The Wondermark Gazette

Our story thus far: The wrinkled stowaway I discovered in a barrel of salt has pledged to set me and my ship back on course for Dublin - in exchange for relinquishing command of the vessel.

His name was Abner Grenadon, and he was insane.

The old man’s first act as Cap’n of the Flopsy Bunny was to march me into the galley and empty the ship’s entire store of grog into my gullet. That bitter alcohol — intended for a full crew’s six-month voyage — swept me far from the realm of sense, and before long I was stumbling into cupboards, holding agitated discourse with the toaster, and answering whatever questions the geezer posed without a hint of inhibition.

My memory of the whole incident is blurred at best, and I later found many bruises, imprints, and tattoos on my person that I couldn’t account for fully, but I do recall recounting at full rambling speed my unabridged life story — from hawking twirled cheese on grimy wharfs as a runaway urchin, to seeking out the ancient cheese-monk Abu Fromage on a far Himalayan hilltop, to eking out a fortune in tips by gamely belly-crawling through Peru’s Andean guano-mines, to finally burying a hatchet into the neck of my dear Uncle M_____ and assuming his estate in Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats. I had quickly taken to that ostentatious lifestyle, the self-indulgent luxury of which I had been loath to abandon — but the Manor was ashes now, burned to a cinder by a hunchback in a fight with hideous, man-sized bat-creatures, rendering me essentially homeless.

I told Grenadon, foolishly and slurringly, about my desperate quest for the Tome of the Precious Lore, and how I hoped it could restore my beloved Lara to her full picture of health. I even described the dastardly Peapoddy, who had smashed Lara into my sitting-room wall and sent her into the coma from which she had shown no hint of recovery — and when those three syllables slipped from my lips, I saw Grenadon’s gnarled expression subtly change. I had the presence of mind to halt my account there, for it was clear that Grenadon had heard the name Peapoddy before.

“This Peapoddy,” he said, a faraway contemplation beginning to work behind his eyes, “was he a tall fellow? Slim, with matching long scars down both left cheeks?”

“Tall and slim, yes, but no scars that I saw,” I said, reaching around for anything to take hold of, as my balance was threatening to betray me. “I had occasion to examine him at close quarters, and saw only smooth skin, as if he had flayed an infant and laid the flesh upon his own bones.”

Grenadon nodded. “Sounds like the Peapoddy clan,” he muttered. “Perhaps you have encountered the younger Peapoddy, who was a mere babe when I tangled with the elder, so many years ago. He seems to have taught his spawn well, the devious chap; I wonder if he even still draws breath. Peapoddy the elder was a far sight older than me, when we first met, not to mention tougher than me-then times me-now. Knowing I was no match for him at his peak, I packed myself into a salt-barrel and drew a breath of slumber-weed, hoping to emerge finding him an old man gasping on his death-bed, where I could drive the final nail through his skull myself. For that task I’d have to stand in line, I imagine, if Fate or some other wronged soul hasn’t beaten me to the strike.”

I shuddered at the thought of another Peapoddy, my hands trembling with rage, my grip failing. I fell heavily onto my tailbone. The sharp pain snapped Peapoddy’s mocking face into my mind’s eye, seeming to laugh at my discomfort. I hadn’t thought about that foppish snake in the long weeks since the sea and the crew had taken his place as my primary enemies.

He’d nearly finished me off, on a cliff-side back home, until I was saved at the last minute by agents unknown. As much as I wished the man dead, I also hoped I would still have the chance to take a croquet-mallet to his spine.

Grenadon took a long draught of water from the ship’s water-pipe, swishing the murky liquid in his mouth. Now that he’d begun hydrating, his crinkled appearance had seemed to soften somewhat; apparently much of the parchedness had been a side-effect of the salt he’d packed himself in, and the effect was beginning to fade. He now looked to be merely several hundred years old, instead of a thousand.

“How old are you?” I said, struggling to pull myself back to my feet, failing in the first seven attempts. It was an impertinent question I hoped I could play off as drunken foolishness, though in truth my high tolerance for spirits (earned in many a raucous overnight back at the Manor) meant that I was quickly regaining my faculties. In my first few months of occupancy at the Manor, the constables would come ’round like clock-work at four o’clock in the morning, ready to clap irons on me for engaging in revelry past the revelry-curfew; however, my always-sober countenance and my frequently chicken-fat-stained attire lent credence to my claim that I was merely performing important offshore labour for a Chinese poultry magnate during the time of day in which that country regularly conducted business. Once I went to the trouble of printing bamboo business cards, and insisted that the constables sit in on an all-Mandarin sales presentation about the virtues of compartmentalised chicken farming, they seemed to take the hint, and their visits became less frequent after that. (However, I did have one of the constables stop back by looking for work after being laid off the force pending an investigation into misconduct, wondering if I might be able to arrange a side gig for him; it would have been an awkward call to my bluff, had I not strangled the fellow with a pair of trousers, thinking he was a salesman.)

Grenadon’s ancient bearded face cocked to one side at my question, and then he turned and headed up the ladder to the fore-deck with nary a word. Had I offended him? Did old people possess the faculties to take offence?

With deliberate care, I made my own way slowly up the ladder to find him squinting at the afternoon sun, holding thin fingers at arm’s length, counting softly to himself in a language I couldn’t discern. I made to speak, but he shushed me without so much as glancing in my direction, which I thought rather rude.

After a full, boring minute of counting, measuring the sun’s position in increments of fingers and palms, and conducting calculations with fingers tracing intricate patterns among themselves, he seemed to arrive at an answer. “Eight hundred and fifty-nine,” he said. “And my birthday is on Tuesday.”

“Happy birthday,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. “I think this year I’ll try to keep things low-key.”

“Probably for the best,” I said. “I don’t think we have that number of candles on board.”

He stared at me for ten long seconds, and then his cracked face split open into a wide, yellow-toothed grin. “You’re all right,” he said.

He looked again at the sky, then back towards the sandbar still barely visible on the otherwise featureless sea. Then he dropped his gaze to the deck beneath his bare, salted feet, where he slowly shifted his weight back and forth, judging the minute movements that the ship made in response. I could feel nothing at all, as the vessel weighed many dozens of tonnes; but then I wasn’t eight hundred fifty-nine, with a birthday on Tuesday.

Whatever he felt made Grenadon cluck in disapproval, like a duck discovering his credit card charging higher fees than he’d anticipated. “Not much time,” the old man said. “She’s sinking fast. But I think she can make it.”

“Make it? To Dublin?” I sputtered. The sun had certainly baked salt into his brain, if he thought this ship could make it to a shore not even yet visible on the horizon, what with a broken mast, a leaking hull, and sails already torn into strips and commandeered for toilet-tissue.

“Just back to that sandbar,” he said, pointing to the tiny island we’d grounded on this morning. He strode purposefully for the stern, shedding his loincloth as he walked — with a shower of salt grains and a weak slap of old rubber, he walked naked to the back of the boat.

“Hold on, how are we supposed to get to the sandbar?” I cried, my first step unsteady, but finding my strength by the second and third. He climbed the steps to the poop-deck and I was afraid he was going to make good on its name, with the way he squatted and stretched. “What current there is is drifting us in the other direction!”

He turned back to me, leaning one hand on the aft railing for balance as he stretched a leg out behind him. “It’ll go a lot faster if you help me push,” he said. He leaned forwards, bending his knee, then straightened, took a shallow breath, and without another word, dove over the side.

His slim, yellowish form pierced the water like an arrow, and after a few seconds, he tossed his head above the surface. With two easy strokes he reached the hull, and then, leaning his back against the ship, he began to kick up a white froth.

The ship shifted. I stumbled. Within ten seconds we were drawing a wake. I stared in disbelief as the tiny old man began to push the ship towards the far sandbar with nothing more than the power of his thin legs. I was definitely putting him on my fantasy cricket team.

“Well, come on,” he cried from far below, tossing his wet beard and spitting out seawater. “I’ll need your help to land this thing before nightfall. We don’t want to be in the water when the moon-sharks come out.”

“Moon-sharks have been extinct for three hundred years,” I shouted back to him, but my words were lost on the wind. Oh well, I thought, beginning to strip to swimming-nudity. That’s something I can hold over him later.

The slight breeze of the ship’s movement on my skin was a welcome relief from days of stagnant doldrums. I had the most wicked farmer’s tan imaginable, my red-brown face and arms standing in stark contrast to my soft, white under-flesh. I looked like a Polish flag flown in emergency conditions.

Bold, nude, terrified, I stood at the stern. The waves roiled far below my feet. My still-queasy stomach lurched at the thought of leaping that epic distance to the water. My toes curled away from the deck’s edge, and my hands gripped the aft railing.

“The more you help, the faster we can both put our clothes back on,” came a soft voice from below, and in an instant I was free-falling towards the sea.

NEXT: Construction of a Contraption

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