The Disappearing Dwarf (11 page)

High in the mountains the river was considerably smaller, but what it lacked in size it made up for in energy as it raced along over the steepening slopes. Twickenham circled once over a cluster of cottages, and a group of elves surged out onto the meadows around them, waving up at the airship in the blue sky. Sheep and cattle wandered about on the hillsides, and it occurred to Jonathan that the whole scene below was what might be called idyllic.

In a few minutes, the cottages and the elves fell away behind, and shortly thereafter the forests became less dense. The trees seemed to be shrinking and growing sparse until finally there were only a few scattered and lonely junipers, twisted by the winds and almost bare of foliage. Then there were no trees at all, only patches of moss and grasses, blown by cold winds and nibbled by occasional elk and reindeer. The stream disappeared abruptly into a crevice in the rocks, reappeared several hundred feet farther up, then disappeared again.

The airship flew through mountain peaks that rose incredibly above, and Jonathan could see the tiny shadow of the ship on the rocks and cliff faces, pursuing them. Patches of snow appeared here and there in among the rocks. The patches spread and grew until there was nothing about them but snow and the sharp pinnacles and broken humps of gray stone. They skimmed over the top of a great ice sheet that shone silver in the sunlight. The ice began to glow as the airship rose still farther, and as they slanted round a tremendous outcropping of rock and ice and into the sharp rays of the sun, prismatic glints of color shone from deep within the ice as if innumerable gemstones were caught and held in the clear depths of the glacier – diamonds and emeralds and sapphires and rubies that scattered a thousand deep rainbows through the ice.

When it seemed as if there could be no more mountains to rise above, they sailed round a sharp, sawtooth peak and into the shadows of still another tremendous precipice. It began to look as if there was an infinitude of successive mountains, each range higher than the last. But when the airship rose over the top of that last precipice, there, spread out before them for what seemed like – and might well have been – a thousand miles, were no end of distant snowy peaks and shadowy valleys. Whole empires could have grown up and fallen again within that expanse of mountains, completely unknown to the little village of Twombly Town or, for that matter, to any of the villages of the high valley. Mountain peaks had always seemed a mystery to Jonathan, who was one of those people who fancied that some marvel lay not only on the other side, but quite likely among the tops of the mountains themselves. Once he’d crested those mountains in the airship, however, it was the unfathomable valleys that seemed so disquietingly mysterious. Here were a thousand of them, ten thousand. Who could say what creatures roamed their slopes and what manners of men dwelled there? Any sort of marvelous thing might be the case.

Just as Jonathan sat imagining a few of those marvelous things he saw – or thought he saw – what must have been an immense bird silhouetted against the distant snow. He watched it wing its way up out of a valley, soar for a moment on vast wings, then disappear again into shadow. Jonathan at first supposed he imagined the thing, for it would have had to have been a hundred miles away, but the Professor-grabbed his arm and said in a voice that was almost a whisper, ‘Did you see it?’

‘Yes,’ Jonathan replied, also whispering for no reason he could imagine other than because of the mystery of it. ‘How big must it have been?’

‘As big as this ship,’ the Professor answered. ‘Bigger even.’

‘A dragon?’ Jonathan wondered aloud.

The Professor gave him a look that suggested dragons were unlikely outside fables and fairy tales. ‘It’s more likely,’ Professor Wurzle explained, ‘that it was some sort of gargantuan prehistoric bird. A tremendous pterodactyl quite possibly.’

Both of them watched, hoping the bird would reappear, but nothing else broke the snowy vastness of the barren landscape.

‘Look up there.’ The Professor pointed toward the sky. Jonathan peered through the glass of the porthole window at a sky covered with stars glowing like brilliants in the deep, purple-blue of the heavens. The sun stood out among them as if quite willing to share the sky with its fellows.

‘Strange, that.’ Jonathan wouldn’t have thought, all things considered, that there was much possibility of the stars putting in an appearance while the sun shone.

‘Altitude explains it,’ the Professor told him. ‘It’s a matter of the density of the aether.’

‘Ah,’ said Jonathan, who was satisfied, actually, just to know that such a wonder existed.

In the distance a bank of clouds lay on the mountains, and it was toward those clouds, dark and billowing and rumbling with occasional thunder, that the airship soared. They seemed to be dropping toward the snowy slopes and were soon enveloped in the gray mist of the clouds. Snow swirled outside the windows and the airship rose and dipped suddenly on the wind before coming to rest on the slope of the mountains.

At first, nothing was visible outside the airship but the swirling snow. Then in occasional moments of calm, Jonathan could see the mottled deep gray black of the granite mountainside and the brilliant white of the snow lying against it. There in the wall of rock was what at first appeared to be the arched mouth of a cave. It was, however, too symmetrical, too clearly outlined to be a natural recess, and Jonathan realized that what they had settled in front of was a door – the eastern door, as Miles had called it, and that through that door lay the land of Balumnia.

Jonathan was struck with the fact that he had only a light jacket and sweater with him – hardly the things for traipsing about glaciers. It seemed a strange place to undertake a search for Squire Myrkle. He had learned, however, that as far as elf doings were concerned, it was best not to assume anything; so that’s what he did.

Miles rose and wrapped his cloak around himself as if the thin robes would protect him from the sailing wind and snow. With his hat smashed down over his forehead, he disappeared forward. A moment later, Jonathan watched him out in the snow, bent over, his robes flailing and whipping about him, the ivory head atop his hat whirling and glowing. Snow flew, obscuring the wizard entirely for the space of a long minute. Then he was visible again, hunched in a weird posture before the door, waving his right hand at it as if expostulating the necessity of its opening up.

Twickenham bustled back with Thrimp and told the rest of the company to ready themselves. The aisle turned into a confusion of knapsacks and jackets and caps and walking sticks, and the confusion was doubled by everyone’s wanting to watch the magician perform his gesticulations before the door. Gump put on Bufo’s jacket and Bufo got Gump’s hat. Then the two of them accused each other of idiocy and made a complicated and inexplicable trade of a variety of garments until they were finally satisfied, all the time rushing to the windows to check Miles’ progress.

The thin wizard stood before the door, arms akimbo, his dark robes sailing, the snow swirling about him. Slowly, the dark face of the door paled a bit and seemed to shimmer as if a slowly brightening light were being shined on it. Through the transparency that had been the iron door could be seen the blue of a summer sky and the green of vegetation. An amazed cow wandered by beyond the opening, looking back at the wizard with a face full of stupefaction.

‘It’s time,’ Twickenham called. ‘Hurry.’ And the four of them filed down the plank and onto the frozen hillside. ‘Good luck, lads,’ was the last thing Jonathan heard Twickenham say. His own goodbye was carried off by the wind which was sharp as an icicle. Jonathan’s cloth jacket might as well have been a fishnet for all the good it did. But in a matter of seconds the five of them hunched through the portal and clustered around the befuddled cow. Behind them the snow still blew, great flakes sailing through onto the grass of the meadow on which they stood. The opening faded as if the light that had shone on it was being slowly switched off. Twickenham’s airship was a long batwinged shadow against the snow, and as they watched, it rose slowly into the sky and disappeared. The wind ceased to howl, the snow ceased to blow, and Jonathan realized that he was standing before an iron door set in the grassy side of a hill. It was summertime once again, and the closest mountains were just barely visible in the hazy blue distances.

They stood in the middle of a pasture, ankle high in clover, the air roundabout heavy with the sweet smell of the round, purple blossoms. A dozen cattle, huge shaggy things that ripped up great tufts of grass, lumbered along, paying them little mind. The opening of the door and the wind and sleet that had blown through for the space of half a minute had momentarily puzzled the beasts. The sudden closing of the door ended their puzzlement. Jonathan admired that sort of placidity, that genial acceptance of inexplicable or impossible events. He’d never been able to take things quite as philosophically as a cow could.

He was doing a pretty good job with the door, though. That it was in some respects an impossibility didn’t bother him much; he was developing a cavalier attitude toward such things. What did bother him was the sudden realization that it would likely not be an easy thing to descend from those incredible heights in the White Mountains once they had found the Squire and wanted to return. In fact, he hadn’t given the whole issue half the thought it deserved. Besides, he knew, the possibility, the likelihood even, existed that they would never find the Squire.

As the members of the company removed their jackets, packed them away, and trudged down along the cow path through the pasture, he asked Miles about all this. ‘What will Twickenham do now?’

‘He has his work cut out.’

‘Do we have some sort of rendezvous planned?’ Jonathan asked. ‘How long will he wait before he flies back up to the door to pick us up?’

‘I don’t believe he’ll do anything of the sort. He’ll most likely spend a few weeks on the river.’

‘On the river!’ the Professor exclaimed, catching Jonathan’s drift. ‘How in the world are we expected to get out of here? We’ll freeze like smelts in the White Mountains.’

‘We won’t go back through the White Mountains,’ Miles explained, tramping around the edge of a pond that had lapped over a section of the path. The shallow water was alive with splashing frogs who leaped out of their way.

‘Now that makes more sense,’ the Professor said.

‘Not as much as it would seem,’ Miles went on. ‘You see the door won’t be here after we find the Squire.’

‘Where does it go?’ Gump asked facetiously, ‘to the coast?’

‘Perhaps,’ Miles said. ‘The doors seem to have something to do with the four seasons, although nobody knows just what. We were lucky we made it through when we did. We would have had to wait for the summer solstice and the chance that the Northern portal would appear. It may not, you know.’

‘It may not!’ Jonathan was beginning to worry. ‘That’s pretty thick. I’m not sure we were lucky to have made it through. How in the world will we get out?’

Miles smiled. ‘We’ll find the globe.’

‘It just occurred to me,’ Jonathan replied, ‘that there’s the chance the Squire might just pop back through the very door he came through. He might be eating strawberries and cream at Myrkle Hall right now.’

‘He might,’ Miles said. ‘But I don’t think so. He’d have to wait a bit, if I understand the working of the Lumbog globe. And even if he is, we still have a bit of work to do. I told you back in Hightower there was more to this than met the eye, that there’d be trouble ahead.’

‘I suppose you did,’ Jonathan said, suddenly regretting that he’d complained. He’d never favored moaning about his fate, and here he was being pettish.

The path wound along through an oak woods, then out onto a pasture again, then once more into the woods. The sun’s rays slanted through the boughs, stippling the forest floor with light. They passed two cottages almost immediately, then saw none for a good mile. The trail finally joined something more like a road that curved along the bank of a fair-sized river. Late that evening they came upon a small village where they ate supper at a tolerably good inn.

Jonathan had been vaguely surprised all day to see that Balumnian oak trees grew the same sort of acorns as did the oak trees of the Oriel Valley. He half suspected that the people of Balumnia would be otherworldly somehow, that they would walk on their hands or have pig snouts for noses. But it turned out that Balumnians appeared to be pretty much the same as the people he was used to seeing. There was nothing, in fact, very magical about Balumnia at all. It was pretty much like anyplace else.

When they sat down at the inn, Jonathan’s first thought had to do with the nature of Balumnian ale. It would be a tragedy if it turned out that ale hadn’t even been invented in Balumnia or that what passed as ale was nothing more than swamp water with dirt in it or fermented onions. The ale, however, turned out to be the real thing – Old Hogweed, it was called – and what’s more, it was served cold, a pleasant surprise on a warm summer evening.

There was some debate at the table over whether to push on after supper. It was such a pleasant night that they might well walk another five miles and sleep under the stars. It seemed like a good idea to Jonathan who, by then, had come to fancy the prospect of a walking tour. He’d had an uncle who took such tours, armed with a book of poetry and a fishing pole, and the whole notion seemed fairly romantic. Sleeping under the stars on a summer night lent itself to such romance.

Gump and Bufo weren’t quite as keen on the idea as was Jonathan, and were quick to point out that they had walked a good ten or twelve miles that afternoon already and that, all things considered, it was a peculiar thing to sleep in the open when there was such a superior inn at hand. Miles didn’t much care one way or the other. In the middle of the debate, food arrived and settled the issue. They worked their way through a big steak and mushroom pie and a second pint of ale, then nibbled cheese and strawberries. After dinner, their spirits having been lifted exceedingly by the food, they took the innkeeper’s suggestion and had a little snifter of brandy and a cup of coffee. Rescuing the Squire, all in all, was turning out to be a moderately jolly time.