Jarka Ruus - Терри Брукс

But had the age of Faerie been so bleak? She hadn't thought so from her readings. She had not imagined it possible. That world was newly made and fresh. This world was dying.

A rustle in the branches overhead drew her attention. The sound was so slight that she almost missed it. But her encounter with the Dracha had put her on guard, and so she glanced up and caught sight of the creature. She stepped back automatically, tensing in expectation of a second attack, but what she found instead of another Dracha was some sort of monkey. It skittered through the trees on spindly limbs, flashes of its hairy, gnarled form appearing through breaks in the ragged boughs. Having been seen, it was trying frantically to escape.

Impulsively, she yelled at it. She didn't pause to think about what she was doing, merely acted on an instinctive need to stop whatever it was from getting away. She was successful. Startled by the sound of her voice, the creature lost its grip and fell, tumbling end over end through the limbs to land with an audible grunt not a dozen yards from where she stood.

It lay dazed and twitching as she walked over to it, and she glanced about as she approached in case it had friends in hiding. But no others appeared, and this one seemed barely able to draw breath after its long fall. It lay on its side, panting heavily, face upturned to the sky. She changed her mind about it as she got closer; it wasn't a monkey, after all. It was hard to say what it was. What it most resembled was a Spider Gnome, but it wasn't that, either. Whatever it was, it was easily the ugliest creature she had ever seen. It was barely four feet tall. Its body was all out of proportion, with bony protrusions and elongated limbs. Coarse black hair sprouted in thick patches from the top of its head and from its dark, leathery skin through rents in its worn pants and tunic.

It recovered and struggled up, still trying to get away from her. She grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and held it fast, holding it away from her as it tried to bite her, using teeth that were considerably sharper than her own. She shook it hard and hissed at it, and it quit trying to bite. It hung limply in her grasp for a moment, then began to chatter wildly. It spoke a language she didn't recognize, but the cadence and tonal repetition suggested it might be a derivation of the tongues with which she was familiar. She shook her head to show she didn't understand. The creature just kept talking, faster now, gesturing wildly. She answered, trying various Gnome dialects. It paused to listen, then shook its own head in reply and began to chatter again. It was so animated that it was bobbing up and down as it spoke, giving it the look of a disjointed puppet, its limbs manipulated by hidden strings.

She set it down and released it, pointing at it in warning to keep it from trying to flee again. It frowned at her and folded its arms over its chest, managing to look defiant and frightened at the same time. She tried a handful of Dwarf and Troll dialects, but it didn't seem to understand those, either. Each time, it would stop and listen to her words, then start chattering away in its own language, as if through insistence and repetition she could be made to understand.

Finally, it plopped down in the grass, arms folded over its chest, eyes turned away, mouth set in a disapproving line. She saw the knife at its waist for the first time, an odd–shaped narrow blade that curved and serrated at the tip. She saw a small pouch attached to a belt, both decorated with beads sewn into the leather. The pockets cut into the sides of its worn pants were sculpted with thread. Whatever species it was, it was advanced beyond the Spider Gnome level. By the same token, it wasn't a member of any race she could put a name to.

She gave up on the Dwarf and Troll dialects and was about to give up on the creature, as well, thinking that it was hopeless, that she should leave it and move on, go hunt for something else. Then she decided, rather impulsively, to try speaking to it in the Elven language, even though the creature looked nothing like an Elf. But the Elves were the oldest species in the world and their language had been around the longest. The response was immediate. The creature shifted to a variation of what she was speaking at once, and she could understand him clearly.

«Stupid woman!» it snapped, the words strange–sounding in the odd dialect, but comprehensible. «Yelling at me like that. Look what you did to me! Look how far I fell! I could have broken every bone in my body!»

He rubbed his arms as if for emphasis, daring her to contradict him. She narrowed her gaze at him. «You should watch what you say to me. If I don't like what I hear, I might break every bone anyway.»

He grimaced. «I could hurt you, if I wanted. You ought to be afraid of me.» His odd face scrunched up, and his tongue licked out like a cat's, revealing the razor–sharp teeth. «Who are you? Are you a witch?»

She shook her head. «No, I am Ard Rhys of Paranor. I am a Druid. Where am I?»

He stared blankly at her. «What's wrong with you? Why don't you know where you are? Are you lost?» He didn't wait for an answer. «Tell me what you did to that Dracha. Magic, wasn't it? I've never seen anything like that. If you aren't a witch, you must be a sorceress or a Straken. Are you a Straken?»

There was another name she hadn't encountered outside of the Druid Histories. Strakens were powerful magic wielders out of the world of Faerie, gone for thousands of years. Like the Dracha.

«Is this the Faerie world?» she asked, beginning to think it must be.

The spindly creature stared at her, head cocked. «This is the land of the Jarka Ruus. You're inside the Dragon Line, above Pashanon. You must know that! Where is it you come from?»

«Paranor. Callahorn. The Four Lands.»

She paused with each name, searching his eyes for recognition and finding none. But the words Jarka Ruus meant something to her. She had heard them before, though she couldn't remember where. «What are you?» she asked him. «What Race do you belong to? Are you a Troll?»

«Ulk Bog," he announced proudly. He smiled, showing all his considerable teeth. «But I don't have a home at present because I'm traveling. This country is too dangerous. Dragons everywhere, all sorts, and they like to eat my kind. Of course, I try to eat their eggs, so I guess it's fair they should try to eat me. But they're much bigger than I am, for the most part, so I have to be careful. Anyway, I don't want to stay here anymore. Where are you going?»

She didn't have the faintest idea, of course, since she didn't even know where she was. She wasn't at all sure she was going anywhere until she figured out what had happened to her. Nevertheless, she pointed west, if only to satisfy him, at the same time trying to figure out how to extract some useful information.

«Ah, Huka Flats. Good choice. Soft earth for burrows and tender rats to eat.» He hitched up his belt. «Maybe I should go with you, since you don't seem to know the way. I know it. I've been everywhere.»

Ulk Bogs had disappeared with the world of Faerie, as well, she was thinking. Everything suggested she had gone back in time to the beginning of things, back before Men were created. The idea was so ridiculous that she kept searching for a better answer, but nothing else suggested itself.

«Are there lots of dragons here in the Dragon Line?» she pressed. «Big ones, as well as the Drachas?»

«You are a stranger, aren't you?» he said. He was growing bolder again, more confident. He puffed out his narrow chest.

«Of course there are big ones. Wyverns and Frost Dragons. Fire Drakes, too, though not so many of those. Some live right down here in the forests, like the Drachas. You have to watch out for them all the time. That's how I happened to be up in that—"

He stopped himself quickly, looking away into the trees. «Well, how I was, uh … how I was …»

«That Dracha I encountered was hunting you, wasn't it?» she guessed. She leaned close. «Don't lie to me, little rodent.»

The Ulk Bog sneered at her. «It wasn't my fault it found you instead of me. I didn't do anything to make it come after you. I was just trying to hide in the trees, because Drachas don't climb and they can't fly close in where there are branches that might get in the way of their wings, so I …»

She held out her hand beseechingly and stopped him midsentence. She doubted he was telling the truth, but then again she wasn't sure he would recognize the truth if it bit him on the nose. There wasn't much about Ulk Bogs in the Druid Histories, but if they were all like this one they were pretty good at shifting blame.

«Never mind," she told him. «It doesn't matter.»

She cast about for help from any quarter, but there was none to be found. She was alone and stuck with this fast–talking creature unless she set him free, which she wasn't ready to do quite yet. She still might learn something from him if she gave herself a chance. Even by just letting him rattle on, she might stumble over something that would help.

«Tell me your name," she said.

He drew himself up. «Weka Dart. What's yours?»

«Grianne.» She abandoned the Ard Rhys designation because it clearly meant nothing to him. «Tell me more about the Dragon Range. Have there ever been any buildings up here on this bluff? A castle, perhaps?»

He laughed. «Dragons don't need buildings! They rule this territory of the Jarka Ruus. Everything else stays away. If you want buildings, you need to go down onto the plains where the Straken live. Your kind.»

My kind. She remembered suddenly that they were speaking in the Elven tongue—an ancient dialect, but Elven nevertheless, a Faerie language. The Elves were the original people, the only true Faerie Race to survive the Great Wars. There had been Elves forever in the world. If this was the past, even if she was all the way back to the time of the Word, there would be Elves.

«Tell me, Weka Dart," she said. «Are there Elves close by? Where do the Elves live?»

The look he gave her was filled with disdain. «Are you stupid? There are no Elves here! Elves are forbidden! We cast them out, back when we made this world! Jarka Ruus ba'enthal corpa u'pahs!»

She had no idea what he was saying, but she got the message anyway. «But there must be Elves. You are speaking in the Elven tongue.»

He became enraged. «I speak Ulk Bog, my tongue, my language, and it does not sound anything at all like Elfish! I will hurt you if you say that again, whether you are Straken or not! No one can call an Ulk Bog an Elf! We are the free peoples, the world of the ca'rel orren pu'u! Jarka Ruus!»

For a moment she was afraid he was going to attack her; his face was twisted in fury, and his breathing had turned quick and dangerous. She could not imagine why he was reacting that way. If he knew about the Elves, this must be the Old World, and the Elves had always been a part of it, not separate from it, not until after the war when the bad Faerie creatures had been exiled to—

She went still, realization flooding through her, so dark it threatened to bury her in an avalanche of horror. No, she must be mistaken, she thought. But she remembered now the origin of the words Jarka Ruus. She had never heard them spoken; she had read them. They were words from the Druid Histories—Elven words, whether Weka Dart liked it or not. They meant banished peoples, and they had been used first in a time before the Four Lands existed, long ago in the beginning, when the war fought between good and evil Faerie creatures reached its climax.