“Just behind this fringe of trees,” I said. “Shall I creep through to see what’s there?”
They clasped hands, all at once, without even conferring, and began to do Egg in the Hollow for me, making me as invisible as they could on short notice. I took this for an affirmative answer to my question and began sneaking through the underbrush, wishing I were Peter so that I could slither without making a sound.
As it was, things whipped about just a bit. I came out on the other side looking down into a small, flat-floored valley, trees all around and the three-peaked mountain staring down upon it from the north. Garden filled the entire valley, from rail fence on the north to rail fence on the south, fruit trees espaliered along a wall, great pots of flowers here and there, orderly rows of this and that. No. Mostly orderly rows of this and that. On the near side of the garden was a perfect jumble of plants, some with only their tufty leaves showing and the others walking about on their roots complaining in high, shrill voices about the overcrowding.
Now “turnip” is a word we use for any kind of bulbous-rooted edible plant. There’s no one plant called “turnip,” just as there’s no one tree called “willow.” It’s either webwillow or gray willow or grease willow or some other kind. So it’s either blood turnip or sour turnip or swamp turnip. These turnips weren’t any of those. They were big, fat, white with a blue belt and with great fluffy tufts of leaves coming out of their tops. At the bottom they were bifurcated, trifurcated, multifurcated into rooty legs or leggy roots on which they wandered about in a rather desultory way, sometimes tripping each other out of what seemed to be sheer ill nature.
One of them stood at the feet of a very tall being wearing a green robe, shrilling out, “Feet, I tell you, Gardener. People feet.” A slit in one side of the turnip seemed to serve for a mouth, and there were several eyelike protuberances on its body.
“Well, and so?” said a deep bass voice, rumbling like a distant roll of thunder. “People feet. So?”
The Gardener was half again as tall as I, not so slender as to seem unnatural but still quite skinny. He had a gaunt, blank face which looked as though he did not often use it for anything. And when I stood up, brushing the leaves off my shirt and undoing the invisibility spell with one gesture, he did not seem at all surprised. “People feet,” he repeated as though it had been some kind of incantation. “Well.” His face had no expression at all.
“I am one of the people,” I shrilled in close approximation of turnip talk, then lowering my voice and addressing the Gardener in common language. “Can you understand me?”
He confronted me with no change in his face, not so much as a furrow between his eyes indicating he had heard me. “Can you understand me?” I asked again in the vegetable language.
He nodded, rather distantly, as though acknowledging a stroke of wind. There, I heard that, he seemed to indicate, without giving any appearance of intending to continue the conversation.
“People, people,” shrilled the turnip, rushing away among his fellows, shrieking as he went. “Come see, come see. It’s people.”
Murzy came through the trees, the others following, and we all stood there in various states of amazement as the turnips gathered. I looked about curiously to see whether there were any other talking roots or ambulatory bushes, but these seemed to be the only ones. Which seemed a good-enough fact with which to start a conversation, I thought.
“Can you tell me how these beings came by the power of speech?” I shrilled in turnip talk.
The Gardener said not a word, but all the turnips began talking at once. They had always had it. No, they had not had it until after they started eating shadow. No, they had had it since the enchantress gave it to them, many centuries ago. The outcry was so great it was some time before I noticed that the Gardener was shaking his head, over and over. I gestured for silence, quelling the outcry by threatening to roast and eat several of them if they didn’t hush. They subsided with a grumpy babble.
“I gave them speech,” said the Gardener in his tumbling voice. “I crossbred them with the Sensible plant.”
“I don’t know the Sensible plant,” said Cat wonderingly. “Where may it be found?”
“It cannot be found,” the Gardener replied. “It is extinct. Sensibly. It was parasitic upon other plants, and when it became conscious of its own nature, it chose to become extinct rather than continue to be what it was. A pity, I felt, though exemplary from an ethical point of view. So I preserved some of its qualities in these turnips, though their parasitism has been carefully controlled. They eat only soil and shadow. Not foreseen, precisely, but useful nonetheless. Actually, shadow makes quite good mulch. For them.”
I considered that while shadow seemed lethal to animal life, it had not, in fact, seemed to have any effect upon plants.
“Have you come to get us?” cried a turnip. “It was foretold that people would come to get us and when that time came, we could go to seed!” There were cheers, cries of encouragement, and three of the turnips began a dance that I could only interpret as frankly erotic.
“I have forbidden them to seed,” said the Gardener. “As it would have upset the ecological balance between light and shadow to have them sucking up shadow at every turn. They’re greedy, as you can see. Despite the overcrowding, still they insist on overeating and becoming fat. If 1 were not who I am, I would be tempted to eat them myself.”
“Who are you?” said Murzy, coming
