The Elfin Ship (32 page)

‘They’re up to no good,’ whispered the Professor when the party was once again only flickering torchlight through the distant trees. ‘Where do you suppose they’re going?’

‘The first outpost maybe,’ said Escargot.

‘Then they’ll get a warm reception from the keeper,’ said the Professor. ‘He didn’t half like the look of Jonathan, Dooly, and me on our ruined scrap of a raft; imagine what he’ll think of a party of torch-carrying goblins.’

‘They could just as easily be heading for Snopes’ ferry,’ said Escargot.

Jonathan chuckled. ‘In which case, they may well run into the Squire’s party. Bad luck if they do.’

‘Let’s hope that they don’t run into anyone at night,’ said Escargot. ‘There’re too many goblins there to mess with, mates, and they ain’t just out to pour honey into people’s hats.’

‘This is unprecedented,’ said the Professor, lighting his pipe. ‘I don’t like the look of it much.’

‘What is it?’ asked Dooly.

‘Bad business,’ Escargot said to Dooly. ‘In more ways than one.’

Jonathan could ifnagine the squint-eyed look on Escargot’s face: and hoped he was as sure of himself as he sounded. It was more than acting and rough talk that they’d need before the voyage was through.

They decided to keep a watch that night. Escargot volunteered to take the first and was to wake Jonathan at one. The Cheeser would rather have taken the first himself, but the day’s pedaling had done him in, and he felt a bit limp, almost as if he were floating. By one, after only two hours of sleep, he’d be in no shape to stand watch.

But when he was shaken awake, sunlight was pouring in through the cabin window and Escargot was slapping water onto his own face out of the bowl, his cloak of invisibility heaped on his bunk. The smell of bacon and coffee filled the small cabin, and the Professor clanged away with their two frying pans on the cabin stove, waving a fork over the crackling bacon.

‘What time is it?’ asked Jonathan. ‘I missed my watch.’ He swung stiff legs to the floor. His calves and thighs felt as they should after a day of pedaling.

‘I missed mine for a week after I sold the thing,’ said Escargot. ‘Made a sundial out of a squid and it kept better time than my watch. Then I traded it away for that pocketwatch you heard about. Worst move I ever made. Nothing but pain ever come from that blasted pocketwatch. Gettin’ rid of that watch was the second biggest mistake. But I’m going after both of them mistakes now. If I would have kept my squid clock none of this would have come up. Think about it. Could you see all them elves and dwarfs and linkmen and goblins and who knows who else up in arms over a squid clock? It ain’t likely. They’re the craziest-looking things there is.’

Jonathan, by then, was up and testing his muscles. He walked like what one of those squatty-legged cavemen in the Twombly Town Museum must have walked like before he turned into a fossil. It occurred to Jonathan that it was likely that exercise caused fossilization – that it made you stiffer every day until you woke up frozen one morning and had to roll yourself out of bed. But he found that he limbered up fairly quickly. The smell of the coffee and bacon had a good effect.

‘Someone should have woke me up last night,’ said Jonathan. ‘I never could have done it myself.’

Escargot slipped the cloak on and vanished. ‘I didn’t do nothing all day yesterday but talk. You talk too much and you go crazy. It’s proven. Ain’t that so, Professor?’ The Professor nodded, but Jonathan suspected that he was just being polite. ‘So anyway,’ Escargot continued, ‘I figured that if I sat up all night and thought about this and that but didn’t say nothing it’d even itself out. The elves have a saying about that, about what a fine thing silence is. Leads to wisdom, they say. But you don’t have to live among ’em for more than an hour or so to know how much philosophy is worth. Which reminds me; do you know what it was that Blump said to me, just as their ship was a-settin’ sail the other night?’

‘No,’ said Jonathan. ‘I thought Blump set sail before we ever left for Thrush Haven.’

‘Nope,’ said Escargot, ‘they waited around for me. Blump’s a prize. Doesn’t have quite the brains that Twickenham has, but he’s a wit, I can tell you. Here he was, already aboard, sails spreadin’ all up and down the mainmast, and he shouts at me as me and Twickenham are off to the Mooneye. He shouts this, mind you, waving at the Squire all the time so as to call his attention to it. “Why,” he shouts, “did the linkman put a chair in his coffin?” Twickenham was for going on, but I had to hear, so I shrugs up at him. And laughing like a crazy man, he shouts, “So rigor mortis could set in!” Then laughs so hard he collapsed on the bloody deck and two elves had to help him to his cabin, him hootin’ and shoutin’ the damn fool punchline all the way. That’s an elf captain for you.’

‘An undeveloped sense of humor, certainly,’ said the Professor. ‘But I find that any jolliness at all is better than none.’

‘I thought the joke was pretty good,’ said Jonathan, who was repeating it to himself so as to remember it to tell Gilroy Bastable. Dooly, who wandered in in search of breakfast, asked, ‘Who was it who set in?’

‘Rigor mortis,’ Escargot explained.

‘Was he some kind of elf or something?’

The Professor tried to explain, but it made the joke incredibly foolish. He finally gave up and told Dooly that it didn’t make any difference anyway, that it had to do with being stiff.

‘Then he must have set in last night,’ said Dooly, ‘because I can’t hardly walk.’

The Professor said that, on the contrary, Dooly could hardly walk, but his explanation of the grammatical arcana involved was no more successful than his scientific explanation of rigor mortis. They all forgot about it while they ate breakfast.

‘Where can I get one of these squid watches?’ Jonathan asked Escargot.

‘I’ll make you one. If we were at Seaside I’d have one this afternoon. We’ll have to fish for river squid here, though. And you don’t catch many of ’em. Tricky bunch of swabs. And they have too many legs too. You have to compensate.’

‘I had a snail clock once,’ said Jonathan. ‘It worked pretty well except when it snowed.’

‘Never heard of a snail clock,’ said Escargot.

‘I made it up,’ said Jonathan. ‘I can only use it at home. At about five in the morning there’s about six hundred snails out on the lawn, all of them going somewhere. Eating grass and such. You have to be careful not to step on them. Then at six-thirty there’s only about twenty left, and they’re all heading for the bushes before the sun comes up over the top of the house. By seven-fifteen there’s usually only one left. I think he’s sort of a village idiot snail, though, because he’s likely to be out any time of day. He mucks the clock up a bit, actually. Then at night they do it all over again in reverse.’

‘Not too accurate, Jonathan,’ said the Professor.

‘It’s good for a break now and then,’ said Jonathan, supporting the snail clock. ‘Being accurate gets tiresome.’

‘Getting up early enough to use the bloody clock is what would be tiresome,’ Escargot put in. ‘I’ll make you a squid clock, Bing; they work day and night.’

Out through the window they could see trees swaying in the morning breeze. It wasn’t as good a breeze as it might have been, but they popped along and raised the sails anyway, tacking away slowly upriver in the cool morning sun.

For two days they traveled along just so, pedaling now and then when the wind gave off, poling their way through shallows, and all in all making fairly steady headway. That same afternoon they sighted smoke downriver on the Highland shore. It was a great billow of dark smoke that dimmed the sky to the east for hours – a forest fire possibly or perhaps a barn fire. In the evening a second billow of smoke appeared some miles distant from the first, but by nightfall it had vanished. There was little doubt among the rafters that the fires and the goblin party were somehow related. Jonathan had to agree with the Professor that there wasn’t time to dawdle, that the high valley likely
was
falling to ruin.

But there was nothing they could do about any fires downriver. One night passed and then another, and by the morning of the sixth day out of Seaside they neared the remains of Little Stooton – which looked, oddly enough, as if it had decayed even farther in the past couple of weeks. Great tendrils of creeping vine covered the houses along the shore, snaking in and out of windows and prying shingles from roofs. Lamps or candles seemed to be glowing dimly within the shadowy recesses of a few of the houses, but that, perhaps, was a trick of the sunlight that still shone off and on through a darkening sky. A thin wisp of smoke rose from one chimney, striking the rafters as being altogether odd. They had no idea whether the smoke – or the lamps, if they were lamps – were a good or bad sign – if that meant that Little Stooton hadn’t been entirely abandoned or if, on the other hand, the village were being resettled by goblins. The Professor said he’d like to find out; he was horrified by the idea of goblins living in abandoned homes. Escargot told him that he had heard of stranger things, that it wasn’t uncommon, in fact, to come across just such a thing in the deep woods. Both Jonathan and Escargot, however, saw no value in stopping simply to satisfy their curiosity, and the Professor finally agreed.

There was almost no breeze at all until about nine o’clock in the morning when what wind there was turned round and blew downriver toward the sea. Even Dooly realized that a storm was brewing, for the wind smelled as if it were full of water, and off toward the White Mountains lightning arced out of the clouds every few minutes, though they were too far away for them to hear the thunder.

Rain began to fall at about ten – big round drops that came sailing out of the gray sky to plop on the deck and on the roof of the cabin and form puddles and little streams running this way and that across the deck. There was not much running around and lashing things down since most of the cargo was stowed inside the cabin. Only the deck chairs were hauled inside.

Jonathan and Dooly, both of whom rather liked rain, decided to continue pedaling in the hope that the rain would let up. The Professor ambled inside along with Escargot, apologizing for his rheumatism. It seemed great fun, at first, sailing along through the rain and watching the lightning flash in the misty distance. But when the first ball of hail hit Jonathan on the head, his mood changed a bit, especially since the hail balls were the size of big marbles. Though there was a canopy of sorts over the paddlewheel and its mechanisms, the hail came sailing and it bounced under the canopy and whacked Jonathan and Dooly on the head and back. They had to bury their faces in their arms during the first onslaught. Then, of course, they couldn’t see where they were going, so it made little sense to keep pedaling.

As quickly as they could, they ran the raft up into the mouth of a little creek that emptied into Stooton Slough. The banks on either side were high and broke the wind, and there was such a tangle of underbrush and limbs that much of the rain was waylaid before it ever reached the raft. As Jonathan and Dooly pedaled in, Escargot popped out and tied the raft up fore and aft to twisted roots that jutted out of the bank. Dooly heaved an anchor overboard, but the water was so shallow that the anchor merely sat there as if wondering what to do, its length of line and chain still mostly heaped on the deck.

They sat about in the cabin all day playing cards and drinking coffee and reading books. Jonathan made an effort to teach Dooly pinochle, but it was too much for him. They ended up playing Go Fishing instead, which is not a bad game at first but gets old after a half hour or so.

The rain fell and the wind blew on and off through the afternoon, but it never turned bad enough so that they had to fear flooding or toppling trees. When the Professor began slicing up cabbages and boiling the corned beef for dinner, the four of them took a vote and decided to spend the night there in the slough, even though the rain had nearly fallen off and there were breaks in the clouds. They could have pushed on, but the few miles they’d travel before dark didn’t seem half worth the effort involved. The inside of the cabin was so cheery and warm by that time that the idea of venturing into the breezy drizzle outside was unthinkable.

Escargot suggested that they eat dinner and then have a council of war to plan the siege of Hightower ridge. Both Jonathan and the Professor agreed, although Jonathan rather thought that any such siege was more Escargot’s business than it was his or the Professor’s. But the battle was obviously drawing nigh, and this was as good a time as any to make plans. All such plans are likely to go awry when the action heats up, but there is still a certain sense of security or purpose that goes with order and with planning.

So they ate a very good early dinner, and they opened a few bottles of ale they’d laid away against just such an evening. The rain and the wind fell away, and it grew very still outside. Dooly observed that they were in the ‘eye of the hurricane’, but the Professor pointed out that there was no hurricane involved. Dooly concluded that they must be in some other kind of eye.

If there was any moon at all it was hidden away behind the clouds that still covered most of the sky. Jonathan suspected that the night was going to be very dark indeed when it arrived.

When dusk was just turning to night Jonathan and Dooly took a look outside and found that the creek, although muddy, hadn’t risen much at all. Dooly spotted a tangle of blackberry vines drooping over the bank, and he and Jonathan and Ahab took advantage of the last twenty minutes of daylight to pick a few quarts. A little trail ran along the bank and back up a wooded rise beyond, and Jonathan thought he could just see the corner of a cabin in the woods there a hundred yards or so beyond them. Dooly looked in that direction but said that he didn’t see anything and didn’t want to either.