It was too late in the evening to set out, so they agreed to be underway an hour before dawn the next morning. Jonathan and the Professor decided to forget their plan of abandoning the treasure map. After all, it was an astonishing coincidence that they had a double reason for traveling to Balumnia, and it would be folly not to take advantage of such an opportunity.
After the lot of them had discussed plans for two hours over apple pie and coffee, Jonathan and Professor Wurzle sought Miles out in his room and showed him the map. Miles pronounced the document authentic and agreed with the Professor that it was probably drawn in octopus ink. There was some possibility, however, that the ink of a river squid had been used. The Professor was quite sure that nothing of the sort was the case, although he admitted, finally, that it was tough to be utterly precise, given the age of the map and the similarity between squid and octopus inks. All the ‘poulpe’ inks bore similarities. At least that’s what the Professor said. Jonathan assumed that the ink controversy was evidence of the Professor’s concern for scientific accuracy, and so didn’t pay much attention. Octopus ink and squid ink were all pretty much the same to Jonathan.
‘This would be Landsend harbor,’ Miles observed, pointing at a great dot on the map. ‘And this is the Tweet River, flowing past it to the sea. A full rigged ship can sail a thousand miles up the Tweet River. A trade barge can sail two thousand if it wanted to. Nobody with any sense would want to, though. You can see the river mouth here on the map. All this gray area, that’s the ocean. These dots are the Flappage Islands. Pirate havens, every one. It’s a rough port, Landsend. But it’s just the place for treasures.’
‘What’s the likelihood we’ll travel this far?’ Jonathan asked.
‘As I see it,’ Miles said, ‘it’s no more likely that we travel in one direction than in another. We might just as well set out for Landsend. If we get word of the Squire, we can always adjust our course.’
‘This has some resemblance to the old needle in a haystack business,’ the Professor remarked about their search for the Squire.
‘It has that,’ Miles replied glumly. ‘But I have methods, gentlemen, that may avail us.’
Jonathan was fairly sure that Miles wasn’t talking falsely. Any man, after all, who could set an ape suit afire with a toasting curse was a good man to have along in a pinch. More useful, no doubt, than the ape suit itself.
7
On the Trail of the Squire
Jonathan was already awake next morning when Miles the Magician came for him and the Professor. In fact, Jonathan had been awake most of the night, what with the double excitement. It had always been Jonathan’s belief that it was folly to worry about unfathomables. He held that as one of his principal philosophies, even if he didn’t always practice it. Since there was nothing to be done for the Squire, not that night anyway, his thoughts were mostly on treasures. Jonathan didn’t care much for wealth – not half as much, anyway, as for the treasure itself. The two times he dozed off during the night he had dreams of finding immense caverns of treasures salted away by pirates for five hundred years.
He was fairly sure that pirates themselves rather felt the same way. If books could be believed – and it was beginning to look as if they could – then it seemed as if pirates spent their lives amassing great chests full of emeralds and gold for the sole purpose of burying the lot of it away on some goat-populated desert isle, only to sail back years later and dig it up and fight over it and make up songs about it and bury it again, finally, somewhere else. He had never heard of pirates spending any of it.
It struck Jonathan as a pity to do anything at all with the treasury. It would be far more worthwhile to leave it be, to return every few years and find it again, to sort of climb about in it yelling like a man who has lost his wits and let the chains of jewels and the gold coins run through his fingers and heap up on the floor. And there would no doubt be grim evidence lying around of the horrible history of it – skeletons in cocked hats run through with cutlasses and set here and there to keep watch. What a shame to move such a treasure – something like tearing apart an old and crumbling building or chopping down an ancient tree.
The Professor didn’t exactly see things in the same light when Jonathan discussed it with him the next morning. He told Jonathan that he had too much of the poet in him – was too romantic. There were things that a man could do with such a treasure. Just for historical purposes it should be catalogued; and given the nature of treasures in general, a good bit of it should be spent on historical exploration and study.
All that sounded pretty punk to Jonathan – which is how Theophile Escargot would have put it. But then it didn’t much matter there at Myrkle Hall; after all, they had no treasure yet.
The Squire’s cook, a dedicated fellow who was very nearly as fat as the Squire, was up before any of them. He had a mind, he said, to go along with them in search of his master, but he couldn’t. It was impossible. It wasn’t to be thought of. If they would send word, however, of their homecoming, they’d see a bit of a feast. As breakfasts go, however, they saw a bit of a feast right there. Waffles and eggs and ham and ripe oranges and biscuits and honey and just about anything you please was spread out on the big table in the dining hall. The food was gobbled down faster than it should have been, perhaps, for Twickenham was anxious to be off.
Five of them were bound for Balumnia: Jonathan, the Professor, Miles, Bufo, and Gump. Stick-a-bush elected to stay behind. He assured the rest of the company that he was itching to be ‘at’ the Dwarf, but it was almost time for him to journey to Seaside with the spring produce from the family farm and return with baskets of smoked fish.
Twickenham and Thrimp were anxious to give them a lift in the airship as far as the portal in the White Mountains, but they were anxious to go no farther. Clearly, the rest of the company could get on well enough without the two elves who, Twickenham pointed out, had done little that past twenty-four hours but eat up the Squire’s food.
So it was settled. The company piled aboard the elfin ship along with a few meager supplies. They decided to carry little along with them, trusting that the country of Balumnia, wherever it lay, would understand the nature of a gold coin.
The airship rose silently skyward. Jonathan watched through the window as the ground below receded. Myrkle Hall looked like a cleverly built toy amid the surrounding green of the meadows. Orchards became visible, laid out in neat rows beside fields of strawberries. Forests crept along over the hills toward the River Oriel, and when the airship was almost level with two white puffy-cheeked clouds, Jonathan could see the river itself off in the distance, a tiny ribbon of a river running away down the valley toward Seaside. Smoke from what must have been Willowood Station rose in the northeast, and beyond that stretched the dark expanse of the Goblin Wood.
They whizzed away east, finally, toward the White Mountains, leaving Myrkle Hall and the orchards of the linkmen far behind. The mountains themselves seemed to grow as the airship ascended and flew into the dawn. Jonathan had heard any number of astonishing stories about the White Mountains, stories about the tribes of mystics who lived in the shelter of high valleys, cut off from the outside by perpetual storms, sharing their caves and huts with snow apes and white tigers. Elves dwelt in the foothills, spinning elf silver and glass into wonderful toys and building fabulous magical machines like Twickenham’s airship. Dwarf villages stretched along the mountainsides below the mouths of deep caves. Almost no villages of men could be found, though, either on the slopes of the foothills or at the higher elevations. It was rumored that there was something magical about the White Mountains that drove men mad, as had happened to the mystics.
The airship followed the slow curve of a little green valley up the foothills. The mountains were heavily timbered and ran with creeks and rills and waterfalls that tumbled along, now visible, now hidden beneath the thick woods, finally cascading out of the edge of the forest to flow into a rushing stream, white and green beneath the morning sun, and
falling away down the valley. One hill seemed to give rise to another, and where the one humped and leveled for a space, the river slackened and pooled up into little lakes before tumbling over another crest and dashing away again. Along the banks of these lakes were timbered dwellings that sat so placidly among the surrounding meadows and trees that they were no less a part of the landscape than were the rocks and the woods and the river itself.
High in the mountains the river was considerably smaller, but what it lacked in size it made up for in energy as it raced along over the steepening slopes. Twickenham circled once over a cluster of cottages, and a group of elves surged out onto the meadows around them, waving up at the airship in the blue sky. Sheep and cattle wandered about on the hillsides, and it occurred to Jonathan that the whole scene below was what might be called idyllic.
In a few minutes, the cottages and the elves fell away behind, and shortly thereafter the forests became less dense. The trees seemed to be shrinking and growing sparse until finally there were only a few scattered and lonely junipers, twisted by the winds and almost bare of foliage. Then there were no trees at all, only patches of moss and grasses, blown by cold winds and nibbled by occasional elk and reindeer. The stream disappeared abruptly into a crevice in the rocks, reappeared several hundred feet farther up, then disappeared again.
The airship flew through mountain peaks that rose incredibly above, and Jonathan could see the tiny shadow of the ship on the rocks and cliff faces, pursuing them. Patches of snow appeared here and there in among the rocks. The patches spread and grew until there was nothing about them but snow and the sharp pinnacles and broken humps of gray stone. They skimmed over the top of a great ice sheet that shone silver in the sunlight. The ice began to glow as the airship rose still farther, and as they slanted round a tremendous outcropping of rock and ice and into the sharp rays of the sun, prismatic glints of color shone from deep within the ice as if innumerable gemstones were caught and held in the clear depths of the glacier – diamonds and emeralds and sapphires and rubies that scattered a thousand deep rainbows through the ice.
When it seemed as if there could be no more mountains to rise above, they sailed round a sharp, sawtooth peak and into the shadows of still another tremendous precipice. It began to look as if there was an infinitude of successive mountains, each range higher than the last. But when the airship rose over the top of that last precipice, there, spread out before them for what seemed like – and might well have been – a thousand miles, were no end of distant snowy peaks and shadowy valleys. Whole empires could have grown up and fallen again within that expanse of mountains, completely unknown to the little village of Twombly Town or, for that matter, to any of the villages of the high valley. Mountain peaks had always seemed a mystery to Jonathan, who was one of those people who fancied that some marvel lay not only on the other side, but quite likely among the tops of the mountains themselves. Once he’d crested those mountains in the airship, however, it was the unfathomable valleys that seemed so disquietingly mysterious. Here were a thousand of them, ten thousand. Who could say what creatures roamed their slopes and what manners of men dwelled there? Any sort of marvelous thing might be the case.
Just as Jonathan sat imagining a few of those marvelous things he saw – or thought he saw – what must have been an immense bird silhouetted against the distant snow. He watched it wing its way up out of a valley, soar for a moment on vast wings, then disappear again into shadow. Jonathan at first supposed he imagined the thing, for it would have had to have been a hundred miles away, but the Professor-grabbed his arm and said in a voice that was almost a whisper, ‘Did you see it?’
‘Yes,’ Jonathan replied, also whispering for no reason he could imagine other than because of the mystery of it. ‘How big must it have been?’
‘As big as this ship,’ the Professor answered. ‘Bigger even.’
‘A dragon?’ Jonathan wondered aloud.
The Professor gave him a look that suggested dragons were unlikely outside fables and fairy tales. ‘It’s more likely,’ Professor Wurzle explained, ‘that it was some sort of gargantuan prehistoric bird. A tremendous pterodactyl quite possibly.’
Both of them watched, hoping the bird would reappear, but nothing else broke the snowy vastness of the barren landscape.
‘Look up there.’ The Professor pointed toward the sky. Jonathan peered through the glass of the porthole window at a sky covered with stars glowing like brilliants in the deep, purple-blue of the heavens. The sun stood out among them as if quite willing to share the sky with its fellows.
‘Strange, that.’ Jonathan wouldn’t have thought, all things considered, that there was much possibility of the stars putting in an appearance while the sun shone.
‘Altitude explains it,’ the Professor told him. ‘It’s a matter of the density of the aether.’
‘Ah,’ said Jonathan, who was satisfied, actually, just to know that such a wonder existed.
In the distance a bank of clouds lay on the mountains, and it was toward those clouds, dark and billowing and rumbling with occasional thunder, that the airship soared. They seemed to be dropping toward the snowy slopes and were soon enveloped in the gray mist of the clouds. Snow swirled outside the windows and the airship rose and dipped suddenly on the wind before coming to rest on the slope of the mountains.
At first, nothing was visible outside the airship but the swirling snow. Then in occasional moments of calm, Jonathan could see the mottled deep gray black of the granite mountainside and the brilliant white of the snow lying against it. There in the wall of rock was what at first appeared to be the arched mouth of a cave. It was, however, too symmetrical, too clearly outlined to be a natural recess, and Jonathan realized that what they had settled in front of was a door – the eastern door, as Miles had called it, and that through that door lay the land of Balumnia.
Jonathan was struck with the fact that he had only a light jacket and sweater with him – hardly the things for traipsing about glaciers. It seemed a strange place to undertake a search for Squire Myrkle. He had learned, however, that as far as elf doings were concerned, it was best not to assume anything; so that’s what he did.
Miles rose and wrapped his cloak around himself as if the thin robes would protect him from the sailing wind and snow. With his hat smashed down over his forehead, he disappeared forward. A moment later, Jonathan watched him out in the snow, bent over, his robes flailing and whipping about him, the ivory head atop his hat whirling and glowing. Snow flew, obscuring the wizard entirely for the space of a long minute. Then he was visible again, hunched in a weird posture before the door, waving his right hand at it as if expostulating the necessity of its opening up.
Twickenham bustled back with Thrimp and told the rest of the company to ready themselves. The aisle turned into a confusion of knapsacks and jackets and caps and walking sticks, and the confusion was doubled by everyone’s wanting to watch the magician perform his gesticulations before the door. Gump put on Bufo’s jacket and Bufo got Gump’s hat. Then the two of them accused each other of idiocy and made a complicated and inexplicable trade of a variety of garments until they were finally satisfied, all the time rushing to the windows to check Miles’ progress.
The thin wizard stood before the door, arms akimbo, his dark robes sailing, the snow swirling about him. Slowly, the dark face of the door paled a bit and seemed to shimmer as if a slowly brightening light were being shined on it. Through the transparency that had been the iron door could be seen the blue of a summer sky and the green of vegetation. An amazed cow wandered by beyond the opening, looking back at the wizard with a face full of stupefaction.
‘It’s time,’ Twickenham called. ‘Hurry.’ And the four of them filed down the plank and onto the frozen hillside. ‘Good luck, lads,’ was the last thing Jonathan heard Twickenham say. His own goodbye was carried off by the wind which was sharp as an icicle. Jonathan’s cloth jacket might as well have been a fishnet for all the good it did. But in a matter
of seconds the five of them hunched through the portal and clustered around the befuddled cow. Behind them the snow still blew, great flakes sailing through onto the grass of the meadow on which they stood. The opening faded as if the light that had shone on it was being slowly switched off. Twickenham’s airship was a long batwinged shadow against the snow, and as they watched, it rose slowly into the sky and disappeared. The wind ceased to howl, the snow ceased to blow, and Jonathan realized that he was standing before an iron door set in the grassy side of a hill. It was summertime once again, and the closest mountains were just barely visible in the hazy blue distances.
They stood in the middle of a pasture, ankle high in clover, the air roundabout heavy with the sweet smell of the round, purple blossoms. A dozen cattle, huge shaggy things that ripped up great tufts of grass, lumbered along, paying them little mind. The opening of the door and the wind and sleet that had blown through for the space of half a minute had momentarily puzzled the beasts. The sudden closing of the door ended their puzzlement. Jonathan admired that sort of placidity, that genial acceptance of inexplicable or impossible events. He’d never been able to take things quite as philosophically as a cow could.
He was doing a pretty good job with the door, though. That it was in some respects an impossibility didn’t bother him much; he was developing a cavalier attitude toward such things. What did bother him was the sudden realization that it would likely not be an easy thing to descend from those incredible heights in the White Mountains once they had found the Squire and wanted to return. In fact, he hadn’t given the whole issue half the thought it deserved. Besides, he knew, the possibility, the likelihood even, existed that they would never find the Squire.
The Disappearing Dwarf Page 8
