Fang, the Gnome (Song of Earth)

by Coney, Michael G.

She hadn’t meant to run away. Pan had invented twin kids and slipped them into her head, and then invented a monster to chase them. But soon Pan’s interests had turned to other mischief and the Sharan had found she was lost and alone in the forest, the vision of kids vanished, unable quite to remember how she’d got where she was, and why the gnomes were pulling at her like this. She allowed herself to be led back to her cave, wondering unhappily what her endless life was all about, and when she would be allowed to bear young again.

  Even so dedicated a bureaucrat as the Miggot must relent occasionally, and the Sharan had twice borne young during his years of custodianship. Her first creation was suggested by his wife. It was the tiny and beautiful beebird, designed to suck nourishment from flowers, at the same time pollinating them. It was much bigger and prettier than a bee, and it had no sting.

  There was much learned speculation among scientists of later millennia as to why this experiment was unsuccessful, because a very similar bird evolved naturally on the North American continent before the days of oxygen shortage. Whole theses can be found in the memory banks of the Rainbow dealing with the mysterious disappearance of the beebird.

  In fact, as the Kikihuahua Cantatas now tell us, the explanation was quite simple. Clubfoot Trimble, fancying himself pursued by a badger, knocked over the nesting box and fell full length onto it, crushing the female beebird and her first clutch of eggs. The badger disappeared, having existed only in the umbra.

  “I always said that bird would never survive,” said the Miggot in gloomy satisfaction.

  The Sharan’s next creation was produced to the order of the Miggot himself. He had been in the habit of visiting a cousin who lived at Pentor, on top of the fog-shrouded moor. The journey took a full day and the gnomes used to wonder why the Miggot bothered to make it, since his cousin Hal was known to be even more disagreeable than himself. They didn’t realize that the Miggot and his cousin drew enormous satisfaction from these meetings, sitting for days in mutual desolation, listening to the howling of the wolves and grumbling about the fecklessness of the new generation of gnomes. These were the most rewarding times of the Miggot’s life.

  One winter, well over a hundred years before, the Miggot visited his cousin to find the wolves had closed in. The moor was foggier than ever and the deer had descended into distant valleys. The hungry wolves, scenting gnome, loped around the vicinity of Hal’s home—a dank crevice between huge granite rocks. The Miggot covered the last hundred yards at a scuttling run and barely closed the door behind him before a wolf was scrabbling at it.

  Precipitate arrivals were fairly common events in gnomedom, as Fang found out a century or so later. More-far-sighted gnomes than Fang and Hal dug pits at the entrance to their dwellings, covered with brush, for predators to fall into. Less farsighted gnomes pointed out that the pits caught gnomes more often than predators; and in any case, once you had caught your predator, what did you do with it?

  “Night is the only safe time. The wolves sleep then,” said Hal that evening, glancing at the Miggot. “What I need is some kind of guard animal so I can get outside to tend my crops.”

  “What you need is to live somewhere else,” said the Miggot shortly, still shocked by his narrow escape.

  “My father, and his father before him, lived in this place. It’s our tradition. That’s why they call me Hal o’ the Moor.”

  “You have no wife or children,” the Miggot pointed out. “The tradition will die anyway.”

  Hal was silent.

  “I saw no crops, either,” observed the Miggot.

  “The wolves probably ate them,” said Hal gloomily.

  The Miggot regarded him thoughtfully. “You’re three hundred years old.” He returned to his previous point. “Why don’t you have children?” It was not a polite question, but one that had often puzzled him.

  Hal stared unhappily at his bed, a damp pile of leaves and heather.

  “You were married once,” pursued the Miggot. “The responsibility was there.”

  Embarrassed, Hal blurted out, “I couldn’t face the sex, of course! All that grappling and struggling.”

  “We could all say that. But it’s our duty, Hal. If everybody shirked his duty, it would be the end of gnomedom.” The Miggot drew himself up proudly. “Nobody detests sex more that I do, but I know my duty. Many years ago I suffered sex a few times, and sired two fine youngsters. It was not a pleasant experience, but it’s over now and I can look back on it with the satisfaction of a job well done. You could do it, too, Hal.”

  “I’ve tried. Don’t think I haven’t. For years Meg and I tried, night after night, and even occasionally in the full light of day. But nothing happened. Our union was not rewarded. It was dreadful. I could see us trying and trying to the end of our lives, and our skeletons being found centuries later, locked in unwholesome embrace. Fortunately Meg could see the same thing, and one fine morning she was gone. So …” His voice trailed away.

  “So you hid yourself in this miserable place. All that stuff about your father and his father before him was lies!”

  “No—they lived here, and a few others besides. It was a long time ago, remember. Things change. There was no fog then, and you could see the wolves coming over the moor a mile away. Then the climate changed and everyone left except me. I was glad they went. To hell with them, Miggot, if that’s the kind of friends they were. I’ve never seen them since, and never wanted to. I never get any visitors except you, and even you are a damned imposition.”

  “So how do you know they call you Hal o’ the Moor?” asked the Miggot shrewdly.

  “They don’t, so far as I know. That was a lie. It was my father—they called him Jack o’ the Moor. He was a great gnome, but genetically unsound, it seems.”

  There was a long silence while they mulled over the sadness of impotency in gnomes. The wolves howled. A sniffing could be heard at the door. Eventually the Miggot said, “The Sharan’s been showing signs of broodiness lately. Yesterday she refused her hay.”

  “It’s not good for a female to remain childless for too long,” said Hal eagerly, sensing his cousin was relenting. “They get grumpy and difficult. Loyalty forbids me to tell you a few choice facts about Meg. You probably thought she was a fine woman.”

  “As a matter of fact, I couldn’t stand the sight of her.”

  “That was later. When I first met her, she was a fine woman. Big, strong arms she had, and a great, roaring laugh, and my dwelling was alive with happiness from the moment she walked in that door; which,” admitted Hal, “can be a real pain, after a while. In time she quieted down, but she never became like you or me, Miggot. She never enjoyed her melancholy, if you get my meaning. She was never happy to be sad. By the end, she was only happy when she was poking fun at my thing. The rest of the time she was bloody miserable. And that,” concluded Hal, having reached his point at last, “was because she was unfulfilled. There is nothing so unpleasant as a female unfulfilled.”

  “A female fulfilled can be damned unpleasant, too,” said the Miggot, thinking of his wife, Elmera.

  “Absolutely!” cried Hal, delighted at the consensus. “I happened to run into Meg shortly after she left me. She was living with a gnome in the forest, and he’d fulfilled her already—but she still seemed to bear some grudge, and shouted after me as I passed. I won’t repeat what she shouted. I think what I’m saying is: sometimes they never recover.” His voice dropped to a portentious drone and he stared at the Miggot significantly. “Have more beer, cousin.”

  “The Sharan must be put to use,” said the Miggot decisively.

  “It flushes out the tubes and keeps them in trim.”

  And so the fogdog came into being. It was not a pretty animal, even as a pup. It was squat and big-jawed, with a leg at each corner. Its eyes were small, pale and almost sightless. Its most noticeable feature was the ears. They were huge and saucer-shaped and they stuck out from the animal’s head like giant clamshells.

  Even the Miggot was sli
ghtly dismayed when he attended the birth and assisted in the production of two pups, male and female. The Sharan herself gave them one glance and refused to have anything more to do with them. There were limits even to her motherly instincts.

  “I expect they’ll improve as they get older,” said the Miggot to Pan, hopefully.

  Pan regarded the pair undismayed. “I doubt it,” he said cheerfully. “That’s pretty much the way they’re supposed to look. They don’t need good eyesight in the fog; it would be a distraction. They send out a signal instead. It bounces off the objects around them, and they receive it back in those ears. They can get a complete picture of their surroundings, even in the fog or the dark.”

  “What’s that terrible noise they keep making?” It was a high-pitched grunting snuffle, accompanied by a spray of mucus.

  “That’s the signal they send out.”

  “Does it have to be so … unpleasant?”

  “That’s beyond our control, Miggot.” Pan smiled down at the gnome from his perch on a nearby branch. “The Sharan creates the most suitable animal to meet the requirements we specify. It is not concerned with aesthetics. The important thing is that these animals will be more than a match for any wolf, when full-grown.”

  “You mean they’re not full-grown now?” asked the Miggot nervously. The pups, staggering to their feet and snapping clumsily at each other, stood twice as tall as he.

  “Far from it,” said Pan, and began to tootle his pipes to calm them down.

  Pan refused to accompany him, so the Miggot doped the pups with a gnomish potion known—for reasons lost in antiquity—as batmilk, and herded them to the moor. Of his adventures during that epic journey nothing is known, because he never spoke of them. It is known that the journey took three days instead of the usual one, and that on the Miggot’s arrival Hal o’ the Moor refused to take delivery of the fogpups.

  “They turn my stomach,” he said, and after a brief family quarrel the pups were quartered in a nearby cave.

  As the years went by, the Miggot dropped self-satisfied little hints to the Mara Zion gnomes about the success of his creations. The fogpups had grown into fine, strong animals. The wolves, beaten, had retreated to the valleys, their sense of smell no match for the fogdogs’ sonar. The moor was safe for gnomish travellers, provided they treated the fogdogs with respect.

  “Respect?” asked King Bison.

  “Just don’t take any unnecessary risks,” explained the Miggot. “Don’t expose yourself. Stay among the rocks—it confuses your outline.”

  But later it became noticeable that the Miggot was visiting the moor less frequently, and beginning to complain of the ingratitude of certain blood relatives. If anyone chanced to mention the name of Hal, the Miggot would turn his head in the direction of the speaker with reptilian slowness, and stare at him coldly down the length of his nose until the speaker lapsed into an abashed silence.

  It was the gentle Fang who eventually enlightened the gnomes, many decades later. The climate had changed and Fang often visited the moor, climbing to Pentor and sitting with his arms clasped around his knees, admiring the view and constructing a fantastic chain of events whereby he led gnomedom out of terrible peril into a glorious future, and the Princess of the Willow Tree became his queen.

  He would sit with his back against a curiously warm rock with circular indentations and watch the distant sea, so bright and clear that he felt he could almost dip his toes in it. The moor was rarely foggy now and the only blemish on the beautiful panorama was the umbra. This caused the forest to shimmer and blur.

  Fang was watching a phantom giant riding a horse along a valley trail when he was startled by a metallic creak. Jumping to his feet, wondering wildly if this was the noise fog-dogs made, he noticed for the first time a small door set in a cleft between two rocks. It swung open. A face peered at him. Although ugly, it was not quite ugly enough to be a fogdog.

  “Who … who are you?” Fang stammered.

  “They call me Hal o’ the Moor.”

  “They do?” said Fang, impressed. “Are you the Miggot’s cousin?”

  “I have that misfortune. And who are you?”

  “They call me Fang.”

  “Why?”

  “I once killed something. It was nothing, really.”

  “Come on in, Fang, and let me tell you what that bloody cousin of mine did.”

  Fang backed away unhappily. The cave behind the door looked dank and sinister, and Hal o’ the Moor had a Miggot-like stare that unsettled him. “I’m expected back soon. Why … why don’t you come out here? It’s a beautiful day.”

  “I hate the day. You can see too much in the day.” But Hal was emerging slowly from his hole, like a termite. In due course the two gnomes were sitting side by side, their backs against the warm rock. “I can see no reason why the whole of Mara Zion shouldn’t know what my cousin the Miggot did to me,” snarled Hal. “You look like a gossipy young fellow.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t—”

  “Be quiet and listen, Fang.” And Hal o’ the Moor told Fang the true story of the fogdogs.

  It happened that a dance was held the next evening in honor of Nyneve, now a frequent visitor to gnomedom, who had snatched King Bison from the jaws of a wild boar that afternoon, at considerable risk to herself. All the Mara Zion gnomes were present except the Miggot, who, as has been explained, believed in natural selection.

  “Nyneve should have minded her own damned business,” he said.

  His wife had a different outlook. Elmera arrived on rabbitback, uttering hoarse cries of enthusiasm and bearing wine. By this time, dancing was in progress and the ancient wooden floor of the log hall thundered to the stamping of feet. Over fifty gnomes were present and King Bison occupied the seat of honor near the fire, occasionally breaking into a fit of trembling as he relived the moment of peril, seeing in his mind’s eye the wicked eyes of the boar.

  “But Bison would have given a good account of himself, you can be sure of that!” boomed Lady Duck.

  The rear wall of the hollow log had been removed and was open to the night; there Nyneve sat on a stump, watching. Every so often the gnomes would fall silent while someone proposed a toast—invariably to Nyneve—and she would see a host of tiny figures turn toward her, raising their mugs. She would smile, thinking how jolly they all looked with their plump cheeks and party clothes. Her visits to gnomedom were bright spots in her otherwise drab and rather strange existence on the other side of the umbra. The lively throng was quite a contrast to the two lined and somber faces at home: Avalona the witch, bowed down by terrible knowledge, obsessed by portentious responsibilities; and Merlin, slightly senile.

  “You know,” said Clubfoot thoughtfully, “if Nyneve were smaller she’d be quite pretty, in a thin kind of way. Do you see what I mean, Fang?”

  But Fang had eyes only for the Princess of the Willow Tree, who was involved in a hand-clapping dance with three other women. Disturbed by the peculiar sensations the sight of the Princess aroused in him, he joined King Bison at the fireside. Bison glanced at him, haggard.

  “Hello, young Fang.”

  “Congratulations on your escape!”

  “From the veritable jaws of death,” said Bison in sepulchral tones. “Nyneve snatched me up so fast I lost my cap. It was a sobering experience. Believe me, Fang, there is nothing so terrifying as facing imminent death. Unless it’s facing imminent sex.” He chuckled hollowly.

  “Is sex that bad?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it. Your time will come.”

  “Bison,” said Fang earnestly, “how did the boar get so close to catching you? I mean, boars are noisy things, rooting and grunting. They don’t usually sneak up on a gnome.”

  “This one did.” Bison’s eyes were wide as he relived the dreadful moment. “One minute I was strolling along a forest path near the racetrack, and the next—whoof, there the bugger was, right on top of me, as though it had materialized from the umbra!”

 
; “Maybe it had.”

  “What? Oh, nonsense, young Fang. Anyway, Nyneve happened to be passing and she grabbed me in time. A harrowing experience. Pass me another beer, there’s a good fellow. So what have you been doing with yourself lately?”

  Fang put his disquieting thoughts aside. “Oh … mooching around. Contemplating. I saw Hal o’ the Moor yesterday.”

  “I don’t want to hear about any relation of that damned Miggot!” said Bison loudly. “The Miggot wants me dead!” It so happened that the music stopped at that instant and the final flourish of panpipes and drums sounded like a dramatic introduction to Bison’s aggrieved remark. Heads turned.

  “I’m sure the Miggot doesn’t really want you dead,” said Fang quickly. “He’s a gnome of principle, that’s all. According to his beliefs, Nyneve interfered in the natural course of events. In principle he may believe you should have died, but in practice, at the bottom of his heart, he’s very glad you’re safe.”

  “Nonsense!” cried Elmera. “The Miggot is a callous swine. I ought to know. I’ve lived with him long enough!”

  “You mentioned Hal o’ the Moor,” said Clubfoot. “Now there’s a strange thing. The Miggot hardly ever speaks of him these days. They used to be as thick as thieves. Have they quarreled, Fang?”

  “That’s what Hal told me.”

  Nyneve’s whisper boomed through the log like a gale. “Is Hal the gnome who lives alone at Pentor Rock?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Tell me what Hal said, Fang.”

  Flattered by the sudden attention, Fang said, “It all happened a long time ago, according to Hal. The Miggot created some fogdogs, terribly fierce things, to protect Hal from the wolves.”

  “He abused his trust!” shouted Elmera.

  “Anyway, the fogdogs drove the wolves off—and everything else, too. They were the only animals that could get around easily in the fog. But Hal couldn’t control them and they hung around his place trying to eat him, and peeing on his crops. He could only get out at night, while they were sleeping.”

  There were unfeeling chuckles from his audience. “I knew something was wrong up there,” said Lady Duck.