The Elfin Ship

by James P. Blaylock

  ‘We’re waiting,’ said the elf, ‘for a party of linkmen coming along the river road. They should be here late tomorrow afternoon if nothing goes amiss.’

  ‘We’ve seen them,’ Jonathan explained. ‘Ate half of their food, in fact. Fine chaps, linkmen, all the way around.’

  ‘They are that,’ Twickenham agreed. ‘Was there a large one among them? A round sort of linkman tremendously fond of food and larks?’

  The Professor nodded. ‘The Squire. He was there. He and Dooly got on famously. When we left them they were a day’s walk from the first outpost, and they seemed fairly anxious to get there. We had a bit of trouble with goblins now and then. Seem to be a lot of them afoot – almost to the Highland edge.’

  ‘That’s part of the business we’ll attend to shortly, as soon as the Squire’s party arrives.’

  There was not much more in the way of conversation. When Jonathan was full and warm he found himself dozing, his head slumping forward onto his chest. But it was no more possible to remain awake than it had been to make his frozen fingers cooperate on the knotted keg line, and finally there was nothing to be done but slouch off down the hall to their respective rooms where they fell asleep atop wide beds with feather comforters.

  12

  The Moon Man

  A long time later, although it seemed but an instant or two to Jonathan, he felt himself being shaken awake by a dwarf lad wearing an idiotic suit of clothes, serving livery perhaps. ‘Wake up, Master Bing. The others are already about.’

  Jonathan slurped away at his coffee while he pulled on his breeches and shirt and suspenders, all of which had been cleaned and dried while he slept. His leather pouch full of coins and charms hung over the edge of a chair. He was pleased that the dwarf lad had brought along a bowl of buttermilk for Ahab, but he was probably not half so happy about it as Ahab.

  He found the Professor downstairs tieing into toast and jelly and waiting for a plate of eggs and ham. Jonathan joined him, noting the presence of an empty plate at the table with traces of egg yolk and crusts. Dooly, then, had already eaten and disappeared. There was no sign of Twickenham, but when Jonathan offered to pay the rotund Monroe for breakfast he replied simply, ‘The elf has seen to it, sir.’ Jonathan took this to mean Twickenham and decided that it seemed reasonable that this Twickenham was deeply involved in all the mysterious doings which Jonathan wanted to ignore until after a bit of vacation. He assumed rightly that the elf wouldn’t stay away too long.

  After breakfast they wandered off into Seaside. The fog had lifted, so the city didn’t seem quite as murky as it had the previous evening. There still wasn’t much sun, and the air was cool and damp. Off to their left not twenty yards distant was the stone wall which, in the light of day, they could see encircled the entire city. It was about fifteen feet high, and judging from the depth of the arch that led through the wall into the open docks along the wharfside, it was about six feet thick. The Professor speculated that the wall was defense against pirates. Jonathan liked the idea fairly well, and as they proceeded uphill toward the center of Seaside, the whole suggestion became more certain. The city was built upon low, coastal hills, and on two such hills, visible over the tops of the buildings and houses, were what appeared to be forts. Jonathan could see the barrels and muzzles of cannonade protruding through the porthole windows and pointing variously toward the bay and playing out over the open ocean.

  On the whole, Seaside was a clean and neat sort of city in its way, even though it was overshadowed most of the year by gray weather. As is true of any port city, much of the waterfront flotsam – dried kelp and tar-smeared wrecks of packing crates and rusty bits of scrap – and the smell of fish and salt air were a continual presence. Even a half mile inland, pelicans padded up and down the avenues, and the foghorns in the bay could be heard off and on, warning trawlers and barges and sloops away from the rocky shores.

  Along the streets, the homes were tall and thin – most of them three stories high plus an attic above. Wooden arms with pulleys attached angled down from the peaks of the houses. In front of one house, a block up the street from the Mooneye, a piano dangled from the end of one of these pulleys. Workmen in dungarees scrambled about below, shouting orders, pointing and looking as if they were ready to cut and run at the slightest indication of a problem.

  An effort had been made to cheer things up; most of the houses were painted in bright colors, although the effect was subdued and dimmed, more often than not, by the fog. Almost all of the windows up and down the streets were lined with boxes containing potted plants. These plants grew abundantly in the wet coastal weather and drooped out over the fronts of the houses. If a person liked the fog and the rain, he’d like Seaside. It seemed to Jonathan to be the sort of a place where a chap could write great poetry while peering down at the fog-shrouded streets from the fourth-floor attic study. It would be perfect for Bufo and Yellow Hat, although the poetry they were likely to write under such conditions would be, doubtless, foggier poetry, not nearly so full of cherries and sweetum.

  On a hill in the center of the city was the palace, and a very functional palace it was – not one of those gaudy, spired affairs lived in by the kings of Oceania. A heavy, gloomy-looking palace of gray stone, almost the color of the fog that so often surrounded it, it was a fortress in the midst of a fortress city.

  The Professor suggested they mosey on up that way, and Jonathan, who had no better plan, agreed. Ahab tagged along happily. They passed through two streets – named, appropriately, Second Street and Third Street – that immediately parallelled the bay. Dim pubs and shops with flats above lined the street, and serious dwarfs hunched along through the cool morning toward the bay. Every now and then the foghorn lowed, and sometimes a cloud of fog trailed through as if to justify the sound. The cobbled streets slanted this way and that, and the occasional carts that clattered past listed frightfully. They passed two interesting-looking bookstores, filled to overflowing with a likely hodgepodge. It looked like G. Smithers country to Jonathan, and he noted the cross streets, intent upon stopping in for some browsing on their return.

  Up and down each street were arched streetlights, most eerily aglow, even though it was getting on toward late morning. When a particularly dense bit of fog rolled in, the lamps glowed through it, seeming to make the atmosphere even more ghostly. The professor pointed out that Seaside was a strangely silent city, that individual noises, even though muted in the mists, stood out against the silence of the morning. The clatter of hooves on the pavement, the cry of a wheeling gull, the shuffle of leather boots along the cobbles – all forced themselves into a person’s consciousness instead of simply being background noise as they would have been in Twombly Town.

  They wandered up a street full of greengrocers and fishmongers. But November really isn’t much of a month for fruits and vegetables, so the produce was a bit thin. The seafood, however, was a different story. They saw great heaped piles of periwinkles and mussels, of moon snails and oysters, and deep vats of squid and clams and shrimp. Fogfish were in particular abundance and were cheap; wide slabs of pink salmon were visible everywhere and weren’t cheap. Jonathan always liked the idea of strange seafood, but somehow it never tasted quite so interesting as it looked or sounded. One vendor had a bubbling tank of water in which he was boiling whole crabs. The Professor suggested they return at lunchtime with a bottle of white wine and a loaf of bread, and the idea sounded brilliant to Jonathan.

  They found Dooly about two-thirds of the way up toward the palace. He stood atop a cask and talked to a dwarf who didn’t seem to be paying him much attention. Dooly was telling about the siege along the Goblin Wood and tossing in trolls and treasures and all such things to glorify his story. The dwarf, red-faced and sweating, held a long tube with a ball of glowing glass attached to the end in his hand. He was very carefully daubing colors of molten glass onto the outside of the ball and swirling them about with a metal pick. It occurred to Jonathan at first that the dwarf was cons
tructing a tremendous glass eye, perhaps for a cyclops who had lost his own – bad luck for a cyclops – but it turned out that he was making paperweights. They were little globes of crystal that were not quite like anything Jonathan had seen. They were larger than marbles and some even had tiny gardens of little glass flowers inside. Some of the glass flowers were so small that Jonathan had to study the paperweight to see them. Others were larger and strangely shaped, more like animals or sea creatures than flowers. Even the Professor oohed and aahed over the things for the space of ten minutes. There was one which was a deep blue, scattered through with chips of glowing gemlike stars. When he put it to his eye and stared inside, the noises roundabout seemed to dim and he felt as if he were falling forward into the jeweled darkness of space. It was a very fearful feeling and yet one which was literally quite wonderful. He stood staring until he heard his name being called and realized that Dooly was tapping him on the shoulder.

  ‘Mr Bing Cheese,’ Dooly shouted. ‘Come along, sir. We’re off, sir, to see the palace.’

  Jonathan put the paperweight down and saw that the Professor was a good way up the road. Feeling a bit foolish for having stared at a globe of colored glass in such a way, he turned to the dwarf still hunched over his work. ‘Good piece this; one rarely sees better,’ he observed in a voice intended to sound knowledgeable.

  The dwarf smiled up at Jonathan pleasantly, winked, then added mysteriously, ‘One rarely sees at all.’ Then he went back to his work.

  ‘Funny little man,’ Jonathan thought, wondering about the odd statement and, at the same time, convinced somehow that there was truth in it.

  The palace wasn’t half as interesting as the paperweights. There didn’t seem to be anyone around aside from two dwarfs who leaned on impossible axes at the monstrous oak door. A chap with a penknife, Jonathan thought, could slide in and do away with both dwarfs before either could heft his axe, let alone swing it. But he supposed that the guards were primarily there for effect anyway. The king, it turned out, had gone fishing on his trawler and wouldn’t be back until the following afternoon.

  They decided at last to see about the bread-and-wine business as the Professor had suggested. After enjoying a most satisfying meal, they cut along back toward the Mooneye, where all three of them slept the afternoon away.

  The following day was spent pretty much the same way, Jonathan engaging at noon in the rigors of eating periwinkles which he discovered didn’t want to come out of their shells for any purpose. He found it such trying work just digging the things out that his appetite grew more quickly than he could satisfy it.

  It was a pleasant two days. The Professor complained mildly about the gray weather, but Jonathan rather liked it. It had a sort of ‘mood’ to it, as Dooly pointed out more than once. Twickenham popped in on the third morning and announced the arrival of the linkmen the previous evening. There was a meeting brewing at the palace which the three rafters, Twickenham insisted, wouldn’t want to miss. Apple pie and cream and hot coffee were to be served, and so it was important they hurry, for the Squire couldn’t be held off much longer. Ackroyd the baker himself had made the pies, and if it wasn’t that Ackroyd and the Squire were such fast friends, the Squire would have set out in search of the pies an hour ago.

  So they popped right along toward the palace where the same two dwarfs with their awesome axes stood guard by the entrance. Behind the palace on a sort of hedge-fenced green, the type where you’d play croquet, lay an elfin airship. The same ship, Jonathan was sure of it, that had routed the trolls below Willowood. The puffy-cheeked countenance of the Man in the Moon, the mysterious winder of clocks, smiled from the side of it. Once again Jonathan thought of his magical coins and felt for the leather pouch tied to his belt.

  Above the hedgerows, the masts and furled sails of a good-sized ship could be seen, a fact that struck Jonathan as peculiar since the ocean was a half mile behind them. The Professor explained that there was likely a backwater or canal that led up behind the palace. They hadn’t any time to investigate though, for a party of elves, all chattering and laughing and pointing toward the three rafters, filed through a gap in the hedgerows. Like Twickenham, they were slightly larger than linkmen and not nearly as stout as dwarfs. The odd thing was that in the dim sunlight some of the elves seemed almost translucent. Jonathan fancied he could see one elf through the first and again through the second as if they were all made of shadowy glass. When a patch of fog obscured the sun, however, the illusion vanished, if it were illusion, and the elves looked very real indeed, much more handsome and less comical than the linkmen. It appeared to the Cheeser, however, for a brief moment, that they were putting on airs, for one or two had a superior look about him. But Jonathan soon discovered that the elves went in for songs and joking even more than linkmen did.

  Twickenham seemed a little put out at the crowd of elves, as if he thought them rather tiresome. One very fat elf who looked remarkably like Mayor Bastable strode along in front. He was very businesslike, although a businesslike elf is still a very cheerful sort of fellow. Jonathan supposed that a speech was in the offing.

  ‘Hullo, ullo, ullo, ullo!’ said the round elf. ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen! Uh? Well, well!’

  Jonathan whispered to the Professor that the jolly elf had what might be described as a way with words, and the Professor agreed. They were soon compelled to shake hands all around, although so many hands shot forth from the cluster of elves that Jonathan was never sure whose hand he shook. Hands kept bursting out in the heartiest manner until Jonathan realized that he had shaken at least three or four times as many hands as there were elves and began to catch on to the fact that he was involved in a sort of elf joke.

  The round elf laughed uproariously when Jonathan caught on and made a point of shaking his hand one last time, wiggling his own hand back and forth in a jellylike way while doing so. Jonathan thought the whole ritual pretty peculiar, but he liked jolliness as well as anyone and so acted very pleased when the round elf explained that he’d been given the fish shake. The balance of the elves exploded once again into laughter, amused no end over the old fish-shake joke. Bursts of laughter erupted fairly often after that amid shouts of ‘Twenty hands apiece!’ and ‘Took him right in!’ and ‘Shook his hand nearly off!’

  Twickenham himself laughed a bit, although he looked as if he had seen rather more fish-shake larks than he cared for.

  ‘Twicky, Twicky, Twicky,’ said the round elf who turned out to be named Mr Blump. ‘There is food inside, sir. Food and drink for the light elves in the winged craft. The bird that flappeth not, eh?’ And this last comment was also, apparently, a vastly amusing joke, for the elves hooted themselves blue over it.

  ‘Hello, good Blump,’ said Mr Twickenham. ‘This, as you know, is Jonathan Bing of Twombly Town, Professor Wurzle the historian, and Dooly the grandson.’

  ‘Clever, clever, clever chaps!’ shouted Blump, reaching for Jonathan’s hand again. But as Jonathan very courteously extended his own, Mr Blump yanked his back and jerked it twice over his shoulder with his thumb extended, laughing like a lunatic. Jonathan grinned to show that he was one of the lads, but the Professor gave Twickenham a look, as if he was tiring of Blump’s unyielding humor.

  ‘Where’s his Highness?’ asked Twickenham mysteriously. ‘We have tidings.’

  ‘Ah, tidings,’ said Mr Blump. ‘Tidings is it? His Highness has been hunting along the canal with his platypuses.’

  ‘Platypi,’ corrected the Professor very respectfully.

  ‘Of course,’ said Blump. ‘But he’ll no doubt be along shortly.’

  Suddenly, through the great door of the palace, strode Bufo, the Squire, Stick-a-bush and Yellow Hat. Stick-a-bush was railing at the Squire for some unknown reason, and the Squire was stuffing a piece of cake or bread into his mouth, no doubt having convinced someone to find him a bit of a snack to tide him over until Ackroyd’s pies were served. Shouts of ‘Ho! It’s the Squire!’ and ‘Squire Myrkle is here!�
� went up from a half dozen of the elves as the Squire lumbered into view, grinning hugely. After quite a bit of pushing and shoving and hand-shaking one elf in a conical cap presented the Squire with a leather bag encircled on top by a drawstring.

  ‘Marbles!’ Bufo whispered to Yellow Hat, and Dooly pushed to the front of the throng to see if it were true. Sure enough, the Squire sat upon the green and loosed the bagful of marbles onto the grass. The tinkle of little glass spheres seemed to fill the quiet air roundabout as everyone watched the marbles flow from the bag into a little marbles stream. It soon grew to a marbles river, then into a bit of a pond, then a lake – hundreds of marbles poured out, their rainbow spirals throwing glints of sunlight into the morning air.

  Clearly this was no ordinary bag of marbles. Even Squire Myrkle had enough sense to pull the drawstring tight before having loosed more than the linkmen could carry back in their baskets. It seemed a bottomless bag of marbles, and Jonathan wished he had such a thing. He’d always been fascinated by the idea of something without end – of coming across unlimited shelves of books all written by G. Smithers of Brompton Village, or of finding rooms and rooms of cut gems and gold coin, enough to burrow about in like a mole. Here was just a thing – an elfin marvel. Jonathan decided that once his journey was done and springtime made travel a bit of a wiser idea, he’d come south again to the land of the linkmen to visit Squire Myrkle and see his marbles treasure.

  The Squire sat on the green staring into a deep red orb the size of a plum, with swirls of color within encircled by clear glass, as if he were looking through an enchanted cavern into the center of the earth.

  Away across the meadow just then, Jonathan spied the top of someone’s head. He expected it to be the head of the dwarf king, what with all this talk of highnesses. But when the entire head appeared, finally, with a body attached to it, it proved not to be a dwarf of any nature, but someone who looked oddly like the face on the airship – like Dooly’s pocketwatch man.