by Adam Sidwell
“We would,” said Guster. It did seem like a much better idea than getting locked up with the Mayor.
Mariah nodded her approval too, and was almost halfway to the chair on wheels.
“I’m delighted,” said Princess Sunday. “They can give you a ride.”
She motioned to the three chairs, and Zeke and Guster climbed up into one each. The padding was soft and comfortable, and it reminded Guster that he had not had a decent place to sit since he’d left the farmhouse. How long had it been? A week? It seemed like years after all they’d been through.
“Thank you,” Mariah said to Princess Sunday. Mariah curled up in her chair. The Marshmallow Cheer had brightened her considerably.
One of the Cherry Brigade took hold of two wooden handles that extended from the back of Guster’s chair and pushed Guster up the butterscotch street. Mariah and Zeke’s chairs kept pace with his, and they all three watched in wonder as they rolled uphill through the city.
Chapter 14— Princess Sunday’s Castle
They passed a house built from pistachio bricks on their left and two more praline houses on their right, then crossed a small, arched waffle cone bridge that spanned the dark brown river.
“Is that made of chocolate?” Zeke asked.
“Of course,” said the guard pushing him. “It’s the Chocolate River. It flows all the way through the city.”
An aqueduct carrying a rich red strawberry sauce crisscrossed over the Chocolate River but never touched it.
“Where does it all come from?” Mariah asked. She’d seemed to gain strength by the minute, and eagerly peered over the edge of her chair now, studying every new structure as they passed. The Marshmallow Cheer was taking effect.
“All what come from?” asked the guard. He looked puzzled, as if she’d just asked him why sun wouldn’t shine at night.
“The ice cream,” she said. “I’ve never seen so much of it in my life. You can’t ship it in, at least not the same way we came in to El Elado. And there’s so much of it, surely such an enormous operation would have been discovered by someone.”
The guard pushing her chair laughed as if she were crazy. “HA! Next you’ll be asking if we have the snow delivered to the mountaintops!” He shook his head. “Flatlanders. I guess the stories I’ve heard are true. You really are crazy.”
The guard pushing Zeke shot the other guard a look. “Don’t be so judgmental,” he said. “You’ve heard stories of those shiny flying birds made out of spoons from the The Extravío Vigilar. You’d probably have questions about those too.” He smiled at Mariah. “Sometimes we forget how special El Elado truly is. This is the only place in the whole world—so says the Princess, and I believe her—where a city like this could be built. It’s as if history and geography met in this one moment, and that’s when El Elado sprang from the ground.” The guard sighed. “I am so lucky to have been born here.”
“So, then, where does it come from?” asked Mariah. Mariah had always loved questions. She loved answers even more. “I mean the ice cream, of course. You can’t bring it from anywhere else, so it must come from somewhere.”
The guard pointed up to the largest mountain behind the city. It was a sharp, craggy peak that looked like a jagged tusk jutting up from the ground. It was planted firmly on the far side of the city where the emerald mint walls ended. The mountain was covered with snow and ice so white and pure Guster wondered if it were frozen solid all the way through.
“You see the glaciers over there?” asked the second guard. He pointed to a pair of glaciers high above the city that cut between the mountain range that encircled the Golden Valley. They were like long, gigantic frozen mountains that had carved their way between the peaks and had spilled over into the valley. There was something so forbidding about them, with their columns of ice and mazes of crevasses that made them impassable—the perfect protection to keep the valley undiscovered for centuries.
“Those glaciers change and move every day, like rivers of moving mountains, inching their way past the rock. They’re always pressing their way downward, only inches a week into the valley.”
“There are strange forces of nature that make such glaciers. Who knows where they come from?” He shrugged. “Somewhere, deep inside that mountain,” he pointed again to the largest, jagged peak behind El Elado, “that snow and ice is pressed and churned into something marvelous and sweet and creamy, and it squeezes out of a crack in the ground in a cave at the base of that mountain.”
Mariah looked at him like he was crazy. “It comes out of the ground?”
The guard looked at her and nodded. “Of course.” Then his face turned puzzled, one eye squinting and wrinkling as he scrunched up his face. “You do have ice cream in the Flatlands, don’t you?”
“Well yes, of course, but . . .” Mariah huffed.
“Then it does not come out of mountains?” the guard asked.
“No, it certainly doesn’t. It comes from cows and milk and it’s . . .” Mariah paused.
The guard seemed confused. Maybe this was like trying to tell someone that the waves on the seashore came from the moon. It really didn’t make sense when you said it.
“Most importantly,” said Zeke, “when it comes out of the mountain, what flavor is it?”
“Vanilla, of course!” said the guard. “Pure and cold and white, just like the snow it comes from! Ready for flavoring!”
Zeke looked disappointed.
It was so strange, but hadn’t Guster and Mariah used to pack snowballs and plop them onto ice cream cones and eat them like they were the real thing back when they lived in Montana? That had been before they’d moved to the farmhouse, and Guster was only three years old. It was one of his earliest memories.
That snow had tasted sweet and pure; it was different from day to day or place to place, all depending on altitude or time of year or how dense the pack was.
But could it be that snow itself could transform in the depths of a mountain and flow out like lava as pure ice cream?
Guster wanted more than anything to see the source, to touch the ice cream that pressed up out of the ground inside the cold and forbidding mountain.
The Cherry Brigade crossed another waffle cone bridge and turned onto a street that left the houses and buildings behind and zigzagged up a steep blueberry ice cream mountain. At the very tip top was an ivory, vanilla castle with seven towers that shimmered in the golden sunlight.
The castle was a remarkable sight, with cherries set into the towers’ pinnacles like gems, intricate marshmallow designs inlaid into the walls, and fluffy white dollops of whipped cream sprouting across the gardens like bushes. There were waffle cone tile roofs, and strawberry ice cream masonry lining the corners of the ramparts and buttresses. Altogether, it was a masterfully made Ice Cream Sundae set on top of the mountain.
They crossed a peanut brittle drawbridge that had been lowered across a bubbling marshmallow moat, passed through a keep lined with orange sherbet, and came to a stop inside a courtyard brimming with raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries set into cloudbursts of whipped cream.
The guard set Guster, Mariah, and Zeke down in the courtyard. Guster hopped from his chair. Zeke reached out a hand and scooped some whipped cream and berries from the nearest bush. He mashed them into his mouth, leaving a ring of whipped cream around his lips.
“I see you’re hungry, sir,” said one of the guards. “Good. We are just in time for lunch.” He led them through an open pair of doors into what looked like a banquet hall.
Warm light streamed through rows of red stained glass windows that smelled like spice. If Guster had to guess, he would’ve said they were cinnamon.
In the center of the room was a table filled with double and triple-decker sandwiches, apples, roast beef, and crackers and cheeses of all kinds. In the center was a large banana split taller than Guster, with a shiny re
d cherry as big as his fist.
“Go ahead,” said the guard. “Eat up.”
Zeke was the first to dive in. Guster followed carefully after. It was all very, very good. He had not eaten a really good meal since he’d left home, and this was enough to make him forget, if just for a moment, how much he really missed Mom’s cooking.
When they were finished, they rested on soft benches while Zeke dozed. El Elado was such an amazing place, Guster doubted that his dreams could conjure anything more wonderful.
***
Guster awoke hours later. One of the guards was shaking him gently. Zeke and Mariah were standing at the open door, gazing out into the courtyard at an open-top carriage inset with candy that glittered like precious jewels. It was hitched to four yaks.
Princess Sunday was seated inside, a smile on her tiny face. Guster hadn’t noticed how young she looked, her face tapering at the chin like the point of a lemon drop, her features as smooth as a polished white peppermint. “Would you like me to show you the city?” she asked.
Guster rose from the bench and followed Zeke and Mariah into the courtyard. “Very much,” said Zeke. The three of them climbed into the coach, and the yaks pulled them out of a gate at the back of the castle, across the marshmallow moat, and out onto a narrow path.
“Is everything here made of ice cream?” asked Zeke.
“Almost everything. It’s the one thing we’re not running out of. The mountain gives it to us, and our Confectioners shape it and mold it into our houses and meeting halls. Of course, the city is covered in it since it flows from the mountain.”
“I am glad you are well and fed,” said the Princess, “because we have important and dangerous matters to discuss.”
Danger? Guster hadn’t considered that anything might go wrong, not now that they were in the Princess’s care. They’d come to a city like none other, a place that so many had tried to find, but no one had ever come close. This was the final destination. There was nowhere further they would ever need to go.
“What kinds of danger?” said Mariah coldly. Despite all the wonders and delights, she held an air of skepticism, as if she did not quite believe what the princess had shown them.
“The Trial by Taste,” said Princess Sunday. “I sent my Guard into the city to listen and learn what they could of the Mayor’s intentions. It is a tradition as old as El Elado itself, and there is nothing I can do, even as the ruling royalty here, to stop it.”
Guster felt his chest tighten. “What exactly is it?” he asked.
Princess Sunday frowned. “It is a challenge designed to identify your true character, Guster. In the Trial you will taste wondrous things. Perhaps more than your imagination can hold.”
That didn’t sound so bad. But the Princess wouldn’t know what amazing flavors Guster had tasted in the last year. How could she? “Doesn’t sound like a problem to me,” said Guster.
The Princess looked sad. “That is not all. Some of the tastes will be wonderful. Others horrible. The most powerful ones may alter your sense of what is real.”
Guster shuddered. “If it’s a trial, then someone must want to find me guilty.”
“I suppose that depends on you. The purpose of the Trial by Taste is to see if you are a pure enough food to be sacrificed to the Yummies—to see if you truly are the Exquisite Morsel. If you do prove worthy, that will be the outcome.”
Guster frowned. “So if I pass the test, I get eaten? What kind of reward is that?”
Princess Sunday looked down at her shoes. “Not a very good one, I’m afraid. There are complex forces at work in El Elado. We live in a divided city Guster.” She swept her arm toward the buildings below.
There was a patchwork of flavors and colors so beautiful it looked like a tapestry. There were green mints with fluffy marshmallow globs, bright fruity blues, yellow sorbets, and dark fudges so brown they were nearly black.
With all that variety, there was an obvious pattern: a dark, chocolate-colored crescent on the outer ring closest to the plains surrounded a small, rainbow-colored oval on the mountain side of the city where their carriage was parked. The Chocolate River carved a border between the two neighborhoods.
“The Mayor controls the majority of El Elado, the chocolate-and-nutty-flavored neighborhood. It’s called the Chocolate Crescent,” said Princess Sunday. She pointed. “And here, immediately surrounding my castle, is the last circle of fruit flavors—the Fruitful Streets. That is where the citizens loyal to me live.”
Zeke pointed to a lighter colored yellow-brown block in the Chocolate Crescent. “So the Mayor controls the cookie dough too?” he asked.
“I’m afraid so, yes,” said the Princess.
Zeke looked crestfallen. “We have to get it back,” he said, balling his hand up into a fist.
“I wish it were so easy,” said Princess Sunday. “The people are free to pass between neighborhoods, but they generally don’t. They’ve grown accustomed to avoiding each other.” She sighed. She sounded sad. “When we found you, it was a special day of celebration. That’s why we were in the Chocolate Crescent.”
“Wait, so you’re telling me that no one here eats choco-chunk strawberry ice cream?” asked Zeke.
The guard driving the carriage snorted.
Princess Sunday shook her head. “I’m afraid that is true. There is such a division between neighborhoods that if the Culinary did not intervene, there would be all-out war.”
She turned to Guster. “People are afraid. There are a lot of citizens of El Elado who want you to be the Exquisite Morsel very badly, Guster. They think that if we feed you to the Yummies, that will satisfy them and they won’t leave ever again. They’ll protect our borders and keep us safe.”
Guster’s stomach sank. They’d come halfway around the world to run away from a monster and ended up right in its den. What luck. Now Yummy was coming to devour Guster.
“Just how many Yummies are there?” asked Guster.
“Thirteen,” said Princess Sunday.
Thirteen? Guster had been fixated on the one that found the farmhouse. This was so much worse.
“How long until the Yummies get here?” asked Mariah.
“A week. Maybe just a few days,” said Princess Sunday. “He was prowling before, tracking you meticulously across the world. Now that he has locked onto your scent, he will come straight here. When Yummy knows what he wants, he can run swiftly.”
Mariah shook her head. “But it doesn’t make sense. We’ve traveled by train and plane. We’ve passed through New York City. We’ve flown over the Atlantic!”
“Yummy found you before. He will find you again. Besides, Caramelo and Pistachero are loyal to the Mayor. They want you to be the Exquisite Morsel, Guster. That’s why they brought you here in the first place. No doubt they left all sorts of clues for Yummy to find. They will have made it easy for him to track you. He’ll get here. I wish I could say that he wouldn’t.”
Guster looked away from the princess. She did seem sincere in her concern for Guster, but he just didn’t like hearing about how half the city wanted him to die. There was no way to look at that with rose-colored glasses.
The carriage rolled down a path lined with red, yellow, and green gumdrops the size of basketballs. The sugar crystals on their gummy surfaces glinted like glass in the sun. Even the breeze was alive with flavor. Guster turned his face to the sun. Though it was cold, the air was crisp and his jacket warm. Under any other circumstances, he would’ve called the day pleasant.
“Hold!” cried the driver.
The yaks slowed. Down the slope, a section of the road was missing. It looked like a large chunk of it had broken off and sunk into the ground, like a giant had smashed his fist into the road from above.
“Sinkholes, My Lady,” said the driver.
Princess Sunday sighed. She turned in her seat and scanned the r
oad. “Find a way around, please.”
“They are growing more frequent,” she said. “And more dangerous. The roads are not the worst of it. There are entire buildings in the city that have disappeared into the ground, leaving families homeless—the ones that escape, that is.”
“But what causes it?” asked Mariah. “Is it an earthquake?”
Princess Sunday shook her head. “No. The ground shakes and trembles, but the destruction happens in a very small area. If it were an earthquake, it would likely affect the entire city.”
“Then what?” asked Guster.
“I am not sure,” said Princess Sunday. “There are many citizens of the city who believe that when the Yummies are satisfied, the destruction will end. That’s why they want an Exquisite Morsel.”
“That sounds like superstition to me,” Mariah scoffed.
The Princess frowned. “Look around you,” she said, turning both hands out toward the creamy landscape. “Isn’t that what you would have called this place before you saw it?”
Mariah opened her mouth to say something, then must have decided against it. She settled back in her chair.
“The tremors started one year ago, about the same time that the Yummy fled the city and went into the wide world. It’s not so unreasonable to believe there is some connection.”
“Correlation is not causation,” Mariah whispered.
Princess Sunday raised one manicured eyebrow, tilting her head and cherry crown ever so slightly. “It is not. But it leads one to wonder,” she said. “And try telling that to the people. They are afraid. They are looking for answers. They listen to the Baconists.”
“The who?” asked Guster.
“The Baconists. They wear the red robes, always with a strip of bacon dangling from their hats. They are the self-appointed scholars in El Elado.”
“We saw them with the Mayor when we arrived at the city,” said Guster. “They smell salty.”
“That is them,” said Princess Sunday. “They have convinced the people that they are the only source of true intelligence and wisdom in El Elado. I think the Baconists have too many of our people fooled.”