“Burning yellow, skipper! Hard on the port beam. A fixed light!”
“Mr. Mate, come about, thus,” Feldman said, and pointed. “We’ll close her. Keep the soundings coming. And have the crew stand to; it might be wreckers.”
The watch below had come on deck at the call, their feet wet from the water sloshing beneath their hammocks, and there was a little crowding and the sound of the Bosun’s voice cursing and the thump of a bare foot on a backside as the lines were trimmed and the ship’s head came slowly about to the northeast.
“Bottom!” the leadsman cried, her voice cracking. “Bottom at thirty fathom!”
“What bottom?” Feldman called, and there was a delay as the sailor examined the soft tallow on the bottom of the cone-shaped lead by the light of a shuttered lamp.
“Shell and coral sand, skipper!”
Another spell of silence, and then a gust of wind and they all saw the light, a low yellow flicker ahead. Feldman looked up at the sails, where they disappeared into the darkness and the fog.
“Wind’s quickening,” he said, as if speaking to himself. “And it’s on the port quarter; morning wind, from the land. It’ll shift this fog soon enough and the sun will burn off what’s left.”
“By the mark . . . twenty-six! Twenty-six fathom even!”
Then they all saw it, a steady yellow spot on the horizon. The mist closed in again, parted again, as they crept forward. Their progress was a faint chuckle of bow-wave under the schooner’s sharp prow.
“By the mark . . . ten fathoms! By the mark . . . eight! Shelving!”
“What bottom?”
“Sharp sand and coral rag, skipper!”
“Back topsails,” Feldman said. “Starboard your helm. Mr. Mate, anchor when she’s stopped. We’ll wait for dawn. The reefs do grow fast around here.”
The Tarshish Queen’s head came into the gentle wind from the northeast and she slowed to a halt. The forward anchor went in with a rumble and splash.
“She holds, skipper!”
“Strike all sail,” Feldman said. “Now we’ll wait.”
They did, and the world turned from shades of black and gray to pale gray and white; then the mist began to lift in earnest.
“Mr. Mate, tell the hands off for breakfast,” Feldman said; unspoken was the thought that it might well be their last meal if they didn’t find a good place to careen. “And then double the stays, preventers fore and aft. We may be trying the masts hard soon, and the mizzen’s already wounded. Pull them taut, if you will.”
“Aye aye, Cap’n.”
Thump . . . thump . . . thump went the pumps, and the water jetted. Gangs of sailors went aloft with heavy cables over their shoulders, like the legs of a long narrow climbing centipede. John split his attention between them—it was always fascinating watching experts do something difficult—and the sights to northward as the mist burned away and the sun came up.
The eastern horizon flashed green as the burning arch cleared the horizon, with crimson the color of molten copper on the fringe of clouds. The stars showed as the mist cleared and then were gone in the greater light, fading away to a few scattered in the midnight blue of the western horizon for a moment. Ruan’s young voice rose from the bows as he greeted the sun with the Dawn Chant.
Even after weeks in these waters, John was still rapt for a moment.
“Dawns like thunder,” Feldman said softly, with the air of a man quoting.
Deor smiled and spoke:
“Between the pedestals of Night and Morning
Between red Death, and radiant Desire
With not one sound of triumph or of warning
Stands the great sentry on the Bridge of Fire . . .”
The Captain nodded and they shared a smile, as old friends do over a common memory.
“I loaned you that volume, a long time ago,” he said, and turned his telescope northward. “While you and Thora were staying in Newport that first time, at my father’s house.
“There’s the light,” he went on to John. “See, on the headland of that sandspit?”
John used his own binoculars. The light was on a small platform atop a tall rickety-looking triangular framework of poles—Deor supplied the word mangroves when he asked what the material was; in Montival the equivalent would probably have been made from two-by-fours of milled timber. As he watched a bucket swung down at the end of a lever and a cap smothered the flame in its glass enclosure.
“Clever,” Feldman said. “A water-clock arrangement. Probably palm-oil for the light, and someone comes by to reset things every evening. All you’d need to do is pour the water in at the top again and fill up the lamp now and then.”
The last of the fog cleared with a rush, and heads all over the ship turned towards the land that was revealed. They were anchored off the western end of it, with a long slope of mountainous forested interior fading off to the eastward in rippled blue-green reaches. Closer to the shore was a white road, running through groves of coconut and other palms, stirring in the breeze coming down from the mountains. John turned his binoculars to the east, and saw the green of tilled fields and what looked like thatched roofs and walls. There was a slight sighing, as the crew knew they weren’t in danger of being cast adrift in small craft far from land. They could reach that shore easily in the ship’s boats. Of course, what lay on it might be just as dangerous as the sea and its dwellers.
“Mr. Mate, we’ll raise the anchor, if you please, and keep course at this distance from the surf-line,” Feldman said. “I don’t like the look of it right inshore. And regular soundings.”
A volley of orders followed, and the long capstan bars were fitted into the drum on the forecastle. John trotted forward and joined them; there weren’t many things he could usefully do on a ship, but pushing hard on a stick was one. Just to add joy to the occasion, the Bosun was looking over the side to see how raising the anchor affected the makeshift sail patch over their leak, which hadn’t been helped at all by the encounter with the giant crocodile.
John braced his palms against the smooth ash surface of the capstan bar; he was barefoot, and he crooked his knees and worked his toes on the holystoned fir planks of the deck to get a firm grip.
“Annnnnnnd . . . heave!” a bosun’s mate cried. “Break her loose, buckos!”
They heaved, putting their weight into it, faces growing contorted and red as they groaned. There was a long moment of strain as the leverage of bars and gears fought against the anchor’s weight and the catch of the wedge-shaped flukes on the rocky sand below. The ship heeled slightly, and pivoted slowly around the rigid bar of the chain. Then it came free and they all lurched forward a step. The mechanism belowdecks gave a single sharp metallic clunk! as the ratchet caught the pawl that prevented it running backward.
“Heave and go! Stamp and go! Heave her ’round and make her go!”
It was still hard work, but not quite such a strain. Thora was beside him, and Ruan, but Deor had hopped up on the drum of the capstan and held a long note before plunging into a song with a strong steady beat, stamping to emphasize it, and those at the capstan with enough breath took it up too:
“It’s a damn tough life full of toil and strife
We sailormen undergo—
And we don’t give a damn when the gale is done
How hard the winds did blow—
We’re homeward bound from the Arctic ground
With a good ship taut and free—
And we won’t give a damn when we drink our dram
With the girls of Old Maui!”
The song came to an end and the labor did, after a remarkable catalogue of what the sailors intended to do with the alcohol, girls, boys and sheep of Maui. They all rested for an instant while the forward anchor was pinned home, and then the capstan bars seemed to vanish as if by magic—his slid through his hands
almost quick enough to burn when someone snatched it away—and a volley of commands came from the quarterdeck:
“Loose heads’ls there! Hands aloft to loose tops’ls, on the fore, on the main! Lively, we haven’t got all day!”
Some of the sailors running up the ratlines and making the rigging thrum like a guitar chuckled grimly at the graveyard humor—they wouldn’t be floating at the end of the day, one way or another, and they all knew it. The staysails at the bow blossomed above their heads and brought the bows around eastward, parallel with the shore.
“Hard a’starboard the wheel! Let fall! Haul away and sheet her home!”
The big gaff mainsails ran up the masts as the windlasses whined, then swung to starboard and cracked taut in long white curves. Now the Tarshish Queen heeled that way too, and the water began to chuckle at her prow as she gained way. The square sails caught with booming sounds and added a little more roll to the pitch.
“Thus, thus, very well, thus! Sheet her home, hands to braces!”
They were sailing at a bit less than right-angles to the wind, easy enough for a schooner, and with the advantage that it slowed the leak by leaning the ship over so that some of the damage was raised a bit above the surface of the waves. From the conversation that passed back and forth he gathered that the pumps were closer to keeping pace . . . but not gaining on the water. The break in the frames was working at the planks further and further from the original round-shot wound, made much worse by the elephantine bulk of the creature that had struck them.
They were a little closer to the shore now, though far enough out to avoid the patches of white where the waves caught on offshore rock or reef. Low combers were breaking in azure and cream on wide white sand beaches, but everything was intensely green beyond, coconut palms and trees he didn’t recognize even from pictures, with patches of forest on higher land or abandoned fields starred with clumps of great vivid flowers, red or white or blue. Birds even gaudier flew upward now and then in clumps, strange creatures with huge beaks or trailing tailfeathers bright as a hummingbird’s breast.
Beyond was a stretch of rice fields covering about half the flat ground, paddies separated into rectangles by the bunds that controlled the water and spotted with low bits in reeds and swampy bushes and higher areas covered with trees. The tall stalks of the rice were still vividly green, but here and there a tawny streak showed that the heads of grain would turn dry and golden soon. Now and then he saw a windmill, different in detail and made of laminated bamboo from the great feathery clumps that served for woodlots, but doing the same work he was accustomed to. He walked slowly back to the quarterdeck. Captain Feldman was examining the shore himself with his telescope, and speaking to Deor and Thora—who’d also sailed in these waters. Ruan was there, looking on with fascination.
“A lot of that land was abandoned, and then some of it’s been reclaimed lately,” John said.
“You’re right,” Feldman replied. A moment later: “More of it under the plow as we move east. That’s where the resettlement started.”
“My great-grandfather’s parents came from hereabouts,” Ruan said.
John looked at him with surprise. “I thought he was from China?”
“No and yes, so to say,” he said; his green-hazel eyes sparkled, and the sun had put reddish highlights in the long black hair that fell down his back in a queue bound with an old bowstring.
“You’re a Mackenzie for certain!” Deor said. “Paradox on contradiction!” To the others: “Get him to explain.”
“That from a bard?” John said with a smile.
Ruan turned to John: “It’s simple, so it is, Prince: my great-grandfather’s ancestors were from China, and they always thought of themselves as Han, but their families had moved to these southern isles long ago. Then he and his wife fled some great upheaval or war here, a generation before the Change, and my grandfather was born near Astoria. When he was of a man’s years he married a woman of the Gael, which displeased his kin, so my grandparents moved to Eugene, where my father was born, and his sisters. After the old world fell things went hard for all of them, but they joined the Clan the next year. There’s not much else in my father’s stories—his mother and father died in the second Change year, and he was fostered when he was only five. That story and our midname Chu was all of the tale we had.”
He turned eagerly to his lover. “Now you can show me the wonders you told of, and we can see them together!”
Deor smiled and put an arm around his shoulders. “See how the houses are mostly inside compounds?” he said, pointing. “And how the compounds all face the same direction? That’s how the folk of Bali build their homes; they’re called karang, and many generations of a family may have houses within.”
John focused his glasses. Apart from the smallest and simplest thatched huts the houses of the dwellers—presumably mostly peasants—were indeed within walled enclosures, grouped into long rectangular villages, always with mixed orchards and leafy gardens around them. All were neatly aligned towards a mountain he could see very faintly on the horizon to the northeast.
“And those little buildings in front of the gateways?” Ruan asked, borrowing the glasses for a moment.
“Shrines, where offerings are made to the wights. The entrance is always narrow—it’s called an angkul-angku. Within is a wall facing the gate, to bar hostile spirits.”
“Sure, and it would be useful for those of human kind entering with ill intent,” Ruan observed shrewdly. “Like a Dun in little.”
Thora laughed and clapped him on the back. “Wit as well as looks, youngster,” she said. “I thought exactly the same the first time I saw them. The compounds can be forts at need. Put a few score together and the whole village is a fort.”
“Indeed,” Deor said. “But to the dwellers they’re the universe writ small, as the human body is. The head for goodness, the feet for evil, and the middle the mixed ream of human kind.”
The walls and the sides of the buildings within were of some thick-looking substance brightly whitewashed; possibly plastered mud-brick, or rammed earth, or compacted coral rag limestone, topped with curved tile. Each compound had a single gateway flanked by pillars, its ornament and size varying with those of the compound as a whole. The roofs that showed over the walls were steep-pitched in their upper sections and then hipped out below, sometimes of clay tile, sometimes of golden thatch or a darker coarse-looking material. It was just too far away to see details of the people except for the odd fisherman casting nets at the water’s edge, though there were plenty about, and now and then an outrigger canoe or double-hulled vessel with an inverted pyramid for a sail kept its distance.
“They know we’re here,” John said.
He thought some of the horsemen on the road were cantering along and matching the ship’s passage, and doubtless others had galloped ahead to bear the news. When they got a bit closer he could see that many other folk were stopping and pointing. Here and there a spearhead twinkled.
“It has a Balinese look, right enough,” the Captain said. “I’ve done good business in Bali, though they’re not the most welcoming of folk until you’ve proven yourself honest.”
John frowned. He’d studied the geography of this part of the world, albeit briefly.
“We’re a long way from Bali, aren’t we?” he asked.
“About a thousand miles, but that’s not all that far in sailing terms. Four to twelve days, with reasonable winds,” Feldman said. “Plenty of places to stop for water along the way, too.”
“Even so, what would they be doing here?”
The three experienced voyagers in their thirties looked at each other. Deor was the one who spoke; he was the maker of tales, after all, the wordsmith.
“There was war in Bali after the Change.”
John shrugged mentally; there had been war nearly everywhere, after the Change. Ranging from mino
r, structured conflicts more like rough peace-officer work to frenzied mass many-million-fold struggles of all against all as the doomed death-zones perished in fire and blood, famine and plague.
And everything in between.
It was a time of legends to him, of villains and heroes and giants, the saviors of peoples and the builders of nations. And of fell, stark warlords carving out realms at the edge of the sword. Who was which often depended on where the question was asked, or in his case how they felt about his respective grandfathers.
Deor went on: “First there was war against the . . . outsiders there. The Javanese, mostly—Java was the ruling part of a great empire of these islands then, its people the masters overall, and some of them had settled on Bali to enforce their rule; about one in ten of the total or a little more. The Javanese had different Gods and customs, and neither much liked the other. Also, to Balinese good comes from inland—from the heights, from Gunung Agung, the mountain that is the abode of their Gods and to them the navel of the world. Kaja, goodness and fertility and right order, flows down with the water. Evil comes from below, from the sea—kelod, chaos and destruction and demons. The Javanese came from oversea and were mostly city-dwellers on Bali, so . . .”
Thora was blunter, as usual. “So, this,” she said, and made a slicing gesture across her throat with one thumb.
John wasn’t surprised at that either. If there just wasn’t enough to go around, you’d naturally see that what there was went to your own folk, those you were bound to by belief and blood, and you’d drive out strangers who added more mouths. Kill them like rats if you had to, when it was a choice of their children starving or yours. That was how human beings were made; like wolves they were creatures of the tribe, of the pack. They could be more than that, but that was the foundation without which nothing could be built.
From the tone of Deor’s words, he suspected that the scop had fond memories of his time there, and wanted to think well of the folk.
“They didn’t kill all of the other outsiders,” he added a little defensively. “The ones who were few and not a threat or great burden, or had useful knowledge.”
Prince of Outcasts Page 17
