by Kai Meyer
“Then find a way to do it.”
“I haven’t the power to do that.”
“Power?” Again that rumbling, stony-sounding laughter. “Oh, that you certainly have. I saw it, in the old time. Saw how the animals fought. Imprisoned him. Saw it.”
Kangusta must already have been imprisoned here at that time. So how could she have watched something going on outside?
“I see much,” said the kobalin mother, as if she intended to answer Jolly’s unspoken question. “Can look through the rocks, taste it in the water. Everything that happens. Tasted how the other little animal shut you in here with me. Oh, yes.” Her voice became darker, deeper. “And I taste you, little animal. Mmmmmm.”
In the grayness of polliwog vision Jolly saw it nearly a moment too late—something twitched up out of the kobalin mother’s throat, a warty strand of black muscle!
She just succeeded in escaping the powerful tongue. The tip smacked against the rocks beside her, felt over the stone, twitching and trembling, and then pulled back with a whip-snapping sound.
A roar of rage rose from Kangusta’s body, then the tongue shot forward again, as long as a topmast, but not very much wider. Presumably this was the only body part the kobalin mother could still move freely.
The cries of the monster faded away, the tongue disappeared.
Jolly had to force herself not to flee in panic. Instead she stayed on the ceiling, just out of range of the tongue. “That’s no way to close a deal,” she said in a thick voice. Her entire body was trembling, and she hoped that Kangusta didn’t see it.
“Little, nimble, quick animal!” thundered from the mouth. “Little, tender, tasty animal!”
“Tell me which way leads to the outside, and I’ll do what I can for you.” The lantern fish had vanished from her sight and were now floating anxiously behind her.
“There’s only one way. Not the one you came by. The other. Leads up, leads outside. They bring me food that way. Living, kicking, fat food.”
Jolly shuddered, feeling her stomach turn over. Don’t think about it. Just don’t think about it anymore.
The second tunnel Kangusta was talking about must lie on the other side of the grotto, too distant for her polliwog eyes to see it. Now that Jolly knew how far Kangusta’s tongue reached, it would be easy to get there unharmed.
But there was something else she wanted to know. About what the kobalin mother had said in the beginning. About Aina and the others. Jolly had to find out what had happened to the polliwogs. Why had Aina betrayed her?
“If you’ve tasted that I was shut in here by another…animal, then you also know that she was no friend of mine.”
“Tasted it. I surely did.”
“Why is she obeying the Maelstrom now? She is doing that, isn’t she?”
Kangusta’s laughter made the rock vault shake. “Obeying? Obeying? You know nothing, little animal. Nothing of the truth. The Maelstrom is powerful, that he is. United my brood, in fear of him. If he were dead, wiped out…then my children would again fight to gain my favor. The way it used to be. But fear welds them together and makes them lose all respect for me. Makes them even leave the water!” An indignant roar followed these words, for it appeared to Kangusta quite unthinkable that a kobalin could voluntarily go onto the land. “If he were destroyed, then yes, there would be some who were there for me again. Who would free me. And others who would be envious of my favor and would fight for it. The way it used to be. In the good times. The fat, tasty times.” The kobalin mother expelled a moan filled with self-pity. “But today…He spoiled them. Made them forget their own mother. He did that.”
The tongue flicked out, whipped through the empty grotto at a mad tempo, and finally fell limp across Kangusta’s face. It lay there for a long time, and there wasn’t a sound except for the sniffling of the kobalin mother.
Jolly waited until the monster had grown calm again. Only when the tongue began moving and retreated into the throat like a dying sea serpent did she speak.
“I will destroy the Maelstrom so that everything is the way it used to be again.” Hesitating, she added, “In the good times.”
“The tasty times.”
Jolly cleared her throat. “Exactly.”
“You’re too weak.” Kangusta sounded tired now. “You said so yourself. Besides, I don’t trust you. You’ll find the way to the top, leave here, and forget me.”
How could I do that? Jolly thought with disgust. She felt no pity for Kangusta, but she could understand what was going on in the brain of this ancient being. Once the deep tribes had revered her, but now she was in danger of going into oblivion down here.
“I will destroy him.” Jolly was amazed at her own certainty. “I will put an end to all this.”
The swollen flesh hills around one of the eyes twitched. “Will you really do that?”
“Or I will die in the attempt.”
“A brave little animal. Or a dumb one. Perhaps both.”
Without thinking about it, Jolly cried, “Better than to be stuck fast in these rocks, lazy and fat and helpless!”
Kangusta was so quiet that Jolly concluded she was planning another nasty trick. But then words rose from the black throat again, very slowly this time, and they were heralded by something like an echo in advance, which hurried ahead of the actual sentences.
“You’re right, little animal. There were times, you should know, when I was strong and powerful. Times when all trembled before me, whether kobalin or animal or the wooden fish on which your kind ride over the waves.”
Then the island dwellers must already have been traveling from island to island by boat thousands of years ago, Jolly thought. But why was hardly anything left of that culture? She thought of the answer herself: Presumably the islanders never recovered from the first war against the Maelstrom. Even though they’d won it. So what would be left of the present-day Caribbean after all this business?
Kangusta continued, “You think the Maelstrom comes from over there, from the other sea, don’t you? But that’s not true. The Maelstrom comes from this world. He was once a little animal like you. That he was.”
“Like me?” Jolly repeated, perplexed.
“A little animal with great power. You’ve seen her. The same one that imprisoned you here. The first little animal that came down here.”
“Aina!”
“If you call her so…yes.”
“But she’s a human. A polliwog.”
“She was like you.” Sssshe, hissed Kangusta.
“And she came to conquer the Maelstrom.”
The monster laughed angrily. “There was no Maelstrom when she arrived. She has become that. She is the Maelstrom.”
For a moment Jolly forgot to swim and threatened to sink. The lantern fish whirled excitedly around her face, startling her. With a rowing motion, Jolly got herself up to the cave ceiling again.
“How can Aina be the Maelstrom?”
“I don’t taste everything from the water,” said Kangusta slowly. “But in the very beginning, right after she set my children against me, she came into the hill. She wanted to torment me. Torment me, she did.” She was silent for a moment. “Told me everything, the little animal. How she was cast out by the other animals because she was different, more powerful. At that time the powers of the other sea were breaking through to us. Into my realm! The little animal came and became a slave to the ideas and promises of the foreigners. She tried to open a gateway for them…to become herself a gateway for them, through which they could get into our world.” The longer Kangusta spoke, the clearer her voice became. It was as if with each sentence a part of her memory of that time was returning—of the Maelstrom, the war against the Mare Tenebrosum, but above all, of herself. She remembered how it had been to speak with another living being and to exchange knowledge. It did not make her more human, but less monstrous.
“Under the prompting of the others, the little animal became the Maelstrom. I could do nothing against it, for I po
ssessed no magic powers at that time, and I do not possess them today…. But don’t tell anyone else that.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jolly somberly.
“The Maelstrom seized power over my kingdom and my children.”
Jolly thought over Kangusta’s words. As unbelievable as it all sounded, it made sense. Aina was expelled by the humans—she’d told them that herself. And as for the temptations that the masters of the Mare employed—Jolly had felt them on her own body. She remembered her visions that time on the deck of the Carfax. If Buenaventure hadn’t been there…
She shook herself, as if to shake the images out of her head. She’d almost forgotten where she was. She gazed thoughtfully at the gigantic head of the kobalin mother. Perhaps she had to revise her opinion of Kangusta. Certainly she was malicious and hideous-looking—but she wasn’t stupid. The pity Jolly had been resisting the entire time now spread through her—mixed with the fear she continued to feel facing this monster.
Kangusta went on, “The little animal you saw…that led you here…she was not real. Only a copy of her earlier self, before she turned into the Maelstrom.”
“That’s why we could reach through her!”
“Yes.”
“What happened to the other two polliwogs? You said there were two more like me back then.”
“They came a while later, when the Maelstrom stood at the height of his power. They fought him in order to stop him. And with him the powers from the other sea.”
Jolly nodded. “They were shut inside the mussel with him, Aina said. Was that a lie too?”
“No. They sacrificed themselves to imprison him there. Brave little animals they were. For a long, long time they were gone, imprisoned in the great mussel. Until it opened again, much, much later, and the Maelstrom began to grow in power. Then they also crept outside, but they were no longer what they had been. He had conquered them during all the ages and made them into his creatures. He formed the one anew, of mud and algae and the remains of those who sank down into the deep to us from the wooden fish.”
“The Acherus!”
“I don’t know that word,” said Kangusta.
“What became of the second?”
The black, barklike skin of the kobalin mother rippled in a burst of anger. “He took the power over my brood to himself. He united the tribes in the name of the Maelstrom. He also was changed, but different from the first one.”
The lord of the kobalins. In retrospect it explained everything. Even the fact that the Ghost Trader had always spoken of only one Acherus, not of several. He’d told them that the Acherus was created by the Maelstrom—not, however, from what.
He knew it, she thought, and tears of rage came to her eyes. The Ghost Trader had known the whole time what the Maelstrom and his two most powerful servants had been. And he’d told Jolly and Munk nothing of it so they couldn’t see the danger that threatened them. A danger much worse than death: Possibly the same fate awaited them as the polliwogs who’d shut up Aina.
The longer Jolly thought about it, the more it became obvious to her that Munk was already well on his way there.
That was why Aina chose him. She wanted to make him into her servant to substitute for the Acherus, whom Munk himself had destroyed. And she also had plans for Jolly, which was why Aina hadn’t killed her but locked her in here. She intended to make Jolly into her slave and misuse Jolly’s magic for her own purposes.
Until now they’d assumed they were fighting against a creature from the Mare Tenebrosum. But that was wrong—their enemy had once been a polliwog like themselves. Cast off by her own people, gone over to the other side, and now its strongest weapon.
“I must get to her.” She spoke her thoughts aloud. “I must free Munk and stop Aina.”
“You cannot stop the Maelstrom,” said Kangusta angrily. “No one can do that. I tried—and look at me. I have not always been as I am today—not always.”
“If I defeat the Maelstrom, will you rule over the deep tribes again?”
Kangusta hesitated. “If he is truly destroyed and not just shut in, the way he was before…yes, then they will see me again as that which I once was.”
“Then promise me something.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to establish your old power again.” Anyway, I’m going to try, she added silently.
“What kind of a promise shall I give you, little animal?”
“That you will keep the deep tribes away from us humans. Away from the surface. That there will be no more attacks, not on our shi—on our wooden fish and not on the sea star city or the coasts of the mainland. Down here you can do and allow what you want—but there must be no more war between you and us.”
“I could promise that. I could.”
“But will you also hold to your promise?”
A muffled gurgling and rumbling rose from Kangusta’s throat. “You don’t trust me, do you, little animal?”
“No.”
“Then you will not believe my promise, either.”
“Do I have any other choice?”
The rumbling in the kobalin mother’s throat repeated itself. “So you want me to let you go. To destroy him.”
“That’s the plan, anyway.”
“It will not succeed.”
“Perhaps not. But perhaps yes.”
Kangusta was silent for a moment. “You are brave, little animal.”
Jolly sighed. “Actually, I’m scared to death of you, of the Maelstrom, and of this whole horrible place down here.”
This time Kangusta’s rumbling sounded almost like human laughter. “Well, little animal, you can stop being afraid of Kangusta. If it succeeds, there will be no more war between you and the deep tribes. So shall it be.”
Jolly heaved a sigh of relief. The warm water of this cave streamed through her lungs, and for a moment it made her feel almost comfortable.
“Go now,” said Kangusta. “I will describe to you the way by which they bring me prey.” She was quiet for a moment, as her giant mouth opened and closed with a smack. “Hurry. I taste mischief in the water.”
Tyrone
“The fish rain has stopped,” announced the Ghost Trader as he looked down at the shore from the library balcony. Forefather’s eyes were no longer the best, and the Trader had to describe for him what was going on. “The kobalins have withdrawn into the water. But that won’t help us. Tyrone’s fleet is placing the city under fire.”
Cannon thunder rolled up from the sea. The smoke of the guns mixed with the black smoke from the ruins on the bank. The eyes of both the men on the balcony were burning. Forefather’s were red and teary. His appearance made the Ghost Trader aware once again of how human his colleague had grown over all the eons.
They withdrew together to the interior of one of the book rooms, closing the door to the outside behind them. The rumbling of the guns was dulled, but the sharp smell of the battle had long since filled even the library’s high-ceilinged halls.
“Is it possible that’s the only point for the Maelstrom?” asked the Trader, while his black parrots settled on piles of books to the right and left of him. “Does he intend to drive us into a corner so that we ourselves take the last step?”
“Not we, my friend. Only you have the power to do that. Mine is long gone. But in you there’s still enough left of what we once were.” Forefather laughed softly and sadly. “In comparison to me, you’re young.”
“You could have remained so yourself, if you hadn’t preferred to hole up in this place. The humans in the outside world have almost forgotten you. They revere something that they call god, but they don’t even give him a name anymore. If you’d stayed with them and shown them…then perhaps you’d still have all your powers.”
“I didn’t want that anymore, you know that. In those days, after the destruction of the first sea star city…ah, sometimes I’d be glad if the memory had deserted me along with my powers.”
The Ghost Trader supported himse
lf on a tower of leather-bound folios. “If I do what you wish, it will bring the Maelstrom even closer to his goal.”
“He has only the mind of a little girl, my friend, don’t forget that. It’s the hate of a child that drives him. I’d call it spite if there weren’t so much riding on it. You’re the only one who still has the power to stop him.”
“You’re asking me to let the spirits of the other gods come to life again. But they wouldn’t obey me for long,” said the Ghost Trader. “They’re not like men, whose souls I can call out of the depths as I will. They’re gods! They’re like us!”
Forefather’s bony fingers clenched his stick. “Nevertheless, they will decide the battle for us! Ah, if I could only do it myself…”
The Ghost Trader walked over to the old man, with a gentle smile now, and took his hand. “You’ve used your power for better things, my friend. You have created an entire world.”
“And now shall I watch while the anger of a single girl destroys it? Tell me, is that really godlike?”
“Aina has not been a girl for a long time. The masters of the Mare Tenebrosum have made her into the Maelstrom, and she has been that for thousands of years.”
“But she still acts like a child. At first she felt she was betrayed by humans who drove her out because of her abilities. They didn’t know any better. And today she feels deceived by the masters of the Mare because they didn’t stand by her when the first polliwogs defeated her.” Forefather let out a despairing sigh. “She can’t annihilate the Mare Tenebrosum, but she can destroy what the masters want most ardently for their own: my creation. This world! Aina will reduce it to ashes, and all because a few stiff-necked humans threw her out of her village and she got mixed up with powers that were too great for her.”
The Trader nodded thoughtfully. “She will annihilate us.”
“If you do not stop her.” Forefather groaned and, supported by his stick, began to hobble back and forth in the pathways between the walls of books. “We’ve been going in circles for days now.” He stopped, and his eyes met the gaze of the Trader. “We’ve become like her, don’t you see that? We argue like two children who never tire of pulling on two ends of a rope, back and forth.” Shaking his head, he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Back and forth, over and over.”