by Craig Zerf
‘Sorry, good sir,’ answered the keep. ‘But we are not of the custom of bathing in our rooms in this part of the country. We do, however, have a central bathing establishment right next door and, as a paying guest in this inn, you have full access to all the facilities.’
Plob thanked him and, after he had taken his luggage to his room he went next door, accompanied by Cabbie and Legles to treat himself to a good hot soak. They entered the room through an inter-leading door between the inn and the baths and, after being issued with a large rough towel each, were shown to the changing rooms.
They stripped their travel-stained clothes off and went through the curtain into the bathing area carrying their towels over their shoulders whilst Cabbie endeavoured to start a serious debate as to whether one should drink one’s best wine first in order to savour fully all of its nuances or whether one should quench one’s thirst with cheaper ale or wine before to prevent one quaffing down the good stuff with little or no thought or, if one did quench one’s thirst with cheap wine then would one become so drunk as to not notice that the good wine was good and, this is the important part he insisted, if this was the case why bother with good wine in the first place as it cost three times more, gets you no drunker than the cheap stuff and, contrary to what anyone says, gives you the same grade of hangover if you overindulge.
This theory of Cabbie’s, which probably bears more thinking about, was completely lost on both Plob and Legles who were gaping dumbstruck at the contents of the baths (actually the contents of the baths was water – as it is oft wont to be) but it is what was in the water that was disturbing our teenager and our decent and dignified noble elf.
The steaming water contained people, naked people, naked people of the very obviously female persuasion. The only reason that Plob knew that he had not inadvertently wandered into the wrong baths was that the water contained people of the male gender as well.
Cabbie carried on his postulation regarding the merits of alcoholic quantity over quality, dropped his towel next to the pool and climbed in. Plob, whose reflexes had been momentarily slowed down by the fact that he was surrounded by almost half a hundred wet naked soapy girls, abruptly realised that he was inadvertently, and quite outstandingly, showing his appreciation of the various female forms arrayed around him and so he hurriedly dropped his towel and followed Cabbie into the dubious cover of the steaming water.
Legles, however, had gone an odd purple colour and seemed to be staring at the mixed sex bathers in something akin to complete and utter outrage.
‘This is an affront to decent behaviour,’ he spluttered as he suddenly remembered his nakedness and whipped his towel off his shoulder to cover himself. ‘It is wicked to be expected to bathe in a place where women shamelessly parade themselves around in font of you like brazen hussies. The whole enterprise smacks of ethical turpitude.’
‘There he goes again,’ laughed Cabbie. ‘Off on his elevated steed once more. Charging recklessly to the aid of the morally corrupt and mentally indecent. Come off it, Legles, it’s the custom here, you know, like that stupid singing that you and the dwarves like. Sorry, I should have warned you but I was totally caught up in my cheap booze hypothesis. Now give it a break and jump in.’
Legles was unrepentant in his moral indignation and stormed out of the baths, his face almost matching the colour of his gilded flaming-red locks. Plob and Cabbie sat soaking in the hot water while Cabbie rambled on about the merit of cigars versus pipes and whether smoking tobacco and drinking excessively was good for you or bad for you because his grandfather on his mother’s side had drunkenly chain smoked cigars since he was about twenty years of age continuing for every day of his ninety-seven-year-old life. Whereas the grandfather on his father’s side didn’t smoke or drink and had died at the sadly youthful age of thirty-two. Admittedly, Cabbie continued, he died in a fire that had been caused by Cabbie’s other grandfather leaving a lighted cigar on the table after he had drunkenly made his way home after being invited over for supper one evening – so – maybe that didn’t count. Still, it was worth thinking about, said Cabbie as he mused to himself whether he should take up smoking to ensure a long and healthy life.
Unfortunately Plob heard none, or at least very little, of this as he was having a hard time (as it were) concentrating on anything and was desperately trying to think how he would get out of the pool and to the cover of his towel which he had dropped a couple of yards from the poolside whilst hiding his testosterone-driven body’s massively (well, medium to large at least) embarrassing betrayal.
He’d tried closing his eyes to block out the view but had discovered that the only thing more erotic than seeing two score and ten nude damsels lounging about in the hot water was not seeing them. The fact that they were there, all around you, floating by whilst you had your eyes closed, instantly conjured up such vivid sybaritic images of wanton carnality that Plob was now unable even to blink lest he, quite literally, went off the deep end. And then, to make matters just a little bit worse and a lot more embarrassing, Dreenee entered the baths. Fortunately she was fully clothed or Plob’s, by now fast becoming, tenuous grip on reality may have slipped completely when faced with the body that had helped to launch a thousand ardent imaginings.
‘Master Smegly says to hurry up,’ she told them as she walked up to the edge of the steaming pool of water.
Plob nodded. ‘OK, we’ll be along soon.’
Dreenee shook her head. ‘Now. He said I must wait and make sure that you get out.’
Cabbie climbed nonchalantly out of the water, strolled across, picked up his towel and started drying himself vigorously.
Dreenee picked up Plob’s towel and stood, grinning, a few yards away from the pool. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’
Basically Plob had three options. One, slip under the water, fill his lungs with the warm slightly soapy liquid and slip mercifully into unconsciousness – workable but rather drastic. Two, clamber out of the pool and immediately assume the crawling hunchback mode of perambulation in order to get to the towel – might work but in all likelihood Dreenee would just keep walking backwards until he was forced to stand upright (in all senses of the word). Plob decided on a third option. He screwed his courage to the sticking post, climbed out of the pool and walked with head, and other certain tumescent extremities, proudly held high for all to see. This unexpected act of bravado totally threw Dreenee who squeaked, blushed, dropped the towel and ran from the room all in one continuous movement.
Cabbie doubled over with laughter and slapped Plob on the back. ‘Good one, boy – good one,’ he chortled wickedly as they strolled forth from the baths.
Plob rose late the next morning with his ears still ringing slightly from the noise and joviality of the night before. As he splashed his face with cold water from the stone bowl in his room, snatches of the eve’s revelry played through his mind like a half-remembered dream.
The evening had started fairly quietly as they all sat down to a meal of roasted ox, potatoes and whole cinnamon baked butternut squashes chased down with a large amount of locally brewed mead, a drink that Plob had never had before and, after an exploratory sip, decided it was very tasty but too sweet to be that alcoholic. How wrong he was, how very, very wrong. Incorrect, mistaken, erroneous, fallacious and monstrously wide off the mark.
Over the meal, Master Smegly had informed them all of the slightly adjusted route that they would be taking to the capital city, a journey that would now take them directly through the uncharted bad-lands of the desolate eastern marshes of Grumble, home to goblins, cacodemons, ghouls, flibbertigibbets and perhaps even worse. They were to do this for two reasons he told them, firstly to hone their team to an edge before the probable big showdown with Bil and his minions and, secondly, there was no better place for them to come across opportunities to do good. In fact, he argued, in a place of such all-consuming evil, pretty much anything that they did, within reason, would probably be construed as good.
This revelat
ion was greeted with trepidation by all except Legles who was so pleased with this forthcoming opportunity to display his overabundance of nobleness and gallantry that he wanted to skip the meal and set off straight away in order to ‘do good on the minions of evil in all their guises.’ Cabbie told him to stow it and the elf had replied that ‘evil never stops to eat or sleep so neither should we,’ Cabbie then told him to bollocks off so Legles sulked quietly for the rest of the evening, or perhaps he went up to his room, Plob couldn’t remember.
The master then advised all to enjoy themselves to the full that night as they would have little chance, or reason, for frivolity over the next few days. The meal came and went and the mead came and stayed, and brought some friends along for good measure.
Cabbie had temporarily lifted his ban on singing and, after the meal, the dwarves started singing in earnest as if to make up for the time on the road that had remained song-free. At first the songs were mainly variations on Cabbie’s ‘drink, drink, drink’ song but, as the candle burnt lower, the lyrics turned more to the ‘I am so lonely and many miles from home and I hope that I don’t die in a foreign land’ type song that makes local bystanders grit their teeth and mutter things like ‘why don’t you just bloody well go home then, really, if you like coal mining so much and the beer is always so good and the girls are so pretty then go back why don’t you’ under their breath. (I don’t know if you’ve noticed but why is it that whenever you find people singing about going home or the old country, the ones that seem the most heartbroken about living away from home were normally the first buggers to leave the place or, in some cases, weren’t even actually born there. In fact it seems that the crappier the country that they have left then the more vocal the singer and the more rose-tinted the spectacles that their old toilet of a nation is viewed through. Although this is not completely true - I’ve never actually heard anyone singing about going back to Mauritania but then maybe that’s just because nobody’s had the sense to leave there in the first place, or maybe nobody really lives there.)
After the gloomy songs had finally drawn to a close, Biggest went around the table topping up everyone’s glasses of mead with Blutop and thereby turning a surprisingly potent drink into a sweet pleasant tasting potion with a ferociously high alcoholic content that had an effect something akin to general anaesthetic. After a glass or two of this demon drink, Biggest announced that he was going for a short walk outside to clear his head and Plob had called out for him to wait as he wanted to come as well. Plob had a moment of overwhelming drunken panic as he had tried to stand and realised that, although he was sober from the waist up, all of his lower extremities were gloriously and catatonically intoxicated. Eventually he levered himself out of his chair and staggered zombie-like through the door and outside.
The cold night air hadn’t sobered Plob up but it did seem to evenly distribute the numbness throughout his whole system which meant that he could now walk, after a fashion. He then stepped into a knee-deep hole with both legs and simply stood there as he desperately tried to figure out what to do next. At this point Cabbie arrived, took one look at Plob and burst into tears of maudlin sorrow. Biggest hadwent gone over to consol Cabbie and enquire as to what was wrong. ‘His legs’ Cabbie told him, ‘look,’ he had said, pointing at Plob’s knees. ‘He’s lost the lower half of his legs. That’s so sad. It’s a tragedy. And he was my friend and now he’s got no legs. Boo Hoo.’
Plob, momentarily forgetting that he was standing in a hole, had felt his eyes well up with tears at the sheer injustice of it all. A young lad like him, struck down, or at least foreshortened, in his prime. Being forced to wander the streets, begging for alms whilst being pushed about in a wheelbarrow. He was completely legless (in more ways than one).
Unable to take it any more, Biggest had leant over and dragged Plob from the small pothole, dropped him unceremoniously on the turf and declared him cured. ‘Praise be to the Gods!’ Cabbie yelled as he witnessed Plob’s miraculous recovery and, overcome with emotion, promptly passed out and crashed to the ground.
Things got really weird after that. More mead. More Blutop. Someone’s beard catching alight. Falling off a chair whilst singing. Mead. Undying love. Best of friends. Blutop. I love the whole world. Mead and Blutop and…
Strangely though, the next day Plob didn’t have a hangover. But then that’s how it goes, he reckoned. No good basing any sort of Blutop-and-mead-doesn’t-give-you-a-hangover theory on his lack of any sort of alcohol-induced malady because, ten to one, the next cup of mead that he drank would probably give him a rip snorting headache of the homicidal death-before-sobriety category. He threw his clothes into his small trunk and carried it downstairs to the cab, after which he went to the common room where everyone was seated for breakfast.
‘Morning, big-boy,’ greeted Dreenee. Cabbie raised an eyebrow at her and she blushed and gazed at her plate. Plob grunted a non-committal morn greeting to all, sat down and spooned some sausages and grated fried potato off one of the laden platters that were scattered around the large central table. The conversation around the trestle was desultory at best as they all applied themselves to their breakfast fare.
Eventually Budget piped up. ‘You know the dwarf that was dancing on the table last night? The one that had taken his breeches off and wrapped them around his head. The one that set fire to Basin’s beard and then got sick all over the table and then cried and cried inconsolably for the rest of the evening even though everyone kept telling him to shut up. You know that dwarf?’ There was a general smattering of agreements. ‘That was me, wasn’t it?’ asked Budget embarrassedly. Another general vocalisation of agreements ensued followed by a chorus of dwarven hur hur hurs. Budget buried his face in his hands and sat very, very still in the hope that it would make his hangover disappear.
After breakfast Master Smegly went into town with Cabbie, his cab and ten or so of the dwarves to purchase sufficient supplies to carry them through the bleak time that they had ahead of them. Legles took his longbow and arrows to a field out back of the inn to put in a little target practice, Dreenee repaired to her room and Plob and Horgy sat with Biggest who had taken a small fold-up wooden board game from his trunk and brought it downstairs to show the two of them.
When unfolded, the board consisted of twelve hollowed-out depressions which contained twenty or so different coloured stones. The way that Biggest explained the game it, seemed to consist of basically moving the stones around until Biggest lost his temper and threw the board across the room. Plob figured that there was probably more to it but, try as he might, he couldn’t figure it out. They played a couple of rounds to pass the time but, after Biggest had thrown the board against the wall a few times they lost two of the stones and Biggest claimed that the game couldn’t be played properly without the correct quantity of stones so he packed it up and went off to his room.
Plob and Horgy, with nothing else to do, walked outside to the back field to see Legles practice his archery. After watching the elven toxophilite for a short while Plob was suitably impressed. Legles was shooting at a coin-sized knot in an oak tree perhaps some one hundred and twenty paces distant and the arrows that he had already unleashed were grouped so tightly that they had split each other as they drove into the target area. But it was not the accuracy that amazed Plob, although he had never seen its like, it was the speed at which the elf loosed his quarrels that truly inspired awe. He could fire his shafts , one after the other, so swiftly as to create the illusion that he was connected to the tree by one long continuous shank of wood. Plob shuddered as he envisioned the effect that that onslaught of sharpened steel and hardened wood might achieve on a closely packed mass of troops. The dwarves were right - Legles was definitely a one-elf army.
Smegly arrived back a little later that day and, after they had repacked the supplies and distributed them, by weight, evenly about the team, the dwarves shouldered their packs and the team set off towards the malevolent swamps of Grumble.
Cha
pter 23
‘It’s no bloody use,’ Hugo slammed the phone down onto its cradle and sprawled back in his chair. ‘We will never be able to track down where every one of those stupid tooly-wrenchy things went. Plumbers, DIY enthusiasts, merchants. We’ve got to try something else – anything else.’
Terry, who had already decided that they were wasting their time with their current wrench line of enquiry but wasn’t about to admit it, stared at Hugo with a scornful and disbelieving look. ‘Oh typical. Mister upper-class wants to give up. No bloody staying power, that’s the problem with you public school nanny-boys. A few phone calls and…’
‘Nancy.’
Terry stopped in mid blether. ‘What?’
‘It’s Nancy-boy. Nancy-boy, not nanny-boy, you imitation working-class, middle-class pillock. Nancy-bloody-bleeding-boy. And if you don’t shut up with the class-orientated taunts I shall come over there and give you a damn good thrashing, you horrid, beastly…beastly…state school wallah.’
‘Oh you’ll give me a thrashing, will you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Oh yes.’
The two detectives stared belligerently at each other for a while each waiting for the other to carry the situation to the next step. Eventually Terry, realising that he was actually being a bit of a prat, gave a sigh. ‘Should we go get a cup a tea and a sticky bun then? My treat.’
