The Sea of the Dead

by Barry Wolverton

  “Mouse!” he said again, looking for the recognition in her eyes.

  She jumped off him immediately and spun around. “Where? Where is a mouse?”

  “You!” said Bren, struggling to his feet as well. He was still whispering; Ani was trying to whisper but failing.

  “What are you talking about? I ask you again—are you crazy?”

  “Keep your voice down!” said Bren, painfully aware now that the others nearby were stirring in their sleep. When he turned back to Ani, she genuinely seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. She grabbed his arm and dragged him off out of earshot from the camp.

  “You mean, you’re not . . . I thought, from what you said, the way you’ve acted toward me . . .” He couldn’t finish the thought. How would he ever explain to her what he was talking about?

  Ani shook her head in disbelief. She was breathing heavily. “You’re a strange boy, Bren. And if that’s your first move after all the lessons I’ve given you, we still have a great deal of work to do.”

  Bren nodded weakly, but he wasn’t really listening. He was heartbroken. Even though the idea was so farfetched, he had somehow hoped . . .

  He felt on the verge of bursting into tears, which he guessed was probably the worst thing he could do in front of Ani, so he went quickly back to his bedding and covered his entire head with his blankets. There, in the darkness of his own mind, he wept quietly.

  The next morning, after they’d been on the road for a couple of hours, David Owen pulled his horse alongside Bren’s and asked, “Everything okay, Son?”

  Bren wondered if he’d heard him crying the night before. He tried to hide his embarrassment with a goofy smile. “Of course! How about you? Bet you never thought you’d be looking forward to being back in Map, at McNally’s Map Emporium.”

  His father smiled back faintly. “If anything’s bothering you, I hope you know you can talk to me.”

  “Yeah, sure I do,” said Bren, but he gently pulled his horse a few feet away, and they didn’t say much more to each other the rest of the day.

  When they were a day out from the Caspian Sea, Shveta said, “We’ll hire out a boat to take us to the city of Baku, on the western side. It’s where all the traders congregate . . . those heading back north to Novgorod and Rus and Nord, those going farther south into Persia, and those coming from Persia or the Ottoman Empire. We shouldn’t have trouble catching on with a Baghdad-bound train.”

  The “boat” turned out to be little more than a tub with a sail, barely big enough for their party of nine plus the boatman, and Black and David Owen spent most of their time vomiting over the side as they bounced across a choppy, windswept sea.

  Both were still violently ill when they reached Baku, and Bren spent his first two nights there tending to them in a small attic room they had rented above a tavern. Emptying the buckets of the two sick men reminded Bren that there were parts of his old life in Map he definitely didn’t miss.

  “Are they going to be all right?” said Ani, intercepting Bren as he was returning with two just-washed buckets.

  “Sure,” said Bren. “Just not used to boats.”

  “Your father seems worse than that,” said Ani. “He’s babbling.”

  “You went up there?” said Bren. “Why?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer before skipping up the steps of the tavern to see if his father had in fact taken a turn for the worse. Ani came right behind him. Bren opened the door to the attic to find his father half-propped up in his bed, a piece of paper and a pen in hand. Mr. Black was still asleep.

  “Dad, what are you doing?” said Bren. “You need rest.”

  “It is a map,” said David. “I tell you, it is. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  His father didn’t seem to be talking to him. Or to anyone in particular. He looked at Ani, who just shrugged. “Told you.”

  “Give me that and lie down,” said Bren, taking the paper and pen from his father. The pen dripped all over him, and he noticed that his father had knocked the inkwell onto the floor. Black ink was pooling next to his bed and slowly filling the cracks of the wooden floorboards.

  “Where did you even get all this?” Bren asked, and he looked again at Ani, accusingly this time, but she gave away nothing. “Can you get me something to clean this up?” he asked her, and she left the room.

  Bren sat down at the end of his father’s bed, trying not to step in ink, and realized he still had the piece of paper in his hand. His father had been drawing something on it . . . a rough circle inside a square, with a smaller circle at the center. It was the mandala from Bren’s tangka. Except his father had added a few notations to it—what looked to Bren like latitude markings, horizontal lines with numbers next to them.

  He’d just said it was a map. But of what?

  “Dad, wake up. Are you asleep?” His father had collapsed back onto his pillow after Bren had taken away his pen and paper, and he barely stirred when Bren shook his shoulder. “Dad, I need to know what this is.”

  His father mumbled something, his eyes still closed.

  “What? I can’t hear you,” said Bren, leaning closer to his father’s mouth while trying to ignore his unbearably bad breath.

  “The North Pole,” said his father.

  Bren sat up. “What are you talking about?” There was no map of the North Pole. No one had ever been there. What it was, what it looked like . . . it was mere speculation. Bren touched his hand to his father’s forehead. He must be delirious with fever, except that seasickness didn’t usually cause fever.

  His father didn’t answer, falling back to sleep just as Ani came back with a bucket and scrub brush. Bren was still angry with her. “What were you doing up here? Where did my father get pen and ink? And paper? What are you up to?”

  “He asked for it,” said Ani. “He kept saying something about a map.”

  “That doesn’t explain what you were doing up here,” said Bren.

  “I just wanted to see if he and the string bean were all right,” said Ani, but Bren didn’t believe a word of it. “So what did he draw?” Ani asked.

  “Nothing,” said Bren firmly, taking the bucket and brush from her. “I can take it from here.”

  Bren hoped that would be the end of it, but it was wishful thinking. When his father and Mr. Black were recovered and able to join them for a meal, Shveta looked straight at David Owen and said, “I hear you have a map of the North Pole.”

  Both Bren and his father nearly choked on the fish stew they were eating. His father seemed genuinely baffled.

  “The North Pole? Where did you get such a notion? There is no such thing. Er, not exactly anyway.”

  “It’s the ‘Er, not exactly’ that interests me,” said Shveta. “And I’m just repeating what you said.”

  Seeing his father so flummoxed, Bren decided to step in.

  “Two nights ago,” he said. “You and Mr. Black were still sick. I came to check on you and you had drawn something on a piece of paper. Ani claims you had asked for pen and ink.” He tried to give Ani the stink eye, but she won the battle of wills handily. “Anyway,” he continued, “it was a picture that looked a lot like my mandala. You had made notes around it and kept saying it was a map. When I asked you of what, you said the North Pole.”

  David Owen was completely astonished, as was Black.

  “You’re saying that thing sewn into Bren’s coat is a map of the North Pole?” said Black.

  “I don’t know what I’m saying,” said David. “I don’t remember saying it!”

  “I wasn’t sure if you meant my mandala was a map, or if you were only talking about your drawing,” said Bren.

  “Perhaps we can solve this great mystery,” said Shveta. “Where is it?”

  Bren really wanted to lie. He felt in his gut that showing the drawing to Shveta was dangerous. But denying it could be dangerous too. He simply didn’t know enough about her and what she really wanted to devise a good story. The truth would
have to do.

  “Right here,” he said, pulling a folded piece of parchment from his tunic and spreading it on the table between them. Shveta studied it carefully, as did Black and especially David Owen, curious as to what exactly he had done without knowing it.

  “It does look like the mandala,” said Black, using every inch of his long neck to get a better look. “What are those notes you made, David?”

  David pulled the drawing closer, studying it. “They look like latitude lines, don’t they?” He paused, as if something were dawning on him. “Years ago, a man came to Rand McNally claiming to have been to the North Pole. He had a map he’d drawn, very detailed, that showed an open polar sea at the top of the world. He said that warm currents from east and west converged there, elevating the water temperature. And that during summertime, when the sun never sets there, the ice completely melted.”

  “So what?” said Black. “I’m sure kooks come to McNally all the time with fake maps hoping he’ll pay them a fortune for them.”

  “Maybe at one time,” said David. “Folks know better now. Nothing gets Rand’s approval without verification.”

  “Which this man didn’t have, obviously,” said Shveta.

  “No,” said David, “but part of his map . . . he had shown elevations of three mountains . . .”

  He broke off, but everyone looked at the presumed map again, and then Shveta produced the mandala, which appeared to show three mountains against a pale-blue sky.

  “Maybe this part is water,” said Ani.

  “Maybe,” said David.

  “So what did McNally do?” Bren asked.

  “The McNally Prize!” Lady Barrett and Black blurted out at the same time.

  “You remember?” said David.

  “I do now,” said Lady Barrett. “Some extraordinary sum for sailing to the North Pole and verifying the man’s claims.”

  “Why haven’t I heard of it?” said Bren.

  “Or me?” said Sean. “I’ve been sailing with the most ambitious explorers I know for years.”

  “Because McNally withdrew the prize after only two years,” David explained. “So many ships and sailors were lost attempting to brave the Arctic that sailors started calling the so-called open polar sea the Sea of the Dead. Bad for business.”

  “So now what?” said Bren, looking to Shveta. But Shveta didn’t seem impressed.

  “Now nothing,” she said. “Your father was probably just dredging up some old memory from his fevered dreams. We already have a plan to make it to Baghdad, where the lot of you can do your best to secure passage home. Unless anyone has other ideas, I suggest we get everyone back on their feet so we can get on with it.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  A FORK IN THE ROAD

  The winds that made the Caspian Sea so rough hit Baku square in the face, and Bren wasn’t surprised to learn that the name Baku came from the Persian for “wind-pounded city.” After spending the last year and a half crossing oceans, seas, deserts, high mountains, and the windswept plains of Central Asia, Bren had the face of a man four times his age. Sean had told him he had the skin of an Irish potato.

  Bren wasn’t exactly vain, but he didn’t want to look like a withered old man before his time, and Ani caught him patting mud onto his cheeks, something he had seen Lady Barrett do before. When he noticed Ani, you could see his embarrassment clear through the cakes of mud.

  “Are you spying on me?”

  “I thought we had established that,” said Ani.

  Bren furiously wiped his face clean. Mostly.

  “They make a special tonic from fish eggs around here,” said Ani. “They say it heals the skin.”

  “What do I care?” said Bren.

  “You tell me, mud-face,” said Ani.

  Bren sighed and threw up his arms. “Fine. Take me to these fish-egg magicians.”

  She led him down to the densely packed market area, where it seemed everything under the sun was for sale. But all that was overwhelmed by the smell of fish. Specifically, the Caspian sturgeon, a huge, pointy-nosed, startlingly ugly fish being hauled out of boats and piled by the thousands along the shore, where workers stacked them into wooden crates to be hauled to the market. Bren assumed a fish this big must be caught for its meat, but it wasn’t—it was caught for the eggs. They were made into something called caviar, which apparently was a delicacy up north. These same eggs were also the magic ingredient in the face tonic Bren and Ani were seeking.

  “There’s a stall back here,” said Ani, leading Bren by the hand down a crooked lane with evil-eyed merchants peering out from under awnings of colorful but worn cloth. “Wait here,” she said, and left him in the middle of the lane while she darted off out of sight.

  Bren felt his skin prickle with panic as he waited for Ani, feeling all the eyes of the merchants on him. A few called out to him, and though he couldn’t understand them he understood them to be making fun of him. Or perhaps threatening him. Finally Ani returned and took him by the hand again.

  “This way,” she said, leading him to the far end of the lane, past the last of the merchant stalls. There she opened her hand and showed Bren a small folded piece of paper. She unfolded it and poured out a small pyramid of dark-green powder into the palm of her right hand.

  “That’s made from those oily fish eggs?” Bren asked, surprised.

  “Here,” said Ani, slightly lifting her right hand while directing Bren to lean in for a closer look. When he did, she suddenly blew a puff of dark-green dust into his face.

  He immediately shut his eyes, which burned, and began coughing uncontrollably. “Why . . . cough, cough . . . did you . . . cough, cough . . . do that?”

  “It’s what you asked for,” said Ani.

  Cough, cough, cough. “I mean . . . without warning me.”

  Ani didn’t answer. Or maybe she did, Bren couldn’t hear anything at the moment. He suddenly felt like his head was underwater . . . sounds were muffled . . . objects were distorted . . . he couldn’t breathe. Ani grew suddenly tall and narrow, then wide and fat, her slight smile changing to a smirk, then a wide grin, then a devilish leer.

  Ani, what is happening? What did you do? The words ran through his brain, but he had no idea if they came out of his mouth. He couldn’t breathe.

  Archibald Black gathered up his meager possessions and thought about how he and David Owen had come to India burdened with what felt like a thousand pounds of surveying equipment, money, and an outrageously dumb plan. They had disembarked at Bombay Island with four enormous trunks, one of them with a false bottom hiding Black’s priceless Gutenberg Bible.

  Well, not so priceless after all. Not when it came to Bren. He had been willing to use it to barter his way into the House of Wisdom when he thought doing so might put them on Bren’s trail. Several months of misery and failure later, having hauled the huge Bible all the way to Cashmere, Black had, in a way, used it to get to Bren. Indirectly, but still. It was Shveta’s now, and frankly, he was glad someone else was having to haul the damned thing to Persia.

  As for the rest of what was in those trunks, who knows. Lost? In the possession of the Moguls? Some of it was likely destroyed or buried by the earthquake that had freed him and David from Akbar’s army—an earthquake that quite possibly was caused by Bren, the rupture that opened this Dragon’s Gate he had told them about.

  Had Bren lost his mind? He seemed well enough to Black, if a bit careworn and somewhat distant, but Black knew in his gut that Bren had lied to his father. He had seen his mother—or, at least, believed that he had. Black had thought of Emily Owen every day since her death . . . what, more than three years ago now? He thought often about the day they met, when she walked into his disheveled little bookstore looking for a book for her son. He was just getting old enough to read, and she wanted something special for him. She had asked Black if he had anything appropriate for children, and Black had responded, “If you mean books that teach them there’s a rich, vibrant world beyond M
ap, then yes.” She had smiled at him when he said that.

  Then she had noticed his chessboard. He explained that he played games by post, and she had wondered if he wouldn’t rather complete a game in less than two years. That began their once-a-week chess matches, on Saturdays.

  She was the loveliest person Black had ever met, and he wanted to know everything about her. He quickly learned more than he wanted to: she was married to David Owen, the mapmaker over at Rand McNally’s. Black had done business with McNally for years, selling him antiquarian maps and books. He had approached McNally with a proposition once—to let Black or Black’s customers buy or commission reproductions of historic maps that would be sold through Black’s Books. Historic maps and atlases, even reproductions, were becoming prestige items for the wealthy, it so happened. It was a growing market.

  McNally thought it was a splendid idea, so he stole it. He didn’t need Black’s help finding customers.

  It was David Owen who approached Black, dropping by the bookstore one evening after work. He would make Black his maps and take a percentage of the sales.

  Black was more than six feet tall; David Owen barely five seven. Black had looked down at this unremarkable man, not very well dressed, with the beginnings of a stoop, surprised that he would take such a risk. How would he pull this off? Working at McNally’s after hours without being caught? Or worse, trying to sneak one of McNally’s valuable maps out of the Emporium?

  It turned out this unremarkable man had a remarkable gift. He could take one good look at a map and reproduce it from memory with exacting detail. Black didn’t believe him at first, of course, so he tested him and discovered it was true. More than that, David Owen was an exceptionally fine artist.

  But it was Emily Owen who kept the business relationship going even when Black’s customers dwindled because of the crash of the Dutch tulip market that left so many destitute. Commissioning maps he didn’t need from David Owen was Black’s way of helping her family without them knowing it.

  It was also his way of making sure she had enough money to keep coming to his store.