by Philip Reeve
“You’re alive!” he shouted.
“I know!” Skarper shouted back, and also, “Put me down!”, because he was hoping to stay alive, and being whirled round and round on top of a crumbly battlement with a long drop on each side didn’t seem like a good way to make that happen. “Stop! Put me down! Listen! The dwarves have built a body for their Head. A Giant Dwarf! I saw it come stomping out of Delverdale, high as a mountain. That’s what they drained our slowsilver for! That’s what it runs on. . . ”
“It’s true!” said Durgar, and Etty added, “It’s huge! Nothing can stand before it!”
A sort of silence fell over the crowd, broken only by a low murmuring as goblins tried to work out what this would mean.
“Is it coming here, this Giant Dwarf?” asked Fraddon.
A score of goblin voices echoed him. “Is it coming here? Is it coming to Clovenstone?”
“Coriander,” said Skarper. “They’re taking it to Coriander.”
“Yazzay! Yibber! Hap!” the goblins screamed throwing hats and helmets, spears and clubs into the air in their excitement. “We’re saved! Clovenstone is saved!”
“No, no!” shouted Durgar. “You don’t understand!”
The goblins fell quiet again, except for the occasional “Ow!” and “Argh!” as the spears and clubs fell back on to their owners.
“The Giant Dwarf is meant to restore the pride and standing of the dwarves,” Durgar said. “They are taking it to Coriander. They mean to defeat the High King and his armies.”
Even the “Argh!”s and “Ow!”s had stopped now: the goblins frowned and scratched their heads, trying to work out what this news meant for them. They didn’t care about Coriander. They didn’t much care about softlings, except for the ones they knew. This Giant Dwarf could stomp the High King flat for all they cared.
But Princess Ned had heard all this as she came slowly up the stairs with Fentongoose, and she saw at once what it would mean. “If the dwarves take Coriander, then no kingdom can stand against them. They will rule over the Westlands again, as they did in days of old. We must warn the High King!”
The goblins rumbled, mumbled, grumbled. They had all heard how it had gone when Henwyn and Skarper asked the High King for help. They still didn’t really see why they should help him. They were goblins, after all: it wasn’t their style. They rather liked the idea of his majesty getting stomped on by a Giant Dwarf. It was just the sort of thing that appealed to them.
Princess Ned sat down on a small sofa which someone had left there on the battlements, then sprang up again and said, “Oh Spurtle, I’m sorry! But please think, all of you. If the dwarves control the Westlands, do you really believe they will let us live on here in peace? Of course not. They have already made sure that there will be no new goblins. They will come and deal with the rest of us at their leisure. They already have our slowsilver, but there is much else at Clovenstone that dwarves would value, and they will not want goblins here. This giant dwarf is as much a danger to us as it is to Coriander.”
Henwyn had been thinking, too. He was imagining a map of the Westlands, with Dwarvenholm in the north-east, Coriander in the south-west. An old straight road ran from one to the other, and it passed through Henwyn’s own hometown.
“Adherak!” he gasped. “The Giant Dwarf will have to pass through Adherak!”
That changed things. The goblins knew people from Adherak. Henwyn’s father and mother had visited Clovenstone, along with his sisters, Herda, Gerda and Lynt. They’d helped set up the Clovenstone Cheesery, and taught the goblins how to make Clovenstone Blue. None of the goblins thought it would be funny if they got stomped on.
“We must do something!” said a voice out of the throng.
“We must stop it!”
“Anchovies!”
“Could Fraddon fight this thing?” demanded Fentongoose.
Etty looked at Fraddon and shrugged. “It is taller than your giant. And it is made all of metal, and slowsilver runs in its veins instead of blood. I do not think that anything could fight it.”
“Goblins can!” the goblins yelled. They waved their spears and clubs and rusty old swords. Even the sofa rustled its cushions in a warlike way. “We’ll bash it in!” they hollered. “We’ll smash it up! Nothing’s ever been built that goblins can’t smash up!”
“Garvon Hael taught us to fight!” shouted Libnog. “We’ll just fight at Adherak instead of Clovenstone, that’s all!”
“To Adherak! To Adherak!” other goblins shouted. “Stop the Giant Dwarf!” And raggedly and out of tune, they began to chant the ancient goblin war song:
Goblins come!
Goblins come!
From Clovenstone with horn and drum!
To the Lands of Man with fire we come!
Over the mountains,
Over the moor,
Goblins are marching,
To war! To war!
It was like the turning of a tide: a great swirl of motion, surging down the stairways of the Inner Wall towards the armouries below. The goblins had grown so used to the idea of fighting dwarves, and so eager for revenge, that once the idea of going to Adherak was sown in their brains it sprouted swiftly.
Goblins go!
Goblins go!
With things to thump and things to throw!
To smash that Giant Dwarf we go!
There and back,
There and back,
Goblins are marching,
To Adherak!
On the battlements, Ned struggled through the current of departing goblins to reach the waiting cloud. “Oh, cloud maidens, do be dears and fly to Coriander with this news!” she said. “And to Adherak as well, to let them know that we are coming. . .”
“Not we, princess,” said Dr Prong, quite sternly. “Do you not remember when you asked me to be your doctor? Well, as your doctor, it is my medical opinion that you must rest, and not exert yourself.”
“Oh yes!” said Henwyn eagerly, because he had suddenly remembered his vision in the bathtub, and was wondering if it was on one of the green fields of Adherak that he had seen the princess laid out dead. “You should stay here. Someone must stay behind to keep an eye on Clovenstone; to make sure the boglins do not try anything while we are away, and to organize a last defence if we fail and the dwarves come here.”
“Henwyn, I am not an invalid!” said Ned quite crossly, because it seemed to her that her place was at the front of this boisterous army, not skulking at home. But then she looked at them, pouring down off the Inner Wall, grabbing pikes and shields and banners from the armouries, and it struck her what a long way it was to Adherak, and how fast the goblins would cover that distance if they did not have an elderly princess to delay them, and she had to admit that what Henwyn and Dr Prong had said was right.
“Well,” she said, determined to be of some use to the expedition, “you cannot just set off now, all higgledy-piggledy, without a plan of campaign or any provisions. We must organize you.”
Ned was good at organizing. As soon as she had waved the cloud maidens off on their mission to Coriander she made Fentongoose and Dr Prong sit down with some old maps from the bumwipe heaps and plan the shortest route to Adherak and the best place to try to stop the Giant Dwarf when they got there. Meanwhile, Henwyn and Garvon Hael ran around making sure that all the goblins at least had weapons and shields, and Fraddon lifted the Bratapult down off the battlements and replaced its creaky, half-rotten wheels with some new iron-bound ones from one of the wrecked war machines the dwarves had left behind. And while they were all busy, Princess Ned gathered the best goblin cooks, lit fires under the great cauldrons and kettles in the scoffery, and set about cooking up an enormous stew, so that the army would not have to set out for Adherak on empty stomachs.
That was not all she cooked. She also made a big dish of crumble, and later, when the res
t were eating, she asked Fraddon to carry it for her, and led him around the Inner Wall and down to the edge of Natterdon Mire. It was almost dark by then. Everything was grey: grey ground, grey sky, grey ruins, and the paler grey of the shifting mist. Here and there a marsh light flickered, drifting eerily above the meres; here and there a bittern boomed, and unseen creatures splashed and rustled in the reeds.
“O boglins!” called Ned, feeling a little silly to be talking to a marsh. “Boglins of Natterdon! Thank you for warning us about the dwarves. We are going out to find and fight them, to try and put things right again. There are not very many of us, and we are not sure that we can do anything, but we have to try. And you could help us. You could weave mists that would hide our little army, so that the dwarves would not see how few they are. You could go with the goblins to Adherak, and help save Clovenstone, and all the Westlands.”
She stopped and listened for an answer, but none came; only the wind, sighing through the feathered reed tops, stirring the water in the secret pools.
“Well,” said Ned, motioning for Fraddon to set the crumble dish down on a flat stone near the mire’s edge, “here is some crumble for you, anyway.”
“Do you really think they’ll help?” asked Fraddon. “Boglins have never been helpful yet. They only told Henwyn and Zeewa of the dwarves because their precious dampdrake had been scared away. Boglins don’t care for anyone but boglins.”
“Maybe not,” said Ned. “But much has changed in the world: perhaps boglins have changed a little too.” She sighed. “I wish I could go with Henwyn and the others! I feel so useless, staying here! It is dismal, growing old. If I were as young and strong as Zeewa I would be leading the army, not Garvon Hael.”
She heard Fraddon’s huge face crease into a smile in the darkness above her. “And if I were three hundred years younger,” he said, “I would walk to Delverdale in ten great strides, squeeze the slowsilver out of this giant dwarf like wringing water from a dishcloth, and carry it home to you. But I am not. All things grow old, and that’s as it should be. There comes a time when we must let the young take over.”
He reached down his hand, as big and comfortable as a favourite armchair, and Princess Ned sat down in it, and let him carry her home to her ship.
All was quiet in Clovenstone by then. The only sound was the soft rasp of metal on stone, coming from the armoury, where Zeewa sat by the light of the dying fire and sharpened her spears, all alone with her ghosts.
She had been thinking hard since she’d spoken to the Gatekeeper. It seemed to her that she owed it to her ghosts to leave them in that afterworld, beneath the green hill at Clovenstone, where they could taste and smell and touch. It was not fair to keep dragging them around after her, and she was tired, so very tired, of being haunted. So it seemed to her that the best thing would be if she were to die in this battle. She had talked of it to Fentongoose, without admitting what she was planning, and he had agreed that someone who fell fighting for Clovenstone would surely be allowed to enter the Houses of the Dead. She would die then, and lead her ghosts after her down into the grass.
The night passed, and as the sky grew grey again above the crumbled spines and spires of Clovenstone the goblins stirred, grumbling and stretching, yawning and farting, and gathered themselves into the order that Garvon Hael had decreed. War horns were blown, startling sleepy birds out of the ruins; the gate in the Inner Wall was opened, and the first goblin army since the Lych Lord’s time went marching down the long, rubble-strewn road to the Southerly Gate. Garvon Hael led the way, mounted on his grey horse, and behind him came the oldest, toughest goblins. Henwyn and Skarper were in the middle somewhere, trying to keep order among the hatchlings, and beside them strode Zeewa, her ghosts mingling mistily with the marchers. Behind her walked Fraddon, carrying the bratapult in one hand and his tree-trunk club in the other, and on his broad shoulders rode Etty and her father. It seemed a strange thing for dwarves to be marching with a goblin war band off to make war on their own people, but Ned had persuaded them to go: they understood this Giant Dwarf better than anyone, and perhaps, with their help, it would be possible to defeat it without too much loss of life. At the rear came Fentongoose and Dr Prong, along with Torridge, Cribba and Kenn. The trolls were carrying the two philosophers’ bags of bandages and medicines, and as the day wore on they ended up carrying the two philosophers as well, for they were not young men, and found it hard to keep up with giants and goblins.
In the pale grey dawn as the first birds were stirring the host passed beneath the trees of the great woods which filled the southern parts of Clovenstone. Twiglings kept pace with them, scampering through the branches over their heads, their woody feet sending down a rain of autumn leaves, red and gold and brown, which fell like tears on the goblins. Looking up, Skarper saw that most of the twiglings carried sharp spears, and their eyes glinted fiercely in the half light, but their anger was not directed at the goblins. Fraddon had spoken with them in the night, and they knew what was at stake; for once they were happy to let goblins pass through their woods. They would have liked to join the army themselves, and go to fight the dwarves whose tunnels had harmed the roots of so many fine trees, but they could not survive for long in treeless country, and the moors between Clovenstone and Adherak were bleak and bare.
As for that other inhabitant of the woods, the old troll who lived under the crossing of the River Oeth, he had never heard so many pairs of feet go tramping over his bridge. He was quite alarmed, and sank deep down into his pool, only emerging when the army had passed. He peeked out through the hart’s tongue ferns that grew from the buttresses of the bridge and was just in time to see the last of the rearguard marching away through the trees on the south bank. Ooh, trolls! he thought, recognizing the lumpy, lumbering shapes of Torridge, Cribba and Kenn as things like him, and for a moment he was tempted to scramble up the riverbank and follow them, but he was a solitary old stone, and he stayed where he was.
At the southern edge of the woods the twiglings stopped, and the goblins looked back to see the treetops bristling with them, spears and twiggy hands upraised in salute. Voices like the wind in dry leaves called out to them, wishing them good luck and a safe return, and promising, “We shall keep Clovenstone safe while you are gone: woods, waters, stones and all!”
And then, quite quickly, they were at Southerly Gate, and setting out across the wide, brindled hills, and very soon Clovenstone was lost behind them, hidden by low cloud and the folds of the land. The black banner with its silver comet streamed out on the moorland wind, and the road swung east and south to Adherak.
Adherak lay cupped between green hills, on a curve of the River Sethyn, where the road from Coriander crossed the road to Lusuenn. It had been a walled town once, but the Softlands had been so peaceful for so long that the town had spread far beyond its walls, spilling down the hill to the river, where the boats and barges of the floating market moored.
Except that now, most of those boats and barges had gone, slipping their moorings and drifting away downstream. Many of the houses had been hastily shuttered too, and the people who lived in them had taken to the roads, heading south to stay with friends and relatives in Nantivey or Chinnery. News came early to a crossroads-town like Adherak, and for some days now frightened people from the northland farms had been crowding down the Old North Road with their tales of the Giant Dwarf. Not all the stories were accurate, because the farmers and their families had left their homes in too much of a hurry to study the approaching terror in any detail. Some said that the giant was as high as a house; some claimed it was taller than a mountain. A few said it had three heads, and sneezed fireballs. One man claimed that a whole army of Giant Dwarves was on the march. But the people of Adherak got the general idea: something bad was coming, it was coming from the north, and it would be upon them very soon.
The town emptied quickly. Even the Lord of Adherak remembered that he had important business down
in Porthzafron and shut up his castle before haring off down the South Road in a carriage with smoked glass windows. Soon a strange silence settled on the once-busy streets. Only a few brave Adherakians stayed behind, vowing to defend their town against whatever it was that had come out of Delverdale.
Henwyn’s mother, father and sisters were among them. They were cheese-makers, not warriors, but bravery ran in the family; that was where Henwyn had got it from. Anyway, they had a fine new cheesery, built only the previous year to replace the one that had been accidentally destroyed by a cheese monster. “If any dwarf, giant or little, thinks he can take our cheesery from us,” said Henmor, Henwyn’s father, “then he has another think coming!” And his wife and daughters all agreed, and busied themselves fixing cheese knives to the ends of old broom handles to make pikes.
Then came more bad news. Farmers from the west started arriving, pausing at the Adherakians’ hastily built barricades before taking the road south. They told of another menace. “Goblins!” they said, breathless with fear and the effort of hauling all their best possessions on handcarts. “A goblin host is coming, pouring out of Clovenstone, just like in the bad old times! Run, friends, or you’ll all be robbed and murdered!”
The Adherakians looked worriedly at one another. Were the goblins in league with the dwarves? Had some great alliance been forged among the old things of the world to overthrow human beings?
“What say you, Henmor the Cheesewright?” people asked Henwyn’s father. “Your lad lives at Clovenstone, doesn’t he? You’ve had dealings with these goblins. What does this mean?”