The Elfin Ship Page 5

  ‘Hey there, Mr Bing Cheese!’ cried Dooly, popping up out of the barrel like a jack-in-the-box and causing Jonathan to leap back onto a sack of beans.

  Professor Wurzle, in the excitement, failed to recognize poor Dooly who had, it seemed, stowed away in an empty keg. He twirled away on the crank device and the whirl-gatherers began flailing round, making little whistling noises until the oboe gun nearly sang a tune. Both Jonathan and Dooly stared silently in amazement for a moment at the dumbfounded Professor, who was immediately sorry that he’d started the thing up. The motion of the whirl-gatherers finally became so intense that the Professor was forced to drop the entire affair, and the weapon went whizzing round the hold like a giant rotating moth.

  Dooly grabbed the fallen lid and dropped back down into his barrel, pulling the lid shut after him. Jonathan took refuge behind the bean sacks. The Professor, fearful of damaging the weapon, leaped after it and attempted to throw a burlap sack over it as it careened off the walls. The burlap, in the end, got caught up among the whirl-gatherers and fouled the entire machine which dropped clattering to the deck. Dooly peeped out, sweat prickling his brow.

  ‘What is it, Professor?’ asked Dooly. ‘Some sort of bird? Looks like a thing my grandpa had once to find treasures with.’

  ‘Well, Dooly!’ the Professor gasped. ‘I don’t suppose your grandfather had one of these. It’s just a sort of a thing I use for this and that.’

  Dooly nodded.

  ‘The question,’ said Jonathan, rising from the bean sacks, ‘is what are you doing here?’

  ‘Aye, aye, Captain,’ cried Dooly, clambering out of his keg. ‘It’s a jolly day to be a-roving, Cheeser, if I do say. And, Cheeser, you said once that you and me couldn’t go a-rafting without we took a fine dog like Ahab along beside us. So there you are, and here I am, and there, with his pickle, as I, if you please, felt I had to give him, is the dog.’

  The answer, somehow, wasn’t completely satisfactory, but Jonathan could see no profit in being upset. Of all the things the Cheeser disliked, being upset was the worst, and so usually, if he had the choice, he ignored anything that would provoke such a thing.

  ‘Dooly,’ he said, taking a pickle from the barrel for himself. ‘Welcome aboard.’

  ‘Ahoy, Captain,’ said Dooly. ‘Shall I make up a lunch?’

  ‘I believe you should.’

  ‘And did I tell you, Cheeser and Mr Wurzle gentlemen, about the time my grandpa went into fix him a lunch?’

  ‘I don’t suppose so, Dooly,’ Jonathan replied rather abruptly. ‘But …’

  ‘About the great Toad King,’ said Dooly.

  ‘But,’ continued Jonathan, ‘I imagine the Toad King and your grandfather can hold on until our own is served.’

  ‘Don’t let me forget,’ said Dooly, lunging out through the door. Jonathan followed, leaving Professor Wurzle separating burlap from whirl-gatherers and puzzling over the odd behavior of his machine.

  4

  Two Trolls Above Hightower

  At long last they completed lunch, and though their stomachs were well filled, they were no closer to being free of the sandbar. But then there’s nothing like a full stomach, or so Jonathan had always thought, to make a fellow sleepy. Just a bit of a catnap is not at all a bad thing after lunch. ‘I say, Professor,’ said Jonathan. ‘What about a bit of a rest?’

  ‘We’ve been taking a bit of a rest, my boy,’ replied the Professor, ‘all morning long.’

  ‘But you know, Professor, that afternoons are somehow the dullest part of the day, and a chap shouldn’t fight against it. Where would we be if we denied human nature?’

  ‘We’d likely be a ways further downriver before nightfall,’ said the Professor, ‘instead of stuck here.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Jonathan, wondering whether, as captain, he couldn’t order all hands to their bunks for a good two-hour lunch recovery period. He was never one to enjoy ordering people about, however, besides the Professor was very much right. So they began debating the various merits of the two plans. The addition of Dooly to the crew made things a trifle more simple, and it was altogether possible that they could quite easily rig the mizzenmast and, with the extra muscle, pole the raft free. They began, in fact, to do just that.

  Dooly managed first off to tangle a length of rope into a knotted mass and, almost at the same time, to drop a spread of canvas overboard into the river. The canvas immediately sank. Amid shouted apologies, Dooly, leaped overboard after it. The rush of water, cold as a herring, swept his feet out from under him. He sputtered and floundered and thrashed until his feet found the bottom and he realized that the water over the bar was no more than waist deep. He stood up shaking the water from his face.

  ‘Whew! he said to the Professor, Jonathan, and Ahab who all stood at the edge of the raft. ‘This is pretty wet!’

  ‘A good deduction – worthy of a man of science,’ shouted the Professor, happy that Dooly was safe and almost as happy again that no one would have to leap in to save him. He’d always wondered what the proper method of saving a drowning person was – whether it was correa to remove one’s shoes and shirt and unclasp one’s pocketwatch, or whether merely to sail in without pause.

  ‘Do you know what I saw, Mr Wurzle, down beneath the sea?’

  ‘I haven’t an inkling,’ replied the Professor.

  ‘My whole life. Right before my eyes.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘If you please, sir. It just come past like a flash: candy bars, sandwiches, my new pair of shoes, my grandpa, everything. Just like a batch of flappin’ birds it come past.’

  ‘I’ve heard of such things,’ said the Professor, ‘but I never hoped to meet anyone who’d seen it.’

  ‘Especially underwater,’ said Jonathan, leaning across to take the heavy, soaked canvas that Dooly had managed to retrieve.

  ‘Aye!’ shouted Dooly, flabbergasted at the idea of his life having gone past underwater. ‘I suppose so!’ Then, without so much as taking a breath, Dooly’s eyes widened into circles and his mouth fell open. ‘The Toad King!’ he cried. ‘The Toad King himself!’

  ‘Why don’t you just hop on up here onto the deck, Dooly, before you start in with the Toad King story. We’ve got weeks of travel ahead of us; plenty of time for kings of all natures, toads included.’ Jonathan bent over the rail to give Dooly a hand onto the raft, but Professor Wurzle cut him short by placing a cold hand on his arm. Dooly clearly wasn’t listening to Jonathan either but was staring goggle-eyed at the shore.

  There, between a pair of huge, twisted alders with interwoven roots exposed on the riverside, stood a pair of awesomely misshapen beasts. They were larger and fatter and more stooped than men and were hunched and scaly-looking. Their faces were lumpy and knobby, and they squinted through little slits of eyes. Each wore a skin garment wrapped around his midsection, and each held a great gnarly club in his hand. All in all, they looked a bit on the stupid side. Ahab didn’t like the look of them by half, and he went barking about the deck cutting capers every six or eight steps as if he were a tap dancer.

  ‘Trolls,’ the Professor announced.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Jonathan, astounded at the sight of such things.

  ‘I said trolls. Two trolls, and very ugly ones from the look of it.’

  ‘Hallo, Mr Toad King!’ shouted Dooly in a quavering voice. ‘You might remember my old grandpa.’

  One of the trolls wandered down to the riverside and stood with his feet buried in a cushion of moss. The branches of the old alder stirring now and again in the breeze nearly brushed his hair for him. With a long, pointed talon of a fingernail he picked at the few great teeth that he had. The second troll stepped along to join him, but slipped on the mossy bank and collapsed all of a heap and ended up sitting in the water, very much upset. The first troll emitted a noise like the creaking of a tree in a stiff wind which must have been some sort of troll laughter because the fallen troll wasn’t at all happy with it. He reached out
with his club and pounded the second troll on the foot once, then again for good measure, and although the second troll seemed unpleased, he merely shuffled a few steps to the side and climbed in among the roots of the tree, brooding and rubbing his foot.

  During this interchange, the Professor tiptoed away toward the hold, and Dooly still stood agog in the river. He winked at Jonathan once or twice and whispered, ‘This ain’t the Toad King. He would have remembered old Grandpa if he was. Grandpa and the Toad King went to the Magic Isles once to find the Purple Pearl you heard me speak of once or twice. No, this ain’t such a one as a Toad King, even though he’d fool the likes of us.’

  Jonathan merely nodded. He’d heard stories of trolls that, at the time, he’d rather not have heard. Most had to do with iron cauldrons like the one Dooly’s grandpa found the stick candy in. In the old tales, trolls were fond of making pots of stew from men lost in the woods and from carefully selected stones. Jonathan had never been amused over the idea. He knew, as did everyone, that trolls were real and not just tales told to children on a stormy night. G. Smithers of Brompton Village had written a story entitled, ‘The Troll of Ilford Hollow’, which, when he’d read it as a child, had frightened Jonathan so that he couldn’t sleep through a night without dreams of dark, lurching things creeping in the deep woods. But he’d finally convinced himself that such fears were unreasonable and, when he’d grown up, the thought of anything making a meal of stones became rather laughable.

  The two trolls waiting on the riverside, however, were anything but laughable. As Jonathan stood watching the trolls which were watching him, the one atop the roots reached down in among them, came up with a stone, and began to gnaw at it.

  The Cheeser was off and running with Ahab at his heels. Poor Dooly thought he was abandoned there in the river and lost no time in clambering up the side of the raft back onto the deck. Almost as soon as he stood on board, however, Jonathan came leaping along with two of the long rafting poles and shouted, Over we go, Dooly.’ He eased himself over and down into the cold river. It didn’t take Dooly more than a moment to catch on, and he and Jonathan each wedged a pole in under the hull of the raft and pushed away for all they were worth. For the first time, the trolls on the bank began looking anxious. The one that had slipped into the river rose and paced back and forth heaving his club into the air now and again in a businesslike way.

  Jonathan shouted for the Professor, who had disappeared into the hold. Old Wurzle then appeared, armed to the teeth. With his jaw set and his eyes wearing a look of determination, he cranked away at the oboe weapon, menacing the trolls on shore.

  ‘Grab a pole there, Professor,’ hollered Jonathan as he strained against the hull. The two in the water made a concentrated effort, and Jonathan leaned into it when he heard the scrape of gravel and sand against the bottom and the raft inch sideways toward freedom. Professor Wurzle laid the weapon atop a cask and, from on deck, wedged another pole into the gravel of the river bottom. As the three of them pushed together, the raft slid another foot out into the stream where it jammed once again on the bar. Strain as they might, the raft clung tightly.

  Jonathan climbed back onto the deck as the two trolls, their differences settled, probed the water with inquisitive toes. Between the bank and the sandbar the river flowed swiftly, but the channel appeared to be shallow. The Professor shouted, ‘Here they come, the blighters!’ as the trolls, seeking lunch, waded out toward them.

  The sails on the mizzenmast were half furled, and Jonathan intended to rig the mast entirely, as the Professor had suggested, to take advantage of the wind. But it looked like a lost cause. The Professor, however, thought otherwise. Grasping his weapon for the second time that afternoon, he mounted the cask and finished cranking the thing up.

  ‘Avast ye, trolls!’ he shouted in a voice filled to the hatch covers with authority. ‘Cease!’

  Although trolls, no doubt, spoke a language very different from that spoken by humans, they knew a fearful sight when they saw one. The whirl-gatherers rotated with increasing speed, and the trolls, as the Professor suggested, halted some twenty feet into the river.

  Dooly, who was once more in the process of scaling the railing, dropped again bravely and hauled away single-handedly at his task.

  The sails stretched taut, Jonathan joined Dooly in the river, and the crew made a final valiant effort to float the raft. The trolls, dull-witted though they were, were sharp enough to see their lunch about to escape downriver, and so, heedless of the Professor’s whirring device, they came sloshing out toward the raft mouthing fearful things beneath their breath.

  Professor Wurzle gave the gun a final crank, and, though he was at a loss to explain the workings of the wonderful device, he stood grimly as the arms flailed and the entire gun shot away in the direction of the stupefied trolls. Both turned, shrieking, and splashed for the shore. But they hadn’t gotten more than a foot or two on their way before the oboe gun sailed whistling past overhead. They watched in mute wonder as it scoured across the slope of the shore and was lost momentarily in the trees. Miraculously, the weapon emerged again, careening unsteadily back out toward the river before it ran afoul of the lower branches of one of the alders and hung whirling till it played itself out.

  The trolls scented victory now that the threat was over, and they surged riverward once more. But between the wind and the three poles, the raft inched free. Before the trolls were two-thirds of the way out and were almost chest-deep in the quick waters, the stern swung round into the current and began slipping away on its own. Jonathan climbed aboard as if his trousers were on fire and gave a hand to Dooly, who looked back at the approaching trolls. Dooly’s foot slipped on the side of the raft, his hand slid out of Jonathan’s, and he fell backward into the river as the raft broke free and sailed off.

  Dooly suddenly found himself in a predicament. There was deep water before him in which he would surely drown and two trolls behind him who would gobble him up as Ahab had gobbled up the dill pickle. Dooly stood there waiting, afraid even to look over his shoulder at the two trolls lumbering toward their supper. He watched his companions gesturing wildly from the raft, but he didn’t hear their cries, for his own voice drowned out all other sounds as he shouted, desperately, to his old grandpa for help. Even Dooly knew, however, that old Grandpa wouldn’t be of much use at such a time as this.

  The river, usually, lazy, raced along with increased fervor between the sandbar and the far shore, but as the bar dropped away, the pace of the river slackened. Professor Wurzle, heaving on the tiller, brought the bow around toward shore. Clearly they had run up onto the bank at least a hundred yards below the stranded Dooly. Jonathan could see no profit in that.

  He cast around for a weapon and seized upon a brass marlinspike that had been shoved in among the canvas and rope. It wasn’t of much use as a club, but it was new and unblunted, and a troll might look askance at being struck with it. Wurzle couldn’t understand a bit of what Jonathan shouted, but could only watch as the Cheeser vaulted the rail and plunged into the cold waters of the river.

  He held the marlinspike in his teeth as he struck out for the sandbar which he lumbered into several yards before he expected it. Jonathan splashed along toward the hapless Dooly, shouting wild and unlikely things like, ‘You, there!’ and ‘Hey, Mr Troll!’ hoping to call their attention away from Dooly, who still stood as if frozen a few scant feet before them. Both trolls had paused for a reason unknown to Jonathan and were twisting their heads about and scratching behind their ears with grimy talons.

  Dooly had given up calling for his grandfather and had pushed a forefinger in either ear. All was silent but for Jonathan’s hallooing at the trolls. When he paused in his cries for breath, he heard the drone of what sounded like a distant hive of very large bees. It was that noise, emanating from the very trees and growing in volume by the moment that had stupefied the trolls. Just as Jonathan became aware of the noise, it was drowned out by the furious barking of the courageous Ahab.
The dog, apparently, had leaped overboard in the wake of his master and, finding the shallows of the sandbar too deep and cumbersome for his short legs, had swum along to the great alder woods and was barking and leaping in a threatening manner to the rear of the trolls. The Professor paused only long enough to tie the raft to outcropping roots before puffing along behind, weaponless but determined.

  The Cheeser hadn’t time to feel more than a bit of pride in his noble Ahab before throwing himself onto the shoulders of the nearest troll who was, oddly enough, thrusting the end of his bludgeon into the other troll’s ear. It acknowledged Jonathan’s presence only by leaving off his prodding, but the thrusts of the marlinspike merely glanced off the troll’s greenish, scaly skin. Jonathan hung on though, perched atop the thing’s huge shoulders. The second troll, who turned to reply to the poke in the ear, stood gaping at Jonathan lunging about wildly above his companion’s head, waving his marlinspike and shouting. In the second troll’s dim brain there registered the possibility that his companion had sprouted a second head, and it was all a bit much for him.

  There was a good deal of shouting at this point, a tumult in fact. Between the howling of Ahab, the bellowed threats of Professor Wurzle, the cries of the stalwart Cheeser, and, finally, the amazed calling of Dooly, who had seen something strange away above the treetops, both trolls were, as the saying goes, out of their depth.

  With a terrible cry that echoed away into the fringe of the wood, both trolls abandoned their supper plans and lurched about, sloshing through the shallows toward shore. At the sight of them, Professor Wurzle fled upriver along the bank, climbing among roots and around bushes, anxious, at that point, to slip away with as little ceremony as possible. The trailing whirl-gatherers of the oboe gun, however, brought him up short, and, faced with the idea of abandoning his weapon which hung tangled in the tree overhead, he chose instead to clamber up after it. He would be safer anyway, he decided, in a tree than on the ground.