The Elfin Ship

by James P. Blaylock

  ‘Sounds a bit like what you’d call inspiration,’ said the Professor helpfully.

  ‘Oh it is that,’ Yellow Hat agreed. ‘It’s that in a nutshell. And you never know when it might strike. Watch this.’ The linkman stepped off to the side a bit and a gleam appeared in his eye. ‘Hark! Ye late rising tornadoes that doth from the sea foam spring! Do ye shout now of this and that? Do ye rage of things foul in the heart of the Goblin Wood? Do ye blow, ye foul hermitage, full-throated like some great beast afoot – ’ He was striding back and forth at this point, one hand pressed to his head and the other flailing wildly. Dooly stood amazed. The Professor nodded seriously, and Jonathan was afraid the linkman was overdoing it a bit. ‘Like some great beast afoot in –. Where the devil is he afoot?’ Yellow Hat asked his companion.

  ‘In the halls of stone?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘in the land of the mig-weed?’

  ‘I won’t stand for your jokes!’ shouted Yellow Hat, and he gave his companion a look. ‘Like some great tramping beast – ‘ he went on, striding about lost in his poetry.

  Jonathan was wondering aloud whether the line he searched for might not suggest itself during breakfast, having heard food recommended highly by G. Smithers of Brompton Village. The linkman in the green cap agreed and set about spreading silverware around the cloths. He seemed to think that ‘in the land of the mig-weed’ was a pretty significant contribution to the poem which was progressing up a small hill nearby, and muttered as much under his breath once or twice.

  The words, ‘Some great slippery beast,’ could be heard from atop the little hill where Yellow Hat had settled down to compose. But further lines were interrupted by the arrival of the two who had been advancing along the road. The pyramidal linkman was devouring what looked to be a loaf of rye bread.

  ‘Squire!’ shouted Green Hat. ‘Let me take your basket, Squire!’ The Squire was apparently hard of hearing. He continued to grip the basket and to tuck into the loaf of rye. ‘There we are, Stick-a-bush!’ cried Green Hat. ‘You’ve let the Squire carry the bread, haven’t you, and it’s half gone. You know the Squire was to carry only plates and cups.’

  ‘He said he wouldn’t have no plates,’ replied poor Stick-a-bush. ‘He said he only wanted to peek at the bread to check it for mold. Then he snatched it up and said it was his. Said he was fairly sure the bread was poisoned and would eat of it to see. Then he wouldn’t give it back but must sample every loaf to be sure, and he ate and ate and ate all the way along the river road. That’s the truth, Mr Bufo, the honest truth.’

  Mr Bufo, the green-hatted poet, tried to pry the Squire’s fingers from the handle of the basket. ‘Squire Myrkle!’ he shouted. ‘We must save the bread. There are hungry people here. Squire, let me introduce you to these fine raftsmen. That’s right, you can lay the basket there on the cloth.’ Bufo tugged on the basket, but the Squire, with a faraway look about him, seemed glued to it. ‘Right there on the cloth, Squire. This is Mr Bing, Squire, the cheesemaker, and this is Professor Wurzle, the famed explorer. And this is Mr Dooly, whose grandfather you’re familiar with.’

  Jonathan was taken aback by the comment. The Professor had a shrewd look in his eye, as if he suspected this was evidence of more things abroad in the land. Dooly began to say something about his grandfather, but didn’t get much of it out before Bufo began shouting at Squire Myrkle again as the Squire began to search through the bread basket.

  ‘Do you see that beast?’ cried Bufo into the Squire’s ear. ‘He’s made entirely of cheese!’

  The Squire dropped the basket of bread and lumbered along toward Ahab who, until then, had been lying very still. At the approach of Squire Myrkle, however, Ahab arose and stretched, alerting the Squire to the sad fact that he wasn’t, as rumor had it, made of cheese.

  The Squire sat down in the middle of the tablecloth and looked as if he were going to cry. Jonathan marveled at the fact that, aside from being considerably shorter, the Squire looked the same sitting as standing. ‘Cheese!’ shouted the Squire shaking his head sadly, whereupon Ahab wandered over and sniffed at him.

  ‘That’s it!’ came a cry from the hill, and Yellow Hat, Bufo’s poet companion came lurching down toward them in a sort of theatrical tragic stride shouting and gesturing. ‘Do ye blow, ye creeping beast, full-throated through the land of cheese?’

  ‘I rather like that,’ said Bufo. ‘Yes. It has a ring.’

  ‘I should say it has. Thank you, Squire, for the suggestion,’ said the Yellow Hat. ‘You’re a good man.’

  But compliments weren’t worth much to the Squire, who was patting Ahab absently on the head. ‘Cheese!’ he shouted. ‘A bit of cheese for the poor Squire. The poor languishing Squire cries out for cheese!’

  Jonathan was overwhelmed. Being the only Cheeser present, it seemed as if the Squire’s cries were directed toward him, and there was nothing to do but break into a cask and hoist out a cheese. ‘Here you are,’ said Jonathan, handing a chunk to the Squire, who nodded very civilly. ‘Thank you, my man.’ Turning to Ahab, he continued, ‘Good fellow, that. Always a cheese at hand for the Squire. The Squire will make him rich. The Squire will eat this cheese now.’ And the Squire did, sharing a bite now and again with Ahab. The two of them quickly became good friends. Dooly finally tramped over and had a bite himself, and the three of them made such a hearty show of it that for years after, Jonathan and the Professor looked back on that as the time Dooly and Ahab ate cheese with the Squire.

  The rest of the company joined in and set to with a will, saying little for a quarter of an hour as they tucked into breakfast. The wild berries were sweet and big as the Squire’s thumb and stained beards and faces purple. Loaves of bread, puffy and white, thick and dark, vanished as if by magic, and two of the remaining cheeses in the rafter’s keg followed suit. Jonathan was tempted to pry the lid from one of the kegs of raisin cheese, but he wisely decided otherwise. Those, after all, were for trade and weren’t, strictly speaking, his at all; not since Mayor Bastable had purchased them from him in the name of the people of Twombly Town that night before their departure.

  Linkmen, Jonathan noted, enjoyed eating even more than did the people of the high valley, amazing as that might seem; their conversation, what little there was of it, ran to comparisons of ales and porters and pies and pastries. The famous dwarf, Ackroyd the baker, was held to be the last word in baked goods – mainly because of his honeycakes – and even the linkmen had to admit that their own bakers, although extraordinary in their way, didn’t hold a candle to Ackroyd. Only Dooly, who most likely wasn’t aware of the extent of Ackroyd’s fame, contested the assumption that the dwarf baker was the major name in cakes. Dooly said that as far as he knew, there was a land among the Wonderful Isles where loaves of cinnamon bread sprouted from trees, and where a man might toss out all the crusts in the world without worrying about wasting food. So, at least, is what Grandpa had told him.

  Jonathan was a bit embarrassed for Dooly since tales of old Grandpa were perhaps too farfetched to be passed off on strangers as truths. Much to his surprise, however, the linkmen nodded in agreement, and Bufo pointed out in his poetic way that no loaf of bread made by a mortal could hope to compare with one from Mother Nature’s oven. Jonathan wasn’t sure if Bufo were being philosophic or diplomatic or if he actually believed in Dooly’s grandpa’s cinnamon-loaf trees, but it turned out in the end that it didn’t much matter. The conversation, in fact, changed direction abruptly when Bufo arose and wandered over to have a look at the remains of the raft.

  ‘Something’s gone wrong with your craft,’ Bufo said, poking at it with a bit of stick. ‘I wouldn’t sail this across the Squire’s mill pond, much less down the Oriel.’

  ‘Who’s sailing on my pond?’ asked the Squire, who was squeezing little round sections of blackberry, trying to shoot the seeds through a circle formed by the thumb and forefinger of his free hand. ‘They must ask me from now on before they sail on my pond. It’s all right thi
s once, but next time they’ll have to give me some marbles. And they shan’t chase my ducks again either.’

  Yellow Hat rolled his eyes and, winking at Jonathan, rotated a finger through the air around his ear. Bufo scowled at him then said to the Squire, ‘No one’s on the mill pond, Squire, nor has been since those filthy goblins cut up rough on your island last Saturday.’ The Squire shot a seed at him and jiggled with laughter.

  ‘Goblins,’ said the Squire, ‘haven’t any sense. Their heads are filled with webs and dust.’

  ‘Goblins is it?’ asked the Professor. ‘I don’t suppose you get many of them down your way. Too close to elf country, I’d think.’

  ‘None at all until a few weeks ago,’ replied Yellow Hat. ‘Since then they’ve been breaking up the orchards and sneaking into people’s houses at night to pour things into their shoes. A bunch of them went out punting on Myrkle Pond and set the Squire’s boat on fire. But that didn’t make ‘em half as warm as they were when the Squire got hold of ‘em.’

  ‘Good for the Squire!’ cried Jonathan.

  ‘Good for the Squire!’ shouted the Squire, shooting another seed at Bufo. ‘The Squire put them in the dungeon. Set them to cleaning fish.’

  ‘Just where they deserve to be,’ said the Professor. ‘But what about this raft, Mr Bufo? As you say, it’s in pitiful condition. All due to an unfortunate collision with a tree.’ And the Professor’s mind, of course, was whirling with ideas for patching up the old raft and sailing away.

  10

  Pickle Trickery

  The lot of them sat there for a time, the Squire occasionally squashing another berry. It was difficult for Jonathan to tell whether Bufo was concentrating on the problem of the ruined raft or was once again being smitten by poetic inspiration. The day had warmed up nicely by that time. It was warmer, in fact, than it had been for weeks, as if the storm had dragged any hint of poor weather away with it toward the sea. There would be pruning fires and autumn dances at Seaside for the next few nights, Jonathan was fairly sure. And if things hadn’t run quite so amok the previous afternoon, he and Dooly and the Professor would have sailed right into the midst of them.

  ‘It isn’t bad as all that, actually,’ said Bufo. ‘We’ll just pop down to Seaside – we’re heading that way anyway – and send the dwarfs upriver to rescue you and the kegs. A few days should do it. They won’t mind. Not much anyway. They’re cheerful sorts, really, dwarfs. For the most part. They may require a bit of a fee, however …’

  ‘Which we haven’t got,’ said Jonathan, ‘and besides, we don’t want to wait for a few days or get rescued by anyone. This is our problem. We promised to get these kegs to Seaside and we will.’

  ‘Hooray!’ shouted Dooly, very patriotically. ‘We’ll ride inside the kegs, Mr Cheeser, just like I did when I stowed away. Mr Bufo can put on the lids and push us into the river.’

  ‘Maybe so, Dooly, but then again maybe not. We’d likely sail through Seaside at night and wind up in the ocean, halfway to the Wonderful Isles. If we’re going to do that, we might as well just shove the kegs of cheese into the Oriel and walk down.’

  Addressing Bufo, the Professor asked, ‘How long would it take us to sail to Seaside from here, Mr Bufo? Two days?’

  ‘Just about,’ said Bufo. ‘The white water is pretty much behind you now. It would be a pleasant sail, in fact. And the first outpost is about a day away – an easy sail. Perhaps we could repair this raft.’

  The Professor nodded. ‘Just what I was thinking.’

  ‘And I,’ Jonathan chimed in. ‘We’ll use these kegs, just as Dooly said. If we can find a log clean enough to lash on to the bottom of the starboard side there where she broke in two, we can get her fairly level and raise the deck high enough to stay dry. Then we can tie the casks around the outside so as to have less weight on deck.’

  ‘And for the purposes of flotation,’ the Professor added. ‘We’ve plenty of line, and a bit of sail, so we can rig a lean-to to keep the wind off. If it rains though, we’re done for.’

  ‘Let’s get going then,’ said Jonathan, who was always happier doing almost anything than doing nothing. ‘Let’s patch her up while the weather holds.’

  Squire Myrkle seemed pleased with the whole idea. He rose slowly to his feet and lumbered toward the raft, Ahab following along behind. It occurred to Jonathan that the two looked like kindred souls. ‘We’d best drag the thing down to the water’s edge to work on it,’ Jonathan suggested. ‘And we’ll need to search for a good, straight log in the debris along the shore.’

  Dooly dashed off toward the Oriel along with Ahab, insisting that he knew where there was just such a log.

  Jonathan was pleased to find that the kegs which the Professor had towed to safety were roped together by the entirety of the extra two-hundred-foot length of line he’d insisted Mayor Bastable add to the provisions. The hundred-seventy-five odd feet dangling from the final keg had been neatly coiled and tied off and was, aside from being a bit on the muddy side, in perfect condition. They’d have enough and to spare. Among the ruins still attached or hanging from the halved raft was one wall of the cabin, knocked askew and splintered up, but with a dozen lengths of board fairly whole. The walls were redwood plank, about a foot wide. Jonathan set about pulling the planks apart, carefully levering them out with a piece of driftwood so as not to split them and to pry the nails free along with the planks. Some of the nail heads, although broad and square, tore through the soft redwood, but most came out with the boards. After being whacked on the tip a couple of times with a flat stone, the nails loosened up. Jonathan wiggled the things loose with his fingers and lay them inside his cap. Only two or three weren’t bent all wiggly, but it would be little trouble to smack them fairly flat again against a rock.

  Stick-a-bush, tired of squabbling with the Squire over which of them was going to lug the dishes down to the Oriel and clean them up, abandoned the whole idea and stood about watching Jonathan salvage bits of the raft. The Cheeser took advantage of his curiosity, sending him along with the cap full of nails to a shelf of granite protruding from the hillside nearby with instructions to straighten out the nails.

  The Professor and Bufo were involved in a heated discussion about principles of flotation. Everything, the Professor insisted, was irresistibly drawn toward the center of the earth due to the whirl of various pendulous masses. Mr Bufo pointed out very simply that such wasn’t always the case. The Squire, he insisted, could float like a bubble all day long on the surface of his mill pond with a glass of lemonade balanced on his stomach. That, insisted the Professor, was what science referred to as shortsightedness. In time, he said, the Squire would sink, along, doubtless, with his glass of lemonade.

  Just what all this had to do with repairing rafts, Jonathan couldn’t quite see. But then theory, more often than not, was his weak side. Jonathan’s father had always held that it was elbow grease and not theories that got the job done, and Jonathan had come to pretty much the same conclusion. The only way he knew to float the raft was to roll up his sleeves and whack away on it until it would work like a raft again and not a bundle of sticks.

  Off beyond the river road along the water’s edge he could see Dooly and Yellow Hat – whose name he still didn’t know – at work on a buried log. Yellow Hat was trying to induce the Squire to help dig it loose, since ten feet of it or so was buried beneath tangled brush and mud. The Squire, however, had hauled his bread basket with him down to the river along with a basket of plates and cups, and he was selectively gouging hunks out of the center of two round loaves.

  Dooly abandoned his submerged log when Yellow Hat began arguing with the Squire. Jonathan watched in wonder as Dooly sloshed out into the Oriel a foot or two, stared a bit into the swirling waters, then carefully inched out a bit farther, nearly overbalancing and plunging headlong into deep water. Jonathan jumped up with a shout that drew the attention of both the Professor and Bufo, but Dooly righted himself and, pointing at a clump of bushes protruding fro
m the water, began to holler and wave his arms and point. Everyone, including Stick-a-bush, gave off their theorizing and pounding and raced across the meadow. Even Squire Myrkle hulked along behind Yellow Hat shouting gleefully, a round loaf of bread with the center plucked out was pushed over either wrist like bracelets of dough.

  All of them reached the side of the Oriel and stood in a little knot on the green clover and oxalis of the bank and searched for the cause of Dooly’s concern in the surprisingly clear water. The river was running swift and high and clumps of prickly bush and snag were growing out into the rush of water. Entangled in the branches was debris, mostly limbs and pieces of wood and flotsam which would, if no more storms added to the river’s depth, be left high and dry on the riverbank within a day or two. Dooly, addled and waving one hand while pointing with the other, seemed to see something amazing down among the leaves and branches.

  Everyone crowded even closer roundabout, but it was Jonathan who first made out the cause of Dooly’s excitement. Half submerged and almost invisible amid a tangle of brush was the crank device of nothing less than the Professor’s oboe weapon, the phenomenal, goblin-routing bird gun hidden in the weeds. By following the crank down into the shadows, Jonathan could make out the trailing whirl-gatherers and funnel nose of the singular machine lodged firmly just out of reach.

  Dooly, without waiting to be asked climbed out of the Oriel, sprinted up the slope toward the remains of the raft and untied the line that threaded the cheese casks together. He puffed back into the group of onlookers, all baffled except Jonathan and the Professor. ‘Tie me up!’ Dooly shouted bravely. ‘I’ll go in after it!’

  Jonathan thought it a bad idea, given the fact that Dooly couldn’t swim a stroke. He himself had no desire to plunge into the cold water, having been thoroughly dry for about an hour and a half out of the last two days, but he could hardly expect any of the linkmen standing about to wade into the Oriel. And the Professor, although game for anything, had complained mildly that morning of his rheumatism which the wet weather and continual dunkings had set going afresh.