Passager Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1. TERRITORY

  2. HISTORY

  3. HAWK

  4. CAPTURE

  5. TRAIL

  6. DREAM

  7. HOUSE

  8. WILD THING

  9. NAMES

  10. THE BATED BOY

  11. ROOM

  12. MEWS

  13. DOG

  14. NAME

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Text copyright © 1996 by Jane Yolen

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Acknowledgment

  This book is based on the short story “The Wild Child” from the collection Merlin’s Booke, but has been significantly expanded and refocused.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Yolen, Jane.

  Passager/Jane Yolen.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A foundling rediscovers his identity through the help of the falconer who adopts him.

  ISBN 0-15-200391-6

  1. Merlin (Legendary character)—Juvenile fiction. [1. Merlin (Legendary character)—Fiction. 2. Feral children—Fiction. 3. Falconry—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.Y78Pas 1996

  [Fic]—dc20 94-27101

  eISBN 978-0-544-20120-0

  v1.0313

  To Michael Stearns,

  passager indeed

  Passager:

  A falcon caught in the wild

  and trained by the falconer,

  but not yet a mature bird.

  Dark.

  Night.

  “He is still asleep, Mother.”

  “Three drops of the tincture will keep him still.”

  “Must we leave him?”

  “We must.”

  “But he is so young.”

  “He is old enough. And we cannot keep him with us longer. There is danger to us all if he stays.”

  “But there is danger for him here.”

  “That is why we are leaving him high in the tree. The wild dogs cannot climb, nor fox nor wolves. In the daytime he will be quick and bright. He knows his nuts and berries, his mushrooms and ferns. You have taught him well. He will be found soon enough by the wild men of the woods, the wodewose, those without a place, whose villages have heen erased by plague. They will hold him close as we cannot.”

  “But he is such a little bird, my child, my owlet, my hawkling.”

  “If you keep him longer, be will be your death. And ours. The church forbids it. God’s law. And man’s.”

  “I would die for him, Mother.”

  “Let him live for you. Come. Morning will he here soon enough and it is already time for Matins. We dare not miss more than that or there will be talk.”

  Light.

  Day.

  1. TERRITORY

  THE BOY WAS SNIFFING AT THE ROOT OF A TREE, trying to decide if it was worth eating the mushrooms there, when he heard the first long baying of the pack. It was a sound that made the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

  He turned at the sound and tried to find its source, but this was a dark part of the woods, and tangled. He was still considering when the first dog broke through the underbrush, almost at his heels.

  It was a dun-colored dog, long-snouted, longbodied. He had enough time to see that. He struck at it with the stick he always carried and it scrabbled away from him, whining.

  He did not wait for the rest of the pack to find him, but jumped for the lower branch of the tree and scrambled up.

  Finding its courage, the dun dog leaped for him and its teeth grazed his ankle, but it missed its hold.

  The boy climbed higher, fear lending him quickness, strength. He was already high up in the tree when the rest of the pack found him. They broke through the brambles and bayed at the foot of the tree. There were seven of them, one more than the last time. The boy counted them off on his fingers—one hand’s worth and a thumb had been the number the last time. There was a new one, a large yellow mastiff. He did not like the look of the dog. It was big and had brutal jaws. Clearly it had taken over leadership of the pack from the dun.

  There was nothing the boy could do but wait them out. He had done it before. Patience was his one virtue, his necessity. Any business he had with mushrooms, grass, sky would wait. He settled into the crotch of the tree, making himself a part of it, as stolid, as solid, as silent as a tree limb, and waited.

  After a while, the dun-colored dog wandered off, followed by two grey brachets. The mastiff growled at each desertion but could not hold them past their hunger. Not wanting to challenge them over the boy, now gone beyond their sight and therefore beyond their reckoning, the mastiff growled to the rest of the pack and walked off, stiff-legged.

  They followed.

  Only when another five long, silent minutes were gone did the boy relax. He whistled then, through dry lips. It was not a sound of relief or a boy’s long, piercing come-here whistle, but sounded instead like one of the small finches. He had been many months in the woods, and what speech he still had was interspersed with this kind of birdsong. When frightened, he grunted the warning call of the wild boar. The dogs had surprised but not frightened him. In the forest he was too quick for them and they could not climb trees.

  This was his patch of woodland. He knew every bush and tangle of it, had marked it the way a wolf does, on the jumbled overground roots of the largest trees. Oaks were his favorites, having solid and low climbing limbs, though he did not call them oak. He had his own name for them, a short bark of sound.

  By damming up one of the little streams, he caught fish when he needed them, bright silvery things with spotted backs, scarcely a hand’s span long. He ate them raw. He did not eat other meat, but rather spied on little animals for entertainment—baby rabbits and baby squirrels when he could find their hidey-holes, and badgers in their setts. They made him laugh.

  At night he called down owls.

  Once he had scared a mother fox off her kill by growling fiercely and rushing her, but found he could not eat the remains. When he returned to the kill the next morning, the meat was gone; the scent of fox lay heavy on the ground.

  The first time he had been set upon by the wild dogs, he’d been forced off his own meager dinner. They had scattered his small cache of mushrooms and berries, mouthing each piece, then spitting them out again. When he came down from the tree, he found what he could of his food, but it all smelled bad; he choked when he tried to eat it. He went hungry that night.

  It was not the first time.

  He was very thin, with knobs for knees and elbows like arrowpoints, and scratches all over his body, which was brown everywhere from the sun. His thatch of straight, dark hair fell across his face, often obscuring his eyes, which were as green as the woodland, with gold highlights, like rays of sun showing through.

  He had never made a fire, was even a little afraid to, for he believed fire was a younger son of the lightning that he thought the very devil, for it felled several of the great trees and left only glowing embers. Still, if he worshipped anything, it was the trees that sheltered him, fed him, cradled him.

  He laughed at the antics of baby animals but could
not tell a joke.

  He imitated birdsong but could not sing.

  He liked the way rain ran down his hair and across his cheeks, but he did not cry. An animal does not cry.

  He was eight years old and alone.

  2. HISTORY

  THE WHOLE TIME HE HAD LIVED ALONE IN THE woods came to one easy winter, one very wet spring, one mild summer, and one brilliant fall.

  A year.

  But for an eight-year-old that is a good portion of a lifetime. He remembered all of that year. What he could not recall clearly was how he had come to the woods, how he had come to be alone. What he could recall made him uneasy. He remembered it mostly at night. And in dreams.

  He remembered a large, smoky hearth and the smell of meat drippings. A hand slapped his—he remembered this, though he could not remember who had slapped him or why. That was not one of the bad dreams, though. He could clearly recall the taste of the meat before the slap, and it was good.

  He also remembered sitting atop a great beast, so broad his legs stuck out on either side, and no beast in the forest, not even the deer, was that broad. He could still remember three or four hands holding him up on the beast, steadying him. Each hand had a gold band on the next-to-last finger. And that was a good dream, too. He liked what he could recall of the animals musty smell.

  There was a third dream that was good. Some sweet, clean-smelling face near his own. And a name whispered in his ear. But that dream was the haziest of the good dreams. The word in his ear was softer than any birdcall. It was as quiet as a green inchworm on the spring bough. So quiet he couldn’t make it out at all.

  The other dreams were bad.

  There was the dream of two dragons, one red and one white, asleep in hollow stones. They woke and screamed when he looked at them. That dream ended horribly in flames. He could hear the screams, now dragon and now something else, as if everything screaming was being consumed by fire. The smell he associated with this dream was not so different from the smell of the small hare he had found charred under the roots of a lightning-struck tree.

  And there was another dream that frightened him. A dream of lying within a circle of great stones that danced around him faster and faster, until they made a blurry grey wall that held him in. Awake, he avoided all rocky outcroppings, preferring the forest paths. At night he slept in trees, not caves. The hollow of an oak seemed safer to him than the great, dark, hollow mouths that opened into the hills.

  The scariest dream of all was of a man and a sword. He knew it was a man and a sword, though he had no name for either of them. Sometimes the man pointed the sword at him, sometimes he held it away. The sword’s blade was like a silvery river in which he could read many wonderful and fearful things: dragons, knights riding great beasts, ladies lying in barges on an expanse of water, and—most awful of all—a beautiful woman with long, dark hair that twisted and squirmed like snakes, who beckoned to him with a mouth that was black and tongueless.

  He could not stop the dreams from coming to him, but he had learned how to force himself awake before he was caught forever in the dream. In the dream he would push his hands together, cross his forefingers, and say his name. Then his eyes would open—his real eyes, not his dream eyes—and he would slowly swim up out of the dream and see the leaves of the trees outlined in the light of the moon or against the flickering ancient pattern of stars. Only, of course, once he was awake he could not remember his name.

  So he named himself: Star Boy. Moon Boy. Boy of the Falling Leaves. Whatever it was on that day or night that caught his fancy. Rabbit Boy. Badger Boy. Hawk-in-stoop Boy. Boy. He never said these names aloud.

  He did not think of himself in the intimate voice; did not think I am or I want or I will. It was always Star Boy is hungry or Moon Boy wants to sleep or Boy of the Falling Leaves drinks or Rabbit, Badger, Hawk-in-stoop Boy goes up the hill and over the dale. Only these were said in images, not words.

  Time for him was always now except in dreams. His history, all of the past, made no more sense to him than the dreams. And as more and more of his human words fell away—having no one to use them with—so did his need for past or future. His only memory was in dreams.

  3. HAWK

  IT WAS THE TAG END OF FALL, AND THE SQUIRRELS had been busy storing up acorn mast, hiding things in holes, burying and unburying. The boy had watched. He had even tried imitating them, but could never recall where he had buried any of the nuts, except for one handful, which when unearthed tasted musky and smelled of dirt.

  A double V of late geese, noisy and aggravated, flew across the grey and lowering sky. He watched them for a long time, yearning for something. He did not know what. Shading his eyes with one dirty hand, he followed their progress until the last of them had disappeared behind a mountain.

  “Hwonk,” he cried after them. Then louder, “Hwahoooonk.” He waited for a reply but none came. Unaccountably his right eye burned. He rubbed his fist in it and the fist was wet. Not a lot. But enough to make the dirt seem like filth.

  Abruptly, he turned and ran down a deer track to the nearby river. He plunged in, paddling awkwardly near the edge, where the water pooled and slipped under exposed tree roots. He brought water up in cupped hands and splashed it on his face.

  “Hwonk,” he whispered to himself. Then he stood for a moment more. The cold water made his skin tingle pleasantly. When he climbed back up on the bank, the grass slippery underfoot, he shook himself all over like a dog and pushed the wet hair from his eyes.

  He hummed as he walked, not a song, not even anything resembling a melody. It had no words, but a kind of comforting buzz. Then he yawned, his hand going up to his mouth as if it had a memory of its own. Finding a comfortable climbing tree, one he had used before, he got up in it, nestled in the place where two great limbs forked, and fell asleep. That it was day did not stop him from napping. He was alone. He made his own rules about time.

  He had been asleep perhaps a quarter of an hour when a strange noise woke him; he did not move except to open his eyes. Caution had become a habit.

  The sound that awakened him was not yippy like foxes or the long, howling fall of the dogs. It had teased into his dream and had changed the dream so abruptly that he awoke.

  The call came closer.

  Carefully he rose up a bit from the nest in the fork of the tree and crawled out along a thick branch that overlooked a clearing.

  Suddenly something flapped over his head. He craned his neck and saw a hunting bird. She had a creamy breast and her tail had bands of alternating white and brown. Beak and talons flashed by him as she caught an updraft and landed near the top of a tall beech tree.

  “Hwonk,” he whispered, though he knew this was never such a bird.

  No sooner had the falcon settled than the calling began again. It was an odd, unnatural, intrusive sound.

  The boy looked down. On the edge of the wood stood a man, rather like the one in his dream, the one with the sword. He was large, with wide shoulders and red-brown hair that covered his face. There was a thin halo of hair around his head. When he walked across the meadow and then beneath the branch where the boy lay as still as leaves, the boy could see a round, pink area on the top of the man’s head. It looked like a moon. A spotty, pink moon. The boy put his hand to his mouth so that he would not laugh out loud.

  The man did not look up, did not notice the boy in the tree. His eyes were entirely on the tall beech tree and the magnificent bird near its crown. He swung a weighted string over his head and the string made an odd singing sound. The man whistled, and called, “Come, Lady. Come.”

  That was the sound that the boy had heard. The sound that had pulled him from his dream. Words.

  The bird, though it watched the man carefully, did not move.

  Neither did the boy.

  4. CAPTURE

  THE MAN AND THE BIRD EYED ONE ANOTHER FOR the rest of the short afternoon. In the tree, the boy watched them both. His patience with the scene below him was amazing, given
that at one time or another his hands and his feet all fell asleep and he had an awful need to relieve himself.

  Occasionally the bird would flutter her wings, as if testing them. Occasionally her head swiveled one way, then another. But she made no move to leave the beech.

  The man seemed likewise content to stay. Except for making more circles around his head with the string, he remained almost motionless, though every now and again he made a clucking sound with his tongue. And he talked continuously to the bird, calling her names like “Hinny” and “Love,” “Sweet Nell” and “Maid,” in that same soft voice.

  The boy took it all in, the bird in the tree, often still as a piece of stained glass, the sun lighting it from behind. And the man, with the thick leather glove on one hand, the whirring string in the other.

  He wondered if the man would attempt, before night, to climb the tree after the bird, but he hoped that would not happen. The bird might then leave the tree; the tree, quite thin at the top, somewhat like the man, might break. The boy liked the look of the bird: her fierce, sharp independence, the way she stared at the man and then away. And the man’s voice was comforting. It reminded the boy of something, something in his dreams. He could not remember what.

  He hoped they would both stay. At least for a while.

  When night came, they each slept where they were: the man right out in the clearing, his hands around his knees, the hawk high in her tree. The boy edged down from the tree, did his business, and was up the tree again so quietly none of the leaves slipped off into the autumn stillness.

  He fell asleep once or twice that night but he did not dream.

  In the morning the boy woke first, even before the bird, because he willed himself to. He watched as first the falcon shook herself into awareness, then the man below stretched and stood. If the boy had not seen them both sleeping, had only now wakened himself, he would have thought the two of them had not changed all the night.