Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(115)

chasing insects, and even dead leaves, than in talking to him.

They stopped to rest when the sun was directly overhead. The

forest had changed: the trees were shorter and spaced more widely

apart, mostly pines rather than the oaks and beeches around

the Lady’s castle. Ahead of him, Ivan could see a different sort of landscape: bare, except for the occasional twisted trees and clumps of grass. It was dry, rocky, strewn with boulders.

“That’s the Eastern Waste,” said Blanchefleur.

“The ground will be too hard for your paws,” said Ivan. “I can

carry you.”

“I’ll do just fine, thank you,” she said with a sniff. But after an hour of walking over the rocky ground, Ivan saw she was limping. “Come on,” he said. “If you hate the thought of me carrying you so much,

pretend I’m a horse.”

“A jackass is more like it,” she said. But she let him pick her up and carry her, with her paws on his shoulder so she could look around.

Occasionally, her whiskers tickled his ear.

The sun traveled across the sky, and hours passed, and still he

walked though the rocky landscape, until his feet hurt. But he would not admit he was in pain, not with Blanchefleur perched on his shoulder. At last, after a region of low cliffs and defiles, they came to a broad plain that was nothing but stones. In the middle of the plain rose a stone tower.

“That’s it,” said Blanchefleur. “That’s Professor Owl’s home.”

“Finally,” said Ivan under his breath. He had been feeling as

though he would fall over from sheer tiredness. He took a deep

breath and started for the tower. But before he reached it, he asked the question he had been wanting to ask all day, but had not dared to.

“Blanchefleur, who is your father?”

“The man who lives in the moon,” she said. “Can you hurry up? I

haven’t had a meal since that mouse at lunch, and I’m getting hungry.”

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? Blanchefleur ?

v

“He’s an owl,” said Ivan.

“Of course he’s an owl,” said Blanchefleur. “What did you think he

would be?”

Professor Owl was in fact an owl, the largest Ivan has ever seen,

with brown and white feathers. When they entered the tower, which

was round and had one room on each level, with stairs curling around the outer wall, he said, “Welcome, welcome. Blanchefleur, I haven’t seen you since you were a kitten. And this must be the assistant the Lady has so graciously sent me. Welcome, boy. I hope you know how to write a good, clear hand.”

“His name is Idiot,” said Blanchefleur.

“My name is Ivan,” said Ivan.

“Yes, yes,” said Professor Owl, paying no attention to them

whatsoever. “Here, then, is my life’s work. The Encyclopedia.”

It was an enormous book, taller than Ivan himself, resting on a

large stand at the far end of the room. In the middle of the room was a wooden table, and around the circular walls were file cabinets, all the way up to the ceiling.

“It’s much too heavy to open by hand—or foot,” said Professor

Owl. “But if you tell the Encyclopedia what you’re looking for, it will open to that entry.”

“Mouse,” said Blanchefleur. And sure enough, as she spoke, the

pages of the Encyclopedia turned as though by magic ( although it probably is magic, thought Ivan) to a page with an entry titled Mouse.

“Let’s see, let’s see,” said Professor Owl, peering at the page. “The bright and active, although mischievous, little animal known to us by the name of Mouse and its close relative the Rat are the most

familiar and also the most typical members of the Murinae, a sub—

family containing about two hundred and fifty species assignable to no less than eighteen distinct genera, all of which, however, are so superficially alike that the English names rat or mouse would be fairly appropriate to any of them. Well, that seems accurate, doesn’t it?”

“Does it say how they taste?” asked Blanchefleur.

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? Theodora Goss ?

“The Encyclopedia is connected to five others,” said Professor

Owl, turning to Ivan. “One is in the Library of Alexandria, one in

the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, one in the Sorbonne, one in