The Polar Bear Explorers' Club Page 11

  Stella took her compass from her pocket and set it to Food and then Shelter. Both pointed in the direction of the frozen rainbow.

  ‘The compass says to go this way,’ she said, holding it up. ‘And it’s not like anyone’s got any better ideas.’

  And so, with the lack of any better ideas, they piled all the blankets they had on top of Ethan – because that rather seemed the thing to do for someone with frostbite – then Shay hopped onto the back of the sled and they set off in the direction of the frozen rainbow. Ethan’s black Ocean Squid cloak didn’t have a furred hood like the Polar Bear ones did, so Beanie tried to offer him his striped pom-pom hat, but Ethan sneered at the offending article with such a look of disgust that Beanie hurriedly replaced it on his own head.

  The snow eased a little as they went, and Stella was able to see the rainbow properly. It soared high in the sky, its many colours sparkling in the sunlight that had started to shine through the snow. Stella was pretty sure that she’d read somewhere – probably in one of the scientific journals Felix left lying around the place at home – that a rainbow was not a physical object at all, but an illusion that could not be reached or touched. And yet here they were travelling below a solid, frozen rainbow that definitely could be reached and, presumably, touched. Stella made a mental note to try. It would, she felt, be a very fine thing to return from an expedition having touched an actual rainbow.

  As the last snowflakes ceased to fall and the sunlight shone stronger, the snow all around them changed colour, from blue to pink to green and back again. Stella thought the rainbow was one of the most magnificent, beautiful things she had ever seen, and probably would have been quite excited about it if she hadn’t been so worried about Ethan. She really would feel terrible – and at least partly to blame – if he lost all his fingers and toes. Plus, his lips were turning blue, and that couldn’t be a good sign at all, even if he was too vain to wear Beanie’s narwhal hat.

  They carried on travelling for the rest of the afternoon, until the sky began to turn a dusky shade of purple velvet. Stella could clearly see the end of the rainbow diving down into the ground, but she couldn’t spot the Yak and Yeti and, for a moment, she felt a deep panic that perhaps there was no such place at all. Perhaps the frosties really had been making it up. After all, who ever heard of a luxurious hotel in the middle of the Icelands? The more she thought of it, the less likely it seemed.

  But then she spotted a little hut, huddled in the frozen landscape. An orange sign was lit up against the darkening sky, clearly spelling out the words: Yak and Yeti – only the bulb in the ‘k’ and ‘i’ had gone so, in fact, it read: Ya and Yet. It was not a large place but it did at least look inhabited – there were several sleighs and sleds parked outside it, light spilling from the windows and smoke puffing from the chimneys.

  ‘It’s there, look!’ Stella said, pointing it out to Shay.

  ‘That’s not a hotel,’ Shay replied. He squinted at it dubiously. ‘Looks more like a shack.’

  ‘Well, there’s obviously people in there so it’ll do.’ Stella nudged Ethan, who was huddled in the corner with his eyes closed. Stella really hoped he wasn’t dead or anything. ‘Ethan, we’re there,’ she said, giving him a poke and trying to sound cheerful and reassuring and not at all scared. ‘We’re there.’

  The magician groaned and pushed her hand away. ‘Quit p-p-poking m-me,’ he stuttered through frozen lips.

  Stella scrambled out of the sled the moment it stopped and hurried around to the side. Ethan stood up but he was slow and unsteady on his feet, and when he tried to get out of the sled he staggered forwards and would have fallen face-first into the snow if Shay hadn’t caught him.

  ‘I c-c-can’t f-feel my t-t-toes,’ Ethan struggled out the words through his chattering teeth.

  ‘Let’s get you inside, Prawn,’ Shay replied, draping one of the magician’s arms around his shoulders. Stella took the other arm and they half carried, half dragged him along, with Beanie hurrying behind them.

  Stella kicked the door to the Yak and Yeti open with her boot, and for a moment the four of them stood framed in the doorway of what was clearly some kind of tavern. A fire blazed in a large fireplace that took up most of one wall, and there were candles placed on rickety wooden tables, but no electric lights like back home. A smell of pine needles, wood smoke and spilled beer hung about the place – but it was dry and warm, and that alone made it inviting.

  The occupants of the tables went instantly silent at the sight of the explorers, and with just the crackle and pop of the fire in the background, you could have heard a pin drop. Or a goose honk. Stella had forgotten about her, but not wanting to be left behind, the goose had followed them into the tavern and promptly waddled across the room where she settled herself quite happily in front of the fire, fluffing her feathers and making herself comfortable.

  There were perhaps ten or fifteen men sat at the tables in the Yak and Yeti, and they all looked rather terrifying. Stella saw a lot of facial scars, glass eyes and grim tattoos. She also saw an awful lot of weapons lying about. She gulped and then winced at how loud that noise sounded in the silent room. She tried to compensate by glaring at the men instead.

  ‘Are you outlaws?’ one of them asked. He had a great big black beard and a tattoo of a skull on his right cheek.

  ‘What?’ Shay said. ‘No, of course not! We’re explorers.’

  ‘Then go away,’ Skullface said. ‘This here is an outlaw hideout. Bandits and outlaws only.’

  Stella silently groaned. She’d known that a luxurious hotel out here was too good to be true. It should really have come as no surprise that the frosties had sent them straight to an outlaw hideout.

  ‘Please, we need help,’ Shay said, and Stella could clearly hear the desperation in his voice. ‘Our friend is hurt.’

  One of the bandits glanced at Ethan. ‘Frostbitten,’ he said unhelpfully. ‘He’s a goner.’

  ‘What?’ Shay was aghast. ‘Are you saying he’ll die?’

  The bandit shrugged. ‘Chop off his fingers and toes and maybe he’ll live. Then again, maybe he won’t. It’s his best chance anyway.’

  ‘I’ve got an axe you can borrow,’ Skullface put in helpfully. ‘It’s a bit blunt but it should do the job all right, if you keep hacking.’

  ‘You’ve g-g-got to be j-j-joking!’ Ethan gasped. Stella could feel that he was trembling from head to foot. Or was that her? It was quite hard to tell.

  ‘I use it for chopping wood mostly,’ Skullface continued with a shrug. ‘But you’re welcome to it. As long as you clean it afterwards, of course. I don’t want blood all over the blade and staining the handle. Even frostbitten fingers bleed quite a lot when you chop ’em off. And it’s a bit blunt, like I say, so you’ll have to put some muscle into it otherwise you won’t cut through the bone. Do it outside, though, eh? We don’t want all that gore and mess and screaming in here.’ He proceeded to produce from beneath the table the most gigantic axe Stella had ever seen in her life. He held it out to them helpfully.

  Ethan fainted dead away, almost dragging Shay and Stella down to the floor with him. They tightened their grip around the unconscious magician, and Stella could feel her shoulders burning with the effort of holding him up.

  A chair over in the corner of the room suddenly scraped back, and a huge man walked towards them. He must have only recently come in from outside because Stella could see ice glinting in his reddish-coloured beard.

  ‘Hey,’ he spoke in a friendly, lazy drawl. ‘Have you kids got any moustache wax? Explorers normally carry moustache wax.’

  ‘What?’ Shay gave him an incredulous look. ‘Can’t you see that we’re dealing with an emergency here, man?’

  ‘Sure. That’s why I—’

  ‘Go away!’ Stella snapped. ‘We’ve got more important things to deal with right now.’

  ‘Do I look like the kind of guy who waxes his moustache or oils his beard?’

  Stella had to admit that he did n
ot. In fact, he looked more like the kind of person who had strange things living in his beard, or saved bits of food in there for later.

  ‘You don’t look like you wax your moustache, but it would probably improve your appearance enormously if you did,’ Beanie said, trying to be helpful. ‘I’ve got some moustache wax. Here, you can have it.’

  Stella didn’t know why Beanie had even bothered to bring the foul-smelling stuff, but was too horrified at the prospect of having to chop off all Ethan’s fingers and toes to worry too much about it just then.

  ‘Captain Filibuster’s Expedition-Strength Moustache Wax,’ the man read off the tin. ‘Yep. That’ll do the job just fine.’ He snapped his fingers and said, ‘Get your friend up on the table. I’ll sort him for you.’

  Stella tightened her grip around Ethan. This could not be happening. This simply could not. She had not signed up for blood everywhere and chopped-off fingers. She had not signed up for that at all.

  ‘There’s got to be some other way,’ Shay said desperately. ‘We can’t let you chop all his fingers off! I mean, we just can’t!’

  ‘I ain’t gonna chop his fingers off,’ Redbeard replied. ‘Keep your shirt on. I’m talking about another way. One that don’t involve blood and gore and screaming. It’s the most effective cure for frostbite I know. And I’ll share it with you on one condition.’ He pointed a stern finger at them. ‘You gotta promise to leave all mention of the Yak and Yeti out of your Flag Report. Yep, I know all about them,’ he said at their surprised expressions. ‘Carried enough explorers on my ship in me day before switching to carrying convicts.’

  Stella frowned. ‘Are you saying that you’re a ship’s captain?’

  ‘Used to be,’ Redbeard replied. ‘Captain Ajay Ajax, at your service.’ He gave them a little bow. ‘Got stranded here during my last voyage trying to take this lot—’ (he gestured to the other men) ‘—to the prison colonies on the other side of the world. Darned ship got trapped in the ice and that was that. We’ve been here ever since. And it ain’t a bad spot when all’s said and done, so the last thing we want is a bunch of law-makers chasing after us because you kids yapped about our hideout in your report. This lot don’t want to be hauled away in chains again, and I don’t want to go back to being a ship’s captain sailing on an ocean full of dangerous sea monsters. Not when I can be warm and safe here in the tavern that I always dreamed of owning, ever since I were a boy—’

  ‘Okay, okay, we get it,’ Stella said. ‘We won’t tell anyone about you. Please just tell us how we can help our friend without using an axe!’

  Captain Ajax held up the tin of moustache wax and said, ‘This heals frostbite as well as anything. Not what it was made for, right enough, and I only discovered it meself by accident when we got stranded here. You just need to apply it to the first bite, and any bits that have turned blue, and he’ll be right as rain by the morning.’

  Stella wasn’t really sure she believed that moustache wax could cure frostbite, but she was willing to try anything if it meant they didn’t have to start chopping off fingers in the snow outside.

  The outlaws at the nearest table removed their drink tankards and then helped the explorers to heave Ethan up onto the table. Perhaps there were a few too many of them trying to do it all at once, because in the confusion Ethan thumped down on the table pretty hard, and Stella winced as the back of his head whacked against the wood with a solid-sounding clunk. If there was a lump there when he woke up, he was bound to think they’d dropped him on purpose.

  ‘All right, get his gloves off,’ Captain Ajax said. ‘Carefully, mind! You’ll snap any frozen fingers clean off if you yank at ’em.’

  Stella, Shay and Beanie proceeded to slide the gloves off with as much delicacy as if they’d been performing a surgical operation. Stella couldn’t help flinching at the sight of the magician’s hands. The frostbite had got a lot worse whilst they’d been travelling to the Yak and Yeti – all Ethan’s fingers were frozen in a solid coating of ice that looked extremely painful, and there was a blue twinge creeping up his wrists as well. She dreaded to think what would have happened without Beanie’s magic slowing it down.

  ‘Just in time,’ Captain Ajax declared, and Stella prayed he was right.

  He unscrewed the lid of the moustache wax, and Stella wrinkled her nose at the overpowering combination of sandalwood and black pepper.

  They spent the next ten minutes or so carefully dabbing the moustache wax onto Ethan’s frozen fingers, and Stella was delighted to see that it started to work instantly. Perhaps it was one of the many ingredients in the moustache wax – or the combination of all of them – but something in the powerful-smelling stuff seemed to penetrate right through the ice, causing it to crackle and melt away, leaving the skin beneath perfectly unharmed.

  Next they pulled off Ethan’s boots and went through the same thing with his feet. Normally Stella would have been quite squeamish about having to deal with feet, but compared to the alternative – the axe and the blood and the snow and the screaming and the sawing – this was a piece of cake, really. And Ethan’s feet, like the rest of him, were extremely clean and tidy.

  ‘All right,’ Captain Ajax said. ‘Only the wrists left and then we’re done. Get that cloak off and roll his sleeves up to the elbow, just to be safe.’

  Because Ethan was, like the rest of them, wearing layers and layers of clothing, it took a while to get all his sleeves rolled up. When they finally did so, Stella was so intent on his frozen blue skin that she didn’t notice the scars at first – not until Captain Ajax came out with a harsh, shocked oath. It was a very interesting, very colourful oath and Stella made a mental note to write it down so she wouldn’t forget it later.

  Beside her, Shay gasped, and Stella finally saw what the others had already noticed. Both Ethan’s forearms were covered in angry-looking scars. They were all perfectly circular, and they stood out stark and white against his skin.

  ‘Are those … squid scars?’ Shay said, peering at them.

  ‘Aye,’ Captain Ajax said in a grim voice. ‘The screeching red devil squid. They only live in the Bone Current of the Poison Tentacle Sea – one of the most dangerous monsters in one of the most dangerous oceans in all the world.’ He shook his head. ‘Explorers,’ he muttered. ‘Only explorers would be crazy enough to go somewhere like that willingly. Stark raving mad, the lot of yers. That’s why I stopped carrying expeditions in the end,’ he went on. ‘Too many burials at sea. Too many creatures trying to eat the ship. Too much mayhem all round.’

  They applied moustache wax to the last of Ethan’s frozen skin, then Captain Ajax said there was a couch in the kitchen they could put Ethan on until he woke up.

  ‘Can’t have unconscious magicians lying around the place, using up the tables, cluttering up the décor,’ he said.

  ‘What décor?’ Stella asked, staring around the bare wooden room with its rickety old tables.

  Captain Ajax ignored her. ‘I got a business to run, y’know,’ he said. ‘You can stay till he wakes up but then you’ll have to go.’

  They carried Ethan through to the kitchen at the back and put him down on the threadbare couch. Stella noticed as they did so that a couple of buttons at the top of his cloak had come undone, and that there were squid scars on his throat as well. She wondered whether that was why he’d always worn his shirt buttoned all the way up to the collar, even on the ship when it was hot and stuffy and everyone else had had their sleeves rolled up.

  Stella realised it was pretty ironic that the moustache wax she and Felix had assumed was useless had actually been so vital to them. Felix would have said something about how that just goes to show you should never be too absolutely sure that you’re in the right and the other fellow is in the wrong. Sometimes you’re the silly fool who needs to learn something.

  Stella couldn’t help wondering whether the beard oil she and Felix had given away to the crew of the Bold Adventurer might also have had any secretly useful properties. Perha
ps a drop of beard oil in your hot chocolate cured hiccups, or allowed you to speak another language, or gave you the ability to become invisible.

  ‘You kids like a drink?’ Captain Ajax said, turning to the kitchen cupboards. ‘All we got is grog. One-Eyed Bill out there made it himself. It tastes terrible but it’ll warm you up some.’

  Stella felt she could do with something warming, even if it did taste terrible. The frosty attack and then that scare with the axe had released an awful lot of adrenaline, and her hands were still shaking a little.

  They sat down around the kitchen table and Captain Ajax handed out chipped mugs of grog. He was right about it tasting terrible, but he was also right about it warming them up. Soon they were even able to remove their cloaks and one or two of their top jumpers. Stella was particularly pleased to get down to her third jumper because it was one of her favourites – Beanie’s mum had made it for her and it was powder blue in colour with a big polar bear stitched on the front. Stella noticed that Beanie, too, wore one of his mum’s creations – a bright green jumper with a stitched narwhal.

  ‘So, you came across a frosty camp, eh?’ the captain said cheerfully. ‘I s’pose they lured you in with promises of tea and cake and whatnot and then wanted you to go off to bed?’

  ‘Yes. But why would they do that? Why go to all that trouble to be friendly just to turn on us a few minutes later?’ Shay asked.

  Captain Ajax shook his head. ‘Don’t you know nothin’? Frosties bite people when they’re asleep because they don’t feel it then. Come the morning they’ve got full-on frostbite and it won’t be long before the fingers fall off. And that’s what the frosties want.’

  ‘But why?’ Stella said, flipping her long white plait over her shoulder. ‘What do they want fingers for?’

  Captain Ajax looked surprised. ‘To eat, of course. Fingers is food to them.’

  Stella was horrified. ‘Can’t they just get the magic eggs to conjure up fingers?’ she asked. ‘The frosties said it would create any food we wanted.’