by Adam Roberts
‘What’s?’ asked the brewer, too drunk to complete the question.
‘Issa Thing®, iss.’
‘Like,’ said the brewer, like the Thing® that the Evil Sharon made?’
‘Precisely,’ said Bingo, after three or four attempts.
The brewer looked at it.
‘What’s it do?’ he said.
‘Lemme, lemme show you,’ said Bingo, and raised the Thing® to his lips. And there his brain stalled. What had his plan been? It had been a good plan. It had been the best plan. He couldn’t remember what the plan was.
‘What you doing?’ asked the brewer.
‘I don’t remember,’ said Bingo, the words drifting through the Thing®.
And he did remember.
‘I am drunk,’ he said, slurring the words a little. And, instantly, he was sober.
For a moment, now that he was sober enough to know what he had done, he held his breath. The risk he had taken! Had the Thing® woven some ghastly sting into his sobriety? But moments passed, and everything seemed normal – except that he was as sober as a stone7. He was not to realise it until many weeks later, but his physiology had indeed been changed by Sharon’s malign magic. He could never be drunk, no matter how much he imbibed. His wished-for sobriety was absolute. He could still have hangovers if he were to over-indulge alcoholically, but he would never again experience inebriation. But this grim revelation was in the future.
He looked around at the slouching or snoring figures. The dwarfs were starting to drift off into a drunken sleep (and dwarfs can take a lot of drink). The brewers were mostly snoring, including the one Bingo had just been talking to. Al the Ale was lying on his back like a model of a mountain.
Bingo was acutely conscious of a sense of terror. In face he had been feeling that all the way through, but the beer had obscured the sensation. Now that he was more sober than he had ever been, he felt a desperate urgency to get out of this place. They had tried to drown him! Because they hadn’t thought his jokes were very funny! And they were classic Soddlesex jokes, too.
He hurried over to Mori, who was asleep in the arms of Thorri, their beards trembling like seaweed in a gentle current as they snored. ‘Mori!’ he hissed in the dwarf’s ear. ‘Mori! We’ve got to get out of here! Mori!’
Nothing.
It was the same with the other dwarfs. Gandef too seemed dead drunk. Bingo scurried from supine body to supine body, his anxiety eating at him. He had never felt so acutely aware of the world around him, so anxiously prescient. Any one of these brewers – hardened by a lifetime of drinking – could wake up at any time. Grumpy with hangovers, could they expect mercy from them? Of course not, of course not. He couldn’t afford to leave it until the dwarfs woke naturally from their beer slumber. And he couldn’t think of a way to wake them sooner.
He took out the Thing® and examined it. But, in his new sober-anxious frame of mind, he could not summon the courage to use it. What if it backfired? What if awful consequences followed?
There was only one thing for it. Bingo examined the stack of barrels closest to the trapdoor. Wooden rails were nailed against the floor planks to guide these barrels to the hole, once a foot-tall wooden wedge was removed from the base of the stack. Thinking fast, and fidgeting as he did so, Bingo tied the beard of Failin to Gandef’s ankle. He tied On’s beard to Failin’s ankle, Gofur’s to On’s, Thorri’s to Gofur, and finally – lugging the bodies of the sleeping dwarfs about, he tied Mori’s beard to Thorri’s ankle. Then he hauled open the trapdoor. The water whooshed past beneath. They had been drinking all afternoon and all night, and now the pewter-coloured light of dawn tinkled chillily on the fast-flowing water.
‘Sorry about this, guys,’ he said, hauling the dwarfs and the wizard into a rough pile beside the lip of the trapdoor hole. He sat himself on the top of the snoring, grumbling, breathing mass of dwarf bodies, reached forward with his foot and kicked aside the wedge.
He shut his eyes, but he could hear the tremble of the tumbling barrels as a sort of thunder before the first struck the pile of bodies. There was a sense of jarring movement, a weightless split-second, and then the water was all over him with a great splash. He barely had time to swear before he was tugged under by the flow. Bubbles swarmed around his open eyes, and then he was bobbing on the surface and moving swiftly beneath a grey-glass sky.
1 Which is why I’m not speaking of it. You’d probably worked that out for yourself, hadn’t you?
2 Sorry. This should be ‘florider’, obviously; the sense being ‘more florid’ rather than, say, ‘resembling a man’s member’. But these errors will creep in.
3 You won’t believe this. In the first edition the printers misprinted this as ‘loading gate’, which gave the sentence an, I feel, unnecessarily slapstick feel. Printers? Misprinters, more like. (Not you Gerald ‘the Type’ Weedon, you’re all right. It’s all the rest of them.)
4 There are, of course, three stages. The first is when you finish a half-pint of lager with your lunch by smacking your lips and saying, smugly, ‘Very nice’. The second is when you’re out to the pub most evenings of the week, and you find yourself admiring a fellow drinker because he can open his throat and drop a pint in seconds where it takes you a dozen gulps. The third stage is the final one: you drink nothing but beer; you brush your teeth at night and rinse your mouth afterwards with beer; you keep a glass of beer on your bedside table in case you need to moisten your mouth in the night; you replace the tea in your teabags with hops, and you start saying things like, ‘We have nothing to beer but beer itself’ and ‘Beer – beer is my ally’.
5 Like a smart-alec (or in Wales, a smart-aled), but in a brewery.
6 If I’m completely honest, these cups and tankards bounced up a fraction of a moment after the blows rained down, but there’s no point in me being prissy or pedantic about a thing like that.
7 Stone-cold sober. Which is to say sober as a sober stone. If you’ve ever seen a drunken stone, for instance at a rockslide or avalanche, you’ll know how important the distinction is.
Chapter Eight
ON THE DOORSTEP, NOT
LITERALLY A DOORSTEP, IT’S A
MOUNTAINSIDE ACTUALLY, BUT
IT’S A DOORSTEP METAPHORICALLY
SPEAKING, IF YOU SEE WHAT I
MEAN
They bobbed and floated down the River Sprinting amongst a slick of wood. Barrels twirled and knocked against one another in profusion and great confusion. Even as deep a drunkenness as the dwarfs had acquired was loosened from their consciousness by the sheer chill of the river, and the shock of their sudden immersion; not to mention the surprise and chagrin of discovering themselves chained together by their beards. Mori, with a little more self-possession than the others, scrambled on to a barrel, and the others grabbed passing floats. Bingo himself swam for a while, and then managed to balance himself half-sprawled upon the top of a barrel that was bobbing, iceberg like, mostly underneath the waves. The fact that these barrels were full of beer meant they floated very low in the water.
In this fashion the party proceeded downriver for several hours, as the sun rose ahead of them finding diamonds and splinters of gold in the ever-crinkling wave tops and warming Bingo’s face. The landscape on either side reminded the soddit, somewhat, of home: broad fields, wheat and barley on either side of the river, and a deep-breathing wraparound sky above.
‘Soddit!’ called a dwarf, rolling a barrel under his body like a hamster in a hamster wheel, and not, to judge by the expression on his face, deriving much satisfaction from the exercise, ‘Bingo! Help!’ It was Gofur, slapping the wood with his hands in increasingly rapid patterns as he struggled to stay above rather than beneath the barrel.
Bingo swam over to him.
‘Untie my beard,’ Gofur said, ‘and my ankle, glub glub glub.’ These last three words may not have been attempts at communication, for Gofur had slid off his barrel.
Bingo fished him out of the water, unknotted his beard and unt
ied his ankle. The dwarf was still not happy, but he was able to thrash out and find another barrel. Bingo, feeling like a mother duck, went from dwarf to dwarf, freeing them from their bondage. Finally he swam out to the wizard, but found him perfectly happy, floating on his back and singing a song about a loofah.
He swam over to Mori, who was grumpier than Bingo had ever seen him. The soddit pointed this out.
‘I’m drunk and freezing cold,’ the dwarf retorted. ‘Are you surprised I’m unhappy about it? Drunk doesn’t go with freezing cold. It goes with nice-warm-fire-toast-your-toes-nicely. It goes with lying under a blanket. Drunk and freezing cold makes for an unhappy dwarf. Look you,’ he added, and he clearly meant it to sting.
‘All right, all right,’ said Bingo. Now that he was in the icy water he was finding it rather refreshing. ‘We’re probably far enough from the brewery now. We can make our way to the bank, climb out, maybe start a fire.’
But as he spoke he noticed that the banks had risen around them from a few feet of mud to several yards of sheer chalk. There was nothing for it but to cling to the barrels and wait until the landscape permitted dis-embarkage.1
After a few hours in which the soothing effect of the sound of fast-flowing water was counteracted by the simultaneous noise of multiple chattering, moaning and complaining dwarfs, the riverbanks started to draw away from them on both sides. Soon after this they floated out into a wide and brimming lake.
This was Lake Escargot, whose waters were silver and whose water snails were the most celebrated luxury in the whole of Upper Middle Earth. The famous town of Lakeside sat on timber stilts alongside the shore. And past this, just visible above the haze of the lake’s northern shore, was the Only Mountain, the famed Strebor that Bingo had travelled so far to see.
He noticed that the barrels were starting to drift in different directions, and bestirred himself to round up the crotchety dwarfs. Under his direction they swam to a shingly beach to the south of the rivermouth, Mori and Bingo pulling Gandef after them. When they were all out, some tried to roll themselves in their beards there and then and sleep on the shore. But Bingo, who was tired and sober (instead of being tired and hungover), insisted they march to the bridge that joined Lakeside to the land. ‘For once,’ he told them, ‘I intend to sleep in a proper bed and eat proper food. It’s been long enough.’
They followed him, complaining but compliant.2
The guards on the bridge were only too happy to welcome this bedraggled party into their halls. ‘Custom has been down,’ they said, ‘since the dragon moved into the Only Mountain.’
‘Really?’ said Bingo, fishing out the entrance fee from Mori’s leather purse. ‘How long ago did he arrive?’
‘Seventy years or so,’ said the guard.
Inside Lakeside the exhausted party were almost overwhelmed by the profusion of goods on offer. Shopkeepers who had never seen a customer and who had survived on selling things to other shopkeepers, and on tales of actual customers passed down from their grandparents, crowded around the group, eager to sell them anything and everything. There was a plethora of stalls selling axes, barrels, haunches of venison, wool and such, with extensive boat-parking and mead halls in which the wearied heroic shopper could find refreshment.
‘Really,’ said Bingo. ‘We’re just tired and hungry at the moment. Can you direct us to a refreshment house? An inn, with some beds?’
Disappointment was bitter for the majority of shop-holders, but the landlady of the Boing Inn was so excited she almost did a dance. ‘Actual guests in the inn!’ she kept saying, as she led them between the narrow ways of Lakeside. ‘Actual guests!’
There was a fire in the inn’s front room, and the dwarfs huddled round it with pathetic eagerness. They devoured plates of porridge, followed by bread and cooked meats, and then they clambered upstairs to fall into complete and unmitigated sleep on top of their beds. Bingo, the last to succumb, thanked the landlady, paid her in advance with some more of Mori’s gold, and finally collapsed into dreamless slumber.
The dwarfs and Gandef slept a total of eighteen hours: the dwarfs because they were each sleeping off monstrous hangovers, and Gandef because he seemed to be sleeping all the time these days anyway.
Bingo woke, feeling indescribably refreshed, during the morning of the following day. A plump, short man was sitting on a chair in the corner of his room.
‘At last you are awake!’ this man announced. ‘Our first customers for seventy years! I greet you, sir. You and your courageous dwarf shoppers! You bring new hope to the town of Lakeside of Thurrock.’
‘I am delighted to be of service,’ said Bingo, remembering his manners. ‘And honoured to make your acquaintance, Mr …?’
‘Ah,’ said the stranger, standing up and clasping the sides of his expansive belly. ‘I am Lard, the Bowman. I am, to be straight with you, Mayor of Lakeside.’
‘It is indeed an honour,’ said Bingo, scrabbling out of bed to be able to bow.
‘No – no – I won’t stand for it, if you intend to treat me as a somebody,’ said Lard with jocular self-effacement. ‘It is not long since I was nobody. I’ll not subscribe to the cant of fame. I was a lowman until last year, sir, one of the lowest of the low lowman in this town. I was a poet, a bard – can you imagine it? Can you think of a more disgraceful and untouchable social caste? But I have raised myself up by my efforts, and I put aside the miserable trade of poetry for bowmanship. Now I am Lard the Bowman. And I have come to welcome you all personally – personally – to the shops and stalls of Lakeside. Your companions …?’
‘They,’ said Bingo, glancing at the other beds, ‘may sleep yet awhile. Our journey here has been wearying and long.’
‘But you are here, nonetheless,’ said Lard. ‘That is the important thing.’
‘Your trade has been depressed?’ Bingo asked.
‘Oh, woe, woe, woe,’ agreed Lard, although still with a degree of complacency, as if he were reciting rather than expressing the sentiment. ‘Since the wicked dragon Smug took possession of the Only Mountain, our customers have shied away from us. Steered clear. We live under a terrible threat all the time. These are not ideal trading conditions.’
‘Yet you have not been tempted to abandon this site, and move your stalls further south?’
‘Abandon Lakeside?’ said Lard, in horror, or mock-horror it was difficult to tell which, since the sentiment was delivered with a rather puzzling wide-eyed indolence. ‘Out of the question. Besides, our patience has been rewarded with your arrival. New custom! May you be the first of many!’
‘Alas,’ said Bingo, ‘we were not planning on staying. We are travelling on, as it happens, to the Only Mountain itself.’
‘You don’t say,’ said Lard conversationally.
‘Indeed. But in fact, Sir Lard, it may be we can be of service to you and all of Lakeside.’
‘Service?’ Lard asked, with the air of a man who understood what the requirements of good service entailed.
‘Our quest – perhaps I should not be so free with this news, but I see no harm in your knowing – our quest is … to slay Smug.’ Bingo had long since decided that this must be at least part of their quest, despite the reticence of the dwarfs.
‘Really?’ said Lard mildly. ‘I say. Is that so?’ He sat for a while, as if digesting this news. Then he shrugged, and said, ‘To do what, sorry?’
‘To slay. To kill.’
‘Oh! Kill – I see,’ the Mayor said, in a much more animated manner. ‘Well that is fantastic news! Fantastic! Fairytaleous! Marvellous! I can only hope that you are successful. If you were to rid us of our curse, then Lakeside could once again blossom as the well-provisioned and convenient one-stop shopping emporium of the eastern wilderness.’
Bingo and Lard talked long on this topic, and by the time the dwarfs awoke (moaning and clutching their heads) the Mayor of Lakeside had agreed to ferry the party up the river to the foot of the Only Mountain in Lakeside’s best transit barges.
&nb
sp; ‘It seems you are proving a useful addition to the party after all, Mr Soddit,’ said Mori as he munched, hungrily, on some toasted bread for his late breakfast. He had doused his beard in vinegar and wrapped it around his temples to assuage the thumping there, which gave him a slightly peculiar look.
‘They will take us directly to the mountain,’ said Bingo, ‘and provision us. The rest is up to us, they say. I was thinking: perhaps we should leave Gandef here? He would be well cared for, I am sure.’
‘Leave the wizard?’ barked Mori, jerking his head up so quickly his beard fell down again. ‘What are you saying? Of course we can’t leave the wizard. Of course the wizard has to come with us. The very idea of leaving him!’
‘But why? He’s not doing anything now much, except sleeping.’
‘He must come,’ said Mori. And that was that.
The following morning, the dwarfs made a handsomer group than they had for a long time as they stood on one of Lakeside’s piers. Their breastplates had been polished, their beards washed and combed, and the holes in their boots expertly mended. Eager-faced lakeside barge operators handed them down into the boats, and pushed off with their poles.
For almost an hour the party simply sat, watching the sun-tickled landscape sliding past. Bingo let his eyes meander. Beasts of herbage stared from the meadows that overlooked the lake. Cranes flew overhead and wheeled around to land on the lake, their gawkiness folding away as they settled themselves, bobbing in the water, to observe the passing boats. In the zenith a tiny cloud seemed to cap the immense blue dome of the sky.
Before them, the conical peak of the Only Mountain rose slowly. At the northern bank of the lake, the bargemen poled their craft up the narrow river that flowed from the sides of the mountain. Before sunset the dwarfs were able to set out a temporary camp on the first upslope. ‘We shall leave you here, heroic ones,’ said the chief bargeman. ‘You can trek the rest of the way easily tomorrow. Good luck in your mighty quest! May your right arms prove strong!’ And they departed.