Summerland (40 page)

It was the wererat. He was staring up at the rear hatch of the car, his tiny black nose aquiver.

"Oh, hey," Jennifer T. said. "Right."

She went to the back of the car and opened the hatch, and rummaged around in the cooler her great-aunts had packed. She reemerged with a stack of sandwiches, wrapped in wax paper, and handed them down to the wererat.

"Pettipaw," said Grim the Giant, shaking his head. "You'd sell your own mother for a hunk of liverwurst, wouldn't you, now, you one-eyed lesser half of a rodent?"

"And yours in the bargain, Shorty," said Pettipaw, with a grin, gazing lovingly down at the sandwiches. Then, with a rapid bow, he scurried off across the grass and disappeared into the trees.

"Cinquefoil," Ethan said. "We don't have a ship anymore."

"True enough," the ferisher said.

"So then how will we ever cross the Raucous Mountains and the Big River and all?"

Another murmuring started up among the ferishers, and the queen looked shocked.

"Ya don't mean ta say—ya aren't seriously bound for
Applelawn
?"

"Farther than that," Cinquefoil said. "We hope to cross Diamond Green itself, and come at the Winterlands through the backdoor. We mean to raise Outlandishton itself, on its high Tor."

"We think Coyote's trying to do something to that Well and kill that Tree thing," said Jennifer T. "My freaky old auntie had a dream."

"Only we don't know what," Thor said.

"Well, then I'm sorry we cut up yer skybag," the Queen said. "Applelawn." She shook her stately head. "Damn. I wanted ta see it my whole life long."

"Can ya tell us how ta find it, then, sister?"

But here the queen could only shake her head.

"There ain't been news from Applelawn in a age," she said.

"I can find it," Thor said. Everyone turned to look at him. He was standing in front of the car, with the map he had found in the Treasury spread out across the hood. "Applelawn. Uh-huh. Okay." He traced a route with the tip of his finger. "So. We just need to go through those mountains there. The Raucous Mountains. Right." Ethan looked off, beyond the trees, to the hazy purplish-gray mountains they had seen, far off, worn and ancient-looking, when they first crossed over from Clam Island. "Then, yeah, okay, then we come down the other side of the mountains, through the Lost Camps, and cross the Big River, here." He jabbed with a finger. "After that we're right there. Applelawn."

The Queen of Dandelion Hill exchanged a look with the Chief of the Boar Tooth mob.

"Crossing the Big River," the Queen said. "That could be tougher ta arrange than any leap o' the Worlds, if them stories I heard are true."

"What stories?" Ethan said.

"It says here, I think it says…
'Old Bottom-Cat
,' " Thor read, tracing the snaking course of the Big River. "Is that it?

"Who is Old Bottom-Cat?" Ethan said. "Is it a who or a what?"

"I heard too many outlandish tales ta repeat," Queen Filaree said. "He might be a sort of a giant; he may be a fish; he could be a snake or a dragon." As she mentioned each of these possibilities, a different bunch of ferishers nodded their heads. Several arguments broke out, amid cries of "Fish!" and "Snake!" She chopped at the air with the back of a pale hand; they fell silent at once. "At any rate I reckon you'll find out soon enough."

Ethan looked at Thor, who nodded. They really had no other choice. Then Ethan looked over at Jennifer T., standing staring off into the trees where Pettipaw had vanished.

"Food, and a grammer," she said finally. "That's all I've heard said about paying us back." She looked around now at the new green expanse of grass that surrounded them. "Doesn't seem like quite enough, somehow."

"Well, I'll grant ya that map," the queen said. "Which otherwise I would have ta consider staled from my treasury."

"And which you could never get to lie
flat
, much less make head nor tails of," Spider-Rose spoke up sharply. She had been hanging back, until now, clutching her doll, as if afraid, somehow, of stepping onto the ball field. As if the merest touch of her foot might blight it. But now Ethan saw her creep up behind Thor Wignutt, and clamber up onto his shoulder to get a better look at the Four-Sided Map.

"Applelawn," she said with a dreamy look on her face. "And to think that it's really just a little ways on the other side of those mountains."

"A
long
way," Thor corrected her. "Especially if we have to
drive
.''

"We definitely want the map," Ethan said.

Jennifer T. nodded.

"And, okay," Ethan went on, seeing how much he could get just by asking. It was the Jennifer T. style of doing things, and new to him. "We want you to release Grim here from the binding you put on his hide."

This produced a silence that was deep and long-lasting, filled almost to the brim with birdsong and the sound of the wind in the trees. For once no bets were settled or laid.

"And we want to take the princess with us, too," said Jennifer T. Then she covered her mouth as if she herself felt she had gone too far. The only person present who looked more surprised than Jennifer T. Rideout at that moment was Spider-Rose. "I mean, like, if she, you know,
wants
to come." She glanced at the ferisher girl, whom Ethan understood for the first time to be the daughter of the queen. "But probably she doesn't."

The queen looked at Spider-Rose, who looked down at the map again, then at Jennifer T., studying her afresh, doubt replacing surprise in her expression—and maybe the littlest beginning of interest.

"It isn't going to work," she said finally, gazing down sadly at her doll. "But even if all you fools end up doing is
bother
old Coyote a little bit, I guess that's something I wouldn't mind seeing."

"Ya ask a good deal, reubens," the queen said. "An awful great lot. My daughter's behavior is her own bizness, since I'm prepared ta say now that her debt ta me and ta her people has been paid—though not by her. But as fer this giant, that's another matter."

"It's awful kind of you," Grim said to Ethan, and there were tears in his eyes. "But a bound giant is bound forever."

"Then we'll bind you to
us
" Thor said. He looked at Cinquefoil. "We can do that, can't we? Isn't there a way?"

"Yeah," Cinquefoil said. "There's a way."

The queen shook her head. "No," she said. "It's too much. The map itself is priceless. Consider yerself paid."

Ethan looked at Spider-Rose. He wondered how it would feel to have your mom be more willing to give you up than anything else she possessed.

"This is an awfully nice field, isn't it?" Taffy said, sitting in the grass. "Maybe you ferishers would care to try it out? Test your ballplaying skills against those of myself and my colleagues?"

There was a sharp buzz of excitement from the Dandelion Hill mob, and the chiming of coins began again.

"Are ya offering us a
wager
?" the queen said.

"Nine innings," Taffy said. "To settle the fate of this little giant's hide." Ethan was startled by the proposal, but only for a moment. Taffy knew intimately, of course, the pain of being bound. But he had his doubts.

"I don't know," he said. He checked the watch, scrolling quickly to the calendar screen. The arrow beside the two was now pointing down. "Bottom of the second!" He was suddenly panicked. "Jeez! It's going so fast! I don't think we have time for baseball, Taff."

All the ferishers burst out laughing, including Cinquefoil. After a moment Taffy and Grim joined in.

"Ya don't think yer going ta cross the Summerlands a thousand miles or more without playing baseball?" Cinquefoil said. "That would be like trying ta cross a thunderstorm without stepping on a raindrop. Can't be done. What's more, it
shouldn't
be done. Baseball is good for ya, little reuben. Yer going ta need ta be a fair sight smarter and tougher than ya are now, Ethan Feld, before this here adventure of ours comes down ta the final at-bat. Catching a couple thousand o' yer girlfriend's fastballs and sliders will make ya that, an more." Ethan's cheeks buzzed from Cinquefoil's description of Jennifer T. as his 'girlfriend.' The chief made a rapid calculation on his fingers. "But we're still be two players short of a team."

At that moment Ethan detected a distinct smell in the air of liverwurst, slightly rancid.

"Just a minute," came the thin, strong voice from behind Grim the Giant. The wererat stepped out from behind his old antagonist. "You don't think I'd be content knowing that you were off living a life of adventure and stimulation, without me hanging around to drive you off your nut?"

"Make that
one
player short," Cinquefoil said.

I HAVE BEFORE ME VOLUME 117 OF ALKABETZ'S
UNIVERSAL
Encyclopedia of Baseball
(Ninth Edition). The line score, according to the infallible Professor Alkabetz, for the game played that day between the rough and contentious team fielded by the Dandelion Hill mob and a ragtag, ad-hoc nine captained by Cinquefoil, Chief of the Boar Tooth mob, reads as follows:

As is often the case with unscheduled and interworld games, details are sketchy—there is no box score, and the ninth man on the Visitors team is referred to only as Chickweed (3b).

He was one of the Dandelion Hill mob, a wiry, taciturn fellow who said nothing at all, to anyone, for the entire length of the game. The other Dandelion Hill ferishers teased him mercilessly for being a turncoat, and warned his new teammates that they ought not to trust him. But he made every pick that came his way, snagged a tricky short-hop grounder in the bottom of the sixth, and started two double plays. Cinquefoil was still quite weak, and four of the other Visitors—Taffy, Ethan, Jennifer T., Grim the Giant—had of course to be grammered down, limbs burning, bones crackling, to ferisher scale. Whether it was the disorienting effects of the shape-shifting, or a deliberate spike in the grammer worked by Queen Filaree and two of her most powerful grammerwrights, they hit poorly—Ethan in particular. He struck out swinging three times, with the Knot on his bat handle chafing viciously against his palm. On his third at-bat he reverted to his old Dog Boy ways, just leaving the cursed stick on his shoulder and hoping, forlornly as it turned out, to coax four balls across the plate before three strikes.

On the other hand, it had been over a century since the Dandelion Hill mob had played a game of baseball, and they were sorely out of practice. One look at the Errors column will show you that. The lone run—the winning run, as it turned out—by the Visitors, in the top of the ninth, was scored by Jennifer T., who reached on a fielding error, moved to third on throwing error, and scored on a passed ball. The home team's hitting was, if anything, even worse than their game in the field. They could not seem to find their timing; the bats, after years of tennis and croquet, felt at once cumbersome and ineffectual in their hands.