Seen It All Before

The golden sea bobbed gently, rocking the unconventional skiff that sailed upon it. Quarrel sat midships. The gnome’s broad grin widened further as he tore a chunk from the vessel’s bow. Then he brandished a long-handled ladle and dipped it into the sea. Almost reverentially, he drizzled the buttery ocean over the hunk of teacake he had removed from his boat’s bottom.

It felt to him like time slowed. The butter dropped like a golden waterfall. It struck the surface of the teacake and ricocheted, spraying droplets of sunlight. What did not bounce formed tributaries and then a stream, running in beautiful rivulets across the delicious landscape before dropping off the rim of the makeshift world to fall back into the ocean. It was a sight usually reserved for the more upper-class sales pitches.

“It’s not just a teacake,” he sighed to himself. “It’s a Mama Gimble teacake.”

Gulls cawed overhead, interrupting the tranquil moment.

Quarrel squinted irritably up into the sky. “Darn birds!”

He turned his attention back to his treat and opened his mouth, ready to savour that initial bite. The gulls called again.

“Get your own treat!” Quarrel yelled. He cradled the delicacy to him and spoke more quietly, as if to the food itself. “This one’s all mine. Mine. My precious.”

The gulls called again, though now the cry was different. More urgent. Deeper. Indistinct, as if heard from a way off rather than directly overhead. More animalistic than avian.

Quarrel looked up…and opened his eyes.

What met his gaze was not the clear blue sky in which the gulls wheeled, crying out for his teacake. It was dark, the only light coming through a slit where the window did not fit properly. The hard pallet on which he lay was not the delicious vessel in which he had, until recently, been traversing a sea of butter.

Though it was dawning on him that it had merely been a dream, Quarrel could not help but feel annoyed. His stomach might not have felt the benefit but his mind certainly would have. And he’d been robbed of it by…what, exactly?

More shouts, muffled through the walls of the hut in which he had sheltered for the night, had him scurrying from his bed. Hands that had suddenly forgotten how to properly function fumbled with shirt and breeches. Sleepiness combined with panicked haste to make a task he had performed daily for decades as impossible to him as Young Jack avoiding mirrors. Finally he slammed his washpot helm on his head, scooped up his crossbow and straightened his spectacles as he stepped out to witness a scene of chaos.

The gnomes had spent the night in an abandoned settlement; an old village that no longer served a viable purpose. The aging structures were sited around a central village green, which had, whilst the gnomes slept, sprouted a most magnificent moonstone bloom, amongst which figures now scurried.

“What’s happening?” Quarrel muttered to himself.

“Pirates.”

Quarrel jumped at the voice and turned to take in its owner. He hadn’t even registered Gradock’s presence. The old gnome was leaning against the wall of the hut in which Quarrel had slept. His long, braided beard twitched with every suck of the long pipe that, presumably, had found its way to the gnome’s mouth amongst the mass of facial hair.

Quarrel turned his gaze back to the fracas. Now that he knew what he was looking for, he could make out figures beyond the gnomes he was travelling with. On the far side of the green, a goblin with a magnificent hat perched atop what seemed to Quarrel to be a wheelbarrow crafted into the form of a small boat, complete with sail. The goblin was stood at, for want of a better description, the prow and was urging those under his command forwards.

Quarrel turned back to Gradock. “Shouldn’t we do something?”

Gradock momentarily lowered his pipe. “I am,” he stated firmly. “I’m assessin’.”

Quarrel turned back to the fray. Bjorn was charging headlong across the green. Watching the norse berserker was a terrifying sight, though the only response the swaying monkey that was the focus of his advance gave was to take a deep swig of rum from the bottle it held in one huge hand. Or should it be foot? Quarrel did not have enough zoological knowhow to understand the distinction.

In any case, the liquor must have dulled the primate’s senses as it merely stood there as the gnome’s axe descended. Quarrel wanted to avert his gaze from the inevitable slaughter but could not tear his eyes away. And it was a good job he couldn’t as otherwise he would not have been able to explain what happened next. One moment the monkey was swaying gently, stood in the axe’s path. The next it wasn’t, its drunken movements causing it to slide out of the way at the last moment.

“How?” Quarrel gasped.

“Drunken Monkey Stance,” said Gradock, nodding knowledgeably.

“Drunken…?”

“Monkey Stance,” Gradock repeated. “I’ve seen it before. Not with an actual monkey, mind.”

Quarrel was not at all certain of the older gnome’s credibility but was in no position to argue. He watched as Bjorn, fully expecting the resistance of the monkey’s skull pushing back against his axe blade, stumbled headlong past the primate, who curled its lips back and bared its teeth in a mocking smile.

Another opponent intercepted Bjorn’s stumble. It looked like a goblin, for the most part, but its head…

Quarrel rubbed a free knuckle into an eye socket but the apparition remained. The figure had the body of a goblin and the head of an octopus. Correction, thought Quarrel, as the octopus lunged for Bjorn, revealing the goblin head underneath, it was a goblin wearing an octopus as some sort of strange headpiece. Not that such a distinction made the sight any less surreal.

Rather than attack Bjorn, as Quarrel had been expecting, the octopus’ tentacles wrapped around his bearskin waistcoat. A brief struggle ended, rather surprisingly, with the octopus wearing the waistcoat. And then both octopus and goblin were off, leaving a significantly more exposed Bjorn to fend off the counter-offensive of the intoxicated monkey.

“Why…?” Quarrel began.

“Well known for grabbin’ things, your basic octopus,” Gradock explained, predicting the question on the younger gnome’s lips. “Yer non-basic ones even more so. Very jealous of what others ‘ave. I’ve seen it before where one stole a man’s boots whilst he was runnin’.”

Quarrel wasn’t sure whether the man had been running on the ocean or the octopus had somehow been on land. Nor was he sure he wanted the conversation to go down that particular rabbit hole. Gradock’s tales seemed to get taller with every telling.

“And the goblin?”

“Probably stole ‘im, too,” said Gradock. “Looks to me like the cephalopod is controllin’ the biped, not t’other way around.”

A clattering overhead forestalled further discussion on the matter and Quarrel glanced skywards, grinning as he witnessed Belle Memphis piloting her airship, highlighted in ghostly tones by the light of the moon. She glided low, lining up her bolt thrower for the pirate captain at his wheelbarrow-ship prow.

As she passed over the octopus-goblin, fleeing with their stolen plunder, the cephalopod launched itself from the head of the goblin on which it rode. Time seemed to slow as octopus and airship converged, the trajectory of each destined to meet, too close now to do anything but collide.

The thwack as the octopus latched itself onto the nose of the balloon, eight arms extended like a starfish for maximum purchase, was audible even from where Quarrel stood across the green. The airship tilted forward under the additional weight and, as it did so, the octopus, still wearing Bjorn’s bearskin, reached its lowest two legs towards its goblin host and hoisted him up towards it.

Quarrel looked on in fascinated horror as the octopus began to inflate. Simultaneously, the airship’s balloon began to sag and lose height, even as the octopus and its goblin accomplice started to drift skywards.

“It’s sucking the air out,” Quarrel gasped. “It’s turning itself into an airship!”

“That’s nothin’,” Gradock chuckled. “When I was a lad, I remember when “Crackers” Blackmore bet “Dozey” Dootson that he couldn’t inhale more helium than ‘im. Crackers just pretended to take it in whilst Dootson went at it like a champ. It was a good job a couple of the lads were on hand to grab his legs before he floated away!”

Whether or not Dozey Dootson had indeed almost got airborne, into the sky was exactly where the octopus was now going, its body distorted into a fleshy ball, Bjorn’s bearskin waistcoat a minute detail on an otherwise pink sphere. Belle had scrambled out of her harness and scurried away to safety as the airship lost all buoyancy and, with a pop, the cephalopod detached itself and drifted upwards into the moonlit night.

“Oh no you don’t,” Quarrel muttered, fumbling with his crossbow and lining up his shot.

Despite being in the open sky, the target was still a small one and he took his time to take aim. Only when he was certain the shot would be true did he squeeze the trigger.

There was an almighty clang from the weapon. The bolt snapped under the pressure exerted upon it and the string arched up before thwacking down onto the woodwork. It was in a state of despair that Quarrel looked over his beloved firearm, inspecting the stock and the string, looking for what had broken.

“Relax,” said Gradock, who still had not moved. “It’s just a misfire. It’ll still work. Nothin’ breaks around me. I’m yer lucky charm. When I was a lad, t’engineers used to keep me close by at all times and nothin’ ever broke…not terminally, in any case.”

For all the potentially tall tales Gradock had told thus far, this was one statement that Quarrel was glad to discover held up. Quickly he reached for another bolt but had only got so far as retrieving the bolt from its quiver when a handsome human leapt out of the shadows to confront the two gnomes.

“Avast, ye landlubbers!” the newcomer cried, and so startled was Quarrel that he fumbled the bolt, which skittered away into the darkness.

The pirate before them was the definition of debonair. Slicked back hair framed chiselled features. Clothes of expensive cloth and cut clad his lean frame. Broad shoulders were made bulkier still by metal pauldrons. In his right hand he brandished a curved scimitar. In his left he sported a buckler, which gleamed brightly with reflected moonlight.

Quarrel raised his hands and the pirate, seemingly seeing no sport in the defenceless, turned his attention to Gradock. He lashed out at the elderly gnome with a triumphant cry that turned to one of shock as Gradock slipped beyond his reach, allowed his pipe to slip through his fingers until he held it towards its tip, before swinging with such force that the bowl snapped the man’s head to one side and left a mark on his cheek.

The pirate reached a hand up to his injured face and gaped at the gnome. “You hit me!”

Gradock shrugged. “That was nothin’. I’ve seen your sort before. Nothin’ but show.”

“But…but I’m a great swordsman!”

Gradock chuckled. “I’ve seen better. When I was a lad we had proper fighters. “Mad Dog” Arnold was bigger. “Slammer” Harris was faster. Even “Poser” Delaney had more style. I beat ‘em all. And here you stand with yer toothpick and yer mirror thinkin’ yer somethin’ special. I tell you, back in my day…”

The voice droned on. Quarrel watched as the man looked at the buckler in his hand as if he had forgotten what it was. He turned it this way and that, examining himself from different angles, as if the small shield was indeed a mirror, just as Gradock had described it.

It occurred to Quarrel that he had before him a distracted opponent and, whilst he, Quarrel, did not have a loaded crossbow in his hands, what he did have was a rather weighty length of timber. He brought it down with some force on the head of the preoccupied pirate, who folded up with a sigh.

Gradock regarded the limp figure. “I was just gettin’ to the good part,” he complained.

Quarrel, adrenaline coursing through his veins following the act of violence he had just perpetrated, regarded his elder critically.

“Let me guess,” he said, injected as much sarcasm into his voice as he dared, “you’ve seen that before, too.”

Gradock regarded the prone pirate for a moment and then turned his eyes skyward, toking gently on his pipe, deep in thought.

“You know,” he said eventually, breaking into a broad grin, “I do believe that was a first.”