"Boss," Padfoot said. "What happened?"
But Coyote just shook his head.
"Tell us," Padfoot said. "We've come all this way. We deserve to know."
"I took my eye off the ball," Coyote said. "There was somebody I neglected to reckon with."
"Who was that boss? Boss, who?"
"WITH HIS WIFE!"
Even from high atop the citadel, the voice came down, so loud and so irritable that even at a distance it deserves to be written in capital letters.
"Oh, brother," Padfoot said. "Not again."
"I thought she was dead!" Coyote said. "I thought that champion from the Middling—what was his name? Beowulf—he was supposed to take care of the old bag." He grabbed two handfuls of hair and began shaking his head back and forth. "Oh, Betty. Angry, Angry Betty. What did I ever—?"
But he broke off before he could finish his question, which no doubt, Cutbelly thought, would have been, What did I ever see in a great stinking shaggurt like you? Coyote let go of his hair, and smoothed it back, and gazed up at the citadel. A startling look of affection—even adoration—entered his bright mocking face.
"Betty!" he cried. "Oh, Betty! Please don't be angry with me! I came all this way to see you!"
At this point there arose from the assembled remnant of the Rade a sound that Cutbelly had learned to recognize. It sounded like three hundred saws tearing all at once through three hundred planks. It sounded like fire snapping through a dry meadow. It was the sound of the werewolves trying to suppress their own laughter. The Boss was up to one of his tricks.
A head appeared over the gates of Outlandishton. It was thatched with unkempt white hair, and though at this distance its features were hard to make out, the tone of voice was unmistakable.
"COYOTE ALWAYS DID THINK BETTY WAS STUPID," Angry Betty said.
Coyote looked shocked. "What?" he said. He turned to Padfoot, the fingers of one hand pressed to his chest. Padfoot shrugged, as if to suggest that he had no idea what Betty could possibly have meant by this strange and mistaken remark. "Stupid? On the contrary, dear, you know I—"
"CLEAR OUT!" Angry Betty said. "BEFORE BETTY COMES DOWN THERE AND EATS EVERY WRETCHED ONE OF YOUR WRETCHED LITTLE FRIENDS."
The werewolves stopped snickering. Angry Betty had a taste for wolf that was legendary.
"Darling," Coyote said. "Come on down! Help yourself. They're a bit stringy by this point, I imagine, living on nothing but ice mouse for these last weeks and months. But you're more than welcome to a snack."
The werewolves had stopped capering and rolling in the ice. They huddled together amid the sledges, looking up at Coyote with an expression of reproach.
"BETTY CARES ONLY FOR THE NEXT MEAL, THAT'S WHAT COYOTE THINKS! THINKS BETTY CARES NOTHING FOR THE LIFE OF THE MIND!"
"Nonsense, Betty. Come down, dear. Bring your family. Come on. Eat my werewolves. Come, you can have them all" An audible whimpering started up in the werewolf pack, threaded with a few angry growls. "I only got a glimpse of those brothers of yours, of course, before you…showed me the door. But my goodness they have grown, haven't they? How is little Geryon?"
The rumbling from the citadel grew louder. Individual voices could be made out among them, clamoring for wolf. Cutbelly saw some of the werewolves began to slink away, back into the Winterlands. The werefox didn't blame them. It was hard not to imagine that someone with a taste for wolfmen might look on a fox-man as a nice little appetizer.
"SHUT UP!" bellowed Angry Betty, and the rumbling of her wild relations ceased. "ANGRY BETTY IS THE SHAGGURT QUEEN, NOW. SHE LAYS DOWN THE LAW. AND THIS THE LAW IS: NOBODY NEVER FALLS FOR THE TRICKS OF THE CHANGER AGAIN."
"How very wise," Coyote said. He was pacing back and forth now, limping a little from his fall to earth. "And may I say, I'm not at all surprised to learn that a woman of your intelligence has risen to such lofty heights. You always were a clever girl, Betty dear."
There was a silence in the wake of this remark, and then a low sound, a trembling in Cutbelly's eardrums. It sounded, or felt, like nothing so much as the purring of an enormous cat. Angry Betty was pleased—in spite of herself, no doubt—by Coyote's flattering words. A moment later a squeal tore the frigid air, and then a deep iron groan. The great gates of Outlandishton were swinging open.
"Were you listening? Did you catch it?" Coyote hissed in an undertone to Padfoot. "Did you hear the keygrammer that opens the gates?"
Padfoot nodded eagerly two or three times, then stopped. He shook his head.
"Sorry, Boss," he said.
"Werefox?"
"Even if I did, I wouldn't tell you. Much as I bear no great love toward shaggurts, if they stand in your way then I consider them to be—"
"Yes, yes," Coyote said. "Thank you."
He turned back to the citadel, from which a great stack of grayish-white hay seemed to be tumbling down the tor toward them. It was, of course, Angry Betty herself. The gates closed behind her and she came skiing down the hillside on the flats of her great shaggurt feet. She was covered all over in the sparse pale fur of the shaggurts, and she carried over her shoulder a heavy wooden club spiked with wicked tusks. Her face as she schussed nearer appeared steadily more human, and Cutbelly had to admit that in spite of everything she might have been an attractive enough lady were it not for the long white beard, braided into nine thick plaits that swung from her chin.
Coyote leapt down from the top of the Panic and strode limping across the ice toward her. As he went he signaled brusquely to his graylings, and they went after the werewolves who had been edging away. They rounded them up with lashes and prods and drove them toward the shaggurt.
"Eat! Eat!" Coyote cried, with a broad chef's gesture toward the fine table he had laid for her.
What followed was horrible and I see no reason to describe it. Betty Ann had not feasted on wolf meat in a very long time. The snow steamed with the blood of werewolves. When she had finished eating, Coyote clapped his hands and a large tarp was produced and handed up to the shaggurt queen for use as a napkin. Daintily she wiped her chin, then belched and sat down in the snow. She beamed at Coyote. He grinned at her.
"WELL, WELL, WELL," she said. "OLD COYOTE HIS-SELF. IT'S NOT HALF BAD TO SEE HIM. BETTY IS SORRY SHE PITCHED HIM OVER THE WALL LIKE THAT. BUT HE STARTLED HER. HE SHOULD KNOW BETTER THAN TO SHOW UP AS A NASTY OLD RAVEN IN THE MIDST OF BETTY'S COURT. BETTY HAS A HORROR OF BIRDS. NASTY CREATURES. COYOTE KNOWS THAT."
"It's been too long, Betty. I've forgotten all your charming ways."
Again Cutbelly heard the low purring of her flattered heart.
"OLD RED LIAR."
"Great big thing."
"OLD SNAKE."
"Fuzzy-wuzzy-wuzz."
Coyote clambered across the ice to her, and then he startled Cutbelly by climbing right up into the shaggurt's immense lap. He reached up and touched the lowest-dangling of her nine beard-plaits. It was smeared with werewolf blood.
"Look what the great silly cow's gone and done, she's gotten her beard all bloody. Remember how I used to sit for hours and groom it?"
Betty nodded, closing her eyes. She remembered. Coyote signaled again to his graylings, and one of them went scuttling across the ice and disappeared into the belly of a steam sledge.
"I wonder that she's so trusting of him," Cutbelly remarked.
"She ain't," Padfoot said. "It's just that she can hear a ambush the day before it's laid for her, smell a sneak attack, feel the footstep of a cat a mile away. Her hide is tough as steel. And her fists could splinter a mountain. She don't trust him. She just ain't afraid of nothin'."
A moment later the grayling reappeared, carrying a large brush with stiff wire bristles. Coyote took the brush and began, one by one, to untwist the braids of Betty's beard until it hung down in a bloody pink fringe from her chin. Then he got down from her lap, gathered up an armful of snow, and carried it back up to her beard. Slowly and lovingly he washed the gore from her whiskers with armfuls of clean snow. T
he rumble of her purring shook the very roof panels under Cutbelly's feet.
It was as he was working the comb through her beard that Betty opened her eyes. She sniffed the air, working the immense nostrils of her long pale nose.
"BETTY SMELLS A REUBEN," she said. "HAS HE GOT ONE? A REUBEN IN THE WINTERLANDS?"
Cutbelly's heart seized. Mr. Feld, of course, was the only reuben component in all of Coyote's Rade. He was lying on his pallet down in the Panic, still and staring. Cutbelly knew this without looking because Mr. Feld had been lying thus for a long time now. His work for Coyote was accomplished; and Coyote's wicked work on him, as well.
"Oh, I might," said Coyote. "What would it be worth to you?"
"BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE BETTY TASTED THE FLESH OF A REUBEN. A LONG, LONG HUNGRY TIME."
"Would you be willing to trade it for the keygrammer to your fine stout gates?"
Betty sat up straight, and glowered at Coyote, and jabbed an immense thick finger in his direction. He ducked.
"Just kidding," he said, pinching at a strand of her beard. He looked across the ice toward the Panic. Cutbelly felt all the deep chill of the Winterlands in that look. "Padfoot, my lad, fetch our poor old friend, Mr. Feld."
"No!" Cutbelly ran to the rail and shouted with all his might. "You can't do that!"
"Of course I can," Coyote said mildly. "I've gotten all the use from him I need. And he's not much good for anything anymore."
Padfoot rolled open the hatch and dropped down into the sledge. Cutbelly could hear him clambering down the rungs to the main deck. If he didn't do something now, Coyote would feed Bruce Feld to the insatiable innards of Angry Betty and to his own voracious plan. But what could he do? Her skin was as hard as steel. She would hear him before he was halfway across the ice.
The graylings inside the Panic began to curse and chatter as they dragged Mr. Feld toward the hatch. Cutbelly could hear the reuben's feeble moans of protest. Betty stood up and began to rub her great hanging belly in anticipation.
A moment later, there was a muffled thump from somewhere deep inside Angry Betty. Her eyes got very wide, and her mouth opened, and a great pale pink bubble of blood formed on her lips. It grew and wavered and then blew from her mouth on the last gust of breath the queen of the shaggurts ever breathed. She pitched forward and fell with a deafening crash and shattering of the ice. Coyote leapt down from her lap just in time to avoid being crushed by the immense bulk of her. The bubble hovered a moment longer in the air over her body and then popped, starring the snow with blood.
A moment later there arose from the top of Shadewater Hill a horrific growling and wailing and banging of drums. The graylings and mushgoblins and the few surviving werewolves all turned to look at each other in wonder.
"What was it?" said Padfoot, emerging alone from the hatch of the Panic. There would be no need, he saw, for the Flat Man.
"It was as if her heart burst," Coyote said, shaking the ice from his sleeves. "I heard it."
A moment later the air over her great back shimmered, and then there emerged from the very fur and meat of the dead shaggurt the sharp snout and foxy ears of Cutbelly. He climbed up out of her body, leaving no trace of his shadowtail passage through her. A moment later a great cheer went up from the remnant of the Rade.
"I didn't do it for you!" he cried.
"Nice enough," Padfoot said. "And they'll be mourning her all night in Outlandishton, wandering around confused and queenless. But now we'll never get hold of that keygrammer."
"Don't be so sure," Coyote said, holding up his right hand. The index finger and thumb were still pinched together from when he had plucked at her beard. He made a series of low clicking sounds with his tongue, and after a moment Cutbelly's sharp ears caught the sound of a tiny, faint reply uttered in the same clicking tongue. Coyote's face broke into a smile, and with a tender expression he gazed at his fingertips and then tucked the tiny freight they carried deep into the hair on his own head.
"You will never go wrong," he declared, "teaching yourself a few choice phrases of Flea."
CHAPTER 24
Applelawn
IN OUR WORLD, ALAS—here in the broken and beautiful Middling—the ways into the peace, the cool air and fragrant grass of Diamond Green have long been lost to us. For a while, as you may know, you could step into Diamond Green through a gall called the Elysian Fields, along the shores of a broad, shining river. It was here, in 1846, that the first game of baseball in the history of the Middling was played. But Coyote unpleached, or cut, that gall long ago. Today an abandoned Maxwell House coffee factory stands on the vanished spot. All that remains of the opening to that fortunate land is one last leafy scrap, a small, modest playground with a swing set and a slide. I once tried to reach Diamond Green from this spot, a big ungainly adult making a fool of himself on the swings; but am sorry to report that I failed completely. Perhaps you will have more success, if you visit one day. Or maybe you will grow up to be the one who finally restores to their former splendor the Elysian Fields of Hoboken, New Jersey.
On the day that the Rade conquered the frost giant's city of Outlandishton, and took possession of Diamond Green, a string of unusually severe thunderstorms lit up the skies of northern New Jersey. Other than that, there was no sign of the impending disaster.
In Applelawn, the peace was utterly spoilt. The storm blew all the blossoms from the trees, and the leaves, and the nests of birds, and strewed them on the ground. Bitter red rain fell on the Lodges of the Blessed, burning through the roofs and ruining the banquet tables and the perfumed baths. The Cattle of the Sun stampeded, and the Sheep of the Moon ran bleating for the distant Hills of Sleep. The three old beaver women who built the Lodges of the Blessed were forced out of their own grand home on the banks of the Big River by a gang of rampaging werewolves who scattered their immense library of romances to the four winds. Everywhere that the Shadowtails went, as they hiked in toward Diamond Green itself, Ethan saw uprooted apple trees, upended carts, and trampled fields. Graylings and goblins had run rampant in the orchards, lighting great bonfires of slaughtered apple trees; and as the vast quantities of fat, sweet apples they had greedily consumed failed to agree with their stomachs, they left foul, steaming piles of gray dung that sullied the apple-sweet air.
At last, after a sad and weary day of walking, the Shadowtails—still minus their shaggy megaloped center fielder—came down a tree-lined hillside that was fouled with goblin dung, and found themselves in the midst of a broad expanse of grass, ringed with trees. At first Ethan thought that the field was square in shape, but when he looked more carefully he decided that it was shaped like an enormous spread fan. A diamond. Directly across from them, beyond the right side of the outfield, stretched only a cloudless sky, a blank blue mass as tall and featureless as a wall of glass. On their right, all along the first-base side, rose a great dark bramble of enormous vines, thick as the trunks of trees, studded all over with long jagged thorns that glinted in the sun. Along the left side of the outfield lay a long pool of clear blue water, and beyond this a high hill that seemed to be on fire. Beyond the burning hill lay a barren white expanse. Far back onto the expanse of ice, strange armored vehicles were arranged, scattered carelessly, and all around the pool the army of Coyote had pitched its crimson tents. And everywhere at the edge of the Winterlands lay great piles of what Ethan took at first to be snow. Then he realized that they must be the fallen bodies of shaggurts.
"Well, we failed," Cinquefoil said, stepping out onto the grass. He looked up. The sky was heavy with the herd of storm buffalo. "Coyote got here first. He laid waste ta Outlandishton, what no one has ever been able ta do afore. And he beat us ta the Well."
"No!" Ethan said. Tears stung to his eyes. "He didn't. He didn't!"
He looked at his watch. The little gray screen was blank. He pushed the tiny buttons of the keyboard, delicately at first, then squeezing down hard. Nothing happened. He ripped the watch from his wrist and threw it into the grass.
Jennifer T. sat down heavily. She hung her head, and covered her face in her hands.
"I hate this place," she said.
"So we're too late," Spider-Rose said. Her arm fell, and Nubakaduba dangled beside her. "I knew it. We may just as well sit down and wait for it all to come crashing down or whatever it's going to do."
"Mebbe," said Grim the Giant, "we ought to get back under cover of the trees. Otherwise it's not going to be very long before they notice us."
There was a high, maniacal yipping sound, then, like the coyotes that Ethan used to hear sometimes in the hills around Colorado Springs.
"I think they already notice us, dude," Buendía said. "Here they come."
A low, ragged line of brown figures came bobbing and clambering toward them across the grass. Ethan turned, and grabbed hold of Jennifer X, and tried to pull her toward the trees on the hill in Applelawn behind them, but he could not move his feet. It was as if the soles of his shoes had been staked to the ground. He looked around and saw that Thor and Buendíia and Cinquefoil and the others were all doing the same absurd dance, working their hips and flexing their knees, like people sunk to the ankles in mud. And getting nowhere at all. The yipping grew louder, and more joyous, and Ethan saw that the creatures had the shapes of men, and the heads of wolves, and the next moment he could smell their coats, rancid and sweet, a smell like the inside of your lunch box at the end of a warm afternoon. He raised Splinter over his head, and as he did so felt something that he could not see grab hold of its barrel and give a sharp yank. He yanked back, and gripped the handle tightly in both hands. Just before some kind of immense soft hammer came down and engulfed his head in endless silky yards of iron blackness, he caught a glimpse of a man, walking along behind the gang of werewolves, a man in a long black coat, his red hair crackling around his head like fire.
AMID THE CRIMSON TENTS, BETWEEN THE BLUE POOL AND THE stumps of fallen trees, there was a patch of trampled earth. It was here, hours or minutes later, that Ethan awoke from the grammer that had been worked on him and his companions. In a panic, he reached for Splinter, and found to his relief that he was still clutching the bat in his left hand, so tightly, in fact, that his fingers had stiffened into a kind of claw around the handle of the bat, paralyzed and aching. And that same invisible something was still tugging, firm and steady, at the other end. The Knot was wearing a raw spot into the palm of his hand.