Year of the Griffin

by Diana Wynne Jones

  To Lukin’s relief, the dwarfs were decidedly interested. All their round, shrewd eyes were fixed on him. “So what is it you’re offering?” Genno said.

  “This.” Lukin took a few steps forward and, in a careless, royal way, fetched the small golden notebook out of his pocket.

  There was a long, penetrating silence, while all the dwarfs’ eyes narrowed to focus on the book. “It looks,” Dobrey said at length with unconvincing casualness, “like dwarf work from here. Can I see it close, lad?”

  “If it is dwarf work,” Genno said, clattering his ornaments as he shrugged to show how unconcerned he was, “if it is, and I don’t say it is, mind, it’ll have a virtue of some kind. What does it do, lad—if it does anything, that is?”

  This really might be going to work. Lukin tried to keep calm. “I don’t know. It’s queer. All I know is that most of the things I write in it just disappear.”

  A very slight tremble of excitement affected all the dwarfs. One of them actually licked his lips. Dobrey held out a large hand, blistered and discolored on its palm and lumpy along its fingers. Old and important he might be, but he evidently still worked at a forge. “Show, lad.”

  Lukin took hold of the notebook by one delicately molded corner and held it out so that Olga could take hold of a corner, too. Together they went along behind the row of dwarfs—like assistants at an auction, Lukin thought—holding the book open so that each dwarf could turn the small, crisp pages. Most of them seemed particularly interested in the page containing the half sentence from Wermacht’s first class, but others checked the gaps in the notes about herbs, and others leafed all through. Once or twice either Olga or Lukin had to let go for someone to examine the work on the cover and grunt enigmatically. When every dwarf had seen his fill, Dobrey leaned back in his chair.

  “Just how did you come by this, lad?”

  It was said as though Dobrey thought Lukin had stolen the book. But Ruskin, shaking with fear so that Lukin could hardly understand him, had assured Lukin that this manner of question would be the second part of the process. If there was a process, which Ruskin appeared to doubt miserably. Lukin looked Dobrey haughtily in the eye and replied, “It was given me as an engagement present by my bride-to-be, Olga Olafsdaughter here. It was part of her dowry. Please tell them, Olga.”

  The shrewd, round eyes all turned to Olga then. Olga colored up and seemed very uncomfortable. “My father was a pirate,” she said, in a flat, wooden way. “Olaf Gunnarsson. This book was part of his private treasure. He took this book and a lot of other things from a dwarf ship that I saw him rob and sink on the Inland Sea.”

  Genno turned and slapped Dobrey ringingly on his armored back. “It is! It is!”

  The great chamber echoed with his voice and the huge delighted voices of the others. “It really is! It’s the Book of Truth! We got it, and those fool Westerners have lost it!”

  Dobrey looked up at Lukin. “It’s the only book of its kind,” he said. “They made it, these Western dwarfs, a good thousand years back, to record only the truth. That’s why your notes went missing. None of them were true. It’s one of the Great Treasures, this book. You can have Ruskin and welcome for this, lad. You can have the whole tribe of artisans with him, for all I care.”

  “Steady on!” said Hordo, whose elbows were still on the table. “Don’t get carried away and sell off all our workers, Dobrey.”

  “Just Ruskin then. Hand us the book,” said Dobrey, stretching out his hand again.

  Corkoran realized that it would be prudent to intervene here, before he lost Ruskin and the money. “Er-hem!” he said. “Before you give it to him, Lukin, I think you should get the bargain down in writing and make sure they all sign it.”

  Lukin’s eyes, turning to Corkoran for an instant, seemed to say, “Why weren’t you any help before this?” Corkoran was surprised to feel his face heating up. Well, he was quite hot in these wretched robes.

  “Yes, of course. Get it in writing—I was forgetting. It’s the excitement,” Dobrey said shamelessly. “Anyone thought to bring writing stuff? Sealing wax? What a pity. Never mind.”

  Corkoran wordlessly conjured a sheet of parchment, pens, ink, a lighted candle, and a lump of sealing wax to the table in front of the dwarfs. Dobrey looked at it all regretfully. “Run out of excuses, haven’t I? You’d better write it, lad. We’ll sign and seal.”

  Lukin grinned a bit. An important part of his education as a prince had been in how to draw up treaties and contracts that were properly binding. Dobrey was not going to get anything this way either. Lukin pulled the parchment over to the end of the table and wrote, quickly but very carefully, two copies and signed his name on both. He passed the parchments along to the dwarfs, who all read with narrowed eyes and signed without comment, except for Genno, who asked in a hurt way, “Now why did you go and put in all this about ‘and all magic he now commands,’ lad?”

  “I gathered that he borrowed a lot of magic from the rest of his tribe,” Lukin explained, as haughty and princelike as he could be. “He’s of no use to me without that.”

  “Oh, don’t haggle, Genno!” Dobrey bellowed as he stamped hot red wax with the great ring on his forefinger. “We’ve got the best bargain we’ll ever get in a thousand years, and you know it! Shake.” He offered his great, rough hand to Lukin again, who shook it with hearty relief. “If only you knew, lad,” Dobrey said, “just what you’ve signed away here! What a treasure!” He clutched the notebook lovingly to his breastplate as he climbed down from his chair. Genno snatched up one copy of the agreement and stuffed it inside his armor, before climbing down, too.

  The dwarfs were all leaving at last. The rest of them, even Hordo, who had been looking like a fixture, were clattering down to their feet and marching in a cheerful body to the door. Corkoran sprang up, too. “Nice work, Lukin, Olga,” he said. Then he fairly pelted out by the back way to the pigeon loft. A clever pigeon could get to the Emperor long before those senators were near the Empire. On the other hand, the senators had almost certainly sent a pigeon of their own. You could hire them from several lofts in the city. Corkoran knew he had to get his version off to the Emperor as soon as possible. A lot of money hung on it.

  The janitor met him at the base of the ladder, looking worried. “I was just coming to find you. Been a bit of a frackshaw up there, there has.”

  “Oh, what now?” Corkoran started up the ladder, nearly fell off it when his robes tangled around his feet, and angrily conjured the robes away, back to his rooms. He arrived in the dim wooden loft with the janitor panting at his heels.

  All the small, rounded pigeon doors at the end were open, letting in a chilly draft and enough light to show gray feathers and splashes of blood everywhere. Two pigeons lay on their backs with their pink claws uppermost, dead, right by Corkoran’s feet. Beyond them was the corpse of a mouse that seemed to have been pecked to death.

  “I ain’t been drinking,” said the janitor.

  “I’m sure you haven’t,” Corkoran said, stunned.

  “You got to believe what I saw,” the janitor asserted. “I heard this noise, see, as I was on my rounds, and I climbs up to investigate. And—you got to believe this—there was battle and mayhem going on, hordes of mice going for the pigeons and the pigeons flying every which way and some of them fighting back. So I jumps inside here and shouts, and the mice all run away down between the floorboards. Then—you got to believe this!—I see a lot of little tiny men at the end there. Climbing about opening the pigeon doors, some were, and some of them was pushing pigeons out through the doors and two of them were fixing a message to another pigeon. When they sees I see them, they push that pigeon out, too, and run for it. Wriggle down cracks in the floor, just like the mice. And I’ve not touched a drop of drink, I swear.”

  “Tell me,” asked Corkoran, “were these little men dressed all over in black?”

  “They were and all,” said the janitor. “That’s why I didn’t see them first off.”

&n
bsp; “Then I believe you completely,” said Corkoran. He looked glumly around the shambles in the loft. The assassins had teamed up with the ex-pirates, by the look of things, and from what the janitor had seen, the assassins had just sent a pigeon for reinforcements, while making sure there were no pigeons that the University could send for help. Corkoran shivered. For a moment he was almost tempted to send Finn or Wermacht to ask Querida to come here quickly. But no. Querida was such a tyrant. She was almost certain, if she came, to reorganize the University around him, and she would start by canceling his moonshot, Corkoran knew it. Much better to manage by himself. He had dealt with assassins and pirates once. He could do it again. “Are there any pigeons left at all?” he asked the janitor.

  There was a stirring in the rafters over his head. “Croo. Some of us. Up here,” a warbling voice replied.

  Corkoran raised mage light in one hand and discovered five decidedly battered birds crouched along the highest beam. Some of his anxiety left him. “I’m going to put the strongest possible protections around you—particularly you,” he said, pointing to the one that seemed the least battered. “I need you to take a message for me.” The bird hunched a bit but obediently fluttered down to the rail beside the message desk. “You,” Corkoran said to the janitor, “go and get all the mousetraps you can find and set them up all around this loft.”

  “Think that’ll work?” the janitor asked dubiously. “These looked to be brainy mice.”

  “They’ll work when I’ve put spells on them,” Corkoran said grimly. “Killer-spells.”

  “Right.” The janitor collected the three corpses for disposal and clumped away down the ladder.

  Corkoran got to work putting protection around the remaining pigeons. He enhanced it upon his chosen pigeon and then, since the bird did look very battered, added a strong speed-spell as well. The ink for writing messages had been spilled in the affray, and all the little slips of paper had been torn up. The assassins had been making darned sure no one could send for help. Too bad. Corkoran conjured more ink and paper. Then he wrote a careful and accurate account of his conversation with the two senators, their hints and their offer of money, and dwelt particularly on their final threat, citing the dwarfs as witnesses to the whole interview. He addressed it to Emperor Titus. He did not ask the Emperor for money or for help from any assassins the senators planned to send. That would have been crude. He was sure he could rely on the Emperor’s gratitude for both.

  “Now,” he said as he fixed the flimsy paper into the tube on the bird’s leg, “you are to take this to Condita in the Empire and deliver it to Emperor Titus. The Emperor in person and no one else. Have you got that?”

  “I’ll try,” croodled the bird. “I’ve heard they bag you in butterfly nets and take you to the Senate down there.”

  “Avoid that,” said Corkoran. “Find the Emperor.” He took the pigeon’s warm, light bulk in both hands and carried it to the open pigeon doors. “Don’t let anyone lay hands on you until you find the Emperor.” He let the bird climb to the small doorstep and watched it wing rather wearily away.

  The janitor arrived back then with an armload of mousetraps. Corkoran spent quite a time setting them up with some distinctly vicious spells, while the four remaining pigeons craned down from their beam to watch. When Corkoran finally climbed away down the ladder, the birds exchanged looks, crooned at one another, and fluttered down to the doors. Corkoran had hardly reached the bottom of the ladder before the pigeons were gone, too, winging painfully away to Derkholm.

  The sun was setting by the time Corkoran reached his lab. He turned on the lights with a sigh of relief. And stood with his hand on the switches, appalled. The assassins and their mouse allies had been here, too. His notes and calculations had been gnawed into confetti-sized scraps and tossed about in heaps. His experiments for the moonsuit had been broken and spilled and emptied all over the floor. But worst and most heartbreaking of all, his precious moonship, his carefully designed and cherished moonship, which had taken him three years and untold amounts of money to build—and had been two-thirds finished by now—had been hacked to bits. Shining shards of it lay in a heap by the window. Corkoran could see hundreds of very small gleaming sword cuts on each shard. Those assassins must have sat in their cage, day by day, learning exactly what things were most important to him.

  Corkoran stared at it all numbly.

  ELEVEN

  LUKIN HELD THE door of Elda’s concert hall open for Olga, then shut it and leaned against it while Olga slowly shed her cloak. He felt weak. The others, scattered around the room, watched him anxiously.

  “Phew!” he said. “You hit the bull’s-eye, Elda. Ruskin, you are legally my slave, and I’ve got a bill of sale to prove it.” He flourished his signed and sealed parchment. “Regard yourself as a citizen of Luteria from now on.”

  “Wey-HAY!” Ruskin bounded to his small legs, pigtails flying, and did a clacking dance of triumph with Felim. In the course of it the cloakrack got knocked over. Claudia let it lie. Her position was nothing like so certain as Ruskin’s. The fact that no legionaries had come to arrest her was small comfort. The senators could be starting extradition proceedings in the city at this moment. She huddled among the cushions on the stage, wondering what to do about it.

  “You stick close to me,” Elda told her, picking up the cloakrack. “Fetch your things, and sleep in here from now on. I can handle those soldiers.”

  Olga was not joining in the rejoicing any more than Claudia was. She was standing near the door beside the dropped furry heap of her cloak, staring into nowhere. “I think,” Lukin said to her, “that I handled those dwarfs rather well.”

  “Do you?” Olga said.

  “Yes, I do,” Lukin said, hurt by her lack of enthusiasm. “Dwarfs are such tricksy beggars. You have to pin them down in all directions. I was afraid they were going to sheer off even before the bargaining started, when you were telling them how you got the notebook. You sounded so wooden, as if you were reciting a lesson you’d learned or something.”

  Olga whirled around on him in a swirl of hair. “Oh, did I? Mr. Crown Prince Lukin! And how was I supposed to behave when you were lording around telling lies about dowries and brides-to-be? Was I supposed to simper? Was I supposed to say, ‘Oh, yes, Lukin’s father’s just dying to have a pirate in the family. And a mouse’?”

  Lukin was perplexed. Olga looked so angry. He could not understand why her eyes were brimming with tears when everything had gone so well. “You know I had to say something like that to give the book a proper provenance. They wouldn’t have accepted that it was mine to sell if I hadn’t. You know I didn’t mean a word of it.”

  “All right, don’t rub it in!” Olga screamed at him.

  “I’m not,” Lukin said, trying to be reasonable. “I thought we were friends enough and understood one another enough that you could accept what I had to say and back me up. I’m sorry if it annoyed you, but we had to rescue Ruskin.”

  “I’m not talking about Ruskin!” Olga yelled. “You might at least have warned me!”

  “Then I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about!” Lukin snapped. “You’re being as bat-headed as Melissa. You must have realized, when I asked you to come with me, that I was going to have to spin a yarn of some kind.”

  “Oh!” Olga gasped. “That does it! I never want to speak to you again, ever in my life! Never!” She burst into tears. Crying so hard that she could barely see what she was doing, she fumbled the door open, flung it wide, and ran away. She was crying such volumes of tears that Lukin could see drops whirling out on either side of her flying hair, shining like rainbows for an instant, before the door swung back and slammed in his face.

  “What’s got into her?” he asked his friends slightly irritably.

  They stared solemnly back. Claudia, realizing this was a time to forget her own troubles, climbed off the stage and went to join Elda. The cloakrack jiggled across the carpet after her. Everyone ignored it. “Don�
�t you really know?” Claudia asked Lukin.

  “No,” said Lukin, and it seemed to him he was being entirely honest. “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Then we can’t tell you. Think about it,” Claudia said.

  Everyone waited while Lukin thought. His first thought was that his friends were being as unreasonable as Olga had been. Here he was, having behaved like a prince for once and rescued Ruskin, and instead of telling him how clever he had been, they were asking him to think. It made no sense. But while he thought that, his immense satisfaction at rescuing Ruskin began to melt and crack a little. Uncomfortable feelings began to wriggle out from under it. Perhaps he had ridden roughshod over Olga a little. But behaving like a prince made you do that. He found he needed to move about, so he went and handed Ruskin the signed and sealed parchment. “There,” he said, and then, before he could stop himself, “Did she really mean that, about never speaking to me again?”

  Everyone knew Olga, her pride and her straightforwardness, and they answered, “Yes!” in chorus, and continued to watch him.

  “Don’t all stare at me like that!” Lukin said irritably. He wondered whether to go away like Olga and be alone for a while. But as soon as he thought of being alone, by himself entirely, he began to see that there was a great yawning pit inside him, of hurt that Olga did not want him anymore. Olga had become the person he relied on. She understood him. She knew when he was making a joke and when he was being serious; that was why it was so astounding that she had not seemed to know he was lying to the dwarfs when she had been his staunch ally in all the other troubles. She had lent—no, given—him money for clothes. She had handed him a priceless notebook without hesitation in Wermacht’s first class, and she had conjured up a smelly monkey to help him, though—as she had confessed to him later—she truly hated calling up monsters; it made her feel unclean. So why, why had she run off now? He had not known she could be so feckless. “Do you think perhaps I should go after her and talk to her?” he asked.