Summerland

by Michael Chabon

  Then, after they had been climbing and searching for a long time, they came to a door that was nearly as tall as they. Unlike the others, it was shut tight, and its knotty expanse featured neither latch nor handle. For a moment Ethan thought that they might have stumbled onto the council chamber itself, and he drew back, then crept forward and put his ear against the door. Silence. The mutterings and shouts of the ferisher debate continued to drift down, as before, from farther up the tunnel. He pushed on the high door, but it was stuck fast. He crouched down, and put his shoulder against it, and pressed with and all his strength.

  "The treasury," Thor said softly, and his hand went once more to his temple to scratch. "All kinds of grammer on this door."

  Ethan looked at his friend. The information, though it came so easily to his lips, seemed at the same time to be causing Thor a certain amount of pain.

  "Is there a Branch you can—?" he began, but Thor was already pressing himself against the door. Ethan grabbed hold of him by the waistband of his jeans, and in half a second, with a shivery chiming as of icicles, they had crossed the massively thick door.

  Say treasury and the thought springs to mind, perhaps, of glinting mounds of doubloons and swag, golden candelabras, ornate caskets choked with emeralds and diamonds. But that is not the sort of loot that interests a ferisher. No, a ferisher's treasure is something else entirely. When Ethan and Thor crossed into the treasury of the Dandelion Hill ferishers, by far the tallest room in the knoll—it was nearly high enough for Taffy to have stood erect—they found AAA batteries, picture hooks, and rubber doorstops; shoelaces, neckties, and the strings of bathing trunks; watchbands, watch works, watch crystals, and the loose hands and faces of watches; loops of wire, baling twine, packing twine, bungee cord, rappelling rope, and electrical wire (coated in plastic, rubber, and fabric); ten thousand shirt buttons of bone and vinyl, wood and shell; tubes, gearboxes, coils, and grilles filched from the backrooms of radio-repair shops, hardware stores, and garages; Christmas ornaments, firecrackers, and the Easter eggs that roll deep under the hydrangea and are never found again; uncountable, but no fewer than two hundred and fifty, ferisher-sized balls of tinfoil, aluminum foil, gold leaf, Mylar, and colored cellophane; canvas stolen from painters and lace from fine ladies; handkerchiefs, bandannas, headscarves, and ten thousand rags of gingham, flannel, corduroy, denim, and terry; no end of house keys, car keys, motel keys, safe-deposit keys, and the keys to locks from the diaries of girls long since grown old and buried, along with their deep and tedious secrets; hair combs, hair clasps, and barrettes; rhinestone brooches, imitation-pearl ear-rings, and cheap finger rings given out by a century of dentists; unmatched but otherwise perfectly good argyle socks; catnip balls, sun-bleached Frisbees, lawn darts, rubber pork chops, and the fuselages of a thousand balsawood gliders.… In short, everything that you (or someone very much like you) has ever lost track of and stood, in the middle of your bedroom (or one very much like yours), holding on to that other perfectly good argyle sock, saying to yourself, "Where do they go?"

  "We are never going to find my stick," Ethan said glumly. "Not in all this. Not if we had a hundred years to look for it. I mean, I sort of think it would be right in the front here." He poked with his toe at some brass buttons, of the sort found most often on men's navy blazers, which were piled by the door. "But they could just as easily have heaved it up somewhere in this mess way back there and then we…" He trailed off, and stood for several moments feeling overwhelmed by the sheer variety and size of the pile of junk. Spider-Rose was right: Cinquefoil was doomed. And without the ferisher chief to lead them and guide them, they would never find Ethan's father.

  At the thought of his father Ethan took out the dark glasses and put them on. To his surprise the scene that had become so familiar—his father huddled on a patch of dark gray, in a pale gray room—was gone. In its place was a scene so bizarre and unexpected that it took him a moment to realize what he was seeing. At first he thought it was a billowing banner or sheet hung in the wind. Then he decided that it was a carpet of some kind, over which ran a rippling stream of water. Finally he realized that what he was looking at was mice, thousands of them, millions of them, tiny white mice running for their lives. And in the lower part of the lenses a pair of claw-like mitts was reaching down into the running river of mice and scooping them up, in the general direction of Ethan's mouth. The image jerked and swung as whoever was eating mice tossed his head and worked his jaws with evident pleasure.

  Ethan whipped the glasses off his face and stuffed them down into his pocket, shuddering. He was going to have to think twice about putting them on again. He looked around for Thor, and presently found him, perched halfway up a mound of what looked like binders or notebooks, sitting on his haunches, turning over a pleated packet of paper, holding it this way and that, folding it, opening it, folding it again.

  "What is it?" Ethan said. Thor said nothing, wholly absorbed in studying the sheet of paper, which looked to be about as big as an open newspaper. If they were still back on Clam Island, and it was a few days before, Ethan would have said that Thor was scanning the paper into his database. "Thor?"

  Ethan found a toe-hold in the mound of binders and hoisted himself up. The little binders, he saw now, were actually address books, plastic- and leather-bound, purse-sized and pocket-sized and briefcase-sized, representing the total acquaintanceship of a couple of thousand people easy. He remembered his mother's having lost her address book, once, the day before she went in for her biopsy—"the worst week of my life," she had called it at the time, though there would of course be worse to come. He wondered idly if his mother's address book could be somewhere in this mountain he was climbing. Whose addresses and phone numbers would have been in that book? What would those people say to him if he called them now? How many address books out there still had his mother's name in them, neatly penciled, with a phone number that was disconnected and an address that was no longer good?

  Even before he reached Thor's perch he could see that what the other boy was studying with such interest was a map, a large one, which had been ruined by repeated and slapdash refolding. There were a number of such maps in the glove compartment of Skidbladnir, puzzle-maps, Rubik's cubes of paper so thoroughly "bollixed up," as Mr. Feld put it, that they couldn't ever really be opened anymore. They had been folded so many times and so incorrectly that they were now forever sealed by some mysterious origami of carelessness. At best you could peel back a pleat and peer inside, looking for a street or highway in a cramped, crazy-quilt terrain where the Pacific Ocean, say, bumped up against downtown Phoenix. Thor was not studying the contents of the map. He was still trying to figure out how to arrange and collapse the colored rectangular sections back together the right way. There were whitish rectangles, and greenish rectangles, and brownish rectangles, painted, covered in tiny black writing, and shot through with curling lines of gray. And then there were the blue rectangles, serenely blue and blank as the sky with no gray lines, no writing or marks on them at all.

  "What's it a map of?" Ethan said, crouching down alongside Thor, accidentally starting a landslide of address books toward the floor. As he leaned in to get a closer look, he saw that the paper on which the map was printed looked old and yellowed, and had chipped considerably along some of its edges. Then he looked closer still and saw how crooked and quirky were the letters in which the names of the various features of the map were written. It was the same alphabet he had seen on the letter-scroll used by Johnny Speakwater to spit out the future as seen by the oracular clam. "Can you tell? Do you see any place names you recognize? Is there a legend? Is there a compass rose?"

  But Thor did not answer. He just went on peeling back sections of the map from one another, folding it in half, then in quarters, then opening it into brand-new quarters and halves.

  "Come on, Thor," Ethan said. "We don't have time for you to play with that. We have to find that stick." Thor ignored him. He had folded the map down to a single th
ick rectangle, one of the blue ones without any text or markings. Now he began to open it up again, one tentative fold at a time.

  "Thor," Ethan pleaded. "Thor, come on, we have to—hey. Way to go."

  He'd done it: opened up the map all the way, smooth and unpleated. He held it out in front of him and Ethan, arms spread wide. From one end to another, from top to bottom and from right hand to left, there hung before them a single, uninterrupted expanse of blue, like a detail of a close-up of a tiny blue section of the wide-open sky. It was six rectangles high and nine wide, like this:

  "What kind of map is that? What's it of? Turn it over."

  The reverse of the map was made of thousands and thousands of overlapping green splotches, pointed ovals, some large and some small, each one painted carefully and edged and shadowed to give them the appearance of depth. Ethan looked closer and saw that they were not splotches but leaves, painted green leaves connected by a bewildering tangle of the curling, twisting, bending gray lines that were meant, he understood, to represent the branches of a tree. Each leaf was marked, in turn, with little picture symbols for rivers and woods, mountains and lakes, hills and cities, and countless other places, all of them named in the crabbed little ferisher alphabet.

  "What happened to the mostly brown parts there were a minute ago?" Ethan said. "And the mostly white ones?"

  Thor turned his head toward Ethan, and looked at him. Though it lasted only a second, Ethan never forgot that look. He had been so often the recipient of Thor's information, of his facts and his preposterous theories. But he had never until this moment seen in Thor's eyes—in anyone's eyes—such a look of utter knowledge. Whatever else happened to him, whatever became of him, in spite of his being too tall, too red-blooded, too mortal, too human, Thor had found his way into a world that he understood. Back in the Middling Thor had been like one of those meteorites you heard about that fall from space and land at the bottom of the ocean. Though it lies half buried in mud and half encrusted in a skin of plankton and mollusks, though it is warmed by vents in the earth and gives shelter to all manner of fish, at its heart lie the chemicals and elements, the sparkling mysterious stuff of outer space. Without saying a word, Thor quickly folded the map down to a single rectangle, this time a greenish one—Ethan saw a patch of rippling black lines meant to represent a sea. Then Thor opened the map back up again, and turned it over. This time the reverse was made up of a mass of pale brown leaves, neatly painted and linked as before by intertwining branches, thick and thin, painted in gray. Ethan opened his mouth but for a minute nothing would come out. Then at last he finally managed to say, "White?"

  Thor nodded, and with the practiced ease of a magician, folded the map down to a single brownish rectangle, then out once again into a map of brown leaves. He turned the map over; the other side of it was covered in clusters and masses of white leaves, traced with ink of pale blue-gray, and all interconnected with the veins and arteries of gray.

  "Four sides," Ethan said. "Four worlds! It's a map of the Tree!"

  "That's right," Thor said. "The white one is the Winterlands. The green one is the Summerlands. The brown one is the Middling. And the blue one is—"

  "The Gleaming. Which is blank. Because no one knows what happens there. Or how you get there. Or even who lives there."

  "I know who lives there," Thor said. "Old Mr. Wood. And his brothers and sisters. The—what Mr. Rideout called the Tahmahnawis. The spirits. The gods. They—they're all up there, or over there, or in there. In the Gleaming. They're trapped there. Yeah. Yeah, Coyote did it. There's a—there's a whole story, like, a song, or a poem or I can't quite…" He shook his head. "It's all about how Coyote tricked them. Got them in there and sealed the Gate. And now it's been sealed ever since. And none of them, not even Old Mr. Wood, can get out. It's part of all this…data that seems to have been…uploaded to my head since we got to the Summerlands."

  "Thor?" Ethan said. "You know—you know that you aren't an android. Not really."

  "I know it," Thor said.

  "But you know—you know that you aren't—I guess you aren't really human, exactly, either."

  "Tell me about it," Thor said. "Like I haven't known that my whole entire life." He shrugged. "I guess being an android was the best explanation I could come up with for how I always felt."

  "And you're all right—I mean, it's okay? You're okay? With being, well, a changeling?"

  "I guess so," Thor said. "I don't really have any, you know, choice. It's just—well, there's this one thing I'm sort of wondering about. A little. Looking around, you know, at all this stuff these ferishers have taken from people over the years. They do take it, you know. It's not like they just find it lying around."

  "Yeah?" Ethan said. "What? What do you wonder?"

  "Well, it's just, the Boar Tooth mob, if they're the ones that, you know, left me. When they left me…"

  "Yeah?"

  "What did they do with the baby they took?"

  This was not a question, Ethan found, that he had any great desire ever to find the answer to.

  "Come on," he said. "Fold that thing up and take it with us. I'm sure it'll come in handy. And let's get going after that stick."

  At this point, though it's a little late, I should probably mention that while ferisher treasures differ from those of dragons, dwarfs, gnomes, etc., in nearly every respect, they resemble them in this one: they are always, but always, carefully, and fearfully, and very often fatally, left in the hands of an ill-tempered and none-too-well-fed guardian.

  "Stick, is it?" said a small, hard voice behind them.

  CHAPTER 14

  A Mother's Tears

  THE CANDLES IN THE SCONCES that lit the little cell guttered, spitting and smoking, and then, one by one, went out. At last only a single flame flickered weakly in the sconce just over the spot where Jennifer T. sat, her head pillowed against the soft fur of Taffy's lap, in the shadow of one of the Sasquatch's heavy breasts. Jennifer T. and Taffy lay that way for a long time, without speaking. They listened to the shallow breathing of the wounded chief and the rowdy snoring of the ferisher princess. The Sasquatch's breath slowed. After a while it occurred to Jennifer T. that it had been a long time since either of them had moved.

  "Taffy?" Jennifer T. said at last. "You awake?"

  "Yes, Jennifer T."

  Taffy shifted a little, and Jennifer T. tilted back her head to look past the coal-black boobs at the Sasquatch's face. Taffy's little dark eyes glinted in the dim light from the sconce overhead.

  "Did you, well, did you hear anything…strange? Today, I mean. Back when that thunderbird had me hanging there like that."

  "Hear?" Taffy said, and a low growl of amusement rumbled in her throat. "I heard plenty. The whole Far Territories heard you, my dear."

  "No, I mean, did you hear anything else?"

  But Taffy seemed not to have noticed the question.

  "When I was just a little squatchling," she said, "I remember the old ladies used to tell us that the Last Day would be signaled by the crowing of a rooster. But I guess they were wrong."

  Jennifer T. thought about this for a moment. Then she said, "Well, I am a Rooster, in a way."

  And she explained to Taffy all about the Clam Island Mustang League, and Mr. Perry Olafssen, and the Angels, and the Reds, and the Bigfoot Tavern Bigfoots, whose team nickname drew another growl from the Sasquatch, though this time it sounded like a growl of irritation.

  "Why must they?" Taffy said, shaking her big head. "It's just so cruel.''

  As Jennifer T. talked on about the Mustang League, she found herself, somewhat to her surprise, missing Clam Island. She had been born and had spent nearly every moment of her eleven years there, except for the summer when she was five, which she had spent at the home of her mother's mother, in Spokane. Clam Island was the only home she had ever known. Now she was very far away from it, separated from that rainy gray-green patch of island not only by miles but also by time and enchantment. So perhaps it is no
t terribly surprising if, lying cold in the darkness of an underground cell, in the midst of the utmost wilderness of the Summerlands, she was suddenly wracked with homesickness. Nonetheless she was surprised. She missed the dirt and the smell of the grass at Ian "Jock" MacDougal Regional Ball Field. She missed her bicycle, and the scratchy cheeks of her uncle Mo, and even the three ancient and irritable ladies in their enormous recliners. She missed Mr. Perry Olafssen!

  After a while she left off talking, but thoughts of home ran on in her mind. Only now they began to meld and entangle themselves in one another, like sections of a map being carelessly folded: she was falling asleep. As she drifted off, she found herself missing, in a kind of dream-stew of homesickness, old Albert Rideout himself, who was standing beside her now, at the controls of Victoria Jean, with the fly of his trousers half zipped. He was piloting the airship, with a steady hand, over the Cascade Mountains. When they reached Spokane he flew right over Grandmother Spicer's house, with its pointed turret, and there on the front porch stood Jennifer T.'s mother, whose given name was Theodora. She was more beautiful than Jennifer T. remembered her—in fact she looked much more like Ethan Veld's mother, at least as she appeared in a framed photograph on the buffet in the Felds' living room. As Albert and Jennifer T. sailed overhead, the beautiful, Mrs. Feldish Theodora raised her small white hand and slowly, with a sad smile on her face, began to wave. And then the smile faded, and from somewhere deep inside the house with the pointed tower came the sound of someone roughly weeping, dark barking sobs of terrible pain.

  Jennifer T. sat up, in the semi-darkness, her heart pounding. Taffy was crying—thundering, rough-edged Sasquatch sobs.

  "You did hear something, didn't you?" Jennifer T. said, with the utter certainty of someone who is not yet fully awake. "You heard it. After I shouted out 'Ragged Rock.' A woman was crying. A mother was crying." She didn't know why she was so sure that the weeping woman was a mother, but she was. "Taffy, I know that you heard it."