Labyrinth (9 page)

“Excuse me,” Sarah called, running across the lawn after the old man. With his slow stride, furrowed brow, bent head, and hands clasped behind his back, he appeared very wise. Surely he could be of more help to her than the runty pipsqueak she had had to rely upon till now. He was sitting gravely down on a garden bench as she approached. “Please,” she said, “can you help me?”

The Wise Man didn’t really register Sarah’s presence. It was true that he raised his face toward her, but only as one might gaze at a tree, a fly, or a cloud while lost in thought. Rather than her, he seemed to be seeing a far horizon beyond her, so far beyond that few mortals had ever scanned it.

The depth and range of his thinking was clearly vast, whatever the subject of his thoughts might be. He was probably pondering deeply upon some problem that Sarah had never even imagined. Was it mathematical, she wondered, like the square root of negative two? Or philosophical, like the meaning of meaning, perhaps? But no, those were things she’d at least tried to imagine, when she had read about them. Those great eyes gazing right through her were more likely preoccupied with some question of physics, or biochemistry, or linguistics, or all of that at once and more.

“Please?” she repeated timidly.

The bird’s head on the Wise Man’s hat suddenly spoke. “Go away! Can’t you see he’s thinking?”

The Wise Man slowly raised a finger, and rolled his eyes up toward the bird, and spoke. “Sh,” he said.

Sarah closed her mouth apologetically. She stood aside, and waited.

“And don’t stare,” the hat reprimanded her. “You’ll put him off.”

“I’m sorry.”

The Wise Man’s lips opened slowly, and his eyes turned upward again, to address the hat. “Silence,” he commanded.

The hat looked wryly at Sarah. “This is the thanks I get,” it said disgustedly.

“Where was I?” the Wise Man was asking.

“How should I know?” the hat chirped. “You’re the Big Thinker.”

The Wise Man noticed Sarah. “Ah, a young girl.”

Sarah returned a polite little smile.

The Wise Man’s gaze traveled downward, and settled on Hoggle. “And is this your brother?”

“Oh, no,” Sarah answered. “He’s just a friend.”

Hoggle had been about to expostulate at being taken for Sarah’s brother, but now he stopped, and looked sideways at Sarah. It was the first time anyone had ever called him a friend. He frowned.

The Wise Man took a long breath. “And what can I do for you?” he asked Sarah.

“Please,” she said, feeling shy and a little confused to be conversing with an ancient sage about what must seem to him so trivial a matter, “can you tell me … we — er, that is, I must get to the castle … But I can’t even get out of this garden. Every time I try to leave I find myself right back here again. I can see the castle over there, but … can you tell me, please, how I can get to it?”

“Ah.” The Wise Man nodded slowly, closing his eyes. After a while he said, “So you want to get to the castle.”

“How’s that for brain power?” demanded the bright-eyed hat.

“Quiet,” the Wise Man commanded.

“Nuts,” the hat replied.

Sarah put a hand over her mouth to conceal a giggle.

The Wise Man composed his hands together on his lap. “So, young woman,” he told her, pursing his lips in thought. Nodding, he explained, “The way forward is sometimes the way back.”

His hat pulled a face. “Will you listen to this crap?”

The Wise Man was glaring upward and clenching his fingers. He cleared his throat. “And sometimes,” he continued, gazing earnestly at Sarah again, “the way backward —”

“Is the way forward,” the hat interrupted. “Can you believe it? I ask you.”

“Will you be quiet!” the Wise Man ordered his hat, profoundly. He looked again at Sarah. “Quite often, young lady, it seems we’re not getting anywhere, when in fact we are.”

Sarah looked despairingly around the garden. “Well, I’m certainly not getting anywhere at the moment.”

“Join the club,” said the hat.

“Perhaps,” the Wise Man said, “perhaps it only seems like that. All … is not always … what …” It appeared that he was drifting off into a reverie, on the nature of good and evil, possibly, or four-dimensional calculus, and he only just made it to the end of his sentence, “… it seems.”

The hat peered down over the Wise Man’s forehead, then looked perkily up at Sarah and Hoggle. “I think that’s your lot,” the hat said. “The sum total of earthly wisdom strewn at your feet for the asking. Please leave a contribution in the box.”

Sarah noticed for the first time that the Wise Man had absentmindedly drawn a collection box, with a slot, from the folds of his robe, and now was sitting, quite abstracted in contemplation, with the box on his knee. As she looked at it, he gave it a discreet little shake.

What was she to do? She hesitated, then had the idea of donating one of the badges from Hoggle’s string, which she was still holding.

He read her mind. “Don’t you dare!” Hoggle barked. “Them’s mine.”

Sarah paused, and finally slid her mother’s costume ring off her finger. Hoggle watched her drop it in the collecting box and looked green. He’d thought he was going to get that too.

“Thank you so kindly,” the hat said, sounding like a fairground barker. “Move along, please.”

As they walked away, across the garden, Hoggle said, “You didn’t have to give that away. He didn’t tell you nothing.”

“Well,” Sarah said reflectively, “he said something about the way forward being sometimes the way backward. We haven’t gotten anywhere so far trying to go out forward, so why don’t we try walking out backward? It might work.”

Hoggle’s expression was skeptical, but he humored her by doing as she suggested. They walked backward through the gap in the hedge from which Sarah had last emerged, and the garden remained in peaceful silence, decorated with birdsong.

The hat was watching where they had gone. When they did not return, it chirped, “Well, what do you know! They took your advice.”

“Zzzzzz,” the Wise Man said, having dozed off after so much mental travail.

His hat cocked an eye down at him. “It’s so stimulating being your hat.”

“Zzzzzz,” the Wise Man concurred.

Once they had left the Wise Man, Sarah and Hoggle found that by walking forward they could move ahead. It made a nice change. Not, however, any more than a nice change, because the maze of hedges turned them left and right and back again so often that it was impossible to make any progress toward the castle. Frequently it could be seen, its spires and turrets looming in the distance above the hedges, but no matter how far and fast they walked, it remained in the distance.

Sarah was still thinking about the Wise Man. “Hoggle,” she asked, “how do you tell when someone’s talking sense and when he’s talking rubbish?”

Hoggle shrugged impatiently. “How should I know? All I knows is we’re going to get ourselves well and truly lost in this place. Let me go back.”

“Not on your life. You’re sticking with me now until we get there,” Sarah said, wondering how much time she had left.

Hoggle said, “Huh,” rather noncommittally, she thought.

Well, she still had his precious string of baubles. He wouldn’t get that back until she had found Toby, and she judged that nothing would induce him to abandon her while she still had his treasure.

Alley, turning, alley, dead end, stone pillar, alley, ornamental shrub, turning, on it went, leading nowhere. Sarah wondered whether it wasn’t a closed system, no exit but its entrance, that urn. It was just the kind of puzzle that Jareth would set, to waste what time she had left. But if that were so … She shuddered. Would she have the courage to go back into the urn, and down that ladder, and start over in that awful subterranean passageway?

Down, down, down, down …

She remembered the hands, and the oubliette, and that terrifying slashing machine, and Jareth in the beggar costume. She recalled a sentence that her mother had once read aloud to her from a book, as she liked to when something caught her fancy: Mind what you say to a beggar, it might be God in disguise. When she saw her mother again, she would tell her: Or it might just be the King of the Goblins.

She shrugged. How could she be expected to have any respect for Jareth? He was dangerous and powerful, obviously, but he was too aware of it — a show-off, really — and mean, a cheat. He had a certain style about him, she could concede that much. He was not unattractive. But how could you respect, still less admire, someone like him? The best word she could think of to describe him was cad.

Alley, turning, alley … on they trudged. Hedged in as they were, they couldn’t see that they were not completely alone in the maze. The head and coils of a sea serpent rode along above a hedge quite close to them, though had they actually encountered the beast they might have spotted three little pairs of goblin feet running along beneath it, and heard the grunts of goblins supporting the parts of the serpent. Several times they narrowly missed meeting a mounted goblin, with lance and flag, who had been sent out by Jareth to look for them and spent an hour galloping at random.

Hoggle was quiet for some time. Then he asked, “Why did you say that about me being your friend?”

“Because you are,” she told him candidly. “You may not be much of a friend, but you’re the only one I’ve got in this place.”

Hoggle thought about it for a while. Then he said, “I ain’t never been no one’s friend before.”

An enormous blood-curdling roar from somewhere nearby froze the two of them in their tracks.

Hoggle spun around. Pausing only to say, “Keep the stuff!” he started to run back, away from the roar.

Sarah ran after him and seized hold of his sleeve. “Wait a minute,” she said angrily. “Are you my friend or not?”

While Hoggle hesitated, another air-trembling roar made up his mind for him. “No! No, I’m not. Hoggle ain’t no one’s friend. He looks after hisself. Like everyone does.” He wriggled his sleeve free. “Hoggle is Hoggle’s friend,” she heard him yell, as he dashed in the opposite direction from the roaring and vanished into the maze.

“Hoggle!” Sarah called. “You coward!”

She heard another frightful roar, but stayed where she was. The monster, whatever it was, did not seem to be getting any closer to her. “Well,” she said, speaking out loud to reassure herself, “I’m not going to be afraid. Things are not always what they seem in this place — that’s what the Wise Man said.” The sound came again, like a pride of starving lions roaring in unison. “It could be some tiny creature,” Sarah told herself, “perfectly harmless … that just happens to have a very loud voice …” After all, by far the loudest person at home was Toby, and he couldn’t do you any harm. Was there some law she had never grasped, something to do with the smallest creatures making the loudest noise? Did dinosaurs roar? She decided not. They would have made a low growling noise. But what about ants, then? Probably they made a terrible noise, somewhere beyond the range of human hearing.

As she was not going to run away, the only alternative was to proceed in the direction they had been going, with some shred of faith that forward meant onward. And so, crossing her fingers for luck, she moved tentatively along the hedge alley.

When she reached a gap in the hedge and peered cautiously through it, she saw that things were, indeed not always what they seemed. The roar was coming from a terrifyingly huge beast, but the animal was upside down, suspended by one leg lashed to a tree. It was roaring with pain, because four goblins were tormenting it with nipper sticks, long poles with small, fierce creatures on the end of them that bit like piranhas whenever they were given the chance.

The great beast, who was covered with shaggy, ginger hair, flailed out haplessly at the goblins, but the only result was that its body swung to and fro. That improved the game for the goblins, giving each of them the opportunity to dart in ahead of the others and get in a cruel thrust with the nipper stick before the bellowing, frantically swatting beast had completed its swing back. They were clearly having the time of their lives. They vied with each other in how soft a part of the beast’s body they could reach, and how long they could hold the nipping teeth in there before they had to jump out of the way of its desperate arms. So absorbed were they that Sarah was able to leave the hedge and come closer without any risk of their noticing her.

She was appalled by the scene. “The little beasts!” she muttered to herself.

She looked around for a weapon and found some small rocks. She picked one up, took careful aim and threw it at the nearest goblin. It hit him on the head, knocking the visor of his helmet down over his eyes.

“Hey,” the goblin exclaimed. “Who turned out the lights?”

He lurched around sightlessly, still swinging and thrusting out his nipper stick. The vicious creature on the end of the stick was glad to bite anything within its reach. When it made contact with another goblin, its teeth sank in.

“Ouch! Ouch!” the bitten goblin shrieked. “Hey, stop that, you.”

“Stop what?” asked the first goblin, still prodding out unseeingly.

The second goblin was now under furious assault. “Aargh. Dog weed! Rat’s meal!” Spitefully he retaliated by deliberately using his nipper stick.

It was the blinded goblin’s turn to wail. “Help! Who’s attacking me? Where are the lights?”

The other two goblins had paused in their tormenting of the beast. This was even better fun. They nudged each other and snickered as they watched the fight.

“Go to it!” one of them shouted.

“Get him!” yelled the other, hopping up and down in his excitement.

Sarah had armed herself with another little rock, and now she threw it. She was astonished at how accurate her aim was today. The rock hit one of the other goblins on the helmet, knocking down his visor. He staggered into his companion, and that one’s visor slammed down, too, with the impact.

“Help,” cried one.

“It’s gone dark,” squealed the other.

“What’s happened?”

“Lights! Where are the lights?”

Meanwhile the first goblin, still visored and unable to see who was nipping him, decided that his only recourse was to take to his heels. Running blind, he crunched straight into the two others, who were both staggering now. His nipper stick seized its opportunity.