Summerland (34 page)

These ancient tales of adventuring females and devouring beasts unsettled their listeners, and ended up feeling pretty cautionary, too, in the end. But on the mind of Taffy the Sasquatch—that was not, of course, her real name; her real name was very long and deeply secret—they had a peculiar effect. They filled her with
longing
. And when the visiting male, having eaten his fill, and told a tale or two of his own, and fathered another squatchling, had gone off again to resume his wanderings, Taffy would feel as if a small part of herself, of her contentment, had gone off with him. It was not many years, as Sasquatches reckon such things, before all the remaining bits of her happiness had been carried away.

By this time she was a mother, herself, twice over, and the aunt of seven squatchlings more. Her oldest nephew, whom she loved dearly, had reached the age when his homewood had begun to feel more like a prison than a shelter. He began, tentatively at first, then for longer and longer periods, to go beyond the streams and fields that were the recognized bounds of their territory. When he returned, his face would be alight with the memory of the things he had seen. One day he was gone for a very long time, and when he returned he told a story of a marvelous bridge of stone that stretched, in a single continuous arch, across a great river gorge, across which there passed a steady traffic of creatures—ferishers and werebears, talking squirrels and blue jays and minks, and strange adventurers, like hairless Sasquatches, from the land known as the Middling. This bridge, he said, was no more than a good day's walk to the west.

Now, Taffy had heard many outlandish tales in her life—she had even heard, once or twice, about this marvelous bridge, which some said had been raised by Coyote, so that he could leap across the worlds more easily, and which others said was a remnant of the time when Old Mr. Wood and his spirit kin still walked the First Forest. But she had never realized that it was so near to home, and she had never heard it spoken of by one who was, himself, so near to her.

"I would like to see that bridge," she blurted out, and then covered her mouth, because it was not a very polite remark for a female Sasquatch to make. And her young nephew, because he was young, and loved her, said, "Go, Auntie! Leave now! Yes! Oh, you must! You can be there by midnight and back again by dawn and none but we two will be the wiser."

"And who," she asked him, "will stay with the squatchlings while I am gone, and lay a cool cloth on their foreheads if they get feverish, and lie beside down them to stroke their forearm fur if they have bad dreams?"

"I will!" said the nephew, laughing. "Go! Go now!"

And so she had gone, taking nothing with her but the memory of his face alight with the wonders he had seen, and of the murmuring of her children sleeping by the fire.

"
I NEVER DID SEE THAT MARVELOUS BRIDGE," SHE TOLD JENNIFER T
.
now, in the darkness of their cell at the bottom of the knoll. "Before I arrived, I was set upon, in the dead of night, by a raiding party of giants—those rotten John brothers. The Sasquatch-mania among the giants was at its peak. They were regularly prowling the woods for—" She shivered. "Pets. Later Mooseknuckle John told me he had heard that the bridge collapsed, or was destroyed. Long ago. So I never will see it. And I never will see my dear, sweet squatchlings again, either."

"Why not?" Jennifer T. said. "You're free. You're home, or close enough. Listen, oh, Taffy, once we get out of here, you don't need to stay with us. You can go off and find your way back to your homewood. You can find your kids. I'm sure they're dying to—"

But Taffy shook her great shaggy head.

"They're gone," she said. "Long gone. I wasn't sure at first. It took a while for my nose to readjust."

"Gone?" Jennifer T. was confused. "Your
nose
?"

"We Sasquatches have very sensitive noses. We can smell things that you can't possibly imagine, my dear. We can smell an idea forming in the brain of a fish. We can smell the first heartbeat of an infant in its mother's womb. And we can smell the passing of time itself. At first, as I say, I wasn't sure. But once that thunderbird storm blew through my nostrils, I had the full smell of the Summerlands again after all those years in the cage in that stinking hall of stone. And I knew. There just isn't any way that any of my children, or even my grandchildren, could still be alive. I was stuck in that cage for much too long."

"But you said it was only a few hundred years," Jennifer T. said. "And if
you
could live that long…"

"Ah," Taffy sighed. "But the cage I was in—it was not made of true iron. It was weird-iron, mined in the Winterlands. And as long as I was kept within it…"

"Time moves different in the Winterlands, so they say." It was Spider-Rose. She rolled over now, and sat up, her face as she looked at Taffy creased with a faint wrinkle of sympathy. "It was a couple of hundred years for you, maybe, but all the while, out here in the wide world—"

"Nine hundred years have passed, here, since the day I left," Taffy said, hanging her head. "I can smell each and every one of them gone by."

Jennifer T. reached over to stroke the smooth dark cheek of the Sasquatch, and Taffy drew her against her side, and then they lay there, in the cell under the ferisher hill, listening to the hollow echo of all those vanished years.

CHAPTER 15

Grim

"CLIMB DOWN FROM THERE.
Come on, now. Be quick."

Ethan and Thor turned, awkwardly, sending fresh avalanches of address books to the treasury floor. At first, when he saw their captor, Ethan wanted to laugh. It was a boy, roughly the age and height of Ethan himself, perhaps a little smaller. An extremely ugly boy, true, with a nose like an empty spool of thread, ears like two shriveled apples, and a pair of pink, staring, bloodshot eyes much too small for the rest of his face. He was brandishing Ethan's stick of ashwood, swinging it carelessly back and forth, like a policeman in the cartoons with a nightstick. There was something familiar about him, to Ethan, and at the same time something very wrong. His expression was far too hard even for the unluckiest child; it banished Ethan's laughter, and encouraged him and Thor to scramble down from atop the pile as quickly as they could.

"What's your problem, rube?" said the not-boy, with a sneer of irritation. He was looking at Thor Wignutt. Ethan turned to his friend and saw that Thor had gone white as a sheet.

"Are you…?" Thor began. He swallowed, with such difficulty that Ethan could hear the muscles of his throat. "Did they—take you?"

"What's that? Did who take me?"

"The ferishers. From the Middling. Are you—a changeling?"

For a moment, Ethan was puzzled by the question, but then he understood. The not-boy gave off such a powerful air of
wrongness
. Maybe that was what seemed so familiar about him. It had reminded Thor of
Thor
.

Now, however, it was the not-boy's turn to laugh. He threw back his knobby head with its thatching of stiff yellow hair, and emitted a series of harsh guffaws, like a trash can banging down a flight of concrete steps.

"Me? You think I'm
human
? Feh!" He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of the loose buckskin tunic he wore. "A
changeling
?" He had to kneel for a moment, he was laughing so hard. "By the Starboard Arm, how did a pair of idiot reubens like you manage to come so far?"

"Well," said Ethan, in his mildest Invisible Boy tones. He was unpleasantly reminded, for some reason, of Kyle Olafssen. And it was just as well, because he was used, by now, to dealing with the Kyle Olafssens of the world. "What are you then?"

"What am I? What
am
I?" cried the not-boy, springing to his feet with startling speed. He rushed Ethan, crowding him up against a teetering heap of stolen mailboxes, most of them still on their posts, some still with dirt and tufts of grass clinging to them where they had been yanked from the ground. He raised the ashwood stick with both hands and rammed it up against Ethan's throat, choking him. The mailboxes clanged and rattled. "I'm a
giant
. I should think that would be obvious."

It was hard to tell—especially when the oxygen supply to your brain was being cut off—whether the not-boy could possibly be serious. When he had said he was a giant, he had sounded as if he meant it. But when he said that it ought to be obvious, his voice had taken on a edge of bitterness or sarcasm. And, after all, he could not possibly have been taller than four feet nine.

Such questions had, for the moment, to be set aside. Thor Wignutt was never one to stand idly by when his captain was under attack.

First he grabbed hold of the not-boy's thick shock of yellow thatch. Then he got around the not-boy from behind, and jerked his head back by the hair with one hand. With the other hand he grabbed hold of the stick, twisting it sharply down and away from Ethan's throat. At the same time he poked his right knee into the back of the not-boy's right knee. The not-boy went down with a grunt of surprise, and Ethan fell back against the tangle of mailboxes, gasping. When next he looked, Thor and the not-boy were whiplashing each other around, rolling on the ground, always with the stick gripped between them. First the not-boy was on top, then Thor, and all the while they kicked and slapped and spat at one another. The not-boy tried to chew off Thor's left ear. It was the ugliest fight that Ethan had ever seen.

Thor won. He ended up on top of the not-boy, with the stick pressed heavily down against the not-boy's throat, and the not-boy going red, then blue, and finally a sickly yellowish-green in the face.

"Say 'uncle,'" Thor said.

"You mean 'nuncle,'" grunted the not-boy, through his teeth.

"'Nuncle?'"

"That's what we say here."

"Say 'nuncle,' then."

"Nuncle!"

Thor let him up, taking the stick with him, and the not-boy rose to his feet, making a disgusting array of gagging and choking sounds and hawking up great yellow oysters of spit which he deposited all around himself with evident pleasure. Finally he drew himself up to his full (and, as has been mentioned, not considerable) height and looked Thor carefully up and down.

"Not bad," he said. "For a jambled-up mishmash of a changeling."

"Not bad," said Thor, "for a shrunken-down little pinky-toe of a giant."

"What?" Ethan said. "He really
is
a giant?"

"Of
course
I am, scat-for-brains," said the not-boy, and, scowling, he bowed very low. "And a wicked mother cursed me with the sorry name of Grimalkin John. If you prize your life, though, you'll just leave it at Grim. Grim the Giant."

"But—but what happened to you?" Ethan said, recalling a poem he had once read about a little gray kitty cat whose name was Grimalkin.

"I was born this way," Grim the Giant said. "What happened to
you
?"