This is the final piece of “The Old Man of the Mountain”, at least for now. I like this story well enough I am considering expanding it to novel length. If you liked it, please let me know. If there was something you didn’t like about it, please let me know that too.
This ended up longer than I thought it would. I was aiming for around eight thousand words, and in the end the story ended up at nearly 10. I'm actually a little proud of that, but I think it will make the story difficult to tell should I decide to do so.
I"ll be coming back some time this week to re-post a proof-read and edited version of this work. For now it is still a raw draft.
The Old Man of the Mountain, pt 4
John’s eye widened and he took a few steps backwards, away from the looming figure of the Old Man. The Old Man’s features were as expressionless as they always were. Somehow the lack of emotional expression made him all that much more frightening.
The Old Man sighed. It was a strange whistling noise, like the sound of wind gusting around the corner of a house. He dropped into a sitting position, cross-legged against Tyler’s unconscious form.
“Relax,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt or your idiot friend here. If I wanted harm to come to either of you I’d have let him die.”
John warily took two more steps backwards. He was still frightened silly of the Old Man, but what he had said at least made sense. He nodded once, quickly, and then ran off down the slope of the mountain in search of the stick the Old Man had asked for.
It was surprisingly difficult to find. Even at the three line the available options were stunted and twisted. John was forced to go nearly a quarter of the way down the mountain before he found a tall, straight sapling he figured would do the job.
He tugged at the tree experimentally, trying to pull its relatively shallow roots free of the patch of soil it was rooted in. It clung tenaciously to the earth, and for a moment John wondered how he would get it free. Finally he recalled that he still had the Old Man’s knife.
The knife was single-edged, with a heavy blade, and so it made a decent tool for hacking away at the sapling’s trunk. The tree was a bit thicker than the Old Man had requested, at least three finger-widths wide, and so cutting it down was slow going. A few times during the process John wished he had thought to retrieve the hatchet from Tyler’s bag.
Finally John managed to hack away enough of the wood that the small tree came down. The remaining wood gave a soft crack as it fell. John used the knife to cut it away from the stump and dragged the fallen tree up the hill.
It was slow going carrying a tree longer than he was tall, and by the time he returned the Old Man was long longer sitting next to his friend. Tyler’s arm was bound to his side, with the handle of the hatched used as a brace to keep the bone straight. There was a pile of wet, bloody rags on the ground that the Old Man must have used to clean the blood from Tyler.
As he dragged the tree into the center of the camp the Old Man emerged from the log hut. He was bare-chested, and carrying his blanket and some rope in the crook of his arm.
“You and your friend owe me a shirt,” he said to John.
John dropped the end of the sapling next to Tyler. He was sweating from the exertion of getting up the slope. The Old Man gave him an appraising look and nodded.
“This will do,” he said. “Give me my knife.”
John returned the Old Man’s knife, careful to hand it over by the blade the way his father had taught him. A moment later he realized he needn’t have bothered with the care. No knife he knew of would mark the Old Man’s skin.
The Old Man went up and down the trunk of the sapling, stripping it of leaves, twigs, and branches. When that was done he hacked at the trunk to divide the remaining length of wood into halves. The two resulting poles he laid side-by-side, using the rope and blanket to form them into a litter. He turned again to Jobn.
“Your friend is no longer dying, but we need to get him home. I would just carry him, but his injuries could get much, much worse if I jostle him too hard. We are going to carry him down the mountain, slowly. I will take the end near his feet and you will take the end near his head. I’ll go first. Do you understand?”
John nodded.
“Good. Help me roll him on to the litter.”
Moving Tyler’s unconscious form proved to be fairly easy. John was worried that the motion would cause Tyler to scream out again in pain, but his slumber was so deep he offered neither help nor resistance. Once he was on the litter the Old Man took the time to get him properly positioned, and then John and the Old Man each took and end and raised him up off of the ground.
“I’ll go first,” said the Old Man. “Be careful, and take it slow. Put the ends of the litter on your shoulder, like this ,” he said, demonstrating. John did as he was told, and the Old Man dropped his arms back to his sides, bringing the ends of the litter to a more level angle.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They walked for a while in silence. The Old Man was moving slowly and deliberately so as not to lose his balance. John did the same, but every once in a while the Old Man would more a little farther than John had room more and he would find himself jerked a few steps down the mountain. Each time he gripped the poles of the litter as though dropping it would mean his death. It might mean his friend’s.
Eventually the question came the John had dreaded.
“What were you doing in my camp?” the Old Man asked.
“It was Tyler’s idea,” he said. He flushed with embarrassment as he realized he had just assigned blame to his critically injured friend.
“That wasn’t what I asked,” said the Old Man. “Answer my question.”
John took a moment before answering.
“We wanted to know more about you,” he said. It was a small fib, but one that at least made him share the blame with his friend.
“We don’t know anything about you,” he continued.”Our parents are all afraid of you, and when we saw you yesterday we thought we could find out more about you if we found where you lived.”
“Stupid,” said the Old Man. John was inclined to agree.
“We knew you’d spot us if we followed you,” John continued, “so we looked for your camp instead. Tyler said he’d come on to your property before. Your land is next to where he lives.”
“I thought he looked familiar,” said the Old Man, “but then I thought it was just my memory playing tricks. What were you doing in the Orchard?”
John shrugged, forgetting for the moment that the Old Man couldn’t see him.
“Tyler saw one of the stone men from the camp,” he said. “We went to investigate. We saw those strange plants of yours, and figured that’s what had turned them to stone. Tyler got the sap on him and thought he was going to die. You know the rest.”
The Old Man gave a non-committal grunt, and they continued on in silence again. After a while, John got up the courage to ask the question he knew he needed to.
“Did you kill those men?” he asked.
The Old Man shook his head. “No,” he replied. “Those men killed themselves, by accident. Your friend was lucky. The Gorgon Tree’s thorns nearly always pierce the skin. Even a small amount of sap into a wound, and he would be dead by now.”
John shuddered. He knew that Tyler had been close to death not once, but repeatedly that day, but it was something else to be reminded of it.
“What kind of plant is the Gorgon Tree?” he asked. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The Old Man snorted. “I should hope not,” he said. “I’ve done my level best to find and remove or destroy every one in the forest that I can.”
“But, why?” John asked.
The Old Man didn’t reply immediately. When he finally spoke it wasn’t to answer, but to ask a question.
“How much do you know about me?” he asked.
“Almost nothing,” John admitted.
“Well, then I will tell you a tale,” said the Old Man. “No need to keep it a secret. There are enough tall tales about me I doubt half the people you meet will be believe it anyhow.”
John said nothing and waited for the story to begin.
“I have been here a long time,” he said. “I have been here since well before your grandparents’ grandparents were children. I am very, very old.
“I was not born in this land. I was born in a land across the Great Ocean in a land ruled by a king that has long since past into the histories. I suffered wanderlust as a young man, and enlisted on the ship of one of the great explorers of my time.
“You probably don’t know his name, but he is the reason your village even exists. Where others sought gold and spices in the lands to the south, this man instead sought fertile farm land and productive forests in the north.
“This land was not uninhabited when we arrived. There were tribes of natives back then. The were human, but did not appear as you or as I did then. They were dark and mysterious, and took pains to stay away from us whenever possible.
“I had quickly grown tired of life at sea. In those days there were great incentives for a man of such simply beginnings to gain fortune among the early colonies. The lands near the ocean were in great demand, and I could not afford a grant there. I had a cunning plan however that I thought would ensure I would be a rich man.
“I saw this mountain, far in the distance. This was a new world, and I thought that on it’s slopes I might find some mineral wealth. I thought that I might find some veins of gold or silver, or even iron or tin, that might make my fortune. I secured my claim and set out to stake it.
“When I arrived I found what you see now. There is no gold here. There is no iron. I dug for days on this mountainside, desperate to find even one small nugget or crystal I could sell.
“One night there was a storm. In a flash of lighting I saw someone at the peak dancing in the wind and the rain. The next day I searched and found her camp. I saw her stand of Gorgon trees, and investigated them, just as you did.
“I wasn’t so luck. Being slowly turned to stone by the venom of a Gorgon tree is an unimaginable pain. Before i was too far gone she found me. She used powerful magics to allow me to move. Her potion leaves me like this. I am still a man of stone, but I am also still alive.
“I never knew her name. I just called her the Mountain Crone. She was assigned by her people to collect the Gorgon Trees and other magic plants to keep them safe and others safe from them. She wasn’t a kind woman, and I was happy to be quite of her. That’s a story for another time though.”
The Old Man’s had came down on a fence post with a soft thump. John was startled at the sound, and he blinked his eyes and looked around him. Slowly he came to realize that over the course of the story he and the Old Man had made it all the way down the mountain.
A sense of relief flowed through him. He could still hear Tyler’s labored snoring coming from inside the sling of the litter. They had gotten him home, and though Tyler was still in some danger, John was happy that his friend would now be able to rest and recouperate.
It took a bit of finagling to get the litter over the fence, since John was so much shorter than the Old Man, but they managed it. As they trudge across Tyler’s family pasture John thought of another question.
“Where do the Gorgon trees and other plants come from?” he asked.
“This is a New World,” the Old Man replied, “and one still full of magics. There is magic in the Old World as well, but people tend not to notice it there as it has mostly been brought to heel by science and logic.
“Things are different here. The New World is still a wild place, and there are still unchained magics within it. The Natives knew how to stay out of their way, and sometimes to harvest them. We don’t work with the land, we make it work for us, and so we trample those magics where we can, and avoid them where we can’t.”
John stayed silent, considering what the Old Man had said. It bore some consideration. If there were other magics here, some might be as dangerous as the Gorgon tree. Despite himself he wondered if he could find some. Maybe he could get the Old man to tell him about them too.”
Assuming he parents ever let him leave the house again, of course.
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