Summerland
Page 23
Thor was studying Grim the Giant now with expression that showed traces of the pity that Ethan had been feeling. The wiry creature who only moments before had seemed to believe that his shoulders brushed the treetops and his shadow blotted out the very sun now listened to the increasingly irritable knocking at the door to the treasury with an air of misery and even dread.
"He means it," Thor said at last. "They really could take his hide."
"Don't I know it," said Grim, glumly. "Didn't the old bat craft her very mitt from the thigh skin of my great-grandpap?"
Ethan thought of the pile of great bleached bones out of which the Boar Tooth mob's ballpark had been built, and found that he could not doubt the little giant's grisly claim. Just like that, all the sympathy that he had built up toward ferishers, especially after witnessing the brutal treatment they had received from Coyote's minions, seemed to drain away. Ferishers had shot him and his friends from the sky, unprovoked, and without asking any questions, thrown them into the deepest dungeon in the knoll. They had enslaved—grammerbound—Grim the Giant. They had stolen all the human possessions piled in this dank and echoing chamber. And they had, once upon a time, stolen Mrs. Wignutt's baby, leaving a strange changeling boy behind. Dizzyingly, all the dark stories that he had read about fairies came flooding into his memory: stories of their heartlessness, their cruelty and indifference to human life and desires, the bewitchments and tricks and the harsh curses that they laid on hapless mortals.
"If we let you capture us again," he said finally, as the knocking grew ever more imperious and sharp, "you have to help us get back to our friends."
Grim's breath came out of him in a single gust as if he had been holding it tight. "Yes!" he cried.
"And then you help us get out of here."
Grim pressed his palms together. "I swear it."
Ethan looked at Thor. "What should we make him swear by? That 'by the Starboard Arm' thing they're always saying?"
"Not serious enough." Thor hand lingered on his temple. "Say 'by the Lone Eye.'"
"It's Eyeball," the giant corrected. "All right then. I swear it, by the Lone Eyeball. A swear can't be more serious than that. Now you got my apologies, rubes, but hope you'll understand I'm going to have to tie you fast."
He grabbed one of the coils of rappelling cable and quickly wound it around and around Ethan and Thor.
"I'll not cinch it overtight," he said. "It's only for show anyhow, and they don't never look too close at nothing, 'less they have some money riding on it."
He went to the door, took hold of the latch, gave them a solemn wink, and threw open the big door. There was a burst of angry jeering and several dozen ferishers trooped in, jabbering and shouting at Grim the Giant in what sounded like Old Fatidic, slapping him on the bottom and kicking at his shins, then dissolving into raspy little gusts of mean laughter. They were dressed in leggings like Cinquefoil's mob, and they had the same strange golden eyes and ruddy skin, but their tunics were cut from some silvery stuff that glowed softly in the firelight. Ethan supposed that it must be some kind of ceremonial garb they wore especially for their Councils. Leading them all was a grand personage, a full head taller than the rest of the mob, and more than twice as wide. She was dressed in leggings and a silvery tunic, like the others, but she wore a silver circlet around her head, and she was unmistakably a queen. Her skin was powdered white. She was the only one who neither laughed nor taunted the little giant. She swept past him without a look, and began to say something, in a quavering, operatic voice, when she saw the boys tied up by the pile of mailboxes. Her mouth snapped shut, and her eyes with their strange rectangular pupils grew wide, then narrowed. She turned to Grim, and gazed up at him with an eyebrow arched, her arms folded tightly under her magnificent bosom.
At the sight of the ferishers Ethan felt a hot shiver run up his spine, and his toes curled and uncurled inside his shoes.
"Might I ask, then, what in the name a yer highest-pocketed and lowest-browed forefather these reubens is doing in my treasury, Mr. Grimalkin John?" Though she had Cinquefoil's broken grammar and accent, her voice had none of his raspy warmth. It was cold and barren of feeling. In her size, her pallid skin, her silvery gown, she made Ethan think of a tiny, cold moon.
There was a silence that grew very long and stretched very thin, and then Grimalkin John, somewhat to Ethan's surprise, laid a hand on his belly and cast a rather evil stare in Ethan's direction, and said,
"Don't hold it against me none, ma'am, but I been living somewhat overmuch on mouse and rat and whatnot for quite some time, as what I'm sure you'll acknowledge. It's an awful long time since I done sucked the good sweet marrow of a nice, meaty little reubenish bone." He lowered his head and managed to work a convincing flush of shame into his cheeks. "I just couldn't, you know. Resist."
At this the ferishers burst out laughing, Queen Filaree the loudest of all. Several little clinking sacks of gold-pieces changed hands, and Ethan marveled that the ferishers had found enough time to wager on what Grim the Giant's excuse was going to be in the brief seconds between the asking of the queen's question and its answer. It was a little worrisome to think that some of them could have been so certain that he planned to devour the boys. Then the queen stopped laughing, and came over to stand beside Thor and Ethan. She gazed up at them, her expression blank but not unpleasant, the way you might stare at the rainbow in a greasy thumbprint on a windowpane, the instant before you wiped it away. Then she turned back to the little giant.
"Well, Mouser, yer in luck," she said. "Fer here we are, spent all the day in a considerable palaver, and in the end come ta no decision whatever but ta go out and play in the sunshine o' the afternoon. Would that it might be nine innings of baseball. But alas."
There was a general sad murmuring among the ferishers at the prospect, and Ethan wondered how much of the meanness of these ferishers was due simply to the loss of their ball field.
"So look here, Ratcatcher," the queen went on. "Just ya be fetching us our racquets"—she uttered the word distastefully—"and balls, and the mallets, and so on, and we'll leave ya ta yer meal."
The giant nodded, and wandered back into the shadows, where Ethan now saw another, smaller door, standing ajar. This must be where Grim the Giant had been concealed when he and Thor first crossed into the room. As the little giant pushed the door open, Ethan caught sight of two long racks filled with dozens and dozens of baseball bats. The little giant banged and clattered around in the equipment room—Ethan supposed that this might form, in a ferisher's opinion, the heart of the treasure—and then came back out carrying several small canvas sacks and pushing a wheeled croquet set.
The queen looked at them with revulsion, and Ethan saw her eye stray wistfully to the baseball bats ranged on the walls of the equipment room.
"Alas, Spider-Rose, what ya done to yer mother," she said, with a sigh. And a great golden tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away, and turned to Grim. "Carry that rubbish out," she said curtly, nodding toward the croquet and tennis gear. With a backward look of warning, Grim followed the ferishers out of the treasury.
Ethan and Thor set about trying to get out of the ropes that tied them together, but giants have the knack of knots, and in the end they were forced to wait until Grim returned. Rapidly he untied them, and then he disappeared into the equipment room again, and began rattling around. Ethan and Thor followed him. The little giant was crouching down beside a straw pallet no different from those that had furnished their cell, stuffing some clothes into another of the canvas equipment sacks.
"What are you doing?" Ethan said.
"Leaving," the little giant said. He tied up the sack and rose to his feet. "Been thinking about it often enough lately. Might as well do it now."
"But can you leave?" said Thor. "Aren't you a bound giant?"
Grim nodded, looking quite grim.
"What will happen to you if you run away?" Ethan said. "What kind of a grammer is it?"
"I told yo
u, scat-for-brains," said the little giant. "They'll have my hide. I'll start walking away from this hill in any direction and little by little, I guess, though tell the truth I ain't never seen it done, my skin'll start getting, well, skinnier. Less and less of it, until I'm a day's walk from her that binds me, Queen Full-a-rot, I calls her, and then it's all gone, and the bones and such are showing plain as anything, and there's nothing at all to hold the inside of me in, nor keep out everything what's meant to be outside."
"Ick," Ethan said.
"Don't matter, though, because once they found out I helped you and your friends, they'd have it anyway, wouldn't they?" He shouldered the bag and took a last look around at the room, the neat ranks of ferisher-scale bats, the ornate baskets overflowing with bright little white balls, the spare bases and extra gloves and sets of catcher's masks and old leather shin-guards. At the very back of the room was a long workbench, well stocked with tools, and beside this a great hulking old wooden machine, busy with flywheels and belts. This must be where the Chief Mechanical crafted the various fanciful machines in which the ferishers so delighted. A look of disgust, but not unmingled with regret, filled his eyes. "Maybe if I'm strong, and this much lucky, myself will hold together until I can get back to home and wrap the blood and bones of my fingers around the throats of them what bound me into the service of this mob in the first place. The pack of great snakes and weasels that my mother gave me in the stead of brothers."
"Mooseknuckle John?"
"Aye, he's one of 'em. And like as not the first I'll seek to liberate from his breath should I get the chance."
He smiled a thin, mean smile, and then his gaze fell on the stick in Ethan's hands.
"We're in some'at of a hurry," he said. "But before we skedaddle, I wonder if you doesn't want me to try and work that splinter of yours into a usefuller shape than it has at present?"
"Useful?" Ethan said. "You mean you know how to—can you make a bat?"
"It's not five minutes' work for me, on that gin of mine," the little giant said, pointing to the big machine. "But I'll do it only on a condition, and that's this: you got to let me keep all the shavings that get shedded off in the turning. If I can stuff my pocket with woundwood, who knows but that the binding grammer might not fit me just a little more loose."
Ethan looked at Thor, who nodded.
"I have a feeling we're going to be needing to hit some things, and not just balls," Thor said. "If a bat wasn't better for hitting stuff than a plain branch, why would people bother to make them?"
So Ethan handed the stick to the little giant, who took it with a certain rough tenderness and carried it back to the big machine at the back of the room. It was kept so far from the outer room and the halls of the knoll, he explained, because of the iron in it, and in the sharp-edged tools he needed for carving. He screwed the ends of the stick between the two spindles of the lathe, and gave it a slap with his hand.
"It's an awful fine piece of wood," he said, almost as if he regretted having to alter it. "Awful fine."
He began, with deep, regular strokes of his left foot, to work a great black treadle that lay in the dusty shadows beneath the hulk of the machine. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster the wood began to turn. The little giant reached for a large metal tool, and held its edge very close to the dark blur of the whirling wood. He paused. Ethan and Thor crowded in behind him.
"This here shank's conformulated out of weird-iron," Grim the Giant said. "Wouldn't nothing else do."
He touched the tip of the weird-iron shank to the wood.
Ethan was never sure afterward exactly what happened next. Something long and thin seemed to reach toward him from the whirling blur at the heart of the lathe, a jagged streak, dark at one end, blazing gold at the other. It lanced out from under the blade in the little giant's hands and struck Ethan, with a bright, stinging sizzle, full in the chest. It could only have been—and afterward both Thor and Grim insisted that it was—an especially long shaving of ashwood, peeled off by the first flashing strike of the shank. But to Ethan it looked and felt like nothing so much as long, jumping spark of electricity. It burned the air in his nostrils, and left a strange pulsing ache in his breastbone. A strange haze filled Ethan's eyes, tears and smoke and the sparkle that fills your head when you have been crouching, and then too quickly rise to your feet. He was filled with a powerful longing to handle the ashwood branch. The palms of his hands ached and tingled—they bothered him—as if something that he had lost, whose absence was as much a part of him as his name or the taste of his own tongue in his mouth, were about to be placed, at long last, in his grasp.
The air around the little giant was filled with a shower of glittering sparks that hit his crooked features with a weird light. For an instant the three of them stood, human, giant, and ferisher changeling, at the heart of the earth, lit by some ancient fire of making. Then, hours or minutes later, the sparks died, and the haze lifted from Ethan's eyes, and Grim the Giant turned to Ethan. His face was rimed with sawdust; sawdust had settled like snow on his hair and eyebrows.
"There's but one stroke remaining," he said. "A heart-knot, deep in the wood. If I cut it, you will have yourself a right fine piece of lumber, the best that I can work; and no more. If you cut it, you might craft yourself, if I'm not terrible mistaken, a bat for all the ages. Or else, lacking practice, you might turn that there chunk of fine woundwood to nothing more than a great flimsy toothpick fit for my old pappy's gums. It all depends."
"On what?" Ethan said. He leaned in to peer at what the giant had done. As promised he had, in a few minutes, turned the knobby hunk of wood that Ethan had found into a smooth, handsome baseball bat, delicately tapered at the handle. The unfinished lumber looked as soft as suede and shone pale and inviting. It was still attached to its former tree-branch self by a narrow pin at either end, where rough blocks of grayish branch remained clamped to the spindles. At first Ethan thought that what Grim wanted him to do was cut the bat loose, but then he saw, about halfway down the slender handle of the bat, a raised ridge of wood, of a darker hue than the rest, that had not yet been cut away. It was like a ring or collar, circling the grip. He could see that if you didn't cut it away, it would dig right into your hand. "What does it depend on?"
"Why, on you, natcherly," the little giant said, just at Ethan had known that he would. "On what you got inside you. On what's in those hands of yours, and in the heart that feeds them."
"Why?" Ethan said, filled with sudden dread of failure, of striking out, exactly like that which seized him when it was his turn to step up to the plate. "Why does it have to depend on that?"
But, of course, he already knew the answer to that question, too.
"Why?" said the little giant. He was busily scooping up handfuls of sawdust from the floor around the lathe and filling his pockets with them. "Because that's the nature of these things!"
"Come on, Feld," Thor said. It was the first time in a long time—maybe the first time ever—that Thor had not referred to him directly as Captain. "We have to get it back to Cinquefoil."
"Right," Ethan said. He took the lathe tool from Grim the Giant. It had a wood handle, and its metal shank was long and curved strangely in on itself lengthwise, as if it had been stopped just short of turning itself into a tube. The tip of it was curved like the moon of your thumbnail and glinted softly. Grim put a foot on the treadle and began to work it up and down. As the bat began to spin again, the ridge became a dark blur and then finally seemed to disappear altogether except as a fleeting shadow Ethan was not even sure he really could see. Slowly he lowered the tip of the shank toward the general area where he felt the dark ridge might lie. He knew that if he pressed too hard, he might very well cut clear through the handle of the bat. What was left might be useful for healing Cinquefoil, but no good whatever for hitting baseballs, and not much good for smacking at the heads of skrikers, either.
"Not so tight," said Grim. "You ain't trying to choke the life out of it!"
"I can't do it!" he shouted.
He handed the tool to Grim the Giant, who took his foot from the treadle. The bat came whuffling to a stop. The dark lump was still there, of course, right in the middle of the handle.
"I'm sorry," Ethan said. "I—I'm not ready yet. You do it."
Grim raised the tool, and put his foot on the treadle. Then he stepped back, and turned to Ethan, and looked him up and down in a curious way, rubbing a little doubtfully at his bony chin. He took a long, narrow saw, wicked as the jaw of some carnivorous fish, from his workbench, and quickly ripped through the unturned ends of the stick, cutting loose the bat. He gripped it by its handle and took a couple of practice swings. He nodded.
"Going to drive you mad, that knot," he said. "But let's leave it there for now."
Ethan took the bat from him, and ran his hands along its surface. The touch was at once hard and satiny, like the coat of a horse's forehead.
"It wants sanding, of course," Grim said. "And oiling. But I reckon there's no time for that."
Ethan nodded, though he had only half heard the little giant's words; the shame of his failure throbbed in his chest as wildly as after any one of his countless strikeouts. For the first time since leaving Clam Island, he was glad that his father was not around to witness another display of Ethan's ineptitude. He gripped the handle, and the knot bit softly into the meat of his hand.