Bufo pulled the Squire away from the window. ‘No, he’s not,’ Bufo explained. ‘He owns all the strawberries in this part of the world. Tons and tons of them.’
‘Is that enough?’ the Squire asked.
‘Why,’ Bufo said, ‘I suppose it is. I don’t really know. It mightn’t be. Let’s find the kitchen.’
With that Bufo and the Squire and Gump and, of course, Ahab, who was alerted to the significance of kitchens, went off down the stairs. Below, the battle was running down. Half the men stood about with no goblins at all to chase. Escargot and Dooly appeared, waving at several soldiers nearby and acting altogether nonchalant, as if they’d just dealt fairly handily with a few goblins themselves. Escargot went poking through the weeds, looking up toward the window a couple of times in order to figure out where the globe was likely to have landed. He stooped after a moment, picked it up, gave the two of them above in the window the high sign, and strolled off down the path toward the sea.
Dooly hesitated for a moment, said something to Escargot, and pointed back up toward the window. But Escargot didn’t wait; he just hurried on, and Dooly, looking once or twice behind him, stepped along lively to keep up.
‘How is Miles?’ Jonathan asked abruptly.
‘Not well,’ the Professor replied. ‘He’ll live, but he won’t be traveling much for a bit. Not for a good bit. What’s Escargot up to here? He hasn’t got to run off with the globe. None of us want it.’
‘He’s more concerned with the Strawberry Baron, I suppose. Something having to do with stealing a barge of strawberries. I overheard Zippo mention it.’
‘He’s taking off, then!’ the Professor yelled. ‘He’s off without us. Scoundrel!’
The Strawberry Baron by then had dismounted and was walking back and forth before a crowd of captured goblins, whacking his riding crop into the palm of his hand, shouting at them. He seemed to see Escargot’s receding form at just about the same time that the Professor began hollering at him through the broken window. The Baron pointed at Escargot, asked something of a man beside him, pointed again, and, with one hand smashing down the hat atop his head, went running off down the rocky meadow in pursuit, calling orders over his shoulder.
‘Your horse!’ the Professor shouted. ‘Ride after them!’ Then he turned to Jonathan. ‘The man’s a fool. He’ll never catch them.’
‘Likely not,’ Jonathan agreed, secretly hoping for that very thing. ‘Let’s go down to see them off.’
On the way downstairs they ran into Gump, Bufo, and the Squire, who had, quite clearly, found the kitchen. ‘Have a look at Miles,’ the Professor told Bufo as he and Jonathan trotted past. They dashed out across the meadow and down toward the beach. Before they were halfway there, however, they could see that the chase had ended. The Strawberry Baron and four of his soldiers stood atop the rocks watching Escargot and Dooly paddle away through a small swell in the direction of the submarine some hundred yards off shore. Since no other boats offered themselves, there could be no further pursuit.
In the space of a few minutes, the two clambered aboard the submarine, set the canoe adrift, and disappeared into the hold. Whirring and splashing noises reached Jonathan and the Professor as they stood near the others, watching lights blink on behind the portholes and water sploosh out from various apertures along the side. The undersea device shuddered once, let out a sigh like a teakettle might that had a broken whistle, and sank beneath the swell.
‘Who axz you, then?’ the Strawberry Baron asked suddenly in a voice that made it clear he’d stand no foolery. ‘Friends of this thief?’
The Professor laughed out loud. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we’re not. I am Artemis Wurzle and this is Jonathan Bing. We’re acquaintances, in fact, of Cap’n Binky, and we’ve subdued the dwarf you know as Sikorsky. He’s in the tower there, yonder, doused with a sleeping potion.’
The Strawberry Baron sent his four companions away at a run toward the tower.
‘If you please, sir,’ Jonathan said very diplomatically, ‘I’d like to say a few words on behalf of your son.’
The Baron tossed his head theatrically, flouncing the pink ruffles along his shirtfront. ‘I have no son,’ he said. ‘My son is lost to me.’
Jonathan wasn’t about to be impressed by his theatricality, and was tempted to tell him so. But for Zippo’s sake he went on politely. ‘That’s just the point. If it weren’t for Zippo, for your son, that is, we – none of us – would be alive. It was your son who set us free.’
The Strawberry Baron looked askance at him. ‘He’s a rascal, sir. A brigand. A seeker after fame.’
‘He was young,’ Jonathan said. ‘He quite simply made some mistakes. You don’t know this Dwarf. He held your son in thrall. He had great power, could make people do as he pleased. It was Leopold, in the end, who subdued him. Shook sleeping powders in his face. And he tried to capture Escargot too. They fought, sir, but the old man and his grandson locked Leopold into a room and fled.’
‘Is this true?’ the Baron asked.
‘Why would I lie about such things?’ Jonathan said, knowing full well why he’d lie about such things. It seemed to him that given his past conversations with Zippo, another lie or two could go a long way toward making things right. Jonathan put on his own theatrical face, a face filled to overflowing with seriousness and sympathy. ‘Have you heard, sir,’ he said to the Strawberry Baron, ‘the story of the prodigal son?’
‘What son?’ the Baron asked impatiently. ‘Polliwog? I don’t care about his son. I care about my own. Where is he, do you say?’
‘In the castle,’ Jonathan replied, and he and the Professor headed back toward Selznak’s castle in the wake of the Strawberry Baron. Trumpet blasts sounded from deep in the woods, the sound of Cap’n Binky’s forces on the hunt, routing out goblins, chasing down ghouls. ‘They’d best be out of the woods by nightfall,’ the Professor said to Jonathan as they hurried along.
Cap’n Binky must have had pretty much the same idea, for within a couple of hours there were no more trumpet blasts. The soldiers set up camp on the meadow, on orders from the Strawberry Baron not to enter the castle. They raided Selznak’s larder first, however, and cooked up a tremendous meal under the watchful eye of the Squire, who insisted upon sampling everything to see if it were poisoned or spoiled. None of it was.
Zippo and his father were soon reunited, and during the evening Jonathan coached Zippo about his alleged heroics. The following morning they broke camp and trekked away up the coast road, Selznak trussed up and stuffed into a sack in the back of a cart. At the crossroads, Cap’n Binky, the Strawberry Baron, Zippo, and their troops turned away inland, upriver toward the town of Grover where they’d cross the river on the ferry. They gave Jonathan and his company three ponies and a sledge on which to haul Miles. The Professor concluded that Miles had broken a leg in the fall, as well as getting knocked about a good bit. He could do little but lie on the sledge and rest.
So in midafternoon that day, the party tramped wearily along. Jonathan tried to buck himself up by reminding himself that the lot of them had quite succeeded in their plans. Selznak was overcome, was to be hung, in fact, at Grover. Squire Myrkle was saved, and was, as far as Jonathan could see, none the worse for wear. There he sat, atop one of the ponies, having a go at two loaves of bread he’d already chewed holes in and shoved up over either wrist. At intervals he’d pluck chunks off and scatter them on the road in order to feed a collection of birds that followed them along, waiting for that very occurrence. Bufo and Gump were busily and secretly making up an ending for their poem, now that the Squire wasn’t lost any more. All in all then, Jonathan thought, he should be thanking his lucky stars, as it were. But he didn’t feel at all like doing so. He felt like sitting down in a slump with his head in his hands. He liked the city of Landsend well enough, but he didn’t half like the idea of sitting about there waiting to leave. More than anything he wanted to be home, or at least to be back in his own familiar world. But the world of T
wombly Town and the High Valley was farther away than ever, now that Escargot had flown and Miles was in no shape to travel. By the time Miles was well – in the six or eight weeks it would take for his leg to mend – who could say where the closest portal would be? They might well have to sail a thousand miles up the Tweet or across the ocean to find it. He wondered if Ahab could understand their plight. It didn’t seem so. He stuck fairly close to the bird troupe so as to get his share of the Squire’s leavings. Somewhere, however, Jonathan concluded, there was still a part of Ahab that missed walking in the woods with Talbot and missed chasing bugs out among the strawberry vines.
The Professor didn’t share Jonathan’s maudlin humor. ‘Abandoned us, did he!’
‘Well,’ Jonathan said, still not wanting to think ill of Escargot, ‘he feared for his life. He hadn’t any choice in the matter.’
‘Choice! I’ll tell you about choice.’ The Professor shook a finger in Jonathan’s direction to illustrate his discussion of choice. ‘He could have chosen to leave us the globe, couldn’t he? We’d be out of here by now if he had. He didn’t need the globe, not to leave Balumnia anyway. He wanted it so that he could go thieving back and forth; that’s it in a nut. Greed is what we’re talking about here. He sold us out, that’s what. And if it weren’t for us, he’d have no bloody globe. He’d have half a useless treasure map and he’d still be a seaweed merchant.’
Jonathan protested a bit, but the Professor’s assessment, sadly, seemed to be pretty much the case. That bothered him almost as much as their not being able to find a way out of Balumnia.
It was just about dinner time when the company found itself winding round the long bend that led to the foot of the last, or perhaps the first, of the Thirteen Bridges. Gump and Bufo announced that they’d completed their poem, that the unfinished symphony had found a final movement. ‘Poor Squire Found,’ recited Gump in ponderous tones, ‘by Bufo Morinus and Gump Ooze of the territory, poor homeless wretches, cast away on Balumnian shores!’
The Squire clapped wildly at Gump’s introduction, pulverizing the remains of the loaves of bread that still encircled his wrists. The bird crowd went wild, sailing in and out and making off with enormous crusty chunks. ‘Do Ashbless now!’ the Squire shouted, clearly under the impression that Gump’s recital of the title had constituted the poem itself. ‘Do Ashbless! The one about the layer cake! The Squire wishes to hear the poem about the layer cake!’
‘It wasn’t a layer cake,’ Bufo said a bit crossly. ‘It was about a loaf of bread. Bread and starvation. Ashbless doesn’t write about layer cakes.’
‘Nor do we,’ Gump added.
But the Squire wasn’t so easily put off. ‘Bread!’ he cried, remembering. ‘Someone’s been at mine.’ He took a long look at his breadless wrists, wondering how they’d come to be in such a barren state. ‘Could you give me the loan of a layer cake, my good fellow?’ he asked Jonathan, turning around in his saddle and nodding.
Jonathan held his palms out to his side and shrugged. ‘I haven’t got one, Squire. But the next layer cake I run across will be yours.’
The Squire blinked at him for a moment. ‘Why will you run across the Squire’s layer cake? It’ll ruin it.’ He shook his head sadly, thinking of his ruined cake.
‘Squire,’ Bufo said. ‘There is no layer cake. Tonight we’ll have one though. A cake twenty feet high!’
The Squire looked at Bufo in amazement. ‘That’s impossible,’ he said. ‘But I have a hippo head on call in town. We’ll eat it.’
‘Good,’ Bufo said.
‘About the hippo head,’ said Gump slowly to the Squire. ‘What would you say to a good wildebeest head instead?’
‘Say to it?’ the Squire asked. ‘What did it say to me? What kind of a beast?’
Bufo shouted at the two of them to shut up, then himself recited Once again, ‘Poor Squire Found!’ in a loud voice. He launched immediately into the final stanzas of the poem that he and Gump had begun several days before and which had ended with the Squire aimlessly trudging through Balumnia.
‘Until at last the Squire comes
Tramping into Boffin Bay
And there he finds the frowning Dwarf,
Necromancer, wild dismay!
‘But when they grasp the jolly Squire
Terror strikes the region wide
They cry, “the Squire, the Squire is come!”
And flee away on every side.
‘For who dare touch his copious form,
His arm is withered at the root.
Goblins, ghouls all howling flee
And every tree does sprout with fruit.
‘Then as he eats and drinks he grows
Stouter and stouter every day.
His friends all weeping find him thus;
Their salty tears they wipe away.
‘And so they ride in glory there,
By the sea, along the road.
The Squire found, they journey home,
And all is done as I have told!’
Everyone cheered frightfully at that. The heroic sound of it even pulled Jonathan out of his slump.
‘A masterpiece!’ hailed the Professor.
‘Shouldn’t that last line read, “all is done as we have told”?’ asked Gump.
The Squire began thundering out applause right then, however, interrupting Gump’s complaining. ‘Every tree sprouts with cake!’ he sang, then paused and turned to Bufo. ‘What went next?’ Bufo seemed to have a hard time answering. ‘All the land did sprout with cake!’ the Squire continued, caught up in the spirit of poetry, ‘and the Squire ate and ate and ate!’
Bufo and Gump looked at each other sadly. But the Squire was the Squire, after all, and it was his poem. So the two linkmen seemed to agree silently that he could pretty much do anything with it he liked, and the company tramped across the bridges toward Landsend, not nearly so thoroughly dismayed as they had been a mile back.
The clammers and the crabbers were out again, setting traps and mucking along the mud flats. It hadn’t been much more than forty-eight hours since Jonathan and the Professor had passed them two mornings since, but to Jonathan it seemed like weeks. The phenomenon reminded him that it quite likely would be weeks before he saw his home again. Months maybe. The effects of the poem began to wear away bit by bit. The galleon still stood out to sea, and seemed to Jonathan to embody the spirit of movement, of being homeward bound. That made him very sad because he knew that all the sailing ships in Balumnia wouldn’t do the lot of them a bit of good.
They crested the longest bridge and trudged down the far side. Jonathan heard a shout from below, from one of the clamdiggers perhaps. Then there was an answering shout and a man farther up the shore suddenly cast down his clamming fork and went running in the direction of the sea, disappearing under the bridge.
The Squire trotted his horse over to the edge, bent out over the parapet and waved. The rest of the company followed him, curious at his waving and at the shouting of the people under the bridge. What they saw was Theophile Escargot shoved up through the hatch of the bobbing submarine, waving back at the Squire.
‘Need a lift?’ he shouted at them, then laughed slowly, ‘Har, har har,’ relishing his gag.
There was a wild dash for the foot of the bridge, Miles bouncing and grimacing on his sledge. Escargot seemed to be in something of a hurry. He relaxed a bit when the Professor told him that the Strawberry Baron had turned inland on the road to Grover, but he didn’t relax much. He was obviously more fearful of the Baron than he’d let on to Zippo.
Sliding Miles down the hatch was tricky, but not impossible, and in the space of ten minutes they’d given their ponies to the flabbergasted clammers and had boarded the submarine and cranked down the hatch.
It all happened so quickly that Jonathan found himself, almost by surprise, sitting on a leather cushion before a porthole with Ahab curled up beside him, the two of them on their way, in effect, to Twombly Town.
Outside the porthole t
he sea went silently about its business. A great fish, almost as long as the submarine, loomed up out of the depths and glided by, peering in, wondering at them. Trailing seaweeds grew from the rocks below and rose toward the surface that lay like an undulating sheet of glass on the water above. Jonathan watched in wonder as a great red kelp snail worked his way slowly across a brown leaf not three feet from him, off, perhaps, to visit a friend. The water swirled and bubbled outside, and lights blinked on around the nine weary travelers. The submarine heaved forward and fell away into the deep, passing out of the mouth of the Tweet River, angling down through sunlit grottoes of towering kelp and schools of silvery fish toward the western door, the land of chambered nautili and sea shell treasures.
Epilogue
In the end it was weeks before Jonathan saw Twombly Town again, what with the voyage out of Balumnia and the journey across the sea from the Wonderful Isles. The, submarine stopped at Seaside where Miles the Magician was entrusted to a stout little doctor with a red beard, and then bubbled its way as far up the Oriel River as Escargot dared take it. There Dooly and his grandfather parted company with Jonathan, Professor Wurzle, Ahab, and the linkmen and sailed away to resume their pirating. The rest of the company set out on dwarf ponies, and in a matter of four days found themselves once again at Myrkle Hall where the Squire’s cook, as he had promised, made them up a bit of a feast. They ate around the clock, it seemed to Jonathan, for two days until none of them except the Squire could bear the thought of another peach pie or roly-poly pudding. During what little time they spent away from the table, Jonathan poked around through the Squire’s marble treasure – uncountable marbles, oceans of them, that overran the cellars beneath Myrkle Hall. He filled a leather marble bag with the little orbs of rainbow glass to bring back as a present for Talbot.
Finally they set out, carrying their bundled ape and alligator suits, bound for home. They trotted into Willowood in just short of a week and in the first days of summer sailed away up the Oriel on Jonathan’s raft, keeping to the far shore as they glided past the Goblin Wood, intending to stay as far away from adventure as they could.
The Disappearing Dwarf Page 29
