The Ocean of the Dead: Ship Kings 4

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘How things have reversed,’ he said to Dow, with a reflective smile that bore scarcely a trace of his former arrogance. ‘Here I am, guest to your hospitality, and it’s your ship that has survived.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Dow asked, eager to be gone.

  The smile faltered, replaced by a confused, empty look. ‘I – I wanted to ask you about Nell. About what happened to her. I know she was left behind, but no one can tell me how it really was. You were there.’ There was no blame or accusation in the words, only a pleading, a desperation to know.

  A natural pity warred in Dow with his old hatred. He was under no obligation to explain a thing about Nell: Diego had long since forfeited any claim in her affairs. Dow and Nell’s last moments were private, to be shared with no one. And yet . . . the bewilderment in Diego was too pathetic to bear. With a sigh, Dow gave a terse account of what had happened on the floating isle, and the choice Nell had made for all their sakes.

  Diego’s shoulders had slumped by the time the tale was done. ‘Why would she do that? To doom herself to die in that place. She didn’t have to. Uyal was the only one they really wanted. Uyal would have been enough to satisfy them. She could have got away . . .’

  Dow only frowned. To imagine that Nell would have abandoned Uyal for the sake of her own freedom only showed how little Diego had known her at all. And yet – as the pain awoke in him afresh – a dark inner voice whispered in agreement; maybe she should have bargained differently with the Sunken, and given them Uyal alone, so that she could be with Dow still . . .

  Diego was gazing at him forlornly. ‘You talked with her, didn’t you? You tried to stop her? We are enemies, I know, but on this we surely agree, and I need to be certain that you did everything you could to save her.’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘And she . . . at the last . . . did she have anything to say of me?’

  Dow blinked in amazement. Did Diego seriously believe that Nell, in her last moments with Dow, had been thinking of him?

  But Diego went on. ‘And if not Nell, then what of Uyal? I see now that it was all my fault. To display Uyal in such a naked fashion was a terrible act. No doubt my scapegoat regarded me with much bitterness in the end, and it would not be undeserved. Did you speak with Uyal, on the isle? Don’t spare me. If my scapegoat had evil to say of me, I should know.’

  Suspicion dawned on Dow at last, along with old loathing . . . was that what all this was about? Not Nell at all, or at least not only Nell.

  ‘No,’ Dow lied. ‘Uyal was barely conscious. I had no last words with your scapegoat.’ And then, just to test if he judged Diego correctly, he added with a deliberate despondency, ‘In any case, it seems that all Uyal’s prophecies, Great or otherwise, will come to naught, for you must have heard how desperate our situation is. There’s little chance we’ll ever emerge from the Doldrums, let alone survive to discover land.’

  Diego nodded ruefully. ‘I confess, I have all but forgotten about the New World in these last days. It seems a foolish dream now.’

  Dow’s suspicion hardened. ‘Indeed. But as to that, and seeing it no longer matters, tell me this: what was the secret prophecy told to you by Uyal, the means by which the founder of the New World was to be known?’ He smiled. ‘How was I to be foiled, at the last?’

  Diego laughed offhandedly – though not before Dow caught one sharp glance of his reddened eyes – and said, ‘That . . . oh, it hardly bears thinking about now, and as you say, it no longer matters anyway.’

  ‘Still,’ Dow pressed, ‘for curiosity’s sake.’

  Cornered, the deposed prince gave an elaborate shrug, not meeting Dow’s gaze, but thinking, it seemed, quickly. ‘Well, by Uyal’s account, the founder would be whomever sighted the New World first. My plan when we reached the southern seas – assuming it was the Chloe that was lost in the Doldrums – was to lock you away in my brig, until the day I spied a shore, and that would be the matter decided.’ He laughed again. ‘But it’s of no import now.’

  Dow smiled back. ‘No. No import whatever.’

  And that – he thought, as he made his departure – told him all he needed to know about this supposedly chastened and reformed Diego. For of course that was not Uyal’s prophecy at all. Dow had scarcely given the true prophecy a thought since awakening from his fever, and had mentioned it to no one; but he had not forgotten its wording. The fateful issue was not who sighted the new land first, but who set foot upon it first.

  And Diego’s answer made one thing clear. If by some miracle they did survive the Doldrums, and pass through to the discovery of the New World, Diego still intended that it should be he who would rule it.

  13. THE EDGE

  But in truth it hardly mattered whether or not Diego still nurtured his old dreams of power, for in the days that followed there was no sign of any miracle that would save the expedition. The only miracle there could be, indeed, was for a wind to rise, but the Chloe only crept on under tow, its masts rising as naked and useless as if they had never known a breeze, and never would again. And all around, the Doldrums gloom hung motionless.

  Two weeks now they had laboured in the Sterile Sea. At first, in the clear water, they had made a slightly better pace compared to the crawl of the inner Barrier, as many as fourteen miles a day. If only they had been able to keep that up! But after the disaster of the mould, and the reduction in rations, their pace began to slow, even as their need for haste became all the more desperate. From fourteen miles to twelve, then ten and less.

  There simply wasn’t the strength available anymore among the rowers. Malnutrition was starting to bite too savagely. It was impossible to work an oar with any vigour or stamina when one had eaten no more that day – or in the days previous – than a small slab of hard tack and a sliver of dried meat, and drunk no more than a few mouthfuls of warm, stale water.

  In company with hunger and thirst came disease. A cavalcade of Doldrums fevers already afflicted the crew, but now scurvy awoke and stalked the overcrowded decks, blackening the teeth and rotting the gums of its victims. The sick list grew so long eventually that it became a struggle, every two hours, to find a hundred rowers fit enough to man the boats.

  And in the Chloe’s sick bay another list also grew: the rollcall of the dead. Each morning their shrouded corpses were brought up and lowered over the side into the waiting sea – the count accelerating, now eight, now nine, now ten. Of the twelve hundred souls who had crowded the ship after the sinking of the New World, already less than eleven hundred remained, and day by day their number dwindled towards a thousand . . .

  But still they rowed, the voices of the coxswains gone hoarse, the crews at the oars ghastly demon figures with parched lips and empty eyes. Seventeen days, eighteen, twenty, out upon the barren waters.

  Now they had perhaps only four weeks left before the last crumb of hard tack was eaten. And yet at best guess they were barely halfway across the dividing zone. Not nearly far enough. At their ever-slowing pace – seven miles a day now – the most they could hope for now was to reach the beginning of the outer Doldrums, and feel a breeze rise at last, just as their food failed.

  It was a bitter promise. For if the Chloe indeed reached the end of the Sterile Sea, and raised sails, then they would fairly be able to claim, even though still short of the open ocean, to be the first humans to gain the southern half of the world, and to know southern winds. It would be the greatest maritime feat of all history, dwarfing even the legendary achievements of the Great Age of Exploration. In any other time and place, they would all be showered with wealth and fame for such an accomplishment. And yet their only reward would be to die slowly of hunger, on the very fringe of the New World.

  It wasn’t fair.

  But they rowed on anyway, towards their cheated prize.

  *

  Dow took his turn at the oars like everyone else. He had become gaunt to behold, but the slashes on his face had healed, and his eye socket had stopped weeping, so he was as abl
e-bodied as anyone. Even so, each two-hour shift was torment to him, his back on fire, his legs and arms trembling in spasms, his oar dragging, the rowers, Dow included, all groaning helplessly as they bent again to the next stroke.

  And for all their efforts nothing moved anyway. Not the boat, not the ship, not the dulled sun in the sky. After-wards, Dow would limp to his cabin and tend his blistered hands, but it was a futile gesture, for nothing could soothe open wounds on palms and fingers gone so fleshless.

  Yet beyond these hours at the oars, there were few demands on Dow’s time. The ship had fallen into a set routine of suffering, and day by day it did not change. And though he was constantly exhausted, sleep eluded him, driven off by the heat and the ache of his limbs. So there was nothing to keep his thoughts from the slow calamity that was enveloping the expedition. They were all going to die, and even their renowned captain was powerless to stop it. So much then for the great Dow Amber, and his special link with fate.

  And yet what plagued Dow most as he rolled sleepless in his bed was not his failure, nor the grim future that awaited them all; instead it was the past, and what lay behind him, a few miles further every day.

  Nell.

  He had assumed that the agony of losing her would lessen over time. Dow had experienced great grief before, after all – his entire family lay slain, back in the Old World – and while the wounds of such a loss never fully healed, they did at least become less crippling as the months went by. Or maybe it was just that one learned to walk erect despite the hurt.

  But with Nell, that wasn’t happening. The pain had not lessened, even after weeks, nor did he cope with it any better; it was fresh every time he woke to it, and obsessed him more deeply as each day passed. And it was only now that Dow was coming to see why this was different from the other losses he had known. His parents and siblings, for instance – for all the horrors of their murder, they were dead. There was nothing that could be done for them. All that was left was to grieve, and to honour their memory.

  But Nell was alive.

  If she had died, as awful as that would have been, it would at least have been final. But there was nothing final about this. The pain and the guilt were eternal. Nell was not dead. Not unless the Sunken had killed her, and they would not do that – she and Uyal were their prize. And not unless she had already ended it herself, using the pilot’s vial of poison. But that would not be either, Dow was sure. Nell would endure for far longer yet before she considered such a course. She lived, he knew it.

  And that was too terrible to conceive. Every instant that Dow’s thoughts turned to her, she was alive at that same moment. Alive, but wretchedly so, with only scavenged water to drink upon her floating isle, and for food only the dead creatures the Sunken deigned to bring her. Alive, but doomed to spend the rest of her days in silence and heat, never to feel wind again, or to behold the stars. Alive, but knowing that no one could ever come for her, that other than Uyal she would never hear a human voice again. Alive, but condemned to the most profound isolation any person had ever known.

  These images beat upon Dow like torture. Time and time again he took the locket and its little cameo from the drawer, and studied her image. It was pitiful, he knew. This wasn’t even the Nell he remembered, not this face so young and unblemished. And the locket itself was cursed, it had brought about all this ruin. By rights, Dow knew, he should throw it away, as Nell herself had wanted. But he couldn’t. It was all he had left of her.

  Several times, in his desolation, he even came close to announcing to the others that they were turning the Chloe about and rowing their way back to rescue her. But it was nonsense, of course. Even if they did retrace the miles, they would be in their last extremity of hunger and thirst by the time they reached her again, with no defence at all against the Sunken – and they would be killed forthwith, right before Nell’s eyes as likely as not.

  And that would be the final insult. At least now, as she languished in her prison, she could hope that the Chloe was winning through to the New World, that her sacrifice had been worthwhile. But if the Chloe returned, and everyone died, then her captivity would be in vain. No, if Nell could not be rescued, then they owed it to her to give her suffering purpose, to strive unto their last strength to achieve the southern world.

  Which was a fine sentiment, except, for all their striving, they weren’t going to reach the southern world. They were going to fail.

  Which brought Dow’s black thoughts full circle.

  She had done it all for nothing anyway.

  *

  At mid-afternoon on the twenty-fifth day within the Sterile Sea there came a moment of fatal significance. The boats were called in for the usual exchange of crews, but when five craft had done so and gone back out, no one could be found to man the remaining three – all hands were either too exhausted, or too ill.

  Dow and Boiler consulted a moment. The five boats already crewed could carry on towing, perhaps, but it would only exhaust those rowers all the more quickly – there seemed little point. They decided instead to recall all the boats, and declare a four-hour break so that everyone could rest through the worst heat of the day, and then resume rowing early in the evening.

  And so it was done. As sunset neared, the boats were sent out again, fully manned. But no one was fooling themselves: the pause marked a deadly deterioration of their plight. If they could no longer tow nonstop, their minimal hopes fell further still. The following dawn, the navigators reckoned their passage in the previous twenty-four hours at less than four miles.

  Dow considered the figure in dismay. Four miles! It was a parody of progress, so much effort and pain, only to move the ship a stone’s throw from where it had been the day before. And he was not the only one who thought so. That afternoon, a second halt was called to the towing, and though the boats went out once more at nightfall, Dow could see that for all the rowers cared as they shambled to their places, the craft may as well have been left unlaunched.

  Everything had changed. In a single day the mood on board had slid from endurance to indifference; from dogged struggle to surrender; from hope, however thin, to a state where all labour seemed futile, and death welcome. The edge had come, and they had crossed over it.

  Soon, Dow knew, a few days more at most, the rowers would give up. And somewhere ahead, maybe only ten or twenty miles further south, the Chloe would come to a stop. And there the ship would stay. Forever. No breeze or current would ever shift it, no sound – once its crew was dead and withered – would ever disturb it. In silence it would sit alone and empty, waiting through the decades in the Doldrums gloom. A tomb, and a monument to the folly of those who would challenge the great division of the world. Until, after centuries maybe, when even the nicre of its hull decayed, it would sink . . .

  And how could Dow prevent it? All that night he stood watch on the high deck, staring up at the black sky, in a crisis of despair. What could he do? What could Dow Amber summon at this last catastrophe?

  Nothing, there was nothing, no fate to which he could appeal, no fortune that could alter the winds and the seas and the facts of starvation. All his assurances, all his grand delusions, had been stripped bare.

  The night fled quickly by in its anguish, and dawn approached like a condemnation, with nothing solved. For a time Dow studied the glow of the coming sun, knowing that it threatened only more suffering, that it might indeed be the last dawn before the end, then he turned for solace to the west, where darkness still lingered under the great arches of the Doldrums roof. And yet this too was only more evidence of his failure. They had not even come far enough south to emerge – even partially – from beneath the Barrier canopy.

  An abject notion arose, that if he could at least sight a single star again before he died, in a clear sky, then maybe he could die content.

  But it wasn’t true. He would die bitter, knowing that it had all been for nothing, and that Nell’s sacrifice had been rendered meaningless . . .

  Then he saw i
t.

  Something shone out for an instant, white and remote, set high in the western gloom, a glimpse from the corner of his single eye.

  A star, in answer to his prayer? But the bright gleam was gone, he must only have imagined it. Dow stared anew into the heights, cursing his depthless vision. There was no star. The roof hung unbroken as it ever did, tinted the dullest orange as the sun rose . . .

  But no – there, in one place alone, high in the west, the orange gave way to a paler patch: a rent in the canopy. And through it was revealed something that Dow had not beheld in months. Blue sky.

  His heart lifted. It was a shred of colour only, washed and faded and faint, but there in the upper reaches of the atmosphere the airs must be in motion, tearing aside for a moment the Doldrums murk.

  And then he saw it again, unmistakable within that pale patch of sky, a flash of white – not a star, but a shape wheeling, high beyond the canopy and catching the rays of the rising sun. A shape familiar and yet so alien to the Doldrums as to seem fantastically strange.

  A bird.

  It was far away, and even as it wheeled it was lost again, but Dow knew in that single glimpse that it was not just any bird, that against all chance, he had spied, for the third time in his life, an Ice Albatross.

  A shout held ready in his throat, a cry to alert the lookouts, waiting only until he saw it again. Ah, but the sun was above the horizon now, flushing the whole Doldrums roof into a brazen dome, and he could no longer see the open piece of sky.

  It was too late, the canopy had closed.

  But then there it was, one last glimpse of whiteness and of great wings outspread: the albatross hanging in plain view. Then, even as Dow called, the great wings folded and the shape dove hard down towards the darkened sea, and in another instant was swallowed up.

  *

  ‘But I did see it,’ Dow insisted.

  Half an hour had passed, and all the senior staff had gathered at Dow’s request in the Great Cabin.

  Boiler – along with many others – was studying Dow in deep concern. ‘No one is saying you didn’t, or that you didn’t see something, at least. But what you now propose – Dow, it’s madness . . .’