by Paul Stewart
‘And it won't just be us low-bellies, neither,’ said Lob. ‘No one's going to be spared this time round. Gonna send us all off to fight, so they are. And then what's to become of the harvest? You tell me that.’
Lummel nodded sagely, and the two brothers stood in the field, side by side, passing the flagon back and forth as they surveyed the sprawling patchwork landscape of fields, villages and settlements spread out before them.
The Goblin Nations had come such a long way since its beginnings as a single gyle goblin colony, with tribe after tribe from all the major clans settling down as neighbours. Peaceable symbites had arrived first; as well as the gyle goblins, there were tree goblins, web-foots and gnokgoblins, settling round the dew ponds and in the Ironwood Stands. But later, others had joined them – warrior-like goblins who, despite their traditional root-lessness, had become increasingly attracted to this more stable and reliable way of life.
Tusked and tufted goblins, black-ears and long-hairs, pink-eyed and greys – they had constructed nondescript huts at first, often clustered round a totem-pole carved from the last tree left standing when a patch of forest was cleared. Later, some individual tribes had branched out – both geographically and architecturally – building towers and forts, round-houses and long-houses. Even some groups of flat-heads had seen the advantages of settling down and had taken land for themselves where they'd erected their own distinctive wicker hive-huts.
The two brothers stared ahead in silence at the scene. In the middle distance, the jagged Ironwood Stands where tree-goblins dwelt and long-hairs trained were silhouetted against the evening sky. Due south and east, the flat-heads' and hammerheads' wicker hive towers broke the distant horizon where, even now, dark forbidding clouds were gathering.
Further to the north, beside the mist-covered webfoots' dew ponds, the pinnacles of the gyle goblin colonies glinted in the rays of the sinking sun, while far to their right, in the partially cleared forest areas, they could see smoke spiralling up out of the chimneys of the huts in the new villages – some not yet even blooded – where the latest tribes and family groups to arrive had begun to settle.
Lob's face tightened with anger. ‘Why can't the clan chiefs just leave us in peace? Why must we go to war? Why, Lummel, why?’
Lummel sighed. ‘We're just simple low-bellies,’ he said, slowly shaking his head. ‘The mighty clan chiefs don't concern themselves with the likes of us, Lob.’
‘It's not right,’ said Lob hotly once more. He nodded round at the blue fields, the barley swaying in the rising easterlies. ‘Who's gonna harvest that lot, eh? No one, that's who. It'll just get left to spoil in the fields.’
‘S'already starting to turn,’ said Lummel.
‘‘Xactly,’ said Lob. ‘And what's there gonna be to eat on those long, cold, winter nights then? You tell me that!’ He took the flagon back from his brother, drained it and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘One thing's for certain, those high and mighty clan chiefs won't go hungry.’
‘You're right, brother,’ said Lummel. ‘They'll be feasting in their clan-huts while we do the fighting and dying in this war of theirs.’
‘Clan chiefs!’ said Lob, his voice heavy with contempt. He spat on the ground. ‘We'd be better off without them.’ He picked up his scythe, turned his attention to the waiting barley and began cutting with renewed vigour. ‘What you and I need, brother, are the friends of the harvest…’
‘Lob,’ said Lummel, his voice suddenly hushed and urgent.
‘You heard what was said at that meeting,’ Lob continued, scything furiously. ‘There's a whole load of goblins like us, from every tribe and all walks of life who think just the way we do…’
‘Lob!’
Lob paused and looked up. ‘What?’ he said. ‘It's true, isn't it?’
And then he caught sight of what his brother had already seen – a long line of scrawny web-footed goblins tramping through the fields towards them from the northeast under heavy armed guard. They were dripping wet from head to toe. Clearly, the flat-head guards had interrupted their sacred clam-feeding and dragged them out of the water without even allowing them to return home for a change of clothes. The thin, scaly creatures looked lost and forlorn away from the dew ponds and the giant molluscs they tended that lived in their depths.
Lob gasped. ‘By Earth and Sky,’ he whispered, his voice trembling, ‘if they're picking on harmless symbites now, then no one in the Goblin Nations is safe any more.’
‘Oi, you two!’ one of the flat-head guards bellowed across the blue-barley field. ‘Get over here and join the ranks at once.’
Lob and Lummel looked at one another, their hearts sinking. The moment they had both been dreading had arrived, and much earlier than their worst fears. Where were the friends of the harvest now?
‘Look lively!’ shouted the flat-head. ‘You're in the army now.’
‘But … but the harvest,’ Lob called back. ‘We haven't finished bringing it in…’
‘Forget the harvest!’ the flat-head roared, his face blotchy crimson and contorted with rage. ‘Let it rot! A richer harvest by far awaits us in the Free Glades, and all you have to do to reap it is to follow in the tracks of a glade-eater!’
Flambusia Flodfox was down on her knees, her large head lowered and her great rear raised. She was feeling more sorry for herself than she had ever done before in her life. She'd lost weight on her meagre, tasteless diet of black bread and barley gruel, her chest was bad, her joints were swollen, her hands had been chafed red raw and her corns were playing up. To crown it all, she hadn't seen Amberfuce for days.
To her right stood a metal pail, filled with cold water and overflowing with soapy suds. Time and again, as she shuffled forwards on her inflamed knees, she plunged a big, bristly brush into the water and scrubbed vigorously at the muddy marks on the white marble floor, muttering under her breath as she did so.
‘Oh, if only they'd let me see him,’ she complained, her voice weak and peevish. ‘Why, if Amby knew just how they were treating me…’
Just then she heard a noise. She paused, and pushed a greasy hank of hair back, revealing the puffy, redrimmed eyes behind. From behind her, the heavy clomping of boots came closer.
Muddy boots, most like, she thought miserably. And then I'll have to scrub the whole floor all over again.
Not that Flambusia was about to complain out loud. She'd tried that once – and still had the angry welts across the backs of her legs to prove it. That Foundry Master was a tyrant all right. The footsteps approached and passed her by without stopping.
Casting a sideways glance round, she saw that there were two of them. Hemuel Spume was one, his longcoat hissing as it glided over the floor, the purifiers on his angular hat wreathing his head in aromatic smoke. He ignored her completely. Beside him was his esteemed visitor, in whose honour she, Flambusia, had been ordered to scrub the marble floor spotless. Hemtuft Battleaxe, he was called, a savage-looking long-haired goblin with a long feathered cloak that swept back behind him as he and Hemuel hurried up the stairs beyond – leaving, just as she'd feared, a trail of muddy footprints behind them. A moment later, she heard an upper door slam.
Bang!
Flambusia looked up, an expression of utter misery in her rheumy eyes. ‘Oh Amberfuce, my love,’ she moaned pitifully. ‘What are they doing to you up there?’
Upstairs in the treatment room adjoining his bed-chamber, Amberfuce the Waif, once High Chancellor to the Most High Academe of old Sanctaphrax, was still not absolutely convinced he hadn't died and gone to the great Eternal Glen. The last thing on his mind was his former nurse. In fact he wasn't thinking of anything except his own pleasure. Even when Hemuel Spume knocked on the door and entered, with Hemtuft Battleaxe close on his heels, it was as much as he could do to open his eyes and raise a thin, spidery hand in greeting.
The soak-vat – or ‘cooking-pot', as his attendant gabtrolls called it behind his back – was, to Amberfuce's mind, the most wonderfu
l contraption ever invented. It was round and squat, fashioned from burnished copper and filled with warm liquid. Amberfuce sat inside it on a small stool, only his head protruding from the top.
There was a series of pipes attached to the outer shell of the vat, delivering hot water, silken balms and salves and purified air – which bubbled through the fragrant, oily liquid inside – from the bottom, and removing the cooled overflow from the top. And as if that were not enough, the team of gabtrolls – their tongues slurping constantly over their eyeballs in the steamy room – were fussing about Amberfuce's head, stroking his ears and temples, massaging his cranium and rubbing sweet-smelling unguents into his skin.
Hemuel approached him, the stocky goblin following close on his heels. Amberfuce's eyelids fluttered as he struggled to concentrate on the visitors to his room.
Leave us a while, he told the gabtrolls, speaking directly inside their heads.
The gabtrolls did as they were told, putting down their sponges and loofahs and vials of aromatic oils, and withdrew. Hemuel Spume stepped closer.
‘You're looking so much better, dear friend,’ he said, a smile tugging the corners of his tight mouth as he looked round the steamy room, scented candles with misty haloes burning on every surface. He pulled off his steel-rimmed glasses and wiped the steam from the inside of the glass. ‘I trust the gabtrolls are taking extra-special care of you, as I ordered.’
‘They're wonderful, wonderful,’ Amberfuce gushed. ‘I haven't felt so good in years.’
‘You've earned it,’ said Hemuel. ‘Those blueprints were invaluable.’ He raised his arm, and gestured to his companion. ‘I've just been showing our esteemed visitor here how well our work is progressing,’ he explained.
‘Indeed,’ said Hemtuft, nodding gravely. ‘Most impressive…’
I see, said Amberfuce, his soft voice hissing inside the long-haired goblin's head.
Hemtuft winced. He despised waifs at the best of times, with their soft, weak bodies and insidious thoughts. And this one – pampered and sibilant – was a particularly unpleasant specimen. Then again, as Hemuel Spume had explained, he'd stolen the plans from Vox Verlix which had made everything possible, and the goblin general made a note to himself to keep his contempt and disgust reined in.
‘My army is assembled,’ he told them both. ‘The Goblin Nations are ready to march!’
To march? The waif's voice sounded contemptuous. Don't you mean to follow, General?
For a second time, Hemtuft winced. He would never get used to the way the frail-looking creatures would invade thoughts, and he resented the waif's tone – but he tried to mask his anger as he turned to Hemuel.
‘The axes of the long-hairs are sharpened,’ he said, ‘the swords and scythes of the hammerheads and flat-heads whetted. The lances of the lop-ears are oiled, the quivers of the pink-eyes are full and the clubs of the tusked and underbiters all freshly studded. We are ready!’
Hemuel Spume smiled, a twinkle in his eye. ‘As are my glade-eaters,’ he rasped.
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN •
SUNSET IN THE FREE GLADES
Good luck, Blad,’ said Felix, raising his tankard to the ruddy-faced slaughterer in the muglumpskin jacket who was seated beside him. ‘Here's to your new life in the Silver Pastures!’
‘The Silver Pastures!’ echoed the other ghosts clustered round the huge, circular table in the Bloodoak Tavern.
‘Though why you'd want to spend your days chasing after herds of hammelhorns beats me … Stupid great creatures!’ laughed a mobgnome named Skillet, nudging his wiry gnokgoblin companion. ‘Skut and I are off to the southern fringes to trap fromps.’
‘That's not all you'll trap if you're not careful,’ said Brove, a lugtroll, darkly. ‘That's hammerhead country, so they say. The forests up there are crawling with them.’ He shook his head and tapped his bone breast-plate. ‘Once I take this off, it's the quiet life for me. Got a nice little cave in the northern cliffs picked out, I have, a small plot to grow tripweed, and a hammelhorn cart to take it to market…’
‘Well, now I've heard everything!’ Felix burst out, clapping the lugtroll on the back. ‘Brove Gloamcheek, the toughest troll in all of Screetown, scourge of the Guardians of Night, is about to become a gardener!’
The whole table exploded with laughter and the ghosts raised their tankards once more.
‘To fromp trapping!’
‘To tripweed!’
‘To Brove the gardener!’
The locals sitting round the tavern turned and looked at them with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. Meggutt, Beggutt and Deg toasted the rowdy group before plunging their heads back into their drinking trough. Zett Blackeye smiled a gap-toothed smile and his hefty cloddertrog sidekick, Grome, raised his drinking-pail in salute. Only the old sky pirate in the corner ignored the ghosts and sat instead staring into his goblet of sapwine with pale, unblinking eyes.
Draining his tankard in one huge gulp, Brove turned to Felix. ‘So what about you?’ he said. ‘Once we're disbanded, there'll be no one to listen to your muglump-hunting stories…’
‘Or to lead raids on the Tower of Night …’ chipped in Blad.
‘… Or to swim 'cross the Edgewater in the middle of the night,’ added Skillet.
‘In full bone-armour!’ Skut reminded him.
‘Happy days,’ said Brove, and put his tankard down on the table.
An awkward silence fell over the ghosts as they each remembered their former home; the rubble-strewn, demon-haunted desolation of Screetown, so different from the peaceful tranquillity of the Free Glades. None of them liked to admit it but, despite the dangers and hardships they'd had to endure, they were going to miss their former lives as ghosts – and none more so than their young leader, Felix Lodd.
Felix peered into the depths of his tankard thoughtfully before breaking the silence. And when he did, his voice was raw with emotion. ‘My father wants me to join him in the new Great Library.’ He shrugged. ‘He says it's my duty to the librarians – and to him…’
‘Felix Lodd, a librarian,’ said Skillett, his face cracking into a broad grin. ‘Who'd have thought it?’
The others laughed – though a little uncomfortably. They could sense their leader's inner turmoil and unhappiness.
Felix shrugged again. ‘Still, if it'll make the old bark-worm happy…’
Suddenly, the heavy ironwood door burst open with a loud crash that made the roof timbers of the New Bloodoak Tavern shake, and in strode Deadbolt Vulpoon, followed by a stream of sky pirates.
‘Well, lads, look what old Deadbolt's found, skulking in the woods of the western fringes,’ he said, nodding over his shoulder.
The two sky pirates behind him wrestled with a hulking figure in an iron collar attached to a chain. The acrid smell of rotting meat and dank vegetation was unmistakable. The figure stopped struggling and straightened up, ear and chin rings glinting in the lamplight. Two bloodshot eyes surveyed the ghosts from beneath heavily tattooed brow-ridges. An upper lip curled in disdain, to reveal two rows of sharp, pointed teeth.
Felix rose to his feet. ‘A hammerhead,’ he said with awe.
Though the sky pirates on either side of the goblin were big, strapping individuals, beside the hammer-head they looked decidedly small. Luckily for them all, the goblin's wrists were tied securely behind his back and his legs were hobbled by a short length of stout chain.
‘A warrior hammerhead,’ said Deadbolt proudly, ignoring the murderous look the goblin gave him. ‘Fresh from the Goblin Nations. Armed to the teeth and looking for trouble. We were fromp trapping when we surprised his war band.’
‘What did I tell you?’ said Brove to Skillet. ‘Dangerous thing, fromp trapping.’
Skillet swallowed uneasily.
‘War band?’ said Felix with surprise.
‘That's what it looked like to me,’ said Deadbolt. ‘They weren't carrying their birthing-bundles or their weaving-rods, just weapons – and plenty of them! They w
ere looking for trouble all right.’
The goblin sneered and fell to his haunches, his eyes darting round the tavern.
‘His mates turned and disappeared into the woods as soon as they saw us.’
‘They ran away?' Felix could hardly believe it.
The goblin spat on the floor and leered up at him. ‘Run now, fight soon,’ he said in a low, guttural voice.
‘When?’ said Felix, dropping to his knees and staring into the goblin's face. ‘When will the hammerheads fight?’
‘Soon,’ said the hammerhead, his smile revealing his jagged white teeth once more. ‘Hammerheads fight soon.’
‘That's as much as we could get out of him,’ said Deadbolt with a wave of his arm. ‘He must have been at the woodgrog, because when his mates fled, they left him curled up under a sapwood tree, snoring his head off. Speaking of which, where's Mother Bluegizzard? I'm parched!’
‘Woodgrog!’ said the hammerhead, licking his lips. ‘Teg-Teg want woodgrog!’
‘I think he's had enough!’ said Mother Bluegizzard, flapping over with a heavily-laden tray, her mate, Bikkle, hiding behind her skirts. ‘Now, if you wouldn't mind, please remove your visitor, Captain Vulpoon. He's upsetting my regulars!’
‘Take Teg-Teg here to the Hive Huts,’ said Deadbolt. ‘And see about getting him a bath,’ he added. ‘He smells worse than a halitoad!’
As the sky pirates bundled the great hammerhead out of the tavern and the door slammed shut behind them, everyone in the Bloodoak let out a sigh of relief. Meggutt, Beggutt and Deg resumed their drinking, thirsty after all the excitement. Zett and Grome exchanged glances, while in the corner the lone sky pirate looked back down at the table before him.
‘Earth and Sky, wouldn't fancy meeting someone like him on a dark night,’ said Skillett, draining his tankard and catching Mother Bluegizzard's eye for a top-up.
‘Me neither,’ added Blad.
‘Maybe not,’ said Deadbolt Vulpoon, as he and the remaining sky pirates joined the ghosts at the table, ‘but I have the horrible feeling we're going to. You heard him. “Fight soon”, he said, and I for one believe him.’