by Oisín Curran
Captain Severn is in the stern getting ready to drop anchor when I crawl back to talk to him.
We have to sail all night, I say.
He looks at me and it’s too dark to tell if he’s smiling or angry.
Can’t do it, says Severn, No light. No stars.
I have a candle I’ve been keeping in my pocket. I hand it to him.
Use your compass, I say. We keep moving.
Why?
We’re being followed.
He stops what he’s doing and stares at me. At least, I think he does. I can’t see his eyes, just black shadows. What’s following us? How do I know?
I know, I say. Also, we’re nearly out of drinking water.
Silence.
We have to keep going, I say.
And so that’s what we do. In the stern, Captain Severn sticks the candle on the seat in front of him to light his compass and keeps his hand on the tiller while Quill shifts the sails to catch the night winds.
We sail like that for three days and nights, switching hands at the tiller and sail. Whoever’s off-duty naps if they can in the light, in the dark. I sleep sometimes, but wake up again and again, feeling my Follower somewhere behind us. Closer? Maybe. Bit by bit.
But the lack of rest dulls our senses, and more than once I catch myself nodding off and see whoever’s at the rudder doing the same. And that’s how and why we run aground on an unforeseen beach one night. There’s a soft scraping sound and then the boat jolts to a stop and we’re suddenly wide awake. Severn was sleeping with his hand on the tiller but he jumps up, as do we all, up and out, and minutes later we’ve hauled the boat out of the water and anchored it to a rock we find by the light of the candle. Then we lump together some bedding on the sand, schedule people for watch, and black out. I wake up with first light and get close to Rook, who’s morning lookout. He wraps a blanket around me, although he doesn’t need to. It’s warm. It’s always warm down here.
Slow light leaks out of hidden pockets like it’s been hiding in the water, in sand, rocks, and grass all night. We’re in a lagoon. One side is a high, long cliff topped with pearl-grey scrub, and the other a low, curving spit of dark orange sand. Behind us there are hills covered with trees. More orange sand under our feet and all along the long beach. Every growing thing is pale. Pale grass, pale trees, pale bushes. Paler even than the water, which is bright green.
No direct sun, says Rook. Little chlorophyll.
After days at sea, any leaves are good to see. To our right, at the base of the spit, a loud splashing comes from a geyser blowing water a hundred feet in the air. The water is burning hot, says Rook, he investigated last night. There’s a loud sound in the bushes above the beach. For a second, I think my pursuer has finally caught me. I grab Rook. Then we laugh. The thing making the sound comes out of the bushes and it’s nothing but a huge bird.
It’s as tall as me. Huge, lumpy beak and pale grey feathers.
The bird doesn’t look at us. It waddles away down the beach and then disappears into the bushes again. It almost seems as though the bird’s walk is some kind of signal, because as soon as it disappears, the island wakes up with birdcalls, howls, chattering.
Amazing! says Rook. I wonder…
But he trails off as Quill wakes, stands, and stretches, looks around and smiles vaguely at us. Since the battle between Lutra and Severn, Rook and I seem to have faded into her background and she appears not to notice that Rook avoids speaking to her.
Eden, says Quill, It seems we’ve stumbled on paradise.
That’s what it feels like for the next few days. We find bright blue pools so full of fish we can pull them out with our hands. There are wide, low, sprawling trees heavy with white apples, not very sweet but crisp. We eat and sleep and swim. Even I, who must go on, am tempted to stay. But I have to go, I have to go—every time I lie down to sleep and collect my images, I can feel the gap where yet another one has disappeared. And out there, over the water, back the way we came, my Follower is closing in. I can almost smell the foul hot odour of its wings beating the breeze.
But the others might stay here forever. I must do something to shake them free of this place.
I didn’t realize I’d fallen asleep on Jack and Simone’s couch until Iris woke me at dawn and shuffled me out to the car, where I conked out again, half-slumped in the front passenger seat, for Iris took the back, lying down with her head propped on pillows, staring out at the unfurling miles, the ocean constricted by appearing and disappearing bays.
They had talked all night and now Iris was anxious to be home, so Myles drove, drove, coffee, coffee, tea, coffee. And was the soup from the lobster pound halfway home more flavourful for her pain? Or was it much the same as the previous trip and all the ones that would follow? Let’s say she enjoyed it and I think she did. Of sensory pleasures, of thick stews and small flowers and noisy crickets, of clear mornings or swollen tides or sudden rains, she is an enthusiast, and so, dim as my memory is, I will choose to believe that the delight she took in the material world was only sharpened by her illness.
There were, on the other hand, many elements of the world that did not please her. The unexpected arrival of Pierce Jones shortly after our return home was one such. Pierce materialized, as he would at random intervals throughout my childhood, as though he were an emanation of the road in his uniform of scuffed denim. An olive-green army surplus sack was always slung insouciantly over his back. Pockmarked, handsome face slender from low rations, knife sheath at his hip threaded through a wide leather belt with a buckle depicting Mr. Natural urging all to Keep on Truckin’. Always too, in my memory, a hand-rolled cigarette dangles from the corner of his sly mouth. He would step down from a passing transport truck, or saunter up the drive, the precise image of a charming drifter. Too precise, according to Iris who was as aggravated by Pierce as she was fond of him. She was scornful of his pose, for he lived in a city where he worked as a garbageman and he was in the union, made more money than Iris and Myles combined, and owned his own art deco house, which he had meticulously restored. None of this mattered to me. If he was playing dress-up, his costume was convincing, although perhaps the aura of wandering romance with which I have imbued him in my memory is influenced by the gifts of exotic comic books that he always had for me, stashed somewhere carefully in the interior of his sack, from which they would emerge crisp and miraculously undamaged, and I, thanking him shyly, would retreat to my bedroom to read in full colour of the further exploits of Asterix and Obelix or of yet another incarnation of Siddhartha, the future Buddha, in which he was invariably the king of some species for whom he would martyr himself in yet another act of selflessness to save his people.
Such afternoons remain carefully shelved in my memory, to be pulled down and opened when under duress—they emit a long glow of comfort. In the memory I half sit, half lie in my bed, Shadow curled behind my knees; through the window, dusk creeps out from the forest and settles on the vegetable garden—on the dying tomato plants, on the low-lying sprawl of the pumpkin plant, the lettuce withstanding the frost; crows cry hoarse elegies to summer (Gone! Gone!); smoke from the chimney whips down the roof, eddies briefly on the windowsill before scattering with the last light. Wood-stove heat is particularly well-suited to this vignette—intense and friendly, it cooks the chill from a body inside out. And it saturated the interior of my room with an invisible colour that glowed against the blue frost on the grass outdoors. So, wrapped in this warmth, made warmer by my peripheral awareness of the cold outside, I read my comic book while the murmur of adult voices rose with the scent of cooking.
And yet, what part of this is accurate? For Shadow was dead and buried under that frosty grass, the heat of the stove was too far from my room to reach it with any conviction, and Pierce Jones did not murmur but recounted his exploits in a loud Kentucky drawl punctuated by guffaws. As I tried to parse a Latinate pun in Asterix, I cou
ld picture him below with his boots propped on a stool, leaning back with his flask of bourbon perched on his stomach while holding forth about his latest love affair—a befreckled young thing from a massive family—a peach, a straightforward, uncomplicated working-class peach with dirt under her fingernails, just the sort of girl he needed, so unlike the high-strung, posh mother of his two children. And here he would kick down his boots, rummage in his sack, and produce a bottle of some rare liqueur for Iris and a first edition of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience for Myles. Then, settling back with a look of high satisfaction, he would resume his soliloquy. As previously noted, the arrival of a visitor with fresh stories was one of the few instances in which Myles listened with interest rather than holding forth himself.
But what of Iris? In this scenario she usually stood at the counter chopping and stirring, interjecting exclamations of interest, launching queries about old acquaintances. And here, no, that could not have been the case. Here she must have sat wrapped in a blanket by the stove and perhaps the pain of her wounds diminished her courtesy, perhaps her face even revealed the displeasure she felt in Pierce’s unexpected arrival. Yes, I think that’s quite possible. Quite possible that she sat and from time to time nodded coldly or smiled a particular smile in her arsenal wherewith she turned up the outer corners of her mouth an immeasurably small distance while the rest of her face was suffused with pain and reproach. When delivered in my direction, this particular smile had a devastating effect. But, if Pierce noted it, he seemed immune.
Myles too, I imagine, failed to notice Iris’s discontent and busied himself with cooking. He was an excellent, if erratic, cook. With the help of neither recipes nor training, he would launch into the matter with an experimental, not to say frenzied, zeal reaching wildly varying results: sometimes perfectly caramelized carrots, tender fish, and roasted potatoes, but sometimes burnt rice, gritty salad, and greasy broccoli. I don’t remember if the meal that night was delicious or inedible but certainly it was one or the other.
The next morning was a Sunday, and Artemis called to ask if I wanted to come over. By this time, I had finished the Asterix and was now reading The Lost World by A. Conan Doyle. The day was cold and grey, a thin coating of wet snow had fallen in the night. Cross-legged and hunched over my book in bed, with a blanket draped over my shoulders, I felt certain that I didn’t want to venture outside. It would involve a cold mile to Artemis’s house, followed by snowballs. I declined, but Iris was displeased and exhorted me to pull myself from my book and go see real people. Personally, I thought her concern for my social life was a ruse designed to cover her unspoken sentiment that I should visit the Krimgold-Gragnolatis because they needed visiting. And I found her exhortation unfair, as after issuing it, she herself retired to her bed with a novel. But I knew better by now than to invoke fairness as any grounds for complaint.
Pierce said he would walk with me and so together we set off. From a maple branch that hung over the road, Pierce cut a section with his bowie knife. As he reached up, I was startled to see the butt of a gun stuck in the waist of his jeans. He saw me looking, pulled the weapon out, and handed it to me and continued walking. Whittling as he strolled, he muttered that I should be careful because the gun was loaded. I nearly dropped it but didn’t and instead held on to it with both hands, as though bearing something made of glass rather than wood and metal.
Beautiful piece, ain’t it? Black walnut stock, silver inlay, single-shot 5.87 manufactured by the Henry Deringer Company in Philadelphia, PA, more than one hundred years ago. Do you know who John Wilkes Booth was?
I did, of course I did. Every schoolchild in America knew the name of the actor who shot President Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, in April of 1865.
Last year, said Pierce, I worked weekends renovating the home of a neighbour. It was eighteenth-century colonial. Got it perfect, even made myself some curved copper plastering tools to repair the crown mouldings. When I was done he said he didn’t have any money to pay me. I was pulling out my knife to gut him when he said to wait because he had something better. Then he showed me this gun. Now I happened to know that this guy was the nephew of a big-time burglar. He boasted that he’d been in his uncle’s gang and they’d gone into the Ford’s Theatre museum in broad daylight, stole the gun, and put a fake in its place. This was it, the gun itself. That thing you’re holding is an agent of fate. Because of this pistol, or at least the fucker who used it, the North came down hard on my people, they hammered us into the dirt after Lincoln died. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Confederate, I don’t fly the Southern Cross, that’s all horseshit, but history’s got hinges and this gun is one. Course it may not be the real thing, but it sure looks like it and it’s pretty. I liked it, I took it. I used it to pistol-whip the bastard and left it at that. It’s not a good idea to antagonize low-lifes too much. You’ve got to cut your losses when you’re dealing with crooks. Keep that in mind when you grow up.
As I pondered the meaning of the term pistol-whip, Pierce handed me the stick he’d been whittling. It was forked. A slingshot, he explained as he hauled from a back pocket a wide elastic ribbon, which he swiftly knotted to the two tines of the fork.
Then, maintaining his sardonic gait, he stooped, caught up a stone, fitted it to the elastic, and drew back, saying, You aim through the fork, then let it fly. The stone in question shot from its sling at invisible speed, the only sign of its passage a thwack on a distant trunk. Pierce turned to me with a sly smile and, handing me the slingshot, said I would never know if he had been aiming for that tree or not.
Gratefully I hefted the thing in my hand and tried to follow his example, but my stone, ill-fitted or ill-flung, flipped skyward in slow and wobbly flight before coming to earth a few feet in front of me. I was downcast, but Pierce said gently, Practise, that’s all, and it was then that he caught a snowball in the ear. He crumpled, cursing with stunning fluency, and as he did so I received a stinging blow to my thigh, followed almost immediately by a second and third, one winging me in the arm and another grazing my forehead. We were under attack from both sides of the road. I shouted to Pierce that it was an ambush, and we turned and sprinted back and to our left, diving into the woods for cover.
Panting behind a scrubby, narrow maple, Pierce dug the slush out of his ear while I brushed myself off. There was no question who our assailants were. I explained to Pierce that Artemis and Apollo specialized in strategic assaults, or rather it was Artemis who masterminded them and Apollo, her faithful adjutant, who obeyed. Pierce slid off his jacket and wool cap and hung them on a dead branch that he pulled from the snow. Then, instructing me to keep a sharp eye for the provenance of the incoming fire, he slowly slid this facsimile of himself out from behind our sheltering tree. Almost immediately three snowballs came flying for it. Pierce retracted the stick, then inched it out again. And again came the projectiles, this time flying like bullets from both sides of the road. From my vantage on the other side of the trunk, I saw both of our assailants as they stood to fire before ducking back down behind their blinds. Artemis was in a stand of cedars on our side of the road, while Apollo had little more than a large tree stump for cover on the opposite side. Pointing out to Pierce that Artemis was the more formidable of the two, I proposed that Pierce should take care of him while I attacked Apollo. But Pierce demurred—there was a simpler way, he said.
If you cut off the head of the snake, the snake dies, he explained grimly, and I looked at his knife with alarm. They’re just kids, I whispered. Pierce snorted that it was a metaphor. Then he explained his plan. Once I’d absorbed the strategy, we set to work quickly packing together a small arsenal of snowballs. Then, as Pierce crept off into the woods, I began flinging my ammunition in the direction of our two attackers. What ensued appeared to be a classic standoff with neither party gaining ground as we exchanged fire. Once I heard a muffled cry from Apollo as one of my missiles mus
t have connected. And once a ball from Artemis nailed my hip.
The dull sky carved by naked maple branches or pierced by spruce trees seemed to have cancelled out all woody echoes—the sounds of our battle flew briefly through the air before dropping dead into the shallow snow. My cold, wet fingers grew bitter red and numb from launching the snowballs and my toes too had lost feeling and my socks were wet for I had worn nothing but canvas sneakers. Winter had begun, yet I refused to dress for it. I knew that, like me, Apollo was becoming distracted by these discomforts, and by the quality of the winter sounds, and the dark crows bursting at strange intervals from one tree to another with rusty cries. He too would be sidetracked by the angularity of the stripped forest, by the peculiar flexibility of the snow layered over the unfrozen sheath of dead leaves.
But on the other hand I also knew that the cold and discomfort only sharpened Artemis’s attention. I knew that she currently thrived on the numbness in her fingers and toes, that her vision grew clearer, her ears more alert. And for that reason I concentrated my barrage on her outpost, for if she was not distracted, all would be lost.
And then, as I watched one of my snowballs sail wide of Artemis’s cedars, I saw a sudden darting motion followed by shouts, scuffling, flying snow, and shortly Pierce emerged with Artemis in his grip. He called to Apollo to surrender; his captain had been captured and he was now all alone. But Artemis shouted to Apollo that honour demanded he stand firm and fight to the finish. From Apollo’s stronghold there was silence. Would he fight on? Or was he frozen, hesitating in a panic of uncertainty. Pierce had been right—cut off the head of the snake and the body dies.
I gathered up my remaining snowballs and charged out from behind my tree. With a reckless scream I dive-bombed Apollo’s redoubt, firing missile after missile as I went. But when I topped the stump with my last snowball I held my fire because Apollo was crouching, hands up, surrendering.
I pulled him from his grotto and marched him out to join his brother, while Pierce and I congratulated ourselves on a fine victory. Apollo seemed glad enough to have it over with, but Artemis loudly declared the unfairness of Pierce’s superior age in the contest. Pierce rejoined that Artemis should put a cork in it and take her defeat like the immortal huntress for whom she was named.
