by Muriel Gray
“Eh, water.”
Fen stretched forward and put his little finger on the die in the semi-circle of cards. He breathed in hard, then waited. The men waited, Parren throwing Hal a fatherly wink. Slowly, Fen’s finger began to move the die across the table top.
It bobbed and hesitated in front of the cards, then moved on, stopping and starting randomly before setting off again. And then his finger speeded up, sliding faster and faster until it was darting across the table top like some impossibly fleet insect captured between the laid-out cards. Most of the men had seen this many times, but they were still impressed. Even if it wasn’t supernatural, just Fen doing some long-practised party trick, it was still damned dextrous. All the time, Fen’s eyes darted with the die, reading the letters as it spelled them out, interpreting what the illustrated cards denoted, and waiting for the voice he had asked to come through.
Fen stopped. His eyes were closed but his head came up sharply.
“Hal?”
It was a woman’s voice. No question. The stewards at the hatch nudged each other in glee. This was good.
Hal gulped. He looked around for support, but all eyes were fixed on Fen’s face. “Yes?” he replied weakly.
“You son of a sow.”
Hal gaped at Fen. There was no question it was his girlfriend’s voice, and if he were honest, her language too.
“What?”
“You dare accuse me of infidelity, you bastard?”
The boy was silent, his mouth working without words.
“I’ll tell you about infidelity. What about my cousin? Yeah? That bring back anything? Tasik and Carlo’s wedding in Manila?”
Hal gawped stupidly at the cards then back up at Fen. He looked as though he might be sick.
“You tried to have her in my brother’s car, didn’t you? Go on deny it. Right there while the dancing was starting. Fumbling at her bra like a kid.”
“Stop. Stop it.” The boy was nearly crying.
“And you’re asking if I’m being unfaithful? I bought that dress specially for you, not for the wedding. Blue, because I know you like blue. And what do you do? You take Deni out to my brother’s car the moment I…”
Fen stopped suddenly and opened his eyes. There was silence except for Hal’s sharp hard breathing as he wrestled to compose himself like the man he wanted to be. Wrestled, in fact, to stop himself weeping with fear and shame.
Every face watched Fen intently, but his eyes, though open, were cloudy and unfocused. Then, slowly, Fen’s mouth contorted, and from it came noises that chilled the blood of everyone present. Guttural, throaty noises that sounded almost like words…
“Caaahrdreeed. Cahrdreeed montwaandet.”
On the table, Fen’s finger started to move. It started slowly, then as before gathered speed, until it was flying from card to card. Sweat had started to bead on his temple.
The men watching stayed perfectly still, hardly breathing as though stalked by some invisible predator.
Spit started to foam at the corner of Fen’s mouth, his eyes rolled in their sockets, and the finger on the die stopped abruptly. The next sounds from his mouth came from the same ugly contorted lips, but this time they were delivered in a low, almost inaudible whisper, as though something were experimenting with his tongue. The words started indistinctly, becoming more articulate, more formed, as the volume increased. It was as if someone were practising speaking in an unfamiliar language, growing bolder as they became more coherent.
“Yes. Yes. Scum. Scum. Oh filthy scum of scum. Listen, scum. Sons of scum. Fathers of scum. Husbands of shit. Brothers of barren spunk. Listen… listen to me. To meeeee…”
Parren broke his own spell of paralysis. This was too much. “Fen. Fen stop it.”
Fen appeared completely unable to comply.
“Dung that drops from the dead. I am whole. You scum. Listen… listen…”
The die beneath Fen’s finger started to tremble as though sitting on a vibrating surface, and it continued to do so, even when it shook loose from his grip. The men watched it with horror, then Parren leapt to his feet and slapped Fen hard across the face with a blow that knocked him back in his chair.
Fen let out a shriek, and raised his arms across his face, but not, thought Parren later, to protect himself from the blow. The die ceased its tremulous progress across the table top, once again becoming an innocent and inanimate object, and the men looked at Fen with horror.
The cadet and the steward had also leapt to their feet, and two of them grabbed Fen under the arms and brought him back upright.
“Get some water,” Parren barked to the two cooks standing dumb-struck in the hatch.
Water was fetched and duly administered, but even an hour later, the time when the men should have been laughing and reflecting on what must have been nothing more than a ugly prank, neither Fen nor his audience had recovered sufficiently to laugh at anything.
6
It was a matter of priorities. She’d washed all three of her T-shirts, her entire collection of underwear, which wasn’t much and depressingly utilitarian, and even her trusty sandals, which had begun to smell like an old carcass. Now, they were all hanging like puritan bunting over the plastic frame of the shower cubicle, or on the rail that ran around the cabin, and it meant only one thing. It was time to do some work.
Esther sat down heavily on her sofa, crossed her bare legs beneath her and gathered the pile of paper, notepads, the Dictaphone and red, hardbound book that she’d carried halfway across Peru, onto her lap, sighing as she started to sift through the confused mess. She grazed until she found what she wanted, the cream of the crop, the thing that she believed was going to make this whole project.
She’d come up with the dissertation idea in a response to a particularly politically correct lecture from a lanky objectionable English professor on a book promotion tour, who had come all the way to their college to present his lecture, bearing the same title as his book: Democracy: The Natural State of Man. Esther didn’t know why, but she’d hated him the moment he’d smoothed his sad academic beard with long fingers, smiled smugly at the audience, and said, “What has politics got to do with anthropology, you must be asking yourselves?”
Esther was in fact sighing, asking herself why this man was patronizing them with his opening sentence.
By the time he got to, “You know, you take it for granted that if I offend you, horrify you, or bore you, you have the power and the freedom to leave. Democracy, ladies and gentlemen. Voting with your feet. It is more natural, more immovably inbuilt into the fabric of humanity, from Piltdown man to a Wall Street broker, than any other form of known social behaviour,” she desperately wanted to prove him wrong merely for the sake of it.
He went on to argue that dictatorships, however benevolent, held back humanity and halted progress, and at question time Esther put up her hand.
“What about the Roman Empire?” she asked without aggression.
He smiled again, a father to a child. “Ah yes, Fascism.”
Before he could begin a prepared response about that particularly abhorrent form of human politics, she interrupted. “I mean, specifically, how did it hold back humanity and halt progress?”
He had raised his eyebrows. “How about slavery, genocide and corruption?” He was looking forward to humiliating her. She could tell he made a living out of it.
“How about social order and justice for the majority, engineering and military advances of a type that have survived even until now, creativity in the arts equal if not superior to anything we enjoy today?”
“No, no, no…” He tried to stop by her shaking his head with sympathy, but she was undeterred.
“Oh yeah. And ice cream.”
The class burst out laughing. He laughed with them, but only with his mouth. His eyes were pinning her down, marking her out.
“And Hitler? I trust you admired the fact the trains ran on time?”
“Hitler was voted into power.” She spok
e the next word deliberately slowly to irritate him. “Democratically.”
She was starting to irritate him as much he annoyed her. She could tell.
“I guess you must be a National Socialist, young lady.” He smiled at his own joke.
“I’m Jewish.”
His smile faded and he looked at her coldly, cleared his throat and gave his pat response to the rest of the class while Esther sat thinking. It wasn’t important to prove the point here. Of course she believed in the might of democracy. It had simply become interesting to her as a student to see if what the English jerk was saying was true or not, and more importantly, in the true naive spirit of the young, to try and ruin his experienced certainty.
That night she sat in the library and after three long hours chose the most successful ancient civilization she could find that was comparable to her own, and one that was not based on any form of democracy whatsoever. The Incas.
They were perfect. Haughty dictators who were so successful in building their empire that their people always had huge surpluses of food. They had plumbing they would be proud of in Idaho, irrigation engineering over thousands of miles that still defies modern understanding, and a hierarchy that by and large only slaughtered each other, leaving the man and woman in the well-paved streets unharmed. There was social welfare, free education and health care, little or no crime, and all with not a sniff of anything remotely approaching democracy.
Unfortunately there was also human sacrifice, but since church was not separate from state in the way it must always be in modern democracies, this would only help to further prove her point. So it was just what she needed. An enviable civilization destroyed not by its lack of democracy, but by an equally undemocratic horde of avaricious religious hypocrites from Europe. Now, thousands of years later, under the democratic rule of a bastardized Spanish civilization, was Peru more successful? No sirree. She was off, and her dissertation was born.
The paper she had created from the dross of notes and photos of temples and dig sites she’d had developed in Cuzcou included sketched diagrams and twenty-nine full pages of her writing. Because unbelievably she had chanced upon something she wasn’t expecting. Something that was so exciting she could hardly contain it. A three-week trip onto the high plateau with some shepherds she had befriended in a small village had led her to an extraordinary piece of living human archaeology, something she hoped she was the first to find, and when she wrote of it might just cause a stir.
The shepherds had told her of a small group of nomadic people, rarely seen, who moved and lived on the very edges of the eastern mountain range that divided the high Andean plateau from the Amazon jungle. What was remarkable about these people, apart from the fear they seemed to inspire in the otherwise hardy shepherds, was the fact that they were Incas. Esther had tried not to laugh. There were, of course, no Incas. All the research told her that in the days of the great empire there were in fact only forty thousand full-blooded nobles who called themselves by that name. The hundreds of thousands of people who lived peacefully under their rule were merely Inca subjects.
The pure-bred Incas were either slaughtered or interbred with the Spanish to create through countless generations the modern Peruvians. To suggest that some of the original royal Incas had survived thus far intact would be outrageous. But the normally reticent shepherds were adamant, insisting, as further proof, that these people were still sun-worshippers, that they had the power and dark practices of the ancient ones very much in their grasp. Not only that, but the shepherds spoke enigmatically, and Esther thought, somewhat fearfully, about the tribe being unusually active recently. One had said in a small anxious voice that some of them had been travelling to towns and cities, a thing previously unheard of.
She begged to know where they might be found and after days of pleading and haranguing, they had left her in a place where the tribe were sometimes seen. She was afraid at first, being left alone in such a desolate spot, but even more afraid when after three days she emerged from her tent in the early light of dawn to find a small group of men sitting silently outside, waiting for her to emerge.
She’d had an incredibly brief twelve days in their company, before they disappeared in the night, their tracks indicating they had moved off in a direction that was too obviously a route to the jungle for her taste. Everything she’d learned from them during their time together was from a peculiarly intense and very beautiful seventeen-year-boy in their midst who could speak a little halting Spanish. She had spent time cultivating him, flirting even, to make him sit with her and talk into her Dictaphone in very broken and difficult Spanish. But then Esther had a talent for making men want her without ever giving them what they expected might be theirs after time. He was no different. Just younger. He’d started haltingly, shyly, glancing at the older men who regarded him and Esther impassively as they sat together by her tent. But as the days progressed he began to take a great, almost obsessive interest in her, talking more animatedly and rapidly, leaving her confused and ignorant of the majority of what he was trying to tell her. He’d been so intense, sweating profusely as he spoke, even though they were camped on the freezing plateau. But at least she’d confirmed what the frightened shepherds had told her. The boy had been to Lima, an incredible journey from here. But his eyes shone when he spoke of it, even though the elders lowered their eyes when they heard the name of the city. Teenagers the world over, thought Esther. Here she was wanting him to tell her about the traditions and rituals of his tribe, and probably all he wanted to talk about would be discos and girls. He certainly became even more flushed and excited when she made him understand she was heading for Lima on the way back, and indeed after that, he rarely left her alone. But his Spanish was too rapid for her. No matter. She checked the tapes each time he finished, and whatever he said was all there.
All she would have to do was to take the time later to decipher and translate, no doubt kicking herself for not asking the right things when she had the chance.
She had also written everything down that the elders had said, in exactly the words they’d used, unfamiliar or not. It was not for her to interpret it until she could think straight later.
The diagrams she had were of the makeshift altar they would build and destroy each morning and she sat examining it, looking forward to comparing it with the ancient lay-outs of the temples she had visited endlessly throughout the rest of the trip. When she awoke one morning to find they had gone in the night, there had been a particularly intricate pattern scratched in the hardened dust directly outside her tent, and what interested her when she’d made a careful sketch of it, was that unlike the altars they built, there was nothing even remotely familiar about its twisting lines. She treasured that one above all.
Esther blessed the dull English professor with the beard. Through a routine academic exercise to try and discuss the effects of democracy on civilization, she might, quite incredibly, have run into what she firmly believed was an almost completely unknown tribe of people.
She had no one yet to share the thrill with, particularly on this ship of fools, but even if it was laughed out of college when she got back, right now she was as excited as if she’d struck gold.
She lay back, and with some difficulty started the long task of deciphering her own appalling handwriting.
Sohn was trying not to laugh. Lloyd Skinner was a big, powerful man, and from the engine room, the only hatch into the cofferdams between the cargo holds and the outer hull was one that was considerably smaller than him. The fourth engineer and a cadet had unscrewed it laboriously to give him access, but he was struggling to get in, especially with the big industrial torch and ridiculously formal flightcase he was carrying.
“You need that in there?” Sohn asked, pointing to the aluminium case.
Skinner looked back. “The only way to keep this damned paperwork together.”
The chief engineer grinned and shrugged. Skinner was a strange man. Anyone would have accompanied him if he’
d ordered it, would have held the papers for him and offered their back as a makeshift table for any documents that needed ticked or filled in at site.
Indeed, Sohn would have been pleased to do it himself. He hadn’t been inside the cofferdams on this ship before, and he was always delighted to acquaint himself with the concealed architecture of any vessel he powered through the water. But Skinner was a loner, a perfectionist, an utter stickler for duty, and if any inspection needed to be done, he always wanted to do it by himself.
The curious thing was not only why the company would want this done now, while at sea, but why they wanted it done at all.
There was nothing in there. Just a long dark space, at least eight feet wide and as tall as the entire hull, running the length of the ship, both to port and starboard. They were supposed to be checked and flushed regularly at port, so that any problem would become rapidly obvious on the loadicator. But that took time and manpower, and Sonstar were not a company to waste either if it got in the way of making money. Skinner was to be admired for pursuing the official line when his bosses would almost certainly have turned a blind eye to its omission. And if he wanted to go wandering in the dark, fumbling with plans and treading on rats, then that was his business. It was Lloyd Skinner’s ship to command and he could do what he wanted.
The captain had already pushed through and was standing upright on the other side by the time Sohn formulated his last offer.
“You want to take walkie-talkie? In case you fall or something?”
Skinner shook his head, but smiled weakly. “Thank you, Chief Engineer. No. I only need to check and see there’s no leakage from the holds. The bosun reported there might be a small lesion near the bow. It’ll only take half an hour at most. If I’m not back by Friday you can send in the dogs.”
He turned and walked away, his boots making a lonely echo on the virgin metal floor. As the circle of his torchlight retreated into the long dark tunnel of dripping metal, three heads peered after him, glad to be on the side of the hatch where the striplights burned bright and Radio Lima played Mariah Carey.
