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Short people on bicycles.
So short, especially in their stumpy legs, that they’d each strapped wooden blocks to their feet so they could reach the pedals.
Mack was just noticing this odd fact when he was smacked on the side of the head by a club shaped a bit like a bowling pin.
Tong Elves, he thought dreamily as his legs turned to jelly and he circled the drain of consciousness.
That’s right: circled the drain of consciousness. You have a problem with that?
Mack barely avoided being completely flushed out of consciousness. He sank to his knees, and Jarrah hauled him back up.
The mob of Tong Elves on bikes shot past, braked, turned clumsily back, and came in a rush for a second pass.
“You got a magic spell for this?” Stefan asked.
“I miss Toaster Strudel,” Mack said.
Stefan and Jarrah correctly interpreted this remark as evidence that the blow to Mack’s head might have scattered his wits a bit.
“Run!” Stefan said to Jarrah.
“Got that right!” Jarrah agreed.
They each grabbed one of Mack’s arms and took off, half guiding, half dragging Mack, who was explaining why strawberry Toaster Strudel was the best, but sometimes he liked the apple.
“I had a s’mores flavour Toaster Strudel once but…” Mack announced before losing his train of thought.
The Tong Elves were just a few feet away. But they were awkward on their bikes. Stefan led Mack and Jarrah straight across their path, rushed into traffic, and dodged across the street through buses and taxis.
The Tong Elves veered to follow.
Wham! A bus reduced their number by two. The unlucky pair went flying through the air and landed in front of a taxi, which hit them again – wham! – and flipped them bike-over-heels into a light pole.
“I like foosball,” Mack said. “But I’m not good at it.”
“This way! We can’t outrun them on foot!” Stefan yelled, and he and Jarrah dragged Mack bouncing and scuffling down the sidewalk and into a rack of parked bicycles. The bikes were locked, but Stefan still had the Skirrit blade.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
And there were three unlocked bikes.
“Can you ride a bike?” Jarrah asked Mack.
Mack drew himself up with offended dignity and said, “I could be a Jonas brother.”
“I think that’s a no,” Jarrah said.
Stefan lifted Mack up and settled him on the handle-bars of a bike. With fluid strength Stefan swung a leg over, mounted the bike, held a drifting, ranting Mack in place with one hand, grabbed the handlebar with the other, and stomped on the pedal.
Down the street, past the now partly flame-engulfed market they rode, with a mob of Tong Elves on bikes behind them.
But then, just ahead, a pedicab.
Small digression: a pedicab is defined on wordia.com as “noun, a pedal-operated tricycle, available for hire, with an attached seat for one or two passengers.”
This particular pedicab had a wiry guy pedalling. And on the back it had a sort of cabin, bright turquoise with a red fringe and gold tassels.
The pedicab was speeding right towards Mack and Stefan. As fast as the guy could pedal.
And leaning out of the side of the cabin, with the naked blade of his cane-sword pointed forward like a knight with a jousting lance, was Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout.
ABOUT NINETY YEARS AGO, GIVE OR TAKE…
o long, son!” Paddy’s parents shouted as they waved to him from the quay. “We’ll…” They paused and looked at each other, each hoping the other would say, “We’ll miss you.”
But in the end neither could quite pull it off. So they just repeated, “So long!”
Paddy shipped out for America aboard HMS DiCaprio, a luxury transatlantic ship. At least it was luxury if you were in first class. But the DiCaprio had seven different classes of accommodation.
In first class you lived like a king. A giant stateroom, a butler, a maid, two bathrooms, crystal chandeliers, gold doorknobs, lovely soft feather beds. The toilet paper was linen, and the linens were silk. In the bathroom there were three knobs: hot, cold and soup. The food served was so fresh you could actually meet the chickens who laid your eggs and the pigs who would become your bacon.
But none of that mattered because Paddy was not in first class.
In second class you were still doing pretty well, with a nice little stateroom. There was no soup nozzle in the room, and the toilet paper was just paper, but it was soft (two-ply). And second-class passengers were served pleasant and healthy meals in the cheerful second-class dining room. You didn’t get to actually chat with your pig or lamb or chicken or cow, but you could wave to them.
But Paddy was not in second class.
Third class was a little more rough-and-ready. You had to make your own bed, for one thing. And meals were all self-serve at the oat ’n’ swine buffet.
SO, MAYBE I SHOULD EXPLAIN BECAUSE YOU MAY NOT KNOW VERY MUCH ABOUT GOLEMS. FIRST OF ALL, IT’S GOLEM, LIKE GO AND THEN LEM. NOT GOLLUM. I AM NOT GOLLUM. I DON’T WANTS IT, PRECIOUS. A GOLLUM IS 90 PER CENT HOBBIT AND 10 PER CENT EVIL. A GOLEM IS 90 PER CENT MUD, AND ANOTHER 7 PER CENT TWIGS, PINECONES, DEAD BEETLES, AND LINT. THE LAST 3 PER CENT IS FAITHFULNESS. WE ARE VERY FAITHFUL. I WILL ALWAYS FAITHFULLY TRY TO TAKE MACK’S PLACE WHILE HE’S AWAY. EVEN THOUGH IT MEANS I HAVE DETENTION BECAUSE OF THE WHOLE DISSOLVED-FEET SITUATION AND THE SCREAMING AND ALL.
Nope, not third class, either.
Fourth class was where most impoverished immigrants travelled. They cooked their own meals over open fires in massively overcrowded holds down in the sweaty bowels of the ship, where they dreamed of spotting the Statue of Liberty.
Paddy was not in fourth class.
Fifth-class passengers weren’t even given a place to spread out a blanket. Mostly they climbed into laundry bags and hung those bags from hooks. Thus they rocked back and forth all night, banging up against the steel bulkheads with each passing wave. They were kept awake by the mystery of how they could hang up a bag they were actually in. Their meals were served at the same time as the livestock kept for the first-class passengers’ dinners. In fact, it was the same food.
Fifth class didn’t dream of spotting the Statue of Liberty because if they ever appeared on the open deck, they’d get a beat-down from beefy ship’s stewards. The only time they were allowed on deck was for gladiatorial games in which they were pitted against each other in pepper mill battles while first-class passengers bet on the outcome.
Fifth class? Tough place. Unpleasant place.
But Paddy was not in fifth class. He’d have loved to be fifth class.
Sixth class meant you slept in the fifth-class bathrooms, or heads as they say on boats. You could sit on one of the toilets until someone needed to use it. This wasn’t a great way to spend ten days, which was how long it took the HMS DiCaprio to get across the ocean to New York.
But Paddy wasn’t in sixth class.
Paddy was in seventh class. And seventh class was a very bad class aboard the DiCaprio. Seventh-class passengers were allowed aboard the ship, but once aboard they were hunted by the packs of wild dogs that lived down in the bilges.
The wild dogs were the offspring of escaped pets. You see, sometimes first-class passengers travelled with poodles or Chihuahuas or Pekingese. Over the years some of these animals had escaped their kennels and had bred and multiplied in the bowels of the great ship.
Imagine, if you will, poodles bred with Chihuahuas and then hardened and made savage by the dog pack life in the dank, dark holds far, far from light.
Nobody would want to go up against that kind of horror.
The bilges of a ship are the lowest level. Down below the engines. Not even the basement of the ship, more like if the ship had a basement but someone dug out a pit below that.
Anyway, the bilges were where all the water that seeped into the ship collected. Rainwater, sea spray, mop water, overflowing toilet water, spilled coffee water, seasickness results, you name it. It was about up to Paddy’s thighs. It smelled like a toilet.
For food, the seventh-class passengers had to trap and kill one of the many alligators that slithered through the dank, cold, oily, poo-smelling water.
So basically it was bad. Very bad. As bad as it gets.
But Paddy was a tough kid. On his first night in the bilges he earned the respect of the wild dog pack by biting the pack’s leader on the ear and gnawing away for so long that forever after that dog was known as Rex “One Ear” Plantagenet.
On his second night Paddy killed and ate an alligator.
By the time he left the DiCaprio – seventh-class passengers didn’t walk down the gangplank; they were tossed into the water and left to swim ashore – he not only had a belly full of tasty alligator sushi, he had a nice pair of homemade alligator boots and a matching alligator vest.
Which was frankly disturbing to the first New Yorkers who saw him, what with Paddy having had no facilities for drying or even properly cleaning alligator skin. So his alligator boots had bits of alligator intestine trailing behind.
On the plus side, no one asked him for spare change.
Paddy went straight from the dock to the headquarters of the Toomany Society, which was housed in Toomany Hall. The Toomany Society offered help to newly arrived immigrants.
“What do you do for a living?” the woman at the desk asked.
“I used to grow oats.”
“That’ll be really useful here in New York. We have so many vast fields of oats.”
“Are you being sarcastic?” Paddy asked.
“Actually, no. I mean, this isn’t New York like it might be in the future, say, the far-off twenty-first century. This is New York in the early twentieth century. And believe it or not, we still have farms here. A hardworking oater can eke out a miserable existence working sixteen backbreaking hours a day, seven days a week in harsh conditions. You’ll marry a dance hall girl, spawn ill-mannered brats, grow old before your time, and die of some miserable disease, possibly consumption. But hey, it’s a living.”
“What are my other choices?” Paddy asked.
The woman shrugged. “You’re not fit for anything but oat farming or banking – and you don’t have the wardrobe for banking. And then, there’s always crime.”
“Tell me about this ‘crime’ of which you speak.”
“Well, hmm… I suppose you’d join a criminal gang, extort money from shopkeepers, rob banks, dress in flashy clothes, and mostly sit around all day drinking with other criminals in between acts of mayhem.”
Paddy pointed a jaunty finger at her and said, “Bingo.”
y favourite colour used to be purple!” Mack cried out as Stefan and Jarrah pedalled frantically.
The Tong Elves were just behind them.
Nine Iron Trout was just ahead, ready to impale them.
Clearly the Pale Queen’s minions weren’t waiting around for the thirty-five days to be up. They were looking for a quick kill.
Or in Nine Iron’s case, a slow kill.
Panicky vendors were trying desperately to save squids and snakes-on-a-stick from the threatening flames. All the commotion was lit by cheery neon lights shining off candy-striped awnings.
Stefan had powerful legs. But the weight of a not-exactly-steady Mack flailing all over the handlebars slowed him down a bit.
Mack didn’t snap entirely back to reality until he saw Nine Iron’s cane-sword within about eight feet of skewering him like a fried scorpion.
“Hey!” he yelled.
Stefan tried to veer right to pass the safe side of the pedicab, but quick-peddling Tong Elves cut him off.
“Left! Closer!” Mack shouted.
Maybe Stefan obeyed or maybe he just wobbled, but either way Mack’s left hand came just close enough to a tray of mixed skewers.
He snatched them up, transferred them to his right hand, and with Nine Iron’s deadly sword just two feet from his heart, flung the skewers like darts.
The sudden movement sent Stefan even further left, crashing through a grease fire and slip-sliding through a couple of dozen frantic lobsters who were no doubt hoping to reach the ocean. (Sorry: no.)
The sword missed by millimeters.
The skewers did not. In a flash of neon, Mack saw that a skewer of fried sea horses had stuck in Nine Iron’s gaunt cheek. And a skewer of fried silkworm cocoons had stuck in Nine Iron’s green bowler hat.
They flashed past the pedicab and gained speed. Jarrah was alongside, pedalling hard.
“Why am I riding on the handlebars?” Mack cried.
“Look out! Here they come!” Jarrah cried, jerking her chin back towards the Tong Elves. With a glance, Mack could see that the pedicab driver had spun his vehicle sharply, making a teetering two-wheel turn, and now raced after the fleeing bikes.
Ahead was a tall, red-lacquered double door studded with brass bolts as big as a baby’s head. Two uniformed guards were just closing a massive filigreed gate behind a departing cleaning crew.
Mack, Stefan and Jarrah shot through the gap, pursued by Chinese shouts of outrage. Which aren’t that different from American shouts of outrage because outrage is a universal language.
The guards slammed the gates closed behind them, locking out Nine Iron and the elves on bikes.
Unfortunately now the guards were yelling at Mack, Stefan and Jarrah, and blowing police whistles, so while things looked better than they had, they still didn’t look good.
“We have to hide!” Jarrah said.
They were in a vast square. Buildings all around formed the edges of a cobblestoned courtyard. The walls on all sides were reddish, although in the dim light it was hard to see very clearly.
Mack was trying to picture the map of the Forbidden City in his mind. He’d glanced at the map but he hadn’t exactly memorised the place. After all, it’s a huge complex full of numerous palaces – some big, some small, all fabulously decorated with dragons and filigree and Chinese characters.
