by Philip Reeve
Most of all, she remembered Skarper. He had been a bigger surprise than all the colours. To meet a goblin, to sit talking with him, and to find that he was not so different from herself. It went against everything she’d ever been told.
She thought about it all through the long walk north, and when they were nearing the new workings she finally summoned up the courage to ask her father.
“Why are goblins our enemy?”
Durgar looked back at her and frowned. “Why? Because they’re goblins, of course. Cruel, brutish creatures. Wreckers and wasters of good things; murderers of dwarves.”
“But Skarper’s not like that.”
“Who?” asked Langstone, smoothing his beard.
“The goblin we met at Clovenstone, and again at Boskennack. Henwyn’s friend.”
“Aye, well, he may not seem so bad,” said Durgar, “but they can be cunning creatures, some of them. This Skarper must be one of the cleverer ones; that’ll be why Henwyn brought him to see the bigling king; to try and prove that goblins aren’t as bad as folk believe. But we know they are, don’t we?”
“Aye,” agreed Langstone and Walna, nodding.
“But how do we know that?” asked Etty.
“Because the Head tells us so,” her father replied. “The Head Knows All and the Head Knows Best.”
“Even so,” said Etty, “it seems mean to be stealing all their slowsilver away.”
“Too late to be fretting about that, lass,” said Durgar. “That plan is well advanced.”
And so it seemed, for as they entered the new workings they passed great troops of dwarf warriors, newly arrived from Dwarvenholm, sharpening their swords in readiness for the coming war. The workings echoed to the fall of armourers’ hammers, the shouts of mole drivers, and the hollow clangs as mysterious lengths of iron pipe were dragged into position.
Overseer Glunt was climbing up on to a diremole when they found him. “Can’t talk now, Durgar,” he shouted. “I must get back to Dwarvenholm to let the Head and the Council of Overseers know how things are going. General Cardle’s in charge of things here while I’m gone.”
The diremole started to lumber off, heading north-east up a broad underground road which the dwarves had recently finished widening. Durgar, rather flustered at not getting a chance to make his report, trotted alongside it. “The High King refused help to the goblins and their friends at Clovenstone,” he called up.
“Good,” said Glunt, not really listening.
“I was wondering, though, Overseer, if it might be worth talking again to their Princess Ned? Young Henwyn and the goblin who came with him did not seem bad sorts, really. Mightn’t it be possible to reach some arrangement about the slowsilver without any need for fighting?”
Etty, listening to all this, smiled to herself. Her dad might seem gruff, but she knew he loved her, and he’d asked that question for her sake, she was sure. But Glunt glanced down at him with a sneer. “No need for fighting? Then why has the Head sent us all these warriors and war machines? Do you think you know better than the Head? Of course you don’t: no one does. The Head has ordered an attack on Clovenstone, Durgar, so an attack there shall be. It is all part of the Head’s great plan. Driver, won’t this beast go any faster?”
The mole’s driver reached behind him and stuck a pointed goad into the monster’s haunches. With a squeal, it broke into a lumbering gallop, and was soon lost in the shadows of the tunnel, far ahead.
Durgar watched it go, then turned back to his companions, looking very dignified and trying to pretend the overseer had not just brushed him off like an irritating dwarf child. “Well, that’s that,” he said, careful not to meet Etty’s eye. “Let’s not stand here yammering. The Head has spoken. There’s work to be done.”
In the world above, Henwyn and his companions found that winter had come to Oeth Moor in the few days that they had been away. The thorn trees on the rocky hillsides stood bare and bleak, their leaves stripped away by a cold wind from the east. The travellers skirted Sticklebridge and headed north on the old faded road to Clovenstone, while the dogs in all the farms and hamlets that they passed barked and howled, catching the scent of trolls, sensing the chill of ghosts.
“At least the dwarves have further to go than us,” said Garvon Hael as they toiled along, cloaks pulled tight against the wind.
“But dwarves don’t need to keep fording rivers and sloshing through bogs,” said Henwyn, stopping for the hundredth time to tip muddy water out of his boots. “Dwarves have nice clear tunnels to travel through, and giant moles to ride on. They’re probably back at their burrows in the Bonehills, planning their attack on Clovenstone.”
He did not know how right he was. But there was nothing they could do about it. They kept on sloshing through the bogs and fording the little streams and rivers of the moor, and before too long they came over the last steep ridge and saw the plain of Dor Koth to the north, and the great ruinous ring of battlements and watchtowers that was the Outer Wall of Clovenstone.
“We’re home!” said Skarper, pricking up his ears, surprised at how happy he was to see the old dump again.
“We are,” said Henwyn, and he felt it too: Clovenstone, where so many adventures had befallen him, and he had learned so much. It was his home too now, and he frowned as he studied the distant view, fearing any sign that the dwarvish onslaught had begun. But no: there was no trace of the flames and fighting he had glimpsed in Madam Maura’s bathtub, and those clouds that hung behind the central towers were marsh mist, not the smoke of battle.
“Is that it?” asked Cribba.
“There’s trolls there?” wondered Torridge.
“And the Houses of the Dead. . .” said Zeewa.
They came down off the moor’s edge and crossed the plain, the road winding between the mounds where bodies had been piled and burned after the great battle long ago. It was late afternoon, and in the low light Zeewa’s train of ghosts showed pale and vaporous, like a scrap of moor mist that had followed her down from the hills. They reached the massive, crumbling Outer Wall, and Henwyn was just shoving a pathway through the brambles and weeds under the arch of Southerly Gate when a voice shouted, “Who goes there?” and with a slither and clatter of rusty armour a score of goblins leapt out of dark doorways and other hidey-holes, pointing spears and hefting axes.
“It’s all right! It is only us, come home from Coriander!” Skarper yelled, before Zeewa could draw her short stabbing spear or the three trolls could start lobbing rocks about.
The goblins peered at him, and realized that he was who said he was, and that what he’d said was true. “Pity,” said one, lowering a huge, spiked club. “I could just have done with bashing somebody.”
“Couldn’t we bash them anyway?” asked another. “Just for practice?”
“I’ll bash you if you don’t shut your cakehole,” said the leader, pulling off his spiky-snouted helmet. He was Libnog, Skarper’s own batch-brother, and he looked around expectantly as he came out to greet the travellers. “You saw the High King then? He sent warriors? An army? Where are they?”
“Here,” said Henwyn. “The High King would not send his heroes, so I found heroes of our own.”
Libnog stared. “A girl, two old men, and a bunch of rubbish trolls?” he said weakly. “What good are they going to be?”
“We’re not rubbish,” mumbled Torridge, but he and his brothers all looked a bit afraid of the goblins.
“There are ghosts, too,” said Skarper. “They might not be able to fight, but they can frighten the dwarves away, perhaps. They’re dead scary.”
“Woooooo!” suggested Kosi, spookily, materializing above Zeewa’s head.
“Stop it!” said Zeewa. “You’re just embarrassing yourself.”
“Goblins are not afraid of the ghosts of men,” said Garvon Hael, looking on with that faint, mocking smile of his. “And
nor will dwarves be, I dare say.”
Torridge, Cribba and Kenn were all trying to hide behind one another. Dr Prong was peering curiously at the goblin guards, as if he still half hoped to find a way of proving they did not exist.
Henwyn looked at Skarper, and sighed. It was not much of an army they had brought home with them, but it would have to do. “They are not great in number,” he admitted, “but their hearts are true.”
What does that even mean? wondered Skarper. It won’t matter how true our hearts are if a million dwarves come charging at us. But he didn’t want to make Henwyn look foolish (at least, not any more foolish than he usually looked) so he said nothing, just followed with the others as Henwyn led them through the Southerly Gate and on up the road towards the Inner Wall on its high crag.
Several times along that road they were stopped by goblin patrols, all dressed up in outsize helms and hauberks from the armouries, playing at soldiers among the ruins. There were listening posts down in the cellars of the old buildings too, for everyone knew that the dwarves were more likely to launch their attack under the ground than over the Outer Wall. “We can hear them,” said a Redcap, when they stopped beside his cellar. “We puts our ears to the ground and we hears scratching and thumping and stuff going on. It’s worse round the east side. That’s where they’ll come from, probably.”
There were fewer goblins in the woods – even in these times, the people of the trees distrusted them – but when the road came out of the trees near the base of Meneth Eskern they were everywhere, marching around in clumsy battalions on the weed-grown old drill yards and building crude catapults on the tops of ancient bastions. There were so many of them that Skarper started to feel a little happier. Goblins were good at fighting, after all. They always had been. All right, so this lot weren’t as rough and tough as King Knobbler and the big bullies of years gone by, but surely they could see off a gang of pathetic dwarves?
They climbed to the gate in the Inner Wall and went through it. Princess Ned was standing in a wild part of her new garden, watching Fentongoose order a regiment of young hatchlings around. At first the hatchlings looked impressive enough, the thicket of their tall spears catching the last of the sunlight as they marched through their manoeuvres. But goblins are not clever creatures (Skarper was probably one of the cleverest goblins there had ever been, and he didn’t feel particularly bright) and inevitably it all went wrong. “Right TURN!” bellowed Fentongoose, and half the goblins turned right while most of the rest turned left and a few just went round in circles, quite bewildered. They tripped over each other’s feet, over spears and shields, over their own too-big armour, and went down with a clatter in a squabbling heap, while loud fights broke out over whose fault it was.
While Fentongoose tried to stop a brawl developing, Princess Ned came hurrying to greet the new arrivals. Even she was wearing armour; a silvery breastplate from the armouries was strapped on over her faded gardening dress. It did not suit her; she did not look like a warrior princess, more like a slightly ill-at-ease guest on her way to a costume party.
“Henwyn!” she said (taking his hands). “And Skarper. . .” (tickling behind his ears in just the way he liked). She looked questioningly at the strangers ranged behind them. Zeewa’s cloud of ghosts were showing up quite clearly now in the twilight, and even Princess Ned quailed a little at the sight of them. And trolls too! But Garvon Hael stepped forward and bowed, and said, “We are your army, Lady of Clovenstone.”
Princess Ned narrowed her eyes. “You are Garvon Hael!” she said. “I remember you! You came to Lusuenn once, when I was a girl.”
Garvon Hael nodded. “More than once. And a loud, foolish, boastful, brash young fellow you thought me, I am sure.”
“Well,” said Ned, blushing a little, “I wasn’t going to say anything, but. . .”
“But I was,” said Garvon Hael. “I remember seeing you there. Like a meadow flower growing in an overtended garden, I thought you. And when the giant Fraddon stole you away I was one of the heroes who came to try and rescue you. But Fraddon set me right; told me you were happy enough and sent me on my way. I was young and full of wind and spoiling for a fight, but I could not fight him: he picked me up between his finger and thumb and hung me on a tree. I was so ashamed that, when I finally climbed down, I took ship for Far Penderglaze, in the Autumn Isles. A fight with the pirates there soon knocked some sense into me. There is nothing quite like a battle for knocking the wind and bluster out of a man.”
“Garvon Hael was the only one of the High King’s warriors who would come to help us,” explained Henwyn.
“And we are very happy that you have, Garvon Hael,” said Princess Ned. “Although I fear that Clovenstone may be a lost cause. . .” She glanced over her shoulder at the goblins, who were picking themselves up and brushing dust off their dented armour, still busy bickering about what “right” and “left” meant. Fentongoose had given up trying to instruct them and was sitting on a heap of dropped shields with his head in his hands.
“That, we shall see,” said Garvon Hael. “I had an army of farm boys and fishermen at Far Penderglaze, and they started not much better than this rabble you have here. Let me be your general, Lady of Clovenstone, and I shall knock them into shape for you.”
There was a feast that night in the great hall at the foot of Redcap Tower. Princess Ned was good at organizing feasts, and she had been expecting a whole horde of heroes, not just Garvon Hael and a couple of hangers-on, so there was plenty to go round. Stew and dumplings, flavoured with the fierce scarlet peppers that the Redcaps grew in Clovenstone’s ancient glasshouses; a giant apple crumble for afters, with dollops of clotted cream.
Then there was singing, and games, and a burping contest, and Princess Ned told the tale of Prince Brewyon and the Loaf of Doom. Fentongoose explained to Zeewa that the Houses of the Dead was an old name for the great complex of tombs and burial mounds in the north-eastern part of Clovenstone, and promised to show her the way there next morning. Garvon Hael drank a lot of wine from some cobwebby old bottles that someone unearthed from the cellars, and made a rousing speech in which he told everybody that this was the last fun they would have for a long time: the next morning he was going to set about turning them into an army. The new hatchlings, who were growing tired of people telling them that they shouldn’t fight, were very taken with this grizzled old warrior, who not only told them that they should but promised he would show them how to do it really well. A speckled, scaly one called Soakaway used a plate as a shield and a fork for a sword and Garvon Hael taught him how to thrust and parry while the others crowded close to watch and learn. It wasn’t long before Soakaway was able to catch the warrior’s sword blows on the plate and Garvon Hael’s quilted breeches were full of fork holes. “See?” shouted Garvon Hael. “Who says that goblins will be no match for dwarves?”
“Hooray!” cheered some goblins.
“Clovenstone for ever!” howled others.
“Anchovies!” yelled Skarper’s batch-brother Gutgust. (“Anchovies!” was the only thing Gutgust ever said, and nobody ever knew why.)
Dr Prong was the only one who did not join in the party mood. He sat in a corner, looking on in nervous amazement as goblins fought and burped, danced wildly to the rough music of tooting goblin horns, and formed themselves into giant pyramids that teetered right up to the rafters before collapsing amid shrieks of goblin laughter. Eventually he seemed to decide that it was all too much; with a muttered “Excuse me!”, he hurried outside and up on to the battlements.
But if he had hoped to escape from the strange sights and citizens of Clovenstone, he was in for a disappointment. Just outside the Inner Wall, where the woods began, a huge figure stood in the moonlight, taller than the tallest beech trees. The giant’s face was as weathered as an outcropping of upland stone, his hair was grey as lichen, and his tusks glinted in the moonlight as he chuckled softly at the prickly, twiggy
beings who were clambering over him.
“Dr Prong?” asked Princess Ned, coming up to stand beside the startled philosopher.
Dr Prong pointed weakly at the scene below. “Is that. . .?”
“That is Fraddon the giant. He is a very old friend of mine. It was he who carried my ship to Clovenstone, many years ago, with me inside it. I am very glad he did. I have never once regretted coming here.”
Dr Prong made a strangled sound that might have been meant as a laugh. “I am regretting it already!” he said. “What can I do here, among goblins and giants and trolls and . . . what are those bushy creatures?”
“Twiglings. They live in the trees, and are great friends with Fraddon.”
“Ah. . .” said Dr Prong. “You see, my lady, I have spent all my life disbelieving in such things, and trying to learn the rules that govern the world. Now all the rules are torn up: wild magic is loose again, and there is no place for me.”
“Oh, do not say that!” said Princess Ned. “There are rules to magic, even if they are strange ones, and hard to understand. But tell me. . .”
She hesitated a moment, and Prong turned to look at her.
“They call you Dr Prong,” she said. “Does that mean that you know something of medicine?”
“I am a doctor of philosophy,” said Prong primly. “But I do know something of the healing arts.”
“Then you must stay!” said Princess Ned, with a smile. “There is no doctor in Clovenstone, and we are in need of one, for the goblins are forever injuring themselves, and one another.”
“Well, certainly I know how to splint a broken leg, or bandage a broken head. Even a broken goblin head. . .”
“And it is not just the goblins who will need you,” Ned went on. “Take me, for instance. I am not what you would call a young princess any more. I have dizzy spells, and get out of breath after even the least bit of exercise.”