Summerland (33 page)

Thor nodded, and with the practiced ease of a magician, folded the map down to a single brownish rectangle, then out once again into a map of brown leaves. He turned the map over; the other side of it was covered in clusters and masses of white leaves, traced with ink of pale blue-gray, and all interconnected with the veins and arteries of gray.

"Four sides," Ethan said. "Four worlds! It's a map of the Tree!"

"That's right," Thor said. "The white one is the Winterlands. The green one is the Summerlands. The brown one is the Middling. And the blue one is—"

"The Gleaming. Which is blank. Because no one knows what happens there. Or how you get there. Or even who lives there."

"I know who lives there," Thor said. "Old Mr. Wood. And his brothers and sisters. The—what Mr. Rideout called the Tahmahnawis. The spirits. The gods. They—they're all up there, or over there, or in there. In the Gleaming. They're trapped there. Yeah. Yeah, Coyote did it. There's a—there's a whole story, like, a song, or a poem or I can't quite…" He shook his head. "It's all about how Coyote tricked them. Got them in there and sealed the Gate. And now it's been sealed ever since. And none of them, not even Old Mr. Wood, can get out. It's part of all this…data that seems to have been…uploaded to my head since we got to the Summerlands."

"Thor?" Ethan said. "You know—you know that you aren't an android. Not really."

"I know it," Thor said.

"But you know—you know that you aren't—I guess you aren't really human, exactly, either."

"Tell me about it," Thor said. "Like I haven't known
that
my whole entire life." He shrugged. "I guess being an android was the best explanation I could come up with for how I always
felt
."

"And you're all right—I mean, it's okay? You're okay? With being, well, a changeling?"

"I guess so," Thor said. "I don't really have any, you know, choice. It's just—well, there's this one thing I'm sort of wondering about. A little. Looking around, you know, at all this stuff these ferishers have
taken
from people over the years. They do take it, you know. It's not like they just find it lying around."

"Yeah?" Ethan said. "What? What do you wonder?"

"Well, it's just, the Boar Tooth mob, if they're the ones that, you know, left me. When they left me…"

"Yeah?"

"What did they do with the baby they took?"

This was not a question, Ethan found, that he had any great desire ever to find the answer to.

"Come on," he said. "Fold that thing up and take it with us. I'm sure it'll come in handy. And let's get going after that stick."

At this point, though it's a little late, I should probably mention that while ferisher treasures differ from those of dragons, dwarfs, gnomes, etc., in nearly every respect, they resemble them in this one: they are always, but
always
, carefully, and fearfully, and very often fatally, left in the hands of an ill-tempered and none-too-well-fed guardian.

"Stick, is it?" said a small, hard voice behind them.

CHAPTER 14

A Mother's Tears

THE CANDLES IN THE SCONCES
that lit the little cell guttered, spitting and smoking, and then, one by one, went out. At last only a single flame flickered weakly in the sconce just over the spot where Jennifer T. sat, her head pillowed against the soft fur of Taffy's lap, in the shadow of one of the Sasquatch's heavy breasts. Jennifer T. and Taffy lay that way for a long time, without speaking. They listened to the shallow breathing of the wounded chief and the rowdy snoring of the ferisher princess. The Sasquatch's breath slowed. After a while it occurred to Jennifer T. that it had been a long time since either of them had moved.

"Taffy?" Jennifer T. said at last. "You awake?"

"Yes, Jennifer T."

Taffy shifted a little, and Jennifer T. tilted back her head to look past the coal-black boobs at the Sasquatch's face. Taffy's little dark eyes glinted in the dim light from the sconce overhead.

"Did you, well, did you hear anything…strange? Today, I mean. Back when that thunderbird had me hanging there like that."

"Hear?" Taffy said, and a low growl of amusement rumbled in her throat. "I heard plenty. The whole Far Territories heard you, my dear."

"No, I mean, did you hear anything else?"

But Taffy seemed not to have noticed the question.

"When I was just a little squatchling," she said, "I remember the old ladies used to tell us that the Last Day would be signaled by the crowing of a rooster. But I guess they were wrong."

Jennifer T. thought about this for a moment. Then she said, "Well, I am a Rooster, in a way."

And she explained to Taffy all about the Clam Island Mustang League, and Mr. Perry Olafssen, and the Angels, and the Reds, and the Bigfoot Tavern Bigfoots, whose team nickname drew another growl from the Sasquatch, though this time it sounded like a growl of irritation.

"Why must they?" Taffy said, shaking her big head. "It's just so
cruel.''

As Jennifer T. talked on about the Mustang League, she found herself, somewhat to her surprise, missing Clam Island. She had been born and had spent nearly every moment of her eleven years there, except for the summer when she was five, which she had spent at the home of her mother's mother, in Spokane. Clam Island was the only home she had ever known. Now she was very far away from it, separated from that rainy gray-green patch of island not only by miles but also by time and enchantment. So perhaps it is not terribly surprising if, lying cold in the darkness of an underground cell, in the midst of the utmost wilderness of the Summerlands, she was suddenly wracked with homesickness. Nonetheless she was surprised. She missed the dirt and the smell of the grass at Ian "Jock" MacDougal Regional Ball Field. She missed her bicycle, and the scratchy cheeks of her uncle Mo, and even the three ancient and irritable ladies in their enormous recliners. She missed Mr. Perry Olafssen!

After a while she left off talking, but thoughts of home ran on in her mind. Only now they began to meld and entangle themselves in one another, like sections of a map being carelessly folded: she was falling asleep. As she drifted off, she found herself missing, in a kind of dream-stew of homesickness, old Albert Rideout himself, who was standing beside her now, at the controls of
Victoria Jean
, with the fly of his trousers half zipped. He was piloting the airship, with a steady hand, over the Cascade Mountains. When they reached Spokane he flew right over Grandmother Spicer's house, with its pointed turret, and there on the front porch stood Jennifer T.'s mother, whose given name was Theodora. She was more beautiful than Jennifer T. remembered her—in fact she looked much more like
Ethan Veld's
mother, at least as she appeared in a framed photograph on the buffet in the Felds' living room. As Albert and Jennifer T. sailed overhead, the beautiful, Mrs. Feldish Theodora raised her small white hand and slowly, with a sad smile on her face, began to wave. And then the smile faded, and from somewhere deep inside the house with the pointed tower came the sound of someone roughly weeping, dark barking sobs of terrible pain.

Jennifer T. sat up, in the semi-darkness, her heart pounding. Taffy was crying—thundering, rough-edged Sasquatch sobs.

"You
did
hear something, didn't you?" Jennifer T. said, with the utter certainty of someone who is not yet fully awake. "You
heard
it. After I shouted out 'Ragged Rock.' A woman was crying. A mother was crying." She didn't know why she was so sure that the weeping woman was a mother, but she was. "Taffy, I know that you heard it."

Taffy snuffled, and wiped her snub nose on the back of a shaggy forearm. Slowly she hoisted her huge bulk into a more upright position, and let out a long shuddering breath. She nodded.

"I heard it," her voice thick with grief. "But I thought it was only the sound of my guilty conscience. Because of what I did, a long time ago. To my children."

"What did you do?"

That question started poor Taffy crying all over again. "I left them," she said.

WHAT FOLLOWS, IS, AS FAR AS I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO RECONSTRUCT
it, the sad story told by Taffy the Sasquatch. It will turn out later to have some importance for
our
story, or else I would never interrupt things in this way to relate it. Not with Cinquefoil shriveling into a seedpod on his pallet in the corner, and Ethan and Thor in the clutches of the guardian of the ferisher treasure, and Mr. Feld and Cutbelly somewhere off in the Winterlands, prisoners and slaves of that smiling, rust-red rogue who means to bring the universe to an end. Fortunately Taffy's story has the virtue, shared by most really sad stories, of being fairly short.

Sasquatches have acquired a reputation, in the Middling, for being solitary creatures. But as a rule it is only the males who spend their lives wandering alone. They range widely in the vast forests of the Far Territories, and from time to time one of them will stumble onto a gall where the Branches of two Worlds are pleached together. These are the unlucky specimens who wind up crashing into the camp of some terrorized party of trappers or fishermen up in Alberta, or, once, directly into the path of a man named Roger Patterson and his 16mm movie camera. The male Sasquatch is a shy and unsociable creature, who prefers his own company to any other, and when he gets around those of his kind it is usually only long enough to exchange some news of the woods and to get some female or other pregnant. Then he is on his way again.

With the females, however, it is an entirely different story. They spend their whole lives, generally, in the woods where they were born, among their mothers and grandmothers, sisters and aunts, helping to look after the squatchlings, gathering food—they are strict vegetarians—and listening to the endless stories of the very old ladies. These stories, few of which are notably sad, tend therefore to be very long indeed, often two weeks, or more, in the telling. Since the old ladies, like their grandmothers and great-grandmothers before them, have never ventured beyond the local neighborhood of hills and trees, their stories are not especially rich with the wonders and marvels of the world. Instead, they tend to be what might be called wisdom tales, cautionary stories, which for all their length and elaborate language boil down, in the end, to pretty simple ideas like Short-Cuts Usually Turn Out to Be Very Long Indeed or Never Throw Anything Away, Because You Never Know.

But then, every once in a very great while, when there are two full moons in a single month, or when one of the less antisocial males has come to pay a visit, a great-grandmother Sasquatch will break out a story from the Beginning of the World. In the Beginning of the World, before Coyote changed everything, when the Sasquatches were still fresh from the making hand of Old Mr. Wood, things were not as they are now. All the Sasquatches wandered, unprotected and lost, a gang of stragglers, through the deep, deep shadows of the First Forest. They had adventures, all right—and terrible misadventures. Because they had no families, no clear lines of motherhood, no organization, no wisdom tales, they could not defend themselves very well against the various nonvegetarian creatures with whom they shared the earliest world. They were stalked and caught and, because Coyote had brought hunger and death into the world, devoured. It was not long before only two Sasquatches remained, a male and a female. They called out to Coyote to help them. As usual, his help took the form of a choice: wander the woods in an unruly way, heedless of each other's safety, but knowing the marvels and wonders of the world; or settle down, make order, find wisdom—stay home. In the end, as you may have guessed, the male chose the first, the female the second, and they have stuck stubbornly by their choices ever since.