by Adam Roberts
The celebrations lasted for the rest of the day and into the night. The sun set in gaudy red splendour, and the waxing moon shone clear.4 Torches gleamed over the still waters. Everybody sang, everybody danced. Troths were plighted, and in some cases (in dark doorways and behind packing cases) more than plighted. Healths were toasted, toast was consumed, consumption cured, and cured ham taken from the storerooms to be put on the toast. It was a celebration to remember.
The bridge that linked Lakeside to the shore had been destroyed, but the Lakesiders went to and fro in their numerous boats. Nobody was surprised, therefore, when a number of boats pulled up at one of the landing berths, and two dozen tall figures jumped out. Indeed, there was hardly anybody still conscious and adequately compos mentis to be surprised.
‘Where’s the lord of this town?’ the leading figure called. ‘Take us to the lord of this place!’
These newcomers moved, swiftly but gracefully, up and down the streets of the town, before meeting again by their boats. ‘Dear me,’ said one. ‘They all seem to be asleep.’
‘A little over-indulgence, I fear,’ said a second.
‘I asked one of them for directions,’ said a third, ‘and he replied in Gobblin-talk! All ugly gutturals and plosives! I assumed the Gobblins had already arrived, and had taken over the town. But then I realised that this chap wasn’t actually replying to me at all. He was just throwing up.’
‘How distasteful,’ said a fourth.
‘Well,’ said the first, ‘it seems they’re all drunk. This makes our job easier, I suppose. Elstree, go and fetch the rest of the army. We’ll rebuild the bridge in the morning, link the town and the water’s edge again. But until then, let’s just consolidate what we have.’
‘Righto,’ said the figure who had been addressed as Elstree. He hopped back down into one of the boats, his cloak flapping apart as he dropped to reveal a glint of elvish armour beneath.
By morning, Lakeside was under new management. The elves had dragged or pushed the sotted inhabitants into a central hall and locked the gates. Then they quartered their men – several hundred, dressed in the most elegant armour – in the best rooms of the place. Finally the elves strapped together a long line of Lakeside rowing boats and barges to make a pontoon bridge to the shore.
This was finished before breakfast. As the elves munched their delicate weybread and sipped their gray tea, the original inhabitants of Lakeside were beginning to regain their now battered and aching consciousnesses. Elsqare gave orders that the lord of the town be brought to him, and twenty minutes later Lard himself was standing in front of the elf.
‘Good morning,’ said Elsqare. ‘How are you today?’
‘What?’ said Lard forcefully, with a cross expression.
‘Are you well?’
‘What?’ He blinked, glowered, looked around. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I am Lord Elsqare, the elf,’ explained Lord Elsqare the elf. ‘At the moment, and much to my chagrin, I find myself at the head of a mighty army. We don’t mean to inconvenience you, you understand, but my men must be billeted somewhere.’
‘What?’ said Lard a third time. ‘Who are you?’
‘Give the chap some tea,’ said Elsqare.
‘You’ve invaded!’ said Lard suddenly. ‘You’ve invaded Lakeside!’
‘Not in the least. Our presence here is only temporary, I assure you,’ said the elf lord. ‘Allow me to explain. We understand that a party of stout dwarfs has travelled here, on their way to the Only Mountain. We understand that they had some business to settle with the dragon who lives there …’
‘Smug!’ blurted Lard. ‘I killed him!’
There was an elegantly shocked silence amongst the elves at this news.
‘Really?’ Elsqare asked eventually.
‘Indeed, he came yesterday to threaten Lakeside,’ said Lard, hoisting his belly up and standing prouder. ‘I confronted him with my trusty bow – I am a bowman, you know. He settled upon the bridge. It collapsed, and he drowned in the lake.’
‘My, my,’ said Elsqare. ‘How interesting. So Smug the Mighty is dead?’
‘Yes,’ said Lard. ‘And did you say something about tea?’ He waddled over and sat himself beside the elf lord. And some breakfast, perhaps?’
Elsqare motioned to his followers to provide the necessary. Well,’ said the elf, ‘if, truly, the dragon is dead that places a very different complexion upon events. Are you sure he has perished?’
‘Certainly,’ said Lard, through a mouthful of crumpet. This is not an easy word to say when one’s mouth is full of food, but Lard had a bold stab at the pronunciation anyway.
‘Have you recovered his corpse?’
‘No,’ said Lard, with a slight hesitation.
‘If he’s in the lake, then surely it would be an easy matter to drag the water for his body. Don’t you think? To be on the safe side?’
At this, one of Elsqare’s followers burst into song.
When they drag in the Dragon
And bring back the corpse of a monster so monstrous,
And lay it out dead on a pontoon so ponstrous
Why then we’ll be sure he really has gone.
Elsqare silenced his minion with a severe look. ‘Mr – Lard is it? Lord? – are you, Lard?’
‘Mayor,’ said Lard.
‘Mayor, excellent. Believe me, the elves have no interest in invading, as you put it, your delightful lakeside town. We are here as your allies, not your enemies.’
‘Yet you have locked all my people in the great central hall.’
‘A precaution,’ said Elsqare, making a dismissive gesture with one hand in the air. ‘When they’re properly sobered, and properly apprised of the situation, then they’ll be let out.’
‘Apprised of what situation?’ asked Lard, his mouth sagging open to reveal half-mushed scone.
‘So you don’t know? Dear me. Well, I’m afraid I come as the bearer of bad news.’
‘Bad news?’
‘Yes. You see, an enormous Gobblin army has assembled.’
‘Gobblins?’ repeated Lard, with a catch in his throat.
‘I’m afraid so. A simply enormous army. They’ve recruited Gobblins from the whole length of the mountains. And they’re a day’s march, at most, from here.’
‘Here? Why should Gobblins want to come here?’
‘The dwarfs I mentioned. It seems they made rather a mess when they went through the Minty Mountains. They stirred up a tremendous fuss. And – I see no reason why you shouldn’t be told this – there’s something else. Amongst the Gobblins is a creature not Gobblin-shaped: something else, a philosopher of doleful countenance called Sollum. From his lips the Gobblins have learned that an artefact of enormous power and evil – one of the Things® created by the Evil Sharon – is in the possession of these dwarfs. Word of this has spread all over the western lands. The Gobblins have come for revenge, for destruction, for the gold, but most of all they have come to seize the Thing®. Who knows what terror they might wreak, if they can but obtain it! It is time for all the free peoples of Upper Middle Earth to unite and face this dire threat!’
‘Blimey,’ said Lard.
Through that same night, and into the early hours of that same morning, the dwarfs on the mountainside kept a sombre vigil, watching the lands and the skies to the south, the direction of Lakeside. They were waiting for Smug’s return, or for some news of him. ‘If there were some big fight,’ Bingo said, ‘wouldn’t we see it? Flame and fireworks?’
‘Maybe,’ said Mori sulkily. ‘Maybe not.’
‘What shall we do?’ Bingo asked.
‘Don’t think you’re back in our good books so quickly,’ snapped the dwarf, and turned his shoulder to the soddit. It was a warm shoulder, literally speaking, because it had been close to the fire; but in metaphoric terms it was a cold shoulder. So, you could say, it was simultaneously a warm and a cold shoulder, which sounds paradoxical I know, but isn’t really when you think about it.
‘All your fault,’ mumbled On.
‘A fine pickle you’ve got us into,’ grumbled Gofur.
‘Mavis!’ gasped Failin. But he was asleep, and his comment had no particular relevance to the situation in hand.
Bingo stared sorrowfully into the fire, watching the glowing logs and the wriggling, writhing, belly-dancing flames that leapt up from them.
‘Don’t be too dithcouraged,’ said Thorri, settling next to him. ‘You weren’t to know.’
‘I feel something dreadful has happened,’ said the soddit. His sense of awkwardness and gloom was compounded by the fact that he had still not yet told anybody of the Barkingstone, which lay like a guilty secret in his coat pocket.
‘Thomething dreadful,’ agreed Thorri. ‘I thenthe that too. But we can’t help that. It’th a thame we didn’t get a chanthe to chat with Thmug before he hurried away, but there you go.’
‘What shall we do now?’
‘The front door’th open, you thay?’
‘Yes,’ said Bingo. The dragon left it open after he left.’
‘Well, when it’th light again, we’ll carry Gandef into the mountain. Even if Thmug’th not there to help, we can at leath make the old feller comfortable.’
Bingo looked, for the hundredth time, at the wrapped-up sleeping figure of the beardless wizard. ‘He does seem taller,’ he said. The wizard’s head was six inches closer to a particular pile of rocks than it had been before.
‘Yeth,’ said Thorri simply.
It was hard to sleep. Just before dawn Bingo managed a couple of hours, but he was woken by dwarfs kicking dirt into the fire and gathering their things. ‘Come along, Grabbings,’ said Mori in a hostile tone. ‘I suppose we can’t leave you on the mountainside. Although we’re all sorely tempted, look you, to do just that.’
They picked their way back down the mountainside, taking turns to drag Gandef’s oblivious body behind them. It was easier than the ascent, but harder than it might have been. The wizard was considerably weightier than he had been before.
They rested for lunch, and then pressed on through the afternoon, keeping the mountain on their left side. They crested the westernmost ridge flanking the front door as the sun was sinking, and as they climbed that hill they temporarily reversed the sunset for a few minutes, bringing the sun a fraction back above the horizon. It was on that low peak that they made their camp for the night, as the sun set for a second time in fifteen minutes.
They ate in silence. ‘It’s still hard for me to understand,’ said Bingo.
If the dwarfs had not yet forgiven him, then they were at least too tired by their exertions to be expressly angry. ‘The world is a stranger place than you realise, little soddit,’ said Mori.
‘Apparently so. When a female soddit and a male soddit get together, they create something new. I don’t understand how dwarfs, or wizards, or dragons – since they’re apparently all part of the same creature – how they – how you propagate the species.’
‘Propagate,’ said the dwarf meditatively. ‘It sounds strange in my ears, that word. You mean: fill the world up with versions of yourself until the world is overcrowded and the landscapes are made a desert and crowds of the starving sway in time to their own moans?’
‘Well,’ said Bingo. ‘Not that exactly …’
‘With us,’ said Mori, ‘we know exactly how many there are. The creator breathed a certain number of dwarf lives into the stone at the beginning of things. These are crystals of the divine, look you, and their coming to life is part of the self-becoming. The great sequence unrolls, and form follows form until the crystals – or those that have survived – achieve their ultimate form. The form of the creator itself.’
‘It sounds a little circular to me,’ said Bingo sourly.
‘Circular? Well, la, perhaps so. Circular like the way spring leads to winter leads to spring? Like the way the sun sets and rises? Circular’s not so bad, look you. Besides,’ he added, ‘this way the Divine experiences the nature of existence in creation.’
‘And the creator can’t do that otherwise?’
‘The creator’s outside creation,’ said Mori, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. ‘He can’t just poke his nose in, or he’ll break it.’
All this metaphysical speculation was making Bingo’s head hurt, so he wrapped himself in a blanket and tried to sleep.
The morning burst upon them in glory, muslin-coloured clouds refracting and making glow the yellow-white light of a new day. Bingo woke with the sunlight, squeezing his shut eyeballs and pressing its warmth against his face.
The soddit roused himself to find the dwarfs already awake, and standing in a line. ‘What is it?’ he asked, rubbing his eyes by punching himself very slowly and very delicately in each eye in turn. He yawned. ‘What’s up?’
‘I’d say,’ said Mori, pointing down the valley before them, ‘that an army is up.’
Below in the valley that led to the cave-mouth entrance of Strebor the Only Mountain, a great host had assembled. The elegant armour of the elves shone like golden water; their purple banners, carrying the emblem of the purple carnation, fluttered in the morning breeze. Beside them was a host of Men of Lakeside, wearing their lacquer-coated leather armour (which doubled as sportswear) and brandishing their various forms of weaponry.
Bingo looked at the ranks upon ranks of warriors: a thousand men and elves all told. ‘Golly,’ he said.
1 I checked with the copy-editor whether this shouldn’t be ‘leather’, but she insisted that the extra n’ makes all the difference.
2 Well, technically it sounded like ninety-eight point three thunderstorms. But for the sake of the metre I rounded up.
3 ‘Brandishing’ in Lakeside is a slightly different process from conventional heroic brandishing (which is to say, ‘shaking’), and involves instead a logo and a series of careful product placements.
4 ‘Waxing’: becoming more like wax – which is to say, acquiring a yellow hue and building into a plug-like ball.
Chapter Eleven
CLODS BURST
‘Can Smug truly be dead?’ said Bingo, in dismay.
The dwarfs and the soddit were gathered in Lord Elsqare’s stylish silk tent, which had been pitched between the two hills before the main entrance to the mountain. Men-at-arms and elves-at-arms moved to and fro, entering and leaving the tent. Preparations were being made for the battle to come.
‘Indeed so,’ said Elsqare languidly. ‘Something of a fortunate happenstance, I think we can agree. This Gobblin army facing us is ten thousand strong. If they’d had a dragon with them as well, then they’d have been, well – I don’t know let me see – hmm, let’s say unbeatable. That’s what they’d have been.’
‘Which shows how little you know, see,’ said Mori, bustling forward in fury. ‘That dragon, look you, would never have sided with the Gobblins. He’d have been our ally!’
‘There’s never been friendship or alliance,’ said Elsqare, ‘between dragons and elves.’
‘No,’ said Lard. ‘Nor between dragons and men neither.’
‘Dragons and dwarfs, however,’ said Bingo, holding the fuming Mori back, ‘is a different matter. I think Mori is right. I think Smug would have fought with us against the Gobblins, and a mighty ally he would have been. But there’s no point in fretting over might-have-beens. Might-have-beens,’ he added, growing strangely poetic, ‘don’t help any more, they just lie on the floor ’til you sweep them away.’
Everybody looked at Bingo. He looked at the floor. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I said that.’
‘As you say, however, Sir Soddit,’ said Elsqare, ‘whether the dragon would have helped or hindered our cause is moot.’
‘Is what?’ asked Mori.
‘Moot.’
‘Moot,’ repeated the dwarf, as if trying the word for size. ‘Moot,’ he said. ‘Moot, moot, moot.’ He walked in a circle around the tent trying variants of pronunciation, drawing out the ‘oo
’, making the ‘t’ more clipped. ‘Moot moot moot. I like that,’ he concluded. ‘That’s lovely, look you. Moot. What does it mean?’
‘It means,’ said Elsqare, ‘that it is something as yet undecided.’
‘Moot,’ said Mori. ‘Grand. What’ll you have for breakfast?’ he said in a little play-acting voice. ‘Moot,’ he added in a basso profundo. ‘Which came first the chicken or the egg? Moot, moot. Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest dwarf of all? Moot is fairest. Moot moot,’ he continued, in this antiphonal manner. ‘That’s good, boyo,’ he said in his usual voice, turning back to Elsqare. ‘I like that. I’ll try and work it into my conversation, la.’
‘Hmm,’ said Elsqare. ‘Anyway. Putting that on one side, we have yet to determine our best strategy. The Gobblins will be upon us in a day and a night. We have a mighty army of elves, and a mighty army of men – a thousand warriors all told. Will the dwarfs join this cause?’
‘We will,’ said Mori firmly, casting a glance behind him at Thorri, who nodded. ‘We will stand beside you.’
‘Then we are joined,’ said Elsqare, with a glad face, ‘by a mighty army of dwarfs! How many warriors are there in your army, Sir Dwarf?’
‘Eh,’ said Mori, rolling his eyes up as if calculating a rough approximation of the number. ‘Five,’ he said.
There was silence in the tent for a little space.
‘They are mighty though,’ Mori added. ‘Those five.’
‘Very well,’ said Elsqare in a heavy voice. ‘Sir Soddit. Will your people join in this cause? Death may follow, but glory comes also and we, the free peoples of Upper Middle Earth, welcome all allies in this battle against the evil Gobblins.’
‘Sure,’ said Bingo, feeling light-headed. ‘Why not?’
‘Then,’ said Elsqare grandly, standing up from his throne, ‘our great alliance will be of four armies! An army of elves, of men, of,’ he coughed, ‘dwarfs, and a great army of soddits! Together we shall stand shoulder to shoulder against the hordes of ten thousand blood-hungry Gobblins!’