CHAPTER FORTY THREE

Seeing Tom again was awkward after experiencing a day of people referring to him as a god. Jane felt incredibly inferior when he stepped onto the riverbank beside her. He stood in the mist, blinking to adjust his eyes after being locked in the darkness of the brig. His orange hair looked like a warning device in the mist.

‘What is happening?’ He asked, and his voice chirped upward.

Jane hesitated. She couldn’t think of something to say.

Meanwhile Trinket dropped to a knee in front of Tom and put her head down. She murmured, ‘This is an honour.’

Tom was nonplussed and he sort of swept his hand in Trinket’s direction, and asked, ‘Are you an elf?’

‘I wish you didn’t ask that.’

‘No … I remember, you are a thrip. Is that right?’

‘That is right. We don’t like being associated with the elves.’

Trinket bounced to her feet. Her green eyes glistened.

The captain was working his way around the rootball of the tree, his muscles bunched, his feet breaking branches.

Jane noticed that the captain had shut and fastened the window to the brig. Dismayed, she went to the rootball, intending to clamber back across the river to reopen the window. She shook her head at the captain, and set her face in a snarl.

‘You have locked Andrew in the brig. He will drown in there.’

‘He is not my problem,’ said the captain, and he grinned, his mouth a huge cavernous opening.

The ship got hit by a pressure wave and a floating tree. The ship reared up and the roof of the brig pushed into the wet black dirt of the riverbank. The wave roared over the deck.

From inside the ship came massive thumps of gigantic feet kicking the ship’s hull, accompanied by the bovine groans of Grogans. Mad with fear and frantic for escape, the Grogans began bashing their chains and their feet into the hull, and the sound of them filled the air.

Jane took hold of the rootball, but the captain put a big hand on her arm.

‘That boat is going to go over. Do not get on board.’

‘Why did you shut the window?’

‘That boys will be of no help to you.’

The boat kept digging into the black dirt, making the sound of crumbling and rending and tearing. Clumps of bunch grass and switchgrass got knocked over.

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Just then, along the boat's trembling deck, came a strange looking man wearing a purple hat and an orange coat. He emerged from the mist, running at an angle on the deck toward the ship's rear. The rest of the ship's crew had gone forward and jumped from the ship onto the cliff that had caught the ship’s bow.

Jane was transfixed. The purple coated man could be a carnival spruiker, or a ringmaster under a circus tent, or a magician at a child's party.

The coated man arrived at the brig, and disappeared behind the bulk of it.

Jane turned to Trinket.

Trinket muttered, ‘Silas Fox.’

Tom was also watching the man, and he shook his head, and made a small harumph in his throat. Then a smile formed.

‘He will be going to the brig to get me. He wants his money.’

‘He will be furious,’ said Trinket. She giggled in a girlish way. She looked at Tom as though starstruck, as though Tom was a movie star, or a King. Tom didn’t notice though. He was just looking out at the ship’s brig, waiting to see what happened.

The captain stood tall with his arms crossed, watching the ship, like he was watching a movie with an expectation of an unfolding plot. There was a tension in his face. The ship that he had been captaining, for who knows how long, would soon be no more.

The thunder of water smashed the ship’s hull, pushing it so that the ship listed.

The sprightly man in the purple coat came back out from the brig. Now the deck was at such an angle, he had to carefully walk up the slope to the gunwales.

Andrew emerged from the brig. Andrew didn’t have the balance of the purple coated man. He managed, with lunging steps to get up to the gunwale, then followed the purple coated man along the gunwales toward the bow. Andrew supported himself by holding the gunwale, and lumbered forward.

Jane caught movement out of the corner of her eye, and without realising what she was doing she lunged across Trinket’s line of sight. If Trinket hadn’t been quick in her thinking, the arrow that she had drawn and sighted along the ship's gunwale toward Fox, would have gone through Jane.

‘Stop,’ Jane shouted, jiggling back and forth in front of Trinket, with her arms out. She was furious, and her face was stricken and her eyes were intense with distress.

‘Just stop shooting people.’

‘Get out of the way,’ Trinket murmured, her voice low and filled with menace.

‘No. I want you to stop shooting people.’

‘They are dangerous to our cause. They will get to the Emperor before we do and alert him of our presence.’

‘Does that matter?’ Jane continued to stand squarely in front of Trinket.

Tom took two steps toward Jane.

‘We are in a different world with different rules.’

‘The rules that I live by are in here,’ said Jane and she pointed to her chest.

The captain said, ‘It doesn’t matter if the Emperor knows or doesn’t know about you arriving. You will not get in through the city gates.’

‘Now we won’t be able to go through the dock either,’ said Trinket. ‘Once Fox informs the Emperor of our presence he will seal the dock up like an oubliette.’

Jane saw that the purple coated man had made it to the far bank and was standing, almost invisible in the mist, on the far cliff. He looked across the river at the group.

Trinket said, ‘We will have to go through the catacombs.’

‘How will you do that?’ said the captain with complete disdain.

‘We take the horses,’ said Trinket.

Jane gazed out at the ship where Andrew stumbled the last few feet toward the prow, walking in the channel between the forward cabin and the gunwales. Just then Jane noticed the danger, but too late.

‘Arrow,’ she yelled while falling as fast as she could to the ground.

An arrow swiped through the mist spinning inches past her ear, heading directly for Tom.