The Elfin Ship (23 page)

Dooly’s ring and the Squire’s ring had both, undoubtedly, been cast by the same smith. The Squire’s was larger and pictured the raised form of one of those feathery plantlike fish with flaps of skin waving about as if they forgot to tuck in their clothes – and commonly called frogfish. In its eye was a blue diamond.

‘Where, Squire Myrkle, did you obtain your ring?’ asked Twickenham.

‘It was a gift, Mr Twickenham.’ The Squire paused for a moment then said in a deep voice again, ‘Twicky Twicky Twickenham,’ and laughed heartily. Everyone but Mr Twickenham laughed.

‘A gift from whom?’

‘Why from Theophile Escargot, who I gave a little cart to once. Carrying things, he was, which he had found, he said. Traded him straight across for this ring.’

‘Just so,’ said Mr Twickenham, who seemed pleased to have gotten a sensible answer. ‘And you, Dooly, do you know this Escargot?’

‘Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir,’ replied Dooly.

‘Contrary sort, aren’t you?’ said the elf.

‘Yes, sir, sir. Begging your pardon, but that isn’t his real name, although he likes it well enough.’

‘And how would you know?’

‘Because, sir, he’s what you might call my grandfather, sir, and my mother’s father to boot. And her name, if I might carry on some, was Stover, sir, which would make his the same and not, begging everyone’s pardon, Escar-what-is-it. He was a great one for fun, was Grandpa.’

Twickenham strode back and forth behind the Moon Man, who seemed about to fall asleep. ‘Did your grandfather, by any chance, Dooly, my lad, ever come across a pocketwatch that was at all out of the ordinary?’

‘Not really,’ said Dooly casting his eyes groundward.

Jonathan cleared his throat meaningfully.

‘Well, once,’ Dooly added.

‘Ah,’ said Twickenham. ‘And did it have a face upon it?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t never have nothing of the sort,’ Dooly said, lapsing into bad grammar because of his excitement.

‘Of course not, of course not,’ Twickenham assured him.

Dooly looked as if he were about to cry, sure as he could be that he was guilty of some dread thing, although he had no idea what dread thing that was. Surely they couldn’t hold him responsible for the fact that his grandfather loved to borrow things, names included. He was relieved when the conversation passed on to something else.

Twickenham gestured at the wonderful oboe weapon which the Professor had brought along to the gathering. ‘And you, Professor, do you know what that is, that thing you carry?’

‘Indeed, sir,’ said the Professor, exhibiting the odd device to those around the table. ‘It is an apparatus I found several years ago along the river near Stooton. It was entangled about the ruined mast of a certain vessel.’

‘That would be the Galleon of the Lakes of Luna, mired in Stooton Slough?’

‘Uh, yes,’ said the Professor after a moment’s hesitation. ‘This is, I have determined, a weapon which works according to the three major urges: velocity, pendulosity, and whirl.’

‘A weapon?’ said Twickenham, smiling a tad for the first time. The Professor looked just a bit put out. His assumption that it was a weapon had been reached after some fairly painstaking study.

‘May I have a look at it?’ asked Twickenham.

‘Of course.’

Twickenham looked it up and down thoroughly as did the other two elves. All of them chattered with excitement. ‘It’s perfect,’ Twickenham concluded.

The Professor smiled triumphantly.

‘But it’s not a weapon.’

The Professor sputtered, feeling foolish. He’d gotten all his understanding from elf runes, so it was likely that elves would know the truth about it.

‘It’s of far greater worth, sir,’ said Twickenham. ‘And I think it may be useful to us all. What do you think?’

‘Just as you say,’ said Professor Wurzle, ‘I ask only to be useful.’

Twickenham bowed in response, handed the Professor his device, and cast a look at the Moon Man, who was polishing his glasses.

He tucked the glasses into a case, then put on a spectacularly large pair which made his eyes look as if they were in fishbowls. He paused for a moment and wearily lit his pipe, at which point several of the elves in the hall did the same. Jonathan, knowing that it was correct to follow his host’s example, lit his own. He didn’t at all like the tone of the conversation so far, and he liked it even less when the Moon Man put away his tamper and said in a grave voice, ‘Christmas is coming on and every day we slide farther into a season which may well be grim beyond our fears. We must prepare for it!’

Jonathan puffed thoughtfully. Dooly seemed to be melting away into his chair, fearing, of course, that the grim fears were somehow his fault. Jonathan wasn’t at all sure why the approaching season was to be so fearfully rotten. He knew, it’s true, that all wasn’t well along the Oriel, but how the goblins and the strange doings at Willowood and Hightower and Stooton could concern the Moon Man or even the dwarfs in their fortified city of Seaside was beyond him. It was true, thought Jonathan with a bit of a shudder, that the Moon Man’s face had turned up rather often in the past, but that didn’t make all this business any more evident. Perhaps it
was
all a bit like a spider web. From a distance the pattern is clear, but for a bug caught up in it, it’s just a tangle of threads running out in every direction toward the horizon. He had hoped that the Moon Man would sort things out for him – that he and the Professor and Dooly would be able to do a bit of fishing off the pier and have a leisurely supper or two with the linkmen and then have a cheerful trip home carrying a paperweight and a carton of books.

But that prospect didn’t look likely. It started to look even less likely when Jonathan noticed what was sitting atop the table in front of the Moon Man – an oddly shaped jar with a glass and cork stopper in which floated a tiny pickled octopus. Dooly saw it at the same time.

‘Old Grandpa’s been here!’ he shouted, gesturing at the octopus.

The Moon Man smiled at him, ‘He has indeed, Dooly,’ he boomed. ‘And quite a grandpa he was.’

‘Oh, yes, Mister Man-in-the-moon,’ said Dooly, hugely pleased at the compliment. ‘There was times, sir, if your grace will pardon me while I carry on, that Grandpa had what might be called adventures. He was a powerful smart man, was Grandpa. And rich! Let me say! He had more than one of those octopods!’ Dooly winked meaningfully at Jonathan, partly because Jonathan was in on the octopus secret and partly because of Dooly’s pride in old Grandpa’s reputation.

‘It’s been many years since your grandfather and I last struck a bargain,’ said the Moon Man.

‘Back in the octopus days,’ said Dooly. ‘Later on it was whale eyes, then horned frogs in little cages, then finally little marbles with a sea horse frozen inside which he said he got from the linkmen. Only I didn’t know he meant jelly men until just a few days ago when we came on Mr Bufo and the Squire and Yellow Hat and Mr Stick-a-bush along down the river.’

The Moon Man seemed anxious to say something, and he took advantage of Dooly’s catching his breath to say, ‘Yes, it was during the octopus period. He traded, if you like, this octopus and a quantity of magic beans for four coins, some golden rings, and a pocketwatch.

‘Of the rings, three have been found. Miles the Magician has one, Squire Myrkle another, and you, Dooly, the third. Where the fourth is is unimportant. It’s likely that your grandfather traded it finally also. Rumors came along several years ago that he was spending a good deal of time of late beneath the sea in a submarine contraption and that he had as a companion a pig of exceptional intelligence dressed as a clown. It was kept previously in a teakwood cabinet above Seaside by a bunjo man, or so the story goes. I’m beginning to suspect, however, that something is amiss in the tale.

‘Your grandfather, Dooly, traded the ring and the coins for the undersea device and possibly for the bunjo man’s pig. The bunjo man wandered away upriver. We know this because the four coins came into Amos Bing’s possession several months later.’

Jonathan thought for a moment and then began to untie the bag on his belt. He had an odd affection for the coins even though they’d come to terrify him in some undefinable way, but if they belonged to the Moon Man and had been stolen, or traded, from him by Dooly’s grandfather, then there was no choice but to return them.

The Moon Man smiled and held his hand up. ‘Keep them, Mr Cheeser, if you wish. But only if you wish. They are what you’d call magical. You know that by now. Through them I can see a great distance, as you, years ago, found out. What good are they to me where I dwell? Real evil hasn’t come there yet. But in the river valley, on the ridge above Hightower Village, lies something I can neither see nor, I admit, fully comprehend.’ The Moon Man paused, adjusting the heavy glasses which slid continually down his nose. He narrowed his eyes, as if to see more clearly. ‘So I’d like for you to keep the coins, Mr Bing, and I’ll show you their secret – that which you stumbled on years ago. And they’ll be my eyes, so to speak, through the coming winter.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Jonathan, not as entirely overwhelmed by the gift as he might have been.

‘One last bit of business here,’ said the Moon Man, ‘before we turn to more pleasurable topics. Dooly lad, to whom did your grandfather give the pocketwatch?’

Dooly looked up and down the table noting fearfully that the elves had turned a bit pale, just as if they were coming onto the part in a ghost story where the ragged skeleton peers in at the window. ‘To …’ Dooly began. ‘To …’ he continued. ‘To a conjurer dwarf from the Dark Forest.’ Dooly then slumped in his seat and closed his eyes.

The Moon Man removed his spectacles and wiped his forehead. He had suspected, of course, that such was the case. It had to have been. What other device could have so completely overwhelmed the galleon while it lay in Stooton Slough, the elves on board searching for that very pocketwatch? What else could account for the desolation along the river, for the weird twistings of nature roundabout Hightower and Willowood and Stooton? The Moon Man had suspected and at first blamed Dooly’s grandfather for stealing the watch. Then he blamed himself for having allowed it to be stolen. Finally he blamed no one, for blame rarely accomplishes anything and it’s best to let it wear itself out. The time to act was, it seemed, upon them. Doom was closer to them all than Jonathan feared. As the Professor had aptly put it, things were abroad in the land.

‘And how do you know, lad, that the watch fell into the hands of this dwarf?’

‘I was there, sir.’

‘Indeed,’ said the Moon Man. ‘And did the dwarf have only one eye, the other covered by a black patch?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Did he have a long walking stick, oddly carved?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And had he a pipe in his mouth that billowed smoke like a grass fire?’

‘He did, sir. All of that, sir.’

‘It’s as I thought. When was this last trade accomplished?’

‘Oh, years back, sir. Just before Professor Wurzle found the boat.’

‘Have you seen your grandfather since?’

Dooly hesitated, but because of the spectacled stare of the round-faced Moon Man finally said, ‘Yes, sir. A few times.’

‘What did he say to you, Dooly?’

‘He said, sir,’ Dooly replied in a voice so small that everyone leaned toward him to hear, ‘that he’d been a fool, your honor, sir, and that there was winter coming on. But it was April then and it was all gibberish to the likes of me. He told me to take care of myself, sir, and watch for squalls, as he put it, and to come along to the coast if things got bad. That he had a device that would take us to the Wonderful Isles.’

‘And where, Dooly, were you to find him? The coast is a long, long place.’

‘I can’t say, sir,’ said Dooly, his voice breaking and tears starting from his eyes. ‘I told him I wouldn’t tell no one. Not even Mr Bing Cheese, sir. Not even old Ahab.’ Dooly began sobbing and looked as if he were getting set to crawl under the tablecloth.

‘I say!’ said Jonathan, not at all happy. ‘It wasn’t Dooly here who took the bloody watch. It was his grandfather, and the boy can’t be blamed for it.’

‘Be quiet!’ the Professor whispered into Jonathan’s ear in such a way that Jonathan obeyed.

‘Dooly,’ said the Moon Man, ‘it’s for your grandfather that I ask you, as well as for your friends. It’s for all of us.’

Dooly sniffed twice and smeared the back of his hand across his eyes. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Very sure,’ said the Moon Man.

‘He said he’d be at the caves of Thrush Haven during fall and winter each year and that I was to wait for him there if ever a time came that I needed to.’

‘Perhaps that time is come, Dooly. Perhaps it’s come.’ A silence followed.

‘Well!’ said King Grump rising. ‘Let’s have a round of ale, shall we? It’s early, but this is thirsty talk, thirsty talk. And we’d best fetch a lager and lime for the lad here who needs bucking up.’

The Moon Man rose, nodded to them all, put a hand on Dooly’s shoulder, then said he was tired and supposed he’d take a bit of a nap. They all watched him walk out of the hall while glasses of ale were brought in and passed down on a tray. He walked slowly as if he were either very tired or very thoughtful. Most likely he was both.