Notes: With the exception of the addition of a British accent, Wrim is Peter Dinklage in my mind. Because Dinklage rules.
15. Hoggle's Decision
Many years later, when learned goblin historians described the events leading to the return of King Jareth, that he was (had been) human and not a goblin at all barely merited a mention. What the crowd at Goblin City remembered, what was told to countless goblin children and recounted over hundreds of ales and over clothes lines by the thousands was were every member of the city had been when they had seen him climb onto the fountain.
"I'd jest been emptying me chamber pot," Gruwella liked to tell her neighbour. "An' I chance to look up at the fountain, an' there 'e was, sharp as you please. Walkin' on air, 'e was, an' so I knew it were important."
Thock had been a good three miles from the fountain. He ordered the first round of stout Ogre beers for the men of The Security Detail and had just turned to ask Crumski the One Eyed if he had heard from Pŭnsch that afternoon, when he stood up with sudden, clear purpose and said, "You know, we should drink these by the fountain."
"I felt oddly compelled to be there, you know?" This was something a great deal many who had been there could agree on.
Supper, work, drinks, sweethearts, the need to sock your neighbour a good one for failure to tie up their goat ("T'aint mine, ye great oaf, it's me neighbours!"), all was forgotten as it became imperative that everyone gather around the fountain. Younger, fitter goblins clambered onto roofs and lamp posts. Children and girlfriends were hoisted onto shoulders. Academes trained telescopes on the sight. Mathematicians and those employed by The Goblin City Committee to The Census Committee suffered near paraplegic attacks at the first chance in decades to properly count everyone. Everyone not counting was staring in rapt attention at the figure standing on the fountain's tallest water spout.
The details got a bit muddled, but nearly everyone could agree that he was pretty tall and, really, much too thin. Everything else passed onto the untrustworthy hands of eyewitness accounts. Depending on whom you asked, he was dressed in anything from a pollen yellow jumpsuit to an ink blue frock coat to black leather straps from chin to toes to a cape made of robin feathers. "Mella said he were naked," one elderly goblin said. "Armour," maintained the cobbler. "He had the pointiest boots I'd ever seen," said the butcher's delivery girl. Her boss swore to his grave that he wore fur boots, with red tassels.
"Do you remember what he said?" asked a history student, hard at work on an oral and written history of The Labyrinth that—due to a misunderstanding of the correct filing order of the letter cabinets—never found its way out of the printers. "What were his opening words?"
"Well, now, I suppose he must've introduced himself, dear."
Hands held aloft. Or maybe folded across his chest. No, no, definitely at least one arm pointed above him. "My people! Goblins! "You, all of you!" Something like that. "I am King Jareth!"
"I's pretty sure that's wot 'e said," grumbled a stooped grandfather.
"Grandpa, honestly," his teenage daughter said, exasperated. "He wos a great deal more genteel'an that." She fixed a lamp post with a dreamy, besotted face. "I am Jareth, he said, all proper an' gentlemanly, and I am your king, if you'll have me. He was so… dapper."
"Dapper? He had an odd nose, is what. Foreign. Said a great deal of nothing. But he looked good, put on a good show. Young folk like that."
He said wonderful things. He spoke of pride and change and a better tomorrow, of what Goblin City had been and could be again. The goblins old enough to remember the glory days nodded. The young, sick with anger at the squalor, wanted to pump their fists. Even the ones who still had no clue what in blazes they were gathered around the fountain for cheered. "You got any idear wot that pom's sayin'?" Some goblins had not a bloody clue. Others scoffed or pointed or flashed toothy grins. "The king's come back, you dolt. That's King Jareth up there!"
"Can you pipe down over there? He's talking."
He talked a great deal. He talked history at them. He talked humans and power at them. He spoke of demons and the creative power of fear and he spoke of the need for humans to fear them once more, just as they feared demons.
"He said," a young goblin said, nursing a cup of black sludge, "he said that humans had forgotten how to fear goblins, yeah? And he was right, you know? It's true. I've read about it. He said a lot of stuff, man, a lot of deep stuff." He took quick slurps of his hot swill. "Yeah, man. Fear. He was, like, so deep."
"Knows the value of the old ways," a thousand year old said. "Used to be we haunted their woods, stole their babes and wrecked havoc with their crops. Sharp young man, that one. Don't see that nowadays."
"I'm for it," a housewife said. "It's the children what have suffered all these years, and I'm for anyone who could change things."
"Oh, great owls, he looked straight at me an' Zle said, nohuh, he totally looked at me but no way 'cause he was lookin' right at me and—ooh mum'll hate this—but I am so goin' to join whatever he wants me to join. He said he, like, needed all of us an' he looked so gorgeous and—"
"—yeah, anyone can look pretty and talk pretty," a goblin girl said as she sat on her neighbour's chimney, "but what he said made sense. Look, I've got a little brother who can't tell a door from a bed. I know what goblin degeneration looks like. This guy, this Jareth, he wants us to bleed into human consciousness again, to regain our power, to grow in number. Not even nan remembers the last king who spoke that way. This is real."
At the ale house across from the castle, Wrim nursed a warm beer and watched the crowd—as a sensible dwarf, he owed it to himself not to press in with them—as they either hung onto every word that bloke up on the fountain said, or hollered for someone to tell them what they thought the bloke was saying. Wrim himself could only make out a few words, most of them "future" or "once more," followed by cheers.
He jerked his head in the direction of the fountain. "Ain't that something, Hoggle?"
Hoggle drank his beer and pretended not to notice the crowd.
"Hey," Wrim said, "you reckon that mate'a yours is out in that crowd? You still want I should put 'im up?"
"He's not coming," Hoggle said after a while. "He never made it out of The Labyrinth."
"Poor bugger," Wrim grunted. "Got himself sucked down by something, did 'e?"
"Fell in with a bad crowd. Got his head full of nonsense." Hoggle pushed away his beer mug and stood to go. "Weren't my friend, anyway."
Wrim was not paying attention. He sat with his face towards the direction of the fountain, a half smile on his face as the bloke hoisted another part of his speech up on, "This is what we could have been, what we shall be again!" Claps and cheers buffeted the air, like ammunition from celebratory canons.
"Ain't that something?" Wrim said. Hoggle left him like that, a smile on his face and beer mug forgotten. "Ain't that just something?"
There was no accounting for goblin loyalty. Jareth had it all cut out for himself when it came to that. They would follow him like lemurs to a cliff. And that was their own damn business, and Hoggle could not wait to be out of it.
"Hail King Jareth!" a young goblin shouted, waving his yellow coat above his head. His friends waved caps and scarves. "Long live the Goblin King!"
"Goblin King," Hoggle muttered. "Phaugh. He's not even a goblin. Just a fraud leading fools."
King Jareth sat by himself at the edges of The Labyrinth, reclining on the branches of a tree as old as the first stone of Goblin City. An eternal sunset saturated the clouds and the sky above him, drenching the wastes beyond The Labyrinth in the rusted, decayed browns and creams of late autumn. Jareth rolled and tasted the word autumn in his head. It was not a word that had any meaning within The Labyrinth. This was something from before, from the part of him that had walked the human world.
Sunset. Autumn. Goblins had no use for those terms in The Labyrinth, where time and, therefore, seasons, had no meaning. He supposed he would stop using them as well, after a while.
Reclaiming the throne had been almost laughable. He had sauntered forward from the gates, one foot higher from the ground with every step he took, until he had touched down upon a water spout in a shower of powdered glass and a flared coat like an oil slick, iridescent and of a colour no one could pin-point. He could have told them the story of The Three Little Pigs and they would have cheered. Most likely. A few glared at him, and some never managed to rub glass particles out of their eyes, and kept bumping into the fountain, but—in the end—they had all cheered and some excitable girls and guys (there were words he never dreamed he would attach to goblins) had kicked off a chant, "Long live the Goblin King!" It had swayed and drifted like strands of seaweed over the crowd, sinking into their depths and gathering force until it had rolled forward and crashed into him. He was pretty certain he had struck a politician's pose at that point, something he had seen on the tellie once, arms above his head, chin tilted and a look of determination and populist optimism on his face.
Tellie. Politician. Populist. More words from the human world. He floated them in his mind's eye, like encased flies on a web, then pushed them away.
Hoggle had been at his side before he stepped out, that he remembered as well.
"Do I have your loyalty?" Jareth said, eyes scanning the aimless crowd he was about to face.
"Loyalty?" Hoggle's eyebrows knotted over his eyes in grey, bushy clumps. "Was that what that birdcage was all about? Just some ploy to impress me? Loyalty…"
"You saved my life. You never abandoned your post. I have now saved your life, and I would have you as my advisor."
He had expected Hoggle to be pleased. Instead, the dwarf had shot him an incredulous stare that crumpled away to harsh, flinty laughter. "Hoggle, an advisor? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!"
"It is a great hono—"
"Keep the honour. As you said, we're even now. One life for another." He shoved his hands into his pockets. "Nah, you keep your honour and your palace staff and all that. I'm gonna go have a beer. Fluorescent pixies know I need one after today."
He had not seen Hoggle again since then.
A goblin with large, translucent ears and a beak surrounded by a fringe of fine, honeyed feathers had offered himself as a candidate for palace staff after his speech atop the fountain. "I come well recommended," he had said, in clipped, professional tones that had made Jareth smile in spite of himself. "I have impeccable references and served as adjunct secretary to the Goblin City Public Works Commission under the ninth King Jareth, sir. I am sure that I would be most helpful in his majesty's transitionary period."
Jareth listened to him politely, then asked, "What's your name?"
The goblin coughed delicately. "Pam, your majesty."
He should have known. He drew his gloved hand down through the air, the front facing Pam, and the goblin's shabby suit mended and dyed itself black. Jareth flicked his fingers and handed Pam a seal of office. "You are my advisor now, Pam. I expect you to report for duty immediately upon my summons."
Pam bowed, grave and officious. Hoggle could never have done that. "So, what's next, boss?" he would have said, rolling his sleeves back. "Let's get this shindig moving."
Jareth tutted away those thoughts and turned his attention back to the horizon line beyond him.
His hands lay on his lap, clasped together. They were still cut and bruised, although no longer covered in blood and dust and gore. He turned his palms over. He counted ten individual wounds where the shards of the orb that was (had been) his left eye had ripped through his gloves and sunk in. Talon gashes surrounded them, criss-crossing arcs of red lightning.
Sankrėl. Poor bastard. Poor, deluded bastard. He had only thought to protect The Labyrinth, to defend it from an unworthy king. They had all wanted to protect something: the goblins, the city, themselves. Ten, protective Kings Jareth.
Jareth did not want to protect anything. They did not need protection.
No, what they needed was a purpose.
And somebody else had needed a purpose. Who had it been? The aging goblin who only stared out of windows, or the aging David who could not even stare as life rushed past? Silly fools, both of them.
A bank of clouds dragged itself to spread out over a smaller cloud, the jaws of a crocodile splaying out into skiffs trailing ribbons of broken glass across moss green rivers.
Earth. He might never see earth again, not the earth he knew.
England was in the past, above ground.
Jareth frowned. Thoughts like that kept intruding on him. He flung his gaze out onto the wastes, fragments of memory falling behind him like exhaust and gravel from an automobile. No, not an automobile. Goblins did not use automobiles. His parents had not even owned a cart. They had walked everywhere. Nothing was far in Goblin City. Not like in Kent.
"There was no Kent," Jareth said. It threw him to hear that his voice had formed as a whimper. His fingertips pressed against his brow ridges. The fingers of one hand traced out the bump his left eye made underneath his eyelid.
"You didn't have to keep it, you know. Any of it. But even if you kept the body, you didn't have to keep his left eye."
"Hoggle," Jareth said. He continued to face the wastes.
"You have the power to fix that eye. Dunno why you've still got it."
"It knew. Somehow, it knew. Thinking on it now, I think George was meant to have damaged it to the point where I should have lost it." He stretched out his legs along the branch he sat on. "I am going to keep it."
An armada of cumulus clouds cleared the way for gaseous rabbits and dragons and winged horses and Jareth wondered at all the fantasy he freely injected into the sky now, after thirty years of, "No such thing as magic."
"I wanted to be someplace else," he said.
"Yeah. David said something like that to me once." Hoggle pulled off his cap and dropped to a cross legged position on the ground, back against the trunk of the tree. "So did the boss. And now you're telling me too." He pulled dried blades of grass from the earth. "You planning on taking off again, then? Piss poor thing to do."
"I shall remain at The Labyrinth, yes."
"Huh." Hoggle scratched the back of his neck, fingers worrying over the deep wrinkles at the nape. "Can't figure you out," he said after a while. "Boss never talked that way, all aristocratic an' stuff. But you're definitely not David. I can't say whether he'd sit on a tree or not, mind you, but he wouldn't magic himself a snazzy new costume for everything he did."
"I was cold," Jareth said, defensive as he drew his fur trimmed motorist coat closer about him.
"Yeah well."
A breeze tumbled organic debris across the ground. Seconds like minutes passed between them. Perhaps it was hours. Hoggle's head dropped back against the tree trunk. He had kept his eyes carefully averted from Jareth all the while, but now he craned his neck and slid his eyes up towards him. He sat with his hands in the pockets of that ludicrous, fur trimmed coat he was wearing, grasshopper legs crossed at the ankles. Snazzy boots, just as Hoggle suspected. Lounging on a tree, dressed to kill.
"Who are you, anyway?" he wanted to say.
But, he found, that did not really matter anymore.
He stood to go. "Well, I'll be off, then. Some of us got things to do."
"I offered you a position at the castle."
"And I said no. I heard your speech. You're gonna bring back the glory days, right? Crawl about snatching human babies and pestering them so that they start having themselves nightmares, right, and the goblins get nice and strong again, maybe grow taller, grow some brains. I heard ya. And that's goblins' work, not a dwarf's." He slapped his cap on his head. "I'm still a standing member of The Maintenance Detail, and that's where I aim to go stay."
"You will stay where I appoint you, Hoggle."
"He appointed me to The Maintenance Detail, and you keep claiming you're him!" Hoggle said, his patience snapping. "So, your majesty, you appointed me, and if you want to appoint me somewhere else right now, then you go ahead. But this dwarf ain't taking nobody's children!"
"He," Jareth said, voiced laced with contempt and anger. "You keep saying he. The boss. David. They don't matter. I am king, and I am your king." He stood up on the branch, glaring down at Hoggle. "If I let you keep your sorry position, it is only because you did me a good turn as I attempted to return, and because you were loyal to me while I was gone. But if you disobey me again, Hoggle, I shall not be so magnimonious."
Hoggle drew in sharp breaths, willing them to be hands that pressed down on his shoulders, keeping him in place. He wanted nothing more than to rip into Jareth's face, to take David's eyes and cheekbones and lips away from him and pummel away the thing that had taken his place. The violence of the thought surprised Hoggle.
"You shall remain at The Maintenance Detail," Jareth said, his voice like the emptiness and desolation around them. "And you shall not disobey me again."
Hoggle removed his cap. He went down on one knee, slowly. He did not have to do this. Jareth was not making him do this. His heart strained and burned within his chest, the blood hot and seething along his veins. But he knelt and he pressed his cap against his chest and he bowed his head and he said, "As you will, your majesty."
The words washed over him and he felt old and defeated. Anger turned to resignation. He put his cap back on, clambered to his feet, and bowed from the waist. "His majesty is most kind."
Jareth nodded. "You may go."
There was nothing else to say, and no more gestures to place between them. Hoggle made his way down the hill, shuffling a bit as he clambered down in a shower of dry grass and ochre dust. Jareth remained on the tree branch and watched him go. Hoggle took a key from his pocket, fitted it into a hedge, and turned it. Then he nudged the hedge backwards and to the side. He walked through, and soon nothing remained but carefully trimmed leaves settling back into their proper place.
Jareth watched all this, and if he felt any sadness or regret, it did not show.
The wind from the wastes changed directions, and the Goblin King passed from that place.