Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware (14 page)

street with baskets of fried rolls on their heads, calling out prices. A man with a bicycle basket full of fresh beets rolled past, hawking his veggies.

Out of the darkness and mist came Bntno, already smiling. “Excellent children,” he said. “You are ready?”

“Top o' the morning, Bntno,” said Jasper, who was always chipper at dawn. “We've just been digging out our backpacks and supplies.”

Lily said hello, but Katie just looked around and said, “Hi. Where's your jeep?”

“Oh, jeep,” said Bntno. “We walk short way to my jeep. I leave it short way down this street.”

“We're off then, chaps,” said Jasper, heaving his pack up onto his back.

They followed Bntno down the street.

Now the mist was rising. Lily could see down the dark alleys. Corn hung to dry on the roofs and eaves of houses. Electrical wires were strung from old, elaborately carved windows,
windows wound around with wooden dragons, with stags and pigs, with angels and devils. Lily glanced into courtyards as they passed and saw the children coming out of tiny doors in their school uniforms: tunics and smiley-face masks of white rice paper. In one courtyard, a mangy, flea-ridden griffon lay couchant, chained to the wall, flies buzzing around its slow-blinking head. It lapped water out of an old orange juice container.

“What do these posters say?” Jasper asked their guide, pointing to the walls.

“It say… It say… ‘Citizens! Your Adorable Autarch loves you! Cuddle his image like a puppy!'”

“The Autarch,” muttered Jasper, “steals from the poor to give to the rich.”

“That's awful,” said Lily.

“If the children will please not criticize our kind and generous Autarch,” said Bntno, smiling, “then maybe we will not spend the rest of the year upside down in a charcoal pit.”

“Speaking of the rest of the year,” said Katie, “just how far away did you park your jeep?”

“A little farther,” he said. “You follow me.”

Women watched the four of them from rickety porches high up on the houses.

An hour passed. Now people were done with their washing and their breakfast, and they were biking to jobs or being flung to work.

Lily looked in amazement at the high tile roofs slumped with age and growing with grass, at the goats grazing there, at the intricately deco-rated courtyards she spotted through arches, signs of greater days.

A wizard hanging bundles of herbs out to dry on racks watched them pass.

“Um,” said Katie, a little more impatiently. “As in: Um?”

“No problems!” said Bntno merrily. “This way, inquisitive youngster!”

Another hour or two passed. Now it was full day, and the four walked through the city's great marketplace, where girls in shrouds
shouted prices through megaphones, and fathers pawed through stacks of rayon socks for their children, and the delicious smells of deep-fry came from barrels over fires, and goose-boys bartered with kitchen girls. Earth-moving equipment ground and stumbled along over the potholes and cobblestones. Donkeys wandered past watermelon stands. Platoons of tusked, six-armed guardsmen from high Lumbrook in barbed helmets passed each other and slapped each other high fifteens.

Lily was mesmerized by the jumble of activity. She couldn't believe all of the color and light and sound. It was too much to take in at once. One moment, she was delighted to see children playing in the square; the next moment, she was outraged that the Autarch kept everyone so poor and so frightened. She gaped at the clatter and action and stepped carefully over the piles of ox dung.

“Hey,” said Katie, “I know I might sound kind of like a… you know, repeating thing, but

haven't we been walking for kind of a long—”

“Just down this road, asking friend,” said Bntno, putting his hands over his eyes in a gesture of respect, and running into a roadside shrine.

Two real eyes blinking behind the eyes of a crocodile idol watched them pass.

An hour and fifteen minutes later, it was getting hot and the mist had burned away entirely, leaving a deep blue sky above the glittering pagoda roofs and complicated domes and spires of the gilded temples far behind the children. The three kids and their guide were no longer in the city. The pterodactyls had come out and circled around those distant towers, crying. Bntno and his charges were on a broad road with mud-and-tin shacks on either side of it, advertising tires or handmade dentistry. Behind the shacks were cornfields and a few sick oxen tied to trees.

“Okay,” said Katie. “It's ten-thirty and we've been walking since—”

“Yes, yes. There my jeep. I leave it right here.” He guided them to the right, between a couple of
thatched cottages, and pointed to where his jeep lay upside down in a ditch.

The three stared at the wreck.

“We turn it over before we get in,” said Bntno.

“Well,” said Katie, “at least we're here.”

“Atoms to gluons!” Jasper exclaimed, smacking himself in the forehead. “We have to go back! I forgot to pay the vaultapult attendant his fifteen cents!”

Lily said, “I think maybe you can pay him another time.”

“I'm a man of my word, Lily.”

“Jasper,” said Katie, with warning in her voice. “Jaaaaasper!”

“Does a man's sworn oath mean nothing? Are words mere puffs of air?”

Bntno was attaching ropes to the side of the jeep. “Not to go back now, child. We pull jeep up.”

A large group of locals had come out of their businesses to watch Bntno struggle with his
jeep. Now they all lent a hand with the ropes. Katie, Lily, and Jasper also yanked. In no time whatsoever, the jeep had flipped back over. It was not in great shape. There was a line of dirt and silt wavering across its windshield where the water had lapped for some days.

And once they got in and started driving, they realized there was probably some kind of problem with the rear axle, because they wobbled. And there were soft-shell crabs on the seats.

They tossed the crabs and headed toward the forests of the north.

I am afraid that now comes the part in the novel of foreign adventure that I really can't stand. We have a lull in the action, so the characters get informative about local industries: weaving, pottery, major imports and exports, farming techniques, etc. They have idiotic conversations like “Now, how do the interesting people in this country make these colorful baskets?” or “So, what about smelting?”

They talk about the life cycle and running speed of some animal they drive past or about the unusual customs they see. The whole time, you just want the story to get back to all the chasing and the riddles and the cabin in the woods and the fighting, but no, all you get are three pages on the history of origami. It's like
seeing someone's vacation slides but in a room half filled with cold water and a stingray.
*

For several hours, they had driven through rice fields. Dover had dwindled to a speck on the horizon. They had passed through small towns, half-timbered houses built over irrigation ditches. Jasper had asked many intense questions about local vegetable farming and, later, about the pasta fields that waved in the welcome breezes beneath the hot sun. They stopped to pluck some ziti for lunch.

The last large town they passed in the plains was Smyrna, built upon a great peak of stone, a massive granite boulder that jutted up out of the grasslands, houses clinging to its sides. At its highest point stood the ruined fortress where, four centuries before, the last few men and women of Smyrna had withstood the ferocious attack of the Silent Butchers of Deakyneville.

By three o'clock, they had reached the
foothills of the mountains. Forest grew upon the slopes. The jeep bumped and rattled through little village squares where people squatted in a few shops that sold lentils and spices or copper wire.

Bntno sang the old, wailing songs of Dover. At first Lily was thrilled to hear them, but after an hour or two, she had a headache. When he wouldn't stop singing twenty or thirty verses per song, Katie tried to interrupt with questions, at first about what the words might mean (“That's so interesting. So what do the—”; “Could you translate what you—”; “Um, could you just keep your hands on the wheel? And could you—”), and then, later, just questions of any kind that might make him stop singing. (“Now, how do the interesting people of this state make these colorful baskets?”; “So, what about -smelting?”)

The jeep juddered over hills where red clay houses stood among rich orchards and bridges swung over deep, leafy ravines.

They stayed that night in a village. They ate
at a small tavern there, and sat outside on the porch, seeing the billion stars above them and hearing the wild dogs bark in the forest. There were lights far up in the mountains—lonely lights—lights from people who saw others only once every few months. Soon, the three friends would be up in those mountains. They would be far from any civilization, any help.

The night smelled of orchids and green.

In the morning, they left behind the last villages. They rambled down the far side of the foothills, and they were in a jungle valley. Moss grew on the trees, and the wide, waxen leaves of exotic plants hung low over the rutted dirt track. Monkeys watched the jeep from trees.

As they drove, Jasper scanned Lisa Buldene's
There and Back Again
™ for clues as to how to find the mountain monastery.

“It mentions the four mountains,” Jasper reported. “Their names are Drgsl, Minndfl, Bdreth, and Tlmp. Vbngoom lies atop Tlmp.”

“I thought they were supposed to have
supersecret names that no mortals knew,” said Katie.

“Well,” said Jasper, somewhat bothered, “I guess some mortals now know them. The mortals who have looked them up in the index.”

Lily could tell that Jasper was a little hurt that his secret mountains were in the book's index. She asked him gently, “What does the book say about the mountains?”

Jostled by the road, Jasper held the book up close to his eyes and, elbows bobbing, read out: “‘Though the Four Peaks look the same height, trekkers will find that Mount Minndfl is actually considerably shorter than the nearby peak covered with deceptively inviting pine woods. English explorer and adventurer Leslie Arbuckle-Smythe climbed both that forested peak—despite its imposing height—and Mount Bdreth because he was too superstitious to climb near the ancient, rune-inscribed pillar that stands on one of the other mountains.'”

“Too superstitious?” asked Lily. “What does it mean by that?”

“He was a fellow archaeologist and adventurer,” said Jasper. “After a few scrapes, we think twice about anything that might get us bitten by a mummified cat.”

“I mean, what was he worried about with the pillar?”

Jasper flipped a few pages. “Doesn't say,” he said. “But it reminds us this is a carry-in, carry-out park.”

They drove through the jungle wastes. The heavy green foliage hung all around them. Wild boar scampered out of their way. Swamps gleamed through the trees.

They saw no sign of civilization. They now saw no house, no farm, no logging teams or goatherds. No one. Birds flew above them. Monkeys called from branches. The wilderness was complete.

That night, they pulled off the track and pitched their tents in the jungle. Lily was a little scared of sleeping outside when unknown things
lurked in the woods. Jasper tried to reassure her, but she was not used to jungle adventures in the way that he was, and she found herself lying awake, listening as things shuffled and slid through the underbrush.

At last, exhausted by a day of being thrown around in the jeep, she fell asleep. She had not slept long, however, when Katie shook her awake.

“Lily,” whispered Katie. “There's someone coming.”

Lily's heart froze in her chest. She listened.

Yes, she too could hear a jeep engine, hear the quiet crunch of gravel under tires as someone drove slowly along the road. As if someone was looking for someone.