Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales Read online

  MOBY JACK

  & Other Tall Tales

  Garry Kilworth

  Introduction by Robert Holdstock

  INTRODUCTION

  AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY BOOKS

  Voyages with G.D. Kilworth esq.

  An armchair traveller, equipped with all of Garry’s short stories and novels, could effortlessly voyage the known world, not to mention the known world in variation, and a feast of invented worlds all with a hauntingly familiar tinge about them. That traveller could be in modern Aden and the Yemen, where Garry spent time as a child, becoming lost in the desert and remembering that experience in Standing on Shamsang and Spiral Winds; then an overland journey to Neanderthal Cyprus (Split Second, an early science fiction) where Garry did duty in the RAF (not in Neanderthal times, you understand), before a quick hop to Polynesia and Micronesia to sail with The Navigator Kings in that vast wilderness of islands; indeed, he could sail via New Zealand, in these books, to reach the north of Celtic Scotland and do battle with its hairy inhabitants. (Geography is mere play-dough to a writer like GDK.) Reaching for a new volume, our traveller would find himself in Spain’s Andalusia, on the battlefields of the Moors, in the shadow of the Alhambra, the great citadel at Granada, facing wizardry and wild romance (The Red Pavilions). A step forward in time, to the Sergeant Crossman series, and he will be in the Crimean War, gearing up for Balaclava and the Siege of Sebastopol, before marching on to India’s Northwest frontier.

  Who needs EasyJet?

  And it’s not just the landscape of Humankind that Garry explores. If you put on your furs, pelts, hides, floppy ears and canine teeth, you can experience a world of nature that is beyond our normal sensitivities: you can feel the delights and terrors of being a fox (the brilliant Hunter’s Moon), a North American wolf (Midnight Sun), a hare caught for coursing (Frost Dancers), a weasel in many guises (The Welkin Weasels), even a mouse among many biblical mice (House of Tribes). Garry refers to these books as his ‘vermin tales’; but they are quite wonderful, and they are wonderful because they are naturalistic as well as fantastic: accurately observed animal behaviour informs the stories, the plots, and the drama, reflecting the author’s passion for the natural world. (In particular, bird-life: I await with anticipation Garry’s first ‘chick-lit’ novel.)

  But perhaps the landscape that features most dramatically and most powerfully in Garry’s work is that of Essex and Suffolk, where his family has lived for generations. It is in many places a bleak and flat land, a place of wind, marshes, stark copses, grey rivers and muddy dikes. It is a place, too, full of a sense of magic. Witchcraft still flourishes. The churches are grey and silent. One, at Canewden, looks out across the scene of the battle where Canute defeated Edmund Ironside. Garry used to live across that raw marsh, where a second church marks Ashingdon. Two ancient strongholds, now surmounted by cold and eerie churches. I love the place, but not with the same passion as Garry. When you walk with him across this landscape he radiates belonging; and memory. The roots run deep. His sense of the place and its people, many of whom are long-gone but remain present in the dialect and in the faces and in the genes, is powerful indeed.

  This sense of people and place, this feeling of belonging, of the intimate connection between folk and earth, resonates in all of Garry’s work that is set on planet Earth. And perhaps this is seen most effectively in his shattering and moving short novel Witchwater Country. It is set in 1952, in and around the saltmarshes of Essex, where a boy and his friends set out in search of legendary creatures called ‘waterwitches’. 1952 was the year of elemental forces in that part of the country: fire, wind and then flooding when the seawall burst. Hundreds died, thousands were made homeless. Garry and his family lived through it, and though to read Witchwater Country is to read a thoroughly ‘ripping yarn’, it is also to read a great deal about the author himself.

  And of course, there are the short stories.

  For our armchair traveller, the stories in this collection–stories previously uncollected–fill in a few gaps in the world itinerary: whale hunting off Vancouver (‘Moby Jack’), artistic temperaments tested in the shadow of Babel, in Babylon (‘The Sculptor’) and a particular favourite of mine, an expedition into The Walled City in the heart of Hong Kong, that maze-like shanty town which–before its demolition–rose vertically rather than spreading horizontally.

  ‘Inside The Walled City’ is a favourite tale because I was with Garry when he entered the maze. Rats scattered ahead of us and eerie, curious faces peered at us from niches and nooks in the crumbling walls. Living space here was akin to a tomb. I was uneasy; Garry intrepid. My mind filled with horror; Garry’s was inspired.

  Indeed, Garry comes up with ideas all the time. He is a walking, breathing, living ideas factory. And the moment of creativity is transparent. Whether talking or walking, he suddenly goes vague; his eyes narrow and his focus becomes distant. He is no longer among us.

  I have seen the process at work in my own home. Many years ago, he wandered off from a Sunday lunch. I found him in the kitchen staring through the window at the mature Greek vine which sprawls over the garden wall. I crept up behind him and tried to follow his gaze, to see what was—so to speak—‘stimulating his creative juices’. It seemed to be a bunch of grapes.

  ‘Getting an idea, are we?’ I asked sourly.

  ‘Yep.’

  When, after several moments, he had said no more, I became a little annoyed. ‘That’s my vine. They’re my grapes. I demand a share of the notion.’

  He laughed in a highly amused fashion; and still said nothing.

  The idea-incubus, he later told me, became the story ‘On the Watchtower at Plataea’, in which a group of time-travellers find themselves trapped in a Greek City State during the Spartan Wars. He offered it to me for an anthology I was editing at the time. I grabbed it and scoured it for grapes. There were no grapes. And I still don’t know how the creative process in Garry works. (But I’ve stared through that window for over ten years, now, trying to get ideas for my novel Vine On The Wall.)

  It was through short stories that I met Garry, in 1974, after he had won the Sunday Times/Victor Gollancz award for best SF collection. With the encouragement of James Blish, I was compiling an anthology called Time in Hand–new writers, new stories. The anthology didn’t happen. A long friendship with GDK did. We met with Chris Evans, Dave Wingrove, Chris Priest and others at the White Hart pub and talked ideas; we shared years of being published by Faber and Faber, encouraged by Charles Monteith, before leaving for Gollancz’s Green Pastures. In the mid-80s we enjoyed lazy afternoons compiling–amidst much creative laughter and astonishment at our own perceived brilliance–a novella, ‘The Ragthorn’. Awards were modestly accepted. We travelled with our best pals, Annette and Sarah, through Malaysia in the early 90s, encountering rainforest, spiders, washed-away bridges, taxis without clutches, buses with no seats, monsoons, and enchantment in the form of curious, smiling welcome, and easy and generous engagement between strangers. Like the armchair traveller, I have listened to Garry’s tales of his own journeys to other lands with awe and fascination. In that month in the Far East, I experienced a little touch of what makes Garry’s hand so adept at bringing worlds alive.

  So: settle back on those cushions, ensure you have adequate supplies for the journey, turn the page: and begin to feel Earth and Time move around you.

  Robert Holdstock March 1st 2005

  THE SCULPTOR

  One night in the pub my friend Peter Beere suggested I write a story around the Tower of Babel. This was the starting image for The Sculptor. The rest of the story wrote itself, as many of them do.

  Niccolò reached the pale of the Great Desert at no
on on the third day. He dismounted and led his horse and seventeen pack camels towards the last water he would see for six weeks. There at the river’s edge they drank. Some would have said that so many camels were an expensive luxury, but Niccolò knew the value of too many over too few. Only eight of them were carrying the statuettes. Of the remaining camels, two were loaded with his and his mount’s personal supplies, three were carrying water, and three were loaded with fodder to feed the other camels. The last camel was packing fodder for the fodder-carriers but not for itself. It was possible that this camel, or one of the others, would die of starvation before he reached the Tower.

  Niccolò had had to call a halt at seventeen. When he had consulted the sage, Cicaro, the old man had recommended that to ensure survival he take an endless string of camels with him. Distance, food-chains, energy levels, temperatures, humidities, moisture loss—when all the relevant information had been given to Cicaro, and the calculations made, the result was camels stretching into infinity. Impossibilities were not the concern of the sage. He merely applied his mathematics to the problem and gave you the answer.

  At least they were flesh and blood. Towards the end of the journey Niccolò could begin eating them, if it became necessary. At that moment he found the thought distasteful, though he was no sentimentalist, and had refrained from even naming his horse. Niccolò knew, however, that when it came to the choice between starvation or butchering one of the beasts, whatever he promised himself now, he would use the knife without hesitation. He had eaten worms, even filled his stomach with dirt when he had been without food. Man is a wretched creature when brought to the level of death. When he has shed his scruples he will eat his own brother, let alone a horse or a camel.

  Yet there was a mystery there. Man also perplexes himself, Niccolò thought, as he filled his canteens from the river. When he and Arturo had almost run out of water in this very desert, they had fought like dogs for the last few mouthfuls, would have killed each other for them. Then rescue had come, at the last moment, preventing murder.

  Yet, not two months afterwards, Arturo ironically committed suicide, hanged himself in the back room of a way station, for love of a whore.

  Why does a man fight tooth and nail to live one day, and kill himself the next? It was as if life was both precious and useless, not at the same time, but in different contexts. Life changed its values according to emotional colours. In the desert, dying of thirst, Arturo had only one thought in mind—to live. It had been a desperate, savage thought—instinctive.

  Yet that instinct had vanished when Arturo had climbed on that ale barrel and tied a window sash around his neck. Why hadn’t it sprung out from that place in which it was lurking? Perhaps it is hopelessness that kills instinct in its lair? In the desert, if Arturo fought hard and callously enough, the water might eventually belong to him. The love of the lady though, no matter how savagely he battled, could never be his. If she withheld it, could not feel such for him, then he was helpless, because he could never in a million years wrench love from her grasp like a water bottle.

  A craft came along the river, silently, the helmsman apparently happy for the most part to let it follow the current. The cargo was sheltered from the sun by a palmleaf-thatched cabin, which covered the deck with an arch-shaped tunnel. The sail was down, unnecessary, even a hindrance in the fast flow.

  As the boat went by, Niccolò was able to peer inside, through a window-hole in the thatch. A giant of a man sat in the dimness within: a clumsy-looking fellow, appearing too big for his craft, but a man with peace, contentment, captured in his huge form. He was knitting. His great hands working the wooden needles while his elbow occasionally twitched the tiller, as if he could steer sightlessly.

  It seemed he knew the river so well—the meanders, the currents, the sandbars and rapids—had travelled this long watery snake for half a century—he needed no eyes. Maybe he could feel the flow and know to a nautical inch, a fraction of a fathom, where he was in time and space? Perhaps he navigated as he knitted woollen garments, both by feel, on his way to the sea.

  Niccolò signalled to the man, and received a reply.

  Afterwards he made camp by the river that wound beneath the star patterns visible in the clear sky. The campfire sent up showers of sparks, like wandering stars themselves, and though Niccolò did not know it they gave someone hope. A lost soul was out there, in the desert, and saw the glow in the heavens.

  The following morning, Niccolò woke to the sound of camels grumbling, kicking their hobbled legs, shaking their traces. The horse took no part in this minor rebellion. A nobler creature (in its own mind), it held itself aloof from dissident camels. Niccolò fed the camels, then he and the horse ate together, apart from the other beasts.

  Three days out into the desert, Niccolò came across the woman. Her lips were blistered and he had trouble forcing water past them. When she opened her eyes she said, ‘I knew you would come. I saw your fire,’ then she passed out again.

  In the evening he revived her with some warm jasmine tea, and soon she was able to sit up, talk. She was not a particularly pretty woman. At a guess she was about the same age as he was, in her very early thirties. Her skin had been dried by the sun, was the colour of old paper, and though it was soft had a myriad of tiny wrinkles, especially around the eyes and mouth. Her stature was slight: she could have been made of dry reeds. She wore only a thin cotton dress.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ he asked her.

  ‘Looking for water,’ she said, sipping the tea, staring at him over the rim of the mug.

  He gestured irritably.

  ‘I can see that, but how did you get lost? Were you part of a caravan?’

  She shook her head, slowly.

  ‘I was searching for my mother’s house.’

  ‘Here, in the desert?’

  Her brown eyes were soft in the firelight.

  ‘It wasn’t always a desert,’ she said. ‘I thought there might be something left—a few bricks, stones, something.’

  Niccolò nodded. He guessed she was one of those who went out searching for their roots. Lost now, but lost before she even came into the desert. One of those who had been separated as a child from her family during the exodus, and had found out her father’s name, where her parents had lived, and had gone looking to see if there was anything left.

  He stared around him, his eyes sweeping over the low and level plain. Only a short three decades ago there had been a thriving community here, the suburbs of a city. On the very place where they were sitting buildings had stood, streets had run. The city had been so vast it took many days to travel by coach-and-six from its centre to the outskirts.

  Now there was nothing but dust.

  ‘I can’t take you with me,’ he said. ‘I’m heading for the Tower...’ He nodded towards the marvellous structure that dominated the eastern sky, taller than any mountain in the region, so tall its heights were often lost in the clouds. Since it was evening, lights had begun to encrust the Tower, like a sprinkling of early stars.

  She said timidly, ‘I can come with you.’

  ‘No. I don’t have the food or the water to carry a passenger. I have just enough for my own needs, and no more. I’ll point you in the right direction. You can make the river in five, maybe six days, on foot. The first refugee camp is two days on from there.’

  She looked at him with a shocked expression on her face.

  ‘I’ll die of thirst.’

  ‘That’s not my fault. I came across you by chance. I didn’t have anything to do with your being here. You might make it. I’ll give you a little water, as much as I can spare.’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly, hugging her legs and staring into the fire, ‘you’ll take me with you.’

  He did not answer her, having nothing more to say. Niccolò of course did not want to send her out there, and he knew she was right, she probably would die, but he had no choice. His mission depended on him making the journey safely. To ensure success, he ne
eded to do that alone, without any encumbrances. She would hold him back, drink his water, eat his food, spy on him, probe for his secrets. He would probably have to kill more than one camel to get to the Tower, if he took her along too. It was not in his plans.

  Finally, he spoke.

  ‘We must get some rest, we both need it.’

  Niccolò gave her the sleeping bag and used a horse blanket himself. Once the sun was down, it was bitterly cold, the ground failing to retain the heat. She moved closer to him for warmth, and the fire blocked his retreat. He had not been with a woman for so long, he had almost forgotten how pyrotechnical the experience could be. Just before dawn she crawled under the blanket with him and said, ‘Take me—please,’ and though he knew that the words had a double-meaning, that he was committing himself to something he wished to avoid, he made love with her.

  In the morning, he knew he could not send her on her way. He wanted her with him, in the cold desert nights, and afterwards, in his bleak life.

  ‘You’ll have to ride on one of the pack camels,’ he said. ‘Have you ever been on a camel?’

  ‘No, but I’ll manage.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, almost as an afterthought, as he helped her up onto her perch. He had chosen one of the less vicious camels, one that did not bite just out of pure malice, though it was inclined to snap when it got testy at the end of a long hard day’s walk.

  ‘Romola,’ she smiled, ‘what’s yours.’

  ‘Niccolò. Now listen, Romola, we ’ve got a long way to go, and your...you’ll get a sore rump.’

  ‘You can rub some cream into it, when we stop at night,’ she said, staring into his eyes.

  ‘We’re not carrying any cream,’ he said, practically, and swung himself into the worn leather saddle.

  They moved out into the desert, towards the wonderful Tower, whose shadow would stretch out and almost reach them towards the evening. He and Arturo, eight years ago, had set out on a mission of murder, and had failed even to cross the desert. This time he was well prepared, but carrying a passenger. If anything happened, he would have to abandon her, for the mission was more important than either of them.