Milo and the Dragon Cross

by Robert Jesten Upton

  “That’s what he would do to shoot it through the ring at the center of the court,” Beryl explained. “Until he can get the ball through the ring, it still belongs to the other team. You can’t score until you’ve ringed it for your side.”

  Then Teryl fired the ball to Deryl, who had run forward to meet him partway. Then they came running back, tossing the ball back and forth between them in all sorts of complex passes until they drew up short just in front of Beryl. Deryl suddenly fired the ball with terrific force at Beryl, who reached out easily to snag it out of the air.

  “That’s how he would score—by putting the ball past the defending goalie and the two pillars of the goal,” Beryl said. “You see, the striker can’t run with the ball, but the runner can. You have to imagine that the defensive players are doing everything they can to deflect Teryl’s and Deryl’s attack and intercept the ball. If they can do that, then they have to get it to the mid-court ring so it can go into play for their side.” Beryl was rocking the ball gently in his scoop while he finished his explanation.

  “So that’s slinger,” Teryl said. “Sort of.”

  “It’s the best we can do without a real court to play in,” Deryl added.

  “And without another team to play against,” concluded Beryl.

  “We’ll show you the real thing when we get to the End,” promised Teryl.

  “How long have you been playing?” Milo asked.

  “It’s a long story,” Teryl said. “Walk with us if you like, and we’ll tell it to you.”

  So Milo did. By and by, Teryl, Deryl, and Beryl told him how they had become slinger pilgrims on the Pilgrim’s Way.

  7

  Of Pilgrims and Ballplayers

  We grew up on an island that didn’t have a flat place on it,” Teryl said. “The closest thing to a flat place was a tiny beach where fishermen pulled their boats up out of the water and dried their nets.”

  “We grew up as the sons of one of those fishermen,” Deryl said, “only it was pretty fishy that we looked so different, with our red hair and green eyes. Our parents, and everyone else on the island, have black hair and dark eyes, and are short.”

  “That, and we hated fishing,” Beryl asserted. “That made our fisherman father very unhappy. ‘How’re you gonna make a living?’ he’d yell at us every time we tried to slip away from mending nets and cleaning the catch.”

  As their story unfolded, Milo learned that what they really liked to do was to run around on the island away from the other fisherfolk. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, first because someone was always watching them, and second because the island consisted mostly of steep-sided mountains of bare rock and thorny scrub brush. Wild goats were the island’s only other large inhabitants. But by following the trails that the goats made crisscrossing the island’s flanks, the boys found a place that was nearly flat. It was on top of the highest mountain and dropped off steeply to every side. When they were up there, they could see the whole island below them surrounded by the sparkling blue sea. It was a magnificent sight and inspired the boys to imagine what might lie out of sight beyond the horizon.

  T, D, and B went up there whenever they could slip away from their chores. It was their secret spot. They were the only ones who went there and the only ones who knew about the place because the other people on the island were interested only in the sea, their boats, and fishing.

  It was on the flat place where they—especially Teryl—learned to run, really run, because it’s not possible to run on steep ground interrupted by canyons, cliffs, and thick thorny brush. They learned that their long, hill-trained legs were good for something besides getting tangled up in the nets on the fishing boats.

  They also learned that they were good at throwing and catching things. All three of them had been throwing and catching things for as far back as they could remember. Things like net-weaving awls, cork floats, water jars—even fish, as slippery as those creatures tend to be. Up on the mountain they would throw a cork float back and forth, and then forth and back while they ran around on the flat space.

  Another odd thing about Beryl, Teryl, and Deryl was that they were the only ones on the island who didn’t have birthdays. When they asked their parents about it, their father blustered and their mother tried to change the subject—another sign to the boys that something fishy was going on.

  “When we were about fifteen years old,” Teryl explained, “we met someone on top of the mountain.”

  “Yeah, a very extraordinary someone,” Beryl added.

  “A lady,” Teryl continued. “A lady very unlike the women in the fishing village. She was tall and slender and had bright red-gold hair. She wore a shimmering white gown with green trim. It was clean, and there wasn’t a patch on it.”

  Teryl, the spokesman for the three, had demanded that she tell them who she was. She said, “I’m your fairy godmother.”

  “Our what?” Deryl had blurted out in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Then she said that she’d come to show us our birthright,” Teryl continued. “She told us that we were all born exactly fifteen years ago, on that exact day.”

  The upshot of it all was to show them a cave hidden behind an extra thorny bush just below the peak. Inside were three slinger scoops and a basket of rubber balls. “She told us that those were our birth gifts,” Teryl explained, “and that she had hidden them there long ago when the three of us, as babies, first came to the island.”

  “How did you get there?” Milo asked.

  “We washed up on the beach in a boat without oars or a sail,” Teryl explained. “Our father—that is, the man we thought of as our father—found us. And he and our mother—or who we thought of as our mother—raised us as their own children. They gave us all they had to give even though they knew we didn’t belong to their trade and place in life.”

  “Anyway,” Beryl took up, “the lady would tell us only that we would have to find out for ourselves where we belonged, but that the bats and balls were ours and were given to us the day we were born. Then she disappeared.”

  Since the boys had never seen slinger played, or even heard of it, they hardly knew what to do with these new implements. So they experimented. Before long they were using the bats to catch and throw as they ran to and fro on top of the mountain.

  It was around then that their foster father took them on their first trip to the mainland. They were old enough and strong enough to ply the oars for the long voyage across the open sea to deliver salted fish to the market.

  The boys were so eager to get away and see something besides the island and the sea that they didn’t mind the long, hard work of rowing. When they reached the port, they first helped to unload the boat and pull it up above the tide line. Then they were free to wander around the town.

  Even though it was in reality a small and ordinary sort of harbor town, the boys, gawking at the sights, were amazed by it all. They had never seen anything but a dozen or so fishing shacks before.

  On the edge of town they came upon a slinger match. They didn’t know what it was, but they watched the game the way a cat watches a bird through a glass window. They recognized the bats and balls instantly, although the rules of the game remained a mystery to them. But after a while, they had the basics puzzled out.

  “We asked them if we could play,” Teryl explained. “They asked if we had our own bats.”

  “When we told them we didn’t have them with us, they told us, ‘Then you can’t play,’” said Deryl. “It was a huge disappointment.”

  They continued to watch with avid interest, until their father located them just as the sun was setting. They left the match, walked to their boat, and set out for their home island with the tide.

  Back on the island, they took advantage of the next time they could slip away to go up the mountain. It was with the specific objective of trying out what they had seen and to practice what they had learned. They practiced and practiced. When it came time to make the next de
livery to market, they hid their bats, wrapped in oilcloth, under the fish. As soon as they had the fish unloaded and the boat drawn up safely on the beach, they fetched the bats and were off.

  It was a festival day, and the slinger games were not just the usual pickup games they’d seen before. This was a real tournament. At first they were refused a chance to play. But by listening to the other teams announce themselves as representing this place or that place, the boys tried again, announcing themselves as representing their home island. They didn’t mention that they were the only slinger players on the island.

  “We hadn’t ever played against another team before, so that gave us trouble at first,” Teryl said. “But the trio of slinger players that we drew wasn’t very good. They couldn’t get a ball past Beryl, and then Deryl drove one in during the last few minutes. That allowed us to advance to the second round.”

  “That posed the next problem,” Beryl went on. “The next scheduled game was the next day, and our father had planned to leave before then. We hunkered down on the beach and watched the waves surf in. And while we watched, we noticed the seabirds coming in to shore.”

  “We pointed it out to our father,” Teryl said, “because that’s a sign that a storm was on the way. Of course he had noticed because he’s a fisherman, and fishermen always watch the weather and the sea. Somewhere out to sea a storm was brewing and sending in waves that rose gradually higher and higher. Waves like that can topple a boat and smash it to bits. Our father decided that we would have to wait out the storm.”

  Deryl took up the thread. “We’d never been so happy to see a storm. As we watched the breakers pound the beach, a white bird landed nearby and trotted up, eyeing us with its sharp black eyes. Then something happened unlike anything that had ever happened to us before. The bird said, ‘I’ve sent the storm. You have three days. You must win this tournament if you are to ever leave your home island and win a chance to reclaim your birthright.’”

  “We figured out pretty fast that the bird was really our fairy godmother helping us out again,” Teryl said. “We thanked her and promised to win the slinger tournament no matter what.”

  The boys played every game with utter abandon. What they lacked in finesse they made up for in energy. What they lacked in skill they made up for in valor. By the second day, word had gotten around that there was a phenomenal new team playing in the festival tournament. Someone asked the boys’ father if he knew them seeing as he was from the island that they represented. He went to see what was going on.

  Even he, who knew nothing of slinger—man of the sea that he was—was impressed to see that his three boys, whom he had considered lazy and frivolous, could run and throw rings around the players of the other teams. “When he saw us,” Beryl exclaimed, “he said, ‘Those are my boys!’ to anyone who would listen.”

  The boys advanced to the finals on the third day. Exhausted and battered, they knew that this last match would be their hardest. They were facing a team that had played for years, traveling as professional players from tournament to tournament. When they weren’t playing or traveling, they were practicing. They even had a full-time trainer. These were no local boys who fancied they could be champions; they were the real thing. They had trounced every team they had played at the tournament, sending players home not only with lost games but with bruises and a few broken bones. They had coldcocked at least one other player with a hard rubber ball to the back of his head.

  Since this was a local boy, and since it was rumored that he was in a coma, the team responsible for the injury was less than popular with the local crowd. Because T, D, and B were the last team left to play the despised one, and they were more or less local boys to boot, the whole crowd was rooting for them against their opponents. Other teams even lent them pieces of equipment that the boys didn’t have.

  “Still, things didn’t look good for us,” Deryl remarked.

  “These guys really played mean,” Beryl told Milo. “They were planning to slaughter us.”

  “I felt almost like giving up,” Teryl said. “Deryl had a sore ankle that he’d had to wrap up. I was limping even worse than Deryl, and Beryl’s arm was so sore that he could barely lift it above his shoulder. Then a man walked up and, without us saying anything, he told us we needed a trainer.”

  “I asked him who he was,” said Teryl, “and what did he think he could do for us.”

  “‘First,’ he told us, ‘a certain lady thinks you might need some professional help just about now. She sent me,’ the man said. He said his name was Savoy and that he knew just about all there is to know about slinger, and how to keep young whippersnappers like us playing instead of falling apart. He pointed out that there wasn’t much time left since we were supposed to go on the court in just a little while. Then he told us that he’d seen one of the players on the other team wrapping flat rocks into his hip belt. He said that was an old trick to cause nasty bruises when the player used a hip-check against his opponent. The man also said that the opposing team’s goalie was slipping a special ball into his belt that weighs more than the standard one. ‘You sling that sucker out with enough force,’ Savoy said, ‘and it’ll wreck a bat or break an arm.’ He told us that we’d have to be extra careful not to be hit directly by their balls. He pointed out that those are old tricks that could work because we were so green. He said he could help us counter them, but first we’d have to be in better condition before we could go on the court. He broke out liniments for our bruises and sprains, and gave us something to drink—some sort of fortifying tea to help with our exhaustion.”

  “I wanted to know how he got there,” Beryl said. “I asked him about the lady who sent him, and he said, ‘She’s the one who looks after you. You know who she is even if nobody else does.’”

  “How do you—”

  “Know her? Let’s just say we’re old friends. You aren’t the only slinger players I’ve stepped in to help at her request. But there’s no more time for chitchat. Get out there and play. Play clean, even if the other team doesn’t. Play hard, and don’t let those guys bully you or trap you into changing your own play. And don’t try to take revenge for their tricks.”

  “As he talked, he helped us put on our gear,” Deryl told Milo. “The easy way he adjusted it proved more than his claims that he knew what he was doing.”

  Off they went. Deryl described how the local mayor’s wife threw out the ball to start the game and how they finessed the ball around every attempt the opposing team made to take it back. When the moment came as Deryl caught the ball off a high bounce, he was open to toss it leisurely between the posts to score.

  The crowd erupted. No other team had scored so neatly and quickly on this feared juggernaut. The roar echoed off the stone paving of the court and walls. The opposing players shouted instructions to one another, but these were lost in the tumult.

  In desperation, the opposing runner brought his dirty tactics into use. He tried to slam into Teryl with his hip belt load of stones, but Teryl, well warned of the threat, slipped him. The goalie and runner managed several passes, trying to throw Teryl off, but still the runner could get no clear shot. Meanwhile, the frustrated striker had to wait on the other side of the court until his runner could get the ball into play for their side. They were yelling at each other, trying to coordinate plays, but the crowd, sensing that their cheers had become an effective deterrent to the despised team’s plans, kept up a steady roar.

  T, D, and B needed no spoken instruction among them. They maneuvered as if they were a single player. “That’s when I saw how the other team’s runner slipped a second ball out of his belt,” Deryl said. “He exchanged it for the game ball when he received the next pass. I gave Beryl and Teryl a nod, enough to warn them what was coming. The goalie shot his pass out with all the force he could put into his vault. He threw straight at Teryl instead of to his own man, not caring if Teryl caught the weighted ball or if it hit him directly. Either way, the unexpected weight of the ball thrown
with such force would be plenty to break Teryl’s bat or wrench his arm.”

  “But I knew better than to try to take the ball,” Teryl said. “I feinted instead. The goalie’s own runner saw the move for an opportunity, and threw himself at me to smash me with his stone-loaded hip belt. Only that put him right in line with the ball.”

  Deryl continued the commentary, relating how the runner caught it with his shoulder. The cannon shot took him down in a writhing explosion of pain. Meanwhile Teryl scooped up the ball as it rolled away from its victim, lifted it adroitly now that its venom was spent and put it into play. He tossed it lightly to Deryl, who caught the pitch, turned with the pull of its weight, and spun it once, twice, adding speed to each turn before firing it down the court with all the leverage he could coax from his bat. It was a goal shot that depended on sheer brute force. The waiting goalie knew better than anyone what was coming at him—and that what was coming would be impossible to stop. He saved himself instead. He dodged as the ball blasted between the goalposts for a score.

  “If the crowd had been wild before,” Teryl commented, “it now went ballistic. People were jumping up and down, hands in the air, howling with something beyond exhilaration Vindication, perhaps, and rage, as well as celebration.”

  “It was sort of frightening,” Deryl told Milo.

  “Yeah,” added Beryl. “There was this poor guy rolling around on the court with a broken shoulder, and maybe a broken hip from falling on the rocks he’d stuck in his hip belt. And it made people glad!”

  “We were really sort of happy to get away from there,” finished Deryl. “Right after we were declared the tournament winners, the sea smoothed out and we left with our dad for the island.”

  “You went back home?” Milo asked. “What about Savoy?”

  “He told us where we should go next, and said he’d meet us along the way,” Teryl explained.