A short while later they rode into the forest, Fang tucked into Ned’s top pocket so they could converse. “Just tell me which way to go, Fang!” cried Ned cheerfully, his good humor restored.
Fang had decided to lead Ned away from the Sharan’s usual haunts. “North,” he said.
“Any particular reason for heading north?” Ned asked. “North is the moors.”
“The Sharan likes to run free in the open country.”
Ned reined his horse to a halt. “I very much doubt it, you little liar. You don’t want me to find the unicorn, do you? You intend to lead me a merry dance, and slip away as soon as you get the chance!”
“Oh, no, Ned!”
“Listen, Fang. Any fool knows what a unicorn looks like. I don’t really need you, you know. I might take it into my head to throw you to the dogs. So behave yourself.”
“South, then,” muttered Fang. Then after a while a thought struck him. “Anyway, I’m the only one who can talk to the Sharan, if you had thoughts of getting her to make you creatures.”
“Whatever gave you that idea, Fang?”
“Why else are you so set on finding her?”
“Scientific interest,” said Ned loftily, “and human curiosity.” He did not seem disposed to expand on this. They rode in silence until Avalona’s cottage came into view through the trees. “I don’t think we need to go too close to that place,” said Ned. “East or West, gnome?”
Fang’s hope that Nyneve might be able to rescue him faded. “West.”
So they rode on with the sun at their backs. Soon they passed the familiar clearing of the mushroom ring and, not long after, Fang’s dwelling. It was different in the umbra, with strange bushes around the entrance. But it still looked very much like home and Fang was ashamed to feel a wetness in his eyes. He wondered who lived there on this world. Probably some animal, he decided. Maybe a badger. He sniffed as they passed, but could detect no odor.
Here and there they came across cottages. Ned would ask if anyone had seen a unicorn, but the inhabitants would look at him strangely and close their doors quickly. And sometimes the faint sound of a laugh would filter through the woodwork.
“This is not doing my reputation any good, Fang,” said Ned irritably. “I just hope you haven’t been lying to me, my sneaky little friend.” He dismounted and drank from his flask. “Am I a fool for believing in your unicorn? Or would I be a bigger fool if I didn’t believe it?” He took the gnome out of his pocket and gazed at him in perplexity.
“Often the Sharan runs in the direction of the beach,” said Fang, realizing that they were perilously close to the Miggot’s dwelling, where the Sharan might well be wandering.
“Then that’s where we’ll go,” said Ned after a searching stare into Fang’s eyes.
They arrived at the beach in the early afternoon, to find it a scene of human activity. The whole village seemed to be there, gathered round a group of people launching a boat. They were in high good spirits. It seemed that Tristan was embarking on his journey to Ireland. The boat was piled high with provisions.
“Godspeed, Tristan!” called the villagers.
Tristan stood in the stern. Six men were seated at the oars and a square sail was flapping free. “Are you sure everything will be all right back here?” he shouted.
“The baron won’t show his face around here for a while!” Torre shouted back. “You made your point with Mador!”
“I didn’t think it went too well, personally,” called Tristan doubtfully. “I thought it was a bit of a disaster, to tell the truth.”
“You showed the might of Excalibur!” yelled Torre as the oarsmen bent to their task.
“Excalibur!” roared the crowd, and Tristan waved the sword in acknowledgment. People rushed forward to ease the boat through the breakers. Porpoising over the waves, the men straining at the oars, it cleared the shallows and slipped into deep water. As it passed the shelter of the headland, the sail filled and Tristan steered west, soon disappearing behind the cliffs.
Ned sat astride his horse, some distance from the others. People began to bring food and drink out of baskets, and gather driftwood for a fire. A party was developing. A minstrel plucked at a lute.
Torre caught sight of Ned. “Come and join us!” he called.
Surprised and flattered, Ned dismounted and tethered his horse to a tree, then remembered Fang. “I think I’ll keep you to myself for a while, gnome,” he said. “You can stay in my saddlebag while I join the party. I may not be back for some time, so you’ll probably get quite hungry. Perhaps it will teach you a lesson for leading me on a wild goose chase.”
“I’ve told you the truth,” protested Fang, but Ned merely snorted, pulled him out of his pocket and thrust him roughly into the saddlebag, still trussed in the leather pouch. Then he fastened the flap and darkness closed in on Fang.
Fang lost track of time. Occasionally he heard a scream of female laughter from the party, but for most of the time the thick leather of the saddlebag encased him in an oppressive, smelly silence. For a long time he lay still and abandoned himself to gnomish contemplation. Eventually he worked around to considering his options, if there were any.
First, he had to get away from Ned as soon as possible. Finding the Sharan while in Ned’s company could only result in disaster. Not finding the Sharan while in Ned’s company would result in disaster, too.
Second, when he shook Ned off he would have to find Nyneve. She would help him find the Sharan, and she would-make sure the two of them returned to gnomedom safely. Fang was not at all sure he knew how to get back into his own happentrack. Certainly he could go and stand in the mushroom ring, but what did he do then? Invoke Agni, or the Great Grasshopper, or one of those other mysterious gnomish myths? It was unlikely that the gods of this happentrack—if it possessed gods—would have heard of Agni.
“Whose horse is it, anyway?” A voice, very close, jerked him out of his thoughts.
“I don’t know. Does it matter? They’re all drunk.”
“I wouldn’t like to think I’d robbed Tristan. He’s a dangerous character.”
They were the voices of two male giants, talking low, and Fang, becoming experienced in the ways of giants, guessed they were up to no good. Next he heard a metallic clatter.
“Shhh! Do you want to wake the whole bloody lot of them?”
“I’ve dropped my knife. I can’t see a thing. Don’t just stand there, you fool. Help me find it.”
“What the hell do you need a knife for anyway?”
“To cut the saddlebag free.”
The whisper took on a note of resigned patience. “When you think about it, Albert—when you really get down to basics—do you need a saddlebag? You have two perfectly good saddlebags of your own. Where do you propose to hang a third? Over the horse’s ass, for Christ’s sake?
“Oh, you’re so bloody clever! Here it is. I wouldn’t have liked to lose it. It’s a good knife. I need the saddlebag to hold whatever’s in it, of course. I don’t want to go creeping through the forest at night with my arms all full of loot. I want something to carry it back to the horse in.”
There came a monstrous buffet that knocked Fang almost senseless. One of the giants had slapped the bag.
“There isn’t a hell of a lot in here, anyway. Wait a moment. What’s this? It feels like a purse.”
“Full of gold?”
“No, it’s not heavy enough for gold. There’s something soft in here. It moved! It’s some kind of an animal.”
“Bring it out and let’s take a look at it.”
“It’s probably just a ferret. Let’s look in the other bag.”
“No, wait a minute. I could use a ferret.”
Fang was hauled out into the cold night air and dumped onto the ground, still in his bag.
“I can’t see—what is it? Is that a head sticking out?”
“Here—let me loosen the string. That’s better. Oh … Catch him!”
Fang bolted for the under
growth. Gnomes can run fast when occasion demands, moving in a kind of gliding scuttle. Fang moved as well as the best of them, and before long the noises of pursuit faded into the night. He slowed down, looked around and soon began to pick out a few landmarks. Eventually he found himself at the site of his dwelling. The lurch tree was not there, however. In its place stood a tall pine, but the pattern of exposed roots was similar to that on his own world. As he’d noted earlier in the day, there was a burrow in there.
Exhausted, Fang crept into it. He lay down and was instantly asleep.
He was awakened by the unfamiliar sight of early daylight just outside the burrow. Normally Fang made sure all light was excluded from his dwelling. Like most gnomes, he slept in darkness until his body was completely rested. This morning, however, he felt he could have done with several hours more sleep. He crawled from the burrow, yawned and stretched, and scanned the forest for signs of food. There didn’t seem to be anything handy. The giants had probably eaten it all, with their enormous appetites. There was no sign of water, either. Fang raised his head and sniffed. He detected a faint wetness on the wind—probably the marshland to the west.
He was thirsty. Moreover, he felt sticky and dispirited, and in need of a bracing wash. Perhaps his father had been right about the therapeutic properties of washing. He took the comb from his pocket and used it vigorously on beard and hair, whistling to raise his spirits.
It says much for the Gooligog’s knowledge of psychology that Fang soon shook off his early-morning blues and came to a decision. He would visit the stream north of the marsh, and have a damned good wash.
He set off at a brisk pace, and before long was descending the escarpment into the flat meadows. Soon he arrived at the stream. He stripped his clothes off and jumped into the chilly water.
“Aaaargh!” he shouted, and the sound of his voice carried lonely across the flatlands until it was swallowed by the immensity of giantdom. Despite his good intentions, the wash was a brief affair, and soon he was fully clad again and heading for a place where the bank was quite high, exposing a sandy vertical face.
He found he was walking on tiptoe, holding his breath. The sounds of the stream seemed to fade. Ghostly willow trees appeared in the umbra, hanging over him like a green mist. When he reached the right place, he climbed down and stood ankle-deep in the water, searching the bare soil of the bank under the fringe of grass.
There was nothing there. In this world there was no burrow under the second tree. A quiet sadness overcame him and he stood still for a while, the water flowing gently past his boots, remembering happy days in gnomedom, and the last time he’d visited this spot.
He was about to climb back onto the bank when a movement caught his eye. The texture of the opposite bank had changed. For an instant the red soil shimmered and seemed to flow, as though seen through a heat haze. Fang held his breath. A queenfisher dived close by, emerging with a tiny fish in its beak. It flashed past him on bright metallic wings, but he didn’t give it a glance. The bank continued to shimmer, just in one spot.
A face appeared.
The face was misty and umbral. Fang felt a lump in his throat. His home world was so near, yet impossibly distant. The soil and pebbles of the bank could be seen superimposed on the face, and a real beetle crawled across the forehead. But the face was clearly recognizable. Knowing she could not hear him, Fang called softly: “Princess!”
Her face was very sad, with a look that told Fang it was not a sadness of the moment but something deeper, a sadness that had been with her for some time, a sadness that she woke up with in the morning. She looked shyly up and down the stream, as though checking to see if anyone was there. The queenfisher had gone and the world was very quiet as though it, like Fang, were holding its breath. The morning sun was hot on his back and a little trickle of sweat found its way from under his cap and down his temple. Then the Princess emerged from her burrow.
She was naked.
Mortified, his face burning, Fang edged back through the water until he stood in the shadow under the opposite bank. If he could see the Princess, it followed she might be able to see him, once her eyes became accustomed to the bright sunlight. He was almost crying with shame. If the Princess ever found out that he’d watched her bathing, she’d never speak to him again. And she would undoubtedly report him to King Bison and the others. He would be socially ostracized as some kind of pervert.
In fact—and now the sweat on his face was joined by a solitary tear—he was a pervert. His own body proved it. For as he watched the Princess standing up to her knees in water, splashing herself, he wanted nothing more than to go to her, to hold her close to him and to … to—his mind attempted to reject the idea, then gave up—to mate with her. Compulsively, like an animal.
At least stop looking at her, he told himself. But he couldn’t stop. She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. When she’d finished, she sat down on a rock, her face cupped in her hands, her elbows resting on smooth, perfect knees. Her arm bore a leaf bandage, loosely tied. He wondered how she’d hurt herself, and he wanted to go and comfort her.
Because she looked heartbroken. For a moment, Fang played with the idea that she was unhappy because of him, because he was lost in a giantish world and she might never see him again. But he was unable to convince himself. Probably nobody knew he was lost. Probably nobody cared; in fact, his father might be mildly relieved. No, something else must be troubling the Princess.
He decided that he would go and visit her if ever he got back into gnomedom, to see if he could help. She sat there for a long time before she arose with a visible sigh and disappeared into the bank. Fang walked slowly to the muddy beach which overlaid most of the gnomish marshland including his father’s home. There were signs that at spring tides the sea might well rise well beyond the area of the Princess’s dwelling. The two worlds, he concluded, were alarmingly different and he was glad he lived in gnomedom.
The tide was out now, however, so he decided to walk around the headland to the familiar beach south of the village. The sea bed sloped steeply there, so the gnomish and giantish beaches looked very similar. By now the party would be over and it would be safe to make his way from the beach through the forest to Nyneve’s cottage.
After pushing his way through undergrowth and scrambling across rocks for a while, he came across something unexpected. It was a little beach, hidden from above by the steepness of the cliffs and from either side by protruding headlands. There was not one headland as he’d always supposed. There were two, and the beach lay tucked between them.
His spirits lifted by the sense of discovery, he began exploring among the huge boulders piled against the foot of the cliff. He soon found the dark entrance to a cave.
Caves are things of irresistible temptation. No gnome could discover a cave without immediately wanting to explore it. Fang trotted inside, yelling and savoring the echo of his voice.
The interior of the cave seemed oddly familiar. It was quite deep, and along one side ran a narrow shelf.
It was the shelf that Pong slept on!
This was the umbral version of Pong’s dwelling. It was almost identical, except for the pile of rocks outside. It even smelled the same. Fang wandered around in the gloom for a while, identifying crannies and protrusions, remembering with nostalgia the night he’d spent here with Pong—which, in retrospect, had been almost idyllic.
Then he heard a heavy thud. Whirling around, he saw a huge creature standing between him and the entrance. He couldn’t make out any details. The thing was simply a frightful outline against the daylight outside. But he knew in his heart what it was.
“The lopster!” he screamed.
It had come for him. The clacking noise would be its snappers, limbering up. It crouched on hairy legs. It waved feelers at him. Drool, Fang surmised, would be spilling from its maw. Pong’s ultimate horror actually existed on another happentrack. Fang hadn’t really believed Pong, but now the fishergnome was vindicated.
Fang flattened himself against the far wall of the cave, groaning with terror. This was poetic justice. The whole scenario was so perfect in its construction, so much like a story the gnomes might tell at their evening gatherings, that it could only end in the death of Fang, the gnome who hadn’t believed.
The monster uttered a deafening screech and began to advance steadily on him, spike-encrusted feelers vibrating, segmented flank scraping on the rock. Fang watched and groaned, and his recent, despicable life began to flash before his eyes as his memory lobe discharged with shock. The filthy spying on the naked Princess. The degrading imprisonment by Ned Palomides. The craven cowardice in the face of the charging Sharan. The daggertooth. …
The daggertooth!
He was Fang, the gnome, the slayer of the daggertooth!
Fang, a gnome to be reckoned with! What was he thinking of, crouched here like some timid rabbit? It was time to take charge of the situation. It was time to assert himself! In any case, it was that or wait to be eaten.
Drawing a deep breath, he strode toward the frightful monster, and waving his arms imperiously, shouted, “Bugger off!”
The lopster paused, clicking uncertainly.
“You heard me!”
And the lopster, cowed by the stare of the gnomish eye, backed away. Fang advanced, yelling. The lopster, screeching, retreated to the beach. Then it whirled round and disappeared around the corner in an awkward gait. Fang slumped against the rock wall, shuddering. Had the lopster been real? Or had it existed only in a particularly clear umbra?
And at some point during contemplation, the real significance of his vision of the Princess struck him, and he knew he had to get back to gnomedom as soon as possible.
The young man rowed smoothly and the ripples sparkled in the early morning sun like a galaxy of stars. As he reached the middle of the lake, an arm arose from the water, clad in white samite and bearing a bright silver sword. The young man took the sword and brandished it over his head, uttering a cry that echoed among the hills, waking the men and the animals to a new world. The arm slid below the surface and the young man rowed back to the shore. His face was handsome, glowing with exertion and something else: a kind of glory.
Fang, the Gnome (Song of Earth) Page 20