The Soddit

by A.R.R.R. Roberts

Genres: Humor & Satire; Satire; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

Bingo Grabbins is a soddit who enjoys a comfortable life (apart from his feet, of course). But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard, Gandef, and a company of bizarrely Welsh dwarves drag him away on an adventure.

They have a plot to raid the treasure hoard (or so they say) guarded by Smug, a large and very tedious dragon. Bingo is reluctant to take part in this insane venture, but a dwarven dagger held to his throat soon surprises even himself and off the companions go on a quest that seems truly epic (well, until you hear about what later happened to Bingo's cousin, at any rate).

Oh, and Bingo finds this ring thing...

Release date: September 18, 2012

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 339

Sample

In a hole, in a highly desirable and sought-after portion of the ground (the hole two doors along went for three hundred thou last month, near enough, although admittedly it was double-fronted and had a newly turfed roof) lived a soddit, the hero of our story. His name was Bingo “Sac” Grabbings. Not a name he chose for himself, of course, but one decided on by his mother. Easy for her to say, of course; she didn’t have to live with it all through school and adult life. Parents, eh?

Where was I? Oh, yes.

In a hole, then, lived Bingo. It was a fair-to-middling soddit hole, with a circular blue-painted door, fine blue tiles in the bathroom with a cheesy blue mould growing on them, blue beetles, silverfish, silvery worms, all manner of moistness and a kitchen area from which it was next to impossible to clear out cooking smells. Nevertheless in soddit terms it was a reasonably desirable residence. Bingo’s aunt, the severe Vita “Sac” Vile-Vest, had designs upon this very sod-hole, although Bingo was in no mood to give way to pressure from that branch of the family. He was a soddit of forty, which in soddit years was next to nothing, a mere bagatelle, less than a bagatelle in fact; well, technically about four fifths of a bagatelle, but still young, that’s my point.

Soddits are a race of little people who live in the earth, which is where their name comes from (you’ll learn a lot about names and where they come from if you pay attention as you read, believe me). Scholars and philologists have established the derivation of the name, evidenced by an ancient rhyme:

Cleave the sod with your trusty spade

Dig out a house that’s quite like a grave

And should your neighbour not return your wave

Cleave the sod with your trusty spade

Now it is an interesting thing that soddits don’t tend to call themselves “soddits,” for reasons I’ll come to in a minute. But “soddit” is the generally accepted term. Once upon a time a traveller from the country of the bigger people roamed far and wide through the country of the littler folk, through the County of the Hunchkins, Shrimpville, Littleputia, the Land of the Lepercorns1, Jockeyton, and into Hobbld-Ahoy!, the home town of Bingo, the hero of our tale. On his return to the human town of Brie this big ’un traveller found his way to a tavern, and sat meditating on his adventures, and his fellow big ’uns gathered around him curious as to what he had seen. “What did you discover?” they pressed him. “Who did you encounter?” “I met a—” he started to reply, and drew a great shuddering sigh into his body, before concluding in a lowered tone, “soddit,” and reaching for his tankard of ale. The name of the particular soddit he encountered has not been recorded, but it was clearly a meeting that had a profound impact upon the big man, for he stayed inside the Dragon-Queen Inn at Brie for two days and two nights drinking all the time and speaking to nobody, and soon afterwards left the area never to return.

Soddits build the accommodation portion of their houses under the ground, and they build their coal-cellars, wine rooms and sometimes large rooms with ping-pong tables in them above the ground. They insist that this is the most logical manner of arranging living space, and indeed Hobbld-Ahoy! planning regulations have made any other form of domestic building illegal, although this does tend to result in living quarters prone to damp, to worms, to mould, to associated asthma and bronchitis for the inhabitants, whilst coal, wine and ping-pong bats are the most burgled items in this burglary-prone town. But a tradition, after all, is a tradition.

Soddits, as I say, don’t call themselves soddits. In their own tongue, which is queer and old and full of syntactical-grammatical inconsistencies, they call themselves hobblds. Now, there’s a reason why they refer to themselves in this manner, and not by the name of soddit like everybody else in the world, and the reason is found in their feet. Shocking feet, they have. Just shocking. Whatever the reason—and soddits down the ages have blamed the gods, or an ancient wizard’s curse, or inadequate orthopaedic practice, or congenital disease, or a dozen other factors—whatever the reason, soddits are almost all of them afflicted with appalling arthritis of the feet. Their feet are swollen and gnarled, many three or four times their normal size, with toes like coconuts and ankles like condoms stuffed with pebbles. This arthritis is extremely painful, and is indeed no laughing matter, although queerly it is a condition that does not spread to any other part of their body. But it gives their feet a strangely deadened, different colour from the rest of their bodies. Moreover, it makes it impossible for the adult soddit to wear shoes, for the pressure of leather against the inflated flesh of the feet is too, too ghastly. This means that the diminutive folk walk only with difficulty and excessive slowness; and accordingly adult soddits spend much of their time searching for the cushion of perfect softness, making little grunts as they collapse into their sofas and using their hands physically to lift their feet on to their footstools.

And now you know everything that you need to know about soddits, or hobblds, excepting only one or two minor details, such as the fact that they are food-loving and drink-loving and enjoy conviviality. And that they like to wear waistcoats and corduroy. Oh, yes, and that they smoke pipeweed a great deal and that accordingly they die younger than they otherwise would of cancers of the mouth, tongue and throat as well as of heart disease. What else? That they are conservative, rural, bourgeois, middle class. That they speak with a slight Birmingham accent, oddly. And, also, that despite their manifest disadvantages—their diminutive stature, their crippled elephantiasitic feet, their small-mindedness, their disinclination to listen to strangers or change old ways, their addiction to tobacco and alcohol, their stagnant class-ridden “respectability”—despite all this, they have developed the most modern semi-industrial culture in the whole world, with water-mills, steam-foundries, comfortable housing, pipes, pop-guns, spectacles, velvet clothes, charming little flintstone churches, books and fireworks, whilst the rest of Upper Middle Earth is languishing in the dark ages of swords, horses, and burying their dead under enormous mounds of earth. Funny that. But, you see, the ways of the world are strange and sometimes inexplicable.

Bingo was sitting on his most comfortable sofa one morning, with his poor swollen arthritic feet resting on a green velvet cushion on the footstool in front of him. He was staring at the knuckled toe joints of these feet, the place where the individual toes meet the body of the foot, and these joints were staring back at him, like ten radishes. He was feeling the full weight of the misery of existence, poor old Bingo.

There was a series of bangs on the door, loud and startling, the sort of noise that might be made by a naughty soddit child stuffing a firecracker in the keyhole, lighting it, running away, hearing the disappointingly soggy pop, coming back vexed and kicking the door off its hinges with his as-yet unspoiled, bovver-booted feet. Young people today, eh? What can you do? Tch.

Bingo sighed. “Go away,” he called. After a pause he added, “Go away.”

The banging continued on the front door.

There was nothing for it. Bingo got slowly to his feet, and made his way to the door, flinching with each step and uttering all his usual expressions of pain, including “ah!,” “ouch” and, half under his breath, “ow-ow-ow.”2

Bingo did not like having a round front door. Who would? Geometry dictates that such a door be held in place by only one hinge, and that this hinge cannot be placed in the most effective load-bearing position, so that the doorway is draughty and the door unwieldy to open, and able easily to be kicked completely in by any soddit still young enough to be wearing boots. But tradition is tradition is tradition, and this was a tradition which Hobbled-Ahoy! planning regulators enforced with particular zeal. Bingo pulled open his door.

Outside, standing in the sunshine, was a wizard. Bingo had never seen a wizard before, but the “W” on the front of his poncho could only mean he was one of that magic brotherhood. Either that, or he was a Munchkin of unusually developed stature and had put his poncho on upside down.

The knocking noise was continuing, louder than before.

Bingo looked up at the wizard.

“Yes, well,” said the wizard in a booming voice. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Sorry?” Bingo repeated, uncomprehending. He looked at his still-knocking door.

“The knocking spell I put on your door. It’s a common enough wizardly spell, you know,” he bellowed, as if talking into a gale. “I’m too fragile at my time of life to go banging at doors. Banging at doors! I’m too old and fragile for that. So I’ve put the knocking spell on, do you see?”

Bingo looked at the door. “Can you turn it off, please?”

The wizard seemed not to hear. “Thank you!” he said, in his stentorian voice. “But, really, you’re too kind. It’s a small spell, but potent. Potent!”

“How long does it last?”

“Yes, yes,” boomed the wizard indulgently. “But can I turn it off? That’s the question. And the answer? The answer is ‘can I buggery.’ Hard to do, do you see? Easy to turn it on, that spell, but fiercely difficult to turn it off.”

“How long does the spell last?” said Bingo, leaving a space between each word and moving his facial muscles in a more marked manner as he spoke.

“Grabbings?” shrieked the wizard, his shaggy eye-brows rising and his eyes staring intensely. “Grabbings?” He stepped forward, filling the doorway, bent down and stepped into the hallway of Grab End.

Bingo spun around as the huge figure of the wizard, bent nearly double, moved rapidly along the hall and into the main sitting room, shouting Bingo’s surname at the top of his voice. All the while the front door carried on making its deafening racket, like a heavy item of wooden furniture clattering down an endless flight of stairs. Bingo stumbled after the wizard, calling out “hey!” and “ow-my-feet!,” and came through to the sitting room to find the old wizard parked there in Bingo’s own sofa (which though large for a soddit was chair-sized for the man), beaming toothlessly at him. “So you are Grabbings, are you?” he shouted.

“Yes, yes I am,” replied Bingo. “But, look, I’m sorry but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you—I’m sorry—to leave. You can’t come in. You can’t sit there.”

“It said ‘Grabbings’ over the door, you see,” said the wizard.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” said Bingo, in a louder voice.

“Grabbings,” said the wizard, putting his finger to his cheek to mime contemplation. “A burglar’s name, is that?”

“I’m a gentlehobbld of independent means,” said Bingo, wincing as a sudden pain arrowed up his leg from his left foot, “and I’m asking you to go, now.”

“I thought so,” said the wizard, smiling knowingly. “I thought so.”

“Leave! Please!” screeched Bingo.

“Too kind,” said the wizard, taking off his hat and placing it on his lap. “Two sugars, for me. My name is Gandef and I am a wizard, yes indeed. The famous Gandef. Don’t be scared. I promise,” he said, chuckling to himself, “I do—I promise—although I am a wizard, I promise not to turn you,” he went on, his chuckling bubbling up until his shoulders and his whole head were shaking with the hilarity of what he was saying, “not to turn you into a toad—arch-CHHTTGH QOOF-QOOF-QOOF,” he added, coughing so abruptly, so prodigiously and body-spasmingly that it looked, for a moment, as if he were going to shake himself out of his seat and on to the floor. “AWARGH—SCHW-SCHWO’AH KOH-KOH,” he coughed. “K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH.”

Bingo, alarmed, sat down in the second-best chair.

“K’OAH, K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH,” the wizard continued.

“Are you all—” Bingo started to say.

“K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH K’OAH,” the wizard concluded, and let his head flop backwards. His colour had drained away, and little dregs of spittle were visible on the grey of his beard just below his mouth. “Blimey,” he said in a strangulated voice. “Oh dear, oh dear.” His right hand fumbled in the pocket of his gown and brought out a pipe, his left hand brought out a wallet of pokeweed, and with trembling fingers he filled the bowl. “I’ll be better in a moment,” he croaked, muttering a small spell to bring a yellow flame from his right thumbnail so that he could light the pipe. For long minutes the wizard simply sucked noisily at the stem of his pipe, making orgasmic little moans between breaths, and swiftly filling Bingo’s front room with a smoke so acrid and dark it made the little soddit’s eyes smart. “Oh that’s better,” Gandef murmured, sucking in another lungful of heated tobacco particles and air, “so much better.”

“Are you all right?” Bingo asked, a little nervously.

“Eh?” Gandef shouted. “What? You’ll have to speak up. My hearing’s not what it used to be.”

Away in the hall, behind him, Bingo could hear the door still knocking away to itself. “I—” he started to say, but realised that he didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

“Oh, once upon a time,” said Gandef, “my hearing was better than an eagle, and my eyesight better than a—well, a goodly eyed animal. I don’t know. Something with a very good and acute sense of sight. An eagle. Yes. But age takes its toll, you know.” The wizard hawked, and so enormous a noise of wrenching phlegm emanated from his chest that Bingo shrank back. “I tried a most potent Noise Amplification Spell once upon a time,” Gandef was saying, his voice meditative, though still loud. “Marvellous spell. I could hear the birds speaking to one another in trees over the horizon, I could hear the rustlings as the clouds rubbed against one another in the sky. I could hear the sound a rainbow makes as it arches its back over the world. Then a dog barked behind me and I burst my left eardrum. Won’t try that again in a hurry. I actually wet myself—imagine it! A wizard! Wetting himself in terror! Wouldn’t do for that piece of news to get around, the forces of evil and all that, important to keep up appearances of, you know, magic and potency. I’m not actually a man, you see—I’m a sort of angel.”3 He chuckled to himself. “Covers a multitude of sins, that. Sharp’s the word!”

“I don’t quite follow,” said Bingo.

“They’ll be here in a moment, Our Friends from the Dwarf. From, uh, the dwarfland. They’re the salt of the earth. Which is to say, they’ve dug up and sold the salt of the earth. And also that they’ve ploughed salt into the earth of people they didn’t like. But we’ll stay on their good side. Oh yes. We’ll draw up a contract, I’ll get the map out, and we can head off tomorrow. Be on our way.” He cleared his throat, or to put it more precisely, he moved half a stone of snot from one internal location to another, and then drew a deep breath through his pipe.

“Come again?” said Bingo.

But Gandef had fallen asleep, his head lolling, his still lit pipe rolling from his fingers and tipping smouldering tobacco over the matting that served for a carpet in Bingo’s soddit hole.

The first four dwarfs4 arrived half an hour later, hammering on the door so violently that it jolted off its latch and collapsed inwards. “My door!” squealed Bingo, scurrying as fast as his deformed feet could take him out into the hallway.

“Apologies,” said the first dwarf, treading on the wreck of the door as he stepped inside. “We were knocking for a while, look you, but seeing how the door was knocking anyway by itself I don’t think we were being heard. I got a mate who does doors.”

“Does doors lovely,” said the second dwarf.

“Oh, he’ll do you a lovely door,” said the first dwarf, with a flush of agreement. “Lovely big hefty door. Soon as he pops along, he’ll quote you, lovely boy, la, bach.”

“There’s been a misunderstanding,” Bingo gabbled at them. “I’m sorry that you’ve been inconvenienced, but you’ve got the wrong hole. Nobody here called Grabbings. No wizard, there’s no wizard here. You’ll have to go away.”

From behind him, in the sitting room, came a series of axe-like chopping noises such as can only be produced by a man who has scoured the walls of his lungs red and smooth over many years of dedicated smoke inhalation.

“That’s the boyo,” said the first dwarf, stepping past Bingo. “Failin,” he said. “I’m a dwarf, la, boy, see, yow, bach, dew,” he added. “This is my cousin Qwalin.” The second dwarf bowed. “And behind him are Sili and Frili, also cousins, see?”

“I haven’t the victuals—” Bingo began, in desperation. But the four dwarfs were already in the sitting room, singing tunelessly but loudly, one of them bouncing lustily on the wizard’s chest to wake the fellow up. Bingo turned about, cursed the gnawing pain in his left toes, and turned again as four more dwarves5 stepped boldly into his house.

“Mori,” said the first dwarf, who was holding a clipboard. He was a strong-nosed dwarf in green, with a waterfall of beard and eyebrows thick as caterpillars. Or as actual pillars. “Allow me to introduce my cousins, Tori, Orni and On. Oh my,” he added, stepping towards Bingo. “Haven’t you the smoothest of chins!”

The four dwarfs kicked their beards out from under their feet and clustered around Bingo, treading on his toes as they did so. “Oo,” they said, running callused fingers over his chin. “Oo.”

“Get off,” Bingo said, flapping his hands before his face like little wings.

“You’ll have to excuse us, see,” said Mori, leaning his clipboard against the wall and taking off his dwarf hat. “It’s a rare sight for us, a bare chin—a sight of rare beauty. Wouldn’t I love a bare chin!”

“Wouldn’t I!” said Orni.

“You’ll say, shave,” said Mori, clapping Bingo in a manly clasp, his arm around the back, his powerful hand crushing Bingo’s shoulder. “You will, you’ll tell me, shave.”

“I won’t,” said Bingo.

“Can’t,” said Mori, as if in correction. “Psoriasis. Terrible. Allergy to bauxite. Couldn’t shave if my life depended on it. Stuck with this ap-surd hippy beard.6 I hate it.”

“We all hate it,” said Orni. “All hate our beards.”

“All of us in the same boat. Smells, la,” s. . .