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The Cellar Steppes stretched out under an infinite sky. Hot orange grasses as tall as Tam’s waist moved in great oceanic waves around bald spots of cracked cobalt earth yawning wide. The sky blazed deep, bright red, the bloodiest sunset a sailor ever shuddered to see. There were no trees and only a few stones, buttes towering up in spindly blue rock columns like forks stuck in a roast. The wind smelled like good, wholesome potatoes put away against hunger.
“How do we know where Tanaquill’s Cellar ends and another begins? Or where to find the Redcaps’ Rum Cellar? It just goes on and on forever!” Tam scratched the back of her neck in the heat.
Hawthorn looked round. The Steppes lay empty and quiet. He saw nothing but sweet orange grass. But Thomas Rood had said everything Cellar-like would be well hidden. It wouldn’t be anything so obvious as the blue buttes knobbling up toward the cloudless sky, or the cloudless ceiling, if only he could see it right, see it for what it was, and not just the Fairy wallpaper. It just looked so big. It went on forever. And trolls are not quick creatures.
Blunderbuss was looking up at him. She was grinning and waggling her rump, her scrap-yarn mouth a little ragged with running, stray bits of worsted popping free of her lips and catching on her cloak-clasp teeth.
“Go on,” she rumbled. “You’ve still got your pencil, dimwit. And I’m bored with being little. Why are you still living like a seventh-grader who’s late for class? The likes of us don’t walk to school, we ride.”
Hawthorn scrambled his pencil and notebook out of his satchel. He hadn’t thought, he just hadn’t thought. When you spend your whole life as a monkey who uses his hands to do things, it’s a hard job to stop thinking you’re that same clever monkey and switch over to being mostly mountain. He spread out the last page of Inspector Balloon’s paper on the cracked cobalt dirt and wrote in his very best penmanship:
Dear Blunderbuss:
Please be as big and strong and thundery as a rhinoceros so you can carry us. Please also be armored and protected like a rhinoceros because when you are big people will be more afraid of you, and yarn never stopped so much as a pinkie finger. I don’t want anything to happen to you. Remember to have an extra-strength spine because I am much heavier than I used to be.
“Pssst. Put in that I can fly now,” whispered the wombat. “Also that I can be invisible if I want.”
“I don’t know if that’ll work, Buss. I don’t even know if I can make you big. All I’ve done is make lamps and stoves and baseballs come to life so far. Besides, if you were invisible, you’d just use it for biting and you know it.”
“Just the flying then. In Wom only the green parrots can fly and they’re such rotten snobs about it. Next time they dive-bomb my ears I’ll just blast off and roar until they drop dead of little parrot heart attacks. Flying! Me! Yes! Do it!”
Please be able to fly, but only if it is not too hard on physics once you’re a rhinocerwombat and weigh a thousand pounds.
Thank you,
Hawthorn
He crumpled up the paper into a ball and tossed it into the air. Blunderbuss leapt up on her stubby legs and caught it in her mouth like a retriever, chewing ferociously and whooping with her mouth full. Before she landed, the steppe-grass lashed upward like fiery whips and caught her paws, her throat, her tail. The grass wound round and round her in pumpkin-colored
ropes, braided and winding tight. The grasses formed themselves into bright greaves on her legs, a belly-breastplate on the underside of her tummy, a curling orange saddle on her back with long, wheat-sheaf stirrups handing down round her ribs, and a helmet over her head, with grassy nubs of wombat ears and several wonderfully vicious-looking spikes. And as the grass-armor wove itself, it pulled. It pulled at Blunderbuss’s skin, her bones, her insides, even her button eyes, kneading her like dough, stretching her up and out and sideways and diagonally.
“YES!” the wombat roared in a new voice, one that came from a much bigger chest. “I AM THE WOMBAT PRINCESS OF PANDEMONIUM! EAT MY SPIKES!”
Blunderbuss landed with a terrific thud and shook her head like a happy horse. “GIDDYUP, TROLLDOOFUS! ALL MATCHSTICKS AND MUSICAL DEVICES ABOARD THE STUPENDOUS SPLENDID AMAZING FANTASTIC COMBAT WOMBAT!”
“We still don’t know where we’re going!” Hawthorn held up his hands, laughing despite himself. His wombat, the old stuffed thing he’d begged Gwendolyn for, was standing before him, bigger than City Hall, doing a stumpy-footed dance of joy.
“I have an idea about that,” said Tamburlaine. She held up her paintbrush. “Rip up some grass?”
Hawthorn yanked up fistfuls of the wheat.
“Now, Bussie, how about some of those passionfruits you were lobbing at Thom…at Hawthorn’s baseball? Or…maybe just one, now.” Her mind was suddenly filled with the vision of herself crushed beneath a giant passionfruit.
“Well, I’m not angry, really. I can only do passionfruit when I’m angry.” Her armored ears lowered, embarrassed.
“Still can’t turn invisible,” Hawthorn said helpfully, knowing just what would set her steaming. “And you had to sleep in a barn.”
The enormous armored combat wombat bellowed and hacked and fired a passionfruit the size of a small terrier onto the pile of steppe-grass. It bounced a little.
“Can you chew it all up for me? And just…spit it up again when it’s good and mushy?”
“Disgusting!” nodded Blunderbuss approvingly. “I’ll be Tobacconist next, you watch! I’ll call this rule: Barns are the worst and shall all be banished from the Land of Wom.” And she gobbled up the fruit and grass and gnawed it in her yarny mouth till her cheeks bulged as though she were blowing bubblegum. She retched up a great puddle of greenish-orangish-red goop and waggled her tail for praise.
“Perfect!” Tamburlaine scratched the wombat’s stop-sign-size nose. “You and me, we’ll have a show at the Met one day. Still Lives by Matchstick and Wombat.”
“Still life is boring. Never stand still! Jumping bean life!”
“Jumping bean life.” And Tam took a deep breath. She dipped her brush in the drooly muck and began to swipe long, bold strokes into the air. The vomit-paint stayed put, glistening in the breeze. “It’s not really air, see. It’s a wall or a staircase or an onion-box or something,” she explained.
