The Gully Dwarves lh-5

by Dan Parkinson

  At the moment, that involved coming up with a throne for him to sit on.

  Somewhere along the way, Glitch had gotten the idea that he was a great and majestic personage. He had once had a personal dragon-according to him-and had led his people to the Promised Place, which was now This Place. He was therefore a legend, at least in his own mind, and was becoming a real nuisance about it.

  He had already changed his regal designation from “Glitch the First” to “Glitch the Most, Highbulp by Persuasion and Lord Protector of This Place and Everyplace Else that Mattered.” And that was only the beginning.

  He had demanded attention, which he sometimes received if he shouted loud enough. He had demanded a crown, to the point that some of them finally made one for him. He had demanded a personal flag, which he didn’t yet have, and now he was demanding a soft chair. Great rulers of mighty nations sat on soft chairs, he reasoned. Therefore he should sit on a soft chair.

  Now that things were quiet again, and he had nothing else to think about, Glitch had become obsessed with the idea of a special place to sit. He complained constantly, every time he decided to sit down.

  “Rocks!” he would grumble. “Alla time sit on rocks. Anybody can sit on rocks. Glitch th’ Most is Highbulp. Highbulp oughtta have sof’ chair. Other kings an’ stuff got sof’ chairs. Why not Highbulp?”

  He had become such a nuisance about it that even the Grand Notioner, old Gandy with his mop handle staff, had lost patience. “Why don’t Highbulp go find sand dump an’ sit on it?” he confronted his liege. “Ever’body tired of hearin’ you gripe.”

  “Highbulp need th … thro … sof’ chair!” Glitch snapped at his chief counselor, his eyes slitted and his crown of rat’s teeth aslant. “Kings got thro … thr … those things. Highbulp good as kings. Who else ever had personal dragon? Highbulp want a whatsit … a throne!”

  “Highbulp wouldn’ know throne if he saw one,” Gandy pointed out.

  The Lord High Protector of Everybody in This Place glared at him. “Would, too. Throne sof’ chair. Highbulp need sof’ chair.”

  “Rats,” Gandy muttered, turning away.

  “What?”

  “Rats. Stew pot runnin’ low. Need rats an’ stuff. Got no time for Highbulp now. Everybody busy with own rat killin’.” Gandy turned and stomped away, muttering to himself. “One thing then ’nother. Want new name. Got new name. Want crown. Got crown. Now want throne. Highbulp a real nuisance.”

  A hunting expedition had just returned from somewhere. A dozen or so Gully Dwarves carried bundles of whitish roots, some unidentifiable greens, a clutch of freshly-bashed subterranean snails and other odds and ends they had found. All the edible forage was dumped into stew pots, the rest tossed aside for later inspection. At one of the stew pots, Gandy noticed, the Lady Bruze was examining the contents with a frown. “Too much snail,” she muttered. “Need more rat. An’ mushroom. Need mushroom.”

  She searched about for her husband, a sturdy gully dwarf called Clout who was considered Chief Basher for the clan. Finally she found him, sound asleep in the shadows, cradling his bashing tool in his arms.

  She went to him, stood over him for a moment, frowning, then kicked him in the ribs. “Clout wake up,” she demanded.

  Abruptly awake and confused, Clout sat up, flailing about him with his bashing tool. Bruze dodged the swinging stick, got behind him and kicked him again. “Clout!” she snapped. “Wake up! Clout a sleepy lout. Wake up! Go find fresh rats for stew.”

  Clout rubbed his eyes, yawned and got to his feet. “Yes, dear,” he said. With a longing glance at his sleeping place, he padded off toward the dark caverns where the best rats were usually found.

  Gandy had watched with interest. Now he leaned thoughtfully on his mop handle and muttered, “Sof’ chair not what Highbulp need. Wife what Highbulp need. Somebody keep him in line.”

  However, he did spread the word again. “Anybody find sof’ chair, bring it back for Highbulp. Might shut him up for a while.”

  And those who heard told others. “Some clown gripin’ ’bout need sof’ chair. Anybody see a sof’ chair anyplace?”

  “Nope,” most said. “For who?” some asked.

  “For what’s-’is-name. Th’ Highbulp. He want sof’ chair.”

  “Why?”

  “Dunno.”

  Most of them promptly forgot all about it. The whims and notions of High-whatevers were rarely worth remembering. But the idea did persist, vaguely, as they went their various ways.

  * * * * *

  It was some of the ladies who found it, though they didn’t realize right away what they had found.

  The Lady Bruze-wife of the Chief Basher, Clout-and some of the younger females had organized a forage into lower levels of the Pitt in search of mushrooms, fat crawlies and anything else that might be useful for stew. They were creeping furtively through the echoing shadows of what might once have been a vast dungeon, when one of them stopped, squinted and pointed. “What that?”

  Several of them coming up behind her collided with one another, and some fell down. “Sh!” the Lady Bruze hissed. “Wha’ happen?”

  “Somebody see somethin’,” someone said. “Then somebody fall down.”

  “Oh.” The Lady Bruze looked back. “Who see somethin’?”

  “Me,” one said.

  “Lidda? What Lidda see?”

  “Somethin’ there,” Lidda pointed again. “Wasn’ there minute ago.”

  They all squinted in the gloom. There was something there. Just to the left of the path they were following, something vaguely ovoid lay in shadows among fallen stones. Cautiously, they crept closer for a better look.

  “What that thing?” someone whispered.

  “Kinda green,” another observed.

  They gathered around it, looking at it first one way and then another. It was about waist-high to most of them, a dull, featureless thing like a squat globe, resting in the shadows. As they approached, it seemed to radiate softly-a dim, greenish glow coming from within it, barely visible even in the murk of the cavernous ancient place.

  “Big mushroom, maybe?” someone suggested.

  “Looks pretty solid,” another said.

  Lidda crept closer and reached a hand toward the thing. When nothing happened, she prodded it quickly with a curious finger, then ducked back. Again it seemed as though the thing had glowed slightly, dim and greenish.

  “Kinda sof’,” Lidda told them. “Not like mushroom, though. Like, uh, like leather.”

  “Leather mushroom?” the Lady Bruze wondered. “Maybe good for stew?”

  Lidda squatted, peered beneath the thing and shook her head. “No stem.” She leaned close to it, sniffing. “Don’ smell like mushroom, either.”

  They looked at the thing curiously for a minute or two, then began wandering away. Having no idea what it was, and seeing no practical purpose for it, they lost interest in it.

  The Lady Bruze looked around and saw her expedition scattering. “Come on. This not good for anything.”

  Lidda lingered, though, fascinated by the way the thing seemed to glow dimly now and then.

  “Lidda come on!” the Lady Bruze called, sounding angry. “I say come on, you s’pose to come on!”

  Lidda waved absently, ignoring the command. The Lady Bruze could be a real pain sometimes. She repeated her inspection of the green thing. When she looked up, she was alone with it. The others had gone somewhere else. “Lady Bruze prob’ly right,” she told herself. “Thing not good for anything. Not up to her, though. I decide.”

  On impulse, she hoisted herself atop the thing and sat, bouncing a bit to test it. It was soft and springy, and glowed happily as she sat there. “Make nice chair for sit,” she told herself, then recalled something she had heard. Somebody had been looking for a soft chair.

  She looked around again in the eerie gloom of the ancient place. The other ladies were long gone, off on their foraging. She was alone, and not sure where they had gone. She shrugge
d, got down and took a deep breath. See if thing will move, she decided.

  The thing was heavy, but Lidda was strong. Although she was barely three feet tall, she was sturdy and determined, and after the first hard shove, the thing rolled along handily. She kept pushing and it kept rolling, like a big, squashy ball. Driven by the guiding forces of all gully dwarves-inertia and inadvertence-and keeping a wary eye out for salamanders and other nasties, Lidda rolled her leathery green “chair” back the way the ladies had come, heading for This Place.

  The journey took hours, and Lidda was nearly exhausted when she came into the firelight and clamor of the gully dwarves’ primary caverns. Crowds of the curious gathered around her, wondering what she had, but she fended them off and kept going. “Hands off,” she ordered. “This for What’s-’is-name.”

  “Who?”

  “Th’ Highbulp.”

  “Oh, ol’ Glitch.”

  “Yeah, him. Get outta way.”

  She found the Highbulp where he usually was-in the center of things, demanding attention-and rolled the thing over to him. “Here,” she said. “For you.”

  He stood, pushed his crown of rat’s teeth back from his eyes and squinted at what she had brought. “What this?”

  “Chair,” she explained. “Sof’ chair, for Highbulp.”

  “Chair?” He looked more closely. “This a roun’ thing. What kin’ chair roun’?”

  “This kin’,” she said, irritated at the great leader’s attitude toward her gift.

  Gandy, the Grand Notioner, came shuffling from somewhere, and squinted at the round thing. “What that?” he asked.

  “Chair,” Lidda repeated. “Sof’ chair for Highbulp.”

  Glitch gazed at the thing, beginning to sneer. “What kin’ chair look like that?” he pointed at it, turning to Gandy.

  With the inspiration of his office, Gandy poked at the thing with his mop handle and nodded, looking wise. “Throne,” he declared. “Throne look like that.”

  “Throne?” Glitch’s eyes widened. “This thing a throne? What I do with it?”

  “Sit on it, Highbulp,” Gandy suggested.

  Uncertainly, Glitch climbed atop the “throne” and sat. It felt soft and comfortable, and the fact that it glowed with greenish light as his backside began to warm it only added to the regal picture of himself that came to his mind. “Throne,” he pronounced, feeling very pleased with himself. “Highbulp’s throne.”

  If Lidda had expected even a word of thanks, it was not forthcoming. Gratitude was not generally a primary quality of the Highbulp. Tired, irritated and a bit confused about why she had gone to so much trouble, she turned and wandered away, then paused when someone spoke to her. It was Gandy, leaning on his mop handle. “Who you?” he asked.

  “Lidda,” she reminded him.

  “Sure. Lidda. I ’member. That pretty good thing you bring, Lidda. Oughtta keep Highbulp quiet for day or so.”

  “Fine,” she snapped, starting to turn away.

  “Day or so,” Gandy repeated. “Then he think of somethin’ else, start all over again.”

  “Highbulp a nuisance,” Lidda pointed out.

  “Sure,” he agreed. “Goes with bein’ Highbulp. Be better if he had a wife. Keep him in line.”

  “Him?” Lidda stared back at the preening, self-important little figure sitting on the green thing. The green was brighter now, glowing with a contented, pulsing light. “Who be dumb ’nough to marry him?”

  “Dunno,” said Gandy, shrugging. “How ’bout Lidda?”

  “Me?” She stared at him, then her eyes brightened with indignation. “No way! You want him married, marry him yourself!”

  With that she stomped away, angry and insulted.

  Gandy watched her go, nodding his approval. “Pretty good choice,” he told himself. There was something about that particular female-something he had forgotten, but that now came back, dimly. She was stubborn, he recalled.

  Chapter 2

  Faces on the Wall

  Though Lidda was young, there were many who had noticed her from time to time. Lidda had a definite stubborn streak. And, such as it was, she tended to have a mind of her own. This in itself was a bit mystifying to most of the gully dwarves. As a rule, the Aghar generally had better things to do than think. But there were occasions, now and then, when thoughts could come in handy.

  There had been a time, in the still-recent torment times, when a group of the lizard-things had almost found the clan. A whole line of the ugly creatures had passed a crack that was the opening to the hiding place, and one had stepped aside and paused, as though to look inside. He had not looked, though. From somewhere above, a fist-sized rock had fallen, striking him on his helmet. It distracted him, and one of the others barked at him, and they had all gone on.

  The Grand Notioner, Gandy, had noticed that incident, and had puzzled over it. The rock had been no accident. He remembered that it had been dropped intentionally, from a high shelf. And the person who dropped it was Lidda.

  It was all very confusing, but somehow, it seemed, little Lidda had kept that bunch of uglies in line.

  “Lidda might keep Highbulp in line, too,” Gandy told himself now. “Keep lizard-things in line, keep anybody in line. Real good choice.”

  Thoughtfully, he looked back at the Highbulp, who was reveling in being the center of attention. Glitch sat straight and proud atop his brand-new throne, his crown slightly askew, the expression on his homely face a study in self-importance. He grandly permitted those who cared to, a chance to come close and admire him.

  Beneath him, warmed by the regal bottom as well as by the radiance of nearby stew fires, the throne seemed to be just as happy as he was. It glowed cheerily with a radiant, greenish light.

  Lidda found something else with which to occupy herself. High on one wall of the ancient chamber the combined clans had claimed as their home, was a mosaic of carvings surrounded by a framework of dark marble shelving set into gray stone. In some forgotten time, artisans had worked the stone within that frame, shaping forms and sculptures-a grand, intertwined mosaic of figures of all kinds, people, animals, vines and flowers interwoven with strange symbols, all sculpted in the stone.

  In the very center of it all was a circle of faces. Had Lidda-or anyone else around-been able to count past two, they would have known that there were nine visages staring from the cold stone of the wall there. Each stood out in stark relief from the surface of an oval plaque. The nine “faces” were not really faces, exactly-certainly they were like no faces any gully dwarf had ever seen-but seemed images of things far beyond understanding.

  Everybody knew the stone mosaic was there. It was in plain sight, and everyone had glanced at it from time to time, but it had no more meaning to most of them than any other unexplainable thing in their world. They didn’t know what it was, or why it was there any more than they knew why some areas of the ancient ruin to which they had come were full of water, or why the largest of the covered corridors leading away and upward from their living area sometimes whined and wept with distant winds that drifted through the halls of the Pitt and made stew fires flicker.

  Lidda had been noticing the mosaic on the wall a lot lately. Somehow, it seemed to her, it looked different than when she first saw it, and it puzzled her why it should.

  Now, with nothing better to do, she went to look at it again, squinting upward in puzzlement as she walked back and forth beneath the sculpture. Then she saw it. One of the faces was tilted slightly outward, as though the plaque on which it rested had partially separated from the stone of the surrounding mosaic.

  Curious, Lidda found handholds and toeholds in the surface of the wall and began to climb.

  It took some time and effort to get there. The entire mosaic extended from just above the floor-eye-level to Lidda-into the shadows high in the great chamber. And even though the circle of faces was only halfway up, that still was more than twenty feet above the floor. But once set on a course, she tended to follow i
t, and eventually she was high on the wall, clinging to chiseled stone vines with the tilted oval plaque just above her.

  It was larger than she had guessed-as wide as she was tall. The face on it seemed to be a representation of a bearded man with a string of beads across his forehead and jutting mustaches that came to sharp points at each side. Then again, it might have been a sculpture of one of the lizard-like creatures who had occupied the Pitt until recently or something else, entirely. It was hard to tell.

  It wasn’t the art, though, that held Lidda’s attention.

  It was the crack behind the plaque. The oval, seen closely, turned out to be old, tarnished metal rather than stone, and she stuck out her tongue to taste it. It was iron. Each of the plaques in the circle was made of metal of a different sort, and each had a hinge at the bottom and a catch at the top. The one she was exploring was separated from the wall because its catch had rusted.

  Leaning close to peer into the crack, she saw that there was a hole in the stone behind it.

  “What this?” Lidda muttered to herself. “Maybe somethin’ good inside?”

  With visions of treasure-nests full of forgotten eggs, piles of pretty rocks hidden away, maybe shoe buckles-dancing in her mind, Lidda grasped her handhold, braced herself against the sculpted stone, wrapped strong little fingers around the nearest edge of the loosened oval, and pulled.

  For a moment, the rusted catch held. Then it gave way and the entire plaque swung downward, shaking Lidda loose from her precarious perch. She clung to the falling edge of the oval and glanced upward as something shot from the exposed hole over her head-something long, dark and very fast that whistled in the air as it shot past her.

  The plaque clanged against stone and quivered. Lidda hung from its lower edge with one hand, high above the floor of the great chamber, shouting for help. And somewhere across the chamber, in shadows at the far side, something big crashed against stone, throwing sparks and skittering off into the main corridor.