The Sea of the Dead

by Barry Wolverton

  “What are you looking at, boy?” Scratch called to him one afternoon, when Bren was on deck staring across the bird-dotted marshlands they were cruising through. “Are you looking at my eye?”

  Bren turned to Scratch. Of course he wasn’t! He was clearly staring out into the distance. But now that he was looking at Scratch, of course Bren’s gaze went directly to the pole man’s missing eye. Unlike Mr. Tybert, who never wore an eye patch, Scratch kept a makeshift rag over the empty socket.

  “I wasn’t, really,” Bren protested, but Scratch came closer. He was shorter than Bren, and about as big around as his pole, but he had a ropy strength about him. Bren’s ears began to buzz.

  “Well take a good look then!” said Scratch, putting his face right in front of Bren’s and lifting his eye rag. Bren reflexively shut his eyes to avoid looking at the rubbery webbing of flesh that he remembered so well from Mr. Tybert, but just as quickly, he peeked. And what he saw nearly knocked him over—a bright-blue eye staring back at him.

  “I don’t—” Bren started to say, but Ani appeared on deck.

  “What’s going on?” she said. “Are you in trouble, Bren?” Ani was standing behind Scratch, so she couldn’t see what Bren could. Scratch gently replaced the rag over his eye.

  “We’ll talk later, boy,” he said, and he walked away, seeming to give Ani a wide berth as he went.

  Later that night, Bren followed Scratch from the time he went to the galley for dinner until he reappeared on deck for his evening smoke at the front of the barge. He couldn’t wait for the pole man to go to bed—there was no privacy among the sleeping hammocks—so Bren bided his time until Scratch was more or less alone near the rail. Bren ran to him.

  “Lady Barrett!” he said, throwing his arms around her. Scratch jumped.

  “What the—I ain’t no lady, fool boy!” he said, trying not to attract attention.

  Bren quickly drew back his arms, thankful the moon wasn’t bright enough to show how red his face was. “But . . . but I thought . . .”

  “Thought I was a lady?” said Scratch. “God help me, you couldn’t pay a woman more of an insult!”

  “But then, why are you wearing a disguise?” said Bren.

  Scratch seemed puzzled. “Oh, the eye patch? I just like to startle folks. Works, don’t it?”

  “I guess?” said Bren. “So, you said you wanted to talk to me?”

  Scratch clamped an old, wrinkled hand down on Bren’s shoulder. “I seen you come aboard with Princess Dazzle and that girl.”

  “Ani,” said Bren.

  “Whatever,” said Scratch. “Whole thing looked strange to me, so I been keepin’ an eye on you.”

  “And?”

  “And the princess don’t seem to be bothering you. Quite the contrary. You’re more like her little pet.”

  Bren frowned. “Well, not exactly.”

  “Now that Ani, she’s a different story.”

  “What do you mean?” said Bren, growing cold in the night air.

  “Those eyes!” said Scratch, pointing for some reason at his covered eye instead of the “good” one. “No man or woman has eyes like that!”

  “I’m sure there’s some explanation,” said Bren. “I had a friend once, a surgeon on the ship I was on—”

  “I’ve got an explanation, all right,” said Scratch. He looked around as if to make sure Ani wasn’t spying on them. “I worked in India for two years, hired on as one of the men who keeps the crocs at bay in the Ganges when they have religious ceremonies and whatnot. Anyway, I picked up a bit of the culture there . . . the superstitions, if you will.”

  “And?” said Bren, growing impatient.

  “That girl is a bhootbilli!”

  “A what?”

  Scratch looked around again. It was all getting a bit theatrical. “What the Indians call a ghost cat!”

  “I’ve been traveling with her for more than a month,” said Bren. “She definitely has some strange qualities, and she may be dangerous, but I don’t think she’s a ghost. Or a cat.”

  Scratch drew back his hand and stood up stiffly—a man whose wisdom had been rebuffed by a mere boy. “Suit yourself. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  When they reached the head of the Volga, they traveled by land to the Slavic Republic of Novgorod, where Bren followed Shveta and Ani, Aadesh, and Aadarsh along cobbled streets past towering spires and onion domes topped with crosses. The market here was the final destination for most of the caviar their barge had been carrying, and men in large fur hats and fur-lined robes eagerly purchased it all.

  They were still almost a thousand miles from Murmansk, where Shveta planned to find a ship willing to take them on their insane quest for the North Pole. Bren had no idea how she would convince any captain to do something so foolhardy, but he suspected she would come up with a convincing argument.

  If only he could convince Shveta that he wasn’t special. That she didn’t need him. He had never wanted to be less special in his life.

  Their first night in Novgorod, they stayed in a small inn, and Ani and Bren shared a room. When the lights went out, he thought back to all the conversations he used to have with Mouse when they shared their tiny room in the caboose of the Albatross. It had been in that room where she told Bren her life story, as she knew it. And it had been in another dark room, aboard the Fortune, where she had told Bren she never liked the name Mouse, and told him how much it meant for her to find out who she really was.

  Something about the complete darkness made it feel safe to share your secrets.

  “Ani, do you understand what Shveta is doing?” said Bren, gently probing the darkness to see if Ani would open up. “Does she understand that sailing that far north is suicide?”

  “Shveta can do anything,” Ani replied tartly. “It is her destiny to rule.”

  “And what will your role be when she’s in charge?” said Bren.

  “Be quiet and go to sleep.”

  “But why does she need me?” Bren pressed. “I offered to give her the mandala. She knows more about it than I do. I can’t help you.”

  “If Shveta wants you, you’re coming,” said Ani. Bren was about to speak again, just to annoy her, but she unexpectedly kept going. “What’s the big rush to get home, anyway? All you wanted was to get away. Now all you want is to go back. Did it ever occur to you that going home isn’t going to solve anything? There life wasn’t what you wanted. Out here life hasn’t been what you expected. Tough cola nuts! Back home you’ll be just where you were, miserable and powerless. Shveta is giving you—giving all of us—a chance to claim power that could make things different for once. The problem isn’t with life. Life is what it is. The problem is with you.”

  “At least I wouldn’t be freezing to death back home,” said Bren, somewhat petulantly, but he turned over in his cot with a loud squeak, signaling to Ani that he was done talking. What more could he say? After all, she was right.

  When the little boat pulled into port on the south shore of the Caspian Sea, its small crew disembarked, while its three passengers stayed behind. They had no choice—they were bound by ropes near the stern.

  “Are they really just going to leave us here?” said David Owen, whose head was still swimming with nausea from being seasick again.

  “I don’t care anymore,” said Black, who was even worse off than David.

  “Aye, sit here then,” said Sean. “I aim to get off this tub and go find Bren.”

  They heard footsteps, someone coming back onto the ship. It was their captain, Vlad.

  “Not much for sailing, are you?” he said in a thick Russian accent.

  “The future queen of India said we were going to Persia,” said Sean. “She didn’t pay you to leave us tied up here.”

  “And so I won’t,” said Vlad. “But you’ll be going with someone else. I have secured passage for you with another traveler. Now you can go.”

  He cut their ropes and then kept the knife raised to make sure no one tried anyth
ing. He led them down the gangplank and across the harbor to a small wagon that looked as if it could barely keep its wheels on, much less carry the weight of three men.

  “Meet Sven,” said Vlad. “Sven is a Swede. He is taking feesh oil to Baghdad.”

  David had assumed all Swedes were giants, but Sven was a slightly built man with a walrus mustache that covered half his face. A jaunty blue hat covered the other half.

  “All aboard!” said Sven, in an almost comically singsong Swedish accent. He helped the two sick passengers into the back, and to Sean he said, “You sit up front with me, Red.” And so Sean rode on the stage with their new companion.

  Sven whipped their single mule into action, and off they went. Sean could hear the groans of Black and David from the back, as the rutted road did nothing to calm their nausea. For Sean’s part, he was trying to plan the perfect time to ditch the Swede so he could begin his pursuit of Bren. Black and David would have to be recovered enough for him to leave them, for starters.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Sven.

  “You do?” said Sean.

  “I do, and I’m going to need you to stop thinking it.”

  Sean stared at the Swede, wondering what was going on. Sven stared back, before slowly pulling the huge blond mustache off his face. Sean nearly fell off the wagon.

  “I thought . . . Shveta said . . .”

  “They did try to kill me,” said Lady Barrett. “But I dodged them. I doubt the two goons will admit it to the Queen of Sheba. Now, as for your plans to rescue Bren—”

  “Don’t try to talk me out of it,” said Sean.

  Lady Barrett smiled. “I know how badly you want to save him, but I’m the man for the job. Those two back there really need someone to make sure they get back to Britannia. It will probably require hiring out a boat. They’ll need you.”

  Sean tried to protest, but Lady Barrett wouldn’t hear him out. All she said was, “Don’t make me hurt you, Red.”

  CHAPTER

  19

  MURMANSK

  Though in the weeks and months to come Bren would long for the relative warmth of Murmansk, he felt at the time that it was the coldest place he’d ever been. There was a wind coming in off the Murman Sea to the north that fought their every step to the tavern. A hundred angry faces turned their way when they opened the tavern door, wondering who had let the outside in.

  “Hurry,” said Shveta as Aadesh struggled to shut the door against the howling wind. When he finally did, and everyone had turned back to their drink, Shveta scanned the room, her gaze landing on a darkened corner where you could just make out the figure of a man drinking alone. “Come on,” she said.

  Bren and Ani followed Shveta to the small table and sat on either side of her, facing a short but stocky man, European by the looks of him. Aadesh and Aadarsh stood behind them.

  “Do you speak Dutch?” the man asked in Dutch. So he was a Netherlander. When Shveta shook her head, he asked, “English?”

  “Yep,” she replied.

  He looked her over, his eyes taking in her reddish-brown skin. “You’re a bit out of your element, aren’t you?”

  Shveta cocked her head a little. “Just sunburned. Why, I’m as fair-skinned as you, Captain Tromp.”

  The man laughed, opening his mouth wide and revealing two rows of teeth so filthy they looked like toadstools. His face was stubbled with a greasy beard, and his hair reminded Bren of a mangy spaniel he had secretly fed once outside his father’s house. How different from Admiral Bowman, thought Bren, remembering how surprisingly dashing the Dutch admiral had looked, despite years at sea. Almost unnaturally dashing. But then again, maybe that should have been a clue that the admiral was no ordinary man.

  “So why, pray tell, do you want to sign on with a rig sailing into the Arctic?” said Tromp.

  “We want you to take us to the North Pole,” said Shveta.

  Tromp belted out another laugh. His breath reeked. “The North Pole? Oh well, you don’t need me for that. The Laplanders have a reindeer taxi that carts people to see ol’ Sinterklaas!”

  He took another swig of his drink. Shveta wasn’t amused.

  “You’ve sailed north many times. You’re going that way next spring.”

  “To find the last damn fool that went too far north,” said Tromp, growing serious. “And I’ll be rewarded handsomely if I find him.”

  “As handsomely as if you were the first man to reach the North Pole?” said Shveta. “You’d go down in history.”

  “More likely, I’d go down with my ship, into an icy grave.”

  “Where’s your courage, man?” said Shveta. “I thought Netherlanders were the greatest sailors, the most fearless explorers on earth?”

  Tromp glared at her. Bren couldn’t tell if Shveta’s tactic was working or not, and she must have felt the same way, for she quickly added, “I can reward you handsomely on the front end, if that’s what you want.”

  “I can’t spend Indian money in Amsterdam.”

  Shveta unfastened the ruby from her forehead and set it on the table. She then reached inside the fur coat she was wearing and pulled a heavily jeweled necklace and set it down, too. She held up both arms and rattled the gold and silver bangles like castanets.

  Tromp finished his beer and looked at the table. He touched the ruby and the necklace in turn, saying, “Bring me ten more of these and five more of these and you have a deal. You can keep the bracelets. They don’t flatter my hairy arms.”

  He burst out laughing again as Shveta leaned back, withdrawing the jewelry from the table. She stood up and motioned for Bren and Ani to do the same. “See you soon, bub.”

  Bren and company traveled back to the Novgorod Republic, moving around from place to place for the next six months. In the beginning, Bren secretly nursed the hope that his father and Mr. Black, led by Lady Barrett and Sean, would come rescue him. He knew what Shveta had told him, but still. Given what they had put themselves through trying to find Bren the first time, would they really just go back to Map and wait?

  But as the days and weeks and then months passed, Bren gave up hope. No one was coming for him. At first he wallowed in self-pity, believing perhaps they had chosen not to come after him. Then it occurred to him that there was a far more logical reason: they couldn’t. After all, there was no guarantee that just because they made it to Baghdad, they would make it safely to Britannia. They would still have been a long way from home. And maybe Shveta had lied to him about leaving his family and friends alive.

  He would never know for sure unless he escaped, or unless he made it back from the Arctic alive. Whenever the slimmest opportunity to run presented itself, Ani or Shveta or the bodyguard brothers seemed to appear, uncannily. Shveta would never let it happen. So what were the chances he might actually survive her quest?

  He had seen Shveta demonstrate her powers. Scratch had insisted that Ani possessed powers, too. Bren hadn’t seen her become a ghost cat, or whatever it was the pole man was claiming, though he didn’t doubt Ani was special in some way.

  But was he special, too, in the way Shveta believed? Could he really be one of these keepers of lost knowledge? If there really was a Well of Wisdom and lost magic that could be recovered, maybe Bren really could change things. At the very least, he might find answers, about Mouse and his mother, and even himself. About what he was meant to do in life, and why.

  And so Bren sustained himself on this, and passed the time writing in his journal, playing chess with Aadesh, and practicing weapons with Ani, who finally let him try throwing the chakram rings and darts and using the two-sided dagger. She also showed him how to position his feet properly to use the katar. You punched with it, like it was an extension of your fist. The band-blade she wore as a belt she wouldn’t even let him touch, for fear he’d cut off all his fingers.

  As for the chess, Bren had been forced into it by Aadesh, who was tired of playing with his brother. Mr. Black had tried to get Bren to play, claiming his scanda
lous memory would give him a huge advantage, but he never had any interest. Now, though, with little choice, he discovered Mr. Black was right. He and Aadesh would begin a game, and at different points Bren would recognize positions he had seen at Black’s Books when his friend was playing one of his postal games or just practicing against himself. Without really understanding the strategy, Bren could still make an effective move, which drove Aadesh crazy. When Bren started to get the game, he became even more formidable, and after a month he finally played Aadesh to a draw, and beat him outright soon after. The look of glee on Aadarsh’s face seeing his brother lose was priceless.

  Finally, in the spring of 1601, they traveled back to Murmansk. Bren half expected Tromp to renege, or to not be there because he was dead, but there he was, sitting in the same place in the same tavern as if he had never left. He laughed when he saw Shveta again, and Bren could have sworn he had lost a couple more teeth.

  The only change to their bargain was, Tromp wasn’t leaving until June. It had been an exceptionally cold winter, which meant the seasonal pack ice in the Arctic would be slower in thawing.

  “I don’t want to wait,” he said. “I hate this place, and leaving later increases the risk we won’t finish the job before the packs start to refreeze. But there’s no way around it.”

  Because of this, they spent another two months waiting, this time in Murmansk. It felt as cold to Bren in May as it had in November, even though Shveta had bought all of them luxurious furs. Aadesh and Aadarsh were so large they looked like bears in theirs.

  Bren wondered how he could survive the cold, survive another Dutch ship, the Arctic, another mad, mythical quest by a charismatic leader with an undying obsession. And then he found another thread of hope, in a most unlikely place—a water closet.

  He normally never left his fur-covered cot in the bed-house where they were living, but one night his bladder got the best of him. He scampered down the frigid hallway to the closet, did his business, and when he opened the door he nearly knocked over another guest who was standing right outside.