by Adam Roberts
‘So?’ said Old Gil.
‘Well, I could be trouble for you. In fact,’ he wheezed, trying to loosen Gil’s fingers with both his hands, and kicking his legs pitifully, ‘in fact – isn’t that the first ray of sunshine, dawn creeping up on you unawares, ha-ha?’
Burt looked over his shoulder. ‘So it is.’
There was a pause.
‘Well,’ said Gandef, his face growing increasingly purple and his voice increasingly gasping, ‘shouldn’t you make a dash for your trollp cave?’
‘Why would we want to do that?’
‘Well – you know. The dawn, the sunshine will, you know. Kill you.’
‘No it won’t,’ said Gerd. ‘Wot a odd notion.’
‘Oh,’ gasped Gandef. He seemed to be casting around for something else to say. ‘You sure?’
‘Quite sure,’ said Gerd.
‘I went on holiday to the Souflands last year,’ said Bill. ‘Lovely sunshine there. Got a nice tan. I say tan, it was more a sort of process of oxidisation.’
‘If you could just—’ Gandef hissed, the purple of his face deepening almost to black. ‘Be so kind as to – just put me down—’
‘Wot’s he saying?’ said Burt. ‘Put him down for a mo. Gil.’
The wizard dropped to the ground. For a while he lay panting, whilst the trollps discussed amongst themselves the best way of adding him to the meal.
‘That’s it,’ said Gandef, pulling himself shakily to his feet. ‘You’ve made me really quite tetchy now.’
The four trollps stopped talking, and looked down at the wizard.
‘As a gentleman,’ Gandef went on, ‘I’m prepared to give you fair warning. Untie my companions here, apologise to them properly, and I’ll let you be on your way. But I warn you, if you persist in this boorish behaviour, I won’t be answerable for the consequences.’
‘Wot consequences?’ said Bill.
‘Terrible consequences,’ said Gandef, shaking his fist, or, possibly, simply holding his fist out such that it manifested his tremulous old-man wobble.
‘Don’t believe yer,’ said Burt. ‘Terrible conscience-quenches for oo? That’s what I wants to know.’
‘Terrible for ’im, I’d say,’ agreed Gerd.
‘Shall I stamp on ’im right away?’ offered Gil.
‘I am a wizard,’ Gandef observed, with a tone in his voice that might have been hurt pride. ‘After all.’
‘And?’
‘I’ll put a spell on you. I’ve got some pretty uncomfortable spells, you know.’
‘Har har har,’ said Burt, speaking the laughter rather than laughing it in order to convey a sense of condescending and sarcastic dismissal.5
‘I do so know some spells!’ said Gandef. ‘Terrible spells, some of them.’
‘Bad, are they?’ said Bill.
‘Oo, yes,’ said Gandef.
‘What’s your worst spell?’ asked Bill.
‘I could,’ said Gandef, with dignity, ‘turn you all to stone. Easily.’
‘But we’re already stone,’ Gerd pointed out. ‘Why should that frighten us?’
It seemed to Bingo that Gerd had a point. ‘Hmm,’ said Gandef, as if considering this.
‘Turn us to stone!’ said Burt. ‘That’s a good ’un!’
‘Go on,’ said Gil, ‘do your worst.’
It wasn’t easy to see in the dimness, for the shadows of the trees threw an obscurity over everything in spite of the growing light of dawn, but to Bingo’s terrified eyes it seemed that the towering figure of the trollp froze for a moment, and then drained away to nothing. The other three turned to their comrade with puzzlement on their faces, and a moment later each of them also shrank away to nothing, losing the substantiality of stone and dribbling away downwards. They vanished completely. For a while the soddit could not believe his eyes.
Gandef settled himself on a bounder not stained with dwarf blood and lit his pipe, puffing meditatively for a while. Then, as if remembering something trivial that had slipped his mind, he got up, shuffled over to Bingo and undid his bindings. The two of them freed the remaining dwarfs, and in five minutes everybody was huddled round the fire, rubbing their stiff limbs and eyeing the still-singeing dog carcasses with hungry, if disgusted, eyes.
‘Gandef?’ Bingo asked in a small voice. ‘You can hear me properly now?’
‘Oh yes,’ the wizard said, sucking on his pipe. ‘You all seemed to be in a sticky situation, so I ratcheted my hearing spell up a notch or two. I don’t like to leave it on all the time,’ he added. ‘It runs my magic strength down.’
‘What did you do,’ Bingo pressed, ‘to the trollps?’
‘Turned them to stone, just as I threatened.’
‘You turned them,’ said Mori, who was kicking his feet through the remnants of the creatures, ‘to sand.’
‘I didn’t say what kind of stone I was going to turn them into,’ said Gandef. ‘It only goes to show, never cheek a wizard. I’d suggest you scatter that sand through the forest in all directions. It’s still alive, you see, and it’d be better for us if we stop it from, well, accumulating again. Then we ought to be off.’
1 The Jingo, upon which Byjingo is located, is a clear, fast-flowing stream that joins the Great River Flem a score of miles south-east of Hobbld-Ahoy!. Legend has it that the stream is named for its resemblance to an alcoholic drink of clear purity and great strength popular amongst the soddits. Flowing from the ice-capped northern mountains, through the fruit orchards of the County of the Hunch-kins (to the north of Soddlesex), the Jingo often carries chunks of pure mountain ice, and bobbing whole lemons in its stream.
2 Golf is a popular Soddlesex game. Its origins are to be found in ancient Soddit religion, a faith which involved worship of a deified potato, and to which attached a ritualised contest to plant next year’s crop by striking the potatoes one by one with a magic staff so that they flew into predug holes. This, it hardly needs adding, was a highly inefficient way of planting potatoes, and the potato crop was always very poor, something the soddits blamed on the anger of their god Spahd rather than their own incompetence.
3 I’d just like to say that the publishers have cut out pages and pages of my best stuff from here … I originally had the group enjoying all sorts of adventures in the Counties of the Little, fending off an attack of the Not Nice Mice, hurrying through the infestation of Piccadilly Flea Circus and the like. My favourite episode, which I begged and begged to keep in, but they didn’t listen to me, was all about the land of the Tellurite Tubbles – those hard, metallic tub-shaped creatures, cyborg beings of terrifying inhumanity with computer screens inlaid in their torsos and weird shaped antenna coming out of their Upper Processing Units. Their ear-piercing cries of ‘Annihilate! Annihilate!’, ‘You! Will Be! Annihilated!’ and ‘Tubble-tora-tora-tora-die-die-aaaiiee!’ have charmed and delighted young children for many years.
4 The publishers have asked me to make it clear that they in no way endorse the cooking and eating of dogs, particularly not bassets, ladies, tramps, dogs that can say sausages’ if you stick a thumb against their soft palate, the dog from the Famous Five or any other household-pet-style animal. Dogs are for Christmas, and for leaving on the side of the A308 in the new year, not for eating. Cows are the ones for eating, not dogs. They’re big enough to look out for themselves, after all, whereas a brown-eyed whimpering Jack Russell is not. Remember the slogan of the ‘Dogs Are People Too’ organisation: ‘Dogs Are People Too!’ (The ‘Cows Are People Too’ organisation slogan is far more equivocal: ‘Cows Are People Too, Though Not Very Bright People, And We Got To Admit It People With Extremely Tasty Flesh When Roasted Or, Better, Grilled, And Served With A Mustard And Dill Sauce, Some Chips, String Beans, A Nice Glass Of Red Wine, Oooh, Go On Then It Won’t Matter If We Have Just The One, There Are Millions Of Them In Big Sheds Up North’).
5 Why does this only work with laughter? If somebody tells you a bad joke and you say ‘ha ha’ you express a withering contempt for the fee
bleness of their sense of humour. But if they throw poor quality pepper in your face and you say ‘sneeze sneeze’ instead of actually sneezing, it doesn’t have the same effect at all.
Chapter Three
A ‘SH’
‘Sh’, said Gandef.
They had been travelling for three days, sorrowfully at first in memory of the four fallen comrades, then wearily, and finally in a crotchety fashion. They did not tell tales, or sing songs. Neither did they sing tales or tell songs. The mountains grew on the horizon, but grew very slowly.
‘Is that the mountain?’ asked Bingo. ‘The one to which our quest is directed?’
‘I wish,’ said Mori dismissively.
‘Phumf,’ said Tori, a sort of nasal equivalent of the same sentiment. ‘Look you,’ he added, with his mouth rather than his nostrils.
They walked on for a while.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Bingo hazarded, ‘for the loss of your – um, comrades. Comrades? Brothers?’
Tori looked grumpy. Bingo felt dopey for having asked.
‘We dwarfs,’ said Mori, ‘do not like to parade our grief, look you. We’re a secretive folk, a tough, stout, thrawn people.’
‘Right,’ said Bingo. ‘I understand. What’s “thrawn” mean?’
‘Thrawn,’ repeated Mori. ‘Well it’s sort of … it’s a word that refers to the dwarfish, to the dwarfish, um. Well. Hmm. Wombl,’ he called. ‘Boyo, what’s “thrawn” mean?’
Wombl was trudging along on the far side of the group. ‘Thrawn,’ he grumbled. ‘Is that, you see, a word for slave?’
‘No,’ interjected Frili. ‘You’re thinking of “thrall”.’
‘Oh, so I am, so I am.’
‘Is it that, kind of, sea creature?’ piped Gofur. ‘Looks a little like an insect. Lives on the ocean floor.’
‘No, no,’ said Mori. ‘It’s a dwarf word, isn’t it? It’s got something to do with dwarfs, see.’
It was at this point that Gandef said, ‘Sh!’
Everybody stopped.
‘Elves!’ said the wizard. ‘See them, in the trees?’
The party stopped at the edge of a great forest, glorious in silver birch, golden-green leaves like sequins, fragrant and expansive. Gandef pointed, and Bingo could just make out thin, sharp, clever-looking faces looking back at them from boughs in the wood.
‘Elves!’ he gasped.
‘Elves,’ grumbled the dwarfs.1
‘Do we have to go through this damn elf-infested forest?’ demanded Mori. ‘Wizard? Can’t we go round?’
‘Well,’ said the wizard, apparently in reply to some completely different question. ‘There are two different races of elf, you see. I’ll tell you. There are the Star Elves – or the “In The Gutter Looking At The Star Elves” as they are more properly known – and there are the Tree Elves, the Herbertbeerbohmtree Elves. I won’t attempt to translate the elvish epithet. Of these two great people, the former likes the plants of the world, particularly the carnations, and especially the purple carnations, which they like to pluck from the places of greatest danger and to set in the front of their clothing to display to all the world. This delight in the dangers of carnation-plucking has led to them being called the Wild Elves – but do not call them so to their face, for the phrase was not meant kindly. The Tree Elves, however, avoid all such danger. Elves are immortal provided no external force kills them, and the Tree Elves take the understandable view that they should do all they can to avoid being killed by some external circumstance. The Wild Elves despise them for this reason, and call them the Coward Elves – but do not use the name yourself, or call them so to their face, for the phrase was not meant kindly. And it is true to this day that the Wild Elves are often truly Wild. I have known a Wild Elf wear bright purple breeches with a lime-green and orange-checked tunic. No Coward Elf would have the courage for such attire. Tweed is about as courageous as they can be.’
Mori smiled warmly at the old wizard. ‘The fact that you can’t comprehend a single word I’m saying,’ he said, clasping the wizard’s old hand in his, ‘encourages me to call you, to your face, the most tedious old codger in all of Upper Middle Earth.’
‘Thank you, my dear dwarf friend,’ said Gandef, his eyes moist with emotion. ‘Thank you indeed.’
‘So,’ said Bingo, who had actually been quite interested by Gandef’s little exposition. ‘So – these elves in the Last Homo House; are they Wild Elves or are they Coward Elves?’
‘I’ve no cladding idea,’ said Mori, utilising a mild dwarfish stone-based expletive.
‘The answer to your question,’ said Gandef boomingly, ‘is no. On the other hand, you’re probably wondering whether these elves of Bluewaterdel are Wild Elves or Coward Elves. It’s a complex matter, but I think I can explain it.’
Mori sighed.
‘Elsqare himself is a Wild Elf. But he took as his partner a Coward Elf, the beautiful Olthfunov, and accordingly groups of both races cohabit here. But their time is not our time. The days pass differently for them, as a fleeting flicker; they do not rise until noon, and they often nap. Alas!’ he cried suddenly, ‘For the tragedy of this forest is that the two races do not cohabit contentedly.’
They were walking between the trees of the beautiful forest now, and an elf sauntered from the shade to stand in the path before them. He was tall and elegant and his garb was of green velvet and silk, and he stood leaning his torso at a slight angle to the vertical, supporting it by placing a hand upon his own hip. His eyes glittered; or one of them did, for in front of it he wore a circle of purest glass.
‘Gandef the wizard,’ he said languidly. ‘And companions. I do declare.’
‘Ah!’ said Gandef. ‘Sunblest, the Elf of the Morning, is it?’
‘I am Elstree the Tree Elf,’ said the elf in a hurt voice. ‘Surprised I am, O wizard, that you did not recognise me. Did we not once share a small lakeside cottage for a fortnight of relaxation and occasional swimming? Nevertheless, I greet you, and shall take you and your companions to Lord Elsqare himself.’
‘Oh, well, I suppose that’s a fair question,’ said Gandef, beaming. ‘I’d say the answer was bread, except in the winter months when it’s probably a meal of chaff.’
Elstree’s eye shield of glass twinkled in the sunlight. His head leaned five degrees to the left. The wind moved in the trees behind him.
There was silence for the space of several minutes.
Eventually, Elstree beckoned to them all to follow him through the woodland.
Lord Elsqare himself was seated in a throne made of boughs and carved branches, high in a tree. He was an elf of indeterminate age, dressed in purple and blue, and he wore the carnation and the polished crystal eyepiece of the Wild Elves. Mori whispered to Bingo that all the elves lived in trees, odd though that seemed to the rest of the world. And, truly, Elsqare was surrounded by elves in amongst the leaves, all of them peering haughtily down at the travellers.
‘Gandef the wizard,’ said Elsqare. ‘How good it is to see you again. Fares your quest well?’
‘About half past four, I’d say,’ returned Gandef. ‘Hard to tell precisely,’ he added, ‘without a watch.’
‘And you are Thorri, King of the Dwarfs, or I am mistaken,’ continued Elsqare, unfazed.
Thorri bowed so low his beard inched along the ground before him like a caterpillar. ‘I am honoured to be in thith thelebrated palath of elvithneth,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry?’ asked Elsqare. ‘Didn’t quite catch …’
‘Our noble King,’ struck in Mori, ‘declares himself at your service, Lord Elsqare.’
‘Thorri,’ said Thorri, in a miniature voice, casting his face to the ground.
‘We have suffered on our travels,’ Mori continued. ‘We have lost some of our company – brothers, comrades, glorious in death.’
‘Really?’ said Elsqare, perking up. ‘How so?’
‘Trollps,’ said Mori severely. ‘They took four of our comrades before we were able to destro
y them. Qwalin, Orni, Ston and Pilfur, may their names be writ in glory.’
‘Dear me,’ said Elsqare. ‘To lose one dwarf might be regarded a misfortune. To lose four looks like carelessness.’
The elves twittered their twittery laughter.
‘What did you say, look you?’ said Mori, his face reddening.
‘To lose one dwarf,’ Elsqare repeated, ‘might be regarded a misfortune. To lose four looks like carelessness. It’s a witticism.’
‘A joke?’
‘A witticism.’
‘You mean,’ said Mori, ‘that you regard the death of four individuals as the occasion for humour? In what way is it careless to have you friends killed? Where’s the carelessness in that? Surely that’s tragic, not funny.’
Elsqare looked marginally perturbed. ‘The good end happily,’ he said, ‘the bad unhappily, that is what dwarfishness means.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Mori. ‘Have you ever had four friends die on you all at once? How would you like it if somebody accused you of carelessness, when—’
‘I think,’ said Elstree the Tree Elf stepping forward, ‘that there has been a misunderstanding. Let us not, elf and dwarf, become enemies.’
‘Indeed not,’ said Elsqare languidly. ‘After all a man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.’
A few elves in the tree behind him tittered and chattered at this.
‘The choice of your enemies?’ said Bingo. ‘How do you mean? People don’t choose their enemies. That’s not how it goes. Your statement doesn’t really mean anything.’
Nobody spoke.
Gandef broke the silence with a single percussive cough. But then he too fell silent.
Bingo became conscious of the fact that everybody was looking at him. He cast around for a topic of noncontentious conversation. ‘Must be hard living in a tree,’ he said eventually. ‘Couldn’t you dig a nice, modern little ditch and live under the soil as God intended? If it’s good enough for dead people, surely its good enough for you? There’s quite a lot of soil over there, for instance.’