by Philip Reeve
(“I wish I’d never lit eyes on that flamin’ map!” wailed Skarper, two thousand feet above the ground and falling fast.)
But he had lit eyes on it, and that was how it had all begun. From then on, while the other goblins went birdsnesting among Blackspike’s turrets or practised fighting on its narrow ledges and crumbly battlements, Skarper always found a way to slip off unnoticed and creep down to the bumwipe heap. There, by the glow of the luminous bat droppings which he smeared on his nose to light his studies, he pored over the mysteries of lettuce, worms and burks. Before many moons passed he had taught himself to read, using the names on the old map as a key to help him work out the sound that each of the lettuce stood for. He had learned that the “lettuce” were really called letters, the “worms” were words and the proper name for “burks” was books. There was even a book there called Dictionary, which held lists of words, with other words beside them explaining what they meant. From this Skarper learned the meaning of words which no goblin before him had ever known, words such as kindness and gazebo.
There were other books, too; books which held whole stories, although sometimes their endings had been nibbled off by whiteworms, and even when they hadn’t Skarper had no way of knowing which were true and which were false. For instance, had someone called Prince Brewyon of Tyr Trewas really been taken up into the sky by a cloud maiden who had fallen in love with him? Skarper didn’t think there were such things as cloud maidens, and he wasn’t at all sure about these “prince” things either, although there seemed to be quite a few of them in the books. Prince Brewyon cropped up in a lot of different stories, fighting giants and trolls and rescuing things called princesses.
Bat droppings showered down on Skarper; cave spiders crawled over his feet; from the chamber above came the bickerings of the older goblins squabbling over the loot from their latest raid, and from somewhere outside a long, fading shriek and a distant crunch announced that one of the birdsnesting younglings had fallen off the battlements. Skarper noticed none of it. The stories in the old books carried him far away from the Blackspike and away beyond the walls of Clovenstone to worlds of mystery and wonder.
The only place the old books did not tell him about was Clovenstone itself. It was barely mentioned in any of them, except for a reference here and there to ye Darke Tower of ye Lych Lord that is called Clovenstone, or Clovenstone, the Tower of Sorrows. All that he could find out about Clovenstone came from that map, which he now knew was called Stenoryon’s Mappe of All Clovenstone. It had been drawn a long time ago, because it showed the buildings and roadways all whole, with not a wood or a marsh to be seen within the Outer Wall, and Natterdon Tower still standing where there was now only a stump. (Goblins didn’t like to talk about Natterdon Tower.) But it was enough to make Skarper understand the size of this place he lived in, and to make him wonder how and why it had fallen into ruin.
Enjoying the strange new snippets of knowledge which he found in the old books, Skarper longed to share them with someone else. If only there had been somebody else like him in Blackspike Tower; somebody he could talk to. . .
At first he’d talked to Breslaw, but slowly he had started to realize that the old hatchling master was watching him, and so he began watching Breslaw in return. He soon found out about the egg-shards Breslaw stole, and once he even glimpsed the ball of slowsilver, big as an eyeball, that Breslaw kept hidden in the hatchery wall. Some of that came out of my eggstone, he thought. That should have been mine, by rights. He was so angry that he sometimes thought of stealing the slowsilver ball and taking it to his own hiding hole. At least, he did until he remembered that Breslaw was batch-brother to King Knobbler himself (he was always boasting that he might have ended up as king, had it not been for his missing bits). Hatchlings who stole from Breslaw got reported to Knobbler, and Knobbler always saw to it that they came to sticky ends. You wouldn’t want to end up catapulted off the roof, for instance, Skarper told himself.
No, you did not steal from a wily old goblin like Breslaw. But neither did you trust him, and you certainly didn’t tell him things that might help to make him cleverer than he already was.
Instead, Skarper did his best to share his newfound knowledge with his own batch-brothers.
“Men down-below don’t hatch from stones like us goblins,” he said one evening in the scoffery. “That’s why we call them softlings. They grow in the tummies of things called ‘ladies’.”
His batch-brothers looked at him, so bewildered that several of them actually stopped eating for a moment or two.
“What?” said Yabber.
“Anchovies!” said Gutgust. (“Anchovies” was the only word Gutgust ever used. No one knew why, or what he thought it meant. He was big enough and tough enough that no one had ever asked.)
“No wonder softlings is weak as cave-bats then!” said Libnog.
“What are ‘ladies’?” asked Wrench.
“Ladies is the ones with long hair,” explained Yabber. He was the biggest of the batch and had been out already on a big raid into the man-towns along the Nibbled Coast; he always liked to show off his knowledge of foreign parts. “They squeal higher-pitched than the ordinary men. I hate it when they do that. It hurts my ears like. . . Like. . .”
“Fingernails on a blackboard?” suggested Skarper.
The others looked blankly at him again.
“What’s ‘fingernails’?” asked Bootle.
“What’s a ‘blackboard’?” asked Libnog.
“What’s ‘on’?” asked Wrench.
“Anchovies!” shouted Gutgust.
“He talkin’ rubbish anyway,” said Yabber airily. “I’ve seen these ‘ladies’ and they ain’t no bigger than ordinary softlings. Smaller, maybe. There’d be no room inside them for a whole man.”
“Men aren’t born full grown,” said Skarper wearily. “They starts out little and they grow, just like us goblins do when we hatch from our eggstones.”
“And I has grown mighty indeed!” agreed Yabber, seizing his chance to steer the conversation towards a subject which didn’t make his brain hurt so much. He proved it by flexing his huge muscles and then punching Wrench and nicking his dinner. Wrench picked himself up and tried to brain Yabber with a handy club, but Yabber ducked and the club hit Bootle instead. Bootle bit Yabber; Libnog stabbed Wrench with a fork; Gutgust smashed a table over Bootle’s head. Sighing, Skarper picked up his bowl of spider stew and left the fight behind, sneaking off to the bumwipe heaps to catch up on his reading. He wished he could join in their innocent fun, but he seemed to have less and less in common with his batch-brothers. He knew so much more than they did. . .
Yet in the end, he thought, as he plummeted towards the rocks, all that knowledge and learning had been his downfall. It was difficult, when you knew so much, not to try to explain things to people, and set them right when they made mistakes. And that was not always a good idea. . .
Tumbling over and over in the bitter gusts that roared up the face of the mountain, Skarper recalled the previous night, and the great mustering of the tribe that King Knobbler had called in the scoffery.
All the goblins of the tower had gathered there, from the mightiest warriors to the lowliest snot-nosed hatchlings. The king, magnificent in all his armour, had stood on his special kinging chair in the firelight. King Knobbler was a giant of a goblin, almost as big as a man, which was how he had managed to make himself king in the first place. His craggy face was seamed with scars from countless raids and battles, and he wore a black patch to hide a missing nose. His fangs gleamed as he shouted, “Great news, boys! Tomorrow night, us lot are going to join with Mad Manaccan’s Lads and the Chilli Hats from Redcap and launch a great raid on the towers round the eastside!”
The eastside towers – Sternbrow, Grimspike and Growler – were home to cheeky goblins who’d lately taken to ransacking old armouries in the very shadow of Blackspike. It was high tim
e they were taught a lesson, and their towers were probably full of treasure, too. A raid that roared through all of them should come home laden with loot. The Blackspike Boys cheered, and the noise boomed and echoed under the stone ribs of the feast-hall’s roof.
Old Breslaw, who was standing at the king’s side, nodded wisely. The idea for the raid was his of course – Knobbler and his captains were all big and strong and good at hitting things, but they didn’t really have ideas; it was Breslaw who did the thinking in the Blackspike. Still, he didn’t mind Knobbler taking the credit, as long as he ended up with a share of the loot. He raised a tattered umbrella to try to shield himself from the royal spittle, which gusted like rain into the faces of those goblins in the front row as Knobbler went bellowing on.
“Us are going to sweep down on them eastside mobs and kill ’em all, and take their gold and silver an’ that. And you lot is going to be right at the fronts of things; the hammer of the Blackspike! We’ll show Mad Manaccan’s lot and them Redcap Pepperheads why King Knobbler’s Blackspike Boys is the best . . . the best . . . the best land pirates in all Clovenstone!”
That was when Skarper, with his head stuffed full of facts and words, raised his claw.
King Knobbler saw the movement. It put him off his speech. He forgot what he’d been going to shout next. His angry golden eyes were drawn to Skarper. He grunted and leaned forward, peering at this weedy little runt whom he’d never noticed before, but who had done what nobody else had ever dared do: interrupt him. The firelight shone sharp on the spines of his armour and the tips of his tea-coloured fangs.
“What?” he said.
“There’s no such things as land pirates, your majesty,” said Skarper uneasily. He already sensed that he had made a mistake, but he could see no way back.
The glow in the goblin king’s eyes deepened, as if a fire somewhere behind them was being stoked up. (Down deep beneath the Bonehills’ roots the lava lake glowed much like that.) “We robs people,” he said. “We smashes in doors and burns houses and kills people and comes home laden with loot. What is we if we in’t land pirates?”
“Well, it’s just that pirates generally work at sea,” Skarper explained. His voice got smaller and smaller as he spoke, but it was still easy to hear in the appalled silence that filled the Kingcave. “We’re bandits, your royal immensity. Or brigands.”
“Brigands?” said Knobbler.
“Yes, your magnificentness. ‘Brigand: noun: somebody who lives by plunder, usually as part of a gang of marauding thieves.’”
The Dictionary definition of brigand rocked the king back on his heels like a blow from a well-aimed war hammer. He didn’t know quite what it meant, but it sounded like softling-talk to him. Knobbler had no time for softlings. “What did softlings ever do that was any good?” he often asked his goblins, and roared the answer along with them: “Nothing!” (Although actually there was one softling invention that secretly impressed him. He admired the softlings’ underpants; so snug and comfortable and toasty warm. He had stolen himself some very cosy pink flannel ones, extra large, with frilly bits, which he wore at all times to protect his bottom from the Blackspike’s icy draughts and the hard seat of his kinging chair. Of course, he made sure they stayed safely hidden beneath his armour and his goat-hide trousers: it would never do to let his goblins see he wore pink flannel knickers.)
And it would never do to let himself be contradicted by a little half-grown runt like Skarper, either. The Blackspike goblins only let Knobbler lead them because they knew he’d dish out dreadful punishments to anyone who questioned him. He scowled at Skarper for a moment, trying to think of something suitably bad to do to him.
Luckily he didn’t have to think very hard. The goblins of Blackspike Tower had an age-old way of dealing with impertinent, rebellious or unwanted hatchlings.
“To the bratapult!” roared Knobbler.
The bratapult had stood upon the topmost pinnacle of Blackspike Tower for as long as any goblin could recall. It had been designed to throw stones and pots of blazing oil at besieging armies, but nobody bothered besieging Clovenstone any more, and when goblins from other towers attacked Blackspike, King Knobbler’s boys usually just dropped rocks on them from upstairs windows. The bratapult was now mostly used for fun, and there was nothing that the goblins thought funnier than flinging a cheeky hatchling high into the air and watching him plummet to the ground far, far below.
It was made from wood, stone, iron, bone, old mineshaft props, the hides of pit ponies, and anything else the goblins could get their paws on and drag up the steep stone stairways to the tower’s summit. Snow covered it, icicles trailed from its long throwing arm, and all night Skarper shivered in the cold, trussed up and left in its vast cup.
King Knobbler had been all for launching him as soon as they got him there, but it was dark by then, and the other goblins complained that they would not be able to watch him fall, which was always the best bit of firing a hatchling from the bratapult. “We could set him on fire first,” someone suggested, but there was a north wind howling round the tower, driving thin, slushy snow, and Skarper proved impossible to light. So they left him there and went back to the scoffery, planning to come back and launch him in the morning.
But what if it’s foggy tomorrow? he wondered as he lay there, roped, regretful and slightly singed. He looked up at the huge bulk of the Great Keep towering into the night, hidden behind the murk most of the time, except when a lessening of the storm cleared the sky for a moment and showed him those empty black windows and bare battlements. The Keep of Clovenstone, doorless, impenetrable, and full of mysteries. It didn’t even look like the towers and walls that had been built around it: it was older, and it did not seem to have been made from individual stones but from one sheer black mass of rock. Goblins had tried to get inside and loot it sometimes, but there was no way in: when the Lych Lord died, every door and window into the Keep had sealed itself shut with a scab of thick, dark stuff called lychglass which no mortal instrument could break or even make a mark on. All the treasures and wonders of the Keep had been locked away for ever, all alone.
Of course, goblin legends said that there were still things living in the Keep: servants of the Lych Lord, waiting for the day he would return, but Skarper had never believed that. At least, not until now. . . He squinted upwards, imagining the terrible cold eyes that might be gazing back at him, and for a moment, just a moment, he thought he saw a light up there, an impossible light in one of those empty windows.
Then the snow swirled back, and with it Skarper’s worries about fog. They won’t be able to see me fall if it’s foggy tomorrow; they’ll have to wait for it to clear. . . Sometimes it took weeks for fog to clear from the heights of Blackspike. He could starve to death waiting in the cup of the bratapult for the weather to improve. He wondered whether starving would be better than being splattered on the stones at the tower’s foot, but he couldn’t decide. He drifted into an uneasy sleep, still worrying.
He was in luck, or out of it. The next morning dawned clear and bright, and as soon as the sun had heaved itself up over the eastward towers a crowd of goblins came tumbling out of Blackspike to watch the fun. Dungnutt, Knobbler’s second-in-command, came and cut Skarper’s bonds, because it would be funnier if they could see him flapping his arms and legs about on the way down. Yabber, Wrench, Libnog and Bootle took bets on how long it would take their batch-brother to reach the ground, and whether he’d bounce off anything interesting on the way down. “Anchovies!” shouted Gutgust. Breslaw the hatchling master sadly shook his head.
King Knobbler drew his sword. It was a massive broadsword, and although it wasn’t as richly decorated as some swords, a sort of sullen magic seemed to live in it: it was said that its blade could slice through stone. Knobbler had heard somewhere that kings and heroes in the lands of men gave names to their swords, so he had named his. It was called “Mr Chop-U-Up”. He raised it so
that the sunrise bloodied its blade.
“This,” he yelled, “is for being too clever by half!”
Mr Chop-U-Up swept down, hewing through the rope that held the bratapult’s cup in place. The throwing arm sprang upright, crashing against the frame. The icicles flew off it with a thousand little pretty tinkling noises, and Skarper flew with them, like many a cheeky young goblin before him, hurtling up and out into the howling emptiness above the tower.
“Aaaaaaaaa. . .” he said.
The goblins cheered, and rushed to the edge of the roof to watch him fall.
Down and down and down he went, his escort of icicles filling the air around him. Sometimes he fell with his face to the wide sky, sometimes face down. Face down was worst, because as the ground drew closer he could see, between the clouds, the smashed-up skeletons of all the bratapult’s previous victims, spread about between the buttresses down there like white shingle at the foot of a sea cliff. Tears came from his eyes as he fell, and whirled upwards in his slipstream like lost raindrops. They were tears of bitterness, because he was regretting every moment that he had spent with books and words. Wretch and Yabber and the others had been right; what use had it ever been to him to learn about far-off lands and long-forgotten kings? Few goblins had even ventured as far as Clovenstone’s Outer Wall in Skarper’s lifetime; what help was it to know about the lands beyond? Most of what he had read had probably been made up anyway. He didn’t believe there had ever been any such person as Prince Brewyon, or any such places as Coriander or Tyr Trewas. As for cloud maidens, who would believe that old tripe?