As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  “Can you see the legs yet?” Machellsen groaned, holding his stomach.

  “We seen 'em this last half the hour, you big housebird,” roared half the boat.

  “Wait, wait,” Joni Baxter agreed, patting Machellsen awkwardly on the back. “You'll be back to touching your cock on your bunk all night before you know it –”

  The Mitarbeitertransport heated with uproarious laughter and Machellsen, not the least bit red-cheeked, told Baxter to go fuck himself. The stink of the unwashed had yet to engulf them again: here only the reek of the engines reigned, and the oilmen had their month on the land scraping grime from their skins like a flock of stormy petrels grooming themselves for the ocean.

  John smiled in answer to another joke, which contained no humour, which set the boat steaming anew, and settled his thoughts with tired ease.

  The little boat struggled on through the waves, pitching all aboard into the front wall like so much loose coinage – the supplies, at least, were strapped to the floor. Armand the Frank seized John's arm as he lost his seat entirely, shouting, “Good old Lancaster, solid as the shore!” to the general applause of the oilmen.

  “If the shore were that silent I shouldn't go,” Weaver claimed, with a lined smile hidden in his beard.

  “What are you talking about, Goodman, a silent whore is the best whore –” cried Armand, affecting to mishear.

  “Maybe if you like 'em dead,” Weaver retorted, seeming to forget that he'd mentioned no whores at all.

  “Forty yards,” Baxter shouted, his face banging on the thick glass of the Mitarbeitertransport’s only window. “If one of you bastards tries to take the head before me I'll break his neck.”

  Appreciative laughter followed this gruesome threat, for Baxter, who ensured their transmissions to shore were not in the frequencies used by Albion Broadcasting, was a pigeon-chested twig of a man with a squint.

  “Nearly there,” Weaver called to Machellsen, “hold your lunch.”

  The Mitarbeitertransport drew alongside the vast stone foot of the rig: often on quiet days John had wondered at such an undertaking but then, he supposed, men had built the Wall, too. It bumped, bounced, and threw the oilmen about with abandon, and Baxter, bruising his nose on the window, yelled, “Mate's off!”

  Soon after, the bucking of the boat was curtailed with ropes, and the mate rapped his knuckles on the roof to warn the oilmen of the incoming wind.

  A moment later the Winterzeitwinde ripped through John's ears, and he tried to unstick himself from the narrow seat he was imprisoned in, ducking his head against the bitter cold. Baxter gave his hand, then Weaver, and with a heave almost spoiled by the sudden rock of the boat, John popped free of the Mitarbeitertransport.

  “Fat buttocks,” Weaver shouted over the wind, “stop eating so much stew.”

  The Winterzeitwinde, fresh off the Gated Continent, folded the oilmen in half like coastal trees, the thirteen moving in flock to keep it from separating them and pitching one or all off the foot and into the murderous sea.

  Gerecke reached the ladder first, and bellowed back to Baxter over the wind, “The head is mine!”

  Baxter, using John's greater bulk as a wind shield, gave no answer, for he saved his breath for the climb.

  The haul to the deck of the rig was as high as two full houses piled atop each other and buffeted by a wind as cold as ice and hard as hammer blows. It was without staircases, only salt-encrusted ladder rungs embedded into the great supports which held the deck above even the worst of the sea's caprices.

  John tucked his scarf into the collar of his canvas suit with cold-darkened fingers, and braced himself for the climb. He thrust a shivering Baxter in front of him: part altruism, part self-preservation, for if Baxter fell he would not weigh enough to drag John with him, and indeed John might even break his fall.

  The sea smashed at the rig foot and sent up great plumes of spray; John gripped the rung below Baxter's foot and drew his head down against the wind once more. It came now from behind, blowing him mercifully onto the ladder, but making it harder to lift his feet.

  His fingers ached from the cold, and his hips where the Mitarbeitertransport seat had pinched him, but his knees and elbows at least were hale. John ascended as quickly as a man might, with a dawdling and scrawny Baxter ahead and an impatient, noisy Jeppe behind.

  No man makes a graceful and dignified entrance to a rig. John was hefted by his shoulders, his arms, and his torso in turn by his fellows, dragged from the ladder and onto the supposed safety of the echoing, ever-rotting deck like a vast fish lifted from the jealous clutches of the sea.

  Baxter, as good as his word, was already in flight for the head, shouting, “I've a shit brewing in me to sink an island!”

  John got to his feet after rolling aside, and stooped to help Jeppe up onto the deck.

  Jeppe's hands bled, torn no doubt on one of the protrusions on the rungs, and he had under the wind-red of his cheeks the waxen complexion of a man who wishes much that he were not bleeding on a rig with only one infamously bad treater of wounds and disease.

  The apothecary-surgeon (he was no doctor of any stripe) was a Bradlet Schooler because Super Rachelsson was a Bradlet man, and from what John could remember of the shouted conversations around the bunks and the head, Jeppe was like his namesake a Yorkist to the core. He would want poulticing, and there were not poultices to be had on a Bradlet's rig.

  “Wash it,” John suggested, as Jeppe regarded his hand with ill-suppressed horror.

  “The rock speaks!” Weaver exclaimed, pulling up the last of the oilmen.

  “Boil water to wash it,” John said, as Jeppe stared.

  The men of the Mitarbeitertransport hurried into the nearest doorway and out of the stinging wind, Jeppe dripping blood onto the plate metal beneath their feet, and John stopped only to watch a gull struggle madly against the ravages of the Winterzeitwinde.

  * * *

  Inside the hut that housed the bunks, its walls bolstered with supply boxes and rattling only fitfully with the wind, John had time only to acknowledge that his name had been moved to one of the upper bunks, ‘to kick him when he yells asleep’. Some other wag had amended, in wobbly pencil, ‘treasure it, when you think how often he speaks’, and a firmer hand retorted, ‘when is the wedding.’

  John removed his scarf and pulled on a hat, and left once more for his work station, for Arnaldsen would be ready to depart in the Mitarbeitertransport and without John to relieve him the departure must be delayed.

  His face stung with the salt wind when he pulled on the door handle and came in out of the cold. Baxter had come straight from the head, and was already fiddling with the back of a dial.

  “Abfalterer,” Baxter said sadly, at the sound of the door closing. “I leave for a month and he wears apart the dial. What's he been doing, stuffing it up his arse?”

  John pulled out the wooden chair frame and folded up behind the rack of his own dials. There was, propped among the glass fronts of the pressure indicators, a figure in newspaper, with many tiny legs and an arched tail in segments bent over its flat back.

  “That Fröba?” Baxter asked, as John picked up the little origami scorpion by the tail.

  “Mmm,” John said, turning the stiff little figurine with his rough fingers.

  “He's really good,” Baxter said happily, pointing at the miniature paper scorpion with a wrench.

  “Yeah,” John agreed, putting the scorpion on the sill of the room’s only window, out of the way of clumsy hands.

  “Why did you ask for a scorpion?” Baxter asked, picking up the worn down dial again and waving it like an amulet at a perceived presence. “Look at this.”

  “Wanted to see if he could,” John lied, politely examining the buggered dial.

  “Ah well, our Fröba has a lot of time on his hands,” Baxter said, as if the rest of them didn't. “He can make anything, he can. How much did you lose?”

  John gave him a rueful smile and extended his hand with
his fingers spread.

  “Ouch.” Baxter threw the dial at the Brokens Box and wagged his wrench mock-sternly at John. “No more arthropods, you'll get him in trouble, and then who will make the tiny tiny paper ladies?” He beamed, expecting to be called a pervert.

  John shook his head and feigned an interest in the pressure dials.

  Baxter continued for a little longer, before (as he so often did) climbing onto his chair to peer out of the window and check the area for busybodies and the unlikely intrusion of Super Rachelsson. Having stared out of that self-same window many times himself, John knew he would see nothing but the sides of buildings and the final, alarmingly unfenced drop at the edge of the rig, and beyond that a grey and violent sea hugged by clouds and attended by seabirds, the sides of each hut worn colourless and pale by the elements.

  The purpose of this coast-checking was of course Baxter's imminent misuse of the wireless equipment, and sure enough, he clambered back down from the chair, cast a conspiratorial glance at John, and mimed buttoning his lips shut.

  “Shall we see what Albion Broadcasting is saying now our backs are turned?” Baxter asked. He looked at the wall clock, and added, “Alright, it will just be Pilbrook, at this hour, but maybe later –” he laid the wrench down and tweaked a dial thoughtfully, “– later, What's My Purpose? and a, a, a cavalcade of canaries...”

  “Do you want to listen to Pilbrook screeching?” John asked, apparently taking Baxter by surprise. The Wireless engineer screwed up his squinting face and considered this for a moment.

  “Any woman's voice is better than none,” he said at last, “and if you put your fingers in your ears she could be any woman.”

  “If you put your fingers in your ears you can't hear her,” John pointed out.

  “Put them in a little way. Anyhurr, there will be Waldren's Canaries and ‘Sundry Forfeit’ right afterward, don't tell me you don't want to.”

  John shook his head again and ran an eye over the dials, knowing that this was mere courtship. They would covertly listen to Pilbrook and What's My Purpose? and Baxter would be pleased with himself and if Super Rachelsson caught them out they would be docked pay and bawled at.

  The thunderous roars of the rig’s machinery insulated their conversation from outside, and almost from each other. The light of day, dim as it was already, had trickled away to almost nothing, the only illumination the sole gas light by the door.

  Baxter worked the level dial as high as it would twist, and began moving the equipment to reception stations. The rig’s wireless receiver was a magnitude more sensitive than any home receiver in Albion, but it was that much farther from broadcasting rods than any home, too.

  A hiss like boiling sap in firewood emitted from the membranes, then a sharp whistle so piercing that both men clamped their hands to their ears instinctively, leaving Baxter to try to knock the receptors into the correct. position with his elbow. This undertaking was not at all quick, and John began to feel a terrible sickness before the hateful sound ended as if its throat had been cut.

  “Sorry,” Baxter mouthed, but he was interrupted in his apology by the thin voice of the Wireless.

  It was not Pilbrook’s nasal shriek, but rather a voice that John recognised from the proclamations between fixed broadcast designs and from some summaries of the news given when other readers of events were away, or unwell. Even the distortion and tininess could not quite rob it of its warm, friendly quality.

  The words were far from warm: as Baxter clamped his jaw shut and both turned their eyes to the membranes, as if to see would help them to hear, it said, “—Continuing with the Pilbrook interviews after this unfortunate delay. York and Bergen ask that Albion Broadcasting-B convey to Albionmen everywhere in our dominions: another aethropede agent has been captured.”

  ‘Aethropede’ was the dialect of Norsk, not of Albion-of-the-Britons, but they were close to interchangeable; John did not reflect on this, instead trying his hardest to suppress the sensation of ice water poured into his chest and stomach. He stared at the membranes as Baxter stared at the membranes, but while Baxter seemed excited, John knew only a pre-emptive desolation and a terrible calm which did not extend below the surface of his face.

  He was sure he would vomit.

  “Found in the woods outside Bergen,” the Wireless continued, maddeningly slow and indistinct, tempered and almost drowned by the ceaseless grind and thump of the rig’s work, “in a state of chill and bewilderment, the aethropede is due to be put to question tomorrow, between two and four in the afternoon. This beetle—”

  “Did he say beetle?” John asked, feeling his blood return to his face and heart in a rush so sudden that he almost let go of his consciousness in the lightness that followed.

  “Beetle, yes, sshhh, he’s still talking,” said Baxter, flapping a wide hand at him for quiet.

  John, all obliging, held his breath, listening not to the measured words of the Wireless but to the thumping of his heart in his throat and ears, obscuring any further sense. They did not have him, not this time. The absence of Wireless recounting of captures this past year had been a balm on his nerves, but he had always been waiting for this, this proclamation of capture, accompanied by another species.

  “—Requires that all Albionmen do their duty and come forward at once with all they know,” said the Wireless voice with finality. “Mabeline Pilbrook continues to interview Tom Halberd on the matter of ornithopter hire.”

  “Boring,” Baxter pronounced, but he made no move to disable the receivers or lower the levels.

  “Going to the head,” John mumbled, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet without thinking on it. He didn’t need to piss, but the vicious slaps of cold sea air would drive the roiling sickness from out of his stomach and the cloud of terror from his mind until he was able to think on his work again.

  Baxter waved and leaned to pull John’s chair across to where he might rest his feet on it, legs extended. “Take your time.”

  Outside the hut John did not rush for the head, but leaned against the weathered wood-and-iron wall with his eyes shut and his forehead to the rain-dyed paint. It was not El Alacrán, but he knew if Super Rachelsson got to hear of it he would be privy to the interrogation as the rest of the rig would, his own swift reminder of patriotism and phyla loyalty. He could almost hear already the shrieks and squeaks of insect pain; he could almost feel already the throes of night miseries the interrogation would bring to him, and he hoped in vain that whoever had taken the bunk below his would kick him awake the instant he began to thrash.

  It was not El Alacrán they had captured. It would not be his voice that he heard pleading and screeching through the crackle of electrical interference and orgone burns, but it would be El Alacrán in his dreams for the whole sixmonth after, if he did not find some way to avoid hearing. Perhaps not even then would he be free of it.

  John Lancaster pulled off his woollen hat and let the knife-sharp wind batter unimpeded against his short-cut skull, and he told himself like a mantra, it is not El Alacrán.

  Chapter 4

  Four days hence their return from shore leave, and three days hence the proclamation of Rachelsson that he had received news of interrogation of an arthropod (he said ‘arthropod’ though the dispatch had almost certainly read ‘aethropede’ in accordance with those who had discovered it and the widely-known lore of capture) and that he would on this occasion assume that the men were aware of their duty to Albion as he wasn’t about to lose money over such a trifle, John Lancaster, the better rested for not listening to torture, sat in the hut alongside Ulf Hoppenstedt while Ulf Hoppenstedt talked longingly of whores.

  The day was clear as the days sometimes were, all the foulness of cloud rushed away to rain on the land to the West, and the sky was marked only by the white lazy wings of gulls, the wheeling of wakes and fights between fulmar and much smaller petrel. In the sunlight the rig gleamed, though the brightness served to illuminate mostly how shabby and wind-weathere
d it was.

  Super Rachelsson had Whetheck out painting the metalwork, and Whetheck had unkind words for Super Rachelsson, for it was still as cold as the frozen depths of Super Rachelsson’s heart.

  “She is Faroe,” Hoppenstedt said, resting his beard on his hands and his elbows on the table before him, staring into the Wireless dials as if he was picturing the whore in question, which he probably was. “Faroe with black eyes and black hair, and a chin you could break rocks with. Goes like a horse with a radish up its arse. You would not find her like anywhere on earth, not in the bordellos of the Moors nor the Frankish whoreholes.”

  John suspected that Hoppenstedt knew as much of the Moorish bordellos or the Frankish whorehouses as he did, and put his exaggeration of what was surely a plain and tired woman, as all the whores of Aberdeen were, down to Hoppenstedt’s long crawl before shore leave. He had yet a month to wait before his turn came, and he had already complained this bright cold morning of having wanked chafemarks onto his cock in boredom and anticipation.

  “No qualms, neither,” Hoppenstedt said wistfully, “any hole for her, any hole.”

  John did not ask him how many times he had been to see the Bradlet Schooler for his pox, but he was sure that if Hoppenstedt’s whore was as obliging as he claimed, Hoppenstedt’s cock was blistered from more than mere chafing.

  The sun lent the hut an unseasonable warmth, and both men basked in it like lizards in spring. So far the morning had been drenched in what the oilmen, without divinatory training, considered good omens. The perceived good augers led men to generosity, to the sharing of tea rations and small skills: Feldman had broken out in poor impressions of Waldren’s Canaries, which still garnered a huge laugh, and Fröba was taking all comers at speed origami now that the sun had made men reckless enough to bet.

  “Might see if I can get What’s My Purpose? later,” Hoppenstedt mused, distracted momentarily from meditations on his favourite prostitute. “D’you think they will have Hugo Waldren back? It’s not the same without him.”