The Shepherd's Crown (Discworld #41)(52)

Frank peered at the catalogue, at its cover. ‘Says ’ere you can get a bride,’ he said in wonder. ‘Comes by train.’

‘Well, there ain’t no train gets up here – no iron near this wood. Nearest railhead’s down at Hot Dang. Near enough. And that there brides is a new offer. Just in time for you lads. It says that you can get a young lady – lots of fancy girls looking for men. Find yourself one, and on what you can make up here she can have a proper indoor privy and no messing and all the clothes she wants. That’s how good the money is.’ He paused and stuffed the catalogue back into his pocket, then added, ‘Women’s clothes are wonderful, don’t you think? Only the other day I met a man who said he travelled in ladies’ lingerie . . .’

‘Are you sure he was all right?’ Martin asked Mr Slack a bit dubiously. He had heard talk of one very remote camp where the tough, strong lumberjacks apparently chose to dress in women’s clothing as they sang songs about their big choppers, but he hadn’t believed it. Until now, anyway.

The lumberjack ignored his question. ‘Well, Martin, you are a fine boy, aren’t you?’ he said, then turned to Frank. ‘You, lad, why do you want to take your chances up here?’

‘Well, Mr Slack, I was going out with this girl, but there was this other lad, you know . . .’ He hesitated.

Mr Slack held a hand in front of his face. ‘Don’t tell me anything more, kid. These hills are full of people who really wanted to be somewhere else, and it sounds like you might fancy taking a look at Biggerwoods then, once you’ve got some money in your pocket. Well, you two seem strong enough. Just sign up and we’ll say no more. You can start in the morning, and then we’ll see. If you ain’t stupid, you’ll come away with good wages. And if you go messing about around the flumes, I’ll give your dear old mothers your wages, so she’ll have enough to bury you with.’

He spat on his thumb, and man and boys made the thumb bargain so common amongst men of the world.

‘And I’ll tell you what’s going to happen to you in the next thirty minutes,’ Mr Slack said with a wide grin. ‘You’ll be over where the logs go into the flumes, watching and learning. And I don’t need no Predictive Pine to tell me that!’ He laughed, and patted the nearest pine.

But as his fingers touched the bark, his jaw dropped open and his hood fell back from a face frozen with fear.

‘Lads,’ he stammered – and that in itself was terrifying, that a man so grizzled should have such a thing as a stammer in his voice – ‘get out of here. Now! Get down the mountain. We’ve got a fight coming our way – in about five minutes! – and I need only men who know what to do with an axe up here.’ And he turned and ran into the camp, shouting to the lumberjacks.

Martin and Frank looked at each other, shocked, and then Frank reached out tentatively and poked a finger onto the tree. A sudden flash of images shot into his mind – gloriously colourful creatures in velvet and feathers, their bodies painted with woad, came tumbling down out of the trees. But there was nothing glorious about the pain and death they were bringing with them. Then he saw a fur-lined hood bobbing in the waters of a flume, a hood that framed the head of Mr Slack. A Mr Slack who seemed to have somehow been slack enough to lose his body . . .

The two boys stumbled through the lumberjacks, heading for the trees, for the snowy ground that offered a chance of escape.

Not quickly enough. For with a sudden whistle, a storm of elves came dancing from the trees – large, nasty elves, the feathers and velvets of their tunics making them seem like predatory birds swooping from the shadowy heights. The two boys shrank back, frozen to the spot.

And for a few minutes it was lumberjack versus elf, helped by the camp Igor, who said, ‘Keep touching the pineth, it troubleth them and they won’t know what day it is. And while they are finding out, you can give them a real rollocking.’

The lumberjacks were not men who would run away from a fight, and the terrible metal of their axes destroyed more than one elf. But more and more elves were pouring into the camp, tipping over the little sheds, kicking at the logs so that they tumbled into the flumes any which way, the elves swinging into the heights of the trees and laughing down at the camp. And there was something enchanting about them . . . something that crept behind the hard exteriors of the lumberjacks and made them fall to their knees, sobbing for their mothers, dropping their axes, easy prey for the victorious fairy folk . . .

‘I told you. Get yourselves away, get to the flumes, boys,’ Mr Slack shouted, chopping with his axe at an elf creeping up behind him. ‘Them flumes are faster than elves. I’ll be OK.’

Martin took him at his word – though Frank had seen the future and knew that ‘OK’ wasn’t really going to happen for Mr Slack – and leaped into the first bucket, Frank close on his heels, and Mr Slack pushed a lever – and the bucket was off! Down the flume snaking its way down the steep mountainside, round corners so terrible that they had to lean from one side to the other to avoid falling. Soaked to the skin, a jumble of logs in front of them, behind them, alongside them, they tore along deep gorges, dodging arrows from arriving elves who were heading up the mountain like a deadly swarm of insects.

It was wild, it was exhilarating, it was almost getting killed – and the almost bit is what made it something they would feel able to talk about later, though clearly getting killed would shut up most people.