The navigator, p.4
The Navigator, page 4
"Petal, I'm scared! They're attacking me!"
The birds continued to squawk overhead, flocking in an ominous circle. Petal had to squint to see them. The sun was burning through the morning fog.
"Then climb down!" Petal shouted over the crash of another wave. She cringed in anticipation of the cool spray.
Junk shook her head; her body quivered. She peered down at Petal, transfixed by the sight of her sister clinging to the sheer rock wall. She watched the spray shoot up from far below and could smell the blast of fresh spray.
Petal's eyes sparkled in the sunlight. "If you're not coming, then go back to the boat!"
Junk disappeared over the cliff top.
Petal put her pistol away. "Useless," she muttered. She turned her attention back to her descent. Her heart was racing. Her naked toes scraped against the sharp rocks, but were too calloused to bleed. She put her left foot down on the outcrop supporting the nests. The narrow shelf began to creak under the pressure. She removed her weight and tried to find another way down. Her fingers burned from supporting her body weight.
High above, Junk was gone. The birds continued to circle and squawk. The sun shone down from the top of the cliff, its light now so brilliant and blinding that Petal couldn't look up.
After several minutes of fits and starts, Petal found a way down, next to the bird nests. She grabbed one of the eggs, feeling its heat in her raw palm. It felt weighted from the slosh of the embryo. She clutched the warm egg and looked for a good way to secure it.
Petal could only carry three of the large eggs by herself. She delicately gathered them up and wrapped them into an extra shirt. She then gingerly slung the makeshift sack over her shoulder and went to ascend the cliff face.
Before she began her climb, Petal was rocked by a sudden sense of euphoria. She looked out at the sea. The cool spray, again, shot up from below. The morning sun sparkled, a shimmering yellow web spun atop the wavy, blue sea. The view from the cliff was mesmerizing and she spent a little while taking it all in - the sun, the sea, the lifting fog.
As the last wisps of fog burned off the face of the ocean, Petal saw something come into view. It was a steel ship - an enormous gray hulk, unlike any that belonged to sea people. It had been cloaked by the fog. Its hull groaned from the rumble of angry boilers. It began to raise anchor and its exhaust stack shot off a cloud of steam with a high-pitched roar.
The strange ship's deck bristled with long, naval guns and scattering crewmen. It was over sixty feet long, with the boxy, segmented look of a centipede. Its sides were spray painted with checkered black and white, military-style markings.
There was a line of faded stenciling on its port side, just under the bow. At some time in the past, text had been painted onto it. It had long since faded to a ghostly afterimage.
Petal strained to read what was left of it.
KOWAKA ADON
Her eyes widened.
A tiny boat began to row toward the ship from the direction of the beachhead, hidden behind the cliff. There were six people inside the little boat. A shore party.
Petal could barely make them out.
JUNK!
Petal's mouth went dry; her pupils dilated. She began to claw her way up the cliff face, but her frantic pace made the rocks crumble. She lost her grip and nearly fell to her death, sending down a shower of little stones.
Petal jammed her fingers into the sharp rocks to catch herself. Her fingertips turned red, bleeding. She slowed her breathing and began to climb deliberately, with a determined calm. She pushed the eggs over the top of the cliff and batted away a cackling bird. She then painfully pulled herself up, using only her upper body.
Petal scanned the island from the cliff top. The large ship was now sailing away, out into open ocean. She could see her rowboat, on the beach. It looked lonely and empty. She began to sprint to her boat, kicking up the dark earth with each stride. Her muscles cried out from the overexertion.
"Junk! Junk! JUNK!"
Petal's cries were drowned out by the wails of the birds and the crash of the waves.
- 9 -
Quill's breathing slowed. Her lungs ached from the constant compression of the water. She'd never treaded for so long.
For a while, she'd been fueled by her panic. There was nothing for her to do but freak out. She screamed and cried, and cursed everyone and everything - her hovering parents, her lonely childhood, the chemical imbalance that gave her constant anxiety, the shame she suffered after her expulsion from the Academy, the emptiness of the ocean.
After a few hours of spewing venom, Quill had run out of emotions. She did a survival float in stoic silence, thinking about nothing but the rhythm of her breathing. Her body was completely drained. Though her muscles burned from lactic acid, she didn't give up. She didn't want to die. The thought of drowning - literally choking on water - was terrifying. She made it her goal to hang on until dusk, so she could see the stars.
Once dusk came, Quill stared up at the sky. She picked out every super-cluster, galaxy, and nebula from memory. She rattled off their esoteric names and tried to fix her position, using all of her training and a bit of dead reckoning. She even started talking to the stars for company.
After a while of this, Quill's mind tired. She started to count the stars one by one, like a bored child. She mumbled the numbers into the water, just above the wave tops.
"One, two, three, four, five, six. . ."
As the sky grew dark with night, a violent squall rocked the ocean. The sea looked like the inside of a washing machine. The waves and wind whipped the water's surface into a cauldron of swirling, white foam.
Quill was battered by the storm. Each wave pummeled her. She constantly had to fight to stay afloat as the ocean tried to bury her deeper and deeper. She was blinded by spray. Rain poured down in sheets, making the sea blend in seamlessly with the night sky.
An hour of abuse and ceaseless churning was all her body could take. In the roar of the storm, Quill began to slip away. The constant waves and utter blackness kept her disoriented. She struggled to find the surface, which seemed to grow further away with each passing minute.
Everything - the sky, the sea - grew dark.
Quill sunk under the surface to escape the abuse. She listened to the waves. Their crashes rumbled over the taps of millions of rain drops. She went to suck in a lungful of seawater to end it all, but couldn't bring herself to do it. She fought her way back up to the surface, one last time, kicking furiously, and was able to suck in half a lungful of air, before she was knocked unconscious by a giant wave.
The Magical Forest
- 10 -
Quill's eyelids fluttered. She could only hear her own gurgled breathing. The last thing she remembered was the feeling of her knees scraping against sand.
"Ewwwoooouu! Ewwooouuu!"
She threw up two lungfuls of ocean. The brackish water burned her throat like acid. She tried to open her eyes, but they ached from their time in the sea, and were too sore to function. She was completely waterlogged – the water had even worked its way into her ears, making everything sound muffled.
"Emma-ooooo. . .em I a lie-ooo. . .am I alive?"
Quill heaved as she tried to say the words. Her eyes refused to focus. Everything around her looked like dark smudges - an overwhelming blur. She fumbled around blindly in her fugue.
Quill was waist deep in seawater. She had washed up against a brown giant with frail, little arms. She ran her fingers across what she guessed to be the giant's torso.
It felt rough and heavily grooved, like tree bark.
A tree?
Quill hugged the tree trunk; clinging to it like it was her mother. She pressed her cracked lips to the trunk. She stuck out her salty tongue and ran it up the rough bark. It felt and tasted genuine.
A tree!
Quill collapsed into the tree. Her chest heaved and she spit out more seawater. She closed her eyes and went limp, waiting for time to bring her senses back to her.
When Quill's vision cleared, she saw that she was in a vast, flooded mangrove forest. The omnipresent water came up to her thighs, as if the forest had sprung up on a giant sandbar. The ocean lay a few feet back, its waves crashing against the tree trunks. The thick, rank mangroves consumed everything else, until they melted into darkness.
The forest air was muggy. It was early morning, just after dawn. The sky looked dim and overcast, a subdued silver. The deep mangroves echoed with the buzz of insects and the chirps of morning song birds.
Quill let go of the tree and sank into the cool water. She wiggled her toes under the submerged sand, trying to fully wake up.
After several minutes of rest, Quill stood up and tried her legs. She took a few steps forward, using the leafy branches for balance, but was too tired to go far, and soon, she collapsed.
As Quill struggled to remain conscious, she saw a ball of light flicker through the tangled mangroves. It did a ghostly dance between their gnarled branches.
Slowly, the light moved closer and its features became more defined. It was a torch, crackling in the early dawn. A dark shape brooded under it, waving the flame in the air. The shape was inhumanly tall with four, spindly legs that splashed through the shallow water.
Quill realized the dark shape was actually a man on horseback. He was dressed in a motley assemblage of combat armor and tribalesque trimmings, gathered from beachcombing. His breastplate was reinforced with baleen. Giant, serrated, shark teeth jutted out from his shoulders. He was clutching a long sword, made of a sawfish's nose, like a knight conjured up by Neptune.
The knight's horse was similarly armored. In the middle of its forehead was a giant starfish with an intimidating conch shell spike.
The horse shot its head to the side and let out a loud neigh. It then began to chew on its leather reins, which were studded with red and white, pastel seahorses.
"FLOTSAM!" The strange knight roared from behind his iron visor. He waved his torch in a circle. The water sloshed all around him.
"Flotsam!" Several echoes sounded off in the distance.
Quill watched silently as a dozen points of light began to close in. They were more men bearing torches. She heard the creaks of snapping tree branches as they trudged through the mangroves.
The knight came up to within a few feet of Quill. She huddled down, hiding between the twisted tree roots. She could feel warm air jet out from the horse's nostrils.
Quill couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a horse. In her dream-like state, she wanted to reach up and start petting it.
"Where am I?"
The knight pointed his sawfish sword straight at Quill's eyeball.
"YOU save YOUR questions for the GRAND BARRISTER!"
Quill blinked. She couldn't think. Her brain felt like it was depleted of neurotransmitters – so much so, that she was out of reactions. She gave the knight a vacuous stare as the other men gathered around her.
One of those men had a twig shoved through his nose and a sea-turtle-shell helmet. The man next to him was bedecked in tuna bones, encased in the fish's massive skeleton. Both men were covered in tattoos and black body paint. They looked like savages, complete with rusty tomahawks and ancient rifles.
A squat man skipped in front of those two savages. He looked like an ape as he munched on a cheek-full of tiny oysters.
"Niize flotsam der. Niiiize flotsam."
The little man licked his painted lips, black from beach tar. He spit out the oyster shells and reached back, producing a large net. Sand and dead fish tumbled out of it.
The squat savage threw the net over Quill. Too shocked to react, she peered at him through the wet netting.
- 11 -
Sejanus dabbed the quill pen on his tongue. The ink tasted foul. He winced at the unpleasant sensation, while straining to read the faded document.
Harold Evry of sound will and mind doth now bequeath upon each his sons, Wetacre, in fee, to be shared and shared alike, equally.
"Hmm," Sejanus mumbled. He turned to Lomax, the Grand Notary. The Notary's flowing clothing was adorned with giant red and white scallop shells, the colors of Smaaland nobility. "This next matter involves the estate of Mr. Evry. The petitioner claims the decedent, his father, wanted to distribute real property per stirpes in his will, but the document contains a latent ambiguity. It is settled precedent of the Court that an ambiguity in such a bequest shall be settled by discerning the will of the testator. Here I hold the phrase 'share and share alike, equally' evinces an intent that the estate be divided between all living heirs – shares per capita, not per stirpes."
Lomax was holding a giant, leather bound book with hundreds of pages of yellow parchment. He ran his quill pen furiously across the pages, jotting down everything Sejanus said. After he finished scribbling, he lowered the tome to Sejanus, allowing him to sign the bottom.
Sejanus jotted down his loopy signature and shifted in his chair. The beech wood creaked from his weight.
Sejanus had just turned fifty. His eyes were the color of walnuts, speckled with flecks of vermillion. He had short black hair and was wearing a long, royal robe of polished seal skin. His most notable feature was his tattoo. He'd tattooed a complete mandible, replete with black teeth, across his jaw line. It made him look more like one of Smaaland's natives - the Jan-Ju savages.
Sejanus rubbed his tattoo teeth and peered out at his kingdom.
Smaaland was a flooded mangrove forest, saturated year-round with foot-high, brackish water. The Jan-Jus put their homes on stilts, or lived in tree houses. Sejanus watched as they came and went, climbing creaky ladders and bounding across wobbly monkey bridges. The treetop town was packed with tiny vendor stalls, squat huts, and raucous beach bars that still glowed with torch light in the early morning.
As Sejanus took his pause, a longshoreman shouted out orders to passing boats from Smaaland's flooded tidal bay. The tall marsh grasses that poked up from the water swayed in the breeze. Various merchants and peddlers called down from the treetops, their cries hanging over the ever-present babble of the water.
"Shall we take a recess?" Lomax looked over to Sejanus, fiddling with his heavy book.
Sejanus continued to gaze out at the ocean. "A brief recess would do the Court well. . .," he began to say. He paused and watched a line of savages emerge from the mangroves. They sloshed their way toward him. "But let's attend to this matter before adjournment."
One of the approaching savages was on horseback. The others were down in the water, hauling beach detritus in their wake. Next to the armored horseman was a desperate-looking woman.
Sejanus strained to better see her.
The woman had a mousey face and a sickly figure. Her clothes were soaked rags. She knelt down in the sand, hacking. A savage grabbed her by her hair and dragged her forward.
"Morning, your honor." The horseman trotted ahead of the pack and slid down the side of his horse. He climbed up into Sejanus's hut and pulled off his visor. His head was a mop of long brown hair that flowed past his crooked nose. His skin was tattooed like all the other Jan-Jus. "Got some flotsam for ya."
Sejanus nodded. "New acquisitions for the state treasury, you serve Smaaland well, longshoreman."
Quill staggered up into Sejanus's hut. The savages who followed her began to lay out a spread of beach-combed, detritus. She glanced down at their meager salvage: an old car tire, the frame of a bicycle, an office chair, the top of a samovar. She turned her eyes away from the scrap and peered up at the hut's thatched roofing.
The hut was Spartan and empty. The wind blew in from one side and out the other, unobstructed. Quill dug her feet into the sand, cringing from the constant draft.
"Gum on." One of the savages shoved her toward Sejanus's chair. She fell face first onto the packed-sand floor, gagging from cotton mouth.
Sejanus scowled at the savage. "Careful! She's state property."
The savage meekly bowed and shuffled backward.
Sejanus turned to an old woman who was standing to his right, just behind Lomax.
"Ms. Urthella, please give the new arrival some water."
Urthella was a silver haired, elderly woman who served as Sejanus's clerk. She darted over to Quill and handed her a hollowed gourd.
Quill stared into the gourd. It was full of fresh water. She gulped it down eagerly - water had never tasted so good. It washed the salty crust from her sore throat.
"We shall deal with the inanimate chattels first." Sejanus perused the spread. "You hath recovered a rubberized, elliptical automotive shock absorber, the remnants of a businessman's recliner, a foot-powered, pedal-driven recreational vehicle, and the chapeau of an antediluvian tea steeper." He pointed to each item.
