Дмитрий Емец – Tanya Grotter and the Golden Leech (страница 11)

Coffinia’s flunkies started to neigh. While Vanka Valyalkin and Bab-Yagun prepared to give a rebuff, although the scuffle would clearly be mismatched, Cryptova moved forward and, as if by chance, pushed Tanya’s shoulder. The strings of the double bass began to hum and – Coffinia began to squeal, a sticky slush smeared on her face. Well, in general, if we look at everything from a philosophical point of view, to have a ladle filled to the brim with pudding stuck to your head is not so unpleasant indeed. Besides, the pudding was fresh, tasty, and everything in this vein… However, Cryptova nevertheless for some reason was not pleased. There live in the world such girls, whom you cannot make happy with anything even if you try till you collapse!

When everyone was already setting off to class, Sardanapal ran into the Hall of Two Elements. His untied moustaches – the right green and the left yellow – were pertly flicking on the glasses. “Quick! All students remain in Tibidox, and instructors come with me! Where’s Medusa? Where’s Tararakh?” he shouted.

“What happened?” Rita On-The-Sly started to worry. “The water-sprites and the wood-goblins are again battling for the ruins!” Sardanapal answered absentmindedly, not even noticing that he had answered someone he should not. Rita On-The-Sly was eternally mistaken as someone else. Indeed such was her magic ability.

Soon all the instructors dashed away somewhere, taking with them as heavy artillery Usynya, Gorynya, and Dubynya. The students, dying of curiosity, rushed to follow, but the cyclops at the gate had been given a strict order to let no one out. Rattling with the chain, Dumpling Maker partitioned off the drawbridge with a rail and, playing with the poleaxe, got up next to the wheel.

Gunya Glomov, Damien Goryanov, Seven-Stump-Holes, and Kuzya Tuzikov began to tease him, but the cyclops only chuckled indulgently. Attempting to bring him to white heat, the pranksters did not forget to follow whether the eye of the cyclops had started to revolve in orbit or roll under. This meant the time to take to one’s heels promptly – even Dentistikha could not remove the evil eye of Dumpling Maker.

Bab-Yagun pulled Tanya by the hand. “I know where we’ll be able to see everything! Come! Only quietly so that any Goryanov doesn’t stick to us!” he whispered, unnoticeably moving back.

“And what are these ruins Sardanapal was talking about? Where do they come from at all? Tibidox has been rebuilt!” Tanya asked.

Yagun looked at her with mockery. “What does it have to do with Tibidox? You must think there is nothing on Buyan besides Tibidox!”

“But where?”

“Well, you’re boring me with your questions! One might suppose that your last name is Pain-in-the-Neck… Later you’ll understand, run!” his ears impatiently shimmering, Yagun interrupted her.

They ran past the inside courtyard of the Tower of Ghosts and found themselves on the tight, overgrown with hawthorn, little square between the desolate wall and the tower. Having scrambled onto the shoulders of Vanka, accusing him of the intention of crushing his head, Yagun slipped into a small niche and pulled his friends after himself. They found themselves on a narrow staircase covered with a red carpet. From time to time the carpet shuddered and inflated like a bubble – under it the sleeping poltergeist Mikheich was making a racket. Somewhere below in the basements, the mixed choir of ghosts were rehearsing, performing Kalinka-Malinka. The chorus sounded well, but the thin treble of Lieutenant Rzhevskii clearly interfered with it. The brash spectre sang not only past the notes but also, it seems, another song altogether.

“Hey, what are you doing there, sleepyhead? Decided to sign up for the choir also?” Yagun shouted impatiently, lowering his head already from the next landing. Tanya, looking around, got up and in no way could get rid of the feeling that she had already been here once. This feeling only strengthened when on the way they came upon two black headstones.

After noticing the friends, the headstones roused themselves. “Tanya Grotter. At long last! Uncle Herman,” was written on the headstone on the right. “Bab-Yagun and Vanka Valyalkin. To brothers from mourning Glomov,” Gothic letters mockingly began to jump on the adjacent one.

Not able to control herself, Tanya launched a Briskus into the headstones and immediately felt sorry about this. “Tanya Valyalkina. From grandsons and great-grandsons,” the right headstone angrily highlighted. “Tanya Yagunova, stupid orphan. From the moronoid house management,” the left one began to argue.

“Here’s a dirty trick! I was wrong to get mixed up with them. Good that neither Vanka nor Yagun noticed anything,” Tanya thought and whisked upstairs in a hurry. Soon they were already standing on the little narrow viewing balcony, the jutting out canopy that hung exactly above the ditch. Tanya thought that earlier she was never in that part of the Island Buyan and completely did not know it. The windows of her room in the Big Tower looked out onto the internal courtyard and the play lawns. The Dragonball field was on the other side.

“And there are the ruins… Where are you looking? More to the right… The-re, to where Usynya and Gorynya are running!” Bab-Yagun gesticulated. Having stared at it, Tanya saw that the ditch proceeded to the swampy bed of a brook, overgrown to a disgrace with prickly stubbles of reed, and that, in turn, ended at the lake. On the shore, half splashing in the water, half rotting on dry land, the ruins stretched, sullenly goggling at Tibidox with blind collapsed windows.

Now a genuine battle was in full swing at the ruins. Transparent, elastic water-sprites, something similar to wineskins well-packed with slime, attacked squeaking, clumsy wood-goblins. On the side of the water-sprites appeared also a shock brigade of mermaids, of whom the famous chosen one of Slander was kicking up a bigger row than all. She howled, knocked down wood-goblins with powerful hits of her tail, and threw rotten fish, which some decrepit green duckweed helpfully brought to her, at them.

“In no way will they share the ruins. One half is in the water – meaning, the kingdom of the water-sprites. But what offends the wood-goblins is that the second half joins the forest. A year hasn’t pass that they haven’t fought because of these ruins. Later they’ll reconcile, for a while they’ll live in peace, and again swing at each other’s noses. In a word, evil spirits, what will you do with them…” explained Yagun.

The instructors of Tibidox were trying to separate the fighters, but so far, the result had turned out to be the most lamentable. Medusa, forced to step back, fired sparks from the side of the wood-goblins. Professor Stinktopp already hung his head down from the nearest tree and in a thin voice squeaked the threat, “You don’t know viz whom you’re dealing! I’ll turn you into small okroshka! Ah, I fear height!” The academician Sardanapal, knocked off his feet, was already being tickled by two mermaids, and a third dragged over a pair of tremendous garden scissors with the explicit intention of cutting his beard. Dentistikha, attempting to pacify the water-sprites, was set down by them in a puddle and was now angrily jumping up and down, trying to concoct an evil eye in return. Tararakh was capitally hit on the ear by a club, and in the next second, he was literally swept away by a hailstorm of dry Caspian roach from the catapults of the water-sprites.

“But it’s merry there! We have some funky Teaches!” Vanka said approvingly.

“You said it!” Bab-Yagun said proudly. “You should have seen how they battled with the wood-goblins the year before last! And the water-sprites almost carried Stinktopp off to the bottom! His pants were completely stuffed with duck-weed.”

“Listen, Yagun, what was in these ruins earlier?” Tanya asked. Bab-Yagun frowned. “Well… Ruins – they’re ruins. On the whole, incomprehensible what to fight for here. All the same neither the wood-goblins nor the water-sprites live here. Never even visit, so my granny says.”

“What, never visit?”

“Never visit. They also disdain Tibidox, in general everything built by magicians, and here bang, how angry! One word – Buyan Island!”

“But do they somehow explain this? Their hostility?” Tanya was interested. Yagun hesitated. “Ugh, fat chance! There’s never such a thing as evil spirits explaining anything to magicians. They’re by themselves, we’re by ourselves,” Yagun categorically stated. He rubbed his snub nose with a finger and pensively continued, “True, there are all kinds of rumours about these ruins. Seemingly, here was the gatehouse of The Ancient One, which he built even before Tibidox. But indeed why he abandoned this gatehouse later – I haven’t the faintest idea. Yes, supposedly, there were reasons… Look, look how incensed these evil spirits got!”

The battle for the ruins was in full swing. Several times the water-sprites forced the wood-goblins back into the thick of the woods, but reinforcement came to them – and by then they forced the water-sprites into their lake. Professor Stinktopp was no longer hanging on a tree. His excitedly kicking legs protruded from some burrow.