King of the Scepter'd Isle (Song of Earth)

by Coney, Michael G.

  “If that’s the case,” said Ned shrewdly, “I’d have a whole lot of new memories. But I don’t. So you’re talking nonsense.”

  “You wouldn’t know you have new memories. They’d seem like old memories.”

  “Makes sense,” said Governayle, coming to Nyneve’s rescue. “But it doesn’t explain why this fellow you call Arthur is so young. The Arthur in your stories must have been forty years old by the time he died.”

  “Avalona explained that. She said happentracks don’t have to be simultaneous. Arthur’s joined us in an earlier time in his life, that’s all.”

  “But …” This was too much even for Torre. “If that was true, we’d know exactly what was going to happen to him, because you’ve told us in your stories. He’s going to be the king of all England, and he’s going to marry Guinevere, and all that stuff. But we could change all that right now, simply by killing him. So I’m with Ned for once, Nyneve. You’re talking nonsense.”

  “But you won’t kill him, Torre,” said the girl quietly.

  “But I could.”

  “But you won’t.”

  They stared at each other. “By God, I will!” shouted Torre, drawing his sword. Then he remembered and sheathed it. “He has Excalibur,” he said heavily.

  “Exactly.”

  “But if he didn’t … ?”

  “But he does. Don’t worry about it, Torre. The time will come when you won’t even dream of killing Arthur. And remember, the stories I told you all happened on a different happentrack. There’s no reason why they should happen exactly the same on this happentrack.”

  And if they’d been astute enough, they’d have noticed her flush slightly. On this happentrack, she was determined, there would be no marriage to Guinevere. … “And then there are the gnomes,” she said hastily. “At least I can prove them. “

  “The gnomes? What have they got to do with anything?”

  “They were on a different happentrack too. Now they’ve joined us, just like Arthur. …”

  “She shouldn’t have said that,” observed the Miggot of One.

  “Why not?” asked Fang, whispering too. “We can hardly hide from the giants forever.”

  The two gnomes watched the humans from under a rhododendron. In recognition of their precarious situation they had left their scarlet caps at home and wore gray flat hats, brown jackets, and pants. This effectively blended with their surroundings but left them depressed. They stared miserably from the giants to each other, deposited by fate in a strange and violent happentrack. Their only friend among the giantish humans was Nyneve.

  “Anyway,” said the Miggot, “it’s time we got back to the Sharan. She will shortly give birth.”

  The thought of attending the unicorn’s labor did not appeal to Fang. “Do you really need me?”

  “No,” said the Miggot. “But it’s your duty as leader of the Mara Zion gnomes.”

  “Am I still the leader?”

  “Of course. Why not?”

  “Well. …” said Fang diffidently, “I thought perhaps now things are settling down, Bison could take over again. I never felt comfortable about deposing him, actually, Miggot. I felt I’d been guilty of some sort of coup.”

  “Coup? I’d say Bison abdicated. He couldn’t take the heat. As a leader, he’s finished. A dead issue.”

  “Oh, all right, if you say so. I’ll continue on a temporary basis, until Bison recovers his, uh, vitality.”

  “Come on,” said the Miggot impatiently.

  The gnomes wriggled carefully backward from under the bush; then scuttled away through the undergrowth. The paths were strange and they lost their way many times. By the time they reached the blasted oak where the rest of the Mara Zion gnomes had hidden themselves, it was mid-afternoon.

  “I wish we’d chosen somewhere else for the camp,” observed Fang as the blackened branches came into view through the surrounding, intact foliage.

  “It’s an excellent spot, Fang,” said the Miggot, who had chosen it.

  “Don’t you think there’s something … pessimistic about it? I mean, a blasted oak?”

  “You’ve been listening to Spector too much,” snapped the Miggot. “It’s a tree, not a symbol. And the roots provide good cover.”

  “It’s Fang and the Miggot!” came a joyful cry. “They’re back!”

  The gnomes rushed from concealment and greeted the pair, pumping their hands, slapping them on the back.

  “Well done, Fang!” cried the Princess of the Willow Tree, hugging him tightly.

  “The spirit of gnomedom is not dead,” announced Spector the Thinking Gnome.

  “So did you see Nyneve and Arthur? What did they say?” asked King Bison. “Did you arrange a suitable area of the forest for founding the new gnomedom? Has Arthur instructed the rest of the giants to let us live our lives in peace?” There was an unaccustomed acidity in Bison’s voice. As the gnomes’ recently deposed leader, he was beginning to feel the loss of authority.

  “Well, not exactly,” admitted Fang.

  “Not exactly what?”

  “Not exactly any of those things. We saw Nyneve and Arthur, yes. But a crowd of giants were there and things weren’t going too well. It didn’t seem wise to show ourselves.”

  “Not wise?” echoed the Gooligog, Fang’s father and the Mara Zion Memorizer. “But up at the lake, Arthur assured us he would protect us! ‘So long as I’m alive, no harm will come to you gnomes.’ Those were his exact words. Are you saying Arthur lied?”

  “No, Father. He meant what he said. The only trouble is, the other giants don’t accept him.”

  “But he’s Arthur! He’s destined to be King of England, according to Nyneve. How can they not accept him?”

  The Miggot helped Fang out. “Obviously there must be certain formalities before Arthur can sit on the throne.”

  “Formalities? Like what?”

  “Like conquering the rest of England, you fool,” snapped the Miggot, losing patience. “You know how giantish society works. It’s not like gnomedom. Giants have to fight for what they get. You’ve seen them doing it often enough in the umbra.’

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “What we intended to do. Rebuild gnomedom. We’ll just have to exercise a little caution, that’s all. We’ll maintain a low profile until Arthur’s influence spreads. Then we’ll emerge triumphantly from hiding and take our rightful place as important members of the forest community.”

  “I’m damned if I’ll go into hiding,” said the Gooligog. “Gnomes have never hidden in my memory.” The Gooligog’s memory went back many thousands of years. “It’s demeaning, expecting us to—”

  A crashing in the bushes cut him short. He bolted for cover, ignoring the demeaning aspect for the sake of expediency. The rest of the gnomes followed, concealing themselves among the decaying roots of the oak. They waited fearfully as the snapping of twigs and the rustle of leaves came closer. “You see what I mean?” whispered the Gooligog to his companion in hiding.

  “What’s that you say?” yelled old Crotchet, who was deaf.

  The forest fell suddenly silent. Then: “Is that gnomes?” came a shout.

  The voice was a gnomish piping, rather than a giantish roar. “It is gnomes!” Fang shouted back. “Who is that?”

  “It’s Jack o’ the Warren and Pong! And Bart o’ Bodmin!”

  The gnomes emerged from cover and greeted one another. Bart introduced himself Such a meeting of gnomes would normally have been an occasion for feasting, but food was scarce and beer was nonexistent in this inhospitable new world. So the gnomes contented themselves with sitting around the base of the blasted oak and nibbling on raw mushrooms.

  “Would it be safe to light a fire?” Pong asked after a while.

  “Kindle the Wrath of Agni, you mean?” exclaimed Bart. “But that’s against the Kikihuahua Examples! I will not kill any mortal creature,” he began to recite unctuously. “I will not work any malleable substance. I will not kindle the
Wrath of Agni. In this way I will take a step toward living in accord with my world and—”

  “Yes, we know all that stuff,” said the Miggot impatiently. “And we don’t kindle the Wrath of Agni. Broyle the Blaze does it for us. He’s accepted eternal damnation. I see you’re wearing a brass belt buckle. That’s a malleable substance, wrought by the Accursed Gnomes. You’re a bloody hypocrite, Bart o’ Bodmin.”

  “We don’t light fires in Bodmin,” muttered Bart stubbornly.

  “We do here,” said Fang shortly, throwing sticks into a heap. There was something about Bart that he didn’t quite like, and it worried him to see Pong fooled by this suspect gnome. “Kindle the Wrath of Agni, Broyle!”

  “I … I don’t have the sacred torch,” said Broyle the Blaze unhappily. “Somehow it got left behind in our old world. Woe is me. I’ve betrayed the trust.”

  “You’ll just have to light another torch,” said the Miggot. “It’s a small price to pay for the warmth and comfort of us gnomes.”

  Broyle began to tremble. “It’s happened too often,” he said. “Often I’ve forgotten to maintain the sacred torch because I’ve been contemplating, or sleeping, and I’ve had to kindle the Wrath of Agni all over again. I’m a disgrace to the Firelighters Guild, and one day Agni will strike me down with a bolt of lightning, you see if he doesn’t!” He glanced at the sky. “That looks like a very black cumulus up there.”

  “Pull yourself together, gnome,” snapped the Miggot.

  “Is that how you do it?” asked Bart. “You have one gnome take on the responsibility, and he lights all fires from the same torch? Isn’t that bending the Examples to suit your selfish purposes?”

  “Broyle prays for forgiveness,” said the Miggot. “And anyway, it’s kindling the Wrath of Agni that’s against the Examples. There’s nothing wrong with maintaining the Wrath of Agni if someone else has kindled it for you. Broyle kindles the Wrath once, then lights everybody’s fires with the sacred torch. At least, that’s the principle of the thing. But the torch keeps going out.”

  “So what are we going to do?” asked Fang, regarding the pile of sticks.

  “Oh, to hell with you, Broyle!” shouted the Miggot, losing patience as the firelighter shot another glance at the sky. “I’ll light the bloody fire myself. I happen to have an example of the Wrath of Agni in the Sharan’s new cave, to keep her warm,” he informed the gathering at large, “and if that offends anyone, bugger them, that’s what I say.”

  Everybody maintained a polite silence as the Miggot stumped off among the roots of the oak, to reappear with a blazing brand. He thrust it among the sticks. Flames spread, and the Miggot grunted in satisfaction.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” said Pong, once they were seated before a cheerful blaze, “is how you gnomes escaped from the giants.”

  “It was the strangest thing,” said Fang. “The giants captured us right after the happentracks joined, and took us to the Great Hall. We thought we were in big trouble. They had us dancing on the table. There was a fire nearby, and you know what that means.”

  The gnomes groaned. They knew what a giantish fire meant.

  “And then, in came Nyneve. I doubt if she could have saved us by herself, but there was this giant Galahad with her. He seemed to have a strange power over the others. And a giant they call the Baron came, too, from over the other side of the moors. He told them to release us.

  “Then Galahad took us to the Lake of Avalon and we watched Tristan’s funeral, which was rather sad. But then this new giant came out of nowhere. Arthur. Nyneve introduced him to us. He seemed like a good giant. Then they left us and we made our way back.”

  “Where’s Galahad now?”

  “He vanished about the time Arthur appeared. It’s a pity, because he’d have been a good giant to have on our side.”

  “He said something odd before he went,” said the Miggot. “How did it go, Gooligog?”

  “ ‘Happentracks are funny things. You and I, we don’t quite coincide. You’ll find out, one day when we meet again,’ ” quoted the Memorizer.

  “So …” Bart looked around. “What do we do next?”

  “We rebuild gnomedom,” snapped the Miggot, who, like Fang, seemed to have taken a dislike to Bart.

  “Right now?”

  “Well,” said the Miggot, “I have to attend to the Sharan. She’s about to give birth. What the rest of you do is up to yourselves.”

  “Rather an inappropriate time to have your Sharan giving birth, isn’t it?” said Bart.

  “As a matter of fact”,—the Miggot snarled, “it’s an extremely appropriate time. She will be giving birth to digging creatures, and if there’s any kind of creature we need right now, it’s digging creatures. We’ll call them moles.”

  “Why?”

  The Miggot stepped close to Bart and stared down his long nose at him. There was a wart on the end of the Miggot’s nose that acted like a gun sight, and the accuracy and penetrative power of his stare was famous throughout Mara Zion. Bart backed off, blinking. “Because that’s what they are.” The Miggot’s voice was quiet, but it held a frightful menace—all the more so because gnomes are not normally menacing people.

  “Of course,” said Bart quickly. “Of course. May I witness the birth?”

  Shortly afterward the Miggot, Fang, Bart, and Spector met the elfin Pan outside the Sharan’s temporary quarters.

  “The moles are born,” Pan announced.

  “Oh.” The Miggot was disappointed. He liked to watch every detail of the Sharan’s labor; it gave him a sense of achievement to see creatures emerge from her womb according to his specifications. The Sharan herself lay on her side, panting, her normally glossy silver coat dull and matted. Two moles sucked on her generous teats. As often happened with small creatures, they had emerged from the Sharan fully grown.

  The Miggot eyed them critically. “Something’s wrong. They’re deformed. Now what shall we do?”

  The Kikihuahua Examples forbade the killing of any living creature. The Miggot sometimes awakened in the middle of the night trembling, having dreamed of a forest populated by monsters of the Sharan’s creating, which he could neither control nor dispose of.

  “The moles are exactly according to specification,” said Pan coldly.

  “Why are they blind, then?”

  Spector, sensing yet another clash between Pan and the Miggot, said quickly, “It’s probably a protective measure to ensure our sympathy.”

  “It doesn’t ensure my sympathy,” snapped the Miggot, who believed in natural selection. “Far from it. It tells me they’re unfit for survival.”

  “There was no mention of eyes in your specifications,” insisted Pan.

  “Why would I need to tell you about eyes? Every animal has eyes. There are some things we take for granted. How in hell can these moles see without eyes?”

  “Perhaps they make a noise and receive the echo back, like moondogs,” Fang suggested.

  “Moondogs have big ears.” The Miggot regarded the two moles in growing anger. “These things have no ears. They’re little better than lumps of meat with claws.” He stepped close to Pan, seized his ragged smock, and tried to stare furiously into the elf’s eyes. Pan, however, overtopped him by several inches and was able to gaze loftily over his head.

  “Let me run through your original request.” Pan was enjoying the argument. For once he felt he was on firm ground. “You asked for a creature that would live underground, skilled in digging tunnels. You said it would make life much easier because suitable burrows for use as gnomish dwellings were always in short supply.”

  “In Bodmin,” Bart could not resist saying, “we live above the ground in stone huts. It’s healthy. It’s clean.”

  “My cousin Hal lives in a stone hut,” said the Miggot in tones of the utmost contempt, “and he certainly doesn’t keep himself clean.”

  “In pursuance of my duty, I planted a telepathic scenario in the Sharan’s mind,” continued Pan, ignoring t
he interruption. “I gave her to understand she would soon be living on a world where the air was poisonous. The only salvation for her children lay underground, where oxygen-producing fungi grew. So she produced the most suitable children for that environment. Eyes and ears would be a disadvantage, because there’s nothing down there to see or hear. But I’ll warrant the moles have an excellent sense of smell, to sniff out their food.”

  “What do they find to eat down there?” asked Fang.

  “Insects.”

  “You mean … flesh? But isn’t that against the Examples? We can’t create flesh-eaters, can we? Surely the moles ought to eat grass, like rabbits do.”

  “They’re not going to find much grass underground, are they?” Pan regarded Fang impatiently. “And anyway, we have a precedent. Many generations ago, we created the shytes.” He pointed out a group of untidy black birds waiting hopefully at the entrance to the cave. “They’re flesh-eaters to a bird.”

  “The shytes were designed to keep the forest clean,” said the Miggot. “They feed on carrion. They do not eat live flesh. Fang is right. The moles contravene the Examples. You have twisted my specifications, Pan. This is a matter of the utmost gravity.”

  As though alarmed by the Miggot’s condemnation, the moles detached themselves from the teats and began to dig. The soil was light and sandy, and in no time they had disappeared.

  “Stop them!” shouted the Miggot.

  “Too late,” said Pan. “They’ll be all right. They’re supreme in their environment.”

  “They’re the only animals in their environment, you fool. Now I’d like to get them back into ours. How can we put them to work if we can’t find them?” asked the Miggot, practical concerns overriding his conscientious objection to the creatures.

  “You must follow them down their holes and lure them out with kindness. Kindness is in your nature, Miggot; you people are always telling me that. Gnomes are kind and good.”

  “We could tie thongs to their hind legs,” suggested Bart, “and drag them out whenever we wanted. And we could train them to dig where we needed, by chivvying them a bit.”