by Liz Braswell
“Can’t travel like I used to,” he was mumbling to himself. “Age requires more first-class treatment. Carriage boys and service gnats.”
“Are you all right?” Alice asked solicitously.
“Far better than our old companions, presumably,” the Dodo replied, for just a moment morose. Then he shook himself out, preened a couple of feathers into place on his neck, and straightened his shoulders. “Come, then! To the Queen of Clubs! It’s a bit tricky from here on out, so be on your guard and careful we don’t get separated.”
Alice stepped cautiously into the grass and looked around. They were in a gently rising meadow at the end of a wide valley of some sort. Grey cliffs like bulwarks bounded either side of the view. Far ahead, dark strips of foliage could be seen weaving in and out of the mild hills. The occasional patch of trees might have hid monsters or jubjub birds, but nothing in the landscape seemed immediately threatening or dangerous.
“There’s nothing to worry about here. There’s no one around—it’s safe as houses,” she protested.
“But how safe are those?” the Dodo asked. “They burn down and get exploded by young ladies all the time.”
Alice decided not to argue with this, especially since she had been a young lady who had in fact exploded one.
They walked up one hill and down the other side. Over here the grass was grainier and dark green. Just ahead was a beautiful prairie blanketed with little white flowers, which Alice bent down to smell.
“Oy, get yer nasty knows away from us,” one of them shrieked. “’Oo nose where it’s been?”
“It’s like they never been smelled themselves,” another one said, sniffing. “If they ’ad, they would think twice about doin’ it to others, they would.”
“For shame!” a third cried, pulling a tiny bud safely away in its protective leaves. “Stinking away at such a wee one. You…hussy!”
“Right,” Alice said, standing back up again. “I deserve that.”
And so they kept walking.
This hill grew steeper and steeper until eventually it became the green skirt of a small, perfectly square tor—which Alice was fairly certain she hadn’t seen before, and should have, considering all had been mellow and field-y with near infinite sight lines a few minutes ago. Just when the way became impossible and nearly sheer, a convenient set of steps appeared, carved into the cliff. Rocks jutted out at helpful locations for placing a hand for balance.
“Of course,” Alice said. “How perfectly Wonderland. It always provides—just not in the way you expect.”
She self-assuredly clambered up, remembering with ease the movements from a childhood of climbing trees.
At the top was a delightful alpine heath with short golden-green grass and scads of beautiful pink and purple flowers that Alice decided not to study more closely. Even though at second glance it became obvious that the glorious sunlight wasn’t sparkling off their dew but the petals themselves: each blossom was a jewel, or maybe glass, and chimed gently in the wind.
The Dodo came up close behind her, huffing a little.
“Oh, you can practically see the Queen of Clubs’ demesne from here,” he said, pulling out a tiny telescope and looking through it the wrong way. He winced when the eyepiece touched the gash across his lid. “It’s very tiny, but gets large enough once you’re close. See it glitter?”
And there in the distance far below them, like a shiny beetle, was a blob of something black and unsuitable for the world they currently seemed to be in. Unnatural and man-made. The Queen of Clubs’ castle!
Alice felt like skipping; maybe it was the air or the height (heights had never bothered her, and they still didn’t). She was giddily happy as they walked along what turned out to be a plateau and not a single mountain after all. A little stream trickled out of some decoratively set boulders. Beside it was an old worn sign with bright gold letters that said YOU MAY DRINK ME, IF YOU PLEASE.
“Oh, I do wish we had brought a picnic,” Alice said, kneeling down to take a sip.
“You didn’t—” the Dodo began.
The ground gave way and Alice tumbled, far less pleasantly this time.
She banged back and forth in what seemed to be an open-topped tunnel. It was hard and cold and so slick and slippery that she couldn’t slow herself down despite the hexagonal tiles that tessellated its brown-and-yellow surface. The grooves in between them were too slight and shallow to dig her fingernails in.
She kept falling.
She tried making her whole body stiff and using friction to slow her descent; that resulted in a skinned elbow and her dress tearing apart at the knees.
She hit the bottom with a whump.
A tiny cluster of white flowers inches from her face glared at her dubiously as she lay still (in much pain) for a moment.
Whump!
The Dodo landed right beside her.
“Alice! We were doing so well!” he scolded. “And then you had to go and bungle it.”
“Bungle it? Bungle what? What did I do?” she cried, attempting to rise. She ached all over.
She tipped her head back to see where they had come from. The thing she had slid down on was…well…a slide. A brown-and-yellow one that snaked back and forth up the side of the hill to the top with the stream.
“You took the spring’s water. You just drank and didn’t say please, naughty girl. What kind of leader and savior are you, anyway?”
“I’m not…But I’ve never had to say please before!” Alice cried. “This is Wonderland—everyone does just precisely as he, she, or it pleases. Without even a modicum of polite and civilized behavior. The sign said Drink Me, so I drank!”
“No, it said You May Drink Me, If You Please. Very proper and polite. You are here now, in the vicinity of the Clubs,” the Dodo said primly, taking out a pince-nez and polishing it with a thumbfeather. “Rules are rules. And the Queen of Clubs has quite a few of them keeping her safe from the rest of the land. All the border areas around her castle are strict about that sort of thing.”
“All right, I can sort of understand that,” Alice said thoughtfully. The Queen of Clubs was sounding more and more like a reasonable, normal person every moment. Like Mrs. Yao.
She peered closely at the slide they had come down. Through some trick of her eyes or the hypnotic pattern of the tiles, instead of looking hollowed out it suddenly became the very opposite, curvy and full.
The end of it, or rather the head, pulled itself up and hissed at Alice, baring two fangs and a large forked tongue.
“Oh!” Alice said, falling back in fear at the green slit eyes. But the head did no more than weave back and forth as the rest of the creature stayed glued to the side of the hill.
“A giant snake! What in heavens…OH! I understand now!”
She stood up and looked around, carefully inspecting the miniature dell they were now in. There were neat squares of darker grass ahead and to either side of them. On their left was a tree with steps hammered in a spiral up around it, leading to somewhere above the treetops.
“It’s a giant game of Snakes and Ladders!” she cried.
“Well, of course it is,” the Dodo said simply. “Now will you kindly follow my lead, since you apparently do not have a real enough understanding of the game—or good enough breeding—to proceed properly? If you were actually familiar with Snakes and Ladders, you would remember that traits like Frivolity and Greediness slide you back spaces, sometimes quite a bit. Habits like Kindness and Pity advance you. Your Impolite Behavior before nearly sent us back to the beginning.”
Alice was outraged. First of all, she was an absolute master of games of all sorts in her household. She had been playing this one almost since before she could count.
On top of that, she was nothing but proper behavior. She always said please and thank you and curtsied when she was trying to think of what to say. One could complain about her lack of respect for social convention when it came to her camera, friends, or her occasionally mannish walkin
g habits, but in conversation at a polite dinner party she had few equals.
“I beg your pardon! Do you remember the caucus races? And…the tea party? I was polite while everyone else was extraordinarily rude!”
“There is a Time and Place for everything,” the Dodo said. “And Time is winding down. We could wait for him here, to wrap everything up, or we could proceed to the Queen of Clubs and save whoever is left of our friends. Being Quarrelsome, you know, slides you back five spaces. And so does having too much Pride.”
Chastened, Alice flushed—and deservedly so.
“You are quite correct. I am most sorry, Dodo. Please lead the way.”
“Take whichever way you like,” the Dodo said magnanimously. “Take two if you so desire. It’s what you do with them where I shall set the example. You see—Generosity. We should be advancing quite soon enough.”
Alice curtsied—very politely. “After you, Mr. Dodo.”
“Thank you kindly, Miss Alice,” he said, also curtsying, which was strange. His tail feathers flipped up and his legs sort of squatted to the side.
Alice decided not to say anything about it. She wondered if Tact was an approved—and useful—trait in this game.
As it is assumed that the reader has more than passing knowledge of Alice’s previous adventures, we can cut to the chase a bit—because otherwise you would be doing nothing at all this chapter except for watching a rather slow game being played by a young woman and an old bird.
They avoided a square in whose center was a bright pile of all sorts of fancy treasure heaped up on a glass table: crowns and coronets and scepters and rings and other gaudy trash. But Covetousness was not the way to win the game.
Alice asked the Dodo to forgive her for setting them back several spaces and apologized profusely for it, and so they climbed a rapidly appearing, oddly lonely set of steps (for Penitence) that seemed to lead to nowhere but actually put them on the other side of a fast-moving and deep creek impossible to cross any other way.
She vaguely remembered another stream of water like it—or maybe it was a river—that she had rowed down once and nearly fallen into.
Alice bit her lip at the reminder of her other life. Of course she had to save an entire world here, but she had emergencies waiting for her when she returned to Angleland as well. What precisely thay were she couldn’t quite remember. Something about children and tea and windows and…
“Catch it over here,” a voice said behind her.
She spun around: the Cheshire Cat was on his back in the grass, playing with a daisy. Literally, of course: one claw was patty-caking with the leaves of the young bud.
“What am I to catch?” Alice asked politely.
“Your mind. It wandered off the game board entirely. That’s dangerous in Wonderland, you know.” He flowed up into a sitting position and the stripes on his tail moved a bit, winking on and off. Alice put out a hand to stroke him; his fur was warm from the sun. How long had he been there—or anywhere, really—watching her?
The Dodo was distracted, muttering to himself, investigating what lay beyond the border of their current square on the sides adjacent to the river.
“I was thinking about how it seems like I have two worlds to worry about now,” Alice said with a sigh. “A real one and this one. I can’t help thinking about the mess I left back home—children taken into custody…”
“Are the ones being thrown in the Queen of Hearts’ dungeon and plundered of their toys any less real than your little ragamuffins?” the cat asked, as lazily as ever.
“Well, don’t you suddenly become clear as crystal when something ticks you off!” Alice snapped, withdrawing her hand from the cat and putting it on her hip. “Perhaps I misspoke, but I have spent all my life in that other world and only been in this one a few times. And this world…it vanishes or fades from my memory over there, like it’s a dream and not real at all.”
“Only this one disappears?” the cat asked, his hind legs walking up a flight of invisible stairs and then falling down over its edge and down his face. “Tell me about your other…your ‘real’ world. What is the name of your aunt?”
“Hatshepsut,” Alice said promptly. “Auntie Hatshepsut.”
She frowned.
The cat waited patiently.
“No, that’s not right, is it?” she said with a sigh.
“And what is it that so upset you about your sister?”
“Why, it’s her magpie, of course. It’s always a bother, always in my personal things, a real nuisance, carrying her voice….”
Alice kept talking, hoping some sense would come out eventually. But it grew worse and worse as she spoke.
The Cheshire Cat said nothing, for once behaving like an English cat, staring at her with large, unblinking eyes as she realized the truth for herself.
“It’s like the real—I mean, my world erases Nonsense from my memories…things that shouldn’t just fade away…. But Wonderland replaces real—ah—my world’s things with Nonsense.”
“Very deep,” the Cheshire Cat said. He curled himself around, forming a perfect circle with his body. Through it was a well, dark and endless. Alice leaned over and peeped in but couldn’t see the bottom. The cat stretched and walked down the tiny spiral steps along its walls (on his own body!) until finally his hind feet followed. “Very…deep…indeed…” his voice echoed back.
Suddenly his face popped out of the sky, upside down, inches from her own.
“One wonders—why you go back and forth. Why you bring what little you carry from one world over to the other. And what that thing is, and how useful it might be.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Alice said, shaking her head. “Not a single word this time. And it’s not even a riddle.”
“A riddle, you say?” the cat said, suddenly frozen in delight. “But I simply love riddles. I’d run many a mile to tell a puzzling tale to a receptive soul. But you’re running away, from Time, and the White Rabbit is running to him. And the Queen of Hearts bakes her tarts out of the tears of children. While you’re off looking for unreliable help, he’s sent you, oh, some friends to play with….”
“Unreliable help? What do you mean? The Queen of Clubs is our only hope!”
“When has Wonderland ever been about anything besides Alice?” the Cheshire Cat asked, but not accusingly or sadly. It was more like a statement. “For Alice, I mean.”
“I beg your pardon—I am not thinking of myself at all here. Others have suggested that I must lead armies against the Queen of Hearts—which really is ridiculous. I know my limitations, and I am not a queen myself—or a Mary Ann, apparently. But I am doing my best to help out in any way I can—which is not that much, I admit! But what do you mean the White Rabbit is running to Time? And what friends did he send? To play what with us? A greater game? A—meta game?”
But the Cheshire Cat had faded from view, and all she was left with were two slitted black pupils that fell with a tinkle to the ground like stones once the rest of the cat was entirely gone.
“You and your stupid riddles!” Alice said, disgusted. Although he hadn’t actually told her one this time.
But wasn’t there another riddle? A real one, that she had to answer? One that someone had told her she must answer? Soon?
“I think we should proceed, with haste, Miss Alice,” the Dodo said, hurrying back to her. “The next squares are clear. No sense lollygagging.”
“Are there other players?” Alice asked. A question she realized that she should have posed at the beginning of this particular adventure. No games were played alone except for Solitaire.
“Of course!”
“And where are they?”
“I don’t know—around, I suppose,” the Dodo said vaguely.
“Aren’t we playing against someone? What do we win? What do they win? What is the point? Who gets to the Queen of Clubs first gains her support, or the like?”
“Perhaps?” the Dodo responded, a little despera
tely. “This isn’t the area of my expertise, dear girl. I know about Tortoises and Impeachments. Do let us go, perhaps before we find out the hard way—as losers of the game.”
A fair point. Alice picked up her skirts and strode quickly alongside him.
Things were quiet for a few more boring squares—no Snakes or Ladders to contend with. On the fifth square she finally saw someone else on the board.
Something else, actually.
Several somethings.
At first it just looked like a scene directly out of a picture book on nature: a herd of strange deer cavorting in the field ahead of them. They were beautiful when they leapt, glittering like glass or fragments of something shattering in slow motion. But once they were back on the ground, their running seemed awkward and disjointed. Despite the fact that they had a formidable lead on the Dodo and Alice, she found herself wincing whenever one of them tottered and seemed about to fall. Finally one did, and it had a very hard time picking itself back up again. It rolled, and stuck out its long legs, and rocked, and…
“They haven’t any knees!” Alice realized. That was why they looked so unreal and graceful in the air and terrible on the ground.
“What don’t? Who? Oh!” The Dodo put up a pair of opera glasses (again, the wrong way around) and then shrieked, dropping them. “Bonetalopes! Run! Have they seen us?”
“They have now,” Alice said dryly.
The delicate creatures turned their long ears toward the two. They pawed their tiny, sharp hooves into the ground and lowered their graceful necks so that a dozen pairs of terrifyingly metallic horns were all aimed at Alice and her friend. Then they cantered awkwardly into a menacing arrow formation with a leader in the front. He (or she) emitted a strange noise—like the honk of a horn but also the call of a bull, with a little bit of a mockingbird trill at the end.
The creatures charged.
Alice shrieked.
The bonetalopes suddenly fell back, snorting in frustration. They had hit the border of their square and could go no farther.
