Sabre Tusk, however, had not counted on a change in heart of his crew who had been floating some yards off shore. With the beach now endlessly covered with lizards, the keelboats began pulling hard toward the ship. Sabre Tusk called for his crew to come back, “Land, you scoundrels! Beach those boats and help me out, you scalawags, or I’ll boil your spleens in rum and feed them to you!”
“Nay, Captain! Nay, our dear and worthy Captain!” the call came back from the keelboats. “We see you in no danger—for you, yourself, said you had nothing to fear from those ‘fools’ and ‘so-called Beasts of Fortune’ as you named them! So, since we’ve been plotting for a chance to maroon you these past weeks—seems right to us, to let those as command others like they was lizards, to stay among the lizards! We’ve elected Saltface as our new captain and we’ll be sailing off to better haunts without you!” So saying, they left Sabre Tusk raging on the beach, surrounded by Godgie lizards.
Fuming, but unable to do anything to stop them, for an instant Sabre Tusk simply screamed after his crew, then turned on Breister again.
“You bilge-sucking, lying Cow! You’re responsible for this! You and your lizard-loving daughter! You tricked me! I should have known!” With a roar, the Rummer Boar leaped at Breister, knocking him to the sand. As Sabre Tusk hit him, Breister’s flicker pole flew from his grasp. Breister rolled once and, pulling his hammer from his belt, bounced back up, facing Sabre Tusk.
“I’ll slice you to shark bait,” the Rummer Boar cried, slashing his cutlass at Breister.
“Not this time, Rummer-Sum!” Breister returned, parrying away the cutlass blow with his hammer.
Despite Breister’s courage, a carpenter’s hammer is no match for a heavy cutlass. The enraged Rummer Boar demonstrated why he was known to be a terror in battle. Slashing with a speed that seemed to cut light itself into small bits, Helga could see no way to stop Sabre Tusk’s attack on her father. It was just a matter of time before the much more skilled Rummer Boar would overcome her father. Quickly picking up her father’s fallen flicker pole, Helga began to work it furiously. With incredible speed, Helga waved the flexible pole, making the tip a blur of motion above her head. An undulating, whisper-like song sounded across the beach.
“Oh, Ancient Ones, help me, help me please,” Helga pleaded silently. Despite the fatigue that made her arms feel heavy and weak, she kept the pole moving furiously. The whisper-like song grew louder. Very soon, a few seabirds fishing off shore changed their direction and headed for the beach. Then, great numbers of birds, appearing from all points of the compass, began gathering in immense flocks wheeling overhead: sea birds, hawks and eagles, sparrows and jays, every kind of bird within miles! Descending en masse, the birds began settling down to roost on every available perch—as near to Helga as possible. Fluttering and flapping, cooing and cawing, chirping and squawking, pecking and pooping—the flocks covered the area around Helga.
Sabre Tusk’s attention was no longer on Breister as the immense flock began to descend around him. Instead, he tried to escape. Running as best he could through the vast gathering of lizards, stumbling, tripping, falling, crawling, he scrabbled across the beach like a crab. The immense maze of lizards, however, left hardly a patch of sand to walk on. Soon, the Rummer Boar captain, who had made little progress through the lizards, knelt among the lizards, screaming, weeping, and blubbing like a wild beast. He was rapidly becoming splattered with black, yellow, white, and brown bird droppings.
To Sabre Tusk’s disgust and horror, his elegant and dramatic oversized hat was nearly dripping with the slimey, smelly mess—becoming a veritable poop umbrella. Some of the birds who commonly made their livelihoods as pick-pockets and petty thieves, swooped at the Rummer Boar’s necklace of golden shark’s teeth, quickly picking him clean.
“What a lot of ships!” he cried! “We’re being boarded! But let them come and I will squash them between my fingers!” Jumping and leaping at the swooping birds, Sabre Tusk tried in vain to capture them between his thumb and forefinger. Pinching at the wheeling birds as if he could pop them between his fingers like bugs, the Rummer Boar’s ranting grew wilder and wilder. “Shim, my mate—turn the wheel to starboard! We’re being boarded—turn away, turn! Starboard! Shim! Shim! Are ye deaf? Why don’t you turn the wheel? Shim! Where are you? Why don’t you answer me?”