Wooden Bones (11 page)

“It's all right.”

“I promise!” Pino insisted. “I just looked and there it was.”

“Really, boy. It's all right.”

“Please don't get rid of me, Papa!”

Geppetto, who'd been reaching to comfort Pino, froze. He gaped in astonishment, then slowly lifted his hand over his heart as if he'd been shot.

“Pino,” he said, “my dear boy, I would
never
do such a thing. Get rid of you? Why would you say that?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you think so little of me?”

“No.”

“Then why do you say it?
Why?
”

Pino pulled his hand away, gazing down at his wooden finger with shame. His vision blurred with his tears, and he felt them fall hot on his cheeks. “I just thought,” he began hesitatingly, “I just thought if I was turning back into wood—I thought you wouldn't want me anymore.”

When he looked at Geppetto, he found that now it was his papa who had tears in his eyes. It was not the first time he remembered his papa crying, but it was the first time his papa made no effort to wipe them away and dismiss them as a bit of wood shavings in his eyes. His chin trembling, Geppetto stared for a long time, the two of them surrounded by all those giant trees, then he grabbed Pino and hugged him fiercely.

“Oh, my dear child,” he said. “My child, my son, you are all that I have. I love you more than life itself. There is nothing that could change that. Nothing.”

*  *  *

They talked about Pino's wooden finger a bit more, and since neither of them could quite pin down
why
it was happening, they decided it would probably be best if Pino didn't use his special gift unless it was absolutely necessary for their survival. Since his finger had been fine for months, Geppetto reasoned the problem must have had something to do with Pino's newfound talent. What else could it be?

The forest darkened considerably, the air growing heavy and moist. They debated whether to seek out the woodsfolk again but in the end decided they were probably better off striking out on their own. They expected a good deal of anger would be directed at Pino for enabling Elendrew to destroy their city in the trees, so there was no sense chancing
a confrontation. Geppetto was quite insistent about it.

“But I helped her,” Pino said. “I helped her walk. I just don't understand why she wasn't happy.”

Geppetto shook his head sadly. “Some people can never be happy, Pino. They're always going to see what they don't have rather than what they do. You could have given her the gift of flight, and she would have complained about the size of her wings. And she went bad long ago, I think. Anger will do that to you. When your heart is full of rage all the time, eventually there's no room for anything else.”

Pino considered this a moment. “The woodsfolk . . . do you think what they did was wrong?”

“Right, wrong, who's to say? I think they thought what they did was right. Sometimes right and wrong depends on who's saying it.”

“But they loved her,” Pino insisted. “They really did love her.”

“Yes, I think so. But no matter how much they loved Elendrew, it wouldn't have changed anything for her. The problem was she didn't love herself.” He sighed. “Anyway, I think we'd better push on. We're on the other side of the bad woods now. Maybe we can just survive on our own. We'll head west—toward the mountains.”

It made Pino sad, thinking he'd never see Aki again, but he supposed he deserved it. Once again he'd tried to use his gift to help someone, and it had only turned out badly. He didn't need his papa to tell him not to use his gift. He'd decided all on his own that he'd never bring anything made of wood to life for as long as he lived—only bad things came of it.

Besides, real human boys couldn't do it, so why should he? If he wanted to be just like other boys, then he at least needed to act like them.

Within minutes Pino felt raindrops on his cheeks, and not long after that the trickle turned into a torrential downpour. They hid in the hollow of an old stump. By the time the storm had passed, it was dusk, so they bedded down there for the night. They were hungry and wet, and though the mossy ground inside the stump was soft, it also smelled bad.

If this was how it was going to be, Pino didn't think much of his papa's plan to strike out on their own.

The next morning was better. The sun pierced the trees, their path dappled with golden shadows. Birds sang merrily. They soon came to a trickling brook, where Geppetto used a makeshift net from a leafy branch to ensnare some shimmering, pink-scaled fish. The fish were tiny, not much bigger than Pino's pinkie finger, but they were also plentiful. After cooking them over a roaring fire—Geppetto showed him how to start one using dry twigs and some stones—they didn't taste bad either. If nothing else, their stomachs were full.

For the next few weeks the two of them traveled through the forest, Geppetto slowly gaining his strength, Pino learning how to fish and hunt. With some sharpened sticks they were able to kill some rabbits and even once a deer, and they spiced up these meals with roots and berries that Geppetto taught him were fine to eat. It was a wonderful time for Pino, just being with his papa.

Besides how to survive in the forest, Geppetto had many other lessons for Pino. He taught him how to add and subtract. He taught him about the planets and the stars. He taught Pino anything Pino wanted to learn, and since Pino had many questions, it seemed they were always talking. His wooden finger was getting slowly worse, spreading up to his knuckle, but it was happening so gradually that Geppetto didn't seem to
notice, or if he did, he didn't mention it. What could they do but hope it went away?

All the while they drew closer to the mountains—not because they wished to live there, but because it was as good a place to head as any, and Geppetto explained it was better for a man to be heading
somewhere
rather than
nowhere
, simply because a man who was heading somewhere had a little spring in his step.

And when Geppetto was fully recovered, he certainly didn't seem to lack for a spring in his step. He laughed often and heartily. He sang old songs his own papa had taught him, teaching Pino to sing along. Sometimes instead of singing, he whistled, and when Pino tried to join him, he found all he could do was make the sound of whispering air.

“Could you teach me that, Papa?” he asked.

Geppetto looked at him with a glimmer of delight in his eyes. “What's that, boy? Ah, you mean whistling?”

Pino nodded. They were in the foothills of the mountains now, following a grassy bank of a stream up into the forest. Water trickled over rocks worn smooth. The light was fading, so they would have to make camp soon.

With winter approaching, the nights were already getting colder, so it was important to find a good camp each night, someplace where it was easy to keep a fire going. The trees in this place were still tall, but nowhere near the giants they'd passed through weeks earlier. Now Pino could actually see the sky, a sky that was laced with pinks and purples as the sunset slipped away.

“Yes, it is good to whistle,” Geppetto said, stepping over a clump of grass. “Whistling is useful for many things. For song, yes, but also to call out to others.”

“Like if I need help?” Pino said.

“Yes, that would be one reason. You could whistle if you needed my help. Here, let me show you. Form your mouth into an O, like this.”

Try as he might, though, Pino just couldn't get it. Perhaps he might have gotten it if he'd gone on trying the rest of that night, but they'd walked only a few minutes when Geppetto stopped, grabbing Pino by the arm. He looked alarmed.

“What is—,” Pino began.

Geppetto hushed him by raising a finger sharply to his lips. They stood motionless, a hint of breeze rustling the trees, then Pino heard what Geppetto heard: someone singing. It was a woman approaching the stream from the other side.

Panicked, Geppetto tugged him into the trees, where they hid behind the trunk of the thickest tree close to the bank.

A few seconds later a woman emerged from the shadows on the other side of the stream, approaching from up the hill. Their angle was such that they could see her only in profile, her left side, but Pino still got a good enough look—of curly red hair and freckled skin—that he recognized her immediately.

It was the woman he'd seen in the cave, swirling in the blue light.

He'd gotten only a glimpse of her before, but now that he saw her in person, he could see that she was exquisitely beautiful. Her long, curly hair, flowing all the way down her back, was as bright red as ripe cherries. She had high cheekbones and a pointed chin, and the freckles on her cheeks, which might have been a flaw on someone else, were perfect on her—like chocolate sprinkles on white frosting.

She carried a copper flask. Her green dress was simple, a
single piece of fabric that covered her legs all the way down to the ankles. The only odd thing about her was the strange way she tilted her head as she leaned over the bank to fill her flask.

Pino turned to tell his papa that he'd seen the woman before, but the words died in his throat when he saw the look on Geppetto's face. The way Geppetto was staring at her, with such awe and amazement, had Pino wondering if maybe Geppetto had seen her before too.

Closer, Pino could make out the words of her song. She was singing about a man she'd loved who'd been lost in a storm while sailing on the sea. Pino had heard his papa sing the same song. He'd even learned to sing it himself. Part of the song was from the woman's point of view, staring out at the waves, and the other was from the man's as he clung to the remains of his ship.

When the redheaded woman reached the part in the song where it was the man singing about the woman he'd never see again, Pino was startled when Geppetto suddenly sang along with her.

They managed only a few words together, then the woman scrambled backward, dropping the flask in the creek. It clattered against a stone and lodged itself next to a log, water rushing over it.

Geppetto stepped from behind the trunk. “Please don't be frightened, signora. You have the voice of an angel, and I mean you no . . . I mean you no . . .”

Harm
. Geppetto may have whispered the final word, or Pino may simply have imagined he did, but either way the word vanished as he and Geppetto gaped at the woman on the other side of the creek. Now Pino knew why she had tilted her head
just so, in that awkward way, as she filled her flask. She hadn't wanted to see her own reflection, at least not the right side.

For though half her face was perfect, the other half was terribly scarred—so many ridges and grooves and so much discoloration that the right side of her face didn't look like a face at all.

It looked like a mask.

G
eppetto and the scarred woman stared at each other across the narrow gulf of the stream.

A sudden breeze, cooler than even moments before, raised goose bumps on the backs of Pino's arms. In the fading light shadows danced on the rippling water like black scarves. Pino could not tell if the scarring on the woman's face was from a fire or from a knife, but whatever had done it, the skin there now looked more like scales than flesh, hard and angular rather than soft and rounded.

“Who—who are you?” the woman asked.

Geppetto swallowed. “I'm sorry to have frightened you.”

“What do you want?”

“Nothing, signora,” Geppetto said. “We mean you no harm. We are merely poor travelers, my son and I. My name is . . . Teppo. And my son—come out, boy, it's all right—his name is Francisco.”

Not understanding why his papa had lied, Pino stepped next to Geppetto. He was careful to keep his right hand behind him at all times so she wouldn't see his wooden finger.

It must have occurred to the woman that the scarred half of her face was visible to them, because she turned her head. Thinking back to the cave, Pino realized he'd seen
her only from the left side, but he also remembered how pure her smile had been when she'd looked at Geppetto.

While she spoke, she leaned over the stream and fished out her flask. “If you're looking for a place to stay for the night,” she said, “the town of Deltora is just north of here. You can cross just up ahead. If you walk east a little ways, you'll come to a road—there's an inn there you can stay in for the night. They'd—they'd be glad to have you. If you can pay.” She added the last part with a bit of a warning.

“Is that where you live?” Geppetto asked.

Pino realized that if the woman had been smiling at Geppetto in that vision in the cave, then he must have been smiling back. He could hear that smile in his voice now. If the woman's scars bothered him, he certainly wasn't showing it.

She looked at him with suspicion. “No,” she said. “I live in Deltora, but not at the inn.”

“Ah,” Geppetto said.

They stared at each other in silence, then the woman broke away her gaze awkwardly, quickly filling her flask. As she stood, the water sloshed onto the bank.

“I really must be going,” she said.

“Please,” Geppetto said, though Pino wasn't sure what he was saying “please” for.

“Good luck,” she said.

She darted into the forest, no longer moving with the stately grace she'd displayed before, but with the kind of slinking defeat of a wounded animal. Pino realized he couldn't let her go. He liked how his papa sounded when he spoke to her. He wanted to hear that sound in his voice again.

“Could we stay with you?” Pino called after her. “We don't have any money. We're very poor.”

“Son!” Geppetto admonished. “Your manners need much—”

“We won't be any trouble!” Pino added.