by Gregory Dark
O’Nestly could now see with his own eyes that it was indeed 31 & 32 heading the posse. But the I-knew-it’s attention was on what lay before it. It looked neither to left nor to right. It didn’t look about it.
Closer they came, the I-knew-its.
Closer. Closer.
March, march.
Looking straight ahead. Tromp, tromp.
Closer, closer. March, march.
They weren’t going to look up.
They weren’t going to …
They didn’t.
The frogs all breathed a communal sigh of relief, and whooped a silent, individual ‘whoopee’.
As the posse passed, Bluemerang and Mimimi high-fived. They watched them as they stomped, inexorably, into a horizon the more truncated for being snow-flaked.
Deeper inside the cave, Miss Chief was trying to restore warmth to her frozen digits. She’d tried holding them under her armpits. With the result of getting extremely cold armpits. She was trying now to sit on them. And she succeeded only in toppling over, thereby hitting her head on one of the nearby cave walls.
“Ow!” she commiserated with herself delicately.
An “ow” which bounced around the walls of the cave several hundred times, each time gathering more force, and which was spat from the cave’s mouth as an “OWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!” Small avalanches trundled down the sides of close-by bergs. The valley was suddenly roaring with an orchestra of “ow”s – they were being tromboned and timpani’d, stringed and cymbaled.
The I-knew-its had to hear it. It was un-unhearable. The vaunted post you’re as deaf as had to hear it. It was only a question of time.
Susie was caught by a stalagmite. The only way of de-sticking her was to wrest the stalagmite from its purchase. O’Nestly and Bluemerang set about this task now with something of a vengeance. Mimimi joined them. Nespa snouted the air.
Miss Chief, in trying to look sorry, only looked sorry for herself. She tried to say she was sorry, but the words simply scratched feebly at her throat. Mr Nip looked at her pepperly, maybe even cucumberly. Miss Chief neither knew nor cared what he meant.
Sure enough there were the I-knew-its back on the horizon. Within a moment or two they would be able to see Susie.
“Au revoir, Susie,” said Nespa. “‘Tis a far, far better thing I do now, n’est-ce pas, zan I have ever done …” And with that she jumped from the cave’s mouth and skilessly ski’d a raggedy piste till she was back on the ground.
She bounced over to where she had seen Corniun bury herself in the snow, roused her, clambered on her back. At a pace which was extraordinary given its backwardness, Corniun galloped off in the direction of that part of the horizon furthest from the I-knew-it posse.
Which saw this and resumed its determined, and undistracted, pursuit. It wasn’t that the posse started to hurry, more that it huddled together into a tortoise of determination and let itself be impelled by the heat this generated.
For a moment or two there was just quiet in the cave. None had expected to see such selflessness, particularly from Nespa. Though, if asked, none would have been quite sure why Nespa less than any of the others. It had been, Nespa’s act, one of real heroism, one of selflessness. They took a moment or two to reverence that heroism.
Chapter 38
But then they knew they also had to get out of the cave.
O’Nestly and Miss Chief pushed the stalagmite, and Susie “ouf”-ed. They got into a sort of swing of pushing and pulling. At first the rock seemed to budge not at all. When first it wiggled, its first wiggle was almost indiscernible. But a millimetre wiggle became a centimetre one. And a centiwiggle became a deci- one. Soon they were waggling at it as Susie had done her milk teeth just before they were about to be lost. And, though Susie still “ouf”-ed, her oufs were in some kind of sympathy, even some kind of harmony, with the waggles.
Finally she was free. The stalagmite was pulled in its last waggle. It was dislodged and she was again able to move.
“Nespa?” she asked. “What do we do about Nespa?”
“Forget Nespa,” Nip told her. “She’s out with Corniun. One of two things will happen: Either Corniun will find us …”
“Or?” asked Susie.
“Or … she won’t.” Mr Nip replied. “We can’t worry about them. What we do have to worry about is not getting found. By the I-knew-its, I mean. There are bound to be other posses.”
“Dremo helped to get me free,” Susie said suddenly, and apparently a propos of nothing. “I really should go to the Ughloos. I promised Dremo I’d speak. It was sort of a condition,” she added with the same enthusiasm as those in tumbrels had for the guillotine.
“Hey, you’re the one who’s got to get us to Grammar Castle. We’ll go any way you say,” said Nip. “But you know that’s the hardest way?”
“It is?” Susie replied, sensing she was going to be presented with a dilemma.
“From here,” Nip ‘explained’ short-temperedly, “we’ve got three choices: We can head off back towards Snow-it Hall, and cross into the Fowork Forest just before the gulch. That’s probably not too sensible as the place tends to teem with Snow-it-alls and I-knew-its.
“Option two: We can go more or less the route Corniun and Nespa seem to have taken. It’s the easiest route, but (for that reason) the border is guarded more closely than the other two.
“Or, finally, we have option three, and that is that we cross at the foot of Mount Neverrest. Its advantage is that it is very lightly guarded. But it is so lightly guarded precisely because the way there is so hard.”
“Option two,” said Miss Chief. “We have decided.”
“You made a promise, Suse,” Bluemerang suggested sadly.
“No promise counts for too much,” said Mimimi, “if you’re not around to keep it.”
“I do want to help,” Susie said, caught on the very sharp point of a dilemma-horn. “But … I couldn’t bear to be endungeoned again. Really. You don’t know how horrible that place was. I couldn’t bear it.”
“You have to decide,” Nip told her. He was looking around him, clearly missing Corniun’s ability to see through solid objects, and thus to know where the I-knew-it posse (or posses) might be. He seemed to have no sympathy for her plight. “And you have to decide quickly.”
“Why can’t you decide?” asked Susie.
“We have already decided,” proclaimed Miss Chief.
“I’m told only you can lead me to Grammar Castle,” the vegetable-man said. “If I interfere I could stop you from getting me there. I have to get there before all the ears have fallen from my chest.” Now that Susie’s attention had been drawn to it, she noticed that his corn-on-the-cob torso had indeed lost several ears. “I lose ears,” Nip continued, “if I waste time.”
“And why else?” asked O’Nestly, his voice adribble with goading.
“Else?” Nip challenged him.
“There is truth,” said O’Nestly, “and there is untruth. But untruth is not the least truth. The least truth is the undertruth. An undertruth is a truth known not to be the whole truth. I’ve come to understand undertruth. Snow-it-alls use it all the time. An undertruth is more perfidious – and considerably less truthful – than an untruth.”
Mr Nip looked abashed. “If,” he conceded with enormous reluctance, “I tell a lie, I lose another ear. Or if I’m unkind.”
“What you might call,” said O’Nestly: “‘Parad-ears Lost’.”
“If I’m kind, I regain one.”
“Sure, ‘Parad-ears Regained’!” O’Nestly laughed. None of the others understood the ‘joke’.
“So?” Nip asked Susie full into her face. She looked back at him blankly. “Option one, two or three?”
“Two,” chorused Miss Chief and Mimimi.
“Your coward’s punishment,” said O’Nestly, “is not that everyone shuns him, but that he shuns himself.”
“Or,” Bluemerang said ‘significantly’, “her-blueming-self.”
“What do I know?”
asked Susie. “What do I have to tell anyone? Which Emo in their right mind would want to listen to me?”
“Quite,” said Miss Chief.
“There are no small roles,” clichéd O’Nestly, “only small actors.”
“What would Mr E say?” asked Susie, agonizing as she was, almost literally, between a rock and a hard place.
“Mr E would say,” replied O’Nestly, “‘What’d you say?’.”
“The storm’s letting up,” said Nip. “If we don’t move soon, the decision will be irrelevant. We’ll be captured right here where we stand.”
“Like that’s a real worry for you!” snorted Mimimi. “You can’t be captured, you’re made of fresh air. The rest of us … well …”
Nip glowered back at her. “They have hermetically sealed jars, precisely for the likes of me,” he told her. “I can be endungeoned just as effectively as you. More, even.”
“Ughloos, that gets my blueming vote.”
“Mine too,” said O’Nestly.
“Yes,” said Susie, resolutely. “Yes, mine too.”
“The route there is very, very hard.” Nip was laying it on with a trowel.
“On the other hand … ” Susie wavered. “No. No, I made a promise. I did make a promise. A sort of promise, anyway. I gave my word. Yes. The Ughloos, it is. Isn’t it?”
Chapter 39
Trudging through the deep snow they started to appreciate more fully the comfort which riding on Corniun had afforded them. Within ten minutes of setting out they were all drenched in sweat. Then hot sweat seeped through that which had been frozen, until there was slogging through them a kind of bi-cycle of hot geysers and icy glaciers, both intensifying the extremes of the other.
This part of the trek was just hard. Where it became dangerous was in an area known as ‘Beelzebub’s boiler-house’, a stretch of huge cavernous cliffs, and very steep falls. Susie sensed they were nearing it. The rockiness was becoming more so. What had once seemed boulders now seemed pebbles alongside the boulders that now there were. Even the snow and the ice seemed to draw back, as if this terrain for them too was intimidating.
Susie’s footsteps slouched in ever greater reluctance as they neared the phenomenon. The countryside was now layered like a giant wedding cake iced by a slapdash chef. Great strands of ‘icing’ fell from the sides of the layers. There were big bits where the cake had not been covered. Susie wasn’t the size even of one of its currants.
More her footsteps slouched.
More.
They trudged, all of them, breathlessly, reluctantly to the brow of the hill. Over the brow …
They couldn’t believe their eyes.
“A pleasant promenade, n’est-ce pas?” suggested a familiar voice.
Nespa!
Their fatigue was forgotten in a trice. They rushed to the dog/frog and patted her and petted her. And Nespa accepted it all with her usual Gallic … let’s say diffidence: No bowl of milk had ever been lapped up with greater enthusiasm than were those laurels and laudations.
“Too help did I,” Corniun mentioned, with a plaintiveness close to complaintiveness.
“Thank you, Corniun,” Susie said. She came over and scratched her between nose and horn. Corniun nuzzled into her and emitted a strange noise – closer to a cat’s purr than a horse’s whinny.
“Zis,” announced Nespa, “is one creature magnifique.” The blush couldn’t penetrate the steel of the white, but Susie could have sworn, beneath it, she could feel Corniun flushing. Who replied, backwardly, that Nespa was likewise one super Sufrog.
They told of how they had led the I-knew-it posse round in circles, until it had become completely disorientated. Corniun had taken them up an incline far too steep for I-knew-it capabilities. There were (of course) elements of the fisherman in the story’s telling, but the audience was too awe-struck to want to weed out such elements.
Bluemerang particularly harkened to the exploits with a certain … well … wistfulness. For a dragon to be slain, a dragon has to present itself. No dragons, so Bluemerang’s wistful-blueming-ness seemed to say, had ever presented themselves to him.
“All very impressive,” Nip said with a tetch of testiness, “but we still have ‘Beelzebub’s boiler-house’ to deal with.”
Which closed the conversation with the finality of a guillotine.
Slowly all heads, whether wreathed or wreathing, turned to stare at the hurdle that now faced them. Beelzebub’s boiler-house appeared to be a cave. A monster cave. Its entrance was like a surgical split scalpelled in the chest of the mountain. This skyscrapered above them. Within they could see light cascading in almost a waterfall of flare.
“One at a time. Tread very carefully,” Nip told them. “The ice underfoot is treacherous. Talk only in whispers. To your left there are avalanches just ripe for the falling. And the falling would mean the killing of us. Talk above a whisper and they will fall. After I raise my hand, there is not even to be any whispering. There the avalanches are literally but a whisper away.”
“Why don’t we shout now?” Bluemerang asked, with some sense. “Start the ava-blueming-lanches before we get to them? All my years in the Outback, that’s what I’d blueming do.”
“This ice has been here for millions of years,” Nip told them. “There’s ice a-plenty for as many avalanches as you want. Create one avalanche, it won’t stop another. It’ll just make the path, already hugely difficult, even more so. I’ll go first. Follow my footsteps.”
“You don’t make any footsteps,” Mimimi reminded him.
“Don’t be so literal,” Nip admonished her.
But Mimimi didn’t know what ‘literal’ meant – so the admonishment was orphaned, looking for a home to take it in.
They entered Beelzebub’s boiler-house.
Chapter 40
In the distance – the light at the end of the tunnel? – still was the waterfall of flare. Just where they were, however, all was … well, if not pitch black, then pitchish: black without being jet, the darkest of charcoal greys.
There was light enough, though, that they could just make out, menacing them on their left, enormous cliffs. And to their right, a sheer drop, the bottom of which could not be seen, and terror of which rather cramped imagination. Worse though than these sights – albeit these ill-defined and silhouettey sights – were the noises.
Heretofore Susie had imagined a creak was a creak was a creak. Here in Beelzebub’s boiler-house there was a cantata of them. What they all had in common was their ominousness. Some might wag a finger whilst others grabbed lapels, but not one creak spoke in a language that was not menace.
Mr Nip’s injunction only to whisper was almost unnecessary. The place was so scary it virtually strangled voice at its larynx. And the concentration needed by the path was so absorbing that any normal tongue would have forgotten what it was supposed to.
Imagine a stainless steel surface covered in oil. Take a pannier of mackerel and coat these with slime. Add the fish to the oily metal and you would have a surface a quarter the slipperiness as that over which Susie and the frogs were now slithering.
Even Corniun, usually so sure-hoofed as to be certain-hoofed, was struggling, her forelegs rarely following the path of her hind ones.
Scared even of breathing, daunted by the high-rise ice on one side of them, terrified by the low-drop fall on their other, they crept on their slithery way.
They found themselves in the waterfall of flare, felt themselves blinded by it. It wasn’t the bask in some holy light, it was the sweaty purgatory of a satanic one. Like a fiend too, the light was mocking them, jeering at them. And it rendered of the ice underfoot one degree more of discomfort. It became a rather gooey slush which waddled around their ankles, like having as slippers a thousand ice-cold slugs.
They slithered round an almost hairpin bend.
Mr Nip raised his hand. This was the particularly dangerous section of Beelzebub’s boiler-house. “No more whispering,” Nip whispered to Susie, who h
ad Miss Chief tucked inside her pocket.
“No more whispering,” Susie whispered to O’Nestly.
“No more whispering,” he whispered to Mimimi.
“No more … aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” Mimimi screamed.
She had lost her purchase – “aaaaaaaaaaaaaah” – and had fallen over the precipice’s side – “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah”.
The Sufrogs watched – “aaaaaaaaah” – in horror as she bounced and slithered down the snow-faced cliff beneath them. Still she “aaaaaaah”-ed and still they watched – not her tumble exactly – but half the cliffside that seemed to tumble with her.
Scree scuttled and boulders bowled, shrubs scurried and stones groaned. There was a scurry of slurry, a moving landscape of devastation, in the midst of which, very occasionally, Mimimi’s long green legs were seen to writhe and wriggle.
And then, suddenly, there was no more “aah”. Eerily there was no more “aah”. There was no more scurry, nor no wriggle. There was no moving landscape. There was just a void filled with a zillion icy particles dancing in a vacuous space, a fairy dust not of Tinkerbells but of gargoyled imps, ashes not from a hearth but from a blitz. And all of it had muffled hooves.
Even the cliffs’ creaking seemed less to menace than to mourn.
Most was still.
Not the still of church or that of contemplation but the still Susie had known buried within the dungeon’s slimy stones. The still of never-endingness. The still of the grave.
Susie did know of death. She’d had that of her father to deal with, that of her grandmother – her mother’s mother. She hated death. She got angry with death. But she’d had, so she thought, a rumbling truce with death. They were both – Susie and death – facts within the fact of each other. They had to find a way to coexist. And so they had.
Until that moment.
When all the hurt of death again lashed Susie with its thousand sabred pincers and she felt again the wound, and wounds, of death. And around her she felt the Sufrogs feeling the wound, and wounds, of death.
Tears would come later. Tears come with the realisation of reality. For the moment, reality was veiled by a film of second-handedness, as if it weren’t reality at all but the film of reality. Not your life, but someone else’s.