A Turn of the Wheel

by Cogwheel Press

Clam Chowder

  Bruce Hesselbach

  “Listen up, everyone!” said the tavern owner. “It is my great honor to present the 789 Vornish Cup to the Royal Navy Polo Club and its Captain, Prince Uthred Gellethin!” Great cheers resounded through the Purple Poloshirt Inn as the large silver cup was given over.

  The ornate cup sported a dashing polo player and pony on the top, but at its base were many historical vignettes of the Islands of Photenvre: fabulous beasts, flying oysters, and the legendary explorer Empedocles Philomoron.

  Even the defeated team seemed in a good mood, being feted by the winners to all they could drink and eat at the Inn. The Prince was a tall, brawny man of 20 with dark brown hair and a full mustache turned down at the ends. He sat next to his best friend Sir Granville Mulchford, who had known him since early childhood. Large pitchers of beer were being quaffed to many joyous toasts.

  “Ten florins says the waitress will mention the weather,” Granville said.

  “Done.”

  One of the members of the team was toasting the ladies, some of whom sat admiring them from another table. “I saw Lanna Gyrren rooting for you in the stands,” Granville told the Prince. “I wonder that she’s not in here with the others.”

  The Prince didn’t wonder at all. Lanna was 18, gorgeous, and one of the most eligible rich commoners in the realm. She had been a foundling, adopted by Admiral Gyrren late in life when it was clear that he and his wife would have no children. The Admiral was a capital chap, a commoner who had risen through the ranks to be one of the leading commanders of Ullerin’s navy. Innumerable times Uthred had gone sailboat racing with Lanna. She had a high forehead, normally covered with bangs from her reddish brown hair, green eyes, and a wonderful smile. Her adoptive mother died when she was ten, and her father passed away just last year.

  “I love her, Granville,” Uthred admitted, “but my father wouldn’t hear of it, and the lady in question has told me many times that she won’t so much as visit me if I don’t give up gambling.”

  “Well, 20 ducats says she loves you too and would elope anywhere with you.”

  “No bet there, Granville. I never bet against myself.”

  “And this polo team would follow the two of you to the ends of the world if you but gave the command.”

  “Would that I could. But if I ever left, what would we have? My brother Smead heir to the crown?”

  Granville shuddered. The younger brother Smead was a notorious bookworm, a boy of 16 who was fluent in five languages and spent every hour of every day devouring every book he could lay his hands on. “Dear me,” Granville said. “I daresay that Smead is a fine intelligent fellow, but if he had to lead an army against Ullerin’s enemies, what would he do? Get his professors to throw books at them?”

  The waitress came up. “Great weather for a championship match today, wasn’t it?” she said, and Uthred cringed.

  Some of the polo club members’ girlfriends now came over to join the champions in their hour of triumph. Admiring the cup, one of them said, “What a fine picture of Empedocles that is! Do you suppose his story is true?”

  “Of course it’s true,” said Uthred. “After all, they named a seafood dish for him.”

  “Here’s to Clam chowder a la Empedocles! Three times three!” toasted Granville, and the crowd clinked their tankards together noisily.

  “Everyone is afraid to sail north,” Uthred said, “where Empedocles discovered his new continent. People think they will get burned up by the heat in the tropic doldrums. But if I had a fearless group, like the members of this club, ten skeat to one I could find that unsettled continent and claim it in the name of my father King Cennth the Great!”

  “Hear, hear! Good Prince, no one will take that bet, since it’s a sure thing we would follow you anywhere!”

  “Hear, hear!”

  At that minute an old souse was in the process of walking out of the tavern, and he collapsed on the floor.

  “Fifty florins he revives and gets up!” a club member said.

  “Done!”

  The innkeeper and a waitress rushed over to the fallen patron. “Nellie,” he said, “go fetch the doctor.”

  “Doctor?” said a club member. “You can’t assist him! A bet hinges on it!”

  Meanwhile, in the castle of Plornish, King Cennth was on his way to visit the court wizard, Phlargo. The wizard had his laboratory in a remote wing of the castle. As the king approached, the large wooden door to the laboratory creaked open.

  “Good day, your majesty,” a voice called out from deep within the cluttered room. Cennth was a fairly handsome man, of average size, with dark, bushy, intimidating eyebrows.

  “Oh, there you are, Phlargo,” said the King, spotting him behind a table filled with specimen jars and a large bat being dissected. “Have you heard the news?”

  “I’ve been in the laboratory all day, Sire. Please tell me what is happening.”

  “Our world is being destroyed. What else is new? There have been further earthquakes south of Dinexuxinee, and Niffleton has been swallowed up by a sinkhole.”

  “Yes, the menace gets worse every year.”

  “Not just every year, Phlargo. Every month. The time for action is now!”

  “What does your majesty have in mind?”

  “All of the four islands of Photenvre are gradually sinking under the sea. Our only hope is war, to defeat the kingdom of Ethlertheldon to our south, and try to annex some higher ground.”

  “But your majesty has had wars with them in the past, and they are notoriously hard to conquer, being a larger kingdom than Ullerin.”

  “Yes, and Fenno keeps trying to interfere. If only we could get Fenno to be our ally, I know that the two of us could defeat Ethlertheldon.”

  “Fenno’s king is too old for war. He won’t do anything except try to stab you in the back if you attack Ethlertheldon.”

  “It seems hopeless, but I know there is a way. We have to find a way. I need your help with my son, Uthred. He could be a big help to me as an army commander if I could get him to give up drinking and gambling. That’s why I am coming to you, Phlargo. I want you to cast a mighty spell that will stop my son once and for all from ever drinking and gambling again.”

  “A tall order, that,” the wizard said, stroking his gray beard. “You don’t want to break the lad’s spirit, and mind control can be stifling sometimes. I have an idea.”

  “Good, I knew I could count on you.”

  “Your son has a pair of lucky dice, does he not?”

  “Yes, yes, he does. He keeps them in a wooden box with a portrait of Lucky Newt Zuchilo, the undefeated wrestler. He thinks the luck will rub off on them. They are really a strange pair of dice, made of whale ivory and much larger than normal dice.”

  “Take me to them.”

  Two nights later, Uthred and his friends were gathered in a back room at the Purple Poloshirt inn and tavern for an epic crap game. Uthred’s friend Granville had been raking in the loot, when finally it became Uthred’s turn. He opened up a leather bag and pulled out the large dice, each one as big as an apple and made of solid whale ivory. Everyone placed their bets, and the betting ran particulary high that night. Uthred shook the dice, said, “Do your stuff,” and hurled them down the wooden ramp towards a small barrier.

  The crowd gasped.

  The dice hit the barrier, rolled back up the ramp, rolled onto the floor, and started rolling back and forth bouncing against the walls. People jumped up and were running about trying to follow them. Some men jumped up on top of chairs so that they would not interfere with the path of the energetic dice.

  “Holy Higbe!”

  “They’re unstoppable!”

  “Watch out!”

  “Here they come!”

  “By my beard!”

  “There they go!”

  And the dice escaped out the door and down the road.

  “After them!”

  “Follow those dice!”

  It was
no use. The lucky dice rolled off down the road and out of sight of the gamblers. “I need a drink,” Uthred said. “And make it a double.”

  “We can’t give up the wager,” Granville said. “The rules are that if the dice roll out onto the floor, or anywhere, we are to let them continue rolling, and when and where they stop, that’s what the result is.”

  “But suppose they never stop.”

  “They have to stop sometime. Nothing can go on forever.”

  “I suppose you’re right, Granville,” Uthred admitted. “First thing tomorrow morning let’s get our horses and give chase. Does anyone want to come with us?”

  And the largest bettors, who happened to be the other four members of the polo club, agreed to come along to see the results of the throw. “We’ll meet you all tomorrow morning, then,” Uthred said. “The dice are cast!”

  Early the next morning the polo club rode off in hot pursuit. Fortunately the large dice left a trail in the dry dusty road. One of the polo club members brought a pack of harriers with him, and they were able to follow the scent of the errant dice. However, the polo club left the hounds in Wrickwick, because the trail seemed fairly easy to follow. The dice seemed to bounce around quite a bit on curves in the road, which gave the horsemen a fighting chance to make up for lost time.

  In the town of Lionsfoot, inhabitants told them that they were catching up to the dice. Perhaps if they could beat the dice to the bridge over the south branch of the Aosmhor River, they could burn the bridge and the dice would get stuck in the water and come to a stop.

  On they rode at a furious pace. Up ahead they could see a cloud of dust coming from the bouncing of the large dice in the dusty trail. By this time there were a few large lammergeiers circling in the air, thinking that some hunted prey would soon meet its end.

  They rode and they rode. When they seemed to be closing in, they heard: Rattle, rattle, rattle rattle! The large dice bounced over the rickety bridge, the bridge started shaking and vibrating, and a few planks began falling off into the river below.

  Seeing this the horses all came to a sudden stop to avoid risking injury or death. “We were supposed to wreck the bridge on the dice, and instead the dice wrecked the bridge on us,” Granville groaned.

  “The dice have turned.”

  “Our luck has run out.”

  “No, men,” Uthred said. “We will prevail. There is a reason for this pursuit, and it is not in vain. I can’t believe that God plays dice with the world. Let’s just rest the horses, and we’ll pick up the trail again even better than we did before.”

  After a rest, they resumed their way south. The dice went off the main road onto some narrow farm roads around the edges of Sreathmere. This formerly prosperous market town had fallen victim to earthquakes and a sinkhole. The ground was rent in places with huge cracks and the land subsided into a large depression. Here and there were vents with white dust floating out above them. No inhabitant or animal was anywhere to be seen. An eerie silence prevailed.

  By day, the riders seemed to get close, but by night the dice opened up a new gap between them. The polo club traded horses at two inns and kept up the pursuit. By the sixth day they took a narrow wooded track and crossed the border undetected into the hill country of Ethlertheldon. This was an area much depopulated by war and border raids, where most of the inhabitants preferred to live in the safe shadows of a string of border castles.

  As they continued the hunt in the hill country between Swivelsby and Ochlabar, they began to get discouraged. They could not seek for an inn to refresh the horses. Dense clouds proclaimed that the relatively dry weather of the journey might soon come to an end. Were it not for the winding nature of the roads, which slowed the dice down, they would be falling even further behind.

  Evening set in with a dense fog, and the men had not had a bite to eat in the last two days. Up ahead they saw a light coming from a small hovel in the woods. Uthred went on ahead and knocked at the door.

  “Anon, anon!” croaked the voice of an old woman, who opened the door. Inside one could see that she had been roasting yams on the hearth. Bundles of drying herbs hung from the low roof. The floor was dirt and there were buckets here and there to catch leaks from a porous roof.

  “We are tired travelers. Might we stop here for some rest and shelter, and perhaps buy a little food for ourselves?”

  “It is time,” she said. “It is time that you have come, Prince Uthred. Rest tonight and tomorrow morning I will show you where your dice have gone.”

  They all tried to squeeze into the hovel and were given small portions of cooked yam to eat. Late in the night a tremendous thunderstorm came through and mild earthquakes shook the ground below them. The booming of the storm, the flashing of lightning, the raging wind, the incessant drips through the roof made their night most uncomfortable, but at least they were indoors. Uthred consoled himself that the flimsy nature of the hovel meant that, should it collapse in the earthquakes, perhaps a portion of the company might survive. What were the odds he would make it out alive? And why was no one awake to bet on it with him?

  The next morning the peculiar little old woman took them out on foot on a narrow track up a muddy hillside. Trees were downed on all sides but the track zigzagged around them. “Is this a trap?” Uthred wondered.

  At the top of the hill was an enormous crater with huge cracks emanating from its center in a spider web pattern. “Here is where your dice have gone,” the old woman said. “Go down a bit and see their track for yourself. Do you see that white material? That is the core of the land on all the islands of Photenvre. That is why they are breaking apart and sinking. They are floating islands and their hull and keel are rotting away in the sea below them. Soon everyone will perish when the islands sink.”

  Uthred and his friends descended and saw that the layers of dirt and rock were underlaid by a strange white material. When they took it in their hands it was as light as a feather, as soft as a thick dry sponge.

  “Who is this old woman?” Uthred asked Granville. “How does she know that this material is the core below all the islands?”

  “Let’s ask her,” Granville replied.

  But when they got to the top again, the old woman was nowhere to be seen. Moreover, when they returned to their horses, which had been tied up outside the hovel, the dwelling had completely disappeared. All that remained was a square area of earth with marks where the travelers had slept.

  “Gentlemen,” Uthred said, “I propose to you that this old woman was telling the truth. Along the coast, we see large areas sinking into the sea. In the interior, we see huge sinkholes swallowing up whole cities and towns.”

  “What shall we do?”

  “My father has often thought that if he annexed this hill country in Ethlertheldon we would be safe. But you and I can see this country is no safer than any other, especially since the whole island may be sinking. What we need to do is to commandeer two boats, fill them with supplies, and seek the continent up north in the legend of Empedocles. If we succeed in that, we will have a new land to settle, but if we die, it’s just another roll of the dice we have to risk.”

  “We are with you.”

  “If we tell people about this sinking, will they believe us? And if they do believe us, might they all panic?” asked Granville.

  “You have a point. We must keep this information secret for now. But I would like everyone, if they can, to bring a woman along on our trip, one who understands the risks, and also bring some trustworthy male and female retainers who are willing to go, so that, in case we cannot make it back, we may be able to start a colony in this new land.”

  “Won’t people get suspicious from us sailing in ships like that?”

  “No, we will say that we are on a trip to trade songs and music with the other islands of Photenvre. Since this is a well-established tradition on all the islands, no one should question it. I will tell my father privately that it is to sound out allies in these other countries.” />
  “Uthred, you are our leader. Where you go, we follow.”

  Back in Plornish, the King was full of care. Word had got out that his son and friends had left town in a rush. Some thought it might be the start of another rumored war. Lanna Gyrren worried that the Prince might be killed, and that perhaps she had been too harsh on him. Yes, they could never marry, but at least she could support her old childhood friend, and one who, in her heart at least, was much more than just a friend.

  Then she heard that he had returned from a trip to the south but no one could tell her what he did there or what his plans were or if there would really be war, as some said would happen.

  Four days after his return, in the middle of the night, he appeared at her mansion on a hill overlooking the harbor and demanded to see her. She dressed and went downstairs to meet him.

  “Lanna,” he said, “my friends and I have been down south and we are convinced from what we have seen that the islands of Photenvre are sinking and will eventually be destroyed. We have decided to go on a secret mission to sail north to see if we can find a new land there to colonize and settle. I have loved you with all my heart for these last two years. I cannot bear the thought of being parted from you. I want you and you alone to be with me as long as I live. Will you marry me and sail with me to seek a new home?”

  “But what would your father say?”

  “It doesn’t matter what he would say. We are leaving this morning at dawn. If you come, we will elope and marry on board and never return unless we have to.”

  She looked into his eyes.

  “Say yes,” he said. “I have given up gambling for this one, last gamble that you will say yes.”

  They kissed for a long time, and vowed to be true to one another forever, come what may.

  The polo club left on two ships with a number of trustworthy retainers, both male and female. With high hopes, they set sail for the north and crossed the equator.

  King Cennth waited for weeks for word from his son. He sent boats out to look for them, but no one knew where they had gone. He told his son Smead that he would be the next king if Uthred had met with harm. In time, Smead began to take a more active role in the court, learning about the operations of government.

  Two months after Uthred’s departure, King Cennth and his son Smead received word of a severe earthquake 120 miles from the capital near the town of Tromathon. When Cennth and Smead arrived there, they saw a gaping hole in the ground, a large depression around it, and puffs of white dust floating in the air. Then they heard a sort of rattling sound, and to their surprise they saw a pair of large dice the size of apples come rolling towards them and stop. “What is this?” said King Cennth.

  Smead went over and picked up the dice. “It looks like sevens,” he said.