by Adam Roberts
Bingo, of course, did not realise any of this.
The spiders were now hurrying back. They did not look happy.
Bingo lifted the Thing® to his mouth a second time.
There is one final quality of the Thing® which it is worth mentioning, and that is the way it embodies the perverse wickedness of its creator’s imagination. A statement usually has several possible opposites. The Thing® tends to choose the one most likely to do mischief, in accord with its creator’s particular and warped perspective of the world.
Had Bingo spoken the sentence, ‘I wish I were free’ through the Thing®, it would have made the opposite true, such that Bingo did not wish to be free, was happy to be a captive and welcomed the fate the spiders had in store. Had he said, ‘I wish I were a captive’, then he would have found nothing changed – the Thing® would have been happy with the world as it found it, a world in which Bingo did not wish he were a captive. But let us assume that Bingo was wise enough to follow Thorri’s advice, and to speak only declarative statements, rather than wishes, through the Thing®. Let us say he had uttered the phrase, ‘We are captives’. Then the Thing® could have chosen to free the dwarfs, the wizard and the soddit. But it could, just as well and more likely, have chosen to interpret ‘we’ as meaning all the captives in all the prisons of the world; or as meaning only Bingo and the spiders; or as meaning anything its perverse magic imagination liked. It is a truth that applies to all magic devices, and applies to the Thing® above all: one must phrase one’s wishes very carefully indeed when one uses such objects.
In the event, Bingo’s imagination dried up at the vital moment. He saw the approaching spiders. He racked his brains to think of a sentence that, reversed, would have meant the spiders were permanently moving away from him, but he could not. And the beasts were almost upon them.
‘Thay what you thee!’ urged Thorri.
Bingo spoke. ‘Spiders,’ he said, ‘are eight-legged creatures.’
All the approaching spiders collapsed. Many fell from the trees to the ground far beneath. Some happened to fall upon tangles of boughs, or net-like webs; but they could not rouse themselves.
It took a while for Bingo to see what had happened. The giant spiders that had threatened them in so dire a fashion were no longer eight-legged creatures. They were now single-legged creatures with eight bodies. Their eight bodies were linked together at the neck and the abdomen but were otherwise distinct, with eight separate stomachs, blood supplies and other internal organs. The creatures looked like monumental clusters of grapes with a single, flexing leg, helplessly stuck in the position in which they fell.
It was in this fashion that the Thing®’s magic worked.
‘Hurrah!’ called the dwarfs. Bingo cheered.
‘Now, boyo,’ urged Mori. ‘Use the device to get us out of these bonds.’
‘Be very careful indeed,’ insisted Thorri. ‘If you allow any loophole at all, any leeway of interpretation, then the Thing® will uthe it to our detriment. Believe me, it ith an extremely dangerouth devithe.’
‘Why don’t I just say,’ Bingo suggested, clutching the Thing® tightly in his fist, ‘“We are tied up”? That might release us.’
‘Or it might rethult in uth being tied down,’ said Thorri. ‘No. Thay thith: “The cordth binding my-thelf, the thix dwarfth and the wizard to my left are thticky.”’
‘The cords,’ repeated Bingo, speaking through the Thing®, binding myself, the six dwarfs and the wizard to my left are sticky.’
The cords flew off them, imbued instantly with a powerful repulsive power. It was so fierce that several of the dwarfs suffered nasty rope burns. And the suspending cords leapt from their branches, dropping the party through the canopy of leaves to the forest floor beneath. Most of them fell on the prone octobodies of fallen spiders and bounced clear. A few of the dwarfs landed on the forest floor, but dwarfs are tough creatures and none of them suffered permanent damage, except Frili who landed awkwardly on his ankle. Gandef went limp as a baby in the fall and was unhurt, if rather annoyed. Bingo landed on a comfortable pile of dead leaves.
The eight-bodied spiders spat thread at the party, and tried to reach them with their single remaining leg, but good luck was on the side of the dwarfs, and they mustered and hurried away from the spiders’ territory in quick order, hauling the complaining Frili after them.
They passed many multi-bodied spiders lying on the ground, and took care to skirt round the creatures. Some of the prone beasts called after them pitiably, speaking in weird, eight-tracked voices, ‘Hhhhhhhhelp! Helpppppppp!’ But the company hurried on.
Finally, when they had left the mass of deformed spiders far behind, they paused and gathered together in a group.
‘Give me the Thing®!’ urged Frili. ‘Give it to me – just for a moment.’
‘And you’ll do what with it?’ asked Bingo.
‘I’ll use it to stop my damn leg hurting, boyo,’ said the dwarf.
But Bingo was starting to become wise to the ways of the Thing®. ‘And how will you do that?’
‘I’ll say “my ankle is hurting”,’ snapped the dwarf. ‘It’s nothing but the truth, see.’
‘And then it’ll stop your ankle hurting,’ said Bingo. ‘Or, maybe, it’ll make every part of you hurt except your ankle.’
Frili grumbled, but said nothing more.
‘I took a chanthe,’ said Thorri, ‘in formulating thuch a long thentence, back there. The betht polithy is to keep it brief and thimple. The more wordth there are for the Thing® to work with, the more mithchief it can wreak.’
‘Well let’s think it through,’ said Mori. ‘Why don’t we, look you, say something like “we are in the forest”. That’s plain and easy, don’t you think? Then the Thing® would make it so that we’re out of the forest.’
‘I think I begin to understand how it works,’ said Bingo, looking at the device. ‘Yes, it might do that, but if it did it would surely put us outside the forest on the wrong side, just to be cussed. Or, if it wanted to, perhaps it would reverse the statement in a different way – it might make it that instead of us being in the forest, the forest was in us.’
‘Pff!’ said Mori. ‘That doesn’t mean anything, bach.’
‘Perhaps,’ Bingo continued, ‘by ripping us to a million bloody fragments and positioning them in an unbroken line all around the forest perimeter.’
Everybody was silent for a while.
‘We should use this Thing®,’ Bingo said, ‘only as a very last resort. A very last resort.’
‘Well thpoken,’ said Thorri.
And, indeed, it was. In fact, although Bingo did not know it, the Thing® had used a great deal of its magical potency up. When the soddit had said, ‘Spiders are eight-legged creatures’, it had made every single spider in the world, large or small, into eight-bodied, single-legged creatures. This had required a great deal of magic, of course, and was to have dire consequences for much of Upper Middle Earth in the years that followed – flies breeding unchecked, locusts ravaging crops, infestations everywhere. But this is in the future, and it is not the business of this tale to relate it.
1 A word pronounced, incidentally, ‘wsct’.
2 I don’t care what you say – people who like spiders are weird. Weird. WEIRD I SAY.
3 Amongst which were Das Web-Kapital, The Attercopmunist Manifesto and Condition of the Eight-legged Working Classes. To quote the famous Karl Marachnoid: ‘All the great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another; the first time as tragedy, the second time as running desperately round and round the sink like a roulette ball in its wheel. Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to wrap it in silk and sting it to keep it from wriggling.’
4 A spider can have four times as many chips on its shoulders as a human being. They’re efficient that way.
5 This is the equivalent of what a cockroach would call ‘a seventh columnist’, and a centipede a ‘hundred-and-first columnist�
��. That humans call such individuals ‘fifth columnists’ has led many in the animal world to argue that we have, deep down, simply not accepted our bipedalism, and secretly we want to crawl around on all fours.
Chapter Seven
BARRELS OUT FOR THE LADS
Fortunately for the party, the Thing® had a number of other features built into it in addition to its power of reversal. Amongst these was a compass, and this told them which direction was due east. They struck off, taking turns to carry the complaining Frili.
‘I’m worried about Gandef,’ Bingo told Mori as they trudged along. ‘He’s not as coherent as he used to be.’
‘Difficult to deny that, laddo,’ said Mori.
The wizard was waving his hands through the air in front of him as he walked. As Bingo watched, it became apparent that the right hand had acquired, in Gandef’s mind, the ability symbolically to represent an eagle, and the left hand a dragon. These two imagined creatures were, it seemed, engaged in an aerial fight. When the ‘eagle’ swooped, Gandef made swooping eagle noises, ‘Wheeh! Ach! Ach! Neeeaaoow!’ When the ‘dragon’ turned and flew, the wizard went, ‘Ggrrrrr!’
‘What’s happened to him?’
‘Like I said in the forest,’ replied the dwarf. ‘He’s getting older.’
‘But he’s useless like this,’ Bingo pointed out. ‘He’s supposed to be coming along to guide and protect us, isn’t he? But he can’t do either of those things in his present state. Do you think he’ll get better?’
‘I think he’ll get,’ said Mori, peering through the trees ahead, ‘different,’ he concluded. ‘Let’s camp here tonight.’
They were all ravenously hungry, but despite an hour’s foraging in the woods for mushrooms or tasty small creatures, they could find nothing to eat. The whole group sat in a circle and debated whether it was safe to use the Thing® to try and conjure up some food. Bingo opposed the whole idea, but his stomach was so empty it was mewing. He felt as though he had spent a month eating nothing but ozone. The dwarfs were insistent that food was a necessity, not a luxury, right now, and that the Thing® was the way to create it, and eventually they began to wear down Bingo’s opposition. ‘We’ll pick the phrase carefully,’ they said, and proposed and rejected several drafts before deciding on, ‘There is not a small pile of food in front of me.’
Steeling himself, Bingo spoke the sentence through the Thing®. Nothing happened. He examined the device closely, wondering if it were broken, or its magic exhausted, until Mori, making what seemed an obeisance at the soddit’s feet, reported that there was indeed a small pile of food on the forest floor. ‘We might serve it on the head of a pin, la,’ he said.
‘I really, really think we shouldn’t use the Thing® any more,’ Bingo announced, tucking it away in one of his waistcoat pockets. The dwarfs immediately started complaining. ‘What about,’ suggested Gofur, ‘trying, “there is not a large pile of food in front of me”?’ But – as Bingo observed – this phrase might very well result in the appearance of a pile of food large enough to crush them all to death. ‘And given the choice of being squashed to death by fried eggs and pineapples and mangetouts on the one hand,’ he declared, ‘and going to sleep hungry on the other, I choose the latter.’
Grumbling, the dwarfs agreed.
The party settled down to sleep.
Bingo was woken by shouting.
‘Hey!’ Mori was calling, scrambling to untangle himself from his own beard (in which, of course, he slept). ‘Hey! Frili! Put that down, boyo!’
Blurry-eyed, it took Bingo a moment to realise what had happened. Frili had not been sleeping. Presumably infuriated by the pain in his ankle, he had pulled himself over the ground to where Bingo lay, and had prised the Thing® from the soddit’s pocket. Now he was sitting a little way away, hunched over the device.
‘Bingo-boy,’ Mori called. ‘Stop him! Double quick!’
Bingo lurched forward, calling out, ‘Frili! No!’ But it was too late. Frili was speaking into the Thing®.
‘My ankle hurts,’ he said, ‘and nothing else.’
Instantly it was true to say that Frili’s ankle no longer hurt. At the same instant it was the case that something else was true. The something else was hideous, ghastly, and – over a period of thirty seconds or so – fatal to the gasping, writhing dwarf.
It was unspeakable.1
The group was silent for many minutes.
‘Nobody,’ said Bingo fiercely, snatching the Thing® from Frili’s cold and deformed hand, ‘is to use this device any more. Do we understand one another? Is it understood?’
They all mumbled their agreement. Except, that is, for Gandef who declared that ‘Seed cake is never the tastiest unless there’s owt to wash it down’. Nobody asked him what he meant by owt.
They buried Frili, digging a shallow dint in the forest floor with their breastplates. By the time they had finished, dawn was seeping through the forest canopy. Nobody felt like sleeping anyway. They gathered themselves and trudged east again.
Within a few hours the trees began to thin. The sound of flowing water became audible. Half an hour after that the group came to a clearing, which is to say a ring of clear ground with a fat oak tree in the middle. Gandef started trotting round and round this tree, laughing, but the remaining dwarfs and Bingo were too weary and hungry to chase him. Past the last singleton trees, the group trudged over open fields, drawing the beardless wizard after them by tugging on his poncho.
Soon they came in view of a large rectangular-faced building standing beside the rushing river. Its large gateway was shut and barred, and a painted sign hung above with the legend ‘Sottish And Brewcastle’, and beneath it in smaller letters, ‘Wheer’s Beer? Near!’
‘A brewery,’ announced Mori.
‘A dwarf,’ Bingo said, ‘stating the bleeding obvious.’
The two of them scowled at one another.
‘Now, now, ladth,’ said Thorri, stepping between them. ‘Let’th not fight. Where there’th beer there’th corn and barley. Where there’th corn and barley we can eat something. Pluth, jug of foaming wouldn’t go down badly either.’
‘Sire,’ said Mori. ‘You speak the truth.’
‘Thertainty I thpreak tho. Thince I’m thaddled with the crown. It’th thevere, but it’th no more than’th ecthpected,’ replied Thorri.
Mori looked at him, with a tired and vaguely puzzled expression, but then shook his head as if to say he couldn’t be bothered to work that out. Instead he stepped to the front door and hammered on it with his fist.
After a while a small portal slid open at man height. ‘Who’s there?’ came a clogged voice. ‘Wha’? Who’s that?’
Mori summoned Failin and On rapidly, and had them lift him on their shoulders. ‘Sir!’ he called. ‘Here.’
The face that peered through the slot in the gate was coloured a kind of sunset purple-red, and its nose was lumpen and coral-like. Little eyes, like lower-case letters ‘o’, flicked from side to side, up and down, and finally registered the dwarf. ‘Oh,’ said the face. ‘Who are you?’
‘Dwarfs,’ said Mori.
‘Are you the glee?’ asked the gatekeeper.
Mori didn’t hesitate. ‘Certainly we are,’ he declared.
‘Hold up, I’ll let you in.’
The portal slid shut, and the noise of somebody with a slight cough shuffling about on the other side of the gate was audible. A noise suggested that a timber beam was being slowly withdrawn from some boltish location. ‘Why did you say we were the glee?’ Bingo hissed as this went on. ‘What’s a glee anyway?’
‘I’ve no idea, boyo,’ said Mori. ‘But it’s getting us inside, isn’t it?’
The gate creaked open about a yard. ‘In you come then,’ sniffed the gatekeeper. He was, now that all of him was visible, a creature who could have with justice declared to the world, had he been so minded, ‘Behold the man that beer made’. His belly was almost perfectly spherical; his legs as thin as creepers; the skin on his hand
s and neck was florid, and the skin of his face was florida.2 He sniffed repeatedly as he spoke, a sort of whhsht noise made on an indrawn breath.
‘Come on, I haven’t whhsht got all day,’ he said. ‘Whhsht.’
The dwarfs and the soddit scurried inside, drawing the wizard after them.
‘Thank you, good sir,’ said Mori.
‘We was beginning to wonder,’ the gatekeeper said, pushing the great door shut behind them, ‘if you lot was, whhsht, coming. Derek!’ he shouted. ‘Derek! The glee’s here.’
‘About time,’ returned a bellowing voice from the darkness.
The dwarfs lined up, turning their broad smiles upwards at the gatekeeper. He was, in turn, looking down, although without a smile. Indeed, his face was bulbous with suspicion.
‘So this is the glee, is it?’ he said. ‘Six dwarfs and some old codger?’
‘I assure you sir,’ said Mori, tugging the hem of the gatekeeper’s shirt, where it depended from the curve of his moon-shaped belly. ‘I assure you that we are indeed the glee of which you speak. Glee is us. We are glee. Oh yes. If it’s glee you want, then we’re the dwarfs to give it you. Glee glee glee.’
The gatekeeper stared down with his disconcertingly umlaut eyes.
‘Glee,’ Mori added. And then, ‘Oh yes.’
‘You’d better, whhsht, come through,’ said the gatekeeper, turning and falling into a loping gait.3 The party trailed along behind him. They passed through the wood-ceilinged entrance room, and into a much larger hall behind. Large copper vats lined both walls, and a yeasty, soapy, gunky, gooey sort of smell was very evident. Another man, of similar stomach proportions and with a similarly purple-red face, was standing on a little stepladder at one of these vats.