The Blue Shoe

by Roderick Townley

  It didn’t help that the mayor began laughing as well, and then Ludmilla, whose laugh was louder than anyone’s.

  “Ye may mock me,” declared Shadow Reader, “but ye dare not mock the one I serve.”

  The mayor tilted back his head to make room for even larger guffaws. “And who do you serve? The queen of the gnomes?”

  The laughter had now spread through the crowd. These strange creatures were clearly not to be feared.

  “Lord of the leafhoppers?” added the mayor’s nephew with a snarky sneer.

  “The duke of dung beetles?” cried the mayor, nearly weeping with laughter.

  Shadow Reader turned to Hap. “See what ye have done?”

  The boy nodded sadly. “All my fault.”

  “So ye see I really have to execute ye.”

  “Maybe not,” said Hap, backing away. “I can outrun you.”

  “But you can’t,” interjected the mayor, stepping forward, “outrun my soldiers. You’re surrounded.”

  It was true. All his men were armed—heavily.

  “But why bother them?” said the mayor. He took tight hold of Hap’s arm. “I’ll do it myself!”

  “No!” said Grel.

  “Rauf!” said Rauf.

  Hap squirmed and twisted but couldn’t get free. The mayor had ruled with an iron fist, and now that fist was dragging the boy to the very lip of the cliff. Hap half stumbled, loosening a crumble of dirt that fell, bouncing and spinning, into the void.

  “Why,” muttered the mayor, “didn’t I think of this months ago?”

  He braced himself to fling the boy over the edge when his attention was briefly caught by a movement near the front of the crowd. It was a child’s hand tugging on the leg of an Auki. The hand belonged to a beggar girl, wound in a filthy green blanket.

  “It’s her!” said the mayor.

  People looked confused.

  “Who did he say?”

  “Where?”

  Shadow Reader felt the tug on his leg and looked down.

  The child’s hand opened, revealing a gray pebble.

  The Auki took it.

  “What are you waiting for?” cried Ludmilla the Large, not understanding the delay. “Push!”

  The mayor wasn’t listening.

  Neither was Shadow Reader. He looked at the pebble, then at the one-eyed beggar girl.

  Suddenly, he fell to his knees. “Your Majesty!” he cried.

  People looked at one another. Several began to giggle.

  “Did you hear what he called her?” said one.

  “It’s that urchin!” Ludmilla exclaimed, squinting at the girl. “The one that started all this!”

  The Auki touched his head to the ground. “I have failed you!” he moaned.

  The child laid a hand on his scruffy head. For the first time in this whole story, she spoke. Her voice was soft but clear. “You have the stone,” she said.

  He nodded without raising his head.

  “You have a shoemaker.”

  He nodded again.

  “You should be able to think of something.”

  The Auki raised his head. “You’re right, Your Majesty.”

  He called for Grel.

  “Wait!” Ludmilla interrupted. “My husband has to finish pushing that horrible boy off the cliff!”

  “In a moment, Luddy dear,” said the mayor. He watched as Shadow Reader handed the pebble to Grel, who disappeared inside the shop and returned a minute later with the stone sewn securely in place.

  The Auki held it up. Everyone stared. The shoe looked exactly the same.

  Almost the same.

  Was it possible there was a faint blue cast over it? A shimmer, maybe?

  The townspeople crowded closer, the mayor among them. He had forgotten about Hap, who by now had stopped waiting for someone to push him to his death. He easily slid free of the mayor’s grasp.

  There was no doubt about it; the shoe was glowing.

  The blues deepened. The sapphires gleamed. The opals shone. The diamond on the shoe’s heel became a fiery star.

  “Gimme that thing!” cried Ludmilla, elbowing her way through the crowd.

  “Just a moment, madam,” said the watchmaker, barring her way.

  “You dare stop me?” Ludmilla’s eyes flashed.

  “I do.”

  “So do I,” said the blacksmith, standing directly in front of her.

  “Me too,” said the jeweler.

  “You!” she cried. “Be warned. I’ll take my business elsewhere.”

  “Oh, thank you!” the jeweler exclaimed. “You haven’t paid me for the last seven necklaces.”

  “Quiet, everyone!” called out the beggar girl.

  Except for some hard breathing on the part of Ludmilla, the crowd was silent.

  “Now,” said the girl, letting the green blanket rest comfortably around her shoulders, “bring the thief to me.”

  The Auki warrior led Hap forward.

  “Not him,” she said firmly. Small and crippled as she was, her voice held a strange authority. “Three times he saved me. He gave me a fish, a loaf of bread, even a stone from the shoe.” She cast her single eye over the crowd. “What he did was wrong, but the stone is back where it belongs now, and I forgive him.”

  People started whispering. “Did you hear? The beggar forgives him for saving her.”

  “Such impertinence!”

  She pointed her finger at the Lord Mayor of Aplanap. “That one!” she declared. “He’s the thief.”

  The mayor shook his head. “Very amusing, I’m sure.”

  “You deny that you stole cartloads of gems?”

  “Stole?”

  “Those infernal mines, they belong to you?”

  “I don’t deny,” he replied, “that I run a mining operation on the mountain, if that’s what you mean. The stones we harvest are for the general good, and for my fair Ludmilla, who fancies them. I keep nothing for myself, beyond a few bushels of diamonds to cover expenses. What crime have I committed?”

  Shadow Reader went up to the mayor and fixed him with such a deadly stare that the hairs on the man’s wart began to shrivel. “Ye have stolen from the goddess, whose mountains these are! Ye have blasted out her treasures and enslaved your fellow humans.”

  The mayor shrugged. “So?”

  The beggar girl directed her single eye at the mayor. “You will put them back.”

  “I will what?”

  “You will put the stones back where they came from.”

  “That’s insane! Nobody puts gems back in the ground!”

  “You will. And your wife will help you.”

  “Ludmilla?” The mayor snorted. “The fair Ludmilla does not put things back,” he said. “She takes things out!”

  “Also,” the girl continued, “you’ll find that your new tasks will take up all your time. Therefore, Hap, the shoemaker’s apprentice, will take over as mayor.”

  The girl’s breathtaking audacity extracted a bark of laughter from the mayor, but the laugh died quickly. “All right,” he said, “that’s enough. Guards! Seize this girl! And see she doesn’t get away this time.”

  The mayor’s guards, bristling with weapons, began pushing their way through the crowd.

  Things did not look good, it must be said, for Hap and his friends. They had come through many hardships, had even managed a few heroic deeds, but they were weak, small, and unarmed, and the guards were, well, the opposite.

  A bull-faced fellow had Sophia by her skinny arm. Another grabbed Hap by his neck. Other guards were getting ready to do violence to Shadow and the beggar girl.

  “One moment!” cried the Auki. “Has no one any curiosity about the shoe?”

  The crowd began to murmur.

  “The shoe,” whispered one.

  “Oh yes,” said another.

  “After all,” Shadow went on, “it was the shoe that started this trouble.”

  “True,” said the watchmaker’s wife.

  “Humans,�
�� the Auki scoffed. “Ye live on the outside. Always ye go from the outside in, from the top down. Even your religions start with what ye call heaven—”

  “What’s he gargling about?” griped Ludmilla.

  “Enough philosophy,” snapped the mayor.

  “The goddess,” Shadow continued, “rules from the earth up, not from the heavens down.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Instead of a crown, a shoe.” Shadow Reader scanned the crowd. “Perhaps it were easier just to show ye.” He knelt before the beggar girl. “Is it time, Your Majesty?”

  She nodded. “It is more than time. It’s going on eternity.”

  Gently, reverentially, he slipped the gloriously misshapen shoe on the girl’s misshapen foot.

  A sudden blinding light flashed over the scene. For seconds, no one could see anything. Then the glare began to lessen, and people opened astonished eyes to a vision of the beggar child transforming into a fearsomely beautiful woman, growing taller and taller by the second until her head was nearly out of sight.

  At the same moment, all the bells in Aplanap— from the tiniest crystal dinner bell to the church’s great gonger—began ringing, binging, and clanging, and flocks of yellow birds exploded into the sky. Cuckoos, they were, thousands of them, freed at last from the prison of their clocks. They cried out in noisy joy, circled the town once, and swept out of sight.

  Instinctively, the crowd fell back. Women knelt, men doffed their caps, and Shadow and his fellow Auki stretched prostrate on the ground.

  “Xexnax!” Shadow murmured.

  “Ye have returned.”

  The vision grew taller yet. It grew upward and downward at once. The blue shoe was no longer a shoe, but the shining waterway known as Doubtful Bay. The goddess’s body grew into a mountain range, covered with a green blanket of vegetation. The beggar’s one eye glowed as the North Star.

  Gradually, the image of the goddess began to fade in the early-evening air, leaving as coordinates the bay; the mountain; the star, glimmering high over the cleansed town.

  It took a few moments for the townspeople to notice that the star was floating in a clear sky. The clouds that for so long had covered Aplanap were gone.

  “Look!” cried a little child, pulling her mother’s dress. “Where did the glass go?”

  It was true. The slippery glaze that had covered every roof, road, and streetlamp had simply melted away. The glass-encased beggar by the bank building blinked his eyes and stretched. The quince-picker’s goat, which had been the glass statue of a goat, shook its horned head and let out a bleat. Even the glass-coated geraniums in the window boxes were freed of their heavy armor and began to lift their heads.

  Hap stood before the townspeople. “It appears,” he said, “that I’m to be the new mayor of Aplanap. Is that all right with everybody?”

  Whisperings and rumblings scudded through the crowd.

  “Fine with me, Hap, my boy!” called out the cheese-maker.

  “Isn’t he a little young?” objected the baker’s wife.

  “Thirteen seems a fine age,” answered her husband.

  “But he’s a thief!” called someone else.

  “Not half the thief as the mayor!”

  “He’s a brave lad,” called the woodcutter.

  Cheers began breaking out. There would have been more, but there in their midst stood the terrifying Ludmilla and her red-faced husband vibrating with rage.

  “You’ll stop this nonsense right now!” the mayor shouted. “Guards! Arrest him!”

  The guards hesitated.

  Hap threw the men a smile. “Hard to know what to do, isn’t it? I understand. But think. You know the kind of mayor you’ve had. Do you want more of him?”

  The guards were not used to thinking for themselves. Their eyes darted back and forth between Hap and the man with the trembling wart.

  “You’d better make up your minds,” said Hap, “because I’m about to give my first order as the new mayor. Ready? Here it comes: Guards! Arrest that man! That woman, too, of course. We wouldn’t want to forget the mayor’s wife.”

  “You lay a hand on me,” growled Ludmilla, “and I’ll have you all ground up for dinner!”

  The guards looked at Ludmilla, and then at Hap, and then back at Ludmilla. On one hardened face and then another, the beginnings of a smile appeared, like cracks in stone.

  Minutes later, Ludmilla and the mayor—former mayor, rather—were marched off to prison to await transport to Mount Xexnax, where they would serve their life sentences. It was agreed that since the human miners were now free, the new prisoners would be guarded by Aukis, who lived in the mountain anyway and would be happy to serve. Naturally, they’d be well paid and provisioned for their work.

  “Well,” said Grel with a happy sigh, “this calls for schnitzel. Will you join me, Mr. Mayor?”

  “Do you have to call me that?”

  “You’d better get used to it. And, Miss Sophia, I hope you will join us.”

  Smiling brightly, Sophia went over and kissed Grel on the cheek.

  Twenty-nine

  AFTER THE SURPRISES of the past hour, it seemed unlikely there could be another. And yet, when Grel and his friends returned home, they found a long banquet table set out in front, with a linen cloth and scores of covered bowls, platters, and tureens.

  Grel blinked. “What’s this?”

  “I think,” said Shadow Reader, “it is best not to question gifts from the goddess.”

  “But…?”

  “No questions.” Shadow and the Auki warrior turned to leave.

  “Aren’t you joining us?”

  “Have ye rat-tail soup? Beetle pie? Braised liverwort?”

  “I hope not.”

  “As I thought. In any case, I need to see about my brother.”

  Hap spoke. “How is Ulf?”

  “Mag takes care of him on the ferryboat. I will be helping till he is well.”

  “So you are friends again?”

  “Again? No. For the first time.”

  Hap gave Shadow a serious look. “Tell me, were you really going to push me off the cliff?”

  The old one paused. “I am Auki. I obey.”

  “What does that mean?” said Hap.

  “To bring harm to the shoe is death.”

  “Death? Really?”

  “It is the law. You’ve seen the shoe. What did ye think it was?”

  “Grel’s masterpiece. A work of art.”

  “Don’t be so human. Ye saw what happened.”

  Hap could hardly say what he’d seen. “It was amazing.”

  “It was the goddess. She ordered me to have the shoe made.”

  “Ordered you?”

  “I read her meanings in the shadows.”

  “But why—?”

  “Without the shoe, she could not return.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Ye would if ye’d think like an Auki for once. To us, it was never a shoe. It was a door. The door to this world. Her foot was the key.”

  Hap frowned, trying to take this in. A door?

  “When the key turned, earth and sky came together, and she was among us again.”

  “But why,” Grel ventured, “would she want to be among us, after all those years?”

  “The boy can tell ye.”

  Hap looked at Shadow. “Because of the Great Blue?”

  “It’s the heart of the heart of the world. To think it almost fell into the hands of humans!”

  “I see,” said Grel, not really seeing at all. “But why pick me to make the shoe? I’m as human as the rest.”

  “Look at us.” Shadow stood beside his Auki warrior. “Look at our feet.”

  “Ah.”

  “We know many things. But not shoes.”

  Grel smiled.

  “Glad I could help.”

  “And you,” said Shadow Reader, turning to Hap. “Ye are the leader now. Tell your people to stop taking what does not belong to them.” He shook h
is shaggy head. “The mountain supports us all. We take from it what we need. That is allowed. But enough.”

  With that, the old Auki turned away. “More than enough,” he muttered, heading down toward Doubtful Bay.

  The friends watched in silence till he was out of sight. Then Grel looked around, dazed by the vast display of food. Neither he nor his dog, Rauf, had eaten a real meal in weeks.

  “Speaking of more than enough!” he said. “Sophia, go and tell Jon and your parents to come. And, Hap—I mean, Mayor Barlo—if you think well of it, why not put out the word to any beggars—”

  “Done!” Hap set off at a trot.

  Twenty minutes later, the long banquet table had a full complement of guests. Rag, the quince-pickers’ boy, showed up with his parents, and Jon Hartpence soon arrived with his.

  Alas, the elder Hartpences were still bickering, this time about where to sit.

  “Sit anywhere!” cried Grel.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Hartpence, “but Mr. Hartpence insists on sitting next to the boiled ham, and I must sit where I have a view of the bay.”

  Sophia shook her head. “I tried,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” said Jon.

  “I kept casting that ‘Never-Fail Love Spell’ on them.”

  Hap looked up sharply. “You mean that was for your parents?”

  “Who did you think it was for?” Sophia laughed.

  Hap blushed furiously.

  “You think it was for you, don’t you?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Why would I waste a perfectly good spell on you?” Sophia went on—rather cruelly, it might be said. “I know you already love me!”

  This made Mayor Barlo blush even more.

  Conversation stopped then as Grel held up his hand. Closing his eyes, he offered thanks to the goddess Xexnax for all the blessings of the earth.

  Then Silas stood and sang the song everyone loved, called “The Cuckoos of Aplanap.” Several guests found themselves wiping away tears.

  Finally, squirming about excitedly, Rauf offered his own blessing—the one word he knew—and the celebration began.

  Acknowledgments

  Great thanks to Jodi Reamer of Writers House for her excellent representation, to Nancy Siscoe of Knopf for her wise editing, and to both for cheering me on through this book’s darkest tunnels.