The Boy Who Lost Fairyland Read online

  “Nobody can take this sort of thing three minutes after waking up with nothing to hold down his belly! Not even flapjacks! Nobody! Where did you get your tea and sandwiches? Tell me! Then we can talk about how a city gets up and walks and a King mopes around like he’s got too much homework and what in the whole wretched world mossfire is.”

  We ought not to judge him. It was Thomas’s first day as the owner of a troll-stomach. They are not like our polite, well-mannered human stomachs. A troll-stomach is hungry the way you and I are awake. It would not be itself if it were not hankering after a leg of panther or a silo of strawberry ice cream. A troll-stomach cannot be ignored or put off or bargained with. It cannot have just a little of something. A troll-stomach must swallow everything whole—and a troll-heart is no different.

  “You oughtn’t talk to a King like that, I don’t think…” said Tamburlaine. Whatever Crunchcrab said, she had read a great many plays in which King thundered and walloped and roared when they were displeased. Kings, she had always thought, were like thunderstorms. They came and went with a lot of fuss but there wasn’t much difference between one and another. And every once in a while they tore your roof off and electrocuted your cat.

  “It’s all right,” King Crunchcrab shrugged. “Everybody does. The chief virtue of a King is how long he can stand being yelled at by several people at once. Leastwise the way I do it.”

  “There’s a tea-tray tree.” Tamburlaine pointed off down a little woodland path. Between a wombat, a troll, and a Fetch, they’d stripped all the reachable branches of the Sunday dinner tree bare. She smiled a little. She could not help being proud of having put so many useful things in their forest.

  Tom Thorn roused himself—so much more self than there ever had been before—and went scouting for the tree. Blunderbuss trundled after him.

  “In the Land of Wom,” she offered cheerfully, “we don’t bother with Kings and Queens.”

  “Then who makes the rules?”

  “The Tobacconist, of course. We all write down rules we like. Look Both Ways Before Crossing a Wombat Bigger Than You. If You Find Mangoes, Make a Whistle Through Your Teeth So We All Can Have Some, Too. All Wombats Are Created Equal, Except for Gregory. No Wombat Shall Be Enslaved, Left Behind, Abandoned, or Unloved. Not Even Gregory. Kangaroos Must Pay a Five-Percent Tax on All Goods and Services on Account of Being Kangaroos. That sort of thing. We take them all to the Tobacconist (whose name is Tugboat). She sits on her porch and chews them up good. Then she spits them at the window of her shop and whatever sticks to the wall across the way is law. It’s very fair, and no one has to wipe Parliament off their shoes at the end of the day. She wears a powdered wig when she’s at her chewing, so it’s all nice and official. Wom is the envy of the democratic universe!”

  Tom could hardly hear over the stampede of his stomach. His hunger pounded on his head with a terrible anger. How dare he make it wait five whole minutes between waking and breakfast? His stomach began to send wild and dreadful thoughts to his brain. The tea-tray tree was so far! Why, there was a perfectly good wombat right there!

  “Oh! Hey! You put that thought away, sweetheart,” huffed Blunderbuss. “I’m hungry, too. Hungry all the time. I’ve pondered plenty what troll tastes like. And gramophone. And Fetch. Braise or bake, hm? Kabob? Souffle? I can’t help it and I’m not ashamed! But I’m two-thirds wool. I’d stick in you like bubblegum. Also I still own you. You’ll learn how to drive your belly soon enough. No snacking on innocent marsupials while you have your lessons.”

  “Aren’t wombats herbivorous?” Tom frowned into the woods.

  “I’ll herbivore your left foot if we don’t find that breakfast bush quick,” Blunderbuss growled.

  Finally, Tom saw the tea-tray tree. It jingled with tinkling coffee cups and teapots and jam jars and milk jugs and sugar bowls dangling from silverware branches. Clotted cream sparkled like dew on shining silver tea trays stretching to reach the sun. But it was only a tea-tray tree; it had no tea at all for him, no food, only china and silver and glass. The cups hung dry, the jam jars gleamed as clean as washing day. But there, there! All round the tablecloth-roots sprouted soft, thick mushrooms, mushrooms that looked quite a bit like mustard, watercress, and sliced crocodile sandwiches. He fell to, ripping them up with both hands, searching for more, his stomach quieting at last, but grumpily, and under protest.

  “We’ve only been here a moment and we’re in trouble, Buss,” he said when, for that brief, wonderful time after he has just eaten, a troll is satisfied. “I’m afraid. A King is much worse than a teacher or a principal. He just wants to use us up like ballpoint ink. What should I know about un-Kinging somebody? And…and…it’s no better here. What if I’m still the strange one, even when I’m home?” His throat got thick. “This is supposed to be my home.”

  “Everybody’s strange,” Blunderbuss said, pawing the sandwich-mushrooms with her paws. “Everybody’s strange everywhere. Most of the trick of being a social animal is pretending you’re not. But who do you fool? Nobody worth talking to.”

  When the wombat and her troll returned to the Sunday dinner camp, Crunchcrab was already partway through a long, hearty complaint. He groused like a grandpa, and the morning was filled with birdsong and the slurping of the King’s tea. A long thread dangled from his cup. The tag read: The Elephant’s Fiery Heart.

  “Oh, it was fine at first! After the Marquess took her snooze, the Stoat of Arms came to see me down on the shores of the Barleybroom. Now, the Stoat of Arms is just about the most disagreeable creature ever born. I don’t like to use words like varmint, but there it is. There’s no talking to it. Them. That chatterbox zoo on eight legs. Imagine a unicorn and a little human girl juggling a mess of silver stars and black cockerels and sunflowers between them with a mean little Fairy on top like a cherry on a sundae, all riding on a palanquin drawn by two giant Stoats called Gloriana and Rex. They all talk at the same time and you can’t pry one off the other with a crowbar because underneath? They’re all the same animal! Even the sunflowers. Reasonably sure the royal robes are all ermined up because some poor sod couldn’t stand the Stoat and skinned one a few eons back. Can’t say I blame him. Fairyland wanted me, the Stoat bleated, and did itself a stupid little dance which I guess is a necessary part of coronating. And the unicorn was wearing her hat. All big and beautiful and black-like, it was. And when the hat saw me it shivered and swallowed itself up and turned into the claws you see clamped on my dumb skull here and now. There were only about five Fairies left back then. The others ran when they heard the Stoat of Arms coming for them. Guess I was too old to be fast. Won’t tell you about the coronation. That’s private. Between a man, or a lady, and his nation. So what did I get in exchange for my ferry? Rubbish with two helpings of ish, is what! A palace full of dresses and tiaras and angry, hurt people who had a beef with someone I didn’t know to shout at. And the Stoat of Arms kept at me. Gloriana said: You gotta learn to talk better! Talk nice like the lords and ladies in the pictures! Rex whacked me with his tail. A King’s verbs agree in number with their nouns! A King doesn’t end his sentences in prepositions! Those miserable black chickens clucked all over me like they were so high and fine. A King pronounces all his consonants CRISPLY and CLEANLY, not just the ones he likes best! And never says ‘ain’t’! The little girl in her ugly little dress would rap my finger with the silver stars: Now walk like you’re in a play about being a King! Now, you don’t bow to that man, even if he has a lovely coat on; he bows to you! And that rotten unicorn, who I hate more than hangovers, wouldn’t hardly let me sneeze the way I liked: No more drinking whistle-gin, it’s fine claret from the Infinite Cellar from now on! And all the while doing stupid little stoat-dances every time it wanted to say something, because Stoats talk mostly by dancing because they are the worst. I did it all. Because Fairyland asked me to, and curse me but I do love her. But then, then, they came back. We came back. Everyone. The Fairies. I don’t know what happened and I don’t want to. They came
vomiting in like a rainbow that wouldn’t shut up. Wings everywhere. And all of a sudden, I was Kinging wrong. Were there any wars? Any vanished counties? Anything left of the Marquess’s meddling? No? No! But I, I had bungled it. The Seelies and Unseelies screeched at me day and night. It wasn’t Fairyland anymore, they hollered. It was RiffRaffLand, RabbleLand, AnyOldSlobLand, EverybodyLand. Back to the Old Ways, they cried. Did I even remember the Old Ways? Well, I did, and they were trash. Nothing but stepping on necks and laughing while we did it, gobbling up the world and leaving nothing for anybody without wings. An empire! That’s what they wanted. Just the way it was when they were in charge and no one could talk back. You’d think they’d remember what happened the last time, on account of what happened last time was they all got turned into rakes and shovels and typewriters and pitchforks for about a hundred years, but no, no, give them a Proper King and a Proper Kingdom or they’d hang me from Groangyre Tower. Well, I ain’t brave. Never said I was. The Stoat of Arms did a stupid little dance of dread and defeat and I shuffled along, too. I did my best. I commanded that Criminal and Revolutionary be made Official Professions all over Fairyland. I thought somebody would come and knock it all down. But it keeps going on and I want to go back to being a man on a boat, please. I’m a bad Fairy. I thought I was a decent King. Middling, anyway. Average. But I’m a bad Fairy. They all say so. And every morning they send an assassin round at eight o’clock sharp in case I want to give it all up. His name is Simon. We get on quite well. Has a sense of humor, my Simon. He poisons my jam in alphabetical order. Arsenic on Monday, belladonna on Tuesday, cyanide on Wednesday…I haven’t had jam in five years.”

  “But your majesty,” Tom Thorn said, trying to be gentle, as the old Fairy clearly needed to get a lot off his chest, “what can we possibly do to help? We’ve only just got here. We don’t even know which way the sun comes up.”

  “Any way it likes, I expect,” shrugged Crunchcrab. “But of course you don’t know! You haven’t got a crowbar for my crown in your back pocket. I know that. I’m not addled, boy. Nobody knows. Except the Spinster. And she won’t tell. Mostly because we can’t find her to ask. But you’ll find her for me, won’t you? There’s a good boy. And girl. And gramophone. And whatever the yarn-pile is.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  UNHAPPY FEET

  In Which Thomas and Tamburlaine Are Introduced to Pandemonium, Fitted for New Shoes, and Meet a Gang of Changelings, While a Walrus Gets a Nasty Cough

  Any city looks a bit like its mother and father. If you peer closely at New York, you will see that the old girl has Dutch ears and English eyes. London cannot hide her Roman nose—and Rome has a way of laughing that is awfully Greek. This is why you may see streets in one city with just the same name as the streets in another, and even cities with identical names, like two Joshuas or Amys in the same class. To be a city is to belong to a family, each taking after another, remembering fondly their old grandfathers and great-aunts, all the way back to the very first hut and fire and lonely cave with horses painted on it that had no name at all. In one city, if you are very clever and sneaky, you can spy out the whole world it belongs to, just as you can spy out a few thousand years of singing and dancing and making bread and putting babies to bed in any single person’s face.

  I tell you this so that, when I say Pandemonium looked just like Fairyland, you will know what I mean. (Traditionally, all cities are politely referred to as “she,” though the actual situation is somewhat more complicated. As we should not like to look up a city’s underskirts, we shall hew to tradition.) Pandemonium is the Capital of Fairyland, as a large Wyverary once informed us. But more than that, she is a miniature, moving, hyperactive copy of Fairyland itself, made and sewn and stitched and tied all of cloth, of wool and silk, of yarn and ribbon, of batting and bunting.

  And she is rather prone to indigestion. You really cannot see it unless you are a roc or a pterodactyl or some other beast who does not need much air and can fly horribly high. Let us pretend we are pterodactyls! Look! There, in the northwest quarter, you can see all the crinoline apartments and customhouses and concert halls are orange and red and chocolatey brown, just as in the north and west of Fairyland the Autumn Provinces are forever colored in October’s fire. In the southern part of the city, clusters of houses with bombazine chimneys make a stumpy, smoking forest that looks so very like Skaldtown. You must squint your eyes in the Seresong District, for nothing lives there that is not covered in organza origami flowers and birds and butterflies, in every shade of pink, of green, of violet, of gold, just as the Springtime Parish will scald your eyes with happy greens if you do not wear your glasses. (Only beware, the butterflies are quite vicious, being an ancient nation of warriors without mercy.)

  From up here, we can see the Barleybroom River flowing in a circle around Pandemonium. Can you believe it was once plain, blue water? Such strange days! Now it is tea again, afloat with sugar lumps and lemon peels. Wyverns and dragons and griffins and hippogriffs and Fairies dive and flutter down into the city like great bright feathery bombs, scattering to Pandemonium’s four labyrinthine districts: Idlelily, Seresong, Hallowgrum, and Mallowmead. Though folk come and go, are coming and going even now, even as we come, something like ten thousand souls live in the satin and brocade and calico towers, walk the muslin alleys and cashmere boulevards, and cheer when the black lace streetlamps flare up with white oilskin lanterns at dusk. The highest point is Groangyre Tower, home of the Royal Inventors’ Society; the lowest is Janglynow Flats. Some common imports include: grain, wishing fish, bicycle parts, children, sandwiches, brandywine, silver bullets—and Changelings.

  All this Tom and Tam and Blunderbuss and Scratch saw as they left the Painted Forest—though not from an angle quite so wonderful as ours. Let us fold away our pterodactyl wings and hide them for a later evening—I promise we will strap them on again! No, Tom and Tam and Blunderbuss and Scratch saw Pandemonium from her streets, quite dwarfed by her shining, fuzzy, ropy buildings soaring up to tufted, ice-cream-colored cupolas in the sunshine. They walked very quietly, in the company of the King, for though they had grown up in Chicago, a very grand place indeed, Chicago does have rather fewer centaurs than Pandemonium, and no turquoise rhinoceroses at all. Blunderbuss capered happily through the avenues, giddy to find herself a scrap-yarn wombat in a scrap-yarn city.

  It is very boring to follow people all the way from interesting place to interesting place. They do take so terribly long to do it, and we are important people with busy eyes, so I shall hurry our motley band along until they arrive where King Crunchcrab intended: Bespoke Espadrille’s Shoe Imporium. The Imporium was a sweet little shop nestled in fashionable Little Buyan, in the Hallowgrum Quarter. It had just the sort of littleness and sweetness that whispers: I am very expensive and exclusive; in fact, there is only room for yourself and Mr. Espadrille, for we do not want any gawkers peeking in at the wonders which are yours alone. It whispers such things, but everyone in Pandemonium ignores it and piles into the Imporium till the windows are full of arms and stocking feet and the cash register quits in a huff.

  But not today. Today only a few boys and girls in rags lag around outside the shop—though rags in Pandemonium are quite fine, cut sneakily with delinquent scissors from the back corners of buildings and dug up from the glimmering streets, leaving potholes like groundhog dens. The kids stood in front of the window, passing a bit of green Fairy flame from hand to hand, making it get up and dance in the shape of a ballerina, a witch, a gondolier, a toad. They giggled. One looked a little like Max, Tom Thorn thought. Taller, perhaps.

  “Hullo,” said Tom. He put out his hand to shake. “What’s your name?”

  The oldest girl flicked her eyes from him to the King. She curtseyed a few times, awkwardly, like a broken doll.

  “You shouldn’t be talking to us, Mr. Friendly,” the boy who looked like Max hissed, snapping his hand shut and extinguishing the green flame. “We’re Changelings. You don’t want to be seen getting
chummy with the wrong sort. Which is us.” He curtseyed, too. But both of them were watching Tamburlaine as they spoke, as though they weren’t talking to Tom at all. He felt quite invisible.

  The boy who looked like Max started to say something else, but he was interrupted by a great lumpy shape in the doorway of Bespoke Espadrille’s Shoe Imporium—that of Mr. Bespoke Espadrille himself. He was rather more walrus than man, with great long tusks carved with scrimshaw and long, shining quills of golden hair on his brown muzzle. But despite his great, drooping head, he had a man’s thick arms and stout legs, and over his chest—which might have been walrus or human, for both can grow a majestic belly if they try hard and work at it every day—he wore a cuirass all of shoe buckles. The buckles shone, perfectly polished, silver, brass, ivory, gold, bronze, tin. Below this ballooned bright hot-green pantaloons, stuffed into the least interesting shoes. Mr. Bespoke Espadrille, the greatest cobbler in a hundred Fairylands, wore the plainest shoes imaginable. They weren’t Fairy-like at all! Tom could not really hide his disappointment. His father might have worn such shoes and not counted himself the least bit unusual at the office. Yet even Tamburlaine could tell they were completely, breathlessly perfect. Their black leather gleamed softer than clouds, their laces braided from the hair of some exquisite animal that had never known a late fee at the library. Their heels looked as though they could stomp out injustice, no matter how great, and tucked into the top of each one gleamed a single blue-silver sixpence piece like a tiny mirror.

  Mr. Espadrille let out a bubbling, grumbling, booming mutter of a grunt. The boys and girls by the window had not moved. They didn’t look twice at Tom—what’s another troll in Pandemonium? But their eyes had hit on Tamburlaine like darts finding home. Bespoke had her in his sight, too, and did not let her go. Tam blushed, a mahogany color moving across her dark, carved cheeks, and Tom saw in a moment that he was not strange in this place, not really. But she was. He put his arm around her. His troll-arm. His strong arm. His mother’s jewelry tinkled comfortingly against her wooden spine.