Taylor Davis: Flame of Findul Episode One (Serial Adventures, 1.1)

by Michelle Isenhoff

Lesson #2

  Pirates Sometimes Hang Out in Family Trees

  “What exactly are you planning to do with that sword?” Elena asked cautiously.

  “Salvaging the biggest wreck you ever heard tell of,” came the man’s gruff reply. “Come along. Smartly now, I haven’t got all day. I summoned you for a reason.”

  “You summoned us?” Elena exclaimed.

  He scowled. “Not you, wench. You blundered in on your own.”

  So that left… “Me? You wanted me? Hey, wait a second. You opened that gulf in the floor?” Okay, mine was not the most nimble mind in the valley.

  He merely grunted and sat us down just beyond range of the sweet-smelling tree, though he stayed on his feet. “Reef your sails, me hearty. I have much to explain before you can ever hope to understand your mission.”

  “My what?” I squeaked. If they had opened any wider, my eyes would have popped out of my head and bounced off my sneakers.

  The man sighed impatiently. “You’re certain he’s the one?” he called out, looking somewhere over our heads. “Seems about as sharp as a belaying pin.”

  I jerked my eyes around the valley—a dangerous action considering the protruding state they were in—but it was empty. Apparently the man received some kind of answer, or perhaps the silence was his answer, for he slumped in resignation and started his story.

  “I was marooned here many long years ago—”

  “Ahem.” It was Elena.

  His face darkened. “What now, wench?”

  “What is wrong with you?” She blazed into a queen again. “This is the twenty-first century. Quit calling me that.”

  “Would you prefer peasant? Provincial? Vixen? Bumpkin?”

  “I prefer Elena,” she demanded, tossing her curls. “Look, do I need to stay and listen to this? It has nothing to do with me and I’d like to join my fourth hour class, if you don’t mind.”

  “This hadn’t anything to do with you,” he said with irritation. “But it might now.”

  “Because I got the burger first?”

  “Because you’re here,” he snapped. “Look, I’m just a lowly Jack Tar. I do what I’m told. As I was saying,” he began again with an impatient glance at Elena, “I was marooned here long ago. Me ship sank in a storm, the worst I’ve ever sailed in. The waves reached twenty feet if they reached an inch. When the vessel foundered, I entangled in the wreckage, but me blade was still about me person. I managed to cut away the lines and climb onto a spar. For three days I clung there like a sodden hen. Eventually the waves deposited me inside a chamber of pure rock. ’Twas the last I ever saw of the outside world.

  “I dragged meself up the valley and found this here tree. I meant no harm. I was famished, and the smell tickled me senses. I took some, and I ate.”

  His face grew terrible then. He lashed out with his fists, fluttering the tatters of his uniform. His eyes burned within their mask of hair. “How was I to know? There was no sentry! That inept scallywag of a—”

  He cut off abruptly with a glance at the two of us. “’Twas the worst blunder of me life.” He sank against the rock wall and stared at his boots so long I thought he was finished.

  Elena had an utterly bored look on her face, but I was thoroughly entranced. The man could have been an actor right off the set of Pirates of the Caribbean. Was this some dramatic hoax? Were there hidden cameras set up somewhere? I had to know what was going on. “What happened when you ate the fruit?” I prompted.

  The man looked up in surprise, as if he had forgotten we were there. “Naught.” He jumped up and began pacing back and forth in front of us again. “And everything. It doomed me to this valley until the end of the world, till the great Sinking of the Ship. The fire that will one day destroy the earth is the only thing that can kill me.”

  “What?!” Elena and I said it together. She was listening now, doubtful, but intent.

  The man paused. Pointing so we wouldn’t miss it, he said slowly, “That tree is the one that was planted in the Garden of Eden millennia ago.”

  Elena did some rapid Sunday school calculations. “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?” she asked. “The one that got Adam and Eve in so much trouble?”

  “No.” He glared at us, one eyeball twitching spastically to the left. “The other one. The one mankind could no longer be permitted to eat from. ’Twas the reason they were banished from the garden. ’Tis the Tree of Life.”

  I gaped at him, completely astounded. “But how did it get here?”

  He sighed dramatically. “It could not be allowed to remain among the peasantry, could it? ’Twas removed here until the Renewal of All Things.”

  Elena leveled him with a skeptical look. She was obviously doing a far better job of remembering than I was. “I thought God put an angel with a flaming sword in front of it.”

  “Aye,” he agreed. “The Flame of Findul.”

  “Well…” she drawled. “Where is it?”

  His face darkened again, and his rogue eye plunged about its socket like a wild stallion. “The flame was entrusted to a scoundrel!” he burst out. “A blackjack! A rogue!”

  At our curious glances, he calmed himself enough to elaborate. “After four thousand years, Findul requested a holiday. It gets irksome in this scurvy sinkhole. His sword was given to a dunderhead who allowed the flame to go out. This new angel was away from his post when I blundered onto the tree and ate. As punishment, I’ve been appointed sentry duty in his stead.”

  “What about the guy who slacked off?” I protested. “What happened to him?”

  The man’s mouth twisted until crooked, yellow teeth showed through his hair. He looked like a shaggy wolf with a really bad tobacco addiction.

  “He was pink-slipped,” he muttered with disgust.

  I felt my eyebrows hurtle up my face. “Really? An angel?”

  He ignored me and began working himself back into a rage. “He should have been keelhauled! Or kissed by the cat-o-nine! Heaven help the one he’s been reassigned to.”

  “Okay, Captain Sparrow,” Elena put in, “this whole playacting thing has gone on long enough. I have to admit, you make a pretty convincing pirate. Maybe not as good as Johnny Depp, but you’ll do. So joke’s over. What’s going on? Who are you, really?”

  The man’s glance strayed across the valley and rested on the chasm leading to the ocean as if it had rested there many times before. His face was fierce and proud. “In life, I was known as the Scourge of the Seven Seas. Davy Jones is me name.”

  For three seconds, the valley was so still that I could hear the far off waves. Then Elena’s laughter gave the impression that this was stupidest thing she had ever heard in her life. “Right. I want to go back to school now. Do you hear me?” she asked, raising her voice and addressing the stone walls and whatever pranksters might be hidden there. “I have an algebra test at 1:55 and I need to be there for it or I can’t be responsible for my report card.”

  The silence surrounding us lingered on and on. Davy shrugged at her as if to say, “Hey, what’d I tell you?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Let me get this straight. You want us to believe that you’re Davy Jones. You were shipwrecked on this—this wherever we are, and you ate of the Tree of Life. So now you can’t die and you’re doomed to guard the tree until the end of time. Did I miss anything?”

  “Nay, that’ll do.”

  “Oh, please. What happens if you mess up?” Her words dripped with sarcasm.

  He raised his head and set his shoulders proudly. “I wield the sword of Findul. Great sight has been given me, a knowledge of the things of this age. I cannot fail.” I suspected he might have rehearsed that speech in the mirror once or twice.

  Elena wasn’t impressed. “You barely stopped us in time. If we had eaten that fruit, would we be stuck here forever, too?”

  His shoulders drooped and he nodded. “It would have been disastrous. Part of me job is to prevent such a thing. But foremost, I must make sure the tree neve
r comes to ruin. Its destruction would bring about the end of life on Earth.”

  I chuckled nervously. I wanted to blow him off as Elena had done. With all my heart I wanted to disbelieve. But if he was lying, Davy was the best actor I had ever seen. And the utter lack of reaction in the clearing was sending warning prickles up and down my arms. There was also the matter of the cafeteria floor.

  “That’s impossible, right?” I asked. “The destruction, I mean. No one out in the real world even knows about the tree.”

  A crazed light touched the man’s eyes. His voice grew soft, menacing. “There is one who knows, one who would destroy it. It’s been foretold that when danger grows most dire, one will be sent to counteract him. The One of Two Names.”

  “Everyone has two names,” Elena scoffed.

  “You have four,” I pointed out.

  She glared down at the top of my head.

  “The One would not have just any two names,” Davy went on. “He would come at the joining of my two names.”

  Elena and I glanced at each other then back at Davy. Elena addressed him pointedly. “Uh, that would rule out everyone here except you.”

  “Would it?” Davy asked, looking hard at me. “Are not Davis and Davy variations of each other?”

  I chuckled again, a desperate attempt at lightness that jangled to the earth like a steel chain. “I suppose they could be,” I consented. “But that doesn’t explain your other—”

  I had a sudden, terrible thought. “Sarah Gail Jones,” I whispered.

  “Who’s that?” Elena asked.

  I felt the blood drain from my face. “My mother.”