Summerland (36 page)

"Mooseknuckle John?"

"Aye, he's one of 'em. And like as not the first I'll seek to liberate from his breath should I get the chance."

He smiled a thin, mean smile, and then his gaze fell on the stick in Ethan's hands.

"We're in some'at of a hurry," he said. "But before we skedaddle, I wonder if you doesn't want me to try and work that splinter of yours into a usefuller shape than it has at present?"

"Useful?" Ethan said. "You mean you know how to—can you make a
bat
?"

"It's not five minutes' work for me, on that gin of mine," the little giant said, pointing to the big machine. "But I'll do it only on a condition, and that's this: you got to let me keep all the shavings that get shedded off in the turning. If I can stuff my pocket with woundwood, who knows but that the binding grammer might not fit me just a little more loose."

Ethan looked at Thor, who nodded.

"I have a feeling we're going to be needing to hit some things, and not just balls," Thor said. "If a bat wasn't better for hitting stuff than a plain branch, why would people bother to make them?"

So Ethan handed the stick to the little giant, who took it with a certain rough tenderness and carried it back to the big machine at the back of the room. It was kept so far from the outer room and the halls of the knoll, he explained, because of the iron in it, and in the sharp-edged tools he needed for carving. He screwed the ends of the stick between the two spindles of the lathe, and gave it a slap with his hand.

"It's an awful fine piece of wood," he said, almost as if he regretted having to alter it. "
Awful
fine."

He began, with deep, regular strokes of his left foot, to work a great black treadle that lay in the dusty shadows beneath the hulk of the machine. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster the wood began to turn. The little giant reached for a large metal tool, and held its edge very close to the dark blur of the whirling wood. He paused. Ethan and Thor crowded in behind him.

"This here shank's conformulated out of weird-iron," Grim the Giant said. "Wouldn't nothing else do."

He touched the tip of the weird-iron shank to the wood.

Ethan was never sure afterward exactly what happened next. Something long and thin seemed to reach toward him from the whirling blur at the heart of the lathe, a jagged streak, dark at one end, blazing gold at the other. It lanced out from under the blade in the little giant's hands and struck Ethan, with a bright, stinging sizzle, full in the chest. It could only have been—and afterward both Thor and Grim insisted that it
was
—an especially long shaving of ashwood, peeled off by the first flashing strike of the shank. But to Ethan it looked and felt like nothing so much as long, jumping spark of electricity. It burned the air in his nostrils, and left a strange pulsing ache in his breastbone. A strange haze filled Ethan's eyes, tears and smoke and the sparkle that fills your head when you have been crouching, and then too quickly rise to your feet. He was filled with a powerful longing to handle the ashwood branch. The palms of his hands ached and tingled—they
bothered
him—as if something that he had lost, whose absence was as much a part of him as his name or the taste of his own tongue in his mouth, were about to be placed, at long last, in his grasp.

The air around the little giant was filled with a shower of glittering sparks that hit his crooked features with a weird light. For an instant the three of them stood, human, giant, and ferisher changeling, at the heart of the earth, lit by some ancient fire of making. Then, hours or minutes later, the sparks died, and the haze lifted from Ethan's eyes, and Grim the Giant turned to Ethan. His face was rimed with sawdust; sawdust had settled like snow on his hair and eyebrows.

"There's but one stroke remaining," he said. "A heart-knot, deep in the wood. If I cut it, you will have yourself a right fine piece of lumber, the best that I can work; and no more. If
you
cut it, you might craft yourself, if I'm not terrible mistaken, a bat for all the ages. Or else, lacking practice, you might turn that there chunk of fine woundwood to nothing more than a great flimsy toothpick fit for my old pappy's gums. It all depends."

"On what?" Ethan said. He leaned in to peer at what the giant had done. As promised he had, in a few minutes, turned the knobby hunk of wood that Ethan had found into a smooth, handsome baseball bat, delicately tapered at the handle. The unfinished lumber looked as soft as suede and shone pale and inviting. It was still attached to its former tree-branch self by a narrow pin at either end, where rough blocks of grayish branch remained clamped to the spindles. At first Ethan thought that what Grim wanted him to do was cut the bat loose, but then he saw, about halfway down the slender handle of the bat, a raised ridge of wood, of a darker hue than the rest, that had not yet been cut away. It was like a ring or collar, circling the grip. He could see that if you didn't cut it away, it would dig right into your hand. "What does it depend on?"

"Why, on
you
, natcherly," the little giant said, just at Ethan had known that he would. "On what you got inside you. On what's in those hands of yours, and in the heart that feeds them."

"Why?" Ethan said, filled with sudden dread of failure, of striking out, exactly like that which seized him when it was his turn to step up to the plate. "Why does it have to depend on
that
?"

But, of course, he already knew the answer to that question, too.

"Why?" said the little giant. He was busily scooping up handfuls of sawdust from the floor around the lathe and filling his pockets with them. "Because that's the nature of these things!"

"Come on, Feld," Thor said. It was the first time in a long time—maybe the first time ever—that Thor had not referred to him directly as
Captain
. "We have to get it back to Cinquefoil."

"Right," Ethan said. He took the lathe tool from Grim the Giant. It had a wood handle, and its metal shank was long and curved strangely in on itself lengthwise, as if it had been stopped just short of turning itself into a tube. The tip of it was curved like the moon of your thumbnail and glinted softly. Grim put a foot on the treadle and began to work it up and down. As the bat began to spin again, the ridge became a dark blur and then finally seemed to disappear altogether except as a fleeting shadow Ethan was not even sure he really could see. Slowly he lowered the tip of the shank toward the general area where he felt the dark ridge might lie. He knew that if he pressed too hard, he might very well cut clear through the handle of the bat. What was left might be useful for healing Cinquefoil, but no good whatever for hitting baseballs, and not much good for smacking at the heads of skrikers, either.

"Not so tight," said Grim. "You ain't trying to choke the life out of it!"

Ethan loosened his grip on the shank a little, afraid that if the blade made too glancing contact with the wood it would go skittering off along the length of the bat, digging out little gouges as it went. He felt the pressure of the little giant's hand on his shoulder, and of Thor's intent gaze. He lowered the tool again, going as quickly as he dared, absolutely certain that he had absolutely no idea where or how firmly he ought to touch the bat. The thumping and screeching of the lathe belts was painfully loud. All at once, just before he brought the shank down once and for all to the wood, he heard, or thought he heard, the voice of Jennifer T. Rideout in his ear, calling out "And keep your eyes open!" That was when he realized that he had, in fact, closed his eyes. He was just blindly poking around his beautiful bat with something that could ruin it forever.

"I can't do it!" he shouted.

He handed the tool to Grim the Giant, who took his foot from the treadle. The bat came whuffling to a stop. The dark lump was still there, of course, right in the middle of the handle.

"I'm sorry," Ethan said. "I—I'm not ready yet. You do it."

Grim raised the tool, and put his foot on the treadle. Then he stepped back, and turned to Ethan, and looked him up and down in a curious way, rubbing a little doubtfully at his bony chin. He took a long, narrow saw, wicked as the jaw of some carnivorous fish, from his workbench, and quickly ripped through the unturned ends of the stick, cutting loose the bat. He gripped it by its handle and took a couple of practice swings. He nodded.

"Going to drive you mad, that knot," he said. "But let's leave it there for now."

Ethan took the bat from him, and ran his hands along its surface. The touch was at once hard and satiny, like the coat of a horse's forehead.

"It wants sanding, of course," Grim said. "And oiling. But I reckon there's no time for that."

Ethan nodded, though he had only half heard the little giant's words; the shame of his failure throbbed in his chest as wildly as after any one of his countless strikeouts. For the first time since leaving Clam Island, he was glad that his father was not around to witness another display of Ethan's ineptitude. He gripped the handle, and the knot bit softly into the meat of his hand.

"Later," he mumbled, his cheeks burning. "I'll take care of it later."

He followed Thor and Grim out of the workshop, across the echoing treasury, and through the door to the spiral corridor—this time, of course, they just opened it and walked on through. They glanced up and down the arcing hall, but there was neither sound nor sign of ferisher—the whole mob, the giant said, had trooped out into the fields for their games. Quickly they ran down and around, and around, and around, past all the doors they had passed on their way up, until at last the corridor ran out, and they were face-to-face with the great oak door of the cell. Thor laid his hands against the wood, and closed his eyes—and the door swung open. Grim grinned as Thor jumped back with a cry.

"No need to wear yourself out with scamperings," he said. "I know the door grammers, took it right—oh."

Ethan and Thor crowded in behind him, and stood there, gaping at the jumble of empty straw pallets that were all that it contained.

"Come on," said Thor. "Let's get scampering."

CHAPTER 16

A Rat in the Walls

"I'M SICK OF THIS!"
said Jennifer T. "What happened to those guys? Where are they?"

The lone candle had nearly burned down; there was no way to know how long they had been waiting in the semi-darkness, but it felt like hours.

"They were probably captured," Spider-Rose said gloomily.

"Then why didn't they bring them back here?"

"Maybe they gave them to Grimalkin John. They sometimes do that with the ill-behaved ones."

"Grimalkin
John
?" Jennifer T. said. "A giant?"

"The tiniest giant in the Summerlands," Spider-Rose said. "He's no bigger than your friends are themselves. Mostly we has him around to keep down the mice and rats, better than a cat. Powerful hungry for rats, he is. Clever with his hands, too."