Airna of Karapin

Airna of Karapin

G.F. Skipworth

Rosslare Press-Portland, Oregon

Copyright©2009 by G.F. Skipworth, Rosslare Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles, reports and reviews. For information, address Rosslare Press, 7660 SW Oleson Rd., Portland, Oregon 97223

First Edition, October 2009

View the Rosslare website at rosslarebooks.com

ISBN-13: 9780982471043 ISBN-10: 0982471041

to

BARBARA

Who assisted in the editing, text, art design and

morale of all four Fables of the Carpailtin Campfire

Episodes

The Fable of Airna

Huzzah!

Say It Ain’t So, Djcho!

In This Cornerrrr!

Dilemma

Someone’s Been Sleeping in My…

Hover, Hover, Slide Slide Slide

The Grand Opening

But Ya Still Can’t Fool Mom

Big Brain

Who Wants to Be Queen for a Day

Oops

Meanwhile

Meanwhile II

Are You a Good Witch, or a Bad Witch?

Father Knows Best

Meanwhile III

First Day of School

While You Were Out

Having Wonderful Time, Wish…

An Hour in the Hedracor

Eagle Cap

Epilogue

His life wasn’t about getting from here to there, but the most earnest effort to remember and celebrate everything between the two. He saw, in every Mofford…a potential Prince.

-Marta, of the Shindaheen Sisterhood

The Fable of Airna

as I first heard it recounted at the Carpailtin Campfire

Even for expert riders, there is an art to very steep embankments, especially when the trail is narrow, winding and hemmed in by rocks on either side…rocks that are big enough to fall on you, but not big enough to hide behind. Heroic cultures, like the Shindaheen, enjoy pitting themselves against the nature of other worlds, so long as they can retain a low or nonexistent profile among the resident populations. Banjeel and Thunder are more than typical of this thrill-seeking behavior…they are utterly emblematic of it. Today, however, they were just trying to make it off of the mountain in one piece…quickly. It seems that while riding along the upper rim of Mount Vykelli, as Banjeel had affectionately dubbed it (in the high likelihood that she was the first to ever see it), she and Thunder had surprised a herd of moss-mammoths (that is, unfortunately, the closest translation that can be obtained-apologies). Now, moss-mammoths aren’t generally high-strung or aggressive unless you really crowd their space, which apparently, Banjeel had done. All is well, though, should they decide to attack you. It takes a lot of real estate for them to gather top speed. Unfortunately, Banjeel, who was acting more and more like Vykelli these days, had stood at the cliff with Thunder, perusing the dramatic horizon and the upper edge of the glassy sky, allowing the indignant herd to extend their tusks and get a good running start at the Shindahee and her horse…such naїveté for a queen and an equine with a resume that included The Conundrum, diamond-eating angels and Hollywood. Even that, however, was not the worst of it. The day dreamers had caught the attention of four predators that adore moss-mammoths, but who found a moderately sized quadra-ped and a smaller bi-ped far easier to bring down…and that’s not the worst of it. Banjeel came to her senses in plenty of time to spring to the saddle and reach the trail down the mountain. The tundra cats are built for flat ground speed, and the mammoths…enough said about that. However, as the heroes departed the eight thousand foot peak of Mount Vykelli, the hairy giants beat out a heavy-footed version of This Land Is My Land to make sure that the visitors would never return...and an even livelier ritual to the cats who had retrained their attentions upon the slower and larger meals. They were now safe on both counts, except for the stones that were dislodged at the top, trickling slowly into other stones that trickled quickly into larger ones and…one can easily see the problem.

Mount Vykelli was shaped a little differently than many peaks of her height. Even though the flat space at the top was spacious, and various animals, large and small, could reach its broad summit from the ridge out of which it emerged, it was too steep to hold snow for the first few hundred feet on the path down. The trail near the top was a quick series of switchbacks down into a narrow snow zone above the timberline. Once past a verdant band of forest encircling the mountain like a belt, it strangely turned to a broad, arid slope, still steep, but not so much that one couldn’t run for all one is worth, which is what Banjeel intended to do. Another belt of large boulders lay a thousand feet beneath the forest, and how it came to be that way was beyond Banjeel’s powers of analysis. Tali might have been able to tell, but…oh, bother.

The skillful animal looked like a four-legged skier as he almost danced through the switchbacks, while little stones continued to encourage larger ones, and the little thunks gave way to slightly more sonorous thunks? Reaching the snow level, Banjeel was relieved to see that something had already knocked it off of the trail, despite its depth to the sides. What she didn’t know was that something had melted it off the trail by walking on it, but there’s no reason to alarm the Queen of the Shindaheen unnecessarily. The medium rocks that had been nudged by the accumulated little rocks began to nudge other large ones, and quite a few of them had relocated by the time they began to have some displacing effects upon the snow, which seemed to have been of the same mind as the little stones at the top. Tiny cascades, a few inches in length, bumped into little drifts that bumped into slightly larger drifts…and soon, rock and snow were engaged in a downhill collaboration that captured the attention of rider and horse, both of whom prayed for the switchbacks to end soon. Their luck held on that account, and the two aliens to this oddly shaped world entered the haven of the forest belt.

The truly unusual feature of the forest, which encircled the mountain at a width of only five or six hundred feet, was that as much or more heavy timber lay on the ground than that still rooted and standing. Banjeel wondered what sort of localized cataclysm would fell such huge trunks. What she did not see, in her concentrated efforts to negotiate the trail swiftly, bending as it did this way and that, was that the vast majority of the ground debris was both punctuated and punctured by teeth marks…but there is no reason to add extra concerns to what must already be a nerve-wracking episode, even for the leader of such a proactive sisterhood. Above, the little stones and little snowslides had bumped into larger stones and larger snowslides, to the point where they enjoined into an entirely new set of sounds, more resonant than any heard to that point. At a leveling off, where an appropriate place presented her the opportunity to take a look, she wheeled to a stop, and did just that. Banjeel and Thunder were unanimous in their decision not to tarry, for they beheld an avalanche of stone and snow obliterating the upper switchbacks and descending into the forest belt. Every unattached thing on the mountainside was following them down, and there wasn’t much of anything around to stop it.

A second round of good fortune followed them as well, for the trail straightened, just in time, and ran through the remainder of the forest, in a pristine condition, then widened and angled down to the right, into the second belt of boulders. A hundred more feet, or so, and they could turn on the speed, while the forest behind would slow down the onslaught.

Banjeel would have loved to stop and climb a tree, let Thunder run and hope for the best, but there’s something un-Shindahee-like about such a tactic, so she felt honor-bound to test their mettle against the elements instead. Considering the brief amount of straight trail behind, they shot out of the lower forest, took the turn down to the boulders and turned it on, not entirely since it was still downhill, but the avalanche, which would certainly be slowed by the trees, was gaining at a much slower rate (at least logic dictated that it should). What Banjeel didn’t know, or see…was that the little and medium rocks, and the little and medium snowslides, hit the forest line like a tidal wave, gathering up the massive logs from the ground, uprooting almost every growing thing on that face of the mountain, and bringing it along down the next portion of slope, without any discernable reduction of speed. Of course, at their next observation spot, both of them realized it at once, and stretched for the protection of the boulder belt, now within less than a minute of hard riding.

Not only did they reach the boulders in time, as snow slides shooshed, rocks thunked and colliding logs thocked behind, but the trail, blessedly, plunged straight through the boulder field…safe at last, but it was best to outrun it by as much as one could. Yes, Tali would have made a fascinating study of this place. The boulders were set about in the most interesting patterns, almost delicate and refined…artistic, despite their enormous bulk. As the two charged deeper and deeper into this last line of natural defense, they knew that nothing was going to knock these rocks around, or get through to the lower side. And so, it was with a deep sense of satisfaction, the sort that Shindaheen feel when outrunning avalanches, that they stopped to rest after dropping below the boulder belt, to watch the thrilling collision.

What Banjeel (sigh) didn’t know (and one must face facts…it was her job to know, not Thunder’s) was that each boulder in that field, regardless of tonnage, had been stacked there precariously, on its most fragile tipping point, where it symbolized, along with its colleagues, the balance of nature’s elements…well, not anymore. When the snow and rock-laden forest smote the boulder field with the sound of a detonated bomb, the queen was left with only three ways in which to respond, and she only had time to choose two of them. She could be terrified, which is also bad form for a ruler of the Shindaheen, she could react adaptively, which necessitated a renewal of the chase…or she could feel embarrassed for misreading nature so completely. She chose two and three, and understood perfectly that embarrassment did not exclude number two’s clause requiring the continuation of the mad dash down the remainder of the peak’s sloping plain.

Off with a jolt they went, angling down the long unbroken slant of the hill that leveled off into a high plain at the five thousand foot mark. It was fortunate, indeed, that they hadn’t taken the trail down the other side of Mount Vykelli. They would have been in switchbacks a full eight thousand feet down to a series of tar pits, formed by dead trees and…other things. Banjeel had the avalanche in a stalemate, as everything and everyone was managing the same approximate speed. The boulders, however, were not all content with rolling along, as boulders are supposed to do. They bounced and flew off of each other like giant Chinese checkers marbles, jumping from spot to spot. The conspiracy between snow, stone and wood was eerily diabolical. At the six thousand foot level, something, or some horde of things, reared out of the brush like gophers, and snapped at the feet of the horse…although receiving mostly concussions for their trouble. Banjeel thought of the places called Monte Carlo and the Riviera that Gray had suggested instead of Legend, and to which she had given some thought, but leaving Earth alone had been part of the plan, and she, of all people, couldn’t be seen ignoring her own rules. She thought of how quiet the time fold must be in its closed condition, and resolved to check in earlier than she had originally intended. But, for now, getting just a bit more speed out of the tiring horse was the priority as they came within seconds of reaching the flat. A mile or two ahead lay a rising slope, but they wouldn’t make that, so Banjeel headed for an anomalous bump of ground with a needle-like peak of thirty or so feet jutting up. That required a leftward movement, which was fine, as the land’s angle would take the avalanche off to the opposite bank, or some of it anyway. By now, it was half a mile across. The exhausted pair reached the lonely node protruding from the prairie with seven or eight seconds to spare. There was even a small pathway where Thunder could stand a little higher in the peak’s center, and still allow a view of the event currently preparing to reshape the low tundra…and it certainly did. Finally, it all collided with itself, in a way that brought the juggernaut to a swift halt instead of knocking the next element down the hill. The din of symphonic crunching, grinding, splintering and clunking lasted longer than a Beethoven symphony (or so it seemed), and when it finally stopped, the silence was almost unbearable, as the dust rolling over the plain said nothing at all. There was unexpected help for that, though, and Banjeel was visibly startled to hear a humanoid voice a few feet higher up the peak…Nice riding, mother…nice riding indeed…never saw anything like it in Pendleton! Hey, I always thought it was impossible to sneak up on you guys. Banjeel took a cloth and wiped the sweat from her eyes…I haven’t been myself lately…none of us have. Did you have any trouble getting here? Tyler threw a small rock into the field of destruction from his perch a few feet up…No, the directions were good. His rock landed almost a hundred feet out, and in another stunning natural occurrence, a thousand foot length of ground, from their node, back along the way Banjeel had come, just gave out, and collapsed into a pit hundreds of feet deep. The noise was as bad as the avalanche itself. The queen and Tyler just stared for a bit, until he wagged a finger at her, and said in his mischievous voice…Ah, Mom…now you’re just showing off. He paused, and looked at the fissure, which had almost reached their nest…Maybe we should go talk somewhere else.

****

No matter where a person is born, he or she must, at some point, sink all ten toes into their native soil. Oregon, Austria and Norway, for example, are all beautiful and share many traits, but one is not a substitute for the other, no matter how spectacular, when the need to visit the garden in which one was planted comes due. Soil has its own DNA, and to the native son and daughter, the hallowed ground of home is absolutely the same, and speaks its own language in its own dialect. Whether you catch an airliner halfway around the world, or blink out among the stars, sometimes you have to go back. Not everyone feels this equally, of course. Some are less firmly planted, and some are angry, more often than not, at human-like abuses perpetrated in their territory.

One can develop real feelings for foreign soils that resemble their own. The former Marta, who found Earth to be, as she put it, silly in general, grew enamored of Gray’s Pacific Northwest in time, and she was almost equally grieved at the thought of leaving. The time fold was similar, and she felt the empathy of its Austrian-Oregonian flavor, but the real Oregon would be sorely missed.

Marta wasn’t enthusiastic about staying in the time fold while it was closed. Everyone goes about their business as usual during a closure, but it’s like a long, long night, and everything is done by torchlight in a soft speaking voice, although it wouldn’t make one bit of difference if you screamed bloody murder. She visited with Gray on Eagle Cap in preparation to leave again, perhaps for the world of the Orphin, or somewhere out in angel territory, but pangs of loyalty took hold of her. Besides, she was as interested as everyone else to meet the new queen.

The question on everyone’s mind in the fold was, Are we just going to hunker down in here and let it blow over, or are we going to act like Shindaheen and make our authority in this part of space clear? For being so adept at military conflict, though, there isn’t much blood lust among the sisters. They wouldn’t buy any attempts to whip them into a frenzy for war by speechmaking or activism from deep within the crowd. They won’t go without the queen’s say-so, and they haven’t revolted against a yea or nay command in many centuries. In short, they are a very level-headed group when it comes to causing injury and damage in their back yard. Being bored, or wanting someone else’s jade mines just aren’t good enough reasons.

For Tali, the closure was comforting, like being tucked in with her family, her jade furniture and her roaring fire. Richard Elvino had never been through one of these, and it was typical for the young to become bored. While Floki might enjoy a marathon game of scrabble, a Shindahee needs stronger stuff. Every once in a while, they could hear the bass drumbeats, which were, according to unproven theory, the detonations of Conundrum probe charges. Clearly, The Accuser had lost track of them, for the moment, and the charges were growing less and less accurate. It wouldn’t matter, anyway. Through the process of crumpling, every person in the fold stood at least dozens, if not hundreds of walls away from danger, one folded oddly about another. Yet, except for the dark, nothing was any different in the interior.

Marta’s sense of allegiance told her to stay, but her assignment was to meet The Conundrum on the outside, so she and Gray felt much pressure to get down to work. Blinking in total darkness was neither advisable nor fun at all for any but the most accomplished adepts. For Marta, that was one thing, but for Gray, who had only visited the fold on rare occasions, it was quite another. He had certainly never gone back into the hinterlands, where most of their night would be spent. This country was full of natural and organic dangers as a result of its dramatic and undomesticated nature.

After going through the normal customs in the nothing, they blinked from mountaintop to mountaintop, valley to valley, and so forth, stopping at lakes, prairies and deserts in between. All told, the project took several hours, at least, and when at last they returned to the entranceway of the nothing, Gray had managed an impressive array of bruises from ankles to knees, not to mention a fair case of blinking fatigue. Marta, however, reminded him, in the gentlest way, not to be a baby, so he held his peace with nobility. As they waited for the nothing to begin their transfer to the outside, which was going a little more slowly than usual due to the closing, he asked what she thought about the situation involving the new queen. At a loss, she replied, You know how Banjeel is. Everything here is a test of one kind or another. It will reach a bizarre turn…just wait. Gray wondered if their night’s work had taken. Marta, who had never been called to function in this way during a closure, had no experience from which to offer an answer. But, with Banjeel’s constant search for enlightenment enhancers for her people, the Shindaheen would not escape life’s classroom just by dropping out of sight. The illusion that any man or woman has ever successfully run from anything, is just that. No one knew that better than the absent queen, who had run only as far as Legend, to face her own story.

****

Time passes differently between every sphere of life, even within each one. In the fold, time tries to satisfy the various desires of the residents, and so the flow of events is altered, even between households. A person who began the first year of school with her best friend might become her professor someday. If someone goes to battle with a younger, stronger opponent, it’s of no matter, for that can be altered, although one might be a little stiff and sore the next morning. For Karapin and Earth, however, time flows the same way, more or less, and doesn’t take special requests. This makes for some interesting inter-world reunions. Parental, sibling and marital relationships have been sorely tested when a member’s vacation has taken too long, or when one has strayed into the wrong tempo stream only to come back as a member of another generation.

Most of the Chadishar members had maintained a good grip on their lives as time passed. Brogi and Jemma seemed ageless. Mallee and Danta had, as a couple, taken on a rather distinguished sheen since Carpailti, and Mixi remained in such good condition that a grey hair here or there didn’t change a thing. What weighed on them more than time was the fading away of their deeds, as the days of Carpailti and Iceland took their places on the history book pages, next to long-dead subjects that once set the blood of their peoples racing, but which now put students to sleep in class and muddled their brains during exams. Just passing through was fine for an age of writing dramatic poetry and singing of battles not yet fought. These still viable warriors, however, weren’t ready to have statues sculpted for them, or to have their portraits hang in the national museum. Brogi could still tease an equation better than anyone. Jemma’s hearing had not eroded in the least, but she didn’t need to be in the action like the others. Mallee was regarded as the wise old diplomat, in the same way that retired prime ministers from three or four regimes back experience modern life. No one, young or old, would get into a cage match with Mixi.

Danta, however, had changed