Tales of the Old World (30 page)

In all, Johan soon estimated there to be upwards of a hundred lizardmen on
the beach. So engrossed were the reptilians, that they didn’t seem to have
noticed the intruding boat. In fact, and Johan thought this most peculiar, they
seemed to be studiously avoiding looking up or out to sea at all, as if
terrified of what they might see.

“They won’t be expecting us, make no mistake,” giggled Johan, his fish
spotting momentarily forgotten.

“Vot is dey?” Keanu asked. “Never seeink nothink like dat before.”

“Dunno, Keanu, but best be on the safe side,” Grimcrag growled, reaching
instinctively for Old Slaughterer, his trusty axe. Only once the mighty blade
was wedged firmly between his stumpy legs did he recommence rowing. “Johan,
you’re an envoy, this should be right up your street,” the dwarf grunted over
his shoulder. “Do something useful for a change.”

“Ja, Usevul.”

Johan looked at the throng of lizardmen they were fast approaching, and
racked his brain for the appropriate phrase or saying. Visiting ambassadors he
was fine with, or representatives of the merchants’ guild, but a hundred
apparently semi-civilised lizards throwing fruit into a lagoon on a desert
island was something different altogether.

“Well?”

“Ja, say Somzink.”

Feeling that his talents were obviously being called into question, Johan
stood up and made his way to the front of the boat with what he hoped was an air
of quiet confidence. From the way Grimcrag beamed toothily and nudged the
steaming barbarian, he had succeeded so far.

Standing at the very prow, Johan cupped his hands to his mouth.

“HALLOO! HALLOO! DONT KILL US—WE, ER, COME IN PEACE!”

Judging by the collective intake of breath from behind him, his speech had a
dramatic effect on Grimcrag and Keanu. The lizards on the beach were immediately
thrown into a state of high panic. Some buried their heads in the sand, others
ran off into the jungle. Others feverishly threw more and more fruit into the
lagoon. Johan saw one of them biting large chunks out his trumpet. A few braver
souls, who unfortunately all seemed to carry bows, stood uncertainly on the
shoreline, arrows knocked and ready.

“Now you’ve gorn and done it, lad,” Grimcrag muttered. “At least try and
smile, nice, like.”

Johan fixed his best diplomatic grin as Keanu and Grimcrag continued to row.

A moment later, something triggered the lizards into even more frenzied
behaviour. Within a few seconds all save a dozen or so lonely warriors had
vanished into the jungle. The creatures raised their bows uncertainly. Johan
could see that they were still trying to avoid looking directly out to sea,
which couldn’t do much for their chances of hitting anything.

“Bound to be poison-tipped. I heard once that…” Grimcrag was rudely
interrupted by an unmistakable elven shriek from the rear of the boat.

“AAAAAARGH! What in Tiranoc and the sunken realms is that!!!??”

“Oh good, Jiriki, you’ve woke—” began Johan as he turned, but the words died
on his lips.

Perhaps fifty feet behind the boat, approaching them in a huge welter of
spume and spray, was the biggest, most fearsome looking beast he had ever
seen.

Consciousness slowly seeped back into Johan Anstein’s wiry frame, like
reluctant treacle leaching through the stygian depths of an old gravel bed.
Something was tickling his face.

“Two sugars in mine, Grimcrag,” Johan groaned, keeping his eyes screwed
firmly shut as he clutched his head to stop it falling off. Johan’s skull felt
as if the dwarf was enthusiastically excavating for gold somewhere behind his
frontal lobe. “Must have been some party,” he thought, groggy from what could
only have been last night’s excesses of ale. Cosy in his blanket, Johan
desperately tried to let sleep reclaim him.

Something slimy and cold began wriggling up into Johan’s nose. It was only
then it occurred to a sluggish Anstein that he hadn’t been to a party for weeks,
not since three days before they set sail on that accursed boat. “Boat…”

Johan frowned inadvertently in his slumber, as dislocated thoughts fell like
dominoes through his drowsy brain: “Boat… shipwreck… pirates… island… lizards…
MONSTER!!!”

A swift moment later, Johan was very much awake and cautiously opening an
eye, whilst keeping the other screwed firmly shut, just in case. He sneezed to
clear his nose of what could only be an inquisitive worm, and blinked his one
open eye. Total darkness. Either he was blind, or somewhere black and smelling
of sandy earth. Somewhere black, sandy and with worms. Johan briefly wondered if
maybe it was better to imagine he was blind.

Cautiously he edged onto his back, immediately encountering another problem.
He seemed to be roughly wrapped in some sort of coarse material. It enveloped
him in a manner most unlike a blanket. The word “shroud” drifted through the
backwaters of Anstein’s stunned mind, on an unavoidable collision course with
his conscious thoughts. Struggling free of his “blanket”, Johan gingerly
reached upwards with his right hand. Almost immediately his nails scraped rough
wooden planks in the dark. Panic struck as quickly as the Dwarf Mineworker’s
Guild when the pit-head bar ran out of Bugman’s.

“Buried alive!” Johan gasped, thrashing out wildly about him in the inky
blackness. In every direction he hit wood almost immediately. “Oh No Oh No Oh
No!” he shrieked, before lying very still, like a desperate and cornered beast.
“Think, Anstein, think!” he muttered, teeth chattering uncontrollably. A
terrible fear gnawed at his innards, threatening to return the blind panic which
had all but overwhelmed him a moment ago.

Johan recapped the situation aloud, in a vain attempt to calm his pounding
heart. “The monster—that’s why there were no fish in the lagoon. That’s what
the strange lizardy men were making offerings to.” Johan stopped for a moment as
a violent trembling fit seized his frame. It passed.

“We almost reached the beach, then it was upon us,” Johan whispered slowly to
himself, as the recollection of the dread fanged monstrosity which had assaulted
their tiny boat flooded back into his memory.

He remembered it roaring in insensate fury. He remembered its tiny, bestial
eyes, staring fixedly at him from a cart-sized head atop a mast-high neck. He
remembered the water streaming in frothy torrents from its crustacean-encrusted
back. Johan remembered Jiriki loosing arrow after arrow at the beast. He smiled
as he remembered Grimcrag’s axe, a whistling arc of gold and red in the bright
sunlight. He remembered the barbarian’s war cry as the Reaver struck again and
again with his wicked longsword. He remembered the moment when the beast began
to know fear. He even recalled his own blade—a cold sliver of silver pricking
at the gargantuan monster’s side.

Johan gulped in the darkness of his tomb as he recalled what must have been
seen as the moment of his own death. Tears welled in his eyes, tears of sadness
and frustration. At least he would be remembered as a hero, killed fighting a
great beast. And they had slain it, of that he had no doubt at all.

Even buried alive, on a far distant isle, for that he surely was, Johan
allowed himself a grim smile as he remembered the sea monster’s death throes.
Bleeding from a hundred or more wounds, it had threshed the water to a pinky red
froth. Its cries had echoed around the cove over which it must have been
undisputed lord for many years.

And Johan remembered its massive tail swinging round as if time had slowed,
clearing the water like a fifty-foot yard arm. The others had instinctively
ducked just in time, but Johan could clearly see in his mind’s eye that he,
alone, had not. He could remember a flash of pain and a great many stars, then
nothing more, but now he nursed the bump on his head and silently wept salty
tears of pain, fear and frustration. Buried alive! Johan desperately hoped he
had been given a good send off at least…

Mad, blind panic swept over Johan again, carrying him like a broken twig
before a mountain river in flood. He screamed, he yelled, he cried insanities at
the darkness as he hammered and clawed weakly at his coffin lid for what seemed
like hours.

Eventually he was exhausted, and lay panting in the darkness. It was no good.
He was surely doomed to die, probably of asphyxiation when the air in the foetid
hole ran out.

Johan slumped, beaten and dispirited in the cool blackness. He was ready, at
last, to die. As one of Grunsonn’s Marauders.

On the beach, the Marauders sat around a small fire and devoured chunks of
half-cooked sea monster with gusto, as the eventful day drew to a close. On the
distant horizon, the sun sank beneath the waves, its angry red orb extinguished
for another day.

“Marooned in the middle of nowhere!” Jiriki muttered, picking delicately at a
tender morsel.

Grimcrag stared wistfully out to sea, hot fat running down his bearded chin.
“Reckon that was as good a fight as any I’ve had for a while—thought it had us
fer a moment or two.”

“Nah!” spat the barbarian through stringy haunch, black eyes gleaming in the
firelight. “Ve voss just Veak, dat’s all, uddervise ve’re killink it pretty damm
Qvick, ja?!”

“S’pose so,” Grimcrag answered after a moment’s chewing, before shaking his
shaggy head as if to clear cobwebs away. “Eeh, though, we’re gettin’ all maudlin
and no mistake, aren’t we?” The dwarf’s eyebrows furrowed and he gestured with
stubby fingers at the feast which lay before them. “Look at this lot, ’nough to
keep us going for weeks.” He turned to the others and smiled his broken-toothed,
bearded grin. “S’not all that bad, is it lads? Old Grimcrag saw you right in the
end.”

Jiriki threw back his head and laughed sarcastically. The silvery note rang
clear across the cove. He wagged a slender finger reproachfully. “Oh yes,
Grimcrag, everything’s just fine!” The elf looked around them pointedly. “Here
we are, stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no boat, no hope of rescue, not
even a map!” It wasn’t often that the elf betrayed much emotion at all.

At this sudden outburst Keanu and Grimcrag sat open-mouthed, fat and saliva
dribbling from their chins in equal measure. Jiriki sighed and kicked languidly
at the sand before looking up and smiling sadly. “Oh what’s the use, we’re stuck
here!” Looking stern, the elf continued in an admonishing tone. “Bear in mind
though, Grimcrag, it’s no use trying that ‘I’m your caring father’ routine
with us anymore, you sneaky old miscreant, we’ve known you far too long for any
of that nonsense to work—we’re not young Anstein, you know.”

At the mention of Johan, the conversation ground to a halt. Keanu reached a
ham-sized fist into the fire and lugged out a huge, crisped slab of meat,
sizzling hot and dripping fatty juices onto the sand.

“Johan would like that bit, I’ll wager,” Grimcrag grunted, nodding at the
hunk of flesh. “He always did like a nice bit of crackling.”

They paused in unison, the unspoken bond of untold shared adventures and
brushes with death uniting the Marauders’ thoughts.

A dull thumping and muffled shrieking intruded upon their reverie, and Keanu
stood up, rack of monster in hand. He padded lithely across the beach to the
spot where their battered rowing boat lay overturned on the sand. The thudding
and shouting quite clearly came from beneath the upturned hull. Keanu reached
down and carefully lifted up one side of the boat, peering underneath through
the small firelit crack. A pair of wild and staring eyes greeted him,
accompanied by animalistic growls and mewlings.

Johan’s panic was rudely interrupted by one edge of his coffin being lifted
away. Ruddy light seeped through the crack. A hulking shape awaited, accompanied
by the unmistakable smell of charred and burning flesh.

“This is it then, Hell it is for me,” Johan burbled, terrified and miserable.
At least he wouldn’t be stuck in the dark forever, which perhaps was some small
consolation.

“Avake, jung ’un?” The unmistakable voice ripped through Johan’s mind, and
reality rapidly readjusted itself in his brain.

“Gghhh?” the ex-envoy burbled, wondering how Keanu came to be down in Hell
too. Perhaps he had a visitor’s day-pass.

“Head betta? Hungry?” Keanu’s voice cajoled, but Anstein knew that devils and
daemons could be very convincing if they wanted. He backed off to the far side
of his coffin, trying to remember suitable holy signs or gestures. Something
outside sighed patiently.

“Kom on out, you’re Schleepink too long, ja? Nitemares also, by da look of
it. All tangled unda da tarpaulin you are.”

The delicious tang of roasting meat reached Johan’s nostrils and his
grumbling stomach decided the matter in lieu of his concussed mind.

“Keanu?” he whimpered hopefully, “Is it really you?”

Whatever stood beyond the coffin seemed to pause and ponder the question.

“Ja, ’f Korse, schtupid!” With one mighty heave, the barbarian lifted the
boat away from Johan, who lay revealed, blinking in the firelight.

Johan shivered uncontrollably, wrapped in his tarpaulin-shroud, dazed and
confused. An all-important question rose to the fore of his battered mind, back
as he was, from the dead. Before he could stop them, his cracked and swollen
lips had formed the fateful words.

“Can I smell… crackling?”

The pathway from the beach into the jungle was obviously well trodden, but
the Marauders trod it with exceptional care. As they wound onwards through leafy
glades, one moment they were drenched in tropical sunlight, the next they were
plunged into the greeny darkness of the humid forest canopy.

Jiriki took the lead, gliding with silky footfall along the jungle track. The
elf sniffed the air, listening intently at every turn. It was a source of some
contention between Keanu the hulking barbarian and Jiriki the elf as to which
had the most highly attuned senses. No one would argue that in the natural
state, an elf’s senses were keener than those of man or dwarf, but the Reaver
had long proven himself to be something of an exception. His ability to pinpoint
danger was second to none (except maybe Jiriki on a very good day), and he too
moved catlike in the jungle, but staying perhaps ten feet from the path itself.