o’ this,” the chief said, at last, his face grim and his tone gruff and commanding. He tossed the tiny baseball to Ethan again. This time Ethan just managed to hold on to it as it came stinging into his palm. “Let’s go talk ta that crazy old clam.”
THEY TROOPED ACROSS the meadow, past the gleaming white ballpark, and down to the beach. Here in the Summerlands, in the Birchwood, there was no ruined hotel, no collapsed dance hall or pier. There was just the long dark stretch of muddy sand, with the ghostly trees on one side of it and the endless dark green water stretching away on the other. And, in the middle of it all, that big grey log of ancient driftwood, spiky and half-buried, on which he and his father had once sat and shared a lunch of chicken sandwiches and hot chicken soup from the thermos. Was it the same log, Ethan wondered? Could something really exist in two different worlds at the same time?
“That bristly old chunk of wood is the gall, some say,” Cutbelly told him.” The place where the worlds are jointed fast.”
They seemed in fact to be headed right towards it.
“But I thought you said the Tree was invisible, and untouchable,” Ethan said. “Immaterial.”
“Can you see love? Can you touch it?”
“Well,” Ethan said, hoping it was not a trick question. “No, love is invisible and untouchable, too.”
“And when your pap puts on that big Roosters jersey of his, and sits there watching you in the bleachers with the smile never leaving his face? And slaps palms with you after a game even though you struck out four times looking?”
“Huh,” Ethan said.
“Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.”
They had reached the driftwood log. At a gesture from Cinquefoil a dozen or more ferishers got down on their knees and began, slowly and with a strange tenderness, to dig in the sand underneath it. They were digging separately, but all of them stayed in the area shadowed by the upraised, snaggled roots of the log. They slipped their small hands into the sand with a hiss and then brought them out, cupped, with a soft, sucking pop. The sand they removed in this way they drizzled through their fingers, writing intricate squiggles on the smooth surface of the beach. The driblets of sand made daisies and cloverleaves and suns. At last one of the ferishers cried out, pointing at the pattern her wet handful of sand had formed, like a pair of crossed lightning bolts. The other diggers gathered around her, then, and with vigour, they began to dig all together at the spot. Before long they had dug a hole that was three times taller than any of them, and twice as wide. Then there was another cry, followed by what sounded to Ethan like a loud, rude belch. Everyone laughed, and the diggers came clambering up out of the hole.
The last three struggled out under the shared burden of the largest clam that Ethan had ever seen. It was easily as big as a large watermelon, and looked even bigger in the ferishers’ small arms as they staggered up onto the beach with it. Its shell was lumpy and rugged as broken concrete. The rippled lip dripped with green water and some kind of brown slime. The ferishers set it down on the beach and then the rest of the mob circled around it. Ringfinger Brown gave Ethan a gentle push at the small of his back.
“Go on, boy,” he said. “Listen to what Johnny Speakwater gots to say.”
Ethan stepped forward – he could almost have stepped right over the ferishers, but he felt instinctively that this would be rude. He arrived at the innermost edge of the circle just as the ferisher chief was going down on one knee in front of the clam.
“Hey, Johnny,” Cinquefoil said in a low, soft voice, calling to the clam like a man trying to wake a friend on the morning of some long-awaited exploit – a fishing trip or camp-out. “Whoa, Johnny Speakwater. All right now. Open up. We need a word with ya.”
There was a deep rumble from inside the clam, and Ethan’s heart began to beat faster as he saw the briny lips of the shell part. Water came pouring out and vanished into the sand under the clam. Little by little, with an audible creak, the upper half of the clamshell lifted an inch or so off of the lower half. As it opened Ethan could see the greyish-pink glistening muscle of the thing, wet and slurping around in its pale lower jaw.
“Burdleburbleslurpleslurpleburbleburdleslurp,” said the clam, more or less.
Cinquefoil nodded, and pointed to a pair of ferishers standing nearby. One of them reached into a leather tube, a kind of quiver that hung at his back, and pulled out a rolled sheet of what looked like parchment. The other took hold of one end, and then they stepped apart from each other, unrolling the scroll. It was a sheet of pale hide, like their clothing, a rectangle of deerskin marked all around with mysterious characters of an alphabet that Ethan didn’t know. It was something like a Ouija board, only the letters had been painted by hand. The ferishers knelt down in front of the clam, and held the unfurled scroll out in front of him.
Cinquefoil laid a hand on the top of the clam’s shell, and stroked it softly, without seeming to notice what he was doing. He was lost in thought. Ethan supposed he was trying to come up with the right question for the oracle. Oracles were tricky, as Ethan knew from his reading of mythology. Often they answered the question you ought to have asked, or the one you didn’t realise you were even asking. Ethan wondered what question he himself would pose to an oracular clam, given a chance.
“Johnny,” the chief said finally.” Ya done warned us that Coyote was coming. And ya was right. Ya said we ought ta fetch us a champion, and we done tried. And spent up half our dear treasury in the bargain. But look at this one, Johnny.” Cinquefoil made a dismissive wave in Ethan’s direction. “He’s just a puppy. He ain’t up ta the deal. We been watching him for a while now, and we had our hopes, but Coyote’s done come sooner than ever we thought. So now, Johnny, I’m asking ya one more time. What are we ta do now? How can we stop Coyote? Where can we turn?”
There was a pause, during which Johnny Speakwater emitted a series of fizzings and burps and irritable teakettle whistlings. The letter-scroll trembled in the ferishers’ hands. From somewhere nearby came the disrespectful cackling of a crow. Then there was a deep splorp from inside Johnny Speakwater, and a jet of clear, shining water shot from between the lips of his shell. It lanced across the foot or so of air that separated the clam and the letter-scroll, and hit with a loud, thick splat against a letter that looked something like a curly U with a cross in the centre of it.
“Ah!” cried all the ferishers. Cinquefoil scratched the U-and-cross into the sand.
One letter at a time, slowly, with deadly accuracy, Johnny Speakwater spat out his prophecy. As each wad of thick clam saliva hit the parchment, the letter affected was copied into the sand by Cinquefoil, and then wiped clean. The clam spat more quickly as he went along and then, when he had hawked up about forty-five blasts, he stopped. A faint, clammy sigh escaped him, and then his shell creaked shut again. Ferishers gathered around the inscription, many of them murmuring the words. Then one by one they turned to look at Ethan with renewed interest.
“What does it say?” Ethan said. “Why are you all looking at me?”
Ringfinger Brown went over to take a look at the prophecy in the sand. He rubbed at the bald place on the back of his grey head, then held out his hand to Cinquefoil. The chief handed him the stick, and the old scout scratched two fresh sentences under the strange ferisher marks.
“That about right?” he asked the chief.
Cinquefoil nodded.
“What did I tell you, then,” Ringfinger said.” What did I say?”
Ethan leaned forward to see how the old man had translated the words of the oracular clam.
FELD IS THE WANTED ONE FELD HAS THE STUFF HE NEEDS
When he read these words, Ethan felt a strange warmth fill his belly. He was the wanted one – the champion. He had the stuff. He turned back to look at Johnny Speakwater, flush with gratitude towards the clam for having such faith in him when no one else did. What he saw, when he turned, made him cry out in horror.