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But he was not so lucky—Tamburlaine crouched next to the creature’s huge, scribbled-over leg, brandishing delicate, decorated daggers in each hand, plucked from the dagger-tree she had drawn herself so long ago. The wind rustled its boughs behind her and the clinking of knives, one against the other, filled the forest air. She had stabbed him, twice, in the hollow of his knee, and was quite ready to go again, her knees bent, knives raised, wooden teeth bared. The giant brandished his fist to knock her flat—and glass exploded against his face. Thomas whipped his head round to see Blunderbuss, rainbow mud staining her rainbow yarn, in the
traditional Wom Fighting Stance, her bone-armored rump in the air, front legs splayed out before her, mouth gaping open in a tremendous snarl, spitting whiskey bottles, passionfruits, and horseshoes into the baseball’s flabby cheeks.
“I’m not afraid of you!” the wombat yelled. “I saw you get stuck in the washing machine once. Round and round you went! Who’s afraid of something that can’t defeat a rinse cycle?”
The funniest thing happened. The tattooed giant blushed. They were all so shocked to see such a thing on his awful face that for a moment they hadn’t the first idea what he was doing. Red spread over his sharp, starving cheekbones and his great bald head. He was embarrassed. It was gone in a second, but they’d all seen it. He looked so wretched, so confused, like a walrus suddenly deposited at the perfume counter of a department store.
“I used to be somebody else,” he whispered.
“Me too,” said Tom Thorn.
He could almost remember it now. A house with a well for a chimney. Bridges. Church bells. The ever-present danger of pirates. Something about a frog…or a toad. Something amphibian. “Me too. But if you try to eat any of us again, I still have my pencil and my notebook and I shall not hesitate at all to write you into a baseball quick as you can say third strike. Or worse! A golf ball. Or a little marble I promise to instantly lose down a storm drain.”
He drew his pencil out of his satchel and held it before him like a sword. Its tip was broken, and he had no notion of whether or not such magic would work here, or whether he could turn alive things back into unalive things at all, but the main thing was to look as though he meant it. He did hope his new troll eyes were fierce and steely and all the things they ought to be. “Now, Mr. Sunday, which we’ll call you until you come round to your senses again and can tell us it’s Harold or whatever it is, you can come with us if you like—”
But it would seem the wild man did not like. He hissed at them, showing his golden fangs and the depths of his golden throat, and leapt away through the eyeball and firework trees, which boomed in his wake.
The Sunday dinner tree rose above them into the night sky, its porkcones glistening caramely brown, its cornbread branches oozing butter and honey and mushed peas, its plum pie blossoms dripping crust onto the little camp of four below. They had managed a fire of fallen firework branches. It blazed green, then blue, then purple, then green again, shooting up showers of sparks whenever it felt particularly festive. Tamburlaine sat a little farther back than her friends, so as not to scorch. They all lay back, very pleased with themselves indeed, as you might be if you frightened off a grizzly thing and followed that up with supper from a tree you’d invented yourself. The stars overhead glittered in birthday colors, unfamiliar and familiar all at once. Tam stroked Scratch’s bell, which had got dented somewhere along the way. He sang softly, his crank turning:
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There’s a land that’s fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night…
“This is Fairyland, isn’t it, Tam?”
“I think so, Tom.”
“Well, it’s not Sydney, you dimwits,” yawned Blunderbuss. Bits of cornbread and peas made a mustache over her muzzle. “My favorite dimwits!” she corrected hurriedly. “Best dimwits in all the world.”
Tamburlaine stared up into the Sunday dinner tree with the lazy, gentle thoughtfulness one straps on after a good meal. “It’s my mother’s recipe. Roast pork with mint and thyme. My mouth watered while I painted it. I think she’d laugh till she fell over to see her Sunday roast growing out of the ground. I wonder what it looks like in Autumn? It ought to have a Latin name. All plants have Latin names. Animals, too. It’s the magic language of humans. Nothing’s really official, really real, unless you can call it to lunch in Latin. Porcinus delicia Ameliae, I should think. That sounds mostly Latin.”
Something moved in the long meadows outside the Painted Forest. Something vast and heavy and curious. None of our merry band could hear it yet. But it had scented them, and loped hungrily across the grass under the stars.
Tamburlaine rolled over onto her stomach and kicked her feet up, waggling them back and forth. Thomas looked up through the shadowy baked-apple leaves at the great dinner plate of the moon—dinner plate and bread saucer, for here in this place not one moon but two rolled through the sky, one enormous and one small.
“You look fantastic,” Tamburlaine giggled, the firelight kicking up glints in her wooden eyes.
“Do I?” said Tom Thorn softly, suddenly shy. “I’m so big. I never thought I could be so big. I’m starting to remember things, too. I feel all over pins and needles, like my heart’s been squashed asleep since I was born.”
“Me too,” nodded Tamburlaine excitedly. “I remember hands carving me out of a big slab of wood. One set of hands were red, and the other set were yellow. The fingers swelled up to do the long parts of me, like legs and arms, and shrunk up for the delicate bits. My hair, my eyes, my fingernails. Spriggans can do that, I think. Get bigger or smaller. Maybe I was made by spriggans!”
Tom Thorn picked at the soft napkin-grass below their wonderful tree. He still couldn’t remember his parents—his real parents. His troll parents. When he thought of his mother and father, Nicholas and Gwendolyn’s faces still rose in his head like balloons. Scratch’s dented bell was turned toward them, listening intently. But now and again it began to droop, falling toward the strange dreams of gramophones, where no one needs cranks and all records are smooth and scratchless as skin. Blunderbuss, being nocturnal, was quite busily awake, snuffling about in the roots of the Sunday dinner tree for cornbread crumbs.
“Top grub,” the wombat snorted. “We’ll live here now. Yes. Much better. Much best.”
And all the while, through the wild, unsown fields beyond the trees, something crept closer, closer, holding its breath so as not to startle its prey too soon.
Tom Thorn’s body could hardly keep awake—but his heart was running circles round his bones. The troll in his heart was now free. The troll inside was the troll outside—and it hadn’t the foggiest what to do with itself.
One question burned through him like a wish.
“Tam—oh, Tam! What are we going to do tomorrow? Everything’s changed, everything in the whole world and the world, too. There’s no school, no after school, no houses or bookshelves or apartments. Where will we go? What will we do?”
But Tamburlaine was already asleep, Scratch leaned up against her shoulders like an exhausted puppy. Tom poked the last of the fire into sizzling pieces with one of Tam’s daggers. He settled back against a log shaped like a snare drum, fallen from a marching band tree growing healthy and full of green tubas next to the Sunday dinner tree. What a strange girl his friend was! Strange enough when he thought she’d only remembered this place, dimly, the way he now remembered Apartment #7. But she’d made it up, all of it, in her head, and painted it alive. Being in the forest was like walking and talking and sleeping and eating in her mind.
