Whale Mail, page 14
Perrin helped Hix to distract the dragon while Verbena and the young deck hands shifted the heavy panels of the broken crate. They just fit in between the railing and the cabin, and a few extra boxes completed the job.
The dragon simply watched while they were doing this. It hissed a few times when they were getting too close.
A few uneaten pumpkins lay in the straw that had been in the bottom of the crate, as well as a spit ball consisting mainly of pumpkin skins. And a fish head. Ew and yes, he’d been right about Quinn feeding the dragon fish.
It also explained the dragon’s lack of interest in food. Dragons were like birds and didn’t eat when a spit ball was about to come up.
The dragon nosed around in the heap of nets it had collected. Then it turned around, lifted its tail and crouched on the sails.
“Hey, don’t poop on my spare sails!” Captain Anko yelled.
But the dragon produced something creamy white, rubbery, about the size of a cabbage, that lay glistening in the nest of nets. It produced another one, and another one.
“It’s laying eggs,” Captain Anko said.
Yes, it was.
But Perrin was sure that male dragon had not made its way into the cage, even if it had tried very hard.
Maybe dragons laid eggs like chickens. They would just… start laying eggs when reaching maturity, male dragon or no.
And so much about the dragon’s behaviour was starting to make sense. The increasingly irritated aggression—that was the instinct to stake out a spot for the nest. The pissing out of the cage—marking its lair. And on top of that, humans poked and prodded her, loaded her onto scary, noisy and smelly vehicles while feeding her a vegetarian diet. Meanwhile, she could feel changes in her body that caused discomfort. The eggs were still coming. In between each, she looked at the humans and the sky with alert eyes. Waiting for the male to come back? It would be too late now. Maybe for the next batch.
Oh boy, Perrin wanted to get to Solania before that happened.
Eventually, the eggs stopped coming. She nosed the sailcloth over them and then curled around them and went to sleep.
Chapter 21
The crew retreated to the galley, where they sat crammed into the narrow benches facing each other across the table, clutching mugs of strong tea.
A deep silence hung between them.
“It wasn’t my fault!” Quinn blurted out after a long silence.
The rest of the crew clearly thought that it was.
“He told you not to feed the beast meat,” Captain Anko said.
Quinn looked down.
“Please, I don’t know whether feeding meat or not would have made all that much difference. The dragon is maturing. That is the cause of all this trouble.”
“And you knew that?” Captain Anko said.
“No.”
It was only partially a lie. Of course, he’d know that the dragon was growing, but just how close she was… no, he hadn’t known that.
“What about I don’t believe you,” Captain Anko said, his arms crossed over his chest. “What about I just toss this dragon and you overboard?”
“Then you would have to deal with me,” Verbena said.
Captain Anko laughed his loud annoying laugh. “You? A girl?”
“Yes. But I have many cousins and my sister has many loyal customers in the harbour district. Almost all of them work for the warehouses. I only have to say one word, and you’ll have no one to load or unload your ships.”
Captain Anko looked from Verbena to Perrin and shrugged. “Keep your hair on. I was only joking.”
That didn’t sound like joking to Perrin.
“Look, I will handle the dragon,” he said, but as yet, he had no idea how.
The dragon was free, had probably been strong enough to break out of the crate for weeks, if not months. The only reason it didn’t fly off was probably because of the eggs. Even if they were most likely blanks.
Perrin had no idea how they were going to handle a loose dragon when they got to Solania, but that was a bridge to be crossed when they got there. Solania had magicians who were undoubtedly better at handling dragons than anyone he could rustle up in Tamba.
The crew strengthened the barricade that stopped the dragon from coming to other parts of the ship and, for the rest of the day, Perrin remained on guard. Every time someone came near—for example Hix had to climb onto the roof of the captain’s cabin and shuffle along a narrow beam to climb to the crow’s nest—the dragon would rear up on her hind legs and hiss and flap her wings at the intruders.
Hix used some interesting and colourful language when he returned from the crow’s nest, having run the gauntlet of fire spouts and flapping wings twice.
Perrin spent much of the rest of the day frantically going through his books to see if he could unearth any information about how to coerce a dragon into doing what you wanted. They were far too few to restrain it, and anyway, the large crate was thoroughly ruined. He was pretty sure that the dragon was not a type of creature that you could walk on a leash, and he would have to communicate with the port master of Solania to get a wizard to come on board the ship to deal with the creature. No doubt that would also cost extra, but he would just have to deal with that.
Perrin discovered a fair number of interesting things in the book. He'd skimmed through it many times, but never properly read the sections about magical creatures that were not living in Tamba, which was basically all of them. About dragons, it said that they were fiercely protective of things they considered theirs, as they had seen with the eggs, and that they were consistently more intelligent than anyone would think, although Perrin had not yet seen any evidence of that. But that had to be because the dragon was only young, and also because no one he knew was familiar with dealing with dragons.
After a quick meal shared with the others in an awkward atmosphere with very long and awkward silences, punctuated with silly questions, like are we in Gaminia yet? he retired to his cabin to read some more. He gave Verbena a book to help him. She asked some questions about magical herbs, but then said she was tired and went to sleep.
This time, he found it hard to sleep. Why hadn’t he noticed previously how noisy this boat was? Several times he thought that something bumped the boat, but when he listened and held his breath, nothing further happened so he continued to pretend to lie in his bunk staring into the darkness at the bottom of Verbena’s bunk.
But he must have fallen asleep because he woke up with a shock to a jolt that was definitely a bump from something hitting the boat from the outside.
“What was that?” he asked, but Verbena was already gone from the cabin.
He jumped out of bed, quickly got dressed, and ran up the stairs. He found the dining room empty, and all the crew on deck, leaning over the railing while hitting the surface of the water with sticks, and the dragon standing on the other side of the barrier, hissing and spewing flames at the water.
“The whales are attacking us!” Captain Anko yelled.
“Have we crossed into Gaminia yet?” Perrin asked.
Last night, Captain Anko had said this wouldn’t happen until mid-morning, although how one determined borders within an ocean was a good question.
The captain had said there were supposed to be islands at the border. Perrin saw none.
But there were whales, at least three of them.
One swam alongside the ship. A huge head with a relatively small eye skimmed the surface of the water. Although the eye was still bigger than Perrin’s hand. It moved and fixed on him before the whale disappeared back under the water again.
A second whale swam ahead of the boat. Its tail would come out of the water and slap on the surface. The third whale was behind the first one, watching from a distance. This one would stick a complete head out of the water and jump halfway out.
Then the one closest to the boat lifted its tail up and—whoa, it was huge—slapped it on the water. The sound was deafening. The resulting spray of water washed over the deck. Perrin managed to avoid getting his feet wet. The dragon spurted a gout of fire at the water, but all that was visible of the whale was a trail of bubbles.
“Why are they acting like this?” Captain Anko asked.
“I don't know. I'm not a sailor,” Perrin called back from behind the crate.
“This is not normal behaviour. If the whales don’t want us to come, they block the channel. They’ve never done this before. We always get permission to cross. This is because of you.”
Many times? And here was Anko saying that they tended to avoid Gaminia.
But there was no time to argue.
A huge whale reared out of the water, head first. It rose and rose until it looked like it was going to jump right out of the water, and then listed sideways.
Perrin could see the tiny eye moving in the side of its head. The smell of ocean enveloped the boat, which looked tiny compared to the size of this creature.
The whale fell and fell, very close to the boat.
Splash!
Water churned and frothed. The whale’s head hit the water with an almighty slap. A bigger wave crashed over the deck, drenching Perrin’s shoes, the boxes and crates standing under the mast, and also the dragon’s nest. She hissed as the water pulled at the bundle of nets and sailcloth, and stood on the cloth to prevent the nest from washing over the side with the foamy water.
The whale then lifted its tail and slapped it on the surface close to the hull. It could so very easily hit the deck and smash the boat to pieces.
“Do you hear that?” Hix yelled.
Yes, Perrin heard it: over the splashing of waves came a keening sound, rising from the water.
“It’s the whale song,” Captain Anko said.
“What does it mean?”
No one knew.
But Perrin remembered that he had something for that.
He ran back down to his cabin. He took his bag off the hook next to the door and retrieved the solid wooden box. Inside lay the precious trumpet that he had come here to return to the whales. Surely they’d recognise the sound, and they’d come to take delivery of it?
He lifted it out of the bed of velvet.
It was indeed a very rusty, barnacle-encrusted thing. If he hadn’t known that this instrument had so much value, he would have discarded it. In fact, there might have been a real risk that Mirella might have done that.
He went back up the stairs with the trumpet.
Captain Anko gave him a strange look.
Now, how to use it?
He was too far from the surface to stick the instrument under the water, so he asked Quinn to hold his feet while he leaned as much as possible over the side.
It was very tricky, because the sea was rough and kept slamming him into the hull of the ship, and the whales were not helping by getting uncomfortably close. At one point, Perrin had to duck to avoid being hit by a giant front fin.
Perrin was afraid that he would be squashed between the huge body and the side of the ship. The spray from the waves hit him in the face.
When he stuck the trumpet in the water, a huge burst of noise came out of the mouth piece. It was so loud that even Ivy watching on the deck to help haul him back up clapped her hands over her ears.
"Can you hear what they are saying?" he yelled.
"You need to put it deeper in the water so that it stays submerged,” Hix yelled.
So Quinn and Ivy lowered him further, hanging over the side of the boat by his feet. Thank goodness for quality shoes.
The waves washed over Perrin, and once he could even feel the tail of a whale brush his arm.
It was rough and made scratches on his skin that started bleeding. The seawater burned like fire.
He got thoroughly wet.
He put the trumpet in the water. It blurted out incoherent words evil, and trespassing.
He stuck the bell in the water again and yelled through the algae encrusted mouthpiece, “We have permission from the whale kingdom to travel through. I’m returning the Horn of Truth to you.”
The response to his comment was a lot of incoherent screeching. He supposed this was a way to show their anger? He wasn’t sure.
But whenever he stuck the trumpet in the water, he only heard garbled words.
And the whales would not let the ship through. They had arrived at the place where a passage between two islands provided access to Gaminia. Each time the boat moved forward, the whales formed a solid wall of bodies. They slapped their tails on the water. Those tails were really very big and strong. When the boat was too close, water would gush over the sides. The whales would have no trouble at all destroying the ship.
And since Hix had to loosen the sails, the boat was drifting with the current, straight for a rocky reef.
Captain Anko yelled, “Tighten the sails, we’re turning back.”
“I have to deliver the trumpet!”
“I don’t care, I have to keep the boat safe. They’re not letting us through. They know you have the damn trumpet. They can come and get it and ask for it politely.”
Perrin couldn’t argue with that. Those islands looked barren and uninviting, and that’s where they’d be stuck if the whales destroyed the ship.
Quinn pulled him up. He was thoroughly wet and cold. This was not at all as easy as he had thought.
Chapter 22
The boat retreated and put out anchor in a bay of one of the islands, where they were out of the influence of the waves, but still very much within the line of sight of the whales that blocked the passage between the islands.
No one mentioned the option of going around the islands, so Perrin guessed that was not a done thing, for whatever reason—and to be honest, he could think of a few. They were, after all, in a land where magic could be used legally.
The island’s shore looked as inhospitable close up as it had from a distance. The island was nothing more than a rocky knoll in the middle of the ocean, the home of a colony of seagulls and other birds that had turned part of the rocky shore white with their excrement. You could smell it, too.
The crew met in the galley, which was rather cramped when everyone was in there, and felt too small to hold this many people, especially when some of them were angry.
Captain Anko had, he said in a rant directed at Perrin and the dragon—which was stomping around on the deck—never been refused passage over Gaminia. That was a point of pride in his seafaring life. Landlubbers wouldn’t understand what it was like being a sailor, navigating the different rules instated by the realms.
“Each of them just care about their own interests. Solania, Tamba, Validor, Gaminia, they’re all just places we travel through on the way to another goal. It’s our pride to get passage into all of them as easily as possible. We need to be able to go to all the realms. That’s what my reputation is built on.”
At this point, Perrin got rather irritated. He pushed himself up from the table. “Look, it’s no good complaining. None of us knew that the whales would refuse us passage, even if we got the permits. The whales are known for pulling those sorts of tricks.”
Hix said, “There is always a reason. The reason is that you are on board.”
“We’re coming to return something they want. Something they have sent thugs into Tamba to retrieve. Something that they are happy to run the risk of punishment for breaking into my brother-in-law’s house!”
“Too right. It’s to do with you.”
“Stop arguing,” Captain Anko said. “He’s right about one thing: complaining gets us nowhere.”
“That’s why I will try again to talk with these cantankerous whales,” Perrin said. “We’re here because of them, and if they won’t listen to us and accept that we’re here to return the Horn of Truth, then we’ll continue to Solania.”
“We’ll have to backtrack and it will cost the Bureau extra,” Captain Anko said.
Of course! Perrin had to make an effort not to roll his eyes. “Let’s just deal with that if it comes to pass. I don’t particularly like it that thugs are making our city unsafe over this thing the whales want returned, so I will keep trying to give it back to them. Lend me a dinghy and someone to row it to the deeper water where the whales are.”
Captain Anko agreed that Quinn could come. He was a strong rower, he said.
Perrin could believe it.
The captain also had a viewing tube, a metal cylinder the width of a bucket that was about waist-high and that was open on one side and had a glass window on the other.
Fishermen would use this device to look for oysters and clams, he said.
But all that would have to wait until the next morning. If the weather was good. And if the pirates that were supposedly still following hadn’t caught up.
Back in their cabin, Verbena asked what she should do.
“Keep that dragon where it is,” Perrin said. “I’ll give you the thunderstaff.”
“I thought it didn’t work?”
“It doesn’t. But it’s the best we have.”
“I was reading about dragons, and apparently some people train them like dogs.”
“Those people are skilled magicians who work with an individual dragon as soon as it hatches.”
“Isn’t that what we’ve done?”
He met Verbena’s eyes. She had a point there.
And what had Tamba done? Locked the dragon up because it was a dangerous creature. But, now that he thought about it, every act of aggression from the dragon could be explained by its fear of people and further mistreatment. Raised to be eaten. Tied up. Locked up in a crate. Fed a diet of only pumpkins.
He shrugged. There was little they could do about that now. “Just make sure it stays on the deck.”
“What if the male returns?”
Perrin shrugged. “Try to chase it off, but if not, we might be forced to witness some dragon hanky-panky.”
Verbena laughed. “You’re so funny. Is that what you call it?”
“Well… you know what I mean, so it was an effective term. What would you call it, then?”
