Chapter 4 - Lily Hoppers
“All you do is leap. It’s a simple maneuver. Bend at your knees first,” said Tom.
“I’m just not convinced. It seems more complicated. Isn’t there danger?” asked Mr. Grey.
“It’s only a ditch.” Tom furrowed his brow in the direction of the shallow rut running beside the road, between himself and Mr. Grey.
Mr. Grey rubbed his knuckles, and glanced at the sun, and kicked up mushrooms of dust with his drumming foot, and hoisted his suitcase and violin coffin from the ground; all indicative of an anxiety to be underway. And yet, despite this anxiety, his feet stuck fast to the dirt road on his side of the ditch.
“Where’s your glory sense?” said Tom. He shook his head, decorated in its ubiquitous glaze of sweat. “Ruts and drains are common things, yet you’re shuddering.”
“It isn’t the ditch. I think it’s more the crossing. What about those birds?”
Mr. Grey gestured with his violin coffin at the one-legged birds squatting in the ditch. They were about the size of the pipkin stoat, but there were definitely more than one of them. Several dozen roosted in the nosebleed of wine running down the base of the ditch. They stared at Mr. Grey with beaks that were twisted, as though each had just sucked forcefully on a nugget of extremely sour candy.
Tom said, “You could throw me your fiddle, if that’s easier.”
“I just think it’s a wide ditch…”
Tom pulled his freshly-laundered, crisply-starched handkerchief from behind a zeppelin cloud of his folded robe. The fabric square looked tiny in Tom’s meaty hand. Metallic gilding on its frill glinted in the day’s shine as he wiped his brow. He said, “I’ve jumped ditches twice as wide, when I was a boy.”
“Is there a bridge we can cross?”
“Many days away.”
Mr. Grey swung the suitcase and violin coffin in an idle rhythm, like twin grandfather-ticker pendulums. He ground his heels, kicking up more dusty clouds, and looked to his left and right. The road hugged his side of the ditch in both directions. Both ditch and road eventually slithered over the rolling hills, out of sight.
Tom’s stomach grumbled.
Mr. Grey said, “Let’s find another crossing. A place that has closer banks.”
Tom seemed not to hear. “I slept in a ditch one time. But it was drier.”
“Tom, are there narrower spots?” Tom noticed Mr. Grey and followed the grey eyes up and down the rut. He shook his head. “Could we walk a bit? Let’s just stroll along the flanks. Let’s not jump with haste.”
Tom stretched and dabbed a particularly fat bead of sweat off his brow. He then carefully folded and stowed the handkerchief. “I’m too worn to waste walking.”
“Why don’t we follow the roads?”
Tom turned and pointed into the wilderness. “Our road goes that way.”
Mr. Grey saw The Wind That Smelled like Rain in the distance on Tom’s side. She played in the tall grass of the lumpy hills. She climbed the scattered poetrees and shook their needles. Her clouds were scant, and their shadows ran fast across the ground. She seemed to flee from the sunbeams gilding the grass. The sun’s light was a cold one though, and the grass and the poetrees waved like feral banners.
“There is a road then?” asked Mr. Grey. He relaxed, loosening his ground-in footing on the dirt.
“A figure of speech. There’s no road to the witch well. We’ll just cross the hills.”
“We won’t know where we’re going. We might become lost.”
“I know the right direction.”
Mr. Grey didn’t look reassured. He looked down at the rough dirt path on which he stood, and the dust he’d kicked up, gathering like mold over his shoes. He tried to picture the shoes without that road beneath them.
Mr. Grey eyed Tom suspiciously. He said, “It’s a far off place to dwell.”
“She must like her privacy.”
“And you’re a friend of this witch?”
“I do what I say. I said I’d introduce you.”
Mr. Grey still looked to his sides; to that dirt trail - no longer so rough or foreign looking - which cleft the wilderness in twain. Mr. Grey asked, “What if we… buy a compass? Back at a town shop?” Tom crossed his arms and stared hard across the gap. “We might still get lost. Even with a direction, there’s no guiding road.”
Tom uncrossed his arms and scratched at his bristly whiskers. “You’ll always be lost, the moment you part from home. Even on a road. The wilds are the same, with landmarks instead of signs; poorly traveled roads.”
Mr. Grey tapped his foot. He forced himself to stop - the dust cloud reached his hem now - and breathed deeply through his nose. He tried to look optimistically at the hills, and poetrees, and playing Wind, in the un-roaded land behind Tom. He took a second steadying breath; a second whiff of the comforting, caustic antiodor cologne.
With a last show of resistance, he said, “I’m not the best at leaping.”
Tom said, “Then I will catch you.”
Mr. Grey nodded, more to himself than to Tom. He stepped back a pace from the ditch’s edge. His arms swung the suitcase and coffin in their pendulum arcs, but wider. At the forward end of the swing, Mr. Grey followed them, letting the two articles add their momentum to his run. Just before the edge Mr. Grey bent his knees. He jumped from the road.
The twisted beaks and sharp eyes of the one-legged birds at the bottom of the ditch followed the grey cloud as it passed overhead.
Mr. Grey shoes touched the wavy grass at the perfect point to be just shy of sure footing. He landed on the exact right spot, where he could wobble at an uncertain angle for eternity. His body could wriggle infinitely for balance, and his laden arms would spin in endless wheels.
Tom saved Mr. Grey this indignity by grabbing his shoulder and pulling him onto flat ground.
Together, Mr. Grey and Tom left the road behind. Together, they set off into the pleasant, hilly yonder.
Some time later, Mr. Grey and Tom were dredged from a deep, fruity marsh - where the chicktails swayed high overhead, and the vintage mud wrapped its clammy fingers about their shins - by a rural marshman.
“Yer fortunate folks. Hadn’t I come upon ye, ye’d be stewed by dusk,” said the marshman. His voice whistled between gap teeth. He pulled Mr. Grey up by his starched collar, away from the marsh’s clutch. Together the two of them lifted Tom into the boat. The two-man craft rocked under the two-and-a-large-man weight.
“Is the marsh so broad?” asked Mr. Grey. He squeezed the wine from the low hem of his robe.
“What’s that ye say lad? I’d not gathered the meaning. Say it out again.”
“How far does the marsh extend?” Mr. Grey spoke with the same intonation, but different words.
The marshman cocked his ear, in a show of still not understanding. Mr. Grey turned to Tom, who woke to the communications breakdown. “His dialect is local,” Tom explained. “What was your question?” Mr. Grey, confused, repeated it to Tom. Tom turned to the Marshman. “He questioned the marsh. The breadth and width of the wine; is that the danger?”
The marshman shook his head. “It’s the tides m’boys; Ye’d soon be up to yer nose, and drunk as a swan.”
Mr. Grey applied a daub of cologne. He poured the wine filling his shoes over the side. Tom gave the marshman a rough direction, and wiped his own shoes off with the handkerchief.
While Mr. Grey and Tom de-wined themselves in the dry hollow of the marshman’s boat, that jolly rustic plied his hands at the oars. Their vessel glided gently past the towering chicktails and through the bloody fermentation. The marshman became garrulous. Through his gaped teeth, he whistled out his story of marsh living.
The marshman spoke of his birth on - and upbringing in - swamp boats of varying shapes and sizes. He reminisced about learning the trade of marsh-candy farming from his father, who’d learned it from his father, who’d received it through the same kind of nepotism. He talked of plundering the dark depths of the wine marsh; of searching for shell candy growing at the muddy bottom; of chiseling it out with water picks. The man offered them a wide selection of marsh candy in every shape and texture imaginable: ultra-rigid scallops with a creamy flavor, horns of spiraling vanilla and caramel that slowly melted into sweet butter on the tongue, handfuls of chewy conches that burst into juice of grape or lemon or strawberry when chewed. Tom gladly attacked the spread, and gladly picked at the marsh farmer for his story, and Mr. Grey gladly relaxed against the curved wood of the craft.
The story and the trip ended too quickly for Mr. Grey’s liking. His shoes hadn’t come anywhere near dry under the cold sun’s rays. But the marshman stopped rowing. Mr. grey peeked his eyes above the gunwale. He saw that the boat now idled next to a floating turf of densely packed, four leafed wine-lilies.
Their skipper said, “This is where I stop. Them lilies are awful dense. Best of luck, you two.”
With still sodden shoes, and many grateful farewells, Mr. Grey and Tom left the cozy boat. They stepped gingerly onto the spongy bank of lilies. As the boatman rowed away through the wine, the towering chicktails soon swallowed him in their rustling stems. Mr. Grey and Tom turned and looked across the floating plain.
That floor of four leafed herbage seemed as if it stretched to the world’s edge. It rolled away from them, into a murky fog which the cold sun left unbroken. The elastic floor squealed and gave uncomfortably - like rubber - at even the littlest motion or shifting of weight. Looking down, Mr. Grey noticed the two lilies he stood on stretching like skin beneath his weight, while the wine lake ran like veins between. He imagined all manner of drunken water monsters swimming and breeding in the fragmented dark wine under the lilies.
Mr. Grey and Tom each placed a foot on a new lily. Mr. Grey’s lily swayed and bent, but held. Tom’s sank dangerously beneath his weight, partway beneath the semitranslucent wine’s surface. But it too held after a fashion, so that Tom only wetted his ankles. The two of them looked at each other, and nodded. They started squeakily to cross the lily field.
Mr. Grey achieved exactly seven springy footsteps at a delicate pace. On the seventh’s completion, he and Tom heard splashing at their back. Mr. Grey turned around.
At the lilies’ edge where they’d just stood, he saw - rising from the wine - a flock of birds. A cluster of the same one-legged, twisted-beaked birds he’d seen nesting in the ditch. The same birds he’d seen roosting atop the poetree gate to Toscamo, he reflected.
The birds flopped onto the lilies. They bounced on their single legs from one lily to the next. They bounced toward Mr. Grey and Tom. Tom looked at Mr. Grey. He said, “Now we should move fast.” He tore off across the lily field with splashing strides. Mr. Grey - after a pause - followed.
This time Mr. Grey truly ran. The end of his anchor shawl trailed behind him in a stiff line. He re-soiled his robe’s hem drumming a rubbery metronome from the four leafed field. His breath and strides came fast and mechanically smooth. A few paces in front Tom huffed mightily.
Ahead of them, the lilies grew apart. Mr. Grey and Tom both leapt the gap. The birds bounced at their heels, keeping pace. For some time the two ran. Another chasm of open wine cut through the lilies. Tom jumped. He landed heavily atop the opposite plants. Mr. Grey placed his foot to follow. But the lily beneath him shifted. Mr. Grey lost his balance. He only cleared half the distance, and landed with a larger splash in the heady artery of wine.
Like blood, the submersion into wine filled his eyes and ears. Mr. Grey immediately lost his bearings. He had no sense of where the sky lay in the deep murk. He gasped instinctively, seeking air, getting instead two lungfuls of intoxicating wine. His head swirled with mixed panic and wooz.
Tom’s meaty hand plunged into the wine, grabbed a fistful of wet anchor shawl, and yanked a sopping and coughing Mr. Grey by the neck onto the petaled shore. Through watery - winey? - eyes, Mr. Grey watched Tom take a wide stance on two petals. He pulled the mallet from his back and swung just in time to send the nearest hopping bird into undesired flight.
Mr. Grey saw Tom’s handkerchief fall from its pocket. He hooked the drenched fabric on a corner of his suitcase (he’d kept hold of both suitcase and violin coffin) just before it slipped through the gaps in the lilies.
Mr. Grey pushed himself up, coughing, and nudged a cloud on the shoulder of Tom’s robe. The two of them turned and resumed their retreat. The birds hopped after, undeterred by Tom’s mallet.
Twice more Mr. Grey saw thick channels lacerating the flower pack. Both times he managed his jump. Tom’s breath came out in wheezes of higher and higher pitch, and Mr. Grey feared for the large man’s stamina. The field of leafy emeralds seemed to stretch endlessly. Mr. Grey thought they might need to give up on escaping. Perhaps they should deliberately squeeze through the cracks in the lilies? They might seek shelter beneath the surface. Or might they simply face their fate at birds’ beaks? After landing on a huge lily, he glanced back at those pursuing avians.
The birds were gone. Not a bird remained in sight, neither on the lilies, nor in the sky.
Mr. Grey strode to a stop. “I think they’ve given it up,” he called to Tom. Tom thundered to his own stop. He looked back, then sat and sank into the flower floor. He wheezed and coughed from the exertion.
After a moment, Mr. Grey handed Tom his handkerchief. Tom rubbed his face with it, succeeding only in switching out sweat for wine. Mr. Grey checked his luggage. His coffin had kept the violin dry. Most of his clothes, however, were soaked in fresh winestains.
“I’m not sure when they gave up,” said Mr. Grey. “They just disappeared.”
“We must… have left… their domain,” answered Tom between gasps.
Mr. Grey waited for Tom to find more of his breath. “You said they weren’t a danger.”
“I said no such thing.”
“Well then what are they?”
“Those are Sourbeak Hoppers.”
“Are they often aggressive?”
“They rip intruders apart. Very vicious birds.”
Mr. Grey stamped a foot; the lily beneath him squeaked in protest. “Then why did you make me jump? Before, at the ditch?” The ditch situation turned suddenly sinister in Mr. Grey’s memory. “Why did you not tell?”
“You wouldn’t have come, if I’d told you of the birds. You wouldn’t have jumped.”
“I certainly wouldn’t have,” said Mr. Grey. He looked at Tom with a cold expression; an easy look for Mr. Grey in any situation, and especially now. Tom looked back with a ruddy, innocent face.
After a while Mr. Grey helped Tom to his feet. They ventured on.