by Adam Roberts
‘What on earth,’ said Mori, ‘did he mean about “right arms”? What was that all about?’
It was strange to think that they had finally arrived at the Only Mountain, after their long, varied and attritional adventures. Dwarfs and soddit breakfasted on hessian-packed bread rolls and miniature cork barrels of orange juice (supplied by the burghers of Lakeside). Afterwards Bingo sat on a broad-topped rock and simply stared up at the mountain. The Minty Mountains had been impressive, but this was something else – a gigantic monument in stone, out of which the morning light was pressing a thousand facets of grey and white: right to left in myriad planes and curves from cinder-coloured, ash, fish-scale, iron, raincloud, to purple and black, streaked and capped higher up with bone-coloured and cream-tinted snow. Many rooks circled in the sky overhead, their cawing as soothing a sound as Bingo had ever heard.
Thorri coughed discreetly at the soddit’s side.
‘Oh,’ said Bingo, who had yet to learn the proper way of speaking with royalty. ‘Hello there. It’s a magnificent mountain, isn’t it?’
‘Thertainly very big,’ said Thorri. ‘It occupieth the eyeth, don’t it? It’th a shame, really, thince it getth in the way of a beautiful view.’
‘How can you say so?’ said Bingo. ‘I think it’s spectacular.’
‘More’n a thpec,’ said Thorri archly. ‘But don’t take it perthonally. We dwarfth, we like down, not up, you thee. We prefer the inthide to the outthide.’
‘But this mountain is hollow, I suppose. Everything’s hollow, after all.’
For the first time Thorri looked at the soddit with a twinkle of respect. ‘Indeed it ith,’ he agreed. ‘Tho you have learnt thomething about the way the world workth, young thoddit.’
‘I’ve picked up a few things on my travels. So what do we do now?’
‘We go inthide,’ said the King. ‘That’th why you’re here.’
He pulled off his boot and drew out a crumpled scrap of parchment. The other dwarfs began gathering around as Thorri spread the paper out on the rock. At first glance Bingo took it to be a picture of an old cabbage leaf with copious annotation. But he saw, looking more closely, that it portrayed with rather crude delineation the environs of the Only Mountain. ‘We can’t go in through the front door,’ Thorri was saying, pointing to a kink in the side of the mountain, ‘on account of it’th locked.’
‘Locked front door,’ murmured the dwarfs.
‘Tho,’ said Thorri, ‘we need to find the thide door. But, Mr Grabbings, the thide door is only wee.’
‘Is only what?’ asked Bingo.
‘Only wee.’
Bingo tried to decipher this. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’th wee,’ insisted Thorri. ‘Wee – wee. And the passage to which it gains accethth, that’th wee ath well.’
‘Wee?’ hazarded Bingo.
‘Wee!’ said Thorri, starting to become tetchy. ‘You’re thmaller than a dwarf, tho you can fit down there. Or tho we hope.’
‘Oh,’ said Bingo uncertainly. ‘I see. And the stuff about wee …?’
‘Never mind about that,’ said Mori, clapping the soddit on the shoulder with one hand.3 ‘We need to find the door. Come! Gather our belongings! We trek up the western flanks of the Only Mountain at last!’
There were some half-hearted hurrahs at this, and the dwarfs trudged off to collect their things. ‘Thorri,’ said Bingo, as he hopped off the rock. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Mm?’ replied the dwarf King.
‘You’re King, aren’t you?’
Thorri sighed. ‘I’m afraid tho,’ he conceded.
‘So why is it you allow Mori to boss you about? Couldn’t you silence him with, I don’t know, one royal command?’
‘Oh,’ said the dwarf. ‘It doethn’t do to be in the front line all the time. Ethpethially,’ he added, ‘if one ith King.’
A rook flapped its wings, landing on a boulder some way distant, regarding them with inkily intelligent eyes. It put its pointy head on one side.
They made good progress at first, but the way became harder and harder as it became incrementally less horizontal. Soon they were picking their way from boulder to boulder and resting every quarter of an hour. Matters were made considerably less agreeable by the necessity, which devolved upon two of the party at any given time, of dragging the sleeping wizard behind them on a blanket. ‘I only wish I knew,’ complained Bingo, ‘why it is we have to bring him along. He never seems to wake any more. He sleeps through everything. He’s completely deaf. He’s lost his beard. He’s lost his mind, as far as I can see. And yet we’re pulling him up a bloody mountain.’
None of the dwarfs enlightened him.
By late afternoon they had reached a little plateau littered with curiously shaped rocks that had clearly fallen from the nearly sheer slopes above. The group sat regaining their breath, and ate a little food. Thorri was poring over the map. ‘It ought to be hereaboutth,’ he announced. ‘From what I can thee.’
‘Look at those rooks!’ said Bingo. ‘Perching in amongst the crannies and crags of the slope above us. They seem to be watching us.’
‘Watching us, they are,’ said Mori. ‘The rooks of Strebor. They are a great and wise race.’
‘Wise?’ asked Bingo, whose experience of birds was limited to the robins and occasional off-course seagulls of Soddlesex. ‘They’re just birds, though, yes?’
Mori shook his head thrice, which caused his beard to shake five times. ‘They are intelligent and cunning,’ he said. ‘They live long, and their memory lasts many generations. They play chess you know—’
‘Chess?’ asked Bingo, frankly incredulous.
‘Oh yes. For what other reason is it the case, do you think, on a chessboard, that rooks are called rooks?’
‘But rooks on a chessboard look like castles.’
Mori hissed at him in a shocked voice, ‘Tush, soddit! Never call them that! It is forbidden! They are rooks – rooks is their name. Tut! Pshaw! You’ll be calling the pawns prawns next.’
‘I just find it rather hard to believe. Birds play chess? How do they play?’
‘They, eh, nudge the pieces around the board with their beaks.’
‘But how do they set the pieces up in the first place?’
‘You’re splitting hairs,’ snapped the dwarf. ‘The fact is that these rooks are not to be trifled with. They can speak, you know. They have a King.’
‘What’s he called?’
‘Eh?’
‘What’s his name, this King of rooks?’
‘Well,’ said Mori, ‘the rooks have long been friends of the dwarfs, and thus it so happens that I can tell you. His name is Caaw. Caaw the Mighty.’
‘Funny-sounding name.’
‘In fact,’ Mori admitted, ‘all their names are Caaw. They only have the one name between them. But they are very bright folk, these rooks, believe you me.’
Bingo craned his neck to look up at the rooks, wrinkling his eyes into crow’s-feet. ‘I’m not sure I’m convinced, Mori,’ he said. ‘I’m not so easily gulled.’
‘Suit yourself,’ said the dwarf.
They searched for the rest of the day but found no sign of the door. ‘Is it like the door of the Coal Gate that led underneath the Minty Mountains? Is that it?’ Bingo wondered. ‘Should we wait until moonlight?’
‘No, boyo,’ said Mori. ‘That was an entrance into the great dwarfish halls of Dwarfhall, mighty Black Maria. This, look you, is more of a portal.’
‘Portal?’
‘Exhaust.’
‘For?’
‘Smoke.’ The dwarf looked around him shiftily. ‘And such.’
‘So?’
‘So it opens easily, see, but from the inside. We have to find it and try to, you know, prise it open from the outside.’
‘It’s a chimney, in other words,’ clarified the soddit.
‘Ay.’
‘So you want me to crawl down a chimney, to come face to face with a terr
ible dragon from a fireplace?’
‘Wasn’t that made clear to you at the start?’
‘Not,’ said Bingo, ‘really.’
‘Ah. Well there you go, there you go.’
The party broke off its search to have supper, sitting around a small and rather mournful fire. Crows, rooks and ravens cawed and swooped overhead through the thickening light. To the west, the sun dropped red as a cherry tomato, painting the ragged stretches and bars of horizontal cloud through which it passed purple and orange and gold.
Shadows lengthened.
‘Look at him there,’ said Bingo, pointing to Gandef, who was sleeping peacefully wrapped in a blanket. ‘He’s been asleep now for, what? Four days? He looks so peaceful.’
The dwarfs mumbled their agreement, nodding.
‘His cough seems to have cleared up,’ the soddit said meditatively. ‘Odd that. It used to be so severe, didn’t it? Disabling, sometimes.’
‘That stage is past,’ said Gofur in a low voice.
‘Eh?’ said Bingo. ‘What?’
‘Nothing, nothing,’ said Mori. ‘Let’s get some sleep.’
Bingo pressed them for a while, but they all clammed up. ‘We clearly haven’t come here for the gold,’ he said. ‘Or at least not just for the gold. I can believe that you’ll happily take the gold if, when, you’ve done what you really came here for. Why won’t you tell me what that is? What’s the story?’
‘Time for sleep now,’ said Mori, as he wrapped his beard around himself.
They were woken at dawn by the cawing of the rooks, which seemed to Bingo’s ears louder than ever. It was cold. Light shone on the lands to the north and south of the mountain making the fields and the plain bright, but the dwarfs and the soddit were in the mountain’s huge shadow and it was dark all around. There were numerous little patches and puddles of ice in amongst the peak’s shadow, reaching up the mountainside like dandruff. Bingo stood up and vigorously embraced himself a dozen times or so, repeatedly slapping both of his palms against their opposite shoulder-blades to try and warm up. Gofur tried to get a fire going, but there was rime on the twigs and the flame wouldn’t take.
‘So,’ said Bingo, sourly. ‘Another day of fruitless searching for this chimney pot, is it?’
‘We’ll find it,’ replied Mori, ‘if we only persevere.’
‘I could be of some help there,’ said a voice from behind them. ‘Yo.’
It was an enormous thrush, yellow-white with pale freckles, half as tall as Bingo himself. It had settled on a boulder and was eyeing the group of them. Its eyes were pale, and its beak was of an almost pink hue. It was wearing a gold-thread jacket with ridiculously long sleeves that dangled, empty, from the front. The bird had ripped, or cut, two large holes in the armpits of this coat through which its wings poked out. A gold tag rattled on the creature’s spindly left leg. A tiny cap was squeezed over the crown of its head. This headgear was too small for even that small head, and seemed to be pinching the top of the bird’s skull into a nubbin.
‘Good morrow, Master Bird,’ said Mori, bowing low.
‘Yo,’ said the thrush. ‘You havink a bit of bother?’
‘Bother,’ repeated the dwarf. ‘Well, I suppose you could say that.’
‘Visitors don’t often come to this hood,’ said the bird. It flapped one of its wings out, a strange and jerky gesture that ruffled the feathers at the end, and then folded the wing away again. It gave the impression of a one-sided St Vitus’s dance. ‘Hood – you know?’ it added as it surveyed the non-comprehension on the faces of its audience. ‘It’s a word, it’s short, innit, for “place-of-the-hooded-hawk”, or somefink. Bird slank.’
‘Slank?’
‘Yeah,’ said the bird, shuffling on its asterisk-shaped feet. ‘Slank.’
‘Oh,’ said Gofur, realisation dawning. ‘Slang.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Sir Thrush,’ said Bingo, bowing civilly to the bird. ‘We are delighted to meet you.’
‘Ca-aaarcg!’ shrieked the bird, flapping both its wings in a positive conniption of anxiety. ‘Nah! Nah! Nah! I’m no frush, innit. I am not a frush. I’m a raving – a raving, I tell ya.’
‘A raven,’ said Bingo.
‘’Sright,’ said the bird. ‘Wired,’ it added, emphatically if mysteriously.
‘It’s just that you look, at first glance, rather thrush-like,’ said Bingo.
‘Certainly not. Not a frush, me. I’m down with the ravens. Well, I’m up there with them, actually,’ it said, its accent momentarily slipping up the social register. It tossed its beak towards the mountain peak. ‘But down at the same time. If you follow.’
‘Right,’ said the soddit, who didn’t. ‘I must say, though, without meaning any offence, that you don’t, exactly, look like a raven. Not like a conventional idea of a raven, at any rate.’
‘What you mean?’
‘Well – your colour, for instance.’
‘Good raving colour, this,’ said the bird. ‘Innit.’
‘Aren’t ravens usually a bit blacker than—?’
‘Ca-aaarcg!’ shrieked the bird again, becoming quite fiercely agitated. ‘Yo! Ba-ka-ka-ka-ba! Wheeh! Polly want a cracker cocaine! Birdy bling-bling!’ It flapped so fiercely it lost its footing, and skeetered around on top of the stone for several seconds before recovering its balance.
‘Best not annoy it,’ said Mori to Bingo, sotto voce, ‘Sir Raven!’ he declaimed loudly. ‘Sir Raven!’
‘Mornink, vicar,’ said the bird, settling itself down again. ‘I am a raven, you know.’
‘Of course you are,’ said the dwarf in a conciliatory voice. ‘We all thought so when we saw you.’
‘Really?’ said the bird, looking pleased.
‘Certainly. I said to my comrade, Gofur the dwarf here, I said, is that a mighty raven settling on to that rock? I do believe it is. Nobody would ever mistake it for a thrush, I said. Clearly.’
‘Like the hhhat?’ the bird inquired, aspirating the word prodigiously and leaning its head forward for everyone to see. It had the words ‘Tomtit Hilfeather’ written round it. ‘It’s wicked, innit.’
‘It’s very,’ said Bingo uncertainly, ‘tight. How did you fit it on?’
‘Weren’t easy,’ said the raving. It plocked around in a little circle on the rock, three hundred and sixty degrees, and ended where it began. ‘Ca-aaarcg!’ it said, loud and sudden. ‘I’m a raven! I’m a raven! I’m a raven! See-eedcake. Ca-aaarcg!’
‘Mighty bird,’ said Mori, ‘we accept your kind offer of help, for we have need of assistance. We have travelled far—’
‘Cup o’tea!’ shrieked the bird. ‘Nice juicy snail! Booba-booba-booba!’
‘… travelled far through many perilous adventures—’
‘Re-speckled!’ Re-speckled! Egg!’
‘… far under mountains and through the forest of—’
‘Tu-whit, tu-woo. She told me to squawk this way-yy! Ca-aaarcg!’
‘We have travelled far …’ Mori persevered, ‘and now we are searching for—’
‘Have a nut?’ the raving suggested.
This, for some reason, seemed to take the wind out of Mori’s sails. There was silence for the space of thirty seconds.
The raving put its head on one side. Then it put its head on the other side.
‘What it is,’ said Bingo, ‘is a sort of chimney. Like a little doorway. Do you know it?’
‘Cup o’tea?’ said the bird, in a more considered voice. ‘Blimey. Boiling-boiling. Two sugars and gold je-well-ery. Did you ever notice that the clouds got no wings, yet they fly? Funny that.’
‘But do you know where this chimney can be found?’
‘Chimney,’ said the bird. ‘Ca-aaarcg!’ it shrilled. ‘I seen a horse fly, I seen a crane fly, I seen a bird fly, I seen a fly fly, but have I ever seen a chimney doorway?’
‘That is indeed the question,’ pressed the soddit.
‘Lil-bow-wow-wow,’ said the bird. ‘Crac! And they diss me?
I tell you, they call me just a trash-nest white flapper – but I’m real, I’m street, ca-aaarcg! I work with real raven flappers all the time. This is what my critics don’t understand. Blimey.’
‘Flapper,’ said Bingo, trying to steer the conversation back to the hidden entrance, ‘yes, well clearly we can all agree on that. That’s plain as the noses on our faces. But about this chimney that we’re looking for—’
‘Listen to this,’ said the bird, and began squawking tunelessly. ‘Now I’m a raven, yes I’m a real raven, all you other non-ravens are just imitating so won’t the real bling raven please fly up! Please fly up! Please fly up!’ He accompanied this recital with jerky flaps of both wings together.
‘Sir Bird?’ said Bingo.
‘What?’
‘The chimney?’ He pronounced these two words in his sternest voice.
The bird looked abashed. ‘Chimney? Opens on to a shaft? Down into the mountink, is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know,’ it said, becoming conspiratorial, and looking at them from underneath its right wing, ‘that there’s this, like, dragon down there? Don’t you?’
‘We’d been led to believe so,’ said Mori.
‘He’s a scary old boy,’ said the raven. ‘That dragon. Just so’s you know.’
‘We’ll take your comments under advisement,’ said the dwarf. ‘And if you could indicate the exact location of the doorway, we will be forever in your debt.’
‘Sure,’ said the bird. ‘’Sover there.’ It leapt up and flapped into flight, oaring its way across the little plateau to the rock face. The dwarfs and Bingo hurried after it. At a place where the smooth mountain wall rose at an angle at forty-five degrees, the raven settled on the floor and tapped sharply at the rock, once, twice, thrice.4
A hatch, barely large enough for even a soddit to crawl through, swung in towards the mountain’s innards an inch, and then swung slowly the other way, opening outwards on creaky stone hinges until it was gaping wide. A few strands of smoke drifted out of the hole.
‘Thank you, thank you, Sir Thr, um, Raven,’ cried the dwarfs.
‘We owe you a great debt, Sir Bird,’ said Mori. ‘What is your name?’