To Slay a Beast

          Ever since Little San Salvador, when Ted dinghied up to me with the dead body of an enormous beast, easily approaching 10lbs, still dangling from his spear, I knew I would now be on a vision quest to battle a beast of equal mass. As Ted approached in the distance, and I could see the silhouette of his trophy, his beloved GoldenRod bending from the huge weight of the beast, I knew even before a word escaped from Ted’s proud mouth that I could not rest until I too had slayed a dragon of such mythical proportions. That night, as Ted carved the roasted beast and generously served up heaping portions of its enormous hind end, I hoped the other Flotilla members had not noticed my uncharacteristic silence as I toiled to unwind the jealousy, envy and ambition that swirled inside my head. When night time came I tossed and turned in my bed as images of Ted trading blows with this beast replayed over and over in my mind. I can see him there at the base of the cliffs of Little San Salvador, a fathom or so below the surface of the crystal blue water, magic yellow glove on one hand, Golden Rod cocked in the other, prepared to meet his maker at the mouth of the beast’s lair, should that be his destiny. But that wasn’t his destiny. His destiny was to thrust forward, draw back, jab and move, duck and dodge, holding his breath till his lungs nearly burst, until he rose to the surface victorious, beast blood splattered across his golden curly locks.
          As a young lad the great water-swordsman of yore spin yarns of epic battles such as these from their stool in the pub, and though you want to believe in their truth, you know that never have you seen any man with evidence of a beast of such size. And on occasion when a knight does fall, and his body is never recovered, and the whispers around the village blame such a beast for slaying the man and devouring his body, there is always doubt in one’s mind. You think no way, man. The beasts don’t grow to that size anymore. They may not have even been the same species as the current midgets we encounter today, whose size is barely enough to give an infant a fair fight, let alone feed one.
          “But what if they were true?,” I used to think. How glorious it must have been for a man to ride his steed into the village with a corpse of a giant water beast slung over the back of his horse. What a party must have ensued, with ale frothing over the mugs of every man in the village, patting the victor on the back and feeling the edge of his blade. All the children listening intently as he retold the story over and over, and all the maidens letting out huge sighs at the climax, expressing their faintness with the back of their hands across their foreheads, then rushing forward to throw themselves at the swordsman, giggling and feeling his biceps. Can you imagine my envy when all these things actually happened to Ted that night? I saw first hand how a victory over a beast of such proportions can elevate a mere water-swordsman to the status of a King.
So I made a solemn vow to myself that night, that I shall not rest until I too had achieved King status. Until I too had a story to tell all my hundreds of children from my 20 different wives. And for many moons I searched near and far, high and low for the lair of such a beast. And I found many a lair that must have once housed a great beast, for inside the bones of water-swordsman where piled high. But no beast was to be found. The lairs lay long extinct. Until this day. This day shall remain in my mind as the greatest battle I have ever endured,….and endure I did, victorious.
          After a long and arduous voyage the flotilla was anchoring their ships in a large horseshoe shaped harbour, the name of which I cannot say, on a far away island which I cannot name. The other captains and crew were taking their dinghies ashore for a stretch of the ole legs, but as my crew and I prepared to launch our war canoe, a familiar scent approached my nostrils. It is a scent I shall never forget, a scent I have known for a long time, a scent I have experienced many a day over the last moons. I experienced this scent in every lair I found to contain human bones. It stays behind faintly, long after its owner has left. It is the scent of scat from a large water beast. The small ones don’t have this scent, this most distinct smell of smells, because the scat only takes on this flavour after the beast has ingested man flesh.
          Although I have smelled this many times before, never has the aroma been so strong, so pungent as to burn the hairs in my nose and make my blood boil. I sent my crew, oblivious to the odor and its cause, on to shore without me, for if this was to be my time, I must go at it alone. When all the crew where gone, and I was alone on my ship, I knelt above the water and said a prayer to Poseiden: “Oh Lord of the Oceans, mighty King of the Seas, whose power and strength are unmatched in this world or any other,….Give me courage of heart to enter into this battle against evil, that when mine eyes gaze upon this monster I do not turn and run. Give me strength of arm and quickness of sword, that I may endure a battle lasting many hours, and give me sharpness of mind so that I shall prevail and arise victorious.”
          With that I donned my armour, my fins, and my mask, and my golden glove. I put a final edge on Excalibur, my trusty waterblade, and dove into the tepid water. At my entrance into the underwater world, the creatures that reside there must have sensed a great battle was about to take place. For as I followed the scent trail the fishes that call this world home began to follow me. The eels, the triggers, the groupers, and the yellowtails all gathered near until I traveled with a great swarm of life behind me. Whether they followed to witness the fight, or to pick up the entrails of the loser, I will never know. I sensed I must be getting close to the lair because my swarm of followers started to fall back further and further. As I came over a grassy underwater knoll there it was. The lair. It was dark inside, although the light outside was bright, bright enough to show a green trail of smoke wafting up out of the cave, the odor from a freshly laid scat. As I approached the cave suddenly all the life around me grew silent. The normal underwater chorus which at times is so loud you can hear it above water, was now gone. The barnacles had stopped clicking, the crabs stopped chewing, the starfish stopped sucking, and the anemones stopped fluttering in the tide. All eyes where on me and my next move. I approached the cave cautiously but the beast must have smelled me, for as I came near he came out to greet me, with all his hideousness. I’m sure at first glance he noticed my golden glove and knew why I was here, standing at the entrance to his lair. For it is customary for all beast hunters to wear this golden glove in their non-sword wielding hand. The glove is impervious to the razors which cover the body of the beast, and will allow the swordsman a grip on the beast’s leg or antennae without losing his hand.
          The beast was easily the size of the beast that Ted bested, only much uglier, much tougher looking, much more hungry. I could tell he’d been in many battles, for he bore many a scar on his face. His huge head was as big as my torso, steering two huge antennae, close to 1 meter in length, covered with razors up and down. Above his eyes protruded 2 long daggers, as sharp as my own blade, although only half the length. His legs were as thick as a childs arm, hairy at the tips and came to a solid, sharp point. It appeared to me that he was missing three legs on one side, obviously from a previous battle which he won. This didn’t slow him down, though, for he still had 7 to spare. Around his mouth were two small, but highly dextrous claws, which he would use to pull my broken body into the two crushing molars of his mouth. The same molars that would reduce me to man-burger has I slid down his gullet. His hind end was a mass of bulging, rippling muscle, easily matching my own thigh in girth.
          I took one quick breath of air, and then dove back down to meet my foe. But at the last minute, it occurred to me that simply running a blade through this beast would only put me even with Ted, assuming that the mass of our respective beasts was equal. I would have considered myself lucky to have won this battle with won quick thrust of my blade and walked away with my life. But that would not elevate me above Ted’s current status. I should be considered lucky to have even found a beast of this size, which hasn’t come along to any swordsman I have known in the last century,….except for Ted. So against the judgment of a more humble swordsman, I thrust Excalibur into the sand beside me. I removed my armour, my fins, my mask. At this moment the beast seemed to let down his guard. His stance relaxed and his antennae folded back to his sides. I walked up to him slowly but deliberately, and stood in front of his face. His jaw gnawing and grinding, foam, bubbling from his mouth, we stared at each other, eye to eye. I then removed the golden glove from my left hand, held it in my right hand, drew back and slapped him across his hideous face - a proper challenge to a mano-a-mano duel to the death. If I came out of this alive, I would be the first swordsman to defeat a water beast without a sword, and the glory would be all mine.
          His response to my face slap was a swift blow from his left antennae, which knocked me flat on my back and sent me sliding away from the lair entrance. I looked down at my chest to see specks of blood from the razors on his antennae, for I had no armour against them now. The only way to kill a water beast without the use of a blade is to twist his head from his arse and separate his body into two. This now occurred to me as nearly impossible, since his head was the size of my torso and his arse the girth of my thigh. I jumped up and ran at him, with all my speed, ducking and dodging counterstrikes from his huge antennae, and slid feet first under his belly. I wrapped my arms around his thorax and my legs around his tail, so that we were held chest to chest, and he could not reach me with his antennae or his legs. I used all my might to twist my own torso at the waist in order to remove his giant head, but the beast was too thick, too strong. He came out of his lair and attempted to mash me on a boulder, wrapping his legs around it and pulling himself onto it. But the missing legs on his right side allowed me to squirm out before he got the better of me. I went back up for air.
          At the surface I tried to reconstruct a plan as I listened to him grinding his molars down below. It was clear I made a mistake by attempting a mano-a-mano battle with a beast so large. But now he was out of his cave, and stood between Excalibur and me. I needed that blade back if I was to win this fight.
I swam back down and tried to get around him, but his superior agility in the water allowed him to turn and face me at every angle, always staying between my and my blade. I searched frantically for a solution, for now he felt he was on top and could finish me at will. But no solution presented itself, and my victory was starting to look hopeless.
          I cannot give up this fight. The beast has taken my glove, my armour, my fins and mask. He has taken my blade, Excalibur, handed down to me by my great grandfather‘s great grandfather. Certainly everyone will ask “Where are your things? What are those wounds on your chest?” And as soon as Ted gets close enough he’ll sniff the air around me, most certainly smelling the odor of the beast and know I had attempted to match him and failed.
         Just then I noticed a much smaller cave, a ways to the left of the entrance to the lair, and a little behind it. It was a gamble, but I surmised that the two caves must be connected, as I had often noticed in the empty lairs I had discovered previously. The gamble was this: although this cave was smaller than the opening to the beast’s lair, I was not entirely sure that the beast could not fit into this hole, and if the cave was a dead end, he would have me for sure.
          I went up for one last deep breath, dove back down and kicked my legs as furiously as I could, threw my arms into a frenzy, and sped toward the smaller opening, hoping the beast wouldn’t figure out my intentions in time to cut me off. He didn’t and I made it inside. Inside was dark and musty, and there were skeletons of every creature imaginable. At this sight I knew the two caves were one, I just had to find the connection. At that moment the dim light that was entering the cave from the opening now became shadowed, and I turned back to see the silhouette of the beast in the entrance to the cave, squeezing his fat head inside. The new darkness allowed me to see the connection to the caves, as light from the larger opening was now filtering into the back where the two caves joined. I darted around to the other side, pulling myself along the bottom with my hands and shot out the entrance of the lair, grabbing Excalibur and tumbling across the sand. When I stood up, the beast was on top of me. With two swipes of his antennae he simultaneously knocked Excalibur out of my hand, nearly severing my hand at the wrist, and struck another blow to my chest knocking me once again to my back. He came at me again, this time to finish me off, But his mistake came here: he knocked me and the blade in the same direction, so as I rolled to dodge the downward thrust of one of his great, pointed legs, I picked up Excalibur in my left hand and thrust it upward through his chest, directly in the center, between where his legs attach on each side. My first stab was shallow, but was enough to stun him. That bought me time to get to my feet in a squatting position. Without withdrawing the blade from his body, I stiffened my back and used my own enormous thighs to thrust the blade clean through him, exiting his head right between his eyes. The weight of his body fell down upon me, but he was dead, and I wriggled from underneath him victorious.
          When I returned to the ship with his enormous dead body, I collapsed as the heaviness of battle now sunk in. No one had yet returned from the shore. I no longer felt the need to have everyone throw a party in my honor, for maidens to throw themselves at me, for me to brag and boast the story. I now felt a strange respect for this beast, and all beasts of his kind. Now I made a new vow to myself: that if I was to ever encounter a beast of this size again, I would turn away, and leave him in peace, for there may come a day when there truly are no more. As I dressed the beast for roasting, alone on the ship, I thought about whether or not I would tell this story. I decided it must be told, but not in the manner most heroics are told, with exaggeration and emphasis. Only in the manner of truth, how it really happened. I would not leave out the parts of my mistakes or my ambition, or my jealous pride. I would not feel the need to bring it up every time I’m at the pub and tell every small child I meet. But I would tell my own crop of children, from my own wife, and make sure they feel the same way; that if ever they come upon a beast such as this, they should take pride only in having been lucky enough to discover it.
C



Obligatory "lobster next to your dog" photo