Taffy snuffled, and wiped her snub nose on the back of a shaggy forearm. Slowly she hoisted her huge bulk into a more upright position, and let out a long shuddering breath. She nodded.
"I heard it," her voice thick with grief. "But I thought it was only the sound of my guilty conscience. Because of what I did, a long time ago. To my children."
"What did you do?"
That question started poor Taffy crying all over again. "I left them," she said.
WHAT FOLLOWS, IS, AS FAR AS I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO RECONSTRUCT it, the sad story told by Taffy the Sasquatch. It will turn out later to have some importance for our story, or else I would never interrupt things in this way to relate it. Not with Cinquefoil shriveling into a seedpod on his pallet in the corner, and Ethan and Thor in the clutches of the guardian of the ferisher treasure, and Mr. Feld and Cutbelly somewhere off in the Winterlands, prisoners and slaves of that smiling, rust-red rogue who means to bring the universe to an end. Fortunately Taffy's story has the virtue, shared by most really sad stories, of being fairly short.
Sasquatches have acquired a reputation, in the Middling, for being solitary creatures. But as a rule it is only the males who spend their lives wandering alone. They range widely in the vast forests of the Far Territories, and from time to time one of them will stumble onto a gall where the Branches of two Worlds are pleached together. These are the unlucky specimens who wind up crashing into the camp of some terrorized party of trappers or fishermen up in Alberta, or, once, directly into the path of a man named Roger Patterson and his 16mm movie camera. The male Sasquatch is a shy and unsociable creature, who prefers his own company to any other, and when he gets around those of his kind it is usually only long enough to exchange some news of the woods and to get some female or other pregnant. Then he is on his way again.
With the females, however, it is an entirely different story. They spend their whole lives, generally, in the woods where they were born, among their mothers and grandmothers, sisters and aunts, helping to look after the squatchlings, gathering food—they are strict vegetarians—and listening to the endless stories of the very old ladies. These stories, few of which are notably sad, tend therefore to be very long indeed, often two weeks, or more, in the telling. Since the old ladies, like their grandmothers and great-grandmothers before them, have never ventured beyond the local neighborhood of hills and trees, their stories are not especially rich with the wonders and marvels of the world. Instead, they tend to be what might be called wisdom tales, cautionary stories, which for all their length and elaborate language boil down, in the end, to pretty simple ideas like Short-Cuts Usually Turn Out to Be Very Long Indeed or Never Throw Anything Away, Because You Never Know.
But then, every once in a very great while, when there are two full moons in a single month, or when one of the less antisocial males has come to pay a visit, a great-grandmother Sasquatch will break out a story from the Beginning of the World. In the Beginning of the World, before Coyote changed everything, when the Sasquatches were still fresh from the making hand of Old Mr. Wood, things were not as they are now. All the Sasquatches wandered, unprotected and lost, a gang of stragglers, through the deep, deep shadows of the First Forest. They had adventures, all right—and terrible misadventures. Because they had no families, no clear lines of motherhood, no organization, no wisdom tales, they could not defend themselves very well against the various nonvegetarian creatures with whom they shared the earliest world. They were stalked and caught and, because Coyote had brought hunger and death into the world, devoured. It was not long before only two Sasquatches remained, a male and a female. They called out to Coyote to help them. As usual, his help took the form of a choice: wander the woods in an unruly way, heedless of each other's safety, but knowing the marvels and wonders of the world; or settle down, make order, find wisdom—stay home. In the end, as you may have guessed, the male chose the first, the female the second, and they have stuck stubbornly by their choices ever since.
These ancient tales of adventuring females and devouring beasts unsettled their listeners, and ended up feeling pretty cautionary, too, in the end. But on the mind of Taffy the Sasquatch—that was not, of course, her real name; her real name was very long and deeply secret—they had a peculiar effect. They filled her with longing. And when the visiting male, having eaten his fill, and told a tale or two of his own, and fathered another squatchling, had gone off again to resume his wanderings, Taffy would feel as if a small part of herself, of her contentment, had gone off with him. It was not many years, as Sasquatches reckon such things, before all the remaining bits of her happiness had been carried away.
By this time she was a mother, herself, twice over, and the aunt of seven squatchlings more. Her oldest nephew, whom she loved dearly, had reached the age when his homewood had begun to feel more like a prison than a shelter. He began, tentatively at first, then for longer and longer periods, to go beyond the streams and fields that were the recognized bounds of their territory. When he returned, his face would be alight with the memory of the things he had seen. One day he was gone for a very long time, and when he returned he told a story of a marvelous bridge of stone that stretched, in a single continuous arch, across a great river gorge, across which there passed a steady traffic of creatures—ferishers and werebears, talking squirrels and blue jays and minks, and strange adventurers, like hairless Sasquatches, from the land known as the Middling. This bridge, he said, was no more than a good day's walk to the west.
Now, Taffy had heard many outlandish tales in her life—she had even heard, once or twice, about this marvelous bridge, which some said had been raised by Coyote, so that he could leap across the worlds more easily, and which others said was a remnant of the time when Old Mr. Wood and his spirit kin still walked the First Forest. But she had never realized that it was so near to home, and she had never heard it spoken of by one who was, himself, so near to her.
"I would like to see that bridge," she blurted out, and then covered her mouth, because it was not a very polite remark for a female Sasquatch to make. And her young nephew, because he was young, and loved her, said, "Go, Auntie! Leave now! Yes! Oh, you must! You can be there by midnight and back again by dawn and none but we two will be the wiser."
"And who," she asked him, "will stay with the squatchlings while I am gone, and lay a cool cloth on their foreheads if they get feverish, and lie beside down them to stroke their forearm fur if they have bad dreams?"
"I will!" said the nephew, laughing. "Go! Go now!"
And so she had gone, taking nothing with her but the memory of his face alight with the wonders he had seen, and of the murmuring of her children sleeping by the fire.
"I NEVER DID SEE THAT MARVELOUS BRIDGE," SHE TOLD JENNIFER T. now, in the darkness of their cell at the bottom of the knoll. "Before I arrived, I was set upon, in the dead of night, by a raiding party of giants—those rotten John brothers. The Sasquatch-mania among the giants was at its peak. They were regularly prowling the woods for—" She shivered. "Pets. Later Mooseknuckle John told me he had heard that the bridge collapsed, or was destroyed. Long ago. So I never will see it. And I never will see my dear, sweet squatchlings again, either."
"Why not?" Jennifer T. said. "You're free. You're home, or close enough. Listen, oh, Taffy, once we get out of here, you don't need to stay with us. You can go off and find your way back to your homewood. You can find your kids. I'm sure they're dying to—"
But Taffy shook her great shaggy head.
"They're gone," she said. "Long gone. I wasn't sure at first. It took a while for my nose to readjust."
"Gone?" Jennifer T. was confused. "Your nose?"
"We Sasquatches have very sensitive noses. We can smell things that you can't possibly imagine, my dear. We can smell an idea forming in the brain of a fish. We can smell the first heartbeat of an infant in its mother's womb. And we can smell the passing of time itself. At first, as I say, I wasn't sure. But once that thunderbird storm blew through my nostrils, I
had the full smell of the Summerlands again after all those years in the cage in that stinking hall of stone. And I knew. There just isn't any way that any of my children, or even my grandchildren, could still be alive. I was stuck in that cage for much too long."
"But you said it was only a few hundred years," Jennifer T. said. "And if you could live that long…"
"Ah," Taffy sighed. "But the cage I was in—it was not made of true iron. It was weird-iron, mined in the Winterlands. And as long as I was kept within it…"
"Time moves different in the Winterlands, so they say." It was Spider-Rose. She rolled over now, and sat up, her face as she looked at Taffy creased with a faint wrinkle of sympathy. "It was a couple of hundred years for you, maybe, but all the while, out here in the wide world—"
"Nine hundred years have passed, here, since the day I left," Taffy said, hanging her head. "I can smell each and every one of them gone by."
Jennifer T. reached over to stroke the smooth dark cheek of the Sasquatch, and Taffy drew her against her side, and then they lay there, in the cell under the ferisher hill, listening to the hollow echo of all those vanished years.
CHAPTER 15
Grim
"CLIMB DOWN FROM THERE. Come on, now. Be quick."
Ethan and Thor turned, awkwardly, sending fresh avalanches of address books to the treasury floor. At first, when he saw their captor, Ethan wanted to laugh. It was a boy, roughly the age and height of Ethan himself, perhaps a little smaller. An extremely ugly boy, true, with a nose like an empty spool of thread, ears like two shriveled apples, and a pair of pink, staring, bloodshot eyes much too small for the rest of his face. He was brandishing Ethan's stick of ashwood, swinging it carelessly back and forth, like a policeman in the cartoons with a nightstick. There was something familiar about him, to Ethan, and at the same time something very wrong. His expression was far too hard even for the unluckiest child; it banished Ethan's laughter, and encouraged him and Thor to scramble down from atop the pile as quickly as they could.
"What's your problem, rube?" said the not-boy, with a sneer of irritation. He was looking at Thor Wignutt. Ethan turned to his friend and saw that Thor had gone white as a sheet.
"Are you…?" Thor began. He swallowed, with such difficulty that Ethan could hear the muscles of his throat. "Did they—take you?"
"What's that? Did who take me?"
"The ferishers. From the Middling. Are you—a changeling?"
For a moment, Ethan was puzzled by the question, but then he understood. The not-boy gave off such a powerful air of wrongness. Maybe that was what seemed so familiar about him. It had reminded Thor of Thor.
Now, however, it was the not-boy's turn to laugh. He threw back his knobby head with its thatching of stiff yellow hair, and emitted a series of harsh guffaws, like a trash can banging down a flight of concrete steps.
"Me? You think I'm human? Feh!" He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of the loose buckskin tunic he wore. "A changeling?" He had to kneel for a moment, he was laughing so hard. "By the Starboard Arm, how did a pair of idiot reubens like you manage to come so far?"
"Well," said Ethan, in his mildest Invisible Boy tones. He was unpleasantly reminded, for some reason, of Kyle Olafssen. And it was just as well, because he was used, by now, to dealing with the Kyle Olafssens of the world. "What are you then?"
"What am I? What am I?" cried the not-boy, springing to his feet with startling speed. He rushed Ethan, crowding him up against a teetering heap of stolen mailboxes, most of them still on their posts, some still with dirt and tufts of grass clinging to them where they had been yanked from the ground. He raised the ashwood stick with both hands and rammed it up against Ethan's throat, choking him. The mailboxes clanged and rattled. "I'm a giant. I should think that would be obvious."
It was hard to tell—especially when the oxygen supply to your brain was being cut off—whether the not-boy could possibly be serious. When he had said he was a giant, he had sounded as if he meant it. But when he said that it ought to be obvious, his voice had taken on a edge of bitterness or sarcasm. And, after all, he could not possibly have been taller than four feet nine.
Such questions had, for the moment, to be set aside. Thor Wignutt was never one to stand idly by when his captain was under attack.
First he grabbed hold of the not-boy's thick shock of yellow thatch. Then he got around the not-boy from behind, and jerked his head back by the hair with one hand. With the other hand he grabbed hold of the stick, twisting it sharply down and away from Ethan's throat. At the same time he poked his right knee into the back of the not-boy's right knee. The not-boy went down with a grunt of surprise, and Ethan fell back against the tangle of mailboxes, gasping. When next he looked, Thor and the not-boy were whiplashing each other around, rolling on the ground, always with the stick gripped between them. First the not-boy was on top, then Thor, and all the while they kicked and slapped and spat at one another. The not-boy tried to chew off Thor's left ear. It was the ugliest fight that Ethan had ever seen.
Thor won. He ended up on top of the not-boy, with the stick pressed heavily down against the not-boy's throat, and the not-boy going red, then blue, and finally a sickly yellowish-green in the face.
"Say 'uncle,'" Thor said.
"You mean 'nuncle,'" grunted the not-boy, through his teeth.
"'Nuncle?'"
"That's what we say here."
"Say 'nuncle,' then."
"Nuncle!"
Thor let him up, taking the stick with him, and the not-boy rose to his feet, making a disgusting array of gagging and choking sounds and hawking up great yellow oysters of spit which he deposited all around himself with evident pleasure. Finally he drew himself up to his full (and, as has been mentioned, not considerable) height and looked Thor carefully up and down.
"Not bad," he said. "For a jambled-up mishmash of a changeling."
"Not bad," said Thor, "for a shrunken-down little pinky-toe of a giant."
"What?" Ethan said. "He really is a giant?"
"Of course I am, scat-for-brains," said the not-boy, and, scowling, he bowed very low. "And a wicked mother cursed me with the sorry name of Grimalkin John. If you prize your life, though, you'll just leave it at Grim. Grim the Giant."
"But—but what happened to you?" Ethan said, recalling a poem he had once read about a little gray kitty cat whose name was Grimalkin.
"I was born this way," Grim the Giant said. "What happened to you?"
"Are you a boy giant? Or—?"
Grim the Giant sneered his toothy sneer, and looked ready to fight all over again.
"I'm a full-grown, tried-and-true man of a giant, boy! And don't you forget it!"
"Here," Thor said to Ethan, handing him back the stick. Thor was badly torn up. Bloody scratches on his cheeks as if he had been fighting with some kind of irascible animal like a wolverine or a stoat. Shirt collar ripped. A bead of blood on his lower lip. Actually he looked sort of angry with Ethan about the whole incident. "Don't ever let go of it again."
"I won't," Ethan said, feeling decidedly scolded. "Okay, so, come on. Let's go. Take the little giant."
Grim the Giant took a dangerous step toward Ethan, pushing back a sleeve. "'Take the little giant?' Where do you think you're going?"
At this point they faced the uncomfortable question of who was now the captive of whom. Ethan, who doubted if he would ever be able to win in a fight against the little giant, even with his bat in hand, decided to take a psychological approach. That was what he was best at. It usually worked on everyone, except for Jennifer T.
"Okay, just tell me this," he tried. "Just say that we are your prisoners. Just say."
"Right," said Grim.
"Which means, in other words, that you are working for them. Those stupid Dandelion Hill ferishers who can't stop talking long enough to realize that, okay, one of their very own species, and the Home Run King of three Worlds, is dying right now, in their dungeon, which is because he's got iron in his body from one of
their arrows, and two, that the entire universe may he about to come to an end.''
"They sure does like to hear themselves talk," Grim the Giant agreed, spitting again.
"So that's what I'm asking, then, is just why would you want to work for them? You're a giant. They're ferishers."
"Well," said the giant, "the fact of the matter is, since you ask, I wouldn't work for that mob by choice or for money. Alas for poor Grim that he doesn't have no choice in the matter."
"You're grammerbound," Thor said. "A slave."
The little giant pressed his thin lips together as if biting back an angry rejoinder. Then he just nodded, once, shortly.
"Ferishers use slaves?" Ethan said, dismayed.
The giant spat. "Some do. This mob does. One. That's me. Grimalkin John. Chief Mechanical, and Senior Equipment Manager for the Dandelion Hill mob. And"—he flushed—"Head Mouser. But that don't—"
He broke off, and stood still, listening, and then Ethan heard it too, a musical cry, a cracked note of song from the other side of the treasury door. When Ethan and Thor had passed through the door, the uproar of the ferishers' council died away. Now, in addition to the exuberant voice of a singing ferisher, there were other raised voices from out in the winding hall. The next moment there came a loud rapping; the sealing grammer had been taken off the door. Grim the Giant turned bright red, and looked wildly around the treasury.
"Damn them!" he said. "They'll have my hide if they see you've beaten me."
He looked quite upset, in a way that did not at all fit with his brash features and hard little twist of a smile. Ethan had no desire to be taken prisoner again, but at the same time he felt sorry for the scrappy little giant. He turned to Thor, whose knowledge of the ways of the Summerlands—Ethan supposed it was really a kind of deep memory, returning to his friend after years of amnesia in the Middling—seemed to be growing by the minute.