Trundle's Quest Read online

  Go down, ye frogs and toadies!

  We’ll sail them wild winds round and round—

  Yo-ho, ye frogs and toadies!

  Go down, ye frogs and toadies-o,

  Go down, ye frogs and toads!

  We’ll haul the mainsail firm and tight—

  Go down, ye frogs and toadies!

  And set a course by Stonewrack’s light—

  Yo-ho, ye frogs and toadies!

  Go down, ye frogs and toadies-o,

  Go down, ye frogs and toads!

  The ale is warm, the hammocks cold—

  Go down, ye frogs and toadies!

  We’ll drink and sleep like sailors bold—

  Yo-ho, ye frogs and toadies!

  Go down, ye frogs and toadies-o,

  Go down, ye frogs and toads!

  “I like that,” murmured Trundle. “I’ve never heard it before.” He sang softly to himself. “Go down, ye frogs and toads.” Then he noticed the expression on Esmeralda’s face. “What’s wrong?” he asked uneasily.

  “That’s a pirate song,” she hissed.

  Trundle suddenly felt sick. “You mean we’re on a pirate windship?”

  “I’m not sure. Wait.” Esmeralda got to her feet and gradually raised her eyes to the rim of the barrel. She stood there for a few moments before sitting down again.

  “No,” she said. “They’re not pirates, but they look a scurvy, disreputable bunch. The kind that would cut your throat and sell your head as a doorstop.” She looked gravely at him. “We are going to have to be very careful, Trundle. Very careful indeed.”

  Trundle curled himself up among the apples, his chin on his knees and his heart in his mouth. He hardly dared breathe as he listened to the cutthroat sailors going about their noisy and boisterous business. Every now and then, Esmeralda would pop her snout over the rim of the barrel to check out the situation.

  Eventually the singing and the hauling and the winching and the stomping about died down.

  “Come on,” Esmeralda said, giving him a friendly poke. “Here’s our chance. Be sharp, now!” She grinned a wild and toothy grin. “And be prepared to fight for your life if they spot us.”

  Trundle uncurled with a heartfelt groan.

  “Only kidding,” she said. “We’ll be fine.”

  They slipped over the top of the barrel and jumped down onto the deck. It was a deep, dark starry night and the ship was full of shadows. Trundle spotted a few sailors busy at work, coiling ropes and stowing spare canvas or taking readings from the stars with curious brass instruments. But they were all intent on their jobs and didn’t notice the two little animals as they crept through the darkness toward a nearby hatch.

  Peering around, Esmeralda lifted the side of the hatch. “Jump,” she urged in a soft voice.

  Trundle stared down into the darkness. “Are you kidding?” he whispered. “I could break my—”

  The rest of the sentence was cut short by Esmeralda grabbing his collar and diving headfirst over the edge of the hatch, dragging him along with her down into the pitch-black hold.

  Fortunately they landed on something reasonably soft.

  “Well?” chuckled Esmeralda. “Did you break anything?”

  “I don’t know,” grumbled Trundle. “It’s too dark to tell.” He sat up, feeling some kind of cloth under him. “Well, aren’t you the clever one,” he said with heavy irony. “Here we are in total darkness. I don’t suppose it occurred to you that we won’t be able to see a single thing down here. Of all the daft—ohh!”

  A small lemon-colored light had begun to form in the darkness in front of his snout. As the light blossomed, Trundle saw that it was sitting right in the center of Esmeralda’s outstretched palm.

  “How do you do that?” he asked in an awed voice.

  Esmeralda’s face appeared, smiling mysteriously beyond the yellowy glow. “I’m a Roamany,” she said. “We know stuff.”

  “Do something else!” breathed Trundle. He had always loved the idea of magic, and he had never seen anything so beautiful and strange as Esmeralda’s palm light.

  “Later, perhaps,” she said. “This isn’t easy, you know. I have to concentrate really hard.”

  As the light grew, Trundle saw that they were sitting on top of a pile of cloth bales in a large hold jam-packed with all kinds of goods, supplies, and equipment.

  “Interesting,” said Esmeralda as they clambered down. “A lot of this looks like mining gear. See those shovels, picks and pitprops, timbers and barrels?”

  “Pity there’s no food,” mused Trundle, his rumbling stomach reminding him that he had not eaten for some time. “I’m quite peckish.”

  “I’ll find us something to eat and drink later,” said Esmeralda. “For the moment, let’s just make ourselves as comfortable as we can.”

  They found a pleasant-enough nest for them-selves, hidden away among the big black barrels. Trundle listened to the creak and crack of the windship’s timbers as it sailed on through the night, taking them who knew where.

  “You still haven’t told me why the pirates were after you,” he said to Esmeralda.

  “Well, the very next day after that Badger Block reading I told you about, our convoy was attacked by pirates!” she replied dramatically. “And not just any old pirates: Captain Grizzletusk himself! They took us completely by surprise, whizzing in through the windows and doors of our caravans on long ropes with cutlasses and daggers in their teeth. It was very scary, I can tell you. I grabbed a coal scuttle, ready to whack any pirate who dared to come near. But some sneaky, sly, cowardly, underhanded son of a bilge rat came up behind me, popped a sack over my head, and that was that!”

  “Good heavens,” murmured Trundle. “You were kidnapped!”

  “I was,” Esmeralda said, with a hint of pride in her voice. “And they sailed off with me and all the booty aboard the Iron Pig and sold me in the slave markets of Drune.”

  “What’s Drune?” asked Trundle.

  “Only the most grim and grisly place in the whole of the Sundered Lands,” Esmeralda declared. “But not all the guards and chains and locks and bolts in creation could keep me a prisoner!” Her eyes glittered in the yellow light. “I escaped from the mines, slipped aboard the first merchant vessel out of there, and then hopped windship at their first port of call—which just so happened to be Port Shiverstones. And because the Fates were guiding me, that was exactly the place I needed to be. I saw you ambling along and thought, Aha! The Lamplighter! The very fellow I need. So I followed you, and the rest you know.”

  Trundle nodded thoughtfully, trying to take it all in. It was hard to imagine why the Fates should have picked him to help Esmeralda with her escapades. The only adventures he knew about came between the pages of books. And the really good thing about books was that when you were tired or hungry or a bit too scared, you could close them and go and do something else. Real adventures, he now realized, weren’t quite like that. You couldn’t switch them off.

  Esmeralda looked quizzically at him. “This is the point where you gasp in amazement and tell me how brave and resourceful I am,” she prompted him.

  “I’m thirsty,” sighed Trundle. “And tired. And hungry.”

  Esmeralda gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “All right,” she said gently. “I know this must be hard for you. I’ll go get us some food. You stay put.”

  She muttered something to herself, and the bright little palm light split into two. “Hold out your paw,” she said.

  Trundle did so, and Esmeralda placed one of the lights on his upturned palm. It felt warm and somehow alive against his skin. He gazed at it, smiling. What a thing! By the time he looked up, meaning to ask Esmeralda about her magic powers, he saw that she had quietly slipped away.

  Trundle sighed to himself in the drafty hold, thinking about his comfortable parlor and the winding stairs that led to his cozy bedroom. Who would be there to snuff out the lamps of Port Shiverstones in the morning? Would his friends and neighbors take to t
he streets in search of him? He imagined their anxious voices, calling out, “Where’s Trundle? What’s happened to good old reliable Trundle? We must find him!”

  On the other hand, with half the town burned down by pirates, they might have other things on their minds.

  Time passed. He sighed again, idly pulling at a cork bung that protruded from a hole near the bottom of the barrel against which he was leaning.

  “Oops!” he squeaked as the cork came loose and a fine dark powder began to pour from the barrel.

  “Get away from that stuff!” hissed a voice from the darkness.

  Startled, Trundle got to his feet. “Esmeralda?”

  “Don’t panic,” came her voice. “Just put the bung back in the barrel and step away over here. And don’t get the palm light anywhere near that powder, or they’ll be scraping bits of idiotic hedgehog off the walls for the next ten days!”

  Puzzled and alarmed by the tremor in Esmeralda’s voice, Trundle jammed the cork in the barrel and backed away.

  “I can’t leave you alone for five minutes, can I?” said Esmeralda, slapping down on his hand to douse the ball of light. “Don’t you know what that stuff is?”

  “Not a clue,” admitted Trundle, looking ruefully at the small yellowish stain that was left on his palm. “Why? What is it?”

  “Only the most dangerous substance to be found anywhere in the Sundered Lands,” said Esmeralda. “It’s blackpowder!”

  “Ohh!” Even Trundle had heard of the terrible blasting powder of the pirates. They used it in their muskets and cannon, and they kept its formula a deadly secret. But one thing Trundle did know was that if you put a flame or anything hot near blackpowder it would go BOOM!

  He shivered, trying not to think about what would have happened if he had brought the palm light too close, but cheered up a little when he saw that Esmeralda had managed to secure some cheese, bread, and apples, and a flask of water.

  They found somewhere to sit as far from the deadly barrels as possible, and ate a reasonably comforting meal. Then they curled up back-to-back and slept for a while.

  Trundle was woken by Esmeralda shaking him.

  “Wakey, wakey,” she hissed in his ear. “We’ve arrived!”

  He sat up, rubbing his eyes and feeling stiff and cold from sleeping on hard windship’s boards. “Where?”

  “Journey’s end!” Esmeralda said excitedly. “Let’s go look!”

  They managed to find a ladder that took them up to a small hatch with a grate over the top. Esmeralda went first, ducking back under cover every now and then as a burly mariner went stamping past on his way to his post.

  At last, they climbed stealthily up onto the main deck. They crept alongside the rail and slipped unobserved into a canvas-covered lifeboat. Hiding under the tarpaulin, Trundle listened to Mr. Pouncepot barking orders, and to the sound of capstans turning and sails being reefed. Esmeralda lifted the edge of the tarpaulin, and he sidled up beside her, peering through the gap.

  A knobbly, lumpy, rugged, ugly chunk of rock filled half the sky ahead of them. It wasn’t flat topped like Shiverstones, more of a big black ball eaten full of holes and hollows and cavities and craters and caverns.

  “Oh, no!” groaned Esmeralda. “Of all the places!”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Trundle. “Where are we?”

  Her voice sounded flat and miserable. “We’re right back where I started,” she moaned. “This stupid windship has brought me back to Drune!”

  Chapter 5

  Rathanger

  Esmeralda slumped despondently in the bottom of the lifeboat, muttering rude things about the Fates under her breath.

  Trundle looked on uneasily and gave her a cautious pat on the shoulder. “There, there,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”

  “No, it won’t,” said Esmeralda. “Everything is wrong, wrong, wrong! I knew the cargo was for mine workings, but I didn’t know it would be these mines! I thought it was heading for the steam moles way out in Hammerland.”

  Trundle peered out from under the tarpaulin. The dismal lump of Drune was looming larger and larger. He couldn’t see any sky at all now, and the windship was steering toward a huge round-mouthed chasm. He narrowed his eyes. Yellowy lights were glimmering all around the entrance to the cavern. Lots of lights. Scores of lights. Hundreds of them, in fact.

  He let out a low gasp as the windship sailed closer. A town—a tumbledown, ramshackle shantytown—clung around the vast aperture like some kind of horrible fungus. The dilapidated buildings grew out of the rock face, one hovel atop another, the buildings crushed together, misshapen and constricted, as though struggling for space. All of them were shabbily constructed from rotten timbers and crumbling stonework and ill-laid bricks.

  Jetties jutted outward, and as the windship glided into the vast cavern, Trundle could see the shapes of animals scuttling through the shadowy, narrow streets, shoulders hunched, heads down, as though they were engaged on evil errands.

  “Welcome to Rathanger,” said a mournful voice at Trundle’s shoulder. “The last place I ever wanted to see again.”

  He looked at Esmeralda. “If the Fates are working for us, then perhaps we were meant to come here,” he said. He wasn’t at all sure he believed this, but he wanted very much to cheer her up. If Esmeralda gave up hope, where did that leave him?

  She looked at him for a few moments. “You’re mostly not as silly as you look,” she said at last. “And you’re quite right; I should trust the Fates. The Badger Blocks don’t lie. We must be here for a reason.”

  They hove close to a rickety-looking jetty bending under the weight of great piles of boxes and crates and sacks and barrels waiting to be transported to the black wharves. As the windship came to a gradual halt, voices called out and ropes were thrown. Dock rats grabbed the ropes and tied them to rusty iron bollards. A gangplank was let down.

  A pompous-looking muskrat in a long coat covered in gold braid and gleaming buttons walked slowly up the gangplank.

  “That’s the harbormaster,” Esmeralda told Trundle. “Every ship that comes through the town of Rathanger has to register with him before it’s allowed to sail on into the mine workings.” She poked her head right out to take a better look around. “This is our chance to get away.”

  She picked up a length of rope that was coiled in the bottom of the lifeboat, and Trundle watched as she tied the end of the rope to a cleat on the side of the boat. “The worm comes out of its hole, around the rhubarb stalk, and back down the hole again,” she muttered, tugging on the rope. “There! A perfect bowline, although I say it myself.”

  She hefted the rest of the rope onto her shoulder and pushed out from under the tarpaulin. Trundle followed her, and the two of them balanced precariously on the windship’s rail.

  Esmeralda let down the rope behind a tall stack of wooden crates. “I hope you’re good at climbing,” she said, catching the rope between her feet and gripping it with her paws as she edged over the windship’s side.

  “So do I.” Trundle didn’t bother telling her that he had never climbed a rope before. If he lost his grip, she’d be the first person to know about it.

  His stomach turned several somersaults as he hung grimly on to the rope. But it was thick and solid and he had strong paws, and before he knew it, the two of them were down on the jetty, dashing from cover to cover as they made their stealthy way through the wharves and into the cramped and winding streets of Rathanger.

  Trundle had never dreamed of such an awful place. Not only were the buildings crushed so close together that the roofs often overlapped one another across the streets, but the whole town stank horribly. The switchback streets and alleys were piled with rubbish and filled with disreputable-looking creatures, dressed shabbily and carrying swords or knives or cudgels.

  “Avoid eye contact,” Esmeralda warned him. “Keep your head down and keep moving—and try not to look like an easy target. This place is full of gambling dens and drinking houses and other much
nastier places that you’d rather not know about. Treat everyone you meet as a potential thief, and you won’t go far wrong.”

  “So where exactly are we going?” asked Trundle.

  “We’re following our noses. The Fates will do the rest!”

  Trundle wasn’t so much following his nose as holding it to keep out the unpleasant odors. They slipped through an alley. The sound of a badly tuned piano rang out from an open doorway, accompanied by a fume of pipe smoke and the foul smell of stale beer. Drunken voices caterwauled an incoherent ditty about knives and murder, with the refrain:

  Blood, blood, buckets of blood,

  Nothing quite like it for thick’ning the mud!

  Trundle looked up at the hanging inn sign.

  The Strangled Stoat

  Proprietor: Punchly Backbreaker

  Licensed to sell hard liquor.

  Gambling actively encouraged.

  Come on in and lose your little all!

  He thought of the kind and hospitable folk of Port Shiverstones and shuddered quietly to himself.

  From the street ahead, there came the sound of voices shouting and of whips cracking and chains clanking. Esmeralda grabbed Trundle and pulled him into a shadowy doorway. “Shhh! Slave traders!” she hissed.

  A few moments later, Trundle saw a long, chained line of miserable-looking animals being herded along by a bunch of burly rats wielding whips.

  “Keep moving, you scum!” bellowed the lead rat. “There might be rumblings of rebellion from the mines, but there’ll be no mutinies among my band of merry volunteers!” A whip cracked, followed by cries and groans.

  Trundle watched in mute horror as the line of wretched captives stumbled past the end of the alley. He looked at Esmeralda. Her teeth were gritted, and her eyes glittered with anger.

  “They treated me like that a few days ago,” she muttered.

  “Can we help them?” asked Trundle.

  “We can’t free them, if that’s what you mean,” she replied. “We’ll do our bit by following our quest. Perhaps when the Six Crowns of the Badgers are reunited, horrid places like this will cease to exist.”