Birdie's Book - Andrea Burden [36]
“Is it a foreign language?” I asked.
“No idea,” said Kerka. “It looks like it might be written upside down or backward.” She bent over to try to read it upside down.
We stared hard at the letters, trying to make sense of them. As we did, I started to get that unsettling irritated feeling again. I could tell that something mean was going to come out of my mouth any second, and I couldn’t stop it.
“You’re the one who brought the map,” I told Kerka. “Why can’t you read it?”
She looked shocked at my outburst (and no wonder—I’m embarrassed just thinking about it!).
“Well, I sure don’t know what this stupid map is saying,” I continued. “You’re supposed to be helping me, not the other way around!”
Kerka turned cold and silent.
Now everything about her bothered me. Her seriousness was boring. Her strength was hard and unfeeling. I looked back down at the map letters, and now they moved around, as if we were upsetting them.
GO WHET PATS AH HA
“Go wet your pants?” I said through my irritation.
“Maybe it’s jumbled?” Kerka suggested, gritting her teeth.
“GO WEST!” I yelled then. “The message says GO WEST PATH, AH HA!” I was proud of myself.
“Ah ha?” said Kerka. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does. It’s what you say when you’ve figured something out, which I did.” I looked around. “So which way is west?”
Without a word, Kerka pointed with her stick. I didn’t ask how she knew. I just stared where she’d pointed, into the tangled sea of brush and twisted vines and seemingly impassable growth. No question, our only choice was to proceed through the strange jungle in as westward a direction as we could.
We walked in silence. The air was getting colder with each step. Kerka used her Kalis stick as a machete, hacking through the dead, tangled vegetation. I wondered why Zally’s map hadn’t shown us a picture of something this time; it seemed to do slightly different things each time we used it. I didn’t say anything to Kerka, though, not with the mood she was in.
We kept going until we hit a sheer drop-off. Kerka and I looked down wordlessly into a ravine filled with more dead trees and bushes. We’d have to walk along the ravine in one direction or the other. If we’d been walking west, which way would it be? Both ways looked the same: dark, with uninviting plants and scrubby trees everywhere. I felt all turned around. Where was this in Mo’s garden?
Then something clicked. “Ah ha!” I said. “We’re coming in backward, past the waterfall—although I doubt there’s a waterfall here—and the ravine, the ha-ha!” I knew exactly which way to go now! I remembered that at Granny Mo’s, the right-hand path at the cliff went to the waterfall with the stone seat, and the left-hand one went to where Willowby had turned to the maze and the Glimmer Tree.
Kerka was looking at me doubtfully. “The map didn’t say AH HA. It said HA HA,” I explained. My excitement left no room for the itchy irritation at Kerka. “This is the way.” I pointed to the left, along the edge of the chasm. “There will be a bridge. Really!”
Kerka just stared blankly at me. “I don’t know what ha-ha means, and you sound crazy,” she said. “Why should I trust you?”
“Mo says that a ha-ha is what the Irish make to keep sheep out of their gardens. It’s like a ditch or a dip in the earth. So with a bit of shadow thrown in, the ha-ha could turn into this ravine, don’t you think?”
Kerka was still not with me, and I couldn’t really blame her. I sighed. “I don’t know what came over me back there,” I said. “Look, I’m really sorry about arguing. Really. Really, really. Please, forgive me, Kerka?”
Kerka’s blue eyes were guarded, and I could tell that she was not sure if she was ready to make up yet. “Do you get the feeling here that sometimes something not good is creeping into you?” I asked. “That’s what I keep feeling. The way the shadow has turned the Aventurine version of Mo’s garden into this … plant graveyard, the shadow is creeping into me, too, and making me, I don’t know, like a mean version of myself.”
Kerka was nodding as I spoke, and I watched her eyes