The Elfin Ship

by James P. Blaylock

  But that prospect didn’t look likely. It started to look even less likely when Jonathan noticed what was sitting atop the table in front of the Moon Man – an oddly shaped jar with a glass and cork stopper in which floated a tiny pickled octopus. Dooly saw it at the same time.

  ‘Old Grandpa’s been here!’ he shouted, gesturing at the octopus.

  The Moon Man smiled at him, ‘He has indeed, Dooly,’ he boomed. ‘And quite a grandpa he was.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Mister Man-in-the-moon,’ said Dooly, hugely pleased at the compliment. ‘There was times, sir, if your grace will pardon me while I carry on, that Grandpa had what might be called adventures. He was a powerful smart man, was Grandpa. And rich! Let me say! He had more than one of those octopods!’ Dooly winked meaningfully at Jonathan, partly because Jonathan was in on the octopus secret and partly because of Dooly’s pride in old Grandpa’s reputation.

  ‘It’s been many years since your grandfather and I last struck a bargain,’ said the Moon Man.

  ‘Back in the octopus days,’ said Dooly. ‘Later on it was whale eyes, then horned frogs in little cages, then finally little marbles with a sea horse frozen inside which he said he got from the linkmen. Only I didn’t know he meant jelly men until just a few days ago when we came on Mr Bufo and the Squire and Yellow Hat and Mr Stick-a-bush along down the river.’

  The Moon Man seemed anxious to say something, and he took advantage of Dooly’s catching his breath to say, ‘Yes, it was during the octopus period. He traded, if you like, this octopus and a quantity of magic beans for four coins, some golden rings, and a pocketwatch.

  ‘Of the rings, three have been found. Miles the Magician has one, Squire Myrkle another, and you, Dooly, the third. Where the fourth is is unimportant. It’s likely that your grandfather traded it finally also. Rumors came along several years ago that he was spending a good deal of time of late beneath the sea in a submarine contraption and that he had as a companion a pig of exceptional intelligence dressed as a clown. It was kept previously in a teakwood cabinet above Seaside by a bunjo man, or so the story goes. I’m beginning to suspect, however, that something is amiss in the tale.

  ‘Your grandfather, Dooly, traded the ring and the coins for the undersea device and possibly for the bunjo man’s pig. The bunjo man wandered away upriver. We know this because the four coins came into Amos Bing’s possession several months later.’

  Jonathan thought for a moment and then began to untie the bag on his belt. He had an odd affection for the coins even though they’d come to terrify him in some undefinable way, but if they belonged to the Moon Man and had been stolen, or traded, from him by Dooly’s grandfather, then there was no choice but to return them.

  The Moon Man smiled and held his hand up. ‘Keep them, Mr Cheeser, if you wish. But only if you wish. They are what you’d call magical. You know that by now. Through them I can see a great distance, as you, years ago, found out. What good are they to me where I dwell? Real evil hasn’t come there yet. But in the river valley, on the ridge above Hightower Village, lies something I can neither see nor, I admit, fully comprehend.’ The Moon Man paused, adjusting the heavy glasses which slid continually down his nose. He narrowed his eyes, as if to see more clearly. ‘So I’d like for you to keep the coins, Mr Bing, and I’ll show you their secret – that which you stumbled on years ago. And they’ll be my eyes, so to speak, through the coming winter.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Jonathan, not as entirely overwhelmed by the gift as he might have been.

  ‘One last bit of business here,’ said the Moon Man, ‘before we turn to more pleasurable topics. Dooly lad, to whom did your grandfather give the pocketwatch?’

  Dooly looked up and down the table noting fearfully that the elves had turned a bit pale, just as if they were coming onto the part in a ghost story where the ragged skeleton peers in at the window. ‘To …’ Dooly began. ‘To …’ he continued. ‘To a conjurer dwarf from the Dark Forest.’ Dooly then slumped in his seat and closed his eyes.

  The Moon Man removed his spectacles and wiped his forehead. He had suspected, of course, that such was the case. It had to have been. What other device could have so completely overwhelmed the galleon while it lay in Stooton Slough, the elves on board searching for that very pocketwatch? What else could account for the desolation along the river, for the weird twistings of nature roundabout Hightower and Willowood and Stooton? The Moon Man had suspected and at first blamed Dooly’s grandfather for stealing the watch. Then he blamed himself for having allowed it to be stolen. Finally he blamed no one, for blame rarely accomplishes anything and it’s best to let it wear itself out. The time to act was, it seemed, upon them. Doom was closer to them all than Jonathan feared. As the Professor had aptly put it, things were abroad in the land.

  ‘And how do you know, lad, that the watch fell into the hands of this dwarf?’

  ‘I was there, sir.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the Moon Man. ‘And did the dwarf have only one eye, the other covered by a black patch?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did he have a long walking stick, oddly carved?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And had he a pipe in his mouth that billowed smoke like a grass fire?’

  ‘He did, sir. All of that, sir.’

  ‘It’s as I thought. When was this last trade accomplished?’

  ‘Oh, years back, sir. Just before Professor Wurzle found the boat.’

  ‘Have you seen your grandfather since?’

  Dooly hesitated, but because of the spectacled stare of the round-faced Moon Man finally said, ‘Yes, sir. A few times.’

  ‘What did he say to you, Dooly?’

  ‘He said, sir,’ Dooly replied in a voice so small that everyone leaned toward him to hear, ‘that he’d been a fool, your honor, sir, and that there was winter coming on. But it was April then and it was all gibberish to the likes of me. He told me to take care of myself, sir, and watch for squalls, as he put it, and to come along to the coast if things got bad. That he had a device that would take us to the Wonderful Isles.’

  ‘And where, Dooly, were you to find him? The coast is a long, long place.’

  ‘I can’t say, sir,’ said Dooly, his voice breaking and tears starting from his eyes. ‘I told him I wouldn’t tell no one. Not even Mr Bing Cheese, sir. Not even old Ahab.’ Dooly began sobbing and looked as if he were getting set to crawl under the tablecloth.

  ‘I say!’ said Jonathan, not at all happy. ‘It wasn’t Dooly here who took the bloody watch. It was his grandfather, and the boy can’t be blamed for it.’

  ‘Be quiet!’ the Professor whispered into Jonathan’s ear in such a way that Jonathan obeyed.

  ‘Dooly,’ said the Moon Man, ‘it’s for your grandfather that I ask you, as well as for your friends. It’s for all of us.’

  Dooly sniffed twice and smeared the back of his hand across his eyes. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Very sure,’ said the Moon Man.

  ‘He said he’d be at the caves of Thrush Haven during fall and winter each year and that I was to wait for him there if ever a time came that I needed to.’

  ‘Perhaps that time is come, Dooly. Perhaps it’s come.’ A silence followed.

  ‘Well!’ said King Grump rising. ‘Let’s have a round of ale, shall we? It’s early, but this is thirsty talk, thirsty talk. And we’d best fetch a lager and lime for the lad here who needs bucking up.’

  The Moon Man rose, nodded to them all, put a hand on Dooly’s shoulder, then said he was tired and supposed he’d take a bit of a nap. They all watched him walk out of the hall while glasses of ale were brought in and passed down on a tray. He walked slowly as if he were either very tired or very thoughtful. Most likely he was both.

  13

  News of a Fourth Companion

  And that, apparently, was the end of the ‘conclave of war’. It hadn’t been much of a conclave. Most of those present hadn’t spoken a word. There hadn’t been any talk of battles or strategies o
r anything else – only questions about Theophile Escargot and his habit of borrowing jewelry and such. He seemed to be uncommonly ubiquitous; always racing about stealing rings, trading rings for pigs, pigs for beans, beans for octopuses, octopuses for undersea devices. He seemed to be a rather notorious and effective thief.

  On the walk back to the inn, Jonathan and the Professor pondered all this, but came to no conclusions. Jonathan was relieved that he hadn’t been drummed into any army, but suspected that they hadn’t seen the end of all this business yet.

  After a lunch of plaice and chips and a pint of ale, Jonathan and the Professor left Dooly to his own devices and walked the half mile along the coast road to Ackroyd’s bakery. The fog had pretty much cleared by midafternoon, and it was a fine autumn day, all things considered. The road wound in and out of the walls of the city, in among the shops and homes for a bit, then through a massive arch and along the seashore. The rocky coast was peopled by little islets, many of them simply clumps of weedy rock beaten by the tides and wind, and many with lighthouses atop them. One or two appeared to be forts, for again the muzzles of cannon were visible through dim ports. It would be a difficult coast to attack, all in all.

  Children played along the sandy beaches, none of which were more than fifty yards across; and a fair number of dwarfs, some in hip boots, some with their pant legs rolled, clammed in the shallows, shoving long-tined forks beneath the sand.

  The two rafters paused once or twice to peer into a particularly promising tide pool. Bright orange fish – garibaldi, likely – sported among sea-green anemones and purple urchins. Preposterous crabs and willowy nudibranchs wandered about, scavenging food and accomplishing necessary fish business. Obviously they could spend a day, a week even, fooling about in tide pools and never wear out, so they decided to press on toward the bakery and have done with their business. It took them all of two hours, in the end, to walk the half mile to Ackroyd’s bakery.

  The bakery itself was a tremendous stone affair, and as soon as they got around to the leeward side of it they were overwhelmed by the smell of warm bread. It wasn’t a bad smell at all, but Jonathan puzzled over the fact that two loaves of bread in an oven smell far more wonderful than two hundred. It seemed to prove what his father had always said about moderation being a finer thing than whatever its opposite was – satiation or gluttony or something.

  Ackroyd himself oversaw all the operations at the bakery, and throughout most of the year spent the better part of his day peeking into ovens, poking loaves of bread, directing lads with mops and buckets about the bakery and that sort of thing. Today, however, he was covered in baking flour and was mixing up a complicated batch of spices – most of them White Mountains spices from the elfin groves and ground barks from the Wonderful Isles. Until Christmas Eve, he told Jonathan and the Professor, he’d be at work on honeycakes. It was nothing but honeycakes after the first of November for him, for he was the only one who knew their secret.

  He shook a bottle full of amber powder in the copper vat of spices, threw a linen cloth over the top of the thing, and led Jonathan and the Professor into a sort of office in the back of the factory. But it wasn’t the usual, dreary, and uncomfortable office; it had a window that opened up onto the sea, and it was lined with bookshelves. Across one wall was a tremendous fireplace with a hearth and face of carved tile and a mantel of some nature of translucent marble, almost the sea-green color of the tide pool anemones. On the walls were, appropriately enough, intricate pen-and-ink sketches and watercolors of astonishing pies and cakes, and one, amazingly, of Squire Myrkle nodding as if in approval over a monumental loaf of glazed cinnamon bread. The Squire had been younger when the painting was finished, but it was clearly he, with the same shoveled-into-his-clothing look about him.

  Jonathan never cared much for business transactions, although that wasn’t because he didn’t, as they say, have a head for it. He knew, for example, the exact weight and value of his cheeses and, to the penny, the amount of Twombly Town coin in his sack. They would return with more kegs of cakes, finally, than the number of kegs of cheese they’d arrived with. And the elfin gifts which he would purchase from Twickenham would fill several more. Elfin gifts don’t take up much room, however, for they are usually small – the smaller the more wonderful, in fact. Sometimes they grow a bit later on or change shape, but four kegs of elfin gifts would satisfy all the children in Twombly Town.

  It was only right that Jonathan made a bit of a profit on the whole affair; the cheeses, after all, were from his cheesery, and he had spent the past weeks out on town business. Although his profits were moderate, moderate profits being the only acceptable sort, they would be rather nice. It looked, however, as if he’d immediately have to give up most of the profit, for he’d lost his raft or what was left of it, in the bay. Not only did he feel responsible for the raft, but they’d have no way to get home unless they bought or rented a new one.

  So he decided to broach the subject with Ackroyd who, after all, had done enough trading in his time to understand the niceties of river-rafting. ‘We have a problem with our raft,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘What raft?’ asked Ackroyd. ‘I heard it had gone entirely to smash. Sounds to me like you don’t have any raft at all.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Jonathan. ‘You’ve touched it exactly. We haven’t any transport upriver. Even our coracle is gone. Drifted away in the fog.’

  ‘Then you’ll need a new raft.’

  ‘Precisely,’ the Professor put in. ‘And a not inconsiderable raft at that. Something substantial. Rafts seem to run into rough times on the Oriel.’

  ‘Well,’ said Ackroyd, ‘you needn’t worry about rafts. There’ll be one for you to use.’

  ‘And the cost?’ Jonathan asked uncomfortably.

  ‘I can’t say,’ replied Ackroyd. ‘But I’d guess that a raft would be one of the advantages of the position you’re about to volunteer for. Don’t quote me on that; I’ve heard rumors.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘Position is it?’ The Professor sounded interested. ‘Volunteer?’

  ‘So to speak,’ said Ackroyd, figuring like sixty on a sheet of paper and piling little stacks of coin. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all. You’ll hear about it soon enough. Nothing dangerous, of course, just a journey upriver. An uncomplicated journey.’ Ackroyd looked addled, as if he had spoken out of turn. The door sailed open just then, and a wild-eyed dwarf lad with a face full of gooey dough charged in shouting about ‘the bread oven’ and ‘Binky the yeaster.’ Ackroyd leaped up and ran off, shouting that he’d come round to the inn for a pint later in the evening.

  After that puzzling exchange, there was nothing for Jonathan and the Professor to do but gather up their receipts and coin and head back to the inn. They were both thinking all sorts of things. Jonathan felt downcast on the one hand, for he was coming to believe that he’d likely not see Twombly Town again, but he was happy about the possibility of obtaining a raft without having to spend every cent. He’d come to look a bit sourly on adventures by that time, having had his fill, and yet he couldn’t help but feel a bit puffed up over the notion of being a central figure in the river doings.

  ‘Professor,’ he said, ‘there’s one thing now that would make me a happy man.’

  ‘What’s that, Jonathan?’ asked Professor Wurzle, who seemed to be lost in thought.

  ‘I’d feel vastly improved, Professor, if you’d be willing to take half of this coin. I quite literally wouldn’t have made it this far without your help. You were the one, after all, who saved the kegs after the storm, and you’re an altogether fine traveling companion. What do you say?’

  ‘I say, Jonathan,’ said the Professor, ‘that I fully intend to profit from this venture. There will be books written and scientific grants obtained, and, quite possibly, not a little fame. I won’t take away your profits now just as I know you won’t take mine away six months from now. I was an uninvited guest anyway. It’s out of the question. Out
of the question.’

  Jonathan shook his hand, and they ambled up to the old Mooneye. ‘Then let me buy you a pint,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘Buy me two,’ said the Professor.

  ‘Done,’ said Jonathan.

  Later in the day the Professor decided to take a bit of a nap while Jonathan just sat and squinted out into the afternoon sunlight. Dooly and Ahab put in a brief appearance, Dooly having somehow obtained a magic toad – although in what way the toad was magic he couldn’t say – and a bagful of paper seeds that would sprout into curious flowers when dropped into water. The Cheeser left the two experimenting with the wonderful seeds. He decided that Dooly had the right idea, that it would be regrettable to come home from Seaside without souvenirs – and he knew exactly what souvenirs he wanted.

  At the glassblower’s shop Jonathan found the celestial orb he’d been so carried away by two days before. The price was dear, but seemed fair given the amazing nature of the things. The dwarf slid it into a little velvet bag and put the bag in a wooden box with a hinged lid.

  Jonathan still had a good bit of coin left after the purchase, and he considered that it would likely be folly of some sort to return upriver with too much money. They’d probably just get waylaid and robbed by highwaymen or goblins. Therefore, all things considered, it would be wise to spend most of the rest of his money on books. Few thieves, when you think about it, bother stealing books. They either don’t go in much for reading or would have an impossible time carting away the books.