The Elfin Ship (19 page)

Jonathan resumed the conversation. ‘I believe we’re what they call fated, Professor. These cheeses are going to Seaside and we along with them. So far we’ve had no choice but to be part of hatching plots.’

‘You’re no doubt correct, Cheeser. It seems more likely the case all the time. I joined this party, as you know, in order to record a bit of natural history. But my pens and paper are gone, and, I’ll admit, I’ve become quite unnaturally lazy. When we get to Seaside, however, I’m going to do a paper on these airships. The bat-winged craft strikes me as implausible, while perhaps possible. But the schooner last night was a clear-cut impossibility.’

‘It didn’t appear to be an impossibility to me, Professor. I believe I even saw the crew moving about on deck.’

‘Hallucination, likely.’

‘All of us hallucinated?’

‘Mass hallucination. Entirely possible, Jonathan. It’s happened before, you know. I’ve often thought that the Beddlington Ape never shouted poetry at all. The audience just thought he did.’

‘A talking ape isn’t half as weird, as I see it, as that ship last night. I’m glad that it belongs to the elves and not this dwarf.’

‘According to Dooly,’ the Professor whispered, ‘it belongs to this cloud-fishing, cheesemaking chap from who knows where. I’m not sure I like the sound of that entirely either.’

‘Well, if he’s a cheesemaker …’ said Jonathan, trying to add a bit of humor to the conversation.

But the Professor, apparently, didn’t catch on, for he was swept up in theories of hallucinations and clear-cut impossibilities. It was about then that a sizable group of pelicans came winging past, each one flapping its wings in long, easy strokes. The Professor pointed the stem of his pipe at them.

‘There you are,’ he said in a tone of voice that made it seem as if the three words were, somehow, an explanation of a mystery. Jonathan listened intently without inquiring as to the Professor’s intended meaning, since he knew from experience that a scientific revelation was in the offing.

‘Wing flappage,’ the Professor stated, ‘is the key to heavier-than-air flight. Only two forces are known to science which overcome the inherent nature of objects to seek solid ground – to plummet, that is, groundward: wing flappage and heated air. Pelicans make use of the former; the bloated fire toads of the Wonderful Isles utilize the latter to fly from island to island. Yet this ship, with a quantity of weighty passengers aboard, whirls aloft as it will.’

‘You’re absolutely correct, Professor,’ said Jonathan as he watched the pelicans sail away upriver. ‘Although I remember that G. Smithers wrote a story about flying carpets that could carry whole trunkloads of diamonds back and forth between two kings of Oceania. They were such fine friends and were so generous that they gave increasingly finer gifts to each other daily. Finally they reached the point where they gave away the entirety of their kingdom to each other every afternoon for a week, until one, having waited some years for just such a thing to happen, accepted the other’s gift one afternoon and neglected to give his in return. It made a beggar out of the other king, but things turned out well.’

‘How was that?’ asked the Professor.

‘The point was that it’s better to be a wise beggar than a foolish king, I think.’

The Professor thought about it, then decided that G. Smithers was a nincompoop. ‘That’s all lies, all that kings of Oceania business. G. Smithers made it up. But science, my good Bing, can’t be made up. It has its roots in deeper seas, in the forces that make order a certainty and hold the flux at bay.’

‘Flax?’ Jonathan repeated, wondering why in the world grain had to be held at bay.

‘Order over chaos,’ the Professor continued wisely. ‘The immutable governing of disorganization by scientific law! That’s the secret of the flappage of wings and of the flying fire toad phenomena of the Wonderful Isles. Everything has its explanation. Every marvel is as common in the eyes of science as a strip of cured ham.’

‘That ship last night was a trifle more astonishing than any cured ham I’ve ever seen,’ Jonathan said. ‘Not that I’m questioning scientific principle.’

The Professor sat thinking for a moment, nodding vacantly at Jonathan’s comment. When he spoke finally, it had nothing at all to do with science or cured ham. ‘That was the same sort of ship,’ he said softly. ‘The same bloody sort of ship. It had to be.’

‘The same as which?’

‘As the one on Stooton Slough. As the elf galleon from the Oceanic Isles.’ The Professor was fairly whispering.

‘I thought you said it wasn’t from the Oceanic Isles,’ said Jonathan.

‘I’m not at all sure. It’s a quandary. The rune could have read either sea or sky, that much I know. And now we’ll assume it’s the sky. But an island in the sky?’

‘Of course,’ said Jonathan.

‘You don’t mean?’

‘What else?’ asked the Cheeser.

Just as Professor Wurzle was about to utter the truth, Dooly, grinning like a hippo, blurted out, ‘The moon!’ in such a wild voice that Jonathan and the Professor jumped in surprise. Ahab, supposing that some fearful segment of his dreams had become a reality, awoke with a lurch and nearly bowled off howling across the raft. He came to in a moment, however, only to doze off again.

‘Dooly,’ said the Professor, in a kind but very authoritative and condescending voice, ‘recently I’ve seen two inexplicable marvels. Indeed both might have been the same marvel. I’m not at all sure. They involve weighty objects sailing in the heavens with a blatant disregard for scientific principle. I don’t pretend, of course, to be learned in that field, but given a sufficiency of paper, a universal calculation chart, and a volume of Lord Piedmont’s observations on physical laws, I could, in time, explain such phenomena away.

‘But nothing, sir, not Lord Piedmont nor the Seven Sages of Limpus, could prescribe a method by which a terrestrial object could overcome the atmospheric tides and the pressures of the suspended globes of the heavens in order to sail to and from the moon!’

And he emphasized the word ‘moon’ in such a final sort of way that Jonathan was half afraid Dooly would never gather enough courage to speak again. But he merely grinned and nodded and said that he didn’t know this Piedmont, nor any of the rest of that stuff neither. Then he shrugged at the two of them and said simply, ‘Magic’

The Professor looked saddened, no doubt regretting having gotten into an argument with, of all people, Dooly.

Jonathan patted his shoulder. ‘Remember what you said, Professor, about science holding the key to the side door?’

‘That was stuff. I was under the influence of the rays of the moon. No, Jonathan, I much prefer scientific explanation.’

But the Professor’s preferred explanation never suggested itself. It’s the wondering and speculating that’s worthwhile in the end anyway – all the solved puzzles in the world aren’t worth the one that’s unsolved. Or at least that’s the way Jonathan looked at the whole thing. He often thought, in fact, that
he’d
like to be a scientist instead of a cheeser. It would be a grand thing indeed to have great rooms filled with bubbling this and thats and coiled apparatuses and devices. Scientists always seemed to have something stewing, some weighty problem to ponder and could jump and race off in the middle of a conversation without seeming rude in order to put to the test some vital new theory that had sprung upon them unawares. It wouldn’t be a bad thing at all if, when a friend called, his housekeeper could say simply, ‘The master is in the laboratory,’ and usher in a wide-eyed visitor goggling at the terrible equipment heaped roundabout. He’d have to buy a long, white coat and spectacles that made his eyes look like plums and talk like the Professor – all that stuff about whirlabouts and universal calculation charts.

But then, of course, he couldn’t take Dooly’s side anymore in learned conversations. And he’d be busy all evening constructing graphs and charts and reading about the mutability of duck feathers or the properties of frozen water. There’d be precious little time for G. Smithers and all his magical kings of Oceania. That would all start to look like ‘stuff’ to quote the Professor. Also he’d have to be perpetually doing something – a condition which, that afternoon in the thin sunlight of early November and from the perspective of one lying on his back and drifting pleasantly with a pipe in his mouth down the old Oriel, seemed like far too much work. Besides, there probably wasn’t enough science to go around, and if he horned in on the profession it would be that much more quickly used up. Then the Professor would have to turn out and maybe become a cheeser and it would all add up to the same thing anyway. Jonathan sailed along thinking about all this but keeping it all pretty much to himself. Somehow it was a bit too cool for a nap; it was just a good day for doing nothing. Jonathan remembered G. Smithers having said that doing nothing was the most tiring job in the world – simply because you can’t quit and rest. Maybe G. Smithers
was
a nincompoop.

That afternoon they lunched on more cheese. The bread was gone, but there were berries and pickles aplenty. With each mile that fell away behind them the sun seemed to lose some of its sharpness, some of its radiant heat. A cool breeze sprang up after lunch, a coastal onshore wind that blew straightaway upriver and likely did so almost every afternoon. It brought with it the smell of the ocean every now and then, a smell of salt spray and kelp and fog and fish – maybe the finest smell there could be. Jonathan, anyway, thought that such was pretty much the case. But it was a sort of cold and lonely smell at the same time, a smell that carried with it the vastness and depth of the sea and everything those depths conjured up somewhere at the base of his mind.

Around two o’clock they passed a dwarf outpost. They halloed at the closed door, but it wasn’t until Ahab barked once or twice that anyone appeared – a dwarf with a beard nearly to his toes who carried a fearful-looking axe. The rafters waved at him, and he raised his axe in the air by way of returning the greeting.

‘Rather short with us, wasn’t he?’ the Professor commented.

‘Well,’ said Jonathan, ‘he can’t answer for his size.’ Then he looked at the Professor out of the corner of his eye.

‘I was referring to the look on his face, although it’s hard to tell with that beard and all whether he was smiling or frowning. Looked rather like a frown though, to me. And that was a pretty halfhearted wave, too.’

‘He’s probably had visitors over the past weeks who didn’t agree with him.’

The Professor nodded. ‘Either that or he thought a pile of kindling wood was shouting to him from the river. I hope he’s more amenable to the idea of travelers by the time the Squire and Bufo and the others come along. They’ll be ready for a bit of a rest by the time they make it this far.’

Beyond the outpost, the river widened even more, and its pace slowed to such a leisurely crawl that Jonathan began to wonder whether they
would
beat the linkmen to Seaside. Presently an island sprang up ahead of them, a thickly wooded, hilly sort of island which was likely covered with all nature of grand caves and turtle ponds. A single log-house perched atop one of the hills, and a jolly plume of white smoke rose from a stone chimney. Beyond the first island were two more, splitting the Oriel into thirds. The river seemed to have lost most of its vigor by that time, and would submit without complaint to being partially dammed up by a family of beavers or a tangle of pond lilies and driftwood.

When night fell finally they were drifting lazily, almost in midriver. The Professor tasted the water and declared it to be brackish – a sure sign that they were nearing Seaside. They decided to draw straws and keep watch in two-hour shifts. Jonathan pulled the first watch and puffed away on his pipe until the Professor and Dooly were sleeping away, then he too dozed off. The gray dawn broke without incident, and the rafters awoke to find themselves wet with foggy morning dew and passing the scattered grove of an outlying farm.

Piles of prunings from apple, cherry, and peach trees were heaped here and there amid the wide orchard rows that crackled with smoky fires. A stalwart dwarf stomped about close by watching the stuff burn. Some of the groves were spindly and unpruned, and all were leafless above a carpet of lush grass.

Jonathan imagined the pancakes and syrup being tossed down inside the farmhouse, the fresh eggs being fried, and the strips of bacon sizzling on open griddles. If he’d been tempted, he likely would have traded away every bit of cheese on board for a cup of coffee. The farms, as the day wore on, became more numerous and generally smaller. Clusters of cottages began to pop up here and there – little villages surrounded by acres of orchards and cozy beneath the pleasant smoke puffs of pruning fires. Long, narrow canals wandered off into the lowlands around the Oriel, canals lined with reeds and cattail and marsh lily. Jonathan could see someone, now and then, with a fishing line cast into one of the waterways.

The raft seemed to Jonathan to be moving at a frightfully slow pace, and there was no real hint – aside from a sort of feeling in the air – that they were nearing the sea. About noon, however, their speed appeared to increase, a phenomenon which the Professor said indicated a receding tide. Within an hour, that certainly looked as if it were true, for the closest bank of the river showed great patches of mud, and parties of dwarfs slogged upon them harvesting oysters from broad beds and moon snails from sand flats.

All in all it was a pleasant day for the rafters. They considered, at first, asking a passing craft to tow them along to port, but finally decided against the notion, choosing instead to laze along toward the sea and enjoy themselves. Around four or five in the afternoon a fog began to blow in, first in little wisps and snatches, then in banks of cottony white which sailed away upriver to leave a clear space for a bit before another wandered through. A foghorn moaned somewhere in the distance, and it was apparent to the rafters that the boats out on the river were becoming few, and those still out were hurrying away toward port. It occurred to Jonathan and the Professor that they’d be wise to do the same.