He'd thought that when Nisodemus had summoned him and asked if there was any paint in the quarry, only now the quarry was being called the New Store.
"Um," Dorcas had said, "There are some old paint cans, white and red, mainly, under one of the benches. We might be able to lever the tops off."
"Then do it. It is very important. Um. We must make Signs," said the Stationeri.
"Signs. Right," said Dorcas. "Cheer the place up a bit, you mean?"
"No!"
"Sorry, sorry, I just thought –"
"Signs for the gate!"
Dorcas scratched his chin. "The gate?" he said.
"Humans obey Signs," said Nisodemus, calming down. "We know that. Did they not obey the Signs in the Store?"
"Most of 'em," agreed Dorcas. "Dogs and Strollers Must Be Carried" had always puzzled him. Lots of humans didn't carry either.
"Signs make humans do things," said Nisodemus, "Or stop doing things. So get to work good Dorcas. Signs. Um. Signs that say 'No.' "
Dorcas had given this a lot of thought as teams of nomes sweated to pry open the lids of the paint-streaked cans. They still had the High Way Code from the Truck, and there were plenty of signs in there. And he could remember some of the signs from the Store.
Then there was a stroke of luck. Normally the nomes stayed at floor level, but Dorcas had taken to sending his young assistants onto the big desk in the quarry manager's office occasionally, where there were useful scraps of paper. Now he needed to work out what the signs should say.
Sacco and Nooty came back with the news.
They'd found more signs. Old ones. A great big grubby notice pinned to the wall, covered with signs.
"Masses of them," Sacco said, coming back out of breath. "And you know what, sir? You know what? I read what it said on the notice and it said, 'Health and Safety at Work,' it said, 'Obey These Signs,' it said, and it said, 'They Are There for Your Protection.' "
"That's what it said?" said Dorcas.
" 'For Your Protection,' " Sacco repeated.
"Can you get it down?"
"There's a coathook next to it," said Nooty enthusiastically. "I bet we could sling a hook up and then pull it over toward the window, and then – '
"Yes, yes, you're good at that sort of thing," said Dorcas. Nooty could climb like a squirrel. "I expect Nisodemus will be very pleased," he added.
Nisodemus was, especially with the piece that said "For Your Protection." It showed, he said, that, um, Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) was on their side.
Every bit of board and rusty sheet of metal had to be pressed into service. The nomes went at it cheerfully enough, though, happy to be doing something. Next morning the sun rose to see a variety of Signs hanging, not always squarely, on the battered quarry gate.
They had been very thorough. The Signs said: NO ETNRY. EXIT THU WAY. DAGNER – HARD HAT AREA. BLASTIGN IN PROGRES. ALL TRUCKS REPORT TO WIEGHBRIDGE. SLIPERY WHEN WET. THIS TILL CLOSED. LIFT OUT FO ORDER. BEWARE OF FLALING ROCKS. ROAD FLOOODED.
And one that Dorcas had found in a book and was rather proud of: UNEXPLODED BOM.
Just to be on the safe side, though, and without telling Nisodemus, he found some more chain and, in one of the greasy old toolboxes in the Cat's shed, a padlock nearly as big as he was. It took four nomes to carry it.
The chain was massive. Some of the nomes found Dorcas painstakingly levering it along across the quarry floor, one link at a time. He didn't seem to want to tell them where he'd found it.
The truck turned up around noon. The nomes waiting in the hedge by the side of the truck, saw the driver get out, look at the signs, and...
No, that wasn't right. Humans couldn't do that sort of thing. It couldn't be true. But twenty nomes, peering out from the undergrowth, saw it happen.
The human disobeyed the signs.
Not only that, it pulled some of them off the gate and threw them away.
They watched in astonishment. Even UNEXPLODED BOM was whirled into the bushes, nearly knocking young Sacco from his perch.
The new chain, though, caused the human a few problems. It rattled the chain once or twice, peered in through the wire mesh of the gate, stamped around for a bit, and then drove off.
The nomes in the bushes cheered, but not too happily.
If humans weren't going to do what was expected of them, nothing was right in the world.
"I reckon that's it," said Dorcas when they got back. "I don't like the idea any more than anyone else, but we've got to move. I know humans. That chain won't stop them if they really want to get in."
"I absolutely forbid anyone to leave!" said Nisodemus.
"But you see, metal can be cut through –" Dorcas began in a reasonable tone of voice.
"Silence!" shouted Nisodemus. "It's your fault, you old fool! Um! You put the chain on the gate!"
"Well, you see, it was to stop the – pardon?" said Dorcas.
"If you hadn't put the chain on the gate, the signs would have stopped the human," said Nisodemus. "But you can't expect Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) to help us if we show we don't trust him!"
"Um," said Dorcas. What he was thinking was:
Mad. A mad nome. A dangerously mad nome. We're not talking about teapots here. He backed out of Nisodemus's presence and was glad to get out into the bitingly cold air.
Everything's going wrong, he thought. I was left in charge, and now it's all going wrong, we haven't got any proper plans, Masklin hasn't come back, and it's all going wrong.
If humans come into the quarry, they'll find us.
Something cold landed on his head. He brushed at it irritably.
I'll have a word with some of the younger nomes, he thought. Maybe going to the barn wasn't such a bad idea. We could keep our eyes shut on the way. Or something.
Something else, cold and soft, settled on his neck.
Oh, why are people so complicated?
He looked up and realized that he couldn't see the other side of the quarry. The air was full of white specks, and more appeared as he watched.
He watched it in horror.
It was snowing.
8
VII. And Grimma said, We have two choices.
VIII. We can run, or we can hide.
IX. And they said, Which shall we do?
X. She said. We shall Fight.
From the Book of Nome, Quarries III, v. VII–X
It wasn't much of a snowfall, just one of those nippy little sprinklings that come early in the winter to make it absolutely clear that it is, well, winter. That's what Granny Morkie said.
She'd never been very interested in the council anyway. She liked to spend her time with the other old people, exchanging grumbles and, as she put it, cheerin' them up and takin' them out o' themselves.
She strutted around in the snow as if it belonged to her.
The old-Store nomes watched her in horrified silence.
" 'Course, this is nothing to some of 'em," she said. "I mind we've had snow so deep we couldn't walk around in it, we had to dig tunnels! Talk about laugh!"
"Er madam," said a very old nome, gravely, "Does it always drop out of the sky like this?"
" 'Course! Sometimes it gets blown along by the wind. You get great big piles!"
"We thought it – you see, on the cards – that is, in the Store – well, we thought it just sort of appeared on things," said the old nome. "In a rather jolly and festive way," he added, looking embarrassed.
They watched it pile up. Over the quarry the clouds hung like overstuffed mattresses.
"At least it means we won't have to go to that horrid barn place," said a nome.
"That's right," said Granny Morkie. "You could catch your death, going out in this." She looked cheerful.
The old nomes grumbled among themselves, and scanned the sky anxiously for the first signs of robins or reindeer.
The snow closed the quarry in. You couldn't see out across the fields.
Dorcas sat in his workshop and stared at the sn
ow piling up against the dirty window, giving the shed a dull gray light.
"Well," he said quietly, "we wanted to be shut away. And now we are. We can't run away, and we can't hide. We ought to have gone when Masklin left."
He heard footsteps behind him. It was Grimma.
She spent a long time near the gate these days, but the snow had driven her indoors at last.
"He wouldn't be able to come," she said. "Not in the snow."
"Yeah. Right," said Dorcas uncertainly.
"It's been eight days now."
"Yes. Quite a long time."
"What were you saying when I came in?" she said.
"I was just talking to myself. Does this snow stuff stay for a long time?"
"Granny says it does, sometimes. Weeks and weeks, she says."
"Oh."
"When the humans come back, they'll be here for good," said Grimma.
"Yes," said Dorcas sadly. "Yes, I think you're right."
"How many of us would be able to... you know... go on living here?"
"A couple of dozen, perhaps. If they don't eat much, and lie low during the day. There's no Food Hall, you see." He sighed. "And there won't be much hunting. Not with humans around the quarry the whole time. All the game up in the thickets will run away."
"But there's thousands of us!"
Dorcas shrugged.
"It's hard enough for me to walk through this snow," he said. "There's hundreds of older nomes who'll never do it. And young ones, come to that.
"So we've got to stay, just as Nisodemus wants," said Grimma.
"Yes. Stay and hope."
"We could make a run for the thickets or something," he said vaguely.
"We could stay and fight," said Grimma.
Dorcas growled. "Oh, that's easy. We fight all the time. Bicker, bicker, bicker. That's nomish nature for you."
"I mean, fight the humans. Fight for the quarry."
There was a long pause.
Then Dorcas said, "What, us? Fight humans'?"
"Yes."
"But they're humans!"
"Yes."
"But they're so much bigger than we are!" said Dorcas desperately.
"Then they'll make better targets," said Grimma, her eyes alight. "And we're faster than them, and smarter than them, and we know they exist and we have," she added, "the element of surprise."
"The what?" said Dorcas, totally lost.
"The element of surprise. They don't know we're here," she explained.
He gave her a sidelong glance.
"You've been reading strange books again," he said.
"Well, it's better than sitting around wringing our hands and saying, 'Oh dear, oh dear, the humans are coming and we shall all be squashed.' "
"That's all very well," said Dorcas. "But what are you suggesting? Bashing them over the head would be really tricky, take it from me."
"Not their heads," said Grimma.
Dorcas stared at her. Fight humans? It was such a novel idea it was hard to get your mind around it.
But... well, there was that book, wasn't there?
The one Masklin had found in the Store, the one that had given him the idea for driving the truck.
What was it? Gulliver's Travels? And there'd been this picture of a human lying down, with what looked like nomes tying it up with hundreds of ropes. Not even the oldest nomes could remember it ever happening; it must have been a long time ago.
A snag struck him.
"Hang on a minute," he said. "If we start fighting humans..." His voice trailed off.
"Yes?" said Grimma impatiently.
"They'll start fighting us, won't they? I know they're not very bright, but it'll dawn on them that something's happening and they'll fight back. Retaliation, that's called."
"That's right," said Grimma. "And that's why it's vitally important we retaliate right at the start."
Dorcas thought about this. It seemed a logical idea.
"But only in self-defense," he said. "Only in self-defense. Even with humans. I don't want there to be any unnecessary suffering."
"I suppose so," she said.
"You really think we could fight humans?"
"Oh, yes."
"So... how?"
Grimma bit her lip. "Hmm," she said, "Young Sacco and his friends. Can you trust them?"
"They're keen lads. And lasses, one or two of them." He smiled. "Always ready for something new."
"Right. Then we shall need some nails..."
"You've really been thinking hard, haven't you?" said Dorcas. He was almost in awe. Grimma was often bad tempered. He thought perhaps it was because her mind worked very fast, sometimes, and she was impatient with people who weren't keeping up. But now she was furious. You could begin to feel sorry for any humans who got in her way.
"I've been doing a lot of reading," she said.
"Er, yes. Yes, I can see," said Dorcas. "But, er, I wonder if it wouldn't be more sensible to –"
"We're not going to run away again," she said flatly. "We shall fight them on the tracks. We shall fight them at the gates. We shall fight them in the quarry. And we shall never surrender."
"What does 'surrender' mean?" said Dorcas, desperately.
"We don't know the meaning of surrender," said Grimma.
"Well, I don't," said Dorcas.
Grimma leaned against the wall.
"Do you want to hear something strange?" she asked.
Dorcas thought about it.
"I don't mind," he said.
"There's books about us."
"Like Gulliver, you mean?"
"No. That was about a human. About us, I mean. Ordinary-size people, like us. But wearing all green suits and with little knobbly stalks on their heads. Sometimes humans put out bowls of milk for us and we do all the housework for them. And we have wings, like bees. That's what gets put in books about us. They call us pixies. It's in a book called Fairy Tales for Little Folk."
"I don't think the wings would work," said Dorcas doubtfully. "I don't think you could get the lifting power."
"And they think we live in mushrooms," Grimma finished.
"Hmm? Doesn't sound very practical to me," said Dorcas.
"And they think we repair shoes."
"That's a bit more like it," said Dorcas. "Good solid work."
"And the book said we paint the flowers to make them pretty colors," said Grimma.
Dorcas thought about this.
"Nah," he said eventually. "I've looked at the colors on flowers. They're definitely built-in."
"We're real," said Grimma. "We do real things. So why do you think that sort of thing goes in books?"
"Search me," said Dorcas. "I only read manuals. It's not a proper book, I've always said, unless it's got lists and line drawings in it."
"If ever humans do catch us, that's what we'll become," said Grimma. "Sweet little people, painting flowers. They won't let us be anything else.
They'll turn us into little people." She sighed. "Do you ever get the feeling you'll never know anything you ought to know?"
"Oh, yes. All the time."
Grimma frowned.
"I know one thing," she said. "When Masklin comes back, he's going to have somewhere to come back to."
"Oh," said Dorcas. "Oh," he repeated. "Oh. I see."
It was bitterly cold in the Cat's lair. Other nomes never came in, because it was drafty and stank.
That suited Dorcas fine.
He padded across the floor and went under the huge tarpaulin where the Cat lived. It took quite a long time to climb up to his preferred perch on the monster, even using the bits of wood and string he'd painstakingly tied to him... it.
He sat down and waited until he got his breath back.
"I only want to help people," he said quietly. "Like giving them things like electricity and making their lives better. But they never say thank you, you know. They wanted me to paint signs, so I painted signs. Now Grimma wants to fight humans. She's got lots of ideas
out of books. I know she's doing it to help forget about Masklin but no good will come of it, you mark my words. But if I don't help, things will only get worse. I don't want anybody to get hurt. People like us can't be repaired as easily as people like you."
He drummed his heels on the Cat's – what would it be? – the Cat's neck, probably.
"It's all right for you," he said. "Sleeping quietly here all the time. Having a nice rest..."
He stared at the Cat for a long while.
Then, very quietly, he said, "I wonder... ?"
Five long minutes went past. Dorcas appeared and reappeared among the complicated shadows, muttering to himself, saying things like, "That's dead, that's no good, we need a new battery," and "Seems okay, nothing that a good clean couldn't put right," and "Hmm, not much in your tank..."
Finally he walked out from under the dusty tarp and rubbed his hands together.
Everyone has a purpose in life, he thought. It's what keeps them going.
Nisodemus wants things to be as they were.
Grimma wants Masklin back. And Masklin... no one knows exactly what it is that Masklin wants, except that it's very big.
But they all have this purpose. If you have a purpose in life, you can feel six inches tall.
And now I've found one.
Wow.
The human came back later and it did not come alone. There was the Land-Rover and a much larger truck, with the words Blackbury Stone and Gravel Inc. painted on the side. Its tires turned the thin coating of snow into glistening mud.
It jolted up the dirt road, slowed down as it came out into the open area in front of the quarry gates, and stopped.
It wasn't a very good stop. The back of the vehicle swung around and nearly hit the hedge. The engine coughed into silence.
There was the sound of hissing. And, very slowly, the truck sank.
Two humans got out. They walked around the truck, looking at each tire in turn.
"They're only flat at the bottom," whispered Grimma, in their hiding place in the bushes.
"Don't worry about it," hissed Dorcas. "The thing about tires is, the flat bit always sinks to the bottom. Amazing what you can do with a few nails, isn't it?"
The smaller truck stopped behind the first one.
Two humans got out of that, too, and joined the others. One of them was holding the longest pair of pliers Dorcas had ever seen. While the rest of the humans bent down by one of the flat tires it strolled up to the gate, fiddled the teeth of the pliers onto the padlock, and squeezed.
The Bromeliad Trilogy Page 21