Ross Lawhead (34 page)

Swiðgar frowned. “What you say may be true, but then again, it may be that the path lies some farther distance up and we do not know it yet.”

“Of course,” said Daniel, “but I don't think so. Remember what Ealdstan said? Gád would want to make sure that he could get to his heart quickly if he needed to. So the hiding place wouldn't be too far away. Besides, those gnomes have been wandering everywhere and haven't found a thing. No, we went wrong at the start of this, somehow.”

“A riddle!” Ecgbryt exclaimed gleefully, rubbing his hands together. “Now my blood is running and my feet shall go no slower. Come, æðelingas, I wist you will have a job to keep up.”

Daniel and Ecgbryt virtually leapt back down the way they had come, with Freya and Swiðgar trailing behind them. But after a few steps, she hesitated and stopped, wanting to turn to Swiðgar, who she knew was still standing there unhappily. She decided not to in the end, thinking it might embarrass him. Instead, she spent an extra long time adjusting her pack.

Behind her, Swiðgar said something she didn't understand, and then there came a crash, a smash, and a rattling clatter as the lanterns bounced into the darkness. It startled her, but she hid this by hiking her pack up onto her shoulders. Then Swiðgar passed her with his enormous strides and she hurried to catch up to him.

5

They made their way back to the big cavern. The journey was uneventful and embarrassing, and bad feelings still hung in the air. Freya only hoped that they could solve the riddle quickly so that they could get on with their journey and put the unpleasantness behind them.

After a time they were able to see the purple glow of Gegan's lamp through the worming tunnel. They unslung their packs when they came to the mining camp and stood a fair ways off from the static gnome chief and his orbiting clansmen.

“So, what are we looking for, Freya?” Daniel asked. “We're underneath Britain, wedged between solid rock—it has to be a tunnel.”

“We have plenty of tunnels, but we think that they're here to distract us. So maybe it's a tunnel that doesn't look like a tunnel.”

“A hidden tunnel?”

Freya nodded. “Let's start looking.”

The two of them, and after a short time the knights also, began hunting around the abandoned campsite. Daniel was searching the rack of lamps again to see if it concealed a hidden doorway, when, taking a step back, his calf bumped against a gnome. Startled, he flinched away and let out a surprised grunt. There were not one but four gnomes standing at his feet. “I nearly trod on you,” Daniel said. “What are you doing here?”

The gnomes just stood, looking up at him. “Freya? Ecgbryt?” he called. They turned to him and bumped into gnomes of their own. Swiðgar almost squashed one completely, except that he shifted his foot at the last instant.

“What do you want?” Freya asked the gnomes. They just stood looking vacantly up at her. “Guys?” she asked nervously. “What's going on?”

Daniel and the two knights had begun to draw away from the corners they had been hunting in to stand closer together, and the gnomes followed their footsteps.

“Are you trying to help us?” Freya asked her gnomes, bending forward slightly as she slowly edged towards the others. “Are you trying to stop us?” The gnomes said nothing, just kept following.

Freya joined the others, who were trying to gently push the gnomes away with their feet. She looked up to the rest of the Gegan clan and saw that more gnomes were leaving the group and wandering towards them. Except for two.

Two of them were heading towards . . .

The well.

It all clicked into place for her at that moment. The Gegan gnomes' chief did know where the exit was, and while its main thought was to keep them away, it couldn't help also thinking about what it was keeping them away from—which was the well, another tunnel hidden, but in plain sight. Freya nudged Daniel and pointed. He looked at it for a moment before his eyes grew wide, and a smile flashed across his face. They silently communicated to the two knights, and they pushed through the growing circle of gnomes and collected their packs. They brushed aside the gnomes that were clinging to them or who had climbed on top of them.

They had just turned towards the well when they heard:

“Where are you going?”

“Where are you going?”

“Stay here.”

“Stay away from there.”

“Get ready, boys.”

They paused instantly, and then Swiðgar said, “Let us be swift, æðelingas—the gnomes are starting to turn.”

“Do they know?”

“They've twigged it.”

“But do they know?”

“They've figured it out.”

“Get them!”

As one, the gnomes leapt forward, gripping at their legs and climbing upwards.

“Run!” shouted Ecgbryt, booting a gnome halfway across the encampment. Daniel and Freya struggled forward, trying to shake the gnomes off of them. It was hard work, as their little pudgy hands gripped their clothes tenaciously.

“Slow them down!”

“Weigh them down!”

“Stab them!”

“Slit their throats!”

At these alarming cries, one of the gnomes that had swung onto Freya's sleeve produced a knife from its belt. Its blade was only two inches long, but it looked very, very sharp. Whipping her arm away, she sent it flying, just as she heard Daniel cry out.

He reached down and clawed a gnome off of his shin and threw it away from him. More and more of the gnomes were producing knives. The well bristled with them now; the whole rest of the clan of gnomes was now lining its rim, waiting for them.

Daniel had an idea, though, and glanced across to the gnome chieftain, still atop the rock near his the purple lantern. He was standing, hands clenched at his sides, glaring at them in anger, but there were no gnomes around him, and none between the two of them. Daniel saw his chance and jumped towards the chief, clearing the heads of several gnomes around him.

The gnomes were fast and energetic, but no match for a boy running at top speed. In any case, it was only a dozen steps before Daniel had reached him. During that time, he had shaken the gnomes from him and drawn his sword.

“No!”

“Stop him!”

“Help!”

“Don't!”

“Please!”

“Mercy!”

Biting down on his lip, Daniel brought his sword down and cleaved through Gegan, the chief gnome. The sword entered the gnome's shoulder and sunk to his belly. A second later the small, rotund little creature was dead.

The gnomes exploded into a frenzy. The ones that were on either the knights or Freya let go and fell to the ground. The gnomes lining the well ran all different directions, bumping into each other and falling in and off the well itself.

They scattered, screaming and wailing into the darkness. Soon they were gone from sight.

Wincing, and trying not to vomit, Daniel shook the dead body of the gnome off of his sword. It fell to the ground with a
plop
.

“That was fast thinking, Daniel,” Ecgbryt said. “Well done.”

“You gave me the idea for it,” Daniel said, wiping his sword with a bit of his leather coat and sheathing it again.

“Let's move on,” Swiðgar said. “Before the Ergan gnomes come back.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Faerie Fayre

1

Now . . .

Daniel awoke just as the sky—where he could see it between the billows of the smoking woodpiles—was just starting to lighten and the stars had begun to fade. Finally his body was adjusting to the incredibly long days.

During the night, the collier had extinguished the fires and was breaking open the first mound. He had paused in his task and was resting his hands on his shovel, his lips moving as if he were talking to someone. As Daniel watched him, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, he thought he saw a shadow standing before the collier, which was roughly the size of a person.

The collier stood as if listening now, and then inclined his head and raised his arm in a farewell. The shadow evaporated and the collier turned back to his work.

Daniel sipped some water from a bowl taken from the cistern and relieved himself behind the hut. After taking a sip from the breakfast bottle and ignoring the gnawing pit of hunger in his stomach, he picked up a shovel and went to join the collier.

They shared a “good morning” nod.

“My wife will be here, perhaps this afternoon,” the collier announced. Daniel was surprised; he hadn't considered that the collier might be married.

“Is that who you were talking to?” Daniel asked. “Where is she now?”

“Not far off. I instructed her to bring food, and she says she has managed to find some.”

“Oh, thank you so much. If she was closer, would she have been clearer?”

“You could not see her clearly? Discern her features?”

“No, she just looked like a shadow to me.”

The collier grunted. “Little matter,” he said after a time. “Are you ready now to help sort?”

“Ready and willing,” Daniel said with a smile.

They worked in silence. During one of their breaks towards noon, the collier's wife arrived. She was leading a horse and cart and seemed, to Daniel, to be fairly old, with grey hair and a graciously wrinkled face. But her eyes and skin gleamed with a youthful sheen, her movements quick and graceful. She was willow-thin, and dressed in a bodice and skirt made up of many different layers of thin, coloured cloth. Her hair was braided around the crown in a crescent shape and cascaded down her back to her waist. As the sunlight filtered into the clearing, Daniel thought it almost glowed.

“Hello, husband,” she said, dropping the horse's rein and dashing up to him. He gathered her in his long, knotty arms and held her close. “I've missed you.”

The collier's wife's eyes then swept over Daniel. “Who is your new helper?” she asked.

“I do not know his name,” the collier said, “but I have known him to be a good worker this past ten day. The young Marrey lad sent him.”

“Tch!” the woman said in a chiding tone, still looking at Daniel.

“Imagine not knowing a fellow worker's name in all that time. But that's my Kæyle.”

Daniel shot the collier—Kæyle—an inquisitive look.

“And you haven't told him yours it seems. I'll never understand men, though I live to be a hundred thousand. My name is Pettyl,” she said, giving a slight curtsey.

“I'm Daniel.” He explained where he had come from and that he was trying to get back.

“So,” Pettyl said when he had finished, “why don't you two work a spell longer, and I'll fix lunch.”

Daniel and Kæyle returned to the first pile and continued sifting and sorting into the barrels. Lunch for Daniel was the food that Pettyl had brought with her—fresh fruits and nuts that Daniel had never seen before. He tried not to eat too much too quickly and stopped when he felt his stomach start to ache. The fruit he enjoyed most was purple and curved like a banana but wider and flatter with a thin skin that could be eaten and soft, juicy flesh, like a grapefruit. He thanked Pettyl profusely afterwards.

They toiled late into the evening and with Pettyl's help they managed to finish packing the charcoal. Kæyle announced that they would depart for the market at the break of the next day.

Daniel ate a hearty supper of more fruits and nuts and fell asleep with the satisfaction of a hard job finished.

He awoke the next morning, aching as he always did since coming to Elfland, but still exhausted, unrefreshed by his sleep— which was odd, since he had slept the entire night through.

The horses had already been hitched to Pettyl's cart, which was larger than the one the collier used for moving wood around, and, Kæyle had loaded the barrels of charcoal, stacking them two high, lashing them to the sides of the cart with rope.

The sky was still not fully bright when they were ready to start off. Kæyle and Pettyl sat in the front of the cart on the driving seat; Daniel made a place next to the provisions box and atop the bundle of cloth that would become their trade tent. When everyone was settled, Kæyle announced, “I will ask the forest for a good road to the market.”

Kæyle faced the forest and began to sing.

It was a song with no words, or at least none that Daniel understood. It started low in Kæyle's chest and grew into a reverberation that came from nowhere and everywhere. Then his call began to rise and fall in soaring major notes and falling minors, before eventually settling into a repetitious melody. The trees before Kæyle swayed and shifted, making way for the cart in a way that made Daniel's head spin—they seemed to be moving, but not moving, like they were shifting place into somewhere they had always been. Finally the tune began to break down, devolving into disparate notes and phrases that were common to the piece. And then it was over.