by Eli Brown
“It was a collaborative effort,” Mabbot said. “We’ll have to fit it to match your stride.”
I could see their hands in it: Mr. Apples’s yarn thick and soft, the wood oiled to a handsome sheen by Kitzu, the leather worked to velvet suppleness. It was a gift of considerable forethought, even beauty, but how could I feel grateful? The thing revolted me. The seductive complacency I had felt just moments before dissipated in an instant. I felt that if I accepted this thing and wore it, then they would, piece by piece, take all of me and leave me a leather-and-wooden puppet. I feared, frankly, for my soul.
I said, “I wouldn’t need such an abomination if not for you!”
Without another word, I took my crutches and hobbled out, leaving her holding the artificial leg.
Tuesday, October 19
Today the surgeon and Kitzu came to fit my peg to my body, and though the process filled me with a number of unpleasant emotions, I cooperated. Mabbot has it in her head that I should wear it, and after all, it would be nice to walk rather than hop. After the measurements, Kitzu took it away, then brought it back a quarter inch shorter and left me with it.
Deeper and deeper through the South China Sea we go. Every day I feel some grim terminus approach. By her tenacity, one would guess the captain intends to drive us to the tattered edge of the map. She is her own planet moving on a stubborn mission against the sweep of order.
17
SABOTAGE
In which we visit a witch
Wednesday, October 20
I spend much of my time learning Joshua’s hand language, though there seems to be no end of it. It’s our arrangement: he learns to read, I learn to sign. If I am falling behind, it is only because he learns so quickly. He corrects me now without hesitation, jumping upon the slightest mistake and mocking my errors. He is frustrated with the way I move my face, particularly my eyebrows, and goes so far as to push at my features as if to mold them by hand.
Wednesday, Later
It is late, but I write by candlelight because I am too anxious to sleep. I saw Mr. Apples and Mabbot discussing anchoring tomorrow in the Phan Thiet port of Cochin China. This may be my last opportunity to escape, and I must take it. Again, I have packed myself some meager foods for a journey. When the party leaves tomorrow, I will wait for them to get some distance, free myself from my cell if need be, then make to the dock.
I stride with my strange new appendage the three steps to my hammock and back and forth like a caged tiger, until a spot has worn in the wood where my peg lands. The strap has to be very tight to keep it from slipping, but each day I can wear it for longer stretches.
Thursday, October 21
I was upended early this morning when Mr. Apples threw my door open and announced, “The cap’m wants you should join us.”
I could not tell him I had other plans, and so, soon enough, we were moving swiftly in a longboat toward a pier. There were six of us: Mr. Apples, the twins, a Cochin seaman, the captain, and myself. In the harbor were half a dozen fishing boats, little larger than canoes, occupied by figures in wide straw hats. I watched as one hauled a net full of shimmering fish out of the water. The green-furred hills bunched toward the mouth of a wide river. Close to the inlet were several ships with roofs instead of masts. They looked like illustrations of Noah’s ark.
“Hulks,” Mr. Apples told me. “Floatin’ warehouses. When a ship’s been patched too many times and is too weary for open sea, she gets pastured.”
“If the Fox is headed to Macau,” I asked Mabbot, “why stop here?”
“There is a man, an old friend of mine—well connected, a first-rate smuggler before the malaria slowed him. He’s the only person I trust to take me into Macau. He knows the countryside there. And with any luck his grandmother is still alive too.”
“His grandmother?”
“She knows things.”
As we walked down the dock, ruby-eyed herons judged us from their perches on the gouty trees above. Bai carried one of the pheasants we had captured on the island, still squawking in its sack.
A pair of unshaven French soldiers sat smoking in wicker chairs at the foot of the dock, their uniforms sagging open in the heat. As we neared, they stood and aimed their muskets halfheartedly. Mabbot’s stride didn’t slow until she was only a few feet from the taller soldier, who was obliged to take a step back to keep his gun trained on her.
“I’m Captain Hannah Mabbot. That’s my Flying Rose. Do you know me?”
No doubt the soldier had seen the scarlet flag of the Rose even as she anchored. Now he was taking in Mr. Apples’s barrel chest and the swords on the hips of the twins. A prod from his subordinate steeled his resolve, though, and he rattled his blunderbuss and growled, “Je ne parle pas anglais.”
Mabbot pulled a ditty bag from her belt and emptied it into her palm. She offered the half-dozen silver crowns to the man. “Do you know me now?”
He took the money with relief and returned to his post, where the other soldier bickered with him for his share of the toll.
Walking upon solid ground took some getting used to, as the path came up and met my peg in a jarring manner. The air was alive with the odor of ox dung and the paternal musk of the earth itself.
“Did you just end decades of enmity with thirty bob?” I asked. “France is poorer than I thought.”
“Mercenaries,” Mabbot spat. “Those men aren’t French any more than I’m English. If we don’t get near their hulks, they won’t give a fig about us. Besides, France knows my work. They should be paying me.”
The forested hills were riotous with birdcalls. I had been eager to get to land, but the jungle was uncomfortably close, and the stories I had read about cannibals and man-eating tigers seemed suddenly quite vivid. The insects alone were enough to make one pause: the flies converged on us as we left the shore, and every few paces a new beetle or spider crawled across our path, each more grotesque than the last.
At a bend in the river, we came to a derelict village consisting of dozens of stilt houses arranged in a rough circle around a boggy meadow. Most were abandoned; others looked to have been razed by bandits and bad weather. The slopes of the nearby hills were scored with fields, but there was no movement there. Weeds had choked the ditches, and feral dogs ran in the wastes. At the peak of the hill sat a church, quiet and dark, its cross jutting into the sky like the hand of a distant swimmer. Several huts had long since burned, their bamboo skeletons grim in the yellow light. Moreover, the Cochins here seemed to be ill. They lay at the doors of their huts looking gaunt and exhausted. A handful of children, their bellies swollen unnaturally, clustered about us begging. Mabbot tossed them sacks of hardtack and pickled herring—our lunch—and when they had bolted these and still were not appeased, Mabbot was obliged to smack at them with a reed to clear our way.
Why the captain wanted me on this day trip, I couldn’t fathom. She seems to anticipate my attempts to escape, though I hide this log very well in a sack of stale tea. I have even gone so far as to leave a decoy set of innocent musings out for a snooper to discover, yet I have never found evidence of the pages disturbed.
Two older boys ran up bearing a rusty musket and a sharpened stick. Just as Bai leaped to intercept them, they fell to their knees and held the weapons over their heads.
The Cochin seaman interpreted: “They think you are the Brass Fox; they are ready to join your army.”
For once Mabbot had no witty reply. Her face curdled, and she left the boys kneeling in the dirt.
Mabbot started her search with the closest stilt house, bowing deeply as she poked her head in and inquired after a man named Huynh.
It seemed that each villager she spoke to wanted something for the information. Since we had already given away our food, it was slow going. Enormous flies kept biting the back of my neck.
As we walked past the huts, a woman sitting in a doorway, her body emaciated and covered with pox scars, clicked her tongue at me. She caught my eye and pulled her robe op
en to reveal a thin breast, offering herself.
I averted my eyes and hurried to catch up with the others.
“What happened here?” I asked Mabbot.
“Opium happened! Oh, missionaries and French militias did their part. But mostly this is a poppy blight. It works so well in India, why not grow it here? This is what I wanted you to see. This was a thriving market. I used to rely on this place. But now…” Mabbot spread her arms and twirled as she sang out in a gilded voice, “Opium! Yāpiàn!”
“Opium is not a magic spell,” I said. “Opium per se cannot do this. Sloth and greed, the weakness of men, do this.”
“Wind and your opinions,” she said. “Opium turns hardworking men into lizards. Isn’t that magic? Many here are addicted now, but it didn’t start that way. These hills used to be green. Rice paddies, melons, oxen, ducks. Then the warlords forced these families to grow opium exclusively and took all the profit for themselves. As a result, the farmers starved. Those who resisted were massacred. They smoke now to dull the hunger.”
Just as she entered another hut, I asked Mabbot if I could visit the church. She nodded at Feng, and he followed me up the dusty hill.
It was a mud-and-wattle construction with an arched door and flaking grey paint. Feng stayed outside with his eye on the stilt house while I went in. Even before I adjusted to the darkness, I could sense that the place was empty save for the flies. I dipped my fingers into the urn of dingy water and crossed myself. The nave was littered with kneeling benches. The confessional was little more than an upright casket with a turmeric-colored curtain. Flies circled before the crucifix, which was rough-hewn and gory. I knelt on one of the benches with some difficulty.
“I am sorry for having offended Thee,” I whispered. “I detest my sins, and I dread the loss of heaven…” I trailed off. The chapel of our orphanage was a simple place; even so, my heart was inevitably soothed the minute I entered it. Now I felt nothing but a growing sense of unease. Never had I seen a church as desolate as this. But wasn’t this fitting for me now, rank as I was, forgetting my wife during moonlit strolls with a brigand?
I rose, clumped toward the apse, and chuckled at what I saw there: a potbellied pig and a mangy pye-dog sleeping together on the floor of the altar. I lay down next to them on the cool bricks, and they made room for me. I felt the muscles of my neck relax. It was very quiet, blessedly so, and I closed my eyes. Then Feng hollered, “Wedgwood!” It seemed Mabbot had finally found her man.
By the dour faces on the family crowded into the hut, it was clear that Mabbot’s smuggler was on his deathbed. Most of them left to make room for us, but one young woman sat at his feet, gripping his swollen ankles, as if defying us to take him from her.
His sunken cheeks were pallid, and I could smell the rot on his breath even from where I stood near the door, an almost sweet stench, like the paste found at the bottom of an apple barrel.
“Mabbot,” he whispered as she knelt by the cot. “I’m no good.”
“I can see that, Huynh. I guess you won’t be taking us into Macau.”
“Be careful, the Brass Fox has people everywhere now.”
“Tell me.”
“He steals opium from Pendleton warehouses, he has smugglers, tunnels, and he trains even fishermen to fight. He has an Indian woman with him—she was part of the Bengali uprising. She has thousands of farmers ready to fight with her. People call him ‘hero,’ they say he’s going to free them from Pendleton. I have cousins sworn to him. They say the day is coming.”
We all waited while the man recovered his breath. When Mabbot put her hand on his brow, the young woman at his feet stood, scowling.
Huynh said something in Cochin, and she sat again. “He wants to stop the Pearl River trade,” said Huynh, “the tea, the spice, the silk, the opium—everything.”
“Impossible.”
“If enough smugglers and farmers stop work, the warehouses will stand empty. They have the harbors…” We waited while he coughed. “They are close enough to slit the right throats. It would take months for Pendleton to bribe new harbormasters. If he controls the river, he can strangle the trade, at least long enough to make a real panic in the investors. You know all of Europe would jump at a chance to squeeze into England’s territory.”
“But why?”
“They say to free the people.” The man chuckled, a dry papery sound. “Sounds like something you’d do.”
“But it doesn’t sound like the Fox.”
“Maybe he’ll surprise you.” The laughter became coughing, and suddenly the man was exhausted. “Either way, he’s going to make a mess of things. Why not let him?”
“You know I can’t do that, Huynh.” Mabbot placed a hand on his shoulder. “What do you need?”
“If Grandmother can’t cure me…”
“She’ll outlive us all,” said Mabbot.
“Maybe something for my family.”
Mabbot withdrew a small sack of coins from her coat and, without hesitation, handed it to the young woman, who received it with a stunned expression, then quickly bowed.
Mabbot touched his shoulder again and said, “Goodbye, Huynh, we’ll play cards together in the next world.”
“And I’ll let you beat me like I always did—you’re a terrible loser,” said the dying man as we ducked into the light.
We made our way beyond the meadow to Huynh’s grandmother’s: a tiny hut overhung by moss-choked boughs. The toothless crone waved us in. Mr. Apples, too big for the door, stood guard outside.
Mabbot offered a live pheasant in the sack, which I realized was the very one I had been planning to stuff for Sunday’s dinner. I was about to object when Mabbot, via the translator, addressed the old woman: “Thank you for seeing me again. I’m sorry, but we have no chicken. Will this do?”
The crone reached into the sack and removed the pitiful bird, which had molted in its agitation.
Mabbot laid a large map of the South China Sea upon the dirt floor of the hut and weighed its corners with stones. She also gave the old woman a gold coin.
Mabbot pointed to the Macanese island of Coloane. “Is the man I’m looking for there?”
The crone shooed us until we had pressed ourselves against the walls of the hut, then she sat before the map. Holding the pheasant upside down, she rocked with her eyes closed, muttering to herself. The pheasant became quiet and closed its eyes as well.
Then she twisted the head of the bird cleanly off and let it run in blind circles, leaving a wet calligraphy upon the map. It hit the wall of the hut between my legs, where it loosed its bowels and finally collapsed.
What had I expected, on an outing with pirates, than to witness a satanic ritual?
The old woman threw slivers of etched bone across the map, and then she and Mabbot consulted it.
The witch placed a curled nail on the island that was now bracketed between a bone and an arc of blood.
“Is he telling the truth?” asked Mabbot. “Is he there now?”
“He is waiting for you. He is there, but not telling the truth.”
“The man doesn’t wait. Where will he go next?”
“He will wait. But it is … very dangerous.” The witch picked up a bone and tapped the markings on it. “This is bad.”
Friday, October 22
Last night my slumber was traded wholesale for a series of upsetting events.
With the witch’s bloody warnings tainting our course, the Rose is finally en route to the rendezvous with the Fox, moving relentlessly through the pitch toward Macau. As if Laroche and the naval patrols were not enough to make me long for English shores, our own crew, it seems, is now more dangerous than ever.
In the deep of the night I was getting the only sleep I would get, worn out from the walk to the witch’s hut, when I became aware of a figure in my cell. At first I thought it a dream, but after a period I was convinced that a person was indeed standing near the door watching me as I slept. When I reached for a candle, Mabbot said, “
Good, then, you’re awake. I’m not the only one who can’t sleep on a night like this.”
I had no idea what kind of night she meant; in my cell, nights were much the same. I was groping for a match to light the candle when Mabbot, without hesitation, sat upon me in my hammock, forcing me to make room for her. Wine from the bottle she was wielding sloshed upon my face. She said nothing, just sat there with her back to me and her legs dangling over the edge, leaving me in a most awkward position. After a time I heard that she was weeping quietly.
“My boy,” she whispered, “my Leighton!”
Completely unnerved by this scenario, I resorted to a tactic most common in prey animals: I froze and hoped to be forgotten. Eventually, though, Mabbot lay down in the hammock with me and passed out completely.
Her snoring filled the darkness and I squirmed to extract myself without waking her, no small feat, as she had left little room between me and the wall. When I had finally untangled myself and confirmed that she was still asleep, I strapped on my peg and left the chamber in nothing but the stained canvas sack I used as a nightshirt, quite unsure of my plans.
One may accuse me of protesting too much, and no doubt, under different circumstances, I may have taken time to be tempted by base motives with a woman thus undone in my bed. I was all too aware, though, that Mabbot is no milkmaid. Those who trifle with her tend to meet dramatic ends.
Unable to think of any other option, I made my way across the chilly moonlit deck to the officers’ berth, a narrow chamber on the starboard side of Mabbot’s cabin where the twins and Mr. Apples slept. I rapped upon the door.
I stood at some distance from the berth with my hands up, trying to appear as unthreatening as possible. When Feng answered, I said, “The captain is … indisposed … in my cell. Please help me.”
