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fireplace. It looked like a rather uncomfortable thing to step over. "How do I
go about it?"
"You just give me your hand, my Lord." Hob-One extended his arm, and Jim took
the little brown hand in his own. A moment later he was traveling up the
chimney without really knowing how he had gotten started.
He had expected the chimney to be a sooty, tight, uncomfortable matter to
ascend. But this was a medieval chimney a good deal wider and deeper than
those in his twentieth-century experience and also, some of the Natural magic
of the hobgoblin may have been at work; because they whisked upward without
even soiling the loose cloak he had put on. They were out of the top of the
chimney before he really had time to formulate any thoughts at all.
Almost immediately, they were drifting over the tops of the leafless trees
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and the snow-covered ground beneath.
Jim's first impression was that they were not moving particularly fast; then
he changed his mind and decided that they were indeed covering ground at
something better than the speed at which he would have been able to fly, in
his dragon body. But it was a very quiet, easy speed even easier than the
soaring which was the main part of any dragon's air travels; since, because of
a dragon's weight, using wings to keep one aloft was an extremely tiring
business. This was almost like traveling in a dream.
It was delightful. Jim remembered how, when he had first attempted flight in
his dragon body, he had been completely won over by the magnificent feeling of
climbing swiftly through the air, soaring or diving several hundred feet,
essentially in free fall. But this was even more marvelous. Drifting at
probably better than over a hundred miles an hour, but it still felt like
drifting above the black-and-white landscape.
"No sign of the troll," said Jim out loud, without thinking, looking down at
the snow blanket with nothing but an occasional animal track across it,
slipping swiftly by beneath them. He tried to envision the sort of tracks that
would be made by the great, naked splay feet of the troll, huge toes ending in
the dents of their claws.
"That's because they're all under the snow," said Hob-One, unexpectedly,
beside him.
Jim turned to look at the hobgoblin. He was riding, apparently upon a single
thin waft of smoke. Jim glanced down past his legs and saw that he was doing
the same thing.
"Under the snow?" he echoed. "I was talking about the troll."
"So was I," said Hob-One. He added darkly, "I don't like trolls. Or dragons.
Or nightshades, or sandmirks, or big kitchen ladies with large knives "
"How do you mean, under the snow?" asked Jim. "Even if the snow was deep
enough to hide one "
"Oh, they don't just lie down anyplace and wait for the snow to cover them,
my Lord," said Hob-One. "They pick places where the snow will blow up into a
deep drift and lie down there. The cold doesn't bother them, of course or
anything else; and they can stay there as long as they like, until somebody
comes by and then they jump up out of the snow and grab him grab and eat him.
Usually, of course, it's just an innocent deer or rabbit. But it could be
anybody even a hobgoblin like me!"
"Well, there shouldn't be any around here to do that to you," said Jim. "The
castle troll says he's kept this territory clear of other trolls for eighteen
hundred years."
"He may say that," said Hob-One. "But there's hundreds of them down there. I
saw them when they were still waiting to be covered up with snow. That was
when I first came looking for you, and it was still snowing."
"Hundreds of them?" said Jim. "You can't be right."
"Yes, I really am, my Lord," said Hob-One earnestly. "I know trolls when I
see them, and there were at least hundreds. At least."
Jim felt a sinking sensation inside him.
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"If there are that many out here why doesn't the castle troll know about it?"
he said. "He was very firm about keeping his territory clear all these years."
"I don't know," said Hob. "But then, I'm just a hobgoblin."
"Why would they be there?" asked Jim.
"I don't know, my Lord," said Hob-One.
Jim caught himself on the verge of saying something sharp about the fact that
Hob-One didn't seem to know much about anything.
He reined himself in. After all, he told himself, the little fellow was just
what he said he was. Somebody who spent days and nights inside a kitchen
chimney could not be expected to know a great deal about the rest of the
world, even if he did go out occasionally. Also, checking his small burst of
temper over Hob had reminded him of Angie's words after they had left Geronde
and Brian. As usual, what Angie told him came back to grind away at him later
on.
She was quite right, of course. He had been taking advantage of Brian's
innocence and suggestibility about the vision and that was not a good thing to
do to your best friend in any century. Well, hopefully, Brian would tell
people he had forgotten whatever there might have been to remember about the
vision; and the whole matter would soon also be forgotten by everyone else.
Still, Jim made a promise to himself that sometime in the future he would find
some way of making up his misuse of Brian, somehow. Though he had no idea how.
"We're almost there!" Hob-One's voice interrupted his thoughts.
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| Cytat |
Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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