by Philip Reeve
Easy, thought Woon Gumpus smugly, and began to sing another of his party pieces, “The Cabbage Picker’s Love Song”.
“Shoals to starboard, cap’n!” roared a sailor, from the crow’s nest high on the mainmast.
“Eh?” said Woon Gumpus, who had just been getting to the good bit. “What?”
“Dirty big rocks, your honour.”
“Oh!” Woon Gumpus squinted into the bright sunshine reflected from the waves. Ah, yes, those were rocks, all right. Black, barnacled boulders, each the size of his old counting house, lying in wait there in a swirl of foam to rip the bottoms out of unwary ships. “Go right! I mean port! I mean starboard!”
He was always getting port and starboard muddled. To be honest, he got left and right muddled, too. But luckily the helmsman had already swung the tiller, and the Swan of Govannon went gliding past the reef as gracefully as – well, as a swan.
Oh, yes, thought Woon Gumpus, sailing was easy. This was the life, all right!
Prince Rhind was contented, too. So was his sister Breenge. They had come safely through goblin country, the Elvenhorn was theirs, and in a few more days they would reach Elvensea and the ending of their quest. Until then, they planned to while away the time lounging in the sunshine on the Swan’s decks, swimming in the little pool, playing games of quoits and deck-croquet, and wondering what Ninnis would produce for supper. The only thing they had to worry about was the danger that the captain might to try to entertain them with another of his dreadful songs.
“But if he does,” said Breenge, “you can have him clapped in irons and let the first mate steer the ship instead. You are a prince, after all.”
Down in the Swan’s galley, among the pots and pans and the smell of the simmering stew, Mistress Ninnis was not so happy. Peering into the little crystal ball she kept hidden in her second-best saucepan, she had seen Henwyn and the others boarding that old ship at Floonhaven.
Curse them! She had thought her storm and the sea worms would have finished them, or at least finished most of them, and frightened the others into giving up their quest. Her crystal had shown her those plankways on the cliffs and they had been quite bare of goblins. So where had they gone to, if not into the sea and the bellies of her worms?
And then she had seen who stood waving beside the king of Floonhaven as the goblin ship set sail – a small, stocky person, long blonde plaits blown out horizontal by the breeze that filled the ship’s sail. A dwarf maiden! And there were dwarf mines in those cliffs. So the dwarves had taken them in! She had not seen it sooner because dwarf mines were full of magic; the old smithy magic of Dwarvendale, which Ninnis’s powers were not strong enough to see through.
Not yet, at least. Not until foolish Prince Rhind delivered her to the shores of Elvensea, and the powers of the elves became hers.
She undid the little bag on her belt and felt inside, but there was nothing there that she could use to harm the goblins. That dried sea-worm larva had been her last; the storm pebble too. All she had left were a few seeds, a jewel from a toad’s head and a clothes peg. The seeds and the jewel were earth magic, no use at sea, and the clothes peg was not magical at all.
“But never mind, Ninnis,” she muttered to herself. “They’ll not catch this fine ship, not in that old black washtub of theirs. By the time they find us we shall be at Elvensea, and I shall have a thousand new spells to fling at them.”
She wrapped the crystal up, put it back in her second-best saucepan, and replaced the lid. She checked the bubbling stew, said under her breath, “A little more sage, I think. Now where did I leave that? In my pack, I suppose, which is in my cabin…” And Prawl, who had been watching all of this through a tiny gap between the planks of the galley door, drew quickly back into the shadows of the passageway outside as she left the galley and went bustling off to her quarters.
He did not like what he had heard. He did not like it one bit. It was starting to seem to Prawl that he was not dealing with a cook at all, but with something far more worrying: a sorceress.
He waited until she was out of sight, then carefully lifted the latch on the galley door and went inside. The floorboards creaked, but who would notice a creaking floorboard with the ship at sea and so many other creakings, squeakings and flappings of canvas going on?
He could tell that Ninnis did not mean to be gone long, because she had left her big book open on a worktop near the galley stove where that huge pot of stew was bubbling. Wiping the steam from his spectacles, he drew the old book closer to the light of the stove and peered at the pages. And what did he see there? Those crabbed lines of ancient letters marching across the parchment like squads of broken spiders… Those mysterious diagrams, spirals overlaid on triangles overlaid on crescents and pentangles and shapes for which he knew no names…
One thing was for sure. It was not a recipe for fish stew.
“This has gone far enough!” said Prawl to himself. He quickly let himself out of the galley. “Prince Rhind must hear of this,” he said.
Behind him, in the empty galley, a bitter new smell began to mingle with the scents of the stew. Prawl had left the old book much too close to the heat of the stove. The edges of its thick pages were starting to crisp and curl, and the ink on the diagrams was bubbling.
Prawl did not realize that he was being watched as he scurried up the Swan of Govannon’s elegant companionways, out on to the deck. Ninnis, coming back from her cabin with the sage, had heard those creaking footsteps in her galley. Hiding outside, she saw him leave, and she whispered a spell.
Prince Rhind was standing in the little white castle at the ship’s prow. He was gazing at the sea ahead, which was turning golden now as the Swan of Govannon sailed towards another sunset, and wondering what awaited him in Elvensea. Behind him, Breenge wallowed in the copper swimming pool, wearing a felt bathing dress that made her look like a seal.
Prawl, coming from the back of the ship, had to walk past Breenge to reach the prince, and he was slightly bashful about doing so. He hesitated a moment, wondering what one should say to a princess of Tyr Davas in her bath. Should he pretend he hadn’t seen her? But that might seem rude, and also unlikely – it was hard to miss someone as large as Breenge, especially now that she was swimming on her back, kicking up those frothy fountains of white water with her feet and singing shepherds’ songs from her homeland.
He decided that he should just nod politely and hurry on up to the forecastle for a word with her brother. But as he strode past the pool he realized that something strange was happening.
It began with an itching in his ears. Then he noticed that the ship was growing larger. The gunwales, which had come up only to his waist before, were suddenly high above him. The masts, no thicker than trees when he came aboard, suddenly had the girth of castle towers. Not only that, his clothes seemed to be growing, too; his robe expanded until it was more like a tent, and a big tent too, engulfing him and hampering his movements. He waded and floundered through its folds of felt.
“Sorcery!” he realized.
He kicked his way out of the robe and hurried on along the wide wooden plain of the deck. Although the sea was calm, the deck seemed to be tilting at a strange angle, as if it were rising towards him. He could only cross it by putting his hands down and going on all fours.
“Prince Rhind!” he shouted. But all that emerged was a plaintive little squeak. The prince, deep in his thoughts, did not hear it. But Breenge did. She stopped splashing and bobbed over to the side of the pool. When she peered over the edge, the first thing that she noticed was Prawl’s shabby old robe lying crumpled on the deck. Really, she thought, who would have imagined that sorcerers would be so untidy? But before she could complain, or call for a sailor to pick up the robe and deliver it to Prawl’s cabin, she noticed something else.
Hopping about on the deck, just at the foot of the steep stairs which led up on to the forecastle, was th
e dearest little white rabbit.
Breenge hauled herself out of the pool. (The water had started to grow unpleasantly hot anyway, making her feel as if she were a lobster being slowly boiled alive for someone’s dinner.) She wrapped a towel around herself and went to scoop up the rabbit, which made small frightened noises and rolled its eyes at her as she cuddled it. “There, there,” she cooed. “Don’t be frightened, little bunny. How on earth did you get aboard?”
Ninnis, watching from the far end of the ship, smiled a smug little smile to herself. “That’s the last time you’ll try to make trouble for me, Mister Prawl,” she said. “And now Breenge will love you, just as you always wished.”
But Prawl had made more trouble than she had realized. Instead of following him up on to deck to watch and gloat as her rabbit spell transformed him, she should have gone down into the galley. If she had, she might have seen her spellbook smouldering there beside the stove, and had a chance of saving it before it burst into flames.
But she hadn’t, and she did not realize the danger until she noticed the steam wisping up off the surface of the swimming pool, which was directly above the galley. Then she guessed, and went running back below, but it was already too late. When she flung the galley door open, air rushed in and fire rushed out. A tawny torrent of flames, playful as a young lion, pawed at her pinafore and singed her eyebrows off.
“Fire!” screeched Ninnis. The sailors heard her, and took up her cry. First they ran for buckets and hoses. Then, when they saw how far the blaze had spread, they ran for the boats.
“Fire! Fire!”
Prince Rhind and Breenge stood on the forecastle, Breenge holding the rabbit, all three of them wondering what to do. After a while Woon Gumpus appeared too, clutching his hurdy-gurdy and blinking at them through a mask of soot. “It seems that a small fire has broken out,” he shouted, over the noise of the crackling flames, which had burst up through the deck and were gathered around the mast, leaping up to lick at the sails like wolves nipping at the toes of a tree-bound traveller.
“What shall we do?” asked Breenge.
“Oh, it is nothing to worry about,” said Woon Gumpus. “We are at sea, and it stands to reason that that is the safest place to have a fire. All this water will soon put it out.”
“Then why are your sailors scrambling into those little boats?” asked Breenge. “Why are they launching them? Why are they rowing away so fast, and shouting things like, ‘Save yourselves, mateys, ’tis all over with the barky’?”
“Oh, you know these seafaring types. Superstitious and easily spooked. They’ll soon have the flames out.”
The main sail caught fire with a massive woof, and transformed into a blinding golden rectangle of flames, like the window into a furnace. Everyone on the forecastle took a step back as the heat scorched their faces. Through the rippling air above the deck, through the smoke, the rising and the falling sparks, Ninnis came scampering to join them, patting at her skirts to put out the fires that had started there.
“Are there… Are there any more of those little boats?” asked Prince Rhind.
“Um … no,” admitted Woon Gumpus.
The Sea Cucumber, meanwhile, was still barging her way steadily through the waves. Henwyn and the goblins had spent the first part of the voyage being noisily seasick over her sides, but slowly they had grown used to the pitching and swaying of the ship. Slowly, too, their fear of sea serpents had faded, but they still kept a sharp lookout. Captain Kestle might say as often he liked that sea serpents were solitary creatures, almost never seen, but Captain Kestle had not had dozens of them biting at his bottom on that lonely walkway. When they weren’t busy being sick or helping him to sail the ship, the goblins stared out at the sea, sharpening their weapons and daring the serpents to appear.
None did. A day and a night and another day passed, and all they saw was a pod of playful porpoises which swam alongside for a while.
Then, on the second evening, the sea people appeared. Skarper was the first to spot them: three riders, mounted upon the big fronded seahorses of the western deeps, surfing on the crest of a foaming wave.
“Sea people?” said Henwyn, when he heard Skarper’s shout, and he and Zeewa ran to the side to look. The other goblins gathered there too, and even Captain Kestle ambled over to see, enjoying their amazement, although he’d met the sea people often enough before.
“They aren’t much like their pictures in the books,” said Skarper, joining him.
“Those pictures was drawn by folk who’d never been to sea, I daresay,” Kestle said. “Those books were written by men who’d never voyaged further than a waterfront tavern in Porthquidden.”
The sea people were indeed a bit of a disappointment. No golden hair blown backwards on the breeze; no combs or mirrors, or fair voices singing. Mermen and merwomen alike were brownish, scaly, finny creatures, and they carried spears made from narwhals’ horns and the business ends of swordfish. Their voices were as hard and clanging as the calls of gulls when they hailed the Sea Cucumber.
“Hello, old man! Hello, ugly goblins! What are you doing, so far from home, so far from shore? Why do you venture out upon the sea, which does not want you and does not like you?”
“I’ve as much business here as any of you,” Captain Kestle shouted back. “Don’t you know me?”
They came nearer and circled the Sea Cucumber, looking up. Their golden eyes were flecked with darkness, like the eyes of fish. “Old Kestle,” they said. “So it is you! We thought you’d gone to the dry land and put down roots. That would have been wiser. The sea will eat your silly ship. You’ll sink to the bottom and we’ll take your nice pewter buttons and all your goblins’ swords and axes too.”
“The sea folk value metal,” said Kestle to his passengers. “They cannot forge their own, of course, because it’s so difficult to get a fire lit down beneath the sea. But don’t worry; they know we are too strong for them. They rob wrecks, but they seldom attack sound ships.”
The sea people circled once more, calling out their taunts and empty threats. Then they grew bored, and sank beneath the waves again, speeding off towards the west.
There was no swimming pool aboard the Sea Cucumber, unless you counted the eight inches of salt water which swirled about in the hold, and which the goblins kept on falling into when they were trying to bale it out with leather buckets. The dinners, cooked by Skarper and Henwyn, were odd affairs, because the tins of food that Etty had given them didn’t have pictures on them to tell you what was inside, like the tin cans in her dream, only dwarf runes, which nobody on the Sea Cucumber could read. The first night they had sausages and custard; the second, beef and apricot stew, with some crabs which Spurtle and Flegg caught by trailing their tails over the side.
As for the on-board entertainment, there was only Henwyn. Henwyn had come by the idea somewhere that when people were off on quests or long journeys they liked nothing better than to sit around after a hard day’s questing or journeying telling stories and singing songs. The fact that he was the only one who believed this never discouraged him, and he was always ready to start a rousing sing-song, even though nobody else ever joined in.
“Tonight,” he said, picking bits of crab shell out of his teeth, “I shall sing you ‘The Ballad of Prince Brewyon’.”
“Washing up to do,” said Spurtle, scampering off towards the galley with the supper dishes.
“My turn to bale the hold,” said Zeewa, hurrying below.
The other goblins made excuses too, except for Grumpling, who never bothered making excuses but just left anyway.
Skarper went scrambling up the mast into the crow’s nest. “I’ll see if I can see any more of those sea people,” he called down as he climbed. And there he sat, swaying to and fro in the gathering twilight, high above the ocean, while the plump sail spread beneath him and the sounds of canvas and rigging and waves almost drowned
out Henwyn’s voice from down below as he began his song.
Skarper could not see any sea people, but he soon noticed something else. Due west, dead ahead of the ship, an orange tongue of fire had appeared, as if someone had built a big bonfire out there on the horizon.
He found a useful rope and slid back down it to the deck. Captain Kestle was standing at the helm, tapping his foot to the rhythm of Henwyn’s song.
“What’s that?” asked Skarper, pointing to the flame in the west. “Is it a lighthouse? Is there land out there?”
“None that I ever heard of,” said the old seafarer.
They watched the fire while it slowly sank and dimmed and went out. There was a stain on the sky where it had been, as if a patch of smoke hung there.
“I’d say a ship has caught fire, and burned,” said Kestle.
By this time the other passengers had realized that something was happening, and were beginning to gather. Even Henwyn stopped his singing and came aft to stand with them and peer at the distant smoke, which was almost invisible by then against the deepening dusk.
“Was it the Swan of Govannon?” he asked.
“I know of no other ship in these waters,” said Kestle.
“Good!” said Spurtle. “Then the fire has done our work for us. That’ll put an end to Rhind’s mischief, and the Elvenhorn will be back in the deeps where it belongs. Can we go home now?”