‘You’ve gone and boggered up the last verse,’ said Gump. ‘You’ve tossed your filthy mig-weed into it and ruined it!’
‘Nonsense!’ cried the Professor before Bufo had a chance to protest. ‘It was capital – beginning to end. Couldn’t have been better.’ Following the Professor’s enthusiastic response, there was relatively thunderous applause. The Professor repeated that he thought that the poem was astonishingly good and said that he and Jonathan and Dooly would carry it back to Twombly Town to spread the tale of the Squire’s heroics.
They shook hands, finally, and said a few goodbyes, and the three rafters promised to come downriver on a visit fairly soon. With that, the linkmen were off, down along the river road toward the Elfin Highlands and linkman territory.
Jonathan, Dooly, and the Professor set about pitching brush off the deck, and Ahab did his part too, wandering about and looking things over as if glad to be on the river once more. By ten o’clock or so they were poling the raft out of the mouth of Hinkle Creek, and Jonathan and Dooly set to pedaling while the Professor manned the tiller. None of them had had satisfactory sleep over the past forty hours or so, but the promise of home and the excitement of victory served to overcome any tiredness and to rather buoy them up and push them along.
They pedaled off and on all that day and most of the next until, in the afternoon, a good wind blew up, cold as a smelt, and they dropped the sails and made good time in the direction of home. They were all, by that time, bundled in jackets and blankets, and they had the coffee pot going out on deck along with a number of hot potatoes to take the chill off a person.
‘I wish I’d been a bit more help there at the tower,’ said Jonathan when all of them were gathered below the tiller canopy, munching steaming potatoes.
‘You and I both,’ said the Professor. ‘But Escargot’s plan, if it was a plan, worked surprisingly well, and you and I played our part in it.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Jonathan. ‘When he rushed off after Dooly, though, I thought we were in for it. I thought we’d end up with fins and beaks and traded to a bunjo man for string beans or something.’
‘That was a powerful mean looking skelington,’ said Dooly, mispronouncing the word. ‘I thought he meant to eat me.’
‘He ate the Squire’s turkey leg,’ said Jonathan. ‘Or at least one of them did. I don’t think it agreed with him. Seemed to be hard on his teeth.’
‘Well I just ran for it,’ Dooly continued. ‘I didn’t even think. Grandpa said it was a reaction. I lit out down the road and ran into a bunch of goblins coming up out of the swamp. There was a mess of ’em, all coming along like sixty. And mean! Let me say. And behind ’em waving this big club was old Mr Gosset, just wild! It was a sight. Strike me for a lubber if it weren’t.’
‘Strike me for a lubber?’ asked Jonathan.
‘That’s what Grandpa would have said, him going for a pirate and all. Anyway, I sat in the bush, shaking like crazy, and here comes Grandpa, whispering my name. I, of course, cries out, and he says that I’m to stay in the bush and leave the fighting alone – that it weren’t safe up at the tower. He said you’d fetch me after it was over.
‘Well I hung around for a few minutes and there was a powerful lot of shouting and all. It seemed like Mr Gosset was giving them goblins a lesson. Then who comes up the path but the Squire and Stick-a-bush and all, and my don’t the Squire look grand. He was ready! So I jump out and nearly scare the daylights out of ’em, and the five of us and Mr Gosset, we cleaned them goblins up. Then that ape come up out of nowhere and whacked Mr Gosset, and the Squire said he’d get the ape, and he did. That’s what happened to me. That’s it in a nut.’
‘Well we were all glad to see you,’ said Jonathan. ‘I was never so happy to see anyone as I was to see you and the Squire and all. It would have gone bad for us otherwise.’
The Professor agreed and said it must have been a close one. Then they all agreed that the Squire was a continual amazement and was ‘one of the lads’.
‘I’m dashed if I can understand why you could see and hear the whole affair and I couldn’t, though, Jonathan,’ said the Professor. ‘It could quite possibly have something to do with atmospheric pressures. The fog, you know, presses in at the lobes of the ear and roundabout the forebrain and has a direct effect on sound and vision.’
‘I didn’t know that, actually,’ said Jonathan. ‘That’s fascinating.’
‘It’s my theory,’ the Professor continued, ‘that due to my slightly advanced age, such pressures had the effect of closing off certain vital humors and that such stoppage resulted in my total incapacitation.’
‘You’re probably right, Professor,’ said Jonathan, ‘although I don’t know anything about humors and pressures and such. It could be, though, that I was the exception to the rule. I’m certain, in fact, that when Dooly pulled the last of the four coins out of my pouch, I missed a good bit, and then came back around when the coins were returned. If I had to guess I’d say it was elf magic that got in the way.’
‘Magic again,’ said the Professor. ‘That’s too easy. A man of science doesn’t trot out magic to explain odd phenomena.’
‘But you can’t deny the coins work,’ said Jonathan, ‘or that the watch stops things short.’
‘Not at all,’ said the Professor. ‘But I firmly believe that if we pried the back off this watch, we’d see a thing or two that made admirable sense.’ The Professor opened his pocketknife as if to have a go at the back of the watch.
‘Professor!’ Jonathan shouted, flabbergasted at the very idea of such meddling.
The Professor laughed and put the knife away. ‘As you say, Jonathan,’ he said. ‘You’re the captain of this vessel. If it’s magic that makes things go round, then that’s fine with me.’ He studied the watch for a few moments, turning it over in his hand. ‘I wonder if there’s any reference to this sort of thing in Limpus?’ he said finally, and ducked into the cabin for a minute before emerging with one of the ponderous Tomes of Limpus in which he was quickly lost.
After that, they sailed upriver until long after dark, and moored the raft well out into the river to take no chance of shenanigans. After all, the Dwarf had fled but there was no telling what sort of pranks he was still capable of playing. Jonathan was fairly sure they could deal with his fog and his dancing skeletons and such. If worse came to worst, the Professor had the pocketwatch and could take a turn at freezing the Dwarf or his ape or any of his other odd minions. Still, they decided they’d all sleep more soundly with a hundred feet of river water stretching away to either side of the raft.
And sleep soundly they did. None of them, including Ahab, awoke before ten the following morning. Jonathan started to hop out of his bunk when it struck him that it was what you might call desperately cold. His breath was as visible in that morning air as steam from the smokestack of a train, and the warmth developed sleeping under a feather comforter all night evaporated almost immediately. He pulled on two pairs of socks which, wisely, he’d left under the covers all night, and a sweater and a jacket, both of which seemed frightfully cold. As soon as he abandoned his bunk and set about building a fire in the stove, Ahab climbed in and buried himself beneath the blankets, peering out at Jonathan with a relatively satisfied look in his eye.
After coffee and breakfast had geared them up a bit and given them heart, they went out into the crisp morning. There was a gray sky overhead and it seemed a safe bet that it was working itself into the mood for a good snow.
An inch of ice crusted the low spots on the deck, and the seats in front of the paddlewheel were covered with frost. The idea of sitting there on the cold seat and pedaling the raft upriver wasn’t too attractive, but there wasn’t much choice – there was no wind to speak of, only a little ear-numbing breeze from up the valley.
So Jonathan and Dooly put canvas cushions down on the seats, and although they were still cold as codfish, it was better than sitting on frosted wood. It turned out that pedaling was just
the ticket, however. After ten minutes or so Jonathan peeled off his jacket and pushed up the sleeves on his sweater and began to feel bad for the Professor huddled there shivering at the tiller.
So it went for about three hours, and after lunch it went along so again. The shoreline was beginning to look a bit more familiar, the closer they got to home. The alders were, for the most part, bare of leaves and the forest on either side of the Oriel was dark and quiet. Few animals seemed to be venturing out for any reason at all. Most, likely, were digging an extra room or so in an underground home and counting the acorns, and pinion nuts to decide whether to make one last topside trip. Only the shore grasses and the water weeds were green and moving. An occasional batch of ducks landed on the river to rest up, and they quacked around and shoved their heads under the surface to see what was doing down in the river world below. But they didn’t wait around long before they were off south, on their way to winter in some sunny clime.
It was no time to be out adventuring – no time to be tramping in the woods or sailing on the river. It was a time to be piling logs in the fireplace and putting up storm windows and starting up the wood stove out in the shop a half hour or so before setting in to work. It was a time to sit in front of the fire in the evening and be happy you weren’t out sailing on the river or tramping in the woods.
Jonathan wondered what direction Escargot would take, whether he would live out the winter in his submarine at Thrush Haven, or sail away south down the coast in the wake of those flocks of ducks. He was probably on his way at that very moment, invisible beneath his cloak, striding along the twisted paths of the Goblin Wood and making plans.
28
Three Men and a Dog
Late that afternoon they ran up onto a sandbar, but before they were stuck they quit pedaling, and the current pushed them off and back into deeper water. Dooly was the first to point out that they’d had problems with that sandbar once before. Sure enough, it was the very spot at which they’d run up against the trolls. But there were no trolls to be seen now. Aside from a rare snow troll, most of the beasts had dozed off in the deep recesses of a cavern somewhere and wouldn’t awaken until March or April. Even trolls can be depended on for that.
As they swung out around the bar, Jonathan caught a brief glimpse of something moving along within the trees – walking along the river road on his way up the valley. At first Jonathan feared it was Selznak, and he started to whisper to the Professor to push the tiller over and angle the raft across to the far shore. But as he watched, he saw that the figure moving through the trees was clearly no dwarf. It was someone tall and thin – strangely tall, in fact – and wearing fairly colorful robes.
‘I know who that is,’ said Dooly in a loud whisper.
‘So do I,’ said Jonathan. ‘Let’s see if he wants a lift.’ Both of them shouted and waved. The robed figure paused, pushed his way through the branches of the shore trees, and clambered down onto the riverbank, knocking his hat off as he did so. It was Miles the Magician, wearing, or attempting to wear, the necessary props. He seemed happy to see them and waved his arms, so they steered the raft in around the bar and held it steady with poles while Miles climbed aboard.
‘There might be trouble brewing up toward Twombly Town,’ said he. ‘I don’t doubt it a bit. I’m on my way up there now to see what I can do.’
The rafters clambered for an explanation as they poled back out into the Oriel and pedaled furiously to get the paddlewheel going. So Miles continued, setting his cap on the deck, tousling his hair, and collapsing onto a deck chair. ‘I saw him last night,’ he said, ‘the Dwarf with the ape, going along in a little fog up the river road. They had some purpose, mind you, there was no mistaking it. They were intent on mayhem upriver, and they were traveling fast, on some sort of enchantment. And there’s been movements in the forest – parties of goblins heading south toward the Wood and trolls out of their caves and following along in the same direction. I saw two skeletons late last night, but they didn’t seem to know where they were going; it was more like they were just out for a stroll. Something’s afoot. Something happened to put Selznak and his brood out of joint.’
The Professor, not normally given over to theatrical behavior, couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pull the pocketwatch out of his coat and dangle it by its chain. Miles, startled, jumped up and peered closely at it, turning it over so as to have a look at the face, puffy-cheeked and wearing spectacles, that smiled there, etched into the elf silver.
‘Do you know what this is?’ Miles asked, clapping his hat back onto his head.
‘Sure!’ Dooly almost shouted. ‘We just stole it, or at least old Grandpa did. We whacked the daylights out of the ape, too.’
‘Well I’ll be!’ said Miles, mystified. ‘That’s what the story is, is it? No wonder there’s an uproar. You’ve taken half his power away. All of it, really.’
The three of them then told Miles the Magician about the siege at Hightower Ridge and about the Squire’s heroics at Snopes’ Ferry and then again, when he and Bufo and Gump and Stick-a-bush arrived in the nick of time. Finally all the stories were told and they sat about into the late afternoon, puffing on pipes and taking turns at the pedaling, making as good a time, all in all, as they had at any point on the voyage.
‘What I don’t follow about this whole affair,’ said the Professor, ‘is why Theophile Escargot sold the watch to that fiend in the first place. I’ve never gotten an answer to that question, and by golly I want one. Now I’ll admit that I didn’t have much faith in the man at first – I beg your pardon, Dooly, for saying it – but I see him in a new light now. He didn’t have to do what he did, but he did it.’
The Professor paused and tamped his pipe. ‘Have you heard of the Lumbog Globe, sir?’ he asked Miles.
‘Oh, indeed,’ said Miles, his eyes lighting up. ‘I saw it once, long ago. It does what they say it does. I can vouch for it. It’s one of the seven elf wonders, actually. As valuable, in its way, as anything there is.’
‘And were you aware,’ said the Professor, ‘that the Lumbog Globe was in Hightower, that the Dwarf owned it?’
‘Seems I heard such a rumor,’ said Miles. ‘But then all sorts of things were said about Selznak the Dwarf.’
‘Well, that rumor was true,’ said Professor Wurzle. ‘I saw it myself. Squire Myrkle came upon it during the siege. Found it near the kitchen apparently. Now I could have sworn that Escargot’s interest in Hightower centered around that globe, that he wanted it for himself. But he let the Squire have it. Didn’t bat an eye. Acted as if the Squire was welcome to it. No, gentlemen, I pegged the man wrong, and I’m sorry for it. And that makes it all the more strange. Why in the devil did he sell that watch to Selznak? He would have done better to have thrown it into the river.’
‘The answer is simple, really,’ said Miles, as if astonished at the Professor’s curiosity. ‘He ransomed the lad here. He hadn’t much choice.’
‘Ransom?’ said Jonathan.
‘Kidnap money. Blackmail. What ever it is you’d like to call it.’
‘What lad?’ asked Dooly, looking about. He was the only lad around that he could think of.
‘Why you!’ said Miles looking shrewdly at him. ‘But you don’t remember it. I had a hand in that – something in the way of a spell. Mesmerized you, actually.’
‘To what purpose?’ asked the Professor, puzzled and interested.
‘Well,’ said Miles, ‘I can’t vouch for it, because I’ve never been there. But I’ve heard, and I’m pretty sure it’s true, that some awful things go on inside that tower – things that a chap wouldn’t care to remember, if you follow me.’
Jonathan and the Professor nodded agreement. They followed him pretty well.
‘So when Escargot was forced to make the trade he brought the lad to me, and I wiped it out of his mind. Swept it away like sawdust off a pub floor, so to speak.’
‘Well, I’ll be a herring,’ said the Professor, shaking his head over the a
ffair. ‘Mesmerization is it? And very effective too, clearly.’ He looked at Dooly for a moment as if he were a specimen.
‘Well I don’t know nothing of it,’ said Dooly. ‘And I don’t care to. If a person doesn’t know about nothing, he don’t care about it.’
‘That’s certainly the truth,’ Jonathan agreed. ‘That was well put.’ But he’d barely said it when all of them, almost as one, became aware of a buzzing sound somewhere up in the dim skies. There was no wondering this time about the nature of the sound. It could only be one thing. And sure enough, there it was, a dark speck in the distance, zooming along just below the clouds, following the swerve of the shore, east along the Oriel. In a minute or two the airship drew near, dropped almost to the treetops, and sailed past overhead, Twickenham and his merry elf friends waving out at the four on the raft. The airship circled once then shot along upriver in the direction of Twombly Town.
On the following day, when the raft passed the first outlying farm and sailed within view of the top of the widow’s windmill, the elves were still there. The airship lay upon the grass below the windmill, and a crowd of townspeople – likely everyone in the village – gathered there on the docks.
Gilroy Bastable, wearing an immense and ridiculous fur cap, stood arm in arm with Twickenham. The band struck up ‘The Jolly Huntsman’ and squawked along wonderfully well when the raft came sailing around the last bend. Hats flew, people huzzahed, and there was more or less general revelry all up and down the banks and across the dock.
Jonathan knew Mayor Bastable too well to suppose there was any chance of his not having a speech prepared against the day of the rafters’ return. Professor Wurzle himself was scribbling away furiously on a note pad, a sure indication that yet another speech was going to be tried out on the afternoon crowd. And there, beside the mayor and Twickenham, was old Beezle. There was never an occasion about which Beezle could think of nothing to say. Perhaps, thought Jonathan, it would be possible to pretend to be ill and so oil out of any ceremony. But on the other hand, if the people wanted ceremony, it was the least he could do to oblige them good-naturedly. It was just as well that he felt that way, because there was ceremony aplenty that afternoon.
The Elfin Ship Page 34
