by Philip Reeve
None of them sounded quite right, so he shook the feelings out of his head with a determined flap of his ears and crept along the trampled path to stand on the very threshold of Clovenstone, under the curve of the great arch. He looked south across the plain of Dor Koth to where cloud shadows walked upon the hills of Oeth Moor, and for a moment he was gripped by an odd excitement as he realized that he was free; there was nothing to stop him stepping out through the gate if he wanted and setting off in search of an adventure, just as Henwyn had. Then he flicked his ears again and told himself not to be so foolish. South of those hills lay man-country, and anyway, the last thing he wanted was more adventures.
He turned away from the hills and stepped back into Clovenstone, and instantly a net came down on him, weighted with stones all round its edges so that it knocked him to the ground and pinned him there. Booted footsteps clapped and clattered, coming down a long stone stairway from the battlements above the gate. Excited voices called, “I got him!”
“It’s a goblin, I’m sure it is!”
“Let’s have a look at him!”
Skarper thrashed and struggled on the old flagstones, getting himself hopelessly tangled in the net. Through the ropes he saw three softlings peering down at him. First Henwyn, now this lot: he had never realized that Clovenstone was quite so busy.
“Yes,” said one of the softlings, nodding until his long white beard bobbed, “it is quite definitely a goblin!”
“I had not expected to meet any so soon, so far from the Inner Wall,” said a second, a tall, pale fellow whose ears stuck out like handles. He had little round panes of glass perched on his nose in a horn frame, and these made his large, nervous eyes look even larger and more nervous.
“We must beware!” the third said. He was shorter than the others, and his skin was peaty brown. He wore a dark brown robe embroidered with suns and moons, and he carried a sword. “Where there is one, there may be more. Make sure he can’t escape, Fentongoose! Maybe he’s been sent out from one of the old towers to see who we are, and how many. If we let him go we could have a whole gang of them down on us by nightfall.”
“Then we shall not let him go,” said white-beard. “Not yet. Not until we have explained ourselves.” He stooped over Skarper, peering in at him through the knots of the net. “If our quest is to succeed then I must win the friendship of the goblin tribes. What is your name?”
There was a pause, while Skarper worked out that the man was talking to him. “Skarper,” he admitted.
“And what is your tribe?”
“King Knobbler’s Blackspike Boys, but. . .”
“Very good,” said the white-bearded man, smiling and rubbing his hands together. “I am Fentongoose, and these are my companions, Carnglaze and Prawl. We are the Sable Conclave. Alone among men we have kept alive the memory of the Lych Lord and his powers. Now Magic is stirring again in the world. We have seen the portents, and we have come here, to the source and centre of it. To Clovenstone!” He pointed towards the Great Keep. The clouds had cleared now, and it soared above the summit of Meneth Eskern with the afternoon sun shining on its impossible walls.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?” asked Fentongoose, and without waiting for an answer he went on, “King Kennack’s armies never found their way inside, for all the entrances were sealed up with lychglass before they got there. But a way will be opened for those of us who have been loyal to the memory of the Lych Lord all these years. Behold: I bear his token, to prove that I am heir to Clovenstone.”
Out from the collar of his tunic he pulled a little stone amulet which hung around his scrawny neck on a cord. It was an old and tarnished thing, carved in the likeness of a grim, handsome face with wings sprouting from its temples.
“Look, goblin!” said the sorcerer. “Gaze upon the face of the Lych Lord!”
“He didn’t really have those wings on his head,” explained Prawl, tugging his spectacles off and buffing them on a corner of his cloak. “They’re symbolic.”
“Of course they are,” agreed Carnglaze. “He’d never have been able to get his hat on if they’d been actual wings.”
“They symbolize his great learning, and the way his will could fly forth from Clovenstone to work upon men and creatures far away,” said Prawl.
“Indeed,” said Fentongoose. He popped the trinket back inside his clothes. “Anyway, the point is that the Sable Conclave are your new masters. That’s what I wish to explain to your King Knobbler when you introduce us.”
“Introduce you?”
“Yes. You will lead us back to Blackspike Tower. There you will announce our arrival to King Knobbler, and ask him to grant us safe passage into the Keep. In return we shall make him our chief general when we become the new lords of Clovenstone.”
“But. . .” said Skarper, and then put a paw over his mouth to stop himself blurting out what he been about to blurt: that he was an outcast who had been thrown out of Blackspike – catapulted out of it, in fact – and that if he went back there with these softlings, Knobbler would tear him to pieces as soon as he’d finished tearing them to pieces.
“But what?” asked Fentongoose sternly.
“Nothing!” said Skarper. “I’m a particular favourite of King Knobbler, and I’ll be happy to show you the way to Blackspike and introduce you and all.” He knew that if he told them the truth about himself he’d be no use to them, and if he was no use to them they’d have no reason not to kill him. He would just have to go along with them. Somewhere between here and the Blackspike, he would find a way to escape from them.
All this time, Henwyn of Adherak had been making his way westward, or as nearly westward as he could. He pushed between the trees, hacking through thick undergrowth with his sword, finding his way along old streets and alleyways which weeds had swallowed. And the further he went, the more he wished that he still had Skarper’s company, because the ruins were strange and forbidding, full of odd rustlings and mysterious sudden movements.
To keep his spirits up, he started to sing an old song from home. It was called “The Lay of the Cheesewrights of Adherak”, and it went like this:
A Cheesewright, a Cheesewright, a
Cheesewright am I,
A master of rennet, an artist of whey,
Preserving the Secrets of Cheesewrights of Old;
The Lore of the Cheesecloth,
The Mysteries of Mould,
So raise up your curd-cutters, hold them high please,
And give three lusty cheers for the Wrights of the Cheese!
“Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” he cried, and stopped, because when those merry cheers came back to him, echoing off the dead houses, they did not sound merry at all but empty and eerie and a little ghoulish, and at the same moment he thought he heard other voices, little creaky ones above his head and all about him, sing, “A Cheesewright, a Cheesewright, a Cheesewright is he. . .” before dissolving into scratchy whisperings and thin giggles. It was as if the trees themselves had taken up his song.
“Hello?” called Henwyn, readying his sword and turning around, his eyes on the trees and the green shadows between them. “Who’s there? Show yourself!” Shapes scattered along the big, mossy boughs. Henwyn waved his sword. “I’m not afraid!” he yelled, then added, “Eeek!”
One of the shapes had dropped to the ground in front of him. It stood in a beam of sunlight and he saw it clearly. It was half as tall as him, and it seemed to be made of twigs. It looked a little like the head of a witch’s broom, except that it was gathered in at the middle by a kind of belt or band made of more twigs, from the midst of which two black eyes gleamed. Instead of a broomstick it balanced on two spindly twig legs, and two twiggish arms with little spidery hands emerged from its sides. In one it clutched a willow withy which had been whittled into a sharp green spear.
A goblin? wondered Henwyn. It did not look like goblins did in stories.
Now, all around him, more of the twiggy creatures were plumping to the ground like windfall fruit. Others swarmed along the overhanging boughs and down the trunks of the trees. One balanced on the stone pineapple that topped a nearby fountain and called out in a voice that sounded like the wind rattling dry leaves. “Men not come! Men bad! Bring fires and axes! Trees hold this place now!”
“Well, I’m, ah, just passing through,” Henwyn tried to explain. “I don’t have an axe. I’m on my way to Westerly Gate, perhaps you could. . .”
But the twiglings (as he had decided to call them) were not listening. They pressed in all around, rustling their twig-tops, blinking up at him with eyes like little drops of oil, and a couple of spear points jabbed experimentally at his legs and bottom.
“Ow!” he cried. “I’m warning you; I shall smite you with my sword! The next one who pokes me will get smited. I mean smitten. Or is it ‘smote’? Hewn: I shall hew you!” He swung the sword, and the twiglings drew back with disapproving whispers, but after a moment they pressed in again, and Henwyn found that they were not really solid enough to smite or hew; the blade just brushed through their twigs, and when he lopped off an arm another emerged in its place, picked up the lopped arm and its fallen spear and jabbed him in the knee.
“Ow!” he shouted again. He was starting to get frightened now. The things were all around him; there were a great many of them, and now that he had started using his sword he did not think it would be possible to reason with them. A flung spear missed his face by inches; another snagged in the folds of his cloak. He turned to run, hoping that his greater size and weight would let him shove his way out through the ring of twiglings.
“Man not come here!” the twiglings clicked and chattered. But once man had come there they didn’t mean to let him go, it seemed. Through a crack in the flagstones at Henwyn’s feet a shoot emerged and grew with astonishing speed, reaching up until it was taller than him, swaying like a snake charmer’s snake. He stepped sideways to go past it, but another grew there. He chopped it in half, but after another few seconds he had no more space to swing his sword in, for the thin, strong trunks were sprouting all around him, and stretching out little side branches which entwined with one another, forming a cage of living wood.
The twiglings formed a circle round the cage, creaking and rustling. A few fetched sharp-edged stones and roof tiles from the ruins and began whittling their little willow spears to even keener points. Somewhere in the woods a deep drum began to beat.
Henwyn gulped. A nasty idea came to him, slipping in through the crannies of the sapling-cage. What if he wasn’t meant to be a hero at all? In most stories, when the hero reached the lair of the giant or the dragon he was to slay, he would pass the bones and rusted gear of other, less fortunate warriors who had tried and failed before him. What if Henwyn was just going to be one of those? In a few months from now some proper hero, a prince or a king or some such, might pass this way to rescue Eluned from the giant and barely notice Henwyn’s skeleton whitening amid a spinney of young trees. . .
The drumbeats grew louder. They shook the ground, and shuddered more slates from the sagging roofs. They startled crows and woodcocks and a bleary-eyed owl into the sky. The twiglings heard them, and drew back from Henwyn’s cage with little fearful twitterings, while their bead-bright eyes went up and up to look at something in the trees behind him.
Oh, he thought, what now?
A vast leg stepped over his prison, and set down a foot as big as a small boat among the weeds in front of it. Another foot came down to join it, twiglings scattering out of its way. Old bones creaked as the huge figure stooped to thrust its face against the saplings. A great grey face, shaggy with lichen, bearded and crowned with twiggy hair and a shapeless felt hat the size of a cottage roof. A gust of musty breath enveloped Henwyn, and a bloodshot brown eye as big as a dinner plate considered him through the gaps between the branches.
It’s F . . . F . . . Fraddon! he thought, stammering even in his thoughts with the terror of it.
He hadn’t imagined that a giant would be so . . . well, so big.
“Man come!” the twiglings were all complaining, hissing like woods in a high wind. “This isn’t man place! This is tree place! Man chop and burn trees!”
“Now, now,” said the giant, in a voice so deep and rumbly that it seemed like something you felt in your chest and your stomach rather than heard with your ears. “This is no woodsman. That’s a sword, not an axe. You leave him be now, hear?” And he took hold of the tops of the saplings which had grown up around Henwyn and uprooted them with one huge heave, flinging them into some nearby ruins like a gardener throwing prunings on a rubbish heap.
The twiglings hissed and twittered and scattered away, like a twiggy tide withdrawing quickly into the shadows of the surrounding trees.
Henwyn and the giant stood looking at each other.
“Who are you, boy?” the giant said.
“I’m Henwyn of Adherak,” said Henwyn.
“I’m Fraddon,” said the giant, and pulled off his hat. “What brings you to Clovenstone, Henwyn of Adherak?”
“I came to fight you, and rescue the Princess Eluned.”
They both looked at the sword in Henwyn’s hands. Henwyn was afraid Fraddon might laugh at him, or simply reach out one of those huge hard hands and kill him where he stood. Instead, the giant just nodded mildly, and fiddled with the necklace of old millstones which were strung around his neck on a rope. He was a well-turned-out giant, Henwyn noticed; his huge shirt seemed to have been stitched together out of the sails of ships, and his hide breeches were patched at each knee with gaily striped awnings. His fingernails and toenails were trimmed and clean, and once you got used to his thunderous voice and the tusks which poked up out of the corners of his mouth he seemed quite mild-mannered; not at all what Henwyn had expected. He began to feel a bit embarrassed, and wondered what to do next.
“Tea?” asked the giant.
Henwyn lowered his sword. This really wasn’t how giant-killing was meant to be, he felt.
“There’s cake,” the giant said.
“Ooh,” said Henwyn, and his stomach gurgled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten anything since he arrived at Clovenstone’s southern border that morning, and that all his provisions had been lost in the fight with the troll.
Fraddon seemed to take that as an answer. He put his enormous hat back on, then scooped Henwyn up in one hand, set him in the crook of one huge arm, and strode on through the forest, bending the big trees gently aside, stepping across the ivied ruins, until, out of the treetops ahead, the battlements of Westerly Gate arose. Henwyn saw that a stranded ship was perched on the high tower above the gate, and that some sheets were drying on a washing line strung between its masts.
Princess Eluned was in the little garden she had made, on a south-facing slope sheltered behind Clovenstone’s western wall. She had taken off her shoes and tucked the skirts of her dress into her belt and she was knee-deep in the fish-pond, scooping out duckweed with a rake. The afternoon sun dazzled her, shining in under the brim of the broad straw hat she wore, but she did not mind; it was good to see the sun, and to be reminded that the spring would soon be here. She liked this end of wintertime in the garden: the first shoots just showing, the crocuses shouldering their way up through the grass, and the sense of the earth’s green life waiting, getting ready to burst forth in leaves and buds and blossom.
The old song that Henwyn had heard about her was quite true. One day, when she was sailing south on the king of Lusuenn’s royal yacht to be married to King Colvennor of Choon, the giant Fraddon had come wading out into the sea, snatched up her pretty little ship, and carried it away with her still aboard, back to his lair on the edge of Clovenstone.
But songs sometimes miss out the important details of things, and the harpist who composed “The Lay of Princess Eluned” had not bothered to
mention that the young princess was a headstrong, intelligent sort of girl who had no wish whatsoever to be married to King Colvennor. Colvennor was loud, lazy and stupid; there were no books in his castle, and he believed a queen should do nothing but sit about all day looking soulful amid a gaggle of silly ladies-in-waiting.
Unfortunately, Eluned had no choice.
She was not the king of Lusuenn’s daughter, just his niece, and the only reason she had been given houseroom in his palace all through her girlhood was so that he could marry her off to Colvennor of Choon in exchange for a couple of islands which he fancied. Her own father and mother had both been killed when she was quite small, on a terrible night that she still remembered faintly, in her worst dreams.
They had been king and queen of Porthstrewy, a tiny kingdom on the rockiest and northernmost stretch of the Nibbled Coast, not many miles from the Northerly Gate of Clovenstone and still haunted by mermaids, sea serpents and other watery hangovers from the Lych Lord’s time. It was a good place despite that. The sea serpents and mermaids hardly ever made a nuisance of themselves. The bright-painted houses were stacked up the sides of a steep valley, overlooking thick harbour walls, which cradled a space of calm water where the fishing boats moored.
The castle of Eluned’s father stood on the headland above the town. From her nursery window she had looked out and seen the cliffs and sea stacks of the Nibbled Coast reaching away and away into the blue distance, and it really did look nibbled; like a great stony biscuit that the sea had been taking bites out of since the world was new. She still remembered the sound of the waves; how they sloshed and boomed in the sea caves under the castle and snored on the inaccessible shingle beaches at the foot of the cliffs. She remembered how, when the tide was making, the foam came feathering out of blowholes in the cliff tops with a great Ker-chooof! and the spray drifted across the harbour, filled with rainbows. That was how the town had got its name: Porthstrewy, which meant sneeze harbour in the olden tongue.