by Philip Reeve
The others wouldn’t hear of it.
“It is only a little wood,” said Henwyn.
“Why don’t we keep walking all night,” said Spurtle, “and sleep in some shady place when the sun comes up? Dark suits goblins better, and we might overtake them softlings that way; they’ll be snoozin’ an’ snorin’ by now, I ’spect.”
“Anchovies!” said Gutgust, and that seemed to settle it. They started down the sloping road into the trees with Henwyn saying, “Maybe we won’t want to keep walking all night. But at least let’s get this wood behind us before we make camp. Maybe we’ll see the light of Rhind’s campfire from the top of that next hill.”
“Here!” said Spurtle, who was scampering ahead. “This is weird. The softlings’ tracks turns sideways here, off the road and up the hill.”
“Why would they do that?” asked Zeewa.
“Maybe there’s something wrong with those trees,” said Skarper.
But by that time Henwyn had already strolled past them and into the wood.
The shadows of the trees closed over him, and with them came silence. The noises of the world outside – the evening wind, the chuckle of the river, and the bickering of the goblins – were muffled here. The trees overhanging the road were dark and solemn, and scraps of mist veiled those that stood deeper in the dell. And what was that strange noise?
“Aaaaah-aaaah-oooooooh-aaaahhhh-aahhh…”
“Someone’s moaning,” said Zeewa, entering the woods behind him.
“Someone’s got a bellyache,” said Flegg.
“No, someone’s singing,” said Henwyn, holding up a hand for silence so that he could hear the weird song more clearly. “Goblins have no ear for music.”
“Aaaaaah-aaaaah-oooooooh-aaaaaahhhh-aaahhh,” went the lonely voice, drifting between the trees like mist.
“I like sumpfing wiv more of a tune to it,” said Grumpling.
“We have happier music in the Tall Grass Country,” said Zeewa. “Music that makes you want to dance.”
“It’s beautiful!” said Henwyn.
He left the road and started downhill towards the source of the sound. Tree roots tripped him, and pale bones snapped like dry twigs underfoot, but he did not notice them. Something was shining faintly in the trees ahead, where the shadows pooled the deepest, and it seemed suddenly very important that he should reach it. A slender figure, it seemed to him to be, glowing with its own soft light there in the wood’s gloom. At home in Adherak when he was growing up he’d heard the tales of wood nymphs who wandered at dusk, singing for their lost loves. He had never thought to see one with his own eyes. Perhaps the sounding of the Elvenhorn had woken this one.
“Henwyn!” shouted Skarper, left behind with the others. He wanted to run after his friend, but he felt wary of leaving the road, which seemed the last solid thing in this shifting world of mist and shadows.
“There’s something white down there between the trees,” said Zeewa.
“Prob’ly a bone,” said Spurtle. “There’s loads of them here. They’re crunchy.” He had picked up a long white bone from the leaf litter beside the road and he was cheerfully sucking out the marrow.
“Lots of softlings died here,” said Grumpling, booting a skull downhill like a bony football. “Not long ago, neither.”
Zeewa said, “There is magic here. I can feel it in the air and the ground.”
“Henwyn!” shouted Skarper again, but there came no answer, only that unearthly, tuneless singing from the heart of the wood.
Typical, thought Skarper. We haven’t been away from Clovenstone for even one day yet, and already Henwyn’s got himself in Mortal Peril. Well, if he thinks I’m going to go and help him he’s got another think coming.
But of course he was going to help. He always did. He drew his short sword and started down through the trees, and the others came after him – some, likeZeewa, because they wanted to help him, some, like Grumpling, because they were hoping for a good fight, and the rest because they did not want to be left behind in that eerie place.
At the bottom of the hill stood Henwyn. He had his back to them and he was so still that Skarper was afraid he’d been enchanted or something until he turned at the sound of their footsteps crunching through the dead leaves and said, “Shhh!”
“What is it?” whispered Skarper.
“Look!” Henwyn pointed through the twilight to a place where a ring of black trees grew. They were not gnarled old yews like the rest of the wood – too slender, too thorny. Through the narrow gaps between their trunks there flickered a ghostly, faintly glowing figure. It seemed to be swaying from side to side, and as it swayed, it sang.
“Aaaaah-ooooh-aaaahhh-oooohhh-aaaahhhh…”
“A wood nymph!” whispered Henwyn.
“A g-g-ghost!” whispered Spurtle.
“Anchovies!” whispered Gutgust.
“It’s a flower,” said Zeewa.
“A what?” the goblins chorused.
“Some sort of strange flower…” Zeewa went forward, crunching over the litter of bones, and Henwyn went with her, afraid she might scare away the beautiful singer. “A flower?” he said peevishly. “Who ever heard of singing flowers?”
But Zeewa had been right. As soon as they stepped into that circle of slender trunks he could see that his wood nymph was nothing of the sort. What he had taken for her gown was just a tightly folded bud of massive, waxy petals; what he had thought was her face were just a few darker patches near the top. In the dark it had looked like eyes, a mouth, and a nose. As for the singing, he could tell now that it was just the night breeze keening through the trees. This flower must give off some natural magic the same way that others gave off scent, and it had tricked him into hearing singing.
“Aha!” he said, trying to make it sound as if he had suspected something of this sort all along. “A tree that mimics the appearance and song of a wood nymph. Fascinating.”
“Why would it do that?” asked Zeewa.
“Who knows?” said Henwyn. “It’s not very good, though. Didn’t fool me for a moment.”
He reached out and prodded the fleshy petals of the flower. Instantly, creaking like a ship in high seas, the ring of trees folded inwards, closing on him and Zeewa like a trap.
It was a trap, of course. A natural trap, like those plants in tropical forests that give off a smell like rotting meat and then snap shut on all the flies that arrive expecting a tasty snack. What Henwyn and Zeewa had taken for a ring of trees was really just the many limbs of one, and when Henwyn prodded the bloom at the centre of them he had released some vegetable spring which caused them all to jerk inwards, trapping them both.
If Fentongoose had been there he could have told them that they had fallen victim to a mantrap tree, of which, in the old days, there had been whole forests in the night valleys of Musk. What one was doing growing on the hills of the Westlands in the present day was a mystery. Perhaps some servant of the Lych Lord, hastening home to Clovenstone from the harbours of the north with seeds and cuttings for his master’s gardens, had dropped a seed upon this lonely road, and it had lain there ever since until the light of the Slowsilver Star conjured it into life.
How it had come there was actually not of much interest to Henwyn at that moment. How to get out of it; that was what he would have liked to know. At first, as the black trunks sprang inwards to pinion him and Zeewa, he had been afraid that they were going to be crushed, but in fact the trunks just made a prison; a cage just large enough to contain the pair of them.
“Help!” he shouted, squeezing a hand out through a gap between two of the trunks and flapping at the goblins outside.
Skarper, running round the tree, saw the hand reach out. He grabbed hold of it and pulled, but the gap was not wide enough to pull a whole Henwyn through.
“What’s it doing to you?” he asked.
“It’s not doing anything,” said Henwyn, from inside his woody prison.
“It’s waiting,” said Zeewa. “I have seen plants in the swampland at the foot of Leopard Mountain which trap flies and spiders in this way. It is waiting till we die and rot and our juices trickle down into the earth to feed its foul roots.”
“Eww!” said Henwyn.
“Don’t worry,” Skarper told him. “It might trap lonely travellers like that, but not ones who have a whole load of goblins outside to help them. We’ll soon have you out of there!”
He tugged at the trunks. They felt about as bendable as wrought-iron railings.
“Grumpling?’ he asked. “Can your strength help us?”
Grumpling unshouldered one of the two huge axes which he had brought with him. “No problem,” he growled. The others scattered out of range as he lifted the axe high above his head and then swung it at the nearest of the mantrap’s trunks.
There was a loud thunk. The tree shuddered, tightening its grip on Henwyn and Zeewa. The axe head dropped to the ground in two halves, leaving Grumpling staring at the useless handle.
“Stupid tree!” he said. “That was one of my best axes!”
Behind him in the darkness Flegg’s eyes gleamed. “Oh dear. What a pity. Grumpling has tried, and since no one is as strong as the mighty Grumpling there is no point in any of us trying. Henwyn and Zeewa are doomed. It’s sad, but there it is. We’d best leave them here and be on our way. We can’t delay our quest for the sake of these two softlings, and we should not linger here. Who knows what other nasty dangers these woods hold?”
“Anchovies!” screeched Gutgust suddenly, as if to prove Flegg’s point. He had just trodden in what turned out to be a baby mantrap tree, a sapling no larger than an egg basket. It had snapped shut on his foot like an actual mantrap. “An-cho-vieeeeeeees!” he wailed, hopping around, knocking Spurtle over in his efforts to wrench it off.
“But we can’t just leave Henwyn and Zeewa here!” shouted Skarper.
“I’m sure Henwyn would agree that our quest is more important than his life,” said Flegg. He was already shoving a bewildered Grumpling back up the dark hillside towards the road. “Every moment we linger here, Prince Rhind and his friends carry the Elvenhorn further from our reach.”
“But…” Skarper gave another despairing tug at the mantrap’s trunks. He could see about half of Henwyn’s face peering out at him through one of the gaps between them, and Zeewa behind him, stabbing the floor of their prison with her spear.
“We won’t leave you here,” Skarper promised. “We’ll think of some way to free you!”
“Best think of it soon, then,” said Zeewa. “The stench of this flower is muddying my wits!”
It was true. The thick, sweetish odour of the unearthly flower had not been so noticeable before the tree closed. Now it filled the cage of trunks like a velvet fog. Henwyn was finding it difficult to keep his eyes open.
“Perhaps we could poison it with something?” he suggested sleepily. “Or just forget to water it; I used to be forever killing my mother’s geraniums like that when I lived in Adherak…” His head nodded and his eyes closed. He shook himself awake with an effort, and said, “Fraddon? Princess Ned?” But of course Fraddon was far away and Ned was gone. For a moment, as he drowsed, he had imagined himself back in that other cage of trees, the one which the twiglings had conjured round him on the day he came to Clovenstone.
“Fraddon!” said Skarper. “That’s it! Flegg was wrong! There is someone stronger than Grumpling! Old Fraddon could uproot this horrid shrub with his bare hands if we could call him here.”
“But Fraddon is in Clovenstone,” said Henwyn sleepily. Behind him, Zeewa had stopped jabbing her spear into the tree and was snoring softly.
“Clovenstone’s not that far,” Skarper said. “Those big ears of Fraddon’s ought to hear me if I shout loud enough. I’ll fetch him and come back, Henwyn; I promise!”
It was a desperate plan. He had no idea how far his voice could carry, or how good Fraddon’s hearing was, or whether the old giant would even care enough to help now he was in that mossy, sleepy mood. But he could think of nothing else to do. He scurried back to the road, where Gutgust sat muttering, “Anchovies!” and Spurtle tried to pull the baby mantrap off his foot. Of Grumpling and Flegg there was no sign, so Skarper assumed that they had gone on their way. Good riddance, he thought. He ran back up the road the way they had come, out of the mist and the tree-dark, into good, clean starlight on the hilltop where he’d wanted to make camp earlier. Far away, the summits of the Bonehill Mountains reared up their stony heads beneath the waxing moon. Somewhere there, lost among the folds of the land, lay Clovenstone.
Cupping his paws around his mouth, Skarper bellowed, “Fraddon! Fraddon!”
Clutched in the mantrap, Henwyn dreamed. It was uncomfortable, pillowed there among the knobby, knobbly limbs of the carnivorous tree, and his dreams were uncomfortable too. He dreamed that he was lying on the stuffy floor of a cavern, and that some dwarves, whose cavern it was, were poking him with their picks and shovels in an attempt to wake him up and move him on.
Then, as he sank into a deeper sleep, that dream faded, and another came. He dreamed that he was looking out over a wide grey sea. There was no land in sight, and no clear line where the sea met the vague and hazy sky. A loud roaring filled the air. A hole had opened in the surface of the sea, and all the water seemed to be swirling down into it. Henwyn was being drawn towards it too. Wider and wider it yawned, and way down in the bottom he thought he could see dry land: roads and rooftops and fair towers rising.
He woke with a start. He was still in the heart of the mantrap tree, squashed up against Zeewa, who was murmuring some song in her own language while she slept. Something had changed, but he was so drowsy that it took him a while to work out what. Then he saw that the mantrap tree’s flower was opening. No longer looking even slightly like a wood nymph, it had risen higher on its stem and opened those white, glowing petals inside the cage of tree trunks like a parasol.
Above it, out in the inky woods, a voice was going, “Buzzz.”
“Fraddon!” shouted Skarper, and the echoes mocked him, bouncing back from crags and empty hillsides and the wild, wet moors that he knew would swallow his voice long before it reached Clovenstone. Silly little goblin, he thought. Howling and yowling in the wilderness. You’re on your own now. You’ve left all your wise friends behind, and you can’t look to them to come and get you out of trouble.
“Fraddon!” he shouted again, one last time, still staring at the dark eastern sky and hoping that he might make out the huge shape of the giant striding easily over the folded hills. But the hope was very small and frail now, and, as the echoes faded, it crumpled up and vanished like a leaf in a bonfire. He was too far from Clovenstone. Not even a giant’s giant ears would hear his shouts. Or, if they did, they would sound no more important than the buzz of a tiny fly…
Fly. That gave him a new idea. It was a small idea, and perhaps a stupid one, but it was definitely an idea, and he did not have so many of those that he could afford to ignore it.
So he stopped shouting for Fraddon and ran back down into the woods, to where Gutgust and Spurtle waited. They had dislodged the baby mantrap from Gutgust’s foot and they were trying to light a fire using the fragments of it and a few dank bits of fallen timber which they had found among the trees.
“Trees oughter be frightened of fire!” said Spurtle. “If we can get a fire goin’ we can tell it to let Henwyn an Zeewa go or we’ll burn it up. Or down. Or up.”
“And it might just clunch them tighter,” said Skarper, “and you might just roast them like a couple of chestnuts. And it won’t listen to you anyway; it won’t understand threats. I’ve got a better idea. What are flowers for?”
The goblins looked blankly at him.
“They looks pretty?” suggeste
d Spurtle.
“Anchovies?” said Gutgust.
“They attract bees,” said Skarper.
“And Henwyns,” said Spurtle.
“Right. That tree wants Henwyn and Zeewa as plant food. But to make baby trees it must need bees. That’s how flowers work. I read all about it, in the bumwipe heaps.”
“That’s weird,” said Spurtle. “Are you sure?”
“Clever softlings have studied trees and plants and things and found out how they work,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because trees and plants and things is interesting.”
“No they isn’t.”
“They is if your friend is stuck inside them. That’s probably why the softlings started studying them in the first place, and then they got a taste for it and carried on. It’s a science. It’s called Bottomy.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Probably because when you sit down on plants and things it’s your bottom that you sit on them with.”
“Maybe that’s why they started studying them,” reasoned Spurtle. “You wouldn’t want to sit down on the prickly ones, or the ones that give you a rash.”
“Anyway,” said Skarper. “Maybe if this tree thinks there’s a really big bee buzzing about looking for some pollen, it might open up to let it get at the flower. And then maybe we can whisk Henwyn and Zeewa out.”
Spurtle understood. He nodded wisely. Even Gutgust said, “Anchovies!” in an admiring sort of way.
“So all we need to do is wait for a really big bee to come along,” said Spurtle.
Skarper sighed. “We aren’t going to wait for a bee,” he said. “We’re going to make a bee.”
“How do you make a bee?” asked Spurtle. “And why are you looking at me like that?”
Five minutes later Spurtle was dangling over the mantrap tree, saying, “Buzzz, buzzz!” in the most bee-like voice he could manage. Skarper had painted his dark goblin clothes with stripes of pale clay from the road, and cut a spare cloak into rough wings that flapped from his shoulders. Two spindly twigs, tied round his head with string, made bee-like antennae. A rope was knotted around his waist, the other end tied to a long branch. Gutgust and Skarper held on to the other end of the branch and managed to swing Spurtle over the tree where their friends lay imprisoned.