The Ocean of the Dead: Ship Kings 4

by Andrew McGahan

  As for the heat itself – and everyone knew it would only get worse from here – several agencies were now adopted to deal with it. First, spare sails were strung in vast awnings across the decks, to block direct sunlight. Second, water was lifted from the sea and sluiced periodically across the timbers to cool them. And third, specially constructed fans, cranked by gangs of four persons apiece, were placed over the main hatchways: spinning, they drew air up from below through the open ports of the empty gun decks and circulated it through the ship. Of course, such measures – and others beside – could not dispel the heat entirely, but they did render it bearable for the present. And so the fleet waited watchfully into the third day, and then a fourth, and then a fifth.

  In the Chloe’s Great Cabin the mood among the officers was one of confident stoicism. They had expected halts such as this, and were ready for them. The junior lieutenants and midshipmen made use of the spare time to attend to their studies, and the senior officers played games of cards or dice, or indulged in their own private pastimes; carving whale’s teeth for one, building a model ship for another, and painting in oils for a third.

  Dow, too, had his hobbies. Sometimes he would spend the day immersed in a book, his reading continuing to improve. Or he might while away the hours by attending to maintenance on the Maelstrom, painting and oiling timbers, or re-rigging lines, for he preferred that no one other than himself worked on the boat. But when tired of such private pursuits, he would often drift into Commander Fidel’s quarters to see what the old scholar was up to.

  Fidel’s cabin was a fascinating place. Opposite Dow and Nell’s own, it was both a library and a laboratory, and there the elderly commander could usually be found either poring over his scientific treatises or busy at his benches, fiddling with specimen jars and preserving fluids. He was forever taking samples of water from the sea, and collected all the plants and creatures he could scoop up or catch, recording their type in his journals, and pickling the most rare of them in bottles.

  ‘People ask why I bother,’ Fidel confided to Dow, on the fifth afternoon of the becalming. He was bent over a magnifying device, examining a drop of water on a glass sheet. ‘After all, I will most likely never get to report any of this back to the academies of my homeland. Nevertheless, there have been too few proper studies made of the Doldrums, and it would be remiss of me not to make observations when I have the chance.’

  Dow, poking about the laboratory, was moved to raise a question. ‘I understand why it never rains here: there’s so much nicre in the water it stops evaporation, so there can be no clouds. By why is there so little wind? Deserts have no rain, but they have wind aplenty.’

  Fidel lifted his eye away from the magnifying lens. ‘It’s rather complex, actually. A matter of physics. In a desert, for instance, the hot sun beats down upon the sand, but the sand, being pale, reflects most of the heat back upwards, warming the air above it. That heated air then rises – for warm air always rises – and air from elsewhere rushes in to replace it, which creates a wind. Simple enough. But here in the Doldrums instead of pale sand, we have dark seawater that is thick with nicre. When the sun beats down, that nicre-rich water traps and absorbs almost all of the heat it receives. Hence the air above the Doldrums sea does not grow as warm as it would elsewhere. But that’s only part of the answer, for after all, the air still grows somewhat warm here – very warm to we humans, as we can feel right now – so what stops it rising?

  ‘Well, it is thought that the upper airs over the Doldrums – say a mile or so high, beyond any influence of the sea – get super-heated by the constant tropical sunlight of these latitudes, and become much hotter than the air below, where, remember, the sea has stolen most of the heat away. This is very unusual, for of course the air is usually colder the higher one goes. And it creates what weather scholars call an inversion, where a very warm layer of air higher in the sky prevents a less warm level below it from rising and escaping.

  ‘It’s an unpleasant phenomenon, and is especially so in cities, where it causes choking hazes, as smoke from cooking fires and the like cannot clear away. But it’s rare, and usually only occurs in places where air movement is limited; a valley floor, for example, or a confined bay. Also, a change in the weather will dispel it quickly. In the normal world, that is. But here in the Barrier nothing dispels it, so the effect is permanent, and vast. In short, a giant inversion hangs forever over the Doldrums, thousands of miles across, and thus the warm airs around us seldom rise, and hence a wind can seldom blow.’

  Dow considered all this. He did not quite grasp the science of it, perhaps, but the image Fidel conjured, of some huge and malign beast of the weather, squatting suffocatingly over the sea, felt right. ‘But,’ he asked finally, ‘if the Doldrums waters absorb so much heat, shouldn’t they eventually get hot? Too hot for anything to live in? And yet all the tales speak of the Barrier’s weeds and slimes.’

  Fidel smiled. ‘For one, the ocean is deep, and much of the heat is drawn down to the abyss where slow currents move, distributing the energy far afield. But the weeds and slimes themselves absorb much of that same energy by the very process of their growth – and how they grow! You have no doubt seen large patches of seaweed in your travels already, Dow – but be warned: such patches are nothing compared to the great fields and morasses that await us now, thick and tangled on themselves and teeming with their own rot!’

  Dow had to laugh. Fidel painted an awful picture, but the scientist in the old commander sounded almost excited by the prospect.

  *

  But for the present no seaweed or slimes appeared. Indeed, rather the opposite. Another two days passed without the wind returning, but either the fleet was drifting slowly on an imperceptible current, or the ocean was transforming itself around the ships, for gradually the greenish tint of the water faded away to a cleaner blue, which then deepened to a limpid aquamarine, stunningly transparent. By the eighth day, the sea had become so clear it seemed to drop away to infinity, a chasm shot through with pillars of shimmering light.

  At length, a group on the Chloe could not resist the call of such pure water, and requested permission to go swimming. It was a rare plea, for sailors – at least those of the Ship Kings and Twin Islands fleets – were notoriously reluctant to deliberately immerse themselves in the sea. It was considered by old hands to be tempting fate foolishly. But those making the request were in fact New Islanders, quite lacking any such fears, and Dow, rather impressed by his countrymen, saw no harm in allowing them.

  Boarding ladders were lowered, and soon several dozen hardy souls were plunging over the sides, observed in fascinated dread by hundreds of onlookers – maybe the ocean would swallow them whole! But the swimmers each surfaced whooping with pleasure.

  An envious notion grew in Dow as he watched. It was hardly fit behaviour for a captain, he knew . . . but then again, why not? He was no ordinary captain anyway, and this was certainly no ordinary fleet.

  Nell was watching him. ‘Surely you’re not,’ she said, traditional enough a Ship King to be appalled by the spectacle.

  But Dow only grinned and nodded. He was indeed. He slipped down to the main deck, threw off his shirt, and under the astonished eyes of the crews of both ships, dove without hesitation over the side.

  For a moment he had the disturbing sensation of falling towards nothing, so flawless was the water beneath. But then he hit the surface with a warm, heavy slap, and plunged on, straight and deep and down, before levelling out as his ears complained of the pressure. Having closed his eyes as he hit, he opened them now to the sting of salt water, and hovered there in the depths, staring about, his chest straining to hold his breath.

  Blue. Blue was everywhere, in shades he had never imagined, delicate and glimmering with brightness above him, falling away to darker and more mysterious tones beneath. And the clarity! There seemed to be almost no blurring of his vision: it was as if he viewed the undersea through only slightly rippled glass.

  Dow
n, down he stared, into the blue-black eternity. It should have been frightening, suspended above such an abyss, in which who knew what monsters might lurk, be it Rope Fish or giant Serpent. But in fact Dow could see so far down that he felt no fear at all; any rising monster would be visible long before it neared the surface.

  Instead, he found himself fascinated by his shadow, cast beneath him by the noontime sun overhead; a man-shaped darkness around which rainbow colours extended away in bands. The further down the shadow cast, the wider it spread, so that it seemed an enormous giant version of himself, rimmed with dazzling light, swam a mile and more below him.

  His lungs beginning to ache, Dow lifted his gaze to the mid-waters and observed his fellow swimmers a moment, stroking their way about the depths like ungainly birds. They were quite alone in the sea, not a fish nor floating creature visible anywhere, nor scrap of seaweed. Ah, but off to either hand, two gigantic shapes intruded from above, piercing the pale ceiling of the surface to extend beneath: the hulls of the Chloe and the Snout.

  How strange they looked, black and smooth and curved, like the humps of inverted whales. And how strange it was to think that so much was contained within them – a thousand lives and more, and goods enough to found an entire nation – all held aloft over the abyss by merely a few planks of wood.

  Why, Dow could even hear, faintly through the water, noises from within the ships – the rattle of steel pans in the galley, feet stomping upon ladders, voices, all muffled and distorted here under the sea. And somehow those sounds only made the hulls seem lonelier and more out of place. The shapes were huge, yes, but around them the blueness stretched forever, and the sounds faded into the distance, unheard, unheeded, finally snuffed out entirely.

  Dow shook his head, chest burning, and rose to the air, and to relieved cries from the watching crews; he had been under for some while.

  He swam about for a time after that, but the elation of his initial plunge faded gradually. The water was too warm to be refreshing, and soon became cloying. The other swimmers too eventually grew quiet, the immensity of the ocean beneath and all around slowly crushing their high humour, and one by one they made for the ladders to climb back on board. Dow was one of the last, and met Fidel on the lower rung; the commander had descended to gain a water sample.

  ‘Curious,’ was Fidel’s verdict on the transparency of the liquid, ‘to have so few particulates or organic matter in suspension. I doubt we will see such clarity again the further we go. It’s a pretty effect, though.’

  Dow glanced back down to the deeps. Pretty wasn’t the word, not when you’d been immersed there, and seen the hulls intruding, and heard those faint human sounds drifting away to be lost in the blue endlessness.

  He did not go swimming again.

  Nor – despite the heat – did anyone else.

  *

  On the twelfth day, the lookouts in the crow’s nests spied a far-off darkness on the horizon, a ruffle on the glassy sea, sweeping towards the fleet like the shadow of a cloud, even though the sky was cloudless.

  ‘Wind coming!’ was the call, and men hurried aloft to ready the sails. The rumpled shadow spread towards them in shifts and leaps, then a hot breath of air snapped at the canvas. It faltered, died, gusted again. The sails filled and with a lurch the Chloe and the Snout slid forward. Cheers rose from the decks, and soon the fleet was fully underway once more, across a sea that was now rippling and green, veined lightly with white chop.

  And so they went for a full three days. The wind rose and fell and shifted in direction, but in the main it held from the northeast, and never failed entirely. The miles slipped away beneath the ships’ sterns, and at night the Dagger rose yet higher in the sky.

  It couldn’t last, of course, and on the fourth day the wind fell away and the heat settled once more. But this time the fleet was not quite becalmed. Erratic breezes came and went through the next several days; blowing strong enough now and then to fill the sails and drive the ships for a mile or two, then disappearing, only to rise again and blow from an opposite point. It made for tedious sailing, the men aloft forever redeploying the sails to best effect in the light airs, but it was better than not moving at all.

  Then even the breezes failed, and the fleet was properly becalmed again. Though conditions were not greatly different from their previous becalming – the heat was no worse, the sea no flatter – there was a grimmer mood this time on board both ships. The novelty of the Doldrums was gone, even though they were only on the outer fringe of the Barrier as yet, and there was a sense of knuckling down resignedly to a long, dull task.

  Time passed slowly under a sky that was monotonously unchanging; there were no clouds to decorate it, no rain ever fell from it. But nor was the firmament quite clear. The haze that had begun as only a tinge back to the north was thicker now. By day the sky had a dusty look, the sun yellowed, the horizons vague; by night the stars were blurred, as if seen through smoke. But what smoke or dust could have blown here, so far from any land?

  Five days crept by, and boredom began to work on the crew. Some looked for Dow to give the order to deploy the attack boats, but Fidel and the other navigators assured everyone that there was no need of that yet, the fleet still remained well within the region where winds occasionally stirred. The oil must not be wasted. Patience was needed for now, not boats. Dow agreed, though in truth, his own patience was wearing thin.

  It was Nell who provided a much-needed distraction.

  She had her own Doldrums pastimes, of course, one of which was the pursuit of her medical studies in sick bay, where the doctors now had not only the usual seafaring maladies to contend with, but also ailing children and expectant mothers. But through this second becalming she had been attending to some other project – one she was keeping secret, even from Dow.

  Whatever it was, it involved her spending much time below decks, and also several trips over to the Snout. Rumours began to circulate that strange, clandestine meetings were taking place on both ships, and that curious items were being requested from the quartermaster’s stores, each signed for and approved by Nell herself, or by Fidel, who appeared to be in on the conspiracy.

  ‘What in the deeps are all of you up to?’ Dow demanded of Nell finally with some temper. ‘It almost feels like you’re plotting a mutiny.’

  ‘You’ll see,’ she replied, denying him with a prim smile. ‘At least, if the wind doesn’t come.’

  The wind didn’t come, and on the ninth morning adrift, Dow awoke to find posters plastered about the ship.

  They read:

  Carnival of the Becalmed!

  Come all, to a festival of tedium-dispelling entertainments,

  with sundry wonders and acts, direct from all corners of the

  Four Isles.

  Where? The main deck.

  When? From noon till dusk.

  Food and drink will be provided!

  A carnival. So that was it!

  Dow would have pressed Nell for details, but she had already vanished from their cabin and gone below, presumably to orchestrate the final preparations, so he was forced to join the expectant throng at midday on the main deck, as unknowing as anyone else. Hundreds were there, gazing up at the Captain’s Walk, which had been decorated as a stage. So packed was the crowd indeed, and so top-heavy the ship accordingly, there could have been a lively danger of capsizing, for the Chloe’s own crew was swollen by a swarm of visitors who had rowed over from the Snout. But marshals kept the crowd evenly distributed, and gangs manned the pumps and hoses to spray cooling water over the assembly, to ward off threat of heat stroke.

  With the ringing of the noon bell, there came a flourish of drums and horns, and the show commenced – and nothing like it had been seen upon the deep ocean before. Oh, yes, many a ship at sea had a sailor or two on board who could play an instrument and sing. But the Chloe and Snout’s crews, filled with hundreds of people from all walks of life, boasted actual professional entertainers; not only singers and mus
icians, but actors and costumiers and writers too. So what followed through the day was a cavalcade of not only music and song, but also gorgeously arrayed theatre, some of it pantomime for the children, some of comedy or drama for the adults. And last of all, as dusk approached, came a fresh-written farce entitled Ship of Fools, which dared to mock not only Dow and Nell and the other officers, but which ridiculed the entire expedition’s lunacy for attempting the Doldrums at all.

  Then, as darkness set in, Nell herself emerged on the stage, solemn and grand, and dressed, to Dow’s amazement, in her old scapegoat finery, with her scars highlighted in some luminescent way to display all their exotic strangeness. She led a parade of bejewelled handmaidens, each bearing high a glowing lantern painted with vivid colours, in a stately procession that wound down through the crowd on the main deck as a full orchestra on the stage played accompaniment.

  The weird pageant culminated in the release of fireworks. These had been fashioned by a skilled artisan who hailed from the Twin Isles, working with gunpowder and other chemicals released from the magazine. Great rockets soared up into the heavy Doldrums night to explode in sprays of red and green and silver, to the oohs and aahs of the rapt assembly.

  It wasn’t over even then. All day long, snacks and drinks had been served to the crowd, but now in the flame-light a full feast was declared, the normal rations relaxed for just this one eve, with food piling up on the tables, and the beer and wine and rum flowing freely. So it was that the party lasted well into the late hours, the crowd – sated in stomach and heart – lingering to enjoy the afterglow, the adults chattering happily, children asleep in their parents’ arms. Until, as midnight neared, it was time at last for the guests from the Snout to go home, and for the Chloe’s crew to go to bed.

  ‘It was wonderful,’ adjudged Dow when he and Nell were alone at last in the privacy of their cabin. ‘The plays, the parade, the feast – everything.’