by Jon Berkeley
“What does it say?” asked Miles. “Is it the same card she drew the other night?”
“It is, my boy,” said Tau-Tau, pulling a small stool over to the beanbag where Miles sat, and settling down on it with a sigh. “And it does indeed concern your father, Barty Fumble.”
Miles felt his heart miss a beat. The hope that someday he might find his father alive was never far from his thoughts, and he feared that the little bird might drown that hope forever. He forced himself to meet Doctor Tau-Tau’s eyes. “What does it say?” he asked.
The fortune-teller poured another cup of masala tea for himself, and one for Miles. “I was a fool not to trust the card the first time it was drawn,” he said, lowering his voice as though there were conspirators listening from behind every drape. “It seems that the old fraud has been alive all along!”
Miles looked at him in astonishment. “Are you sure?” he whispered.
“The oracle is sure, my boy,” said Doctor Tau-Tau. “And that is good enough for me. What’s more, I think I know where we could start to look for him.”
Miles struggled out of the beanbag and leaped to his feet. The dizziness had left him completely, and in his excitement he barely noticed the less-than-flattering way in which Tau-Tau spoke of his father. “Where?” he asked. “Can we go now?”
To his surprise, Doctor Tau-Tau also sprang to his feet. “Indeed we had better!” he beamed, “but we shall have to find you something more fitting than pajamas to wear if we are going to be mixing with royalty. To mix with royalty,” he said, looking around his cluttered wagon in a distracted fashion, “you will need something more fitting, my boy, than pajamas.”
CHAPTER TEN
HELL’S TEETH
Doctor Tau-Tau, fez-topped and sparrow-led, huffed through the night at a considerable pace, and Miles had to trot to keep up. He was still in his pajamas despite his appointment with royalty, but wrapped around with an embroidered dressing gown that the fortune-teller had lent him to give the boy, as he put it, some semblance of dignity. Tau-Tau had insisted that they leave at once, without a word to anyone. He would not let Miles return to his wagon for clothes, nor would he hear of him retrieving his overcoat from the Zipplethorpes’ trailer.
“I still don’t see why we couldn’t bring Little,” Miles panted. “She wouldn’t say a word to anyone, and she’s very useful in a tricky situation.”
“Out of the question,” called Tau-Tau over his shoulder. “The people we are going to see don’t make a habit of welcoming visitors. My great negotiating skills will be stretched to their fullest to get the information we need, and one more hanger-on would make it ten times harder.”
“Who are they, the people we’re going to see?” asked Miles.
Doctor Tau-Tau stopped to unsnag his own dressing gown from a bramble. “Don’t bother me now with questions, boy,” he said tetchily. “It’s a good few years since I’ve been this way, and if you continue to pester me we may end up going in circles.”
They marched on in silence for a while. The wind still gusted strongly, and at times it was as much as Miles could do to keep moving forward at all. It was a moonless night, and the faint light of the stars was all they had to guide them. Miles could make out the dark bulk of the mountains to their right, but most of his attention was focused on the ground before his feet. The countryside was hilly and dotted with small trees whose knobbled roots were well suited for tripping the unwary, and now and then they would stumble as they stepped suddenly into a hidden rabbit hole. Despite the cold wind Miles began to sweat in the heavy dressing gown, and his throat was as dry as sand. The fat doctor’s labored breathing came back to him on the breeze.
“Is it much farther?” called Miles when they seemed to have been walking forever.
Doctor Tau-Tau said nothing, but a minute later he stopped in the shelter of a tall pinnacle of rock that rose from the side of a hill. “This will do,” he said in a hoarse whisper, when Miles had caught up with him. “We’ll take a short rest here.”
Miles flopped gratefully down in the long grass, checking for Tangerine in the dressing-gown pocket where he had put him when Tau-Tau wasn’t looking. The bear seemed to be shivering slightly, and Miles kept his hand in the pocket to warm him. “Are we nearly there?” he asked.
Doctor Tau-Tau put a long finger to his lips. “Shhhh,” he said. “You don’t want to be hollering around here like a schoolboy on an outing.”
“But we’re in the middle of nowhere,” said Miles, whispering nonetheless. “There’s no one for miles around.”
“Don’t be so sure,” said Tau-Tau. His bulging eyes shone faintly in the darkness. He produced a thermos flask from inside his dressing gown, and poured himself an inevitable cup of spiced tea. When he had emptied it he poured another and handed it to Miles. The cold had begun to bite again now that they had stopped, and Miles gulped it down gratefully.
“You said we were going to see royalty,” he whispered.
“Well, in a manner of speaking,” said Tau-Tau, pouring himself another cup. He slurped noisily, presumably forgetting about the need for stealth. “The people who live in these parts have been here for countless years, since before your ancestors or mine ever set foot here. Your ancestors, that is, not mine,” he corrected himself. “I come from a distant country that you will never have heard of.”
“That depends,” said Miles, “on what letter of the alphabet it starts with.”
The fortune-teller snorted, and promptly began to choke noisily on the tea that had shot up the back of his nose.
“It’s true,” said Miles. “I’ve got all my education from Lady Partridge’s encyclopedia. I’m up to the letter ‘Q.’”
“My hometown begins with ‘Z,’” coughed Doctor Tau-Tau.
“Maybe I’ll know the country,” said Miles, who had always been fascinated by the pictures of far-off places in Lady Partridge’s richly illustrated encyclopedia.
“Also ‘Z,’” said Tau-Tau sharply. “Now if we don’t press on, the sun will come up and the path may no longer be available to us.”
Miles scrambled to his feet. The night was still dark, but away on the eastern horizon he could see the sky beginning to lighten. They were entering a strange landscape of small hollows and steep hills, out of which there grew more and more of the tall jagged rocks like the one that had sheltered them while they rested. In the darkness they looked like giant stone teeth, some tilted at a crazy angle, and the faint path wound among them and dipped into the empty sockets in between. The wind whipped around them, shredded by the stone teeth into gusts and eddies that ambushed them from every direction and dropped just as suddenly. Doctor Tau-Tau moved more slowly now, and every now and then he stopped and squinted at a battered notebook that he produced from the pocket of his dressing gown. Miles kept close behind him.
“What is this place?” asked Miles, as loudly as he dared.
“The locals call it Hell’s Teeth,” whispered Tau-Tau. “It’s been mined for thousands of years, which accounts for the holes, to an extent, but the wind and the rain have made most of it.”
“It’s not the kind of place where I’d expect to find royalty,” said Miles.
Doctor Tau-Tau stopped so abruptly that Miles almost ran into him. He turned slowly and bent down until his face was inches away from Miles’s nose. “We are only here for your benefit, my boy,” he whispered hoarsely, “and we are getting very close, so you will oblige me by keeping your ceaseless chatter to yourself.” He straightened up and began to creep forward with all the stealth of a buffalo.
If you have ever stood at the sink cleaning your teeth and become convinced that someone is staring at you from behind, you will be familiar with the feeling that came over Miles as he began once again to follow Doctor Tau-Tau through the forest of giant teeth. Perhaps it was the pajamas and dressing gown that did it, but he slowly became convinced that if he were to look around he would see a pair of eyes staring at him from somewhere in the shadows. The
more the feeling grew, the more determined he was not to give in to it and look around. He was beginning to wonder if this midnight trip had been such a good idea, and he had to remind himself that it was his determination to find his father, or at least to discover his fate, that had brought him to this eerie place.
They came to a hollow that seemed to dip steeply into blackness on its far side. They descended carefully, their feet slipping on the damp grass. At the bottom of the hollow Doctor Tau-Tau paused and put his finger to his lips. He produced his notebook and peered at it for a minute, then he took out a small flashlight. It gave off a feeble yellow light, which flickered and died within seconds. Tau-Tau muttered something ugly, and tried to shake the flashlight back to life.
Strangely enough it was this attempt to pierce the darkness that made Miles finally lose his nerve and look behind him. Before his eyes had time to make sense of the shadows they had begun to move and break up, and a swarm of little figures was slithering down the steep sides of the hollow toward them, like the hairy outcasts of a hundred forgotten dreams.
“Doctor Tau-Tau!” said Miles in an urgent whisper, tugging at his sleeve.
“Not now, boy,” said Tau-Tau, still squinting at his notebook, but as he fumbled once again with the switch on his flashlight, one of the hairy little men appeared at his elbow, reached up in an instant and snatched it from his hand. Doctor Tau-Tau’s jaw dropped in astonishment, and at that moment a second little man jumped up nimbly and wedged a large clod of grass into his open mouth before the fortune-teller could utter a word.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
TWO HUNDRED KINGS AND TWELVE
Miles Wednesday, dressing-gowned and hollow-trapped, stood in the center of a heaving circle of small, shaggy figures, none of whom rose above the level of his chin. The sky was still dark and they carried no lights, but at close range he could see them a bit better. Their hair was long and matted, and their faces almost completely covered with thick beards. In their noses they wore brass rings. They were dressed in a sort of patchwork of animal furs, but so hairy were the little men themselves that it was impossible to tell where their clothes ended and their own pelts began. They jockeyed and elbowed each other to get a better look at him, and some of them poked him with sharpened sticks, or reached out and pinched him with bony little fingers to see what he was made of.
He glanced at Doctor Tau-Tau, who was struggling to free his arms from the grip of their captors so that he could remove the clump of grass from his mouth, but although the hairy men were small they were wiry and strong, and there were far too many of them to be overpowered. Miles himself had been neither tied nor gagged, and he decided that it was better not to resist, and to wait and see what would happen next. He had no doubt that these little men were the ones who had been raiding the circus at night, and if anything this encounter increased his curiosity about them.
Their captors began to poke and prod them toward the deeper darkness at the far side of the hollow. Miles could just see Doctor Tau-Tau stumbling ahead of him, surrrounded by the jostling men, and soon he found himself pushing through thick bushes. He suddenly lost sight of Tau-Tau altogether, and before he had time to wonder where he had gone the ground disappeared beneath his feet and he tumbled into blackness. The hole into which he had fallen was not very deep, and moments later he found himself rolling down a rocky slope in absolute darkness. He could hear Doctor Tau-Tau ahead of him grunting and swearing as he bounced along. The grass gag had been jolted from his mouth, and he cursed and spat by turns as he tried to rid his tongue of the gritty soil.
As he tumbled down the underground slope Miles could hear a faint jingle of metal and the whisper of many leathery feet. He pictured (quite rightly, as it happened) the small army of hairy men running and leaping down the rocky slope on either side, without so much as a flashlight or even a flaming match to light their way. Just when he felt he had collected a bruise on every part of his body, he fetched up against the bulk of Doctor Tau-Tau, who was lying winded at the bottom of the slope.
“Get off me!” spluttered Tau-Tau. His hand found Miles in the darkness and groped its way around his face. “Oh, it’s you,” he said irritably, as though it were Miles who had led him to this place and not the other way around. Miles picked himself up carefully and checked in his pocket for Tangerine. The little bear gripped his finger shakily, but he knew better than to make a sound.
Miles felt little bony fingers take his elbows on both sides, but their grip this time was not hard, and it was obvious that their captors knew he could see nothing in the pitch darkness that surrounded them. He wondered why they did not make a light, but it seemed they needed none.
“Get your hands off me!” he heard Tau-Tau say. “I wish to parlay with the king. Which one of you hairy little devils is the king?”
A ripple of chuckles swept around them, and Miles could hear the sound of muttering and argument in a language he did not recognize. He wished, not for the first time, that Little were with him. He had never heard a language she was unable to translate.
The men gripping his elbows began to push him forward, and they stumbled for a while over uneven rock, Doctor Tau-Tau grousing loudly all the way. “Can’t see a thing,” he grumbled. “Surely even these gibbering pygmies have learned to make fire.”
“Aren’t these the people you were planning to meet?” asked Miles.
“Of course,” huffed Tau-Tau, who must have been bent double to avoid cracking his skull on the rocky ceiling. “But I wasn’t expecting their emissaries to be such an uncouth rabble.”
“You said they didn’t welcome visitors,” said Miles. “Who exactly are they, anyway?”
“I told you,” said the fortune-teller, “these are the people who lived here before your ancestors came from the lands to the east. They are known as the Fir Bolg by the few people who believe in their existence. They don’t get out much, as you may have noticed.”
“But why should they know anything about my father?” asked Miles.
“That’s a long story.” Tau-Tau’s voice echoed back along the tunnel. “I believe there was some connection between them and Celeste before she died, but it’s too complicated to go into now. I intend to speak to their king, assuming he too hasn’t descended to running around in rabbit skin and speaking gibberish.”
A faint glow appeared ahead of them. It began to grow in size, though not in brightness, but it was relief to eyes that had spent so long straining in the inky dark. Miles began to make out the outlines of their Fir Bolg captors, swarming through the tunnel and out into a wider space from which the glow came.
They emerged into a large cavern filled with stalagmites and stalactites and lit with a feeble orange light. There were hundreds of the little hairy figures in the cave, arguing and laughing in their strange tongue, eating and fighting and crouched in groups playing games with small pieces of bone. There were women and children here too, even smaller than the men and distinguishable only by the fact that they had no beards.
The dim glow came from a sort of fireplace built in the center of the cavern. The fire was almost completely enclosed by a huge stone funnel, and in the stonework was a network of little gaps. These let out warmth and plenty of smoke, but very little light.
As Miles and Tau-Tau stood blinking in the smoky glow a silence fell over the crowd, and hundreds of faces turned to stare at them with glittering black eyes.
The silence did not last long. For a few moments there was nothing to be heard but the faint crackling of the enclosed fire, and somewhere in the distance a trickle of water, then all at once the Fir Bolg began to swarm around them—men, women and children, shaking their sticks and their fists, and all shouting at once. Miles and Tau-Tau were propelled into the cavern and half pushed, half carried toward the other side, which sloped steeply upward into the gloom. Doctor Tau-Tau’s fez was knocked from his head in the scuffle, and what little patience he possessed deserted him altogether. His face turned a dangerous purple, and he threat
ened his hairy captors with the police, the plague and a hundred forgotten curses. The Fir Bolg did not understand a word.
Miles knew better than to put up a struggle, and allowed himself to be swept along. The far side of the cavern was a stone slope dotted with smaller caves. Some were as large as a baron’s bedroom, and others so small that they were just big enough for one of the little men to lie down in. Up ahead of him Miles could make out a knot of Fir Bolg manhandling Doctor Tau-Tau over the lip of one of these caves. The sight reminded him of a swarm of ants heaving a grub into their larder, and for the first time he wondered what the little men ate.
A moment later he was shoved into the cave after the grub, and collapsed beside him onto a carpet of dried grass. Tau-Tau was gasping for breath after his exertions, and no doubt the shouting had not helped. “Barbarians . . . ,” he panted. “Troglodyte hooligans! . . . Clearly have no idea who they’re dealing with.” He produced his battered notebook from inside his dressing gown and rifled through it for a time in the faint orange light. He closed the notebook with a snap and poked his head out of the cave. “I wish to speak to the king,” he said slowly to the knot of guards posted outside. The little men looked at each other and shrugged. “On Ree,” said Tau-Tau. “Get me on Ree.”
The guards broke into laughter, then began to argue and gesticulate among themselves. Eventually one of them received a poke from the blunt end of a spear, and set off back down the slope.
“That’s more like it,” said Tau-Tau. “There’s nothing like an in-depth knowledge of the local lingo.” Miles joined him at the cave mouth and looked out into the cavern. “Are you going to ask the king about my father?” he said.
“Yes, yes, all in good time,” said Doctor Tau-Tau. “There are formalities to be observed first.”
