Fable: The Balverine Order (Fable)

by Peter David

  Then something lunged out of the water at them and James, with a startled cry, nearly tried to strike it with one of the oars. He held up at the last second and gaped in astonishment.

  It was the dog, paddling furiously, desperation in her eyes.

  “I don’t believe it,” Thomas said. “That damned animal has more lives than a cat.” Even as he spoke, he put down the bucket he was using to bail and stretched out a hand. He grabbed the frantically swimming animal by the scruff of the neck and hauled her toward the boat. Then he let out a cry as the dog, desperate to get on the source of very meager safety, clawed at his chest and even scratched his face before tumbling onto the bottom, water splashing up around her. “Poxy cur!” he cried out, and cuffed her, but she snapped her head away and deflected most of the impact. She didn’t snarl in response, though; instead, she looked at him with apologetic eyes and then started eagerly lapping at the water gathering on the bottom.

  “It’s salt water! It’s no good for you, Poxy!” James shouted over the thundering all around them and pushed the dog away from it with a shove of his foot. The dog looked surprised, but she didn’t continue with her endeavors to drink it.

  “Poxy?” Despite the severity of their situation, Thomas found the strength to half smile. “That’s her name now?”

  “Well, I called her that, and you called her that. So it seems fitting someh—”

  Poxy suddenly started barking, and if it was possible to discern fear in the voice of a dog, then the terror that this animal was feeling could have been perceived by a man who was deaf and blind.

  James paused only long enough to rack the oars, and then he threw himself backwards, landing atop the dog, clamping his hands around her muzzle, and hissing, “Shhhhh!”The clearly frightened dog started to fight out of reflex, but then immediately appeared to understand the need for silence. James angled himself so that he was lying under the narrow bench that stretched across the boat and provided a seat for whoever was manning the oars.

  Thomas instantly followed James’s lead, dropping to the bottom of the small boat, rolling himself into as small a target as he could possibly make himself. The three of them lay there, paralyzed, too scared even to breathe. If they had been able to cease the beating of their hearts, they would have done so. In fact, it seemed a distinct possibility that that might just happen.

  A tentacle had emerged from the water and was moving slowly across the boat.

  It’s going to crush us, thought Thomas. It’s going to crush this boat just like it did the ship. I’ve led us into a fool’s quest, and this is the end for both of us.

  Except the lifeboat was so small that it was, in and of itself, indistinguishable from dozens of other pieces of flotsam and jetsam that were bobbing in the water, a mute reminder of the sailing vessel that had been endeavoring to traverse the seas only minutes earlier. The tentacle slid into the boat, but rather than touching the bottom, the tentacle rested on the rower’s bench. It then moved across it tentatively, looking for . . . well, Thomas didn’t like to think about what it was looking for. It was mere inches above the boys, neither of whom were moving, and even the newly christened Poxy was able to restrain her natural desire to start barking at it or challenging it in some manner. Thomas could see that she was trembling against James, her fur still matted down from the water. High above, the lightning continued to shatter the darkened sky, the waves bouncing them around. And Thomas was utterly convinced that he could still hear the screams of the pirates being ripped apart or dragged down to their deaths in the murky, surging sea.

  The tentacle had now made its way across the bench, probing delicately, and Thomas braced himself, waiting for it to haul the entire ship beneath the water.

  And then it withdrew.

  Just like that, the tentacle withdrew, hurriedly, seemingly losing interest. Seconds later, it was gone, and although the ship was still bobbing violently in the water, the kraken appeared to have moved on to something else.

  Thomas could not for the life of him imagine how it was that they were still alive. He wanted to stay where he was, flattened on the bottom of the boat and doing everything he could to avoid possibly being noticed by the tentacles making their triumphant return. But that didn’t seem to be a viable option, not if they wanted to have a prayer of keeping the boat from tipping over.

  James realized this at the same time, and, sitting up, he grabbed the oars and started rowing. It seemed an eternity ago that he had boasted to Thomas that his presence on the excursion was a necessity because he has an infallible sense of direction. Never had that been put more to the test, or been more necessary to any possibility they might have for survival, than at that point in time.

  Poxy remained at the bottom of the boat, taking up a position under the bench and keeping her head covered with her paws. She might well have been a valiant rat catcher and even assailant of pirates within the relative safety of a boat, but it was clear that she was not exactly at her ease in the middle of a roiling sea. But neither were they, so it didn’t seem fair to hold the dog to a higher standard. Her flank was near Thomas, and he saw a gash in her hindquarters that he had no doubt was a gift from the barrel of Rackam’s gun. Well, thought Thomas grimly, the dog is still alive, while Rackam died. So it was obvious who was the final victor in that little confrontation.

  “Do you need help?” he called to James, who was continuing to row with all the considerable strength in his arms.

  “Not right now! I’m pretty much in control! Trying to do it together might be more trouble than it’s worth!”

  “True,” said Thomas, who hated to admit that since he despised the notion of simply lying there and not serving any purpose. He pulled himself upward and steadied the prow as best he could, trying to offer a counterbalance every time the waves threatened to upend the boat.

  Then, in the near distance, he heard what could only be described as an unearthly scream. It was like nothing he had ever heard before, like nothing he thought anything living would have been able to produce. It was deep and sonorous. Shielding his eyes as best he could, he tried to see through the chop and the spray, through the darkness that continued to be broken almost entirely by lightning and nothing else.

  And then, for just a moment, a cloud moved aside, and moonlight flooded from on high, and Thomas was able to see something that seemed as if it had been ripped from a primeval time before humanity strode the earth. At that moment, the notion that there were dividing lines between myth and magic, between reality and legend, dissipated, and Thomas saw the world through a prism that provided an image of a world that could not possibly exist.

  A vast, perfectly shaped undersea creature that Thomas could only conclude was a whale—a creature so astoundingly big and so beautifully and meticulously crafted by nature that Thomas had to choke down a sob lest he be unmanned by the sight—lunged in slow motion out of the water at least a mile away. It was not alone. The kraken was wrapped around it, its tentacles encircling it like a twisted perversion of a lover’s embrace. For the first and only time, Thomas had a brief glimpse of the kraken’s vast body beyond its tentacles, shaped like a spear, clinging onto the whale’s skin. The eerie noise that Thomas had heard seemed to be coming from the whale, and he could only imagine what it signified. Was it a bellow of defiance? Was it a desperate cry for help that would never come? He did not know, nor would he ever. It was obvious that the presence of the whale had been what had drawn the kraken away from him, and with any luck would keep the creature away long after he and James had vacated the area. That was assuming, of course, that they managed to accomplish that seemingly impossible feat.

  But James was undaunted by the challenge that the high seas were presenting. He rowed unrelentingly, indomitable, his jaw set, unwilling to give even an inch to the seas that were battling him.

  The waves pushed them higher, higher, and then the boat tumbled down the far side, and James deftly kept the valiant little vessel on an even keel. They completely lo
st track of how long they continued to fight to survive: It might have been minutes, or hours, although it most certainly wasn’t days. James continued to row, and Thomas saw that his friend was becoming exhausted. His arms were moving as if they were leaden, and he was grunting with every stroke whereas earlier he had rowed with facility. Finally, he could stand it no longer. “I’m taking over!” he shouted.

  James tried to shake his head, but he scarcely had the energy even for that. Thomas pulled himself across the bottom of the boat, avoiding standing up lest he cause the entire thing to topple. Realizing that their mutual safety was far too important to be jeopardized by his pride, James waited until Thomas was in place and firmly gripping the oars and then slid off the bench with a moan. “Which way?” Thomas shouted. In response, James pointed off to the right, and Thomas obediently sent the boat careening in that direction.

  And as they continued to try to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the site of the pirates’ violent demise, the cries of the whale eventually subsided and then disappeared entirely.

  I AM ... DUBIOUS.

  The storyteller ceases his narrative and regards me with what I could best describe as mild surprise. “A problem, Majesty?”

  “They survived an encounter with a kraken?”

  Slowly, he nods. “Yes, Majesty, as you have heard ...”

  “I find that difficult to believe,” I tell him after a long pause. I stand because I have been seated for a time, and I am feeling a distant tingling in my legs. I both hear and feel the creaking in my knees. When I take a few steps forward, it requires everything I possess not to display a limp.

  “Arthritis in the right knee causing you to limp, Majesty?” the storyteller says without hesitation.

  I am irked by this. It is foolish, I know, but despite my advanced age, despite the very obvious betrayal in every way imaginable that my body has foisted upon me, I nevertheless do not want to appear at all fragile. Yet this man, this spinner of fables, is able to discern immediately the pain that has taken up residence in my leg joint.

  I am about to deny it out of hand, but I see in his eyes that he would not be fooled. It seems foolish to me that I should allow pride to dictate my response. I am, after all, a man of accomplishment. A king. Why should I be the least bit concerned about displaying frailty in front of this . . . this no one.

  It is foolish pride, nothing more.

  “Yes,” I say, and add, “and in my hip as well, if that is of any interest to you.”

  “I was aware of that as well, but I did not wish you to think I had developed a curious fixation on your hip.”

  I stare at him for a moment, and then I laugh loudly. The noise startles even me; it has been quite some time since I actually laughed about something. It is not . . . kingly, perhaps. Not appropriate to one of my station.

  He smiles slightly in response. He does so awkwardly; it does not appear to be a normal expression for him. Then the smile fades, and he says, not ungently, “Human frailty is nothing to be ashamed of, Majesty.”

  “It is nothing to be proud of, either.”

  “It is the price one pays for not dying.”

  “Not dying,” I tell him, “may be an overrated experience.”

  “Living is not a pastime for the faint of heart,” he says. “And the commonality of the human experience is that no one gets out alive.”

  “How fortunate that you have come here to me so that you can share your pointless homilies and inane observations,” I say, driven more by my own unwanted pain than anything he has said or done. “To say nothing of your increasingly unlikely narrative.”

  “Unlikely?”

  I say again: “A kraken? They survived a kraken?”

  “It is as I have said.”

  “No one survives such an encounter.”

  “Indeed.” He appears thoughtful. “If that were the case, then how would any know of the existence of such a creature, much less be able to lend name to it? Sailors would simply be lost at sea, unable to pass on legends of a monstrous tentacled being. The expression, after all, is ‘living to tell the tale.’ ”

  “Still . . . two callow youths on their own in a rickety lifeboat in the midst of a storm?”

  “And a dog. They had a dog,” he reminds me.

  A silence stretches between the two of us, and then the storyteller says, “Majesty, you simply have to ask yourself: Do you desire for this story to be true?”

  I surprise myself with my lack of hesitation. “Very much.”

  “Then your wish”—and he bows slightly, albeit not mockingly—“is my command.”

  I sit back down, trying to ignore and refusing to acknowledge the audible creak of my knees. “So our young Heroes are adrift in the water, the storm raging ...”

  “The storm, as it so happens, subsided before much longer.”

  “The fate of the kraken?”

  “Unknown. Perhaps it died in combat with the other great behemoth of the seas. Perhaps it triumphed and was so sated in its devouring of its vast prey that it settled to the sea bottom to digest it. Whichever the case, it did not return to harass the lads further. So in that regard, they were fortunate.”

  “And then—?”

  “Then it turned out that James’s instincts had proven true yet again, as the rising of the eastern sun verified. For the dawn of a new day revealed that land was beckoning to them.”

  “Safety.”

  “Well,” says the storyteller, “safety may have been another matter entirely. It is all relative, you might say. The boys had encountered piracy and a mythic creature upon the seas, but it was not as if there was a lack of evil or menace on the land, as well you know, Majesty.”

  “Indeed I do.”

  “So they achieved landfall—Thomas, James, and Poxy Cur, as she was to be known—and made their way to the town of Blackridge. It did not take them long to get a sense of the place in which they had landed. They were immediately struck by the fact that it seemed far less industrialized than all that which they had left behind. Even the most backwards, least impressive sections of Bowerstone seemed tremendously advanced in comparison.

  “The sky seemed to be permanently overcast, and the forests . . . which had been beaten back to a large degree in Albion . . . seemed to be everywhere, lurking just on the edges of the town at all times, as if waiting for the residents to lower their guards just for a moment so that the trees could overrun it and reclaim the territory for their own. It would turn out that much of Blackridge was like that; indeed, most of the country was, as they would continue to explore it. There was a feeling of the arcane in the air that was unique in their experience.

  “As for the residents of Blackridge, their view of the world, and the things about which they worried, well . . . that was somewhat different as well ...”

  Chapter 8

  THE MASTER OF THE HOUSE BLANCHED when he saw Poxy, and snarled, “Is that your . . . your creature?”

  Thomas and James, bone weary, wet, exhausted, and wanting nothing but a place to dry out, looked in confusion from the innkeeper to the dog and back again. “Yeah,” said James, who was hardly in the mood for any manner of grief from anyone, much less a bowlegged tavern-owner with a foul attitude that was only matched by his equally foul breath.

  “How long have ye had it?”

  Something warned James to lie immediately, and he said without hesitation, “Raised her from a pup. If you’re in the market for one, you can’t have her.”

  The master of the house squinted at James as if he had just been speaking in a foreign tongue. “Why would I—?” Then he stopped, waved off the notion, and instead said, “Never mind. Just keep the damned thing to yourself, understand?”

  “Yes,” said James, who didn’t understand in the least but was too fatigued to care. Thomas was in the same state of mind, and he simply nodded.

  Minutes later, they were in a small room, which was furnished with a pair of bedrolls and nothing else. Poxy growl
ed at them, and James said, “Go ahead, girl.” The dog promptly leaped upon the bedrolls, and an assortment of round insects, some almost as large as the palms of their hands, scuttled out in all directions. Poxy immediately took great delight in bounding about and stomping on as many of the bugs as she could catch before the last of them had scurried to safety in the cracks and crevices of the room.

  Without having to say a word, James picked up the bedrolls, dragging each of them between two fingers of either hand, and shoved them out into the hallway. If the window in the room had not been little more than a crack in the wall, he would have tossed them out of it.

  They didn’t say anything for long moments; instead, they just sat on the floor in a daze. Then Thomas said, “Something to drink?”

  “Absolutely,” James said so quickly that Thomas didn’t even get the last word out in its entirety.

  Minutes later they had cracked open a couple of newly acquired bottles of God-only-knew what it was. The uncertain brand or type of alcohol they were about to pour down their throats was of no consequence to them. All that mattered was drinking as much as possible, as quickly as possible, as if doing so could wipe away what they had seen and experienced. Thomas had also acquired some manner of dried-out meat, which he doled out between himself, James, and Poxy, the latter of whom sniffed it suspiciously and didn’t seem particularly thrilled at the offering. Then she made a noise that sounded like a grunt and ate it grudgingly.

  James’s head was swimming when he finally got around to speaking. “I’m sorry,” was what he said.

  Thomas stared at him, squinting, trying to determine why it was exactly that there seemed to be more than one James in the room. He chalked it up to simply being the most recent of the exceedingly odd things that he had experienced since he had left home. “You’re sorry? For what?”