The Disappearing Dwarf (39 page)

Everyone cheered frightfully at that. The heroic sound of it even pulled Jonathan out of his slump.

‘A masterpiece!’ hailed the Professor.

‘Shouldn’t that last line read, “all is done as
we
have told”?’ asked Gump.

The Squire began thundering out applause right then, however, interrupting Gump’s complaining. ‘Every tree sprouts with cake!’ he sang, then paused and turned to Bufo. ‘What went next?’ Bufo seemed to have a hard time answering. ‘All the land did sprout with cake!’ the Squire continued, caught up in the spirit of poetry, ‘and the Squire ate and ate and ate!’

Bufo and Gump looked at each other sadly. But the Squire was the Squire, after all, and it
was
his poem. So the two linkmen seemed to agree silently that he could pretty much do anything with it he liked, and the company tramped across the bridges toward Landsend, not nearly so thoroughly dismayed as they had been a mile back.

The clammers and the crabbers were out again, setting traps and mucking along the mud flats. It hadn’t been much more than forty-eight hours since Jonathan and the Professor had passed them two mornings since, but to Jonathan it seemed like weeks. The phenomenon reminded him that it quite likely
would
be weeks before he saw his home again. Months maybe. The effects of the poem began to wear away bit by bit. The galleon still stood out to sea, and seemed to Jonathan to embody the spirit of movement, of being homeward bound. That made him very sad because he knew that all the sailing ships in Balumnia wouldn’t do the lot of them a bit of good.

They crested the longest bridge and trudged down the far side. Jonathan heard a shout from below, from one of the clamdiggers perhaps. Then there was an answering shout and a man farther up the shore suddenly cast down his clamming fork and went running in the direction of the sea, disappearing under the bridge.

The Squire trotted his horse over to the edge, bent out over the parapet and waved. The rest of the company followed him, curious at his waving and at the shouting of the people under the bridge. What they saw was Theophile Escargot shoved up through the hatch of the bobbing submarine, waving back at the Squire.

‘Need a lift?’ he shouted at them, then laughed slowly, ‘Har, har har,’ relishing his gag.

There was a wild dash for the foot of the bridge, Miles bouncing and grimacing on his sledge. Escargot seemed to be in something of a hurry. He relaxed a bit when the Professor told him that the Strawberry Baron had turned inland on the road to Grover, but he didn’t relax much. He was obviously more fearful of the Baron than he’d let on to Zippo.

Sliding Miles down the hatch was tricky, but not impossible, and in the space of ten minutes they’d given their ponies to the flabbergasted clammers and had boarded the submarine and cranked down the hatch.

It all happened so quickly that Jonathan found himself, almost by surprise, sitting on a leather cushion before a porthole with Ahab curled up beside him, the two of them on their way, in effect, to Twombly Town.

Outside the porthole the sea went silently about its business. A great fish, almost as long as the submarine, loomed up out of the depths and glided by, peering in, wondering at them. Trailing seaweeds grew from the rocks below and rose toward the surface that lay like an undulating sheet of glass on the water above. Jonathan watched in wonder as a great red kelp snail worked his way slowly across a brown leaf not three feet from him, off, perhaps, to visit a friend. The water swirled and bubbled outside, and lights blinked on around the nine weary travelers. The submarine heaved forward and fell away into the deep, passing out of the mouth of the Tweet River, angling down through sunlit grottoes of towering kelp and schools of silvery fish toward the western door, the land of chambered nautili and sea shell treasures.

In the end it
was
weeks before Jonathan saw Twombly Town again, what with the voyage out of Balumnia and the journey across the sea from the Wonderful Isles. The, submarine stopped at Seaside where Miles the Magician was entrusted to a stout little doctor with a red beard, and then bubbled its way as far up the Oriel River as Escargot dared take it. There Dooly and his grandfather parted company with Jonathan, Professor Wurzle, Ahab, and the linkmen and sailed away to resume their pirating. The rest of the company set out on dwarf ponies, and in a matter of four days found themselves once again at Myrkle Hall where the Squire’s cook, as he had promised, made them up a bit of a feast. They ate around the clock, it seemed to Jonathan, for two days until none of them except the Squire could bear the thought of another peach pie or roly-poly pudding. During what little time they spent away from the table, Jonathan poked around through the Squire’s marble treasure – uncountable marbles, oceans of them, that overran the cellars beneath Myrkle Hall. He filled a leather marble bag with the little orbs of rainbow glass to bring back as a present for Talbot.

Finally they set out, carrying their bundled ape and alligator suits, bound for home. They trotted into Willowood in just short of a week and in the first days of summer sailed away up the Oriel on Jonathan’s raft, keeping to the far shore as they glided past the Goblin Wood, intending to stay as far away from adventure as they could.

Hightower Castle stood lonesome and rocky on the ridge above the fens. As they slid past on the river a mile or two away, Jonathan was struck with the sudden irrational idea that the high valley, somehow, hadn’t seen the last of Selznak the Dwarf, that the pale smoke of enchanted fires would someday tumble up out of that stone tower once again. But that was foolishness. He was sure of it. The Professor said it was anyway. What
he
was worried about were the creatures that still lurked in the caverns there. It was even possible that in the weeks since the two of them had wandered through those caverns, Selznak had let a few more in through the door. But Jonathan, more out of general tiredness than anything else, was contradictory. He said that he, for one, was willing to let the monsters go on about their business. They were blind, after all, and they lived at the bottom of a pit. He couldn’t imagine blue squids climbing one by one up little iron ladders. As for any other monsters having been let loose, that didn’t seem at all likely. During most of the time they had spent in Balumnia, Selznak was out somewhere in the countryside. He hadn’t reached his castle at Boffin Beach but a day or so ahead of them, hardly time enough to herd monsters from one land to another.

By the time they’d debated the issue there on the river, High tower Castle had fallen steadily behind. And as it shrank in the distance it seemed to grow less threatening until finally it faded and vanished from both sight and mind.

Their journey ended in early morning when they rounded the last long curve of shore, and paddled into the harbor at Twombly Town, surprising Talbot, of all people, who was out checking trout lines. All the lines were empty except one, which had an old canvas shoe covered in water weeds hanging from it. Talbot threw the shoe back in, assuring Jonathan and the Professor that crayfish would use it as a house. Then he plunked his rubber cheeses back into the shady water beneath the dock.

The Professor set off through town toward his laboratory as Jonathan, Ahab, and Talbot struck out across the meadow for home. Talbot hadn’t had any trouble with the cheesing, he said. Nothing to it. A cheese is a cheese, after all. But Jonathan, by then, didn’t entirely agree with him. In fact he was itching to be back at it – to have a go at a couple of cheese ideas – cheeses that involved sage and oranges and brandy; he wasn’t quite sure in what proportions yet. He knew though that he hadn’t much desire to return to being a man of leisure. It struck him, in fact, that it’s not so bad at all having work to do if you know you don’t
have
to do it. Anyway he could go back to being a man of leisure whenever he wanted – say every other Wednesday – just to keep his hand in. And the same was true, in a sense, of being an adventurer. He’d found both occupations very nice in their way, but as he watched Ahab trotting on ahead toward the Strawberry patch, off to see what his bugs had been up to, he was fairly sure that unlike cheesing, such occupations were easily worn-out.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

World Fantasy Award winning author James Blaylock, one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre, has written eighteen novels as well as scores of short stories, essays, and articles. His steampunk novel
Homunculus
won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and his short story "The Ape-box Affair," published in
Unearth
magazine, was the first contemporary steampunk story published in the U.S. Recent publications include
Knights of the Cornerstone
,
The Ebb Tide
, and
The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs
. He has recently finished a new steampunk novel titled
The Aylesford Skull
, to be published by Titan Books.