Lev Grossman - The Magicians

“Let’s buy it a beer,” Quentin said.

“I think it’s asleep. And anyway it doesn’t look that friendly.”

“Beer might help with that,” Quentin said. He felt punchy. “This could be the next clue. If it’s a talking beer, I mean a talking bear, we could, you know, talk to it.”

“About what?”

Quentin shrugged and took another sip.

“Just get a feel for what’s going on around here. I mean, what else are we doing here?”

Richard and Anaïs hadn’t touched their drinks. Quentin took another big gulp just to spite them.

“We’re playing it safe, is what we’re doing,” Richard said. “This is strictly reconnaissance. We’re avoiding any unnecessary contact.”

“You’re kidding me. We’re in Fillory, and you don’t want to talk to anybody?”

“Absolutely not.” Richard sounded shocked, shocked, at the very idea. “We’ve made contact with another plane of existence. What, that’s not enough for you?”

“As a matter of fact, it’s not. A giant praying mantis tried to kill me earlier today, and I’d like to know why.”

Fillory had yet to give Quentin the surcease from unhappiness he was counting on, and he was damned if he was leaving before he got what he wanted. Relief was out there, he knew it, he just needed to get deeper in, and he wasn’t about to let Richard slow him down. He had to jump the tracks, get out of his Earth-story, which wasn’t going so well, and into the Fillory-story, where the upside was infinitely higher. Anyway, the mood he was in, Quentin was willing to take any position on any subject with anybody if it meant he could pick a fight.

“Barkeep!” Quentin said, louder than necessary. As an afterthought he gave himself a thick Wild West drawl. If it feels right, go with it. He jerked his thumb at the bear. “ ’Nother round fer mah friend the bar there in the corner.”

A bar in a bar. Clever. In the other booth Eliot, Alice, Janet, and Penny all turned around in unison to look at him. The man in the uniform just nodded wearily.

The bear, it emerged, drank only peach schnapps, which it sipped from delicate thimble-size glasses. Given its bulk, Quentin guessed it could consume a more or less unlimited amount of it. After two or three it ambled over on all fours and joined them, dragging over the heavy armchair, the only piece of furniture in the room capable of supporting its weight, by hooking its claws into the chair’s much-abused upholstery and pulling. It looked way too big to be moving around in a confined space.

The bear was named Humbledrum, and it was, as its name suggested, a very modest bear. It was a brown bear, it explained in deep sub-subwoofer tones, a species larger than the black bear but much much smaller than the mighty grizzly bear, though the grizzly was in fact a variety of brown bear. It was not, Humbledrum reiterated periodically, half the bear that some of those grizzlies were.

“But it’s not just about who’s the biggest bear,” Quentin offered. They were bonding. He wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted from the bear, but this seemed like a good way to get it. He was drinking Richard’s beer, having finished his own. “There’s other ways to be a good bear.”

Humbledrum’s head bobbed enthusiastically.

“Oh yes. Oh yes. I am a good bear. I never meant to say that I’m a bad bear. I’m a good bear. I respect territories. I’m a respectful bear.” Humbledrum’s terrifyingly huge paw fell on the table emphatically, and it put its black muzzle very close to Quentin’s nose. “I am a very. Respectful. Bear.”

The others were conspicuously silent, or talked among themselves, elaborately play-acting that they were unaware of the fact that Quentin was conversing with a drunk magic bear. Richard had bailed out early, swapping places with the always-game Janet. Josh and Anaïs huddled together, looking trapped. If Humbledrum noticed any of this, it didn’t seem to bother it.

Quentin understood that he was operating outside most of the group’s comfort level. He could see out of the corner of his eye that Eliot was trying to shoot him warning glances from the other table, but he avoided them. He didn’t care. He had to push things forward; he was afraid of staying still. This was his play, and he was playing it, and he was going to play it his way till it was played out. Everybody else could either get on board or button their candy asses on back to Drop City.

It wasn’t like what he was doing was easy. The range of Humbledrum’s interests was suffocatingly narrow, and its depth of knowledge in those areas abysmally profound. Quentin still vaguely remembered being a goose, how laser-focused he’d been on air currents and freshwater greenery, and he realized now that all animals were probably, at heart, insufferable bores. As a hibernating mammal Humbledrum had far more than the layman’s familiarity with cave geology. When it came to honey, it was the subtlest and most sophisticated of gastronomes. Quentin learned quickly to steer the conversation away from chestnuts.

“So,” Quentin said, flatly interrupting a disquisition on the stinging habits of the docile Carniolan honeybee ( Apis mellifera carnica ) as contrasted with those of the slightly more excitable German honeybee ( Apis mellifera mellifera , aka the German black bee). “Just to be clear, this is Fillory we’re in, right?”

The lecture ground to a halt. Under its fur Humbledrum’s massive brow furrowed, producing a vivid equivalent of human befuddlement.

“What is, Quentin?”

“This place we’re in, right now,” Quentin said. “It’s called Fillory.”

A long moment passed. Humbledrum’s ears twitched. It had impossibly cute, round, furry teddy-bear ears.

“Fillory,” it said slowly, cautiously. “That is a word I have heard.” The giant bear sounded like a kid at the blackboard hedging his bets against what might or might not be a trick question.

“And this is it? We’re in Fillory?”

“I think it… may once have been.”

“So what do you call it now?” Quentin coaxed.

“No. No. Wait.” Humbledrum held up a paw for silence, and Quentin felt a tiny pang of pity. The enormous hairy idiot really was trying to think. “Yes, it is. This is Fillory. Or Loria? Is this Loria?”

“It has to be Fillory,” Penny said, leaning over from the other booth. “Loria is the evil country. Across the eastern mountains. It’s not like there’s no difference. How can you not know where you live?”

The bear was still shaking its heavy muzzle.

“I think Fillory is somewhere else,” it said.

“But this definitely isn’t Loria,” Penny said.

“Look, who’s the talking bear here?” Quentin snapped. “Is it you? Are you the talking fucking bear? All right. So shut the fuck up.”

Outside the bar the sun had set, and a few other creatures trailed in. Three beavers sipped from a common dish at a round café table in the company of a fat, green, oddly alert-looking cricket. In one corner, by itself, a white goat lapped at what looked like pale yellow wine in a shallow bowl. A slender, shy-looking man with horns jutting through his blond hair sat at the bar. He wore round glasses, and the lower half of his body was covered in thick bushy hair. The whole scene had a dreamlike quality, like a Chagall painting come to life. In passing, Quentin noted how disturbing it was to see a man with goat’s legs. Those backward-bending knees reminded him of the crippled or the gravely deformed.

As the inn filled up the silent family rose as one and shuffled out of their booth, their expressions still somber. Where could they be going? Quentin wondered. He’d seen no sign of a village nearby. It was getting late, and he wondered if they had a long walk ahead of them. He pictured them trudging down the grooved dirt road in the moonlight, the little girl riding on the old man’s narrow shoulders and then later, when she was too tired even for that, drooling drowsily on his lapel. He felt chastened by their gravity. They made him feel like a bumptious tourist, rattling drunkenly around what was, he kept forgetting, their country, a real country with real people in it, not a storybook at all. Or was it? Should he run after them? What secrets were they taking with them? When she reached to open the door, Quentin saw that the woman with the elegant cheekbones had lost her right arm below the elbow.