Goblins vs Dwarves

by Philip Reeve

  “There are loads of them!” said Henwyn. “I thought dwarves lived in the far north. What are they doing under the Bonehills?”

  “They must be on the move,” said Skarper. “I ’spect it’s all this new magic, mucking things up again. Come on, we’d better find our way out and get back to Clovenstone. Princess Ned should hear about these diggers. I’m not sure what they’re up to but they’re bad news, I think.”

  “Good idea,” said Henwyn. “I shall be glad to see the sky again. And all this running about in burrows has given me an appetite. Once we’re safe away from this mine we’ll stop and eat those pies.”

  “Pies?” said Skarper guiltily. “Ah. . . There’s bad news about those, too.”

  Clovenstone had changed. The long Outer Wall was still there, girdling the streets and buildings of the walled town, which rose steeply to the crag of Meneth Eskern in the centre. The Inner Wall stood too, its seven towers ringing the crag like a stony crown. But the old, dark heart of Clovenstone, the Keep that once rose from the crag’s summit, was gone. Even its ruins had been cleared away, and in its place a garden was being made, with lawns and flower beds and stands of young trees. On the grassy parade grounds where, long ago, the Lych Lord’s goblin armies had marched, young apple trees had been planted in rows. The goblins who lived in the towers of the Inner Wall spent slightly less time fighting and robbing each other now, and slightly more time cheese-making: Clovenstone cheese was becoming quite a well-known delicacy in the Softlands, the green country that lay to the south, beyond Oeth Moor.

  On top of the tallest of those towers, the Blackspike, there rested an old ship. This was the home of Princess Eluned, “Ned” to her friends, who was the creator of the garden. She had become ruler of Clovenstone after all the biggest and most vicious goblins perished in the fall of the Keep, and after Henwyn, who was the true heir to the place, had decided that he wasn’t cut out to be a Dark Lord.

  Ned was not aboard her ship when Skarper and Henwyn returned to Clovenstone next day. They spent half the morning looking for her, and eventually found her round at the eastern side of the Inner Wall, gazing out across Natterdon Mire, the broad, misty marsh which had swallowed up the ruins there.

  It was a place to which Ned often came. During the great adventures of the year before, she had encountered the boglins: savage, froggish creatures who dwelled among those mires and meres. She’d often wondered since what had become of them. Their king, Poldew, was dead, and his hall lay in ruins, but what of the boglins themselves? Were they still watching secretly from behind the mists and reed beds which screened their perilous pools and secret sinkholes? Or had they slunk away, across the Outer Wall, into the still wider marshes which lay north of Clovenstone? And what of the monster they had woken, the dreadful, wet, dragonish dampdrake? Did it still slumber in the deep, dark mere at Bospoldew, waiting for more gifts of human blood?

  Partly it was fear that kept the boglins in Ned’s thoughts (for no queen likes to have a tribe of hostile savages living within a stone’s throw of her realm). Mostly, though, it was just curiosity. As a girl, she had been taught that there were no such things as giants or goblins or twiglings. Since she came to Clovenstone she had made friends with all of them, and with the silly, flighty cloud maidens as well. Even the grumpy old troll who lurked under the bridge over the River Oeth was civil to her now. So it hurt her that the boglins would not even talk with her. Sometimes she took little gifts down to the margins of their marsh, to show them that she meant no harm to them. A basket of cheese; some windfall apples; a tray of fresh-baked scones. The gifts always vanished, but not while Ned was watching. She never saw a trace of boglins.

  When Skarper and Henwyn found her that day, she was sitting quietly on a ruined wall, watching an apple and blackberry crumble which she had left on a tussock at the edge of the nearest lagoon. The marsh mist wove strange shapes around her, the mossy ruins came and went like ghosts, and when Skarper and Henwyn stepped out of the reeds she jumped up with a scream, thinking for a moment that they were boglins.

  “Oh!” she said. “I did not expect you to come home from your adventures so soon! Did you find anything interesting among the Bonehills?”

  “Among them, no,” said Henwyn. “But beneath them; ah, that is another story!”

  “Then you had best tell it to me,” said Ned, glancing quickly at her crumble to make sure it was still there.

  “The Dark Lady of Clovenstone” they called Eluned, down in the Softlands where news from the north came mixed with lots of rumours. In Coriander and Nantivey and places like that, they imagined her as a cold and terrible queen, presiding over a court of goblins. They would have been astonished to see the real Ned standing there, in her faded old russet dress with her apron still tied round it, a smudge of flour on her nose and her grey hair done up in untidy pigtails, listening to the tale of Henwyn and Skarper’s adventure.

  When they had finished, she sat down on her wall again, frowning thoughtfully. “Dwarves,” she said. “I do not know much about them. I haven’t heard of them for years, although when I was a little girl I remember hearing merchants from my father’s harbour at Porthstrewy talk of how their grandfathers had done business with dwarf-holds further up the Nibbled Coast. A wild, rugged country lies there, between the Bonehills and the Winter Sea. Dwarvendom, they call it, and at its heart lies the great citadel of the dwarves, Dwarvenholm in the Delverdale. How nice they sound, those northern names! I wonder if these dwarves you saw could really have tunnelled all the way from there?”

  “With those dreadful diremoles to dig their runs for them, I should think they could!” said Henwyn.

  “They’ll bring trouble with them,” Skarper promised. “Dwarves is always trouble. Stubby little back-stabbing goblin-killers, that’s all they are. Every goblin knows that.”

  Ned smiled. “And every human being knows that goblins are fearsome, red-eyed people-killers, Skarper dear. These dwarves are probably not nearly as bad as you think; you just made a bad impression by falling on their heads. And as long as they stay out in the Bonehills, beyond the walls of Clovenstone, I do not see that they are any business of ours. Let them do as they like up there. It does not concern us.”

  Henwyn shook his head. Ned’s words were wise, but he was still troubled by the things he’d seen beneath the mountain. “I wish we knew more about these dwarves. What are they doing up there? And why?”

  “You should ask Fentongoose,” said Ned. “He is very learned, and he is bound to know something about dwarves. You could take him my blackberry and apple crumble, too. The boglins do not seem to want it.”

  But when she turned to pick the dish up, the tussock where it had stood was empty. While the three friends had been talking, the boglins had come and taken it, then vanished like ghosts back into the mazes of the marsh.

  Fentongoose was one of the three self-styled sorcerers who had arrived in Clovenstone the previous year, believing themselves to be the heirs of the Lych Lord. They’d been wrong about that, and two of them, Prawl and Carnglaze, had gone back home to Coriander. Only Fentongoose had stayed on, acting as hatchling master to the young goblins. In his spare time he hunted for scraps of ancient knowledge among those mounds of valuable scrolls and ancient books which the goblins called “the bumwipe heaps”.

  Fentongoose made his home in a big, dilapidated guardhouse at the foot of Blackspike Tower. That was where Henwyn and Skarper went to visit him, after their talk with Princess Ned. A fire was glowing in the hearth there, and lined up in front of it were a dozen football-sized stone eggs. Fentongoose had fetched them a few days earlier from the slowsilver lake deep beneath Clovenstone. Soon they would crack open, and a dozen new goblin hatchlings would spill out and need to be taught that Hitting Other Goblins was Bad. That sort of lesson wasn’t easy to drum into thick goblin skulls, so Fentongoose knew he had hard work ahead of him. In the meantime he was taking things easy in hi
s favourite chair, his feet up on a padded stool, a plate of Princess Ned’s biscuits on a table beside him and an old book open on his lap.

  “Dwarves, eh?” he said, when Skarper and Henwyn told him what they’d seen. “Yes, I know a little about them. There was a scroll I found last month. Young Libnog was heading off to the pooing holes with it, but I thought it looked interesting and persuaded him to part with it. On Dwarves and Their Ways, it was called. It came from a time before the Lych Lord, when the dwarves were still one of the powers of the world. Honest, hard-working creatures, by all accounts.”

  “Hard-working, certainly,” said Henwyn, thinking of the huge mine the dwarves had hollowed for themselves under the Bonehills. “But are they friendly?”

  “Not really,” admitted Fentongoose. “They like to keep to themselves. When the first dwarves made contact with the first men they were shocked to discover that we are so much larger than them. ‘Biglings’, they call us, and I’m afraid they see us as clodhopping, overgrown, stupid and clumsy.”

  “But that’s not true!” said Henwyn, and he thumped Fentongoose’s table for emphasis, upset the plate, and catapulted the biscuits out of the window.

  “Perhaps not,” said Fentongoose. “But the dwarves believe it, and think that they are far superior to us. However, their scorn for us is as nothing compared with the scorn they feel towards goblins, whom they see as mere animals, interested only in food and violence.”

  “That’s not true either!” shouted Skarper, over the noise from outside, where a whole bunch of goblins were fighting over the biscuits.

  Fentongoose wasn’t listening. There was a great deal of knowledge stored up in his head, and it wasn’t often that anyone asked to hear some of it: he was not going to be distracted from his history lesson.

  “Dwarves are mortal beings, much like men,” he said. “They are born of dwarf mothers and grow up slowly, like ourselves. Once they lived under the open sky, although their love for minerals and metals soon led them underground. It’s said that the old dwarf mines and tunnels run beneath every part of the Westlands. But when the first men arrived, the dwarves retreated into the hills. They withdrew to their great citadel, a hollowed-out mountain called Dwarvenholm, in the valley of Delverdale, in the far north. They shut its great burnished doors behind them and became creatures of the under-places. They are seldom seen in sunlight nowadays.

  “But there was always trade between Dwarvenholm and the lands of men. The dwarves were great workers of metal. Slowsilver was the stuff they valued above all else. That’s why they hated goblins, who guarded the natural pools of slowsilver where they hatched, down in the deep places beneath the hills. They fought the goblins, and drained the pools. The dwarf-smiths knew how to work magic into items forged from slowsilver. Even in the Lych Lord’s time, most of the magical weapons and artefacts in the world came from the smithies of Dwarvenholm.

  “But the magic faded, and the power of the dwarves declined. I am glad to hear that they are mining again. Perhaps we shall be able to trade with them. I wonder if they like cheese?”

  “Oh, look!” said Henwyn, pointing to the hearth. Several of the stone eggs there had started to jiggle. As Skarper and Fentongoose turned to stare, a large black crack spread over one of them. They hurried across the hearthrug to bend over it as it shattered. A small, damp, speckled goblin blinked out at them.

  “Hello, little fellow!” said Fentongoose kindly, all thought of dwarves forgotten. “Welcome to Clovenstone.”

  The hatchling snatched up a log from the hearth and belted him over the head with it. Around it, the other eggs were starting to hatch too, and the new goblins bared their teeth and clenched their tiny fists as they tumbled out into the ashes of the fire, as eager for mischief as every hatchling before them. How were they supposed to know that things had changed at Clovenstone?

  Nobody gave very much thought to dwarves for the next few weeks. The new hatchlings turned out to be much too boisterous for Fentongoose to look after on his own, so Henwyn, Ned, Skarper, and even Skarper’s batch-brothers Libnog and Yabber had to help him. Princess Ned was determined that this new batch of goblins would have a gentler start in life than the older goblins of Clovenstone, so everyone spent a lot of time prising makeshift weapons out of their paws, showing them how to use the pooing holes, and trying to teach them not to steal, or strangle one another, or throw one another out of high windows.

  Summer was over and the long, golden days of early autumn were beginning. The first frost had come before Skarper and Henwyn had cause to think about the dwarves again.

  They had gone out with Henwyn’s bow, hunting rabbits along the shores of the wood, which reached almost to the foot of the Inner Wall round on the north-east side. Towards lunchtime a light rain began to fall. At least, they thought it was rain, until Henwyn looked up and saw that it was actually a big gang of goblins on the battlements of Growler Tower having a Who-Can-Pee-the-Furthest competition. Hurrying to escape the downpour, they ran away from the wall into a gully between some craggy outcroppings of rock. There, to their surprise, they found a trio of sturdy little figures hard at work.

  One of the dwarves was busy with a hammer, chipping pieces off the rock. Another had set up a complicated-looking instrument on a spindly-legged tripod and was squinting through it, muttering to himself, and scratching notes on a slate which hung from a string around his neck. A third stood ready with a basket to collect up the chippings which the first was making. They all looked much the same as the dwarves Skarper and Henwyn had encountered in the mine, except that all three wore wide-brimmed leather hats and goggles of dark volcanic glass to protect their eyes from the daylight.

  “Dwarves!” said Skarper.

  “Goblins!” said the dwarf with the basket. “No, one goblin, and one bigling!”

  “What are you doing in Clovenstone?” demanded Henwyn.

  “Hush!” snapped the dwarf with the tripod, not glancing up from the sheet of slate, where he was scratching some important-looking calculations.

  The one with the basket came bustling over to confront the new arrivals. She was a girl dwarf, Henwyn realized; hairier than most human girls, with thick fair eyebrows which met in the middle and a faint, fair moustache, but she had no beard to speak of, just thick blonde braids which dangled almost to the ground. She whispered, “You must be quiet, bigling. My father is making important calculations.”

  “But how did you get in here?”

  “We just walked,” said the girl, pointing away north-westerly across the woods and ruins. “We came through the big wall where it has tumbled down and followed the ’croppings.”

  “The whats?”

  “The outcroppings of rock. My father believes this whole crag is part of the same great batholith that forms the central Bonehills.”

  “Ah!” said Henwyn brightly, and looked at Skarper in the hope that Skarper might know what “batholith” meant.

  Skarper didn’t.

  “A batholith is a large mass of igneous rock made from magma which formed deep beneath the earth’s crust,” explained the girl brightly, sensing their confusion.

  “Etty,” said the dwarf with the tripod, “hush! We dwarves do not waste our words on biglings, lass, nor on goblins neither.”

  The third dwarf, who had been hammering away all through this talk, suddenly turned, holding up a chunk of rock. “Look, Durgar!” he called. “Flecks of white pyrites!”

  Durgar nodded, satisfied. “’Tis as I thought. White pyrites is a sure sign that there is slowsilver nearby. I suspect a vast reservoir of molten slowsilver lies beneath yonder crag.” He pointed towards Meneth Eskern, the crag on which the Inner Wall and all its towers stood.

  “Well of course there is!” said Skarper. “This is Clovenstone! The lava lake lies down below, where all us goblins hatch from. We could have told you that. Not that that’s any business of yours.”r />
  The dwarves ignored him, except for the girl Etty, who gave him and Henwyn a quick smile. Her father was pointing now towards the Bonehill Mountains, saying, “We shall dig a new spur off the Milk Ghyll mine and strike into it from this side.”

  “What’s he on about?” asked Skarper, turning helplessly to his friend.

  Henwyn said, “Are you talking about digging up Clovenstone?”

  Durgar glanced at him without interest. “Not digging up, bigling. Tunnelling under. Scooping out. That lake of slowsilver can’t just be left there, serving no purpose, brewing up goblins. It needs to be extracted, processed, put to use.”

  “But it’s ours!” cried Skarper.

  “I can’t help that,” said Durgar. He had packed his measuring device away and was folding up his tripod.

  “But it belongs to goblins!” said Skarper. “It’s always been there!”

  “‘Belongs’, does it?” said Durgar. “What lies beneath the earth belongs to dwarves, and to dwarves only: that’s been the way of things since the world’s beginnings. When the Lych Lord ruled this place, his spells and armies kept us out, but there’s no Lych Lord any more.”

  “No!” agreed Henwyn. “There’s Princess Ned, the Dark Lady of Clovenstone. She won’t let you come undermining us!”

  Durgar looked thoughtful. “I don’t see as how she can stop us,” he said.

  Henwyn couldn’t see how, either. The goblins who lived in Clovenstone weren’t big enough or brave enough or organized enough to be good warriors. He couldn’t imagine them fighting the dwarves and their dreadful diremoles. Princess Ned did not really hold with fighting, anyway; she thought arguments were best solved by talking. “At least come and talk to her!” he said helplessly.

  Durgar swung his pack up on to his back. “It’s none of my concern, bigling. I’m just a surveyor. If this Dark Ned-Lady of yours has summat to say, then she should come and talk to Overseer Glunt: Overseer Glunt is the dwarf in charge of our operations here.”