by Liz Braswell
“Whew,” the Dodo said, pulling a—still clean!—white handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping his forehead. “We’re safe!”
“That’s what the Cheshire meant! These are emissaries of the White Rabbit sent to stop us. But they are playing by the rules,” Alice said slowly. “They can only go forward.”
“Well, that’s a relief, then,” the Dodo said.
“Yes, as long as we stay here. But we have to win.”
Her mind began to race—just as it did when she was playing against her sister or a male companion at any sort of strategy game. It was as if dozens of little Alices broke off from the main Alice of her mind and went running around in all directions, looking for an answer or a way out. Twenty heads were better than one.
“Sometimes,” she reminded herself, “you have to dance when you need to get somewhere.” Or do the thing that didn’t seem to make the most sense.
“Look!” she said aloud, pointing. “If we go up a square we can Quarrel, and then slide down that snake over there.” She pointed, grabbing the Dodo’s arm.
“But that’s preposterous. My dear girl, we can’t go back….”
“No, do you see? Two squares up from there is Pity, whose ladder takes us one square ahead of the, ah, bonetalopes.”
“Lose on purpose—go backward so we can go forward? I suppose it will work,” the Dodo said dubiously, looking the wrong way through his glasses again.
“Come on!” Alice cried. “Let’s do try it!”
This felt right and Wonderlandy, and she nearly skipped with eagerness to test her theory.
The Dodo, however, being a bird—even an ancient one—was, like all birds, not overfond of snakes or serpents. The idea of purposefully mounting one to slide down its awful, scaly back was almost inconceivable. He pulled an old colander out of one of his pockets and put it over his head to blind himself.
“Coo coo,” he said echoingly from inside.
They stepped into the next square, wing in hand.
“Oh, I’m sick of it!” Alice declared, trying to figure out a good Quarrel. “All of your…talking! And Nonsense! And…setting me up with young gentlemen I don’t at all desire to have a conversation with, much less marry!”
“Eh, what?” the Dodo asked from inside his colander.
“Stay out of my life, you ridiculous thing! Imperious sister! Keep to your own banal little life, with your ridiculous views on what is and isn’t right. Get married to that big wooden block of a sheep and leave the rest of us out of your idea of what a perfect Angleland should be like!”
“I beg your pardon,” the Dodo said, echoingly, yet with some dignity. “I don’t really care a huffle’s ruffles about your Angleland, and I do not take kindly to your tone, Miss Alice….”
“Choose a side, you ridiculous bird! You don’t even know my sister or her magpie, but you know me! I cannot believe you would defend her! Impudent avian!”
The poor, mostly extinct bird was having a difficult time indeed with his end of the made-up row.
“Er…you!” the Dodo tried, thinking hard. “Then! Go take a…long walk…off a, let me see, very short couch! Yes!”
“Go stuff it!” Alice cried, grinning.
And so the snake, with a dull, confused look in its large golden eyes, tossed them into the air and onto its back, and the two went sliding down back a number of squares.
They landed with a double thump, right next to each other this time. And, having been prepared for the slide down, Alice wasn’t injured at all and managed to leap directly up again.
After rising, the Dodo put his colander away with specific movements and affronted dignity. “Well, I’m not surprised that your sister wants to rein you in a bit. You do seem like a bit of a Monster.”
The square they were in was greener and moister and cooler than the ones around it. Little trees and bushes cast some much-needed shade on the otherwise open landscape of the game.
“Oh, a tea rose, most excellent,” the Dodo said, delightedly taking in their surroundings. “Just what we need.”
Alice was about to admonish him for his nonsense, but of course the tea rose had fat buds that, when closed, made perfect teacups, complete with steaming, delicious-smelling tea within. Actually, a nice cuppa didn’t sound too bad right then.
“All right, on to the next square, and Pity,” Alice declared.
“Why is it a pity?” the Dodo asked, a little dumbly.
“No—it’s the ‘Pity’ square. We have to get ahead now.”
“I already have a head,” the Dodo squawked, outraged. “You were the one who seemed to let your mind drift back there. And you’ve lost your mind completely if you think the ground is pitty; seems like it’s fairly flat and even to me.”
“Never mind,” Alice muttered. “Nonsense.”
They stepped to the next square, where a beautiful, swaying ladder as light as mist rose into the air just out of their reach. Its other end dangled languorously on a moss-covered stone just beyond the bonetalopes.
Alice closed her eyes and summoned the faces of the spectaclesbird and mirrorbird taken away by the policebirds.
“I Pity the poor children, snatched from the Circle, to who knows where.”
“I Pity your sister,” the Dodo muttered. “Your temper is formidable.”
The ladder unrolled slowly and deliciously into Alice’s outstretched hands. The frustrated bonetalopes whickered and whinnied in frustration a square behind them. They really were beautiful in their own fragile, clumsy way.
But Alice still had to resist putting a thumb to her nose and waggling her fingers at them.
As she climbed onto the next square, she saw a funny white cloud hovering directly above them. One didn’t have to look very closely to see its strong resemblance to a rabbit, and of course it was all fluffy and white. As the winds blew it, a paw seemed to drift to a fob and pull out a watch—and did the cloud wink at her? A younger Alice would have been delighted. An older Alice watched it uneasily and wondered what the Cheshire Cat meant when he said the Rabbit was running toward Time.
Just then a little spiral snout poked its head over a stump, and sparkling black eyes regarded Alice unblinkingly.
“Hello!” she said to it. “I’m very much afraid I don’t have time to talk, but…”
A second curlicue snout popped up.
“Toves,” the Dodo observed. “Slithy ones, at that.”
“Are they dangerous?” Alice asked.
A third snout popped up. The three creatures seemed to confer, somehow rubbing their corkscrew snouts along each other’s without getting them tangled.
“Not when taken singly,” the Dodo said thoughtfully.
A fourth and a fifth tove crept around the bottom of the stump. Their paws were a little too large and strong for Alice’s liking, claws a little too curved. Much like a badger’s. Which, if Alice remembered correctly, was also relatively harmless when encountered singly, and as long as one didn’t back it into a corner.
Now there were a dozen.
And they started creeping closer.
“Dodo,” Alice said uncertainly.
Pinned to the fur on the breast of these beasts were tiny ruby-red hearts.
She grabbed the old bird’s wing and ran, pulling him after her.
The toves brayed and launched themselves forward.
Alice felt a sudden pain in her ankle: she hadn’t moved fast enough! One of the creatures had successfully connected with her flesh. She tumbled to the ground and the force of her fall knocked the horrible thing off—but not before she had felt it actually turning and squirming, trying to work its horrid, dangerously sharp snout farther into her skin.
With a moist-sounding snarl another leapt forward. Its claws raked furrows into Alice’s side, slicing her clothes into a thousand tiny ribbons.
She scrambled up off the ground as best she could with the searing pain in her ankle. The toves hissed and lunged at her. The poor Dodo whimpered, surrounded by six toves lowering their h
eads and getting ready to drive their snouts into his belly.
Alice desperately felt around in her pocket for one of the biscuits she had taken from the White Rabbit’s house. Swallowing it all at once without chewing was, of course, Mildly Impolite. A small snake slithered up and around her and the Dodo and pulled them down—right to the square with the bonetalopes.
“Out of the frying pan…” she moaned.
“How dare you even speak of such a thing! Some of my grandbirds were murdered in a hot skillet with crusty breading!” the Dodo shouted at her.
But the biscuit’s effects were working their way through her system.
Alice looked around for something to do. The Queen of Clubs’ castle was in view but far ahead of them: a beetle-shiny square of blackness nestled at the base of the distant mountains, behind a formidable river.
She reached over and—pulled.
The game board stretched and distended like an India rubber ball. Alice’s stomach felt like it was doing the same thing. Nevertheless, she hooked her thumbs into the best hold she could—the far riverbank—and heaved it mightily to herself.
“Come on! Run!” she told the Dodo.
“That’s cheating!” the leader of the bonetalopes cried. She sounded and bugled, a fearsome beast with no fewer than six sharp knife-horns sprouting from her skull. The fierce thing lowered her head and galloped madly, nearly breaking her slender kneeless appendages in fury.
The Dodo leapt up onto the tongue of stretched land and ran down to the castle, getting immediately smaller like a trick drawing or an illusion.
A tove rammed itself into the meat of Alice’s calf and began twisting around, working its spiral deeply in.
Alice screamed.
She had never experienced pain like this in all her life. She could feel the sharp and deadly tip moving through her flesh, cutting sinew and muscle.
The bonetalope leapt.
Alice let go and fell. The land snapped back away from her. She grasped desperately at the riverbank, but instead plummeted into cold, wet blackness.
Alice awoke.
A light breeze brushed her cheeks; it smelled dry and sweet. The bed she lay on was soft and giving in all the right places. A thick, clean linen sheet that had been draped over her body protected her just enough from the air to keep her warm without overheating. The light was unobtrusive. Nothing sounded of clangs, honks, shouts, horseshoes on cobbles, large wheels over ruts, the cries of deliverymen or women, or students getting their exams back. Nothing smelled of coal. Everything was peaceful and serene.
She awoke, but not in Angleland.
Alice’s first real emotion that pushed through the blackness of recovering from collapse was relief.
The very last thing she had thought before passing out was how she was just going to wake up at home, yet again losing the immediacy of the dangers in Wonderland while being forced to deal with the problems in her own world.
(Only to return at a later time, perhaps, with things having gone from terrible to even worse.)
Alice’s second emotion was—nothing.
Not joyous or sad or scared or angry. Just peaceful.
There was no one else in the room and she could, for the first time in a long time, just pause and think and be.
She pondered what would have happened if she had died in Wonderland. Would her spirit be trapped—freed—there? Here? Would she die in the real world? Was there a God and Heaven for Wonderland? Was He as full of Nonsense as His creations? Would she never have to return home to boring reality and stodgy sisters and flowers that stayed firmly silent…
…and young men with rosy cheeks…?
Could she remain forever in a world where your words were constantly twisted? Where nothing and no one behaved properly? Where it was all Nonsense all the time, whether you liked it or not?
“I should like a world in between, I think,” she murmured to herself, finally stirring a little. “Fancies and whimsies who don’t quite know their place, but don’t try to kill you, either. They remain delightful or annoying but small and easily dealt with. And same with the real world. Small problems and some sort of consistency.
“No, that sounds more like a wish for an end to all problems than a real world for living in. Very lazy of you, Alice. How about…large, eventually solvable problems in a world with rules that may not make sense, but at least stay consistent? And with friends and creatures and places that are occasionally prone to Nonsense?”
She sighed and sat up. Her hair had come completely undone and fell a little lankly around her shoulders. Her dress was gone but her underclothes remained. With only a little bit of aching, she managed to push herself up into a sitting position, resting her back against a positively enormous pile of pillows.
She wasn’t in a proper room at all but more of an open space symbolically delineated by airy stone arches that dipped from the ceiling almost to the floor—but then broke off suddenly as if they had grown bored by the whole process. Beyond the arches on one side was an outer wall with giant (strangely indefensible) open windows. On the other side of the bed, wide corridors—or perhaps other connecting rooms—continued onto infinity, with interior walls angling in and out here and there.
Everything was pale grey stone, vaguely pearlescent, like a shell Alice might pick up by the sea and spend several long moments gazing at before deciding to keep or toss. The inside of a purple mussel, perhaps, fascinating in its silveriness that might have been the beginning of a gem—or just a stain from the mud in which it lived.
All of which made her question: had she won the game? Was she in the Queen of Clubs’ castle? Because it didn’t look very black, as it had from the outside….
Alice’s worries were somewhat relieved when a giant stoat, black as night (including her pinafore and apron and little nurse’s hat) came quietly padding in on hind legs. Her neck was curled and crooked so she could carefully watch and balance the items on the shiny black tray she carried: a little black cordial bottle that said, of course, DRINK ME in silver curlicue letters, a glittering obsidian cup, and a black digestive biscuit that Alice at once decided she wouldn’t put anywhere near her mouth no matter what it said on it. It looked eminently inedible and very disagreeable.
“How’s the patient? Took quite a nasty fall there,” the thing rasped in a voice far more deep and masculine than Alice would have expected.
“I’m right as rain. I feel marvelous,” Alice said, obviously stretching the truth, quick to block any suggestions to the contrary.
But a shooting pain up her leg caused her to wince despite her best efforts.
The nurse carefully set the contents of the tray down on a little nightstand Alice was fairly certain had not been there before. Then she gently pulled the sheet off Alice’s lower half. Her left calf, where the tove had pushed its snout fairly far into her muscle, was bandaged tightly and redolent of some sweet-smelling salve. But the flesh pulsed and throbbed with an almost unbearable magnitude when she pointed her toe or moved it at all.
“Toves is difficult critters,” the stoat clucked sympathetically. “They pick up all sorts of nasty things from livin’ under sundials—poisons and bad humors. Your leg is infected. We cleaned it out best we could, but not sure we got all the charms and nasty beasties out.”
Alice was about to open her mouth to correct this outdated notion of science and medicine; thanks to Monsieur Pasteur, everyone knew that infection wasn’t caused by magic or spirits or creatures of the usual kind. Merely tiny, microscopic…
And then a small blue thing, less a bug than a sort of star with too many legs, pulled itself up out of her bandage and looked around warily.
The stoat snapped out a paw faster than Alice could react (and anyway her reaction would mainly have been to scream in horror).
Triumphantly the nurse held up the thing and crushed it between her claws.
“Got ’em!”
Alice turned away, worried the nurse would pop it into her mouth.
But the stoat was far too professional for that and daintily put it back on the tray and covered it with a cloth.
“Most likely that’ll be one of the last of them, don’t you worry,” she said soothingly. “Now drink your medicine.”
Alice dutifully took the tiny—very heavy!—cordial glass after the nurse filled it to its rim with a thick, viscous black liquid. She was a little vexed at the amount and tossed it back as quickly as she could, uncertain whether to expect the nasty codfish-oil taste that came with real-world medicinal draughts—or the sort of complicated, delicious concoction that was the specialty of Wonderland.
It tasted of nothing.
Literally.
It was like…thick water. Sort of refreshing, but hard to swallow.
Immediately Alice felt a lovely warmth relaxing all the hard bits inside her, unknotting them, loosening the pain, unraveling the things that oughtn’t have been tangled, burning out whatever evil creatures remained in her leg.
“Your wee might be a bit lavender for the next week. Pay it no mind,” the stoat advised, and then padded away, her long tail bobbing in the air.
Alice, feeling much better, rose out of the bed that was so oddly placed in the middle of nowhere and saw more things that she hadn’t noticed before—that probably hadn’t even been there before. Most apparent was a dress hanging from the air that was obviously meant for her. It wasn’t at all like her old dress; it was shorter and had what looked like wide trousers instead of a proper skirt. The sleeves went only three quarters of the way down and were finished in knitted ribbing rather than a proper cuff. The material was a very flattering herringbone grey that looked like it might sparkle a bit in the right light.
Over the right breast was pinned a glittering brooch: three black and sparkling clubs held tightly together. As from a deck of cards.
“So I did indeed make it, and this really is the Queen of Clubs’ castle,” Alice murmured, pleased and perhaps just a trifle bit smug. “I don’t fancy wearing her sigil, though. We haven’t treated yet—nor even talked. I can’t go around wearing a queen’s favor without knowing where she stands on certain issues.”
