Keeper of Dreams (41 page)

“Where’s Mo?”

“The skinny girl with the wart under her eye?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you see her leave?”

“Oh, of course. I’m very watchful. There isn’t much else to do. There’s firewood a few feet away behind you. If you like, you can brighten up this fire a bit. Just to cook me, mind you.”

Enoch found the firewood, and soon had a few pieces going, just enough to let him see the edges of the room. All the people were gone. Their clothing, however, was neatly folded on the benches, and their weapons lay on the table. Enoch decided that nothing would ever surprise him again.

“Which way did she go?” Enoch asked.

“I can’t say.”

“Didn’t you
see
?”

“Oh, yes, of course I
saw
.”

“But you can’t say.”

“Would you like, for instance, roast pig’s tongue?”

So the pig was under some sort of enchantment, and couldn’t help him. Or maybe he could.

“What if I took you with me? Could you tell me if I were heading in the right direction?”

“That would depend on what our journey was
for
.”

Enoch tried to find a way to outsmart the enchantment. “To find Mo so we can eat you.”

“I can be of inestimable assistance.”

Enoch got a thick robe from one of the piles of clothing and wrapped it around the pig. Then he lifted the animal, spit and all, and began to carry it away from the fire.

“Don’t you need a torch?” asked the pig.

Enoch began to set down the pig while he went to fetch a torch from the wall.

The pig yelled. “Do you want your supper to be eaten by rats?”

“No,” Enoch said. He carried the pig with him.

With the torch in his right hand and the pig under his left, Enoch headed for the secret door behind the throne.

“That isn’t where your fellow diner is,” said the pig. And the pig directed Enoch to another secret passage that could only be reached through a narrow slit by a window that looked like a shadow until the very moment that Enoch began to step into it. It turned into a stairway winding down.

“This isn’t in the map,” Enoch said.

“Do you believe everything you’re told?” asked the pig.

As they went slowly down the stairway, Enoch kept up a one-sided conversation with the pig. “I noticed that even though all those dead people had warm food on their plates, not one of them was eating ham.”

“They should have been. I taste unusually good.”

“Which suggests that you weren’t put on that spit until after they were all dead.”

“If you refrigerate me, I make an excellent cold ham salad.”

“What I’m wondering is whether you have anything to do with why the king wasn’t at supper.”

“He doesn’t eat ham. Never does.”

“What I’m wondering is what would happen if I pulled you off that spit.”

“It would be so much harder to roast me then.”

Enoch didn’t try the experiment right then, however, because he had found Mo.

She was hanging by the wrists from manacles and chains. Her feet, also chained, were two feet off the floor. She looked tired and out of sorts.

“Took you long enough,” she said nastily.

“If you at least had told me you were going,” Enoch said.

“Then we’d both be chained up here.”

Enoch looked around. It was a dungeon. He recognized some of the machinery as torture equipment. A rack. An iron maiden.

“What do you have with you?” asked Mo.

“The pig.”

“Want a sandwich?” asked the pig.

“The pig! Of all the stupid—”

A roaring sound from the other side of the room interrupted Mo’s remarks. It was a tiger, and it had an unkind expression on its face.

“Do you happen to have your sword with you, Mo?” Enoch asked.

“No,” she answered. “I lost it in a battle with a gorilla. The gorilla was the one that put me up here. And then she dragged out the bodies of the eagle and the bear that had I already killed.”

“Hey, this is a fun place,” Enoch said. “Do you think this tiger only wants to chain me to the wall, too?”

The tiger roared.

“Not a chance,” said Mo. “It wants you dead.”

“If it’s so set on killing me, why didn’t
you
get killed?”

“I’m protected,” said Mo.

The pig spoke up from under Enoch’s arm. “She has a wart under her eye. Nothing in this place can kill her. But
you
—that’s a different story.”

Enoch was annoyed. “You might have mentioned this little difference between us before we set out on this quest, Mo.”

Mo looked contrite. “I thought I could protect you.”

Enoch looked away from her. “Listen, pig, if I’m going to be able to eat you for breakfast, I have to be alive in the morning. Any suggestions?”

“Get me off this spit,” said the pig.

Enoch set down the pig and began pulling out the spit. A long metal rod, it was so greasy that he had a hard time holding on.

“That spit isn’t going to do much good against that tiger,” said Mo.

But almost as soon as he had the spit free of the pig, it began to shimmer. And it turned from a pointed metal rod into a dazzlingly bright silver thread.

“What do I do with
this
?” asked Enoch.

“It’s perfect for slicing meat,” said the pig. “In fact, the only thing it won’t slice is you, so be careful.”

Enoch got the idea, and swung the thread at the tiger. It missed, and then flipped around and cut the iron maiden neatly in half.

“It’s sharp,” Enoch said.

“Watch out for the tiger,” Mo suggested.

The tiger was already leaping at Enoch. He had no time to do anything except hold the silver string in front of him like the string of a bow. It wasn’t much of a shield. The tiger knocked him to the floor and landed
on top of him. Enoch braced himself for the tiger’s teeth, but they never bit him. The tiger had knocked him down, but on the way the silver thread had cut it in half to the shoulders.

“I suggest you keep holding on to the thread,” said the pig. “If you aren’t holding it, it will cut
you
.”

Enoch was careful to keep hold of the thread as he got out from under the tiger.

By the time he was on his feet, there was a horse at the opposite side of the room. It was a beautiful animal, large and powerful, but Enoch figured he would probably never ride it, for its hoofs were fire, and fire dripped from its mouth in great drops. The horse reared up and whinnied, and fire spattered on the floor only a few feet from him.

Enoch did the only sensible thing. He turned his back on the horse and cut Mo’s chains with a few swipes of the silver thread. He started to hand her the thread, but then it occurred to him that it would cut her hand off. And then he realized that if he set it down so she could take it, it would cut right through the floor and sink out of reach. It might even keep going until it reached the center of the earth.

Mo must have thought of the same thing, because she said, “It’s your show, Eeny, baby.”

So Enoch turned and faced the horse, wondering how he could learn to use his weapon in the next fifteen seconds.

“Think of it as a towel fight,” Mo said.

After that it was easy. He just scrambled around and around the room, drawing the horse into corners or behind machines where it couldn’t turn around. Then he snapped the string at the horse like a towel in the locker room at junior high, and it wasn’t long before the horse was in just as bad condition as the tiger.

“And to think that during all those towel fights, I was really in training,” Enoch said.

He cut the manacles off Mo’s wrists and ankles as carefully as he could. As he was finishing, he noticed little flecks of cold on his hands. He looked closer, and in the torchlight he realized it was snowing.

“Snowing,” said Mo. “It’s always summer here.”

“It’s also indoors. Isn’t indoor snow a little unusual here, too?”

“It’s a bad sign,” Mo said.

“On the contrary,” said the pig. “It’s a very good sign.”

“It is?”

“It means that the king is getting some of his power back. You’ve been doing very well.”

Something was wrong with this, though Enoch wasn’t sure what. “Why would the king bring snow and cold, and his enemy brings summer all the time? Are we fighting for the wrong side?”

“Not at all,” said the pig. “Winter is absolutely necessary for life to go on. Winter, then spring. Death, then life. If it were always summer, then it would always be the same. Nothing would
change
. Nothing would really be alive.”

Enoch thought of his mother, thought of her dying, and he said, “No. It would be better if there were no death.”

“Suit yourself,” said the pig. “It’s no skin off my snout. Or nose, rather.”

Enoch glanced over at the pig, and it wasn’t. A pig, that is. Instead it was a white-bearded man in a red gown with a white fur cape and a white fur belt. He was wearing huge boots, and on his head was the most extravagant of turbans. The costume was not exactly as Enoch had always seen it, but the man was recognizable.

“Santa Claus,” Enoch said.

“Around here they usually call me the king,” he answered. “The snow is mine.”

“I thought you lived at the north pole,” said Mo.

“Don’t believe everything you hear. I live here, in the Castle of Care.”

“Not the Castle of Contempt?”

“That’s what my enemy named it. His specialty, you know. And yet it was a kind of warning. For instance, Mo, you didn’t have contempt for that little lizard. If it had bitten you, it would have infected you the way it did all those other people, making you believe that the only way to get what you want is to get someone else out of the way.”

“What happened to the pig?” asked Enoch.

“
I
am the pig. Or was. My enemy didn’t have the power to finish me off, but he did catch me without friends one day and changed my shape and put me under a spell so that all I could say to people was suggest that they eat me.”

“What if we
had
eaten you?”

“It would have killed me. And given you an excruciating headache, too.
You
were all for eating me, Eeny—don’t think I didn’t notice that. I’m glad Mo had more sense.”

“Is it over now?” asked Enoch.

“Not really. Almost, though. Let’s see—Mo found the secret room that my enemy built here, and you killed his tiger and his horse. I expect all we need to do now is call him here. My staff, please,” said the king. “The silver string.”

Enoch held out the string. “Won’t it cut you?”

“Not
me
.” The moment it touched the king’s hand, the string turned into an ivory staff, taller by half than the old man, and as white as his beard.

“All right, Trickster,” bellowed the king. “Front and center, right now!”

Immediately there appeared in the middle of the dungeon, surrounded by snow, a thin, woeful-looking little girl with tears running down her cheeks. “Mommy,” said the child.

“None of that,” said the king.

The child instantly turned into a man with a skull-like face. “You’re such a sucker for children, I thought it was worth a try,” he said.

“I must tell you, Trickster, I didn’t like roasting.”

“I thought you could take a joke.”

“You’ve had your way long enough. Now I’ll get rid of you without another word.” The king held up his ivory staff and suddenly a foot of snow fell on the Trickster all at once, covering him completely. The Trickster did not move. He just sat there, buried in snow.

“It’s only going to get colder down here,” said the king. “Shall we go up and have some breakfast? It should be morning by now.”

“I’ve been dying for a ham sandwich all night,” Enoch said.

“We will
not
have ham,” said the king.

Mo could not take her eyes off the pile of snow where the Trickster had been. “Is he dead?” she asked.

“For now,” said the king. “But soon enough another liar will come along to try to tell us that death is the enemy of life and fool people into thinking that I’m just a jolly old elf who gives presents.”

“Aren’t you?” asked Enoch.

“Yes, but I have other jobs. Now, since you saved me, I’ll give you your reward.”

“All I want is the dust of healing,” said Enoch.

“That’s
your
affair,” the king answered. “That isn’t mine to give. All I can give you is a sip of water whenever you want it.”

They were upstairs now, and out in the courtyard. It was not empty anymore. Now it was full of people and animals, and in the center of everything was a large fountain with two great spouts of water coming up.

“The fountain of wisdom and the fountain of love,” said the king. “When they mix, they’re just ordinary water. But when you drink from just one fount or the other, then you drink either the water of wisdom or the elixir of love. If you drink one, the other won’t have any effect on you for at least a year. But after that, you can come back as often as you like. Don’t bother coming to see
me
—I’ll be much too busy. But feel free to have a drink from either fountain. Well, much to do, much to do. I have a few hundred years of work to catch up on. Roast pig indeed.” The king disappeared inside the great hall.