by Mark Jacobs
Chapter XVI
The hill was surrounded by dead trees. The clearing at the top was all dirt. The whole of it looked like a bald head donning a coronet of nettles. As the Purloiner hiked up, Pence kept his eyes on the sun, determined not to miss a single detail of its descent, as if pointing out which two mountains it ultimately sank between would guarantee him a smooth and inscrutable victory.
They arrived on the peak of the hill and Pence put a hand over his eyes like a sailor on the lookout for land. “Where is your enchanted winged steed? I yearn to finish this madness–I’ve been away from home so long… you could never understand.”
“Just behind those shrubberies, there,” said the Purloiner, pointing halfway down the hill’s opposite side, “although I fear you may have your expectations set a little high, young master.”
“Yes, I don’t concern myself with anything short or small,” Pence affirmed quite seriously.
The Purloiner approached the shrubberies and spread them aside with one hand. Tied to an old crab tree stooped over with age was a small cast-iron bicycle with a shoddy pair of wooden practice wheels attached to either side.
“Ooooh,” said Pence, mouth agape.
The bicycle was painted pink. There was a little silver bell affixed to the left handlebar. It was most obviously engineered for a young girl.
“Ahhhh,” said Pence, eyes aglow. “I especially like the rainbow-colored ribbons hanging off the sides. Is that what gives it the magic to fly?”
The frame of the bicycle was solid iron, as were the primary tires, the one in front being twice the size of the rear. Spiraling spokes connected the rims to the frame. Iron stirrups were affixed to the pedals. The wooden training wheels in the back were full of chips and chinks and the handles and seat were covered in peeling, parched leather.
“So this is what a flying horse looks like, huh?” Pence whistled in astonishment. “I’ve got to say, it’s exactly like I imagined it.”
A massive iron chain was looped over, under, and around every conceivable part of the bicycle’s frame, then wrapped around the crab tree and secured with a rusty padlock.
The Purloiner fished in his haversack and produced an ornate key that may have been even heavier and more rusty than the padlock. He knelt to unlock the chain. The padlock creaked open. Pence giggled with excitement, standing at the edge of the top hat so as not to miss anything. The Purloiner stuck the key back into his bag, then stared at the lock, one finger tapping the tip of his nose as he considered.
“One question,” said Pence giddily. “How will I reach the handles when I’m on the seat? And the pedals? Two questions, I guess that was. And what is its name? So that’s… let’s see… three! Wait, how many questions do I get?”
The Purloiner spat out of the side of his mouth, hoisted up the cumbersome padlock with his good hand, and dropped it into his bag. Immediately his gravity shifted off-center and his perpetual wobbling devolved into something altogether more chaotic. He took a knee to avoid capsizing.
“Another question,” said Pence. “What about manure?”
Without a word, the Purloiner unknotted the chain, piled it in coils on the ground, and stared at the pile. Then he picked it all up with a prevailing grunt and stuffed it into his bag.
“Just how much can you fit in that purse of yours?” Pence asked curiously, poking his head over the brim of the hat. “Must be roomier on the inside than it looks. You know, my old husk was like that, too.”
The Purloiner stood up, which took him a great while longer than usual. His wobbling had all but stopped, now–the chain was simply too heavy to allow any superfluous movement.
He up-righted the bicycle. The handlebars came barely to his waist, while the leather seat was closer to his knees.
“She’s kind of puny, isn’t she?” Pence observed. “What is she, a runt? Maybe you should feed her more. Like I said, I know these carrots, they think they’re so cool–”
“One drink for the road,” the Purloiner muttered. He scooped his hat off, ever mindful of his fragile passenger, and with a deft snap of his fingers he switched the hat for the bottle of grog hidden on his hairless head. He stared miserably at the uninviting mixture, then shut his eyes in resignation and took a swig. The grog glopped out of the bottleneck and into his throat with all the speed of bird droppings oozing down the side of a barn roof.
He belched hideously; the air in front of his face distorted from the stench like waves of heat rising from a tar-pitched road. “Awful!” he hiccoughed. Two tiny bubbles wafted out of his nose and sailed away. “Finest in the land.”
He straddled the bicycle and sat down. His cloak draped over the rear end, training wheels and all, while in the front his knees bumped into the handlebars and his legs flayed out sideways at cramped-up angles.
“Hey, I thought that was my seat,” Pence called from the hat. “I can’t ride up here the whole way–there’s no safety harness!”
The Purloiner stared tiredly at the bottle in his hand, resting his wrist on the handlebars. His eyes swam and sank. He burped again–one bubble.
Pence was relentless. “Hey! Talk to me! Hey, big-nose! Up here! Whoa, that reeks,” he said, coughing and staggering back from the edge of the hat as the stink from the giant’s belch hit him square in the face. “Light a candle, man.”
The Purloiner rolled his eyes up as though he could see Pence through the underside of the brim.
“Hello?” Pence yelled down. “Are we leaving? Hey! Why won’t you answer me? Hey! I’m up here, remember? Do I need to speak LOUDER? HEY!”
The Purloiner closed his eyes tightly.
“Where can I ride? Don’t forget about me! What about meeeee?”
Then the Purloiner smiled; the points of his teeth all touched so that his grin looked like a crooked chessboard. He brought the bottle to his chest and held it pressed there with his left arm. With his right hand he grabbed at Pence, who instinctively raised the penny above his head as though protecting a baby from a rising flood; as he did so, his velvetleaf cape curled tautly around his body like a fruit peel–this made him just the right size and shape for a giant hand to take hold most easily.
“Hey! Hey!” Pence continued to shout, though now for an entirely different reason. As he was lifted down, he fought to land a kick on the Purloiner’s nose but was just out of range.
“In you go,” said the Purloiner and he began fitting Pence into the bottle of grog. Legs vice-gripped together, arms clamped above him, Pence slid through the narrow opening right up to his shoulders.
“This is intolerable!” he roared, but his voice was muffled by his armpits squishing his face between them like an olive in a nutcracker.
“Roomier than it looks, I daresay,” the Purloiner said through his teeth as Pence thrashed wildly, “like your old husk, isn’t that right?”
“Ahh! Stop it! I don’t want to go in there! This is nothing at all like my husk! Help!”
“Don’t fuss, young master,” the Purloiner grumbled, trying to get his thumb over Pence’s head in order to push him the rest of the way down.
Pence deflected the giant’s thumb with the penny several times, but the longer he hung suspended in the bottleneck, the more the rim of the bottle cut up into his armpits, which in turn sapped his strength to wield the coin as a shield. “Foul play! Yowch! Foul play!” he bellowed with waning force and dimming eyes.
“Stop squirming!”
“Villain!” Pence was down to his chin. “You’re no… ugh, better than the–ow!–than the Prince, are you?”
The Purloiner raised his right hand to his mouth and used his teeth to pull off his glove. He flexed his fingers, each long and white, more bone than flesh, nails chewed and raw. He placed his bare thumb on the penny, pressing it down onto the boy’s head, mushing his spikes of hair flat.
“No!” cried Pence in abject terror. The heartseed burst into a thunderous drum roll, charging the air with panic.
And then, with the merest
pressure from the Purloiner’s thumb, Pence plunked out of sight down into the bottle, landing with a splat in a third-pint of grog. The penny had not fit down–it was stuck in the neck of the bottle as snug as a cork. Pence’s crudely whittled hands, which had been clutching either side of the penny when he was pressed down into the hole, were crimped off between fingers and thumbs like so little pie crust. Pitifully they fell away to the path without a sound, where the Purloiner carefully smashed them into the ground with the toe of his boot.
The Purloiner raised the bottle to his nose. He poked the penny with his pinky finger and it spun about its axis like a turnstile. “Fitting,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
He kicked the bicycle off to a start and began pedaling madly down the path. They careened down the bramble-crowned hill and up the next, sailing over the land as though the tires tread on a cushion of air and touched the earth not at all.