Free King of the Scepter'd Isle (Song of Earth) by Michael G. Coney

satisfaction.
    “One thing I don’t understand,” said Pong, once they were seated before a cheerful blaze, “is how you gnomes escaped from the giants.”
    “It was the strangest thing,” said Fang. “The giants captured us right after the happentracks joined, and took us to the Great Hall. We thought we were in big trouble. They had us dancing on the table. There was a fire nearby, and you know what
that
means.”
    The gnomes groaned. They knew what a giantish fire meant.
    “And then, in came Nyneve. I doubt if she could have saved us by herself, but there was this giant Galahad with her. He seemed to have a strange power over the others. And a giant they call the Baron came, too, from over the other side of the moors. He told them to release us.
    “Then Galahad took us to the Lake of Avalon and we watched Tristan’s funeral, which was rather sad. But then this new giant came out of nowhere. Arthur. Nyneve introduced him to us. He seemed like a good giant. Then they left us and we made our way back.”
    “Where’s Galahad now?”
    “He vanished about the time Arthur appeared. It’s a pity, because he’d have been a good giant to have on our side.”
    “He said something odd before he went,” said the Miggot. “How did it go, Gooligog?”
    “ ‘
Happentracks are funny things. You and I, we don’t quite coincide. You’ll find out, one day when we meet again
,’ ” quoted the Memorizer.
    “So …” Bart looked around. “What do we do next?”
    “We rebuild gnomedom,” snapped the Miggot, who, like Fang, seemed to have taken a dislike to Bart.
    “Right now?”
    “Well,” said the Miggot, “I have to attend to the Sharan. She’s about to give birth. What the rest of you do is up to yourselves.”
    “Rather aninappropriate time to have your Sharan giving birth, isn’t it?” said Bart.
    “As a matter of fact”,—the Miggot snarled, “it’s an extremely appropriate time. She will be giving birth to digging creatures, and if there’s any kind of creature we need right now, it’s digging creatures. We’ll call them moles.”
    “Why?”
    The Miggot stepped close to Bart and stared down his long nose at him. There was a wart on the end of the Miggot’s nose that acted like a gun sight, and the accuracy and penetrative power of his stare was famous throughout Mara Zion. Bart backed off, blinking. “Because that’s what they are.” The Miggot’s voice was quiet, but it held a frightful menace—all the more so because gnomes are not normally menacing people.
    “Of course,” said Bart quickly. “Of course. May I witness the birth?”
    Shortly afterward the Miggot, Fang, Bart, and Spector met the elfin Pan outside the Sharan’s temporary quarters.
    “The moles are born,” Pan announced.
    “Oh.” The Miggot was disappointed. He liked to watch every detail of the Sharan’s labor; it gave him a sense of achievement to see creatures emerge from her womb according to his specifications. The Sharan herself lay on her side, panting, her normally glossy silver coat dull and matted. Two moles sucked on her generous teats. As often happened with small creatures, they had emerged from the Sharan fully grown.
    The Miggot eyed them critically. “Something’s wrong. They’re deformed. Now what shall we do?”
    The Kikihuahua Examples forbade the killing of any living creature. The Miggot sometimes awakened in the middle of the night trembling, having dreamed of a forest populated by monsters of the Sharan’s creating, which he could neither control nor dispose of.
    “The moles are exactly according to specification,” said Pan coldly.
    “Why are they blind, then?”
    Spector,sensing yet another clash between Pan and the Miggot, said quickly, “It’s probably a protective measure to ensure our sympathy.”
    “It doesn’t ensure
my
sympathy,” snapped the Miggot, who believed in natural selection. “Far from it. It tells me they’re unfit for survival.”
    “There was no mention of