"Pettipaw," said Grim the Giant, shaking his head. "You'd sell your own mother for a hunk of liverwurst, wouldn't you, now, you one-eyed lesser half of a rodent?"
"And yours in the bargain, Shorty," said Pettipaw, with a grin, gazing lovingly down at the sandwiches. Then, with a rapid bow, he scurried off across the grass and disappeared into the trees.
"Cinquefoil," Ethan said. "We don't have a ship anymore."
"True enough," the ferisher said.
"So then how will we ever cross the Raucous Mountains and the Big River and all?"
Another murmuring started up among the ferishers, and the queen looked shocked.
"Ya don't mean ta say—ya aren't seriously bound for Applelawn?"
"Farther than that," Cinquefoil said. "We hope to cross Diamond Green itself, and come at the Winterlands through the backdoor. We mean to raise Outlandishton itself, on its high Tor."
"We think Coyote's trying to do something to that Well and kill that Tree thing," said Jennifer T. "My freaky old auntie had a dream."
"Only we don't know what," Thor said.
"Well, then I'm sorry we cut up yer skybag," the Queen said. "Applelawn." She shook her stately head. "Damn. I wanted ta see it my whole life long."
"Can ya tell us how ta find it, then, sister?"
But here the queen could only shake her head.
"There ain't been news from Applelawn in a age," she said.
"I can find it," Thor said. Everyone turned to look at him. He was standing in front of the car, with the map he had found in the Treasury spread out across the hood. "Applelawn. Uh-huh. Okay." He traced a route with the tip of his finger. "So. We just need to go through those mountains there. The Raucous Mountains. Right." Ethan looked off, beyond the trees, to the hazy purplish-gray mountains they had seen, far off, worn and ancient-looking, when they first crossed over from Clam Island. "Then, yeah, okay, then we come down the other side of the mountains, through the Lost Camps, and cross the Big River, here." He jabbed with a finger. "After that we're right there. Applelawn."
The Queen of Dandelion Hill exchanged a look with the Chief of the Boar Tooth mob.
"Crossing the Big River," the Queen said. "That could be tougher ta arrange than any leap o' the Worlds, if them stories I heard are true."
"What stories?" Ethan said.
"It says here, I think it says…'Old Bottom-Cat,' " Thor read, tracing the snaking course of the Big River. "Is that it?
"Who is Old Bottom-Cat?" Ethan said. "Is it a who or a what?"
"I heard too many outlandish tales ta repeat," Queen Filaree said. "He might be a sort of a giant; he may be a fish; he could be a snake or a dragon." As she mentioned each of these possibilities, a different bunch of ferishers nodded their heads. Several arguments broke out, amid cries of "Fish!" and "Snake!" She chopped at the air with the back of a pale hand; they fell silent at once. "At any rate I reckon you'll find out soon enough."
Ethan looked at Thor, who nodded. They really had no other choice. Then Ethan looked over at Jennifer T., standing staring off into the trees where Pettipaw had vanished.
"Food, and a grammer," she said finally. "That's all I've heard said about paying us back." She looked around now at the new green expanse of grass that surrounded them. "Doesn't seem like quite enough, somehow."
"Well, I'll grant ya that map," the queen said. "Which otherwise I would have ta consider staled from my treasury."
"And which you could never get to lie flat, much less make head nor tails of," Spider-Rose spoke up sharply. She had been hanging back, until now, clutching her doll, as if afraid, somehow, of stepping onto the ball field. As if the merest touch of her foot might blight it. But now Ethan saw her creep up behind Thor Wignutt, and clamber up onto his shoulder to get a better look at the Four-Sided Map.
"Applelawn," she said with a dreamy look on her face. "And to think that it's really just a little ways on the other side of those mountains."
"A long way," Thor corrected her. "Especially if we have to drive.''
"We definitely want the map," Ethan said.
Jennifer T. nodded.
"And, okay," Ethan went on, seeing how much he could get just by asking. It was the Jennifer T. style of doing things, and new to him. "We want you to release Grim here from the binding you put on his hide."
This produced a silence that was deep and long-lasting, filled almost to the brim with birdsong and the sound of the wind in the trees. For once no bets were settled or laid.
"And we want to take the princess with us, too," said Jennifer T. Then she covered her mouth as if she herself felt she had gone too far. The only person present who looked more surprised than Jennifer T. Rideout at that moment was Spider-Rose. "I mean, like, if she, you know, wants to come." She glanced at the ferisher girl, whom Ethan understood for the first time to be the daughter of the queen. "But probably she doesn't."
The queen looked at Spider-Rose, who looked down at the map again, then at Jennifer T., studying her afresh, doubt replacing surprise in her expression—and maybe the littlest beginning of interest.
"It isn't going to work," she said finally, gazing down sadly at her doll. "But even if all you fools end up doing is bother old Coyote a little bit, I guess that's something I wouldn't mind seeing."
"Ya ask a good deal, reubens," the queen said. "An awful great lot. My daughter's behavior is her own bizness, since I'm prepared ta say now that her debt ta me and ta her people has been paid—though not by her. But as fer this giant, that's another matter."
"It's awful kind of you," Grim said to Ethan, and there were tears in his eyes. "But a bound giant is bound forever."
"Then we'll bind you to us" Thor said. He looked at Cinquefoil. "We can do that, can't we? Isn't there a way?"
"Yeah," Cinquefoil said. "There's a way."
The queen shook her head. "No," she said. "It's too much. The map itself is priceless. Consider yerself paid."
Ethan looked at Spider-Rose. He wondered how it would feel to have your mom be more willing to give you up than anything else she possessed.
"This is an awfully nice field, isn't it?" Taffy said, sitting in the grass. "Maybe you ferishers would care to try it out? Test your ballplaying skills against those of myself and my colleagues?"
There was a sharp buzz of excitement from the Dandelion Hill mob, and the chiming of coins began again.
"Are ya offering us a wager?" the queen said.
"Nine innings," Taffy said. "To settle the fate of this little giant's hide." Ethan was startled by the proposal, but only for a moment. Taffy knew intimately, of course, the pain of being bound. But he had his doubts.
"I don't know," he said. He checked the watch, scrolling quickly to the calendar screen. The arrow beside the two was now pointing down. "Bottom of the second!" He was suddenly panicked. "Jeez! It's going so fast! I don't think we have time for baseball, Taff."
All the ferishers burst out laughing, including Cinquefoil. After a moment Taffy and Grim joined in.
"Ya don't think yer going ta cross the Summerlands a thousand miles or more without playing baseball?" Cinquefoil said. "That would be like trying ta cross a thunderstorm without stepping on a raindrop. Can't be done. What's more, it shouldn't be done. Baseball is good for ya, little reuben. Yer going ta need ta be a fair sight smarter and tougher than ya are now, Ethan Feld, before this here adventure of ours comes down ta the final at-bat. Catching a couple thousand o' yer girlfriend's fastballs and sliders will make ya that, an more." Ethan's cheeks buzzed from Cinquefoil's description of Jennifer T. as his 'girlfriend.' The chief made a rapid calculation on his fingers. "But we're still be two players short of a team."
At that moment Ethan detected a distinct smell in the air of liverwurst, slightly rancid.
"Just a minute," came the thin, strong voice from behind Grim the Giant. The wererat stepped out from behind his old antagonist. "You don't think I'd be content knowing that you were off living a life of adventure and stimulation, without
me hanging around to drive you off your nut?"
"Make that one player short," Cinquefoil said.
I HAVE BEFORE ME VOLUME 117 OF ALKABETZ'S UNIVERSAL Encyclopedia of Baseball (Ninth Edition). The line score, according to the infallible Professor Alkabetz, for the game played that day between the rough and contentious team fielded by the Dandelion Hill mob and a ragtag, ad-hoc nine captained by Cinquefoil, Chief of the Boar Tooth mob, reads as follows:
As is often the case with unscheduled and interworld games, details are sketchy—there is no box score, and the ninth man on the Visitors team is referred to only as Chickweed (3b).
He was one of the Dandelion Hill mob, a wiry, taciturn fellow who said nothing at all, to anyone, for the entire length of the game. The other Dandelion Hill ferishers teased him mercilessly for being a turncoat, and warned his new teammates that they ought not to trust him. But he made every pick that came his way, snagged a tricky short-hop grounder in the bottom of the sixth, and started two double plays. Cinquefoil was still quite weak, and four of the other Visitors—Taffy, Ethan, Jennifer T., Grim the Giant—had of course to be grammered down, limbs burning, bones crackling, to ferisher scale. Whether it was the disorienting effects of the shape-shifting, or a deliberate spike in the grammer worked by Queen Filaree and two of her most powerful grammerwrights, they hit poorly—Ethan in particular. He struck out swinging three times, with the Knot on his bat handle chafing viciously against his palm. On his third at-bat he reverted to his old Dog Boy ways, just leaving the cursed stick on his shoulder and hoping, forlornly as it turned out, to coax four balls across the plate before three strikes.
On the other hand, it had been over a century since the Dandelion Hill mob had played a game of baseball, and they were sorely out of practice. One look at the Errors column will show you that. The lone run—the winning run, as it turned out—by the Visitors, in the top of the ninth, was scored by Jennifer T., who reached on a fielding error, moved to third on throwing error, and scored on a passed ball. The home team's hitting was, if anything, even worse than their game in the field. They could not seem to find their timing; the bats, after years of tennis and croquet, felt at once cumbersome and ineffectual in their hands.
In any game where the hitting is weak, of course, it will all come down to pitching, and this, according to Professor Alkabetz in his brief summary, was the story of the game. Jennifer T. pitched for the Visitors, and here the change in size seemed to work to her advantage. Though she was now only about eighteen inches high, somehow her sense of the distance to be traveled by the ball "retained a certain 'grandeur' " as Professor Alkabetz puts it, and with the help of a sympathetic umpire, a local werebear* named Smacklip, she was able to mow the home nine down, giving up only a cheap single in the bottom of the fourth. Ethan, who read feverishly from How to Catch Lightning and Smoke whenever he was on the bench, tried to mix his calls as much as he could, but since Jennifer T. only had two pitches, the fastball and the slider, he couldn't get too fancy. Mostly he just called for the heater. It was enough; and the run that she finally scored, on three errors, stood up.
Queen Filaree herself made the last out, popping up weakly to her daughter (2b) in shallow right. She threw down her bat, cursed, spat, and then uttered a strange series of coughing barks in Old Fatidic. Grimalkin John took off his glove, turned and knelt on the ground before Ethan.
"I'm bound over to you, little reuben," he said.
"Cool," Ethan said. "Only stand up, okay?"
Chickweed walked past Jennifer T. on his way toward his fellows, head down, watching his feet. As he went past her he looked up briefly, and gave a tug on his long mustache.
"Nice game," he said.
After the larger beings had been restored to their normal sizes, the queen issued a proclamation—henceforward this ball field, in honor and commemoration of its generous donors, would be known as Three Reubens Field. This went some way, in Ethan's mind, to making up for his terrible afternoon at the plate. After that the promised provisions were brought and packed into the rear of the car; and then the Visitors piled themselves, as well as they could into the car—except, of course, for Taffy, who resumed her familiar station on the roof. Except for Jennifer T., of the eight of them, only Grim the Giant had really driven a car—once, years before, in Trondheim, Sweden. ("Long story," he said, licking his lips in a nasty way that did not encourage questions.) Oddly enough, that other car had also been a Saab. This coincidence more than qualified him, in Ethan's opinion, to serve as driver for the group that now and hereafter styled itself, at Jennifer T.'s suggestion, the Shadowtails.
"Because it sounds to me," she explained, climbing into the backseat with Thor, Ethan, and Spider-Rose, "like we got a lot more scampering to do before we scamper across Home Plate."
"Farewell, daughter," Queen Filaree said to Spider-Rose through the rear window of the car. It took two of her subjects to hold her up. They staggered and strained under the weight of her. "Perhaps ya'll return one of these days."
"Not likely," said Spider-Rose, without looking at her mother.
"If ya do, I can't help hopin' it's not before ya done found some sense in that head o' yers."
Spider-Rose turned now and glared at the Queen of Dandelion Hill.
"Not likely," she said again, more carefully.
Then Grim started the engine, and glanced over at his old nemesis, Pettipaw, who shared the front passenger seat with Cinquefoil. "The better to criticize," the wererat said, "what promises to be a display of some truly horrendous driving."
"Ready, rat?" Grim the Giant said, with a grin.
"That all depends," said Pettipaw, "on whether you plan to drown us or drive us off a cliff."
Then Grim put the rattling old car in gear, and they set off into the woods, following the wide, ancient giant-built track that ran up into the Raucous Mountains. Some of the Dandelion Hill ferishers ran after them for a while, and then they fell away, whistling and calling farewell. The noise of the engine, the crunch of the sandy road under the tires, and the squeaking of Skid's old springs, combined to ensure that as the car plunged into the dark green shadows of the Great Woods, only Taffy the Sasquatch, sitting on the roof, heard the distant sound, faint but unmistakable, of a woman, disconsolate, weeping for the children she had lost.
* Werebears, methodical and sharp-eared, able to hear the difference between a strike and a ball, being the race that has traditionally produced the finest umpires in the Summerlands.
THIRD BASE
CHAPTER 19
The Lost Camps
BIG CHIEF CINQUEFOIL'S Traveling Shadowtails All-Star Baseball Club made its way up into the Raucous Mountains, through Sidewinder Pass, and down into the Lost Camps of the Big River Valley. Every day brought new signs of the coming of Ragged Rock: vast rustling coverlets of crows that blotted out the sun; weresquirrels and werechipmunks carrying reports of earthquakes, of great tracts of forest turned to empires of fire, of mighty rivers that reversed their courses or dried up overnight. The moon turned first the color of apple cider, and then the next night—full now—to a deep rusty gold, like ferisher blood. And one morning they woke in their bedrolls to see the glint, on the tip of Kobold Mountain's peaked cap, of snow—snow, in the Summerlands!
Their record, when they came down from Sidewinder Pass and into the Lost Camps, was two and seven. One of those victories was a forfeit (9-0) by some hill ferishers On Account of Excessive Shyness, and the other was a blowout, 15-3, against a team of wizened old Bowling Men who were drunk on honey beer and had not played a game of baseball, by their own admission, in 216 years.
They were, at best, an uneven ball club, and chronically shorthanded. Because of her annoying habit of regarding every game as lost before it even began, Spider-Rose did a slapdash job at second, hotdogging it on one play with all kinds of pointless but pretty tumbling and diving, and then drag-assing it on the very next play so that she just barely got the ball to Cinquefoil over at first. The ferisher chief had
yet to get his hitting game back, but he was steady as usual at his corner. In the outfield, there was Pettipaw in left—he was, if anything, even more of a hotdog than Spider-Rose, all one-handed catches and over-the-shoulder catches and crazy grass-churning dives toward the fence, but he did everything with such style, from hunting squirrels to rolling ragweed cigarettes one-handed, that it was impossible to imagine him playing any other way. Center field was Taffy, and even grammered down to the scale of a ferisher field she remained too lumbering and slow for the position, so that every routine fly became something of an adventure. The truth was that Sasquatches have never been passionate about baseball. In right, there was the outsider, a blinking pale ferisher or a Bowling Man drinking steadily from his flask. And playing shortstop was Grimalkin John. ("What else?" as he had said on first taking the position.) The novelty of a miniature giant never quite wore off and just having him there, glowering and gnashing his teeth gigantically, whenever one of the opposing ferishers came to the plate, messed with their minds a little bit.
As for Jennifer T., every day she could feel her arm getting stronger. Each time she threw, her fastball had more of a shimmy in it, like the wobble of a bit of metal caught between opposing magnets, so that it might veer at the last instant just a hair from its apparent trajectory as it left her hand. And she was learning, with coaching from Cinquefoil, to "take something off it," so that when Ethan put down three fingers, she could begin to experiment with throwing the change. But it was her slider that gave the other side fits. It was a hard slider that Jennifer T. threw, one that she had learned from watching big-league players throw them on TV. It broke not only downward but also a little to one side, away from the right-handed hitters. "A slurve," the announcers sometimes called it, a shadowtail kind of pitch, part slider, part curve. The Raucous Mountain ferishers had never seen anything like it.
But the most uneven feature of the Shadowtails, by far, was Ethan Feld. On the one hand, his hitting was the scandal of the team. It was funny the way such a small bump could give you such fits, but Jennifer T. had tried swinging the magical bat herself and the Knot really did throw you off, somehow. It was like how you heard sometimes about a pitcher, Dizzy Dean or somebody, whose whole career was ruined because a broken toenail grew back in a different way, or a callus on his thumb changed from round to oval. For the first five days he swung, and swung, and swung, and struck out swinging in twenty straight at bats; after that he reverted to his sad old Dog Boy ways, waiting for a walk. Then the crafty ferisher pitchers ate him up. Yet though his hitting game languished, Ethan's mastery of the craft taught by Peavine daily improved. Every game brought him face-to-face with situations—the pitchout, the swinging bunt, the slide into home—that Peavine described in How to Catch Lightning and Smoke. He grew accustomed to the sticky pressure of the mask against his forehead, the endless crouching and rising, the brutal treatment he got from foul-tipped balls and careless swings that smacked his mask and made his head clatter like an iron lid.