“Let’s just say, it gives me
something to do.”
The caterpillar exhaled a cloud of green smoke. It enveloped Redd and the others, and when they awoke, they were alone.
CHAPTER 37
P ARTING FROM Redd, Jack of Diamonds had lumbered breathlessly into the first encampment that fell in his way.
“Your leader!” he’d said to the Gnobi tribespeople lolling about. “It’s important that I speak to your leader immediately! Your future freedom depends on it!” The Gnobi, when not roused to violence, were a sluggish clan, the least nomadic of Boarderland’s tribes. Not sensing any immediate threat to their freedoms in the person of Jack Diamond, they had responded to his urgency with characteristic listlessness. “Myrval’s tent is somewhere that way,” one of them had said with a vague wave of the hand. “Follow the sound of the snoring and you’ll find it,” another had suggested. But there had been a fair amount of snoring to be heard in the camp, and not until Jack had roused several civilians from their naps did he catch sight of the only tent with a pennant flying from its roof and two males asleep on stools at its entrance. “Guards,” he’d said to himself.
He had marched past the slumbering guardsmen and, in the tent’s front room, discovered five more sleeping guards—two slumped on chairs, two curled up on floor mats, and one snoring on his feet. What Jack had come upon was no less than a festival of snoring, a riot of honking inhalations, snotty exhalations, and inarticulate mutterings. But louder than all of these, coming from the back room: the wail of an ailing jabberwock. Jack had stepped into the back room and seen a lone figure asleep on a cot. “Myrval!” he’d called, unsure, which had caused the sleeper to groan and roll toward the wall. “I’m an emissary of Redd Heart, former and future queen of Wonderland,” Jack had said, shaking the Gnobi leader awake. “She has sent me here with a proposal that can guarantee future peace and freedom for the Gnobi tribe—for all of Boarderland’s tribes. But it’s a—” “That’s nice of Miss Heart to think of us,” Myrval had mumbled, and again closed his eyes. “We must arrange a gathering of the tribal leaders to discuss the details of Mistress Heart’s proposal, a summit.”
“You can arrange what you like. I have nothing against nineteen of the twenty other leaders, but Gerte, who heads the Onu tribe, insulted my daughter. He’s an abomination and I will never meet with him unless he is to apologize.”
Jack had been about to promise this and anything else when Myrval yawned, “The Gnobi and Onu are on the verge of war.”
Jack had had similar trouble with the rest of the tribal leaders, each citing one of their number with whom they refused to have any dealings that did not involve bloodshed. Several of them also took offense at Jack’s not having physically visited their camps to request their attendance at the summit, seeing in this his
The caterpillar exhaled a cloud of green smoke. It enveloped Redd and the others, and when they awoke, they were alone.
CHAPTER 37
P ARTING FROM Redd, Jack of Diamonds had lumbered breathlessly into the first encampment that fell in his way.
“Your leader!” he’d said to the Gnobi tribespeople lolling about. “It’s important that I speak to your leader immediately! Your future freedom depends on it!” The Gnobi, when not roused to violence, were a sluggish clan, the least nomadic of Boarderland’s tribes. Not sensing any immediate threat to their freedoms in the person of Jack Diamond, they had responded to his urgency with characteristic listlessness. “Myrval’s tent is somewhere that way,” one of them had said with a vague wave of the hand. “Follow the sound of the snoring and you’ll find it,” another had suggested. But there had been a fair amount of snoring to be heard in the camp, and not until Jack had roused several civilians from their naps did he catch sight of the only tent with a pennant flying from its roof and two males asleep on stools at its entrance. “Guards,” he’d said to himself.
He had marched past the slumbering guardsmen and, in the tent’s front room, discovered five more sleeping guards—two slumped on chairs, two curled up on floor mats, and one snoring on his feet. What Jack had come upon was no less than a festival of snoring, a riot of honking inhalations, snotty exhalations, and inarticulate mutterings. But louder than all of these, coming from the back room: the wail of an ailing jabberwock. Jack had stepped into the back room and seen a lone figure asleep on a cot. “Myrval!” he’d called, unsure, which had caused the sleeper to groan and roll toward the wall. “I’m an emissary of Redd Heart, former and future queen of Wonderland,” Jack had said, shaking the Gnobi leader awake. “She has sent me here with a proposal that can guarantee future peace and freedom for the Gnobi tribe—for all of Boarderland’s tribes. But it’s a—” “That’s nice of Miss Heart to think of us,” Myrval had mumbled, and again closed his eyes. “We must arrange a gathering of the tribal leaders to discuss the details of Mistress Heart’s proposal, a summit.”
“You can arrange what you like. I have nothing against nineteen of the twenty other leaders, but Gerte, who heads the Onu tribe, insulted my daughter. He’s an abomination and I will never meet with him unless he is to apologize.”
Jack had been about to promise this and anything else when Myrval yawned, “The Gnobi and Onu are on the verge of war.”
Jack had had similar trouble with the rest of the tribal leaders, each citing one of their number with whom they refused to have any dealings that did not involve bloodshed. Several of them also took offense at Jack’s not having physically visited their camps to request their attendance at the summit, seeing in this his