Tad Williams - The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

“Stop it, both of you!” Lucinda cried, but Tyler was just getting started.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Save the farm… like when you tried to sell Meseret’s egg to the person Gideon hates most in the world? When you pretty much gave away the secret of this place? Yeah, you really care…!”

Tears actually came into Colin Needle’s eyes. He balled his fists and for a moment Tyler thought the older boy might take a swing at him, but instead Colin turned and hurried out of the Snake Parlor toward the front door.

Tyler stared after him. “What’s his problem?”

“You’re a creep, Tyler Jenkins,” Lucinda said. “He came to me for help! He wanted someone to listen to him! And he might have had something important to say about Gideon, but no, you had to be… you had to be… ” She turned and stomped out of the room, headed for the kitchen. As the door fell shut behind her, she shouted back, “

… A big creep!”

“Huh?” Tyler said it out loud, even though he was now the only person left in the room. “I don’t get it? What did I do?”

“Oh, sweet! Careful, now…!” Lucinda laughed a little nervously as Desta took another carrot from her hand. Lucinda had just discovered to her astonished delight that Desta’s long tongue was as blue as a summertime sky. “Will it stay that color?” she asked.

Ragnar looked down from the landing above where he was hosing out the cockatrice cages. “I do not know. Her mother and father are not that way, but they might have changed-I don’t remember what color tongues they had as young worms.” He laughed. The sound startled the displaced cockatrices, which hissed at him from their temporary wire cages.

“Where is Haneb today?” Lucinda asked. “I thought he was the one who took care of the dragons?”

Ragnar shrugged as he swept the water toward the drain in the concrete floor. “Simos has taken him and your brother and others to walk the hills and canyons. There are many trees and deep spots there which could hide… someone.”

A man’s body, he had almost said. Because now that he was three days missing, Ragnar, Lucinda, and everyone else knew Gideon Goldring might very well be dead. A cloud of fear hung over Ordinary Farm.

Lucinda swallowed hard. “Ragnar? What if Uncle Gideon doesn’t come back? What if we never find him? What… what happens next?”

Who will get the farm? That was what she was really asking. Who will take charge of this strangest, most wonderful place on earth?

When the Norseman had all the creatures back in their cage he latched the door, then pulled off the hood of the hazard suit he wore to protect himself from the creatures’ poisonous saliva. He clanked down the stairs to join Lucinda as the cockatrices stepped awkwardly around the puddles, hissing at each new outrage to their familiar home-sawdust and sand now clean and new, their droppings washed from every surface.

“What happens if he’s really gone?” she asked again.

“Here you make a testament, yes?” Ragnar asked her. “A… will? Writing down how your treasure will be shared after you are dead. But first someone-one of the city-chiefs, what are they called…?”

She thought for a moment. “Police? Government?”

“Government, yes. They will send someone, as Gideon always warned us. And how can we let that happen? How can we explain anything about this place? No, child,” Ragnar said seriously, “believe me, it will be much better if we find Gideon alive. Much better.”

Ragnar stood now and watched, shaking his head, as Desta wrapped her sky-blue tongue around Lucinda’s last carrot and pulled it into her mouth. The dragon crunched contentedly, her long teeth flashing as her jaw opened and closed, then eyed Lucinda to see if there was any more. Haneb had been right-Desta definitely liked carrots.

No more today. Lucinda tried to make each thought clear and individual. That’s all. But I’ll bring you more carrots soon. Would you like that?

For a moment the amber eyes bored into her, then the dragon, small but still bigger than Lucinda, turned and walked away in awkward dragon-fashion, stilting on its back feet and the elbows of its folded wings. But just before Desta pulled herself up onto her nest of straw and old mattresses, Lucinda caught a whisper of happy, greedy thought, faint as a breeze through branches. It was wordless compared to her own, but still had a meaning she could understand.

Yes. More. Bring more.

For a moment Lucinda thought she’d imagined it, then her heart seemed to spread wings inside her chest.

As the cart rolled along Lucinda watched the hills shimmering in the mid-afternoon heat. “Do you think that creepy Kingaree guy has anything to do with Gideon disappearing?” she asked suddenly.

Ragnar shook his big, shaggy head. “I do not believe it but it could be true. He is a crafty, wicked man.”

“Everyone keeps telling me that-okay, I believe it! But what did he do?”

Ragnar stayed silent for a while as the horse slowed to a stop beside Elliot’s Lagoon, as Gideon sometimes called it. The sea-serpent who lived in the small lake didn’t need regular feeding-the water just had to be restocked with fish twice a year-but Mr. Walkwell and the Norseman made a point to check in on Elliot every couple of days. Just now, though, Ragnar wasn’t even looking at the water.

“Things were better before the fire,” the big man said suddenly.

“The fire that burned down Gideon’s laboratory?”

He nodded his head. “Grace had been gone for several years. Gideon used his shiny toy almost every day to go into the Fault Line and search for her, but he would not admit that was what he did.”

“Shiny toy… You mean the Continuascope.” The thing Tyler was always going on about.

Ragnar nodded again. “He called it ‘collecting.’ He never found Grace, but instead he brought back animals… and people. I was one of the people he collected. It was a madness-but it was a kind of madness I understand.” Ragnar curled the reins into a loop in his massive hand. “I had a friend once in my old country whose family was killed by raiders from down the coast. From that moment on my friend was a dead man too, but still walking. He swore he would kill two of the raiders for every one of his that had been taken from him. He put aside the blood-gold we call ‘weregild’ so his neighbors and relatives would not have to bear the burden for what he planned to do, then gave away everything else he had, sang his death song, and set out in a small boat… I hear he killed thirteen of the raiders’ tribe before they brought him down, one less than the two for each of his he had promised.” Ragnar abruptly laughed. “I am sure that his spirit is still angry about that!”

“That’s a horrible story!”

“Is it?” He seemed surprised. “I fear I don’t understand this place very well, this time. But after Grace was lost, that was how Gideon’s spirit was-like my friend’s, restless and angry.

“In that first year or two Gideon brought back many animals and many people-Patience Needle with her son in her belly, Sarah the cook, Kiwa and his cousins. Haneb came with two small dragons during that time-he was only a child, but already his face was scarred. And Gideon found me, too. And of course, the other animals! Gideon told me that before she vanished, Grace had begged him to help her use the Fault Line to save some of the animals that had been lost from the earth-the great worms, the one-horns, all of them-and so after he lost her Gideon did his best to fill the farm with all the animals they had discovered together.

“Then one wild night Gideon came back from the Fault Line with a ragged, bloody stranger-that was Caesar. We all hurried out to welcome Gideon back, but then we heard a great baying from the Fault Line cavern-I swear for a moment I thought Gideon brought back the Fenris Wolf itself! I thought the end of days was at hand!”