The Polar Bear Explorers' Club by Alex Bell (life changing books to read txt) 📗

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. Perhaps 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.