Potlendh Page 10

  “No,” the bandleader cried out. “No hurt. No fair. No get-em.” To his companions, he complained, “They get-em three. We lose number. We gonna lose. What we do now?”

  “We give-em-up, chief?” asked another leader, even though most of his band, about thirty or so, were sitting around him, waiting for him to tell them what to do.

  The bandleader thought about this for a minute. “Trade?” he asked.

  “That new game?” another guerrilla asked.

  “No like game,” a third chimed in. “No like hurt.”

  “What do now?” repeated the leader.

  “Hit nose,” suggested a fourth.

  “Idea good,” the leader brightened. “Hit nose with stick. Hit nose with fruit.” And several of the Guerrillas immediately started gathering up this kind of prickly fruit that grew in abundance on the smaller branches.

  “Now what do?” the second leader asked.

  “Drop,” the bandleader commanded.

  Like I said before, these Guerrillas were a simple-minded sort, so about a dozen or so of the Guerrillas, hearing the command to drop, jumped down out of the trees right in front of Carl and Karen. By now, Karen was also armed, and when these new assailants appeared, the twins started whomping on them with their sticks.

  The leader covered his face with both hands as if in disgust. “No. Drop nose hitters,” he told the others, and in a second or two, the forest started raining prickly fruit. Unfortunately, since these Guerrillas had never had much practice throwing anything, not one prickly fruit made it to their intended targets, but their hapless comrades on the ground started howling and running away, several pieces of prickly fruit sticking to their hides!

  “You surrender?” the leader called down to the twins.

  “Why?” asked Carl. “If that is the best you can do, then we’re winning!”

  “Hit friends,” the leader suddenly had an idea. And then some Guerrillas brought their captives lower into the trees so that the twins could see them bound and gagged. There were other Guerrillas who held high prickly fruit in each hand and threatened to start pelting their captives.

  “Wait!” Karen called out. “If we surrender, will you promise not to hurt our friends?”

  The leader had to think about this for a minute. “Promise no hit,” he said finally.

  Carl threw down his stick and motioned for Karen to do the same. “We surrender,” he said resignedly, meaning that he thought losing to save his friends from harm was better than continuing to fight. Thus the twins allowed themselves to be captured, bound, and carried to the Guerrillas’ home base.

  The Guerrillas lived in the treetops, and they had built a rather impressive looking fort high up in the trees with several houses built out of sticks and covered with broad leaves. The base was supported by roughly hewn wooden planks to make a flooring for the houses to sit on. A peculiar kind of wall had been built around this base, using old tree branches lashed together, which had two gates opposite each other. This base was then guarded by other Guerrillas who carried short spears or sharpened sticks and had some kind of a tube hanging on their backs, which later the Group discovered were banana blowguns. Why the scouting parties were not similarly armed was a mystery the Group never did figure out. But they had little time at the moment to think about it much because it was time to meet the leader of all the Guerrillas who called himself the “Colonel.”

  Those Guerrillas who carried our friends unceremoniously dumped their burdens in the middle of the base, then raced as quickly as they could to higher, and presumably safer, ground. All the Guerrillas, in effect, made a large circle around the Group. They began thumping their breasts and hooting in a very loud and screechy way, believing that they were such great warriors having defeated the Group, and some began weaving fantastical stories about how great and terrible the battle was before they overcome these invaders. Even those Guerrillas who had been involved began to believe these tall and exaggerated tales as if they were true!

  Then the noise of celebration suddenly died down. The Colonel chose that moment to step out of his house and approach the prisoners. The children expected the leader of these Guerrillas to look a lot like their captors, perhaps a big bigger in size, maybe a lot older, like a wizened chief. But that simply was not the case. Instead, a short, rather flabby, elderly human, dressed in strips of red and blue cloth to cover his middle and sporting large banana leaves over his shoulders to give him the impression that he had wings (which is the ensign for the rank of a colonel), stepped forward to look closely at the prizes. (The children suspected that he was near-sighted, which meant that he had trouble seeing things at a distance, because he kept coming very close to each member of the Group and squinting his eyes while looking them over.) He was barefoot and looked as if he had not bathed for a very long time, underscored when he came near the Group by a very powerful body odor. In his right hand he carried a long walking stick, which looked pretty dinged up, possibly because he liked to hit the Guerrillas often on their heads.

  “I am the Colonel,” he told the Group in a pompous kind of way, as if the Group should be afraid of him and wonder at his power. “If you’re smart, you’ll address me as such.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Carl responded without the least hint of politeness. “You mind untying us and letting us go now?”

  The Colonel’s eyes looked like they might pop out of his head, and he raised his walking stick as if he wanted to hit Carl over the head. “How dare you speak to the Colonel like that! That’s insubordination! You have to be punished.”

  “You mean, we have to be more punished,” Karen stated.

  “Huh?” the Colonel stopped in his threatening stride. “The punishment has not yet begun.”

  “You don’t think being tied up like this—which hurts by the way—is not punishment?” Karen asked him. “Our Father was never this mean to us when he punished us. In fact, he never even hit us! But when he scolded us, boy, did we ever feel bad.”

  “Yeah,” Carl added. “If you really wanted to punish us, you’d just yell at us for being bad or stupid and send us off to our rooms.”

  The Colonel looked at the twins very curiously. You see, he had lived in this forest for a very long time, and he had forgotten how to live with regular people like you and I. Something in the back of his mind must have told him to change his demeanor, which means how to treat people, and he turned to the Guerrillas who had captured the Group. “Release these two. I will interrogate them myself in my house.”

  The Guerrillas were a bit mystified by their Colonel’s orders, but they did not want to be punished either for disobedience. So, they untied the twins and then carried them by the arms to the Colonel’s hut. There they dropped the children onto the leafy floor and then stood behind them threateningly with their bulging arms crossed in case the twins decided to try and escape. The Colonel then stepped into his house and sat down on a small stool lashed together from stripped branches that served as his throne.

  “Now then,” the Colonel began when he has settled himself comfortably. “Where do you come from?”

  “What’s going to happen to us?” Carl asked this question instead of answering.

  “After we have had some fun—you know, practice being targets for our banana blowguns—you will be released to go back to wherever you came from.” The Guerrillas practiced often with their blowguns, shooting at makeshift targets on the ground, animals that grazed near the camp, and often at each other. But that was not much fun, for they really wanted to practice on an enemy they believed would invade their forest any day now.

  “Banana blowguns?” Carl repeated. “What good are banana blowguns?”

  “Well, we don’t want to really hurt anybody.” The Colonel shifted his body on the stool as if he suddenly felt uncomfortable. “But we will not tolerate another invasion by the enemy. When they come again—and believe me when I tell you that they will come again some day—we’ll be prepared. We’ll drive them back for sur
e and make them wish they had never come here in the first place. They will wish that they all stayed home.”

  “But that’s just the problem. We have to get to the Mountain of Power before we can go back to where we came from. And, besides, we can’t go back to where we came from because there is a big typhoon right now,” Karen told the man.

  “A typhoon?” The Colonel scratched his head, trying to remember where he heard that word before.

  “You know: lots of clouds, high winds, likes to knock down things,” Carl tried to help the man remember.

  “Same thing happened to me,” the Colonel finally spoke in a soft voice as if he were reliving a memory. “Must have been a hundred years ago if it were yesterday. I was sailing—fishing, actually—when this sudden storm just came over the horizon. One minute the weather was calm. The next, I was being tossed around like a cork in a bottle. I thought I was going to be drowned for sure that day. I must have almost been, because I think I lost consciousness. When I woke up, the storm had gone, and I was stranded on a beach. My water was gone, and I didn’t have any food. I just started walking towards this forest. These chaps found me and saved me. I then decided to become their leader. They weren’t the smartest creatures, mind you, and they weren’t very organized. So, teaching them and guiding them came to be my job in life. So, now, I’m their leader.”

  “You taught them how to be Guerrillas?” Carl asked in astonishment.

  “You should have seen them before I turned them into Guerrillas. Like I said, they were the most unorganized bunch of creatures you’d ever want to meet. Always fighting and quarrelling with each other. Never thinking about the future. They didn’t even know how to protect themselves, living in the tops of trees like ignorant monkeys. And they were pretty lazy, I’ll tell you. Now that I have trained them into the best fighting force on the Island, they can take pride in being a Guerrilla and a member of this great society we have made together.”

  “I think you could have turned them into something more than just Guerrillas,” Carl persisted. “I mean, aren’t Guerrillas supposed to be fighting a war against someone else?”

  “Shh,” the Colonel cautioned. “We are fighting a war,” he insisted, but then his tone softened with a note of sadness. “It’s just that the enemy doesn’t show up very often.” Then with more forcefulness he added: “But that means that we have to be on our guard all the more. When you showed up, you were the enemy. You probably are the enemy, which goes back to my original question: where are you from?”

  “We live in the middle of the ocean,” Karen answered, “on an oceanographic platform. Our father studies oceanic life. So, you see, we can’t get back to our home in the ocean without a boat or an airplane. But, Mr. Who told us that if we meet the Lord of Power, he can help us get home again.”

  “And the others?” the Colonel pressed.

  “They are from Derkesthai,” Karen again answered. “And they are our new found friends. The Rabbits are cooks for Cassandra the Dragon, and Uniqua the Unicorn is the one who found us first and introduced us to Cassandra and the Rabbits.”

  “A Unicorn, you say?” At this information, the Colonel became very thoughtful. Then he turned to one of the Guerrillas standing guard. “Bring this Unicorn to me.”

  “What is a Unicorn, Colonel?” asked the guerrilla bodyguard.

  The Colonel started to get red in the face, but then he remembered that his Guerrillas were not all that smart. “The animal with the horn on its head.”

  “Ah. The strange dog.” The guerrilla tried to salute the Colonel but ended slapping his face with his palm and left the hut.

  The Colonel chuckled. “I have taught these creatures all about animals I have known in our world, but since Unicorns either are not real or left the real world a long time ago, I have never taught these creatures about such mythological creatures. If this is a real Unicorn, like you say, this could be my lucky day.”

  Soon, Uniqua was awkwardly carried into the hut, still tied up. She looked very angry and very uncomfortable.

  “Untie her,” the Colonel commanded, and Uniqua was, at last, able to stand up on all four legs.

  She looked at the human with fire in her eyes, and her first words to him were full of anger and indignation. “Do you realize that you have violated at least seven rules laid down by the Lord of Power? The most serious offense being the unlawful hunting of and catching of Unicorns?”

  “You can talk, too?” the Colonel responded, his eyes open in astonishment. “And, you are real! I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen you with my own eyes. This is marvelous!”

  “Are you a child, man?” Uniqua fired at him.

  “There are no such things as Unicorns in my world,” the Colonel tried to explain. “You are a myth in my world. I’m not sure if you are really a Unicorn here in this world. Are you real? Tell me, are you magical here as in the myths of my world?”

  “If I were, or if I held an ounce of magic, why would I want to tell you?” Uniqua countered. “You are probably the evilest person on the Island—mark that, the second evilest person behind that idiot Kurt of FOB who helped imprison the kindest and most wonderful Dragons in all of the world—and would probably try to use my magic for evil purposes.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” the Colonel protested.

  “Hey, what about me?” Cassandra wailed from outside. “I’m a kind and wonderful Dragon!”

  “You don’t call this treatment evil?” Uniqua barked.

  The Colonel shrugged his shoulders. “As I have already explained to these two youngsters, this is a very serious game we play. You were intruders; you were the enemy; and we had to capture you. You know how the game of war is played.”

  “War is not a game, and we did not intrude upon you but were minding our own business.”

  “Do you have any magic or not?” the Colonel changed the subject.

  “I have already told you, I will not answer that question. You can torture me until my dying breath, but I would rather die than help you continue to torture and hurt people who enter your forest, whether on purpose or by accident.”

  The human sighed and then stood up. “We did not mean to hurt you, but no one ever enters our forest. Everyone is afraid of us. Still, we have to be on our guard and ever watchful. When this Kurt fellow you mentioned wanted to conquer Derkesthai, he came to us and asked us to help him. We told him that there was no way to enter Derkesthai from our forest except through the portals. But then, the portals were in disrepair, and no one knew how to fix them. Apparently, since you came here from Derkesthai, one of the portals must be working.”

  “It only works one way,” Carl interjected.

  “Ah. That’s too bad. But maybe that’s a good thing, too,” the Colonel said thoughtfully. “Anyway, Kurt got angry with us, and he tried to make war on us. But we got him in the end. It’s kind of hard to fight my Guerrillas when they are up in the trees. Kurt tried to chop down the trees, but there are two strange creatures that guard this forest. I’ve never seen them or met them—I don’t think I’d want to meet them—but they sure chased Kurt’s men out of our forest, but not before they had their fill of prickly fruit and bananas.

  “But Kurt said something that hurt me, and I’ll never forget what he said as long as I live. He called me a tailless monkey.” At this he placed his left hand on his buttocks and pulled at a long scrap of red cloth. “This is all I have that can be called a tail. Since I am the leader of these Guerrillas, and since all of these Guerrillas have such beautiful tails, I wish I had a tail, too, because I want to be just like them. Sure, they love me as their leader, but I feel that I am so different from them, and I really want to be one of them.

  “So, if you had just a little bit of magic, I would ask you to help me either grow a tail or be given a real tail.”

  After the Colonel had finished his tale, Uniqua stared at him for several minutes, her anger subsiding. Then she started to giggle. This giggle turned into a laugh, and you ca
n guess what happened next. Yes, she fell down to the floor and started to laugh so hard that her sides shook and tears started to stream from her eyes.

  “This is not funny!” the Colonel shouted.

  The twins, who were also grinning because of Uniqua and not because of the Colonel’s honest revelation, quickly interjected on the Unicorn’s behalf.

  “Please,” Karen said, “she is not laughing at you.”

  “Uniqua laughs at everything,” Carl explained. “She understands how you feel. She is just showing you that she wants to help you.”

  “Well, she sure has an odd way of showing it,” the Colonel responded gruffly, nursing his feelings. “I didn’t like the way Kurt said it, and I don’t like people laughing at me because I’m different.”

  “Let’s say that Uniqua is laughing with you,” Karen suggested. “And, I believe that when Uniqua has finished enjoying your story that she will help you.”

  “So, she does have magic after all,” the old man declared hopefully.

  “No,” Uniqua breathed heavily through her laughter and tears. “I have no magic that can help you, old man.” She started to rise up on her feet. “But I do have some knowledge that can.”

  “Tell me!” the Colonel demanded.

  “On one condition: you must let us go.”

  “Agreed,” the Colonel blurted, perhaps too hastily.

  “Then I will tell you. Northeast of your forest is a large lake called Submarine Lake.”

  “I have seen this lake.”

  “Then you are aware of the people who live in the lake.”

  “No. I didn’t know that anyone lived on the lake,” the Colonel said.

  “Not on the lake but in the lake,” Uniqua corrected him. “They live on the lake floor and out of sight. These Submarians know many secrets, and they can make a potion for you to drink that will grow a tail. You simply have to contact these people and ask them to give you that potion.”