Chapter 36: Abundance of the Sky

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I shake my head, trying to drive the sleep out. Nothing scratches like goblin claws on stone. I say something half formed and Jimbe grunts.

“It’s too cold,” Jimbe says. “Too cold.”

“Goblins outside,” I say. “Listen!”

“Doesn’t matter,” Jimbe says. “Stone will keep them out.”

“It can’t be,” Trinket says. “You saw them. The goblins are froze solid.”

We all hold still for a moment and the scratching continues. Not slow, not like in the cold, but persistent. Hungry.

“It’s broken,” Mrs. Trinket says. “It’s broken. Smell that! The air smells different.”

By and by, some light glows in through the slats up high. Mr. Trinket gets up to take a look outside.

“The lamp will be out,” he says. “If there’s that much light coming in, they’ll be no goblins, but I’ll open the door slow.”

I get up with him and - as soon as he is sure that there are no goblins - I rush out into the snow. It’s still cold on my feet, but the air is warm and the sky is bright. The wind rushes up the slope as I look around, eyes overwhelmed by the light.

I see a flight of Leviathans in the cloud, big ones swimming gracefully through the air, pups dashing about at play. Until then, I’d never seen so many.

And the sky was full of fish - sharks and cod and herring and bonefish and groupers and velvet fish and unicorn fish and salmon and snapper and rockfish and pike and a cloud of anchovies I think is a true cloud until it sparkles and moves in a different direction all at once.

I don’t know the names of half these fish as I stand there in the warmth and the light. I learn their names and aspects over the years - and taste many of them.

For that moment, I just never knew the sky could be so bountiful.

“Look out,” Trinket says to me.

I look around and see a goblin, in light, and in no dream.

A few paces away from the cottage, a goblin had been frozen and now it starts to thaw and, when it does, turn its hunger on the people it sees.

It is still too froze to move right, to run away from the light, so its skin burns and blisters and it gags out its pain.

I reach for my belt, but I’ve left my hood inside - but this goblin dies from the light before it can crawl to me. I step back, none-the-less, and watch it writhe as it dies.

“Eyha, Eyha.”

I walk around the side of the cottage and mark three peasants waving their arms as they walk down the hill at us.

“What’s this?” Trinket calls out. “Back home, you lot!”

But the peasants shake their heads and wave their arms and keep coming. I’d yet to see Trinket with a scourge, but he must have one.

“Jimbe, come out here,” Trinket says. Then he says to me, “Come along, Bessil. Stay close to me.”

When they see us coming along, the peasants turn to go back - not wanting, I fancy, to come any closer to the overseer’s cottage than they must. The three of us traipse up the hill, after them. My feet are still cold in the snow, but the warm air and bright sky make me warm.

I slip, now and again, going up the path toward the longhouse. As we approach, I see four women folk and six children. The children dance and run around the yard in front of the dwelling. They are bigger - third circle, perhaps. Too old, I think, to be taken from their mothers by the overseers. Is that a joy or a sadness?

When we come near, the four women kneel, briefly, in the snow, then shoo the children up the hill away from the house. Three of the women have harvest dolls, but the fourth does not. And she is older. Did she never have taken a child in the harvest? Did she never have a child to take? Or did she have a harvest doll, once, and then put it aside when the pain of loss dulled?

One of the peasant men touches me on the arm and beckons me to follow him into the house. I look to Trinket who looks back and shrugs, so I go inside.

The longhouse is made of shark bones - as large as the Three Goats - and rushes, like the other longhouses I have seen. Where the peasants come by them, I don’t know, but they are sunk clear into the ground. A grid of poles bind them and rushes - woven - form the walls.

I am so captured by my first close look at the inside in the light from the high slats that I don’t notice, at first, the peasants still asleep in the middle of the floor.

But they are not asleep.

A body is hard to lift and move around. All the fish of the air float of their own volition and something of man - even of peasants - must have that buoyancy.

The peasant and I drag the first of their dead comrades out of the long house onto a tarp on the snow.

A peasant and Jimbe drag that first one down the hill, each taking a corner of the tarp. I stare after them until the peasant shakes my arm.

We go back inside to get the next of their brothers.

I’m lightheaded with hunger and hard work by the time we pull the last of the peasant remnants out of the longhouse. Four of the six are men, two women. I count up - there are three men alive, four women, and six children. Four men dead and I think two others who died before.

Two of the living men have ugly purple feet and ghastly purple scars on their faces. When Jimbe and I drag the last dead man down, the peasant men stumble down behind us, the two afflicted falling and stumbling frequently.

Submitted: August 15, 2023

Fantasy sprite goblins bones