The White Fox

by James Bartholomeusz

  “Jack, Lucy,” Ruth continued, “can you come down to the command deck afterwards? There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “This way, please,” said Quentin. He hoisted himself over the side of the hatch and began clanking his way down the metal ladder.

  Jack and Lucy looked apprehensively at one another. Then, one after the other, they clambered onto the ladder and descended into the dome.

  Ruth did a quick visual sweep of the area (an action rendered virtually useless by the fog) and shouted into the mist, “All hands below deck.” Waiting for the clanging of other hatches to recede, she pulled herself onto the ladder and slammed the hatch shut above her head. Instantaneously, with the sensation of a sinking elevator, the ship started to descend into the water.

  Twenty minutes later, Jack and Lucy found themselves standing outside the command deck. Their latest journey had been a blur of bustling men and women, all in a seeming hotchpotch of clothing. Impelled by their guide through a network of tunnels and stairways, all corridors with identical dark wood panelling and lit with soft gaslights, they had been shown the way to their rooms several floors below. They had torn off their filthy school uniform and netball kit and thrown on a collection of seemingly miscellaneous and mismatched items of clothing and accessories.

  Jack was now dressed in a flamboyant waistcoat over a woollen white shirt, with two layers of cotton trousers and absurd cowboy boots. Lucy looked like a fortune-teller in a couple of shawls, trousers straight out of a stage version of Arabian Nights, an extra large man’s shirt, and several bangles. She had opted to keep her torn-up trainers after offers of clogs, Wellington boots, and leather bags as alternative footwear. Both of them had looked at each other and acknowledged the silent consensus that it was good that their rooms didn’t have mirrors.

  Jack knocked, the door emblazoned with a stylized golden turtle symbol, and a moment later the answer came.

  “Come in.”

  They opened the door and entered. Whatever Jack had been expecting, this was not it. The walls and ceilings of the room were a single curved dome of glass, entirely transparent, save for the metal framing. Beyond the dome, barely illuminated by the jets of gold projected from the lights below them, was the blue black of deep ocean. They appeared to be surging above the ocean floor at considerable speed. Looking up, only a glimmer hinted at the surface of the water.

  “We’re under the sea?” Lucy murmured, quite unnecessarily given their surroundings.

  “Yes, you are,” came a cold reply from somewhere in front of them.

  The contents of the room were computer panels and screens set around the edges facing inwards, a dozen crew members keying things in or following readings on numerous radars and relays. In the center, set into an indentation in the carpeted floor, was a large oak table, apparently anachronistic with the high-tech electronics around it. Pinned to it were several faded maps decrying strangely shaped islets and illustrations of fantastical sea beasts around the edges. Ruth and another woman were standing by it, examining something.

  Ruth was stunning, but Jack’s attention couldn’t help but be attracted by the other woman, the one who had spoken. She was like no one he had ever seen. She was taller than both him and Lucy by several inches and extremely slim. She looked vaguely Middle Eastern. Her jet-black hair was plaited down her back, and she was wearing a serene blue tunic with silver trimming. Her clothes would have seemed strangely medieval were they not set next to Ruth’s, Jack’s, and Lucy’s own fashion chimeras. Her eyes were even darker than Ruth’s yet surprisingly cool, and her face had an oddly pinched look.

  As they came closer, she stood up straight, regarding them imperiously. “So this is Jack Lawson?” she said, her voice calm and genteel.

  “Yes,” Ruth said, then seeing Lucy’s expression, “and this is Lucy Goodman.”

  The strange woman stepped around the table and offered her hand to Jack. He took it cautiously and shook it. As he did so, he noticed something else. Her ears were pointed upwards ridiculously far, past the level of her eyes, almost to points.

  “Jack, Lucy, this is Adâ Sharif. She’s our escort to the mainland.” Then Ruth saw Jack looking at Adâ’s ears. “And this might come as a bit of a shock to you, but she’s an elf.”

  Jack was about to challenge this, but then he remembered what Vince had said about becoming reeducated in this new world.

  Adâ’s hand tightened momentarily, and she looked into Jack’s eyes, as if daring him to challenge it. Jack stared back defiantly, and she let go.

  Adâ turned, taking no more notice of Lucy than if she had been a balsa-wood hat stand. “I would have greeted you earlier with the others, but I cannot stand that girl Gaby.”

  Neither Jack nor Lucy said anything. Both knew what the other was thinking.

  Over the rest of the day, Jack and Lucy were given a flurried tour around the ship by Quentin. Along increasingly claustrophobic tunnels of panelled wood, they were taken to the kitchen, the dining room, and below to the mechanical workings of the ship—reactors, turbines, and generators that neither Jack nor Lucy thought could ever work, looking as they did like the inventions of a cartoon evil scientist. It took Jack a while to realize that The Golden Turtle was not just a name. The entire ship was literally built in the shape of a gigantic metallic turtle, with the command deck as the head.

  Though the tour was quite dull (not helped along by Quentin’s increasingly monotonous attempts to sound piratey through an Etonian accent), they came across many of the crew who were going about their day’s work. From the bits of conversation they had with them, most of them seemed very amiable and friendly. For once, Jack threw himself much more into conversations with strangers than Lucy, who remained stoic and visibly uneasy throughout.

  Eventually, the jet lag began to kick in, with the realization that they had been awake for almost twenty hours. After the tour, they were shown back to their own small cabins. Both tried to sleep but found it impossible. Somehow, they had come out on this planet midmorning, despite leaving at midnight. But then, Jack thought, that probably happened when you jumped two hundred thousand light-years through space.

  In the end, Lucy managed to doze off, but Jack gave up and took to wandering around, talking to the crew and taking in the atmosphere.

  Whilst exploring, Jack discovered an observatory dome on the top deck—one panel of the turtle’s shell made of transparent glass rather than metal, through which he could sit and watch. They had risen over the course of the day, so that now they were much closer to the surface. The echo of silver moonlight glittered above, dancing on the surface of the water. Evidently, the fog had cleared.

  “So how are you enjoying your first voyage aboard The Golden Turtle?” said a voice behind him.

  Jack whipped around to see Ruth leaning casually on the railing, her arms folded. “I was just getting some fresh air,” he said awkwardly. He felt very like a small child, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

  Her expression broke into a grin. “Don’t worry. You’re not part of the crew,” she said reassuringly, coming to stand next to him. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t give you jobs to do. Everybody’s got to pull their own weight here.”

  “Yeah, Quentin made that very clear.”

  Ruth laughed. “He’s harmless really. The crew joke about him, but he’s the one who keeps everyone organized. God knows we need it, with so many different worlds, each with their own missions.”

  “Missions?”

  “We help out the Apollonians wherever they’re working—usually ferrying goods and people around various worlds. Mostly humanitarian aid for worlds devastated by the Cult, though we do occasionally get involved with direct conflicts.”

  Jack nodded, looking upwards. He made out hints of starlight. “There are so many stars. You don’t get them like this on Earth.”

  “Not as many as there used to be.”

  Jack turned to her, but she offered no explanation.

  “What did
you think of Adâ?”

  “She’s … nice,” Jack said slowly.

  Ruth laughed. “She likes being intimidating, and the elf thing doesn’t help. We have passengers on board all the time but none—no offence—as completely clueless as you and Lucy. You handled it fine, though.”

  “Thank you.” Jack laughed, a little more at ease.

  “So, how are you?” she asked. “Missing home?”

  “Not as much as I thought I would,” he replied. “I don’t have a lot to go back to anyway. I’m an orphan.”

  “I’m so sorry. Did you know your parents?”

  “Never did.” He paused for a moment. “Where do you come from? Have you got any family there?” Jack glanced at her. She was staring resolutely at the undersky, watching the crystal clear ripples of light on the waves.

  “I don’t remember. I don’t remember much at all. The Cult … they got me about five years ago. My earliest memory is being locked up in Nexus—that’s their base world. I don’t remember my home, my family … anything.” She rolled up the sleeve of her right arm and held it out to him. The lion tattoo he had glimpsed earlier was imprinted in black across her veins. “This is all I’ve got from before I lost my memory. This and a dream I keep having …” She faltered. Finally, she spoke again, rolling her sleeve back down. “How did you get through?”

  Jack had never been asked that before. When he told people he was an orphan, they were sympathetic for a moment, then avoided the issue for fear of awkwardness or upsetting him. “Friends,” he said. “Friends got me through it.”

  “Yeah,” Ruth continued, “I suppose, in the end, that’s all that counts. I was lucky. I escaped and got picked up by The Golden Turtle. The captain here … his name was Ishmael. He took me under his wing. He was like a dad, I guess. But then he died. A blood disease. And the crew elected me captain … and here I am.” She turned to look at him fully.

  He met her eyes. They were slightly red.

  They stood in silence for a minute.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said.

  “It’s alright.” Ruth smiled. “I can deal with it.”

  “So, where are we going?” And the conversation continued from there.

  There they stood, two adventurers, lost from homes they never knew, staring upon the underside of the starry dome of darkness and light. In twenty-four hours, Jack’s life had changed forever. He had been sent from his home to another world and was now moving, unseen, under the waves towards an unknown destination. On the brink of this brave new world, he at least knew he had someone he could rely on.

  And, though it surprised her to think it, so did Ruth.

  Part II

  “Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer”

  “The Second Coming”

  W. B. Yeats

  Chapter I

  lake, mountains and goblins

  After three days of subterranean sailing, they reached their destination.

  Jack had finally managed to get to sleep in the early hours of the first night, only to be woken again by a loud bell at seven. True to what Ruth had said about the ship traversing different worlds, every main room aboard the ship had at least nine clocks next to one another on the wall, each with a different series and amount of numbers or symbols. Jack had looked at the others with interest but had quickly given up trying to understand them. Eleven o’clock was equivalent to a squiggle, a blue triangle, a broken circle. Five o’clock, a lightning bolt, a flagon of ale, a spear, a sofa with wings, and a green moose. He could only guess which one their new destination adhered to.

  True to Malik’s words on the beach, the crew were remarkably non-alien. Whilst most of them looked human enough, some of them had pointed ears that hinted at being the same race as Adâ. Jack felt he should find out exactly what an elf was, but there were more burning questions he needed to ask. He tried once or twice with different sailors, but they had evidently been told not to say anything about his and Lucy’s circumstances, so he gave up.

  As it turned out, Quentin was a laughingstock amongst the rest of the crew, who kept joking that he was out to kill anyone who didn’t fit into the minutiae of his clockwork planning. They all seemed to view Ruth half as their captain and half as their collective little sister. Many of them made allusions to Ishmael and how Ruth could never have had a better father figure.

  They answered Jack’s questions about the ship and made constant attempts to get Lucy involved when she was sitting in lonely silence. Jack’s suspicions that The Golden Turtle was far more technologically advanced than anything on Earth were confirmed. For one thing, you could easily not notice changes in depth or diving and surfacing actions. As his grasp of earth science was patchy at best, he decided not to pursue the subject.

  When he asked about what the crew actually did (implying that they were pirates), the two he was talking to, Aonair and São, burst into laughter.

  “It’s a righ’ loose term,” Aonair had said in his thick Irish brogue.

  “It is indeed,” São had continued with a Spanish roll. “Think of all the worlds we go through and all the different countries in those worlds, each with their own laws. We cannot possibly keep track of them all. Anyway, there are some fairly disrespectable regimes in place.”

  “We make our own and keep to those.” Aonair nodded. “And if occasionally we get in trouble with the law, then so be it. They’re a righ’ side worse than us, but ‘cause they’re doing it on behalf of a country, then apparently that’s all fine.”

  Exactly as Ruth had said, they had been worked very hard on board. Even though there were no female members amongst the crew, having a woman as the captain meant there was no traditional sexism. This meant that both Jack and Lucy, devoid of any sailing or navigational-computer skills, were drafted into the kitchen, peeling white-tinged parsnips and grey potatoes, and running seawater through an ultrafast distillation machine. Lucy had come to expect deferring behavior and selective equality rolled into one. Neither was present aboard The Golden Turtle. Jack found her many times during breaks sitting in her room, tinged green with claustrophobia and kitchen odors. It didn’t help that Ruth seemed to find this quite amusing every time she walked past.

  To his surprise, Jack had been fine with seasickness. He’d been on a ferry only once, on a school day trip to Calais, and had thrown up three times. This was different; he was restrained below deck, and there was no smog being pumped back in his face. He did, however, begin to feel the impact of the enclosed space during the second day. He had never gone so long without sunlight, and though the cabins and hallways were lit softy, he was beginning to feel the pressure for fresh air and openness.

  Ruth, meanwhile, was no hypocrite. She mucked in with the rest of the crew, working just as hard, if not harder, than any of them. The huge disparity between the work ethic of her and Lucy was hard to ignore.

  Jack was below deck on day three, catching several well-earned hours of sleep, when he was unusually awakened not by the bell but by Quentin’s own rendition of a wake-up call. This comprised of a long poetic monologue about rising from the night into the morning, interspersed with bursts of pirate dialect. In the end, Jack got out of bed just to shut him up.

  On the command deck, the crew were frantically preparing to surface. Ruth, Lucy, and Adâ were already there, watching as the voluminous blackness receded into lighter and lighter shades of blue green.

  With his bearings completely gone, Jack had no idea where they might be surfacing. As the water pressure thinned, rocky outcrops—pillars of stacked stone reaching up from the deep like giant fingers—became visible around them. A moment later, the briny water around the glass began to bubble frantically, and the water sloshed off it, as if drained away. For the first time in three days, natural light broke through the dripping screen, refracting off the glass in rainbow cylinders. They appeared to be in some sort of lake, surrounded by rocks.

  “Come on up to the hatch,�
�� Ruth said, leading the way.

  Jack and Lucy followed her, Adâ bringing up the rear, through the network of tunnels to the bottom of the ladder.

  Ruth climbed up, unscrewed the hatch, and pushed it open. As soon as she was clear of the ladder, the others followed.

  The mist was still clinging to the air, though not as thick as before. They were indeed in the middle of a mountain lake, with no apparent connection to any other body of water. Jack could only assume they had come out of some subterranean passage. The lake seemed to be in a valley basin—on all sides, iron-grey rocks loomed, forming into peaks high above them. The only way out of the valley was a rocky path, snaking in between two large boulders and around a cliff face up towards one of the mountains. A small tree, its leaves a dead grey color, sagged on its side on the water’s edge, looking as if it were about to keel over into the lake. He breathed in, and the air tasted tangy, as if cooking spices had been evaporated into it.

  “Do we have to walk from here, then?” Lucy asked sullenly.

  “Yes,” replied Ruth. “Yes, you do.”

  Lucy glared at her.

  The tensions between the two had been running high over the last few days, a combination of sleepless nights, a great deal of work, and Lucy’s constant complaining. Ruth seemed to be the first girl of Lucy’s age who didn’t look up to her like some divine sending. It made a nice change, Jack thought privately, though letting it on to Lucy would be tantamount to a signed suicide note.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Jack asked her.

  “Sorry,” Ruth said, smiling. “Business calls. This one’s another Apollonian mission. No doubt the Cult have stuck their oar in somewhere …” She did a little drumroll on the side of the rail.

  Everyone ignored her.

  “The rings?” Adâ prompted her.

  “Oh yeah. I won’t be a minute.” Ruth disappeared down the hatch.

  Jack, Lucy, and Adâ stood in awkward silence on top of the turtle, waiting. Jack had barely spoken to Lucy since they’d arrived on the ship. They’d both been either sleeping or working, or Jack had been engaged with the crew members or Ruth. He now felt quite guilty that he’d left her to flounder for three days. And neither of them was particularly keen to strike up a conversation with Adâ, whose icy temperament didn’t seem to have melted at all since they’d met her.