Elm of False Dreams

by Jon Jacks

  It returned later, landing on the ship’s prow, where it bent down towards one of the painted eyes, seemingly talking to it, whispering through its lightly clacking beak.

  Mima drew closer, expecting the raven to fly off. Instead, it simply clamped its beak shut. And, yet again, observed her warily.

  Bending over the side of the ship, she looked towards the painted eye that graced the ship’s hull. It moved slightly, as it did before, as if aware of her presence.

  Then the eye focused once more on the way they were heading.

  The raven basked in the sun, appeared to grin in satisfaction as it was lightly doused every now and again by the cooling spray of the waves the prow was powering its way through.

  Mima wondered; would the raven talk to her, the way it had talked to or at least listened to the bull-headed man?

  ‘Where is the captain?’ she asked the raven. ‘The captain you were sent to pass a message onto?’

  The raven cocked its head towards her, as if listening with interest.

  As Mima finished speaking, it raised his head, opened its beak as if to speak; but only cawed.

  Mima shrugged in disappointment and frustration.

  ‘I am the captain,’ the raven suddenly announced, its beak moving with each word it ever so carefully spoke.

  ‘You? The raven? But–’

  ‘No, no; I’m only speaking through the raven, as he has graciously allowed me to. I’m the captain of this ship; I am the ship.’

  *

  Chapter 18

  The Chart of the Unknown

  What is a captain without his charts?

  He is nothing. He is lost.

  And yet so much of the world remains uncharted.

  Oh yes, we may fool ourselves into thinking we have mapped out everything we need to know – and the rest, therefore, is of no importance.

  We have enough to get by on, after all, in our day to day lives.

  We have enough maps that suffice to take us safely from here to here, from there to there.

  What more could we possibly need?

  What we need, the more adventurous amongst us would reply, is a chart that can at least lead us into the unknown – and thereby, at last, we can make it known!

  And the known can be placed upon a new chart.

  One that leads us even farther into areas previously unexplored.

  Is it possible, however, that a chart can be produced that predicts what you may find in the unknown?

  That maps out lands that have yet to be discovered?

  Impossible?

  Yet the currents of the seas, the waves of the air, all follow certain proscribed patterns.

  The air tangibly changes as it flows overland, rather than the sea.

  The directions of currents are visibly altered by landmasses otherwise out of our sight.

  The heat of both is dependent upon whatever obstacles they encounter in their courses.

  And a captain who had long flattered himself that he had charted every inlet, every rocky island, recognised one day that all the winds and all the currents that he had also successfully registered just didn’t make any sense.

  They just shouldn’t be flowing in that way!

  There shouldn’t be a warm wind here, but a cold one!

  He checked his calculations time and time again – and always came up with the very same, very strange answer.

  There should be a large island lying out in the great ocean to account for these otherwise unexpected effects.

  An island that no one had ever seen. Let alone charted.

  *

  Even when he showed his usual financial backers the results of his calculations, his carefully rendered map of this mysteriously invisible island, no one believed him enough to provide him with the money required to mount an expedition to discover it.

  It was his own money, his own ancient and barely seaworthy ship, that he had to resort to using. His crew had to be the dregs of the ports.

  They sailed for days. Then weeks.

  And still there had been no sign of the land he had ever so painstakingly mapped out on his chart.

  Why, at this very moment, they should be in the very centre of the island!

  Like those who had previously been his most ardent financial backers, his crew now began to believe that the captain was possibly just a little crazy. Yet it wasn’t their money that was at stake, but their lives.

  They threw him overboard, and set sail for home.

  *

  There would be no other passing ships out here, in the middle of the vast ocean.

  He himself, after all, had only been out here on his fool’s errand to discover an island that quite clearly had never existed.

  He would drown. There was no doubt about it in his mind.

  There was nothing to help him stay afloat. His legs and arms were already tiring.

  He let the waves take him, slipping beneath the waters, accepting its cold embrace, its bizarrely comforting darkness.

  Far beneath him, there was a flash of lighter colours, colours that were surging towards him, rapidly ascending from the depths. One of the denizens of the deep, no doubt, awaking, seeking him out as a tasty morsel.

  Here be monsters!

  It was a whale, huge beyond belief.

  It rose towards him ever faster.

  It opened its great maw.

  And it effortlessly swallowed him whole.

  *

  It was a cavernous interior, mostly as dark as the depths the creature itself had undoubtedly risen from.

  And yet, there were a multiple of strange lights amongst that darkness.

  Lights that were like flames, lanterns, their flickering reflected on the water he found himself once again exhaustedly attempting to keep afloat in.

  One such light was slowly making its way towards him, the odd splash of water gradually growing more audible.

  ‘Hi there,’ a voice called from the darkness, ‘need any help?’

  The man on the crude raft drew up alongside him and pulled him aboard. The captain gratefully spluttered his thanks, asking as soon as he felt capable where they were and what chances of escape they had.

  ‘I’ve been here what must be months,’ the man admitted. ‘There are sides to this great beast for sure, but they curl in above you, and are covered in either the slipperiest seaweed or the sharpest barnacles. We live on the water.’

  ‘We?’

  There are others out there; but beware them – shush!’

  He swiftly covered his lantern with a dark cloth, hiding its flame. He also brought in the small paddle he used to propel his raft, every move as silent as could be.

  He tapped the captain on his shoulder, pointed out into the darkness.

  There were other lights out there, closer now. There was also a frantic splashing of paddles.

  The flames were drawing closer to each other. At last, in their combined light, the captain saw armed men leaping from one driftwood raft to another.

  There was a ferocious, bloody scuffle, men on either side falling.

  The wounded were finished off with a quick slash to the throat, even the wounded of the victors screeching in horror as they too were instantly killed.

  The conquered raft was lashed to the other, and piled with the dead. There was a quick rummaging of artefacts, the discarding of unwanted materials. Then the victorious group of men began to thankfully slip away into the darkness once more.

  The captain and his new companion remained silent until the raft had long gone, despite the former’s eagerness to ask why they hadn’t tipped the bodies into the water.

  ‘Why didn’t they–’

  It was the flash of the suddenly accidently uncovered flame that alerted the captain to the man reaching towards him with knife drawn.

  He swung aside, the swinging knife only clipping his forehead.

  He reached out in the darkness, his hands gratefully clasping around something that would serve as a cl
ub. He raised it quickly, swung it violently.

  He caved in the man’s head with this new, handy cudgel.

  It was a thigh bone.

  A man’s thigh bone.

  *

  He was aghast that he had killed a man.

  Aghast that his fellow man had resorted to cannibalism.

  He glanced at the surrounding water. There were no signs of life in it.

  No fish.

  It seemed this whale only ever ate humans.

  He made a quick yet thorough search of the raft, wondering what he had inherited from his killing of its previous owner.

  There was a mast and yardarm there that could be raised. A large, ragged sail. There were other sheets of canvas, used as bedding, as a tent, as the covering for the lantern. Ropes, leather ties, knives.

  There was also fat and oil for the lamp.

  The captain shivered as he touched it, knowing there would be only one source of animal fat down here.

  There was nothing here that could save him from degenerating into the cannibal his companion had become.

  He stared forlornly at the imprisoning waters. They moved beneath him, as if alive.

  A current.

  This inner sea had currents, just like the oceans he regularly crossed.

  He bared an arm, raised it into the air.

  Yes, there was a slight breeze there too.

  That meant hot air, cold air.

  He looked at the objects around him with renewed interest.

  *

  There had been many occasions when he had seen men struggling with a loosened sail lifted high off their feet by even a light wind.

  Single men with smaller pieces of canvas had been lifted even higher, the rising hot air taking them higher and higher as they slipped from one current into another.

  No one who had flown so high had ever survived their brief experience, of course.

  But he wasn’t intending to come back down.

  Once he had carefully constructed his contraption of large, billowing sails and wooden supports, he strapped knives to his feet and wrists.

  With these – once he had attained sufficient height to quickly ram home a spear into the (hopefully) soft inner flesh of the whale’s stomach – he would crawl towards the hole for the waterspout.

  Here, his knowledge of what might be possible deserted him.

  He knew hardly anything of the living mechanisms of a whale. He had seen, however, that a thick water spout rose every now and again from a part of the great lake, heading ever upwards into the all-consuming darkness.

  The gushing spout was also a sure sign, of course, that the whale must now be on the sea’s surface.

  Strapping himself into his elaborate construction, he paddled close to the area where he knew the spout arose from; then patiently waited.

  When the water abruptly gushed upwards, it took him by surprise. The spear was wrenched from his hands as he was flung up into the air, as if from a sling shot.

  The spray was also drenching him, making both him and his sails heavier by the second.

  Before he could avoid it, he was dragged into the surging waterspout itself; and within a brief moment, was being pummelled viciously from side to side as he was forced through the narrow spout hole.

  *

  The spouting water projected him high into the air.

  He could only hope that the force of his ejection hadn’t damaged his flying contraption so much that it wouldn’t support him any longer. He had to hope, too, that it wasn’t too heavy, too soaked.

  He sighed with a grateful sigh to the gods as the sails billowed open above him. He felt, too, the rising hot air currents he knew he could make use of to glide a good distance.

  Daring to glance down at last, he was surprised to see that he was already soaring over land. It was like no land he had even seen before, however.

  It consisted mainly of a series of spiralling canals, down which whale after whale was headed.

  Some whales were heading in the opposite direction to the others, without actually passing each other on the water. It dawned on the captain that there were in fact two canals, each spiralling inside the other.

  Some of the whales were gliding towards the banks, where they opened their mouths to disgorge the men caught inside. Before these men knew what was happening, they were dragged off by whip-wielding guards and immediately set to work constructing the huge buildings dotting this strange landscape.

  He would have liked to see more, of course. But he was wise enough to recognise that he had to use the height he had gained to set out to sea.

  Otherwise, he would end up as just one more of the island’s countless slaves.

  *

  There was still the odd ascending current for him to make use of as he serenely glided over the rich fields of corn, the plaza-strewn cities, the huge encampments of massed ranks of soldiers.

  When he finally reached the edges of the vast island, however, the much colder sea afford him less opportunities to continue his flight. He dropped ever lower.

  He soon had to face up to the dreadful thought that he might soon be back in the sea where he had started from.

  One of the whales was passing just beneath him. He landed surprisingly softly upon its back, discarding his contraption before another wind dragged him unwillingly back into the sea.

  The whale was every much a construct of man’s mind as his flying machine had been. It wasn’t of flesh and bone, but of wood, iron, leather.

  He wondered if there was some way of descending inside the whale once more, but this time into the crew’s quarters as opposed to that of its captives.

  He didn’t have time to find it.

  The whale was beginning to slip beneath the waves once more.

  And with a flip of its great tail, it was gone.

  He was alone in the seemingly endless sea once more.

  *

  Then he saw the sail of a ship.

  He couldn’t believe it!

  He shouted. He cried out.

  He feared he wouldn’t be seen. That the ship – so close, so very, very close – would pass him by.

  Fortunately, it was heading his way. As if it had miraculously set course in his very direction.

  And as it drew ever closer, he realised with surprise that it was his very own ship.

  The men threw a line over the sides to haul him on board, greeting him joyously. As if it were a miracle that he’d survived. As if they’d been searching for him all along, after he’d unfortunately fallen overboard.

  They were glad to see him.

  They were lost too.

  *

  With his charts, his navigation instruments, laid out before him, the captain was sure he could set a course for home.

  Yet the winds weren’t as he remembered them. Neither were the currents of the sea.

  On a night, even the stars were different, as if they had somehow ended up on the other side of the world.

  On another world.

  Their expedition to find the missing island had resulted only in the regular patterns of his own mind becoming confused, unreliable.

  Eventually land was sighted, land indeed that he recognised as having visited numerous times in his past. Yet it was a land that wasn’t supposed to be here, not so close to where he reckoned they would be after their many days of travelling.

  Of course, they landed anyway.

  The captain talked to the people in authority he knew here, excitedly telling them of the new land he had discovered in the great sea. He proudly unfurled his old chart, upon which he had carefully rendered the position of the new land – and they laughed.

  They asked him if all this was some strange joke of his.

  He was confused.

  What on earth could they mean?

  Well, they explained, they all knew no such land could possibly exist where he claimed it should lie, for they regularly sailed through that part of the ocean.

&nb
sp; Besides, they each added with an amused chuckle, even his mapping of the lands they already knew of was incredibly inept. And with that, they would show him the great charts on the walls of their offices.

  The captain stared at every chart they showed him with dismay – for every one would show him a whole new world, a completely different world to the one he believed existed.

  *

  Naturally, he would always take the new charts with him.

  But they never made any sense in the real world he encountered.

  Every chart turned out, for him and his crew at least, to be wrong.

  Moreover, wherever they sailed, everything would be different the very next time they sailed there.

  Even if it were only an hour later.

  The inlets, the harbours, the shorelines: all would be different.

  They would end up in a port that only a day ago was hundreds of miles away.

  And the next day, it would be hundreds of miles away again.

  They could never find their way home. They could never settle elsewhere, neither.

  For after a night, they would awake in a different bay, in a different anchorage. Or even in the middle of a storm-tossed ocean.

  Eventually, they found they could no longer step ashore, their feet or arms or pony tails having someone become welded to and now an essential part of the ship.

  Unable to make repairs of wood or tar, they increasingly used the bones and skin of the sea creatures they feasted upon. As they aged, too, more and more of their own bodies were blended into and were subsumed into the build of the ship.

  And so when they died, their own bones and flesh became as one with the ship.

  In this way, the ship sales forever on.

  Forever searching for a home they can never find; for now home is where they already are.

  *

  Chapter 19

  ‘Then if you’re lost,’ Detritus asked grimly, having come across the deck to listen to the captain’s tale, ‘how can you take us where we need to be?’

  ‘The ravens, they know the way, if we’re granting a lift to someone,’ the captain said, still speaking through the crudely made raven. ‘They were given us by Cerissa, to fly ahead a few miles, and ensure our course stays briefly stable rather than changing before we get there.’