The Parodies Collection

by Adam Roberts

  Chapter Five

  QUEER LODGE

  ‘I know this land well,’ declared Gandef. ‘Two days’ march down the side of the Floss and we come to the famous Mill. There we may replenish our supplies – needful, since some of us,’ – he glowered round at the dwarfs – ‘left our baggage behind when Gobblins attacked.’

  ‘And some of us,’ Mori retorted, ‘were too prissy to be carrying any baggage in the first place, you idle great wizard.’

  ‘Well said, Master Dwarf!’ Gandef replied, laughing and clapping him on his back. ‘Well said! I like a fellow who’s big enough to admit his own failings! And I like a chap with the sense not to cheek a wizard – very important that, sharp’s the word. But we needn’t worry. When we come to the famous Mill we’ll replenish.’ He clearly like the sound of this word (Bingo wondered how he could hear his own speech when he was so deaf to other people’s), and repeated it over and again as they walked. ‘Replenish. Replenish. Replenish. Replenish.’

  ‘I may have left the bags behind,’ Mori muttered, ‘but ’twas not I who chopped off Sili’s head by mistake.’ He scowled.

  ‘Replenish. Replenish. Replenish. Replenish,’ said Gandef, in time to his strides.

  And in this fashion the company marched for the rest of the day, the dwarfs complaining of their grumbling bellies and sore feet, the soddit going ‘ouch’ and ‘ow-ow-wah’ intermittently.

  They spent a chilly night camped under a riverside tree; but it was not their fate to get an uninterrupted night of sleep. They had just settled down to rest, the dwarfs wrapping their beards duvet-like about their bodies and Bingo shivering in his corduroy, when wolves sprang upon them. It was as if the darkness took shaggy shape: the night sky transformed into muscle and pelt, the stars jagging into the form of white teeth, the low red moon being swallowed by a lolloping tongue.

  ‘Wolves!’ shrieked one of the dwarfs.

  Bingo smelt the hot, sharp stink of wolf, and heard a growl by his ear. He leapt awake.

  In two minutes everybody had scrambled up the tree, Bingo levering himself up in the midst of a knot of beards and stocky limbs. By the dim starlight Bingo clutched his branch as tightly as a gonk clutches the end of his pencil.1 ‘Gandef!’ he called down. ‘Gandef!’

  But the wizard was still asleep on the ground, as the wolves milled around him. ‘Gandef!’ called Mori. ‘Oh savannah! This is terrible. Somebody wake him up!’

  The wolves did not pounce on the snoring wizard immediately, suspicious perhaps of his lack of movement. ‘Gandef!’ the dwarfs called. ‘Wake up!’

  It was useless.

  The lead wolf, grey and lean, moved his muzzle slowly towards the wizard’s face. His jaws clicked apart. His white fangs glinted in the starlight. ‘Gandef! Gandef!’ shrieked the crowd of dwarfs in the tree above. ‘Wolf!’ they cried.

  The wolf angled his head through ninety degrees, all the better to be able to vice the wizard’s neck between the two rows of his terrible teeth. Bingo leaned as far down from his branch as he dared. ‘Wizard! Beware! Be wakeful! Be watching out for your throat!’

  And then the soddit saw something startling. A wisp of smoke crept up from Gandef’s mouth, though his pipe was cold and in the pocket of his poncho. Further puffs followed. Tentacles of smoke drifted upwards. The wizard yawned in his sleep. And then, quick as a lightning flash, fire jabbed out of his open mouth and caught on the dry fur of the wolf.

  The beast reared back, yelping, but the flames were already wriggling on the top of its head and spreading down across its neck. As the wolf writhed, butting into its fellows, it spread the fire. In an instant the whole pack was whinnying like horses and dancing a macabre dance as their fur caught aflame. Gandef was on his feet, shouting, ‘What? What? What?’ at the top of his voice, waving his arms and staring wild-eyed about him – the better, Bingo assumed, to nurture the panic in the wolf pack. And if this was indeed the wizard’s plan, it was working. The wolves howled, scattering over the hilltops. Some raced as flaming torches. Some, unlit, skeetered away from their fellows’ whimpering, and stretched their long legs in flight. In moments the landscape was empty of wolves.

  The stars twinkled, as if in silent silvery applause.

  ‘Gandef!’ the soddit called down in glee. ‘A brilliant spell! That put paid to them!’

  With remarkable rapidity, Gandef scaled the trunk and positioned himself on a branch next to Bingo.

  ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What?’ Bingo had never seen the wizard’s eyes quite so wide.

  ‘You lured the beast on!’ Bingo enthused. ‘You enticed it to come close, and then you put out a fire spell and burnt it up!’

  ‘Where the bloody hell,’ asked Gandef, ‘did those wolves come from?’

  ‘You put them to flight, Gandef!’ said Bingo.

  ‘They’re dangerous, are wolves,’ said the wizard, blinking and looking about him. ‘Who was on watch duty? Why weren’t we warned?’2

  The dwarfs were reaching down from branches higher up to clap him on the shoulder, laughing at the plight of the wolves. ‘They eat people, do wolves,’ Gandef said.

  It was at this juncture that somebody noticed Wombl was missing. They called his name a few times, in a desultory fashion, and then explored the ground under the tree, but it was clear enough what had happened to him.

  They spent the rest of the night in the tree.

  The following day Gandef led the company along the banks of the river. ‘Don’t be downhearted,’ he announced. ‘Soon we’ll arrive at the famous Mill, and then we’ll feast and replenish.’

  They reached the Mill by noon, but it was nought but a fire-blackened ruin, timbers poking from the ground like shards of coal, the land all about laid waste. The trees had burnt to the ground, leaving only charcoaled twigs and tar-black stumps. Gandef stood, puffing on his pipe, and surveyed the desolation. ‘Gobblins,’ he said at length.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Bingo.

  ‘This is a sorry pass,’ said Gandef.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Bingo.

  ‘Wizard?’ said Mori. ‘What shall we do? Is there none other who can give us shelter in this dangerous, open land? What if the wolves should return? What if a huge army of Gobblins, in their rage, should flock out of the Minty Mountains to track us? What if we should die of exhaustion and hunger and our bones be picked clean by eagles?’

  ‘Your optimism does you credit, Master Dwarf,’ said Gandef. ‘But no matter what you say, I’m afraid this is a sorry pass we find ourselves in. There is no help for it, we must go visit Biorn.’

  ‘Biorn?’ the dwarfs echoed.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Bingo.

  ‘Biorn,’ said Gandef, shaking his head.

  ‘Do you mean Biorn the Bear-man, who is a man by day and a bear by night?’ asked Failin, a quaver in his voice.

  ‘No,’ replied Gandef crisply. ‘I didn’t catch a word of that.’

  ‘What’s it?’ said Bingo. ‘Bear-man?’

  ‘Biorn,’ said Mori, picking a burnt twiglet from the ground and examining it. ‘The legends that surround him are dire. Bestial, is he.’

  ‘There’s nothing for it,’ said Gandef. ‘He’s a moody man, so we’ll have to be on best behaviour. But his house is very neat and tidy. Don’t do anything to enrage him, though, or he’ll like as not rip your arms and legs from your torso and then jam the red soggy ends of the arms into the sockets where the legs should go, and vice versa with the legs in the arm sockets, afterwards making you dance upside down on your leggy-arms for his amusement.’

  Nobody knew what to say to this. Gloom settled on the company.

  They carried on alongside the river, Gandef regaling the company with several anecdotes of Biorn’s reputation as bear-man, all of which involved the words ‘wrenching’, ‘ripping’ and ‘agonising’, and two of which ended with the same phrase: ‘to join the heap of still-quivering flesh’. He seemed to find these stories rather heartening, and laughed several times, or to put it more precis
ely produced on several occasions a sort of hybrid laugh-cough. But the dwarfs became more and more sombre as he went on.

  Soon enough they cut away from the river and made their way through fields of honey-smelling clover tall as a dwarf’s chest. ‘Come!’ called Gandef, marching through the meadows up a gently sloping hill and leaving behind him a wake in the grass like a boat in the water. The sun was hot above them. I’ll need to cast a hearing spell on myself in Biorn’s house,’ Gandef announced to the party. ‘So, please, no sudden noises.’ He summoned his magic spell, and it appeared in his hand in the general area of his right ear.

  Finally, as they crossed the brow of a broad hill, they came across a great log-built hall standing in the midst of the open land. As they came closer, through a perfectly planed wooden gateway into a neatly tended market garden, Bingo could see how precisely and elegantly the timbers of the house had been put together.

  There, in a yard before the house, stood a towering, broad-muscled blond man. He was holding a chicken by its legs and eyeing it. ‘Teasing me!’ he chided the bird. ‘There’s that look in your eye. But I can’t take a chance on a chick like you.’ He shook his head and put the bird back in the pen. ‘It’s something I couldn’t do,’ he added, to nobody in particular. His voice though carefully enunciated, had a strange flattened and pursed accent to it, a manner of speech the like of which Bingo had not before heard.

  ‘See those hands!’ whispered Gandef, with the booming-echoey whisper in which the wizard specialised. ‘How huge and muscled! He could tear a fat book of spells in half with those hands! He’d make short work of you lot, that’s for sure.’

  The owner of the hands looked up at his visitors.

  ‘Biorn,’ called Gandef, with a forced heartiness. ‘Hello!’

  The big man stared impassively at the approaching company. ‘Wizard!’ he boomed. ‘And Gobblins? No – no – dwarfs. Dwarfs are better than Gobblins. You are all welcome.’

  ‘Thank you kindly, Master Biorn,’ said Mori, bowing low. ‘And may I compliment you on the extraordinary and beautiful smoothness of your chin?’

  ‘My chin,’ said Biorn. The expression on his chiselled features did not change at all as he spoke, but he seemed to Bingo more courteous than Gandef’s description had suggested. ‘Yes, yes, I have a smooth chin. My brother has a blond beard, and a great musical talent on the fjord-horn and the stringed linchirping. But my chin is smooth.’

  ‘Biorn!’ said Gandef. ‘It is many moons since last we met. You may indeed have forgotten, it is so long ago. Hmm. But now I visit you again, with a company of dwarfs and a soddit, in the middle of a great journey to the east. We have suffered in our travels, and many of our fellows have – by their own idiot negligence it is true, but nevertheless – got themselves killed. We were hoping for some of you fabled hospitality.’

  ‘For sure,’ Biorn replied. ‘Come inside.’

  They stepped through the wide doorway into a huge timber hall, with planed and polished wood beams, square-cut columns of darker wood, and everywhere a pleasant piney, honey-sweet smell. Many items of attractive wooden furniture were neatly arranged about the place. The dwarfs lined up with Bingo at one end, nodding politely and pointing out the more attractive furnishings to one another. Gandef sat himself in one of Biorn’s chairs. He seemed, to Bingo, a very nervous wizard.

  ‘And do you like my house?’ asked Biorn, with his odd, up-and-down reverse-camber intonation.

  ‘Very nice,’ said the dwarfs, more or less in unison.

  ‘Nice,’ agreed Bingo, ‘is precisely the word.’ It did not seem to him to be the house of an arm-ripping, leg-pulling-off maniac. But then again, the man’s torso was unfeasibly crammed with muscle, and his neck was thicker than his head.

  ‘This chair,’ said Biorn, grasping a chair with his enormous, tanned, blond-downy hand. ‘It is tinted clear lacquered solid beech with Wharg skin green-woven seat.’ He held it so that everybody could see. ‘I have many chairs.’

  ‘So you do,’ said Mori.

  There was a pause.

  The blank expression on Biorn’s face did not change. ‘I call my chairs my four-legged friends,’ he said. Then, after a two-second pause, he laughed a series of precise laughs, Hü hü hü hü.

  Everybody joined in, their eyelids more widely separated than was usually the case when they laughed. ‘Ha! Aha! Yes, very good. Ha-ha. Excellent.’

  Biorn put the chair down.

  ‘And over here,’ he added, stepping to one corner of the interior space, ‘is what I call Biorn Central. I mean by, of course, that, the kitchen. It all happens here: meals, playtime, a bit of wolf-skinning work brought home. Family life revolves around here, and so I have designed it practical and also with durability, but with adult taste into the bargain.’ His blond eyebrows, like strips of yellow felt, sagged a fraction. ‘Although, as I have no family, it is only I who occupy the Biorn Central.’

  ‘No family?’ asked Bingo.

  ‘No. I am Biorn, the bear-man. I am man in day, and bear in night. I have yet to find woman who will bear with me.’ He waited two seconds, and then laughed at his own joke: Hü hü hü hü.

  ‘Excellent,’ everybody said, squeezing grins out of their faces with all the vigour they could manage. ‘Aha! Awfully good. Ha-ha. Ah.’

  ‘I use the word “bear”,’ Biorn said doggedly, ‘in the two-way sense of large shaggy-pelted wood-dwelling animal, and also endure. This is punning. Sometimes a woman comes, sits and eats with me at my Lokka dining table, which is solid oiled beech, with one extension leaf stored underneath the table surface. Maybe we eat, she and I, meat, bread, or drink a honey beer. But then the sun will be sinking, and I will be turning into a great roaring bear, and she will not usually be staying longer than it requires to exit through the main door – Markör antique-style sapstained solid spruce, handles included.’

  Biorn’s face seemed blandly untouched by the poignancy of his own tale.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Bingo in a slightly squeaky voice, ‘you might find a bear-woman …?’

  ‘Bear-woman, for sure,’ said Biorn, nodding. ‘Of course, this is my dream. But I need not only bear-woman, but – since I cannot join my life with hirsute female – a bear-woman who will be contented to depilate. She may use the bees’ wax, or she may use my specially sharpened dining knife, with wooden handle and flower pattern twenty-seven – I do not mind.’ He looked from face to face. ‘I have many bees here,’ he added. ‘I am the Wolf of Bees.’

  ‘Right,’ said Bingo, dwelling on the i.

  ‘It is woman that I am waiting for, for sure,’ said Biorn. ‘Sometimes I feel I would be doing all right, if it wasn’t for the nights.’

  ‘Nights,’ agreed Mori, ‘can be a bugger.’ He laughed nervously.

  Biorn stepped over to the far wall. ‘This shelf,’ he said, ‘in bi-ply laminate with silver brackets, I was putting it up yesterday. I was doing this putting-up the day before you came.’

  ‘It’s,’ said Bingo, ‘very good. Very, uh, shelvy.’ His hunger got the better of his fear. ‘You got any, you know, food?’

  ‘Ya, for sure,’ said Biorn. He stepped over to a freestanding larder unit, and gestured towards it with his open palm.

  Biorn brought out some honey, or as he put it, ‘honey, honey’. He brought out honied loaves. He served a dish of tripe, and the dwarfs tucked in with an appetite that seemed to wane within seconds. ‘Biorn,’ asked Mori. ‘Er – don’t misunderstand me, but – er, this is super tripe, er – but does it have honey in it?’

  ‘For sure,’ said Biorn.

  ‘Gracious,’ said Mori in a low tone.

  At first Bingo was so grateful to have something to eat that he was oblivious to the physical proximity of Biorn, his enormous flesh-shredding muscles, his tediously monotonous voice. But as sunset darkened the skies outside, and Biorn lit a log in his Arås stone-block fireplace, Bingo started to feel the dreary weight of the bear-man’s presence press down upon him again.

&nb
sp; ‘I have known your wizard,’ Biorn was saying, pronouncing the word ‘wheezer’, which Bingo thought rather appropriate, ‘for many years.’ He put a musical kink into ‘years’, such that the ‘y’ started on a low E, the ears slipped up to an A#.

  ‘Have you really?’ replied Mori. ‘How interesting.’ The dwarf, although he wore an unnaturally wide grin on his face, looked rather uncomfortable on his chair, leaning forward stiffly and pressing his legs together tightly like a man desperate to go to the toilet for several simultaneous and pressing reasons. ‘How interesting.’

  ‘Ah yes, he is friend of animal, he is famous Raddledghastly the Ragged, for sure, and all animals – such as I am myself an animal, as I have been saying – know him as friendly.’

  Gandef, smiling manically, leant towards Mori. ‘He thinks I’m Raddledghastly,’ he hissed through set teeth. ‘Play along with it! Don’t let him know the truth! We mustn’t upset him, or he could flip into his bear state. That would be a disaster.’

  He stopped, and turned his head to see Biorn staring at him.

  ‘You are whispering,’ observed Biorn placidly.

  Everybody was silent.

  ‘I,’ said Gandef, looking around him, sweat appearing on his forehead like diamond studs, ‘was,’ he concluded lamely.

  ‘Please to share,’ said Biorn, sing-song.

  ‘I was – ah, telling Mori how, ah, lovely your roof beams are.’

  Biorn looked steadily at Gandef. He tipped his massy blond head backwards through ninety degrees and looked up at the ceiling. Then he levelled his gaze and looked at Gandef again for one long minute. Eventually he said: ‘For sure.’

  ‘I wonder if it would be all right,’ asked Gofur, ‘if I used your privy?’

  ‘Bathroom, ah, yes, for sure,’ said Biorn. ‘Outside in the yard, you will be finding a shed. You will be finding the sophisticated appeal of free-standing design inside, the privy clad in the pale beauty of smooth birch veneer, teamed with sleek cherrywood handles and legs to achieve a stylish simplicity.’

  Gofur dipped his head and positively rushed out, almost tripping over his beard.