CHAPTER SIX: WHO’S BESEIGING WHO?
They found Dhamnú and his fellow gnomes struggling to position the catapult atop one of the taller hills on the edge of Kettle’s Knob. As it was explained to them, this would put the weapon out of the direct path of the Gurglesplat, who was en route to strike the village’s very center. As it was the village’s only catapult, this tidbit of decision-making proved ingenious.
Looking back and forth between the mountainous monstrosity and the vulgar gnome, the Captain blurted, “I need a horn!” A curled brow and bulging eye of contempt and damnation was the response. “No, really, this will work. My friend here is no operatic dynamo and I don’t have the time or my portable foundry with which to smelt brass! We need a horn!”
“For what?” the gnome growled.
“You’ll see! Just locate a wind instrument or some sort of rigid tube, please!”
“The spodgeezing central mine,” Dhamnú explained, pointing back down the hill to the largest of the tunnel entrances. The grinding clicks of the catapult’s crank could be heard behind him. “The signal horn hangs from the gadwathit wall next to the foreman’s station.”
The Captain smiled, nodded to Ghost-Tongue, and then dashed down the hill. Ghost-Tongue on the other hand started toward the adjoining hill, moving nearer the Gurglesplat.
“Where in the blimuthing guzzunderspart are you going?” Dhamnú yelled after him. There was a cacophony of grunts and a solid crunch as a boulder was set into the catapult’s metallic basket.
Ghost-Tongue turned with a bit of a grin and explained, “Center stage!”
The click of a lever and the whoosh of the catapult’s released arm preceded the loud bang of the arm against the crossbar. The boulder hurtled across the air and smashed into the titanic mound of stone debris that was the Gurglesplat. The debris created by this collision rolled down and soon joined the rest of the Gurglesplat’s cragginess in its tumultuous churning.
“Kuffungus!” Dhamnú cussed. “We just made more of it.”
Ghost-Tongue limped slowly downhill, hobbled slowly across the valley, and then even more slowly uphill before reaching the summit of the earthen mound most directly facing the Gurglesplat. With one last, long look at the churning mountain of loose rocks, the Anasazi braced himself on his spear as he lowered himself to the grass. Folding his legs both wounded and not, he closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and began to sing.
A deep, baritone vibration emerged up from out of his belly, reverberated around the hollow of his chest, sloughed through his throat, and rolled across the air before him. He sang not words but rather feelings. His voice was the drone of a living universe, a choir of life combined to a single pitch. With it he touched upon the land, upon each and every creature in it. As such he joined in their individual spiritual songs, which combined to form the universal pitch that Ghost-Tongue now reached. When the two sounds merged to become one, his body flushed with a sense of understanding. He was, as they say, at one with the world.
Having achieved that harmony, he began to add a chirp here and a warble there, speaking as it were to the calls of the world around him. A falsetto greeting to a joyful bird directed him to the wanton timbre of an eager young grasshopper who spoke of a beautiful green-shelled girl in danger of being crushed by some enormous being. But who was this being? Was he about to step on a lovelorn grasshopper or was she out there in the path of the Gurglesplat? Attuning his ears to their responses and adjusting his voice to match those with whom he would then interact, he felt his way through the sonic realm until at last, in the deepest, darkest spiritual bass, he found the Gurglesplat. To his astonishment, having been seeking out the roar of rage and the rumble of fury, Ghost-Tongue instead found the low, solitary murmur of sadness.
The Gurglesplat was crying.
When the Captain returned to the high ground beside Dhamnú, he smiled at the awed silence of the gnomes who stared across the hilltops at Ghost-Tongue. Their mouths gaping as widely as their eyelids, the villagers of Kettle’s Knob were as seemingly enthralled by the Indian’s spiritual song as the Gurglesplat, who had come to an even slower crawl in the distance. That is to say, it had all but come to a complete stop. The village might very well be in the very midst of being saved. This made it all the more strange when Captain Vaguely climbed into the empty basket of the freshly drawn catapult, kicked the release lever, and launched himself at the great, slumbering monster.
With a voluminous and resounding “BALLYHOOOOOOOOO!” the Captain arced across the sky, much higher than any of the boulders they had launched, and was well above the head or rather peak of the Gurglesplat. At the apex of his flight, the Captain swung his feet out in front of himself, pulled Marybelle to his shoulder, and took aim at the higher regions of the Gurglesplat below him. A spool of cable had been mounted on her undercarriage, its line running to a three-prong grappling hook protruding from the trumpet-like blunderbuss barrel that jutted out from and was the support around which spun the circle of rifle barrels that formed her Gatling gun. It was this important feature of Marybelle that he fired once within range.
The grappling hook struck out with the hemp cable in tow and banged its way through a tiny gap between several of the hundreds if not thousands of stones comprising the Gurglesplat. As the Captain descended over the back of the Gurglesplat, he let go of the gun, leaving himself connected to it by the leather strap angled across his chest. Soon the cable would reach the end of its slack, draw taut, and sling him back toward the terrible, stony monster. In the meantime, he drove his hands quickly into the Portable Transmundane Pocket of Quasi-Reality ™ where he had been keeping the Digital Spinneret™.
Just as quickly, the cable reached its end. The quick jerk of it expended some of the gathered energy of the Captain’s flight, but he was still moving at a dangerously high rate of speed directly for the craggy backside of the Gurglesplat. Not wanting to become so much remnant detritus on the rump of a living mountain, the Captain turned his back to the Gurglesplat, and began spinning thread of gossamer just as thick as the rope that was presently swinging him to his death. It trailed out ahead of him, catching and contorting in the wind that slipped between the gaps between the smaller knits and threads.
All at once, the tip of the spider silk fluttered, caught the wind hard and ballooned, billowing larger, expanding, and almost pulling the weaving gloves out of the Captain’s hands. “Stegodyphus mimosarum!” Vaguely cried out, tugging hard on the sack of spider glands between his hands. “You beautiful, eight-legged geniuses!” A moment later he slammed hard, back first into the rocks of the Gurglesplat. Alas, the spider-inspired kiting had slowed him enough that only the Captain’s wind and not his innards were knocked out of him.
It was a long moment before he could suck in a very much needed breath of air. When the stars faded and his ears stopped ringing, he realized he could still hear Ghost-Tongue’s deep, melodic song. With a sigh, the Captain cut away the gossamer parachute that still tugged at him on each passing gust of wind and watched it float away. Next he had to free himself from the grappling line and then he was able to continue with the hasty if not serendipitously planned mission.
As he rounded the base of the monstrosity, the Captain noticed that some of its stones in the rear were rumbling up its length like some strange mystical sort of avalanche, while in the front they rolled down its as one familiar with gravity might expect. He also saw that these falling stones in the front continued to move once they reached the ground and were in fact pulled under the Gurglesplat, thus dragging it forward ever so slightly. He realized it was this sort of locomotion that propelled it forward; a slow, continuous, circular avalanche. Still, these locomotive stones were few and very slow, which meant Ghost-Tongue’s efforts were not in vain. Time was what he needed now.
Reaching what appeared to be the entryway that they had first encountered, though slightly different as some of the stones had obviously been drawn down and away in its march to Kettle’s Knob, the Captain leapt up and
into it. The cave was still very much the same as well. The animal bones were still piled there and Turbees was still very much dead.
It was to Turbees that the Captain moved first where he searched the goblin’s person until he found the tiny brass fife. “I don’t mean to seem ghoulish, my stiffened goblin friend, but I need this,” he said, tucking the tiny wind instrument into a pocket. Looking back down at the cadaver, Vaguely sighed and said, “Sorry for the confusion, old boy. There’s a pixie I’d like to blame for that but in the end it was my own assumption that got us off on the wrong foot.” He moved to turn away but then spun back quickly on the goblin carcass. “Now listen here! It can’t be said that this was not in some part your own fault as well. You had a heavy hand in this, mister. If only you’d had less of a sweet tooth, this little venture of ours might be freeing you from servitude in addition to saving one small village of gnomes. Then, who knows, maybe they’d invite you in and give you some of that bread you seemed to like so much.” He smiled, nodded to his own thoughts and added, “But on the bright side, now that you’re only a rotting corpse, you certainly do smell better.” And with that last little bit of vain encouragement, and one of his world-famous winks, Captain Tripp Vaguely made a wild dash up the ascending tunnel.
In long strides, his lungs ablaze, he hurled himself forward and upward. Familiar blurs from their previous and all too calamitous descent greeted him in reverse. A jagged, blood-stained lump here and a tuft of black goblin hair there recounted their violent fall and the eventual demise of Turbees. “You damned, gluttonous fool,” the Captain cursed.
By the time he reached Turbees’ living chamber, the Captain was dripping sweat and gulping for air. He staggered against a wall and fell to his knees. He took one long moment to recover, and then he began to dig through his many pockets, transdimensional and otherwise.
He set out before himself the large bull’s horn that up until a few minutes ago had been the property of the foreman, Turbees’ fife, his own wooden billows, the Digital Spinneret™, Dhamnú’s scrolled and unsigned contract, and set to work.
The Vulgar Gnome of Kettle's Knob Page 10