Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [5]
She drove slowly out of the village’s main square, past the blacksmith’s forge attached to one of the stables. She maneuvered carefully around Tom Thumb’s miniature castle keep, with its tiny moat and curtain wall, and then past the goat pen, where there was a mailbox out front with the name Three Goats Gruff painted on it. An intrepid squad of mail mice was already out beginning their morning rounds. They looked dignified in their miniature frock coats, puffing important little clouds of white vapor into the cold air. And dignified they were, for it’s as true among mice as among men that the swift delivery of the mail is a sacred trust. They had their delivery ladder propped against the box, and one of them was making the ascent with a letter addressed in a bold hand to one Mr. William Gruff, Esquire slung over his back. It was hard to guess which of the goats it might actually be for, since all three of the brothers were named Bill.
Rose left the village behind, driving northeast and then due north along a single-lane dirt and gravel road. After a few hundred yards of undeveloped scrubland, she entered the farmlands proper. There were cultivated fields to either side of her, newly planted winter wheat to her right and endless rows of silage corn to her left, tall yellow-green stalks, as high as an elephant’s eye and groaning under the weight of their treasures. The corn harvest would have to begin in a few days, which made her wince a bit, as most of the harvester’s engine was still scattered across the tractor shed floor. She’d have to get back to work on that today. To the east, the sun began peeking over the distant high hills that folks in this part of the country insisted on calling mountains. On the other side of the hills was Wolf Valley, which used to be part of the Farm, but had recently been turned over to the family of a legendary monster — her brother-in-law.
Rose came to a fork in the road and turned northwest. As she did so, the rising sun stabbed at her from her rear-view mirror. Grumbling, she angled the mirror away from her line of sight, squinted to banish the spots from her vision and drove on. The road paralleled a small but determined river for a while and then crossed it with a short wooden bridge, when the river abruptly changed direction. She left the cultivated fields behind and entered a wide rolling expanse of grasslands, where the mundy livestock were fed and fattened. Herds of cows were moved into an area to graze, bringing the grasses down to a reasonable height, then flocks of sheep were moved in after them, reducing the same grass to low stubble. A few farmhands were already in the fields, driving scattered clusters of cattle in the distance, towards fresher grass. Most of the farmhands were Fable animals earning their keep; talking horses, who talked seldom, unless they really had something to say, and talking dogs, who chattered constantly, believing that just about anything that was possible to say should be said, just in case it turned out to be important. But there were absolutely no talking cows among them. Fable cows wouldn’t normally mix with mundy versions of their own species, finding the thought of their dumb cousins’ eventual fate as steaks and burgers more than a little unsettling. Some of the farmhands were human Fables who lived up here because they preferred it to city life, or because they’d been caught breaking one or more Fable laws and were working off the judgments. Fabletown imposed a lot of laws on its citizens.
After crossing another dozen small bridges, as the river settled into an entrenched meander, constantly turning back on itself, Rose crested a rise and looked down into a golden field full of mundy sheep being pushed around by a half dozen Fable sheep dogs, who scolded their charges with heavily accented epithets. At the far end of the field she spotted her destination, a small isolated stone and timber cottage, perched on the top of the next rolling crest and nestled under a stand of cottonwood