Goblin Quest (10 page)

If Fentongoose had been there he could have told them that they had fallen victim to a mantrap tree, of which, in the old days, there had been whole forests in the night valleys of Musk. What one was doing growing on the hills of the Westlands in the present day was a mystery. Perhaps some servant of the Lych Lord, hastening home to Clovenstone from the harbours of the north with seeds and cuttings for his master's gardens, had dropped a seed upon this lonely road, and it had lain there ever since until the light of the Slowsilver Star conjured it into life.

How it had come there was actually not of much interest to Henwyn at that moment. How to get out of it; that was what he would have liked to know. At first, as the black trunks sprang inwards to pinion him and Zeewa, he had been afraid that they were going to be crushed, but in fact the trunks just made a prison; a cage just large enough to contain the pair of them.

“Help!” he shouted, squeezing a hand out through a gap between two of the trunks and flapping at the goblins outside.

Skarper, running round the tree, saw the hand reach out. He grabbed hold of it and pulled, but the gap was not wide enough to pull a whole Henwyn through.

“What's it doing to you?” he asked.

“It's not doing anything,” said Henwyn, from inside his woody prison.

“It's waiting,” said Zeewa. “I have seen plants in the swampland at the foot of Leopard Mountain which trap flies and spiders in this way. It is waiting till we die and rot and our juices trickle down into the earth to feed its foul roots.”

“Eww!” said Henwyn.

“Don't worry,” Skarper told him. “It might trap lonely travellers like that, but not ones who have a whole load of goblins outside to help them. We'll soon have you out of there!”

He tugged at the trunks. They felt about as bendable as wrought-iron railings.

“Grumpling?' he asked. “Can your strength help us?”

Grumpling unshouldered one of the two huge axes which he had brought with him. “No problem,” he growled. The others scattered out of range as he lifted the axe high above his head and then swung it at the nearest of the mantrap's trunks.

There was a loud thunk. The tree shuddered, tightening its grip on Henwyn and Zeewa. The axe head dropped to the ground in two halves, leaving Grumpling staring at the useless handle.

“Stupid tree!” he said. “That was one of my best axes!”

Behind him in the darkness Flegg's eyes gleamed. “Oh dear. What a pity. Grumpling has tried, and since no one is as strong as the mighty Grumpling there is no point in any of us trying. Henwyn and Zeewa are doomed. It's sad, but there it is. We'd best leave them here and be on our way. We can't delay our quest for the sake of these two softlings, and we should not linger here. Who knows what other nasty dangers these woods hold?”

“Anchovies!” screeched Gutgust suddenly, as if to prove Flegg's point. He had just trodden in what turned out to be a baby mantrap tree, a sapling no larger than an egg basket. It had snapped shut on his foot like an actual mantrap. “An-cho-vieeeeeeees!” he wailed, hopping around, knocking Spurtle over in his efforts to wrench it off.

“But we can't just leave Henwyn and Zeewa here!” shouted Skarper.

“I'm sure Henwyn would agree that our quest is more important than his life,” said Flegg. He was already shoving a bewildered Grumpling back up the dark hillside towards the road. “Every moment we linger here, Prince Rhind and his friends carry the Elvenhorn further from our reach.”

“But…” Skarper gave another despairing tug at the mantrap's trunks. He could see about half of Henwyn's face peering out at him through one of the gaps between them, and Zeewa behind him, stabbing the floor of their prison with her spear.

“We won't leave you here,” Skarper promised. “We'll think of some way to free you!”

“Best think of it soon, then,” said Zeewa. “The stench of this flower is muddying my wits!”

It was true. The thick, sweetish odour of the unearthly flower had not been so noticeable before the tree closed. Now it filled the cage of trunks like a velvet fog. Henwyn was finding it difficult to keep his eyes open.

“Perhaps we could poison it with something?” he suggested sleepily. “Or just forget to water it; I used to be forever killing my mother's geraniums like that when I lived in Adherak…” His head nodded and his eyes closed. He shook himself awake with an effort, and said, “Fraddon? Princess Ned?” But of course Fraddon was far away and Ned was gone. For a moment, as he drowsed, he had imagined himself back in that other cage of trees, the one which the twiglings had conjured round him on the day he came to Clovenstone.

“Fraddon!” said Skarper. “That's it! Flegg was wrong! There is someone stronger than Grumpling! Old Fraddon could uproot this horrid shrub with his bare hands if we could call him here.”

“But Fraddon is in Clovenstone,” said Henwyn sleepily. Behind him, Zeewa had stopped jabbing her spear into the tree and was snoring softly.

“Clovenstone's not that far,” Skarper said. “Those big ears of Fraddon's ought to hear me if I shout loud enough. I'll fetch him and come back, Henwyn; I promise!”

It was a desperate plan. He had no idea how far his voice could carry, or how good Fraddon's hearing was, or whether the old giant would even care enough to help now he was in that mossy, sleepy mood. But he could think of nothing else to do. He scurried back to the road, where Gutgust sat muttering, “Anchovies!” and Spurtle tried to pull the baby mantrap off his foot. Of Grumpling and Flegg there was no sign, so Skarper assumed that they had gone on their way.
Good riddance
, he thought. He ran back up the road the way they had come, out of the mist and the tree-dark, into good, clean starlight on the hilltop where he'd wanted to make camp earlier. Far away, the summits of the Bonehill Mountains reared up their stony heads beneath the waxing moon. Somewhere there, lost among the folds of the land, lay Clovenstone.

Cupping his paws around his mouth, Skarper bellowed, “Fraddon! Fraddon!”

Clutched in the mantrap, Henwyn dreamed. It was uncomfortable, pillowed there among the knobby, knobbly limbs of the carnivorous tree, and his dreams were uncomfortable too. He dreamed that he was lying on the stuffy floor of a cavern, and that some dwarves, whose cavern it was, were poking him with their picks and shovels in an attempt to wake him up and move him on.

Then, as he sank into a deeper sleep, that dream faded, and another came. He dreamed that he was looking out over a wide grey sea. There was no land in sight, and no clear line where the sea met the vague and hazy sky. A loud roaring filled the air. A hole had opened in the surface of the sea, and all the water seemed to be swirling down into it. Henwyn was being drawn towards it too. Wider and wider it yawned, and way down in the bottom he thought he could see dry land: roads and rooftops and fair towers rising.

He woke with a start. He was still in the heart of the mantrap tree, squashed up against Zeewa, who was murmuring some song in her own language while she slept. Something had changed, but he was so drowsy that it took him a while to work out what. Then he saw that the mantrap tree's flower was opening. No longer looking even slightly like a wood nymph, it had risen higher on its stem and opened those white, glowing petals inside the cage of tree trunks like a parasol.

Above it, out in the inky woods, a voice was going, “Buzzz.”

 

“Fraddon!” shouted Skarper, and the echoes mocked him, bouncing back from crags and empty hillsides and the wild, wet moors that he knew would swallow his voice long before it reached Clovenstone.
Silly little goblin
, he thought.
Howling and yowling in the wilderness. You're on your own now. You've left all your wise friends behind, and you can't look to them to come and get you out of trouble
.

“Fraddon!” he shouted again, one last time, still staring at the dark eastern sky and hoping that he might make out the huge shape of the giant striding easily over the folded hills. But the hope was very small and frail now, and, as the echoes faded, it crumpled up and vanished like a leaf in a bonfire. He was too far from Clovenstone. Not even a giant's giant ears would hear his shouts. Or, if they did, they would sound no more important than the buzz of a tiny fly…

Fly. That gave him a new idea. It was a small idea, and perhaps a stupid one, but it was definitely an idea, and he did not have so many of those that he could afford to ignore it.

So he stopped shouting for Fraddon and ran back down into the woods, to where Gutgust and Spurtle waited. They had dislodged the baby mantrap from Gutgust's foot and they were trying to light a fire using the fragments of it and a few dank bits of fallen timber which they had found among the trees.

“Trees oughter be frightened of fire!” said Spurtle. “If we can get a fire goin' we can tell it to let Henwyn an Zeewa go or we'll burn it up. Or down. Or up.”

“And it might just clunch them tighter,” said Skarper, “and you might just roast them like a couple of chestnuts. And it won't listen to you anyway; it won't understand threats. I've got a better idea. What are flowers for?”

The goblins looked blankly at him.

“They looks pretty?” suggested Spurtle.

“Anchovies?” said Gutgust.

“They attract bees,” said Skarper.

“And Henwyns,” said Spurtle.

“Right. That tree wants Henwyn and Zeewa as plant food. But to make baby trees it must need bees. That's how flowers work. I read all about it, in the bumwipe heaps.”

“That's weird,” said Spurtle. “Are you sure?”

“Clever softlings have studied trees and plants and things and found out how they work,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because trees and plants and things is interesting.”

“No they isn't.”

“They is if your friend is stuck inside them. That's probably why the softlings started studying them in the first place, and then they got a taste for it and carried on. It's a science. It's called Bottomy.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Probably because when you sit down on plants and things it's your bottom that you sit on them with.”

“Maybe that's why they started studying them,” reasoned Spurtle. “You wouldn't want to sit down on the prickly ones, or the ones that give you a rash.”

“Anyway,” said Skarper. “Maybe if this tree thinks there's a really big bee buzzing about looking for some pollen, it might open up to let it get at the flower. And then maybe we can whisk Henwyn and Zeewa out.”

Spurtle understood. He nodded wisely. Even Gutgust said, “Anchovies!” in an admiring sort of way.

“So all we need to do is wait for a really big bee to come along,” said Spurtle.

Skarper sighed. “We aren't going to wait for a bee,” he said. “We're going to
make
a bee.”

“How do you make a bee?” asked Spurtle. “And why are you looking at me like that?”

Five minutes later Spurtle was dangling over the mantrap tree, saying, “Buzzz, buzzz!” in the most bee-like voice he could manage. Skarper had painted his dark goblin clothes with stripes of pale clay from the road, and cut a spare cloak into rough wings that flapped from his shoulders. Two spindly twigs, tied round his head with string, made bee-like antennae. A rope was knotted around his waist, the other end tied to a long branch. Gutgust and Skarper held on to the other end of the branch and managed to swing Spurtle over the tree where their friends lay imprisoned.

“Buzz,” said Spurtle miserably, dangling there. He didn't feel like a bee and he didn't think he looked like a bee, and he was terribly afraid that if the others let go of that branch or the rope snapped then he would drop into the tree, and the tree would think he was another helping of dinner rather than a useful pollinator. He could see the pale glow of the flower below him, inside that cage of trunks. Tiny shapes were flying in and out of the cage, their wings shining softly in the light from the huge petals.

“Moths!” said Spurtle. “Skarper, I reckon it's moths what pollentates this flower, not bees at all!”

“Try making a noise like a moth, then!” called Skarper.

“What noise do moths make?' Spurtle asked.

“Anchovies!” growled Gutgust, sweating with the effort of keeping Spurtle airborne. Spurtle was the smallest of the goblins, which was why Skarper had chosen him to be the bee, but he was still quite a weight. The long branch was difficult to control, too; it kept swaying about with Spurtle dangling from the end of it like a fish on a line, crashing into the surrounding trees.

Skarper felt that sad, deflating-balloon feeling that always came to him when a brilliant plan turned out not to be so brilliant after all. “All right,” he said. “Let him down. We'll have to think of something else.”

Gutgust took the words “Let him down” a bit too literally. He simply let go of the branch. The weight of the fake bee was far too much for Skarper to support alone. The branch crashed down, and Spurtle fell with a terrified squeal right on top of the mantrap tree. His sudden arrival seemed to confuse it. It opened its cage of trunks, then closed them again as if to trap this new victim along with the others. But Skarper leaped forward and threw himself between two of the trunks before they could spring back together. He wasn't strong enough to hold them apart alone, but he shouted for Gutgust, and the burly goblin joined him, pushing with all his strength against the trunks as they struggled to close. Meanwhile, Skarper darted between his legs and dragged out Henwyn, then Zeewa. Then Skarper pulled Spurtle out, and Gutgust jumped clear and let the tree crash shut.

It kept opening and closing for a while after that, creaking and snapping as if it was angry at being robbed of its prey. But the goblins and their friends were far away by then, and at last it fell still, and the woods were quiet again.

 

The night was almost worn out, and the goblins were weary. They scrambled up to the hilltop on the far side of the woods, dragging Zeewa and Henwyn with them, and fell asleep there in a big heap. But Henwyn did not sleep for long: he had slept enough, and as soon as the sun showed its head above the Bonehill Mountains he was up and urging the others to awake and be on their way. “There is no time to lose!” he kept saying. “Rhind will be halfway to the sea by now!” In fact he was very embarrassed by all the trouble he had caused. All he seemed to do these days was get captured, first by Woolmarkers, then by a tree. He was well aware that he had almost got himself and Zeewa eaten when they were only a few hours' march from Clovenstone, and he was determined to make amends, and to take more care on the rest of this quest.

Before they left that place, Skarper skirted back round the edge of the wood to the road on the far side. He dragged a dead branch across it to make a barricade and propped a rock against the branch on which he scratched:

 

DANGER!

MAN EATING TREE* AHEAD!

DANGER!

*IT ALSO EATS LADIES

 

When he had finished he stood back to admire his work, and that was when he noticed the corner of an old board poking out of some bracken further down the hillside. That would have made a much better sign, he thought, as he went toiling down the steep slope to fetch it. But when he pulled it from the bracken he found that it was a sign already. A few moments' searching and he found the rusty nail sticking out of the birch tree where it had once been hung.

So either it fell off by accident
, thought Skarper,
or someone pulled it down and hid it. And I'm guessing that someone was Prince Rhind of the Woolmark. And I'm also thinking that pulling down and hiding danger signs is not very friendly
…

“Skarper!” There was Henwyn, a tiny figure on the hill beyond the woods, waving his arms, all eager to be off.

Skarper hammered the sign back into place with a rock and went running to join him.

 

They set off through the sunrise, and after a few miles they found Flegg and Grumpling, asleep on a hillock by the side of the road. Small hills humped up there, and a long, pinkish outcropping of stone stuck up through the turf on the summit of the one nearest to the road. Grumpling was sitting with his back against it, while Flegg had curled up like a dog in the wet heather nearby.

“Let's creep past and leave them there,” suggested Zeewa. “They're no use to us, running off like that at the first sign of trouble.”

“No,” said Henwyn. “This is Grumpling's quest as well as ours. And we may yet have need of his strength, and Flegg's cunning.” And he left the road and set off up one of the little wandering sheep tracks that led through the heather to the stone.

Grumpling opened one eye as Henwyn climbed towards him.

“I thought you was all getting eaten,” he said. “That's what he told me.” And he lashed out and kicked Flegg, who went rolling down the slope into a patch of tall thistles.

“I thought so too,” said Henwyn. “But Skarper and the others all worked together and managed to save me.”

Grumpling didn't look as overjoyed at this happy news as he might, but it was early, and he had slept badly, propped against that hard old rock. Flegg didn't exactly seem delighted either, but that was understandable since he was full of prickles.

“We're bound for the sea,” said Henwyn, holding out a hand to help Grumpling up. “With luck, we may still catch that thief Rhind before he reaches Floonhaven and takes ship.”

Grumpling didn't take the proffered hand. “I don't need no softling's help just standing up,” he growled. He clambered to his feet, and after a good scratch he joined the others and they set off again, with Flegg hopping along behind, trying to pick the prickles from his paws.