Summerland

by Michael Chabon

  The Herald

  "A THUNDERSTORM;" TAFFY CRIED from her lookout perch atop the car, amid the humming guy wires. "A great, big, old-fashioned, singe-your-nape-fur, Summerland thunderstorm!"

  "It's on a direct heading for this vessel," Thor reported. Jennifer T. had noticed that Thor tended to get especially androidish whenever he was afraid. Actually the storm was well above them, hovering, as if trying to make up its mind what to do about them.

  "Nevertheless," Taffy said. "It's so beautiful!" They could hear her, snuffling up a deep nostalgic breath of stormy air. "It smells so wonderful!"

  It was, Jennifer T. had to agree, a beautiful thunderstorm, its black wings beating at the summer air. It had lightning for talons and rain for plumage and its eyes were alight with a static charge of ozone. It was a creature of storm, a big black bird made of thunder.

  "Tell me it isn't," she said. But she knew that it was.

  "Course it is," Cinquefoil said.

  "Thunderbird!" Taffy said. "Hey there, you thunderbird!" Up on the roof of the car there was an awful thumping. Jennifer T. grabbed hold of Thor Wignutt as the car began to shake and rock violently. Taffy the Sasquatch, somewhat ill-advisedly in Jennifer T.'s opinion, was jumping up and down on top of Skidbladnir. She had been in that cage, Jennifer T. supposed, a few hundred years too long. "Hi! You-hoo!"

  "Quiet, ya shaggy old she-bigfoot!" snapped Cinquefoil. "Ya think this wired-together heap a junk and grammer could stand up ta a brush with that?"

  Taffy quit her leaping about, but it was much too late, of course. The thunderbird had noticed them long before. It was circling over them, about half a mile up, with an easy malevolence.

  "Why does it want to hurt us?" Ethan said. "Is it on Coyote's side?"

  "Wouldn't think so," Cinquefoil said. "Coyote stoled storm-bringing from Thunderbird, like he stoled fishing from Eagle, and war from Ant, and fire from Old Mr. Wood hisself."

  "Wait a minute." Certain features of everything they had experienced since her first crossing, back on Clam Island, had struck Jennifer T. as familiar from the old people's stories, of course, in particular all this talk of Coyote and the Changer. But a thunderbird? "Is the Summerlands, like, is it an Indian world?" she said.

  "Well, we use ta see a fair number o' Indians in the Summerlands, at one time. Adventurers, shamans, rogues and trickster men, witches and princesses. They used to get all tangled up in the greater grammer and take some terrible fine stories home with them when they found their way out agin. But we don't see too many Indians these days." Cinquefoil leveled his heavy-lidded gaze at Jennifer T. "Something musta happened."

  Jennifer T. felt that the ferisher was looking right into her, into everything that had always troubled her about what old Albert called her "Indian side." How she loved all the old stories so much that it made her angry, everlastingly furious, with her Indian ancestors, for having lost everything, land, language, legends, so completely. Even though she knew it was not fair to blame them, not fair at all; there was nothing that those poor old Squamish and Salishan and Nooksacks could have done, not really, in the face of white-man inventions and white-man viruses and white man wanting them dead. She couldn't help it; she blamed them anyway. She even blamed them for not having had antibodies against smallpox and measles. Nevertheless, all the old people's stories were still in there, locked away in her brain or her heart or wherever such things were kept. And now, somehow, they had brought her this far, to a place where they had never been lost.

  "Well," she said. "I'm here, now."

  "So ya are."

  Jennifer T. rolled down her window. A strong fresh breeze, with a bright, coppery tang like burning wire, blew into the car. The storm was nearly upon them. Just the smell of it seemed to fill her with the sudden certainty of all the marvelous things it was in her power, as Jennifer T. Rideout, to do.

  "Hey! Thunderbird!" She thrust herself, head and shoulders, out the window of the car. "Shame on you! Doing Coyote's work for him, you big dumb turkey vulture! Don't you know what's coming? Don't you know the day is here? The day of—ack." She lost her purchase on the car door, lurched forward, and fell out of the window. The deep green forest far below her seemed all at once to leap up.

  "Ensign Rideout!"

  Thor's reflexes were android-sharp and he grabbed at her right ankle with his thick fingers. But the force of her fall yanked her loose of his grip, and she fell. Even in the Summerlands certain laws hold true, and she fell very fast, at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. The world of green in which she was going to die rushed toward her with breathtaking eagerness. Light drained from her head like the air running out of a balloon, and she began to lose consciousness. She was just barely aware of a sharp upward jerk of her body, a firm grip on her ankles. At first she thought that it was Thor again. As if in a dream, she saw him reaching down from the car, his robo-arms telescoping out of their sockets, section by titanium section, to snatch her out of the air. Then she opened her eyes, and looked up into the seething black breast of the thunderbird, caught in the grip of its lightning claws. There was a roar of wind all around her that deafened her almost to the sound of her own thoughts. It blew past her ears, growling, then broke and billowed into little whistles and eddies. Her hair hung down in her face, damp from the rain of the bird's black plumage, clinging to her cheeks, flapping in her eyes, and standing out in all directions as the charge of the bird's body flowed through her. Her ankles thrummed and tingled, and burned. But somehow, in the face of all that, she managed to finish the sentence that she had begun in the car.

  "—RAGGED ROCK!" she told the thunderbird.

  That was when something very strange happened. The arching wings of the storm bird seemed to grab hold of her voice, to catch it up, and roll it around between them, and then to send it forth into the world enlarged. It was as if a pair of invisible hands, as huge as those of Mooseknuckle John, had clapped themselves like the bell of a trumpet to her mouth. The two words were shaken out across the sky, in every direction, like a blanket, scattering every other sound before them. Then the spreading blanket of echoes and re-echoes seemed to settle, billowing, down over the world below, in the form of an immense silence. The wind died. The rivers and streams ceased murmuring and ringing on the rocks. The birds of the Summerlands left off singing their endless songs. From the Big Fella Country to Turtle Ocean to the snowcaps of the Raucous Mountains there was only the echoing last traces of her voice. In this way the news of the end of the world was brought to the Far Territories of Faerie.

  And then, as if in reply, Jennifer T. heard, from a great distance, a sound that broke her heart. Someone was weeping—a woman, bitterly and freely, runny-nosed and moaning and half-laughing, the heavy grunting laughter of grief, the way you weep only when you are certain that you are absolutely alone, letting out the sadness in all its ugliness and animal strength. It was faint but unmistakable, and hot tears sprang to Jennifer T.'s eyes in response, and sorrow clutched her heart, and she forgot that the world was ending, and that she was hanging upside down with her hair falling into her face and pennies and dimes dropping from her jeans pockets one by one. For an instant longer the world was racked by the sobbing of a poor lost woman in the woods. Then the weeping faded and died. The birds resumed their songs, and the squirrels their chatter, and the beavers their toil, and the butterflies their drunken rustling flight, and the silence, and the weeping, and the echo of Ragged Rock's coming, were all drowned out by the old, stubborn life of the Summerlands.

  The thunderbird circled in low over the forest, to a spot where the tree cover thinned as the land rose toward the foothills of the Raucous Mountains. Jennifer T. saw a wide clearing, a vast stretch of gray-brown land that looked—it was hard to tell, in her current position—as if it had been stripped, or paved over, or maybe burnt. In the center of this ruined meadow rose a high grassy hill, spangled with dandelions. The contrast was stark between the lovely hill and the patch of blighted earth from which it ro
se like a green island in a sea of ash. As the great raptor circled lower Jennifer T. saw that tennis courts had been drawn in white lines on the gray surface of the wasteland, as well the circles, grids and parallelograms of other games, some of which she thought she recognized—marbles? foursquare?—and others that were strange to her. Ferishers were scattered across the waste, interrupted in their pastimes, clutching rackets and mallets and leather balls and gazing up at the sky, and at her, the girl who was hanging down from it. One of them, taller and larger than the others, raised a hand in a bewildered warning or salute. And that was when the thunderbird dropped her.

  She landed at the back of the hill, away from the ball field, and tumbled down all the way to bottom. She sat up, rubbing at her legs where they bore the throbbing purplish-red mark of the thunderbird's electric grip. The ground beneath her backside was at once hard, springy, and cold to the touch, a strange kind of clay or dried mud, and with an acrid smell of charcoal. It was like the skin of some kind of loathsome animal and she tried to roll off it, back up onto the grass and flowers of the hillside. Ferishers came running toward her, jabbering excitedly in the local dialect of Fatidic, helping her to her feet, brushing the dirt and grass from her jeans. She just had time to thank them, in English, for the kindness of their welcome when ropes were fetched, and the ferishers began to tie her arms to her sides, comfortably enough, but with very strong knots.

  "Wait!" she said.

  Now a group of ferisher women appeared at the top of the hill. They unslung longbows from their back and nocked arrows with black barbs and bright red feathers to their bowstrings. They took aim at the sky. For an instant Jennifer T. thought that they were shooting at the thunderbird, but she could see the great creature soaring off away toward the mountains, already a tiny unhittable speck and growing smaller all the time. No, the ferisher archers were aiming for something much nearer to hand, and much easier to hit.

  "No!" she said, but it was too late. With a kind of whispering sizzle the arrows took to the sky. Jennifer T. knocked her captors to one side and whirled around to watch as the arrows arced toward Skidbladnir. Three of them glanced harmlessly off the tough picofiber hide of the gas bag, and then a fourth, and a fifth, and Jennifer T. began to leap up and down. 'Yes! Way to go Mr. Feld! Picofibers rock!" The sixth arrow was plucked from the air by the swift black hands of Taffy the Sasquatch, who snapped it in two and tossed the halves back down to the ground. "Nice catch!" Jennifer T. said. "Ha, ha, ha, you stupid little—oh."

  The seventh arrow entered the front window of the Saab station wagon, on the passenger side. There was a cry that sounded unmistakably like the voice of Cinquefoil, and then Skid lurched, and shuddered, as the grammer ran out of the envelope of magic the ferisher had woven around the envelope of picofibers, and the station wagon dropped, slowly and then swiftly, to the ground.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Royal Traitor

  THE PRISONERS WERE LODGED deep in the roots of the fairy hill, or knoll, in a clean, warm room with whitewashed walls and a floor of beaten dirt covered with rushes. There were two wicker hampers of food. One was filled with little bricks formed from some kind of paste of nuts and dried fruits. They were salty, sweet, a little dusty, and gritty in the teeth. The other hamper held packets of some kind of boiled thing like a potato, with a taste like nutmeg, wrapped in an edible leaf. A large clay jar, with a dipper tied to the handle, held fresh water that somehow stayed cold hour after hour as the ferishers who held them prisoner debated their fate. Though there were five in their party—Ethan, Jennifer T., Thor, Taffy, and Cinquefoil—the cell held six prisoners. The sixth was a ferisher, a little red-haired female in a short green jerkin and baggy buckskin trousers. She called herself Spider-Rose.

  She was a member of the Dandelion Hill mob—that was the name of the tribe that had shot them from the sky. Though age seemed to be more or less an unknown thing among the ferishers she seemed somehow younger than Cinquefoil. She had a springy, impatient way of stalking back and forth across the cell. And then there was the matter of her doll. It was a horrid little thing, a knot of chamois leather with a hank of black yarn for hair. Ethan couldn't tell if it had a face or not.

  It was Spider-Rose who told them that the dusty nut bricks were called durpang and the mushy tamale thing a guapatoo. Both, she assured them, were sure to give a reuben "a dire case of the runs."

  "Don't take it personally," she said, when they asked her why they had been treated so badly. "They're in a terrible state around here these days. Have been ever since—" Her voice caught and broke, and she squeezed the horrible twist of skin, and nuzzled it with her cheek. "Ever since the ballpark was lost."

  "What happened to it?" Ethan said. He and the others had been struck by their brief aerial view of the sad gray waste around the knoll. "How did it get lost?"

  But at this Spider-Rose only squeezed her doll more tightly, and looked away.

  "What are they going to do to us?" Jennifer T. said. "That's what I want to know. We have to get out of here. We have stuff to do."

  "Oh, they're talking it over now. Talking and talking. They'll be talking for days. Course in the end it won't turn out any different for you than it would if they didn't waste a week in chatter. The punishment for intruding on a ferisher hill's a, what's the word, a no-brainer." She smiled sadly. "You reubens'll be driven mad, then sent back to the Middling to tell wild tales no one will ever believe. The Sasquatch there'll be bound with grammers and put to work in the kitchens for the rest of eternity."

  "And Cinquefoil?" Ethan said, looking anxiously at the little chief, who lay on a pallet by the water jar, unconscious.

  "Cinquefoil? Of the Boar Tooth mob? The Home Run King? That's who that is?" She went over to the pallet and looked down at him. "How about that? Oh, well, he's going to wither up something bad," said Spider-Rose. "Them arrows were tipped with iron."

  "Iron is poisonous to fairies," Ethan remembered. They had bandaged the meat of the little slugger's right hand—the arrow had entered the back and exited through the palm, luckily missing the bones—but the ferisher had shown no sign of stirring, and as Ethan sat beside him he seemed indeed to have dwindled, somehow. His face was hollow, his rib cage sunken. I finally remember something I've read about fairies, he thought, and he's not awake to hear it.

  "Please! Poisonous!" Spider-Rose shuddered, and stroked her cheek with the black yarn hair of her dolly. "We don't even like to touch the stuff. Those archers, we done trained them up specially since the time they was girls. Dressed them in little shoes of iron. Hung iron chains from their necks. Twisted the iron-jimjams right out of them. Ironbroke, we call them. But if iron goes through a ferisher, that's just, well, it's just sad. Ferisher dries up like a seedpod. Even a ironbroke girl. There's life inside her, still, but she's never waking up ever again. Nah, he's doomed."

  "Why tip your arrows with it, then?" Jennifer T. said. "Are you trying to kill other ferishers?"

  "Iron works hard on the Cousins. Graylings. Skrikers. Reubens, too. Rough customers come troubling the ferishers of the Far Territories. They like to find a spot in the Middling that brushes up to the Summerlands and push on through the gall that way. We can't be too careful."

  Ethan thought of the attack on Hotel Beach, the trucks and earthmovers blazoned TRANSFORM PROPERTIES, the pile of slaughtered birch trees. Coyote's forces had pushed and pushed against the grammers of the Boar Tooth mob until they finally got through, and the ancient ban on summertime rain was broken.

  "Is that what happened to your ball field?" Ethan said. "Did Coyote's things destroy it?"

  Spider-Rose didn't answer right away. She stopped pacing the cell, and lowered her doll to her side.

  "In a sort of a way," she said, looking down at her little feet in their green slippers. "Not quite exactly."

  "Taffy, is it true?" Jennifer T. turned to the Sasquatch. "Is he going to shrivel up and die?"

  Taffy shook her head. "Not die. Nothing can kill them but the gray
crinkles, as far as I have ever heard," she said. "But iron gives them a deep, deep hurt."

  "Isn't there anything we can do?"

  Spider-Rose shook her head. "Not in these stinking dull times I got myself all ended up with," she said, sounding somehow younger than ever. If there could be such a thing as a ferisher teenager, Ethan thought, Spider-Rose appeared to qualify. "Use to be you could just go out walking into the deep woods, find yourself a piece of the Lodgepole. A nice little slivereen of that Oldest Ash. Wave it around the hole a few times, draw out the bit of iron and the hurt along with it." She stopped, and sighed, shaking her head. "But all the bits of the Lodgepole got finded up a long time ago. Coyote's been searching 'em out."

  Ethan leapt to his feet in excitement.

  "I have one!" he cried. "I mean, I had one. A piece of the Lodgepole itself, that's just what Cinquefoil called it. I found it in the Summerlands, back at the Tooth. Only those guys must have taken it from me, your people. After they crash-landed the car. It was lying across the foot-well in the backseat and I…I know there's something special about it, I can feel it whenever I pick it up. It knocked the head clean off one of those skriker things." He flexed his hands a few times, choking up on an invisible bat handle and taking a pantomime swing. His palms ached for the cold hard pressure of the wood against them. In all the confusion of the attack, the plunge from the sky, their capture, somehow he had lost track of his piece of the Lodgepole. Now he felt ashamed. He ought never to have let them take it from him. "We have to get it back!"

  He ran to the door of their cell and began to pound on it with both fists.

  "Hey!" he said. "Hey, you! Out there! Give me back my stick!"

  After a moment Jennifer T. came and started banging on the door, too. But the wood—oak, it seemed to Ethan—absorbed the blows like the softest of cushions, sound and all. They might have been pounding on a sheet of empty air. Taffy came over, then, and the children stepped aside. The Sasquatch hunched down in front of the door—her head nearly brushed the ceiling of the cell—and glared at it steadily for a moment with her mild, intelligent eyes. Then she raised her right leg in front of her, bent at the knee. Her enormous right foot quivered with the intensity of the blow she was about to deliver.