Catching Elves

Part the First

Ah, it was so long ago, over forty years! I was but nineteen years old and a poor apprentice. And at that time, as I have said, stupid and wrong about elves. I had heard all the stories about elves, all the ones you too might have heard. About how they snatch babies from their cradles and get up to endless mischief breaking things and making things go wrong. My mother used to say to me, “If you don’t behave, the elves will come and get you!” But though it scared me as a child, I grew in time to laugh at it like the stupid person I was. After all, people were always blaming elves for things, for their own misfortune, but I had never seen one, so why should I believe? Little did I know! So little!

I had been apprenticed at fourteen to a joiner for seven years, I moved into his house to live and work by his side. I was to learn all my trade from the master joiner and, at twenty–one, become a journeyman joiner myself, with hopes that one day I might make it to master with my own journeymen and apprentices. Such hopes! Such vain hopes! What good would it have been to spend my life as a joiner—even a master joiner—when I could have become the Great Master Elf Catcher? None, none whatsoever! So I am glad it did not happen, and the city ought to be glad too, for without me the last forty years would have seen even greater chaos than they have. And what chaos!

My master specialized in building, adding wooden storeys to buildings which already soared many storeys high in brick or stone. It was a hard job, and a dangerous one. For half the work is lugging and moving timber to the top of buildings, and half the risk is that a bodyful of timber will come your way and send you flying—or, I should rather say, falling. Many a soul did I see in my five years as an apprentice meet their doom in that way. But not me. Oh, not me, for I excelled at this task just as I have at elf catching. I soon learnt to know, almost by inwits alone, what was safe and what was dangerous. I would skip and dance almost on the highest of frames when I felt that no harm would come to me, yet haunch and glance about when I sensed danger. I need only think ‘Duck!’, and I would duck, and a swinging timber would miss me by a hair’s breadth. That was a daily occurrence; no, hourly! I was born to be a joiner—a complete natural—it was my true calling. That is, until I found my true, true calling.

You see, most of the work of building wooden storeys comes from rebuilding them after a fire. So many burn down, even today, because of elves. Of course, I didn’t believe in elves back then, but people would always blame then whenever a building burnt down. And indeed my master would praise them sometimes, for they were the main source of his work. He would see a burning building, with poor souls leaping out of the fiery windows to their death, and proclaim, “Praise the elves, another fire!” Just like that, no word of a lie. If I asked him why he would say such a thing, he told me to be quiet and to bear in mind that my belly is filled by these very elves and their mischief.

As I said, I had never seen an elf, and like you was wrong and stupid to misbelieve that they existed. I thought that maybe the people living in the buildings had lit a fire to keep warm, or knocked over a lamp, and blamed the elves for their mistakes. Not, of course, that many of the people living in the buildings survived to tell the tale, so it may have been that they saw the elves setting the fires, but never got to tell us. My mother used to blame elves whenever she burnt a pie, which is roughly the same thing, and so too my schoolmates would often have the misfortune of elves burning their homework. All silly stories, so I thought, but now I know better, and soon you will too.

So it was, in the nineteenth summer of my life, apprenticed to a joiner, and as poor as a goblin living in the gutter—but happy nonetheless!—that war broke out between the Empire and the possum people from the southern wastes. You cannot remember the war, I am sure, for you are far too young, so let me tell you. The possum people had denied that the Emperor was a god, which is as big a blasphemy as anybody can possibly utter. The godhood of the Emperor is utterly and totally undeniable! I myself have, since that time, asked the High Priest at the Temple of Emperor: “Is the Emperor a god?” And he replied that the Emperor was indeed a god. If the High Priest says such a thing, then who is to deny it? For surely nobody knows more about the godhood of the Emperor than his own High Priest, and thus for me such a question is settled. But the possum people denied it, and brought a war upon themselves, as the Empire must defend its honour and that of the Emperor, who is surely a god.