The Alchemaster's Apprentice (19 page)

Read The Alchemaster's Apprentice Online

Authors: Walter Moers

Unable to restrain himself any longer, Echo leapt off the table and joined in the Alchemaster’s dance. He cavorted across the kitchen more wildly and uninhibitedly than he had ever done in his life. Ghoolion’s playing became ever louder, his zapateado ever faster. Meanwhile, Echo went bouncing over the tables and benches like a rubber ball. They continued to dance their frantic, seemingly indefatigable tarantella until, all of a sudden, Ghoolion stopped playing and flopped down on a chair, utterly exhausted. Echo, too, noticed that he’d overdone it. He stretched out on the floor, rolled over on his back and stared at the ceiling. Oddly enough, the room began to rotate.
After a short breather Ghoolion sprang to his feet, gave him a glassy stare and lurched towards the door.
‘Hey, where you going, Mashter?’ Echo said thickly. ‘We were jusht getting into the shwing of thingsh.’
‘Even the most sociable wine connoisseur has to perform one part of every tasting by himself,’ Ghoolion called over his shoulder.
‘You mean there’sh another part?’ asked Echo.
‘Yes,’ the Alchemaster said hoarsely, ‘the passing of water!’ And he disappeared through the kitchen door with his cloak billowing out behind him.
Echo continued to lie there, grinning foolishly to himself and listening to Ghoolion’s hoarse laughter. The old devil doesn’t seem such a bad sort, he thought as his eyes closed and he lapsed into a tipsy torpor filled with dreams as sweet as ripe grapes.
The Tree of Nutledge
E
cho found it an effort to open his bleary eyes. When he finally ungummed them, Ghoolion was standing over him, staring down with a face devoid of expression. Bright early morning sunlight was streaming in through the kitchen windows. As motionless as if he’d been struck by a bolt from the blue, the Alchemaster resembled one of his own stuffed mummies. Roused at last by this sinister sight, Echo rolled over on his side - and promptly regretted it. He had spent all night lying on his back, just the way he’d gone to sleep, and his muscular reaction to this sudden movement was painful in the extreme. Laboriously, he scrambled to his feet.
‘I take it you aren’t feeling too much like food at present,’ Ghoolion said coldly. He had reverted to his role as a forbidding Alchemaster and looked as if their binge had left him entirely unaffected.
‘That’s why I’ve prepared you only a frugal breakfast,’ he went on. ‘I trust that’s acceptable.’
‘Absolutely,’ Echo grunted. The kitchen floor seemed to sway beneath his paws as he strove to get his bearings. ‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Your current physical condition’, said Ghoolion, ‘is known as a monumental hangover.’
Echo didn’t reply. The Alchemaster’s voice sounded unpleasantly loud.
‘Breakfast is on the table. If you regain your appetite in the course of the day, I advise you to go to the roof and help yourself. I have some important experiments to carry out - they won’t wait.’
‘That’s all right,’ Echo mumbled. He scrambled on to the table by way of a chair instead of jumping straight up in the usual way. All he found when he got there, grunting and groaning, was a bowl of warm milk and a plate containing three shrivelled nuts.
‘Just nuts?’ he said petulantly.
‘They’re no ordinary nuts,’ Ghoolion replied. ‘They come from the Tree of Nutledge.’
‘Aha,’ said Echo. He proceeded to munch the nuts without enthusiasm. They were dry and tasted of nothing, not even of nuts.
‘The Tree of Nutledge grows in the Valley of Cogitating Eggs,’ Ghoolion explained. ‘That’s an arid, desertlike depression in the neighbourhood of Demon Range. The highest temperatures in Zamonia can be recorded there - if you’re crazy enough to cross it in summer. Towering into the sky in the very centre of the valley are a dozen enormous eggs. They’re arranged in a perfect circle, and some astronomers claim that its coordinates would enable one to calculate the dimensions of the entire universe.
‘Nobody knows how the eggs got there, but the long tracks they’ve left in the desert floor seem to indicate that they did so under their own power. On the other hand there’s an ornithological theory that they were laid by giant birds and that one day something unpredictable will hatch out of them. They emit a humming sound suggestive of profound thought, hence their name.’
Echo gulped down the last dry morsel. ‘But where do the nuts come in?’ he asked.
‘Well, it’s assumed that the intellectual radiation given off by the Cogitating Eggs has endowed large tracts of the valley with intelligence. Some of the animals there can talk as well as you do. I own a cactus from the area - we play telepathic chess together and it wins every time! One day a nut landed on this intellectually fertile soil. No one knows where it came from. It may have been dropped by a traveller or jettisoned by a passing bird. It may also have been a tiny asteroid from outer space. All we know is, it must have rained heavily soon afterwards, because the nut germinated and took root in the desert floor, and from it grew the Tree of Nutledge. A tree with blood-red timber found nowhere else in the whole of Zamonia, it grew like mad, both upwards and outwards, and put out snow-white leaves that make you very mentally alert if you chew them. Druids have settled in the tree and live in its branches. Naked, weather-beaten fellows with long hair and beards and demented expressions, they climb like monkeys and screech like cockatoos. Their consumption of nuts has rendered them so brilliantly clever that they’ve lost the need for speech and communicate by telepathic means. Scientists, artists and politicians from all over Zamonia make repeated pilgrimages to the tree when confronted by knotty problems. They write their questions on slips of paper and put them in wickerwork baskets, which the Druids let down on strings. Having been hauled up into the tree, the baskets are generally lowered soon afterwards, complete with answers. Suggestions from the inhabitants of the Tree of Nutledge were responsible for ending the Florinthian Choral Wars. They also led to the invention of the Aeromorphic Barograph and helped to crack the Cucumbrian Cryptogram.’
‘I see,’ said Echo. ‘So how do the nuts get here if the Druids eat them?’
‘A few of them fall to the ground from time to time, and the Druids are too mentally preoccupied to pick them up. They’re then collected and eaten by pilgrims, but a handful reach the open market. Each nut imparts a priceless insight.’
‘The ones I’ve eaten have left me none the wiser,’ Echo said sullenly.
‘They don’t work like that - they have a delayed reaction. Believe me, enlightenment will dawn in due course - it’s guaranteed. It sometimes takes a day or two.’
‘But that’s like eating something which doesn’t fill your belly till next week.’
‘Exactly!’ Ghoolion gathered his cloak around him and turned to go. ‘You’ll have to excuse me now, I’ve got things to do in the laboratory. There’s more food waiting for you on the roof, as I said.’
Echo spent the rest of the morning roaming aimlessly around in a thoroughly bad mood. He took refuge in dark corners, waiting impatiently for his body to regain its equilibrium and his nagging headache to subside. Early that afternoon he made an excursion to the roof, where he ate a fish pie and some chocolate cake. Although he didn’t really enjoy his meal, it made him so sleepy that he stretched out in a gutter and let the sun warm his fur until he dozed off. He slept for the rest of the afternoon and half the evening.
It was long after sunset when he awoke feeling thoroughly refreshed - almost newborn, in fact. He was in such a good mood that an audacious idea occurred to him: he decided to needle Ghoolion a little.
Shadow Ink
‘I
’m bored,’ Echo said as he sauntered into the laboratory, sounding as supercilious as he could. He followed this up with a long, unabashed yawn.
The Alchemaster was engrossed in an experiment with a Leyden Manikin, which he had strapped to a wooden board. He was injecting green fluid into the alchemical creature’s little body with a hypodermic syringe and watching its convulsions spellbound.
‘Hm?’ he said absently. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘I’m bored because you aren’t fulfilling your contractual obligations, ’ Echo said in a resentful voice. ‘In other words, you aren’t doing enough to keep me entertained. Come on, amuse me.’
He instantly regretted his presumptuous demand, because the Alchemaster’s face darkened, his eyes bulged alarmingly, and his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth began to quiver. He was obviously about to give Echo a tongue-lashing. The little Crat shrank away, expecting the worst, but Ghoolion suddenly stopped short. His body relaxed, his stormy expression vanished and an indulgent smile appeared on his face.
‘You’re absolutely right,’ he said to Echo’s great relief. ‘I’ve been neglecting you. My work is so all-consuming, please forgive me. Your entertainment is an important part of our agreement, every single condition of which must be strictly fulfilled. What form of amusement did you have in mind?’
To crown it all, the Alchemaster performed a humble bow.
‘Oh,’ said Echo, completely thrown by this, ‘I, er … I don’t know. What about a game of some kind?’
‘A game, eh? Hm …’ Ghoolion was clearly thinking hard. ‘I don’t know many games, to be honest.’
‘Never mind,’ said Echo, ‘It was just a -’
‘Wait!’ Ghoolion broke in. ‘I
do
know a game! I’m really good at it, too.’
‘Oh?’ Echo said nervously. ‘What is it?’
‘Wait and see.’ After a last, sceptical glance at the twitching manikin, Ghoolion hurried out of the laboratory.
‘Come on!’ he called. ‘We need a dark room without any windows.’
Echo followed him reluctantly. What sort of game could the Alchemaster be ‘really good’ at? He doubted if he’d enjoy it and cursed his presumption. He could have spent a quiet evening on the roof, complete with herring salad, honey-flavoured milk and a stimulating chat with Theodore. But no, he’d insisted on needling Ghoolion into playing some mysterious game with him in ‘a dark room without any windows’. Great!
Boots clattering and cloak flapping, Ghoolion went striding along the passage to the half-open door of an unlit chamber Echo had never entered before. In the dim light from the passage he made out a few crates of junk and a big, unlit stove with a broom leaning against it. That apart, the place was completely bare.
‘This was going to be a storeroom, but I haven’t fixed it up yet,’ Ghoolion announced. ‘It’s ideal for our purposes because the walls are whitewashed and there aren’t any windows. Wait here, I need to fetch a few things. I’ll be back in no time.’

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