The Voyage of the Morning Light

by Marina Endicott

  Aren nodded, and Kay said, “Yes, oh yes, that would be perfect.” Which sounded as if she knew the story, which she did not—but Father had read him, therefore Herodotus was manly reading, and a historical account rather than mere fiction.

  Mr. Brimner adjusted his dark spectacles (Kay was happy to see his portable darkness unbroken) and began: “This Arion, they say, was a great harpist, the first, so far as we know, who composed a dithyramb!” He gave a courteous nod, as if Kay at least would certainly know what a dithyramb was. She smiled at him, knowing he knew by then exactly what she knew and did not know.

  “He had sailed to Italy and Sicily and made a great deal of money—he was the Caruso of his time. Wishing to return home to Corinth, he hired a ship with a crew of Corinthians, whom he trusted. But out in the open sea, those rascals announced their intention to cast Arion overboard and take the gold for themselves. He offered them all his wealth if they would spare his life, but the sailors insisted he either slay himself on deck or leap straightway into the sea. Being driven to it, he promised to put himself to death if they would let him sing one last song.”

  Aren looked to Kay; she mimed the playing of a lyre-harp to show what was meant.

  “Thinking it good to hear the best harpist alive, for the few moments he remained alive, the men settled themselves on deck to listen. He dressed in his full singer’s robes, took his harp and sang the Orthian measure. At its end, as he had promised, he threw himself into the sea, and they went on sailing away to Corinth.”

  Mr. Brimner sat back in his deck chair and took his spectacles off to polish them.

  “That cannot be the end,” Kay protested.

  Aren said, urging him, “Then? And then?”

  Mr. Brimner sighed. “You are too wise for my narrative ploy. Yes, and then—and then, as Arion struggled in the waves, a dolphin came and swam beside him, and then beneath him, and supported him on its back across the water and brought him to shore at Tainaron, which is very near to Corinth.”

  Kay could have said, I once swam where dolphins were. She remembered that grey smoothness, the clear eye watching her. And how she would not have touched him without his permission. It did not seem impossible to her, this tale.

  “And when Arion came to land, he went to Corinth and told the king what had happened. The king set watch for the rascally sailors, and when they came, he inquired of them if they had any report to make of Arion, his famous harpist. Oh yes, said they, he is safe in Italy, they left him at Taras faring well . . . At that, Arion appeared before them, in the same singer’s robes as when he made his leap from the ship, and they were struck with amazement and no longer able to deny their crime.”

  Aren laughed and laughed. Kay was not sure if he understood it perfectly, or if he merely laughed to please Mr. Brimner.

  Who laughed as well, and added, “Herodotus says this tale is still told by Corinthians, and there is at Tainaron a bronze figure of a man upon a dolphin’s back.”

  The voyage was too quickly over.

  They stood again on the little stone jetty under the rise of Mr. Brimner’s house, Francis having good-naturedly said they would pull for Ha‘ano, no need for cadging a second lift at Pangai. Thea sent a basket of supplies and two chickens over in the boat; Kay went along to hold the chickens, and to say farewell.

  Mr. Brimner pulled on his thin nose. “Well, my dear Kay, goodbye again, for a short while at least.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  The pier faced a flat, beige-blue stretch of sea with nothing much to interest the eye.

  “Your brother tells me another voyage is planned, not next year but in 1914.”

  Kay nodded. Her braid had come loose; she pushed her hair out of her eyes again and rubbed them.

  “When people are fast friends, it is immaterial whether they visit in the flesh or in the spirit. I have been following your work and travels with great interest through your letters—Wait, let me think . . . Have I yet received a single epistle from you? No?”

  She blushed.

  “Ha, I do not mean to shame you! The price of a seafaring life is that one is always busy, and correspondence suffers.”

  “I will write to you faithfully now,” she promised.

  “And I to you,” he said. He shook her hand on it.

  She went down the pier and hopped back into the boat. The boys pulled on the oars, and once again she left Mr. Brimner’s bundled, bird-legged body standing at the end of the pier, waving his handkerchief to them as the boat separated from the pier at Ha‘ano and made way to the Morning Light, back out into the blue.

  15

  An Eclipse

  On April 28, they sailed through an eclipse of the sun, the first that Kay had ever witnessed. Mr. Wright, a great amateur astronomer, believed it must be the first for Aren too, since he could find no note in his almanacs of a full eclipse occurring in this hemisphere during the boy’s lifetime.

  The sun was bright and ordinary when they went up on deck for breakfast, but Mr. Wright rushed round with pieces of card and instructions for creating a pinhole viewer, and dire warnings about blindness, not only for Kay and Aren but for all the crew. Aren was in the lifeboat playing knucklebones with Seaton, and leaned over when called. He watched the perforation of the card with interest, listened gravely to the cautions of Thea and Mr. Wright, and then leapt back up to finish his game, crowing whenever the bones fell in his favour.

  Kay took her book up to the roof of the Aft cabin, letting her bare feet dangle down through the open skylight. Thea had quite stopped remembering to order her to wear either boots or stockings these days—everything was much freer now that Aren took up half her worrying time.

  At a sudden feeling Kay looked up, scanning the yellowish sky, but could see no portent. And yet everything felt strange.

  The ship was nearly at a standstill, the wind having dropped completely, and Francis directed Mr. Best to set the sea anchor so that all the crew could stop their work and watch the phenomenon.

  Finishing with the bones, Aren appeared again over the lip of the lifeboat and made a game of coming to sit by Kay by the most devious route, ending with a drop onto all fours beside her. He sat close, looking at her book, which was Treasure Island, for the seventh time.

  There was no point in attempting study when something enormous was about to happen, but Kay read to him, pointing at the words, and his finger raced ahead to find words he knew: ship, island, table, ocean. She stopped reading to him and made him read to her, helping him when needed.

  Though I had lived by the shore all my life, I seemed never to have been near the sea till then. The smell of tar and salt was something new. I saw the most wonderful figureheads, that had all been far over the ocean. I saw, besides, many old sailors, with rings in their ears, and whiskers curled in ringlets, and tarry pigtails, and their swaggering, clumsy sea-walk . . .

  They were getting on very well, Kay doing a good deal of prompting and Aren very concentrated, when that feeling of quiet alertness came over them again, as something odd happened to the page. It was muted, darker.

  Aren looked up first, and then Kay. All the men had gathered on deck, even those who ought to have been sleeping. All were looking up into the sky.

  Pilot came out of his shady spot by the wheelhouse and stood looking up too.

  “Not direct at the sun!” Mr. Wright called in general warning. But the temptation was strong! Many of the crew put up their hands to shield their eyes, but most continued looking generally up.

  The day—darkened.

  Nobody spoke.

  The eeriness of it, and the stillness of wind and sea, took hold of Kay in her deepest heart. Aren had moved imperceptibly so that he was very close to her. Kay whistled for Pilot, and he came, moving quietly and crouching a little as if afraid, and hopped up onto the saloon roof. Aren made room for him and put an arm round his neck.

  Thea came with the pieces of card and reached them up. Kay adjusted them to show Aren how the sun was
looking—a bite taken out of the top of the disc. It had turned into a horned thing. Then there was a slow progression into dusk. The men eventually went back to a desultory kind of work, until in half an hour or so the twilight was pronounced. On the card the sun showed like a crescent moon lying on its back. Then they had to look up.

  The air around them had fallen into purple, eerie evening. Kay realized that half its mystery lay in the absence of a preceding exit of the sun, no redness in the west, no lingering light. The whole sky darkened equally.

  When Cocker called eleven o’clock, the sun was only a bright thumbnail left in the sky, like a bit of evening star come early. The sky had tinted from cerulean down into Delft and Prussian blue, and then lower, into a shining indigo.

  In the starboard shrouds, Jacky Judge called down, “Sir!”

  Francis turned, and Jacky pointed out to the sea. Kay and Aren stood to see better—to see the strangest thing imaginable.

  In the weird descending twilight, the water was full of shapes. Whales, many of them, had come to the surface, their heads gazing up. Then more, smaller shapes.

  Aren said a word and Kay said, “Dolphins, dolphins . . .”

  A head, and another head, another—dotted across a wide space, twenty or thirty dolphins and whales had risen from the deeps, all looking up into the heavens together to where the sky was growing murkier, yellower, more sombre and burnt umber every minute—no longer normal darkness in the least.

  Again, silence fell across the ship. Thea had crouched down by the railing and Kay thought she might be praying.

  Darkness fell then, as quick as a blind. They could see the shadow-edge of it skimming toward them across the sea, and in two minutes it was night.

  Kay let out a little shriek and clamped on to Aren, as he did to her with both his thin, strong arms. The darkness came with a wave of vertigo—everything was wrong! This was not how the world was to work!

  The darkness, which was not night but a tarnished-silver sadness cast over the world, lasted four minutes. Kay breathed, of course she did, but she could not make her chest open as usual. She and Aren both kept tight hold on Pilot, who shivered uncontrollably all through it, and on each other. When the light came back, as if it had never gone away, they saw the other observers diving down, dispersing like darkness, going on about their usual lives. And so did the Morning Light sail on.

  Aren was interested in everything. While Kay sat reading in the morning, sitting on the roof of the Aft cabin, Aren poked about the ship and asked what? what? how? wanting to know how the ship was steered, how the pulleys worked, how the scuppers drained, how the holystone ground the boards to that clean white finish. He was quiet, but infinitely alert. Timid and brave by turns, very loving to Kay, whom he had adopted as his partner. For a time he would sit with her at the work table, printing his own letters at Thea’s direction; then he would race around the deck, laughing with the boys. He could swarm up the ropes faster than any, but Francis had commanded him to stay out of the way when orders had been given, and he obeyed. He was fond of Francis, which surprised Kay a little—she thought he might have been shy of him, as she sometimes had been herself at first. His affection was quiet, a matter of a hand trustingly laid on Francis’s arm, or of standing side-by-each at the chart desk, in undemonstrative harmony.

  But he was sad, too. From time to time it seemed that the weight of learning things was too much for him, and tears would well into his eyes. Then, tired of new knowledge, he would go and knock on the hull of the starboard lifeboat and be taken up by Seaton for a rest.

  One afternoon Arthur Wetmore called Kay and Aren to come quick, come to the side. “Sharks!” he said, not so loudly as to alarm them. Looking over the rail, they found shapes milling in the dark-green waters—long, thin, grey, muscled in their movements. Liu Jiacheng had just dumped a basket of scraps, and the great fish had come to feed. Six upright fins, circling, looking for more. The thick grey skin had a rough look of badly moulded clay.

  Aren stared out over the water. “I wish for my taod.”

  “What is that?” she asked.

  He made a strong motion. “I stick the—wood—stick in fish. Stick, stick . . .” He lifted his arm and slashed it down, again and again.

  In his own place, he would have been a fisherman, Kay thought. What would he become now, in this place?

  16

  The Horn

  Off the western side of the Horn at 6 p.m., the wind was blowing hard when the starboard watch came on deck to haul up the mainsail. All hands went aloft to make it fast—an operation that Kay always watched if she could, because it was so terrifying: twelve men at intervals along the mainsail, hauling, and six below, sweating the ropes even harder, to make the wet canvas compact into a long roll fit for tying up. She stood in her oilskin coat, tucked into the shelter of the House, staring upward into the clouded twilight overhead. They had furled the sail, all but the clews, and now came the tricksy part.

  Arthur Wetmore was the outside man, way out at the end of the cross yard, sitting on the footrope ready to pass a turn of the gasket around the clew—when somehow he lost his balance, slipping forward of the footrope, and came down.

  He held on to the gasket, but it was a small rope, not two inches across, and it slid through his hands so that he fell into the sea. It must have hurt his bare hands terribly—it made Kay’s hands hurt as she watched.

  They all saw him fall. Francis rushed aft, and as he ran, he was calling to the man at the wheel—it was Mr. Best, for the starboard watch—“Put the wheel hard down!”

  Kay felt the instant change in their course, the ship responding even in this turbulent sea. Francis had already grabbed the lifebuoy. He threw it to Arthur, and it landed not ten feet from him—his arm reached out and clutched at the log line, but that too slipped through his fingers. When he came to the log, he held it for a moment, but that towed him under and he had to let go—but then Kay saw him take the few strokes, swimming hard, and he caught at the lifebuoy. Her heart was clamouring in her chest. Suddenly everything was awful. But he had the buoy.

  Francis shouted, “Let go, t’gallant halyards! Let go, topsail halyards! Jacky, you there! Up aloft to watch for Arthur . . .”

  Jacky swarmed up, faster than Kay had ever seen him go, and clung fast to watch.

  The other men were working their way inward from the mainsail to safer positions and then all scrambling down, knowing what must be done. There was no time to take in more sail—Francis tore the covers off the gig, Seaton leaping from his station in the lifeboat and helping to unfasten the mooring, and six or seven of the men carried the boat over the deck to the lee side and threw her over the rail with a single line in each end. The gig was longer and stronger than the lifeboat, it would fare better on these bad seas.

  Mr. Best and four of the strongest men, Douglas, Anderson, Lynch and Thomas, started out from the ship. Francis gave Thomas a tin of oil as he went over the side, for the sea was very heavy and now breaking badly.

  Kay watched in terror, seeing the boat almost standing on end. She was still standing there, fists tight-clenched about the rail, when Francis spotted her and sent her down below. She did not protest, but went as she was bid.

  In the saloon, Thea sat reading to Aren, as if nothing at all was happening. Kay told them, words clogging in her throat, and they waited together for a very long time, not wanting or daring to intrude up above. Then Thea stood and said she must—they could at least—ready things for the men returning.

  She went to find Jiacheng, and they together made up the fires in the narrow forward saloon, while Kay and Aren fetched extra blankets from the lazaret and set them round the stoves to warm.

  “Hot water too, please,” Thea said, and Kay and Aren fell to as Jiacheng’s bucket brigade. They were glad to be busy down below, while Thea went up—Francis had sent word down that they’d lost sight of the gig boat.

  She came down shortly, saying the sea was dreadful, that she had seen nothi
ng like it since the hurricane. But she did not pack Kay and Aren off to bed, perhaps realizing that Kay would not go, and thinking it best to keep Aren with them anyhow. Or perhaps even wanting their company, Kay thought. Kay sat beside her at one of the mess tables for a little while, holding her cold hand and kissing it to make it warm.

  It seemed a very long time until they heard glad shouting and noise up on deck—then Thea sent them back to Aft quickly, to make room for the chilled men coming down, saying she would soon follow. Kay tucked Aren under one quilt with her on the banquette at the end of the saloon, far from the lamp, and he had fallen into a doze before Thea came.

  In a little while Francis too came to the saloon and told them all that had happened. At least, he told Thea, not seeming to be aware of Kay and Aren in the shadows behind him. Even Thea had forgotten them.

  “After half an hour the dark had come down so that we lost sight of the boat. I wore ship at once. We had clewed the topgallant sails up and the upper fore topsail down—” He caught himself up. “But that is for my report. Find me my inkwell, will you, Thea?”

  She hastened for it, and some sheets of rough paper, and he sat at the table to tell the rest, scribbling a note now and again as he went through the tale.

  “She was in a dead drift, as I wished to keep the boat to windward to give them a square run before the sea coming back. The rain squall had set in, blowing hard. The risk was terrible, and I set the ensign to recall the boat, but for—oh God—for an hour and a quarter, I tell you, we saw no sign of her. I gave her up.”

  He stared across at Thea, his hand stilling on the page, silent for a moment. “One must go through the experience to realize how horrible is that feeling. Jacky Judge was in the main crosstrees all this time, trying to sight the boat—I sent him down for warming too, poor lad—and at last I saw her, right to windward, as the squall cleared, steering for the ship, running as much as ten feet of herself out of the water in those seas! They got under the lee of the ship and pulled alongside, the boat half-full of water, but no Arthur. He’s gone, poor fellow.”