing that the other overseers that I saw tended towards. His clothing was more drab, older, and while not tattered, were obviously worn. As we watched him, he sighed, got up, and hobbled forward towards where his soldiers were searching and calling to them. When they gathered, he bullied them into some semblance of a formation and marched them on further into the forest. If march is the right word for it. The Gorf soldiers I saw in the Kinderling village and then up at the Mushroom farm acted like soldiers. When they formed up and marched, there were straight lines and they were, more or less, in time with each other. These poor wretches, most of them limping or hobbling at least to some degree, didn't look at all impressive.
It was a mystery. This was obviously a squad of Gorf slave soldiers, but why create a squad of the old and infirm? Perhaps to get them out of the way? Without the ability to talk to the Gorfs, capturing one to question was useless. We decided to move on.
Keeping to the forest canopy instead of threading between trees on the ground slowed us by quite a bit. I didn't like it, but getting captured ourselves wouldn't help Mouse out of his predicament. We continued around the mountain, looking for a likely place to climb up, or at least fly up, without being seen. Eventually, the mountain became steeper, almost a cliff, and the forest grew right up to the base of the cliff. It was getting late, so we found a likely tree and stopped for the night.
The next day dawned grey and wet. The rain started in the dark of night and woke me up. Happily, I woke up with the first few drops because that meant I was able to pull the rain cover over my hammock before I got too wet. I looked over to where Mama was and she was doing the same. It was one of those slow soaking rains, with what seemed like impossibly huge drops.
By morning the rain had turned into quite the deluge and the wind started to really pick up. From the look of the sky, it was only going to get worse.
"I think we need to find somewhere to hold up until this blows over Tandy." Mama said. "I think our best bet is to find an outcropping or a small cave."
I could only agree. We pulled our hammocks in close to the main trunk of the tree in order to take as much advantage of the cover provided by the tree's branches and leaves, and packed up as quickly as possible. When we were finished, we boarded our go-sticks and flew along the mountainside looking for a likely place to wait it out.
Mama led us along the cliff towards the way we had come from the previous day. As we flew, I noticed a waterfall spouting from the mountainside, falling into a depression in the rocks far below. It struck me that this might be similar to how Old Barrel might have been formed and curiosity made me go down to take a look. It wasn't as large, or as impressive as Old Barrel, but it smelled like a sewer. The basin was also strewn with rubbish like it had been used for refuse disposal.
Mama looked surprised, "That is what I was looking for, but I didn't expect it to be quite so obvious."
"What is this place?" I asked.
"Any time you have a population amassed in a single place, you have to deal with drainage and waste, or risk having a very unhealthy population. Our village is small enough that it isn't that big a problem. A few ditches here and there to carry the excess away from the village was all we really needed. A population big enough to produce the number of Soldiers I have heard you and others talking about would need more than that. It makes sense that a fortress city on the side of a mountain would send it down the mountain somewhere."
"Oh boy," I said, obviously feigning excitement, "We found their poo."
Mama laughed a little.
"Well yes, but no. By the smell of it there is definitely poo here, but what I'm hoping we found was a way in. Now all we need to do is wait for it to stop raining."
The very idea filled me with dread.
