“Put the stick down! Oh please, put the stick down!” the little man cried. “Don’t you know you could hurt someone?”
Persimmony decided she had nothing to fear from a person obviously terrified of her, so she put the stick down and sat on a rock with a sigh of relief. “I’m Persimmony,” she said, “and I have had the worst night in history. You’ll never believe what I’ve been through. My hat flew away, and I got drenched in a thunderstorm, and a poison-tongued jumping tortoise chased me through the woods and nearly killed me, and I’ve had nothing to eat since lunch yesterday, and I’m so hungry I could eat a—a—well, something very, very big. As long as it doesn’t taste like my mother’s cooking.”
Worvil gazed at her with bottomless sympathy.
“And the worst part of all,” she continued miserably, “is that I’m lost and I have no idea how to get home again.”
“Oh, I can fix that.” Worvil brightened a bit. “I was so afraid I’d get lost in the woods that I made a map. It’s in my house.”
“How far away is your house?”
“Right beyond those trees over there. In a clearing.” Worvil pointed, and the two began picking their way through the thick shrubbery toward the spot.
“If your house is nearby, why did you spend the night in the tree trunk?”
“I was on my way home, but it came after me before I could get there.”
“The poison-tongued jumping tortoise?”
“No, the cricket. And then the rain came, and then you came, and then the Leafeaters—” He broke off.
“The what?” A sudden memory washed over her—voices in the night, spindly legs, a letter from the king, gold under the mountain, digging. “So you heard them too! It wasn’t a dream!”
“No, no, I didn’t hear a word. Not about kings or gold or anything. I was asleep. Here’s the clearing up ahead. My house is—” Worvil stopped so suddenly that Persimmony bumped into him. There was certainly a clearing, and a lot of churned-up earth in the center of it, but no house in sight.
Worvil fell on his knees and gripped his bald head in his stubby hands. “Not again!” he cried. “I knew it! I am the most miserable person in the whole world!”
Persimmony was just about to say that if you’re silly enough to lose your own house, you’re better off keeping your map in your pocket, but Worvil was already dashing into the woods again.
“Hey!” yelled Persimmony, following him. “Where are you going? Stop! Wait for me!”
But Worvil didn’t slow down, and he ran remarkably fast for someone with such short legs and such long trousers. “It all started on my sixth birthday,” he wailed as he ran. “The whole family was gathered, and I knocked over the cake with all its candles and burned the house down. I alone survived.”
“That’s terrible,” said Persimmony breathlessly, truly feeling sorry for him but wondering what this had to do with finding his house in the woods.
“That’s when I lost all my hair—it burned off and never grew back. After that I moved in with my uncle on the northern coast. My uncle was a fisherman, you see, and taught me how to fish. But one day I was out fishing and he was in the cottage taking a nap, and a huge wave swept the cottage out to sea with my uncle inside.”
“I really am sorry, but don’t you think we should be marking our trail or something?”
“Then I moved south and tried my hand at being a farmer,” he continued, panting and wheezing as Persimmony struggled to keep up. “That was the year of the Great Sweet Potato Famine when the crops rebelled and refused to produce anything but turnips, and of course, no one wanted to eat turnips. And so my farm failed, and I had to move to Candlenut to be apprenticed to a beekeeper whose hives were just downwind of the pepper mill. But I’m allergic to pepper, you see, and one time I sneezed so hard that I cracked a rib, which was bad enough, but the sneeze disturbed the bees so much that they stung me thirteen times, and I discovered that I’m also allergic to bee stings. And I almost died. So of course I had to move again.”
Persimmony had a strong feeling that she should have paid more attention to the place they had come from and the direction they had taken. But the fear of being abandoned by Worvil in an unfamiliar part of the woods drove her on.
“So I moved out to the middle of a field,” he was saying, “with no candles, no sea, no crops, no pepper mills, no bees, and no roof above me, and I lived on nuts and berries and took baths in the rain and dried off in the sun, and I was almost content—until one day an eagle flying overhead mistook my bald head for a rock and dropped a turtle on it, and I almost died again. I’ve never been able to add or subtract right since. So I moved to the Willow Woods and built a house in the low branches of a mangrove tree. How was I supposed to know it was a restless mangrove?” He spotted something over to the right and ran with more determination than ever. “Wait!” he cried. “Come back with my house!”
Just then, Persimmony saw what they were chasing.
It was indeed a mangrove tree—a small one—walking on the tips of its sprawling, tangled web of roots. The dwelling in its upper branches looked less like a house and more like a badly made nest of wooden boards, sticks, and dried mud with a patched-together tent for a roof. A sign was nailed to the side of the trunk:
NO ONE LIVES HERE.
PLEASE GO AWAY.
Standing still, the roots would have made a perfect ladder by which one could climb to the house above. But moving, they were like the legs of a giant spider crawling across the forest floor. The tree was evidently out for a leisurely morning stroll, but as Worvil got closer it started walking faster. The house at its top shook and rattled. Chunks of the walls started falling to the ground.
With a look of utter desperation, like a man whose last hope in the world is running the opposite direction, Worvil flung himself onto the nearest root. He bounced up and down, holding on to the root and shouting, “Oh, please, please, stop . . . Have pity on me . . . What have I ever done to you?”
Persimmony gasped and called out, “Hold on! I’ll save you!” though she had no idea how. She leaped forward and grabbed Worvil’s leg, but that only unrolled his trousers, and she ended up with her fists full of trouser cuffs, bumping and rolling in the dirt after the fleeing tree. “LET GO!” she cried, and choked on a tuft of grass. But then the tree raised the root high and gave a kick, and both Worvil and Persimmony sailed through the air and landed in a pile of wet leaves. The mangrove disappeared into the forest.
Persimmony rolled off Worvil’s stomach and sat up. “Are you all right?” she asked.
Worvil lay flat on his back staring forlornly at the sky. “The last three times this happened,” he said, “I was inside the house. Once a pot fell on my head and knocked me unconscious, but at least I still woke up in my own home (even if it was on the other side of the woods). That’s why I started making a map.”
“Why don’t you just build another house in a tree that stays put?”
“You mean move again?” he groaned.
“Well, anyway, that was brave of you, jumping onto a moving tree like that,” she said, trying to make him feel better.
Worvil sat up quickly. “Brave? Was that brave? Oh, no! I’ll never do it again, I promise.”
“But someday you might—”
“DON’T! Don’t say that word!”
“What word? I didn’t even get a chance to finish!”
“You said might!” Worvil covered his face with his hands. “Of all the words that have ever been invented, that is the worst. All of the terror in the world hangs on the word might. The Leafeaters might kidnap me and keep me locked up underground forever. They might tie me to a tree and leave me to be eaten by poison-tongued jumping tortoises. A hurricane might flood the Willow Woods and both of us drown ...”
“Well, there certainly isn’t much chance of that happening!” said Persimmony. “The sun is shining and there isn’t a cloud in the sky.”
“But it might. Anything might happen.”
“Right. You might find your house again and live happily ever after.”
“But I might not.”
Persimmony stared at Worvil and discovered that she liked him. He was a coward, certainly, but he had Imagination. She like people with Imagination.
Something was still tugging at her mind. “Do you believe the Leafeaters really kidnap people and lock them up underground?”
Worvil carefully rolled up the trouser leg that Persimmony had unrolled when she grabbed him. “I don’t know if they do, but they might. Why else would they build a secret city underground, if not to hide people that they don’t like?”
“It’s just that—it’s just that I have a father, or I had a father—”
“I’m sorry,” said Worvil.
“Why?”
“That you had him, but you don’t have him. Did he die a terrible, miserable death?”
“NO! Well, at least, I don’t think so. How can you die a terrible, miserable death on an island and no one know about it?”
“Then you still have a father?”
“No—I mean yes—except that I don’t have him. I mean I don’t know where he is. He disappeared when I was very little, and I don’t remember him at all.”
“I remember my father,” sighed Worvil. “Sometimes remembering isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“My father is a hero,” Persimmony said proudly. “I know because Mother always said that he was the bravest man she had ever met and that she wished he had been cowardly and stayed home instead. I think that means he disappeared doing something very brave, don’t you? She won’t tell me.”
In fact, no amount of questions could drag out of her mother much more than “Your father is a father, that’s what he is!” or “Handsome is as handsome does, oh! and he did it so handsomely too. Go wash your hands for supper.” She wouldn’t say whether or not he whistled, or whether his ears got taller when he smiled, or what color his eyes were in the dark, or what happened when he disappeared. Persimmony had once asked Prunella, who was two years older, whether she remembered anything at all, and Prunella had just stared out the window for a moment and said, “He made little animals out of twigs and pine needles. He made me a turtle once. I don’t know where it went.” And then, rubbing away tears with her apron and tucking her feet underneath her skirt, she had gone back to knitting a stocking.
Prunella was so dull. Didn’t she understand that when you were the daughter of a hero, especially a mysteriously disappeared hero, you couldn’t just sit around knitting stockings all day? You were meant to do important things, like cure a horrible disease, or discover a new color, or tame wild donkeys, or teach mosquitoes to ask nicely before biting.
For a long time, Persimmony had imagined that her father was on a secret mission for the king, living in disguise while he battled treacherous enemies—until recently when she told Theodore of her idea, and Theodore informed her that the king was only twelve years old. This had shocked her, for she thought that all kings were born very old and very wise, with silver beards on their noble, wrinkled faces. That would have made the king only five years old when her father disappeared, and five was surely too young to be sending people on secret missions. But if her father was doing anything else on the island, he would have come home, or someone would have seen him sometime, somewhere, unless—
That thing that had been tickling her mind since last night suddenly caught hold of it: Unless he had been underground all this time, a captive to the Leafeaters. Give me ten years in a room with one of them, and I assure you I wouldn’t be able to teach him to say please to a beetle . . . he deserves to be whipped, scolded, hanged until he is thoroughly dead, and then sent to bed without supper . . .
All her life, Persimmony had heard the name Leafeaters spat out like a curse by villagers who needed someone to blame for a lost spool of thread or a dead rooster. The first time she had ever seen them, she had been burying the dirty dishes under a tree at the edge of the woods. They were bent over large sacks, gliding silently between the trees. She had had an urge to follow them, but at that moment her mother had called out, “Persimmony, are those dishes clean yet?” and she had other problems to worry about. They were strange-looking people, she thought . . . not much taller than herself. Thin and pointy like branches, as if they were all thumbs and noses and knees and elbows, but with hair as soft as moss. Skin that was no color at all—or rather, it was as if all the colors in the world had gotten mixed together into a dull, muddy, gray mush spread sloppily over sharp bones. They loved the trees so much that they had come to look like them. Their green robes whispered when they walked, like the wind through the leaves—like wind and leaves telling secrets.
“Maybe he was in the woods saving someone from a tortoise,” she mused aloud, “and the Leafeaters snuck up behind him and captured him. Or maybe he knew about someone else who had been kidnapped, and he somehow found the entrance to Willowroot and tried to rescue the person—but the Leafeaters surrounded him and locked him up in an underground prison cell. And he’s been forced to eat pine needles ever since.”
“Or, or, or,” Worvil said excitedly, “maybe he did rescue the person, but on the way out he slipped and tumbled all the way down underground again and landed in an enormous pile of beetles.” He was good at this game.
“Yes, and since the Leafeaters live underground, they love bugs, and were very angry with him for squashing any of them, and that’s why they locked him away. I wonder if they were beetles or earthworms. Earthworms would be softer to land on, but more squashable. My mother once told me he tried to save the town of Candlenut from a swarm of angry cockroaches. But something went wrong, I think.”
“Something always goes wrong,” Worvil sighed.
Persimmony thought about what the Leafeaters had said last night. Gold buried under the mountain. A secret plot against the king. This wasn’t a story in her head. This was a real adventure gathering around her—if only she could figure out what the adventure was, exactly. One thing she knew for certain: She had to find out where the two Leafeaters had gone and how to get down into their city. Somewhere underground might be a brave captive who had no idea—yet—that his daughter was brave enough to find him.
Suddenly there was a rustling behind her, and a stern voice said, “Persimmony, Persimmony, you naughty child! What will I do with you?”
Chapter 5
IN WHICH GEOGRAPHY TAKES A TURN FOR THE WORSE
King Lucas was one of those people who wanted to be known as wise but didn’t particularly like to think. So he employed a professor to do his thinking for him and then tell him the interesting bits. It was difficult to hear those bits, though, while Guafnoggle, a Rumblebump who served as the king’s jester, was cartwheeling across the throne room at top speed. Guafnoggle’s long hair billowed out around him like a thick brown cloud, and his huge bare feet (which were even larger than Rumblebumps’ feet usually are) thundered on the stone floor: boom BOOM . . . boom BOOM . . . boom BOOM . . .
“As you can see,” yelled Professor Quibble over the noise, “the island is entirely complete, with all forms of life known to humankind, all possible combination of plants, grasses, and soils, all the colors of the rainbow, nothing at all lacking anywhere, and—Oof! My eyeglasses!”
He was knocked off balance by the sudden lurching of the castle (the mountain had been particularly shaky as it rose this morning) and tumbled onto the map of the island that lay spread out on the floor of the throne room. Guafnoggle, who had landed upside down, rolled over and laughed.
Watching a Rumblebump’s laughter is a little like getting caught in front of a tidal wave as it is about to break. Guafnoggle’s laughter began as a twitching in his round, bulbous nose and spread first to his cheeks and then to his belly and then to his hands and his feet. Four buttons popped off his coat and went flying across the room. This was not too much of a loss since he was wearing at least three other coats underneath that one with plenty of buttons to spare.
&
nbsp; The professor stood up again angrily, his eyeglasses returned a little crookedly to his nose. “Your Highness, for the hundredth time, must we put up with this? What good is a jester who laughs at everything ? Geography is a serious subject.”
Lucas, snickering in spite of himself, quickly forced his face into a commanding frown. “Of course you’re right, Professor. I was just about to say so myself. Guafnoggle, stop laughing!”
Guafnoggle stuffed the thick green and yellow folds of his coats into his mouth. He giggled as softly as he could until finally his laughter had ebbed into a gentle twitching in his nose and a slight trembling in his chin.
“As I was saying,” continued the professor more calmly, “look to the north, the south, the east, the west . . . What do you see? Nothing but a great blue sea, stretching on and on forever. And so you can understand the high and noble role we must play, here at the Center of Everything. We are the last keepers of the Un-Blue Things. Without us, this earth would be an empty and colorless place!”
Even though Guafnoggle was sitting down now, when he spoke his words were still cartwheeling: “But how do you know the sea goes on and on forever on all sides, and how do you know the sky is blue behind your back when you aren’t looking, because after all it might turn green or purple or orange the way the sunrise changes colors, and did you see how beautiful the sunrise was this morning?” Guafnoggle could never keep a sentence heading in a straight line and hated to slow down for punctuation unless absolutely necessary.
“The sea goes on and on forever,” the professor said, gritting his teeth, “because there is no proof to the contrary, and if there is no proof to the contrary, then it is true.”
The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic Page 3