Summerland (35 page)

"Are you a boy giant? Or—?"

Grim the Giant sneered his toothy sneer, and looked ready to fight all over again.

"I'm a full-grown, tried-and-true man of a giant, boy! And don't you forget it!"

"Here," Thor said to Ethan, handing him back the stick. Thor was badly torn up. Bloody scratches on his cheeks as if he had been fighting with some kind of irascible animal like a wolverine or a stoat. Shirt collar ripped. A bead of blood on his lower lip. Actually he looked sort of angry with Ethan about the whole incident. "Don't ever let go of it again."

"I won't," Ethan said, feeling decidedly scolded. "Okay, so, come on. Let's go. Take the little giant."

Grim the Giant took a dangerous step toward Ethan, pushing back a sleeve. "'
Take the little giant
?' Where do you think
you're
going?"

At this point they faced the uncomfortable question of who was now the captive of whom. Ethan, who doubted if he would ever be able to win in a fight against the little giant, even with his bat in hand, decided to take a psychological approach. That was what he was best at. It usually worked on everyone, except for Jennifer T.

"Okay, just tell me this," he tried. "Just say that we are your prisoners. Just say."

"Right," said Grim.

"Which means, in other words, that you are working for them. Those stupid Dandelion Hill ferishers who can't stop talking long enough to realize that, okay, one of their very own species, and the Home Run King of three Worlds, is dying right now, in their dungeon, which is because he's got iron in his body from one of their arrows, and two, that
the entire universe may he about to come to an end
.''

"They sure does like to hear themselves talk," Grim the Giant agreed, spitting again.

"So that's what I'm asking, then, is just why would you want to work for them? You're a giant. They're ferishers."

"Well," said the giant, "the fact of the matter is, since you ask, I wouldn't work for that mob by choice or for money. Alas for poor Grim that he doesn't have no choice in the matter."

"You're grammerbound," Thor said. "A slave."

The little giant pressed his thin lips together as if biting back an angry rejoinder. Then he just nodded, once, shortly.

"Ferishers use slaves?" Ethan said, dismayed.

The giant spat. "Some do. This mob does. One. That's me. Grimalkin John. Chief Mechanical, and Senior Equipment Manager for the Dandelion Hill mob. And"—he flushed—"Head Mouser. But that don't—"

He broke off, and stood still, listening, and then Ethan heard it too, a musical cry, a cracked note of song from the other side of the treasury door. When Ethan and Thor had passed through the door, the uproar of the ferishers' council died away. Now, in addition to the exuberant voice of a singing ferisher, there were other raised voices from out in the winding hall. The next moment there came a loud rapping; the sealing grammer had been taken off the door. Grim the Giant turned bright red, and looked wildly around the treasury.

"Damn them!" he said. "They'll have my hide if they see you've beaten me."

He looked quite upset, in a way that did not at all fit with his brash features and hard little twist of a smile. Ethan had no desire to be taken prisoner again, but at the same time he felt sorry for the scrappy little giant. He turned to Thor, whose knowledge of the ways of the Summerlands—Ethan supposed it was really a kind of deep memory, returning to his friend after years of amnesia in the Middling—seemed to be growing by the minute.

Thor was studying Grim the Giant now with expression that showed traces of the pity that Ethan had been feeling. The wiry creature who only moments before had seemed to believe that his shoulders brushed the treetops and his shadow blotted out the very sun now listened to the increasingly irritable knocking at the door to the treasury with an air of misery and even dread.

"He means it," Thor said at last. "They really could take his hide."

"Don't I know it," said Grim, glumly. "Didn't the old bat craft her very mitt from the thigh skin of my great-grandpap?"

Ethan thought of the pile of great bleached bones out of which the Boar Tooth mob's ballpark had been built, and found that he could not doubt the little giant's grisly claim. Just like that, all the sympathy that he had built up toward ferishers, especially after witnessing the brutal treatment they had received from Coyote's minions, seemed to drain away. Ferishers had shot him and his friends from the sky, unprovoked, and without asking any questions, thrown them into the deepest dungeon in the knoll. They had enslaved—grammerbound—Grim the Giant. They had stolen all the human possessions piled in this dank and echoing chamber. And they had, once upon a time,
stolen Mrs. Wignutt's baby
, leaving a strange changeling boy behind. Dizzyingly, all the dark stories that he had read about fairies came flooding into his memory: stories of their heartlessness, their cruelty and indifference to human life and desires, the bewitchments and tricks and the harsh curses that they laid on hapless mortals.

"If we let you capture us again," he said finally, as the knocking grew ever more imperious and sharp, "you have to help us get back to our friends."

Grim's breath came out of him in a single gust as if he had been holding it tight. "Yes!" he cried.

"And then you help us get
out
of here."

Grim pressed his palms together. "I swear it."

Ethan looked at Thor. "What should we make him swear by? That 'by the Starboard Arm' thing they're always saying?"

"Not serious enough." Thor hand lingered on his temple. "Say 'by the Lone Eye.'"

"It's Eye
ball
," the giant corrected. "All right then. I swear it, by the Lone Eyeball. A swear can't be more serious than that. Now you got my apologies, rubes, but hope you'll understand I'm going to have to tie you fast."

He grabbed one of the coils of rappelling cable and quickly wound it around and around Ethan and Thor.

"I'll not cinch it overtight," he said. "It's only for show anyhow, and they don't never look too close at nothing, 'less they have some money riding on it."

He went to the door, took hold of the latch, gave them a solemn wink, and threw open the big door. There was a burst of angry jeering and several dozen ferishers trooped in, jabbering and shouting at Grim the Giant in what sounded like Old Fatidic, slapping him on the bottom and kicking at his shins, then dissolving into raspy little gusts of mean laughter. They were dressed in leggings like Cinquefoil's mob, and they had the same strange golden eyes and ruddy skin, but their tunics were cut from some silvery stuff that glowed softly in the firelight. Ethan supposed that it must be some kind of ceremonial garb they wore especially for their Councils. Leading them all was a grand personage, a full head taller than the rest of the mob, and more than twice as wide. She was dressed in leggings and a silvery tunic, like the others, but she wore a silver circlet around her head, and she was unmistakably a queen. Her skin was powdered white. She was the only one who neither laughed nor taunted the little giant. She swept past him without a look, and began to say something, in a quavering, operatic voice, when she saw the boys tied up by the pile of mailboxes. Her mouth snapped shut, and her eyes with their strange rectangular pupils grew wide, then narrowed. She turned to Grim, and gazed up at him with an eyebrow arched, her arms folded tightly under her magnificent bosom.

At the sight of the ferishers Ethan felt a hot shiver run up his spine, and his toes curled and uncurled inside his shoes.

"Might I ask, then, what in the name a yer highest-pocketed and lowest-browed forefather these reubens is doing in my treasury, Mr. Grimalkin John?" Though she had Cinquefoil's broken grammar and accent, her voice had none of his raspy warmth. It was cold and barren of feeling. In her size, her pallid skin, her silvery gown, she made Ethan think of a tiny, cold moon.

There was a silence that grew very long and stretched very thin, and then Grimalkin John, somewhat to Ethan's surprise, laid a hand on his belly and cast a rather evil stare in Ethan's direction, and said,

"Don't hold it against me none, ma'am, but I been living somewhat overmuch on mouse and rat and whatnot for quite some time, as what I'm sure you'll acknowledge. It's an awful long time since I done sucked the good sweet marrow of a nice, meaty little reubenish bone." He lowered his head and managed to work a convincing flush of shame into his cheeks. "I just couldn't, you know. Resist."

At this the ferishers burst out laughing, Queen Filaree the loudest of all. Several little clinking sacks of gold-pieces changed hands, and Ethan marveled that the ferishers had found enough time to wager on what Grim the Giant's excuse was going to be in the brief seconds between the asking of the queen's question and its answer. It was a little worrisome to think that some of them could have been so certain that he planned to devour the boys. Then the queen stopped laughing, and came over to stand beside Thor and Ethan. She gazed up at them, her expression blank but not unpleasant, the way you might stare at the rainbow in a greasy thumbprint on a windowpane, the instant before you wiped it away. Then she turned back to the little giant.

"Well, Mouser, yer in luck," she said. "Fer here we are, spent all the day in a considerable palaver, and in the end come ta no decision whatever but ta go out and play in the sunshine o' the afternoon. Would that it might be nine innings of baseball. But alas."

There was a general sad murmuring among the ferishers at the prospect, and Ethan wondered how much of the meanness of these ferishers was due simply to the loss of their ball field.

"So look here, Ratcatcher," the queen went on. "Just ya be fetching us our
racquets
"—she uttered the word distastefully—"and balls, and the mallets, and so on, and we'll leave ya ta yer meal."

The giant nodded, and wandered back into the shadows, where Ethan now saw another, smaller door, standing ajar. This must be where Grim the Giant had been concealed when he and Thor first crossed into the room. As the little giant pushed the door open, Ethan caught sight of two long racks filled with dozens and dozens of baseball bats. The little giant banged and clattered around in the equipment room—Ethan supposed that this might form, in a ferisher's opinion, the heart of the treasure—and then came back out carrying several small canvas sacks and pushing a wheeled croquet set.

The queen looked at them with revulsion, and Ethan saw her eye stray wistfully to the baseball bats ranged on the walls of the equipment room.

"Alas, Spider-Rose, what ya done to yer mother," she said, with a sigh. And a great golden tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away, and turned to Grim. "Carry that rubbish out," she said curtly, nodding toward the croquet and tennis gear. With a backward look of warning, Grim followed the ferishers out of the treasury.

Ethan and Thor set about trying to get out of the ropes that tied them together, but giants have the knack of knots, and in the end they were forced to wait until Grim returned. Rapidly he untied them, and then he disappeared into the equipment room again, and began rattling around. Ethan and Thor followed him. The little giant was crouching down beside a straw pallet no different from those that had furnished their cell, stuffing some clothes into another of the canvas equipment sacks.

"What are you doing?" Ethan said.

"Leaving," the little giant said. He tied up the sack and rose to his feet. "Been thinking about it often enough lately. Might as well do it now."

"But
can
you leave?" said Thor. "Aren't you a bound giant?"

Grim nodded, looking quite grim.

"What will happen to you if you run away?" Ethan said. "What kind of a grammer is it?"

"I told you, scat-for-brains," said the little giant. "They'll have my hide. I'll start walking away from this hill in any direction and little by little, I guess, though tell the truth I ain't never seen it done, my skin'll start getting, well,
skinnier
. Less and less of it, until I'm a day's walk from her that binds me, Queen Full-a-rot, I calls her, and then it's all gone, and the bones and such are showing plain as anything, and there's nothing at all to hold the inside of me in, nor keep out everything what's meant to be outside."

"Ick," Ethan said.

"Don't matter, though, because once they found out I helped you and your friends, they'd have it anyway, wouldn't they?" He shouldered the bag and took a last look around at the room, the neat ranks of ferisher-scale bats, the ornate baskets overflowing with bright little white balls, the spare bases and extra gloves and sets of catcher's masks and old leather shin-guards. At the very back of the room was a long workbench, well stocked with tools, and beside this a great hulking old wooden machine, busy with flywheels and belts. This must be where the Chief Mechanical crafted the various fanciful machines in which the ferishers so delighted. A look of disgust, but not unmingled with regret, filled his eyes. "Maybe if I'm strong, and
this
much lucky, myself will hold together until I can get back to home and wrap the blood and bones of my fingers around the throats of them what bound me into the service of this mob in the first place. The pack of great snakes and weasels that my mother gave me in the stead of brothers."