Goblins Read Free

back in oldy-times they’d use such maps to find their way about. Look,” he said, pointing to a place near the map’s centre. “Here’s the old Blackspike.”
    Skarper peered closely at the lines and saw that Breslaw was right. He recognized the spiky outline of Blackspike Tower, and next to it its neighbour towers, Redcap and Slatetop and Sternbrow, Natterdon, Grimspike and Growler, with the Inner Wall stretching between them to form a ragged ring around the Great Keep itself. Any goblin could have recognized the distinctive pointy outlines of those towers if they had taken the trouble to look, but apart from Breslaw and Skarper none ever had, and none but Skarper would have thought to do what Skarper did next, which was to look at the squiggly black worms written on the map and think, The worms beside Slatetop and Sternbrow both start with that big squirly mark. S . And there it is again, in the middle of that worm next to the Blackspike. So maybe the squirly S mark means “Sssss.” And maybe all them other marks mean different sounds. . .
     
    (“I wish I’d never lit eyes on that flamin’ map!” wailed Skarper, two thousand feet above the ground and falling fast.)
     
    But he had lit eyes on it, and that was how it had all begun. From then on, while the other goblins went birdsnesting among Blackspike’s turrets or practised fighting on its narrow ledges and crumbly battlements, Skarper always found a way to slip off unnoticed and creep down to the bumwipe heap. There, by the glow of the luminous bat droppings which he smeared on his nose to light his studies, he pored over the mysteries of lettuce, worms and burks. Before many moons passed he had taught himself to read, using the names on the old map as a key to help him work out the sound that each of the lettuce stood for. He had learned that the “lettuce” were really called letters , the “worms” were words and the proper name for “burks” was books . There was even a book there called Dictionary , which held lists of words, with other words beside them explaining what they meant. From this Skarper learned the meaning of words which no goblin before him had ever known, words such as kindness and gazebo .
    There were other books, too; books which held whole stories, although sometimes their endings had been nibbled off by whiteworms, and even when they hadn’t Skarper had no way of knowing which were true and which were false. For instance, had someone called Prince Brewyon of Tyr Trewas really been taken up into the sky by a cloud maiden who had fallen in love with him? Skarper didn’t think there were such things as cloud maidens, and he wasn’t at all sure about these “prince” things either, although there seemed to be quite a few of them in the books. Prince Brewyon cropped up in a lot of different stories, fighting giants and trolls and rescuing things called princesses.
    Bat droppings showered down on Skarper; cave spiders crawled over his feet; from the chamber above came the bickerings of the older goblins squabbling over the loot from their latest raid, and from somewhere outside a long, fading shriek and a distant crunch announced that one of the birdsnesting younglings had fallen off the battlements. Skarper noticed none of it. The stories in the old books carried him far away from the Blackspike and away beyond the walls of Clovenstone to worlds of mystery and wonder.
    The only place the old books did not tell him about was Clovenstone itself. It was barely mentioned in any of them, except for a reference here and there to ye Darke Tower of ye Lych Lord that is called Clovenstone , or Clovenstone, the Tower of Sorrows . All that he could find out about Clovenstone came from that map, which he now knew was called Stenoryon’s Mappe of All Clovenstone . It had been drawn a long time ago, because it showed the buildings and roadways all whole, with not a wood or a marsh to be seen within the Outer Wall, and Natterdon Tower still