The Deinonychus growled softly in his own tongue. With his human palate Nallab was unable to reply, but as long as communication was kept simple, he was able to understand much of what Enit said.
“No, no. I’m sure that we had the delegation from Chan-dara scheduled in at four o’clock, not two.” Taking up pad and stylus, Nallab wrote out his reply in the familiar dinosaurian calligraphics.
Enit glanced at the response and rumbled a comment. Alone among the carnivorous dinosaurs it was the humansized dromaeosaurs who had managed to moderate their natural appetites sufficiently to allow them to participate in
Dinotopian civilization. Subsisting largely on a diet of fish and invertebrates, they had successfully subdued their baser natures. Their considerable intelligence was a great asset to the advance of Dinotopian science and research, and far more spiritually and intellectually rewarding than making a meal of their neighbors.
The two librarians, one human and the other dinosaur, conversed energetically by means of gestures and scribblings while Arthur stood quietly nearby, temporarily forgotten. With a resigned sigh, he turned away.
Nallab was right, of course. He usually was, even when he turned the subject under discussion into a gentle joke. After Arthur had found time to ponder what the old librarian had said, the wisdom that underlay each humorous anecdote or jest inevitably shone through.
Will had to grow up on his own. Much as a loving father might want to, Arthur knew he couldn’t coddle, couldn’t watch over his son every minute of every day. There would come a time, he knew, when he wouldn’t be there at all, to answer questions or give advice or even offer simple comfort.
Why, Will already had a fiancee, the splendid Sylvia, and a career as an accomplished skybax rider. He’d also retained and developed his interests in scholarship and the sciences. Whether he would become a master skybax rider or take up a life of advanced academia remained to be seen. Either way, these were decisions he must necessarily make by himself.
Just as he would have to handle his part in the forthcoming crisis on his own, without his father’s assistance.
Arthur Denison blinked. It struck him then that what was troubling him was not that he would be unable to offer Will help or advice. It was the realization that his rapidly maturing son might no longer need it.
III
gulls and terns rode the storm front, their wild cries rising above the wind as piercingly as any trumpet call. Effortlessly they surfed the sky currents, rising and dipping to tease the waves that clutched futilely at their supple white-winged forms. More than anything they resembled fragments of foam cast free from the crests of breaking rollers.
Whole tree trunks sent down rivers or torn free from squall-scoured shores tumbled and snapped in the waves. Teak from Siam and mahogany from Java, mangrove from Sumatra and bamboo from Borneo, marked the leading edge of the tempest, riding the breakers like jackstraws. There were clusters of branches still clinging futilely to their remaining leaves, dead fish stunned to the surface by the fury of the churning debris, a forlorn handmade fishing net ripped from its moorings, and whole rafts of coconuts bobbing in the swell like so many abandoned punctuation marks in search of a paragraph.
Riding high above this roiling confusion of flotsam, her foremast snapped, unreefed sails tattered and shredded, and taking on water, was the three-masted barkentine Condor. Designed not for speed like a tea clipper but for hauling cargo, she was proving her seaworthiness now. Her heavy keel and reinforced hull were all that had kept her anxious crew from being cast upon the mercy of the waves many days and leagues earlier. A more handsome but lesser vessel would have broken up at the mere sight of such a storm as raged about her rigging now. Not that there was a man-jack aboard
who didn’t believe that to be her ultimate fate anyway. Not given the furies that thundered and raged all about them.
A few men gazed longingly at the immense seas surrounding them, whose crests frequently overtopped the sodden deck, and silently wondered whether a quick end by drowning might not be preferable to the unending battering they were being forced to endure. Even if they somehow managed to survive and outrun the storm front, the inevitable exhaustion of their meager supplies promised a slow death from starvation. A step to the nearest railing, a quick jump, and the sea would welcome them with her eternal impartiality.
Raging for weeks, the storm had carried the Condor and her crew hundreds of leagues off course, driving them steadily south and west into the empty vastness of the Indian Ocean. According to the best contemporary charts, in all that great expanse of water there was not a single friendly isle or welcoming shore on which they could hope to be cast up.
Only the energy and ravings of their indomitable captain kept them going. Cursing and beating them from one task to the next, he refused to let them concede their ship, much less their lives, to the relentless gale. Any man who chose to leap overboard knew he’d best sink quickly lest the Condor’s captain have him gaffed and brought back aboard, to face a wrath no less terrifying than that of the tempest.
Brognar Blackstrap’s anger was as capacious as his stomach, and few dared tempt it. Though his expansive gut heaved and rolled like one of the green swells beneath the bow, rash and foolish was the man who dared to challenge the face above. Of indeterminate age, he was strong as an ox and just as stubborn.
His personal history was as difficult to navigate as a London fog, in which very city he was rumored to have done some trading. Subsequently moving (or chased) to the Americas, he’d dabbled in various enterprises while keeping always one step or, if fortune happened to be smiling on him, two ahead of the authorities. Eventually his luck had run out and, betrayed by a comrade whom he had importunately cheated in a matter of business, he had been captured, tried, and sentenced to the prison at Hobart, Tasmania, from which no ordinary man had ever escaped.
But then, Brognar Blackstrap was no ordinary man.
In bright sunlight the impressive dome of his skull shone with a pinkish radiance, as if inlaid with rose quartz. From the sides and back, long black hair flecked with gray cascaded in rippling waves, as if mocking those long-forgotten follicles that had once thrived upon that now vacant globular terrain. Heavy brows served to introduce the enormous downward-pointing mustache, which burgeoned from beneath his bulbous nose like an ebony octopus emerging from its coral hideaway. The deep-set eyes were black as night, though not entirely without humor. Teeth showed scattered and broken in his jaws, as irregular as neolithic monuments. One was fashioned entirely of gold cast from a watch Blackstrap had appropriated in the course of an argument with a forgotten but now wiser gentleman planter of Jamaica.
Woe betide the seaman caught shirking his work. Not that Blackstrap was a cruel captain—no. He was too crafty a leader to employ such blatant methods on his own crew. Instead, he preferred to employ the subtlety that had characterized his shady business dealings across the half the globe.
Not that he was averse, mind, to cracking heads when the occasion demanded.
Preister Smiggens was another matter entirely. Self-taught as a seaman, possessing more brains than the heads of any three jack-tars slapped together, the only man aboard the Condor who had suffered any advanced formal education, the tall first mate was as lanky and weathered as a length of driftwood. Encountering Blackstrap in the course of their mutual sojourn in quaint Hobart, Smiggens had recognized in the captain qualities of survival that he himself did not possess. To his credit, Blackstrap saw many complementary traits in Smiggens. While engaging in the not so very restful prison pastime of breaking up large rocks with small hammers, the two men shaped an informal partnership, which had, to date, endured for several years.
A partnership that the relentless storm seemed about, any day now, to dissolve.
Presently both men were standing aft, behind the wheel and the wizened Nantucketer who held it. Determination rode the helmsman’s face like a harpooner in the bow of a
whaleboat, but hope had long
since taken flight from his eyes. Scrambling about the rigging and clinging to the wave-swept deck, the rest of the crew did their best to keep the Condor from capsizing.
As it had for weeks, the wind blew steadily from astern. The obdurate current that had caught them in its grip carried them ever farther from land, ever deeper into uncharted waters.
A small, tattered flag fluttered from a mizzen stay. Currently it was Dutch, a memory of their recent visit to Batavia. Previously, while they had been conducting business in Hong Kong, the crew had flown the Union Jack. Packed neatly below in a small sail locker were the flags of some thirty nations, each to be brought out and run up as the occasion required.
In point of fact, while the crew of the Condor hailed from many of those countries, they recognized and honored none, professing loyalty to their comrades rather than to larger and more restrictive societies. The one flag they did salute was run up only in the course of serious enterprise. That flag consisted of a skull and bones rampant on a black field.
Wind buffeted the barkentine and she heeled sharply to starboard. Standing six-foot-four and weighing well over three hundred pounds, Blackstrap slid not an inch sideways. He was as much at home in the sea as any fish, and about as compassionate.
“Keep a weather eye there, Mr. Ruskin.”
“Aye, Cap’n.” Ignoring the sting, the helmsman wiped saltwater from his eyes. He was old and small, but if you gagged and blindfolded him he could smell out a course between two close-lying islands by comparing the odor of land with that of coral. What he could not do was fight clear of the damnably insistent current and storm.
Preister Smiggens interceded on his behalf. “Do your best, Ruskin. There’s little we can do in weather like this save try to stay afloat.”
“Aye,” growled Blackstrap. “Curse this current! She makes the Gulf Stream feel like a bloody creek!” Enormous hands contracted, forming hairy, gnarled masses.
Smiggens clutched at a line to steady himself. “If the wind would change, we might have a chance to break free.”
“The wind, the wind,” Ruskin groused. “I’ve never seen the like, current and wind acting in such concert. Off Cape Horn ’tis something like this, but never so steady or for so long. Never!” A wave crashed over the bow and the spray reached even those in the stern. “If the sea wants us, she’ll have us.”
“Belay that kind of talk, Ruskin!” Blackstrap rumbled. “I’ll not stand for any nonsense of that sort on any ship of mine.” “Sorry, Cap’n.” The aged helmsman subsided.
“How be that caulking forward, Mr. Smiggens?”
“Still holding, Captain.” The first mate’s voice was growing hoarse from the need to constantly shout above the wind. “I’ve made up some glue which I think will be stronger than mere tar and—”
“Spare me your learned dissertations, Mr. Smiggens! Will the caulking hold or not?”
“For a time, sir.” Though it was not always apparent to outsiders, the two men, so different in background and upbringing, had the greatest respect for one another. The first mate squinted forward into the rain and spray. The faint outlines of numerous seamen, exhausted from being driven before the storm and their equally relentless captain, struggled with the rigging.
“It would aid our efforts tremendously if we could ground on even the tiniest spit of sand and make more permanent repairs to the damaged planks.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Blackstrap muttered. “There be no dry land hereabouts, Smiggens, unless one counts a turtle back. Be that not so, Mr. Ruskin?”
“On this course, not till we fetch up on the shores of Africa, Cap’n. Or so the maps insist.”
“Africa!” Blackstrap unclenched his fists and promptly slammed his hands together behind his back. “Fate seems determined to make us cross an entire ocean simply to reprovision and repair. ”
“I dunno, Cap’n.” Ruskin strove to inject a note of optimism in what was becoming yet another fatalistic conversation. “The distance we’ve covered already and the speed we’re making would put the Flying Cloud herself to shame. The sea may claim us yet, but she seems bound and determined to show us as much of herself as possible before she does so!”
“Just like a woman,” the captain growled. “1 wouldn’t have thought this old crate would hold together as long as she has.”
As if to underline his evaluation there was a violent groan from amidships. Rushing to the rail, Blackstrap bellowed into the rain.
“Avast there, you shipworms! Get that cannon secured! D’you want to meet Davy Jones with crushed bones?”
Sailors hurried to tighten the lashings restraining one of the Condor’s twelve-pounders. A loose cannon banging about on deck in the midst of a storm could do as much damage to ship and crew as an angry whale.
Blackstrap watched until he was convinced the crewmen were doing a proper job of it, then returned to Smiggens’s side.
“So Africa be the nearest land, be it? By Triton’s scaly backside, then, we’ll run to Africa if we must! ”
The first mate eyed the captain admiringly. Blackstrap might be a liar and a cheat, a thief and a cutthroat, and as treacherous a captain as ever fondled a gold sovereign or unread contract, but he was afraid of nothing, not even the sea itself. There was something inside him that insisted that if one couldn’t laugh at death, one could, if given enough time, at least try to outwit it.
“You might say that we’re in desperate straits, sir.”
Blackstrap glared at him. “I’ll thank you to keep your witticisms to yourself, Smiggens.” He’d always been suspicious of his first mate’s book learning, quick as he was to recognize its value. But if he ever caught the other man openly laughing at him, no one aboard doubted that the Condor would find itself in immediate need of a new first mate.
For his part, Smiggens suspected that the captain was simply too mean to die. When the storm finally abated (as surely it must, he told himself), when the tropical sun emerged from behind the clouds and began to bake ship and crew, when the last of the food and water had run out, Brognar Blackstrap would still be standing, back to the mainmast and fist upraised, cursing the elements themselves.
The crew was nearly done. They’d had no rest for weeks and no opportunity to rotate the watch. Every hand was needed at all times to keep the ship afloat.
If only, Smiggens thought, they hadn’t tried to make off with that chest of ingots from the treasury at Batavia. A well-thought-out and prepared plan had been spoiled by a cabin boy who’d fallen asleep where he oughtn’t to have been. He’d escaped to another room and sounded the alarm.
Alerted to the true nature of the outlaw barkentine in their midst, two Dutch warships in the harbor had hauled anchor and given chase, only to be joined outside the Sunda Strait by Her Majesty’s frigate Apollonia, on watch for the Condor ever since her notorious escapade at Hong Kong. Portuguese warships, too, were on the lookout for Blackstrap’s vessel, thanks to her boarding and sinking of a well-connected mandarin’s junk near Macau.
Previously the crew of the pirate vessel had always managed to stay one step ahead of the Southeast Asian colonial authorities. Now it seemed that every warship in the South China Sea was in on the hunt. Smiggens felt unnecessarily persecuted. They were no more than small-time brigands at best. Piracy in the region was no longer a growth industry.
None of which would have mattered had the Condor been able to slip out of Batavia to the east, where it could have lost itself in the thousands of islands that constituted the East Indies. But the Apollonia had forced her to turn west and south, through the strait and into the teeth of the brewing, boiling squall from which there seemed no escape.
At least they had shaken the pursuit, Smiggens believed. Probably their pursuers thought them dead. He wondered if their British and Dutch tormentors had been sunk or had managed to escape the grasp of the storm. Somehow he could not find it in himself to be grateful. Leg irons, hardtack, and a nice dry hold would be preferable to what they were
presently being forced to endure, and certainly an improvement over the starvation to come should they somehow manage to ride out the storm.
He thought of the purloined goods banging about in the hold below: the fine bales of tea, the now shattered porcelain, the rolls of silk and crates of spices. Not quite the equal of gold ingots, but valuable nonetheless. All worthless unless the crew could make port.
Give old Ruskin his due, he thought admiringly. Many
times during the storm the helmsman had tried to turn them north, toward Ceylon and India, but without success. The combination of current and wind was simply too strong. The Condor could do nothing but ride before the storm.
They were now somewhere near the Tropic of Capricorn, where the southeast trade winds acted in a manner most contrary and the threat of entering the horse latitudes loomed over their most strenuous efforts to escape. A hopeless situation. If they held to their present course the weather would eventually turn cold, and they would freeze before they had a chance to starve.
Africa, he mused. Unless they could fly like an albatross they hadn’t a chance of making it all that way. Slave unceasingly and battle the storm as they might, the crew of the Condor were condemned men.
There on the storm-tossed deck he recalled his early life. He’d been a tutor, and a respected one, much in demand by the aristocratic families of London. It was a taste for strong drink (and other things) that had brought about his eventual downfall. Thefe was one particular pupil, the attractive young daughter of a certain duke, whose tutoring he had perhaps accelerated beyond reasonable bounds. Certainly her father had believed so. It was only by the grace of God and good fortune that Smiggens had been able to obtain passage on a ship leaving for the West Indies just before the outraged nobleman had set upon him with pistol, sword, and police in hand.
He’d thought his escape a clean one . . . until his ship was intercepted at the mouth of the Thames and boarded by the authorities. There was no chance for him, of course, in a court dominated by the good duke, his innumerable solicitors (countless as the sands on a beach, Smiggens remembered), and a magistrate bought and paid for by friends of the suitably outraged.
Dinotopia - Dinotopia Lost Page 4
