The Princess and the Goblin
'Your Royal Highness,' he said, 'possibly requires to be reminded that
you have got three toes yourself--one on one foot, two on the other.'
'Ha! ha! ha!' shouted the queen triumphantly.
The councillor, encouraged by this mark of favour, went on.
'It seems to me, Your Royal Highness, it would greatly endear you to
your future people, proving to them that you are not the less one of
themselves that you had the misfortune to be born of a sun-mother, if
you were to command upon yourself the comparatively slight operation
which, in a more extended form, you so wisely meditate with regard to
your future princess.'
'Ha! ha! ha!' laughed the queen louder than before, and the king and
the minister joined in the laugh. Harelip growled, and for a few
moments the others continued to express their enjoyment of his
discomfiture.
The queen was the only one Curdie could see with any distinctness. She
sat sideways to him, and the light of the fire shone full upon her
face. He could not consider her handsome. Her nose was certainly
broader at the end than its extreme length, and her eyes, instead of
being horizontal, were set up like two perpendicular eggs, one on the
broad, the other on the small end. Her mouth was no bigger than a
small buttonhole until she laughed, when it stretched from ear to
ear--only, to be sure, her ears were very nearly in the middle of her
cheeks.
Anxious to hear everything they might say, Curdie ventured to slide
down a smooth part of the rock just under him, to a projection below,
upon which he thought to rest. But whether he was not careful enough,
or the projection gave way, down he came with a rush on the floor of
the cavern, bringing with him a great rumbling shower of stones.
The goblins jumped from their seats in more anger than consternation,
for they had never yet seen anything to be afraid of in the palace.
But when they saw Curdie with his pick in his hand their rage was
mingled with fear, for they took him for the first of an invasion of
miners. The king notwithstanding drew himself up to his full height of
four feet, spread himself to his full breadth of three and a half, for
he was the handsomest and squarest of all the goblins, and strutting up
to Curdie, planted himself with outspread feet before him, and said
with dignity:
'Pray what right have you in my palace?'
'The right of necessity, Your Majesty,' answered Curdie. 'I lost my
way and did not know where I was wandering to.'
'How did you get in?'
'By a hole in the mountain.'
'But you are a miner! Look at your pickaxe!'
Curdie did look at it, answering:
'I came upon it lying on the ground a little way from here. I tumbled
over some wild beasts who were playing with it. Look, Your Majesty.'
And Curdie showed him how he was scratched and bitten.
The king was pleased to find him behave more politely than he had
expected from what his people had told him concerning the miners, for
he attributed it to the power of his own presence; but he did not
therefore feel friendly to the intruder.
'You will oblige me by walking out of my dominions at once,' he said,
well knowing what a mockery lay in the words.
'With pleasure, if Your Majesty will give me a guide,' said Curdie.
'I will give you a thousand,' said the king with a scoffing air of
magnificent liberality.
'One will be quite sufficient,' said Curdie.
But the king uttered a strange shout, half halloo, half roar, and in
rushed goblins till the cave was swarming. He said something to the
first of them which Curdie could not hear, and it was passed from one
to another till in a moment the farthest in the crowd had evidently
heard and understood it. They began to gather about him in a way he
did not relish, and he retreated towards the wall. They pressed upon
him.
'Stand back,' said Curdie, grasping his pickaxe tighter by his knee.
They only grinned and pressed closer. Curdie bethought himself and
began to rhyme.
'Ten, twenty, thirty--
You're all so very dirty!
Twenty, thirty, forty--
You're all so thick and snorty!
'Thirty, forty, fifty--
You're all so puff-and-snifty!
Forty, fifty, sixty--
Beast and man so mixty!
'Fifty, sixty, seventy--
Mixty, maxty, leaventy!
Sixty, seventy, eighty--
All your cheeks so slaty!
'Seventy, eighty, ninety,
All your hands so flinty!
Eighty, ninety, hundred,
Altogether dundred!'
The goblins fell back a little when he began, and made horrible
grimaces all through the rhyme, as if eating something so disagreeable
that it set their teeth on edge and gave them the creeps; but whether
it was that the rhyming words were most of them no words at all, for, a
new rhyme being considered the more efficacious, Curdie had made it on
the spur of the moment, or whether it was that the presence of the king
and queen gave them courage, I cannot tell; but the moment the rhyme
was over they crowded on him again, and out shot a hundred long arms,
with a multitude of thick nailless fingers at the ends of them, to lay
hold upon him. Then Curdie heaved up his axe. But being as gentle as
courageous and not wishing to kill any of them, he turned the end which
was square and blunt like a hammer, and with that came down a great
blow on the head of the goblin nearest him. Hard as the heads of all
goblins are, he thought he must feel that. And so he did, no doubt;
but he only gave a horrible cry, and sprung at Curdie's throat.
Curdie, however, drew back in time, and just at that critical moment
remembered the vulnerable part of the goblin body. He made a sudden
rush at the king and stamped with all his might on His Majesty's feet.
The king gave a most unkingly howl and almost fell into the fire.
Curdie then rushed into the crowd, stamping right and left. The
goblins drew back, howling on every side as he approached, but they
were so crowded that few of those he attacked could escape his tread;
and the shrieking and roaring that filled the cave would have appalled
Curdie but for the good hope it gave him. They were tumbling over each
other in heaps in their eagerness to rush from the cave, when a new
assailant suddenly faced him--the queen, with flaming eyes and expanded
nostrils, her hair standing half up from her head, rushed at him. She
trusted in her shoes: they were of granite--hollowed like French
sabots. Curdie would have endured much rather than hurt a woman, even
if she was a goblin; but here was an affair of life and death:
forgetting her shoes, he made a great stamp on one of her feet. But
she instantly returned it with very different effect, causing him
frightful pain, and almost disabling him. His only chance with her
would have been to attack the granite shoes with his pickaxe, but
before he could think of that she had caught him up in her arms and was
rushing with him across the cave. She dashed him into a hole in the
wall, with a force that almost stunned him. But although he could not
move, he was not too far gone to hear her great cry, and the rush of
multitudes of soft feet, followed by the sounds of something heaved up
against the rock; after which came a multitudinous patter of stones
falling near him. The last had not ceased when he grew very faint, for
his head had been badly cut, and at last insensible.
When he came to himself there was perfect silence about him, and utter
darkness, but for the merest glimmer in one tiny spot. He crawled to
it, and found that they had heaved a slab against the mouth of the
hole, past the edge of which a poor little gleam found its way from the
fire. He could not move it a hairbreadth, for they had piled a great
heap of stones against it. He crawled back to where he had been lying,
in the faint hope of finding his pickaxe. But after a vain search he
was at last compelled to acknowledge himself in an evil plight. He sat
down and tried to think, but soon fell fast asleep.
CHAPTER 19
Goblin Counsels
He must have slept a long time, for when he awoke he felt wonderfully
restored--indeed almost well--and very hungry. There were voices in
the outer cave.
Once more, then, it was night; for the goblins slept during the day and
went about their affairs during the night.
In the universal and constant darkness of their dwelling they had no
reason to prefer the one arrangement to the other; but from aversion to
the sun-people they chose to be busy when there was least chance of
their being met either by the miners below, when they were burrowing,
or by the people of the mountain above, when they were feeding their
sheep or catching their goats. And indeed it was only when the sun was
away that the outside of the mountain was sufficiently like their own
dismal regions to be endurable to their mole eyes, so thoroughly had
they become unaccustomed to any light beyond that of their own fires
and torches.
Curdie listened, and soon found that they were talking of himself.
'How long will it take?' asked Harelip.
'Not many days, I should think,' answered the king. 'They are poor
feeble creatures, those sun-people, and want to be always eating. We
can go a week at a time without food, and be all the better for it; but
I've been told they eat two or three times every day! Can you believe
it? They must be quite hollow inside--not at all like us, nine-tenths
of whose bulk is solid flesh and bone. Yes--I judge a week of
starvation will do for him.'
'If I may be allowed a word,' interposed the queen,--'and I think I
ought to have some voice in the matter--'
'The wretch is entirely at your disposal, my spouse,' interrupted the
king. 'He is your property. You caught him yourself. We should never
have done it.'
The queen laughed. She seemed in far better humour than the night
before.
'I was about to say,' she resumed, 'that it does seem a pity to waste
so much fresh meat.'
'What are you thinking of, my love?' said the king. 'The very notion
of starving him implies that we are not going to give him any meat,
either salt or fresh.'
'I'm not such a stupid as that comes to,' returned Her Majesty. 'What I
mean is that by the time he is starved there will hardly be a picking
upon his bones.'
The king gave a great laugh.
'Well, my spouse, you may have him when you like,' he said. 'I don't
fancy him for my part. I am pretty sure he is tough eating.'
'That would be to honour instead of punish his insolence,' returned the
queen. 'But why should our poor creatures be deprived of so much
nourishment? Our little dogs and cats and pigs and small bears would
enjoy him very much.'
'You are the best of housekeepers, my lovely queen!' said her husband.
'Let it be so by all means. Let us have our people in, and get him out
and kill him at once. He deserves it. The mischief he might have
brought upon us, now that he had penetrated so far as our most retired
citadel, is incalculable. Or rather let us tie him hand and foot, and
have the pleasure of seeing him torn to pieces by full torchlight in
the great hall.'
'Better and better!' cried the queen and the prince together, both of
them clapping their hands. And the prince made an ugly noise with his
hare-lip, just as if he had intended to be one at the feast.
'But,' added the queen, bethinking herself, 'he is so troublesome. For
poor creatures as they are, there is something about those sun-people
that is very troublesome. I cannot imagine how it is that with such
superior strength and skill and understanding as ours, we permit them
to exist at all. Why do we not destroy them entirely, and use their
cattle and grazing lands at our pleasure? Of course we don't want to
live in their horrid country! It is far too glaring for our quieter
and more refined tastes. But we might use it as a sort of outhouse,