Summerland (7 page)

"Everything is a race or a contest, with the Neighbors," Cutbelly said, sounding fairly fed up with them. "Somebody always has to lose, or they aren't happy."

At last one of the buses broke free of the pack for good. It shot across the diminishing space between it and Ethan's head and then came, with a terrific screech of tires against thin air, to a stop. There was a loud cheer from within, and then the other buses came squealing up. Immediately six or seven dozen very small people piled out of the doors and began shouting and arguing and trying to drown each other out. They snatched leather purses from their belts and waved them around. After a moment great stacks of gold coins began to change hands. At last most of them looked pleased or at least satisfied with the outcome of the race, and turned to Cutbelly and Ethan, jostling and elbowing one another to get a better look at the intruder.

Ethan stared back. They looked like a bunch of tiny Indians out of some old film or museum diorama. They were dressed in trousers and dresses of skin, dyed and beaded. They were laden with shells and feathers and glinting bits of gold. Their skins were the color of cherry wood. Some were armed with bows and quivers of arrows. The idea of a lost tribe of pygmy Indians living in the woods of Clam Island made a brief appearance in Ethan's mind before being laughed right out again. These creatures could never be mistaken for human. For one thing, though they were clearly adults, women with breasts, men with beards and mustaches, none stood much taller than a human infant. Their eyes were the color of cider and beer, the pupils rectangular black slits like the pupils of goats. But it was more than their size or the strangeness of their pale gold eyes. Looking at them—just
looking
at them—raised the hair on the back of Ethan's neck. On this dazzling summer day, he shuddered, from the inside out, as if he had a fever. His jaw trembled and he heard his teeth clicking against each other. His toes in his sneakers curled and uncurled.

"You'll get used to seeing them in time," Cutbelly whispered.

One of the ferishers, a little taller than the others, broke away from the troop. He was dressed in a pair of feathered trousers, a shirt of hide with horn buttons, and a green jacket with long orchestra-leader tails. On his head there was a high-crowned baseball cap, red with a black bill and a big silver O on the crown, and on his feet a tiny pair of black spikes, the old-fashioned kind such as you might have seen on the feet of Ty Cobb in an old photograph. He was as handsome as the king on a playing card, with the same unimpressed expression.

"A eleven-year-old boy," he said, peering up at Ethan. "These is shrunken times indeed."

"He goin' to do fine," said a familiar voice, creaky and scuffed-up as an old leather mitt. Ethan turned to find old Ringfinger Brown standing behind him. Today the old man's suit was a three-piece, as pink as lipstick, except for the vest, which was exactly the color of the Felds' station wagon.

"He'll hafta," said the ferisher. "The Rade has come, just like Johnny Speakwater done foretold. An' they brought their pruning shears, if ya know what I mean."

"Yeah, we saw 'em, din't we, boy?" Ringfinger said to Ethan. "Comin' in with their shovels and their trucks and their steel-toe boots to do their rotten work."

"I'm Cinquefoil," the ferisher told Ethan. "Chief o' this mob. And starting first baseman."

Ethan noticed now that there was some murmuring among the ferishers. He looked inquiringly at Mr. Brown, who gestured toward the ground with his fingers. Ethan didn't understand.

"You in the presence of royalty, son," Mr. Brown said. "You ought to bow down when you meetin' a chief, or a king, or some other type of top man or potentate. Not to mention the Home Run King of three worlds, Cinquefoil of the Boar Tooth mob."

"Oh, my gosh," Ethan said. He was very embarrassed, and felt that a simple bow would somehow not be enough to make up for his rudeness. So he got down on one knee, and lowered his head. If he had been wearing a hat, he would have doffed it. It was one of those things that you have seen done in movies a hundred times, but rarely get the chance to try. He must have looked pretty silly. The ferishers all burst out laughing, Cinquefoil loudest of all.

"That's the way, little reuben," he said.

Ethan waited for what he hoped was a respectful amount of time. Then he got back to his feet.

"How many home runs did you hit?" he asked.

Cinquefoil shrugged modestly. "Seventy-two thousand nine hundred and fifty-four," he said. "Hit that very number just last night." He pounded his mitt, which was about the size and color of a Nilla wafer. "Catch."

A small white sphere, stitched in red but no bigger than a gumball, came at Ethan. The air seemed to waver around it and it came faster than he expected. He got his hands up, just, and clutched hopefully at the air in front of his face. The ball stung him on the shoulder and then dropped with an embarrassing plop to the grass. All the ferishers let out their breath at once in a long deflated hiss. The ball rolled back toward Cinquefoil's black spikes. He looked at it, then up at Ethan. Then with a sigh he bent down and flicked it back into his mitt.

"A hot prospect indeed," said Cinquefoil to Ringfinger Brown. This time Mr. Brown didn't try to stick up for Ethan. "Well, we got no choice, an' that's a fact. The Rade has showed up, years before we ever done expected them, and yer about ten years shy o' half-cooked, but we got no choice. There ain't no time ta go looking for another champion. I guess ya'll hafta do."

"But what do you need me for?" Ethan said.

"What do ya think? To save us. To save the Birchwood."

"What's the Birchwood?"

The little chief rubbed slowly at chin with one tiny brown hand. It seemed to be a gesture of annoyance.

"This is the Birchwood. These trees—ain't ya ever noticed them? They're birch trees. Birch
wood
. These woods is our home. We live here."

"And, excuse me, I'm sorry, ha, but, uh, save it from
what
, now?"

Cinquefoil gave Ringfinger Brown a hard look.

"Ta think that we done paid ya half our treasure fer this," he said bitterly.

Ringfinger suddenly noticed a bit of fuzz on his lapel.

The ferisher chief turned to Ethan.

"From Coyote, o' course," he said. "Now that he done found us, he's going ta try ta lop our gall. He does that, that's the end o' the Birchwood. And that's the end o' my mob."

Ethan was lost, and embarrassed, too. If there was one thing he hated more than anything else in the world, it was being taken for stupid. His natural tendency in such situations was to pretend that he understood for as long as was necessary until he
did
understand. But whatever the ferisher was talking about—
lop our gall?
—it sounded too important for Ethan to fake. So he turned for help to Cutbelly.

"Who is Johnny Speakwater?" he said miserably.

"Johnny Speakwater is the local oracle in this part of the Western Summerlands," the werefox said. "About ten years ago, he predicted that Coyote, or the Changer as he is also known, was going to find his way to the Birchwood. Listen, now, you remember I was telling you about the Tree—the Lodgepole, as these people call it."

At these words, a groan went up from the assembled ferishers.

"He don't even know about the
Lodgepole
!" Cinquefoil cried.

"Stop givin' me the fisheye, " Ringfinger Brown snapped. "I done told you they was slim pickin's."

"Shrunken times, indeed," the chief repeated, and all his mob nodded their heads. Ethan could see they were already very disappointed in him, and he hadn't even done anything yet.

"Every so often," Cutbelly went on patiently, "two branches of a tree will rub right up against each other. Have you ever seen that? Every time there's a stiff enough wind. They do it so long, and so furious, that a raw place, a kind of wound, opens up in the bark on each limb where it's been rubbing. And then, over time, the wound heals over with new bark, only now, the two limbs are joined together. Into one limb. That joining or weaving together of two parts of a tree is called
pleaching
. And the place where they are joined is called a
gall
"

"I've seen that," Ethan said. "I saw a tree in Florida one time that was like that."

"Well, with a tree as old and as tangled-up as the Lodgepole, and with the Winds of Time blowing as stiff as they like to blow, you are bound to have some pleaching, here and there. By now it's been going on so long that these galls are all over the place. Galls mark the spots where two worlds flow into each other. And they tend to be magical places. Sacred groves, haunted pools, and so forth. Your Summerland is just such a place."

"So, okay, Summerland is in my world
and
this one," Ethan said, to Cinquefoil as much as to Cutbelly, hoping to demonstrate that he was not
totally
hopeless. "At the same time. And that's why it never rains there?"

"Never can tell what's going to happen around a gall," Cutbelly said. "All kinds of wonderful things. A dry sunny patch of green in a land of endless gray and drizzle is just one of the possibilities."

"And now this Coyote wants to cut the worlds apart again?"

Cutbelly nodded.

"But why?" Ethan said.

"Because that's what Coyote does, among a thousand other mad behaviors. He wanders around the Tree, with his Rade of followers, and wherever he finds the worlds pleached together he lops them right apart. But this local gall is tucked away in such a remote corner of the Worlds that he's missed it until now."

"Okay," Ethan said. "I get it. I mean, I sort of get it. But, I mean, you know, I sort of agree with the whole idea of how I'm a, well, a
kid
. Like, I don't know how to use a, what, like a
sword
, or even ride a horse, or any of that stuff, if that's what I'm supposed to do."

Nobody said anything for a long time. It was as if they had all been hoping in spite of themselves that Ethan was going to rise to the occasion and come up with a plan for saving Summerland. Now that hope was gone. Then, from the edge of the meadow, there was a scornful laugh. They all turned in time to see a crow—the same great black bird, Ethan would have sworn, that he and Cutbelly had seen earlier—take to the sky. Some of the ferishers unslung their bows. They nocked arrows to their bowstrings and let fly. The arrows whistled into the sky. The black bird took no notice of them. Its wings beat slowly, lazily, with a kind of insolence, as if it thought it had all the time in the world. Its rough laughter caught the breeze and trailed behind it like a mocking streamer.

"Enough o' this," the chief said, at last, his face grim and his tone gruff and commanding. He tossed the tiny baseball to Ethan again. This time Ethan just managed to hold on to it as it came stinging into his palm. "Let's go talk ta that crazy old clam."

THEY TROOPED ACROSS THE MEADOW, PAST THE GLEAMING
ballpark, and down to the beach. Here in the Summerlands, in the Birchwood, there was no ruined hotel, no collapsed dance hall or pier. There was just the long dark stretch of muddy sand, with the ghostly trees on one side of it and the endless dark green water stretching away on the other. And, in the middle of it all, that big gray log of ancient driftwood, spiky and half-buried, on which he and his father had once sat and shared a lunch of chicken sandwiches and hot chicken soup from the thermos. Was it the same log, Ethan wondered? Could something really exist in two different worlds at the same time?

"That bristly old chunk of wood
is
the gall, some say," Cutbelly told him. "The place where the worlds are jointed fast."

They seemed in fact to be headed right toward it.

"But I thought you said the Tree was invisible, and untouchable," Ethan said. "Immaterial."

"Can you see love? Can you
touch
it?"

"Well," Ethan said, hoping it was not a trick question. "No, love is invisible and untouchable, too."

"And when your pap puts on that big Roosters jersey of his, and sits there watching you in the bleachers with the smile never leaving his face? And slaps palms with you after a game even though you struck out four times looking?"

"Huh," Ethan said.

"Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt."

They had reached the driftwood log. At a gesture from Cinquefoil a dozen or more ferishers got down on their knees and began, slowly and with a strange tenderness, to dig in the sand underneath it. They were digging separately, but all of them stayed in the area shadowed by the upraised, snaggled roots of the log. They slipped their small hands into the sand with a hiss and then brought them out, cupped, with a soft, sucking
pop
. The sand they removed in this way they drizzled through their fingers, writing intricate squiggles on the smooth surface of the beach. The driblets of sand made daisies and cloverleaves and suns. At last one of ferishers cried out, pointing at the pattern her wet handful of sand had formed, like a pair of crossed lightning bolts. The other diggers gathered around her, then, and with vigor, they began to dig all together at the spot. Before long they had dug a hole that was three times taller than any of them, and twice as wide. Then there was another cry, followed by what sounded to Ethan like a loud, rude belch. Everyone laughed, and the diggers came clambering up out of the hole.