Читать книгу Faery Stories - Charles L. Marson - Страница 3

Table of Contents

There was once on a time a wicked Sea Troll named Yewli, who was one of the rulers of the Great Bight. Ages ago, he was born in a little cave, no one knows quite where, and indeed no one cares; but he grew uglier and uglier every day, and shiftier and shiftier every week, and stronger and stronger every year, until he became chief of the wicked water things in this part of the sea. He hunted with a pack of sharks, who obeyed no one else; hunted the poor fat schnappers, and even the very whales themselves. He would send stinging things, like policemen, to order one off from his dominions; and when he could do nothing else, he told his wickeder brothers what time the ships were coming, and got them to untie the winds. He had a great palace under the sea—a hideous black palace, all slimy and hidden in masses of seaweed, and three parts buried in the sand. There were no windows there, for, as you well know, if the sun ever shines on a Troll he bursts in pieces. Yewli sat in his dark palace all day, eating sea-apples and sleeping, and at night he came out to hunt and kill things by starlight and moonlight.

But one night it was blowing great guns, and game was scarce, and the sky was as black as ink. Yewli had crawled half out of the sea, and was sitting on the sandhills, with the foam crusting his yellow skin. His great tawny feet, with their black nails, were still in the breakers, when he heard his two neighbours—the Hill Trolls—talking. Compared to Yewli they were quite little fellows, those Hill Trolls: reddish-brown hairy people, no taller than a good-sized gum, with long arms and hands that could tear down the largest branches from the trees, and teeth that could grind stones into mud. They were discussing how they might best do a mischief to the sons of men. Wirra, the elder one, was all for tearing up their houses and tossing the people into the sea; but Mukka, the younger, thought that plan too simple for the Hill Trolls; “and besides,” he added, “it does not much hurt folk to die. That is a small mischief to do them—only to kill them.” So the wind boomed, and the Trolls plotted, and the lights were few and faint in the town; and Yewli, seeing that it was not nearly morning, called to the Hill Trolls to come over and plot with him. And there they sat on the sand-hills near the creek, and talked until a grey streak in the sky frightened them back to their places before the sun rose on the world.

I do not know whether they invented it then, or fetched it from over the sea; but I am sure it was Yewli’s idea—the Goblin Glue—for that began it hereabouts. Night after night the neighbours met, and the sea smoked, and the hills smoked, and the children said one to another—”The Trolls must be brewing today,” as they watched the steam and smoke roll away in great, twisted, grey masses. The school teachers, when they heard this, used to get angry, and say— “There are no Trolls, no Trolls anywhere.” But we knew better.

At last the grey sky grew blue, and the soft sun shone out again as usual, and a young blue moon and a blaze of stars at night shone in a clear heaven, and nothing seemed wrong at all. But Yewli, Wirra, and Mukka had brewed a great cauldron full of Goblin Glue, and the grey dwarfs were spreading it about everywhere. You cannot see Goblin Glue, but it is terrible stuff for all that. It gets into your hair, and you cannot take your hat off, not even when you meet your own sister in the road. It gets into your ears, and then, when the sour-sorbs and the dandelions and the orchids all whisper to you, you never hear them. The grey dwarfs drop a handful into one man’s pocket, and when he puts his hand in, there it sticks; and they flip bits into people’s eyes, and then they can only see about a dozen things in the whole world. It gets into people’s heads, and they get stupider and stupider every day. The grey dwarfs smear it on fences in the paddocks, and on workmen’s tools, and on buggies and horses’ harness, and even on flowers; and O! the misery it brings! Still, I must say that it keeps the nap on hats and coats, and makes shirts white. They tell me also that it keeps houses and fences from going to decay, but I am not sure of this. In a few years every one in the colony got some of this horrid glue on him somewhere, and when the grey dwarfs reported to the Trolls, Wirra was forced to confess that Mukka’s plan was far better than his, and that Yewli was the best of the three.

But somewhere, probably up in the bush, some children will be born who will be able to see this dreadful glue, and to keep away from it, and then they will tell us how to escape from the curse of the Trolls; and that is what I am waiting for. I asked a white dwarf about the matter, but he only wrung his little hands and cried, and said the cauldron was not a quarter empty yet; and he did not know what we could do, for the remedies were terrible—made out of boiling blood mostly, and the juices of white men’s eyes.