“Then what is the point?”
“The point is. . .” said the one who had spoken first, and shook his head angrily, because all these questions had completely broken his train of thought. “The point is that we need money to hire ourselves some transport if we’re to get to You Know Where, and young Henwyn son of Henmor there is going to give it to us.” And he hurried ahead of his two companions, calling out, “Young man! I say! Cheesewright! Henwyn son of Henmor!”
Henwyn turned, at first surprised and then intrigued to be accosted in this way, by these three strangers who looked – well, like something from a story. Their leader, the one who had just spoken, wore a deep hood, from the shadows of which a long white beard emerged like a waterfall from a mountain cave. One of the others was a dark-skinned man from Musk or Barragan, wearing silk robes embroidered with symbols of stars and suns and moons. The third was tall and lanky, with curly grey hair and ears that stuck out like two pink handles and held up the horn frames of a pair of spectacles, a new invention, seldom seen in Adherak.
“Yes,” said Henwyn, “I am Henwyn son of Henmor.” He assumed that the unlikely trio wanted to buy some cheese.
“Your father is away in Nantivey,” said the white-bearded one, throwing back the hood of his robes to reveal a plump and disappointingly ordinary face. “He has left you to run the cheesery in his absence.”
“How can you possibly know that. . .?”
The stranger smiled a secret smile. “I am Fentongoose. These are my colleagues, Carnglaze and Prawl. We are sorcerers of the Sable Conclave, and sorcerers know everything.”
“There are no such things as sorcerers any more!”
“You see? We knew you were going to say that!”
Henwyn gaped. He knew that there had been once been real and powerful magic in the world, and he believed firmly that there were wild places where it lingered still, but even he had never imagined that he might meet three sorcerers just walking around the marketplace, accosting passing cheesewrights. Yet these strangers knew his name, and his business. . .
“The Sable Conclave. . .?” he said.
“It is a secret society,” said Fentongoose, impressively.
“Well, I’ve never heard of it.”
“You see? Secret.”
“Sable means black, doesn’t it? I hope you’re not evil sorcerers.”
“Good and evil; these are terms for children,” said Carnglaze. “In the worlds of magic which our studies have opened to us, they have no meaning.”
“What matters is this,” said Fentongoose. “Word of your skill as a cheesewright has reached our brotherhood, and we have travelled far to offer you our aid. The great cheese magnates of Coriander would pay us in mountains of gold, but we should rather use our powers to help a young man of great skill. And you are the most skilful cheesewright in this patch of the world, and the most handsome, and the truest of heart. That is why we offer you this.”
Henwyn looked down and saw a little brown glass bottle, teardrop shaped, lying on the sorcerer’s outstretched palm.
“For ten gold pieces,” said Fentongoose, “it shall be yours. It is an elixir of great power, which I brewed myself. Three drops in the next cheese you make will give it such a flavour as no mortal man has ever tasted. It will make you famous the length of the Westlands; the name of Henbane. . .”
“Henwyn.”
“. . .Henwyn will go down the coming years in song and legend.”
“Gosh,” said Henwyn, taking the bottle, staring at it. He could see his own face reflected in the glass, distorted like a reflection in the back of a spoon. Inside the bottle some thick liquid swirled. The wind blew Henwyn’s golden curls around his head, and seemed to blow his thoughts around inside it too. It looked very magical, and magic led to trouble; all the old stories were agreed on that. But to hold real magic in his hand, in real life, was thrilling. It was as if he had stepped into a story of his own. He glanced round quickly, to make sure no one had noticed him accept the sorcerers’ gift. Surely his father would be pleased, when he came home from Nantivey to find that Henwyn had created the world’s best cheese while he was gone?
“Ten gold pieces?” he said uncertainly.
“We cannot possibly ask less than ten gold pieces,” said Fentongoose solemnly. “All right; eight.”
Henwyn hesitated for just a moment longer, then untied the purse from his belt. It held eight gold pieces, a few steel and copper coins, and a spare button. He tipped them all into Prawl’s cupped hands, and looked down at the bottle again. Was it just the sun shining through the glass, or did the stuff inside glow with a golden light? “At what stage of the process do I add the three drops. . .?” he asked, looking up again at the members of the Sable Conclave.
But the sorcerers, if sorcerers they were, had gone, and although Henwyn went looking for them all through the floating market he saw no sign of them again. He walked home thoughtful, one hand in his coat pocket, clutching the bottle of magic.
Back at the cheesery, all was quiet. His mother and sisters had finished their cleaning and gone out to shop or see friends. Sunshine poured in through the windows and shone on the newly washed floors. It seemed hard to believe in magic in a light like that; hard to believe in dangerous magic, at least. Henwyn took out the bottle and held it up, and the sun shone through it, splashing his fingers with gold.
In the big cheese vats the cheese milk which he and his sisters had prepared the day before was waiting, slowly setting into curds. Henwyn lifted the wooden lid off one of the vats and unstoppered the bottle. Drip, drip, drip: three drops, that’s what the sorcerer had said. He watched them fade into the pale curds. He waited to see if the mixture in the vat would change colour. Would it take on a strange and lovely aroma? Would there be unearthly music? There was always something of that sort in stories.
But this was not a story, and nothing happened at all.
Henwyn shrugged. He put the lid back on the vat and turned away, pocketing the little bottle. He was starting to regret those eight gold coins, not to mention the loose change and the button. Perhaps the so-called Sable Conclave had just been a gang of tricksters, or people playing a prank. The fact that they had known about Henwyn’s father going to Nantivey and leaving him to mind the cheesery was no proof of magic powers; Henwyn realized now that the self-styled sorcerers might have learned those things from half the other merchants in the market. This was just Adherak, after all. Magic didn’t happen here.
Burrrrk, went the cheese vat behind him. A sort of deep, wet belch. An odour reached his nostrils: cheesy, and yet not quite cheese. Henwyn had known socks that smelled like that.
He looked round. In the silence of the cheesery the lid of the vat he’d doctored rattled softly, like a pot coming to the boil. A wisp of pale green vapour curled out from under it. Something was happening to the cheese after all. . .
He was halfway back across the room, reaching out to lift the lid, when the lid lifted itself. It shot up and shattered against the ceiling. From beneath it something white and glistening came boiling out of the cheese vat, stretching forth thick, cheesy, quivering ropes like tentacles in all directions. One found Henwyn’s ankle and wrapped around it.
It was only then that he understood the cheese was alive.
A tug from the tentacle tipped him off his feet. The cheese was still rising from the vat; far more cheese than a vat should hold, as if the mixture he had added had made it grow as well as move. It formed itself into a lumpish shape, like a bad snowman. The tentacles kept whipping out of it, sticky hawsers of cheese, and whenever they touched something that was not nailed down – a chair, a spoon, his sister Gerda’s best apron hanging on the door – they started to retract, reeling the captured objects in until they vanished with soft sucking sounds into the body of the cheese-thing. It was reeling Henwyn in too, pulling him across the tiled floor by his ankle, but only
slowly, as if his weight was more than it could easily drag. He saw a curd knife pass him, one of the big slotted paddles which were used for cutting the curds. He snatched at it and tugged, and the leash of cheese which held it parted, the end that had been wrapped around the paddle hanging limp, the rest withdrawing quickly into the cheese-thing. Gripping the curd knife in both hands, he used it to strike at the thicker strand which held his ankle. After a few blows, that parted too, and he was up and out of the room, slamming the door behind him, leaning against it to catch his breath.
Through the door’s planks came the sound of falling furniture and clattering pans. That monstrous cheese would dismantle the whole cheesery if he didn’t stop it. What would his parents say? What would the neighbours think? At all costs he must not let it escape.
He dragged a bench across the door and went up the stairs, two at a time, to his room. His second-hand sword lay under the bed and he took it out and strapped it on. His hands were shaking, but he told himself not to be such a coward. Wasn’t this what he had always waited for? A chance to prove himself in combat? And it wasn’t as if it were a dragon or a troll crashing about downstairs; it was only cheese gone bad. . .
He reached the foot of the stairs just in time to see the door he’d barricaded give way; the cheese oozed through the splintered planks, bulked out with all the objects it had eaten, reaching out its pale, whiplike tentacles to seize more. Soon the whole cheesery was festooned with the sticky strands. Henwyn swung his sword at them, chopping and lopping, but although the strands parted, the cheese stuck to the blade like some awful fondue, dulling the cutting edge and making the weapon heavier and heavier. And all the time more strands were lashing at him, sticking to his face, his arms, his hair, until at last with a great wrench he broke himself free of them and ran, crashing out into the street, where passers-by stopped to stare at him, surprised by this cheese-stained swordsman, and by the crashes and clangs, the weird belching sounds and vile sock-like wafts that were emerging from inside Henmor’s usually quiet cheesery.
“It’s nothing,” said Henwyn, as casually as he could, trying to put his sword back in its scabbard and discovering that it was so thick with cheese that it would not fit. He felt sure that if the city authorities found out he had created this cheese monster he would be banished, and the cheesery closed down.
“We’re having a bit of trouble with, um, mice,” he said, unconvincingly.
The people in the street stood and stared, but it was not Henwyn they were staring at. Behind him, the cheesery bulged. The roof heaved.
“Well, rats,” said Henwyn hopefully.
One whole wall of the building collapsed with a roar, and out through the hole the cheese-creature came sprawling, soft and glistening and shapeless, except that as it reared up part of it seemed to briefly form a face, with little holes for eyes and a wide, dark, stringy mouth.
There were screams, shrieks, curses. The townspeople turned to run, tripping over the cats which had come scurrying to lap up the flood of cheese-milk spilling from the wreckage. Tiles and timbers smashed on the cobbles as the cheese-creature wrenched itself out of the ruins. Henwyn thanked his lucky stars that Herda, Gerda, Lynt and his mother weren’t at home. Where the cheesery had stood there was now only the cheese-thing, its hundred tentacles as thick as the ropes of a ship, lashing out to pull down chimney pots. He felt both scared and embarrassed as he stood there in its cheesy shadow, wondering what to do. If only he could think of some really brave and decisive way to deal with this thing, he might make up for having made it in the first place. He wiped the cheese from his sword as best he could and wondered how to use it. Did the cheese-thing have a heart? A brain? He looked for a head that he might lop off, but it had nothing that looked even vaguely head-like. The only good thing was that its movements were growing slower, as if it were weighed down by all the vats and benches and lumps of masonry it had engulfed. It seemed unwilling to drag its lumpy bulk far from the ruins of the cheesery, and the cats, which were the only living things left nearby, easily avoided its sluggishly groping tentacles.
He glanced down the street, towards the heart of town, the looming grey bulk of Adherak Castle on its walled mound. Three figures watched him from the corner of an alleyway. “Fentongoose!” he shouted. “Carnglaze! Prawl! Help me! Use your magic! Undo what your potion has done!”
He ran towards them, but the three sorcerers looked as horrified as Henwyn by the thing that their elixir had created. “Water,” Fentongoose said, in a weak voice. “Coloured water. That’s all it was. . . How can this be. . .?”
Henwyn snatched at his beard, meaning to force an explanation and an antidote out of him, but the sorcerer was too swift for him; he ducked aside. The white beard slithered through Henwyn’s fingers, and the three sorcerers turned and fled.
“Oh,” wailed Henwyn, turning back towards the ruins of the cheesery. “Oh, what have I done? I should have known better, after all the tales I’ve heard! I have summoned up a monster from the underworld, and it has turned on me the way they always do! I shall be destroyed by my own unholy fondue. . .”
But even as he spoke, he saw that the cheese creature was starting to change. It was shuddering, subsiding, shrinking. With unpleasant sucking and bubbling sounds it gathered itself into a taut, quivering blob upon the ruins of the cheesery, like a vast, restless pearl. Then something picked Henwyn up and flung him at the wall behind; as he hit it and crashed down on the cobbles he heard a high-pitched boom and a ghastly belch, and, as warm, sticky cheese began to rain down all around him, he realized that the creature had exploded.
He scrambled up, still clutching his sword, his face blackened by the blast, the rags of his clothes all scorched and smouldering. All that remained of the monster was a thick coverlet of rubbery yellowish sludge draped over the ruins of his home, making it look like a piece of toasted cheese which had been left too long in the oven.
That was the reason that Henwyn was banished from Adherak. He had tried to explain about the Sable Conclave, but the sorcerers had vanished, not to be found anywhere, so no one believed him. Few people had actually seen the monster for themselves, and the idea that real magic had been at work in their own town seemed so disturbing and unlikely that most Adherakis preferred to explain it all away as just a freak cheese-making accident. “Too much rennet,” they reasoned. “Or a new form of mould. Whatever it was, it was all the fault of that careless young cheesewright.”
Still, the elders had been very good about it. There had been talk at first of sending Henwyn to face the high king in Coriander, but it was decided that it would be embarrassing if word got about that Adherak had been menaced by, well, cheese. So they sent the foolish young man away, and warned him never to let his shadow darken the gateway of their town again, unless he wanted to end up like the brigands and cutpurses whose heads and trunks and chopped-off limbs were displayed on the spikes above it like the pieces of a Build Your Own Brigands and Cutpurses Kit.
They let him keep his worthless old sword, though, and a little money which his mother slipped into his hand as he was leaving (his father wanted nothing more to do with him). He spent the money on a pair of boots and that tunic with the studs, the closest thing to armour he could afford. He had decided to seek adventure in the wilderlands.
As he left Adherak behind him his eyes turned to the north. A few days’ walk would take him to wild hills where people were few and legends walked. “Clovenstone!” he whispered to himself, and the word woke all the old, wild feelings in him. It reminded him of that strange certainty he’d always felt that he was meant for something more than dairy produce. At Clovenstone there would be adventures. At Clovenstone there would be evils to fight: proper ones, not made of cheese. At Clovenstone, in the lost kingdom of the Lych Lord, he would find his destiny, or death.
Destiny, hopefully, he thought to himself, as he parted from Skarper and squelched on his way through the overgrown
ruins towards Westerly Gate. Unless my destiny is death . . . but hopefully it’s just destiny. . .
He was sure that if he could just do something really brave his father and the Lord of Adherak would change their minds about him. Adherak had never produced a hero before.
Skarper hurried on his way south, and the road rose up in long, low stairs again, climbing away from the river. As it rose, the trees around it thinned, and soon he could see ahead of him the high battlements of the outer wall, and the guard towers clustering around Southerly Gate. The towers were topless and battered-looking, and parts of the wall on either side had been smashed down, for here the armies of the lands of man had fought their way right into Clovenstone on a long-ago day so terrible that it was still remembered in goblin lore: Bad Wednesday, the day the Lych Lord was defeated. As he neared the gate he began to pass heaps of bones lying scattered on the road or gleaming white among the roadside weeds. There were loads of old skeletons lying around all over Clovenstone, and Skarper would hardly have spared them a glance usually, but many of these were still encased in rusting armour, and around them lay corroded swords and the crumbling heads of axes, spears and pikes. In all the years since the Lych Lord fell no goblin had ventured this far from the Inner Wall to rob the dead who lay here.
The gateway was huge; big enough for giants to pass through three abreast. Splinters of the shattered gate still hung from rusted hinges. Weeds grew up thickly in the shadow of the arch, and a path had been trampled through them; trampled quite recently, judging by the smell of crushed leaves and stems. Skarper sniffed suspiciously, detected man-scent, and guessed that this was where that numbskull Henwyn had crept into Clovenstone earlier that day. For a moment he wondered how the young hero was faring, away in the woods between here and Westerly Gate, and whether anything had eaten him yet. The oddest feeling came to him; a pang of regret that he had not talked a little longer with Henwyn, or walked a little further with him. He hoped that the softling had not been eaten. He shook himself, feeling unsettled, for he had never actually cared about anyone but himself before, and he could not find a name for this strange new emotion. Perhaps one of the words he’d learned in Dictionary would describe it. “Kindness”? “Compassion”? “Gazebo”?