Boots and the Seven Leaguers, Page 2

  Or I could run off into the great, dark New Forest, which lies at the heart of the Kingdom, a place so untrammeled and untampered with, it has more shadows than light.

  But I hadn’t the stomach or the nose or the heart for such places. Besides, my mom and dad would miss me.

  Not to mention my best friend, Pook.

  And my little brother, Magog. Who can be as smart as he is a pain.

  Of course, if Magog ever found out what I’d done, I’d never hear the end of it.

  So I decided just to go home and not say a word to anyone about how utterly stupid I’d been.

  But word in the Kingdom has a way of getting around.

  Someone saw the butterflies and figured out the greenmen had done a trade.

  Or the grass on the riverbank told the lea grass. The lea grass told the meadowsweet. The meadowsweet told the trefoils at wood’s edge, who told the catkins in the marsh. The catkins, of course, are notorious gossips, and they ran all the way up and down the river whispering.

  That’s the way word travels around here.

  No matter how determined I was, news of how stupid I’d been was going to get home before me.

  So, when I arrived under our bridge, there was Magog waiting for me on the doorstoop, hairless and smirking. His glasses reflected my unhappy state back at me.

  I had to tell him the whole thing then. My side of it. So that he’d understand and put his hand in mine and look up at me with his face all shiny and rosy-gold, like he used to do when he was real little.

  It was either that or have him at me all night long with his whiny “Whatcha do, Gog? Whatcha really do?”

  I gave him the quick version first, the slow version after.

  I sounded stupid in both.

  “Boy,” Magog said, “that was dumb.” He doesn’t use the s-word either.

  How could I disagree?

  “Tell me about Mr. Standing Bones again,” he said, and he shivered. “Did he come very far out of the alley? Did you look at him over your left shoulder? Or your right?” Magog loves scary stories. He and his friends sometimes wear black jerkins and trews and play at being undead. They paint bones on their clothes with phosphorescent paint. They make fangs out of wood.

  But then, they’re really young.

  “Were you scared, Gog?” Magog’s little eyes behind the thick glasses were wide and he trembled with make-believe fear.

  So, I told him the whole stupid story again, even though I hated showing myself up for a fool. Brothers do that, you know.

  When I was done, Magog’s eyes turned bright with pleasure.

  Partly because I’d been stupid.

  Partly because his eyes were behind glasses.

  And partly because he had an idea.

  “Since we don’t have the coins for tickets, why don’t we—”

  “What do you mean we, bridge-bound?”

  “I can go if you take me,” he said. Which was true, since technically I’m an adult—I have all my hair. “Mom will let me.” Which was also true. “What Mom says, Dad says, too.” Three out of three. The magic number. “And then I’ll tell you how we can get to hear the band.”

  My little brother may be hairless, but I think sometimes he’s a genius. There’s sidhe blood way back in the family on Mom’s side, though she says that Magog got it all.

  Me—I’m all troll. Big. Strong. Loyal. But not so bright. So, I always listen carefully to my little brother, even when I act like I don’t. It’s a slow way to learn, but I usually get there in the end.

  “Well … all right,” I said to Magog. “It’s a deal.”

  We shook hands. Palm-to-palm is sacred with trolls.

  “We can set up chairs,” Magog said.

  “Set up chairs?” Even to me that sounded dumb. Of course, genius can be a pretty chancy thing and sidhe blood often runs thin.

  “Carry guitars. Haul gear. You know—roadies.” He grinned that big mossy smile of his. “After all we are trolls. Brawn R Us, as the sign on Dad’s shop says. Haulage and Heftage.”

  That time I got it.

  “Brilliant!” I said, and Magog’s grin grew larger.

  “Though we may have to go in disguise,” Magog added. “I mean, we’re not really big-enough trolls yet to do all that carrying.”

  “You mean, you aren’t big enough yet,” I said, flexing muscle at him.

  “I mean you aren’t either,” he said. “Not really. You’ve got new hair and bumps on the arm, but there’s no mass yet.”

  Mass is important for trolls. Lots of it. As Grandpa used to say, “Mass is mastery.” I had to admit that Magog was right, though I didn’t admit it aloud. Even I wasn’t old enough yet for real mass. Troll mass. The bulk between the shoulders and right through the chest. Arms like staves. Thighs like trees. Massive.

  But I did have muscle.

  At least some.

  What I said to Magog was “Unh.” Which could have been “Unh-hunh” or “Unh-unh.” Take your pick.

  “But with a disguise …” Magog added.

  Disguise. That’s not a troll trait.

  But another word for disguise is deceit. And deceit is what pookahs are best at.

  “Pook!” I said.

  “Exactly.” Magog nodded, which made me feel good. Brothers are like that.

  Of course, for that I had to make up with Pook, even if he didn’t deserve it.

  “All right,” I told him. “But I go to find him alone.”

  “He’s your friend,” Magog said. “I’d never come between you guys.” Which meant he knew that Pook and I had had a fight. Old news travels slow but stays around a long time.

  So, I went over to Pook’s house, though of course I couldn’t go there directly. It’s a pookah place, after all, and they tend to move around a lot—one day on your street, the next in an alley, the third somewhere way across the Kingdom. They never say where they’re going, or when. Just up and go.

  As Grandpa used to say of pookahs: “Light fingered and light traveling.”

  But if a pookah is your close friend, you can always find him somehow.

  So, I did what had to be done: I stood on my left foot, put my left arm up in the air, and cried:

  I call you, Pook,

  Earth to air;

  Come out, come out,

  If you dare.

  Of course, he came, with the loud snapping sound of pookah magic. He’s my best friend, after all. He always comes when I call.

  He took my hand and pulled me right through the hazy air and the sizzle of magic, and into his cozy little house. That’s always the surest way to get there.

  Just as well.

  This time his bedroom was overlooking the Great Span, which is way over on the other side of the Kingdom from our bridge. I would have needed real seven-league boots to get there in time, not the plastic ones the hawkers sell at festivals to tourists. The only pair of real seven-leaguers I’d even heard of were in the Kingdom’s museum. Well—they used to be in the museum. They’d been stolen over a year ago, and not even the Queen’s Men could find a clue to where they’d gone.

  “Are we still friends?” Pook asked straightaway, curling up on his bed. That’s his usual opening line with me because he’s always playing tricks. And I’m always having to forgive him.

  It’s a pookah’s nature, of course, to be a trickster, though they are never mean like the greenmen.

  Just annoying.

  “Barely,” I answered. Though truth to tell, I couldn’t even remember what our quarrel had been about.

  He nodded and sat up, his dark eyes full of sparkle.

  Then we spit on our palms and smacked them together.

  In the olden times, my father says, pax was sealed blood-to-blood. But one can’t be too careful nowadays, what with True Humans traipsing back and forth across the bridges without thinking, bringing with them odd and mysterious diseases in their blood or on their hands or in their pockets. Why, the dirty little border towns are chock-full of od
d fevers with names like Leak Ear and Droop Lip and Black Gallus and the Grippes. Even the sidhe catch them. The Queen had a cousin who spent all of last year down with something called the Spiny Pox.

  So, we don’t do blood oaths anymore. But spit is good enough. Spit in the Kingdom is a salve. A fix-it. No one in the Kingdom ever got sick smacking spit-to-spit.

  “What calls you here?” Pook asked, grinning. He’s got a great grin, even for a pookah. And sometimes, when he’s not concentrating, it becomes a dog smile as he morphs into canine shape—dog, jackal, dingo, wolf. He’s got Irish cousins who do the horse/donkey/ass thing. And a great-great-great-uncle—so he says—who was into butterflies and moths. But in his immediate family, it’s all dogs.

  This time, though, he must have been concentrating, because he stayed in human form.

  “Greenkid,” I said. “Close enough for green nose hairs. Only he had none. No hairs. No green.”

  Pook had the grace to look embarrassed for a moment. “You were really that close?”

  “I was really that close,” I said.

  Pook knew I was telling the truth because, unlike pookahs, trolls have a hard time telling a lie. Whenever we try, we turn this awful grey, as if we’d stayed out in the sun much too long. And I was as nice a pink as any troll would like.

  I looked down and added, “Traded.”

  “Trashed?” he asked. He said it quickly, but with the careful tones of a real friend, though by rights he could have been hee-hawing himself into hysterics.

  “Totally,” I said.

  “What did you lose?” he asked. He stared at me as if he could find a missing body part just by looking.

  “A poster.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It was enough.”

  You could see him working that out, faster than a troll could do. He looked up, sly eyed. “Not a poster of … Boots?”

  I nodded. “The whole band,” I said. “The new one, with the color photo.”

  “Could have been a lot worse,” he said, though it didn’t sound as if he really meant it.

  I nodded again. Worse? I couldn’t think how.

  “Could have been a lot worse!” Pook said, pointing to various parts of my body.

  For a minute we were both silent, considering the damage the greenkid could have done.

  Suddenly I remembered. “Magog’s got a plan.”

  He looked surprised. “The hairless one?”

  I nodded.

  “A good plan?”

  “For a troll,” I said with pride in my voice.

  “But it’ll probably need a few special pookah refinements,” Pook said.

  This time I was the one who grinned.

  Trade? Trade?

  Got if made?

  Got a pocket of stuff

  That won’t ever fade.

  —“Trade,” from BRIDGE BOUND

  CHAPTER FOUR

  UNDER THE BRIDGE

  Pook took me by the hand and popped us both back through the dazzling air to my bridge.

  We went in the side door, hoping to avoid my parents and explanations, but my mom’s sidhe blood lets her know certain things, like when Magog and I are trying to sneak around. So she knew the moment Pook and I entered the house.

  “Evening, Gog. Evening, Pook,” Mom said, peering around the door and wiping her hands on her apron.

  Pook looked hangdog at her, because he prided himself on being sneaky and she had caught us without half trying.

  Sensing that, she added, “Stay for supper, Pook. I’ve got leftover amaranth stew—your favorite.”

  Amaranth stew. It’s a troll specialty—thick and strong, without any fancy spices or spells. Just meat, potatoes, plenty of amaranth, and whatever green vegetables are lying around.

  “Plain food for a plain folk,” as Mom likes to say.

  Pook’s eyes lit up, and he accepted with a tongue loll. If it has to do with food, Pook’s there.

  “Ten minutes to warm it up,” Mom said. “We’ve already eaten. Of course.” She glared at me, her face saying what she wouldn’t in front of Pook: I was late.

  Again.

  We nodded, Pook because amaranth stew really is his favorite and me because adventures always make me hungry. Mr. Bones had given me a stomach that felt like it had a giant-sized hole in it.

  Ten minutes later Pook wolfed down his dinner, face in the bowl like any dog, much to my mother’s dismay.

  “Pook,” she said, “have you no manners?”

  “None at all,” he said, grinning up at her.

  But since he’d cleaned his plate—the green stuff, too (something neither Magog nor I can manage)—she softened, her face going all gooey and her eyes a deep brown.

  “That’s all right. You can’t help being a pookah.”

  Then she turned to me. “Why don’t you eat everything on your plate, like Pook does? Think of the poor starving hobgoblins.”

  “Name three,” I replied.

  I was sent to my room for being smart mouthed.

  Pook grinned at Mom, pulled his forelock, and ran to catch up with me.

  “You never learn,” he said, shaking his head so that his dog ears flopped in front of his mouth.

  “That’s not true,” I answered. “I do learn. Just slowly.”

  It’s not actually bad being sent to my room. My half of the room.

  All my stuff is there.

  And I was finished eating, anyway.

  We played Boots’s tunes on my megalodion. The windup is hard on CDs, but electricity is always chancy in the Kingdom, as power comes from inside the Folk, not along wires to plugs.

  We began with the latest—TrollGate—then went back to the first, Bridge Bound.

  I sang along, with my voice cracking on the high notes.

  Pook sang, too, his voice sounding like the baying of a pack of hounds.

  Dad had gotten me the megalodion last winter, in a trade with some mound folk whose barrow he’d helped enlarge. But the CDs I’d gotten on my own, earning enough by working after school with Dad in the body shop, and all summer as well. The CDs—and the magic cards—were where all my hard-earned summer coins had gone.

  I have twenty-seven CDs already, all cataloged. My favorites—besides Boots, of course—are Richard Thompson, Wolfstone, Boiled in Lead, and Ivo Papasov’s Bulgarian Wedding Band. All of it’s the kind of music that’s called rock-and-reel on the Outside, but in the Kingdom we call it rock-and-troll.

  Pook favors Loreena McKennitt, June Tabor, and Shania Twain. But pookahs are like that.

  As for Magog—he isn’t old enough to have his own taste. He listens to whatever I play, and seems to like it. I’m working hard to teach him well.

  Pook lay across the covers of my bed, half human, half dingo, his long pink tongue lolling from his mouth to show his pleasure. But he shifted to all human when we began talking about Magog’s plan, because a dog’s mouth has trouble forming words.

  “The kid,” I said, my head nodding in Magog’s direction. He was fast asleep in his green pajamas, the ones with the pattern of knotwork running up the sides. “The kid thinks we should go be roadies. You know: Haulage and Heftage. Carrying drum cases, amps, and guitars for the band. Setting up chairs. Brawn stuff.”

  “Brawn is good,” said Pook. He got a faraway look in his eyes, which usually meant he was thinking about something tricksy. “But convincing the band to use us when there are bigger and older guys around to be roadies will take a bit of finagling.”

  Finagling. It’s an Out word that’s perfect for what pookahs do, and they long ago adopted it as their own. It means to get something by twisty means. By tricksy means. By pookah means.

  “So how are we going to finagle?” I asked. The word sat funny in my mouth. But then we trolls are a straightforward folk.

  No lies.

  And no tricks.

  “Follow the Pook’s lead,” Pook said with a smile. “Have I ever led you wrong?”

  I didn’t reply. W
e both knew the answer to that one.

  Pook spent the night, popping home for his pj’s in a single swift motion, because anything Magog or I had would have been way too big for him.

  Then we stayed up half the night talking.

  Funny how the less you do, the more you have to talk about.

  Magog was already snoring, that slow pip-pip-pip sound he makes, when Pook and I at last went silent.

  Then, one after the other, we fell straight into dreams.

  It didn’t matter how late we went to sleep, we were up early in the morning.

  Well before Mom and Dad woke up, we were already dressed, downriver—through a hole in the rowan fence that I made with my fist and Pook sewed back up with a spell—and under Rhymer’s Bridge.

  We were so early that we were there long before the three trucks carrying the band’s equipment arrived.

  And we were there long, long before those without tickets had come to stand in a snaking line, copper jangling in their pockets as sweet as the bells on the Queen’s bridle.

  And we were there long, long, long before the Queen’s Men—in their grass green uniforms with gold braid and buttons, their wands in green leather holsters—came riding in to bring order to the crowds.

  We were there when dawn drew her red crayon across the sky.

  When the sky blushed a soft rose.

  When the dew still hung like pearls on the tips of leaves.

  Early.

  Rhymer’s Bridge is an old-style span of grey stones set together without mortar. On either side of the arch the grass is green as the Queen’s dress, all year round. Under the bridge, though, the banks are scuffed and brown.

  If you want to know who lives in the Kingdom, you read the tracks under Rhymer’s. At least that’s what the ancient wisdom says. The old magic is supposedly still there, in the hoofprints and footprints under the bridge.

  Boots sings about that:

  trail the long road home,

  Pack and pail, and then we’re gone.

  Who can find us, under span?

  Just read the prints and know the man.

  But that particular tracking wisdom’s been lost. Or at least put away where hardly anyone can figure it out now, except for a few old mossmen who learned their trade before humans and the Fey started crossing the borders.