The Ocean of the Dead: Ship Kings 4

by Andrew McGahan

  Dow, leaving Fidel in charge of work on the Chloe, took a boat over to the Snout and found preparations underway for a daring exercise, indeed a perilous one, here in mid ocean. For if the repairs were to be effected, then the damaged part of the Snout’s hull must be raised clear of the water, and the only way to do that was to tilt the ship in the opposite direction. This could be done simply enough by shifting cargo from one side to the other; the danger lay in overbalancing the ship, and rolling over.

  Nevertheless, they had no choice. Dow waited with Jake topside as the crew laboured away below decks to transfer whatever they could to the left of the ship, sinking the left rail down towards the sea, and accordingly lifting the right-hand rail up. In time, the cant on the deck was steep enough to make walking awkward, and on the right flank of the hull a good fifteen feet of normally submerged timbers had been lifted free of the sea.

  Towards the bow, the damage was now plain to behold. Where the battle repair had been made a year ago, the timbers had been completely stripped of their nicre and eaten away to husks. Carpenters were lowered on trestles to make their inspections. The reports they returned with were not good: it would take a day at least to remove the old timbers and install new ones.

  A day, with the Snout so precariously balanced. Dow did not like it – but again, what choice was there? And in one way at least the Doldrums favoured them. There would be no unexpected wave to unsettle and topple the ship, nor any strong gust of wind, not in this part of the world.

  Indeed, the breeze that had carried them this far was now fading. It rose still in occasional hot breaths, and under such impetus the two ships – even without sail raised – were drifting across the band of seaweed towards the open water. But Dow knew the Doldrums’ moods well enough by now to know that the fleet would be fully becalmed again soon. Well, no matter. If need be, they could deploy the attack boats once more.

  In the meantime, there was nothing to do but stand by.

  Dow took his boat back to the Chloe. There he found Fidel hanging from the boarding ladder, plucking up samples of the strange seaweed and storing them in buckets of seawater, his face set grimly.

  ‘Surely this weed isn’t dangerous too?’ Dow asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Fidel. ‘But after the white algae, I’m uneasy that there is likewise no mention in my histories of any purple and red weed. After all, it’s quite notable, with these great vermilion buds rising high above the water. Someone should have written about it – unless it left no witnesses to do so. Therefore I intend to make no mistakes in my testing this time.’

  Dow could not disagree. If there was indeed a peril in the ugly weed, then by all means let Fidel discover it, so that they might be forewarned.

  The day progressed. On the Chloe the worst of the leaks were plugged by mid afternoon, and the bilge pumped down to a proper level once more. By then, over on the Snout, the carpenters had stripped out all the damaged timbers from the bow. It left a gaping hole that was an unnerving sight in a ship not in the safety of port. But the new timbers would soon be hammered in, and meanwhile both ships had now drifted through the thickest of the seaweed, and now were nearly in clear water.

  The tension in Dow, wound taut all day, began to relax minimally. By next morning the Snout should be watertight, and with open water ahead, maybe the worst of this whole algal zone was behind them.

  However, he suspected that this might be as far as they would go under the power of any wind. The breeze had died completely now, and the Doldrums heat was settling like a solid substance across the ocean, the haze weighing darkly from above like a roof sagging on weak supports. The fleet had known becalming before, of course, but some quality of the stillness felt different to Dow this time, as if the silence contained a sly whisper. The wind is gone, Mariner, and it will not return today or tomorrow or in even a month, if it ever returns at all. You are abandoned.

  Thank the deeps for the attack boats, then.

  Which was when Nell appeared on the high deck. ‘Dow. You’d better come. Fidel – in his laboratory.’

  ‘What is it?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s something you have to see for yourself.’ Then, even more baffling, she leant back and gave a shout to the lookouts high above. ‘You there, aloft, keep an eye on all that seaweed to the north of us! Call out if you see any change there!’

  Dow stared. ‘The seaweed?’

  Nell was pulling him after her. ‘It’s too incredible – but Fidel is the one to explain it. Come on!’

  She led him hurriedly to Fidel’s cabin. There, the old scholar was standing at one of his laboratory benches, upon which were gathered the buckets of the purple weed. He looked up as Dow and Nell came in, his expression somehow both deeply sombre and profoundly excited.

  ‘Well?’ asked Dow.

  ‘We are in immense danger,’ declared Fidel, an uncharacteristic quaver ruffling his calm tones. ‘And yet . . . how to put it? We have also made a remarkable discovery. Indeed, we have happened upon the answer to one of the most pondered mysteries of the Doldrums.’

  ‘What, by all the oceans?’

  The commander turned to one of the buckets. ‘Behold these strange blossoms,’ he said, indicating a frond of seaweed that floated there, with one of the scarlet bulbs attached, swollen and bloated and lifted stiffly above the water. ‘I was puzzled by them. If they’re a flower of some kind, I wondered, what fruit might they produce? So I intended merely to cut one open and see – but look what happens when I remove it from the water.’

  He did so now, lifting the bulb well clear of the bucket. At first nothing occurred, but Fidel held out a hand – wait – and after perhaps a minute the red petals of the bud, enfolded in tight layers about the core, began to tremble and shift slightly, as if to uncurl. Dow leaned forward to see what might be revealed, but to his surprise Fidel took a breath and blew a long exhalation across the blossom. The petals immediately gripped tight again.

  Dow objected, ‘What are you—’

  ‘Patience,’ said Fidel. ‘I merely wanted you to note this aspect of it first, so that you understand the threat we face. As you’ve just witnessed, the blossoms are sensitive to wind. Indeed, to judge by my experiments, if there is any motion in the air at all, the petals will stay shut. It’s only in a completely still atmosphere that they’ll open.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So – this.’ Fidel raised the bulb again, holding it at arm’s length. Slowly, in the warm, still air of the cabin, the petals began to loosen once more. ‘Beware now,’ said Fidel, careful not to breathe across the opening flower, ‘keep your distance from the thing.’

  Dow waited in bewilderment. Within the red petals a white core was finally unveiled, a mass of what looked like fine dust or pollen, compressed into a ball. This mass quivered subtly as the fronds fell away from it – and when they had opened to their full extent, the ball seemed to rise up, trembling in ever greater agitation.

  Then – puff! – it exploded silently into a mist of drifting particles.

  ‘Don’t inhale the spores!’ Fidel warned.

  ‘Why?’ Dow asked. The particles sank and settled over the water in the bucket. They did not dissipate there, however, but held together, almost as a cloud, slightly flattened in shape and rippling uncannily. ‘Are they poisonous?’

  ‘In their way, I suppose they are,’ said Fidel, ‘though in this small amount I doubt they pose any true danger. But they possesses one other property that you will find familiar, I fear. See what happens now.’

  He nodded to Nell, who was stationed by the window that faced forward over the main deck. She pulled the blind shut, and darkness settled in the room. But as it did so, a new illumination arose – in the bucket. There, to Dow’s amazement and horror, the particles had begun to glow, as if with an internal light.

  Their colour was a ghostly green.

  Fidel spoke in the tinted gloom. ‘Neither I nor Nell were with you, Dow, on your voyage across the Wilderne
ss, when last you strayed into the Doldrums. But we have heard you and others speak of what you saw there one night. The deadly green mist upon the water.’

  Dow nodded, gazing rapt at the little glowing cloud. It had begun to move slowly across the water, narrowing into tendrils that reached this way and that, as if drifting in a current of air – only there was no current, the mist moved by itself, questing, searching . . .

  ‘The Miasma,’ said Fidel, voice hollow.

  Dow shook his head, scarcely able to believe it. ‘You mean it comes from the seaweed?’

  Fidel inclined his head. ‘Long have mariners wondered as to the Miasma’s origins, and how it is that the mist appears to move of its own will, and with apparent intent. Now I think we know. You see here what one blossom can release; now imagine what thousands upon thousands of blossoms would produce – and there might be millions in a large field – if they expelled their contents all at once. A great cloud it would be – not a mist or a gas or fumes at all, as has been thought, but a mass of living spores.’

  ‘It couldn’t be,’ Dow protested, remembering the glowing, rolling finger of green that had pursued the Snout long ago in the Wilderness. So silently in the night, but so hungrily. ‘It couldn’t just be spores . . .’

  ‘Why not? There are precedents, after all. I know of similar events that occur in grasslands, when clouds of pollen rise and blow in the wind. But of course the Miasma blows on no wind. Instead, it seems that the spores can move on their own, and together, as if by a collective consciousness, in the way that a flock of birds will wheel and turn as one. And the reason for this movement? My guess is that the spores are seeking another seaweed field, so as to fertilise it. Which might also explain why the Miasma seems drawn to anything that rears above the water. When it senses a becalmed ship, it mistakes the vessel for seaweed of its own kind – for nothing else in the Doldrums, other than these blossoms, rises above the sea – and so it hastens towards the ship with all the eagerness of a lover.’

  ‘And we know what happens to the hapless vessel so embraced,’ intoned Nell, eyes on the green cloud. ‘Madness, terror – and death.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Fidel conceded. ‘Though to be fair, the Miasma intends no such harm. Still, the unfortunate crew cannot help but breathe the cloud in, filling their lungs with the spores, which clearly are poisonous to the mind, if not the body.’ His scientist’s ardour shone a moment. ‘Still, now we know that the Miasma is not after all some demonic thing, hunting and haunting ships, but simply nature at work. It’s rather wonderful, in its way.’

  ‘Wonderful?’ Dow echoed, appalled. ‘There’s a whole field of those things out there!’

  Fidel sobered. ‘Yes, we must depart with all haste. We have lost the wind, and as you have seen, the bulbs will open without air movement to prevent it. I suspect they watch for such calms very deliberately. Their spores are tiny and weak, after all, individually, and in even the lightest breeze their cloud would be scattered.’

  Dow’s alarm grew. ‘But it’s been hours already since the wind died. How much longer do we have?’

  ‘Oh, there’s time enough, I’m sure. Yes, these specimens in the buckets opened quickly, but they are dying, cut off from the main body of the weed; out there it would be a different matter. A Miasma field would surely not discharge its spores merely at the first lull in the breeze, for what if the wind returned an hour or so later? No, the bulbs would wait to be sure that a true calm has settled, a lasting one. We must hasten away indeed, but it may be many hours yet, or days, before a Miasma rises.’

  But Dow knew with a sudden certainty that Fidel was wrong. He had felt it himself; the calm that had settled was going to be a long one, as heavy and fixed as stone. And if he, a passing visitor to the Doldrums, could tell this, then surely the Miasma weed, native to this realm—

  As if summoned by his thought, a cry went up from outside. ‘Ignella of the Cave! Captain Amber!’

  Nell stared. ‘The lookouts. I told them to watch the Miasma field . . . to call out if anything changed.’

  Nothing more needed to be said. The three of them dashed from the cabin and up to the high deck, and stared north to the main expanse of the seaweed, as if expecting to see the Miasma rising there already. But no. The great field of weed stretched off in all its red and purple ugliness, but no cloud ascended.

  ‘Well?’ Dow cried aloft. ‘Why did you call?’

  ‘Look hard, Captain,’ came the shouted reply from the crow’s nest. ‘Something is happening out there.’

  They all stared again. And yes, slowly – so slowly that the eye could scarce detect it – the scarlet bulbs were writhing, petals unfolding from petals. All across the field, thousands of them. Millions. Tens of millions . . .

  ‘Do you see?’ breathed Nell.

  ‘I see,’ said Dow.

  Fidel was calm. ‘A warning must be sent to the Snout, so they understand the danger – then we must deploy the attack boats and flee, this instant.’

  Dow stared bitterly over to the Snout. ‘How can they flee? With a hole opened in the bow, and the ship half on its side? If they tried to get underway like that, all they’d do is flood themselves and sink.’

  Fidel looked stricken. ‘I’d forgotten.’

  ‘Then we must save the Chloe at least,’ said Nell faintly. ‘Get everyone from the Snout over here, now, and make a run for it.’

  Dow only stared. All across the Miasma field the blossoms were spreading open, the red petals unfurling, slow fingers of fists unclenched. A flush of carmine swept the ocean, and set within were leprous balls of white by the multitude: the Miasma spores.

  ‘We can’t,’ he said. ‘We can’t leave the Snout behind. There’s no hope in this for one ship alone. We stay.’ And yet the vexation of it was immense. He had been so confident that they would be able to outrun any Miasma they encountered – and now that the Miasma threatened indeed, they could not even make the attempt!

  ‘Then we’ll all be lost,’ moaned Nell.

  ‘No,’ said Dow, tearing his gaze at last from the horrible vision across the water. ‘If the cloud comes then it comes, but we’ll endure it together, and live. Madness may descend on us, but we need not die.’

  He turned to Fidel. ‘Send a message to the Snout and warn them. Tell them to do what they can to secure their hull – but that either way we won’t leave them. In fact, we’ll run lines between the ships, so that we don’t become separated, no matter what happens. Here on the Chloe get all weapons – even the kitchen knives – locked away in the magazines. And when the cloud rises, send everyone below and seal the hatches and gun ports; it may keep some of the spores out. Tell the Snout to do the same.’

  Fidel nodded, and wheeled away to give the orders.

  Feverish activity burst out, but from the first it was confused by a rising panic, as word spread as to what the scarlet blooms in their thousands signified. Miasma! The dreadful name confounded people, made even the simplest tasks impossible. Officers yelled in rage, and sailors dashed to and fro to no purpose. A boat was launched, carrying the message to the Snout, but it set off without the lines that Dow had commanded be strung between the ships; another would have to be sent.

  Amid all this mayhem, Dow, standing with Nell on the high deck, stared constantly to the Miasma field. The vermilion flowers were all lying open and flat now, an unbroken blood carpet extending as far as could be seen in the haze. And all across that vast expanse the white balls of spoor were rising on their stems, swaying, like overripe mushrooms ready to rot and fall apart. It was the most loathsome sight Dow had ever beheld.

  Beside him, Nell seemed transfixed.

  ‘If it happens,’ he told her, ‘we go below. Fast.’

  But she shook her head. ‘It won’t make any difference. Above decks, below. Nothing will help. Dow clutched her shoulder. ‘Nell – this doesn’t have to destroy us, if we stay calm.’

  ‘You don’t understand!’ Her face was a rictus, eyes fixed upon the swellin
g field of red and white. It reminded Dow, suddenly, of her fits. ‘I think I’ve seen this. I think I remember this. It will be awful.’

  Dow gaped. She remembered this?

  ‘Nell— ’ he started.

  But it was too late. She gave a gasp, and Dow turned again to the Miasma field. All over its red expanse, the white spheres were detonating.

  They did so in silence, and it was the silence that Dow would remember most later. It shouldn’t have been possible that so many square miles of blooms could explode as one without making a sound.

  In an instant, the crimson carpet vanished under a cloud of white – a pall that slowly lifted itself into the sky; a wall rearing as high as the mainmasts of the ships, and then higher still before the appalled eyes of those watching from the ships. It might have been a bank of dense fog, except that its lower reaches, cast in shadow by the billows above, glowed a sickly shade of green.

  The Miasma, new born.

  Dow stood hypnotised. He could think of no order to give, no exhortation to offer. An unspeakable coalescence now began to take place within the cloud, as if the millions upon millions of newly released spores were communing and taking thought. Questing tendrils of mist extended out slowly from the main mass, great dragon shapes, some rising to tower skywards, some sliding low across the sea – but all of them searching, searching.

  And then finding.

  The dragon shapes paused abruptly, blind heads cocked, as if assessing the fleet in glee. Then as one they withdrew into the cloud, and the entire mass began to roll hungrily towards the two vessels.

  It swallowed the Snout first. One moment the ship seemed to stand tiny at the foot of a monstrous wave that would flip it end to end – then it was simply gone, eaten up, and the wall was advancing with effortless speed. There was just time for Dow to hear what sounded like screams and cries within the cloud, coming from the Snout, then the wall was upon the Chloe.

  The day darkened, and for a moment Dow knew an ironic relief, for it was the first time the sun’s heat had been blocked since they had entered the Doldrums. Then at the last he winced and turned from the wall, as if expecting a blow. But the mist only swept silently over him, eddying thickly as it crowded up over the Chloe’s hull and spilled across the deck, then raced on.