Odds Are Good (24 page)

Bindlepod still said nothing, simply held out one clammy hand and helped her onto the frog's back.

 

Toward evening on the third day of their journey, they came to an opening in the side of a hill.

“This is the path to Nilbog,” said the goblin. “Are you still sure you want to go with us?”

Violet looked at the dark hole, then glanced back toward her old home. After a while she nodded. “I'll go in.”

Bindlepod and Violet dismounted, for the entrance was too low for the frog to carry them through. Bindlepod took the princess by the hand and led the way into the cavern.

It was darker than Violet had imagined possible.

“How can you see?” she asked, as she picked her way forward on the stony path. She was holding tight to the goblin's hand and was secretly terrified that if he let go of her she would never find her way to the light again.

“There's enough light,” replied Bindlepod. “It's just that your eyes are too small.”

“It gets better soon, anyway,” added the frog.

And, indeed, after another five or ten minutes, she could see a dim glow ahead of them, which was like food to her light-starved eyes.

The glow turned out to be coming from some greenish mushrooms that grew along the cavern walls. It was sufficiently bright to let her walk with confidence, though not bright enough to cast shadows. Violet noticed that it gave an odd tinge to Bindlepod and his frog. Then she held up her hand and realized that the light made her look strange, too.

Narrow stone bridges took them across dark chasms. Winding passages with many tunnels branching to the sides carried them deeper into the earth. And at last they arrived at the entrance to Nilbog—or, at least,
one
of the entrances.

It was carved in the shape of a great mouth. Within that mouth, barring their path forward, were dozens of spiky stone teeth.

An enormously fat creature who looked something like a goblin, though not entirely, was leaning against one side of the entrance, cleaning his navel with a sharpened bone. When he saw them coming, he opened his yellow eyes a little wider but made no movement.

Bindlepod stopped a respectful distance away. He stuck out his long tongue by way of salute, then said, “Greetings, Frelg. I return from the land above.”

“Not alone, I notice,” said Frelg, shifting his huge bulk to the side just a bit.

“Princess Violet wished to see our world,” said Bindlepod, not referring to the fact that her father had banned her from returning home.

“Come here,” said Frelg. “Not you, Princess! Just Bindlepod.”

The goblin stepped forward. Frelg lurched to his feet, and the princess shuddered to see that he was twice the height of Bindlepod. Bending forward—not easy, given his enormous bulk—he began to sniff.

Sniff. Sniff sniff.

Frelg frowned in disgust.
“Whooie!”
he cried. “You stink, Bindlepod! You smell of quiet rooms and cramped hearts, tiny minds and tiny places. You smell small and nasty.”

Hearing this, the princess grew nervous. “Does that mean he's not going to let us in?” she whispered to the frog in a quivering voice.

“If I sent you away, then I would have a tiny little mind, too, wouldn't I?” asked Frelg, who had heard her in spite of her caution. (No surprise, really, given the size of his ears.) “You may enter. Just don't be surprised if people are not particularly happy to smell you.”

With that he wobbled his way from in front of the gate and gestured for them to enter. At the same time the stone teeth slid out of sight, leaving the path clear.

With Bindlepod leading the way, they passed through the gate into a long dark tunnel that led down at a steep angle. After about an hour the tunnel widened and they came out on a ledge overlooking a stone city. It was lit all about by that same glowing fungus.

Bindlepod sighed with pleasure. “Home.”

Not for me
, thought the princess sadly, wondering what was to become of her.

They followed the stone path, which was sometimes dry, sometimes slimy, down to the level of the city. As they drew closer to the city, the path widened into a road, and Bindlepod and Violet climbed back onto the frog. As they hopped toward the city, they occasionally saw other travelers, goblins all. Some of them merely waved. Others, recognizing Bindlepod, greeted them with respectful bows. But all of them, even the goblins who bowed, stayed at the far side of the road, sniffing suspiciously.

 

Their reception at the court of the goblin king was no more encouraging than Violet's last interview with her father had been. The goblin king—a huge creature with leering eyes, fantastical warts in several colors, and a tongue as long as his arm—was sympathetic, but disturbed. “I am glad to have you back, Bindlepod,” he said. “And your young lady friend is welcome to stay as well, of course. But really . . .”

With that, his voice trailed off, and his eyes rolled around, as if he was searching for exactly the right word.

The goblin queen, who had been plucking out a tune on the back of a strangely scaled creature, looked up and said, “Your father is troubled, son, on account of the princess's smell.”

“Son?” asked Violet in surprise. “You didn't tell me you were the
prince
of Nilbog!”

Bindlepod shrugged.

“And what's wrong with my smell, anyway?” continued Violet indignantly. “My father thought I smelled too much like a goblin to go home. So I would think I would smell just fine for you.”

“You do smell of goblin,” said the king wearily. “But you also smell of the world above, of something lost and distant that it pains us to remember. We will give you shelter, of course. But I fear my people will not be jolly in your presence.”

“I fear not,” said the queen, striking a particularly melancholy chord on the back of the lizard-thing.

 

Time proved the queen to be correct. Though, everyone in Nilbog was polite to Violet and Bindlepod—at least, polite by goblin standards—no one seemed terribly
comfortable
in the presence of either of them.

The result, not surprisingly, was that Violet and Bindlepod spent more and more time alone together.

The result of that situation
was
surprising, at least to those who think goblins and humans are more different than they really are.

Bindlepod and Violet fell in love.

It happened—or, at least, they became aware it had happened—one afternoon when they were sitting beside an underground river, basking in the gentle light of the glowing fungus. Bindlepod had just caught a fish and was trying to convince the princess to try a bite.

“Princesses don't eat raw fish!” she said tartly.

“You have done many things princesses are not supposed to do,” replied Bindlepod, speaking a little tartly himself.

Violet pursed her lips in exasperation but couldn't think of a good answer for this. “All right,” she said at last. “I'll try a bite. One. A small one.”

Bindlepod cut a bit of flesh from the fish with his knife, then took it between his fingers and held it out to the princess. As she bent forward to take it in her mouth, Bindlepod found himself, much to his own surprise, running his finger gently along her lower lip. Though he drew his hand back in shock, the bigger shock was the one that had passed between them, a jolt of recognition that made it impossible for them to ignore what their hearts had known for a long time.

From that moment on they knew that they were in love.

“I can't say we were made for each other,” said Bindlepod, later that same afternoon. Violet was reclining in his arms, dreamily gazing at the waterfall. “Even so,” he continued, “I am glad we found each other.”

“And why weren't we made for each other?” she asked, reaching up to pat his sallow cheek.

“Well, my stinky little sweetie, our smells are, to say the least, incompatible.”

“Oh, fiddle,” said Violet. “You smell fine to me.”

“And I've grown quite fond of your odor as well,” he replied—which was not what you would call a ringing endorsement, but it satisfied the princess nonetheless.

 

As the days and weeks wore on, Violet began to realize that Bindlepod was right. Though they were utterly happy in each other's company, the world around them—or, to be more specific, the other goblins—were most uneasy with their relationship. And though Bindlepod claimed this did not bother him, Violet was perceptive enough to see that he missed the company of other goblins, missed their easy teasing, their wild energy, their bizarre games.

Finally she decided to seek help for their situation, and, after a bit of asking around, learned the whereabouts of the wisest of goblins, an incredibly ugly female of astonishing age. Her name was Flegmire, and she lived in a cave at the edge of Nilbog.

Violet did not tell Bindlepod where she was going, simply asked if she could borrow the frog for a time.

Bindlepod agreed, on the condition that she not be gone for long.

Violet and the frog hopped away.

 

Flegmire's cave was deep and dank and hung about with moss. Snakes lounged around the entrance, as well as some other creatures that were like snakes, only stranger.

Standing at the front of the cave, Violet called, “May I enter, O Wisest of the Wise?”

“Yeah, yeah, come on in,” replied a gravelly voice.

Picking her way around assorted slimy creatures, Violet entered the cave.

Flegmire sat on the floor, which meant that her knees were considerably higher than her ears. She was playing with a collection of colored rocks that had been carved into various shapes. Violet recognized the game—she had seen the goblin children playing it fairly often—and wondered if coming to see Flegmire had been such a good idea after all.

Her doubts increased when the ancient gobliness held up her hands, cried, “Wait! Wait!” and then farted with such violence that it raised her several inches off the floor.

The smell caused Violet to gasp in shock, and she grabbed a nearby stalactite to keep from falling over. Flegmire, however, sighed in contentment and said, “Well, now that I can think again, tell me what it is you want.”

Eyes watering, the princess explained her difficulty.

“A sad story,” said the gobliness. “But I still do not know what you want of me.”

“You are the wisest of your kind,” said Violet. “Don't you know anything I could do to rid myself of this smell?”

Flegmire hooked a curved green fingernail over her enormous lower lip. “You can't think of anything yourself? No hints you've had along the way?”

The princess started to say no, then stopped. She swallowed nervously. “Well, Bindlepod's frog did mention something about . . . Fire Lake.”

Flegmire spread her arms as if the whole thing had been the essence of simplicity. “Well, there you go! If you already knew about that, why did you come here to bother me? I've got games to play, you know.”

“But the frog said the lake would change me,” said the princess.

“There are worse things that can happen,” said Flegmire. “Not changing isn't so good, either.”

“But
how
will it change me?”

“What do I look like?” asked Flegmire. “A prophet? You want to get rid of your smell, you go in the lake. How you come out, that's no concern of mine.”

“Well, can you at least tell me how to get there?” asked Violet.

Flegmire smiled. “Sure,” she said. “That's easy.”

 

That night—night and day being pretty much the same in Nilbog—Violet rose from her bed in the little stone cottage behind the palace grounds that the goblin king had given her to live in. She put on her riding clothes, then slipped out the door, intending to saddle up the frog and ride to Fire Lake. But she hadn't gone more than ten paces from her door when Bindlepod stepped from behind an enormous mushroom and said, “Going somewhere, my darling?”

Violet jumped and gasped. “What are you doing here?” she cried. Then, spotting the frog, who was crouched on the far side of the mushroom, she hissed, “Blabbermouth!”

The frog merely shrugged.

“He does have his loyalties,” said Bindlepod. “As do I. If you are going to do this thing, then so am I.”

“You can't!” cried the princess.

“Piffle,” said Bindlepod. “There's no point in only one of us taking the risk. If we're going to change, we might as well change together.”

And nothing the princess could say would dissuade him.

So together they rode to Fire Lake, a journey that took them ever deeper into the earth.

At the end of the second day, they crossed a field of bubbling hot springs, and the frog narrowly escaped scalding his rear quarters when a geyser erupted behind him. “You're going to owe me a lot of june bugs when this is over,” he said bitterly.

At the end of the third day, the horizon began to glow. Nervously, they climbed to the top of a slippery hill. Ahead lay Fire Lake, its flaming waves lapping idly against its scorched shore.

Violet tightened her hand on Bindlepod's arm. “I'm frightened,” she whispered.

“You should be,” croaked the frog, who was standing next to them.

“Whatever happens, we're in this together,” said Bindlepod.

They started forward again.

In a few hours they were standing at the edge of Fire Lake. The blazing waves hissed and crackled as they rolled against the shore.

Bindlepod took Violet in his arms. He held her close, burying his nose in her neck.

“You know,” he murmured, “I like the way you smell.”

“And I like the way you smell,” she replied.

“Then what are you going to do this for?” cried the frog, who had been growing more alarmed as they approached the lake. “Are you out of your minds? What do you care what the others think? It's none of their damn business! You love each other the way you are. Who are you going to change for?”