by Dale Peck
Then, without preamble, the box exploded all around Susan. She felt the strangest sensation, as if she were a washcloth being twisted out to dry. Down was up and up was down, inside was outside, outside inside. And then there was just … bouncing.
Susan opened her eyes, not sure when she’d squeezed them shut. The bright blue sky was overhead, the bright green grass beneath. Both stretched out to infinity. And she was…
Bouncing.
Not like a ball, or something rubber and buoyant. Instead she felt like the ground threw her up and away each time she got close. The motion was neither gentle nor smooth, like a trampoline. It felt more like she was being chewed like gum. She rolled and careened up and down and felt a little nautious. But, as far as she could tell, she was okay.
A flash of red caught her eye. A voice that sounded much more stable than any she could muster said, “Are you okay, Susan?”
“M-M-Marie-Antoinette?”
“It’s me, Susan? Is anything broken?”
“I—I don’t think so.” It was hard to concentrate in such constant, stomach-churning motion. “Wh-what’s happening?”
“The Island of the Past allows only one member of each species on its surface. You know that, Susan.”
Susan didn’t like the macaw’s tone, which sounded condescending to her ears.
“I’m n-n-not exactly in a p-p-position to think c-c-clearly right now!”
The bird chuckled quietly. “I beg your pardon, Susan. But this is Pierre Marin’s doing, after all—his injunction, and his presence, presumably, that is causing you to bounce. If it makes you feel better, I would guess that he is experiencing what you are at this very moment.”
Susan imagined the pirate wig bouncing off Pierre Marin’s nearly hairless skull, and managed a small laugh. “Well, what are we going to—oof!—to do now?”
A tone of baffled awe came into the macaw’s voice. “I, um, I…”
Susan tried to twist in Marie-Antoinette’s direction. It was hard: every time she turned her face, her air-flung body twisted in another direction.
“M-M-Marie-Antoinette?”
Susan could’ve sworn she heard a gulp. “I, um, I think the answer to your question is approaching, Susan.”
Susan twisted about. At first all she saw were the low green hills of the Island of the Past. Then, hovering above the hills, she saw the vortex she had presumably just spun out of, stretching endlessly up into the sky. For a moment she thought the vortex was swooping down on her like a tornado, but then she bounced again and an enormous dark shape on the horizon flashed before her eyes. There was something familiar about it, but before she could focus she bounced again, was jerked in another direction. She twisted, caught another glimpse. It looked like a mountain at first—a mountain with legs. A walking mountain—walking toward her.
“Wh-what is that?” Susan stuttered.
“It—it would appear to be a…a horse. A giant wooden horse.”
“A horse?” Susan flailed about, trying to catch another glimpse. “Do you mean the Trojan Horse? The one Charles saw?”
But the macaw didn’t say anything. She seemed too stunned to speak.
All the while the huge dark shadow came closer, flickering in and out of Susan’s vision as she was buffeted about. It seemed to move slowly, yet its enormous legs covered ground quickly. Susan could see the space between them, more like the sky beneath skyscrapers. All at once the huge beast, which was almost impossible to conceive of as a horse, was beside her. Over her. Enveloping her in its shadow. Its torso was like the bottom of an ocean liner floating above her.
“Marie-Antoinette!”
The macaw’s voice came faintly from above; the bird had apparently taken wing. “I think it’s okay, Susan.” But the macaw sounded anything but calm.
Now a dark shape was descending toward her like a cloud. The horse’s head, Susan saw as she tried desperately to bounce out of its way. A hole was opening in the cloud—its mouth, which was at least as big as that of Frejo the whale. Susan had been terrified when she first climbed into the whale’s mouth, but it was nothing like this. The horse’s head seemed to be as big as Frejo, and it was but the tiniest part of its enormous, enormous body.
A smell of dry wood filled her nostrils. The mouth was closing around her. The air turned soft and brown, like the air in the radio, and there was a tearing sound as the teeth—each as big as a tombstone—ripped through the ground beneath her. And then all at once the bouncing stopped. Susan landed on her bum, hard.
“Ouch!”
The word disappeared into the emptiness inside the horse’s head, wafting farther and farther and farther into the great beast’s innards. Susan had never heard something sound so empty in her life.
“Hello?”
Again, the swallowing silence. A silence so palpable that there seemed to be an intelligence behind it—a mind that could not, or would not, speak to her. Then Susan heard a faint voice.
“Susan?”
“Marie-Antoinette!” Susan called. She clambered to her feet. The inside of the horse, or at least its head, was a three-dimensional grid of interlocking beams, so that she was enclosed within a network of open-walled cubes, like the biggest jungle gym in the world. “I—I’m in the horse!”
“I know that,” Marie-Antoinette called. “I couldn’t get in in time.”
From high above came two bright patches of light. The eyes, Susan thought.
“Go for the eyes!” she yelled. “I’ll meet you there!”
She felt motion now, had to grab on to a beam to keep from falling. She realized the horse must be raising its head. There was a slight creaking of wooden joints, the nostril-tingling smell of ground sawdust. Susan’s stomach fluttered as she felt herself rise up and up.
“Susan!” Marie-Antoinette’s voice sounded even fainter. “It’s moving! It’s moving very quickly!”
As if in response, Susan felt a lurching. She knew what that lurching was: the horse had resumed its journey across the plain.
“Go for the eyes!” Susan called again.
“Hurry!” Scrambling, Susan ascended the lattice of beams inside the horse’s enormous head, making for the glowing portals far above her. Even though the beams looked as though they were arranged in a symmetrical grid, they were actually quite crooked, each beam canting off at a strange angle, some going on for many feet, while others, unexpectedly, stopped after a few inches. The great beast lurched unevenly as it lumbered across the Island of the Past, making the climb that much more difficult, and several times during her climb toward the eyehole Susan looked up to find herself turned around and facing the wrong direction.
“Marie-Antoinette?” she called. But only a forlorn, deserted silence greeted her. As she looked around the gigantic cranial cavity, the phrase “food for thought” popped into her head again. Before, she had used the words to refer to Marie-Antoinette’s speech about extinction, but now she found herself wondering if she had become some kind of food for the Trojan Horse. Well, if that were the case, he would find she didn’t go down as smoothly as a drink of water. And, gritting her teeth, Susan turned herself around yet again, and kept climbing.
TWENTY-TWO
In the Tower
Charles’s fingers danced over the moon and star, and silent as a gliding hawk, the carpet slipped into the Tower of Babel. It tilted as it descended, and Charles and Iacob had to lean back to keep from falling over. Oddly, though, the mirror books, standing up at the front of the carpet, remained perfectly still, as if they were held in position by a force greater than gravity. With their amulets facing forward and glowing brightly, the books seemed to have turned their backs on the boys, as if they no longer deigned to acknowledge them.
“We have to be careful,” Charles said now. “The Wanderer told me the mirror books have desires of their own. We need to listen to them so we know where to go, but that’s all we should listen to them for.”
The carpet reached the bottom of the staircase and le
veled off. A corridor stretched ahead, pitched slightly downhill. The light from the amulets pulsed ahead for a good twenty or thirty feet, but beyond that was only darkness.
Iacob peered into the dark corridor. “Ears are not like eyes, Charles. You can’t simply close them. And this listening”—Iacob waved a hand over his book—“is a much more subtle kind of hearing.”
“I’m just saying we should be careful, that’s all. If one of us feels the other is going too far, we should… do something.”
Iacob turned to Charles and stared at him strangely after he said these words. Glancing down, Charles saw that his hand was on the hilt of the knife Handa had given him when he’d left the Wendat. He snatched it away.
Iacob waited to speak till Charles’s eyes met his. “I understand,” he said. “We should go.”
Charles tapped the stars again, nudging the carpet forward. As they inched down the corridor, Charles was reminded of the long slow beginning of a fun house ride, before the first ghoul jumps out from a corner and makes you scream. He looked around for the edge of a door from which someone might surprise them, but the corridor seemed devoid of any marking. He let his fingers trail over the wall closest to him. It wasn’t covered by the shiny tiles that adorned the exterior of the tower, but beneath a thin layer of surface grit the mud bricks were surprisingly hard.
They came to the first corner. Charles eased the carpet to a stop. He and Iacob both looked back at the barely discernible gray patch that marked the exit, then, without speaking, turned forward again. Charles tapped the right arrows and the carpet made a slight scraping noise around the sharp turn, and then they were in the next length of corridor.
Iacob turned to Charles. “Do you think every turn will be like that?” he whispered. “Offering only one direction?”
Charles glanced at the walls again, looking for some kind of sign, although he kind of doubted he’d find anything like the floor guide at a department store. The walls were as blank as ever, but something came to his mind.
“These… ziggurats,” he said, hesitant to use the word, because he knew the mirror book had put it in his head, “are made of mud bricks, which aren’t very strong. So you have to use, like, a ton of them to hold up the building, unlike the steel beams in a skyscraper.” Charles stopped when he remembered that Iacob would have no idea what a skyscraper was—although he could tell from the expression on the Greenlander’s face that the translation charm had put a rather interesting picture in his head. “Anyway, what I’m saying is, this building is basically a mountain into which a few tunnels have been dug. So chances are there’s only one way down. All we have to do is follow it.”
“Like a mine!” Iacob said.
“You have mines in Greenland?”
“No. But in my favorite story, Prince Reinulfson must descend into the mines of Karnaka to defeat the troll army and rescue the golden sword.”
“I don’t know that story,” Charles said, somewhat distractedly, because they were coming to another corner.
“Oh, it’s a good one!” Iacob said, with almost too much excitement. “Prince Reinulfson’s mother, Queen Katalina, has sent her son to live with a shepherd in the mountains because a witch came to her castle disguised as a milkmaid and told her that her husband, Prince Reinulfson’s father—King Reinulf—was going to kill and eat their child to make sure he never tried to usurp his throne.”
“Yeah, sure,” Charles said, piloting the carpet around the corner, which was tighter than the last one. “Maybe you should tell me some other—”
Charles broke off when he caught a glimpse of Iacob’s face. He realized his companion wasn’t telling the story just to be amusing, but to distract himself from the shadowy depths. The dry desert air was gone now, replaced by a mildewy basement smell, and the mirror books practically hummed with their eagerness to reach their destination. The lights emitted by the books had sharpened, cutting the air like two flashlight beams, and Iacob stared at the golden lines with a half-hypnotized expression on his face.
“Er, you should tell me some other details,” Charles said now. “I mean, go on with your story.”
Iacob nodded convulsively.
“Right. So, um, Queen Katalina didn’t believe the witch at first. But when her first son was born the king took it away when it was seven days old, and ate it. This happened with five more sons, until the queen became with child for the seventh time, and on this occasion she made arrangements to spirit her son away as soon as it was born. She gave him to a trusted maid who took him to her father’s cottage deep in the countryside, and told her husband that the baby had died.
“Many years passed. Prince Reinulfson came to young manhood, at which point the shepherd told him the secret of his identity. The prince wanted to go immediately to the castle to kill his father and rescue his mother, but by then the queen had borne six daughters, all of whom the king had eaten, and he had grown too powerful for a mere mortal to confront. The shepherd told the prince that he would need a magic weapon. He said that the trolls of Karnaka lived deep underground in their mines, where they guarded an enormous treasure, the most important item of which was a golden sword that was said to cut through falseness, evil, greed, and cowardice. Prince Reinulfson descended to the very bottom of the cave. The trolls attacked him with their sword, but it was powerless against him because he was pure of heart. He defeated the trolls, and then he used the sword to cut a path straight to his father’s castle. There he found his father in the act of dropping his mother’s seventh daughter down his throat. With one stroke, he sliced the evil king in half and liberated the six brothers and seven sisters imprisoned in his stomach. Each brother married a sister, and together they founded a new kingdom of peace and prosperity for all.”
Iacob had spoken slowly and forcefully, as if to draw out his story, and part of Charles had wondered if he wasn’t actually making it up as he went along. But he was too busy trying to maneuver the carpet through the increasingly cramped corridor to say anything, and besides, Iacob’s voice had been soothing, and had allowed Charles to free his mind and concentrate on their path. But now they had come to another corner, and this time it was clear the carpet wasn’t going to make the turn: the path ahead was too narrow.
Charles turned to Iacob. “We’re gonna have to walk the rest of the way.”
The two boys climbed off the carpet. Hesitantly, each took a book. Charles half expected the book to resist his touch but, though it vibrated wildly, it seemed, if anything, eager to come. He was careful to keep the bright beam focused away from his body, and Iacob’s as well. Charles handled his book gingerly, and he could see Iacob did also. The vibration it gave off set his fingers tingling, and strange, half-comprehended images flooded his head. For a minute it seemed to him that Murray appeared before his eyes—five-year-old Murray, his face still stippled with chicken pox—but just as suddenly he disappeared. Charles had to fight the urge to stroke the glowing lines of the amulet on his book, as if, like Aladdin’s lamp, it would grant him three wishes.
Instead, pressing on the moon, Charles lowered the carpet to the floor. He thought of rolling it up, but since there was no place to hide it in these bare corridors, he figured it was least likely to be seen flat on the ground. Iacob, meanwhile, stared at the ceiling as if contemplating the enormity of weight atop them. A shudder shook his thin frame, and he clutched the book to his chest, as if for warmth, or protection.
“I wish that there was a golden sword at the end of our journey,” he said now, “so that with one stroke we could cut a doorway back to our home.”
“So do I,” Charles said. “So do I.”
The two boys set off down the hallway in silence. But after they’d gone a few steps, Charles said, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.” Iacob seemed relieved to hear a voice break the oppressive silence.
“Did all those princes really marry their sisters? In your story?”
Iacob blinked in surprise, then laughed sl
ightly. “Of course. It is not uncommon where I come from. Sometimes a brother and sister are the only two people of marrying age—”
“Whoa, that’s enough,” Charles said, holding up a hand.
“There are some things I don’t need to know just yet.” And, under his breath, he added, “Gross.”
They journeyed on. Soon the corridor became so narrow the two boys had to walk single file. Charles took the lead, even though he felt more exposed to danger. The Wanderer of Days had assigned him this task, after all. Although he was glad Iacob was with him, he knew his companion couldn’t really help him. The Greenland boy’s face was determined but also confused, and Charles knew that for whatever reason, Iacob wasn’t as capable as Charles was of sorting out the confusing thoughts and feelings the mirror book put in your head. And so, clutching the book securely to his chest with one hand and placing the other on the hilt of his knife, Charles led the two boys forward.
The beam from the mirror book stretched ahead in the darkness. The walls were positively damp now, and Charles could feel their slick wetness against one shoulder or the other if he wobbled just a little bit. Step after step the boys marched onwards. Without anything to measure their progress it felt as though they’d gone hundreds, thousands of feet underground. Charles knew that was just imagination running away with him, but still. Where would this corridor end?
Suddenly Charles saw a glint of light ahead. A shapeless golden glow that pulsed slightly, like a heartbeat. Charles didn’t know if another person was ahead of them, and he wasn’t sure if he should keep going, or stop, or turn and run. He wanted to ask Iacob what he thought, but if it was another person up there he didn’t want to warn him of their approach. And so he marched on, staring fixedly at the pulsating light. It seemed to contract as Charles got closer, and the pulsing switched to a steady, slight bounce. Charles couldn’t stop staring at it, couldn’t stop himself from placing one foot in front of the other and marching toward it, even though he was increasingly certain that the light was bouncing because it was being held by another person far ahead of him, rising up and down in tempo with that person’s footsteps as he or she walked toward Charles. Charles knew it was reckless to simply walk up to this person, but he couldn’t stop himself. The book in his arms (in both arms, because he’d let go of his knife to hold on to it more securely) was practically humming with its desire to go forward. It seemed to pull him forward like a dog straining at its leash. Faster, faster, it said to Charles. Hurry.