Summerland (56 page)

On the fourth side of the Green, beyond right field, there was a profound darkness, broken here and there by the smudged light of fires that were, she realized, only the reflections of the fires burning in the Summerlands across the way. The Gleaming, sealed forever by some kind of trick of Coyote's that he was unable, or afraid, to undo. Or maybe, since everything was about to come to an end anyway, he just didn't see any point to bothering.

It was hard to imagine someone as powerful and tricky as Coyote being afraid of anything, but standing there in the middle of Diamond Green she got the unmistakable feeling that he was. He had laid waste to the orchards of Applelawn, trampled the Greenmelt around Murmury, and violated the waters of the Well itself. And he had allowed his followers to pitch their red tents in the dark thorny bramble of the Middling. But Diamond Green itself, where she now stood, lay untouched, stretching smooth and unsullied in every direction, the grass dark in the moonlight and glinting with dew. Even with the Gleaming sealed up, it was as if there was a power in the world, on this great grassy diamond, that Coyote still feared.

There was a rustle, just behind her, like a flag in a stiff breeze. She whirled, remembering the shadows that had pursued them into the Middling, back on Clam Island. A black shape, with a smell like the smell of smoke in your hair the day after a barbecue, churned the air beside her. It was a huge black bird—a raven. Jennifer's heart lurched in her chest, but she stood her ground as it dived toward her. Covering her face with one arm, she swatted at it with the other, knocking it away, wary of its sharp beak and claws.

"Take it easy!" croaked the raven. "I'm just looking for a place to sit down."

Once she had heard it talk, she could no longer seem to move her hands to shoo it away. She stood stock still, her heart pounding so hard now that she could hear it as a soft iron clanging in her ears, and allowed the raven to light on her shoulder.

"Now who's afraid?" the raven said, and the voice, though raucous, was familiar to her. "Coyote doesn't
fear
the power of this field. Coyote
is
the power here. This is his ground, the Great Crossroads of the Four Worlds. It was here, oh, ages ago, that he fell asleep, and dreamed a Coyote game of paths and chances. The game you love so much, little girl. So don't go thinking such nasty thoughts about Coyote."

"You don't fool me," Jennifer T. said. "You're
him
."

He was standing beside her then, in the moonlight, regarding her, his head cocked curiously to one side in a way that really did remind her of a cunning and curious old coyote.

"You are a spark plug, all right," he said. "If I weren't about to disband my team, I'd be tempted to sign you to a contract."

"Where's
my
team?" Jennifer T. "Cinquefoil and Rodrigo and Spider-Rose. Where are they?"

"I have them," he said. "As I now have you."

"You don't have me yet," she said. "So shut up."

He smiled. She could see that he really seemed to like her. For some reason that made her even angrier than before.

"You know why I'm here, right?" she said. "You can read my thoughts."

"I can, in fact. And I do." He reached into the pocket of his long coat and withdrew a long tobacco pipe. It was pale gray in the moonlight, but she guessed that, like Cutbelly's, it was carved from bone. He wiggled two fingers and a little gold fish of fire flopped in the air above the pipe and then plunged, with a hiss, into the bowl. "You want to play ball."

"That's right. My guys against your guys. Nine on nine. Right here, on Diamond Green. If we win, you get that hose out of there and pack everything up and, you know. Basically, lose. If you win, then…" She hesitated before saying it. It was not as if she had asked Ethan for his permission; he might not agree. "Then we give you Splinter. The bat. The piece of wood you need."

"Interesting proposition. You know Coyote pretty well, for a gum-chewing half-breed child of television. And I just love the idea of the fate of the entire universe coming down to the bottom of the ninth.
Love
it. But you're neglecting one thing.
I
have all the power here, and
you
have none. I hold all the cards, except one, the bat, but as to that, look around you. I have ten thousand of my freakish little buddies scattered in their tents and trailers all around this field. That's versus nine of you, of whom at the moment all but two are in my immediate control. I have positioned my fellas in a ring in this immediate vicinity, all around Applelawn, the Greenmelt, and the Briarpatch, armed not just with weapons but with powerful grammers to dampen the talents of Shadowtails. You can't get away, and you can't send for help. All I need to do is be patient, and keep your friend Ethan away from food for a week or two. And that stick of his will be mine."

Jennifer T. had used up her entire store of boldness in stealing through the Briarpatch, coming here, and standing up to Coyote as she had. Now she fell silent, and allowed the weight of defeat to hang her head.

"What do
you
have to fight me with?" Coyote said. "What do you
know?
Your father's father's people knew me, once; and got the better of me many times. But that lore is not yours, little girl. What lore do you have?"

When Coyote said
lore
—that was when Jennifer T. thought of the book her uncle Mo had given her.
The Threefold Lore, they called it. All that's nonsense
. She took it from her back pocket and held it up to him.

"I have this," she said. "The Lore of the Wa-He-Ta Tribe."

"What is
that
?" He peered through the darkness at the book's cover, with its three costumed little white boys sitting by a fire while a big Indian in a corny headdress taught them how to tie trout lures or do lanyard. "
That
?" He grinned. "That book was written by a little old man named Irving Posner, in a hotel room in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1921. There's no
lore
in that book. There's nothing in there that can save you."

"The Threefold Lore," she said, without much faith in what she was saying—
Irving Posner
?—but taking refuge, as so often in her life, in her own deep stubbornness. "Wonder. And Hopefulness. And Trust."

Coyote laughed so hard that he blew his pipe out; a little comet of burning tobacco shot into the air. He bent over, laughing. He stood up, and smoothed his hair, and dabbed at an eye. And then the pipe fell out of his mouth, and he looked surprised as only Coyote—whose talent has always been that of ridiculous failure as much as of wild success—can look surprised. Jennifer T. turned. At first she thought that it was a mist, rising from the grass, but then she saw that it was clearly stealing in through the Briarpatch itself, from the Middling. It was some kind of silk, milkweed spores or the floats of balloonist spiders, thousands of them, drifting in the moonlight, blowing in from the Briarpatch on a breeze she could not feel.

"They're ghosts, you idiot," Coyote said, with a twisted grin of dismay.

The wisps of silky fog settled on the field like smoke curling inside a bottle. Then each wisp seemed to bloom, instantly, into a small shape, oddly spiky up on top. As she stood there with Coyote, holding the
The Wa-He-Ta Brave's Official Tribe Handbook
, the field of Green Diamond filled with an army of ghostly boys. The ghost-boys were gotten up like little "Indians," in buckskins and warpaint, each of them wearing a dopey-looking feathered headdress on his head. The boys filled in—developed like photographs—as they settled and spread across the field. Their features grew more distinct. They even took on a certain amount of pale coloring. They reminded her of old photographs of her grandmother and great-aunts on the breakfront in the house on Clam Island: black and white, or brown and white, but tinted with delicate pale Eastery colors. Some of the boys were bigger than she, and others smaller, but none of them seemed to be older, as far as she could tell, or as far as you could ascribe an age to a ghost.

"Who are you guys?" she asked the nearest ghost, a snub-nosed kid with wide-set dark eyes and pale cheeks, tinted candy pink.

"We are the braves of Wa-He-Ta," he said. "And we are true-blue to the end."

"That's right," said a second boy, thin and spotty. "Even if you is a girl."

Jennifer T. opened the
Handbook
to its title page and held it out to Coyote. Under the crossed-tomahawk-and-peace-pipe symbol of the Wa-He-Ta braves there was a motto in big slanty letters. She guessed that Coyote's eyes would be sharp enough to read the motto, even by the light of a three-quarter moon.

"Says so right here," said Jennifer T. " '
True-Blue to the End
.' "

"Your uncle Mo wishes he could be here with us," said the pink-cheeked boy. She could see clear through his body to the name tag sewed into the collar of his uniform shirt. It said
COOTER SIMMS
. "But he isn't dead yet, so he can't."

"He's the last of the Wa-He-Tas," said another ghost boy.

"We doesn't need him," said a third. "We is skitterish as squirrels and toothy as garfish and scrappy as a mess of rat terriers." There was a general excited murmur of agreement among the ghost boys at this declaration, a number of them piping up with feisty similes of their own. "An' they's one of us for every one of them little critters and graylings and whatnots you got doing your dirty work 'round here. An' mister," the boy finished, pushing up his sleeves, "we aim to see that they doesn't do you one lick of good."

"So now it's a fair fight," said Cooter Simms. "Ten thousand against ten thousand."

Coyote spun around where he stood, watching as the billowing ghost-boys fogged up his view of the fires of his troops. Their soft rustling presence seemed even to dampen the sound of the Rade's iron music. The infernal pounding of the unwinding picofiber hose on its clattering spool faded and died. Coyote opened his mouth, and as he did so his lip curled in an ugly way, and Jennifer T. thought she caught a glimpse of a row of snaggled, ugly canine teeth. Then he closed his mouth, and smiled his beautiful smile. He reloaded his pipe, and sent another firefish diving into its bowl. He puffed merrily for a moment, looking around at the ghostly army of boys. Then he looked at Jennifer T., and his eyes blazed with a fire so old and deep that the cockiness she had been feeling over the past few minutes vanished like a drop of water on a hot skillet.

"All right, then," Coyote said. "I'll release your teammates, and return your gear. And we'll meet on this green at noon tomorrow. But don't count on winning. My Hobbledehoys are
tough
, Jennifer T. Rideout. They're spikes-out, swill-spitting dirt players who'll steal your signs and brush back your hitters and load up the ball with Vaseline. They're the original Gashouse Gang, and they play by Coyote rules. And their pitcher, let me tell you…" He sucked on his pipe and it flared up and lit his face from underneath, the way you do with a flashlight when you are telling a ghost story and want to spook your friends. "He has the
nastiest
stuff you've ever seen." He chuckled. "A real
fire
baller."

Then he turned, and walked off the field.

CHAPTER 25