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

by Coney, Michael G.

The snow was driving horizontally down the forest path, funneled by the trees. The rabbits, blinded, proceeded at a slow lope. Fang and the Miggot clung to their mounts’ backs, eyes squeezed tight and trusting to the Miggot’s rabbit’s sense of direction. The journey seemed unending. The wind rose and the gnomes rode heads down, their caps deflecting the worst of the storm. Somewhere they heard a crash as a tree fell.

  At last they reached the blasted oak and secured the rabbits in the lee of an exposed root. Then they made their way to a big chamber, hollowed by moles and supported above by arched roots. The Sharan lay panting in the light of a meager fire tended by Elmera. Pan sat beside the unicorn’s head, playing his pipes softly and feeding her soothing thoughts. When the Sharan was in labor, a surprisingly sympathetic side of his nature always emerged.

  “Not before time,” snapped Elmera. “I suppose you called in at the Disgusting on your way. This isn’t my job, you know. You’re the Sharan’s official guardian, Miggot!”

  The Miggot ignored her. “How’s she doing, Pan?”

  “All right. She seems a bit frightened.”

  “Let’s take a look at the rear end of her.”

  The Miggot and Pan commenced a close and expert inspection. Fang, embarrassed, tried to open up a conversation with Elmera.

  “Bit of a storm outside,” he ventured.

  “You can look after the fire now. I’m going to bed.” She stalked out of the chamber, thin for a female gnome, and trailing an aura of disapproval.

  “Does she know?” Fang asked.

  “Do you think I’d tell her anything?” By now the Miggot and Pan were sitting on the ground, their feet braced against the Sharan’s rump, hauling on something about which Fang’s mind refused to speculate. “Come and give us a hand, can you? You and Spector and me are the only ones who know about this. Let’s keep it that way.”

  “And me,” said Pan. “Don’t forget me. I know.”

  “Yes, and you’d better keep your bloody mouth shut. If word gets out, the three of us will be in deep manure. We’ll be ostracized by gnomedom, and the giants will probably roast us on spits. Pull, you little runt. Pull!”

  Fang, reluctantly approaching, was in time to see the Miggot and Pan fall onto their backs as the resistance suddenly ceased.

  A human baby lay on the earthen floor.

  “Success!” shouted the Miggot.

  “Oh, my,” said Pan, awed, crawling to his feet and staring. “Isn’t it big!”

  “It’s a male,” said Fang.

  The Sharan twisted her head around and expertly bit through the umbilical. Then she began to lick the baby with a rough tongue. He uttered a cough, then filled the chamber with a hiccuping, squalling din.

  The Miggot was hurrying from the corner of the chamber, trailing an armful of blankets. “Where the hell has Elmera gone? You can always rely on her to run out in a gnome’s hour of need. Go and get her, Fang!”

  “Perhaps you ought to get her, Miggot.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Thrusting the blankets at Fang, the Miggot ran for the door. “Wrap the baby up in those!” he shouted over his shoulder.

  The baby was immensely heavy and cumbersome. By spreading the blankets on the floor and pushing, Fang and Pan managed to get him rolled up in them like a gigantic chrysalis. Soon the Miggot and Elmera arrived, the latter wearing a thunderous expression that abated somewhat on seeing the baby.

  “If he wasn’t so big, he could almost be a new gnome,” was her comment.

  “So feed him,” snapped the Miggot.

  For one appalling moment Fang thought he meant Elmera to bare her scanty breasts; but she urged the Sharan to change position, then guided a teat into the baby’s mouth. The baby clearly knew what this was all about and began to suck, waving tiny fists in appreciation. The chamber was suddenly quiet. Fang smiled at the Miggot and Elmera. The Miggot returned a twisted grin. Pan, his job completed, lay down on a bed in the corner and went instantly to sleep.

  “What now?” asked Elmera. “You can’t keep that thing here.”

  “I realize that,” said the Miggot.

  “And you can’t take him away. You’ll be seen. You’ve got yourself into real trouble this time, Miggot. I always said you would, playing God like this!”

  “We’re moving the baby out tonight,” the Miggot told Fang.

  “Tonight? In this weather?”

  “The weather is in our favor. Nobody will see us. Only a fool would be out on a night like this.”

  “I’m not a fool, Miggot!” Fang was annoyed. An hour ago he’d been comfortable at home and looking forward to cuddling the Princess in bed, and now he was facing a snowy journey and being called a fool into the bargain. “Bugger you, Miggot!” he snapped. “You can move the baby yourself!”

  The Miggot frowned. Fang seemed determined to misunderstand him. “I meant the only people likely to be out tonight,” he said carefully, “will be fools and two other people. We will be those two other people. We’ll be in the cart, with the baby. The rabbits will pull the cart. Is that clear?”

  “But suppose we run into a fool,” said Fang worriedly. “Or even a band of fools. They might want to know what’s in the cart!”

  “Fools have no curiosity, Fang. That’s one of their characteristics. Now, Elmera,” said the Miggot quickly, before Fang could continue the discussion, “all I ask is that you help us get the baby into the rabbit cart. Then you can go to bed, and Fang and I will take it from there.”

  The baby, although no taller than a gnome, was immensely heavy, and all three of them were exhausted by the time he was loaded into a cart built specially for the purpose. Unlike the normal rabbit cart, this had four wheels and long shafts to dampen the effect of the rabbit’s bounding motion. Both Gene, the Miggot’s rabbit, and Thunderer were harnessed to the cart. The gnomes fortified themselves against the cold with beer and loaded several gourds of milk for the baby. Then they rigged a tentlike awning over hoops of hazel attached to the sides of the cart, so that the baby would stay dry.

  Elmera watched silently. When they were finished, she said, “Keep him here for a few days at least.”

  “We can’t take the chance. This isn’t the kind of secret you can keep from gnomedom. And he gets any bigger, we won’t be able to move him. It’s now or never, Elmera.”

  “You’re a cruel bastard, Miggot!” she stormed, eyes bright. Then she swung around and ran from the chamber.

  The Miggot avoided Fang’s eyes. “Elmera has always been a source of challenge to me,” he muttered.

  Fang said nothing. Silently they boarded the cart and urged the rabbits forward. Once they were outside, the force of the storm hit them, rocking the cart.

  They took the beach path directly south from the blasted oak. The snow fell steadily, eddying around them. Drifts built up against the larger trees. They sensed rather than saw these by the way the cart would suddenly slow down. They sat side by side on the open front platform of the cart with the baby, warm and well fed, enclosed behind them. The rabbits plodded on miserably. They didn’t like the weather any better than the gnomes did, although they were better dressed to deal with it. Progress was painfully slow. The wind seemed to cut through every crack in the gnomes’ clothing. An hour went by, then another, and Fang judged it to be well past midnight. Tiredness overcame him. …

  He slipped easily into a world a little different from the one he knew, but not much. It was a world he often visited in his dreams. Afterward, when he awakened, he would remember very little, just a vague impression of a human girl standing on the edge of a cliff and watching the sea gulls. …

  She took off her blouse and laid it over a flaming yellow gorse bush. She stood still for a while, dressed only in a pair of white shorts, as the wind played with her hair. Her breasts were proportionately much smaller than a female gnome’s, but they were neat and pink-tipped, and the sleeping Fang could appreciate their beauty. There was one part of the dream that had a nightmarish quality, however, and
that came next.

  The girl shrugged her shoulders with a gesture that was becoming familiar to Fang.

  She spread her wings.

  They were large and feathered white, at odds with the rest of her body, and terrifying because of it. She flapped them slowly, facing the sea.

  “Oh, why can’t I!” she shouted, a dreadful despair in her voice.

  And then she was gone and Fang slept on. Different and more gnomelike creatures entered his dreams and brushed away the lingering images of the girl on the cliff. The new creatures were still frightening, however, and he groaned in his sleep.

  He was awakened by the jerk as the cart stopped dead. The night was inky black.

  “Go and see what the problem is, Fang.” The Miggot spoke into his ear.

  “But what if it’s a fool?” He’d been dreaming of fools who prowled the forest on nights such as this: big gnomes, insane and hairy, with gnarled clubs and a total disregard for the Examples.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Fang?”

  “Never mind.” The image was fading and he began to feel a little foolish himself. He jumped from the cart into the darkness—and found himself imprisoned in snow up to his chest. “Help! Miggot!” he cried.

  “What?” He felt the Miggot’s breath on his face. “What are you playing at now, Fang?”

  “I’m stuck! Pull me out!”

  Grumbling, the Miggot got his hands under Fang’s armpits and tugged. Fang scrambled back onto the cart, panting. “Try your side,” he suggested.

  The Miggot peered into the blackness, then lowered a circumspect foot. “It’s deep snow here too. You know what, Fang? We’re stuck in a drift.”

  “Perhaps we can dig ourselves out,” said Fang.

  “How can we? The drift will get deeper the farther forward we go—and rabbits can’t go backward; everybody knows that. We’re doomed, Fang. The mission is a failure.” He slumped back, defeated. “I should have listened to Elmera.”

  It was this last remark that told Fang how deeply into despair the Miggot had plunged. Cold, tiredness, and lack of nourishing beer had taken its toll.

  “I’m going to take a look at the back,” he said.

  “How can you take a look? It’s pitch-black!”

  “I’ll feel my way around,” snapped Fang, losing patience. “I’m not going to sit here until I freeze. I suggest you have a drink of beer and pull yourself together.” He crawled into the covered section of the cart. It was warmer here, and the baby seemed to be sleeping easily. He wormed his way past, ducked under the back awning, and stepped carefully to the ground. Here the snow came only to his knees. It would be possible to back the cart out if the rabbits were unhitched from the front and reattached to this end. But the task of unhitching the rabbits and getting them out of the drift would be insuperable. Up front, the snow would be well over his head. Fang sighed and leaned against the cart to consider the situation. The blackness pressed in on him, thick and impenetrable.

  Or was it?

  Wasn’t that a light a little way back? A faint yellow chink, illuminating a thread of snowy ground?

  Fang plodded toward it.

  It was a door, set into a bank at the side of the path. Snow had been cleared from around it. He pounded on it, shouting. It opened.

  Clubfoot Trimble stood there, showing no surprise. “Oh, it’s you, Fang,” he said in depressed tones. “At least some one had the courage to come out on a night like this. It’s very bad for trade, this kind of weather, I can tell you.”

  “Clubfoot!”

  “Who did you expect?”

  “Well, nobody really. I hadn’t thought about it.” And Fang followed Clubfoot into the Disgusting Drinking Hole where a fire blazed merrily and benches stood empty, awaiting customers. “I didn’t know you stayed open so late.”

  “What else is there to do?” Clubfoot’s wife had been accidentally killed a year ago, stepped on by a giant whose identity only Fang knew. For a while he’d turned into a recluse and, like the Gooligog, had gone to live in the marshy land to the west. More recently he had been elected to take over from the late Tom Grog as host of the Disgusting. He was a good choice, being given to rambling monologues to which nobody felt obliged to listen and which provided a restful background to serious drinking.

  “Clubfoot,” said Fang seriously, “Miggot and I are on a mission of great importance. The very future of gnomedom hangs on the outcome of our odyssey. What do you think of that?”

  “Odysseys are like life,” said Clubfoot, who had ambitions of becoming gnomedom’s resident philosopher. “They must be built on a solid foundation of beer.”

  That statement, made before a warm fire to a cold and discouraged gnome, seemed to embody all the wisdom of the ages. “I’ll have a mug of your best dark,” said Fang.

  The beer was drinkable, but it was apparent that Clubfoot had not yet achieved the high brewing standards of his predecessor. The two gnomes settled at the fireside, feet stretched toward the flames. “Tell me about your odyssey,” said Clubfoot. “Where are you bound?”

  “Our destination is secret,” said Fang, glancing over his shoulder. “And so is our cargo.”

  “That’s good.” Clubfoot nodded wisely, a response he’d been practicing lately. “That’s good. It bodes well for the future of gnomedom that two distinguished gnomes should undertake a secret odyssey. And where is the Miggot now? Or is that secret too?”

  “The Miggot is stuck in a drift,” said Fang unhappily.

  “Shouldn’t you be digging him out?”

  Fang eyed him speculatively, wondering how much he might safely reveal. “The Miggot is not personally stuck.”

  “But the cargo is?”

  “The cargo is not personally stuck, either.”

  “Then what is personally stuck?”

  “The cart.”

  “Oh.” A great light dawned on Clubfoot’s broad face. “I understand.” He thought about it for a moment, then said, “No, I don’t understand, Fang. It’s probably no business of mine, but I’ve had experience with carts. And if they are hauled by rabbits, as they usually are, they don’t get stuck in drifts.”

  “I can assure you our cart is stuck, Clubfoot.”

  “Then what are the rabbits doing?”

  “Sleeping, I expect.”

  “Well, of course you’re stuck, if your rabbits are asleep,” cried Clubfoot. “You must wake them up. They’ve been fooling you. I expect they stopped pulling when they ran into the drift?”

  “Instantly.”

  “Well, all you do, Fang, my friend,” and Clubfoot rose to his feet and laid an arm around Fang’s shoulders, “is to make them dig. Rabbits like lying in snowdrifts because they’re out of the wind that way. They won’t dig their way out unless they’re forced into it. A good kick up the backside will usually improve their selfish attitude. And then they’ll tunnel right through that drift, pulling the cart behind. Snow is soft, Fang. It’s no obstacle to a rabbit with a determined gnome behind him.”

  Fang was already draining his mug and wiping the foam from his beard. “You’re right, Clubfoot. If you’ve ever had the feeling I wasn’t always listening to you, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I must go. The odyssey must press on!”

  And with these inspiring words he hurried into the snowy night.

  He found the Miggot feeding the baby gloomily. “Oh, it’s you, Fang. I thought you’d wandered off into the snow to die, not wishing to be a burden to me.”

  “The odyssey must press on!”

  “What the devil are you talking about?”

  “I have an idea, Miggot. Leave the baby for a moment and come and watch!”

  Grumbling, the Miggot followed him forward. A faint hint of morning had lightened the sky, and now the drift could be dimly seen, rising before them like a pale mountain. From out of the drift poked the dark rumps of two rabbits.

  Fang balanced himself on the dashboard and drove a vigorous boot into the right-hand rump.<
br />
  “What did you kick Gene for?” cried the Miggot, outraged.

  To even matters up, Fang kicked Thunderer with equal force.

  The rumps stirred. Fang kicked them both again. They became galvanized into action, surging and bucking. Snow began to spray past the gnomes. The cart lurched and began to move forward. Soon the mountainous drift closed over them as they inched their way through a blizzard of snow from the rabbits’ kicking paws.

  “It’s all a matter of understanding rabbits,” said Fang a little later as they emerged from the far side of the drift.

  By dawn the snow had ceased and the cart was skirting the beach, keeping close under the western cliff to avoid Drexel Poxy’s settlement. The sea rolled toward them, choppy and clawed by the wind. They arrived at Pong’s cave and reined the rabbits to a halt.

  Pong’s face peered fearfully out at them.

  “Oh, it’s you, Fang,” he said, relieved. “And the Miggot. That crunching I heard, it must have been the wheels of your cart. For a moment I thought it was Something Else.”

  “Pong, we come on a mission of grave importance.”

  “Good. Come on in and have a drink of herb tea.”

  “Pong doesn’t believe in beer,” Fang explained to the Miggot.

  “You mean the most important leg of our journey is in the hands of a crank?”

  “It’s the only thing Pong is crankish about. He has this theory that beer changes our behavior.”

  “Bloody nonsense. It normalizes our behavior.”

  “One has to keep one’s wits about one,” Pong explained. “Enemies are everywhere. I used to drink beer once, and it made me sleepy. When I’m sleepy, I’m at my most vulnerable.”

  Tiredness and cold had honed the edge of the Miggot’s temper. “You’re not talking about that bloody lopster again?” he snarled. “I thought we’d explained all that to you!”

  “So you did, Miggot. So you did.”

  “How are things going in the Poxy camp?” Fang changed the subject hastily.

  “Wonderfully well. I’ve been waiting to talk to you about that for some time.” Pong glanced shiftily at them. “I hope you don’t mind my …”

  “Throwing your lot in with Drexel Poxy?”