by Adam Roberts
Everybody in the tent cheered.
‘How many,’ Elsqare asked Bingo, as if in afterthought, ‘are there in your army, Sir Soddit? You are small, but I’ll wager you are tough, strong, thrawn, single-minded folk in battle, slow to anger but terrible when your blood is up. How great is your army?’
‘Just me,’ said Bingo.
‘I see,’ said Elsqare, sounding peeved, ‘well that’s not exactly an army, now, is it?’
‘Doesn’t that depend,’ said Bingo, ‘on what you mean by an army?’
‘No, it doesn’t. Ah, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve declared ours an alliance of four armies, so that’s what it’ll be. The scribes and historians will have to be creative in future accounts of it, that’s all.’
The elven scouts had estimated that the Gobblin horde was nearly upon them. The new allies had very little time. ‘We must prepare for war,’ Mori told Bingo. ‘Look you.’
There was still the question of Gandef. ‘We hoped the dragon would supervise his transformation, but that’s not to be,’ said Mori. ‘Without Smug’s help it is difficult to know what will happen. But it can’t be helped. The future is moot. Gandef himself is moot.’
‘Mute?’ asked Gofur, puzzled.
‘No, bach, moot,’ said Mori eagerly. ‘That’s a word I just learned. It means uncertain.’
‘Ahh,’ said the other four dwarfs.
‘Anyway, what I suggest is,’ said Mori, ‘we move Gandef inside the mountain. He’ll be comfortable enough there. Leave him in Smug’s old hall. At least he’ll be out of the way of the Gobblins.’
‘Unless the Gobblins are victorious,’ Bingo pointed out. ‘In which case they’ll swarm into the mountains and kill him.’
Mori shrugged. ‘We’ll all be dead then, boyo,’ he pointed out. ‘So that’s moot too.’
It took all five dwarfs and Bingo hauling together to drag Gandef’s sleeping form. His body was twice as long as it had been before, and although not twice as broad around it was considerably thickened in the torso. Like a sprouting adolescent there was a stringiness to his limbs and torso. His face had elongated, and although it was still recognisably Gandef it had a weird and unnerving quality. The wizard had burst the blanket in which he had been wrapped, and ripped his clothes to pieces in his growth. Bingo took one foot and Gofur the other, and the other dwarfs took up places beside the wizard’s six-feet-long legs. Pulling together they dragged him up the valley, through the main entrance and along the corridor within. Bingo, grasping the old wizard’s ankles, found himself unpleasantly fascinated by Gandef’s toenails. They were black, protruding, and were starting to claw-up at the end. It was not nice. His shoulders had blackened also, and two spikes had grown out of the blades like the tips of furled umbrellas.
‘Should we cover him with something?’ Bingo wondered as they positioned Gandef’s supine form on Smug’s pile of gold. ‘Won’t he get cold?’
‘You’re still thinking he’s got the same sort of body as you,’ said Gofur. ‘He hasn’t. He’s in the metamorphosis state now.’
‘How long will that take?’ the soddit asked.
‘Nobody knows exactly—’ Gofur began saying, but Mori interrupted him. ‘That’s moot, see,’ he said. ‘Moot.’
‘I see,’ said Bingo.
They left Gandef in the chamber.
The party came out of the mountain again to bright sunshine, and to the sight of elves and men drilling in the valley before the front door. ‘We’d better close the gate,’ said Mori.
They pushed together, heaving with all their might, first on one of the huge stone leafs, and then on the other. Slowly the pair of hundred-yard-tall doors closed. When the second slammed shut with a great shuddering clunk, they could hear another sound, the clanging of the brass lock inside. ‘He’s sealed in there now,’ said Mori.
‘How do we get back inside?’ asked Bingo.
‘You could always go down the chimney,’ suggested Gofur.
The dwarfs laughed together at this. Bingo did not join them.
‘Either that,’ Gofur added, ‘or else Gandef will open the gates when he’s ready.’
‘Could we not have hidden ourselves in the mountain?’ asked Bingo as they stood there. ‘Surely we could have hidden from the Gobblins in there.’
‘No, bach,’ said Mori sadly. ‘If they win, they’ll batter the gates down and sack the halls within. We stand a better chance meeting them in open war here, rather than being caught like rats in traps inside.’
‘Let’s hope we win then,’ said Bingo. ‘For Gandef’s sake.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ agreed the dwarfs.
That day, before the battle, seemed to Bingo the longest he had known. The sun moved incrementally over the blue sky. Men and elves cut trees and sharpened them at one end, planting the jagged stakes in several rows beside the river. The archers in the company whittled new arrows and rubbed wax into the bowstrings. The soddit, however, had nothing to do; he felt superfluous, and he didn’t like the feeling. He begged a short sword from one of the armourers of Lakeside, paying for it with dragon gold, and for an hour or so in the hot, fly-drony, pollen-dusty afternoon he practised making sweeps with this blade. He cut the tops off long strands of grass that grew in the meadows by the water. He stabbed the bark of old trees, forcing little plugs of wood out. An hour of this was enough for his arm to grow sodden and tired with the practice, and he stopped.
Then he climbed the eastern hill and watched the sun set over the dark sea of trees on the horizon, but his heart was heavier than the sinking sun. An hour of play-fighting and his arm had become too weary to lift, and now it was sore and ache-filled. An hour of play-fighting! Come the morning, he would have a whole day of real fighting, and – for all he knew (for he knew very little about real battles) – all night too. He dreaded the thought that he would collapse with exhaustion before the fight had barely begun. He was, by himself, the army of Soddlesex, the Hobbld-Ahoy! battalion. He had never fought before, and he had no relish for it.
That evening, the four armies lit many camp fires, and ate what would be for many of them their last supper, and drank their last wine. Bingo sat around one of the fires with the Army of Dwarfs. The six of them ate in silence, and afterwards sat in silence. ‘I was thinking,’ Bingo said eventually, although the words felt heavy and unreal in his mouth, of a plan. Tell me what your opinion is of this, boys. I was thinking – there is still the Thing®.’
The dwarfs groaned.
‘I know, I know,’ said Bingo. ‘It’s served us mostly ill, and if we give it the chance it will bring catastrophe down upon us.’
‘That,’ agreed Mori, in an emphatic voice, ‘is not moot.’
‘But maybe there’s some watertight, guaranteed, win-win spell we can cast through the Thing®,’ Bingo insisted, ‘that could bring an end to this terrible battle before it’s begun. Don’t you think?’
‘No,’ said Gofur.
‘No,’ said Failin.
‘No,’ said On.
‘No,’ said Mori.
‘I’d thay,’ said Thorri, ‘that it’th betht not to uthe it at all.’
Bingo sat in silence for a while.
‘So Smug is dead,’ he said. ‘How and if I were to say “Smug is dead” through the Thing®? Wouldn’t that bring Smug back to life? Then at least he could help us defeat the Gobblins – and afterwards, he could aid Gandef.’
The dwarfs sat in silence. They were, clearly, tempted by this prospect. But Thorri steeled their resolve.
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘The Thing® ith a magic artefact. Dragonth are magic creatureth. Micthing magic with magic, micthing malign magic like the Thing® with benign magic like the dragon would not be clever. Leave it alone. Just leave it alone.’
‘Thorri is right,’ said Mori sadly. ‘The Thing® would find a way of thwarting us, and bringing disaster through our wish, no matter how carefully we framed it. Let us leave it alone.’
They sat in silence for a long time.
Bingo could not sleep. He tossed and turned, turned from his left side to his right and from his right to his left, but neither side was comfortable. He found himself wishing for a third side on which to lie, and instead of trying to sleep he got up and wandered about the camp until dawn. The fires were burning brightly, and the elvish and mannish soldiers seemed in good spirits.
Dawn came slowly, first with a thinning of the darkness to the east, then in a glory of sunrise gold. Low horizontal clouds brimmed with brightness, as if they were rips in the sky and diamond-gold illuminations were pouring through from some other place. Bingo watched for long minutes. Then he noticed that the chiefs of the other three armies had assembled, with their standards, on the top of the hill east of the main entrance of Strebor. He hurried up there as fast as his little legs could carry him.
‘Ah,’ said Elsqare, as the guards let him through. ‘Here is the general of our fourth army. Have a look, general.’ He gestured to the south.
From their vantage point, Bingo could see for many leagues. At first his eyes confused him. It was as if the grass meadows that lay alongside the river had been overgrown in a single night with gnarled black thickets, with thorn bushes and stark pole-like trees. But then the sight before him resolved, in his mind, to reality. The ground was covered with Gobblin soldiers. Ten thousand or more, armed and armoured, waiting for the order to charge.
‘A horde,’ said Elsqare. ‘Wouldn’t you say?’
‘A horde,’ agreed Bingo.
‘Don’t let your heart quaver, Sir Soddit,’ said the elf. ‘Be brave.’
‘It’s not my heart I’m worried about quavering,’ said Bingo. ‘It’s lower down in my torso. What can we do? That army stretches as far as the eye can see – ten thousand soldiers, you said. How strong is our army?’
‘Our combined armies,’ corrected Elsqare. ‘I lead a force of five hundred elves. Lard commands five hundred men. The dwarfs, fierce and resolute, represent a force of five. And you yourself, Sir Soddit, are a force of one.’
Bingo could do the maths for himself. ‘Oh dear,’ he said.
‘Quite,’ said Elsqare. ‘Still, can’t be helped, can’t be helped. Ready the squadrons!’ he called. ‘Trumpeters, prepare to sound! Fall back upon the mountain if the press is too great!’
Bingo tried to swallow, but his throat no longer seemed to be in working order. A fine time, he thought to himself, for my throat to seize up. How can I beg for mercy if I can’t beg at all?
The Gobblins had marched day and night without pausing, all the way from the Minty Mountains, led by their terrible King, Kluk the Bald.1 A hunger for death and a lust for battle was upon them: battle red in tooth and wattle, as the saying goes. Their soldiers had been inflamed with stories of the wrongs done to Gobblin-kind by elves and men and dwarfs. ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ they chanted. ‘Elsqare the baster! Lard the waster!’ Above all, they had been fired with excitement by the tales of the Thing,®, and of the great things that Kluk would achieve once he possessed it. They felt, in their gobblin innards, the tug of the device: for they had themselves also been created by Sharon the Evil One, just as had been the Thing®. Theirs was a like substance. The soldiers chanted:
Bring the Thing®!
Bring the Thing®!
We want the Thing®!
We want the Thing®!
As the defenders watched from the hill, King Kluk was carried to the front of the horde on his silver platform. ‘Chicken!’ called the front rank of elves and men, hoping to discomfort the Gobblin army with this aspersion upon their King’s courage. ‘Chicken!’ But the Gobblins only scowled and hissed, and the Gobblin King was brought closer.
He was armoured in the most splendid of Gobblin armour. White parchment overshoes, folded and cut with harsh curlicues, had been placed over his shoes to prevent the unclean blood of his enemies soiling the soles of his boots. His armour presented two enormous breastplates to the world, one on either side of his sternum, implying that his heroic chest was twice the size, twice as muscled, as lesser beings. The space between his armour and his skin had been crammed with herbage – grasses and herbs that possessed healing properties, such that should a blade pierce his skin their charm would lessen and close the wound. He carried a two-pronged killing pitchfork in one hand and a long-bladed knife in the other, both polished and glinting in the morning sunlight. As the ranks of Gobblins passed to allow his bearers to carry him forward, the soldiers chanted his name in an ecstasy of excitement.
Kluk! Great Kluk!
Kluk! Kluk! Kluk!
Kluk! Kluk! Kluk!
Gre-eeat Great Kulk!
Kluk! Kluk! Kluk!
And so on.
‘Archers!’ called Elsqare. The hilltop silence was broken by a whittlish sound, as a hundred bowstrings were drawn back in unison.
‘Fire,’ said Elsqare. And a hundred arrows shot into the sky, and arced their deadly hail upon the Gobblins.
The horde roared, and surged forward.
And so the battle of the Famous Five Armies began.
Bingo’s memory of the battle would always, afterwards, have a number of gaps in it. He would never forget that first charge of the enemy, and the burning, desperate sense of panic that it created in his torso all the way from his hips to his throat. Neither would he forget the first of the fighting, as the fore-guard of Gobblins, the fearsome Uruk-Low, came sprinting up the hillside on their ungainly legs. To the right elves brought down their swords in a coordinated sweep, cutting into the advancing wave; to the left, men thrust and parried. In the middle, dwarf axes swept up and down in a pendulum motion, catching little patches of sunshine on their blades at the highest point of the swing until the iron was too blackened with Gobblin blood. And he would never forget his first taste of fighting: running underneath an elvish swordsman’s legs, hacking and stabbing with the sword, and cutting into the side of a Gobblin head. Bingo’s blade bit deep, and the Gobblin squealed and jerked, but as he fell he drew Bingo down after him because the sword had jammed in the skull. Bingo tumbled forward and collapsed on the corpse, trying to lever the sword out of the Gobblin’s bone. After what seemed an age Bingo got the thing free, with a wrench that caused him to stagger backwards. He paused and looked around him, and his heart seemed to fail in his breast. Gobblins were everywhere he looked, jabbing with their pikes, swinging their maces and their notched blades; men and elves fought bravely, but, like outcroppings of rock in a stormy and poisoned sea, they were beset on all sides. A gobblin bounced into Bingo’s line of sight, his wicked little eyes glancing left and right, his red wattle swinging from his grisly neck. Bingo swung his sword.
But he could not remember what happened after that. There was a series of disconnected memories: of Gofur struggling with a mass of Gobblins, two hanging on each of his arms, and two on each of his legs. Bingo ran at the mass, trying to cut the creatures away. Then he remembered running in a different direction, trying to keep up with a party of elves. He remembered seeing the blue sky scratched and stitched over and again with ceiling after ceiling of arrows. He remembered seeing decapitated Gobblins sprinting with extraordinary vigour in random directions. He remembered seeing a mannish warrior struck in the small of his back with a long pike, forced along by three Gobblins, and seeing the jagged head of the weapon erupt from the man’s chest. Other than that it was all a maelstrom of indistinct memories: the smell of blood, the terrible weariness in his arms that told him he could barely lift his sword again, and the insistent fear in his head that compelled him to lift his sword anyway; the sight of rush and counter-rush, of blade colliding with shield, and always the whizz and thrumming fall of storms and storms of arrows in the air overhead. Bingo thrust his sword into the chest of a Gobblin soldier, and the blade squeaked as it sank home.
The next clear memory in Bingo’s head was of himself standing, panting, next to Lord Elsqare and Mori and two dozen warriors, men and elves. They were no longer on the hills flanking the front door. Under the pressu
re of the Gobblin advance the four armies had retreated, and now they had taken up positions on the mountainside itself, to the west of the main entrance. Bingo could not remember the actual retreat; but now here they all were.
‘How goes it, Master Soddit?’ Elsqare asked. ‘Warm work?’
‘Blimey,’ said Bingo, which was his way of agreeing.
‘My lord!’ called a subaltern, a man splattered with blood and dirt, with a deep wound in his forehead. ‘My lord, the Gobblins are swarming up the eastern flank of the mountain. I fear they will clamber over the main gate, and come down on us from above.’
‘A grim prospect,’ said Elsqare. ‘If they can establish a position up there, then we are doomed. Archers!’ he called. ‘The gate!’
Those archers still alive took up position, and began firing arrows at the Gobblins that were scurrying along the mighty door lintel of the front gate. Bingo could see the danger. Once a large enough party crossed this narrow ledge, they would possess the higher slopes of the mountain, and could rain down weapons, boulders, anything upon the defenders beneath. His heart burning in his chest, Bingo watched the archers at work; but although their darts flew accurately, and although many Gobblins fell from above the door to the ground far beneath, yet still there were too many of the creatures to be killed in this manner, and droves of them were reaching the upper slopes.
Bingo’s next memory was from much later in the day. He could not say what happened in the intervening time, except that he looked around and noticed that the sun was lower in the western sky, and that he felt much, much more tired – more tired than he had ever felt before. His sword was dented and chipped along its cutting edge, and was smeared with black blood. A huge Gobblin, cleaver-wielding, ran at him, and Bingo half ducked, half fell out of the way, heaving round with his sword, cutting into the creature’s neck from behind. His arm was so weary that it burned with a fierce pain. The muscles threatened to disobey his mind every time he ordered them to move. He could hardly grip the handle.