Summerland (22 page)

"Well," he said.

"I can barely hold on to one of Jennifer T.'s," said Ethan. "Even if I'm his size, how am I going to catch a fastball from a full-grown giant?"

"Why don't ya look in yer book?" Cinquefoil said.

CHAPTER 8

Taffy

ETHAN HAD FORGOTTEN ALL ABOUT
How to Catch Lightning and Smoke
. Now, as the party warmed themselves beside the giant's huge cookfire, trying to banish thoughts of how that fire might very soon be put to awful use, he searched the index for anything there might be about making up a battery with a giant.

The giant's lodge was a kind of immense igloo of rocks, a stony dome formed from huge chunks and jags of granite, puzzled together like stones in an old wall. You entered through an arched notch—right beside that pile of bones, which they had all tried not to look at too closely. Then you proceeded inward along a steep-walled corridor that wound in on itself, until you got to the centermost chamber of the spiral. Here the dome was high enough for Mooseknuckle John to enter without ducking, and wide enough for him to stretch out to his full length on the floor in his fur cap and boots. To Ethan, creeping in with his friends huddled close around him, it seemed vast, filled with echoes and shadows and hints of all kind of unpleasant odors. The floor was covered from end to end in thick furs and skins, some of which seemed to be those of bears, gray and brown, of wolves and moose and elk; others, Ethan would have sworn, were the lush, silvery-black pelts of gorillas. The only opening, here at the center of the giant's lodge, was a wide triangular notch cut in the roof to let out the smoke from the towering bonfire over which he cooked his grisly food. Apart from the furs there was no furniture of any kind. From three stout leathern ropes worked into the joints of the walls hung an iron pot as big as a garage, a dipper as deep as a bathtub, and a spoon whose bowl was as wide as a trash-can lid. And, on one side of the room, stood an iron cage, bigger than Ethan's bedroom at home, empty but for a heap of bones and old fur blankets in one corner.

"Anything?" Jennifer T. said. She had picked up one of the furs from the floor and come to stand beside him, draping the soft, thick, rank-smelling brown mantle over their shoulders. In spite of the fire, it was not exactly warm inside the lodge. "Does Peavine have anything to say about giants?"

"It's hard to tell," Ethan said, paging with the tip of his little finger through the latter sections of the book. "The words are all so
small
"

He had, of course, neglected to pack his magnifying glass. And though he stood close to the light of the fire, it was still pretty dim. Cinquefoil knew the book well, and might have been able to provide some guidance about relevant chapters. But as soon as Mooseknuckle John had ushered them into this vast echoing room, the ferisher, exhausted and weak from his injuries and from the grammers he had worked, curled up under a bearskin and went to sleep.

"It's only a matter of minutes until that giant comes back, Captain," Thor said. The giant had gone back outside again to raid his root cellar for some turnips or whatever it was that he planned to use to garnish his little-kid stew. "I advise you to make haste."

"Noted, TW03," Ethan said, captainishly. He looked at his watch, which he had not bothered to consult since leaving the Middling behind.

"Huh," he said. "Check this out."

Thor and Jennifer T. leaned in to take a look at the marvelous bit of hardware that the genius of Mr. Feld and the sale bins of Geek World had produced.

The liquid crystal display was changed. Across the top, where it had once read
SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI SAT
, with a digital mark over the proper day, it now read
SUN CAT TOD RAT DOG PIG
and
MOO
(for Moonday, as Ethan would later learn). Ethan pressed
FUNCTION
and 1, which normally gave the month and day, and found that while the month was still given as "4," in place of the old Gregorian year it now read "1519 Mole."

"So this is a Mole year," Thor said.

"Is that bad? Cinquefoil told me that the old people always said the end of the world would come in a Mole year."

Thor scratched at his right temple for a moment, then shook his head. He shrugged.

"That sounds right," he said.

In the lower right corner of the calendar screen, Ethan saw, where there had never been anything before, there was now a numeral one, and beside it a small triangular arrow pointing down. He pressed the buttons a few times, scrolling back through the functions he knew about, but every time he returned to the calendar screen, the little number one was still there. He could not get rid of it. He wondered if the strain of leaping across worlds was overloading its circuits somehow.

"Come on," Jennifer T. said. "Stop fooling around with the watch, E."

Ethan nodded, and returned his attention to Peavine's book, squinting at the pages as he flipped through them.

"What was that?" Jennifer T. said, grabbing hold of Ethan's wrist before he could turn another page. "What was that chapter called?"

"Hey," Ethan said. "Good eye. 'Barnstorming…the Far…Territories.' Huh. It…" He moved the book back and forth, and tilted it toward the fire. He simply couldn't make out the words. "Man!"

"Perhaps these will be of some assistance, Captain," Thor said. He took off his glasses. "As you know, my photo-optic sensor array is equipped with these adapter-lenses."

Ethan held the glasses up to his eyes. Of course they were, unlike Padfoot's, only an ordinary pair of eyeglasses with no special powers whatever. Thor's pale, serious face swam in and out of focus, and Ethan saw that the lenses of his glasses were different from those of Mr. Feld's. Ethan's father was nearsighted, and when you looked through his glasses everything seemed to bend inward, shrinking the world down to a miniature replica of itself. But Thor must be farsighted; in the lenses of his spectacles everything loomed and swelled to twice its normal size.

Ethan held the glasses to the first page of the chapter Jennifer T. had found. The words swelled to a readable size as he passed the left lens across them, reading aloud for the benefit of his friends. In the years reckoned, in the Summerlands, as 1319th Adder, 1319th Hoptoad, and 1319th Otter, he learned, a team known as Peavine's Traveling Ferisher All-Stars had made what the author called "a mad tour of the Far Territories, taking on giants, kobolds, adlets, and all that vast and motley crew of eldritch characters who still revere the great and glorious Game." A good number of these games had been played against nines of giants.

"What does 'eldritch' mean?" Jennifer T. said.

"I think it means magical," Ethan said.

"
Eldritch
," said a dark, unhappy voice not very far away, "is the term used by some to designate a world where the Rule of Enchantment remains in force."

The children looked at each other. None of them had spoken. Ethan grabbed Jennifer T.'s arms and they froze, listening. They looked at Thor. He shook his head, looking young and frightened without his glasses. The glum voice spoke up again.

"Once, yours was also ranked among the eldritch worlds," it said. "But it has been some time since then."

"There's a ghost," Jennifer T. said, clinging now to Ethan in return.

"It's coming from that
cage
!" Thor said, pointing, his outstretched arm trembling in a very unandroidlike way.

Ethan slid Peavine's book back into the muff pocket of his sweatshirt and, still holding tight to Jennifer T.'s arm, crept across the giant's hall to the black iron cage. As he drew nearer he saw that what he had taken at a distance for heap of old pelts amid a scattering of bones was gazing right at him with a pair of yellow eyes. The eyes were large, intelligent, and held a sad expression. They were set into a dark face, heavy-browed, in a ruff or mane of thick, black fur.

"There's nothing special about catching a giant," the creature said. Its voice was at once so glum and so reasonable that it was hard for Ethan to feel afraid. It stood, slowly, and the heap of furs seemed to gather and twist. The fur was thick, glinting with silver—like those, scattered across the floor of the giant's lodge, which Ethan had taken for a gorilla. But this unfortunate creature in the iron cage was no gorilla. It stood fully erect, like a man, though its long powerful arms reached below its knees. It had breasts like a woman, dangling and heavy, black as coals, and only partly covered in fur. And it was at least nine feet tall. "It's just like catching a man, or a fairy, or even, I imagine, a bloodsucking white adlet, though I never played against a team from the Utternorth. You just put down the sign, and call for the pitch."

There was a strange sound just behind him, a strangled cry. Ethan turned. The sound had come from Thor Wignutt. He was gazing at the furry prisoner with a look that was somewhere between horror and delight.

"A Sasquatch," he said.

"True enough, alas," said the Sasquatch. "A She-Sasquatch, to be precise. And believe me, it's a hard, hard fate."

"Do they have a taste for Sasquatches, too?" asked Jennifer T. "Giants, I mean."

A faint smile briefly haunted the Sasquatch's bitter face. "No. Though I could dearly wish that the great stinking ill-tempered old heap would make an end to me, even if it was between the grindstones of his rotten old molars. Like you reubens, a giant will eat anything—whale dung, boiled wendigo hoof—but they're also like you humans in one curious respect: they never eat their pets."

"You're a
pet
?" Ethan said.

The Sasquatch nodded, her eyes brimming over with tears. "It's fashionable among giants to keep one of my race in the house, and feed us from the scraps and leavings of their horrid tables. Before that they used to hunt us for our pelts. I don't doubt that you're wearing a close relative of mine."

"So what do you, well,
do
?" Jennifer T. said, letting the soft black Sasquatch fur slide to the ground. "What does he do with you?"

"Yeah," Thor said. "Does he, like, take you out and
walk
you?"

The Sasquatch looked offended. She gave her head a vehement shake. Then she said something, too softly for them to hear.

"What?" Ethan said.

"I said, 'I sing,' " the Sasquatch said. "I have a fine contralto voice."

Before they could ask her to demonstrate, however, the floor beneath their feet began to tremble and jolt, and a moment later Mooseknuckle John emerged from the mouth of the spiral corridor. He was carrying an armload of huge turnips, parsnips, carrots, and potatoes. The vegetables tumbled to the floor with a terrific rumbling and booming, like an armload of boulders. One of the potatoes rolled lumbering toward the children, and they just barely managed to scamper out of its way before it slammed against the iron cage with a horrible clang, sending the Sasquatch flying backward, and splitting in two with a great gusty whiff of potato.