The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (Fairyland 4)

THE CRUNCHING OF THE CRAB

In Which Tom Thorn Stuffs His Stomach Most Satisfactorily and Hears a Great Deal Concerning Current Events in Fairyland

“Can’t you just…not be King anymore? Quit? Quitting’s called abdicating when a King does it. Can’t you abdicate?” Tamburlaine’s tears were quite dry now that they were discussing things she’d read about in newspapers. She looked at the King of Fairyland and all his nations with sharp, pointed interest.

“Oh, well, I never thought of that, did I, girlie? Just holler out NOT KING NO MORE at breakfast and put my feet up? OLLY OLLY OXEN FREE? What a good job I have a scholar like you to advise me.”

“You don’t have to be rude.”

“But I like to be rude,” Crunchcrab pouted. “Don’t you?”

“Do I!” crowed Blunderbuss. She scratched one ear with her back paw. Crunchcrab ignored her. “I suppose where you come from a man can just up and decide he’s not in the mood for Kinging. Meet a nice girl and skive off to the tropics. It don’t work that way here, my duckhearts. Once they’ve got you, you can’t get free without leaving your wings at the door, if you get me. Fairy countries mate for life. Once you’ve won her heart, Fairyland is the truest girl you’ll ever know. She’ll never leave you till she buries you, and that’s the truth. See, when you’re King of Fairyland, it’s more like a marriage than a political system. Queens, too. She…she chooses you. A crown’s a hungry beast. She chooses you and you hafta dance with the realm what brung you. And good gravy, the dancing’s good—for a while! But it always ends cockeyed. Revolution, assassination, accident, slow poisoning, take your pick. Elderly and abed is nice work if you can get it but it makes a dull story so the world won’t have it. No, Fairyland loves me, Pan knows why. I’ve tried to let her down nice. Had a herald read out a writ in the square and everything. I, KING CC NUMBER ONE, AM HIGH-TAILING IT

ON THE TOUTE-SUITE SO BYE BYE NOW. No one paid me any mind. And the little things of a marriage, the little daily things you don’t think much on before you’re married, they didn’t stop either. I still had to put roses in the vase in the third washroom on the fourth floor of the Briary to make the Summer come. I still had to make sure the moonflowers outside my second bedroom opened every night, had to watch every one bloom with my own eyes, or else there’d be drought in Weepwallow. Do you know, if I don’t have the milk of a dun cow, liegelime cordial, and a short stack of magnanimillet flapjacks every morning for breakfast, the Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern will wake from her thousand-year slumber? No one else can do what I do. Not even for a day. And then comes Parliament, which I wouldn’t wish on a dishrag. I do not like my life, and that’s the bald truth. Being a King is too peculiar for the likes of me, and I don’t sleep half as well as I did on my ferry, under the open stars. I was happy as a ferryman, back and forth over the same patch of water, back and forth every day. Good and clean and simple. Predictable. No voles, Great or Average. I’m good at carrying folk, you know. I was good at that.” King Crunchcrab the First sniffled miserably. “I don’t want to be King anymore and I don’t want to die, and I want you to sleuth out how to do the one without the other. Seems you’re good at wiggling in between the rules.”

“No,” said Tom Thorn sharply. “No, no, no. Nope. Absolutely not. Breakfast. Not you. Not this. Breakfast. Yesterday I had a bedroom and a clean pair of pants and a geometry quiz and cold beef sandwiches in the icebox. Today it’s Kings and walking cities and apparently I turn into a rock when I fall asleep but at least I’m a pretty rock, I guess? And you have to eat flapjacks to keep a vole asleep.”

“A Greatvole,” the King corrected. “She’s got obsidian teeth and a pelt of knives and she breathes mossfire. So I eat me flapjacks, yes I do, thanks plenty.”

“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.”