Sam Bobbins

Let me tell you a story!
Let me tell you the story of a man named Sam,
Poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed,
Then one day he was looking for some loot,
When up through the ground came a-bubbling spook…
Ghosts, that is…
zombies, wraiths, a dead dragon…
and they’re the worst kind.

Sam Bobbins
The Continuing Adventures of:
Sam Bobbins,
Detective

by
Charles Brobst

Chapter titles:
Sam Bobbins in a Hole in the Ground
Sam Bobbin’s Zombie Holiday with a Dragon
Sam Bobbins Takes Moody Richard’s Place
Sam Bobbins Never Says Dead
Sam Bobbins in the Watery Grave
Sam Bobbins with the Pirates of Penn’s Aunts
Awl’s Well That Ends Well for Sam Bobbins
Sam Bobbins in the Mirror
Sam Bobbins in the Crypt of the Vampires
Sam Bobbins’ Fair Lady
Sam Bobbins Takes a Lesson from the Fairies
Sam Bobbins Goes Where He’s Never Gone Before
Sam Bobbins Meets His Maker

His Very First Adventure:
Sam Bobbins in a Hole in the Ground

Merry no More
    In a garden before a wide round green door stood a Wee Little man, and before him a Wee Little boy just as Small. Short of stature but strong of backbone, either would make it up to only a Big man’s belt buckle, yet with hopes and dreams as big as anyone’s. Birds sing, butterflies flutter and flowers are fragrant in their brilliant colors but neither notices them. This is not an occasion to smell the roses.
    “How do you expect to support my daughter? Where do you think to buy land? And with what? You must know that the Small farmer cannot hope to compete with the Big people. You will need to do better than as a farmhand if you expect to marry my Merry, Sam Bobbins!” he threatens me, the Wee Little boy come to ask for her hand, the hand of the only daughter of my nearest and dearest neighbor.
    “But neighbor Opal, Merry and I have been seeing each other since we were knee high to a toadstool, and the Bobbinses have been farmers… Forever!” I plead with all my thirty-six inches of my Wee Little frame against his sudden inexplicable unreasonableness.
    “Times have changed, young Bobbins, times have changed. Medievalism left behind, we are all to be ‘enlightened’ in this Age of Enlightenment. Now with the Big people living cheek by jowl with us — though I don’t say what cheek it is — we must change. And one thing they have taught us is to demand a bride price. Young’uns like you must prove he can support a family! Do you know that the miner down at Forty-nine got his girl’s weight in herring? And she no petite thing! Why shouldn’t I ask my Merry’s weight in whatever I can get? And you can’t give me a single knob nor a straw for her!”
    “It don’t seem right to sell your children like cattle. I love Merry and she loves me. I’m the one who would make her happy and we should be together!” I demand, losing my temper.
    “Sell?! Is that wha’ you think o’ my gel? Be home with ye, younger, afor I call me dogs!” Old Farmer Opal dismisses me, a young Small not a wee inch littler than himself with a wave that might as well have been a slap, so staggered backwards I am from it through the fruitful garden, crushed and breathless.
    Under the arch of the gate an adorable little blond with more curves to her than sense leaps upon me out of the shadows and kisses my lips. Fat brown rabbits ready for the pot scurry for home, frightened by our carrying on. True to her name, she giggles and laughs, playfully wrestling me back under the seclusion of the hedge.
     “Take me to wife, Sammy Bobbinger! I’m six and ten and not getting any younger!”
    “I cannot marry you, my Merry Opal. Your pa wants money or treasure for you and of that I have none!”
    “Piffle on treasure! We’ll dig us a burrow like the great great grands and lay there and make our young.”
    “It’s not so simple, Mare! Your pa’s right. You will be wanting better soon enough. I might take you in a burrow but I couldn’t keep you there. I must go and find a job. Then I can earn you treasure and put you in a proper home.”
    “Is that how little you think of your Merry, Sammy? That after all our lives together I could tire of you and run off with a rich man? I will show you what I think of that! I will dig my own burrow!”
    “That’s silly, Mare, a girl don’t burrow, it’s for a man to do that.”
    “Then here!” She grabs a garden shovel and flings it in my face. “Find a hillside and start digging! I want to start my family!”
    I put the shovel back on the neat and tidy wheelbarrow tucked under the hedge where we sit and felt I had done something fateful and significant in this sensible, everyday little gesture. “No, Merry girl, we must live like civilized folk. This isn’t the Dark Ages when a decent man would lay with the woman he loves in a hole with the ends of worms and crawly things. I must get myself a job and earn us some gold so we may buy a proper house with a proper outhouse back behind it.”
    “Well, aren’t you citified! All I want is you, Sammy Bobbinger, not no outhouse or piffling dead man’s grave gold or you running off everyday to get hurt in a factory, falling into the waterwheel or under the hammers or into the woof and weave. I won’t stand for it!”
    “And I can’t stand to hear you cussing, Mare!” I do stand to go but first tell her, “It won’t be like that.” She also stands but grabs the shovel again. For a moment I think she’s going to bang me once on the head and drag me off to her burrow, but she just uses the handle to hold off fainting.
    “You run off and just try to find your ‘job’, Sammy Bobbinger, I’ll show you! You come back here tomorrow and you’ll find me doing for myself. Now be off with you!” She begins to cry, merry no more.
    I come toward her to hold her as I always do, but she points the sharp end of the shovel at me and starts toward me. I back out of the hedge and leave by way of the gate, my heart wrenching to go back to her but knowing I would for once find no familiar welcome I trudge instead toward town.

I need a drink!
    To settle my nerves I stop at the Tip and Tap, a local nightspot and watering hole. I sit at the bar with my root beer and drown my sorrows. After a while I look up to see a man of middling height, nondescript face and indeterminate origins staring at me from the other end of the bar.
    “What be you a thinkin’, Sam Bobbins? You think to find jewels at the bottom of a bottle? Ol’ Tom, he know better! You need to find a wizard, or a dragon, or some such to solve your problems for you!” the strange creature offers in a singsong voice.
    “There be no more dragons! Alive, at least.” A low, sour, crass voice interrupts from a table in the shadows. “As for wizards, I don’t know there ever were, but I know where there are jewels — and gold — for the taking!” His obscene denial of the existence of dragons and wizards shocks me back to sobriety, but his offer of ‘gold for the taking’ interests me.
    “That’s what you need, Sam Bobbins, a pack of dwarves to go run off with, he’ll find you dragons — with or without a wizard. Go to him, now!” The oddball is singing again. I feel I must be drunk, or the other guy is, but I get up and sit with the dwarf anyway.
    “Since when did one make a pack? And I don’t like your tone, stranger, calling dwarves a pack as if we were wolves or geese. Huh? Where did your friend go, young-un?”
    “No one ever did catch Ol’ Tom!” his singsong voice fades into the distance through the open door.
    “I don’t know. He’s no friend of mine. You got a job for me?”
    “I might… Can you detect?”
    “Detect?” I had never heard the word before then.
    “Are you a detective? Can you smell out treasure? That’s my job, my line, and the work I do. See, I’m a detective, Hercule Poirot by name.”
    “That’s an odd name!” I shout out my amazement.
    He puts his finger to his lips and whispers, “You were expecting maybe Miss Marple?”
    “Sorry,” I shush myself.
    “I do need somebody to carry my tools. Detective work takes a lot of tools.”
    “How much does it pay?”
    “A copper for every silver we find, a silver for every gold, a tidy tithe before taxes. What taxes are, you’ll have to ask the Big people, if you’re daft enough.”
    “Is it dangerous?”
    “Cave-ins and the occasional spook. But if it were quite safe, everybody would be doing it, now wouldn’t they?”
    “When can we start?”
    “Tonight! We must away, ere break of day, for the sea and the elvish ruins by the shore.”

Break of Day
    We walk into the west all night beside his two mules. He spoke of tools, and tools there were! He had more shovels, picks, lanterns, rope and other even odder things than a whole row of gardens. As the sky turns blue above us and pink behind I hear a roar like what I imagine a thousand great dragons must sound like. I wonder what I must be getting myself into, since I had never so much as seen the sea before.
    “The Sea People came out of the drink on this very coast, and from here they left again ages ago. At least most of them left. Many people don’t believe in Elves anymore, but I have seen their specters walking in their mansions, and I have taken their gold. They did exist, and in a way still do. So when we get inside, what we don’t want is to find anyone watching us — if you catch my drift — or at least see them before they see us so they can’t sneak up behind us.”
    “You mean they’re still here?! Shouldn’t we leave them…”
    “Leave them their gold?! Of all the lame brain… They’re dead people, what use have they for money? Do they need to feed their own bellies and two mules? Or buy a pumpkin shell for little wifey, as do you?”
    “I was thinking of leaving them in peace! Gold or not.” Now I really did wonder what I was getting myself into! I didn’t care to rob the dead or desecrate their crypts and haunts. You go where the spooks are, and the spooks feed — off your life! Or so a wise old proverb reminds me.
    Shortly, a dark gray mass of moss-covered tumbled stones looms before us. “The gates of Fair Havens, young-un. Three hundred years ago, in it’s day, before Ol’ Crusty lit upon it’s pinnacles, it was full of tall — taller than Big people tall — pale pointy-eared people. Elves were more slim than bulky Big-uns, too. Big people are just overgrown shrubs in comparison to these tall pines, all muscle and no smarts. Small people know farming, and we Dwarves can dig, but the original Elves knew every sort of magic and wonder. And not Big people ‘science’ either, such as they have down South with their balloons and steam engines. Their magic was truly inexplicable!”
    “Will there be magic rings and crystal balls and such as in stories?”
    “Rings! Ye gods, I hope not. All those things are supposed to be melted away or sunk into the sea a thousand years ago. No, all I want is to turn an honest coin. I don’t want no miracles!”

A Haunt
    A dark door of bronze bound with green brass vines and leaves bars our way on the rubble-strewn street of the ruined city. Several other doors into the formerly great mansions on the cluttered avenue stand ajar.
    “Ah, here’s a likely suspect! Here, take this pick and jimmy the lock.” The dwarf Hercule gives me a finger’s length of fine steel, the tip covered in old boars’ grease. “Put it in the hole, feel for the tumblers and push them aside one by one. Yea, that’s it! You’ve got the fingers for it, more Small people do than don’t.”
    The door swings creaking back on it’s hinges. For a moment I thought I could see the white sepulchral face of a tall thin woman, but then the sunlight rushes into the tomb and it is gone.
    “That was a close one! That, me boy-o, is why we do this work afore noon, while the sun is low and still able to reach into doorways. We couldn’t open this door at night, or pass it’s threshold without the sun. The door will close of it’s own accord by dusk, and we will be caught behind it if we aren’t quick!”
    We run through the dusty rooms opening drawers and cabinets grabbing the few metal things yet to be found. Once I found the mummified corpse of a former explorer with a look of abject terror on his face. I closed up that cabinet quickly. The spooks had stolen his breath away!
    It was noon and no lunch, brunch or elevenses when we run up the front stair leaving the full sacks in the front hall to hold the door open. The greased pick opens locked bedrooms for me. Corpses lay mummified under blankets. I want to carry off books and scrolls as well as coins, bars and statuary in shiny metals, but Hercule forbids me. “Leave them! There is no market for what no one can read,” he scoffs.
    I give him a stern look and stuff them in my sack, replying, “I found them. I carry them.”
    The light is arching out of the west and the sun is sitting on the sea as we run back downstairs and out the door. This door is already pushing our first two small sacks along the floor as it swings itself shut. We grab our sacks but I spill a silver ring with a tremendous blood-red gem. I stop to pick it up but see a disembodied hand reaching out to grab me, or grab the ring. I pull back my hand just before it touches me and watch the spook hand pick up the ring, put it on a finger of the other hand that appears just then, now beckon for us to enter. Her face is so sad, so lost, I wonder what ship may yet be found to carry such a spirit back where she belongs. But I stand stock still. Finally the door slams shut and I hear the lock click.
    “You tetched? Hurry!”
    The light is fading from the streets, shadows gather and reach out for us. Poirot and I and our four sacks barely make it out under the portcullis before it falls on our heels.
    “Don’t look at them! Don’t try to understand them or communicate with them or help them. They only want to suck the life out of you! There is no hope for them. They aren’t even real people anymore, just memories that suck life to sustain their pointless existence!” The Dwarf gives me a good scolding as we tramp down the dusky path toward our campsite and the ever-patient asses.
    “She was looking for a ship! I could tell, as if I came to her house to tell her that there was none to be had at any price!” I excitedly jabber about my first spook.
    “Argh! Don’t ever talk of such things!” He gestures against evil fortune. “You mustn’t understand them! I suppose before she died some sea captain came to bring her the bad news. You stepped between her memory and his. But this is too much to know!”

Buried Treasure
    That night by the campfire I open the books I had purloined from the dead matron’s bedside table and behold a handwritten script I had never seen before. It’s very beautiful, done in a fine clear hand with elaborate engravings of mythic beasts at the start of each chapter. But I can make no sense of it. Poirot chuckles to himself as he uses a scale of balance to divide the loot between silver, gold, copper and brass. His pile is nine times larger than mine and almost pure gold. I decide to take it easy tomorrow.
    “I told you they’re no good. You can keep that trash, I won’t count it as part of the loot — this time. But if you ever disobey me again, any more books come out of your share. By weight!”
    I nod my sleepy head in agreement. Perhaps Merry would like the pretty drawings. She and I at least now have something to decorate our mantle, should we ever have a mantle. Merry! I wonder what you are doing while we are apart. If I get sucked up by the ghosts of someone else’s’ past lives, I shall never be able to live this one in the present which is mine! That night under a glaring full moon we bury our loot then mark the spot with a cairn of broken tombstones.
    In the morning it’s to the graveyard we go with our picks and shovels. We bust open sepulchers and dig up tombstones all day and by dusk in spite of not taking it as easy as I had hoped our sacks are not as full. “It would have been easier to clear that field for crops,” I tell the dwarf in disgust when he finally calls it quits for lunch.
    “Farm a graveyard? Are you daft?! You can’t grow corn or raise apples on graves. The spooks enter the trees or play devilment hiding in the corn. You eat that grain, the spirits eat you. You enter that orchard, the trees grab you and you’ll never be heard from again.”
    “Is that what the Old Forest grew up on?”
    “Yes, a sort of graveyard, an ancient battlefield. The trees grew up wild and like the grass of the Downs beyond would conceal the spirits of the restless dead who in fog or storm would lead those who try to pass to their deaths. Once spirits are satiated they fade. The wilds are far less dangerous now after a thousand years of peace than in the Dark Ages. There are enough innocent unmarked graves underfoot to shame the wicked into silence.”
    “I thought it was unmarked graves that cause restless dead?”
    “Up to a point. The newly murdered want to suck up all the life they can. The long dead only wish to be remembered. And the most ancient dead are harmless — as long as you don’t try to call them up!”
    “I thought you had to be a witch or a wizard to summon spirits?”
    “Now if that were the case, then what happened between you and that spook-woman at her door the other day? You just need to have a kind heart and they will sucker you in! Most of them have no malice, but that’s just their nature.”
    “And there are some who are worse?”
    “Oh! Indeed there are, the spirits of violent, ruthless, cruel beings. Especially of the magical sort. A dead dragon is almost as bad as a live one: Beware those!”
    “But why!”
    “Why? Why? They can possess you! Make you greedy beyond avarice, more cruel than a ton of tyrants, and vicious like a pack of wolves. And all it takes is to remember them in the presence of their bones, hardly difficult. I don’t traffic in dragon bones or scales or powder for that reason.”
    “What’s that used for?”
    “It raises the dead! Don’t you know anything? But the animated corpse and those who handle the dragon dust become as wicked as dragons. A man may hire a witch to bring back his sweet daughter to life, see, but what he really gets is a little bit of the beast reanimating the unchanging corpse of his child. I even heard of some of these vampire zombies transforming into serpents — small dragons — if they get enough of a dose. But the body has to be still warm, very fresh and in no way dismembered for the worst to happen. Usually it just becomes a ghoul that must drink blood to survive.”
    “Have you ever seen the walking dead in these coffins you open?”
    “Mummies? No, but they can be summoned. That’s why you do all the digging and I rob the corpses.”
    “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Dead Dragon
    It’s not a pretty job working the tombs and robbing the houses of the dead. Every other day we are among the sepulchres again with pick and shovel. The odd days we raid a house in the city. Having to be out before darkness descends, we spend less and less time actually inside the forgotten mansions as we go deeper into the city toward the harbor and as I become more proficient at finding their hiding places for tableware, jewelry, statuary and coins.
    “Hercule, there aren’t really dragons,” I blurt out one day upon entering the city by the southern gate. “Are there?”
    “No dragons? Ha! Is there gold? Silver? Precious stones of red, green, yellow and blue fire? Of course there’s dragons! My word, but you are the most stupid, naive hick I have ever had the pleasure!”
    “But they are no more, or at least none nearby?”
    “Indeed there is! What do you think killed this city, and keeps the people away still today? You think the fishing went bad? Or perhaps trade routes changed? All those things did happen, but they happened after the dragon came! Because the dragon came. Nonsense to your enlightened Big people explanations and rationalizations! The dragon did it, Ol’ Crusty, which isn’t his real name, to utter that would awaken the same and so much for our sorry hides, now wouldn’t that be?”
    “But where is he?”
    “He sleeps, some say, under the great dome above the harbor in the highest part of the city!” He grumbles greedily, “In the wealthiest neighborhood, naturally.”
    “Have you ever gone to see him?”
    “Fool! Boy!” he spat. “Am I a necromancer to raise an ancient pestilence again upon the world?! You don’t go to see dragons like some fool tourist. It would have even more power to suck you in than the corpses in the tombs I don’t allow you to see. I don’t want a bunch of dead mummies trotting about and getting in the way of my profit. You shouldn’t be concerned with raising up trouble either, now should you? Your sole concern should be to do the job and get done so you can get back to your little darling. Go home, make babies, and let dead dragons sleep.”
    “But to come all this way and not see the sights! Besides, I only ever seen one spook, I never raised the dead if that’s even possible and I don’t believe I could have any effect on the dragon, who’s surely just dust and bones by now.”
    “Dust and bones? Dust and bones is enough, for a dragon. He never leaves his pile of treasure. He curls up around it and dies there. And yet, though but dried up old bones, he’s still here!”
    “Is that where he is?” I point to the largest dome in the city. He knocks my hand out of the air in a fright as if someone might see.
    “Yes. And you stay away from it! Nothing’s there for us. Now pick me this lock and let’s sack us a house.”
    Day after day we break into tombs, rob mansions, and fill our six then eight sacks daily. I help the dwarf dig up his share of the loot and pile it on his donkey.
    “I will take this to my banker and get supplies for next month. I’ll be back in a couple of days. You continue to break into houses. Do the ones near the gates, stay out of trouble. You hear?!” I nod in agreement, but I’m not really listening.
    That day I hike around the outside of the wall to the North Gate to loot the houses there. The next day I again do as I am told. I break into a former inn and ransack the rooms for loot. Strange, the way people dropped things in their flight from the city. Stranger still what they clung to till the last. Flight! A flutter of raven wings draws my attention. From a fourth story window I see mobs running from a flying serpent as it swoops down upon the roofs and proclaims it’s sovereignty over the city. Ships burn in the harbor. The roads are liquid rivers of flame. A few escape, but what are so few among many thousands? I awake suddenly from my vision. I can still see the wraiths of traders and merchants crowding around me at the window. It would never have occurred to them to just abandon their goods and go, on foot and naked if need be to save their hides. But like little dragons themselves — all races included — they too curl up around their little piles and die. I have to bust up quite a few such corpses in the inn to get at their goods.
    I think of the dragon and his vast pile of treasure all that night around the lonely campfire. The dragon while he yet lived would have taken the better part of the treasures of the city for himself, in lieu of human sacrifices. The best of all treasure stashes, and the most vast by far, is within the coils of that ancient and ruined monster. Having some of that would get me home and in my Merry’s arms all the sooner, like the next day!

Ol’ Crusty
    In the morning I pass by the tempting locked doors of hundreds of mansions and arrive at the shattered maw of the domed State Palace at the top of the hill. Immediately I see bronze shields with patterns of silver inlay and bosses of gold that I know instinctively are the chitinous rubbish of the serpent’s illimitable passes. I pass ruined stairways, smashed porticos and the scattered bones of thousands of defenders. There are rooms with heaped breastplates, tangled stacks of swords and spears, and a high pyramid of skulls under a smaller dome.
    Finally I enter under the great dome and stand between the columns of the surrounding circular colonnade. The sun spears through thick dragon dust that chokes the air from open sky at the top of the broken hemisphere. And there, occupying the broad floor, is a dark mountain of tarnished silver glinting with irregular gold shapes and the huge ruined serpentine skull on top of it all. He went to sleep one dark night ages ago, content that he had collected all the treasure from this city that could be collected, and with his worshippers either dead or fled, no more would be forthcoming. So he never woke again. I stupidly hoped that he couldn’t awaken now.
    I circle around the mount of gold to allow my eyes to adjust to the dim light while greedy desires grow unasked-for in my bosom. I see at the base of the mountain the ribs of the serpent like a fence of elephant tusks around his stash, but a broken fence lying on their sides or propped where the treasure supports them. The floor beyond them is littered with the bronze shields of it’s scales and thick with the dust of dragon’s flesh dissoluted into gray dirt. I keep behind the columns hiding from the bones of the ruined giant but each turn offers a new spectral vision between rose granite pillars. There are lights where there should be darkness, the ghosts of burning braziers in the space between the colonnade and the ribs of the immense serpent. Ghosts of worshippers too, bearing silver trays laden with gold coins, silver plate, platinum urns. The dragon appears whole and alive again.
    His deep voice booms, “Crystasaurus!” and multitudes from every race bow prostate around me: tall thin pale women, thick tanned muscular men, Small people like myself and fat hairy Dwarves carrying chests of jewels. And there descending out of the smoke of incense from the heights is the living head of the monster. The eyes transfix me, standing as I am between two granite pillars as thick as I am tall, as if each transmits a beam of light as dense and solid as a spear. The bronze scales of the body transmute to gold around the face: small and delicate leaf. The bright red forked tongue whips out and gently wraps my face.
    “Who are you?” the dragon demands.
    “Sam Bobbins. I’m a detective.”
    “Why are you here?”
    “To see you. I’ve heard of what you’ve done to this city.”
    “What do you bring me?”
    “But you are dead! You haven’t collected anything in centuries.”
    “Old dragons never die. We always keep our treasures — forever!”
    “Why? You can’t use it. I collect a few coins to take back to my mate so our children may have a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. But you have no mate, no descendants, nothing but you and your useless pile of fancy shiny rubbish. What is the point of it?”
    “You are a thief, and a fool. I am the Great and Terrible Crystasaurus Industrious Militarus. I conquer and never suffer defeat. I take and never give. I kill and never suffer harm. I seize and none escape. It’s my destiny and nature to possess. My venom is fire and what I coil my body around I forever strangle. Now, what do you bring me? Surrender to my taste even the least tribute or tax, the smallest coin, and I will let you live yet another day. But tomorrow you must bring me more. Give!” He holds his tongue out in front of me like a hand.
    “I’m sorry, I have nothing. I’m so poor I can’t even feed and house my own mate. I’m homeless, helpless, horseless, hopeless. The only thing I have is my own life and love, and sometimes I doubt whether I truly value those. I have nothing, and besides, you’re only a vision, a mere ghost.”
    “I accept what you bring me. The lives you don’t value, your own and your mate and future children, will feed me briefly.”
    He opens his mouth and there is a great wind around me. All I see is blackness as I’m sucked into the huge maw and down the deep throat. But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Is it my escape or my final destruction in the inner flames of the dragon’s gut?

His Second Adventure:
Sam Bobbin’s Zombie Holiday with a Dragon

A Grave Situation
    I stand on my feet in a black pit, a grotto of dank tightly fitted stones that had it been painted with pure soot could not have been any darker. Nothing can be seen, unless you count blackness itself as something tangible. I wonder if I have been struck stone blind and deaf. Nothing can be heard either, except my own breathing and an anxious throbbing in my ears. I stand still for the longest time, hoping for some illumination, expecting something to happen, anything, when nothing did.
    So I step forward, and to avoid bashing my nose, reach out with my hands. My poor bare toe stubs on a wall before me, but my hands feel nothing. I lower my arms until my fingers touch — a sleeve! And within it a long narrow bone.
    “Argh!!” I jump back. Fortunately I recall I still have my own little ‘dragons’ in my waistcoat pocket. I strike one against the stone alcove holding the skeleton and behold the dead man. He’s more than twice as long as I’m high, the skull huge, a ball of bone with a face no bigger than mine. Everything is dust and dry as dust. So I know Ol’ Crusty is around here somewhere.
    I turn about and see a torch on the wall. Before the wooden match bites at my fingers I light the greased rags and take it to explore the tomb. There are seven biers, one at the end of the alcove where I stand and three more in alcoves on each side of the narrow main corridor. Where alcove eight should be is a solid wall of stone, the entrance to this unopened crypt. I stand facing the impassable barrier of dense featureless stone for a long time contemplating being locked away with this. A foul wind blows out the torch. A skeletal hand is bound like an iron vise across my throat.
    Suddenly with a warm hand of living flesh on my shoulder I stand on a hillside before the teeming city as the sun sets in red on the ocean and the roofs of the metropolis erupt in orange and yellow flames to light the coming long night. The dragon crouches on four short skinny legs on the highest dome while he spreads his great bat wings and caws like a rooster of the night. Jets of yellow fire shoot from his mouth over the forest of burning masts in the harbor.
    The tall pale knight by my side speaks, “We delayed too long. This land has made us fat and contented cattle. Now is the day of our slaughter.”
    Another elf joins us. “Captain, we are ready to initiate the evacuation by land. The escape tunnels are cleared.”
    “Very well, Corporal. Let’s hope we have better luck than the Harbor Patrol.” He turns to me, “If I may explain, young prince…” I try to tell him I’m no prince at all but detective Sam Bobbins. “We have three tunnels: North, East and here in the south, made long ago to secure exit from the city in case of siege. Only the exits remain unfinished above a vault of stone designed to cascade the ground above into deep pits on either side while we depart safely through the middle up a stone ramp. Fires underground have undermined the vaults’ wooden foundations and now the way shall open for some to yet escape the dragon’s grasp!”
    Suddenly the ground shudders beneath my feet as the invisible vaults open. I perceive then the train of refugees coming toward us out of the gathering gloom. They lead mules and horses weighted with burdens or are burdened themselves with packs. “No!” I shout as to our right a stream of fire burns through the air and the eastbound wagon train burns in a river of orange blames. I hear the inhuman screams of the burning men, women and children. People near us drop their packs and bundles, abandon horse and mule, and come running toward us to escape the searing heat. Too late! The burning air chars our lungs.
    I am before the same bronze door to the same mansion where I first began my detective career. It swings open, and the same long pale delicate hand beckons me within. This time I follow and stand in the foyer with the living slender giantess whom I saw as a specter before, more than twice my height with a long white mane of hair wrapped about her scalp like a crown.
    “What news do you bring us? When do we leave?”
    “Leave?” I find myself answering. “No one is able to leave. There is no ship, not for all the treasure of your house.”
    “But we shall starve! There is no food in the city! I know of mothers eating their infants, so starved are we all. What shall become of us?”
    “Perhaps the roads are passable, at night, for a few at a time. But for me, it’s over. I saw my ship and my crew consumed by the dragon. There is no hope.”
    “We would only starve in the wilderness. We have waited too long, we are all weak with hunger.”
    “We’ve clung to our treasures too long. It’s all the dragon wants.”
    “My only treasure is my children. Their father perished with your crew aboard his ship in the harbor. Now we shall lock this door behind you and the dragon for the last time, go to our beds, and die.”
    “There will be those who will come to take your gold to the dragon. They will force you to open, if only to bide themselves a moment’s more time.”
    “Leave me. Never come here again. I bar the door behind you.”
    I see the bronze panels shut in my face from the stoop.
    Then I’m again at the dragon’s pile. Beside me a tall brazier roars high as a bonfire with large blocks of charcoal. The gilded living head of the monster gleams in the glimmering light. His eye is on a tall willowy elf queen standing fearlessly under his snout.
    “We must go work the fields, we have no food,” she pleads before it.
    “This is not enough. You brought me as much yesterday.”
    “We are starving. We are faint with weakness. We must eat!”
    “You have strength enough to bring me your gold. You have no need but to serve me. Bring me more, and I will let you live.”
    “Our children die of hunger.”
    “If they bring me gold, I will let them live too.”
    “We have had nothing for weeks.”
    “Bring me your gold, or you will perish — now.”
    “Let us have food, for indeed we perish — now.”
    “You have food in your homes, where you also have gold.”
    “That food is long since eaten. And you burned our granaries and stores when you destroyed our harbor.”
    “I burned the boats that were taking away your gold. Tell the people to bring me the gold that is in their homes.”
    “We first need to eat.”
    “I allow you to live only because you said you can control your people. Have them bring me more gold.”
    “They would gladly give you their gold, in exchange for food.”
    “Give them food then, bring me their gold.”
    “Why can’t you understand? The grain is in the fields, we must go out to get it!”
    “No one can go beyond the wall and live. I know what you want to do! You would all run away and carry off your gold with you.”
    “If we do not go out to collect the food, we cannot eat. If we cannot eat, we die and the gold stays with us. Please, let us at least send away our children!”
    “No! They would carry off your gold.”
    The dragon opens his immense jaws wide and breathes on her. Suddenly the tall gorgeous woman chars into a living — if still dignified — burning charcoal.
    “Which among you will serve me? Him shall I let live. Bring me your gold, and you will live. Break into your neighbors’ homes and force them to yield me their gold, lest I consume you as well!”
    Crowds of people of all races run from the hall screaming and trampling each other in their mad rush to avoid the dragon’s threatened fire. Under the dome of skulls — still fully fleshed charred heads — I crawl into a hiding place, close my eyes and shudder to wait for the tide of starving souls to subside.
    I awaken to a melee of bodies heading the opposite direction. They are armored and armed with spears and swords but their steel is no help against the dragon’s fire that follows them. A river of flames sweeps them off their feet and I duck my head and hold my breath.
    When I open my eyes again the floor is littered with burning corpses — or soon to be corpses. I get out of my hiding place and run for my life, only to stumble and slide on hot grease and boiling blood. A dwarf, the hair singed off his skull, his helmet forsaken, is before me trying to drag himself out of the pile of bodies that the defenders’ rout has become. I stretch out to grab his arm and pull him toward me but the flesh comes off in my hand like cooked meat. He pleads at me with a tongueless mouth as he dies and I vomit before I stumble to my feet and run.
    Back under the larger dome, I find the women of the leading citizens of the city cowering under the colonnade as the lantern of the dome crashes down sending a barrage of bricks, fire and dust among us.
    A whip-like tail slithers down after it, followed by the dragon’s back legs then his fore, the long scraping claws like scimitars. The black batwings followed, hugged tight against the bronze scales of the thick body. Finally the head comes down upon coils like those of a common python. The gold snout approaches me.
    “Now you have seen what I have done, little man, what will you do for me?”
    “You starved all those women and children to death!”
    “Even then I did not release them. And I will not release you! You too must serve me. Yet it is not a coin I require of you, the only tribute I ask is that you call me by name.”
    “And bring you back among the living? Never!”

The Living End
    It’s night. I am on a ruined street I had seen before by daylight and now in the dark. I have often wondered why certain houses are locked tight while others had their doors ajar and broken. Now I see. I am in the middle of a riot, but these are not ordinary people. Each is a rotting corpse, women I had seen worshipping the serpent, men burned by his fire fighting it or crushed in the rout with the defenders, now ransack any house whose wooden door is too weak to bar their way, breaking windows in the stronger houses and spilling the goods of shops into the street.
    As I’m pulled along by the press I can see where we are heading. This is how the monster collected his treasures after the city had starved. Soon we are again in the state palace and I watch the army of zombies climbing the flanks of the serpent like living vermin on rotting flesh,only here the vermin are rotting flesh and they crawl over a living monster. Already a huge stash has piled up between his coils, but not as great as I know it will become.
    They dump they’re armloads between the dragon’s coils and slavishly go out again for more. I choose to stay behind. If a zombie is what I am now, I am the most un-zombie-like zombie among them, fresh meat with a mind of my own.
    I look for a place to hide and await the dawn. I find a fairly intact stair and run in short leaps to the top. In the corridor I open a door and must beat back innumerable mummy hands that hungrily reach out for this fresh meat. I drag it closed again.
    This is going to be difficult, finding a hole until morning that’s not already occupied by horrors that want to eat me, terrorize me, or otherwise do me in. I walk the ruined corridor to it’s end, not daring to open any other doors, and step carefully down the far stairwell. Several of the marble steps are broken or even missing, so it’s more a climb than was the run up the other stair. Dragon fire has climbed these stairs in the past, turning patches of hard stone to frail lime. Those steps that carry my weight are twice the height of what I’m used to, a whole foot, built for elvish legs.
    For all my efforts I’m not rewarded at the bottom. The stair is shattered and impassable the last ten feet and below me is a writhing mass of snakes. Not dragons — the stair could not have stood it — fortunately they breath no fire to toast my toe hair, but are only common variety pit vipers. I shudder that I must find myself in a place where any kind of viper is common, but here I am. I cover my arm with my cloak and smash out the leaded glass of the landing window. It’s a drop into darkness nonetheless, but there is no other way out. Up or down stairs I would be eaten alive.
    I fall for long suspenseful seconds before I hit the branches. My hands grab and after falling some more I thump against the boughs, carrying with me needle and twig as I tumble, my torn hands find purchase on the sticky branches. I shimmy down the trunk to the ground.
    I manage the steep cliff as only a Small person can and after an arduous climb I’m at the bottom. There is a stagnant slough I dare not step into so I follow the bank south with the help of the moon until I step up onto a paved road. The ruined bridge is still climbable and shortly I’m beyond the swamp.
    I smell more than see where I am. The salt air and the charcoal odor of ruined docks and warehouses tell me I’m at the harbor. The silvery oval of salty bay is before me, the waves lashing sluggishly upon the seawall where I stand.
    A movement interrupts the beauty of the night. Zombies covered in green phosphorescent weed walk up the stony beach beyond the sea road to claw at the wall. One cadaverous head with tiny crabs crawling through hair of kelp ascends on steps set into the wall beside me. I set off at a run south.
    My hope is to reach the city wall and the South gate when it opens at dawn, if only I can keep out of the clutches of desiccated mummies, rotten zombies, and immaterial wraiths till then. Out among the tombs there would merely be corpses walking. Here, even if I can avoid the rioting zombies there are still the will-o’-the-wisp ghosts wandering alone. Perhaps I am one of those.
    The midnight streets of the ruined city are alive with specters and apparitions held captive as am I by the dragon. Many are seemingly innocent children playing, boys kicking ball, girls skipping rope. But even these are not as harmless as they appear. One little tike steps in front of me and holds out her hand. In life she would have deserved a smile and a pat on the head, but this leggy child screams, “Name me!” as her little hand and arm turn into the dragon’s forked tongue and her eyes into his eyes. I run anew, until my bare feet feel like lead and my chest aches begging air. Maybe I’m not dead yet!
    The portcullis of the South gate yawns open before me. The moon has set beyond the dragon’s dome behind me and it’s pitch black, but the way open before me is a deeper, darker blackness still: an unnatural darkness. I stop panting in front of it and the gate transforms into the open jaws of the hideous serpent. My adversary utters, “Do you think to escape me so easily, little man? I have devoured hundreds like you, and all are still with me.”
    I pick up a broken halberd and fling it at him. It clatters off the closed bars of my prison. I pick it up again and begin my trek east through the city. It’s fairly easy to keep clear of the marauding bands of zombies going door to door calling out in raspy gurgling voices, “Trick or treat!” and “Bring out your gold!” by just disappearing as is natural to my kind. Disappearing seems enough like magic to Bigs to amaze the crowds on market day but to me and the cousins it’s just commonsense. That got me reminiscing, recalling the fun we had sneaking up on rabbits during my boyhood or spooking deer more recently. I wish I had a fat roast rabbit to fill my empty belly with right now. I laugh to myself seeing in my mind’s eye brother Bill riding buck for all he’s worth, grasping the flesh-hung antlers.
    “Where’s your purse, my little man?” I awake from my reverie to see a zombie Big with flesh hanging from his bones just like the flesh on Bill’s buck’s antlers hung. He receives a stab in the belly from my halberd for his interest. I move quickly then, careful to kick up no dust, around the corner, behind a flagpole and through an arch. “Huh, where’d he go? The little spook!” I hear him say.
    I find myself in somebody’s forgotten garden. Above me stretch the boughs of a massive ancient oak. The tree is dead, a skeleton of a tree actually, without leaf or acorn or twig. I circle around — keeping my distance — looking into windows of the broken down kitchen and scullery and at the upper floors above.
    “Hey, you there! Little mouse! What do you think you’re doing? Come over here and I’ll twist your little head off like an apple from it’s stem!” I turn around to see the trunk has acquired a face, and is waving two large boughs about it’s middle like big muscular arms. I’m out of there, double quick.
    Back on the street I have an easier go for a while. I think of how this city unlike any other set of human habitations I’ve ever been in is totally without horse, cat or dog. Perhaps I should search their pots for their pets, people will do mad things when they’re starving. This reminds me of our own animals, which reminds me of home and our mother feeding them, and of my mother’s kitchen. I think of my mother scolding me, and how right she was. “Sammy, you watch out now! Don’t you know those drinking fools and card sharps you go about with are only looking to lead you astray? Don’t you go trying to take anything from anybody! They won’t like it and then where will you be then, huh?” She would be standing in her homespun apron and house dress with a round broom of straws she had tied herself around an old stick or pointing a large dripping spoon at me while bending over a caldron of rabbit stew at our hearth.
    Brought back suddenly to the present I must hide from a barking and mewing white mist that’s covering the pavers before me and crawling like a living thing after me. Around a corner I go and there is the East gate. I work my prick on the rusty ironbound door of the attached guardhouse and slip in shutting the door behind me. I’m in a tiny crude scullery and beside me is a rickety wooden stair crowded with cobwebs. At me feet is a rotted basket full of bones. They must be dog bones for they are barking at me. Not knowing if I’m about to face mummified spiders or vampire bats, I cover my head with my cloak and charge upward. It was neither.
    I come out of the shaky wooden spiral onto a parlor. There on a moth-eaten sofa reclines a skeleton in yeoman’s mail and round helmet. “What have we here? Who goes there?” he shouts as he begins to get up. I pick up a brick lying loose and hurl it, shattering his jaw and backbone. The skull and round iron hat rolls off and spins to a stop at my feet to say, “Ow, now that wasn’t fair, was it?” The remainder of his bones sit down abruptly, not knowing anything else to do.
    I bound across the parlor and bash my shoulder into a likely looking door. It shatters to reveal a wailing desiccated mummy of a woman wearing nothing but her camisole and stocking pawing at me. I back away and open the next door by the knob. I find the spiral up to the roof. “At last! Madam, and sir, my regrets.” I bow and escape up the stair closing the door behind me.
    I come out with my pick from another ironbound door onto the top of a gate tower, a circle of battlements overlooking the abandoned elvish fields long since overgrown with woods, the burned-off clearing where the ass stands patiently sleeping, and miles past the horizon, my home and my beloved. I think to myself, this is as close as I would get for a long while.
    For it’s no use, without a rope the ground fifty feet below might as well be fifty miles. If I fall off those battlements I would surely join the zombies in their nightly forages robbing empty ruins for the rest of eternity. If I was back at the campsite with the donkey I would have the rope, but if I was back at the campsite with the donkey I wouldn’t need a rope. Behind me a loud pounding begins at the door to the yeoman’s parlor below me.
    “I found me hat, my little fellow! Now open up and we’ll have us a little dance! You can’t get down from there, and the Captain of the Guard’s sure to be around shortly to have words with ye afore I introduce my prick into ye! Scare my whore into hysterics, will ye?” Apparently a zombie has a social life of a sort, and this one lost his head over my barging in on his.
    I take off along the top of the wall. The zombies within the city riot in the streets below and the mummies without the wall labor to set right their shattered tombs Hercule Poirot and I had opened. How long has it been? It seemed like centuries since I was an innocent grave robber.
    The animate dead below me seem like so many broken dolls. I recall my little sister, all fifteen inches of restless playfulness bouncing on her tippy-toes over her half dozen dollies, leaping, giggling, then bending down to rearrange a pose and chatter endlessly in her pretend conversations. The twig and rag creations with acorn heads would go off on journeys over Mythic Mountains tall, the top of the nearby stone pile wall just a little taller than she is, while their wives sat at the home fires or scratch in the dirt with more twigs, planting pine needles.
    I wonder if my Merry is planting pine needles, scratching her burrow out of the clay and rock? Can I ever get back to her? Am I even still alive? It seems this night has lasted forever, and it isn’t getting any lighter.
    I recall when Merry and I played together as children. She liked me to make leaf boats to float on the Little Britches. If I found a good whole leaf — dry but with no bug holes — it would carry her leaf and twig doll down all the way to the Big Britches, floating past drowned logs and wave covered boulders to where the fish are so large they come up and nibble at the leaf boats like sea monsters.
    Monsters! Here I’m fantasizing about sea serpents when I have a real dragon after me. How shall I escape him if dawn doesn’t ever come? Can I scale the wall of my prison and get beyond his reach? Will I ever awaken safe in the arms of my beloved?
    I near the North gate with still no sign of daylight when I see a raven. It’s so black and the sky so dark I can see it only when it flies, as an absence of stars. As I continue north and now west along the battlements of the city wall there are more and more ravens gathering, fluttering in from elsewhere and cawing at me as I pass, each showing one glittering jewel of an eye watching me.
    Finally I arrive at the round top of the East tower of the North gate and stop. Surely I’ve walked a good many hours to get to this point. but still there is no dawn, no lightening of the firmament’s oppressive blackness. And now there are ravens everywhere, hundreds of them. I pick up the broken staff of a halberd to shoo them away but they become even more daring and aggressive. They push me back from the outer wall until I’m tempted to make for the guard’s room below. But no, a loud hammering comes from that door. And below me on the street the zombies are rioting. No help down there, not a chance of survival behind that ironbound door even then beginning to splinter.
    Just then the ravens all take to wing at once. I cover my face expecting an attack but when none comes I look and all the birds have collected themselves into a pillar of bodies, all gently cooing. The column becomes a cowl and cloak of black ravens’ wings and a face appears within the cowl. It’s the dragon, his serpentine snout bejeweled with ravens’ eyes.

A fateful Decision
    “What have I asked of you, little man? What worship do you owe me in exchange for another hour of your miserable little life?”
    I decide flattery is the better part of valor this time around, since he obviously is real enough to make my life miserable, keeping me running in circles like a mouse in a bucket. “Oh, Great Crusty, how many your victims who serve you! Of what possible use is one more Small person? Don’t you know all around think you’re dead? Most wonder if you ever did really exist! If only I may go home, then the living may know of your glory!”
    “Would you there pronounce my name?”
    “Of course!”
    “This I shall grant.”
    I am that instant in my father’s house, standing before my own mother’s hearth.
    “Ye gods!” My father drops his bags at the door. “Is it really you, son?” But he appears older than he ought.
    I can only weep at first. Finally I find my voice, but it’s like speaking in a dream. “Father, I was unable to bring home any treasure. I went with a dwarf to Old Haven, but a dragon captured me. But at last I am home again!”
    “But you’ve been gone fifty years, boy! Your Merry’s dead, she buried herself alive the day you left by digging her own burrow. What she dug was her own grave, the wicked gal. Now the Small farmers are all selling out to the Big. I’ve come out from town where I’ve found work in the mill to get the last of our things. The house is bound to be firewood. There’s nothing here for you, son.”
    “No!” I scream before I find myself back on the East tower of the North gate of the cursed city. “No! That’s a lie! You didn’t really send me home, that was all illusion, as are you!” I charge the raven-cloaked serpent and crash through nothing but a storm of feathers.
    “You see you have no choice but to serve me. I’ve killed your mate so you have nothing to go back to, nothing to live for but to bring me back to life.” The very air vibrates with the dragon’s thoughts.
    Seeing no other possible escape, I leap into the outer darkness in my despair, beyond the cursed haunted city, and fall into the abyss to what must surely be my destruction. I only hope it will be an afterlife free from dragons. I never hit bottom.

My Ass is Dragon
    I’m standing in the dragon’s lair under the dusty sunlit dome, nothing but bones and wreckage around me. I walk back out the way I came into the morning air and leave the city. Taking not so much as a copper I grab the unloaded donkey and make my way home at a trot. I must know the truth. I pass my mother’s house without a glance and batter the round green door of farmer Opal’s house.
    It flies open before me. “She’s gone!” He growls at me.
    “Where is she?!” are the first words out of my mouth, but I already know.
    “She’s dead! She’s been dead over a month now, since the day you left. I didn’t even know she’d gotten it into her fool head to dig her own burrow, but she smothered in falling sand and dirt. I dug her out with these own two hands, with your father and brothers and my boys to help us, and put her in a proper casket wearing her mother’s wedding dress after her mother and yours washed the dirt off her. She still looked so sweet. Over there she is!” He points at his family graveyard. “If you want to come calling on my young daughter.”
    He slams the door in my face. I turn and walk away.

His Third Adventure:
Sam Bobbins Takes Moody Richard’s Place

Mourning Morning
    I walk away. My life is dead. I mean to say my wife is dead, but it amounts to the same thing. The life that I should have had lies mouldering in the ground, over before it even got started. Our sons and daughters lie in that grave with her and I could never conceive of my taking another girl to my bed, if that were even possible. For a landless, pennyless, grave robbing son of a Small farmer it isn’t to be hoped for in my wildest imaginings.
    The road stretches ever on before me. Another thing about my situation occurs to me: some, particularly her father, her family and all her relations surely blame me for letting her dig her own burrow and hold me responsible for her death. I cannot stay around here. Doubtless I shall live, somewhere else, continuing on another century or more to sleep and eat and walk on my tottering two stumps hither and yon. But I walk like a dead man even now, like the zombies I barely escaped becoming, staring straight ahead at a horizon gone gray in my sight, the birds in the trees laughing at what the dragon has done to me, the rabbits in their burrows as unappetizing to my mouth full of dust as mummies in their graves, as my beloved’s rotting flesh.
    It occurs to me my hand still grasps the bridle of the ass that brought me to this place. I drop it like it was some vile thing out of the accursed city. I become suddenly alive and slap the rump of the senseless beast but it just continues on slowly setting one hoof in front of the other as if nothing has changed. Anger flares in me like I didn’t know I was capable of, like I thought I could undo what has been done, to take back my fateful choice whereby I took up with this stupid beast’s master, and so somehow to raise the dead.
    Therefore I pick up a hefty tree branch laying in the lane and swing it against the rear of the animal. The rotten wood smashes against the ass of the ass exploding in a shower of bark and dust. I must have found a tender spot in the thick hide for he brays and startles into a trot.
    “Get up! Get away! You dumb ass! Go back to your master and to your mate! I shan’t come with you! I have no need of your dragon’s gold!” He starts into a run, on past the gate to my father’s farm and back in the direction of the distant haunted city.
    I stop at that gate and turn to look at the fields and cabin I have always known. My father is nowhere in sight but I know all he would say is, “I told you so.” My brothers would be with him and would be cold comfort as well. Even my mother represents no consolation from the wound I have suffered, selfishly thinking as I then was only to assuage my guilt and pour balm on my dead dreams.
    I weep a flood of hot salty tears as I stand facing the setting sun. There is nothing for me here. Would I wish to inflict myself upon my brothers and force them to go thirds with me? The farm can barely support one family, much less three broods. Well, two, since I will never marry. The silvery moon points my shadow to the road, and enveloped in darkness, I stagger to my fate.
    Dillsberg is dark and locked up tight by the hour I get there. Even the Tip and Tap is as abandoned looking as the haunted houses of Old Haven. It spooks me so after all I’ve seen to return to where my adventure began that I can almost envision ghosts and zombies waiting for me in the shadows, ready to take me back to that nightmare. I’m out of town in a hurry.
    The road goes ever, ever on in my despair as I head west into farmland where the clay is replaced by sand and the air is tangy with the scent of salt. Finally at dawn I’m along the docks of the very alive and busy port of New Haven. I turn into a rough and ready public house that stinks of fish and order a dozen eggs, a hunk of cheese and a beer. The eggs come boiled piled on a plate and the cheese in a wedge on a separate plate with a fork stuck upright in the wedge. I use my own knife to cut the cheese and roll the eggs between my palms. It’s warm salty cheddar for me, then hot bland egg, cheese, egg, cheese and a swig of ice-cold beer when I get thirsty.
    I’m six eggs in as I notice I’m not alone. Two Big men — shaggy scruffy stinking sailors — are at the bar. “We ain’t makin’ money sittin’ in this stinkin’ town, mate!” grumbles the younger slamming down his lager.
    “It my fault that Dick walked out on us? It’s the Captain as won’t leave port without a hooksman for number one! And what Shrimp will e’en talk to us much less sign onto the Cathay for seven years on the briny?”
    “Lan’ lubbin’ little pricks! You’d think we had lice or something’!” he drains his beer.
    “Ha! You do! Ya’ drunkin’ fool!” laughs the older salt.
    The younger slams his empty tankard down on the table at this affront.
    “Excuse me, gents,” I put down my beer and speak up. It seems I hadn’t learned my lesson. “I hear you need a hand?”
    “Huh? You know sail, lad? You e’er hunt the great sea serpents?” The older salt looks me up and down.
    “I know serpents! Handled them large and small, wet or dry. You sick enough of the dry to take a chance on me?” But I knew I had to do something for my next meal!
    “Well, he is Small!” shrugs the younger.
    “Aye,” says the older to me ignoring his partner. “That we are. All right! We’ll let Ishmael settle on you or no, it’s not us who’ll decide.”
    “He’s partial to the Small folk for first hook. E’er stick a gaff in a serpent? It’s no work for the squeamish!”
    “I’m not afraid of any bloody gore, living or dead!” I swallow another white egg as if to prove it.
    “It takes a firm stance and a strong arm to gaff-hook a great sea serpent.”
    “I’ll slice into it like into this here cheese,” I continue at my breakfast with a salty, mouldy sliver of the yellow sharp.
    “All right, let’s have at it! Shove off with us, then.” They swallow the last of the beer and stand up. I swallow the last of my own and lay my last brass under the glass, after filling my pockets with eggs and cheese.
    I follow the two sailors out and down alongside the docks past fishing trawlers and merchant caravels to the planks of a fourmasted schooner, a swift whaler with half a dozen boats and painted on it’s prow, ‘Cathay’.

The Cathay
    “Come aboard then, wait here on the deck and I’ll get the Captain.” The older salt disappears into the back of the ship.
    Shortly I see a Small person approaching. “You be my first hook?” he asks me.
    “I need work. And I’ve handled serpents. Will you try me?” I give my best impression of a careless swagger. “Call me Sam.”
    “I’ve never seen your face before in this or any other port I’ve been in, and I’ve been in a few. Where’d you serve?”
    He stares at me like a drill into a stump of wood. And I was suddenly as dumb as that stump of wood. I didn’t know what to say!
    “Aye, like I thought, a plough boy. But it don’t matter. I’ve been here two weeks since my boy Moody Richard ran off to crawl down a hole with his girl. So I’m ready to take on any sturdy fellow and show him the ropes. We’ll be gone seven years and you’ll see the world. What would your girl think of that?”
    “I’ve got no girl. All I had is dead. Seven or seventy-seven, I’ve got nothing better to do.”
    “How’d she die?”
    “I went to dig up treasure with a Dwarf at Old Haven. I come home and she had tried to dig her own burrow, and died in it.”
    “Damnation! You poor sack! But buck up, it could be worse. Mine is still alive, living with my so-called friend, a Big. When our kind loves, it’s for life. We meet her when we’re children, and there can be no other.”
    “I can’t say which is worse, to know she’s dust and worms, or to see her in another man’s arms bearing his seed. And a Big at that!” I commiserate with him in sympathy.
    “The sea will be your mistress. Just think of those damn serpents as what killed your girl.”
    “That won’t be a problem for me. I saw the old dragon, Crusty, at Old Haven. I think he killed my woman.”
    “No! Isn’t it dead by now?”
    “They never really die.” I tell him my story.
    “You may be right. So that’s what you meant by serpents?”
    “Yes, it had me for a night, but I got away, came home to find all hope lost.”
    “If you can beat Old Crusty whether he be yet fire or just old bones and cinders, you can gaff-hook a sea serpent. I’ll be glad to have you!” We shake hands. “Call me Ishmael,” he gives his name.
    That night is the first of many I would spend at sea and I spent it at the rail. Between the tossing of the ship, the hot sun, the boiled cabbage and salt ham we had for supper, I feel so sick in head and heart and belly I thought I wouldn’t live to see the sun rise. Not that I exactly cared. But it’s not a pretty way to go.
    “What a wicked waste!” the younger of the two from the bar is by my side, whom I now know as Abel.
    “Get me a bowl, Abel, and I’ll give you the rest of my supper in a minute.” He doesn’t move so I send another serving of half-digested cabbage and ham to the fishes.
    “Sam Bobbins! You got any stomach left?” It’s the Captain coming to the rail.
    “Sorry, Captain, I’ve always been regular before.”
    “If you don’t agree with our good fresh food, what will we do with you when we’re down to wormy dry biscuit and moldy dry tack?”
    “I hope I’ll get my sea legs afore then, Captain.”
    “You see to it!” he chuckles. “Abel, I came to have you see to the second mast’s royal. It seems loose to me.”
    “Aye, aye, sir.” He leaves us alone together.
    “Captain, may I ask you a question?’
    “Ask all you want. I’ll decide whether to answer, and how.”
    “Aye, aye, sir! Captain, where did you get such a name as ‘Ishmael’?”
    “Yo ho! Now that’s a funny story. I’ve had it forty years since a cabin boy. It’s actually, ‘He’s Small!’ which is what ol’ Jonah, second mate on the Tar Sheesh called me on my first trip out. He was lying on the poop deck drunk and he looked up at me and slurred his speech. It came out, ‘Ish mael’ and everyone laughed. So that’s what stuck. The name me own mother birthed me to is forgotten, I never use it. And if you ask me what that was, I’ll cure your sea sickness by dousing your head with sea-water, hanging you over the side with a rope about your ankle!”
    “Thank you, sir. Do sailors commonly sport odd names, like Abel because he’s so fumble-fingered when he’s sober, Cain because he carries a stick he doesn’t really need, and Moody Richard because he was pining after his girl?”
    “Aye, you’ve pinned us there. And there are more! You’ve met Popeye and seen his vicious stare, Brutus with his sweet disposition. But Dick, he was a real moby one. What they will call you, I don’t know. ‘Projectile Vomiting’? No, too long. But by the time we see land again, you’ll have one. And you’ll need it.”
    “Detective. That’s what grave robbers and treasure hunters call themselves. And that’s what made me the wreck you see before you today.”
    “Stay with us, Sam Bobbins, and we’ll find something better than detective for you.”
    By the next day I have found my sea legs and suffer never again from a stomach that leaps out of my throat.
    The green sea surrounds us on all sides with the blue vault of the sky above by day. I soon learn to climb the ratlines and tug and pull at sailcloth and rope. A sailing ship needs constant attention. It’s not like a field of seed that you put in and then let go until it sprouts heads. Every few moments of every day at all hours Captain Ishmael would call out a command and a horde of us would clamber up the ratlines to shimmy out on a yardarm and either wrap or unwrap, tie or untie the sails and running rigging.
    If I’m not climbing like a tree squirrel I’m scrubbing the deck underfoot furiously as a burrowing rabbit at my labors. The job of detective — for all it’s perils — is much easier. But I’m glad for the hard manual labor as it takes my mind off my sorrows and at night I have dreamless sleep. I have no doubts whether I’m doing the right thing by sailing with Captain Ishmael. Not only is he my own kind, but he was on the water for the same reason, lost love.
    Moreover, the Big People who are the majority of those aboard as they are the majority on land respect him, which impresses me no end. And he insists on holding back a fair portion of the available positions for Small people who like him have loved and lost as I have. Though after I got to know what is expected of me I wondered to myself if a Big Man crouching couldn’t do the work better by virtue of his longer, heavier arms and better leverage.
    Not that a Small farmer’s son is any weakling. I find no difficulty doing all that’s expected of me both in the rigging, on deck and I expected when the time comes in the boat. We are seven months out from New Haven when I hear the lookout far overhead in the sun call down, “Serpent ho! Port bow!” in that long drawn-out yell sailors use when calling to one another at a distance.
    I run to the rail to see a line of dark lumps, each throwing spray before it sinks to be replaced by a triangular fin. “That’s one big ol’ sea dragon!” I say aloud to myself in my excitement.
    “Dragon?” Old Cain comes up beside me. “No, me matie, they’re more akin to cows, though mighty large. Those are several individuals, fifteen I count ‘em. The cows will be smaller but still as big as a house and dangerous as a raging bull, worse if they have calves, the calves as big as horses. The bulls are bigger still and more sluggish. We go after the bulls, since they have the most weight and therefore the most oil and are less likely the kill ye.”
    I am crushed. I thought the sea serpent would be a living relative to the dragon that took my Merry’s life. Am I to have no revenge? Here we are chasing a herd of mere sea-cattle!
    “Don’t worry about not having a rough blow of it, though, mate. Just a swat with that tail can hammer a man’s skull into his chest and the man through the bottom of the boat! You’ll earn your share.” He turns away from me with a menacing chuckle. But for the life of me I can’t see the humor in it.
    During this exchange we have altered course and soon come among the school of sea serpents. I see now they are not in any way reptilian, but have soft leathery hides and mouths full of mesh. But I still have no way to measure their immense size in that vast gulf of empty ocean.
    “Boats!” Captain Ishmael calls us to stations. We have had drills daily in these thirty long weeks. I’ve been in the boat before and even in the water, but never for very long or very far and certainly not hunting a deadly monster. The six longboats are swinging out on davits as I report to the port bow to lend my hand to number one. The long keel over the water, we winch the ropes down until the boats splash into the water, then we climb in ourselves.
    When I first came on board the Captain gave me an old pair of his boots. He laughed saying, “Even our people wear leather on deck as bare soles attract splinters like cheese attracts mice.”
    These ‘captain’s boots’ which will be my proudest possession for a long time to come are worn and stained but whole and water tight. They had been dyed black, but largely the dye has been leeched out by the sea-water, so are generally a muddy brown. Square toed, the extend up to my mid-calf and can be tied tight to my leg if I had laces. I generally wear them turned down over my ankles, my stocking-less leg bare to my knees. The knee buttons were also missing from my breeches, so I am no fop. Aside from my waistcoat, the only other garment I owned was my shirt, which doubled as a nightshirt hanging to my knees when not tucked into my breeches.
    It was my bare feet more than my barefaced lies that had told the Captain that I was a clod hopping farmer and no seaman. Yet after a few laughs for his amusement and my embarrassment he put this behind us, slapping my back familiarly at the apparent denseness of Cain and Abel.
    “They took you at your word without even looking at your feet! Now, isn’t that a life lesson!”
    “Yet Wee Little People are the world’s greatest yarn spinners, and I don’t just mean wool either!” I had told him in my shipmate’s defense.
    So that’s how a farmer’s son came to be sitting in a small boat’s bows on the open ocean gripping a long iron gaff hook like a life preserver while ten large men row for all they’re worth toward a huge leathery island of flesh innocently playing in the waves, the one end spouting like a fountain and the other slapping the surface so hard it resounds like gunshots.
    The twelfthman, a tower of stupid muscle named Brent, crouches in the center of the boat behind a huge tub containing an immense coil of hemp seacable. The end of this comes out of the bottom of the tub between two boards that form a channel and is securely bound to an iron ring that pierces the head of the keel before me like the ring in the nose of a bull. The other end is securely belayed to the bottom of the hefty iron harpoon he holds in his big fist.
    My instrument, just as long but more delicate, is one of several with me in the bow. Both ends are bent over and sharpened into steely hooks with teeth for tearing and making the blood flow rather than gripping like a fishhook. Brent has the fishhook, his job is to catch the monster, mine to kill it by bleeding it to death with my innumerable little pricks. But first we must run the beast to exhaustion.
    Brent stands to his widely braced feet as we are almost on the yet unmolested monster and skillfully lifts the iron javelin over his head as if it’s no more than a butter knife. He takes aim, and with the precision and ease of long experience hurtles the harpoon into the dorsal fin of the sea serpent.
    Suddenly the sea around us is a froth of action and blood and the rope begins it’s race through the channel into the sea. We haven’t moved yet beyond bouncing with the waves created by the monster’s wrath. The rope whips back and forth in it’s tub like a mad snake or a frightened bird’s swiftly flapping wing. The rope in it’s channel at my feet is a rushing stream of hemp, a gushing blur of twine.
    “Get yer fool head out o’ that channel, mister, afore the rope bites it off! And set that gaff in the bilge, the rope’ll catch it! Steady, fellers, here she comes!”
    I instantly drop the gaff hook and immediately lean away from the channel to Brent’s rebuke. If I hadn’t the whipping end of the rope would have tangled in the gaff and also tore my head off. As it is, a blur of hemp shoots out of the tub out of the channel past my nose and out of the boat before I know it. The end tugs taut against the keel head and we’re off!
    If you think a horse leaps out of the starting gate swiftly or a fly takes wing faster than the hand can catch him then we in our little boat upon the great wide sea start faster and fly swifter.
    “Watch the rope, gaffer, where’s it headed?” shouts Brent.
    I look over the bow at the taut vibrating rope where it comes out of the sea and pulls on the keel that drives us. “It’s going straight down! And to the north!”
    “Which is it, mister, north or down? And how many degrees down? Read the parallel number off the wood!”
    I find the likely line and read the number off the end of it. “Six! It’s a six!”
    “Now that’s not quite down, is it? Down is nine, if it were nine we’d be fish food…”
    “Wait! It’s five!” I interrupt, not wanting to listen to another word out of that big dumb mouth.
    “He’s coming up!” Brent braces himself.
    “Four!” “Steady!” “Three!” “Get ready, Gaffer!” “Two!” “Peel them eyes, mates!”
    “Steady at two!” I call out.
    “He’s breached where we weren’t looking and is heading down again!” answers Brent.
    Sure enough, we are off on our wild race once more, the sudden burst of speed throwing me back against the first rows-man.
    “Get thee back to that line, mate!” He pushes me upright.
    I’m leaning over the side again. “Seven! It’s down to seven!”
    “Hold tight!”
    We race that sea serpent for hour after hour, again and again it spouts then dives: east, west, east again and south until we seem to be heading straight toward the Cathay. We see two of the other longboats alongside and our mates aboard are winching up two great misshapen bodies all wet and dripping blood. on one they are already butchering huge bloody ribbons of blubber from it, black skin on one side and red mess on the other. I see the ribs of the poor dead beast and turn away in disgust at the hugeness of it’s death. A moment before we slam to splinters against the hull of our own ship, we swing away, almost as if the monster planned it so.
    Finally we are able to row over to the exhausted beast. At last he seems too tired to run, we are certainly too worn to chase. It makes no move and offers no resistance even when our keel head bumps against it. I lift my weapon to strike.
    “No, not yet. We must find the head. Row to starboard, mates!’ Brent directs. We go around the floating, seemingly dead monster and for the first time I get an idea of how big it is. As wide as a house? No, I’ve known houses, my own mother’s for one, that would fit inside this hill of flesh, this mountain of life.
    Suddenly it moves, an eyelid rises to reveal a great eyeball as big as my whole head, and I look into the inhuman gaze of the monster.
    “Now, gaffer, stab it deep into the brain and kill it!” shout Brent. “What’re you waiting for? Coward! Strike the beast before he kills us all!”
    But I’m startled by the intelligence of it’s gaze. While I hesitate just that instant, my weapon over my head to strike, it spits out the severed rope and slaps it’s tail like a cannon while moving it’s forelimbs. The wave rocks us back and forth and the weighty overbalanced gaff hook pulls me over the side. One instant I’m afoot in the bows of the boat and the next the ocean rises to smack me in the face as I reach out toward the sea serpent to stab it. Foam and salt smother me and I’m aware just an instant longer to jettison the anchor of the heavy iron gaff hook. Then blackness swallows me.

A Fishy Story
    “Hey there, little monkey?” a deep rumbling voice calls to me. I open my eyes to the blazing noon sun and listen to quiet wavelets lapping against the island I lay upon. “You awake yet?” the ground rumbles again. I sit up. “Easy there, watch it! You’re all hard pointy angles and knobs. It’s quite like having a load of bones on my face.”
    Underneath me is the black leathery skin of the sea serpent. Another floats nearby, the same sad, thoughtful gaze that first captivated me, how many hours or even days ago?
    “Sea serpent? I should think not! We are Cetaceans, we are warm-blooded vertebrates that nurse our young, whom we birth live, not in eggs like the sharks and other fishes, and educate to follow careers in medicine, law, religion or political science in our society.”
    “Science? You’re men? How can that be? How is it you talk?”
    “So many questions! You see, Matilda, I told you they are reasonable.”
    “Reasonable? Ha! Disgusting little imp! It’s just a hairless ape which somebody nipped the tail off of. How can such a rapacious little devil be reasonable? It can’t even think properly. Look, it uses it’s pie-hole to shriek at us,” responds another voice just as reverberating but more shrill.
    “You see, young lady, it even knows the difference between us,” the living island upon whom I sit speaks again. “As to your questions, little monkey, yes. We do practice the sciences, though theoretical only. No longer the applied, not for hundreds of millions of generations. But I’m not myself a scientist. I’m an attorney at law for the sovereign state of Florida, where we are. But I best answer your other inquiries with history, or at least legend, as history that ancient might be. Hundreds of millions of years ago we were men. We had applied technologies by which we could fly above the clouds, swim to the sea-floor, even leave this planet to go between the stars to other planets and settle there.”
    “Balderdash!” Matilda interrupts. “Why are you telling him such myths?”
    “Because it entertains me and interests him.”
    “Oh, Richard!”
    “Now, where was I? Oh, yes! Well, we also had gene splicing technology whereby we were able to incorporate human intelligence into the brains of sea creatures such as blue whales… or was it whale abilities into humans…”
    “Richard! You know perfectly well that’s not how it goes. You see, some people just evolved naturally over time into whales because… Well! It all began back in the twentieth century with the rush to buy beach-front property , the surfing craze and then global warming…
    “What better surfboard could there be except the body of a sea mammal? Some people say it was gradual over hundreds of millenia, others that it happened overnight, in only a generation or two. But however it came about Homo Sapiens turned themselves from coach potatoes into whales. Just add water! I rather think home automation had a lot to do with it…”
    “Nonsense! It was fast food! If you no longer need to cook your own food or work with your hands — if robots do everything and all you need to do to control the machines is move an eyeball, why have hands? The wealthy few who could afford to sit around and literally do nothing were the first…”
    “Really, it happened over a very short period of a few million years that the entire human race who had remained behind on Earth and not taken to the stars abandoned it’s cities and became whales. Though most of the really good beachfront property like Des Moines, Iowa was already underwater anyway. Our cities — abandoned — then returned to dust. Your ancestors — we conjecture — the monkeys of tropical America, grew opposable thumbs, erect posture and large brains in order to fill the human ecological niche.”
    “Well! If that wasn’t just a moment ago, two or three million years at most, we think. Indeed, it seems only an instant since you began farming and now your own Industrial Revolution.”
    “I suppose in another few generations you will have trains, planes and automobiles, then star ships, space colonies and godlike powers. Until you get wise and become whales in your own turn.”
    “Only if they don’t blast themselves to extinction, or if a meteor doesn’t smack into us. Or if a mass epidemic of a resistant virus or bacteria does not get them first.”
    “But how is it you talk?” I interrupt.
    “You know he hasn’t understood a thing?”
    “What can you expect? Such a pointy little head!”
    “Our distant ancestors were almost as tiny.”
    “Well! You don’t need to insult me, Richard!”
    “You see, we evolved telepathic abilities. You don’t really need to shout at us, we can read your mind, as you can receive our psychic emissions inside yours.”
    “But why would you allow people to kill you if you are so smart?” I wonder.
    “When one is practically immortal with all of time for nothing but contemplation, life gets boring. We regard this as sport. Some of our multi-millennia elderly males do give up though, living forever isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
    “I think you’re nuts!” I look him in the eye.
    “You may be right,” Richard sighs.
    “Hee hee. Hey fatso! You carrying trash now?” Other, high-pitched voices arrive. Two porpoises poke their heads out of the sea.
    “Ah! At last! The French have arrived. Monsieurs, would you be so good as to carry our friend to land?” Richard requests of the dolphins. To me he says, “They are world-famous surfers.”
    “Tell the little menkey to walk it off! Why should we be bothered?”
    “Those French always have to be contrary and make a joke of everything!” Matilda rolls her eyes in disgust.
    “Please! He’s really quite harmless. I’m afraid my carelessness caused him to be separated from his little tribe,” Richard argues in a lawyerly fashion.
    “Ha! Then you take him to shore, if he’s your responsibility. What do we get out of it?”
    “Very well then, what do you require?”
    “Ten hours of your computing time. We have a theorem to solve!”
    “Agreed,” Richard sighs.
    “Climb down from there, little menkey, and be quick about it, we don’t have all day!” So I carefully jump off Richard the blue whale’s snout into the sea. One of the porpoises gets underneath me and before I know it I’m riding through the surf on his back.
    “Leave it to the blue whales to come up with such a lobster brained scheme, rescuing a drowned menkey when it’s the menkeys that kill them.”
    “Dreadful! Positively dreadful,” says the other.
    “Excuse me, but haven’t I heard that porpoises rescue drowning sailors?” I interrupt.”
    “Amazing! Such a state of developments! It thinks it knows our language.”
    “Rather poorly, though, so provincial.”
    “Yes, indeed. Not at all parisian.”
    “Yet, in terms of content, how can it be debated?”
    “I suppose not, it’s just that it supposes it can address us,” one grumbles irritably.
    “Well! You see, my little man…”
    “Don’t call it that!”
    “Well! So be it, then, little menkey, we only do it if it’s finny.”
    “Finny. That is our sole reason to rescue.”
    “Or as a favor to the blues.”
    “Then those are our two chief reasons, but no one ever expects it of us.”
    “Or if we damn well just feel like it.”
    “Very well, Picard! We have three chief reasons, but if you add another I shall just dump the little menkey in the drink and you shall carry him.”
    “I most certainly shall not!”
    “Yes, you shall!”
    “No, I shan’t!”
    “Please!” I interrupt, “I don’t wish for you to quarrel.”
    “Kindly stay out of this. It doesn’t concern you.”
    “I rather think it does!” I’m terrified by now. I’d just as soon not know the thoughts of the beast that bears me.
    “Oh yes, it does concern him!”
    “Oh no, it doesn’t!” The French dolphins argue about me. This goes on for hours.
    Finally there is a break in the dispute. “Why were you so rude to Richard when you wanted something from him?” I ask.
    “Rude? However are we rude? Impossible!”
    “We are not rude, little menkey, we are French!”
    “What do you do in this ‘society’ Richard spoke of? And what is ‘computing’ time? Is it some sort of sport?” I inquire.
    “Remarkable! It has such insight into our lives. Surely such creatures are not far from joining us in being evolved,” said Jules with a snide chuckle.
    “Only in your overheated imagination! We are social workers, little menkey, trained in psychology.”
    “Please, I’m Sam Bobbins. What is ‘psychology’?”
    “Oh, they have names now, do they? And it expects a splash course in Freud, Jung and Skinner!” laughs Picard.
    “We understand the mind, Sambobbin. And we rescue people,” Jules explains.
    “But didn’t you just say you only rescue people for fun, profit or because you feel sorry for them?” I recall.
    “Oh! Now he’s twisting our words yet! I said we rescue people, not menkeys. Intelligent people, beings of the race Cetacea,” Jules chuckles.
    “Just go ahead and dump him. I’ll pick him up, at twenty thousand leagues!” Picard threatens.
    “Please, Picard, he amuses me. It’s remarkable to see the high opinion they now have of themselves.”
    “It’s so full of itself. To think they imagine themselves to be people now, when only yesterday they were hanging from trees!”
    “Isn’t that what evolution is all about, that yesterday’s tree hugger becomes tomorrow’s lumber baron?” Jules laughs.
    “Absurd! Impossible! Rescuing menkeys! Next we will be required to rescue the fish from our own gullets,” Picard squeals with hysterical glee.
    “Well! It’s almost done. And we get that attorney’s help with our study. We’ll make a name for ourselves!”
    “Don’t you animals have names already?” I wonder.
    “That does it! Get that menkey off your back this minute!”
    “No!” I fear I’m about to be drowned.
    “It’s all right, Sambobbin, we are here. You can just slide off my back onto the sandy bottom. It’s shallow all the way to the island.”
    “That whale really ought to have called Animal Control!” insists Picard.
    “Then where would we be?” warns Jules.
    We have crossed a line of coral shoals and are in the shallow lagoon of a sandy palm-strewn isle. The beach is about two miles off.
    “Hey, where are we?” I plead. “How do I get home?”
    “It’s deserted. There is fresh water, fish to eat and no predators. What more can any menkey ask of life? You can wait until a passing vessel of your kind comes to take you off,” explains Jules.
    “For all the good that will do you!”
    The French dolphins both laugh as they swim away.
    I stand in the water up to my neck for the longest while. Tall shady green palm trees decorate the clean white beach and form a dense jungle rising to low hills behind it. Little fish play about my body. The water is bathtub warm and crystal clear. Suddenly one toothy little sucker that has squirmed up my pant leg discovers something I can’t decently mention and I decide it’s time to abandon the warm sea. I limp up the beach and sit on the hot dry sand picking fish out of my sodden clothes.
    I scan the beautiful horizon for ships. I am all alone.

His Fourth Adventure:
Sam Bobbins Never Says Dead

Maroon
    I’m all alone. I sit on the snow-white sand picking toothy little fish out of my clothes for some time. Then I just sit and stare out to sea. After a while I notice the light has turned orange behind me so I reckon I’m on the east side of the island, the sun setting behind me. I realize I must immediately find water, then food and shelter.
    While the light remains I head north along the beach hoping to stumble across some stream of water, since the French dolphins said there would be water and food, though nothing about shelter. But how would fish know people need shelter anyway?
    And am I to believe all that nonsense they told me, how fish and sea monsters are enchanted people living in the sea with a society of their own, a society older than Atlantis, older even than the Elves? Matilda did say it was all myth, but Richard seemed quite earnest and the French dolphins were certainly sure enough with their ‘Psychology’ and ‘Social Work’. The sea holds much that we cannot begin to understand.
    It’s after about half a mile with the sun now beyond the palms to my left that I fall face down into a cool deep brook coming out of the jungle. I swallow a lot of it before I’m able to regain my footing and it’s sweet, if a bit like weak tea. I drink deeply at last, not realizing until then how thirsty I had become. So I wade upstream to where it overflows from a deep pool. There before me is a green-stone escarpment with a waterfall gushing from it’s grassy top. Here I drink even more deeply. I’m chilled and full of water when I crawl up on the grassy bank and lie back. Now if I only had something to eat.
    I immediately perceive my next problem: Would my dragons light? They are still in my pocket but have endured much jostling and a thorough soaking so the bees’ wax they are coated in might have been rubbed off and the sea might have soaked into the wood. I get up to collect wood for my fire but find the bushes and litter around the pool as drenched as I am myself from their proximity to the waterfall and crawling with multi-legged vermin, so I climb up the hill a good ways from the stream. Up here the grass is dryer, the thick woody twigs of the bushes more brittle and their broad wax leaves dry to the touch.
    I get an armload of kindling to take back to the beach, if I can still find the water’s edge in the fading light, when picking up a stick my eye spies a white rabbit. This is no ordinary bunny nor even a hare but nearly as tall as I am and dressed in clothes similar to mine. It wears a waistcoat and a cloak such as mine but no linen nor breeches. And it stands watching me as I am watching it — on it’s hind legs like a person!
    Suddenly it turns and hops off upright on it’s hind feet into the dusk. “Yup, already crazy as a hatter,” I tell myself. It would have been too much even for me to eat in one sitting anyway.
    I stumble back downhill in the growing dark, avoid the pool and crash through the jungle thickets. It is pitch black by the time I’m out on the beach. I know enough to build my fire near the water for several reasons. Firstly, it would be a signal to ships that it couldn’t be if hidden in the bush. — Tomorrow, I promise myself, to search for a proper place for a beacon fire. — Secondly, it’s good to have water around to douse it if necessary, one can never be too careful with open fires. And finally, I know I would find dry driftwood on the beach to stoke my fire with, the leaves and twigs would only get it started.
    Fortunately the second match lit on the rough drift and I have my pile of kindling, damp and smoky as it was, going in no time. I gather driftwood and stoke with it and soon the night is pushed back by a mighty bonfire. In my glee at this accomplishment I dance around it. Never one to carelessly waste anything, I had saved the handful of tiny fish that had found their way into my pants and boots during my immersion and I lay them on a log against the fire to roast. At least I would have a bellyful of bait in my gut tonight. Giant rabbits in waistcoat and cloak could wait for tomorrow. I eat the fishes whole, crunching heads, fins and all, except for the offal which I burn in the fire. I return to the stream to wash and to the sea some distance south of the brook to make water and then lay down on the sand after moon set to sleep.

‘Him Who Raises the Dead’
    I’m awakened by something alive hopping or sitting on my chest and the first thought I think is of that giant rabbit deciding to make a meal of me before I could of it. But my hands seize human thighs and a woman’s dress, though I can see nothing of her but her silhouette against the background of a panoply of stars. She giggles and her hands close around my face as she kisses me. “Don’t you know your very own Merry? You Sammy Bobbinger, you!”
    “But how? The dragon — your own father — said you were dead! And how did you come here?”
    “No one ever really dies, Sammy. It’s true, part of me is in the earth, but the rest of me still loves you, and is always by your side. I walked with you on the road. I was beside you on the boat when you went to sting the sea serpent. By the by, Husband Mine, that’s a nasty thing to do to such nice people. No more of that? Yea? And I was riding on Picard while you road Jules. You are not ever alone!
    “Now I need you to find me my way back. Or rather, you must find ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’ and persuade Him to bring me back to life.”
    “No, Merry, darling,” I kiss her and hold her tight.” “I would never ever do that to you, turn you into a vampire zombie or worse yet into a little dragon. No, dearest Merry, it’s bad enough that you’re a ghost!”
    “I’m not a ghost, Sammy, I’m a spirit, and a pretty good one if I do say so myself. I’m not asking you to use dragon dust on my bones. No, ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’ is different. He could actually bring me back to life — not just a lying dragon in my place — so we may have our babies. Promise me to search for ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’ for me. Promise!”
    “Yes! Yes, certainly. If there is such a one living or dead, I will not stop until I find him.”
    “Oh, He’s very much alive! He’s a Man, yet He’s also a huge and powerful spirit, all those on this side talk of Him. It’s complicated, and I can’t tell exactly, everyone has an opinion. I think He’s a god.”
    “Where does a Small man go to find a god, though? Nevertheless, I will search for him!”
    “That’s my detective, my Sammy Bobbinger! Now make love to me, make love to me as I always wanted you to but you never did!” And we did. All that night she lay in my embrace, my hands caressing her face and breasts and thighs, among other thing. We joined together once, twice, three times as husband and wife.
    Yet come the dawn I’m all alone. But not really, for I know it was no dream — it was so vividly real, I know she is always with me, now inside me — dwelling in my heart as a child in it’s mother’s womb. I can feel Merry inside — forever joined to my spirit until I can find this, ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’, though I have no idea where to look. People would think me quite mad even to ask, if I can ever find my way back to where there are people.
    The first thing I need to do today is to find food. I have awakened quite famished. Also I shall look for a beacon hill and proper shelter. I water in the ocean again then return to the pool to bathe and satisfy my thirst. This time I keep my clothes and my dragons dry. All I wear is a worried look on my face.
    “Somebody rub you the wrong way, Bub?” I look up to see that I’m being addressed by a large rat who’s slipped in the water beside me.
    “You’re a rat!” I find myself saying in my surprise.
    “A regular professor, aren’t you?” He lays on his back and spouts a fountain into the air. “So what the heck are you?”
    “What sort of island is this where beasts talk and ghosts walk?”
    “Who you calling a beast, you dirty rat? I’m as civilized as you are.” He shows his pointy teeth my way. “And maybe a little more so, considering your lack of hygiene and the way you live. At least I’ve got a burrow. You’ve obviously been sleeping rough, and not just recently, by the look of you!”
    “My Merry girl wanted a burrow, and she suffocated in hers.” I feel a twinge of rage inside me. “Now she haunts me.” I sigh and am silent for a long while, floating still in the cool water. “She told me to find, ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’. Does that make any sense to you?” I pause to think. “Or maybe I’m just crazy.”
    “Eek! That sounds horrible. I wouldn’t want what I just ate to crawl up out of my gut and choke me! Maybe you are potted, but you seem harmless enough. How about some breakfast after we finish our bathes?”
    “Thank you. Thank you very much, I’m starved.”
    He picks up a white cake of soap and throws it at me after I express my gratitude. It bangs me in the chest, plops in the water and floats to the top.
    “Use this, will ya? You smell like a dead fish. Maybe that’s yer death-raiser, huh?”

Breakfast and no Tea
    We dress and I follow him through the palm groves to a table where sits the rabbit from the night before. The rat wears a long red coat with a green trim and collar and brass clasps.
    “No room! No room!” Rabbit cries out, covering the cake and bread and jam with his long paws, just the two front ones. His back two are under the table dressed with bedroom slippers and a red paisley silk robe I would covet lays on his shoulders, his neck wrapped with a matching cravat.
    “It’s all right, Rabbit, he’s with me,” the rat stands up for me as he sits down.
    “I will not have such an uncouth creature at my table!”
    “By the way, Bub, what’s yer moniker, your nom de plume, your John Henry, what do we call you? You didn’t say.” The rat already seated addresses me, still standing and starting to salivate.
    “Sam Bobbins, gentlemen.”
    “Ho!” Rat laughs. “He sees food and suddenly it’s ‘gentlemen’!”
    “Ask him what he does!” Rabbit pokes Rat with a fork.
    “I’m a detective,” I say as I sneak into a seat a good distance away from Rabbit’s fork.
    “He says he’s looking for someone to raise the dead!” Rat intimates to his partner.
    “I knew he was up to no good! What a ludicrous idea!” grumbles Rabbit. “It would impoverish dozens of industries: the clergy, undertakers, box builders, gravediggers, used-clothes salesmen…”
    I spread toast with cream cheese and strawberry preserves before I respond.
    “More ludicrous than talking animals?” I ask finally, when I’m sure of my food.
    “It all depends,” answers Rabbit.
    “Depends on what?” Rat stops buttering his own bread to ask.
    “On who’s talking,” responds Rabbit, as if this were obvious.
    “And on what they’ve got to say it with!” Rat points out with his knife.
    “Indubitably!” finishes Rabbit.
    “Is there anything to drink?” I ask.
    “No more tea!” sounds a muffled voice I hadn’t heard until now from the large round teapot in the middle of the table.
    “Come out of there, you Nut!” shouts Rat.
    “Let him be, you know how he is in the morning,” Rabbit interjects.
    “There is no more to drink.” The teapot’s dome rises on the sodden head of a very large squirrel. “Because it’s all been drunk, Rat, and there’s the problem.”
    “And what’s the rest of us to drink? You soggy Nut!” Rat accuses. “We’ve got us a guest!”
    “If he wants a drink so badly I’ll pee in his cup. Hick! It’s the same color,” the squirrel burps loudly.
    “No, that’s all right.” I finish my fourth slice of toast with cream cheese and jam then slice a wedge of frosted cake.
    Rabbit jumps up on the table and jabs in my direction with his fork. “I know what you want! I know what you’re after!” I worry that he might think I want stabbed. “You must go on a quest!”
    “I rather thought I already was!” I glare.
    “No, you’re just asking around. And eating my toast and jam!” He stabs again at me. “But I wouldn’t bite into that! If I was you.”
    “And who’s going to stop me?!” I shout back.
    Squirrel is out of the pot by now, dragged by his tea-steeped furry throat by Rat who seemed to be trying to wring the tea out of the sopping animal’s hide. Nut is gagging, Rat muttering threats.
    “Bite me!” I hear a squeaky little voice and for a moment think it’s coming from the fork before my face upon which lay a morsel of the multicolored cake that seemed to shimmer in opalescent fumes. “Go ahead, just you dare to bite me!” The next moment I’m sure.
    “Much room! Mush room!” I think I hear Rabbit shouting at me. Rabbit’s running across the table toward me, his fork in both paws over his head, tines down, his eyes all aglow.
    I hide the contested morsel of cake in my mouth and get ready to defend myself. But I can’t seem to find my hands and feet. The rabbit has turned fluorescent orange and the rat purple, strangling a green fuzz ball. In the next instant the grape sky with puffy lemon clouds descends like a stage curtain and I feel myself flying backwards. But it does not matter. I know nothing for a very long time.

A Shortcut From Mushrooms
    I awake to the braying of hunting horns and the yelping of hounds. The clearing with the breakfast table and the animals is gone. I lay on a soft silken divan, and beside me on a similar couch lay a large silvery flounder. Though we are in the air and sunlight it’s quite alive and puffing on a straw attached to an apparatus that gurgles with water and smokes from a fire underneath it.
    “Good junk, man! They say you’re into mushrooms, too!” he says to me.
    “Fish, what do you know of ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’?” I interrogate this osteichthyes out of it’s proper place.
    “Out of body experiences! Channeling! Crystals, tarot cards and ouija boards!” It catalogs in a dreamy voice, but I can make no sense of it nor gain any help from his drooling sputter.
    The horns and the hounds resound again, and crashing through the trees comes a six-hoofed, four-armed, eight-headed and ten-horned large-breasted violet female beast. “Please, sir, can you tell me if the bus stops here?”
    “I don’t know, what’s a bus? For that matter, what are you?”
    “That is the quest we all are on, sir.” The hounds bay and the horns trumpet again. “Oh my! Oh dear! I’m afraid I must be off, bus or not!”
    “Mind if I tag along?” I ask out of the blue. I didn’t know if I wanted to meet those hounds and hunters either — the sound makes me want to flee — and besides, I still have some questions for her.
    “Certainly, glad for the company. All aboard!”
    The whirl of light and air I had discerned on her back slows to a flutter and a flap and there on her rump are twelve oversized hummingbird wings. I get on well in front of them and we are off, storming through the thick jungle faster than I would have thought possible for such an ungainly and mis-apportioned mount. But the hodgepodge of unaffiliated and misaligned parts seem to work remarkably well together for her, the ten horns thrusting each a different way to move aside branches and vines, the seventeen eyes on eight heads looking a different way for both danger and escape not to mention sustenance and shelter, the heads conversing among themselves to decide the best route, the four arms assisting the horns out in front balancing and grasping and the six hoofed legs always able to find a solid footing regardless of the terrain.
    “I’m looking for ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’. You ever hear of any such a being in your travels?” I ask at last.
    “Have you tried the Yellow Pages?”
    “No. Should I? Where do I find them?” I have oft heard of ancient tomes hidden away in forgotten towers holding secrets lost to the living.
    “I’ll drop you off at the very next phone booth.”
    “Thank you, I’d much appreciate it. What is this quest you’re on?”
    “As I said before, sir, I’m looking to find myself, my identity and my place in this world. That is all anyone is looking for, now isn’t it?”
    “I suppose. And tolerance for other’s quests is essential to having a quest of your own. But you already have your identity, it’s this unique person you are, and your place in the world seems to be, well, to be chased.”
    “Thank you sir, but could you kindly give a name to what I am?”
    “It would really help to wrap up everything about you in one or two words?”
    “I feel it would, sir.”
    “I think I see what you mean. My name’s Sam, Sam Bobbins. I’m a detective, I search for things.”
    “How wonderful! I do wish you could find me a place where I may rest my weary feet.”
    “You’re not the only one, sister.” I tell her my story and she commiserates with me. One of her eight heads, the motherly one with an eye in the back, gives me it’s undivided attention.
    “I recall my mother, but I never knew my father. Nor have I ever met any more like me. I never had a home nor a bed, neither a place to stand for more than a minute. One day running by her side we became separated and there I was, standing in a wood with trees on every side but no Mother. I heard her singing, but I could not find her. Then her voice was drowned out by the hounds and I knew I must flee, though I called and cried for her in vain.”
    “However do you sleep or eat?”
    “Eat? I don’t know what you mean, sir, I am a lady. I nibble here and there. And as far as sleeping, well, whatever are eight heads good for if not to take turns napping?”
    “Still, being up and running constantly!”
    “A woman’s work is never done.” She stops suddenly and one of her four arms points to a tall glass box that looks like an outhouse for an exhibitionist. “Try there, it should have a phone book.”
    “Thank you. How can I ever repay you?”
    “Find me a place to rest, Detective.”
    “But if I do, how do I contact you?”
    “I’m in the phone book.”
    “But under what name?”
    “Ah, there you see my problem.”
    Before I can reply, an immense metal carriage drives up without any horses in front but carrying instead every sort of different animal. It was not merely a matter of putting the cart ‘before the horse’, but the horse, mule, moose, elk, bison, caribou, reindeer, gazelle, questing beast, what have you, in the cart! In short order her ten horns, eight heads, four arms, six hooves, twelve hummingbird wings and fifty-six different varieties of tail are on the omnibus. This ark rolls away quickly before I hear again the braying horns and echoing hounds — that sound that makes me want to flee — follow instead after it.
    “I wonder how she could find a seat on such a carriage?” I turn and push back the folding door of the glass booth.
    “Hey! Hey! Hey! Can’t you see I’m using it? Wait your turn, man!” An earth piggy — what some call groundhog — is standing half-in half-out of a hole at the bottom of the booth. At first I look away, thinking he’s following nature’s call, then I realize that groundhogs, talking or not, are not noted exhibitionists. I study him and see he’s holding some horseshoe shaped apparatus as big as himself up to his ear and talking down to the other end between his feet.
    “Well, I says to her, I says, if she’s going to be that way she can just get out. No! Yes. Indeed! No, really! And she says to me, she says, that I owe her… Excuse me! What did I just tell you?” This is the last he says to me. Then he fastens his teeth onto the toe of my old sea-boot.
    I see on the shelf far over his head a thick dog-eared book that’s more than half yellow, the pages toward the back. I reach in and grab it but it’s chained. I pull harder and the chain comes off the binding. I smack the groundhog on the head with the spine as I retrieve my boot — the toe none the worse for wear — and shut him in the phone booth with the book in my custody.
    I leaf through the faded, tattered pages but they make no sense to me. Nothing like ‘Raise’ or ‘Dead’ is listed inside, and though there is ‘Religion’ in case He is a god none of those listed claim to be able to raise my dead nor put me in touch with Someone Who Would. I don’t need ‘Shoe Repair’ in spite of that biting little rodent’s teeth nor do I see how to get a ‘Pole Building’ though it would be nice to have shelter.
    Another metal horseless carriage pulls up where the omnibus had left a while before as I study the yellowed pages. This one has flashing red and blue lamps on top. Then it growls at me. Finally two Big men in blue uniforms get out and point guns at me.
    “Freeze!” says one.
    “Put down the phonebook and step away from the booth,” says the other.
    The door folds back behind me. “That’s him, officers! He vandalized the phone booth and smacked me on my little head!” says the groundhog behind me. I glimpse a white bandage on his head. I wish I had another crack at it.
    But after escaping zombies, dragon, drowning and crazed killer rabbits with forks I am not about to be shot by two thugs with popguns. I go into ‘disappear mode’, drop the useless burdensome book, and I’m behind the booth before they blink twice.
    “Where’d he go?” one cop says to the other.
    “He’s back here!” the groundhog snitches me out.
    I’m under the police car, behind the gunmen and in the woods in three blinks. From there I hightail it back the way I had come as best I may.

Back to my senses
    I reckon the sun at noon, determine my compass, and right or wrong, stick to it. I’m on an island, after all! With the sun lowering behind me I climb to the top of a cliff and there below me is my beach and the empty ocean.
    I collect some green brush and site my beacon, the task I should have been attending to today instead of dining with animals and talking to strange beasts. I then return to the clearing where the table had been set for breakfast, dagger in hand ready to kill and roast Rabbit, clothes and all.
    I do not find Rabbit in the meadow or even see Rat. The table is set for three and in the middle where Nut had steeped all morning is a pot of stew. I expect it to be squirrel, but my nose tells me fish. Perhaps the very one I awoke with, smoked and potted. This morning I had been famished, now I am starving. I pick up the ladle and dig in. I take the animals’ supper with me as I leave the clearing.
    I return to the pool for a long drink and then to the sea to make water. I lay down on the sand and wonder what tomorrow might be. Anything could be possible on this island. But what good could they do me? And is it possible to ever get off?
    I watch the sky darken and the stars come out. I must find shelter tomorrow, the rain won’t stay away forever. Soon I can’t tell the difference between the stars in the sky and the stars within my drooping eyelids.
    I sleep, but do I dream?

His Fifth Adventure:
Sam Bobbins in the Watery Grave

Damp Rot
    I dream I float in a glittering expanse of sea as warm and clear as bath water. Above me is the drowned silvery disc of the moon. Below me is a shimmering castle of coral colors: canary yellow, rose red, blue green. It seems so close I feel I could just reach out and take it into my hand as if it were a child’s toy aquarium sandcastle. But no, it’s yet beyond my reach, though drawing closer.
    The current pulls me deeper. Odd, I’m not breathing but neither am I crowning. This is, after all, just a dream, isn’t it? I fell asleep on the beach, on a desert isle. I wouldn’t have gotten up and walked beyond the lagoon, over the ring of coral to sink into the deep ocean, would I?
    Coral gables loom up before me. Weird lights gleam out of the antique gothic arches. The high gate beckons, opening inward for me. I’m suckered into the castle.
    I arise out of the water a step below a landing leading to stairs on either side. Before me is a bright broad tapestry of a bare shouldered, pale armed young woman with golden ringlets of hair taking an apple from a green bough. I stand and am attracted to the right. Turning I climb the steps and walk under an arch into a great high room with fire blazing in the hearth, but I see no log. The table is set but I don’t recline. Again I turn, to the left this time, and climb another stair to a carved wood balcony. I follow the balcony the length of the room past the wall with the blazing hearth into what must be the back parts of the great house.
    I wander the corridors alone, winding along passages ever narrower, lower and bleaker. Plaster damp with mildew falls in sodden lumps at my feet upon the rotting floorboards. The corridor now so low and narrow that I can reach out and touch either wall with both hands like the walls of a coffin ends at a door which turns by itself on rusty hinges before me. I enter. It’s empty: without carpet or bed or chair, devoid of any comfort like a poor pine box. But there is a window. I walk straight ahead to the two lonely panes, one beside the other, through which light gleams. The glass sweats with moisture. There through the darkness outside a lone ray of moonlight glimmers on a carp swimming through the ocean beyond the glass… Through the depths! I reach out to touch it.

Old Grudges
    “Don’t!” a voice behind me calls out in panic. I turn and there are two girls holding each a candle, young elf women in noble dress of a bygone age, antique dresses such as their great great grands might have worn, except these dresses seem to have been fitted to these girls, or the girls to the dresses. Can a gown be a yoke of bondage? “Don’t!” the taller one repeats, “The sea will come in at us! Who are you?”
    It’s as hard to speak as if I am drowning — or dreaming. “I… don’t… know. A moment ago I thought I was someone, now I can’t recall.”
    “Step away from the window. Even your presence so close to the outer wall is hampering the magic that keeps the sea at bay. Come toward us, but slowly.”
    Indeed as we stand there the plaster around the window softens, becomes sodden and drops to the floor. Underneath I see writhing worms of water on the masonry. The glass bulges.
    “Run!” We rush out of the room and the taller girl slams the door shut behind us and locks it, then backs away from the door shaking with terror. In a moment a loud bang hits the door from the other side, echoing down the corridor behind us. The girls scream and weep. The wood bulges, bends and sweats, but does not break. “That should hold it. But we must abandon this corridor and never enter it again.”
    We retreat through several other doors which she locks behind us back to the finer parts of the house and the magic hearth at it’s center. It sends out such a fierce heat and flame with no log. The ladies stand so close to it I fear they would any moment burst into living torches like the elf queen before the dragon long ago.
    “I’m Catherine, this is my sister Elizabeth. We are the last of a long and full line in this house. Can’t you tell us your name?”
    “Roderick? No! That’s not my name.” I think for a long moment. “I’m… I don’t know who.”
    “Roderick! My fiancé’s name. Of course, when I first saw you climbing the stairs and moving down that corridor to the little window in the maid’s room, I thought of him.”
    “No, sister, he is dead! And this is nothing like him. He’s not even our race! They are all dead,” groans Elizabeth.
    “How did they die?” I wonder.
    “Our father was King over all this country round. It was the day of my wedding — you see we still wear our gowns for it — when the defenders my father had sent forth against the pirates led by the sea witch were smashed. She cursed us and declared there must be no heir. Not only did she blow back the fleet with a terrible wind, but the same sea rushed up and overtook us, and so you find us. My Roderick… drowned… trying to enter the castle to rescue us. I expect his bones are down there on the ballroom floor, among countless others…” Catherine shudders with sobs.
    “I don’t understand how I got here, or even who I am, but I will help you,” I promise.
    “You must help us!” Elizabeth pleads. “Since our salvation is your salvation. For behold, the castle is slowly collapsing around us against the weight of the sea.”
    “Come, eat with us,” Catherine shows me to her table. When I first glance at this, it seems every plate and morsel of food is crawling with gleaming white maggots and slithering sea worms. But after I blink my eyes, it appears decent and wholesome. The girls sit and delicately devour the meats and vegetables. I have no appetite having witnessed what I just seen. Even then my uncooperative stomach seemed the strangest thing of all.
    Afterwards we each take a candle lit by the roaring hearth and they lead me to my chamber for the night. Again we ascend the grand mahogany staircase but head the opposite direction from the ruined servants’ quarters. There are many turns and the capacious corridors seem opulent even in their ruin. Finally Catherine opens a carved door with her keys.
    A small fireplace springs magically to flame and heat as she enters the clammy chamber. “This was Roderick’s. Somehow, I know you must sleep here tonight. But beware the windows!” Elizabeth carries in blankets and sheets and they make the bed as I watch.
    It seems wholesome enough. After they leave I strip and climb under the sheets. “I expect tomorrow I’ll awake to discover I’ve either been dreaming all this or drowned,” I say to no one in particular as I pull the covers over my head. I fall right asleep. Within my dream, I dream.

No Swimming!
    “Roderick!” Catherine calls to me. I sit up in bed. I see her sitting on a chair before the little fire talking to a tall thin youth sitting in front of me on this bed, his back to me.
    “How do you propose we escape the judgment that has befallen us? Shall we four wade out into the sea and fight the suction at the mouth of the enchanted wall?”
    Then I hear him answering, “No, not swim. Father is too old and Beth too delicate. I can’t imagine even you could swim that far, to make it out into the ocean, then yet to claw your way out of these depths. No! The Library has the secret, and your keys show the way. We must go to your father, he has the tools.”
    The vision fades. I am sitting up in bed staring at the empty chair. The fire burns on loglessly.
    “Catherine!” I run from the room and down the twisting corridors screaming. “Elizabeth!” I only stop to pull on my breeches, and for even that I hopped on first one foot then another.
    Behind me another door is flung open and Catherine in nightgown and robe is in the hall. “Roderick, what is it?”
    “The library, where is it?”
    “It’s underwater, at least the door to it is, across the ballroom on the far side of the hall. What could you want in there?”
    “I don’t know. I had a vision. Your father’s chamber, where is that?”
    “Desecrate the King’s last resting place? You cannot!”
    “We must! Show me the way!”
    “I won’t! I can’t!” Catherine screams.
    “I will,” Elizabeth comes out behind her. Of course they would seek out each other’s companionship in this vast mausoleum of a palace.
    We hadn’t far to go down the twisting paths. Catherine’s chamber was meant to be the bridal suite, past the Queen’s boudoir and then there was the great door to the Royal Sanctum. A vast domed chamber, austerely devoid of furnishings except for a scattering of capacious chairs that would have filled a normal room, and the huge canopied bed that could be a normal room in the center whose four pillars and voluminous curtains soar upward toward the darkened dome. This is where the old man whom Roderick told Catherine was too weak to swim to safety went to sleep one night never to awaken again. Indeed, the lump under the blankets could only be his mouldering remains. And he must have been mouldering a good long time for the room has no stink but the mildew that pervades the whole house.
    I stand at the foot of the King and know not what to do. Elizabeth holding the candelabra stares at me. Catherine creeps to the doorway and stands there biting her fist in unspeakable horror.
    “Elizabeth, which way is the library from here?”
    She points back out the door with her thumb hooked toward the great room hearth at the magical center of her world. I think, “That can’t be right,” and walking the opposite direction touch the paneled wall. A door formerly unseen unexpectedly springs open in it. I shine my candle into the closet to reveal a toilet.
    “First tomb I ever robbed with a water closet,” I scoff, then consider any one of these hidden closets may indeed be open to the sea. I touch no panel that is damp and go nowhere near any that are sweating and bulging.
    The next two panels open just drawered wall cabinets, the third a clothes closet. Finally I find one that’s locked. “Catherine, the key!”
    But she stands stock still and whimpers and shakes. Elizabeth runs to her side I think to comfort her, but instead drags her into the room, not by the hand but fighting over the key ring! Suddenly, Catherine comes alive and pushing her sister aside opens the door willingly.
    We behold with our three candles the gleam of a roomful of gold, silver and precious colored gems: green, yellow, blue and ruby red flames of echoing fire. If Hercule Poirot had ever come across a hoard half so great I’m sure he would have grown a tail, batwings and snout and curled up around it and died on the spot. I leave that door open.
    Again I find cabinets and common closets until I find another locked door. Elizabeth takes Catherine’s hand with the key ring in it and together with sisterly affection they unlock the door. We step back. A black stairway climbs upward into cobwebs and darkness.
    The next locked panel door I fear to touch. It’s damp and the panels beyond it are sweating and bulging. But Catherine finds more courage than me — or is it despair — and plunges past both of us to open it.
    Blackness. And steps leading down into the unknown.
    “You said the library was below us, drowned? These steps must take us there.”
    “I had no idea this was here!” Catherine gasps. “I had no idea any of this was here! I don’t know what half these keys open.”
    I lead the way, every second expecting to step into icy cold seawater. The claustrophobic walls sweat, weeping salty tears. Finally a door blocks our descent. I’m about to get Catherine with her keys when the rotten panels collapse to my touch. We are at the library.
    We stand on a balcony. To either side are bookcases. The door behind us had been a bookcase, now a pile of muck under our feet. The floor below us is not flooded. Tables and chairs sit ready for readers. Light glimmers from the moon on the surface of the sea beyond the glass roof overhead. I charge two marble steps at a time in spite of their elfin scale down the spiral stair to the flags below. Books cover shelves higher than I , on both sides and underneath the balcony where the girls stand. To one end I see sweating, bulging doors. Overhead and on three sides is glass — the ocean surrounds us and bears down on us like a hand around an egg — the least shift and all this comes crashing down. But while it yet stands this library is larger than I ever knew any collection of books could be. Are all these books different?
    “Where do I begin?!” I say back to the girls above me staring openmouthed at the sea beyond the glass overhead. I pick a book at random and pull it off the shelf. It comes apart in my hands. I open the cover and worms crawl across the rotted indecipherable pages. In disgust I slam it down on the table. It too crashes in rot to the floor. Somewhere there is a distant tinkling of glass and the sound of rushing water builds quickly to a roar.
    “Back inside!” I run for the stair as the floor becomes a puddle. “Upstairs! To the Royal Chamber! Run for your lives!” I look behind me to see a rushing wave crush glass room, swallow tables, chairs, shelves and books. Back up the secret staircase, Catherine locks the library panel in her father’s mausoleum then stands back as a thunderous crash slams against that door. It swells and sweats like it’s neighboring panels. We retire to the corridor. In her exhaustion she neglects to lock her father’s tomb. Dejected, we make our way back to our beds and sleep.

Worm Food
    Boom! goes the door to my chamber. I sit up out of a death’s sleep to behold a tall gray old Elf standing beside my bed. The door stands gaping behind him. It is the dead king.
    “Roderick! How can you sleep! Don’t give me any nonsense about swimming for help. Here, look! We must build this. It’s a bathysphere and with this we could all four escape. Use my laboratory. Roll the finished sphere out the guard’s corridor to my Lady’s Apple tapestry. Roll off into the sea when the current breaths in!”
    He lay a huge tome on my blanketed legs. I look as he shows me the design of plates, the frame forming shelves on the inside and seating for four. A round hatch screws into place underfoot.
    “Use the gold in my personal treasure room,” says the ghost. “Take as much as you can carry. I will not come with you. I deserve the Priestess’s curse. But my innocent daughters don’t. I robbed the people raw for fifty years, as my fathers did before me. Surely we should have known our sins would find us out. But with you, son, the Old Dominion has hope. The South shall rise again!”
    He vanishes, his voice still echoing in my ears after he’s gone. I am sitting up in bed. The door stands open into the empty blackness of the cold clammy corridor. The huge heavy book lay upon my lap. This was no mere nightmare, the old king has actually been here. But now I am alone. By the light of the spectral fire I see the book shimmer and squirm before me. It’s alive with crawling maggots.
    In revulsion I pull my legs out from under the infested sheets and get dressed. I take a candle, lit from the ghostly flames, and exit into the corridor closing the door behind me.
    By the dim candlelight I find the door to the King’s chamber standing open. I go and stand myself beside the corpse. In a sudden fit of retribution I throw back the coverings. The King lay undisturbed on his rotten linen, a mouldered mass of death. I replace his cover. Looking up from the bed of decay I see the black maw of the stairway ascending upward into blackness behind him, which I now know leads to his laboratory — and possibly escape! I leave the domed chamber and take a little tool out of my pocket I didn’t remember I possessed until that instant. I open the door to Catherine’s Bridal Chamber. I stand with my candle at the foot of their bed.
    “Roderick!” Catherine suddenly sits upright in bed. Elizabeth awakens more slowly beside her. “What are you doing? How?”
    “I’m no Roderick. Whoever I might be, I’m not Roderick. Why did you lie to me? Your husband did not die swimming to you, but trying to escape out into the sea! And it wasn’t a witch who cursed you, but the just wrath of the gods upon you house! You’re a race of brigands and pirates, grown rich on the toil and deprivation of the common man! You deserve your fate. Why I must share it with you, I don’t understand. Perhaps I’m being punished for letting my girl die… I remember that that now! Or maybe I’m also dead, as you must surely be, pretty young ghouls in ancient gowns. You’ve been here at least a century. If you could get out, you would surely crumble into worms and muck like everything else here seems to want to.”
    “How do you know all this?” Elizabeth asks.
    “You father rose from his crypt and appeared to me. He had the book we need in his hands. It’s all muck and worms now, but he showed me what I need to know.”
    “It’s true. On the day of my wedding, a week after my father launched his fleet to punish revolting peasants, a priestess appears. Not the royal priest to pronounce his blessing upon the royal union, rather an old woman of the people. She cursed my father to his face so father ran her through. I had heard nothing of his crimes until then. His ceremonial sword broke off in her belly. Mother turned her back, but I could not help but watch her slowly die. With her last breaths she declared our doom, then the sea overtook us. But as we watched the mountain of water rise over our heads, a Enchanter promised to rescue an inner circle of a few. With my father’s consent he pronounced a spell upon the hearth and all the fires of the house that those who stay nearby would live forever. But I saw the people in the great room around us turn to fire and smoke. I saw…” She chokes and grabs her sister’s wrist. We saw our own Mother burn to death before our eyes. Only five, the Enchanter included, survived out of thousands. When my father saw what his bargain with the devil had cost him, he struck the Enchanter even as Mother burned, and he too fell away and was consumed. The waters fell around us and we have been shrinking back to that hearth where we had stood that day ever since. We do not age because we feed on the heat of the heath, the consuming flames of our mother’s — and so many others’ — sacrifice.” She breaks down weeping.
    “The flames and smoke of our family and friends,” Elizabeth continues for her, “Rose up over our heads that hour and fled up the chimney. The log has long ago evaporated to ash and dust, but the flames do not go out. If ever they do, the great room itself must be swallowed up by the sea.”
    “But this is no way to live! Even the food you eat is glamour. I saw it before the magic worked upon it and it’s nothing but muck and worms.”
    “Yes, we feed off the fading magic of the hearth that consumed our mother. But what are we to do? You must help us, whoever you are!” Catherine pleads.
    “I don’t see how two princesses from out of the distant past could make their way in this enlightened world. Or even if you could exist away from your hearth! You might turn to muck and worms yourselves if you get too far from it. But yes, I will help you. We will build your father’s bathysphere.”

Diving Belles
    We again pay a visit to the King’s crypt. We climb the clammy but relatively dry stair to the laboratory and find a metallurgical wonder equipped with a ready-made steel frame for the bathysphere which the King had apparently been working on before he died, or even after for all I know. I discover with Catherine’s keys and my own remaining dragons how to work the gas furnace. The girls get to work hauling gold up from their father’s private hoard. The coins drop into the furnace and come out in a bright red stream onto molds for the plates. I don’t bother to polish them. Plate after plate I weld onto the frame. I discover the already made screw-hatch and weld it’s female mounting onto the frame.
    With enough material at hand I send the girls to explore the administrative corridor down which we must roll the sphere. They report back that’s it’s still sound, miraculously. Catherine claimed to have felt her father’s presence there. I melt silver into the seams of the completed sphere as the girls load boxes of jewels into the sphere.
    Finally, we open the great doors to the corridor and roll the gold and silver ball out past abandoned scribe’s offices and guard’s quarters. I can only imagine the treasures entombed to either side of us. I’m behind pushing my creation while out in front the girls sweep away the debris of a century to provide a smooth surface for this outsized marble. We come out from the left of the tapestry of the blond with ringlets of gold thread taking the ruby apple from a verdigris bough.
    “It’s a likeness of Mother,” Catherine confides.
    “She was a real good looker!” I confess.
    “Not when she burned alive before our eyes,” Elizabeth chokes.
    The girls walk ankle deep through the sea that’s climbed as far as the landing to return to the accursed hearth.
    “Would they ever be able to leave it?” I wonder.
    They return shortly with gowns and blankets, their emptied linen press and striped bed, their whole wardrobes bundled up to fill the sphere and give us a soft place to ride. I follow them back to help bring a second and then a third load down the mahogany stair when we hear tinkling glass and roaring waters pound the door of their abandoned chamber behind us. Before us a long low wailing moan resounds like the death cries of thousands.
    “It sounds just as it did that fateful day!” Elizabeth gasps.
    “The hearth! It knows we are leaving!” Catherine warns.
    We rush to the stairs to see the fire blazing higher than ever before, escaping into the room, burning up the portrait of the King above the hearth and setting alight the table set now visibly with muck and worms before it. The flames shooting into the room play on the paneled ceiling blackening it and raising thick smoke.
    Running out to the top of the steps before the tapestry we discover the water has risen halfway to the hearth floor. We could see it visibly climbing. We lift the bundles over our heads and plunge into the icy cold sea. Crossing to the opposite landing where the bathysphere awaits, water is gushing out from under the door to the Administrative Corridor around the sphere and down the steps. The tapestry darkens, soaking up the ocean. The gorgeous white face portrayed blackens as if it burns.
    “Mother!” Catherine screams. “That was how she looked when she…” she ends in stifled sobs.
    We stuff our bundles then ourselves into the sphere and I screw the golden door shut. Secure in our thick cocoon of blankets and cushioned from every blow by bundled gowns, we rock the sphere until it tumbles down the steps into the sea.
    We rock there in the suffocating darkness for the longest while bobbing up and down but going nowhere. “How are we going to get across the ballroom? We can’t move the sphere!” Elizabeth screams. I’m about to tell her we’ve done all we can when a ringing explosion hits us and we shoot forward. “The sea must have reached the hearth!” she surmises.
    We come to a sudden stop with a jaw rattling thump and I wonder if we’ve missed the gate, in more ways than one. But we sink a little and scrape by and I feel us roll a little bit forward. “Roll! Roll forward!” I shout.
    Suddenly we are rising again but not too far. I’m sure we are free of the crumbling castle, but do we have the buoyancy to be free of the sea? We shudder again as a big bubble of air lifts us from below, but then we rise no more.
    “We’re too heavy! Find the hatch! Where’s the bottom? Put the clothes on top of the bench and get the jewel boxes off the shelves behind you where you’ve secured them and set them around the door.”
    The women do as I bid and soon the screw is under our feet. But still we rise no more. I begin to turn open the door.
    “Oh, no! Don’t! We’ll drown like Roderick,” Catherine begs.
    “We’ll suffocate if we don’t open up! Only a little water will come in. I think I see how the magic worked. The air under there was at sufficient pressure to keep out the sea. We will not drown.”
    As I turn the screw a little water does come in. Nothing much happens until suddenly the heavy solid gold screw drops out of my hands. The door lays open to the sea and the ocean gushes in — but we also rise a little without the heavy screw.
    “We’re going to drown like Roderick!” Elizabeth screams.
    “Get rid of the blankets!” We throw the dank mildewed rags down the hole. We rise a tiny bit. “Get rid of the gowns!”
    “No! Whatever shall we wear?” Catherine fights me over the bundled gowns. They split and tear in our hands as we struggle. The sea is up to our waists, almost half filling the sphere.
    “Look at them! They’re rotten! They stink and are spoiled by black stains. You can’t ever wear these again, anyway!”
    She releases her grip looking down at her own tattered, decayed wedding dress. For the first time the royal princess realizes she is dressed in grave-clothes. The gowns fall away.
    All that’s left in the emptied sphere is us and three chests of jewels in a ball of gold and silver. I kick mine down into the ocean. The sea is up the their breasts, my neck. “Better alive than rich and dead!” Suddenly I know who I am! “I know my name! Ladies, Sam Bobbins, detective. At your service! Kick away your jewels! That’s what holding us down.”
    “No! However shall we live?” Elizabeth scolds. I’m floating, the water is up to their chins. But these women are tightfisted!
    Treading water I say, “You can always get more jewels, but you can’t get another life!” That seems right, but Something in me rebels at that idea.
    “Sister, fill your bosom with what baubles you can,” Catherine advises while coughing up the choking sea, “Then kick the rest out!”
    Why hadn’t I thought of that? I dive and fill my pockets from the ladies’ jewel boxes. Soon enough they vanish into the ocean depths, spilling out their contents as they fall.
    We shoot upward and the water level falls as well, rewarding us with room to breath. I can see the light of the sun in the water through the hole at our feet. But now the sphere tosses in the waves and that hole isn’t always underfoot. We are slowly sinking back into the depths.
    “We must swim from here!” I announce and drop into the hole. As I abandon ship I make sure to grab a right ankle with each hand and force the women to follow me. Their gowns billow above their knees as we drop into the deep and I see rapturous sights. Finally free of the sinking bathysphere, I wrap an arm around each waist and kick for the sunlight. The women follow my example.
    Our heads break into air as sea gulls cry and the sun breaks the sea on a new morning. We lay arm in arm and kick for shore.
    Floating in the ocean with these two girls, I realize one encouraging thing. The Dead Do Rise!

His Sixth Adventure:
Sam Bobbins with the Pirates of Penn’s Aunts
-or-
“Who Stole the Cheese?”

    We come crawling on hands and knees up the black sands, drenched and exhausted, a Small man and two tall Elf women. We lay on our backs, turning on our sides to cough up sea-water back out into the sea from time to time before settling back on the sand.
    “I’m sorry we couldn’t save any of your things,” I confess finally.
    “No, it’s all right. You were right. At least we are ourselves alive. Thank you for returning us to the land of the living, Sam Bobbins,” says Catherine, older of the two sisters. It occurs to me then and there that I have raised the dead in these two girls!
    “There’s a town nearby. We should go there and find an inn,” says Elizabeth, the younger.
    “And pay what for it?” I quote, ‘A pearl to pass the door’?”
    “We have more need of dry clothes and hot food than of our pearls, Sam Bobbins. Let us be going.” Catherine leads us to a rather unsavory public house a social step or two beneath the dockside tavern in New Haven or even Dillsberg’s Tip and Tap, but nevertheless a half step above sitting on the beach drenched, cold and starving. A diamond got us two rooms and three meals — decent fish stew, too — as well as a visit from a ladies’ costumier to re-clothe the women.
    My things are washed as am I — separately — in water hot, a pleasure forgotten under sea, at sea and since I took up grave-robbing and then dried. I tell the ladies my story as we eat waiting for my clothes to dry and theirs to arrive, all three robed in blankets, but they can be of no help to my quest. Indeed it is Catherine who christens me, ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’.
    Afterwards I have pressed into my paw by an exuberant Elizabeth a fine large pearl. She gives me a kiss goodbye in spite of my reticence and calls me ‘Roderick’ one last time with moist eyes before I depart. I never expected I would be the sort not to value treasure, but there is more than one kind of treasure. I leave the ladies remarking on the changes in fashions and the seamstresses gossiping among themselves over the century-old dresses they arrived in and go explore the town.

Which Witch?
    I am walking through the market when I overhear one stall merchant shout to another over the back of a woman shopping, “She’s a wench, spurn her!”
    Witch? Which? Who’s a witch?” an old hag appears. “Come along, me pretty, Granny will hide thee!”
    Witch! Witch! burn the witch!” the ever-available mob began to chant. Rough men with beery breath seize the shopper and drag her into the circle the crowd makes to trap her.
    A magistrate comes along in the nick of time and he pleads, “What have we here?”
    “She’s a witch! We’re goin’ to burn the witch!” shout out more than a few there looking for a show.
    “How do you know she’s a witch?” he cites an ancient precedent — err — trite old formula.
    “You just said so yer self, ‘…she’s a witch’! Besides, I heard the baker say so,” one village idiot accuses another.
    “No, it was the fish monger’s son!” answers the baker.
    “I did not! I called her a wench, ‘cause she wouldn’t let me pinch her. Let me pinch her!” pleads the scurvy unwashed slob who started it.
    “Yes, yes, but how do you know she’s a witch?” arraigns the judge.
    “She turned me capt’ into a bug!” peaches an old drunk.
    “I ain’t no bloody bug you damn fool!” an old salt smacks the drunk on the side of the head.
    He sat down hard. “Well, you was. I got drunk, ya see, and Capt’ he, he ups and punches me in me nosh. And when I wakes me up, there’s this bug, and I saws this woman walking by!”
    “Was it this very woman?” asks the magistrate.
    “Well, maybe no, but one just like her!”
    “They all look alike to him!” adds a local wit.
    “But how do you know she’s a witch?” insists the judge litigiously.
    “You’re all witches!” cackles the old hag.
    “Mother, please!” pleads the magistrate.
    “You’re a witch!” she answers her own son. “She’s a witch, everybody’s a witch, which…”
    “Someone take Mother home!” orders the magistrate.
    “Everybody ‘cept me, of course,” Mother cackles. She leaves a trail of tarot cards, rat’s tails, bugs’ eyes and potion bottles as two sturdy officers take her home to her bed.
    “I will tell you how we know she’s a witch!” continues her son pointing at the young prisoner. “Because we, a jury of her peers, say she’s a witch!” All the mob cheer. They all know they will have fireworks tonight.
    “She’s not a witch!” I rebut, stepping into the circle around the accused.
    “Who does he think he is? How dare he?” the mob murmurs.
    I make my case. “A witch tells fortunes. Do you find any cards on the accused? A witch speaks to the dead. Does she?” To each question the grumbling mob begrudgingly admits that she didn’t by a shaking of their rattling empty noggins. “Where is her accuser? Didn’t he just admit that he called her not witch, and that for refusing his advances? What were he take a fancy to any of your wives? Finally, have you found the smallest potion bottle on this woman? No? Well, unhand her, and be off with ye, wench!”
    She wrenches herself out of the grip of the drunken sots who hold her arms, takes to her heels lifting her skirts and spilling her basket, barely escaping my boot’s well-aimed broadside toward her rear and she is out of sight nearly as fast as a Wee Little girl could have ran, and that’s fast!
    “Do you mind? I was trying to establish an important principle of jurisprudence here, trial by jury!” the judge snaps at me. “Of course, in a case involving circumstantial evidence you cannot take the denials of the accused for anything,” instructs the magistrate. “For the innocent will naively confess her innocent, and the guilty would wisely never admit to anything. So we keep them in our dungeon until they admit to the charge, which they never do.” He now ceases to address his audience and turns his full gaze upon me, “But who are you?”
    “A man who knows the only witch in this port is your own mother!” I barely make it up to his navel, so I know my only hope is to put on a brave face. “She would not tolerate any other. She talks to the dead, tells fortunes, and prepares potions.” I pick up a bottle filled with something murky, disgusting and quite alive. “Like this one, which fell from your mother’s pockets, along with these cards and other trash,” I sweep my hand above the ground at the magistrate’s feet, where the accused shopper never trod.
    “Be that as it may, it doesn’t demonstrate the innocence of the accused,” rejoins the judge.
    “But it does show that you like most of your kind are such an incompetent fool that you couldn’t judge your way out of a paper sack!”
    “I don’t know what a paper sack is, but I do know you owe the city your life in exchange for that of the witch you released!”
    “I’d like to see you try!” All the mob cheer as I draw my cutlass. They just want to see a fight, but somehow all the magistrate’s muscle chose that moment to be absent, and he knows it.
    “If I ever see you around here again, I’ll blacken your hide!” says the magistrate, but it’s him who turns tail and runs, seeing himself outmatched by one Wee Little man.
    I hold the field of battle for a brief moment while the mob cheers but directly they go on about their business. After all, it wasn’t making a living to stand gawking at some runt with a sailor’s pig-sticker stare after their local magistrate’s butt.

An Offer I Can’t Refuse
    “That was very brave!” says the taller of two very little boys.
    “Who are you?” I look him in the eye.
    “Penn. This is Teller, he won’t peach!” he gestures to a yet smaller boy smiling beside him.
    “Teller who won’t talk? And Penn who can’t write?” I chuckle.
    “How’d you know? Anyway, are you a man or a boy?”
    “I’m a Small man who stands tall. What can I do for you?”
    “It’s what I can do for you, Mister Stands Tall. If you don’t get out of town, Madge’ll roast you, if his mother don’t poison you first.”
    “And you’ve got the cure for my ills, huh?”
    “My aunts need sailors. Can you handle sail?”
    “Yes, I can. And what do you want for introducing me to these gracious ladies?”
    “Oh, they ain’t no ladies! My aunts are mean! Mabel runs the crew, see, and Aunt Ellie deals with the shore men, making sure we get a good price for the merchandise Mabel brings back. They’re all ready to go today, which suits you fine. And they need an able body.”
    “Well enough. Let’s go.” But the boys just stand there. “Well, that is it?” Penn holds out his hand, and the other imitates him. “Et tu, Teller?” I say in poor Elvish as I laugh and put a copper into each boy’s palm. Following the children they lead the way into a dockside establishment. A sign over the storefront reads, ‘Auction’.
    “Auntie El’! Auntie El’!” The boys run in and embrace a pretty little blond, each tugging on a shapely thigh and lifting the woman’s skirts in their excitement.
    “Boys! Boys! What is this?!” She beats them away playfully and smoothes her dress. Then she sees me and her attitude changes like sunlight to storm.
    “I found one! The sailor Auntie Mabel needs!”
    “And who might you be, sir?” she addresses our hero.
    “Sam Bobbins, detective, at your service, ma’am.”
    “What’s a detective? We don’t want anything detected here!”
    “I find things, ma’am. But I understand you need a sailor, I can do that too. I’ve found the need to know many things in my line,” I explain.
    “He’s a witch! He has to go or the Madge’ll cook him!” Penn squeals, both boys bouncing excitedly on their toes.
    “Nonsense, child, Madge’s old mother is the only witch about these parts. Unless — sir — that is one of those ‘skills’ you mentioned?”
    “I only came to the defense of a lady, madam, that is why he has it in for me.”
    “Well that is enough, for the Madge! But you have experience? You can handle sail?”
    “A year before the mast on the four masted schooner, ‘Cathay’ with Captain Ishmael.”
    “Don’t know him. Very well, if worse comes to worst, we can always use your carcass for fish bait. Come along, I’ll introduce you to your Mistress.” She leads me from the shop stuffed I now notice with a broad variety of items: casks, barrels, traveling bags, canvas sacks, loose clothes, piles of jewelry and stacks of shoes, every sort of article of human trade. I also cross my fingers that she was only joking about my being fish bait.
    Captain Mabel is a woman only a little older than her sister, but with short black hair. Larger and more muscled, she wears an unattractive armored leather bodice with brass fixtures. She looks at me with a cruel frown and my hair rises on my back, a bad sign I ought to have listened to.
    “Sister, this wants to handle sail for you. I’ll leave him to you. Madge and Mother are looking for him.” Ellie returns to her shop.
    “You ready for a fight?” Mabel snarls. A sharp looking metal disk with a saw-toothed edge hangs menacingly from her waist.
    “Not if I can help it,” I grin.
    Mabel’s frown deepens in response to my good humor. “You may have to fight to stay on this ship.”
    “Maybe I should look elsewhere for passage.”
    “No one else is leaving today. If you don’t go with us, you burn. Madge’s sure to catch you. So here’s your choice: fire or water. How do you choose to go?”
    “Later. I’d just as soon put off death until later.”
    “Then it’s the water you want. It takes longer to drown.” Mabel begins to smile, or maybe she is just showing her teeth.
    “Especially if your boat don’t sink,” I answer.
    Mabel laughs long and hard — and a little maniacally. I decide I like her better the other way — frowning! “All right! I’m desperate for a hand at the sails to get me underway. And I won’t ask you to fight. Just stay out from underfoot when it comes to that.”
    “I’ll be sure to do that. Thank you.” How could I have ever thought she was joking? That she ever jokes?
    “You won’t be thanking me later!” Mabel walks away, leaving me gripping the deck rail.

Yo! Ho! Ho!
    And I do! Stay out from underfoot, that is. This voyage, like every other I’ve been on, is a slow exercise in tedium. I climb the rigging, look out on blue sky and blue ocean, release sailcloth, pull in sail, tug ropes, let ropes out, and stay clear of the rest of the crew whom I rightly read as being the sort that needs a captain like Mabel to keep them from each other’s throats.
    Which she barely manages. For a shipload of women there are more fights, thefts, and shouting than on a fleet of Cathays. The girls go at each other with teeth and nails, slapping, hair pulling — even carving each other up with knives! We subsist on rum, hard biscuit and dry salt pork. We are each required to eat a whole lemon every day, and it couldn’t have made them any more sour. It is the worst trip I’d ever been on. Then it gets worse.
    The morning comes when a lookout calls, “Sail ho!” A merchantman smaller than us by half appears on the horizon. Quick and rough orders are shouted out to put up sail and we tack in their general direction. With each blow to windward the other ship becomes a little larger. Finally, we are right up next to them.
    Until this moment I have been too busy handling rope and sheets alone alive up in the rigging to notice that the other ship has been fleeing. They don’t want to share mail with Mabel or converse with her amazon crew. This occurs to me only when a cannon erupts in the stern of the pursued vessel that flies the whole length of our ship to split the sail next to my head. Something like that will cause a fella to look behind him and take stock of his surroundings. Hanging by the rearmost rattails of the mizzenmast I watch with shock and outrage as Mabel’s thugs swarm over the stranger’s decks. It’s over very fast.
    As I take in sail on all three masts — entirely single-handed now that there is no rush — I witness the rest of the crew carry aboard the casks and bundles of the other’s cargo. So this is where Ellie’s merchandise comes from! Lastly her men come aboard and all these honest sailors elect to enroll in Mabel’s mob rather than join the owner and his cowering family in irons abandoned to languish down in the hold. These passengers menaced by that terrible woman and her amazons are taken below decks. Soon the gutted smaller boat fills with sea and vanishes sadly below the waves.
    That night I seek below amid the scattered baggage of the sacked merchantman and find what I want, the captive passengers, shackled to a beam of the deck above. “I need you to know I knew nothing of the Captain’s plan to go pirate. I did nothing to take your ship,” I say as I pick the father’s lock.
    “Nothing? I don’t understand?” the man answers with an open jawed look of surprise.
    “I came aboard to work my passage handling sail, only until we reach the next port.”
    “Don’t you know the pirate’s only port is the one you came out of? They will touch no land except the pier you last stepped off from.”
    “Are you sure? But of course! It must be. I’ve been such a desperate fool. You see, I’m wanted — unjustly — by the magistrate of that city, and by his mother the witch.”
    “Then you are as much a prisoner as we are. She intends to hold us for ransom. I expect we will be joined by quite a few others before she takes us back to her sister to be auctioned.”
    “Then we will need to make sure that doesn’t happen. Here, use this to pick the other’s locks.” I give the now free man my tool that Hercule Poirot gave me — Oh so long ago! — and show him how to use it. No part of the ship is now closed to him. “I will get you food and weapons. When she attacks the next merchantman, we must act. Together with the other ship we can kill the pirate captain and persuade her amazons and your men to follow you. But keep yourselves hidden until then.”
    “That we will do!” he thanks me.
    My merciful act of giving a tiny metal pick to the owner of the captured vessel set loose on her ship a handful of saboteurs among dozens of pirates. Night watches vanish, lines are cut, sailcloth dumped overboard. Especially vicious and heartless pirates are found dead in their bunks, their throats cut. Food and weapons disappear as do their prisoners, escaping into the labyrinthine hold like so many rats. And these are too smart for any trap.
    Of course the rational thing to do is to seek out the missing prisoners and apprehend them. But that doesn’t happen. Indeed, Captain Mabel does not notice anything out of the ordinary for about a week when she calls for a trusted mate and she does not answer. In fact, her women treat each other shabbily at the best of times, and they commonly fall overboard drunk at night.
    When the time eventually comes to seize another vessel the plan is she wouldn’t even notice that her original crew are either dead — systematically exterminated by her ‘captives’, or converted over to the men’s side by fraternizing with the enemy. And there is a lot of fooling around! Most nights I avoid the poop deck as it’s occupied by writhing bodies. When the father freed by Bobbins long before appears behind Mabel as her ship comes under fire from the next merchantman she would have no one to rally to her bloodthirsty and gold hungry cause. All that would remain will be the family, the crew of the defeated merchantman and their amazon lovers. Captain Mabel would end at the end of a rope, and an honest man would take her ship to a new port, thanks to Sam Bobbins.

Plank! Plank! Plank!
    Unfortunately, one morning long before that blessed day — about a week after I gave away my detective tool — the crew is called up to the main deck and exposed to a long tirade by their leather-garbed and brass-buckled mistress. Finally she comes to the point.
    “And along with my strawberries — which is bad enough — there’s something unspeakably worse! My cheddar is gone!”
    She pauses for effect. This utter silence, more than all the shouting and gritting of teeth that came before, is terrifying.
    “Now, I will only ask once before I start lobbing-off heads. Who stole the cheese?” She hefts her razor-sharp throwing disc menacingly. We know it’s sharp, she sharpened it last night with the same wetted stone she uses on her shaving razors.
    The amazons grumble at these unspeakable atrocities while they are recounted. The men study their heels, snickering. That one of them should walk off with the Captain’s Brie cups, much less her cheddar pantries!
    “I think I speak for all of us girls, Capt’, when I say there isn’t a woman aboard who hasn’t stolen an extra ration of grog or hard tack as the mood has struck her, or got falling down drunk on a lonely night watch, or cut the throat of a bunk mate who looked at her funny. That’s all fun and games for a pirate’s life, such as it is. But to steal the Capt’s cheese! Why, there’s witchcraft aboard! Nothing like this ever happened until we brought along that Sam Bobbins!” says the second mate.
    “A rat’s ass! I’ve been nowhere near the Captain’s pantries!” I shout, and truthfully. The prisoners had been shackled in the bow hold, Captain’s cabins are invariably in the rear. Perhaps one of them stole it?
    “The second mate must be right, Capt’,” says another amazon pirate, the first mate. “For what likes cheese but rats? And who’s the hairiest and shortest among us but Bobbins? I say he’s a giant rat disguised as a small man!”
    “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard! By that reasoning, you’re a block of wood, since you’re no smarter!” That’s called logic.
    “Overboard with the Rat! He’s a wanted witch, isn’t he?!” the women shout.
    I’m opening my pants to show them I have no tail when I say, “And you can kiss it while you’re back there!” This is the way you have to talk to pirates, even if they are a bunch of ladies.
    “Enough! By now Bobbins, you know we are heading back home after we get a full hold,” says Captain Mabel. “And I know you don’t approve of our ‘trade’. So you can just leave my ship and walk back to shore. You chose long ago between the fire and the water. Get going! I don’t need you anymore, I have more than enough crew.” I just stand there dumb while huge leather-garbed women on either side of me grab my cutlass and pick my pockets.
    “Plank! Plank! Plank!” the pirates chant while they shove me toward a piece of ship’s lumber laid over the scuppers of the main deck. I crumble into a heap aside the plank, and soon come up facing the amazon hoard swinging my fists. But I’m soon laying on my back, laying on the rough gray salt-caked plank. My struggles stop when the point of my own stolen cutlass pricks the flesh between my collar bones. The lumber is pushed outboard, and the plank with myself riding it is unceremoniously jettisoned. The pirates cheer at the great fun when Sam Bobbins lands in the drink, the plank knocking me on the skull. I see crossed bones then!
    They cheer again when I surface a distance from the ship grasping the plank. Dazed and helpless I watch the pirate ship slowly drift toward the horizon. I have no food, no water — that I can drink! — and aside from a crude board an inch thick, a foot wide and a dozen feet long, no means to stay afloat. “The flames would have been quicker!” I repeat the Captain’s last words to me, almost regretting my choice. Taking long to die isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
    I decide to keep my boots. They would preserve my feet from the many small fish who want a piece of me. Likewise my clothes would discourage the other tiny sea creatures who regard me as so much flotsam, already a floating buffet on the way to their gullets.
    Almost immediately the thirst begins, but I know I have to keep my wits about me and not drink the water. Oh, where are those French dolphins now! Fortunately I’m in the tropics and the sea is nearly as warm as blood, so I would not freeze. But I would eventually cool, and with no food to keep up my strength against a constant drain on my inner heat, it’s yet a race between the cold and my thirst as to which will kill me first.
    The sun sets in glorious reds and my world contracts to a sightless chilly void, the rough plank riding lower in the sea as the dry wood hungrily soaks up the ocean, the ocean that hides in it’s black heart unknown predators, and the starless heavens hiding equally deadly storm in it’s vault.
    I awake to hard heavy drops pounding on my face and arms. I open my mouth to catch the downpour. The sea tosses me up and down, up and down. By now the plank is covered with sea-water, it’s top the top of the ocean. Lightning lights the sky, the flash exposing a sea more vertical than horizontal as waves crest in whitecaps far overhead or vanish into black troughs far below.
    The battering given my ribs and hands by vicinity to the plank makes me question if I should leave it, an idea that coming into my head tells me desiccation in spite of the cold drowning rain even now eats away at my mind, for the waterlogged swollen plank is the only thing keeping me afloat, taking as it’s fare the skin from my waterlogged swollen fingers along with it. Then I lose my grip anyhow. The plank and Sam Bobbins part ways as inexorably as I had parted from the pirates, as relentlessly as I am carried in the ups and downs of the battering waves.
    The sky is lost to me. The rain is beyond my reach. The plank is forever deleted from my universe as darkness closes in upon me. All I know from now on is the illimitable depths: beneath me, above me, boundlessly about me. I am sucked into the black abyss. The last thing I see is churning suds of phosphorescence.

His Seventh Adventure:
Awl’s Well that Ends Well for Sam Bobbins

Wet and Bedraggled
    The churning suds of phosphorescent waves swim over my head as I am sucked into the black abyss. The crushing burden of all the world’s oceans lay on me dragging me down to my death. The heavy fist of water crushes my ribs. A single great crystalline ball of air escapes from my lungs Then I lose consciousness.
    I dream that the cares of the world crush me — smaller — then smaller — and smaller still. Then I awake. My lungs explode into air. My chest takes control of me, my mouth opens on it’s own accord. I am breathing again, gasping foul reeking air, and my mind regains mastery over my body as my sight returns.
    Glad to see my hairy-backed hands, I find I’m clinging to a four inch thick steel rod jammed crosswise into the depths of a black well eight feet across. Where the steel emerges out of stinking water, where I wrap my arms around it, the metal disappears into a waterlogged shaped timber. The wood is slimy with black mold, but after I recover myself I struggle up the log until I fall exhausted on my back onto the slanting rim of the well. After a rest I pull myself above the lip of the rim and stand at the bottom of a weathered water channel. I climb to the level floor and see to my gaping astonishment a checkerboard of square tiles sixteen feet on a side, the wall hundreds of feet away, and the ceiling hundreds of feet high. But thanks to a rectangle of two gleaming white squares in a window far above I can gain a perspective on where I am.
    I am in a cellar and I have just crawled up an awl out of a drain. I stand, by the scale of what I see, three inches tall: a very Small man indeed. In this basement there is an immense blazing hot furnace with a towering medusa’s head of dull pipes and shiny square metal channels. Also below another distant window is a separate room with black boulders piled mountain-high. Beside the furnace stand house-size tubs of white rocks — to tell by the surrounding spillage — the extinguished fuel. “The black rocks must be coal,” I realize, I have just never seen it so large. The Dwarves mine it not so far from home, in another world, I must accept.
    Also in my cellar are several immense tools and gigantic pieces of lumber on a tall tableland of a workbench. The tools are far out of reach and too huge to be wielded by me. Then across the room there are cabinets full of shiny metal cylinders. All the cylinders have letters and some broad portraits of cooked foods on their sides of meats and vegetables. And all that serves to do is to remind me how hungry I am. It too is out of reach.
    Finally there is the stairway. But this is no stair I could ever use. The treads are over ten feet high, the timbers like trees in breadth. How could a three-inch man ever hope to climb such Mythic Mountains? I look for other escapes, as well as for food. I could never hope to open the metal cylinders if they do indeed hold promise of food. That would require a tool, I cannot wield such tools as readily present themselves even if they were within reach. Tools! Perhaps with tools I could capture my own food, crude though they might be, and fashion my own egress.
    Searching the floor under the tool bench I find just what I need, a nail over half as tall as I am rusty but still sharp. And better yet, spiders. The spiders are the size of feral dogs and with their clutching mandibles and sharp claws twice as vicious. The only thing that saved me was that they did not hunt in packs, they were solitary creatures who did not come to the aid of their own kind. I stab and sting until I damage one enough to drag it away toward the furnace.
    I use the head of the nail to push the wounded beast up against the closed fire-door. There it cooks, roasted alive by the waste-heat of a hidden inferno as hot and as large as a house afire. In a short while I pull back the roasted arachnid with my tool. I break off the stiffened joints of the bristled legs and hairy claws as if it’s a crab. Indeed it is a sort of huge crab, as far across the splayed legs as I am tall, yet in my hunger the horrid monstrosity tastes like lobster. “Too bad there’s no butter!” I remark.
    Restored by my repast I now consider how to escape my dungeon. I consider finding strong string and set about mountain climbing the stone walls. Then the door opens. At the top of the stairs I hear footfalls. Light spills down from a small artificial sun I hadn’t noticed before. A woman comes down the stair, dressed in a brilliant pink robe and easily over sixty feet tall. I see my main chance! I run toward her, or at least run to place myself in her path. Still she has to cross only sixteen of her feet to my hundred yard dash and is quickly in front of me.
    Crossing to the cabinet, she picks up one of the metal cylinders. Her pause gives me just the moment I need to grasp the edge of her robe as she swings around and heads back up the stair. I climb as quick as a bug to avoid being hit by either the soles of the giantess’s pink bunny-slipper clad feet or by the next step up, either of which would readily kill me. Though dainty to her scale, each fuzzy-eared covering could have been a boat for me.

Out into the Light
    The cellar is left behind in darkness as her hand brushes the switch and swings the door closed behind us. Vickie told me later that she dreads going down there — which is absurd, nothing in that cellar could harm her — yet still perhaps she should get a nice metal cabinet at the Hill store to keep her canned goods up here in the kitchen so she doesn’t need to go down there. But no, she would still have to go down to take care of that ancient coal burner so she would have heat and hot-water. If only she had the money for a modern oil burner like everyone else! Vickie washes the top of the dusty can of evaporated milk and carries it to the can-opener. What was that she saw out of the corner of her eye?
    “Oh, no! Mice again. I’ve got to get a cat, a big hungry farm stray. Such an inheritance Grammy Rarick left me! Here I thought with a mansion like this she would have left oodles of cash and securities! I have more money in my purse than she kept in the bank. It’s all in this old ruin. Well, at least I have a roof over my head and my work to keep me in cash until I can find a buyer.”
    I drop when I see rug underfoot, roll and come to my feet running. The giantess stands talking to herself with her back to me before a towering wall of cabinets that would make a substantial building in my world — what, five stories high? I hide behind a table leg and spy on the giantess now that I can get a perspective on her vastness. “Why, she’s just a girl!” Not even as much as my age, a pale almost snow white face, she has short black hair just over her ears and wears brassy spectacles with egg shape lenses. She’s very thin and sports a strand of black pearls around her long lean throat. “I’d like to see the clam that hatched those!” I gasp greedily. Each pearl is as big as a cannonball.
    The room we are in is large, well lit and very clean: no roasting spiders up here! I’m going to have to be dependent upon this giantess for my supper. Though the many large windows I see bright sky and snow falling outdoors. Could I survive in a climate that to my size must be arctic? I hardly even had any clothes. All that is left to me from the pirates are my boots, shirt and pants. It would be difficult and dangerous to show myself. And how is it that she would speak any language I know? Whether my mother’s Shirish that I now hear out of Vickie’s mouth, the market Normal the pirates spoke, or scholarly Elvish I acquired in my weeks with Elizabeth and Catherine? Still, I haven’t found it impossible to communicate with my hosts yet, and how can that be? Does the magic that moves me about alter my mouth and ears along with my size and place in the wide world? It’s like someone is watching out for me, dragons and pirates be damned.
    Vickie sits at the kitchen table with her plate of hash and eggs the condensed milk into her coffee. She has a wedding that morning to photograph so she can’t be long. But her pantsuit is all laid out upstairs and after she brushed, it would be a simple matter to pull on her pants and tuck in her blouse and get out to the beetle.
    I see the giantess rise and take her plate and cup to the sink. Water runs and I thirst. The water stops and she leaves the room. Now is the time to act! I still have the nail from the cellar. I have to find a way to scale that five story edifice of cabinetry and get to the water. There’s a towel hanging from the door of the cabinet, but that would only take me part way, yet the towel has a frayed edge. Could it be unraveled and serve as a rope?
    It takes most of the morning to pull and untwine a fifty foot length of giant thread. I knot it every foot for handholds and tie one end around my nail. I throw the nail trailing out the rope over the cabinet. It bounces back clattering to the floor, nearly hitting me. I worry, “Maybe this won’t work? What then?” But I try again, and again, near where I know the water must be. It disappears with a wet thunk this time, but I pull and it comes back. I try again, again this time it sticks! I climb the remaining towel and then my frayed string, praying it won’t break and send me crashing to my death.
    It doesn’t break! My shoulders burning, I come over the top to see a huge porcelain pool of soapy water. Another twin bowl lay empty. A shiny metal pipe towers over the soapy sink dripping water. I know I have to get out to that drip!
    I don’t try to retrieve my nail, since I don’t know what it has caught on or how to refit it to get down again. Instead I look for another tool, and I see it: a large metal bowl with a long handle sits on the high tableland of the cabinet. Better still a black fluid is in the bottom of this giant spoon. I sniff it and it smells sweet. I lap it and it has a strong bitter taste, but powerful enough to be food. I drink until my stomach feels sour.
    Whatever it is, too much is no good for me even though I’m still thirsty. Dragging the spoon around behind the metal apparatus that controls the water in place of a pump I lever one of the long-handled ivory valves to open. Water gushes from the tall gooseneck tower high overhead into the soapy pool. The level there rises. I have to turn that fountain to the empty sink if possible. Using the giant spoon again as a lever I make the faucet swing over the lip of the pool of dishwater into the empty sink. A torrent of cold clear water runs down the drain.
    Now to get myself down to it! I drag my rope up the slippery edge of the sink. Dangling a loop of it over the edge, I hook a brass knob for for support then drop the end into the empty sink. I climb down after it and am soon drinking to my heart’s delight.
    After I wash with the soap suds clinging to the bottom of the empty sink I climb back out and lever the water back as far as my strength would allow, reducing it to a trickle. Then I explore the countertop for food. I find a large glass globe of the black drink that had been in my spoon, and it’s hot. I see the light of it’s flame in the red-glowing button on it’s stand. Then I spy some crusts under a metal box each as large as my fist and toasted brown or black. Then there are more crumbs — not blackened, but stale — in front of another metal box.
    Underneath are hinges, so the front must drop down, I scratch my head how I might open this. Kicking it from the side, suddenly the bread box falls open with a thud.
    “That was easier than I thought!” I congratulate myself. Then I see what the contents are and how they are wrapped. I scratch my head some more, then drag my spoon and stab at the filmy covering with it. It breaks! I tear off chunks of soft white bread with relish. “Mm! Cake!”

“Are You a Man or a Mouse?”
    Vickie for her part photographs the young lower middle class collegiate couple in white tuxedo and white homemade gown and enjoys herself. She nibbles at wedding cake, champagne and roast beef sandwiches between shots of the wedding party and guests enjoying themselves. It’s all rather low class and common, and her pay envelope reflects that. But it would be enough to pay for gas, film, utilities and food, though she’ll never get rich on brides and grooms in this town.
    The real money in photography — as long as you want to keep it clean and decent and Vickie so very much wants to keep it clean and decent — is in glamour and fashion. But to make a living at that you must go to the big city where the truly beautiful people gather and that takes big money: a ‘catch 22’ as she calls it that catches nothing but disappointment. Maybe if she could sell this old house? She must begin calling real estate agents and antique dealers on Monday. “Maybe the paper and the local auction house too. For that matter I could look into the net tonight, scan photos of the old junk into the PC.”
    Vickie drops her camera with the bag of used film in the front hall to take up to her improvised darkroom in the closet upstairs and follows the hallway back to the kitchen and the coffee pot in the back of Grammy’s big old house. She has a knack for observation that serves her well as a photographer and immediately notices the frayed dishcloth, the faucet turned from where she left it and left dripping, the open breadbox with one of the plastic bags torn, and a doll having been stood in front of it. She glances first to see that the backdoor is still secure, the bolt still in place, then steers away from the basement door which might hide the intruder. Then the impossible happens: the doll speaks.
    I decide when I hear the noise of the giantess’s return to be forward and aboveboard about my trespass. So I stand straight and still in front of the pillaged breadbox and when her eyes light upon me, I give my most genteel bow. I regretfully have no hat to flourish. But she doesn’t seem to see me, or even reach until I speak.
    Vickie screams and leaps back. The doll spoke but she didn’t hear me so I must speak again. “What are you!” she shouts.
    “I’m a man, I mean you no harm. Forgive me the damage I’ve done…” I gesture at the breadbox.
    “Where did you come from?!” she gasps, still very loud and excited. “Are you one of those gnomes or fairies I’ve read about?”
    “No, I was a sailor, with people near the same size as me, only a little taller. I fell overboard and thought I had died. But I turned up here.” I describe briefly my adventure in her cellar below.
    “How horrible for you!” By now VIckie has calmed down, quieted down, lowered her pitch, and crept a little bit closer. “May I take photos of you?” She reaches for an oven mitt without taking her eyes off this tiny Wee Little man lest he vanish and puts it on. “Would you ride on my hand?”
    “What is this, ‘fote-oh-graff’? It wouldn’t harm me, will it?”
    “Oh, no! It’s only a way of recording a picture of reflected light on paper. Come, I will show you how we do it. It’s how I make my living, photographing people so they may always recall the happy moments in their lives by seeing them again.”
    “Well, in for a pickle, in for a peck!” I leap onto the giantess’s gloved hand and she lifts me to her breast and uses her bare hand as a fence so I wouldn’t drop while I sit cross-legged for the jolting ride.
    Vickie told me later she sees in myself — that weird little imp — a chance at the money she needs to make a real mark in the world doing what she loves. She carries me careful of any sort of infectious contact upstairs to her grandparents’ bath. Vickie sat me on the floor then put the oven mitt — inside out — in the hamper. She would spray bleach into it later. She washes her hands with an antibiotic soap then put two inches of warm water in a plastic washbasin along with a bar of Grammy’s ivory soap. Vickie drapes a towel over three stepped books aside the high-sided basin with the cloth dangling down the side into the water. “Wash in this and I will find some doll clothes for you to wear.”
    After she leaves I climb up the towel laid over the giant tomes and look down into the water. I know I need a bath and to do my laundry while I’m at it. So I remove my boots and climb down the end of the towel into the warm water. Already some of the luxurious white soap has dissolved into the water. I strip and blissfully wash myself and my things. I haven’t had a bath since I left Catherine and Elizabeth. Soap and hot water are rare finds for travelers.
    Vickie finds an antique boy doll and undresses it. Then she realizes this would never do, for it has a musty smell and is rough and a good deal more filthy than even my clothes aside from being entirely the wrong proportions. So she puts the doll clothes aside and gets out one of Grammy’s best silk hankies. “This will be a toga until I can wash and dry his own clothes.” She also brings along an antique Victorian dollhouse and another bath towel along with a fine linen pillowcase.
    She sprays disinfectant on a washcloth and wipes out the inside of the dollhouse. This she placed in her bedroom. In it she lay the folded towel and on that the pillowcase to be mattress and sheets for her tiny guest. Then she returns to the bath. She told me all this later.
    She finds the wash water soapy, turned distinctly beige with dirt, and her guest having laid out my tiny pants, shirt, and little underclothes neatly on the towel to dry. I myself have burrowed into the folds of the thick towel to keep warm. I come out part way, wrapped in the folds and looking like a bedraggled mouse. Indeed I am rather hirsute as is normal for men of my kind, though without facial hair, but not so different than men she’s seen, or so she would tell me. I have wavy brown hair on my head not so much unlike her own when it wasn’t dyed fashionably black, and curly brown fuzz on my chest, arms and shoulders like her own father. In short, I am entirely human, if in miniature. She hands me the silk hankie. “Here, use this for a robe until your own things dry.”
    “Thank you, it’s very nice.” Actually it feels like canvas to me, but it’s abundant enough.
    “Come for a ride. I guess you’re clean enough now.” She offers me her bare palm. It must be soft and smooth to people her own size, but it reminds me of riding Richard the Whale.
    “I was concerned with disease from that drain you crawled up out of. I hope you don’t catch typhus or anything.” I can feel her earthquake of a shudder.
    I ride in her hand to another room where I see a miniature building more to my scale. “This will be your bed tonight. I wanted you to see it. Now I will explain photography to you.” We continue on to another room about the same size as the bathroom but with no window, no plumbing, instead a table and strange apparatus. “These are photos.”
    She shows me large portraits — as big as me at least — of people in fine dress amid elaborate furnishings. “Why, you are a great artist! Did you make these? They seem as real as life itself.”
    “Yes, I did. But it’s easier than you may think. Look at this.” She sets down a big box with a shiny dark glass at one end and a side panel that she pulls out then spins on it’s hinge. She presses a button on the video camera and the panel becomes a mirror. “Video is one kind of camera. I suppose someday chemical photography will be obsolete, but for now most all moving pictures are video while the best stills are basically the same processes discovered over a century ago.”
    She then proceeds to develop yesterday’s ‘pics’ of Gramma’s antiques. “Now look at this. You can see the dollhouse where I set up your bed. It didn’t take anything from the object to record some of the it’s reflected light, no more than it takes anything from these people to make their pics. They pay me to do it and are glad for it. Then I can make copies or even alter the image later. Come along.”
    Vickie carries me to her PC. I stand on the desk while the machine comes alive. I must hold my hands to my ears against it’s screaming banshees.
    “Sorry about that! I didn’t know it would be so loud to you.” Vickie keys up her scanned photo file. “You see with this machine I can fix any flaw in the photos and print them again repaired. But changing the print does nothing to the copy I had scanned from, or even the object itself. The people and places and things are real, my slides and prints are just art. So may I make art with you?”
    “Of course! We have artists in my country, though none so great as you. They use paint.”
    “I do that sometimes too, but cameras are more fun.”
    So Vickie spends the evening with me video recording and photographing her tiny guest from all angles. She has me stand next to an upright ruler and many other objects while I recount my many adventures and show that I do exist and am alive, even standing next to her tremendous face. Then she copies the disc from the camera into her machine and writes a query to a big-money scientific journal whose name she knows.
    “Inter-dimensional Traveler Discovered in NE Pa!”
    Then she ‘e-mails’ to the appropriate editor. I recount it as she explained it to me. To make a long story short, the scientific community laughs at this and all her photographic evidence as an ‘obvious fraud’ and a ‘hoax’ and ignores me. After all, she has no credentials as a scientific researcher or even as a journalist. Neither is she back by any institution, not to say credible institution. Her world refuses to believe that I exist. For which I am quietly relieved.
    I myself find all her attention rather embarrassing. I am glad of the privacy of my bed that night though the linen pillowcase is as rough to me as sailcloth I’ve slept soundly on that too until last night. I’m up at first light dressed and ready to explore. Vickie carries me downstairs and gives me a teaspoon of coffee, another of milk, a taste of some strange fruit called an orange and a whole giant egg for myself. She makes an empty soft margarine dish into a latrine for me and then I explore the downstairs while she uses the library as her office. I stay away while the horrid banshee machine is wailing. Later I hear something like rattling bones from that room, she is using the printer.
    After lunch I search through the dozen or so large rooms downstairs. She left the doors open for me. The most interesting room though is the old nursery upstairs which I explore in the evening, where my ‘house’ had been before she washed it. Her aunts and father had played with these toys, and it looked like they never put anything away. The floor is strewn with two-foot wide blocks of painted carved wood, brown stained shaped logs, mannequins larger than myself and mountains of fabric in the shape of fantastic creatures vaguely reminiscent of animals. There are also the bugs, vicious mouse-size mites crawling through the dusty rugs. Spiders hunt them, and I can clearly hear in the walls — the top of the food chain on this floor — giant mice as big as me. I stare into the gaps created in the plaster by their marauding and swallow hard. At dinner I have a good talk with my hostess.
    “Madam Vickie, I shall require weapons and tools.”
    “Madam? I’m a miss yet, Sam. Though it’s not because some guy didn’t want me. I want to marry when I want to, not because I need to. I see too much of that in my business. But what kind of weapon? Who you gonna kill?”
    “A sword or a dagger to protect myself against the spiders and the mice. I want to explore your house. I feel I could find treasure and so be of service to you, if the journal never prints your article. Didn’t you say your Grand put all her fortune into this mansion?”
    “Yes, but to pay the taxes and utilities! But she may have dropped a few coins behind the couch. Would you like to see her sewing table?” I look at her doubtfully. “Certainly! Pins and needles could be just the right size blade for one of your size.”
    I requisition a spool of heavy black thread as rope and a bent safety pin, the end wrapped in gauze for a handle. I feel considerably safer and undertake short expeditions under sofas and beds, at the feet of dressers and in the dark inner recesses of closets.
    The following day Vickie presents to me a cloak, a real sword and a dagger, all my size. “However did you get such things!”
    “I have an admirer, a real fantasy nut who role plays the Lord of the Rings. I robbed his ‘Aragorn’ while he was busy pouring me a drink. That crazy thought I was going to spend the night with a little booze in me! Ha! But you will need to sharpen it. I’ll bring Poppop’s tools up here for you to use.”
    And I did just that, rubbing the good slender steel on an oiled block of carborundum. After I put a razor’s edge on both weapons I feel ready for anything, but Vickie has even more surprises for me.
    “Your country sounds pre-industrial as you’ve described it to me. You know of bows and arrows?”
    “Of course, and musketry too. I doubt I could manufacture a gun.”
    “But could you make a crossbow?” Then she opens a book that shows a crude but devilishly effective weapon that would shoot bolts by way of a wire, a spring and a lever.
    “Yes, I could do that. When were these invented?”
    “Oh, a thousand years ago. Our men have far worse to kill each other with nowadays. But with one of these, you’ll be a far more proficient mouse catcher than any cat.” Having discovered her miniscule house guest, Vickie had put off getting a pet.
    So she got me a squared sliver of hard maple, a five-hands length of tensile steel and a spool of stainless-steel wire. Other bits and pieces I make or find in the sewing table, including the flat-headed pins which become my crossbow bolts. It becomes one mean and fearsome weapon, deadly to any small creature my size or quite a bit larger, like a rat.

Pay Dirt!
    Upstairs I find nothing. Vickie herself would have to empty out the stacked hatboxes and suitcases in the closets, as well as the drawers and cabinets of the heavy wooden furniture that stand as huge and tall as a city around me. Except when I find a piece of wood molding missing at the back of a closet revealing a deep dark hole smelling of damp and rot like the cellar I know I’m on the cusp of discovery. I can smell it. I’m a detective, after all. I rappel with my heavy cotton thread down under the floor of the closet and see glittering gold and flashing silver, diamonds and sapphires, all spilling onto the ceiling of the dining room below. I come back up and excitedly tell Vickie.
    She gets her Grand’s old crowbar and rips up the closet floor. Her eyes go round and wide as dinner plates behind her spectacles as she lifts my find. “O! Sam! This is incredible! I had no idea! However did it get here?”
    “Your Grand must have thought to hide them in the wall from someone.”
    “These date from my great- grandparents’ time I think! I wonder if they really were Gram’s or maybe even Great Gram? I never met her! I wonder if she hid them from her mother — or her husband! Maybe they were stolen loot, or gifts from lovers.”
    “You have enough to go to your city now, don’t you?”
    “Yes, with the hundred they’ll give me for the house, another twenty for the antiques and now this! I certainly will.”
    “I’m sure there must be more at the bottom of the wall. I’ll find it for you! It goes down to the cellar walls in there.” I drop again into the wall armed with my sword, my crossbow and my dagger. Only the end of the twitching thread wrapped around a nail of the exposed slats of the curved plaster ceiling betrays to my hostess the continuing adventures of her tiny friend. I would never see Vickie again, but I’m sure she eventually used that fiber optic cable she showed me to explore inside her walls and recover the fancy mirror and more jewels. I don’t know if she would have been relieved or grieved not to recover my body.
    After the furnishings and the empty house is sold Vickie planned to go away seeking her fortune in NYNY, living out her days in a cramp studio she expects, snapping shots of temperamental women for demanding men until a director from LA discovers her. Marriage wouldn’t make her any happier, but such is human nature of any world. Happiness is what you must bring to the marriage. The new owners would undoubtedly fumigate the house and fill the empty walls with insulating foam.
    Rappelling deeper into the wall cavity I dodge deadly electrical cables — like mechanical snakes — from a renovation half a century before and finally come to rest on a dry, brittle cardboard box. I use my dagger to easily cut a hole through the end I stand on and continue down. The box has no bottom, having broken open and spilled it’s contents long ago. Continuing deeper and deeper I come to a masonry floor, really just the top of the stone foundation walls of this balloon-framed house. And next to me stands a bejeweled silver oval mirror with gold inlay larger than myself, a giant lady’s hand-mirror. About my feet are more loose gems, rings and piles of glittering things. A draft blows wintry air around my legs. I can see light from the weathered end of the boards of the outside siding. The ends of the towering timbers that enclose this wall space have been gnawed at by some animal. The way is closed to me by the broken glass that lay around the bottom of the exposed embossed metal back of the mirror, it’s jeweled handle being up, so I explore in the other direction. Crawling under the gnawed two by four I see no more treasures, but I wonder where else in these walls Vickie’s Grands might have buried treasure in the three generations her ancestors have lived in this rambling old ruin.
    Yet after an hour of searching I do discover something. The dirt floor under the kitchen is wet with decay and infested with giant ants. These I easily avoid up on the cellar wall, but then I hear a squeaking and the running of many feet.
    The first rat to sniff me out receives a pin from my crossbow in the eye for his trouble. I retreat, and the bear-size beasts climb over their fallen comrade and come after me. I use up my arsenal of twenty-five straight pins making each bolt count before I’m able to get back to my rope — or slim thread — at the mirror. But there seems to be no less of the monster rats pursuing me than before. I draw my sword from across my back and slash at the teeth and claws and beady eyes as they press me back from my slim thread of hope.
    I expected to use the largest piece of glass as a footing — slippery though it might be — wondering how I could survive this attack where I was outnumbered and outweighed and not really expecting to, but my foot slips through to another place, the glass isn’t where I know it must be.
    Glancing down at my foot I see the ankle terminating at the glass, but there is no blood. Pulling my leg out again as I battle, there is my foot in my boot, well and sound. And my eye alights as I glance back a second time for an instant upon a strange sun setting in another world, a world through the looking-glass.
    Just then a giant rat bites down upon my sword blade wet wet their gore and pulls it from my hand. Without further thought, I back through the glass and vanish from this world.

His Eighth Adventure:
Sam Bobbins in the Mirror

Trapped like Rats
    The orange light of a setting sun slips through the thick, little round prismatic glasses of the tall narrow window. It rests first on a girl’s ivory combs on her ornately carved trunk, then on the silks and woolens laid out on her prissy little bed, and finally crosses the bed to alight on a full-length mirror standing in it’s frame before brilliantly colored tapestries covering the stone walls of her chamber.
    This Mirror is a magical thing, framed in platinum, electrum, silver and gold it’s a thing of extraordinary — even supernatural — clarity that suits a queen more than a daughter of a prince born merely to breed future kings. It’s back is a pure silver sheet over which is a sheet of liquid mercury had been run. It was the gift of a wizard for the princess’s fourteenth birthday. No mere furniture artisan could have conceived much less executed such a work of both art and science. The setting orange glow of the sun, bent and focused by the more archaic window glass, shines in the mirror and makes the vacant and still room glamourous with rainbow colors.
    Suddenly a dark movement scurries past the face of the glass and is gone, departing to the left of a tall linen press, causing a wall tapestry to flutter before all is still again.
    Voices are in the corridor. A key turns in the lock. A woman enters. “Milady, I’m sure you will find life in the Capitol most exhilarating!” First to enter is a broad-breasted dame of about thirty summers with fiery red hair and red dimples in her cheeks. She wears a high-breasted simple white linen gown to the floor. “There will be dancing, and the finest foods, and books and theater and all sorts of things to see and do.”
    “And there will be the Crown Prince!” This is said by the adolescent pixy of a girl who follows after. She is small and slight, slender and still more girl than woman: the Princess Nora.
    “And will that be so bad?” scolds Nanny. “You’re a grown girl now. Surely you must be curious what the marriage bed will be like? Better to find out with a band on your finger than without. And let me tell you, if I may, milady, a man can be a far better consolation on a cold winter’s night than a lap dog!” she titters. “And a romp in the linen with your own lawful spouse a nice bit of exercise, too. You’ll enjoy it!”
    The Princess takes off her silken cap to expose a short boyish cut of platinum hair playfully scattered about her scalp. “Louis is a bore. All he cares for is the hunt. If he’s not in the woods after the hind, then he’s in the barroom after the bee-hind! Do you really expect marriage to change him? He pinched every wench’s bottom in the City, so now he’s come here chasing mine.”
    Nanny unbuttons her charge’s gown. “Well, what must be, must be. It is woman’s place to find ways to bear it, as we bear all that life offers until it kills us. But no one says you can’t have a bit of fun as well!” she titters. “You only need to bear an heir and a spare, beyond that your time’s your own. And what’s good for the gander, can be oh-so-much-better for the goose, ducky.”
    “I will not demean myself to the level of a goose or a duck or any sort of flighty fowl. I will be neither this man’s sport nor his dessert nor will I run about like some stupid mad bird! If I’m to be responsible for this country’s heirs then I shall take responsibility for it’s improvements as well.” She drops her day gown and stepping out of it in her long covering chemise picks up the evening gown for the party this evening from where Nanny had laid it out earlier on the bed. Nanny dutifully groans bending and lifts the red-hooded riding outfit, shaking it out.
    “Then milady can have the wizards and scholars attend her in the Capitol,” Nanny assures her. “For the mere loan of your body once or twice a year the Capitol and it’s heir will have much to offer you in any case.”
    “The countryside needs proper stone roads, not these mud wallows, so trade may proceed freely to the villages. And traffic must be guarded by officers of the King’s law. Now any merchant who dares to carry his goods through rural regions imperils both life and property, yet must also pay toll to any upstart local official who dares to call himself a constable. Also, in the City we must have proper schools and a university to govern them so that even a yeoman’s son may learn and be assured of a proper education, and so foster invention and contribute to the general progress.” Nora steps into her dark green panne velvet silk gown and stands preening herself fluffing her billowing skirts as Nanny buttons her.
    “I’m sure milady will do great things for Elvland.” The shimmering green dress touches the glass of her mirror and seems to pass through it. After it falls back into pleats again, the Princess raises her skirt once more to experiment, to make sure what she knew she saw she hadn’t seen. Again the fabric touches the glass and again it passes through it. But this time it does not come back. The dress remains attached to the mirror, and the Hope of the Elvish nation to the dress.
    My hostesses are the almost legendary Wood Elves, elvish faces on petite Man-tall bodies, who gave Bill the Bagger and his thirteen Dwarves so much trouble. They are reputed to still exist on the far side of the Mythic Mountains back home, wherever ‘home’ is.
    “What by the Seven Stars is this!” Nora demands.
    Nanny looks down at the green velvet skirt being inexorably drawn into the shimmering fluid glass and screams with fear and astonishment.
    “Help me pull it back out,” Nora commands. Nanny pulls, but still the mirror draws her toward it. “Get your knife, woman! Cut away the skirt, if it wants it this badly, but it shall not have me!” Nora promises.
    Now two eyes appear in the glass, twin beacons of menacing red fire. The dress comes out, but so does the snout of a horrible grayish-black creature, a rat as big as a bear.
    Both women scream, “Help! Help us!” Nora takes the seamstresses knife from her Nanny and stabs at the monster’s eyes as it walks out of the mirror toward her. Other eyes appear in the glass behind it.
    Out of evening candlelit shadows from between the parts of two tapestries there steps out a mysterious little man in cloak and cowl, leaping into the bristled back of the beast and raising a long glinting knife with hairy-back hands. The women scream at the sight of me. My dagger falls across the neck of vicious beast and digging into the vertebrae I sever head from body with a gush of hot blood then kick the carcass back at the others behind the glass. There’s a hideous screeching of more giant rats but no more dare to step through before the sun finally sets upon that world and the paired beacons of bloody wrath fade from the mirror.
    “Who are you!” the Princess demands, sitting in a puddle of rat’s blood.
    The cowl falls back off the face of the cloaked figure with the height of a small child but the wild brown hair and weathered look of a grown man. “Sam Bobbins, detective, at your service, ladies,” I make a coarse little bow.
    “Where did you come from!” Nanny shrieks.
    “Calm yourself, woman. Thank you for rescuing us from those creatures. You shall have a reward, Sir Bobbin. But how did you get in here?”
    “Forgive my trespass, mistress. I escaped from the giant rats through your mirror, and not knowing where I found myself, I hid in the niche behind the tapestries until I might see how things would fall out. I was running for my life. I meant no harm.” I shift nervously in my boots.
    “No harm taken. So this is a magic mirror. It bears investigating.” Nora touches the now solid glass. “It seems to need the sun to power it. Come you two, help me move it to the opposite wall. It should be safe there.”
    Nanny has been using her knife to free the Princess’s hem from the severed Rat’s head that lay as large as a bear’s skull on the blood-soaked rug. She hides the dressmaker’s knife in the pocket of her dress, I notice. It takes the two woman and the strange little man — myself — an hour to push and pull the heavy solid base across the foot of her bed past the fireplace and against the tapestries of the opposite wall.
    “Good! No sunbeam will find it there.”
    “Milady, your gown is torn where the beast took it. And… Ye gods! You’re bathed in blood! I must change you before we go anywhere,” Nanny insists. The girl’s backside looked like a Yule decoration. I turn away in embarrassment.
    “No time now for that! I’ll change before we sit for supper. Return here after you accompany us down to the Hall and lay out my red dress. Besides, don’t you see our guest? We can’t ask him to stand out on the corridor while I disrobe, and I suspects he’s already seen my shift once.” I shift my weight on my boots anxiously as my ears turn red. “Sir Bobbin, follow me. Now I shall present you to my father Prince Joseph and you shall receive what reward you have coming to you for your trespass,” she says to me with a wink.
    “Ah, for my charge to be seen in such a state by the Princes! I shall have my hide tanned.” with a murmur of complaint the Nanny turns away and crosses to the exit. The door opens to her cell.

Happy Birthday Nora!
    The petite pretty princess leads us authoritatively out into the high wide gallery filled with more bright pictorial tapestries to hide behind — if it came to that — stretching out yards before and behind. It’s only a little nauseating really, all this prettiness and pretension. We come to a grand descending staircase not so unlike the ruined mansions of Oldhaven nor the great hall mahogany staircase in Catherine and Elizabeth’s High Elvish palace — except it’s neither rotten to the core nor underwater — and all below applaud as they see their petite little lady with her royal blue eyes, boyish-cut royal platinum-blond hair and long narrow green velvet gown fashionably chewed at one end and fashionably stained with blood in an adorable heart shape. — If she’s wearing it, that’s fashion by definition. — Next comes to no one’s notice common Nanny, her common red flame of hair falling down her back to her knees marking her status as ordinary. But behind Nanny is an even more low-bred looking little brown-haired mouse of a man, me myself and I, a defective runt in their sight with suspiciously beady eyes in a filthy stained traveling cloak, muddy boots and the obvious bulge of a weapon at his hip under the black wrap.
    “Look out! He’s got a knife!” a woman screams.
    “What is this?!” her father exclaims.
    “Behind you, princess!” another points.
    “I’ll take care of this!” A tall thin platinum-blond boy bounds up the stairs unsheathing his ceremonial sword — still a formidable weapon to one so Small as yours truly.
    “Down, Prince!” Nora raises her delicate palm to stop the heir of the Elvish throne like I’ve seen some women curb a cur. He stumbles back a step cowed by her rebuke. “Father!” Nora looks over his head — a feat only possible by her being at least two steps above the prince — “This is my protector!” She gestures that slender arm improbably toward me. “The Wizard’s mirror really is magical! This knight came out of it. And then he severed the head off a vicious beast the size of a bear. He fought off a horde of such monsters!”
    “Why, I never!” exclaims the tall white-blond boy in disbelief.
    “I’m quite sure you never did hand to hand combat with a bear or a whole plague of bears with nothing but a knife, but the head of this man’s trophy lays on the rug of my chamber to prove his prowess!” The Princess directs her graceful hand at the end of that slender bare arm to the passage above. “My person is testimony to this man’s valor, as I am covered in the blood of the creature he killed, which is a fair sight better than it being alive and covered in my blood as was it’s wish.” She turns and shows her dress. All below gasp, except the old man.
    “You sound?” the old man asks her. She nods. “Barry! Bernard! See about it!” directs her father, a chubby gray-haired old warrior. Two skinny platinum-blond lads, her brothers, race up the stairs past us, giving me a suspicious glance as they run up. They return in a moment bearing between them the severed snarling head with bristles and fangs as big as a boar’s but with the beady eyes and large ears of a rat. There remains a bit of green velvet between it’s teeth. All gasp, again.
    “Zounds! Let the strange knight come before me,” the Old Prince commands. I descend the stairs to stand before the old knight. I barely make it to the edge of his doublet.
    “Your name?” demands old Joseph.
    “Sam Bobbins, if you please, sir.”
    “And what would it be if I don’t please? No matter. Your land?” he interrogates me.
    “Well… there’s been so many…” I bid for time to think this through. “But I can tell you, sir, I was born and raised in a quiet green country called Shireland.”
    “Never heard of it,” the old man scoffs gruffly, then continues, “Your father?”
    “Same name as me, sir, Sam Bobbins. He’s a farmer, same as my granders on both sides before him. He raises greens and milk cattle on forty acres of river bottom along the Little Britches outside Dillsberg between that and Gram’s Hamlet.”
    “Oh really?” He pauses to clear his throat. “For the services you have rendered this nation and this house, Farmer Bobbin, what would you desire?” Prince Joseph abruptly demands. He thinks we are mere sharecroppers, and not free men!
    “I’m not a farmer, if you please, sir. Though I am a free man as are my fathers before me. I left left that noble and time-honored profession years ago seeking adventures. And often I regret the hard life of detecting trouble and solving mysteries, yet here I find myself. No, no return, sir! Even if I knew the way back. I would like nothing better than to continue to be of service to the young lady, as the fates have placed me here. She seems to need someone to look out for her, if you please, sir.” I fidget with my head down as I speak. I’ll be lucky to get out of here with it still attached to my shoulders.
    “Yes, Father! I enlist this experienced warrior as my bodyguard. I assume that right!” the little white-haired girl-woman speaks up behind me.
    “That’ll do! Well, I don’t please!” he says to me. “But it seems my will matters less and less to my only daughter.” Her father put his hand on the disturbed Crown Prince’s shoulder, “But if your Highness will forgive me, before the law I have no choice. I must permit her her choice of protector. This can be no threat to your own suite, Louis, look at him! It’s only a girl’s fancy.” Joseph then offers his hand to me, bending his big belly to spread the buttons of his doublet and come down to my eye level. ‘And you must join us in celebrating your mistress’s fourteenth birthday! She is come of age, and shall soon be the bride of the most excellent of young men. Aren’t they a lovely couple?”
    “That they are, sir,” I said, even though I knew what Nora and Nanny had said upstairs. Slim chance she would ever consent to him! “Highness, you make a lovely pair. I am honored to serve in the defense of your noble family.” I bow to first old then young prince.
    “As for you!” Old Joseph turns to his daughter. “Go change! I’ll not have you mucking up my furniture!” Nora shrieks in girlish glee, turns and runs back upstairs. Nanny follows.
    Later, seated at table the old prince questions the Wizard, an ancient-seeming white-whiskered elf in the dark blue robe and conical cap of stars expected of his line of work. Is he really antiquated, I wonder, or just another middle-aged medieval platinum blond?
    “And what do you mean, sir, by giving my daughter, the Hope of the Elvish Nation, a magic mirror?”
    “The Mirror is nothing of the sort, Sire. It’s possessed of no enchantment I ever put upon it, nor that of any other magician either. I had a sheet of simple silver hammered and polished to be the back of the work. It alone is as good as a common mirror. The frame was cast from royal platinum in fine black sand one with the back. Then gold leaf and electrum thread was inlaid on the frame in a rose pattern. Lain on it’s back, I covered the inside with liquid mercury metal and gently flowed onto the hot liquid metal the finest leaded crystal. A base of like construction was provided separately by artisans to balance it on. Entirely science and art, nary a chant nor a charm about it.”
    “How then do you explain what sunlight reportedly does to it?” demands old Joseph.
    “I cannot. It puzzles me. Tomorrow with her worship’s kind indulgence — and yours too, my liege — I shall visit the Princess’s boudoir and investigate it. I never heard the like. Unless! If you’ll forgive me, Sire, unless the magic comes from her.”
    “Who? Her?” scoffs the father, underestimating as often parents do the abilities of his own child.
    “The Princess herself! In all the realms in all eras it’s been observed by those who observe and take note of such things that a young girl, even the most common creatures, at the moment they come into their womanhood can for a brief while summon spirits, perform miracles, and do magic. This lasts from the time she first becomes cognizant of her budding charms until she becomes a settled wife. Perhaps the Princess feel deep within — beneath her conscious will — an instinctive need of a protector. And whether her hazard is genuine or not, her virginal womanhood made the mirror of her habitual likeness into a gate to a distant place or time or even into a parallel universe.”
    “What balderdash! And all to throw off the blame onto an innocent! The very idea! To blame the poor child for bringing that misshapen brute into her bed chamber!” her father slams his fist on the table setting the glass and silverware to rattling.
    I hold my breath, not sure whether the Old Prince means the giant rat in their trophy room or the grotesque runt at their table.
    “What more of a Protector could any girl want but myself? And protect her from what? Her own future husband?”
    The boy prince snickers at my obvious openmouthed discomfiture and asks, “Sir Bobbin, do you hunt?”
    “Oh yes sir, I do indeed. For treasure or learning or for food. But never for pleasure. Yet I do enjoy a good catch, yes indeed!” I answer, I savvy his intent at once.
    “Then you shall join us after the hind tomorrow. You can ride, or can’t you?” the boy ridicules me with his tone.
    “No, he shan’t! I won’t hear of it!” insists the Old Prince.
    “Yes, he will!” the young Princess contradicts her father. “A pony shall be provided him. I will not go anywhere my protector does not go. I think the Wizard is quite right. I require the Protector that the Seven Stars have sent me. Indeed I have wished upon Them for that very purpose — as all girl do — and it must have been on my mind as I stood before the mirror combing my hair.”
    The Young Prince snorted and said under his breath, “Will she want the dwarf in our marriage bed, too?” I bit my tongue at this offense, I am many things but I am not a dwarf!
    “What say, your Highness?” queries the Old Prince.
    But he knew I had heard him, and he winked my way. “Nothing, Uncle Joseph, nothing at all.” The boy savors his sour grapes as he picks them from the bunch in his left hand and plops them in his mouth.
    Nevertheless, Nora enjoys a very happy day, all the better to tolerate what is to come.

Judgment Day
    The whole castle arises at first light or before and after a swift breakfast of cold fish or game and hot porridge we make our way individually or as small parties to the stables. The grooms had arose even earlier and brought mount after mount out to the assembling hunting party.
    “And be sure to be at the Churl’s Pasture with pavilions and provender well before our noon repast,” the Old Prince browbeats his servants.
    Princess Nora appears beside her father. “Don’t forget oats for the horses, my good man,” she adds kindly but firmly.
    The Crown Prince charges up on his tall white charger with gold panoply and says, “Hoi polloi! Let’s ride, Joseph. Get us underway! The bastards know you’ll beat them if all is not right at noon. Morning’s wasting!”
    “You know your business!” Old Joseph gives one last warning to his stewards as he climbs onto his massive beast.
    “There, there, Agnes, you ready for a run, too? Ready as that stallion straddling his mare?” Princess Nora gestures toward the Crown Prince with a bob of her head as she talks to and mounts her delicate pale gray mare.
    I ride behind her smartly as I can on a child’s pony shadowing the Princess yet staying out of sight of the princes.
    With the Old Prince, the young Princess, her Royal Suitor, the old man’s sons her half-brothers Bernard and Barimore, and the knights attached to the house, the noble party numbers a dozen riders. Adding their several retainers and bodyguards such as Sam Bobbins — I myself — more than doubles that number. First, we bring the horses into stride heading cross-country over harvested grain and around stacked fodder, jumping hedge and fence, pell-mell down the lanes of villages and through orchards hung low with apples and pears until one of the outriders far ahead sights the prey and gives the signal.
    To the trumpeting of curling brass and the baying of hounds, hooves thunder across the landscape more like a battle than a sport. I keep within two lengths of the princess, the pony and her little mare are similar enough. “But the King’s Son and Elderly Brother ride side by side at the van of the spread-out hunting party, more racing each other in sport than seriously running down the prey somewhere out beyond us. That I could even see from my saddle.
    The princes’ squires chase the prey, whatever it is, and everyone else chase the princes. The fleeing creature could only be a gray elk or a red deer by how it rides us ragged at breakneck speeds through gorse and thicket over rocks and fallen trees. Deeper into the forest it goes, as the sun climbs toward it’s autumnal zenith the thickness of falling red and orange leaves and damp black trunks make it seem like the nadir.
    Finally our way is blocked by a rambling pile of boulders and small trees in the very heart of the wood. Behind the sparse trunks at it’s top rose distant high snowcapped peaks like the Mythics back home. I could almost believe that crossing those passes I would again hear my own tongue spoken, and be able to respond in kind. Except no one lives in this manner anymore in our enlightened world. The retainers come forward to begin to find a safe path up the mossy rocks and scattered fallen trees. The family gathers to rest their horses and survey the mound.
    “Father, it’s already noon, don’t you think we should be…” Nora never finished.
    “Look!” exclaims her Royal Fiancé, pointing at where the sun shines through the leaves onto us from above the rocks.
    There flanked by tall red oaks and crowned by the glaring yellow-white sun itself is a huge white hart. It’s pale legs are like pillars, it’s breast a snowcapped mountain, it’s neck a thundercloud and it’s forest of antlers hold up the glory of the heavens. Old Prince Joseph has already raised his riding bow with an arrow notched to sight the great beast when the miracle happens. The great white elk melts and transforms to a little man in white priest’s garb.
    “The Heretic!” the boy prince exclaims.
    “The Who?” Nora wonders.
    A knight of her father’s whispers to her, but not so I couldn’t hear, “Your first father, child, your natural sire.”
    A tall platinum blond woman wearing only her magnificent white mane of hair which falls discreetly down to her knees comes from behind the apparition and embraces the priest around his waist. Her skin has the bloodless pallor of the dead.
    “Mother!” Nora had last seen her exhausted mother looking exactly like this, dead in childbirth years before. She told me so months later after her wedding.
    “Joseph!” the priest raises his hand in benediction. “The Day of Retribution has come!” Or rather it was a curse. “The Hour of Vengeance is at hand!”
    Old Prince Joseph trembles as he pulls back the bow to let his arrow fly into the breast of the priest. He seemed to feel pain or discomfort in his upper right arm for his fingers fumble the tail of the arrow. It springs away from the bow cockeyed. The razor point strikes the neck of his steady old war horse. Though it had never done so before — or so the stable boys would later tell me — it rears in fright at this prick as a startled Joseph falls off the back of his horse.
    Every eye leaves the apparition when the majestic mount rears. The Crown Prince and the Princess Consort on either side both reach for him but their hands grasp only empty air, nearly meeting where the Old Prince had been. When we glance back nothing is at the top of the rocks above us, and Joseph lay beneath us on the stony forest floor, his bloody skull split on a rock amid the damp red and orange leaves.

Retreat
    It is in a sad column that we make our way back by muddy roads through village after village. At the head rides the Crown Prince and his Fiancée, so the people dutifully cheer when they see the Royal Pair. But they are soon quiet when they see their Lord’s old warhorse with no one in the saddle and a cloaked body on a crude forest sled made of interlocking roughhewn branches and leathern straps dragged behind the sad beast.
    Our picnic abandoned, the column of mourners enter an almost empty castle in mid-afternoon. The Prince is close whispering to the Princess. Suddenly Princess strikes Prince with her hunting crop, and his horse shies away from her. Nearby but out of earshot this time, all I could do is to give him a hate filled look that could sour milk, king’s son or not.
    “You dare speak to me of such things! And my father’s corpse not yet cold! May I remind you, Sire, I’m not one of your barroom strumpets that you know so familiarly in your City! I am the heir of a seventh of your father’s kingdom, and the Liege-woman of your Father. First we shall see to the burial of my father. Then we shall consider your future, whether it deserves the embrace of a maiden of flesh or of iron! Guards! Take your lord to the chapel. Find the Wizard for him. Barny! Barry! Show our Guest to his chamber. Sergeant! Place a guard before his door for his protection, only remember Whose Son he is. You will all obey your Lady now!”
    And so it is done. Nora strides into her father’s throne room and still in her red riding outfit sits down sharply and decisively on his vacant throne. She gives orders for iced milk and cold mutton and bread, then sees to the security of her house and her realm. “Inform the villages that they now obey only their Princess Nora and no one else. Retribution will fall upon the recalcitrant!” She dismisses the soldiers to their duties and gives a little cry, believing herself alone, as she considers either her affection for the old man or her anger at the lie he has made of her life or perhaps a mixture of confused emotions, certainly exuberance at her sudden emancipation.
    But by nightfall every crossroads and village report in control of local yeomen under the appointed sheriffs and the King’s knights file in as guests of her house, giving her their clumsy condolences which she accepts graciously, but each is disarmed and escorted in by armed local yeomen.
    “Wizard! What is our situation?” she demands of the white-haired magician, healer and scholar.
    “Your swift action, my mistress, prevented any outbreak of lawlessness among either the common or the gentry. Tonight we shall lay the former master to rest among his ancestors and all will see you in command, both your guests the King’s men and our own local sheriffs whom you sent for. Your local yeomen occupy every crossroads from here to the suburbs of the Capitol and as far as the Mountains.”
    “But what of the King’s situation?” she ponders.
    “His Royal Majesty has unfortunately wasted the coin of the realm on pleasures and fetes. Imitating the far-eastern monarchs, he has courted the mobs of the City with bread and circuses. There is no standing army. He cannot move against you, whatever you should do, either now or in the conceivable future.”
    “But could We oppose Him?” she probes.
    “How do you mean? Invade he city?”
    “Is it possible?”
    “As a foreign expedition your army would meet scattered but universal resistance that would eventually overwhelm us by attrition, to say nothing of the other five princes your uncles who would be most displeased but any such attempt upon their heritage. But if you go with your husband to take your place in your father-in-law’s house it would be the celebration expected and welcomed by all.”
    “Except myself. So it is as I thought. Then we can decide what to do with Father and Son after I am safely ensconced in the Palace.”
    “It is no great shame to be a wife, my daughter.”
    “Indeed! But I will not be one of a stallion’s harem of breed mares, my future and that of my children forever at their father’s whim, however high the distinction. I will not be forced to marry an immature whoremonger who neither loves me nor can be faithful to me.”
    “Neither can you afford to bite the Crown’s hand, whether by permanently disposing of this boy or by refusing his hand. In the one case your uncles — who are as capable as you or mounting a martial expedition — might conceivably join to punish you. Alive, he will inherit his father’s throne, his tribute, and yet have a young man’s appetite for battle.”
    “He would seize what is not given to him, will he?”
    The old wizard nods to the young girl’s ominous question.
    “Boys!” she addresses princes Barimore and Bernard, her younger half-brothers. “Your own throne cannot be secure as long as your card partner lives, unless your sister takes him as her husband. That shall she secure for you.”
    That evening before going to the chapel she privately questions her butler. I again await behind one of the ubiquitous tapestries. “Chamberlain, tell me of my mother, and of my natural father.”
    “Gladly, your ladyship. Eleven years ago, nine months before the birth of Prince Bernard, your Predecessor his lordship Joseph rode through those very woods as he rode for the last time today, but in full panoply. He found your mother, the Lady Kathryn, alone picking mushrooms. Captivated by her beauty and her suitability to raising an heir that could compete for the throne he took her, conceiving upon her a son and brought her back here. Later your father brought you to her and demanded as was his right a court of law. He got it, and the King’s Peers commanded the Lady Kathryn to return to your father the abbot.”
    “As well she should! What sanctity is there in marriage if it can be interfered with so cavalierly?”
    “Your father the Prince in turn demanded a King’s Court. With His Royal Majesty in attendance and seated beside his brother the Prince, the Sheriff of Rockwood and the former chamberlain accused your father the abbot of sorcery and unnatural acts, presenting into evidence a document in the Prince’s own handwriting against the King his brother which the chamberlain said your natural father put it into the Prince’s head to write.”
    “Did anyone actually believe such nonsense?”
    “Actually, no, your ladyship. We all knew it to be a ruse to keep your mother in his bed and to silence your father’s just complaint. But what could be done? From the King’s justice, there is no appeal. Your father was naive to go to law against the King’s own brother, irrespective of the trespass upon his honor. And your mother, it must be admitted, saw advantages to herself and her descendants to be attached to a Prince.”
    “But it didn’t help her. Two years later she was dead as well, bled out by Barry’s birth.”
    “Before your parents could return with you to the abbey, the King ordered the abbot to be burned. Your mother became in her widowhood the bride of the Prince, and you his daughter.”
    “Now the old bastard’s sin caught up with him!”
    “Indeed, your ladyship. The abbey was later reported looted, the congregation scattered or dead, supposedly by brigands. Some of the better furniture is in this very room.”
    “I see. Then did I cause Old Joseph’s death by this magic the Wizard claims I have? And how am I royal, merely by the color of my hair? Though the blood of what, a commoner and a mere earl’s daughter?”
    “Custom demands royalty keeps up certain appearances, your ladyship. Just as the King and his heir must always be named, ‘Louis’. And the race of kings would quickly die out if new blood was not brought in to constantly replenish it. The current dynasty is only three generation father to son. His Royal Majesty’s father was himself found in a hovel on a hunting trip by his then ancient predecessor and there immediately adopted. It is your heritage, your ladyship. You are the sole heir of either of your fathers to reach the age of consent before both were dead.”
    “Lawyers!”she says with exasperation. “Some say to kill them all, I can see why. But I do love my brothers, though we can no longer pretend we share a father. I will maintain their rights and dignity.”

The Prisoner is Sentenced
    The circular chapel of the Elvish castle turns out to be made of thirteen standing stones older than writ or memory twice as high as a man, carved all over with unreadable runes and twelve openings between them, eleven of which are filled with colored glass in silver settings forming pictures of past lords of this land and their achievements. The cavernous vault thus formed is open to the stars above. The ceremony begins as the zenith constellation of seven stars comes into view. “The Pleides,” I say to myself, or ‘Sisters’ as my mother called them, but from a different view or a different time.
    “The Harbingers of Our Fates,” intones the Wizard, “Arise to look down upon chance and circumstance, and in their slow, regular circle of a lifetime of years decide our futures with their Justice Gloved in Mercy. Too soon, and the innocent will be dragged down with the wicked. Too late, and the guilty go unexposed.”
    The bier in the center before the high altar covers a circular well down into darkness. On forest-fresh pine branches fragrant with sap lay the body of Old Joseph. He is dressed in his finest breastplate, the silver hilt of his sword on his chest with his hands clasping it, the blade down the length of the body. The right hand is gauntlet gloved, the left atop it bare. He’s wrapped in his finest furs and reddish-purple cloak and wears a circlet of royal platinum upon his washed and oiled brow.
    His daughter Nora stands beside him, appropriately between him and the wizard. Around them stand the assembled knights and sheriffs — and the Crown Prince — as witnesses. The Prince had spent the evening being entertained by her brothers, whom he now stands between.
    “Let the ashes of a life descend into darkness,” the Wizard continues. “But let the spirit ascend like smoke to his Seven and Final judges.”
    He hands a slender beeswax candle to the slight white-haired girl in the silver skullcap and matching gown and she touches the blue flame to a mound of red powder on his still breast. The hands then the whole body bursts suddenly into flame and she has to move quickly but gracefully as only a young princess can do to avoid scorching her silver-threaded silk sleeve. The bier burns rapidly until suddenly the ashes and flame falls into the pit. The draft from below carries the dense smoke up out of the circle of ages-old standing stones into the starry heavens.
    The new Lady of the Land stands before the altar alone now aside from the rising column of blackness but herself in the light of her own candle and the twelve lamps, one between each two stones, and the many candles held by her many witnesses. Though still a girl, she is woman enough to be reckoned with and an admirable spectacle for the officers of the King and of the countryside to hold in awe.
    “Let the Old Deeds be past, and let a New Work begin,” she utters her part of the age-old service. “We free all men and kindred from all debts held to us, and pray they likewise forgive us the debts of our fathers, and the wrongs done by those who went before us.”
    As the Seven Stars turn above the open dome of the Elvish chapel, the celebrants follow their Lady out the door. Tomorrow, workmen would return the stones covering the family crypt.

Nora’s Wedding
    At dawn three days after Joseph had set out to hunt the white hart another party assembles in the castle courtyard. Nora rides beside her prince charmingly — hunting crop firmly in hand — to her wedding in the Capitol. Her forces are divided between the castle and the expedition. With her goes her young brothers and the ancient druid. Half the King’s knights and half her own knights go with her. All the sheriffs, the yeomen and the remaining knights stay behind to keep the castle and the shire.
    The villagers cheer as she progresses — rather grimly — to her wedding. The Capitol is high-walled with strong stones and many towers. The Palace in it’s center is a labyrinth of corridors, courtyards, and innumerable rooms. The pyramid of the Great Temple of Lady Luck beside it — another religion of this country — is a long ascending gallery of stairs flanked with columns. In a sheer white silk veil that covers her matching floor-length gown Nora gracefully climbs up pink granite steps past reddish-brown pillars of sandstone that soar into darkness. Amid accompanying sackbut, tympani, and stringed instruments she seems to float as a white spectre to her destiny.
    Fortunately I know how to fiddle, so Sam Bobbins goes along as a musician. I gag — the stale air is thick with incense — and think, “It’ll be luck if we all don’t smother in this pyramid before we get there!” Finally we climb the last step and stand in the square roofed penthouse of the pyramid surrounded by a colonnade of those reddish-brown pillars overlooking the city. The sun outside is at high noon. Trapped birds flutter up under the plastered bricks of the roof.
    An old crone rises before us with the Prince and the King on her right side and Nora’s two brothers on her left. “Who brings the sacrifice?” she ceremoniously intones.
    I don’t like the sound of that! “Sacrifice?”
    “I, Whitebeard of Rockwood,” the Wizard answers in front of the old witch, “Come in the will and purpose of the father of this damsel.”
    “Is she a Willing Sacrifice?” the old crone continues.
    “I am,” Nora answers for herself.
    “Who witnesses her confession?” the witch turns to the boys.
    “We do, Sir Bernard and Sir Barimore of Rockwood, brothers of this damsel,” they say in practiced unison.
    “Who brings the Fire to the Altar?” she turns to the old king. Nora is taken aback. She told me later that she suddenly realized just how old he was.
    “I,” the old man simply says. It seemed sufficient!
    “And who is it that is Consumed With Desire?” asks the crone.
    “I am,” answers the young Prince with noble simplicity that impresses me, he would have grown into his father’s dignity had he lived.
    “Then Burn with Passion for Many Days,” she cackles and leaves. Husband and wife kiss. Her Prince leads the Princess back down the stairs, her veil left behind at the marriage altar.
    “That was it? Vegas has longer ceremonies!” I recall pictures of another city given over to idolatry that Vickie had shown me on her television, a machine for seeing what’s not there.
    That night we are slow to leave the party. The brothers, myself and the Wizard as the Bride’s family, accompany her and the Prince as far as the anteroom of the bridal chamber. As per instructions I get between husband and wife and the boys linger to engage the Prince in an argument over the right kind of weapon to use with various game. The Wizard dotards slowly before us while Nora rushes away almost at a run in front of him. We see her race into the anteroom and the door to the inner chamber slams shut as we come into the sitting room.
    The Prince turns the door and finds the door locked. “Ah, Honey, let me in!”
    “Not tonight!” comes the muffled response. “I have a headache.”
    “Come along, Louis, she wants to make herself ready. Play us a hand of cards. We got gold!” says Bernard, shaking his tempting red velvet purse while Barry cracks a fresh inviting deck.
    “What kind of bridal chamber is it without a groom?!” the Prince loudly complains kicking the door, but he takes his place between the boys at the card table nonetheless.
    “Sir Bobbin, tell me of the place on the other side of the Mirror,” the Wizard sits with me on a divan opposite the three card players.
    “Horrible! Sir Wizard, yet also beautiful. Firstly, it’s a land of giants. You saw the rat’s head. Well, people there are over a hundred feet tall. They go about in devilish contraptions on the ground, underground and even in the air. Also they have magic boxes to see and speak from a great distance,” I whisper.
    “No, Sir Bobbin. What I mean is, what does the portal look like on the other side?” probes the white whiskered antique.
    “I was inside the hollow wooden walls of an old house. My word, sir! That house must have been a mile high and as deep and wide. The rats were before me and pushing me back. I saw a lady’s ornate silver hand mirror. The mirrored glass is shattered, but the piece still in the frame is easily as tall as you are. I saw the light of the sun setting on your world through the glass, so I stepped through. You know the rest.”
    “Now let me tell you what you will say to the King tomorrow. No word of rats! You look enough like a big mouse to his eyes as it is. Mention giant jewels and the wonders of that world. It’s a place of magic — always an attractive feature — and power and wealth for picking up off the ground. Let’s tempt the Old Devil with his own greed. You agree?”
    “I nod and the Wizard grins. The government has a severe shortage of funds here, too.
    We five men sleep on couches. Nora does not appear again till dawn. She kicks her husband as she walks past him, awakening the rest of us as well, “Heel, Prince!” she says as to a dog.
    We follow her downstairs into the Morning Room. Two large men from Rockwood push a huge heavily draped object on a wheeled cart after her. We surprise the King cracking an egg.
    “Father! Such a delight to see you!” Nora gushes with charm as she embraces and kisses her father-in-law.
    “What have we here?” His eyes drink in the delightful girl-woman in negligee and not much else with clear blue eyes like morning stars that has come as a sudden clear dawn to live with him. Then he sees the workmen set down their burden and remove the thick wool tapestry from it.
    “A gift, Father!” Nora chimes delightfully, presenting the mirror with a gracious wave of her slender shapely arm.
    “Father, we must talk,” the Crown Prince arrives beside her. I stand with the two boys at the door as her sheriffs bid a hasty retreat. The Wizard strides forward past us.
    “Is this the legendary magic mirror, Daughter?” The King kisses his nymph-like new daughter-in-law on the cheek, especially inviting and attractive this fresh morning. She giggles, showing her dimples. Turning to the Crown Prince, the King doesn’t listen, he only pronounces, “I know, boy, they all look like adorable children by daylight at that age, but get them in the sack and they are temptresses!” He growls. “But you two shouldn’t be up at such an early hour, though I do expect you’re both famished by the night’s exertion… You should have called for your breakfast in bed! I’m sure this old astrologer fool has nothing better to do.” He laughs at his own wit.
    The Wizard speaks up, “Beware, Oh Royal Majesty! This is a doorway to a place of enchantment, a treasure house of fantastic size. In that world, this large glass is but a mere lady’s hand mirror, and her cast-off rings and jewels litter about it! The stars foretell misfortune, and forbid you this trespass!”
    “Oh! They do, do they? Intriguing. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good scrape. I hear this young man beheaded the beast that guards the treasure?” The king ignores both son and wizard to focus on me.
    I bow and step forward. “Yes, sir. I saw the lady’s hand mirror, and I stepped through it.”
    “Present your sword to your King,” he says grandly for someone standing there in his bathrobe. I offer him the hilt of my dagger. The King doesn’t touch it. “This is all it took?” He scoffs at a Small man’s wee little weapon. “Ives! Fetch my sword!” he calls to his butler.
    “Father, listen to sense…” whispers his son the Crown Prince.
    “Are you a coward, boy?! Ives! Get his as well!” The King laughs as he straps on his weapon and the Prince dutifully takes another from a waiting servant’s hand. “Why, I shall slap your bottom and then go clean out this nest of a few small vermin myself!”
    The King stabs the shimmering fluid mirror with the point of his blade. It passes through like it was water. “Come, follow me!” He steps through the looking glass. The Prince, cursing under his breath and with a look that should have shattered glass or at least froze water, disappears after him. Nora and her brothers, the Wizard and I quietly exit the now vacant dawn-facing Morning Room and she locks the door behind us.
    Hours later Ministers of the King come before us, bowing and scraping at Nora’s feet where she sits with her men and boys reading aloud an exceptionally dry treatise on Political Science titled, ‘The Prince’. She should be writing one.
    “Your Royal Highness! Your Most August Majesty!”
    “What do you mean by addressing me in such a manner?” the young princess states with regal aloofness.
    “There have been terrible events, O Queen!”
    “Tell me of them, plainly.”
    “Immense rodents, larger than men, were found in the  garden of the palace.”
    “Have you disposed of them?”
    “Yes, with some difficulty. It required a company of bowmen on the walls to bring them down.” This gives me a warm, proud feeling for my wee little weapon.
    “Then all is well.” Her eyes fall back to her book.
    “That’s just it, O Queen!” they pleaded.
    “Why do you call me that?” she looks up again.
    “Your Husband the Prince and your Father the King were found dead!”
    “What treachery is this!” She is a regular little actress. But then, since I’ve gotten out and seen a bit of the world — worlds — I’ve noticed that most females have an actress in them ready to take the stage at a moment’s notice.
    “They were battling the creatures, Your Majesty. Your husband was found covered with their gore amid dozens of the beasts in the rose garden with a devilish contraption for shooting bolts with a spring at his feet.”
    “That would be mine.” I speak up to claim my crossbow. “Did he bring back my sword as well?” They ignore me.
    “Your Father we found outside the broken window of the Morning Room, still clutching an immense diamond as large as a man’s head!”
    “How terrible! What of my Mirror?” she asks innocently.
    “It was found toppled on it’s face.”
    “Leave it till nightfall. Then place it in a deep dungeon, facing the wall, covered in a thick wool blanket.”
    “Your Most August Royal Majesty!” They bow and scrape some more.
    “Yes, what else?”
    “We need you to accompany us.” Aha! Here’s the rub! Will it be to a throne or to one of those deep dungeons? For a moment, it honestly seemed it could go either way.
    “To what purpose?” she demurely asks, a smiles beginning now to crack her mask of innocence.
    “The Government must continue, my lady. You are the clear choice short of civil war. You are our Queen!”
    As the virgin widow follows her ministers out the door, I hear the Wizard beside me remark, “She keeps her integrity and gains her throne. Now, that I call powerful practical magic, Sir Bobbin. Where does a head so young finds such wisdom?”
    “I guess you could call it that, Sir Wizard, at least to us men a girl like that is magic itself.”

His Ninth Adventure:
Sam Bobbins in the Crypt of the Vampires

Someone’s Unlucky Day
    On the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month in the thirteenth apartment of the thirteenth floor on the thirteenth avenue, I sit with Wizard Whitebeard and watch the birds outside the open window fluttering and chirping happily in the old ivy. He does not bear watching as he is buried alive behind a wall of dusty vellum books and scrolls of yellowed parchment. He’s especially hard to see for he’s not moving just now and he’s a bit of yellowed parchment himself hidden within voluminous vellum color robes.
    “Yes… Yes, Sir Bobbin, I do believe… I’ve found it!”
    “Found… ‘It’, sir? The clue? The cure for all our ills or the one that reveals the whole mystery of what are you talking about? Or what?”
    “The explanation of what it is that has come upon us! Sir Bobbin…”
    I turn my gaze from the pleasant if chilly scene of sparrows and last year’s brittle ivy and stare into the dusty yellow cave that was the wizard’s lair. But it’s like staring at a bookshelf, or more rather a wall of library trash. Suddenly it explodes!
    “We must away!”
    “Where, sir?”
    “To the crypt… We have something to ask one of… Them.”
    “Them, sir? Not… Them as stay there? Would they talk to such as us? Have you the power to make them talk? Would they have anything to say? Or be capable of speech?”
    “That is what I fear.” His long lanky form hidden in his wizard’s robes strides across the floor of the royal archives and through the door like a huge swooping bird I am hard pressed to follow, but follow I do.
    Out we blow into the billowing leaves like the wind, the blast of his onward rush clearing a wake for me through the late October leaves. But we don’t stay in the pleasant garden of the palace courtyard for long. We approach the locked door of the tombs.
    “Must we?”
    “We must,” he shudders. “Priests bar the entrance at the other end.” I shouldn’t wonder. But our exit? Will they bar that as well? He takes out a ring of keys and passes a literal skeleton of brass by it’s intricate feet into the keyhole. The lock bumps and grinds like someone’s trying to get out, but it opens.
    I have not been idle. Knowing my short sword shall be useless against what might lie restless ahead, I go over to a black banner thirteen months old hinging limp and ragged on a pole and pull the cloth free. This rag I drop from my hand. It’s the lofty ten foot pole I want, though over three times my height, half again what I can use, I wield it as a fighting staff knowing that if it comes to it, ten feet will be cut down to size soon enough. We pass into the crypt.
    To either side behind sacred seals lay the chambered catacombs within which the sarcophagi of lesser officials of ages past rest, full of ruin and corruption. Ahead the passage burrows down into the Ground, the slanting floor slick with slime and foulness.
    “We can slip down this slide, but will we be able to crawl back up it?” I worry.
    “We can arise through the pyramid if necessary. This is the quicker way in, and speed is of the essence.”
    The Wizard does not go unarmed either, he carries the lit torch. It’s flame lit naturally for now, I know he has the means to do far worse to a body than puzzle out the inexplicable while they wait on a windowsill.
    Down into the tombs we go. The highway of the dead is as still as those surrounding us on their hard beds, the air growing fouler and fouler with their exhalations, More than once the torches in now both his hands gutter and he must bring them to blaze again with one of his magic powders. He had found a second one for me, which he lit without flint or match. For that I am grateful. Though I can’t say I’m grateful to my colleague for his rash pursuit of the sleeping undead. Finally we arrive after what seems like an hour by the straightest way before the sarcophagi of the kings.
    Most are tucked away neatly into recesses in the square walls. But there are yet two in the center of the chamber. Usually it is just one, the grandfather of the young prince most recently, but in this generation thirteen months before both father and son had died leaving Princess Nora on the day after her unconsummated marriage as Queen of all Elvland. It is she we serve, I as her bodyguard, Wizard Whitebeard as her chief counselor. Seeing no way to proceed in my search for ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’ I have stayed on.
    “Well, young man, which shall it be?”
    “The younger! I fear the elder.” I shudder at the thought of meeting either again.
    “As well you should! He was a cagey old autocrat. But we shall open up both before we’re through here.”
    Neither of us wanting to get any closer to a vampire, with his considerable power and concentration he stares at the left-hand stone box and poses as if pushing at it with his calloused, weathered hands though he is four of his wide elvish paces away from it. I stand ready, torch in one hand, ten foot pole in the other.
    “That took it out of me, Sir Bobbin, let’s rest a bit before we go on…” the Wizard says weakly.
    The tomb is still and quiet again. But for the lid of the coffin, that half covering head and torso, which hinges creakily upward.
    “That is not me, Sir Bobbin. That I am not doing! I thought it was too easy.”
    A hand of desiccated flesh pushes the lid of the coffin up from inside. Open now, the visage of the dead prince rises before us, long fangs where the canines should be between his dry, drawn mummified lips. He sits up and looks at us out of dead eyes.
    Whitebeard — his face still white as death with exhaustion — speaks first. “Who is giving it to you?” he demands. “Who gave you the dragon dust!”
    The dead do not answer. Instead, this one makes to crawl out of his coffin.
    “Stay! Or you shall be consumed!” the Wizard raises his hand as if to throw something, but nothing happens.
    “You are weak, old man,” the vampire of the young prince mutters. “But your blood is warm.”
    His knees appear. He is now able to stand and free himself from his confinement, and if he can pass an exhausted scholar and a Small farmer, he can walk out of his tomb to threaten the world — and our Queen.
    “First you shall sustain me. Then the blood even of the dog that stole away my bitch!” The vampire looks at me. I step forward.
    In an instant my pole is in his eye hole and sticking out the back of his skull. But that does not stop him. His hand grasps the ten foot pole and tries to pull it out of my grasp. He can’t. I meanwhile try to lift his skull off his neck. I can’t. Though an animated corpse, he is no rotted zombie as I had fought before. Whatever has been done to him has preserved him from putrefaction. Both his hands are now on the pole.
    I move sideways, forcing his head to follow me, but though he bellows his rage his neck will not break. Instead it is my pole that snaps, and I’m down to a seven and a half foot pole to touch him with. But that’s more a size I can manage! And besides, it’s pointed now.
    As unwilling as I was to touch him with a ten foot pole and did, I all the more abhor getting three feet closer to the vampire. But I swallow my repugnance and fear and halve to distance between us in a bound. He protects his other eye with one arm while he continues to pull the yard-long splinter from his other eye, but I aim for the breast and drive the stake deep into where I think his heart should be and out his back, getting only a lung. I jump back to go after a knee.
    “I don’t need to breath!” the vampire laughs.
    I had heard somewhere that transfixing the heart of a vampire with a wooden stake will kill the undead, but it seems to be more difficult to hit it right than one would imagine. By now the other stone lid is banging. The Old King is awake.
    “I come for you, Father!” cries the dead prince as he finally manages to pull the log out of his eye. “We will not wait for them and their schemes, we will leave here and retake our throne ourselves!” With my stick transfixing his knee and keeping him from his father, I recover the dropped guttering torch and draw my little rat-stinger, though I dread the vampire getting close enough for me to use it, I thought to sever the heel tendon of his other leg while jamming the torch into his face.
    “You, I shall drain to dust!” Foot-long dragonish fangs grow from his face as he lunges toward me. I manage to part way disarm him, breaking off one of the long fangs when I smash my torch into his jaw.
    I only need to delay his reaching his father’s coffin, because by now the Wizard is recovered and adds his voice to the fray. “Beware! I shall consume you!” His torch flares preternaturally as he points it at the rampaging vampire.
    The undead prince positively hisses with rage. Plunging himself like a serpent at the Wizard, he is suddenly aflame. The Wizard has deftly stepped aside like a bull baiter, avoiding the half-blind attack. The vampire swoops around the great square of the crypt casting strange lights upon the carvings hiding the bones of more ancient resting kings as he burns. Screaming and still fighting final dissolution far longer than any living man could have, there is a final flare of gas and light and the chamber is suddenly dark except for our two comparatively dim torches. The charred skeleton of the vampire prince drops to the flags truly and everlastingly dead.
    “Come, Sir Bobbin, let us beard the last lion in his den and be gone from this place.”
    Knowing now how the coffins were laid in the stone boxes — which end is up, as it were, the venomous head — we can more cunningly slide open the King’s sarcophagus so that the stone blocks his face. This time, together we shove forward the granite knight guarding the foot of the coffin. We open instead to the undead slippered feet.
    “I have burned your son. He is truly dead and will remain so. Tell us, where did you get the dragon dust?”
    “Priestess!” is the one word the old vampire king calls out. Dignity, always dignity, even beyond the end.
    “You know I must burn you. It is the only cure. You cannot be allowed to continue unlife, perhaps to threaten future generations.”
    “No!” the king commands, but the Wizard blasts the kicking feet in the ruined satin lining with his torch and the inside of the sarcophagus becomes an inferno. The vampire king screams, if possible more horribly in his long thrashing destruction than did his son until the last of his desiccated flesh is char. We leave the dead to death.
    “Let’s get out of the charnel house, Sir Bobbin. You shall need to go to the Captain of the Guard. Bring him and his men into the base of the pyramid. We have no time for ceremonial stairways. I shall find the woman we want and take custody of the drug.”
    We tread up a ceremonial stairway ourselves, but briskly, not at the funereal pace normal for such an avenue. Almost a ramp, so wide is it’s shallow tread, still it’s difficult not to stumble on the slimy muck underneath. To either side are graves sealed with the Elvish death myths in carvings and runes that I cannot understand — and hardly see except where the light of our two flickering torches reach to either side of us and barely before or behind. The Wizard assured me that none of the other corpses so shut away were vampires, but still, as we fled upward into the light I felt them behind us, a mounting pressure as if of ghosts and weak malevolent shades who envy the living. Finally we come to a blank wall of stone, The Wizard does his thing and it hinges inward, opening just enough to allow us to pass. We shut it closed behind us.
    “I cannot believe the infection has spread to any other of the dead yet. You felt them behind us?”
    “But how can you be sure without incinerating each one?”
    “This is why my sect cremates, to make sure the dead remain dead.”
    “Like you did to Nora’s stepfather?”
    “Indeed! Though there was no dragon dust in Southmarch to raise him to Menace and Vanity.”
    Vanity as in looking in the mirror too much? Of course not, vampires are so ugly they could never be vain that way. Vain as in the pointless prolonging of that which is not life. But you should already know that.
    We have come in my musings into the lobby of the Pyramid of Lady Luck, jammed with people who ignore us and head to the gambling tables to the left and right and the free food beyond them. There before us is the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ which Nora had trod on her wedding day after which she murdered her groom and king whom we had just killed again. To our back is the ‘Death’s Door’. I like to keep it there. I head gratefully outdoors, straight ahead to the Palace, while the Wizard turns toward the quarters of the priests and monks who make gambling their living to seek out the poison and the poisoners.
    I run to the gate to raise the alarm. Having come secretly underground through the crypt beneath the Temple of Lady Luck, mobs of boys playing crabs and ball and tag in the streets now block my way back to the Palace Gate. Meaning no harm, they nonetheless chase me or stand in my path as I race along. But they have never dealt with a Wee Little runner before. Though most are my size if not larger — being wood Elves, Big man with elvish faces — they are not as maneuverable nor as fast as me. I pass under their noses like a will-o’-the-wisp, though they grasp at the mist they cannot hold it. With no more magic than my hairy toes and Shirish habits I leave them behind in confusion. I race on through the gates chuckling, “They had better go back to school if they think to catch me!” But there is no school for them. Most of their fathers while away their days as their grandfathers did, in the pyramid gambling. It’s all they will be good for grown, unless Nora succeeds in all she has planned.
    “Vampires! Your mummies are vampires!” I shout as I charge into the nearest guardroom, disturbing a game of Hearts — cards — gambling even here. It’d like a religion with these people. And every one of them works hard at becoming a saint.
    “My mother is no such thing!” laughs the sergeant at the table. “Now, my mother-in-law, that’s a horse of a different color!”
    “Listen — and listen well. Your Wizard Whitebeard, the Queen’s Counselor, has burned two vampires — the Old King and his son. The Priestess has been giving them dragon dust in a Pyramid scheme to overthrow the Government! There may be more. The Wizard has gone after the Priestess. He needs our help.”
    As I finish their jaws hang. Finally the sergeant stands. “Well, what are you wasting time for, Runt? Sound the alarm!” I am about to tell him that’s exactly what I’m there for when another card player jumps up seeing my confusion, their game forgotten. He rushes to a bell pull in the corner. There is a ringing outside and high above then an answering running of feet.
    Finally the Captain of the Guard appears. “What did you ring that for?!”
    I tell my story again.
    Horns blow, trumpets sound. Soon a hundred of us are on horseback for the Pyramid of Lady Luck, myself before the Captain in his saddle, recounting again in excruciating detail my experience in the charnel house, Wizard Whitebeard’s words, and my whole evening, night and morning with him in his tower, the royal archives and down the tunnel.
    “There have been bodies found in the city ritually drained of blood. But what made him think it was the work of actual vampires, or that the king and prince had been raised with dragon dust?”
    “I don’t begin to imagine that I could know the processes of a wizard’s mind. But with his crystal ball? Cards? Maybe he saw it in the stars. Those kind have their ways. Anyway, I sat up with him overnight while he consulted his craft and this morning in the library he hid himself behind a pile of old papers, scrolls and tomes until he raced out down the tunnel like a hound who had suddenly caught the scent of fresh blood.”
    “From tome to tomb, eh?” the old campaigner quips. “Must have been all those bodies we’ve been finding in the gutters that set him off.”
    Then without further explanation as to exactly who was dead or where they were found, we were there. Following the Wizard’s footsteps into the left wing, we find the place a shambles with overturned tables, cremated monks and priests — some with long dragon’s fangs — rubbish, cards and dice bones scattered about, smashed tables and chairs, wheels of their god still turning but unattended and all the various games of chance rudely interrupted in the middle of play, the worshippers having fled. The guards looking longingly around them at the money, chips and the games. We don’t stop.
    We find the Wizard five flights up amid an increasingly dense count of charcoaled bodies — male and female — both fanged bloodsuckers and seemingly innocuous human beings. He was staring down a phalanx of sword-wielding clergy.
    “Begone, Astrologer! I cast thee out, Mage!” shrills the same old hag who had married Nora to her un-charming prince a year before, ere Nora had led King and Husband to a magic mirror behind which lurked on a whole other world a pack of giant rats as vicious as wild wolves and as large as bears. “For the rest of you, including the dwarf demon, the wrath of Lady Luck all your brief lives!”
    I scowl at the hag for this insult but the Wizard laughs. “You have been promising me bad luck for thirteen months, and look how far I’ve got. Do I feel lucky? You bet I do, Puck!” he answers mockingly, a ball of blue flame dancing gingerly in his fingertips, ready for the throwing. This gives heart to our men.
    “Ready bolts!” the Captain tells his men. They all have the new spring-steel crossbows copied from my own that the Prince had carried back from the other side of the looking glass. Levers are cocked back and hollow iron darts are set before them.
    “All I want is the dragon dust, all of it. Of course, all those who are addicted to it must burn.”
    “Aim at their hearts!” orders the Captain.
    “Of course, I know you wouldn’t have used it, so you live. Though you may not enjoy what hospitality the Queen has to offer, life of any sort is to be preferred over death.” This sounds oddly like what someone trying to sell dragon dust might have said. I doubt the wisdom of the sentiment itself, but not the wisdom of the Wizard having said it right then.
    “Desist!” She tries to distract the Captain. He has his bolt aimed right at her heart, but then, so is the Wizard’s fireball. “Kill me and the whole land shall become a blackened desolation!”
    The Wizard laughs at her contemptuously. “Surrender! I shall have your dust in any case. As I would like the names of your suppliers, you may sell me those in exchange for food and bedding in the dungeons. Resist, you burn. Unless a bolt reaches you first!”
    The Priestess, a soft courtesan at heart, quails at his threat. For a moment I wonder if she will choose a quick death or life at any price. But then I recall, she has sold dragon dust, which is life at any price. “Very well. Cast down your weapons!” she tells the troops, but it’s her minions who obey her.
    “Keep your aim!” shouts the Captain, countermanding her ‘order’ just in case.
    But her priests surrender in truth. Swords clank down in a pile before them. I go around — ‘demon dwarf’ though I may be — binding their hands with some cord I found on the window curtains, checking for and confiscating daggers and anything suspicious, like pouches of unknown powder. You can never have enough cord, so I fill my pockets with what I don’t immediately need. Then I lead them into the guards’ custody. But first I stare carefully at each man to make sure he don’t sprout fangs. None of them do, they too had something left to live for.
    Soon it was only the Wizard of Rockwood staring down Puck the high-priestess of Lady Luck. She turns her back and to no one in particular commands, “Come!” I bet fifty years ago she said that frequently to her customers and they gladly did!
    But at the moment I feared another vampire being summoned, dead and raised by her dust to a half-life of hunger and servitude or alive and enslaved to her will by addiction to the dust only she can provide. But none appears. Wizard, Captain and myself follow her into a back corridor — from whose doors we fear attack until we have passed them all — then through a sitting room and into a veil-choked bedchamber where inside a locked cabinet is a small lead-lined wooden chest. I know it’s either lined or loaded with lead by it’s considerable weight as she takes it down with difficulty and hands it with a smile to the Wizard.
    “I trust this will lead to a reconciliation?” The Wizard shrugs noncommittally to her request. “Guston Arrowarche, State Street,” she adds anxiously, and seems disappointed by the Wizard’s inscrutable face.
    “Thank you.” He receives it graciously enough, without giving a clue as to her fate. The ball of magical fire has winked out of existence, extinguished because there is no further need for it. The Captain gestures and two of his men take her roughly into custody, first binding her hand and foot then stuffing her into a dirty canvass sack to hide her identity. They don’t want to cause a riot of pious gamblers, after all.
    “Precious stuff, Sir Bobbin,” he looks into the casket without letting me see into it.
    “I know where there’s a whole mountain of it: Old Fair Haven, where I’m from. If I could ever find my way back there. Could I go down Vickie’s drain and claw my way up out of the bottom of the ocean, then cross a thousand leagues of open sea? I think not.”
    “We seek a nearer stash, the source of this casket, the grave of a dragon.” He hands it over to the Captain.
    “You sure that’s all of it?” asks the Captain.
    “Have your men search the whole temple, but I believe so. A second casket this size would be more than even the Temple’s treasury could finance. Find that treasure too, and take it for the Queen.”
    “Yes, sir!” he smiles and salutes. Nothing a soldier like more than sacking loot. Except one thing, but there are plenty of temple prostitutes for that as well. “Sir Bobbin,” he salutes me, and goes out.
    “Where next?” I ask with more than a little trepidation.
    “You heard her, State Street! And the dwelling of this merchant, Guston Arrowarche.”
    “No straight arrow that one, if he has been bringing that into town,” I gesture with my chin in the direction that the poison had gone, and grimace after it with revulsion for emphasis. It’s already killed me once! How many times must I die, a dragon’s victim?
    “Then neither shall we be. But we must arrive before he has time to hear that the plot to overthrow the Queen with vampires is discovered, and may flee the city to try again elsewhere. Or worse yet, fortify himself in his castle requiring a long siege.”
    I follow the fleet-footed wizard out as men come in to ransack the room for anything valuable. By tomorrow nothing of value shall remain in the Temple of Lady Luck but a crumbling stone pile.

The Merchant of Un-death
    The street called State was as crooked as they came, but then so was the government in this town until recently. And while Nora used unsavory means to get to the throne, she has ruled decently ever since. But generations of corruption like a crowded crypt are not cleaned out overnight.
    The Wizard reads the tarnished brass on the door:
Guston Arrowarche
Purveyor of Property
and Private Goods
    “A ‘fence’! A buyer of thieves’ loot and used grave goods,” I translate. “Why is he tolerated?”
    ‘He is a mobster, Sir Bobbin. Cut him down and a dozen rise up to take his place, but only after rampant butchery and wholesale arson has rampaged through the streets. It’s better just to let him in place to control his underlings. Or at least that’s been the politically correct answer for all too many years. And look where it’s gotten us! Now, we shall see.”
    “So we can expect a fight?”
    “After what you did to the dead prince, I think we’re up to it.”
    “No, that was you! I only harried him until you cooked his goose. And look what you did all on your own to that pyramid gang!”
    “A whole troop of vampires — animated corpses or dragon dust addicts — could not get past you, Sir Bobbin,” he chuckles. “I fear, though, I frightened away the faithful. It was their unlucky day!”
    “The common gamblers, or the cardsharps and whores?” I grumble in disgust.
    “Speak well of our most prominent and pious religion, Sir Bobbin!” the Wizard guffaws. “So,” he sighs. “This should be comparatively easy. Let’s have at them!”
    “One moment, Sir Wizard!” I go over to an iron hitching post. No animals are tied there at the moment, but it consists of two thick wooden fence posts headed by iron rings screwed into the wood and an eight foot long iron bar as thick as my little finger between them. I whack at the wood with my dagger until I free the iron.
    “You shall rule them with a rod of iron!” laughs the Wizard.
    “My staff. I’ve needed one for some time. And just the right length! We find this evens the odds between the Small and the Big folk back home. I shall have the blacksmith sharpen the ends later.”
    “Destroying public property! Tisk! Tisk!” he snickers. “Well, are we ready now?”
    “Straight at ‘em!”
    The Wizard steps up the several brown stone steps to the door and lifts the three-ball knocker, letting it fall once with a magically enhanced bang like reverberating thunder.
    “We parley?” I wonder.
    “We ask politely for his entire supply of dragon dust, and his supplier.”
    “And if he won’t ante up?” Sell his stock? If the price is high enough. Sell the goose that lays his gold bricks? Not on his life!
    “Then you jab that thing in his eye until he sees reason!” I smile as he reminds me of what I did to the dead prince.
    “He’d sooner see out of the back of his head!”
    “Oh! One more thing, wear this.” He draws from his voluminous layers of robes a pair of belts, oversized for me, each with about twenty-four well balanced daggers.
    “Bandoleers! But they aren’t even legal!” I gasp.
    “Neither is defacing a royal corpse or purloining public property!” He scolds me with a wink.
    As I put a belt over each shoulder so that the jangling knives cross my chest with an ‘X’ I am about to say, “You have me there,” when the door opens.
    “May I help you ‘gentlemen’?” asks a snooty servant in black livery.
    “The master of the house please,” demands Whitebeard.
    “Upon what errand?”
    “We are men of business…” the Wizard begins, but already he is moving forward into the hall. The doorman travels backward like he’s on wheels. Whitebeard concludes mysteriously, “That is between us and your master.”
    I follow my associate.
    “May I check your… our hitching post?”
    “And so you have!” grins the Wizard. He’s trying to seem friendly, but he ends up just showing his teeth like an angry dog. He was never any good at hiding his feelings.
    “Please, I cannot let you pass until I have.” He places his hand on a bell pull.
    “No,” I say firmly but ‘soothingly’, brandishing my — their — ‘hitching post’. The doorman winces and stands as if paralyzed, the end of the iron an inch from his eyeball.
    The Wizard tries the door on his right. It opens but he closes it again. “No one there! Library.”
    “That was locked! How could you… Please, at least tell me who is calling?”
    “The ‘Rat’,” I joke, nudging my iron closer to his eye.
    “And ‘Scorcher’,” the Wizard winks. “Rats bite, but you don’t even want to imagine what I could do to you.”
    He’s really starting to sweat now. “You can’t go in there!” he says as the Wizard tries the door on his left. But he’ll be hotter still soon enough.
    “Ah, this is more like it! Gentlemen! I am Scorcher, and this is my good friend Rat. Don’t mind me, but we do want to keep him calm. Nervous little fellow. We are men of business, like you, come to call upon your patron.”
    I follow my good friend Scorcher through the door, whacking the doorman in the ass with my iron as I turn into the room. He gets back up on his feet and rushes upstairs. I don’t imagine that’s the last we shall see of him or his works. “Door run up,” I whisper to the Wizard.
    “Eyes open for the balcony!” he whispers back.
    “Wha’ chow’ wan’?” an ugly old man at the inner door screeches at us.
    “We have an offer for your chief,” answers the Wizard. “That he will not be able to refuse.”
    “He doe knee naught fro’ you! Wha’ chow’ god?”
    “The Queen’s gold. We wish to buy as much as he can find for us of a certain… powder. And we want information. Then we shall go, and leave you in peace.”
     By this time twenty longbow men have taken up positions overhead on the balcony surrounding this waiting room on three sides but the windows. The other supplicants had slipped out the door behind us.
    “Up!” I warn.
    “Up wha’?”screeches the nearsighted old receptionist.
    “Up the Queen!” I shout patriotically.
    “Up the Queen’s arse!” he answers rudely.
    “You shouldn’t say such things, or even think them,” responds the Wizard, his bushy white brows narrowing.
    “She bad for business,” he answers with remarkable clarity.
    “You shouldn’t say such things,” I reiterate. “Because you’ll make me nervous!” I assume the first fighting position with the staff.
    “As you should be! Now, your weapons? Including our hitching post.”
    Shortly I am amazed to find we are both still unscathed. The balconies, though, are aflame and deserted except for the dead. The Wizard rushes the inner door behind the receptionist’s desk. “This way, young Rat!”
    “Coming, old Scorcher !” I whack the insolent old man aside the head as I follow Whitebeard, not a killing blow, but he will need a strong drink when he wakes up, if he wakes up. He and us may yet burn to death, but he’s out of the way behind us.
    The next room is a small, long, ‘throne room’ of sorts. While this next old man is not dressed in ermines or purple, he is in fine silks and satins, fox fur trim and gold fancies. He’s obviously the one we came to see.
    “Well, what can I do for you gentlemen,” he asks calmly enough, considering the flames at our backs.
    “We will have your dragon dust, and all of it! As well as the source you get it from,” commands the Wizard.
    Behind us, a few men pour bucket after bucket of water on the flames that have now taken over the waiting room, and won’t wait for us much longer. To our left four swordsmen in heavy armor come in and take up positions around their ‘godfather’ as these people call their warlord. But they don’t worry me: I still have my ‘Rod-o’-Iron’ which should make a pleasant patter on their iron heads, and my bandoleers have magically refilled themselves after I had thrown the lot into the balcony, killing not a few. I am armed and loaded for bear. And they know I ‘outnumber’ them.
    “I don’t deal in poisons, mainly abandoned estate jewelry.”
    “Got it grave robbing, eh?” I scowl knowingly. I’ve done the same myself.
    “The old priestess says you do, and as she is now in the Queen’s dungeons, I trust her word more than yours.”
    “She’s a liar!”
    “Would you come and tell her that to her face? And I know of another persuasive maiden you would tell all you know to, as well.”
    “I don’t need to. I have iron of my own.” It has gotten too quiet behind us. I signal the Wizard.
    “Then you will be forthcoming here and now? We cannot let you keep it, but other than the dragon dust all we wish is information.”
    “I don’t need to do that, either.” And he doesn’t, not yet anyhow. For we are surrounded.
    I whip knife after knife into the eye holes of each swordsman as they come toward us. Meanwhile behind me the waiting room bursts out alight again, to the screams of knife-wielding erstwhile firefighters. Swordsmen drop their weapons and grasp at their faces then fall to their knees. I dispatch them all, one throat at a time. Now my staff comes into play, the end of it coming at the end of a triple somersault to rest against the base of the godfather’s throat. I press him back into his chair.
    He gasps but dare not move. “My sons! My boys!” The battle behind me is all but over.
    “I think you will find them all dead, as you may be soon enough, unless you tell us where you got the stuff.” I threateningly nudge him with my ‘hitching post’.
    “Why should I? What have you left me to live for?”
    “Ah, come now, you chose this when you attacked the Queen’s officers.”
    The Wizard returns from out of the unchecked inferno and closes the door, as the fire’s now threatening to engulf this room as well. So it is up to me to deal swiftly with this ‘godfather’.
    “We can end it then, and we can end it easy. Or we can end it hard. You don’t want hard.” My Rod-o’-Iron inches just a hair’s breath deeper between his collar bones.
    The Wizard is by my side again. “Don’t crush what he needs to talk with, Sir Bobbin. This fire is out of hand. It’s spread to the whole front of the building. Fools, they should have paid attention to it and let us be. Let us depart!”
    “Up, you! We’ll give you a nice cool cell to die in. Fire is one of those hard ways I spoke of.” I herd him now with my rod like a shepherd his old goat.
    “The corridor is afire!” The Wizard has touched his fingertips gingerly to the door on our right. “Out the back.”
    With appropriate thumps from my rod, I push the godfather after the wizard as fire burns through the door behind us.
    We enter a dining room cool and quiet after the roar and heat of the throne room, and from there a kitchen. I grab a sack of wieners for roasting as we pass the abandoned preparations. All others have already fled or perished, so we make our exit out into a foul garbage strewn alley unmolested and more easily than we got in.
    “Back to the Palace with him, Sir Bobbin. They have ways of making him talk!”

Bankers, Queen and Countryside
    Having turned my prisoner over to the torturers with less than the usual qualms of regret, I have the rest of the day to myself and the smith. Then after a good night’s sleep attend morning Council with the counselors, the Queen, the Wizard and other assembled wise guys.
    “That was quite a busy morning you had yesterday, Sir Whitebeard, making a charnel house and a ruin of the largest and most powerful temple in town then committing arson on a house in an old and respectable neighborhood.” But Nora was amused.
    “Two nests of robbers and devil makers cleaned out, your Majesty. I have spent the time since with a Master Guston Arrowarche, who now rests quietly in your dungeons, nursing his poor thumbs. He told us all we need to know, and if Sir Bobbin is prepared to take a long journey, we shall be off on the morrow.”
    “I’ve been on a long journey half my lifetime, it seems. What’s a few more miles between friends?
    “But off where, Wizard, and why?” Nora interrupts. “Yet before you tell me, explain first about the High Priestess of Lady Luck. She’s down in my dungeons spitting like a cat deprived of it’s tail and promising everlasting misfortune upon my house.”
    “Empty threats. The stars are in your favor, and so am I and Sir Bobbin. What more could you need?”
    The yet virgin queen giggled girlishly. “Well said. But some say I need the goodwill of the large and long established institutions in the city. What do I tell them?”
    “Pay for a clean up, all the while stripping the Temple of it’s gold. Replace it with brass if you must. Not without royal precedent, that route. Resume gambling and prostitution, that should satisfy the mob. As for the priesthood itself, they thought to replace you, my Queen, with vampire puppets of your Husband and King. The High Priestess was assembling an army of hundreds of live vampires addicted to dust that would make her the de facto ruler of the kingdom. To say nothing of their plans for the rest of the dead, making vile monsters of them and slaves of us all.
    There was murmuring around the table.
    “What evidence do you give of all these — allegations — sir?” one of the more urbane wizards speaks up nervously. He has always depreciated Whitebeard for his country habits and the odd company he keeps, namely me. I glare at him viciously. It keeps me from dozing off at these council meetings and keeps them on their toes if I make faces at them from time to time.
    “Have you examined the bodies in the pyramid?”
    He shook his head.
    “I invite you to do just that. You will find them to be victims of dragon dust, complete with fangs majeure and in many cases reptilian scales and other transfigurations.
    “I will do that.”
    “The only cure for dragon dust contamination — and it’s resultant vampirism — is of course cremation. Thanks to the fire of zabaglione I was able to do that on the spot, reducing the suffering of such victims to minimal. As you know the fire is self containing and destroys only what it’s sent after. At Arrowarche’s house they refused to pay attention to their real problem, and hence secondary combustion got out of hand. I had only intended to destroy the balcony. They allowed it to consume the room and the entire structure. At the pyramid you will notice intact drapery immediately next to charred corpses, there the fire was seen for what it was and given the proper respect.
    “Your Royal Highness, I recommend you take care of the priestess quietly but firmly with that as her end — cremation. Do nothing publicly against the Pyramid, but let it’s schemes and schemers perish from public outrage. In the light of day the Pyramid Scheme will be seen for the unspeakable horror that it is, Once the mob knows to what ends the priests would go to make slaves of them the games, free food and prostitutes will lose savor to all but a few. The Pyramid must decline for your Queendom to persevere. I go to destroy the source of the poison. Sir Bobbin, I understand you would be willing to come with me?”
    “What, and leave the drowsy comfort of the council chamber for a bit of excitement and adventure? Point the way! If you don’t take me along, Sir Wizard, I will hide myself in your sack!” I don’t realize what I’m getting myself into. I’m going to miss my bed and my six squares a day afore long, just like Bill the Bagger.
    “You reassure me, Sir Whitebeard. Now on to other business. The school, Sir Shragg, how goes your preparations?” The Queen continues her council without my participation and as if there were no cremated vampires less than a mile away.
    I’m thinking, ‘Now you’ve stuck your toes in it, Sam Bobbins! Hunting vampires and more dead dragons! Didn’t you get enough of that yesterday? Or, for that matter, in Old Haven? What will be the end of thee! Sorry, dearest Merry, there seems to be no hope for us, no way back from the grave unless you wish to come back as a vampire, with a vampire husband and maybe a crypt full of vampire babies!’
    After lunch we go to comb through the rubble of the godfather’s house.
    “And what are we looking for, Wizard?” I say irritably.
    “You’ve seen dragon dust, Sir Bobbin?”
    “I’m all too familiar with it,” thinking of Old Crusty.
    “Arrowarche said it’s in his vault, in a casket similar to the one we took from the High Priestess. Fire will free the dust from the wood box wherein it was kept or the flesh it had permeated, so the charred remains of the king and prince for example will have a scattering of gray dust underneath them. The wizards will, in time, collect that pollution, but the safest place for it now is in a tomb. I have arranged for the other vampire corpses to be stacked into the defiled royal crypt for temporary safekeeping. For now, look for the gray dust, or for the tumbled masonry where the chest might have been kept. It should have been lead lined as the other, and lead and dust might make an misshapen lump somewhere.”
    And so we search the charred timbers for any little bit of Ol’ Crusty, that gray powder which is all too familiar, or the lump of lead that might hide it, or the remains of the casket, or a spill of masonry that could mark a hidden crypt or vault for the perverse treasure. The chest might be ashes itself, even the lead a puddle. So hope was slim. We stood in a black pit of hopelessness, the cellar of the former tall house, as most of the masonry walls around it had crumbled outwards into the streets. The house next door was intact, the brave efforts of neighborhood boys and young men had saved it, though it will need a new roof and other repairs. I had brought along my now sharpened Rod-o’-Iron and was using it to lever beams out of the way, one of the few pieces of the house to survive the inferno.
    “And if we don’t find it?”
    “We will. It may have to wait until the rubbish is cleared away, but if it’s here we will find it.”
    “And if it’s not here? We’ve been at it for over an hour!”
    The Wizard grumbled. “You small stature must be stuffed with patience…” He stopped. “By the Seven Stars! Sir Bobbin, you have it! It wouldn’t be here.”
    “It wouldn’t?” I look at him puzzled.
    “I have been misled. A man threatened with torture will say almost anything. He never said the vault was in his house! Most valuable thing in the Capitol? It would be deposited with his bankers.”
    So we abandon the ruin to the workmen even then clearing the street and go from one banking house to another — beginning with the nearest — until we find a banker who answers, ‘Yes’ to Whitebeard’s question, “Do you hold the accounts of Guston Arrowarche, formerly of State Street?”
    At the fifth bank a mile and a half from the charred ruin we are ushered into a paneled meeting room, sat at a luxuriously polished table, and wait for another banker to bring the item. I had been forced to leave my rod outside.
    Three enter. Each pushes a cart bearing a chest quite large enough to hold another lead-lined dragon dust coffin within. The chests are sat on the table. Keys are flourished, and the head banker unlocks the boxes one at a time, under the careful eye of the Wizard.
    The first contains paper: books and books of accounts. Though the least spectacular, these may be the most valuable, as they might lead to other treasure troves.
    “A wise man, Master Arrowarche, not trusting the records of even his despicable business to the cellars and attics of his well-known house. These shall go to the tax authorities, you agree?”
    The bankers nodded. What did they need with paper?
    The second crate holds gold and silver coins in bags, jewelers’ boxes of gems and rings, and assorted grave goods. I look at the eyes of the bankers and see no greed there, but I know better than to trust on the face of it.
    “To the taxman! Standard ten percent finders’ fee?” The bankers happily agree, their true feelings now apparent. The Wizard has just made them considerably more wealthy, both personally and as a corporation. And for bankers that’s saying something. The bankers get it all in the end, anyway, as everyone knows.
    The third case contains a case, and before he opens the inner coffin the Wizard covers his mouth and nose with a kerchief like a bandit and directs us all to stand back.
    It is indeed lined with dull gray lead. And within the dull gray metal is an odorless, blandly gray fine powder: the last remains of a magical beast of unprecedented violence, greed and will, a little bit of Crusty.
    “Quite enough here, with the similar chest found in the Pyramid, to turn every man, woman and child in the kingdom into an undying vampire slave of the Priesthood of Lady Luck. Added to food or wine and the victim wouldn’t even know he was being progressively enslaved until it was too late to save them: an undying, unliving puppet to corruption. I must, of course, secure this and take the poison from you. The tax authorities shall be by for the rest. Have an accounting prepared for them by the morrow. Good day, and my thanks.”
    The bankers are more than willing to cooperate, not only because Whitebeard was the Queen’s confident and a notoriously dangerous fire-throwing wizard, but to get the appalling preternatural poison out of their entirely respectable establishment. Account books and taxmen they could deal with, vampire enslavement they could not!
    We proceed straight to the pyramid to scrutinize the cleanup and deliver the goods. Gambling and prostitution had resumed in the right wing of the cavernous bottom floors open to all comers but the private upper floors and the ravaged left were oddly vacant, as was the noticeable absence of cardsharps, pimps, fake cripples, snake oil salesmen, psychic surgeons and other priests of Lady Luck at their prayer wheels, dice, Martingale, Darr, pigeon drops, salting, shell games, occult, religious and romance scams, and other bunco.
    Underfoot were broken old dice with the lead on the side favoring the house clearly visible and crumpled cards that must surely be marked where the priest could watch it added to the clutter on the floor. Without priests around, wheels had been impiously lifted up and the extraneous levers used to control their speed and stopping violently pulled out. We wade through this wreckage to the kitchens and the Wizard insists loudly and publicly so that people out in the casino could hear him that the entire stock of old food must be incinerated and that the ashes of it’s incineration must be added to the piles of dragon-dust permeated char in the sealed crypt.
    “Incinerate it! Just in case,” Whitebeard demands with the clientele listening at the door. This gets the word out that all the free temple food is ‘permeated’ with dragon dust. But he never actually said that.
    From there we climb to the priestess’s quarters where the battle had taken place. The doubting wizard from this morning is there.
    “Do you concur with my diagnosis, Doctor?”
    “Obvious! Had to see it for myself, of course,” the other wizard nods. He carries the staff of ‘Royal-Physician-to-the-Queen’ as my wizard carries a staff of ‘Royal-Counsellor-to-the-Queen’ on occasion. I have back my own staff of ‘I’ll-Knock-Your-Block-Off-If-You-Bother-Me!’, my Rod-o’-Iron.
    My wizard asks, “They are in the crypt?”
    “Only place for them.”
    “Guston Arrowarche, held by his bankers,” my wizard utters as he pulls from his voluminous layered robes the second fateful casket. It’s as if the small coffin passes through the material, becoming larger as it reenters the light. He passes it carefully to his fellow wizard. They each place cloths over their faces and I look to be in the company of bandits.
    “It is the thing,” says wizard number two.
    “Put it in the crypt,” says my wizard.
    “I should come with you, William.”
    “I go to hold off the infection at it’s source. The Queen shall need all the help she can find in these difficult days. Those infected here must be identified and isolated.” He means burned at the stake! “The Pyramid must be shut up. This will create unprecedented societal unrest and mean an end to a long cherished culture of gambling.”
    “With the priests held in the dungeons, that has already begun.”
    “Sex is half their sway over the masses. We must work at putting away the young priestesses as well.”
    “Understood. It will be difficult. They come in through mixed motives. With many it is because of a lifetime of abuse, a few are obsessed with greed. What the cure for them could be I cannot say.”
    “Something must be found for those who are free of the drug, Everett. As for the others…”
    “But what of the mobs? Addicted as they are to lotteries, games and prostitutes, an attractive alternative must be offered them if we are to again avoid civil war, this time from below.” Thirteen months ago Nora’s coup had left the nation with a choice of war between noble houses or herself as Queen. They chose the girl, thinking to find her easily manipulated, they have been disappointed.
    “That will be up to our colleagues in the education department. And also, in the hard sciences. University for those with the wit and factories for those who like to work with their hands. But all this will take time!”
    “Time we might not have. Deprived suddenly of their accustomed drug and pastime, sex and superstition, the mobs may not wait!”
    “Superstition? Like what a body might gain at one of the gaming tables?” he passes his hand broadly over the room.
    “The casino wins in the end, but they must believe themselves to be the exception to the rule.”
    “Truly!” the Royal Physician shakes his hoary head.
    Having disposed of his load of poison and leaded wood, the Wizard leads me to the stables where our departure has been prepared.
    “A pony for you, Sir Bobbin! A horse to carry me. A pair of mules for our supplies.”
    “It looks like we’re going detecting! This is exactly the sort of rubbish that old Hercule Poirot carried about with him.”
    “In a sense, we are, as I understand it. We follow the chain of infection back through it’s sources, but at the end we must excavate the dragon itself — or bury it so deeply it cannot be disturbed again.”
    “Seems like it’s a hopeless task if it’s anything like the dragon I’ve seen, particularly as there’s only two of us,” I lament with a sigh.
    “An army of laborers traversing the country would attract attention and make our task of hiding or stealing the poison all the more impossible.”
    “But what if more poison shows up in the City while we’re away?”
    “To sell to whom? The Priestess? Master Guston? No, even now a notice is being placed before the palace promising fifty lucre for the genuine article, and thirty silver for the name of anyone possessing it. Were any remaining at large in the City it shall go to the palace and thence to the crypt, and so will anyone found withholding it. If any vampires remain on the loose when we return, I shall expect you to deal with them as you did with our King and Prince.”
    “At least you leave me something to look forward to!” bI grumble halfheartedly.
    “Go pack yourself a change of clothes, Sir Bobbin! All the rest is ready.”

On the Road Again
    Before me is a pair of stinking mules piled high with tools, weapons, camp gear and food. Before the mules is the white wizard high on his white gelding, and before him a long, long road into a rising sun. It has been this way for a week now.
    All I’ve ever wanted is my own Mare, Marry now years dead and lost worlds away, a bit of soil to farm and a cabin to shelter us. But that is the one thing it seems I must never possess. Instead I ride a pony — a right pleasant strong mount it is true — on a fools quest for trouble.
    More than on any of my magical travels on or under water, through mirror or drains, or chased by monsters and spooks, I feel as ancient Bill and Freddy must have felt that the road goes ever, ever on! And so on and on we go. Finally at sundown we reach another large village — they all look alike now — of farmers whom I envy, craftsmen and small merchants and locate in the town an inconspicuous and therefore unimpressive inn where we stop for the night. Aside from them being all wood Elves instead of a Brie-ish mixture of Big and Small, it was an inn very like what they would have stopped at, Bill with his Not-Quite-Twice-Seven Dwarves or Freddy with Old Sam my namesake of legend, Pip and Merry. Ah, Merry! My thoughts return again to you. How is it I am heading ever farther away from your arms?
    We deliver our animals and most of our goods into the hands of the stable boys who after being pointedly told by the Wizard, “It is the Queen’s business!” and after seeing our weaponry — I keep my self-refilling magic bandoleers. My Rod-o’-Iron I leave with the baggage. The Wizard carries away his one long sword strapped conspicuously to his waist, but does not show his magic fire — they seem honest enough.
    We have a table against the wall in a private booth to our lonesome. No one speaks to us though we can see they are all curious enough. We have a supper of the strange stew of this region — which seems to have everything in it including gristle that they fittingly call it ghoulish — along with heavy dark bread and watered wine. After goulash we are shown to our beds. It’s all very primitive and not at all enlightened, so resembling ‘Only Mountain high’ rubbish that you would think we were really after dragon’s gold, instead of just wanting to give his crummy old bones a permanent burial. To where would I cart his gold if I had it? Back through mirror and across ocean to a cold grave?
    “That last dragon I met, Wizard, was none to willing to give up ant bit of himself, not the least trinket of his hoard and certainly not the tiniest grain of his own person, and he was a centuries dead dragon! What he wanted most of all was to be remembered. What less could be expected of any such beast, living or dead? They’ll grind our bones to chaff sooner than let us bury theirs!”
    “Lesser men than you have managed to steal their dust, Sir Bobbin.” I like how he says ‘lesser’, it makes me feel pretty good, as if a man’s significance is not determined by his stature but by what he can pinch. He goes on, “If once we can reach the dragon’s grave, we’ll be past our troubles. It’s his worshippers that worry me, or rather his addicts.”
    “Which you’ll haul over the coals and roast!” I assure him.
    Morning comes early. The inn’s staff pack our mules and saddle our mounts for us under our four watchful eyes, and while they thank us for Whitebeard’s coin which he places into each outstretched right hand, they are glad to see the back of us. The ground becomes increasingly hilly, and still we go on. There is no village or inn at nightfall. But we do find lodging in a hunting lodge just then occupied by it’s lord and his party.
    “And how is the lovely girl,old man?”
    “Sunny. All is well in the City. We have been sent to seek a rare mineral in the distant — most distant — east. Can’t stop but for the night, we still have so very far to go,” answers my Wizard.
    “And you are, ah… Sir…?”
    “Sir Bobbins, your Lordship, Her Majesty’s personal bodyguard. She sent me along to look after my companion’s… Health!” Which I then drink to.
    “Must be doing pretty well then if she sends away her chief counselor and personal bodyguard on foolishness!”
    “It is what it is, sir,” answers Whitebeard cheerily to this affront. “Old men are always interested in new curiosities.”
    “What’s this stuff good for?” he scoffs.
    “Ladies facial creme!” I say with a wink. The whole house erupts in laughter.
    And it was a grand old woodsy house. There was whole spiced roast boar — freshly killed — lots of bread and gravy, honeyed carrots and peas and more salted gravy. There was a big log in a bigger hearth and affectionate dogs roaming around looking for a handout — demanding meat and gravied bread — from the hands of the guests.
    And the other guests were interesting, too. All were Wood Elf lords, hunters here for a friendly kill from the surrounding manors: earls, dukes, counts of the Old King’s vintage or drinking buddies of the dead prince.
    “Ah! The poor young wench wincher, he knew how to put it down, eh? At least he died in battle! They ever discover where the beasts came from?” The yellow-bearded brute to my left whimpers, overly indulged already when we sat down in the alcoholic honey-wine peculiar to the region. I am quite sure he would throw me in with the blazing log if he knew what I had done to his prince the last time I had seen him and throw Wizard and Queen in after me if he knew about the magic mirror.
    “Rest in peace!” I utter quickly and respectfully as a toast.
    “Hear! Hear! Rest in peace!” glasses click, but only the Wizard and I know what peace I had on my vampire-obsessed mind.
    “Where are you from, err… Sir Bobbin?” asks Red Beard over green vest across from me.
    “The Shireland, a distant place. I stumbled upon this land… err, magically.”
    “The Queen’s sacred stars summoned him, and so She named him Her bodyguard,” the Wizard on my right saves my bacon from the fire.
    “It was the selfsame magic that…” I think of that magic mirror of Whitebeard’s manufacture that in sunlight opens upon a world of giants and which tempted King and Prince to their horrific deaths.
    “Yes, err… Sir Bobbin?” probes Red Beard.
    “Preserves Her Majesty’s peaceful Dominion!” Wizard plucks my bacon out of the roasting again.
    “Hear! Hear! The Queen!” glasses click around me again.
    “To Peace! To the Hunt, Good Food, Better Drink!” Wizard enchants cheerily with powerful magical results.
    “Hear! Hear! The Hunt, Good Food, Better Drink!” glasses click around the table again, but not mine. I am under it.
    Mead goes to my head. I know ale, beer, even whiskey on occasion, but this fermented honey is strong stuff. It had nearly gotten me stuffed up the chimney. I slept well that night.
    More road the next morning and for weeks afterward. Most night we slept rough in the woods near the road without a fire. We would have a cooking fire earlier in the day when we stopped for our one hot meal, but never at our sleeping site lest we attract worse than wild beasts.
    Only once did we have to fend off robbers. But the moment they saw me wearing my bandoleers raise my eight foot Rod-o’-Iron from my saddle, they became honest men and scattered. Of course, the Wizard ‘s shining sword in it’s scabbard by his side didn’t hurt matters, either.
    I carried native flint as well as the remainder of my matches in my pack, which fascinated the Wizard — the matches, not flint which everyone has — and it amused him that I called them dragons until he saw me impressively light a cone of tinder by striking one upon the rough heel of my hand. We usually used his magic.
    Less and less frequently we stay in public houses and lordly mansions, though none was quite like that rowdy party of drunken hunters. Finally after more than a month on the road we come to a town at the edge of the Queen’s dominion that was our final destiny.
    “This is where the next link in the chain is forged, Sir Bobbin!”
    “Meaning?” I ask with irritation at his wizardly obliqueness, mainly from my saddle sores.
    “We are here to find a certain Master Ulysses Elveson. It is he who sold the chests to Master Arrowarche, who in turn sold half his stock to the High Priestess who corrupted both the living and the dead.”
    “Elveson! Sir, I happen to know Elveson is the most common of names in your country, almost as bad as Bobbins or Toehair or Smith in my own. Surely there are mobs of Elvesons, and not a few would be named Ulysses. Well, all right, Ulysses at least is uncommon. Or is it”
    “It doesn’t matter. We have his street address,” he scolds, chuckling.
    “Let’s hope he hasn’t absconded!” I grumble, our argument all in fun.
    But then again, I wish Elveson has cut and run so we could end this fool’s errand after trouble and go home. But no such luck. After stabling our beasts and storing our goods with the hoteliers, we walk, Whitebeard armed with sword and I with knives across my breast and Rod-o’-Iron in hand, up Market Street to the corner of Belvedere and above the shop of a local dry goods emporium we find Master Elveson at his desk.
    “What can I do for you, ‘gentlemen’?” He looks at the Wizard’s hip to my bandoleers full of shiny throwing daggers until his eyes come to rest upon the eight foot hitching post in my hand that barely fits into his crummy little office but which my Small yet taut frame hefts easily.
    “Good day. I am Whitebeard, this is Bobbin. We are from Queen Nora of Elvland. You sold two caskets of gray powder to one Guston Arrowarche in the Capitol. We are here to purchase your remaining stock, and inquire as to it’s origins. Perhaps you were unaware that it is a deadly poison?”
    “Err… Poison? I send Arrowarche many things: curiosities, abandoned grave goods, imports from foreign lands. But never poison! Are you quite sure?”
    “It has been recognized as dragon dust by several physicians and wizards, myself and my colleagues, as well as by experienced travelers, such as my bodyguard here,” he gestures to me. I nod slowly and silently, eyeing the elf in a way he does not like. “We have seen it’s vampirizing effects upon both the living and the dead. How can we help but be sure?” the Wizard concludes.
    “There is no more!” he pleads.
    “Now, are you sure?!” the Wizard probes.
    “Let me say a word, sir. If we do find more of that poison in the Queendom, I will personally come back here and poke your eye out to wear around my neck on a chain!” I speak up. “You would like that?”
    “No! No! There is no more! Two small coffins, that was all.”
    “All is well then. We shall be friends. Now, friend, where did you get it from?” demands the Wizard.
    “Don’t know him by name. A grave robber from out of the North. Came off the sands. Doesn’t come often.”
    “Describe him!” I demand.
    “Ah… A unique individual… Short, not so short as this… Err, gentleman. A head shorter than our race, but dark and swarthy, yet no goblin. Trollish, perhaps. Dressed in rags. Indeterminate age. We call him, ‘The Rag Merchant’.”
    “You do, do you? Did he ever show his fangs?” the Wizard grumbles.
    “Fangs?! You mean… he was — he is — a vampire?”
    “Would you call his complexion, ‘dry’?” I venture.
    “Coming off the sands as he does, I shouldn’t wonder. But surely not everyone in the desert…”
    “Deals in dust? Wears grave clothes? Is a ruined and desiccated corpse? Is dead yet walks?” Whitebeard scolds. He has little patience for those who fail to see the obvious and agree with him.
    “A vampire!” Elveson gasps.
    “You deal in grave clothes, you eventually deal with the living dead. Or those who prey upon them,” our Wizard states the obvious.
    Our suspect looks suddenly pale as the living dead himself. “He could have bitten me! He stood just where you stand now!”
    “I would go away if I were you. Travel can be enlightening of the mind and preserve the body,” I warn ominously.
    But he bristles at kindness. “But I have so much invested here!”
    “The vampire will surely return,” the Wizard cautions.
    “I don’t rob the graves, and if the goods are already lost to their proper owners, why not put them to some use?”
    “You create a market for the grave robbers. No market, no robbers,” I admonish him.
    “Good day to you, sirs!” he says hurriedly.
    “If any more dust comes into your hands, contact the Capitol. The Queen will give you a good price, with no punishment,” the Wizard waves farewell and turns to go.
    I must back out. But before I do, I look at him and point first to my eye then to his. “‘Eye’ will see you again, if anymore turns up. Remember, you have been warned!” And we are gone.
    “Where next, Sir Wizard? Home?” I ask hopefully.
    “No, no, no. Journey not half done! Dragon yet unburied. We go north, as the man said, and search for this, ‘Rag Merchant’.”
    I had dreaded he would say that. So I add, “Better add another two mules, then,” I grumble. “Just for water — or blood!” I’m thinking of at least one vampire in our path. It may help to carry bait other than what’s in our veins.
    “Sounds to me you don’t like travel, Sir Bobbin?”
    “Took you this long, did it? Not away from the direction of home, nor toward certain doom!” I’m imagining scores of thirsty bloodsuckers where we’re heading.
    “But always toward duty,” he sighs.
    So we are indeed lighter in clothing and gold and heavier in flesh and water when we leave the eastern town, heading north by northwest into danger. Two mules loaded with casks of water, enough for a there and back again of many days. But first we water our six animals and ourselves off the land, while streams and puddles last.
    When you travel you use what forage and pasture as comes naturally along the path before using up your cash — or worse yet, your stores. As we descend out of the hills the green diminishes, the dark watered earth giving way to dry sand, and it is six well fed and watered animals and two riders likewise relatively content that enter the grassy plain stretching north toward the sun hanging above the road.
    There are still for a long while irrigation ditches. But the clouds scoot away few and high above us, having relieved themselves of their precious moisture in the hills behind us. Soon even farming turns back in despair toward the south and civilization, but we and our faithful companion the road carry on. Yet it’s a far drearier road: less traveled, less cared for, more dusty and nebulous. It becomes a path, a regular trod rather than a certain line, and like a stream in the desert, it too broadens and vanishes into rocks and dust.
    “Plenty of dust here for you, Wizard. Even a few bones,” I joke weakly as my boot toe moves about the whitened remains of some small animal, a rat perhaps, but it could as likely have been a snake’s skull.
    “We shall rest here tonight. I may be able to do something about our quest, if the stars are right.”
    I sigh, turn back to my beasts and begin to unpack. We need water, critically. Not yet desperately, as we have the two extra mules, but almost as badly as we need one other thing. With a vanished road and cold trail, where do we go from here We need direction!

Dry, Drier, Driest!
    I get a fire going with one of my precious few dragons while the Wizard is otherwise occupied. I put the water on to boil and while I wait, I look to see what he’s been doing.
    He is at the cards, not gambling cards like in the City but odd picture cards which seem to tall him a different tale every time he gapes at them.
    As the pot lid begins to rattle I look away to prepare our food. When I look back he’s under a dark cloth — standing still as death — and mysterious as the magician that he is.
    Again I must tend to our supper. Noodles and jerky boiled, carrots and turnips sliced, pan bread fried. When I look up again the stars are out and so is the Wizard, standing beneath the naked heavens like a man in prayer. I hesitate to disturb him, but then he sniffs avidly and looks down at where I sit by the fire.
    “Ready to chow down, mine host?”
    “On the table, Sir Wizard. Can you take a break?”
    “Stars will be out all night. Pity we have no bones or intestines,” he shakes his head and sighs.
    “You getting anywhere?”
    “Only a vague northerly compass so far. But the night is yet young.”
    We eat in silence. I have questions about his mysterious craft without the words to even ask them. Instead after supper I clean the pots and utensils with clean dry sand while he takes a walk into the desert. He doesn’t go far — remaining in sight — except briefly when he crouches down to examine something in the earth. Soon he is back.
    “I will have to repeat my divination every night from here on, but I have an idea of direction and distance.”
    “How far?”
    “A week away.”
    “Well, as we do thirty miles a day, that would be two hundred ten. Could be worse.”
    “No, not distance on the ground, Sir Bobbin. The enemy will find us in na week whether we stay here or go in any direction except back south. South is a fresh green plant springing up out of bare earth. North is where the blood flowed from a wounded serpent in the sand. And we are here within his domains — dry as dust — a desolation sucked of all life.”
    “Well, I could have told you that! He’s out in this desert somewhere. South is the way to safety, but if he can come as far as that town back there we would have some ways to go even from there. Yet surely he is somewhere out there!” I gesture vaguely. “Just my luck, too! I seem to attract things that suck, and not just these flies, either. First the dragon, now this!” I rattle the cookware in consternation as I put it away.
    “Well, time for bed, then,” the Wizard yawns.
    “A little farther, I should think. Just to get past the cooking smells. Don’t want to attract snakes and other vermin into our bedrolls.”
    “Then let us walk off that excellent meal, Sir Bobbin. A fine cook you are, I thank you!”
    “Could do better with a bit of fresh rabbit and some greens. In this desolation we’d be lucky to find nettles and rats.”
    “I find fresh snake a nice treat. Tastes like chicken,” he pops his lips as we lead horse, pony and mules.
    “I’ll keep an eye out and knife handy come daylight. A snake in the pot is better than fangs in the ankle any day.”
    “And the bulbous, thorny plants around here, Sir Bobbin, some are edible. I shall take the liberty to collect them as we find occasion. Our only water source — meat and cactus — from here on I expect. Except of course what we have brought with us.”
    “Do you think two pair of mules will last us a week? We need as much to get back out as in.”
    “We will make it last by traveling the nights — a half night tonight, two hours on foot, four asleep, two till morning’s heat stops us.”
    “I understand. We sleep away the heat that way, keeping ourselves and the animals under the tent cloth until sunset, then twelve hours walking and riding: evening, a full night and early morning hoofing north.”
    “You are a well-traveled man, Sir Bobbin, which is why I’m relieved that it is you I have for a companion on this expedition.”
    “Not traveled nearly enough! I never saw plants and trees like these!”
    Actually the island with the Questing Beast, Rat and Rabbit was pretty odd, but this was different yet again. The bulbous trees no taller than my companion and thorny bulbs around my knees are unlike anything I ever seen before. There is nothing resembling twig or leaf, except the fur-like but razor-sharp bristles that cover most brush vaguely resembles pine needles in their longer forms except they are sewing needle hard and unyielding. The taller ‘trees’ have more of these long needles than the brush, but the bulbs are covered in short spikes as thick as fur.
    “I guess animals would eat these fruits if not for the brambles?” I ask the Wizard.
    “No, not edible. Poisonous, in fact! But there are others. When there is a rare rain, the desert blooms with flowers as well as birds, bugs and lizards. Then we will find food and abundant water! Unfortunately, rain is hardly ever seen on these sands. We will arrange our tarps to collect and rain that might fall during our daily rests. But even so, there are a few things around us that are edible, they hide…” He began to search the earth underfoot.
    “I can’t imagine it raining here. A few good showers should cure this land.”
    “It doesn’t need cured, Sir Bobbin. No more than this ocean you tell me of needs drained. It is what it is, home to the creatures native to it, it is best left wild. Plenty of good farmland to the south, if you are itching to leave the Her Majesty’s personal service. Attempting to domesticate the needles and the flies and the other creatures that have always been here would only be an exercise in futility. Not that some poor fools haven’t tried. No grazing to speak of, either. Too much that is poisonous! Oh, our six beasts will manage the two weeks it may take us to cross out and back, but a herd of cattle? Impossible! And it gets worse the farther north we go.”
    “Dryer than this? I don’t see how we’ll live!”
    “Yet we must, Sir Bobbin, we must!”
    That night until very late we walk under an infinite ceiling of constellations, more stars than ever I see in my own damp country. Brighter and clearer than I ever thought possible, I frequently stub my boot on cactus as I become mesmerized by the wonder of bright crowded stars overhead: mostly yellow, but red and blue, too, off into the deepest depths of the sky. And directly before my face, a spinning whirlpool of stars, the center of all things. The Seven Sisters were there, as well the five hunters and the planets Mother and Father. It was a crowded and busy spectacle.
    “Ah! Yes, see this, Sir Bobbin?” I look down at the approaching Wizard, leading horse and mules. My own train of beast stopped abruptly behind me. “This is one of those edible desert fruits I told you of. Keep your eye to your feet for such as these!”
    He hands me something that looks like a thorny, tough, blackish-green thistle head. I couldn’t see how it could even be attacked without scraping the mouth or puncturing the tongue on it’s spines. But he seems to think he has given me a delicacy.
    “Pull out each leaf so, the root is the edible part, eat the soft white meat where it attaches to the whole and the pith within.”
    I do this and find it bland and starchy though it may be good enough once I was hungry. The center is where most all the moisture lies, but moisture there is, hidden away within it.
    Well before dawn we stop again, get out our bedrolls and rest. All too soon the sun is in my eyes. We ride for the cool of the day. Fortunately the winter season means a low sun takes longer to heat the ground and never heats it too much. But nevertheless before ten we stop and sleep through noon and afternoon, the beasts and ourselves shaded by tarps of thick black canvas tent cloth on poles. I this shade we stay cooler, don’t perspire much at all, and sleep.
    With the sun descending we let the beasts graze and make ourselves our only hot meal of the day. True to his promise, the Wizard provides a fresh-killed rattling serpent of a kind I know not. It did taste like fried chicken.
    Late in the day we tramp out, riding at first. I use my pointed Rod-o’-Iron to spear more of those artichoke things from the saddle. As I had skewered another snake for our supper before. My pony had been skittish with my prickly pointer when we first set out, but in the weeks since, seeing my skill with it he became accustomed. Between supper and full night we make good time at a full gallop, side by side, pony and horse trailing complaining mules behind. We push several leagues deeper into the dry until it became necessary with the dark to walk the beasts.
    Under the bright heavens we walk on through the night, feeding artichoke hearts and other desert treats my Wizard finds for me to my pony and mules. He seems to be taking direction from the stars — but not as a sailor does — and from his crystal ball before sleep and from his picture card while I cook supper in daylight before. But I don’t ask him for details. I already know we have a long way to hoof.
    The next day is pretty much the same, though drier. Indeed grazing dries up over the next few days and our beasts suffer more. We water all six from both water mules, keeping the weight evenly distributed, but water these mules less. They will be sacrificed before the journey out. It seems cruel, but so six may survive, especially the two of us along with the horse and pony, the two extra mules must suffer. The other two may survive if they can make it out on only what they can find to graze. I don’t like the idea of prolonged suffering in beasts, but there it is.
    In twilight each dry, drier day I ride through the desert on a pony named ‘Rain’ for luck, the Wizard’s steed ‘Thunderclap’ or ‘Clap’ for short having acquired it’s name though long service under him, I wonder if rain has ever ridden out of those skies before us. We haven’t seen a single cloud since that first nighttime desert walk and this is the reputed ‘Rainy Season’. We would be long since dust in summer regardless of our safeguards.
    I miss washing with water. Neither of us have washed since the last town. The larger part of our daily drink comes in the tea, noodles, artichokes and snake we ingest for supper. The desert fruits only moisten our tongues and allow us to breath. Our tongues would cleave to the roof of our mouth otherwise. water is all I think about awake or asleep dream of. I miss even my drowning in the ocean.
    After four nights under the spectacular sky I don’t seem to notice when it disappears. But the Wizard does! He shakes me out of my walking stupor, as if from a dream, and we set out the tarps to catch… “Catch what?” I croak stupefied.
    Suddenly lightning cracks and we must tend to the animals, tying all six closely nose to nose and hobbling their forefeet — You never want to be in a position to be kicked by the rear, especially a mule’s! — when the downpour begins. We race back to the tarps. It pounds in big drops such as I never saw fall out of a clear starry sky — It was starry only minutes before! — and we must place tent poles or rocks against the edges of the tarps to collect the water in four shallow pools. Shallow, and too small to satisfy our needs. We need ten times as much. Then we open our mouths to the heavens and let them wash away the dust from our faces and tongues and soak our clothes. All too soon it is over — and very, very cold!
    Shivering the Wizard rouses me, “Fill the skins, Sir Bobbin! This cold is our water vanishing away, out of our clothes and hair, out of the earth and from our tarps. Then we must find standing puddles to water the animals. Even your second mule since it takes nothing from our supplies.”
    We make no further headway for the rest of that night and are still where we stood in the rain at dawn. By dawn all is again parched dry, no one could tell it had ever rained. But more food is out upon the earth: flowers, fruits, lizards, snakes, birds. We gorged ourselves on water and meat and the animals on water and greens until it had vanished like a dream in the dawn’s heat and we ourselves must seek shelter and shade.
    The day after the flood the earth descends and the land definitely changes. Plants becomes scarcer, meat rare. The soil looks fallow, too dry to grow anything at all, parts of it look diseased as if with rot. But the earth at least stays put, flat as the curving edge of a fry pan as we drop down into a wide deep bowl or river valley hundreds of miles across. It won’t continue to lie passively where we put our feet.
    My second mule drags his feet far worse the sixth day. In mercy we transfer most of it’s far too lightweight — and getting lighter — burden to Whitebeard’s water mule. We have been using dry cracked casks for firewood since before the flood night. We are indeed half down. Full half of our water has been drunk, sweated and occasionally pissed into the ever thirstier sands. And that includes the four casks refilled by the flood.
    Then dawned the seventh day. “It’s an ocean! An ocean of sand!” I gasp, dry-mouthed.
    “Someday I must see this ocean of yours, Sir Bobbin. An ocean of moving water must be terrifying indeed. But this desolation worries me. My stars and other divinations tell me it’s very near, as straight ahead. I have guided us a little west of directly north, north by northwest in fact, and inside those shifting dunes are both monsters, the undead and the living.”
    “Living? Don’t you mean dead? It is a dead dragon we’re going there to bury, isn’t it?”
    “I’m afraid not.”
    Before us the bare grains of sand dance and flow in their millions of billions, building up slowly on one side as they are blown by the wind to suddenly drop of their own weight in cascades down the other side like ghosts walking the dune crests with heavy tread.
    “How will we ever get through it!” I groan. “And how can we survive that which lies beyond it?”
    “Yet though it our path lies!” the Wizard warns. “And beyond is our destiny. Stiff upper lip, Bobbins, sooner in sooner out.”
    “If you say so, but look at it! It’s going to swallow us! How do we walk on or through that stuff? It’s like deep fresh snow!”
    “Very carefully!” He leads his horse and most of our remaining water out into the sand. I follow the water and grumble.
    “Sooner in sooner dead! Or worse!”

Pillar of Fire, Pit of the Undead
    Desolate wastes weren’t as bad as I thought they would be. Sure, there is nothing to eat or drink, no sure place to put your foot, and as hot as an oven. But if you were careful, you would not fall or be swallowed alive at the base of the dune by overblown sand your tumbling body undermines. I know, I took several tumbles until I got my ‘dune legs’. It was very like the queer sort of balance you must have on a sea-tossed ship, ready to shift your weight at an instant’s notice. We walk or ride till eight in the morning. The farther north we’ve come the hotter the days have become. We must hide, the eight of us, under the now ragged cloths.
    Supper the seventh day is meager. Our supplies we must more carefully ration. We are into the oats kept for when the beast would have no other pasture, which is certainly now. The bulky material serves both us and them. We do not, though, feed my second mule.
    “Not much longer,” I croak.
    “No. Tomorrow, we will see it. Light and abomination together.”
    “I mean for the water mules. But you’ve seen it? You’ve been here before?”
    “No. But the powers have described it to me. The hanged man, the cave, the wall, the tower in my cards. The diseased color, the inverted kidney, the whole mouse in the snake’s entrails. The river of light, the shifting orbits, the black hole in the heavens with Elvenhome before it.”
    “I understand none of that. All I know is tomorrow we shall not have the services of my second mule, and yours is not far behind. It will collapse. We give it nothing, it will give us back the same.”
    “That is as expected, Sir Bobbin. But not to leave a healthy beast and a quarter of our dwindling supplies when we turn back.”
    “Or we won’t make it out ourselves.”
    “Correct. Two must die or all eight will. The signs are also clear in that prediction.”
    And indeed as if he had been listening to me, my second mule refuses to budge when we load up for our after-supper gallop along the long stretch between two dunes. So I remove his bridle and all his rigging, transfer the remaining water casks to the three remaining mules, dump some used-up rubbish and we abandon the still living beast to the desolation and the empty horizon. It may yet somehow survive us. Mules are hearty beasts, smarter than we think, at least about mulishness.
    “Not far now. Just a walk and we’ll be there,” the Wizard whispers later in the dark.
    “This one’s done for as well.” I begin unloading the balking third mule. “I’m amazed it’s come this far. You’ve not been giving it anything either?”
    “No matter. Just over the next hill, we reach our journey’s end.”
    Well I don’t like the sound of that! “Madness!” I grumble as I swat the mule’s behind and send it south.
    So we walk. The ridges of dune blow across our path, so we must scale up one and down another. But finally my boot hits something harder than loose sand. I don’t want to know what — or who — it could be.
    “It is before us,” the Wizard intones spookily, pulling up at my side.
    I shudder. “What is?!”
    “The ruin of an ancient civilization. Wherever they got the original dragon dust is lost in the mists of time. But what we have are the collected remains of ancient vampires, and at such a depth of antiquity dragon and vampire can hardly be told apart, certainly their dust is identical, after the dragon’s dust has passed through their once-human flesh. But after millenia a vampire losses all human features, becomes a small wizened serpent. Small for a dragon, but man-size. Lacking prey, the eldests dried up and perished. Then more recently, no more than five centuries, fresh meat wandered this way and somehow became contaminated with ancient dust. Perhaps a tomb robber. Then in our lifetimes, realizing what he was and what it’s fate would ultimately be, this ‘Rag Merchant’ marched out of the desert to infect the world. Yet, something causes it to return here…”
    “How do you know all this?”
    “The stars see all, but they tell what they know very slowly.”
    “So that’s what we’re up against!”
    “Your knives, I’m sorry to say, will be of no avail against them, Sir Bobbin.”
    “Well, I still have my Rod-o’…” I gasp: “’Them’? What them? I thought it was just this ‘Rag Man’?”
    “He is breeding them, whether live flesh or butchered meat, he is imbuing dust with fresh life. Whether by dozens or hundreds I do not yet know. We must burn them. And there will be no sleep tonight! They will attack. Fire is our only security. Your iron will only delay them.”
    “Torches, then!”
    “Not quite.” The Wizard first pulls gloves and then some red powder in a glass jar from the voluminous folds of his cloak from which he poured a ring around our four beasts and ourselves. Then he brings out a spring-steel crossbow, my crossbow from Vickie’s Giant world recovered by the vampirized prince and ever since then in the Royal Museum of Strange and Unnatural armament, and new darts for it. But his darts are hollow. In these razor-sharp hollow points he pours some of the red powder through a funnel, also materialized out of his mysterious magical robes, plugging them with a bit of light tallow. I exchange these loaded bolts for the knives in my bandoleers. Then there are the bandages, wrapping the ends of my Rod-o’-Iron and the tip of his great long sword, he permeates the clean white strips with the powder as he wraps. Then we are ready. He hands me my dart shooter.
    “Need a light, Bud?” I suggest.
    “No! The darkness for the moment is our friend. They can smell our blood, but we will light the phosphorus with theirs: a special preparation that burns when wet.”
    “How do we see them, then?”
    “That is the trick, and the reason I’m elated to have your sharp ears and eagle eyes by my side, Sir Bobbin. Crossbow up! Listen! They are not specters, they will rustle their scales or hiss as they approach.”
    The silent waiting, with only the sounds of the animals at our backs, seems like half the night. But the stars have hardly moved when the mules and mounts cry out in terror!
    Something unspeakable hangs from the neck of my poor pony Rain. Rising out of the earth, out of the loose sand, is a scaly skull with no ears, four long fangs stabbing into the fleshy underside of the animal’s throat, long curving claws clinging to Rain’s flanks at the end of fleshless arms, and below a less than human chest an undulating serpentine belly buried in the sand. I don’t think, I shoot.
    The dart goes straight and strikes deep into the throat. The monster bursts into flame and so does a circle racing around our camp. The night is suddenly alight with the Wizard’s ring of phosphorescent fire and we see dozens more surrounding us, two caught crossing the ring, shrieking in flaming agony.
    I don’t wait to be told. Immediately I put one bolt after another to my crossbow, cock it with booted heel again and again, and set our attackers afire. The Wizard is having an easier time, sending a dozen fireballs for each of my darts. Soon the monsters get the idea that without surprise, their battle is lost. They begin to get scarce, and not because we are exterminating them.
    “Tend to the animals, Sir Bobbin! The pony must be destroyed!”
    “Destroyed?” I think. “Wasn’t it already killed by that thing?” But no, it’s undead, sucking the life out of one of the mules. Fortunately we had unloaded our beasts as we do at every stop and stacked the water, food and luggage in it’s own dwindling pile. I release the horse and the remaining mule from their bonds and guide them away. Then I must secure them again, frightened as they are. The Wizard must have drugged them, otherwise they should be unmanageable.
    Meanwhile, the pony and infected mule have burst into flames, racing through the ring until they drop in piles of smoking ash without the camp.
    Soon it is just us, horse and mule within the fading ring of light. The Wizard time and time again sends forth a fireball into the carcasses around us: monsters, pony and mule, keeping them afire until there is nothing left to burn.
    “What next, Wizard?”
    “Keep alert! Neither the night nor the battle is half spent.”
    “But I am! What do I do when the darts run out?”
    “Look at your magic bandoleers, Sir Bobbin,” the Wizard chuckles, knowingly.
    Of course I can’t actually look at anything, it’s as dark as the inside of a rat’s ass. But I gingerly feel the shoulder belts, the darts in their places as if I had never thrown a one of them since I had put them in place of the useless knives now in the sand.
    “Give me your fire-powder then, too!’
    “Whatever for?”
    “I’ll put that into these marvelous belts so it will never run out.”
    “No fear of that! I can conjure more as needed.”
    “We’re all right, then?”
    “Victims only of surprise. Listen!” he shushes.
    “What’s to protect the animals?”
    “Only us!”
    I can’t say I’m reassured, but he has cured my feeling of panic. The Wizard places a new ring around the hooves of our remaining beasts and around the whole camp. We were as secure as we could make ourselves.
    As soon as the last of the red-glowing coals of the carcasses go cold we stand again back to back. “Watch! Now, they’re coming in again,” warns the Wizard.
    And as suddenly as the snap of a crossbow four fangs appear in front of my face. My finger moved itself on the trigger of the bow and all is alight again. I kill three more going after the horse and mule and we suffer no more casualties. They burn best when you shoot straight into their mouths open before you, but one between the shoulder blades makes them dance.
    We battle all night, and dawn greets us with a vision of hell, a hundred smoldering piles of hot ash in a vacant valley of sand and crumbling stones in what must surely have been the walls of a city’s houses around a pyramid like that at the Capitol.
    This pyramid was a ruin of it’s former self, though. As much as the tumbled squares of stone at it’s feet. Just a mound of terraced stones, the facing seems to have sloughed off leaving only the bones of this corpse of a monument. But even when it was new it was not as elaborate as our pyramid at home: no colonnade, no stairway to heaven, only one entrance in sight, rather a pyramid’s bones with the best part lost to age.
    “We attack, Sir Bobbin. To the lair!”
    I was afraid he would say that.
    But first we must secure the surviving horse and mule. We can’t leave them out here to be bitten into vampirism in our absence. What shall we do? The Wizard speaks to his horse, Thunderclap. Then he releases them. They head south, running free.
    “Wizard, you have just stranded us!” I groan seeing them go.
    “They will return. A free stallion and it’s herd in daylight has nothing to fear from any sort of monsters.”
    “I sure hope you’re right.”
    We plunge down into the death-dry vale of sand, I with my Rod-o’-Iron and crossbow, the Wizard looking ferocious with his bandaged sword and handful of fire.
    The stone pile looms before us, dwarfing the sand choked ruins of prehistoric palaces and avenues. We race up the broad street of blowing sand lined with tall spires like squared tree trunks, many still upright like needles but most tumbled into the dust like broken teeth.
    “Look at this, Sir Bobbin!” the Wizard stops in front of a large statue whose face is disfigured into anonymity by wind and sand and time. To either side are broken steps, but at it’s foot are runes which he reads, “‘I am…’ The name is gone. ‘the Immortal, Lord of All. Look upon my works, you who come before me, and despair.’”
    “All his ‘works’ are despair!”
    “Precisely. Onward!”
    With crossbow cocked and loaded, and the Wizard’s fire lit, we race climbing the sand-chocked broken risers on one side of the statue. We are still a long way from the pyramid proper, now lost to view in a maze of flattened palaces. We cannot go directly to the great stone-pile but must piece our way step-by-step over or between the thickly tumbled stones and deep pits of loose swallowing sand.
    We had penetrated to the very heart of the city, where in ages past common folk could not go unchallenged, and challenged we were! Suddenly, a dozen vampire serpents rise out of the sand pits on every side. I have time to release one bolt, but not to reload before I am again assailed. In the light and the heat they are too quick. The Wizard is busy blazing away with his fireballs. I resort to my Rod-o’-Iron.
    I have only to whack them with it to set off the powder, with every stab or slam some of the powder is rubbed off and the fire spreads onto the monsters making them recoil and scream.
    In daylight they are — if possible — more nightmarish than can be believed. From the abdomen down they are snakes. They have human chests but no breasts even though these are vicious long-haired females. Their arms are like jointed snakes, their flashing nails black claws. The faces are noseless — only slits where a nose should be, the eyes dragonish slits. Their mouths are like those of snakes — full of pointed teeth, forked tongue and four long fangs that stretch out from the face as a viper’s does when it bites: two up, two down. The fangs drop acid.
    What we encountered last night must have been the priests, for these are the priestesses. And they are legion! No matter how many hundreds the Wizard flashes with fireballs into undead but inanimate torches, more arrive. Soon the powder on my rod is used up and I must drop it to resort to — what? I end up throwing darts as id they were knives, one after the other, finally able to match the speed of the Wizard’s fireballs, aiming for and getting the mouth opened to bite me almost every time. It’s also good to hit them in the eye. But after an hour’s battle we are left alone.
    “No time to linger, Sir Bobbin! Forward!”
    “Wrong, Sir Wizard! I need to powder my Rod-o’-Iron!”
    “They will be back!” he warns, but respectfully. A Small man with a Rod-o’-Iron gets a lot of respect.
    “And if they reappear I will dart them by hand as before.” My bandoleers have indeed magically refilled themselves.
    “Very well. Allow me, I have the gloves for it. Were the powder to contact bare flesh…”
    “Don’t I know it!” The powder in the darts is sealed off by tallow. Yet still, I am careful to only touch them by their tails. Which is all right, since it’s the same as throwing knives by their handles. In five minutes we are ready. The priestesses have stayed away. Are they tired of the fight? Wouldn’t they want revenge, and to defend their home? They must be planning something for our entertainment.
    We come to the door of the pyramid rearmed and reloaded. Within, the sand diminishes drastically. We walk side by side up a long vast chamber, the roof slanting down either side to the floor. It’s all floor and slanting roof, like an attic in a house but all stone .
    “Triangles, an obsession for the worshippers of Lady Luck,” explains the Wizard as we march into the darkness, the sunlit entrance now far behind us.
    We come to the end. Corridors branch off before us behind and to either side of a vacant dais. “Down to the King’s chamber. Up to the Queen’s.” He stands there staring at it for quite a while. What mental processes occur behind a Wizard’s inscrutable visage I couldn’t imagine. Finally he ominously intones, “We go down.”
    Unlike the Capitol’s pyramid, there is no transept, no crossways of level passage but a ramp to the left up and to the right down. We took the right hand down. Overhead the ceiling is two slanted stones meeting in a peak as in the Audience Chamber behind. Only two choices and not built for much traffic. These stones were meant for only royalty to trod. Down we descend. The Wizard lights our way with a suspended ball of his blue fire.
    After an interminable descent into the bowels of the ground we stand in a charnel house of animated human corpses, another room identical to the Audience Chamber above. They get up and crawl toward us but the Wizard immediately sets them afire. The air that had been rank with rot grows fouler with smoke, the warmed chamber a picture of hell with it’s burning zombies.
    “Enough!” From an even deeper pit ascends the King. In the midst of the flickering red flames consuming his court, he glitters with gold and decayed finery. He drags another after him. A hostage? Both Wizard and I hold fire to see, but I finger a dart at the ready.
    “The Rag Man, I presume?” Whitebeard asks.
    The monster answers, “An unsuitable appellation delivered by arrogant mortals who know no better. But they shall learn! For I, am their Master.”
    “And who is that with you, ‘Master’?”
    Now I from my lower perspective could see the face of the body being dragged by the collar at the Ragman’s side. I answer the Wizard. “It’s Elveson.” Ulysses Elveson, whom we thought we had left safely back in town.
    “And are you yet among the mortal, Elveson? Do you require assistance?”
    “Oh, alive he is, Astrologer Mage, unlike these poor wretches from ages past. As alive as you and he, your accursed familiar. But soon to be alive forevermore!”
    “Oh, really!”
    “And you may watch, before you take the cure yourselves. As you see, I too am quite alive though centuries young. I remain unchanged since the day I first discovered this city.”
    “A ruin,” I scoff.
    “You would be too, little man, after thirty-five centuries!”
    But I had meant him.
    “Yet I invite you both to follow me to my chambers and behold the miracle for yourselves.”
    “A wonder I most earnestly wish to see,” answers the Wizard. “Proceed!”
    Ragman turns on his heel, losing his grip on Elveson momentarily. Elveson rushes forward to grasp the Wizard’s feet. I raise my bow to the vampire’s chest.
    “Hold!” orders the Wizard, his hand in the path of my dart.
    “Save me!” Elveson croaks dryly. “He came the night after you left. He can fly! He spirited me away, dragged me down here. He means to turn the whole of all flesh to be like him! Save us!!”
    “Are you bit? No? Have you drunk anything? Eaten?”
    Elveson shakes his head. “Only meat and water. I’ve been here a week, I had to!”
    The Wizard nods, inscrutable. “Go with him. Do as he says. I will deliver you from this curse.” The vampire’s fence looks up at the Wizard with terror.
    “Come!” commands the Ragman.
    The Wizard pushes Elveson away. He slides down the ramp toward his captor. The Wizard marches forward. Ragman proceeds before us. Elveson and I are caught between vampire and wizard in a sort of parade. After as long a trek as we have had from the Audience Chamber to the Zombie Room we arrive in another chamber — presumably the bottom. Torches light an aisle between twin carpets of writhing snakes, not giant half-human monsters but quite ordinary pit vipers — if you hang out in places where pit vipers are ordinary! Merely instantly deadly by their bite, ordinary pit vipers would not turn you into a zombie like those Priestesses and priests above! Beyond the snakes to either side are stone sarcophagi with bars along their sides. The snakes crawl in, the snakes crawl out, the snakes crawl all over the mummies rattling about within, trying to get out.
    Ragman seizes Elveson by the collar and throws him into the snakes. He screams at once — he is instantly bitten — but he gets up and rushes back to the light, pulling the snakes from him.
    “I thought you were going to save me!” Elveson rages at my Wizard.
    “You ate and drank. You were already his,” Whitebeard shrugs. “Bobbin, kill him!”
    I let loose a bolt into Elveson’s eye as I had promised and he instantly burns. Without wasting a blink the Wizard has fire-balled Ragman and both vampires spread the fire through the chamber to the snakes, racing around like undead torches.
    “Flee!” After knocking one oil-filled torchiere into another and another, the Wizard turns and I’m on his heels racing up the ramp. Back through the now still Zombie Room, soon we are back in the Audience Chamber, but we don’t stop there.
    “All right! Done!” I turn toward the sunlight.
    “Not entirely!” But the Wizard goes to the opening of the upward shaft. “Up this way, Sir Bobbin! We must destroy the High Priestess and her court as well.”
    “The what?” In dismay I turn my back once again upon the sunlight.
    “I told you he was breeding them! He has had centuries to try different ways. He has somehow combined viper and human flesh in these monsters he sent to waylay us outside. You saw the gender of those we fought on the platform today. They can yet raise cockatrices like chickens, more of their own sex without even the males we destroyed last night. We must destroy the mature females to prevent this evil from spreading!”
    We come out into a vast pyramidal chamber, the heart of this perversity, the center of the stone-pile. It’s full of the serpent-women, including one giant — dragon size — curled up in the middle. She has wings! They hiss at us. It’s sunlit from many openings to the outside, the floor strewn with rubble from these crumbling stones.
    “Behold, the Queen’s chamber!” intones the Wizard.
    Ragman’s harem? Like the Wizard said, he had to have gotten human flesh from somewhere, why not from between his own legs? But how could he copulate with a viper in the first place? Some complicated breeding to create a companion for himself? Live captives forced like Elveson to eat dust and crawl on their bellies? We shall never know. Or wish to know, really!
    From the doorway we saw the monsters crawl in and out of holes in the vast floor and the soaring pyramidal roof. The serpent-women crawl in, the serpent-women crawl out. When they have all gathered protectively about their mother, Whitebeard says, “Have at them, Bobbin!” We open fire with darts and fireballs.
    The small ones die easily enough, my darts piercing even their scaly backs. Apparently this is the immature form. But the armored scales of the giant serpent-woman seems impervious even to the Wizard’s fireballs. She, at least, is more dragon than vampire. As her flaming progeny fall around her across the chamber or near us at the door as they try to attack, she sheds his blasts and my darts like rain and crawls persistently toward us.
    “Your rod, Sir Bobbin, use your mighty rod!”
    I pull it from my pack and stand it in a crack in the stone sill that we defend all the while the Wizard continues to firebomb the remaining monsters, but one.
    It’s above us. It has fangs longer than Whitebeard’s long sword. I tilt up my Rod-o’-Iron and thrust, all the while keeping in mind the crack in the floor to retreat to. There are two explosions, and the giant human-headed serpent — the High Priestess of Ragman — is burning. She drops, and I look to the pointed heel of my rod to make sure it digs into that precious crack. It does, and I retreat into the corridor.
    The Wizard is already there, his sword flaming in the giant serpent-woman’s blood. “I got her in the eye. You were right, it is a good place to poke them. Leave it, Sir Bobbin. I expect our battle is done. Even if any survive, you have your darts and crossbow.
    The trusty Rod-o’-Iron — that Capitol horse hitch — is buried in the middle of an inferno. I cannot help but agree. We race back down the ramp stopping at the Audience Chamber. The Wizard takes out his bottle of fire-powder — which to my eyes seems to magically refill every time he places it back in his cloak — and throws it up the ramp where it bursts in a red cloud of certain inferno to any flesh — human or scaly — that might try to pass that way. He takes out what looks like the exact same bottle again and throws it a second time down the descending corridor with the same effect. And after we exit into the sunlight he empties the bottle a third time on the threshold.
    No monsters appear in our crossing of the ‘palaces’ surrounding the pyramid. There is no opposition to our leaving and soon we are out in the desert.

South by Southeast
    Ascending out of the smoking pit we behold our campsite. I perceive it has also been smoking. Behind us black smoke columns up out of numerous holes unnoticed before in the pyramid’s sides. But likewise wisps of smoke rise from where we left our luggage — and our food and water.
    “We have had visitors,” the Wizard sighs.
    Climbing back up on the southern rim of the dead city, we find seven of the male vampire-serpents had attempted to raid our supplies and were turned back by the Wizard’s ring of red powder. But an eighth had mad it through, dying on the casks and bags and setting some of them alight. The pile had stopped burning, the monsters were char, and the red powder remained dangerous, though scattered.
    “Careful, Sir Bobbin, there may be more!” warns the Wizard. I have crossbow in hand, cocked and loaded.
    And indeed, there had been a ninth and a tenth. Already char, they had tried to crawl under the powder on the sand to sink their fangs and claws into our water casks before the Wizard’s poison had reached their scales and set them alight.
    The Wizard steps gingerly over his lethal line and kicks away the corpses of the charred monsters before he begins to pull apart the wreckage of our food and clothes to get at the most precious water underneath.
    “Good news, Sir Bobbin! There is some left. Let us carry only the water, we shall drag them on our cloaks…”
    “The oats? Burned! The clothes? Burned! The tent cloth? Burned! How shall we protect ourselves? And where is the horse and mule?”
    “Be calm, Sir Bobbin, we are heading directly south. It will be a shorter journey by a day or two. And there are desert creatures only a day away. It will be easy to catch up to the beasts, I instructed Thunderclap to await us out there. And we succeeded, Bobbin, we saved the world from a terrible fate!”
    “Like Ol’ Freddy, saved the world but not able to enjoy it. Well, it won’t be the first time I died. I’ve drowned, I might as well die of thirst. But it won’t be pretty!”
    “This part of the religion of your people, Sir Bobbin, I find intriguing. You must tell me about it. Who is this ‘Freddy’ and how dying again and again?”
    “You couldn’t understand.”
    “Try me.”
    So after we load our cloaks with what oats as can be salvaged — toasted, but not char. Not bad, when you have nothing else to put between your teeth — and the remaining water — a third of our supply lost — I begin to recite to him the history of my world as well as my personal history in details, even as I related it here to this point. We are miles away south on the dunes when I finish.
    “Amazing, ‘Zam Bobbinzez’,” he emphasizes the ‘s’ to make up for omitting it for so long. “You are being summoned, by who or what I can’t say. Perhaps this ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’? Though I should fear anything that could raise the dead, after what we just saw.”
    “I can’t see I’ll ever get any good of it, Merry’s body is far and lost to me. He’d have to do more than undo our deaths! I wonder, when other blokes die does he appear in another world? Or am I somehow special? And when he dies in that second world, does he appear in a third? And on and on? For how long?”
    “I can’t see it happening every day, Sir Bobbinzez. You are the only man I’ve ever met who claims to have died in one world and appeared in another. This is what I mean by saying you’re being summoned. These many lives of yours, short though each is…”
    “This is the longest I’ve stayed anywhere since home!”
    “… Are a promise and a foretaste of eventual success! If ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’ can do what you tell me he has done, he can restore you to your wife.”
    “I hope you’re right, Sir Wizard, but I honestly don’t see how. I seem to be getting farther and farther away from home, pulled to stranger and stranger places!”
    “Ah! Success again, Sir Bobbin! Thunderclap has found us, and there has been a resurrection from the dead among us!”
    “Huh?!” The horse had indeed reappeared. And behind him follow not one but two mules, one of the water mules having survived and rejoined us.
    The rest of that day we race in the hot sun across the sand. ‘Raced’ is an exaggeration. After feeding and watering all three animals well, we rode. Mules don’t gallop especially fast, and this was no gallop. The dunes slow us down but we keep ourselves and our animals — one mule for the water and rump-end of the food — well watered and travel quickly but safely south. We keep moving, riding into the night. Thirst kept all five of us awake and by dawn we are beyond the last of the dunes.
    In two days trotting through the cactus and rattlesnakes we are down to four casks.
    In four days we had but two half-empty casks left, keeping one behind each of us, and release the extra mule to follow or not as it would. It followed.
    Then even those casks are dry, and still the desert stretches on in front of us.
    What is it like to die of thirst? It’s beyond being thirsty, constantly thinking of water. It’s not being able to think clearly at all! It’s not being able to trust your own desiccated body. I feel as I am dust. I try to recall as we bump along the times I’ve drowned, when I felt like a drop in the ocean myself, dissolved in endless water, though I know I cannot believe there ever was or could be so much water or that it could actually be undrinkable. I know I would try to swallow an ocean now! I only want enough for my mouth to contain, which seems impossible enough. Somehow I stay in the saddle, in fact it was this mule which saved me. He just went on and on. I could not have continued on my own.
    Thunderclap did even better. Not only did he obediently, placidly, go on and on across trackless, waterless desolation, stopping only for grazing and the rare desert fruit, but he went and found water! The Wizard and I had been living on the blood of snakes and birds, I’m sorry to admit, but on the sixth day after the burning of the pyramid and of our campsite, Thunderclap led the mules and us to a muddy pool. The five of us — people and animals — crawl to the water. It was a moldy green, obviously left early that day by a rain that didn’t reach us. Had I seen it in the road any other week of my life I would have shied my pony from it and not even let it soil my mount’s hooves. As it was, I plunged my face into the pool and sucked the muck into my belly greedily. I was going to be sick, but I was going to live!
    Hours later we rested beside an irrigation ditch, having drank and washed from a somewhat cleaner source.
    “We did it, Sir Bobbin! We fought the devil and got away to tell the tale. And won! Our path is open and unobstructed before us.”
    “Never again! Never again will I go with you on one of your mad adventures. I want to get back to my apartment in the palace and spend a week in a bathtub. After I drank it cold and refilled it hot!”
    “A bathtub is before you in town. We shall message ahead by mirror to Her Majesty and tell Her of our success. We will also inform the local authorities of the hazards in the ruins a week north. Then we must get you another pony, and us both another kit…”
    “Get another mule, I shall ride this faithful beast until journey’s end.”
    “As you wish. We do indeed have a long road before us, and new labors at the other end. Your stories fascinate me, particularly those of the giants’ land beyond the Mirror.”
    “I’m certainly not going back among those giant rats!” I’m suddenly on my feet.
    “No, that’s not what I had in mind. But think, Sir Bobbin, what might it be like to fly over the wilderness! Ragman flew and beat us to town and back by many days.”
    “Fly? You mean drop like a stone, splattering your skull like an egg dropped onto a kitchen floor. What goes up must come down, Sir Wizard! Usually hard!”
    “There is danger, certainly… But if it could be done successfully?”
    “I’ll keep my toes planted firmly in the earth, thank you very much.”
    “In any case I will be keeping my ‘toes’ in my laboratory for many days. I have some ideas I would like to try out.”
    “What of the pyramid in the City?”
    “What of it? I expect you shall find it mostly deserted. There will always be gambling and prostitution, though far less of both without government subsidizing and encouraging it. There have always been a few pious people who faithfully believe that chance and the goddess of impersonal randomness is how the nature behind things actually works, beyond all reason to the contrary. Just as my sect’s grove continued to operate in the city throughout all the dynasty of the Lucky Kings, so will now the pyramid continue.”
    “There’s a Star Chamber in the City?” I recall the chapel at Nora’s stepfather’s castle, where her brothers Barney and Barry remain.
    “Certainly. Quite a large grove, in fact.”
    “What has been going on there?”
    “The practice of Astrology, cremation of the dead, feeding the poor and sheltering the homeless. Same as ever, but quietly, so as not to draw attention to themselves or threaten the State Religion.”
    “But now the State Religion…”
    “Is mine. It will be the Grove that is crowded, after it’s refurbishment, and the pyramid will appear abandoned, though carrying on quietly.”
    “Looking to make more vampires!”
    “No. That was the perversion of a few. Game playing and casual sex is quite enough for them, and that kept indoors and on the sly.”
    “Still, they bear watching!”
    “Leaderless? Impoverished? I think the Palace and the Grove will be able to keep them in their place. Please understand, Sir Bobbinzez, while I consider the faith of half my countrymen to be utter foolishness, I do consider them to be otherwise people of average intelligence and perception. They are not out to make trouble.”
    We came into the town from which Arrowarche had bought his two chests of dust and ashes and Elveson had first dealt with then been abducted by a vampire like two bums and stop first at the local constabulary.
    Of course they remember us from two weeks before and gave us every assistance. As it was noon by then they took us up to their watchtower where there was a huge mirror. An operator sent our messages, to the Queen and to the bankers in the Capitol. By one we had our answer and descend with the appropriate forms to the local bank, a promise to pay on the account of Whitebeard of Rockwood in southmarch all we needed. I will repay the wizard my share when we get home. It’s amazing how they could communicate just with long and short flashes of mirrored sunlight or firelight over the whole length of their narrow country.
    After the bankers came the provisioners: fresh clothes on our backs and bags carrying a change, another mule, a saddle for me — saddles are as much for the beast’s comfort as for the rider’s — and supplies for the journey home. Then the inn: that long bath, cold beer which is better than cold bath water any day, a good meal, and a stay overnight in fresh decent linen before beginning our long road west.
    I rode the spare mule that saved my dried-out then restored hide all the way back to the Palace stables. I kept using ‘Dusty’ after all we had been through together, and he kept on in his mulish ways. He didn’t mind the sugar cubes I occasionally stole for him from the Queen’s tea, and his company seemed to suit my mood.
    The pyramid had indeed declined in our absence and would continue to fade henceforth. The Wizard would indeed secret himself away in his rooms for a month while Nora the Queen became daily more beautiful and terrible and great and fair in Her Sovereignty. I had the leisure to think many hard thoughts, and hoping vaguely for hope went out the North gate of the Palace to the Grove of the Seven Sisters to see what I might see and inquire of what might be learned.
    It was somewhat run down, but in a grand, mellow way. The oaks needed pruning, the grass mowed. The low cabins of the wizards and witches needed their roofs patched and walls re-plastered, to say nothing of new doors and windows. But all this was already in the process of being done, carpenters and masons busy all over the vast garden compound. Still, it would take a while.
    They served a decent bread and stew, thick and rich in vegetables they grew themselves but light on the meat. The same crowd that used to mooch off the Pyramid now bellied-up here, since it got around that Pyramid food was poisoned by dragon dust. I put a coin in their common breadbasket after I took a loaf from it, one of the few who did pay. I sat with a pair of their witches who found me a curiosity. And I asked my question.
    “Where is, ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’?”
    “There are those among us who speak to the dead, but only to their own dead. Necromancy is not allowed among us. You must let the dead rest and go on with your own life as best you may,” answers the older of the two, a pleasant, ancient, grand-motherly wood elf.
    Her advice did not sit well with me. “To do what? Just carry on without love, without purpose year after year?” Something within me raged hotly against the idea.
    “There is more to love than marriage, more meaning in living than progeny. There is love of the common good, your service to our Queen, the public work,” answers the other, a middle-aged woman who is — I notice — no one’s mother.
    “My Merry’s spirit came to me asking me to find this being, and yet here I am stuck in your country. I don’t know how to carry on! Oh, sure, it’s fine enough. Couldn’t ask for a finer situation, a better job, but I must find some way to follow my quest and get back to where I should have been all along!” There were hot tears streaming from my eyes.
    “Or find peace. Be patient until what summons you leads you on to the next step.”
    “Patience, you say! No matter how many years I must wait here? I suppose you’re talking sense, but it rankles so! Me fed and fine while my beloved lies mouldering in a grave?”
    I attend to the brown wheat loaf and herb-flavored stew. It’s certainly an improvement on cactus and rattlesnake, but it is lonely in the City.

His Tenth Adventure:
Sam Bobbins’ Fair Lady

The Balloon
    The brilliant yellow sun glares down out of a pale blue sky. It’s eclipsed by a huge dark vessel straining at it’s moorings like a hovering dragon anxious to be off, the boat-size basket slowly rising off the ground. I look up at the white-haired mage in the basket.
    “How high today, Wizard?”
    “Not height today, Sir Bobbin, but distance! I intend to supper in my own tower this evening.”
    “But that’s a week’s journey with regular change of horse!”
    “Yet with a favorable wind, if the mechanism holds, I will make it in as many hours through the air as days it would take on the ground.”
    “I would like with all my heart to join you! But alas the Queen requires a report from me on your progress.”
    “I would be grateful for your company, but rather observe my departure and tell Her Majesty of my cargo and of my flight.”
    The wood Elves have extensive lakes and rivers, so sailing is not unknown to them. In the bow quarter — just as on their river boats — goats, cows, pigs and geese. Dividing the bow from the rest of the gondola is a wall of hay that would be welcome in the South, then sacks of grain stacked aft of the hay, wooden crates of goods to keep the rest in place, and in the last quarter the controls of the vessel and personal effects of the Wizard himself.
    “I shall rise into the wind, unfurl the sail wings and let them carry me south. The tail-wing will steer me,” Whitebeard explains.
    “This is far greater than any magic I’ve seen you do yet! To become a bird, and such a bird as to lift the burdens of several wagons! Why, with ships like this we will not need roads,” I rave.
    “I don’t become a bird, Sir Bobbin, I only direct a hydrogen-filled vessel that imitates a bird. And we will always need roads. Do you think every cottager will have one of these to all descend upon market day together? Road travel may be slower, but it’s sure to be safer.”
    “Safer? No band
    “Your tales of the place behind the Mirror led me to invent this.”
    “I never actually saw one of their airplanes up close, only images in a magic-box from afar. But they weren’t like this! The wings didn’t fold, and I don’t think the bodies were full of gas. They looked to be made of metal. They had windows and people rode in them. And smoke came from the wings.”
    “The only thing lighter than lifting gas is fire itself. Those people have some way to carry their fire and release it as needed. I don’t understand it, but surely if the wings carry fire, that must be why their airships must be made of metal. For us, oilcloth balloons and lifting gas will suffice.”
    “Then the best of Luck and the Seven Stars go with you, Whitebeard!”
    “The sisters will suffice, along with a knowledge of my ship and a fair wind. All that I require is that it not be entirely against me.”
    “Then may you have a just wind, balanced like an honest merchant’s scales!”
    “That would get me home. Release the ropes!” he calls to his attendants.
    First the front pair are untied. The bow rises into the air. As the two boys running through the field under the rising airship free each rope, the nose climbs a great deal faster than the still secured stern. His menagerie slipping on the slanting deck cries out in fright, mooing, oinking and baaing. Finally they release the tail ropes that fall to either side of the rudder. The majestic ship shoots into the air like a cork out of a bottle of bubbly wine with the Wizard at it’s tiller.
    I with hand shading my eyes stand beside the boys my size watching him grow smaller and smaller while far above us the ship sprouts wings, long horizontal batwings from amidships on the basket and a vertical fan from the rudder of the tiller. It turns to the south and drifts away. I ‘good day’ the boys, get back on my mule Dusty and return to the Palace.
    The City itself is a very different place from the one I entered with the bridal party over a year before. The Grove of the Seven Sisters is busy, once abandoned by the previous administration and their toadies, now it’s loud with both construction and worshipers. Since the burial of the Old King fifteen months ago, the coronation post-mortem and immediate burial of the young ‘king’, the Pyramid of Luck is more tomb than center of society. Of course it didn’t help them that two months ago they were discovered trying to turn us all into drug-slaved vampires.
    The children are absent from the streets for most of the day, sequestered in the new schools which take the moneys formerly spent on public amusements. Likewise many men and quite a few of the otherwise unengaged women are in the new Wizardry Colleges uncovering mysteries of anatomy, astronomy, chemistry and physics. The city I ride through is both cleaner as wives whose husbands are off working gossip on the streets over their children while their children are busy learning and quieter while a steady hum comes from the new factories. Looms produce new cloth, machinists cobble everything from kitchen utensils to surgeons’ tools, and carriage makers assemble every different sort of chariot and freight wagon. Yes, a very different city indeed.
    It’s three days before I see the Wizard again. “However do you come down again?” Nora asks him at her council table in her Capitol’s Palace.
    “I vent. The gas seeks to rise upward. But I have a hand pump rigged to a hose in the balloon. When I reach the sky over my destination, I winch back the wings to their closed position which brings me to a stop, suspended in air. Then I pump out the gas while the balloon slowly gently descends. I throw the ropes out and my boys winch me down until the ship touches earth. Of course I require helpers on the ground to land the ship safely.”
    “A most extraordinary odyssey!” the Minister of Manufactures exclaims.
    “People want to know when it will be ready to carry their goods?” asks the Minister of Commerce.
    “Oh, my ship will never be used for trade,” the Wizard made a gesture of declining Commerce’s offer.
    “What?!” exclaims Commerce, looking almost violently offended.
    “Whatever do you mean?” wonders Transportation. “You’ve talked for weeks of nothing else than how this will improve travel and trade.”
    “My ship is a prototype. I’ve learned much from it. But an improved version must now be put into production, and chemists must build in each village factories to manufacture lifting gas to fuel these ships. Have the town criers announce throughout the Queendom the formation of companies to operate ships, make gas, winch them down, cart the goods to market, and all else needed to make transport by air a reality. As for my own ship, I intend to outfit it for a trip over the Mountains.”
    “The Mountains! Can I come along?” I leap onto my chair out of a light doze on my excitement. This my be my chance to get on with my quest.
    “Of course, Sir Bobbin,” he gestures me to sit.
    But the Minister of Diplomacy scolds, “A journey outside the bounds of the Dominion is a matter of State. And do we really want the people over the Southern Snowcaps — if any — to know we are here?”
    “I second the Minister of Diplomacy’s sentiment,” the Minister of Commerce speaks up.
    “How typical of you, Whitebeard, to start something and leave it unfinished!” the Queen scolds. But she is grinning.
    “Firstly, we don’t know who or what might exist over the Mountains. There may be dragons! Flying dragons that will follow you back! Secondly…” Diplomacy continues.
    “Secondly,” Whitebeard interrupts, “to discover what resources or threats exist over there is a task for Wizardry. Thirdly… Well, there is no thirdly. I am only going to look and — if possible — come right back. We have no way to cross on foot or horse and no way to get landing gear to them. If any ‘Them’ exist! Nor can we talk to them, were we to even know their language which I’m sure we could not.”
    “Thirdly,” the Minister of Transportation speaks up, “To follow Whitebeard’s train of thought, it’s obvious even to me that if there are dragons beyond the edge of our map, they would have found us by now.”
    “If they had been looking!” Diplomacy scowls. “We can only hope there isn’t!”
    “I’m in favor of Wizard Whitebeard of Rockwood undertaking this dangerous venture. He has proven himself capable of dealing with dragons and worse. Moreover, we will begin to utilize his great invention for air transport as he has laid out. Allowing him use of his ship which here christen, ‘Typical’ as soon as he has established the necessary works to accomplish this command. If anyone can climb above Snowcaps, he can. And we have no more able and well-traveled knight to watch over him who is able at the same time to appear so unintimidating than Sir Bobbin. They seem to work well together. He shall go along.” Nora decides things for us. “Besides, if we don’t let him go, Sam will leap Snowcaps like he leaps on my furniture in his enthusiasm, and we’ll still need to send the Wizard if only to retrieve him.” The serious council burst out in laughter, me included.

Misty Mountains
    So it happens that an immense cloth warehouse is transformed in a week into a factory assembling airships. Orders come in from each of the villages, wagons take out winches and bring back men to learn piloting and the use of sky sails. Commerce picks up anticipating the new trade routes and soars as one airship after another goes into service freighting wealthy travelers from villages to City and merchants with their goods from City to villages. The population of the Capitol and the numbers of college students climb. Road crime falls off as there are fewer good traveling shorter distances over better guarded roads. It seems to be the dawn of a new era of utopian progress by the time we actually leave on our expedition.
    The yellow fields and green forests stretch in mosaics of soft and fuzzy features. To the north the boxy angular gray of the Capitol can yet be discerned on the horizon. To the east and west the farms and woods seem to go on forever except where they are interrupted by the silvery puddles of lakes and ribbons of rivers to merge with those of neighboring elvish kingdoms. But ahead to the south are the jagged white teeth of the Mountains. There are other ridges, rocks and rises scattered about the countryside, but none are like the Mountains.
    The Mountains begin in forested crests above the cultivated edge of civilization. They climb to stony plateaus with tormented scrub pines and finally to bare windswept passes prone to sudden snowfalls and avalanches even in summer beneath perpetual peaks of ice that collapse suddenly into the passes below. The danger is so great, the rewards so few, even the most intrepid hunters and prospectors never venture beyond timberline.
    I soar with Wizard Whitebeard above all this in our balloon. We had climbed until level with timberline, the batwings and rudder fan is put out and the winds push us steadily south. As we float over the last forested ridge the Wizard releases more gas into the balloon from the casks onboard and the ship climbs to the height of the passes.
    It’s frightful going when the winds refuse to take us through the snowy pass but press the airship closer and closer to the icy peaks. If the wings strike the stone hard blue ice we would lose control. If the balloon is punctured we will fall to our deaths on the icy peaks. I winch back the wings while the Wizard lets still more gas into the balloon. But we can’t go much higher. Already breath comes in shallow gasps, we have headaches and dizziness. Flares and black spots dance in my sight. Worse still, the Wizard points out to me, the fabric at any moment might burst! Already it’s as full as it could be, straining against the seams under it’s covering net of rope.
    But with the wings and tail folded away only the basket flank of gondola drags through the snow, the ship glancing by. We are able to playfully collect some summer snow in a bottle to eventually take back to Nora. Now our attentions turn to the vista no one from the Wizard’s country has ever before seen. We discover more snow peaks beyond the first rank, but smaller. The passes empty into snowfields and the snowfields drain into glaciers. It’s a dismally empty land beneath us. Yet I point out reason for hope: a green band can be glimpsed at the horizon, and beyond that a stretch of blue.
    “Whatever could that be?” asks the Wizard.
    “I think I know! The ice flows down to a forested beach, and breaks off into a sea.”
    “Sea?”
    “A wilderness of water such as I’ve told you about, Sir Wizard, a country of unbroken waves. But there may be people on the shore and islands in the water. I came through countries like that, my own borders one such.”
    We descend a little until we can breath better and with wings outstretched once again sail down the glacier. The ground begins to drop away quickly and we behold the ice break off the end of the glacier into a wide savage river of water clogged with the blue chunks. The valley is full of conifers and the occasional farm house that appears beneath us sending up a thin column of gray cook smoke but otherwise invisible.
    The Wizard lets out a line and hooks the top off a tree bringing up a broken piece of bushy foliage. “Spruce!” I identify. He doesn’t know the tree.
    But there’s clearly habitations on the shore and small boats work the sea beyond. The sea itself is spotted with islands. And those far islands too would be inhabited. The airship has come down to where a dragging rope begins to be snagged in the trees. Seeing this we put out all our drag lines and half retracted the batwings to reduce air speed. Coming over the village at the mouth of the river, eyes look up and fingers point at us as we explorers fully retract wings and rudder and come to a stop.
    “I was afraid of this,” says the Wizard listening over the side with an ear-horn. “They don’t speak normally.”
    “Let me listen,” I take a turn at the long brass cone. “Yes, just as I thought. It’s not Normal, but amazingly it is Shirish. I don’t know how, but they are talking my language!”
    The Wizard stands gaping as that strange little man — me, myself and I — shouts what’s to him alien gibberish through the horn to the people below, then listens to their response. “Have we found your country, Sir Bobbin?” he whispers to me.
    “No! It’s nothing like it. Except in this one fact. That they speak Shirish is no more queer than that you speak the language of the Big Men of my world.” I turn back to the people below, “We’re explorers! No, not magic, it’s full of hot air! We’re here to trade! May we come down to speak to you about trade?!” I turn to the Wizard and say in Normal, “Let some air out of ye ol’ windbag, Sir Wizard, there’s a good fellow.”
    The Wizard cranks a gear irritably and the ship descends. At tree tops the horn is no longer needed. “Hello! I’m Sam Bobbins, Detective. May I introduce you to Wizard Whitebeard. We are a delegation sent by Queen Nora over the Mountains to open trade between our two peoples. Fortunately I speak as you do, but the Wizard can learn, and I can teach you the Wizard’s language.”
    “How does that thing work?” asks one of the feather-crowned trolls wearing more paint than clothes.
    “The Wizard made a flying-air and filled the bag with it.”
    “You mean that whole thing is cotton?”
    “Silk, actually, another more fine-threaded cloth waxed to keep the air in.”
    “We do need more cloth. And I would like to learn about you. You aren’t the same as he, are you?”
    “No. I traveled to the Wizard’s country from yet a third land, where by coincidence we speak as you do and have neighbors that talk like the Wizard.”
    “I’m Chief Storming Eagle, son of Storm Cloud and Mother Fishing Eagle. I’m Headman of this town.”
    I turn and repeat this to the Wizard. I give the names both as the head troll spoke them and in translation, since what they mean seemed significant. He speaks to me, and I back to the head troll.
    “He says he wants to learn. We can come again to trade. We do have a little with us today, just samples of Northern products. We didn’t know if anyone even lived over here. We came this first time mainly to find out.”
    “Would you come down and eat with us?”
    Now trolls have a bad reputation about eating people, as I’m sure you have all heard. So I turn to the Wizard. He too seems unsure at first but then agrees. I’m thinking if we do end up in the pot ourselves that would be a way for me to get on with this stalled quest of mine.
    “Of course. Please pardon our reticence. This is all very new to us, too.”
    “Don’t you have other races where you’re from?”
    “My country does, but the Wizard’s neighbors are all very like him. Do you have different peoples near you?” I’m thinking, one troll’s pretty much like another, but I shall learn this is not the case.
    “On the islands. Each island is different and we often have boats come to shore, intending us either harm or good. We can’t know until they actually stand on the shingle, so we are armed to shoot fire-arrows into the marauders’ boats.”
    “Oh! We don’t mean any harm, but keep fire away from the balloon ship. If the flying gas finds fire, flames will spread over your village as well. And we don’t want to lose our ship or our lives either!”
    By now the gondola has touched down and I’m instructing the trolls how to tie off and secure the drag ropes. The Head Troll and the Elf Wizard clasp hands. They escort us into a large round pyramid of poles and cloth — a tent they call a ‘teepee’ — where we sit on tanned hides and eat cooked fish, rice and vegetables such as were not found in the North. Afterwards the ‘Chief’ takes his guests on a tour of the women weaving cotton out of little tufts inside a bark ‘wigwam’.
    “What animal is this the hair of?” I translate for the Wizard.
    “Animal? Cotton is a plant, those bushes out back, that’s cotton!” The Chief leads us next to his fields. “Do you make cloth from animals?”
    “Yes, sheep make wool and caterpillars make cocoons for silk.”
    “Bugs! That’s horrible!” said one of the women who had followed us.
    “No, this is silk,” I show the woman — a big ugly troll, but I’m polite anyway — my sleeve. “It’s the finest of all fabrics.”
    “It’s nice. But that wool, doesn’t it get smelly? I know our hides do.”
    “No, the hair is washed after it’s taken from the animal. It’s much like cotton, only warmer and dryer.” I show them my cloak.
    “With wool and silk we could hunt higher into the mountains and farther into the seas longer into the year. With ships like yours we could stop the raiders who threaten our coasts.”
    The Wizard suggests through me, “I don’t think airships would ever be any use in war, the fire hazard you see. But may I propose we take students back with us over the mountains?” I am aghast at his liberality, giving away his only advantage so freely, and look for an opportunity to speak privately with him.
    “That’s an idea!” But the ‘Chief’ Troll immediately leaps at this suggestion.
    “We have school to teach our own people these crafts,” I continue to translate, though with a sick feeling in my gut, and for once it wasn’t just the unfamiliar food. “Your scholars may learn then return with airships of their own to transmit the knowledge on to younger people.”
    “Excellent! Would three of us be able to ride back with you in your balloon?”
    “That may just be possible.” The Wizard explains through me, “Though we only barely managed to get over the mountains ourselves, with the empty gas barrels removed and most of what remained pumped into the balloon, five men may just make it.”
    By now we had made a circle back to the balloon to find the ship surrounded by armed trolls each with an arrow notched in his short powerful bow.
    “They are for your protection. Pay no attention to them. We are so often threatened, we have learned to be suspicious in our dealing with strangers, so we want to keep people away from your craft. Some may stupidly resent your being here.”
    “So have me people back in Shireland. We are surrounded by larger and more powerful folk who are slowly assimilating us.”
    “Have you no defense?”
    “We find the best defense is marriage with our larger neighbors. It’s better to be assimilated than exterminated.”
    “That’s something I’m not sure I could do, unless it could be done with honor.”
    “It would hurt less to swallow your pride than your teeth.”
    “That I know I could not do!” he laughed.
    The following day is spent refitting the airship with Troll supplies, samples of their food and weaving, and moving the casks of lifting gas outboard where they may be emptied into the balloon then easily cut away. The boiled fish and rice cakes we take along for sustenance had been cooked by the women that morning into hand-size mounds then wrapped in fragrant cabbage leaves and brought aboard in one of our empty gas casks. Water casks as well need to be cleaned, refilled and refitted and the lines made secure with the set of landing winches brought along to be left at the landing site. Then the balloon is refilled with as much gas as the ropes will hold down, a third of the of our remaining supply. It would be a long visit if the Wizard had to make more at this juncture. Now we are ready for our trip over the Mountains.
    The Troll woman who had followed us out into the cotton fields wept repeatedly on Storming Eagle’s breast at our departure pleading with him not to leave her. He patted her back in a fatherly manner and she collapsed into an embarrassing heap so that the other women had to come and carry her away. His lover? His intended? I didn’t dare ask.
    Finally Chief Storming Eagle introduces to new Trolls to us, “Moondog, and Sundog, just today arrived from my father.”
    Then we were all aboard and ready to go.
    “Cast off the fore!” Whitebeard calls out. Troll boys release first the winches on the bow ropes then running back along both sides of the ascending airship the other levers in turn. I pull in the ropes and crank out the batwings. The Wizard steers with the tiller and catches a breeze in the tail fan that carries us North and home. In fact it seems the air over the river sucks us along as we float north, the breeze climbing with us up into the glacial plain and then into the passes. We would not have to go quite so high this time. It turns out to be easier to enter Nora’s country than to leave it, which has been my personal experience as well.

Trolls over the Mountain
    The three Troll emissaries are calm but fascinated at seeing the glacier they knew from treks on the ground far beneath our feet. They agree with me that the mountain passes are impassable on foot from either side because of the avalanches that invariably take anyone who ventures so high under the frowning brows of the snow peaks. Too frigid in winter, summer temperatures open crevices in the ice and invite snow slides from the higher slopes. As if to verify our words we watch a flurry of slides as we go past. The shamans seem to view the peaks as something spiritual, to each they ascribe a name and describe it’s personality as if it were alive.
    “Are they your gods, then?” asks the Wizard through me.
    “Gods? Certainly not! The habitations of very large, very complex forces, only,” Sundog answers.
    “Demons, then?”
    “No, they are neither good nor bad. They exist for their own purposes and ignore any little creature…” begins the shaman Moondog.
    “Who exist only for a blink of an eye in their unchanging eternity!” Sundog interrupts.
    “ …that happens to crawl into their domain, where they have no business! They care less for us than we do for a flea. They care only about making snow fall from the sky, shoveling their snow onto the glaciers to make ice, and sending that ice down to keep the sea filled.”
    “And at the other end the equally powerful sea is just as unfeeling.”
    “Yet each is so large, so powerful, so temperamental that the nearest parallel is people. They seem to have a will of their own!”
    “Whether they are alive or not,” interject the Chief with a chuckle, “They don’t seem to mind us going over their heads.”
    “Our return north is easier than our first trip over the Mountains. We had to go much higher and were pulled toward the peaks coming south,” Whitebeard says. I must translate at the Trolls’ request.
    Then we are past the peaks and over the high rocky plateaus, coming up on timberline and the wooded ridges descending to the cultivated fields of the North.
    “Amazing!” says Sundog. “You have no sea!”
    After I mediate the Wizard replies, “That’s why we took to the air. But the land is very productive for us.”
    “Our sea is what’s productive for us, but also carries danger. The land is mostly too rocky for crops, but holds plentiful winter game.” He turns his back on us and looks down on the land. “Yet there are so few people for such vast cultivation!”
    “Yes, we’ve suffered through a time of troubles. The former king did nothing for the countryside. Most people have crowded to the City in the center of the land to wrest some sort of existence out of the state.”
    He causes the ship to descend yet further into the traffic lanes used by the suddenly numerous cargo and passenger balloons. I notice a steady flashing of mirrors even at this untimely hour from the regularly spaced watchtowers. “Our return has been noted, Sir Bobbin,” the Wizard whispers. This, unremarked by the Trolls, I do not translate. The Trolls are amazed more by the road traffic below us.
    “What kind of beasts are those? And the roller thing behind them?” asks Moondog.
    “The horses? And wheeled carts?”
    “Now that is truly astounding. You have animals here never seen south of the Mountains. And what a bright idea! We don’t have roads, all travel is by boat on our innumerable lakes and rivers or on foot by pack so people mostly stay near the water. But with beasts and carts we will populate the hinterland!” promises Storming Eagle.
    “We saw some isolated farms in your forests.”
    “Antisocial malcontents! I mean we will construct entire villages with cultivation, connected by your balloons.” Something about this seems ominous to me, but I can’t quite put it into words. Shortly they have more than horses and carts to interest them.
    “How odd it is that a people so able to travel and disperse are drawn by land and even air to gather in one large place,” says Moondog.
    “Yes, indeed! You would expect people who can’t travel would gather in a single place, but it seems to work the other way around,” answers Sundog.
    “Those who can’t easily travel, scatter. Those who can fly, gather all in one place,” reflects Moondog.
    Our progress toward the Capitol and the fact that we have picked up passengers has been reported by signal mirror to observers on every intervening watchtower in Southmarch. So we have a crowd to meet us as we touch the grass in the field near the Palace that the Wizard had left on his trial flight to Rockwood Castle weeks before.
    “Dear friends and countrymen, we have successfully flown over the mountains and returned. There we met our Southern neighbors and found them to be friends! We brought back a delegation…” The Wizard introduces the three shockingly ugly Trolls and describes our voyage. I translate for the Trolls while the Wizard attributes the success of the mission to my fortunate familiarity with the Trollish speech. I dutifully blush, but I can see from the faces in the crowd that most would rather the Wizard had dropped me and the three Trolls onto the glacier and come back alone. Rumor has long had it that the Queen’s diminutive bodyguard is part goblin, part imp, and wholly ugly.
    The Queen is prevented by her dignity from meeting the balloon but she watches from her window and is prepared to greet her guests as the three Trolls are ushered into her throne room. Nora sits and watches as the long-haired dark muscular young man leads the two older men down the long red rug to her dais and stops. He doesn’t kneel as is customary before the throne. He just stares, arms at his sides, the old men behind him standing erect and chin up. How he stared! And Nora stares right back.
    Finally, he speaks, haltingly but clearly the few words he asked me to teach him. “I must thank your servant Sam Bobbins, Great Queen, for instructing me in the language of your people. It is most fortunate that he accompanied your Shaman to visit us.” Well, not every word was Queen’s Normal, but it was understandable!
    “You are welcome, Chief Storming Eagle, to our presence and to be my guest in our home. We expect this to be the beginning of many years of commerce and mutual benefit between our two peoples.”
    “It’s fate that we two must eventually meet. How long could even the most insurmountable barrier have kept us apart? Whether we tunneled under them or you flew over them, still us two must meet, no matter how many lifetimes it took.” He a quick study.
    “You tunnel?” And she is as perceptive as a rabbit or a doe.
    “Yes, we have extensive diggings used during our harsh winters. We have great skill with ice, rock and earth.”
    “We have mines, but they don’t go anywhere, except down.”
    “We also sail.”
    “The Wizard’s messages mentioned that you have whole desolations of water over there.”
    “An many kinds of tribes. Our experience with other peoples has taught us the need for watchfulness. I came here to begin trade with the purpose of purchasing two airships which my shamans will learn to fly. But now that I see your face, I wish to stay, if only that I may gaze upon your beauty.”
    “You’re most flattering, Chief Storming Eagle, I also enjoy your company. You will be the Ambassador from the Sea People, and your wizards will be enrolled to learn all they wish about our industry, commerce and flight.”
    Nora descends from her throne. She sees that he is over a head and a half taller than she is. The Trolls mostly are bigger and heavier than the slender, petite Wood Elves. His upper arm is on a level with her eyes. She wants to touch those shoulders, but does not dare. Instead she presents her hand to the Chief Troll, handshake fashion. “Do you have roses in your country?”
    “Roses? That is a word I do not know.” He wants to embrace this pale little creature of flower-petal skin and corn-silk hair. He would have folded her to his chest wrapping her in his arms, but he did not dare. He wondered what her trifling weight would feel like held against his body.
    “Then I must show you,” she says, leading him by the hand past guards out a side door into her garden. I follow discretely.
    “You have such a wise, quiet and productive country,” I hear the Troll Chief say to my Elf Queen.
    “But it wasn’t always that way. The previous administration had a talent for waste. I only wish to be fair. A liberal generosity in knowledge and the capacity to use it makes commerce grow between peoples and improves the welfare of everyone.”
    “We are habituated to defense, whether against sea raiders in the summer of from snow in the winter.”
    “Can snow be that bad?”
    “Like the high passes. Fishing halts, farming is abandoned, people take refuge in communal dugouts connected by tunnels. Only hunters venture out.”
    “For us, winter is a season of rest and enjoyment. The poor are cared for from the public charity and industry turns indoors. During the summer most workers are out in the fields, but come winter we fashion some or our best ideas into metal, wood and glass.”
    “You live in a happy land. And such flowers!”
    “These are roses.” She sniffs the fragrant pink blooms.
    “You are a rose yourself, the flower of your dominion.”
    She giggled. “Don’t make me blush!” Which she promptly did.
    We could begin trading immediately in cloth were it not for the language barrier. But I mean what I say about you.”
    “I shall have Sir Bobbin instruct my people in your language. He does tend to get underfoot if I give him too much free time. Don’t you, Sam?” I blush behind a bush. “But how will your cloth merchants at home learn your speech? I don’t wish to send you away, after you’ve made such a studious beginning.”
    “I shall send Moondog back with your cloth merchants to help translate and return with a load of students as well as cotton and furs. He will also inform your people of our winter quarters.”
    “Do you think silk and wool will sell well up South?”
    “How can you doubt it? Every man desires beautiful things, to give to a beautiful woman to earn her love as I wish to earn yours.”
    “People must be very much the same regardless of which side of the Mountain they are born on.”
    The Queen and the Chief — a woman and a man — continue like this until the sun goes down and I get very cramp while they discuss trade and industry and both mean far more than they could yet say.
    “Chief Storming Eagle, we shall continue in the morning. My Chamberlain will direct you to your bed.”
    A liveried servant appears and bows.
    “I am most honored to be in your presence, great and fair lady.”
    “Please, call me Nora.”
    “And I am Storm.”

Invasion
    I also taught Moondog and Sundog to speak Normal during our stay south and during the days flying north. After becoming fluent in the language, they progress rapidly in all that is necessary to build, repair and operate airships. Likewise I train a class of young pilots to return to the Troll side of the Mountain with cargos of cloth and manufactured goods. Actually moving the goods and flying the balloons is easy, teaching grown men a foreign language that sounds offensive to their ears is the hard part. From both sides I hear, “Why can’t they learn my language?” Moondog and Sundog help by speaking to the boys between their own lessons in chemistry or flying back and forth across the snow peaks, but mostly it all falls on my shoulders. The Wizard has decided to fly the Great Northern Desert and is preparing for his own expedition, so he is no help.
    Storm is no help either. He and Nora see each other every day. They become very proficient in the language of love. Nora takes to wearing Troll cottons and Storm sports an Elvish silk uniform, a gift from the Queen.
    My friend the Wizard when he is not occupied with preparations for his next expedition has become quite the stallion with the ladies, who are all agog over him and his wonderful flying machine. His balloon which brought the Trolls to the Capitol is often seen floating along seemingly unmanned two hundred feet up, rocking. Seems he’s not anywhere near so old as he gives himself airs. Me, they still look down upon as they would at a dog turd.
    Finally the day comes to bid farewell to the two shamans each in a horse-laden airship heading South. When they do not reappear after two weeks, Storm becomes concerned for their safety.
    But it’s not until Midsummer’s Day that the signals come from Sirs Barry and Bernard at Rockwood Castle. Her childhood home is under siege: by the Trolls! A small army has materialized out of the Rockwood and occupies the few farms and villages between the Mountain and the castle, the inhabitants having fled to the castle.
    “You sent airships to resupply and reinforce my brothers?”
    “Yes, your Majesty, but they were chased off by flaming arrows. Fortunately, none struck either of the ships which dropped water ballast on the rooftops but the castle courtyard where they attempted to land was covered with the burning pricks.”
    “Reinforce by land. How soon can the Capitol Force engage the enemy?”
    “A week, Majesty.”
    “Summon the wizards! We must find a way to break them before that with the airships. And where is the Troll Ambassador?” she glares.
    “Awaiting you in your withdrawing room, Majesty.”
    “That will suffice. Inform me when the wizards are assembled. Is Whitebeard in the City?”
    “No, Your Majesty,” he bows as he backs away. “He has not been heard from since Sun’s Day, a fortnight.”
    “Fine time for that man who’s responsible for all this to be off gallivanting! Captain of the Guard! Meet me at the door to my drawing-room!” I go off with them and shortly Nora appears wearing an adamantine cuirass over northern silks. She opens the door and goes in. We follow.
    “Nora darling! Whatever is amiss? I see all your servants running to and fro like there’s a fire, and they give me no explanation, only dirty looks,” says Chief Storming Eagle standing at the window. He is dressed as a knight in her retinue, speaking her language now fluently, he can hardly be told apart from the Palace Guard, except that his dark complexion and long straight black locks belie his alien origins.
    “Don’t you already know? How could a son know nothing of his father’s intentions?” Nora glares at her lover.
    “My father? Whatever has happened, my Queen?”
    “Don’t you ‘dear’ and ‘darling’ me! To think I loved you! How could I hope to trust you? You will be the ransom I will pay to buy back my country from the invaders. Captain!” Her troops crowd in around her. “Treat him gently. Only remember whose son he is.”
    They lead the Troll away in bonds. “Please, Nora! You must believe me! I know nothing of this! I’m in love with you!” The Troll and his sixteen rough jailers empty the room. I stay behind, hidden in the tapestries as usual.
    A single tear escapes down the cheek of the terrible Queen. The girl within utters a sobbing whisper, “And I you, dear Storm.”
    Later the Queen enters in terrible majesty to give audience to the assembled wizards. They rise before her: the Metallurgist, the Alchemist, the Machinist, the Cartographer and many others all must have their say. Finally, she has hers.
    “Opticaloger, we will begin with you. How did these invaders come to our land unobserved?” Nora lowers herself from pacing into her throne.
    A graybeard carrying a telescope as sign of office rises before her. “Your majesty!” He bows. “We first knew of their presence North of the Mountain after Sirs Bernard and Barimore awoke in the middle of the night to the alarm from the Watch. They signaled us by mirrored torch light that their castle was invested.
    “Later, our airships discovered their base camp above Rockwood. It appears that the two Troll airships have been depositing men and supplies on the rocks above timberline, where there is also a tunnel feeding troops under the Mountain into our land. We have of course recalled our trading ships, but several have not hearkened to the call. We fear they were on the ground and have fallen into the hands of the enemy.”
    “What is the strength of the invading force?”
    “A few thousand, but growing steadily. The Trolls now field several cavalry corps, and there is that tunnel.”
    “We must destroy that tunnel!” the Queen demands.
    “Yes, but how? For now we must break the siege on Rockwood Castle by delivering a superior force to Southmarch Before we lose the entire province. That is underway. But to destroy their means to resupply and rearm? We cannot get close enough yet.”
    Nora could not sleep that night. But then, neither could I. She wanders down and yet farther down underground as if drawn by a magnet. For a sleepy moment I wonder if she is going to visit her Magical Mirror, but no, she has forgotten that entirely as it had achieved her purpose. Soon she is in the corridor outside Storming Eagle’s cell. I hide at the turn of the wall in a dark alcove. No tapestries here! Nora shoos away the guard and once she thinks herself alone calls out to her lover. “Storm! How could you! I trusted you!”
    “Nora! Please believe me, I knew nothing of this.” He’s only inches away from her on the other side of the iron grill of a wooden door bound with iron straps.
    “How can I trust you, when my brothers and my queendom are imperiled by your people?”
    “I want to help in anyway I can. My heart is with you now, Nora.”
    “And what can you do that we can’t do better for ourselves? And how do I know I can trust you to let you leave here?”
    “I could go to my father and speak to him.”
    “To aid him with information about my Capitol!”
    “Do you want me to tell you all I know about my father’s forces? How they fight?”
    “I want you to talk to me. I want us to go back to peaceful trade as we were before!”
    “Is trade all there is between us, Nora? You know it isn’t. But there is peace! Peace between you and me. I cannot answer for my father’s actions. But you recall I did tell you we are skilled tunnelers. By now there are tunnels from the coast into Rockwood. With the airships, he has the entire nation behind him. Yet he must watch his back and be ready to defend our shores. And we are not a kingdom, Nora. My father was elected by the people, as was I to govern my village. His continuance in office is dependent on the good will of the populace, and there are always those who think they can do a better job. So his attention is divided. Does that help you?”
    “I don’t know. I shall pass on all you’ve told me to my staff. Here too, I am dependent upon the good will of my people, and look to others to actually implement my decisions. But did you come here, did you court me, only so I would be distracted while your father attacked us?”
    “I came to explore. I stayed because I discovered you. I want to marry you, Nora.”
    “Why, so you can rule us with me as your figurehead?”
    “No! This is your country. I want us to make a home together. Governing is your concern. I would be your consort, never your king.”
    “I like you, Storm. I even dare to say I love you! But only if I could again trust you after this!” She leaves him to his cold cell.
    The first blood between the two armies goes entirely to the unarmored, lightly horsed Trolls hiding scattered in the woods along either side of the road through Southmarch. The Elvish Knights in glittering panoply ride noisily in a solid column down the road until suddenly they are showered with arrows from every direction. They don’t know what to shoot at. Nora’s bloodied troops are routed instantly.
    “Don’t let them see you, Nora, your armored knights are beacons showing the position of your army.” Storm nightly instructs the young Queen who turns out to be a quick study as a general of armies. “Cover the shiny metal with dull natural materials like grass, mud and leaves to appear as part of the landscape. And don’t travel on the highway or in columns. Scatter along the breadth of the enemy, try to encircle them. Then when they do see you, leap onto your horses and run down their lines. You are better horsemen than we are. We are better archers.”
    From then the Elves attack the Trolls with stealth and woodcraft. The common farmer proves a better soldier against the invaders than the clumsy armored nobility. Their society is forever changed by this realization, with the peasants thereafter demanding a voice in the Palace, which they get. In a month’s hard fighting the green-garbed bow and pike men break through and relieve Her brothers.
    With the invaders pushed back all along the front up to the wooded ridges above Rockwood, Nora takes Storming Eagle Her beloved prisoner and teacher to her childhood home to meet her brothers. And for Her to meet Him, the Chief of all Trolls, Storm’s father. Sam Bobbins, myself with the troops, precedes Her Majesty.
    I have followed the lightly horsed farmers armored nobility south as the reformed lines spread like a green tide through woods and fields. I see wounded and dying men from both sides, knights with a thousand arrows sprouting like a forest from their joints. Trolls with their skulls split, farmers laying on their sides with a look of surprise at a single Troll arrow, and always on the horizon the fleeing backs of the invaders dissolving like mist into the countryside.
    My mission has not been to fight but to treat the wounded, talk to the Trolls, find intelligence from the leaders and locate the Chief’s party. Now before the shadowy leaves of Rockwood I have hunted him down and hold him at bay. From under it’s branches a tall-feathered and long-fringed invader walks out into the sunlight and stands waiting for me. I stride forward, not daring to look to my left or right but certain braves crouch to either side of my path in the long grass ready to cut me down should I threaten their Chief of Chiefs.
    “Your Excellency!” I bow. “I bring you greeting from my Queen. She and your son are at the castle ready to talk peace. Will you attend?”
    “You aren’t one of Them, are you? You talk like one of us but look like no one I’ve ever seen. Who are you? What are you?”
    “Sam Bobbins, sir. Since coming from afar into this country, I’ve been the Queen’s bodyguard. By good fortune and coincidence we speak alike.”
    “By Great Spirit, you should say! That’s a big step for such a little fellow! Had someone told me of the like of you, as Moondog and Sundog indeed did tell me, I would have called them liars.”
    “I’ve been with the Queen since before she was Queen.”
    “And what’s my boy doing with your Queen?”
    “Talking peace between the two sides of the Mountain. And, if I may say so, talking marriage between themselves. Your son told me to invite you to join them there tomorrow noon. ‘Bring a party of six braves and yourself to the castle drawbridge at high noon.’ Those are his words. May I return a message to him, Your Excellency?”
    “That’s what he would say. I’ll be there,” he says briskly.
    “Thank you, Your Excellency,” I retreat the requisite ten paces before I turn my back and continue the rest of the way to Elvish lines.
    On the following morning the lawn before the castle is alive once more with a distant line of Trolls, just beyond bow shot. Seven horses move forward. In the center the Great Chief Storm Cloud, Storming Eagle’s sire, sits proudly if uncertainly on the blanket they use instead of a leather saddle. They swing off their mounts like they haven’t been riding long and cross the drawbridge into the castle. Directed by liveried footmen into the keep they come into the Great Hall. There pokerfaced father sees Son, and the Enemy Leader next to him, the terrible Great Queen, just a girl. His son is clasping her hand. At this the Great Chief frowns.
    “Hello, father,” the young man says.
    “Boy, what have you been up to? You sleeping with the Enemy?” he growls like the old troll he is.
    “She knows our language, father! Speak respectfully. This war must stop. Withdraw behind the Mountain.”
    “Nonsense! Our only security has ever been in aggression. And there’s good land here, much better than those mossy rock heaps they call islands. We need to have a presence here.”
    “You have me. And our honest traders, students and merchants. An army cannot hold a people against their will and you have aroused this whole land against us.”
    “We need their machines and their produce. Your brothers fight a rear action off the coast. The pirates are especially bad this year.”
    “The North will help the South. No aggression will come from this land.”
    “How can you promise that?!”
    “Because I will be her consort.”
    The Old Chief’s eyes widen. He had been told as much by me, but there’s nothing like hearing it with your own ears to make it true. Then the poker-face returns. “Well, girl, you can talk for yourself, can’t you?”
    “Indeed I can. We contacted you for trade. You broke faith. My consort your son assists me in the just defense of my land and together we turned back the bulk of your invasion. Return across the Mountain and we will use your tunnel for rail-wagons as well as fly airships. Your youths may come North for schooling. A generation from now our two peoples will be one, equal in skill and joined by blood and commerce. You cannot conquer, and we wouldn’t even try.”
    “So you’re really going to marry him?”
    “Of course, I have loved your son since first we met. Our child will inherit after me.”
    “Well! What do you take me for? I wouldn’t attack my own kin! You will send me an invitation to the wedding before the moon is new?”
    “Yes, father,” Queen and consort answer in one voice.
    The Troll braves return south through the tunnel leaving only a guard at it’s northern entrance. Elvish knights — to relieve their chagrin at failing each single-handily to rout a mess of mere Trolls — camp in the Rockwood within sight of the Troll-tunnel and three weeks later the Great Chief Storm Cloud with Mother Fishing Eagle and an entourage of Troll lords and ladies fly north to Nora’s second, genuine and final wedding in the Grove of the Seven Sisters, a grand feast of thanksgiving for the whole city and both nations, for peace and prosperity.
    I walk afterwards alone to my chamber in a third floor corridor of the Palace that’s covered floor and walls with no end of picture tapestries, decorative rugs showing myths Elves tell their toddlers of fabulous places, exotic people and strange beasts. I am just then patting my belly, tight under my weskit with a ‘fulsome feast’ especially of that strange dry wild bird of the Trolls’ as big as me, the turkey along with it’s gravy and cranberry stuffing. Chuckling at the thought of myself as a roasting stuffed bird, I ignore pictures on the walls that I have seen a hundred times before without incident. I look forward to the Port in my own cabinet and think of the life I will enjoy as the close personal friend of Queen Nora and Prince Storm. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away from my cushy office, now that I am raised to the title of ‘Count Bobbin’, so that even the ladies don’t shudder anymore at my presence.
    “The butterfly winged and spider web gowned little ladies and bug like gentlemen in the tapestries begin to move and hover and whisper. I hear the buzzing of insects over flowers and the scurrying of mice through grass. Birds soar through the tapestry skies on the walls and underfoot in the rugs.
    I think for a moment that perhaps I would forgo more wine. I already feel drunk, dizzy with contentment, as both walls and floor swim and are alive around me, yet only inside the tapestry borders and not on the wall paneling or floor planking or in the tables and chairs along the walls which behave normally. I try to grab a chair arm to steady myself as my foot slips through into the sky in the rug underfoot.
    “Oh, no! Not again!” I realize I’m falling out of this world into another. It’s that old familiar feeling of disorientation and stupefaction, you see. The chair which I hold onto and the side table next to it topples and a brass lamp and other knickknackery: a pair of gewgaws, a bibelot, a bowl of dry trifles, baubles, a gimcrack, curios, a tchotchke, kickshaws and gauds scatter onto the surface of the moving animated rug. These things lay as would be expected on carpeting, but I myself can find no purchase! A pageboy runs to my aid. But he’s too late, still yards away, he watches in astonishment as I disappear into the solid carpet underfoot.

His Eleventh Adventure:
Sam Bobbins Takes a Lesson from the Fairies

The Fall
    I fall! I fall and fall and fall through brilliant blue skies with a dense glistening white snow or fog beneath me. It’s so beautiful I cannot close my eyes, I cry as much with the exquisite gorgeousness of it as with the brutal wind and chilling cold. Then I hit the fog and shake ice off my face and hair. I fall through into overcast skies of puffy clouds above me and green meadows beneath. The ground is coming up fast and I know I don’t have long to live. The world is such a breathtakingly beautiful place, it’s unfortunate that it must be so cruel.
    My Merry! I remember my quest at last, now that all the excitement of wars and parties, funerals and weddings is over for me forever. My Merry Opal was such a beautiful girl, plump right where a girl should be plump, true as the morning sun on your face and loving as a warm summer shower. I regret that we did not have any babies. I regret I did not dig when she told me to dig. If I had done as my mate asked me to none of this would have happened. To heck with tomorrow! We must love all the loving we can love today, and let tomorrow provide for it’s own children.
    Yet I have seen wonderful sights: the sea, the islands, the sunken coral castle. People have been so good to me. Rat provided for me. I realize now Rabbit was only trying to protect me from the mushrooms in his own wonderfully insane way. Catherine and Elizabeth were wonders, surviving the impossible with dignity and keeping their innocence. Ellie and even terrible Mabel found their own way to live on in this cold cruel world — if only for a while. Vickie is as much a wanderer as I am, in her own gigantic magical world. And Nora demonstrated true queenly resilience while staying true to her principles. All wonderful, interesting people! And now it’s over: I hit.
    I awake amid long leafy grass and tall stalky meadow flowers to the sounds of insects buzzing and birds calling. The sun breaks through the parting clouds and shafts of exquisite golden light descend to play among the rolling hills. I feel chilled and realize I am wet. A passing shower is what woke me.
    “Dang! You hit hard!”
    I look up and over my forehead to see a tiny little fellow sitting on the petal of a lily that hangs over me. He’s dressed all in leaves, two blue-green fuzzy leaves cover him front and back as a jacket leaving the limbs bare. He sits with his legs underneath him and his tiny hands grip the edges of his supporting petal. On his head is an even smaller whole flower worn as a purple cap. But his ears are his most distinctive feature, the tips stick out past his shoulders and end in long hairs like antenna. He is so unlike any person I have ever met — he is so beautiful!
    “I’m alive?” I stare up at him.
    “For the moment! Though I don’t see how. Now you just lie quietly. I’m sure you’ll feel it after a bit. If it doesn’t hurt like the dickens already! By the way, how did you get up there?”
    “I slipped on a rug.”
    “I suggest staying off flying carpets in the future, if there is any future for the likes of you, they sound pretty dangerous.”
    “It wasn’t like that. Though in a manner of speaking I did have the rug pulled out from under me. Where am I?”
    “Laying on the ground, I shouldn’t wonder.”
    “Yes, of course, but where is this place?”
    “It’s right here, between this lily and that daisy way over there on the horizon where it was pushed up by your feet. Beyond that, I can’t say. You pretty much crowd out all the scenery.”
    “Sorry. I guess you wouldn’t know the way to the nearest town?”
    “I hear tell there’s prairie dogs over the next hill, but what you want with them I couldn’t tell.”
    “I guess I’ll have to find my own way.” I think to get up but find I can’t move a muscle past my neck. I’m quite thoroughly planted where I am.
    “Don’t bother getting up! I’ll go get some nymphs I know, they’ll want to see you!” He leaps off his petal and is gone.
    I lay there looking up at the perfect blue sky, so thankful it’s not raining. If I stay here long enough, I’ll grow flowers myself. Is this what it’s like to be dead? To just lie there, perfectly conscious of what’s happening around you, but utterly incapable of moving a muscle to effect it? Maybe I’ll just lie here rotting until I’m an inseparable part of the meadow, communing with the pansies and gazing upon the nymphs while daisies push up through what was once me?
    “We’re back! How are we doing?” says the same pansy as before, sitting now on my nose.
    “Oh! He’s so big!” A tiny lady comes fluttering into view. She’s dressed in a negligee of filmy spider’s gauze, her thin little tiny body visible in the sunlight that goes straight through it. Where ever did he come from?”
    “He fell off a cloud, slipped on a rug, or so he claims,” my pansy friend explains gaily.
    The reason for his being gay soon became apparent. More of the fluttering naked girls just his size arrive, each thinner and more flighty than the last, fawning over him, each one perfectly human except for their shimmering blur of wings and entirely nude except for a filmy gauze of spider’s silk that hides nothing. The ladies chatter and giggle around me. Refreshments appear.
    “Is he quite safe?” a nymph asks.
    “He hasn’t made a move yet!” my pansy gaily toasts, raising up his buttercup of nectar.
    “It so rare to find one alive who’s quite safe!” a nymph nods.
    But another mopes, “Whatever shall we do!”
    “Be patient! He’ll provide a lot of business for a certain line of work if he doesn’t get up soon,” another answers her.
    “Carry out?”
    “Carrion, it’s called, dear.”
    “How positively dreadful!” she claps her tiny hands and does a cheerful little dance.
    “I thought you girls would like to watch!” Maybe my concerned pansy is no friend after all.
    “You know, I can’t just lie here. Could someone go get me some help, send for a physician, perhaps?”
    “We don’t know of any, my friend. You’ll just have to get up and get it for yourself.”
    “I would if I could…”
    “But you can’t and we won’t!” He selling tickets now as more fairies arrive.
    “That’s not very neighborly!”
    “Look, if you do get up you will certainly step on some of us. If we knew where to find others like you, and if we could bring them here, a whole mess of you would surely turn our lovely meadow into mud and ruin,” says the pansy.
    “And you certainly killed fairies when you hit the ground, so as a convicted criminal you deserve to rot,” adds a pretty little nymph.
    “That was an accident!” I insist.
    “A likely story! All you criminal types say they’re innocent,” my pansy gaily snickers.
    “Now hurry up and rot!” adds a nymph. “We want to see some action!”
    “I thought fairies are supposed to be so good and gentle and kind, bowing your heads to the rain until the cloud passes by?” I also had listened to the Wood Elves’ fantasies.
    “What a mound of cow flop!” My pansy laughs hysterically.
    “He does have a point there,” responds a nymph. “We simply must keep it light, keep it fun, keep it gay!”
    “That’s fine for you, but if I could sting the rotter dead, I would!” My pansy friend jabs me with a thorn, but I don’t feel it. “I know of fairies that used to live on a daffodil over there. And he’s sitting on them!” My faith in faerie meekness vanishes. Now that I’ve met them, I know they are not so much gentle as incapable of acting upon their anger.
    “What say if we could round up some mice, have them burrow out underneath him, we might recover your neighbors alive!” a faerie nymph claps her hands and dances exuberantly on my cheek in her excitement.
    “Excellent! And that would speed up the dissolution!” Another nymph claps and dances with her, hand in hand, mirror images of each other.
    “That sounds like an awful lot of work!” the pansy complains, for an instant almost sober.
    “Only for the mice,” a nymph explains.
    “They’ll want something for their trouble.”
    “They’re mice, for them, digging is it’s own reward.”
    “Hey! I don’t want no nasty rodents crawling all over me!” I demand — if ineffectually.
    ‘They won’t be over you, they’ll be under you. And if you don’t like it, just get up and leave. But we have to rescue our neighborhood and provide disaster relief!”
    They leap away, leaving me along to worry. ‘I’m in for it now’, I think, ‘eaten alive by thousands of tiny gnawing teeth while all I can do is just lie here and rot.’
    It’s too soon that I hear the scrambling of many tiny feet, the squeaking of their tiny mousy voices and the directions of their pansy overseer and nymphet cheerleaders.
    “No, no time to eat through! You can do that later. People are smothering under there! Just dig through the grass and soil and get them out. After you have tunneled all underneath him you may use the carrion as nest for your young or whatever you want to do with him.” He is interrupted by the squeaking of mousy voices. He answers, “Yes, I realize that! But time is of the essence!”
    I can visualize the scurrying of hundreds of tiny diggers beneath me creating catacombs as refuge from martyring cats, burrows through the mud to get out of the rain, and one, two and three bedroom condominium apartments under me with shopping in my hair and restaurants in my trousers serving Sam Bobbins three times daily as well as school and temples underneath my armpits. It takes a long time, I’m not consulted, I can’t feel or even see anything but gorgeous blue sky and I don’t really know what’s going on but finally I hear new voices.
    “Oh! I am so thankful! Oh! I am so relieved! I saw that terrible sight falling down upon us out of the sky and it was all I could do to get mother and the kids down to the storm cellar in time before it hit!” A Faerie gentleman and lady are upon my cheek with their dozen even tinier young ones.
    “I’m terribly sorry. It was an accident, an act of nature, or of a god,” I apologize profusely.
    “Oh! It’s still alive!” says the oldest son.
    “Stars preserve us!” says the mother.
    “Oh, my hero!” That is the adolescent daughter who promptly hangs herself from my pansy’s neck, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, so long as ye both shall live.
    “Really, I was minding my own business, entirely at home with myself and content when the rug was pulled out from under me. I fell through a carpet, try as I might to prevent it.”
    “This’ll teach him to stay off flying carpets!” says my pansy.
    “Definitely the criminal type!” says the son.
    “He ought to be taught a lesson!” says the girl. All the other tiny Faerie children nod and chatter in agreement.
    “No consideration! No consideration what-so-ever for other people!” says the mother.
    “Cheese it! It’s a cat!” I hear nymphs call out around me.
    The Fairies all leap away. The mice move around underneath me scratching at the dirt and closing doors and shutters in their brand-new condominium apartments, very minimum indeed.
    Then I feel him, a big heavy tom walking up my leg until his face appears over the horizon of my stomach. “Meow!” he mewls at me, “Meowww!”
    “Good kitty! Scare away all the nasty mice! Dig them out from underneath me.”
    But he doesn’t leap off after the burrows that must catacomb my back. Rather, he turns tail toward my chin and starts pulling at my weskit with his claws. He turns himself around a few times before curling himself down on my chest.
    “No! Don’t lie there! I shan’t be able to breath! Oh, if only someone would come to my aid! Mice gnawing up from underneath and suffocating cats above? Who shall rescue me from this body of death?!” I begin to call out for help. “Help! Oh, anybody, please rescue me!” Even though I knew that in wild places it’s not wise to attract attention. You never know what might turn up, but it couldn’t be worse than this. Could it?

Out of the Frying Pan
    I hear horses. “Oh, please, don’t let them bite me!” Strange horses can be nasty.
    I hear voices. “What have we here?” says some surly Big man in need of a shave.
    “Don’t worry, little fella, we’ll take care of ye,” adds his even scruffier companion.
    “Don’t you know who this is?” Both men stand over me.
    “Nope, never saw the like of him.”
    “This is the Rat who got the Magistrate’s goat!”
    “No! I heard that fella took ship!”
    “Well, he’s back now! Can there be two of them?”
    “Wouldn’t matter if there were a whole country filled with the wee little blighters, he’s enough like his twin brother to please the court and pay the penalty.”
    “Hey guys, I’ll be fine. I Don’t really need any help after all. Just leave me be, there’s good fellows, I’ll be all right in the morning.” This takes going from the frying pan into the fire too literally.
    “He thinks we’re going to just leave him lay!”
    “The reward says dead or alive, fifty quid!”
    “He’s neither one nor the other, but cash to us!”
    They lift me up by my wrists and ankles. “Why, he’s just a sack of broken bones! Not a joint that doesn’t flop.”
    “Rats! There’s a nest of ‘em under him.” One man drops my feet and starts kicking at the trampled grass. From my elevated position I can now see the rooftops of Ellie and Madge’s town not far away.
    “Just a few field mice. You’ve had as much under your bedroll.”
    “Well you aren’t the one walking through them, are ye?”
    “But whatever did this to him broke every bone in his body twice over.”
    “They did us a good turn then, didn’t they? I’ve heard he was a vicious little biter, the Rat!”
    The one still holding my arms puts me over his shoulder and lifts me onto his horse’s ass. They tie me in place and ride off.
    “They’ll be wine, women and song for us tonight!” they sing.
    “And smoked Rat tomorrower!”
    They laugh and belittle and poke at me all the way to town. I’m thrown onto a straw pile in a jail when we get there where I spend the night. A bucket of gruel and another of water is left for me at the door, not that it does me any good. I can’t even feel anything anymore, except the bugs crawling over my face.

Into the Fire
    I awake in the dim light of the cell to a woman standing over me. “Get up! You sad excuse for a sailor. Where is my sister?! How did you get back here alive?” It’s sweet little blond Ellie, the merchant of stolen goods and captive souls.
    I find I have no voice. I open my mouth and pant, gesturing with my eyes toward the water pail beside the door. She gets the hint and makes a sound of disgust at it’s contents as she picks up the water pail by it’s rope handle and pours it over my face. It’s the nicest thing she’d ever  done for me.
    “Now answer me! What happened out there? Get the heck up!”
    “I’m paralyzed from the neck down! Can’t you see I can’t move? As far as your horrid sister and her pirate Amazons, I hope they’re all at the bottom, where they sent me. I drowned out there, reappeared in other worlds, and now find myself no closer to my goal!” I moan.
    She shudders at the racket I make, if not at my tale. Then she seems to find her courage, for she scoffs, “What goal would the likes of you have!”
    “To find, ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’ and beg him to restore my sweetheart to me.”
    This revelation seems to give her pause, but then she rejoinders, “You’re crazier than a hatter, there is no such thing! Dead is dead.”
    “Been there, done that. Only it was a rabbit, not a haberdasher. I’ve been swallowed by a dragon, fought zombies and mummies, swam with talking fishes, lunched with talking animals — that rabbit and company. I’ve been to the bottom of the sea, to the top of the sky. I’ve been a treasure hunter for an artistic giantess and the personal bodyguard of the Queen of the Wood Elves. I’ve just yesterday been the guest of some pansy fairies as small as bugs. Crazy? Yeah, maybe I am. But I’m no killer and no thief! Now in my book, that’s crazy!”
    “What do you know of it? We do what we must to survive.”
    I continue, “ …loony, fruitcake, nuthatch, psycho, mental, head case, screwball, sick-o… ”
    “And you’ve probably forgotten half the wrongs you’ve done. How dare you lecture me!” And with that she storms out.
    I lie there and brood for a long while. I can’t feel my arms or legs or even whether I’m hungry, though I’m sure I must be. My fall from Elvish grace has left me emotionally numb as well as physically. But I can’t even crawl to the food or if I had it right in front of me, bite it. I can still bite as well as swallow — and talk, breath, see and hear — but I can’t turn my head to get my teeth around the food. Someone would have to feed me and there is no one to do that. Eventually, thanks to the dim light and the boredom I must have calmed down from my interview with a pirate and fallen asleep, for I awaken to another bucket of water poured on my head.
    “Up and at ‘em! Judge’ll see ya now!” A big fellow with a bald head dressed head to toe in leather straps is in my cell.
    “Can’t!” I explain reasonably, “Paralyzed!”
    “You will! Do as I tell you!” He picks up yours truly with one meaty fist by the front of my weskit and throws me out the open door of the cell, past his twin brother who stands stupidly in the corridor watching me pass. He makes no attempt to catch me. I land spinning like a top on the damp mildewed slabs. “Get up!” the first ape shouts, but now I’m insulting apes. I leap forward a whole foot by the force of another impact — his boot against my ribs I presume — and suddenly find it hard to breath.
    “You’ll get it if he’s dead before the Madge sees him!” the other goon says. I thank my Lucky Stars — of which I see plenty — I can’t feel anything below my chin, which burns from being scrapped along the floor as I’m lying face down. I’m picked up by the collar and dragged at arm’s length — so low to the earth that my hands and feet are dragging — out of the jail and up the steps into the sunlight.
    Crossing a courtyard I’m handed like a piece of luggage through a door of iron straps to a better dressed officer. “Claims he can’t walk, the coward!” They laugh together at my expense. “Lazy slug!”
    This officer carries me indoors and along a finely appointed corridor where he is met by another officer. “Filthy Rat! Smells like he shit hisself!” We enter the courtroom. “He’s all bloody, too! And pissed.” They better guess I’m pissed, in more ways than one. I’m thrown into a chair like a doll.
    “All rise!” I make no move.
    The Magistrate comes in. “Instruct the prisoner to rise.”
    “He claims he can’t, yer lor’ship.”
    “Then make him!” A hand is on my collar and I’m hauled out of the chair and off the floor, six feet up.
    “You may be seated.” I’m thrown back into the chair and my head falls onto the table before me.
    “What’s the matter with him? He looks like a corpse! Is he even alive? I instructed you to bring me the prisoner alive for questioning.”
    “He ‘live, yer lordshit.”
    “Then instruct the prisoner to sit upright!”
    I’m repositioned like a doll so I don’t fall over. I can’t raise my head so I don’t see the Madge, all I see is the polished wood of the tabletop bloody and soiled by having my head fall on it.
    “Look here!” the Judge demands. I don’t, can’t, won’t move. “Instruct the prisoner to raise his head!” he demands with exasperation.
    The guard yanks my skull up by the scalp.
    “I find you, prisoner known as ‘The Rat’, in contempt of this court and fine you a hundred quid. Now, what have you to say for yourself?”
    Obviously he was expecting me to beg for my life, he was prepared to gloat over me, but I break out into laughter: Long, loud, and hysterical, perhaps maniacal. Overwrought, overemotional, out of control, frenzied, frantic, wild, feverish, crazed; beside oneself, driven to distraction, distraught, agitated, berserk, manic, delirious, unhinged, deranged, out of one’s mind,  but surely about to be raving.
    Finally I regain enough of a veneer of composure to speak. “I find you to be a thief and a brigand, a murderer who preys only upon the helpless who are incapable of defending themselves. If I wasn’t paralyzed from the neck down I’d gladly ram my stinger up yours the long way. To hell with your court and your fines! The worst you can do is kill me, and I would welcome that!”
    “Which brings us to the matter of the warrant. You have been tried and found guilty in absentia of ‘Aggravated Assault With A Deadly Weapon Upon A Public Figure’, namely myself, and of freeing a condemned criminal.”
    “An innocent woman out grocery shopping!”
    “Enough from you!”
    “Go to hell!”
    “I’ll make sure you do!”
    “And I’ll probably come back again, and the next time I find you on the street, I’ll cut out that lying tongue of yours without asking first!”
    “Not when I get through with you!”
    “I’ve already died, several times, over and over again! I can’t be killed, just ask Mabel’s sister Ellie down at the waterfront Auction House. I’m the fabled bad penny that always turns up! You will never be free of the dread of me, until one day, in your toilet with a sword, asleep on your bed with a garrote, out in the street with an arrow through the eye, I will catch up with you and it is you who will be dead! You and all autocrats like you!”
    The Madge looks really disturbed now. This is hardly the vindication he had expected, rather terrified than terrifying. I can see he’s just a bully to the core and afraid to die. In order to kill without fear you must not be afraid to be killed. Whether or not I’m the one to actually do the job and personally make good on my threat, somebody else will unless Death itself finds him a afore long. He’s dead meat in any case, and sooner will be better than later. The gods will not leave such arrogance standing for much longer.
    “Bind him! Gag him! Drag him out and burn him! With two fagots of wood!”
    “Faggot!” At least his pirate sweethearts taught me to talk like a sailor.
    “Make it four fagots! And cut the balls off him first! But get the surgeon. I want him alive for the flames!”
    I didn’t mind. They could cut the heart out of me and I wouldn’t feel it. Soon enough I’m indeed bound and gagged, tied to a stake in the courtyard that smells of char and something like roast chicken, other shoppers whom they burned alive here for the Madge’s entertainment. But why bind a paralyzed man? What are they afraid I’d do? As far as the gag, that makes sense after I spit on their boots as they carried me from the courtroom. But I have no more to say. What could one more victim and a stranger at that tell these people that they didn’t already know they needed to do? Not after all these innocents — their neighbors, wives and daughters — whom they have seen testify here with their screams. If I could, what would I say? ‘Workers of the world unite!’? But that trick never worked.
    The smoke gags me more than the smelly old rag between my teeth. Then I see the flames rising up around me and that does terrify me. Soon I can’t breath at all. Smothering in the blistering heat, I consider my fate. From the pinnacle of success, I’ve fallen to a bed of affliction. Condemned for a crime I did not do, I’ll surely be dead momentarily from smoke or flames. And I’m no closer to this Death-Raiser my Merry wants me to find, every move I make seems to take me farther from the life of farmer, husband and father I was meant to have. Gagging in the dense smoke, I can only hope I die quickly!
    I can smell something that smells like roast pig. I think it’s me. So this is how I end. I am become smoke. I am become flame. It’s really not so bad, I’m thankful I can’t feel my feet roasting, the fat dripping off my charred toes. Wouldn’t it be a laugh if I were to just now vanish from this world under the Madge’s nose? Even if the cavalry were to ride in just now and pull me from the pyre, it would do me no good. What is life to a broken man? I am fire. I am smoke. I ascend up to the clouds from whence I came, then beyond.

His Twelfth Adventure:
Sam Bobbins Goes Where He’s Never Gone Before!

Beam me Up!
    The world reappears to me like snow at a bee convention. All is white, then black sparkles appear buzzing like a whole universe of mad yellow jackets in heat and walking all over my skin under my clothes and through my hair until it all stands on end. Slowly lines form and the snow is replaced by dark and light shapes, then colors, then sounds other than buzzing, mechanical noises like giantess Vickie’s banshee computer made until I stand at the point of a wedge-shaped room on a platform under a lamp before a Troll in strange elastic garb.
     “Moondog!” I recognized him, or so I thought. He’s dressed in a tight stretchy red shirt with a seven-pointed gold star on the left breast and tight black pants with gold stripes. Except this Troll has pointy ears like a Wood Elf.
    “I am Spook. Who are you, and where is our captain?”
    “Spook! Quirk here. Is there a problem? Beam me up!” a voice sounds out of nowhere.
    The pointy-eared Troll strikes his heels together and slaps the star on his breast. “Spook here, Captain. We’ve had a beamer incident. One moment, please.” He punches himself again. “Security to the beamer room.” Again with the slapping. “Who are you?” This he addresses to me.
    “Sam Bobbins, sir. Forgive me, you’re the spitting image of a Troll shaman I know, companion of Sundog and Prince Storm, the Queen’s Consort. Except you have pointy ears.”
    “I am Spook, First Officer of the Star ship Everready. And I am indeed of mixed race, as are the most notable historic families on my world. How did you interfere with our transporting beam, Sam Bobbins?”
    Two burly men in tight pants and black shirts come in. They are not so unlike the two goons who had just chained me to a stake and set me alight, except for being cleaner.
    “He seems harmless enough. It appears to be a random cronoton flux.” Spook informs the muscle. He turns back to me, “Where were you a moment ago, Mr. Bobbins?”
    “I was being burned alive by pirates after falling from the sky and breaking my back when I slipped through a rug on the third story of Queen Nora’s palace in the Capitol of the Elvish Queendom.”
    “A sixteen century slip through history, I do believe, and as many light-years. Tell me, sir, are you the same Sir Bobbin of the Magic Mirror who traveled in a balloon over the Great Continental Divide all those years ago on Victoria?”
    “Over the South Mountain with the Wizard Whitebeard! Your people happened to know my mother tongue. The Wizard spoke our market speech, Normal. But what is Victoria? I knew a giantess ‘Vickie’ once.”
    “Victoria is our home planet, the mother world. Yes, only scholars recall the old Northern name for the southern hemisphere’s greatest mountain range was ‘South Mountain’. You are the genuine article. Welcome to the future, Sir Bobbin. Come here and shake my hand.”
    I approach Spook and we clasp hands. Then I stand between the two guards while he operates the controls. A Wood Elf wearing a ripped yellow shirt materializes out of snow and mad bees where I had stood. Spook hands him a clean shirt and he slips it over his head after discarding the old one.
    “Spook!” he says as he changes. “Why — did — you keep me waiting?! Who is this?” The Troll-tall Elf in the fresh yellow shirt is the spitting image of a certain brigand whom the Queen put in a dungeon for making promises to young girls he could not possibly all fulfill at the same time just some days ago. Or millennia, to hear Spook talk.
    “This, Captain, is Sir Bobbin of Magic Mirror fame out of Tenth Century Elvland. A time wiggle caused our beamer to pull up miss pattern, just in the nick too, to hear him talk.”
    “Just saved me from being burned alive! Thank you, gentlemen,” I bow. And I smile broadly from ear to ear, as I realize just then that I am not broken, not bruised and not burnt. Even my dinner weskit is as unsoiled as when I put it on that afternoon.
    “Good! Glad to be of any help. I thought — you — Spook, made another — me! Like you did — that last time,” says Quirk.
    An older man wearing a blue shirt enters the room. “Well! What can you expect when you scatter your quarks all over the blamed universe, Tim?” He adds when he sees me, “Who the hell did we pick up this time?”
    “The Wizard!” I recognize the face in spite of it’s shaven condition as that of my old friend.
    “Wizard? You look like one of those bigheaded ‘Galactic’ fellows to me, except for all the hair.”
    “No, I’m Sam Bobbins, Detective,” always tooting my own horn. “But you are the spitting image of my friend Wizard Whitebeard of Rockwood.”
    He points a shiny rotating gizmo at Captain Quirk. “I’m a Doctor, Tim, not a magician! Many more of these escapades and you’re going to need one!” He turns it on me. “You’re fine, healthy as a horse. And I was right, you are a Homo Galactic! I never saw a hairy one before.”
    “Well, isn’t that one for the history books!” Spook slaps himself this time on the forehead.
    “You — boys! Go on about your business. We’re cop acetic — here!”
    The thugs leave us to my great relief as we head the opposite way down a corridor. Just then, what looks like a shiny metal rabbit on wheels carrying a drum runs past us down a cross-corridor. Tim, the Doctor and Spook ignore it but I stop and stare, resisting a strong urge to follow it and find out what’s down whatever rabbit hole it went.
    We four a moments later get into a small round room and Spook says, “Bridge!” while the Doctor engages me.
    “Please to meet you, Sam. So you really knew Whitebeard of Rockwood? By the way, most folks just call me Needles, ‘cause I’m the Chief Physician aboard this bucket.”
    “The last time I saw your face, Wizard Whitebeard that is, he was leaving for a trip across the Great Northern Desert.”
    “Oh, yes, his historic crossing of the Sandanarama to the diamond shores and the tropics! He found the warlike Clingers and nearly got himself cooked in a stew on that trip. He later returned and was Wizard Emeritus Retired and the mentor of King Cloud, Nora and Storm’s son. But what I’d like to know is, how did your people get involved in our history?”
    “I found myself with my back to a glass, cornered by a hoard of murderous giant rats. I backed into the young Princess’s bedroom. It was a matter of luck. Is this a balloon ship?”
    “Luck, huh? No, not quite. After Whitebeard our world was linked by more, larger and better airships, railroads, oceangoing ships that circumnavigated the globe, hydrogen-burning supersonic aircraft and finally fusion powered spaceships like our Everready, which is superluminal.”
    “So things worked out all right for Queen Nora’s people?”
    “All right?! Thanks to Whitebeard’s airship and your skills as a diplomat we avoided the world wars and petroleum pollution seen on many worlds we’ve visited!”
    “That world!” Quirk explodes, which he has every right to being Captain now, in spite of having been a brigand in another incarnation. “They use uranium! Built it up — by neutron bombardment — into heavier and more radioactive atoms. They made it into bombs! And leaked it out as poisons that are killing — wiping out — their whole race!” Why does he speak in such a peculiar way? I look at him puzzled.
    “No! The idiots.” Needles looks back down to me, “Now Sam, this is very puzzling. Biologically, you are one of a race of beings who aspire to take over the galaxy! Except you have hair. So, where do you come from, and why or how did the Galactics have a hand in the rise of our civilization?”
    I am saved from answering this unanswerable question by the door sliding away after we rise many hundreds of feet so we exit the little round room into a larger round room with a dozen people or more of as many backgrounds.
    “No, really! This is utterly remarkable, that one of you should be responsible for almost single-handedly joining the two halves of our world into a whole and so jump-starting our civilization!” Needles continues. “It utterly changes so much of our history especially in view of our recent confrontations with the Galactics and needs an explanation! Those bigheaded time-travelers with their huge spherical ships think they own this entire local group!”
    “Course laid in to leave orbit, Captain!” a squinty-eyed fellow eyes me suspiciously.
    “Let — us — do it! That a way!” says Captain Tim Quirk, “Check off!”
    “You know what, Spook!” grins Doctor Needles, distracted for the moment from needling me.
    “How may I help you, Doctor?” First Officer Spook raises a single pointy eyebrow.
    “If I didn’t know better I’d think you enjoy sending Tim on all these silly adventures down to the surface of radioactive planets.”
    “How is that, Doctor?” Spook spoke. “I don’t ‘enjoy’ anything, I’m entirely under control of my Rationalizations at all times.”
    “What a load of Venusian Wamboogle poop!” Needles needles.
    “Boys! Boys! What does it matter, as long as I get the girl — in the end!” Quirk smirks.
    “Old Trollish proverb, Doctor, ‘Tis a foul wind that blows nobody no good’,” Spook spoke. I think he’s joking, but he doesn’t crack a grin.
    “Where’s our next stop, Hula?” asks the Captain.
    A particularly ugly Troll woman with an imposing figure answers, “The Romeoans are having trouble with treacle, Captain.”
    “We’ll have to take a swing past — Ol’ Crusty — to get there. Check off! Set a course for Ol’ Crusty!” Quirk calls out.
    “Ol’ Crusty? I know that dragon all to well!” I shudder.
    “Dragon? Mr. Bobbins, our Crystaferrous is a black hole, a giant dead star,” explains Spook.
    “Whether he’s a pile of dusty old bones or the blackest pit of a star, I’m sure he’s after me!”
    “Hula, how bad are things on Romeo?”
    “Terrible, Captain! They have treacle dropping on them out of bins!” says the supremely ugly but big skirt.
    “Sorry, little buddy, have to skirt Crusty,” shrugs the Captain. “Gilligan, how’s the motor?!”
    “I canna get na more p’wer, Captain! If that’s what yer callin’ fur. She’s goin’ like a bat out of ‘ell now! What ‘er do you want of me?!” another disembodied voice speaks.
    “All right! All right already! We’ll be using the black hole for a gravitational boost, I wanted to know if you can handle it?”
    “Well why didna’ say so! I canna break the laws of physics, Captain…”
    “But you sure as hell can bend them!”
    “I know what I’ll do, Tim, I’ll show Sam here how to use a space suit, so even if we do get smashed all to bloody hell in a hand-basket, crushed by relativistic waves into tiny bits, he’ll be fine as fish. We don’t wish to lose the good Doctor’s valuable historic artifact until he gets in a rejoinder to his goading.”
    “Goading! Why, I never!”
    “Stop, Needles? Fascinating, Spook! Keep the little guy’s mind off the excessive danger we are in. That a way! Just do it! Have at it! Execute! Engage!” Quirk encourages as I follow Spook back into the little round room.
    “This region of space is rich in everything from dust and asteroids to blue giants and super-massive black holes,” Spook lectures as the floor drops.
    I think of how sad Vickie must have been after I rappelled down that dark gap in her floorboards to never return. Are there other sad tremendous girls beyond these metal walls?
    “But it’s quite impossible that we would ever hit anything.”
    “How can a suit of clothes protect me?”
    “Surely you recall the armor of ancient times?”
    “That didn’t help them, either.”
    “We’ve improved on it since then, as we’ve improved on our ‘airships’.”
    “I don’t know that it’s such an improvement. I enjoyed the wind on my back.”
    “We can provide that too.” We arrive at the armorers’ workshop. The new suits are a lot different from what the Elvish knights wore in their war with the Trolls. For one thing they are white all over except for a crystal ball of a helmet. He fits me into breastplate, sleeves, leggings, shoes and gloves and all must be carefully joined together to light little green lights at the joints. Lastly, he shows me how to set the helmet on my head and make the lights inside the collar turn from red to green. The fresh wind he had promised blows on my back when I do.
    “Suit’s systems come on automatically when it senses full integrity. You cannot now open the suit without the access code.” He taps numbered buttons on my wrist and the glove comes off, the wind ceasing. “Put your glove back on after you first take off your helmet.” I do this. “Very good. Now come, follow me. I will show you the rest of the ship.”
    Carrying my fishbowl I tag behind him as we go to the ship’s engines where we meet Engineer Gilligan in his red shirt. He says to me, “The First Mate here’s a mighty sailin’ man, though the Skipper’s brave and sure, too… Arr!”
    Then we turn in at the infirmary to catch Needles with Nurse on his lap. “Giving anatomy lessons now, Doctor?” Spook spoke. Nurse blushes and hides in a nearby closet.
    We visit laboratories and gardens, a library and an actor’s stage until we finally come to a large room with many small vessels. At least that is what Spook said they were. Now these are not vessels such as you would recognize as boats. They don’t have sails to work the air or oars to work the water but are square shapeless boxes with motors that carry these flying machines on the same principals as the larger Everready.
    Spook requires me to put on my helmet in this room and the wind starts up from behind me again as soon as all my collar lights shine green. He is standing inside a ‘shuttle’ lecturing me about many things I don’t begin to grasp when a loud rending noise of shattering stone and ripping metal erupts behind me. I turn just in time to see a great black mountain carry off the far wall of this ‘shuttle bay’ into the blackest night I have ever seen.
    I turn around to see that the door of Spook’s shuttle has closed in my face. I haven’t a chance to knock before both shuttle and myself and all the other contents of that vast great room blow away into the sky. I see the huge Everready drifting away from me, a confusing collection of crockery as I couldn’t begin to describe, a mad assortment of white plates and saucers, cups and bowls, stacked on one another’s bottoms. I can’t even find the hole in the side where I came out.

Ol’ Crusty Again
    “Sam! Sam! Are you still alive?!” a voice erupts in my ears and I spin around to see who it is. No one’s behind me, but something is. That I will describe — or attempt to — momentarily. But when I circle around again and keep spinning around and around again and again the Everready is gone. I am alone in space, lost!
    “Sam! You are moving too close to Ol’ Crusty! Stay away from the black hole!” Spook calls to me from nowhere, his voice crackling with electric hiss like a whole pit of vipers.
    This black hole is not at all black and not a hole, at least where I can see. It’s a glittering, rotating series of concentric spirals lit by a dozen balls of burning flame in every color: blue as the heart of a flame, red as a hot coal, blinding white like sun on snow, yellow like the sun and orange as a strange tropical fruit I’ve eaten on my travels on Rat and Rabbit’s island.
    There is no down, no up, no ground. The sky is lit overhead and underfoot and on every side all around me with stars and planets, one so close as to look like an oft-hammered moon. Also I spy some of the tremendous hammers as well, irregular rocks in every size from tiny shards to vast mountains.
    The disc of dust and gas, fire and moons, spins madly beneath me. I had started myself spinning by turning to my right shoulder, so I think to turn left and sure enough, by repeated turns opposite to my spin I can stand still. The rings are larger than they were before and though previously they were on their side now they spread out like a distant floor beneath my feet. At the center, between my toes, is an empty space surrounded by a narrow ring of fire. So this is the black hole — Ol’ Crusty in person — a ring of death and destruction on any world, whether a dead dragon or a dead star.
    “Sam! On your right sleeve are buttons,” Spook is talking to me again out of nowhere but I don’t hear all he’s saying. “ …and then the zero. Do you understand? Press five as you talk.”
    I press the five: “I don’t understand!”
    “Press seven and…” he crackles, “ …then zero.”
    I press the seven and the zero and suddenly move up and left. The center of Crusty is now directly between my heels, while before it was between my toes, and somewhat smaller.
    “ …and nine then zero, then try again.” I try the nine then the zero. I spin head over heels, out of control. “ …losing you. We can’t come… “ Spook is fading away. “ …having to go back. Try again later. I’m really sorry… “ Then I hear no more from him.
    I press one button after another in my panic and pound on the number pad in my frustration only to find myself moving in every direction at once, though mostly in circles. Finally I give up on the buttons and try counter-spinning myself as I did before. I have more luck with this and soon I can stand still.
    Except now the spiraling rings of stars and moons and glowing clouds are all around me and the ring of fire at the center — much closer — beckons to me like a door in front of my face. But is this a door I would want to pass through?
    As the hours pass I sleep then awaken from a dream of laying on a bed of ice with a fire raging in the sheaves of the roof above me. The black hole is much bigger now, the ring of fire at the periphery of my vision, and I decide to do somersaults to even the hot and cold on either side of me. But soon I must stop, my stomach sickly wanting to toss my cookies. I didn’t think that would be a good idea, seeing I have glass inches from my face and I don’t know how to take off the helmet or even drop my drawers to relieve myself. I must hold it all in.
    Finally, I have the black hole underfoot, the ring of fire spreading out around me to the horizon. But I feel my feet are being pulled off my legs while my head is being ripped from my shoulders so I turn in a slow gentle way to let the stars above me come around to my face, laying on my back above the hole.
    “I’m soon again too hot on one side and too cold on the other but I find I can turn no more. I feel so heavy, so sleepy, I must weigh a hundred tons. My eyesight is fading too, as the stars visible overhead become a more and more narrow tunnel surrounded by utter blackness.
    I feel so very hot and sleepy. I’m in utter blackness now and I can hardly keep my useless eyes open or even blink.
    I hallucinate in my overheated imagination that I’m laying on a bed of hot coals but I cannot sit up or even roll over to escape.
    My shallow breaths labor in quick gasps.
    I can no longer breath.
    I die.

His Thirteenth Adventure:
Sam Bobbins Meets His Maker!

The End of The Journey
    I’m standing in a cool green garden with tall conifers as wide as houses and tall as mountains around me. I walk on a brown bed thick with pine needles while the sun sends shafts through the distant treetops all around me. Small normal size dogwoods and crabapples flower around me.
    I don’t know how I got here. The space suit is gone, the ring of fire and the crushing weight and searing heat have all vanished. Even my old sea boots that have stood under me through all my travels and my fancy Elvish party clothes are gone. I’m barefoot and comfortable in my own favorite waistcoat and breeches from the long ago beginning.
    I come out from under the huge trees into a relative clearing with bushes only a little taller than I am and covered in white scented blossoms. Wandering the maze between them, their fragile petals and sweet pollen fall on me, refreshing me. But if I was intent on going anywhere, I’d be lost.
    Yet I do get somewhere for soon I come out into another region of yet smaller bushes, well known huckleberry like at home laden with their luscious dark juicy fruits. I fill myself on these childhood delicacies.
    Shortly I come to a stream where I drink my fill. Crossing the water in several places are narrow little footbridges. Over on the other side is a cool green lawn with scattered oaks and maples and ringing each tree wide beds of colorful small flowers.
    I cross over on one of these miniature bridges and sit on a garden bench to rest and admire the view. The birds sing around me, butterflies flutter, bees buzz, metallic-winged hummingbirds flit from flower to flower, even coming in close and hovering in front of my face momentarily as if asking who I am. They seem so tame, I hold out my hand to give it a perch. The bird shies away but before I have a chance to drop my hand a large exquisite blue and green butterfly alights on my finger. It’s twice the size and four times as beautiful as any I’ve ever seen before. I gasp, my eyes wide with wonder.
    “He’s good, isn’t he?” Suddenly I’m aware of a stranger on the bench beside me. I jump to my feet and the little creature on my finger flies away.
    “Who are you?” I exclaim.
    “Sit down, Sam. I am.” He is dressed all in a gleaming white robe and has long chestnut hair and beard.
    “You are what?”
    “I am what I am. I’ve always — well, almost always — found that sufficient. I understand you wanted to see me?”
    “Are you ‘Him Who Raises the Dead’?” I ask, at least I think it’s me doing the asking.
    “Yes, Merry Opal, I’ve done that before. How about you come on out here?”
    “But Merry is…” I start to explain, but I feel a sudden lurch that staggers me.
    “Dead?” Suddenly she’s sitting in my lap, my sweet pudgy little dumpling, her arms around my head tenderly. But the look in her eyes says murder. “You were going to call me dead!”
    “Merry!” I embrace and kiss her. “Is this another dream — it must be — or can you finally be real?”
    “I am very real and always have been, you Sammy Bobbinger! Now we can stay here for ever and always and have our babies.” She bathes my face with her kisses. She turns then to the stranger while I grin and act dazed. ‘Can’t we, Sir?”
    “This is no place for babies, Merry. But I will bring you both back here someday when your children and great grandchildren are grown and you can enjoy my garden forever.”
    Now she is dumbfounded by that news.
    “How did we get here, Sir?” I ask Him.
    “I brought you. How else could you ever have come? I am Who it is that moved you. I pulled you out of the dragon and led you to the ship. I saved you from becoming a zombie and delivered you from wasting your life killing whales. I sent you to the islands and kept the hunters at bay. I took you to Catherine and Elizabeth because I had a job for you to do there and on Mabel’s pirate ship, but then I rewarded you with a trip to Vickie’s time. She needed encouragement and to rediscover the magic of childhood and you came a little closer to me.”
    “But I slipped out of Nora’s world to my death!”
    “You are a particularly hard one to kill, Sam Bobbins, and the only way to come here is to die an undeserved death. I finally had to step in and alter a few laws of physics to injure you so badly that you would let death take you.”
    “I burned!!”
    “And that got you up to the Everready and so here by way of Crusty.”
    “I fell into the black hole! Into Ol’ Crusty for a second time, just as at the beginning.”
    “Dead dragon or dead star, they are the same sort. Both became so full of themselves they turned into an empty sucking void inside. And both serve me by moving things around. Crusty the dragon made people scatter from the old city. Crusty the star scatters quarks across the galaxy to where they may become new stars and planets.”
    “So now we’re here. But where is here?”
    “‘Here’ is where I am. Wherever I am, that’s where ‘here’ is at the moment. Here is every place, and all time.”
    “You don’t seem to have a problem with time or place.”
    “I sit above time as a chess player sits above the game. I control the hand of my opponent — though not his will — and the significance of every move.”
    “Can you take us back to before I died, then?” asks Merry still perched on my lap — my fat little hummingbird.
    “I intend to do just that, young woman, if you give me a moment,” He chuckles.
    “I’m sorry! I’m just anxious to start on being a mother.”
    “And a wife, you should confess,” the god laughs out loud.
    Merry giggles and hides her hot face in my neck.
    “But you put us to all this pain, all this anguish, when you could have set us right the very first day!” I complain.
    “Am I not the One who made you? Can’t I do with you as I please?”
    “You made us?!” Merry catches on.
    I’m still as dense as a wood block. “But it’s so cruel!”
    “Were you not cruel when you disregarded your wife? Didn’t you neglect her to her death? Didn’t you willfully chose to go to the dragon in spite of all my warnings through Hercule Poirot, to take ship, to join in with pirates, to forget that your only beloved lay rotting in the earth while you partied with your Queen and her Consort? When you alone could have rescued her? You chose your own anguish, Sam.”
    “You were such a bad boy, you naughty Bobbinger you!” Merry scolds me with her finger tapping the end of my nose. I catch it and kiss it.
    “And you, you wicked girl!” The god laughs again at my Merry. “You knew that what you were doing is perverted according to the standards of your society. Whatever made you think you could get away with it?”
    Merry first gasped, lost her smile, then began weeping. “Excuse me, sir, things were changing so fast. I thought if I started it, Sammy would finish it. I just thought I needed to do something for myself.”
    “Even though you knew it was wrong and manipulative?”
    “I’m so sorry, please forgive me!”
    “That’s all I wanted to hear you say, you are forgiven. Now you know why your distant ancestors decided only men may dig burrows. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with a woman doing it, except you shouldn’t try to manipulate your mate, it’s not loving. I made you to love. Listen to your heart. You can’t have babies if you are dead under a hillside. You may live.” He waves His hand and she’s gone.
    “Where’d she go?” I’m on my feet and looking around for her.
    “Sit, Sam.” I sit, like it or not. I stare at Him and marvel. “She’s back — in her perspective — to the day she began digging her own grave. Your task is to go stop her.”
    “Then we will be back to where we started to go wrong! That also brings me back the the original problem: How do I support her?”
    “Trust me, Sam! I always intended to take care of you both, and also Little Merry, Sammy, Cate, Beth, Vickie, Mabel and Ellie, Stormy, Nora, Tim and…”
    “These will be our children?”
    “Only if you stop wasting eternity, as if you could, and get back into your own place and time!” He scolds me, grinning all the while.
    “Forgive me! Tell me what to do, and I will do it, just tell me!”
    “If only it were that easy.” He shakes His long brown locks and sighs like the wind through the trees. “You already knew what to do when you began this journey. Be a man! Dig for your mate if digging is what she requires of you! If you do what you know you should, you will find that a better, bigger treasure than the one underneath the dry old bones in Merry’s burrow awaits you: Your self respect!”
    “Treasure in her burrow?” My greedy eyes brighten.
    “Your experience will serve you well. I’ll let you remember it all.”
    “Is this what a god does, sir, pull small people around on strings? No offense, if you please, sir.”
    “‘A’ god, Sam? Have you ever seen the like of me in all your travels? Is there any God besides me? No, there is no other Rock; I know not one. I’m everywhere and every when all at once. I am the I Am, the One and only God. Nothing and no one else compares to me.”
    I’m on my knees before Him. I’m speechless. He picks up a shiny round blue glass marble. “This one’s your world. I know it well.” I suddenly realize that the pebbles under me are like glowing coals, not that they’re hot, but they are alight with a supernatural light coming from within them. Likewise the flowers and the trees and the animals themselves seem to be made of fire, bursting up from the exuberant life within them.
    “This is Heaven!” I gasp. Then I notice His hand around my folded hands. “Who could ever wound you? You are infinite, you are eternal, you are almighty!”
    “I did it for you. Now, look closely at the hole in my wrist.”
    I stare intently at His punctured hand. It seems closer and closer. At any moment I expect to fall against His hand, to drop my head into His palm. But then it grows bigger still. His flesh and bones become a vast doorway into blinding light. I trustingly step forward into tangible love. It takes my breath away.
    Once again I see His face. His eyes are suns. His features whole worlds. He speaks and all that exists stops to listen. “Now that you know me, see you don’t forget me. Tell of me to your children. Love them, and even love your Big neighbors, for then you love Me. You will see me again soon enough, Sam. For now: Live!”

The Beginning of the Adventure
    In that instant the face of the God transforms into blue sky with cotton clouds, summer trees and fields green with crops. I’m standing in the lane from my father’s house to the home of my long lost love. A spray of sand with clods of earth hits me from the side. A tunnel has opened, unnoticed till now in my joy, and in the mouth of the tunnel stands my own beloved holding a pointed shovel: cute, plump, curvy, darling, precious, yellow gold haired Merry Opal!
    “You want another face full, Sammy Bobbinger? You come to just watch me work? I told you I’d do for myself if you wouldn’t do for me and here I am. Now take this shovel and dig my burrow like a man!”
    “Merry!” I fall on my knees before her. “Please forgive me for ever leaving you! I’ve been lost all these years without you. And here I come back empty handed. Forgive me for all the years I’ve wasted hunting treasure when my only real treasure is you!”
    “Sammy Bob, I don’t know what you’re going on about. I told you to be back here ‘tomorrow morning’ which is today though you are terribly late but here you are. I’m your treasure?!” she tittered. “Now are you going to be my man and start burrowing or not?” She offers me the shovel.
    But I furrow my brow and think, there on the earth of the lane at her feet. “The one and only God brought me back! Don’t you remember Him, Merry? Is it really just tomorrow?” I get up. “But today I went with the Dwarf to labor in the haunted city and got eaten by a dead dragon.”
    “Sammy, you ought not to drink so early!” She shoves the shovel into my hands and retreats back up the tunnel laughing at me.
    Not able to bear losing her again, I follow. “No, really, I’m sober as a magistrate. I have been to other worlds and drowned in the ocean — more than once — and fell into a star…” I stop in my tracks and look around at the sizable chamber she’s opened. “You got all this done this morning?” Large, but not sound, as sand grains drop on us in a continuous drizzle.
    “Yes, I started at dawn out of my mother’s house and the hill is full of sand and just a few old stones. But this room was already dug out for me. Isn’t that nice?”
    “Stones? Don’t you know what these are, my sweet innocent?” The only light is from the end of the tunnel, so she could hardly be blamed.
    “Those funny shaped rocks?”
    “These are bones!” I hold up a skull and she screams and runs outside. I find her jumping up and down in the lane and wiggling her hands as if she’s on fire, or buggy. “Are you all right?”
    “Oh! I’m doomed! I’ve been so wicked! I’ve touched a dead man’s bones and I’m about to rot away on the spot! I just know it!”
    “No, you’re not! Nothing of the sort is ever going to happen to you. You’re not going back into that grave to let it fall in on you. Besides, I touched them too, and I’m fine.”
    “Eww! Don’t you touch me! You’re come tangy mated!”
    “Look who’s talking! You’re as covered in sand and mud clods as I am, even more so!”
    “Oh, Sammy!” She suddenly throws herself into my arms. “You must burrow me a home in a proper hillside with good solid earth and no bones about it!”
    “Not so fast, Sweet Thing. Let’s finish what we’ve started here. Did you find any ‘stones’ too big for you?”
    “Eww, did I! Are they full of bones, too?”
    “Let’s hope not. I’ll see.” I go back down the tunnel and bang around a bit in the dark until I hear metal strike on metal. I uncover the chest and drag it out into the sunlight for Merry to see.
    “Ye gods! Was that thing hiding in there all this time?” Merry exclaims. I go to break the lock with the point of the shovel but she hold back my arm. “Don’t! A skeleton will jump out!” The box is big enough to hold a body.
    “If one does, I’ll play the fiddle!” Excitedly, I shatter the rusty old clasp and kick back the cover of the old bronze-banded wooden box. The wood suddenly crumbles to dust. Merry hides behind me. When the dust clears, there in the middle of our lane lies a huge pile of gold coins and jewels in every color of the rainbow.
    Merry is no longer hiding. First her jaw drops then so does she. I find her up the her elbows in coins with a tiara on her head and bracelets on her arms and rings on all her fingers, oohing and awing as she admires her treasure. “Mine! Oh, it’s all mine! I will dress like a queen and every day eat cake!”
    “Here’s your bride price, Merry Opal!” I pick up an egg-size ruby.
    “Get your grabby fingers off my treasure, Sam Bobbins!” She slaps my hand.
    “Merry, snap out of it!” I crouch down beside her and start kissing her face and mouth and eyes.
    “Oh, Sammy dearest, my Sammy, what came over me!”
    “Greed, Dear Heart! Just common ordinary avarice. We’ll give some of this rubbish to your Pa, let him be a little greedy though not so much to harm him. More to a landowner, he will want to be a little more greedy…”
    “Oh, Sam! We don’t need to dig a burrow!”
    “No, we can have our babies in a proper house plenty big enough for a dozen!”
    “But we don’t need all this! All we need is a roof over our heads and food in our bellies!”
    “I will buy land from the Big people, and wood enough for a barn, seed corn, horse and plow. I’ve learned a thing or two about farming that’s not done in these parts.” I know then that my earnings laying in a hole in the ground from helping Hercule Poirot do detective work will just pay the taxes on this and allow us a living from it. I’m glad then we found this, for though I’m willing to live in a hole in the ground with my Merry Opal Bobbins, I don’t know I could keep myself out of the tombs and the burgling to provide for her without it.
    “Do you know who provided you bride price, my love?”
    “Whatever do you mean, Sammy Bobbinger? We dug it just now out of the ground ourselves!”
    “Yes, but why did you dig just here, and how did I know to look for it? The Maker of all things provided this, Merry. I met Him just before He brought me back to you. I really did leave you for foreign parts, I really did die out there and through many adventures He found me and brought me back to you. All we have is His. I have you, you have me, we have each other and He gives us to each other and gives us what we need to live together. He gave this to us and I never did need to go away to find what I needed after all. He provides for us! He is the One Who Raises the Dead that your spirit on the island told me to find, but all the while He was looking for us!”
    “Oh, Sammy, you say the funniest things!” she giggles. “But I don’t care, you could be as mad as a rabbit in a weskit and I would still love you!”
    “And you know what I’m going to do, my Merry girl, I’m going to love you. I’m going to be your husband and father to our children, I’m going to farm, and I’m going to tell the story of all He did for us! All He still does!”
    So a week later I take my wife in my arms and kiss her in the presence of friends and family, and never leave her again. And of course I do write down my story, teaching myself letters from the elf-books I secreted away in my loot from Old Haven. You’ve read the results of that, poor as a farmer’s scratchings can be. I became a better farmer than my father or any of the Bigs around us, I and my renowned five sons and seven daughters. Trust the Maker of all things to provide for you. He always has.

The End

Sex, Drugs, & Rock & Roll!

Cats from space buy and sell. Parrots from Alpha Centauri threaten war.
What do they all want? Sex, Drugs, & Rock & Roll!
http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0-595-41130-4