Theatre of the Gods (31 page)

‘Your price?’ said Fabrigas.

‘From now I think the children should be containing in them all the freedoms of the grown-ups. We must have good rest, and share the treasure. What says you?’ In front of her the girl sensed the crackle of smiles. ‘My dear,’ said the old-beard, ‘for the help you are giving us, it is a reasonable price.’

The girl wrinkled her little nose and raised an arm sideways. ‘Oils are that-aways.’

*

That night the slaveys sang with such power and passion that the captain had to go below and calm them, lest their song be overheard by a local tribe or un-neighbourly creature.

But when the captain went up late on deck the jungle seemed at rest. It pulsed with gentle clicks and hoots. There was a small light near the foredeck, someone reading, the poet, perhaps, but everyone else was asleep.

*

The next morning the hunting-and-gathering party was assembled: the captain, Fabrigas, Miss Fritzacopple, the bosun, two sailors – Hardcastle and McCormack – Lenore and, of course, Roberto. Lenore had protested that she did not want him to come along, since she had discovered him that morning teaching a coin trick to a young slavey, one Brittany Burk. ‘He should maybe stay here where his tricks is welcome.’ It took some time to convince the pouting alien princess to change her mind. They helped her into the raft they were going to use to cross the swamps and she sulked while they loaded boxes of supplies around her. Roberto was oblivious to the whole saga.

Descharge was left in charge of the ship and the repairs.

‘It’ll be nice to get the gang back together,’ said the bosun, adjusting the belt of elephant rounds on his broad shoulders and hoisting a heavy belt of charge canisters around his waist. ‘I had such fun on our last outing.’ They each clamped an air filter into their nose – for emergencies.

‘You don’t want to be going out there,’ said a voice from the shadows. It was an old sailor called Murphus, who liked to whittle by the foredeck. ‘There be dreadful things out there. That is to say, there
will
be dreadful things out there.’

‘Who’s that guy?’ said Lambestyo as he hoisted on his gun belts.

‘Can you not smell it? Can you not smell the death hanging in the air? If you go out there you’ll never come back.’

‘He’s spooking me up,’ said Lambestyo. ‘Make him stop.’

‘If you go into the swamp you’ll never see the ship again – except as ghosts. And who needs that hassle?’

‘I don’t smell much death,’ Lenore called up from the raft. ‘There’s a village over there.’

‘Don’t go anywhere, dearest,’ said the captain to Descharge.

‘I won’t be going anywhere without you and the old man,’ Descharge coldly replied.

DARK TERRITORY

The jungle fell mute as they prepared a raft: as if it was waiting for them to dare to enter its secret mists. The old man loaded his personal equipment into the stern. The air was languid and heavy as they pushed out into the swamp, looking back one last time at the
Necronaut
– half buried in the primordial mud, its long spars hung with vegetation and scraps of sail – not realising that a number of them would never see the boat again. Soon it had vanished.

There were long-toothed reptiles still as logs upon the lagoon. There were slender-tongued rats lapping in the shallows. There were frogs and insects croaking. There was a bird calling from the darkness with the sound of a plucked string. ‘
Plang. Plang. Plang.
’

The boat had two gas lamps hung on the end of steel hooks. The sailor called McCormack pushed them forward from the back with a wooden pole. Fabrigas was peering bemused at several of his instruments. It was amazing what came out of that cloak of his. ‘The gravity does not make sense!’ he said. ‘Perhaps we are inside a volcano. That would explain the seismic motions.’

No one was listening.

‘
Plang. Plang. Plang. Plang. Plang. Plang. Plang.
’

‘Death is out there,’ said the captain. ‘I can feel it. This place has a bad energy. Not like the last place.’

‘The last place tried to kill us,’ said Fabrigas.

‘Ah, it was not so bad. I’ve seen worse. Like this place.’

‘So you’re in one of those moods.’

‘Maybe I am, maybe I’m not.’

Before long they were in an area where a million white mushrooms shone on dozens of muddy bulges; each shroom was an unblinking eye.

‘Everyone be careful,’ drawled the botanist. ‘The spores might be deadly. Don’t touch them.’

‘What are those called, Miss Lady?’ said Lenore, who was full of questions.

‘Mushrooms.’

‘What kind of mushrooms are they?’

‘Big ones.’

‘How did you get to know so many plants? I would like to be a botanist one day: only I’d collect smells, not plants. Do you have a man-friend?’

Fritzacopple sighed. ‘I have to concentrate on collecting samples.’ She pulled out her tongs. But the boat sailed on too quick across the darkly luminous estuary; her tongs snapped at the soggy air.

‘You’re distracting me. Stop staring.’

‘I’m blind.’

‘Why don’t you play with Roberto?’

‘I do not care for the coin tricks.’

At last they came towards solid land. Their boat pushed into the mud below a small, rocky hill topped by a single lonely tree. ‘We should go that-aways,’ said Lenore, ‘many smells up there. Two big beasts is breakfasting.’ Beyond the small hill was a clearing before a narrow valley leading deeper into the jungle. There in the gloam they could see two large four-legged beasts. ‘Unicorns!’ said Hardcastle as he grabbed McCormack’s arm. ‘As I breathe!’ The beasts who blocked their way on did not seem to register the presence of the wide-eyed pack of people crammed into their raft.

‘We will set up a base camp on the shore,’ said the captain. ‘When the beasts are finished grazing we will continue.’

‘I want to collect some samples around the edge of the lagoon,’ said the botanist.

‘I don’t want you to leave the group,’ said the captain. ‘Stay within sight.’

‘You worry too much,’ she replied, and she took her small sample case and sloshed off through the mud.

‘I’ll come too,’ said Lenore.

‘No!’ came the reply.

‘You have fifteen minutes!’ said the captain, but she was already gone into the darkness beyond their lamps.

‘My word!’ they heard the botanist say from the distance. And then not a peep.

The mist came in like sleep, turning everything they saw to shadows. The unicorns, just thirty feet away, chewed their grasses lazily, with a full four seconds between each chomp. ‘They’ll die back at ship when they hear we’ve spotted unicorns,’ said McCormack. Fabrigas patiently tried to point out that these beasts did not much resemble unicorns as they knew them from fables, since they were not lithe, white equine quadrupeds with single horns upon their heads, but rather were fat, insolent-looking creatures with wide, flat feet, grey, leathery skin folded over in places and studded with wiry hairs. Certainly the beasts had horns upon their snouts, but they were black and stumpy, curved like an assassin’s dagger.

‘I don’t care what he says,’ whispered Hardcastle to McCormack. ‘If they aren’t unicorns then I’m a jungle ape.’

‘The village is one mile that-aways,’ said Lenore. ‘And there are other villages here, I thinks. That is what I thinks. You smell of worry.’ She said it to Lambestyo. Lenore, the captain noticed, was looking straight into his eyes now and he felt a sudden fear. Those eyes seemed so large and terrible in this place. She stood against the black of the swamp. She always stood evenly on two booted feet; always had her green hands clasped in front of her; her eyes had always the haunted and expectant look of the young true wife of a
sailor who has died at sea; her mouth, always at work, showed luminous pale fangs and a restless fillet of silvery tongue dipping in and out across a pair of deathly blue lips. She seemed lit from within by a dreadful moonlight. Lambestyo moved a step to his left to break her gaze and, almost unbelievably, those dread eyes followed him. There was something less than human in them. ‘What it is?’ said the girl. ‘Has something frightened you?’

‘Sweet mercy, that’s delightful!’ came the botanist’s distant voice and snapped him from his terror.

Everything else was quiet. A hazy rain fell; it seemed to swirl around them, though the air was still. They were huddled around the lamp; the other lamp bobbed away in the distance, letting out the occasional ‘Heavens!’ or ‘Good grief!’

‘Come back to our light!’ called the captain, but she didn’t answer. ‘Maybe someone should look after her.’ Hardcastle looked at McCormack and they both shrugged. Hardcastle went off to relieve himself in the shadows. ‘I’ll go,’ said Lambestyo, standing self-consciously. ‘I mean, it’s best I go and find her.’ He looked around, unsure which way to set off. Her lamp had vanished.

‘I know where she is,’ said Lenore. ‘I will witness what she’s doing. I’m bored anyways.’

The girl floated off after the botanist. Lambestyo sat down again. They heard a bird’s call from the undergrowth so loud and sudden that they all jumped.

A dark and dreary fog was creeping in.

Hardcastle returned to the group with an object he’d found buried in the mud near the swamp. It was a sphere of brass and wood with several moving parts. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s a child’s puzzle.’ He wiped away the mud as Carrofax appeared and said, ‘He should not be playing with that. That isn’t a happy toy.’

‘Give that to me,’ said Fabrigas, but the sailor said, ‘Get your own toy!’

‘If I may, sir,’ said Carrofax, ‘and without wishing to interfere in
your … human things … I think it might be time to prepare for a quick departure.’

Roberto had walked a few feet away and was bouncing higher and higher in the flimsy gravity. He was bouncing so high that at times only his pale legs were visible. Higher into the darkness above, floating back like a leaf, until each time he left the ground he was gone for minutes.

Then he didn’t come back at all.

For ten minutes the captain wandered around below, vainly calling up, until finally Roberto floated down and touched, crouched, paused, his hair thick with leaves and bugs. He put his hands flat upon the ground. Fabrigas noticed. ‘What is it?’ The boy’s face was soaked in fear. He swung instinctively around to find Lenore, but she had already vanished from sight.

Now the dreadful fog had hidden even the darkness.

Then Roberto left the ground like a bullet, springing into the foggy heights, and was gone.

*

Miss Fritzacopple stood in a grove of luminescent ferns. ‘There’s enough here to make lanterns.’ She looked over at Lenore, standing among the ferns, cast in an eerie light. ‘You look like a young ghost!’ she laughed. ‘What is it?’

‘There’s something strange upon us,’ said the girl, ‘down up there,’ and she was off. Miss Fritzacopple hurried to gather her things and follow. She saw the girl’s shape, a whisper of light, vanishing and reappearing among the thickening trees, and she experienced a rapid beating of her heart. She heard, she thought, a child’s laugh and stopped. But to her right she saw no lamplight, just her own – ending at a grove of thorns and skeletal trees that vanished into darkness. The girl had vanished, too.

She ran on, her boots coughed in the mud, the tip of her tongue
dabbed at her teeth, until finally she entered a swampy grove where the green girl was standing, arms wide. The tree she stood beside was old, its ancient skin spun in jagged eddies, its broad, knuckled roots grasped the earth, its bare branches reached down, it seemed, to cradle the girl.

‘You see now?’

The botanist went towards the ancient tree. ‘Well I never.’ She held up a jar with a piece of glowing fern in it and studied the patterns on the bark of the tree. ‘In all my years,’ she whispered. ‘This reminds me of the old trees of the Timberlak tribe,’ she said. ‘They used them as signposts for the dead. So they could find their way home. But how would they get here?’

On the far side of the clearing was a thin creek spanned by a small wooden footbridge. The bridge was made of two halves joined at the centre by rusted hinges.

‘Just look at that!’

‘We should not cross it, my lady. We should not.’ But the botanist ignored the girl, taking her by the hand and leading her up the bridge and down the other side.

‘See? Not so bad. But I wonder who built it.’

‘We did, of course,’ said a child’s voice. ‘But you really ought not to have crossed it.’

*

‘Roberto!’ called Fabrigas. He knew what the boy had felt: vibrations, and kneeling himself he too could feel them.

‘Look, the lovers are leaving,’ said McCormack.

And it was true, the two horned beasts were trotting quickly off into the darkness.

‘Something frightened them,’ said the bosun.

‘Let’s form a defensive position on that hill,’ Fabrigas said.

*

A boy and a girl stood together. Miss Fritzacopple and Lenore had jumped when the boy spoke. Lenore had jumped particularly high because she was not used to being snuck up on by anything. ‘What’s there?!’ she cried. ‘I can’t smell you.’

‘We didn’t mean to startle you,’ said the girl. ‘We heard you from our camp and came to see.’

They were young, the boy around nine, the girl perhaps eleven. They both wore strange outfits: the boy a purple tunic, belted trousers and boots, and the girl a short dress with green stockings and boots. Although it was dark at the edge of the clearing, beyond the reach of the lamp and the jarred fern, this pair seemed to glow. ‘We’re glad you came. You’re the first visitors we’ve had in ever such a long time.’

Lenore went to Fritzacopple’s side and grasped her hand. ‘Who are they, Miss Lady?’ she hissed. ‘I can’t smell them. I can’t smell them not at all!’

*

The drumming clicks had quickly grown from a soft rain of pins falling on glass to a sound like the rattle of bones in a sack. The party contracted to a tight group around the tree at the top of the hillock. Each had a blade in one hand and a pistol in the other, but as the drumming grew louder the two sailors, Hardcastle and McCormack, broke away and ran back towards the boat, screaming, ‘Forgive us, please! We don’t want to die today!’ Soon they were pushing off from the beach and out into the fog.