The Elfin Ship (7 page)

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.

He was hoisting himself into the lower branches, ripping a gaping hole in his shirt as he did, when he became aware of a great silence – a silence broken only by something like the whirring of a thousand sparrow wings and the hum of an army of bees. There, soaring along not twenty feet above the swirling waters of the river was an elfin airship which had dropped so swiftly from the heavens that ragtail ends of clouds were dragged along and were rising skyward like misty bubbles here and there overhead.

The ship didn’t exactly pursue the trolls, but clearly the beasts were uncommonly afraid of the airship and were making straightaway for the deep woods to avoid it. Ahab met them on the shore and generally raged about growling and woofing until both trolls lumbered off into the shadows of the alders and hemlocks and were gone. After that, Ahab sniffed about, raising a meaningful growl now and again and making an occasional dash in the direction of the forest simply to ensure that the trolls stay put.

The airship buzzed along upriver traveling only about as fast as a man might walk if he were in a moderate hurry. Jonathan, Dooly, Professor Wurzle – whose leg had become stuck in a crotch of the alder – and even Ahab watched wide-eyed the long, cylindrical ship.

A row of porthole windows as if built for sightseeing lined either side, and at each window was a grinning elf face, each gazing back at the four along the river as if
they
were the marvels. The sides of the craft glowed in the late afternoon sun as if lit from within, and the craft’s color was that of a snowflake just as it turns to transparent silver and melts. It was some sort of precious elfin metal, no doubt, mixed high in the White Mountains and laced with enchantment and wind and sleet and glass and precious stones all melted down in a stew. Such, anyway, is how it appeared to Jonathan. The mere presence of the airship itself was enough to keep the company amazed for a week. The ship sported a pair of wings that thrust out from either side and were shaped very like the wings of a large but slender bat. The nose of the craft was translucent green, likely shaped from a monstrous emerald. Within sat another small party of elves, each wearing a pointed cap and gazing puffy-cheeked and pointy-eared through the green window.

The only markings on the vessel were a smattering of elf runes near the tail around a giant round face with wide goggling eyes. Although the image had ears, the face could have been little else but a comical drawing of the Man in the Moon in one of his most effervescent moods.

‘My grandpa knows that man!’ shouted Dooly as the craft began to round a distant bend in the river. And without thinking much about the consequences, he splashed along after the disappearing elves into deep water where he thrashed crazily until Jonathan dragged him to safety.

‘My old grandpa!’ cried Dooly.

‘Was
he
in there?’ asked Jonathan.

‘No, he’s been away for an age. But that man on the side with his cheeks all loaded up with cherry pits like a jelly man – him and Grandpa were friends.’

‘Ah,’ said Jonathan. ‘Then your grandpa was friends with the Moon, I suppose.’

‘I bet he was!’ cried Dooly, doubly amazed. ‘He had such a picture on the back of a pocketwatch which he said was give him by a half-dwarf from the east. It was an amazing watch, Mr Cheeser. You bet it was. You could stop it whenever you liked.’

‘I’ll be a fried chicken,’ Jonathan said as the two waded chest-deep across the channel to shore. ‘You could stop it, could you?’ But Jonathan wasn’t feeling as flip as he sounded, for he too had seen such a face, and he wasn’t at all sure whether he liked it or feared it or whether his mind might just be playing a trick on him.

‘I should hope to shout,’ said Dooly. ‘And once it stopped, so did everything else.’

‘Bless my soul.’

‘And you could walk about and put people’s hats on sideways and put their spectacles on upside down, and anything you want. Yes, sir. The Widow’s pies weren’t safe when Grandpa was about with his watch with the big face on the back.’

‘I should say not. I bet he ate his fill of pies, that grandfather of yours. He must have been the pie king.’

Oh yes. He was that. Everybody knew him as that up and down the river. Apple pie and a bit of yellow cheese. That was
his
idea of food. But I shouldn’t mention the cheese.’

‘How come?’ asked Jonathan, vaguely suspicious.

‘Well he didn’t take much.’

‘From whom?’

‘From your old dad, I suppose. He was the Cheeseman back then. Do you remember?’

‘Vaguely,’ said Jonathan, who actually remembered very well. He could close his eyes and see his father through a mist of rain coming out through the cheesehouse door with a great wheel of salted goat cheese as he himself had done a hundred times since. Old Amos Bing wore a wide-brimmed hat that rose to a stiff point on top and always had a leather pouch slung from his belt which housed a tiny ivory jar filled with snuff, a half dozen good luck charms, and four coins – possibly from the Oceanic Isles – that had wonderful pictures on them of strange deep water fish. Every time you looked at the coins there was a different fish on each side. You had only to turn the coin over for the pictures to change. And like the jeweled symmetry of a kaleidoscope, the strange fish wavered and reformed as the coins were turned and never, once they were gone, reappeared. Jonathan’s father had told him that as each fish disappeared it found itself in the sea, and that that was why the ocean had so many marvelous creatures swimming in it. At least that was the story told originally by the bunjo man who had traded the coins to Amos Bing. Jonathan sat for hours after that revelation, turning the coins over and over and keeping tally of the hundreds of fish with which he stocked the oceans. Once, as he turned two of the four coins, a face appeared on all the coins instead of a fish, and it smiled and blinked at Jonathan and seemed to be looking around the room trying to ascertain where it was. Jonathan watched in startled silence as the face wavered and rippled as if seen through the haze of a hot August day. Its cheeks swelled and its smile grew until it was just this side of a leer, then it turned into the face that was on the side of the elfin airship – a great, round-faced moon which winked very slowly at Jonathan as if the two of them were in on the same secret. Then it, too, rippled again and was gone with the fish, and the coins became what they were before the face had appeared. Jonathan abandoned his task of calling up new fish and toyed with the coins only rarely in the years since. The face never reappeared.