JMJ
Chapter Fourteen
The Cha-writable Teafarers
To see Matthias and Esther sitting there like a pair of abandoned ducks in a bathtub the teafarers looked up just as surprised as the sitting ducks. A dark-colored Teacup Maltipook (a cross between a tiny dog, a pookah, and a malt tea fit for use as a puja) gave a high-pitched bark. A Teacup Pig (smaller than most piglets with a remarkable teacup hat) released a piercing-sharp squeal, a Red Elephant trumpeted, and a chialingosauras chachong (also known as a Chalingosauras) was silent but visibly staring and changing from a tea-colored to pale blue.
Quickly recovering, the four huddled to convene, and none of what they said could be overheard.
Esther looked at Matthias. Matthias helped her back onto the saucer. Then after another pause, Matthias looked at Esther. It seemed to him that the seafarers were not discussing the rescuing of the pair so much as simply muttering about the perturbing unusualness of seeing them. With some annoyance and positioning himself in the middle of the hoof-like foot of the saucer, Matthias cupped his mouth with his hands and shouted, "Hey, there! We could use some help, if… well, if you don't mind!"
"Yes, yes, of course!" cried the Elephant in a shrill voice. "We do mind!"
Matthias wrinkled his nose.
The Elephant paused. "I mean that we would like to mind! Or I mean that, we are of a mind, the type of which we would like to help."
"You mean you wouldn't mind?" huffed Matthias.
The Maltipook pouted and the Teacup Pig snorted. The Chalingosauras only stared but was becoming tea-colored again. The Elephant tried to defend himself sheepishly. Despite his great size, he looked like a mouse in the presence of many angry cats the way he writhed and recoiled into himself. At least he looked like he wished to turn into a mouse to disappear but he was not the one part pooka.
"I— I think it's only charitable, I mean," muttered the Elephant.
"Cha-writable," the Chalingosauras corrected, but with solemn agreement as he closed his sage eyes, his body was turning the color of sagebrush, though it was difficult to tell for certain because it was quite close to the usual color of his scales.
"Yes, yes, of course!" agreed the Elephant wringing his trunk.
The Teacup animals did not argue. In fact, once it was decided, the pair of them together seemed quite as though they had unanimously agreed with gusto from the beginning. The Chalingosauras was busily writing down the cha-writable deed for the correct tax deduction, and the Elephant was left to apologetically have the honor of pulling the two soaked people up one at a time into the boat-like cup. He seemed to be blushing by the way he kept smiling so bashfully, but since he was always so red it was impossible to tell.
After the teafarers introduced themselves, they insisted that their guests do the same.
"Well, my name is uh…" Matthias glanced at Esther as he was suddenly unsure whether or not they should give their real names in case they were known somehow down here as prisoners of the great ball above them.
One thing was for certain, Matthias did not want to mention anything about the ball itself. He cleared his throat to try to hide his hesitance. Then he grinned from ear to ear. Now he had to hide as well the fact that he was used to sweeping a hat off his head for a proper gentlemanly bow, and Esther did not dare interrupt his fumbling.
Then he said, "Excuse me, the steam, you know. My name is Matthias" (he decided to keep his surname private anyway) "and this is my, er, companion—"
He felt rather than saw the flushing tenseness of Esther beside him, and he suddenly found himself mentally sitting before three names "Esther", "Lise", and "Alice", so that it came out of his mouth as "Alsy". He was not sure how since it was really none of the names together. He even tried calculating it mathematically afterwards, but the answer had already been inserted into public hearing with no way of reprieve. He could now feel Esther's grimace upon him, but he chose not to look back at her. He grinned all the more.
"Please to meet you, Elsie!" said the Teacup Pig with a bow, and he swept off his tiny hat; though it did look more like a china saucer with a chain set up to hold it snug under his chin with a cup glued on the top.
"No, no, no. He said 'I'll see'!" said the Maltipook.
The Teacup Pig sipped from his cup and then put the whole ensemble back onto his head with an 'ulp'.
"He doesn't know his companion's name?" asked the Elephant. "Rude of him not to ask her before they were in trouble."
"No, it was 'Elsie'! I know I heard it!" squealed the Pig defensively.
"I heard 'Null. See?' myself," muttered the Chalingosauras turning lavender as it became thoughtful.
"You can see yourself?" snorted the Pig.
"Yes, yes, of course if one looks over the edge, one's bound to see one's own reflection!" said the Elephant. "In a psychological sense, anyway."
"I mean, she doesn't have a name," said the Chalingosauras. "So we shall have to name her. 'One drawn out of tea.' I think we'll have to call her 'Tehmose'."
"'Tea mouse'?" snorted the Pig.
"'Chako'?" suggested the Maltipoo. "Chako, Chako, Chako… Choco-latte!"
He took to bowing and bow-wowing before taking the woman's hand about to lick it, but Esther pulled her hand away from the little dog-like creature. It was interesting that she could smell the malt in his fur. Perhaps since he was part beverage, he did see the problem with another person being part confection. Matthias stood in front of her for further protection either way.
"I said, 'Alice'!" said Matthias deciding it better to keep her real name hidden more than to risk making a novelty of her name being after the heroine of Wonderland.
"'Lise'," said Esther.
And they said these names at the same exact moment, which silenced the whole cup.
"Alisslees!" barked the Maltipook then.
And although the Chalingosauras looked quite ready to give some sort of etymology, pun, or portmanteau as explanation, Matthias said, "Yes, exactly! 'Estella' for short! That should be easy to remember!"
Esther rolled her eyes despite herself.
"Yes, that is a little shorter when spelled out, of course," said the Red Elephant with uncertainty as he rubbed his head with his trunk. "And easier to etymologize." Here he glanced with extra uncertainty to the Chalingosauras.
The Chalingosauras turned bronze with obstinacy but said nothing as though the stupidity of the conversation had gone beneath his reason for responding. Or perhaps he simply thought nicknames themselves to not be worth analyzing.
"Yeah, so…" said Matthias looking over the edge of the teacup as he crossed the whisk-like boards that kept them near the brim. "… going to harvest tea, are we? Into the tea cup. Below the sieve boards or whatever?"
"Are you calling our activities illegal?!" confronted the Pig.
The Maltipook barked and growled and shook his floppy ears as he shook his thick malty coat, which caused such a scene as to make it uncertain whether the Elephant was shirking away from the supposed accusation or the from the violence of his companion.
"Not at all!" exclaimed Matthias cheerfully.
"Is it illegal?" asked Esther.
"You can't drink the tea from the Tea Field," said the Chalingosauras.
"Of course!" said the Elephant. "It's untreated, untested, un—"
"Unhealthy!" nodded the Maltipook.
Esther and Matthias yet again looked at each other and this time very uneasily.
"How exactly?" asked Esther hesitantly. "What would it do to a person?"
"That's just it, nobody knows!" said the Maltipook.
"Including yours," muttered the Pig.
The Elephant gasped, and the floor whisk waved about like a loose bridge under his swaying feet. "I know what's wrong with them! They were drowning in the Tea Field! Of course they consumed it!"
"But they didn't drink it," snorted the Pig.
"Yes, they have to drink it, Red!" snapped the Maltipook.
"Yes…" mused the Elephant more unsure than ever. "Yes, of course… I remember, I just don't understand, exactly."
"Well, nobody says that elephants understand," retorted the Pig. "Only that they remember."
"Hold your tongue," said the Chalingosauras then, calm as chamomile and as strong as steeped to its limit before becoming undesirable. "He understands more than he appears to, it's only his resolve that's the problem, but as for the matter on hand…"
He seemed to be the elder of the group, despite his youthful face as now the others watched him with sobriety, if not exactly admiration. Matthias wondered if it was not so much the tone he used but the fact that he was so prehistoric in nature that gave him his authority.
The Chalingosauras held out his forefoot. "Did you drink any?"
"No," said Matthias.
"Yes," said Esther.
Again they said these things at the same time.
"If you rework that enough," said the Chalingosauras after a pause. "You could make it 'nice', but etymologically speaking it would still be neither and both at the same time as 'nice' can mean as much as 'wonton' as it can be 'pleasant'."
"Of course it would!" agreed the Elephant as though it was the first thing he had agreed with all day.
"Please," said Esther gently. "Be clear, we just wish to know what is wrong with the tea."
"We already told you!" said the Maltipook impatiently. "We told you it was untested, untreated, and unsafe!"
"Unsound!" said the Pig.
"They'll call all the shots for you before they'll let you into the Citea Dell!" the Maltipook said with further haste.
"Yes," said the Chalingosauras professionally. "There'll be the incubations, inoculations, and the quarantines."
"What's the difference between the incubations and the quarantines?" asked Matthias.
"Well, you've heard of 'hatching an idea', haven't you?" asked Chalingosauras.
"Well, every smart person is an egg head," shrugged Matthias.
"Every brainchild hatches from an egg," the Pig sniggered.
The Chalingosauras held up his forefoot for silence. "Well, a mind must be incubated to have a good idea, and before anything else is done about a problem such as the one before us, the leading minds of the city must incubate their skulls under reasonable lighting for their brainchildren, so to speak, to come forth."
"You mean the 'light of reason'?" asked Esther.
"No, I never say things I don't mean," said the Chalingosauras offended.
"And…our situation is that…er, confusing, is it?" asked Matthias. "That it requires this sort of incubation from the leading intelligentsia of the sitty-place?"
"Absolutely!" said the Elephant. "How did you get out here? Did you get tea up your nose? And did you hatch from the great egg floating there?"
He pointed with trunk up to the great planetoid hovering as surreal as ever above the sea.
"Yes," said Matthias.
"No," said Esther, and once again they were at an impasse.
The four teafarers looked at each other, but before they could make any sense of this, Matthias interrupted, "Well! If you aren't doing anything illegal and you are going to be extra charitable—"
"Cha-writable," interrupted the Maltipook.
"Yes, yes, cha-writable," agreed Matthias idly, "by bringing us to the sitty-place where they all sit and incubate for every decision, and with the fact that the tea is so dangerous in this sea, then what virtuous task are you endeavoring to accomplish out here?"
"It's the sun, mostly," said the Chalingosauras. "We're harvest-tea-ing the raw tea leaves deep enough below the surface to be purer than the tea surface where the sun spoils it."
He then motioned for the Maltipook and the Teacup Pig to hoist the tea ball infuser back to the cup.
"Then we take it back to the Citea Dell, where it is boiled and pasteurized, prioritized, demagnetized, and demoralized," said Chalingosauras.
"There wouldn't be much sense in drinking tea after all that," said Matthias after a pause. "At least not while still calling it 'tea'."
"We do our best, Sir!" exclaimed the Maltipook with such seriousness that Esther was unable to hold back a small laugh.
He and the Teacup Pig now had their load of fresh tea leaves in the tea ball.
"Does all Wonderland drink this sort of tea?" asked Matthias.
It was bad enough to drink tea made from leaves already steeped, but to think that someone drank such a beverage as these teafarers were suggesting when all the tea in the sea was already fresh and perfect in this great cup, was almost enough to bring a tear to one's eye for the waste of it all. He did not even feel that the foursome should be called teafarers anymore.
"It's rather locolized, I'm afraid," said the Chalingosauras turning quite blue with a forlorn sigh. "Our train only goes so far. And the motive is lacking to go charting out further."
Matthias laughed in relief. "Would that be normal charting or cha-arting?"
"I don't like him!" barked the Maltipook.
"I don't either," said the Teacup Pig with a sound between a high pitched squeal and a snort.
"The art of tea is lost upon him," said the Chalingosauras.
The Elephant who had been gaping for some time as he looked at all the speakers in turn, now clamped his mouth shut as he suddenly realized that he was the only one among his fellows who had added nothing to this topic. He lifted up his trunk for a profound statement and all that came out was, "Yes."
"Quite the yes-man," remarked Matthias.
"Of course!" said the Elephant making a blushing expression again.
"Except he's an elephant," said the Maltipook.
"We don't have to like any of them," said the Chalingosauras after a pause to look at the tea leaves behind the mesh of the tea infuser. "We have our duty and that should be enough for us. Think of the writable. The teacher will give us three gold stars each. One for three of the senses. One for us seeing them, one for us hearing them, and one for us touching them."
"We could smell them too," suggested the Maltipook.
"I'd rather not," remarked the Teacup Pig.
"Too late, I already did," remarked the Maltipook back.
"Never mind," said the Chalingosauras. "It doesn't matter. Smelling did nothing to rescue them."
"I think we should get a gold star for the fact that that one is called Estella," said the Teacup Pig.
"Maybe she'll just get one for herself," said the Maltipook.
But there was no more talk about it much to the Maltipook's disappointment.
At once the four of teafarers began to work. The Chalingosauras had the important job of calling out commands while further inspecting the leaves. The Elephant had the job of picking through the tiny specimens to keep the good ones and throw out the bad. Unfortunately with his feet it was almost an impossible task. He insisted upon using his feet more than his trunk, though the few times he did use it, it did him little more good anyway with how he fumbled with it. There was still much good thrown out with the bad and much bad kept with the good. The fast-paced Teacup Pig and Maltipook were busy with the heavy spoons to paddle towards the unknown destination through the sunny tea mists. If it was not for how they adjusted the sail to face the direction from which they had come (with the cup handle as the prow), they would not have been able to manage it.
They were so busy about their work that it seemed to Matthias that if he or Esther were to jump out the back of the cup, no one would notice the splash. He considered the option carefully a moment, but as he turned to Esther he nearly cried out for her to stop as she was leaning over the edge of the cup as though to do just what he had thought.
Like a bird on the wing he hurried swiftly towards her and looked over the edge with her.
In a hushed voice, he asked, "What is it?"
"It smells like jasmine now," said Esther.
Matthias paused to take a whiff. "Yes, so it does. You know it's all bosh what they say about this tea, don't you?"
"It's Wonderland, isn't it? Of course it's nonsense," Esther shrugged.
Matthias stifled a laugh as he glanced at the crew.
"So you believe it now?" he asked in a voice more hushed as he returned to the woman.
Esther sighed and looked away, first down at the steamy tea and then up at the great hamster ball they were leaving behind. The mist was not shrouding it in the same way now that they were not below it, and it looked more ridiculous than mysterious, like something that really was not there and it was only a trick of the like mistaking a bit of dust as being completely the wrong size. As Matthias followed her vision, he felt his eyelid do a tick as his brain tried to figure it out, but it could have been a Pavlov-like impulse for knowing the tick for every tock instead of sizing it.
He shrugged, but there was something even stranger about the ball suddenly.
"Is that something moving on it?" asked Matthias.
Esther squinted. "What?"
Yes, it was moving whatever it was. Something under the ball was peeping out like the snout of a metal munching mouse through what he had already eaten through. It seemed that a tail was coming out of it now behind its jolting metallic rump.
He placed a hand over his eyes to block the blind spots caused by orbs of sunlight across the tea, but it did nothing to stop the gleams from the planetoid. It would be a very big mouse, unless he and Esther were actually very small. They could have shrunk as may happen in Wonderland and perhaps that was the consequence of drinking the tea around them, but he had no time to contemplate as the metal creature suddenly dropped.
"I see it!" gasped Esther, just barely able to keep her voice hushed; though again, Matthias doubted anyone behind them was paying the least bit attention.
A muffled splash made an anticlimactic end of the phenomenon, and Matthias threw his fingers through his hair as he realized what it was.
"'Said the Fury to the Mouse…'" muttered Matthias only afterwards realizing he was quoting the Poet.
"Something's after us?" asked Esther.
"No, at least not on purpose, but it may condemn all to death without jury or judge."
"What do you mean now?" Esther whispered trying not to be impatient.
"The ball itself," said Matthias.
Esther turned to Matthias in full.
"It's falling apart," she said.
"Well, the tea will probably be polluted now," Matthias remarked.