The League of Sharks (10 page)

‘I have to go. You understand. I can't move you. You're too big. I could maybe make some sort of stretcher. Plenty of wood. Wheels would be harder. But I've got no tools apart from your big ol' knife. And even if I could, I'd never be able to move it. Not unless it was downhill all the way. No, it's best if you stay in the boat. I think you just need rest. I've dressed all your wounds. Nothing's infected. Frankly, I don't know why you're still out. Can't see any reason why you should be, but I'm no expert. Only know what I've picked up along the way. I know how to cure dysentery, but I'd need a kapok tree, and luckily for us you don't have that. That'd be awful messy.' Junk actually shuddered at the thought.

‘So we're agreed then. I need to go. I can't stay and I can't take you with me. So the only option is for me to go and leave you here.' He looked at Garvan as if expecting a reply. None came, but Junk nodded in agreement anyway. ‘So that's settled then. Good.' Junk looked at his fish again but it had gone cold by now and its opaque little eye was staring up at him accusingly. He tossed it aside.

*

Junk spent the rest of the day preparing for his onward journey. He caught more fish, fashioned a smokehouse out of several large flat stones he found a little further along the shoreline and hung the majority of his catch
up to smoke. It was a technique he had learned in Russia a little over a year before. The process would keep the catch edible for longer. He had no way of knowing what was to come, so couldn't rely on finding more fresh food.

He debated with himself whether or not to take the knife with him. Garvan's knife. It felt wrong to steal a man's only knife. And it would very much be stealing. It wasn't borrowing. He didn't think he'd ever see Garvan again after he left, so he didn't think he would have the opportunity to return it. However, he decided that if Garvan remained comatose he wouldn't have need of the knife, and if he gained consciousness, he was bigger, stronger and better able to defend himself than Junk was, so the only sensible option was for him to take the knife. He knew it was the wrong decision, so he stopped thinking about it.

He topped up the water butts and decided, because he was still feeling guilty about the knife, to leave three for Garvan and take two himself.

He went to sleep as soon as the sky started to darken, planning on setting off at first light.

*

Junk found himself sitting at an unfamiliar table in an unfamiliar room surrounded by unfamiliar figures bathed in shadow. The room was vast. Cavernous even. So large that the walls and ceiling disappeared into blackness. It reminded him of somewhere else, but he couldn't remember where exactly.

The table stretched away from him. He was seated at the head. There were people sitting on either side of the length of the table but they had no detail to them. They were just eyes glinting in the dark. They were all talking at once, speaking over one another, but Junk couldn't make out any of the words.

He looked down and in front of him was a box. One of Garvan's puzzle boxes. He picked it up and knew instinctively what to do, how to manipulate it to make it open. As his fingers twisted, pushed and pulled at the panels, he became aware that the garbled conversations of his companions were dying away. All eyes turned to look at him. Junk stopped and looked around, not comfortable with the scrutiny. Then his gaze settled on a single yellow eye at the opposite end of the table. The one eye was looking back at him, glaring. It was a malevolent eye – if such a thing was possible. He caught his breath.

Junk became aware that his fingers had started to manipulate the box again, seemingly on their own, without his brain being involved. He heard a click and looked down as the box split open on his lap. Inside were two small green stones. Junk lifted them out and set the box aside. He knew what to do with them even though he didn't know how he knew. He held the two stones out in front of him, just above the table, and cracked them together. A small green flame shot out, igniting an invisible wick. The green flame spread down the centre of the table, illuminating the people on either side as it progressed. Except they weren't people, they were
animals. They sat like people, wore clothes like people, but their bodies were scaled or furred.

To Junk's immediate left was a goat, wearing a white coat and a pair of pince-nez. Next to him a tiger, opposite a snake smoking a pipe. Next to the snake was a porcupine pulling a sour face.

‘Ugh, what's in this pâté?' asked the porcupine. Now Junk could understand what was being said around him.

The green flame continued down the table, illuminating more and more animals: a walrus polishing his tusks, a crow playing a ukulele, a rhinoceros doing sleight-of-hand card tricks, a capybara with a yo-yo, a bear making the sign of the cross over and over, muttering a little rhyme under his breath as he did so, a flamingo applying lipstick and a cow nodding sagely.

The flame went on until it reached the far end of the table, where it fizzed and sparkled and lit up the occupant of the seat directly opposite Junk. It was a shark. A great white, covered in scars, the most prominent of which was in the shape of a cross over its left eye. The eye was milky and dead just like the eye of the creature who took Ambeline. Junk stood up violently, knocking his chair back as he did so. As the chair hit the floor, all conversation in the room stopped again and everyone looked from Junk to the shark and back again.

‘Sit down, boy,' said the shark. His voice was deep and slow. He spoke from the back of his throat.

‘I'm here to kill you!' shouted Junk. The shark laughed, his fleshy throat pulsing. The laughter enraged
Junk. His hands curled into fists, his fingernails digging into his palms. His face was puce with burgeoning rage.

Then, in the blink of an eye, the shark stopped laughing. ‘Impertinent worm.' And with that, the creature launched himself out of his seat and flew the length of the table at lightning speed, coming straight for Junk, his mouth open, multiple rows of teeth glinting. Junk couldn't move. No time to react. And then, just as the shark reached him, just as the shark's jaws were about to snap down on him, a hand came out of nowhere. A fist moving like a cannonball. It hit the shark on the top of its nose, smashing him down on to the table, where all life left the one good eye.

Junk breathed again and looked up to see Garvan standing over him. Garvan unclenched his fist and shook out his fingers. Then he grabbed the dead shark, hoisted him over his shoulder and walked away. The shadows at the edge of the room swallowed them both.

*

Junk woke with a start. He was lying in the boat and Garvan was next to him. Still unconscious. Junk sat up, leaning back against the side of the boat, and thought about the dream.

By the time the sun started to rise the next morning, Junk had decided what the dream meant and what to do. So instead of abandoning Garvan, he took down the canvas he had used as a shelter and rigged it to the boat's mast, returning it to its intended purpose. He untethered the boat and set sail. He and Garvan would stay together a little longer.

*

They headed south, keeping the coastline in view off the starboard side. The wind was gentle so it was slow going. For hours Junk saw nothing but open water and forested land. Garvan's boat sliced through the calm seas easily and there wasn't much Junk had to do. As the hot sun bore down on him, Junk's eyes grew heavy and he started to slip into sleep, which was why he didn't notice the approaching ship until it was almost too late.

It was a job to not notice it. The ship was huge. Vast. So vast in fact that it was hard to comprehend. It was eight hundred metres in length, three hundred metres wide and towered a hundred metres out of the water, with
fourteen masts adding further to its height. It seemed to be made of wood so had the look of a galleon or a barque but on a scale that would dwarf a supertanker.

The reason Junk didn't see it was because the coastline cut away sharply. Had he been awake he would have been getting ready to turn to starboard to continue following the land and would have turned unwittingly straight into the path of the behemoth. Ironically, falling asleep was what saved his and Garvan's lives. He ploughed on straight and in doing so cut across the bow of the big ship. As he drew closer, someone on board miraculously noticed Garvan's little boat and sounded a warning. The cacophonous blast yanked Junk from his dreams. He cried out as he leaped to his feet and looked around just in time to see the skyscraper-like bow bearing down on them. He screamed in horror and panic. There was nothing he could do. He grabbed hold of the rudder and held it firm and true and just managed to cut across the front of the giant ship with the narrowest of margins to spare.

The wash from the big ship tossed the little boat about as if it was a leaf in a washing machine. Fortunately Junk had lashed Garvan to the deck in case they experienced any storms. Junk however was flipped overboard and only just managed to grab the little boat's perimeter rail. He held on with one hand and refused to relinquish his grip no matter how much the boat was tossed to and fro. After a minute the massive ship passed by and the sea returned to its former calm. Junk hauled himself up and into the boat. He lay on the deck panting until he regained
his breath. He looked up to see the stern of the huge ship moving away. It was like watching an office block sailing out to sea.

Junk turned and looked the other way, in the direction the ship had come from. He was startled to see a town nestled in an expansive cove. Stone buildings littered the shoreline and rose up behind on steep hills. He was reminded of the Greek island of Santorini. Though whereas the buildings there were predominantly white, here they were many different colours. Here also the buildings were bifurcated by an enormous railway line that ran, rather incongruously, straight into the sea and disappeared beneath the waterline.

The town was buzzing with activity. There were three dozen boats of various sizes moored in the cove, much closer to shore. Nothing was on a scale with the supership that had narrowly missed flattening them. They were mostly fishing boats, roughly the same size as Garvan's. From where he was, a clear mile out to sea, Junk could see what looked like a bustling market on the quayside. There were people of all shapes and sizes milling to and fro. Not people, Junk reminded himself. Aliens.

Junk had no way of knowing whether or not the inhabitants of the town were friendly. He decided caution was the best approach. He sailed on past the cove and around the next headland he found another smaller, deserted cove and anchored the boat there. He unrigged the sail and used it again to shade Garvan from the harsh sun. Then he secreted Garvan's knife under his jacket,
which wasn't easy, seeing it was the size of a frying pan, and set off.

*

He climbed up the hill. When he reached the summit, he looked down and discovered that the part of the town visible from the water was small compared to the rest. It was sprawling, reaching back for a couple of miles before the buildings started to thin out. He could see the huge railway line stretching off into the distance. Just below where he stood, the tracks split into two at the largest structure in the town, which appeared to be a station.

Junk made his way down the hillside on to a dirt road, which he followed into the town. Single-storey stone houses gave way to municipal buildings and shops. Junk passed one building that made him think of a sheriff's jail in a western. Three big glowering men were loitering outside, all wearing the same uniform of red-stained hide long coats. The men were big, though not as big as Garvan. Seven or eight feet tall, broad-shouldered, with big hands, big feet, big features. They looked like brothers. All had dark brown skin and white-blond hair cut short at the front but tied back into a long, thin ponytail behind. They had heavy brows and thick blond moustaches that were in need of trimming. They sat or leaned outside their building, eyeing the passers-by with undisguised suspicion. Hanging by their sides were foot-long leather saps, and their expressions were begging for a reason to wield them. Junk kept his head down and hurried on.

As he went he looked at all the different aliens and
marvelled at their uniqueness. Not just from him but from one another. People here were all sizes, shapes and colours. Then it occurred to him that they weren't the aliens; he was. He was on their planet, not the other way around.

He passed shops selling fruit, bread (or at least the bread-like substance that Garvan had given him), fish and meat. The smells of cooking flowed over and around him, caressing his senses and making him realize how ravenously hungry he was. He hadn't eaten in several hours. He felt his pockets for money and realized that he had neither money nor pockets.

The winding streets were narrow. He followed the sound of the sea to the quayside that he had observed from the boat. As he had thought, there was a market set up here. Dozens of stalls were selling food (more divine smells teased him), clothes, tools, books, artwork, all sorts of things. As Junk listened to the myriad voices around him, the first he had heard since his arrival (the didgeridoo calls of the birdmen didn't count), he realized that he couldn't understand one word of what was being said. The local language was spoken quickly and rhythmically. There was almost a musical quality to it, similar to Italian, though the words were most definitely not Italian or French or Spanish or English or Russian or Chinese or any other of the hundred languages that Junk could speak to some degree or had heard on his globe-trotting travels. The signs on the stalls, the street names and the titles of the books for sale were indecipherable to him.
There seemed to be distinct characters, but it was like the first time he had ever visited Japan: he couldn't work out what anything meant.

He spotted another of the dark-skinned, blond policemen (if that's what they were). He wore the same uniform as the others Junk had seen and had the same distinctive hairstyle. He walked casually between the stalls, as if on his beat. He had an air of chilly superiority about him, glancing at the people he passed with a curled lip of contempt, and everyone knew to get out of his path rather than the other way round. Junk gave him a wide berth for no other reason than that Junk didn't belong here.