by Tod Davies
Chapter XI
DAWN IN THE MOUNTAINS OF RESISTANCE
“NNOOO!!!” Snotty wailed. Lightning flashed. Thunder cracked. The Fortress lights disappeared behind him in the dark. Another crack of thunder and the sky opened up. Sheets of rain poured down—sluices of water—as often happens in a desert storm. These are sudden and fierce, and this one stopped the Gnomes from giving chase.
So the Rebels disappeared into the darkness. And Snotty went with them. Well, he had no other choice.
Snotty’s Idea dragged him skittering across the desert floor. Snotty squealed as he bounced off a rock, and just when he thought he couldn’t be any more uncomfortable, the Idea veered out of the rain up an old mountain track. This path was covered with so many bramble bushes and nettle patches that Snotty became seriously annoyed.
But Snotty had never been one to see the glass as half empty. “At least the rain stopped,” he said cheerfully to himself as his Idea slowed down. Snotty, wincing as his bare feet made one last awkward bounce against a tree stump (he’d long since lost the gentlemen’s brocade slippers given him by the Gnomes), saw they’d come onto a clearing, a sheltered meadow, on the mountainside. This was misty in the pale pre-dawn. Nothing was clear. Muffled and stocky figures moved in and out of the fog. Snotty could just make out their low murmurs as he and his Idea passed by.
Who were these figures? Were they dangerous? What were they doing there? And what would they do to him, Snotty?
The morning cold was sharp and harsh, and Snotty, let down on the meadow grass by his Idea, felt frost crackle between his toes. His teeth chattered.
“Here.” A small figure loomed up at him from out of the thickening mist. It thrust something hot and steaming at him, and disappeared again.
Cautiously, Snotty eyed the warm thing in his hands. It looked delicious—pale brown and creamy and sprinkled with spices on top. And it smelled wonderful. He sniffed at it and frowned.
It was hot chocolate, of course. But Snotty had never tasted this before. He wasn’t sure about it now.
“Hey,” a high-pitched, girlish voice said, and another, even smaller, figure, appeared, eyes glittering behind its mask. Snotty recognized this as the Rebel who had thrown the Idea at him.
“That can’t be right,” he thought, offended that he’d been bested by a girl. And then, grudgingly, “She seems friendly enough.”
“Drink up,” she said encouragingly. “Don’t let it get cold.” Two other masked Rebels appeared beside her, holding their own mugs, which they raised in a friendly salute before laughing and disappearing together into the now thick fog.
“Were they laughing at me?” Snotty wondered as he sipped at the hot drink, first doubtfully, then with more and more enthusiasm. It hadn’t sounded like it, but you could never be sure. Snotty hated being laughed at. In fact, of the five things he most hated—being laughed at, being hungry, being helpless, being ignored, being looked down on—it was in the top three. So he was anxious not to run into those girls again until he was sure of their intent. He picked his way slowly through the fog.
Careful as he was, though, he almost stumbled over two tall women giving each other a hug. “Sorry,” he mumbled. He turned away. But the two women looked as if they knew all about him, and one of them put out a hand to hold him back.
“So you got here, did you?” she said, and Snotty then recognized her face.
“Justice!”
Justice looked at him as if she wasn’t too pleased with what she saw, and let him go. The other woman smiled and held out a slim brown hand. “Ah,” she said. “You must be the Sun God.” She looked like Justice, but her hair was wilder and streaked with gray. “My name is Mercy,” she said.
“The Sun God,” Justice snorted as Snotty and Mercy shook hands. “Indeed.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Mercy said.
“No need to be so formal,” Justice said briskly. “I had a good look at him at the Feast. He’s just a snotty little boy.”
This stung.
“I AM the Sun God,” Snotty said, stamping his foot. “I’m Snotty the Sun God!” Confused and angry, he turned back into the fog. The words “just a snotty little boy” rang unpleasantly in his ears.
He walked on, brooding on this and clutching an empty mug, up a green rise. He was aggrieved that Justice and Mercy hadn’t recognized his greatness. But then, in all fairness—because Snotty was a very fair boy—he had to admit that he didn’t look like much this morning. “Not that I do even on my best days!” he thought, and he laughed. The fog lightened now and the newly risen sun burned what was left of it away. Snotty could see farther, to the top of the hill, where there was a large white tent. In front of this, an enormous figure waved a stocky arm.
“Aha!” Snotty thought. “The Leader!”
Suddenly, he saw he wasn’t as alone as he had thought. Dozens and dozens of muffled figures streamed around him up the hill. They didn’t take much notice of him except to give a friendly nod now and then as they passed. As the Sun moved higher, the figures shed their hats and their mufflers and their coats, and Snotty saw that they were, most of them, Teddy Bears. Scattered among these Bears was the occasional Doll or low flying Kite. Snotty also thought he saw a large Gingerbread Man in lavender boots. But most of the others were Teddies, of all different colors and types of fur. The burly figure, the Leader, was much bigger than the others, a black and yellow Big Teddy with black button eyes.
This Big Teddy waddled down the hill toward Snotty, huge stubby paw outstretched, black button eyes unblinking. “Welcome,” it said in a deep warm voice, and Snotty, exasperated, heard that this Bear, too, was a she. “Hello. Happy to see you. Glad you could come.”
“YOU’RE the Enemy?” Snotty demanded, ignoring the outstretched paw. He gave an angry laugh. He thought of how scared and uncomfortable he had been, and this made him even madder.
The black and yellow Teddy stopped, dismayed. “Oh, the Enemy, well, I don’t know about that,” she said. After a moment, embarrassed, she dropped her paw.
She waved at the Bears behind and around her, and, as the fog had now entirely burned away, Snotty could see hundreds of them, standing silent in all directions. They peered at him anxiously.
This just exasperated him. Was this the Grand War of the Gnomes? This?
“We’re not much for a fight,” Big Teddy said finally, shuffling her huge black and yellow plush feet. “Unless we have to be, of course.” A Bear or two behind her shook their heads in agreement. “But,” she said, her round face brightening, “we’re great ones for a picnic. And we love company. We always have. Known for it, in fact. So if you would just...”
“A PICNIC!” Snotty scowled with contempt.
Big Teddy fell backward with a thud, onto her plush rear, as if Snotty’s voice had knocked her down. Other Teddies rushed to her side. But she waved them away and, huffing, pulled herself up as well as she could. “They’re nice, our picnics,” she said in a mild way.
“This is unbelievable,” Snotty snorted. “I come here, expecting Rebel Forces, Guerrilla Warriors, getting ready to make war on the Grand Army of the Gnomes...”
“Oh,” Big Teddy sighed. “Yes. Well. We’re that, too, you know.”
Snotty stared. “Oh, yeah,” he jeered. “You’re the guys who’re going to beat the Gnomes. Teddy Bears! TEDDY BEARS! A bunch of stupid, crummy, little Teddy B...”
But he never had a chance to finish the sentence. Big Teddy sighed, the Teddy Bears sighed, and with a sad nod, she strode forward with one...two...three strides of her enormous black and yellow stubby legs and, with one blow from her enormous plush paw, knocked Snotty a powerful clout on the head.
The hit, when it came, was like velvet, like the roaring of a faraway lion, like being tumbled in a warm sea. Snotty, outraged, had time to think indignantly: “This doesn’t hurt at all!” Then he toppled to the ground.
And all of his nasty, niggling little thoughts were, for the moment anyway, at an end.
SNOTTY FINDS THE KEY
A voice cleared itself in a polite sort of way.
“Er...mmmrreeehhmmp,” it said. “Ermp.”
Snotty’s nose twitched. He woke up. He couldn’t remember where he was. He opened his eyes. The face of a silly-looking teddy bear hung upside down above him.
“HEY!” he shouted in surprise. He shut his eyes tight. Maybe when he opened them, the thing would have gone away.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” muttered a silly-sounding voice. “Oh dear, oh dear....” Snotty heard little stumpy plush footsteps move away across a wooden floor.
When they retreated, he opened his eyes again. There was nothing there—nothing but a ceiling of woven tree boughs. These were of spruce and cedar, and they smelled good.
“Ermp... erm... ERM.” The voice cleared its throat. Snotty sat up and looked around. There, almost invisible against the brown and cream woven boughs of the wall, was the silly-looking and sounding Bear. He was brown and cream colored, too.
“Pardon,” the Bear said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
Snotty blinked.
The Bear was indeed a silly-looking thing. He was covered in brown and cream plush, and a pink felt tongue stuck out of his mouth. A baseball cap was sewn off balance over his bugged-out eyes.
In his paw, the Bear held a long, thin, rosy thing that he waved in the air.
“Thermometer,” he said in a silly-sounding growl. “Nothing to be scared of. See?”
Snotty was about to dispute the idea that he would be scared of anything at all, let alone of such a thing, when the Bear waddled forward with a concerned expression on his silly face. (He had a limp in his left rear leg, which was a strange thing for a stuffed bear, Snotty thought.) The Bear held out the thermometer so that Snotty could see what it said. Written on its side in bold red letters was: “VERY ILL.”
“No, I’m not!” Snotty protested. “Never felt better in my life!”
This was a lie, of course. Snotty’s head throbbed in a horrible way, and his stomach twisted this way and that. In fact, everything hurt, even his toes and the tips of his fingers. “But I’m not telling a silly-looking bear that!” Snotty knew it was dangerous to be weak, unless you were among friends. And since he had never in his life been among friends, it would have been silly of him to change his behavior now.
The silly-looking Bear cocked his head.
“Definitely a case of fever,” the Bear squeaked, nodding its silly plush head. “What we call Trance Fever, here in the Mountains. And very painful it is, too.” Before Snotty could protest, the Bear laid the thermometer against his head.
“HEY!” Snotty yelled, batting it away. But not before he saw a new set of red letters form. These said: “BETRAYED HIS FRIEND.”
“Oh DEAR,” the silly-looking Bear said, his voice filled with real distress. “Oh my poor friend. Oh I’m so sorry.”
“I didn’t!” Snotty shouted, struggling to get up. But he felt groggy and achy and not himself, and it was like moving through Jell-O. “I DIDN’T,I tell you!” But the silly-looking Bear just stood there shaking his head, looking at Snotty with an unbearable—as it were—expression of sympathy on his silly face.
“How terrible,” the Bear murmured. “How truly horrible and bad.”
“I’m telling you,” Snotty said, but his voice sounded weak and sneaky, even to him, “I didn’t....”
“Sssh,” said the Bear. He rummaged in a little black bag. “Let me give you something for the pain.”
And he pulled from the bag a rose gold Key.
“No!” Snotty shouted as the Bear dipped the Key into a glass of water. “Don’t touch me with that thing!” The sight of the Key filled him with dread, and he struggled to get away from it and from the Bear’s horrible sympathy.
But his limbs ached, and he couldn’t move. Exhausted and defeated, he fell back and closed his eyes. He felt the Bear place the Key gently right between his eyes. It felt cool and straight, and a softness, like a white light, spilled from it into Snotty’s head. He felt this light spread through him, chasing away all the aches and pains it found, and as the last ache fled, Snotty drifted into sleep again, the same kind of sleep he’d fallen into when buffeted by Big Teddy’s paw. But this time it was a slower fall, as if he were in a boat floating down a river on a summer’s day. There was a pleasant rushing in his ears like the sound of water running over stones.
“Poor child,” was the last thing he heard. “Poor, poor child.” Then Snotty, for a time, heard nothing more.
When he woke again, he felt much better. In fact, he felt excellent in every way. His headache and stomachache were gone. Nothing hurt in his limbs and his chest—nothing at all, except the throbbing where his little finger used to be. He was dressed now, not in his Gnome clothes, but in a lilac plush suit with matching boots. And he was hungry. He was very, very hungry.
“Feed me!” a voice said.
“Who said that?” Snotty leapt up, looking wildly around.
“Feed me!” the voice said again, very nearby—very. It took Snotty a moment to realize that it was the voice of his own stomach. Naturally, this was a bit of surprise.
“I didn’t know you could talk,” Snotty said to his stomach warily. He felt stupid talking to his own body parts like this, but he didn’t know what else to do.
“I’m hungry,” his stomach said, patient but insistent. Snotty wrinkled up his forehead and thought about this.
Snotty was used to being hungry. At such times, he knew, his stomach would complain until he stuffed down as much food as it could hold as fast as possible. (This was what he had done, for example, at the Gnomes’ Grand Feast. Snotty felt sick afterwards, but he identified this feeling with pleasure as the sign of a true Feast.) “Ahem,” his stomach said politely.
“Sorry,” Snotty said. Looking around, he saw a woven twig and bark table, and on it were some slices of brown bread, a mound of milky cheese, and a bunch of scraped carrots.42 Snotty looked at these doubtfully. He felt his stomach wasn’t used to this kind of thing. He didn’t know if it understood what it was in for.
“Now, please,” his stomach said in a good-humored way.
“I don’t know if you’re going to like this,” Snotty warned, trying an experimental chomp on a carrot. “And what if they’re trying to poison us, huh?” But by now his stomach was too busy to reply.
The idea that the food might be poisoned cheered Snotty up a lot. It was making him nervous, all this Teddy Bear hospitality. It was not what he was used to. Whereas the thought that he was a prisoner, liable to be tortured or killed at any moment—if that was the position, he knew where he was.
“More, please,” his stomach said.
“Well,” Snotty shrugged. “It’s your funeral.” So he ate his way through another couple of carrots and two slices of bread spread with the lemony cheese.
“Mmmm,” his stomach said. But Snotty wasn’t listening. Instead he planned his escape. Then he saw that the silly-looking Bear had left the rosy Key. There it was in the lock of the door.
“Honestly, what kind of a prison is this, anyway?” Snotty grumbled as he pocketed the Key in his lilac and purple plush suit. He slipped out the door. No one was about.
Snotty felt a little hurt by this. “What, they don’t think I’m important enough to be guarded better than THIS?” Reflecting on the Bears’ total lack of professionalism, he crossed a lush and overgrown meadow toward a wood where swallows and finches and chickadees sang in the trees. “I miss the Gnomes,” he thought to himself, depressed. He missed their size and their strength. He missed their manliness and grandeur. Most of all, he missed his own importance in their midst. “But think of how much credit I’ll get for escaping from the Rebel Stronghold with a full report. That’ll be a real score!”
At the thought of this, Snotty cheered up. If it was war between the Gnomes and the Teddy Bears—as it obviously was—then he considered the Gnomes to be in the ri
ght. For one thing, they were bigger than the Bears.
That much was easy. Once Snotty had determined this, his duty was plain. “I must fight the Enemy by any means possible!” he thought fiercely. “First I should get the lay of the land.” With that, he set about his mission with no delay. He went into the wood and climbed the highest tree.
As he climbed, the Key in his pocket slapped at his leg in an uncomfortable way. The higher Snotty got, the heavier the Key dragged on him.
Snotty ignored this.
When he had climbed as high as he could, he found himself in a canopy of treetops, surrounded on all sides by green: leaves, tree needles, and pale slanting light. He couldn’t see up, he couldn’t see down, he couldn’t see around. And because the branches above him were spindly, this was as far as he could go.
Little pools of water dotted the canopy, places where rain collected in hollows made of twigs and leaves and lichen. Tiny transparent shrimp scuttled about. And in a pond cradled by a bowl of moss lay a rose pink Crab.
Snotty considered this. “A Crab in a tree,” he thought. “That’s weird.” Other stuff was weird, too. The breeze smelled of strawberries. Every leaf and needle on every tree was clear and sharp. And, weirdest of all, the stump of Snotty’s little finger stopped throbbing. Here, in the trees, it didn’t hurt at all.
Snotty peered into the little pond. The rose pink Crab lay on its bottom, resting on a bed of pale green. Snotty leaned over to get a closer look, and the Key in his pocket banged against his leg.
“Let me out!” the Key said in a furious voice. “Now!”
Startled, Snotty thrust his hand in his pocket and pulled out the Key. It was heavier than he remembered, though, and it slipped from his hold and fell with a mild plop into the pool.
Snotty stared at the Key as it lay there at the bottom of the pond. Its head was oval and its shaft was plain. It was smooth and pink gold and it reminded Snotty of something, but he couldn’t think of what. He dipped his hand in the water to get it back. To his surprise, the little pink Crab didn’t scuttle away. Instead, to Snotty’s even greater surprise, it put what might have been its shoulder—if crabs had shoulders—to the Key, as if trying to dislodge it from the moss.
