The Wondermark Gazette

Our story thus far: Grenadon, the salt-caked geezer, and I have been making for a sandbar to beach the H.M.D. Flopsy Bunny. Grenadon has some plan for using the damaged vessel to deliver us yet to Dublin.

We reached the sandbar at sunset, our limbs aching and our lungs burning from the effort of pushing the ship across a hundred yards of open ocean. I wouldn’t have thought such a task even remotely possible, especially considering that I began to flail and choke on seawater almost immediately, and Grenadon had to hold me in a life-guard’s hold almost the entire time. I tire quickly; it’s an acquired condition of the upper class.

The ship safely shored on the thin ribbon of sand, Grenadon and I lay on the beach staring heavenward. The stars were beginning to pierce the growing darkness, and Grenadon sighed an ancient, wrinkled sigh.

“They change so much,” he said.

“Have you really seen them move over your lifetime?” I asked. I had always pegged the stars for pin-holes poked in the celestial big-top by wayward meteors, but I supposed the tent could flap a bit over the years.

“Not much, but enough to make me feel old,” he said. He turned to look at me, and it was light enough yet to still make out his craggy features. “It will be strange to see my family again.”

“Your family lives in Dublin?” I hinted, hoping that Dublin was still our scheduled destination — for there, finally, I could perhaps pick up the trail of the Tome of the Precious Lore. I thought back to Lara, lying pale in her hospital bed, silently awaiting my return. I hoped she wasn’t, you know, dead.

“They live on the Isle of Yam-Runners, just offshore from the Irish main-land,” he said with a sigh. “That is, if the young’uns have kept up the estate, and the Scottish freedom fighters haven’t annexed the place as a landing-base for their war-porpoises. So much can change in the world outside while you’re lying asleep in a salt-barrel.” In this last I heard the first hint of bitterness the old man had expressed. Such vitality — and yet, such anger. And such wrinkliness — it was seriously hard on the stomach to look at him.

“How did you come to live such a long time?” I ventured, figuring that we were by now fast friends and bosom buddies, and that not to pry would be the rudest act of all. “Are all of your family similarly afflicted?”

“My family? Oh, no, no,” he said. “No, they think I’m a bit crazy, I think, crazy old Great-Uncle Abner. I was an herbalist, back in the days of King Rufus of Roofie, and had a ritual of prescribing myself a daily tincture of long-wheat to keep the allergies at bay. Little did I know…” He spread his hands out to either side, resting their sallow skin on the warm white sand. “Well. And now here I am.”

Eight-hundred-whatever years old from eating wheat? And I had had my pantry-lad flayed for imbibing oatmeal on the premises, in those Dark Ages before I had met Abner Grenadon, paragon of wisdom. “Tell me more,” I told him and the stars.

“I have a hut on the isle, kept up by the family over the generations,” he said, and then turned away from me for a moment — when he rolled back, I had to shield my eyes from a bright point of green light he held in his hands. It looked like jade, or perhaps a shard from a Sprite bottle. I had no idea where he had produced it from; he wasn’t wearing pants at the moment. I scurried to find my own, only to realise they were still up on the ship’s poop-deck. I made a mental note to guard myself against sharp green edges in the night — at least, with its brightness, I’d be able to see that thing coming a mile away.

The shard had a leather strand twined around one end, which hung down in a wide loop about the old man’s wrists and forearms. He lifted the loop over his head and brushed his beard away, so that the shard’s green brilliance shone unencumbered by rangy chin-hair. “This is how we’ll work at night,” he explained. “This is how they know me, as I am often gone for long periods. When last I set foot on the Isle, my great-grandson had just passed on. I know not whether his descendants have kept my legend alive, or if they will even recognize me when we swim up to that fair shore.”

Swim?

“I thought we were, uh, taking the ship,” I ventured casually.

“Oh, no,” he said. “We’ll have to break her down for parts and build us a barrel-catapult. The springs in the leprechaun-traps’ll provide the tension. With only our weight for payload, we should get pretty close to the Isle — I’d say twenty miles offshore. That’s where the swimming will come in.” He groaned, pushed himself up to a sitting position, and passed a palm over the green shard — instantly cloaking us in dusky dimness. The light went out. The green hung dull from its leather. “Still, that’s a far sight better than swimming from here.” He turned to me, and I only saw his silhouette, haloed by that crazy hair and beard. “What’s your business in Dublin, again?”

I licked my lips nervously. “The Tome of the Precious Lore,” I said.

A second of pause, and then the shadow nodded. “Ah,” it said, and lay down again.

###

I could scarcely get another word from the old man after that. We built the spring-catapult in twelve scorching days, drinking sea-water with the salt filtered out (absorbed, somehow, by the old man’s kidneys); we lashed leprechaun-traps to beer-stones with sail-ropes, and the catch from the helm’s wheel became the release-trigger for the springs. Spring after spring I wrenched from those traps, setting them precisely in series to compound their energy; my skin ruddied under the sun, and my beard became full and flecked with vigour. After twelve days the H.M.D. Flopsy Bunny was no more, and in its place on the sandbar sat a spring-powered catapult made of timbers and hawsers, with capacity for the simultaneous launch of two man-bearing barrels.

Also on the sandbar was the ruined leftover hulk of about half a sailing ship. And barrels and barrels of Shamrock Shakes; I was off the juice for good. The hallucinatory polar bears scratched to be let out, but I was a sober man, enhardied now only by Labour.

I tried to draw more from the old man about the Tome, in those long hours of monotonous work, pulling nails from boards with our teeth or constructing pulleys from kitchen utensils. “In your many years and long travels,” I said at one point, “have you ever encountered the Tome of the Precious Lore? Or its counter-part, now lost to the ages, the Tome of the Cowering Sigil?” I didn’t mention that the latter Tome had been lost, in fact, to the stove in my manor one particularly chilly evening.

“Lost, is it?” he grunted, and then added, “Good. What’s on those pages isn’t for the likes of men to read.”

How appropriate! I, it should be noted again, couldn’t read. Couldn’t so much as make out the telegram when Father finally passed; I’d asked my Peruvian valet read it to me, but he couldn’t read either; he was a monkey, and not a particularly bright one, as it turned out. Singe and I didn’t learn the news of Papa’s passing until some years later, when we returned to Civilisation to find his inheritance disbursed among disreputable cousins and red-bearded relations. That night, I had eaten Singe in my grief. The following day I was hungry again. I learned an important lesson, about something.

But Grenadon didn’t speak of the Tome again, until we were safely strapped into our barrels, awaiting a favourable shift in the wind.

“You have everything you need?” I asked.

He touched the green shard about his neck. “Seems that way,” he said. “Got my birthday cake, my bright-jade, my senses.” He sniffed the wind. “Getting close to time. Now listen — this is very important. We only have one shot with this rickety device. I tried to get you to work to more exacting tolerances, so we could test it, and so on, but you are like an oafish bull-pup with the wrench I made from that serving-spoon.”

“It hurt my hands,” I shot back. “And besides, I’m saving my strength for this awful twenty-mile swim. I am pretty sure that’s going to kill me anyhow, so go ahead, lay into me. You’ll have eight hundred years of wandering the earth to regret being mean.”

He ignored me, which I found rude, considering that he was the one who’d signed me up for a freaking twenty-mile swim after a rocketing barrel-ride into the ocean. “We must launch at the exact same time,” he blathered. “If we don’t, one of us will go shooting way too far; might even make it all the way to the Isle. But the other will be launched backwards into the ocean at blinding speed, and will surely be killed instantly.”

“Exactly the same time,” I nodded. “Oh, boy, I’d hate to overshoot and make it all the way to the Isle without having to swim.”

Grenadon shot me a dark look. “When we land in the water, the barrels will break from the impact, but we’ll be cushioned by the salt.” He patted the chest-deep layer of salt that encased him in the barrel from torso to toes. I was similarly buried in my own barrel, and could feel my skin shriveling as we waited under the sun. “Grab a stave and use it to float. We’ll link up together, and when we reach the Isle, the folk’ll recognize the bright-jade and take us in. Or at least they should, if they’ve been taught correctly. My greatest fear is that public education may have been introduced in the last hundred years.”

“What happens if they don’t?”

Grenadon shrugged. “Probably kill us. Yam-Runners are a secretive lot even at Christmas. But don’t worry — the bright-jade is probably still like a sacred diadem to them. And with the beard and the sun and the salt-wrinkles, you look almost like my twin, you handsome devil. We’ll have no problem.” He licked the breeze. “Almost ready. Let’s count backwards from thirty-one.”

“Hold on! In case we die,” I said quickly, “in case, for some reason, something happens. I just want to know. The Tome of the Precious Lore. Can it heal my beloved Lara? Does it have that power?”

Grenadon took a deep, long breath. “When we get to the Isle, there is a path along a lonesome cliff. I won’t direct you to it, because I’d rather it be forgotten, but if you find it, you’ll know. There, you will find your answers.” He scowled. “Now, for the love of Cramshackle, can we get going?! Count backwards from five with me! Five, four, three–”

“One,” I said, snatching the jade from his neck and slashing with one stroke the rope supporting his barrel. His eyes went wide for a split second as he tumbled from the launch platform. And then, with a deafening, metallic crack, I felt my own weight grow into a boulder pressed against my chest. The wind rushed by with blinding speed, and I saw nothing but the blur of the ocean far below.

NEXT: Impact!

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