“Was your husband the goat king?” Gnaria suddenly asked.
A sound of surprise came from Julia.
“Yes,” she said, “he was the goat king.”
I felt like someone had hit me on the face. Julia was one of the wives of the goat king? But how was it possible? The island wasn’t even mentioned in the map and had no relation to the quest of the goat king.
Wait a minute. I did not have the full map, only half of it. It was every bit possible that the island had been mentioned in the other part of the map which was with the hooded female, Glosis. And that was why she had come to the island in search of Julia.
“Glosis wanted some second word from you that you were not willing to provider her,” I said to Julia.
“How do you know about my husband, the goat king?” Julia instead asked to Gnaria. I wondered if we had to give some explanations to Julia before we could get further information from her about the goat king, her husband.
“The goat king has entered the myths and legends of countless kingdoms,” Gnaria said, and she didn’t seem to want to directly tell Julia that we were actually after the goat king’s treasure. “Everyone knows about him.”
Julia just stared at her, gaping. I decided it was best to be completely honest to her instead of giving her incomplete information.
“And we are actually on a quest to find the goat king and his treasure,” I said.
“Only once did the goat king ever show us his great treasure to us,” Julia said. “He kept it in his castle. The last time I heard about him, he had left the castle. I doubt that he left the treasure in his abandoned castle for others to plunder.”
“Okay,” I said, “regardless of the treasure, what word did Glosis want from you?”
“A second word to complete a code that can lead us back to the goat king,” Julia answered. “He had created the code in the happy days by using a complicated spell so that we could always find him if we ever parted ways. But the code would require the cooperation of two of the wives at least. One wife on her own could never find her way back to him.”
“Can you tell us the word?” I said to Julia.
“No,” Julia answered immediately, “I trust you two, but I cannot share it with you. I can only share it with one of the other wives of the goat king and that too if only I want to find him… which I do not.”
“But maybe he has changed now?” I said. If Julia gave us part of the code and if we were able to get to another wife who gave the other word for the code then we should be able to reach the goat king. We could complete the quest and then I could return to my father and perhaps even brag about my achievement to him.
Julia smiled.
“I can take you to the goat king, right now,” she said.
“Right now?”
“Yes, come with me. Perhaps after meeting him you will realise why I have no desire to find him even though we shared many a moment of love a long time back.”
Julia led us towards the hill. I was happy to get away from the beach because the wasps that had killed the catmen on the beast were beginning to eat the corpses of the catmen one small bite at a time. Even though I had killed catmen, the sight of the wasps eating the catmen even with the meagre light available was more or less disturbing. The wasps did not spare the corpses of Glosis’s followers either.
Gnaria and I followed Julia. While I couldn’t understand how she was going to take us to the goat king when she herself didn’t know where he was and required the help of another wife to find him, I was still curious. So curious Gnaria and I were in fact that we forgot all our weariness from all that we had gone through that night. Levelling up had also brought our health and mana to their optimum levels which probably played a role in banishing away our tiredness.
Julia led us to a certain part of the hill to which we hadn’t been to before. There was a tree there, one that bore a few fruits. The fruits looked like apples to a degree but were much rounder than apples.
There was a circle of stones around the tree and Julia led us into this circle. The moment we did so that the fruits of the tree began to glow with magic light. Each fruit reflected faces of countless different people, of different places, of different times.
“What is this tree?” Gnaria said, her voice filled with wonder.
“This is the only tree in this island from which the catmen have never dared to steal a fruit,” Julia said. “These fruits you see are my memories and they can only be eaten when I allow them to be eaten. After I returned from the castle of my husband the goat king, I cried for many days at this spot. I kept on crying never taking a bite of food or a drop of water to quench my thirst. Apparently there are powers within me that even I do not know about and when my tears fell to the ground, they gave rise to this magnificent tree. Each fruit preserves a memory from the days in the castle, the memories from the unhappy days, not the happy ones.”
Julia reached out to one of the fruits on a lower branch and plucked it. Next Julia flicked her hand in a particular manner such that a duplicate of the fruit appeared magically. She then offered the fruits to me and Gnaria.
“Take a bite and meet the goat king,” she said to me. “This particular fruit is from the last day in the castle. The day when the goat king insulted all of us. Once you are inside the memory, make sure to remain as still as you are. If you remain still everyone inside the memory will ignore you, however, if you do any sudden movement that alerts them of your presence then the memory will dissolve.”
With some hesitation, I brought the fruit to my mouth and took a bite.
Immediately everything around me dissolved. There was a wide range of colours all around me. And then the colours began to interact with each other until they had acquired the forms of people and of objects.
Chapter 27
We were in a great throne room. There wasn’t much glamour in the throne room though. There were few decorations. The room looked ancient, like time had had its stab at the room. Around me were five women. Women of rather interesting races.
I recognised Julia immediately. She was the same back then as she was now. Beside her was a female cat that I knew to be Glosis from the way her eyes sparked. Beside Glosis was a… peculiar being. She had long hair, but her head was shaped like a cat’s. Her arms were also like that of a cat’s but her torso was a strange mix between the torso of a cat and that of a human and it was covered in fur. If these features of her body alone were not odd enough, below her waist she had no legs. Instead she had tentacles like that of an octopus, at least eight of them and the tentacles even had suction cups. Despite everything, the female being had a certain amount of beauty on her. And the more I stared at her bizarre form, I realised her form wasn’t a bizarre one in the first place and more like a beautiful piece of art.
Besides the cat-human-octopus lady was yet another strange female. She was a human, but had the wings of a butterfly. She almost looked like an angel of sorts. Last but not the least was a female dogman.
And then there was the goat king himself.
He was looking away from all the ladies and his face was turned away from me. The goat king had horns and he was very much like Hoovemine, the goat woman whom I had met through the plant in Dom’s garden of souls.
“I have had all the fun that I could derive from you all,” the goat king said and contrary to my expectations that the goat king’s voice would be like that of an old person, it was actually quite youthful. “I do not need you anymore. You can return to your true homes.” There was a certain arrogance in the voice, an arrogance which was meant to hurt whoever it was aimed at. But something about the arrogance felt rather artificial.
“How can you say that?” the five wives said together, like none of them had expected the goat king to say anything like that.
“We are your wives,” the octopus woman said, her voice filled with disbelief.
“Have you found better women then us?” the butterfly woman said, her voice filled with rage.
“I can do whatever I want to,” the goat king replied, his face still turned away from everyone. Some distance away from where everyone was standing there was a circular shield hanging from the wall. The surface of the shield was very polished such that it reflected the face of the goat king. I saw that there was a lot of pain on his face. “I am done pleasing myself with you,” the goat king continued and the effort that he required to say that reflected clearly on the polished shield. “None of you can pleasure me anymore. You can get lost from my castle.”
The wives all gasped. Julia, who stood nearest to the goat king was on the verge of tears. Glosis meanwhile kept staring at the goat king fixedly as though her world was crumbling down.
I was too lost staring at the face of the goat king on the shield. Was someone forcing him to say all these things? I made a sudden movement towards him. I wanted to ask him why he was doing all this. But the moment I made the movement that everyone present in the room suddenly turned to look at me, the goat king included, as if I was an unwanted person. I recalled Julia’s warning and next the entire place dissolved and I found myself standing next to Julia and Gnaria.
“It seems none of you could keep standing still as the goat king was insulting us,” Julia said. The apple in my hand had disappeared.
“Timmy, maybe we should give up on this quest?” Gnaria said and she sounded like seeing the memory had made her feel like the quest wasn’t worth the effort anymore. I shook my head.
“Didn’t you see his face?” I asked Gnaria.
“His back was turned towards me,” Gnaria replied.
“There was a polished shield that was reflecting his face, you didn’t see it?”
Gnaria shook her head, apparently not having noticed the shield.
“He looked like he was in a lot of pain as he was speaking,” I said, turning at Julia.
“How can you be so sure that it was pain when you only saw his face in a reflection?” Julia asked though I could see her eyes soften just a bit.
“It was,” I said. “He looked like he required a lot of effort to say the insulting words to you and the other wives.”
Julia looked away from me, her eyes fixed at the distance as though she was relieving the day even without eating a memory fruit. She pursed her lips as though she was fighting back tears.
“But… but why did he behave like that in the first place?” she finally said.
“Maybe he faced some problem that he couldn’t share with you all?”
“So you mean to say that I should have given the second word to Glosis?” Julia asked me, looking directly at me, her eyes almost penetrating into me.
“Not to Glosis,” I said. Glosis had killed Minnata and for me she was a villain. But maybe it had been just desperation on her part? But at the end of the day she had done a wrong deed in killing Minnata, an innocent cat, just to acquire the map. “But maybe you could give the word to some other wife?”
“I do not know where any of the other wives are, and I also do not know how Glosis happened to find me in the first place.”
I took out the part of the map that I had with myself.
“But this map probably knows,” I said. Julia frowned as she took the map from me.
“What is this map?” she asked.
I explained its relation with the quest of the goat king and how I happened to possess it and that Glosis had the other half of the map.
“We were on our way to Hostania when our ship sank and by sheer luck we were able to come to this island,” I said, “there is a fair amount of chance that one of the other wives is in Hostania.”
Julia kept staring intently at the map. Then she gave it back to me.
“Are you absolutely sure that it was pain that was in the goat king’s eyes?”
“I believe it was.”
“Then tonight itself we embark for Hostania.”
“Tonight? How?” Gnaria said who was as confused as myself. We didn’t have any boats or a big ship that we could just embark to Hostania. Or did Julia plan to use her air bubble spell such that we could simply walk the sea bed to Hostania? That would surely take us a long while.
Julia smiled.
“I am going to talk to the soul of this island.”
Chapter 28
It was something that I could have never even dreamed about. An entire island moving, headed towards Hostania. Julia had asked the soul of the island to move towards Hostania, and the soul had readily followed her order, being a servant of her family from the times of yore. Gnaria and I, amazed as much as we were with what was happening, went to sleep at the top of the hill and finally gave our exhausted bodies the luxury of rest. When I awoke late next morning, I saw from the hilltop that the bodies of the catmen which had littered the beaches of the island on either side were completely gone. Apparently the wasps had eaten even the bones of the catmen and completely wiped out all traces of them overnight. As the island moved, splicing the sea, the waves hit the shore hard, much harder than when the island had lain still. On certain parts of the island the beach shrank greatly. I just prayed that by the time we actually reached Hostania most of the island would remain intact instead of eroding away because of the fierce sea waves.
Gnaria and I stayed with the cats who were previously enslaved by the catmen. We got to know from them that most of them had been survivors of ship wrecks, while others had been attacked by the catmen out in the sea and they had been captured from their ships. They had been much abused by the catmen females even more than the males, but they said that they were very thankful to us for having freed them.
The cats hunted small animals and birds that were common in the island and also collected fruits and they prepared a grand feast in celebration of the destruction of their torturers. It was the best meal Gnaria and I had had in a long while and that afternoon the two of us sat down next to a big tree and rested our protruding tummies.
“Some rum would have made the feast even better,” Gnaria said, watching the cats who were currently putting the leftovers of the feast into a hole dug into the earth.
“Too bad there is no rum here,” I said to her with a smile.
“I think I can finally say that I am not as much dependent on the drink as I was before,” Gnaria said more seriously. “If ever I return to my friends I will tell them how much I have changed.”
Suddenly the vision of the entwined plants that I had seen in Dom’s garden once again came to me. Mine and Gnaria’s plants joined to each other, inseparable.
“Do you plan to come with me on all my adventures?” I asked her.
Gnaria shrugged.
“Maybe, I am kind of liking these adventures,” she said, “it’s making me feel more alive although most of the time the previous few days I have missed death only barely. Plus, it’s better than going from town to town tasting different flavours of rum. Once you are able to get the goat king’s treasure, will you embark on yet another adventure?”
I shrugged. In the scenario that I did get to the goat king and his treasure, I would probably embark on some other adventure again. Perhaps I will give a good bit of the treasure to my brother and my father and they could do whatever they want with it for the betterment of Abhaya, but I did not want to settle down in my life. My mother used to say that my father was a lively man who thirsted for adventure before. And now he had settled down and there was enough peace in Abhaya that he was rarely in any situation that made him come out of his comfort zone. He had turned into the person that I now knew him as, and I did not like how he was.
“Probably,” I replied. “Even if I become an old cat someday, I will still go on adventures. I have spent a great chunk of my life hating myself for not doing anything. Now that I have got started, I do not want to go back to my old way of living.”
“But say we are able to get to the goat king,” Gnaria said thoughtfully, “and we are able to revive him. Will he simply giv
e us his treasure?”
“If he does not,” I said and I found myself smiling playfully, “then that is okay. It will be simply another reason to embark on a different quest.”
It was the night of the next day when Julia informed me and Gnaria that Hostania was a mere few kilometres from the place where we were and that she had asked the soul of the island to not move further without asking the two of us regarding what should be done next.
“The entire island can go to Hostania,” Julia said, “but imagine what the inhabitants of Hostania would think if that happens. I feel it’s best if we get into Hostania without the inhabitants seeing the island.”
I pursed my lips. Julia had a point. What if the inhabitants of Hostania look at us as a threat and attack us? From what I had known from the passengers of the ill fated ship in which I had initially embarked for Hostania, the kingdom of Hostania had a mostly cat population. I did not really want to go on a fight against cats.
“Then what do we do?” Gnaria said, “Walk the seabed to Hostania?”
“It’ll be a good number of kilometres,” Julia said.
“But it’s the best way,” I said. “Or would you not be able to sustain the air bubbles with your magic for long?”
“Nothing will happen to the air bubbles as long as I want to keep them and have sufficient mana,” Julia said, “but if you get hungry, you will not be able to eat anything at the sea bed because of the air bubbles around your heads. Plus there is the danger of being attacked by sea creatures.”
“Say, if we go still, will the other cats accompany us?”
“I haven’t asked them yet,” Julia said, “but I don’t think it would be good if they go. It would be putting them in unnecessary danger. They are better off being in the island while we are in Hostania.”
Catheroes Page 39