Barnaby Britto
| Species | Olphin |
|---|---|
| Affiliation | The Olphin Survivors |
| Home | Tide Tale Alley Books, Ovallia |
| Weapons | A spear |
| Companions | Mauz, Egras |
| Family | Pemadee, his guardian |
| Status | Alive |
| First appearance | Sacred: Eslura's Calling |
Barnaby Britto is an Olphin who was spared as an infant from the sentence that took the rest of his people to Morgaedion, and who spent his whole life inside a bookshop in Ovallia under a contract that he never leave it.[1][2] He broke the contract to go looking for the only other free Olphin, The survivors hidden inside the walls of Morgaedion have since named him their leader.[2][3]
Appearance
Barnaby has green scales over his skin, webbing between his fingers and toes, brown curls, large fish-like eyes and oversized glasses. Green fins sprout from his cheeks where his ears would be. Little fins on his arms and legs can be hidden under a cloak, and the webbing under gloves, but the cheek fins give him away.[1] He wears a scarf over his gills, and no shoes, because he hates the way they feel on his webbing.[1][4]
One lens of his glasses cracked the night he knocked them off in a panic about snakes, and he wore them cracked and crooked afterwards.[5][6]
Personality
Barnaby talks a great deal and apologises for it afterwards. He is enthusiastic to the point of being winded, reads voraciously, and tells jokes nobody finds funny.[1][7] Peppersnakes is his exclamation of choice, and it later becomes the only word Egras reliably answers to.[1][8]
He startles easily and knows it. He said as much to Mauz the first time the toad made him jump.[1] None of it stops him volunteering. Told that a giant spider was loose in the halls of Morgaedion and that an Olphin had been taken, he offered to go after it before he had established what Relagatra was.[9]
His gratitude to Pemadee was always in tension with resentment at a life spent as a reminder of what his people were blamed for.[1]
Background
Barnaby was born in Treenode. Pemadee found him there when the Olphins were taken from the town and shipped to Morgaedion, and made a contract with Lumikki Otsby, the Sacred Ruler of the Book of Water, the same day: he could keep the boy as long as the boy never left the bookshop.[2] Barnaby grew up sweeping the floor of Tide Tale Alley Books under a yellowed paper sign on the door reading Olphin Present, which warned the customers and reminded him what he was.[1]
He kept one possession from his parents, a tattered postcard of the Eslurian Opera House with a note from his father on the back saying that the building was where he and Barnaby's mother met, and that he wished Barnaby could see it with his own eyes. Barnaby read it a couple of hundred times.[1] He has never known what his parents looked or sounded like.[10]
Story
Sacred: Eslura's Calling
A letter blew off Pemadee's desk and Mauz would not let Barnaby put it back unread. It mentioned an Olphin at Treenode, marked a few moons earlier. Barnaby left the shop for the first time in his life to find them.[1]
On the beach at Ovallia a blond Ovallian boy knocked him down, recognised him, snatched the postcard and tore it corner to corner. Sacred Guards were on him moments later.[11] Pemadee found him in an alley, told him the letter was from Seely, an expelled Knower living outside Treenode, pressed the reactor stone and the letter into his hands, and asked him to carry them to him. Then the old man tipped himself out of his wheelchair in the street to draw the Guards off the bridge, and Barnaby ran.[2]
He had told Mauz to stay behind at the shop and was missing him before he reached the beach, but the toad was at his side again by the time Pemadee found him.[1][11][2] With the Guards drawn off, he made for the giant statue of Bellbour and left Ovallia over the bridge at Bellbour's Strait.[2] He was found by Beatrice Tidal in an abandoned house, where his panic about snakes cracked his glasses and where she told him her name was Bea and not Lea.[5] Alpin Loomin came in, called him a spawn of Nelazgus, drove a staff into his forehead and locked him unconscious in a closet. Bea waited for the gopher to sleep, opened the door and gave him a handful of berries.[5]
He travelled on with Bea and Alpin through Haberpaw to Treenode, where Seely used the reactor stone on him to prove what it did. Barnaby dropped to the floor shaking, stood blank when told to stand, fetched a candy when told to fetch one, and remembered none of it afterwards.[6] Seely's conclusion was that Obellius Kalaar had taken the power to control the Olphins from the god Nelazgus, and that the Olphins were innocent.[6]
At the Hollow of Gewa, Alistair Archibald said that if Seely was right there was no reason the Olphins should be imprisoned any longer. Barnaby asked whether that meant he was free. Alpin told him not to celebrate, that he still had the whole of Eslura to win over, and then offered him a room at Farenworth until they came round.[7]
The party reached Galecrest during the High Moon Festival, and Barnaby saw the Eslurian Opera House across the plaza for the first time. Alpin stopped him walking toward it. Bea promised him she would get him inside.[7] The Nelazgians attacked that night, and Barnaby gave up his cloak, fins and scales exposed, to press against Reagan Hideaway's side while she bled.[12]
Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened
Barnaby set out for Morgaedion with Alpin and Piercio to find Lumikki Otsby and whatever Olphins were still alive on the island.[13] A storm on the mountain drove the three into the house of Vendalis, a purple troll who was keeping a dragon egg warm and losing the fight. Barnaby agreed to carry it to the core of Alakyer so that it could hatch, over Alpin's objection that Lumikki was waiting.[4]
Inside the core they found Obellius Kalaar and his Nelazgians on the scorched ground below them.[14] The egg hatched in the lava, and the dragon answered Barnaby when he yelped, which is how Peppersnakes became her command word. She swept two Nelazgians off their feet and tore the armour off them.[14] He named her Egras, after the first grey and white gully Mr. Pemadee ever brought home to Tide Tale Alley.[15]
Egras flew the party down off the cliff to the beach at Morgaedion and landed badly.[8] Inside the prison, an eye watched them through a crack in the wall, and Alpin shouting at it nearly cost them the contact; Barnaby pulled him off the wall and talked to it instead. The eye belonged to Mavis, and behind the wall was a camp of Olphin survivors who had not seen anyone since the Nelazgian raid.[8][9]
Barnaby went out alone after Monagan, an Olphin taken by Relagatra, and found him webbed to a ceiling among the spider's hoard. He fought her in the dark with a borrowed spear, lost the spear, and brought Monagan back to the camp.[16][17]
A gully found him on the ground block of the prison with a letter from Mr. Pemadee. Ovallia had been invaded and Pemadee had been taken. Barnaby nearly went down the Nelazgian ladder there and then, and Alpin talked him into planning first.[3] Mavis came out of the shadows with a dozen Olphins behind her holding broken pipe and shards of glass, and said it was time they left the place. Ofie handed Barnaby a new spear and told him he had proved he could lead. He took it with his hands shaking, put a foot on the first rung of the ladder, and went down first.[3]
Relationships
Mauz is Barnaby's fairy-winged toad and the thing he treasures most. Mavis told him that toads bond with one Olphin one time, and that Mauz staying through everything means the bond is a strong one.[1][9]
Pemadee raised him and is the closest thing to family he has known. Barnaby blames himself for the man's arrest.[1][3]
Beatrice Tidal was the first person to treat him as somebody worth knowing rather than a monster, and promised to get him into the Eslurian Opera House.[5][7]
Alpin Loomin began by beating him unconscious and ended by pacing the whole time he was away hunting a spider. The gopher denies the pacing.[5][17]
Egras hatched in the core of Alakyer with Barnaby standing over her, clings to his back the way Mauz sticks to his head, and answers to Peppersnakes.[15][8]
Behind the scenes
The pronunciation guide at the back of both novels gives the name as Bar-nuh-bee Brih-toe.[12][18]
Whether peppersnakes are an actual creature of Eslura or only Barnaby's exclamation is never established.[1]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 Book 1, Ch. 3.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Book 1, Ch. 11.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Book 2, Ch. 27.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Book 2, Ch. 6.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 Book 1, Ch. 13.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Book 1, Ch. 17.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Book 1, Ch. 24.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Book 2, Ch. 18.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Book 2, Ch. 21.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 10.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Book 1, Ch. 9.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Book 1, Ch. 26.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 2.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 Book 2, Ch. 14.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Book 2.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 24.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 Book 2, Ch. 26.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 28.