by M. Suddain
‘Oh, and who will you take me to? The Queen who betrayed you? Your beloved navy? They tried to destroy your fleet.’
‘Nonsense.’
Fabrigas turned momentarily to an empty corner, then smiled, turned back and said, ‘The commander of that attacking fleet was someone you might know. A Commander Mattlocke.’
Descharge briefly lost control of his smug expression.
‘Could this be the same Mattlocke you’re competing with for the position of Supreme Imperial Commander? How interesting. With you gone he’d get just what he’s wanted for so long: to lead the fleets in a war against the Vangardiks. How very interesting.’
Descharge fixed Fabrigas with a look so hard it made him draw back. ‘Your tricks won’t work with me, old fool. I’ll see you swing.’ And he left.
‘What a nice man,’ said Carrofax. ‘So you mean to help the girl after all?’
‘We have no choice for the meantime. I can’t exactly feed her to the plants, and apparently she could be harmful to us if we keep her too long.’
‘“Harmful” is an understatement. She gets more unpredictable the closer she gets to maturity. I will find out what I can and guide you.’
‘Good. And find out who this Calligulus is, too. And find out why I keep dreaming about starfish. And find out where in all the heavens we are.’
‘I will. Although I can tell you that if there’s one place we most certainly are not, it’s heaven.’
*
Fabrigas came back to the group to propose a radical escape plan. He had confirmed the position of the nearby planet. It was close enough that with sufficient upward force they would be able to break the bonds of the plants’ embrace, and the moon’s feeble gravity, then drift across space to the new planet where repairs could be made. ‘I propose we overload our landing jets so they explode!’ This, he reasoned, should give them the thrust to throw them clear of the moon.
‘Joo want to blow us up?’
‘Exactly. I want to blow us … up.’
‘Why are joo always trying to kill us?’
‘I’m not trying to kill us. Our hull is strong. I chose this ship for its structural integrity. We should be fine.’
‘Should?’
‘Most likely.’
‘It was a stupid plan,’ said Lambestyo. ‘If the moon is deadly, the planet it orbits could be terrifyingly dangerous.’ And besides, they had shredded their supersonic chute on landing. Descharge agreed. In fact, the crew was unanimous in their condemnation of the plan, but also in their awareness that they had no other options.
Fabrigas did his best to reassure them. ‘I will calibrate the explosion precisely. I promise. It will be a controlled blast.’
CONTROLLED BLAST
‘Everybody try to stay limp!’
This was the last thing they heard from Fabrigas before the blast knocked them senseless. The explosion the old-beard had ‘calibrated’ beneath the treble-armour-plated hull of the Necronaut was so powerful that those closest to the epicentre were temporarily deafened. They departed the moon like a ballerina who has just sat on a fire-wasp, leaving behind a crater of charred vegetation 180 yards wide. Even as they barrelled most unballetically into space their iron hull rang on like a gong. The forces of gravity knocked most of them unconscious, and when they came to they saw the wild, willing jungles of Bespophus receding below, crying and reaching up to them like children, and soon they found themselves once more floating in space.
They drifted for a long, long while.
ABOUT ME
Why don’t I tell you a little about myself? What? Now? While our friends are locked in dreadful floaty peril? Certainly. They will stay off the boil for as long as we need them to.
Each creature has its job. Bakers bake, explorers explore, murderers murder. I am a writer. I bake with words, I explore the limits of imagination, I murder expectation. I was once a great and renowned man: a poet, philosopher, raconteur, hypno-flâneur (an exponent of the art of walking while automatic writing). I rose to fame after the publication of my first collection, The Excrementalists. And when I say ‘rose to fame’, I mean that the subjects of my book, the aristocratic poets of my Empire, tried to kill me. But they could not divert me from my labours. Every morning I would rise at 11.15 – no later – my servants would bring in my breakfast and coffee, they would bathe and anoint me with fine unguents. Then, in the early afternoon I would put a warm towel about my head and I would write! I would write for exactly two hours, not a second less. Then I would see to my correspondence, then I would walk in the grounds with my house guests (usually other famous writers) and we would discuss philosophy, politics, or the issues of the day. But this is the life of a young poet: it demands dedication, sacrifice.
Then there was a revolution, bloody and terrible. All my friends were put to death – which vexed me greatly – even the ones who’d tried to kill me – which didn’t. I lost everything. All I had accumulated, striven for and inherited was washed away in a tide of blood and aristocratic tears. My hand shakes when I think of what I’ve lost: my first editions, my handmade shoes, my collection of porcelain puppies in amusing poses. All vanished, like tears in the rain. But I am lucky to have escaped with my head. It turned out that a leader of the revolution, one Dejanne Hammer, was a fan. (Oh, save me from my murderous fans!) I was saved from death in return for a signed book and a kiss, but was condemned to a fate far worse. I was forced to go to the vulgar press and earn a crust writing adventure books. All the wit and genius bequeathed to me by nature would now be channelled into the task of penning these crude pulp tales.
And so I work now on assignment, for a pittance. While I work my poetry languishes and my genius shrivels under the flabby mediocrity of the novel. The novel! That most base of all written forms. I who have written epic poems for queens and salted the ears of dauphins with saucy couplets.
Anyway, one must not dwell upon life’s misfortunes. One must push on. Let’s return to our adventure.
BELLY OF THE BEAST
The first thing the crew aboard the Necronaut realised as they gathered themselves was that they were blind. Leaves, vines and swiftly growing mosses had completely covered the exterior of the vessel and would not shift. All they had was audio feedback, and the anti-crash bats – who were utterly frantic.
‘Are you mad?!’ Lambestyo shouted when he found the old-beard. ‘You said you would do a controlled thing!’ His ears were ringing.
‘I did!’ shouted Fabrigas. ‘But there are degrees of control.’
The crew tried to regain their composure. Most had peed themselves. Some had done worse. The Gentrifaction were in a more hysterical state than the bats. G. De Pantagruel was weeping while fanning a prostrate Scatalletto who still had not regained consciousness.
Eventually, after a very, very long time, the hull and their ears stopped ringing, and audio reported the sound of drumming. ‘We need to change heading!’ screamed the lad as the ba-booms grew heavy in his phones, but of course they had no steering, ‘We have no steering!’ They were at the mercy of the gravity of the planet they were drifting towards. ‘We’re at the mercy of its gravity! Crash positions!’
A pressure wave hit their craft – it was a roar you didn’t need phones to hear, and it made the whole ship shake, a roar so deep it was like the sound of a steel beam a mile thick being twisted by a pair of giant hands.
‘That is a very, very large thing,’ said Fabrigas. The bats in the nose were losing their precious little minds.
Then the Necronaut found itself tumbling, still blinded by the clinging vines. Its crew saw a blur of friends and objects. Then there was a crunch as the vessel slammed into something immovable. They were airborne again for what seemed like for ever. Then, for reasons they couldn’t understand, they touched softly down, as if a pair of giant invisible hands which enjoyed bending steel beams had plucked them from the air and set them back on solid earth.
*
Darkness, total and unyielding, wh
en no light is present but the zany specks that flit around behind the eyes. People rose like foals on battered legs. The ship groaned and listed like a bathtub set upon a mattress. Audio picked up the music of a jungle whose eerie blips and calls sounded like a ship’s sonar. Underneath was something else, a rumble like the thrumming of a boiler. ‘Where are we? The sea?’ said Miss Fritzacopple, whose shoulder was badly bruised. She could be forgiven for thinking so. They used cargo hooks to push small viewing holes through the dead foliage which caked their vessel. They sent lanterns out on grappling poles and discovered a floating loveliness in the dark: the foliage was wafting slowly and things that looked like squid were drifting past. Pale-eyed birds of fancy watched from the undergrowth.
‘We are on land,’ said Fabrigas. ‘But the gravity here is very weak.’
Their lamps found crooked trees in a misty lagoon, sumptuous roots plunging like serpents into the mud. Eyes big and small reflected their lamplight. They saw foliage that didn’t want to eat them hiding creatures that might.
‘We have landed in a swamp,’ said the captain, ‘and what’s the bet it wants to eat us?’
At that moment a seismic ripple passed through the ship and the Necronaut was left rocking and creaking like an ancient toad.
‘We could have slipped into a crevasse,’ mused Fabrigas.
‘Well, I see no reason to hesitate,’ said their captain. ‘We can’t survive or launch without key supplies. We will form a party to search the area for readies, and the rest should stay onboard and begin repairs. We should aim to sail in three days. This is my plan. What smell you, little green girl?’
‘Confusion,’ said Lenore. As she sniffed, her dead eyes rolled up and quivered white in their sockets. ‘But there are tasty things. Fires. Peoples.’ She closed one eye. ‘And oils for wicks and gears.’
‘This could be a good place for us,’ said Fabrigas. ‘Do you think you can guide us to the food and oil?’ And Lenore laughed brightly. She turned her sickly green face up to the light.
‘Of course. You know I’ll give you my nose. Always.’ She folded her arms. ‘But will you hear my price?’
‘Your price?’ said Fabrigas.
‘From now I think the children should be containing in them all the freedoms of the grown-ups. We must have good rest, and share the treasure. What says you?’ In front of her the girl sensed the crackle of smiles. ‘My dear,’ said the old-beard, ‘for the help you are giving us, it is a reasonable price.’
The girl wrinkled her little nose and raised an arm sideways. ‘Oils are that-aways.’
*
That night the slaveys sang with such power and passion that the captain had to go below and calm them, lest their song be overheard by a local tribe or un-neighbourly creature.
But when the captain went up late on deck the jungle seemed at rest. It pulsed with gentle clicks and hoots. There was a small light near the foredeck, someone reading, the poet, perhaps, but everyone else was asleep.
*
The next morning the hunting-and-gathering party was assembled: the captain, Fabrigas, Miss Fritzacopple, the bosun, two sailors – Hardcastle and McCormack – Lenore and, of course, Roberto. Lenore had protested that she did not want him to come along, since she had discovered him that morning teaching a coin trick to a young slavey, one Brittany Burk. ‘He should maybe stay here where his tricks is welcome.’ It took some time to convince the pouting alien princess to change her mind. They helped her into the raft they were going to use to cross the swamps and she sulked while they loaded boxes of supplies around her. Roberto was oblivious to the whole saga.
Descharge was left in charge of the ship and the repairs.
‘It’ll be nice to get the gang back together,’ said the bosun, adjusting the belt of elephant rounds on his broad shoulders and hoisting a heavy belt of charge canisters around his waist. ‘I had such fun on our last outing.’ They each clamped an air filter into their nose – for emergencies.
‘You don’t want to be going out there,’ said a voice from the shadows. It was an old sailor called Murphus, who liked to whittle by the foredeck. ‘There be dreadful things out there. That is to say, there will be dreadful things out there.’
‘Who’s that guy?’ said Lambestyo as he hoisted on his gun belts.
‘Can you not smell it? Can you not smell the death hanging in the air? If you go out there you’ll never come back.’
‘He’s spooking me up,’ said Lambestyo. ‘Make him stop.’
‘If you go into the swamp you’ll never see the ship again – except as ghosts. And who needs that hassle?’
‘I don’t smell much death,’ Lenore called up from the raft. ‘There’s a village over there.’
‘Don’t go anywhere, dearest,’ said the captain to Descharge.
‘I won’t be going anywhere without you and the old man,’ Descharge coldly replied.
DARK TERRITORY
The jungle fell mute as they prepared a raft: as if it was waiting for them to dare to enter its secret mists. The old man loaded his personal equipment into the stern. The air was languid and heavy as they pushed out into the swamp, looking back one last time at the Necronaut – half buried in the primordial mud, its long spars hung with vegetation and scraps of sail – not realising that a number of them would never see the boat again. Soon it had vanished.
There were long-toothed reptiles still as logs upon the lagoon. There were slender-tongued rats lapping in the shallows. There were frogs and insects croaking. There was a bird calling from the darkness with the sound of a plucked string. ‘Plang. Plang. Plang.’
The boat had two gas lamps hung on the end of steel hooks. The sailor called McCormack pushed them forward from the back with a wooden pole. Fabrigas was peering bemused at several of his instruments. It was amazing what came out of that cloak of his. ‘The gravity does not make sense!’ he said. ‘Perhaps we are inside a volcano. That would explain the seismic motions.’
No one was listening.
‘Plang. Plang. Plang. Plang. Plang. Plang. Plang.’
‘Death is out there,’ said the captain. ‘I can feel it. This place has a bad energy. Not like the last place.’
‘The last place tried to kill us,’ said Fabrigas.
‘Ah, it was not so bad. I’ve seen worse. Like this place.’
‘So you’re in one of those moods.’
‘Maybe I am, maybe I’m not.’
Before long they were in an area where a million white mushrooms shone on dozens of muddy bulges; each shroom was an unblinking eye.
‘Everyone be careful,’ drawled the botanist. ‘The spores might be deadly. Don’t touch them.’
‘What are those called, Miss Lady?’ said Lenore, who was full of questions.
‘Mushrooms.’
‘What kind of mushrooms are they?’
‘Big ones.’
‘How did you get to know so many plants? I would like to be a botanist one day: only I’d collect smells, not plants. Do you have a man-friend?’
Fritzacopple sighed. ‘I have to concentrate on collecting samples.’ She pulled out her tongs. But the boat sailed on too quick across the darkly luminous estuary; her tongs snapped at the soggy air.
‘You’re distracting me. Stop staring.’
‘I’m blind.’
‘Why don’t you play with Roberto?’
‘I do not care for the coin tricks.’
At last they came towards solid land. Their boat pushed into the mud below a small, rocky hill topped by a single lonely tree. ‘We should go that-aways,’ said Lenore, ‘many smells up there. Two big beasts is breakfasting.’ Beyond the small hill was a clearing before a narrow valley leading deeper into the jungle. There in the gloam they could see two large four-legged beasts. ‘Unicorns!’ said Hardcastle as he grabbed McCormack’s arm. ‘As I breathe!’ The beasts who blocked their way on did not seem to register the presence of the wide-eyed pack of people crammed into their raft.
‘We will set u
p a base camp on the shore,’ said the captain. ‘When the beasts are finished grazing we will continue.’
‘I want to collect some samples around the edge of the lagoon,’ said the botanist.
‘I don’t want you to leave the group,’ said the captain. ‘Stay within sight.’
‘You worry too much,’ she replied, and she took her small sample case and sloshed off through the mud.
‘I’ll come too,’ said Lenore.
‘No!’ came the reply.
‘You have fifteen minutes!’ said the captain, but she was already gone into the darkness beyond their lamps.
‘My word!’ they heard the botanist say from the distance. And then not a peep.
The mist came in like sleep, turning everything they saw to shadows. The unicorns, just thirty feet away, chewed their grasses lazily, with a full four seconds between each chomp. ‘They’ll die back at ship when they hear we’ve spotted unicorns,’ said McCormack. Fabrigas patiently tried to point out that these beasts did not much resemble unicorns as they knew them from fables, since they were not lithe, white equine quadrupeds with single horns upon their heads, but rather were fat, insolent-looking creatures with wide, flat feet, grey, leathery skin folded over in places and studded with wiry hairs. Certainly the beasts had horns upon their snouts, but they were black and stumpy, curved like an assassin’s dagger.
‘I don’t care what he says,’ whispered Hardcastle to McCormack. ‘If they aren’t unicorns then I’m a jungle ape.’
‘The village is one mile that-aways,’ said Lenore. ‘And there are other villages here, I thinks. That is what I thinks. You smell of worry.’ She said it to Lambestyo. Lenore, the captain noticed, was looking straight into his eyes now and he felt a sudden fear. Those eyes seemed so large and terrible in this place. She stood against the black of the swamp. She always stood evenly on two booted feet; always had her green hands clasped in front of her; her eyes had always the haunted and expectant look of the young true wife of a sailor who has died at sea; her mouth, always at work, showed luminous pale fangs and a restless fillet of silvery tongue dipping in and out across a pair of deathly blue lips. She seemed lit from within by a dreadful moonlight. Lambestyo moved a step to his left to break her gaze and, almost unbelievably, those dread eyes followed him. There was something less than human in them. ‘What it is?’ said the girl. ‘Has something frightened you?’