Goblins Vs Dwarves (18 page)

“Oh, sisters,” said Rill, the kindest of the cloud maidens, “we must do as the goblin asks.”

“But why?” asked the others. “He's horrid and he'll get our cloud all dirty. We can fly to Henwyn faster if we are not weighed down by nasty goblins.”

“But think how cross Henwyn will be if he hears you've left me here to starve and parch!” said Skarper.

“Oh, that's true,” admitted a cloud maiden. “Remember, sisters, Henwyn is fond of the ghastly creature for some reason.”

“Oh, very well,” said the others.

“And my friends must come too,” said Skarper, pointing to Etty and Durgar. “I can't leave them behind.”

If the cloud maidens had thought about it for a moment they would have realized that all they needed to do was fly away: if Skarper was left behind to die, how would Henwyn ever know that they had even spoken to him? But the cloud maidens weren't all that bright, and at the moment there was not much room in their cloudy heads for any thought except Henwyn. Most of them were just staring into the middle distance with soppy smiles upon their faces, imagining his blue eyes and blond curls. “Mmm, he's so dreamy!” they murmured, while their cloud drifted sideways on the morning breeze.

“Come on then!” shouted Skarper, before they blew away entirely, and Rill and a few of her sisters came to their senses and lowered cloud ladders for the prisoners to climb aboard.

“You must all take your boots off,” they said. “We don't want grubby footprints all over our cloud.”

Meanwhile, two of the dwarf sentries down at the foot of the crag had decided that they really should investigate the conversation that was going on above, and the strange cloud that was hovering above the Bright Bowl. They hurried up the long stair and emerged on to the bowl's brim just in time to see their prisoners climbing up a cobwebby ladder which had descended from the belly of the cloud. Their eyes went wide behind their black glass goggles. They shook their halberds in a threatening way and shouted, “Stop!” but the prisoners just kept climbing. Then the sentries did the only thing they could think of: they shouted to their friends for help, then jumped into the bowl and went slithering down into its middle, where they grabbed at the bottom of the cloud ladder and started climbing it.

But the cloud maidens were unhappy about letting two dwarves on to their cloud; they certainly weren't going to welcome any more aboard. As Durgar clambered up to sit panting beside Skarper and Etty on the cloud's cushiony top, the maidens let their magic ladder melt back into plain ordinary cloud. The dwarves below yelled in anger and surprise as the woolly rungs which they'd been climbing turned suddenly to mist. They yelled again, in pain mostly, as they dropped heavily down on to the heap of dry bones in the bottom of the bowl. The cloud twirled above them, scattering maidenly laughter, and the last Skarper saw of them they were trying desperately to scrabble back up the bowl's sides and calling out to their friends to bring them ropes and real, solid, metal ladders.

But their friends were not paying them much attention; they stood on the bowl's brim and on the stairs that led to it, staring north towards the doors of Dwarvenholm, and as the cloud rose and flew out across Delverdale Skarper stared with them, for something was happening in the country of the dwarves.

The road which led up to the great doors was lined with onlookers. Streams of dwarves were pouring out of all the little hidden doors which speckled the lower slopes of the hollow mountain. They kept to the shadows where they could, but where they could not they braved the sunlight, shielding themselves with umbrellas and moleskin screens. Like the guards on the crag, they were all staring towards the main doors, which Skarper now saw were swinging open.

“Hang on!” he told the cloud maidens, who had lifted their cloud up into the clear, cold river of wind which swirled over the mountain's shoulder, and were starting to steer it towards Clovenstone. “Wait! What's going on down there?”

“Oh, what now?” tutted the cloud maidens, but when they looked where Skarper was pointing they fell silent too, and watched. It was not every day that the Doors of Dwarvenholm were opened.

The great burnished metal plaques which sheathed the doors flashed and rippled with sunlight as they swung wide. Behind them lay shadows: a dark opening leading into the heart of the mountain, like the earth's mouth. Then, in the darkness, Skarper started to make out the twinkle of dwarf lamps, and the glint of light on the armour of marching dwarves. Hundreds of warriors were coming up out of the deeps, up the great paved way which led to the doors, and out into the morning sunlight. Banners with the device of the Brazen Head flapped in the breeze, and so did the broad moleskin awnings which the marchers on the edges of the column held up to shade their comrades.

“Marching above ground?” said Durgar, frowning at the spectacle below. “It don't make sense. Why send an army marching in hot sunlight when we have tunnels and delves below ground that will take us all the way to Clovenstone?”

But behind the marching warriors, something else came striding: something far too big to fit in any delve or tunnel. It was the shape of a dwarf, but as tall as the tallest giant, and it was made all of shining metal. On its shoulders sat the Brazen Head, and as it stepped out through the open doors and started to follow the army down the road that led through Delverdale, the Head swung watchfully from side to side, as if it were gazing down upon the dwarves who lined the way.

“They have built a body for the Head!” said Etty, clinging to the thick, cottony cloud-stuff and leaning far out over the edge to stare down.

“So that is what that maggot Glunt meant!” said her father. “I have heard stories of storerooms deep beneath the mountain where mighty limbs were stored; legs and arms, built out of iron. So they were meant for the Head, and Glunt and his friends have assembled them, and now he has slowsilver enough to set them moving. . .”

“The Head walks! The Head walks!” dwarves were chanting, down in the valley, their massed voices loud enough to be heard clearly on the cloud. The cloud maidens steered it lower, and soon Skarper and the others could make out the tubby form of Overseer Glunt, standing with some other dwarves upon a railed platform which circled the Head's brow like a crown. Glunt had a huge brass trumpet in his hands, and when he bellowed through it his words came out loud enough to be heard even over the chanting.

“Behold!” he announced. “The Giant Dwarf! The slowsilver of Clovenstone runs in its veins! The magic of our spell-smiths makes it move! No army can defeat it! No wall, no tower, no bastion raised by men can stand against it!”

“That's Clovenstone done for, then,” said Skarper sadly, ears drooping.

“Poor Henwyn!” whispered the cloud maidens. “It will stamp him flat!”

“The day long foretold has dawned at last!” Glunt roared. “The day when dwarves look down again on men! They called us short! They laughed at us! We'll see who laughs last when they look up and see the Giant Dwarf coming to trample their palaces underfoot! To Coriander!”

“To Coriander!” shouted all the dwarves in the valley – at least it sounded like all of them; their voices merged into one vast voice which echoed and re-echoed from the steep sides of Delverdale.

“Did he say Coriander?” asked Skarper.

“So they aren't going to Clovenstone at all!” sniffed a cloud maiden, looking disdainfully at the footprints the passengers had made in the cloud. “The goblin lied to us!”

“I thought they were!” said Skarper. “I thought. . . Why do they want to go to Coriander?”

“To drive men out,” said Durgar. “To open up the mines of the sea coast again. To take back what was ours in the long ago. Dwarves were wronged, and the wrong must be righted.”

“But not this way!” cried Etty. “Not this monstrous thing, trampling folk and bringing death and disaster! Dwarves should be makers, not breakers of things!”

“We must still take word to Clovenstone!” said Skarper. “Henwyn should hear about this, and Fentongoose, and Princess Ned. . . Maybe they'll know what to do. . .”

Just then the shadow of the cloud fell over the Giant Dwarf. Glunt looked up and saw the faces of the cloud maidens and their passengers peering down at him. He shouted something that they could not hear. Dwarf crossbowmen on the Giant Dwarf's shoulders raised their weapons. A flight of darts went chirring into the sky like starlings, and thudded into the underside of the cloud. They did no harm, except to make it look rather odd, like a flying pincushion, but the cloud maidens quickly took it higher and, flinging a storm of hailstones down at the dwarf army, soared up into the river of wind again and let it carry them west, away over the empty valleys and stony summits of the Bonehills, whirling towards far-off Clovenstone.

A dreadful noise filled the cavern beneath Meneth Eskern, echoing and re-echoing from the stony ceiling.

SQUksWKSwKKRKkkkggKKrrrrRRRggKK

it went, rather like the noise you get when you're drinking milkshake through a straw and reach the bottom of the glass, or when the last of the bathwater goes gurgling down the plughole. The pipe which the dwarves had driven through the crag had finally drained the last of the slowsilver from the lava lake.

Princess Ned and Fentongoose, standing on the beach, looked down into a broad, empty pit where the slowsilver had been, and saw the mouth of the dwarf-pipe far below them. A few small pools and puddles of the magic metal still glimmered in crevices of the stone around it, but they had lost their silvery glow, and showed no sign of spitting out any eggstones.

They had known of the pipe's existence – or at least guessed it – ever since Henwyn and Zeewa came back out of the marshes with the tale of their strange meeting with the boglins. Fentongoose and Dr Prong had spent a long time hunting for it, hoping that it could be blocked. But they had soon realized that the pipe must open at the very bottom of the lake, and there was simply no way to reach it. Slowsilver is not like water, or even like ordinary lava; it is more magical and mischievous than that. The hooks and poles which the two philosophers lowered into the lake in the hope of finding the pipe dissolved in puffs of steam, or froze and shattered. A goblin called Spurtle, who was helping them, fell into the slowsilver by accident and was instantly transformed into a small sofa. The pipe remained hidden. It seemed immune to the strange powers of the slowsilver. It kept on sucking and sucking away, invisible down there in the depths. Every half-hour Fentongoose checked the stones he had set on the beach to mark the edge of the slowsilver, and every half-hour he found that the level had dropped. It had gone down with horrifying speed, and now the lake was empty.

“That is that,” said Fentongoose sadly. He was thinking of all the eggstones he had collected on the lakeshore, and how he had kept them warm and helped the hatchlings inside them to emerge (and forgetting how the hatchlings had hit him with planks and bitten his fingers). “It is the end of Clovenstone!” he said.

“There must be some way we can get our slowsilver back!” said Princess Ned. “What if we sent some of our smaller goblins along that pipe? Perhaps they could find whatever tank or reservoir the dwarves have taken all our slowsilver to, and – oh, I don't know – reverse the flow somehow? Pump it back to us?”

Fentongoose shook his head. “I do not think so. Apart from anything else, the pipe will be smeared with slowsilver. It must have been wrought by spell-smiths out of dwarven iron to be proof against the slowsilver's effects. Our goblins are not, and they would probably be transformed into frogs or puffs of smoke before they had crept more than a few feet along it. Remember what happened to poor Spurtle. . .”

“Of course. How is Spurtle?”

“Oh, he is comfortable enough. We just have to plump up his cushions from time to time. But Ned, these dwarves do not do things for fun. I daresay they have plans for our slowsilver. They are probably putting it to use already.”

“But to what use?” wondered Princess Ned.

Flat feet flapped on the stone floor of the passage behind her and a panting goblin came running up to her. It was Yabber, and he had news. “The cloud maidens are back!”

“Oh, that is all we need,” groaned Fentongoose, who had always found those airy young ladies most annoying. But Yabber hopped up and down and waved his paws excitedly. “They ain't alone! Skarper's with them!”

“Skarper?” cried Fentongoose and Ned together, and they went hurrying up the long, winding passageway and out into the afternoon light.

It was a cloudy day at Clovenstone, and for a moment it was quite difficult to make out which of all of those clouds was the exciting one. Then they saw it; there was Skarper, dancing up and down on top of it as it came slowly down to brush against the battlements of the Inner Wall. A huge crowd of goblins had already gathered there to greet it. Others, who had been practice-fighting with Garvon Hael in the old tilt yard behind Growler Tower, were running up the stairways in a yowling, cheering throng.

Outside the wall, Henwyn heard the cheering, but he was busy helping Cribba, Torridge and Kenn block up dwarf tunnels, and he did not see the cloud descend.
Stupid creatures
, he thought bitterly, listening to the whoops and howls of the excited goblins echo among the ruins. That was a bit unfair, but it was certainly true that most goblins weren't all that bright.
How can they be celebrating
, thought Henwyn,
when Skarper is dead, the slowsilver lake is being drunk dry and goblinkind is facing its doom?

“What's that?” asked Torridge just then, pointing up.

“It's a cloud, stupid,” said Cribba.

“But it's got people on top of it!” said Kenn.

“Henwyn!” shouted Zeewa, running through the ruins with her tangle of ghosts behind her. “Henwyn! It is Skarper! He is alive! He has come home!”

They ran towards the wall together, Henwyn and Zeewa, the trolls and the ghosts, almost getting stepped on on the way by Fraddon, who had come up from the woods to see what was happening. Rushing inside the wall and shoving their way past the yapping, yahooing goblins who clogged the stairways, they reached the battlements just as the cloud bumped gently against the top of Blackspike Tower. Skarper jumped off, followed by Durgar and Etty, who looked about uncertainly at the goblins who surrounded them and peered down at them from the Blackspike's mossy roof. The whole cloud blushed sunset pink as the cloud maidens spotted Henwyn: they waved shyly, and shook their hair out into long cloudy streamers, which they hoped he'd think pretty. But Henwyn wasn't paying them any attention at all; he ran straight to Skarper, picked him up, and swung him round and round.

“You're alive!” he shouted.

“I know!” Skarper shouted back, and also, “Put me down!”, because he was hoping to
stay
alive, and being whirled round and round on top of a crumbly battlement with a long drop on each side didn't seem like a good way to make that happen. “Stop! Put me down! Listen! The dwarves have built a body for their Head. A Giant Dwarf! I saw it come stomping out of Delverdale, high as a mountain. That's what they drained our slowsilver for! That's what it runs on. . . ”

“It's true!” said Durgar, and Etty added, “It's huge! Nothing can stand before it!”

A sort of silence fell over the crowd, broken only by a low murmuring as goblins tried to work out what this would mean.

“Is it coming here, this Giant Dwarf?” asked Fraddon.

A score of goblin voices echoed him. “Is it coming here? Is it coming to Clovenstone?”

“Coriander,” said Skarper. “They're taking it to Coriander.”

“Yazzay! Yibber! Hap!” the goblins screamed throwing hats and helmets, spears and clubs into the air in their excitement. “We're saved! Clovenstone is saved!”

“No, no!” shouted Durgar. “You don't understand!”

The goblins fell quiet again, except for the occasional “Ow!” and “Argh!” as the spears and clubs fell back on to their owners.

“The Giant Dwarf is meant to restore the pride and standing of the dwarves,” Durgar said. “They are taking it to Coriander. They mean to defeat the High King and his armies.”

Even the “Argh!”s and “Ow!”s had stopped now: the goblins frowned and scratched their heads, trying to work out what this news meant for them. They didn't care about Coriander. They didn't much care about softlings, except for the ones they knew. This Giant Dwarf could stomp the High King flat for all they cared.

But Princess Ned had heard all this as she came slowly up the stairs with Fentongoose, and she saw at once what it would mean. “If the dwarves take Coriander, then no kingdom can stand against them. They will rule over the Westlands again, as they did in days of old. We must warn the High King!”

The goblins rumbled, mumbled, grumbled. They had all heard how it had gone when Henwyn and Skarper asked the High King for help. They still didn't really see why they should help him. They were goblins, after all: it wasn't their style. They rather liked the idea of his majesty getting stomped on by a Giant Dwarf. It was just the sort of thing that appealed to them.

Princess Ned sat down on a small sofa which someone had left there on the battlements, then sprang up again and said, “Oh Spurtle, I'm sorry! But please think, all of you. If the dwarves control the Westlands, do you really believe they will let us live on here in peace? Of course not. They have already made sure that there will be no new goblins. They will come and deal with the rest of us at their leisure. They already have our slowsilver, but there is much else at Clovenstone that dwarves would value, and they will not want goblins here. This giant dwarf is as much a danger to us as it is to Coriander.”

Henwyn had been thinking, too. He was imagining a map of the Westlands, with Dwarvenholm in the north-east, Coriander in the south-west. An old straight road ran from one to the other, and it passed through Henwyn's own hometown.

“Adherak!” he gasped. “The Giant Dwarf will have to pass through Adherak!”

That changed things. The goblins knew people from Adherak. Henwyn's father and mother had visited Clovenstone, along with his sisters, Herda, Gerda and Lynt. They'd helped set up the Clovenstone Cheesery, and taught the goblins how to make Clovenstone Blue. None of the goblins thought it would be funny if
they
got stomped on.

“We must do something!” said a voice out of the throng.

“We must stop it!”

“Anchovies!”

“Could Fraddon fight this thing?” demanded Fentongoose.

Etty looked at Fraddon and shrugged. “It is taller than your giant. And it is made all of metal, and slowsilver runs in its veins instead of blood. I do not think that anything could fight it.”

“Goblins can!” the goblins yelled. They waved their spears and clubs and rusty old swords. Even the sofa rustled its cushions in a warlike way. “We'll bash it in!” they hollered. “We'll smash it up! Nothing's ever been built that goblins can't smash up!”

“Garvon Hael taught us to fight!” shouted Libnog. “We'll just fight at Adherak instead of Clovenstone, that's all!”

“To Adherak! To Adherak!” other goblins shouted. “Stop the Giant Dwarf!” And raggedly and out of tune, they began to chant the ancient goblin war song:

Goblins come!

Goblins come!

From Clovenstone with horn and drum!

To the Lands of Man with fire we come!

Over the mountains,

Over the moor,

Goblins are marching,

To war! To war!

It was like the turning of a tide: a great swirl of motion, surging down the stairways of the Inner Wall towards the armouries below. The goblins had grown so used to the idea of fighting dwarves, and so eager for revenge, that once the idea of going to Adherak was sown in their brains it sprouted swiftly.

Goblins go!

Goblins go!

With things to thump and things to throw!

To smash that Giant Dwarf we go!

There and back,

There and back,

Goblins are marching,

To Adherak!

On the battlements, Ned struggled through the current of departing goblins to reach the waiting cloud. “Oh, cloud maidens, do be dears and fly to Coriander with this news!” she said. “And to Adherak as well, to let them know that we are coming. . .”

“Not we, princess,” said Dr Prong, quite sternly. “Do you not remember when you asked me to be your doctor? Well, as your doctor, it is my medical opinion that you must rest, and not exert yourself.”

“Oh yes!” said Henwyn eagerly, because he had suddenly remembered his vision in the bathtub, and was wondering if it was on one of the green fields of Adherak that he had seen the princess laid out dead. “You should stay here. Someone must stay behind to keep an eye on Clovenstone; to make sure the boglins do not try anything while we are away, and to organize a last defence if we fail and the dwarves come here.”

“Henwyn, I am not an invalid!” said Ned quite crossly, because it seemed to her that her place was at the front of this boisterous army, not skulking at home. But then she looked at them, pouring down off the Inner Wall, grabbing pikes and shields and banners from the armouries, and it struck her what a long way it was to Adherak, and how fast the goblins would cover that distance if they did not have an elderly princess to delay them, and she had to admit that what Henwyn and Dr Prong had said was right.

“Well,” she said, determined to be of some use to the expedition, “you cannot just set off now, all higgledy-piggledy, without a plan of campaign or any provisions. We must organize you.”