Summerland (32 page)

As they climbed, they passed dozens and dozens of low ferisher doors, most of them elaborately carved with tangling shapes that might have been vines or flames or the characters that spelled out a grammer. Many of the doors had been left ajar, even wide open. The rooms inside—kitchens and sculleries, bedchambers and salons, card rooms and galleries, had all been abandoned to the urgency of council. They were lit by rows of tiny windows that let in the afternoon sunshine, though Ethan was sure he had seen no windows on the outside of the knoll.

"Grammery windows," Thor said, passing his hand through a slanting beam of illuminated dust.

"Is that what they're really called, or did you just make that up?'"

Thor considered the question, his big serious head cocked to one side.

"I really don't know," he said.

At first Ethan and Thor crept into the rooms cautiously, looking all around, checking under the doll-sized beds and card tables, peering behind the draperies, touching nothing. But before long the complete desertion of the rooms by the ferisher folk was apparent, and the two boys grew bold. They helped themselves to cheeses, handfuls of pumpkin seeds and wild strawberries, and to the dazzling array of candies that they found piled high in dishes in nearly every room. Ferishers love sweets, and the variety of candies was positively baroque. There were candies like snowflakes, and candies like stars and planets, and candies like the striped domes of Russian churches. The boys stuffed their mouths, and dirtied their faces, and loaded their pockets, too. They opened wardrobes and rifled drawers. They got up on tabletops and peered behind dusty rows of books on the shelves of the moldering library. There was no sign anywhere, though, of Ethan's stick, and meanwhile they climbed ever higher in the knoll, and the circuit of the tunnel narrowed, and now they could hear, faintly, the shouting and blustering of the assembled ferishers, away at the top of the hill.

Then, after they had been climbing and searching for a long time, they came to a door that was nearly as tall as they. Unlike the others, it was shut tight, and its knotty expanse featured neither latch nor handle. For a moment Ethan thought that they might have stumbled onto the council chamber itself, and he drew back, then crept forward and put his ear against the door. Silence. The mutterings and shouts of the ferisher debate continued to drift down, as before, from farther up the tunnel. He pushed on the high door, but it was stuck fast. He crouched down, and put his shoulder against it, and pressed with and all his strength.

"The treasury," Thor said softly, and his hand went once more to his temple to scratch. "All kinds of grammer on this door."

Ethan looked at his friend. The information, though it came so easily to his lips, seemed at the same time to be causing Thor a certain amount of pain.

"Is there a Branch you can—?" he began, but Thor was already pressing himself against the door. Ethan grabbed hold of him by the waistband of his jeans, and in half a second, with a shivery chiming as of icicles, they had crossed the massively thick door.

Say
treasury
and the thought springs to mind, perhaps, of glinting mounds of doubloons and swag, golden candelabras, ornate caskets choked with emeralds and diamonds. But that is not the sort of loot that interests a ferisher. No, a ferisher's treasure is something else entirely. When Ethan and Thor crossed into the treasury of the Dandelion Hill ferishers, by far the tallest room in the knoll—it was nearly high enough for Taffy to have stood erect—they found AAA batteries, picture hooks, and rubber doorstops; shoelaces, neckties, and the strings of bathing trunks; watchbands, watch works, watch crystals, and the loose hands and faces of watches; loops of wire, baling twine, packing twine, bungee cord, rappelling rope, and electrical wire (coated in plastic, rubber, and fabric); ten thousand shirt buttons of bone and vinyl, wood and shell; tubes, gearboxes, coils, and grilles filched from the backrooms of radio-repair shops, hardware stores, and garages; Christmas ornaments, firecrackers, and the Easter eggs that roll deep under the hydrangea and are never found again; uncountable, but no fewer than two hundred and fifty, ferisher-sized balls of tinfoil, aluminum foil, gold leaf, Mylar, and colored cellophane; canvas stolen from painters and lace from fine ladies; handkerchiefs, bandannas, headscarves, and ten thousand rags of gingham, flannel, corduroy, denim, and terry; no end of house keys, car keys, motel keys, safe-deposit keys, and the keys to locks from the diaries of girls long since grown old and buried, along with their deep and tedious secrets; hair combs, hair clasps, and barrettes; rhinestone brooches, imitation-pearl ear-rings, and cheap finger rings given out by a century of dentists; unmatched but otherwise perfectly good argyle socks; catnip balls, sun-bleached Frisbees, lawn darts, rubber pork chops, and the fuselages of a thousand balsawood gliders.… In short, everything that you (or someone very much like you) has ever lost track of and stood, in the middle of your bedroom (or one very much like yours), holding on to that other perfectly good argyle sock, saying to yourself, "Where
do
they go?"

"We are never going to find my stick," Ethan said glumly. "Not in all this. Not if we had a hundred years to look for it. I mean, I sort of think it would be right in the front here." He poked with his toe at some brass buttons, of the sort found most often on men's navy blazers, which were piled by the door. "But they could just as easily have heaved it up somewhere in this mess way back there and then we…" He trailed off, and stood for several moments feeling overwhelmed by the sheer variety and size of the pile of junk. Spider-Rose was right: Cinquefoil was doomed. And without the ferisher chief to lead them and guide them, they would never find Ethan's father.

At the thought of his father Ethan took out the dark glasses and put them on. To his surprise the scene that had become so familiar—his father huddled on a patch of dark gray, in a pale gray room—was gone. In its place was a scene so bizarre and unexpected that it took him a moment to realize what he was seeing. At first he thought it was a billowing banner or sheet hung in the wind. Then he decided that it was a carpet of some kind, over which ran a rippling stream of water. Finally he realized that what he was looking at was
mice
, thousands of them, millions of them, tiny white mice running for their lives. And in the lower part of the lenses a pair of claw-like mitts was reaching down into the running river of mice and scooping them up, in the general direction of Ethan's
mouth
. The image jerked and swung as whoever was eating mice tossed his head and worked his jaws with evident pleasure.

Ethan whipped the glasses off his face and stuffed them down into his pocket, shuddering. He was going to have to think twice about putting them on again. He looked around for Thor, and presently found him, perched halfway up a mound of what looked like binders or notebooks, sitting on his haunches, turning over a pleated packet of paper, holding it this way and that, folding it, opening it, folding it again.

"What is it?" Ethan said. Thor said nothing, wholly absorbed in studying the sheet of paper, which looked to be about as big as an open newspaper. If they were still back on Clam Island, and it was a few days before, Ethan would have said that Thor was scanning the paper into his database. "Thor?"

Ethan found a toe-hold in the mound of binders and hoisted himself up. The little binders, he saw now, were actually address books, plastic- and leather-bound, purse-sized and pocket-sized and briefcase-sized, representing the total acquaintanceship of a couple of thousand people easy. He remembered his mother's having lost her address book, once, the day before she went in for her biopsy—"the worst week of my life," she had called it at the time, though there would of course be worse to come. He wondered idly if his mother's address book could be somewhere in this mountain he was climbing. Whose addresses and phone numbers would have been in that book? What would those people say to him if he called them now? How many address books out there still had his mother's name in them, neatly penciled, with a phone number that was disconnected and an address that was no longer good?

Even before he reached Thor's perch he could see that what the other boy was studying with such interest was a map, a large one, which had been ruined by repeated and slapdash refolding. There were a number of such maps in the glove compartment of Skidbladnir, puzzle-maps, Rubik's cubes of paper so thoroughly "bollixed up," as Mr. Feld put it, that they couldn't ever really be opened anymore. They had been folded so many times and so incorrectly that they were now forever sealed by some mysterious origami of carelessness. At best you could peel back a pleat and peer inside, looking for a street or highway in a cramped, crazy-quilt terrain where the Pacific Ocean, say, bumped up against downtown Phoenix. Thor was not studying the contents of the map. He was still trying to figure out how to arrange and collapse the colored rectangular sections back together the right way. There were whitish rectangles, and greenish rectangles, and brownish rectangles, painted, covered in tiny black writing, and shot through with curling lines of gray. And then there were the blue rectangles, serenely blue and blank as the sky with no gray lines, no writing or marks on them at all.

"What's it a map of?" Ethan said, crouching down alongside Thor, accidentally starting a landslide of address books toward the floor. As he leaned in to get a closer look, he saw that the paper on which the map was printed looked old and yellowed, and had chipped considerably along some of its edges. Then he looked closer still and saw how crooked and quirky were the letters in which the names of the various features of the map were written. It was the same alphabet he had seen on the letter-scroll used by Johnny Speakwater to spit out the future as seen by the oracular clam. "Can you tell? Do you see any place names you recognize? Is there a legend? Is there a compass rose?"

But Thor did not answer. He just went on peeling back sections of the map from one another, folding it in half, then in quarters, then opening it into brand-new quarters and halves.

"Come on, Thor," Ethan said. "We don't have time for you to play with that. We have to find that stick." Thor ignored him. He had folded the map down to a single thick rectangle, one of the blue ones without any text or markings. Now he began to open it up again, one tentative fold at a time.

"Thor," Ethan pleaded. "Thor, come on, we have to—hey. Way to go."

He'd done it: opened up the map all the way, smooth and unpleated. He held it out in front of him and Ethan, arms spread wide. From one end to another, from top to bottom and from right hand to left, there hung before them a single, uninterrupted expanse of blue, like a detail of a close-up of a tiny blue section of the wide-open sky. It was six rectangles high and nine wide, like this:

"What kind of map is that? What's it of? Turn it over."

The reverse of the map was made of thousands and thousands of overlapping green splotches, pointed ovals, some large and some small, each one painted carefully and edged and shadowed to give them the appearance of depth. Ethan looked closer and saw that they were not splotches but
leaves
, painted green leaves connected by a bewildering tangle of the curling, twisting, bending gray lines that were meant, he understood, to represent the branches of a tree. Each leaf was marked, in turn, with little picture symbols for rivers and woods, mountains and lakes, hills and cities, and countless other places, all of them named in the crabbed little ferisher alphabet.

"What happened to the mostly brown parts there were a minute ago?" Ethan said. "And the mostly white ones?"

Thor turned his head toward Ethan, and looked at him. Though it lasted only a second, Ethan never forgot that look. He had been so often the recipient of Thor's information, of his facts and his preposterous theories. But he had never until this moment seen in Thor's eyes—in anyone's eyes—such a look of utter knowledge. Whatever else happened to him, whatever became of him, in spite of his being too tall, too red-blooded, too mortal, too
human
, Thor had found his way into a world that he understood. Back in the Middling Thor had been like one of those meteorites you heard about that fall from space and land at the bottom of the ocean. Though it lies half buried in mud and half encrusted in a skin of plankton and mollusks, though it is warmed by vents in the earth and gives shelter to all manner of fish, at its heart lie the chemicals and elements, the sparkling mysterious stuff of outer space. Without saying a word, Thor quickly folded the map down to a single rectangle, this time a greenish one—Ethan saw a patch of rippling black lines meant to represent a sea. Then Thor opened the map back up again, and turned it over. This time the reverse was made up of a mass of pale brown leaves, neatly painted and linked as before by intertwining branches, thick and thin, painted in gray. Ethan opened his mouth but for a minute nothing would come out. Then at last he finally managed to say, "White?"