by James Comins
She looked down at her hands. They were white and bent at the wrists. Her dress was entirely out of shape, rumpled, accommodating all of ...
She was Renard the Weasel.
Hm. Here came the two fake Arctic foxes with the bag.
“I wish you had made me a foxen, too. I don’t care to be a wizzle.”
“Ah, so particular?” Lenna the Fox pulled a straw scarecrow in a blue and green striped ballroom gown out of the bag and threw the bag away. “The drug brings forth the veritable inner self, Madame Weaselle. It is your true form.”
“Rr.”
“Now for la grande ruse,” said the fox. “You will throw your voice, we take the mannequin, no one is the wiser.”
“But--”
“Begin!”
The cat and the fox gripped the stick hands of the dummy and waggled it out from behind the tree.
“Oh THANK you Mr. I-sen-grim. You are so KIND to let me pee,” she said loudly, hiding behind the tree. She peeked around the side, then popped her head back, feeling the thousands of animal eyes searching for her. She hunkered down in a fuzzy little ball and pushed the yucky pad further away with a foot. Her weasel paws were very soft and floppy, and they didn’t quite move right. She went down on all fours, but had to stand up again when she felt the urge to scamper. “NOW we will go meet No-ble the Reindeer.”
Uproarious laughter.
From the far side of the tree, Isengrim snarled and gnashed his teeth. “Noble the Lion will have your nose off for that insult,” he growled, not at her but at the advancing stick-figure in the dress.
Renard risked a peek again and saw that it wasn’t a mannequin but a hologram of her, projected over the dummy as it sat in the cage. No one noticed. Tibert and Lenna stood between the handlebars of the sedan-chair cage and crouched, ready to pick it up. Lenna the Fox turned to the wolf.
“Oh, er, paadon me, suh,” he said in a fake British accent. “Wouldn’t it be, er, fair for you to have a turn carrying the cage, guvvna?”
“Espinarz, take his place for awhile,” said Isengrim to the hedgehog. He blinked and looked closer at the powdery white fox.
“Right sunny day, in’t it, guvvna? Capital,” the fox said to the wolf. “Shimply shmashing, in’t it?”
“What ridiculousness, an Arctic fox of London. This accent seems imprecise. Where are you from, mon ami?”
For a moment, the fox’s black-pointed ears flattened against his head. Then they went back up. “Why, Piccadilly Circus, suh, where my brother-compatriot and I escaped with my wife, er, er, Portia. Portia, dahling, come out come out. Olly olly foxenfree, my dear.”
Renard poked her weasel nose around the tree. It occurred to her to disguise her voice. “Helloo,” she said deeply.
Lenna pursed his lips tight at her for a moment, discreetly, then relaxed them. “Yes, yes, my Tudor rose,” he said. “Good Tom John Icecream heah has h’offered to take over, so that you and myself and our dear, dear chum, er, Cornelius heah may take a constitutional. In’t that dandy?”
Isengrim came forward and sniffed Renard the Girl. “You smell like human,” he said to her, breathing deep huffs through his wet black nose.
“Ooo,” she said in fake contralto. “It’s, um um, because of the circus. Circus weasel. Um, one of the best. Humans all around.” She nodded.
Lenna winked with his long red-fur eyelashes.
“And what farces or tricks do you do?” asked Isengrim.
Ono. What should she say? Back flip? Juggling? What if he asked to see it?
“I yip.” That sounded like something should could do. An urge to yip had been building up in her since she had become a weasel anyway.
“Well,” said Isengrim amiably, “let’s hear it.”
“Yip.”
Isengrim blinked. “Is this all? No ... acrobatics?”
Tibert the cat leaned around the side of the cage. “It has been declared the finest yip in all the West End,” he said. “Surely the discerning ear of as fine a canine as yourself can recognize this, m’lord.”
“Well yes, yes, of course I recognize the timbre, the, eh, exquisite timing, the control of pitch ...” Isengrim waved a paw forward and forward, trying to describe.
“The best uppercrust society would travel from Westminster and Buckingham Palace, even as far afield as Edinborough”--Tibert pronounced it with a cough at the end--“just to hear the yip.”
“May I hear it again?” asked Isengrim to Renard.
“I mustn’t stress my instrument,” she said quietly, looking at the fox, who stifled a smile.
“Of course, excusez-moi, excusez-moi, pardon,” said Isengrim.
“Always a pleasure, guvvna, helpin’ you drag the ole bumbershoo bamboo about, what. But we really must be off, what what. Top of the morning. Chim chim.” Lenna took Renard’s fuzzy hand ...
“Remarkably similar dress you have to what the girl-fox wears. What,” Isengrim said to her, crossing his arms.
“It’s in style,” she replied.
“Mm. Very well. Espinarz--”
The hedgehog pointed quiveringly to the dusty white trail behind the two Arctic foxes. “What is that?” he squeaked.
“Oh, the blasted dandruff. Cor blimey. Nothing you can do. Comes out by the handful, I’m afraid. Dreadful. Feels like, like breadflour in the fur.”
“Ah,” said Isengrim. “I use the witchhazel shampoo, for this very reason.” He scritched his scalp. A few big dandruff flakes fell off. “See? Hardly a snowflake.”
“What excellent advice. I’ll, er, be sure to give it the ole college try. Tally-ho.”
Lenna, Tibert and Renard scampered out through the crowd of animals toward the river. Behind them, the tweetley we-caught-the-fox song resumed.
They crested the hill and hid out in the lee of an overhang of boulders. Lenna spun to Renard and keeled over laughing. “What buffoons. L’imbecile. The Arctic fox of London indeed. Hardly a ruse worth mentioning.” He rolled around on his back laughing, then pulled himself back up and shook his fur, wet dog style, sending flour everywhere. “You play at being the circus weasel with infinite assurance, ma petite belette.”
She curtsied fuzzily. “May I have my name back now?”
“They would of course then notice that you are not la renard avec cheveux rouge, the redhead,” said Tibert. “The parade would disperse, and they would witness what we do. This we cannot have.”
“And what do we do?” Renard asked irritably. She wanted her name back.
“End l’avalanche once and for all,” Tibert answered, rubbing his fur to shake the flour out. “Tell me, mademoiselle. What would you say is the essence of the green growing things? The forces powering them?” asked Tibert.
“Water?” she said.
“Oui. And another?”
“The sun?”
“Oui.” Smiling, Lenna the Fox went to the edge of the greenery under the shadow of the overhanging rock. He pushed aside a cluster of giant singing ferns like curtains to reveal a hilltop overlooking the narrowest curve of the mellow river. Propped up by a stick was a board marked ACME holding back a cluster of boulders. Beside it was a magnificent mahogany crossbow with a slim silver arrow braced on its back.
Renard the Girl came forward. Tibert and Lenna bowed and swept their arms to her.
Below her the river lay helpless, shaded by the shadow of the propped-up rocks. The river was shallow where they would fall into it. Below the shadow of the rocks, the blue of the river streamed past in the ever-increasing sunlight.
The sight of the colors--lush, burning, violent colors, raw and nauseating--made her crazy. Peering up at the laughing sun, she felt a horrible angry gut-feeling. This place was rotten. It made her sick to look at it. Everybody here was so endlessly happy about everything, singing and dancing while the real world drowned in magic. And yet they could be cruel and unfair and uncaring. She thought about how uselessly happy this world was, and she thought about how nice it would be to make it less happy.
>
The sun noticed her cold expression and shined down some extra pyramid rays to warm her up. She could feel it staring down at her. With sweat pooling in her fur, she picked up the smooth block of the crossbow, put her hand on the grip, aimed it at the round jolly lazy sun and stood still beneath it.
It occurred to her that she didn’t need to pull the trigger. There must be other ways to stop the Verdance of Verdandi. Other choices she could make. Her temper was rising with anger and violence.
She found herself squeezing the trigger. Why not? Plot, the silver bolt fired and hit the sun. She turned and kicked out the ACME support stick and felt her fuzzy legs shake as the boulders dammed up the river. Water flooded the flowers and drowned them. Sizzling, the rest of the waterway dried up, becoming dry cracked earth in seconds.
The yellow door with the teal trim slid up out of the ground. It felt like she knocked on it four times.
Chapter Fourteen
Loki’s Side of the Story
or, Why is a Tarantula Like a Teacozy?
As soon as the crossbow slipped out of her hand and hit the ground, things began to Change. The grass and flowers shrank and turned to hard brown dirt-crust. The sun cried as it turned red. Its pyramids fell off, one by one, and its face disappeared until it was a tiny distant red light, like a darkroom light.
The fox unzipped his powdered fur, and a spout of tall spiky orange hair emerged from the foxskin, followed by a thin head and a thin tall man wearing a red tailored tuxedo. He picked up the foxskin by the tail, shook the flour away and put it on his head as a hat. Tibert’s cat-smile widened and widened to his ears, past his ears, opening his mouth up like an unzipped backpack. Indaell stepped out of the cat’s mouth in his gray toga, and the cat fizzled away, phuff.
“No!” she shouted at them.
“Welcome to Deathworld,” Indaell whispered. His neck went long, bringing his face up to hers, hugely. “I told you so.”
“No! This didn’t happen. World world world go back in time.”
She was very tired all of a sudden. The red lightbulb sun was in a different spot in the sky. In the distance some skeleton cows lumbered forlornly over the desert. They hadn’t been there a second ago.
“The world doesn’t turn that way,” smirked Indaell. “Once it Changes, it has always been this way.”
She felt exhausted, shrunken and empty of human juice. She lay down on the brown ground, her fur all wilted under her long poky nose, and curled up around her fuzzy tail.
“Oh, and my dear Renard, take care with that,” the thin red man said to her. “Two year lifespan, weasels.”
“Time go back to where we were!” Renard moaned quickly. She relaxed as the cows disappeared and her bones thawed and her muscles relaxed and she returned to being a young weasel. She stood and hopped in a circle. Life had returned into her sinews, bouncy and exciting and full of possibilities. It must really be terrible to be old and dying. She hoped she’d never feel that way again.
The thin red man watched her with lunatic eyes. He was narrow from head to foot: His arms, peeking out at the wrists from his tuxedo, were knotted with muscle and veins but were impossibly skinny, like an American baseball player’s arms. His pant legs were stylishly narrow, but were baggy anyway, and his hipbones poked out to either side through the fabric under his belt. His neck was long, and he was very tall from head to foot. On top of his skinny bony knick-knock rumpled head, orange-red hair grew straight up like flailing flames.
“Who are you? Why did you do this?” she said to him.
“Loki, at your service.” He wore a sinister not-quite-a-smile. His voice was as narrow as the rest of him. “And I did nothing except provide you the tools required. There are rules after all. Rules you seem to have forgotten.”
“B-but why?”
“Ah, that is refreshing to hear.” He turned away from her and began marching slowly in a circle, examining the deathscape with interest.
“You killed Baldur and Thor and Odin! They were good!” she exclaimed.
“Oh, yes. Very good. Mighty fine.” Loki watched, amused, as a tiny skull flew through the air on bumblebee wings. “I see no reason not to tell you the story.
“Once,” Loki began, “we were friends. Honnur, Odin and I especially. We would go wandering the world, looking for stories. We had a lovely time, until our friendship got ruined. It was a relative of yours that ended that friendship.” He frowned at her with flaring red eyebrows.
“Of mine?”
“An otter,” said Loki.
Renard laughed halfheartedly. “Mr. Loki, I’m not really a wizzle. It’s only a disguise.”
“No. No, you really are a weasel. Every one of you humans has an animal in you. The truth pill I gave you just brought it out. Now shut up while I tell you what happened.”
He waited, tapping his foot, glaring at her.
“An otter, frolicking wretchedly in a river. Us three--Honnur and Odin and me--we’re discussing what to have for dinner. I want meat, Honnur wants fish, and Odin wants a single sip of sacred wine consecrated to himself. But that’s all he ever has anyway, and he carries it with him. So we’re arguing between meat or fish.
“As we argue, this otter dives, pulls up a salmon and lays it out on the shore. So I kill the otter. Honnur takes the salmon, I take the otter. Perfect, right? Meat and fish. We don’t have a fire, but we see there’s a house up ahead with smoke coming out the chimney. We take the food inside and ask the peasants if we can cook over their fire.”
Loki’s enormous fluffy red eyebrows rippled in fury.
“How could I have known they were shapeshifting Fomor?” he screamed, throwing his long fingers outward.
“I don’t know,” said Renard smallly.
“Shut up. This peasant bozo jerk tells us I killed his shapeshifting son. Named Otter. Creative, right? This guy and his two other beefy sons grab us and pin us down--”
“How could they pin you? You’re gods,” she asked.
“Shut up. We have human strength on earth. That’s why we stay in Asgard. So this bulky guy’s just yelling and yelling in our faces, and his face is all bright red, and he holds up this dead otter--” Loki grabbed the foxskin off his head and shook it at her. “And he’s just waving it around like a maniac and says we have to give him enough gold coins to cover it up or he’ll kill us.”
“It isn’t that much gold.”
“Shut up! Not just cover it, but so much that you couldn’t even see it. Every hair. That’s, like, ten layers of coins. And so I say, like, okay, I’ll get you the money, right? But he doesn’t want the gold. He just wants to kill us. But his sons--” Loki paced back and forth, whirling at each side of his pacing line. “His sons are just the greediest little nits, and they take him aside and try to talk him into his own idea. Meanwhile, Odin and Honnur make out like anything’s my fault. My fault! Like it wasn’t Honnur telling me to get him some fish! And I get him what he wants and now it’s my fault? I’m telling you.
“But these two cash-hungry twerps convince their daddy to let me get them the dough. So they untie me and I run off to this guy I know, name of Andvar. He knows I’m coming, so he hides in his cave, but I know all his tricks and flush ‘im out. I hit him until he agrees to give me his gold, and I wrap it up. As I’m leaving he gets mad, like I’m not just doing what I gotta do, right? He says that whoever’s got all this gold is going to be cursed, like they’ll become an ormalaster if they claim the gold. And I’m like, no problem. It’ll be this Fomor guy with the sons who’ll get the curse. So right away I say the gold belongs to him, and when I drag it back to him, he’s the ormalaster.
“So Odin and Honnur and me are all headed back to Asgard, right? Problem solved, right? Forget it. They’re all chewing me out, ganging up on me, saying the whole thing was my fault. I’m defending myself, saying I was the one who got us all free from the beef brothers. But they’re not buying it. And they tell my buddy Thor about it. And he and I were really best buds, but after H
onnur’s done telling him the story he acts like I’m totally, totally untrustworthy. He acts like I killed the damn otter on purpose. Can you believe it? I’m like, come on. It was an accident. But Thor won’t even talk to me.”
The hard brown land broke open beside them in a spray of clods and a skeleton climbed out. After it, another skeleton pushed out of the same grave, then a third. They danced in unison as they walked away across the desert. Indaell did the hula with his arms to unheard music. Loki glared at the angel, then turned back to Renard.
“So I’m mad. I’m real mad. I’m as mad now at Thor as I am at Honnur and Odin. I’m like, I’ll show him. I break into Thor’s house, and his wife’s there, and she’s asleep. So I shave her head, just to teach Thor not to call me untrustworthy.”
“Do you mind giving me my name back?” Renard asked.
“Shut up. I’m not even done with the story. Thor finds out that his wife is all bald and this time he just loses it. I mean, he’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. Screaming and throwing things at me. Heavy things. So I say, hey, hey, cool down. I’ll fix it. I hoof it to Svart Alpha, the dwarven caves, where there’s a master goldsmith, Vivaldi. I say, can you spin hair out of gold? Hair that’ll grow out of Thor’s wife’s head? He says yeah, but how’re you going to pay? I say we’ll hold a contest up in Asgard, you against this other famous dwarf smith, Brock, and the guy that makes the coolest stuff’ll be declared the Goldsmith of Asgard. So we set up the contest. He makes the hair, and to win the contest he also makes a sailboat you can fold up into your pocket and a magic spear that never misses. And I say to myself, I’ve got this in the bag. So I go to see what the other smith, Brock, is doing. But I hadn’t counted on him. This Brock guy, he’s even better than Vivaldi. And, like, I accidentally bet on the contest.”
“What did you bet?”
“Shut up. I bet my head against his. Cause I mean, what’s he going to do, beat enchanted gold that grows like hair? No way. Not gonna happen. But this dwarf Brock, he’s crafty. Sly. He’s like, instead of making useful things that make sense, like boats and spears, he’s just going to try to flatter the gods. He knows that Frey, god of summer, loves horses. So he makes an enchanted mechanical horse that can gallop so fast that it just flies around over the ground like a mosquito, and he’s all like, ‘I know this isn’t as fast or as beautiful as you, Frey, God of Most Joyful Summer,’ and he just flatters him and flatters him ...” Loki spat. “And then he knows Odin’s the wealthiest guy in Asgard. So he makes a gold ring that’s like a gold ring factory, you know? Like, it makes more gold rings. And they make more gold rings. Gold everywhere. And he’s like ooo, Odin ol’ pal, you’re going to be soooo rich now.”