“If it were anybody else, I’d say, can you blame him?” Seshe commented, looking comical for a moment, then she dipped her hands, folded them to make a cup, and drank.
Clair shook her head. “I do not blame him at all for wanting to be away from Glotulae. But not here.”
“So if he does come, you get ’em again,” I said. “Make it so awful he never wants to come back. But that means being on the watch.” My tongue moved dryly in my mouth. “Um, is the water okay?”
Clair looked surprised, and then reflective. “Ah. Yes. It is good, here.”
I needed no more invitation. And she was right, it was good, tasting not like chlorine, like the tap water at home, but pure and sweet and clean. I slurped up so much my stomach sloshed when I stood.
And, to my surprise, I saw the girls all looking at me.
“Your patrol idea is good. That would mean patrolling around here regularly.” Seshe smiled. “I’d like that.”
“Not me,” Irene stated. “Oh, I like being here when the weather’s nice, but I like being indoors, too.”
“So we build a little house,” Sherry suggested.
“And they’ll find it first thing,” I said, sorting through all my favorite stories. “No ...” Then I stopped, remembering I was the guest, and was I sounding too bossy?
“Go on,” Clair invited.
“See, what I’d do — if I could — is make a kind of underground hideout that they wouldn’t know about. Somewhere close enough to where they’d be coming from, see. Secret entrances and exits. Of course it’s a horrid amount of work ...” I stopped, thinking of shovels and wet and mud and insects and fresh air and cave-ins.
Clair frowned. Not angrily, more like she was thinking. “And if that could be arranged?”
“Why, then you have a kind of headquarters, and you can even keep supplies in it. So if they come back, there are your seeds. Or rotten tomatoes might even be better.”
“An underground hideout!” Irene whirled around so her petticoats showed. “Oh! I love it!”
“Me too,” Sherry admitted.
Seshe nodded. “I do like that idea, and also patrolling. Oh, I don’t want them coming here and cutting this wood down, as they did to part of the North Wood.”
“I was ready to explode,” I snarled. “That disgusting Prune Juice and his ‘I require at least twenty rooms for my personal needs’.” I parodied his princely drawl — or what he obviously thought a princely drawl. “Does he always talk like that? Like he has the world’s worst case of — ”
I remembered myself then, and felt my face burn.
“Ah. Sorry,” I heh-hehed.
“Prune Juice?” Sherry asked, looking perplexed.
They all looked at me in question. I gulped. “Prince Jonnicake — PJ — Prune Juice.”
Irene let off a peal of laughter. “Prune Juice! Prune Juice! That’s it, that is his new name! Now you must think of one even better for his horrid mother!”
And Clair grinned. “Prune Juice. PJ. It is a better pair of nicknames for him than he uses for me.”
FOUR — The Underground Hideout
“He knows Clair?” I asked Seshe as we walked toward the Magic Lake.
Seshe gave me a quick glance of muted surprise. “Yes,” she said, rather tentatively. As if she could say more, but hesitated.
I clamped my jaw against being nosy. Anyway, I had another problem, a much worse one. Good as that water had been, I soon wished I hadn’t drunk any.
“Is something wrong?” she asked then, glancing at me in obvious worry.
I realized I was walking weird, my legs stiff. My face went hot again. Irene and Clair were a ways ahead talking, with Sherry listening. Didn’t these girls ever have to go? I whispered, “Is there a bathroom anywhere?”
Seshe blinked in blank surprise. “You wish to bathe?”
“No. You-know.”
“I-know what?”
Hotter face. My guts writhed with embarrassment. Was I about to get myself into trouble here, too? “Restroom.”
“Oh! You need a rest? Clair said it is night, in your world.”
I sighed. “I have to go.” I waved a hand vaguely toward my privates.
Seshe gaped, and then said in a low murmur, “The Waste Spell does function here, I assure you.”
“The what?”
“Waste Spell,” she repeated, and then her eyes went big in amazement, and then crinkled in horror. “You mean — you do not know it? What do you — no.” She shook her head violently. “Forgive me.”
“What’s wrong?” Clair turned around.
I groaned. “I can’t help it — ”
Seshe darted ahead, and whispered in her ear.
Clair did not get angry. Her mouth rounded, and then she said, “Well, we’re all girls, and the need is the need. Here’s the Spell. You repeat it first, learn it, and then say it and, and, well, let go at the same time.”
And she taught me the Waste Spell. I didn’t want to try it in front of them, so I went behind a tree, in case it didn’t work, and they understood at once, and stayed where they were. When it did work — and weird that was! — I ran back. “Hey, that’s great! So you don’t have bathrooms here?”
“Well, rooms with baths, yes, though many places have cleaning frames instead,” Clair said. “It depends on water, and other things. But I think I know your question. I do not yet know if humans brought magic knowledge here, or discovered it when they found magic here, but what would you do if you had magic?”
“Make life better,” Irene stated.
Clair nodded. “And so our ancestors did. The Waste Spell is taught to our young as soon as they can learn it.”
Potty-training, I translated to myself. But with no potties.
“Where does it go?” I asked, and then clapped my hand over my mouth.
If they noticed, no one commented.
“Into the ground,” Clair said. “As does the dirt when you step through a cleaning frame, or pass your clothes through one. Separates into component parts.”
“Do animals know the Waste Spell?” I asked.
“No,” Clair said. The other girls were silent, their eyes downward. “But most places have the Wanders’ Guild. A besorcelled wand passes over the waste, using a variation of the Waste Spell, and so the streets stay clean. The Wanders walk streets of cities all day.”
“So you don’t get pollution problems, then?” I asked.
The word pollution came out as poison.
“Not from those,” Clair said. “Life is not perfect here — ”
“Or the Chwahir wouldn’t be around,” Irene put in. “Or Glotulae trying to oust — ” She stopped, and waved her hands around. “The Mearsieans from their land.”
What was she going to say?
Irene whirled around, crossed her arms, then stated, “I know it is impolite, but I must know. Is your world covered with — ” She gestured.
Cusswords, I was to discover, were very different from Earth — except for this one. In a world where no one had to poop or pee externally, you might say, to do it deliberately — or even refer to it — was ten times worse than the sex cussing at home, which, by the way, they didn’t have here. Spitting was also considered superdooper bad, I was to find out. In some countries, even making the motion of spitting could get you into real trouble.
Right then I was fighting not to laugh. “No,” I said. I noticed Sherry was crimson, shaking silently. “We have plumbing. In the past, though, it was.” I remembered what I’d read about people throwing the contents of chamber pots out windows into the streets — and all the diseases that came of it, though no one knew that at the time.
“Plumbing? So whatever that is puts it in the ground?” Sherry asked.
“Well, no, I think it goes to the ocean, where I live, and inland, into the rivers.”
The girls exchanged looks of horror, but no one said anything more. We emerged atop another clearing then, looking east. This one was not as close to t
he Lake as the one on my first visit. I looked up at the mountain with its eternal cloud — and then I realized what that cloud had to be. My perspective kind of jolted. Was that the cloud on which sat that white palace?
I stopped, tipped back my head — yes! I saw the gleam of something white, one of the tallest towers, just beyond the edge of the lower cloud. And beyond that the sky was white with puffs of little clouds.
“Rain coming,” Sherry said.
“Rain!” I said, and then hesitated.
“You don’t like it?” Seshe asked, as Clair gave me a funny look.
“Opposite,” I said. “We almost never get rain where I live, and I love it.”
Clair smiled. “Well, then, we shall have to see if you can have some here, then.”
And I knew from that she’d been waiting only for the nicest days before bringing me.
But I still hadn’t figured out what it meant.
o0o
The school year had changed again before the next visit. The weather got hotter, as it always does at the end of the year, and came January and it cooled off at last, alternating days of heat with brief rain. I started sleeping with clothes under my nightgown. Every single day was a long, hot dreariness to be gotten through, for I no longer even tried to fit in, or find happiness there. I moved through the countless hours, doing what I had to do, my whole being concentrated on nighttime and whether or not this time Clair would come.
And come she did. I heard the tapping at the windowpane, jumped out of bed, threw off my flannel nightie, and stepped out, wearing a t-shirt and pedal-pushers.
This time, once I’d recovered from the transfer ickies, I discovered that we were alone in a woodland clearing. Clair said, with a big grin — rare for her — ”We have a surprise for you.”
She looked around very carefully, and I did as well. Then she led the way to a lightning-blasted tree and climbed the lower branches. It turned out to be hollow inside, after she cleared off this big mat of leaves and moss and stuff — and there was a ladder going down!
“Oh!” Pleasure seared from my eyes to my toes. Golden light way down indicated that this wasn’t just a hollow tree, but a secret entrance to a room. Not just a room, but an underground hideout.
I scrambled down, impatient to see everything. Clair followed me into a short tunnel that curved downward. It opened into a room round as an egg, with some roots in the otherwise smooth ceiling. Round lights sat on pedestals, shining on a colorful woven rug spread over the smooth, hard-packed ground. Pillows made a circle on the rug. Another tunnel led downward to what was obviously another room. And in the other direction, the same. Against one wall was a fireplace.
All the girls were there — including a new one, this girl about Irene’s height, sturdy build, her skin a dusky brown, her hair dark and thick and worn in shining long braids. Her eyes reminded me of dog’s eyes — brown and pretty and watchful.
“This is Diana,” Clair said. Her name was pronounced Dih-YAN-ah. That ‘yuh’ in the middle, I was to find out, was common to Sartoran-influenced words.
Diana was dressed in an old, patched green tunic and worn brown knee pants. Her legs and feet were bare.
“She’s great at woodcraft, it turns out,” Seshe said, coming forward. “And so she’s taken over organizing our patrols.”
“We took your idea,” Irene added. “Making it so awful here for PJ whenever he tries to stick his wiggly nose south of their city — unlawful, I might add — that he seems to have given up his plans for his ‘thousand room retreat’.”
“At least until he can get his own guard to send against us.” Clair rubbed a hand up her other arm. “He sent a message to his uncle up in north Elchnudaeb since his mother won’t give him his own.”
“We overheard him bragging about it.” Irene posed with her wrist to her forehead.
“Want to see our place?” Sherry asked, springing forward. “Isn’t it wonderful? It took Clair ever so long, for it was lots and lots and lots of magic, but oh, isn’t it grand?”
“It sure is,” I said longingly.
Sherry showed me the kitchen alcove. There was a barrel of water with a spell over it that cleaned dishes, and down below was another egg-shaped room, also lit by magic glow-globes, with hammocks strung up to big strong roots in the ceiling.
“This is so cozy,” I said, looking around. Envy crunched my heart into a tiny ball, but I fought hard against it. “I’m so glad you have this place,” I added with determined cheer.
“Clair says maybe we can have more rooms someday, if we like,” Sherry added. “But she was so tired, doing all this. You’ve no idea how many spells it took to make it all safe for us and for the plants above, and to have air, and keep it dry, and everything. Spells and days, and us camping in the rain twice, because — ”
A quick look went between them all, and she fell silent.
Seshe poked her head down through the hole above, her long hair swinging. “Want to go on patrol?”
“Sure!”
I hoped we’d encounter PJ again, but we didn’t. I was careful not to express any disappointment, but to keep my face as calm as Clair’s, and not ask questions about that because, to thank everybody for everything they showed me, and for my visit.
o0o
Each of the next two times I came, there was a new girl added to the group. None of the others had left. They all lived there together, I realized — though I had no idea how much time was passing in Mearsies Heili. I’d had another birthday, and I was taller, but none of them seemed changed at all. My aging made me the more anxious as time steadily wore and bore onward. Time, the worst enemy. Just when was I going to be too old for Clair — and would I find out before it was too late?
Faline was the first of the new ones. She was short and stocky, with bristly red hair that sprang into tight curls unless forced into braids so stiff they stuck out like sticks. Her face and arms and legs were covered with freckles, her eyes blue-green and always crinkled with merriment.
It was clear that sometime between my last visit and this that she and Sherry had become best friends. Did Clair mind? She didn’t seem to. She just smiled at Faline’s constant jokes. Constant and really, really dumb.
On the next visit the addition was a strange, moody girl with thin, flyaway brownish blond hair worn short at her shoulders, changeable eyes. She moved with grace. Not fussy or show-offy, but fluid, like everything she did was a dance.
We all went on patrol together, and from time to time she did dance, with utter unselfconsciousness. She didn’t care if anyone watched or not. Her face lifted, her eyes half closed, as if she heard music that others could not hear, and there she went, whirling away, light as autumn leaves on the wind. She vanished out of sight.
“She’s not human, you know,” Sherry said cheerily to me. “Well, half.”
I caught a quick look from Faline, a stricken, guilty look, but then she looked away again just as quickly.
“We were all at the Lake, splashing our feet in the water, and the bubbles give this heave and roil, and out she comes, just like that!”
I squinted at Sherry. “You’re making that up.”
“Nuh uh.” She shook her head so hard her curls bounced.
“It’s true,” Seshe said. “We were all there. She said, I choose to have human form for a time, and to be with you, if it is permitted.”
“Real careful, like,” Sherry put in. “Like she’d never talked before.”
“Well, she hadn’t,” Seshe said, smiling. “Not like humans talk, anyway. And of course Clair said she was welcome, and did she have a name?”
“She didn’t know what that was,” Sherry added, her blue eyes round with amazement. “Imagine!”
“But we told her our names, and after Diana told her her name, and so she said, Oh, I am Dhah-neh —
It was a breathy sort of sound, the initial D no more than a touch of the tongue to the front teeth, and a lot of ‘h’.
“ — which we think
is how she was translating the name of her people. The ones in the Lake. And Diana’s sounded most familiar. Anyway we turned that into Dhana, which is kind of pretty, don’t you think?” Seshe put her head to one side.
“Very,” I said truthfully. “But will she get mixed up with Diana? They do sound kind of alike.”
“Well, it hasn’t been a problem so far — ”
Sherry shook with silent laughter. “Except when she forgets that she has a name.”
“That’s very seldom anymore,” Clair said, coming up on Seshe’s other side.
“Is anybody else a magic person?” I asked, watching Faline from the side of my eyes.
Yep, her shoulders hunched up. But she didn’t turn.
“No,” Seshe said. “At least, not that I know.” Her smile was sad. “I can’t speak for the others, but my own circumstances were both ordinary and dreary. Until Clair found me on the road and invited me here for a visit. And then to stay.” She sent a grateful look at Clair, who was studying the ground, and didn’t see it.
Not that that mattered to Seshe. She wasn’t trying to toady — none of the girls did, though Clair was the one with the magic.
Irene’s dramatic voice brought attention her way. “Do not ask about me,” she said, shaking her fist toward the south. “Unless you wish to hear a terrifying tale.”
Diana, just beyond her, sidled a frowny look, but she didn’t speak. Dhana reappeared then, joining us matter-of-factly, as if she’d never been gone.
“My story was yukky too,” Sherry said wistfully. “Not my home. I come from Mearsies Heili, but Kwenz — ” She shook her head. “Never mind. I was left without a family, and Clair found me, and I’m happy to be here.”
After a silence, Clair said, “We agreed that no one has to talk about her past if she doesn’t want to. Listen, how about if we find a name for the hideout?”
“I like calling it ‘the hideout,’” Irene announced. “Besides, it sounds kind of fussy for it to have some grand name.” She waved her hands in circles around her head on the words fussy and grand.