The Parodies Collection

by Adam Roberts

‘QUANDOG!’ shouted Gandef. ‘QUANDOGGLI! QUAN-AGH! ACH! A-KOOFKAH-KOOFKAH!’

  It was the worst coughing fit to seize the wizard that Bingo had yet seen.

  Gandef went, ‘UH-KHOO! UH-KHOO! UH-KHOO! UH-KHOO!’ He went, ‘KLAK! KLAK! KLAK!’ He drew enormous amounts of breath into his lungs prior to going ‘HOOOGH! HU-HOOOGH!’ and shaking his hat off as he swung his head back and forth. He went, ‘WHO-WHO! WHO-WHO!’ as if he were asking a question. He went, ‘K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH.’ He went, ‘oooohh god’ in a low and miserable voice and then immediately added, ‘Hurgh! Hurgh! Hurgh! Hurgh! Hurgh!’ with great emphasis.

  When he had finally finished, he slumped slowly to the ground moaning, gasping ‘I’ll be all right in a minute,’ and scrabbling ineffectually in one of the pockets of his poncho for his tobacco.

  ‘Look!’ said Bingo.

  It was impossible to say which of the many noises inadvertently produced by the wizard had been the one to open the door, but there it stood, open as wide as you like. It seemed he had chanced upon the magic word in extremis without even realising it. The dwarfs cheered weakly. It seemed that at last their luck was changing.

  They picked up the whimpering, ash-faced wizard and carried him inside. As they stepped over the threshold, the door started to groan, heaving shut behind them.

  They lit torches, and explored the space within. It was a towering lobby, carved, it seemed, from the very living rock, with numerous stairways going up and down away from the space. ‘Let us camp here,’ said Mori. ‘After a rest we can choose a path and make our way under the mountain.’

  All were in agreement.

  They lit a fire under the portable cauldron and stewed up some salt beef, with some salt potatoes and salt garlic for taste, and salt-preserved beer to wash the meal down. It was belly-filling, thirst-creating stuff. After about forty minutes, Gandef seemed to have recovered sufficiently from his coughing spasms, and helped himself to a hunk of beef (‘I’ll just have a hunk of this,’ as he put it), a chunk of potato (‘… just a chunk …’), and got a little drunk on the beer. For a while he amused himself by repeating ‘hunk-chunk-drunk’ sixteen or seventeen times. Then he grew sombre. ‘Dark in here,’ he observed, several times.

  He lit his pipe, and smoked in silence for a while.

  ‘It’s an amazing place,’ said Bingo to Mori, who was sitting next to him polishing his cleaver.

  ‘Ay,’ said the dwarf laconically.

  ‘And this enormous hallway was carved from the massy living rock by dwarfs?’

  ‘This,’ said Mori, ‘and caverns a hundred times as huge! A thousand yards tall, leagues and leagues long, supported on carefully fashioned pillars of intricate design and towering height, enormous staircases carved from pure marble, great groined spaces the length and breadth of the whole Minty Mountains! You are seeing with your own unworthy eyes the Great Dwarf Halls of Dwarfhall, the Mines of Black Maria, the great achievement of our race!’

  ‘Blimey,’ said Bingo.

  They sat in silence for a while.

  ‘And all this,’ Bingo said, the question occurring to him as he asked it, ‘carved out with – what? Hand axes?’

  ‘Trowels,’ said the dwarf. He seemed to be looking, studiedly, in another direction.

  ‘Trowels? All of it? Gracious. And are there – if you’ll excuse the question – many dwarfs in the world?’

  ‘We don’t,’ said Mori, like to talk of our personal affairs.’

  ‘But, let’s say,’ said Bingo, becoming interested, that there are – I don’t know – ten thousand dwarfs in the world. How much stone can one dwarf clear in a year with a trowel?’

  ‘These be the great mysteries of the dwarf miners,’ mumbled Mori, still looking away.

  ‘Let’s say half a ton. That’s five thousand tons a year, five hundred thousand tons over a century assuming every dwarf in the world worked at the project without break. That would barely empty even this lobby.’

  Mori mumbled something else, of which only maybe’ and ‘difficult to judge’ were audible.

  ‘To carve out halls running the whole length of the mountain range,’ Bingo carried on. ‘That must have been the work of hundreds of thousands – no, of millions of years. How long have dwarfs existed? To say nothing of the enormous number of trowels you must have gone through …’

  ‘All right,’ said Mori hotly, putting his face close to Bingo’s. ‘All right, don’t go bleating and blurting, look you. Have you tried chopping into solid rock with a little bronze trowel? It’s no easy matter. But don’t give the game away, boyo. Some of the others still believe the legends.’

  ‘Legends?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. That dwarfs are great miners, so speaks the legend. There were mines once, or so we believe, yes, certainly, look you. But it’s been a long time since any dwarf worked in one. They were all closed down long ago.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bingo. ‘What do dwarfs work at now?’

  ‘In shops, mostly. Markets. Sometimes in the entertainment industry. Singing dwarfs have a certain appeal to certain bookers. Perhaps you’ve heard of Qyli the Singing Dwarf? No? Lovely singer. Big teeth. But our legends are important to us, do you see. Don’t take them away.’

  ‘Does this,’ said Bingo, with renewed interest, ‘have something to do with our quest? Does the real reason for—’

  ‘Gold,’ said Mori firmly and finally.

  Bingo didn’t think it worth pursuing that line.

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘If you didn’t build these great under-mountain halls, who did?’

  It was hard to say in the ruddy half-light of the dying fire, but it seemed to Bingo and Mori shrugged. ‘Nature,’ he said.

  ‘Nature?’

  ‘They’re hollow. All the mountains. In fact, although you may not realise it, everything’s hollow here, even the trees. The hills have got chambers and rooms inside them – nothing’s solid all the way through.’

  ‘What a bizarre notion,’ said Bingo.

  ‘I know, bach, but the world’s stranger than most people realise.’3

  ‘But how can it be? The mountains hollow?’

  ‘According to one myth of creation,’ said Mori, ‘the world was blown up like a big soap bubble by the Great God at the beginning of things. The smoky breath of life puffed up the thin crust of the Primordial Flatness into the bumps and peaks and curves of the world we see today. ’Course, that’s only a myth.’

  Their conversation was interrupted by a distant thudding noise. Suddenly the party were gathered in the centre of the lobby clutching each other in fear and apprehension, all except Gandef who hadn’t heard the thudding and was caught up in the scrum.

  They prevailed upon the wizard with much shouting and repetition, to place upon himself a hearing spell. Grumbling and complaining Gandef did so. ‘Ah,’ he said, when the spell was successfully achieved. ‘What’s that noise?’

  He stood with his head cocked, listening.

  ‘Drums,’ he said finally.

  ‘But whose?’

  ‘Gobblins, of course,’ said the wizard. ‘Who else?’

  ‘Gobblins?’ said the dwarfs, shrinking back.

  ‘They’re bad, then, are they?’ asked Bingo. ‘Gobblins?’

  ‘Terrible,’ said Gandef. ‘Servants of the Dark Lord who must not be named …’

  ‘You mean the Great and Evil Sharon,’ said Tori.

  ‘The Dark Lord must not be named!’ snapped Gandef. ‘Yes, Gobblins. Terrible, bad. Dear me, they must have taken up residence down here, the evil creatures. Perhaps I should have thought of that before I brought us here. It slipped my mind. But actually, now you come to mention it, there’s no doubt that these mountains are absolutely swarming with Gobblins. Dear me, yes.’

  ‘What are they?’ asked Bingo, who didn’t like the sound of this at all.

  ‘What? Gobblins?’ said Gandef. ‘Long ago the Evil Lord took races of harmless, virtuous turkeys and chicken
s from the fields and yards of Upper Middle Earth, tortured them hideously and transmuted them into a warped, monstrous and easily suggestible species to fill the ranks of the mighty armies of Darkness and to do the Evil One’s bidding. You’ll know one when you see one, my young soddit: you’ll recognise the turkey provenance of their ghastly and monstrous appearance: the wattles of flesh at their neck, the small heads, the alarmed expression in the eyes, the tendency to scurry around in circles shrieking and so on.’

  Gandef puffed at his pipe.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he concluded, ‘it might be better if we retreated out through the door and climbed over the mountains, after all.’

  No sooner had the dwarfs expressed their complete agreement with this proposition, than there was a mighty crack, a bang, and Gobblins swarmed into the hallway.

  Enormous Gobblins! There were four to each dwarf, and two even for Bingo.4 They were over the group before anybody knew what was happening, and legs were shackled, arms pinioned, beards yanked and the great swarm was carrying the prisoners away, clucking and ducking their heads in triumph, in an instant.

  Things looked black for the company; both in the sense of ‘their prospects looked unpromising’ and in the more literal sense that ‘they couldn’t see anything because of the dark’ – since they were carried down unlit corridors, through unlit hallways, and on on. ‘Take ’em to the Gobblin King!’ the Gobblins sang. ‘Take ’em to the hall of the Gobblin King!’ Then they sang their terrible song.

  I feel like dwa-arf tonight!

  Like dwa-arf tonight!

  I feel like dwa-arf tonight!

  Like dwa-arf tonight!

  Then they flapped their hideous arms up and down, and sang another of their songs in their own brutish language which went like this:

  Ga-ARG ga-ARG

  Guggle-guggle-guggle

  Gugg-ARG guggle-guggle

  Guggle-guggle-guggle

  Guggle-guggle-guggle

  It went on and on.

  ‘Gandef,’ hissed Mori. ‘Do something!’

  ‘My head hurts,’ called the wizard. ‘The noise of that explosion in the lobby was amplified by the hearing spell. It’s most annoying. My ears are full of this infernal ringing noise. Hang on – hang on.’

  There was a dazzling, silent flash of blue-white light. For an instant Bingo could see everything in the broad corridor down which they were being carried: the curving upward arches of the tunnel walls; the hideous seething mass of Gobblins carrying their helpless cargo. Then his face smacked against the rock floor, and he rolled to the wall. Gandef’s spell seemed to have snapped the iron chain that held his hands, and he tried dizzily to pick himself up. More than a little dazed by his fall, he saw Gandef standing tall in the middle of the Gobblins, wielding a great shining sword, slicing it back and forth. His face was grimmer and more determined than Bingo had ever seen it before. ‘Take that, you Gobblins!’ he was yelling, and his sword went snicker-snack and snacker-snick. ‘Cleaver and Carver!’ the Gobblins cried in terror, running hither and thither in their confusion. ‘Chopper and Decapitator!’ And, truly, Gandef’s sword was making short work of the long Gobblin necks, cutting off head after head. The newly beheaded Gobblins ran hither and thither with, if anything, more eagerness than the ones with heads. Sili the dwarf, freed from his bonds by Gandef’s spell, rose to his feet amongst a crowd of swarming, panicking Gobblins. The glowing sword, scything backwards and forwards, swept towards the hapless dwarf and in a moment his head, still in its tight-fitting helmet, was bouncing and rolling down the corridor. ‘Sorry!’ Gandef sang, as he continued chopping.

  Then, from behind, came a terrible war cry, and by the light of Gandef’s shining sword Bingo could see an enormous mass of Gobblins filling the corridor, all with hatchets and beak-shaped axe heads, and all charging towards them.

  He got to his feet and ran as fast as his soddit legs could carry him. For long minutes he ran, his chest pumping, until a stray rock tripped him, and he fell down a side-staircase towards a smack on the head and oblivion.

  When he came round it was dark. Very dark. Very dark indeed. Imagine the darkest you can image. No, really, go on. Have you got a good mental picture of darkness in your head now? Right – this was darker than that. That’s how dark it was. Bingo crawled around in the dark, and knocked his head against the wall. He tried to stand up but he found it hard, in the dark, to distinguish up from down and he ended up falling over. After this he crawled on.

  Then something happened. Something of the utmost significance, something that was to change his life for ever – and the lives of everybody in Upper Middle Earth, everything. Nothing was ever the same again afterwards. The most significant thing to happen in Bingo’s life, although he didn’t realise it at the time. But just because he didn’t recognise the significance of the moment, and just because it isn’t, actually, now I come to think of it, actually alluded to at any place in this book – just because of that, I wouldn’t want you to miss this moment. It’s terribly terribly important. Do you see? I can’t tell you why, exactly, not at this stage. Indeed, it may not become apparent even by the end of the book. But take my word for it.

  What happened, terribly important as it was, was this: Bingo stumbled upon a Thing.5 It was a small Thing®, and was lying in the corridor out of the way. It did not seem to Bingo to be a terribly important Thing® either (although, as I have said, he was wrong in this, and it was indeed terribly important). But he put it in his pocket, and continued crawling.6

  Almost immediately he heard a voice. The voice said: ‘Hello.’

  Bingo had crawled, he saw, into a cave. He stood up. The cave was very, very dimly lit – by a sort of phosphorescent lichen that grew on the roof of the cave, although Bingo didn’t know that. In the cave was a pond, and in the middle of the pond was an island, and on the island lived a creature called Sollum. Now, Sollum was a mournful and solitary soul. He lacked the gregarious playfulness that endears people to their fellow creatures. He lacked the ability to pretend interest in stupid or repetitive things. His interests were philosophy, metaphysics, ontology and psychology (especially the schizophrenic condition). Month by month he had been alienated from his original community, until, ultimately, he was driven down deep into the mountain’s depths, to live in a solitary hut by a chilly pond eating raw fish and occasionally killing passers-by – an existence too common to our academics and university lecturers. Hearing somebody coming down his corridor, Sollum had splashed through the water to meet the newcomer.

  ‘Hello,’ said Bingo.

  Sollum sighed. The sigh started as a hiss, and ended with a reflex closure of the soft palate that closed the noise off with a labially approximately sound. From this noise, if you can believe it, had he derived his name: for his sighs were the most notable thing about him.7

  Bingo looked around. He could just make out the smooth surface of the pool and the nearer walls of rock that surrounded it. He peered at Sollum, and noted the knobulous bald head, the large thoughtful eyes, the doleful cast of the mouth.

  ‘How do you do,’ Bingo said, remembering his manners. ‘I seem to have lost my way.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Sollum, imbuing the word with tragic overtones.

  ‘I’m Bingo Grabbings,’ said the soddit. ‘I’m a soddit, you know.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sollum, on a dying fall. He thought to himself that his own origins were not far removed from soddit life, and that he had cousins who had married soddits, and it all brought miserable and depressing memories into his head. It was an unfortunate turn-up. He had been pursuing a train of solipsistic philosophy for seven years, and had been uninterrupted save for the occasional gormless Gobblin getting lost and ending up roasted on Sollum’s Sunday lunch table. Nothing is better suited to the prosecution of a truly solipsistic philosophical line of thought than absolute solitude. And now he had been interrupted.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Bingo pressed.

  ‘Sollum,’ said Sollum.

&nbs
p; ‘Splendid name. I say – can you help me?’

  Sollum sighed. ‘Help you?’ he said eventually.

  ‘Yes. I seem to have lost my way. Banged my head, too.’

  ‘Your head,’ repeated Sollum slowly. Then, as if he were reciting the lines with a certain distaste, he added, ‘Tasty head, a choice feast, a tasty morsel it’d make me.’ Then he sighed again.

  Bingo, not really following this but feeling more than a little uneasy, said, ‘Right,’ in a nervous voice. ‘Can you help me?’

  ‘Well,’ said Sollum unwillingly. ‘Perhaps the question is, whether there is such in the cosmos as an action willed unconditionally, which is to say, freely, or whether all creatures are determined by the doctrine of Necessary Causes.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Bingo, after a pause.

  ‘On the other hand,’ said Sollum, ‘if you were to claim rights of victory – if you were to defeat me in some contest or other, such that my compliance was compelled …’ He trailed off.

  Bingo stood and waited.

  ‘Riddles?’ offered Sollum.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bingo.

  Very well. I’ll riddle me you, and you can riddle you me,’ said Sollum, his immovable face looking simultaneously haughty and sorrowful, as if he were examining Bingo’s pathetic little life from on high and was under-impressed by what he saw.

  ‘Riddles,’ said Bingo. ‘All right. You ask first.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Sollum. He swallowed noisily, making a sound like a rubber ball bouncing on a springy mattress. ‘I shall go first. This, we have agreed. Then you will go. The first to be unable to answer a riddle loses the contest.’

  ‘All right,’ said Bingo, sitting on the floor and crossing his legs.

  So Sollum asked:

  Given that the ontological necessity of existence must be defined as essential to Being itself, how can such grounding of the epistemological function be articulated without assuming an a priori and unwarranted existential premise?

  It was silent in the cave for a long time. Somewhere, far out in the pool, a fish brushed against the underside of the water’s surface, disturbing it for a moment before sinking back into the depths. It made a noise like this: plop.8 Bingo took a deep breath into his lungs and then exhaled slowly.