The Elfin Ship

by James P. Blaylock

  Jonathan and Ahab somersaulted forward through the open door, onto the ruined deck. Jonathan slammed backforemost against the stump of the mast and Ahab slid yipping into him. Scrabbling to hold onto Ahab and to the mast at the same time, Jonathan slipped and tumbled. When the raft smashed again into the trunk of a great lone alder and went to bits for good, Jonathan and Ahab tumbled away together into the water, both of them shouting and flailing legs and arms.

  When the Cheeser popped to the surface he was pleased, as anyone would be, to see the wave a hundred yards before him, dissipating in size and strength as it rolled away. The roar of the wave was gone and even the howl of the wind had decreased, replaced now by the barking of the befuddled Ahab, who paddled in tight circles around his swimming master. Jonathan, for some odd reason, was very happy, as if he’d just accomplished some grand feat.

  A hard object, just then, cracked against the back of Jonathan’s head. It was the little coracle which had been tossed from the deck in the crash; it had floated along upside down to crack Jonathan in the head and remind him, no doubt, that this was no time to go about feeling satisfied. On the other hand, a boat isn’t at all a bad thing to come upon when you’re overboard in a flood. After rubbing the bump on his head, Jonathan set about trying to right the craft. He could get one side up out of the water, but with nothing to brace his feet against, it was impossible to fling the thing over. Finally Ahab showed uncommonly good sense by trying to climb up onto it as onto the back of a great turtle. Tired from fighting to overturn it and from treading water, Jonathan followed Ahab’s example and dragged himself up onto the flat bottom. Then he helped Ahab up. The craft turned out to be steadier upside down than it had been right side up.

  The sky, which had been dark all day, was growing steadily darker. But a lone star on the eastern horizon showed that the onset of night, not clouds, was causing the darkness and that, in fact, the clouds were breaking up and going on their way. In a few minutes the wind fell off almost altogether, the rain decreased to a drizzle, and the coracle bumped up onto a hill and sat there.

  They were perched, for the moment, on what seemed to Jonathan to be the top of a fairly round hillock covered to the depth of a foot or so by the floodwaters. The Cheeser sloshed around for a bit, toppling Ahab into the water, until he managed to right the coracle – a simple enough task with firm ground beneath his feet. Then he helped Ahab over the gunnel and stepped in himself. He was pleased to find the two paddles, wet but undamaged, still lashed securely beneath the thwarts. He untied them out of instinct, but with no real thought of where in the flooded, night landscape he might paddle.

  He decided finally to stay atop his hill in hopes that the half of the raft the Professor and Dooly were on had fared better than his own and that the two might come to find him. Bits of wreckage floated roundabout from time to time although nothing salvageable presented itself. The night began to grow chilly. It had been chilly all along, of course, but the excitement had made him oblivious to the cold. Sitting now on the skinny thwart without a dry rag on him, he began to shiver. He decided that something, by golly, was going to be done. Having nothing else better in mind, he shouted once or twice, ‘Hallo! Hallo!’ with his hands cupped over his mouth. It seemed reasonably certain to him that the Professor and Dooly were far downriver by this time, no doubt having been borne along on the crest of the wave after his own piece of raft collided with the alder. But it was a good idea to shout anyhow. If no one was about, then he’d simply waste a bit of breath. But if there was someone, anyone for that matter, then Jonathan wanted to find him. They were far too deep into the Elfin Highlands for there to be any danger of trolls or goblins, and bears and wolves would have moved to higher ground long ago.

  ‘Hoo-ha!’ Jonathan shouted, not much caring whether he made sense or not, and he went on shouting so while slapping his hands against opposite shoulders to warm himself. When he paused to say a few words to Ahab, who slumped in the puddle on the deck, looking thoroughly miserable, he heard a distant echo – a ‘hoo-ha’ just like his own, but drawn out and mournful.

  He was surprised at the echo, but imagined that the broad expanse of water surrounding him must have something to do with the phenomenon. ‘Hello, old Ahab,’ he said to the dog. ‘Wet are you? Wet as a sponge from the look of it. And cold, I shouldn’t wonder.’ Just then, in the midst of his sympathizing with Ahab, the echo repeated itself a bit more clearly. ‘Aaaay!’ it seemed to echo. Then, unmistakably, ‘Mister Cheeser!’ with the drop of a note or so between the two ees.

  ‘Hallo!’ Jonathan shouted, standing in the boat which sat firmly on the little hill. ‘Dooly! Professor Wurzle! Whoo-hoo!’ This went on so for a score of minutes, Jonathan half the time listening and half shouting, while the answering shouts drew slowly closer.

  Overhead the clouds were in a whirl of activity, dashing this way and that at tremendous speeds. It looked as if they’d heard that something was brewing up toward the White Mountains and were determined to be there by morning or know the reason why. The moon, not much more than a crescent, seemed to soar out into clear spaces in the sky every few moments to get a look at the earth. It glowed silver white, tilting crazily and outlined so clearly that it appeared to be an immense hook for some heavenly giant to drape his overcoat across.

  But even though the moon was just a slice, its pale rays lit the surface of the water when it loomed free of the clouds. Jonathan could now make out tousled clumps of trees roundabout him hoisting up out of the water like little clusters of vegetables clamped into an asparagus cooker. From between two such clumps, about a hundred yards off his port bow, there appeared a weird but welcome sight. It was Dooly and the Professor, sitting waist deep in the water and paddling along slowly with pieces of plank, no doubt once a part of the cabin. There was no sign of any boat beneath them, and Jonathan marveled at the sight of the two rowing boatless through the flood – probably one of the Professor’s ideas. What cheered him most though was the string of kegs that trailed behind them, looped together with rope.

  They looked like a little keg armada off in formation to do battle. In a minute or two they drew up with a lurch on to the hill. Then Jonathan saw the little fiddlehead which he recognized as part of their borrowed canoe.

  ‘You might have drained it,’ Jonathan said smiling. ‘It rides higher that way. Keeps you dry, too.’

  ‘I’m afraid, Jonathan,’ the Professor replied, ‘that this is one canoe that would be easy to drain but difficult to keep so. It met with a tree stump once or twice some half mile below here and took on water, as they say. But a submerged canoe is better than no canoe at all, eh, Dooly?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir,’ began Dooly. ‘Especially, sir, if you flap about in the waters as I do, sir. Flap about drowning whenever I’m in it, I do. If it weren’t for the Professor, Mr Bing, I’d be laughing out of my other mouth, as my grandpa liked to put it. It was what he called a shave, on account of it being so close.

  ‘Yes, well, eh?’ Jonathan said. ‘You’ve got the kegs and I the coracle, and I suppose we can eat cheese as well as anything else for a few days.’

  ‘Better yet, Jonathan,’ the Professor said, ‘we’ve got a bit of raft salvaged on high ground beyond that stand of trees you see off to the left, and a few yards of sailcloth and a bedroll and Dooly’s coat. With a bit of luck, we won’t entirely freeze, and this infernal water will drop away by morning.’

  ‘I believe it will,’ said Jonathan. ‘The storm is past, along with our chances of getting home by Christmas.’

  The Professor nodded. ‘First things first. Why don’t we drag these boats free of the hill and tie this keg line to the coracle with the painter, and perhaps we can tow our kegs to where the piece of raft is. Of course we can! Where the mind mutinies, the spirit stands fast! Those were the words of Captain Standish, the great dwarf general.’

  ‘Righto,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘Aye, aye,’ Dooly agreed. Together they tugged and tied and paddled, finally, through
the still waters to where the remains of the raft – a seven-foot-wide chunk with part of one wall of the cabin still attached – floated before the clump of cottonwoods to which it was tied. The weight of the four rafters as they scrambled aboard caused the raft to settle on to solid ground, there being only a few inches of water below. Within a half hour they were clear of the water altogether and sitting on a grassy hill. The flood was dropping quickly away.

  There they sat, long river miles from home, the four of them on a ruined raft marooned somewhere on the Elfin Highlands. It was well on into November and no time to be wet and cold and surrounded by floodwaters. Without their raft they might just as well be destined for the moon as for Seaside.

  9

  Dooly Eats Cheese with the Squire

  No one got much sleep that night because it never seemed to stop growing cooler. Being wrapped up in wet sailcloth wasn’t Jonathan’s idea of a jolly, warm bed, but he found that wet blankets were better than no blankets at all. He and the Professor had a long discussion about the stars, and in the early morning darkness they pointed out constellations – a dipper here, an elk there and even what appeared to be a grinning, spectacled face – all revolving very, very slowly in the night sky.

  To the east was a long river of stars leading along into the deep void. They were so close together that they shone like a white splash across the sky. Although the Professor pointed out the broad patch almost at once as the Milky Way, Jonathan was already aware of the name and was wondering what it might be like to be rafting away down a river of stars. What distant seas might lay deep and shifting at the mouth of that river, and what weird sea creatures might be swimming and splashing in the shallows and deep canyons of an ocean such as that? The more he thought about it, the less he really liked the idea of making such a journey. The old Oriel was enough of a river for him – too much, apparently.

  Jonathan was the only one of the four of them awake when the sun came peeping up above the eastern horizon. The first bright tinge of red immediately reminded him of the morning he’d sat on the log below the mill plunking stones and watching the frogs sail past. It seemed like a year ago, even though it was only a couple of weeks. He hoped the sun would be warm enough to dry things out. If a person were dry, warm, and fed he had little to complain of. A good book and an easy chair would add a good deal, of course, but good books and easy chairs were as far off as was Twombly Town and the log below the mill where the frogs sailed along. Jonathan dozed off just at sunrise and immediately began to dream he was sailing seaward in pursuit of Mayor Bastable’s hat which tumbled along in the wind before him, always just out of reach.

  When he awoke, the sun was high in the sky. It must have been nine o’clock or so. Roundabout on the meadows lay pools of bright water, but most of the river had returned to its usual course. Flood debris – broken limbs and bushes and such – was lodged in among the branches of the cottonwoods and alders and occasional willows which dotted the meadowland. Below them ran the Oriel, acting as if nothing were out of the ordinary, as if she had been doing nothing for the last twenty-four hours but minding her own business. Above them and off to the south toward Seaside, the trees thickened until they added up to a full-fledged forest. They quickly turned into the Elfin Highlands as the thick, forested slopes rose away into the misty distances.

  The Professor sat hunched and sleeping at the base of a tree, and Dooly could be seen hiking halfway between the river and the remains of the raft. He seemed to be intent upon clambering up into the branches of a tree and was being fairly secretive about it. He would take a hop at one of the lower branches, flail about with his legs, then drop groundward and crouch for a moment peering around the trunk toward the river. Finally, he flailed up against a limb, caught, and yanked himself into a sitting position. Soon he was in among the uppermost branches, crouched and watching.

  Jonathan, noting Dooly’s odd behavior, took a listen or two himself, and from somewhere downriver he heard just the breath of a tune and perhaps a song. He waited, straining to hear. Evidently the singer was approaching, for the tune grew by the moment. Jonathan could make out the words of the jolly song almost at the same instant that two figures strode into view along the muddy river road.

  They were linkmen, of that he was sure – jelly men as the children of Twombly Town called them, and here they came carrying baskets of blackberries and great, green pippin apples. Both of the tiny linkmen were weighted down like hod carriers.

  They were almost copies of the several linkmen who had come into Twombly Town selling jams and jellies some years back. But to Jonathan, most linkmen looked pretty much alike anyway. They all wore pointy hats like elves and had long slender legs and noses and perpetually grinning mouths. They almost always wore short pants and high woolly socks in season and out, and if it weren’t for their size it would be tough to tell them from elves. Elves, of course, are a head or so taller and are altogether too secretive to be strolling along the river road singing ridiculous songs. One of the linkmen hummed loudly, rather more of a shout than a hum, while the other sang in a clear falsetto:

  I’ve a basket and a berry, tra-la-la

  And I’m singing oh so merry, tra-la-la

  For the sun is shining yellow

  And the clouds go sailing by,

  And I’m such a jolly fellow, tra-la-la.

  Jonathan remarked to himself that linkmen, although superb jam makers and fruit pickers and, no doubt, altogether fine chaps, weren’t poets. But almost as soon as the first fellow’s verse ran itself out, the second took off and added a stanza or so.

  Well I’m on my way to eat ‘em, tra-la-la

  With a pleasant bit of sweetum, tra-la-la

  And a touch of golden cream

  With a pink and rosy gleam

  That will please the dusty palate, tra-la-la.

  He wrapped the verse up with such a wild and yodeling tra-la-la that Jonathan cringed even more than he had at the ‘eat ‘em/sweetum’ part.

  Jonathan decided that the only thing to do would be to leap about and catch their attention, both to explain being marooned and to have a glance at the contents of their baskets which, illuminated by the sunshine, looked awfully good. Apples and berries aren’t normally breakfast foods, but when it’s a clear choice between fruit and cheese, cheese, although clearly one of the food marvels, is best left alone until lunch.

  So just as Jonathan began a hearty wave and opened his mouth to shout, the two linkmen spied him there on the hill and began jabbering excitedly and waving their arms. They were about six feet from the base of Dooly’s tree when, with the sound of snapping branches and a lunatic shout, Dooly himself plummeted from his perch and crashed wildly to the ground. He was immediately up and sprinting toward Jonathan on the hill where the Cheeser and Professor Wurzle watched the stupefied linkmen, hoping the while that the linkmen wouldn’t think Dooly mad and run off with their baskets.

  In truth, the linkmen looked momentarily puzzled. But when it became clear that Dooly was fleeing them and was not, apparently, a menace, the two simply shrugged and climbed along in his wake.

  ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo!’ called one of the linkmen – the one who had gotten so carried away with his singing. ‘Here we are now. A cheeseman and two cheese companions. No, three, clearly. There’s a beast among the ruins. A wonderful thing from the high valley.’

  Jonathan began to introduce himself until he realized, abruptly, that an introduction appeared to be unnecessary. They had, oddly enough, called him a cheeseman. First Miles the Magician and then linkmen. It seemed that everyone knew what he and his companions were about. ‘Yes, indeed,’ Jonathan said, not so much in reply as for lack of anything else to say.

  The Professor, however, was bowing and waving his cap and ay-aying it like a medicine man selling elixirs to a batch of church ladies. Dooly crouched behind the Professor, grinning. He poked old Wurzle in the back and pointed along toward the river where yet another pair of linkmen were striding, one enormo
usly fat and the other seemingly taken with fits of dancing and leaping. They too carried baskets of goodies. The big linkman’s basket was loaded with loaves of bread, some long and white, some round and very dark. There was enough bread to feed a dozen people, probably twice that many, although Jonathan noted that the linkman was stuffing bread into his mouth with his free hand as if he were shoveling coal into an oven. He looked, Jonathan thought – a bit unfairly – like a creeping pyramid. His head angled immediately up from his shoulders without leaving room for a neck, and his cheeks were so round that the top of his head appeared to taper up into his pointed hat. Somewhere below his waist, Jonathan knew, were legs. But at such a distance they sort of blended together within the floppy pants to give him a comical, shuffling look, like a little hill having come to life for the purpose of robbing a bakery.

  The first two linkmen produced great flowery oil cloths from their baskets and began flapping them out in the breeze and laying them about.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the Professor. ‘I am Professor Artemis Wurzle; this is my good companion Dooly; and here, as you are apparently aware, is Jonathan Bing, the Cheeser of Twombly Town.’

  The linkmen paused during the Professor’s introductions and listened respectfully. ‘We’re poets,’ the linkman in the green hat explained. ‘You might have heard us coming along the river road.’ He gave the Professor and Jonathan each a squint in turn as if to say, ‘Pretty rare stuff, eh?’ But linkmen, of course, are a very humble lot and wouldn’t think of complimenting themselves.

  ‘Oh, indeed,’ said Jonathan. ‘It sounded like quite an epic. Is there more of it?’

  ‘Not at the moment,’ said Yellow Hat. ‘But there will be. It strikes us now and then like – like – ’

  ‘Like a stone on the forehead,’ his companion chimed in.

  ‘Just so. Like a bonk on the head. That’s the beauty of poetry. It just sails in on the wind.’