by Jon Berkeley
“Don’t hold it against your father, my dear,” said Lady Partridge. She sat on the arm of the sofa (which creaked in protest) and handed him a mug of steaming cocoa. “We can never understand the decisions people have to face without knowing all the details, and sometimes not even then. In time you may learn more about your parents, and their story will become clearer.”
Miles nodded. There were too many things spinning around in his head, and he still had more questions to ask. The Bolsillo brothers dragged the heavy sofa closer to the fire, and there they all sat in comfortable silence, each with their own thoughts: the boy, the lady, three tiny clowns, a blind explorer and a four-hundred-year-old girl with the faint outline of a lost pair of wings etched into the skin of her back.
Silverpoint, marble-skinned and straight-winged, took his leave the following night in Baltinglass’s moonlit orchard. He had recovered with remarkable speed from his encounter with The Null, and said that it was time for him to return home and explain his absence, and how he had managed to lose a Song Angel to the hungry Earth. Before he left he had tried to persuade Miles to let him restore Tangerine to his former self. He pointed out that Little was not permitted to give life to any inanimate object, and that the walking, dancing bear was a grave offense against nature. If its existence was discovered, he said, it would make matters even worse. At this, Little flew into a rare temper and refused point-blank to let Silverpoint near Tangerine, and eventually he was forced to let the matter drop.
Silverpoint shook Miles’s hand as he had when they first met, and though Miles was ready for the tingling sensation it still made his hair stand on end. The Storm Angel’s dark eyes looked searchingly into his for what seemed a long time, then he turned and embraced Little, lifting her off her feet. As he did so he whispered something in her ear, and his eyes flickered in Miles’s direction. Little seemed to stiffen slightly. “Take care, little softwing,” said Silverpoint.
“Good-bye,” said Little as he put her gently down, and behind the tears that glinted in the light of the moon, Miles thought he heard indignation in her voice.
Silverpoint stood in the stillness of the autumn night among the rows of apple trees, and with a frown of concentration on his pale face he conjured up a storm to cover his departure. Black clouds rolled in from nowhere like pirate ships, covering the moon and throwing the small town of Cnoc into darkness. A sudden torrent of hailstones lashed the roofs and clattered in the leaves of the apple trees.
“Will you be in a lot of trouble?” shouted Miles above the noise.
Silverpoint nodded. “I expect so,” he said. “They’ll probably have me making drizzle for a century.”
The winged boy walked backward through the trees until he had placed a distance between himself and the others. He looked up into the blackness above. A twisted rope of blue lightning split the sky with a deafening crash and struck the spot where he stood, leaving Miles and Little momentarily as blind as Baltinglass himself. When their sight returned, the black clouds were dissolving like dreams. One of Baltinglass’s apple trees was split clean in two, and Silverpoint was no longer there.
The morning after Silverpoint’s departure Miles woke late, with the sunlight slanting in through his window. The sky was washed clean by the storm that the angel had created, and the rich smell of damp earth drifted in through the open windows. He found Baltinglass, Lady Partridge and the three Bolsillo brothers deep in conversation on the sun-dappled patio. They were discussing a plan to devise an entirely new show from the remnants of the Circus Oscuro, under the ownership of the Bolsillo brothers themselves, which would reverse the Great Cortado’s sinister hypnosis, and wean those people who had been “laughtered” off Dr. Tau-Tau’s Tonic for good. Miles thought he heard Little’s name mentioned, but the subject seemed to change when he arrived.
He sat himself at the table and listened with his chin resting on his hands, but no one paid him any further attention, and after a while he took an apple from the wooden bowl in the center of the table and went to look for Little. He found her eventually, after an extensive search of Baltinglass’s rambling house, sitting in the window of a small tower room in the roof. She was gazing through the dusty pane at the lightning-split tree in the orchard, and when he asked her if she was all right, she nodded, but did not say a word or turn her head to look at him.
Miles sighed and closed the door softly behind him. He wandered down through the house and out into the orchard, feeling slightly left out. He made his way toward the far end of the walled garden, where the orderly apple trees gave way to a jumbled undergrowth of strange foreign plants with enormous dark leaves, as though some far-off patch of jungle had been unable to part company with Baltinglass and had followed him home. Miles scuffed his feet through the first fallen leaves, and when his toes met the weight of an apple in the grass he gave it a sharp kick, sending it sailing into the undergrowth. There was a low growl, and a tiger’s head appeared from the bushes. Miles felt his heart leap.
“Tub boy,” grunted the tiger. “I might have guessed. Your manners haven’t improved since we last met.” He turned and disappeared into the undergrowth, and Miles almost ran to catch up, half afraid that the tiger would vanish as he had before. He found the tiger stretched out in a small clearing in the center of the miniature jungle. Miles sat down in the grass nearby.
“You found what you were looking for, I take it?” said the tiger.
Miles nodded. He hardly knew where to start.
“I got Tangerine back,” he said, “and we found Silverpoint.” He picked up the bruised apple and twirled it on its stem. “Lots of other stuff happened too, after you left. We could have done with your help in the Palace of Laughter.”
“You still insist on thinking you can call me up like a plumber, I see,” rumbled the tiger. “In any case, you seem to have managed all right by yourselves.”
“I barely escaped with my life,” said Miles. “It was Little who saved me.”
The tiger looked at him. “I told you she would prove a valuable companion,” he said. “And I am not often wrong. How did she manage to snatch you from the jaws of death?”
“It’s a long story,” said Miles.
“Then you had better put it in a nutshell for me,” yawned the tiger. “They say patience is a virtue, but it’s not one of mine.”
“She gave up her name for me,” said Miles, “and now she can never go home.”
“More riddles,” said the tiger. “I won’t waste time trying to solve it, but it sounds like a noble sacrifice. You had better make sure she never regrets it.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Miles.
“I should hope so,” said the tiger. He stretched out in the grass and flicked his tail idly. “Of course, I may have played a small part in your rescue myself,” he said.
“You did?” said Miles. “But I thought you wouldn’t go near the city.”
“You thought right,” said the tiger. “But I’m surprised you haven’t wondered about the fortuitous timing of your rescue party’s arrival.”
Miles frowned in puzzlement. “You mean you told Lady Partridge?”
The tiger chuckled. “You should know I am not in the habit of popping up in people’s living rooms, especially if they happen to be perched in a tree. Your ample friend, however, has the good sense to listen to her cats, even if she has little understanding of their speech. It was enough to inform them where you were, and that you were stepping into deep waters. They are resourceful little midgets you know, and plucky too.”
Miles considered what the tiger had told him. “Why did you do that for us?” he asked.
The tiger sighed. “Questions, questions,” he said. “Life follows its course like a river runs in its bed, tub boy. Perhaps you should just be grateful that things have worked out for you, and leave the chattering to the monkeys.”
“I am grateful,” said Miles. “Thank you.”
“Think nothing of it,” said the tiger. “Now I must be on my
way, and it’s time you went to cheer up your little friend in the attic. She has been moping at that window since before sunrise, and she has probably had enough of being alone by now.”
Miles looked up at the window. He could just see Little’s pale face in the gloom, and he wondered if she could see the tiger. A chilly breeze rustled through the bushes, making him shiver as he got to his feet. “Will we see you again?” he asked.
“It’s my experience,” said the tiger, “that once you have crossed someone’s path a couple of times you are bound to cross it again in the future. Unless, of course, you have eaten them,” he added.
“So long then,” said Miles. He took a last look at the tiger, stretched out and striped in the jungle shade, and pushed his way through the bushes into the cold wind of the autumn day.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE LARDE WEEKLY HERALD
Miles Wednesday, villain tamer and hero of Larde, sat in an old armchair in the rebuilt gazebo by Lady Partridge’s pond, and read aloud to The Null from a newspaper. He did not imagine for one moment that the creature could understand what he was reading, but it was still subject to frequent fits of madness, and the sound of his voice seemed to have a calming effect. In any case Lady Partridge had set him the task of reading the paper from cover to cover each week as part of his education, and he found it easiest to concentrate in the peace and quiet of the early morning when he brought The Null its breakfast.
The gazebo had been converted into a sort of fortified residence for the beast, after a lengthy and boisterous town meeting had debated its fate well into the night. Mayor Doggett was all for having The Null put down at once. He said it was a menace to society, and should be stuffed and mounted and displayed in a prominent place, such as the lobby of the town hall, where it might become a renowned attraction for visitors. This idea had earned him a sharp kick under the table from Mrs. Doggett, who suggested that the beast should be presented to the Smelt city zoo, where it could be reunited with “others of its kind,” although she was as vague as anyone on what that kind might be. After many other suggestions had been shouted by the Lardespeople, from harnessing The Null to a plough to training it as a game warden, Miles had stepped up to the podium and the people had fallen silent to hear what he had to say.
He began, in a hesitant voice, by saying that he of all people would have good reason to want The Null stuffed and mounted, or locked away in a far-off zoo. The townspeople nodded as one. Yet despite having been throttled to within an inch of his life by the beast, Miles went on, he could not help thinking that somewhere deep inside its fearsome exterior there lay something like a soul. The townspeople began to look more doubtful at this, but Miles would not elaborate. He was thinking of what Little had told him about the creature’s missing name, and he wondered privately how it could be that any creature could be left unnamed in the tongues of both men and of angels, but this was not something he felt he could explain to the people of Larde. At this point Lady Partridge stood and boomed that if it was Miles’s wish to try and befriend the creature, that was good enough for her, and she would have her gazebo converted to provide suitable accommodation. If there was anyone in Larde who had the nerve to try and obstruct Lady Partridge’s wishes, that person was certainly absent from the meeting that night.
Now The Null sat brooding in a corner of the straw-carpeted room, separated by a set of stout bars from the small lobby with the armchair where Miles sat. The newspaper from which he was reading was The Larde Weekly Herald, which Lily the florist had set up on her return from the Palace of Laughter. Like most of the people who had made the trip, her memory of that night’s momentous events was dim and confused, but she had returned to Larde with a strange urge to leave the flower business to her sister Maggie, and go into the newspaper business instead. Taking full advantage of the town’s collective amnesia she produced a first issue that was so fat with outlandish stories that it sold out in a matter of hours, and a second edition had to be hastily printed, followed by a third.
The exploits of Miles Wednesday had featured heavily in the first few issues of the paper, making him something of a local hero. Stories of the Boy from the Barrel who had fought savage tribes in the city and brought down a notorious villain almost single-handedly had been read and reread, until many people were surprised, when they met him, to find that he was not ten feet tall.
Lady Partridge’s dramatic rescue mission to the Palace of Laughter had also been covered in some detail. Though she had refused to be interviewed personally (far too busy for that sort of thing) a riveting story had been pieced together from the accounts of various policemen and other witnesses. Apparently Lady Partridge’s cats had somehow alerted her to the danger in which Miles and Little had found themselves. How the cats could have known, far less made their anxieties clear to Lady Partridge, no one could say. In any case she had grasped the seriousness of the situation at once. She had intercepted Sergeant Bramley just as he was locking up the police station for the night, and harangued him into rounding up his two constables and setting off for the surrounding villages to collect a rescue party. The half-pajamaed task force had taken to the highway in a small fleet of battered police vans, and since half the population of Larde had taken a train to the Palace of Laughter the day before, the policemen reasoned as Miles and Little had done, and followed the railway tracks.
If the policemen felt disgruntled at their rude awakening, their tiredness soon turned to excitement as they hurtled through the dawn at breakneck speed. Sometime before midday they had roared into the sleepy town of Cnoc, their whistles and sirens blowing, and screeched to a halt outside the house of Constable Flap’s uncle and Lady Partridge’s old friend, the famous explorer Gulliver P. Baltinglass. There were many dry throats and full bladders to be dealt with, but to their surprise they found that Baltinglass of Araby had not only met Miles Wednesday, but had provisioned him and sent him on his way two days before. When Baltinglass in turn learned of Lady Partridge’s mission, he had torn off his apron and clambered into the lead van, leaving a relieved Rufus Weedle to escape the third and last day of his hard labor, at least for the time being.
There were so many conflicting accounts of what had happened when the rescue party reached the Palace of Laughter, and about how it was that the Boy from the Barrel had already managed to dethrone the Great Cortado and subdue him with a tin can, that Lily had decided they should all be published in the interests of balanced reporting.
As for The Null itself, the exact nature of the beast continued to be the topic of much debate, which led to it being described both as a previously unknown species of hyena, and as a cross between a giant Ivory Coast Baboon and a Tibetan Yeti, in the same issue of the paper. Several policemen from Larde and the surrounding villages claimed that the beast had been attacked by angels as it attempted to strangle the Boy from the Barrel, and that the boy’s little sister herself had been one of them, and was over five thousand years old.
These last stories were of course dismissed as complete fantasy. Most people put them down to the long journey the brave constables had undertaken at great speed, which might have rattled their brains somewhat, but they enjoyed reading them all the same. As for the girl herself, there was always a smile on her face and music in her laughter, and the Lardespeople had grown so fond of her that they would not have cared if she had come from the planet Neptune.
The second issue of the Herald also featured a detailed account of the mysterious disappearance of Mr. and Mrs. Fowler Pinchbucket from the town orphanage. The paper reported that Miles Wednesday, the Boy from the Barrel, had paid a visit to Pinchbucket House the day after his return from his adventures in Smelt, accompanied by Sergeant Bramley and his two constables. They had a warrant to search the premises on suspicion that the Pinchbuckets had been stealing the property of the orphans and using the children themselves for slave labor.
To their surprise they had found the orphanage in an uproar. A party had been going on for mos
t of the night, and there was not a sign of an adult in the whole building. None of the children were sure what had happened to the Pinchbuckets, except for two small boys, Ruben Monday and Lawrence Friday. Their outlandish statement told of a huge tiger that had appeared in the orphanage hall in the dead of night. The terrified boys, who had been paying a secret visit to the orphanage kitchen, claimed that the tiger had bounded up the stairs and made his way straight past them to the Pinchbuckets’ bedroom. A moment later, the Herald said, the Pinchbuckets had emerged shrieking from their room and had stumbled down the stairs and out through the front door of the orphanage, with the tiger in hot pursuit. They had not been seen or heard from since. In the absence of any more reliable witness accounts, the sergeant had filed the incident under Missing Persons, and the case had been closed.
Lady Partridge had been appointed the new director of the town orphanage by Mayor Doggett himself. She had found herself unexpectedly wealthy once more thanks to a miracle cure produced by an obscure factory that her late husband had owned. The chemical in question, which was meant to be a weed killer but had had no effect whatsoever on the gardens of the nation, was discovered by accident to be an excellent cure for insomnia, halitosis, pessimism and nose-drip. It was now selling like hotcakes all over the land, and with the money that had been pouring into Lady Partridge’s coffers she had hired a team of skilled craftsmen to restore her mansion to its former glory. Once the restoration work was completed she planned to move the orphanage lock, stock and barrel from its grim municipal building to her newly refurbished stately home.
The Herald had reported the appearance of the Once Great Cortado and his accomplice Genghis in court, to answer charages of Attempted Despotism and Accessory to Mind Control Offenses respectively. The two men had been assessed by a leading psychiatrist from Shallowford, who decided they were unshackled from their wits and unfit to answer the charges. They had been committed to the secure wing of Saint Bonifacio’s Hospital for the Unhinged, where Cortado would refuse to emerge from his cell for days on end, lurking in the darkness with nothing for company but his own hollow laughter. Genghis, by contrast, had found a use for himself tending the hospital’s vegetable garden, between fits of helpless giggling. Inside his Wellington boots he still wore lemon yellow socks.
