The Elfin Ship (24 page)

And that, apparently, was the end of the ‘conclave of war’. It hadn’t been much of a conclave. Most of those present hadn’t spoken a word. There hadn’t been any talk of battles or strategies or anything else – only questions about Theophile Escargot and his habit of borrowing jewelry and such. He seemed to be uncommonly ubiquitous; always racing about stealing rings, trading rings for pigs, pigs for beans, beans for octopuses, octopuses for undersea devices. He seemed to be a rather notorious and effective thief.

On the walk back to the inn, Jonathan and the Professor pondered all this, but came to no conclusions. Jonathan was relieved that he hadn’t been drummed into any army, but suspected that they hadn’t seen the end of all this business yet.

After a lunch of plaice and chips and a pint of ale, Jonathan and the Professor left Dooly to his own devices and walked the half mile along the coast road to Ackroyd’s bakery. The fog had pretty much cleared by midafternoon, and it was a fine autumn day, all things considered. The road wound in and out of the walls of the city, in among the shops and homes for a bit, then through a massive arch and along the seashore. The rocky coast was peopled by little islets, many of them simply clumps of weedy rock beaten by the tides and wind, and many with lighthouses atop them. One or two appeared to be forts, for again the muzzles of cannon were visible through dim ports. It would be a difficult coast to attack, all in all.

Children played along the sandy beaches, none of which were more than fifty yards across; and a fair number of dwarfs, some in hip boots, some with their pant legs rolled, clammed in the shallows, shoving long-tined forks beneath the sand.

The two rafters paused once or twice to peer into a particularly promising tide pool. Bright orange fish – garibaldi, likely – sported among sea-green anemones and purple urchins. Preposterous crabs and willowy nudibranchs wandered about, scavenging food and accomplishing necessary fish business. Obviously they could spend a day, a week even, fooling about in tide pools and never wear out, so they decided to press on toward the bakery and have done with their business. It took them all of two hours, in the end, to walk the half mile to Ackroyd’s bakery.

The bakery itself was a tremendous stone affair, and as soon as they got around to the leeward side of it they were overwhelmed by the smell of warm bread. It wasn’t a bad smell at all, but Jonathan puzzled over the fact that two loaves of bread in an oven smell far more wonderful than two hundred. It seemed to prove what his father had always said about moderation being a finer thing than whatever its opposite was – satiation or gluttony or something.

Ackroyd himself oversaw all the operations at the bakery, and throughout most of the year spent the better part of his day peeking into ovens, poking loaves of bread, directing lads with mops and buckets about the bakery and that sort of thing. Today, however, he was covered in baking flour and was mixing up a complicated batch of spices – most of them White Mountains spices from the elfin groves and ground barks from the Wonderful Isles. Until Christmas Eve, he told Jonathan and the Professor, he’d be at work on honeycakes. It was nothing but honeycakes after the first of November for him, for he was the only one who knew their secret.

He shook a bottle full of amber powder in the copper vat of spices, threw a linen cloth over the top of the thing, and led Jonathan and the Professor into a sort of office in the back of the factory. But it wasn’t the usual, dreary, and uncomfortable office; it had a window that opened up onto the sea, and it was lined with bookshelves. Across one wall was a tremendous fireplace with a hearth and face of carved tile and a mantel of some nature of translucent marble, almost the sea-green color of the tide pool anemones. On the walls were, appropriately enough, intricate pen-and-ink sketches and watercolors of astonishing pies and cakes, and one, amazingly, of Squire Myrkle nodding as if in approval over a monumental loaf of glazed cinnamon bread. The Squire had been younger when the painting was finished, but it was clearly he, with the same shoveled-into-his-clothing look about him.

Jonathan never cared much for business transactions, although that wasn’t because he didn’t, as they say, have a head for it. He knew, for example, the exact weight and value of his cheeses and, to the penny, the amount of Twombly Town coin in his sack. They would return with more kegs of cakes, finally, than the number of kegs of cheese they’d arrived with. And the elfin gifts which he would purchase from Twickenham would fill several more. Elfin gifts don’t take up much room, however, for they are usually small – the smaller the more wonderful, in fact. Sometimes they grow a bit later on or change shape, but four kegs of elfin gifts would satisfy all the children in Twombly Town.

It was only right that Jonathan made a bit of a profit on the whole affair; the cheeses, after all, were from his cheesery, and he had spent the past weeks out on town business. Although his profits were moderate, moderate profits being the only acceptable sort, they would be rather nice. It looked, however, as if he’d immediately have to give up most of the profit, for he’d lost his raft or what was left of it, in the bay. Not only did he feel responsible for the raft, but they’d have no way to get home unless they bought or rented a new one.

So he decided to broach the subject with Ackroyd who, after all, had done enough trading in his time to understand the niceties of river-rafting. ‘We have a problem with our raft,’ said Jonathan.

‘What raft?’ asked Ackroyd. ‘I heard it had gone entirely to smash. Sounds to me like you don’t have any raft at all.’

‘Quite,’ said Jonathan. ‘You’ve touched it exactly. We haven’t any transport upriver. Even our coracle is gone. Drifted away in the fog.’

‘Then you’ll need a new raft.’

‘Precisely,’ the Professor put in. ‘And a not inconsiderable raft at that. Something substantial. Rafts seem to run into rough times on the Oriel.’

‘Well,’ said Ackroyd, ‘you needn’t worry about rafts. There’ll be one for you to use.’

‘And the cost?’ Jonathan asked uncomfortably.

‘I can’t say,’ replied Ackroyd. ‘But I’d guess that a raft would be one of the advantages of the position you’re about to volunteer for. Don’t quote me on that; I’ve heard rumors.’

‘Ah,’ said Jonathan.

‘Position is it?’ The Professor sounded interested. ‘Volunteer?’

‘So to speak,’ said Ackroyd, figuring like sixty on a sheet of paper and piling little stacks of coin. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all. You’ll hear about it soon enough. Nothing dangerous, of course, just a journey upriver. An uncomplicated journey.’ Ackroyd looked addled, as if he had spoken out of turn. The door sailed open just then, and a wild-eyed dwarf lad with a face full of gooey dough charged in shouting about ‘the bread oven’ and ‘Binky the yeaster.’ Ackroyd leaped up and ran off, shouting that he’d come round to the inn for a pint later in the evening.

After that puzzling exchange, there was nothing for Jonathan and the Professor to do but gather up their receipts and coin and head back to the inn. They were both thinking all sorts of things. Jonathan felt downcast on the one hand, for he was coming to believe that he’d likely not see Twombly Town again, but he was happy about the possibility of obtaining a raft without having to spend every cent. He’d come to look a bit sourly on adventures by that time, having had his fill, and yet he couldn’t help but feel a bit puffed up over the notion of being a central figure in the river doings.

‘Professor,’ he said, ‘there’s one thing now that would make me a happy man.’

‘What’s that, Jonathan?’ asked Professor Wurzle, who seemed to be lost in thought.

‘I’d feel vastly improved, Professor, if you’d be willing to take half of this coin. I quite literally wouldn’t have made it this far without your help. You were the one, after all, who saved the kegs after the storm, and you’re an altogether fine traveling companion. What do you say?’

‘I say, Jonathan,’ said the Professor, ‘that I fully intend to profit from this venture. There will be books written and scientific grants obtained, and, quite possibly, not a little fame. I won’t take away your profits now just as I know you won’t take mine away six months from now. I was an uninvited guest anyway. It’s out of the question. Out of the question.’

Jonathan shook his hand, and they ambled up to the old Mooneye. ‘Then let me buy you a pint,’ said Jonathan.

‘Buy me two,’ said the Professor.

‘Done,’ said Jonathan.

Later in the day the Professor decided to take a bit of a nap while Jonathan just sat and squinted out into the afternoon sunlight. Dooly and Ahab put in a brief appearance, Dooly having somehow obtained a magic toad – although in what way the toad was magic he couldn’t say – and a bagful of paper seeds that would sprout into curious flowers when dropped into water. The Cheeser left the two experimenting with the wonderful seeds. He decided that Dooly had the right idea, that it would be regrettable to come home from Seaside without souvenirs – and he knew exactly what souvenirs he wanted.

At the glassblower’s shop Jonathan found the celestial orb he’d been so carried away by two days before. The price was dear, but seemed fair given the amazing nature of the things. The dwarf slid it into a little velvet bag and put the bag in a wooden box with a hinged lid.

Jonathan still had a good bit of coin left after the purchase, and he considered that it would likely be folly of some sort to return upriver with
too
much money. They’d probably just get waylaid and robbed by highwaymen or goblins. Therefore, all things considered, it would be wise to spend most of the rest of his money on books. Few thieves, when you think about it, bother stealing books. They either don’t go in much for reading or would have an impossible time carting away the books.

So he cut along back to one of the bookstores he’d been intending to investigate and found it open. A dwarf sat atop a stool within, playing chess with himself and seemingly in a rage about the way the game was progressing. But he was polite enough when Jonathan wandered in. Books were piled everywhere, on shelves leaning this way and that and angling up to the ceiling – everything covered by a thick layer of dust. Books which were out of reach overhead were gray with it, and Jonathan reflected that somehow the dust added to their appeal, as if books which had aged a bit like wine improved in some measure.

‘Everything’s half price,’ said the dwarf, one hand poised above a rook, ‘except the almanacs.’

‘Almanacs too popular for that sort of sale?’ asked Jonathan.

‘Not at all,’ said the dwarf. ‘The almanacs are free. Nobody wants them except the mice.’ He pointed to a heap of paperbound almanacs on the floor beside the counter. Three mice, one white and two white with brown spots, were methodically chewing strips of paper from the pages and hauling the scraps through a hole in the wall. Other mice could be seen capering along across the doorway that led into a second room of books. ‘The best mouse library on the coast rests within that wall,’ said the dwarf. ‘The little buggers must read like whizbangs. I can’t figure it out.’

‘They have a lot of free time,’ said Jonathan, who liked to think that mice would enjoy books as much as the next man. He started poking along up an aisle, leaving the dwarf to his chess game, and found no end of good stuff almost immediately. The first shelves were loaded with pirate adventure novels – something he’d never been able to pass up. If he were in Twombly Town he’d buy the entire lot of them, but he’d have to be selective in Seaside. The more books he bought, the more he’d lose if they were dumped into the river. On the other hand, what did it matter if he lost fifty books into the Oriel or if he lost a hundred? He’d end up with no books either way. The outcome was identical. He might as well buy what he wanted, after all, and worry about it later. It was far more fun that way. He held up a dark copy of the book called
The Pirate Isles
by someone with the ridiculous name of Oodlenose, and he asked the dwarf the price.

‘The price is on the inside cover,’ said the dwarf, moving his queen several squares ahead and then over two. Jonathan didn’t know much about chess, but he’d played enough to know that such a move was unsound. The dwarf slammed his hand against the oak countertop, the chessmen hopping and dancing in a little cloud of rising dust.

‘Did you see that?’ asked the dwarf.

‘I believe so,’ said Jonathan. ‘Odd move, that.’

‘Cheating, that’s what I call it! How can I win if he cheats?’

‘You can’t,’ said Jonathan. ‘Who is he anyway?’

‘My opponent,’ said the dwarf, motioning to a book lying open before him on the counter. The book, entitled
Peculiar Chess Moves,
was about three inches thick and had seen some use.

‘I’d use another book,’ said Jonathan. ‘Find another opponent.’

‘It’s the only one I have,’ said the dwarf. ‘It’s awfully rare. Paid a fortune for it actually.’

‘Ah,’ said Jonathan, seeing the logic of it. ‘It sounds like you’ll have to cheat too then. It’s only fair.’

‘I don’t do that,’ said the dwarf seriously.

‘Of course not,’ Jonathan said. ‘By the way, there’s no price at all in here, actually.’

‘Well how much is it worth, do you suppose, six pence?’

‘Easily,’ said Jonathan.

‘Then half that. Everything here is half price. Didn’t I tell you that already? Seems like I did. The almanacs are free, but you’ll have to wrestle the mice for them.’