The Alchemaster's Apprentice - By Walter Moers Page 0,32
alone with giants. It’s the smallest story in the whole of Zamonia. Can you come to terms with that?’
‘No problem,’ said Echo. ‘I like small things.’
‘You see? One immediately feels more comfortable when small things are involved, doesn’t one? More comfortable and free from the shadows cast by monstrous events to come. The things that happen in cramped but clearly visible surroundings are so small and uncommodious that even a Rootkin can deal with them. Isn’t that nice and reassuring?’
‘Yes,’ said Echo.
‘Rootkins are so small that they can’t even be termed dwarfs. They belong to the Dwurf family, which embraces all life forms smaller than a chestnut: Piplings, Nutkins, Antlets, Skwirts and so on. But Rootkins are the smallest of the lot. They’re only knee-high to a Skwirt and you know how small a Skwirt is.’
‘No,’ said Echo, ‘I don’t.’
‘Well, a Nutkin is smaller than a Pipling but bigger than an Antlet, and a Skwirt is half the size of the latter. Stand all three on top of each other and they would be as tall in relation to a dwarf as a chicken is to an elephant.’
‘I see,’ said Echo.
‘Now that I’ve explained their relative sizes, perhaps I can get on with the story. Well, all Rootkins are alike. Equally big or equally small, equally kind, equally courageous, equally timid, equally this, equally that. And because they’re all so alike, they need no names. They sprout from the floor of the Miniforest in springtime, precisely a dozen of them every year, and they’re fairly long-lived unless they fall victim to an accident. Their job is to tend the Miniforest. They scarify the soil by raking it, lop off dead branches and milk greenflies - that sort of thing.’
Ghoolion clasped his hands together and cracked his knuckles with a grisly sound like twigs snapping, a habit Echo profoundly disliked.
‘Our story begins’, he went on, ‘when a Rootkin who was busy weeding a clearing - a very small clearing far from the rest of his kind - came upon something protruding from the forest floor. It was a vessel with a cork in it.
‘The Rootkin’s curiosity was aroused, so he dug up the vessel and discovered it to be an earthenware bottle. Being smaller than a Rootkin, the bottle could justifiably be called a small one, but since it almost came up to the Rootkin’s shoulder, he thought: “My, what a big bottle! Looks like an antique or something - it’s very old, anyway. If there’s some kind of drink inside it, it’s bound to taste awful.”
‘Gingerly, the Rootkin removed the cork and sniffed the neck of the bottle. As he did so, a cloud of evil-smelling fumes emerged from it. He thought at first that the drink inside had gone bad and was escaping in the form of a gas, but the cloud grew bigger and bigger and turned as red as a stream of molten lava flowing upwards into the sky. The air was rent by a yell that might have been uttered by a hundred Storm Demons. By the time it finally died away, leaving the Rootkin half dead with terror, the Miniforest was overshadowed by a hovering figure so tall that it almost reached the clouds: a blood-red ogre with evil black eyes and flames instead of hair. “Free!” it bellowed in a voice like thunder. “Free at last!”’
‘Just a minute,’ Echo cut in. ‘You told me there wouldn’t be any giants in this story.’
‘True,’ said Ghoolion. ‘I must have misled you in order to heighten the effect of surprise. Shall I stop?’
‘No, no,’ cried Echo, ‘go on!’
‘Hm …’ said Ghoolion. ‘The Rootkin naturally realised at once that he had released an Omnidestructive Ogre, and he was even more terrified than before - quite rightly so.
‘“Free at long last!” yelled the giant. “Now I can take my revenge! I shall tear this planet to pieces like a scrap of paper! I shall set it ablaze with my flaming hair and poison it with my breath! My hatred has grown so great in the course of time that I won’t be content to destroy this planet alone. No, I shall annihilate all the planets and extinguish all the suns and reduce the whole confounded universe to rubble and ashes! And then I shall hunt down time itself, which afflicted me so cruelly in my captivity, and torture it to death!”
‘“Oh dear,” thought the Rootkin, “how silly of me! What on earth am I to do now?”’