Wooden Bones, page 8
“Aki?” he said.
“This way!” she said.
She led them across a series of rope bridges, all around them people shouting and screaming. Geppetto, unable to keep up, stumbled, and both Pino and Aki helped him. His cane, however, rolled off the edge and disappeared. Another bridge not far away, fortunately with no people, collapsed and crushed a dwelling below—the people escaping with their featherwings just an instant before their home exploded in a blizzard of wood and pine needles.
Through the plumes of smoke they could hear Elendrew’s incomprehensible shouts.
When they arrived at another dwelling, a small one on a thinner trunk, a bald man with sad eyes swept Aki up in his arms. Behind them flames encroached upon the bridge leading to their home. There was no going back now.
“My child!” the man exclaimed. “Where have you been? We must go now!”
She wriggled out of his embrace. “I needed to help them, Father!”
They followed her inside. The whole dwelling was one tiny room with one bed, the floor blanketed with plush purple leaves. She groped under the bed.
“I’ll get us the featherwings!” she said.
“We can’t take one of yours!” Pino protested.
“It’s okay! We have an extra. It was . . . it was Mother’s.” She returned with three white packs, one of which she handed to Geppetto. “One should be okay. Pino’s not too heavy. I wish I had two.”
Aki’s father grabbed a pack and slipped the straps over his shoulders, then quickly helped Aki do the same. He started for the door with his daughter, then, seeing Geppetto struggle with his own pack, hurriedly helped him slip it over his shoulders.
“Tighten those two straps and then pull the third one when you’re in open air,” he said. “Good luck!”
Then he grabbed Aki and rushed out the door. A shimmering wall of fire was halfway across the bridge. They couldn’t see anything beyond it but plumes of smoke.
“Good-bye, Pino!” Aki said. “Maybe I’ll see you . . .”
The rest of her parting words were lost as she and her father leaped over the side. Pino heard two pops and then the zipping of their feathers twirling through the air. He wished he could have told her he was sorry.
With the two chest straps fastened, Geppetto tried to pick up Pino, but he was too weak. Pino pushed him instead out the door. The smoke billowed into the dwelling, scorching his throat. There was nothing out there—in front of them or below—but a pulsing gray cloud.
They groped until they found the rope railing.
“You climb over first!” Pino said, coughing.
“Not without you!” Geppetto said.
“I’ll climb over next! Then we’ll jump together!”
Reluctantly Geppetto climbed over the rail, holding fast to it as he teetered on the edge of the planks. Fire crackled through the pine needle roof. Most of the platform was ablaze, and Pino felt the heat pulsing the air like a living thing, hot on his cheeks and his neck. All around them burning wood crackled and hissed.
Pino scrambled over the rope next to Geppetto. He reached for him, stretching to grab hold of Geppetto’s shirt—and then suddenly, before his grasping fingers could find purchase, the rope railing snapped and gave way.
And they both fell.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
For a few terrible seconds Pino fell alone through a gray world—a haze of smoke and ash that burned in his lungs and seared his eyes. Through teary vision he could not see Geppetto. He could not see the ground. He could not see the dwelling where they’d stood or even the tree. He saw only shifting gray vapors, making him wonder if he’d already died.
His papa had told him about dying. He’d told him people were here and then they weren’t. But he’d never told him what the people who died saw. Maybe this was it. Maybe they went to a gray place.
The moment lasted only a few heartbeats, and then he burst from the smoke and plummeted in open air.
He coughed and blinked away the tears in his eyes. Not far away, just beyond his grasp, Geppetto also fell—on his back, looking up at Pino with astonishment, his clothes fluttering. Pino could not reach him. Even worse, their descent seemed to be drifting them farther apart.
“Pino!” Geppetto cried.
They fell past white clouds of featherwings, woodsfolk in their slow drift to the ground. They fell through webs of branches, some that came dangerously close. They fell through wisps of fog. They fell faster and faster, the cool air numbing cheeks and ears, and Pino knew it was only a matter of time before they reached the ground.
Without featherwings of his own, he’d never survive. Geppetto was so far away. He had his hand on the strap that would release the featherwings, but he wasn’t pulling it.
By shifting his body, leaning this way or that, Pino realized he could slightly alter the course of his fall. It was tricky, because too much leaning sent him spinning, but if he tilted just right, he angled toward Geppetto. He stretched out his arms. His papa stretched out in return. They were only inches away.
Then a thick tree branch appeared out of the mist, directly in their path.
At the last second Pino jerked backward, the branch grazing his nose. Geppetto, who hadn’t reacted as quickly, wasn’t nearly as lucky: The branch thumped his shoulder, sending him flying in another direction. The gap between them grew.
Out of the mist Pino finally saw the ground rising to meet them, a black mouth opening to swallow them whole.
“Pull the strap!” he cried.
“No!” Geppetto shouted back.
“Pull it!”
Geppetto shook his head and attempted to adjust his fall, bobbling, slowly drifting toward Pino. The ground was so close. Pino tucked in his arms and legs and leaned forward, slicing through the air like a blade. He was moving so fast that he knew there was a chance he’d fly right past Geppetto, but there was no time.
They fell past the last of the branches. The long trunks of the giant trees loomed around them. The ground was so close Pino could now see individual leaves and mossy green stones.
Pino realized at the last moment that he hadn’t aimed well enough—he was going to fly right past Geppetto.
He twisted, stretching his arm as far as it would go, reaching out his hand.
Geppetto grasped for him. They streaked past each other. Pino saw his papa’s anguished face.
Then—with a last stretch—Geppetto grabbed his finger. Not just any finger. The first finger of his right hand, the one turning into wood. Geppetto grabbed tight, and just for a moment Pino saw the startled look on Geppetto’s face.
Then Geppetto pulled them together. Pino hugged both arms and both legs around his papa’s body and closed his eyes, sure that it was too late, that they were going to hit the ground.
The strap was pulled.
There was a fluttering whirl as the feathers shot out of the pack, jerking them backward, gravity tugging at their feet. Pino felt his stomach drop and Geppetto’s arms pressing into his back.
Then, as the featherwings did what they were intended to do, Pino and Geppetto soared through the forest.
* * *
It was either the speed of their fall or the sudden breeze that swirled from below, but their featherwings carried them much farther than Pino had expected. He’d been waiting with his eyes closed for the bone-jarring impact seconds after the featherwings opened, but when that didn’t happen, he opened his eyes.
They swooped over the forest floor like an ungainly bird, dodging the massive trunks. Down here, in the thick forest, it was darker than up high. Craning his neck, Pino saw Geppetto working the braided cords that led into the whirling feathers above them, tugging one way, then the other.
Up high there had been few birds, but now many birds fluttered out of the trees at their approach. The trunks passed in a blur. They lost altitude, the ground, littered with leaves and pine needles, getting ever closer to Pino’s feet.
Finally, as they were about to touch ground, Geppetto yanked back on the cords, trying to slow their speed. It was nearly perfectly done—Pino was impressed at how well his papa used the featherwings, having never used them before—but Geppetto still collapsed with a painful cry when all their weight came down on his knees.
Pino rolled off of him, spitting out a mouthful of dirt, and immediately sprang back to his papa. The featherwings floated over their heads, still tugging at the straps attached to his shoulders.
“Papa!” Pino said.
“I’m—I’m all right, boy,” Geppetto said, holding one of his knees, his face screwed up in pain. “Just . . . help me undo this.”
It took a bit of work, but Pino managed to get the straps of the featherwings off Geppetto’s shoulders. The featherwings, buoyed by a bit of breeze, floated some distance away until they were snagged by a thorny yellow bush. Pino helped a wincing Geppetto rise to a sitting position. There was no one else around. The breeze that had carried them to this place must have carried the other featherwings somewhere else.
“Whew,” Geppetto said, wiping the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. “When we landed, it was like I was carrying a house.” Then he looked at Pino with concern. “Let me see your hand, Pino.”
Pino’s right hand was slightly behind him, just out of Geppetto’s sight. He didn’t move. “It’s okay, Papa. It’s—it’s better now.”
“Let me see it.”
“It was just, um, covered with some tree sap.”
“Pino—”
“We should get up, Papa. We should—”
Before Pino could react, Geppetto seized Pino’s right hand and jerked it into plain sight. When he got a good look at it, he shook his head in befuddlement. But then he touched it, and his befuddlement changed first to astonishment, then dismay, then anguish.
“It’s okay, Papa,” Pino insisted. “It’ll get better.”
“When did this happen?”
“I don’t know. After the cave.”
“How?”
Pino felt tears springing into his eyes, and he forced them back. “I don’t know, Papa. I don’t know.”
“Oh, boy, don’t get upset. I’m just trying to understand.”
“I didn’t wish for it. It just happened.”
“It’s all right.”
“I promise!” Pino insisted. “I just looked and there it was.”
“Really, boy. It’s all right.”
“Please don’t get rid of me, Papa!”
Geppetto, who’d been reaching to comfort Pino, froze. He gaped in astonishment, then slowly lifted his hand over his heart as if he’d been shot.
“Pino,” he said, “my dear boy, I would never do such a thing. Get rid of you? Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think so little of me?”
“No.”
“Then why do you say it? Why?”
Pino pulled his hand away, gazing down at his wooden finger with shame. His vision blurred with his tears, and he felt them fall hot on his cheeks. “I just thought,” he began hesitatingly, “I just thought if I was turning back into wood—I thought you wouldn’t want me anymore.”
When he looked at Geppetto, he found that now it was his papa who had tears in his eyes. It was not the first time he remembered his papa crying, but it was the first time his papa made no effort to wipe them away and dismiss them as a bit of wood shavings in his eyes. His chin trembling, Geppetto stared for a long time, the two of them surrounded by all those giant trees, then he grabbed Pino and hugged him fiercely.
“Oh, my dear child,” he said. “My child, my son, you are all that I have. I love you more than life itself. There is nothing that could change that. Nothing.”
* * *
They talked about Pino’s wooden finger a bit more, and since neither of them could quite pin down why it was happening, they decided it would probably be best if Pino didn’t use his special gift unless it was absolutely necessary for their survival. Since his finger had been fine for months, Geppetto reasoned the problem must have had something to do with Pino’s newfound talent. What else could it be?
The forest darkened considerably, the air growing heavy and moist. They debated whether to seek out the woodsfolk again but in the end decided they were probably better off striking out on their own. They expected a good deal of anger would be directed at Pino for enabling Elendrew to destroy their city in the trees, so there was no sense chancing a confrontation. Geppetto was quite insistent about it.
“But I helped her,” Pino said. “I helped her walk. I just don’t understand why she wasn’t happy.”
Geppetto shook his head sadly. “Some people can never be happy, Pino. They’re always going to see what they don’t have rather than what they do. You could have given her the gift of flight, and she would have complained about the size of her wings. And she went bad long ago, I think. Anger will do that to you. When your heart is full of rage all the time, eventually there’s no room for anything else.”
Pino considered this a moment. “The woodsfolk . . . do you think what they did was wrong?”
“Right, wrong, who’s to say? I think they thought what they did was right. Sometimes right and wrong depends on who’s saying it.”
“But they loved her,” Pino insisted. “They really did love her.”
“Yes, I think so. But no matter how much they loved Elendrew, it wouldn’t have changed anything for her. The problem was she didn’t love herself.” He sighed. “Anyway, I think we’d better push on. We’re on the other side of the bad woods now. Maybe we can just survive on our own. We’ll head west—toward the mountains.”
It made Pino sad, thinking he’d never see Aki again, but he supposed he deserved it. Once again he’d tried to use his gift to help someone, and it had only turned out badly. He didn’t need his papa to tell him not to use his gift. He’d decided all on his own that he’d never bring anything made of wood to life for as long as he lived—only bad things came of it.
Besides, real human boys couldn’t do it, so why should he? If he wanted to be just like other boys, then he at least needed to act like them.
Within minutes Pino felt raindrops on his cheeks, and not long after that the trickle turned into a torrential downpour. They hid in the hollow of an old stump. By the time the storm had passed, it was dusk, so they bedded down there for the night. They were hungry and wet, and though the mossy ground inside the stump was soft, it also smelled bad.
If this was how it was going to be, Pino didn’t think much of his papa’s plan to strike out on their own.
The next morning was better. The sun pierced the trees, their path dappled with golden shadows. Birds sang merrily. They soon came to a trickling brook, where Geppetto used a makeshift net from a leafy branch to ensnare some shimmering, pink-scaled fish. The fish were tiny, not much bigger than Pino’s pinkie finger, but they were also plentiful. After cooking them over a roaring fire—Geppetto showed him how to start one using dry twigs and some stones—they didn’t taste bad either. If nothing else, their stomachs were full.
For the next few weeks the two of them traveled through the forest, Geppetto slowly gaining his strength, Pino learning how to fish and hunt. With some sharpened sticks they were able to kill some rabbits and even once a deer, and they spiced up these meals with roots and berries that Geppetto taught him were fine to eat. It was a wonderful time for Pino, just being with his papa.
Besides how to survive in the forest, Geppetto had many other lessons for Pino. He taught him how to add and subtract. He taught him about the planets and the stars. He taught Pino anything Pino wanted to learn, and since Pino had many questions, it seemed they were always talking. His wooden finger was getting slowly worse, spreading up to his knuckle, but it was happening so gradually that Geppetto didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he didn’t mention it. What could they do but hope it went away?
All the while they drew closer to the mountains—not because they wished to live there, but because it was as good a place to head as any, and Geppetto explained it was better for a man to be heading somewhere rather than nowhere, simply because a man who was heading somewhere had a little spring in his step.
And when Geppetto was fully recovered, he certainly didn’t seem to lack for a spring in his step. He laughed often and heartily. He sang old songs his own papa had taught him, teaching Pino to sing along. Sometimes instead of singing, he whistled, and when Pino tried to join him, he found all he could do was make the sound of whispering air.
“Could you teach me that, Papa?” he asked.
Geppetto looked at him with a glimmer of delight in his eyes. “What’s that, boy? Ah, you mean whistling?”
Pino nodded. They were in the foothills of the mountains now, following a grassy bank of a stream up into the forest. Water trickled over rocks worn smooth. The light was fading, so they would have to make camp soon.
With winter approaching, the nights were already getting colder, so it was important to find a good camp each night, someplace where it was easy to keep a fire going. The trees in this place were still tall, but nowhere near the giants they’d passed through weeks earlier. Now Pino could actually see the sky, a sky that was laced with pinks and purples as the sunset slipped away.
“Yes, it is good to whistle,” Geppetto said, stepping over a clump of grass. “Whistling is useful for many things. For song, yes, but also to call out to others.”
“Like if I need help?” Pino said.
“Yes, that would be one reason. You could whistle if you needed my help. Here, let me show you. Form your mouth into an O, like this.”
Try as he might, though, Pino just couldn’t get it. Perhaps he might have gotten it if he’d gone on trying the rest of that night, but they’d walked only a few minutes when Geppetto stopped, grabbing Pino by the arm. He looked alarmed.
“What is—,” Pino began.
Geppetto hushed him by raising a finger sharply to his lips. They stood motionless, a hint of breeze rustling the trees, then Pino heard what Geppetto heard: someone singing. It was a woman approaching the stream from the other side.
