Summerland (29 page)
Authors: Michael Chabon
"A THUNDERSTORM;" TAFFY CRIED
from her lookout perch atop the car, amid the humming guy wires. "A great, big, old-fashioned, singe-your-nape-fur, Summerland thunderstorm!"
"It's on a direct heading for this vessel," Thor reported. Jennifer T. had noticed that Thor tended to get especially androidish whenever he was afraid. Actually the storm was well above them, hovering, as if trying to make up its mind what to do about them.
"Nevertheless," Taffy said. "It's so
beautiful!
" They could hear her, snuffling up a deep nostalgic breath of stormy air. "It smells so
wonderful!
"
It was, Jennifer T. had to agree, a beautiful thunderstorm, its black wings beating at the summer air. It had lightning for talons and rain for plumage and its eyes were alight with a static charge of ozone. It was a creature of storm, a big black bird made of thunder.
"Tell me it isn't," she said. But she knew that it was.
"Course it is," Cinquefoil said.
"
Thunderbird!
" Taffy said. "Hey there, you thunderbird!" Up on the roof of the car there was an awful thumping. Jennifer T. grabbed hold of Thor Wignutt as the car began to shake and rock violently. Taffy the Sasquatch, somewhat ill-advisedly in Jennifer T.'s opinion, was jumping up and down on top of Skidbladnir. She had been in that cage, Jennifer T. supposed, a few hundred years too long. "Hi! You-hoo!"
"Quiet, ya shaggy old she-bigfoot!" snapped Cinquefoil. "Ya think this wired-together heap a junk and grammer could stand up ta a brush with that?"
Taffy quit her leaping about, but it was much too late, of course. The thunderbird had noticed them long before. It was circling over them, about half a mile up, with an easy malevolence.
"Why does it want to hurt us?" Ethan said. "Is it on Coyote's side?"
"Wouldn't think so," Cinquefoil said. "Coyote stoled storm-bringing from Thunderbird, like he stoled fishing from Eagle, and war from Ant, and fire from Old Mr. Wood hisself."
"Wait a minute." Certain features of everything they had experienced since her first crossing, back on Clam Island, had struck Jennifer T. as familiar from the old people's stories, of course, in particular all this talk of Coyote and the Changer. But a thunderbird? "Is the Summerlands, like, is it an
Indian
world?" she said.
"Well, we use ta see a fair number o' Indians in the Summerlands, at one time. Adventurers, shamans, rogues and trickster men, witches and princesses. They used to get all tangled up in the greater grammer and take some terrible fine stories home with them when they found their way out agin. But we don't see too many Indians these days." Cinquefoil leveled his heavy-lidded gaze at Jennifer T. "Something musta happened."
Jennifer T. felt that the ferisher was looking right into her, into everything that had always troubled her about what old Albert called her "Indian side." How she loved all the old stories so much that it made her angry, everlastingly furious, with her Indian ancestors, for having lost everything, land, language, legends, so completely. Even though she knew it was not fair to blame them, not fair at all; there was nothing that those poor old Squamish and Salishan and Nooksacks could have done, not really, in the face of white-man inventions and white-man viruses and white man wanting them dead. She couldn't help it; she blamed them anyway. She even blamed them for not having had antibodies against smallpox and measles. Nevertheless, all the old people's stories were still in there, locked away in her brain or her heart or wherever such things were kept. And now, somehow, they had brought her this far, to a place where they had never been lost.
"Well," she said. "I'm here, now."
"So ya are."
Jennifer T. rolled down her window. A strong fresh breeze, with a bright, coppery tang like burning wire, blew into the car. The storm was nearly upon them. Just the smell of it seemed to fill her with the sudden certainty of all the marvelous things it was in her power, as Jennifer T. Rideout, to do.
"Hey! Thunderbird!" She thrust herself, head and shoulders, out the window of the car. "Shame on you! Doing Coyote's work for him, you big dumb turkey vulture! Don't you know what's coming? Don't you know the day is here? The day of—
ack
." She lost her purchase on the car door, lurched forward, and fell out of the window. The deep green forest far below her seemed all at once to leap up.
"Ensign Rideout!"
Thor's reflexes were android-sharp and he grabbed at her right ankle with his thick fingers. But the force of her fall yanked her loose of his grip, and she fell. Even in the Summerlands certain laws hold true, and she fell very fast, at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. The world of green in which she was going to die rushed toward her with breathtaking eagerness. Light drained from her head like the air running out of a balloon, and she began to lose consciousness. She was just barely aware of a sharp upward jerk of her body, a firm grip on her ankles. At first she thought that it was Thor again. As if in a dream, she saw him reaching down from the car, his robo-arms telescoping out of their sockets, section by titanium section, to snatch her out of the air. Then she opened her eyes, and looked up into the seething black breast of the thunderbird, caught in the grip of its lightning claws. There was a roar of wind all around her that deafened her almost to the sound of her own thoughts. It blew past her ears, growling, then broke and billowed into little whistles and eddies. Her hair hung down in her face, damp from the rain of the bird's black plumage, clinging to her cheeks, flapping in her eyes, and standing out in all directions as the charge of the bird's body flowed through her. Her ankles thrummed and tingled, and burned. But somehow, in the face of all that, she managed to finish the sentence that she had begun in the car.
"—RAGGED ROCK!" she told the thunderbird.
That was when something very strange happened. The arching wings of the storm bird seemed to grab hold of her voice, to catch it up, and roll it around between them, and then to send it forth into the world
enlarged
. It was as if a pair of invisible hands, as huge as those of Mooseknuckle John, had clapped themselves like the bell of a trumpet to her mouth. The two words were shaken out across the sky, in every direction, like a blanket, scattering every other sound before them. Then the spreading blanket of echoes and re-echoes seemed to settle, billowing, down over the world below, in the form of an immense silence. The wind died. The rivers and streams ceased murmuring and ringing on the rocks. The birds of the Summerlands left off singing their endless songs. From the Big Fella Country to Turtle Ocean to the snowcaps of the Raucous Mountains there was only the echoing last traces of her voice. In this way the news of the end of the world was brought to the Far Territories of Faerie.
And then, as if in reply, Jennifer T. heard, from a great distance, a sound that broke her heart. Someone was weeping—a woman, bitterly and freely, runny-nosed and moaning and half-laughing, the heavy grunting laughter of grief, the way you weep only when you are certain that you are absolutely alone, letting out the sadness in all its ugliness and animal strength. It was faint but unmistakable, and hot tears sprang to Jennifer T.'s eyes in response, and sorrow clutched her heart, and she forgot that the world was ending, and that she was hanging upside down with her hair falling into her face and pennies and dimes dropping from her jeans pockets one by one. For an instant longer the world was racked by the sobbing of a poor lost woman in the woods. Then the weeping faded and died. The birds resumed their songs, and the squirrels their chatter, and the beavers their toil, and the butterflies their drunken rustling flight, and the silence, and the weeping, and the echo of Ragged Rock's coming, were all drowned out by the old, stubborn life of the Summerlands.
The thunderbird circled in low over the forest, to a spot where the tree cover thinned as the land rose toward the foothills of the Raucous Mountains. Jennifer T. saw a wide clearing, a vast stretch of gray-brown land that looked—it was hard to tell, in her current position—as if it had been stripped, or paved over, or maybe burnt. In the center of this ruined meadow rose a high grassy hill, spangled with dandelions. The contrast was stark between the lovely hill and the patch of blighted earth from which it rose like a green island in a sea of ash. As the great raptor circled lower Jennifer T. saw that tennis courts had been drawn in white lines on the gray surface of the wasteland, as well the circles, grids and parallelograms of other games, some of which she thought she recognized—marbles? foursquare?—and others that were strange to her. Ferishers were scattered across the waste, interrupted in their pastimes, clutching rackets and mallets and leather balls and gazing up at the sky, and at her, the girl who was hanging down from it. One of them, taller and larger than the others, raised a hand in a bewildered warning or salute. And that was when the thunderbird dropped her.
She landed at the back of the hill, away from the ball field, and tumbled down all the way to bottom. She sat up, rubbing at her legs where they bore the throbbing purplish-red mark of the thunderbird's electric grip. The ground beneath her backside was at once hard, springy, and cold to the touch, a strange kind of clay or dried mud, and with an acrid smell of charcoal. It was like the skin of some kind of loathsome animal and she tried to roll off it, back up onto the grass and flowers of the hillside. Ferishers came running toward her, jabbering excitedly in the local dialect of Fatidic, helping her to her feet, brushing the dirt and grass from her jeans. She just had time to thank them, in English, for the kindness of their welcome when ropes were fetched, and the ferishers began to tie her arms to her sides, comfortably enough, but with very strong knots.
"Wait!" she said.
Now a group of ferisher women appeared at the top of the hill. They unslung longbows from their back and nocked arrows with black barbs and bright red feathers to their bowstrings. They took aim at the sky. For an instant Jennifer T. thought that they were shooting at the thunderbird, but she could see the great creature soaring off away toward the mountains, already a tiny unhittable speck and growing smaller all the time. No, the ferisher archers were aiming for something much nearer to hand, and much easier to hit.
"No!" she said, but it was too late. With a kind of whispering sizzle the arrows took to the sky. Jennifer T. knocked her captors to one side and whirled around to watch as the arrows arced toward Skidbladnir. Three of them glanced harmlessly off the tough picofiber hide of the gas bag, and then a fourth, and a fifth, and Jennifer T. began to leap up and down. 'Yes! Way to go Mr.
Feld
! Picofibers
rock
!" The sixth arrow was plucked from the air by the swift black hands of Taffy the Sasquatch, who snapped it in two and tossed the halves back down to the ground. "Nice catch!" Jennifer T. said. "Ha, ha, ha, you stupid little—oh."
The seventh arrow entered the front window of the Saab station wagon, on the passenger side. There was a cry that sounded unmistakably like the voice of Cinquefoil, and then Skid lurched, and shuddered, as the grammer ran out of the envelope of magic the ferisher had woven around the envelope of picofibers, and the station wagon dropped, slowly and then swiftly, to the ground.
