Be Free Ye' Lothsom Brays

by Roy Candido

Chapter 1

Game at the Mill

There's an old game played by the lambs of the Meadow when they're young, idle and at a loss for honest troubles. Two of them now, a brother and sister, sit upstream from a watermill, and having one picked dandelions and the other daisies, let the soft powdery pedals float down the glassy rush that drives it. Under the turbine they disappear, but during one turn of the wheel they wager candies or treats that they'll see that flower again, scooped into driving buckets and dribbled back behind into the river, double or nothing if returns twice, and only a daft wether would bet a third. When any profit from each other would simply be nicked back from each other's room when vacant, they settled simply to win. It was in the distance down the hill between the flower's embarking and the wheel that the judgement was made, and the bet when it vanished beneath it. A further stretch of the creek past the wheel had stolen Pom's attention, and weakened her bets as her eyes trailed its giggling flow a mile down into her town, disappearing into the river wide enough to demand the red centennial bridge to be made. As if enough attention could pick apart the twisting waters like a lock of hair and find the one that grew from their betting wheel's waters, she followed from the outlet down the river, which disappeared in a turn past a green and far obscuring hill. She tossed a daisy pedal with no deliberation and called "bet" when she suspected it had disappeared already.
"If we had been betting with salt today, I'd have been rich before the noon, you know." Her brother Woogums said.
"Aye, same," she hummed back like a parrot repeating.
"Not one bit, you wouldn't! I know it's a game of chance, but you're not even weighing the odds. What're you looking at now?"
Instinctually she shrugged to keep her troubles with her, but as she nosed through her white ribbon pile they welled up again and spoke themselves.
"Where do you think these go when they get past the wheel? They move with the water, and the water doesn't stop unless they wash up. Didn't Ma and Pa toss flowers just like this, and their Ma and Pa too, and after all those flower tops maybe there's a pond or a bank somewhere where they've planted themselves again?"
Woogums searched by approximation where his sister had been watching, as if the mysterious blooming place was just a garden in plain sight that no one pointed out to her before, and concluded "Where the Unicorns are, I'll bet, and they pick them for their boiling cauldrons and potions. We must have delivered a great deal of our dandelions to them. Someday we'll all have to march down with our picking baskets and bring them back,"
Visions of sheep wielding wicker and thatch in a bleating front line against the mystics of the woodland swelled. A ram might press the advantage and snatch up a mouthful of flowers before retreating from the riposte of a pike-like horn in a war for the orphaned meadow flowers, and as their guard dogs yapped the scornful Unicorn spit venomous curses that had never been spoken. When her face flushed hot from her imagination's engine, her heart began to beat against the tangled grass underneath.
"You're shaking, Pom, again. They probably never made it that far. In fact, they're probably just around the bend, and I'm sure it's a sight at least," He relented when the little golden bell around her neck chimed as she shivered in whatever dark daydream she climbed into. His words passed silently in her sphere of imagination and did nothing to wake her. Unicorns were doubtful afraid of fire and knew white-hot torches would turn wool to kindling. Their oily flames licked at her face, but the tongue was only warm, and to the skin-short fur of her pink face, wet as well.
A dog of hers came to her side, as they were trained to never resist its intoxicating glassy ring of her bell. When it singingly tolled on the days she tramped they couldn't help themselves but heel, and if she haunted herself, its shy cries would bring them to tickle her nose and push her chin with their soft heads until she could address only them. Like the image of a candle's light that lingers when extinguished, and melts into the dark as soon as it came, the Unicorn's faces fled, and it was evening at the watermill again. Heavily she draped a leg over the squirming back of her puppy, Ruff, to keep his tongue from endeavoring to her's when her scrunched lips betrayed her into a smile.
"Bet" Woogums said, and threw another, and Pom's train of thought departed silently from its station, and the golden flower lit a flame in its furnace. Deftly it slipped under and past the watermill while she smiled at it, but dawning on her was its exile to the woodlands. Spinning without arms from every ripple and roll, and the only distant paradise for it was the jealous guardianship of the Unicorns and their scalding brews. Whatever cool breeze carried its seed here to be planted in the bounty of the Meadow was a fortunate wind, now wasted at Pom's plucking teeth and into their betting piles, and she sat idle while the last images of her home flashed by and were swallowed by dark canopies southward.
"Pom! I meant these!" He said, kicking the rest of his dandelion pile into the creek, "these are just around the bend, not the unicorns! The odds a flower could make it more than a mile before washing up are next to none,"
When she stood, Ruff barked and threaded frantic circles through her spindly legs. Possessed by something newfound, she started some steps down from the clearing to the dirt road along the water and, like how old sheep harken back to the day a lost love escaped by it, her eyes trembled in the darkening evening, and she kept on. Though the whole creek ran gold as the sinking sun still preceded their due time home, she found the rich yolk of Woogum's dandelion still tipping along the stream. Woogums, only a dozen steps behind having the same striding legs as her own, protested unconvincingly on the rare chance she'd hear, but still followed along in the shallow cloud of dust kicked up by Ruff, and not his sister's hooves that barely glance the ground.
Many sheep in the passing years beat into the grassy cruxes between the hills the dry clay paths Pom frantically traced. Never taking her eyes from her target in the water, unless darting agile around a boulder cleaving the river from its accompanying road, she began to pant softly, and Ruff whined childishly as if to ask why she ran now, when all other times she loitered.
Soon she came past towers of brick, plastered and red with turbines stunned at the windlessness of the late day, and iron posts with candlewax gushing in their glass hexagon lamps. Only from back porches and rear windows of public houses was she leered at with concern while taller and more densely hackled dogs stopped their waterside patrols when she approached, then scampered around them. Cattails batted at her eyelashes with an aggression she'd never felt, grown from ground crunching untrodden by hooves, and her hypnosis from the flower flickered in a moment when she realized she was running on pathless grass that others never did, and finally she toppled. Not from exhaustion or a grabbing root, but the plastering force of something massive and furred that pounced across the water.
If the wild stretch behind the street of waterfront houses wasn't unknown to her, the throttling against the grass and into a soft cloverbed she received dashed all hopes to learn. Familiar to all those raised with siblings, the heavy smell that emerges when the nose is knocked without care returned, and she hadn't the wherewithal to cry, but only to lay there and hear her brother patter to her side, and the side of whatever delivered her into the ground.
"Pom, are you alright? Let me see your teeth," He told her, and she dazily bared them.
"All still there, thankfully, and no red, so you didn't bite yourself. Big Scrap here has bashed me too when I got carried away with one of my kites and almost left the border. He's gentle as can be, but you're so light, I got a little worried."
Big Scrap, the statuesque and massive hound he was, watched from short distance, as if she may clamor to her feet and make another try at the strict borders of the town. The waters of the river, submerging a much deeper gouge into the valleys than the little creek they both bet their flowers into, were unseen and only audible low under the banks. Pom's hot face embraced cool shamrock bed. Ruff now spun circles before Woogums, trained as he was to fetch help had his owner collapsed, but too young to know what good her collapsing did, and that she'd already been attended.
"They're not much farther away, are they?" She spoke through the leaves, "Just around the bend there, like you said, a garden of all the flowers we sent replanted themselves. I was afraid one might slip through, miss the bank and end up in the woodlands."
As Woogums lay down beside her she say up, and Big Scrap turned and left her in her brother's possession.
"Do you remember at the beginning of the Winter, when all the leaves had fallen and I saw out our window that the clock tower was really only a block away, where else it felt like leagues when the trees hid it?"
"Yes," Woogums said, "Ma could barely pull you from the window for dinnertime. I knew I'd seen that look on your face before,"
"When you told me about the garden around the bend, and the woodlands, yes, I felt the same. Almost like it was always there, and how close it was... I felt so different. Different about the river and the flowers, and where our house sits not far from it. It finally connected, and I wanted to see it."
"So bad you'd just leave me at the mill back there?"
"You'd have followed me and Ruff anyway, how little you like the dark and all." At this, Woogums bobbed his head in admittance, "But I want to see it still. Will you take me there, tomorrow? If all four puppies are with us, Scrap would let us pass, wouldn't he?"
"Well, It's not me you need to be asking. The Prime Minister permits you to leave, and only if it's passed by a vote,"
"A vote!?" Pom stood at the statement, "but it's just a smidge around the bend, they could see us from the bridge, even!"
Woogums shrugged. Between their ages lay an initiatory fencepost. The younger had attended the town halls and public councils for the trivial things to which even a lamb's ballot can matter; the colors of fences repainted, the theme of new litter's names, and if the doorknobs all be polished before the hinges. Only the impersonal things, with the lives of sheep left alone. Her brother attended other meetings.
"Then you'll come with me to ask him? You're older and he'll listen to you. You want to see the garden too, don't you?"
Without a doubt, he didn't. Flowers were abundant in the valley, and were cultivated in vast blankets to feed to the dogs, and nearly he suggested they visit them instead. In their gentle salutations to the sun, anyone who watches their pedals wave take on a brightness of their own. The ones in Pom's imagination affected her in no simple way, and he began to believe his own hapless suggestion convinced her that something stalked that grove.
"I will," He relented, "We'll ask, and if it passes, we'll go see it. Only past the bend though, and if it isn't there, you won't press any further down the river, right?"
She agreed, and all at once her hooves skipped in place, "After breakfast, and we'll bring our puppies so he knows we've guards of our own! But we'll need more, and with the new yearling hounds they're sure to have some to spare. I don't want to go far, I only want to know that we'll never have to, that's all."