[Blood Bowl 04] - Rumble in the Jungle

by Matt Forbeck - (ebook by Undead)

  “Hello to you too,” said Dunk. He could hear the tone of relief in Edgar’s voice, even if the treeman would never admit to it.

  At the sound of Dunk’s voice, M’Grash, who’d been soaking his feet in the water and moping about missing his friend, leapt up in sheer joy. The ogre dashed across the beach, kicking up enough of it to start a sandstorm. “Dunkel!” he shouted. “Dunkel safe!”

  Dunk braced himself for what he knew was coming next. M’Grash scooped both Spinne and him up in his arms and gave them hugs that forced every ounce of breath from them. When he finally set them down, and both of them had hacked enough air back into their lungs, they grinned up at the ogre, who apologised to them over and over, just as he did every time. Being M’Grash’s friend was normally wonderful, but it wasn’t always easy.

  “All right!” Jiminy said, pointing to the little boat floating next to Edgar. “You went back and got the boat and hauled it all the way over here.”

  “Bloody right we did,” said Edgar. “It’s bad enough I have to endure the humiliation of having the ogre kick me from one island to another all around this bloody continent of yours. I am not putting up with being a bloody boat for the rest of you lot.”

  Edgar narrowed his eyes at Dunk. “You all seem healthy for a crew of souls I last saw being chased by a bloody mass of zombies.”

  Slick and Jiminy gathered together with Edgar and M’Grash and spun the tale of how they’d managed their escape. They stopped long enough for Dunk to finally describe to everyone just how he’d managed to survive the death traps in the stairways of the Temple of Gloom. By the time they finished, Edgar shook his branches at them.

  “Bloody amazing,” he said. “I’ve never seen such a lucky pack of liars.”

  “Every word of that story’s true,” Jiminy said. “Well, most parts anyhow. You’ve got to allow a storyteller some room for embellishments, of course.”

  “But all of the most amazing parts are true,” Slick said, “the traps, the lava, the slann mage-god.”

  “You might have left out the part with the volcanic fishwomen who swam up through the lava just to fall in love with you,” said Spinne.

  “Okay,” Jiminy said. “Most of the best parts were true.” He considered this for a moment. “Some of them, enough of them, for sure.”

  “Never bloody mind,” Edgar said in disgust. “It’s already dark. We’ll let you lot get some bloody sleep, and we can embark for Amazon Island at the first sign of dawn.”

  “Embark?” Jiminy said. “That’s a treeman joke, right? I get it.”

  “Shut up.”

  With Edgar standing watch, there was no need for the others to stay awake. Soon each of them fell over exhausted in the encroaching darkness.

  Dunk woke up once in the middle of the night with Spinne snuggled up tight against him for warmth. By the glow of starlight, he could see the whitecaps of the gentle surf crashing against the shore with its endless roar. Above, in the darkness, the stars sparkled and danced, and he wondered if his sister could be looking up at the same constellations. He hoped to find out soon.

  Morning broke warm and early. They breakfasted on bananas and coconuts that M’Grash shook from the nearby trees, and set off soon after.

  A long day’s rowing and kicking brought them within bowshot of Amazon Island. It lay nestled at the very end of the Amaxon River delta, where the mighty river spilled into the sea. Unlike Xocibiki or Tobazco, Amazon Island bore no volcanoes or mountainous land. It seemed more like a giant sandbar with trees.

  After some discussion, they decided that it would be best to land after dark. That way, they could enter the island unseen, hopefully slipping under the noses of any sentries.

  “Maybe we should all dress up like Amazons to fit in,” Spinne said with a wink.

  Dunk looked at Dirk and Jiminy. “I don’t think we could pass,” he said. “Our chests are too hairy.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jiminy. “Have you seen many Amazons in your time? They make most pirates seem soft and kind.”

  “I thought they were a bunch of women who’d banded together to live alone on an island,” said Dirk. “They can’t be that tough.”

  Lästiges smacked his arm with the back of her hand. “They’re a race of warriors,” she said, “bred for the sword and bow, and trained to them from birth. You and your friends just run around and play with your balls.”

  Dirk cringed. “All right,” he said. “Point taken.”

  When night fell, they rowed and kicked ashore. As they hauled the boat onto the beach, Dunk turned to speak with Edgar and M’Grash.

  “Don’t tell me,” Edgar said. “Sit here and guard the bloody boat.”

  The treeman’s words surprised Dunk. “Yes,” he said, “that’s right.”

  “You’re going on a bloody scouting mission,” Edgar said. “You don’t need a pair of monsters like M’Grash and me crashing through the bloody woods with you. You’ll have a hard enough time on your own. If we come with you, you’ll be spotted for bloody sure.”

  Dunk clapped Edgar on his trunk. “You’re the smartest plant I’ve ever met.”

  “You don’t run in the same bloody circles as me.”

  M’Grash sat down in the middle of the beach, right next to the boat, considerably more morose than Edgar. Dunk walked up to him and cocked his head to the side to look into the ogre’s eyes. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Dunkel leaving again.”

  “We’ll be back,” Dunk said, “soon. We just want to find my sister.”

  “Hmph.”

  Dunk raised an eyebrow at M’Grash. “I miss her, buddy. She’s my sister. I love her.”

  “What about M’Grash?”

  “You’re my best pal. She’s my sister. Two different things, see? One can’t replace the other.” He put his hand on M’Grash’s arm. “Don’t worry. She can’t replace you. No one can.”

  M’Grash clapped Dunk on the back and nearly sent him sprawling along the beach. “Sorry!” the ogre said.

  Dunk looked back and saw that M’Grash was grinning. He knew everything would be all right.

  “We ready?” Dunk said as he approached the others.

  Dirk nodded, as did Spinne. Lästiges frowned, and Slick looked away. Jiminy whistled a little tune.

  “What?”

  “Lästiges and I aren’t coming, son,” Slick said. “We’d just get in the way. We’ll stay behind and make sure M’Grash and Edgar don’t lose the boat.”

  Dunk thought about this. “You’re part of the team. We need you.”

  “Yes,” said Lästiges, “but not right now. We each have our roles to play, and a reporter and an agent don’t belong on a reconnaissance mission.”

  “What about a singer?” Dunk said to Jiminy.

  “As a singer, I have no right to come along with you. Truth be told, I’d rather not. The lady there wasn’t kidding when she went on about the Amazons as a warrior tribe. Any one of those lovely ladies could kick my ass into the ocean. And after they got through with my donkey they could kick my butt too.”

  Jiminy waited for a laugh but got none. “Sorry about that. Trying too hard for the jokes again?”

  “It’s a little too true to be funny at the moment,” Slick said. “Try it again when this is all done.”

  “So you’re staying here,” Dunk said to Jiminy.

  “Afraid not,” the man said with a grimace. “Seems I’m the closest thing to a guide around here you got. Me and the Moral Reefers have been out here a few times to entertain the ladies, and, ah, help them repopulate the island, if you know what I mean.”

  “I thought men weren’t allowed here,” said Spinne.

  “They can’t live here, but they can visit,” Jiminy said, “some for longer than others. They raise their kids all the same. Once the boys hit puberty, though, they’re on the first boat out of here.”

  “What happens to them?” Lästiges asked. Her camra, which she’d finally taken back from Dunk, focused
on the man, waiting for his answer.

  “You’re looking at an Amazon Island alumni,” he said.

  “You? And all the Moral Reefers?”

  “Where do you think guys like us come from around these parts? They don’t fly us in from Altdorf for the rainy season.”

  “So you know Amazon Island,” said Dunk.

  “Like it was my home.” Jiminy winked. “Exactly like that, in fact.”

  28

  “That’s it,” Jiminy said in a soft voice, pointing at a clearing cut out of the jungle ahead. “Home.”

  Torches flickered in the clearing, illuminating the edges of huts and other structures scattered about the place. There weren’t streets so much as spaces between the buildings. The land was nothing more than sand, after all, and Dunk hadn’t seen or heard a single beast of burden on any of the islands they’d been on so far.

  The Amazons got around the old-fashioned way, on foot. Dunk had only seen a few of them strolling along the sandy paths, and they’d all reminded him of Enojada: tall, muscular, tanned, and blonde. He hadn’t seen any children at all, but he supposed they went to bed soon after dark or were at least called into their homes.

  The huts had grass or bamboo sides and thatched roofs. Not one of them had a door on the entrance, and the windows all stood open too. The village stood close enough to the sea for a breeze to caress the place. It caressed the place steadily, keeping the biting insects away. With night having fallen, the temperatures had cooled to something reasonable. Perfect sleeping weather, as Dunk’s mother would have called it.

  “Now what?” Dunk said quietly. “Where do we go from here?”

  Jiminy pointed to the nearest hut. “Why do you think I brought you all the way around here?”

  “To avoid the guards?”

  Jiminy smiled. “The Amazons depend on their reputation more than their swords to protect this place. They haven’t had an attempted invasion since long before I was born, and thieves and bandits are almost as rare.”

  “What do they do to such people when they catch them?” Spinne asked.

  Jiminy sucked at his teeth. “They’re almost always male, of course. Women don’t come out to attack Amazon Island. Join, sure, but not attack.”

  “What do they do?” Dirk asked, growing impatient.

  “They take the men, hogtie them, and string them up by their genitals in the sun. Never seen anyone last for more than an hour that way.”

  No one said anything.

  Dunk sidled forward. “Let’s be sure not to get caught.”

  “That’s your sister’s place right there,” Jiminy said, pointing at a large hut right in front of them. “We should be able to slip in through the rear window.”

  Dunk took a closer look at the place. While Kirta’s hut was larger than most, it was made of the same materials as the rest. A torch on a stick flickered near the front corner, and somewhere inside the home several lamps burned, keeping back the night.

  With a glance at Dirk, Dunk moved forward. He crept up to the edge of the wide window set in the rear of the hut and peered inside.

  The room beyond the window lay in dimness, separated from the rest of the building not by walls but by translucent curtains. Through the fabric, Dunk could see a light burning at table height to the left and to the right. A third flickered a bit farther away, probably outside the hut’s door.

  Dirk, Spinne, and Jiminy crawled up beside Dunk and looked into the room too. They all waited for a long moment for something to happen. When nothing did, Dunk slipped over the window’s edge and into the hut.

  He was in a bedchamber. A four-poster bed that looked like it must have been imported from Altdorf stood to one side, and a massive wardrobe loomed to the other. The floor was nothing more than hard-packed sand.

  Dunk heard something scratching in the outer room. After listening for a moment, he realised it was the sound of a pen on paper. Encouraged by this, he reached back and helped the others through the window and into the room.

  When they were all inside, Dunk realised that the scratching had stopped. He held his hand up for the others to remain silent. They had to somehow figure out if Kirta was alone. If so, they had to reveal themselves to her in a way that wouldn’t surprise her so much that she started screaming for help right away.

  Dunk crept closer to the curtain, walking on the balls of his feet to minimise even the tiniest noises on the sand. As he neared the edge of the curtain that separated the bedchamber from the rest of the hut, he reached out for it slowly. He saw that there were actually two curtains that met in the middle, and he meant to part them with his hand and peek through.

  He did so, and saw the simple chamber beyond. It contained a small table and chairs for dining, a writing desk and chair covered with ink-spattered papers, a hammock strung near a window in the opposite wall, and a door next to that. A pair of cabinets stood against the wall to the left, and a rack filled with weaponry sat on the ground to the right.

  No one was there.

  Dunk pulled the curtain apart a little farther. “Kirta,” he whispered. “Kirta?”

  A blade sliced towards Dunk from the left. He ducked to avoid it and threw himself backward, bowling over the others in the path of the sword. It cut a neat slit through the curtain, which then sagged away from the top of the fabric, separated partially, but not detached.

  A face appeared in the hole. It belonged to a beautiful young woman with bronzed skin and black hair. Her eyes flashed with anger, and she brought the sword back up to strike again.

  “Kirta!” Dunk said. “Kirta! It’s us!”

  The woman froze. Then her sword moved through the air in three quick cuts, and the rest of the curtain fell to the ground. She backed off, unwilling to step into a darkened room.

  “Come out here where I can see you,” she said. “If this is some kind of trick, you can be sure you’ll pay with your lives.”

  Her voice was lower than Dunk remembered, and it featured a harder edge. He hoped the years had been kind to her. He wondered if she’d think they’d been kind to him.

  Dunk stepped out into the light, his hands held palm out before him. Spinne came in on his left, while Dirk joined them on his right.

  Kirta, the woman, not the girl that Dunk had thought dead for so many years, took a stunned step back and dropped her sword. “Y-you made it,” she said.

  Her voice cracked as she spoke, and tears welled in her eyes. A moment later, she launched herself at Dunk and Dirk and gathered them into a rib-cracking three-way embrace. She held them that way for a long time, and her brothers returned her grasp just as tightly.

  “I thought I might never see you again,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “Even after spotting you in the Blood Bowl championship, I never thought I’d find a way to, to…”

  Just as hard as she’d come at them, Kirta shoved her brothers away. “You have to leave,” she said, her voice and hands trembling with fear. “You have to leave now.”

  Dunk and Dirk glanced at each other, and then turned to their sister. “But we just got here,” Dunk said. “There’s so much we want to ask you about.”

  “No time for that now,” Kirta said, her fear transforming into resolve. “You must leave. You’re putting us all in horrible danger! I’ll see you at the tournament. It will have to wait until then.”

  “We can’t wait that long,” said Dunk. “We want to talk with you now.”

  Kirta groaned. “The tournament starts tomorrow evening. You can’t hold out that long?”

  “Tomorrow?” Dunk said. “But I thought we had plenty of time.”

  “The volcano’s ready,” Kirta said. “The games start. You need to go.”

  “But wait!” Dirk said. “We’re not just going to turn around and leave without some sort of explanation.”

  “I think you owe them that,” Jiminy said, stepping from the darkness.

  Kirta’s jaw dropped at the sight of the singer. “You! What are you doing here? With them?
”

  “Now, darling—”

  “Darling?” Dunk and Dirk spoke in unison as their heads snapped around to stare at Jiminy, and then at their sister, and each other.

  “Darling,” Jiminy said again, “we all just want to see how you’re doing.”

  Kirta stepped forward and punched Jiminy in the shoulder. The singer yelped and pranced away. “You should know better,” she said. “You do know better. Get them out of here, now!”

  As she spoke the last word, the lights in Kirta’s home all went out at once. A chill breeze blew through the place, cutting into their skins like frozen knives.

  “Too late,” Kirta said with a moan. “Too damned late.”

  “What’s going on?” Dunk said. He reached for Spinne with one hand and for Kirta with the other.

  “She’s here,” Kirta said.

  To punctuate that, someone let loose with a howling scream of agony that Dunk thought might freeze the blood in his veins.

  “Who?” Dunk said. It was the only question he could think to ask. His brain urged him to stop talking and leave the damned place, but his feet didn’t seem to want to move.

  “It’s Mother,” Kirta said, “she’s come home.”

  “Who dares intrude upon the home of my daughter?”

  Although the lights in the hut had all been snuffed out, Dunk could still see the apparition swirling in the air under Kirta’s high, thatched roof. The pale, translucent figure glowed softly in the dark as it circled overhead, extenuated by its movements, but still recognisably his mother.

  At least her face looked the same. She clearly wasn’t herself any longer. Only her spirit must have survived that fateful night in Altdorf. She was nothing more, or less, than a ghost.

  “Mother?” Dirk said, sounding very much like a little, lost boy.

  Dunk cringed. First, he feared how his mother would react at seeing them, even if she had been alive. She had always been notoriously protective of them throughout their childhood, and she hadn’t had the luxury of seeing them grow into strong, confident, Blood Bowl hardened men.

  Second, whatever was swirling over their heads wasn’t really their mother as they knew her. It was a ghost. Dunk didn’t want to get into the metaphysical questions about whether or not it was his mother’s spirit or some strange creature that happened to be around at the moment of his mother’s death, and had imprinted upon her strongly enough at that most intense moment for it to believe it was his mother’s spirit. In the end, a ghost could be nothing but trouble.