Summerland

by Michael Chabon

  "Thing is, John, we'd be happy ta make it a present ta ya, if only we didn't need it so urgentlike."

  "DON'T NEED IT NO MORE, DO YOU, MORSEL?" The giant's voice was not a growl so much as a deep sonorous ringing, as of an enormous bell. He was extremely ugly, his face at once smashed-looking and bug-eyed, but Ethan supposed that was how it was with giants.

  "True," Cinquefoil said in a low voice. "Each one's uglier than t'other. And ta answer yer question, little brother," he said to Thor, catching him by surprise in mid-thought, "he knows English because he is thirty thousand years old, at least. He's had more ta do with reubens than I'm sure he cares ta recall. He knows Sumerian, Urdu, Masoretic, and San. He knows all the dead languages o' the Middling and the living ones, too. Of course he speaks my tongue, but I thought ya might want to know what I'm saying."

  "I don't like the way he keeps calling you 'morsel,' " Jennifer T. said. "It sounds like he's planning to eat us."

  "He would never eat me," Cinquefoil said. "I wouldn't agree with him one bit. Ya saw that yella sap bleeding outta this old jar o' mine, little reuben?" He pointed to his head; the wounds had by now completely healed. Ethan nodded. "It's like poison fer 'em. They'd as soon eat stones or tree bark. No, it's children they like, children and sheep. If ya only read more true stories ya'd know that."

  The children looked at each other, their eyes wide. They had never been troubled much by the ancient fear of being eaten. They lived in a world devoid not only of giants and ogres but of wolves, bears, and lions, too. And yet Ethan, like many children who are not otherwise vegetarian, had always felt a strange unwillingness to eat the young of animals. Lamb, veal, suckling pig—the idea of eating baby anythings had always repelled him. Now he understood why. It would be a kind of cannibalism. It would imply that he, little, defenseless Ethan Feld, might himself quite easily be eaten.

  Cinquefoil poked his head back out the window.

  "Look here, John, stop yer nonsense and send us on our way. There's considerable trouble afoot just now. Coyote is making fer Murmury Well. We believe he aims ta spoil it. Waylay us and ya might just be bringing down Ragged Rock itself. I wager that's somethin' ya'd regret sore enough."

  "LOSE YOUR BET, THEN," replied the giant. "COMES RAGGED ROCK, WON'T HAVE MUCH USE FOR REGRET." He cupped his hands around Skid, tightly, leaving them in darkness. Thor cried out.

  "Gah!" He was afraid, Ethan knew, of small spaces and dark corners.

  The giant's voice was muffled now, but still booming. "MIGHT AS WELL HAVE ME A SNACK."

  "Isn't there anything you can do?" Ethan said Cinquefoil. "Some kind of grammer or something?"

  "Too big a job," Cinquefoil said. "Even fer a chief. I mebbe could confuse his thoughts a little. Mebbe fill one a his eyes with smoke too thick ta see through." But he looked doubtful.

  Ethan tried to think of something, to remember what he might have read about giants in the fairy tales which it still felt odd to think of, in spite of all that had happened in the last week, as true.

  "They're gamblers," he said at last. "Giants. Isn't that right?"

  "Crazy big gamblers." The voice of the little chief, in the darkness, took on a certain edge. "They'd bet their own eyeballs on a snowflake's falling or not. If we only had something ta wager with, mebbe we…John!'' he shouted, right in Ethan's ear. "Ho, Mooseknuckle John!" His light voice took on a ragged crow's-caw huskiness. "He can't hear us."

  They all began to shout and cry out the giant's name, until their throats were raw. But there was no reply from outside the prison of his cupped fists. Ethan could feel them swinging back and forth as the giant walked, each footfall on the ground sending a deep rumbling shudder through them. The interior of the car rattled and creaked. They gave up calling. They were going to be roasted on a giant's cookfire.

  "YAIIIIIYAH!"

  The great shout of the giant came blasting into the car, along with a flood of light, as, on Jennifer T.'s side, he lifted the hand that gripped Skid. Jennifer T. grinned. She was holding a Swiss Army knife, its blade open and bright with blood. In the meaty pleats of the giant's palm was a tiny red speck.

  "He heard that," she said.

  "EAT THE GIRL FIRST!" roared Mooseknuckle John. "BEFORE SHE'S COOKED HALF THROUGH!"

  "We was trying ta get yer attention!" Cinquefoil explained. "We was wondering if ya'd care ta take a more sporting interest in yer meal."

  The giant stopped. They were nearly to the slope of a great mountain of boulders, an enormous cairn with a dark maw that was as high as Mooseknuckle John himself. Outside the great gash of a doorway there was a smaller mound that seemed to be made up entirely of bones. Many of the skulls looked disturbingly human, and small.

  "A WAGER?" He grinned. The idea was clearly appealing to him. "BUT WHAT CAN YOU WAGER, APART FROM LIVES THAT ALREADY BELONG TO ME?"

  He raised the car once again to his bone-and-blood eye and, batting the envelope out of the way, peered in, regarding Jennifer T. with greater wariness than before. He tilted the car this way and that, tumbling them into one another and making a shambles of the gear they had packed into the back of the car.

  "NOTHING JOHN WANTS. LOT OF RUBBISH. DON'T SEE—AH. TO WHICH IS THE PIE PLATE?"

  "Pie plate?" Thor said. "I didn't know we brought a—"

  "It's mine," Ethan said. "Actually it's my father's. He's an engineer, see, and Coyote—"

  "YOU CATCH, MORSEL?"

  "Well, I just sort of took it up the other day. I'm not—"

  "THIS IS THE GAME, THEN. JOHN THROWS A TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE FASTBALL. BREAKS DOWN THE SIDES OF GREAT FORTRESSES. BURNS HOLES IN THE HEARTS OF MIGHTY OAKS." His pink eyes gleamed and his face collapsed with the deep, ancient gigantic pleasure of boasting. "BLEW IT PAST SKOOKUM JOHN THREE TIMES IN A ROW. STRUCK HIM OUT LOOKING."

  "Giants play baseball, too?" Ethan said.

  "Not with any style," said Cinquefoil. "But old Skookum John was a slugger, all right, before Sees Canoes brought him down."

  "Sees Canoes?" said Jennifer T.

  "A great reubenish giant killer o' some years back. Indian fella. Scouted by Mr. Brown, it seems ta me."

  "I've heard of him!" Jennifer T. said. "Uncle Mo talked about him one time. He was a Salishan. I think he was like my great-great-grandsomething or whatever."

  "Ya might want to keep that ta yerself," Cinquefoil said.

  "YOU CATCH THE MOOSEKNUCKLE JOHN FASTBALL, THREE TIMES, IN THAT SHREW'S-BUTTON MITT OF YOURN. MOOSEKNUCKLE JOHN DON'T ONLY LET YOU GO—LA, HE GIVES YOU A LITTLE PUSH! YOU DROP IT, YOU LET IT GO PAST, LA, HE SUCKS THE JUICES OUT THROUGH THE HOLES IN THE TOP OF YOUR HEAD."

  "Uck," Jennifer T. said.

  "Catch one of your pitches? How big is the ball?"

  "BIG BALL!" the giant said. "NICE BIG ONE! BIG LITTLE REUBEN, TOO! FAIR AND SQUARE! UNIVERSAL RULES!"

  The giant waited, happily, for Ethan's reply. His rank breath billowed and curled around the car.

  "What are Universal Rules?" Jennifer T. said.

  "The rules for interworld play," Thor said. He tilted his head to one side and gave it a thump with the heel of his hand as if to reseat a loose circuit board. "How did I know that?"

  Cinquefoil eyed him carefully. "That's right," he said. "When creatures o' different size engage in play on the diamond, they play at the scale o' whoever's the home team. The shape-shifting grammers are usually worked right inta the pattern o' the diamond itself."

  "You mean I'll be a giant?" Ethan said.

  "Only so long as yer standin on his turf, and yer conduct is sportsmanlike. Try ta sneak up behind him and, say, brain him with a oak tree, the grammer's undone and yer a pipsqueak all over again. And then it's snacktime fer sure."

  Cinquefoil climbed into the backseat, then over into the way-back of the car. He dragged out the old leather mitt and handed it to Ethan.

  "Well," he said.

  "I can barely hold on to one of Jennifer T.'s," said Ethan. "Even if I'm his size, how am I going to catch a fastball from a
full-grown giant?"

  "Why don't ya look in yer book?" Cinquefoil said.

  CHAPTER 8

  Taffy

  ETHAN HAD FORGOTTEN ALL ABOUT How to Catch Lightning and Smoke. Now, as the party warmed themselves beside the giant's huge cookfire, trying to banish thoughts of how that fire might very soon be put to awful use, he searched the index for anything there might be about making up a battery with a giant.

  The giant's lodge was a kind of immense igloo of rocks, a stony dome formed from huge chunks and jags of granite, puzzled together like stones in an old wall. You entered through an arched notch—right beside that pile of bones, which they had all tried not to look at too closely. Then you proceeded inward along a steep-walled corridor that wound in on itself, until you got to the centermost chamber of the spiral. Here the dome was high enough for Mooseknuckle John to enter without ducking, and wide enough for him to stretch out to his full length on the floor in his fur cap and boots. To Ethan, creeping in with his friends huddled close around him, it seemed vast, filled with echoes and shadows and hints of all kind of unpleasant odors. The floor was covered from end to end in thick furs and skins, some of which seemed to be those of bears, gray and brown, of wolves and moose and elk; others, Ethan would have sworn, were the lush, silvery-black pelts of gorillas. The only opening, here at the center of the giant's lodge, was a wide triangular notch cut in the roof to let out the smoke from the towering bonfire over which he cooked his grisly food. Apart from the furs there was no furniture of any kind. From three stout leathern ropes worked into the joints of the walls hung an iron pot as big as a garage, a dipper as deep as a bathtub, and a spoon whose bowl was as wide as a trash-can lid. And, on one side of the room, stood an iron cage, bigger than Ethan's bedroom at home, empty but for a heap of bones and old fur blankets in one corner.

  "Anything?" Jennifer T. said. She had picked up one of the furs from the floor and come to stand beside him, draping the soft, thick, rank-smelling brown mantle over their shoulders. In spite of the fire, it was not exactly warm inside the lodge. "Does Peavine have anything to say about giants?"

  "It's hard to tell," Ethan said, paging with the tip of his little finger through the latter sections of the book. "The words are all so small"

  He had, of course, neglected to pack his magnifying glass. And though he stood close to the light of the fire, it was still pretty dim. Cinquefoil knew the book well, and might have been able to provide some guidance about relevant chapters. But as soon as Mooseknuckle John had ushered them into this vast echoing room, the ferisher, exhausted and weak from his injuries and from the grammers he had worked, curled up under a bearskin and went to sleep.

  "It's only a matter of minutes until that giant comes back, Captain," Thor said. The giant had gone back outside again to raid his root cellar for some turnips or whatever it was that he planned to use to garnish his little-kid stew. "I advise you to make haste."

  "Noted, TW03," Ethan said, captainishly. He looked at his watch, which he had not bothered to consult since leaving the Middling behind.

  "Huh," he said. "Check this out."

  Thor and Jennifer T. leaned in to take a look at the marvelous bit of hardware that the genius of Mr. Feld and the sale bins of Geek World had produced.

  The liquid crystal display was changed. Across the top, where it had once read SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI SAT, with a digital mark over the proper day, it now read SUN CAT TOD RAT DOG PIG and MOO (for Moonday, as Ethan would later learn). Ethan pressed FUNCTION and 1, which normally gave the month and day, and found that while the month was still given as "4," in place of the old Gregorian year it now read "1519 Mole."

  "So this is a Mole year," Thor said.

  "Is that bad? Cinquefoil told me that the old people always said the end of the world would come in a Mole year."

  Thor scratched at his right temple for a moment, then shook his head. He shrugged.

  "That sounds right," he said.

  In the lower right corner of the calendar screen, Ethan saw, where there had never been anything before, there was now a numeral one, and beside it a small triangular arrow pointing down. He pressed the buttons a few times, scrolling back through the functions he knew about, but every time he returned to the calendar screen, the little number one was still there. He could not get rid of it. He wondered if the strain of leaping across worlds was overloading its circuits somehow.

  "Come on," Jennifer T. said. "Stop fooling around with the watch, E."

  Ethan nodded, and returned his attention to Peavine's book, squinting at the pages as he flipped through them.

  "What was that?" Jennifer T. said, grabbing hold of Ethan's wrist before he could turn another page. "What was that chapter called?"

  "Hey," Ethan said. "Good eye. 'Barnstorming…the Far…Territories.' Huh. It…" He moved the book back and forth, and tilted it toward the fire. He simply couldn't make out the words. "Man!"

  "Perhaps these will be of some assistance, Captain," Thor said. He took off his glasses. "As you know, my photo-optic sensor array is equipped with these adapter-lenses."

  Ethan held the glasses up to his eyes. Of course they were, unlike Padfoot's, only an ordinary pair of eyeglasses with no special powers whatever. Thor's pale, serious face swam in and out of focus, and Ethan saw that the lenses of his glasses were different from those of Mr. Feld's. Ethan's father was nearsighted, and when you looked through his glasses everything seemed to bend inward, shrinking the world down to a miniature replica of itself. But Thor must be farsighted; in the lenses of his spectacles everything loomed and swelled to twice its normal size.

  Ethan held the glasses to the first page of the chapter Jennifer T. had found. The words swelled to a readable size as he passed the left lens across them, reading aloud for the benefit of his friends. In the years reckoned, in the Summerlands, as 1319th Adder, 1319th Hoptoad, and 1319th Otter, he learned, a team known as Peavine's Traveling Ferisher All-Stars had made what the author called "a mad tour of the Far Territories, taking on giants, kobolds, adlets, and all that vast and motley crew of eldritch characters who still revere the great and glorious Game." A good number of these games had been played against nines of giants.

  "What does 'eldritch' mean?" Jennifer T. said.

  "I think it means magical," Ethan said.

  "Eldritch," said a dark, unhappy voice not very far away, "is the term used by some to designate a world where the Rule of Enchantment remains in force."

  The children looked at each other. None of them had spoken. Ethan grabbed Jennifer T.'s arms and they froze, listening. They looked at Thor. He shook his head, looking young and frightened without his glasses. The glum voice spoke up again.

  "Once, yours was also ranked among the eldritch worlds," it said. "But it has been some time since then."

  "There's a ghost," Jennifer T. said, clinging now to Ethan in return.

  "It's coming from that cage!" Thor said, pointing, his outstretched arm trembling in a very unandroidlike way.

  Ethan slid Peavine's book back into the muff pocket of his sweatshirt and, still holding tight to Jennifer T.'s arm, crept across the giant's hall to the black iron cage. As he drew nearer he saw that what he had taken at a distance for heap of old pelts amid a scattering of bones was gazing right at him with a pair of yellow eyes. The eyes were large, intelligent, and held a sad expression. They were set into a dark face, heavy-browed, in a ruff or mane of thick, black fur.

  "There's nothing special about catching a giant," the creature said. Its voice was at once so glum and so reasonable that it was hard for Ethan to feel afraid. It stood, slowly, and the heap of furs seemed to gather and twist. The fur was thick, glinting with silver—like those, scattered across the floor of the giant's lodge, which Ethan had taken for a gorilla. But this unfortunate creature in the iron cage was no gorilla. It stood fully erect, like a man, though its long powerful arms reached below its knees. It had breasts like a woman, dangling and heavy, black as coals, and only partly covered in
fur. And it was at least nine feet tall. "It's just like catching a man, or a fairy, or even, I imagine, a bloodsucking white adlet, though I never played against a team from the Utternorth. You just put down the sign, and call for the pitch."

  There was a strange sound just behind him, a strangled cry. Ethan turned. The sound had come from Thor Wignutt. He was gazing at the furry prisoner with a look that was somewhere between horror and delight.

  "A Sasquatch," he said.

  "True enough, alas," said the Sasquatch. "A She-Sasquatch, to be precise. And believe me, it's a hard, hard fate."

  "Do they have a taste for Sasquatches, too?" asked Jennifer T. "Giants, I mean."

  A faint smile briefly haunted the Sasquatch's bitter face. "No. Though I could dearly wish that the great stinking ill-tempered old heap would make an end to me, even if it was between the grindstones of his rotten old molars. Like you reubens, a giant will eat anything—whale dung, boiled wendigo hoof—but they're also like you humans in one curious respect: they never eat their pets."

  "You're a pet?" Ethan said.

  The Sasquatch nodded, her eyes brimming over with tears. "It's fashionable among giants to keep one of my race in the house, and feed us from the scraps and leavings of their horrid tables. Before that they used to hunt us for our pelts. I don't doubt that you're wearing a close relative of mine."

  "So what do you, well, do?" Jennifer T. said, letting the soft black Sasquatch fur slide to the ground. "What does he do with you?"

  "Yeah," Thor said. "Does he, like, take you out and walk you?"

  The Sasquatch looked offended. She gave her head a vehement shake. Then she said something, too softly for them to hear.

  "What?" Ethan said.

  "I said, 'I sing,' " the Sasquatch said. "I have a fine contralto voice."

  Before they could ask her to demonstrate, however, the floor beneath their feet began to tremble and jolt, and a moment later Mooseknuckle John emerged from the mouth of the spiral corridor. He was carrying an armload of huge turnips, parsnips, carrots, and potatoes. The vegetables tumbled to the floor with a terrific rumbling and booming, like an armload of boulders. One of the potatoes rolled lumbering toward the children, and they just barely managed to scamper out of its way before it slammed against the iron cage with a horrible clang, sending the Sasquatch flying backward, and splitting in two with a great gusty whiff of potato.