Goblins Read Free Page A

standing where there was now only a stump. (Goblins didn’t like to talk about Natterdon Tower.) But it was enough to make Skarper understand the size of this place he lived in, and to make him wonder how and why it had fallen into ruin.

Enjoying the strange new snippets of knowledge which he found in the old books, Skarper longed to share them with someone else. If only there had been somebody else like him in Blackspike Tower; somebody he could talk to. . .
    At first he’d talked to Breslaw, but slowly he had started to realize that the old hatchling master was watching him, and so he began watching Breslaw in return. He soon found out about the egg-shards Breslaw stole, and once he even glimpsed the ball of slowsilver, big as an eyeball, that Breslaw kept hidden in the hatchery wall. Some of that came out of my eggstone , he thought. That should have been mine, by rights . He was so angry that he sometimes thought of stealing the slowsilver ball and taking it to his own hiding hole. At least, he did until he remembered that Breslaw was batch-brother to King Knobbler himself (he was always boasting that he might have ended up as king, had it not been for his missing bits). Hatchlings who stole from Breslaw got reported to Knobbler, and Knobbler always saw to it that they came to sticky ends. You wouldn’t want to end up catapulted off the roof, for instance , Skarper told himself.
    No, you did not steal from a wily old goblin like Breslaw. But neither did you trust him, and you certainly didn’t tell him things that might help to make him cleverer than he already was.
    Instead, Skarper did his best to share his newfound knowledge with his own batch-brothers.
    “Men down-below don’t hatch from stones like us goblins,” he said one evening in the scoffery. “That’s why we call them softlings. They grow in the tummies of things called ‘ladies’.”
    His batch-brothers looked at him, so bewildered that several of them actually stopped eating for a moment or two.
    “What?” said Yabber.
    “Anchovies!” said Gutgust. (“Anchovies” was the only word Gutgust ever used. No one knew why, or what he thought it meant. He was big enough and tough enough that no one had ever asked.)
    “No wonder softlings is weak as cave-bats then!” said Libnog.
    “What are ‘ladies’?” asked Wrench.
    “Ladies is the ones with long hair,” explained Yabber. He was the biggest of the batch and had been out already on a big raid into the man-towns along the Nibbled Coast; he always liked to show off his knowledge of foreign parts. “They squeal higher-pitched than the ordinary men. I hate it when they do that. It hurts my ears like. . . Like. . .”
    “Fingernails on a blackboard?” suggested Skarper.
    The others looked blankly at him again.
    “What’s ‘fingernails’?” asked Bootle.
    “What’s a ‘blackboard’?” asked Libnog.
    “What’s ‘on’?” asked Wrench.
    “Anchovies!” shouted Gutgust.
    “He talkin’ rubbish anyway,” said Yabber airily. “I’ve seen these ‘ladies’ and they ain’t no bigger than ordinary softlings. Smaller, maybe. There’d be no room inside them for a whole man.”
    “Men aren’t born full grown,” said Skarper wearily. “They starts out little and they grow, just like us goblins do when we hatch from our eggstones.”
    “And I has grown mighty indeed!” agreed Yabber, seizing his chance to steer the conversation towards a subject which didn’t make his brain hurt so much. He proved it by flexing his huge muscles and then punching Wrench and nicking his dinner. Wrench picked himself up and tried to brain Yabber with a handy club, but Yabber ducked and the club hit Bootle instead. Bootle bit Yabber; Libnog stabbed Wrench with a fork; Gutgust smashed a table over Bootle’s head. Sighing, Skarper picked up his bowl of spider stew and left the fight behind, sneaking off to the bumwipe heaps to catch up on his reading. He wished he could join in their innocent fun,