Kendermore

by Mary Kirchoff

  “—whoever owns that boat made the pulley job!” Tas finished for him. “They had to get up here somehow, and I’ll bet they used the pulleys. We could use their equipment to go up and down the cliff!”

  “Exactly,” said Woodrow.

  “Pulley job! Pulley job!” screamed Fondu, jumping up and down beneath the Cyprus tree.

  “Wait just one minute,” Gisella said, refusing to get caught up in the excitement so easily. “Do we have enough people to lower a swinging wagon six hundred feet? And do you think we could then load the wagon onto the ship and sail it away?”

  “Maybe,” Woodrow said. “But I don’t think we should. That would be stealing.”

  “It wouldn’t be stealing!” Tas disagreed. “We would just be borrowing it. They’re not using it now, and we don’t know when they’ll be back. When will they be back, Fondu?”

  “Two day,” the gully dwarf said simply, holding up four fingers.

  “How long have they been gone?” Gisella asked.

  “Two day.” He held up all his fingers.

  Gisella, Tas, and Woodrow looked at each other.

  “How many of you are there?”

  Fondu looked at the dozens of gully dwarves and smiled broadly. “Two.”

  “Oh, boy,” breathed Woodrow.

  “We don’t seem to be getting any real information out of this,” drawled Gisella. “Woodrow, you’re good at technical things. What would we need to do this ‘pulley job’?”

  Woodrow squatted on his haunches and poked at the ground with a stick, scratching lines at random on the slate. Within moments, all of the gully dwarves were down on their haunches, scratching and doodling on the rock in imitation of the human. Tas was enormously amused and strolled among the pondering gully dwarves.

  Gisella stood over the human with her arms folded expectantly. “Well?”

  After a minute or two, Woodrow tossed his head back and looked up at Gisella. “Ma’am, I figure we’ll need the pulleys there in the tree, at least four thousand feet of rope, and for muscle, the team of horses—plus about a dozen good men. But that’s just a guess,” he added modestly.

  Looking somber, the gully dwarves all nodded their heads in agreement, pointing at each others’ scratchings and chattering among themselves.

  Gisella threw her arms into the air. “Well, I guess that’s that. We don’t have a dozen good anything, and we certainly don’t have four thousand feet of rope. If I didn’t have so many steel pieces tied up in those rotting melons, I’d push the wagon off the cliff myself and smash that lousy boat into splinters.” She flopped down on the ledge where she stood, her chin in her hands.

  Tasslehoff skipped back to the sullen Gisella. “As far as muscle is concerned,” he said, “we’ve got all the gully dwarves we could ever want.”

  “And how many is that?” Gisella quipped. “Two?”

  “I know they’re not much to look at and they don’t smell very nice, but I’m sure they’d be willing to help,” prodded Tas. “After all, this was Fondu’s idea.”

  Fondu grinned broadly. “We glad to heave-ho. Heave-hoing fun! We heave-ho lots for funny men. ‘Heeeeave ho’,” he mimicked, drawing on an imaginary rope.

  “That’s very nice, Fondu,” Gisella said flatly. “Now I don’t suppose you can tell us where to find four thousand feet of rope, can you?”

  The gully dwarf’s chest swelled with pride. “Fondu have rope. Big rope. Pulley rope. I show pretty-hair lady.”

  The three travelers stared at Fondu, then looked at each other. “You don’t suppose,” mouthed Gisella.

  “Funny men hide pulley rope,” explained Fondu, “but Fondu find it. Me smell rope, my nose smell big.”

  Gisella batted her eyelashes at Fondu. “And would you show me where it is?”

  Fondu grabbed Gisella’s hand and yanked her to her feet, nearly tripping himself in his excitement. “Come come come!” he shouted, dragging the object of his infatuation behind. Tasslehoff and Woodrow ran behind the stumbling pair, followed by a tumbling, sweating mass of gully dwarves.

  Fondu led the pack to an enormous, hollow tree not quite five hundred feet from the edge of the cliff. With a quick scramble, he was up on the lowest branch, and then disappeared through a basket-sized hole into the tree. His fuzzy head reappeared moments later, and he thrust the end of a coarse hemp rope back out through the opening.

  “See?” he shouted. “Pulley rope! You no worry, pretty lady,” Fondu said, petting Gisella’s hair. She batted his hand away, shivering.

  In a moment, Tasslehoff was up the tree and had stuck his head through the hole for a look. When he pulled it back, he was grinning from ear to ear.

  “The entire tree is full of rope!” he gushed. “Coils and coils of rope! I’ve never seen so much rope in my life, except maybe on the docks at Port Balifor. Wow! I wish my Uncle Trapspringer was here to see this.”

  Gisella clapped her hands and rubbed the palms together. “All right, crew, it looks like we’ve got ourselves a pulley job.”

  * * * * *

  It took the dozen gully dwarves three and a half hours to drag all the rope out of the tree and arrange it in two orderly lines leading away from the cypress tree. Meanwhile, using a small length of rope from the wagon to practice with, Woodrow figured out how the pulleys had to be set up. When the longer rope was ready, he rigged two stout loops of rope around the wagon, one lashed to the front axle and the other to the rear axle. All of that was simpler than explaining the system to Gisella.

  “We connect the two single pulleys to the ropes around the wagon. The two double pulleys are connected to the overhanging branch of the tree. You’ve got that part, right?”

  Gisella nodded. “Of course. I’m not dense.” But darned if she understood it anyway!

  “We used to rig up a hoist like this on my cousin’s farm when I was a boy,” Woodrow said.

  The dwarf, who was now wearing a simple, green working outfit and leather gloves, sat down on the wagon next to Woodrow. She looked at the wagon, then up at the pulleys, and then back at the wagon. “This is everything I own, Woodrow. Are you sure?”

  Woodrow looked up. “Reasonably sure, Miss Hornslager.”

  Gisella glanced up at the pulleys again and contemplated the mass of ropes connecting them to the tree, and the wagon to them. Her gaze moved on to include the ropes that had been strung to several boulders to anchor the tree. Then she cleared her throat.

  “I haven’t had much practice trusting people,” she said to Woodrow. “The few times I’ve tried it, it hasn’t worked out too well, personally or financially. I don’t have a lot of choice here, though. If we go south, I’m ruined by the delay. If we go down the cliff—well, maybe I’m ruined and maybe I’m not. It sounds like a plan to me. Fondu! Where’s Fondu?”

  The gully dwarf tumbled out of a knot of his fellows that were wrestling over someone’s grimy cap. “Fondu here,” he announced. “You ready for pulley job?”

  A pair of hands reached out of the melee and hauled Fondu back into the writhing mass before Gisella could answer. Careful not to get too close, Gisella approached the pile of gully dwarves and, cupping her hands around her mouth, shouted, “Fondu! Line them up! Line them up!”

  Several seconds later, Fondu kicked and swatted his way out again and began hauling gully dwarves out of the fracas. Within minutes, everyone was sorted and lined up along the two ropes, which stretched over a quarter of a mile away from the cliff. Gisella reviewed her company, replete with bloody noses, blackened eyes, and swollen lips. No sooner did she turn her back than someone pushed someone else and the whole fray began over again until Woodrow collared the two troublemakers and held them at arm’s length.

  “All right, Woodrow,” Gisella instructed, “you’re in charge of the ropes. With one horse and six gully dwarves on each, you should be able to lower the wagon nice and easy. Let’s have that as our slogan today, shall we? ‘Nice and easy.’ Can everyone say that?”

  A ragged chor
us of “nice and easy,” or variations on it, rippled up and down the two lines of gully dwarves.

  “Right,” said Gisella. “And Tas, you and your six husky lads have the guy lines. Your job is to guide the wagon off the edge …” Gisella’s throat constricted slightly on the words “… and then steady it as much as you can on the way down.”

  For a moment, everyone looked at everyone else. Then Gisella winked at Tas and Tas kicked away the stone that was blocking the wagon’s wheel. Slowly, guided by Tas, the six Aghar on the guy lines rolled the wagon toward the edge of the cliff. Meanwhile, Woodrow, who had three times as many gully dwarves to control and therefore three times as many problems, struggled to keep the lines taut through the pulleys.

  Gisella’s breath caught in her throat as the front wheels of the wagon dropped over the edge. The ropes on the forward pulley snapped tight at once, and the tree bobbed up and down. With its forward wheels suspended over six hundred feet of nothing, the gully dwarves inched the wagon ahead.

  Gisella’s heart was pounding. The wagon, the tree, the gully dwarves, all swam in front of her. Then the rear wheels of the wagon crunched across the brink, and the vehicle dropped six inches, swaying to and fro. The gully dwarves on the guy lines squealed and dug their heels into the packed dirt under the tree as the weight of the wagon, swinging out into line beneath the pulleys, dragged them toward the cliff. Gisella’s hand shot out to a nearby boulder to steady her balance, and her knees chattered together like teeth.

  “Hold on, hold on!” cried Tas, latching onto one of the guy lines. He realized then that the gully dwarves were squealing with delight, like children at a spook show. As the wagon reached its equilibrium the dwarves stopped sliding and the noise died down. Gisella swayed slightly, but was relieved that she was still on her feet. The wagon swung gently on its ropes, twisting slightly in the breeze.

  “OK,” said Gisella, swallowing a lump. “OK, that wasn’t too bad.” Cupping her hands to her mouth, she hollered, “Now, Woodrow, start letting it down. ‘Nice and easy,’ remember?”

  “Lice and squeezies,” grunted the dwarves in no particular unison. With a hand on each of the horses’ bridles, Woodrow started walking them backward toward the cliff. After the first twenty-five feet, Woodrow could no longer see the wagon and had to rely on Tas to guide him from above, where he lay on a limb in the tree, watching to make sure the ropes glided smoothly through the pulleys.

  “OK … OK … slow it down a little … the back end is a little high … oops, now the back is a little low … still low … no, the back is low … the back, the back!”

  Gisella sprinted to the cliff. “What’s happening?” she screamed, and then she spied the wagon, about one hundred feet down the cliff. One of the lines of gully dwarves had gotten ahead of the other. The front end of the wagon was at least four feet higher than the back, and still rising. “It’s all cockeyed!” she shrieked, flailing her arms. “I can hear bottles breaking! Straighten it out! Straighten it out!”

  But the gully dwarves, who had no concept of what was happening, continued their erratic march to the sea. In desperation, Woodrow let go of the slower horse’s bridle and was hauling vainly on the faster-moving horse, trying to slow it down. Unfortunately the other horse, with no one guiding it forward, stopped in its tracks.

  The wagon lurched suddenly as something inside it broke free and crashed into the back wall. Gisella clapped her hands over her ears when a second crash echoed up the cliff face, then frantically slapped them over her eyes as the wagon’s door flew open and a potpourri of melons, cushions, and personal items tumbled out of the doorway. Everything she owned spiraled, for what seemed to Gisella like an eternity, down the hundreds of feet to the sea.

  By now, the wagon was hanging almost vertically. The door flapped in the breeze with one of Gisella’s nightshirts, caught on the latch, waving like a flag of truce. Within moments, Woodrow brought the advancing horse and gully dwarves to a halt and raced back to the stationary line, then advanced it so the lines were again even. All this was accompanied by even more smashing and tinkling from below. Each crash made Woodrow wince, each tinkle made Gisella bite deeper into her lip.

  Finally, Tas announced from above that the wagon was level again.

  Pecring down at Gisella, he called, “Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounded.” But when he saw her vacant stare fixed on the horizon, he gave it up. He shouted to Woodrow, “OK, try it again. You don’t have to be too careful, I don’t think there’s much left inside.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gisella’s face twitch.

  Once again the wagon started down the cliff in jerks and fits. Gisella no longer watched. Instead, she had positioned herself on an exposed tree root and was reciting a disjointed monologue that had more numbers than words in it. She was obviously trying to determine how she would recoup her losses of the last minutes.

  “Slow it down, slow it down,” Tasslehoff warned as the wagon neared the ground.

  Woodrow was glad that the red-haired dwarf wasn’t watching when he was unable to appreciably slow the wagon’s momentum in the last one hundred feet. The gully dwarves clawed and tugged at the rope to little avail. The human could feel it in the ropes when the wagon landed with a heavy ‘thump!’ far below. He squinted up at Tas through one eye.

  “Boy, what a landing!” the kender breathed. “The wheels look a little bowed out, but I think the wagon is OK.”

  Woodrow heaved a sigh and sagged against one of the horses.

  Tasslehoff spotted Gisella. Climbing down from the tree, he approached her cautiously. “Well, it’s on the shore,” he said unceremoniously. “I guess I’ll shinny down one of the ropes and unhook the pulleys so we can lower the horses and you and everyone who’s going.”

  Gisella nodded her head and inhaled deeply. Tas took that as approval and hiked back to the tree.

  Woodrow was waiting for him. “How is Miss Hornslager?” he asked.

  “I think she’ll be all right,” said Tas. “She just needs to rest for a while. I think it was the nightshirt on the door latch that did her in. It’s too bad you missed it, Woodrow. Stuff was flying everywhere. Boy, what a sight!”

  “She’ll never talk to me again,” Woodrow moaned. “I wouldn’t blame her if she fired me and left me stranded here with these gully dwarves. I don’t know how I’d ever get home then.”

  “I could leave you a map,” offered Tas. Woodrow blanched. The kender began tightening his belts, equipment, and pouches in preparation for his climb. “Anyway, it wasn’t your fault,” he added. “I’m sure Gisella won’t blame you. She’s just feeling lowly. That seems to be sort of common with dwarves. Apparently they can’t help themselves. Whenever my friend Flint gets depressed, there’s no cheering him up until he feels like being cheered up.”

  Stripped to his tunic, belt, leggings, and shoes, Tas was ready to climb. He snaked across the branch to the pulleys and then swung down onto a rope.

  “Good luck,” called Woodrow.

  “You, too,” replied Tas with a wave as he started the long slide to the boat, six hundred feet below.

  Chapter 8

  Wilbur Froghair was on the deserted, cobbled street in front of his grocery shop at dawn, preparing for the early morning rush. The carrots and onions were in place on the vegetable carts and he was about to turn the rotten spots down on the two-day-old tomatoes when he noticed the body slumped in the bench before the haberdashery next door.

  His first concern was for the human’s health. Carefully holding one of his small hands before the middle-aged man’s nose, the kender was reassured by the even breathing. The man looked like he’d had a bad night. He wore a hat that was too small for his balding head, his pockets were turned inside out, the knee of his breeches was ripped, and his face had a layer of street dust on it. But what the kender saw next made him almost more concerned than before.

  The perfectly good leather boot on the man’s right foot lay carelessly in a puddle.

  “He sho
uld be more careful with his possessions,” Wilbur mumbled. “That very nice boot is going to get wet, and then shrivel up like an old, dried currant. I certainly can’t sit by and watch that happen.” With that, the kender crept forward and gingerly lifted the man’s calf, slipping the boot from his foot. “I’ll just keep it nice and dry in my shop,” Wilbur whispered to himself, satisfied with his good deed. It was such a nice boot, in fact, that he decided it really deserved to be kept very safe indeed in the big, locked tin box under his grocery counter. He was about to take the other boot to maintain the pair, when the man stirred in his sleep. Wilbur tiptoed quietly into his shop, holding one boot.

  Phineas Curick drifted half out of sleep, thinking that his foot felt cold. He tried to ignore the sensation because he knew his body would ache from top to bottom if he woke up fully. But when he realized his foot probably felt cold because it was also wet, he awoke abruptly.

  The bone! He’d placed another rat bone in one of his boots to sell to Trapspringer in exchange for the rest of the map. He fished around frantically in his left boot and sighed with relief. The rat bone was still safely tucked away.

  Disaster narrowly averted, Phineas was dismayed but not at all surprised to realize, too, that his other boot was missing. He saw his pockets sticking out and remembered that he had run through or lost all his money yesterday. He felt a headache coming on, as if someone had tied an overly tight band around his head. Reaching a hand up, he realized someone had done just that. His own hat was gone, replaced by a small, ratty-looking cap with a hole in the back, presumably for a topknot.

  Kendermore was the kind of city in which a person could spend his entire life—or a number of years, as in Phineas’s case—without ever leaving his own neighborhood. Everything he needed was near his home. When the human had come to Kendermore some years before, he had made his home in the first neighborhood he landed in. In the meantime, Phineas had forgotten how thoroughly confusing the city was.