The Disappearing Dwarf (38 page)

‘I’m hungry,’ the Squire announced ponderously, squinting out the window at the fray. ‘We’ll eat something.’

‘Good idea,’ Bufo said. ‘What shall we have?’

The Squire held the stuffed newt up and gave it a look. ‘This isn’t a cheese?’ he asked in a voice filled with the hope that Bufo would disagree.

‘No.’ Bufo confirmed. ‘It’s not a cheese. We’ll find a cheese.’

But the Squire turned the newt in his hand as if suspecting that from another angle, from beneath perhaps, if might turn out to be a cheese after all.

Selznak stirred on the floor, so the Squire wandered over to him and squeezed the newt into his face again, perching the thing thereafter across his nose and forehead.

‘That’s the Strawberry Baron,’ Gump reported, nodding down toward where the Baron had reappeared on his horse.

‘Zippo’s father,’ Jonathan told him.

The Professor gave him an astonished look. ‘No?’ he said.

For a fact. Zippo told me so himself.’

The Squire seemed skeptical. ‘That man is a strawberry?’

Bufo pulled the Squire away from the window. ‘No, he’s not,’ Bufo explained. ‘He owns all the strawberries in this part of the world. Tons and tons of them.’

‘Is that enough?’ the Squire asked.

‘Why,’ Bufo said, ‘I suppose it is. I don’t really know. It mightn’t be. Let’s find the kitchen.’

With that Bufo and the Squire and Gump and, of course, Ahab, who was alerted to the significance of kitchens, went off down the stairs. Below, the battle was running down. Half the men stood about with no goblins at all to chase. Escargot and Dooly appeared, waving at several soldiers nearby and acting altogether nonchalant, as if they’d just dealt fairly handily with a few goblins themselves. Escargot went poking through the weeds, looking up toward the window a couple of times in order to figure out where the globe was likely to have landed. He stooped after a moment, picked it up, gave the two of them above in the window the high sign, and strolled off down the path toward the sea.

Dooly hesitated for a moment, said something to Escargot, and pointed back up toward the window. But Escargot didn’t wait; he just hurried on, and Dooly, looking once or twice behind him, stepped along lively to keep up.

‘How is Miles?’ Jonathan asked abruptly.

‘Not well,’ the Professor replied. ‘He’ll live, but he won’t be traveling much for a bit. Not for a good bit. What’s Escargot up to here? He hasn’t got to run off with the globe. None of us want it.’

‘He’s more concerned with the Strawberry Baron, I suppose. Something having to do with stealing a barge of strawberries. I overheard Zippo mention it.’

‘He’s taking off, then!’ the Professor yelled. ‘He’s off without us. Scoundrel!’

The Strawberry Baron by then had dismounted and was walking back and forth before a crowd of captured goblins, whacking his riding crop into the palm of his hand, shouting at them. He seemed to see Escargot’s receding form at just about the same time that the Professor began hollering at him through the broken window. The Baron pointed at Escargot, asked something of a man beside him, pointed again, and, with one hand smashing down the hat atop his head, went running off down the rocky meadow in pursuit, calling orders over his shoulder.

‘Your horse!’ the Professor shouted. ‘Ride after them!’ Then he turned to Jonathan. ‘The man’s a fool. He’ll never catch them.’

‘Likely not,’ Jonathan agreed, secretly hoping for that very thing. ‘Let’s go down to see them off.’

On the way downstairs they ran into Gump, Bufo, and the Squire, who had, quite clearly, found the kitchen. ‘Have a look at Miles,’ the Professor told Bufo as he and Jonathan trotted past. They dashed out across the meadow and down toward the beach. Before they were halfway there, however, they could see that the chase had ended. The Strawberry Baron and four of his soldiers stood atop the rocks watching Escargot and Dooly paddle away through a small swell in the direction of the submarine some hundred yards off shore. Since no other boats offered themselves, there could be no further pursuit.

In the space of a few minutes, the two clambered aboard the submarine, set the canoe adrift, and disappeared into the hold. Whirring and splashing noises reached Jonathan and the Professor as they stood near the others, watching lights blink on behind the portholes and water
sploosh
out from various apertures along the side. The undersea device shuddered once, let out a sigh like a teakettle might that had a broken whistle, and sank beneath the swell.

‘Who axz
you
, then?’ the Strawberry Baron asked suddenly in a voice that made it clear he’d stand no foolery. ‘Friends of this thief?’

The Professor laughed out loud. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we’re not. I am Artemis Wurzle and this is Jonathan Bing. We’re acquaintances, in fact, of Cap’n Binky, and we’ve subdued the dwarf you know as Sikorsky. He’s in the tower there, yonder, doused with a sleeping potion.’

The Strawberry Baron sent his four companions away at a run toward the tower.

‘If you please, sir,’ Jonathan said very diplomatically, ‘I’d like to say a few words on behalf of your son.’

The Baron tossed his head theatrically, flouncing the pink ruffles along his shirtfront. ‘I have no son,’ he said. ‘My son is lost to me.’

Jonathan wasn’t about to be impressed by his theatricality, and was tempted to tell him so. But for Zippo’s sake he went on politely. ‘That’s just the point. If it weren’t for Zippo, for your son, that is, we – none of us – would be alive. It was your son who set us free.’

The Strawberry Baron looked askance at him. ‘He’s a rascal, sir. A brigand. A seeker after fame.’

‘He was young,’ Jonathan said. ‘He quite simply made some mistakes. You don’t know this Dwarf. He held your son in thrall. He had great power, could make people do as he pleased. It was Leopold, in the end, who subdued him. Shook sleeping powders in his face. And he tried to capture Escargot too. They fought, sir, but the old man and his grandson locked Leopold into a room and fled.’

‘Is this true?’ the Baron asked.

‘Why would I lie about such things?’ Jonathan said, knowing full well why he’d lie about such things. It seemed to him that given his past conversations with Zippo, another lie or two could go a long way toward making things right. Jonathan put on his own theatrical face, a face filled to overflowing with seriousness and sympathy. ‘Have you heard, sir,’ he said to the Strawberry Baron, ‘the story of the prodigal son?’

‘What son?’ the Baron asked impatiently. ‘Polliwog? I don’t care about his son. I care about my own. Where is he, do you say?’

‘In the castle,’ Jonathan replied, and he and the Professor headed back toward Selznak’s castle in the wake of the Strawberry Baron. Trumpet blasts sounded from deep in the woods, the sound of Cap’n Binky’s forces on the hunt, routing out goblins, chasing down ghouls. ‘They’d best be out of the woods by nightfall,’ the Professor said to Jonathan as they hurried along.

Cap’n Binky must have had pretty much the same idea, for within a couple of hours there were no more trumpet blasts. The soldiers set up camp on the meadow, on orders from the Strawberry Baron not to enter the castle. They raided Selznak’s larder first, however, and cooked up a tremendous meal under the watchful eye of the Squire, who insisted upon sampling everything to see if it were poisoned or spoiled. None of it was.

Zippo and his father were soon reunited, and during the evening Jonathan coached Zippo about his alleged heroics. The following morning they broke camp and trekked away up the coast road, Selznak trussed up and stuffed into a sack in the back of a cart. At the crossroads, Cap’n Binky, the Strawberry Baron, Zippo, and their troops turned away inland, upriver toward the town of Grover where they’d cross the river on the ferry. They gave Jonathan and his company three ponies and a sledge on which to haul Miles. The Professor concluded that Miles had broken a leg in the fall, as well as getting knocked about a good bit. He could do little but lie on the sledge and rest.

So in midafternoon that day, the party tramped wearily along. Jonathan tried to buck himself up by reminding himself that the lot of them had quite succeeded in their plans. Selznak was overcome, was to be hung, in fact, at Grover. Squire Myrkle was saved, and was, as far as Jonathan could see, none the worse for wear. There he sat, atop one of the ponies, having a go at two loaves of bread he’d already chewed holes in and shoved up over either wrist. At intervals he’d pluck chunks off and scatter them on the road in order to feed a collection of birds that followed them along, waiting for that very occurrence. Bufo and Gump were busily and secretly making up an ending for their poem, now that the Squire wasn’t lost any more. All in all then, Jonathan thought, he should be thanking his lucky stars, as it were. But he didn’t feel at all like doing so. He felt like sitting down in a slump with his head in his hands. He liked the city of Landsend well enough, but he didn’t half like the idea of sitting about there waiting to leave. More than anything he wanted to be home, or at least to be back in his own familiar world. But the world of Twombly Town and the High Valley was farther away than ever, now that Escargot had flown and Miles was in no shape to travel. By the time Miles was well – in the six or eight weeks it would take for his leg to mend – who could say where the closest portal would be? They might well have to sail a thousand miles up the Tweet or across the ocean to find it. He wondered if Ahab could understand their plight. It didn’t seem so. He stuck fairly close to the bird troupe so as to get his share of the Squire’s leavings. Somewhere, however, Jonathan concluded, there was still a part of Ahab that missed walking in the woods with Talbot and missed chasing bugs out among the strawberry vines.

The Professor didn’t share Jonathan’s maudlin humor. ‘Abandoned us, did he!’

‘Well,’ Jonathan said, still not wanting to think ill of Escargot, ‘he feared for his life. He hadn’t any choice in the matter.’

‘Choice!
I’ll tell you about choice.’ The Professor shook a finger in Jonathan’s direction to illustrate his discussion of choice. ‘He
could
have chosen to leave us the globe, couldn’t he? We’d be out of here by now if he had.
He
didn’t need the globe, not to leave Balumnia anyway. He wanted it so that he could go thieving back and forth; that’s it in a nut. Greed is what we’re talking about here. He sold us out, that’s what. And if it weren’t for us, he’d have no bloody globe. He’d have half a useless treasure map and he’d still be a seaweed merchant.’

Jonathan protested a bit, but the Professor’s assessment, sadly, seemed to be pretty much the case. That bothered him almost as much as their not being able to find a way out of Balumnia.

It was just about dinner time when the company found itself winding round the long bend that led to the foot of the last, or perhaps the first, of the Thirteen Bridges. Gump and Bufo announced that they’d completed their poem, that the unfinished symphony had found a final movement. ‘Poor Squire Found,’ recited Gump in ponderous tones, ‘by Bufo Morinus and Gump Ooze of the territory, poor homeless wretches, cast away on Balumnian shores!’

The Squire clapped wildly at Gump’s introduction, pulverizing the remains of the loaves of bread that still encircled his wrists. The bird crowd went wild, sailing in and out and making off with enormous crusty chunks. ‘Do Ashbless now!’ the Squire shouted, clearly under the impression that Gump’s recital of the title had constituted the poem itself. ‘Do Ashbless! The one about the layer cake! The Squire wishes to hear the poem about the layer cake!’

‘It wasn’t a layer cake,’ Bufo said a bit crossly. ‘It was about a loaf of bread. Bread and starvation. Ashbless doesn’t write about layer cakes.’

‘Nor do we,’ Gump added.

But the Squire wasn’t so easily put off. ‘Bread!’ he cried, remembering. ‘Someone’s been at mine.’ He took a long look at his breadless wrists, wondering how they’d come to be in such a barren state. ‘Could you give me the loan of a layer cake, my good fellow?’ he asked Jonathan, turning around in his saddle and nodding.

Jonathan held his palms out to his side and shrugged. ‘I haven’t got one, Squire. But the next layer cake I run across will be yours.’

The Squire blinked at him for a moment. ‘Why will you run across the Squire’s layer cake? It’ll ruin it.’ He shook his head sadly, thinking of his ruined cake.

‘Squire,’ Bufo said. ‘There
is
no layer cake. Tonight we’ll have one though. A cake twenty feet high!’

The Squire looked at Bufo in amazement. ‘That’s impossible,’ he said. ‘But I have a hippo head on call in town. We’ll eat it.’

‘Good,’ Bufo said.

‘About the hippo head,’ said Gump slowly to the Squire. ‘What would you say to a good wildebeest head instead?’

‘Say to it?’ the Squire asked. ‘What did it say to me? What kind of a beast?’

Bufo shouted at the two of them to shut up, then himself recited Once again, ‘Poor Squire Found!’ in a loud voice. He launched immediately into the final stanzas of the poem that he and Gump had begun several days before and which had ended with the Squire aimlessly trudging through Balumnia.