The Sea of the Dead

by Barry Wolverton

  Tromp barked a laugh. “What sort of witchery are you getting at?”

  “I thought you wanted to know how to acquire my power,” said Shveta. “This is how. Besides, I’m hungry.”

  Tromp turned to Nindemann, as well as the others with him. Bren knew exactly what he was thinking. He was planning to kill Shveta. It didn’t matter if she was conning him. He had the upper hand.

  Except he didn’t, and Bren knew it. He just didn’t know what Shveta had in mind.

  The ship’s cook came down to the hold, and with the help of six other men, he turned the bear on its back and slit open its belly. He removed the heart, the liver, the kidneys, the stomach, and the pancreas. Tromp wanted to eat the brain, too, but Shveta assured him it wasn’t the bear’s intellect he was after.

  “Boil the organs, and let us know when soup’s on,” said Shveta. “We’re just fine right here.”

  “Cook them?” said Tromp. “You should eat them raw!”

  “Only if you want to make yourself sick,” said Shveta.

  They gathered two hours later in the officers’ saloon, where the cook had prepared three large platters of organ meat. Tromp, Nindemann, Bren, Shveta and Ani, Aadesh and Aadarsh, the first mate, and the navigator all sat around the stained wooden table.

  “There must have been men who’ve eaten polar bear meat before,” said Tromp. “Don’t recall hearing of any Arctic explorers with supernatural powers.”

  “Maybe they didn’t eat the organs,” said Shveta. “They are an acquired taste.”

  Tromp picked up his fork and knife, then pushed his plate across the table to Shveta. “You go ahead. I want to see how you like it.”

  Shveta smiled. “You don’t really think I’m dumb enough to believe I could poison you so obviously.”

  “I do,” said Tromp. “The obvious part is the trick of it. Now go ahead, eat up.”

  Shveta glanced at Ani and Bren, then carefully cut a piece of pancreas and placed it in her mouth. She chewed slowly, seeming to savor the bite. Tromp made all of them try some, except his officers, and when it was Bren’s turn, he got to try the liver. Despite growing up in Map, with the worst cooking in the world, he decided he had never tasted anything so foul. The liver tasted like metal, with the aftertaste of medicine. The texture was horrible, too, somehow slimy and chalky at the same time.

  Tromp sat there, his knife and fork propped in each hand, watching them eat. This went on for twenty minutes before Nindemann said, “I don’t think the food is poisoned, Captain.”

  Tromp snorted. “I guess not. Perhaps you are on the level, Queen Shveta.” He laughed as he overemphasized the word queen, and Bren could see the murderous look in Shveta’s eyes. But the look softened a bit when Tromp began to eat. He dug into his organ meat with gusto, polishing off an entire kidney by himself, wolfing down half a pancreas, and then cutting long strips of liver, which hung from his lips like wriggling worms before he slurped them down. Bren wondered if Shveta’s plan was to disable Tromp by way of a powerful stomachache.

  “Here, finish the liver, Mr. Hein. It’s delicious,” said Tromp as he leaned back from the table, rubbed his belly, and let out a disgusting, loud belch. Then he stood up, raised his arms and curled his fingers like claws, and let out a great animal roar, which quickly morphed into laughter.

  “I better wake up with white fur on my chest, Your Highness,” he said, then barged out of the saloon like a drunk.

  After Mr. Hein had polished off the remaining liver, he and the other officers followed, except for Nindemann, who sat there, looking at Shveta, Ani, and Bren in turn before finally standing and walking out of the saloon without saying anything.

  “What’s the plan?” Bren asked.

  “You’re about to get very sick,” said Shveta.

  “You . . . you poisoned me?”

  “I poisoned all of us,” said Shveta. “Polar bear liver is toxic. But we’ll be the only ones to survive it.”

  Ani pulled out another vial of crushed powder. This one was green. She stirred it up in their water cups and ordered Bren to drink.

  “This will keep us from getting sick?”

  “Oh no,” said Ani. “We’re going to start puking like volcanoes before the night is over.”

  “How did you know all this?” said Bren.

  “My father was a physician,” said Shveta. “One of his patients ran the zoological park in Jammu. When animals died he would let my father poke around. He was also an amateur apothecary . . . it was useful to him to be able to grind his own medicines. I still have his notebooks, and Ani is fond of reading.”

  Sometime around three bells, Bren rushed to the head—a chute at the back of the ship that emptied into the ocean—and threw up so violently that he was sure his own liver and at least a couple of other organs had been ejected from his body. The only consolation was that he didn’t have to clean it up.

  He was so weak he barely made it back to his cabin. When it came time for the seven a.m. watch—the one Tromp always commanded—the captain was nowhere to be seen. Bren had no idea if Tromp had given the order to turn back or not, but either way they had a difficult task ahead of them. They had to break through the pack ice and find a way out.

  The icebreakers went to work, this time with Nindemann watching them from the bow of the ship. He had jerry-rigged a device to hold the ship in place to prevent the ghastly consequences of the ship slipping forward into open cracks. Bren, braving the cold, sneaked onto the forecastle and stood by his side, watching with him.

  “Is Captain Tromp sick?” Bren finally asked.

  Without looking at him, Nindemann replied, “Would that surprise you?”

  Bren didn’t know how to take this response. “I just . . . I mean, I was throwing up all night. I guess my stomach isn’t used to organ meat.”

  “No one’s stomach is used to poison,” said Nindemann, and this time he turned and looked Bren squarely in the eye. Bren felt himself getting sick again. “You found out he was going to abandon you and kill the others, didn’t you?”

  Bren nodded. Nindemann turned back toward the icebreakers.

  “You may have saved me the trouble,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?” said Bren.

  “The trouble of killing Tromp myself,” said Nindemann. “I’m not a murderer; I am an explorer. And ever since you showed me this map of the Pole, getting there is all I can think about. I wasn’t about to let Tromp stop us.”

  “Oh,” said Bren.

  Nindemann took off his furs and leaned against the gunwale with both arms, now wearing just his grey company shirt, which was heavily soiled and threadbare in places, especially the sleeves, where the engineer’s massive shoulders had nearly rubbed through the fabric. “Look at my right arm,” he said.

  And that’s when Bren noticed it, scarcely visible through the translucent threads—a black V, bracketed by a smaller Z and T, and cupping a small black tulip.

  CHAPTER

  24

  TRAPPED

  “You’re in the Order of the Black Tulip?” cried Bren, before realizing how loudly he’d spoken. Nindemann cringed; they both looked around, but no other crewman was close enough to hear them.

  “I am,” said Nindemann. “And your friend, Reynard Bowman, wasn’t. Not when you sailed with him.”

  “He wasn’t my friend,” said Bren. “But I thought there was no Order anymore.”

  “He tell you that?”

  Bren nodded, embarrassed even now to learn one more thing about the admiral he had been foolish enough to believe.

  “I guess maybe that was only a half lie,” said Nindemann. “There was more than one Order once, both claiming to be real. I like to think I believe in the true mission, to believe anything is possible.”

  “How many are in the Order now?” said Bren. “Are there more on this ship?”

  Nindemann barked a few orders down to his icebreakers before answering. “That’s a secret, jongen. Because of the split, most men don’t
even get the tattoo anymore. Or they hide it, like I do.”

  “So what is it you believe is up there?” said Bren. “The North Pole, I mean.”

  “I’m not sure,” said Nindemann. “I’ve heard rumors, stories. I remember the man’s claim to have found a warm-water paradise. I just know that no man has ever made it that far, and many think it can’t be done. I say we find out.” He shrugged his furs back on. “I’m sure the Indian woman is looking for something besides warm weather. Nor does she seem like the adventurous type. What does she think we’re going to find?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” said Bren, trying to imagine explaining the Well of Wisdom and Lost Words of Magic to the engineer. And the fact that Bren himself was nursing the hope that she was right.

  “Wouldn’t I?” said Nindemann, but when Bren was unable to find an answer, he half smiled. “It doesn’t matter. Like I said, I want to find out, whatever it is. Whatever the cost.”

  “I feel the same way,” Bren mumbled, but when the engineer gave him a puzzled look, Bren said, “I’ve made a fake navigation chart. It was Shveta’s idea when she learned of Tromp’s plan. The idea was to eliminate him and have the navigator go by what he thought were Tromp’s orders.”

  “Mr. Hein will still be a problem,” said Nindemann. “But I can deal with him. Slip the chart under my cabin door tonight.”

  Bren went to find Shveta and Ani to tell them they had an ally. He was halfway belowdecks when he realized he was practically running. He was excited. The sensation stunned him, unexpected as it was. Here he was, on this horrible ship in the most unforgiving climate he’d ever experienced. He had been brought to the brink of departure against his will, taken from his father and Mr. Black just when it seemed he would finally get to go home.

  So what was this? He had willingly boarded the Sea Lion, but this was something different. Belief.

  Somewhere along the way, he had come to believe that the part of him that yearned for adventure, to be an explorer, was childish. Shveta and Ani had sparked something. And here was Nindemann, the engineer, the problem solver, the practical man, admitting that he believed anything was possible. He was upholding an ideal that Bren still badly wanted to cherish.

  Tromp didn’t die, not right away, but he was so sick he couldn’t leave his bed. Mr. Hein, despite having a smaller portion of the liver, had become violently ill, too. Nindemann, in charge with Tromp and Hein debilitated, would set their course for the Pole, if they could ever get free of the ice.

  The icebreakers did their work tirelessly for seven days and nights, slowly but surely carving space for the Sea Lion to push through the floes. But each time the ship filled the space where ice had been, the packs shifted and regrouped, pressing in on them from all sides. If it had been a trap, it would have been a brilliant one. There was no turning back, but the way forward might be a prison.

  It took them three weeks to sail clear of the islands of the barbarians. It was now August. Bren, having spent months on the Albatross, knew that life on a ship was a hard one. But at least sailing from Britannia to Asia there had been periods of relief—tropical waters, relatively easy days of clear sailing, and an end in sight. They knew where they were headed, and could look forward to the comfort of reaching ports like Cape Colony and Bantam. But on the Sea Lion there was no relief, ever. The unbearable cold became colder, the brutal work and conditions even more brutal.

  He also remembered how frightened he had been at first by the strange noises on the Albatross. No sailor’s account can really prepare you for living in the bowels of a ship, trying to sleep while the planks and boards moan and the rats scrape and scurry with such abandon that it feels like they’re inside your skull.

  The Sea Lion was no different, but in addition to all the sounds of the ship there were the sounds of the ice. The grinding when floes rubbed across one another. Cracking that sounded like rifle shots. And when an iceberg calved, sending a mountainous chunk plunging into the sea with concussive force, it sounded to Bren like the world was ending.

  Nindemann was used to the noises; what he was worried about was the ship itself. So congested was the pack ice that the Sea Lion was often pinched at its sides, warping the hull and the decks. The boards would become so separated that the black tar used to waterproof the ship would ooze forth, and the caulkers and joiners worked nonstop to reseal the ship once it had become unpinched and sighed back into shape.

  But they could not work fast enough to keep the water out. The slush seeped in, filling the bilge and sloshing into the hold. It was critical for them to keep their food stores and other supplies dry; they had no alternatives, other than what they could hunt, and it might be months before they returned to inhabited lands.

  Nindemann had built a sump pump able to handle the weight of icy water, but it was a constant struggle and required constant manpower. Men were forced to stand waist-deep in sub-freezing water, bailing and pumping. And Nindemann was right there with them, as were Aadesh and Aadarsh, who won the respect of the crew for their efforts. All three could work the pump for hours at a time, never seeming to tire. But Bren knew better, because at morning and evening meals he could see how hollow their eyes were, how they were so weary it was a struggle for them to lift their spoons or cups.

  The crew was now so afraid of Shveta and Ani that they didn’t even want to see them, which was fine by them. They spent hours at a time in their cabin, meditating, and it finally dawned on Bren that they were practicing magic. Natural magic, what little of it they knew. Before they had poisoned Tromp, Bren had asked Shveta why she didn’t just rain snakes down on him.

  “That was just an illusion, a shadow of the full spell,” she had explained. “I need the Lost Words to master my full powers, the kind that can take down an empire.”

  An illusion, a shadow . . . Mouse had said similar things on the mountain in China, when she was trying to explain the power of their stones and the artifacts. When she was trying in vain to convince him not to open the Dragon’s Gate. Given what had happened since—his stone and Lady Barrett’s sword now useless—had Mouse been wrong? Or had Bren’s mother, in changing his mind, prevented real catastrophe?

  Bren had too much time to think about such things, because there was so little he could do to help the crew. Finally, seeing Nindemann and the rest down in the bottom of the ship, freezing and yet sweating from exertion, delirious from lack of sleep, was too much. Bren pleaded with the cook on their behalf—rations were tight, but he convinced the cook to let him concoct a sort of paste from lard, beef trimmings, and soup stock to help the men keep up their energy. It was a trick Bren had learned from Beatrice, of all people, back at the Gooey Duck in Map, when the pub had been forced to scrape meals together out of next to nothing.

  “What is this gruel?” said Nindemann, when he smelled what Bren had brought him.

  “Food,” said Bren. “Maybe sustenance is a better word. I know it’s not bear chops and peas, but it’s all we could manage in order to give you and your men extra portions without making a dent in the rations.”

  “This was your doing?” said Nindemann.

  “I wanted to help,” said Bren. “I’m sorry if it’s gross.”

  Nindemann smiled, even though just lifting up the corners of his mouth seemed like a struggle. “You’re a good jongen, Bren.”

  Bren smiled, dipped one finger into the paste, and touched a small amount to his tongue. He grimaced. “You may change your mind after you try this.”

  Nindemann grabbed his shoulder with affection and then scooped up a mouthful of the foul stuff with his first two fingers. The look on his face suggested he had just had the best meal of his life.

  “The men will appreciate this,” he said. “Thank you. And thank Cook.”

  “I will,” said Bren, who turned to go back above. But he noticed something he had overlooked on his previous trips to the hold—a large sheet of canvas, the size of a mainsail, draped over a cylinder-shaped object that st
retched a third of the length of the ship. It was common for supplies to be covered by tarp, but the shape of whatever lay beneath looked like neither crates nor barrels.

  Nindemann, noticing Bren’s curiosity, took his men the food and came back. “Wondering about that, I see?”

  Bren had just been about to lift a corner of the canvas when the engineer caught him off guard. The water had been pumped out, for now, and more repairs were being made to the joints. Nindemann could rest. He grabbed the canvas and pulled it back, revealing what looked like the great bulbous nose of a wooden whale. He pulled the canvas back farther to show Bren not fins, but oars, a row of six on each side that appeared to grow straight from the middle of the round body.

  “It’s an onderzeeer,” said Nindemann.

  “It goes under the water?” said Bren, who’d never heard anything crazier. “How do you keep from drowning?” Even as he asked, he was running the palm of his hand along the surprisingly smooth sides of the curved hull. The seams were so solid they seemed more like decoration. He examined one of the oarlocks more closely. Surely there was no way to keep water from leaking in there.

  “There’s a rubber collar there,” said Nindemann. “Flexible, but it stays with the oar as it moves. The collar itself is fixed to the inside of the hull with pitch.”

  “What about the hull?” Bren asked, again marveling at how seamlessly the boards came together.

  “Pitch on the inside, just like a ship,” said Nindemann. “But I sealed the exterior with beeswax, then varnished the entire hull with sap from the lacquer tree.”

  “You designed this yourself?”

  Nindemann allowed himself a smile.

  “Have you tried it?” said Bren.

  “Only in the Amstel River, to impress King Max enough to bankroll this prototype. Lacquer sap is like liquid gold.”

  Bren studied the size of the vessel. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be inside, no natural light or air, under the sea. And here in the Arctic, under masses of ice as well. Plus there didn’t seem to be any way to see out of it, or navigate.