The Strange Voyage of Oren of the Good People, Judy Colella [book club recommendations .TXT] 📗

Oren was one of the Good People. The humans in Ireland called them the daoine maite in their Gaelic tongue. The clumsy language of England didn’t quite know what to do with that. So “good people” it was, and sometimes “the fair folk,” although that term applied mostly to the cousins of the daoine maite.

This Oren, incredibly ancient, was wise most of the time, but not always. He would occasionally spend time with a clurichan named Dani. Now time was something both had plenty of and then some, so they would indulge in Dani’s favorite pasttime, drinking. Understand that this meant indulging in potables favored at pubs and taverns or personal wine cellars. Being magical, Oren and Dani could get in and out of such places unseen. But when they got caught, they knew how to outmaneuver their human captors and end up free anyway, usually at the expense of the poor humans.

How, then, had Oren ended up trapped in a smokestack? When he figured out where he was, one could say he spent some time fuming about it, but then, one would be indulging in a pun worthy of severe and possibly eternal punishment. So it shall only be said that Oren was horrified.

Some time earlier, Oren and Dani had been cavorting in the pubs of Belfast. They’d gone to see the magnificent vessel being built in its famous shipyard, but were mostly there to laugh at the efforts of humans who thought that building such an object would make themselves somehow greater than they were. Or so Oren and Dani thought. Sadly, neither really understood humans as well as they believed, despite their supernaturally long lives. After millennia, they still couldn’t comprehend some of the more subtle nuances of the minds of men – and nothing at all of their female counterparts.

Without the influence of Dani, Oren mightn’t have indulged in drinking and cavorting at all; without the sensibilities of Oren, perhaps Dani…well, no, Dani would still have indulged in typical clurichan behavior (they’re alcoholics of legendary proportions, in fact).

But back to Oren and the smokestack. After flitting about the shipyard, admiring the craftsmanship while guffawing at how hard everyone was working, the two had developed a supernatural thirst. To remedy this condition, they’d drained several casks in the storage area of a tavern, then gone to a nearby pub. This pattern – tavern to pub to tavern to pub, etc. – continued for quite some time. Finally, Dani declared that one more drop of anything would cause him to burst. Oren, so drunk his eyes had crossed and recrossed too many times to count, thought this was hilarious.

Normally, Dani would have agreed and found his own statement ludicrous enough to laugh over, but his state of intoxication was a tad over the edge of his “normal” so he grew angry instead. “Think thatsh funny, do you?” he demanded, swaying slowly to the left.

“Of course, you loon! You’re a – a clur….er, a chlrrrurr…a cruller, no… a relative of a leprechrrrr – never mind. You can’t burst!”

“Thatsh not the point!” Dani shouted, swaying slowly back toward the right.

“Ah, so what would the point be, then?” Oren emitted an uncontrollable belch and gave his friend a wink.

Dani blinked. “Of what?”

Somehow, Oren realized his friend had forgotten what had set him off, so wisely decided to try and change the subject. “The point…er…of that smokestack over there!” He waved a hand at the huge black tubular object visible over the tops of the buildings where the massive ship awaited completion. There were four, actually, but in his state of amiable incandescence he thought there was probably one, and that he was only seeing in multiples.

“The point of – what’r you talkin’ about, ya crazy fae?”

Sometimes the Good People were called fae, or fay, or faerie, or fairies, or anything related to that because no one wanted to explain the spelling of what they were really called. However, unlike the modern concept of such creatures, Oren wasn’t the size of a fat mosquito, nor did he have wings. He rarely hung out in rings of dew and couldn’t have fit under a toadstool if his immortal life depended on it. No, he pretty much looked like a rather foppish, underweight human male. He was tall, too – six-foot-two – which made his friendship with the diminutive clurichan (a species which was, in fact, related to the leprechaun) unintentionally comical.

And that’s why Dani called him a fae.

“I don’t really know, friend.” Oren sighed and almost lost his footing. As he regained his balance, it occurred to him that he’d never actually fallen off the ground before, and thought the experience might be interesting. “But take that smokestack now, and never mind about the ground.”

“I can’t take the smokestack. It’s bigger than a mountain. And what was that about the ground?” All this talking was somehow improving Dani’s ability to speak, but he hadn’t noticed the slurring, so he didn’t notice the improvement, either.

“Ah, the ground. Why ever did they make that smokestack so large?”

“So it would match the other ones?”

“Could be…” Oren started walking back to the shipyard, although he couldn’t begin to say why. The alcohol having done all the damage it was going to do for the night, he settled into a controlled stagger and began to sing.

Dani joined him, their voices a lot more pleasant than one might have thought they could be under the circumstances. Before they knew it, they were on the dock beside the gargantuan ship, singing up at it like a lover at his lady’s window.

“…of I-I-I-I-Irela-a-a-a-and!” They ended in harmony, arms around each other’s shoulders, nearly falling into the water when they ran out of breath and had to stop.

They continued to stare upward for several long minutes, but at last the stillness was pierced by the sound of a sob.

“Are you crying?” asked Oren, looking down at his friend in surprise.

“No, you loon, I’m weeping!”

“Why?”

“Because it’s so – so – big and lovely, and here we stand, unable to get up there and walk its magnificent decks!”

“Dani. My friend. Dani. Listen. We’re magical, remember? I think if we’re really, uh, really, uh, if we focus, we can probably fly up there.” They could, of course, but in his fuzzy-brained state, had quite forgotten that otherwise well-known fact. He’d also forgotten the volatile nature of his diminutive buddy, so he was astonished, flummoxed in fact, when the little man started cursing at him.

“What’s wrong now?” Oren asked, backing away.

“Fly? Fly? Are you forgetting that it was flying that caused my dear, dear, departed grandmother to drown in an untimely way?”

Oren frowned. Was there a timely way to drown? “I didn’t know at all!” He really didn’t.

“Well, some friend you are, then! The poor woman flew out over the water to see if she could capture some moonlight in her cup, and a fish jumped out of the sea and ate her, so she drowned!”

Three things were wrong with that story, thought Oren, trying to look sympathetic while working out the problem. “How dreadful!” he murmured, thinking how daft the woman must have been to try and catch moonlight in a cup (everyone knew you had to use spells and a special net), how unlikely it was for a sudden fish to snatch her in mid-air, and how, if she had been eaten, the drowning thing never had a chance to occur in the first place. “Dreadful,” he repeated, sure he wasn’t appearing nearly as sorrowful as Dani might have expected.

“It was, that, and yet here you stand, talking about flying up there as if it was nothing! Well, fine, my tall, skinny friend! You can fly up there yourself!” And so saying, he waved his arms while shouting words in the most ancient version of his tongue, and a misty second later, Oren was gone. Only the desolate sound of a faint “whoosh” and the slap of water against the sides of the ship remained.

He stared around for a bit, confused. “Oren? Where’d you go, lad?” When he got no answer, he started walking back along the dock, thinking perhaps his friend had returned to the tavern. By the time he got there himself, he’d forgotten about Oren altogether.

As for Oren, he found himself inside something huge and dark, and no amount of chanting or struggling was getting him out of there. After a bit of thought, he made a disturbing connection between what happened and what he had seen earlier: the ship. That gargantuan piece of human folly with its smokestack – or were there four?

A bit of knocking about gave him the size and dimension of his prison – a place with curved walls about twenty-two feet in diameter. When he finally thought to look upward, he saw what could only be the night sky, but it was framed in a circle. No doubt about it, then. He was trapped at the bottom of one of those damnable smokestacks, and for some reason, his own magic wasn’t working well enough to get him the hell out of there.

He closed his eyes, tired and completely sozzled. It seemed a nap would be just the thing, and when he woke up, he’d probably find himself in a tree somewhere. Which, he decided before drifting off, would be ever so much better than where he was at the moment.

*******

It should be explained that when someone of Oren’s ilk took a nap, it could last anywhere from five seconds to five hundred years, depending on why he was taking this nap in the first place. Normally, the Good People don’t need much sleep, but when something out of the ordinary occurs, they may retreat into a state of profound slumber, hoping that by the time they awoke, whatever it was would have gone away.

In his case, besides getting drunker than he’d ever been in all his long years, his dearest and oldest friend had used magic against him, something that was almost unforgivable. His own magical abilities had fled for some reason, leaving him stuck good and proper, so his decision to take a nap had been no light matter, but certainly understandable. This being in the neighborhood of epic, so was the length of this nap.

So what, exactly, had happened to him? In his sloshed state of irrational ire, Dani had cursed Oren, sending him to the nearest, darkest place possible, which had been that smokestack. It was only because some god or godess somewhere in Ireland must have liked Oren that he landed in the only one of the four that was there for balance and not function. The ship’s builders had found the three stacks of its original design to be aesthetically displeasing, so had added a fourth for purely cosmetic reasons. Because of this fortuitous decision, Oren didn’t suffer severe smoke burns when the ship’s engines were finally engaged, but was able to sleep undisturbed. Fortunately, Dani’s curse was a mild one that would wear off in about a hundred years, perhaps less.

It should also be explained that while Dani (upon sobering up a few days later) experienced some serious remorse over his treatment of his best friend, he also couldn’t quite remember where he’d put the daoine maite, much less how to retrieve him, until many years later. While stealing ale from behind a bar in that same town, he heard patrons discussing a ship that had been built there. It was supposed to be indestructible, yet had managed to strike an iceberg during its maiden voyage and subsequently sink. He suspected his friend’s prolonged absence might have had something to do with this ship which he and Oren had viewed all those decades earlier, even though neither had bothered to learn its name. Well, now Dani needed to know, for if he’d done