by Mailie Meloy
“Yes.”
“But I now believe that part is manageable.”
They had rounded a rocky point and saw a trim, elegant yacht, about sixty feet long, anchored off the island. Two white people were visible on the yacht: a man struggling with a dinghy on the stern, and a woman in a black bikini shielding her eyes. They hadn’t seen the castaways yet.
“Can you swim, with your arm?” the apothecary asked.
Jin Lo nodded. But it was a longer swim than it seemed, and difficult with their wounded arms and the need to breathe air. When they came alongside the boat, treading water, the skipper jumped and swore with surprise. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“The island,” Marcus Burrows said.
“Do they have ice there?” the woman in the bikini asked. “And rum, and bananas? And maybe some nice bacon? We’re running low on provisions.”
“I don’t think you should go to the island,” Marcus Burrows said.
“Not even for ice?”
“If you help us aboard, we’ll explain.”
“How do we know you aren’t pirates?” the man asked. He had silver in his hair.
“Do we look like pirates?”
“Yes, in fact, you do.”
“We’re wounded,” Marcus Burrows said. “We have been attacked by the islanders. I assure you that we mean you no harm.”
The woman looked at her husband. “Oh, perfect,” she said. “Hostile natives. And you have no idea where we are.”
“Well, we wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been too bored to stay where we were!” he said. “In a perfectly safe harbor! In cyclone season!”
An arrow whistled through the air. It splashed into the water behind Jin Lo. Two archers in loincloths stood at the edge of the shore.
“They’re firing at us,” Marcus Burrows said. “Please.”
The man hurried to the stern of the boat and lowered the swimming ladder. “Get in!” he said. “Quick! Charlotte, the anchor!”
“Oh, God, I hate the anchor!” Charlotte said. With her long limbs, she reminded Jin Lo of a stalking waterbird as she moved toward the bow.
Jin Lo climbed the ladder first. Her arm ached. An arrow splashed closer. She heard the boat’s engine start, and the grinding rattle of the anchor chain. The man and the woman were shouting at each other, half in fear and half in anger. Jin Lo hauled herself dripping onto the hot teak deck, then reached to help Marcus Burrows with her good arm. He pulled the swimming ladder up after him just as the couple brought in the anchor. An arrow passed so close to Jin Lo’s head that she felt the air displaced by its flight against her ear.
The woman in the bikini swore colorfully about those rude and unwelcoming savages, and the fact that they still didn’t have any ice.
Jin Lo sat in a salty puddle in the cockpit, her arm throbbing. She kept her head down, to avoid both the arrows and the couple’s shouting.
The skipper turned the boat, showing the archers its stern, and they motored away, as fast as the sleek hull would go.
PART SIX
Corrosion
1. the process of damaging or destroying metal, stone, or other materials by chemical action
2. damage or weakening caused gradually, as to ideals or morals
Chapter 49
At Sea
Benjamin sat at the tiller of the little boat, sunburned and windburned, his lips so chapped that bits of them were flaking off. The mast had broken, and the squall had left him hopelessly confused about where they were. Tessel had worked out a new course, and they had rigged up the mast again, laying the two parts over each other and lashing their sunshade around them, but it could hardly take any sail. Benjamin was trying to stay on the course that Tessel had set for him, but the wind had gone, and they barely had steerageway. He remembered reading that sailors whistled to make the wind come up, and he tried, through parched lips.
The children were asleep like two puppies in the bottom of the boat, exhausted by the storm. Efa laid her head on Tessel’s arm and tucked her knees up against the boy’s rib cage. Their lips were as chapped as Benjamin’s, and their hands, like his, were raw from working the salt-roughened lines. They had run dangerously low on drinking water, in spite of refilling their casks in the squall, and their last meal had been the raw flesh of a flying fish that had landed mistakenly in their boat. It was bony and unsatisfying.
Tessel was a preternaturally good navigator, but he hadn’t seen the charts Benjamin had seen. Were they really on course? They might be run over by a cargo ship, or taken by pirates. They might drift along forever. And even if they could find the island where Janie was, what then? Benjamin would be taking the children from the dangerous sea to a dangerous island.
He saw a dark ship on the horizon and stood and waved his shirt, but the ship was miles away, and grew smaller as he watched. Birds overhead eyed him. He waved his shirt some more to show that he wasn’t wounded, wasn’t even close to dead. And neither were the children.
The birds flew on, and Benjamin fought sleep, his eyes drifting closed and then snapping open as he shook himself awake. The sun was relentless. The sky was an endless blue. He wondered if he had imagined everything else in his life, if he had always been here, drifting, baking in the sun.
Then something hard and swift jostled the side of the boat beneath the water.
Benjamin grabbed the gunwales, awake, looking into the fathomless blue.
A fin broke the surface of the water, a little farther off, and was gone again, ghostlike. Tessel had made a spear by tying a short-bladed knife to the end of a long pole with a strip of bamboo. They had tried fishing with it, without much success. Benjamin picked up the spear now and waited.
Another bump, harder than the first, rocked the boat, too fast for Benjamin to react with the spear. The thing was trying to knock them into the water. Tessel stirred, blinking.
“A shark,” Benjamin said. He said it again in Tessel and Efa’s language. They had seen other sharks, though not so close, and it was a word he felt confident about.
Tessel was alert, kneeling in the bow and peering out. He held out his hand for the spear like a surgeon awaiting his instrument, then cocked his arm and waited, scanning the water, but nothing surfaced.
They were so preoccupied that they didn’t see the sailboat until it was almost upon them. A woman’s voice called, “Hullo, you! What’re you spearing? Dinner?”
It was a wooden sloop, steering toward them. There were two women perched on the bow. One was Charlotte from Manila, deeply tanned in a black bikini, shielding her eyes with one hand.
The other was waving wildly and grinning. She wore loose cotton clothes, and had a bandaged arm and a black braid snaking over her shoulder. Benjamin nearly fell into the bottom of the boat with surprise when he recognized Jin Lo.
A third figure came to the bow, also with a bandaged arm: Benjamin’s father. He was grinning, too, and didn’t look distracted, or preoccupied, or deep in thought. He looked like he had never been happier, although his eyes were full of tears. Benjamin felt his own wind-chapped face cracking in an enormous smile of gratitude.
When the battered little boat was tied behind the Payday and the three fugitives had clambered aboard, Benjamin’s father hugged him so tightly, he thought his weakened bones might break. He couldn’t remember the last time his father had hugged him.
“I told you not to follow me,” Benjamin said.
“I know,” his father said.
He wanted to sink in relief onto the deck. “I’m glad you did.”
There were explanations and introductions. Tessel boldly shook hands with everyone, though Efa shied away. Benjamin’s father and Jin Lo had been to their island.
“Your powder,” Jin Lo said. “Is brilliant.”
“Are they angry about the children?”
She nodded. “Also about John Frum.”
“Now, who wants a cold drink?” Charlotte said. “Your nice dad made us plenty of ice, out of nowhere. I wis
h I knew how he does it!”
Benjamin looked at his father, who shrugged. They didn’t usually do party tricks like making ice. Maybe his father was planning to give Charlotte and Harry the wine of Lethe and make them forget everything. Benjamin decided that was true. Otherwise it would be impossible to talk about anything. The boat was too small for secrets. “I’ll have a ginger ale,” he said. “And I’d like to see your charts.”
They all leaned together over the chart table. The skipper put his finger on a spot of blue on the map. “I took a noon sighting with the sextant, and I think we’re here.”
Tessel frowned. He squinted at the sun, which was setting in that sudden equatorial way, and at Venus, which had just become visible in the twilight. He pointed to a spot on the chart just east of the skipper’s finger. “Here,” he said.
Charlotte burst out laughing. “I trust the kid,” she said. “Harry never gets the same sextant reading twice.”
“It’s a good thing I don’t,” her husband said, indignant. “That would mean the earth had stopped moving. I’m a perfectly capable navigator.”
“Yes, and I’m Shirley Temple.”
Benjamin pointed to an island that formed the top of a triangle with two others. “This is where Janie is,” he said. “I think there’s a mine there.”
“Wait, hang on,” Harry said. “I have a guidebook.”
“I’ll get the drinks,” Charlotte said.
When they had both gone below, Benjamin said, “Did you bring the little packet of powder?”
His father shook his head.
“I think Janie’s trapped underground,” Benjamin said. “The powder’s worn off almost completely, but I get tiny flashes. I just wish we had anything useful!”
Charlotte brought drinks up from below, her charm bracelet clinking against a glass. Benjamin eyed the bracelet. “Are those charms real gold?” he asked.
“Of course!” she said. She set down the drinks and turned each charm over, baring the inside of her sun-browned wrist. “The racquet is from the tennis team at Farmington. The pair of dice is from Monaco. The elephant is from India. The gold anchor was supposed to make me better at setting our anchor—but it didn’t work. The shoe is kind of silly because I never wear shoes anymore.”
Benjamin nodded, as if that was all important information. “Could we borrow a few of the sillier ones?” he asked.
CHAPTER 50
The Materia Medica
Jin Lo had been trained early in the Pao zhi of Chinese medicine. At twelve, the master to whom she had been apprenticed told her that she would not always have a laboratory with everything she needed arranged in neat glass bottles. To teach her to work with scarce resources, he sent her out on scavenger hunts, giving her assignments for which she had to scrounge weeds and bits of rock and metal, and improvise: Make your hand turn blue, then change it back. Trap a whisper in a jar of oil, and release it later. Move a book across a table without touching it. Paralyze a cricket, and then set it free.
Luckily, their hosts on the Payday were scavengers themselves. They were not clever people, Charlotte and Harry. But they had been all over the world, living a lonely, nomadic existence. Like those greedy, lucky black-and-white birds called magpies, they had taken bright things that pleased them and tucked them away in their floating nest. Jin Lo scoured the boat for these souvenirs, then sat at the table in the yacht’s saloon with Benjamin and the apothecary, considering the impressive array:
—An intricately carved red box made of what she knew in China as jindan, which Charlotte called cinnabar, and the apothecary called mercuric sulfide. It could be roasted to make quicksilver, which might not bestow eternal life when mixed into the Golden Elixir, as the early Chinese alchemists believed, but was extraordinarily useful anyway.
—Three charms that Charlotte was willing to give up from her bracelet: the shoe, the dice, and the skull. “The skull is to remind you that you’ll die someday,” Charlotte had said. “And I don’t need to be reminded of that.”
—A small jade carving of a frog.
—A piece of purple quartz.
—A jar of very high quality ylang-ylang oil from the Philippines, which Charlotte had bought as a perfume.
—A set of six silver teaspoons.
—A healthy aloe vera plant growing in a terra-cotta pot.
—A sickly fern in another pot.
—Aspirin, quinine, rubbing alcohol, mineral oil, and a bottle of iodine from the medicine cabinet. Also a decongestant called Dristan, Pepto-Bismol, calamine lotion, smelling salts, and Unguentine First Aid Spray for sunburn, which Charlotte had tried to use on the back of Benjamin’s neck. He had waved her away.
—A small amount of high-grade opium, which Harry insisted was for toothaches.
—A bottle of powdered talc with a gardenia scent.
—Several graphite pencils and one grease pencil.
—A smooth yellow stone, surely sulfur, which gave off the stink of rotten eggs.
—Three hen’s eggs, still reasonably fresh.
—A vase covered in a bright purplish blue glaze, which Jin Lo believed to be gu, or cobalt, though she would need to grind it up and burn it to be certain.
—The guide to the islands that Harry had promised: a mimeographed booklet written by a sailor he had met in Manila. It was called Captain Marty’s Sailing Guide to Malaya.
—A mortar and pestle, a decent cooking knife, and a hammer.
All in all, it wasn’t bad. Jin Lo had worked with less. She could hear her old master’s solemn, gravelly voice. Consider the properties of each substance, but do not be limited by what you already know. It is the union of opposites that is important: hot and cold, wet and dry, acid and alkali, solar and lunar. They are separated, they join together. The work is a flowing river from which you divert a stream.
So it was time to divert a stream. She picked up the pretty carved box, placed it on a wooden cutting board, and hit it hard with the hammer. It broke into several pieces, and she took the smallest piece and hit it again, crushing it.
“Oh!” Charlotte cried. “I’m not going to watch this.”
Jin Lo had forgotten the woman was there. Charlotte’s long legs disappeared up the hatch. She would distract herself by teasing and tormenting her husband, who was sailing the boat with the help of the two island children.
The magpie, xi que in Chinese, was the bird of married happiness, but not for its own sake. It was because the magpies in an old legend made a magical bridge to unite two separated lovers. If Charlotte and Harry could bring Benjamin and Janie together, maybe that would be their contribution to the world’s happiness, since they had so little happiness of their own.
“You said you figured out how to talk to animals, right?” Benjamin asked.
“Perhaps,” Jin Lo said. It was possible that she had been losing her mind, and only thought the cat was talking to her. But she was fairly sure about the crocodile.
“Maybe we could get some dolphins to help us sneak onto the island,” he said.
Jin Lo looked up at Benjamin. He was not so many years younger than she was, but he was a romantic, which made him more of a child than she had ever been. He could imagine himself riding a heroic pod of dolphins to rescue his princess. “Animal with less intelligence is better,” she said. “Does not have so much own mind, own plan.”
Benjamin frowned, thinking. “Sea turtles?”
“Giant squid is better,” she said, and she was rewarded with a look of disgust and horror.
“Squid?” Benjamin said.
“Squid has complex brain. This is good. But does not have plans.”
“Don’t they eat people?” Benjamin asked. “Like the kraken?”
“Sometimes.”
“And they’re slimy?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think I want to ride on a giant squid.”
“The Aidos Kyneê is our best option,” the apothecary said, turning a page in the sailing guide. “We have the
necessary gold, and invisibility is the safest, surest thing.”
“Invisible solution will stay on body?” she asked. “In water?”
The apothecary looked thoughtful. “That’s a good question. It might not.”
“And does not work on clothes. We want to be naked and visible, on island?”
“No,” Benjamin said.
“So no animals, no invisibility,” she said. “Too complicated.”
The apothecary was reading the sailing guide. “I found Janie’s island,” he said. “Listen to this.”
The island is believed to possess a geological oddity in the form of an underwater tunnel between the southern point of the island and a small lagoon near the island’s center. Formerly, the island was the ignored property of some Malay potentate, and there were rumors of pearl divers with enormous lung capacity reaching the open sea from the secret lagoon, like mermen. Now the island is privately owned. Very stern NO TRESPASSING signs warn off the curious sailor looking for a placid moment on a sandy beach. A pompous white villa has sprung up like a wart on the pristine island’s face, near the mermen’s lagoon. Apologies to the island’s owner if my little book finds its way into his hands and he reads this opinion. But your humble guide maintains that he has taken from the world one of its loveliest spots.
He looked up from his reading.
“If we can get through that tunnel,” Benjamin said, “we can get close to the villa, and no one will see us!”
“I believe that’s so,” his father said. Then his brow furrowed with concern. “You do know how to swim, Benjamin?”
“In school, we went to the public baths every Wednesday.”
“Ah,” his father said. “Well, that’s a relief.”
“That might be a thing a father would know,” Benjamin said.
His father pushed his spectacles up onto his nose. “I realize that I was too distracted by my work, in those years.”
“Too distracted to know if your son could swim?”
