The Walrus and the Warwolf coaaod-4

by Hugh Cook

  These tales he told, and others equally incredible. All were disbelieved – and for a very simple reason. They were all true. And, as is well known, truth is far, far stranger than fiction.

  'Methinks in truth this Hexagon's a place so boring a traveller must fiction it up to win half a hearing at all,' said old Gezeldux.

  'No,' insisted Drake. 'We have strange things there, strange things. Look – this was given me by the Baron's eldest daughter. Is it not strange enough for you?'

  And he showed off a cameo brooch, the only one he had ever seen. The Baron's eldest daughter, when prisoner on the Warwolf, had used it to bribe her guard of the moment – Drake – to admit her manicurist to attend most urgently to two broken nails and a disgustingly dirty set of cuticles.

  'A trinket,' said Gezeldux, with something in his voice suggesting he might have sneered had that been in his nature. 'There's nothing strange about that.'

  'Ah,' said Drake, 'but I'm living proof of strangeness myself. I've matched you drink for drink, yet my hands don't shake.'And he held them out sober in front of him.

  'You see,' said Drake, 'on Hexagon we worship the Flame, and as a priest of the Flame I am guarded against all intoxication.'He saw Yot looking at him, scandalized; he winked.'What's this Flame?' asked a voice.Drake told. His audience fell about laughing.

  'Don't laugh,' he said. 'People have been killed for less than that.'

  But he could not convince them that anyone could take such fabrications seriously.

  'And,' said old Gezeldux, 'my hands aren't shaking yet either. See?'

  This naturally precipitated a drinking contest, which Drake, equally naturally, won.

  His tale about being a priest of the Flame, consecrated to eternal sobriety, began to win some credence. The hard drinkers of Brennan set out to test it in earnest. They fed him with ale and with rum, plied him with vodka and strawberry liqueur, topped his mug with Essence of Anemone and spiked it with Heavenly Dreams, dosed him with cider and treated him to cognac – all with no effect.

  By that time, everyone in the bar (except Drake) was thoroughly drunk.

  'Boy,' said Gezeldux, slurring his words, 'you've been good enough for most things, but I bet you're not good enough for this.'

  And he pulled out a blue-glazed ceramic bottle and thumped it on his counter.'Firewater, boy, the Old Original from the very Ebrell

  Islands themselves. I bet you've not seen firewater before.'

  'No,' said Drake, just a touch of uncertainty in his voice.

  He had certainly never seen firewater, but he had heard whispers of its evil reputation in sundry drinking places everywhere from Stokos to the Teeth. Until now, he had thought its threat apocryphal. But here it was. The stuff itself.

  Gezeldux tipped the last of the salted sprats out of the free lunch bowl, and slowly poured the firewater. The liquid curled slowly through the air, hissing as it hit the bowl. The bowl filled. Green flames danced across the surface.

  'Come now,' said Gezeldux, as Drake hesitated. 'A priest of the Flame doesn't fear a fire as small as this – does he?''No,' said Drake, still uncertain.

  'Courage, son,' said Jon Arabin, just sober enough to stay upright in his chair. 'You're a hero, aren't you?''Right!'said Drake.

  And picked up the bowl with all due ceremony, and drank.

  The firewater was cool, it was cold, it slid down like raw fish then flashed red-hot in his stomach. His vision blurred as veils of darkness hazed the room. He felt dizzy. Then, swiftly, his head cleared again, and the fire in his belly died down.

  'A good drop,' he said, seeing that the bowl was still half-full.And drank the rest.

  'Holy mother of a million octopuses!' breathed Gezeldux, who had not been so awed for fifty years or more – not since the time he first saw Big Bertha's breasts.

  'You see?' said Drake, with the triumphant arrogance of youth, putting down the empty bowl. 'There's nothing that can touch me!'That was too much to bear.

  'Oh isn't there just,' muttered Gezeldux grimly. T tell you what, young sprig – I bet you can't stay sober on this.'

  'Five bricks to a buggering says that I can,' said Drake – which was not actually a bet but simply a bit of gutter-Galish well known from Drangsturm to Chi'ash-lan. 'What is it?''This!' said Gezeldux.

  And slapped a small bottle of green cut glass onto the counter. Slapped it down so hard it almost broke. It was a mess of dust and cobwebs, but, polished up quickly, it glittered. With hands that shook slightly, Gezeldux pulled the glass stopper. Then he poured the contents into a transparent drinking glass, a rarity of special manufacture that was not just transparent but was (when scrupulously clean) actually invisible.

  Out of the bottle of green cut glass came an orange fluid that writhed slowly in the glass.'What is it?' asked Drake.

  'I've no idea,' came the frank reply. 'My great-greatgrandfather took it from the body of a drowned wizard. Never been nobody with the nerve to try it yet.'

  'Then I'll be the first,' said Drake, thinking if it was safe for him to drink firewater then it was safe for him to drink anything.He took the glass and downed it.

  Almost immediately, several things happened. His legs went rubbery. He fell off the chair, and found the view from the floor hilariously funny. Then he started to float upwards.

  'Whoa, boy!' cried Jon Arabin in alarm, grabbing him by the trouser leg before he could float away entirely.T can fly!' cried Drake. 'Look at me!'

  And he waved his arms like a bird, and, pretending to be an experimental navigational aid, started flapping in the direction where he guessed the Greater Teeth could be found. He broke free from Arabin's clutches, but was brought up short by the ceiling.

  'I always thought you were full of hot air,' shouted Bucks Cat, who had long since forgotten that he was supposed to be a deaf mute.

  'Aye,' shouted Whale Mike. 'Full of fart-flame and belly-gas.'

  And Drake, looking down on them all, and admiring -in particular – the look of utter stupefaction on Sully Yot's face, collapsed in hysterical laughter. Collapsing thus, he fell toward the drinkers, who shouted in alarm and scattered from their chairs. Then Drake burped, and floated up toward the heights again.Was he tipsy?He was drunk!

  Yes, truly, wildly, gloriously drunk, the world around him softened to the luxury of velvet, his body and psyche immune to the pull of gravity – it was wonderful!

  The wizard brew he had drunk had been truly enchanted, and its enchantment, being an anomaly beyond the control of the normative functions of the universe, was not subject to detoxification by his body-worms. Drake was not aware of this technicality, but he did rightly guess – even though he was guessing drunk – that somewhere in the world there must be a further source of this ambrosia.

  'Wizards,' muttered Drake to himself. 'Aye, wizards . . . that's the answer.'

  22

  Goudanism: worship of the Flame (the living presence of the High God of All Gods); veneration of Gouda Muck, swordsmith of Stokos, who is avatar of the Flame, 'as will be verified in the fullness of the Infolding, when Rose and Flame are as one'; corpus of dogmas, rituals, feasts, festivals, superstitions, rules, regulations and denials associated with worship of said Flame and said Gouda Muck.

  Drake woke next morning to find himself floating just off the floor, arms outstretched and fingers trailing. Staring at the ceiling, he wondered which hell had claimed him. His head was full of broken glass, his eyes hurt, and his throat felt as though someone had rammed a dirty mop down it. Aye, and left that mop soaking there overnight.

  Feeling sick, he rolled over, in case he had to vomit. He hung just above the bare floorboards, observing, without striving for cognition, a dead wine skin, half a salted sprat, a splattering of fish scales, and a solitary cockroach making a hesitant tour of inspection. Then saw, out of the corner of his eye, a green cut-glass bottle lolling on its side.

  Now he remembered. Now he knew where he was. This was the bar run by old Gezeldux in Brennan, on Carawell. He w
as not in hell at all – he just had a hangover. Just! He had forgotten how bad they were.

  Clutching a table leg, Drake hauled himself to his feet. He took a couple of steps forward, walking on nothing but air, then slipped. He grabbed the table to steady himself,

  then worked his way round the bar. Slowly. Investigating. He opened shutters. Winced as harsh sunlight streamed inside. The cockroach-scout broke off its patrol and fled for shelter.

  Motes of dust drifted in the sunshine. Shadows sprawled from mugs, tankards and dead wineskins. A fly, flitting through an unshuttered window, began to dizzy around with an irritating hum. Shading his eyes and peering outside, Drake saw the backside of a boatshed, a couple of houses, and a large stone building which, on the basis of a familiar clanking-hammering sound which started to issue from it, he identified as a forge.

  Drake's head began to pound rhythmically in time with the hammering of the unseen blacksmith. Somewhere, quite close, a cockerel began to crow:'Co co rico! Co co rico!'

  The fly settled momentarily on the table. Drake brought his hand down with an almighty thump, sending more dust swirling into the air. He examined his stinging palm for corpse mash – but the insect in question was flying happily round his head. It settled shortly oh a shutter. Drake picked up a wineskin and hit it, hard and accurate. The fly dropped dead, the shutter fell off its hinges, and two more flies came bumbling in through the window.

  Drake grunted in disgust, and, head hurting worse than before, looked for a hair of the dog which had bitten him. But there was no such dog. The little green bottle was empty, and even a hearty swig of vodka failed to have the slightest impact on his hangover, which, being a consequence of enchanted liquor, was naturally beyond the reach of all ordinary remedies.

  The only instant cure for that hangover was a drachm of fresh blood drained from a living salamander of the blue-gilled variety. But these were extraordinarily rare: even the salamanders sometimes seen in the flames of Drangsturm were but the more common green-gilled variety, which has blood useless for anything except removing wine stains from linen (and even the evidence for that use is dubious, consisting as it does of a reference in Cralock which is ambiguous, an assertion in the 'Regiment of Reptiles' which cannot be given much weight since the scholarship of Prenobius has thrown doubt on Gibble's corpus in its entirety, and a mention in Zoth which in all probability – and despite the claims of Elkstein to the contrary

  – actually refers to the taniwha of Quilth, an altogether different creature).

  Drake knew nothing of salamanders of any variety, but did know his booze. He sampled all types available

  – which did not take him long, as the bar had been almost drunk dry the night before – then concluded he could not kill his hangover but must suffer it. He did not know it, but he would go on suffering from that hangover for the next five and a half days. If he lived that long.

  Drake grunted, stretched, yawned, scratched his scalp, rubbed his head, pulled on the few hardly noticeable ginger hairs which these days straggled out from his chin, burped, farted, yawned again, took off his boots so he could pull the wrinkles out of his socks, pulled on his boots again, and felt as ready to face the world as he was likely to be on that particular day.

  He felt by now that he had got the knack of walking around with his heels touching nothing but air, so it was with some confidence that he stepped outside. The sunshine was warm. The cockerel had shut up – with any luck, someone had strangled it. The blacksmith had quit hammering; a busy sound of filing now came from the forge. Within a shuttered house, someone – a big, big fat man, by the sound of it – was snoring loudly.

  Drake grunted to himself, his grunt meaning, 'Demon's thanks, the racket's died down.'

  The next moment, a small blac'k-and-tan dog ambushed him, jumping from beneath a propped-up dinghy, barking wildly. It snapped at his heels, almost dared itself to bite, then backed off growling ferociously. Drake liked dogs – usually – but today he was not in the mood. He swung a kick at the cur, lost his balance, fell over, threw out an arm to save himself – but never hit the ground. He just hung there, floating. He was not amused. The dog leaped forward and started worrying his wrist.'********!' said Drake, shaking it loose.

  Or, to be precise, to give (in the interests of accuracy) form to that which a misguided prudery would rather suppress:'Salk felsh!'

  As he regained his feet, Drake said a few other words of similar nature. Then tore a fishing-float free from a drying net, and threw it. The float scudded past the dog's left ear, and the mongrel turned and fled.

  Drake's throat was too sore to allow him the satisfaction of hurling abuse at its scampering heels.

  He walked between forge and boatshed to the waterfront. A couple of dozen fishing boats were drawn up on the sandy beach; several larger ones lay at anchor in the harbour bay. Further out was the Sky Dancer, the ship Arabin's men still insisted on calling the Warwolf. A few people were moving about on deck; the unintelligible tones of their voices came drifting through the still, calm air. Tiny wavelets lapped against the sands like kittens eagering on cream.

  Drake looked around for a boat so he could row to the ship. He saw a number of dinghies, all lying clear of the water. All looking heavy. And none had oars. Drake paused, shrugged, then walked out across the water.

  By the time he reached the ship, he was having no trouble at all with his negative gravity. Those on deck crowded to the rails to watch, so he showed off a bit. Striding over the water with great aplomb, Drake paraded around the vessel, feeling still very sick but very clever all the same.

  'Stop playing the fool, man!' shouted Rolf Thelemite from the deck. 'We need you up here, fast!'

  Drake made a rude gesture for Rolf Thelemite's benefit. Then the Walrus himself, Slagger Mulps in all his hairy glory, shouted in a regular storm voice:

  'Drake, you son of a snake-spawned cockroach, get your arse up here, now, before I come down there and kick it off!'

  Drake was just considering whether the Walrus was also worthy of a rude gesture, and what his (Drake's) chances of survival would be if he made one, when the last of the enchantment wore off, suddenly and without warning. Gravity reclaimed him, and he fell into the sea, which was shockingly cold and wet besides. He spluttered and floundered a bit, while those on deck laughed loudly, then he swam overarm to the anchor cable, where he hung resting until a rope ladder was dropped so he could scramble up.'Here!' bellowed the Walrus. 'What's up?' asked Drake. He soon found out.

  As the Walrus swiftly told him, in language almost salty enough to blister paint, Jon Arabin had been taken hostage by the locals, who thought that Baron Farouk of Hexagon would be worth a handsome ransom. They were holding him in the Bildungsgrift, an ancient (and usually abandoned) broch some three leagues inland. All of the locals had fled.

  'No they haven't,' said Drake. 'There's someone snoring, and a blacksmith working still.'

  'That forge is full of haunted metal,' said the Walrus grimly. 'I've been to see for myself. As for the snoring – that's Whale Mike, dead drunk in a stranger's bed. It would take six of us to shift him.'

  'It wouldn't have taken six of you to shift me,' said Drake, slightly aggrieved.

  'Aye, no,' said the Walrus, uneasily, 'but we had no time to search the town proper.'

  In truth, a raiding party had gone ashore at dawn, had found Whale Mike asleep, had investigated the forge -and had fled immediately, having seen lean limbs of skeletal metal working unattended, stoking the furnace for the morning's work.

  'Well then,' said Drake, 'it's a hard day for Jon Arabin, that's to be sure, but I'm off to bed. Wake me tomorrow so I can hear how you've handled it.'

  'Not so fast!' said the Walrus, grabbing Drake by the collar as he sauntered away.

  The collar, being rotten, tore free – but Drake stopped anyway.'What do you want from me?' he asked.

  'Your luck,' said the Walrus. 'Man, the fortunes you've won by gambling – you're so fay you can luck t
his out blindfolded with both hands tied to your testicles.''Luck be buggered,' said Drake, turning away.

  'Hold fast!' said Mulps. 'You'll be buggered yourself with a sealing spear unless you come to order quickly. I'm putting you in charge of rescuing friend Warwolf.'It was, Drake sensed, no idle boast.

  'Okay then,' he said sullenly, 'I'll get Jon Arabin loose, or get him killed by trying.'

  'None of that!' said the Walrus. 'Your life rides with his!'

  'Ouch!' said Drake, his glorious stock of obscenities entirely failing him in the face of this news.

  He saw – he was thinking fast, now – that Mulps had decided the situation was hopeless. They were like to lose Jon Arabin, which meant no admiral's hopes for the Walrus, hence no chance of extra booty to be divvied up between the crew, and thus, for a start, the possibility of civil war between the men ex-Walrus and the Warwolf originals.

  Slagger Mulps was looking for a scapegoat, and had found one in Drake, the lucky one, whose glamorous dice and youthful insolence had not exactly made him widely beloved, at least not amongst the crewmen from the Walrus.

  Jon Arabin's men thought better of Drake, as he had found when the Warwolf tried to have him thrown overboard more than a horizon away from the Teeth. But would they stand staunch against the Walrus? For an entire crew to face down Jon Arabin on Drake's behalf was one thing. For them to fight it out cutlass to cutlass with the likes of Ish Ulpin was another thing altogether.

  Likely those from the Warwolf would throw in their lot with the Walrus men. Likely the men would relieve their frustrations by battering Drake to death. Which would suit Mulps just fine.'He won't do it,' said Simp Fiche loudly.