The Silver Glove (6 page)

“Don't gape, child,” Gran said, “the cause isn't lost. Not yet, anyway. They've done the best they could at Sorcery Hall. They've sent me home.”

What could I say to that? Sure, they sent you, my tiny little old Gran, to fight horrible big Brightner?

I said, “But he knows about us now, Gran! He tried to get me to bring you to him. And he made a grab at me, and now he's after Mom. He's already after us all!”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I'm afraid that's true, lovie. I'm sure that as soon as I gave him the slip he got nervous and checked up on me. Now that he knows I've a magic gift myself and that I trained in Sorcery Hall, he's hot on my trail. And yours and your poor mother's, of course. He's not sure how strong I am, so he'd like to get hold of you or your mother to use as an argument, you might say, against my interfering with his plans. So he's turned up at your school, and in your mother's life.”

Oh, no. My mother the hostage. “What can we do?”

Gran closed her eyes for a minute and didn't move. Then she opened them again and turned over the last of the cards, which showed a tower being struck by lightning.

“That looks awful,” I said.

Gran swept up the cards. “It is awful. Well, your job is to try to keep your mother out of Brightner's clutches. I'm going to go to this restaurant-shelter with Dirty Rose tonight, in the guise of a street person myself of course, and find out what's going on there. Collie's Kitchen, it's called. Odd name.”

That would teach me to make up stories about Gran being a spy in her youth! I felt as if a mean-minded Fate had been listening to that conversation and had turned my own imagination against me.

“ ‘Collie's Kitchen,' ” I said angrily. “Sounds like a restaurant for dogs.”

Gran said, “I'll phone you in the morning when I know a bit more about the place, and we'll decide what to do next.”

I said, “But if you get held up or something—Gran, Brightner's working in my school! He'll
get
me! And Mom thinks he's wonderful. What can I
do
?”

She looked at me critically. “Keep your wits about you and hang on to the silver glove.”

I had an inspiration. “I'll give the glove to Mom,” I said. “It saved me. It'll protect her, too, won't it?”

Gran sighed. “I doubt it. She fights my magic, always has, so how could it help her? You keep the glove. It will work for you.” She tapped the table top with the corner of her glasses for emphasis, before slipping them back down the front of her clothes. “Now let's pack up here and I'll be going. Where is Rose, do you see her?”

The day had turned cold. There were hardly any customers now, and some of the vendors were closing down their stalls. The rug vendor lugged a rolled-up carpet on his shoulder toward a battered van parked outside the yard.

I helped Gran turn the card table on its side and I started wrestling with the rusty catches that let the legs fold in along the inner edges. I was boiling with questions.

I said, “You can't go, not until you teach me how to use the glove. I don't know anything, really, about what it can do—”

Gran held up one hand to stop me. “Look!”

There was Brightner at one of the gates, talking with a young cop. He must have waited outside my building and followed me, figuring that sooner or later I would lead him to my Gran!

And, like a jerk, I had.

Another cop came strolling up to the opposite entrance. The third gate, on Columbus Avenue, was jammed by two guys trying to get all their boxes of brassware out at once. Gran and I were sealed up inside a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence.

Brightner had been a cop himself. All he had to say was that Gran had run away from an old folks' home, addled and paranoid, and that I was a troubled teen.

He stepped past the pumpkins lined up on the pavement next to the jellies and the potted plants. He came toward us down the aisle between the tables, his hands in the pockets of his beautiful cashmere coat. I could see his toothy smile.

Granny Gran snatched me by the hand and dragged me onto the middle of the largest of the carpets, which still lay unrolled on the cement as flooring for the rest of the display.

Brightner burst into a run.

Gran pointed her finger at the center design in the carpet and muttered something that sounded like “Twelve o'clock high!” The carpet gave a lurch and shot straight into the sky, with me and Gran aboard.

 

6
Kite Fight

 

 

I
SHRIEKED A SHRIEK
they must have heard in Poughkeepsie. It was a short shriek, because the carpet went up like an express elevator in a skyscraper, the kind of elevator that leaves your stomach staggering around at ground level.

Past the edge of the carpet, which I was clutching with both hands, I saw the upturned face of Dr. Brightner. He stood with his legs braced apart and his hands on his hips, just looking up. Everybody else, including the rug vendor, danced around screaming and pointing up at us.

A cold wind from the west wafted us toward Central Park. The park looked like a carpet itself from that height, green and brown and full of random-looking sweeps of silver, gray, and black—cement walks and roadways—and blue plates of water at the reservoir and the lakes and the sailboat pond.

Gran sat in the middle of the rug with her legs crossed and her hands folded in her lap, a little skinny genie in tweed and beads and those crazy cowboy boots. She looked awfully small and awfully old to be piloting a large flying carpet.

The thing must have been a full ten feet by twelve, all faded reds, black, and tawny gold. A thick beige fringe fluttered wildly at each of the narrow ends. I stayed hunched down low. After all, there were no guardrails.

“How are you keeping this thing up?” I said, running my palm over the rich surface of the carpet.

“I've woken the gift worked into the pattern.”

“Can Brightner follow us?”

Gran chuckled. “This was the only carpet with the right design. I've had my eye on it all morning.”

I said, “Let's go back and dive-bomb him! Can this thing shoot somehow, like a fighter plane?”

Gran said sharply, “Don't even think it! Power turned to destruction becomes a curse.”

“That's not fair,” I shouted into the wind. “Brightner gets to throw any old magical crap he likes at us, but we can't hit back? What good is power that you can't use to defend yourself?”

“If you want to counterattack,” Gran said, “you must find a way to turn his aggression against him, which I'm afraid is beyond me at the moment, lovie. I'm half frozen and I can scarcely think and still steer this thing decently.”

“I'm cold too,” I admitted. “When can we go down?”

“I'm looking for a flat place to land,” Gran said. “These are a bit tricky to handle if you're out of practice.”

I didn't much like the idea of zooming around on a flying carpet with somebody who was out of practice.

We were right over Central Park now, and even colder: the sun had gone behind some clouds. At least we had company. In the sky were three kites, two above us and a smaller one below.

I had once spent some Saturdays in the Sheep Meadow with Mom, who had thought she might meet some interesting guy among the kite-flying enthusiasts who hung out there. I remembered getting an earache from running in the wind all day (I was pretty little then) and a crick in my neck from looking up.

I wondered if we looked like a giant kite from below. More like a manta ray, probably. The carpet was very slowly and subtly sort of flapping its wings: its outer sides rippled up and then down. This was certainly not the way magic carpets were supposed to fly according to the special-effects people who did these things in the movies. They always pulled the carpet flat through the air like something on rails, which I guess a flying carpet in a movie probably is.

This one was something else. I must say I found its ponderous way of flapping along reassuring. It made the carpet seem like an exotic animal with a brain of its own, maybe enough of one to keep us up even if Granny Gran got absentminded about the mechanics of flying the thing.

The smaller kite below us was a neat diamond shape, like an Oriental fighting kite.

I had made two kites and done a lot of research before Mom gave up on kite flying. In my reading I'd come across stories about kite fighting, which is a sport in Japan and Korea.

What they do is, they run a good length of the flying line, just under the bridle where you hitch it to the kite, through some paste. Then they roll that part in smashed glass and let it dry. When the line is taut, it's like a knife-edge that can cut other lines if it crosses them at the right angle.

The flyer who cuts the other guy's line gets to keep the downed kite as a trophy (usually the losing kite crashes and is ruined anyway). The kite is always small, so it maneuvers fast, like a hawk.

One of the larger kites above us, with a soaring bird painted on it, suddenly fluttered and jigged and began to spiral toward the ground. Its line trailed after it, cut down below.

“Hey,” I said, “a kite fight!”

Well, sort of. You're only supposed to use a fighting kite against other fighting kites, of course. Cutting down ordinary kites is crude.

The little kite was no longer below us but darted above, heading across the line of the second big kite, a huge one painted with a snarling samurai face.

I peeked over the edge of the carpet, trying to see who was flying the kites. The meadow was scattered all over with the little dark figures of people strolling, throwing Frisbees, practicing karate and so on.

“A kite what?” Gran said distractedly. “Blast it, this light is so hard to see by. I don't want to bring us down in the trees!”

“That samurai kite's no fighter,” I said. “It's not even the right shape. This little guy must be a pirate, chopping the others out of the sky for kicks.”

The fighter kite was painted with a black and orange stripe design, like tiger fur, with a yellow cat's eye in the center. It was chasing the bigger kite, which floated lower.

Then the wind shifted and suddenly the two kites collided and dropped. The tiger kite shot free and the samurai kite just fell out of the sky, looking ragged and torn. The little fighter zigzagged high into the air directly above us, undamaged.

I couldn't help but admire the thing, with its wedge-shaped tail and the arched cross-strut that made it look like a bow-and-arrow drawn to fire. Too bad it was being flown by a bully.

A rasping noise made me look to my left. The flying line of the fighter kite was sawing at the edge of our carpet, tearing at the heavy wool fibers.

“Gran!” I yelled. I made a grab for the string, but the kite shot clear and the line was snatched out of my reach.

Our carpet trailed a wispy curl of thread where it had been frayed.

We both looked up.

The tiger kite floated above us, its painted eye looking blank and innocent. Innocent, for Pete's sake, what was I thinking? It was just paper, glue, a couple of sticks of wood, and some string!

It fluttered suddenly and sped across our path, and the line hit the carpet edge at another place.

“Help!” I yelled. “Gran, what's happening?”

“Brightner,” she shouted. “Or one of his cohorts.”

I could believe that, all right. I could believe anything about that awful man. How in the world could we get away from him? I ached with cold and hopelessness.

The rowboat lake was below us now. We had been maneuvered over water so that we couldn't land. The kite string curved away down a huge, impossible distance back to the Sheep Meadow.

“Grab the rug fringe and hang on,” Gran said. She lay down beside me, her lumpy old hands twisted firmly into the thick fringe next to mine. The carpet shivered under us and we banked and headed west toward the river, traveling so fast that I could scarcely breathe.

Nothing spectacular, mind you, no loops or rolls or zigzags, but flat-out velocity into the west wind. The kite chased us, but its line held it back. It got smaller, falling behind, and my heart rate started to slow to mere overdrive.

Then the kite made a dive, looped back across its own string, and flew free, its cutting line trailing maybe twenty feet—cut by itself.

As the tiger kite sped toward us, I saw something that made me shut my eyes: a metallic glitter of the sun's sudden light along the wooden frame—the edges of razor blades, fixed to the wooden spars. Now I knew why the big samurai kite had gone down trailing raggedy flags. It had been sliced to death, not by a fighting kite but by a killer kite.

“Hold tight!” Gran screamed in my ear. Our carpet did a sudden sideslip and fast climb that almost made me whoops.

Something brushed my right hand like a feather of fire, and we sped upward at a steep angle.

I opened my eyes and saw a line of blood along my knuckles. Below us, the killer kite stalled, turned, and shot toward the carpet's underside. We dropped hard toward the ground, as if to knock the killer out of the air with our sheer weight.

The little kite turned belly-up and crossed underneath us, hitting us a light blow. A three-inch slice in the weave opened right next to my knee.

The tiger kite spiraled off at an angle, righted itself, and sailed in a high, wide, mocking loop over us. Our carpet flew heavily now, losing altitude over the dull, rippled sheen of the Hudson River.

My cut hand hurt. The pain sort of merged with the cold that ached in my clenched fingers.

The tiger kite peeled out of the sky like a fighter plane in an old movie.

“Aagh!” I screamed. “Get away!”

Then the gulls came: big, white, noisy birds in a riotous gang looping through the sky. They swarmed around the kite and pretended to ram it, sheering off at the last minute. They stalled and flipped and clowned, squawking and nipping at it with their ugly orange beaks, quarreling as if over a choice piece of edible garbage.