The Elfin Ship

by James P. Blaylock

  ‘No, Dooly,’ Jonathan said, wrapping the end of the rope around his own waist. ‘I’ll go. It’s a fine day for a swim, what with the sun and all.’ He tied a bowline in the rope and gave it a yank or two. Squire Myrkle latched on to it to prevent Jonathan’s being swept away in the current. Shouting directions and encouragement, the Professor leaned out over the river, as Jonathan waded forth. Somehow the warm sun overhead served to make the water seem even colder than it was, making Jonathan gasp and breathe in little gulps. He wriggled in among the branches, the water about waist deep, and plunged his hand down beneath the surface to grasp the stock of the weapon. He feared at first that he’d be forced to use both hands to free it, a process that would require ducking his head. But the oboe gun seemed to free itself, and he pulled it forth and handed it up to the anxious Professor.

  The Squire, at the other end of the rope, relaxed his grip to goggle at the wild-looking thing which was, the Professor was relieved to discover, entirely whole and unharmed. The slack rope allowed the current to give Jonathan a quick shove, nearly upsetting him and pushing him deeper into the bushes. He caught himself, as Bufo and the Professor took up the slack and hollered apologies before reminding the Squire to pay attention.

  Beneath the water, Jonathan could see before him the shadow of something too symmetrical to be a rock. He focused and squinted and determined it, finally, to be a keg of a size a bit smaller than those on the raft. Pushing a prickly bush aside and scratching his arms and hands a dozen times, he burrowed even deeper into the bush. An overhanging branch snatched his cap from atop his head. Turning to retrieve it, he was astounded to see two caps hanging in the branches above him. One was his own, suspended from a broken twig. Another, waterstained and battered but obviously of good make, hung a foot or so higher up.

  He yanked his own free, and then by pulling on a fairly stout limb, he managed to retrieve the second. ‘I’ve found something here, Professor,’ Jonathan shouted.

  ‘He’s found something! He’s found something!’ came a chorus of voices from shore. ‘A treasure!’ cried Dooly.

  ‘A hat,’ said Jonathan, sorry to disappoint anyone. ‘And a keg of some sort. I’m going to untie the rope and fasten it to the keg, Professor, then climb out. We can haul in the line from shore.’ Jonathan began to do so as the Professor shouted assent. He found a ring atop the keg simply by feeling about and poked the free end of the line through it, tieing it securely. ‘Keep the rope taut,’ he called, then pulled himself hand over hand through the bushes, wearing both hats at once. In a moment he stood shivering beside his comrades.

  Stick-a-bush and Bufo stood some distance away, near the oboe gun. The Professor looked happy as a lark and not a little proud after having revealed himself to be the original discoverer of the thing. The rope was being slowly reeled in, the keg apparently not tangled too thoroughly in the brush.

  ‘I found a hat,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘And a good one too,’ the Professor observed. ‘Or it was once. The Oriel seems to have been wearing it for a few weeks. Rivers have little concern for hats.’

  Jonathan inspected the hatband. ‘Look here,’ he said, pointing. And there, stitched into the band very elaborately, was the name G. Bastable, Mayor. ‘It’s the mayor’s hat, lost in the storm!’

  ‘Not surprised are you?’ asked the Professor.

  ‘Why I suppose I am.’

  ‘It’s scientific law, my boy. Nothing extraordinary. The third law of stasis and termination, and nothing less.’

  ‘Of course it is.’ Jonathan nodded, ‘I should have seen it at once.’

  ‘The law of accumulation,’ said the Professor. ‘All things seek like things. The lost seek the lost, the found the found.’

  ‘Ah!’ nodded Jonathan in full agreement. ‘But here’s the keg. And it’s a familiar-looking keg too.’

  The Professor cast Jonathan a knowing look. ‘Looks rather like a pickle keg, what?’

  Jonathan admitted that it did, whereupon an argument ensued over whether the pickles inside were ruined with the river water or not.

  ‘They’d bloat,’ said Yellow Hat, who seemed to know what he was talking about.

  ‘They’d rot,’ Bufo added.

  ‘Pickles exist in a state of passivity,’ chimed in the Professor. ‘They are impervious to the processes of leeching and bloating. I’ll stake my reputation on their being unharmed.’

  ‘Pickles!’ shouted the Squire, who still wore his bracelets of bread, now and then taking a bite out of one, being careful not to break the ring.

  There was no choice but to pry off the top and have a go at the pickles. Since he was perhaps the most learned of them all in the way of tasting food, the Squire bit into the first pickle, fished forth another, and declared that to be positive, to be absolutely sure, he’d have to taste a third. He squinted thoughtfully and demanded a fourth which he devoured with a mouthful of bread.

  ‘It’s a trick,’ shouted Stick-a-bush. ‘He’ll eat them all!’

  ‘The Squire will have another pickle,’ said the Squire, giving Stick-a-bush a fish-eye. ‘Squire Myrkle will test each pickle.’

  ‘See!’ Stick-a-bush cried. ‘He’ll do what he did with the bread basket. Devour ‘em all. Every one.’

  It seemed fairly clear that Stick-a-bush was right, for the Squire submerged both hands into the keg and drew forth clusters of pickles, chomping away at them noisily. He offered one to Ahab, who was sniffing roundabout. Ahab accepted the morsel gratefully, sitting down to eat it as if it were a beef bone. The Squire smiled cunningly at his companions and dipped again into the barrel as Bufo shouted, ‘Pickle trickery!’ Then, following the Squire’s example, Bufo began handing pickles, and very good pickles at that, to everyone. It was a trifle odd that pickles seemed such a delightful food in midmorning. Like cheese, they seemed more of a lunchtime food. But the fact that they had been recovered from the river must have added a certain something – a mystique perhaps – and they tasted very good indeed.

  Bufo cleared his throat once or twice in the manner of someone trying to gain attention. He held a pickle aloft and, eyeing Yellow Hat all the while as if to say, ‘Listen to this!’ began a peculiar sort of poem.

  A pickle in a hat and with a cat upon his lap

  Came riding in a cart along the road.

  He met upon the way, in a rather sad toupee,

  A wrinkled and quite beastly seeming toad.

  I have come, he told the toad, from mig-weed land which o’er

  Looks the forest near the lands of rocky shore,

  And I have with me a cat and a timid sort of bat

  From the caves of inky-blinky-dinky-nor!

  ‘Hurrah!’ shouted Stick-a-bush, breaking into applause.

  ‘A mighty line that last,’ said the Professor.

  ‘Very substantial,’ Jonathan agreed.

  ‘Mig-weed my foot,’ said Yellow Hat, who was apparently dead set against poems involving mig-weed.

  Stick-a-bush and Dooly clambered to hear about the traveling pickle again, and Bufo thundered out the verses a second time, then said that he intended to add a few more verses later. He gave Yellow Hat a look which could only be described as hoity-toity.

  After the bunch of them mooched around by the side of the Oriel for a half hour, it occurred to Jonathan that, as the saying goes, talk won’t cook rice. Given the nice weather it seemed a bad idea indeed to dawdle there. If they were to finish the voyage at all, they must do it in good weather. Another storm would doom them.

  He said as much to the Professor, who had, by then, decided that his bird weapon was in tip-top shape. Old Wurzle quite agreed with Jonathan and said that, in fact, he’d like to be away by morning. Spending nights on shore in such goblin-infested times seemed unwise. Jonathan hadn’t considered the whole affair from that particular angle, but when he did he had to admit the wisdom in it. So they set to with a will.

  Stick-a-bush and Dooly whacked away at nails and untangled tattered canvas whi
le the rest of them, Squire Myrkle hunching along before, dragged the remains of the raft to the waterside. Dooly’s log was fairly easily wiggled free of the debris once they found a hold to pry against. Although a tad short, all agreed that it would do nicely, being for the most part free of interfering branches. Those few which would have gotten in the way when it was lashed beneath the supporting cross joists of the raft’s deck, Jonathan broke off. Then, with a sizable rock, he smashed away at the short stumps of removed branches until the log was comparatively smooth and altogether serviceable.

  The Professor and Jonathan undertook the actual lashing after Bufo and Yellow Hat fell to arguing about suitable knots and then tied a couple which were so mushy and loose they hadn’t a hope of remaining knots. The Squire, who proved to be amazingly strong as well as easily distracted, obliged everyone by obediently lifting corners of the raft into the air so that Jonathan and the Professor could poke one rope end through here and tug another out there.

  It was easy work late in the afternoon to pound together a rough lean-to which Jonathan anchored to the deck with a pair of redwood slats. In the front they managed to rig a canopy tacked securely in place and made from the remains of the sail, the whole thing appearing a trifle ramshackle and worn finally, and shearing from port to starboard if anyone pushed on it. Jonathan nailed the remains of a battered plank diagonally across the back of the angled wooden wall of the lean-to, fearful as he did so that he was about to knock the whole structure to bits. He didn’t though, and in the end the structure proved solid and large enough to hold the three rafters and Ahab with room to spare, although not much room.

  They rolled the kegs down and with the remaining line secured them round the perimeter. Jonathan could only hope they were tied fast enough so that, bobbing in the current, they wouldn’t continually whack against the sides of the raft and fall to pieces. The coracle, still being serviceable, was to be tied to the rear of the raft. The canoe, however, was a lost cause, the hole in the bottom rather diminishing its value. But they saved a paddle from it and that was better than saving nothing. It began to look to Jonathan as if he might, with luck, see Seaside yet. The whole lot of them looked the raft over from this angle and that and found, with the fall of night, everything shipshape.

  The rafters and linkmen had been so busy with their repairs that none of them had noticed evening coming along. When the Professor finally called everyone’s attention to the fact, the sky against the horizon was a deep purple that faded gradually to an aqua blue. It wouldn’t be long – a half hour perhaps – before the first stars would twinkle into life. The line of trees along the edge of the Elfin Highlands was just a dark smear in the gray distance, hardly distinguishable from shadow. The moon obligingly sailed out early like a phantom galleon on the purple sky. Jonathan hoped that beneath such a bright moon the night wouldn’t be altogether dark and foreboding.

  Not building a good-sized fire was unthinkable to any one of them, but a problem arose when they ventured to gather firewood. Although wood a-plenty was scattered about the meadow, most of it was water-soaked and good for nothing but smoking out bees. Finally, several hundred yards downriver, one capsized hemlock was discovered that sported a few dead, beetle-eaten limbs which had risen high above the mushy meadow and had managed to dry out some. Jonathan and Dooly clambered atop the log and set to stomping as many free as they could. Everyone else hauled bundles along toward the raft where they heaped up a great whacking pile of the stuff. Four smaller piles were stacked, and the little camp was finally bordered on one side by the Oriel and on the other by a half circle of little crackling fires.

  Jonathan was afraid, was certain in fact, that the dry wood wouldn’t last out the night, but he counted on the possibility that they were too close to the Elfin Highlands to be in danger of encountering any really fearful creatures. And such, in fact, seemed to be the case for a time. The night was unusually warm for late autumn, and although no one would have complained at the idea of another blanket, everyone got on well enough, for there was no lack of room around the various fires.

  A cloud or two sailed skyward over the northeastern horizon as evening drew on, remnants, perhaps, of yesterday’s storm. The moon tilted its way across the heavens. A bright star, another world likely, trailed along for a bit to keep it company. About the meadow, each tree branch and stand of willow, each outcropping of rock threw a weird moon-shadow which pointed away downriver toward Seaside. As each cloud wandered across the face of the moon, the shadows on the meadow would fade and the evening landscape would dim away into night. The cloud, for the few moments it passed in front of the moon, seemed to catch fire and glow, and it appeared as if grand things were occurring inside – great rolling oceanic tides and plunging surge. Then the glow faded in a second and was gone, and it was impossible to tell whether the cloud was full of rain or was empty or whether anything at all was going on within.

  The entire company lay about munching pickles and cheese and the few remaining loaves of bread, and poking at the embers of the fire. Squire Myrkle was asleep and had been for an hour, but the others chatted softly and idly about this and that. Dooly contributed oddball tales concerning the doings of his old grandfather, most of which the linkmen seemed to take pretty much at face value. Bufo, in fact, pridefully admitted to having met the old man some years back on his way to market at Seaside. Old Escargot, as Bufo referred to him, had traded him a whale’s eyeball for his horse. Escargot, with frequent glances back over his shoulder, had leaped upon the beast and pounded away down the river road toward the sea, a gloomy fog rising up in his wake.

  ‘Odd chap, your grandpa,’ said Bufo, ‘I never saw him again, even though he had some dealings with the Squire not long back. Something to do with a handful of marblesized emeralds. The Squire is rather fond of marbles. Has dungeons full, actually, that he clambers through.’

  The conversation popped right along for a space, then fell off. Then it picked up again for a bit, then lazied away to nothing again. The silent spaces between grew longer as the night grew late, and everyone talked in low tones as if it weren’t quite proper, or perhaps safe, to speak aloud.

  When the moon was overhead and Jonathan assumed it to be about midnight, a deep, distant rumble sounded way off upriver. It was a low, mournful sound and made Jonathan feel uncommonly lonely, even though he was in the company of good friends. He reached out and patted old Ahab, who lay curled beside him, warm as a baked apple. It was a moment before Jonathan considered the source of the rumble, not, in fact, until after it occurred a second time, Ahab’s ears pricking up at the sound; the stalwart beast jumped to his feet and growled off into the darkness.

  ‘Just a bit of thunder, boy,’ Jonathan said, hoping, of course, that it wasn’t. More storms wouldn’t do any of them any good. It wasn’t however, until another noise joined the first that Ahab’s odd reaction was explained. The muted echo of copper gongs and the cackle of goblin laughter wafted past on the winds from the direction of the Goblin Wood, and Jonathan could see the goblin fires burning in the distant hills, miles and miles away upriver in the direction of Twombly Town.

  The eerie shadows of the trees around the rafters and linkmen flickered and danced in the light of their own campfires, now and then seeming to be the upraised arms of a great goblin or hunched troll set to rage in upon them. Jonathan was happy to see that Dooly, asleep next to the Squire, had not awakened when Ahab barked. Stick-a-bush, however, was wide awake, his eyes goggling and one arm pointed off toward a thick stand of oak atop a small rise beyond the camp. Amid the crooked limbs blinked a bobbing jack-o’-lantern, its eyes flickering weirdly and its grinning mouth agape. No one moved or spoke while the thing bobbed there. When it winked out and disappeared there was a simultaneous whoosh of air as everyone began to breathe again. Professor Wurzle, happily possessing a mind curious enough to consider the grim vision from a scientific slant, said simply, ‘Can you beat that?’ Then, when no one apparently could, he added, ‘Someone’s play
ing a bit of a gag on us. I’ve half a mind to hike up that hill and play one of my own on the top of his head.’

  ‘Perhaps we should leave whoever it is alone,’ Jonathan suggested. ‘Let them have a bit of fun. Jack-o’-lanterns don’t amount to a bit. We’d best stay together here and wait for the sun.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Bufo. ‘It’s a good idea to be in the open at night. No one with any sense goes prowling about in the woods.’

  The Professor wasn’t convinced. ‘This all strikes me as damnably familiar. It reminds me, in fact, of a poem that an ape up in Little Beddlington used to chant. His master was a dwarf, a crafty-looking sort with a great cap and eyepatch. The ape would shout “The Madman’s Lament” as clearly as you or I, unless, of course, it was a trick of ventriloquism. There was another poem he’d chant – you know which ape I mean, Jonathan – but I can’t remember just how it went. Something about pumpkins in trees and a great deal of cheese.’

  ‘I think I know it,’ said Bufo. ‘Although it’s strange that it would mean anything to an ape. If it’s the one I believe it to be, it was written by Lum Blimp in “The Song of Ildor’s Domain”. Tell me if this is it:

  Bottle cork, bottle cork

  There’s naught within but lees.

  The glowing eyes of Jack O’Lantern

  Dance on evening’s breeze;

  Goblin fires light the wood

  And flicker through the trees.

  The clouds, they say, are whipping cream,

  The oceans seas of teas,

  The rain a fall of diamonds,

  The moon a ball of cheese.’

  ‘That was it,’ cried the Professor. ‘That was it exactly.’ And he scratched his head in wonder.

  The goblin drumming and gonging rumbled along until one by one the various rafters and linkmen forgot it was even there and began to nod off and fall asleep. Jonathan, fearful the fires would burn themselves out, piled on most of the remaining brush before finally turning in, grateful for the loan of one of Bufo’s blankets and for the company of the steady Ahab, who nestled in beside him.