Goblins

by Philip Reeve

  It was too late; the shouting or the flash of the blade had caught the troll’s eye. Its big head turned; it roared its fury at the pair on the bank.

  Fortunately the parapet of the bridge had not quite finished falling to pieces. One huge stone still teetered, leaning far out over the river but held in place by a tether of ivy stems. At the troll’s roar the last stem broke; the stone toppled, fell, and landed with an ugly thud on the troll’s flat skull. The troll collapsed into the water and did not come up again; a few bubbles rose, and the river whirled them away. The white rapids downstream flushed a rusty red.

  “Victory!” cried the softling triumphantly, and started to wade towards the pool where the troll had sunk, holding his knife aloft. “I shall cut off its head!”

  “Not with that, you won’t,” shouted Skarper, still holding on to the raggedy end of the softling’s cloak and pulling hard to hold him back. “Don’t you know the king of Coriander dresses his bodyguards in trollskin armour because it deflects the blows of any man-forged blade?”

  The softling looked back, a glimpse of doubt in his large blue eyes. “You have been to Coriander?”

  “I read it in a book,” said Skarper. “And I read in another one that trolls’ bones are hard as upland stones,” he added, and fell backwards on the bank as the softling turned and waded back to shore.

  “You think it might only be stunned?” he asked as he scrambled out of the water.

  “Let’s not wait around and find out,” said Skarper.

  “No; perhaps that would not be wise,” the softling said, showing some sense for the first time since Skarper met him, and together they scrabbled their way up the bank to the road and hurried along it until the river was well behind them, its voice far and faint behind the trees. The softling had retrieved his baggage and his sword, and Skarper eyed him warily as they both paused to catch their breath and ring water out of their soggy clothes.

  “Henwyn,” said the softling.

  “Eh?”

  “My name. Henwyn of Adherak.”

  He held out his hand, though Skarper did not know what he was supposed to do with it. He looked the softling up and down. He’s not much more than a hatchling, he thought. Maybe that’s why he’s so stupid. . .

  “You must be a man of great learning,” Henwyn said earnestly. “To have read books and things. I hope that you can forgive me for trying to. . . Well, I mistook you for a troll, you know. It was quite understandable, seeing you creep out from under the bridge like that, and what with you being a rather strange-looking fellow, if you don’t mind me saying so. Where I come from, in Adherak, people are taller than you and, well, different altogether, so when I saw you I naturally assumed. . .”

  He paused, and suddenly bowed low and dropped his sword on the road with a clang that made Skarper leap back nervously.

  “Allow me to apologize and to lay my sword at your service. I should be glad of company in this fell place. Everyone knows that Clovenstone is full of ravening, rampaging goblins of the most wicked and unsightly sort.”

  “Really?” asked Skarper. He glanced sideways at his companion. Surely this idiot must have noticed his goblin ears, his goblin paws, and the goblin tail that stuck out from under his thick leather goblin jerkin? “So what do these goblins look like, then?” he asked.

  “Oh, they are great big hulking brutes,” Henwyn explained. “Taller and broader than men, dressed all in iron armour, with red, glowing fangs and terrible pointy eyes.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I may have got the eyes and the fangs the wrong way round, but otherwise, yes, quite sure. That’s what all the songs and stories say. They are supposed to infest those tall towers around the Great Keep, but who knows how far they might creep in search of loot and victims? Even on this road I feel that I may be close to a goblin. . .”

  “So what’s brought you here?” asked Skarper, thinking, You have no idea how close. . .

  “Oh, I am a hero,” said Henwyn airily, and then, as if he sensed that Skarper did not quite believe him, “At least, I mean to be. Like in the old tales. I am of humble birth, but I’ve always had a feeling that I am destined to do great deeds. My mother came from the line of King Kennack, you see; a daughter of heroes. So I decided to try my hand at heroing. Slaying monsters, rescuing princesses. Though there’s not much call for that sort of thing in Adherak these days. That’s why I came to Clovenstone. I haven’t actually done any great deeds yet, not unless you count that troll, and that wasn’t really a deed, more of an accident. I wish I could have got its head. . .”

  He paused, looking thoughtfully back towards the river, and Skarper said, “So you decided to just come and wander about in the ruins till you found something heroic to do?”

  “Oh no,” replied Henwyn. He sat down on the mossy kerb and took his boots off, tipping the water out of each before pulling them back on. “No, no; I am on my way to the Westerly Gate.”

  Skarper’s eyes narrowed as he recalled Stenoryon’s map. “Why’s that, then?” he asked.

  “It is the home of the giant Fraddon,” said Henwyn.

  That meant nothing to Skarper. “I don’t know what a giant fraddon is,” he said. “I don’t even know what a normal-sized fraddon is.”

  “No, he’s a giant called Fraddon,” explained Henwyn. “A very wicked, villainous giant. There is a song about him, ‘The Lay of Princess Eluned’, all about how he carried off Princess Eluned of Lusuenn and keeps her prisoner in the old fortress that guards the Westerly Gate of this evil place. It’s quite catchy. Shall I sing it to you?” And without waiting for an answer he began singing in a thin, tuneless voice:

  “O, ’twas on a summer’s morning,

  A Tuesday, I’ve heard tell,

  The princess of Lusuenn sailed

  Upon the grey sea’s swell. . .”

  “Some other time, maybe,” said Skarper hastily, for although he didn’t know that particular song, there had been books in the bumwipe heaps full of others like it, and some of them went on for pages and pages.

  Henwyn stopped singing. “Well, anyway,” he said, “if I can rescue Princess Eluned and slay the giant, the king of Lusuenn is certain to reward me with half the kingdom and her hand in marriage.”

  “Her hand?” said Skarper (for the ways of men were strange to him).

  “Oh, and the rest of her, of course. At least, that’s the way it generally works. Lusuenn is only a small kingdom, but it would be a start, and the song says that Princess Eluned is a great beauty. . .”

  He stopped talking and looked round in surprise, for Skarper had started to make a strange creaking, croaking, snoring sound, which turned out to be laughter.

  “You?” cawed Skarper. “You, defeat a giant? With that overgrown butter knife? Oh, he, he, he!”

  “Well, I don’t see what’s so amusing about it,” said Henwyn huffily. “I am a hero, and that is the sort of thing that heroes do.”

  Skarper shook his head. This wasn’t funny any more. It was sad. He had read about giants in the bumwipe heaps, and once, from one of the roofs of Blackspike Tower, he and Breslaw had watched one moving about among the ruins up northerly way. “All sorts of old things are coming here out of the Bonehills and the tangleywoods,” Breslaw had said. “There ben’t no place for them in man-country any more, so they comes to make their homes at Clovenstone. That’s why wise goblins stay safe within the Inner Wall.” The giant had been a long way off, and fog had been brewing in the bogs that lay north of the Inner Wall, so it had been hard to say just how tall the giant was, but he’d stood high enough to lift the roofs off buildings as if they were the lids of treasure boxes. It would need a whole army of softlings to defeat him, Skarper thought.

  “I came in through Southerly Gate because it seemed easier than skirting round outside the walls, through all the mires and crags and things,” said Henw
yn. “I hoped to find a road through these woods to Westerly Gate. Have you passed one, friend?”

  Skarper shrugged. All sorts of little roads and side ways had branched off the road he’d come down, but there was no telling where any of them went. “You’ll have to follow your nose,” he said rudely, and pointed vaguely westward, where scraps of golden sunlight showed between the trees.

  Henwyn did not seem offended. “Very well. It looks a difficult and dangerous path through these haunted trees, but that is where my fate must take me. Will you join me on that road, Master, er. . .?”

  “Skarper,” said Skarper. “And no: I’m heading south. . .” He had no idea where his fate was taking him, only that it wasn’t going to involve giants. Or would-be heroes. He raised a paw in farewell and scurried on along the road. He looked over his shoulder twice as he went. The first time he could see Henwyn standing staring after him. The second time, the road was empty. He paused, and thought he heard the young man’s voice raised in song, dwindling westward between the trees.

  What an idiot, he thought.

  Let’s pause a moment and take a good look at Henwyn as, stout of heart and damp of socks, he squelches off in search of his adventure. Tall, slim, curly-haired, he certainly looks like a hero, or would if his tunic wasn’t quite so old-fashioned, his wet cloak quite so ragged. “I am of humble birth,” is what he’s told everyone he’s met on the way from Adherak, “but my mother was of the royal line of King Kennack. . .” Only that’s not quite true: his mother was not descended from one of the great king’s sons or daughters, but from his dairy maid. Henwyn son of Henmor comes from a long line of dairy maids and cheesewrights, and he did not grow up in a castle or a manor house but in his father’s cheesery in Adherak.

  Not that it wasn’t a good cheesery. It was a very good one; the best in Adherak, and his father’s famous cheeses were carted off to stock the larders of the high king in Coriander and the pantries of all the little kings of the Nibbled Coast. Among the low, thatched roofs of Adherak the house of Henmor stood tall and proud, built from creamy-coloured stone, triangular and two storeys tall, with round windows and doors that made it look like an enormous slice of cheese. A brass weathervane in the shape of a cow twirled on its rooftop, and the wind that spun the weathervane wafted delicious smells across the neighbourhood, reminding all of Adherak that Henmor made the finest cheese in the Westlands.

  There were probably young men – good, sensible young men – who would have given anything for a chance to be the great cheesewright’s apprentice and a hope of inheriting the cheesery from him. It was just bad luck that his own son wasn’t one of them. Henwyn didn’t even like cheese, and he certainly did not want to be a cheesewright all his life.

  He felt that fate had something far more interesting in store for him.

  For as long as he could remember, Adherak had felt too small and ordinary a place for him. He liked to stand at the edge of the town and look north to where, beyond the safe, soft hills, you could just make out the brindled moors and high blue mountains massing. Sometimes, on clear days, he even glimpsed the dark spike of Clovenstone, like a tentpole holding up the sky. That’s where I should be, he thought. Not here in the softlands, among merchants and traders; up there in the north, where there is still magic, like in stories. I wasn’t born to be a cheesewright! I was born to be a . . . a hero!

  He wanted magic and adventures so badly that it was almost unbearable. But there was no magic any more in Adherak, and no adventures to be had, so he got them the only way he could: second-hand, from stories. Henwyn had never been much of a reader, which was lucky, because there were no books in the cheesery. But Adherak was a market town, plonked down plump and prosperous in a green valley where the road from Coriander crossed the winding river Sethyn. Up that road, from Coriander and the Nibbled Coast, came fish and sealskins, spice and silk, all the produce of the Sundering Sea and the lands that lay beyond. Down the river to Adherak’s docks came barges filled with grain and timber and all the good things of the softlands. And up and down both road and river there came stories: tellers of tales, singers of songs; whole travelling shows arrived in Adherak every few days, and Henwyn, running through the town on errands for his father, always found some excuse to stop and listen.

  “The boy has his head in the clouds,” said Henmor, the first time his son spent a whole afternoon watching a play about Prince Brewyon and the cloud maidens when he should have been collecting a shipment of cheesecloth from the floating market.

  “He’s only young,” said Henwyn’s mother. “He’ll grow out of it.”

  “He’s away with the fairies!” Henmor raged, the day Henwyn was sent to buy chives to flavour a special wheel of cheese for the wedding of the Lord of Adherak; he came back without the chives, and without the money he’d been given either. He had been hanging round the second-hand-weapons stall where the old washed-up warriors went to pawn their gear and tell tall tales, and one of them had sold him a rusty old sword which he said had once belonged to King Kennack. “All this nonsense he fills his head with!” Henmor railed. “Heroes and monsters! Quests and battles! What sort of dreams are those for a young man? When I was his age, I just dreamed of cheese! The world would get on very nicely without battles and quests, but where would be it be without cheese, eh? Heroes and monsters were all very well in the olden times, but nowadays a young fellow needs a sensible trade.”

  “He’s still just a boy,” said Henwyn’s mother, though even she was getting tired of making excuses for her son. “Wait till he turns thirteen; he’ll gather his wits and settle down to cheese-making, like his father and his grandfather before him.”

  But Henwyn turned thirteen, turned fourteen, turned fifteen, and still he was more interested in stories than in cheese. He did his best to pay attention to the things his father told him: the best ways to make milk coagulate, how to separate curds from whey, the ripening times of different cheeses. Sometimes, as he concentrated on wrapping the cheeses and pressing them in the great round moulds, he would tell himself, Yes, this is the life for me. . . But then, across some empty, sunlit meadow of his mind a rider would go galloping, off to save a princess or defeat a tyrant, and his work would go all to pieces. Often the cheeses went all to pieces too: he would leave them too long in the brine bath or drop them down the cellar steps, or forget to add rennet at the right moment so that the cheese never thickened properly.

  Whenever he could, he would leave his sisters to do his work – there were three of them, Herda, Gerda and Lynt, and they were all better cheesewrights than Henwyn. If only they could have been Henmor’s heirs, and carried on the family business! But cheeseries were passed on to sons, not daughters, and Henwyn was Henmor’s only son. It made him feel ashamed of himself when he left Herda, Gerda and Lynt to do the wrapping and salting and pressing for him while he went off to hear whatever new storyteller the trade winds had blown into town – but not too ashamed to stop him doing it. By night, in his attic room, where the smells of the ripening curds drifted up between the floorboards like invisible, cheesy smoke, he would fetch out King Kennack’s sword and mime great battles, practising the moves he knew good swordsmen had to know, such as Thrusting and Parrying and Not Getting It Stuck In The Ceiling.

  One day – a blue day in his fifteenth summer, the west wind blowing fat white clouds in over the hills where the cows that made the cheesery’s milk were grazing – Henmor took his son aside.

  “I have business down in Nantivey,” he said. “A cheesewright there has devised a new sort of vat, and I want to take a look at it. While I’m gone, you’ll be in charge here. The cheesery is yours for a week. It will be good practice for you, for the day when I retire and it is yours for ever.”

  “Yes, Father,” said Henwyn.

  He looked so serious and earnest as he said it that Henmor thought, He’s a good boy after all; I should have given him responsibility sooner. Perhaps his son was settli
ng, just as his mother had always said he would; maturing like a good, hard cheese. He set off for Nantivey with a secret smile, because the cheesewright there didn’t just have a new sort of vat, he had a daughter too, and Henmor thought she’d make a good wife for young Henwyn, and stop him daydreaming of princesses. He couldn’t know that Henwyn had been daydreaming all through their little talk, and that when he’d said, “You’ll be in charge here,” Henwyn had been imagining that it was a castle he was being left in charge of, not a cheesery, and that he must defend it from ravening hordes of goblins for a week, not just make cheese.

  For the first day, and the second, all went well. Henwyn tried hard to concentrate, and whenever he found himself daydreaming he would tell himself “Cheese!” and drive the warriors and dragons and princesses from his thoughts. But on the third day there was not much to be done; only the cleaning of the cheesery, which was woman’s work, and which his mother, Herda, Gerda and Lynt were busy doing. To get himself out of the way of their mops he walked into the heart of town, and then down to the floating market, wondering if the latest barges had brought in any players or bards. They hadn’t; there was only an old man singing “The Lay of the Blind Giantslayer”, a tale so familiar that even Henwyn was a little tired of it. He listened to a few verses, but it lit no pictures in his mind, and he turned to walk home, wondering if perhaps he was settling down, and would be a good, sober cheesewright from now on.

  He didn’t see the three travellers who followed him out of the marketplace. He didn’t hear the quick, muttered conversation that they held.

  “That’s him!”

  “Who?”

  “Henwyn; the one I told you of. They say he’s a daydreamer: away with the faeries; believes in goblins and trolls and any old folly the harpers sing of.”

  “But so do we.”

  “That’s not the point.”