There were a lot of cuckoos, and when after a few seconds it became clear they weren’t after us, Sandy let out a little laugh and started walking through the crowd. Reliably, every time she lifted a foot, the brick she’d just been stepping on was yanked away. After a few more steps there were no bricks in reach, and she had to step on rough dirt. The cuckoos thinned, flying or climbing away. The last few cuckoos all had heavy loads wrapped in one wing, and one actually had two wings full and climbed a wall just with its hind legs, moving from one window and broken gap to another, gripping the edges with those big X feet.
The very last cuckoo yanked two bricks right out from under the road builder, packed them into its mouth with two more, and climbed away.
Oh, my. I looked at Sandy. She looked at me. We both spread our hands helplessly. “It’s over,” she told the round and now denuded little fellow. The cuckoos had even pulled off his covering of bricks, baring the coat of spines underneath.
The unfortunate road builder began to uncurl. Little black eyes looked up to meet Sandy’s, and now that the brick dust had been rubbed off his beige cheeks, we could see them bloom into a huge blush. He waved both pairs of arms desperately, shouting, “Don’t look! Don’t look!”
We turned our heads dutifully, and listened to the faint crunching of heavy clawed feet padding over to the edge of the road. Scraping and grinding and clonking noises followed.
And all of a sudden, it hit me.
I sat up straight on Sandy’s shoulder and bopped my fist into my other hand. “Oh, my. No wonder that was so weird. Cog said it himself! Or herself. I don’t think we got that worked out. But what Cog said is that the Greater House Cuckoos are from over There! Is that right, Mister Builder Person?”
I spun around on Sandy’s shoulder. The four-armed gentleman curled forward a little, but he was already finishing patting mortar onto his short, flat-ended snout. Now he was covered in blocks of stone taken out of the fancy ruined house next to us.
Patting his legs with his lower arms and his lower arms with his upper arms to make sure all the blocks were in place, he nodded. “Supposedly, but I swear they spend all their time flying back and forth just to steal our roads.”
Sandy slowly turned around, and that let me spin around to sit on her shoulder properly. I gave her a firm nod and clap of my hands. “There you are! Problem solved. I’ve always heard that everyone over There are thieves and hunters. Really very rude. Please don’t let them give you the wrong impression of Cul-De-Sac.”
Sandy gave me another one of those pauses, but fortunately decided to be gracious. “I’ll try not to. So, what do we do next, personal adviser?”
I blinked. Oh, delightful, a proper blink! I was getting used to this button eye after all! What did it look like from the outside? I had to find a mirror.
I had to keep my mind on track. My head filled so easily with distracting thoughts, now that I had glasses! “Mister… can we have your name, good Sir?”
“Charybdis,” the local grumped, picking up the fallen bowl and putting it back on its pedestal.
“Mister Charybdis, Sir, can you give us directions to the nearest historian?”
He hunched over a little more, not looking back at us. Well, I could understand his irritability, what with having a street stolen out from under his posterior. Still, his answer was decidedly unhelpful. “I can’t direct you to anything until the guide bats return.”
I looked back at Sandy. “Then the logical remaining path is to explore Cul-De-Sac itself. I’m certain we’ll find it much nicer than our first impression suggested.”
Mister Charybdis chimed in with another grunt. “That’ll be easy. Now that you’re in, Cul-De-Sac will draw you to the center. The trick is getting out again.”
Chapter Five
We left the road builder tearing down a house and sorting stones. I had to wonder if he was nearsighted and hadn’t noticed that Sandy was human. Perhaps I should not have assumed that everyone Here was as polite as I was used to?
Sandy set off down the street, with me tucked into her elbow again. It was quite a street, with marble temples and multistory houses complete with turrets crammed into place against badly smashed white plaster-and-wood cubes.
I pointed. “There!”
“I see it,” agreed Sandy.
A gaping hole cut all the way through the marble temple. On the other side of the next street another hole cut through a peak-roofed theater. I knew it was a theater, because with the inside exposed we could see the stage and the seating. The building behind it sported another hole, and so on, a miniature street heading right toward the center of town. Charybdis hadn’t been kidding!
Sandy had just stepped across the pile of rubble into the theater when we heard a loud creak. I grabbed her sleeve, but didn’t need to. She leaped forward, sprinting through the building while behind us wooden beams and stone blocks crashed into heaps. The collapse set off the building behind it, and by the time we emerged onto the next street we stood in front of a ruined mess the House Cuckoos could have carried away in nets.
Across the street, the house with a hole in it fell in on itself the same way.
Looking up at Sandy, I shrugged. “I suppose we take the long way!”
So, we wandered. Cul-De-Sac was a maze, with streets all of different lengths, turning this way and that or branching unexpectedly.
After three streets of this, Sandy lifted her face and sniffed twice before asking, “Do you smell food?”
I twisted my head around. Nothing. However, “No, Your Highness, but I don’t have a nose, and my sense of smell is terrible. I’m unlikely to smell anything until we’re right on top of it.”
“Well, I smell pastry, and it smells delicious, and I am starving.” She took a few deep breaths to express her longing, bobbing me up and down.
I considered this information. I had a suspicion and a near certainty. I relayed the second. “If you find the food, it seems to me that you’ll find people. I suggest you follow that smell!”
She did. We rounded another corner, and Cul-De-Sac changed. Only a couple of buildings on this street were ruined. Most were clean, with intact windows and even narrow alleys between them. I saw a face peek down at us from behind a second-floor window. We could come back here if necessary.
At the next intersection, there was no need to follow Sandy’s nose. We could see the town center from where we stood.
The road builders had been hard at work here. The streets we had just walked were neat and even, but the wide circle at the center of town had been laid out in spirals of different colored cobbles, with blue and red and white and yellow curling in toward a picture of a compass.
We drifted, dragged by Sandy’s nose toward… exactly what I expected! Flops sat on a bench surrounded by barrels and boxes, corn cob pipe held at the pipe end in his mouth and the cob end in his hand. His long ears twitched when he saw Sandy, but he maintained his composure like the canny old vendor he was. Although really, any fool could tell that Sandy would come to him, because she was already on her way.
She let out a sigh as she tottered up to the display, her eyes fluttering almost shut. “Is that… that smells like everything! I smell apple pie, and chocolate cake, and croissants or donuts or something, and corned beef, cheese, and…”
Flops took his pipe out of his mouth and nodded. “Yup. And more besides.”
Sandy opened her eyes wide, staring at Flops in longing. She opened her mouth to speak, stopped, and her expression changed suddenly to worry. Lifting me up, she whispered, “I don’t even know what you use as money. How do I get food?”
I snorted a laugh. Oh, my. Was I absorbing Sandy’s traits? Interesting idea. “From Flops? Stand within arm’s reach.”
As Sandy stared at me with thoughtful curiosity, a marionette walked up and tapped her on the hip. “Excuse me, Miss—AAAH! Your Highness!” He yelped and got down on his knees when Sandy looked down at him.
Flops tilted his head, one ear d
raping down over his shoulder and the strap of his overalls. Dark eyes squinted at Sandy. “Can’t be, she just—” He stopped himself, stuck his pipe in his mouth, and sucked until his body went nearly spherical, then let it out in a rush. “Another human!”
“Your Highness!” clanked the tinker on the far side of the square.
“Your Highness! Your Highness! Your Highness!” twittered a gang of messenger pigeons, bouncing up in front of her.
Sandy squeezed me tighter, taking a half step back, and asked me in a hush, “I’ve been meaning to ask. Why do you all think I’m royalty?”
I gave her a huge grin. This was a fun question. “Because humans generally are. I imagine you can’t all be princesses back in Elsewhere, but over Here you’re special. The throne has been vacant for quite some time, so you must be our new ruler.”
A rapping sound made me look around. Next to the star symbol in the center of the plaza, a clothling sat on a high chair next to a podium with a book on it. Smacking her pencil on the wooden stand, she shouted over, “Incorrect! Princess Charity passed through Cul-De-Sac earlier this morning. She had the crown, which makes her the princess.”
There was no point in arguing that Sandy was clearly a much better princess. Titles didn’t matter. I knew who my hero was, so I gave Sandy an encouraging pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. You’ll turn out to be a great witch or warrior or sage or inventor or something. Princess is merely the most common option. You’ve already proven your power.”
Flops scratched his scraggly head with the stem of his pipe. “I thought she were Princess Charity. You see a human girl with yellow hair carrying a clothling around, you don’t figger you’ll see a second one the same day. I was fixing to ask where my wagon got off to.”
The marionette kneeling in front of her looked up adoringly and asked, “Then what is your name, Your Not Highness?” He could stare up at us all he liked. He was the fanciest marionette I’d ever seen, fine painted wood with a red and white checkered costume, a long nose, glittery black eyes, and red spots painted on his cheeks. It was too crazy a day for my heart to glow pink for more than an instant, but he was nice to look at.
I’d heard Sandy laugh, but this was the first time I saw her look happy and optimistic. She gave a little bow. “Call me Sandy. I’m pleased to meet all of you.”
The marionette leaped to his feet, dragged up by the little strings on his wrists and feet. My, my, was he fancy. Dashing toward the clothling on the chair, he called out, “One human, Kittums, name of—”
“I heard her, Mushy, I heard her!” The clothling waggled her pencil at him and gave him a warm, lingering smile. Ah, well. I was too numb to have really gone googly over him anyway, and they deserved each other. She had shiny pink fur, was stuffed nice and fat in a feline shape, and her eyes shifted as she turned like, well, cat’s eyes. An unexpectedly crude paper hat sat pointily atop her head.
The pencil pointed straight at me. “And your name?”
I wriggled in Sandy’s arm, climbing up to stand on her forearm and hold onto her shoulder. “Heartfelt, originally from the Endless Picnic.”
Kittums tapped the wooden podium twice as she thought, then started writing in her book. “I’ll put down Sandy, human, Mysterious Hero. Heartfelt, clothling, Sidekick.”
Sandy shook her head, and a chuckle made her voice stutter as she agreed, “I guess that’s us.”
“You!” one of the messenger pigeons chirped suddenly. He ran across the plaza, flapping his wings wildly, and met one of those lantern-carrying bats just as it fluttered down and dropped a token in a bowl just like the one we’d seen coming into town. As the token landed in the bowl the pigeon arrived to pick the token up in his beak and hand it back to the bat. “The Princess must know about this immediately! Take me to the road to the palace!”
“I need that bat!” Flops yelled, shaking his fist at the messenger pigeon. He wasn’t the only one. The plaza lit up with cries of “No!” and “Hey!” just as it had with homages to Sandy a minute ago.
They were all too late. The pigeon hopped down, pulled his rolling wheel off a nearby wall, and raced off in it down a street, pedaling as fast as he could and with the bat leading his way.
Everyone groaned. Everyone but me, Sandy, the Mushy, and Kittums, at least.
Kittums rapped the podium with her pencil again. “Back to work! Princess Charity dislikes dilly-dally!”
Work? Mushy marched over the opposite end of the plaza, and with the help of the tinker pried up a tile. Ah, they were rearranging the mosaic, and had just started. They’d gotten as far as a yellow triangular point, and that’s it. Kittums kept glancing between Mushy’s progress and a drawing on her podium, of a circle with a smiling face drawn on it and a crown on top.
Sandy carried me over to the podium, grinning now. “No, Charity is a gets-things-done person.”
“She certainly is,” agreed Mushy, her tone and body stiff. Too stiff, like someone trying to put a bad memory behind her.
I saw the fire again, and Noble’s face, ash grey and ember orange, but still his face…
Sandy didn’t notice any of this, her jaw working in an odd motion that… ah. She was scratching her teeth together! “So this means I’m not catching up to Charity today?”
Flops was apparently still part of this conversation, because he tapped his pipe on his knee and pursed his mouth sourly before answering, “It means ain’t no one getting out of here tonight. Somebody must of dumped a pile of chips. Bats’re all flyin’ em all over the city, and nobody’s going nowhere ’til they’re done.”
Pushing my own bad memories aside, I patted Sandy’s shoulder, and sat down on her forearm again. “I believe I have figured out the peculiar curse of Cul-De-Sac. Only the guide bats know the way in and out. Anyone else who tries to leave will get lost and end up here.”
Flops nodded resignedly, and stuck his pipe back in his mouth. It didn’t stop him from talking around the pipe. “Yep. We’re all lost, but we’re all lost together. ’Til morning, anyway. By then, I figger the bats’ll be back in order.”
“Does this happen to you a lot?” Sandy asked him.
He scowled. That was a plain answer all by itself. “Most times I come through here. Usually works out, cause there’s always someone else passin’ through who wants food. No luck this time. Tinkers hardly eat nothin’. I slipped the Princess a pie during all the bowin’. Threw the messengers some biscuits, but they ain’t finished em yet.” He gave me a stare, his dark eyes beady in his mass of rough grey fur. “They’d better be mighty hungry at the Picnic, or I don’t know how I’ll get rid of all this food.”
Sandy lifted me up in both hands, clasping me against her shoulder and hugging me. Her hand patted my back as she took over answering Flops. “The Endless Picnic kind of ended, but there’s a guy living next door, made all of twigs and tree stumps—Lumber Jack? Do you know him?”
“Yep.”
“I think he’ll take all the food you can give him, this time.”
Flops was silent for a moment. I couldn’t see him, looking back over Sandy’s shoulder. Her huge, warm arms gave good hugs. I would think about them instead of the fire. Was it always this comfortable to belong to a human? Was Sandy exceptional, or was I particularly suited to the role? Perhaps all clothlings felt this way, given a chance. We were all waiting for a human to pick us up and make us their sidekick.
Eventually, Flops had more to say. It probably had only been a few seconds. “Well, I figger you’re stuck here for the night, which means you’ll need to stay in the inn over yonder, and that means they’ll need extra food to feed ya, since I’m bettin’ humans have a heroic appetite also wise. You just go introduce yourself, and tell em I’ll be by in a few with a gift basket or two to make sure you’re fed.”
“Thanks, Mister… Flops? I’ll do that.” Sandy spun around, and I got a brief view of Flops rummaging in his wagon before Sandy pulled me off her shoulder, holding me up in front of her face. Pitching her
voice low, she confided, “I’m sure he’s pulling a fast one on me somehow, but I’m so hungry I don’t care.”
I squinted my plastic eye, trying to look sly and thoughtful, even though this one was obvious. “He’s pulling a fast one, but not on you. The poor innkeeper had better have two empty pantries to hold all the food that’s about to be delivered.”
I twisted Sandy’s grip to look at the inn as Sandy stepped up to the door. It was hard to identify. Like most of the buildings in Cul-De-Sac it looked crumbling and dark. It had windows, but they were cracked and the metal latticework mostly disguised the glass. Above the door hung a circular wooden sign so grey with dust and grime that the emblem couldn’t be made out.
The heavy wooden door stood ajar, and a tarnished silver bell on a chain hung next to it. The place looked awfully bundlish, and sure enough, as soon as Sandy reached for the chain, the door opened wider and a bundliss leaned out.
“Can I help you, my sweet human?” she asked, her voice dripping with friendliness.
Sandy stared, transfixed. The door opened wider, and a bundler peeked out over the bundliss’s shoulder. Sandy retreated a step, and leaned away further.
I could hardly blame her. They put Threadbare back at the picnic to shame. She’d worn a tiny little sequined eye mask over a multi-ply wrapped scarf. This bundliss’s mask was white ceramic with scarlet swirls that almost hid the scowling mouth. Those did nothing to disguise the mask’s pointy little devil horns. The bundler’s mask was even worse, a huge brown leather thing like a raven’s beak with glass lenses over the eyes and straps to fasten it onto his head. Of course, we couldn’t see how they fastened. The pair both wore plain brown cloaks with the hoods pulled up, and the bundliss’s red and black silk dress had a collar that went all the way up to disappear under her mask. Her lumpy shape and the three visible layers of skirts suggested more dresses worn under the first, not to mention the baggy white bloomers and purple and black striped tights. The bundler wore a silver-embroidered pale blue waistcoat over a cream sweater under which peeked out a black tie and white shirt. I couldn’t see his pants, but I knew he’d be wearing more than one pair, tucked into his boots. He wore clawed metal gauntlets, which weren’t half as threatening as her elegant and skintight black velvet gloves.
A Rag Doll's Guide to Here and There Page 4