by Tim Powers
And how much, he wondered, of me will I be leaving here, buried in the foam at the bottom of this glass when I leave this inn and walk to London Dock? A lot, I hope. All the Michael Crawfords I tried to be: the ship’s surgeon, because Caroline had preferred a sailor to me; the man-midwife, because there seemed to be value in the innocence of infants. He held his glass up and winked at the warped in vitro reflection of his own face in the side of it. From now on it’s just you and me, he thought at the image. We’re free.
Suddenly Keats was at the window, looking tense. Alarmed, Crawford stood up and unlatched the window and pulled it open.
Instantly Keats pushed his portmanteau in over the sill. “She’s right behind me. Dump this out and give it back to me—she’ll be suspicious if she sees me without it now.”
“Christ.” Crawford took the bag and hastily carried it over to a table that had a tablecloth on it, unbuckled the straps and upended the bag; trousers and shirts tumbled out onto the table, and several rolled pairs of stockings fell off and wobbled across the floor. The barmaid called to him sharply, but he ignored her and ran back to the window. “Here,” he said, shoving the portmanteau back out into Keats’s hands. “Thanks.”
Keats nodded impatiently and made a get down gesture.
Crawford nodded and stepped away from the window, but peered out from around the edge with one eye. The barmaid was saying something behind him, and he dug into his pocket and threw a one-pound note over his shoulder. “I want to buy that tablecloth,” he rasped without looking around.
Keats was walking away from him, out onto the pier, swinging the leather portmanteau ostentatiously. Don’t overplay it, Crawford thought.
A moment later another person walked in front of the window, following Keats, and Crawford instinctively cringed back, for it was indeed Josephine, moving with all the indomitable purpose of one of the gear-driven figurines that emerge from German clock-towers to ring the bells. Crawford hoped for
Keats’s sake that she hadn’t managed to get her pistol reloaded.
Still peering out the window, Crawford backed across the hardwood floor to the table that had all his clothes on it; he flipped up the ends of the tablecloth and balled them up in his good fist.
At the end of the pier Keats glanced back and saw Josephine advancing at him; he swung the portmanteau around like a discus thrower and then let it sail off the end of the pier; Crawford’s whispered curse coincided with the distant splash.
“A pound’s enough for the goddamn tablecloth, I trust,” he said bitterly, thinking of how much he’d paid for the portmanteau.
“Yes sir,” said the barmaid, who edged away from him as he strode across to the street door, swinging his impromptu luggage with a sort of furious nonchalance.
He crossed London Bridge and, after walking east through the Billingsgate fish market, he sauntered as carelessly as he could past the Customs House and the Tower of London, envying the surrounding fish-sellers and housemaids and laborers their indifference to these imposing stone edifices that seemed to personify law and punishment. He kept glancing behind him, but he didn’t see any following figure that walked as though it had been wound up with a key.
He could tell by the shops he passed that he was approaching the docks. All the grocers had posted signs assuring the public that the barrels of beef and pork and biscuit they sold would keep forever in any climate, and every other shop window seemed to be crowded with brass sextants and telescopes and compasses—and the stiff paper compass-cards printed with the crystallized-looking rose indicating the directions. These shook with the rattling passage of every carriage as if fluttering in some otherwise-undetectable magnetic wind.
His tablecloth bundle was attracting the rude attention of a crowd of street boys, so he stepped into a shop that displayed luggage in the window—but the proprietor, after greeting him civilly enough at first, took a second look at Crawford’s face and then asked him how he dared to bring “filthy bones and teeth and marbles” into a store run by a Christian; the man actually drew a pistol from under the counter when Crawford tried to explain that his bundle just contained clothes and that he wanted luggage, so he fled back out to the street and the clamoring children.
One of the boys ran up behind him with a knife, slashed the bottom of his bundle and then yanked on the bulge of garment exposed; the sleeve of his green velvet jacket wound up hanging out, with a pair of undershorts from his more heavy-set days somehow caught in the lacy cuff.
Crawford whirled around so fast that the sleeve-and-shorts stood out behind him like a tail, but he wasn’t quick enough to see which boy had done it—though he did see the luggage shop proprietor standing in the shop doorway looking after him, and Crawford thought he saw the man make a hand-signal to someone across the street.
Just what I wanted, Crawford thought hysterically—an inconspicuous exit.
A pub door banged open farther down the street and two skinny, sick-looking men came hobbling out toward him, each of them waving a bloody handkerchief; they were both jabbering at once, but Crawford caught the word “stone” and another word that seemed to be “neffy-limb.”
He turned around to run back the way he’d come, but he thought he glimpsed stiff limbs swinging in the crowd, and a rigid, expressionless face … and so he swung his bundle around in a fast circle, much as Keats had done with his portmanteau, and let go of it. The tablecloth blew open and clothing billowed out in all directions and shoes flew into the crowd, and Crawford ran down an alley.
Enough people ran squabbling into the street after the explosion of valuable clothing to cause a raging traffic jam, but several members of the crowd came pelting along the alley after Crawford; he rounded a corner into a narrow old brick court and then, before his pursuers could appear behind him, he found a door, yanked it open and stepped inside, and then drew it closed behind him. There was a bolt on the inside, and he slid it across the gap into its bracket.
He was at the back of a crowd of men, evidently some class of laborers, in a low-ceilinged room that smelled of beer and sweat and candle wax, and though he wasn’t very successful in his efforts to breathe slowly, the men near him just glanced his way, nodded civilly and returned their attention to whatever was going on in front.
“Pile of old sail pieces here by the door,” came an authoritative voice from the far end of the room.
Crawford heard steps on the cobbles outside, and someone rattled the door at his back; but none of his companions made a move to let the person in, and a moment later the footsteps clumped away.
“Pick ‘em up as you go out,” the voice at the front of the room added, and the whole crowd began shuffling forward across the floor of what Crawford now recognized as a pub. Old sail pieces? he thought. What are we expected to do, wash windows?
No one gave him a second look as he filed out the pub door into the sunlight again, following the example of his companions and picking up several sheets of coarse cloth from a pile by the doorway. Once out in the yard the men around him began tying the rags around their shoes and ankles, and Crawford imitated them as best he could.
“More like this ‘ere, mate,” said one old fellow, tightening Crawford’s wrappings and pulling the overlap wider. “Loose like that and you’re sure to get gravel in there, and then it’s harder to get it out of your shoes than if you wasn’t wrapped at all.”
“Aha!” said Crawford. “Many thanks.” His gratitude was doubly sincere, for now he knew what sort of employment he had inadvertently volunteered for; these men were ballast-heavers, whose job it was to shovel gravel into the holds of ships that had discharged their cargoes and now needed extra weight in the holds to keep them from heeling too far to the wind. He had seen such work done often enough, he thought, to be able to do it himself. And it ought to get him aboard a ship.
The docks were vast, a series of interconnected canals and basins and pools; masts and spars and the diagonal slashes or droops of rigging fenced out the misty sky except
for directly overhead, and the slow progress of a ship in the middle distance being towed in or out could be read by the way its profile blended and separated in the stationary pattern. Sitting in the stern of the ballast-heaver boat, Crawford eyed the hulls they poled and rowed their way between—towering away above if the ship had been unloaded and was riding high in the water or, if it was still laden with cargo, low enough so that he could have jumped and touched the railings—and he wondered which one might be his transport out of England.
The load of gravel in the boat smelled of the weedy river bottom it had lately been dredged from, but whenever there was a cold gust of breeze he could catch on it the smells of foreign lands—a heartening mix of tobacco and coffee aromas from one direction, a curry of conflicting spices from another, and the decayed smell of hides from a third; and the songs of the sailors on various ships made a cacophonous, multilingual opera to fill in the moments when the released chains of the cranes weren’t springing noisily upward and the coopers weren’t hammering barrels. He was glad conversation in the boat was practically impossible.
When the boat was finally turned toward the bow of the ship they were to ballast, another boat was already working on the portside. Crawford hiked himself up on his thwart and looked to refresh his memory of how the job was done.
A platform had been set up on poles that fitted into the boat’s gunwales, and men were shovelling gravel from the boat’s waist up onto the platform, where other men scooped it up and poked spadeful after spadeful into a yard-wide porthole in the side of the ship. Soon the view was cut off, as Crawford’s boat rounded the bow to load the starboard side, but he had seen enough to dampen his hope of getting aboard a ship this way. The Navy ships he’d sailed on had used stone blocks for ballast, and the heavers had had to be aboard the ships to stow it, but these men never even touched the ship except with the blades of their shovels.
Damn, he thought, it looks as if all I’ve done is committed myself to a day’s hard work—and without pay, since I’m not on the work list. Should I just dive overboard and swim away? I’ve got no luggage to worry about anymore.
The men on his own boat had already stood up and erected the scaffolding. “Up on the stage with ye,” growled an old fellow near him, pushing him forward, and a moment later Crawford found himself trying to climb up onto the platform while gripping the shovel someone had thrust into his hand. By the time he had clambered up onto the platform and was able to get to his feet, another man was already standing there and digging his shovel into the gravel that the men below were flinging up onto the sagging beams.
Crawford got to his feet and scooped up a couple of pounds of the stuff and swung the load toward the ship, but he nearly overbalanced and had to lean back quickly, and his shovelful of gravel slid off the blade and down into the dirty water between the boat and the ship’s hull. He felt he had done well to hang on to the shovel.
“Drunk, are you?” asked the man beside him. “Work below if you haven’t got sea legs.”
Stung that a landsman should say this to him, Crawford shook his head and dug the blade in again; he hefted a load of the gravel and then watched the way the man flung the stuff in through the porthole. A moment later it was his turn again, and he did it just the way the other man had, using the shovel blade against the rim of the porthole to catch himself before dumping the gravel inside, and then bracing it there again to push himself back upright afterward.
“That’s better,” the man allowed, and Crawford was embarrassed to realize that he was blushing at the praise.
After an hour his arms were aching with the effort, but it was only when his finger stump began to bleed that he thought he would have to stop. He was about to feign some kind of illness when a banging started up nearby and the men below stopped tossing the gravel up onto the stage.
The other ballast-heaver boat appeared from around the ship’s bow, and he could see that the noise was being made by two of the men in it clanging their shovels together overhead like actors portraying a fight with broadswords; and when he saw the men below him drop their own shovels and begin pulling baskets from under the gunwales he understood that this was the ballast-heavers’
customary supper ritual. He put down his shovel and let his arms hang limp at his sides, ignoring the blood that pattered regularly onto the wet boards of the stage.
His companion had jumped down into the boat and was scrambling to get at the baskets, but for a moment Crawford just watched, catching his breath and wondering if each workman had brought his own food or if this was some kind of common supper, provided by the contractor, that he might hope to get a bite or two of.
Just when he had decided to climb down and try for a bit of food, there was a yell of alarm from another ship, and when he looked up he saw a broad wooden pallet falling from a crane; it was tipping as it fell, and among the several tumbling crates that had been on it Crawford could see a man, his arms and legs waving uselessly as he dropped down through the misty air. From this vantage point it was difficult to guess whether he would hit the deck of the ship he had been helping to unload or splash safely into the water.
And, without thinking, Crawford turned and leaped across the gulf between the boat and the ship and caught the edge of the porthole; one kick and a convulsive jackknifing slither got him through it, and then he crossed his arms over his face an instant before he plowed headfirst into the heaped wet gravel and did an avalanching somersault down to the pebbled deck.
He sat up, cradling his bad hand and whimpering softly. The hold was dark, the only illumination being the beams of gray light slanting in through the dusty air from the portholes, but he could see that the deck was crisscrossed with knee-high partitions to divide it into low, square bins. He got up and walked to the farthest, darkest corner of the deck, being careful to step over the partitions and not kick them, and in the last bin he lay down, confident that he couldn’t be seen.
He hoped that the dock worker had hit the water.
For what seemed like an hour he waited, wondering if the ballast men would deduce where he had disappeared to, but eventually another shovelful of gravel came cascading in, and then another, and he knew that he was safe for now.
After a while he heard men come into the hold and begin shifting the piles, shovelling the gravel from one bin into another and arguing about whether one side had more weight fore or aft than it should, but they finished up and left without getting to the one he was hiding in. After that there was nothing to hear but the occasional faint thud of booted feet on some upper deck, and distant cries from out in the dock, and nothing to watch except the ponderously slow dimming of the light from the portholes.
He slept, and didn’t wake up until the ship was rocking in ocean swells, and moonlight rimmed the porthole edges and raised faint points of glitter on the higher gravel piles. The hold was chilly, and he wished he hadn’t lost the rest of his clothes. Despite the sea air, his head was filled with the smell of river-bottom rock.
Then he heard gravel shift, once, somewhere out across the deck, and he realized suddenly that it was the same noise that had awakened him.
A rat, he told himself nervously. Fattened on whatever cargo this ship carried to London, and now left with nothing to nibble on except gravel and my face. Better not sleep anymore. Too cold anyway—and getting colder by the moment.
The rattle came again, prolonged this time as though someone were letting the gravel run out from between cupped hands; then there was a noise like something heavy being dragged along. In the darkness the hold seemed vast, and the noise sounded far away, but he got an impression of terrible weight moving out there.
Crawford was suddenly much colder. Whatever that is, he thought, it isn’t a rat.
Dimly he could see that something had stood up in some farther region of the deck, something tall and broad. It wasn’t human.
Crawford stopped breathing, and even closed his eyes in case the thing could sense his gaze, and though he knew t
hat even the most labored heartbeat can’t be heard at any distance, he was afraid that the shaking his own heart was giving him would knock him audibly against the partition of the bin.
But a moment later he was horrified to realize that a perverse impulse to make some noise was building in him; he managed, with some difficulty, to suppress it.
The thing was moving—walking, to judge by the regular, ponderous jars Crawford felt through the deck—and he opened his eyes in fear or even eagerness in case it might be coming toward him; but it was crossing to one of the portholes, and as it got closer to the moonlit circle he could see it more and more clearly.
Its torso seemed to be a huge bag at one moment and a boulder in the next, and the surface of it was all bumpy like chain mail; and when it had plodded its way on elephantine legs to the porthole, he could see that its head was just an angular lump with shadows that implied cheekbones and eye sockets and a slab of jaw.
Oddly, it seemed female to him.
It didn’t have arms to rest on the porthole rim, but Crawford sensed something weary about it—he got the impression that it had had no particular purpose in getting up … that it was just looking thoughtfully out at the sea as any sleepless voyager might.
For many long moments neither of them moved; Crawford lay stiff with something like terror, trying not even to tremble in the intense cold, and the thing by the porthole just stared out, though it didn’t seem to have eyes. Then finally it stepped back, grinding gravel to powder under its inconceivable feet, and it turned and faced Crawford across hundreds of feet of deck.
He was in total darkness, but he knew intuitively that the figure saw him, saw him by his body heat rather than by any light, and recognized him, knew him. Crawford wondered desperately how long he would be able to continue to keep from screaming—and again he almost wanted to scream, wanted it to come toward him.
