by Rick Johnson
’N they’ll never ever ever,
Never ever blinkin’ break me!
Knowing the voice instantly, Klemés rushed to find an old friend. “Migg! You old sea-salt!” he howled, embracing his old shipmate.
Years before, Klemés and Migg had served together on the same ship, Dainty’s Shant. It was while he was captain of that very ship that Klemés had been captured and sent to Tilk Duraow.
“I haven’t seen you since we got here!” Migg exclaimed. “Ten years in the same place and never laid eyes on you in all that time!”
“They haven’t seemed to want me corruptin’ the prisoners!” Klemés chuckled. “Seemed to think I’m a bad influence.”
“Oh, yeah,” Migg replied, “you’re a bad one. They know you well. When we ran into that squadron of Battle Stallion cruisers, you almost had them running into each other—remember? I don’t think there’s been a crazier beast ever commanded a ship, than you.”
“Maybe so,” Klemés laughed, “maybe so. But in the end, they were too much for us all the same—and here we are.”
“Oh, no, they weren’t,” Migg protested. “You forget that Dainty’s Shant did get away! The crew fought off a full-scale Battle Stallion boarding party—that’s what gives you a bad name around here!”
“Ah, but the Captain surrendered,” Klemés replied, “and what kind of a Captain is that?”
“I don’t call being captured, while you’re in beast-to-beast combat, surrendering,” Migg said. “The scoundrels slugged us both over the head from behind and hauled us off with them. That’s not surrendering, Captain, whatever you say.”
“Ah, well, call it what you will,” Klemés smiled. “The best is that today we’re together again as free beasts.” After a few more words, Klemés opened the remaining cells. Soon, a veritable torrent of joy-crazed beasts surrounded him and Christer.
“We’ve done it!” Christer exhulted, as the last prisoners were freed.
“No,” Klemés replied, nearly limp with emotion, but speaking in a grim tone. “We’ve barely begun. And whatever may be accomplished at the end of this, now depends far more on those around us, than on you or me. It’s these that’ll save us, if we are to be saved.”
“What do you mean?” Christer asked, seeing steel and fire in Klemés’s eyes.
“This is not a victory. It is using the only wicked—yes, I call the terror we created here wicked—it is using the only wicked means we have, to break these beasts out of here. But tyranny bends only a little even when confronted with opposing terror. You cannot befriend insane cruelty. Until it is broken completely, there will be no safety for any of us. Do you think that those who built this place will simply let us walk away?” the Wood Cow asked. “Do you think the High One is weak? No. We’ve not only soiled his pride, but threatened his precious Crowning Glory. He will be after us. Soon. We have now unleashed a wrath that we can’t control. It will take every beast here to overcome what awaits.”
In spite of Klemés’s grim prediction, they were both soon engulfed in the sheer pandemonium of free beasts wondering what to do next. With hundreds of beasts now milling around, disorientation and disorder reigned.
There was little celebration that evening, despite the high spirits of the newly freed captives. No singing, no dancing, no wild Huzzahs. The realization of what had really occurred in the kitchen and the dining hall was too strong for merry-making. And in the pit of every beast’s stomach gradually grew the uneasy questions, “Was it really over? What happens now?”
The first wild enthusiasm of liberation soon settled into a more subdued promise of immediate food for the famished captives. That work moved swiftly once Tē’d’Tē began recruiting help to carry food from the Midge Reserves, and others began building cookfires. Working together to meet the need of the moment put uncertainty and worry on hold for a time. The recently freed captives smiled a bit more than usual, there were hugs for old friends and warm handshakes for new ones, but no celebration could rise above the gnawing anxiety and uncertainty.
Later, shark steaks broiled on low spits over lazily smoking fires, providing food for the famished masses. From a perch far above the subdued celebration, concealed by a high chimney, a ferociously strong and very angry beast observed it all, and made his plans.
ThunderUp
As ThunderUp looked down on the celebratory feasting from his perch high atop Tilk Duraow, his mind was firmly fixed on other images…
He saw rows of low, squalid log and mud cabins, snails covering everything in layers four and five deep. The air red with the glow of a massive furnace, blazing as he shoveled snails into the fire as fast as he could. So prolific were the snails, that left to grow by themselves, everything would slowly disappear underneath ever-increasing layers of snails.
Beasts for generations before him had shoveled snails just as he had, and just as his father had, and his father before him. Most ended up maddened with the crustiforia sickness that inevitably ate away the minds of snail shovelers. Everyone knew that every beast who shoveled snails eventually began sneezing bits of rock-hard snot. As time went on, the sneezing became more frantic, and the beast became less and less able to function. First speech was lost, then muscle control, and finally basic mental functions. Crustiforia gradually turned a beast’s brain into sand. No one knew what caused crustiforia, but everyone knew that snail shovelers got it. Yet the snail must be shoveled. This they knew. It was the sustenance of their world. No snail shoveling, no slaving. No slaving, no work…
“Who do those beasts below think they are,” he scowled, his thoughts coming back to the sight below him. The end of Tilk Duraow would be the end of everything he held dear.
Despite a hard life coming up in a family of snail shovelers, ThunderUp, being unusually large for a Badger, had gotten a lucky break. With a little help from a friend of Mr. Snigg, the Wrack Lord’s Standing-Lash, he had landed a job as a Shark Lugger at Tilk Duraow. He now carried huge sides of shark to and from the Midge Reserves. It was hard work and took enormous muscles to do the job. And ThunderUp was enormous—at least a head taller than any other beast he’d ever met, solid muscle all the way. By far, he was the biggest, strongest Shark Lugger ever seen at Tilk Duraow. It was all in a day’s work for him to carry as much as five other beasts put together.
“Load up Thunder! Load up Thunder!” Hearing that all day, every day, it just got to be easier to say, “ThunderUp”—and so he got his name.
Tilk Duraow had provided him the best life he’d ever known and now these stupid beasts wanted it to end. Sitting on the roof of Tilk Duraow, watching the happy beasts below, he judged they must be either ignorant or consciously trying to kill his way of doing things. “Either way. Either way,” he fumed. “Snugs and Tilk Duraow—keep it that way or things get crazy. Touch either of them, and you’re a crazy beast.”
The snails that covered everything in Wrack, as ThunderUp’s home area was called, were not just any snails. They were extremely valuable—a veritable golden goose. When heated to high temperature in a furnace, the snail shells shattered into thousands of identical razor-sharp flakes. The flakes worked perfectly as tips for the small throwing lances—known as snugs—that the Wrackshee folk favored. And, as luck would have it, the liquid that boiled off of Wrack snails as they heated in a furnace was a highly effective poison. A drop of the poison brought death within hours—the unfortunate beast going mad with thirst, eyes bugging, bleeding the color of grass. A drop on the tip of a snug made an excellent instrument of death.
In the beginning, the Wrackshees used snugs only for hunting the Giant Fire Toads and Slumber Newts that were staples of their diet. But as work expanded on Maev Astuté, the great castle of the High One, they learned it was convenient to prey on beasts who did not want to die. It was also helpful to the High One that the Wrackshees learned to be excellent slavers. Thus it was that a “tidy little trade” developed to the benefit of the High One, the Wrackshees, and a myriad middle-beasts in between
.
Little of this history was in ThunderUp’s mind as he watched the festivities below with hate-filled eyes. One thing focused his thoughts, “Snugs and Tilk Duraow—keep it that way or things get crazy.” Snugs and Tilk Duraow were Belonga to the Wrackshee—the essence of daily life, no way to have one without the other. That was it. End of story. Mess with Belonga and you were messing with the basic way of life in Wrack. Mess with Belonga and you were messing with tradition and culture. Mess with Belonga and you were messing with ThunderUp way down under his skin. The cap he always wore said it all: Belonga. Nuf Said.
Considering what could be done to break up the party below, ThunderUp decided it was best to bide his time. His desperate escape from the dragons ravaging the kitchens below had left him badly burned. He had just finished delivering the last sides of frozen shark for the day to the kitchens, when the dragons rushed in, slashing and snapping. In moments, kitchen workers were being cut in half by single snaps of the dragons’ jaws. Lifting a massive soup pot directly out of the hearth, ThunderUp heaved the contents squarely in the face of a charging dragon. The boiling liquid had the desired effect, sending the dragon backward, wailing in pain.
Having staved off the most immediate danger, there was no time to lose if ThunderUp hoped to save himself. It was clearly too late for any other beasts in the kitchen. Looking frantically about, he saw the only certain escape route—up the chimney. Fortunately, the fire had burned low in the hearth, where the soup pot, moments ago, had been simmering over dying embers.
Wrapping towels around his burned paws and arms, and quickly stepping into the embers with this boots, he reached up inside the chimney. Grabbing some outcropping stones, he pulled himself up. Bracing his back against one side of the chimney and pushing upward with his legs, he was able to inch his way up while sparing his burned paws. Wheezing and coughing in the smoky air, the huge Badger gradually worked his way to safety.
By the time he reached the top of the chimney he was dizzy, nearly passing out from the noxious air. The moment his head rose above the chimney, gasping for breath, he sucked in huge lungfuls of air. For several minutes, he just hung there, catching his breath, collecting his wits.
What on earth had happened? How had dragons suddenly been unleashed in the kitchen? Treachery. Betrayal. Corruption and traitors had somehow wormed their way inside Tilk Duraow. But who? How? Why had there been no alarm? Treachery. Betrayal. Traitors. It must be so, but it seemed impossible.
After pulling himself together, ThunderUp pulled out of the chimney, and with intense pain and distress to his burned limbs, climbed down the outside of the chimney. Finding a safely concealed perch on the roof, he settled down to wait and observe what would happen below. Before taking any action, he needed to understand what was happening. But he knew also that despite the horrible burns he had sustained, he must take action. If Belonga was at stake, as it seemed to be, no pain was too great to stop him from doing what he could.
East o’ Non
With Tilk Duraow now liberated, when Helga left the fortress to return to the Offaluvia, she departed through the work gates opening onto the Granite Hulks. Despite the darkness, it was much less treacherous to navigate at night than the mucky and slippery slope by which she and Christer had entered Tilk Duraow the first time.
Taking a torch from a wall sconce, Helga stepped out on the narrow path skirting the base of Tilk Duraow. Groping and path-finding by flickering torchlight, she made her way along the winding way, up and down, around obstacles, squeezing through narrow passages. The going was slower than she expected. Being completely alone, she took special care with each step.
The sun was just beginning to rise as the Offaluvia came into sight. A morning fog, blanketing the lower hollows of the immense dump and sewer, forced her gaze to examine the surrounding hills more closely than she had on her first visit. The angle of the rising sun picked out a shining glint some distance away, as from a stream flowing down out of the mountains. Faint twists of smoke rose from the same general area.
“A stream and campfires,” Helga thought. “Nice place to camp, but Emil and Bem should have more sense than to light fires!”
Staying on high ground above the shrouds of fog lower down, Helga picked her way around the Offaluvia’s immense heaps of trash and stinking pools of sludge. Working with no sleep, after the forced march to reach Tilk Duraow, Helga barely had strength to slog through the sucking muck. She had to make so many detours around unstable hills of trash and neck-deep pits of sewage, that she wondered if she would ever reach the shining stream she had seen. Only the promise of reunion with her brother and friends, and her irrepressible no-quit spirit, kept her moving.
After hours of meandering progress around the mammoth dump, the nauseating smell began to give way. A breeze coming off the high mountains pushed the putrid odors down, and Helga found that she had now broken through to clearer air. Nearly gulping in the fresher air, her sagging spirits revived and, having left the main part of the trashfield behind, she picked up her pace.
Soon the smell of woodsmoke and other wonderful aromas told her that she was nearing her goal. Climbing up the side of a narrow ravine separating two hills, she came out into a much larger and wider ravine, with a wide river running across the bottom. Everywhere along the sides of the ravine, holes were cut into the slopes, with crude huts fashioned out of materials from the dump. Dozens of such huts peppered the ravine’s walls, sometimes joined together or stacked on top of one another. Packed together in groups, they looked to Helga like huge wasp nests.
“Hey! Hey there! You must be Helga!” a booming voice called out. As if from nowhere, a tall Horse appeared, smiling and exclaiming, “Come! Eat! You’re a favory here!” Wide at the shoulders and round at the belly, the overall appearance of the Horse set Helga’s nerves at ease. A kindly smile ran crookedly across his face, twisting like a river among the canyon-like wrinkles deeply cut there. Something about the Horse also startled her, however, but she could not decide what it was. Had she seen him before?
“Come! Eat!” the Horse boomed again. “Your other favories are here. Come! Eat!” Pulling a short whistle from the pocket of his canvas jacket, the Horse played something that struck Helga like an extended, melodious sneeze. How such a fine sound could be both explosive and beautiful at the same time, she couldn’t guess. Its effect, however, was immediate.
In the twitch of an eye, crowds of beasts, of nearly every description, were crowding around Helga. Foremost among them were her brother, Emil, and their friend, Bem Madsour.
“Oh, Emil,” Helga burst out, throwing her arms around her brother, “how good it is to find you!” Turning to Bem, she repeated the embrace, and exclaimed, “You’ve found more than we guessed! What is all this?”
“That you’re here tells me you’ve found more than you guessed also,” Bem replied. “You’ve good new from Tilk Duraow?”
“Yes,” Helga cried happily, “by the Ancients! We have taken the place and all the slaves are free!”
“Taken the place!” Emil exploded! “Taken Tilk Duraow and freed the slaves!” It was not a question. It was a loud statement of fact that cast a hush over the crowd surrounding them. For a moment, there was no sound except the wind in the trees. Every beast present knew the meaning of what had just been said.
At last the Horse broke the silence, “Aye, well, what is done is surely done for the best. Even or odd, up or down, the best is always found where things end. That’s what it is to be a Trash-breaker. That’s what we do. That’s who we are. Let’s get on and find the best in it.” Turning to Helga, the Horse said, “Sorry to forget things—I’m NeyMooz Cockadu, head-breaker here at East o’Non. We were just eatin’ first light—come an’ join us.”
Following NeyMooz, the crowd headed back to the settlement, where tables were set up in the open among the jumbled collection of huts. “Here you go,” NeyMooz said to Helga, handing her a curious metal skewer, with several small curly-tailed fish stuffed on
it. “Just hold it over the fire until the skin falls off,” he instructed. “That’s the sign they’re ready to eat.”
Following NeyMooz’s directions, Helga squatted down on her haunches beside Emil and Bem, holding her skewer over the fire. The skewer was clearly made from iron salvaged from the dump, probably an old metal spike, now hammed out long and thin with a wooden handle attached.
With everyone back at the business of cooking and eating, NeyMooz joined Helga and her friends at the fire. “Soon as your other favories arrived here, I knew something big was happening,” he said. “No beasts ever come here—no one visits the Trash-breakers. We are called “barogre,” which means so unclean we make the spiders vomit. So no one pays us a thought.”
“Tilk Duraow knows you are here?” Helga asked.
“Oh, yes,” NeyMooz replied. “Everyone knows we’re here—they just pay us no mind…”
“No one bothers you here in the very shadow of Tilk Duraow?” Helga could hardly believe her ears.
“Trash-breakers are beneath their notice,” the Horse replied. “We are barogre, lower than slaves.”
“What do you do?” Helga said. “How do you survive?”
“We sift through the rubbish in the Offaluvia for the best bits we can find of what Tilk Duraow throws out. That meets many needs,” the Horse replied, “and our needs are small.”
“And you live this way?” Helga exclaimed.
“You can find anything in the Offaluvis,” NeyMooz said. “And they give the stuff away, don’t you know.” NeyMooz’s crooked smile gave way to a full-throated laugh. “All in how you look at things, ain’t it?”
“You never leave this place?” Bem asked.
“‘This place,’ as you call it,” the Horse replied, “is huge. We roam all the way up in the mountains for nuts, berries, wild turnips, and boulder spuds. In spring and summer, when the river’s up, we catch Curly Pike up in the high country. So we don’t just sit here and admire the Offaluvia, if that’s what you’re thinking.”