Summerland (14 page)

"What are you going to do?"

Ethan shrugged. "I guess I'm supposed to save him," he said. He didn't really believe that he could do it, in spite of Cutbelly's words. But he felt he ought to try. After all, it was just a question of saving one ferisher, not a whole tribe. Maybe he could do something to draw them off, and give the ferisher a chance to recoup his strength. He was clearly an excellent fighter, much better than Ethan could ever hope to be.

Ethan ran toward the driftwood log. Cinquefoil leapt and ducked, thrust and slashed, hacking at a swarm of the bat-things with a long, wicked knife. His hair blew back from his head and his knife arm lashed and flailed and held steady. The sight was inspiring. That was a hero. That was how you did it. Ethan ran up, yelling and screaming, hoping to distract the skrikers for a moment. Cinquefoil turned, and smiled faintly, and then three of the skrikers looked Ethan's way. They grinned yellow grins, and the bridges of their sharp little noses wrinkled with a rank pleasure that snuffed out the little flame of purpose which Cutbelly's words had kindled in Ethan. They flew at Ethan, scattering themselves around him, their wings jerking and spasming. Ethan saw that the wings were not a part of them but queer machines, affixed to their backs by means of brass-red screws. Ethan ran past them, ducking underneath their spindly legs, and then when he turned they were on him.

He looked around for something to use to defend himself, but all he could see were the spiky stumps of broken limbs that jutted from the driftwood log. Most of them were much too short to be of any use, but there was one that was longer, and nearly perfectly straight. He clambered up onto the log and grabbed hold of the limb, and pulled. It made a dry, cracking sound, but held firm.

"Glad you could make it," Cinquefoil said, and then there was a muffled explosion, and the ferisher cried out and tumbled from the log. One of the skrikers, Ethan noticed, seemed to have lost its head, and was wheeling crazily around in the air. Cinquefoil must have decapitated it just before he himself fell. The skrikers hovered over his motionless body, now, poking and prodding it with their steel-tipped toes. Ethan threw his weight against the limb, putting his whole shoulder into it. With a great crunching snap it broke loose, and came away free in his hand.

It was about the size and length of a baseball bat, more or less straight, but knotty and weathered gray. He lifted it, and hefted it, and gripped it at one end in both hands. It felt good and solid. He swung it over his shoulder and came after the skrikers that were molesting the dead ferisher. One of them reached up and took hold of its own ears, one in each hand. Its grin grew wider and yellower. Ethan saw that its teeth were made from jagged shards of what looked like quartz. There was a series of ratcheting clicks, a nasty wet sound of ripping. And then the face with the dirty crystal grin was no longer atop the neck at all. It perched on the skriker's left hand like an old gray moldy peach. The skriker had removed its own head, and was cackling at him now from this weird vantage. The severed neck was tipped with a black ball that gleamed like a bead of wet ink. Ethan recoiled, and then the bat-thing reared back and tossed its head at him. Without thinking he swung his big stick at the head as it spun toward him.

"Breathe!" he heard Jennifer T. call.

He kept his eyes open, too: and connected. There was a burst of white flame, a
whoomp
shot through with a crackle, and a sweet, unpleasant smell like burnt cheese. Another head came spinning at him, and he swung, and there was another sharp blazing
whoomp
. He fought off three more of the head-bombs, swinging wild and hard, and then, it seemed, there was a power failure in Ethan's head somewhere.

RED AND BLACK. BLOOD AND SKY. JENNIFER T. WAS LOOKING DOWN
at him, with the heavy sky spread out behind her, a nasty cut on her cheek. Then a gamy, butcher-shop smell: Cutbelly. And finally, something jabbing at his cheek: Cutbelly, again, poking him and poking him with one of his sharp little fingers.

"Wake up, piglet!"

Ethan lay on his back, in the doomed green grass of the Summerlands.

"I'm awake," he declared, sitting up.

"Come," Cutbelly said. "The Rade has carried away the Boar Tooth mob. They have felled all the trees on either side of the gall. We have only a short while to leap through or be forced to find another route back. That could take a while. Come! Failed or not, we must get out of here."

Failed. The word resounded in his mind. He had struck out, swinging. Some kind of marvelous opportunity had been granted to him, and before he could even begin to understand what was happening to him, he had blown his chance. He could already taste the regret of the lost moment, how it would haunt him for the rest of his life.

"Will they—are they all dead?" he said. "What about Cinquefoil?"

"I'm all right," said a gruff voice behind him. "You get back to the Middling now. No telling what Coyote's up to there."

Ethan rolled over and saw the little chief crouching on the ground beside him. He was filthy, and his hair dripped pale streaks down his grimy cheeks. The coat of rough mail he wore over his buckskin had been slashed through and through. It hung in tinkling strips from his shoulders. His tan leggings sagged, his feathered cap sat askew, its savage green feather snapped in two. And his quiver of arrows was empty.

"I'm in yer debt," the ferisher said, sounding unhappy about it. "Nice work with that stick o' yers."

"You were amazing."

"I weren't nothing. I done nothing. I saved nothing and no one and all was lost."

"Did he get your…your family?"

"Those in the mob what aren't my sister or my brother are my child, my mother, or my aunt," he said. His voice broke with sorrow. "And all o' them ta be changed. Twisted inta the things ya saw, them skrikers."

"Graylings, too," the werefox pointed out, in a morose tone. That must be the name of those horrible little gray children whose bodies littered the field.

"And graylings." Cinquefoil shuddered. "And then sent back, no doubt, ta take their revenge on the chief that failed ta keep 'em whole."

There was that word again:
failed
.

"I wish I could have done more," Ethan said. "We were too late."

"There weren't nothing ya coulda done. Coyote and the Rade, they grown stronger and swifter in the last one thousand years, as we have grown scattereder and few."

"Did he get them all? Everyone?"

"I don't know, but I fear it's so. Go, g'wan back. I mean to take off after them a ways, see if some got left behind."

"We'll come with you," said Jennifer T. "We'll help you find them if they're there."

But the ferisher shook his head.

"Go," he said. "Ya heard Cutbelly. There ain't much time."

So they said good-bye to the little chief, and he turned and wandered through the charred ruin of the Birchwood off into the green fields beyond. Ethan could see that the fields were rutted with deep muddy tracks, as if some kind of heavy vehicles had passed that way. The farther away he got, the faster his pace became, and he was soon lost to view in the dim green haze of the Summerlands.

"Come on," Cutbelly said. They turned back toward the ordinary forest of firs and pines through which they had come. Ethan followed after Jennifer T., who followed the scurrying shadowtail. They had not been walking long when Ethan became aware of a low, steady rustling in the trees around them.

"What's that noise?" Jennifer T. said.

Cutbelly's earlier warning, about the shadows' not being shadows, had made little sense to Ethan at the time. Now he understood. The thick shadows that filled the woods with the half-night of an eclipse had detached themselves from the trees and hollows. They were following him and Jennifer T. and Cutbelly. They fluttered in great gauzy sheets, now drifting like a piece of rubbish caught by the wind, now flapping steadily with great vulture wingbeats. They passed through the limbs and trunks of trees, some weird cross between fishnet and smoke. And though Cutbelly was leading them as fast as his short legs could go, scurrying back to the world where such things were not, the false shadows were gaining on them.

They ran for home, so fast that snowdust began to drift and swirl around them in glittering white gusts. Cold burned the inside of Ethan's nose. The air in his ears tinkled like ice. Ethan saw Jennifer T. trip over a root, and go flying forward. He stopped and reached down to grab her hand. As he did so he heard a soft flutter of drapery, a curtain parting, and looked up to see one of the false shadows settle down over him and Jennifer T. Burning cold, a smell like rust on a cold iron skillet. Ethan reached up to fight it off and saw that he was still holding his stick. It caught on something inside the shadow, something at once springy and hard, and when he yanked it out there was a sickening wet sound. The shadow faded at once and was gone. Jennifer T. was back on her feet by now. She grabbed Ethan by the elbow and pulled him along the path they had been following. There was no sign of Cutbelly ahead, and Ethan looked back and saw, to his horror, that one of the false shadows had taken, lazily, to the sky. From its shifting silk depths there protruded the white tip of a bushy red tail.

There was silence, and Ethan thought, They got him. Then there was the rumble of an engine in the near distance.

"Harley," said Jennifer T. "Big one."

They were standing at the edge of the Clam Island Highway. They were home. The motorcycle roared downhill and then pulled onto the line for the Bellingham ferry.

"How'd we get here?" Jennifer T. said.

There was Zorro's Mexican restaurant, the ferry dock, and the long green smudge of the mainland. Somehow they had come out of the Summerlands at the southern tip of Clam Island. The Harley-Davidson growled on down the hill to the lanes where you waited for the next ferry. A moment later they heard another engine, and a car appeared, a big, old, finned monster, peppermint white with red roof and trim. It slowed as it passed by Ethan and Jennifer T., then stopped.

Mr. Chiron Brown rolled down his window. He looked surprised but not, Ethan would have said, happy to see the children. He shook his head.

"Well," he said. His eyes were shining and for a moment Ethan thought he might be about to cry. "Let this be a lesson. Don't never listen to a crazy old man when the old Coyote be workin' one of his thangs." A tear rolled down his cheek. "I let them poor creatures down."

No, Ethan thought. I let them down. "I struck out," he said.

"Nah," Mr. Brown said. "Don't blame yourself. It's like you said. You too young. In the old days, not so long ago, we used to be able to afford to bring 'em along a little bit. Season 'em up. Hell, it took U. S. Grant most of his natural
life
to finally find his stroke."

"Hey, where are you going?" Jennifer T. said. A pickup truck appeared at the top of Ferrydock Hill and came down toward them, slowing as it neared the white Cadillac. "Are you leaving?"

Ringfinger admitted that he was headed for home.

"Where is your home?" Ethan said.

"Oh, I doesn't have no fixed abode, not here in the Middlin'. But lately I've been livin' down in Tacoma."

"What's the Middling?" Jennifer T. said.

"The Middlin'? You standin' in it. It's everythin'. All this here local world you livin' in."

The pickup had settled in behind Mr. Brown's car. Its driver tried to be patient for a few seconds, then began irritably to honk. Mr. Brown ignored or seemed not to hear. Another car rolled in from the top of the hill, with a third right behind it.

"So is it…is it all over?" Ethan said.

"Well, I ain't as up on my mundology as I ought to be, which is a word signifyin' the study of the Worlds. I ain't sure how many galls we started out with, back before Coyote's mischief commenced. And I couldn't say how many we got left now. But there wasn't never very many, even in the glory times. And Coyote been hackin' and choppin' on 'em for a long, long time now."