The Elfin Ship Page 10

‘The same. I hope it’s worthy of its reputation.’

  Miles smiled and nodded. ‘Thank you. It’s been a year since I’ve had a cheese of any sort and here I am with one of the true cheese wonders.’ He called after Dooly and retrieved the axolotls, and then with a last farewell, stepped ashore and disappeared around the ruined boathouse.

  Jonathan was put out with himself because he hadn’t asked the wizard to stay for supper. But they had several hours of sunlight left and might just as well press on. The Professor seemed much improved, and there was enough of the poultice on the plate to last a week. So Jonathan and Dooly cast off once more and sat together in the stern with old Ahab, watching the deserted ruins of Willowood disappear in the distance.

  8

  Whacked to Bits

  The day was windy and cold. Jonathan sat huddled at the tiller steering the raft around and through quick little channels between rocks in the river. It wasn’t what you’d call a rapids, certainly, so there wasn’t much excitement involved, just the barest chance that they’d come up against a rock if Jonathan didn’t look sharp. And so he had to sit in the cold and push on the tiller now and then.

  Dark clouds had sailed along through the skies for days but the wind managed to keep them in continual rout. During the past night, however, they began to bunch together and by late morning the sky was fairly black. It had, no doubt, been raining heavily behind them in the high valley. Jonathan thought that the clouds should be made to explain themselves when they acted that way – when they decided to quit fleeing before the wind and get down to business. Perhaps they had sailed entirely around the earth and met themselves again and gone bumping together and crowding up until all the blue spaces between were filled. That certainly seemed likely.

  The wind tossed the branches of the hemlocks along the river and made them bend, then jerk straight, then bend again like spindly, many-armed giants waving frantically to ward off buzzing mosquitoes. It blew down the center of the river, as luck would have it, and it didn’t seem to care a bit about coats and hats and mufflers – just whistled through them.

  Jonathan anticipated the splash of rain – had been anticipating it for hours – but somehow it didn’t come. Apparently the clouds were gathering force, which didn’t at all seem like a good idea. Jonathan was reminded of gathering snowballs as a boy in preparation for a snowball war. He could recall once when he and two friends had piled snowballs until they had a dozen neat pyramids completed, each as high as their shoulders, in preparation for an impossibly huge battle. It had turned out that they hadn’t time actually to have the battle; they’d spent so much time in preparation, that the afternoon sun started the piles melting. That night they froze solid once again, the melted snow turning to a sheet of ice. When Jonathan returned the following morning to carry on the campaign, he found a dozen ice pyramids clustered in a circle – the sort of thing that would set Professor Wurzle’s brain bones twirling with wonder and generate theories of the pyramidal propensities of snow and of the five standard shapes. Professor Wurzle’s great joy was his discovery of such phenomena. He was what Jonathan liked to call an explainer.

  Five days had passed since the wizard had run the axolotls through the poultice, and Professor Wurzle was fit as a fiddle, as he liked to say while slapping himself on the chest. A dab of the poultice was left on the plate after the Professor’s wounds had healed, and they saved it carefully in a little jar against future misadventures.

  Stooton-on-River, or rather what remained of Stooton-on-River, they had passed morning before last. From all appearances, it hadn’t a building left whole. If the waterside homes were any indication, the goblins had done a thorough job – most lay in a heap with even their chimneys knocked apart. All was abysmally quiet – so quiet that none of the three companions felt like breaking the silence because of some unnameable dread that seemed to hang in the air. Not until they had passed the ruined cottages of Little Stooton and were passing Stooton Slough did they hear again the sounds of birds and frogs and the occasional cry of an animal off somewhere in the swamps.

  The Professor had begun to puff at his pipe with the fervor of a blacksmith puffing away at a forge when they came upon the great lily expanses of the slough. Old Wurzle, pretty thoroughly worked up, pointed out the spot where he’d first seen the masts of the magic galleon and then, some two miles downriver, the place among the reeds where he and Flutesnoot had come upon the broken section of mast, the oboe weapon, and the incredible gems. Dooly was for putting in to shore and wading about in the shallows in search of leftover treasure, but Professor Wurzle reminded him that five long years had passed and that any jewels which had escaped had long since found their way to the sea.

  There followed a discussion of just how anyone, even elves, could have sailed such a wonderful craft so far upriver when there were leagues of overland portage to contend with where the Oriel dropped the final miles to the sea. They themselves would be weary as tramps before they even arrived at the coast since they’d be forced to leave their raft at the final upriver portage station and trek overland to the funnel of the delta. How then, asked Jonathan, could a boat of any nature make the trip in the other direction. It looked impossible to him.

  And it looked much the same to the Professor, as the Professor admitted. ‘Just between the three of us,’ Wurzle had said, ‘I wouldn’t say, if anything depended on my being right, that the elf galleon came upriver at all. The runes seemed to hint at islands and so I assumed, naturally, that the islands spoken of were the Oceanic Isles. Who wouldn’t? But, in truth, I couldn’t decipher the runes in any other way than to make them come out looking like “sky” instead of “sea”. But that, of course, is impossible. It’s preposterous. There aren’t any islands in the sky, are there?’ The Professor had puffed away at his pipe, the thick smoke curling about his head, and he squinted first through one eye and then the other, looking convinced then unconvinced. ‘And they referred to one island in the sky particularly and to a sort of king. It was when deciphering those runes that I got all twisted up, to be frank. The thing seemed to hint at jewels with eyes in them and, pardon me, Jonathan when I say this, of cheeses of one phenomenal sort and another. All lunacy, you’ll admit.’

  Somehow Jonathan was of two minds. The sensible one, the one that longed for the fireside and the beef bone and the shelf of books, had to admit to the lunacy. The other, which caused him to bolt his windows and heap oak logs on the fire whenever he read the wild and unlikely tales of goblins and trolls and dark night things written by G. Smithers of Brompton Village, didn’t find the rune tales quite as lunatic. Vaguely unsettling glimpses of twisted patterns, patterns turned inside out, were demanding space in his mind somewhere even though Jonathan, in the sensible and altogether preferable light of day, tried to keep them out.

  So there Jonathan sat, five days beyond the wreckage of Willowood Station and two beyond Stooton-on-River. Almost a week had passed without adventure, though that was all right with all three of the rafters, all four if you include Ahab, who had taken to sleeping most of the day atop the sailcloth in the hold. What with the wind and lowering skies, the lack of adventure was doubly welcome, since adventures in the cold and rain are about twice as likely to make you uncomfortable.

  The Professor, having awakened from an afternoon nap, wandered out of the cabin with Dooly at his heels at about three o’clock – just when Jonathan was beginning to want a bit of company. They hadn’t sat for more than a moment, Jonathan and the Professor making several vain attempts at getting their pipes lit and keeping them so, when the first drops of rain plunked down onto the deck. One, amazingly enough, landed with a hiss in the bowl of the Professor’s pipe, putting out most of the fire that poor Wurzle had managed, finally, to stoke up. He looked at Jonathan and then at his pipe and said it was a stroke of bad luck, perhaps even an ill omen. Jonathan agreed that when water comes out of the sky to put a man’s pipe out, it certainly can’t be good.

  But good or ill, the rain did
nothing but increase, and the drops seemed to be something near the size of goose eggs. They pulled the canvas canopy across over them optimistically figuring that the rain would take note of it and give up. It didn’t though. Instead the drops grew bigger and the wind blew harder and the rain simply ignored the canopy and came charging in as if it were great fun.

  Within a few minutes, Dooly and Ahab were highstepping along toward the hold, and things were banging about the deck. The hatchdoor whacked shut about sixty times in quick succession until Dooly secured it from the inside. The Professor and Jonathan shouted across the few feet that separated them just to be heard.

  Both were stupefied to see a tall hemlock growing along the larboard shore teeter in the wind, then continue to teeter, its roots tearing up from the ground in a muddy tangle and the whole thing collapsing crash splash into the Oriel.

  ‘Seems to be a major blow shaping up,’ said Jonathan. ‘If this goes on we’ll sail to the sea like the airship.’

  ‘Skip?’ the Professor shouted. ‘Skip what?’

  Jonathan waved at him to indicate that what he had said really didn’t much matter. And actually it didn’t, for just as they had ceased shouting, two of the empty kegs which stood against the side of the hold pitched forward and rolled smack up against the bulwark. Professor Wurzle went scooting along after them, but before he could right them three others mutinied and all five rolled this way and that as the raft bumped along in the choppy water.

  The Oriel was running high, and there seemed, right then, to be little danger from rocks. But the high water rolled and bounced along in such a wild manner that Professor Wurzle hadn’t a hope of keeping things righted. He was forced, finally, to summon Dooly from the cabin, and together they pounced on this keg and that, one after another, lashing them to the deck and the mast and the bulwark.

  They went along so for the space of an hour, the rain falling in sheets and buckets and angry rills appearing here and there along the shore and cascading through forests and meadows into the swollen river. The wind skittering along the river whipped up little wavelets which, along with the natural roll of the current, bounced the raft along with a slap and a bang. The whole thing creaked woefully as if warning the rafters that it had had enough.

  It was then that the Professor and Dooly changed their plan. Professor Wurzle had seen his own raft whacked to bits in a storm some five years back when he and Flutesnoot and the other two traders had crouched in a shallow cave above the riverbank. The storm that nearly brought round the fate of the trip hadn’t sprung up with even half the rapidity and violence that this storm seemed to boast. Whole hemlocks and the limbs of alders along the unprotected bank were toppling and cracking with enough regularity that floating trunks and tangles of limbs shot along in the current beside the raft, bumping and scraping and hurrying toward the sea.

  Now the Professor wasn’t what you’d call a pessimist, quite the opposite in fact, but here were signs of disaster. And when disaster looms ugly before you, there’s nothing for it but to light in and, as the poet said, set accounts in order.

  So Dooly, directed by the Professor, began dragging the kegs along and stacking them beside one another. He was as wet by then as if he were working beneath the river rather than atop it, but so were the others. Dooly, to everyone’s good fortune, hadn’t yet figured out the seriousness of their straits. He liked a good storm as well as the next person and it was still all rather grand. He’d set up a keg and then lurch away after another, speaking to them as if they were chickens in a barnyard or dogs in a kennel. ‘You there, Mr Keg,’ he’d say, grabbing for one just as it began to roll away across the deck. ‘Enough, sir!’ And he even added a bit of sea-wise talk he learned from the Professor, shouting, ‘Avast, ye keg!’ and threatening the rampaging things with keelhauling and plank-walking and all manners of fearsome ends if they didn’t leave off and cooperate.

  As each was righted and stacked next to another, the Professor looped a rope through the metal eyes on the tops of the kegs and bound them together. They hadn’t gotten more than a dozen or so lashed tightly, most of them full of cheeses but with an occasional empty keg for the sake of buoyancy, when the Professor noticed that Jonathan was having a bit of a time with the tiller. They were charging along between the Highland banks like a mad buffalo, and the Cheeser couldn’t hold on to the tiller. Each change in the direction of the current wrenched the slippery thing from his hand, and it flapped back and forth with a will of its own. Jonathan wrestled with it, leaning away to steady it while the rain whipped into his eyes and the wind ripped the little canvas awning above him into tatters that blew straight out in the gale like ragged banners flying above a besieged fort.

  He no sooner regained control when the tiller tore loose again from his sore hands and went off on its own. Clearly he was gaining little and was losing the skin on both hands and getting thumped resoundingly by the arm of the tiller each time the raft decided to surge off on a new course.

  After being whacked two or three times running, Jonathan was in a state. He couldn’t wipe his eyes dry quickly enough to be able to see clearly, and a rivulet of rainwater charged continually down the back of his shirt, despite the brim of his hat which had worked well to keep out the rain until it filled up with water. So while he was being sloshed and wrenched and smacked, he went so far as to lose his temper and, between lunges at the tiller arm, to shake his fist at the whirling skies. He even shouted something at the heavy clouds, but the wind took the words away.

  It struck him that shouting and raging, under the circumstances, was pretty theatrical; behavior that smacked of the dramatic was almost sure to appear foolish. Shouting at the heavens was as futile as wrestling with the tiller, so he gave up both at the same time – at about the time, in fact, that Dooly and the Professor finished getting everything lashable lashed.

  The three of them stumbled dripping into the cabin where Ahab, unable to sleep, waited. The raft churned along on its own jolly course, pitching and rolling in the current and flying toward the sea like the wind.

  With the storm howling outside and the drumming roar of rain on the roof, the Cheeser and Professor Wurzle once again discussed strategies. However, when all was said and done, there were no strategies worth a flea, for the four of them were trapped aboard the runaway raft, powerless to alter her course. They had to wait, they knew, for the storm to slacken and the river to go down. Though none of them had been much below Stooton before, they were fairly sure that there were no rocks or rapids about that might trouble them. Sandbars and islands were no doubt well covered by the rising waters, and it was quite possible they could plunge along for hours without much danger. Theirs was a sturdy craft, and though it creaked and cracked in the rolling current it showed no signs yet of breaking up.

  None that is until with a snap and a crash the mainmast broke away, splintering a section of railing as it smashed against it and tumbled over into the river dragging along a mass of rope and furled sail. But there would be plenty of fallen trees along the riverside out of which to hew a new mast, and the extra rope and canvas that Jonathan had insisted upon taking were still piled there in the hold. So, all in all, their position remained much the same, or so Jonathan thought as he and the Professor peered out through the cabin door which they held against the wind.

  Dooly was the first to notice that the speed of the raft had increased and that the bow seemed to be dipping as if the whole raft were careening forward. Jonathan and the Professor, watching the fall of the snapped mast, pointed out at almost the same instant the tangled branches of a clump of cottonwoods seemingly sprouting from midriver.

  ‘Odd sort of cottonwoods,’ Jonathan said, ‘to be growing in the river.’ But then he noticed that the shore off to starboard seemed to be about a mile away and that the raft was rushing along amid occasional clumps of tree trunks. The Oriel was no longer a river, or at least it wasn’t paying any attention to its banks. It had broken out over them, increased by the torrential
rains, and gone lapping away over the meadows of the Elfin Highlands shouting and booming and uprooting bushes and trees.

  Jonathan had hardly had time to wonder at their having abandoned the river and to consider the amusing but grim possibility of their finally being left high and dry in the middle of some meadow or other on the Highlands, when a roaring, bursting sound reached his ears – the sound perhaps of a mountain taking a rumbling stroll through the woods.

  The raft tilted dizzily, slamming all four in the cabin against the forward wall, cascading the accumulated contents of the hold against them in a tangled heap. Dooly was shouting and the Professor was calling for order. Jonathan seemed to have the end of a coil of rope against the tip of his nose, but he couldn’t yank his hand free to push it away.

  The roar increased. Then, through the door that had crashed open, Jonathan saw a strange sight. The water all along the larboard side was eight or ten feet higher than it should have been – higher, in fact, than the top of the cabin. It was this wall of water, gray and muddy beneath the sky and littered with debris, which was doing the roaring.

  Jonathan hadn’t time to do much more than shout and pull himself free from the tangle when the bow of the raft dipped even farther, and they were running across the face of the wave. They no longer bumped and rolled but simply tore along over what had been a vast expanse of meadow. Pressing against the wall, Jonathan pulled himself to his feet as Dooly and the Professor endeavored to do the same.

  The open door drew Jonathan forward, partly because of the tilt of the deck and partly because of the wonderful sight outside which was terrifying and thrilling at the same time. The raft quartered across the unbroken surface of the wave as it folded and boomed behind them. It was as if they were on a giant skate gliding down the surface of a frozen hill of ice. The sensation was short-lived, however, for a clump of lonely cottonwoods loomed up before them, and, with a crash and a slam, the raft caught and spun and broke into two pieces.