by Adam Roberts
‘There’s been a misunderstanding,’ Bingo gabbled at them. ‘I’m sorry that you’ve been inconvenienced, but you’ve got the wrong hole. Nobody here called Grabbings. No wizard, there’s no wizard here. You’ll have to go away.’
From behind him, in the sitting room, came a series of axe-like chopping noises such as can only be produced by a man who has scoured the walls of his lungs red and smooth over many years of dedicated smoke inhalation.
‘That’s the boyo,’ said the first dwarf, stepping past Bingo. ‘Failin,’ he said. ‘I’m a dwarf, la, boy, see, yow, bach, dew,’ he added. ‘This is my cousin Qwalin.’ The second dwarf bowed. ‘And behind him are Sili and Frili, also cousins, see?’
‘I haven’t the victuals—’ Bingo began, in desperation. But the four dwarfs were already in the sitting room, singing tunelessly but loudly, one of them bouncing lustily on the wizard’s chest to wake the fellow up. Bingo turned about, cursed the gnawing pain in his left toes, and turned again as four more dwarves5 stepped boldly into his house.
‘Mori,’ said the first dwarf, who was holding a clipboard. He was a strong-nosed dwarf in green, with a waterfall of beard and eyebrows thick as caterpillars. Or as actual pillars. ‘Allow me to introduce my cousins, Tori, Orni and On. Oh my,’ he added, stepping towards Bingo. ‘Haven’t you the smoothest of chins!’
The four dwarfs kicked their beards out from under their feet and clustered around Bingo, treading on his toes as they did so. ‘Oo,’ they said, running callused fingers over his chin. ‘Oo.’
‘Get off,’ Bingo said, flapping his hands before his face like little wings.
‘You’ll have to excuse us, see,’ said Mori, leaning his clipboard against the wall and taking off his dwarf hat. ‘It’s a rare sight for us, a bare chin – a sight of rare beauty. Wouldn’t I love a bare chin!’
‘Wouldn’t I!’ said Orni.
‘You’ll say, shave,’ said Mori, clapping Bingo in a manly clasp, his arm around the back, his powerful hand crushing Bingo’s shoulder. ‘You will, you’ll tell me, shave.’
‘I won’t,’ said Bingo.
‘Can’t,’ said Mori, as if in correction. ‘Psoriasis. Terrible. Allergy to bauxite. Couldn’t shave if my life depended on it. Stuck with this ap-surd hippy beard.6 I hate it.’
‘We all hate it,’ said Orni. ‘All hate our beards.’
‘All of us in the same boat. Smells, la,’ said Mori confidentially. ‘Food gets stuck in it. I found a chicken bone in mine yesterday. Anyway, anyhow, anyhew.’ He released Bingo. ‘Is the King boy here yet?’
‘King boy?’ said Bingo.
‘Thorri, our King, heavens bless him. No? There you go. I can hear merry being made, though, look you, begorrah, la, bach, boyo, see, dew, bach, look you, so we’ll go on through.’
Bingo stumbled to the larder, and brought out a selection of the food he possessed. The dwarfs devoured it all in quarter of an hour. In dismay he tried telling the group that he had no more, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer, explored his hobbld hole thoroughly and completely ransacked it. They rolled out his one and only barrel of Soddit ale, and tapped and drank it. They sang all the while, whilst Gandef sat in the corner tapping his foot not in time to the music and smoking. They sang:
When you walk with a dwarf keep your head down low
So as not to draw attention to his height,
For a dwarf’s hold on his temper is only so-so
And a dwarf has no fear of a fight.
Walk on, walk on, crouching all the time
Though your hips are racked with pain –
Walk on, walk on, with a bend in your spine
Or you’ll ne-ver walk again,
You’ll NE-ver walk again.
After which they sang, or rather they howled:
AND! WE! WERE! SI-I-INGING!
SONGS AND ARIAS –
DWARFS IN THE LARDER –
OH ME, OH MY.
After which they insisted that Bingo join in with the quaffing, despite his protestations that he was normally a very moderate drinker. They drank toasts to his smooth chin, and his smooth upper lip, and they sang more songs: raucous songs, caucus songs, ribald songs, dribbled songs, hymns, whims, theramins, chim-chim-cherees, songs that were hard, songs by bards, songs that left you scarred (emotionally speaking), drinking anthems, looting anthems, puking anthems, footy anthems, beauty-pageant anthems, and ‘Bess You Is My Woman Now’. They sang a-capella, a-patella7 and any umber-ella-any-umber-ella. At some point in the proceedings the remaining dwarfs came in, Ston, Pilfur, Gofur, and Wombl; and finally there entered a diminutive little creature, small even for a dwarf and barely an inch taller than Bingo, who introduced himself as ‘Thorri, King you know’, but who seemed to be accorded remarkably little respect from the other dwarfs. But by this stage Bingo was well drunk, tanked-up, reeling and rocking, and soon enough he was falling over and getting up with a silly expression on his face. He was as unsteady on his feet as a newborn colt that had been force fed half a bottle of whisky. Then Gandef began singing a song, and got halfway through the first stanza before he started coughing with shocking vehemence, making a series of noises like a roof-load of snow collapsing twenty feet to the ground. Forty-five seconds of this and the wizard was too weak to stand, and collapsed back on to the sofa gasping and fumbling with his tobacco pouch.
‘My new friends,’ said Bingo, with tears in his eye and alcohol compounds in his bloodstream. ‘My new friends! How sweet it is to have friends – to make new friends!’
‘Strictly a business arrangement, Mr Grabbings,’ said Mori. ‘We have a quest to undertake, and we need your help, that’s all.’
‘You need my help!’ repeated Bingo joyously, his cheeks wet. ‘My friends!’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Mori, pushing the over-affectionate soddit away. ‘Let’s not lose proportion, look you, bach, la. There’s a dragon, see, and he’s got, eh, well shall we say … treasure. Let’s call it treasure.’
‘Gold?’ asked Bingo, his eyes circular.
‘What’s that?’ said Qwalin, ‘Yeah – yeah, that’s it. Gold. That’s a good one.’
‘Gold,’ said Mori, looking significantly at his fellow dwarfs. ‘All right? We all clear? Mr Grabbings here is to help us nick us some gold. Yes, that’s it, we’re on our way to steal the dragon’s gold. See?’
The dwarfs made various noises of dawning comprehension.
‘So,’ said Mori, turning to Bingo, ‘we figured – and this is only a rough plan, see – that we’d go over there and distract the dragon boyo with some close-harmony baritone singing whilst you steal the, eh, gold, you being a thieving little tinker, or so we’ve been led to believe – no offence.’
Bingo’s heart was flush with new comradeship and love. He sobbed like a child, trying to hug Mori and unburden his heart, to say how he’d always felt, somehow, distanced from the other soddits, as if there was something that held him back from them, and held them back from him – it wasn’t easy to say what exactly, but on occasion he’d stand at his door with a glass of dry hobbld martini in his hand and watch the evening traffic making its way up Hobbld-Ahoy! high-street and over the bridge into the thickening gloom and feel, somehow, a great emptiness inside himself, a sense of purposelessness of it all – the way the narrow respectability of his world felt sometimes like a suffocating velvet cloak – and all along the thing he’d been missing was right here, this sense of purpose, belonging to this band of brothers, united in a common aim. Sadly the ale, which provoked this chain of thought in Bingo’s mind, also prevented the articulate expression of it, and the best he could manage was a ‘such-a-lovely-buncho-blokes-lovely-feller-love-you’ and a further series of throaty syllables like the noise a dog makes just before it throws up.
‘Now,’ Mori continued in a louder voice, backing against the wall, ‘are you OK with our plan, boyo, look you? Remember, the only problem to this quest thing is that the – eh – the treasure is in the possession of a dragon. Righ
t?’
‘Dragons!’ said Bingo. ‘They don’t frighten me. Insectivores, aren’t they?’
‘No,’ said Mori. ‘I wouldn’t describe them as insectivores.’
‘Well,’ said Bingo, waving his hand dismissively and wobbling on his feet. ‘Does it matter?’ He’d long since reached the level of alcoholic uncoordination where it becomes difficult to place the right thumb upon the end of the left little finger, and indeed had gone somewhat beyond it, to the state where it is difficult to get one’s upper and lower lips to connect.
‘Smug the Dragon,’ said Gandef, erupting apparently from sleep. ‘A fearsome, terrible sight, he is, the mighty wyrm in his desolation.’
‘Terrible, terrible,’ said the dwarfs in unison.
The ale swirled in Bingo heart. ‘I’m not afeared!’ he squealed, trying to clamber on the table.
‘Smug the Dragon!’ Gandef bellowed, rather carried away with himself. ‘Terrible Smug! Marvellous great dragon! Bah!’ He coughed once, twice, and then thrummed a long, enduring note on the taut surface of the mass of phlegm held in his chest.
The dwarfs brought out their own pipes, and soon the smoke was so thick in Bingo’s sod hole that you couldn’t see the smokers for the smoke.8 Moreover, the smoke that came out of the dwarfish pipes had a strange savour to it, a slightly herbal, fruity, pleasant, drowsy, hey-man edge to it, a whiff of ‘Rings, eh? They’re, like, all hard round the outside and all, like, nothing at all in the middle, isn’t that weird? The way they can be both really really hard on the edge and really soft in the middle, d’you ever think of that?’ and a slight odour of ‘Hey I’m really really hungry, you got any, like, scones or something?’ The excitement and passion drained out of Bingo wholly, and he lay on the floor with his feet in the grate, humming along as the dwarfs sang another song.
Smug the Magic Dragon
Are we afraid of he?
In his Magic Dragon-grotto-place,
No-o-ot like-a-lee –
We’ll travel over earth,
And we travel over sea,
To beard that dragon in his den, look you now
Most assuredly.
Oh yes we will, I tell you now,
You better believe we’ll do it
We will, oh yes we will, oh
Yes we will, we’re going to it,
I’m telling you we will
It’s practically good as done,
We’re going that way right now,
That dragon’s, well, let’s just say, I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.
Gandef was shouting something at this point and had to be calmed. Then, under the illusion that he was whispering discreetly into Mori’s ear, he boomed, ‘I was thinking, why don’t we tell the young soddit that we’re off after some gold? Eh? Wouldn’t that be sly?’ Mori’s voice, much lower, came murmuring indistinctly through the fug. ‘You see,’ Gandef bellowed, louder still, ‘if the soddit thinks we’re after some gold then he won’t ask after the real reason for our quest – do you see?’ Again, Mori’s voice, now more urgent but still indistinct, muttered in the dark. Bingo, from where he was lying, could just about see the pyramidical shape of the wizard’s hat, and the hunched silhouette of Mori trying to communicate with the old man. ‘I can’t hear you if you mutter like that,’ bellowed Gandef petulantly. ‘All I’m saying is that this would be a good cover story as far as the soddit is concerned. That way we don’t have to tell him what we’re really going for yrkh, yrkh, mmbbmmmdd.’
It seemed to Bingo’s eyes, in the smoke-obscured candlelight, as if Gandef’s hat had been dragged sharply down to cover his whole face. But the young soddit’s eyelids were slipping down in irresistible sleep, and he couldn’t focus any more.
1 A brave little folk afflicted with the most repulsive and contagious foot diseases. Foot diseases are, it must be said, something of a common theme for the Counties of the Little.
2 Which is to say, the noises somebody makes not when they are in actual pain, but when they wish to communicate to the world at large that they are experiencing a sensation of slight discomfort. Nobody suffering actual pain – let us say, a broken leg, or having their shoulder pierced all the way through with a Wharg-rider’s arrow – would ever say ‘ouch’. If somebody in such a situation were to say ‘ouch’ we would think not that they were in pain, but that they were taking the piss.
3 This is true, actually. The best theological thinking today suggests that when you die and go up to heaven you’ll find God surrounded not by people in white with wings, but instead by a large crowd of crotchety, beardy men in big hats with nicotine-stained fingers and swords. As the Philosopher once said: The world is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine, and more imaginative than we can imagine too, which is something of a contradiction, don’t you think, where was I? Hold on, bear with me for a minute, angels, old men, ah yes, ahm, ahem, stranger than we imagine, stranger than we can imagine, stranger than we will imagine, stranger than we shall imagine, stranger than we can’t imagine, stranger than we shouldn’t imagine, stranger than we wouldn’t imagine if we could, stranger than you can imagine but not me, and so on. Anyway, I think we can both agree I’ve made my point.
4 This, by the way, is the correct plural form of ‘dwarf’. Look it up if you don’t believe me – really.
5 Sorry, that one must have slipped through the proofs.
6 Which is to say, a beard that reaches down to one’s hips. Why? What else did you think this might mean?
7 The sort of song you sing when somebody has just kicked you in the kneecap.
8 I’ve got a PhD you know, from Cambridge University. I just thought you might be interested in that fact. I’m not some bloke making this up from thin air, I’m a proper scholar, I studied Anglo Saxon and everything.
Chapter Two
ROAST MUTT
Bingo was woken by the smell of Gandef’s pipe, the smoke of which caused a stinging sensation in the mucus membranes of his sinus and gave him a mixed impression of singed hair, burning bark and smoking rubber. The young soddit, coughing, pulled himself into a sitting position to find Gandef reclining lazily on the sofa.
‘Good morning, young master Grabbings,’ the wizard said genially, and sucked at the stem of his pipe so hard that his eyeballs shrank back in his skull.
‘What time is it?’ Bingo squeaked. But as he asked the question his eye lighted on the half-hunter squatting on the mantelpiece. The hour lacked some minutes of nine. He rubbed his eyes, and some minutes came into more precise focus as fifty minutes. ‘Ten past eight?’ he gasped. ‘Ten past eight in the morning?’ (Soddits, as I’m sure you know, like to sleep until noon – a habit so entrenched in their culture that the idea of a clockface having the dual function of ‘a.m.’ and ‘p.m.’ is for most of them only a notional and theoretical hypothesis.)
Gandef nodded intelligently. ‘Bright and early,’ he said. ‘Ah! The first pipe of the day. The first is always the sweetest.’ He took another drag.
‘Dwarfs!’ said Bingo, getting unsteadily to his feet. ‘Drink! Potweed! Hallucinations!’ His head felt like it had been turned inside out, had tent pegs hammered into it, and then folded back in on itself again.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Gandef indulgently. ‘It is late, I know. But Thorri didn’t have it in his heart to wake you. You looked so peaceful. But you’d better get a move on. Did you read the letter?’
‘What letter?’
‘Good. I’m glad that at least you read the letter.’
Bingo found the letter after a ten-minute search through the desolation and chaos that had once been his front room. Written upon the finest dwarfish parchment, a form of scraped and treated stone, it read as follows:
Honourable sir,
On the offchance that you have forgotten our arrangement, we beg to remind you that should you fail to present yourself at the Putting Dragon Inn at Byjingo by nine a.m. we would be obliged to consider you an enemy of all dwarfkind and would thereaf
ter hunt you down and slay you like the vermin you are. At nine sharp, mind for we depart on our great quest eastward to confront the evil and condescending dragon Smug in his lair.
Yours dwarfully,
Thorri (King) and Company.
P.S. Mori begs to remind you that the purpose of our quest is gold, honestly, gold, lots of gold, and nothing else, certainly not anything non-gold.
‘Hunt me down and slay me like the vermin I am?’ said Bingo, a catch in his voice.
‘Lovely illumination on the “H” don’t you think?’ said Gandef, looking over the soddit’s shoulder. ‘That’s a little rugby ball flying through the top portion, and Barijon standing to the left of it. A great dwarfish hero, he.’
‘Will they really kill me if I don’t turn up?’
‘Oh no, of course not,’ said Gandef, shaking his head forcefully and chuckling a little. ‘No, no, nothing like that. On the other hand,’ he added, tamping some more tobacco into his pipe bowl, ‘they certainly will kill you if you don’t turn up. It’s a sort of dwarfish tradition, you see. Punctuality. That,’ he added, mysteriously, ‘and sheep.’
In a blind panic Bingo fled from his front room, stepping over the wreckage of his still-knocking door, and scurried along the main street of Hobbld-Ahoy! as fast as his sore feet would permit in the general direction of Byjingo.1 He arrived at the Putting Dragon Inn with one minute to spare, panting and clutching at his agonised feet. The dwarfs were waiting for him, standing underneath the painted inn sign (which represented a trouser-clad dragon attempting to hole a tricky twenty-foot putt whilst a salamander stood in the background).2
‘Just in time, lad, la, boyo,’ said Mori, as the Byjingo town clock chimed the hour, or rather thudded once, which is what it did every hour of the day, ever since a bored soddit youth had stolen the bell to wear as a hat. And with that the dwarfs shouldered their packs and started away on their great quest, Bingo limping complainingly along behind them.