Goblins (3 page)

The bratapult had stood upon the topmost pinnacle of Blackspike Tower for as long as any goblin could recall. It had been designed to throw stones and pots of blazing oil at besieging armies, but nobody bothered besieging Clovenstone any more, and when goblins from other towers attacked Blackspike, King Knobbler’s boys usually just dropped rocks on them from upstairs windows. The bratapult was now mostly used for fun, and there was nothing that the goblins thought funnier than flinging a cheeky hatchling high into the air and watching him plummet to the ground far, far below.

It was made from wood, stone, iron, bone, old mineshaft props, the hides of pit ponies, and anything else the goblins could get their paws on and drag up the steep stone stairways to the tower’s summit. Snow covered it, icicles trailed from its long throwing arm, and all night Skarper shivered in the cold, trussed up and left in its vast cup.

King Knobbler had been all for launching him as soon as they got him there, but it was dark by then, and the other goblins complained that they would not be able to watch him fall, which was always the best bit of firing a hatchling from the bratapult. “We could set him on fire first,” someone suggested, but there was a north wind howling round the tower, driving thin, slushy snow, and Skarper proved impossible to light. So they left him there and went back to the scoffery, planning to come back and launch him in the morning.

But what if it’s foggy tomorrow?
he wondered as he lay there, roped, regretful and slightly singed. He looked up at the huge bulk of the Great Keep towering into the night, hidden behind the murk most of the time, except when a lessening of the storm cleared the sky for a moment and showed him those empty black windows and bare battlements. The Keep of Clovenstone, doorless, impenetrable, and full of mysteries. It didn’t even look like the towers and walls that had been built around it: it was older, and it did not seem to have been made from individual stones but from one sheer black mass of rock. Goblins had tried to get inside and loot it sometimes, but there was no way in: when the Lych Lord died, every door and window into the Keep had sealed itself shut with a scab of thick, dark stuff called lychglass which no mortal instrument could break or even make a mark on. All the treasures and wonders of the Keep had been locked away for ever, all alone.

Of course, goblin legends said that there were still things living in the Keep: servants of the Lych Lord, waiting for the day he would return, but Skarper had never believed that. At least, not until now. . . He squinted upwards, imagining the terrible cold eyes that might be gazing back at him, and for a moment, just a moment, he thought he saw a light up there, an impossible light in one of those empty windows.

Then the snow swirled back, and with it Skarper’s worries about fog.
They won’t be able to see me fall if it’s foggy tomorrow; they’ll have to wait for it to clear
. . . Sometimes it took weeks for fog to clear from the heights of Blackspike. He could starve to death waiting in the cup of the bratapult for the weather to improve. He wondered whether starving would be better than being splattered on the stones at the tower’s foot, but he couldn’t decide. He drifted into an uneasy sleep, still worrying.

He was in luck, or out of it. The next morning dawned clear and bright, and as soon as the sun had heaved itself up over the eastward towers a crowd of goblins came tumbling out of Blackspike to watch the fun. Dungnutt, Knobbler’s second-in-command, came and cut Skarper’s bonds, because it would be funnier if they could see him flapping his arms and legs about on the way down. Yabber, Wrench, Libnog and Bootle took bets on how long it would take their batch-brother to reach the ground, and whether he’d bounce off anything interesting on the way down. “Anchovies!” shouted Gutgust. Breslaw the hatchling master sadly shook his head.

King Knobbler drew his sword. It was a massive broadsword, and although it wasn’t as richly decorated as some swords, a sort of sullen magic seemed to live in it: it was said that its blade could slice through stone. Knobbler had heard somewhere that kings and heroes in the lands of men gave names to their swords, so he had named his. It was called “Mr Chop-U-Up”. He raised it so that the sunrise bloodied its blade.

“This,” he yelled, “is for being too clever by half!”

Mr Chop-U-Up swept down, hewing through the rope that held the bratapult’s cup in place. The throwing arm sprang upright, crashing against the frame. The icicles flew off it with a thousand little pretty tinkling noises, and Skarper flew with them, like many a cheeky young goblin before him, hurtling up and out into the howling emptiness above the tower.

“Aaaaaaaaa. . .” he said.

The goblins cheered, and rushed to the edge of the roof to watch him fall.

Down and down and down he went, his escort of icicles filling the air around him. Sometimes he fell with his face to the wide sky, sometimes face down. Face down was worst, because as the ground drew closer he could see, between the clouds, the smashed-up skeletons of all the bratapult’s previous victims, spread about between the buttresses down there like white shingle at the foot of a sea cliff. Tears came from his eyes as he fell, and whirled upwards in his slipstream like lost raindrops. They were tears of bitterness, because he was regretting every moment that he had spent with books and words. Wretch and Yabber and the others had been right; what use had it ever been to him to learn about far-off lands and long-forgotten kings? Few goblins had even ventured as far as Clovenstone’s Outer Wall in Skarper’s lifetime; what help was it to know about the lands beyond? Most of what he had read had probably been made up anyway. He didn’t believe there had ever been any such person as Prince Brewyon, or any such places as Coriander or Tyr Trewas. As for cloud maidens, who would believe that old tripe?

There was a soft tearing noise, a louder
whoof
, and he landed heavily on something that yielded beneath his weight like a blanket bog.
I’m dead!
he thought, and then realized that, if he was thinking it, he couldn’t be. He opened his eyes, which he had shut tight as he landed, not wanting to watch bits of himself being strewn about the landscape.

He was lying in thick, cottony white fluff at the bottom of a deep, Skarper-shaped shaft. The walls of the shaft were all made of the same pale fluff, and at the top of it there was blue sky in the shape of his own spread-eagled silhouette. He realized that he had plunged into the top of a low-flying cloud, and sunk about halfway through it.

At about the same moment that he worked this out, a face appeared at the top of the shaft, looking down. It was a cloud-white face with a lot of smoky hair, and when it saw Skarper it frowned and flushed an angry bruise-grey. “What do you think you’re doing on our cloud?” it demanded.

Skarper groped through all the memories of all the books he’d read, searching for a witty or a courteous answer.

More heads were appearing at the top of the hole he’d made. “What is it, sister?” asked one of them.

“Is it a prince?” asked another, hopefully.

“Of course not! It’s much too small.”

“Perhaps it’s a very small prince?”

“Anyway, what would a prince be doing up here?”

“It’s just a horrid goblin!”

“Seize him!” said the first cloud maiden. She darkened like a thunderhead and little zigzag sparks of lightning started to dance in her cloudy hair.

“If you don’t mind,” called Skarper hopefully, “that would suit me very well. Just set me down anywhere and I’ll trouble you no more.”

The cloud maidens peered down at him suspiciously.

“He’s very polite, for a goblin,” said the one who’d hoped he was a prince.

But the rest blushed black, spitting and sparking with lightning. “Take him to the ground? The very idea! We must cast this creature back into the sky, sisters, before his weight drags us to the earth!”

“Seize him!” shouted the cloud maidens.

But Skarper wasn’t waiting to be seized. He had spent enough time escaping from other goblins to know when to make himself scarce. He started to writhe and wriggle against the cloud that pressed around him, and found that it had the texture of light, dry snow. He could kick holes in it, and dig out handfuls. Turning over on to his hands and knees, he started digging like a dog, shovelling up great handfuls of the dense vapour and flinging it over his shoulder, where it drifted uncertainly up the shaft. By the shrieks and hisses coming from above he could tell the cloud maidens didn’t much like him doing further damage to their home and, when he glanced up, he saw that several of them had started to climb towards him down the shaft he’d made, kicking footholds in its vapoury walls like climbers coming down a snow-face. Their faces glared angrily at him with eyes as hard and bright as hailstones; in their smoky hands were blades of ice.

Skarper whimpered and dug faster. He’d rather be smashed on the flagstones after all, he thought, than sliced to bits by angry cloud maidens. He dug and dug, clawing up big handfuls of cloud and throwing it frantically over his shoulder, fighting his way down into the deepening hole. The further he went, the darker grew the cloud, and soon the handfuls that he was scooping up became wetter and heavier, packed with hailstones or sodden with unfallen rain, like cold grey sponges. At last, through a growing crack in the bottom of the cloud, he glimpsed daylight.

A cloudy hand reached down and grabbed him by the tuft on the tip of his tail. Considering that it was made of cloud, the hand was surprisingly strong, but it was not as strong as gravity, which seized Skarper from below at exactly the same moment, because the thin cloud floor had given way beneath him. He dangled there a moment, screaming, “Let me go! Let me go!”, suspended by his tail while the cloud maiden’s wrist stretched out longer and longer, thinner and thinner. Finally it tore, and Skarper was tumbling again, only to land with a soft squelch in thick mud about six feet below.

Freed of his weight, the cloud bobbed upwards, caught by the breeze that curled around the base of Blackspike Tower. Bits of it had unravelled like fraying banners, and Skarper could see the cloud maidens scrambling about all over it like sailors on a ship, trying to plait it back together. He wondered why he had never noticed such interesting clouds before. Presumably they were rare, and their crews stayed out of sight of groundlings. It was a pity they’d been so unfriendly, he thought, flicking wisps of the cloud maiden’s fingers from his tail like clinging smoke. He would have liked to ask them about their life in the sky.

He stood up shakily and looked around. He was standing in a bleak little bog about a mile from the base of the Inner Wall, formed where a leat of fresh water overflowed from its channel and spread across a weed-grown area which had once been a square between two massive ruined buildings. On either side of this marsh were stretches of ancient paving, the huge flagstones cracked and tilted by misshapen trees which had grown up from beneath them.

I’m outside the Blackspike!
he realized suddenly.
Beyond the Inner Wall!
Never having set foot outside his home tower before, he felt frightened by the huge space around him, so much wider and brighter than the halls and passageways that he was used to. All his life he had been trying to find peace and quiet and places away from other goblins, and now that he had finally reached one he found he
missed
the sounds of their constant squabbling and bickering, their snores and farts and burps. For a moment he felt tempted to run straight back to the Inner Wall, climb inside Blackspike Tower again, say he was sorry and beg King Knobbler to forgive him. But goblins were not good at forgiveness. He would have to find somewhere else to make his lair, he decided. He looked south, at all the old bastions and towerlets which rose among the trees between the Blackspike and the Outer Wall. Surely one of those could hide him? He’d hole up there and think what to do. Maybe there’d be treasure to find; just a few small trinkets, left behind in those old buildings. He’d sort out a nice new hoard for himself. There might even be goblins down there; some little outcast tribe that wouldn’t mind an extra member. . .

So he turned his back on his home, squelched his way out of the bog, and set off southward down a broad, paved road, stopping now and then to munch a handful of the dead thistles which stood man-high between the flagstones.

At first the margin of the road was marked by mounds of tumbled masonry, with the chimneys of fallen-down buildings sticking up like bony fingers, and meres between them where water had flooded the old cellars. But as it sloped downhill, away from Blackspike Tower, the trees came to meet it: Skarper could see them crowding in ahead until they appeared to close over the road like a twiggy tunnel. He began to feel uneasy. He didn’t know much about trees and growing things. The saplings which sprouted from the crevices of Blackspike made good eating, but these great trees were so
big
and
old
, and their creaks and rustlings had the sound of secret whispers. Skarper couldn’t help noticing the ease with which their roots had managed to split and crumble huge slabs of stone.

He walked slower and slower, and he was about to turn back when there was a crackle, a flash, and a clump of alders that had been minding its own business nearby burst suddenly into flames. Skarper yowled and looked round again, then up. The cloud which had broken his fall had recovered itself, and it was hovering over him, black as wet slate, with lashes of lightning flicking from its belly. It looked like a fierce, shaggy monster with electric legs.

Skarper set off at a loping run while lightning bolts lanced down all around him, sizzling when they hit the meres and starting small fires when they touched the dry bits in between. Above the steady boom of thunder and the fizz and prickle of the lightning he caught another sound: the high, scornful laughter of angry cloud maidens.

Zigzagging between forks of their white fire, jumping a line of fallen pillars which had collapsed across the old road, he sprinted towards the edge of the woods. The trees looked more welcoming than forbidding now. Big and bare and wintry, they clustered close together, branches bearded with lichen, forming a cage of green shadows. Once he was under there, surely the cloud maidens would not be able to see him. . .

Krazzzzzap!
A lightning bolt crisped past his ear, making his hair stand on end.

Pfritzzzz!
Another touched down in a puddle just ahead of him and turned it to scalding steam.

Krakkk!
A wobbling globe of witch-fire drifted by and blasted a nearby boulder into bits.

Skarper zigzagged his way between the explosions and threw himself into the shelter of the woods. There he lay, bruised and panting, on a bed of thick, wet moss under a fallen tree, while his heartbeat thundered in his ears like all the war drums of all the goblin holds of Clovenstone.

The cloud maidens steered their thunder-grumbling cloud around above him, trying to peer down through the dense branches. “Oh, goblin!” they called. “Come out, little goblin!” They sent a few more lightning bolts down just for fun, and then let the wind take their cloud and blow it away towards the east, to join a herd of others above the Bonehill Mountains.

Skarper waited until the last faint sounds of their voices had faded, then slithered out of his hiding place, checked the corners of the sky for lurking clouds, and set off again through the trees, looking for his new home.