Lonely 

The oak wasn’t always lonely, but after the goblins moved in the other trees picked up their roots and walked away. 

They didn’t go far, of course; a tree is weighed down by its hundreds of years, and after more than a couple of yards they had to stop and rest. Their roots settled back into the soil with a sigh, and the oak stood alone, its branches zigging and zagging across the empty air just far enough from the beeches and elms around it that no goblin could jump the space. Trees will let themselves be infested with many things, but at the thought of goblins they flee.

The goblins themselves wrought their festive mischief. When they’d swarmed the tree they’d been riding on the back of a traveller, and had assumed the shape of more-or-less-men in imitation. Their jaws had been undershot like open drawers and their fingers long and broad in their reach as bat-wings, but they’d only had two arms and two legs apiece and they’d worn their hair on their heads. Once they settled in the oak, though, they shifted the hair to their feet, worming bunches of toes gripping the bark like roots, and they’d scabbed over their heads so that if anyone walked past they could squat down still and pass for galls. They settled, and they feasted.

Trees weather many insults, but to have your every acorn gobbled down by creatures clad in a mocking imitation of your skin is too much. The oak was lonely for other trees, and the company it had, it hated. 

Goblins will gorge themselves on whatever they can. The acorns were stripped the second they were ripe and the tree scattered no new generation, but that wasn’t all. Any squirrel that scuttled up its bark was mobbed from a dozen directions, branch-tipped fingers digging in and uncoating the poor squealing thing to reveal the pink meat beneath. The aphids they sucked down like grains of sugar-candy, and the sticky fungus they ripped apart bare-handed and stuffed into their greedy mouths, cackling and gulping all the while. An unlucky nightingale made the mistake of stopping to rest there for a moment, and for a full week the goblins wore feathers on their bums and croaked out tunes that made the other nightingales of the forest flee in sheer shame that anything, even a goblin, could make their sweet song sound so dreadful. 

A tree is a city; that is its natural state. But the goblins were nobody’s neighbour.

Some trees die of old age, and some of disease; winds can fell them and fires swallow them down. But this tree was on its way to dying of grief when the bats came. 

Every bat needs a roost, and they like to roost together; they’re kindly little creatures with a fondness for their friends, and besides that, if you’re just the size of a fox’s bite you know better than to go it alone. These ones, crumple-faced and big-eared, were in search of a safe place to land, and for them a tree that stood a little apart from the others looked like a good prospect: some extra yards to spread their wings before they bubbled up into the sky for their night-time hunt might be just the thing. 

The goblins, seeing the dark-winged moppets land, pointed their teeth to fangs and grinned. There was much to copy in the sharp bite of their new prey, and it had been some time since they’d tasted that squirrel-meat.

Their first attempts left them annoyed. It’s one thing to set upon a squirrel when the tree’s too far from its neighbours for the screaming rodent to jump safe to another branch, but the bats could fly. As soon as the goblins bore down on them they were in the air. The nightingale hadn’t heard them coming, but the bats’ ears could hear a moth’s chirrup and they weren’t about to wait for the hunters.

So for an evening, the bats tried to roost. The goblins tried to catch and eat them, and the bats leaped into the air and circled round in jagged escapes, and the goblins chased them to the tips of the branches and got nowhere.

The bats filled their bellies with insects that night, and nested on other trees during the day, but they hadn’t lost their liking for the oak. Its bark, by now, was scored with goblin-claws; given time and freedom, so many delicious grubs might come to doze in those scars. 

So the next evening they tried again. They could shriek so high a man couldn’t hear them, but the goblins had been copying their ears. With battle cries loud enough to stun a beetle, they raced around the tree. The goblins flinched and covered their heads, and quickly shrank their ears down to a less vulnerable size, but they kept the faces they’d been imitating from the bats and bared needle-fine teeth and chattered, ready to bite any who landed.

Sensible creatures might have recognised that the tree wasn’t a good place to roost, but the bats weren’t entirely sensible. They lived in camps; they understood the idea of friendship – and the way the goblins copied their ornate little faces had really and truly offended them. 

Chittering together on other branches, the bats consulted. They didn’t have the force to lift the goblins off: they weren’t made to carry anything bigger than an insect in their jaws, and the goblins were heavier than they were. 

But that was a thought. And now, after all, the goblins couldn’t hear them planning.

So on the third night, the bats gathered around the tree. It was always their way to catch insects with their feet, flicking the things up towards their mouths with a limber bend of the back, but the goblins had begun by copying a man and were used to hunting with their hands. And they were, by their insolent nature, mimics. 

The bats spread out their wings, pointing and squealing. They dived as if to snatch the goblins up in a smothering embrace.

The goblins did what goblins do: they reshaped themselves. It wasn’t difficult to grow skin between their fingers, to dive into the air and fly towards their prey. When they launched themselves, they couldn’t imagine why they hadn’t thought of it before. 

A bat is just light enough to fly. But a goblin of the same size is just heavy enough to fall. 

If the ground beneath the tree had been soft, they might have survived the smashes. But the other trees had stepped back from the ridden oak, and there was no leaf litter to act as a cushion. The goblins cracked hard on the oak’s bare roots, and since a great deal of them was still twigs in imitation of the tree, they were brittle. Soon enough the oak’s feet were buried in broken pieces of goblin, and the last few – the ones that had realised how stupid it was to copy a bat – were left in a state of confusion as to what they should try to look like. All they could think to do was crouch down like oak-galls again, and that meant their claws were sheathed. The bats had no trouble pulling them free and letting them drop to their doom.

Thus the tree was cleansed of its goblin infestation. It would be some years before its branches grew long enough to close the gap between it and its neighbours, but the bats were delighted at so quiet a roost, and with winter nearly upon them, they very much wanted somewhere to hibernate. Little huddles of fur clustered around its trunk, and as the cold set in, the tree was not lonely. 

posted by Kit Whitfield  # 8:00 am