by JT Lawrence
“Ouch!” exclaimed Marcus Pointdexter, the animal on the boy’s shoulder.
Sharoni held onto the boy’s arms and pushed him away just enough to see the creature. “What now? Who are you, then?”
“This is Marcus Pointdexter,” said the boy Baron. “He’s my pet lemur.”
“I prefer the term ‘companion’,” said the animal.
“A monkey?” asked Sharoni.
“A lemur,” said the boy. “A talking lemur.”
Pointdexter smiled in a Cheshire Cat way. “The best kind there is.”
“You found him in the jungle?” she asked.
The Baron shook his head. “He found me.”
“It was the almond biscuits that did it,” said Pointdexter. “I never have been able to turn down an almond biscuit.”
Sharoni lifted the boy’s chin with her finger, to inspect it. “And what happened to your cheek?”
“It’s nothing. It’s almost healed. I used Eucalyptus leaves on it, and a tincture of saffron and sage.”
“It was an unfortunate canoeing incident,” said the lemur.
“The canoe cut your cheek?” she asked. “Or a rock, perhaps, in the rapids?”
“It was a wrestling match with a forty-foot crocodile with filthy yellow daggers for teeth.”
Sharoni’s face paled. “A crocodile?”
“Don’t worry, Mama. It wasn’t that big. Marcus Pointdexter is known to exaggerate.”
Then, at 6, there was the infamous horse accident, when the Baron jumped on the rose-petalled back of a wild stallion to go for a ride—which went well until they galloped under a particularly low-hanging branch of a popping pepper tree that stuck the young boy in his left eye.
“I like my eye-patch,” said the young Baron, snapping his book shut. “It gives me character.”
“It’s a wonder you can read at all, with one eye,” said his mother.
“One eye is all you need! I’m off to archery practice.”
“Well, take your big brother with you.”
The boy looked confused. “Dash?”
“Yes, Dash. Do you have any other old brothers that I don’t know about?”
“Take Dash? To play with arrows? Are you sure?”
"You know how he loves being included," said Sharoni. "How he looks up to you. It'll be good for him. It'll get his head out of the clouds.”
The years passed quickly, like rocks rolling down the hilly green landscape of mossy southern Moldavia. Despite various colourful stunts and capers, the Baron’s thirst for adventure was never quenched. He longed to leave his quiet village in search of a crusade.
“A crusade for what?” asked Dash. The two brothers were standing on the bank of a stream, fishing for blue-scaled lobsters and skimming pebbles.
“What do you mean?” asked the young Baron.
“You say you want to go on a crusade. What kind of crusade? For what purpose?”
“It doesn’t matter!”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? The whole point of a crusade is to do something for a reason.”
“I don’t need a reason,” said the Baron. “It’ll be an adventure!”
“Ha.”
“Ha?”
“Meaningless adventure. Where will that get you? What’s the point?”
“You think too much. Adventure is the point, egg-head!”
“What about the rest?” asked Dash.
“What else is there?”
“Success,” chipped in the lemur, yawning. “Money. Love.”
“Hello, Marcus Pointdexter,” said the Baron. “I didn’t see you there.”
“I was asleep. In the knapsack.”
The Baron looked at his brother. “Will you look after Ma? You know, when I’m gone?”
"So you get to go off, and I'll be stuck here, in this dead-end village? What will I do? Apart from my blasted ironmonger apprenticeship? Do you know that the ironmonger has a serious case of halitosis?”
“You don’t have to. You can come with us!”
“Who is ‘us’?”
“Marcus Pointdexter and I, of course.”
“Go on a pointless adventure with my little brother and his pet lemur?”
“I prefer the term ‘companion’,” said Pointdexter.
“It’ll be a blast. What do you say?”
Dash threw a pebble into the stream. “I’d rather take my chances with the ironmonger.”
So the Baron planned his trip, drawing a map of Moldavia on the hide of a yellow buffalo with chalkstone and the juicy wax of lipstick corn. The whole village helped, pointing out what they knew of the lay of the land from their limited journeys to collect stock and capture errant daughters.
“This part here, Dudlin, in the west,” said one of the villagers. “It’s much bigger than that. And there’s a giant waterfall here … that flows backwards, up the mountain. Man-eating goblins live behind the ‘fall, so don’t go anywhere near it.”
The butcher stepped in and sketched a lake.“I’m adding in the Fuerté Lake. In the east, here. It’s filled with warm, copper-coloured water.”
“That sounds beautiful,” said the young Baron. “I’d like to see that.”
“Stay well away, lad!” warned the butcher. “It’s teeming with pirañas and aqua-sequinned mermaids that will drown you if you give them a chance."
They all crossed their arms and nodded. Aye, aye. Best to stay away.
“You must also give a wide berth to the golden grasses of Shamrocky, here, in the centre,” said the baker, jabbing the map with her flour-powdered fingers.
“Aye, those leaves are razors,” agreed her husband.
“Those grasses will slice you quicker than the King’s emerald-studded Scimitar.”
“So,” said the boy. “I should avoid the east, the west, and the centre of Moldavia.”
They all nodded and agreed.
“So … I’ll go to the north, then.”
"Oh, no," they clucked. "Oh, no, no, no."
“That’s not a good idea,” said the blacksmith.
The old neighbour piped up; his frown etched forever into his face. "Don't you know anything, boy?”
“I’m not a boy,” said the young Baron. “I’m a man!”
The villagers all laughed.
“You may have a beard and a broken voice, lad,” said the neighbour, “but you’re not yet twelve.”
“What’s in the north, then, tell me?”
The villagers danced on the spot, all keen to tell him.
“The king!” said the butcher.
“King Zam,” said his wife.
“The ruthless, reckless, bloodthirsty king.”
“The Remorseless Ruler of the Kingdom of Moldavia.”
“He’s more dangerous than all the rest, combined! Him and his savage soldiers. They’ll not hesitate for a moment before shooting you full of arrows. Men come out of there looking like porcupines—”
“Dead porcupines.”
"Very dead porcupines. If you somehow manage to dance around those arrows, then the army with flintlocks will be waiting for you, and after them the blunderbusses and the cannons and the boiling oil.”
"His castle is clad in alabaster white enough to blind you when you approach."
“There is a thorny maze of poisonous snickerbushes all around the castle. It can take days to find your way through it. But no-one ever does, because they either starve halfway through or eat the deadly snickerberries."
“It’s a bad way to die. A very bad way.”
They nodded and gave each other sincere looks of understanding.
“If you get through the maze—which you never will—you’ll be faced with a moat alive with the long snapping jaws of gharials.”
“I can fight them!” said the boy. “… What are they?”
“Gharials are narrow-snouted crocodiles, son, the meanest kind. And the king keeps them hungry.”
“He can definitely fight them,” piped up Marcus Pointdex
ter. “He once fought off a 40-foot crocodile.”
The villagers chuckled and hooted and stomped their feet in amusement. The baker was laughing so hard she crossed her legs and looked as if she needed the privy.
“I did, too!” shouted the one-eyed boy. “I did fight off that crocodile!”
“Ah, we know, son,” said the blacksmith.
“Then why are you all laughing?”
“It’s the talking monkey! He cracks us up every time.”
On the day of his departure, the Baron shook everyone’s hands while Sharoni wrung her hands and wept.
“Good luck, son,” said the blacksmith.
The cantankerous neighbour’s voice was gruff with emotion. “Try to stay out of trouble, now.”
“Send us word every now and again, if you’re able, just so that we know you’re alive.”
The young Baron kissed his weeping mother and hugged his sulking brother. With a happy wave from the boy and Marcus Pointdexter, they began their journey into the wild country of Moldavia.
They walked for a year, hiking over thorny mountains and wading through sharp-stoned rivers where the water ran cold and sweet. They walked till the Baron’s shoes were worn through—which he had grown out of, anyway—and was glad to see them stolen by a pair of mischievous ginger squirrels on the eve of his 13th birthday. Every month at full moon, he sent a raven back to his village, with a gift for his mother: a fistful of golden pomegranate jewels; a dried fig; a rock polished smooth by the rushing rapids. A sprig of rooted lavender; a pretty flower fossil; an old kidney bean engraved with a heart. Never had such simple gifts been more happily received: each one a parcel of evidence that her son was still adventuring.
When they reached the sea on the western-most tip of the country, The Baron knew that the first leg of his journey was over. They could hear waves crashing and watched as gulls wheeled overhead.
“Look at that, Pointdexter! I’ve never seen the ocean before.”
“Is this it, then?” asked the talking lemur. “Will we go home now?”
The Baron picked up a clamshell. “Do you want to go home?”
“No,” said Marcus Pointdexter.
“Good, because I have a feeling our adventure has only just begun.”
“What makes you say that?”
“There’s an especially ugly man-eating beach goblin standing right behind you.”
So far, The Baron had fought off a diamond-skinned python, a ten-legged albino forest spider, and a rabid raccoon that tried to kidnap Marcus Pointdexter. He had never, however, brawled with an especially ugly man-eating beach goblin.
“Now, listen here, Goblin,” said the young Baron. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong.”
The goblin looked at the boy, his mouth watering. “Ooga?”
“You’re thinking how tasty we look. But we’re not.”
“Ooga.”
“Look here,” said the Baron, lifting his threadbare shirt. "There's no meat on me. See? Skin and bone, I am." He slapped his ribs to accentuate his point. Unfortunately, this had the opposite of the desired effect, and the goblin began to salivate more.
The boy lowered his shirt again. “I’d just be a waste of your dinner fire.”
The beach goblin took a step forward and licked his rubbery lips.
“I’m not sure your argument is having quite the desired effect,” said Marcus Pointdexter.
“Ooga!”
“He’s pointing that way,” said the boy. “I think he wants us to go with him.”
“Of course he wants us to go with him! Much less work for him if we walk to his cave before he brains us with that club and throws us in his mussel pot.”
“Come on, then.” The Baron began to follow the goblin, who looked mightily pleased with himself.
“You can’t be serious,” said the lemur, who was being left behind on the empty beach. “You’ll end up as bouillabaisse! Or worse: ceviché!”
The Baron yelled so that Pointdexter could hear him. “I want to see the waterfall that flows backwards!”
“It’ll be the last thing you ever see! They’ll batter you!”
“I can handle a battering,” said the boy.
Marcus Pointdexter ran to catch up with the pair. “No, I mean, they’ll batter you and deep fry you! They’ll Surf & Turf you!”
“Well, are you coming?”
Pointdexter straightened his spine as if brushing off an undeserved insult. "Of course I am."
Soon they approached the magnificent—and deadly—Dudlin waterfall.
“Spectacular!” exclaimed the young Baron. “Look at that waterfall! It really does go backwards! I’ve never seen anything like it in my life!”
Marcus Pointdexter nodded. “Made all the more poignant by the fact that we’re about to die.”
“The majesty of it,” said the boy. “The power!”
“And just behind the watery curtain: a hundred hopping hungry beach goblins who want to boil us for brunch.”
The goblin who had lured them there nodded, hopped on one foot, and salivated. “Ooga!”
They followed him into the cave behind the gravity-defying waterfall.
“Holy Moldavia!” exclaimed Marcus Pointdexter. “What is that stench?”
“Old fish bones,” said The Baron. “Sun-dried sharkskin leather. Rotten calamari.”
“Not that. The OTHER smell.”
The boy sniffed the air. “I think that’s the goblins.”
“But I don’t see any—”
Just then, the shining, glowing, blinking eyes of a hundred slimy beach goblins came out of the shadows. “Ooga.”
The Baron and the lemur took a step back and resisted their impulses to pinch their noses shut against the terrible smell. The goblin who had brought them to the cave began to address the crowd. He spoke in a rude-sounding guttural language that the boy nor his companion understood. The group, however, liked what they heard and cheered.
"Well!" said the young Baron. "This is going better than I expected."
The riot of goblins rushed straight for the Baron, and Pointdexter screamed. The goblins lifted them both into the air and began singing a cheerful-sounding song. The lemur stopped shrieking. “Wait, what?”
For a reason unbeknown to the travelling pair, the goblins were celebrating them: lifting them in the air, kissing their ankles, licking their knees, and singing them goblin pop songs.
“Do you think this is some kind of pre-slaughter ceremony?” whispered the Baron.
“Probably,” said Pointdexter. “But it’s fun, nonetheless.”
Instead of the goblins carrying them to the fishbone fire, they hoisted the pair to a high wall deeper inside the cave, which was illuminated by scores of whale blubber candles. The goblins set them down gently, and the goblin with the club tapped it against the cave wall. There was a slight echo. “Ooga.”
Another goblin holds a fiery torch up to the wall.
“He’s trying to tell us something,” said the boy. “Through the rock art.”
“Let’s see,” said the lemur, trying to follow the story drawn on the wall. “This is a woodland elf, next to a tree. He has dark hair and a creepy smile. This is a very ugly monkey. And a large dragon is about to cuddle them. I think it's the goblins' rather naïve supernatural interpretation of a Shakespearean sonnet."
“That is not an elf,” said The Baron. “And that dragon is not about to cuddle them. Look at his massive jaws, his dirty, dagger-y teeth. In fact … he looks quite familiar.”
Pointdexter moves to look at the painting on the left. “The dragon’s here, too, in an earlier story.”
The Baron joins him and squints at the illustrations. “He’s ferocious here. He’s just destroying everything. And look—”
“He’s gobbling up the goblins!”
The goblins began hopping up and down again, chattering in excitement.
“Hundreds of them,” said The Baron.
“Ooga!”
“But the elf and the monkey—”
“The dragon bit the elf’s face—”
"But then the two slew the dragon!"
“And look here. Look how happy the goblins are. They’re—”
The goblins cheered and danced.
“It’s not a dragon at all, Pointdexter,” said The Baron. “Not a woodland elf. Not an ugly monkey.”
“What now?”
“It’s us! It’s a child and a lemur. And that’s the crocodile we fought! That’s my scar! We chased away their mortal enemy.”
“But … that was so long ago. So far away. How did they know?”
“Stories. Gossip. Rumours. Broken telephone. The same way we heard about them.”
And with that, the chief beach goblin handed The Baron an extraordinary gift. It was a small skeleton of a fish, white and polished, and fully intact. The Baron thanked him and hung it on a leather cord around his neck. He didn’t know exactly what he would need it for, but he had the feeling it would come in handy.
“Thank you, sir,” the boy said, bowing down to the gabble of goblins, and they parted to allow The Baron and Marcus Pointdexter to continue on their journey.
Twelve moons later, the pair of travellers reached the centre of Moldavia. During the journey, the Baron had sent his mother 12 raven-gifts, including a round sea-sponge, a pouch of vanilla tobacco, and a red crayon made from the gum of the rare ScarletSap tree. It had been a challenging walk, but The Baron had taken time out to rest and make himself new clothes when his others fell off. His shirt was cotton, woven from the green Gossypiums that embroidered the westward paths they had taken. His pants were silk, made from a thousand cocoons he had collected from under the leaves of purple-blooded mulberries. He was especially proud of his belt, a special kind of rubbery leather, made from the pelt of a kangaroo that he had hunted with his whittled-cinnamon arrows. He had also fashioned a rainproof hooded jacket and a pair of sturdy shoes. The marsupial meat he had divided: he roasted the ribs with green wasp honey over a rosemary wood fire, and shared it with a passing shepherd who told him of unrest in the North.