The Book of Wonder: A Chronicle of Little Adventures at the Edge of the World by Lord Dunsany

Author:Lord Dunsany
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fantasy fiction, English
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2014-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

There the Gib­belins Lived and Dis­cred­it­ably Fed

The Hoard of the Gibbelins

The Gib­belins eat, as is well known, noth­ing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cog­nita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is bey­ond reas­on; av­arice has no use for it; they have a sep­ar­ate cel­lar for em­er­alds and a sep­ar­ate cel­lar for sap­phires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only use that is known for their ri­dicu­lous wealth is to at­tract to their lar­der a con­tinu­al sup­ply of food. In times of fam­ine they have even been known to scat­ter ru­bies abroad, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their lar­ders would soon be full again.

Their tower stands on the oth­er side of that river known to Homer—ὁ ῥόος ἀχεανοίο, as he called it—which sur­rounds the world. And where the river is nar­row and ford­able the tower was built by the Gib­belins’ glut­ton­ous sires, for they liked to see burg­lars row­ing eas­ily to their steps. Some nour­ish­ment that com­mon soil has not the huge trees drained there with their co­lossal roots from both banks of the river.

There the Gib­belins lived and dis­cred­it­ably fed.

Al­der­ic, Knight of the Or­der of the City and the As­sault, hered­it­ary Guard­i­an of the King’s Peace of Mind, a man not un­re­membered among makers of myth, pondered so long upon the Gib­belins’ hoard that by now he deemed it his. Alas that I should say of so per­il­ous a ven­ture, un­der­taken at dead of night by a val­or­ous man, that its motive was sheer av­arice! Yet upon av­arice only the Gib­belins re­lied to keep their lar­ders full, and once in every hun­dred years sent spies in­to the cit­ies of men to see how av­arice did, and al­ways the spies re­turned again to the tower say­ing that all was well.

It may be thought that, as the years went on and men came by fear­ful ends on that tower’s wall, few­er and few­er would come to the Gib­belins’ table: but the Gib­belins found oth­er­wise.

Not in the folly and frivolity of his youth did Al­der­ic come to the tower, but he stud­ied care­fully for sev­er­al years the man­ner in which burg­lars met their doom when they went in search of the treas­ure that he con­sidered his. In every case they had entered by the door.

He con­sul­ted those who gave ad­vice on this quest; he noted every de­tail and cheer­fully paid their fees, and de­term­ined to do noth­ing that they ad­vised, for what were their cli­ents now? No more than ex­amples of the sa­voury art, and mere half-for­got­ten memor­ies of a meal; and many, per­haps, no longer even that.

These were the re­quis­ites for the quest that these men used to ad­vise: a horse, a boat, mail ar­mour, and at least three men-at-arms. Some said, “Blow the horn at the tower door”; oth­ers said, “Do not touch it.”

Al­der­ic thus de­cided: he would take no horse down

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