Dry Water Runs Uphill
from the Water book
ONE EVENING, after a day of wind and storms, the water lost its wetness. It started with a bucket: the bucket tipped up but the water clung to the edges and would not come out, not even when shaken, or when the upturned bucket was beaten with a stick. Margaret Mogmeggin’s baby twins started crying because their bath water had corners, and was scratchy, which is not normally the case. Then the water in the harbour began piling up towards the centre—and the ships and boats all slid down to the low ends and bumped and scraped against each other. People said, “This looks like trouble,” and they were right.
On top of the steep hill of water that had risen up in the middle of the harbour, a dark ship appeared: she was the Nightingale, a three-master with cannons on her deck. She sailed in, lifted high up on the water, running with dirty grey sails flapping, and flying a tattered flag of a skull and two crossed bones. At the top of the water-hill, her crew dropped the anchor (letting out all of the chain, because from up there the water was very deep) and furled the sails. And there the ship remained, overlooking the harbour from its unnatural summit.
The captain of the Nightingale was a pirate, a big, rude man who only laughed at something if it was scaring someone else. He stood on the deck of his ship and looked at the people arranged along the docks staring back up at him. He shouted out to them a number of rude curses (he had been a pirate for thirty years, and that was the first thing he had learned to do) and told them to make him and his crew welcome, or else he would make the water slope away from their stupid harbour town, so that nobody would ever again be able to sail into it, and the fish would drain away, and their pretty little beaches would dry up and become long deserts of sand, with camels.
Then this pirate captain—Elzevir Thundermouth Sea-spit McCutlass—laughed a bellowing laugh that made everyone who heard it (including some of his crew) flinch, and caused the dry waves to tremble. He took a telescope from one of his pockets and put it to his eye, scanning along the dockside, inspecting the people staring back at him, before stomping back to his cabin. He shut and bolted the door, and pulled out the chest from underneath the chart table. He unlocked it with a key that hung around his neck and took out his precious book: the only book (if truth be told) he’d actually read without tearing any of the pages, the book that had taught him how to tie knots that really mattered. He pulled up his chair and started turning the pages, following the words with his finger, while reading them out to the blood-red parrot who sat on a perch in the corner and listened, its head on one side and both eyes wide open.
In the harbour town, people rushed around in some consternation. The clever ones ran home to hide their gold and also put corks in their taps, before anything terrible came out; and the dimmer ones ran home to scoop up all their money to offer to the pirates. The mayor ran to his offices to have a meeting with the council in order to form a committee to decide whose money should be used to pay the pirate to go away, and make the water watery again.
. . . continues
The Knot-Shop Man © Beholder / David Whiteland 2009