The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear

by Walter Moers

  Once they had pulled themselves together, they explained the situation to me. It seemed that a strong current had been running for some days, and the Babbling Billows knew they must follow it. If they remained in the same spot for too long, they evaporated. That was why they were doomed to roam the seas in perpetuity.

  ‘Many thanks for everything,’ I said, for I could speak now, of course.

  ‘Oh, don’t mention it,’ said one of the waves, and I could tell it was fighting back the tears.

  ‘I’m lost for words for the very first time,’ it went on.

  ‘We’ve got something for you,’ said the other wave. ‘A name!’

  I am named for life

  ‘Yes,’ said the first wave, ‘we’re calling you Bluebear.’

  The Babbling Billows obviously didn’t have much in the way of imagination, but still, I’d never had a name before. They each gave me a damp hug and sloshed off, sobbing as they went. I felt like crying myself.

  I watched them making for the horizon, their silhouettes outlined against the orb of the slowly setting sun. But they perked up after only a few yards and started babbling again.

  ‘Now listen to me …’

  ‘There’s nothing you can tell me I don’t know already!’

  ‘That’s what you think!’

  And they went on babbling. Even when darkness had fallen and they’d been out of sight for hours, I could still hear them squabbling in the distance.

  My supply of coconuts was gradually running out, and my arduous language lessons had almost completely exhausted my reserves of liquid. What was more, a merciless sun had been beating down on my unprotected head for quite a while, for I was drifting ever further south.

  The huge eye

  After three days my brain was so dehydrated that I simply sat there, torpidly contemplating the surface of the sea. If you stare at seawater for long enough, you start seeing the strangest things in the foam: wild beasts, dragons, hordes of sea monsters locked in battle, dancing water sprites, leaping mermaids, weird grey shapes equipped with horns and tails. I soon got the feeling I could see the bottom of the ocean. I glimpsed translucent palaces floating beneath me like glass submarines. I saw a kraken with a thousand tentacles, a pirate ship manned by clattering skeletons singing frightful songs. And then I saw the most terrible sight of all: a huge gargoyle of a face, ten times bigger than my raft, with a single eye the size of a house rolling around in its socket until only the white showed.

  Beneath it was a mouth big enough to swallow any ship, the massive lower jaw studded with countless long, pointed teeth. The creature’s throat was gaping greedily, and looking down it was like looking into a watery grave. The face was covered with scales and horny wrinkles, small craters and deep scars. I went on staring into the water in a daze.

  But I wasn’t scared by the sight. After all, it was only a figment of my desiccated imagination.

  Or so I thought. But it wasn’t. It was a Tyrannomobyus Rex.

  From the

  ‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  Tyrannomobyus Rex, The. A plagiostome belonging to the selachian order of fishes and related to the killer whale, the giant moray eel, the shark, the carnivorous saurian, and the cyclops. It derives its size from the whale, the conformation of its lower jaw from the moray eel, its urge to devour anything its maw can encompass from the shark, its instinctive habit of chasing anything that moves from the saurian, and its single eye from the cyclops. Over 140 feet long, the Tyrannomobyus Rex may readily be numbered among the largest predators in the world. Its skin is studded with knobs of cartilage and black as pitch, which is why it is also called the Black Whale. The head consists of a single large slab of bone that enables it to ram quite sizeable merchantmen and send them to the bottom. Fortunately, the Tyrannomobyus Rex is almost extinct. According to many experts, the specimen that has been rendering Zamonian waters unsafe for decades is the only one still in existence. Numerous whalers have tried to kill it, but none has succeeded and many have never been seen again.

  I didn’t awake from my daydream until the Black Whale surfaced right in front of me. It was as if the sea had given birth to an island. Towering over my raft was a mountain of black blubber sprinkled with warts the size of boulders. Water streamed down the fatty furrows in the monster’s back and cascaded into the sea. Sucked into one of the whirlpools created around it by these waterfalls, my raft began to rotate.

  The air was filled with a throat-catching stench.

  I clung tightly to the mast and tried to breathe as little as possible. The whirlpools subsided, but the whale blew a gigantic fountain of water into the air, possibly as much as 300 feet high, through the vent in its head. I was so fascinated by this spectacle that I never stopped to think what its consequences might be from my own point of view.

  For a moment it seemed as if the fountain had turned to ice. It hung there in front of the sun like a transparent, frozen waterfall. I could see thousands of fish in it, large and small, whole schools of cod and porpoises, a few sharks, a largish octopus, and a ship’s wheel.

  Then the fountain fell back into the sea. The water descended on me like a ton of bricks. It smashed my raft to pieces and carried me down, further and further, into the depths. Fortunately, although I was surrounded by sharks, they were far too dazed to snap at me.

  The pressure eased at last and I shot to the surface like a cork. Scarcely had I drawn a breath and got my bearings (I was right in front of the monster’s cyclopean eye) when it opened its mouth to gulp some more water.

  In the whale’s jaws

  I was brutally sucked into the whale’s jaws. I feel sure that this wasn’t directed specifically at me – indeed, I doubt if the monster had noticed me at all, not being the kind of prey that would have justified the effort. The whale was simply breathing in.

  Suspended from its upper lip were innumerable whiskers, the yard-long, lianalike tentacles with which it filtered its food. I managed to catch hold of one as I was swept along and clung to it while the water rushed beneath me into the creature’s maw. It wasn’t easy, for the whiskers were slippery and gave off a disgusting stench of rotting fish, but I hung on with all my might.

  Having finished taking in water, the whale began to shut its mouth again. My next task was to avoid being swallowed. To achieve this I started swinging back and forth on the whisker. It would be my bad luck if the mouth closed while I was on the inside.

  The lips were closing very slowly.

  I swung in.

  The lower lip emerged from the sea, big as a sand bank.

  I swung out.

  With a gurgle, the last of the water disappeared down the monster’s throat.

  I swung in.

  I would have done better not to venture a glance at the whale’s dark maw. Yawning beneath me was a chasm coated with dark green slime, a hissing hole filled with gastric juices. I was so scared, my strength wellnigh deserted me. Momentarily relaxing my grip, I slithered a little way down the whisker, then tightened it in the nick of time.

  I swung out.

  The monster’s lips shut with a snap. I had managed to finish my final swing on the outside and was now perched on the whale’s glutinous lower lip.

  The cyclopean eye was rolling overhead but failed to notice me. Without giving the matter much thought, I reached for the nearest knob of gristle on the upper lip and began my ascent.

  It wasn’t easy to clamber up the huge creature’s warty epidermis, but I was urged on by a courage born of despair. I climbed right past the eye, from one gristly protuberance to the next, scaled the forehead, which was a miniature mountain of black, horny skin, and made my way down into the deep wrinkles that furrowed the monster’s brow. Thereafter the going became easier. The slope was less steep, and I soon reached the foothills of the back.

  There is no polite way to describe the whale’s stench. Prolifer
ating on its back were whole coral reefs, forests of seaweed, colonies of clams. Stranded fish were flapping everywhere, crabs and lobsters scuttling excitedly to and fro.

  The harpoon forest

  I continued to toil across the viscous surface until I came to a cluster of harpoons protruding from the whale’s gristly back. There must have been hundreds of them. Many were old and rusty, with rotting wooden shafts, but the gleaming steel barbs and brightly polished handles of others indicated that they hadn’t been there long. The harpoons were of all sizes. They ranged from normal ones that I myself could have thrown to big ones as much as fifteen feet long, which had clearly been hurled by giants, and tiny ones no bigger than a toothpick, which had probably belonged to Minipirates. Dangling from one of them, entangled in his own line, was the skeleton of a luckless whaler.

  The whale was absolutely motionless now – motionless as a ship that has run aground. I took advantage of this lull to reflect on my predicament. My raft was now being digested somewhere in the Tyrannomobyus’s innards. Sooner or later the monster would dive once more, either carrying me down with it or leaving me floundering in the sea with nothing to cling to. I decided to improvise a new raft out of harpoon shafts. They were largely of wood, and still attached to many of them were corks for buoyancy and lines with which I could tie them together. My first step was to extract a brand-new harpoon some nine feet long.

  A slight tremor ran through the whale’s back as I pulled it out. Not an alarming reaction, it was accompanied by a faint grunt and followed by a huge, pleasurable sigh that rang out far across the sea. The same thing happened when I extracted the next harpoon, except that the sigh was even more prolonged and pleasurable, perhaps because the harpoon was more deeply embedded.

  The whale evidently liked what I was doing. I guessed I would be safe for as long as I went on removing harpoons, so I extracted one after another from the huge creature’s back, proceeding as gently and carefully as possible so as not to madden it by yanking out a barb too quickly. Within a very short time I was an expert at extracting harpoons. You have to begin by levering the shaft back and forth to loosen the barb in the gristle, and then, with a gentle, oscillating movement, pull it out.

  The more carefully and skilfully I extracted the barbs from the whale’s flesh, the more pleasurable its grunts became. One huge, contented sigh after another went whooshing across the sea – an audible manifestation of the monster’s relief. I was so engrossed in my work, I never even noticed that it had got under way again. A refreshing breeze was my first indication it was very slowly propelling itself along with gentle movements of its tail. It showed no signs of being about to dive.

  Removing the harpoons was hard work. Many of the barbs were so firmly embedded that it was a real struggle to get them out. The very long harpoons were lodged in the gristle more deeply and stubbornly than most, having been hurled by powerful arms. I sweated and slaved, but it made a welcome change from lolling around in idleness on the raft.

  I doubt if anyone apart from me has ever heard a Tyrannomobyus Rex sigh. It’s a sound unlike any other, a sort of groan of gratitude for deliverance from years or even centuries of torment. Assemble ten thousand sea cows at the bottom of a mine shaft, persuade them to utter a simultaneous sigh of love and add the wingbeats of a million bumblebees drunk on honey, and you might produce something akin to that penetrating, contented hum.

  After half a day or so my work was nearly done. I had extracted hundreds of harpoons. Only one remained, and that I removed with a certain ceremony. A final sigh of relief rang out over the sea. Tyrannomobyus Rex was harpoon-free.

  I realized my mistake a moment later. By removing the last harpoon I had also disposed of the whale’s only reason for tolerating my presence on its back. It prepared to dive, as I realized when it drew a deep breath. In my eagerness I had completely lost sight of the need to build another raft. I had thoughtlessly tossed the harpoons into the sea.

  Yes, the Tyrannomobyus Rex dived, but so slowly, almost gently, that I wasn’t directly endangered by its submersion. It went down by degrees, like a very big ship with a tiny leak. I slid off its back into the mirror-smooth water while the last knobs of gristle were silently engulfed. Then it disappeared altogether. A few huge bubbles rose to the surface, presumably a final farewell from its air hole.

  The water was warm. I doggy-paddled around for a bit, trying to get my bearings. A few cork floats could be seen here and there. Perhaps I could collect enough of them to fashion a makeshift lifebelt. As I was swimming towards one I spotted a seagull overhead, the first I’d seen for a long time. It was flying westwards, into the setting sun.

  A cloud of screaming seabirds was circling above a point on the horizon with the sun melting into the sea beyond them. A ship, or had the whale surfaced in another place? I swam towards the place. The nearer I got, the more clearly I seemed to discern a small palm forest beneath the birds. Soon I could make out a coastal strip: an immaculately white sandy beach and, beyond it, some luxuriant vegetation.

  I sight land

  Whether by chance or by design, the whale had dumped me near an island. Alluring scents came drifting across the sea towards me. Appetizing aromas I’d never encountered before, they included vanilla, grated nutmeg, wild garlic, and roast beef. The island smelt good. Having discovered the place, I resolved to take possession of it by right.

  The sun had almost disappeared by the time I crawled ashore. I was so exhausted I simply lay down on the sand and dozed off at once. Before I finally drifted into dreamland I heard a chorus of inane giggles coming from behind the curtain of forest nearby. But I didn’t care, I had nothing to fear. Whoever they might be, those people, they were my subjects.

  Breakfast on Gourmet Island

  THE NEXT MORNING I was roused from my dreams of discovery by a choir of songbirds. A gigantic, breathtakingly beautiful butterfly had perched on my nose and was fanning me with cool air. A coconut plopped into the sand from a nearby palm tree and split in half with such precision that not a drop of the precious milk was spilt. The milk was delicious, cool and refreshing, and the flesh melted on my tongue like cream. A flock of humming-birds hovered above me for a moment, then formed line ahead and went whirring off into the palm forest. The island seemed to want to welcome its discoverer in person. It was time to inspect my new domain. I brushed the sand from my fur and set off into the interior.

  I still can’t find the words to do justice to the paradisal splendour of Bluebear Island (as I provisionally christened it). Clouds of colourful butterflies fluttered through serried ranks of huge, shady palm trees with golden fronds and snow-white trunks. Some of these butterflies were as big as seagulls and had wings that shimmered like mother of pearl. Growing beneath the trees were flowers such as I had never seen before, with silver petals and leaves of glass.

  Other flowers, which had cups that seemed to consist of blue light, could sing in low, subdued, sing-song voices like tiny, industrious elves. I passed tall plants that smelt of vanilla and could unfurl their gorgeous, multicoloured leaves like peacocks displaying their plumage. Other, tuliplike flowers with thin yellow stems were forever changing colour. If you looked at them for too long, they turned puce and giggled. That was the sound I’d heard on the threshold of sleep.

  I came to a clearing in which some pale green orchids were phosphorescing in the deep shade of the palm trees that fringed it. They were blowing iridescent soap bubbles. Other orchids stood among them, bursting the bubbles with their long, tonguelike stamens. The humming-birds had assembled above the clearing and were amusing themselves by doing some formation flying.

  Potato fritters

  But the most amazing thing of all was situated in the middle of the clearing, where a small pool of cooking oil was bubbling away in an appetizing fashion. The hissing and spitting seemed to grow louder as I approached. At the edge of the pool were some plants whose long stems terminated in potatolike excrescences. As I drew near the stems bent and dipped
these in the sizzling oil. I could only gaze at this process in amazement. The stems eventually straightened up and dropped a few potato fritters at my feet. I picked one up and sampled it. Ah, what bliss! I had never tasted anything more delectable. Greedily, I gobbled up the rest of the potatoes as well.

  The further I ventured into the interior of the island, the more unusual the vegetation became. Tinkling among the trees was a dense network of brooks and rivulets. On examining these more closely, I discovered them to be of different colours. Many looked like ordinary water, but others were white as milk or yellow as orange juice. I bent and drank from one of the yellow streams. It really was orange juice.

  Cocoa on tap

  The white streams consisted of pure, cold milk. Overhanging them were large plants with thick, dark brown seed pods. When I accidentally brushed against one of these plants, dozens of pods fell into the milk, dissolved, and temporarily turned the stream pale brown. I quickly stooped and lapped up some of this delicious drinking chocolate.

  Growing on the banks of the rivers were fruit and vegetables such as I had never seen before, including blue cauliflowers that smelt and tasted like roast pork with crackling. The flowers brimmed with honey, and you could even eat their leaves, which tasted like white toast. Lengths of thin creeper dangling from the trees smelt faintly of garlic and could be eaten like spaghetti. The trees themselves excreted delicious sauces and gravies from their knotholes when the bark was tapped. Mushrooms the size of pumpkins stewed in their own juice below ground. You had only to break off a piece to see it grow back again within minutes.

  The island seemed completely devoid of horrors. There were no cannibals lurking anywhere, no treacherous quagmires, no evil spirits, no dangerous wild beasts. There weren’t even any of the usual unpleasantnesses like spiders or earwigs, snakes or bats, only creatures that were either beautiful or, if not beautiful, cute: butterflies and songbirds, hares and squirrels, hamsters and flamingos, humming-birds and dainty little cats. They were all very trusting and showed no sign of fear, which indicated that the denizens of the island lived in peace. There was plenty of food for all, so they had no need to prey on each other.