Chapter 1 - Shipwrecked
Time sprawled out… too far? Let’s see.
Jodee’s disordered horde clustered round the stilled hooves of the colossus. Over the crowd fell the four-pronged umbra of the marble stalactite udder. Some tourists hunched low behind their pluckier comrades, as though struggling under the shadow’s weight. Most of the throng simply laughed and jeered. They held heads, shoulders, and primitive weapons high. These were the unplagued pick of Jodee’s partisans. What did it matter that their war machine stayed its hooves? In the righteousness of their cause and the vigor of their health, they felt invincible.
In two steady, organized arcs on the colossus’s flanks, the Glorious Defense Force stood at the ready. Their hands held guns. The chambers of the guns held bullets…
Yep, too far. Let’s go back a bit.
Time held the rewind button…
Hissing like a maniacal goose, The Thick and Sweaty Wind squeezed through the amphora door-seam. She threw herself against the dense water outside the vessel wall. She heaved the heavy sea away from the amphora, and worked a broad bubble of air around the earthenware hull. Silt and sand flew in the gale. Gemstone Moss - long-blooming with emeralds over the boulders of the sunken depth - withered. A new smoky quartz overgrew the stones in the new hot air. These sweeping changes, The Thick and Sweat Wind made in a tock.
The following tock, the ceramic hatch sprung wholly open. It smacked the ceramic hull. The hull proved stronger, and the door exploded into pottery shards on the silty sea floor. The vessel’s host of occupants gushed through the hole. The Wind pulled them out after her; as the callous, leathery hands of a dairy farmer draw the frothy milk from the swollen udder, plink by plink into an old metal pail; just so did The Wind draw the tourists from the amphora. They tumbled onto the damp sand in their entirety, one spill of people.
Mr. Grey’s grey hands pushed his body up and away from the fellow passengers, at the same time trying to avoid actually touching those forms. He regained a proper upright posture. His grey legs picked a high-kneed, steam-swan-like path through a jumble of robes, torso, heads, and limbs. He stepped through the people pile. His grey voice apologized each time his automaton tread brought a groan from a fellow passenger. But, notwithstanding those unmeant hurts, he beat a quick escape.
Only when his feet had left a dozen shoe prints in wet open sand did Mr. Grey pause and collect himself. He dusted his robe with mechanical arm-swings. He noticed dry blood beneath his nose in the reflection of a puddle, and rubbed the flaky trickle off with a windshield-wiper twist of knuckles.
Mr. Grey gathered his bearing while the tourist pile untangled. The amphora’s tall, double-eyepatched captain rose, tall and looming like a Bottomworld shade. He pulled a long spyglass from a deep fold of his robe and mounted to the peak of a sea-floor crag. Tom also emerged, shook fellow-passengers off like fleas, and stomped over the bodies. He walked to where Mr. Grey posed like a fretting statue. Honeydew jumped agilely from the crowd and stalked over with them.
The passengers smoothed themselves out while The Wind blew hot and busy. Honeydew spoke first. She said, “Are Odormoat trips this jarring one hundred percent of the time?” She flicked her hand mirror open with a sharp snap and swiped at the wet silt sticking to her cheek.
Mr. Grey looked across the wet sand and rocks. He roamed his eyes up and down the vine-covered hulks of waterlogged, wooden ships; long ago sunk and claimed by the deep. He glanced at the groove of darker sand, where their amphora had plowed up the seafloor. “There are some upsides,” he said weakly. “At least it’s not dark. I thought the sea floor was dark.”
Honeydew looked from the mirror’s reflection. She threw a hand over her eyes and set them following the giant, glowing, spiny pufferfish; swimming the deep sea, far above their little air bubble. This fish, which had brightened their descent, now threw daylight across the broad, desolate depths. Its shine pierced the bubble and threw their wavy shadows against the sand.
Honeydew made one annoyed click. She looked back at her mirror. She rubbed at its surface, fogged over by The Thick and Sweaty Wind, to no avail. She made another click and turned to the captain. “Well? Is this the usual docking way?”
The other passengers heard her question. All turned to the captain with his spyglass on the crag. He swiveled the lens across the sand around their bubble; packed with long-lost hulks of other ships; existenceless but for the algae. He said, “Nope, this one’s a wreck.”
The passengers now added, to Honeydew’s clicks, their own snorts, shrieks, and shouts of indignation. The whole gamut of panicked, shipwrecked questions fell upon the captain’s lank spine. The castaway crowd wanted to know where they were, and what monsters lived on the bottom of the sea, and - most importantly - what they were going to eat. The captain answered only the first of these questions. In his taciturn way, he said they were in, “The vast Abyssal Desert. Between the bubbles.”
The statement did not soothe the crowd. The word ‘desert’, especially, raised alarm over the food question. Even Tom, who’d thus far engaged in the talk with only a blank face, threw out the question of, “So when’s our next lunch?”
Following a raised-voice debate, the passengers decided to take stock of the supplies left within the amphora’s humid halls. The supplies were to be set on a rocky plate outside the ship, and tabulated under the giant, glowing fish’s light.
The castaways got busy moving luggage and crates from inside the amphora. The captain paid them no mind. One of his eyes squinted. The other scanned the horizon through his spyglass.
Tom also took no interest in unloading. He had no luggage. He lumbered over the wet sea floor to a conch shell, half-buried in sand churned up by their crash. He brushed the sand away and grunted as he uncovered the shell. It rang with faint musical notes as he held it aloft. Tom brought the shell to his eyes, peered inside, then began scooping out sand with his heavy fingers.
Honeydew, on the other hand, kept a keen eye on the massing possession pile. She set oil-bright, vulpine eyes on each passenger who carried one of her own crates. The focused glare was of such intensity, that the passengers bearing her belongings to the pile unconsciously walked with greater caution, and handled her stuff with great care. Every so often, she did break from the intense accounting to glance somberly at the dour, claustrophobic habitat.
Watching all this with an outwardly-stony, inwardly-anxious expression, Mr. Grey considered what might ease Honeydew’s ire. In the usual flat tone, he said, “At least we’re not here alone.”
Honeydew maintained her angry glower on the unloading crew. Worse result; Mr. Grey himself awakened to a second meaning in his own words. Being shaken from a terracotta pot onto a vast stretch of abyssal plain had been disorienting. Mr. Grey’s self-consciousness had retreated. The sense which remained had focused on Honeydew and Tom. Now, at his own words, he awakened to a fuller recognition of his surroundings. He stood among strangers…
Mr. Grey brought his breathing to a conscious, controlled march. He pulled out and inspected his ticker. He dusted his robes and straightened his collar. The smell of seaweed filled his nose; he dabbed cologne at his neck and shut out the menacing odor. These preparations occupied him for a few timely tocks. In the same tocks, the captain swayed his spyglass from one side of the bubble to the other, and the passengers unloaded another of Honeydew’s cosmetic crates.
Honeydew attended the unloading. She made sure Mr. Grey’s violin coffin arrived at his hands undamaged. Then she returned to the stockpile. Tom threw handfuls of wet sand out of the noisy seashell and onto the ground. Neither paid attention to Mr. Grey. He unbuckled the violin coffin and - to occupy himself - checked the tuning. The strings vibrated tinnily. They seemed to quiver with fear and loneliness in that underwater dome.
While Mr. Grey, Tom, Honeydew, the Captain, and the other passengers individually occupied themselves, The Wind threw herself into keeping up the air bubble. She flurried actively across the wet sand and threw salty splashes of moisture up as she ran. One passenger dropped a box when her gusting threw hot sand into his eyes. He yelled at The Wind to, “Watch her doings!”
The Wind blew a hot retort at the passenger. “Oh, sure. I’ll just stop working. We can all cease existing at the bottom of the sea. Great plan. Any other brilliant ideas?” This last comment she addressed to the general group. If any did have something brilliant, they kept to themselves. For several moments after, the passengers attended their business with heads bent.
Mr. Grey’s violin insisted on a terrible tone, no matter how he adjusted his touch, or the strings, or his hold on the bow. The pegs held tight in their holes - as though glued in place - and the strings groaned in tense, metallic voices with each jarring turn. While swiveling his spyglass the captain captured Mr. Grey’s image on the lens. There, the miniature version of the grey man tensed and stretched with his violin; across the warped glass; pressured on all sides; lonely in the crowd.
Whispered conversation bloomed once more after an awkward period. The crowd had the luggage gathered, and Honeydew had the contents totaled. Many were already trying to establish a ration system based on total supplies. One beanpole passenger wearing a robe of banana peels suggested they eat everything at once, then hibernate, and hope for rescue.
Mr. Grey glanced from his strings toward Honeydew. He saw annoyance still showing in her folded arms, and the way she pinched the sunflower cloth of her robe’s shoulder. He moved closer and tried a new line. “At least it’s an adventure,” he said. “I doubt we’d have such… fascinating encounters - amphora shipwrecks, Abyssal Deserts - without our visa together. We’d still be confined to Starharbor’s Odormoat.”
“Sure - click,” she said, with the click being the sarcastic kind. “Starvation prospects are a real romp…”
Mr. Grey’s jaw clamped shut. His miniature in the captain’s spyglass resumed tense fiddling.
Tom sauntered over. He continued to dig a thick finger in the musical conch, loosing bits of sand every so often. Between Mr. Grey and Honeydew, he settled his eyes. They shone like steel over an ivory smile. He said, “This is exciting. Not a lake of ruby wine; even past the dome. A mare’s nest, of course,” he added, noting Honeydew’s sour look. “But still; exciting!”
Mr. Grey quitted the strings. His body shed its tension; not by any change of posture, but in the way a weather-worn sculpture seems relaxed next to one freshly carved. He clinched his violin between chin and shoulder, and brought his string fingers to his cheek in a look of ponder.
“I’m in the middle,” Mr. Grey began musingly. He held the bow angled toward Honeydew. “In the left corner; not a faultless beginning. The landscape looks grim.” A twist of wrist arced the horsehair wand towards Tom. “In the right corner; It’s just as Tom described it. There’s a thrill in this. In the unknown land. I’ve grown fond of off-roading… unexpectedly.” He let the bow hand loose between a pinched thumb and index. Mr. Grey wrapped up by saying, “It’s evidence though, supporting the Odormoats. It’s why they’re in place. To check such troubles.”
“If they were open, inexperienced boatmen wouldn’t be a problem,” Honeydew said. Her chin drooped glumly.
“But two eyepatches…” Mr. Grey gestured at the captain; unknowingly at his miniature in the spyglass lens. “Those suggest a long background.”
“The crash suggests a brief one.”
“Aha, there’s the thing,” said Tom with a satisfied sigh. His input surprised Mr. Grey. He’d assumed Tom would struggle grasping Honeydew’s half of the dialogue; spoken without Wine Medo accent. Mr. Grey looked and noticed Tom wasn’t attending them at all, but instead staring at something he’d dug from out of the shell. A tiny, ivory tuning fork hummed in his hand. It sang the musical notes of the conch.
Tom looked up from the fork. “A Siren Shell tongue,” he said. “You sometimes see them higher. In the candy reefs. They lure wings and fins.”
Tom held the fork up like a trophy. Honeydew rolled her eyes. But she took the fork Tom offered. Her sour look melted as the pearl instrument vibrated in her hand. She tossed her shoulders alternatingly, and said, “Maybe there’s some verve.”
Somehow, even as Honeydew’s mood finally brightened, Mr. Grey’s went dim. He felt as though Tom had beaten him. Felt that Tom recognized that Honeydew only wanted music to liven her mood. Perhaps to drown out The Wind’s work? That must have been her anger’s source. Mr. Grey wished he’d recognized it himself. He studied the aching strings of his violin. He felt betrayed. He sighed through his nose and loosened the tension in the pegs.
Mr. Grey sensed a presence at his shoulder. He rotated round and angled his eyes up. The two eyepatch flaps dangled below the amphora captain’s eyes as he loomed over Mr. Grey. The captain held out his spyglass. He said, “You’re a busybody type. Make yourself useful. Watch our surroundings.”
Mr. Grey - caught off guard by the abrupt command - took the spyglass. He scanned the horizon. The captain, meanwhile, turned to the crowd at the luggage pile. He asked, “Who’s going to cook supper?”
Mr. Grey dropped his spyglass hand back to his side. He turned quickly and addressed the parting captain. “Beg pardon captain. But those vine-covered shipwrecks; what’s in there, wriggling? Moving in the wood?”
The captain returned to Mr. Grey with a single stride. He yanked the spyglass from Mr. Grey’s hand and squinted through it at the waterlogged wrecks.
The wrecks sat within the bubble; easily seen by naked eye; not at all requiring a spyglass. Tom had looked when Mr. Grey asked the question. Tom gave Mr. Grey immediate answer. He said, “That would be woe worms…”
Mr. Grey’s neck cricked tockwise in time to dodge a weighty, hypodermic barb. The woe worm’s curved stinger punched by his ear in keycard fashion. The wriggling insect reeled its tail in and uttered a guttural screech. Mr. Grey retreated.
A fish swimming over the bubble looked down. From its high perspective it saw a packed disc of castaway passengers; a diverse mix of hair and robes. It thought, ‘There’s an oddly spackled rock.’
The tourists squeezed themselves around the amphora’s piled cargo. The most athletic had clambered atop the stacks of suitcases. From their view, they took a sense of hopelessness.
Woe worms twisted themselves out of the waterlogged wooden shipwrecks surrounding the amphora. The Wind carried the sniffing and snorts of the monsters on her hot air. The noise and the worms surrounded the quivering disc. When the wriggling began, Honeydew, quickest of mind, had turned for the amphora door. The worms had been waiting for her. They left slimy trails on the ship’s ceramic. No passenger had escaped inside, and now they stood, huddled together, condensing in from the worms’ terrorizing.
After Mr. Grey’s stinger evasion and retreat, Tom arrived. He ceased the worm’s existence with a squelching mallet swing. Tom seemed the only fighter. The tourists, though they outnumbered the worms, quivered and shrank. Those atop the luggage - with their clear view of the slimy, constricting, writhing ring - resigned. One woman in a coaster-patterned robe of silk wanted to end things her own way. She pulled a plastic letter opener from a sleeve and held it to her wrists. Mr. Grey thought her optimistic.
“Alas, you’re finished,” said The Wind in a tired voice. Her rushing had slowed to a hot, breezy meander; she felt it wasted effort. The bubble shrank with the woe worm ring. “I’ll tell your tale to future sailors.”
“Do something!” Honeydew barked at the captain. She reeled at the disk’s edge, shoulders ready for any too-close worm.
“Can’t, Wind’s got it right,” said the captain. His droopy eyepatches looked somber and taciturn. “Not a bad ending. Few moments of agony; a Woe Worm stinger. Then cease existing.” The captain pushed his eyepatches over his eyes. He held his arms wide and prepared to go down with his ship, albeit belatedly. Mr. Grey closed his own eyes and took even breaths. Even Tom’s arms drooped.
They waited for the worms.
The worms wriggled closer.
A noise like thunder through water pried Mr. Grey’s eyes open. He looked past the mass of woe worms. He looked beyond the edge of their shrunken dome.
Something was coming.
Another pocket of air zoomed toward their bubble’s membrane. The two domes joined. A mounted phalanx of soldiers lanced into the amphora clearing from this second bubble. Their mounts beat a dumpy, muffled, ambling rumble on the soft seafloor. The soldiers atop wore robes in a style stranger than Wine Medo’s; long and thick down to the ankle, but with a lessening of fabric near the torso. The robe rested over the left collarbone of each rider by a single cloth band. It left their hairy chests and tanned shoulders bare; scandalously-so, thought Mr. Grey. Beneath the robes they wore metal breastplates. Matching bracers glinted from the soldiers’ wrists as they repeatedly raised their right hands to whip the mounts’ flanks. In their left hands, they held guns.
Mr. Grey saw the guns first. He thought the soldiers would shoot, the way they brandished and shook the weapons. But the soldiers did not shoot. They smacked their mounts into a slow, trotting charge at the worm ring. The wriggling, salmon-ey circle shattered before the cloven stampede. Bug guts mixed with salty sand under the rumbling hooves and roaring riders. Worms slithered and retreated before the new foe. They took the tourists’ quivering fear with them as they fled to their waterlogged homes.
The tourists jeered at the retreating worms. Mr. Grey felt it wasn’t quite earned. Perhaps the riders felt the same. The moment the worms were routed, the soldiers wheeled their mounts around. They trapped the tourists in a shiny new ring of armored men and stamping beasts. They shook their rifles just as openly against the castaways. The crowd resumed quivering.
The guns pointed toward him instantly grabbed Mr. Grey’s attention. He looked sharper at everything, including the tockwise-circling mounts. Their trot was carried out on stubby pigs’ legs. Their torsos were beef cattles’, and jiggled with each footfall. The heads too were of the cow style, but the tails were those of horses.
The cow heads made lowing snorts that came out like cello notes, and the horse tails swished noisily, but it was the pigs feet plashing holes into the soft ground that drew the lion’s share of Mr. Grey’s focus. He saw the captain’s spyglass in the sand. His violin too, lay where he’d left it in flight. The line of mounts undulated near both objects. His instrument had so far avoided the stomping hooves, but its proximity made Mr. Grey anxious. Mr. Grey felt his attention split between the riders with their guns, and the beasts they rode in on.
One rider led the troop. He wore a wrinkled robe patterned in belt-buckles, over top of copper armor. He carried a seashell trumpet instead of a gun. This instrument he blew several times, tossed his copper-wreathed head wildly, then hollered over the lowing, swishing, stomping animals. “C’mon soldiers, you call that a Glorious Defense Force encirclement?! Don’t forget, it’s disrespectful having your rifles pointed at the Sun Fish. And keep your cowsowhorses moving! If you don’t whip them they’ll just stand still and chew algae.”
Though this captain gave his orders to the soldiers, Mr. Grey had the strange feeling they’d been phrased for the tourists’ benefit. The soldiers sneered in response, which only caused the expository commander to shout the same orders louder. The guns - haphazardly held - had renewed the tourists’ quivering. Mr. Grey couldn’t quite quiver, but he shared their nerves. He hadn’t discerned if these soldiers served the king, or were a species nearer to Gourd and his road bandits.
Mr. Grey, between glances at the guns and hooves, spared a glance behind. Tom, once again, seemed the group outlier. The guns caused no jiggly quiver in his heavy frame. He calmly drew his handkerchief and wiped the sweat worm-smashing had put on his brow. He just as calmly folded and stowed the kerchief away, and followed by stowing his mallet in its holster.
This last action drew the eyes and barrels of the nearest soldiers. They swiveled their guns onto him. The passengers nearest Tom edged aside. Mr. Grey felt in his robes for the visa. Despite all prior encounters pointing to the contrary, he genuinely was going to speak first this time, coming to Tom’s defense and explaining that they were only tourists. But it so happened that another passenger had already drawn a visa. They raised it meekly, which drew the guns away from Tom, onto this new perceived threat.
The soldier with the seashell trumpet and jerky attitude shouted questions at the daunted crowd. “Where’d you guys travel from anyway?! Panache? Antiquity? We won’t waste wakeful time rescuing you from woe worms without finding your origin bubble. So… just… tell us who you are. And what you’re doing!”
No passenger braved an answer; not in the face of the jerky guns. Mr. Grey glanced back again and looked for the captain. He seemed the logical choice for a group spokesman. Mr. Grey saw no eyepatches. It seemed their skipper had dropped his uniform at the coming of the guns.
“Oh I see. Not talking huh?” the leader went on. “Well… If you think you’ll get away with silent treatment, you’re making a colossus-sized mistake!”
The leader jerked his arm to emphasize the threat. His cowsowhorse veered. It passed within a hoof’s-breath of Mr. Grey’s violin. Mr. Grey unconsciously took a step toward the instrument.
The guns swiveled to him in an instant. Mr. Grey froze; a sunken statue on the ocean floor. The leader jerked his cowsowhorse to Mr. Grey. He shook his head, and spoke in a whinny. “Stone Boy! So, you think you can take us by surprise?”
Mr. Grey stared stricken at the long, dark tunnels of the gun-barrels. Every ounce of his face held fixed position. When he finally spoke, it was with steady, quiet words, not at all representative of his stuttering, shrieking thoughts. “I just wanted my violin.”
Mr. Grey felt eyes settle across his skin; soldiers’ and tourists’. These soldiers, like Lord Snake’s back in Wine Medo, seemed cowed by his unperturbed exterior. The barrels lowered. The leader said, “And why’s that? Planning an enchantment attack?”
“I would’ve put it away. I don’t want it trampled.”
“Are you crazy? Soldiers of the Glorious Defense Force would never senselessly destroy a perfectly good instrument. Particularly an art piece like that one. Don’t you know that Glorious Defense Force soldiers - especially Diegeonaries like myself! - are trained to show respect for fine craftsmanship?” And the ‘Diegeonary’ threw back his hairy shoulders and puffed his plated chest.
“Well… No. I didn’t know.”
“Oh forget it. Just pick it up.”
Mr. Grey did so, then rejoined the crowd.
“Now I don’t want to have to ask you people again,” the captain resumed, driving his mount back into the circling ring. “Where in the bubbles are you from, and why are you crossing the Abyssal Desert? You haven’t got one cowsowhorse for air. How are you keeping this bubble up anyway?”
Mr. Grey waited for someone to speak. No one did. The Wind herself held a breath; the bubble shrank. Mr. Grey glanced at Honeydew. She followed the officer with shiny, glowering eyes. Even she seemed stricken, however, by the threat of the guns.
The Diegeonary smacked the side of his mount hard with his fist, and it lurched suddenly forward. “Blob Fish’s curse on you!” he yelled. He blew a single note on his trumpet. In a uniform motion, the soldiers raised guns to bare shoulders. Mr. Grey heard the sharp clicks of releasing safeties.
Softly as possible, Mr. Grey whispered sidelong at Honeydew, between his lips. “If these are the king’s soldiers, they’d have identification.”
Honeydew repeated his thought louder, and with only a little tremor. “For all we know, you’re robbers. Real soldiers have IDs.”
The soldiers said nothing. The captain blew another loud, seashell note. The soldiers pulled back the weapons’ hammers.
Someone from deeper in the crowd said, “Please, you can see our wrecked ship. We’re just tourists.”
The soldiers jeered in voices of triumph. One said, “I knew it. Barbarians of the tourist horde!”
The soldiers tossed their rifles carelessly from side-to-side; safeties still off, hammers yet cocked. The diegeonary leader yelled, but with a merry expression. “C’mon fellas… You know when we encounter tourists, King’s Law demands we escort them to a processing center.”
The soldiers only brandished their arms with greater fervor. The tourist disk shook like gelatin. The leader’s lips twitched down with sudden rage, and he shouted louder still. “My orders mean just as much as any other fish worshiper’s! I said; escort them to the nearest processing center!” This captain seemed incapable of an inside voice, thought Mr. Grey.
The soldiers brought down their weapons, let off the hammers slowly, and flicked on the safeties. “But diegeonary Ordus, sir,” said one soldier, addressing the leader, “are we actually going to treat these people peacefully? When they’re part of the same, war-making tourist horde from Panache?”
Ordus said, in a slightly lower shout, “Yes. Get them walking at a trot. Our cowsowhorses should make a big enough air bubble for all of us and these tourists to fit.”
Honeydew glanced sideways at Mr. Grey and raised a brow. She turned back to the captain and said, “Are you… speaking that way for our benefit?”
“No more questions!” said Ordus the diegeonary, in his usual volume. “We’ve got a long stretch of Abyssal Desert to cross.”
The soldiers holstered their guns. They’d fired no bullets. They’d spoken of the king’s laws. Mr. Grey tried to reassure himself of their safety in the soldiers’ hands. They just had to explain this ‘tourist horde’ misunderstanding when they reached the processing center.
A few of the troop gathered the luggage from the pile onto their stocky mounts. Others rode among the group of tourists and confiscated certain possessions; anything that could be used as weapons, they explained lengthily. They took Tom’s mallet and Mr. Grey’s violin.
As the group began marching - away from the amphora, into the sightless distances of the Abyssal Desert - Mr. Grey saw the captain’s spyglass. It lay on the ground, shattered beneath the hoof of a cowsowhorse. Though he thought the broken looking glass a shame, Mr. Grey walked lighter knowing he’d spared his violin that fate.