‘No,’ said Darwin. ‘This is all absurd.’
‘Not as such,’ said the literarily inclined pirate, happening by. ‘In many ways it exhibits a divine elegance. The ghosts of men inhabit a realm above the Earth, to which those who walk upon terra firma will never rise when living.’
‘Oh yes they will and quite soon,’ said Darwin. ‘Oh, I don't feel very well.’
‘Just getting your dead-legs,’ said the captain. ‘As in sea-legs, you see.’
‘I do see,’ said Darwin. ‘And it was not even funny.’
‘I'm a prince,’ said Jack, ‘so I am happy enough.’
This gave Darwin pause for thought. ‘Just hold on here,’ he said. ‘I recall well enough that conversation with the kiwi bird. It identified me as the Ape of Thoth, Lord of the Past and the Future.’
‘And your point is?’ asked the captain.
‘I cannot be dead if I am a God,’ said Darwin.
‘I might take issue with you there,’ said the pirate with literary learnings. ‘As this Heavenly realm encompasses the dreams and fantasies of the souls that inhabit it, an inflated image of one's own importance might surely result in a projected manifestation where delusion of Godhood takes on a reality of its own. In fact—’
But this pirate said no more than, ‘Ooooow!’ for Darwin bit him.
‘I am not dead,’ declared the ape. ‘And I never said I was a God.’
‘You did say,’ said Jack, ‘that Man descended from the noble ape and the noble ape from you.’
‘I might have,’ said Darwin. ‘But—’
‘It really doesn't matter,’ said the captain. ‘Soon we will all be nothing but whispers in space.’
‘And what does that mean?’ asked Darwin.
‘Look around you,’ said the captain. ‘Look around the sky.’
Darwin did and Darwin shook his head.
‘You see islands, you see fish, you see birds and kraken, too, but you will notice that you don't see many men.’
‘I see you,’ said Darwin.
‘And my crew of pirates. Eight in number – a rather small tally of pirates, don't you agree?’
‘Where is this leading?’ Darwin asked.
‘I believe,’ said the captain, ‘and others before me have believed – others who are not here now – that this wonderful cloudy realm in the sky is but the portal to Heaven. You might consider it Limbo, or indeed God's waiting room, for surely if it were inhabited by the souls of the dead it would be a very very crowded place. Seeing as how millions and millions of people have died before this time.’
‘Hm!’ went Darwin, making a face. ‘That could well be an argument that this is not some realm of the dead. In fact,’ and here his little face lit up, ‘I might just be dreaming all this.’ And Darwin started pinching himself. Because it is one of those Eternal Verities that if you are having a bad dream, you can pinch yourself and it will wake you up.
Not that Darwin could ever recall anyone vouching for the authenticity of this particular Eternal Verity.
‘I tried that,’ said Captain Black Jack. ‘Gave myself terrible bruises. Banged my head on the mast, I did. Nearly put me eye out.’
Darwin made fists, flung them into the air and took to stalking up and down the deck.
He took to reciting a mantra that went: ‘I am not dead. I am not dead. I am not dead,’ and so on.
‘You don't seem to mind at all, do you, boy?’ the captain asked young Jack.
‘I told the ape,’ said Jack, ‘when I jumped from the spire, that I had nothing to lose. I was a child labourer, pushed up chimneys, treated like the dirt that covered me. There was no life in that for me. I am happy here.’
‘You were not so happy when you had that magic egg poked down your throat,’ said Darwin. ‘Not very Heavenly, that, to my thinking.’
‘It's not all wings and harps,’ said Black Jack MacJackblack. ‘There would be no adventure if it was. We have battles and we have quests. Why, even now we are bound for a treasure castle. Aaah-harr-harr-harr.’
‘Bravo,’ said the literary pirate. ‘A nice return to character. Let us have no more of this theosophical disputation. Let us just be sky pirates bold and sail the aerial oceans.’
‘Well said,’ said the captain. ‘Break out the grog and we'll all get legless together.’
There had been a certain shift about in the sulking.
Young Jack had brightened up no end. Considering that he was a prince now, and he was having an adventure with pirates, and that was pretty much all he had ever wanted to be and to do when alive.
Darwin, however . . .
The ape hunched low with folded brow and glared towards the sky. Here was an ape who was not at all pleased with his lot. A dead ape who did not want to be dead, had not chosen to be dead, did not consider it fun at all to be dead. And so on.
‘Outrageous,’ Darwin said at intervals. ‘Quite preposterous, too.’
Jack even tried to comfort Darwin.
Darwin bit young Jack.
The sails billowed out as sails will do and the good ship Venus moved on. Young Jack was actually nice to Darwin and was even prepared to take just a little bit of responsibility for the ape's death. What with him encouraging Darwin to leap from the church spire into the cloud boat. And everything. Darwin sighed and huffed and puffed but finally gave up the grumping. There was really no point to it, and he was an ape of a naturally cheery disposition, and if he was now dead, and it did appear extremely likely that this was in fact the case, then there was really nothing more for it than to make the best of a very bad job and simply get on with it.
Though it still made the ape very angry and also rather confused. Because he was absolutely certain that when it came to his own death, this death would come through the medium of his old master Lord Brentford shooting him dead within the Marie Lloyd in eighteen ninety-nine.
Darwin's conviction that this was how it would happen was, of course, backed up by the fact that it already had.
So Darwin was left in some confusion, but was prepared to put it down to all the chaos of time travelling, and so he would have to make the best of a very bad job and simply get on with it.
‘The captain said you might like this,’ said Jack, presenting Darwin with a bottle and a pair of long-stemmed glasses.
Darwin perused the bottle's label.
Château Doveston
CHAMPAGNE
1824
Darwin had a little cry. Then uncorked the champagne.
It is a fact well known to those who know it well that the simple transference of a body of liquid from one place to the other can alter so many things. Or at least appear to.*
One half-hour after the champagne opening, Darwin was mellow once more. He and Jack peered over the rail and spat onto seagulls below.
‘Look at the size of those mountains,’ said Jack. ‘They'd be the Him-a-ma-layas, they would.’
‘And that would be Lhasa,’ said Darwin, pointing, ‘the capital of Tibet, and that is the Potala Palace, where the Dalai Lama lives.’
‘And that,’ said Jack, all pointy-fingered, ‘that there would be something very special.’
Darwin looked and Darwin saw and Darwin's mouth fell open.
In the distance, something monstrous swam. It was monstrous in size, not in nature, for it swam with grace and rolled with ease through the bright blue sky. The sunlight shimmered upon its sides, which shone with rainbow hues. And rising high upon it stood a castle formed from many many spires. Before this kingly castle was a noble courtyard proud with mighty statues, and in this courtyard stood a gushing fountain.
‘Thar she blows!’ cried a pirate from the crow's nest. ‘Thar blows Skia the Sky Whale.’
* See The Sprouts of Wrath, available from Amazon in a Kindle edition, Far-Fetched Books, 2012. (R. R.)
33
he pirate ship approached the mighty sky whale.
Darwin stared in awe and shook his head.
Skia was va
st. Surely the biggest creature that had ever lived. If indeed she had ever lived and was not the wistful conjuration of some deceased whale, a phantasm brought to reality within this Heavenly kingdom.
The sky whale was many times the length of the good ship Venus. In fact, she put Darwin in mind of the ill-fated Empress of Mars, an airship of improbable dimensions aboard which he had once travelled.
The whale was a beautiful thing to behold, with its shimmering flukes and its great fanned tail. And upon its back rose the castle, a fairy-tale construction of high towers, cupolas and minarets. Flags waved gaily, crystal windows reflected the sunlight and down in the courtyard, with its heroic statuary, the great fountain - which was Skia's blowhole – cast watery rainbows skyward.
It was all too beautiful. Such nobility, such grandeur, such wonder. Darwin was enchanted.
‘Harpoons at the ready!’ The captain stumped along the deck, waving his cutlass high. ‘Steer us close, Mr Mate, and we'll have her.’
‘No!’ shouted Darwin. ‘Do not even think of doing such a terrible thing.’
‘We be pirates,’ said the captain, ‘and we be whalers, too. Are we not men? Show us such a beast as this and we must kill it. Be it already dead, or not. What say you, my bonny lads?’
His bonny lads said, ‘Aye!’
‘You must not kill this beautiful creature,’ begged Darwin.
‘You're not really cut out for a life of piracy, are you?’ asked the captain, tapping a shanty-beat upon his wooden leg.
‘No,’ said Darwin. ‘And I do not understand how you can kill things when they are already dead. Nor why you would wish to.’
‘I told you – we're pirates. That's that. Harpoons at the ready, lads.’ The captain turned his back.
‘Ah,’ said Darwin, who was not done yet. ‘If you kill her she might sink.’
The captain paused.
‘And if she sinks,’ Darwin continued, ‘then you will lose your treasure.’
And the captain turned back.
‘Hold hard on those harpoons,’ he told his crew.
‘Aaaaaaw,’ his crew replied.
‘Take us in to the whale's back and we'll storm the castle.’
‘No,’ said Darwin. ‘No. My monkeys might be in that castle. I do not want you doing any storming. We should just knock politely upon the door and they will probably let us in.’
Black Jack MacJackblack cocked his head. ‘Do you be issuing orders?’ he asked. ‘For as you may or may not know, pirates are notoriously treacherous and untrustworthy, and as we have now reached our destination and be almost in sight of our treasure, perhaps it's time for you to walk the plank.’
‘What?’ went Darwin, rightly appalled.
‘It's my treasure, anyway,’ muttered Jack.
‘And I heard that,’ cried the captain. ‘Along the plank with the both of them, lads.’
The pirates fell upon Darwin and Jack.
Then came a terrible sound. It was a series of sounds really, a procession of sounds. A triad of sounds, to be precise. The first could be described as a ‘muffled report’. The second a ‘pronounced whistling’, which grew inexorably louder and deeper. And the third an ‘explosion proper’ as a cannonball struck the mainmast, bringing it down upon the deck.
In chaos and confusion, pirates floundered and murmured then roared. Someone raised a spyglass and then shouted.
‘Chickens on the starboard bow!’ he shouted.
‘Chickens?’ Darwin, under much sailcloth, adopted the foetal position.
‘Chickens?’ bawled the captain. ‘Man the cannon.’
The chickens’ ship was very fine indeed, a four-masted hen-o’-war with two gun decks and a rear-mounted prang cannon. The ship was named the Pride of Atlantis and flew the infamous chicken ensign of double egg, chips and crossed bacon. The figurehead was a noble cock, as was indeed the captain, whose name was Speckley Jim.
The captain wore high-topped boots and spurs, a sleeveless golden-braided frock coat, gilded back adornments and the very latest in avian nautical wear, a quadracorn hat. Beneath a dextrous wing he carried his lucky fun-fur figure of Lop Lop, God of the Birds.
For seamen are notably superstitious and seagoing chickens even more so.
‘Put another one across their bows, Master Mate,’ called Captain Speckley Jim to a chicken whose full name was Henry Chirpy-Cheap-Cheap-Fancy McPenny-Cluck-Cluck—*
‘Aye aye, Captain,’ said a hen.
And another shot rang out.
‘Fire!’ yelled Captain Black Jack MacJackblack. Pirates fired their cannon.
‘Come on, Darwin.’ Young Jack uncovered the monkey. ‘This is wonderful stuff. Pirates battling chickens – it doesn't get better than this.’
Darwin peeped over a gunwale. ‘So even chickens secretly yearn to be pirates,’ he said.
‘Now, if I could be a pirate King,’ said Jack, ‘that would fulfil every wish, really, now duck.’
Darwin did not say, ‘What duck?’ for Darwin knew better than that. He ducked as a cannonball soared overhead, and ducked more as something exploded.
Captain Black Jack was at the ship's wheel, spinning it around and shouting out orders. Pirates were firing cannon and yelling abuse at the chickens. A cabin boy had appeared from somewhere† and was playing the concertina.
A mast went down on the hen-o’-war and the pirates cheered its falling.
The chickens’ prang cannon poured forth fire and the pirates took to ducking.
‘Prepare to board!’ the captain called. Pirates thrust knives between their teeth, cocked their pistols and ‘ahhaar-harrhed’ ’til they were almost blue in the face.
‘I think I'll stay out of the actual hand-to-hand combat,’ said Jack. ‘We could climb up one of the remaining masts and watch it from there.’
Darwin shrugged, and as the good ship Venus slapped into the side of the Pride of Atlantis and the pirates swung onto the enemy ship in a manner not unlike that employed by monkeys, he and Jack did swarmings up a mast to watch the ensuing meêlée.
‘’Tis a fellow bold as would war with a hen,’ as William Shakespeare put it. And the Bard of Avon knew of which he spoke, for history records that Shakespeare himself, when down upon his uppers, before rising to fame, had made a precarious living fighting chickens in one of the notorious cock pits of Chiswick.
When pirate fought chicken, the battle was bloody and brutal. The hackings and hewings were horrible. The slashings and slaughters were savage. The choppings of chickens and piercings of pirates were, as it happens, mightily cheered on by Jack and Darwin who, from the comparative safety of their lofty viewing point, were able to enjoy what must surely have been a unique spectacle.
Captain Black Jack engaged Captain Speckley Jim in swordplay. Up and down the decks they went amidst the battle royal. Feathers flew and bits of Black Jack also. Then the Pride of Atlantis burst into flames, which brought even more excitement.
‘Who do you think will win?’ Jack asked of Darwin.
The monkey gave himself a scratch and said, ‘I do not think it will go well for us no matter which side wins. The pirates will make us walk the plank if they win. And as for the chickens, Heaven knows, if they win they will probably eat us.’
‘Perhaps it would be better if we just quietly slipped away,’ was Jack's suggestion.
Darwin had no objection to make regarding this.
‘To the longboat,’ said Jack, because pirate ships always do have a longboat. ‘I will row us over to the sky whale whilst all the fuss and bother's going on.’
For the fuss and bother was going on by now in a most spectacular fashion, with chickens on fire and barrels of gunpowder exploding and pirates hacking away like mad and pirates and chickens falling off the Pride of Atlantis and Captain Black Jack giving a pretty good account of himself with the swordplay. And everything.
Jack lowered the longboat whilst Darwin looked on.*
‘Come on,’ called Jack, when the lowering was done. ‘Let u
s make good our escape.’
Darwin joined Jack in the longboat and Jack put effort to the oars.
The sky whale wallowed in the air, all a-shimmer and spouting water up through the ornamental fountain.
Viewing this fountain, Darwin was caused to remark that he wondered just where the sky whale got its water from to spout, as it hung in empty air.
Jack replied that, given the ludicrous nature of all that was presently going on, did it actually matter?
Darwin agreed it did not.
Whales have rather friendly faces, as do dolphins and porpoises. They have big smiley mouths and charming expressions. Skia had lovely long eyelashes.
There was a harpoon in the longboat. Jack looked wistfully at it.
‘We will beach the boat on Skia's tail,’ said Darwin, and he showed his teeth to Jack.
As the longboat beached, Jack and Darwin found themselves ducking as two mighty explosions rent the air about them. Then down towards the Earth plunged wreckage of the good ship Venus and the Pride of Atlantis.
‘And good riddance to them,’ said Jack, and he smacked his palms together.
‘I shall not miss them,’ said Darwin. ‘I hope though that they do not fall upon anyone and do them serious damage.’
Jack rolled his eyes and shook his head. ‘Darwin,’ he said, ‘when things fall from this kingdom they change into rain, for they are made out of clouds, are they not?’
‘Yes,’ said Darwin. ‘I suppose that they are.’ And it pained him somewhat to say it, because by saying it he had to admit that he was now made out of clouds.
Jack looked up at the lofty castle and rubbed his hands together. ‘My castle,’ he said to Darwin. ‘And my treasure within.’
‘There might be a little more to it than that,’ said the adventurous ape. ‘And if there isn't, don't forget about the magic egg you still have to lay.’
Which quite wiped the greedy smile from the face of Jack.
‘Shall we go and knock on the castle door and see what happens?’ Darwin asked.
Jack shrugged and nodded and offered Darwin his hand.
Together they wandered along the great back of Skia around the fairy-tale castle to the courtyard with its statuary and ornate fountain, which cast water skyward without a care for logic.