Summerland (24 page)

Ethan squinted, and blinked, and squinted some more.

"Time out!" he cried. The giant nodded.

Ethan stepped back from the plate and studied the diagram. There was one finger for the fastball, two for the breaking ball, and three for the change-up, a pitch that looked just like a fastball coming out of the pitcher's hand, but which traveled far more slowly, fooling the batter into swinging at it too soon.

"Remember," wrote Peavine,

the pitch is the pigment, the pitching arm the brush, and the pitcher himself is the mind and hand of the artist, directing the movements of paintbrush and color; but you, the catcher, are the artist's eye that clearly sees what must be painted. You are in charge of the pitching game; you call for the pitch. Do not be swayed by the passions of your battery-mate, in particular if he is a fireballer; above all,
don't let that rascal shake you off
.

"Thanks, Peavine," Ethan said.

"What are you going to do?" Jennifer T. called up to him.

"I'm going to call for the change-up," Ethan said.

He took his position once more, squatting on his haunches. Mooseknuckle John climbed up onto the hill again and looked in at Ethan, as he had twice before without Ethan's understanding why. This time, however, instead of merely nodding, Ethan held out the first three fingers of his right hand, pointed them at the ground, and waggled them back and forth.

Mooseknuckle John stood perfectly still. His mouth hung open as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Then he smiled a sour smile and gave his great head a firm shake. He started to rear back. Ethan jammed his fingers downward, stabbing again and again at the air with them. The giant stopped again, and again shook off the sign. He wanted to throw a fastball; the potatoes and the parsnips were waiting. Ethan held his breath, and flexed his hand a few times, and then put down the sign for the change-up one more time.

"Don't you shake me off," he called out to Mooseknuckle John, and his voice sounded surprisingly large and authoritative. "What are you, a rookie?"

The giant started to say something. Then he closed his mouth and reared back one last time. His arm swung out from his side and his hand turned over and the ball came tumbling and screaming across the sky toward Ethan's mitt. It landed with a sharp meaty crack, and Ethan clapped his bare hand around it; Mooseknuckle John had thrown the change-up.

"It worked," Ethan said, once he had stepped off the field again and the grammer had drained him like sand from the top of an hourglass, down to his usual size. "He didn't shake me off."

"He couldn't," said Cinquefoil. He took Peavine's book, opened to the page on pitch calling, and pointed with a finger at the bottom of the page.

There was a footnote to the passage that Ethan had been reading. It said:

*N.B. In the Middling these ancient Signs have not the eldritch power that they once possessed
.

"It's powerful stuff," he said. "Putting down the Signs."

THE TANTRUMS OF GIANTS, ARE, OF COURSE, QUITE LITERALLY THE
stuff of legend. How many of the world's volcanoes, maelstroms, and boiling geysers, how many of its hurricane winds and earthquakes, have been attributed to the ill-tempered fumings and poor sportsmanship of giants! In the days before the giant-killers flourished, when the waycrosses of the Middling were thick with
Homo giganticus
, terrible and sad were the lengths to which humans would go to appease the wrath of a massive, hungry neighbor in the hills. Their fattest calves, their juiciest hogs, even, as you must know, their own sons and daughters, were offered up to still the eruptions and blusterings of a giant in the grip of a rage. When Mooseknuckle John realized that some scrap of a little reuben he-puppy had somehow managed not only to hold on to a pair of his nastiest fastballs, but then, at the last moment, to work the powerful magic of the Signs on him, obliging him to bring to the plate only a skiddering slow change-up, he was, to say the least, exceedingly irritated.

First he stood, with a foot on either side of the mound, knees bent, arms flung out to either side of him, fists raised to the sky. He threw back his head, opened his throat, and roared. It was not the roar of a lion or a bear, but a horribly human-sounding roar, at once low and screeching. It was so loud that it made the air over his head tremble in a high, shivering blue column, and shook the needles from the trees, and opened several long jagged cracks in the stone walls of his lodge. The wind from his lungs set Skid's envelope trembling and shuddering like a sail. Then, as the children and the ferisher threw themselves to the frozen ground and covered their ears, the giant left off roaring and began to leap and caper about the field, cursing and stomping, kicking up great clots of dust and turf. In the process he injured several toes, which only made him angrier. At last he flung himself headlong across the outfield on his belly, and began like an enormous toddler to kick and beat with his fists. The ground shook as if it were about to split open. The children were thrown against one another; a portion of the lodge fell in with a sound like a crate full of bottles rolling down iron stairs.

He sputtered and raged; he snorted and choked on his own saliva. He threatened punishments and uttered oaths so heinous and foul that even to summarize them here in the mildest of terms would curl the very pages of the book you are holding and make your hands and fingertips hum as if they were swarming with bees. But there was nothing that Mooseknuckle John could say, no curse he could utter or horrible punishment impose, because he and Ethan had struck a bargain, and in the two remaining eldritch worlds, as here in the Middling once upon a time, the stuff of a sworn bargain is a metal less yielding than iron. He was bound, in the end, to send the party on its way, and to give them, what was more, a helpful shove in the right direction.

And in the end, as is so often the case with tantrums, this one ended up costing the giant even more than he had originally bargained to lose. For while Ethan and Thor rode out the ranting winds and trembling earth of the gigantic fit huddled, terrified, under the behemoth-bone planks of the bleachers, Jennifer T. struck out across the grass toward the giant's lodge. She was intent on freeing herself from a hard ball of pity that had lodged in her chest and would not go away.

She ran along the spiral corridor, across the carpeting made from the hides of five hundred poor, peeled animals, and over to the big black iron cage. The Sasquatch lay asleep, a great miserable heap in a corner of the cage. She was snoring, and loudly, but the harrumphing rumble of her lungs was nearly drowned out by the thunder of the roared oaths that was coming from outside. Every so often the entire structure of the giant's lodge would shake with a sound like an enormous drawer of spoons. The whole thing was probably going to come crashing down on their heads any second.

"Yo," Jennifer T. said, whispering at first, though she doubted the giant could hear her, or anything, at that moment. "Yo, Mrs. Sasquatch. Taffy." There was no reply. She raised her voice. "Hey,
Bigfoot!
"

Once again the heap of ragged skins seemed to assemble itself with startling rapidity, and there before her, glowering down with great staring yellow-orange eyes like two glowing chunks of amber, stood the lanky, powerful creature which, only yesterday, Jennifer T. would have been inclined to refer to as
a giant
. Taffy did not look pleased.

"Look at my feet," she said, in a low, steady, angry voice. "Do they look inordinately large to you?"

They were like a human's feet, more or less, big toe, pinky toe, and three in between, but they were covered all over with thick black fur, and the big toe, come to think of it, looked a lot more like the thumb of a
hand
. And they were nearly half again as long as a big man's foot, and half again as wide. If you tried to put shoes on them, Jennifer T. thought, you would need at least a size twenty-nine or thirty. She did not know how to answer. She had no desire to injure the Sasquatch's feelings, but the feet really did look awfully big.

"
Relative to the rest of me
, of course," the Sasquatch said. "I'm nine feet tall. Of course they're bigger than
yours
.''

"I guess not," Jennifer T. said. "Actually, when you look at it that way, they're really almost kind of dainty."

The Sasquatch looked more pleased than she had until now, but when Jennifer T. told her that Mooseknuckle John had lost his wager, and explained that she was taking advantage of the giant's being a sore loser to sneak in and spring Taffy, the creature's smile faded.

"I have nowhere to go," she said, with an air of deep bitterness.

"Then come with us," Jennifer T. said. "We're going across the Far Territories."

The Sasquatch's dark face softened in its rich soft mantle of fur.

"The Far Territories," she said, her voice thick. "I haven't seen the Great Woods since the day Suckmarrow John and his trapping party snared me."

"Then come!" The irritating thought crossed Jennifer T.'s mind that there might not be room in a Saab station wagon for a nine-foot Sasquatch, but she dismissed it. "And fast. We may have to make a run for it if that guy settles down."

The Sasquatch had begun to pace eagerly back and forth across her cage but now she stopped and her smile faded once more. She pointed to the immense lock that was bolted to the door of her cage. The keyhole was nearly as high as Jennifer T. herself, and as wide. Even if Jennifer T. had somehow managed to obtain the key, it was plain to see that she would not have been able to wield it. And while a human girl might have been able to slip through, the keyhole was nowhere near large enough to allow a Sasquatch to pass. Jennifer T. glanced at the hinges of the door, at the iron rivets that held the bars to the frame.

"I've been in this thing for two hundred years," the Sasquatch said. "I've studied those hinges and rivets as if they were holy scripture, and raged against and fought with them as if they were robbing me of the dearest thing to me in all the world. Which, of course, they are. It can't be done, little human. Get yourself back to your friends out there, and begone."

And so saying she sank back into a wretched ragged pile on the ground.

Jennifer T. looked around for something she or the Sasquatch might use to break the cage. There were plenty of old tibias and shankbones, but Jennifer T. felt pretty certain that they would just snap in two if you tried them against the thick black bars. There were the burning embers and logs of the cookfire, but she knew that an ordinary fire, even a giant's fire, would never be hot enough to melt iron—otherwise it would melt the big iron stewpot, too. Feeling the hope ebbing from her heart with every inch lower to the ground that Taffy sank, she zipped open her backpack, and saw the
Wa-He-Ta Brave's Official Tribe Handbook
lying there. Maybe there was something in it about fires, something herb or mineral you could add to them to make them burn hotter?

She flipped through the old musty pages, and saw that the point of being a Wa-He-Ta brave seemed to be to collect something called Feathers—maybe they were real feathers—one of which you earned whenever you showed that you had mastered some aspect of True Indian Lore. There were Feathers for Tracking, for Canoe Building, for Fire Making and Spear Fashioning, for Fishing and Swimming and Climbing Trees and Rocks. There were Feathers to be won in Dancing, Singing, Telling the Truth, and even, somewhat to her astonishment, in Telling Good Lies. And you could—it was right on page 621—earn a Feather in the Most Ancient Lore of the Knot. It was here, in the chapter on Knots, at the very back, in the final three paragraphs, that she encountered a small essay, almost an afterthought, on the picking of locks. It was illustrated with a series of five drawings that showed what was going on inside of what was called a "warded lock." This appeared to be exactly the type of old-fashioned lock that she was now confronted with. The kind that you opened with one of those clunky old "skeleton keys." Inside the lock there was a kind of metal tube; when you twisted it, it raised the latch. This tube was prevented from twisting, however, by a series of three pins, resting on springs. The pins were set to three different heights. When you stuck in the key, three different bumps on the key's blade pressed the pins down so that they all sat level with one another, out of the way of the tube. That allowed the tube to turn.

Jennifer T. put down the book and pulled herself up to the keyhole. She stuck her head inside, but it was too dark to see. She felt along the narrow passage with one hand. She could feel a pin—it was more like a rod, thick and cold. She pressed down on it and, with an unwilling creak of its iron spring, it gave. She crept along this strange passage until she encountered the second pin, and then the third. A moment later her head poked through into the cage itself, followed by her shoulders. Taffy was staring at her, looking very surprised.