The Expeditioners and the Secret of King Triton's Lair by S. S. Taylor

Author:S. S. Taylor [Taylor, S. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781940450308
Publisher: McSweeney's

When the captain he spied a lovely mermaid

With a comb and a glass in her hand

Oh, the ocean waves may roll

And the stormy winds may blow

While we poor sailors go skipping aloft

And the landlubbers lay down below, below, below

And the landlubbers lay down below

“You the boys going out to King Triton’s Lair?”

We jumped.

An elderly man was sitting outside one of the little shacks by the harbor, working away on a big fishing net made from small sticks and rope. “You the boys?” he asked again.

He was very old, his skin wrinkled and folded like old cloth. His eyes were watery and unfocused as he looked up at us.

“We’re on an expedition from the Academy for the Exploratory Sciences,” I said.

“Idiots,” he replied.

Zander and I glanced at each other. “What do you know about King Triton’s Lair?” I said.

“I know a lot.” He snorted and went back to his fishing nets. “Why do you want to go there?”

I decided we didn’t have anything to lose by being halfway honest with him. “We’re hoping we can find the shipwrecks and maybe the oil,” I told him.

“That’s why I wanted to go, too,” he said. “And I almost died. The storm came out of nowhere. I barely knew it had started to blow before the ship went under. My cousin who was with me that day, he died in the sea.”

I took out a map of St. Beatrice and the surrounding ocean that I’d scrawled on a scrap of paper. “Where was your boat when you sank?” I asked him. “Can you show me?”

He looked up at me again and pointed to a place on the map and I marked it down. I could figure out the coordinates later, but it looked to be near to the location of King Triton’s Lair on Dad’s map.

I thanked him.

At first I thought he wasn’t going to say anything else, but as we started to walk away, he muttered, “You won’t find the oil. It’s just a story. But King Triton’s Lair is out there, the weather is out there. There is a song that the fishermen sing that goes:

Don’t go down below, boys

Don’t go down below

For if you go with Triton

You’ll never come up no more

I turned back and met his eyes. “If you try to go there, you are as stupid as all the rest.” He was finished. He resumed his work on the net.

Zander and I were silent as we approached a little stall selling fried fish and Ribby Fruit cake. We bought enough for everyone and brought it back to the Fair Beatrice.

Coleman met us at the end of the day, and after we’d said goodbye to the others, we told him and M.K. about our conversation with the old man.

“That’s Papa Madigan who you met. And he’s right, you know,” Coleman said. “I’ve been thinking about it all day, and this is crazy. I don’t know why the Academy is letting you do this. I don’t know why Leo Nackley is letting his son risk his neck.

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