Trak needs to get to the broch. Later that morning, the duke’s children will arrive to begin their daily lesson, while Trak tends the fire and goes about his chores. On most days he relishes his good fortune. Working for Krage exposes him to the education reserved for the high born of the goblin kingdom. Trak hangs on every word the alchemist utters. Trak has no idea what purpose it serves to memorize royal lineages, the history of the kingdom, the rules of statesmanship or the high language used at court, but he absorbs the fundamentals of courtly protocol as eagerly as he absorbs the lectures on mathematics and astrology. It never occurs to Trak that his good fortune might be more than coincidence.
To reach the broch, Trak passes through the yett, the castle’s outer gate. The castle is perched on a cliff jutting out over the western sea; it is approachable only from the east. As he crosses the drawbridge, he waves to a sleepy guard. “You’re late,” the guard grunts in response.
The broch is a tall, circular tower built eons ago as a fortified residence. A few centuries back, it was incorporated into the inner wall of a fortress. Built of grey slate, the castle intimidates friend and foe. The Isle of Uisgebeatha with its castle, small villages, farms and mines, occupies the southwestern edge of the goblin kingdom and is in little danger from a direct invasion by the men who occupy the southern half of the mainland. Even seafaring marauders are an unlikely threat since the cliffs surrounding the island offer poor beachheads for warships. Only a small dock on the east side of the island is able to accommodate sea-going vessels.
With the sun at his back, Trak stares up at the brightly lit hulk of the broch; he muses that he has never been higher than the second floor, which serves as the alchemist’s library and bedroom. His duties confine him to the main floor, which functions as a kitchen and classroom or to the food larders that share the cellar with centuries of accumulated junk.
To enter the broch, Trak passes through a narrow passage set in its thick outer wall. A tandem of heavy wooden doors protects the passage. Murder-holes located in the ceiling above the corridor permit boiling oil to be poured on any intruder who manages to breach the outer door. Access to the upper floors of the broch and battlements is possible only through a spiraling staircase built into the tower’s outer wall.
Trak hears the alchemist’s dog Dun bark. Krage is always aloof and mysterious, but his small, yellow dog greets Trak warmly. For a goblin to own a dog is astonishing. Goblins hate dogs and don’t keep them—not even for food. Trak realizes that because of his dog, visitors never surprise Krage.
***
Glowing embers greet Trak when he stirs the ash of the previous day’s fire. He knows the hearth needs a cleaning, but decides that, unless the alchemist complains, the chore can wait. Within minutes, he has the fire blazing once again. He grabs a bucket and, accompanied by the yellow dog, passes through the back door of the broch and down a long corridor built into the defensive wall of the castle. Upon reaching the inner courtyard, he fetches well water for the tea the duke’s children would drink as they listen to the alchemist’s lesson.
The duke’s household includes his three sons, ages 18, 15 and 12, and a niece, Dorla Giantslayer, of 16 years whom the duke adopted after his brother was killed in the last war. Although Trak has spent most mornings for the last five years in the same room with these children; none has bothered to learn his name. To them, Trak is the lowliest of servants, a cross-breed child, the detritus of war, salvaged solely for his economic value.
On one occasion, Dorla abruptly entered the broch and collided with Trak as he swept the slate floor. Trak bowed and in his most elegant manner uttered, “My Lady, I beg you to excuse my clumsiness.” Trak despairs that this is as close to courtly banter as he will ever come.
When Trak looks into Dorla’s face expecting to see a trace of recognition or perhaps revulsion, he sees only passive indifference. He thinks she is the most elegant creature he has ever seen. The gracefulness of her alluring walk contrasts with the ungainliness that characterizes the movements of most goblins. Trak longs to inhabit her world.
Krage typically wears a sky-blue robe and pointed cap trimmed with white rabbit fur. Sitting in the classroom on his tall stool, he looks most wizardly. Although in his fifth decade and approaching old age, Krage is still vigorous. He is often seen crisply walking with his yellow dog across the island for no other reason than for invigoration.
Each morning Krage delivers a lesson in the high court language which isn’t so much a separate language as an elegant extension of the common tongue. It combines hand gestures and voice intonations with many borrowed, foreign words and grammatical innovations. The affect is erudite. Trak grasps the nuances without difficulty and is resentful that he has no opportunity to demonstrate his competence.
Nothing escapes the alchemist’s attention. Once during a grammar lesson, Farg Giantslayer, the eldest son, complained to the alchemist about the difficulty of the exercise. “Education is wasted on this dumb oaf,” Trak said to himself, smirking. He looked up and saw Krage staring at him, his face frozen in a cold frown. He realized Krage had read the disgust on his face. In the future, he was more careful to cradle his contempt.
Farg would inherit the duke’s lands and titles, while the younger brothers would become Farg’s sworn swords and administer parts of the island as tax collectors and local judges. None of the brothers had an interest in anything beyond military topics. Once they grasped basic arithmetic and achieved a modest level of literacy, their interest in scholarship ended. Krage has the impossible task of meeting the needs of the niece and at the same time holding the attention of the brothers. His solution is to add an extra hour of instruction to the end of the morning lesson.
When the brothers go off to the training yard, Krage and the niece discuss all manner of arcane subjects. As Trak prepares the midday meal, his mind alternates between actively participating in the discussion and fantasizing about the day when the niece will passionately surrender herself to his embrace.
The Alchemist Krage in his Broch.
Chapter 3
Isle of Uisgebeatha: The Old Goblin
When the morning’s lesson is over, Trak realizes that Baelock would still be asleep. He decides to visit the forest and query the she-goblin about his origins. Since he began working for Krage, he only rarely has time to visit his ancient friend.
Trak has never seen a man and isn’t exactly sure how a cross-breed differs from a full-blooded human. He can see that he is larger and stronger than the other children, but he attributes his size in part to his labors in the smithy and uncertainty about his true age. He guesses he is about 18, but his height suggests that he is older.
Spore are beardless or nearly so, and four years ago, he noticed the appearance of facial hair, which he considered too blonde to be noticeable. Perhaps his blue eyes and hairiness distinguish him most clearly from full blood goblins, but the old she-goblin in the woods told him a few Spore on the mainland also possess these traits. Like all Spore he has seen, his skin bears a yellow hue, but he lacks the pale translucency possessed by some goblins. Although he is fairer than the darkest goblins, his skin color is not unlike that of the duke’s children or, for that matter, of Krage, the alchemist.
As he walks through the forest, he thinks back more than twelve years ago, to when he made his first journey up the same path and stumbled on the old Spore’s cave. He remembers peering through the wattle and daub wall that covered the cave’s entrance to be startled by the oldest goblin he had ever seen. A hairless, wrinkled sack of bones, he thought. She was at her fireplace stirring a pot. Without even looking up she said, “Hello, little one. Who might ye be?”
When he told her his name, she responded, “Trak! Now that is an unusual name. Ye are missing your family name. Did ye lose it somewhere? Well, it is good ye came to see me, I can help ye find it again. The first thing to be decided is whether ye lost your ancestors or they lost ye?”
“Sit!” said the old Spore pointing to h
er table. She handed Trak a glass of tea and demanded, “Drink this! Ye look like ye need herbs to strengthen your blood.”
She has an odd way of speaking and says the strangest things, Trak thought.
She picked up her large magnifying glass and looked into Trak’s eyes. He looked back startled. The glass puffed up the old Spore’s face. It was huge and distorted. The glass was some kind of magic, Trak thought. The old goblin handed the glass to Trak and said, “See what ye can learn about the world that ye didn’t know before ye came here.”
Trak passed the glass over his hand and realized it was covered by thousands of tiny creases. “My fingers are swirly,” Trak announced. The old goblin fetched some black soot from her hearth, dusted the tips of his fingers, and pressed them onto parchment. “This trick will make the patterns easier to study.”
Trak used the glass to study the swirly marks his fingers made on the parchment. “Does everyone have swirls on their fingers?” He wondered if being a cross-breed made his fingers different.
“Yes, everyone has the marks, but I have never found two people with the same marks,” she replied. “The patterns are more unique than a name. I believe your ancestors know your marks and can use them to recognize ye. Hang this parchment near where ye sleep and they will find ye.”
The boy left the cave believing he had discovered a way to be reunited with his family. “Haste ye back! There is much in the world that ye need to learn.” Months later, when Trak complained that the parchment didn’t work, the old goblin retorted, “Of course it did. Your ancestors now know exactly where ye be. Your problem is half solved. Now ye must find them.”
***
On his second visit to the old Spore’s cave, he was delighted to discover she rescued an owl chick that had fallen from its nest. The chick was sleeping with his talons tightly wrapped around a branch the old Spore had jammed in a crack in the cave’s wall. Trak came everyday to bring the owl a scrap of meat. Once, when the owl was tearing at the meat with his talons, the old goblin said, “The way the owl uses his feet resembles hand-talk. I once heard a tale about a wizard who talked to a magical owl using sign language.” As she spoke the words, she signed, “How did you like your dinner?” When she received no reply, the old goblin said, “Of course, this owl be too young. He needs a teacher. I don’t have the time for such an effort. He looks like a slow learner.”
“Could I teach him?” Trak asked eagerly. “You teach me, and I’ll teach the owl. It would be wonderful to have a magical owl. She taught Trak to sign one sentence a day, and each day Trak stood in front of the owl and signed everything he had learned. The old goblin said, “I think the owl wants to answer but still doesn’t know how.” She began signing how the owl might respond to Trak’s questions. She became the owl’s interpreter. Trak asked the owl “What is your name?” The owl sat there motionless with his feathers fluffed and one eye closed. The other eye stared unblinkingly at Trak. The she-goblin signed, “I am Whitecloud, Prince of the Forest.”
“What! How could he being saying that or anything else? He hasn’t moved!” Trak protested. “You are making things up.”
She smiled and replied, “When ye have studied owls as long as I, ye will know that there be many ways they communicate.” At the end of the summer, the owl flew off. Trak still looked for it hunting its dinner in the island’s fields. Whenever he spotted Whitecloud, he would greet the prince with the appropriate hand-talk.
***
Except when a villager came seeking an herbal remedy, the old Spore’s time with Trak was almost the only contact she had with others. She seemed content. The natural world was the center of her existence. For several years Trak diligently trekked to her cave to learn new things. She opened Trak’s mind to the world outside the island. Her biggest challenge was teaching Trak to read and write.
She explained, “The goblin writing system evolved out of the hand-talk ye have already learned. Traders once used hand signs to communicate with foreigners. Stick drawings of hand gestures became the symbols that represented the most important words in the language.” Using her hands, she signed, “The king ascends the throne.” Then using chalk, she drew on slate the goblin glyphs that said the same thing. Trak studied the slate and recognized a glyph composed of five converging curved lines. It resembled the cupped hand and open fingers that were the hand sign for “crown” or “king.” A circle topped by a single straight line mimicked a closed fist with the thumb extended skyward that meant “ascended.” He recognized that the semicircle topped by two straight lines was a combination of a downward curving palm and two upright fingers that together meant “chair.”
The old Spore wrote a series of glyphs on the slate and asked Trak to read what she had written. With prompting, Trak figured out the glyphs. “I can read!” he exclaimed.
“You have made a good beginning,” said the old goblin, but you will find there are many complicated ideas that are difficult to express using hand symbols. You must now learn the alphabet.” She explained that all words could be written using the twenty-one letters in the goblin alphabet. Trak learned to write his name. By adding an extra slash mark, a vowel went from short to long, and Trak became Trake. Placing a squiggle in front of a verb indicated the action will happen in the future and cross behind meant something happened in the past.
Goblins loved to write compound words. It allowed them to combine the phonetic symbols taken from the alphabet with the glyphs derived from hand gestures. A very long word could be written several ways. Accomplished writers delighted in inventing new ways to write a word. It was considered erudite to avoid writing a word the same way twice. It was not necessary to learn the hand signs to be able to write, but knowing the hand gestures enabled one to read old tomes and communicate in silence. After two years of daily practice, Trak mastered the letters and could phonetically write any word he heard even if he didn’t know its meaning. At ten years of age, he was one of the few literate inhabitants of the island.
When signing one’s name, it was customary to add an identifying mark, such as a family lineage glyph. In Trak’s case, he had to invent one of his own. Even illiterate smiths stamped their creations with a personal mark. Trak considered many possible candidates for his identifying glyph before selecting a conflation of two symbols, a zigzag superimposed on an upheld sword. The zigzag represented the leaves of a bellows. Trak thought, a sword and a bellows were appropriate symbols for a smith. It was this mark that Baelock, with a sharp needle and charcoal, tattooed on Trak’s chest.
***
Trak learned to address the old Spore as “Mother,” the polite way to speak to an old female goblin. From listen to the old goblin, Trak learned how to weave a tale. She couldn’t resist enlivening Trak’s world with wondrous tales of ancient sorcerers and legendary heroes. Trak would watch mesmerized as the wrinkles above her eyes, where her eyebrows would have been if she had hair, rose and fell to match the mood of her story. She made her wrinkles bend and twist to mimic dozens of personalities.
Without access to parchment, Trak developed the capacity to remember much of what he read or heard. The old Spore possessed a few tattered, handwritten books she said came from a former employer. They were mostly concerned with plant lore. Trak read them aloud as the old Spore challenged him to express clearly his opinions and observations.
The old mother showed Trak her collection of elf bolts—flint and obsidian arrowheads, which she discovered over the years in plowed fields. She let Trak hold each bolt, feel its sharp edges and appreciate its craftsmanship. “They were made by forest elves and be charged with magic. With one tiny bolt, an elf could kill an evil spirit,” she assured Trak. She saved her best bolt for last. It was a black, obsidian blade as long as her forearm. “I call this one Dragon Killer because it be made to slay a monster,” she informed Trak.
“Are there still elves in the forest?” Trak asked.
“I can’t say I’ve seen one,” replied the old goblin, “but that doesn’t mea
n they aren’t there. If ye believe in the strange and unbelievable, ye will never be caught unprepared. Perhaps ye will see an elf this very day. The trick is to always be on the lookout.” The old goblin could make sticks and stones come alive and speak across time.
He and the old mother read aloud The Legends of Woddin so often that Trak could recite the epic as well as any bard. The story was close to the old goblin’s heart; it told of a sorcerer that smote a dragon into nine pieces and used his magic to change each part of the worm into one of the nine sacred herbs. Each of the sacred herbs was an antidote for a different type of venom that blew on the wind and caused disease. When Trak cockily bragged that he knew all there was to know about the nine herbs, the mother sent him into the forest to collect a sample of each. Most were easy to find. Wormwort was a tall perennial with reddish stems and long green leaves with whitish undersides. It gave good dreams and restored vigor. The legends said it had power against any loathsome foe that might be roving the land.
Waybread, he recognized by its tall, cylindrical leaves and yellow flowers that evolved into a gelatinous seedpod in the fall. With the leaves, Trak could draw out the poisons of biting insects and stem bleeding. Stune or Watercress was an evergreen perennial that was a tonic for the body and soul. Chamomile or Maythen, as some call it, lifted the spirit and cured fungal rot. Two common plants, Nettle to provide nutrients and Crab Apples to renew energy, were easy to find. It was said that Thyme could restore the will to live. When eaten frequently, Fennel guaranteed good eyesight and courage in battle. Trak found them all, but the last herb, Atterlothe, the venom loather, Trak could not find, although its tall stem ringed by blue flowers should have been easy to spot. It was the herb of the sun, the only cure for the bite of the rock viper.
After two days of searching for Atterlothe, Trak reported to the old mother that he had failed. Perhaps the season isn’t right, he suggested. She said, “When ye find it, tell me. I have looked for it the last seventy years.”