In Which We Cross The Desert And I Go Temporarily Bonkers

We spent the next evening in the wizard’s clearing, figuring that we’d already been doomed once so what the hell difference did it make. The next morning we set out early after a breakfast of delicious sausages (which Margaret did not approve of one bit) and an entire wheel of cheese, which we devoured in about fifteen minutes and had us all gaseous and bloated for the whole morning on the woodland trail.

Our rotund, belching rescue mission made it to the edge of the mystical forest at around quarter past three in the afternoon, and as one we drew an astounded breath as we took in the rolling dunes of the Goochi desert before us. The map had indeed drawn a hard border between the forest and the dunes, but to see it before our very eyes was, frankly, mental.

The trees that were mere metres earlier bordering on impenetrable suddenly gave way to a shimmering, golden expanse of open air. The gnarled roots of the forest floor that Glob had been hilariously tripping over for the previous six hours stopped dead, and fine sands bullied them away and took over the landscape in great dunes, tumbling away as far as my beautiful royal eyes could see. There was not a tree to be seen, nor a cloud above, nor a source of water all the way to the horizon.

“Edgar,” I shouted, not realising that he was already standing next to me, “how much water have we?”

“Er, none, Sire.”

“Right. Excellent.”

*****

“The Goochi Desert is cursed. The sands have for aeons been feared by grass-dwellers, for precious few who have traversed its dunes have returned. There has been a handful of survivors, but none who have made it out of the dunes have ever breathed a word about what they witnessed out there in the shifting sands. The survivors all wore the same glazed expression, and seldom spoke save for unintelligible mutterings.

It might be possible to attribute this to their going mad from the heat, were it not for the fact that, within a fortnight of their return, each and every survivor has disappeared in the night. When relatives followed their tracks, each time it was found that the near-catatonic survivors had risen from their beds and wandered alone into the dunes once more. This time, however, they never returned. They were lost forevermore – every last one. Out there in the shimmering sands there lies an unspeakable evil, and all who enter are doomed.”

Edgar finished reading, clapped the guide book shut and busied himself packing it away in his bag.

“Didst thou have to read that, Edgar?”

“I just thought-“

“Nevermind, Edgar, thine wits are frayed and spent. It maketh no difference to our noble quest. A cursed desert may lie before us, but fortune smiles upon us. The gods are watching. I can feel it.”

“ ‘Ang on, we got told we was doomed in them woods not two days ago, and now you reckon some gods is happy wi’us? Gi’o’er,” said Glob.

“Glob, young stable girl, I cannot understand thee, for thine tongue speaketh a language most foul. T’would serve thee well to learn to speak English proper before addressing thy king.”

Glob sighed and slunk away as I perused the map.

“I decree that the direction we must take is…” I turned the map around a few times to figure out our exact orientation, “forward!”

*****

We were an hour into the desert when the madness began to take hold.

“Did anyone hear that?” I asked.

“ ‘ear wot?” replied Glob.

“Nothing, nothing.”

I was struggling to see for the sweat trickling into my regal eyes, and Margaret was oinking under her breath with the strain of carrying me over the endless shifting hills. Edgar’s story on the curse of the dunes was ricocheting around my skull, and I felt the gnarled, creeping fingers of insanity probing my brain. A fog seemed to descend around our group, and the sound of my own breathing rang in my ears. A fly landed on my arm. I swatted it, but upon checking my palm there was no crushed creature to be seen.

“Edgar,” I cried, “my mind is crumbling to ash! Willst thou carry me?”

“Sire, you’re riding Margaret. You don’t need to be carried.”

“Ah, yes. Quite right.”

I wondered momentarily why it was only I who was affected by the curse. However, it didn’t take me long to realise that it was because although the others were accompanying me on my quest, they were only minor characters, and I was not only the protagonist but also royalty. It was only logical that the desert’s curse should extend its dark tendrils towards me first.

I began to sweat and pant, and the desert swam around me. Margaret was plodding along, grunting, and I lay draped over her back like a damp flannel. I felt the madness tug at my vocal chords before long, and compulsive groans and wails escaped my lips. Edgar and Glob did their best to pretend they hadn’t noticed their king going stark raving bonkers atop a pig two metres away, and said nothing in response to my shrill howls and odd declarations, highlights of which included:

“I’m a gibbon! I’m a fucking gibbon!”

“I need a donkey. Edgar. EDGAR. Give me thy donkey I need him right now, I have to do an experiment. EDGAR.”

“Long legs. Long, slender legs.”

After four hours beating across the evil sands, my sanity had been worn down to a nub. I am not proud to admit that I devolved into a jabbering, frothing maniac, topless and sunburned wearing my crown around my arm like a bangle. The sky overhead was utterly devoid of moisture, and the sands rolled on to the horizon in every direction. I feared that it would not be long before the curse began to affect the others, too, and our expedition would be lost. We would be rendered zombies, dead eyed and empty, wandering the dunes forever; a silent procession of the damned under the laughing moon.

As I was lost in insane thoughts, a searing hot breeze carried with it several notes of music. I thought I had imagined it, but I noticed Edgar look up as well. Another gust brought further notes, and before long I realised we were approaching the source of the sound, for it grew louder with every step we took.

Soon, it was unmistakeable: drums and strings and singing – and so close! It must only have been over the next dune.

We began to jog, then to run, towards the music. Our small band crested the dune and stared down into the sandy valley and gasped as one as we beheld what looked very much like a party in the middle of a huge oasis, because that’s exactly what it was.

Palm trees circled a huge azure pool, and around its sandy banks were hundreds of semi-nude revellers. I use the term ‘revellers’ rather than ‘people’ because they weren’t all human. It was a fairly even mix of humans and gremlins. If you’re not familiar with them, gremlins are an offshoot of humanity from a point in the distant past when a fork in the road took them to a different evolutionary endgame. It’s quite a complicated issue and is still hotly debated among scholars, but the gist is this: gremlins just party way harder.

The most obvious differences are the physical. Gremlins are ugly buggers – potbellied and pale and around four foot tall with big, meaty ears, gigantic nostrils, and pupils the size of saucepans. Their voices I find personally irritating, high pitched as they are, and somewhat nasal. Oh, and they absolutely cane it.  Their tolerance for sundry nefarious substances is truly monstrous.

Note: In fact, the gremlins’ sessioning abilities are second to only the Great Sloths of the Bungyan Steppes, who feast on the hallucinogenic leaves of the Boogie Tree and are consequently in a permanent state of ball-trippery. In the spring, members of the aristocracy often make a holiday out of travelling out to the Steppes in order to spend a weekend watching the Great Sloths stumble around and bump into one another; it’s meant to be roaring great entertainment and, come to think of it, might be the perfect getaway to take Astra on once I’ve murdered the evil Prince and freed her from his clutches.

With my mind still gripped by the claw of insanity, our bold trio dismounted at the oasis’s edge and drifted through the party. Nobody seemed particularly alarmed at our arrival; in fact it was quite the opposite – I was handed a horn full of frothing ale by a topless woman with luxurious armpit hair and a neatly shorn blonde head, and a nude man with a pair of tattered angel wings strapped to his back blew me a kiss. I gave him a thumbs up in return.

We passed between various tents and stalls and carts and kegs, crossing a patchwork of intricately detailed carpets, all dusted with fine sand and bleached by the endless stare of the sun. Instinctively, I led my fellows to a large tent on the far side of the oasis, drawn by a thick flume of purple smoke that was enjoying unspooling itself from a hole in the roof. I commanded Edgar to wait outside and watch for danger (a symbolic endeavour only, given that Edgar is a fucking half-wit), and with Glob in tow, I ducked inside the mysterious and enormous tent.

When I was younger I read books about magical tents that were much larger on the inside. However, I was disappointed and somewhat baffled to discover that this particular tent was the opposite: while from the outside it looked the size of a couple of end to end tennis courts, inside it had roughly the floor space of a stationary cupboard. And before you get smart and say something stupid like ‘since when do tennis courts and stationary cupboards exist in castle times’, I’d like to remind you that you were fine when the wizard appeared and cursed us all, you were okay with the existence of party gremlins, and you were totally willing to accept that a mercenary called Dedmìht could travel on a sledge pulled by raccoons. And this is where you choose to draw the line? This is where the extended cord of your disbelief snaps? For shame. 

Across the tent, about two metres away, sat a plump old woman with deep brown skin. Her mouth was full of gold teeth, strewn willy-nilly across her gums like headstones in a badly tended graveyard. She was chomping on a cigar and laughing heartily with a harem of nude men.

“I was wondering when you would arrive, my dears,” she said. “My scouts saw you crossing the dunes, headed our way.”

Her voice sounded like a hug; the kind of hug your grandma gives you at Christmas, pressing you against her unfathomable bosom while wearing a thick knitted jumper.

“Who art thou, crone?” I asked, scraping the last residues of my sanity together and throwing them in the furnace of my consciousness.

“My name is Toot. And you may be a king but you’re in my town now. Call me crone again and I’ll boil your head,” she smiled.

“Fair Toot, before we can engage in further verbal jousting, I require thine aid. The curse of these sands has jangled the blubber of mine royal bonce, and I cannot finish a sentence without uttering something completely cabbage. Please, Toot, if the power be within thy gnarled hands, heal thy king’s head!”

Toot inspected her hands with raised eyebrows.

“Curse? What curse?”

“The curse of the Goochi Desert!” I replied. “The curse that has claimed so many poor souls, the curse that ravages mine kingly mind as we chatter idly! I can feel it, even now. I can feel it!”

I began compulsively dancing an odd sort of jig, while sticking my tongue out and making owl noises. Glob looked away. Toot chuckled softly, her shoulders jigging up and down.

“King Athelstan,” said Toot, smiling gently, “I don’t know what you’ve read, but you’re not cursed. These sands are not evil; they do not claim people. People just like it here. Look outside. It’s nice weather. People take their clothes off and they dance, people drink wine, they chew the leaves of the Boogie Tree, they have a nice time. Sometimes they return home for a little while, but they always miss it here. Everybody always wants to stay, and we welcome every single traveller who passes through. Have you ever seen a more beautiful paradise?”

“Thou art telling me I am cured of the madness of the shifting sands? The evil of the endless dunes that so scorched mine cranial ceiling has been lifted?”

She raised an eyebrow at me.

“King Athelstan, you never were cursed in the first place. You are probably just dehydrated-”

“Huzzah! Mine royal swede is healed! The snakes that oozed between the coils of mine brainstuff have been smoked out; I am sane once more. Toot, I thank you. Truly, thou art very wise. Please, take this as a token of my gratitude.”

I handed her a small bag of gold coins I produced from my tunic and hugged her, then stood back, smiling ear to ear. She looked as if she was about to say something, then thought better of it and shrugged, stuffing the bag of coins down her dress.

“Now that you have been… cured, I welcome you to my paradise. This ethereal oasis sanctuary you now find yourself is called Inebrium. It was I who founded it many years ago, as an escape from the tribulations of life among the grass-walkers; folk like your subjects, who toil in the mud growing carrots for thirty years before dying in agony from a rotten tooth. I had no desire for my own existence to be so mud-spattered and boring….”

As Toot continued her tale, she sat back in her chair and poured herself a goblet of rich red wine that glugged in a very satisfying way as it lurched from the bottle to the cup. Wine always looks so delicious when other people pour it, don’t you think? I found myself licking my lips, and tried to think back to when I had last had anything to drink. I realised with an internal gasp that I hadn’t had anything at all since I got wankered with Edgar in the Klinghorns and that avalanche smashed Dedmìht to bits. It was no wonder the curse had wrangled away control of my mind with such ease. Goodness. I suddenly felt parched.

“King Athelstan, are you listening?” said Toots, snapping me out of my kingly ponderings. I blinked at her. “I was just explaining important information regarding your quest. Did you hear what I said? I am concerned with your lack of reaction.”

“Yes, I heard thee. T’was most interesting.” I replied on impulse, before immediately regretting it.

“Good. So remember what I told you about the cursed Mines.” My brain at this point yelled ‘ARSE’, but my mouth said “I will”.

Toot led Glob and I out of the strange shrinking yurt, and we strolled betwixt the tall palms and the sweaty revellers and the cock-eyed gremlins of Inebrium.

“You can spend the night here,” said Toot. “You must eat and drink plenty, for I can see from your complexion that you are dehydrated. Then, once you are fed and watered, we dance!”

I tried to explain that it didn’t feel quite right to spend an evening partying while Astra was being hauled away by a malevolent prince, but she wasn’t having it.

“You can’t travel across the sands at night – cannibals roam the southern desert, and great thunder birds fly over the dunes and pick off weary travellers. You would not last an hour.”

I did not know what a thunder bird was and I had no real desire to find out, so I shrugged and grabbed the nearest wine bottle.