The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (27 page)

Dear Blunderbuss:

Please be as big and strong and thundery as a rhinoceros so you can carry us. Please also be armored and protected like a rhinoceros because when you are big people will be more afraid of you, and yarn never stopped so much as a pinkie finger. I don't want anything to happen to you. Remember to have an extra-strength spine because I am much heavier than I used to be.

“Pssst. Put in that I can fly now,” whispered the wombat. “Also that I can be invisible if I want.”

“I don't know if that'll work, Buss. I don't even know if I can make you big. All I've done is make lamps and stoves and baseballs come to life so far. Besides, if you were invisible, you'd just use it for biting and you know it.”

“Just the flying then. In Wom only the green parrots can fly and they're such rotten snobs about it. Next time they dive-bomb my ears I'll just blast off and roar until they drop dead of little parrot heart attacks. Flying! Me! Yes! Do it!”

Please be able to fly, but only if it is not too hard on physics once you're a rhinocerwombat and weigh a thousand pounds.

Hawthorn

He crumpled up the paper into a ball and tossed it into the air. Blunderbuss leapt up on her stubby legs and caught it in her mouth like a retriever, chewing ferociously and whooping with her mouth full. Before she landed, the steppe-grass lashed upward like fiery whips and caught her paws, her throat, her tail. The grass wound round and round her in pumpkin-colored ropes, braided and winding tight. The grasses formed themselves into bright greaves on her legs, a belly-breastplate on the underside of her tummy, a curling orange saddle on her back with long, wheat-sheaf stirrups handing down round her ribs, and a helmet over her head, with grassy nubs of wombat ears and several wonderfully vicious-looking spikes. And as the grass-armor wove itself, it pulled. It pulled at Blunderbuss's skin, her bones, her insides, even her button eyes, kneading her like dough, stretching her up and out and sideways and diagonally.

“YES!” the wombat roared in a new voice, one that came from a much bigger chest. “I AM THE WOMBAT PRINCESS OF PANDEMONIUM! EAT MY SPIKES!”

Blunderbuss landed with a terrific thud and shook her head like a happy horse. “GIDDYUP, TROLLDOOFUS! ALL MATCHSTICKS AND MUSICAL DEVICES ABOARD THE STUPENDOUS SPLENDID AMAZING FANTASTIC COMBAT WOMBAT!”

“We still don't know where we're going!” Hawthorn held up his hands, laughing despite himself. His wombat, the old stuffed thing he'd begged Gwendolyn for, was standing before him, bigger than City Hall, doing a stumpy-footed dance of joy.

“I have an idea about that,” said Tamburlaine. She held up her paintbrush. “Rip up some grass?”

Hawthorn yanked up fistfuls of the wheat.

“Now, Bussie, how about some of those passionfruits you were lobbing at Thom … at Hawthorn's baseball? Or … maybe just one, now.” Her mind was suddenly filled with the vision of herself crushed beneath a giant passionfruit.

“Well, I'm not angry, really. I can only do passionfruit when I'm angry.” Her armored ears lowered, embarrassed.

“Still can't turn invisible,” Hawthorn said helpfully, knowing just what would set her steaming. “And you had to sleep in a barn.”

The enormous armored combat wombat bellowed and hacked and fired a passionfruit the size of a small terrier onto the pile of steppe-grass. It bounced a little.

“Can you chew it all up for me? And just … spit it up again when it's good and mushy?”

“Disgusting!” nodded Blunderbuss approvingly. “I'll be Tobacconist next, you watch! I'll call this rule:
Barns are the worst and shall all be banished from the Land of Wom
.” And she gobbled up the fruit and grass and gnawed it in her yarny mouth till her cheeks bulged as though she were blowing bubblegum. She retched up a great puddle of greenish-orangish-red goop and waggled her tail for praise.

“Perfect!” Tamburlaine scratched the wombat's stop-sign-size nose. “You and me, we'll have a show at the Met one day.
Still Lives by Matchstick and Wombat.
”

“Still life is boring. Never stand still! Jumping bean life!”

“Jumping bean life.” And Tam took a deep breath. She dipped her brush in the drooly muck and began to swipe long, bold strokes into the air. The vomit-paint stayed put, glistening in the breeze. “It's not really air, see. It's a wall or a staircase or an onion-box or something,” she explained.

“But what are you painting?” Hawthorn asked.

“Well, I know what a rum cellar looks like, you know,” Tam laughed. “It's worth a try.”

She worked quickly. Greenish-gold rum barrels floated in the air, reddish rafters and flagstones. Finally, she put in a Redcap, or at least what she remembered a Redcap looking like in books. Hers leaned against a rum barrel, sleeping. The only safe Redcap is an unconscious Redcap, she figured.
Dear Wombat Puke, please be a door,
she thought hard
. Please go straight into the right rum cellar. Please don't just be a mess.

“Ready?” Tam put her hands on her hips. “I'm either going to be very proud of myself or very embarrassed in a moment.”

Everyone climbed onto Blunderbuss's broad, grassy back, Hawthorn in front, Tamburlaine behind, and Scratch, delicate as he was, sandwiched between them. His crank spun excitedly:

Ain't we got

Ain't we got

Ain't we got fun?

With a valiant snarl the likes of which no basement has ever heard, Blunderbuss leapt toward the passionfruit painting. They collided wetly and with much gurgling. On the other side, the smell of molasses and yeast and good greenwood greeted them like a fine hello.

*   *   *

The Cellar Steppes had got bored of grasslands and become a long salt flat, red crystals crunching underfoot. The sky flushed a proper daytime blue again, but now there were a hundred moons in it, all shaped like stony white rum barrels with starry spigots hanging off them. Barrels great and small dotted the salt flat, too, red rock banded with red gold and sloshing with red rum inside. Thick liquor dripped now and again from the stone slats onto the desert. Nestled in a circle of particularly robust barrels were several rich red velvet armchairs and red lanterns and red tables, with red glasses set for tastings.

An incredible din filled the air. Hollering, ululating, bleating, laughing, whooping—and a gnash of metal and stone bashing one against the other.

The Redcaps were coming.

They poured in a scarlet screech through the Steppes, some running pell-mell on foot, others mounted on pigs and toads, their spurs and saddles as red as their long, billowing caps, tassels flapping in the air. Hawthorn squeezed his own knit cap, still stuffed into his coat pocket. Their little gnomic faces were transported in joy, their feet sending up clouds of blue and orange dust.

Behind them rolled a bicycle bigger than any Hawthorn and Tamburlaine had ever seen, a bicycle like an elephant, one of the old-fashioned sorts with the front wheel like a giant's dinner plate. On top of it a woman in blue hollered along with the Redcaps. She raised her fist in the air and barreled down mercilessly upon them.

The Spinster came riding down the Steppes with an army before her.

“Out!” she cried. “Get out! Leave me alone!”

White-and-black-streaked hair flew out from her brownberry head. The wheels of her velocipede spun savage and fierce.

“How did you get in here?” she yelled down, pedaling backward and forward powerfully to keep her steed in place. “Can't you leave an old woman in peace?”

“King Charlie sent us!” Hawthorn yelled as loud as he might, through two cupped hands.

The Spinster put her head to one side.

“You want we should make kebabs out of 'em, ma'am?” A large Redcap with a mushroom-shaped cap like a chef's hat, so red it was nearly black, twirled a long scarlet spear in her fist. She smiled broadly and cheerfully, without the smallest flutter of malice in her round face.

“You know very well today is Vegetables Only Thursday, Sir Sanguine. Now, put your armor away, I don't think we'll be needing it. Hold on, you lot, I'll be down presently.”

Sir Sanguine scowled miserably. A little of her fight seemed to leak out. And very suddenly, Sir Sanguine was the only Redcap in the Cellar. The wild throng simply popped out of the world when the Redcap put down her shield.

“
Jolly
good armor!” the combat wombat squealed. She was suddenly very interested in armor.

The Spinster unhooked a grappling claw and line from her belt and rappelled neatly down the side of her velocipede, which snorted and shook its handlebars as it jutted its kickstand into the salt with a spray of crystals.

“She seems quite spry for an old granny,” Tam whispered up to Hawthorn.

“You're not such a dry old bird after all,” Blunderbuss bellowed, much more loudly, having no particular manners about much of anything. She peered down at the figure in blue striding toward them.

The Spinster was not wearing a dress, but billowing azure trousers like a djinn, long midnight-colored sleeves like a kimono, and a bodice that seemed to be having trouble deciding whether to be a corset or a blue steel breastplate. Her face was wide and kind and sun-browned, full of the lines of living at her eyes, her mouth, between her stubborn brows. She was not ancient at all, but the sort of age people often call
hale
or
hearty
.

“What are you doing here?” the Spinster demanded. “I'm busy—you have no idea how busy I am! I've nearly got it figured out. You can't go interrupting me like this. I don't have the time for this nonsense.”

“We came to rescue you,” Hawthorn said, not at all sure that they were, now.

“As you can see, I'm quite all right. I've never needed a rescuing I couldn't whip up myself faster than the cavalry could get out of bed.”

“But the Redcaps … they're horrible monsters holding you prisoner.…”

“Oh, Sir Sanguine? She's such a sweetheart! We get on famously. I've always had a way with red things, you know.”

Tamburlaine spoke up. “We came to rescue you so that you can come and rescue the King.”

“Now what,” the Spinster sighed, “does Charlie need rescuing from today?”

“He doesn't want to be King anymore.”

“I don't see what that has to do with me. He's never wanted to be King.”

“Well, he feels pretty confident that you can help him abdicate without having to be assassinated by Simon,” Hawthorn ventured.

“I see.”

“Can you?”

“I have no idea.”

“Then why's he so bloody sure you're the gran for the job?” cried Blunderbuss.

The Spinster smiled up at the wombat and her riders. The sun glinted on a mole on her left cheek.

“Because I've done it before,” she said. “Twice.”

A peal of indigo fire exploded through the air above them all, boiling and popping a trail through the sky. Something hurtled toward them at breakneck speed, something huge and bright and winged. A colossal red Wyvern beat his wings against a hundred rum-barrel moons. A man all of blue and black clung to his long crimson neck.

“Are we late?” the Wyvern called. “We came as soon as we heard footsteps but we
are,
aren't we? Oh, I'm just hopeless! Late begins with
L
!”

 

CHAPTER XVIII

S
OMEONE
C
OMES
TO
T
OWN

In Which Much Is Revealed

“
Want to know a secret?” the Spinster said, leaning forward in one of the plush red chairs. Red rum filled the red crystal glasses on a little carved table by her side, but she had not touched hers. None of them had. Her eyes twinkled in her sun-bright face, the tiniest of lines at her eyes crinkling as though she was about to play an extraordinary trick.

“Yes,” Hawthorn said. “I always want to know. If there is a choice between knowing and not knowing.”

“Well said.” She laid her finger against her lips like a librarian.
Shhhh.
The Spinster looked one way, then the other. “I'm fifteen years old,” she whispered, and giggled just like a schoolgirl.

“You're not,” scoffed Blunderbuss.

“If I'm a day.”

The scarlet Wyverary nuzzled her with his scaly, bearded chin, which meant nuzzling most all of her armchair, too. If we are all very quiet, perhaps we can sneak in and nuzzle him a bit, too. How he has kept us waiting!

“It's true,” the Wyverary haroomed. “You can't lie once you've been to the Moon. That's just a fact.”

The blue-and-black man, whose skin glowed like the ocean, all covered in swooping dark smoke-like tattoos, squeezed the Spinster's hand. “It's a funny thing,” he said. “I'm both older and younger than she is, and she's both younger and older than I am. Time cannot bear boredom.”