Hugh Cook: The Wordsmiths and the Warguild

"How so?"

"Look back to the harbour, man."

Togura looked, and saw another ship setting out to sea.

"So some more of us have got away," he said.

"That's not ours!" said Drake. "That's enemy!"

"How can you tell?"

"The sails, man, the sails! That gap-tooted raggage was never set by pirates! There's landsmen aboard that ship. In pursuit of us, my friend. Lusting for our eyeballs. Hearty for our gizzards. They'll cuttle us down and under, unless we're careful."

"Yes, well," said Togura. "Tell us when it's fighting time. I'm going to sleep."

He snoozed for a while. When he woke, eight enemy ships were in pursuit.

"Eight against five," said Togura.

"As odds go," said Drake, "it's not exactly picnic time. But never fear – I think we're hauling away on them. Griefs, they're still having trouble getting their canvas up!"

"Tell me if anything changes," said Togura.

And closed his eyes.

The sun was warm, the motion of the ship was easy, and he was very, very tired. He drifted off to sleep again, and was soon dreaming confused dreams in which blue-green sea serpents tangled their way through piles of chicken feathers which were swarming with baby turtles. In his dream, he found his way into a woman's thighs, and was just about to apologise when she clouted him on the head.

He woke.

"What?" he cried, dazed by a mix of sleep and sunlight.

The ship lurched.

Something smashed into the vessel with a blow which was felt from keel to masthead.

"Sea serpents!" screamed Togura.

"No, whales!" shouted someone, looking overboard.

And whales they were. Big ones. Sperm whales, each more than twenty paces long. Water-surging cetacean wrath, charging the ship and battering it.

"Let's find ourselves a swim," said Drake.

"A swim?"

"Something to float us," said Drake.

The ship, struck again, staggered, listed. It was holed. It was sinking. Togura was knocked to the ground as men brawled for possession of a choice "swim," a well-founded barrel. He lost sight of Drake.

The deck canted. The seas surged up. Togura staggered upright. Water boiled around him. He struck out, trying to swim, lest the descending rigging snag him and drown him under. Clearing the ship, he floundered round, turning in the water. He caught a glimpse of fully-rigged masts and canvas plunging under.

The water was cold and turbulent. The waves smashed down the screams of drowning men. The blue sky billowed above. Everywhere, pirates were going under. With a shock, Togura realised that hardly any of them could swim.

Then, with a greater shock, he realised that another ship was sinking. And a third was in trouble. Big trouble. As he watched, it suddenly turned turtle and plunged down out of sight, quick as gasping.

Another ship was riding through the waves toward him, closing the distance steadily. It looked as if it would ride him down. He saw men busy at its deckrail. Boarding nets were being lowered. Big, slow and stately, the ship ploughed through the seas toward him. he could make out its figurehead: a grene-haired girl with three breasts and five nipples.

Closer still it came, till he could see the name of the ship painted on its bow. He could see it, but he could not read it; it was scripted in arcane foreign ideograms he had never seen before in his life. Looking up, he saw the canvas being furled: the ship was losing headway.

"Swim, boy!" shouted someone.

It was Draven, floundering toward the ship.

"Come on, Forester!" yelled another voice. "Don't just float around wallowing! You're not in the bath, you know!"

That was Drake.

Togura struck out for the ship. As it yawed, he saw the black tar of its undersides. It plunged down again, rolling toward him. He grabbed the though hemp of the boarding net.

"Climb, you lazy whoreson dog!" shouted Draven, already half way to the deckrail.

But Togura could not. He clung there, shivering, exhausted. Someone climbed down to him. It was Drake. Who grabbed his hair.

"Up," said Drake, yanking.

He was merciless.

Togura managed to claw his way up a bit. Drake helped him. Bit by bit they scavenged their way up, while the rolling seas tried to batter them to death against the ship's indigo topsides.

They gained the deck, and Togura promptly fainted.

When he recovered, Drake told him the news. The enemy, for reasons unknown, had turned back for Androlmarphos. And the whales had gone.

They were, for the moment, safe.

Togura lay dreaming wild, chaotic dreams. Waves went stumbling-tumbling through his memories, stirring up unfragmented images which bit, raged, swore, hummed, pulsed, sweated, stank, sang, sundered and bifurcated.

Ants clambered out of his navel.

He was giving birth.

While the ants swam through his fluids, feeding on his milk, Slerma ate Zona. The moon burnt blue. Guta pulled a hatched from his head then wrestled with a sea serpent, his sex striving.

"Shunk your cho," said Day Suet, running her eager little golls over Togura's body as he savoured the curves of her bum.

Her woollen chemise tore open and a wave rolled out of it, swamping him down to green anemone depths where turtles spun out lofty poetry in the accents of sea dragons. He swam downwards, breaking his way through mounds of salt beef, fighting through to the sun.

"Zaan," said the sun.

Its light washed over him, scoured away his skin, hollowed his bones, dragged his brain out through his nostrils then washed his guts in rosepetal water. He fell through a hollow tower, pursued by the music of a kloo, a kyrmbol and a skavamareen.

"Unlike yours," said someone, "my floors are not knee-deep in pigshit."

"Who said that?" said Togura.

And was so curious to discover the truth that he chased his question over the edge of Dead Man's Drop and fell screaming to the pinnacles below. They shattered his body, killing him.

The shock woke him.

Waking from his dreams, Togura blinked at the sun. He was lying on the deck of the ship; it was so crowded with refugee pirates that there was no hope whatosever of finding accomodation below.

"Zaan," said Togura, looking at the sun, then looked away, blinking at purple after-images.

Togura remembered that the Wordsmiths had given him the rank of wordmaster. He thought his chances of getting back to Sung were now remarkably good, yet it seemed that, having failed to find the index, he would be returning empty-handed. Perhaps he could at least bring back another language.

Yes. He could see what he should do. Invent a language, claim that it was spoken on one of the smaller islands of the Greater Teeth, and gain kudos for making a valuable contribution to the Wordsmiths' quest to discover or invent the Universal Language. He would call his invented language Pirate Pure. Togura thought he could assemble Pirate Pure easily enough, using Orfus pirate argot, bits and pieces of Savage as spoken on the Lezconcarnau Plains, and his own made-up words.

"Zaan," in Pirate Pure, could be a name for the sun.

The scheme was dishonest, but it was, really, no more daft than any of the other mad projects the Wordsmiths were engaged upon. As far as Togura could remember, one wordmaster, noting that all men swear, had been attempting to create a Universal Language made entirely from insults and obscenities, from the "rat-rapist" of Estar to the "lawyer's clerk" of Ashmolean bandits. Another had claimed that the Universal Language was the language of love, and, on the strength of that theory, had left to do practical research in foreign brothels.

Togura had also heard of a scholar who, thinking the Universal Language might in fact be the Eparget of the northern horse tribes of Tameran, had gone to the Collosnon Empire to research it. Perhaps his grasp of foreign etiquette had been faulty, for he had returned as a jar of pickled pieces. (More accurately, part of him had returned – even bulked out with some spare dogmeat, he had made a pretty slim coffin-corpse.)