Summerland (30 page)
Authors: Michael Chabon
THE PRISONERS WERE LODGED
deep in the roots of the fairy hill, or knoll, in a clean, warm room with whitewashed walls and a floor of beaten dirt covered with rushes. There were two wicker hampers of food. One was filled with little bricks formed from some kind of paste of nuts and dried fruits. They were salty, sweet, a little dusty, and gritty in the teeth. The other hamper held packets of some kind of boiled thing like a potato, with a taste like nutmeg, wrapped in an edible leaf. A large clay jar, with a dipper tied to the handle, held fresh water that somehow stayed cold hour after hour as the ferishers who held them prisoner debated their fate. Though there were five in their party—Ethan, Jennifer T., Thor, Taffy, and Cinquefoil—the cell held six prisoners. The sixth was a ferisher, a little red-haired female in a short green jerkin and baggy buckskin trousers. She called herself Spider-Rose.
She was a member of the Dandelion Hill mob—that was the name of the tribe that had shot them from the sky. Though age seemed to be more or less an unknown thing among the ferishers she seemed somehow younger than Cinquefoil. She had a springy, impatient way of stalking back and forth across the cell. And then there was the matter of her doll. It was a horrid little thing, a knot of chamois leather with a hank of black yarn for hair. Ethan couldn't tell if it had a face or not.
It was Spider-Rose who told them that the dusty nut bricks were called
durpang
and the mushy tamale thing a
guapatoo
. Both, she assured them, were sure to give a reuben "a dire case of the runs."
"Don't take it personally," she said, when they asked her why they had been treated so badly. "They're in a terrible state around here these days. Have been ever since—" Her voice caught and broke, and she squeezed the horrible twist of skin, and nuzzled it with her cheek. "Ever since the ballpark was lost."
"What happened to it?" Ethan said. He and the others had been struck by their brief aerial view of the sad gray waste around the knoll. "How did it get lost?"
But at this Spider-Rose only squeezed her doll more tightly, and looked away.
"What are they going to do to us?" Jennifer T. said. "That's what I want to know. We have to get out of here. We have stuff to do."
"Oh, they're talking it over now. Talking and talking. They'll be talking for days. Course in the end it won't turn out any different for you than it would if they
didn't
waste a week in chatter. The punishment for intruding on a ferisher hill's a, what's the word, a
no-brainer
." She smiled sadly. "You reubens'll be driven mad, then sent back to the Middling to tell wild tales no one will ever believe. The Sasquatch there'll be bound with grammers and put to work in the kitchens for the rest of eternity."
"And Cinquefoil?" Ethan said, looking anxiously at the little chief, who lay on a pallet by the water jar, unconscious.
"
Cinquefoil
? Of the
Boar Tooth mob?
The Home Run King? That's who that is?" She went over to the pallet and looked down at him. "How about that? Oh, well, he's going to wither up something
bad
," said Spider-Rose. "Them arrows were tipped with iron."
"Iron is poisonous to fairies," Ethan remembered. They had bandaged the meat of the little slugger's right hand—the arrow had entered the back and exited through the palm, luckily missing the bones—but the ferisher had shown no sign of stirring, and as Ethan sat beside him he seemed indeed to have dwindled, somehow. His face was hollow, his rib cage sunken. I finally remember something I've read about fairies, he thought, and he's not awake to hear it.
"Please! Poisonous!" Spider-Rose shuddered, and stroked her cheek with the black yarn hair of her dolly. "We don't even like to touch the stuff. Those archers, we done trained them up specially since the time they was girls. Dressed them in little shoes of iron. Hung iron chains from their necks. Twisted the iron-jimjams right out of them. Ironbroke, we call them. But if iron goes
through
a ferisher, that's just, well, it's just sad. Ferisher dries up like a seedpod. Even a ironbroke girl. There's life inside her, still, but she's never waking up ever again. Nah, he's doomed."
"Why tip your arrows with it, then?" Jennifer T. said. "Are you trying to kill other ferishers?"
"Iron works hard on the Cousins. Graylings. Skrikers. Reubens, too. Rough customers come troubling the ferishers of the Far Territories. They like to find a spot in the Middling that brushes up to the Summerlands and push on through the gall that way. We can't be too careful."
Ethan thought of the attack on Hotel Beach, the trucks and earthmovers blazoned T
RANS
F
ORM
P
ROPERTIES
, the pile of slaughtered birch trees. Coyote's forces had pushed and pushed against the grammers of the Boar Tooth mob until they finally got through, and the ancient ban on summertime rain was broken.
"Is that what happened to your ball field?" Ethan said. "Did Coyote's things destroy it?"
Spider-Rose didn't answer right away. She stopped pacing the cell, and lowered her doll to her side.
"In a sort of a way," she said, looking down at her little feet in their green slippers. "Not quite exactly."
"Taffy, is it true?" Jennifer T. turned to the Sasquatch. "Is he going to shrivel up and die?"
Taffy shook her head. "Not die. Nothing can kill them but the gray crinkles, as far as I have ever heard," she said. "But iron gives them a deep, deep hurt."
"Isn't there anything we can do?"
Spider-Rose shook her head. "Not in these stinking dull times I got myself all ended up with," she said, sounding somehow younger than ever. If there could be such a thing as a ferisher teenager, Ethan thought, Spider-Rose appeared to qualify. "Use to be you could just go out walking into the deep woods, find yourself a piece of the Lodgepole. A nice little slivereen of that Oldest Ash. Wave it around the hole a few times, draw out the bit of iron and the hurt along with it." She stopped, and sighed, shaking her head. "But all the bits of the Lodgepole got finded up a long time ago. Coyote's been searching 'em out."
Ethan leapt to his feet in excitement.
"I have one!" he cried. "I mean, I
had
one. A piece of the Lodgepole itself, that's just what Cinquefoil called it. I found it in the Summerlands, back at the Tooth. Only those guys must have taken it from me, your people. After they crash-landed the car. It was lying across the foot-well in the backseat and I…I know there's something special about it, I can feel it whenever I pick it up. It knocked the head clean off one of those skriker things." He flexed his hands a few times, choking up on an invisible bat handle and taking a pantomime swing. His palms ached for the cold hard pressure of the wood against them. In all the confusion of the attack, the plunge from the sky, their capture, somehow he had lost track of his piece of the Lodgepole. Now he felt ashamed. He ought never to have let them take it from him. "We have to get it back!"
He ran to the door of their cell and began to pound on it with both fists.
"Hey!" he said. "Hey, you! Out there! Give me back my stick!"
After a moment Jennifer T. came and started banging on the door, too. But the wood—oak, it seemed to Ethan—absorbed the blows like the softest of cushions, sound and all. They might have been pounding on a sheet of empty air. Taffy came over, then, and the children stepped aside. The Sasquatch hunched down in front of the door—her head nearly brushed the ceiling of the cell—and glared at it steadily for a moment with her mild, intelligent eyes. Then she raised her right leg in front of her, bent at the knee. Her enormous right foot quivered with the intensity of the blow she was about to deliver.
"Yah!" she cried. "Bigfoot
this
!"
The next moment Taffy lay rolling on the soft rushes of the floor, clutching her great, big foot in pain.
"Don't you know anything about grammer?" Spider-Rose said, shaking her head. "And a door grammer is just about the strongest, you know. A slab of good heart-oak can hold an awful lot of grammer. A door grammer is proof against any blow, charm, or picklock you care to employ. You can go on and kick it till Ragged Rock if you like. Not as how that's apt to be a very long time. We're all
doomed
." She sighed, and knelt down on the floor beside the sleeping Cinquefoil. "That's really Cinquefoil, then? Poor little fay. Not bad looking, neither."
"Let me try?" Thor Wignutt said.
Thor had barely moved or said a word in all the time since they were first thrown into this cell. Instead he sat in a corner, with his eyes rolled back in their sockets. From time to time he tapped on his left temple and murmured to himself. When Jennifer T. had gone over to see if he was all right, he had waved her away. Now he approached the oak door of the cell. Gently he stroked it with the fingers of one hand, fluttering them delicately as if they were the most sensitive of instruments.
"Okay, Thor, you're strong and all," Ethan said. "But not stronger than Taffy."
"But, okay, here's the thing. You told me that that werefox guy, Cutbelly, could scamper anywhere, as long there was a way through, a branch or a twig of the Tree. Not just
between
Worlds, but
inside
a World. And these twigs and branches are everywhere. I can feel them all over the place." Thor reasoned, slowly, and thoughtfully, but with no trace that Ethan could see of his flat TW03 manner. "I leapt from one world to another, remember? What's to stop me from crossing just one little grammery door?"
And with that, he got right up against the door, until his face, chest, and hips were pressed tightly to it. He closed his eyes and began muttering to himself. The stout door seemed to ripple, for the briefest instant, like a curtain stirred by a breath of wind. Then it fell still, solid and impenetrable as before. But Thor was gone. He had passed right through.
"I knowed there was something haintish about that boy," Spider-Rose said.
"He's a shadowtail," Ethan said, watching to see if Thor was going to reappear. He hoped that his friend wouldn't take it upon himself to set off alone, inside a fairy hill, looking for a piece of wood that might be anywhere. "Cinquefoil said he's the—"
"He's a changeling, is what he is," Taffy said, pulling herself upright and gingerly testing her outraged foot. "Oof. I knew it the first time I laid eyes on him."
"A
changeling
?" Ethan said. "Do you mean—are you saying—Thor Wignutt is a ferisher?"
"Wow," Jennifer T. said. "That kind of explains a few things."
"But he's so
tall
," said Ethan, feeling that the explanation begged as many questions as it answered. "And his blood is
red
, I've seen it."
"No doubt he was fed on human milk," Taffy said. "Nursed by his human mother. If that's the case, then—"
"Then he ain't neither ferisher nor reuben," Spider-Rose said. She had resumed her pacing now. "And that's how come he can walk on through a door all loaded up with grammer. A changeling shadowtail. Huh." She shook her head gloomily. "I predict all kinds of trouble for you with that one."
"With what one?" said Thor. He was standing there, in the cell again, breathing steady and carefully, as if his heart were pounding and he was trying to slow it down.
Everybody stared at him as if he had just returned not from the other side of a door but from the land of the dead itself. Then Ethan looked at Taffy, hoping she would know what to do. The Sasquatch tugged thoughtfully for a moment on her brush of a beard, then went over to Thor and laid one of her big soft paws on his shoulder.
"Can you get me through with you?" she said.
Thor nodded. "Yes, Ms. Sasquatch, I really think I could."