Even as they realized it was hopeless, Jon-Tom and Naike threw all their strength onto the wheel. It would not budge an inch. With a piercing cry from Heke, who clung desperately to the fore stays, they went over the edge. Locked in the maelstrom’s inexorable grasp, they began to spin, cycling around and around the great green wall, riding the carouseling waters ever downward, accelerating as they descended.
Heeling to port, Jon-Tom was able to see all the way to the bottom. Benthic sands gleamed darkly where the whirlpool exposed the very floor of the ocean. Several of the princesses were sobbing openly as they tried to console one other, while the soldiers were exchanging solemn good-byes.
Caught as they were in the maelstrom’s grip, fish and other extraordinary sea dwellers spiraled within the rotating wall of water. From time to time inorganic flotsam and jetsam appeared: the hulks of sunken ships, fragments of ruined buildings, whole chunks of polished lava like great black beads ripped from some colossus’s necklace, massive tree trunks shorn of all but their heaviest branches.
Someone was pulling insistently on Jon-Tom’s shirt. Looking down, he saw Naike staring up at him. The eyes of a mongoose are particularly penetrating. “No more talk of what ‘might’ follow, spellsinger. If you’ve ever made magic, make some now!”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” He stumbled toward the stairs, intending to remove his duar from its secure place of storage.
The boat careened sideways, heeling still farther to port, and he was forced to grab wildly at several cross lines to keep from being thrown over the side. Ansibette let out a shriek and Seshenshe hissed in panic. They were spinning very fast now indeed. Very rapidly, around and around, one revolution after another, spinning dizzingly …
Jon-Tom’s insides were overwhelmed. Nor was his a solitary reaction, nausea being a decidedly egalitarian condition. Only Mudge seemed immune.
“Interestin’ way to go.” The otter’s disarming cheerfulness had yet to desert him. Jon-Tom wanted to strangle him but it was all he could do to hang on, both to the lines and to his intestines. “Smashed to bits on the bottom o’ the sea with me best friend an’ ’alf a dozen noble princesses all competin’ to see who can upchuck the most. Frankly, I’d always ’oped to depart this world in a fashion somewot flashier, I ’ad.” He tilted his head back to peer philosophically at the distant sky, now hundreds of feet overhead.
“Reminds me o’ the story o’ the two baker’s apprentices an’ the baker’s wife. You remember, mate. The one about gettin’ yeast to rise?” When a bilious, green-faced Jon-Tom proved unable to reply, the otter proceeded to repeat the tale anyway. It never failed to crack him up, and if he was going to die, he was by heaven going to die laughing.
Something else, however, was paying attention.
A deep booming reverberated around them. It was akin to the resolute roaring of the whirlpool and yet subtly different. A variegated modulation that suggested something less primal and more cognizant than simply a rotating hole in the sea.
“What … what’s that?” Jon-Tom’s color was approaching that of pea soup. His fur blocking any such subtle shifts in epidermal hue, Naike clung weakly to the railing nearby. The state of his innards, however, was straightforwardly apparent in his voice.
“I can’t … imagine.”
“It almost sounds like … almost sounds …” Jon-Tom forced himself to turn from the railing. “Haven’t we slowed down a little?”
“We must not be falling as fast,” Naike suggested weakly.
“No.” Jon-Tom found that concentration helped to steady his stomach. “We’ve definitely stopped descending. And I know that sound. It’s laughter. “
“Laughter?” The Lieutenant’s cheeks bulged. “What could be laughing here, besides an uncaring fate?”
Jon-Tom stumbled in the direction of his friend. “That … that was a good story, Mudge.”
“Glad you liked it, mate. How are you doin’? Not that it matters, by me soul.”
“You told a joke. It provoked a response.” He was no longer sure if the roaring was in his ears or arose from an external source.
“Response? I were just makin’ a small, final analogy between our present situation and the baker’s daughters.”
The booming sounded a second time. Jon-Tom whirled, anxiously searching the roiling waters. “There it was again! The maelstrom! It has to be the maelstrom.”
Blimey, the otter thought, the poor bloke’s finally gone over the edge. “Whirlpools don’t laugh, mate. Gurgle, maybe, an’ roar.”
“Is it such a stretch from gurgling and roaring to laughing? Have you noticed that our descent has slowed? Tell another joke.”
“Another joke?”
“A funny story, a dirty limerick, one of your horrible puns—anything!”
“Cor, I suppose I could think o’ one or two. Right, then: ’ere goes.” With evident relish, the otter proceeded to relate a famous tale involving a stallion, two ladies of the evening and a wealthy but perpetually inebriated banker. It was, on balance, considerably bluer than the waters surrounding them. It was also hysterically funny. Several of the princesses had the grace to blush through their lingering discomfort.
When with typically otterish gusto Mudge delivered the long-anticipated punch line, Pivver let out a series of startled barks, Quiquell involuntarily wrapped her remarkable tongue several times around her snout, Ansibette’s face turned the most charming shade of pink, and the remaining princesses reacted similarly. Heke and Pauko would have fallen down laughing had they not already been rolling about the deck under an entirely different type of stimulus, and even the perpetually dour Karaukul cracked a broad smile.
As for the maelstrom, from its depths issued a Promethean bellow of amusement that rose clearly above the rumble of the rotating waters. Unbelievably, the tormented ship began to ascend.
“I’ll be swoggled.” Leaning over the side, Jon-Tom studied the sea beneath their keel. “We’re rising; we’re going back up.” He straightened to shout the news to the others. “The whirlpool’s sending us up!”
“That’s nice.” Mightily evacuated, Ansibette lay on her back on the saturated deck. Though not in much better shape, Umagi knelt alongside, trying to offer what comfort she could.
Jon-Tom sensed his digestive system stabilizing. All that body surfing he’d done in his youth, all those times he’d “gone over the falls” at Zuma and Santa Monica hadn’t been for naught. With internal equilibrium came time for reflection.
“Keep it up,” he urged the otter. “The funnier, the better.”
“That’s right, mate, don’t put any pressure on me.”
“Come on, Mudge. I know you. You must have a thousand outrageous stories and as many short gags. Tell ’em to me, one at a time. Tell ’em all!”
The otter promptly launched into another couple of his favorites, at the conclusion of which a new sound could be heard. Not the roaring of the waters or the booming of strange laughter, but something entirely different: a volatile, voluble whispering. The whirlpool was speaking to them.
It isn’t enough it has to laugh, Jon-Tom reflected in astonishment. It talks, too. What it said was, “That was rich, that was wonderful! Now let me tell one.”
“Why not?” The otter scampered to the railing, deftly ducking a turgid mass of kelp which came flying past. “I ain’t never swapped stories with no force o’ nature before.”
The ship’s timbers creaked dangerously as Jon-Tom waited, wondering what sort of joke something capable of sucking whole fleets down to a watery doom would tell.
He should have known.
“There were these two sperm whales, see?” rumbled the maelstrom. “And this fishing barge.”
“Yeah, yeah, go on,” Mudge urged expectantly.
At the joke’s conclusion the otter guffawed uproariously. Naike grinned, but Pauko didn’t get it at all and felt decidedly left out. Aleaukauna put a hand over her mouth and giggled. Jon-Tom found the tale mildly amusing, but made it a
point to roar as if the ultimate gag had just been pulled on him when he wasn’t looking.
Meanwhile, the boat had climbed another hundred feet and the circle of blue sky overhead had expanded perceptibly.
How long it went on like that Jon-Tom could not have said. Mudge and the maelstrom swapped jokes and jests until the witty counterpoint of watery rumble and wily otter seemed to become as one. Meanwhile, the river-rat’s fellow passengers clung dismally to the ship and to their insides while the boat continued its steady ascent surfaceward. None of them had anything left to bring up, and they could only hope and pray that Mudge, in a manner of speaking, did.
Having forsaken their position just forward of the bowsprit, the glowing chords hovered close to Jon-Tom. Now and again they would ring out brightly, as if somehow sensing the essence of a joke. Not an impossibility, Jon-Tom told himself. Musical jokes were legion, if one knew how to Handel them.
God help me, he whispered to himself. It’s catching.
Overhead, blue sky beckoned enticingly within an all-encompassing circular frame of green. They were almost back at the surface. Almost, but not quite.
“Don’t quit now, Mudge,” Jon-Tom exhorted the otter. “You’ve done a lot. Ask it to let us go.”
With a nod, the otter turned to confront the swirling void. “Oi, ow about it, then, old funnel? ’Ow’s about spittin’ us out?”
“No, no,” the maelstrom boomed. “More jokes. Best jokes ever I heard!” There was an aqueous echo to the eerie, disembodied voice which resounded all around them. “Keep you here, tell jokes forever.”
“See ’ere, water-mate, I can tell jokes for a long time, I bloomin’ can, but not quite for forever.” He looked questioningly at Jon-Tom, who nodded understandingly. With a sigh, the otter resumed his licentious litany.
They neither sank nor rose, but hung suspended within the wall of the whirlpool perhaps twenty feet below its rim. The distance might as well have been twenty miles, Jon-Tom knew. With his steady stream of humorous anecdotes Mudge continued to buy them precious minutes.
It was about time, Jon-Tom thought, to put those to use.
Disappearing belowdecks, he reemerged with the duar slung over his shoulders. A couple of the soldiers raised an enfeebled cheer. Facing the awesome pit, the spellsinger deliberated how best to proceed. He knew he would have to be careful. Stop the whirlpool in its circular tracks and without its centrifugal force to press them against the watery wall, and they would probably plunge to their deaths. Collapse it, and tons of water would come crashing down atop the deck, smashing the ship and all aboard to splinters. Anger it, and there was no telling what might happen.
Could he somehow persuade the phenomenon to let them go? How did one persuade a hole in the ocean?
“Too much fun, too much fun!” the maelstrom rumbled in response to another of Mudge’s tales. The otter threw his friend a warning look.
“Better think o’ somethin’ quick, mate.”
“Running out of jokes already?” Jon-Tom inquired.
“Not jokes. Voice. Gettin’ ’oarse.”
Jon-Tom had to admit that his friend was beginning to sound a little raspy. He doubted that the maelstrom would either comprehend or sympathize with laryngitis. No doubt the one thing that was beyond a whirlpool’s capacity to understand was excessive dryness.
That’s when it came to him.
The gray mist billowed from the duar so fast and thick that for an instant he wondered if everything had gone badly wrong. In volume it exceeded anything he’d ever sung up. Even the chord cloud ducked belowdecks, peeking out uneasily from just behind the edge of the hatch. Despite their lingering nausea, the princesses, too, became aware that something extraordinary was happening.
The whirlpool began to slow, its reverberant voice to echo uncertainly. “What is this? What is happening? This is not a joke. I can feel it.”
“Sail!” Naike sprang to the wheel. “Put on all sail!”
“Has the Lieutenant gone crazy?” Pauko struggled to comply.
“No.” Karaukul fought to steady his stomach. That they had stopped spinning in circles helped a great deal. “Even though we drift on the edge of oblivion, we now have wind and still water. We sail not to port or starboard, north or south, but upward!”
Though the whirlpool had ceased revolving, because of the temperature differential between the exposed sea bottom and the surface a steady, cool breeze continued to funnel upward. It filled the ship’s sails, propelling it forward.
Unsure of the effect his spellsong was having but seeing the mongooses in a frenzy of purposeful activity, Jon-Tom played and sang on. Around them the maelstrom continued to voice confusion and complaint.
Sailing at a sixty-degree angle the boat struggled to climb surfaceward, driven by gusts from the depths. Progress was slow and difficult. Their vessel stubbornly refused to ascend, preferring instead to move steadily forward. At the rate they were rising it would take a week to reach the surface, and Jon-Tom couldn’t sing that long.
Then the whirlpool began to rotate once more … in reverse.
“This shouldn’t be happening …” A concerned Jon-Tom gazed over the side. Their sail useless against the power of the maelstrom, they were accelerating upward. The only difference from their initial descent was that they were now traveling backward, in a counterclockwise fashion. If anything, it was even more upsetting to the equilibrium.
“What did you do, mate?” Mudge clung to a stay for support.
“I played too long, dammit! I should’ve stopped when the current did.” Struggling to maintain his balance, he gaped at the howling, spinning wall of water. “Where I come from, playing music backward is supposed to have hermetic effects. I just wanted to make the spinning stop so we could try and sail clear, but it seems I’ve got it going in the opposite direction.”
“Ohhhh … does anyone know if it’s possible to throw up in reverse?” Ansibette lay on the deck, holding her stomach.
“what a charming thought, my dear.” Quiquell lay alongside the human, “you have too vivid an imagination.” Neither of them needed to worry, as none of them had anything left to heave.
As they continued to accelerate, Naike clung determinedly to the wheel. “Be ready, everyone! As soon as we’re cast clear we need to make all possible speed away from this place!”
“Aye, sir!” came the shouts from his soldiers. Jon-Tom kept his hands on the duar’s strings. There was no telling what might happen when they reached the surface. Another hasty spellsong (would he ever have the chance to sing any other kind? he wondered) might be in order.
Bereft of crew, an abandoned three-master trailing tattered sails spun past them, followed by a very disoriented school of tuna. Huge chunks of coral torn from some unknown reef threatened to smash in their hull. The sides of the whirlpool became filled with flotsam.
“What is all this?” Naike wondered aloud. It was Mudge who supplied a possible explanation.
“Since Jon-Tom’s made it run backward, I expect ’tis growin’ a bit queasy itself.” He tightened his grip on the supporting stay. “Turnabout’s fair play, I say. ’Tis the turn o’ the maelstrom to upchuck!”
“Hold on, everybody!” Swinging his duar onto his back, Jon-Tom wrapped his arms around the mast and held on tight.
An incredibly violent gurgle arose from the depths of the whirlpool, followed by a maniacal lurch. Together with half a dozen sunken ships, tons of coral, whole schools of frantically flapping fish, and all manner of accompanying debris, they were flung skyward. The boat landed with a deafening sploosh a hundred yards from the rim of the pit. Fortune and not spellsinging saw them land upright.
The little craft bobbed several times in the calm sea before steadying as water drained from its decks and sides. Strips of seaweed streamed like attenuated green pennants from stays and rigging, railing and mast. As the soldiers dragged themselves off the deck and rushed to clear the rigging and reset the mainsail, the maelstrom continued to burbl
e and belch prodigiously.
“Wind!” Naike gazed imploringly at the luffing sail. “Where is our wind?”
Even as he spoke, a slight breeze materialized. It filled the sail with agonizing slowness, but fill it, it did. They began to move, the cloud of music leading them south once again. An exhausted cheer rose from the princesses.
Behind them, the oceanic urpings of the distressed maelstrom gradually faded into the distance.
They sailed amid drifting debris for some time: ancient planks, the shattered keels of long-drowned ships, fragments of forest, scarred oars and binnacles. They watched in wonder as one scuttled ancient craft twenty times the size of their own drifted past. It had a single mast fixed in its center and four tiers of oar ports, from which still protruded a dozen or more oars each as big around as Clothahump’s tree. What sort of crew it might have carried could only be imagined.
Glass fishing floats bumped up against their bow and went bobbing past like bubbles from a giant’s pipe. Scattered rope and torn rigging were a constant threat to entangle their steering.
No one was prepared when Mudge unexpectedly flung off his clothes and dove over the side.
Jon-Tom rushed to the railing while behind him a dignified Umagi commented, “Water-rats! Always unpredictable.”
“And not a little unbalanced.” Seshenshe was trying to dry out her fur.
“Now just a moment—” Pivver began.
“I was referring only to commoners,” the gorilla hastened to explain. Thus mollified, the princess of Trenku relented.
“Hard aport!” a disgusted Pauko barked. “Bring her around sharply, sir!”
Straining at the wheel, Jon-Tom and Naike coerced the unwieldy craft into a tight circle, bringing it back to where Mudge had entered the water. Waving cheerfully, the otter awaited them atop what appeared to be a large floating block of shining red wood.
As they drew nearer they saw that his raft had a curved top and was belted vertically with deeply patinaed bronze straps. Hollow fastenings of scored brass showed where leather carrying straps had rotted away.
“Give me a ’and ’ere, mates!” Mudge reached out to grab a trailing line.