Goblins (5 page)

Let’s pause a moment and take a good look at Henwyn as, stout of heart and damp of socks, he squelches off in search of his adventure. Tall, slim, curly-haired, he certainly
looks
like a hero, or would if his tunic wasn’t quite so old-fashioned, his wet cloak quite so ragged. “I am of humble birth,” is what he’s told everyone he’s met on the way from Adherak, “but my mother was of the royal line of King Kennack. . .” Only that’s not quite true: his mother was not descended from one of the great king’s sons or daughters, but from his dairy maid. Henwyn son of Henmor comes from a long line of dairy maids and cheesewrights, and he did not grow up in a castle or a manor house but in his father’s cheesery in Adherak.

Not that it wasn’t a good cheesery. It was a very good one; the best in Adherak, and his father’s famous cheeses were carted off to stock the larders of the high king in Coriander and the pantries of all the little kings of the Nibbled Coast. Among the low, thatched roofs of Adherak the house of Henmor stood tall and proud, built from creamy-coloured stone, triangular and two storeys tall, with round windows and doors that made it look like an enormous slice of cheese. A brass weathervane in the shape of a cow twirled on its rooftop, and the wind that spun the weathervane wafted delicious smells across the neighbourhood, reminding all of Adherak that Henmor made the finest cheese in the Westlands.

There were probably young men – good, sensible young men – who would have given anything for a chance to be the great cheesewright’s apprentice and a hope of inheriting the cheesery from him. It was just bad luck that his own son wasn’t one of them. Henwyn didn’t even
like
cheese, and he certainly did not want to be a cheesewright all his life.

He felt that fate had something far more interesting in store for him.

For as long as he could remember, Adherak had felt too small and ordinary a place for him. He liked to stand at the edge of the town and look north to where, beyond the safe, soft hills, you could just make out the brindled moors and high blue mountains massing. Sometimes, on clear days, he even glimpsed the dark spike of Clovenstone, like a tentpole holding up the sky.
That’s where I should be
, he thought.
Not here in the softlands, among merchants and traders; up there in the north, where there is still magic, like in stories. I wasn’t born to be a cheesewright! I was born to be a . . . a hero!

He wanted magic and adventures so badly that it was almost unbearable. But there was no magic any more in Adherak, and no adventures to be had, so he got them the only way he could: second-hand, from stories. Henwyn had never been much of a reader, which was lucky, because there were no books in the cheesery. But Adherak was a market town, plonked down plump and prosperous in a green valley where the road from Coriander crossed the winding river Sethyn. Up that road, from Coriander and the Nibbled Coast, came fish and sealskins, spice and silk, all the produce of the Sundering Sea and the lands that lay beyond. Down the river to Adherak’s docks came barges filled with grain and timber and all the good things of the softlands. And up and down both road and river there came stories: tellers of tales, singers of songs; whole travelling shows arrived in Adherak every few days, and Henwyn, running through the town on errands for his father, always found some excuse to stop and listen.

“The boy has his head in the clouds,” said Henmor, the first time his son spent a whole afternoon watching a play about Prince Brewyon and the cloud maidens when he should have been collecting a shipment of cheesecloth from the floating market.

“He’s only young,” said Henwyn’s mother. “He’ll grow out of it.”

“He’s away with the fairies!” Henmor raged, the day Henwyn was sent to buy chives to flavour a special wheel of cheese for the wedding of the Lord of Adherak; he came back without the chives, and without the money he’d been given either. He had been hanging round the second-hand-weapons stall where the old washed-up warriors went to pawn their gear and tell tall tales, and one of them had sold him a rusty old sword which he said had once belonged to King Kennack. “All this nonsense he fills his head with!” Henmor railed. “Heroes and monsters! Quests and battles! What sort of dreams are those for a young man? When I was his age, I just dreamed of cheese! The world would get on very nicely without battles and quests, but where would be it be without cheese, eh? Heroes and monsters were all very well in the olden times, but nowadays a young fellow needs a sensible trade.”

“He’s still just a boy,” said Henwyn’s mother, though even she was getting tired of making excuses for her son. “Wait till he turns thirteen; he’ll gather his wits and settle down to cheese-making, like his father and his grandfather before him.”

But Henwyn turned thirteen, turned fourteen, turned fifteen, and still he was more interested in stories than in cheese. He did his best to pay attention to the things his father told him: the best ways to make milk coagulate, how to separate curds from whey, the ripening times of different cheeses. Sometimes, as he concentrated on wrapping the cheeses and pressing them in the great round moulds, he would tell himself,
Yes, this is the life for me
. . . But then, across some empty, sunlit meadow of his mind a rider would go galloping, off to save a princess or defeat a tyrant, and his work would go all to pieces. Often the cheeses went all to pieces too: he would leave them too long in the brine bath or drop them down the cellar steps, or forget to add rennet at the right moment so that the cheese never thickened properly.

Whenever he could, he would leave his sisters to do his work – there were three of them, Herda, Gerda and Lynt, and they were all better cheesewrights than Henwyn. If only
they
could have been Henmor’s heirs, and carried on the family business! But cheeseries were passed on to sons, not daughters, and Henwyn was Henmor’s only son. It made him feel ashamed of himself when he left Herda, Gerda and Lynt to do the wrapping and salting and pressing for him while he went off to hear whatever new storyteller the trade winds had blown into town – but not too ashamed to stop him doing it. By night, in his attic room, where the smells of the ripening curds drifted up between the floorboards like invisible, cheesy smoke, he would fetch out King Kennack’s sword and mime great battles, practising the moves he knew good swordsmen had to know, such as Thrusting and Parrying and Not Getting It Stuck In The Ceiling.

One day – a blue day in his fifteenth summer, the west wind blowing fat white clouds in over the hills where the cows that made the cheesery’s milk were grazing – Henmor took his son aside.

“I have business down in Nantivey,” he said. “A cheesewright there has devised a new sort of vat, and I want to take a look at it. While I’m gone, you’ll be in charge here. The cheesery is yours for a week. It will be good practice for you, for the day when I retire and it is yours for ever.”

“Yes, Father,” said Henwyn.

He looked so serious and earnest as he said it that Henmor thought,
He’s a good boy after all; I should have given him responsibility sooner.
Perhaps his son was settling, just as his mother had always said he would; maturing like a good, hard cheese. He set off for Nantivey with a secret smile, because the cheesewright there didn’t just have a new sort of vat, he had a daughter too, and Henmor thought she’d make a good wife for young Henwyn, and stop him daydreaming of princesses. He couldn’t know that Henwyn had been daydreaming all through their little talk, and that when he’d said, “You’ll be in charge here,” Henwyn had been imagining that it was a castle he was being left in charge of, not a cheesery, and that he must defend it from ravening hordes of goblins for a week, not just make cheese.

For the first day, and the second, all went well. Henwyn tried hard to concentrate, and whenever he found himself daydreaming he would tell himself “Cheese!” and drive the warriors and dragons and princesses from his thoughts. But on the third day there was not much to be done; only the cleaning of the cheesery, which was woman’s work, and which his mother, Herda, Gerda and Lynt were busy doing. To get himself out of the way of their mops he walked into the heart of town, and then down to the floating market, wondering if the latest barges had brought in any players or bards. They hadn’t; there was only an old man singing “The Lay of the Blind Giantslayer”, a tale so familiar that even Henwyn was a little tired of it. He listened to a few verses, but it lit no pictures in his mind, and he turned to walk home, wondering if perhaps he was settling down, and would be a good, sober cheesewright from now on.

He didn’t see the three travellers who followed him out of the marketplace. He didn’t hear the quick, muttered conversation that they held.

“That’s him!”

“Who?”

“Henwyn; the one I told you of. They say he’s a daydreamer: away with the faeries; believes in goblins and trolls and any old folly the harpers sing of.”

“But so do we.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is the point?”

“The point is. . .” said the one who had spoken first, and shook his head angrily, because all these questions had completely broken his train of thought. “The point
is
that we need money to hire ourselves some transport if we’re to get to You Know Where, and young Henwyn son of Henmor there is going to give it to us.” And he hurried ahead of his two companions, calling out, “Young man! I say! Cheesewright! Henwyn son of Henmor!”

Henwyn turned, at first surprised and then intrigued to be accosted in this way, by these three strangers who looked – well, like something from a story. Their leader, the one who had just spoken, wore a deep hood, from the shadows of which a long white beard emerged like a waterfall from a mountain cave. One of the others was a dark-skinned man from Musk or Barragan, wearing silk robes embroidered with symbols of stars and suns and moons. The third was tall and lanky, with curly grey hair and ears that stuck out like two pink handles and held up the horn frames of a pair of spectacles, a new invention, seldom seen in Adherak.

“Yes,” said Henwyn, “I am Henwyn son of Henmor.” He assumed that the unlikely trio wanted to buy some cheese.

“Your father is away in Nantivey,” said the white-bearded one, throwing back the hood of his robes to reveal a plump and disappointingly ordinary face. “He has left you to run the cheesery in his absence.”

“How can you possibly know that. . .?”

The stranger smiled a secret smile. “I am Fentongoose. These are my colleagues, Carnglaze and Prawl. We are sorcerers of the Sable Conclave, and sorcerers know everything.”

“There are no such things as sorcerers any more!”

“You see? We
knew
you were going to say that!”

Henwyn gaped. He knew that there had been once been real and powerful magic in the world, and he believed firmly that there were wild places where it lingered still, but even he had never imagined that he might meet three sorcerers just walking around the marketplace, accosting passing cheesewrights. Yet these strangers knew his name, and his business. . .

“The Sable Conclave. . .?” he said.

“It is a secret society,” said Fentongoose, impressively.

“Well, I’ve never heard of it.”

“You see? Secret.”

“Sable means black, doesn’t it? I hope you’re not
evil
sorcerers.”

“Good and evil; these are terms for children,” said Carnglaze. “In the worlds of magic which our studies have opened to us, they have no meaning.”

“What matters is this,” said Fentongoose. “Word of your skill as a cheesewright has reached our brotherhood, and we have travelled far to offer you our aid. The great cheese magnates of Coriander would pay us in mountains of gold, but we should rather use our powers to help a young man of great skill. And you are the most skilful cheesewright in this patch of the world, and the most handsome, and the truest of heart. That is why we offer you this.”

Henwyn looked down and saw a little brown glass bottle, teardrop shaped, lying on the sorcerer’s outstretched palm.

“For ten gold pieces,” said Fentongoose, “it shall be yours. It is an elixir of great power, which I brewed myself. Three drops in the next cheese you make will give it such a flavour as no mortal man has ever tasted. It will make you famous the length of the Westlands; the name of Henbane. . .”

“Henwyn.”

“. . .Hen
wyn
will go down the coming years in song and legend.”

“Gosh,” said Henwyn, taking the bottle, staring at it. He could see his own face reflected in the glass, distorted like a reflection in the back of a spoon. Inside the bottle some thick liquid swirled. The wind blew Henwyn’s golden curls around his head, and seemed to blow his thoughts around inside it too. It looked very magical, and magic led to trouble; all the old stories were agreed on that. But to hold real magic in his hand, in real life, was thrilling. It was as if he had stepped into a story of his own. He glanced round quickly, to make sure no one had noticed him accept the sorcerers’ gift. Surely his father would be pleased, when he came home from Nantivey to find that Henwyn had created the world’s best cheese while he was gone?