The Blue Shoe Read online

  ALSO BY RODERICK TOWNLEY

  THE SYLVIE CYCLE

  The Great Good Thing

  Into the Labyrinth

  The Constellation of Sylvie

  Sky

  The Red Thread

  For Wyatt—

  hope it fits

  Contents

  Part One: Grel

  Part Two: Slag

  Part Three: Shadow

  Part Four: Silas

  Part Five: Xexnax

  One

  NOT LONG AGO, in the sunny mountain village of Aplanap, famous for its tilted streets, cuckoo clocks, and Finster cheese, there stood a small shoemaker’s shop. And in the window of that shop was a shoe that fit nobody.

  Of course, since it was only one shoe, it was doubly useless.

  Yet everyone who learned of this shoe was seized with the desire to own it. Curious travelers with hard money winking in their pockets came from as far away as Doubtful Bay. But the shoe was not for sale.

  You’re thinking this must have been a remarkable shoe.

  People lined up outside the shop just to look in the window. Even the town’s mayor (whose name is far too long and important to write out here) felt tempted by it. He was an impressive man, but not an easy man to impress. Passing in his carriage, he’d have the coachman slow down so he could catch another glimpse of the famous object, with its sapphires, opals, and moonstones flashing in the sun.

  Did I mention the shoe was covered with precious stones?

  Precious and semiprecious, and a few (like the beads of Murano glass) merely beautiful. And all of them blue. Blue of every description, from palest aquamarine to clearest azure to dramatic cobalt to assertive navy to deep-thinking indigo.

  A blue shoe.

  The shoemaker—I should say this right away—was a simple man, nothing remarkable about him at all. Everyone called him Grel, which was his name, or as much of it as anyone bothered to remember.

  Grel was neither very short nor very tall. He wasn’t particularly thin, nor exactly fat. Neither ugly nor handsome. He had a beard (now threaded with gray), but most Aplanap men wore beards. He was poor, but not poor enough to be arrested.

  Did I mention that the poor were arrested in Aplanap? They were. Well, beggars were arrested. You could be poor all you wanted and you’d be left alone. But if hunger forced you into the streets to beg for a coin, large men would come and cart you to jail, and from there, they’d ship you to the north side of the next mountain, a peak so tall its top was perpetually covered in snow and surrounded by swirling clouds.

  There were many superstitions about this mountain. It stood in plain sight, and yet you couldn’t see the top of it. At night, it was even more mysterious, because the peak pulsed with a dull orange glow. No doubt the light came from the campfires of the beggars condemned to live there, but you know how people are. They’ll believe anything. Some said the mountain was really a volcano. Others claimed that trolls hopped about among the crags and spent the nights forging weapons over a great fire. Still others believed the ancient myth about Xexnax, the goddess the mountain was named for. The glow, they said, came from her kitchen, where she roasted the poor doomed souls who’d been sent there.

  Whatever the truth, you didn’t want to end up on that mountain.

  It was a good thing Grel had Hap Barlo, a young boy he’d taken in as an apprentice. A slim thirteen-year-old with nimble hands and likeable eyes, Hap was smart in ways that Grel was not—quick with numbers, sharp at business. More than once he’d saved his absentminded master from ruin.

  They were never far from ruin as it was. Cobblers were always needed but badly paid. Grel and the boy often lived on crusts, although they could usually indulge in a slice of schnitzel on Sundays, sitting at a little table in front of the shop, with Grel’s dog at their feet. The dog’s name was Rauf, since that was the only word the creature knew. Rauf sometimes spoke his word to the passing cats, but he lacked conviction, and the cats paid no attention.

  On summer evenings, Rauf would lie contentedly in the dust, one eye closed, the other watching his master and a few old friends playing a game of Plog after the day’s work was done. There was something reassuring in the clack of wooden pieces on the game board and the smell of pipe smoke spiraling over Grel’s head.

  As far as the rest of Aplanap was concerned, Grel might have been invisible. Even regular customers would have a hard time placing him had they seen him outside his shop, without his work apron, walking the tilted streets. Grel didn’t mind. He had no desire for recognition. He cared about his sleepy dog, his alert young apprentice, and his art. For he was an artist among cobblers. He might seem vague as he pottered about his shop or rummaged around looking for his glasses, but when it came to work, his concentration was unmatched. The idea of tearing the stones off the fabulous shoe and selling them would never occur to him, any more than he’d tear out his own eyes, especially since, long ago, with excruciating care, he had placed the jewels there himself.

  Grel often thought back to that rainy evening when a weirdly tall stranger, his face shadowed in a cowl, had slipped into the shop at closing time. What struck the shoemaker at once were the man’s eyes, which glittered with a cold blue fire. Wherever they alighted, they lowered the temperature by ten degrees.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” Grel said.

  “Ye make shoes, don’t ye?”

  Grel did not understand at first. The man had a strange accent, a nasal tone, and a voice that started with a grumble in his throat.

  “Shoes, you say?”

  “Shoes! Shoes! Ye are deafen?”

  “Shoes! Yes, the finest.”

  “Then make me one!”

  “Make you…one shoe?”

  The stranger ignored him. He pulled out a sketch and laid it on the workbench, smoothing its creases with his skinny hand.

  One shoe. That’s what he wanted. And he paid in advance. Grel watched the heavy coins clink on the wood.

  “But that’s too much!” he faintly protested.

  The man’s eyes held him.

  “Ye complain I pay too much?”

  “But it’s only one shoe. I should charge you half as much, not …”

  I mentioned, didn’t I, that Grel was not a sharp businessman?

  More coins clinked on the wood.

  “Thinken me,” said the stranger in a dark voice, “ye’ll earn every groat.”

  Grel shook his head. It was ten times what he generally received for his work. And only one shoe! What could be simpler?

  It was not so simple as he’d imagined. After the stranger had given Grel the measurements, he’d pulled out a velvet purse and emptied it, with a small tinkling sound, on the worktable. Sapphires, tiny blue opals, lapis lazuli, tourmalines, bits of turquoise, topaz, and sky blue quartz glittered in the candlelight, casting a blue glow upward into the cobbler’s astonished face.

  “Wh-what’s this?” Grel stammered.

  “This,” the stranger replied, pointing a crooked finger, “is to put on the shoe. Use every stone. Leave one out, I will know, and things will go not well.”

  “I will not leave any out.”

  “Not one stone.”

  “Not a single one, I promise!”

  The stranger nodded.

  “I will return.”

  Grel bowed.

  “Very good. When should I expect you?”

  But he was already at the door, ducking his head under the lintel. Grel was startled to see that the man was wearing no shoes at all, and in the place of toes, he had claws!

  Was the shoe for him?

  “It will be my masterpiece!” Grel called out as the stranger disappeared in the darkness.

  So it was. Never had anyone constructed such a shoe
. Even more remarkable than the gleam of the jewels was the daring design itself. From its delicacy of line, it seemed a woman’s shoe, if it was meant for a human at all. Whoever would wear it must have an exceedingly odd-shaped foot, thick at the heel, then tapering weirdly to a point. From a certain angle, it looked, in fact, a bit like Doubtful Bay, the glittering watercourse that wound around the base of the mountain and that one could see from any point in town, simply by looking down. Grel began to think of the object as “The Doubtful Shoe.” He poured all his artistry into it, staying up nights to get it finished. The result was the most weirdly beautiful shoe ever cobbled. As a last touch, he put his mark, a small backward G, on the tongue of the shoe. He always did this. It was the one touch of pride in a modest man, like an artist signing his painting.

  For a long time, no one except Grel and his apprentice knew of the shoe’s existence. Grel kept it wrapped in brown paper tied with a string on a shelf in the back of the shop. But Hap had helped him make it, fetching special clips and clasps from the local jeweler and thin silk ribbons from the dressmaker, and he itched to tell someone about it. Grel made him promise not to.

  “Not even Sophia?” Sophia Hartpence was a girl Hap would have liked to impress. She was a bright little thing with quick blue eyes and definite ideas about everything. Her parents owned a curio shop, Xexnax Knickknacks, at the edge of town.

  “Especially not Sophia. She has a brother, and he has friends. By the end of the week, even the cats would know.”

  Hap nodded sadly. Grel was right. Did I mention that the stranger never returned for his shoe?

  It made no sense. Had he had an accident? What would keep him from claiming this wondrous feat of shoemanship?

  Sometimes when young Hap was alone in the shop, he took down the package and unwrapped it. The shoe glowed up at him. How much was it worth? he wondered. Who was it intended for? Someone remarkable, no doubt.

  Hap wrapped it up again and set it on the shelf.

  He was beginning to think no one would wear it at all.

  Two

  I SHOULD HAVE mentioned something before now about Hap. It’s painful to say, because he had so many good qualities, but, well, here it is: Hap was a thief. He’d had to be, in the terrible months after his mother had died, and his father—Silas Barlo was his name, a beekeeper by trade—had given up on life. It was terrible to see. The man had been so cheerful, such a prankster, almost a playmate to his son. Even Hap’s friends liked him, and they didn’t go in for grown-ups. With his crooked nose and berry-bright eyes, he made everyone laugh.

  And he had a voice—such a wonderful tenor voice that people asked him to sing at their parties and weddings. He did it free of charge, for the pleasure of it.

  Some of the locals thought him a fool, but Hap knew better. It was just that he was so grateful for his life, simple as it was, that he could not help pulling pranks or breaking into song.

  After his wife fell ill, everything changed. Barlo grew gloomy. When she died, he was so distraught he set his bees loose and tossed the hives over a cliff, never thinking of the consequences.

  Consequences were quick to arrive: no money to buy bread, and soon enough no honey to put on the bread they couldn’t buy. Father and son foraged for blackberries. They ate leaves. Sometimes they caught fish. At first, the townspeople tried to help by hiring Barlo to sing at their parties, but his songs were so mournful that everyone left depressed. Before long, the only singing jobs Barlo could get were at funerals.

  He couldn’t pay his taxes or his other debts and was turned out of his house.

  It was steal or starve, and his son, Hap, had no trouble choosing between them, especially after he discovered his father crouching in the shadow of the Town Hall one afternoon with a can in his hands, begging for coins.

  Begging! In Aplanap!

  A vision of the goddess Xexnax in her mountain kitchen flew into Hap’s mind. He imagined his father turning slowly on a spit over a hissing fire.

  In a panic, Hap hustled his father away to the little shelter they’d built at the far end of Xexnax Park, on the outskirts of town. Later that night, he climbed through the window of the clockmaker’s shop and took money from the leather pouch behind the workbench.

  In the months that followed, Hap became a skillful pickpocket. His conscience bothered him, but the thought of his father begging in the street struck him like a blow to the chest, and he advised his conscience to leave him alone.

  One afternoon, he watched the mayor’s wife, Ludmilla the Large, leaving a jewelry shop. A woman fond of heavy rouge and heavy bracelets, Ludmilla was counting gold coins and dropping them into a tiny purse. She had no need for a larger one because she seldom paid for anything. The truth is, the townspeople were afraid of their mayor, and their fear extended to his wife. Shopkeepers let her take whatever she wished and cheerfully put it “on her bill.”

  Jewelers suffered the most, because Ludmilla was obsessed with ornament. Each roll of fat beneath her chin was enlivened by its own necklace. Each sausage-like finger was weighed down by a ring.

  Surely, thought Hap, so fine a lady wouldn’t miss a coin or two. No sooner had she slipped the purse into her pocket than Hap brushed against her and fished it out, hardly noticing the faint tinkle of a bell.

  A gloved hand, remarkably powerful for a woman’s, slammed down on his wrist and held him like a vise. The purse, with its bell attached, was held aloft for all to see.

  Ludmilla’s eyes were fierce but her voice soft. “Well, well,” she fairly purred, “what have we here?”

  The story was huge news in the sleepy town. The Daily Aplanapian quoted the mayor’s angry denunciation of the thief and his beggarly father. Both of them, the mayor told the municipal court, deserved to be sent off at once to the north side of the next mountain, never to be seen again.

  If it hadn’t been for Grel, that is certainly what would have happened. He was fond of the boy and sorry for the father. Of course, he had no money to pay the enormous fine, but he offered to take the boy in and teach him the honest trade of shoemaking.

  The mayor seemed undecided whether to be outraged or amused. “Do you really think that I”—and here he spoke his whole long, unpronounceable name—“the Lord Mayor of Aplanap, would so easily release the thieving urchin who assaulted my wife?”

  It was widely understood in the town that the mayor was besotted with his wife’s beauty. Anyone injuring or even displeasing her would suffer the full weight of the law—twice the full weight.

  But the assaulted one held up a hand clinking with bracelets. “Just a moment,” she said quietly, and whispered in his ear.

  “Really?” he murmured.

  She whispered some more.

  “Are you quite sure, Luddy?” he said. “Think what he’s done.”

  She gave him a look well known to townspeople— The Look That Cannot Be Denied.

  “Very well,” he said. “If you wish it.”

  The Lord Mayor cleared his throat, rubbed his hands, and looked out over the crowd. The room quieted as his brow furrowed in thought. He was a virtuoso with his brow, sometimes raising it in mock surprise, at other times lowering it in disapproval. But his most impressive weapon was the large pink wart that stood on his forehead like a lighthouse amid the rough seas of his frowns. It was a thrilling sight, with three shiny black hairs sprouting from its base. There was no winning an argument against it.

  “It seems,” he intoned, “that my lovely wife, Ludmilla, is inclined to mercy. We will therefore grant Grel’s petition, on condition that he provide her with any shoes she asks him to make.”

  “Agreed, agreed, of course!” said Grel.

  “For the rest of her life.”

  The shoemaker swallowed. “Yes, sir. Well,” he said, “at least for the rest of my life.”

  The mayor furrowed his brow so deeply it nearly hid his eyes. Finally, he nodded. “That will be sufficient.”

  So it was that Hap came to be the shoemaker’s
apprentice. The boy’s father, unfortunately, did not escape his punishment and was sent to Mount Xexnax to serve his life term. The poor man was so disheartened he almost forgot to wave to his son. He certainly wasn’t singing.

  Months went by. The sun shone cheerily on the mountainside, while far below, the thrashing waters of Doubtful Bay churned like a crash of silverware. The well-scrubbed cobblestones of Aplanap gleamed. Even the chimney swifts, dipping and twirling, seemed to wear a coat of polish on their wings.

  The town had the good fortune to be located on a mountain that was protected from severe weather by the taller mountains surrounding it. Tourists were drawn by its cheeses, its quince preserves, and the local folklore about some mountain goddess who lived in a “cave of winds” somewhere. But visitors were especially keen on the cuckoo clocks. They were the pride of Aplanap, with cuckoos so expertly carved you would swear the birds were real.

  It was all very quaint and very profitable. Some said that every time a clock chimed, another coin dropped in a cashbox somewhere in this prosperous town. The truth is that some of the town’s wealthier citizens were spoiled by the success they enjoyed. An odor of self-satisfaction hung in the air. When a stray beggar was picked up by the police and deported to Mount Xexnax, people simply looked the other way. I heard one woman declare that there were no beggars in Aplanap. That there had never been beggars in Aplanap.

  Grel the cobbler was under no such illusion. He continued making shoes, repairing straps, replacing worn-out soles, but he barely earned enough to survive. Hap did what he could, striking the best deals for his master’s work. He was devoted to Grel. Whenever an impatient customer spoke disrespectfully about the shoemaker, Hap burned to speak up and say, If you only knew!

  But he remembered his promise. Even when Sophia Hartpence came by, he bit his tongue and kept silent about the blue shoe.

  Generally a cheerful soul, Hap was well liked by customers—in fact, by pretty much everybody. Sophia made fun of him, and that was upsetting; but maybe, he thought, that meant she liked him, or why would she bother? You could never tell with girls.