The Final Days of Springborough

Every time a wave crashed over the bow of The Hamptons Chase, a big cheer would arise from the crew of eight men. J.J. (or Jage, as his crew called him) was the youngest man on this boat, and the crew, devised mostly of men twenty to forty years of age (which made them mostly ten to thirty years older than Jage), loved the white-haired lad for it. For Jonathon James of the Village of Fortis was an honest captain. He was a captain who paid them handsomely with his family’s money at the beginning of the voyage, and had never broken his word yet. While the crew believed the ship’s mission to be a foolish one, one with no end in sight, they did love the ocean-blue-eyed, small statured captain, and have been seen telling anyone that would listen… “I’d follow Captain Jage to the ends of the Earth, and fall off the falls that lie there for him.”

J.J. did not want to find the end of the Earth. He simply wanted to find his family’s lost kingdom.

How a family loses a kingdom was never told. His father, a man also named Jonathon, simply shrugged and sighed when asked if the stories were true and if the family was lost royalty. “You know, I don’t know!” Jonathon the First would say, throwing his hands up in the air like a man, who should be ruling a kingdom but had never found one, would do. His father was a tired man who watched the sun dials throw shade on higher numbers to make sure the day was coming to an end. Jage’s mother, on the other hand, would tell him stories about the Kingdom of Gambrille, although she herself had never seen it.

“The Kingdom of Gambrille was a beautiful kingdom, it is said,” Jage’s mother would tell him when he was a younger boy. He would curl up in her lap, and count her fingers as she talked softly into his ear. “Its walls are twenty soldiers high. Inside, everyone’s houses are made out of wood, not the mud and stone you see in Fortis, and higher quality than what we’ll get if we swear allegiance to Springborough. No, in Gambrille, people sweep the dirt off their floors; the floors are not made of dirt.”

“Tell me about the castle, Mom,” Jage would say, skipping the boring real estate talk of the village.

“The castle has walls of ivory and gold so it shines as bright as the sun during the day. At night, the balconies are lit with flames to keep the sun’s heat in, and to keep any thieves from thinking twice about scaling the castle walls and getting in. The great hall, where your Daddy and Mommy will sit, has stained glass windows, marking every generation in our lineage. There’s a chandelier, made out of gemstones only found in the four corners of the world…”

When Jage would ask his mom how she knows so many details about a place she’s never seen, his mother would simply shrug and tell him that she sees it in her dreams, that their family can travel to far off places in their sleep. That’s how they know Gambrille is real. And through dreams, with his eyes shut and his mind at its most open, is how Jage the Pirate thinks he will find what he is looking for.

His crew believe none of it. The Kingdom of Gambrille has long been perceived as a myth, a bedtime story to scare little boys and girls from running off, because the Kingdom of Gambrille, it is believed by everyone but Jage, his sister Brynn, and their parents-is guarded by a great, monstrous, fire-breathing dragon who eats anyone who is walking alone. When reminded of this fact, Jage would look at his men and smile. And with an innocent twinkle in his eye, he’d ask his men: “So, do you really believe my family’s castle to be a myth? Or are you just hoping it is because you don’t want to run into my family’s dragon?”

The main reason for the crews love of J.J., though, came at a time when the boat had caught a current from which it couldn’t escape, and therefore was drifting off course quite a ways. The crew, tormented by their own thoughts and cursing the wind, began to see the smallest inconveniences as large insurmountable situations. One of the overall concerns was a lack of food. The bread, brought for the journey, had grown hard, and the crew became sick of it.

So, Jage, as his crew slept, spent the night fishing. Without eight men up and shouting at the wind, the seas, the birds, and anything that moved, the fish were not scared and plenty were biting. By the time the crew had awoken, J.J. had caught a chest full of fish. Everyone was happy. The crew’s diet now had protein. They prepared the fish in a variety of ways, and J.J. had all the bread on the boat for himself to eat. The night watchman now not only had to watch to make sure the boat stayed on course, but also to watch the fishing pole for the crew.

Most captains of ships would rule with a whip, using brute strength and the promises of riches to keep their crew in line. But Jage paid his crew up front, promised them no riches (just adventure), and ruled by trying his utmost to solve their problems. Most of the time, Jage felt like he was a mediator, forcing his crew of unruly men to talk through their problems instead of punching each other. This is why the crew loved J.J., the small captain of eleven years of age.

After days and weeks of seeing nothing but endless views of water, J.J. began to grow land sick. He began to think of his father, traveling up the coastline north and his mother, traveling south, and his sister staying put looking out over the cliffs. He grew to miss his family, and knew it was about time to head back. Hopefully one of them had more luck than he did. So, one night as his crew sat down to eat their grilled snapper with lemon and pepper, Jage brought up the subject of family, asking the crew to go around and tell the ship about their own. Some men talked about not really having a family. Some men missed their own, but had to work in order to put food on the table. By the time the conversation got around to Jage, the boy captain had a tear in his eye.

“I reckon I miss my family, fellas,” Jage said, swallowing his cry to put on a brave face. “I thank you all for helping me on my journey, but it’s about time we turned the boat around and got back to Fortis. My sister is up on Quakenfalls, maybe my parents, too, and hopefully they have seen what I’ve only been telling you about.”

The crew took the news silently.

The next morning, J.J awoke to a crewman named Juba shouting frantically from the stern. Jage put on his slacks, found a shirt, threw on a hat, and burst from his captain’s quarters to look down his ship to see all eight crewman on deck, hanging over the side to get a look at something.

“Captain! Captain! There’s a boat!” Juba said, pointing, but J.J. couldn’t see whatever he was pointing at.

“Murray! Drop anchor!” J.J. ordered.

“Already did, Cap,” came the response.

Jage walked down the stairs to the deck, staring up at the sun which didn’t have to compete with any clouds in the sky. The day was peaceful, and Jage hoped it stayed that way, but he didn’t understand what was getting his crew so worked up. So, he walked to the railing of his boat and looked down.

In the water, about a fifth of the size of the boat he was currently captaining, was a smaller sized boat rocking in the waves, butting up against his hull. Not a soul was in sight. J.J. didn’t see it as much more than a pile of driftwood, haphazardly floating along the surface. His crew was very much intrigued by the boat. Jage watched them looking down at it, their mouths hung open and their eyes hardly blinked.

“Haven’t any of you louts seen a boat before?” J.J. asked his crew, whose wits had seemingly grew dim.

“There’s a body on it,” Juba said, still pointing, and still the only crew member with the wherewithal to speak.

Jage looked back down at the boat, and sure enough, he saw legs lifelessly laying on the deck of the other ship. But that was all he saw, legs, as the upper body seemed to be cut off by the cabin door. As they watched, the legs bent upward. The feet rose and fell, going from resting on their heels to being flat-footed on the ground. The dead legs now looked like legs resting, on their own, on the deck of the boat.

Legs moving, not attached to anything, was curious.

“Get a rope to that boat,” Jage said, shivers running down his spine, but not in his voice. “Let’s see what this is about, shall we?” Captain J.J. knew he had to find the other half of that body.