Like Frenchmen, crocodiles were what they were, and did what they did, and saw no point in making pretenses or apologies, and therefore possessed a sort of aplomb that Jack found admirable in a way. He wished only that God would send him some more mammalian enemies. Though, come to think of it, nothing was more evident than that Queen Kottakkal was a mammal-unless it was that she was his enemy, too. So perhaps it was a distinction without a difference.
The only plan Jack could conceive of was to throw the other chicken in another direction and divert the crocodiles’ attention long enough to make a dash for it. And this required shifting his burdens from hand to hand-the second chicken went to his right, the bamboo pole to his left. This was when he first became aware that the pole in question had a barbed metal head on one end. It was a fishing spear. A rope was trailing from the other end-Jack had been dragging it behind him, without knowing he was doing it, during his run through the swamp. Now he gave it a hard jerk. The knot at its far end (intended to keep the rope from slipping out of a fisherman’s hand) bounced off a mangrove-root and came flying towards him. Jack dropped the spear and snatched the knot out of the air. Ten seconds later it was noosed round the neck of the second chicken. He now tossed the chicken into a momentarily crocodile-free zone about halfway between him and the masts. The crocodiles naturally converged on that place, their warty backs lifting the surface of the water without breaking through. Jack took advantage of this to jump down into the water, wade forward several steps (it came up to mid-thigh), and fling the spear in a high arc over the masts. It landed flat in the water on the far side of them. Or Jack guessed as much from the sounds made-he could not linger to watch its trajectory, because two crocodiles were already climbing over each other to reach him. Jack scampered back up onto mangroves and drew his sword before turning around.
The second chicken had long since been swallowed, without any tedious chewing, by a big croc. The rope was still attached-it ran up the crocodile’s gullet, out of its mouth, and several yards across the water, over the mast-raft to the floating spear. As the masts moved downstream, the spear was dragged backwards across them, and inevitably the barbs in the spear-head snagged in some of the ropes binding the raft together. As to what happened inside of the crocodile’s gut when the rope went taut and tried to pull the chicken out, Jack could only speculate-and as to what was going on in the mind of the chicken (which might be in some sense still alive), that was a matter for metaphysicians. The outward result was that the masts stopped moving and the crocodile became highly annoyed. Jack supposed that a very big and old crocodile must take a certain pride in his work, viz. swallowing and digesting whatever came along, and that an attempt to revoke a meal by yanking it out must be viewed, by such a Reptile, as a very serious affront. In any event it led to an amount of thrashing. And that led to a bit of good fortune Jack had not really looked for: All of the other crocodiles seemed to hear or feel this commotion and made it their business to get there as fast as they could-which was disturbingly fast.
Jack, anyway, was not slow to take advantage of this, the only opportunity he was likely to get. He waded halfway to the masts and faltered when he felt the river-bottom falling out from under his feet, and the current trying to sweep his legs. His boots and weapons would make swimming impossible. He kicked off a boot, and was about to abandon it when something prompted him to turn around. Nostrils were headed his way. He flung the boot towards them and it vanished as quickly as the chickens had. A few moments later, the second boot joined it. Now Jack pulled off the belt that supported his sword and scabbard. The belt he flung at the crocodile; it paused for one heartbeat to consume it. The sword he flung at the mast-raft; it had the good grace to stick there. The scabbard he made as if to throw at the crocodile. Watching him through bulging slit-pupil eyes, it opened its mouth to catch it; but Jack held on to this morsel, turned it vertical, and shoved it between the crocodile’s jaws.
Now this turned out to be nothing more than a brief annoyance to the animal, and not the show-stopper Jack had been hoping for; but as Jack had demonstrated in diverse settings, sometimes it sufficed to be annoying. It took a few moments for this crocodile to shake the scabbard loose, and in that time Jack divested himself of his clothes. While another crocodile was swallowing those, naked Jack was swimming to the masts. While the two crocodiles were fighting over precedence, Jack was climbing onto the masts and retrieving his sword. A smaller crocodile came towards him with shocking speed, as if it were being towed on a rope behind a fleet ship, and made it halfway up onto the fore-mast on sheer momentum. Jack nearly took its head off and it fell into the water and became food for other crocodiles. Another stroke of the Janissary-blade severed the rope of the chicken and set the masts adrift again. The raft slowly began to move, and soon eased over the bar and into the harbor, spinning slowly in some vast unseen vortex.
The Queen’s boat was waiting there, and with a couple of throws Jack was able to get the line over to his comrades, who proceeded to reel him and the masts in like a fish.
Jack sensed that he was already badly sunburnt; yet the equatorial sun was a soothing balm compared to the glare of Queen Kottakkal.
“I perceive the wisdom of your tradition, O Queen,” Jack said as his mast-raft was brought alongside the royal barge, “for not one man in a thousand could survive the trial you set for me there. Andas near as I can make out, one in a thousand is the normal proportion of honest men in any group…”
But here Jack’s oration was rudely interrupted by screams from nearly every man on the boat. He turned around to see a giant crocodile, twenty feet long if it was an inch. It was not so much climbing onto the masts as thrusting them below the surface of the water with its weight, and then gliding up over the submerged wood. This meant that it was advancing toward him. But then suddenly it was raining Shaftoes as Jimmy and Danny vaulted down between Jack and the reptile, each gripping a boat-paddle, and began waving these in the animal’s face. It proceeded to chew its way up the wood as if the oars were breadsticks, and was well on its way to having Jimmy and Danny Shaftoe for lunch, and Jack for dessert, when the Nayars up on the boat opened fire with their blunderbusses.
A moment later the Malabar skies were split open by a long rippling train of explosions. Jack looked across the water to see the new ship obscured in a bank of gray smoke, and light jabbing out of it in all directions: The eager crew had misunderstood, and were firing a full salute to their approaching Queen and their ship’s officers. Jack felt the masts bob upwards under his feet, and glanced over to see quite a bit of blood where the crocodile had been.
The guns of Queen Kottakkal’s castle were firing a salute of their own now, and the Queen was ascending to the top of her barge to accept all of these honors. She had been overtaken by events, which happened to all monarchs; but like a good monarch she knew when to accept the strange verdicts handed down by Fortune and by crocodiles.
JACK, IN A BORROWED Nayar loincloth, raised the Champagne-bottle over his head and drew a bead on the ship’s bowsprit. “In the name of whatever passes for sacred in this hell-hole, I christen thee Eli-”
Halfway to its target, the bottle slapped into the suddenly out-thrust palm of Enoch Root.
“Don’t name it after her,” he said.