by Paula Guran
“I saw him,” Possum sobbed, pointing in my direction. “I saw him tomorrow. And the next day. And the day he dies. His grave. It overlooks a big blue lake. I saw . . . ”
Nicolas crouched to inspect the goggles, poking at them with a slender finger. “The juniper didn’t give you the gift of sight, Miss Possum—but of foresight. How frightening for you. But very beautiful, and very rare, too. You are to be congratulated. I think.”
A sharp, staccato sound tapped out an inquiry. Froggit was exploring his own gift: a small bone drum, with a shining white hide stretched over it. I wondered if the skin had come from one of his siblings.
Best not to muse about such things aloud, of course. Might upset the boy.
Froggit banged on the hide with a drumstick I was pretty sure was also made of bone.
What does the drum do? asked the banging. Is there a trick in it?
“Froggit!” Possum cried out, laughing a little. “You’re talking!”
A short, startled tap in response. I am?
“Huh,” I muttered. “Close enough for Folk music, anyway.”
Flushed with her own dawning excitement, Greenpea brought the bone fiddle in her lap to rest under her chin. She took a bone bow strung with long black hair and set it to the silver strings.
The fiddle wailed like a slaughtered rabbit.
She looked at her legs. They didn’t move. She tried the bow again.
Cats brawling. Tortured dogs. That time in the rat-baiting arena I almost died. I put my hands to my ears. “Nicolas! Please! Make her stop.”
“Hush, Maurice. We all sound like that when we first start to play.” Nicolas squatted before Greenpea’s chair to meet her eyes. She kept on sawing doggedly at the strings, her face set with harrowing determination, until at last the Pied Piper put his hand on hers. The diabolical noise stopped.
“Miss Greenpea. Believe me, it will take months, maybe years, of practice before you’ll be able to play that fiddle efficiently. Longer before you play it well. But perhaps we can start lessons tomorrow, when we’re all better rested and fed.”
“But,” she asked, clutching it close, “what does it do?”
“Do?” Nicolas inquired. “In this world, nothing. It’s just a fiddle.”
Greenpea’s stern lips trembled. She looked mad enough to break the fiddle over his head.
“Possum can see. Froggit can talk. I thought this would make me walk again. I thought . . . ”
“No.” He touched the neck of the bone fiddle thoughtfully. “I could pipe Maurice’s broken bones together, but I cannot pipe the rats of Amandale back to life. What’s gone is gone. Your legs. Froggit’s tongue. Possum’s eyes. They are gone.”
Huge tears rolled down her face. She did not speak.
He continued, “Fiddle music, my dear Miss Greenpea, compels a body, willy-nilly, to movement. More so than the pipe, I think—and I do not say that lightly, Master Piper that I am. Your fiddle may not make you walk again. But once you learn to play, the two of you together will make the world dance.”
“Will we?” Greenpea spat bitterly. “Why should the world dance and not I?”
Bowing his head, Nicolas dropped to one knee, and set a hand on each of her armrests. When he spoke again, his voice was low. I had to strain all my best eavesdropping capabilities to listen in.
“Listen. In the Realms Under the Hill, my silver pipe is the merest pennywhistle. It has no power of compulsion or genius. I am nothing but a tin sparrow when I play for the Faerie Queen; it amuses Her to hear me chirp and peep. Yet you saw what I did with my music today, up here in the Realms Above. Now . . . ”
His breath blew out in wonder. “Now,” the Pied Piper told her, “if ever you found yourself in Her court, with all the Lords and Ladies of Faerie arrayed against you, fierce in their wisdom, hideous in their beauty, and pitiless, pitiless as starlight—and you played them a tune on this bone fiddle of yours, why . . . ”
Nicolas smiled. It was as feral a grin as the one he’d worn on the steps of Brotquen Cathedral, right before he enchanted the entire town of Amandale. “Why, Miss Greenpea, I reckon you could dance the Immortal Queen Herself to death, and She powerless to stop you.”
“Oh,” Greenpea sighed. She caressed the white fiddle, the silver strings. “Oh.”
“But.” Nicolas sprang up and dusted off his patched knees. “You have to learn how to play it first. I doubt a few paltry scrapes would do more than irritate Her. And then She’d break you, make no doubt. Ulia Gol at her worst is a saint standing next to Her Most Gracious Majesty.”
Taking up his cloak from the spot where Dora Rose had dropped it, Nicolas swirled it over his shoulders. He stared straight ahead, his face bleak and his eyes blank, as though we were no longer standing there.
“I am very tired now,” he said, “and very sad. I want to go home and sleep until I forget if I have lived these last three days or merely dreamed them. I have had stranger and more fell dreams than this. Or perhaps”—he shuddered—“perhaps I was awake then, and this—this is the dream I dreamed to escape my memories. In which case, there is no succor for me, not awake or asleep, and I can only hope for that ultimate oblivion, and to hasten it with whatever implements I have on hand. If you have no further need of me, I will bid you adieu.”
Alarmed at this turn, I scrambled to tug his coattails. “Hey, Nico! Hey, Nicolas, wait a minute, twinkle toes. Nicolas, you bastard, you promised me almonds!”
“Did I?” He looked up brightly, and blasted me with his smile, and it was like a storm wrack had blown from his face. “I did, Maurice! How could I have forgotten? Come along, then, with my sincerest apologies. Allow me to feed you, Maurice. How I love to feed my friends when they are hungry!”
Greenpea wheeled her chair about to block his way. “Teach me,” she demanded.
He blinked at her as if he had never seen her face before. “Your pardon?”
She held out her bone fiddle. “If what you say is true, this gift is not just about music; it’s about magic, too. And unless I’m wrong, Amandale won’t have much to do with either in years to come.”
I snorted in agreement.
“Teach me.” Greenpea pointed with bow and fiddle to her two friends. “Them too. Teach all of us. We need you.”
Please, Froggit tapped out on his bone drum. We can’t go home.
“Of course you can!” Nicolas assured him, stricken. “They’ll welcome you, Master Froggit. They probably think you are dead. How beautiful they shall find it that you are not! Think—the number of Cobblersawls has been halved at least; you shall be twice as precious . . . ”
Possum shook her head. “They’ll see only the ones they lost.”
Once more she slipped the goggles on. Whatever she foresaw as she peered through the bone lenses at Nicolas, she did not flinch. But I watched him closely, the impossible radiance that rose up in him, brighter than his silver pipe, brighter than his broken edges, and he listened to Possum’s prophecy in rapturous terror, and with hope. I’d never seen the Pied Piper look anything like hopeful before, in all the years I’d known him.
“We are coming with you,” Possum prophesied. No one gainsaid her. No one even tried. “We are going to your cottage. You will teach us how to play music. We will learn many songs from you, and . . . and make up even more! When the first snow falls, we four shall venture into the Hill. And under it. Deep and wide, word will spread of a band of strange musicians: Nicolas and the Oracles. Lords and Ladies and Dragons and Sirens, they will all invite us to their courts and caves and coves to play for them. Froggit on the drums. Greenpea on her fiddle. You on your pipe. And I?”
Greenpea began to laugh. The sound was rusty, but true. “You’ll sing, of course, Possum! You have the truest voice. Ulia Gol was so mad when you wouldn’t sing up the bones for her!”
“Yes,” Possum whispered, “I will sing true songs in the Realm of Lies, and all who hear me will listen.”
All right. Enough of this yammering. My gut
s were cramping.
“Great!” I exclaimed. “You guys’ll be great. Musicians get all the girls anyway. Or, you know”—I nodded at Greenpea and Possum—“the dreamy-eyed, long-haired laddies. Or whatever. The other way around. However you want it. Always wanted to learn guitar myself. I’d look pretty striking with a guitar, don’t you think? I could go to the lake and play for Dora Rose. She’d like that about as much as a slap on the . . . Anyway, it’s a thought.”
“Maurice.” Nicolas clapped his hand to my shoulder. “You are hungry. You always babble when you are hungry. Come. Eat my food and drink my Faerie ale, and I shall spread blankets enough on the floor for all of us.” He beamed around at the three children, at me, and I swear his face was like a bonfire.
“My friends,” he said. “My friends. How merry we shall be.”
Later that night, when they were all cuddled up and sleeping the sleep of the semi-innocent, or at least the iniquitously fatigued, I crept out of that cottage in the lee of the Hill and snuck back to the Heart Glade.
Call it a hunch. Call it ants in my antsy pants. I don’t know. Something was going on, and I had to see it. So what? So I get curious sometimes.
Wouldn’t you know it? I made it through the Maze Wood only to find I was right yet again! They weren’t kidding when they called me Maurice the Incomparable. (And by “they,” I mean “me,” of course.) Sometimes I know things. My whiskers twitch, or maybe my palms itch, and I just know.
What hung from the juniper tree in that grey light before full dawn wasn’t nearly as pretty as a Swan Princess or as holy and mysterious as a clutch of silver watermelon eggs.
Nope. This time the ornaments swinging from the branches were much plainer and more brutal. The juniper tree itself, decked out in its new accessories, looked darker and squatter than I’d ever beheld it, and by the gratified jangling in its blackly green needles, seemed very pleased with itself.
Ever see an ogre after a mob of bereaved parents gets through with her?
Didn’t think so. But I have.
Certain human responses can trump even an ogre’s fell enchantments. Watching twenty kids disappear right out from under your helpless gaze all because your mayor was a cheapskate might induce a few of them. Hanging was the least of what they did to her. The only way I knew her was by the tattered crimson of her gown.
Mortals. Mortals and their infernal ingenuity. I shook my head in admiration.
And was that . . . ?
Yes, it was! Indeed, it was! My old friend, Henchmen Hans himself. Loyal to the end, swinging from a rope of his own near the mayoral gallows branch. And wearing his second best suit, too, bless him. Though torn and more than a little stained, his second best was a far sight better than what I presently wore. Needed something a bit more flamboyant than a dog blanket, didn’t I, if I was going to visit Lake Serenus in the morning? Bring a swan girl a fresh bag of caramels. Help her babysit. You know. Like you do.
Waste not, want not—isn’t that what the wharf boys say? A Rat Folk philosophy if I ever heard one. So, yeah, I’d be stripping my good old pal Hans right down to his bare essentials, or I’m not my mother’s son. And then I’d strip him of more than that.
See, I’d had to share the Pied Piper’s fine repast with three starving mortal children earlier that night. It’s not that they didn’t deserve their victuals as much as, say, I (although, really, who did?), and it’s not like Nicolas didn’t press me to eat seconds and thirds. But I still hadn’t gotten nearly as much as my ravenous little rat’s heart desired.
The juniper tree whispered.
It might have said anything.
But I’m pretty sure I heard, “Help yourself, Maurice.”
JOHNNY REV
Rachel Pollack
That was your black double. You aren’t who you think you are.
—Flannery O’Connor, “Everything That Rises Must Converge”
Prologue
In his early years as a Traveler, Jack Shade, Rebel Jack, as people would later call him, studied with the legendary teacher known as Anatolie. He didn’t really know her fame at the time, only that she was the one whose name he’d been given by the lion-tamer who’d first shown Carny Jack a glimpse of the Real World in the mouth of a lion.
In the years Jack studied with Anatolie, she annoyed him as much as inspired him, not least because at something like five hundred pounds she did not get around much, and Jack sometimes thought he was more errand boy than apprentice. One day he went to see her in her fifth-floor walk-up on Bayard Street in Chinatown, and as usual had stopped in at the Lucky Star restaurant to pick up the order she’d called down when she knew he was coming. Most of the time Jack didn’t really mind bringing her food, but that day he decided he’d had enough. It was time to tell her some hard truth. “Why don’t you get a ground-floor apartment?” he said as he arranged the food on a tray big enough to go across her belly. “Or at least one of those lofts with an old freight elevator.”
“And why is that, Jack?” she asked softly, as her ancient bone chopsticks began to ferry har kow to her wide, flat face.
Jack should have recognized that tone and backed off but he was feeling reckless. Years later, a dealer in the Ibis Casino would tell him, “You were always Johnny Danger back then. Or maybe just Jack Crazy.”
“So you can actually leave the house now and then,” he told her. “Get out in the street. Experience picking up your own food.”
“Oh, Jack,” she said, “you still think things are as they appear?” As she moved on to shredded pork and puffed tofu in ginger sauce, she said, in that same bland voice, “Perhaps you should go. You don’t seem in the mood for a lesson.”
“Great,” Jack said. “All this way just to drag your food upstairs.”
“Oh, by the way,” she said as he was about to leave, “pay attention on the way home. You wouldn’t want to miss anything.” Jack made a noise and slammed the door.
He was so annoyed he didn’t notice anything strange until he was on Canal Street, heading for the No. 6 Subway, and a large woman in a bright red parka bumped into him. She was moving so fast, with heavy shopping bags in each hand like pendulum weights, she almost knocked Jack down. “Hey!” he yelled, and was about to add something very New York when he noticed the woman’s gait and the set of her shoulders. “Anatolie?” he said, but not loud enough for her to hear him as she moved through the crowds of shoppers, tourists, and hucksters.
It can’t be, he told himself. Even if she could get herself up and dressed and downstairs without his help, how would she have had the time to catch up with him? Distracted, he found himself going past a knock-off shop, the kind of place with oversize, over-bling watches and fall-apart luggage out front, but fake Prada hidden in the back for the right sort of customer. A skinny Chinese man with greasy hair was pretending to flirt with a trio of white teenage girls from the suburbs in hopes they might buy his phony Pandora bracelets. Jack paid no attention until the man called out, “Rolex watch, Jack. Look just like real.”
Jack spun around, and in place of the Chinese hustler stood Anatolie, so large she filled the doorway. She held up the watch. “Good quality, Jack. No tell difference.”
Jack wasn’t sure he could breathe. He turned to the three girls to ask if they too saw the large black woman, only to discover that their skin had darkened and their over-gelled bleached hair had snaked into long dreadlocks. All three nodded and smiled at him.
Jack tried to escape into the crowd but it was no good. The old Chinese ladies with their net shopping bags filled with bok choy and tofu, the guys behind the fried-noodle stands, the homeless man pretending he had someplace to go, the art students with plastic bags from Pearl Paint—they were all her.
He did his best not to look at anyone, at least not close enough to see them change, as he rushed back to Bayard Street. For just a second he considered picking up a bribe at Lucky Star, but was pretty sure he couldn’t take it if cheerful, loud Mrs. Shen became a five-hundred-po
und black woman with dreads that wound around her waist like that Norse serpent that holds together the world. So instead he just ran upstairs, burst into her apartment where of course she was still lying on her oversized, reinforced bed, empty takeout cartons all around her, and he begged her, “Make it stop. Please. I get it, I’m sorry, I’ll never say you can’t leave your apartment again. Please. You can’t be everyone.”
She laced her hands across her belly. “Are you sure about that, Jack? Maybe there’s just one person in the world, and we’re all Duplicates.” Jack stared at her, confused. Finally she smiled, and said, “You can go now. It’s safe.”
He hesitated a moment, then left. All the way home everyone remained themselves, but even so, he stood a long time outside his door before he went inside. For what if his wife Layla’s olive skin had turned dark brown, or eleven-year-old Eugenia had put on four hundred pounds?
Now
Jack Shade was walking down Lafayette Street, heading toward Canal, when the Momentary Storm hit. He was on his way to buy a stone frog from Mr. Suke (not his real name) as a present for Carolien Hounstra, Jack’s colleague in the New York Travelers’ Aid Society. Generous Jack, people called him, though usually not without a half-smile and a lifted eyebrow.
Carolien collected frogs, had many shelves of them in her West Side apartment. Some were netsuke, others jade or malachite or onyx, and a few were so old it was hard to tell what they were. There was a story people liked to tell about Carolien’s hobby, that an ancestor had been turned into a stone frog by some malevolent Traveler, or maybe a vindictive Power, and Carolien hoped to find him and turn him back. Others claimed it wasn’t an ancestor but an older, or younger, brother, and the enactment had retroactively aged the carving to make it harder to find him. Still others claimed it was Carolien herself who’d stoned her brother—or maybe a lover who’d jilted her—and had done too good a job, so that when remorse set in she couldn’t locate him. This last group consisted mostly of people whose advances Carolien had rejected. “The Dutch Ice Queen,” some called her, a term that always made Jack laugh or shake his head.
