Instead they had to settle for an inglorious end-run around the awakened carnivore. The concomitant jolting nearly bounced the wizard out of his shell. In addition to these unexpected drawbacks, the hydrocarbon spell that kept the metal box’s belly sated was continuously running down and had to be periodically renewed. He reminded Jon-Tom that his resources were not unlimited. Before long they would reach the point where the machine would become useless because they could no longer fuel it.
The bone-jarring ride affected Sorbl least of all. When the bouncing and jouncing began to bother him, he simply spread his great wings, released his grip on the backseat, and took to the air, soaring effortlessly above the treetops while keeping track of his unfortunate companions below.
They encountered no more dozing carnivores, however, and the road began to smooth out as they drew nearer to Lynchbany. The autumn Bellwoods were beautiful to look upon, with many leaves still clinging to the trees and the ground between carpeted with umber and gold.
They were less pleasing to listen to, since the dying leaves that still hugged the branches sang out of tune when the wind blew through them. As Clothahump explained, the music of the bell leaves was a direct function of the seasons. An experienced woodsman could forecast the weather by listening to the music the trees played. The tree songs were sweet and melodious in springtime, languorous in the summer, and harsh and atonal as they dropped from their limbs in the fall. They struggled to blot out the discordant chorus from Lynchbany all the way past Oglagia Towne, until they left the woods just south of Ospenspri.
“Not as fine a sight as grand Polastrindu,” Clothahump told him, “but an attractive little city in its own right, sequestered among rolling hills at the northernmost fringes of civilization.” He was leaning forward expectantly, scanning the terrain ahead for their first sight of that lovely metropolis.
They were driving through herds of fat abismo lizards let out to graze on the last of summer’s grass. Off in the distance the landscape lifted toward the sky, the distant slopes the first manifestation of the high Northern Plateau. It struck Jon-Tom as strange that no herdsfolk were visible among the abismos, but perhaps they were trained to return to their barns at nightfall by themselves.
“Ospenspri is particularly famed for its orchards,” Clothahump was telling him. “Up here they grow the best apples and toklas in the warmlands.”
Jon-Tom kept both hands locked on the wheel. The long drive north from Lynchbany had been harder on the jeep than on any of them. While never exactly responding like a Porsche, its handling had become worse than ever. He’d driven the last couple of days haunted by visions of the wheel coming off in his hands just when they were attempting to round a sharp bend in the road. But the wheel stayed on the steering column.
Just get us into town, he whispered silently at the straining machine, and I’ll see that you get a formal funeral.
They swung around a hill crowned with pines and saw the cloud first. A massive black cloud. It was not moving. It just hung there in one place like a lump of sooty cotton that had been pinned to the sky. Directly above Ospenspri. Jon-Tom slowed but didn’t stop.
As for beautiful Ospenspri, the Ospenspri that Clothahump had never ceased describing to him ever since they’d left home, Ospenspri of the numerous streams and delicately arched bridges and many fountains, Ospenspri the flower of the north, it bore little relationship to the wizard’s word pictures.
Instead of tall, graceful buildings with fluted walls, the valley that lay beneath the black cloud was occupied by a succession of mud and adobe huts. Dirty water flowed down a few central canals. These joined together below the city to form a single river. What beggared comprehension was not the fact that the water above the city flowed clear and pure, but that it appeared to become fresh again the instant it left behind the city limits. It was as though the pollution it acquired within the city was unable to depart with the current.
Yet there was no sign of any kind of filtering or treatment system where the canals became river.
There were plenty of trees among the houses, as Clothahump had predicted. Every one of them was dead, and not from the onset of winter. They had been blighted by something far worse than inclement weather. On the slopes north of the city where grew the famed apple and tokla orchards there was nothing but twisted, spiny lumps of brown bark huddled together against the wind. No neatly tended rows of healthy trees with busy citizens working among them.
And hovering over it all, that single, ominous, unmoving black cloud.
Sorbl fluttered down to resume his perch on the frame of the backseat. “Are you sure we didn’t take a wrong turn somewhere, Master?”
“No, we did not take a wrong turn, you feathered twit.” But there was little venom in the wizard’s retort. He was staring in disbelief at the city spread out before them. “This is Ospenspri. There’s the Acomarry Hill, and there the three springs, each winding its own way into town.” He rose, leaning on the windshield for support. It groaned.
Behind them stood the autumnal forest of the Bell woods, shedding its leaves to the accompaniment of mournful but hardly malign notes. Ahead was once-beautiful Ospenspri, with its polluted waterways, devastated architecture, and clear air, dominated by that unnatural mass of cumulonimbus. When he spoke again, his tone was subdued.
“Drive on, lad. Something dreadful has overtaken this place and the people who make their home here. Perhaps we can do something to help. We are honor-bound to try.”
Jon-Tom nodded, took the jeep out of neutral. The tenuous transmission made gargling noises, and they lurched forward.
“What’s a tokla?”
“You never had a tokla, my boy?”
“I don’t think so.” He kept his eyes on the road as he spoke. “It doesn’t sound like anything that grows where I come from.”
“That is your loss, then, for it is a most delightful fruit. You can eat all you want because it shrinks inside your stomach.”
“You mean it shrivels up?”
“No. It shrinks before it is digested. In shape it is like this.” His hands described an outline in the air that reminded Jon-Tom of two pears joined together at their tops. “Each bite starts shrinking on its way down. By the time it hits your belly, it’s barely as big as a fingernail, but you’re sure you’ve eaten something as big as a loaf of bread.”
“Would that ever be a hit on the shelves back home,” Jon-Tom murmured. “The tokla fruit diet.”
“Diet? What’s a diet?” Sorbl asked.
“You don’t know what a diet is?”
“You always repeat questions, Jon-Tom. I don’t know why humans waste so much of their talking time. If I knew what a diet was, I wouldn’t have to ask you what a diet was, would I?”
“I think I like you better when you’re drunk, Sorbl.”
The owl shrugged. “I’m not surprised. I like me better when I’m drunk too.”
“A diet is when people intentionally restrict their intake of food in order to lose weight.”
The famulus twitched his beak. He was a little shaky on his unsteady backseat perch, but not so shaky that he couldn’t recognize an absurdity when he heard one.
“Why would anyone want to lose weight, when nearly everyone is working hard to put it on? Are you saying that among your people there are those who intentionally starve themselves?”
“To a certain degree, yes. They do so in order to make themselves look better. See, among the humans where I come from, the thinner you are, the more attractive you’re considered to be.”
Sorbl wiped at his mouth with a flexible wingtip. “Weird.”
“The multiplicity of peculiar notions your world is infected with never ceases to amaze me,” Clothahump put in. “I am glad 1 am exposed to them only through you. I do not think I could cope in person.”