Crown of the Cowibbean

by Mike Litwin

  “What did I tell you?” Marco clucked angrily as they made their way back to the ship. “I told you to stay away from The Black Spot! I told you to stay away from the Kingfish! Marco is the captain here! If you sail on Marco’s ship, you follow Marco’s orders! Capice?”

  Chuck and Dakota looked shamefully down at their feet. “Yes, sir.”

  Marco sighed. “I knew you cows would be bad luck. We were supposed come and go quietly. Now we have to leave Cattleena right away! All so you can find some silly flute! Did you at least keep quiet about our voyage?”

  “Yes, sir,” they both lied. With Marco so angry, they were afraid to mention their chat with the black parrot.

  Back on the deck of the Swashclucker, Chuck and Dakota studied the hornpipe as they sailed away in the night.

  “So what does this thing do?” Dakota wondered.

  “Makes music, of course,” Chuck said. He took the hornpipe and tried to play a song, but his hooves made it difficult to play more than one or two notes.

  “Here, you play it,” he said, handing it to Dakota. “You have fingers.”

  Dakota looked at the name of the last song on the list. “Fire in the Heavens,” he read. “That sounds pretty cool.”

  Dakota played the notes on the sheet. As he got to the end of the tune, the hornpipe began to shake. He pulled it away from his mouth as little sparks jumped from inside. Suddenly, a bolt of fire shot out of the hornpipe! The fire arced into the sky, where it exploded like a firecracker. The sound echoed across the water. Dakota’s eyes grew big as dinner plates. He very slowly and carefully put down the hornpipe.

  “Maybe you should start with the first song,” Chuck suggested.

  “Maybe we should get some sleep,” Dakota said.

  Below deck, Dakota fell asleep right away. But Chuck lay awake for hours, thinking about the other verses on the map. A spying eye? Stars of our own? What did it all mean? He went over the phrases in his head again and again, until the gentle lobbing of the ship finally rocked him to sleep.

  5

  WATERDOWN

  Chuck and Dakota awoke at dawn to the sound of Marco crowing on the ship’s bow. They clambered out of their bunk, rubbing their eyes in the morning light as they came up to the ship’s deck.

  “Buon Giorno, Buccowneers!” Marco crowed. “Rise and shine! Big day ahead of us!”

  After a quick breakfast of bananas and corn, Chuck and Dakota took time to experiment with the hornpipe some more while Marco watched. This time, Dakota decided to start with the first song on the list, “The Fishes’ Breath.” It was a very short tune with only eight notes. When Dakota played the jaunty little ditty…BWOP! A big bubble appeared around him.

  Chuck snickered. “You look like you just got burped up by a fish!” he joked. They both laughed as Marco popped the bubble with his sword. They went on like that for a while—Dakota playing the tune and making bubbles, while Marco and Chuck kept popping them and laughing. For a moment, they forgot all about the Kingfish and the trouble they’d gotten into the night before.

  Before too long, they heard Ribeye give his “Land Ho!” grunt. They dashed to the railing and looked off the starboard bow to see the tops of several ships’ masts sticking out of the water. They reminded Dakota of tombstones.

  “Waterdown,” Marco said, looking through his spyglass. “The final resting place for many a doomed ship. Make a wide circle, Ribeye. Let’s not get too close to that graveyard, unless we wish to be part of it.”

  “Wait! We’re just gonna go around? What about the clues?” Chuck pointed to the shipwrecks as he recited the second line of the poem. “‘A watery grave where the clock strikes eleven’. What time is it right now?”

  “Nine thirty,” Marco answered.

  Chuck scratched his chin with a hoof. “Are we supposed to wait until eleven?”

  “We do not wait at all!” Marco said. “We sail on to the next place on the map.”

  “Please, Captain! Can’t we explore the shipwrecks?” Chuck pleaded. “It won’t take too long! Who knows what kind of treasure there might be?”

  Normally, Marco would have no desire to drop anchor here. He would have preferred to go around this shipwreck and head to Sterling Reef. But he had to admit the hornpipe Chuck found was pretty remarkable. And the little calf had a good point: there could be more treasure in this wreck.

  “Fine,” Marco agreed. “But we do not wait until eleven o’clock. You must look right now.”

  They couldn’t see much of the underwater wreckage from the surface. Chuck thought about the next line of the poem: “A spying eye sees when our own eyes do fail.” He thought maybe he could see further down through Marco’s spyglass. But when he asked, Marco refused.

  “No one touches Marco’s spyglass,” Marco said flatly. “A captain’s spyglass is a treasure in itself.”

  Chuck thought and thought about how to get down underwater. I’d have to be able to breathe like a fish! he thought. Suddenly, his tail began to twitch.

  “That’s it!” he said. “The first song is ‘The Fishes’ Breath’! We can use that bubble to go underwater!”

  “Do you enjoy getting us in trouble?” Dakota asked. “Now you want me to go into an underwater graveyard?” Dakota did not like the idea of underwater danger any more than above-water danger.

  “Come on!” Chuck said. “I just know there’s something important down there!”

  Dakota knew Chuck’s plan was going to bring him trouble. But he played “The Fishes’ Breath” anyway.

  BWOP! The bubble blew up around the both of them. They gently sank into the water, but inside the bubble, they were dry and surrounded by air.

  Chuck looked around at the bubble with a sense of wonder. “Isn’t this amazing?” he marveled. “We’re breathing underwater!”

  With a little bit of practice and little bit of teamwork, they found that they could pilot the bubble around in the water by rolling it with their feet. Before long, they were pedaling around in the water with ease. They headed for the shipwrecks.

  The wreckage loomed in front of them like a collection of giant, sleeping skeletons. It looked a lot like the Hortica on Bermooda, except this was dark and murky and much bigger. Everything was covered in barnacles, seaweed, and green algae. This place had not been disturbed in a long time.

  Neither of them were sure where to begin looking. Chuck suggested that they start in the captains’ quarters, just like they did on the Swashclucker. They pedaled their bubble through a big hole in the roof of the largest ship’s cabin.

  The inside of the cabin was bare. Dakota scratched his head as they looked around the watery room. There was an old table broken in half, a chandelier without any candles, and a few empty barrels. The windows were all shattered, with stained glass scattered all around. The two of them were about to leave the room when Chuck spotted an old chest in the corner.

  “Look!” Chuck said. “Look at the chest. It has a clock on it!” The clock on the chest was smashed and broken. Its hands were stopped at precisely eleven o’clock, and looked as though they had been there for hundreds of years. “This is where the clock strikes eleven!” Chuck was so excited he started clapping his hooves together.

  Dakota pulled the cow mask away from his face. For once, he was amazed. “Are we supposed to take the broken clock?” he asked.

  “I think we’re supposed to take whatever’s in that chest.” Chuck said. The front of the chest had rotted away, and they could see something was inside. When they pedaled the bubble closer, they made out the shape of a spyglass covered in slimy green gunk.

  “A spying eye!” Chuck gasped. “Let’s reach in and get it!”

  “That thing?” Dakota said. “It’s all gross. Besides, Marco already has a spyglass.”

  “You heard what Marco said,” Chuck reminded him. “A captain’s spyglass is a treasure in itself.”

  Chuck reached out toward the chest. He froze as his hoof neared the edge of the bubble. “Uh-oh,” he mutte
red. He suddenly realized that there was one thing they had to do before grabbing their new treasure. “We have to pop the bubble!”

  “What about our air?” Dakota said, as all the color drained from his face.

  “Just take a deep breath,” Chuck said. “As soon as I grab that spyglass, play the song again so we can get our bubble back.”

  Dakota’s hands shook as Chuck’s plan got more dangerous by the minute. They both took a deep breath, Dakota held the pointy end of the hornpipe to the side of the bubble, and…POP!

  The first thing Dakota noticed was how surprisingly cold the water was. It rushed in from everywhere, making all his muscles tense up. Chuck reached out quickly and broke his hoof through the rotten wood of the chest. He grabbed the spyglass and nodded his head at Dakota. Dakota put the hornpipe to his lips and blew hard into the hornpipe, playing “The Fishes’ Breath.”

  BLOOP! BLIP! BLOOP! All that came out were air bubbles! Chuck closed his eyes as he realized the flaw in his plan: You can’t play a hornpipe underwater!

  Dakota flailed his arms and legs in a panic. He had used up all his air blowing into the hornpipe. The cold water squeezed him from all sides as he began to sink.

  Chuck grabbed Dakota by the shirt and swam up and out of the cabin. Cows were known for having strong legs, but Chuck knew that even legs as strong as his wouldn’t take them all the way to the surface. Instead, he started kicking toward the anchor chain for the Swashclucker, dragging Dakota with him. They both grabbed onto the chain and started climbing and kicking as quickly as they could, leaving a trail of bubbles behind them. The water got warmer as they neared the ocean surface, until…SPLASH! Their heads popped out of the waves about ten feet away from the Swashclucker.

  Dakota and Chuck gasped for air, taking in big, hungry breaths as they clung to the anchor chain. They were very tired but very excited they survived and they couldn’t wait to look at their new treasure. But before they could even look through their new spyglass, a huge shadow covered both them and the Swashclucker. It was the large shadow of a large ship speeding up right up alongside them.

  Their secret voyage was no longer a secret. They were not alone.

  6

  THE TYRANT

  Ribeye helped Chuck and Dakota climb back up onto the Swashclucker.

  “It’s about time!” Marco crowed. “We have company!”

  “Who is that?” Dakota asked, still catching his breath.

  “That’s the Tyrant! The Kingfish’s ship!” Marco said. “I told you to stay away from him!”

  Dakota’s face fell. “That’s the Tyrant?” he squealed.

  The Tyrant was much bigger than the Swashclucker. It was more than twice as long, and was outfitted with cannons all down the side. Big, scary spikes stuck up from its deck and an enormous fish skull stuck out from its bow. It had raggedy sails and a flag as red as blood blew in the breeze.

  Worst of all, the Tyrant was loaded with ferocious shellfish—dozens of them, far more than they had seen in the Black Spot. Lobsters, crayfish, cannibal shrimp, and all kinds of crabs littered the deck and masts of the Tyrant, gnashing their claws and whipping their antennae. As they pulled up alongside the Swashclucker, a gang of crayfish jumped across to their mast.

  “What are they doing?” Chuck mooed.

  “They’re pirates, you kau’pai!” Dakota cried. “They’re attacking us!”

  The crayfish began coming down the ship’s lines. At the same time, a troop of crabs began climbing over the side of the ship, scuttling onto the deck.

  “They’re overtaking the ship!” Marco shouted, drawing his sword. “I hope whatever you found in that shipwreck was worth it!”

  Chuck held up the slimy, grungy telescope.

  “That’s it?” Marco clucked. “A spyglass? I already have a spyglass!”

  Chuck’s shoulders slumped. As a great explorer, he thought for sure that Marco would be more excited.

  The pirates set a plank across the two ships. A brigade of burly lobsters marched across the bridge, followed by none other than the Kingfish himself. Chuck and Dakota looked right at him as he strolled aboard the Swashclucker, and he looked right back at them as they held the hornpipe and spyglass.

  “Andare! Scram!” Marco ordered the calves. “Go hide in the cabin! Ribeye and I will fight them off!”

  Chuck and Dakota followed the captain’s orders, scurrying into Marco’s cabin and locking the door.

  “Oh, no!” Chuck mooed. “The Kingfish saw the spyglass!”

  “Who cares? What are we gonna do?” Dakota panicked.

  “I’ll think of something!” Chuck said as he looked around the room for an idea. The door banged loudly as shellfish pirates tried to break their way into the cabin. Suddenly, Chuck’s gaze landed on Marco’s spyglass.

  “I’ve got it!” he said. He quickly rolled the old spyglass in a rug and stashed it in a trash barrel in the corner of the cabin. Then he grabbed Marco’s spyglass from the table. It was very fancy. Tiny diamonds were embedded in its rich wood. It had gold rims and a gold eyepiece. It was heavy and shiny and sparkly…and looked every bit like a treasure.

  No sooner had Chuck taken Marco’s spyglass in his hand than two big crayfish burst their way into the door. The crayfish dragged Chuck and Dakota out of the cabin and up to the quarterdeck, where the Kingfish already had Marco and Ribeye held prisoner by six heavily armed lobsters. They had put up a glorious fight, but they were no match for an entire pirate army. The crew of the Swashclucker watched helplessly from the ship’s wheel as shellfish began stealing whatever they could find on the ship.

  “A prisoner on my own ship,” Marco grumbled. “You calves are definitely bad luck.”

  “Some treasure hunt,” Dakota murmured.

  “How did you find us?” Chuck asked the Kingfish.

  Dakota frowned as a familiar black parrot fluttered down and perched on the Kingfish’s shoulder. “I’m guessing a little bird told him.”

  “Nwar!” Chuck mooed. “You rotten spy!”

  Marco gave Chuck a look as sharp as daggers. “You said you didn’t tell anyone!” he clucked.

  “Okay, so I told the parrot!” Chuck admitted. “But I didn’t think he’d repeat it!”

  Marco’s beak dropped open. “That’s what parrots DO!”

  “I told you I’d let you off with a warning for one day,” The Kingfish said with an evil grin. “Well, that was yesterday. Today’s a new day, and I woke up feeling a whole lot less generous.” He motioned his head to the parrot on his shoulder. “My friend here tells me you’re on your way to find the Coral Crown. Says you’ve got a map and everything. Now, you do know that only a king should wear a crown, right?”

  Ribeye answered the Kingfish with a series of snorts and grunts, all the while giving him the stink-eye.

  “Don’t worry, Cyclops,” the Kingfish said with a cruel smile. “I’ll get to you in a minute. But first…I want that map. And I want that flute. And I want whatever you just took out of that shipwreck.”

  “We’ll give you nothing, you shovel-nosed bottom-feeder!” Marco clucked boldly.

  “You talk big, Pollo,” the Kingfish taunted. “But you can’t fight off all of us. In the end, it looks you’re nothing but a scrawny…little…chicken.”

  Marco didn’t care for the way the Kingfish had said the word “chicken”. It sounded an awful lot like he was comparing chickens with weaklings and cowards. He tried to break free again, but the lobsters holding him were too strong. The entire ship of shellfish roared with laughter.

  “You field-trotters just don’t get it, do you?” the Kingfish jeered. “I’m the boss around here. I’m the king. You don’t belong here. This is a fish’s ocean. It’s my ocean. That means everything in it also belongs…to me.” He stretched out a fin and snatched Marco’s spyglass from Chuck’s hooves.

  “Hey! That’s my spyglass!” Marco squawked.

  “Well, now it’s my spyglass,” the Kingfish gloated. “Now give me that flut
e thing you took from my tavern.”

  Nwar flapped over to Dakota and tried to take the hornpipe. Dakota refused to hand it over, and the two of them wrestled back and forth over it. Nwar cleverly molted a cluster of black feathers right in Dakota’s face, and Dakota dropped the hornpipe. The sly parrot carried it in his beak and dropped it in the Kingfish’s fin.

  “So what’s the big deal with this little thing?” the Kingfish asked.

  Chuck’s tail began to twitch as a great idea came into his head.

  “Well…it plays music,” he answered. “Perfect entertainment for those long, boring sea voyages.” He gave Dakota a sideways glance. “In fact, Dakota here can play a heavenly song for you that will just set the place on fire. How about it, your highness? Can we play one last song?”

  Dakota felt his heart beat faster as he realized Chuck’s plan. The Kingfish shrugged his fins and tossed the hornpipe back to Dakota. “Go on, little hamburger. Entertain me.”

  Chuck watched nervously as Dakota played the last song on the list, “Fire in the Heavens.” Just as before, the hornpipe started jumping and bumping when he finished the tune. Dakota aimed the hornpipe toward the Tyrant as sparks spewed from inside. Once again, a bolt of fire shot out, streaking like a comet straight to the Kingfish’s ship. It exploded in flames, lighting his sails ablaze.

  “My sails! My ship!” the Kingfish shrieked. He roared at his crew in a panic. “Move it, you swabs! Put the fire out!”

  Shellfish everywhere began to scramble, scurrying back to the Tyrant as the King-fish screamed orders from the Swashclucker’s quarterdeck. In all the commotion, Marco broke free. He flapped up to the ship’s yardarm and pulled on the lines, unfurling the Swashclucker’s main sail. It billowed in the wind, swinging the ship’s heavy wooden boom across the quarterdeck and knocking the Kingfish and his goons right into the water.

  “Hoist the anchor!” Marco ordered as he flapped to the ship’s wheel.

  “Stop them! Stop them!” the Kingfish blubbered as he searched for his glasses in the water. By this time, the Kingfish’s crew realized they had been tricked. Three big coconut crabs started rushing their way back to the Swashclucker with their powerful claws snapping.