Then again, maybe these tiny creatures were used to cooking their meals over the flame of a candle, he thought with a shudder. He wondered how long it would take him to cook by candle.
“Stop that!” someone shouted.
Doctor Bothy craned his head round and discovered that Sir Grumdish hung nearby, similarly trussed and dangling over a single green candle. He angrily spat his beard from his mouth. This seemed to amuse the creatures to no end. They buzzed merrily around the small, stuffy underground chamber, squeaking, “Monkey talk! Monkey talk! Listen monkey talk!”
“I am not a monkey!” Sir Grumdish spat. Every time he opened his mouth, his beard fell into it.
One of the creatures swooped close and hovered a few inches from the tip of Sir Grumdish’s nose, its wings a blur. It gathered up a fistful of the gnome’s white beard. “Hair… face… monkey!” it cried with glee, then gave Sir Grumdish’s beard a sharp tug. Sir Grumdish bellowed in pain and tried to twist his head away, which only set him to swinging in crazy circles.
“Why are you doing this?” Doctor Bothy asked.
“This is your fault, Bothy!” Sir Grumdish howled. “I hold you to be responsible. I should have let you eat that whole cottage.”
“Please be quiet, Grumdish!” the doctor shouted. “I am trying to establish polite communication.”
“How do you propose to accomplish this miracle?” Sir Grumdish mocked.
The tiny creatures now concentrated on the doctor, buzzing all around his head. They took turns thwacking him on the thighs and belly with their small spear-staves, giggling uproariously at the way the blows rippled across the expanse of his dangling portliness, like waves in a pond. “Cry fat monkey! Fat monkey cry!”
“This is intolerable!” the doctor wailed.
Suddenly, the tiny creatures let off and flew away to the corners of the chamber to hide amongst the roots dangling from the roof or sprouting from the walls. Doctor Bothy tried to turn his head to see what had startled them. Grumdish slowly twirled at the end of his entangling vines, first one way, then the other.
The only thing unusual they saw was a small door in the center of one wall. It was set into an arched frame of rough unmorticed stones. Through the cracks in this door, they noticed a bright white light shining, but a shadow came before it, walking with a slow, purposeful gait toward the door. They also noticed a peculiar scrape-thumping noise, repeated at regular intervals, like a shutter tossed against the side of a house in a storm. As the shadow behind the door grew larger, the odd noise grew louder, until it seemed to be just outside the room. Then, ominously, it stopped. A nervous titter rippled through the room’s occupants, gnomish and otherwise.
The door creaked open, spilling the light brightly across the floor. A cold gust of wind snuffed out the two candles, casting the chamber into startling contrasts of light and shadow. The roots hanging down from the roof took on a horrific aspect, as though they might writhe suddenly to life and reach out to grip and choke the helpless gnomes. The two gnomes cried out in terror, their eyes starting from their heads at the thing that lurked in the open doorway.
Its shadow stretched across the length of the floor and loomed up the further wall. Most like a bear it seemed, standing on its hind legs, but it had a tiny head sunk down between its shoulders, and no neck at all. What was more, it had only one leg. The other was a wooden peg.
As it entered the chamber stump-clumping on its wooden leg, it seemed to diminish in size, if not fearsomeness. They perceived that it was not a bear but a largish badger, but this failed to bring them much comfort, for what difference is it whether a bear or a badger enters your room stumping along on a wooden peg? It seemed to walk with something of a swagger, exaggerated by its false leg, and it carried a small, twisted twig or stick tucked military-fashion under one arm-or foreleg-like a riding crop. It was from the nether tip of this curious wand that the brilliant white light emanated.
The badger strode a few paces into the chamber before stopping and gazing up with hate-filled eyes at the two dangling gnomes. The door, seemingly of its own accord, swung shut and thudded in its frame. The badger then flipped the stick-which was a wand-out from under its arm and stood it on the floor before him, like a staff of office, his small, clawed fists gripping it fiercely. The glow at its tip softened and dimmed until it was no brighter than the flame of a single candle.
“Who are these miserable creatures?” the badger snarled.
“My name is Doctor Bothy,” the doctor gasped after he had got over his astonishment. “And this is Sir Grumdish, a knight of renown.”
The badger thumped his staff/wand on the ground three times, which had the effect of starting a spume of sparks from its glowing end. The sparks fell about him like a shower, and where they settled, they seemed to cling together in a discernible shape or pattern. In moments, they had formed a large chair or throne, which continued to glow and throb with its own light. The badger eased his furry bulk into this amazing piece of furniture.
“Say, you wouldn’t mind lending me your wand, once this is cleared up and we are released?” Bothy said. “I know some folks who’d like to study it for a day or so.”
The badger shouted, “Silence!”
His small but powerful voice tolled like a bell, resounding through the small underground chamber, and Doctor Bothy found that his tongue was suddenly stuck to the roof of his mouth, as though he had been eating hot marshmallows.
“What did we do to deserve this?” Sir Grumdish asked angrily.
“You did criminally bury your nasty haggis in my forest,” the badger said.
“Your forest?”
“My forest!” the one-legged badger growled. “I am Grim Alderwand, king of this place. This very night by light of the ugly new moon, you fouled my forest with your nasty sheepses’ stomachs. What vine did you hope to sprout from such a seed?”
Before either astonished gnome could answer, the creature continued, speaking now to no one, or perhaps to everyone. He lifted his small black eyes to the roof and raised his hands as though invoking heaven. “These nasty monkeys is always stinking up my forest with their rubbishes. We are the burrowers, the diggers under the roots. We finds all these things that they be trying to be hiding here, their garbages and their fish heads and their nasty sheepses’ offals. They are worse than trolls, for trolls eat everthings: bones, scales, prickles and all. But these mens, these humans…”
“But we are not humans. We are gnomes!” Sir Grumdish argued.
“And a kender,” Doctor Bothy mumbled, finally freeing his tongue from its magical confines.
“Did you not this very night dig holes in our forest for to hide your nasty haggises?” the badger king asked.
“It was horrible! We couldn’t eat it, or at least some of us couldn’t,” Sir Grumdish said, glancing sharply at the doctor. “We had no other choice!”
“Yes, we didn’t wish to be impolite to our hosts, and we certainly couldn’t keep the haggis onboard our ship,” Doctor Bothy said. “We have a long sea voyage ahead of us, and we don’t want to attract sharks.”
“Yet you are impolite to us, most impolite indeed, I must say,” the king said, looking round. The shadows in the corners shifted and hummed with the winged creatures hiding there. “You does not want to take the sheepses offals into your houses, so you come here and bury it in ours.”
“But we didn’t know you were here,” Sir Grumdish said.
“That is because monkeys, so high up their trees, never looks down to see whose head it is upon which they are peeing,” the king said, waving his wand over his head like a director’s baton. “When you monkeys come round our homes burying your haggises and fish heads, you do not think of these trolls that your nasty things attract. And when these trolls come rooting round our houses for sheep stomachses that you are burying, which they can smell from miles away I can tell you by golly, they do not care if they accidentally eat themselves a hedgehog or a badger or whatnot!”