“Natterdon Mire,” said Skarper, and at the sound of its name all the hair on his ears prickled and stood up on end.
The boglins were returning to Bospoldew just as they had come: in a broad column of marching bog boys, the hatchlings on the edges holding tight to the misty strings that held a dense awning of fog above the host. The only difference was that on this homeward march they made more noise, their war horns booming like bitterns to let Poldew and the others who had waited behind in the mire know that their raid had been a success.
Actually, that was not quite the only difference. In the heart of the column, trussed in mist bonds and dragged along on sleds of woven rushes, was the Princess Eluned.
This is so embarrassing, she thought. To be captured like a silly princess in a story. Why, only yesterday I was telling that nice young man that I did not need rescuing. Now I think I need it rather badly.
When they seized her she had thought, uncharitably, that Skarper was to blame. As they manhandled her across the bridge in their wet net she had imagined that the goblin had gone sneaking back to Blackspike Tower with news that Fraddon was away, and brought all his friends to attack Westerly Gate. But as they carried her through the spills of moonlight on the wood paths, she soon saw that these were not goblins. During her years at Clovenstone she had talked with many of the old creatures of the place, and some had spoken of the horrors that lurked in the Natterdon Mire. Boglins: that was what these were. She felt the excitement of an Unnatural Historian encountering new creatures for the first time, mingled with a healthy dose of fear.
To Bospoldew, to Bospoldew, (the horrid creatures chanted as they marched)
We’ll boil your bones to make our stew,
We’ll bake your eyes to fill our pies,
We’ll take your ribs to roof our hall,
We’ll use your head for a bouncy ball,
At Bospoldew, at Bospoldew. . .
Most of them were as naked as frogs, but the bigger ones wore armour made from old slates and roof tiles lashed together with strands of tussock grass. Some had spears and knives made from old slates too, or from shards of glass they’d found in Clovenstone’s countless shattered windows. Of course, thought Ned, metal blades would dull and rust in no time in the dankness of their mires. That was why most of the boglins were armed only with clubs of bog oak, blackened and stony-hard after years in the mud, or with those long blowpipes made from hollowed reeds, and quivers of willow-splinter darts.
It was all most interesting, but Princess Ned found it hard to concentrate, for she kept wondering what the creatures planned to do with her when they reached this place that they called Bospoldew. They were moving steadily downhill now, the thickening fog concealing all but the vague outlines of the ruined buildings and stunted trees which lay about them. Ahead there were shifting lights behind the fog, and the hint of a great whale-backed shape like an upturned ship. She did hope the words of their marching song were not meant literally. . .
At Bospoldew, at Bospoldew,
We’ll use each little bit of you,
We’ll take your guts to thatch our huts,
We’ll have your spine for a washing line,
We’ll use your appendix for um, er, what rhymes with appendix? Erm. . .
At Bospoldew! At Bospoldew!
The bittern horns boomed, and out of the fog ahead the upturned ship thing emerged clearly at last, and it was a hall, built badly out of tumbled stones and roofed with slabs of mildewed thatch. Long colourless flags of flame wavered up from braziers on either side of the gate, and drifting balls of marsh gas dithered like fat phantom fireflies, reflecting in the black waters which stretched all around the hall.
By the light of these ghostly lamps the boglins hauled their captive across the causeway and in through the gate, and the tall doors of Bospoldew slammed shut behind them.
Meanwhile, the rescue party was starting to descend the northern side of the ridge, still following the broad trail left by the boglins. But as the first pools and reed beds of the mire opened among the ruins on either side of them, they found their way barred by a net of mist. When Henwyn tried to plunge through it, the mist strands yielded like wet ropes but would not part.
“Hard mist,” he said, plucking at one of the strands so that it twanged damply. “That’s just unnatural. Like black snow, or dry rain. . .”
“Or hot water,” agreed Skarper.
“Hot water’s not unnatural. Don’t you have baths in Blackspike Tower?”
“Er. . .”
Henwyn started hacking at the mist webs with his sword. The strands parted reluctantly, and immediately started to re-form. Through the gap he’d made, the two companions peered at the way ahead and saw that it lay down a long, narrow street between tall buildings, and that the mist webs were strung everywhere.
“It will take us hours to get through!” gasped Henwyn. “And the mist will form again behind us as we go. We shall be trapped.”
“The boglins can prob’ly feel us twitching at it, like spiders feel flies in their webs,” said Skarper.
They stood there for a moment, not sure what to do, both feeling hot and tired from their trek through the woods, both starting to fear that it had been in vain. Henwyn was the first to turn away. “I’m going back to the top of the hill,” he said. “Perhaps from up there I can spy a better way.”
He set off before Skarper could tell him that he was wasting his time and walked quickly uphill, trying to outpace his helpless anger. The heroes in stories never had this much trouble rescuing people. How was he supposed to slay monsters if the monsters wouldn’t even let him get near them?
He felt better when he regained the ridge-top and left the mists behind. The setting moon had spread long carpets of silver light across the gaps between the buildings there, and the Lych Lord’s star peeked at him over the Inner Wall. There was only one single cloud in the sky, and that was silvered by the moonshine too, so that it looked more like a puff of thistledown. Henwyn ran up the outside staircase of one of the old astrologers’ towers and stood on the top, peering into the bowl of mist which stretched away northward towards the Outer Wall.
Beneath the fog, a mile or two from where he stood, lights seemed to be moving. A far-off hooting rang among the ruins. As the fog eddied, Henwyn thought he could make out a shape: the roofline of a massive, whale-backed hall. Was that where the captives had been taken? But how to reach it when the mist lay over everything?
He looked eastward to the towering darkness of the Keep. It was so immense that you tended to forget about it, as you might forget about the sky or a mountain or anything else that seems a permanent part of the backdrop of the world. But this was the closest that Henwyn had yet come to it, and he looked at it afresh, at the moonlight shimmering on its strange walls. The sight filled him with feelings that he could not name. Without thinking, he raised a hand to finger the amulet which hung beneath his tunic, and suddenly into his mind there came a snatch of poetry he had once heard:
The white owl calls,
As twilight falls,
Behind the lofty towers and walls
Where roofs decay
And weeds hold sway
From dawn to dying of the day;
The wind in gusts
Disturbs the dusts
Where old bones bleach and armour rusts
In Clovenstone.
But in the Keep
In darkness deep
Where dead things creep
Behind barred gates
And lychglass plates
The Stone Throne waits,
The Stone Throne waits. . .
“How I should love to see the Lych Lord’s Stone Throne,” Henwyn said to himself. “Then I could say I had had adventures, all right. . .”
“Oh, prince!”
The voice, coming suddenly o
ut of the darkness, startled him, and made him remember that he was having an adventure already. Princess Ned still needed rescuing and these ruins were filled with unknown dangers.
“Cooee! Prince!”
He looked this way and that, but saw no one.
“Prince!”
A well-aimed hailstone bounced off his head, and more voices called, “Up here!”
They were peeking down at him over the edge of that thistledown cloud, which had come down to hover just above his head like a fluffy oversized halo. Cloud faces, with eyes of shadow and hair like wind-combed cirrus. Cloud hands reaching down to him.
“Come aboard, young prince!”
“Come, forsake your lonely quest and tarry in the air with us!”
“We’ll show you the sky’s sky!”
“We’ll show you the Ice Crystal Mountains on the edge of the world!”
“That’s very kind of you,” Henwyn told them politely. “But I’m a bit busy at the moment. . .”
“Oh!” they said, dejected, pouting (who’d have thought a cloud could pout?). They seemed like nice girls to Henwyn, and he was sorry he had upset them. “Anyway,” he told them, hoping to console them, “I am not really a prince. I am just a cheesewright. Though I am on a quest, as it happens; I have to rescue. . .”
An idea came to him. He did not get very many, so they were always welcome, and he smiled as this one arrived. The cloud maidens thought he looked gorgeous when he smiled, and they all forgave him at once for being only a cheesewright.
“Perhaps you could help?” he asked. “I need to reach the lair of these boglin fellows, down under the mists yonder. I don’t suppose you could fly me there, could you?”
“Bospoldew?” The cloud maidens quailed, and their manner grew distinctly cooler: so much so that a little flurry of snow settled on Henwyn’s upturned face.
“Bospoldew is a fearful place!” said one.
“Poldew of the Mire lives there.”
“He is weaving his mist magic again!”
“He has power over clouds too. In olden times the boglins used to set snares for us, and use us and our clouds to stuff their mattresses.”
“We dare not carry you to Bospoldew.”
“Oh, but sisters,” said one of the maidens, “he’s the first prince we’ve seen for years and years.”
“He’s not a prince; he said himself that he is just a cheese-writer or something.”
“Well, it is very nearly the same thing, and he’s so beautiful.”
“Ladies, please!” said Henwyn, who was a bit embarrassed at being called beautiful. “I can see no other way into the mire, and I have to reach this Bospoldew place and rescue Princess Ned.”
“Princess? Princess?” whispered the cloud maidens. “Eugh! Princesses are rubbish! We don’t like princesses at all.”
“I suppose you are in love with her?”
“Oh no!” cried Henwyn, blushing. “It’s nothing like that. She’s quite a middle-aged princess. Though very nice.”
The cloud maidens withdrew inside their cloud, and it bobbed and rustled there for a moment while a hasty, whispered debate took place within. Then, to Henwyn’s delight, a kind of smoky ladder came dangling down, and the cloud maidens reappeared, gesturing for him to climb aboard. Before that night he would have been afraid to trust his weight to such a flimsy-looking thing, but he had felt the strength of the boglins’ woven mists and he felt sure that this ladder would be just as tough. He set his foot on the bottom rung and started climbing, calling loudly over his shoulder as he went, “Skarper! Over here!”
“Who?” said the cloud maidens, startled out of gazing at him.
“A friend of mine,” said Henwyn, looking up into their pretty, cloudy faces. “I’m sorry, I should have said. I can’t go without him. Look, here he comes. . .”
The cloud maidens had already seen the little figure hurrying uphill towards the tower. The cloud lifted a little, and angry lightning fluttered in its belly.
“You did not say anything about friends. . .”
“Oh! It’s that horrible goblin!”
Skarper looked up and recognized the cloud maidens at the same instant that the cloud maidens recognized him. He flattened himself against the tower wall as a lightning bolt fizzed past, exploding the flagstones below.
“Do be careful!” cried Henwyn anxiously. “That is my friend Skarper.”
“No, no!” the cloud maidens said.
“We will not take him!”
“Not an earth-sprout. . .”
“A stone-born. . .”
“Not a goblin!”
“Oh, he may look like a goblin,” protested Henwyn, “but he. . . Well, he is. Yet he is stout-hearted for all that. He saved my life.”
“No goblins,” said the cloud maidens firmly.
“Nasty creatures.”
“Specially that one. Throwing himself about in the sky where only birds should be, making horrible great holes in other people’s clouds. . .”
Henwyn, who had almost reached the top of the cloud ladder by then, sighed loudly and started to descend again. “I am sorry, kind cloud ladies, but I cannot leave my friend behind. I’m a hero, you see – well, I’m hoping to be – and that wouldn’t be heroic at all. It seems that we must find our own way to Bospoldew. . .”
The cloud maidens all looked at one another. For a moment it seemed they were about to go back inside their cloud for another conference, but they came to some agreement without speaking, and one said, “All right. Just this once. You and your goblin may both come into our cloud.”
Skarper didn’t trust them. He thought they might be planning to frazzle him with a thunderbolt as soon as he stepped out into the open, or drop him off the cloud as soon as it rose high enough for the drop to do him harm. But no lightning seared him as went up the tower steps and then climbed that cloudy ladder. He sat down, sinking only slightly into the cloud’s soft billows as it lifted and began to waft northward. Apart from a few hard stares (and a smile from Rill) the cloud maidens ignored him and clustered around Henwyn, asking him how he liked it up here in the sky, and which of them he thought was prettiest.
Henwyn wasn’t sure quite what to say. They were all as pretty as each other in their cloudy way, and having grown up with three sisters, he had a good idea of the sort of quarrel that would break out if he told one that she looked better than the others. So he said, “Oh look, a bird,” pointing at a passing owl, and then noticed how high he was, how far above the towers and walls of Clovenstone, and came over a little faint. “Coo!” he said, turning roughly the colour of a well-squashed boglin.
“What is it, sweet prince?”
“What ails you?”
“It’s just – we’re flying. It feels unnatural, somehow. . .”
The cloud maidens fussed around him, inviting him to lie back on plump cushions of cloud and bringing him cool drinks of rainwater in a cup of ice.
“It is not really high at all,” they said.
“Not when you are used to it. . .”
“The sky is a lovely place.”
“You should see it at sunset, when the long light fades all rose and gold on the long rim of the world, and the stars come out. . .”
And so on. If Skarper had been a bitter sort of goblin he might have thought, That great dim-witted lump. I fall out of the sky through no fault of my own and ask them for help and they just scold and scoff and try to strike me with lightning. He only has to smile at them and they all start twittering about his lovely curly hair and telling him to make himself at home. (And actually he did think that, because he was a bitter sort of goblin: there isn’t really any other sort.)
“What on earth do they see in him?” he asked aloud. It was an unfair world, it seemed to him, and just as bad outside of Blackspike Tower as in.
The cloud maidens were now asking Henwyn what it was that a cheesewright did, exactly, and if he could remind them what cheese was, because they did know but they’d temporarily forgotten. When he explained that it was a food made from coagulated milk curds they giggled as if he had just made the most wonderful joke. Eat rancid cow’s juice? All they ate up in the sky’s sky were drifting flakes of water-ice, flavoured sometimes with a speck of wind-borne pollen. They were certain he’d just made up this cheese to tease them.
Then the cloud maiden called Rill slipped down into the soft chambers at the cloud’s heart and returned cradling something gently in her hands. “You should have this, cheese-prince,” she said, bringing it shyly to where Henwyn waited. “It is an earth-born thing, and you will be able to care for it much better than I can. It won’t eat water-ice, or pollen. The wind brought it to me, poor creature. It must have been blown out of its nest up in the Bonehills, and flapped about until its poor little wings could flap no more, and landed on our cloud to rest.”
Henwyn took the creature in his cupped hands and it was warm and light and throbbing with its own swift little heartbeat. He thought at first it was a bird; then a bat. Then, as it stretched its snaky neck and he saw its big-eyed reptile head clear in the moonlight, he realized that it was a tiny dragon. It made a mewling sound, and sank its teeth into his finger.
“Ow!”
“That means he likes you,” the cloud maidens all assured him.