Goblins (14 page)

“Who?” said the cloud maidens, startled out of gazing at him.

“A friend of mine,” said Henwyn, looking up into their pretty, cloudy faces. “I’m sorry, I should have said. I can’t go without him. Look, here he comes. . .”

The cloud maidens had already seen the little figure hurrying uphill towards the tower. The cloud lifted a little, and angry lightning fluttered in its belly.

“You did not say anything about
friends
. . .”

“Oh! It’s that horrible
goblin
!”

Skarper looked up and recognized the cloud maidens at the same instant that the cloud maidens recognized him. He flattened himself against the tower wall as a lightning bolt fizzed past, exploding the flagstones below.

“Do be careful!” cried Henwyn anxiously. “That is my friend Skarper.”

“No, no!” the cloud maidens said.

“We will not take him!”

“Not an earth-sprout. . .”

“A stone-born. . .”

“Not a goblin!”

“Oh, he may
look
like a goblin,” protested Henwyn, “but he. . . Well, he
is
. Yet he is stout-hearted for all that. He saved my life.”

“No goblins,” said the cloud maidens firmly.

“Nasty creatures.”

“Specially that one. Throwing himself about in the sky where only birds should be, making horrible great holes in other people’s clouds. . .”

Henwyn, who had almost reached the top of the cloud ladder by then, sighed loudly and started to descend again. “I am sorry, kind cloud ladies, but I cannot leave my friend behind. I’m a hero, you see – well, I’m hoping to be – and that wouldn’t be heroic at all. It seems that we must find our own way to Bospoldew. . .”

The cloud maidens all looked at one another. For a moment it seemed they were about to go back inside their cloud for another conference, but they came to some agreement without speaking, and one said, “All right. Just this once. You and your goblin may both come into our cloud.”

Skarper didn’t trust them. He thought they might be planning to frazzle him with a thunderbolt as soon as he stepped out into the open, or drop him off the cloud as soon as it rose high enough for the drop to do him harm. But no lightning seared him as went up the tower steps and then climbed that cloudy ladder. He sat down, sinking only slightly into the cloud’s soft billows as it lifted and began to waft northward. Apart from a few hard stares (and a smile from Rill) the cloud maidens ignored him and clustered around Henwyn, asking him how he liked it up here in the sky, and which of them he thought was prettiest.

Henwyn wasn’t sure quite what to say. They were all as pretty as each other in their cloudy way, and having grown up with three sisters, he had a good idea of the sort of quarrel that would break out if he told one that she looked better than the others. So he said, “Oh look, a bird,” pointing at a passing owl, and then noticed how high he was, how far above the towers and walls of Clovenstone, and came over a little faint. “Coo!” he said, turning roughly the colour of a well-squashed boglin.

“What is it, sweet prince?”

“What ails you?”

“It’s just – we’re
flying
. It feels unnatural, somehow. . .”

The cloud maidens fussed around him, inviting him to lie back on plump cushions of cloud and bringing him cool drinks of rainwater in a cup of ice.

“It is not really high at all,” they said.

“Not when you are used to it. . .”

“The sky is a lovely place.”

“You should see it at sunset, when the long light fades all rose and gold on the long rim of the world, and the stars come out. . .”

And so on. If Skarper had been a bitter sort of goblin he might have thought,
That great dim-witted lump. I fall out of the sky through no fault of my own and ask them for help and they just scold and scoff and try to strike me with lightning. He only has to smile at them and they all start twittering about his lovely curly hair and telling him to make himself at home.
(And actually he
did
think that, because he
was
a bitter sort of goblin: there isn’t really any other sort.)

“What on earth do they see in him?” he asked aloud. It was an unfair world, it seemed to him, and just as bad outside of Blackspike Tower as in.

The cloud maidens were now asking Henwyn what it was that a cheesewright did, exactly, and if he could remind them what cheese was, because they
did
know but they’d temporarily forgotten. When he explained that it was a food made from coagulated milk curds they giggled as if he had just made the most wonderful joke. Eat rancid cow’s juice? All they ate up in the sky’s sky were drifting flakes of water-ice, flavoured sometimes with a speck of wind-borne pollen. They were certain he’d just made up this
cheese
to tease them.

Then the cloud maiden called Rill slipped down into the soft chambers at the cloud’s heart and returned cradling something gently in her hands. “You should have this, cheese-prince,” she said, bringing it shyly to where Henwyn waited. “It is an earth-born thing, and you will be able to care for it much better than I can. It won’t eat water-ice, or pollen. The wind brought it to me, poor creature. It must have been blown out of its nest up in the Bonehills, and flapped about until its poor little wings could flap no more, and landed on our cloud to rest.”

Henwyn took the creature in his cupped hands and it was warm and light and throbbing with its own swift little heartbeat. He thought at first it was a bird; then a bat. Then, as it stretched its snaky neck and he saw its big-eyed reptile head clear in the moonlight, he realized that it was a tiny dragon. It made a mewling sound, and sank its teeth into his finger.

“Ow!”

“That means he likes you,” the cloud maidens all assured him.

“Oh, does it? Ow! It’s a snappish little thing, isn’t it?”

By that time the cloud had drifted far out over the mire, and when they looked down the passengers could see again, in its coming-and-going way, the bulk of that great shapeless building in the mist. Lights were moving all around it, and the cloud maidens let their cloud waft over it before they made it settle towards the ground. “We must be quiet now,” the maidens hissed in stage whispers. “If Poldew of the Mire hears us he will send up snares of mist magic. . .”

“He will turn us into pillows. . .”

“Hush!”

The cloud descended, and the mist rose up and swallowed it so that you could not tell any longer where the cloud ended and the mist began. It was like sinking into a cold sea. There was nothing but pale grey darkness, and the figures of Henwyn and Skarper crouched in it (the cloud maidens were all quite invisible). The little dragon cooed, and nibbled at Henwyn’s fingers as he stuffed it carefully inside one of the pouches on his belt. Then, below them, they saw the gleam of water; a dead tree growing on a grassy knoll between two black lagoons. The tops of crumbled walls poked from the waters, forming a path of sorts.

“This is as close as we dare to go,” said a cloud maiden. “Farewell, sweet Henwyn. But we wish you would fly further with us, and tell us more about your fascinating cheese. Are you sure you would not rather come and watch the sun rise behind the Ice Crystal Mountains?”

Henwyn looked down at the dark and threatening marsh and thought that he was not sure at all, but Skarper nudged him and he remembered his farewells and scrambled quickly down the cloud’s side, down the ladder that showed dimly, a denser grey than the mist around it.

Skarper went after him, and the ladder dissolved when he was halfway down it, dropping him with a squelch on the moist earth. “Sorry!” giggled the cloud maidens, not sounding a bit sorry. He looked up angrily, but their laughter was already fading, the cloud already rising back into moonlight far above the fog.

Henwyn looked carefully around. “This way,” he decided, pointing into the greyness.

From directly behind him came that booming, hooting noise again; the pale glare of light behind the drifting vapour.

“Or perhaps that way. . .” said Henwyn.

They set off, balancing like tightrope walkers along the tops of those slimy walls which rose out of the meres, and whole sections of which sometimes slithered down into the water with sad sloughing noises. Reeds whispered, water gurgled, the branches of the mire’s sparse trees rattled dismally together, and through the fog ahead came ugly voices. Through stands of rushes they saw the hall, and beyond the hall, beside the pool that opened there, the jerky hopping movement of many boglins and the dim, fitful flickering of scores of marsh lights.

“What are they doing?” whispered Henwyn.

They crept nearer, parting the reeds and peering through. The boglins were coming out of Bospoldew in great numbers. Some held stone bowls in which marsh-gas flames stood wavering like snakes; others were dragging Princess Ned, still bound to the sled on which they had brought her there. They propped her up in the angle of an old wall on the brink of the black mere which lay before the hall. A boglin pricked her finger with a sharp glass knife. Then they all crowded backwards, leaving their captive there alone.

Out from the hall came waddling a huge boglin. “
Poldew! Poldew! Poldew!
” chanted the rest, bowing down as he passed, pressing their flat faces into the slime. He waved a webbed hand and they fell quiet. The wind moved in the feathery tops of the reeds; the water lapped at the mere’s edge and echoed from the green walls of Bospoldew.

“What’re they doing?” wondered Skarper.

“Waiting for something,” said Henwyn. He drew his sword, thinking that if he were to slay that fat bog king the rest might panic, and in the confusion there might just be a chance. . . But the boglins crowded so thick about Poldew that it was hard to see how Henwyn could reach him, and now the waters of the mere had started to ripple in a strange, greasy swell.

From the cut that the glass knife had made, the blood of Princess Ned dripped on to the earth, black in the glow from the bobbing marsh lights and steaming faintly. It seeped into the waters of the mere. The water, thick with mud and moss and the dust of drowned buildings, was suddenly flavoured with the faintest trace of hot and frightened human. Down in the roots of the mire a thing that had not tasted man-blood for a long, long time stirred in its sleep, and into its long, cold dreams came creeping the idea of breakfast.

“The dampdrake!” cried Poldew, and all his boglins echoed him, some in whispers, some in shouts. “Dampdrake! Dampdrake rises! Dampdrake wakes!”

“What’s a dampdrake?” asked Henwyn, hidden in the reeds.

Skarper knew. The books he had read in the bumwipe heaps hadn’t had much to say on the subject of boglins, but one or two of them had mentioned the dampdrake.

“It’s another creature from the olden days,” he said uneasily. “Also known as the
Mergh Dowr
or Water Horse.”

“Oh, that’s all right then! I quite like horses. . .”

The mere-waters bubbled. The mere-waters boiled. The mere-waters split, and up out of them there rose a huge, flat, pale and faintly glowing head.

Serpent-like it was, yet not a serpent; dragon-like, yet not a dragon; the head of some ancient thing that had been sleeping through centuries down among the drowned oaks in the deepest oozes of the mire, but which had begun to stir and surface as the star of Slowsilver drew near, and which Poldew’s blood offering had now brought wide awake.

“But that’s nothing like a horse at all!” he hissed.

Poor Princess Ned just hung helpless in her web of mist, looking up and up at that dreadful head. It snorted, letting out two plumes of steam which mingled with the drifting mist.

“Dampdrake!” the boglins kept calling.

“
Mergh Dowr!
” yelled a few of the better-educated ones.

“Quickly!” said Henwyn, turning to Skarper, his eyes shining. Here at last was a monster he could fight: a true monster, awoken out of ancient tales, and it wasn’t made of cheese, and he had a sword in his hand. “Attract its attention!”

“What? Me?” asked Skarper, trying to burrow deeper among the roots of the reeds. “You mean,
Don’t
attract its attention. . .”

“I have a plan,” said Henwyn.

“Oh no!”

“I’ll cause a diversion,” he explained. “You free Princess Ned.” And he gave Skarper a shove which sent him somersaulting out of the reeds into the full view of the boglins and the dampdrake and landing with a white splash in a puddle.

The dampdrake’s pale, short-sighted eyes had not seen the two companions hidden in the reeds. Their scent had been masked from it by the scents of Ned and the boglins. Now a hot waft of frightened goblin tickled its nostrils. The great head swung towards Skarper. The barbels which trailed from its lower jaw quivered, and its feathery gills batted at the air like the feelers of enormous moths. Its mouth gaped wide. It roared, and its fetid breath engulfed Skarper like the wettest and smelliest wind there had ever been.

The dampdrakes were of dragon-kind; relatives to the great fire-breathers which had laired in the Bonehills long ago. But the breath of dampdrakes was not fiery; it was as chill and stinking as the wind off a marsh. As it huffed over Skarper, water droplets swelled and trickled on his skin, while white mould furred his clothes. His belt snapped and his trousers fell down; his tunic rotted and dropped from him in wet rags; he shivered and sneezed and tried to cover his private bits with Stenoryon’s map, cowering naked in the blast of the dampdrake’s breath.

“Eugh!” he said, and, “At-
choo
!”

The dampdrake reared above him, ready to reach down and gobble him up, but while it was busy with Skarper, Henwyn had been running along the mere’s edge, getting round behind it. His idea had been to lure it away from Ned, and as he reached the far side of the mere he shouted loudly, trying to draw the attention of the boglins so that Skarper could run forward and cut her free.

“Don’t be afraid, princess!” he yelled. “I am here to save you!” – and he slipped in a puddle and went down with a splat, face first in black mud. From the far side of the mere Princess Ned saw him, and felt a deep, warm glow of thanks and happiness that he had come to rescue her. She also felt pretty sure he couldn’t manage it on his own, and she began to struggle against her mist bonds with fresh vigour.

The dampdrake had sensed Henwyn too. It turned away from Skarper, and Skarper dived back into the reeds, whimpering with the cold and frantically checking the map. It was soaked through and crinkled, and thin white mushrooms sprouted from it, but miraculously it was still in one piece, and still readable. Or maybe it wasn’t miraculous: maybe Stenoryon had woven spells into the parchment to protect it. Anyway, he gave a sigh of relief . . . and then remembered that the map was useless without the slowsilver which would show him its secrets.

He checked in his pockets, but the ball of slowsilver was gone. Actually his pockets were gone, fallen away with the rest of his rotted clothes. He peered out of the reeds and saw a whirl of confusion. Princess Ned had fought one hand out of the misty ropes which held her and was struggling to free the other. On the far shore of the mere, Henwyn was swinging his sword at the dampdrake’s tail, which had burst from the water, lashing about like a whip. Boglins were hopping and scrambling everywhere, all trying to obey the marsh king’s ever-changing orders. “Kill me that softling! No, not
that
one,
that
one!” Poldew roared. “Stop the prisoner! She’s escaping!”

Down between their feet rolled Skarper’s slowsilver, unnoticed as yet, booted this way and that like some priceless football.

Bunching the wet map in one hand, Skarper dived after it. Boglins ran over him as he scrabbled between them; boglins kicked him in the face with their stinky frog feet as he slithered on the wet earth under them, but he didn’t care; nothing comes between a Blackspike Boy and treasure. He lost sight of the slowsilver for a moment, confused by the mad shadows cast by the marsh lights, which were skittering about overhead as if in panic. A few had even fallen to the ground, and pale flames were leaping in the grass along the mere’s edge. And there was the slowsilver, trundling down the slope to the water.