by Kai Meyer
It was Munk who had the idea of the book.
Jasconius was bade farewell with all the honors of Aelenium and sent to the bottom of the sea for the last time with heavy weights. The day after, Ebenezer asked to be allowed to tour the library of Aelenium, and Munk readily offered to show him around. In the course of the afternoon Ebenezer told him of his exploratory work along the coast some thirty years before, of his writings about the insect world of Orinoco, of his drawings. And of course, how much he regretted that all that work had been lost after his apparent drowning.
Munk remembered what Jolly had told him about her search for the poison spiders of the Skinny Maddy. In the library she’d stumbled on a book written by a missionary three decades ago, which had, however, only been taken to Europe and printed there after the author’s reported death in a shipwreck.
After the tour with Ebenezer, Munk located the book in a corner of the library and took it to Jolly. She and Griffin were beside themselves with joy when they discovered the author’s name on the title page. Griffin, especially, was so happy about the find that he immediately ran to Soledad, who was just taking a first timid walk with Walker along the balustrade outside the palace. Griffin told her everything, and she rejoiced with him. Even Walker murmured a few approving words.
That evening, when they were all eating together and the winged serpent was cozily curled up under the window, his feathers illuminated by moonlight, Griffin suddenly stood up, asked for silence, and proposed a toast to the dead Jasconius and to Ebenezer. Then he ceremoniously handed the monk the book from the library.
Ebenezer, who’d spent thirty years in the belly of a whale, opened the leather cover and saw his name. Overcome, he sank into his chair and burrowed feverishly in the pages, while Jolly and Griffin held hands under the table. Buenaventure walked up behind Munk, thumped him on the shoulder, and whispered in his growling dog voice that there were great heroes’ deeds, like conquering a maelstrom, and small ones, like making a grieving man extremely happy, and one was hardly inferior to the other.
On that evening they sat together for a long time, enjoying each other’s company, telling stories, making plans, and dreaming of the future here in Aelenium and elsewhere. The whole time, Ebenezer held the book firmly pressed to his breast like a long-lost son, and when he thought no one was looking at him, he ran his hand over it and wiped a tear from the corner of his eye.
Several weeks after the battle around the sea star city and the end of the Maelstrom, Soledad put on one of the diving suits again, furnished it with a bubblestone, and dove down into the deep with Jolly. Her shoulder still hurt a little, making her right arm move more stiffly than her left, but on the whole she was amazed at how well it went.
For a while they sat on one of the steel links of the anchor chain, with legs dangling over the dark blue abyss. Jolly could hear what Soledad was saying behind her mask, and although she already knew the story of the meeting in the undercity, she gladly listened a second time, for now Soledad described every detail and also what she’d asked of the giant serpent. Jolly remembered the feeling that had overtaken her and Munk when they’d explored the undercity together during her first days in Aelenium, the panic and the knowledge that something was behind them, very close to the edge of polliwog vision. Suddenly there was a meaning to all that, and she realized that the thing that followed them hadn’t necessarily meant them harm.
She looked over at the steep coral walls of the undercity, which vanished jaggedly somewhere deep below. The holes and splits, but also the beauty of these tortuous shapes, moved her, though differently from the first time.
At last she nodded to Soledad, and together they went on their way. The princess led Jolly to a cavern and through it they entered the undercity. Now it was Jolly who swam ahead, her polliwog vision making it easy for her to orient herself in the dark caves and tunnels. Soledad had some of the lantern stones with her and used them to mark their return.
It didn’t take long for them to reach a deep vertical shaft. Jolly was quite certain that it was the same one through which she’d dived with Munk.
Soledad exchanged the bubblestone under her diving helmet, and then she looked down into the darkness. Jolly tried to imagine how frightening this bottomless blackness must be without polliwog vision—even she felt uneasy, though she could see a hundred times farther than Soledad.
She was all the more astonished when the princess suddenly said, “It’s coming.”
Jolly was about to ask what made her so certain, but at that moment she knew it herself.
Beneath them, where the shaft merged with the darkness at the edge of Jolly’s vision, something was moving. The darkness billowed, and then something emerged from it, a mighty reptilian head, triangular, with slit pupils, followed by a monstrously long serpent body. The creature shot up to them, outstretched like an arrow, displacing such a quantity of water that the pressure on the two intruders pushed them two or three fathoms upward.
Soledad remained very calm, while Jolly had to fight with herself not to flee before the swiftly approaching sea serpent. The crack in the wall through which they’d glided out into the shaft appeared to be unreachable now.
Then the serpent slowed its ascent, the currents ebbed. The head rose up in front of them and stopped on a level with their faces.
“We’ve come to thank you,” said Soledad under her helmet.
The serpent regarded her for a long time without any recognizable reaction. Then its gaze swung over to Jolly. The mouth opened a crack and a fine forked tongue groped forward, straight to Jolly.
“Don’t be afraid, it won’t do anything to you.” Soledad’s voice sounded so muffled under the helmet that it wasn’t at all clear how convinced she was of her own words.
But then something strange happened. One moment Jolly was about to recoil from the tongue—yet immediately afterwards all fear fell away from her. It happened at the same moment that both tongue points touched her cheek, stroked down it, velvety soft, wandered under her chin, along her neck, and over her leather clothing down to her heart. There it stopped for two or three breaths, then with lightning speed withdrew into the snake mouth.
Jolly didn’t even sigh. All her fear was wiped away. She now understood what Soledad had felt when she faced this creature the first time. It was a feeling in such overwhelming contrast to the fearsome appearance of this giant reptile that it made her quite dizzy.
“Soledad said you protected the anchor chain from the kobalins,” said Jolly to the serpent. Was she deceiving herself or did understanding flare in the cold serpent eyes? “Without you the city would have been annihilated by the tidal wave.” She thought for a second, but then she couldn’t think of anything else except to bow in the water. “Thank you,” she said.
The serpent’s head whipped up and down several times, which might be a gesture or only the result of an occasional current. Finally its tongue was thrust out a second time, touched Jolly, then Soledad, and vanished into its mouth again. The serpent body made a tight loop in front of them, rushed past them endlessly, and shot back into the deep.
Jolly and Soledad floated in the shaft a little longer, gazing silently into the darkness below their feet. Finally the princess said, “I wanted you to see it yourself. So I know that I didn’t just dream it.”
“It’s very beautiful,” said Jolly. “And very old, I think.” She remembered Jasconius, who now rested somewhere on the sea bottom, and she wondered how many such creatures there might still be down there in the darkness. Creatures whose looks instilled fear in any human and yet in truth were completely different from what everyone saw in them. A shiver ran down her back, but this time it was a comfortable feeling, born of the certainty that even her meetings with gods and water spinners were only a glimmer of all the wonders that awaited her in the world.
They turned around, crossed the undercity on their marked route, and soon were swimming through a curtain of sunbeams that reached down into the water, refrac
ted a million times and sparkling.
“Do you think the worm can dive in his new body?” asked Soledad, just before they broke through the surface. “If so, there’s someone down there he should arrange to meet.”
Laughing, Jolly grabbed the rung of the iron ladder and climbed up onto the arm of the sea star.
Griffin was waiting for her on the embankment. Walker and Buenaventure were with him, and all three were eagerly awaiting what Soledad and Jolly had to tell them. Later they had to repeat it for Munk and the Hexhermetic Shipworm and a third time for the Ghost Trader, who nodded abstractedly at their words and then silently walked back into the library, supported by Forefather’s staff, as if recent events had robbed him of years of strength.
His parrots sat on each of his shoulders, one with red eyes, the other with yellow, and they didn’t even move when he walked out onto Forefather’s balcony alone, looked over the night sea, and thoughtfully breathed deeply. He looked down at the coral cliffs, from which new buildings were already being carved, then up to the plateau at the peak where several rays wheeled like shadows that swallowed the stars.
At last he looked down at the shore, at the water between the edges of the sea star and the fog ring, and his gaze penetrated the depths of the ocean, where he saw many creatures, the mighty and the very tiny. He saw Jasconius dreaming in darkness, and he also saw the magic veins, newly woven where they had been torn apart.
Hugh and Moe whispered softly in his ear. The Ghost Trader turned and went inside. His staff clacked at every step; the sound followed him like an unseen companion.
He closed the door to the balustrade softly behind him and made his way into the labyrinth of books. Munk and Ebenezer were waiting for him with thousands of questions to which there were ten thousand answers.
Presently the three of them were sitting in the midst of all these stories, a boy, a monk, and a god. When the Ghost Trader became aware of this, he laughed aloud, and when they asked why, he murmured something about fate and age and knowledge, and he acted secretive and mysterious, so that they wouldn’t realize what moved him. But the truth was that he enjoyed their company and, for the first time in a long time, his own as well.
Far removed, behind coral walls, corridors, and halls, Jolly and Griffin were kissing. They watched Soledad and Walker at their gibing, listened to the serpent under the high arching window grooming his feathers with whispering tongue, and finally looked over Buenaventure’s shoulder as, by candlelight, on a huge sheet of paper, he refined his plans for a new ship, a three-master like the Carfax, but slimmer and faster, he hoped.
Later they walked out into the moonlight, wandered along an arcade of columns outside the palace, smelled the salty sea, and watched the campfires of the workers down on the cliffs.
And that night, finally, Griffin completed the coral picture on Jolly’s back.
