Potlendh

by David J. Wallis

  “But I cannot dive into this lake and start talking to people who live underwater?”

  “I’m sorry, Colonel, but that is the only way to get the potion that will grow you a tail.”

  “You must do it for me,” the Colonel insisted.

  “You promised that if I told you how to acquire a tail that you would let us go.”

  “Well, I’ve changed my mind. You all must accompany me and my Guerrillas to this lake, talk to these Submarians or whatever, convince them to make the potion and give it to me, and then—and only then—I will set you all free.” The Colonel was very adamant about this, and in the end the Group had no other choice than to agree to the Colonel’s demands. Otherwise, this story might very well have ended with a statement like this: the Group lived unhappily ever after in the forest of the Guerrillas.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SUBMARINE LAKE

  The trek through the forest was a problem. First, the guerrillas did not want to walk on the forest floor, because they were afraid that an unseen enemy might attack them; even a snake, a frog, or a stone that could trip them up was regarded as an enemy. Second, carrying the Dragon and the Unicorn would be hard work because they were so heavy; also, the thought of being carried while swinging from treetop to treetop had no appeal to Cassandra and Uniqua, and they objected to being treated like bags of grain and slung over someone’s shoulder. In the end a compromise was made: the Rabbits were carried on the backs of three Guerrillas; Uniqua and Cassandra were allowed to walk through the forest while a band of Guerrillas followed them from above; and the twins would accompany the Colonel who traveled through the treetops by walking on planks of wood securely placed and supported by Guerrillas as they moved along. (Picture several pairs of Guerrillas racing ahead to lay down a plank of wood, only to pick it up again after the three humans crossed over it, and then racing ahead through the treetops to put the plank down again to make a continuous bridge.)

  Other than an occasional slip or almost-fall by the twins as they tried to walk these planks so high up in the air, the journey to the vast lake in the northeastern corner of the Island was fairly uneventful. It did give the twins a good look at one of the Island’s features that proved to be very important later.

  The Mountain of Power was indeed a separate Island inside Potlendh, for it was completely surrounded by a great moat of water that could only be navigated by boat. Between the western moat and the Guerrillas’ forest, a marshland had formed an almost impenetrable barrier, just as the Dearth Desert did west of Derkesthai, and prevented anyone from getting close to the moutain. Anyone who tried to cross the marsh was swallowed up by lakes of quicksand and never seen again. So, it appeared that even if the Group had not been captured by the Guerrillas, they still would have had to journey to Submarine Lake; maybe it was just lucky that they were captured by the Guerrillas and escorted safely to the lake.

  A large river flowed lazily out of the swamp and gradually grew wider and wider until it entered this huge lake. By huge, I mean that you could not see the far eastern shore from the western shore. From the Group’s vantage point, it looked as though they had come to the sea again, except that there were no beaches, and the water moved calmly, almost placidly, against the shore. To the east of this lake, stretching from the forest to the northernmost point of the lake, low lying hills ruled by one tall, pointed volcanic mountain hemmed it in to keep it from getting any larger, and beyond that to the east sat miles and miles of flat grassland.

  “End of the line,” the Colonel finally announced to everyone’s relief. By this time the trees had thinned out, and the Guerrillas did not want to go any further. Besides, they were very afraid of the water, and they remained high up in the last line of trees.

  Cassandra waddled up close to the lapping water of the lake, sniffed it, and then took a drink. She spat it out quickly. “Tastes like bath water,” she complained.

  “It is because of the marsh west of here,” the Colonel explained. “Puts something into the water. It won’t kill you, but I wouldn’t want to drink it, either.”

  “So, what do you we do next?” Carl asked. “Build a boat?”

  “There will be no boat-building,” Uniqua stated authoritatively. “To build a boat we need trees. The only trees around here belong to Why. And if we start chopping down trees, then Why is going to be after us, and right now we don’t need any more enemies—or busy-bodies, for the matter,” she added derisively.

  “Then how are we going to get out there,” he pointed to the center of the lake, “so we can meet these Submarians?”

  “We walk,” the Unicorn replied.

  “Walk?” the twins exclaimed together. “We can’t walk on water,” Carl added.

  “Correct. We will have to walk into the water and along the bottom of the lake.”

  “But how can we breathe underwater?” Karen asked.

  “Karen, I believe this is where you will have to use one of those precious wishes,” Uniqua whispered into her ear. She did not want the Colonel to know that the children still had four magic wishes they could use. Otherwise, they might never escape captivity. Karen did not like the idea, but she nodded her head slowly in understanding.

  “Now, Colonel,” Uniqua addressed the human. “If you will set the Rabbits free, I will gather my group together and prepare to enter the water.”

  “How are you going to breathe?” The Colonel looked at the Unicorn in a rather suspicious way.

  “Oh, I shall manage, never fear, Colonel.”

  “And how will I know that you will keep your word?”

  “You have the solemn oath of a Unicorn. What more would you need?” Uniqua was a bit offended by the Colonel’s tone.

  “No, no,” the Colonel said. “I’ll need more than that. I will keep the Rabbits, the Dragon, and the children while you go meet them Submarians and have them fix me up the potion.”

  “I need the children to go along with me,” Uniqua insisted. “I have no hands to carry anything.”

  “The children stay,” the Colonel argued back. “Something tells me that they are more important than anyone else in this Group.”

  “Then, you stupid, stubborn old man, you will remain a tailless monkey for the rest of your life. It might be worth being your captive for the rest of our lives just to watch you suffer and be miserable. If you do not allow me to take the children, that is what will happen.”

  The Colonel thought this over and rubbed his chin with his left hand. “You can take the girl.”

  “No. Both go.”

  “Then the boy.”

  “No.”

  “Well then, blast you, no one goes!” the Colonel exploded.

  “Fine with me,” Uniqua stated, holding her head up high. “Come, children. We will return to the Guerrillas’ Base and laugh at this tailless monkey.” She started to lead the twins away.

  “Wait!” The Colonel was frantic. He was so close to having his dream come true, and yet he was allowing his arrogance to steal it away from him. “All right. The twins can go with you. But if you are not back by this time tomorrow, then you will never see your friends again.”

  “Agreed,” Uniqua said. “Now, if you will leave us alone, we will begin our preparations for entering the lake.”

  “How are you going to do that?” the Colonel was curious.

  “Magic!” Uniqua blurted out rather perturbed. She was becoming very impatient with the man, and every minute talking to him was another minute wasted. She waited until the Colonel walked away so that she could talk to the children.

  “I can create an air bubble that will allow me to breathe under the water. But I’m afraid that it will not be large enough for you two. How are we going to solve that problem?”

  “I’ll use one of our wishes,” Karen said flatly. “Besides, if we were inside your air bubble, it would be very hard to walk around and talk to the Submarians, right?”

  “You’ll have to use one of your wishes, Sis,” Carl told her. “I only
have one wish left, and I’d like to keep it a while.”

  “Right,” Karen agreed. She closed her eyes and thought about how to phrase the wish in the best way. Then she opened her eyes, turned, and faced the lake. “I wish that Carl and I can breathe underwater while we travel in the lake and meet the Submarians.” Then she waited for something to happen.

  “Uh, nothing happened,” Carl remarked, as he, too, was expecting a change to his body.

  “Well, there’s nothing to be done but to try it,” Karen sighed heavily, and she started to walk into the lake. “You guys wait for me. If I get into trouble, you’re going to have to rescue me.” She stepped into the water and shivered. “It’s kind of cold.” But she continued until the water reached her knees, then her bottom, and finally her chest. “Here goes!” And, she dove head first under the water.

  Meanwhile, Uniqua and Carl waited anxiously. It seemed a long time when Karen did not come back up to the surface. Carl was just about to ask Uniqua if they should go in and get her when Karen suddenly appeared.

  She wiped her hair off her face and pushed it back over her head. “It’s okay. It works. Come on in!”

  Uniqua’s horn began to glow a soft blue. “I’m ready. Are you?”

  “Not really,” Carl admitted. “I don’t like water.”

  “Now you tell me.”

  Still, Carl walked alongside Uniqua into the water. The Unicorn quickly dived under the surface and disappeared. Carl turned and looked sadly at the Rabbits and Cassandra, gave them a little farewell wave, took a deep breath, and then sank beneath the water.

  “You don’t have to hold your breath, Carl,” Karen told him, swimming up next to him.

  “Whoa! You can talk!” he exclaimed. Then a moment of panic overcame him as he realized that he had just let all of the air out of his lungs. He started to panic and swim up to the surface, but Karen held him firmly.

  “Breathe!” she commanded.

  “I can’t!” Carl yelled back. “Everyone knows you can’t breathe under water!”

  “Then what are you doing right now?” Karen smirked.

  Carl stopped struggling and suddenly realized that he was breathing quite normally, just as if the water was really air. “Wow! This is amazing! You were right about it being cold though.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Karen said as she pushed away from her brother and started swimming further away from the land.

  The twins could see just the bluish horn of the Unicorn in the distance, and they swam towards her.

  “There is a steep drop-off just a few feet ahead,” she told the children. “Wait until you see the view.”

  Now, how best to describe the scene just as the twins saw it might be a problem. Let us say that we take a bowl and sink it into a pail of water. Visualize that there is also a lip on this bowl, and it was on this lip that the children and the Unicorn were standing. At the bottom of the bowl sat a huge city, and this city glowed with a phosphorescent light. At present, they could not see any people and began to wonder what the Submarians looked like.

  “The adventure begins,” Uniqua announced, and she kicked off the lip and started to descend into the bowl.

  “You mean ‘continues,’” Carl corrected her, but the Unicorn did not hear him.

  Down, down, down the trio descended. Soon they started encountering the tops of a large underwater forest. But these were not trees of bark and leaves but giant stalks of seaweed. It was several minutes before their feet reached the floor of this forest, and it was thick with the vegetation weaving gently back and forth. They would have to rely on their general sense of direction to keep from being lost.

  “We should swim over the tops of the seaweed,” Karen suggested.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Uniqua interrupted her thoughts. “We have company.”

  Gliding effortlessly through the great stalks came a party of Submarians towards the trio, and they did not look pleased. Their greenish, scaly bodies were humanoid in shape, but they had these long tails that propelled them quickly through the water. Their heads and faces were fishlike, to describe them best. Their mouths were perpetually open as they breathed in water and passed it out through gills in the backs of their necks. They had no noses at all, and their eyes were huge, almost all iris so that they could see very well. And the tops of their heads narrowed at the crown and sported what looked much like a fin that crept all the way down to the base of their spines.

  “If you value your lives, do not move,” the leader of the Submarian party warned the trio. He pointed his short trident-like weapon at them.

  “We come to talk,” Uniqua told the leader.

  The Submarian stopped his advance. “You can talk!” He seemed surprised.

  “Most of us do,” Uniqua responded.

  “What’s more amazing is that we can understand each other,” Carl said quietly to his sister.

  “Must have been part of the wish.”

  “If you can understand me, then you know that you have violated the territory of Submaria,” the leader informed his prisoners.

  “Well, how else does one meet someone unless they do some violating?” Uniqua questioned. “It’s not like you have any communication with the world above, do you?”

  “We have no use for the air world,” came the reply.

  “Unfortunately, we have a use for the water breathers,” Uniqua challenged back. “Now, if you would be so kind, as we do not have much time, please escort us to your city and to someone who is in charge. We have an urgent request to discuss.”

  “You are a bold one, aren’t you?”

  “Let’s dispense with all the formalities, shall we? I am Uniqua, a Unicorn (if you haven’t met one before), and these two are children, Carl and Karen by name. What shall we call you?”

  The Submarian gawked at the Unicorn. Finally he spoke. “I don’t think you can pronounce it, but you may call me Gill.”

  Carl covered his face to hide his grin. Perhaps he was expecting some name like “Fish,” but “Gill” was enough to want to make him laugh.

  “All right, Gill, then take us immediately to your city. Time’s a-wasting,” Uniqua directed Gill.

  The Submarian obviously was not used to taking orders from outsiders, and his eyes narrowed with anger. But then since his mission was to intercept intruders and take them to his commander, he decided not to address this offense by Uniqua. Later, perhaps, after the intruders had been found guilty of trespass and punished, he could exact some revenge.

  He waved his trident in Uniqua’s face, pressing against the air bubble. “No tricks. I will not hesitate to use this, and your life will be forfeit. Your body will feed the fishes.”

  The other Submarians of his party surrounded the trio and they swim-marched through the seaweed forest until they came to its end. There a road paved with dark brown stones led unerringly (in a straight line) to the city walls. Now, this part of the story could be told very quickly if it were not for one very important incident that happened during this time, as it will have great bearing later on in the adventure.

  Carl pretty much kept his head down. He didn’t want to get all tangled up in the seaweed vines. But as much as he tried, it seemed that the forest did not like intruders either, and every so often a vine would move towards his feet and tried to trip him. He succeeded in avoiding all attempts until the last, which proved to very fortuitous. Down he went, spreading his hands out in front of him as he fell in a slow motion towards the lake floor. As his right hand slid on the muddy bottom, it touched something rather metallic, and he instinctively clutched at it. Before he could right himself and look at his find, rough webbed hands grabbed him and quickly shoved him out of the seaweed forest. To prevent the Submarians from knowing that he had found something, he quickly shoved the metal object into his pants’ front pocket.

  Now the city drew closer quickly. (Well, actually the city did not move at all. This is just the way some writers like to describe the situation
when people get close to something.) The three captives saw that the city walls were built very high, at least six times the twins’ height, and Carl thought that having walls in the first place was kind of silly. He believed that anyone who wanted to get into the city badly enough could just swim over the top of the wall. He did not know that the walls were there to prevent giant mud slugs from entering the city, for these giant mud slugs could not swim but had to slither along the bottom of the lake. It was a good thing, too, that these giant mud slugs were all asleep at this time. Blind, they ate everything they encountered except for stones, and the twins would have made a tasty, although a quick, snack.

  Their guards pushed them through an arched gate that had opened just as the party neared and was quickly closed behind them after they were in the city. Gill swam up to the front and was met by another Submarian, with whom he had a short discussion. The twins felt that Gill and the other Submarian were more or less of the same rank, but it was hard to tell who was an officer and who was not as the Submarians did not wear any clothes or insignia. Anyway, the other Submarian hurried off towards a nearby building that acted like some kind of military headquarters.

  “I have announced your capture,” Gill told Uniqua. “Now, we will await my commander, and she will decide whether or not to have you fed to the fish or to the mud slugs. Personally, I think I would choose the mud slugs. They eat faster.”

  The second Submarian returned, following dutifully behind a rather large Submarian who bore a slightly larger trident. Although this creature was female, other than having a slightly orange tint to her scales, the trio could not tell her sex from their captors.

  “Intruders!” the Commander spat out contemptuously, which means that she did not have a nice word to say to the twins and the Unicorn. “Spies, I would wager!”

  “My dear Commander—” Uniqua began but the Commander cut her off.

  “You dare to talk?”

  “I talk, and I will talk whether or not you like it.” Uniqua was becoming rather angry now, and at the moment she did not care if she made the Commander madder or not. “Time is precious, and we have very little of it. Lives are at stake. Now, we can play these silly little games of yours, or we can get right down to some diplomacy, make a deal, and be on our way.”