Cinnamon and Gunpowder

by Eli Brown

  “You make your way on a sea of it,” I objected. “Not a stranger approaches but you fill him with shot.”

  “We are at war. Your ignorance doesn’t—”

  “Yes, yes, the opium.”

  “The opium, the slaves, these are but ripples on the surface. Our struggle is deeper and older. We battle princes of power, kings of industry, popes, the rich who gnaw at the bones of the poor.”

  “And on your side?” I asked. “What armies do you have?”

  “Only the few of us who are awake. We fight each in our own fashion. I’ve had the bad luck to be awake from a very young age.”

  “How do you hope to win?”

  “Naturally there can be no hope of winning,” she said. “That’s what makes me so dangerous.”

  “And your son. Which side of this war is he on?”

  I had pushed too far. Her mood properly curdled, Mabbot showed me the door.

  12

  THE DIASTEMA

  In which we are bitten by the Fox

  Tuesday, September 7

  The call from the foremast of “Ship ho!” brought all to the deck to see a schooner adrift a mile from our bowsprit. It was the Diastema, the very ship I had met the Fox on, only now lacking any sign of sails, rigging, or crew. The massive profiterole clouds stacked in the sky made her look the more pitiable. A lone yellow flag punctuated her mainmast, and our crew took it to mean there was illness aboard. We assumed the weather gauge so as not to be downwind from a plague craft.

  “She’s adrift,” Mr. Apples announced, “and stripped of apparel and cordage—cleaner than a nun’s backside. Mayhaps mutiny?”

  “Anyone care to bet he’s still in there?” Mabbot scowled. “Well, Mr. Apples, at least say hello.”

  Mr. Apples fired a shot that took the flag right off the mast. The only answer was a graveyard stillness.

  “We’re not far from the Sunda Strait,” said Mr. Apples. “I don’t trust a prune on a plate like this, Captain.”

  “Longboats!” Mabbot ordered. “Twins, five others, keen for ambush. Muskets. Get the surgeon’s camphor for our kerchiefs.”

  Mabbot called to me, “Well, Wedge? Aren’t you curious? There may be a larder for you to pillage.” As I climbed into the longboat, she chuckled. “See? You’re a pirate through and through.”

  Mr. Apples halted the men readying the davit tackle for our descent and whispered urgently to Mabbot, “Captain, this has my tapeworms dancing.”

  “If it is an ambush, Mr. Apples, I’ll need you here with the advantage. Eyes on the horizon, and if so much as a gull shows its feathers, fire a shot to inform me.”

  We were already being lowered to the waves when I saw with chagrin that Asher, the poor young man who had received a lashing for my escape, was in the boat with me, giving me a scowl so searing that I suddenly didn’t care what was in that larder.

  As we neared the Diastema, her stillness worried me. The ship seemed to be holding her breath. When we pulled alongside, Asher threw a line, shinnied up, then secured a jack ladder for us to climb.

  The other men tied their kerchiefs about their faces. Mabbot, seeing I had none, sighed and pulled a silk square from between her breasts, doused it with camphor, and threw it at me. “Can’t have you giving me yellow fever, can I?”

  The cabin, which had been glutted with charts and logs, was now cavernous and bare. The deck was bereft of lanterns, blocks, and lines—some pinchfist couldn’t stand to leave anything of use, it seemed—and therefore offered an unobstructed view of the endless horizon. The effect was both exhilarating and discomfiting. The schooner was rolling on the surf, and I tried to find the exact center of the deck where the motion was slightest. No sooner had I done that than Mabbot said, “Asher, you are Wedge’s chaperone.”

  “Yes, Captain!” Asher said, as he took my elbow with an eagle’s grip. It was his opportunity to redeem himself, and my arm would bear the bruises of his determination.

  “Tightly below, gents, and eyes open,” Mabbot said.

  Feng opened the companionway door, and immediately we smelled it. The men paused, but Mabbot urged them on: “Below, boys!”

  Once inside, the men lit candles, then clustered about Mabbot, their muskets and sabers making an urchin’s shell. The forecastle was empty. We made our way to the aft holds, the smell of rot and shit getting stronger with every step. The camphor hardly helped.

  Just beyond the aft mast, the bulkheads had been walled to form a chamber where the odor was becoming aggressive. One of the men tugged his kerchief down to retch. Mabbot sniffed. “Well, we might have a plague after all. Don’t touch a thing. Wedge, no provisioning here.” Food was the last thing on my mind anyway. Asher didn’t relax his grip.

  Just inside the doorway we heard the unmistakable buzz of blowflies. I resorted to breathing through my mouth with the captain’s kerchief clapped over it.

  The corpse sat with his back against a chest, as if guarding it. Disturbed by our approach, a cloud of flies rose from the body and into the air. The face of the dead prison guard was animated with maggots, now laughing, now crying. His stomach had given way, and he sat in a skirt of his own offal.

  I panicked. I had slipped somehow on the slick walls of the world and fallen into hell, where the flies wove their black shroud about me.

  One man was even worse off than I, for he dropped his sword and bolted into the darkness only to knock blindly into the corners of the chamber, swallowing flies with each gasp. He was a young carpenter’s mate with a tattoo of a bluebird on his neck. The darkness, or the smell, or the sound of the maggots doing their wet work on the corpse—something had unmoored him.

  Mabbot hissed, “Quiet!”

  When the seaman’s orbit came close to me, my own terror gave way to action. I seized his head in my hands and drew it to my chest, whispering, “Stay still.” Asher helped me hold the man, and while he whimpered, he had at least stopped struggling.

  “Thank you, Wedge,” Mabbot said. “Well, let’s see what kind of treasure this poor soul couldn’t walk away from, shall we? Wedge, do you smell that?”

  “How could I not?”

  “Not that—something under it.”

  Bai lifted the lid of the chest, which was empty and seemed much deeper than it should be. He inserted his candle to illuminate the bottom.

  It came all at once, the shouts, the push for the door, all of us running full-out because of what we had seen: Bai’s flame had sparked a web of fuses whose courses spread down into the hole beneath the chest. Before I even understood what I had seen, Mabbot screamed, “Run, fools!”

  Tapers were dropped as we emerged from the chamber and scrambled in a herd toward the companionway. Mabbot had been pushed toward the light of the stairs by the twins. This lower deck was shallower than that on the Rose, and Asher, who tried to stay close to me even in this blind rush, cracked his head on a beam and fell. As I bent to lift him, I was knocked over by those behind me and trampled. Asher and I were untangling ourselves when the first explosion threw us forward. My cheek was split against a timber. Smoke and water coiled around me as I made it finally into the light, only to find the deck beneath me had risen in a splintering wall. I would have been crushed if a spar hadn’t come swinging to pitch me in an arc over the water.

  The schooner had become a grenade, and chunks of burning wood hit my back even as I flew. Several bursts on top of one another lifted a crest of water. I dove beneath the waves to avoid being mangled, but another explosion flattened me as I swam. It felt as if all of my air had been forced out through my ears. At last I found the surface where the Diastema was nothing more now but the stern, turning in the water like the arse end of a diving duck.

  But what had I seen? A body rolling past me as I came up. Though the air burned like brandy, I filled my lungs and dove again, groping through the sooty currents. I caught a foot and tugged toward the surface. The body seemed eager to find the floor of the sea, but I pulled with all my might. Near the surfac
e, even as the need for breath lit my lungs with phosphorus, it occurred to me that I might be towing the rotting corpse. I bawled like a newborn when I finally had air again, sucking at the sky, and saw that the man I had pulled from the deep was Asher, lips and eyelids blue. Pulling him over a still-smoking spar, I beat on him until he gasped and puked.

  The next thing I remember, I was being wrapped in a blanket on the deck of the Flying Rose with Asher beside me, breathing but weak.

  Whosoever finds this record, I warn you, avoid the sea. Calamity hides in every wave, and the floor of the deep is paved with bodies. If you must eat fish, catch them from a creek.

  My ears rang and my eyes throbbed. I felt as if I had shoved my head into a hornet’s nest. Mabbot and the twins had made it into the longboat and, though shaken up, were considerably drier than I was. The three others were burst, burned, or drowned.

  Panch was brought for us, and someone presented Mabbot with a strip of salt-cured ham, more evidence of the hoarded treasures the crew kept in their lockers. When it became clear that Mabbot was not retreating to her cabin, a chair was brought for her, and she sat there with a blanket across her shoulders like a mantle, staring out at where the stern of the Diastema was now sinking out of sight. Her panch was replaced with hot tea.

  The crew stood in dumb clumps until Mabbot said, calm as could be, “Mr. Apples, do the men have nothing to do?” They jumped to their duties even before he began to roar orders.

  “You see, Wedge, what I’m up against?” Mabbot said. “I should have anticipated it; the Fox wouldn’t leave a toy like that for the navy to pick up. And he does love his hellburners.”

  Mr. Apples was upset. “Madness to waste even a small ship—”

  “The Brass Fox isn’t mad,” Mabbot chided. “He is ruthless. It isn’t a waste if it confuses the hounds. If we catch him at sea, negotiations will be on my terms. He’s buying time to get to his den.”

  “You call that buying time?”

  “If he wanted me dead, he would have made those fuses much shorter.”

  I was dismayed to hear admiration in Mabbot’s voice. These, then, are the games that Mabbot and the Fox play. It was a wonder they hadn’t set the entire globe aflame.

  Asher was shuddering on the deck beside me, still alarmingly pale. I tried in vain to get him to drink some panch until Feng shoved me aside and helped him to his hammock in the forecastle.

  After drying my hands and face and with humility heavy as a veal calf on my shoulders, I went in search of Joshua. With the exception of my meals with Mabbot, my lessons with Joshua had been the only moments when I did not feel death’s very teeth upon my neck. Our time together tethered me to a gentler life, and while he has shown that he does not need me, it is clear that I need him. The singed hair on the back of my neck testifies that life is short and my stubbornness serves nothing.

  I found him on the forecastle deck mending his hammock. “I’m sorry,” I said—and said it again to be sure he understood. He ignored me for a moment, then pointed out for me the distant strip of Madagascar, thin as a vanilla pod on the water, and sniffed the air. Was it an aromatic mirage or did the wind actually carry the perfume of that sumptuous spice drying on racks in the afternoon sun all the way out to our musty ship? But the smell disappeared just as quickly, and the land shimmered and slipped behind the rim of the horizon.

  Sitting beside him, I made the gesture I had seen the day we quarreled: the thumb on the forehead, fingers splayed. Joshua used his finger to trace the word on the deck: father. Apparently it was a word he already knew how to spell. We took turns tracing more words—mother, brother, boat, money, and storm—onto the planks and I learned the proper hand signs for each. I went to get paper, and we spent the remaining light trading words this way. I learned dozens more, among them: poor, the fingers touching on a patched elbow; grief, the hands dropping down the body; and death, like closing the back cover of a book. If I was to learn about his family, it would be in his words, not mine.

  By sunset, the horizon’s opalescent glow had filled my heart. It seems I have my pupil again, and have become one myself.

  Thursday, September 9

  Last week, to repay Kitzu for the fish he gives me, I prepared a simple candy that he may use to rid his mouth of the taste of Conrad’s insults. I simmered diced coconut meat in a mixture of molasses, honey, and rum until thick, then kneaded and twisted dollops into knobs to cool. If I’d had butter, they wouldn’t have been dense and black as asphalt, but Kitzu loves them and is happy to chew on them like a dog with a rawhide. When he passes me on the decks, he slaps me on the back and shows me his darkened teeth.

  Seeing some sailors snacking upon strands of kelp they had dried on the bulwarks gave me another idea, and I set about puttering in the galley to calm my nerves. Boiling the Patience’s dried corn in ash-water, I made hominy, which, after it had cooled, I drained and placed in a jar with seaweed, garlic, a pinch of the precious rosemary, enough brine to cover it all, and a splash of sauerkraut juice. I’ll have pickled hominy in a week or two, and with any luck I’ll have something to serve it with.

  The sea here in the middle of the Indian Ocean is the color of pewter, but at intervals great patches of jade and turquoise embellish the surface. To me they are lovely, but the older seamen scowl at the blooms and mutter about typhoons. Before we reach Cochin China, we must first pass through the narrow passage between Sumatra and Java. There, I am told, we can look forward to heavy naval patrols, and perhaps Laroche himself waiting to pounce.

  After our misadventure together, I could not help but try my apologies to Asher again. I made lace-edged golden crêpes on a tin inverted over a boiling pot. For having been made without eggs, they were surprisingly good.

  As a young man in the monastery, I suffered a passionate crêpe-mania. I argued with my chef that a well-made crêpe was the pinnacle of civilized achievement—its simple elegance masking the rigors of mastery, like a ballerina’s pirouette—and that it was a universal medium for any ingredient. Smoked smelt, lemon curd, horseradish—there was nothing I wouldn’t smear on a crêpe. My teacher indulged me because, he said, he had been an ignoramus once too. Like many youthful convictions, mine was as short-lived as it was fervent. I stopped eating crêpes for every meal, but not before I perfected the pouring of the batter, the motherly flip and fold.

  The best crêpes, I know now, are simple. For Asher I made a sauce of raisins stewed in rum and drizzled it over the rolled crêpes. I found him on the forecastle deck. He was surrounded by comrades huddled near, listening to him tell the story of the fireship Diastema. I knew I had chosen the wrong moment, but they had all seen me, so I had no choice but to walk right up to the man.

  “Asher—” I had intended some eloquent explanation of my motives and circumstances, but the words did not come. “I’m sorry,” I said, and held out the wooden trencher.

  It was a long quiet moment, and when I was nearly ready to hurl the crêpes over the rail myself, Asher took one from the tray and had a bite before passing it to the man next to him. The tray made its way around the deck, as if I had apologized to them all, and I was finally able to take a long deep breath.

  I had made to leave when Asher called after me: “Wedge!”

  I turned to face him.

  “How did the ship burn?” he asked.

  “Like hell itself,” I said.

  “And the corpse?”

  “Froze my blood.”

  Asher made room for me to sit beside him and continued his story to the delight of the others, who occasionally looked to me for confirmation. When he had finished, they insisted that he tell it again as the sun set.

  I found myself lying on the deck, talking to a clean-shaven Italian they call Chicken. He’d been brought aboard years ago to tend to the hens and small Oriental pigs that once inhabited crates on the deck. “After the men slipped on manure during a chase,” the man opined, “Mabbot ordered a great feast, and I’ve been scrubbing decks with the rest
ever since.”

  There is a game the men play here. On clear nights the stars are close enough to tickle one’s nose, and the men take entertainment lying on their backs making light bets on the number and direction of falling stars. Gambling is forbidden by their contracts, so the men bet not money but only trivial things, calling them gifts. In this way trinkets circulate among them: etchings of brothel girls, withered nubs of sausage, perfumes, mostly tobacco. I have found that I have a knack for the game, though I have nothing to bet and so cannot technically win. Still, men, in their goodwill, have rewarded me for my luck, and in this way I have acquired a jar of salted olives and, to my delight, half a small bottle of olive oil that Chicken drinks as a tonic.

  It is not a bad thing to be among men looking at the stars and laughing. Without faces, or scars, or clothes, a voice fits right in, finding its course across the sky with the others.

  13

  LA COLETTE

  In which justice catches up with us

  Friday, or perhaps Saturday, early October

  I am lucky, they keep telling me, to be alive. Much has happened and none of it kind. I am not the man I was. My mind is still beset by fog and wind, but I can recall the events of September 10 clearly enough.

  It began with a balloon.

  We had passed through the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra just a day prior, and I thought I felt those island gates closing behind us.

  A sharp wind had scraped the sky free of clouds and brought a quiet that I had learned to associate with coming thunder. Mabbot and Mr. Apples stood on the quarterdeck peering at the sky with what he called a “big an’ close” but the civilized world calls a telescope. To my eye the thing in the sky was just a speck, but through the lens, which they eventually granted me, I saw what looked like an Oriental paper lantern hung on the vault of heaven.