'Yes,' said Shabble, sounding mightily crestfallen. 'It laughed at me. It told me to go bounce.'
'So what did you do then?'
'I blasted it again. But it didn't make much difference.'
'So then you chased me,' said Guest. 'That wasn't very fair, was it? To get angry with the demon then go chasing after me on that account?'
Shabble tried to avoid the question, but Guest pressed the bubble hard, and in the end it had to concede that it had been naughty.
'Naughty!' said Guest. 'You were rather more than naughty!
I'm stuck here on this hellhole of an island, and there's no way off that I can see!'
'You've got the Door,' said Shabble.
'But it's closed!' said Guest.
'Well,' said Shabble, 'there's, uh, there's this boat.'
'This rowing boat?' said Guest. 'Are you mad? It's got cracks in it which I could just about crawl through.'
'Well, someone came here in it,' said Shabble.
'From a sinking ship, maybe,' said Guest. 'Or maybe they were marooned. But judging by the evidence, they didn't get much further!'
With that, Guest indicated the bones which he had found beneath the rowing boat.
'Well, I don't see what you're so worried about,' said Shabble. 'You've got the bottle, you've got the ring, there's food, there's water, they told me that on Alozay.'
'Who told you?' said Guest.
'The one with big ears,' said Shabble. 'Your father.'
'Neither of us has big ears,' said Guest. 'We have normal ears. Everyone else has an undersized issue.'
'If you say so,' said Shabble. 'But you've still got food, you've stood got water, what else do you need?'
'All kinds of things!' said Guest. 'Women, to start with.'
'Oh,' said Shabble, crestfallen.
Shabble knew that men liked women, and had a theoretical knowledge of the reasons why, but Shabble remained unconvinced of the validity of the theories. Shabble had once maintained a small harem, but many nights of sleeping with women and exploring their intimacies had convinced the bubble that the whole experience was grotesquely overrated. Shabble much preferred sleeping amidst the flames of a fire (for fire was pretty, and gave Shabble melodious dreams), or sleeping with a balloon (for Shabble thought balloons were happy creatures), or sleeping alongside a billiard ball (which gave Shabble the comforting illusion of having the company of one of its own kind).
'You wouldn't understand,' said Guest moodily.
'Oh, I understand,' said Shabble. 'You miss your Yerzerdayla.'
'Yerzerdayla?' said Guest.
'The woman,' said Shabble. 'You know! She was locked in a pod, you were all set to rescue her!'
'Oh,' said Guest. 'Yes, yes, so I was.'
But the truth was that the Weaponmaster had long ago forsaken Yerzerdayla. She was a figure from his adolescence, and in these the years of his maturity he had almost forgotten her. The woman
Penelope meant much more to him, for it was Penelope who had comforted him during the four years of his convalescence in Dalar ken Halvar – but even Penelope, it seemed, was lost to him.
As for Yerzerdayla – why, on his latest sojourn on Alozay, Guest had been so busy getting drunk and eating horse meat, or planning strategy and dealing with demons, that he had never thought of the woman for so much as a moment. Long ago, he had conceived the notion of rescuing her from the pod in the Hall of Time in which he had seen her last, but all such thoughts had long since passed from his head.
Still, Guest thought it unwise to confess as much to Shabble, for he feared the bubble might be a romantic. If so, then it would think less of Guest for his forgetfulness. So Guest put his head in his hands and moaned, in what he hoped was a convincing manner:
'Oh! Oh! My poor Yerzerdayla!'
Then much more of the same followed, until Shabble gallantly declared that it would fly back to the Old City in the Penvash Peninsular, and find the star-globe (wherever that might have got to) and reopen the Door so Guest could continue round this particular Circle.
'Or,' said Shabble, 'I could find Sken-Pitilkin and get him to fly here.'
'But that's impossible,' said Guest. 'For a start, you don't know where we are to start with, and even if you did, you'd never be able to get here again.'
'I know exactly where we are,' said Shabble.
'How?' said Guest, wondering if Shabble perhaps had some anciently derived knowledge of the previously unexplored Circle into which Guest had so precipitately ventured.
'From the sun,' said Shabble simply.
Then the bubble declared that they were some hundreds of leagues north-west of Untunchilamon; that it had calculated their position to a nicety; that its agility at celestial navigation would permit it a swift passage back to Penvash; and that it would have no trouble whatsoever in guiding Sken-Pitilkin back to Guest Gulkan's island. Guest then expected the bubble of bounce to go whistling up into the heavens, hastening with all possible force to the Old City. But Shabble did not. Shabble wanted to chat, to talk, to play some more in the water, to invent names for the fishes, to speculate on the size of the clouds. And Guest, realizing that he was dependent upon Shabble for his rescue, had no alternative but to play along with these games.
At last, after a full two days of play – an excessive indulgence, doubtless, but Shabble had been held prisoner by the demon Ko for upwards of a year, and so was in a mood to enjoy its liberty to the full – Shabble gave Guest a parting present. The parting present was a full-length massage of the Weaponmaster's back, and Guest had to admit that Shabble did it very well.
Then the bubble set forth.
It did not soar upwards, but, rather, went bouncing across the sea, skip by skip. On seeing Shabble adopt this slow and selfindulgent mode of transport, Guest groaned. He had a vision of the bubble slow-hop-skipping all the way across Moana, a process which would surely take days.
'Grief of gods!' said Guest.
Then made a moody promenade around his minuscule island, then withdrew – not for the first time – to the yellow bottle. With Shabble gone, Guest began to make a methodical assessment of his assets. He had food, including more siege dust than he could have eaten in a thousand years, and he had water. And, toward the end of his search, Guest realized he also had a book.
The book was a book of verbs.
To be precise, the book was Strogloth's Compendium of Delights, that hateful manual of irregularities which had vexed, perplexed and persecuted Guest's boyhood. Guest glared at the thing, then laid rough hands upon it, determined to rend it and tear it, to rough it and burn it.
Then he stopped himself.
He was all alone, marooned without women or companions, deserted by even Shabble. In this exile, nothing remained to him but the exercise of his sword and this one, single, solitary book.
'But,' said Guest, 'why did it have to be this book?'
Why not a pillow book, or a potentially useful Book of Maps, or a great Book of Battles, or (he had raw materials in plenty) a great Book of Cookery?
'I blame Sken-Pitilkin,' muttered Guest.
For who else did he know who was in love with the verbs? Who else had the motive, the means and the opportunity to smuggle such a reprehensible object into the yellow bottle? But, regardless of who was to blame, the facts were the facts, and Guest was stuck with the facts. He was marooned on a desert island, and the sole companion of his maroonment was the most hateful book in all the world: Strogloth's monomaniacal compendium of the world's irregular verbs.
Oh doom of dooms!
Oh fates worse than death! Guest Gulkan saw the future, and he shuddered.
