The speed at which the U-Boat crew and the men under Levsky, Pullman and The Color Sergeant stowed all equipment on board the whale of a boat, absently amazed Richard as he stalked in real kind. He was stalking about the slain beast, a half ton parrot with 12 feet of height, 26 feet of wingspan, a head the size of a rhino, a beak like a titan tree-pruner, and an eye the size of a human head. The massive brain, thrice that of a person’s brain, was purple, not gray, and was threaded with great arterial vessels exposed by the shot of Levsky that tore off the crown of the saurian head.

Prodding about with his sword, not butchering or dissecting, but probing, Richard found, couched among nasal tubes, something of a second brain, connected to the main—probably an additional lobe, not an altogether separate organ. This gelatinous sack was filled with a kind of oil, perhaps an ichor such as was said to have flowed through titanic veins in ancient myth. Careful not to pierce this sack, in case it was corrosive as in the fables—which he thought were more than fable—Richard considered the burning mate of this creature, how its tail and head had flamed the brighter, the longer.

Levsky was shadowing him, politely, at a distance. They had fought this thing. It was their business. The officers and crew were more than capable of taking on the expeditionary effects. Richard paced around behind the great parrot and observed the tail, not a normal bird tail, but something that might belong to a penguin or a whale—perhaps a great mallard duck.

He heard his own voice wandering strangely and alone among the crackling, sizzling, roaring and steaming of The Czarina.

“I doubt if these things can gain great altitude. In the future, airship doctrine should be for radical lift when attacked by these. Like hawks, eagles or penguins, I wager these are a mated pair and that if one is slain the other will go all-in.”

He was behind the tail feathers now, touching them with his hand, “It looks tropical, but is more the duck, an aquatic bird. The organ in the forehead, the brain lobe, perhaps connected to the trumpet-like sinus, is its main mode of attack and control. Darwin would be astounded. Yet I think Mather would come closer to the mark in identifying this nightmare creature, as a daughter—for it is female, I think, based on its ferocious feeding language it directed at my mind—of Enchidna, a Tiamat.”

Levsky was stalking close, looking with interest at the creature as the remains of one of his sailors sizzled and moaned in the background. The sailor that had been left at his feet was still in death, with no doubt in Richard’s mind that the death of the creature that’s predacious brain had seized him in such agony, had released him of all possibility of earthly suffering.

“Sir,” continued Richard, in a tone oddly detached and quietly fanatic, which would have given him a pause of self-reflection if not for his tone being a true reflection of his myopic intensity, “the Chimera that scourged Enkidu for rending the terrible veil, the mother of Grendel, who was aquatic, the dragon that slew her slayer, Beowulf, and even the Worm Oroboros eating its tail—would not this creature prune its own tail feathers? Python and Typhon, the sirens with their ruinous song? Might the poets have warned as many times only to have us shrug our shoulders over the improbability of their fancy?”

Levsky said, deadpan, as his men and machine continued to burn, “The first one we have killed.”

“Beowulf might argue the point,” smiled Richard.

“We must go, before another pair come to their distant call,” urged Levsky.

“Yes,” smiled Richard, sheathing his sword and using both—no, just the one hand, as the left shouldered bent pathetically—to draw forth one great emerald feather, a smaller one from about the back of the neck, “I speculate that as whales communicate many leagues through sound waves under water, that these devil ducks do the same through the air.”

Within five brief minutes, Levsky and he were boarding the extruding spout of the steely Teutonic whale, up a ladder and onto a small deck for four men, and then down through a steel hatch. This moved him to think, “Are we finally imitating Jonah in his sorrowful quest, or Gilgamesh or Beowulf in search of truth?”

He stood now, comically, he thought, holding the two foot feather before Admiral Donetz, who completed his outer thought, “Odysseus, Jason, Aeneas, did not they all—to include Hanno, who failed to return from his final sally—so venture? They, like swans, but we, as you have observed, like Jonah, a prophet after all.”

This concord of thought brought Richard out of his tireless, detached trance, he regarded the Admiral and on impulse extended his hand, realized it had a feather in it, went to switch it from right to left, was reminded in a sickening start that he had but the one hand, causing his recent towering confidence to plunge.

Noting the turn of melancholy as they stood at the base of the ladder from the extruding spout, a sailor screwing the hatch shut and climbing down, the stern face of Donetz softened as he extended his left hand to take the feather and his right to take the sanguine hand of Richard.

His voice soothed in a low tone of high character, “Well done, my young fellow. Our losses are often not fully to mind for some time. I still wake expecting the crew of U-22 to be at their stations, though they long ago went forever below. I suppose you have brought this trophy for our darling clairvoyant, The Czarina?”

“Yes, Sir,” Richard spoke to the Admiral, so relieved to be so entirely outranked in age and station by the man before him that he was able to become tired and look about for a berth. This was noted by the Admiral with a sad smile.

The Captain gave some order in that nearly extinct language, generally reserved for scientific and engineering projects, and the steel well hummed to life. Confirmations and orders were spoken in German, as the Admiral himself saw Richard down a short narrow hall, to a rack of bunks, and put him to bed like Daddy once had, “Sleep Daunt Richard, we will soon be over The Wrack, and She, shall wake you from your hard won nap.”

He felt the feather quill placed in his hand, like a pipe of bamboo in his palm, his eye lids falling like pouring sand.