Goblins Vs Dwarves (17 page)

The hollow mountain that housed Dwarvenholm was high and stark, and its western face fell almost sheer, a black cliff with its feet in the stony fields of Delverdale. In this cliff there was a vast door, with ramplike roads zigzagging up to it, but it was shut and barred, and had not opened since men first came into the Westlands and the dwarves retreated in a huff into their caves.

There were other doors, though, further down the mountain, and out of one of them the tallboys led their prisoners, out under the light of a bone-pale moon. Looking back, Skarper saw the huge, shut door of Dwarvenholm towering above him, and looking ahead he saw Delverdale spread out below; the big fields divided by stony walls, the barns and pigsties clustering around windowless, turf-roofed farms from which dwarf farmers would emerge at night to plant their crops and tend their animals. Dwarf chimneys poked up everywhere, a forest of tall stone stacks that sucked in air and breathed out the smoke of the teeming city hidden beneath the fields.

But Overseer Glunt and his tallboys were not leading their prisoners down into the dale. Instead they turned south, along a narrow path whose paving had been worn smooth by the feet of many such processions. Up and up the thin way wound, to a place where a tall crag jutted out of the mountain's flank, sharp and jagged with the moon behind it, and as black as a goblin's toenails.

“Dungeon Crag,” said Glunt. “You may not have heard of it, goblin. To dwarves it is a name of terror; something for dwarfwives to scare their naughty children with.”

Skarper looked up critically at the crag. What did the dwarves do to their prisoners there? Chuck them off the top? His ears curled at the memory of his long-ago fall from the top of Blackspike Tower, but he did not want Glunt to have the satisfaction of seeing how afraid he was, so he shrugged and said, “I've been thrown off taller things than
that
.”

Glunt looked narrowly at him, and then laughed. “Who said we were going to throw you off it? We're going to take you up there and leave you there, you and these traitor friends of yours. Of course, after a day or two, you may
wish
we'd thrown you off!”

And his nasty laughter echoed off the rocks of Dwarvenholm as he led the tallboys and their prisoners up the steep stair to the summit of the crag.

 

Dwarves do not build dungeons. Even in the olden days, before they started to live underground, they felt at home beneath the earth. The darkness of an underground cell holds no terrors for them, and they would probably manage to tunnel out of it quite quickly anyway. So, long ago, the Dwarvenkings had commanded the building of a sky dungeon: the dreaded Bright Bowl, a deep, steep-sided hollow which dwarf stonewrights had carved into the summit of Dungeon Crag. There traitors and murderers could be cast and left to rot. Its sides were as smooth as glass, and shone dimly with reflected moonlight as the prisoners arrived, panting, on the narrow path which circled the bowl's brim.

There, Etty turned to Glunt and said, “Please, Overseer; my father and Skarper have done nothing wrong. It is I who should be punished, not them.”

Moonlight silvered the masks of the tallboys, and made Glunt's ugly sneer of triumph uglier still. “Skarper is a filthy goblin,” he said. “As for your father, you should have spared a thought for him before you started shouting insults at the Head.”

“It is nothing but a machine,” said Etty. “How can I insult it?”

Those tallboys who stood close enough to hear her muttered dark mutterings behind their visors, outraged that, even here, on the brim of the Bright Bowl, she should still be telling her dreadful lies about the Head. But Overseer Glunt just leaned close to her, and winked. “A machine it may be,” he said softly, “but it shall be the salvation of Dwarvendom. The dwarves who made it were very wise, and they gave it one mission that is more important than any other: to restore the pride of dwarves. But the magic was failing in those days, and there was not enough slowsilver left in the world to make it work, so it was never finished. They did not know of the great lake under Clovenstone, or perhaps they did not think that they could drain it. Well, I, Glunt, have succeeded where they failed! The Clovenstone slowsilver is flowing to Dwarvenholm now, and the Head shall be finished at last.”

“Finished?” said Durgar. “Finished how?”

Glunt chuckled. “There was a time when our kind did as we liked in the Westlands, before the biglings came. That is how it shall be again, when the Head goes forth. The time is coming, very soon, when we shall look down in scorn upon men.”

“‘When the Head goes forth'?” asked Etty. “How can it go anywhere? It's just a head!”

“Why don't you think about that,” suggested Glunt, “while you wait to die?” And with that he reached out and shoved her in the chest. He did not push hard, but she was caught off guard, and she stepped backwards, slipped on the sleek stone of the bowl, and went slithering helplessly down. With armoured fists and spear butts the tallboys shoved Skarper and Durgar after her. Even Skarper's sharp claws couldn't find a purchase on that glassy slope, and he went skidding down to land with the others in the bottom of the bowl.

They lay there, hearing Glunt and the tallboys leave, then nothing but the soft moaning of the wind as it blew around the bowl's brim, far above them.

Something was digging into Skarper's bottom. He wriggled round and pulled the object out from under him. It was a bit of somebody's skeleton, and looking around he saw that a litter of bleached bones filled the bottom of the bowl. Skulls grinned sheepishly at him in the moonlight.

“So I suppose there's no way out of here?” he said.

“No prisoner has ever escaped from the Bright Bowl,” said Durgar doomily, which was exactly what Skarper had been afraid he was going to say.

“So why do they call it the Bright Bowl?” he asked. “It sounds quite cheerful. And it doesn't look very bright to me.”

“Not now it isn't,” Etty said. “But wait till morning. When the sun comes up its light will shine into the bowl, and we must lie in it till we are blinded and burned and shrivelled up. Dwarves are shy of sunlight. We have dwelled too long in shadows.”

“Oh,” said Skarper, remembering how the tallboys had stripped Etty and her father of their black glass goggles before they brought them to the bowl. Then he brightened. “Still, goblins don't really mind the sun,” he said.

“Then you will lie here till you starve,” said Durgar. “Or die of thirst. Whichever comes sooner.”

He turned his back on Skarper and cuddled up to Etty, leaving the goblin to stare up miserably at the cold, mocking twinkle of the high stars.

“Maybe it will rain,” Skarper suggested hopefully. “Then there'll be something to drink, and the clouds will shield us from the sun. Then we'll have time to think of a way out. Princess Ned says there's always a way if you just think hard enough.”

But the dwarves did not answer. Maybe they were asleep, or maybe they were just too miserable. Skarper lay awake, thinking hard for a long time, but he couldn't think of a way out, and above him still the cold stars shone, promising a cloudless day to come.

 

Towards dawn, Skarper fell into a fidgety sort of a sleep. Bad dreams came to him; of moles and dampdrakes and long drops. He woke with a start. He was lying beside Etty and Durgar in the bottom of the Bright Bowl. Above him the sky was like another bowl, harebell blue and upended over him. It was completely clear. Soon the sun would be up, and Skarper was not sure how long Etty and Durgar would be able to withstand its scorching gaze. He wasn't sure how long he could withstand it, come to that – goblins did not mind the daylight as much as dwarves did, but it was going to grow hot here, with no shade, no water, and the sunlight reflecting off the polished stone. He licked up some of the dew that had formed on the bowl's sides in the night, then made another scrabbling attempt to climb out. He soon slid back again. He seized one of the dwarf bones that lay in the bowl's bottom and tried using it as a pick, but it soon splintered on the hard stone.

Durgar, who was awake and watching him, said, “It is useless. We tried while you were sleeping, me and Etty.”

“There is no hope for us, Skarper,” Etty said sadly, hugging him. “We can only wait, and hope that the Overseers of the Dead find good work for us when we reach the afterworld.”

Skarper scratched his head. “What? You dwarves have to keep on working even after you're dead?” he asked.

“Of course!” said Etty. “The dwarf gods are building a vast castle in the afterlife to keep out the ghosts of men. There is much to be done there!”

Skarper didn't fancy that. Goblins were a bit vague about what went on in the afterlife, but he'd always imagined it would be a chance for a nice long rest, with maybe a bit of wafting about and scaring people like those ghosts of Zeewa's, to stop it getting boring. It seemed to him that if he died here with these dwarves there was a good chance he would end up in the dwarf afterlife by mistake, and be set to work building their ghost castle.

More desperate than ever to escape, he looked up at the sky again. Black dots circled up there; carrion birds whose sharp eyes had spotted the three prisoners waiting in the bowl. Over to the east there hung a little puffball cloud, the first he'd seen, but it was not big enough to blot out the sun for long. Then, as he looked at it, Skarper realized that Etty had been wrong. There was hope after all!

The dwarves looked on in bewilderment as he jumped up and started shouting. They'd never paid much attention to the sky. They'd never looked with any interest at clouds, and had certainly never noticed that some clouds didn't always go where the wind blew them. They'd never guessed there were such things as cloud maidens, air-headed spirits of the skies who travelled the world aboard their magic clouds and who could sometimes be persuaded to take passengers.

“Cloud maidens?” growled Durgar, when Skarper tried explaining. “Are they friendly?”

That made Skarper hesitate for a moment. Cloud maidens weren't exactly friendly; not really; not to goblins. The first time he'd dropped in on them, they'd been ready to hurl him off their cloud, and when the fall proved not enough to kill him they had chased after him, slinging lightning bolts and hailstones. No, you couldn't really call them
friendly
at all. But they were the only scrap of hope he had, so he went on leaping up and down, waving his paws and tail in the air and shouting, “Hello! Over here!” They were flighty creatures, but there was always a chance that they might decide to help. And if they didn't, well, it would probably be better in the long run to be roasted quickly by a thunderbolt than slowly by the sun. . .

Etty joined in, waving her short arms and yelling, and eventually Durgar started shouting too. The dwarf sentries at the foot of Dungeon Crag looked up and shook their heads and grinned, imagining that their captives were screaming for mercy as the sun rose. But at last the cloud seemed to swivel a little in the air, and then it drew closer, as if blown towards them by a wind they could not feel. As its shadow fell over the Bright Bowl, the wispy faces of the cloud maidens appeared around its edges, looking down. Their high, fair voices carried clearly on the morning air.

“It's that horrible goblin again!”

“What is he doing here?”

“And some dwarves. . .”

“Come, sisters, let us leave this dismal place. I told you there would be no princes here.”

“No!” shouted Skarper, as the cloud began to rise again. “Don't go! Please help us! We'll die if we stay here!”

“Then you shouldn't have climbed up there in the first place, should you?” said a cloud maiden tartly. “You have only yourselves to blame, you know.”

“Please!” begged Etty.

The cloud came down again, but only so that the cloud maidens could peer at Etty. They hadn't realized she was a girl until she spoke, and they wanted to make sure that she was not prettier than them. When they saw that she wasn't, they giggled at her.

“Have you heard what has happened at Clovenstone?” asked Skarper slyly. “There's been a great battle there! Henwyn led a charge against the dwarves!”

Just as he'd hoped, the cloud maidens stopped tittering and stared at him. They were all crazy about Henwyn.

“Is he. . . Is Henwyn all right?” they asked.

“Oh yes,” said Skarper, hoping it was true. “You know Henwyn: brave as a lion and twice as clever. He defeated the dwarves. But now they are planning some new trouble; building a great engine of war or something, and there's little doubt they'll use it to take Clovenstone by force.”

“Oh! And dear Henwyn would sooner die than let that happen!” wailed one of the cloud maidens.

“That's why I need you to help us, see?” insisted Skarper. “We have to get home and warn him.”