Summerland (57 page)

A Game of Worlds

THE GHOST BOYS
conveyed Jennifer T. through the briars to the place where Ethan lay, huddled by a stream, cheeks silvered with tears.

"E?" she knelt beside him. "You all right?"

He shook his head.

"What happened?"

"I don't want to talk about it," Ethan said. "Is that all right?"

"Sure," said Jennifer T. She held out her hand to him and he took it, and she dragged him to his feet. He looked around at the flickering army of dead boys she had brought along with her into the Briarpatch.

"Who are all these…guys?"

"We're the braves of Wa-He-Ta," said the ghost of Cooter Smith. "And we don't much hold with a boy what cries."

"Oh, like you never cried in your whole life," Jennifer T. said. "I'm
sure
. I'll bet you could have earned yourself a Feather in Straight-up Old-fashioned Indian-style Bawling if they gave one out."

Cooter Smith's ghost glared at her, and the delicate pink tinge of his ghostly gray cheek seemed to deepen. There was a murmur of delighted appreciation among the other Wa-He-Tas.

"Come on," Jennifer T. said. "Let's go find Cutbelly."

They found the werefox scrambling madly amid the hooks and tangles of the Briarpatch, calling out their names. When he saw the boyish ghosts of all the men who had never forgotten their years of service in the ranks of the true-blue Wa-He-Tas, he was alarmed, but when Jennifer T. told him how they had intimidated Coyote, he broke into a foxy little grin.

"So, it's to be a game of baseball, then," he said. "And what did you promise him, should we lose?"

Jennifer T. looked at Ethan, then down at the bat in his hand. It shone softly in the pale light of the horned moon.

"
Splinter
?" Ethan said. "You promised him my bat?"

"It's the only thing he wants, Ethan. What else could I offer him?"

Ethan raised the bat, and hefted it, and then winced. He opened his left hand and she saw the fiery welt on his palm, raw and glistening.

"I guess it doesn't matter if I lose it," he said. "I can't even swing the darn thing."

"Ya want ta spit on that there blister," offered one of the Wa-He-Tas.

"Spit on it, then rub it with some sourgrass," suggested another.

"Spit and lemonade," suggested another. "And then lay a nice hairy cobweb acrost it."

Jennifer T. winked at Ethan. "I guess we know how they died," she said.

They spent the remainder of the night sleeping in a 1977 Ford Citation that had been abandoned in an impromptu junkyard, down a steep embankment from Route 179, outside of Sedona, Arizona. The air was cool and flavored with the dusty smell of sage. The sky in the distance glowed like the dial of a luminescent clock. They were not sure what had become of the ghost boys—they were not sure, in the tender pink glow of a desert morning in the Middling, if there really had been any ghost boys at all—until Cutbelly crossed them back to Diamond Green, and they saw the ruination of the Rade.

The red tents were struck; the great armored vehicles had rolled out of sight; even the fleet of storm birds had passed away, leaving behind only the endless blue heaven of Diamond Green. Jennifer T. thought that the braves of the Wa-He-Ta must have driven the Rade away, but Cutbelly said that it was Coyote himself who had sent them packing, now that he could no longer avail himself of them.

"They drive him mad, you know, the Rade," he said. "All that yelling and banging and yammering. Every thousand years or so he just goes off and
eats
them all."

All that remained now of the great rambling Rade was the armored truck, a great black-and-red katydid crouched on the edge of Murmury Well, from whose belly there played the endlessly unspooling bobbin of Mr. Feld's hose. There was also a painted sledge, like a gypsy caravan on steel runners, drawn by a team of werewolves. As they stepped out onto Diamond Green, Ethan saw the back door of this wagon swing open, and the shaggy white creature with the irritating laugh stepped out. He raised his hand, and then one by one the Shadowtails emerged and stepped blinking into the sun. They ran toward each other and met at the very center of Green Diamond, where mysteriously in the night a pitcher's mound had been raised, or had sprouted of its own accord from the grass. They embraced, or shook hands. They took stock of their hurts and weaknesses, and confirmed, to their universal regret, that Taffy was not among them. Then they moved into the ruined orchards of Applelawn to rustle up some breakfast.

Aside from the loss of their center fielder—Cutbelly would have to take the Sasquatch's place—their single greatest liability was Ethan's hand. Overnight the blister on the palm had ballooned to the size of an olive. The skin all around it was fiery and swollen. Furthermore, his repeated struggles to cling to the bat, in the face of attempts by Coyote and La Llorona to take it, had left the muscles of his hand stiff and aching. He could barely fit it into the glove.

"We'll need a salve," said Pettipaw. "A blister like that calls for comfrey."

"Comfrey, my eye," Grim the Giant said. "Comfrey is for boils. What's wanted is yarrow."

A hot dispute might have broken out then, but Cutbelly cut in sharply.

"Clearly the herbal lore you two possess couldn't squidge a blackhead," he said. "What's truly wanted in this case is marshmallow."

The three of them tramped off into the Summerlands, arguing, while the rest of them set about gathering the wood the graylings had left unburnt. Amid the heaps of foul garbage and dubious bones they managed to find a sack filled with loaves of the grayling's sour bread, and a miraculous two dozen eggs that Spider-Rose taught them to roast in the ashes of the fire. They had a strong, rich flavor—Cinquefoil said they were goose eggs—and after he had eaten three of them Ethan felt strong enough to contend with the pain in his hand. It was decided among the three quarrelling herbalists to craft a compound of the leaves they each favored. Grim the Giant upended an iron hat abandoned by some fleeing skriker and filled it with water. Then he tossed in the leaves and steeped them until the water had all boiled away, leaving a noxious charred paste that stank like tar. Like tar, the smell of it, though awful, somehow reached down into you and reminded you that you were alive. Cutbelly slathered it onto palm of Ethan's hand with a quick paw. They were just going to have to hope for the best.

"You know there's no way we can beat them," Spider-Rose said. "I say we don't even try. Everybody knows the Hobbledehoys are the best. They been playing on Coyote's team since the day he invented the game. That's what I heard, anyway."

"It's true," Pettipaw said. "They were the First Nine. Demons, is what they were, until Coyote put gloves on their off-hands and set them loose right there on the green. They traded in their hell-hammers for bats and their iron slippers for lace-up leather spikes. That's how all the demon virtues—patience, deception, quick hands, craftiness, an eye for the mistakes of others—they all got dragged deep into the game."

"I've played 'em before," Cinquefoil said, and everyone turned to look at him. They were sitting around the embers of the fire as the last chill of the morning burned away. "Tough team. I don't mis-doubt the demon tale, though they looked ta me like more or less ordinary reubens, but even uglier. They was making a tour of the Outer Islands, oh, it was long, long ago. Took a best-a-nine series from us in five straight games. Tough, tough team."

"How do we play them?" Jennifer T. said.

"What do they got?" said Grim. "Tell us all about it. Did you hit off 'em? Tell the truth."

"Yeah, Chief," Ethan said. "Can you give us a scouting report?"

"No." It was Rodrigo Buendía. He had been quiet all morning, puffing away at a succession of cigars, walking back and forth across Diamond Green as if taking the measure of it. The confinement he and the others had undergone, in a lightless cell in the wagon sledge, had been hardest on him; Cinquefoil had told Ethan that the great slugger even wept in his sleep. "Waste of time, dude. We should to be out there warming up. Sprints. Bunt work—fielding
and
laying them down. And then a couple hours of BR You, little fox dude, you going to be in center today. When the last time you played ball?"

"Fifteen sixty-nine," Cutbelly said at once. "I hit into three double plays."

"That's what I'm saying," Buendía said.

THEY SPENT THE NEXT TWO HOURS WORKING OUT ON DIAMOND
Green, and then, when the sun had climbed nearly to the center of the sky, a crew of graylings emerged from the wagon sledge, carrying chalk-spreaders and bases, and chased them from the field. They went to work laying down the lines, painting the batter's boxes and basepaths. Half an hour later the field was ready. Jennifer T. climbed the mound and began to throw softly to Ethan at home plate, warming up her arm. Little by little she increased the velocity of her pitches until they were snapping pretty well into Ethan's mitt. She was not going to be able to avail herself of the wormhole today. Diamond Green was the hinge of Worlds, the axil point. All branches were born from it, but none crossed it. There was no way to scamper across it.

Each time the ball slammed into the heel of Ethan's mitt, it hurt so badly that he clenched his jaw, and his breath came hissing through this teeth. It was while he was waiting for a curveball from Jennifer T. that he heard Cinquefoil say,

"That's them."

They were just there, the Hobbledehoys, crossing the outfield grass with the great blue sky of the lost Gleaming behind them, as if they had stepped somehow out of that sealed-up land. As Cinquefoil had said, they were like men, lean, rangy men, and one broad, beefy fellow, with sallow, pinched faces. They reminded Ethan of the faces you saw on really old baseball cards, country faces, squinting eyes set close together, noses sharp, mouths lipless and grimly smiling. They wore white flannel uniforms with red pinstripes and black caps with red bills. Across the front in black script it just said
HOBS
. Their spikes were long and black, with pointed rat-snouts and quivering black laces. They walked right up to the mound and stood in a loose group around it, looking at Jennifer T. She pretended to ignore them—actually Ethan supposed she actually
was
ignoring them—reared back, and let fly with her slider. It dived, and bent at the end like a buttonhook, and smacked like a brick against Ethan's glove. One of the Hobbledehoys grunted, but none of them spoke. Then they went over to their bench and sat down. Aside from grunts and mutterings, they hardly spoke. When it was necessary, they communicated mostly by means of a series of signs, like those used by managers and third-base coaches.

"There are only eight of them," Thor said. "Where's the ninth?"

"Here," Coyote said. "He's here."

He was looking splendid in a dazzling Hobs uniform, standing behind the visitors' bench. Beside him, on its black wheels, stood the great iron cage that held Taffy the Sasquatch.

"I hope you don't mind," he said, "but I really thought it would be a shame if there were no spectators at all for the last game of baseball ever played."

"Taffy!"

Ethan, Jennifer T., and Thor ran to the cage and pressed their faces against the bars. The Sasquatch lay in her old boneless heap on the floor of the cage, an arm thrown over her face.

"Taffy!" Jennifer T. said. "Taffy, are you all right?"

There was no reply. Jennifer T. knelt down beside the cage and reached in between the thick iron bars. The tips of her fingers just reached the ends of the fur on the Sasquatch's head, and she stroked it, gently.

"We're not mad at you, Taff," she said. "We understand."

"Yeah—" Ethan began. He was about to tell her that La Llorona had come to him, too, with an offer of release from sorrow. But then he remembered that, thanks to the Knot, he had managed to resist the temptation of La Llorona, where Taffy, dooming the Lodgepole, had failed. So he just said, "Yeah."

But Taffy didn't stir.

"Hey," Ethan said to Coyote. "I need somebody to hold my bat when I'm catching. To make sure
you
don't get it."

"As if I would ever resort to such trickery."

"Yeah, well, and I want it to be Taffy."

Taffy lowered an arm from her face and gazed at Ethan with her little round eyes. They shone with tears.

"Will you, Taff? Will you watch my bat?"

Taffy blinked, and puckered her dark forehead. Then, slowly, she nodded.

"All right, then," Coyote said. "Let's begin."