Playing Hearts (4 page)

I was an avid puddle-gazer from my ninth
to my twelfth birthdays. No cards of invitation appeared on my pillow and I
didn’t accidentally fall into Underland either, so there seemed to be nothing
for it but to watch from a distance. Then, at last, a few months after my
twelfth birthday, I woke with a start to find that a playing card was on my
pillow again. It kicked into gear a plan that must have been growing in my back
brain for weeks. I snatched at the card, my thoughts spinning, and was out of
the house less than fifteen minutes later. On my back was my school bag,
stuffed with the food I’d hoarded over the last few weeks and heavy with as
many clothes as I could manage. I’d stolen a carrot from the kitchen for Hare—a
big fat one that seemed like it might make even him less loud and angry—and a
patchwork cap I found in the dress-up bin at school for Hatter. Perhaps if I
was clever about it, they would let me stay for a while.

But I didn’t find them
when I leapt into Underland. Instead, my puddle brought me out into a cool,
dark woods. There was a chill to the air around my ankles, and dark green grass
stretched out in a velvety expanse beneath my shoes. Up ahead was a sharp
demarcation of lighter green which I thought at first was a sunbeam finding its
way through the trees, but turned out to be a straight line of lighter green
grass. There was no graceful or patchy seguing between the two, it was a sharp,
straight line; dark one side, light the other. Curious. I frowned at it,
wondering if this was a sort of fake turf like the oval at school. Only why
would there be fake grass in a wood?

“It’s Underland,” I said
to myself, because I couldn’t keep staring at it. I wanted to find Hatter and
Hare. “Maybe the trees aren’t real, either.” I hefted my backpack a little
higher on my back and walked toward the line of lighter green grass.

I had taken just one step
over that line when a voice boomed: “Forfeit! Your life is forfeit! I claim
this square!”

I clutched at the straps
of my backpack, my heart racing, and saw a flash of red in the shadows. A
furious thundering of hooves beat in my ears, and then my fear that the Queen
had somehow found me again was put to flight by the very much more present
danger of the red knight who was galloping straight at me. His horse was
blood-red, too, its neck arched and proud, and there was a very sharp red lance
pointed at my chest.

I froze for the barest
instant, then threw myself sideways as the horse barrelled past, tearing up
chunks of turf. The grass was soft and springy, and I rolled easily to my feet
again despite my backpack. Unfortunately, in the time between rolling and
rising, the red knight had pulled up, turned, and was setting his lance at me
again.

“Ho! Challenger to the
square!” called another voice behind me.

I gave a squeak, instinctively
ducking, and a second horse and knight galloped past me, intent upon the red
knight. This horse and knight were white, and when the red knight saw them he
spurred his own horse into a furious gallop again. My first feeling was one of
relief. Maybe I could sneak away while they were fighting each other. The
second was one of sudden terror: both knights had somehow utterly missed each
other with their lances, and the red knight was still bearing down on me. I
yelled and tried to leap sidewise again, but I was too slow. The red knight’s
lance slid between my shoulder and the strap of my backpack, burning me with
its speed, and hove me off my feet.

For the briefest of
moments I flew. Then my weight dragged the point of the lance into the grass,
and a red, shouting, clanking heap of metal sailed over my head and into a
tree. There was the clashing of metal and wood, then a brief silence, during
which I discovered that I was pinned to the grass by my backpack strap.

“Bravo!” shouted the
white knight. “Oh, well played, madam! A rout indeed!”

“
Help!
” I said in
annoyance.

The white knight at once
dismounted. “A thousand pardons, madam! At once, and immediately!”

At once and immediately
was not exactly how it happened. The white knight turned out to be incapable of
helping me until he had removed his helmet and his gauntlets, which took far
longer than it should have taken. Then he stopped to apologise for the
necessity of touching me to remove the lance (which he called ‘rude weaponry’).

“
That
’s all
right,” I said, eyeing his enormous white whiskers in fascination. “Just take
it out, please. Why do you keep calling me madam?”

The white knight looked
at me uncertainly. “Should I, perchance, address you as
sir
?”

“What? No! I’m a kid. I’m
not even a miss yet. I’m Mabel.”

“A great pleasure to meet
you, Mistress Mabel,” said the white knight, at last plucking the lance from
the earth beneath me. “I am Sir Blanc, wandering knight.”

I took the hand he held
out to me and rose to my feet a little shakily. “Thank you, Sir Blanc. You
showed up just in time.”

“Alas!” sighed Sir Blanc.
“My interference has brought no glory! I have failed to bring about the
downfall of my enemy.”

“Well, neither did I,” I
said, throwing a look up at the red knight. “He went up, not down. And he did
it to himself, anyway. Why did he attack me?”

“You approached his
square,” said Sir Blanc. “It was ever thus in the Chessboard Woods. He was
honour bound to challenge you; as was I to challenge him. And yet, I failed!” He
sank down on a fallen tree, a crumpled little tin can of sad eyes and drooping
whiskers. “It’s all of a piece,” he continued, as if I wasn’t there. “A failed
knight, a failed inventor, always to be thwarted in my search.”

He looked so woebegone
that I was prompted to ask him: “What are you searching for?”

“My wits,” he said sadly.
“They wandered away and now I can’t find them.”

I said: “Oh,” because
there didn’t seem to be anything else to say. In an effort to be helpful, I
added: “Do you remember where you last had them?”

“I was envisioning my
latest invention,” said Sir Blanc meditatively. “Oh, very clever, it was! I’ve
no idea what it’s for
now
, but back when I had my wits about me I was a
very clever fellow!”

“Your wits,” I prompted,
hugging my backpack.

“Indeed, indeed. I let my
thoughts wander for a moment—pondering something devastatingly intelligent,
methinks—and when I looked around my wits had wandered away.”

“Just walked off, did
they?” I wasn’t quite sure that Sir Blanc wasn’t making fun of me.

“The Queen had been
waiting for just such an occasion,” said Sir Blanc, his pleasant face
darkening. “She swooped on them and took them away, and I’ve not seen them
since.”

I thought about this for
far too long, until it occurred to me to ask: “Hang on, if the Queen has them,
why are you looking for them
here
?”

“I know not,” said Sir
Blanc, even more sadly. “Forsooth, I’ve lost my wits! Alas the day! Once such a
bright light in the rebellion!”

My eyes flew to his face.
“What rebellion? The Queen came to the tea-party one day and– oh! Hatter and
Hare! What rebellion, Sir Blanc?”

“It is gone with my
wits,” said Sir Blanc simply. “Until I regain my wits, I wander the Chessboard
Woods and serenade the trees with my sad ditties.”

“If the Queen has your
wits, you won’t find them by wandering the woods,” I reminded him; but Sir
Blanc wasn’t listening. He was warbling something mournful to the greenery
around us, his moustaches drooping disconsolately. “Where are Hatter and Hare?”
I asked, by way of trying to stop the wavering noise. “Can you take me to
them?”

“I fear not, Mistress
Mabel. My wits, having fled, have taken with them all useful knowledge of my
former associates and occupations.”

“Maybe that’s why the Queen
took them,” I said slowly. “When did your wits first go missing?”

“Five years ago,” he
said. “Five long, weary years!”

A fizz of excitement went
through me. “That’s when I came to Underland last! And the Queen was
threatening Hatter and Hare. Maybe that’s how she knew about them. Sir Blanc,
if I help you get your wits back, will you take me to Hatter and Hare?”

“It would be my pleasure,
madam.”

“All right, then!” I
said, pleased with myself. “Do you know how to get to the Queen’s Castle?”

“Every man knows the path
to the Castle of Hearts. That he may escape again from thence is another
matter.”

“Well,
we
will,” I
said stoutly. I couldn’t see the red points of the Heart Castle from here in
the woods, but the pall of it was still palpably felt. I had no intention of
being trapped in it.

It took us a day and a half to get to the
Heart Castle. We probably would have been faster walking, but Sir Blanc
insisted on us riding his horse, which was so old and mournful that it seemed
to take one step backwards for every two it took forwards, in a sort of a sad
strathspey. I tried not to be irritated, because neither of them could really
help it. Really, I could have made it to the Castle myself: it was immediately
noticeable on the horizon when we got out of the Chessboard Woods.
Unfortunately, Sir Blanc was too honourable to let me go by myself;
particularly
since I was helping him. I tried not to be irritated at that, too, but it was a
bit harder: Sir Blanc may have been brave and kind, but he had no idea of how
to be inconspicuous. It was partly his armour, which clanked and rattled more
loudly than I’d thought possible; but he also had a habit of talking at the top
of his lungs– or worse, when the dismals fell on him, softly wailing sad songs.

When we got to the Castle
of Hearts, however, it became obvious that it would take a lot more than being
inconspicuous to get in. Sir Blanc and I made it into the servants courtyard
without anyone batting an eyelid, but once there it was clear that the only
thing getting past the guards and into the Castle itself were recognised
servants and a series of heavily weighed and loudly creaking metal carts. Each
of them was guarded by a red knight who stood to attention on a metal footboard
at the back of the carts, and each of them was pulled by a stocky little
mechanical horse. I wondered at the mechanical horses until it occurred to me
that real horses needed drivers, and there was no room on the carts for a
driver. They seemed to be very precise in their movements, and no less precise
in their timing: an outgoing cart met an incoming cart on the hour, every hour.
I counted the minutes on my watch, which interested Sir Blanc greatly, looking
around at the courtyard while we waited. It had been made into a storage ground
for various stockpiles of supplies, from barrels of wine to crates of apples,
and a lunch spot for a lot of very small, very grimy children. Sir Blanc and I
lingered close to the apples and tried to think of a way past the guards. At
least, I tried to think of a way past the guards while Sir Blanc became
enthralled by my watch, which I had given him to distract him from his very
loud determination to challenge the red knights to combat. When he was
enthralled enough to have forgotten about the other knights, I stole one of the
apples from the crates and sidled up to one of the kids.

Munching on my apple, I
jerked my chin at the latest cart and said: “What’s that?”

“An ice cart.”

“Why’s it getting into
the castle? They’re not letting anyone else in.”

“It’s for them ice vents
in the castle: they keep the halls cool in the summer. The ice goes in the ice
chamber and a bunch of vents splits off from there and runs through the castle
so it all stays cool.”

“Oh, that’s clever,” I
said, thinking of the air conditioning systems back in Australia. They were
probably better at keeping places cool, but it wasn’t very likely that you
could sneak in through the air conditioning. I was very much hoping that it
would
be possible to sneak through the ice vents. The only question was to get into the
ice chamber itself. I was quite certain that wandering into the ice chamber
with a knight would be even harder than sneaking into the castle with one.
Unless...unless I didn’t try to sneak in with a
white
knight. Unless I
tried to sneak in with a
red
knight.

Sir Blanc, for all his
clanking and vagueness, proved to be very handy when it came to waylaying one
of the carts and its attendant knight. Maybe the loss of his wits made him more
prone to violence. We attacked it a street before it turned into the courtyard,
and while Sir Blanc did most of the hard work, I was proud of the fact that it
was I who unseated the red knight from his position with my school tie. Once he
was on the cobbles in a stunned heap, it was Sir Blanc who removed his helmet
and hit him once, very effectively, in the head. He also proved to be very good
with knots, and had the red knight trussed and out of sight in an alley before
the cart had a chance to turn into the courtyard.

While Sir Blanc settled
himself on the moving cart, wrapped in the red knight’s cloak and wearing his
helmet, I scrambled into the back, where I was simultaneously almost crushed
and almost frozen by the massive block of ice it contained. From there it was
simply a matter of listening anxiously to Sir Blanc’s short interaction with
the castle guards, and excitedly to the sound of our progress echoing against
the passage walls as we drove into the bowels of the castle.

We drove for a lot longer
than I expected, making a curved descent that seemed to be never-ending and
increasingly claustrophobic until, all at once, the noise of the cart again
echoed loudly. Shortly after, the mechanical horse stopped, though the sound of
its clopping remained while Sir Blanc descended from his perch and lifted me
out of the cart.

“We’re in!” I said. I
couldn’t quite believe it myself. I looked around us while the mechanical horse
waited patiently for its load to be uncrated. The ice chamber was enormous, cold
reflecting off the domed metallic surface. To my joy, the vents that dimpled it
at regular intervals were large enough not only to fit my skinny body, but Sir
Blanc’s much larger one. There were even ladders leading to the higher vents. Well,
air vents must have to be cleaned and repaired occasionally, I supposed. The
chill that surrounded us from the massive blocks of ice already unloaded was
something fierce.

“Very well,” said Sir
Blanc. “Where shall we begin, madam? I am entirely at your disposal.”

“The royal chambers, I
suppose,” I said. “Where are they?”

“We must traverse two
levels of underlings and utility chambers before we attain to the galleries and
royal chambers.”

“All right,” I said,
throwing another look around. “The higher vents, then.”

It hadn’t really occurred
to me how horribly noisy Sir Blanc would be when confined to a metallic vent. If
he was noisy out in the open air, he was actually
shattering
in the
metal vent system. It wasn’t easy getting him in the vent, either. And when I
tried to warn him about the amount of noise, he looked reproachfully at me and
said: “A knight and a nobleman does not creep into a fortress like a
sneak-thief, Mistress Mabel. My honour much misgives me.”

“Your honour is helping a
damsel in distress,” I told him crossly, and kept crawling. It was
half
true.
“And my name is Mabel. Not mistress or madam.”

“Certainly, my dear
child,” responded Sir Blanc, once more conveniently oblivious. Redirecting his
thoughts wasn’t hard, but it was a little wearisome having to do it so often.
“Shall we arrive soon, do you think?”

“Don’t know,” I panted.
“Hold on, Sir Blanc: boost me up to this grating. I think I can see a grand
hall.”

It
was
a grand
hall, like something out of a fairy tale book. Red knights lined a hall of
marbled white and scarlet, and a grating opposite me in my line of sight told
me that if we continued straight ahead we would be going in the wrong
direction. As we travelled toward the castle through a giant chessboard of
different shades of green, Sir Blanc had told me that the Queen kept all her
exotic curios in a small room at the centre of the castle, close to the royal
chambers. He had been beamingly surprised when I suggested that it was possible
she kept his wits there, too.

“Which way to the Queen’s
curio room from the grand hall?” I hissed down at him.

“Onward and upward!” said
Sir Blanc, by far too loud. I thought one of the red knights might have moved
at the noise, but I didn’t stay to be sure. Instead, Sir Blanc and I continued
onward and upward, taking each passage that led us higher until we came to an
exceedingly tiny grate on the inward-facing side of the passage. I’d noticed
that the grates usually had a counterpart on the opposite side of whichever
room we found ourselves, but this grate had none. It was also by far the
smallest grate we had yet seen. I couldn’t see through it at all until I
realised that it was double-grated: there was another grate further in, at
least an arms-length away. When I pried out the grating on my side I could see
the marble bricks that formed the rectangular hole; and through that, a small
piece of a plush, velvety sort of room that seemed to be almost entirely red.

“I think we found it!” I
said, in an excited whisper. What I could see of the room was lined with
glass-covered shelves, behind which were myriad tiny knick-knacks and oddities.
In one corner I could see the contours of curving red wood that I could imagine
were heart-shaped doors.

“What a shame we can’t
fit through this grate! It must be the right one:
she
wouldn’t leave
anything up to chance. What do you think we should do?”

Sir Blanc carefully let
me down, and stared at the hole for a long, thoughtful moment.

“We must find a troupe of
tiny people!” he said at last, his eyes bright. “We shall enlist their good
services by representing to them the iniquity of the Heart Queen’s reign of
terror.”

He looked so pleased with
himself that I didn’t like to bring him down to earth. Well, for all I knew,
Underland
might
be home to a troupe of tiny people. They weren’t
here
,
though, and I didn’t much like our chances of getting back into the Heart
Castle once we were safely out again.

“That’s a good plan,” I
said, smiling at him. “But supposing we can’t find a troupe of tiny people in
time? Maybe we can find another grating that’s close enough to sneak into the
room without anyone seeing us.”

Sir Blanc gave me a sad,
sweet smile. “It was a terrible plan, wasn’t it? My regrets, dear child: I am
of no use to you.”

“That’s not true! I
wouldn’t have been able to get in here without you! Who knocked out the guard,
and tied him up? Who boosted me up into all these vents?”

Sir Blanc, after thinking
about it, said in a pleased sort of a way: “’Twas myself, forsooth!”

“That’s right,” I said,
descending from rhetoric to particulars to avoid confusing him: “And you
stopped the red knight from killing me, too. Look, if we crawl up the
right-hand vent, we can probably skirt around the side of it and sneak into the
halls.”

“A knight does not
sneak,” said Sir Blanc.

“Well, I’ll sneak. You
just try not to clank.”

Music filtered into the
vents the further we crawled. We were getting close, I knew.

“What do you see, child?”
hissed Sir Blanc. He was still too loud, but at least he wasn’t clanking so
much now. We were quickly approaching another grating, just as I thought we
would. When I finally wriggled up to it, I found that it looked out on a small
antechamber. It was a cool room for tray upon tray of tiny finger food and
beautifully coloured bottles of wine. Unfortunately, even such a tiny room
wasn’t unoccupied. Leaning against the doorway was a tall, thin figure with
razor-sharp creases in his trousers and shiny red shoes with pointy toes. He
was holding a champagne glass with something red and bubbly in it, but he wasn’t
drinking: it seemed to be more of an elegant accessory. I’d seen him so often
in windows and reflections that I recognised him straight away, even from
behind.

I whispered to Sir Blanc:
“Hang on. I might be able to get us some help.”

We were certainly in the
right place: the wide doorway Jack was leaning into had heart-shaped mouldings
that opened out at about waist height, and beyond that I could see the curve of
red heart-shaped doors. Much to my joy, there were no card sharks in sight.
Unfortunately, the lack of card sharks was probably due to the fact that the
room beyond the antechamber was full of laughing, drinking guests. No one could
get into that room without being seen by at least a dozen people. I couldn’t
shout, either, or the guests would hear me. Whispering, on the other hand, wouldn’t
draw Jack’s attention over the babble of conversation and the wail of the
violin.

I settled for a piercing
hiss. “Oi! Jack!”

One golden brow arched as
Jack’s head turned. His black-flecked eyes searched the space behind him,
flickering over red and white marble until they came to rest on the decorative grating
that I crouched behind. Perhaps he was going to ignore me—or perhaps he hadn’t
really figured out where the noise was coming from—because he turned back to
the music room, his eyes running lazily over the room. At length, however, he
turned around again, his eyes lingering on the other room, and sauntered
casually toward me. He gave the clasp a quick, sharp kick with the heel of his
shiny red shoes, his eyes never leaving the other room and his back never
losing its arch.