The Elfin Ship (25 page)

‘Fine,’ Jonathan said, picking up an empty wooden crate and putting the pirate book in the bottom with a few others by the same author. Then he ran across a shelf of books by Glub Boomp, the elf author from the White Mountains who wrote about lands way off in space and about the Wonderful Isles and a country beneath the sea called Balumnia that was peopled by mermen. Needless to say, Jonathan stacked those away in his crate too.

But he really struck paydirt when he stumbled upon the collected works of G. Smithers of Brompton Village. At home Jonathan had a dozen or so volumes, most of them dog-eared and falling to bits after having been read and reread and loaned out and so on. But there was a complete set of G. Smithers, one hundred-twenty-nine volumes in all and every one as good as the other. After a couple of hours of browsing, he hunched out into the evening mist. He had to hire a wagon to carry his books back to the Mooneye. It had been an amazing afternoon all in all and was even more satisfactory because he had found, in a room of illustrated science and philosophy classics, the phenomenal
Tomes of Limpus,
great aged, vellum-covered volumes full of scientific arcana – a collection for which, Jonathan knew, the Professor would gladly sell his oboe weapon. They’d make a fine gift, something the Professor couldn’t refuse.

Ackroyd the baker came round that evening, as did the four linkmen, and all sat about before the fireplace gobbling down roast goose and oyster pie and cranberry jelly and pints of ale. Jonathan settled into bed late with Ahab curled up on a rug beside it and lost himself in a G. Smithers he hadn’t read before – a book about buried treasure and goblin wars and all manners of things. He dozed off, however, before he was through twenty pages, and he slept through the night, his candles burning themselves into little waxy puddles.

He seemed to be involved in the same dream for hours, a dream in which he and the Professor were walking with the Moon Man across broad meadows of clover and lavender. It was a sunny day, a spring day, and the path they ambled along led to a heavy oak door set into the steep side of a small grassy hillock along the path. A huge bar and lock bolted this door, and the Moon Man toyed with a chain of keys in search of one which would fit the great lock. When the door swung open it revealed nothing but a dark hallway running down and away beneath the meadows. The Moon Man produced a lamp from a shelf just inside the door, lit the wick, and stepped in, followed by Jonathan and the Professor. Their footsteps echoed along the dim, stony passage. Jonathan became aware, in his dream, of an odd, musty, sharp odor in the air roundabout – not at all unlike the smell of the inside of a cheesehouse.

‘Smells like a cheesehouse down here,’ he said aloud.

‘Just so!’ said the Professor. ‘That’s just what it smells like. Rather nice, actually.’

‘Watch your step here,’ the Moon Man warned as the three of them clumped down a long batch of stone stairs into an immense underground gallery.

The Moon Man turned the flame up on the lamp, and the yellow glow lit the entire cavern. The walls, pockmarked and cut into odd geometric forms, seemed light green like very pale jade. There was an overpowering smell of cheese in the air.

The Moon Man was grinning widely. With his penknife he cut a chunk out of one wall and broke it into three pieces. All of them popped a bit into their mouths, and Jonathan was vaguely surprised to find that it tasted good, very sharp and with a smooth soft texture. The whole thing struck Jonathan as funny all of a sudden, for the Professor stood goggling, chewing slowly. He was smack up against another impossibility and was trying to study it out. Jonathan couldn’t contain himself; he began to laugh like a lunatic. The Moon Man joined in, and finally the Professor did the same. All of them laughed their way out along the passage and into the open air. Amazingly – though it seemed natural to Jonathan in his dream – it was dark out – dark as midnight – and the meadows roundabout stretched off in every direction, lit not by the pale rays of the moon but the blue-green light of the earth which swung overhead in the night sky like one of the Squire’s marbles.

It was altogether a pleasant if mysterious dream, but it ended abruptly when Jonathan became conscious that someone was whacking on the door. He awoke, sat up, and shouted, ‘Green cheese,’ very loudly before realizing that he wasn’t in the land of dreams anymore but was sitting in his bed at the Cap’n Mooneye and that, according to his pocketwatch, it was nine o’clock in the morning.

There was a whacking at the door again, and Ahab bounced about the room, rushing to the door, then to the side of Jonathan’s bed. ‘Jonathan!’ the Professor shouted from behind the door. ‘Wake up, man. We’ve an appointment with your Moon Man.’ Jonathan stepped over to the door and opened it.

‘I rather thought something like this was coming up,’ he said.

‘It had to be,’ agreed the Professor. ‘There’s more to our trip upriver than just gifts and cakes. You can count on it.’

A short hour later they found the Moon Man waiting at the Seaside dairy, a mile inland from the coast. He wore his tweed coat and leaned heavily on a carved stick. But the countryside roundabout and the bustle of the dairy seemed to buoy him up a bit, as if he felt at home. In truth he had nothing to do with the operation of the dairy, but he liked to point out that he and Hodgson, the master of the Seaside dairy, were thick as thieves, especially when it came to the making of cheeses. Jonathan was pleased when Hodgson, a cherubic-looking dwarf with a pointed beard, insisted that the Professor was witnessing a meeting of the three finest cheesemakers in the Western lands. The elves, he said, couldn’t make cheese worth a bob. They were always dumping magic crystals or impossible spices into them and ruining the whole lot. They insisted it was all very gourmet, but, if the secret were known, they wouldn’t even eat their own cheeses. They sold them to the coastal villages to be used as fish bait.

The dwarf cheesehouses looked pretty much as you’d expect – much like Jonathan’s, in fact, only vastly bigger. Enormous wheels of cheese hung from the high rafters, some wrapped in gauzy cheesecloth, some covered in coatings of wax and wound round with rope, some encased in great crystals of rock salt.

Along one wall of the cheeseroom were stoves and cutting boards and presses and a dozen or so dwarfs all up to the elbows in tubs of curds and whey. The cheese presses were huge affairs, one almost as large as Jonathan’s house, and they were an absolute wonder of cranks and gears and sieves. Great dollops of whey dripped into long troughs cut into the floor beneath, and a rush of canal water was allowed in through a trap in the wall every ten minutes or so to wash the troughs clean.

Jonathan was treated like a prince by the cheese-hands who assured him that his name had been well known for years around the Seaside dairy. Jonathan doubted that such a thing could be and blushed a great deal, assuring them that his cheeses were paltry things at best when compared to dwarf cheeses. The dwarfs, however, slapped him on the back and said that they enjoyed a humble nature as much as the next dwarf.

Hodgson led them along to the milking parlors – long rooms with a maze of stalls and a line of cattle coming along on a sort of treadmill device. The cattle were clearly Seaside hybrids. They seemed easily twice as large as any cow Jonathan could remember having seen around Twombly Town, but such a phenomenon might have been an illusion caused by the fact that they towered over the dwarfs who scuttled about milking them. They were ponderous, low slung beasts with round, lumpy hooves and legs like the stumps of trees. Their eyes were small, far too small to seem anything but foolish, and the folds of flesh on their faces made them look as if they were squinting and always deep in thought.

Ahab didn’t know what to make of the beasts, but he seemed to sense that in many ways he bore the things a family resemblance and, as a consequence, felt at home with them. He went sniffing about and, as if he hadn’t any manners, pretended to peer into a bucket of milk for some apparently philosophic and innocent purpose, when what he intended, Jonathan knew, was to have a go at it. Jonathan warned him away, after which a dwarf poured the pooch a dish of the stuff and patted him on the head.

Hodgson stormed about overseeing the milkers and so left the rafters and Ahab and the Moon Man to go about their business. Jonathan and the Professor followed the Moon Man out onto a pasture, then sat down on a long bench, gray and pitted from years of coastal fog and rain.

The Moon Man didn’t waste words. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said after clearing his throat and pushing his spectacles higher up onto the bridge of his nose, ‘I’ve had correspondences last night from upriver, and the news, I fear, is disheartening.’

Jonathan thought immediately that whatever curse seemed to be plaguing the high valley had spread to Twombly Town. But that, it turned out, wasn’t the case.

‘The town of Hightower, gentlemen, has been deserted by the townspeople. Not more than a handful remain – half a dozen at most. The houses are inhabited now by things from the swamp. Goblins and hobgoblins and animals behaving in odd ways go about freely in the town and even carry on trade with two or three of the merchants who have elected not to give up their shops.’

‘Staunch sorts, those,’ said Jonathan, who remembered his meeting with Old Hobbs who, as the Professor had stated at the time, was the sort to ‘bear up’ through a crisis.

‘All gone daft, actually,’ said the Moon Man with a sad shake of his head. ‘Every one of them, I’m afraid, and the rest off upriver and down with nothing but baskets of clothes and food. It’s a sad pass.’

Jonathan shook his head. Three villages between Twombly Town and Seaside lost. Nothing lay between Hightower and Twombly Town to slow the creeping spread of horror but a few short miles of forests – forests already frequented by trolls and wolves and, no doubt, goblins. ‘It seems to be time, sir, that the Professor and Dooly and Ahab and I got about our business. We’re needed in Twombly Town while we’re here on a holiday of sorts in Seaside. That’s not a good thing, I believe.’

‘Not a bit,’ the Professor agreed.

‘No, I suppose not,’ said the Moon Man with a sigh. ‘One likes to think that the trouble will dry up and blow away on the wind, but that’s rarely the case.’

Jonathan agreed, apprehensive over all this trouble business and fearing that his return to Twombly Town wouldn’t be a simple matter. ‘We’ve only a little more than a month before Christmas,’ Jonathan said, ‘and trouble or no, we’ve got to get these cakes and gifts home before Christmas. We can’t very well forego tradition.’

‘I should say,’ said the Moon Man. ‘Traditions such as those mustn’t be foregone. We can’t change such things with our whimsy; they’re rooted too deeply in us all. No, Mr Bing, you’re very right. You’ll all be on your way in due time on a raft that should be quite suitable. I have high hopes that you’ll be home in time for the holidays. In time to put up a jolly good Christmas tree and light the fire in the fireplace and appreciate your pipe and your dog and your merry companions and everything else that the holidays are. Because, Mr Bing, it’s those traditions that see us through each winter and will, I hope, see us through this one.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Jonathan, seeing some truth in the Moon Man’s words. He suddenly felt a funny sort of sad regret for the passing of the few days he’d spent in Seaside and for knowing that the future, whatever it held, would as surely pass away in time. But perhaps that’s what made such days seem so wonderful, finally, in his memory. So Jonathan told himself to buck up and cheered himself at the thought of the coming holidays and of seeing good old Mayor Bastable again and talking about philosophy with him in front of the fireplace.

‘Well, sir,’ said the Professor, always the one to get down to brass tacks, ‘this is all just a bit too mysterious for my liking. I’m ready to lend a hand, and I think I can say the same for Jonathan here and for Dooly too. And Ahab’s no slouch either when it comes to the dirty work.’ The Professor patted Ahab atop the head. ‘You should have seen him routing goblins there below Hightower. He was inspired.

‘We’ve been led to believe, sir, that we can obtain a suitable raft, and as far as we’re concerned, Jonathan and I, there’s no reason not to bung straightaway upriver tomorrow morning. We’ve had quite a stay here these past days, but time is growing short.’

‘Shorter than you suppose, perhaps,’ the Moon Man said cryptically.

‘That’s just the sort of thing I mean,’ said the Professor, getting his dander up. ‘Anyone with any sense can see that things have run fairly well amok along the Oriel. There’s no end of marauding goblins and trolls and menacing toads and such, but what has it to do with us? It’s time, in other words, for Jonathan and Dooly and me to have a look at the script, if you follow me.’

The Moon Man nodded in agreement, as did Jonathan. Ahab trotted away to sniff at two cows who wandered past munching clover. He didn’t care much for scripts of any sort.

‘I won’t tell you that the whole thing is very simple,’ said the Moon Man, ‘because it most decidedly is not. The danger grows daily, and the future is a muddle of possibilities. But your part is not complicated. I’ll merely ask you to transport a certain party upriver – to give passage to a gentleman whom you’ve heard something of, I dare say. In exchange, you’ll have your raft, as well as the knowledge that you’ve played a part – and a very significant part at that – in what will most assuredly be a momentous event. I’d like to say a momentous victory, but I’ve seen far too many odd turns of event in my time to be so optimistic’ The Moon Man removed his fish-globe spectacles and wiped away at them with a checked rag he kept in the pocket of his tweed jacket. He began to replace them on his nose, then seemed to see another speck and polished the things again. Then he blew his nose ponderously into the cloth, plucked a clean cloth from a trouser pocket, put the clean cloth away in his coat and shoved the used cloth into his trousers. It was an altogether odd exchange of checked cloths, but it seemed unportentous to the Moon Man so Jonathan didn’t comment on it.