Goblins (13 page)

“Help!” he shouted, trying to drag the stone back over the hole, but it was too heavy for him to move. Then a hand grasped him by the back of his tunic and it was Henwyn, pulling him back towards the woods with one hand while with the other he waved his sword so that the blade flashed in moonlight.

The cold reflections flicked across the angry faces of the Blackspike Boys emerging from the tunnel, and they hung back, remembering how fiercely the softlings had fought yesterday and ignoring Breslaw’s angry voice that shouted orders at them from below. Henwyn let go of Skarper, and they fled together through the ruins and into the deep shadows of the woods until they reached a clearing where moonshine lay like a grey carpet on the stony ground.

“Did you get the map?” panted Henwyn.

“’Course I did,” said Skarper. He patted his trousers again. The slowsilver ball was still there, and Stenoryon’s map gave a comforting papery rustle.

“Does it show the secret way?”

“I don’t know, do I? I haven’t had time to go burning up any slowsilver next to it, have I?” Skarper chuckled, remembering old Breslaw’s face. “I got some, though. That’s what they was all chasing me about.”

“We will take it back to Ned’s ship and show it to her,” said Henwyn, smiling as he thought how pleased and impressed the princess would be with what they’d done.

“Oh, we don’t want to bother her with it,” Skarper protested. “Not with her so busy and all. Why don’t we just keep it between ourselves, like. . .”

“Ned and the others must know of this,” said Henwyn firmly. “Or shall I leave you here to find your own way home?”

He walked off through the woods, setting a brisk pace, and there was nothing that Skarper could do but follow.

“Henwyn!” called Princess Ned, going out across her garden in the moonlight. She had been looking forward to another night of talk and stories, but Henwyn was nowhere to be found, and it would not be the same without him.

“There is no sign of Skarper either,” called Fentongoose, from up on the stern gallery of her ship. “Perhaps they’ve gone off together somewhere?”

The princess felt a little chill settle on her. She remembered seeing Henwyn and the goblin talking that afternoon, wreathed in the steam that rose from the dung-filled barrow. She had wondered at the time what it was that they had been discussing. She wondered again now. Henwyn was lovely, and if he had only turned up thirty years earlier she would have rather liked to be rescued by him, but he was not very wise, and she was afraid he did not understand how treacherous goblins could be.

Not all goblins
, she told herself.
They can’t all be bad, any more than all men are good, and Skarper wasn’t even hatched when the goblins attacked Porthstrewy.
But beneath all her good sense she could still hear the pleading voice of that deceitful goblin whose trick had led to the deaths of her mother and father.
Spare me! Spare me!
it said, and mingled with it in her memory there were other voices, the fierce voices of the raiders as they burst into her father’s castle, bellowing,
Blackspike! Blackspike!
Wasn’t Skarper a Blackspike goblin?

“Oh, Henwyn,” she said softly, crossing the garden, finding her way to the clapper bridge by the sound of the water that gurgled beneath it. “I do hope you have not let him lead you into a trap. . .”

The moonlight that fell in patches through the branches showed her their footprints clearly, in the muddy hollow at the bridge’s end. As she stopped to peer closer she noticed other footprints too, pressed in the mud and glistening wetly on the granite of the bridge itself; the prints of big, triangular, web-toed feet.

She had never seen marks like those before. The chill deepened. She straightened up, and there in the shadows all around her the moonlight reflected on watchful eyes.

She cried out and turned to run, but a net dropped over her, white and cold, tangling and tripping her, trapping her in strands of marsh mist as strong as any rope.

In Blackspike Tower, Breslaw was searching through the bumwipe heaps. “He came in here,” he grumbled to himself. “His footprints is all over. He came in here and took something and then he came and stole my stuff. But why?”

Outside, he could hear the tower’s guards shouting, “That’s right, Libnog, you take that alleyway,” and “Come on, let’s check this building.” He knew they weren’t really looking for Skarper and the softlings, though; they were just standing in a scaredy bunch at the tunnel entrance, shouting those things to make him think that they were searching. He snorted. Why would Skarper have taken up with softlings? What could they have wanted from the bumwipe heaps? He looked at the books and papers scattered all around him, and thought,
That map. Maybe it’s that map he wanted. But why steal my lovely slowsilver too? What are you playin’ at, Skarper?

Dimly, a faint memory came back to him; something he’d heard an old goblin tell him years and years before. “When slowsilver burns,” he muttered, “it can show up secret writings sometimes; worms and lettuces what the old-times men wanted hidden. . .” Of course, he’d never tried it for himself: slowsilver was shiny and precious; why waste it peering at a bunch of old secret scribble?

“But if there was scribblings on that map, they must show the way to something. The way to something that the softlings want. . .”

There was only one thing worth going to that much trouble for. Breslaw’s eye glowed with goblin greed.

“Treasure!”

Long before they crossed the clapper bridge and came in sight of Westerly Gate, Skarper and Henwyn could tell that something was wrong. The woods smelled damp, and they were too quiet; no twiglings rustled in the treetops or scuttled along the branches. There was one sound, though. Drips were falling all around; drops were patting on to wet earth.

“It’s been raining,” said Henwyn.

“I saw no clouds,” said Skarper.

The path filled with puddles. The two companions squelched through mud that rose past Skarper’s knees. They sloshed through fresh puddles, kicking the moon’s reflection into dancing shards.

“A real storm, by the look of it,” said Henwyn.

“I didn’t hear no thunder,” said Skarper.

They reached the clapper and barely recognized it; the swollen river had risen to brush its underside, and sprawled out in wide moonlit pools upon the bank. Eluned’s garden had a wilted look; the shrubs were beaten flat as if by heavy rain. The old ship was gone from the gatehouse.

“A hurricane!” gasped Henwyn.

“I didn’t hear any wind,” said Skarper, and they both began to run, splashing through the streamlets which trickled down the path, slithering on patches of transparent slime. Everywhere there was the sound of water trickling.

The ship lay on its side at the tower’s foot, its prow staved in by the fall. Some of the ropes which had been used to pull it down were still around it: thick white ropes with a strangely smoky look about them, as if they could not quite decide whether they were real or not. There were dozens of them. Henwyn seized the trailing end of one.

“Eugh! It’s all wet!”

From the shadows inside the fallen ship there came a loud sneeze.

Henwyn stepped forward. “Who’s that?”

“Henwyn?”

Three pale shapes emerged into the moonlight.

“Henwyn?” said Fentongoose, stifling another sneeze. “Skarper? Oh, thank badness! We thought those creatures had taken you too!”

“What creatures?” Henwyn asked. “Taken who? Taken where? Where is Princess Ned?”

“Gone!” said Carnglaze. “Those slimy goblins wrapped her up in nets of mist and carted her away!”

“Slimy goblins?” said Skarper. Goblins had been called many things in the long history of the world, but he’d never yet heard anyone call them “slimy”. “This isn’t goblin work. Goblins hate damp and wet.”

“Well, whatever they were,” said Prawl, “they came from the north, beneath a cloud of thick fog.”

“North?” asked Skarper uneasily. “That would be Natterdon Mire. Goblins don’t talk about Natterdon Mire, but there’s supposed to be things living there. . .”

“What sort of things?” asked Prawl.

“I don’t know. We don’t talk about it.”

Fentongoose said, “The first we knew of them was when they looped their white ropes around the ship. We didn’t think that they could pull it down, but there were many of them, and they must have been stronger than they looked, for down it came. After that they were everywhere, the slimy devils. They wrapped the princess up in more of their filthy mist ropes and dragged her away. There were so many of them; there was simply nothing we could do. They would have taken us too, except that our arcane wisdom gives us the ability to conceal ourselves from mortal eyes.”

“He means we hid in a cupboard,” explained Prawl.

“Didn’t you try to stop them?”

“Stop them? When they had such powerful spells?” demanded Fentongoose.

“We were afraid,” sniffed Carnglaze shamefacedly, and the sorcerers all hung their heads.

“Where did they take Princess Ned?” asked Henwyn.

“We don’t know,” replied Carnglaze.

“It was quite a dark cupboard,” said Prawl.

“We heard them chuckling and chanting as they carried her off.”

“They were singing something about ‘Bospoldew’.”

“If you can call that racket ‘singing’.”

“The noises faded away towards the north, into the woods.”

“Back to Natterdon Mire,” said Skarper.

“But what do they want with the princess? What are they going to do with her?”

“Nothing nice, that’s for sure,” said Carnglaze. “If they had just wanted Princess Ned to visit them for supper they would have asked, not tied her up and kidnapped her.”

“Maybe Ned
is
supper,” said Skarper. He had an uneasy, queasy feeling that he could not name. “It’s my fault, isn’t it? I’m to blame. If we’d not gone off to Blackspike tonight we’d have been here. We might have done something. . .”

Henwyn patted him encouragingly on the back. “Yes,” he said, “we might have got ourselves wrapped up and stolen like Princess Ned. But thanks to you we’re free, and we can go and rescue her.”

“Rescue her?” croaked Skarper. The idea had not occurred to him, and now that it did it seemed like a bad one.

“It should be easy enough to track them,” Henwyn went on, and he turned to look north. The rags of mist tangled in the trees there seemed to form a line, like a ghostly paper trail, leading away through the woods and over the high ridge that thrust out to the west of the Keep. “Fentongoose, you must come with us. We shall need your magic.”

“But I don’t have any magic!” cried Fentongoose, aghast. “I don’t even have the Lych Lord’s amulet any more. . .”

“You should have more faith in yourself,” said Henwyn. “Your spells worked well enough on my cheese. They may work again.”

“But what if they don’t?” said Fentongoose. “What if we confront these bog creatures only to find that the magic falls flat? Then we should feel like idiots.”

“Don’t you feel like that already?”

“Yes, but at least here we are
safe
idiots,” said Prawl. “We are not warriors or adventurers. We are scholars. We shall stay here. Look at all poor Princess Ned’s belongings, scattered around in the damp. How upset she would be, if she came home to find it all in such disorder. We shall stay here and tidy up and wait for your return.”

“An excellent idea!” Fentongoose said firmly. “I’m sure such brave and noble souls as you will have no trouble tracking these moist bandits to their lair, and fetching back their fair captive. We would only slow you down, and get in your way.”

“I could stay behind too,” offered Skarper hopefully.

Henwyn shook his head. “I need you, Skarper; you are my guide to Clovenstone.” Of the sorcerers he asked, “What did these creatures look like, by-the-by?”

Carnglaze led him across the garden. There in the shadow of the fallen ship lay four of the attackers, who had not jumped out of the way quickly enough when their ropes pulled it down. The ship had rolled over them before it settled into its present position. So far as it was possible to tell they’d been wet, grey-greenish things of goblin size, with the wide mouths and broad speckled faces of evil toads.

“They looked like that,” said Carnglaze, “only not flat.”

The woods of Clovenstone seemed stunned and silent. Traces of the raiders’ magic mist still lingered in the trees, but there was no sign of the twiglings; they were hiding in hollow trunks somewhere, in spaces between roots, waiting for the danger to be gone.

And Henwyn and Skarper were going towards the danger, following it as fast as they could along paths floored with puddles and covered with the wide, webbed prints of three-toed feet.

“What are these things, Skarper?” Henwyn asked, as the wet woods deepened round them. “I know you don’t talk of them, but you must know something. . .”

“Boglin,” said Skarper, dredging up a name he’d heard old goblins mutter sometimes. “That’s what they’re called, I think. Swamp things. Slime things. Bad things always. They’ve not left their marshes before; not in my time.”

“That star’s to blame, I expect,” said Henwyn. “Princess Ned said herself; all manner of old things are waking.”

Above the trees, the comet burned. The moon was low; the shadows long. The muddy path took them uphill to where an old road rose in zigzags past ivied temples with domes bashed in like breakfast eggs, mossy observatory towers where the Lych Lord’s astrologers might have watched his star the last time it swooped over the Westlands. From the top of the ridge they looked north and east. Trees were fewer there, and instead of oak there were stands of alder lying like smoke in the hollows of the ground and birches standing ghostly in the moonlight. As their eyes moved away from the wall, out across the broad bowl of the marsh, there was nothing but mist, with here and there a gaunt tower or a tall tree’s crown poking up above the billows.

“Natterdon Mire,” said Skarper, and at the sound of its name all the hair on his ears prickled and stood up on end.

The boglins were returning to Bospoldew just as they had come: in a broad column of marching bog boys, the hatchlings on the edges holding tight to the misty strings that held a dense awning of fog above the host. The only difference was that on this homeward march they made more noise, their war horns booming like bitterns to let Poldew and the others who had waited behind in the mire know that their raid had been a success.

Actually, that was not
quite
the only difference. In the heart of the column, trussed in mist bonds and dragged along on sleds of woven rushes, was the Princess Eluned.

This is so embarrassing
, she thought.
To be captured like a silly princess in a story. Why, only yesterday I was telling that nice young man that I did not need rescuing. Now I think I need it rather badly.

When they seized her she had thought, uncharitably, that Skarper was to blame. As they manhandled her across the bridge in their wet net she had imagined that the goblin had gone sneaking back to Blackspike Tower with news that Fraddon was away, and brought all his friends to attack Westerly Gate. But as they carried her through the spills of moonlight on the wood paths, she soon saw that these were not goblins. During her years at Clovenstone she had talked with many of the old creatures of the place, and some had spoken of the horrors that lurked in the Natterdon Mire. Boglins: that was what these were. She felt the excitement of an Unnatural Historian encountering new creatures for the first time, mingled with a healthy dose of fear.

To Bospoldew, to Bospoldew,
(the horrid creatures chanted as they marched)

We’ll boil your bones to make our stew,

We’ll bake your eyes to fill our pies,

We’ll take your ribs to roof our hall,

We’ll use your head for a bouncy ball,

At Bospoldew, at Bospoldew. . .

Most of them were as naked as frogs, but the bigger ones wore armour made from old slates and roof tiles lashed together with strands of tussock grass. Some had spears and knives made from old slates too, or from shards of glass they’d found in Clovenstone’s countless shattered windows.
Of course
, thought Ned,
metal blades would dull and rust in no time in the dankness of their mires
. That was why most of the boglins were armed only with clubs of bog oak, blackened and stony-hard after years in the mud, or with those long blowpipes made from hollowed reeds, and quivers of willow-splinter darts.

It was all most interesting, but Princess Ned found it hard to concentrate, for she kept wondering what the creatures planned to do with her when they reached this place that they called Bospoldew. They were moving steadily downhill now, the thickening fog concealing all but the vague outlines of the ruined buildings and stunted trees which lay about them. Ahead there were shifting lights behind the fog, and the hint of a great whale-backed shape like an upturned ship. She did hope the words of their marching song were not meant
literally
. . .

At Bospoldew, at Bospoldew,

We’ll use each little bit of you,

We’ll take your guts to thatch our huts,

We’ll have your spine for a washing line,

We’ll use your appendix for um, er, what rhymes with appendix? Erm. . .

At Bospoldew! At Bospoldew!

The bittern horns boomed, and out of the fog ahead the upturned ship thing emerged clearly at last, and it was a hall, built badly out of tumbled stones and roofed with slabs of mildewed thatch. Long colourless flags of flame wavered up from braziers on either side of the gate, and drifting balls of marsh gas dithered like fat phantom fireflies, reflecting in the black waters which stretched all around the hall.

By the light of these ghostly lamps the boglins hauled their captive across the causeway and in through the gate, and the tall doors of Bospoldew slammed shut behind them.

Meanwhile, the rescue party was starting to descend the northern side of the ridge, still following the broad trail left by the boglins. But as the first pools and reed beds of the mire opened among the ruins on either side of them, they found their way barred by a net of mist. When Henwyn tried to plunge through it, the mist strands yielded like wet ropes but would not part.

“Hard mist,” he said, plucking at one of the strands so that it twanged damply. “That’s just unnatural. Like black snow, or dry rain. . .”

“Or hot water,” agreed Skarper.

“Hot water’s not unnatural. Don’t you have baths in Blackspike Tower?”

“Er. . .”

Henwyn started hacking at the mist webs with his sword. The strands parted reluctantly, and immediately started to re-form. Through the gap he’d made, the two companions peered at the way ahead and saw that it lay down a long, narrow street between tall buildings, and that the mist webs were strung everywhere.

“It will take us hours to get through!” gasped Henwyn. “And the mist will form again behind us as we go. We shall be trapped.”

“The boglins can prob’ly feel us twitching at it, like spiders feel flies in their webs,” said Skarper.

They stood there for a moment, not sure what to do, both feeling hot and tired from their trek through the woods, both starting to fear that it had been in vain. Henwyn was the first to turn away. “I’m going back to the top of the hill,” he said. “Perhaps from up there I can spy a better way.”

He set off before Skarper could tell him that he was wasting his time and walked quickly uphill, trying to outpace his helpless anger. The heroes in stories never had this much trouble rescuing people. How was he supposed to slay monsters if the monsters wouldn’t even let him get near them?

He felt better when he regained the ridge-top and left the mists behind. The setting moon had spread long carpets of silver light across the gaps between the buildings there, and the Lych Lord’s star peeked at him over the Inner Wall. There was only one single cloud in the sky, and that was silvered by the moonshine too, so that it looked more like a puff of thistledown. Henwyn ran up the outside staircase of one of the old astrologers’ towers and stood on the top, peering into the bowl of mist which stretched away northward towards the Outer Wall.

Beneath the fog, a mile or two from where he stood, lights seemed to be moving. A far-off hooting rang among the ruins. As the fog eddied, Henwyn thought he could make out a shape: the roofline of a massive, whale-backed hall. Was that where the captives had been taken? But how to reach it when the mist lay over everything?

He looked eastward to the towering darkness of the Keep. It was so immense that you tended to forget about it, as you might forget about the sky or a mountain or anything else that seems a permanent part of the backdrop of the world. But this was the closest that Henwyn had yet come to it, and he looked at it afresh, at the moonlight shimmering on its strange walls. The sight filled him with feelings that he could not name. Without thinking, he raised a hand to finger the amulet which hung beneath his tunic, and suddenly into his mind there came a snatch of poetry he had once heard:

The white owl calls,

As twilight falls,

Behind the lofty towers and walls

Where roofs decay

And weeds hold sway

From dawn to dying of the day;

The wind in gusts

Disturbs the dusts

Where old bones bleach and armour rusts

In Clovenstone.

But in the Keep

In darkness deep

Where dead things creep

Behind barred gates

And lychglass plates

The Stone Throne waits,

The Stone Throne waits. . .

“How I should love to see the Lych Lord’s Stone Throne,” Henwyn said to himself. “
Then
I could say I had had adventures, all right. . .”

“Oh, prince!”

The voice, coming suddenly out of the darkness, startled him, and made him remember that he was having an adventure already. Princess Ned still needed rescuing and these ruins were filled with unknown dangers.

“Cooee! Prince!”

He looked this way and that, but saw no one.

“Prince!”

A well-aimed hailstone bounced off his head, and more voices called, “Up here!”

They were peeking down at him over the edge of that thistledown cloud, which had come down to hover just above his head like a fluffy oversized halo. Cloud faces, with eyes of shadow and hair like wind-combed cirrus. Cloud hands reaching down to him.

“Come aboard, young prince!”

“Come, forsake your lonely quest and tarry in the air with us!”

“We’ll show you the sky’s sky!”

“We’ll show you the Ice Crystal Mountains on the edge of the world!”

“That’s very kind of you,” Henwyn told them politely. “But I’m a bit busy at the moment. . .”

“Oh!” they said, dejected, pouting (who’d have thought a cloud could pout?). They seemed like nice girls to Henwyn, and he was sorry he had upset them. “Anyway,” he told them, hoping to console them, “I am not really a prince. I am just a cheesewright. Though I
am
on a quest, as it happens; I have to rescue. . .”

An idea came to him. He did not get very many, so they were always welcome, and he smiled as this one arrived. The cloud maidens thought he looked gorgeous when he smiled, and they all forgave him at once for being only a cheesewright.

“Perhaps you could help?” he asked. “I need to reach the lair of these boglin fellows, down under the mists yonder. I don’t suppose you could fly me there, could you?”

“Bospoldew?” The cloud maidens quailed, and their manner grew distinctly cooler: so much so that a little flurry of snow settled on Henwyn’s upturned face.

“Bospoldew is a fearful place!” said one.

“Poldew of the Mire lives there.”

“He is weaving his mist magic again!”

“He has power over clouds too. In olden times the boglins used to set snares for us, and use us and our clouds to stuff their mattresses.”

“We dare not carry you to Bospoldew.”

“Oh, but sisters,” said one of the maidens, “he’s the first prince we’ve seen for
years
and
years
.”

“He’s not a prince; he said himself that he is just a cheese-writer or something.”

“Well, it is very nearly the same thing, and he’s so beautiful.”

“Ladies, please!” said Henwyn, who was a bit embarrassed at being called beautiful. “I can see no other way into the mire, and I have to reach this Bospoldew place and rescue Princess Ned.”

“Princess? Princess?” whispered the cloud maidens. “Eugh! Princesses are rubbish! We don’t like princesses at all.”

“I suppose you are in love with her?”

“Oh no!” cried Henwyn, blushing. “It’s nothing like that. She’s quite a middle-aged princess. Though very nice.”

The cloud maidens withdrew inside their cloud, and it bobbed and rustled there for a moment while a hasty, whispered debate took place within. Then, to Henwyn’s delight, a kind of smoky ladder came dangling down, and the cloud maidens reappeared, gesturing for him to climb aboard. Before that night he would have been afraid to trust his weight to such a flimsy-looking thing, but he had felt the strength of the boglins’ woven mists and he felt sure that this ladder would be just as tough. He set his foot on the bottom rung and started climbing, calling loudly over his shoulder as he went, “Skarper! Over here!”