The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  “What are you looking for?” asked Tanni.

  “That green beard . . . the one I wore to the Count of Monte Cristo’s masquerade ball last week . . . thought it’d come in handy.” Alex tossed articles of apparel every which way, and Tanni sighed. “You see, I’ve already been to the Admiralty in my proper persona, and they wouldn’t order out the fleet to catch those pirates – said the routine patrols were adequate. Going over their heads, through Parliament and the King, would take too long. . . . Ah, here!” He emerged with a hideous green beard, fully half a meter in length.

  “I’ll go direct to Lord Nelson, who’s in town,” he went on. “It’s best to do it incognito, to avoid offending the Admiralty; this beard is disguise enough, not being included in the Hokas’ Jones-Gestalt. Once alone with him, I’ll reveal myself and explain the situation. He’s pretty level-headed, I’m told, and will act on his own responsibility.” He put the beard to his chin, and the warmth of his body stuck it as fast as a natural growth – more so, for the synthetic fibers could not be cut or burned.

  Tanni shuddered at the loathsome sight. “How do you get it off?” she asked weakly.

  “Spirits of ammonia. All right, I’m on my way again.” Alex stooped to kiss her and wondered why she shrank away. “Wait around till I get back. It may take a while.”

  The foliage flapped around his chest as he went downstairs. “Scuttle my hatches!” said someone. “What is it?”

  “Seaweed,” theorized another. “He’s been too long underwater.”

  Alex reached the dock and stared over the tangle of rigging and tall masts which lay beyond. The Hokas had built quite a sizable navy in expectation of imminent Napoleonic invasion, and HMS Intolerable lay almost side by side with Incorrigible and Pinafore. Their mermaid figureheads gleamed gilt in the light of a lowering sun – that is, Alex assumed the fish-tailed Hoka females to be mermaids, though the four mammaries were so prominent as to suggest ramming was still standard naval practice. He couldn’t see where the Victory was. Casting about for assistance, he spotted a patrol of sailors swinging along with a burly little Hoka in the lead. “Ahoy!” he yelled.

  The patrol stepped smartly up to him, neat in their British Navy uniforms. “Tell me,” said Alex, “how do I get out to the flagship? I must see Admiral Lord Nelson at once.”

  “Stow my top-hamper!” squeaked the leader. “You can’t see the Admiral, mate. ’Tain’t proper for a common seaman to speak to the Admiral unless spoken to first.”

  “No doubt,” said Alex. “But I’m not a common seaman.”

  “Aye, that you are, mate,” replied the other cheerfully. “Pressed right and proper as a common seaman, or me name’s not Billy Bosun.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand –” Alex was beginning, when the meaning filtered through to him. “Pressed?

  “Taken by the press gang of Billy Bosun for His Majesty’s frigate Incompatible,” said the Hoka. “And a fair bit o’ luck for you, mate. The worst hell-ship afloat, not counting the Bounty, and we sail on patrol in two hours. Toss the prisoner into the gig, men.”

  “No! Wait!” yelled Alex, frantically trying to pull his beard loose. “Let me explain. You don’t know who I am. You can’t –”

  As he himself had remarked, the Hoka musculature is amazingly strong. He landed on his head in the bottom of the gig and went out like a light.

  “Pressed man to speak with you, Cap’n Yardly,” said Billy Bosun, ushering Alex into the captain’s cabin.

  The human blinked in the light from the cabin portholes and tried to brace himself against the rolling of the ship. He had been locked in the forward hold all night, during which time HMS Incompatible had left England far behind. He had gotten over a headache and a tendency to seasickness, but was frantic with the thought that every minute was taking him farther from Tanni and his desperately urgent mission. He stared at the blue-coated, cocked-hatted Hoka who sat behind a desk facing him, and opened his mouth to speak, but the other beat him to it.

  “Does, does he?” growled Captain Yardly. The fur bristled on his neck. “Thinks he signed on for a pleasure cruise, no doubt! We’ll teach him different, b’gad, won’t we, bosun?”

  “Aye, sir,” said Billy stiffly.

  “Wait, Captain Yardly!” cried Alex. “Let me just have a private word with you –”

  “Private, eh? Private, damme!” exploded the Hoka. “There’s no privacy aboard a King’s ship. Ain’t that right, bosun?”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “But if you’ll just listen to me for a moment –” wailed Alex.

  “Listen, b’gad! I don’t listen to men, do I, bosun?”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Nothing in the articles of war that makes it my duty to listen! My duty’s to flog, b’gad; keelhaul, damme; drive the mutinous dogs till they drop! Stap my vitals, eh, bosun?” Captain Yardly snorted with indignation.

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Alex took a firm grip on his temper. He reminded himself that there was no use arguing with a Hoka once he had decided to play a certain role. The only way to handle him was to act along. Alex forced his face into a meek expression.

  “Sorry, Captain,” he said. “The truth is, I’ve come to confess that I’m not what I appear to be.”

  “Well, that’s different!” huffed the officer. “Nothing against my listening to a man’s confession as long as I flog him afterward any way.”

  Alex gulped, and quickly continued: “The truth is, Captain, this green beard of mine is false. You probably think I’m one of these outworlders you see occasionally, but without it, you’d recognize me at once. I’ll bet you can’t guess who I really am.”

  “Done!” roared the skipper.

  “Huh?” said Alex.

  “I wager I can guess who you are. Your name’s Greenbeard.”

  “No–no–”

  “Said so yourself.”

  “No, I said –”

  “SILENCE!” thundered the captain. “You’ve lost your wager. No carping, damme. It’s not done. Not sporting at all. I’m appointing you first mate, Mr Greenbeard, in accordance with regulations –”

  “Regulations?” stammered Alex. “What regulations?”

  “Pressed man always appointed first mate,” snorted Captain Yardly, “in spite of his well known sympathy for the crew. Got sympathy for the crew, haven’t you?”

  “Well . . . I suppose so . . .” mumbled Alex. “I mean . . . what kind of first mate would I be – No, wait, I’m all mixed up. I mean –”

  “No back talk, if you please!” interrupted the Hoka. “Step lively and drive her smartly, Mr Greenbeard. We’re headed around the Horn, and I want no malingerers aboard.”

  “The Horn?” goggled Alex.

  “You heard me, Mr Greenbeard.”

  “But –” protested Alex wildly, as Billy Bosun started pulling him by main force out of the cabin. “How . . . how long a voyage is this supposed to be?”

  The captain’s face dropped suddenly into an unhappy, embarrassed expression.

  “That depends,” he said morosely, “on which way we go.”

  And he turned and vanished through a connecting door into the inner cabin. His voice came back, somewhat muffled: “Clap on all sail, Mr Greenbeard, and call me if the weather freshens.”

  The words were followed by what sounded like a sob of desperation.

  Giving up further argument as a bad job, Alex went back on deck. A stiff breeze drove the Incompatible merrily over a sea which sparkled blue, to the sound of creaking boards and whining rig. The crew moved industriously about their tasks, and Alex hoped he wouldn’t be needed to direct them. He could pilot a spaceship between the stars, but the jungle of lines overhead baffled him.

  Probably he wasn’t essential though. He was simply part of the pattern which the Hokas followed so loyally; in the same way, all that talk about gruesome punishment must be just talk – the Navy felt it was expected of them. Which was, however, small consolat
ion, since the same blind devotion would keep the ship out here for as long as the orders said. Without this eternally cursed beard, Alex could easily take command and get back to shore: but he couldn’t get rid of the beard till he was ashore. He had a sense of futility.

  As he walked along the deck, his eyes lit on a completely incongruous figure leaning on one of the guns. This was a Hoka in shirt and trousers of coarse cloth, leather leggings, a chain-mail coat, a shaggy cape, a conical helmet with huge upcurving horns, and an interminable sword. A pair of very large and obviously fake yellow mustaches drooped from his snout. He looked mournful.

  Alex drew up to the anachronism, realizing he must be from the viking-culture area in the north and wondering how he had gotten here. “Hello,” he said. “My name’s Jo –” He stopped; it was useless to assert his identity till he got that triply damned spinach off his face. – “Greenbeard.”

  “Pleased to meet yü,” said the viking in a high-pitched singsong. “Ay ban Olaf Button-nose from Sveden. Have yü ever ban to Constantinople?”

  “Well – no,” said Alex, taken somewhat aback.

  “Ay was afraid yü hadn’t,” said Olaf, with two great tears running down into his mustache. “Nobody has. Ay come sout’ and signed on here, hoping ve would touch at Constaninople, and ve never do.”

  “Why?” asked Alex, fascinated.

  “To yoin the Varangian Guard, of course,” said Olaf. “Riches, loot, beautiful vimmen, lusty battles, ha, Odin.” He shed two more tears.

  “But –” Alex felt a twinge of compassion. “I’m afraid, Olaf, that there isn’t any Constantinople on this planet.”

  “How do yü know, if yü never been there?”

  “Why, because –” Alex found the conversation showing the usual Hoka tendency to get out of hand, He gritted his teeth. “Now, look, Olaf, if I had been there, I’d be able to tell you where it was, wouldn’t I?”

  “Ay hope yü vould,” said Olaf pessimistically.

  “But since I haven’t been there. I can’t tell you where it is, can I?”

  “Exactly,” said Olaf. “Yü don’t know. That’s yust what Ay vas telling yü.”

  “No, no, no!” yelled Alex. “You don’t get the point –”

  At this moment, the door to the captain’s cabin banged open and Yardly himself came popping out on deck.

  “Avast and lay forrad!” he bellowed. “All hands to the yards! Aloft and stand by to come about! We’re standing in to round the Horn!”

  There was a stampeding rush, a roar, and Alex found himself alone. Everybody else had gone into the rigging, including the helmsman and captain. Alex turned hesitantly to one of the masts, changed his mind, and ran to the bows. But there was no land in sight.

  He scratched his head and returned amidships. Presently everyone came down again, the crew growling, among themselves. Captain Yardly slunk by Alex, avoiding his eyes and muttering something about “slight error – happen to anyone –” and disappeared back into his cabin.

  Olaf returned, accompanied by Billy Bosun. “Wrong again,” said the viking gloomily.

  “Rot me for a corposant’s ghost if the crew’ll take much more o’ this,” added Billy.

  “Take more of what?” inquired Alex.

  “The captain trying to round the Horn, sir,” said Billy. “Terrible hard it is, sir.”

  “Are they afraid of the weather?” asked Alex.

  “Weather, sir?” replied Billy. “Why, the weather’s supposed to be uncommon good around the Horn.”

  Alex goggled at him. “Then what’s so hard about rounding it?”

  “Why, nothing’s hard about rounding it,” said Billy. “It’s finding it that’s so hard, sir. Few ships can boast they’ve rounded the Horn without losing at least part of their crew from old age first.”

  “But doesn’t everybody know where it is?”

  “Why, bless you, sir, of course everybody knows. It doesn’t move around. But we do. And where are we?”

  “Where are we?” echoed Alex, thunderstruck.

  “Aye, sir, that’s the question. In the old days, if we were here we’d be about one day’s sail out of Plymouth on the southwest current.”

  “But that’s where we are.”

  “Oh, no, sir,” said Billy. “We’re in the Antarctic Ocean. That’s why the captain thought he was close to the Horn. That is, unless he’s moved us since.”

  Alex gave a wordless cry, turned, and fled to the captain’s cabin. Inside it, the skipper sat at a desk mounded high with sheets of calculations. There was a tortured look on his furry face. On the bulkhead behind him was an enormous map of Toka crisscrossed with jagged pencil lines.

  “Ah, Mr Greenbeard,” he said in a quavering voice as he looked up. “Congratulate me. I’ve just moved us three thousand miles. A little matter of figuring declination in degrees east instead of degrees west.” He glanced anxiously at Alex. “That sounds right, doesn’t it?”

  “Ulp!” said Alex.

  In the following four days, the human gradually came to understand. In earlier times, native ships had found their way around the planet’s oceans by a familiarity with the currents and prevailing winds, but with the technology of 1800 had come the science of navigation, and since then no Hoka would lower himself to use the old-fashioned methods. With the new, some were successful, others were not. Lord Nelson, it was said, was an excellent navigator. So was Commodore Hornblower. Others had their difficulties. Captain Yardly’s was that while he never failed to take a proper sight with his sextant, he invariably mistrusted the reading he got and was inclined to shift his figures around until they looked more like what he thought they should be. Also, he had a passion for even numbers, and was always rounding off his quantities to more agreeable amounts.

  Under this handicap, the physical ship sailed serenely to her destination, guided by a non-navigating crew who automatically did the proper thing in the old fashion at the proper time. But the hypothetical ship of Captain Yardly’s mathematical labors traversed a wild and wonderful path on the map, at one time so far at sea that there was not enough fresh water for them to make land alive, at another time perched high and dry on the western plains of Toka’s largest continent. It was not strange that the skipper had a haunted look.

  All of which was very unsettling to the crew, who, however willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, were finding it somewhat of a strain even on their elastic imaginations to be told they were in the tropics at one moment and skirting the south polar ice the next. Their nerves were on edge. Moreover, Alex discovered, the consensus among them was that the captain was becoming too obsessed with his navigation to pay proper attention to the running of the ship. No one had been hanged for several weeks, and there hadn’t been a keelhauling for over a month. Many a Hoka standing on the sun-blistered deck east longing glances at the cool water overside and wished he would be keelhauled (which was merely fun on a planet without barnacles). There was much fo‘c’sle talk about what act could be committed dastardly enough to rate the punishment.

  “If you want a swim, why don’t you just fall overboard?” asked Alex of Billy Bosun on the fourth day.

  The Hoka’s beady eyes lit up, and then saddened again. “No, sir,” he said wistfully. “It’s contrary to the articles of war, sir. Everybody knows British sailors can’t swim a stroke.”

  “Oh, well,” said Alex helpfully. “If you’ve got scruples –” He picked up the boatswain and tossed him over the rail. Billy splashed into the sea with a howl of delight.

  “Shiver my timbers!” he roared gleefully, threshing around alongside and blowing spouts of water into the air. “I’m murdered! Help! Help! Man overboard!”

  The crew came boiling up on deck. Small furry bodies began to go sailing into the sea, yelling something about rescue. The second mate started to lower a boat, decided to pitch the nearest sailor into the ocean instead, and followed him.

  “Heave to!” screamed Alex, panic-stricken. “Man – er – men overbo
ard! Bring her about!”

  The helmsman spun the wheel and the ship pivoted into the wind’s eye with a rattle of canvas. Whooping, he bounced up on the taffrail, overbalanced, and fell. His joyously lamenting voice joined the chorus already resounding below.

  The door to the captain’s cabin flew open. Yardly rushed out. “Avast!” he cried. “Belay! What’s about here?” He headed for the rail and stared downward.

  “We’re drowning!” the crew informed him, playing tag.

  “Belay that!” shouted the captain. “Avast drowning, immediately. Call yourself British seamen, do you? Mutinous dogs, I call you. Treacherous, mutinous dogs! Quarrelsome, treacherous, mutinous dogs! Careless, quarrel –”

  He looked so hot and unhappy in his blue coat and cocked hat that Alex impulsively picked him up and threw him over the side.

  He hit the water and came up spouting and shaking his fist. “Mister Greenbeard!” he thundered. “You’ll hang for this. This is mutiny!”

  “But we don’t have to hang him, do we?” protested Alex.

  “Blast my bones, Cap’n Greenbeard,” said Billy, “but Yardly was going to hang you.”

  “Ay don’t see how yü can avoid it,” said Olaf, emptying sea water out of his scabbard. “Ve ban pirates now.”

  “Pirates!” yelped Alex.

  “What else is left for us, Cap’n?” asked Billy. “We’ve mutinied, ain’t we? The British Navy’ll never rest till we’re hunted down.”

  “Oh well,” said Alex wearily. If hanging the ex-captain was considered part of the pattern, he might as well play along. He turned to the two seamen holding Yardly. “String him up.”

  They put a noose around the captain’s neck and politely stepped back. He took a pace forward and surveyed the crew, then scowled blackly and folded his arms.

  “Treacherous, ungrateful swine!” he said. “Don’t suppose that you will escape punishment for this foul crime. As there is a divine as well as a Hoka justice –”

  Alex found a bollard and seated himself on it with a sigh. Yardly gave every indication of being good for an hour of dying speech. The human relaxed and let the words flow in one ear and out the other. A sailor scribbled busily, taking it all down for later publication in a broadside.