[Blood Bowl 04] - Rumble in the Jungle

by Matt Forbeck - (ebook by Undead)

  Dr. Pill opened a bottle and poured some of its brackish contents onto a dirty rag. Then he used the soaking rag to clean Spinne’s wound.

  “Apparently not. Give me a couple more rags.”

  Dunk tried to hand him the strips of his uniform, but the elf pushed them away in disgust.

  “Not that filthy crap. Get the clean ones out of my bag. You want to kill her?”

  Dunk reached into the bag and found the rags the apothecary wanted. As he looked into the bag, he saw that it was larger on the inside than it seemed on the outside, a lot larger.

  “Did anyone else survive with you?” Dunk asked.

  “Not one.”

  “How did you make it?” Dunk asked.

  “I had M’Grash help me. I climbed into my bag, and he threw it onto this ship.”

  Dunk almost stopped pulling out rags to gape at the elf. Dr. Pill took the rags from him and nodded for him to shut the bag. “Thank Nuffle I landed on the bridge instead of the forecastle.”

  “How?” Dunk stopped. That wasn’t the question he wanted an answer to. “Why? You’re a doctor. Why didn’t you save anyone else?”

  Dr. Pill grimaced, but he did not look up from binding Spinne’s wounds.

  “As magical as that bag is, it’s a miracle I fit into it. I couldn’t have fit your agent in there with me.”

  Dunk sighed in amazement. Stunned as he was, he was thrilled to have the old elf around to work on Spinne. He’d seen the apothecary work miracles with players dragged off Blood Bowl fields, looking like little more than a person-shaped puddle. Spinne couldn’t have been in better hands.

  “Why can’t you just give her one of your potions?” Dunk asked. He wanted Spinne to be entirely better, right now.

  “First rule when someone’s leaking their life all over the place is to stop the leaking. I could give her a potion, but if I don’t bind her wounds first she’ll just end up bleeding all that goodness right out of her again.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Don’t you think you did enough by getting her into this game? Against a bunch of amateurs? Without armour?”

  Dunk started to snap at the elf, but he realised he needed him too much to make him angry. “I just want to help.”

  “Take care of that man behind you,” Dr. Pill said, not looking up from his work on Spinne. “That would help.”

  Dunk turned around to see a short, thin man standing over him, waiting for him expectantly. As Dunk stood, the man’s hand stabbed out in greeting. Dunk reflexively took and shook it.

  “The name is Coward Hosell,” the man said in a singsong way. “I am the first mate on this particular ship on which you find yourself today. I have not had the opportunity to welcome you and your fellows aboard. Please allow me the pleasure of taking care of that duty right now.”

  “You’re kidding,” Dunk said, confused. “I just killed your captain.”

  “Be that as it may,” Coward said, “it is as clear to me now as it was during his tenure, just who is in charge of this ship. I am prepared to offer my services and those of my crew to you in exchange for our worthless and measly lives.”

  Dunk blinked. “What?”

  “All we ask for, sir, is a chance to prove ourselves, to be the kind of contenders we can be, to show you that we can crew this ship perhaps better than any other crew on the seven or more seas.”

  “Um,” Dunk said, “all right.”

  He’d been prepared for a fight, to pit the Hackers against everyone else aboard the ship. Now, the first mate had capitulated to him without even a request for surrender.

  “I just have to ask,” Dunk said, trying to bite his lip as he spoke. This was too easy. He had to know, even if it spoiled everything. “Don’t you have any concern over Mad Jonnen?”

  Coward shook his head, and a wide, easy grin spread on his face. “Not really, sir. He served his purpose, it’s true, but now that he’s gone we’re just as happy with someone else in his position. Happier perhaps.”

  “And what position was that?”

  Coward gave Dunk a “you really don’t know?” look. “Why, figurehead, of course. Mr. Jonnen was a fine, fine coach, and he brought a lot of passengers on to this ship, but it’s not an exclusive talent. Others can do that just as well, maybe better, the reigning champions, the Bad Bay Hackers, for instance.”

  Dunk narrowed his eyes at the little man. “Who really owns this ship?”

  Coward’s smile grew wider, something Dunk would have bet was impossible. “Why that’s neither here nor there now, sir. As far as I am concerned, if there are any real bosses on this ship, they are our customers, the fans who purchase passage here and allow us to keep our wonderful enterprises afloat, so to speak. Everyone else just works to make them happy.”

  “But in the meantime, who’s in charge? I mean, who sets the ship’s course? Who gets to choose where it goes?”

  Coward’s face seemed like it might split in half and flip over backward from his widening smile. “Why, sir, I thought you understood. Tradition on the Fanatic holds that the most famous ballplayer aboard at the time the previous figurehead surrenders his position, or is forced to abdicate it, is the first in line for the position. That, sir, would be you.”

  16

  “Land ho!”

  Dunk spun out of bed at the shout that had gone up on the main deck. He’d been waiting for just such a call for days on end, and he’d started to get cranky about it. Dirk had spotted this right away and had taken to asking his brother one horrible question every time they crossed paths.

  “Are we there yet?”

  Dunk kissed Spinne, who still lay sleeping in the bed they shared in the captain’s quarters, jumped into a pair of breeches, tossed on a shirt, and then charged out of the door.

  Dunk made his way up on to the bridge. The crew, fans and Hackers lined the starboard gunwale, staring out into the distance, hunting for something that none of them could yet see. Pegleg stood at the wheel, ignoring them and keeping a steady course.

  Dunk craned his head back and spied Guillermo up in the crow’s nest, waving down at him. “Land ho!” the man shouted again. Dunk could see his grin shining down from all the way up there.

  “What’s the situation, coach?” Dunk asked as he reached the wheel.

  Pegleg had continued to be surly with Dunk since they’d taken over the Fanatic, but the captain had come around after Dunk had granted him command over the ship. The only choice he would not relinquish to the man was their destination.

  “Once we’re done in Lustria, you can have that too,” Dunk had said.

  “Your generosity knows no bounds, Mr. Hoffnung,” Pegleg had said, his words dripping with sarcasm. Despite this, he’d been barely able to disguise his glee, and his attitude towards Dunk had warmed considerably over the weeks.

  Dunk realised one day that this had to do with the fact that Pegleg loved running a ship, but hated being the one in charge of it. “Keeping her in shape, getting her to where we want her to go, taking care of the crew and passengers, these are worthy challenges,” he’d said to Dunk one night over a late shot of rum served in a pair of tin cups. “Dealing with their whining and complaints is the price the man in charge must pay.”

  In their current arrangement, Pegleg ran the ship, with Coward’s help, while Dunk took the blame for everything that went wrong. On a ship this large, things went wrong all the time, and it was up to someone to have to deal with it. That duty fell to Dunk.

  Dealing with such things didn’t bother Dunk too much. He had to listen to the complaint, assure the complainant that it would be taken care of, and then report it to Pegleg and Coward, taking care to remove as much of the whining from the initial complaint as he could manage.

  As a management trio, they worked well together. Dunk had what Coward generously called “people skills,” whereas the others had know-how and experience to fall back on. Dunk pointed out more than once that “people skills’ often came down to not hating e
veryone else, but there seemed to be no way to get the others to change their ways on that subject, so he soldiered on.

  “Mr. Reyes reports sighting land on our present course,” Pegleg said. “If it is, in fact, Lustria, it should become visible from the bridge soon.”

  Dirk hailed Dunk from the far side of the bridge. “Hey,” he said with a grin, “it looks like we’re there.”

  Dunk couldn’t help but smile. It had taken a lot to get here, and privately he knew that the ship’s supplies were running low. The Fanatic had been outfitted for a long, sumptuous trip around the Old World, not across the open sea. Cutting back on the all-you-can eat feasts, to once a week, had helped stretch things out a bit, as had the death of Mad Jonnen.

  “That orc went through a turkey a day,” Coward said. “I have never, in all my years aboard a ship, seen anyone eat so much, so fast. I once asked him what his secret was.”

  Dunk waited for the man to continue, but soon realised that he was expected to prompt Coward for the answer.

  “And what would that be?”

  “The more he ate, the less anyone else could have, and that’s the way he liked it.”

  With the promise of dry land and fresh food, Dunk could at least let that worry slip by. Now all he had to think about was him and Dirk reuniting with their sister. He wondered where in Lustria they’d make landfall, and how far it might be to Amazon Island from there.

  “We are not far away at all,” Enojada said, as if reading Dunk’s thoughts. “I have kept track of our position by the stars. I am not an expert navigator, but I have some skill in this area. Once we reach land, I should be able to orient us in the right direction and get us to my home in no time.”

  “Thanks,” said Dunk.

  The rising sun burnt the low lying mist off the ocean, gradually revealing more of what lay hidden inside it. Soon, Dunk could make out the horizon, along with the barest hint of dry land along it. It appeared as a dark, thin stripe separating the sky from the sea. A wide smile broke out on his suntanned face.

  As the land grew closer, more and more of the crew arose and found their way to the main deck. Soon, hundreds of people lined the gunwales as the ship tacked back to the northwest under Pegleg’s orders.

  The dark stripe grew to a white strip of sun-bleached sand stretching out before a deep, thick jungle that seemed to roll back from the shoreline forever. Dolphins breached the surface near where the waves broke, and as the Fanatic grew closer, they came to swim alongside the gigantic ship, playing in its wake.

  As they neared the shore, the land that they’d seen first seemed to break away from the lands around it. The sprawling fields farther in the distance, sweeping away to the south, featured wide swaths of wind-swept savannah rather than the jungle of what Dunk now saw was either an island or the tip of a peninsula.

  Enojada pointed to the emerald island before them. “Our navigation has been nearly perfect. That is Columbo’s Island. That land to the south is the Scorpion Coast. The lizardmen live there and have long been at war with invaders from the New World, many from dark elf cults that worship Chaos in its more decadent forms. We have no business there, and the lizardmen and the slann usually give plenty of distance to the islands of the River Amaxon delta, which is where we will find our final destination.”

  “Columbo? The captain who discovered the New World? They named an island after him?”

  “He named it. He formed a colony there shortly after landing, claiming the land in the name of his nation. That was long ago, though, and the city that once prospered has long since returned to the jungle.”

  “I hear he was a little man with a preoccupation with shoes,” said Dirk, “a detective as well as an explorer.”

  “That’s what they engraved on his tombstone, wasn’t it?” asked Spinne, who’d just joined them. “ ‘What did you pay for those shoes?’ ”

  “I never did understand that,” said Dunk.

  “You’re too young to appreciate history, Mr. Hoffnung,” Pegleg said. “Someday, you’ll realise that one man’s trivia is another’s obsession.”

  Dunk didn’t understand Pegleg either, but he guessed that confessing that would only make the coach’s point.

  “We’ll stop there to resupply,” Pegleg said, pointing to Columbo’s Island. “If it’s as deserted as you say, it should be safe enough, and we could use some fresh food and drink.”

  “I didn’t say it was deserted.” Enojada stared out at the approaching island. “Just that it was no longer as civilised as it once was.”

  “Tell me, ma’am,” Coward said, standing at the very rear of the bridge, “just what does that mean? Are we putting ourselves, our people, our customers, in horrible danger?”

  “Civilisation is overrated.” Enojada scoffed. “On Amazon Island, we barely bother with clothes. People from your world might call that primitive. We think of it as freeing.”

  “Bring it on!” Getrunken said as he staggered up towards the bridge. “Freedom! FREEEEEE-DOM!”

  The fans standing atop the forecastle instinctively echoed his cry. “Free-dom! Free-dom! Free-dom!”

  Dunk turned to Spinne and held her in his arms. “Looks like freedom it is,” he said with a grin.

  17

  “I thought you said they’d greet us with flowers and drinks,” Dunk said as he helped row the dinghy out to the island.

  “Once we reach Amazon Island, you will find our hospitality to be the finest in the land. Here though, I can make no such guarantees.”

  “Haven’t you ever been here before?” asked Spinne.

  Enojada shook her head. “On Amazon Island, we tend to keep to ourselves. Our ancestors were not native to this land. We descended from the female survivors of a Norscan settlement that once shared Columbo’s Island, but abandoned it after the conflagration that destroyed the town.”

  “Humans aren’t native to this land?” Lästiges asked, her camra floating towards Enojada to record the answer.

  The Amazon shook her head. Here, beneath her native sun, she looked more beautiful than before, more comfortable with her surroundings. Dunk hadn’t noticed before how tightly wound she had been in the Old Word. Now that she was in Lustria, she was clearly at home.

  “The slann and the lizardmen have been here since long before anyone can remember, including them. The lizardmen built amazing cities, the whole of which comprise of temples to their mysterious gods. Some of them were abandoned and have fallen into ruins for reasons no one understands. The ones that still stand, however, are breathtaking monuments to the greatness their people once had.”

  “Do you mean that now they suck?” asked Dirk. He continued to work the oars with Dunk, pulling them closer to the island’s shore.

  “Language, Mr. Heldmann,” said Pegleg.

  Dirk stared at the man with a disbelieving look.

  “There are ladies present.”

  “That’s never stopped you from cursing up a storm in the locker room.”

  “That’s his point, son,” Slick said. “We’re not in a locker room now. We’re strangers about to land on a strange shore, and we should be careful to treat our prospective hosts with as much respect as we can muster. There’s no telling what they might take offence to.”

  Dirk rolled his eyes, which Dunk took to mean he’d capitulated to the argument, even if he didn’t agree with it, for now, at least.

  “Maybe we should have left our escorts behind,” said Dirk. “Having an ogre and a treeman show up on your doorstep might be enough to set some people off.”

  “They’ll be fine,” said Dunk. “I don’t think I could have kept M’Grash on the ship with an army.”

  “How about you, Edgar?” Dirk called. “How you doing?”

  The treeman answered from where he floated in the water behind the dinghy, M’Grash clutching tight to him. The ogre was using him as a float while propelling them both through the water with his powerful kicks.

  “How am I doing?” Edgar shouted. “I�
�m bloody humiliated, that’s how I’m doing. I’m a treeman, not a personal flotation device.”

  “Do trees float because they’re full of hot air?” asked Dirk. “Or is that just treemen?”

  “You’re bloody fortunate I can’t stand up right now.”

  “I’m sorry we had to do this, but you and M’Grash can’t fit in the dinghy,” said Dunk, “and this beat trying to tow you into shore.”

  “It’ll be worth it to feel some soil around my roots again,” Edgar said. “You people packed bloody nothing for a treeman to eat. I can’t live on sunshine alone, you know.”

  Dunk smacked Dirk on the back of the head to silence his younger brother’s snickering. If Edgar threw a tantrum on the way to the island, M’Grash might panic and drown. Dunk put a finger to his lips. Dirk rolled his eyes, but kept silent.

  “Look,” Spinne said, pointing towards the shore, “we have a welcoming committee.”

  Dunk glanced over his shoulder and saw a group of people standing on the shore, waiting for the boat to come in. When they saw that they had been noticed, some of them waved.

  Most of the score or so of people wore short breeches or skirts and brightly coloured shirts in floral prints. Off to one side, a band played music with a strangely relaxing yet engaging beat. One of the musicians beat on something Dunk could only describe as a steel drum, while the others pounded on large bongos, or strummed guitars.

  The man in the front of the band, who wore the most colourful shirt of all, sang melodiously at the top of his lungs. As far as Dunk could tell the song had something to do with a desperate search for something lost. It sounded like a “shaker of salt” but he couldn’t see how that could be.

  A tall, tanned man stood before the rest of the crowd, dressed in an immaculate white suit. Beside him stood a person that made Slick look like a giant, a tiny, tanned person dressed in a suit identical to the larger man’s.

  The people on the shore waited patiently as Dunk and Dirk rowed the dinghy in through the breakers, with Edgar and M’Grash close behind them. The brothers leapt out of the boat as it scraped bottom on the sand, and pulled it in the rest of the way. At the same time, M’Grash got his footing, and then tipped Edgar back on to his roots. Then the two bigger players strode ashore.