The Disappearing Dwarf (10 page)

Jonathan and the Professor once again shot each other a significant look. There was no mistaking it. Apparently the Squire and the treasure were both, somehow, in the land of Balumnia. Jonathan was struck with a sudden memory, a memory that rather confused the issue for him.

‘I once read a book about this Balumnia,’ he said. ‘It must have been twenty years ago. It was a wonderful book by the elf author, Glub Boomp. A fantasy novel.’

‘Glub Boomp didn’t write fantasy novels,’ Twickenham put in. ‘He was an historian.’

That seemed unlikely to Jonathan, who vaguely remembered stories about amazing lands beneath the sea and horrible dark woods infested by cannibals and goblins and werewolves. The tales hadn’t sounded much like history to him, but then he’d only been twelve or so at the time. Still, unlikely or not, here were Twickenham and Miles insisting that the Squire, somehow, was off in the land of Balumnia. And if Balumnia were real enough to hold the Squire, it was a very real world indeed.

‘The Lumbog globe,’ Twickenham said, ‘has certain powers. To the uninitiated it affords wonderful dreams – much as Escargot had promised. To the knowledgeable it’s a key, figuratively speaking, to a Balumnian door.’

‘A Balumnian door?’ The Professor was a bit more skeptical of all this business than was Jonathan.

‘Just so,’ Twickenham continued, warming to his subject. ‘A door into Balumnia.’

‘Like a closet door?’ the Professor asked, ‘or a cupboard door? That seems fairly unlikely, doesn’t it?’ Obviously the Professor wasn’t convinced. ‘Strange sort of a land, isn’t it? Fancy walking into it through a door rather than sailing to it on a ship.’

‘That’s possible too,’ Miles continued. ‘There’s a door beneath the ocean, the western door. It’s somewhere out toward the Wonderful Isles, hundreds of fathoms beneath the swells. The islanders thereabouts catch some of the most wonderful beasts: butterfly fish and winged cod and periwinkles the size of your head. There are said to be chambered nautili that live in the passage itself that produce song bubbles – music so wonderful that when the bubbles burst on the surface of the sea, dolphins gather by the thousands and weep.’

The Professor sat there open-mouthed, looking as if about half of him suspected that Miles was having him on.

‘And that, of course, is why Escargot didn’t need the globe,’ Twickenham explained. ‘At least he didn’t need it enough to steal it from the Squire; not as long as he had his submarine.’

‘Then we will need a submarine too,’ Jonathan said. ‘We’ve got to find Escargot and borrow his.’

‘Not so,’ Miles replied. ‘The undersea door is, as I said, the western door. In the White Mountains lies the eastern door. In the north, beyond the City of the Five Monoliths, there’s another door. The southern door we won’t mention.’

‘And it’s just as well,’ Twickenham added. ‘Doors are much like people. There are good doors and evil doors – doors that would better remain shut. The Lumbog globe is a floating door, and somehow the Squire stumbled upon its secret.’

‘Selznak must have been after the globe then,’ Jonathan reasoned.

‘Almost certainly,’ Twickenham answered. ‘Two Elvish Wonders were taken from him: the pocketwatch and the globe. The watch was quickly beyond his grasp. The globe, however, was a different matter. We’d be fools, though, to suppose that only his desire for the globe spurred him on. The Squire, I believe, has reason to fear for his life.’

‘The fog on the heath!’ Jonathan cried. ‘That was him – the Dwarf.’

‘Of course,’ Miles said. ‘He was heading back upriver, toward the southern portal.’ They told Twickenham of the little fog that had hung about on the meadow along the trail and had, somehow, snuffed their campfire.

‘That’s just like something he’d do,’ Twickenham said, ‘snuff your campfire. He was on the trail of the Squire, all right.’

‘Then we’d best be off on that trail ourselves,’ Jonathan suggested. ‘Poor Squire. He doesn’t know where he is or why he’s there. He’s probably confronted right now by singing squids, and the Dwarf’s after him with an eye toward turning him into a winged toad or something.’

‘Well,’ said Gump, sticking in his two cents worth, ‘we don’t have to worry about any squids. The Squire would just eat the things. I’ve seen him eat squid sandwiches that would turn your head. They were marvels. And he wouldn’t care if they sang either; he’d eat them anyway. A singing sandwich is right in the Squire’s line.’

Everyone laughed at the image of Gump’s singing sandwich, but they didn’t laugh long. There were plans to be made, bags to be packed. It had become something of a race. The only bit of hope lay in the supposition that Selznak, though he might well enter Balumnia ahead of them, would have no more idea of the Squire’s whereabouts than they had. Jonathan was beginning to feel like one of the detectives in a G. Smithers novel. He considered the idea of buying a tweed suit and cap and magnifying glass like the Professor’s. But then he recalled that emulating a G. Smithers character often brought about undesirable ends, so he gave up the idea.

It was too late in the evening to set out, so they agreed to be underway an hour before dawn the next morning. Jonathan and the Professor decided to forget their plan of abandoning the treasure map. After all, it was an astonishing coincidence that they had a double reason for traveling to Balumnia, and it would be folly not to take advantage of such an opportunity.

After the lot of them had discussed plans for two hours over apple pie and coffee, Jonathan and Professor Wurzle sought Miles out in his room and showed him the map. Miles pronounced the document authentic and agreed with the Professor that it was probably drawn in octopus ink. There was some possibility, however, that the ink of a river squid had been used. The Professor was quite sure that nothing of the sort was the case, although he admitted, finally, that it was tough to be utterly precise, given the age of the map and the similarity between squid and octopus inks. All the ‘poulpe’ inks bore similarities. At least that’s what the Professor said. Jonathan assumed that the ink controversy was evidence of the Professor’s concern for scientific accuracy, and so didn’t pay much attention. Octopus ink and squid ink were all pretty much the same to Jonathan.

‘This would be Landsend harbor,’ Miles observed, pointing at a great dot on the map. ‘And this is the Tweet River, flowing past it to the sea. A full rigged ship can sail a thousand miles up the Tweet River. A trade barge can sail two thousand if it wanted to. Nobody with any sense would want to, though. You can see the river mouth here on the map. All this gray area, that’s the ocean. These dots are the Flappage Islands. Pirate havens, every one. It’s a rough port, Landsend. But it’s just the place for treasures.’

‘What’s the likelihood we’ll travel this far?’ Jonathan asked.

‘As I see it,’ Miles said, ‘it’s no more likely that we travel in one direction than in another. We might just as well set out for Landsend. If we get word of the Squire, we can always adjust our course.’

‘This has some resemblance to the old needle in a haystack business,’ the Professor remarked about their search for the Squire.

‘It has that,’ Miles replied glumly. ‘But I have methods, gentlemen, that may avail us.’

Jonathan was fairly sure that Miles wasn’t talking falsely. Any man, after all, who could set an ape suit afire with a toasting curse was a good man to have along in a pinch. More useful, no doubt, than the ape suit itself.

Jonathan was already awake next morning when Miles the Magician came for him and the Professor. In fact, Jonathan had been awake most of the night, what with the double excitement. It had always been Jonathan’s belief that it was folly to worry about unfathomables. He held that as one of his principal philosophies, even if he didn’t always practice it. Since there was nothing to be done for the Squire, not that night anyway, his thoughts were mostly on treasures. Jonathan didn’t care much for wealth – not half as much, anyway, as for the treasure itself. The two times he dozed off during the night he had dreams of finding immense caverns of treasures salted away by pirates for five hundred years.

He was fairly sure that pirates themselves rather felt the same way. If books could be believed – and it was beginning to look as if they could – then it seemed as if pirates spent their lives amassing great chests full of emeralds and gold for the sole purpose of burying the lot of it away on some goat-populated desert isle, only to sail back years later and dig it up and fight over it and make up songs about it and bury it again, finally, somewhere else. He had never heard of pirates spending any of it.

It struck Jonathan as a pity to do anything at all with the treasury. It would be far more worthwhile to leave it be, to return every few years and find it again, to sort of climb about in it yelling like a man who has lost his wits and let the chains of jewels and the gold coins run through his fingers and heap up on the floor. And there would no doubt be grim evidence lying around of the horrible history of it – skeletons in cocked hats run through with cutlasses and set here and there to keep watch. What a shame to move such a treasure – something like tearing apart an old and crumbling building or chopping down an ancient tree.

The Professor didn’t exactly see things in the same light when Jonathan discussed it with him the next morning. He told Jonathan that he had too much of the poet in him – was too romantic. There were things that a man could do with such a treasure. Just for historical purposes it should be catalogued; and given the nature of treasures in general, a good bit of it should be spent on historical exploration and study.

All that sounded pretty punk to Jonathan – which is how Theophile Escargot would have put it. But then it didn’t much matter there at Myrkle Hall; after all, they had no treasure yet.

The Squire’s cook, a dedicated fellow who was very nearly as fat as the Squire, was up before any of them. He had a mind, he said, to go along with them in search of his master, but he couldn’t. It was impossible. It wasn’t to be thought of. If they would send word, however, of their homecoming, they’d see a bit of a feast. As breakfasts go, however, they saw a bit of a feast right there. Waffles and eggs and ham and ripe oranges and biscuits and honey and just about anything you please was spread out on the big table in the dining hall. The food was gobbled down faster than it should have been, perhaps, for Twickenham was anxious to be off.

Five of them were bound for Balumnia: Jonathan, the Professor, Miles, Bufo, and Gump. Stick-a-bush elected to stay behind. He assured the rest of the company that he was itching to be ‘at’ the Dwarf, but it was almost time for him to journey to Seaside with the spring produce from the family farm and return with baskets of smoked fish.

Twickenham and Thrimp were anxious to give them a lift in the airship as far as the portal in the White Mountains, but they were anxious to go no farther. Clearly, the rest of the company could get on well enough without the two elves who, Twickenham pointed out, had done little that past twenty-four hours but eat up the Squire’s food.

So it was settled. The company piled aboard the elfin ship along with a few meager supplies. They decided to carry little along with them, trusting that the country of Balumnia, wherever it lay, would understand the nature of a gold coin.

The airship rose silently skyward. Jonathan watched through the window as the ground below receded. Myrkle Hall looked like a cleverly built toy amid the surrounding green of the meadows. Orchards became visible, laid out in neat rows beside fields of strawberries. Forests crept along over the hills toward the River Oriel, and when the airship was almost level with two white puffy-cheeked clouds, Jonathan could see the river itself off in the distance, a tiny ribbon of a river running away down the valley toward Seaside. Smoke from what must have been Willowood Station rose in the northeast, and beyond that stretched the dark expanse of the Goblin Wood.

They whizzed away east, finally, toward the White Mountains, leaving Myrkle Hall and the orchards of the linkmen far behind. The mountains themselves seemed to grow as the airship ascended and flew into the dawn. Jonathan had heard any number of astonishing stories about the White Mountains, stories about the tribes of mystics who lived in the shelter of high valleys, cut off from the outside by perpetual storms, sharing their caves and huts with snow apes and white tigers. Elves dwelt in the foothills, spinning elf silver and glass into wonderful toys and building fabulous magical machines like Twickenham’s airship. Dwarf villages stretched along the mountainsides below the mouths of deep caves. Almost no villages of men could be found, though, either on the slopes of the foothills or at the higher elevations. It was rumored that there was something magical about the White Mountains that drove men mad, as had happened to the mystics.

The airship followed the slow curve of a little green valley up the foothills. The mountains were heavily timbered and ran with creeks and rills and waterfalls that tumbled along, now visible, now hidden beneath the thick woods, finally cascading out of the edge of the forest to flow into a rushing stream, white and green beneath the morning sun, and falling away down the valley. One hill seemed to give rise to another, and where the one humped and leveled for a space, the river slackened and pooled up into little lakes before tumbling over another crest and dashing away again. Along the banks of these lakes were timbered dwellings that sat so placidly among the surrounding meadows and trees that they were no less a part of the landscape than were the rocks and the woods and the river itself.