‘Now, you must concentrate all your efforts on getting well, and not worry about a thing. After all…’ Thaw shot a dazzling smile at a blushing Maris. ‘You have the finest nurse anyone could wish for - she has the expert touch of a gabtroll, but twice as soft…’
‘You’re very kind, Captain Daggerslash,’ said Maris quietly, refilling the little kettle with aromatic sallow-drop water and placing it back over the candle.
‘Alas, a captain no longer,’ said Thaw, getting up and giving them each a low bow. ‘But perhaps, one day, a captain once more.’
He left the small cabin and closed the door quietly behind him before pausing as he caught the unmistakable smell of burning tilder sausages. Thaw hurried up the ladder and made his way to the Galerider’s galley, bursting through the door.
‘Tem Barkwater!’ he exclaimed with a hearty laugh. ‘If it isn’t my favourite galley-slave! Now, let’s see if we can’t rescue these sausages before they all turn to charcoal…!’
The Galerider rose on the warm air currents, the patched spider-silk sails ragged but billowing as they filled with the following wind. The damaged ironwood mast -lovingly bound by Spillins - creaked and groaned, but held firm as the mighty sky ship sailed on, lighter now after delivering her cargo of tallow candles to the Great Shryke Slave Market.
At the Galerider’s centre, the warm flight-rock wheezed fitfully as the steady burners kept its temperature constant. Without the expert hand of the Stone Pilot to tend it, the rock had become a dull, lifeless thing, keeping the great sky ship airborne, but little else. At the helm, the figure of Captain Wind Jackal stood erect and vigilant. Given the inadequately tended flight-rock, his job was all the more exacting. His fingers moved constantly across the flight-levers on either side of the ship’s wheel, making adjustments, not just for the hull-weights, rudder and sails, but for the dormant flight-rock as well.
It was ceaseless work, but Wind Jackal refused to leave his post even for a moment. The Galerider was his ship and the crew was his responsibility. This voyage had tested his captaincy to the very limit, and there had been times when even he - the great Captain Wind Jackal -had felt his resolve weakening and his courage failing. He had lost three brave and loyal crew-members, and the memory of their deaths would haunt him for the rest of his days, he was certain of that.
But he was a sky pirate captain, and such tragedies had to be accepted. What he found harder to take; what made his heart contract within his chest as if grasped by the icy talons of a shryke-sister, was the dark panic of almost losing his son, Quint, together with Maris, the daughter of his best friend. The seemingly endless hours that had passed when he’d thought they were lost for ever had been, without a shadow of a doubt, the blackest of his life.
Even after their rescue, the memory of that black despair nagged away at Wind Jackal. It made his hands tremble over the flight-levers; it drenched his body in a cold clammy sweat, while lighting a fiery furnace in the pit of his stomach that seemed to consume his strength from within. But just as he fought with the wheel and flight-levers to keep the Galerider on a steady course, so Wind Jackal fought the raging panic within himself, and gradually, as the seconds turned to minutes, and the minutes turned to hours, he felt his sanity slowly returning, while the sky ship sailed on over the endless Deepwoods.
For three days they journeyed, sailing by day and anchoring up by night, and leaving the stench and misery of the shryke market behind them like a bad dream. Up over the high ridges they’d climbed, across the lakes and the glade country beyond, towards the great Timber Stands of the woodtrolls and deep forest clans. As the sun rose on the fourth day and a fair wind filled the Galerider‘s sails, Wind Jackal felt his spirits start to rise lift.
‘Report, Master Spillins!’ he shouted to the oakelf, who, ever since they’d left the slave market, had kept to his caternest as determinedly as he, Wind Jackal, had kept to the helm.
‘Timber Stands on the horizon, Captain,’ Spillins announced. ‘Can’t see any pathways yet, but I’ll keep looking.’
‘One path leads to all!’ Wind Jackal called back, his spirits lifting all the time.
The ancient Timber Stands of the Deepwoods forest - where lufwood, lullabee, blackwood and a thousand other trees were to be found - were ringed by the settlements of the deep forest clans. Gnokgoblin colonies nestled high in ironwood pines, mobgnome camps were dotted amongst blackwood groves, and slaughterer villages lay beside forest glades and pastures - all offering goods to trade, and a shelter from the dangers of the Deepwoods. But of all the many settlements, it was only those of the woodtrolls that offered the prize Wind Jackal was seeking.
Their great villages of buoyant-wood cabins were unmistakable from the air, marked out as they were by myriad criss-crossing paths, each one worn down by countless woodtroll feet. Each village was connected, one to the other, in a great snaking progression that wound round the highest and richest of the Timber Stands.
Here, timber of the highest quality was to be found. Seasoned and stored, sometimes for centuries, it was renowned throughout the Edge. And like woodbees to a honeybush, the sky ships of the leagues and the sky pirates alike would cluster round the villages, seeking this timber out.
Behind him, from the balustrade on the stern side of the upper cabins where Duggin’s sky ferry, the Edgehopper, was lashed, came the sound of voices in conversation.
‘Ah, Duggin, my fine fellow!’ Thaw Daggerslash’s cheerful voice was unmistakable. ‘Repairing your excellent fine craft, I see.’
‘She might not look much to a fine sky pirate such as yourself,’ came Duggin’s voice, ‘but the Edgehopper means all the world to me …’
‘I’m sure she does, Duggin. I’m sure she does.’ Thaw gave a laugh. ‘I say, have you seen that blasted heap of fur and bones that masquerades as a banderbear?’ he added. ‘Can’t find the dratted beast anywhere …’
‘If you mean Hubble,’ said Duggin stiffly, ‘then I last saw him with Quint, who was trying to talk to him. Poor creature’s been neglected if you ask me …’
‘Not my fault, I assure you, Duggin,’ said Thaw smoothly. ‘It was that damned sky pirate I was fool enough to recruit to go with Hubble and me on our mire-pearling voyage. Seemed capable and experienced enough, but he pulled the wool over both our eyes. Turned out he was poisoning Hubble behind my back, so that when he festooned me, poor Hubble was too weak to resist. Took my sky barge and left the two of us to fend for ourselves in the Deepwoods, Sky damn his eyes!’
‘I … I’m sorry,’ Duggin mumbled. ‘I didn’t realize … Thought you had …’
‘Don’t mention it, Duggin,’ said Thaw Daggerslash good-naturedly. ‘After all, a good sky pirate captain learns from his mistakes. Just ask Captain Wind Jackal…’
At the helm, Wind Jackal’s hands tightened round the wheel, and he swallowed hard.
‘Pathway below, at a hundred strides, Captain!’ Spillins the oakelf’s quavery voice sounded from the top of the mast. He shrank back into the comforting darkness of his caternest.
The path stood out from the dark green of the forest like a vivid tear in a velvet curtain, winding its way into the distance. All Wind Jackal had to do was follow its course and they would come to a woodtroll village. Spillins felt a warm glow seep through his chest and stir his heart with a dull ache.
Oakelves and woodtrolls were ancient friends. They had a natural feeling for each other’s customs and beliefs, and Spillins knew that he’d receive a warm welcome amongst the woodtroll cabins that lay somewhere up ahead. For the first time since the moment in the slave market when he’d initially laid eyes on the young sky pirate, the old oakelf began to feel better.
As to what had happened to Thaw Daggerslash, Spillins didn’t like to think about it. But whatever it was, it had been enough to turn the handsome young sky pirate’s aura a hideous, boiling, corrosive purple, the like of which the oakelf had never seen before in all his days.
Just then, from the deck below, came T
haw’s good-natured laugh as he greeted Quint and Hubble the banderbear. Spillins shuddered, curled up in a tight ball and covered his ears.
‘Maris!’ called Quint, leaning over the aft-deck gunwales. ‘Come and look at this!’
Maris appeared at the door to the aft-cabins and joined Quint, squinting down through the hazy air as the Galerider slowly descended. Unlike the endless expanse of unbroken green that they had been sailing above for so long, the forest below them now showed all the signs of woodtrolls. Trees had been felled on either side of a narrow track - a track which had been made by generations of woodtroll feet. And, as the sky pirate ship drew closer, the wisps coiling up from the distant cabin chimneys revealed themselves to be the purple-tinged smoke of lufwood, the woodtrolls’ favoured timber.
Lower the Galerider came in the sky. As it did so, the Deepwoods revealed more and more tracks, each one leading off in a different direction. One veered off sharply to the west. A purple haze hovered there in the still air, far in the distance.
‘See that?’ said Quint, pointing.
Maris nodded.
‘That’ll be another settlement,’ he told her. ‘Woodtrolls build clusters of villages quite close to each other -anything from half a dozen to twenty or so. They’re far enough away from one another to ensure they don’t encroach on each other’s land, or wood and water supplies, yet never further apart than a day’s walk along those long winding paths of theirs - paths they never, ever stray from.’
‘And they lead to the Timber Stands as well, do they?’ said Maris.
‘They certainly do,’ said Quint, and laughed. ‘Otherwise the woodtroll timberers couldn’t get to them, could they?’
‘Oh, look, what’s that?’ asked Maris, pointing as the Galerider swept low across a large square field, tracks criss-crossing the long grass and a basket atop a rickety pole at the very centre.
‘A trockbladder pitch, I think,’ Quint replied, ‘though I haven’t got a clue how you play the game.’
‘Trockbladder!’ Maris exclaimed. ‘Oh, but I know! Nanny Welma told me all about it. You have to use this ball-type thing. It’s made of a hammelhorn bladder!’ she said, wrinkling up her nose with disgust. ‘And stuffed with trock beans.’ She looked at Quint, her eyes glazing dreamily. ‘Sometimes Welma would lay out the balcony-hall with rugs and we’d play it together, her and me …’
Ahead of them now, Quint and Maris were able to make out the small woodtroll cabins themselves, straddling the branches of the grandest trees in the village and clinging to their mighty trunks. They were curious barrel-shaped dwellings set on jutting ledges, with round doors, smoking chimneys and spindly ladders, which offered access from the ground and could be pulled up to deter intruders.
Some way from the centre of the village was a massive lullabee tree, its bulbous trunk gleaming, and a great caterbird nest hanging from one of its branches silhouetted against the orange glow of the late-afternoon sun. And beyond that were the docking-rings.
With great skill and pinpoint accuracy, Wind Jackal brought the Galerider down out of the sky. It twisted slowly round, its lowered sails flapping, and came in to hover beside the jutting stanchions. As the mooring-ledge drew close, Steg Jambles seized the end of a tolley-rope, jumped over the balustrade and onto the platform, where he secured it to the gleaming metal ring.
‘Ship tethered, Cap’n!’ he shouted up to the helm, and Quint could see his father visibly relax for the first time in days.
‘Crew!’ Wind Jackal shouted. ‘You may step down to earth …’
‘I’ll stay and tend to the Stone Pilot, Mistress Maris,’ said Duggin, laying a hand on her shoulder. ‘You run along with Master Quint, and explore.’
‘And you join them, Tem,’ said Steg Jambles from the fore-deck, pushing his young friend forward. ‘Do you good to get the smell of burned tilder sausages out of your nostrils for a bit.’
‘But what about you?’ Tem asked, reluctant to leave his friend.
Steg shrugged. ‘With Sagbutt gone, someone’s got to stand guard,’ he replied.
‘With your permission, Captain,’ said Thaw Daggerslash, stepping forward, ‘Hubble and I should like to repay you and your crew’s kindness by standing guard while you all step down to earth.’
‘Thank you, Thaw,’ said Wind Jackal, smiling. ‘Most thoughtful. Keep the flight-burners lit - and look out for league ships.’
‘Aye-aye, Captain,’ said Thaw, with an easy laugh, and gave an elegant bow.
The crew of the Galerider disembarked. Beneath their feet, the firm earthen path which led back into the village felt strangely unreal after the rolling decks of the sky ship. As they reached the middle of the village, there came a shout, and the crew turned back to see the diminutive figure of Spillins the oakelf racing towards them.
‘Wait for me! Captain!’ he cried in his quavery voice. ‘Wait for me!’
As if in answer, from the trees all around them, the circular doors of the lufwood cabins creaked open, and timid, frightened-looking woodtroll faces - with beady eyes, rubbery noses and dark hair in knotted tufts standing on end - peered down. The sound of an oakelf voice seemed to reassure the villagers, for they came out of their cabins, and soon the Galerider’s crew was surrounded by curious chattering woodtrolls.
A woodtroll elder pushed his way to the front and saluted Spillins with his carved blackwood staff.
‘Greetings, friend of the forests,’ he said in a gruff voice. ‘I am Chopley Polestick, the timber-master. I see you travel with the sky pirates. What brings them to our village?’
‘Greetings, Chopley Polestick, Timber-Master,’ said Spillins, fixing the woodtroll with his large dark eyes. ‘My captain’s sky ship is empty and his purse is full. If you guide him to your timber stores there is business to be done.’
Chopley Polestick turned to Wind Jackal and eyed him up and down. ‘Follow me,’ he said.
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN •
THE BLOODOAK
Wind Jackal and Quint followed the timber-master down a track, half-concealed by wood chippings and clumps of moss. Through bevies of clucking wood-chucks scratching for seed they went, past hammelhorn pens, patches of swaying nightkale and tripweed, and stands of coppiced lufwood.
Behind them, in the middle of the village, at a huge round table, Maris, Tem and Steg were the centre of attention at a grand outdoor feast. Spillins the oakelf had taken himself off at the earliest opportunity to pay a visit to the caterbird nest hanging from the ancient lullabee tree in a clearing on the edge of the village.
Chopley Polestick stopped at the end of the path and cleared the wood chippings and moss at his feet with the end of his blackwood staff. The old woodtroll then bent down and pulled a copper ring, seemingly embedded in the earth, to reveal a trapdoor.
‘The timber stores,’ he said simply, ushering them inside with a wave of his staff.
Wind Jackal and Quint ducked their heads and descended the roughly hewn steps that led down a broad, high-ceilinged, but shallow tunnel, and on into a vast cavern. The dark earth walls were latticed with glowing roots which cast an eerie light over the great stacks of logs, planks, decking and broad beams of the timber store.
Wood of all kinds, from towering heaps of roughly hewn logs to criss-cross stacks of seasoned timber, filled every corner of the great cavern. Purple-tinged lufwood, ringed lullabee and grey, featureless leadwood; stinkwood and scentwood, their vastly different smells competing with one another in the cool air; bundles of thick sallowdrop branches and huge boulder-like slabs of sumpwood; neatly cut boughs of blackwood and redoak and the opalescent knots from dried silverpine -and all gathered and graded according to quality and size.
Wind Jackal stood for a moment, scanning the array of different woods, gently stroking his chin. Behind him, Chopley Polestick tutted and shook his grey tufted head.
‘Not you as well,’ he grumbled in his gruff voice. ‘You don’t have to tell me …’ he went on. ‘Bloodoak timber. Am I right?’
‘How did you know?’ said Wind Jackal, turning and smiling down at the timber-master.
‘Because that’s all anybody seems to want just lately’ he said. ‘Something’s going on back there in Undertown … No, no!’ The timber-master shook his head and wagged a finger at Wind Jackal. ‘Don’t tell me, because I don’t want to know. What I do know is that the last of the seasoned bloodoak was shipped long ago.’
‘Can’t you get any more?’ Quint blurted out without thinking - then wished he hadn’t when he saw the look on the old woodtroll’s face. It was a mixture of irritation and impatience, as if the timber-master was about to scold a stubborn hammelhorn.
‘I’ll tell you, young master, what I tell those pushy leagues types who come here wanting bloodoak,’ he said, tapping his blackwood staff on the earthen floor. ‘The bloodoak is no ordinary tree. It grows far from the well-trodden path. You don’t chop down a bloodoak, you hunt it, with all the skill and cunning that you can muster. It can take years to tread a path to the glade of a bloodoak, and great courage to bring one down. Its wood - stripped and properly carpentered - is the finest in all the Edgelands for strength and buoyancy, and one tree can furnish twenty sky ships, but at a cost…’
The old woodtroll shook his head as if remembering some distant event, and was silent for a while. Wind Jackal reached into his greatcoat and took out a tilder-leather purse, heavy with gold pieces - the profits from the cargo of tallow candles.
‘There is enough here,’ he said coolly, handing the bulging purse to the woodtroll so that he could test its weight, ‘to furnish the whole village with new cooking pots, to buy every matron a new tilder-wool shawl and every tree-feller a new axe - and still have enough left over for a full season of feasting!’
Chopley Polestick handed the purse back to Wind Jackal and, although he frowned, there was a twinkle in his small black eyes.
‘And in order to earn this fortune?’ he said, fixing Wind Jackal with a level stare.
Clash of the Sky Galleons Page 19
