by Tom Holt
The king was gazing at him with a mixture of loathing and deep curiosity. “I know that, do I?”
“Of course you do. But you need me to spell it out, so I can prove I’m your intellectual equal. Well, here we go.” The little man folded his hands in his lap and beamed. “You’re perfectly well aware that gold is no longer the real currency around here, straw is. It can’t have escaped your attention that the princes of the West are locked in a desperate bidding war with each other to get every last stalk of straw they can lay their hands on. Which means,” he continued, “that even as we speak, human ploughmen are ploughing up every last headland, roadside verge, mountain ledge, sand dune and window box with a view to sowing wheat, which will in due course produce straw, which I will then turn into gold. What you’ve realised, the true essence of the situation, which you’ve grasped like an eagle swooping on a dove, is that gold and straw are now essentially the same thing; which is to say, gold is now basically a finished form of straw, the end of an industrial-economic process that starts with a grain of seed and ends with a coin. Isn’t that right?”
“Well, yeah. Stands to reason.”
“Indeed. And furthermore, you’ve zeroed in on the most important fact of all, namely that straw has a by-product, namely wheat. As in grains of. As in the stuff you make bread out of and feed to livestock. Of which, come harvest, there’s going to be an awful lot. Mountains of it.”
The king frowned. “You mean food.”
The little man snapped his fingers and pointed at the king, who was too preoccupied to be affronted by the gesture. “Precisely,” the little man said. “Far more food than the humans will be able to consume themselves, though if I know them they’ll have a damn good try. But even so, there’ll be masses of it left over, which nobody will want. They’ll be practically giving it away. So when you come along and make them an offer for it, they’ll be all over you. Result; they get some of their worthless gold back, you get all the food you want cheap, and everybody’s happy.”
There was a long silence, as the merits of this argument soaked into the king’s brain like puppy-wee into an expensive carpet. “Yeah, but there’s another thing,” the king said.
“Of course there is.”
The king looked at him, then went on, “If the idiot humans keep buying weapons and armour and stuff off us, quite soon they’ll have loads of weapons and masses of armour and there’ll be the most god-awful war, and they’ll wipe each other out, and then there won’t be anybody left to grow our food. And that’d be really bad.”
The little man pursed his lips, and for a moment the king felt something akin to panic, in case he’d missed something obvious and was about to prove he wasn’t as smart as the little man thought he was. “Not bad?” he queried.
“Not bad,” the little man said.
“Right.” The king thought for a moment, and the effort was like carrying an anvil in each arm and another one on his head. “Because the princes don’t want to go to war, because they want all their men out in the fields, growing wheat to turn into straw.”
The little man smiled kindly. “Of course,” he said. “You knew that. And you know precisely why, when the harvest’s in and the princes don’t need the men for farm work any more, they won’t then proceed to enlist all those men into the army and start a war.” He paused. “You do know that, don’t you?”
“Course I do,” the king said, and then his face went blank. “Perfectly obvious.”
“Quite,” the little man said. “It’s perfectly obvious that as soon as the princes realise that they’ve got masses and masses of the latest deadly weapons and so have all their neighbours, it’ll occur to them that the only possible outcome of a war would be that they’d exterminate each other, and nobody would win.”
“I knew that.”
“I know you did. You also know that they’ll realise that the only way anybody could hope to win a war would be if one side got hold of even newer, better, deadlier weapons. So they’ll keep on buying new ones, just to make sure the others don’t get ahead of them in the arms race—”
“The what?”
The little man paused for a moment. “It’s an expression,” he said, “which I’ve only just thought of. It means you see that the prince next door has just bought ten thousand new improved crossbows with horn-and-sinew bows and improved lock mechanisms, so you go right out and buy fifteen thousand crossbows with steel bows and even better lock mechanisms, whereupon your neighbour—”
“I get the idea,” said the king. “I mean, I’d already got it, but you just said what I thought of ages ago.”
“Of course. Anyway, all the princes will keep on buying more and more stuff, which means your people will be kept busy for ever and ever.”
“Exactly. You took the words right out of my mouth there.”
“And they’ll tell themselves,” the little man went on, “and anybody else who’ll listen, that they’re not buying all this stuff for fighting humans with anyway, it’s all just to scare the goblins so they won’t dare to attack–which is true, because the goblins will be terrified, understandably enough; at which point—” The little man paused. “But that’s enough from me,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what happens after that?”
That’s the thing about thinking. It’s like falling out of a window. Once you start, it’s actually quite hard to stop. The king furrowed his brow, crumpling it the way tectonic shift once created mountains. After a long, long time, he suddenly smiled. “At which point,” he repeated.
“Yes?”
“You start spinning straw for the goblins.”
Archie’s head hurt, and a drowsy numbness pained his sense, as though of bourbon he had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the dregs. Also his tongue felt like sandpaper, his mouth was full of foul-tasting glue and his right arm had gone to sleep where he’d been lying on it. His mind was a total blank. Make it stop, he thought, make it stop. What it was in this context he wasn’t sure, though if pressed on the point he’d probably have said life.
“How are you feeling?” someone asked.
He opened his eyes. “Ouch,” he said, and closed them again.
The voice, which was male, deep and friendly, laughed. “Sorry about that,” it said. “I expect you’re feeling rotten. It’s that damn sedative. We had to give you rather a lot, because of you being a goblin. And it’s your poor frail human body that has to carry the can. Life can be so unfair.”
The hell with the pain, and the murderous brightness of light. Archie opened his eyes again, and saw a lot of people. Men mostly; they were the ones with the guns. The women were nearly all in white coats. Talking of which, why did the room have to be so very glaringly white and so very, very brightly lit?
“I know,” said the voice. “Bloody, isn’t it?”
The voice turned out to belong to a short, round bald man, sitting in a chair directly in front of him. Everybody else was standing, which was probably highly significant. “I’d offer you an aspirin,” the bald man went on, “but you should see what that stuff does to goblin intestinal tracts. Of course, your insides are probably human, but we can’t be sure without taking them out and looking at them under a microscope, and I told them, you can’t do that, he hasn’t finished with them yet.” He smiled pleasantly. “Sometimes they just don’t think things through.”
At last Archie’s survival instincts started to kick in. “Who are you? Where is this? What have you done to me? I was on a date.”
“Alas.” The bald man looked very sad. “I have to tell you, the course of true love isn’t running as smooth as it could be in your case.” He leaned forward a little and lowered his voice. “She doesn’t actually fancy you at all,” he said. “Sorry about that.”
Archie looked up and saw that the men with guns were trying to look properly sympathetic. “That’s all right,” he said, “I didn’t like her much either. I was only—”
“Researching non-parthenogenetic reproduction for a f
riend, I know.” The bald man grinned. “Good old Kurt. I’m amazed anyone ever falls for that, but they do, all the time.”
One of the gunmen shook his head sadly. A woman in a white coat sniggered, then looked embarrassed. “Who are you?” Archie said.
The bald man sat back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. “Now that,” he said, “is a very good question.”
Efluviel smiled and pointed.
The broad sweep of her outstretched arm encompassed a panorama practically unmatched in the whole of the Middle Realms. Directly ahead loomed the three peaks that mark the highest point of the mighty Taupe range; Clordarf, Simithoel and Old Big Pointy. Around their summits mist swirled like a bridal veil, although the midday sun was searingly bright. “Mountains,” she said.
Mordak dragged himself the last few yards and dropped at her feet. “You what?”
“Mountains.”
“Really. So what were those things we just came up?”
“Foothills.”
“Oh God.” Mordak struggled out of the rucksack straps, stretched out on his back and shaded his eyes with his forearm. “It’s not fair,” he said. “I’m the king. I shouldn’t have to do this.”
“Don’t whine,” Efluviel said without looking round. “And we’re not stopping. We need to be right down in the valley by nightfall.”
“Oh shut up.” Mordak closed his eyes. “My feet,” he said, “are killing me.”
“You’re such a slob,” Efluviel said, her eyes still fixed on the horizon. “A gentle stroll in the country—”
“Three days,” Mordak groaned. “Like the side of a house. I hate uphill. We goblins have a saying, down with up.”
“Rubbish. Mountains are your natural habitat.”
Mordak scowled at her without opening his eyes. “The insides of mountains are our natural habitat,” he pointed out. “Caves, caverns, mines, all that stuff. Nice level tunnels. Our legs aren’t designed for all this horrible climbing.”
“Do you good.” Efluviel took a biscuit from her pocket and nibbled it. “Get some of the fat off you.”
“I am not fat.”
“Over there,” Efluviel went on, indicating some arbitrary location in the mist. “That’s where we need to get to.”
Mordak risked opening one eye. “We can’t go there. There’s nothing to stand on. We’ll slide off.”
“Don’t be feeble. And stop squinting.”
“I’m nocturnal,” Mordak growled. “Bright light doesn’t agree with me.”
She gave him a typical Elf smile. “Ninety-nine per cent of the time, neither do I. But I put up with you, because I have a beautiful nature. Come on, porkchop, on your feet.”
“I am not—”
Efluviel was already twenty yards down the track. Mordak scrambled to his feet, snatched up the rucksack and hobbled after her. “Wait for me.”
“Why should I?”
Another thing Mordak regarded as unfair, though he hadn’t mentioned it because he suspected she’d only make fun of him, was that there should be such a colossal disparity between the proportions of up and down. It was hard to account for, if you believed at all in geometry, but he could attest to it from bitter experience. Three days to climb up the hill, one afternoon to climb down again. So where had all the rest of the down got to?
That night, as scheduled, they rested in the valley. Horribly bright and early they set off to follow the winding zigzag path that led all the way up to the snow-capped top of Clordarf, where the hermit lived. It was a very long way, and very, very steep. “Why aren’t you tired?” Mordak kept asking. “You ought to be worn out by now, I’m worn out, I’m a battle-hardened goblin warrior and you’re just an effete, decadent bloody Elf. I demand that you be tired immediately.”
“Wuss.”
“I am not a wuss. Can we stop now? Just for a bit?”
“If you talked a bit less, maybe you wouldn’t be out of breath all the time.”
The last two hours were probably the worst. Goblins, whose natural habitat is underground caverns, where the temperature is always just on the warm side of pleasantly mild, don’t do well in snow up to their knees. True, losing all feeling in his feet stopped them hurting, but the glare of the sun on the white, white snow seemed to bleach every last trace of intelligence out of his brain, and the cold-induced numbness still had a long way to go before it reached his knees, thighs and back. The worst thing of all, however, was Efluviel’s cheerful whistling.
“We’re here.”
“Wassa?”
“We’re here,” Efluviel repeated. “Look, you can just make out the mouth of his cave in the rock-face over there.”
“Ung.”
“There now.” Efluviel took a moment to pat a few stray strands of hair back into perfect place. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Uck oo.”
She turned and looked at him. “Oh for pity’s sake,” she said, “look at you, you’re a mess. How can you expect the hermit to take you seriously in that state? And stop wheezing, for crying out loud. It’s embarrassing.”
“Tired.”
“Nonsense.”
Ahead of them was a level plateau, about fifty yards across, before you reached the sheer face of the mountainside. Mordak’s woefully light-abused eyes could just make out a darker patch, about the size you’d expect a cave mouth to be. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t like this.”
“You seem not to like a great many things. Hence the whining.”
“I know caves,” Mordak said stubbornly. “I have instincts. That’s not a good place.”
“Chicken.”
“I am not—”
“You’re afraid. Admit it.”
She took a few steps toward the cliff. Mordak stayed resolutely where he was. She paused and looked back at him. “Oh come on,” she said. “You’re a goblin. Goblins don’t know the meaning of fear.”
“I don’t know the meaning of half the words in the dictionary. That doesn’t make me a bad person.”
“Don’t be silly. Look, there’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a cave, right?”
Mordak folded his arms. “We goblins have another saying,” he said. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself and scary things. That,” he added firmly, “is a scary thing. You go.”
Efluviel hesitated. On the one hand, Mordak had a point–two, if you counted the top of his head. Goblins knew caves, that was undeniable, and if Mordak reckoned there was something wrong, there was a good chance he knew what he was talking about. On the other hand–that would be the hand she’d cheerfully bite off at the wrist rather than squander such an opportunity as this for putting the loathsome little upstart in his place. “With pleasure,” she said. “You go and hide somewhere, if you can find a biggish crevice you can squeeze into—”
“I am not f—”
“And when you get bored of cowering you can come in and join me. So long.”
She walked away, her heels crunching in the snow. Mordak looked round and found a deep fissure in the rock, just wide enough for a goblin–a thin one, like himself–to hunker down in. He crawled into it and hunkered. Efluviel had reached the cave mouth; she went in and disappeared. Silly cow, Mordak thought. Some people just don’t listen.
He hunkered a bit more. The wind was getting up, and iron-grey clouds were sailing in from the far side of the mountains. Obviously what they should have done, what they would have done if she hadn’t insisted on flouncing off like that, was work their way cautiously round the side of the plateau so as to approach the cave from its blind side; then, waiting till nightfall, edge their way even more cautiously to the cave mouth and wait there for an hour or so in case they saw or heard anything, before creeping inside a few yards at a time while maintaining a clear escape route. But no. Charge in where goblins fear to tread. And he wasn’t fat.
Time passed, and the hunkering started to tell on Mordak’s knees. Big chunky gobbets of snow drifted down and covered his should
ers like dandruff. He was shivering, and it wasn’t fear. She’d been gone over an hour, probably closer to two. He didn’t know what to make of that. She might be dead, or dying, or dangling captive in the web of a giant spider. Or she could be sitting by the hermit’s fire drinking tea and toasting crumpets. If she’d got herself into trouble, she’d have screamed–a screamer if ever he saw one, first sign of danger and she’d be yelling the place down. Assuming, of course, that she’d seen the danger coming which, being an Elf rather than a goblin, she almost certainly wouldn’t have. So, Mordak thought, either she’s in there in the warm and dry or she’s in desperate peril and I suppose I’ve got to go and save her.
He blinked.
I suppose I’ve got to go and save her. That was hero stuff; where in the Dark Lord’s name had that come from, all of a sudden? That was what you got for associating with Elves and freezing your claws off on mountain-tops; eventually the brain goes, the instincts decay, the moral fibre turns to mush, the categorical imperatives gurgle away down the U-bend and you might as well be dead. Worse still, you might as well be human. The hell with all this, Mordak told himself. I’m going to go in there and bite something. It’s my only hope.
Feeling incredibly stupid, he got up and walked across the plateau. The cave mouth–he could see why they called them that, it did look just like a big, wide-open mouth, just waiting to gobble him up. Inside it was pitch dark, even for goblin eyes. Oh poo, he thought, and plunged in.
He couldn’t see a damn thing, but he could smell–what? Definitely a food sort of smell, which served to remind him that he hadn’t eaten anything but dry biscuits for a week, thank you so much, but with overtones of mildew, sweat and some strong, volatile chemical. Wonderful. His feet registered a smooth stone floor. Big deal, it’s a cave. Onwards.
And onwards he went, until he walked into something. It was soft, and gave way. It squeaked.
“Efluviel?” he whispered. “Is that you?”
“Mmm.”