The Elfin Ship (31 page)

‘But where did all that stuff go, Grandpa?’ asked Dooly, slow to catch on when the glasses finally disappeared.

‘Into the blasted cloak. It’s really more of a coat than a cloak as far as I can tell. It has sleeves at least. And it isn’t warm worth a damn – like having nothing at all on. I’d appreciate it if you could see clear to giving me the spare bunk inside boys, if you would. I most froze up here this morning. Twickenham said I wasn’t to come down too soon, and who am I to argue with Twickenham? Never argue with an elf who gives you a cloak of invisibility, that’s my motto, and so far it hasn’t steered me wrong.’

‘I dare say.’ The Professor, who, Jonathan suspected, actually thought Escargot a trifle glib, smiled. Jonathan didn’t mind a bit though. He rather liked Escargot’s attitude. Confidence, in fact, was just what he himself could have used a bit more of. He wondered, however, whether or not Escargot was as untroubled about returning to Hightower Ridge as he seemed. If he was, then he was an altogether astonishing grandfather indeed.

They ran along after dark, not wanting to miss any of the breeze that was still being very cooperative. They were well above any section of the river that was likely to be frequented by boats of any sort, and the Oriel was still broad enough and lazy enough so that they hadn’t any fear of rocks or bad water. Late in the evening they hit stretches of river free of fog, and in the glow of the laternlight felt safe enough to press on, the Professor at the tiller and Jonathan sitting forward.

But by midnight both of them were done in. As it grew later it seemed less profitable to push along. By twelve-thirty if someone had offered Jonathan a choice between eight hours sleep and a treasure map, sleep would have won hands down.

‘I’ve had it, Professor,’ he said, stretching and pulling his coat tighter. ‘Let’s throw out the anchors right here and call it a night.’

But there was no response from the Professor, only a fairly revealing snore. Jonathan turned and saw that his friend had fallen asleep, his head slumped forward onto the tiller arm. The raft was still maintaining a rather straight course, although the wind had fallen off somewhat. It was a simple thing to reef the sails and heave out both anchors, one on either side of the raft. The raft was on its way back to Seaside when the starboard anchor dug in and the bow swung round, almost pointing the raft downriver. The port anchor caught a moment later and the raft lay still as a pond lily in slack water. Jonathan wished he had a snag to tie up to. He could imagine himself waking up several hours later only to find that the raft had broken loose and drifted halfway back to Seaside. But, being seafaring dwarfs, they likely knew a bit about anchors, though the only way to find out whether the anchors were trustworthy was to try them. At last he blew out the running lights and then almost immediately wished he hadn’t. The sliver of moon above gave off almost no light, and the night was so utterly dark that he stumbled over the deck chairs on his way to the stern.

He rousted the Professor out of a sound sleep and the two bent in through the cabin door and collapsed into their bunks.

The second day out was as uneventful as the first. More so, in fact, for the coastal fog finally cleared up and the sun favored them with a visit during the afternoon. Escargot felt it best that he keep his cloak on all the time, day and night, just in case they were visited by some creeping thing from the river or in case one of the crows that occasionally flew over was somehow a minion of the terrible Dwarf.

Jonathan quite preferred it that way. Enough mysterious occurrences had taken place already on the downriver voyage to satisfy any desire for adventure that he might have had. Besides, he and Dooly and the Professor amounted to nothing more than bystanders. If it were known that Escargot was aboard, who could say what sorts of terrible times might lay ahead?

So Escargot only took the cloak off to wash up. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until he pulled his arms out of the sleeves that he suddenly appeared, as did the cloak, looking altogether normal. Even one arm in a sleeve was enough to remove him and the rest of his clothes entirely from sight. Escargot was as grizzly as he had been on the day they found him at Thrush Haven. He explained he was ‘cultivating an image’ and hoped to pass as a pirate come the following April. The wilder a pirate looked, it seemed, the more highly he was regarded in certain circles.

Jonathan had always thought of Escargot as an old man – probably because Dooly constantly referred to him as ‘Old Grandpa’ – but he thought that the man couldn’t be as old as all that, though it was hard to tell. His hair was black as a tunnel, and although there was a fleck or two of gray in his beard, there wasn’t enough to bother about. When Jonathan had first seen Escargot, years before, he had seemed something of a dandy. His beard – probably more of a goatee than a beard – had been trimmed neatly. He had worn a top hat, carried a cane with a silver knob atop and was never seen around town in the daytime without a tie with a stickpin stuck through it. He affected a cultured speech then, not the seaworthy tone he was using lately. It was a bow here and a ‘Good day to you, sir,’ there and a prithee this and that whenever possible. Considerably younger at the time, Jonathan had been greatly affected and had even tried to act the same way. Eventually, however, he determined that he himself was destined to be no more than Jonathan Bing, and that anything else was foolishness.

Several years later Escargot reappeared – actually he wandered through several times but rarely stayed – wearing a pair of round spectacles and a tweed suit; he was selling cookbooks door to door. Then he vanished again, and wild and unlikely tales filtered upriver from the sea and down from the White Mountains.

Whenever he took the cloak off it too became visible, and although he wasn’t sure what he had expected, Jonathan was a little bit disappointed in it. In fact there was nothing about it at first glance that would lead anyone to suppose it an elf marvel of any sort. It was white, mainly, although within the wrinkles and folds of material it appeared to be pink. And it wasn’t until they had been three days on the river that Escargot held the coat up in the sunlight streaming through an uncovered window, and Jonathan saw its true colors. The thing shone like a rainbow in the sunlight.

In the sunlight, the cloak became a rippling mass of color, almost alive with it, though it was abruptly still and pale when in shadow. As Escargot’s arm slid down the sleeve, the coat very simply vanished, as did Escargot. Jonathan once again had to be careful not to step on invisible toes and to question seemingly empty bunks and deck chairs before sitting down on them. Cupboards opened and shut, the water jug upended itself into cups that floated about, hovering knives spread peanut butter onto floating slices of bread. All that took a bit of getting used to, as did the disembodied voice that was likely to speak to you when you expected nothing of the sort. But apparently it doesn’t take an overwhelmingly long time to get used to living with invisible people, and, all things considered, everyone got along smoothly. On the third day the voyage became somewhat more arduous because the wind fell off almost entirely. It seemed to Jonathan that it would be pleasant merely to lay about and read a book and wait for things to pick up again. The wind was sure to blow up sometime. But the Professor, insisting that the entire valley was falling to ruin about them, thought it best to crank up the paddlewheel.

Jonathan suspected that what the Professor meant was that he wanted to investigate the workings of the thing which, it turned out, was operated to fairly good effect when two of them pedaled simultaneously. One man, likely, could have made headway alone if he were on a lake and the water were very calm. On a river, however, even a lazy river like the Oriel, the going was more difficult. Together he and Dooly pumped away until the raft was sort of skimming along. Actually, though, it only seemed so in relation to the river water that was streaming past. In relation to the shore, they weren’t doing quite so well. The Professor said they were making about three knots; Jonathan determined that if a man were walking along the river road, he and the raft would keep about even. He started to calculate exactly what that meant in terms of the miles that lay between them and Twombly Town. Then, for fun, he counted the number of times he pedaled in twenty minutes, figuring that they had covered about a mile in that time. It turned out that he and Dooly – or whoever else did any pedaling – would pedal about sixty zillion times before they were halfway home. Just thinking about it was lunacy. When he checked his figures with the Professor, old Wurzle pondered for a time and said that, give or take a billion or so, Jonathan was tolerably close. The best thing he could do, all things considered, was not think about it at all.

But the more Jonathan tried not to think of pedaling along, the more he thought about it, or else thought about not thinking about it, or thought, every fifteen seconds or so, that it had been some time since he had thought about it last and then felt like a fool. The whole thing was maddening. After about twenty minutes he forgot all about not thinking of it and so didn’t. The pedaling itself, once the paddles were slapping easily through the water, wasn’t much of an effort – no more, certainly, than riding a bicycle. When the Professor offered to take over for a spell after an hour or so, Jonathan replied that he was just getting into his stride. Dooly said the same, proud, no doubt, that he was an important member of the crew.

Escargot, invisible atop the cabin, cheerfully volunteered to have a go at it himself, but the Professor pointed out that such a thing might, as he put it, tip their hand. Escargot agreed, but not as quickly as Jonathan had expected. Instead he told them the story of when he had taken a job logging and had to run rafts of logs downriver from the City of the Five Monoliths to Willowood Station. It would have been an exciting job under any circumstances, but to hear Escargot tell it, there was no end of trolls and goblins and wildmen and outlaws who wanted those logs or who simply wanted to run mad for a bit at Escargot’s expense.

Dooly prompted his grandfather to relate the tale of finding the stick candy treasure, and after a few moments hesitation he did. Jonathan was fairly sure that Escargot was laying it on pretty thick for Dooly’s benefit.

The afternoon passed along into evening, and as the sun went down the wind came up. They gave up their pedaling and sailed for about three hours. The night was so dark, however, that they ran up onto two sandbars, one right after another, and had to pole themselves free. Night travel seemed to be a bad idea, and – as Escargot pointed out – they weren’t in such an incredible rush as all that anyway.

So they threw out their anchors about ten o’clock when they were in the midst of a wide spot in the river – one of those lily-covered, swampy areas that threatened now and again to choke the Oriel entirely. The countryside round-about was particularly low and the floodwaters of the preceding week’s storm still covered the meadows. Thick stands of willow poked through the still waters, and just to be safe, they tied up to a thicket.

Escargot dug around in his bag and came up with a bottle of cream sherry and a bag of walnuts. In the light of one of the lanterns, the four of them sat about on deck chairs cracking walnuts and sipping the sherry which was very good – made across the sea in the sunny Oceanic Isles. Jonathan was surprised to discover that Ahab liked walnuts as well as any of them – even more than Dooly, who simply cracked them for the sport involved and fed every other one to the dog. It was a little cool to be picnicking on deck that late in the evening, but the night was so wonderfully clear and the stars so bright that it would have been a shame not to. When the moon finally peeked up over the hills it was just a little scrap of a moon, only two days away from being nothing at all. Still, it was a friendly sight.

Dooly, still awed by his grandfather’s tales that afternoon, insisted that Escargot ‘spin the yarn’ about when
he
went to the moon and fell in among sky pirates. The word yarn struck Jonathan as being particularly appropriate, but Escargot’s reaction to Dooly’s request made him wonder a bit. In fact, the old man changed the subject rather abruptly after saying only that it had been ‘quite a time’ and nothing more. Either the sky pirate story was a trifle far over into the realm of the tall tale or else, quite possibly, it involved the theft of the pocketwatch – something that Escargot regretted. Jonathan couldn’t be sure which, but one way or another, no one heard any more that evening about the moon and sky pirates.

Changing the subject wasn’t difficult. Escargot called their attention to several flickering lights moving among the trees upriver on the far side. Jonathan jumped up and blew out the lanterns. They waited in the darkness. The moon didn’t even cast enough light for them to see one another’s faces. Only the rustle of creatures alongshore and the noise of crickets or an occasional frog could be heard. Jonathan found that he was staring at the approaching lights, his eyes wide as saucers in an attempt to make some sense out of the night around him. Dooly started to whisper but Escargot shushed him. For five minutes they sat in silence and watched what had to be sixty or eighty goblins trotting down the river road. They were surprisingly sensible goblins compared to the lot that had attacked the raft. Half a dozen flaming torches lighted their way. Among them were several goblins of tremendous size – easily twice the size, say, of the average elf. Oddly enough, however, it was impossible to say which of them were the big goblins. When they were directly across the river – perhaps fifty or sixty yards away, Jonathan spotted a tremendous thing, a ghastly, pale, disfigured goblin more horrible than any of his fellows. But just as Jonathan picked him out of the lot, he seemed to shrink and change and reduce himself to half his size, and the goblin beside him, up until then a sort of nondescript pixie of a goblin, puffed up incredibly, dwarfing his fellows.