The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear Read online

  I would have done anything for him. He’d saved my life.

  ‘You see, my eyes aren’t as sharp as they used to be. I’m getting a bit, er, short-sighted these days. I’m three thousand years old, after all.’

  I still don’t know if that was really true. Roving Reptilian Rescuers tend to exaggerate.

  ‘But for heaven’s sake keep it to yourself! If my colleagues get to hear of it I’ll be finished, professionally speaking.’

  He sighed.

  ‘The thing is, I’ve only got another year before I retire. I’ll have to keep going till then, but it’s getting harder and harder. I only saw you because you’re so exceptionally fat and blue.’

  Mac turned his head so that I was looking straight into his dim eyes.

  ‘Listen, youngster, I’ve a proposition for you. Stay with me for a year – be my navigator, my helmsman. Tell me where the action is, and I’ll provide you with free board and lodging. What’s more, you’ll get to see something of the world. Dramatic, last – minute rescues, beautiful damsels in dire peril – things like that. What do you say?’

  My navigator’s outfit

  BEFORE I TOOK up my duties as a navigator, Mac kitted me out with some working clothes. We normally operated at altitudes where the air was very thin and painfully cold, even for someone in a bearskin.

  Mac set me down on a mountain top, disappeared for a couple of hours, and returned with two articles of clothing, a thick red sweater and a pair of dark blue trousers.

  ‘I got them from a farm,’ he explained. ‘They were hanging on the line to dry. I wouldn’t call it stealing. Who knows, maybe we’ll save the original owner’s life some day.’

  You see things in their true perspective, looking at them from overhead. In my year as Mac’s navigator I learned much that proved useful in my subsequent lives as a seabear. I had always imagined, for example, that the world resembled a bowl of water with a few islands floating in it. From my vantage point on Mac’s back I perceived that it was an immense sphere, some of it covered with water and some with extensive continents. I had never thought it possible that such agglomerations of dry land could exist. We sometimes sailed over broad plains for weeks without sighting the sea. For the first time I saw mighty mountain ranges, big rivers, lakes, and forests. Mac flew me over the poles, and I marvelled at their mountains of pure ice. I saw the jungle, an endless green sea of gigantic trees from whose canopy of foliage the heads of fire-breathing dragons occasionally peered forth. We circled active volcanoes and warmed ourselves in the waves of heat given off by their mighty pillars of fire.

  Lurking dangers

  Mac showed me deserts, many of sand, others of multicoloured rocks, and never tired of explaining geological conformations. He enlightened me on alpine glaciers and peat bogs, quicksands, mud flats, and geological faults. Mac’s view of the world was mainly of a professional nature; as he saw it, danger lurked everywhere. A person could drown in marshes and quagmires, be swallowed up by crevasses, be overwhelmed by avalanches, meet a watery end in mud flats. If we flew over a forest, Mac automatically scanned it for dangerous species of animals and demons and gauged the risk of fire because of drought. Rivers we checked for piranhas (we simply dropped a dead fish into them and erected a warning sign if the water seethed), seas for the presence of sharks, and lakes for water snakes, lethal salamanders, and giant crocodiles.

  To Mac, an iceberg drifting in the rays of the setting sun was a hazard to shipping, not a breathtaking spectacle; a forest waterfall a threat to inexperienced boatmen, not a welcome source of refreshment; a cloudcastle hovering over a Caribbean island the precursor of a tropical typhoon, not one of Nature’s paintings. Even empty desert could turn out, under Mac’s stern gaze, to be a death trap replete with dangers: venomous gila monsters, giant spiders, electric scorpions loitering under stones, mirages that led the credulous astray, heat capable of driving a person insane with sunstroke.

  A windless sea could be just as dangerous as one that was lashed by the most violent of storms; more sailors died of thirst in the doldrums than drowned in hurricanes. Mac’s glum manner was the product of his daily misgivings about everything and everyone. Each of them, large or small, had etched another furrow in his skin and turned him into a living map of anxiety.

  The shift system

  The Roving Reptilian Rescuers kept tabs on the world in accordance with a complicated shift system I never entirely fathomed. They had divided the whole planet into grid squares, each of which was watched over by one pterodactyl. These grid squares were reallocated after a certain length of time to prevent boredom from setting in.

  Mac would occasionally meet some other pterodactyl on a bare mountain top. I generally preserved a discreet distance while they exchanged professional tips, dinosaur gossip, information about the distribution of grid squares, and a few dry quips. All Roving Reptilian Rescuers were inveterate loners. Social intercourse wasn’t their scene, and none of them ever made an exception to that rule.

  Meantime, I had lost a lot of weight. During our long-haul flights I performed exercises on Mac’s back: press-ups, knees-bends, et cetera. Now and then I would hang from his talons and do chin-ups. Mac saw to it that I was properly fed. He would set me down on a treetop or a mountain peak, fly off, and return with a beakful of fruit and vegetables, after which we would munch away in silence and enjoy the view. I had soon regained my former weight and acquired a few muscles into the bargain.

  I never quite discovered how Mac knew when someone was in danger. It was instinctive, I guess. As a rule we flew along at random until Mac suddenly cocked his head and stopped flapping his wings. Then he said ‘Work to be done!’ and altered course. Once we reached the target area I did the precision work, piloting Mac to our customer with pinpoint accuracy. I could steer him like an aircraft by using his horns as joysticks. Either that, or I simply told him where to go: ‘Further to the right, left a bit, down a bit, up a bit, now grab him!’ – that sort of thing.

  Last-minute rescues

  We rescued explorers from the clutches of forest demons before they were devoured; we caught mountaineers just as they were tumbling into deep ravines; we hoisted shipwrecked sailors off ice floes and out of shark-infested waters; we extricated lost children from gloomy forests before moss sprites could drive them mad; we preserved fanatical vulcanologists from death in boiling lava; we hauled foolhardy people out of swamps and quicksands; and, of course, we often saved gluttonous idiots who had fallen for the wiles of a Gourmetica insularis and bore them out of the danger zone.

  And – needless to say – we always waited until the very last moment.

  Having completed a mission, we usually transported the customer to safety and flew off at once. Mac found gratitude intolerable. Many customers wanted to entertain us, make a fuss of us, shower us with gifts, adopt us, marry us, and so on. I wouldn’t have objected to a little fuss, but not Mac. ‘That’s all right, it’s my job,’ he told them. ‘Be a bit more careful and avoid eating meat in future.’

  Then we soared off.

  Incident at Demon Rocks

  The greatest source of danger was recklessness. Although many of our customers had got into difficulty through sheer bad luck, our clientele included a hard core of incorrigibles who positively sought danger and, for unidentifiable reasons, wanted to pit themselves against the elements. Mountains had to be climbed, rapids negotiated, spooky swamps traversed after dark. Some blithely sang as they strode through benighted forests notorious for their population of werewolves, others insisted on watching volcanic eruptions from the crater’s edge or tornadoes from the eye of the storm.

  I recall an incident at Demon Rocks (we were already operating in Zamonia by this time) which could hardly have been surpassed for stupidity. We had spent the whole day watching from afar as a man clambered around in that ill-famed mountainous region. He was obviously an inexperienced climber. His shoes were far too light, and he had set off in a slight drizzle. ‘There’ll be tr
ouble,’ was all Mac said, and I strove to keep the man in sight as Mac circled at a considerable distance to prevent our being spotted.

  At the foot of Demon Rocks lay a dense crystal forest whose yards-long daggers of glass bristled close to the rock face. The bleached skeletons of incautious climbers hung, clattering, on many of those lethal spikes. Responsible mountaineers shunned the area just as seamen steered clear of the Malmstrom.

  Despite this, the man succeeded in climbing Demon Rocks. But the ascent tends to be the simpler, less dangerous part of a climb; the descent is riskier and more complicated. We resigned ourselves to a long afternoon’s wait, at the end of which we would probably have to pluck the numskull out of some crevice into which he had fallen.

  Far from it, however.

  Having ascended the highest peak, the climber spread his arms.

  ‘He’s holding his arms out,’ I told Mac, who couldn’t see him at that range.

  ‘Is he?’ said Mac. ‘Then he’s going to jump.’

  ‘Jump?’

  The climber launched himself into space.

  ‘He’s jumped!’ I cried.

  ‘I told you so,’ growled Mac.

  The madman fell like a stone. Demon Rocks were several miles high, and awaiting him below were the crystal daggers.

  ‘Let’s go!’ I cried.

  ‘No,’ said Mac.

  ‘What!’

  ‘It’s his own fault. He needs to be taught a lesson.’

  The man had now fallen a mile. We might just make it if we set off right away.

  ‘You can’t do this, Mac! Come on, move!’

  ‘No,’ said Mac, and flew another leisurely circuit.

  Fifteen hundred feet to impact …

  ‘But Mac, we can’t just watch like this.’

  ‘I’m not watching. I can’t see him in any case.’

  Nine hundred feet … The drizzle had given way to a heavy downpour, and visibility was steadily deteriorating.

  ‘Mac! I order you get going at once!’

  ‘I don’t take orders from you.’

  Six hundred feet …

  I couldn’t understand why Mac was doing nothing. By now the situation was wellnigh hopeless.

  Three hundred feet …

  ‘Mac! I can’t bear to watch!’

  ‘Don’t look, then. I’m not.’

  A hundred and fifty feet.

  ‘Now!’ squawked Mac, and flapped his wings harder than I’d ever known. The slipstream almost tore me off his back.

  He was flying fast, but in the wrong direction. I twisted his horns to the right to bring us back on course.

  ‘Now!’ Mac cried again, and flapped his wings even more fiercely. We shot forwards a good three hundred feet.

  Another sixty feet to impact …

  ‘Now!’ Mac cried for the third time. His wings clove the air with such force that the sound hurt my ears.

  Another thirty feet and the climber would be skewered by one of the crystal daggers, but we ourselves were still a good six hundred feet away. I applied slight pressure to Mac’s horns, putting him into an even steeper nosedive.

  ‘Now!’

  Fifteen feet … Six hundred to go …

  ‘Now!’

  Six feet … Still another three hundred …

  ‘Now!’

  Only an inch separated the falling climber from the tips of the glass daggers.

  ‘Grab him!’ I shouted.

  Mac caught hold of the man’s left leg and yanked him upwards.

  We deposited the mountaineer on a plateau. Mac gave him a tongue-lashing and demanded to know what he’d been thinking of. ‘Nothing much,’ the man replied. ‘I just wanted to see how good you Roving Reptilian Rescuers really are.’

  ‘I told you he deserved to be taught a lesson!’ growled Mac as we flew off to find ourselves some supper.

  I was a talented navigator. Although I never received a word of praise or appreciation from Mac’s beak (he was incapable of that), I could tell from his little ways that he respected my work. Whenever we completed a successful salvage operation, for instance, he would emit a self-satisfied hum like an unmusical cat attempting to sing. That hum told me I’d done a good job. I, too, began to develop a nose for danger as the weeks went by. Sometimes I sensed at the same moment as Mac that there was work ahead. I knew it from a sudden smell borne on the wind – the scent of distant woodsmoke mingled with a whiff of cinnamon. My knowledge of the earth increased, grid square by grid square. We flew over Africa and the Antarctic, Borneo and the Black Forest, Tasmania and the Himalayas, Siberia and Kathmandu, Heligoland and Death Valley, the Grand Canyon and Easter Island, and eventually over the continents of Cataclysmia, Zombia and Yhôll, which no longer exist. Yes, I soon came to know the earth like a vast mosaic in which only one piece was still missing: Zamonia.

  Zamonia

  Zamonia was recognizable from a great height by an offshore island in the shape of a bear’s paw, hence its name, Paw Island. On the way to our new grid square we approached Zamonia from the north-east, where it was traversed by mountain ranges. We flew over the mainland for weeks on end, steering a zigzag course because Mac wanted me to acquire a general overview of the continent. Zamonia possessed the most diverse scenery. In addition to desert plateaux I saw pinnacles of ice, mangrove swamps, vast wheat fields, stony wastes, and mixed forests. In the far west were some mountains known as the Gloombergs, whose peaks were considerably higher than the others. One prominent feature in the middle of the continent was a desert, the biggest I had ever seen. But what interested me most of all was the capital of Zamonia. This was Atlantis, at that time the biggest city in the world.

  From the

  ‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  Atlantis. Capital and seat of government of the continent of Zamonia. Classified as a megalopolis, Atlantis is divided into five administrative districts, each of which really constitutes a kingdom in its own right: Naltatis, Sitnalta, Titalans, Tatilans, and Lisnatat. These urban districts are, in their turn, divided into subdistricts: NALTATIS into Santalit, Tisalant, Satalint, Sitaltan, Tintasal, Tansalit, and Anstlati; SITNALTA into Stalinta, Satintal, Stanilat, Talnatis, Nastilat, Titanlas, and Tinsalat; TITALANS into Alastint, Lisatant, Aslitant, and Santatil. As for LISNATAT, whose inhabitants voted against subdivision, it is merely divided into North Lisnatat, South Lisnatat, East Lisnatat, West Lisnatat, and Central Lisnatat. All the above subdistricts are divided into subsubdistricts whose enumeration would transcend the scope of this publication. At the time of writing, each of the five administrative districts is inhabited by approximately 25 million living creatures, so the total population of Atlantis may be put at roughly 125 million, or, if one includes all the anonymous, unregistered creatures resident in the sewers, at almost 200 million.

  From the air Atlantis looked like the toy collection of a demented giant. Quaint little houses with red, green and golden roofs stood cheek by jowl with white minarets and black factories with belching chimneys. Some buildings were constructed of stone, timber, and iron, others of silver, gold, and crystal. Corkscrew towers jutted into the sky for miles, so high that I had to steer Mac round them on a slalom course. I saw pagodas and shanty towns, palaces and tenements, onion domes, marble mansions, and gigantic cathedrals. The city was threaded with innumerable rivers and canals spanned by bridges of complex design. There was movement everywhere. Steamships, sailing boats and canoes plied the rivers, massive captive balloons hovered among the towers and skyscrapers. But what fascinated me most of all about Atlantis were the bustling streets, which were alive with pedestrians and vehicles. I would dearly have liked to land there, but Mac was against it.

  ‘Cities are the end,’ was his verdict. ‘They’re madhouses.’

  I simply couldn’t persuade him to land, however much I begged and pleaded. I had no choice but to promise myself that I would visit Atlantis som
e day.

  The last grid square we surveyed included the South Zamonian Sea between Wotansgard Sound and Three-Quarters Island, on which stood the Impic Alps. We had already flown around for three days without spotting anything of note apart from a chamois, which we rescued from the clutches of a mountain demon, so I was delighted when, early on the evening of the third day, Mac suddenly raised his head and sniffed the air. It was filled with a scent he recognized. He altered course to the south-west and I took up my navigator’s position just behind his head with one forepaw on one of his horns and the other over my eyes to shield them from the rays of the setting sun. There was something afoot that differed from our routine rescue operations. Even the air around us was unnaturally turbulent, swirling violently as if something very large had just passed through it.

  CRASH!

  A menacing sound like distant thunder.

  We flew low over Harvest Home Plain. Nothing to be seen but scattered farmhouses, endless fields of wheat, and an occasional small village. It would have been pretty hard to come to grief there. There were no treacherous swamps, no precipitous cliffs, not even a lake in which to get cramp while swimming.

  CRRASH!!

  The ground was vibrating violently as if rocked by small, rhythmical earthquakes. The wheat fields had been flattened at intervals of half a mile. The flattened areas, all of which were the same shape, resembled giant footprints.

  CRRRASH!!!

  ‘A Bollogg,’ said Mac, as if that explained everything.

  From the

  ‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  Bollogg, The. The Bollogg [Cyclops stupidus] belongs to the Giant Cyclops family, which includes all one-eyed, outsize life forms over 75 feet in height. Although Giant Cyclopses do not exceed 500 feet as a rule, a Bollogg can grow to a height of two miles and is thus the only living creature to be classified among Zamonia’s exceptional natural disasters [→Eternal Tornado, The, or →Sharach-il-Allah, The]. It has even been inferred from skeletal remains that Bolloggs existing in very ancient times could attain a height of twelve miles. Fortunately, very few Bolloggs still survive in Zamonia. They are currently estimated to number no more than half a dozen.